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Marshy   /mˈɑrʃi/   Listen
Marshy

adjective
1.
(of soil) soft and watery.  Synonyms: boggy, miry, mucky, muddy, quaggy, sloppy, sloughy, soggy, squashy, swampy, waterlogged.  "A marshy coastline" , "Miry roads" , "Wet mucky lowland" , "Muddy barnyard" , "Quaggy terrain" , "The sloughy edge of the pond" , "Swampy bayous"






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"Marshy" Quotes from Famous Books



... story of Alexander the Great and the African lawyers is probably a sample of the wisdom lauded. Nor were the doctors of the Talmud ignorant of the physical features of the country. A scoffer asked, "Why have Africans such broad feet." "Because they live on marshy soil, and must go barefoot," was the ready answer given by ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles

... kind neighbourly office of Nicholas Frog, in that he has been pleased to accept of the aforesaid trust, I, John Bull, having duly considered that my friend, Nicholas Frog, at this time lives in a marshy soil and unwholesome air, infested with fogs and damps, destructive of the health of himself, wife, and children, do bind and oblige me, my heirs and assigns, to purchase for the said Nicholas Frog, with ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot

... ado, he led me in and out the marshy places, to a great round hole or shaft, bratticed up with timber. I never had seen the like before, and wondered how they could want a well, with so much water on every side. Around the mouth were a few ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore

... secondary period; Professor Owen, from the examination of a few relics, pronounces it to be a Dicynodon. According to Sir B. Murchison, such have been the main features of Africa during countless ages; 'for the old rocks which form her outer fringe, unquestionably circled round an interior marshy or lacustrine country, in which the dicynodon flourished at a time when not a single animal was similar to any living thing which now inhabits the surface of our globe. The present central and meridian zone of waters, whether lakes, rivers, or marshes, extending from Lake Tchad to Lake Ngami, with ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 452 - Volume 18, New Series, August 28, 1852 • Various

... eyes. I approached in silence, and as I drew my chair to the table, my eye fell on a glove on the floor. It was a man's glove. Do you know," said my father, "that once, when I was very young, I saw a Dutch picture called 'The Glove,' and the subject was of murder? There was a weed-grown, marshy pool, a desolate, dismal landscape, that of itself inspired thoughts of ill deeds and terror. And two men, as if walking by chance, came to this pool; the finger of one pointed to a blood-stained glove, and the eyes of both were fixed on each other, as if there were no need ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... brunt—just what he was fit for, Matey gave no offence by choosing, half-way down the list, his little French friend, whom he stationed beside himself, rather off his battle-front, as at point at cricket, not quite so far removed. Two boys at his heels piled ammunition. The sides met midway of a marshy ground, where a couple of flat and shelving banks, formed for a broad new road, good for ten abreast—counting a step of the slopes—ran transverse; and the order of the game was to clear the bank and drive the enemy on to the frozen ditch-water. Miss Vincent ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... the roads really were in a worse condition because of that fact that they ran through marshy country, or whether it was because the men were worn out and their horses more so, they made the slowest progress of the day. They plodded on determinedly through the night. The two weaker horses of the four finally gave way under the ...
— The Eagle of the Empire - A Story of Waterloo • Cyrus Townsend Brady

... Turns it on thine own soul, be most severe. But when it falls upon a fellow-man Let kindliness control it; and refrain From that belittling censure that springs forth From common lips like weeds from marshy soil. ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... Blois, and one league from the Loire, in a small and deep valley, between marshy swamps and a forest of large holm-oaks, far from any highroad, the traveller suddenly comes upon a royal, nay, a magic castle. It might be said that, compelled by some wonderful lamp, a genie of the East had carried it off during ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny

... up to the enemy's frontier. The invasion it was, which, in a strategic sense, seems to have been ill combined. Three armies were to have entered Persia simultaneously: one of these, which was destined to act on a flank of the general line, entangled itself in the marshy grounds near Babylon, and was cut off by the archery of an enemy whom it could not reach. The other wing, acting upon ground impracticable for the manoeuvres of the Persian cavalry, and supported by Chosroes the king of Armenia, gave great trouble to Artaxerxes, and, with adequate support ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey

... and then changed. "Mr. Alwyn, the line between virtue and foolishness is dim and wavering, and I should hate to see you lost in that marshy borderland. By a streak of extraordinary luck you have gained the political leadership of Negroes in America. Here's your chance to lead your people, and here you stand blinking and hesitating. Be ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois

... namely, 10 twenty-four grinders, four eyeteeth, and twelve incisors. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell

... and the great stars came gleaming out to look on the face of Yann. Then the sailors lighted lanterns and hung them round the ship, and the light flashed out on a sudden and dazzled Yann, and the ducks that fed along his marshy banks all suddenly arose, and made wide circles in the upper air, and saw the distant reaches of the Yann and the white mist that softly cloaked the jungle, before they returned again into ...
— Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsay • Lord Dunsany

... historically open to question whether there would have been any Roman occupation, or any Saxon or Norman one either, for that matter, but for the coquetry of those chalk cliffs. An adventurer, sighting the low and marshy shores of Lancashire, and muddying his prows in the yellow waters of the Mersey, would be apt to think that such a land were a good place to avoid. But the race of adventurers has long since died out, and their place is occupied by the wide-flying cormorants of commerce, to whom ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne

... terminates in a marshy plain (Fig. 1), in which the first excavation was made. This is protected by longitudinal dikes which lead back the water to it in case of freshets. At the end of this cutting, which is 100 meters in length, begins the canal properly so called, with a width of 5.7 meters, at the surface, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various

... cut off from the west and from the east, had for its base a barrier that completed its isolation. That barrier was the marshy valley of the Mersey. It could be outflanked only at its extreme eastern point, where the valley rises to the hundred-foot contour line. From that point the valley rises so rapidly within half a dozen miles into the eastern hills that it was dry even under ...
— On Something • H. Belloc

... four miles away, near a marshy hollow thickly covered with osiers and willows. A wood fringed the marsh, and covered a hill which rose from a little stream beyond it. Here and there was a glimpse of the yellow flame of gorse. There were rolling ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce

... I believe, by Sir W. Parish, is that the Pampean formation was thrown down on low and marshy plains by the rivers of this country before they assumed their present courses. The appearance and composition of the deposit, the manner in which it slopes up and round the primary ranges, the nature of ...
— South American Geology - also: - Title: Geological Observations On South America • Charles Darwin

... hills east of Rio Paraguay; Gran Chaco region west of Rio Paraguay mostly low, marshy plain near the river, and dry forest and thorny ...
— The 1990 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... were near the monster's lair. They stretched strong nets from tree to tree; they uncoupled their dogs, they tried to find the footprints of their quarry in the grass. From the wood was a descent to marshy ground. Here the boar, as he lay among the reeds, heard the shouts of his pursuers, and rushed forth against them. One and another is thrown down and slain. Jason throws his spear, with a prayer to Diana for success; and the favoring goddess allows ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch

... policy and strict justice towards the natives, and the introduction of a good system of cultivation as in Java and northern Celebes, might yet make Timor a productive and valuable island. Rice grows well on the marshy flats, which often fringe the coast, and maize thrives in all the lowlands, and is the common food of the natives as it was when Dampier visited the island in 1699. The small quantity of coffee now grown is of very superior quality, and it might be increased to any extent. ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace

... and marshy, which gratified Tom who was always fearful of leaving footprints. The hills beyond were low and thickly wooded, the face of the nearest being broken by slides and forming almost a precipice surmounted by a jumble of rocks and underbrush. ...
— Tom Slade with the Boys Over There • Percy K. Fitzhugh

... Lake of the Woods, and at the mouth of a nameless river, or narrow arm of the lake. The banks on one side are high and wooded, on the other high also, but completely bare of shrubs or trees; while between them the river wanders hither and thither through marshy ground, looking somewhat as one fancies the fens at home ...
— A Trip to Manitoba • Mary FitzGibbon

... them now southward along the Kinderkamack Road with its high terraced houses to the right and to the left the low marshy land stretching away to the river. Along the road they had to pass several villages before reaching the point where it would be well to leave the road and cut through ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh

... low-lying lands, although still clothing the distant hill- sides and mountain-peaks, from the loftier ones of which it probably never entirely cleared away even in the height of summer; but, the ground around was naturally so damp and marshy, and had become so soddened now with moisture, that it was almost as impracticable for Mr Meldrum or any other of the party to get away from the vicinity of the hut, as it had been during the heavy storms of August when the snow had drifted up the gullies ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson

... any visitor drew near who might be a member of the board, he disappeared into his house much as a startled weasel makes for its hole. The most striking thing about him was his walk, which to the casual observer seemed a limp. The glen in our part is marshy, and to progress along it you have to jump from one little island of grass or heather to another. Perhaps it was this that made the dominie take the main road and even the streets of Thrums in leaps, as if there were bowlders or puddles in the way. It is, however, ...
— Auld Licht Idyls • J.M. Barrie

... the ten miles to Coniston, to save the money that dinner at the hotel would cost. And so they started, Cynthia flitting hither and thither along the roadside, picking the stately purple iris flowers in the marshy places, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... sides of arable fields which the tenants believed injurious to crops. He repaired labourers' cottages, and added offices to farmsteads. In short, he did everything that could be done without too heavy an expenditure. To kill off the rabbits, to grub the smaller coverts, to drain the marshy spots, to thatch the cottages, put up cattle sheds, and so on, could be effected without burdening the estate with a loan. But, small as these improvements were in themselves, yet, taken together, ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies

... there is a fine range of large pines: in by far the largest space ancient fires appear to have spread, destroying the forest and giving rise to a young growth of pines, aspen, shad-bush, and bramble. Some portions are marshy. A deep cup-shaped cavity exists a little to the right of the path on the ridge, denoting it to be cavernous or ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft

... northwest; winters along the Gulf Coast. This species is one of the most beautiful of the Grebes, having in the breeding season buffy ear tufts, black cheeks and throat, and chestnut neck, breast and sides. They breed abundantly in the marshy flats of North Dakota and the interior of Canada. They build a typical Grebe's nest, a floating mass of decayed matter which stains the naturally white eggs to a dirty brown. The number of eggs varies from three to seven. ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed

... jungles, when not disturbed by the ravages of lions and other blood-thirsty beasts. In our engraving a pretty meeting of these creatures is represented. A company of zebras have gathered by a marshy pool to drink, while a huge two-horned rhinoceros, his great nose resting on a fallen tree, looks wonderingly at these uninvited guests to his particular swamp. Two zebras are in the water, eagerly drinking, while the others look up at the lord of the domain as if saying, "Excuse us, kind ...
— Harper's Young People, August 31, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... hill and hallowed grot, By mossy wood and marshy glen, Whence rang of old the rifle-shot, And hurrying shout of Marion's men! The groan of breaking hearts is there, The falling lash, the fetter's clank! Slaves, slaves are breathing in that air Which old De Kalb and ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... in the ascendant; we reached Wad N'fiss at eleven o'clock to find its waters low and clear. On the far side of the banks we stayed to lunch by the border of a thick belt of sedge and bulrushes, a marshy place stretching over two or three acres, and glowing with the rich colour that comes to southern lands in April and in May. It recalled to me the passage in one of the stately choruses of ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan

... to both commanders that the village of Lobositz was the decisive point; and indeed, the nature of the ground was such as to render operations almost impossible, in the marshy plain intersected by rivulets, which in ...
— With Frederick the Great - A Story of the Seven Years' War • G. A. Henty

... there, and your horse would starve to death before you had a chance to ride him. And even supposing that you could keep him alive,—I don't believe you could ride him over the tundra swamps; there is no horse made that could keep his footing on those marshy tussocks." ...
— The Boy With the U.S. Census • Francis Rolt-Wheeler

... in wet or marshy situations differ in structure from those detailed above. As examples the stems of Panicum flavidum, Panicum colonum, Panicum Crus-galli and Panicum fluitans may be considered. The stem of Panicum flavidum is broadly ovate in ...
— A Handbook of Some South Indian Grasses • Rai Bahadur K. Ranga Achariyar

... crop, the rice-lands are turned over and planted in March and April. In September and October, the rice is reaped, beaten out, and cleaned for market or storing. The lowland crop, on the contrary, is planted in September, October, and November, in marshy lands, and harvested in March and April. Lands will not produce two successive crops without manuring and ploughing. About two bushels of seed are sown to the acre; and the crop, on the acre of upland, is about thirty bushels, and from forty to forty-five ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge

... approach to Baltimore is very well managed. The railroad makes an abrupt curve, as it sweeps round the marshy woodlands through which the Patapsco opens into the bay; so that you have a fair view of the entire city, swelling always upwards from the water's edge, on a cluster of low, irregular hills, to the ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence

... in his militia uniform, and Miss Pie, the daughter of the celebrated Mrs. Margaret, or Mag Pie, as her neighbours call her. And opposite to them were a Mr. Puddock, a person connected with the City, who, through the death of a relative, has just come into possession of a fine marshy estate among the Lincolnshire Fens; and Miss Lavinia Greyhound, who, as all the world knows, was a long time engaged to young Hare, who ran away from her in a very shameful way, and hurt her feelings so much that she did not appear again ...
— Comical People • Unknown

... rapidity of the pendulum, and finally reached Quito by different routes. Condamine pursued his way along the coast, as far as Rio de las Esmeraldas, and drew the map of the entire country, which he traversed with such infinite toil. Bouguer went southwards towards Guayaquil, passing through marshy forests, and reaching Caracol at the foot of the Cordillera range of the Andes, which he was a week in crossing. This route had been previously taken by Alvarado, when seventy of his followers perished; amongst them, the three Spaniards who had attempted to penetrate to the interior. Bouguer reached ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne

... Wansdon Green, written also Wandon and Wandham; all of which names, according to Lysons, originated from the manor of Wendon, so was the local name written in 1449, which in 1565 was spelled Wandowne. As the name of a low and marshy piece of land on the opposite side of the Thames to Wandsworth, through which wandered the drainage from the higher grounds, or through which the traveller had to Wendon (pendan) his way to Fulham; it would not be difficult to enter into speculations ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker

... deg. swearing, deg.17 Horses fret, and boar-spears glance. Off!—They sweep the marshy forests. Westward, on the side of ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold

... once as I crossed the Devon moors a volume of "Richard Feverel." For fifteen miles I had struck across the upland where there is scarcely a house in sight—nothing but grazing sheep and wild ponies that ran at my approach. Sometimes a marshy stream flowed down a shallow valley, with a curl of smoke from a house that stood in the hollow. At the edge of this moorland, I came into a shady valley that proceeded to the ocean. My feet were pinched and tired when I heard the sound of water below the road. I pushed aside the bushes and saw ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks

... an hour Honor wandered over the marshy ground of both banks, often imagining she heard footsteps and rustlings among the long grass that screened the view. The sounds ceased when she paused to listen, so she concluded that her imagination had played her false. At length, just as she was beginning ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi

... the flesh of about 2 Elk and 4 skins the Indians having purloined the ballance of seven Elk which Drewyer killed the other day. I find that there are 2 vilages of Indians living on the N. side of the Columbia near the Marshy Islands who call themselves Wackki-a-cum. these I have hertofore Considered as Cath-lah-mahs. they speak the same language and are the ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al

... worthy ecclesiastick assured me, that a dead calm is always attended with the greatest danger, as there is a continual perspiration issuing from the tree, which is seen to rise and spread in the air, like the putrid steam of a marshy cavern. ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin

... our horses, and soon cleared the marshy ground intervening between us and the Fork, which we forded, and rode for several miles through a country thickly covered over with oak trees and intersected by numerous small rivulets. Large herds of elk were frequently ...
— California • J. Tyrwhitt Brooks

... posted on a hill near Hochstadt, their right being covered by the Danube and the village of Blenheim, their left by the village of Lutzengen, and their front by a rivulet, the banks of which were steep, and the bottom marshy. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett

... the City dames to blaunch their cloaths, Some sober matron (so tradition says) On families' affairs intent, concern'd, At the dark hue of the then decent Ruff From marshy or from moorish barren grounds, Caused to be taken in, what now Moorfields, Shaded by trees and pleasant walks laid out, Is called, the name retaining to denote, From what they were, how Time can alter things. ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke

... Even duck-shooting becomes a weariness when a man has to manage gun and punt single-handed. One afternoon he abandoned the sport in an exceedingly bad temper, and pulled up to the jaws of Cuckoo Valley. Here he landed, and after an hour's trudge in the marshy bottoms had the luck to knock ...
— Wandering Heath • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... rather have seen, in its early simplicity, than the greater one; when the old image of the god, carved probably out of the stock of an enormous vine, had just come from the village of Eleutherae to his first temple in the Lenaeum—the quarter of the winepresses, near the Limnae—the marshy place, which in Athens represents the cave of Nysa; its little buildings on the hill-top, still with steep rocky ways, crowding round the ancient temple of Erechtheus and the grave of Cecrops, with the old miraculous olive-tree still growing there, and the old snake of Athene Polias still ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater

... Jennings sits his steed with nose aloft, and a high perch in the general, somewhat loosely, and, had the pony been a Bucephalus rather than a Rozinante, not a little perilously. Simon is jogging hitherwards toward Roger Acton, as he digs the land-drain across this marshy meadow: let us see how it fares now with our ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... with some increasing sense of lassitude, passing one marshy islet after another, all seeming strangely out of place, and sometimes just reaching with my foot a soft tremulous shoal which gave scarce the shadow of a support, though even that shadow rested my feet. At one of these moments of stillness it suddenly occurred to my perception (what nothing ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... in marshy lakes As motionless and still As a dark rock jutting from a plain Without a tree or hill, The bull that is the sign of life, Its ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various

... more? We ask it wonderingly when we are healthy. Poetic rhapsodists in the vales below may tell you of the joy and grandeur of the upper regions, they cannot pluck you the medical herb. He gets that for himself who wanders the marshy ledge at nightfall to behold the distant Sennhiittchen twinkle, who leaps the green-eyed crevasses, and in the solitude of an emerald alp stretches a salt hand to the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... stand on either side of the River Garigliano, one of the broadest rivers of Southern Italy, falling into the Gulf of Gaeta. The French had possession of the right bank of the river, close to the rising ground, and had therefore a more favourable position than the marshy swamp on the lower side, in which the Spanish forces remained encamped for fifty days. It was a fearful time, in the dead of winter, with excessive rains, and the soldiers in both camps were driven to the last verge of endurance, while numbers sickened and died. Under these depressing circumstances ...
— Bayard: The Good Knight Without Fear And Without Reproach • Christopher Hare

... value of L500, which he hath met with in a late attempt of making of bricks upon an adventure with others, by which he presumed to have got a great deal of money; so that I see the most ingenious man may sometimes be mistaken'. Kiviet a year or two later on had a fresh scheme for draining marshy lands 'with the hopes of a rich harvest of hemp and cole seed', but Evelyn took no share in this ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn

... becomes more and more barren; the mountains recede, and the extended plains have a desert, uncultivated look. Towns and villages become so thinly scattered, that it seems as though the whole region were depopulated. The road is rather narrow, and as the country is in many places exceedingly marshy, a great portion of it has been paved. For many miles before we enter Rome we do not pass a single town or village. At length, some three hours before we reach the city, the dome of St. Peter's is seen looming in the distance; one church after another appears, ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer

... aux Noix, on the opposite side of the river, was marshy to the distance of three hundred paces from the river, covered with small trees where there was a rising ground, and there was no English post nearer to it than at the Prairie de Boileau, distant half a mile down the river, so that the ...
— The Campaign of 1760 in Canada - A Narrative Attributed to Chevalier Johnstone • Chevalier Johnstone

... and little knolls of earth. On the farther bank from me the trees rose thickly again, and shut out the view, and cast their black shadows on the sluggish, shallow water. As I walked down to the lake, I saw that the ground on its farther side was damp and marshy, overgrown with rank grass and dismal willows. The water, which was clear enough on the open sandy side, where the sun shone, looked black and poisonous opposite to me, where it lay deeper under ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins

... that enchanted forest, where the wild vine trails from tree to tree, where birds and creatures of the marshy solitude haunt their ancient home, lie buried the ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing

... are acquainted only with a single group are apt to be ready with solutions. Thus I have heard the mortality of the Maoris attributed to their change of residence—from fortified hill-tops to the low, marshy vicinity of their plantations. How plausible! And yet the Marquesans are dying out in the same houses where their fathers multiplied. Or take opium. The Marquesas and Hawaii are the two groups the most infected with this vice; the population ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson

... of wilderness, a great marshy plain. In the middle of this swamp was a crater, like those caused by meteors, a deep, ugly scar in the mud. I shuddered at the thought that my darling Mjly might have landed there. Her weaker scientific sense might not have given her the cue to use her skin as a parachute and she might ...
— Lonesome Hearts • Russell Robert Winterbotham

... succeeds,' he said, 'some fail from not having money to feed their families until enough land is under crop to maintain them, others from going on stony or sandy lots that yield only poor crops, and not a few from going where it is marshy and fever-and-ague prevail. Many go into the backwoods who have not the muscle for its hard work or who will not be content to live on pork and potatoes, until they can get better, yet even they might do had they perseverance and self-denial. The Scotch and the North of Ireland people, ...
— The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 • Gordon Sellar

... black hole," said a lean man whom the glance of the blacksmith had indicated as Jube, and who spoke in the intervals of a racking cough that seemed as if it might dislocate his bones in its violence. "Hoof marks hyar—hoof-marks thar—as if they didn't rightly know which way ter go in the marshy ground 'bout Sinking Creek. But at last they 'peared ter git tergether, an' off they tracked ter the west——" A paroxysm of coughs intervened, and the attention of the group failed to follow the words ...
— The Raid Of The Guerilla - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

... and resolution when thinking will not. I started off in the morning down by the river, and towards the sea, my favourite stroll. I went on and on under a leaden sky, through the level, solitary, marshy meadows, where the river began to lose itself in the ocean, and I wandered about there, struggling for guidance. In my distress I actually knelt down and prayed, but the heavens remained impassive as before, and ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford

... towns. It was a blunder; the site has proved untenable; and, although it is still such a young place by the scale of Europe, it has already begun to be deserted for its neighbour and namesake, North Vallejo. A long pier, a number of drinking saloons, a hotel of a great size, marshy pools where the frogs keep up their croaking, and even at high noon the entire absence of any human face or voice—these are the marks of South Vallejo. Yet there was a tall building beside the pier, labelled the Star Flour Mills; and sea-going, full-rigged ships lay close along shore, waiting ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson

... neither in history nor in the more reliable traditions has any reminiscence been preserved as to the period or occasion of the establishment of a frontier line so important in its results. We find, at the time when our history begins, the flat and marshy tracts to the south of the Alban range in the hands of Umbro-Sabellian stocks, the Rutuli and Volsci; Ardea and Velitrae are no longer in the number of originally Latin towns. Only the central portion of that region between the Tiber, the spurs of the Apennines, the Alban ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... months, is at an end, and copious rains cause the seed to shoot above the ground a few days after the sowing. Several varieties of PADI are in common use, some more suitable for the hillsides, some for the marshy lands. On any one patch three or four kinds are usually sown according to the elevation and slope of the part of the area. Since the rates of growth of the several kinds are different, the sowings are so timed ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall

... there as we went south, and we caught some exquisite lights on the near and snowy hills; and there was something almost homelike in the miles and miles of olive orchards, that recalled the apple-trees, but for their shining silvered leaves. And yet nothing could be more desolate than the brown marshy ground, the brown hillocks, with now and then a shabby stone hut or a bit of ruin, and the flocks of sheep shivering near their corrals, and their shepherd, clad in sheepskin, as his ancestor was in the time of Romulus, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... the time. Italy, the mother of art, wished the laurel to encircle the brow of the living, not to be simply the ornament of a tomb. Rome had crowned, in 1341, him who, "cleansing the fount of Helicon from slime and marshy rushes, had restored to the water its pristine limpidity, who had opened Castalia's grotto, obstructed by a network of wild boughs, and destroyed the briers in the laurel grove": the illustrious Francis Petrarch.[478] Though ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand

... wide, sluggish, clayey water, oozing out of fens, and in this part of its course it strained among some score of willow-covered, marshy islets. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... This was but a small comfort to us; yet seeing a little grove, about a quarter of a mile's distance, we moved to it, by the old Portuguese pilot's advice, without meeting with any opposition. Here we found a marshy piece of ground, and a spring of water running into a little brook on one side, which joined another like it a little further off, and these two formed the head of the river called Writska. As soon as we arrived, we went to work, cutting great arms off the trees, ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe

... gates." This is to be noticed also in monasteries, banks, governmental departments, regiments, places of learning and other public institutions, where for a long time, almost for decades, life flows evenly, like a marshy river; and, suddenly, and after some altogether insignificant incident or other, there begin transfers, changes in positions, expulsions from service, losses, sicknesses. The members of society, just as though they had conspired, ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin

... breast I see majestic VENICE rest; While round her spires the billows rave, Inverted splendours gild the wave. Fair liberty has rear'd with toil, Her fabric on this marshy soil. She fled those banks with scornful pride, Where classic Po devolves her tide: Yet here her unrelenting laws Are deaf to nature's, freedom's cause. Unjust! they seal'd FOSCARI'S doom, An exile in his early bloom. And he, who bore the rack unmov'd, Divided ...
— Poems (1786), Volume I. • Helen Maria Williams

... a river which had grown to a very considerable stream, sometimes with high banks, again with shores rather low and marshy, and often broken with many islands scattered across an expanse of water sometimes nearly a quarter of a mile in extent. The last forty miles of the stream to the junction of the Finlay had averaged not ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Trail • Emerson Hough

... which found ample accomplishment. The misery of the country came to a climax about 1830, when the Uzbek chief of Kunduz, Murad Beg Kataghan, swept away the bulk of the inhabitants, and set them down to die in the marshy plains of Kunduz. (Cathay, p. 542; ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa

... fifteen miles by water from the river's mouth. Opposite the Palatine community there arose on the Quirinal Hill another settlement, which seems to have been an outpost of the Sabines. After much hard fighting the rival hill towns united on equal terms into one state. The low marshy land between the Palatine and Quirinal became the Forum, or common market place, and the steep rock, known as the Capitoline, formed ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER

... away, until it sounded like distant thunder, and I thought we touched the ground now and then, although slightly. All at once the Spanish part of the crew, for we still had a number of the felucca's people with us, sang out "Palanca," and we began to pole along a narrow marshy lagoon, coming so near the shore occasionally, that our sides were brushed by the branches of the mangrove bushes. Again the channel seemed to widen, and I could hear the felucca once more ply her sweeps. In about ten minutes after this the ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott

... rank sunflowers, gave them a place of concealment through the daylight hours. Again on the second night they hurried cautiously forward. The second morning they were near an Indian village. Their only retreat was in the tall growth of a low, marshy place. Here they crouched through another long day. The unsuspecting squaws, hunting fuel, tramped the grasses dangerously near to them, but a merciful Providence ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter

... Knight, who had done so much for good and cheap literature; Madame Bodichon (formerly Barbara Smith), the great friend and correspondent of George Eliot, who was interesting to me because by introducing the Australian eucalyptus to Algeria she had made an unhealthy marshy country quite salubrious. She had a salon, where I met very clever men and women—English and French—and which made me wish for such things in Adelaide. The kindness and hospitality that were shown to me—an absolute stranger—by all sorts of people were surprising. ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence

... character. I recollect a history of a buffalo-hunting adventure, told me by a Dutch farmer, who was himself an eye-witness to the scene. He had gone out with a party to hunt a herd of buffaloes which were grazing on a piece of marshy ground, sprinkled with a few mimosa-trees. As they could not get within shot of the herd, without crossing a portion of the marsh, which was not safe for horses, they agreed to leave their steeds ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat

... bamboo with the gum of the jack-tree, the former being tied to the branches of some wild fruit tree, upon which, when the fruit is ripe, the birds light and are caught by the bird lime. This is called ka riam thit. Another is a kind of spring bow made of bamboo which is laid on the ground in marshy places, such as are frequented by snipe and woodcock. This form of snare is unfortunately most common. A third is a cage into which birds are lured by means of a bait, the cage being hidden in the grass, and the entrance being so contrived that the birds can hop ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon

... over it, was behind us, and we went through the fir-wood which I had seen the day before. The sun poured down a cheerful light on the merry Burschen, in gaily colored garb, as they merrily pressed onward through the wood, disappearing here, coming to light again there, running across marshy places on trunks of trees, climbing over shelving steeps by grasping the projecting tree-roots; while they thrilled all the time in the merriest manner and received as joyous an answer from the twittering wood-birds, the invisibly plashing ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... the station and leave Knowles there as his manager. Although there were but four thousand head of cattle on the run, they were widely separated in small mobs of a few hundreds each—some high up in the ranges, and some haunting the low-lying littoral, and frequenting the flat marshy land about the mouths of the numerous creeks debouching into the sea, where they eagerly ate the lush, saline grasses and creepers that lined the coast above high-water mark—and to "round up" all these scattered mobs on their various camps, and count every beast, meant ...
— Tom Gerrard - 1904 • Louis Becke

... plain. Compare modern English, "lawn," and French, "Landes" — flat, bare marshy tracts in the ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer

... on the shores of the lake of Tiberias. Once probably the sea covered the whole of this ground. At twelve hours and a half Suez bore S. about an hour and an half distant from us. To our right we saw marshy ground extending northwards, which the people informed me was full of salt; it is called, like all salt marshes, Szabegha (Arabic). At the end of thirteen hours we crossed a low and narrow Wady, perhaps the remains of the canal of Ptolemy; and at fourteen hours and a ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt

... health than when I left Tripoli. Yet we are all a little nervous about the climate of Mourzuk, which is situated in a slight depression of the plain, in a place inclined to be marshy. The Consul has just recovered from a ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson

... the sea-beach, forming the western side of Swansea Bay. The encroachments of the sea have been very extensive here; at high water shipping now traverse what was fifty years ago, we are told, a marshy flat, bordered by a wood near the present road, the stumps of which yet appear on the sandy beach. We have several times on riding to low water mark (about three quarters of a mile out) been nearly involved in a quick-sand adventure. Landward, the ground ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 488, May 7, 1831 • Various

... curiously intermingled runs the one straggling street of the town, with its sturdy pilots' cottages, its mouldering marine store-houses, and its composite shops. Toward the northern end this street is bounded by the one eminence visible over all the marshy flat—a low wooded hill, on which the church is built. At its opposite extremity the street leads to a deserted martello tower, and to the forlorn outlying suburb of Slaughden, between the river Alde and the sea. Such are the main ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins

... chiefly of a mystical character. If, for instance, it was observed that a flag and a fern never grew near each other, the circumstance was imputed to some antipathy between these vegetables; nor was it for some time resolved by the natural rule, that the flag has its nourishment in marshy ground, whereas the fern loves a deep dryish soil. The attributes of the divining-rod were fully credited; the discovery of the philosopher's stone was daily hoped for; and electricity, magnetism, and other remarkable and misconceived phenomena were ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott

... she stayed her feet. The speed at which she had come, and an agitation which was increasing, made breathing so difficult that she turned a few paces aside, and sat down upon a rough block of stone, long since quarried and left unused. Just before her was a small patch of marshy ground, long grass growing about a little pool. A rook had alighted on the margin, and was pecking about. Presently it rose on its heavy wings; she watched it flap athwart the dun sky. Then her eye fell on a little yellow flower near her feet, a flower she did not know. ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing

... needed. A French officer, however, had recognized him as he passed through the line, and now with some dozen soldiers was pursuing at full speed. The Prince's horse had been wounded in two places and was also blown with exertion, and passing over some marshy ground had not strength to clear it, but plunged helplessly in the soft soil. In two minutes, the French would have been upon them and made the greatest capture of the war. Claverhouse, leaping off his horse, asked the Prince to mount, who, ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren

... was rested and full of spirits. They drove almost straight across the city, about at the end of our first hundred numbered streets. But the road wound around to get out of a low marshy place, a pond in the rainy season, and some rocks that seemed tumbled up on end. They struck a bit of the old Boston Post Road, and that caused the little girl to stop her prattle and think of the old ladies they ...
— A Little Girl in Old New York • Amanda Millie Douglas

... reign by private purchasers, assisted by an act of Parliament passed in 1601, intended to remove legal difficulties. It proceeded slowly, partly because of the expense and difficulty of putting up lasting embarkments, and partly because of the opposition of the fenmen, or dwellers in the marshy districts, whose livelihood was obtained by catching the fish and water fowl that the improvements would drive away. With the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, however, largely through the skill of Dutch engineers and laborers, many thousands of acres of fertile ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney

... to a boat that was on the river that ran behind the hall, and entereth thereinto and roweth up-stream of the river. And he cometh to a fishery, where was a right fair hall on a little eyot enclosed by a marshy arm of the river. The jealous knight was come thither for disport, and lay in the midst of the hall upon a couch. The dwarf cometh forth of his boat thereinto, and lighteth a great candle in his fist and cometh ...
— High History of the Holy Graal • Unknown

... County Clare by rail we cross into Galway, between Crusheen and Tubber. Beyond the marshy country on the right, away in the woodlands, nestles Loughcootra Castle. The great lake from which the place takes its name covers eight square miles. The hundreds of islets here scattered about its surface are the homes of thousands of herons. The country people have a belief that this ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger

... footsteps, assist the two chiefs in pursuing him, and stop just with the spear that arrests him. We are perfectly acquainted with the situation of all the forces, with the figure in which they lie, with the disposition of Rhesus and the Thracians, with the posture of his chariot and horses. The marshy spot of ground where Dolon is killed, the tamarisk, or aquatic plant upon which they hung his spoils, and the reeds that are heaped together to mark the place, are circumstances the most ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer

... education there, or devoting their lives to piety within its walls. It was here that Guthlac, a Saxon warrior, disgusted with the world, sought solitude and repose; and for ten long years he led a hermit's life in that damp and marshy fen; in prayer and fasting, working miracles, and leading hearts to God, he spent his lonely days, all which was rewarded by a happy and peaceful death, and a sanctifying of his corporeal remains—for many wondrous miracles were wrought by ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather

... advantage we picked up with the leaders in a couple of miles, and two of the largest boars were immediately seized by the dogs close together in a piece of bad marshy ground, covered with snow and spear grass, much rooted and honeycombed. Smith, who was first in the running, narrowly escaped a broken neck. The huge sixteen hand mare he rode planted her feet in a hole and somersaulted, ...
— Five Years in New Zealand - 1859 to 1864 • Robert B. Booth

... superintendence of his hospitals in the time of peace; always the same, untiring, unmurmuring, brave, studious, observing, unflinching in his duties, unselfish; whether in the burning sands of Egypt or in the snowy steppes of Russia, in the marshy plains of Italy or in the highlands of Spain, he always found him the same, and his notes and observations, from his first government service on the Newfoundland coast to his last, always showed him the same laborer and student in the field ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino

... went on his weary way for many days, and nowhere did he come across any linen that would have done. So he journeyed on, and his spirits sank with every step. At last he came to a bridge which stretched over a deep river flowing through a flat and marshy land. Before crossing the bridge he sat down on the banks of the stream and sighed dismally over his sad fate. Suddenly a misshapen toad crawled out of the swamp, and, sitting down opposite him, asked: 'What's the matter with you, ...
— The Green Fairy Book • Various

... undried[obs3], humid, sultry, wet, dank, luggy[obs3], dewy; roral|, rorid|; roscid[obs3]; juicy. wringing wet, soaking wet; wet through to the skin; saturated &c. v. swashy[obs3], soggy, dabbled; reeking, dripping, soaking, soft, sodden, sloppy, muddy; swampy &c. (marshy) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget

... answered. "The country we shall now traverse will not facilitate our flight, but the reverse. From the edge of the Great Forest to Buna, beyond the Kong mountains, it is mostly marshy hollows and pestilential swamps, while the lands beyond Buna away to Koranza, in Ashanti, are flat and open like your English pastures. We will, if opportunity offers, endeavour to escape, but even if we succeeded in eluding their vigilance death lurks ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux

... along the excellent railway in a style calculated to make the "limited express" look to its laurels, and in less than two hours drew up at the station of Aiasulouk. Here the western chain of hills which we had skirted ceases, and the great marshy plain of Ephesus opens out, the river Cayster meandering through it. The insignificant station-house and platform, with a small coffee-house and some dwellings, reminded me of a prairie station in our Western country. But the eye was at once attracted by something ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various

... of these trees support their stems some feet above the ground, and diverge in every direction, so as to produce an almost impenetrable thicket. The trees do not rise more than twelve feet high. They grow in marshy places, generally within the influx of the Indian Ocean, and where the tide can ...
— The Wreck on the Andamans • Joseph Darvall

... river was a little shanty in which was a mass of fishing seine. It stood hospitably open, for the hinges of the door were all rusted away and the dried and shrunken boards lay on the marshy ground before the entrance. Keekie Joe had intended to make sure that there was nothing to eat in the shanty before casting his line in the neighboring water. For there was the barest chance that a petrified crust of bread, ancient ...
— Pee-Wee Harris Adrift • Percy Keese Fitzhugh

... rain in the middle of July—Hyacinth was invited by Canon Beecher to join a boating party on the lake. The river, whose one useful function was the turning of Mr. Quinn's millwheel, wound away afterwards through marshy fields and groves of willow-trees into the great lake. At its mouth the Beechers kept their boat, a cumbrous craft, very heavy to row, but safe and suited to carry a family in comfort. The party started early—Canon Beecher, Hyacinth, and one of the boys very early, for they had ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham

... grieved, detesting life prolonged That brought with it another civil war. And thus spake one, to justify his fears: "No other deeds the fates laid up in store When Marius (1), victor over Teuton hosts, Afric's high conqueror, cast out from Rome, Lay hid in marshy ooze, at thy behest, O Fortune! by the yielding soil concealed And waving rushes; but ere long the chains Of prison wore his weak and aged frame, And lengthened squalor: thus he paid for crime His punishment beforehand; doomed to ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan

... above spoken more particularly of high lands. The low and marshy grounds, called in Brazil, varzeas, are, however, those which are the best adapted to the cane; and, indeed, upon the plantations that do not possess some portions of this description of soil the crops are very unequal, and sometimes almost ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds

... strongly fortified, and so surrounded by marshy ground, intersected by a number of small streams, that the only way of approach for a besieging force was a single causeway defended by the forts of St Isabella and St Anthony. The garrison consisted of 8000 men, and the governor, Grobendonc, was an ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson

... was a boy," he said to his daughter, who remained close at his side, "I lived, as you know, in a seaport town. Ever since I came away, it seems to me, I have been longing to smell that salty, marshy, briny smell again. It takes me ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond

... recover his breath; then he went on at a slower pace. The pursued had not discovered the pursuit; he trudged along steadily and sturdily, never once looking back. Thus the two men crossed the Trastavere, and each in turn, emerging from a gate in the wall of the Leonine City, passed out into the marshy country beyond. They had not gone very far, when Esperance saw Giovanni suddenly give a start; at the same time he heard a loud, harsh ...
— Monte-Cristo's Daughter • Edmund Flagg

... are gathering for dark winter days, a few pleasant hours are yet left to the dying year, the atmosphere is saturated with moist exhalations, with tender mists softening but not obscuring the beautiful forms of the leafless trees and shrubs. The springs are filling, the low grounds marshy, the leaves on the woodpaths crisp and of a golden brown. Far away in the west is a band of gray light, that tells of clearer skies and brighter seasons one day to come, of new hopes to dawn, when the earth, and the soul, shall have been purified by adverse blasts, by the baring of their nakedness ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... to do—for it was caused by home-sickness. He pined for his rude home in Siberia—for the ice-fields, the marshy meadows, and the barren steppes of his fatherland—he saw no beauty in the summer plains of the South, no charm in the cultivated fields, nor found pleasure in the society into which he was thrown. His sadness increased every day—he lost his flesh, and at length became incapable of effort, ...
— Hair Breadth Escapes - Perilous incidents in the lives of sailors and travelers - in Japan, Cuba, East Indies, etc., etc. • T. S. Arthur

... should be applied so as not to impair the quality of the herbage. Slow-acting manures are consequently best, such as basic slag or bones, which have been found to be of special value. On wet or marshy land after draining, lime is perhaps one of the best manures to apply in the first instance. As we have already said, farmyard manure will do more to maintain the quality of pasture than any kind of artificial manure. Mr Cooke is of opinion that no system of manuring yet discovered will both thicken ...
— Manures and the principles of manuring • Charles Morton Aikman

... then I do not remember, except that the dull rumble of the wheels told me we were passing over a bridge, and that I saw through the mist before my eyes a sluggish river, a muddy canal, and patches of marshy fields. ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine

... it is otherwise on the coast of the mainland. In West Greenland the mosquito as far north as the southern part of Disco Island is still so terrible, especially to the new comer during the first days, that the face of any one who without a veil ventures into marshy ground overgrown with bushes, becomes in a few hours unrecognisable. The eyelids are closed with swelling and changed into water-filled bladders, suppurating tumours are formed in the head under the hair, &c. ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold

... was an island called the Isle of Thorney, from the brambles that grew over it. The island lay very low, so that when the tide swept up the river it stood but little above the water; and even after many years, when the ditch running round the island was dried up, yet still the land was marshy. It was an odd place to choose for the building of a church. Then, as you have read in history, came the invasion of the Saxons, and the monks had to fly and leave their church, for the Saxons were not Christians, and they came to ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton

... corroborated and increased our respect for popular beliefs and impressions. While "bad air" had nothing to do with causing the disease, except in so far as it was inhabited by songsters of the Anopheles genus, yet it was precisely the air of marshy places which was most likely to be "bad" in this sense. So that, while in one sense those local wiseacres, who would point out to you the pearly mists of evening as they rose over low-lying meadows and bottom-lands, and inform you that there before your very eyes was the "mylary ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson

... Sometimes it carried down from its celestial sources branches and fruits unlike any to be found on earth. The sea mentioned in all these tales is perhaps a less extravagant invention than we are at first inclined to think. A lake, nearly as large as the Victoria Nyanza, once covered the marshy plain where the Bahr el-Abiad unites with the Sobat, and with the Bahr el-Ghazal. Alluvial deposits have filled up all but its deepest depression, which is known as Birket Nu; but, in ages preceding our era, it must still have been vast enough to suggest to Egyptian soldiers and boatmen the idea ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... heavy wings and croak of alarm flew up a great heron from a marshy pool, and in a moment all was forgotten as I unhooded my hawk—one that Olaf had given me from the Danish spoils at Canterbury. Then the rush of the long-winged falcon, and the cry of the heron, and the giddy climbing of both into the gray November sky as ...
— King Olaf's Kinsman - A Story of the Last Saxon Struggle against the Danes in - the Days of Ironside and Cnut • Charles Whistler

... of the snake? Here an European, fatigued with luxury, riches, and pleasures, may find a sweet relaxation in a series of interesting scenes, as affecting as they are new. England, which now contains so many domes, so many castles, was once like this; a place woody and marshy; its inhabitants, now the favourite nation for arts and commerce, were once painted like our neighbours. The country will nourish in its turn, and the same observations will be made which I have just delineated. Posterity will look back with avidity and pleasure, ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur

... find that it is impossible to go on so quick with the battery of cannon as would have been wished. By the report of those I sent there, the ground is marshy, and vastly too much exposed; and, notwithstanding all the pains taken by the Duke of Perth, who is indefatigable in that service, and who meets with innumerable difficulties, I suspect the place pitched upon will not answer. But, if the thing be prosecuted, I think it ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson

... similarity of sound, the name Maer-field has been, naturally enough, interpreted to mean Mary-field. The apparently obvious form "Miry-field,"—as, according to Leland, it appears on an old inscription,—in spite of the marshy nature of the site, is probably a mere coincidence. Nor is Thomas Fuller's "Merry-field, for the pleasant situation thereof," better worth attention. The generally accepted theory at present is that maer, the Anglo-Saxon word for a boundary, supplies the clue. A hamlet, Marton, near ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White

... saw the sacred hour when a misty smoke hung over a pit surrounded by an impassable sinking mire. This strange smoke appeared every morning, both winter and summer; but most visibly in midwinter it rose immediately above the marshy spot. By the time the full face of the sun appeared above the eastern horizon, the smoke vanished. Even very old men, who had known this country the longest, said that the smoke from this pit had never failed a single day to ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa

... like the white cockle. On cutting a bough or leaf there run out a great stream of milk, as from the dug of a goat. On all this coast I saw no other trees, except a grove a little beyond Massua, in some marshy ground near the sea. Besides these trees, there are some valleys inland producing a few capers, the leaves of which are eaten by the Moors, who say they be appropriate to the joynts. On the 4th of April, from sunrise till eleven ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr

... pass out into the plain, and run, a full and brimming stream, between high sandy banks, half hidden by the thick, glossy-leaved alders. Hugh knew the broad water-meadows down below, with the low hills on either side, where big water-plants grew in marshy places, and where the cattle moved slowly about through the still hours. Soon the stream would be running by the great downs—it was a river now, bearing boats upon it—till it passed by the wharves and beneath the bridges of the little town, ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson

... furze from the footpath, there are purple traces here and there at the edge of the fern where the heath-bells hang. On a furze branch, which projects above the rest, a furze chat perches, with yellow blossom above and beneath him. Rushes mark the margin of small pools and marshy spots, so overhung with brambles and birch branches, and so closely surrounded by gorse, that they ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies

... centre of a brilliant court, a famous school of pictorial art, the seat of a university whose fame drew scholars from distant Britain, and whose ducal family gave birth to the Brunswick dynasty, whence descended the royalty of England. The city dates its origin from the fifth century, when its marshy site gave refuge from the pursuing Huns, and the ambition of its rulers gradually concentrated around the unpromising domain those elements of ecclesiastical prestige, knightly valor, artistic and literary resources which enriched and signalized the Italian cities of the Middle Ages. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various

... it found a vent. The thing she knew she was obliged to hide; By interest and by oath the wife was tied; 180 But if she told it not, the woman died. Loath to betray a husband and a prince, But she must burst, or blab; and no pretence Of honour tied her tongue from self-defence. A marshy ground commodiously was near, Thither she ran, and held her breath for fear; Lest if a word she spoke of any thing, That word might be the secret of the king. Thus full of counsel to the fen she went, Griped all the way, and longing for a vent; 190 Arrived, by pure necessity compell'd, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden

... looking away over a vast plain towards a distant range of volcanic mountains. A broad river wound through the midst between isolated volcanoes, curling with smoke, and thick forests of a sable hue, or expanded into marshy lakes half lost in brakes of grisly reeds, on the margin of which living monsters were plashing in the mud, or soaring into ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro

... because it was surmounted by a small chapel, the roof of which had the appearance of a minaret. The French centre was near the pool of Kobolnitz, and the right was at Telnitz. The Emperor had put very few troops there in order to tempt the Russians into the marshy ground, where he had prepared their defeat by concealing in Gross-Raigern, on the road to Vienna, the corps ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot

... in agony, hewing his way toward the king. Rodolph was alone against a host, while his horse sank up to his knees in the marshy ground. Before succor could arrive, a sword had cloven through the monarch's wrist, and his right hand ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles

... chill and the desolate character of the country seriously interfered with Napoleon's plans, the troops being obliged to make their way through thick and rain-soaked forests, and march over desolate and marshy plains. The winter of the north fought against them like a strong army and many of them fell dead without a battle. Warlike movements became almost impossible to the troops of the south, though the hardy ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall

... refreshment he led his tired horse, directing his way by the compass, lit up at intervals by vivid flashes of lightning. It was not till the third week of his flight that his reward came. "I was told I should see the Niger early next day," he wrote on 20th July 1796. "We were riding through some marshy ground, when some one called out 'See the water!' and, looking forwards, I saw with infinite pleasure the great object of my mission—the long-sought-for majestic Niger glittering to the morning sun, as broad ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge

... beauty which is quite distinct from both. Palms are its chief characteristics. They lean against the garden walls, and feather the wells outside the town, where women come with brazen pitchers to draw water. In some of the marshy tangles of the plain, they spring from a thick undergrowth of spiky leaves, and rear their tall aerial arms against the deep blue background of the sea or darker purple of the distant hills. White pigeons fly about among their branches, and the air is loud with cooings ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... ash-colour that occur on fallen leaves are all reproduced in its plumage, so that when according to its habit it rests upon the ground under trees, it is almost impossible to detect it. In snipes the colours are modified so as to be equally in harmony with the prevalent forms and colours of marshy vegetation. Mr. J. M. Lester, in a paper read before the Rugby School Natural History Society observes:—"The wood-dove, when perched amongst the branches of its favourite fir, is scarcely discernible; ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various

... is a paste made of the tuberous root of the kalo (Colocasia antiquorum, var. esculenta, Schott.). More than thirty varieties of kalo are cultivated on the Hawaiian Islands, most of them requiring a marshy soil, but a few will grow in the dry earth of the mountains. The tubers of all the kinds are acrid, except one, which is so mild that it may be eaten raw. After it is freed from acridity by baking, the kalo is ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff

... June 5, and, after calling at Cagliari and Chia, arrived at Cape Spartivento on the morning of June 8. The coast here is a low range of heathy hills, with brilliant green bushes and marshy pools. Mr. Webb remarks that its reputation for fever was so bad as to cause Italian men-of-war to sheer off in passing by. Jenkin suffered a little from malaria, but of a different origin. 'A number of ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro

... blazed down upon the earth, there was a vividness of flamy vegetation, of fierce seclusion amid the savage peace of the commons. Strange how the savage England lingers in patches: as here, amid these shaggy gorse commons, and marshy, snake infested places near the foot of the south downs. The spirit of place lingering on primeval, as when the Saxons ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence

... the critical ears of ethnologists and philologists, but to touch the hearts of my countrymen on behalf of the poor Gipsy women and children and other roadside Arabs flitting about in our midst, in such a way as to command attention to these neglected, dark, marshy spots of human life, whose seedlings have been running wild among us during the last three centuries, spreading their poisonous influence abroad, not only detrimental to the growth of Christianity ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith

... protection for themselves and their posterity. After this a soft bed was prepared for him, on which he was no sooner laid but he expired, the happy moment he had not ceased to pray for ever since his torments, and his first call to martyrdom. Dacian commanded his body to be thrown on a marshy field among rushes; but a crow defended it from wild beasts and birds of prey. The acts in Ruinart and Bollandus, and the sermon attributed to St. Leo, add, that it was then tied to a great stone and cast into ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler

... proclaims its genesis. The gravel moraine is heaped there like a barricade, often in pieces larger than a man's head; between are tufts of rushes and rotten branches; the shallows are covered with green and brown river-shells; on the marshy parts round holes are washed out, in which, at the sound of approaching footsteps, hundreds of crabs rush to hide. The shore is covered along its whole length with prickly willow, which the ice-floes shave off every winter close to ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai

... west side of the river, and is separated from the west shore, not as he said, by a wide running branch of the river, as wide as the Eemster, near Amsterdam, but by a small creek, as wide as a large ditch, running through a meadow. It is long and covered with bushes, and inside somewhat marshy. It is about two miles long, or a little more, and a mile and a half wide. Although there are not less miles than he said, he did not say they were English miles, which are only one-fourth the length of Dutch miles, of fifteen to a degree. The southwest point, ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts

... thatcher, began to appear at the road-side. The old gabled cottages of the early part of the drive dwindled and disappeared, and huts with mud walls rose in their place. With the ancient church towers and the wind and water mills, which had hitherto been the only lofty objects seen over the low marshy flat, there now rose all round the horizon, gliding slow and distant behind fringes of pollard willows, the sails of invisible boats moving on invisible waters. All the strange and startling anomalies presented ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins



Words linked to "Marshy" :   marsh, wet



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