"Rotting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... on board of ships with our families and treasures and leave to those dogs the ruins of cities and the rotting corpses of slaves. Do we not know greater and more beautiful countries than Phoenicia, where we can begin ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... the evolution of a military horse-trade,—one of those periodical swappings required of his dragoons by Uncle Sam on those rare occasions when a regiment that has been dry-rotting half a decade in Arizona is at last relieved by one from the Plains. How it happened that we of the Fifth should have kept him from the clutches of those sharp horse-fanciers of the Sixth is more than I know. Regimental ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... breathing became easier, and then he was running lightly. His second wind had come to him. He was no longer exhausted. He felt as if he could run forever, and ran on more swiftly still. Suddenly the flashlight beam showed him a deep furrow in the rotting vegetation underfoot, and something glistened. A musky reek filled his nostrils. The thing's trail—the furrow left by its dragging tail! That musky reek was the thing's blood. It was bleeding from the wounds the explosive bullets had made. It was spouting whatever filthy fluid ran in its veins ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... one where the doors and shutters were still in place, but rotting from the fantastic hinges that supported them. A few hard blows brought down the outer doors in a dusty heap, and as we stepped upon the marble floor within our eyes met an unexpected sight. Furniture, statues, dingy pictures in crumbling frames, images in bronze and silver, mirrors, ...
— The Last American - A Fragment from The Journal of KHAN-LI, Prince of - Dimph-Yoo-Chur and Admiral in the Persian Navy • J. A. Mitchell
... stranger, whose right of possession no one questioned, was to be its occupant. He sat now, in the moonlight, on the broken mill-stone that served his house as a doorstep—and as yet he had not slept under the rotting roof. About him was a dooryard gone to a weed-jungle and a farm that must be reclaimed from utter wildness. His square jaw was grimly set and the hands that rested on his knees were tensely clenched. His eyes held a far-away and haunted fixity, for they were seeing again ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... stocks tumbled and broke their backs. Gilt-edged securities showed themselves to be tinsel. Old man Minick had retired from active business just one year before, meaning to live comfortably on the fruit of a half-century's toil. He now saw that fruit rotting all about him. There was in it hardly enough nourishment to sustain them. Then came the day when Ma Minick went downtown to see Matthews about that pain right here and came home looking shrivelled, talking shrilly about nothing, and evading ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... not hair, but sopped and rotting moss— A thief, a thief indeed.—And twice a thief. She has no ears. Keep thy hooked fingers still While thou art here, for if I miss a mouthful Thou shalt miss all thy nose. Get up, get up; I'll lodge ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... simultaneously deposited Charley and myself on the same station; respectively, in the hut of a stock-keeper, and in the hut of a petty overseer. Together, as the seasons passed, we had looked forward to the shearing, the foot-rotting, and the lambing; and together we had watched the lagoon for the bunyip. We had aimed our little reed-spears at the same mark, we had whirled our little boomerangs over the same big tree, and we had been welted an equal ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... over into the smooth pit, backward, and Bradley Headstone upon him. When the two were found, lying under the ooze and scum behind one of the rotting gates, Riderhood's hold had relaxed, probably in falling, and his eyes were staring upward. But, he was girdled still with Bradley's iron ring, and the rivets of ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... flowed scarcely murmuring through the night, itself dark and brown as the night from its far-off birthplace in the peaty hills. He crossed the footbridge and turned into the bleachfield. Its houses were desolate, for that trade too had died away. The machinery stood rotting and rusting. The wheel gave no answering motion to the flow of the water that glided away beneath it. The thundering beatles were still. The huge legs of the wauk-mill took no more seven-leagued strides nowhither. The rubbing-boards with their ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... south lay the old cypress swamps, dark glens of rotting wood and sprawling vines. A spur of this unsavory no-man's land ran close along the road, and looking into it one could almost believe, fancied Val, in the legends told by the early French explorers concerning the giant monsters who were supposed to haunt the ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... Even bliss—'twere woe alone to bear; The heart once left thus desolate Must fly at last for ease—to hate. It is as if the dead could feel[114] The icy worm around them steal, And shudder, as the reptiles creep To revel o'er their rotting sleep, Without the power to scare away The cold consumers of their clay! 950 It is as if the desert bird,[115] Whose beak unlocks her bosom's stream To still her famished nestlings' scream, Nor mourns a life to them transferred, Should rend her rash devoted breast, And find them ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... that Smith is attacking is this. Living in an entangled civilization, we have come to think certain things wrong which are not wrong at all. We have come to think outbreak and exuberance, banging and barging, rotting and wrecking, wrong. In themselves they are not merely pardonable; they are unimpeachable. There is nothing wicked about firing a pistol off even at a friend, so long as you do not mean to hit him and know you won't. It is no more wrong than throwing a pebble at the ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... of the waist-cloth, XIII. 1-11. Jeremiah was charged to buy a linen waist-cloth(342) and after wearing it, but keeping it from damp, to bury it in the cleft of a rock, and after many days to dig it up, when he found it rotting. So had the Lord taken Israel to cleave to Him as such a cloth cleaves to the loins of a man; but separated from Him they had likewise rotted and were good for nothing. Separated by what—God's action or their own? As it stands the interpretation is complicated. God ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... she said, walking to the window and looking out on a shabby back-yard which was full of rotting scenery and old ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... steamy, and loaded with a smell as of rotting vegetation. I wondered why my bearer so scrupulously avoided touching any of the unwholesome-looking growths in passing through what seemed a succession of cellars, but steered a tortuous course among the bloated, unnatural ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... scattered about on the floor there were just as many empty ones as full ones. The shelves, which once upon a time had reached half-way up the cellar walls, had fallen to pieces, and were now nothing but a heap of rotting wood. All kinds of rubbish lay amongst the potatoes, and broken hooks, broomsticks, and old pieces of pot stuck out of the sand, into which, here and there, a bundle of herbs had been carelessly thrust, in order to keep it through the winter. ...
— Absolution • Clara Viebig
... followed. He came across plenty of tracks, but most of them were old ones. He recognized the spoor of deer, bear, and innumerable rabbits. Toward noon fresh caribou tracks crossed their path. The slot pointed south. Over a soft and rotting trail ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... barbarians slain to two hundred thousand, and that of the prisoners to eighty thousand; the most moderate stop at one hundred thousand. In any case, the carnage was great, for the battle-field, where all these corpses rested without burial, rotting in the sun and rain, got the name of Campi Putridi, or Fields of Putrefaction, a name traceable even nowadays in that of Pourrires, a ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... night, and very early next morning I was astir. I went down into the garden somewhere about the hour of sunrise, through the wet grass that was all scintillant with dew. On the marble bench by the pond, where the water-lilies were now rotting, I flung myself down, and there was I found a half-hour later ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... from it to the church, and the next day he had the windows blocked. No one but he has entered the room during all these years, the key has never left his person. It must be the ruin of a room by now. You can imagine it, the dust gathering, the curtains rotting, in the darkness and at times the old man sitting there with his head running on days long since dead. But you know Mr. Mardale, he is not ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... through the forest land, Nor man, nor maid, nor child was seen— Not even a dog. The air was still; The blackened hut they turned to see, And spied charred benches on the green; A squirrel sprang from the rotting mill Whence Mosby sallied late, ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville
... Even the dignity of hatred was wanting to their conflicts, for they changed sides without scruple, and the comrade of yesterday was the foeman of to-day, and again the comrade of the morrow. The only moral salt which kept the carcass of their villainy from rotting was a military code of honour, embodying the freemasonry of the soldier's trade and having as one of its articles the duel with all the forms—an improvement at any rate upon assassination. A stronger contrast ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... in silence, using a little-travelled woods-road, scarce more than two deep, grass-grown ruts, full of rotting stumps. Suddenly a couple of children playing under some wayside bushes leaped up and ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... here and there, far out of its present reach, and scattered all about, were torn and tattered corpses of forest trees, which had evidently been sucked up and carried along until some rock more abrupt than its neighbours, had brought them to a stand and left them, bleached and rotting, in the summer's sun. At night we found ourselves glad to exchange our usual covering of a single sheet for a heavy complement of blankets, and found our encampment not the least too warm. The authorities here were particularly civil and obliging, and supplied us with the best of butter, eggs, ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... "religion,"[482] however, had died out of it for many generations before the Reformation. At the close of the fourteenth century, Wycliffe had cried that the rotting trunk cumbered the ground, and should be cut down. It had not been cut down; it had been allowed to stand for a hundred and fifty more years; and now it was indeed plain that it could remain no longer. The ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... uneasiness. Though he was hot from walking, he shivered. There was something hostile in the air which made him hesitate, and he felt that invisible forces barred his way. Unseen hands seemed to draw him back. No one would go near now to gather the cocoa-nuts, and they lay rotting on the ground. Everywhere was desolation. The bush was encroaching, and it looked as though very soon the primeval forest would regain possession of that strip of land which had been snatched from it at the cost of so much labour. ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... in truth?" answered Warner; "pardon me, I believe not: the middling classes are as human as the rest. There is the region, the heart, of Avarice,—systematized, spreading, rotting, the very fungus and leprosy of social states; suspicion, craft, hypocrisy, servility to the great, oppression to the low, the waxlike mimicry of courtly vices, the hardness of flint to humble woes; thought, feeling, the faculties and impulses of man, all ulcered into one great canker, ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of what was to be seen in many country churches. 'Some, I fear, have scarce been kept in necessary present repair, and others by no means duly cleared from annoyances, which must gradually bring them to decay: water undermining and rotting the foundations, earth heaped up against the outside, weeds and shrubs growing upon them ... too frequently the floors are meanly paved, or the walls dirty or patched, or the windows ill glazed, and it may be in part stopped up ... or they are damp, offensive, and unwholesome. ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... although its cry may be heard close at hand, let a person watch ever so attentively he will not see the cheucau; at other times let him stand motionless and the red-breasted little bird will approach within a few feet in the most familiar manner. It then busily hops about the entangled mass of rotting canes and branches, with its little tail cocked upwards. The cheucau is held in superstitious fear by the Chilotans, on account of its strange and varied cries. There are three very distinct cries: One is called ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... told. We got the rotting bags out somehow, and portion of their contents spilled out on the ground, though we didn't mind that at the time. There was more money in each of the bags than any one of us had ever handled before. In the light of what happened afterwards I'm positive that it was Cumshaw ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... rock, and sway; And rife with ill delay From northern Strymon blew the thwarting blast— Mother of famine fell, That holds men wand'ring still Far from the haven where they fain would be!— And pitiless did waste Each ship and cable, rotting on the sea, And, doubling with delay each weary hour, Withered with hope deferred th' Achaeans' ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus
... weak or rotting post, he pulled the staples that held the strands of wire to it and and then set the trestle alongside the post. Resting the lever on the trestle, he dropped the end link of the chain on the hook, looped the chain around the post, and hooked on ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... after day her black hull lifts And sinks with the swell's long roll, And the white birds cling to her rotting shrouds Like prayers ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... conviction that no other women were as beautiful as the women of Yucatan. And then the inevitable Mona Lisa would get onto the carpet, and one heard, apropos, of the theft of Adam mantelpieces from Russell Square, and of superb masterpieces of paint rotting with damp in neglected Venetian churches, and so on and so on, until one had the melancholy illusion that the whole art world was going or gone to destruction. But this subject did not really hold us, for the reason that, beneath ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... those who estimated most highly her resources and the abilities of her rulers. Both her agriculture and her commerce were suffering. The vineyards of Burgundy, the interminable cornfields of the Beauce, had failed to yield their increase; the looms of Lyons were silent; and the merchant ships were rotting in the harbour of Marseilles. Yet the monarchy presented to its numerous enemies a front more haughty and more menacing than ever. Lewis had determined not to make any advance towards a reconciliation with ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... institutions of cantonists, penal recruits, and "captives." However, it soon became clear that those who had fallen under the walls of Sevastopol had sealed by their death not the honor but the dishonor of the old regime of blood and iron. Beneath the rotting corpse of an obsolete statecraft, built upon serfdom and maintained by soldiery and police, the germ of a new and better Russia ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... little wood, then, though somewhat dark and damp, had its pleasant and cheerful associations; but the wood beyond was weird and dismal, with its dense shade, its fallen trees rotting in dark gullies, its depth of decaying leaves, into which your feet sank down and down, until in alarm you doubted whether there were really any footing beneath, or if it would be possible ever to extricate yourself again. These two woods touched only at one point, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... in bed—the boisterous wind rattled clown the chimney and shook the ill-fitting casement in its rotting frame. The clothes he had last worn were thrown carelessly about, unsmoothed, unbrushed; the scanty articles of furniture were out of their proper places; slovenly discomfort marked the death-chamber. And ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... little alcove in a rotting mass of brick and plaster. Beneath it extended a stone seat whereon the wayfarer might kneel or sit; above, in the niche, protected by a wire grating, stood a doll painted with a blue cloak and a golden crown. Offerings of wayside ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... Mooteeharree, consisted of a long bazaar, or market street, beautifully situated on the bank of a lovely lake, some two miles in length. From the main street, with its quaint little shops sheltered from the sun by makeshift verandahs of tattered sacking, weather-stained shingles, or rotting bamboo mats, various little lanes and alleys diverged, leading one into a collection of tumble-down and ruinous huts, set up apparently by chance, and presenting the most incongruous appearance that could possibly be conceived. One or two ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... they are still liable to be lost by evaporation. They are here often saturated with water, and this water in its evaporation carries away the ammonia, and carbonic acid which it has obtained from the rotting mass. The evaporation of the water is rapidly carried on, on account of the great extent of surface. The whole mass is spongy, and soaks the liquids up from below (through hollow straws, etc.), to ...
— The Elements of Agriculture - A Book for Young Farmers, with Questions Prepared for the Use of Schools • George E. Waring
... the country-side, which bore so clearly the mark of the waning year. Yellow leaves carpeted the lanes and fluttered down upon us as we passed. The rattle of our wheels died away as we drove through drifts of rotting vegetation—sad gifts, as it seemed to me, for Nature to throw before the carriage of the returning heir ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... square-headed style of notation, of old Scotch tunes, apparently the work of some musical county-clerk of Orkney in the seventeenth century; but the paper, in a miserable state of decay, was blotted crimson and yellow with the rotting damps, and the ink so faded, that the notation of scarce any single piece in the collection seemed legible throughout. Less valuable and more modern, though curious from their eccentricity, there lay, in company with ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... needed in a provision shop on Green Street. George placed himself in the line of dirty, squalid applicants. The day was hot, the air of the shop was foul with the smells of rotting meat and vegetables. He felt himself stagger against a stall. He seemed to be asleep, but he heard the butchers laughing. They called him a drunken tramp, and then he was hurled out ...
— Frances Waldeaux • Rebecca Harding Davis
... alloyed in percolating through a rotting civilization; though pagan gods were taken into her pantheon, and pagan forms into her ritual, and pagan ideas into her creed; yet her essential idea of the equality of men was never wholly destroyed. And two things happened of the utmost moment to incipient civilization—the ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... Amiens, Toussaint had delivered himself up to Leclerc: France had her troops strongly posted in Tuscany and Parma, and could, if necessary, forcibly end the remaining scruples felt at Madrid; while the United States, with a feeble army and a rotting navy, were controlled by the most peaceable and Franco-phil of their presidents, Thomas Jefferson. The First Consul accordingly ordered an expedition to be prepared, as if for the reinforcement of Leclerc in St. Domingo, though it was really destined for New Orleans; and he instructed Talleyrand ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... boarding-house. On the upper steps, in their shirt-sleeves, were the other boarders; so the bride and bridegroom spoke in whispers. The air of the cross street was stale and stagnant; from it rose exhalations of rotting fruit, the gases of an open subway, the smoke of passing taxicabs. But between the street and the hall bedroom, with its odors of a gas-stove and a ...
— Somewhere in France • Richard Harding Davis
... to the ground, went on bravely, winding in and out between quagmire and rotting herbage. Had the light been brighter, our Normans would have perceived the impressions of numerous footmarks of men on the path they were taking—the dogs were at last on the scent they had sought all day, whether ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... of proceeding across to the pier by the side of which La Montaigne was moored, we cut across the wide street and turned down the next pier, where a couple of freighters were lying. The odour of salt water, sewage, rotting wood, and the night air was not inspiring. Nevertheless I was now carried away with ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... house, with green arches of the vine, and groves of orange-trees, and blushing oleander in full bloom, twenty, thirty, forty feet above the street—the painted halls, mouldering, and blotting, and rotting in the damp corners, and still shining out in beautiful colours and voluptuous designs, where the walls are dry—the faded figures on the outsides of the houses, holding wreaths, and crowns, and flying upward, and downward, ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... bricks showed like blotches of paint under a thick coating of powder. Over the wide door two little oblong windows, holding four damaged panes, blinked rakishly from a mat of ivy, which spread from the rotting eaves to the shingled roof, where the slim wooden spire bent under the weight of creeper and innumerable nesting sparrows in spring. After pointing heavenward for half a century, the steeple appeared to have swerved suddenly ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... for you," he said. "I should have lain here till the cart fetched my putrid carcase. I should be rotting in one of their plague-pits ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... thanked the good fisherman and his wife, and set out to walk the hundred leagues to the house of the Witch of the Sands. His path lay along a desolate and lonely shore, on whose rocky beaches the wooden bones of old wrecks lay rotting, half buried in stones and weed. Just as the third day's sun was sinking in the shining waters, the sailor ...
— The Firelight Fairy Book • Henry Beston
... upon it, Sailed upon that sluggish water, Covered with its mould of ages, Black with rotting water-rushes, Rank with flags and leaves of lilies, Stagnant, lifeless, dreary, dismal, Lighted by the shimmering moonlight, And by will-o'-the-wisps illumined, Fires by ghosts of dead men kindled, ...
— The Song Of Hiawatha • Henry W. Longfellow
... home were soon informed of the state of affairs in the Crimea, and gifts and supplies poured in profusely. But owing to the inefficiency and red tape of the War Department, the supplies were not delivered, but lay rotting in warehouses and in the holds of vessels while men died for the want of them. On one occasion, we are told, a consignment of shoes for the soldiers turned out to be in women's sizes. Improper inspections resulted in high profits, for the army contractors made uniforms ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... inclination of mine to defend Martin Van Buren in the war of extermination now waging between him and his old admirers. I say, "Devil take the hindmost"—and the foremost. But there is no mistaking the origin of the breach; and if the curse of "stinking" and "rotting" is to fall on the first and greatest violators of principle in the matter, I disinterestedly suggest that the gentleman from Georgia and his present co-workers are bound to take it upon themselves. But the gentleman from Georgia further says we have deserted ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... one above the other. The Mafulu never cut down these trees, and in seeking a new site for a village they will often choose a place where one of them is growing. So long as the corpse of a chief is rotting and stinking on the platform or the tree, the village is deserted by the inhabitants; only two men, relatives of the deceased, remain behind exposed to the stench of the decaying body and the blood of the pigs which were slaughtered at the funeral feast. When decomposition is complete, the ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... to Cappy on the condition of the Amelia Ricks, Matt, his brain still filled with thoughts of that lonely big steamer swinging neglected in Mission Bay among the rotting oyster boats and old clipper ships waiting to be converted into coal hulks, proceeded to the Merchants' Exchange where Lloyds' Register soon put him in possession ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... miserable cottages they met with a repetition of their experience in the first. If the reproaches of the living could bring back the dead, old Jacob Horn should have formed one of the group in those mouldy and rotting cottages, to listen to the reiteration of the shameful story of his criminal neglect. Here the windows were bursting from their setting, like the bulging eyes of suffocating men; and here the door-frame was in a state of collapse. In one cottage the ceiling was depositing ...
— The Golden Shoemaker - or 'Cobbler' Horn • J. W. Keyworth
... went downhill, falling into bushes, floundering to the shoulders through withered fern, and now and then stumbling over rotting trees, but the splashes grew closer, and he fancied the sound before him a little nearer. It was significant that there was any sound at all, because a deer usually clears every obstacle in its almost silent flight, and the gasping man took heart again. The quarry's strength ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... up a jug.) No sign in this vessel of anything that would leave a sign. I'll go bail he takes his tea in a black state, and the milk to be rotting in ...
— New Irish Comedies • Lady Augusta Gregory
... and let us go no further than Covent Garden. Enter it from Russell-street. What can be more unsightly,—with its piles of cabbages in the street, and basket-measures on the roofs of the shops—narrow alleys, wooden buildings, rotting vegetables "undique," and swarms of Irish basket-women, who wander about like the ghosts on this side of the Styx, and who, in habits, features, and dialect, appear as if belonging to another world. Yet the Garden, like every garden, has ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 357 - Vol. XIII, No. 357., Saturday, February 21, 1829 • Various
... it a jest that I have ever since been a prey all over to these hellish tortures, this ghastly fear of death? My own skeleton, my own rotting carcase is standing perpetually before my eyes. Old Conrad too over yonder has fallen sick, and is bewailing the loss of his reputation. Such a knave as this stranger is just as bad as a murderer: nay worse: for he pours the poison down ones throat in the midst of a large party without himself ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... not see the cheucau; at other times, let him stand motionless and the red-breasted little bird will approach within a few feet in the most familiar manner. It then busily hops about the entangled mass of rotting cones and branches, with its little tail cocked upwards. The cheucau is held in superstitious fear by the Chilotans, on account of its strange and varied cries. There are three very distinct cries: One is called "chiduco," and ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... snowy sides interlaced their bare boughs into a network of bewildering complexity, and how the cedars and balsams and spruces stood in the bottom, their dark boughs weighted down with heavy white mantles of snow, and how every stump and fallen log and rotting stick was made a thing of beauty by the snow that had fallen so gently on them in that quiet spot. And we could see the rocks of the canyon sides gleam out black from under overhanging snow-banks, and we could hear the song of the Swan in its many ...
— The Sky Pilot • Ralph Connor
... luck had not been unqualifiedly against him, he thought. Here he was in an isolated spot in the wide river. What was the purpose of this little tower on its pile of rocks he could not imagine, but it was fast going to ruin and save for the rotting fishing seine there was no sign ...
— Tom Slade with the Boys Over There • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... morning, Mattie was standing at the hall door, looking out a little blankly through the open gateway at the prospect before her,—at the rotting leaves that lay heaped up in the road, and at the gray, humid sky,—when a very big man suddenly blocked up the ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... wounds, and sometimes slaughter amongst them. When he reached the plains on which the battles (434) were fought [708], some of those around him being offended at the smell of the carcases which lay rotting upon the ground, he had the audacity to encourage them by a most detestable remark, "That a dead enemy smelt not amiss, especially if he were a fellow-citizen." To qualify, however, the offensiveness of the stench, he quaffed in public a goblet of wine, and with equal ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... an opportunity offered at last to meet my predecessor, the grass growing through his ribs was tall enough to hide his bones. They were all there. The supernatural being had not been touched after he fell. And the village was deserted, the huts gaped black, rotting, all askew within the fallen enclosures. A calamity had come to it, sure enough. The people had vanished. Mad terror had scattered them, men, women, and children, through the bush, and they had never returned. What became of the hens I don't know either. I should think ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... when she came to the end, the excitement was hot and Babylonic. Napoleon! What a word! A treasure put together to rescue him from St. Helena! Gold, French gold, English gold, Spanish and Austrian gold, all mildewing in a rotting chest somewhere back of Ajaccio! It was unbelievable, fantastic as one of ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... morning sunlight strove to check the smoke from the smouldering wood, in order to mount freely into the blue sky. Little clouds floated over the damp, grassy earth, rotting tree-trunks, piles of wood and heaps of twigs that surrounded the kiln. A moss-grown but stood at the edge of the forest, and before it sat Ulrich, talking with the coal-burner. People called this man "Hangemarx," and in truth he looked in his black ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... we had done with Harfleur," Long Tom said as they started on their march to the seaport. "I don't mind fighting, that comes in the way of business, but to see men rotting away like sheep with disease is not ...
— At Agincourt • G. A. Henty
... and the missionaries, all indefatigable in their noble tasks. It was a different place when Damien came there and made his great renunciation, and slept that first night under a tree amidst his rotting brethren: alone with pestilence; and looking forward (with what courage, with what pitiful sinkings of dread, God only knows) to a lifetime of dressing ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... other with the sole desire to destroy as many lives as possible. Thousands of unfortunates groan and writhe in cruel sufferings and die in agony in Japanese and Russian field hospitals, asking themselves in bewilderment why this fearful thing was done with them, while other thousands are already rotting in the earth or on the earth, or floating in the sea, in swollen decomposition. And scores of thousands of wives, fathers, mothers, children, are bemoaning their bread-winners; uselessly destroyed. Yet all this is still too little; new and newer victims are being prepared. The chief ...
— "Bethink Yourselves" • Leo Tolstoy
... from one of the cheeks and invading the mouth, which it distorted into a horrible grin. And over this loathsome and grotesque mask of death the hair, the beautiful hair, still blazed like sunlight and flowed downward in rippling gold. Venus was rotting. It seemed as though the poison she had assimilated in the gutters and on the carrion tolerated by the roadside, the leaven with which she had poisoned a whole people, had but now remounted to her face ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... same with smells. Wood smouldering outside!—and all the country round is smoky with bush fires. Mimosa in the room—and I can feel the sun beating down on deserted shafts and the stillness of the bush. Rotting leaves and the smell of moist earth, and I am a little girl again, in short dresses, standing by a grave—my father's to which I was driven in a high buggy, between two men in black coats. I can't remember crying at all, ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... dead clay was gathered and thrown to its last rest on the bosom of the waters, to be borne towards the eternal ice-fields of the Pole, or lie rotting on barren, rock-bound shores, where only the cries of the wilderness awaken the echoes. There was no reverence, no ceremony. The perils of existence were too near, too real in the minds ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... 'heroinomaniacs.' It is, as I told you before, a derivative of morphine. Its scientific name is diacetyl-morphin. It is New York's newest peril, one of the most dangerous drugs yet. Thousands are slaves to it, although its sale is supposedly restricted. It is rotting the heart out of the Tenderloin. Did you notice Veronica Haversham's yellowish whiteness, her down-drawn mouth, elevated eyebrows, and contracted eyes? She may have taken it up to escape other drugs. Some people have—and have just ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... expression ignores all man-made laws. Truth is that which serves us best in expressing our lives. A rotting log is truth to a bed of violets, while sand is truth to a cactus. But when the violet writes a book on "Expression as I Have Found It," making laws for the evolution of beautiful blossoms, it leaves the Century Plant out of its equation, or else swears, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... rapidly growing in size while the oranges and the apples are shrinking and rotting. The fittest survives." ("A lot he knows about the theory of the survival of the fittest!" I jeered in my heart. "He hasn't even heard the name of Herbert Spencer.") "Peanuts are peanuts, that's all there's to ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... are not keeping well this year. They are rotting; and besides father says we eat ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... opening year, fresh with the dew of heaven and the blush of innocence, coming up in this wild garden of a world, what would the gardener do without you? Where would all beauty and sweetness be found among the thorny bushes and the withering old shrubs and the rotting weeds, were it not for you? Maidens with clean hands and pure hearts, in whose touch there is something that heals the ills and soothes the pains of mortality, roses whose petals are yet unspotted by dust and rain, and ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... Blandfords, Aylesburys, and St. Leonards, rave against a man as a "destroyer of marriage" whose life is pure, and whose theories on this, as it happens, are "orthodox", merely because his honest Atheism shames their hypocritical professions, and his sturdy Republicanism menaces their corrupt and rotting society. ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... white oaks and beeches; the wild grapevines which coiled round the trees like gigantic serpents, spread out in the upper branches and obscured the sun; witch-hopples and laurel bushes grew thickly; monarchs of the forest, felled by some bygone storm, lay rotting on the ground; and in places the wind-falls were so thick and high as to ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... great will be the fighting among kings and death will be in the blood and there will be much mortality among asses." Q "What if it fall on Fourth Day?" "That is Mercury's day and portendeth great tumult among the folk and much enmity and, though rains be moderate, rotting of some of the green crops; also that there will be sore mortality among cattle and young children and much fighting by sea; that wheat will be dear from Barmdah to Misra[FN425] and other grains cheap; thunder and lightning will abound and honey will be ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... Here the Russian leaned forward, shaking his fist, his eyes suddenly inflamed and hissing his words in a fury. "You came because you believed in serfs and human slavery—because your own land spewed you out from a sick stomach, because you were one of the rotting sores in its inside—that had made Russia the dying nation that she was; because it was time that your country and my country cleansed herself from such as you. That's why you came. And we'll let these men judge which of us they ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... friend Finley, on the trail of the Western plume-hunters, searched in vain for a single pair of the exquisite birds in the vast tule lakes of Oregon, where, only a few weeks before his trip, thousands of pairs had nested. He found heaps of rotting carcasses stripped of their fatally lovely plumes; he found nests with eggs and dead young, but no live birds; the family of snowy herons, the whole race, apparently, had been suddenly swept off the world, annihilated, and was ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... here? All ye that stand ready for service, and doing service, all 'ye that stand in the house of the Lord, behold' your peril and your duty—and 'bless ye the Lord,' and remember that the more work the more prayer to keep it from rotting; the more effort the more communion; and that at the end we shall discover with alarm, and with shame confess 'I kept others' vineyards and my own vineyard have I not kept'; unless, like our Master, we prepare for a day of work and toil in the Temple ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... pitiful; brain-sick most of them; and not fit to live in the same world as you. They're not fit to be exhibited on the public stage, these poor nervous little modern people with their dried instincts and their withered thoughts, clever and helpless, rotting in inaction.... No. It has been all wrong. I've been a fool, but I couldn't pretend.... I think I knew it in my head, but it needed you to bring it home to me.... I'm not fit to live in the same world as you. I ought not to have ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... Hermes; the stalwart Hercules, resting against his club, looks on quietly, a smile beneath his beard; and the gods murmur to each other, as they stand in the cloister filled with earth from Calvary, where hundreds of men lie rotting beneath the cypresses, "Death will not triumph for ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... But back of it lay banked the fires of cruelty and race hatred! The Nation cannot live with such barbarism rotting its heart out." ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... athletic club comes along. Brutal shouts stream from bars for coachmen. Yet fine bells mix with them. On the fairgrounds where athletes wrestle, Everything is dark and indistinct. A barrel organ howls and scullery maids sing. A man is smashing a rotting woman. ...
— The Verse of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... require the birch to be lightened. Cancut must steer her alone over the foam, while we, springing ashore, raced through the thick of the forest, tore through the briers, and plunged through the punk of trees older than history, now rotting where they fell, slain by Time the Giganticide. Cancut then had us at advantage. Sometimes we had laughed at him, when he, a good-humored malaprop, made vague clutches at the thread of discourse. Now suppose he should take ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... ignorance, vanity, and revenge, contending every moment for superiority in their breasts. Such creatures are not to be reformed, neither is it prudence or safety to attempt a reformation. Yet, although their memories will rot, there may be some benefit for their survivors to smell it while it is rotting. ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... hundreds of buzzards and myriads of flies; little rills of foul, discolored water trickled into the open gutters at intervals from the kitchens and cesspools of the adjoining houses; every hole and crevice in the uneven pavement was filled with rotting organic matter washed down from the higher levels by the frequent rains, and when the sea-breeze died away at night the whole atmosphere of the city seemed to be pervaded by a sickly, indescribable odor of corruption and decay. I had expected, as a matter of course, to find Santiago in bad sanitary ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... to sleet. The sleet froze to the rotting sails, to the ice-logged hull, to the wan yardarms frost-white like ghosts. At every lurch of the sea slush slithered down from the rigging on the shivering seamen. The roar of the breakers told of a shallow sea, yet mist veiled the sky, and they were ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... his boisterous laughter. "It is not a lie about you English that you never do aught that you do not sit down first and consider, till the crews have eaten all your provisions and the timbers of your boats are rotting. When a Dane strikes, it is like the striking of lightning. So soon as you hear the thunder of his coming, that instant you see the flashing of his weapon. My chief gives you no time at all. So long a time, he has studied out, will it take me to ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... was bankrupt, shorn of half her provinces, enduring the quartering of foreign soldiers, and suffering the ruin of her crops and the paralysis of her trade. Thanks to the Continental System, which had been none of their doing, the Prussian people witnessed the decay of their seaports, the rotting of their ships in their harbors, paid exorbitant prices for tobacco, and denied themselves sugar, coffee, and spices. They were grumbling and getting into a temper that boded ill to the author ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... brushed and the mouth clean. Have decayed teeth repaired at once. Decayed teeth drop out and they cause abscesses, which may destroy the jaw bone or cause brain fever. Old snags give the stomach the germs of rotting, which cause dyspepsia. ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... than plants. At certain stages they consist of naked masses of protoplasm of very considerable size, not infrequently several centimetres in diameter. These are met with on decaying logs in damp woods, on rotting leaves, and other decaying vegetable matter. The commonest ones are bright yellow or whitish, and form soft, slimy coverings over the substratum (Fig. 5, A), penetrating into its crevices and showing sensitiveness toward light. The plasmodium, as the mass of protoplasm is called, ...
— Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany - For High Schools and Elementary College Courses • Douglas Houghton Campbell
... out and shot through the door; he ascended the steep, short stairs, and with a torch examined the black shingles, but nothing was there except a litter of young owls, whose parents had gone poaching. Then, returning, he searched on every open beam and rotting board, as ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... Along the walls are several cupboards, nests of registers and rats; a few pictures with their faces to the wall; some carved wood scutcheons, half a dozen flagstaffs and a triumphal arch in cardboard, now taken to pieces and rotting—gloomy apparatus ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... the contented humble drudge of his boyish years; to have been restored to life, but for a week, a day, an hour, a minute, only for so long a time as would enable him to say one word of passionate regret to, and hear one sound of heartfelt forgiveness from, the cold and ghastly form that lay rotting in the pauper's grave! The children wild in the streets, the mother a destitute widow; both deeply tainted with the deep disgrace of the husband and father's name, and impelled by sheer necessity, down the precipice that had ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... is his, he will in person go thither; confident that there will be victual and equipment discoverable for self and Army were he there. Remonstrances avail not: 'Ask me to die with honor, ask me not to lie rotting here;' [Ib. iv. 241.]—and quits Frankfurt, and the Reich's-Diet and its babble, 17th October, 1744 (small sorrow, were it for the last time),—and enters his Munchen in the course of a week. [17th October, 1744, leaves Frankfurt; arrives in Munchen ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... there was a man named Lazarus, who died and was buried; and after he had lain four days in a tomb, shut in by a great stone, the Nazarene was shown to the place. Upon rolling the stone away, we beheld the man lying inside bound and rotting. There were many people standing by, and we all heard what the Nazarene said, for he spoke in a loud voice: 'Lazarus, come forth!' I cannot tell you my feelings when in answer, as it were, the man arose and came out to us with all his cerements ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... underneath the logs at one side of the cabin. A very primitive cider mill—two wooden rollers fastened in a frame, and moved by a long sapling sweep attached to one of them—stood near. The ground was covered with rotting apple pomace, from which arose the odor that had reached ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... rift within the lute That by and by will make the music mute, The little rift within the lover's lute Or little pitted speck in garnered fruit That rotting inward slowly ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... procured water from shallow and improvised wells that we dug in the hollows and ravines. Wild cane grew luxuriantly in this locality, attaining a height of fifteen or twenty feet, and all other wild vegetation was rank in proportion. The annual growth of all this plant life had been dying and rotting on the ground for ages, and the water would filter through this decomposing mass, and become well-nigh poisonous. An order was soon issued that we should get all water for drinking and cooking purposes from the Yazoo river, and boil it before using, but it was impossible ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... brooding over the addled eggs of the past. Are the High Gods bringing our new Iliad to grief in a spirit of wanton mischief? At whose door will history leave the blame for the helpless, hopeless fix we are left in—rotting with disease and told to ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... Lutra and her companion followed the fish, and afforded a rare, unexpected sight as, bold with hunger, they ascended to breathe between the sheets of ice in the pool by the village gardens. At night the otters wandered over the snow, and sometimes visited the hillside farms. There, among rotting refuse-heaps, they discovered worms and insects sheltering in genial warmth. When exceptionally hungry, Lutra and her mate would dig into the chambers of the mole and the field-vole in the meadows, and search ravenously for the inmates. Among ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... and nails of dead people to grow? A. Because the flesh rotting, withering and falling away, that which was hidden about the root of the hair doth now appear as growing. Some say that it grows indeed, because carcasses are dissolved in the beginning to many excrements and superfluities by putrefaction. ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... wooden pins; and over all, a fresh storm-roof was laid on yearly for the hurricane months, composed of folded cocoanut leaves, held down with planks of wood, and bound to the frame-work below—which, however, had to be removed again in April to save the sugar-cane leaf from rotting beneath it. There you were snugly covered in, and your thatching good to last from eight years to ten; that is, provided you were not caught in the sweep of the hurricane, before which trees went flying like straws, huts disappeared like autumn leaves, and your Mission House, ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... charity did not consist in dispensing largesse after making a fortune at the expense of one's fellow-men; that there was something still wrong in a government that permits it. It was gradually becoming plain to us, after two thousand years, that human bodies and souls rotting in tenements were more valuable than all the forests on all the hills; that government, Christian government, had something to do ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... said by a pleasant author that Englishmen hang and drown themselves. In truth, this work has a tendency to alarm us with symptoms of public suicide. However, there is one comfort to be taken even from the gloomy time of year. It is a rotting season. If what is brought to market is not good, it is not likely to keep long. Even buildings run up in haste with untempered mortar in that humid weather, if they are ill-contrived tenements, do not threaten long to incumber the earth. The author ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... itself with fury on the woods, dug into their depths with its teeth, tore off boughs, and with a roar of triumph whistled along the glades and swept the forest as with a besom; or from out of the depths of space huge mud-coloured clouds, like piles of rotting hay, strangled the trees in their embrace, or dissolved in a cold unceasing drizzle that might have penetrated a stone. The roads were deserted, flooded with a mixture of mud and foul snow; the villages seemed dead, the ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... woodwork, and ironwork, bristling too with briars and brambles. It was the site of the old mansion, still black with traces of the fire which had destroyed the building. Underneath the briars lay rotting timbers and fire-split masonry. The spot was like a little ravined, hillocky wilderness of sterile rocks, draped with rude vegetation, clinging creepers that twined and twisted through every crevice like green serpents. The young folks amused themselves by wandering across ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... They muzzle up, and beat his limbs to death; With violence to life and stifling pain He flings and spurns, and tries to snort in vain, Loud heavy blows fall thick on every side, Till his bruised bowels burst within the hide; When dead, they leave him rotting on the ground, With branches, thyme, and cassia, strowed around. All this is done, when first the western breeze 390 Becalms the year, and smooths the troubled seas; Before the chattering swallow builds her nest, Or fields in spring's embroidery are dress'd. Meanwhile ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... and deepen, and all the rest on't. I should be chin- deep in the grave, man, before I had done with my task; and, in the meanwhile, all the quirks and quiddities which I might have devised for my reader's amusement, would lie rotting in my gizzard, like Sancho's suppressed witticisms, when he was under his master's displeasure.—There never was a novel written on this plan while the ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... revelling among the leaves; and the gay red and light beetles being the habitees of flower cups. Upon the first table of the series (1) are some curious varieties. Here are the remarkable burying-beetle, that deposits its eggs in the rotting flesh of small dead animals, and then, with the assistance of some kindred beetles buries the body, leaving its progeny to enjoy the carrion when they quicken; the sacred scarabaeus of the Egyptians, and the British variety of the same beetle, that ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... crossed the strip of turf, and entered the haunted wood. It was a gloomy place indeed; the great wide-topped trees grew thick there shutting out the sight of the sky; moreover, the air in it which no breeze stirred, was heavy with the exhalations of rotting foliage. There seemed to be no life here and no sound—only now and again a loathsome spotted snake would uncoil itself and glide away, and now and again a heavy rotten ...
— Black Heart and White Heart • H. Rider Haggard
... China, Weary moon on the river of the sky, The stir of light in the willows is like the flashing of a thousand silver minnows Through dark shoals; The tiles on graves and rotting temples flash like ripples, The sky is flecked with clouds like the ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... breath of air moving, nor a sound but that of the surf booming half a mile away along the beaches and against the rocks outside. A peculiar stagnant smell hung over the anchorage—a smell of sodden leaves and rotting tree trunks. I observed the doctor sniffing and sniffing, like someone tasting ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is impossible for a vessel to hold its own in that locality while they blow, for they are following winds for us; it is therefore certain that the enemy will not be able to trouble us. Even in case the fleet were necessary, it remains in port rotting, and the men are causing the same expense; and it would be better for it to go for goods that are sure and bought at very low prices, the duties and freight charges on which would equal the expense of going out to drive the enemy ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XXII, 1625-29 • Various
... human life on such terms." Who in future will hear of rest-cures, retirements, retreats, nursings, comforts, and attention to health, without beholding in his mind that monstrous flat-fish, blind and deaf with age, rotting at ease upon the Atlantic slime? Life is not measured by the ticking of a clock, and it is no new thing to discover eternity in a minute. "I have not time to make money," said the naturalist, Agassiz, ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... his way home. Everything was strangely altered. Ancient trees grew where shrubs had grown four days before. Cedars under whose shade he used to sleep lay rotting on the ground. Where his lodge had stood now he saw a new and handsome lodge, and presently out of it came a very old decrepit squaw who, nevertheless, through her wrinkles, had a look that seemed strangely familiar to him. Her ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... Outside the moon soared, soared brilliant, a greenish blotch on it like the time-stain on a chased silver bowl on an altar. The broken lion's head of the fountain dribbled one tinkling stream of quicksilver. On the seawind came smells of rotting garbage and thyme burning in hearths and jessamine flowers. Down the street geraniums in a window smouldered in the moonlight; in the dark above them the merest contour of a face, once the gleam of two eyes; opposite against the white wall standing very quiet ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... cultivation of upland padi the site of woods is universally preferred, and the more ancient the woods the better, on account of the superior richness of the soil; the continual fall and rotting of the leaves forming there a bed of vegetable mould, which the open plains do not afford, being exhausted by the powerful operation of the sun's rays and the constant production of a rank grass called ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... us, and it was all the poor old man could do to keep from breaking down as he led us mournfully through that devastated cemetery. Some of the graves, even those with large slabs over them, had been shelled to such an extent that the stone coffins beneath could clearly be seen, half opened, with rotting grave-clothes, and in others even the skeletons had been disinterred. New graves, roughly fashioned like the one we had seen in the back garden at headquarters, were dotted all over the place. Somehow they were not so sinister as those old ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... She would see the weak spot there.... She would refuse. He could feel refusal gathering in her heart. And his own heart beat hotly in his throat. For if this failed, what other way was left? Yet to go and leave her here, alone in that rotting cottage on the hill.... the prey of any ghastly fate.... no, it couldn't be done. He must convince ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... she had come upon the rotting ribs of a wreck on the beach. Its distance from the tide line, its position, and its deep imbedding of sand, showed that it was of ancient origin. An omnivorous reader of all that pertained to the history of California, ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... Guillemont, Montauban. It was not easy to understand it, my knowledge of those places being what it was. Those villages did not exist, except as corruption in a land that was tumbled into waves of glistening clay where the bodies of men were rotting disregarded like those of dogs sprawled on a midden. My knowledge of that country, got with some fatigue, anxiety, fright and on certain days dull contempt for the worst that could happen, because it seemed ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... a stake in the world, you must certainly see its foundations are driven deep and look to the stake itself, that it's not rotting. Some stakes are certainly not made of stuff stout enough to stand against the storms ahead. Education is the great, vital thing. I often feel mad to think how I wasted my own time at school, and came to man's work a raw, ignorant fool. We talk of the education of the ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... any headway in those parts of New Britain, New Ireland, and the Solomon and New Hebrides Groups which were visited by trading vessels—the nuts were turned into oil by a crude and wasteful process known as "rotting." ...
— Yorke The Adventurer - 1901 • Louis Becke
... did." The boy reaches up and takes the hand, and squeezes it with the shyness of the Englishman who responds to some display of solicitude or affection on the part of a comrade. "Don't mind my rotting like this. There are times when one must let off steam ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... gigantic proportions, are given to rotting in the lower portions of the trunk, and chambers eight feet in diameter are not uncommon. In the course of a canoe voyage down the Ohio, in the summer of 1894, I frequently saw such cavities, with the openings stopped by pickets or rails, utilized by small bottom farmers as hog-pens, chicken-coops, ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers |
