"Droppings" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... whose effect Holds such an enmity with blood of man That, swift as quicksilver, it courses through The natural gates and alleys of the body; And with a sudden vigour it doth posset And curd, like eager droppings into milk, The thin and wholesome blood; so did it mine; And a most instant tetter bark'd about, Most lazar-like, with vile and loathsome crust All my smooth body. Thus was I, sleeping, by a brother's hand, Of life, of crown, of queen, at once dispatch'd: Cut off even ...
— Hamlet, Prince of Denmark • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... and fro in the garden, and the twilight began to close around me, their little voices were hushed; and that peculiar silence which belongs to such an evening in the country when the lightest trees are quite still, save for the occasional droppings from their ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... down the trail, staying a little off it, studying tracks and droppings, noticing evidences of browsing on the shrubs—mostly old—pausing to examine tufts of hair and an occasional feather. Halfway down the slope he flushed a bird about ptarmigan-size, grayish brown ...
— Cat and Mouse • Ralph Williams
... were always built in woods, sufficient space only being cleared to prevent the droppings from the boughs from rotting the roofs. They were simply formed of three rows of parallel stakes for the support of the roof, the highest part of which was only nine feet from the ground, while the eaves reached to within three feet and a half. The houses were thatched with palm-leaves, and ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... march to-day brought us to a village on the same Moami, and to avoid a Sunday in the forest we remained. The elephants had come into the village and gone all about it, and to prevent their opening the corn safes the people had bedaubed them with elephant's droppings. When a cow would not give milk, save to its calf, a like device was used at Kolobeng; the cow's droppings were smeared on the teats, and the calf was too much disgusted to suck: the cow then ran till she was distressed ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... able-bodied seamen represented the whole port. The cramped, twisting thoroughfare was full of people like this; they overflowed from the single narrow border of pavement to the left and walked indifferently upon the road among the straw-scatterings and the dung-droppings; and when the tramcar swept through and past with prodigious whistlings and ringings, they swerved as little as possible aside, for three parts of the tide of them were neither white nor black, but many shades of brown, written down in the census as "of mixed blood" and ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... paper we see a grand ethical discussion, and in another the droppings of most accursed nastiness. Oh! you cannot by all your religion, in one column, atone for one of your abominations in another! I am rejoiced that some of our papers have addressed those who have proposed to compensate them for bad use of their columns, in the words of Peter to Simon Magus: "Thy ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... have his fist gloved with his jesses.[38] A justice of peace he is to domineer in his parish, and do his neighbour wrong with more right.[39] He will be drunk with his hunters for company, and stain his gentility with droppings of ale. He is fearful of being sheriff of the shire by instinct, and dreads the assize-week as much as the prisoner. In sum, he's but a clod of his own earth, or his land is the dunghill and he the cock that crows over it: ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... tomahawk, I remember, he led us down across the sand to where the ship lay, so deeply bedded that one stepped over her rail as it might have been the coaming of a hatch. Her deck, and indeed every uncovered part of the Livorno, was encrusted in the droppings of multitudinous sea-fowl. For almost as many years as I had lived, probably, these creatures had made a home of the derelict. To be sure, they had as good a right to it as we had; yet I remember how keenly we ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... are covered with wet dust than during heavy rains when the insulators are thoroughly washed by the action of the water. In like manner a heavy rain-storm cleaned the tracks from the accumulations due chiefly to the droppings of the horses, which otherwise served largely to increase the conductivity. Of course, in dry weather the loss of current was practically nothing, and, under ordinary conditions, Edison held, his ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... to the door to see what had become of all our party. I found that the Major and Dodd, with all the Kamchadals, had pitched tents upon the spongy moss outside, and were spending the night there, instead of remaining in the yurt and having their clothes and blankets spoiled by the muddy droppings of its leaky roof. The tents were questionable improvements; but I agreed with them in preferring clean water to mud, and gathering up my bedding I crawled in by the side of Dodd. The wind blew the tent down once during the night, and ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... departed pleasure. Drooping evergreens, dying lamps, dim transparencies, and faded flowers, met her view as she crossed the hall; while the public rooms were covered with dust from the chalked floors, and wax from the droppings of the candles. Everything, in short, looked tawdry and forlorn. Nothing was in its place—nothing looked as it used to do—and she stood amazed at the disagreeable metamorphose an ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... been subjected to the injurious practice of close pruning, the knots left will frequently be found oozing out resin. This gardeners' labourers and cottagers might collect, reduce to a fine powder, and mix up with small coal, horse droppings, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19, No. 528, Saturday, January 7, 1832 • Various
... cockney pays five hundred per cent. beyond its value, and a tax of five hundred per cent. more than that,) these centipedes, toads, small alligators, large worms, white bait, snails, caterpillars, maggots, eels, minnows, weeds, moss, offal in detachments, gas-juice, vinegar lees, tallow droppings, galls, particles of dead men, women, children, horses, and dogs, train-oil, copper, dye-stuff, soot, and dead fish, are all, according to the chemistry of the washerwomen, neutralized, mollified, clarified, and rectified—but this we doubt; and if any of the unhappy persons ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 343, November 29, 1828 • Various
... horses almost anywhere in the United States. It occurs in the intestine and probably occasions little damage as a rule, except when present in large numbers, in which case it will probably be found in the droppings. The symptoms occasioned by it are rather obscure and are such as might arise from a number of other causes, namely, colicky pains, depraved appetite, diarrhea or constipation, and general unthriftiness. In a general way, ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... of satisfaction and peace, I returned to my fire. As I sat there I could hear the curious noises of the woods, the little droppings, cracklings, rustlings which seemed to make all the world alive. I even fancied I could see small bright eyes looking out at my fire, and once or twice I was almost sure I heard voices—whispering—, perhaps the ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... of moral endeavor, depends more on its teacher, than the home upon the mother? What influence of all the world's professors and teachers tells so strongly on the habit of a man's mind as those gentle droppings from a mother's lips, which, day by day and hour by hour, grow into the enlarging stature of his soul, and live with it forever? They can hardly be mothers who aim at a broader and noisier field; they have forgotten to be daughters; they must needs ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... hath left his gloves behind where he sat in his chair, and hath sent me to fetch them; it is such an old snudge, he'll not lose the droppings of his nose. ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... of fire The mate of her who nursed Desire Moulded the glowing steel to form Arrows for Cupid thrilling warm; While Venus every barb imbues With droppings of her honeyed dews; And Love (alas the victim heart) Tinges with ...
— Correggio - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... (Prov. xxi. 19). As there was no wilderness into which he could fly to escape the tongue of his dear Jemima, he would fly away into a solitary room, or into the adjoining garden, or into a neighbour's house, or take a walk in the lonely road,—anywhere to shelter himself from the fiery droppings of ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... has the day been, how bright was the sun. How lovely and joyful the course that he run. Though he rose in a mist when his race he began And there followed some droppings of rain! ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... aggregate of petty sins that make up a worldly life. It is their custom to ask alms, and perhaps to measure the duration of their penance by the time requisite to accumulate a sum of money out of the little droppings of individual charity. The avails are devoted to some beneficent or religious purpose; so that the benefit accruing to their own souls is, in a manner, linked with a good done, or intended, to their fellow-men. These figures ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... from the paws of Amarock, and rescue her from the ravine of Hafgufa." He concluded with a wish, that "whoever shall attempt to hinder his union with Ajut, might be buried without his bow, and that, in the land of souls, his skull might serve for no other use than to catch the droppings of the starry lamps." ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... being repelled by its form, and Byron, that great passionate human incomplete creature, could appreciate neither the poet of the cloud nor the poet of the lake, and the wonder of Keats was hidden from him. The realism of Euripides was hateful to Sophokles. Those droppings of warm tears had no music for him. Milton, with his sense of the grand style, could not understand the method of Shakespeare, any more than could Sir Joshua the method of Gainsborough. Bad artists ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... their work, and with rival models of a button for the Pontifical cope. Giuseppe fumed and fretted while the Holy Father put on his spectacles to examine the great silver vase which was to receive the droppings from his table, its richly chased handles and its festoons of acanthus leaves, and its ingenious masks; and its fellow which was to stand in his cupboard and hold water, and had a beautiful design representing St. Ambrogio on horseback routing the Arians. And when one of the ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the morning dawned and day broke the merchant came and the watchman began greeting him with blessings, because of the two dirhams; but the shop-keeper wondered at his words as one not knowing what he meant. When he opened his shop, he saw the droppings of the wax and the account-book lying on the floor, and looking round, found four bales of stuffs missing. So he asked the watchman what had happened and he told him what has passed in the night and what had been said to the cameleer, whereupon the merchant ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... God and the droppings of his clouds, because they continually sit under the means of grace. But alas, they receive it as stones receive showers, or as dunghills receive the rain: they either abide as hard as stones still, or else return nothing to heaven ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... cells, she heaps up, in the uninhabited vestibule, a conglomeration of rubbish, whatever chance may offer in the neighbourhood of the nest: little pieces of gravel, bits of earth, grains of sawdust, particles of mortar, cypress-catkins, broken leaves, dry Snail-droppings and any other material that comes her way. The pile, a real barricade this time, blocks the reed completely to the end, except about two centimetres (About three-quarters of an inch.—Translator's ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... thee my ghost to follow To sadder groves, and churchyards, where we'll hollo To darker caves and solitary woods, To fatal whirlpools and consuming floods; I'll tempt thee to pass by the unlucky ewe, Blasted with cursed droppings of mildew; Under an oak, that ne'er bore leaf, my moans Shall there be told thee by the mandrake's groans; The winds shall sighing tell thy cruelty, And how thy want of love did murder me; And when the cock shall crow, and day grow near, Then in a flash ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... hard—when an old woman, on learning of their adventure, told them that, in her young days, she and her female companions were once returning home from a grand festival, and adopted another plan for ascertaining if they were all together. Gathering some of the cattle-droppings, they kneaded them into a cake, in which they each made a mark with the tip of the nose, and then counted the marks—a plan which the Gooroo and his disciples should make use of ...
— The Book of Noodles - Stories Of Simpletons; Or, Fools And Their Follies • W. A. Clouston
... dispatch without quarter the flower of the youth of Florence troubled him, as I take it, no whit. He was too imperturbable, too phlegmatic for that. Had he been of our race he might, perhaps, have sighed over their fate, for we that are of the race of Rome have some droppings of the old Roman pity as ingredients in our composition. Messer Griffo was no such fantastico, but a plain, straightforward, journeyman sword-bearer that would kill any mortal or mortals whom he was paid to kill, unless—and here is the key to his character ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... months; but you may see it rain every day from the hotel piazza in Honolulu, though you get not a drop in the city itself; for in the Nuanu and Manoa valleys there are showers every day in the year—the droppings of fragments of clouds which have been blown over the mountain summits; and if you cross the Pali to go the windward side of the island, though you set out from Honolulu amidst brilliant sunshine which will endure there all day ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... a slaughtered animal is swarming with colon germs, and when long kept for use of hotels and many restaurants, is covered with a beard of green mold. Such food is fit only for scavengers. Hamburger steak and pork liver often contain more manure germs than the fresh droppings of animals. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... stubble. It fits into the scene, and does not appear to lead a beggarly and disconsolate life, like most of our winter residents. During the ice-harvesting on the river, I see them flitting about among the gangs of men, or floating on the cakes of ice, picking and scratching amid the droppings of the horses. They love the stack and hay-barn in the distant field, where the farmer fodders his cattle upon the snow, and every red-root, ragweed, or pigweed left standing in the fall ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... the centre of strength. She could write finally of the factory wheels "grinding life down from its mark," a strong and strictly true observation. Unfortunately she could also write of Euripides "with his droppings of warm tears." She could write in A Drama of Exile, a really fine exposition, touching the later relation of Adam and the animals: unfortunately the tears were again turned on at the wrong moment at the main; and the stage ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... be very recent, the sand may sometimes, where it is very loose and dry, be seen running back into the tracks, and by following them to a place where they cross water, the earth will be wet for some distance after they leave it. The droppings of the dung from animals are also good indications of the age of a trail. It is well to remember whether there have been any rains within a few days, as the age of a trail may sometimes be conjectured ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... regarded the rusty evidences acrosss the narrow muddy ditch of cow-droppings that had once been a High Street. He was clearly disposed to be sceptical, and yet there the ruins were! He grappled with ideas beyond the strength of ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... hammock for a little, her friends take great care to prevent her from touching the Boyrusu, which is an imaginary serpent that would swallow her up. She must also be very careful not to set foot on the droppings of fowls or animals, else she would suffer from sores on the throat and breast. On the third day they let her down from the hammock, cut her hair, and make her sit in a corner of the room with her face turned to the wall. She may speak to nobody, and must abstain ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... first half of July that the Sitaris-grubs reach their full dimensions. At this period the cell usurped by the parasite contains nothing beyond a full-fed larva and, in a corner, a heap of reddish droppings. This larva is soft and white, about half an inch in length and a quarter of an inch wide at its broadest part. Seen from above as it floats on the honey, it is elliptical in form, tapering gradually towards ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... at; but one day he leaped too high, and then he, also, was gone. They searched everywhere, even in the cellar, but he was nowhere to be found. Where could he be? He had jumped into the dust-bin, where all sorts of rubbish were lying: cabbage-stalks, dust, and rain-droppings that had fallen down from the ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... of Tallum, like its botany, was Siberian, Arctic types occurring at lower elevations than in the wetter parts of Sikkim. Of beetles the honey-feeding ones prevailed, with European forms of others that inhabit yak-droppings.* [As Aphodius and Geotrupes. Predaceous genera were very rare, as Carabus and Staphylinus, so typical of boreal regions. Coccinella (lady-bird), which swarms at Dorjiling, does not ascend so high, and a Clytus was the only longicorn. Bupretis, ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... hour. Then we all go out naked and dig trenches to get it out of the way. It is very rough living. I have to confess that I never knew how well off I was until I got to smoking Durham tobacco and I've only half a bag of that left. The enlisted men are smoking dried horse droppings, grass, roots and tea. Some of them can't sleep they are so nervous for the want of it, but to-day a lot came up and all will be well for them. I've had a steady ration of coffee, bacon and hard tack for a week and one mango, to night we had beans. Of course, what they ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... knows, had been well "brought up." He had been taught to tell the truth at all times; and he did so on the present occasion, very much to the confusion, no doubt, of the rebel soldiers, who had not been brought up under the droppings of the sanctuary in a New ...
— The Soldier Boy; or, Tom Somers in the Army - A Story of the Great Rebellion • Oliver Optic
... coloration, by which each species has become more and more harmonised with its immediate surroundings, till we reach the most curiously minute resemblances to natural objects in the leaf and stick insects, and those which are so like flowers or moss or birds' droppings that they deceive the acutest eye. We have learnt, further, that these varied forms of protective colouring are far more numerous than has been usually suspected, because, what appear to be very conspicuous colours or markings when the species is observed in a museum or ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... asserts that the weather for forty days after his feast-day on July 15 is dry or rainy according to its state on that day. The legend is said to be based on the fact that the removal of his body from "a vile and unworthy place where his grave might be trampled upon by every passenger and received the droppings from the eaves" to the golden shrine in the cathedral was delayed by a long continuance of wet weather. Similar legends to explain a wet summer are found elsewhere in Europe. "The saint was translated," says Rudborne, "in the 110th year of his ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Winchester - A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • Philip Walsingham Sergeant
... Religion, and highly indispensable, though so often dispensed with! Readers, especially in our time English readers, who would gain the least knowledge about Friedrich, in the extinct Bedlam where his work now lay, have a great many things to forget, and sad strata of Owl-droppings, ancient ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... no enjoyment to equal a good stool; and now I am no longer astonished at sempiternal droppings of a fly," replied ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... in coops the floors of which are made of heavy wire having one-inch mesh; underneath the wire is a droppings pan, which is emptied every day. My coops are built in tiers and long sections. I have ninety of them, each one accommodating nine chickens. I have enough portable feeding coops with wire bottoms and droppings pans underneath to enable me to feed, in all, about ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... practice—the feeblest colonies to survive; degenerate stock, secondary or tertiary swarms, which have just barely sufficient food to subsist through the winter, or whose miserable store he will supplement perhaps with a few droppings of honey. The result is, probably, that the race has grown feebler, that the tendency to excessive swarming has been hereditarily developed, and that to-day almost all our bees, particularly the black ones, swarm too often. For some years now the new methods of "movable" apiculture have ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... judgment could be formed of what any soil in this country would produce until it had been properly worked, dressed, cleansed, and purged of that sour quality that was naturally inherent in it, which it derived from the droppings of wet from the leaves of gum and other trees, and which were known to be of ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... the Bedouin, "O chief of the Arabs, this girl is none of thine affair; so do thou sell her to me for what thou wilt." "Take her," said the Bedouin, "and pay me down her price, or I will carry her back to the camp and set her to feed the camels and gather their droppings."[FN28] Quoth the merchant, "I will give thee fifty thousand dinars for her." "God will open,"[FN29] replied the Bedouin. "Seventy thousand," said the merchant. "God will open," repeated the other; "she ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume II • Anonymous
... by raisings and droppings of arms when pleasure is great (299). Arm-movements that seemed like defensive movements (314). "Crowing" a ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... when the flowers begin to bud (early in the month of May), the women and children go into the timber and prepare a large bed, clearing away the underbrush, weeds and grass and leaves and sticks, raking the ground till the earth is thoroughly pulverized. Elk, deer, and mountain sheep droppings are collected, pounded fine, and mixed with the seed which ...
— Blackfoot Lodge Tales • George Bird Grinnell
... steps but help them to renew the race, As after stumbling, jades will mend their pace. What crowds of these, impenitently bold, In sounds and jingling syllables grown old, Still run on poets in a raging vein, Even to the dregs and squeezing of the brain; Strain out the last dull droppings of their sense, And rhyme with ...
— An Essay on Criticism • Alexander Pope
... where a great granite gorge, the Nakb Ab Shr, ran up to a depression in the dorsum, an apparently practicable Col. Suddenly the rocks assumed the quaintest hues and forms. The quartz, slaty-blue and black, was here spotted and streaked with a dull, dead white, as though stained by the droppings of myriad birds: there it lay veined and marbled with the most vivid of rainbow colours— reds and purples, greens and yellows, set off by the pale chalky white. Evident signs of work were remarked in ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... very edges of which my mule maliciously walked as though to mark them out with her shoes—we arrived, by an almost perpendicular descent, at the end of our journey. It was a vast desert of rocks, absolutely bare, all white with the droppings of gulls and sea-fowl, for the sea is at the bottom, quite near, and the silence of the place was broken only by the flow of the waves and the shrill cries of the wheeling circles of birds. My guide, ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... ma'am, may be so. It's the way with money. Comes like the droppings out of the spout at the gable, ma'am; but goes like the tub when the bull has tipped it. Now ...
— Capt'n Davy's Honeymoon - 1893 • Hall Caine
... of it is taken up by land plants and animals for the building of their tissues, and another part goes in solution to the sea to be taken up by sea plants and animals. In places where the bones and excrements of land animals or the shells and droppings of sea animals accumulate, deposits of phosphatic material may be ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... on Dick opposite her and she was both shocked and displeased. There were droppings of food all down the front of his coat; the mouth under the ragged ill-grown beard drooped sullenly; the forehead was lined and contracted; and on the lean temples the hair was a dusty indeterminate colour that might or might not have been called gray. ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... French Canadians say "C'est un oiseau qui suit la Religion" frequenting churches, convents and sacred places, and it is considered a privilege to have so good a bird about the house. The sparrow lives readily in Canada, as it feeds on the droppings of the horse and takes shelter down the chimneys or under the roofs of the houses. The enemies of the sparrow are very numerous, notably the great Northern Shrike, the owls, hawks and in summer the swifts and swallows. I have seen the English ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... to "cut down an oak and plant a thistle," of which there is a further version, "to cut down an oak and set up a strawberry." The truth of the next adage needs no comment—"Usurers live by the fall of heirs, as swine by the droppings ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... the insect constructed from papier-mache-like material a disc-shaped lid exactly fitting the mouth of the excavation, to which it was attached on its upper edge by a hinge. Then round and about the disc similar stuff was plastered, so as to form an irregular splash, imitative of a bird's droppings to the-degree of perfect deception. In the centre was the lid with the hinge, and whensoever the insect visited its nursery the lid swung up, closing behind it. On departure it fell into position. Unless the insect by its presence betrayed its secret, the shrewdest observer ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... eccentric hoop in marine and land engines is generally of brass; it is expedient to cast an oil cup on the eccentric hoop, and, where practicable, a pan should be placed beneath the eccentric for the reception of the oil droppings. The notch of the eccentric rod for the reception of the pin of the valve shaft is usually steeled, to prevent inconvenient wear; for when the sides of the notch wear, the valve movement is not only disturbed, but it is very difficult to throw the eccentric rod out of ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... one. It is fascinating to watch an experienced elephant hunter and to see how eloquent the trail is to him. A broken twig means something, the blades of grass turned a certain way will distinguish the fresh trail from the old one, the footprints in the soft earth, the droppings—all tell a definite story to him, and he knows when he is drawing down upon his quarry. As we proceeded his movements became slower and more cautious, and the plodding drudgery of following an elephant trail gave ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... when portions of the land lay deep under the sea. Thus each separate layer of mud or sand or other material became in its turn the top layer, and was for the time the floor of the ocean, until further droppings of material out of the waters made a fresh layer, covering ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... not the last time he led the talk in the direction of Government claims, and in the course of his marketings and droppings into various stores and young lawyers' offices, he gathered a good deal of information. Claims upon the Government had not been so far exploited in those days as they were a little later, and knowledge of such business ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... to quiet it—simple girl! She told it to rest in peace, and she went from me! Insatiable love! ever self-torturer, never self-destroyer! the world, with all its weight of miseries, cannot crush thee, cannot keep thee down. Generally mens' tears, like the droppings of certain springs, only harden and petrify what they fall on; but mine sank deep into a tender heart, and were its very blood. Never will I believe she has left me utterly. Oftentimes, and long ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... difficult matter to keep them clean without summer-fallowing. Such soils, however, seldom contain a large store of unavailable plant food, and instead of summer-fallowing, we had better manure. On such soils artificial manures are often very profitable, though barn-yard manure, or the droppings of animals feeding on the land, should be the prime basis of all attempts to maintain, or increase, the ...
— Talks on Manures • Joseph Harris
... the western wind had again risen; and, notwithstanding its deep distant soughing, the soft regular patter of the eaves-droppings could be heard as they dripped from the roof. And so the tears of the forsaken one began to flow—tears running even to her lips to impart their briny taste, and dropping silently on her work, like summer showers brought ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... falling of a nation's tears O'er Freedom's prostrate form, Dew droppings sweet from starry spheres, Swift-rushing wings ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... ourselves on a horizontal monument, which was elevated just high enough to be a convenient seat, I observed that one of the gravestones lay very close to the church,—so close that the droppings of the eaves would fall upon it. It seemed as if the inmate of that grave had desired to creep under the church-wall. On closer inspection, we found an almost illegible epitaph on the stone, and with difficulty made ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... out again, vibrant, strangely disquieting, harmonious. Murmurous chanting it was at first, rhythmic and low; ripples and flutings, tones and progressions utterly unknown to me; unfamiliar, abrupt, and alien themes that kept returning, droppings of crystal-clear jewels of sound, golden tollings—and all ordered, mathematical, GEOMETRIC, even as had been the gestures of the shapes; Lilliputians of the ruins, Brobdignagian of ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... Eternal World, Yesterday was, To-day is not!" I answer'd; "Oh Fount of Light!—under an Alien Name I shadow One upon whose Head the Crown Both Was and Is To-day; to whose Firman The Seven Kingdoms of the World are subject, And the Seas Seven but droppings of his Largess. Good luck to him who under other Name Taught us to veil the Praises of a Power To which the Initiate ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Salaman and Absal • Omar Khayyam and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... household may inhabit a neighbourhood for years without becoming acquainted even with the outward aspect of their neighbours; but in the lordly servants' halls of the West, or the modest kitchens of Bloomsbury, there will be interchange of civilities and friendly "droppings in" to tea or supper, let the master of the house be never so ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... a ring of orange light Glows. God, what leprous tatters of distress, Droppings of misery, rags of Thy loneliness Quiver and heave like vermin, ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... drew her money from the Court, and expended it here, and a feeble, gouty old sailor who had bidden the sea farewell. Out in the street, on the sharp-edged cobble-stones, the sparrows were clamoring loudly, lying there with puffed-out feathers, feasting among the horse-droppings, tugging at them and scattering them about to the accompaniment of a storm of chirping ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... toes Are seldom withdrawn from the stirrup. Dr. Humdrum, whose eloquence flows, Like droppings of sweet poppy syrup; Dr. Rosygill puffing and fanning, And wiping away perspiration; Dr. Humbug, who proved Mr. Canning The beast ...
— English Satires • Various
... Rabbit was taken, but one individual was observed by H. B. Tordoff on June 18, 1954, at locality 8. Droppings of a large lagomorph were seen in the woods, and tracks were seen in ...
— Mammals of the Grand Mesa, Colorado • Sydney Anderson
... smooth, hard, even-textured clay, of lively color, from which thousands of red men cut their pipe-bowls, forms a wall on the Coteau des Prairies, in Minnesota, that is two miles long and thirty feet high. In front of it lie five bowlders, the droppings from an iceberg to the floor of the primeval sea, and beneath these masses of granite live the spirits of two squaws that must be consulted before the stone can be dug. This quarry was neutral ground, and here, as they approached it, the men ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... this Pitying Angel repose the dust of two hundred of England's gentle martyrs, whose murdered and mutilated forms, but thirty years ago, choked up the well into which they were tossed. While I stand and read the sorrowful inscription it rains a gentle, soft, unpattering shower. Are these gentle droppings the tender tribute of angels' tears. I wonder, and does it always rain so soft and noiselessly ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... greater richness of invention than was given to any other composers excepting two, Bach and Mozart; and death would not take his gifts as an excuse when he was thirty-seven. Hence our Mr. Cummings has droppings of lukewarm tears; hence, generally, compassion for his comparatively short life has ousted admiration for his mighty works from the minds of those who are readier at all times to indulge in the luxury of weeping than to feel the thrill of joy in a life greatly ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... longer. Tell him that his great, bulky ship ruins the view; that it hides the most beautiful church and part of the Doge's Palace. Tell him that I might as well have stayed at home and built a cottage on the dock in Boston Harbour. Tell him that his steam-whistles, his anchor-droppings, and his constant loadings or unloadings give us headache. Tell him that seven or eight of his sailormen brought clean garments and scrubbing brushes and took their bath at our front entrance. Tell him that one of them, almost absolutely nude, instead of running away to put on more clothing, ...
— Penelope's Postscripts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... of winter, severe frosts retard too long what apiarists term their " flight of cleanliness," rather than sully the hive they will perish by thousands of a terrible bowel-disease. The males alone are incurably careless, and will impudently bestrew the surface of the comb with their droppings, which the workers are obliged to sweep as they hasten ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... to little William that the albacores had sought the companionship of the Catamaran less from the idea of obtaining any droppings there might be from her decks, than as a protection against their formidable pursuer,—the sword-fish. Indeed, this is most probably the reason why not only the albacores and their kindred the bonitos, but several other ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... supporting a certain amount of vegetation, and they continue to do so for an unlimited period, because the whole of the substances extracted from them are again restored, either directly by the decay of the plants, or indirectly by the droppings of the wild animals which have browzed upon them. Under these circumstances, a soil yields what may be called its normal produce, which varies within comparatively narrow limits, according to the ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson
... long-handled "knocker," I used to be sent forth in the April meadows to beat up and scatter the fall droppings of the cows —the Juno's cushions as Irving named them—I was in much more congenial employment. Had I known the game of golf in those days I should probably have looked upon this as a fair substitute. To stand the big cushions up on edge and with a real golfer's swing ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... from straw.—For growing mushrooms on a small scale, as in cellars or boxes, some prefer to select the horse droppings free ...
— Studies of American Fungi. Mushrooms, Edible, Poisonous, etc. • George Francis Atkinson
... write, and did presently write and subscribe all his confessions." That Briant, a man said to, have been reduced to such extremities of hunger and thirst in prison, that he ate the clay out of the walls and drank the droppings of the roof, was kept in that state by his own fault; for certain treasonable writings being found upon him, he was required to give a specimen of his handwriting; which refusing, he was told he should have no food till he wrote ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... tapeworms, consisting of one or more segments, are occasionally seen in the droppings of infected cattle. The infection is undoubtedly taken in with the food or water, infection being spread by the eggs of the parasite, and being expelled with the feces of an infected animal. The eggs being swallowed by insects, worms or snails, which act as an intermediate host, ...
— The Veterinarian • Chas. J. Korinek
... the Exhibition would serve as a rallying point for all the ruffians in England, for all the malcontents in Europe; and that on the day of its opening there would certainly be a riot and probably a revolution. It was asserted that the glass roof was porous, and that the droppings of fifty million sparrows would utterly destroy every object beneath it. Agitated nonconformists declared that the Exhibition was an arrogant and wicked enterprise which would infallibly bring down God's punishment ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... talk." It is a barn-like interior. The women all sit on hard, high-backed benches in the center of the church, and the men on hard, higher-backed benches about the sides, inclosing and facing the women, who are more directly under the droppings of the little pulpit, hung on one of the pillars,—a very solemn and devout congregation, who sang very well, and paid ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... place, that the droppings or trillings of Lapidescent waters in Vaults under ground, seem to constitute a kind of petrify'd body, form'd almost like some kind of Mushroms inverted, in so much that I have seen some knobb'd a little at the lower ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... night, ringing his heels with regularity, and sending sparks out of the paving-stones with the ferule of his stick. Whether in avenues, streets, or lanes, he took care to keep in the middle of the road—an excellent method of precaution, allowing one to see danger coming, and, above all, to avoid any droppings from windows, as happens after dark in Tarascon and the Old Town of Edinburgh. On seeing so much prudence in Tartarin, pray do not conclude that Tartarin had any fear—dear, no! he only was on ...
— Tartarin of Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... for us, however, excepting such hasty little droppings off into brief forgetfulness that our worn-out bodies gave way to for an instant; for we were constantly being roused up, almost as soon as our wearied eyelids had closed, by the sudden rush of the spent ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... employed for excluding the air from wounds caused in the process of grafting. These are liable to crack, unless the clay is well kneaded and mixed with wood ashes or dry horse droppings. ...
— Gardening for the Million • Alfred Pink
... binding a cow's hide upon the latter:" it would be worth inquiring if this was ever attempted, and it might add to our traditions about the "Jumart." And the tale of the elephant-hunters deceiving the animals by anointing themselves with their droppings deserves investigation. Wounds of poisoned arrows are healed by that which produced them. A woman's milk cures the venomous foam which cobras spit into the eyes. A snake as big as a beam kills and consumes men with its look. An "ill liver," ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... deform and deface the loveliness of his incomparable genius are hardly so damaging to his fame as his general monotony of matter and of manner. It was doubtless in order to relieve this saccharine and "mellisonant" monotony that he thought fit to intersperse these interminable droppings of natural or artificial perfume with others of the rankest and most intolerable odour: but a diet of alternate sweetmeats and emetics is for the average of eaters and drinkers no less unpalatable ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... same Richard, who had come upon them unobserved, and stood before the father and daughter; looking down upon them with a face as glowing as the iron on which his stout sledge-hammer daily rung. A handsome, well-made, powerful youngster he was; with eyes that sparkled like the red-hot droppings from a furnace fire; black hair that curled about his swarthy temples rarely; and a smile—a smile that bore out Meg's eulogium on his ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... insufferable pride, which will have a fall some day! If you had gone with us and let me pay the $50 which the trip and the board and the various nicknacks and mementoes would cost, I would have picked up enough droppings from your conversation to pay me 500 per cent profit in the way of the several magazine articles which I could have written, whereas I can now write only one or two and am therefore largely out of pocket by your proud ways. Ponder these things. Lord, what a ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... neighborhood those few will most certainly be found living near each other. One of the early adaptations of the sparrow to his city surroundings was the ability to find for himself a considerable proportion of his food in the undigested seed that could be picked up from the droppings of the horses. This naturally led the surplus sparrows out through the many thoroughfares leading from any large city. Where horses went sparrows could follow. Accordingly along the great lines of travel this bird found the simple path by which he could enter ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... the full, and the night is fair with light clouds. The day has been otherwise than fair, for slush and mud, thickened with the droppings of heavy fog, lie black in the streets. The veiled lady who flutters up and down near the postern-gate of the Hospital for Foundling Children has need to ...
— No Thoroughfare • Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins
... ants deliberately sow a crop, as Lincecum asserts, but that they have, for some reason, found it to their advantage to permit the Aristida to grow upon their disks, while they clear off all other herbage; that the crop is seeded yearly in a natural way by droppings from the plant, or by seeds cast out by the ants, or dropped by them; that the probable reason for protecting the Aristida is the greater convenience of harvesting the seed; but, finally, that there is nothing unreasonable, nor ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... occupy a large extent of forest. When they have frequented one of these places for some time, the appearance it exhibits is surprising. The ground is covered to the depth of several inches with their droppings; all the tender grass and underwood destroyed; the surface strewed with large limbs of trees, broken down by the weight of the birds clustering one above another, and the trees themselves, for thousand ...
— Stories about the Instinct of Animals, Their Characters, and Habits • Thomas Bingley
... it all the trenches are now sometimes half full of water, for the summer rains, which have held back for so long, are beginning to fall. The stenches are so bad from rotting carcases and obscene droppings that an already weakened stomach becomes so rebellious that it is hard to swallow any ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... 17. cent. 3. cur. 94. prescribes epithems and lotions of the head, with the decoction of flowers of nymphea, violet-leaves, mandrake roots, henbane, white poppy. Herc. de Saxonia, stillicidia, or droppings, &c. Lotions of the feet do much avail of the said herbs: by these means, saith Laurentius, I think you may procure sleep to the most melancholy man in the world. Some use horseleeches behind the ears, and apply opium to ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... been," he said, "the third most learned work that has ever yet appeared. The most learned work ever published I consider Bentley On the Epistles of Phalaris; the next Salmasius On the Hellenistic Language." Alluding to Boswell's Life he continued, "Mine should have been, not the droppings of his lips, but the history of his mind."' Field's Life of Parr, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... conflict of labour, With truth for my armour and thought for my sabre, Be that home a calm home where my old age may rally, A home full of peace in this sweet pleasant valley! Sweetest of vales is the Vale of Shanganah! Greenest of vales is the Vale of Shanganah! May the accents of love, like the droppings of manna, Fall sweet on my heart in the Vale ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... chapter. "By this you have to cross a plain of sand, extending for more than 100 leagues. You see nothing in any direction but the sky and the sands, without the slightest trace of a road; and travellers find nothing to guide them but the bones of men and beasts and the droppings of camels. During the passage of this wilderness you hear sounds, sometimes of singing, sometimes of wailing; and it has often happened that travellers going aside to see what those sounds might be have strayed from their course and been entirely lost; for they were voices of spirits and ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... the time to start curing if possible. Now, from experience the first thing I recommend is to sweat the disease out of it, and I find the best way to do this is as follows:—Get an old bucket with a few one-inch holes bored in the bottom, and almost fill it with good new straw horse-droppings; put a little hay on the top of the droppings, and then put the ferret on the hay. Place or hang the bucket over a boiler or on the mantelpiece, and let the kettle steam under the bucket, say for 30 minutes, and you will ...
— Full Revelations of a Professional Rat-catcher - After 25 Years' Experience • Ike Matthews
... fathers of the Council of Nicaea, in rags, abject. The martyr Paphnutius is brushing a horse's mane; Theophilus is scrubbing the legs of another; John is painting the hoofs of a third; while Alexander is picking up their droppings ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... attracting their attention at this particular time? Surely! Robins, flickers, and downy woodpeckers, chewinks and rose-breasted grosbeaks, among other feathered agents, may be detected in the act of gormandizing on the fruit, whose undigested seeds they will disperse far and wide. Their droppings form the best of fertilizers for young seedlings; therefore the plants which depend on birds to distribute seeds, as most berry bearers do, send their children abroad to found new colonies, well equipped for a vigorous start in life. What a hideous mockery to continue to ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... of rising, hence they only alighted on the tops of high mountains, and as there was nothing for them to eat in such places, it being naked rock and ice, they were compelled to subsist on each other's droppings. Now it came to pass that one year during his childhood a crane, owing to some accident, came down to the ground near his home. The whole population of the village turned out to see so wonderful a bird, and were amazed at its size; ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... orchard of Bartlett pears about fifteen years old, located on sediment land. I desire to set this to alfalfa, and to feed the alfalfa by letting hogs eat it off, thereby leaving the droppings on the land. What I wish to know is this: Will this crop be beneficial or ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... what day Death shall visit me * I smell as thy droppings and drippings[FN97] smell! Could I in my clay-bed on Salma lie * There to me were better than Heaven ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... refined, or when the general public comes more into contact with the crops while being so applied. In almost all of the cases where the ingredients mentioned are used they are diluted with a large quantity of water, except in the case of the droppings of the animals; the latter are often used by florists in the form of a very heavy mulch, depending upon the ordinary watering to carry down to the roots such parts of the dressing as would dissolve in the water, and thus give extra stimulant, and at ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 1, January 5, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... Catholic and Protestant,—the sash of blended orange and green, soiled and defaced by his patriotic errands, stained with the smoke of cabins, and the night rains and rust of weapons, and the mountain mist, and the droppings of the wild woods of Clare. He united in one mighty and resistless mass the broken and discordant factions, whose desultory struggles against tyranny had hitherto only added strength to its fetters, and infused into that mass his own lofty principles of action, until the solemn ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... fortune was, Watching folk's faces to know who will fling The bit of half-stripped grape-bunch he desires, 115 And who will curse or kick him for his pains— Which gentleman processional and fine, Holding a candle to the Sacrament, Will wink and let him lift a plate and catch The droppings of the wax to sell again, 120 Or holla for the Eight and have him whipped— How say I?—nay, which dog bites, which lets drop His bone from the heap of offal in the street— Why, soul and sense of him grow sharp alike, He learns the look of things, and none the less 125 For admonition from ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... mats. Take them back to the house before the buds begin to move. Shape the trees in winter, and summer prune as may be necessary. They require syringing as well as rich feeding when carrying a crop. A mixture of poultry droppings or night soil (half a barrowful) added to the same amount of sifted soil and of wood ashes, with a peck of soot and a peck of bone dust, all made into a compost a few days before use, is a strong surface-dressing. A layer ...
— The Book of Pears and Plums • Edward Bartrum
... sweet voice of the church-bells through the hushed heart of the great metropolis, while old men and little children—youth in its hope, and manhood in its pride—came forth at their summons, setting a mighty human tide in the direction of the sanctuaries, beneath whose sacred droppings they should hear again the tidings which come to us over the waves of nearly two thousand years, fresh and full of exceeding melody, as when the Day-Star from on high first poured its blessed beams over the mountain heights of Judea, and the song, pealing over the hills of jasper, ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... with your hands, and let it stand a quarter of an hour longer. Then pour off from the top as much of the whey as you can; tie up the curd in a linen cloth or bag, and hang it up to drain out the remainder of the whey; setting a pan under it to catch the droppings. After all the whey is drained out, put the curd into the cheese-tray, and cut it again into slices; chop it coarse; put a cloth about it; place it in the cheese-hoop or mould, and set it in the screw press for half an hour, pressing it hard. [Footnote: ...
— Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches • Eliza Leslie |
