"Pit" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... tell you 'bout how we killed hogs in my day. We digged a deep pit in de groun' and heated big rocks red hot and filled up de pit with water and dropped dem hot rocks in and got de water hot; den we stuck de hogs and rolled 'em ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Texas Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... to the character of a keen sportsman, has what is termed a poste a feu. This is a pit or cave dug in the ground in the vicinity of a couple of pine-trees, and covered over with branches. In addition to the pine-trees, it is usual to have cimeaux, long spars of wood, of which two are supported horizontally on the branches of the trees, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... attacked the city of Dijon in 1558, a lady, named Nicole Lentillet, being reputed dead of the epidemic, was thrown into a great pit, wherein they buried the dead. The day after her interment, in the morning, she came to herself again, and made vain efforts to get out, but her weakness, and the weight of the other bodies with which ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... whatever they did during the next few hours, no one ever knew, but from that evening both forgot their rivalry and became fast friends. Jack suddenly decided to go West and finish his engineering studies in the mountains about Pebbly Pit. And Tom decided to make one last stand for Polly, and should she still refuse him on the basis that she must finish a business experience first, then he would knuckle down to hard work and ...
— Polly's Business Venture • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... was in the crowd, all her money, with the exception of two hundred pounds she had put by, crushed into her big beaded hand-bag. She remembered how at Aberdeen the night she went to the theatre people stood like this, patiently waiting for the pit-door to open. What did she not remember about that, her first and only visit to ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... I confined my whole attention to spade labor. The centripetal force seemed to have made me its especial victim. I dug on until autumn. In the beginning of November I observed that, upon percussion, the sound given by the floor of my pit was resonant. I did not intermit my labor, urged as I was by a mysterious instinct downward. On applying my ear, I occasionally heard a subdued sort of rattle, which caused me to form a theory that the centre of the earth might be composed of mucus. In November, the ground broke beneath ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... in the Bell (1821) is one which might happen to anyone. The maddening clangour of sound, the frightful images that crowd into the reeling brain of the man suspended in the belfry, are described with an unflinching realism that reminds us of The Pit and the Pendulum. To the same class belongs the skilfully constructed Iron Shroud (1830), by William Mudford, an author who, as Scott remarks in his journal, "loves to play at cherry-pit with Satan." The suspense is ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... Thackeray were living together in London, visiting the Cave of Harmony and revelling in the dear delights of young intellectual companionship. Under a drawing of the famous Braham, dated 1831, Fitz has written: "As I saw and heard him many nights in the Pit of Covent Garden, in company with W.M. Thackeray, whom I was staying with at ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... Witnesse all the creature-throng, Is confess'd by every Tongue. All things back from whence they sprong, As the thankfull Rivers pay What they borrowed of the Sea. Now my self I do resigne, Take me whole I all am thine. Save me, God! from Self-desire, Deaths pit, dark Hells raging fire, Envy, Hatred, Vengeance, Ire. Let not Lust my soul bemire. Quit from these thy praise I'll sing, Loudly sweep the trembling string. Bear a part, O Wisdomes sonnes! Free'd from vain Relligions. Lo! from farre ...
— Democritus Platonissans • Henry More
... had come running up, suddenly stooped over and constituting himself a battering ram, ran full tilt into the tentman, the boy's head landing in the pit of the circus hand's stomach. The fellow went down, whereupon Teddy promptly sat on him until the ...
— The Circus Boys On the Mississippi • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... there was a sound of racing feet, and down the drive there came two men at headlong speed. Yorke did not doubt that they were poachers; but his blood was up, and he was armed—he felt like an iron-clad against whom three wooden ships were about to pit themselves. "Where I hit now I make a hole," he muttered, savagely, and stood firm; nor did he even put his lips to the whistle that hung round ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... K. Keidgewack, for piling wood upon. L. Keek kloweyt, cooking side. M. Keek loot, fire-place built of stone.{6} N. Eegloo, house. O. Kattack, door. P. Nattoeuck, clear space in the apartment. a. d. Eekput, a kind of shelf where the candle stands; and b. c. a pit where they throw their bones, and other offal of their provision. Q. Eegl-luck, bed-place. R. Eegleeteoet, bed-side or sitting-place. S. bed-place, as on the other side.{7} T. Kietgn-nok, small pantry. ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 2 • John Franklin
... fed, slept, and fought with his comrades; had dodged with them behind cover, loaded, fired, charged with them; had behaved outwardly like a decent soldier, but almost always with a sickening void in the pit of the stomach. Once or twice in particularly bad moments he had caught himself blubbering, and with a deadly shame. He had not an idea that at least a dozen of his comrades—among them Dave and Teddy—had ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... in with the railway; she must have a hand in the shaping of the country. If society crystallises without her influence, the country is lost, and British Columbia will be another trap-door to the bottomless pit.' ...
— Black Rock • Ralph Connor
... is some one who is quite of your opinion. What creatures we are! Last evening my good Betta would have thought no pit of hell too deep for our enemy, and now? To be led to a chariot by such a fine gentleman in person is no doubt flattering; and how quickly the old body has forgotten all her grievances, how soothed and satisfied ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... processes surround a stellate depression, the primitive buccal cavity or stomatodaeum, from which the mouth and nasal cavities are developed. The buccal cavity is bounded above by the fronto-nasal process, which is divided by a fissure—the nasal cleft or olfactory pit—into a lateral nasal process, and a mesial nasal process, at the outer angle of which a spheroidal elevation ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... Army lass, disputing his catch with him; upon the police detective going his rounds with coldly observant eye intent upon the outcome of the contest; upon the wreck that is past hope, and upon the youth pausing on the verge of the pit in which the other has long ceased to struggle. Sights and sounds of Christmas there are in plenty in the Bowery. Balsam and hemlock and fir stand in groves along the busy thoroughfare, and garlands of green embower mission and dive impartially. Once a year the old street recalls its ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... get my bread first and live for beauty after. Everything is refused though, everything sent back or else dropped as it were into some bottomless pit or gulf. ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... of guns from below had ceased, and as the Yankees above could not find any enemy plane against which to pit their strength, they, too, no longer scurried this way and that, each one like an ...
— Air Service Boys Flying for Victory - or, Bombing the Last German Stronghold • Charles Amory Beach
... 3).—Clear the mouth and throat of mucus by introducing into the throat the corner of a handkerchief wrapped closely around the forefinger; turn the patient on the back, the roll of clothing being so placed as to raise the pit of the stomach above the level of the rest of the body. Let an assistant, with a handkerchief or piece of dry cloth, draw the tip of the tongue out of one corner of the mouth (which prevents the tongue from falling back and choking the entrance to the windpipe), and keep it projecting a little beyond ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume I (of VI) • Various
... become irksome and tedious. I have fled from myself; I have fled from the magnificence of my retinue, to find variety. And yet how dearly am I to pay for a few gratifications which were in fact no better than specious allurements to destruction, and flowers that slightly covered the pit of ruin! In the bloom of manhood, in the full career of youth to be cast forth an UNPITIED, NECESSITOUS, MISERABLE VAGABOND! All but this I could have borne without a sigh. Were I threatened with death, in ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... miserable he sat down on a stone by the gate and looked longingly into the entrance. The gospodyni was boiling potatoes for the pigs, and the smell was so good, as the little puffs of steam spread along the highroad, that it went into the very pit of Maciek's stomach. He sat there in ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... hadn't even time to guess wot 'ad 'appened. Got no warnin' wotsomedever. I just felt a tree-mendous shock all of a suddent that struck me motionless—as if Tom Sayers had hit me a double-handed cropper on the top o' my beak an' in the pit o' my bread-basket at one an' the same moment. Then came an 'orrible pressure as if a two-thousand-ton ship 'ad bin let down a-top o' me, an' arter that ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... ma wots ben neeth the old sod fer ten yers. Don't cast any miscomplementry reflecshuns, yung man, on my ma wot dide of anty-consumpshun, or I'll plant the fore end of me toe nales forninst the pit of yer stummick in a way wot'll mak yer feel like a he muel had bruk loose. Air yer the in-dyvidooal wot sent me this invytashun?' sed she, handin the ...
— The Bad Boy At Home - And His Experiences In Trying To Become An Editor - 1885 • Walter T. Gray
... allegiance! Vows, to the blackest devils! Conscience and grace, to the profoundest pit! I dare damnation.... ... Both the worlds I give to negligence, Let come what comes ... ... to cut ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... a preacher peevish to have you land in the pit of his stummick with them sharp hoofs of yourn. But you're only an innercent little sheep, and they wan't no sense in his tryin' ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... furious, "no! a thousand times! I'd sooner see her in the burning depths of the bottomless pit than have you get within a hundred miles of her with your contaminating presence. She is safely hidden away, and that forever, from the companionship of our sex. So let her ...
— Deadwood Dick, The Prince of the Road - or, The Black Rider of the Black Hills • Edward L. Wheeler
... its rocky pit, was not yet buried under the snow, although the white masses came quite close to it, balked, however, of their prey by the pine woods which protected the hamlet. From his vantage point the low houses looked like paving-stones in a large ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... gods, their judgment shows No loss of flair for grace or wit; We see the comic's ruby nose Reduce to pulp the nightly pit, Whose patrons, sound in head and heart, Still love the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 17, 1920 • Various
... in that," he said; "a minister's supposed to preach a hundred and four sermons in each and every year, and there's plenty more where they come from. What's one sermon more or less, when stock costs nothing? It's like wheeling gravel from the pit." ...
— The New Minister's Great Opportunity - First published in the "Century Magazine" • Heman White Chaplin
... through Newcastle, while still a young man, on one of his journeys to the University at Edinburgh, and being desirous of witnessing the operations in a coal-mine, a friend recommended him to visit Killingworth pit, where he would find one George Stephenson, a most intelligent workman, in charge. My father was introduced to Mr. Stephenson accordingly; and after rambling over the underground workings, and observing the pumping and winding engines ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... gentleman who accompanied us; he was very unwilling that he should take me from home, as, he said, he foresaw many difficulties that would attend my going with them.—He endeavoured to prevail on the merchant to throw me into a very deep pit that was in the valley, but he refused to listen to him, and said, he was resolved to take care of me: but the other was greatly dissatisfied; and when we came to a river, which we were obliged to pass through, he purpos'd throwing me in ...
— A Narrative Of The Most Remarkable Particulars In The Life Of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, An African Prince, As Related By Himself • James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw
... prince to submit was the Governor of Herakleopolis, and when he had laid before Piankhi his gifts he said: "Homage to thee, Horus, mighty king, Bull, conqueror of bulls. I was in a pit in hell. I was sunk deep in the depths of darkness, but now light shineth on me. I had no friend in the evil day, and none to support me in the day of battle. Thou only, O mighty king, who hast rolled away the darkness that was on me [art my friend]. Henceforward I am thy servant, ...
— The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians • E. A. Wallis Budge
... remote, and trying to rid himself of this that belonged to him here? Was he trying to get back to it, to resume habitation and possession and command? It was rummy. It was eerie. It was creepy. It was like staring down into a dark pit and hearing little tinkling sounds of some one moving there, and wondering what the devil he was up to. Yes, ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... extended to grasp or to parry—his head lowered with a ferocious scowl—and across his forehead swayed a tuft of black, shaggy hair. He might have stood for one of those northern barbarians whom the Romans loved to pit against their native champions in the arena. He was the greater because of the opponent he faced, and it was upon this opponent that the eyes of Father ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... impatience; "that's my brother Phil all over. He is so honourable, so plain and straightforward in all his dealings, that he would get the best of Lucifer himself in a bargain. I tell you, Hawkehurst, you don't know how deep he is—as deep as the bottomless pit, by Jove! His very generosity makes me all the more afraid of him. I don't understand his game. If he consented to your marriage in order to get rid of Charlotte, he would let you marry her off-hand; but instead of doing that, he makes conditions which must delay ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... struck me at the pit of my stomach—sort of sickish, sweetish feeling—that my position needed regularising pretty bad. I ought to have been a naturalised burgher of a year's standing; but Ohio's my State, and I wouldn't have gone back on her for a desertful of Dutchmen. That and ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... the story of the sub-prior was to be believed, Hereward and his housecarles had taken an ugly stride forward toward the pit. They had met him riding along, intent upon his psalter, in a lonely path of the Bruneswald,—"Whereon your son, most gracious lady, bade me stand, saying that his men were thirsty and he had no money ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... the side of the hill always has the advantage of those who hold the crest. It was in this way that we got such decided advantage over the enemy at South Mountain. We took, in these two redoubts, four more guns, making, in all, five for our regiment, two redoubts, and part of a rifle-pit as our day's work. The Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh United States colored troops advanced against works more to the left. The Fourth United States colored troops took one more redoubt, and the enemy abandoned the other. In ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... intensely busy men, though, at Zanzibar, who were out at all hours of the day. I know one, an American; I fancy I hear the quick pit-pat of his feet on the pavement beneath the Consulate, his cheery voice ringing the salutation, "Yambo!" to every one he met; and he had ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... my suit, my madness vain; Tho' gladly, from her eyes to gain One earthly look, one stray desire, I would have torn the wings that hung Furled at my back and o'er the Fire In GEHIM'S[4] pit their fragments flung;— 'Twas hopeless all—pure and unmoved She stood as lilies in the light Of the hot noon but look more white;— And tho' she loved me, deeply loved, 'Twas not as man, as mortal—no, ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... counterplots; Wallenstein, through personal ambition and evil counsel, slowly resolving to revolt; and Octavio Piccolomini, in secret, undermining his influence among the leaders, and preparing for him that pit of ruin, into which, in the third Part, Wallenstein's Death, we see him sink with all his fortunes. The military spirit which pervades the former piece is here well sustained. The ruling motives of these captains and ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... object of their search. In the evening, when Count Raymond had withdrawn to his post, and the weary assistants began to murmur, Bartholemy, in his shirt, and without his shoes, boldly descended into the pit; the darkness of the hour and of the place enabled him to secrete and deposit the head of a Saracen lance; and the first sound, the first gleam, of the steel was saluted with a devout rapture. The holy lance was drawn from its recess, wrapped in a veil ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... and—forgive them all. The poem closes upon her obtaining from God a compromise, a kind of yearly respite of tortures between Good Friday and Trinity, a chorus of the 'damned' singing loud praises to God from their 'bottomless pit,' thanking ...
— "The Grand Inquisitor" by Feodor Dostoevsky • Feodor Dostoevsky
... little valley of Brand Death was rife in many and awful shapes that no eye might see, for the many watch-fires were scattered and trampled out; but up from that pit of doom rose shrieks and cries and many hateful sounds—sounds to pierce the ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... hours, And if their smiles encountered, he went mad, And raged deep inward, till the light was brown Before his vision, and the world forgot, Looked wicked as some old dull murder-spot. A star with lurid beams, she seemed to crown The pit of infamy: and then again He fainted on his vengefulness, and strove To ape the magnanimity of love, And smote himself, a shuddering ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... of marl and clay. They stared in silence at a vast ochre's-coloured glistening cavity in the ground, on the high edges of which grew tufts of grass amid shards and broken bottles. In the bottom of the pit were laid planks, and along the planks men with pieces of string tied tight round their legs beneath the knees drew large barrows full or empty, sometimes insecurely over pools of yellow water into which the plank sagged ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... Knowledge but only Ignorance. Ignorance should be exalted. In Ignorance lies peace, contentment, happiness, and safety." Even of his work—of his dreams he said this. He said: "It is no use." To the very edge of this pit he came but he did ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... if Squire's lawyer Serves me with his writ, I'll take the bay horse To Marley gravel pit. Over the quarry edge, I'll sit him tight, If he wants the brown hide, He's ...
— Songs Of The Road • Arthur Conan Doyle
... The pit and orchestra arose at once, less to express accord with Fougas' sentiments, than to silence him. During the following entr'acte, a commissioner of police said in his ear, that when one had dined as he had, one ought to go quietly to bed, instead ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... to his after story, it seems strange that any one should ever have felt him unbearably prosperous. About six months after his mother's death he married a milliner's assistant, whom he met first in the pit of a theatre, and whom he was already courting when his mother gave him the advice recorded. She was French, from the neighbourhood of Arles, and of course a Catholic. She had come to London originally as lady's-maid ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... vines. In the second before the vines gave way under his weight, Charley succeeded in grasping a limb and swinging himself in to the trunk of the tree where he found a safe resting-place between two branches. Below him yawned a gigantic pit, its edge hidden from view by the ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... to meet the popular taste. Cricket had hardly taken practical shape, but representative contests did take place in the favourite pastime of cock-fighting—or "cocking" as it was always called in the last century—in which contests the Hertfordshire side of the town brought its birds into the pit against those of the Cambridgeshire side. Of this the following is a specimen under ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... Into that pit of insolvency there went all that was fetched by the sale of the stock and the goodwill of the business and all that Mrs. Ransome had put into the business, including what she had saved out of her tiny income. As for Ranny's savings and the sum he had ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... little game. It is clear enough to me. There are two of them in it, you understand. The other one gets the gold. Never mind how, but we will hope that there is no harm. Let us suppose, for example, that they have found a marvellous mine, where you can just shovel it out like clay from a pit. Well, then, he sends it on to this one, and he has his furnaces and his chemicals, and he refines and purifies it and makes it fit to sell. That's my explanation of it, Robert. Eh, has the old man ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... or other about his playing a fiddle and dancing, far worse than Sandy Neil had ever been guilty of, for this was in a theatre. Wee Andra knew the word theatre was to his father a synonym for the bottomless pit. "Mebbe the minister had been an actor once." Wee Andra hoped, for the sake of the Church, that it ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith
... of The Rich Iew of Malta. As it was playd before the King and Qveene, in His Majesties Theatre at White-Hall, by her Majesties Servants at the Cock-pit. Written by Christopher Marlo. London; Printed by I. B. for Nicholas Vavasour, and are to be sold at his Shop in the Inner-Temple, ...
— The Jew of Malta • Christopher Marlowe
... hast brought me to shame and misery, and hast sworn thyself to the bottomless pit: what canst ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... of the meat they smoked and salted down for future use. Stern undertook to tan the hide with strips of hemlock bark laid in a water pit dug near the spring. He added also some oak-bark, nut-galls and a good quantity of ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... and as Nicholas looked about him, ceiling, pit, boxes, gallery, orchestra, fittings, and decorations of every kind,—all looked ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... I perceived that the hall was crowded to suffocation. My editorial friend sat in a prominent position near the stage, and the audience was manifesting those signs of impatience which seem to be equally orthodox among the news-boys in the pit of the old Bowery Theatre and the coarse young rustics who go to 'shows' in the back villages of ruraldom. I tinkled a bell. The uproar grew quiet. I drew aside my curtain, and made my bow, amid the silent wonderment of ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... mining districts, even at the present day, may partly be explained by remembering that up to the end of the eighteenth century, colliers were serfs and, as such, were not allowed to leave the mines and seek work elsewhere. When a pit was sold, the workers passed as a matter of course into the hands of the new proprietor. The son of a miner was compelled to follow the father's occupation.[8] Slavery fixed a brutalising mark on generation after generation that is not yet entirely erased. In the first ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... must be lukewarm, consisting chiefly of toast and water, mixed with a little white wine. If the cough be attended with feverish symptoms, a gentle emetic must be taken, of camomile flowers, and afterwards the following liniment applied to the pit of the stomach. Dissolve one scruple of tartar emetic in two ounces of spring water, and add half an ounce of the tincture of cantharides: rub a tea-spoonful of it every hour on the lower region of the stomach with ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... with a sigh. "Well—there's prayer and fasting; but there'll be considerably more fasting than prayer, I should imagine. I assure you, I do pray that he doesn't make a fool of himself and marry some woman out of the bottomless pit of Bohemia." ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... not to be spared either, though they had been most excellent women. The base clergy of that time gave up their bodies, which had been buried in the Abbey, and—to the eternal disgrace of England—they were thrown into a pit, together with the mouldering bones of Pym and of the brave ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... governance of all things and matters.' Quoth she, 'Thou sayst truly; but how shall we do with him?' And he answered, 'I have a device, so thou wilt help me in that which I shall say to thee.' Quoth she, 'Thou shall have my help in whatsoever thou desirest.' And he said, 'I mean to dig him a pit in the vestibule and ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... could write a mere note of inquiry to Mr. Penzance, but that was all. She could only walk up and down the lanes and think—whether he lay dying or not. She could do nothing, even if a day came when she knew that a pit had been dug in the clay and he had been lowered into it with creaking ropes, and the clods shovelled back upon him where he lay still—never having told her that he was glad that her being had turned to him and her heart cried aloud his name. She recalled with curious ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... not going to make love to her. He was far too clever for that. He knew that with a woman like Kitty, in Kitty's state of mind, he had nothing to gain by making love. Neither did he propose to pit his will against hers. That course had answered well enough in the time of his possession of her. Passion, which was great in her, greater than her will, made his will powerless over her. His plan was to match the forces of her brain with ...
— The Immortal Moment - The Story of Kitty Tailleur • May Sinclair
... passages it more probably means peat than mineral coal. According to Way, Promptorium Parrulorum, p. 506, note, the Catholicon Anglicanum has "A turfe grafte, turbarium." Grafte is here evidently the same word as the A.-S. grafa, and the Danish Torvegraf, a turf-pit, confirms this opinion. Coal is not mentioned in King Alfred's Bede, in Neckam, in Glanville or in Robert of Gloucester, though the two latter writers speak of the allied mineral, jet, and are very full in their enumeration of the mineral productions of the island. In a Latin poem ascribed ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... business, and must do him the justice to say that he seldom troubles me about it. I have little taste for details of intricate financial scheming, but practical operations, like your task among the mountains, would appeal to me. It must be both romantic and inspiring to pit one's self against the rude forces of Nature; but one grows tired of the prosaic struggle which is fought by eating one's enemies' dinners and patiently bearing the slights of lukewarm allies' wives. However, since the ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... moment Ellen's face was a compound of expressions. She instantly acquiesced, however, and went down with her brother, her heart, it must be confessed, going very pit-a-pat indeed. She took him into the library, which was not this evening thrown open to company; and sent a servant for Mr. Lindsay. While waiting for his coming, Ellen felt as if she had not the fair use of her senses. Was that John Humphreys quietly ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... on the end-table, she led him toward the other fireplace. Past the piano, past the tri-di pit; past a towering grillwork holding art treasures by the score. Over to the left, against the wall, there was a big, business-like desk. On the wall, over the desk, hung the painting; a copy of which had been in Hilton's ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... made in the language of Diabolus himself; for although he can, to every man, speak in their own language, (else he could not tempt them all as he does,) yet he has a language proper to himself, and it is the language of the infernal cave, or black pit. ...
— The Holy War • John Bunyan
... was aware that Lord Rufford was fond of feminine beauty and feminine flutter and feminine flattery, though he was not prepared to marry. It was quite possible that she might be able to dig such a pit for him that it would be easier for him to marry her than to get out in any other way. Of course she must trust something to his own folly at first. Nor did she trust in vain. Before her week was over at Mrs. Gore's she received ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... the pitmen's village, all shut up and silent now, and through the turnpike; and then they were out in the real country, and plodding along the black dusty road, between black slag walls, with no sound but the groaning and thumping of the pit-engine in the next field. But soon the road grew white, and the walls likewise; and at the wall's foot grew long grass and gay flowers, all drenched with dew; and instead of the groaning of the pit-engine, they heard the skylark saying his matins high up in the air, and the pit-bird ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... hell from a servant girl who loved to tell its horrors and warn us that if we did anything wrong we would be cast into it, I always insisted that I could climb out of it. I imagined it was only a sooty pit with stone walls like those of the castle, and I felt sure there must be chinks and cracks in the masonry for fingers and toes. Anyhow the terrors of the horrible place seldom lasted long beyond the telling; for natural faith casts ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... nightmare he scrambled out. Halfway up, he recollected Bondell's gripsack. It had fallen into the hole with him; the pack-strap had evidently broken, and he had forgotten it. Back he went into the pestilential charnel-pit, where he crawled around on hands and knees and groped for half an hour. Altogether he encountered and counted seventeen dead horses (and one horse still alive that he shot with his revolver) before ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... are provided and covered to the ground to keep flies from reaching the deposits; urinal troughs discharging into trenches are provided. Each day the latrine boxes are thoroughly cleaned, outside by scrubbing and inside by applying, when necessary, a coat of oil or whitewash. The pit is burned out daily with approximately 1 gallon oil and 15 pounds straw. When filled to within 2 feet of the surface, such latrines are discarded, filled with earth, and their position marked. All latrines and kitchen pits are filled in before the march is resumed. In permanent ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... in the Strangers' Gallery, and heard your great speakers; I have been in the pit of the opera, and seen your fine ladies; I have walked your streets; I have lounged in your parks, and I say that I can't fall in love with a faded dowager, because she fills up ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... had made to Talma: that celebrated actor played before a pit of kings, and it was, perhaps, this fact, or the expectant face of Napoleon, whose eyes were on him, or the presence of Alexander, who was never weary of praising him—it was probably all this that enkindled the actor's enthusiasm. Never before had Talma ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... heart, between sleeping and waking, Thou wild thing, that always art leaping and aching, What black, brown, or fair, in what clime, in what nation, By turns has not taught thee this pit-a-pat-ation?' ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... cried, passionately, rising from his chair—"friends from the bottomless pit could not have more foully and fatally deceived that poor, thoughtless, trustful child. But all their trickery and treachery could never have succeeded had they not found a paltry tool in a senseless creature like you—you, Sir—who could stand there and go mumbling your marriage service, ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... to make a mockery of our sacrifice. Around this wonderful burying ground are growing up a miscellany of alien crosses, of all shapes and sizes, stuck in ugly heaps of upturned earth. Every day a pit is dug and the dead-cart arrives. There is no service, no ceremony. But forty or fifty nearly naked bodies of women and children are shot into the pit and covered over hastily and a cross put over them. They are Russians, the so-called Russian Greeks evacuated from the ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... beside the helmsman, holding a soiled chart in his hands; further aft on the elliptical railed platform of the conning tower a tall, angular, grey-haired man, clad in civilian garb, stood talking to the First Lieutenant. A Yeoman of Signals, his glass tucked into his left arm-pit, was securing the halliards to the telescopic mast, at which fluttered a frayed White Ensign. A couple of figures in sea-boots and duffle coats were still coiling down ropes and securing fenders, crawling like flies about the whale-backed hull. A hundred and fifty feet astern of the conning-tower ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... nothing but utter blackness; but presently her eyes became accustomed to the place, and the feeble light which struggled in past her through the opening, revealed strange objects which rose here and there from the vast pit of darkness,—fragments of rusty iron, bent and twisted into unearthly shapes; broken beams, their jagged ends sticking out like stiffly pointing fingers; cranks, and bits of hanging chain; and on the side next the water, a huge wheel, rising apparently out of the bowels of the earth, since ...
— Queen Hildegarde • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... to the door of the Consul, around which stood several other vehicles, of every shape and fashion, while in the doorway were to be seen numbers of people, thronging and pressing, like the Opera pit on a full night. Into the midst of this assemblage I soon thrust myself, and, borne upon the current, at length reached a small back parlour, filled also with people; a door opening into another small room in the front, showed a similar mob there, with ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... boys!" yelled Dan, and the men, bowing their heads, advanced five feet, directing the streams into the fiery pit. For a minute the flames were driven back by the concentrated rush of water; two minutes, and then a gush of fire flared through the break. It broke as a stream hit it, but its ghost, in the guise of hot gases, choked ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry
... the manner described, would never dictate and seldom insist. He had said what he had got to say, and the Marquis was left to act for himself. But the old lord had learned to feel that he was sure to fall into some pit whenever he declined to follow his son's advice. His son had a painful way of being right that was a great trouble to him. And this was a question which touched him very nearly. It was not only that he must yield to Mr. Fenwick before the eyes of Mr. Puddleham and all the people of ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... session. Dunsford attached himself to Philip merely because he was the first person he had known at St. Luke's. He had no friends in London, and on Saturday nights he and Philip got into the habit of going together to the pit of a music-hall or the gallery of a theatre. He was stupid, but he was good-humoured and never took offence; he always said the obvious thing, but when Philip laughed at him merely smiled. He had a very sweet smile. Though Philip made ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... yourself work," cried the guests. "No, don't! we ain't needin' nothin'; we was late about supper." But their hostess stepped carefully down and disappeared for a few minutes, while the cat hovered anxiously at the edge of the black pit. ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... if I was to pit my name till't, ye wad get the siller frae the bank, and when the time came round, ye wadna be ready, and I wad hae to pay't; sae then you and me wad quarrel; sae we mae just as weel quarrel the noo, as lang's the siller's ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... are certainly the crackerjack when it comes to laying a trap to trip a scamp up. Why, he'll fall into that pit head over heels; and I do hope we can snatch the paper away from him before he has a ...
— The Boy Scouts of Lenox - Or The Hike Over Big Bear Mountain • Frank V. Webster
... grow strong, as Antaeus by contact with the mother earth. Thus roused from my long torpor into the most intense activity,—for all activity is slack in comparison with that of thought,—I became dissatisfied with the facility of my present surroundings. I was anxious to pit myself against the world of Paris. I wanted opposition, contradiction, in order to vanquish them, and absorb their force into the glory of my triumph. Moreover, my studies had now reached a point where they required the assistance that could only ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... Thet's wut we shall git 440 By tryin' squirtguns on the burnin' Pit; For the day never comes when it'll du To kick off Dooty like a worn-out shoe. I seem to hear a whisperin' in the air, A sighin' like, of unconsoled despair, Thet comes from nowhere an' from everywhere, An' seems to say, 'Why died we? warn't ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... dreads the strut and meen Of new prais'd Poets, having often seen Some of his Fellows, who have writ before, When Nel has danc'd her Jig, steal to the Door, Hear the Pit clap, and with conceit of that Swell, and believe themselves the Lord ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... to follow that globe. Take the front cockpit alone, Maynard; Carnes and I will get in the rear pit with the spec and guide you. You can take of your gas mask at an elevation of a thousand feet. You have pack ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... the fairies. It seemed to me that if I could only run away with this, and give it to Philip like a wild sort of wedding-ring, it would be a bond between us for ever; I felt a thousand such things at once. Then there yawned under me, like the pit, the enormous, awful notion of what I was doing; above all, the unbearable thought, which was like touching hot iron, of what Arthur would think of it. A Carstairs a thief; and a thief of the Carstairs treasure! I believe ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... once Larry uttered a yell of pain and anger. One of Phil's missiles had landed in the pit of the fellow's stomach. Larry doubled up like a jacknife, and, dropping suddenly, rolled rapidly toward the foot of ...
— The Circus Boys Across The Continent • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... out; then laid on a bed or mattrass in a warm apartment, with the head and upper part a little raised, and the nostrils cleaned with a feather dipped in oil. Let the body be gently rubbed with common salt, or with flannels dipped in spirits; the pit of the stomach fomented with hot brandy, the temples stimulated with spirits of hartshorn, and bladders of lukewarm water applied to different parts of the body, or a warming-pan wrapped in flannel gently moved along the back. A warm bath, gradually increased to seventy-five ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... set him off with the same energy in a much worse direction," answered Fisher; "a pretty endless sort of direction, a bottomless pit as deep ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... on Suzanne in the same clear, indifferent voice, "for you do not leave me to be his prey. Say, now; if we walk backwards swiftly before they could catch us we might fall together into the pit of the ...
— Swallow • H. Rider Haggard
... on a diet for reducing flesh in a few days complain of great, weariness, exhaustion and gnawing hunger in the pit of the stomach. A diet that cuts down the supply of food with the intention of reducing is extremely dangerous unless it is supervised by a physician. But persons who wish to make a visible reduction of flesh in a time ranging from five to six weeks ...
— Mrs. Wilson's Cook Book - Numerous New Recipes Based on Present Economic Conditions • Mary A. Wilson
... life of work, of abnegation, and of good deeds, a pure and stainless reputation that had extended beyond the gulf into distant countries, and the traditional admiration, rising almost to worship, of several generations; all these things only served to deepen the pit into which the fisherman had fallen, at one blow, from his kingly height. Good fame, that divine halo without which nothing here on earth is sacred, had disappeared. Men no longer dared to defend the poor wretch, they pitied him. His name would soon carry horror with it, and Nisida, ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... themselves. And nature seldom fails to avenge herself for the outrages suffered. She uses the flail of disease and remorse, of misery and disgust, and she scourges the culprit to the verge of the grave, often to the yawning pit ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... stream, not excepting the dead bodies of men and horses, the former for their clothing and whatever their pockets contained, and the latter for the saddles and bridles on them. He buried the bodies of the men in a pit he had made for the purpose, drying and storing in his house portions ...
— A Lieutenant at Eighteen • Oliver Optic
... temperate life, AEt. 68. He was affected with great difficulty of respiration, and cough particularly troublesome on attempting to lie down, oedematous swellings of the legs and thighs, abdomen tense and sore on being pressed, pain striking from the pit of the stomach to the back and shoulders; almost constant nausea, especially after taking food, which he frequently threw up; water thick and high-coloured, passed with difficulty and in small quantity; body costive; pulse natural; face much emaciated, ...
— An Account of the Foxglove and some of its Medical Uses - With Practical Remarks on Dropsy and Other Diseases • William Withering
... not prove permanent. Clint had a way of suddenly waking, at the most inopportune moments, to the fact that he was due to play left tackle on the Brimfield Football Team against Claflin School in a few days, and when he did he invariably experienced an appalling sick feeling at the pit of his stomach and became for the moment incapable of speech or action. When this occurred in class during, say, a faltering elucidation of the Iliad, it produced anything but a favourable impression on the instructor. Fortunately, while actually engaged in out-guessing Lee, of the second, ...
— Left Tackle Thayer • Ralph Henry Barbour
... did give them a good morning draught, and so to my Lord (who lay long in bed this day, because he came home late from supper with the King). With my Lord to the Parliament House, and, after that, with him to General Monk's, where he dined at the Cock-pit. I home and dined with my wife, now making all things ready there again. Thence to my Lady Pickering, who did give me the best intelligence about the Wardrobe. Afterwards to the Cockpit to my Lord with Mr. Townsend, one ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... The opera-house of Milan was one blaze of light and colour. Royalty in field-marshal's uniform and diamonds, attended by decorated generals and radiant ladies of the court, occupied the great box opposite the stage. The tiers from pit to gallery were filled with brilliantly dressed women. From the third row, where we were fortunately placed, the curves of that most beautiful of theatres presented to my gaze a series of retreating and approaching lines, composed ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... little knew it was to be their last in that fine house—the ladies retired to give their parting kiss to baby—a parting look to the toilettes, with which they proposed to fascinate the inhabitants of the pit and the public boxes at the Olympic. Goby made vigorous play with the claret-bottle during the brief interval of potation allowed to him; he, too, little deeming that he should never drink bumper there again; Clive looking on with the melancholy ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... broke in the old man furiously. "I'll give ye jes two minutes to hit the road and git a license. I'll give ye an hour an' a half to git back. An' if you don't come back I'll make Jason foller you to the mouth o' the pit o' hell an' bring ye back alive or dead." Again the boy tried to speak, but the ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... seventy feet each way and is two fathoms in depth. Into this they plunge a pole with a myrtle-branch bound to it, and then with the branch of the myrtle they bring up pitch, which has the smell of asphalt, but in other respects it is superior to the pitch of Pieria. This they pour into a pit dug near the pool; and when they have collected a large quantity, then they pour it into the jars from the pit: and whatever thing falls into the pool goes under ground and reappears in the sea, which is distant about four furlongs ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... church entrance is a large reservoir, built of brick, twenty-one feet long and eight feet wide. It is at the bottom of a walled-in pit, with a sloping entrance to the reservoir proper, walls and slope being of burnt brick. This "sunk enclosure" is about sixty feet long and thirty feet across at the lower end, and about six feet below the level ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... be only to do well, And he alone be crowned who did excel. Ye call them Whigs, who from the church withdrew, But now we have our stage dissenters too, Who scruple ceremonies of pit and box, And very few are sound and orthodox, But love disorder so, and are so nice, They hate conformity, though 'tis in vice. Some are for patent hierarchy; and some, Like the old Gauls, seek out for elbow room; Their arbitrary ...
— An Essay Upon Projects • Daniel Defoe
... Ashton Dilke had appeared in public since her husband's death, and tears glistened in many eyes as the men who were his constituents welcomed her among them once more. Some miners walked twelve miles to hear her and twelve miles back after the meeting, who had to go down the pit at 3 o'clock next morning. Some could not get in, and pleaded piteously for an overflow meeting. "We have come a long way to hear Mistress Dilke; do bring her." Some women after hearing Miss Tod said: "She's worth hearing ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... wagons moved as ships tossed on a stormy sea, chuck! chuck! from boulder to boulder, without intermittence. We found delicious spring water about noon and passed a most remarkable place later in the day. This must have been the pit of a volcano. A few steps aside from the road you might lean over the precipice and look straight down into a great, round crater, so deep that it made a person dizzy. At the bottom there was a ranch house, a small lake and a cultivated field, the whole being apparently ten acres in area. I ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... and firing-post, rushed back to the dugout. He needed the dark of that dungeon. He crawled in and, searching out the remotest, blackest corner, hidden from all human eyes, and especially his own, he lay there clammy and wet all over, with an icy, sickening rend, like a wound, in the pit of his stomach. He shut his eyes, but that did not shut out what he saw. "So help me God!" he whispered to himself.... Six endless months had gone to the preparation of a deed that had taken one second! That transformed him! His life on earth, his spirit in the beyond, could ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... he who was perhaps the greatest mocker that ever lived knew better than to laugh at Mathilde. The abysses of his brain no one can, or even dare, explore—but, listen as we will at the door of that infernal pit of laughter, we shall hear no laugh against his faithful little Mathilde. It is not at Mathilde he laughs, but at the precious little blue-stocking, who freshened the last months of his life with a final infatuation—that still unidentified "Camille ...
— Old Love Stories Retold • Richard Le Gallienne
... did discharge themselves from their own throats Against the splintered gates of audience 'Twere wholesomer to take them in at mouth Than ear. These shall burn first: their ignible And seasoned substances—trunks, legs and arms, Blent indistinguishable in a mass, Like winter-woven serpents in a pit— None vantaged of his fellow-fools in point Of precedence, and all alive—shall serve As fueling to fervor the retort For after ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... of the most celebrated fighters of Mexico would have an exhibition in the evening, and combat with animals. As my friend and myself never had seen one we thought we would go. It was an amphitheatre, with circular seats about the pit, with thick planks around it, the seats commencing about twenty feet from the bottom of the pit. There was a door at the side of the pit, which was raised by pulleys, which admitted the bull. They were wild ones. Our seat was about the fifth row back. The house was crowded and brilliantly ...
— The Adventures of a Forty-niner • Daniel Knower
... in a horrid little private box, with a vulgar drop-scene staring me in the face. I looked out from behind the curtain, and surveyed the house. It was a tawdry affair, all Cupids and cornucopias, like a third-rate wedding cake. The gallery and pit were fairy full, but the two rows of dingy stalls were quite empty, and there was hardly a person in what I suppose they called the dress-circle. Women went about with oranges and ginger-beer, and there was a terrible ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... cold, buried up in ice; but such was not the case. I was hot. The snow burned my face, as it came in contact with it. As to the ride, it was pleasant enough, but rather rapid and perplexing to the breath. It was like sinking into a pit of quicksand, where everything gives way below one, as though the bottom of the world had fallen out. There was the struggle of a moment to keep the fine snow out of my mouth and nostrils, as I drew in my breath, and the next instant ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... shot walking by Morpheus, and subsided altogether; for dramatic performances, amusing and exciting to youth seated in the pit, convey a certain weariness to those bright beings who sparkle on the ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... man with a lantern discovered a great pit in the field behind the lane and the crowd quickly surrounded it. From their limited knowledge of the facts the explosion seemed unaccountable, but there was sufficient intelligence among them to determine that dynamite had caused it and dug this gaping hole in the stony ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation • Edith Van Dyne
... cried, "it is bad ground! It is a pit, Marguerite! Do not move, do not come near me! Run and get help!" For Margaret was already stepping forward ...
— Three Margarets • Laura E. Richards
... and put it in her pouch, and said as to herself: 'Here, then, is another seeker who hath not found, unless one should dig a pit for her here when the thaw comes, and call it the Well at the World's End: belike it will be for her as helpful as the real one.' Then she turned to me and said: 'Do thou with the rest what thou wilt,' and therewith ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... roughest bed, the worst ventilated hole, the most insanitary surroundings and conditions were all one to him. He could thus hide himself away in places and receptacles from which the average landsman would have turned in fear or disgust. In quarry, clay-pit, cellar or well; in holt, hill or cave; in chimney, hayloft or secret cell behind some old-time oven; in shady alehouse or malodorous slum where a man's life was worth nothing unless he had the smell of tar upon him, and not much then; on isolated farmsteads ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... their third meeting the committee decided to use cast-iron for the Columbiad, and in particular the grey description. This metal is, in fact, the most tenacious, ductile, and malleable, suitable for all moulding operations, and when smelted with pit coal it is of superior quality for ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... also now to this man, that this is but the beginning of hell; but as it were the first step down to the pit; when, indeed, all these are but the beginnings of love, and but that which makes way for life. The Lord kills before he makes alive; he wounds before his hands make whole. Yea, he does the one in order to, or because he would do the other; he wounds, because his purpose is to heal; 'he ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... dazed before ever I came into the chalk pit, but now, at this succession of incidents, I began to rub my eyes and ask myself whether this was young Louis de Laval, late of Ashford, in Kent, or whether it was some dream of the adventures of a ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... roared the lions, with horrid laughing jaws; They bit, they glared, gave blows like beams, a wind went with their paws; With wallowing might and stifled roar they rolled on one another, Till all the pit with sand and mane was in a thundrous smother; The bloody foam above the bars came whisking through the air; Said Francis then, "Faith, gentlemen, we're better ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... lies! Sinking deeper into the pit every day. I tell you this constant deceit makes me ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... The pit, as usual, was no doubt divided; those who delight in heroic virtue and perfect character objected to the producing such instances of villany, without punishing them very severely for the sake of example. Some of the author's friends cryed, "Look'e, ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding |
