"Quagmire" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... construction of the Villas. The next morning we had reveille at six, and turned out promptly to feed the wretched horses; the poor, woe-begone looking creatures, hardly one of which was properly picketed, were standing expectantly amid a perfect cobweb of muddy, tangled picketing ropes in the quagmire, which represented their lines. One of the fellows, who had passed the night under our ox waggon, on lifting his rain-sodden blanket, found to his surprise and disgust a fine iguana, about four feet long, nestling ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... a long rambling speech, in which he pretended not to know what things are and what are not wonderful. The Boy Hunters young gentleman fell headlong into the quagmire of definitions, but the oldest sister, who had her own ideas ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... bones crack, climbed, straining, struggling, panting, wild eyed and steaming from over-exertion under the lash of angry and profane drivers, until they sank to their haunches, helpless and exhausted, in some quagmire. Such common misfortune necessitated the unloading of the poor beast at the loss of time and patience, not only of his own driver, but those following, as any obstruction to this narrow trail was ...
— The Trail of a Sourdough - Life in Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... Oscar had heard the man's invitation, and having made up his mind that it was an opportunity to teach one ruffian to mind his own business he took a course favorable for the exhibition, and started to go across an open lot; the men followed, and just as our hero arrived near a quagmire the man who was to give the exhibition ran forward ...
— Oscar the Detective - Or, Dudie Dunne, The Exquisite Detective • Harlan Page Halsey
... life, as his Duke, in a highly-ridiculous manner, had already done. And, again, tragically, it is certain that he stood on the fated Austrian left-wing at the Battle of Leuthen; had his horse shot under him there, and was himself nearly drowned in a quagmire, ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... Sidney Lanier was teaching in Prattville, Alabama, a town built on a quagmire by Daniel Pratt, of whom one of his negroes said his "Massa seemed dissatisfied with the way God had made the earth and he was always digging down the hills and filling up the hollows." Prattville was a small manufacturing ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... us, and so she was more sensitive like. She can't understand she was loving a dream. So I say it might do her good if somebody that knew, could tell her, but I swear to gracious, I never could. I've heard her out at the edge of that quagmire calling in them wild spells of hers off and on for the last sixteen years, and imploring the swamp to give him back to her, and I've got out of bed when I was pretty tired, and come down to see she didn't go in herself, ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter
... continued for four whole days and nights, and the low-lying ground is like a quagmire in places. In the sunlight the whole mountains glisten with running streams and falling water. I feel a strange kind of elation, but from no visible cause. Aunt Janet rather queered it by telling me, as she said good-night, ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... [FN127] Arab. "Wartah"precipice, quagmire, quicksand and hence sundry secondary and metaphorical significations, under which, as in the "Semitic" (Arabic) tongues generally, the prosaical and material sense of the word is clearly evident. I noted this in Pilgrimage iii. 66 and was soundly abused for so ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... holy mass and psalm now ascend daily from it. The wretched hovels around the gates, where miserable peasants herded like swine in their sties, have been cleared away, and places fit for human habitation have been erected in their stead. That fearful quagmire, in which so many wretched travellers have lost their lives, has been drained, and a causeway built across it. Basildene is becoming a blessing to all around it; and so long as thou art lord here, ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... him a little for what he found. All the way from Balaclava his horse struggled knee-deep in mud: a very quagmire of black, sticky slush. Yet this was the great highway—the only road between the base of supply and an army engaged eight miles distant in an arduous siege. Along it the whole of the food, ammunition, and material had to be carried on pony-back, or in a few ponderous carts drawn by gaunt, over-worked ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... that of a personal God, many have hunted but none have found. The only solid foundation is, as in the case of the earth's crust, pretty near the surface of things; the deeper we try to go, the damper and darker and altogether more uncongenial we find it. There is no knowing into what quagmire of superstition we may not find ourselves drawn, if we once cut ourselves adrift from those superficial aspects of things, in which alone our nature ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... the land? Is it a dull or uninstructive picture to see a whole people shaking suddenly off the trammels of reason, and running wild after a golden vision, refusing obstinately to believe that it is not real, till, like a deluded hind running after an ignis fatuus, they are plunged into a quagmire? But in this false spirit has history too often been written. The intrigues of unworthy courtiers to gain the favour of still more unworthy kings; or the records of murderous battles and sieges have been dilated on, and told over and over again, with all the eloquence ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... avail: Was Sir Launfal's long quest entirely without avail? Compare the last lines of Tennyson's Holy Grail, where Arthur complains that his knights who went upon the Holy Quest have followed "wandering fires, lost in the quagmire," and "leaving human wrongs to ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... burning crags, there to blaze like a bonfire. Thence they were snatched away up the ravines amidst the eternal ice and snow; {73a} then plunged again into an enormous flood of seething brimstone to be parched, stifled, and choked by the direful stench; thence to a quagmire of vermin, to embrace hellish reptiles far more noxious than serpents or vipers. After that the devils took knotted rods of fiery steel from the furnace, wherewith they beat them so that their howls resounded throughout all Hell, so ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... refined, elevating, symmetrical, and chaste. By properly adjusting it, a railroad conductor can easily lift a recalcitrant passenger, and project him through one of the windows of the car, (provided said window is large enough to admit of such exit,) into any selected pool, or pond, or quagmire, or any other sort of mire, of the miasmatic salt meadows, with the produce of which Morris and Essex stock ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 16, July 16, 1870 • Various
... dry season, are said to be connected by an extremely good road; but, when we passed, the two places were separated by a quagmire into which the horses ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... the East, but the ignorance of the West. "It is deplorable," he says, "that the intense scientific production of Russia is almost totally ignored by the West.... A great nation like Russia is not a negligible quantity affected by an intellectual quagmire (p. 671). The Russian Ecclesiastical literature is rich in monographs on particular subjects, and above all in Patristic theology. In this sphere of research, Russian Orthodoxy can even outrival ...
— Hymns from the Morningland - Being Translations, Centos and Suggestions from the Service - Books of the Holy Eastern Church • Various
... that any German should be left alive in this quagmire, but there was still a rattle of machine-guns from holes and hillocks. Not for long. The bombing-parties searched and found them, and silenced them. From the heaps of earth which had once been trenches German soldiers ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... I can manage to reach it, I shall find the home of the chat. The situation was discouraging, but I was not to be discouraged; to reach that stronghold I was resolved, if I had to dam up the irrigator, build a bridge, or fill up the quagmire. ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... covered was about two hundred and thirty miles. Under favorable circumstances, the trip could have been made in five or six days and with little hardship. The rainy season, however, was now at its height, and the country was one vast quagmire, overrun by swollen streams which could be crossed only at great risk. Ten days of wearisome marching brought the expedition to the forks of the Little Wabash. The entire region between the two channels was under ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... wur gone, soh ey gets o' meh feet, and daddles along os weel os ey con, whon aw ot wunce ey spies a leet glenting efore meh, an dawncing abowt loike an awf or a wull-o'-whisp. Thinks ey, that's Friar Rush an' his lantern, an he'll lead me into a quagmire, soh ey stops a bit, to consider where ey'd getten, for ey didna knoa t' reet road exactly; boh whon ey stood still, t' leet stood still too, on then ey meyd owt that it cum fro an owd ruint tower, an whot ey'd fancied ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... ruining himself without pleasure. A man who loses at play, or who runs out his fortune at court, makes his estate less, in hopes of making it bigger: (I am sure of this word, which was often used by him:) but it is a sad thing to pass through the quagmire of parsimony, to the gulph of ruin. To pass over the flowery path ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... quite right," agreed Rollo. "We once lost a fine brindle cow, because she wandered into a swamp and sank in a quagmire. But, hello—what is this?" As he spoke Rollo pulled from his ...
— Rollo in Society - A Guide for Youth • George S. Chappell
... from adding more of the eloquent speeches delivered, because they throw light for English readers on the high degree of culture French literature has attained at Quebec. All, we are sure, will rejoice with us that, for the cause of letters, M. Frechette was timely rescued from the quagmire of political ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... pursued both in the personages of his satire through "Every Man Out of His Humour," and "Cynthia's Revels," Daniel under the characters Fastidious Brisk and Hedon, Munday as Puntarvolo and Amorphus; but in these last we venture on quagmire once more. Jonson's literary rivalry of Daniel is traceable again and again, in the entertainments that welcomed King James on his way to London, in the masques at court, and in the pastoral drama. As to Jonson's personal ambitions with respect to these two men, it is notable that he became, ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson
... down the poor beast's face as he bellowed in an agony of fear. The Maharajah directed the men who had gathered around the scene to fell some saplings, which were conveyed to the nala by some smaller elephant and pushed into the quagmire towards "Kennedy". The poor entrapped animal seemed to understand that efforts were being made to rescue him, and he obeyed his driver's now soothing voice and held himself still. At last, the combined labours of men and brother-elephants ...
— Bengal Dacoits and Tigers • Maharanee Sunity Devee
... upbounding aside, a zig-zag exhibition of great strength and knowingness and recklessness. But it was unreasoning; it was the instinct begotten of long training and, now, of the absence of all nervousness. Each taut toe touched each point of bearing just as was required above the quagmire, and, all unperceiving and uncaring, he fled over dirty death as easily as he might have run upon some hardened woodland pathway. He did not think nor know nor care about what he was doing. He was only running away from the something he had ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... shifting sand-dunes on the outskirts were beaten motionless and sodden by the onslaught of consecutive storms; the southeast trades brought the saline breath of the outlying Pacific even to the busy haunts of Commercial and Kearney streets; the low-lying Mission road was a quagmire; along the City Front, despite of piles and pier and wharf, the Pacific tides still asserted themselves in mud and ooze as far as Sansome Street; the wooden sidewalks of Clay and Montgomery streets ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... surprised, and stood still. "You astonish me, you will-o'-the-wisps," he said; "this is no quagmire we are on now. Of what use is this ground to you? What does the proximity of a philosopher mean to you? For around him the air is sharp and clear, the ground dry and hard. You must find out a more fantastic region ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... In "A brief Character of the Low-countries under the States, being Three Weeks Observation of the Vices and Virtues of the Inhabitants, written by Owen Felltham, and printed Lond. 1659, 12mo. we find them epitomized as a general sea-land—the great bog of Europe—an universal quagmire—in short a green cheese in pickle. The sailors (in which denomination the author appears to include all the natives,) he describes as being able to "drink, rail, swear, niggle, steal, and be lowsie ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... been, but fortunately circumstances combined to render it merely ridiculous, as reflected in the mirror of memory. The rain still fell heavily, lying in places to the depth of nearly a foot, and converting all the ground that was not rocky into a slippery quagmire. So profound was the darkness, that it was literally impossible to see any object six inches from one's eyes, and it was only by the occasional flashes from the firelocks of the persevering enemy and the forked lightning that we could realise the surrounding scene. By the light of the last were ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... of the kind, called quaint conceits, can be read from these printers' devices. There is Gesner's Bibliotheca swarming with frogs and tadpoles like a quagmire in honour of its printer, a German Frog, latinised Christopherus Froshoverus. The Quae Extant of Varro, printed at Dort, are adorned with many lively cuts of bears and their good-humoured cubs, because the printer's name is Joannis Berewout. So the Aulus Gellius, printed ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... by a long, dreary, thorn capped clay ditch, with sour red water oozing out at every yard; a broken gate leading into a straight wood ride, ragged with dead grasses and black with fallen leaves, the centre mashed into a quagmire by innumerable horsehoofs; some forty red coats and some four black; a sprinkling of young- farmers, resplendent in gold buttons and green; a pair of sleek drab stable-keepers, showing off horses for sale; the surgeon of the union, in Mackintosh ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... caution, yet she had never thought it possible that a girl so steady in her ordinary demeanour, so utterly averse to all flirtation, so little given to the weakness of feminine susceptibility, would fall at once into such a quagmire of indiscreet love-troubles. The caution had been intended, rather in regard to outward appearances, and perhaps with the view of preventing the possibility of some slight heart-scratches, than with the idea that ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... daily toil. No white man could even direct the work, and the ubiquitous Chinaman, proof against every ill that flesh is heir to in Java, was deputed to superintend the solution of abstruse professional problems, between the short and hasty visits of Dutch and English engineers. Quagmire and quicksand, stagnant pool and sluggish stream, succeed in weary iteration. Bleached skeletons of dead trees writhe in weird contortions against the dark background of jungle, as though some wizard's curse had blighted life and growth amid the rank vegetation rising ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... with suspicion of Irishmen by Englishmen and of Englishmen by Irishmen and, worst of all, of Irishmen by Irishmen. It was a quagmire of distrust which clogged the footsteps and made progress impossible. That is the real ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... liberty. Such a document goes a good way in support of the contention that with ordinary firmness, consistency, and courage on the part of the luckless Louis XVI., the convocation of the States-General in 1789, instead of leading France, as it actually led her, through a quagmire of blood and rapine, into what George Sand felicitously called the 'merciless practical joke of the Consulate,' and the stern reality of the despotic First Empire, might easily have resulted in converting the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV. ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... hillocks were secure from overflow at any time, but the low-lying spaces between them were already under water, the depth of which varied from a few inches to two or three feet. The soft earth of the roadbed was now a mere quagmire, through which the horses laboriously dragged the wagons hub deep ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston
... walls to keep off the chilly wind? Is it nothing to us that in the rainy season they have to make their bed on the damp floor or ground, though to do so means a certain attack of fever? Is it nothing to us that under such circumstances the houseless poor should be converted into a dismal quagmire in which moral leprosy, more terrible than its bodily representative, should thrive and propagate itself? Certainly if the Indian destitute are to have a "bullock charter" granted to them, it will be necessary that it should sooner or later include suitable and ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker
... their eagerness to drink the saline waters, or lick the salt, those in front, hurrying forward, would have been pressed upon by those behind, and thus, before they were aware of their danger, sank helplessly into the quagmire. It is supposed that the bones of not less than one hundred mastodons and twenty elephants have been dug up out of the bog, besides which the bones of a stag, extinct horse, megalonyx, and bison, have been obtained. Undoubtedly, therefore, ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... Heare, heare, how dying Salisbury doth groane, It irkes his heart he cannot be reueng'd. Frenchmen, Ile be a Salisbury to you. Puzel or Pussel, Dolphin or Dog-fish, Your hearts Ile stampe out with my Horses heeles, And make a Quagmire of your mingled braines. Conuey me Salisbury into his Tent, And then wee'le try what ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... say a few kind words for art and literature, intimate the part they play in the civilizing of a nation, and promise to further them by all means in his power, that the people should not sink deeper into the quagmire of materialism? Probably not. ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... way was long and Uncle Terry's old horse slow, and the road in the hollows a quagmire of half-frozen mud. Gone were all the leaves of the scrub oaks, and beneath the thickets of spruce still remained a white pall of snow. A half gale was blowing over the island, and when they reached the hilltop that overlooked the Cape, it was so dark that only scattered lights ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... Tezcuco. I had to take a by-way to avoid the Guadalupe road, which was blocked up in consequence of the holiday. In doing so, I had to leap a ditch or canal, in which both I and my horse came near closing our pilgrimage in a quagmire; but in time we were again upon the road. It is a dreary place about the hill of Tepeyaca, or Guadalupe, and if the Virgin had not smiled upon the barren hill and made roses grow out of it, it would be as uninviting as one of the hills of the valley of Sodom. This hill is ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... touching the under side of the band of his dress. He then realized that he was in one of the dreaded mud sucks that are numerous on the Missouri. They are something in the nature of quicksand or quagmire and it is seldom anything escapes from their slimy embrace. Seeing no way out, he grew exceedingly nervous. He beat around in every direction without success. Now and then he put his hand down and could feel the deadly suction right under him. He had turned and twisted so ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... building, with the tip of her abdomen? I have no idea what she does or what she has in view. I leave the interpretation of this performance to others, more venturesome than I. Plenty of theories are based on equally shaky foundations. Blow on them and they sink into the quagmire of oblivion. ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... future is black—confused—a chaos. My life is like to one of these paths upon the fells. You have seen them, Monsieur Upperton. They are smooth and straight and clear where they begin; but soon they wind to left and wind to right, and so mid rocks and crags until they lose themselves in some quagmire. At Brussels my path was straight; but now, mon Dieu! who is there can tell ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... only three or four families of poor emigrants. Nothing could be done toward relieving those at Donner Lake until help could arrive from Sutter's Fort. A rainy winter had flooded Bear River, and rendered the Sacramento plains a vast quagmire. Yet one man volunteered to go to Sacramento with the tale of horror, and get men and provisions. This man was John Rhodes. Lashing two pine logs together with rawhides, and forming a raft, John Rhodes was ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan
... anomaly in our being were it, if that prayer were to be denied! And what would the memory of friends be, so sweet and solemn now,—what would it be, but as the taper which the angel of death extinguishes in this earthly quagmire? ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... difficulties in love. But Maria was no reader of novels. Out of a strict Calvinistic family she and her brother had leaped into heterodoxy—William to pause neatly poised on the line where Conventionalism ended; Maria to flounder in an unsounded quagmire, which she believed the well of Truth. Five years ago she would have felt her chance of salvation in danger if she had spoken to a woman who persisted in loving a married man. But five years work strange changes in the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... am not certain as to the prevalence of this weed in the swampy places of the North-West, I can affirm that I have scarcely ever seen a very dangerous quagmire that has not been covered with this exquisite little plant; and if I could credit the stories of the nursery, I would be able to believe that those malignant fairies who live about dangerous springs and shaking swamps, cover the ground with these dainty sprays ...
— Annette, The Metis Spy • Joseph Edmund Collins
... to the end of the long log. Stepping down, she found that the quagmire was not so deep. But for some minutes they continued to plow through it, but ...
— Ruth Fielding at the War Front - or, The Hunt for the Lost Soldier • Alice B. Emerson
... our friends, broader and deeper than ever: here they wind down into the hollow; and there, you may see where they have floundered through that vile pool, that is still turbid, where they crossed it. A horrible quagmire! But courage, my fair cousin: it is only such difficulties as these which the road ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... they fly around the streets like the beads of a rosary when the string is snapped. Perhaps you haven't noticed how serious this letter is. I'm frowning as I write—a habit most bad on the eyebrows—surest of signs that I am sinking again into the quagmire of love. ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr
... premature, did not at first take them up and standardize them but left them entirely in the hands of local, county, and state Granges. These thereupon proceeded to "gang their ain gait" through the unfamiliar paths of business operations and too frequently brought up in a quagmire. "This purchasing business," said Kelley in 1867, "commenced with buying jackasses; the prospects are that many will be SOLD." But the Grangers went on with their plans for business cooperation ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... are well dressed, and would be modest, if modesty were worth its having in such an atmosphere. Indeed, they might have been taken for men with other motives than those of gaining office by wallowing in a political quagmire reeking with democratic filth. Courteous to each other, they sit at a large table containing long slips of paper, each candidate's sentiments printed thereon. As each voter—good fellow that he is—enters the room, one or the other candidate ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... in that direction, but had only gone a few yards when the ground became a perfect quagmire of black loam, that looked like coal ground to powder, and ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... of Sir George, hurled suddenly out of his age and world—the age des philosophes, and the smooth world of White's and Lord March—into this quagmire of feeling, this night of struggle upon the Wiltshire downs? A few hours earlier he had ridden the same road, and the prize he now stood in danger of losing had seemed—God forgive him!—of doubtful value. Now, as he thought ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... the prospect grew less repellent. A gradually matured conviction that New Orleans would not be found standing on stilts in the quagmire enabled the eye to become educated to a better appreciation of the solemn landscape. Nor was the landscape always solemn. There were long openings, now and then, to right and left, of emerald-green savannah, with the dazzling blue of the ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... and religion were as openly treated with mockery and contempt. Bunyan justly says, "The text calls for sharpness, so do the times." "With those whose religion lieth in some circumstantials, the kingdom swarms at this day." When they stand at the gate, they will "shake like a quagmire—their feigned faith, pretended love, shows of gravity, and holiday words, will stand them in little stead; some professors do with religion just as people do with their best apparel—hang it on the wall all ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... it was certainly necessary for him to oppose pride with pride, and before the eyes of Evelyn demonstrate his indifference to that lady's choice of Mr. Lee for the minuet and Mr. Lightfoot for the country dance. This last thought had far to travel from some unused, deep-down quagmire of the heart, but it came. For the rest, the image of Audrey decked in silk and lace, turned by her apparel into a dark Court lady, a damsel in waiting to Queen Titania, caught his fancy in both hands. He wished to see her thus,—wished it so strongly ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... soldier raised his hands to heaven as he sank. A moment later only one of his iron gauntlets was to be seen convulsively quivering above the sand. Presently nothing was to be seen—nothing except some bubbles of air on the surface of the quagmire. ...
— The Brass Bell - or, The Chariot of Death • Eugene Sue
... lump in her throat and a pang in her heart, she recklessly wiped her eyes upon the best parlor curtains, when Barnes mounted to the box, as robust a stage-driver as ever extricated a coach from a quagmire. The team, playful through long confinement, tugged at the reins, and Sandy, who was at the bits, occasionally shot through space ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... have been the hurricanes of steel which have swept these slopes, that the surface of the earth has been literally blasted away, leaving a treacherous and incredibly tenacious quagmire in which horses and even soldiers have lost their lives. General Dubois told me that, only a few days before my visit to Verdun, one of his staff-officers, returning alone and afoot from an errand to Vaux, had fallen into a shell-crater and had drowned in the mud. Indeed, the ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... on such a thin crust of facts, and there was so deep a quagmire of supposition beneath, that talk was almost painfully difficult. Never before perhaps had each of these four women realized so clearly how much Miltoun—that rather strange and unknown grandson, son, and brother—counted in the scheme of existence. Their suppressed ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the terrible, melancholy truth about Rome. He had several times already strolled through the Trastevere, attracted towards its wretched denizens by his compassion for all who suffered. Ah! that quagmire of wretchedness and ignorance! He knew of abominable nooks in the faubourgs of Paris, frightful "rents" and "courts" where people rotted in heaps, but there was nothing in France to equal the listless, filthy stagnation of the Trastevere. On the ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... down much of the distance and some of the hostility between Manuel and Stuart, and, as soon as the road began to rise from the quagmire country, and was wide enough to permit it, the Cuban ordered the boy to ride beside him. Naturally, the conversation dealt with the trail and ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... a quagmire in the red clay of the road. It was an ancient trap left over from the rains of winter, strewn with twigs and small branches so that light wheels might skim, with ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... heart! Jean Valjean thinks it is heaven's morning. Marius has discovered that Jean Valjean is not his murderer, but his savior; that he has, at imminent peril of his life, through the long, oozy quagmire of the sewer, with his giant strength, borne him across the city, saved him; and now, too late, Marius began to see in Jean Valjean "a strangely lofty and saddened form," and has come to take this great heart home. But God will ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... musketry drowned out the words, and immediately Ben's company found itself all but surrounded. To go into this quagmire had certainly been a grave error, but all leaders make mistakes sometimes; and Major Morris was suffering ...
— The Campaign of the Jungle - or, Under Lawton through Luzon • Edward Stratemeyer
... lanes and sinking paths. The tules grow inconceivably thick in places, standing man-high above the water; cattle, no, not any fish nor fowl can penetrate them. Old stalks succumb slowly; the bed soil is quagmire, settling with the weight as it fills and fills. Too slowly for counting they raise little islands from the bog and reclaim the land. The waters pushed out cut deeper channels, gnaw off the ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... indulging in foul jokes, making indecent allusions, and subjecting to lewd criticism every passing female, is a most abominable sin. Such habits crush out pure thoughts; they annihilate respect for virtue; they make the mind a quagmire of obscenity; they lead to overt acts ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... excellent in their way, without which it is difficult to see how society could get on at all, but when they have done their best there still remains this great and appalling mass of human misery on our hands, a perfect quagmire of Human Sludge. They may ladle out individuals here and there, but to drain the whole bog is an effort which seems to be beyond the imagination of most of those who spend their lives in philanthropic work. It is no doubt better than nothing to take the individual ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... the poor man had ventured on a sort of quagmire, and had disappeared half-way in the sticky mud. They stretched out their hands, and he rose, covered with slime, but quite satisfied at not having injured his precious entomologist's box. Acteon went beside him, and ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... his temper; he was of too humble a frame of mind to do that, but he got into a hopeless quagmire of mixed recollections, and he too left the witness-box quite unprepared to swear as to the day of the interview with the ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... her husband's opinion, at all events about men.' He plunged on into the ancient quagmire. 'A man may know with impunity what is injurious if ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... upon the road, and took with him twenty knights. And as he went he did great good, and gave alms, feeding the poor and needy. And upon the way they found a leper, struggling in a quagmire, who cried out to them with a loud voice to help him for the love of God; and when Rodrigo heard this, he alighted from his beast and helped him, and placed him upon the beast before him, and carried him with him in this ...
— Chronicle Of The Cid • Various
... houses comes to our very garden gate. Well, people can come so far without muddying their boots. Now, our garden abuts almost on the railway-platform, so I propose sweeping a path straight across from the road, putting up a gate at each end, and saving people five hundred yards of quagmire, and a good five minutes in time, and a lot of swear-words, and my charge for all these improvements ...
— Brave and True - Short stories for children by G. M. Fenn and Others • George Manville Fenn
... myself stuck fast in a new quagmire of thought," Reade confessed humbly. "What I was about to say is that the first thing to do is to write to Mr. William Howgate, secretary of the Gridley High School Athletic Council of the Alumni Association. But that ...
— The High School Boys' Canoe Club • H. Irving Hancock
... rode on through the endless forest of palms, and waded through a quagmire at least eight miles in extent, where the green slime reached up to the saddle-flaps. On that day we came to a sluggish stream, bearing the name of "Aptikpangmakthlaingwainkyapaimpangkya" (The Place Where the Pots Were Struck When They Were About to Feast). There a punt was moored, into which ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... Tom? whom the foul fiend hath led through fire and through flame, and through ford and whirlpool, o'er bog and quagmire; that hath laid knives under his pillow, and halters in his pew; set ratsbane by his ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... our military chest, for it was a well-to-do place, with a thriving coast trade carried on down the River Parret. After a night in snug quarters we set off again in even worse weather than before. The country in these parts is a quagmire in the driest season, but the heavy rains had caused the fens to overflow, and turned them into broad lakes on either side of the road. This may have been to some degree in our favour, as shielding us from the raids of the King's cavalry, ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of "goose" land, after selling for $5 and then $15 an acre, was subdivided and sold as garden soil for $125 an acre. Three brothers who were market gardeners bought farms and settled there with their families. They found the soil, when wet, to be a quagmire and when dry to be possible of cultivation only with dynamite. After three years of utter failure they were forced to abandon their homes, having lost their money, time, and labor, and having reaped a bitter ...
— A Stake in the Land • Peter Alexander Speek
... tenet of our order, "that we do for others as we would have others do for us, and that if I find my brother in distress, I must bind up his wounds, lift him from the quagmire of despond and set him on his feet." If any lesson stands out boldly before the mind of the Odd-Fellow it is truth. He finds it on his banner wherever he goes. Friendship is ephemeral. It lasts only through life. It may die, it will die. The grave ends it all. ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... the tottering knees give way. With shouts of triumph on his lips he falls Prone in the gore and in the miry clay. E'en then, his love remembering, he recalls Euryalus. Across the track he crawls, Then, scrambling up from out the quagmire, flies At Salius. In the dust proud Salius sprawls. Forth darts Euryalus, 'mid cheers and cries, Hailed, through his helping friend, ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... the forests or in the deep morass which girded the road, pounced upon the traveller on the causeway, eased him of his luggage if he carried any, and if there was no further occasion for his services, they either let him down easily into the next quagmire, or if they were, for those days, gentlemanly thieves, left him standing, as Justice Shallow has it, like a "forked radish," to enjoy the summer's heat or the winter's cold. The cross and escallop shell of the pilgrim were no protection: "Cucullus non ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... and black shadows of many mysterious things were gathered. He gave the royal party a cheese knife and a watermelon, and bade them be merry, a bidding which set the hearts of Piggy and Abe and Jimmy and Mealy to dancing, while Bud's heart, which had been sinking lower and lower into a quagmire of dread, beat on numbly and did not join the joy. As the time for going home approached, Bud shivered in his soul at the thought of meeting Miss Morgan. Not even the watermelon revived him, and when ...
— The Court of Boyville • William Allen White
... Riding-saddles and bridles, pack-saddles and strings of bells, mules and men, lanterns, torches, sacks, provender, barrels, cheeses, kegs of honey and butter, straw bundles and packages of many shapes, were crowded confusedly together in this thawed quagmire and about the steps. Up here in the clouds, everything was seen through cloud, and seemed dissolving into cloud. The breath of the men was cloud, the breath of the mules was cloud, the lights were encircled by cloud, speakers close at hand were not seen for cloud, though their voices ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... dying Salisbury doth groan! It irks his heart he cannot be revenged. Frenchmen, I 'll be a Salisbury to you: Pucelle or puzzel, dolphin or dogfish, Your hearts I 'll stamp out with my horse's heels, And make a quagmire of your mingled brains. Convey me Salisbury into his tent, And then we 'll try what these dastard ...
— King Henry VI, First Part • William Shakespeare [Aldus edition]
... negotiations. Heavy rain had fallen without interruption for several days, and now the track on which we were travelling could not, without poetical license, be described as a road. In some parts it resembled a water-course, in others a quagmire, and at least during the first half of the journey I was constantly reminded of that stage in the work of creation when the water was not yet separated from the dry land. During the few moments when the work of keeping my balance and preventing my baggage from being lost did not engross all my attention, ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... It is, indeed, a remarkable territory. In summer it seems a vast moor carpeted by glowing purple heather, which one can traverse up to a certain point, but woe betide him who would advance farther, for, surrounded by what seems solid ground, lies a treacherous quagmire declared by the people of the neighbourhood to be unfathomable. This part of the bog, whose victims have been many, is known as the Youdic. As one leans over it its waters may sometimes be seen to simmer and boil, and the peasants of the country-side devoutly ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... surely add more common-sense—have changed the whole aspect of the matter. This difference has been proved to be due, not to Nature at all, but wholly to the effect of corset-wearing and woman's conventional dress. There is, it would seem, no limit to the quagmire of superstition and error into which sex-difference have drawn even the most careful inquirers if once they fail to cut themselves adrift from that superficial view of Nature's scheme, by which the woman is considered as being handicapped ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... a man of good intentions, but if he is weak, and allows himself to fall into the hands of despotic Ministers, he is a worse affliction than the cruellest tyrant. Think well, your Majesty! A throne may be a quagmire, and a man may be buried ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... of the latter are aimlessness and impatience; and their misfortune—which is largely responsible for those faults—is that they are too soon allowed to plunge into the quagmire called by euphemism "society," and often whelmed in its sorry pleasures and petty ambitions—too soon, also, invested with the right to manage their own affairs and to choose their own associates, advisers, and even instructors; in a word, permitted to breathe the invigorating spirit ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... Crow, "one time there was an old woman that lived near a well. For a long time nobody thought she was a witch, but after a while people began to have their suspicions. There was a quagmire in the road right in front of the old woman's house, and every traveler passing that way was sure to get mud on his feet. No matter whether he was riding horseback or in a buggy, it was all the same. He was sure to get his feet muddy. And the mud was so black, and thick, and heavy, that he ...
— Little Mr. Thimblefinger and His Queer Country • Joel Chandler Harris
... and thrives; where you go knee-deep in slush and catch at a tree-bole to prevent yourself going farther, cling, sweating at every pore and shivering like a dog, feeling for firmer ground and finding it, only to be led on to another quagmire. The bush pig avoids this place, the leopard shuns it; it is bad in the dry season when the sun gives some light by day, and the moon a gauzy green glimmer by night, but in the rains it is terrific. Night, ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... native county, or had noticed in his tinker's wanderings. "Born and bred," writes Kingsley, "in the monotonous Midland, he had no natural images beyond the pastures and brooks, the town and country houses, he saw about him." The Slough of Despond, with its treacherous quagmire in the midst of the plain, into which a wayfarer might heedlessly fall, with its stepping-stones half drowned in mire; Byepathmeadow, promising so fair, with its stile and footpath on the other side ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... summer, and the rich prospects of a forward autumn, which were just before spread over the face of that fertile and beautiful country, it now presented the dreary aspect of an arctic winter. The soil was changed into a morass; the standing corn beaten into a quagmire; the vines were broken to pieces, and their branches bruised in the same manner; the fruit-trees of every kind were demolished, and the hail lay unmelted in heaps like rocks of solid ice. Even the robust forest trees were incapable of withstanding ...
— The Rain Cloud - or, An Account of the Nature, Properties, Dangers and Uses of Rain • Anonymous
... against Tchagan Hou's advice I decided to try bullying the weather, and when the rain came on again I refused to stop. As a result we were all soaked through, and after getting nearly bogged, all hands of us in a quagmire, I gave it up and we camped on the drenched ground, and there we stayed till the middle of the next day—spending most of our time trying to get dry. The argols were too wet to burn, but we made a little blaze with the wood of my soda-water ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... eastern side of the slough. Having got the range of the stakes, he was moving slowly back toward them, holding his stake before him, when the youth signalled him to stop just in the edge of the quagmire. ...
— The Young Surveyor; - or Jack on the Prairies • J. T. Trowbridge
... person the climate was itself almost a deadly foe. The extreme heat produced a lethargy that was depressing in the extreme. In a few days of dry weather, the surface of the ground would be baked like a brick. Then would come most violent storms, converting the soil into a quagmire and covering it with water like a lake. At this time, there was no small danger of falling into the deep ditches with which the fields were intersected, for drainage. In this way I lost one man of my company. Of course it will be understood how productive of disease would be the malaria from the ...
— Reminiscences of two years with the colored troops • Joshua M. Addeman
... he drove the Federal cavalry back upon their camps; and the same afternoon Jackson, leaving Elk Run Valley, which was immediately occupied by Ewell, with 8000 men, marched up the river to Port Republic. The track, unmetalled and untended, had been turned into a quagmire by the heavy rains of an ungenial spring, and the troops marched only five miles, bivouacking by the roadside. May 1 was a day of continuous rain. The great mountains loomed dimly through the dreary mist. The streams ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... I confess that through love men win to sick disgust and self-despising, and for that reason I will not love any more. Now breathlessly the tall lads run to clutch at stars, above the brink of a drab quagmire, and presently time trips them—Oh, Sesphra, wicked Sesphra of the Dreams, you have laid upon me a magic so strong that, horrified, I hear the truth come babbling from long-guarded lips which no longer obey me, because ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... personality of infinite tact; and that he possessed. He was the kind of man everybody could like; that put everyone at ease; that was friendly and familiar in all sorts of society; so he could make that treacherous quagmire Rome stable enough to be his pied-a-terre. That done, he could stretch out his arms thence to the provinces, and begin to weld them into unity. For this was the second part and real aim of his work: to rouse up in the Empire a centripetalism, with Rome for center, before ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... did not afford a safe footing for their horses, they left them in charge of the Hottentots, and proceeded on foot, thinking, that if the Buffaloes should turn upon them, it would be easy to retreat by crossing the quagmire, which, though firm enough to support a man, would not bear the weight of a Buffalo. They advanced accordingly, and, under shelter of the bushes, approached with such advantage, that the first volley brought down three ...
— Delineations of the Ox Tribe • George Vasey
... good are a pack of City lubbers!" returned Stephen. "Don't we know a quagmire when we see one, ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... "and it is enough for us shortlived mortals to feel a reasonable assurance that whether the origin of the An was a tadpole or not, he is no more likely to become a tadpole again than the institutions of the Vril-ya are likely to relapse into the heaving quagmire and ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... whole I think the experience was worth what it cost. The spectacle of a man prevented by religious scruples from photographing children at prayers, while plotting at the same time to rob his employer, has been a kind of chart to me that has piloted me through more than one quagmire of queer human nature. Nothing could stump me after that. The man was just as sincere in the matter of his scruple as he was rascally in his ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... his religion. It was the religion of the seer, the hero, the patriot, and the lover of his race and time. Amid the political idiocy of the times, the corruption in high places, the dilettante culture, the vaporings of wild and helpless theorists, in this swamp of political quagmire, O Lincoln, it is refreshing to think ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... noticed that they never sat down, though a bench was close by them; they would squat for an hour at a time. The day following we took our last horseback ride in South America. It was short, but horrible. Through quagmire and swamp, and down a flight of rocky stairs, in striking imitation of General Putnam's famous ride—over rocks, too, made wondrously slippery by a pitiless rain, but which our unshod Indian horses descended with great dexterity, ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... new consideration of the tantalizing subject, deeper and deeper in the quagmire of doubt and uncertainty, I sought enlightenment by making a memorandum of the special points which must have influenced the jury in their verdict, ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... steamers during the night sent swashy waves into my lair, which kept me in constant fear of a ducking, and gave me anything but a peaceful night. This was, however, all forgotten the next morning, when the startling discovery was made that the river had fallen during the night and left me in a quagmire, from which it seemed at first impossible ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... splendour of it," Poppy declared, soft mothering tones in her voice. "All the same we must keep our heads screwed on the right way. So, tell me, will it be of any personal advantage to you to help pull these elderly plungers out of the quagmire?" ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... worse than that. Sibley is as treacherous as a quagmire. If a woman ventured into a false position with him he would marry her only when compelled to do so. I'm savage enough to shoot them both this afternoon. I see but one way out. I must warn her promptly, and in language so emphatic that she will understand it, that everything ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... and strode away, afraid he might decide to choke the animal after all. A culture of twenty worlds was the same as already destroyed, and he was held in a maddening quagmire of helplessness by a crafty alcoholic and a dog with the mind ...
— —And Devious the Line of Duty • Tom Godwin
... know," echoed from every one. No powder could be found; the Norwegian having taken possession of the porter bottle, and placed it in his pocket, had doubtlessly fallen with it into the quagmire; and ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... the building. There was a dead silence. Was it going to rain? Was it going to pour? Was the storm confined to the metropolis? Would it reach Epsom? A deluge, and the course would be a quagmire, ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... curiosity to walk a little way along the right-hand path which they were about to take. Only a few yards further on I found myself sinking in a floating quagmire, from which I extricated myself with much difficulty but just in time for as I discovered afterwards by probing with a pole, the water beneath the matted reeds was deep. That night I questioned the guides upon ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... horrible quagmire, the worst upon all Exmoor, John had heard from his grandfather, and even from his mother, when they wanted to keep him quiet; but his father had feared to speak of it to him, being a man of piety, and up to the tricks of ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... steadily without hurry, avoided these dangers. They soon reached a vast plain three hundred miles across, utterly deserted by the human race; a desert composed half of barren rock and half of swampy quagmire, soft above, but at a foot deep solid and perpetual ice. Fortunately, it was now frozen hard, and the surface was fit to bear the horses. But for this the party must have halted and waited for a severe frost. The rivers were not frozen when large in volume, and the Aldana had to be crossed in the ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Of Literature, Art, and Science - Vol. I., July 22, 1850. No. 4. • Various
... disappointment to God," said he, "but thou hast deceived the Saviour also, for thou hast gone as it were to a quagmire which has poisoned thy soul with its miasma. Thou mightst have offered it to Christ as a costly vessel, and said to Him, 'Fill it with grace, O Lord!' but thou hast preferred to offer it to the servant of the evil one. May God forgive thee and have mercy on thee; for till thou cast ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... you are going right?" the magistrate said to Walter. "The marsh seems to stretch everywhere, and we might well fall into a quagmire, which ...
— Saint George for England • G. A. Henty
... conclaves, and seemed to have some understanding with Murat. Were they plotting to bring this ambitious man and his still more ambitious and vindictive consort from the despised throne at Naples to seize on power at Paris while the Emperor was engulfed in the Spanish quagmire? A story ran that Fouche had relays of horses ready between Naples and Paris for this enterprise.[206] But where Fouche and Talleyrand are concerned, truth lurks at the bottom of ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... rained so persistently in San Francisco during the first week of January, 1854, that a certain quagmire in the roadway of Long Wharf had become impassable, and a plank was thrown over its dangerous depth. Indeed, so treacherous was the spot that it was alleged, on good authority, that a hastily embarking traveler had once hopelessly lost his portmanteau, ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... uniform, he put on that of the dead rebel, who was fortunately about his own size. Rolling up his own clothing in as small a bundle as possible, he concealed it in the bog, at some distance from the place where the picket had fallen. Dragging the corpse to a quagmire, he sunk it beneath the muddy waters, and it passed from his view. After taking the precaution to straighten up the long grass, which might have betrayed his movements, he advanced ...
— The Young Lieutenant - or, The Adventures of an Army Officer • Oliver Optic
... sank into some pit or slough; others, more uncharitable, hinted that she had eloped with the household booty, and made off to some other province; while others surmised that the tempter had decoyed her into a dismal quagmire, on the top of which her hat was found lying. In confirmation of this, it was said a great black man, with an axe on his shoulder, was seen late that very evening coming out of the swamp, carrying a bundle tied in a check apron, with an ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... miles long,—where he understands the Saxons are. Miller lad guides us, over height and hollow, with his best skill, at a brisk pace;—through one hollow, where he has known the cattle pasture in summer time; but which proves impassable, and mere quagmire, at this season. No getting through it, you unfortunate miller lad (GARCON DE MEUNIER). Nevertheless, we did find passage through the skirts of it: nay this quagmire proved the luck of us; for the enemy, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... and her generous sons should only weep in silence without the impotent complaints and mutual recriminations of slaves.' That as patriotic a heart as ever beat should have been afflicted to this point by the canker of despair tells of the quagmire—not only political but spiritual—into which Italy was sunk. The first thing needful was to restore the people to consciousness, to animation of some sort, it did not matter what, so it were a sign of life. Foscolo ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... February—Dean and I with our chairs to the fire, waiting for the Eastern mail. The night watchman's orders were to stop for it if the trains were anywhere near on time. At this storm season the Westbound was frequently behind and the road to town a quagmire. We never looked for Fahey—he was the man I found there as night watchman—before eight o'clock. It had rained and snowed off and on since the month began. In the dark, low rooms the fire burned all day. The dining-room, which had blue-green walls in imitation of Flemish ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... with the slow and cautious rather than with the rash and over-bold; the former may for a while serve as a drag upon the chariot wheels of progress, the latter are sure to thrust us out of the road and land us at last in some quagmire whence it will be very hard to get back into ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... another to touch. The inn where I had lain was at the river's bank, and yet no road seemed to lead to it or from it. As for mounting the river bank, that was impossible, by reason of the thickets which crowded down to the water's edge. I had to tramp inland, through marsh and quagmire, in which more than once I thought to end my days, till, after much searching, I hit upon the road which led to the city. Before I entered it the bells were clanging from a score of steeples, and many a hurrying form, clad ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... to the parent soil that gave it. The channel was deepened, the lagoon was drained, until one evening the magic mirror that had so long reflected the weary waiting of the Blue Grass Penelope lay dull, dead, lusterless, an opaque quagmire of noisome corruption and decay to be put away from the sight of man forever. On this spot the crows, the titular tenants of Los Cuervos, assembled in tumultuous congress, coming and going in mysterious clouds, or laboring in thick ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... of a somnambulist who wakes up from a complacent dream of activity to find himself walking on a quagmire. A profound disgust of the ground on which he was making his way overcame him. Even the image of the charming girl was swept from his view in the flood of moral distress. Everything he had ever ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... what the lanes will be like after two feet deep of snow? Be sure, my love, you are happier twanging your lute by this fireside than you would be stuck in a quagmire, perishing with ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... before came to have names. Big Bone Lick located in what today is Boone County, Kentucky, was one of the greatest and oldest animal rendezvous in North America, geologists claim. It took its name doubtless from the variety of bones of prehistoric and later fauna found imbedded in the salty quagmire. ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... who had dragged her parents into this quagmire, was silently wondering what she could do to help them out of it; and then her ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... ride the Normans! Onward through bush or brake, or copse, or quagmire. Onward, till the clearing is reached, where the English Lords of Aescendune ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake |
