"Muck" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and carrying huge yards of steel, rising higher and higher, until steel masts and yards gave way to slender spars of wood, while ropes and stays turned into a delicate tracery of spider-thread against the sky. That such a wretched muck of men should be able to work this magnificent ship through all storm and darkness and peril of the sea was beyond all seeming. I remembered the two mates, the super-efficiency, mental and physical, of Mr. Mellaire and Mr. Pike—could they make this human wreckage do it? They, at least, evinced ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... trail, we struck up Bonanza, a small muddy stream in a narrow valley. Down in the creek-bed we could see ever-increasing signs of an intense mining activity. On every claim were dozens of cabins, and many high cones of greyish muck. We saw men standing on raised platforms turning windlasses. We saw buckets come up filled with the same dark grey dirt, to be dumped over the edge of the platform. Sometimes, where the dump had gradually arisen around man and windlass, the platform in the centre of that ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... thirst in my own ould bones go to you that you shall niver pass bottle full nor glass empty. God preserve the light av your onderstandin' to you, my jewel av a bhoy, that ye may niver forget what you mint to be an' do, whin you're wallowin' in the muck! May ye see the betther and follow the worse as long as there's breath in your body; an' may ye die quick in a strange land, watchin' your death before ut takes you, an' enable to stir hand ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... coloring from the action of time and the elements; his shirt had faded from a bright buff to a nondescript shade which blended with what had once been light corduroy trousers; his heavy shoes, treated only the evening before to a coat of preservative grease, were now covered with muck; and, pulled over his eyes, a shapeless canvas hat completed the list of the ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... and himself. After two days' fasting, the poor animals were so tame that they ate out of Pablo's hand and submitted to be stroked and caressed; and before they were a fortnight in the stable. Alice and Edith could go up to them without danger. They were soon broken in; for the yard being full of muck, Pablo took them into it and mounted them. They plunged and kicked at first, and tried all they could to get rid of him, but they sank so deep into the muck that they were soon tired out; and after a month they were all three tolerably quiet ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat
... the mud, and the cold, The cold, the mud, and the rain; With weather at zero it's hard for a hero From language that's rude to refrain. With porridgy muck to the knees, With sky that's a-pouring a flood, Sure the worst of our foes Are the pains and the woes Of the RAIN, ...
— Rhymes of a Red Cross Man • Robert W. Service
... the men from giving the old chief as much liquor as they were ready to bestow on him, lest he might get drunk, and take it into his head to run a-muck or jump overboard. He had taken enough, however, to send him fast asleep in the bottom of the boat, where he lay, as Jerry observed, "like a porpus ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... one side of the highway was the broad river, which glinted like molten lead in the sunshine. They could not travel very close to its bank, for here the ground was uncertain. Once Sam left the highway to get a better view of the stream, and, before Cujo noticed it, found himself up to his knees in a muck which stuck to ...
— The Rover Boys in the Jungle • Arthur M. Winfield
... morning for a blank tyke?" And for all his respectable appearance, his features become debased, and he emits a jet of disgusting profanity and brings most of the Trinity into the thunderous assertion that he has paid his fare. Then a man passes wheeling a muck-cart. And he stops and talks a long time with the other uniforms, because he, too, wears vestiges of a uniform. And the crowd never moves nor ceases to stare. Then the new arrival stoops and picks up the unclaimed, masterless puppy, and flings it, all soft and yielding, ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... much," protests Rupert. "You see, I lived in a little town in southern Illinois. Father ran a general store. I had to help in it—sold shingle nails, molasses, mower teeth, overalls. How I hated that! But there was the creek and the muck pond. I had an old boat. I played smuggler and pirate. I used to love to read pirate books. I wanted to go ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... having taken so much trouble to get at the young man, was not going to be put off in this way. "Never mind your muck for a quarter of an hour," he said. "I have come here on purpose to find you, and ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... comes up green shoots, and blossoms. So it is with the great thoughts of men, the deep race-thoughts, Comrade Geddes—seeds, bulbs, germs, all of them, in the ugly husks of the common people. Out of our muck and grime they come, the little green shoots which the fool will say is poison, maybe, but which the wise know and labor and make room for. I, Riedriech, and workers like me, we go into our graves nothing but husks. But it is out of the buried hearts ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... were about to take their degree, when Joel, who had gone home on a visit, was wrecked on the Island of Nantucket, and, with the rest of the ship's company, was either drowned or murdered by the Indians. The name of Caleb, Chee-shah-teau-muck, Indus, is still to be seen in the registers of those who took their degree, and there are two Latin and Greek elegies remaining, which he composed on the death of an eminent minister, bearing his signature, with ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... run a muck," said old Judge Girvin, "and while I am far from denying that In many—perhaps in most—cases his facts are correct, still his methods make for lawlessness among the masses. It might be well to meet ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... of citizenship as voting and taking an interest in the distribution of offices. Scores of men have told me, without false pride, that they would as soon concern themselves with the public affairs of the city or state as rake muck with a steam-shovel. It may be that their lofty disdain covers selfishness, but I should be very sorry habitually to meet the fat gentlemen with shiny top-hats and plump cigars in whose society I have been spending ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling
... sensitive as to what newspapers say about me or I should have been in my grave years ago; but Sergeant Smith and his knowledge touches me at a raw place. You are always messing about with narcotics and muck of all kinds, and you will understand when I tell you that the money I give Sergeant Smith every week serves a double purpose. It is an ...
— The Man Who Knew • Edgar Wallace
... suitable to colonial requirements. Of course she is independent, often even cheeky, but a mistress learns to put up with occasional tantrums, provided the general behaviour and character are good. When we were first out here we used to run a-muck with our servants about once a week; but now we find it better to bear the ills we have than fly to others which we know not of. Our present Lizzie is impertinent to a degree when reproved; but then she can cook decently, and she is the first decent cook we have had ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... brought the wallet. Still I did not understand. It was when I heard the lift door and knew you had gone forever that I understood. Loved you with all my heart, with all that poor old Stefani had fashioned out of muck and clay. If you held my head to your heart, if that is my blood there—Do you, ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... up careful, in open formation, with their guns ready. I set apart with my eye the one I opinionated to be the boss muck-raker of this law-and-order cavalry. ...
— Options • O. Henry
... "Heave that muck overboard," he ordered some of those who stood idling in the waist. "Then up anchor, and let us after ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... along many roads down which they had come with songs of victory and across stony fields strewn already with the debris of fighting, on through villages where they burned arid looted as they passed, left a trail of muck and blood and ruin. Five weeks before, when I had travelled through part of the countryside from the eastern frontier of France, the spirit of beauty dwelt in it. Those fields, without any black blotches on grass nibbled short by flocks ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... shotgun slipped out of the sling to the ground, and the stock broke! The gun is perfectly useless, and the loss of it is great to us and our friends. To be in this splendid game country without a shotgun is deplorable; still, to have been buried in a hole of black water and muck would have been worse. ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... reckless laugh, which was Steve all over; "better luck next time, I say. Here, Toby, what d'ye think of that for a saddle? Do the needful to him, won't you please, for I've got to scrape some of this nasty black muck off ...
— Chums of the Camp Fire • Lawrence J. Leslie
... "How-do-you-know?" and "Did-it-happen-to-you?" air every time a man says something he knows by—well—by seeing it—perfectly plain seeing it. One doesn't need to stand up to one's neck in experience, in a perfect muck of experience, in order to know things, in order to know they are there. People who are experienced within an inch of their lives, submerged in experience, until all you can see of them is a tired look, are always calling out to the man who sees a thing as he is ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... person; and it shows every sign of having been written to please the opera-goers of those days. Curiously, the critics of the time, in the words of the "Daily Telegraph," saw in "the Bayreuth master another form of Bunyan's man with the muck-rake," who "never sought to disguise the garbage he found in the Newgate Calendar of Mythland, or set his imagination to invent," and they were disgusted, also like the "Daily Telegraph," by "approaching ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... famous of the Dutch masters, and he rises into glory; coarseness and vulgarity in them had no point out of which could come instruction. If they picture the issues of their own minds, they must have been gross and sensual; they ransacked the muck of life, and the grovelling in character, for themes that one should see only by compulsion. But Hogarth's subjects were never without a lesson, and, inasmuch as he resorted for them to the open volume of humanity, like ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... in a muck with their rubber sea-boots worn out by constant chafing, sweaters torn, the blades of their shovels reduced by the work demanded of them, the drills, shortened by steady sharpening, gone like the spare flesh of the laborers, who, at last, began to show signs ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... part of the Pilgrim's Progress, Bunyan tells us how Christiana and her children came to the Interpreter's House, and were taken by the master of it into one of his Significant Rooms. In one of these there was a man that could look no way but downwards, with a muck-rake in his hand; there stood also one over his head, with a celestial crown in his hand, and proffered him that crown for his muck-rake; but the man did neither look up nor regard, but raked to himself the straws, the small sticks, ...
— Evangelists of Art - Picture-Sermons for Children • James Patrick
... in the Fourth Ward school-house, where planks have been laid over the tops of desks, on which the remains are placed. A corpse is dug from the bank. It is covered with mud. It is taken to the anteroom of the school, where it is placed under a hydrant and the muck and slime washed off. With the slash of a knife the clothes are ripped open and an attendant searches the pockets for valuables or papers that would lead to identification. Four men lift the corpse on a rude table, and ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... Stoop! Hold on!" shouted Tiffles, with what was left of his breath. But the idiot only screamed, "Gosh thunder! Gorryfus!" and darted for the main aisle, intending to run a muck among his persecutors. There was a general scrambling of the boys to avoid this incarnated wrath. The whole female seminary, and all the ladies present, ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... your friend. I've always loved you, Eleanor," went on Carley, earnestly. "I'm as deep in this—this damned stagnant muck as you, or anyone. But I'm no longer blind. There's something terribly wrong with us women, and ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... good enough for you to want me to muck up out of the window, wasn't it?" demanded the obstinate barbarian, becoming passionate in his bearing rather than reluctantly, but with courteous grace, lessening the price to a trifling degree, as we regard the proper way of carrying on ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... though they did not look it. There seemed nothing unusual about them, while they would have passed muster as fair specimens of lumbermen in any Michigan camp. But outside, in the darkness, where holes yawned in the ground, were many men engaged in windlassing muck and gravel and gold from the bottoms of the holes where other men received fifteen dollars per day for scraping it from off the bedrock. Each day thousands of dollars' worth of gold were scraped from bedrock and windlassed to the surface, and it all belonged to Pentfield and Hutchinson, ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... she repeated with a sigh of satisfaction. "Always; and hyiu muck-a-muck when big salmon run. No more ever come that bad year when not ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson
... companions, by the same hand: "Their squab noses poking out of bladders of lard that did duty for their faces;" not to speak of the characterization of a "Sacred Heart" too revolting to reproduce? Surely when, after having reviled M. Tissot almost personally, he describes his works as painted with "muck, wine-sauce, and mud," it is difficult not to answer with a tu quoque as far as this word-painting is concerned—difficult not to see here some morbid and "frightful appetite for the hideous" struggling with the healthy appetite ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... "is good, old-fashioned farming. Plenty of straw for bedding, and good clover and timothy-hay for feed, with wool, wheat, and barley to sell. No talk about oil-cake, malt-combs, and mangels; nothing about superphosphate, guano, or swamp-muck." ...
— Talks on Manures • Joseph Harris
... when we got to the farmyard his eloquence reached the highest pitch. "Mrs Greenow," said he, "look at that," and he pointed to heaps of manure raised like the streets of a little city. "Look at that!" "There's a great deal," said my aunt. "I believe you," said he. "I've more muck upon this place here than any farmer in Norfolk, gentle or simple; I don't care who the other is." Only fancy, Alice; it may all be mine; the blankets, the wine, the muck, and the rest of it. So my aunt assured me when we got home that evening. When ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... detects traces of the white grub, cross-plow it again just as the ground is beginning to freeze. Early in the spring he can cover the surface with some fertilizer—there is nothing better than a rotted compost of muck and barn-yard manure—at the proportion of forty or fifty tons to the acre. Plow and cross-plow again, and in each instance let the first team be followed by a subsoil or lifting plow, which stirs ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... it'll take great thumpin' jumps sometimes, an' run along the tops of the trees, carrying its partner with it, an' then droppin' him jest as a fish hawk'll drop a pickerel to kill it before eatin'. An' its food, of all the muck in the whole Bush is—moss!" And he laughed a short, unnatural laugh. "It's a moss-eater, is the Wendigo," he added, looking up excitedly into the faces of his companions. "Moss-eater," he repeated, with a string of the most ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood
... of the name of M'Lean, nephew to the Laird of the Isle of Muck, came this morning; and, just as we sat down to dinner, came the Laird of the Isle of Muck himself, his lady, sister to Talisker, two other ladies their relations, and a daughter of the late M'Leod of Hamer, who wrote a treatise on the second sight, under ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... general names of humus and humic acid, which may, in a slight degree, affect the growth of plants, but their practical importance is of too doubtful a character to justify us in considering them. The application of manures, containing organic matter, such as peat, muck, animal manure, etc., supplies the soil with carbon on the same principle, and the decomposing matters also generate[Q] carbonic acid gas while being decomposed. The agricultural value of carbon in the ...
— The Elements of Agriculture - A Book for Young Farmers, with Questions Prepared for the Use of Schools • George E. Waring
... existence render it impossible for any girl, once she has attained the age of fifteen, to continue unacquainted with the main facts of life, and some are initiated at an even tenderer age. How is it possible for any maiden to remain unenlightened in this regard these days when sensational, muck-raking prints throw the searchlight of publicity into every boudoir and spicy details of society's philandering fill column after column in the breakfast table newspaper? No matter how little curiosity ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... the girl as they walked slowly out into the office; he was wondering what her object might be in this pilgrimage. His mind flitted briefly over the ideas of muck-raking reporters and inquisitive lady novelists; yet surely this self-possessed but quiet young lady suggested nothing of either class, and besides, a niece of Silas Osgood's could scarcely deserve suspicion. At the same time, detecting in ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... ship—biscuits as is dropping to pieces, salt junk as 'as been twenty years in cask, and which was mostly horse to begin with. No wonder as they grumbles and growls. A convict is a man, you see, though he be a convict; and it ain't in human nature to eat such muck as ...
— A Final Reckoning - A Tale of Bush Life in Australia • G. A. Henty
... English patent medicines had not been the target at which disturbed physicians and "muck-raking" journalists had taken aim, these ancient remedies were governed by provisions of the new law. In November 1906 the Bureau of Chemistry of the Department of Agriculture, in charge of administering the new federal statute, received a letter from a ...
— Old English Patent Medicines in America • George B. Griffenhagen
... their way in those dark and dismal swamps and find themselves mired in the mud holes, they would be in a sorry fix, and they might even be forced to shout for assistance in order to save their lives, thus revealing themselves to their enemy, for the tenacious muck had a tendency to act in the same treacherous fashion as quicksand, clutching the victim and dragging him down, inch after inch into ...
— Eagles of the Sky - With Jack Ralston Along the Air Lanes • Ambrose Newcomb
... oscillation of the crust of the earth brought this marsh above the surface of the sea and a luxuriant growth of plants spread over it. Then a sinking of the bottom allowed the mud and sand to wash down the shores, and spread out over the marsh, and enclose the muck of the marsh under a layer of sand or clay. Another lift of the bottom would start the swamp growing once more, and a series of alternations between marsh land and sound seems to have followed. The plants of this period are not the plants of to-day, though we ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... cheats and 'bashers' now surround the Ring, You'd better stop it as a shameful thing. In JACKSON'S time, and even in my day, It did want courage, and did mean fair play— Most times, at least. But don't mix up this muck With tales of rough-and-tumble British pluck. I'd like to shake ENTELLUS by the hand, And give that DARES—wot he'd understand Better, you bet, than being fair or "game," Or trying to keep up the Old Country's name! But anyhow, if Boxing's sunk so low As this, why, hang it, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 January 11, 1890 • Various
... country, the ground being prepared and treated as for oats. If designed to cut for green fodder, half a bushel of seed to the acre should be used; if to ripen seed, twelve quarts, sown broadcast, about the last of May or early in June. A moist loam or muck is the best soil adapted to millet; but very great crops have been grown on dry upland. It is very palatable and nutritious for milch cows, both green and when properly cured. The curing should be very much like that of clover, care being taken not to over-dry ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... great pleasure out of them, as a rule. Now the trouble with an American paper is that it has no discrimination; it rakes the whole earth for blood and garbage, and the result is that you are daily overfed and suffer a surfeit. By habit you stow this muck every day, but you come by and by to take no vital interest in it—indeed, you almost get tired of it. As a rule, forty-nine-fiftieths of it concerns strangers only—people away off yonder, a thousand miles, two thousand miles, ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... while drinkable by one who has known worse, was unlikely to cause an attack upon an enfeebled constitution, of cholera, enteric, dysentery or any other of India's specialities. What would he not have given for a clean whisky-and-soda in the place of the nauseating muck—but what should be the end of a man who, in his position, turned to alcohol for help and comfort? "The last state ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... a considerable quantity of both the black and white alkalies, the upper two feet being a rather heavy, sticky clay, the next three feet below being fine sand, containing more or less alkali, while immediately underneath this sand is a dense black muck in which, summer and winter, is found the ground-water. Do you think the following method of setting trees would be advantageous. Excavate for each tree a hole three feet in diameter and three feet deep. Fill in a layer of three or four inches of coarse hay, forming a lining for the ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... 'tis past: The mischief is that 'twill not last. Oh I have been to Ludlow fair And left my necktie God knows where, And carried half-way home, or near, Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer: Then the world seemed none so bad, And I myself a sterling lad; And down in lovely muck I've lain, Happy till I woke again. Then I saw the morning sky: Heigho, the tale was all a lie; The world, it was the old world yet, I was I, my things were wet, And nothing now remained to do But ...
— A Shropshire Lad • A. E. Housman
... house raised or appear higher owing to the slight depression of the ground at the site, and for this reason the border was all made above the surface two feet and a half in height, composed largely of decayed sods, with an addition of muck, coal and wood ashes and a small quantity of stable manure. It has been found to work admirably, and preserve an even moisture throughout. Elevated borders are highly recommended by some exotic grape ...
— Woodward's Graperies and Horticultural Buildings • George E. Woodward
... silent at his side. But in the cattle-market she shrank from the press of men, all men, all in heavy, filthy boots, and leathern leggins. And the road underfoot was all nasty with cow-muck. And it frightened her to see the cattle in the square pens, so many horns, and so little enclosure, and such a madness of men and a yelling of drovers. Also she felt her father was embarrassed by ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... the winds you would chuck now, Concerning that Legend of Lucknow. That sweet Scottish girl Never heard the pipes "skirl?" Come! This is mere sceptical muck now! ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, April 5, 1890 • Various
... a Member of Parliament! Running a-muck of all abuses. His unqualified assent Somehow nobody now refuses. Whigs and Tories Dim their glories, Giving an ear to all his stories Carrying every Bill he may wish: Here's a pretty kettle of fish! Kettle of fish! Kettle of fish! Here's a pretty ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... Deaf and blind to every other consideration, to this end they had degraded their intellects by concentrating them upon the minutest details of expense and profit, and for their reward they raked in their harvest of muck and lucre along with the hatred and curses of those they injured in the process. They knew that the money they accumulated was foul with the sweat of their brother men, and wet with the tears of little children, but ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... prison, was followed everywhere by the jeers and branding of a society which gloated over his downfall and which forever reminded him of his infamy. But the men who waded on to wealth through the muck of base practices and by means of crimes a millionfold more insidious and dangerous than the offense of the convict, were not only honored as leading citizens, but they became the extolled and unquestioned ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... we had them even then, although they were not put forth from printing presses, but displayed on board fences in scare-head letters six or eight feet high—one of the yellow journals of the day, I say, issued a muck-raking Extra, exposing what it termed The International Marine and Zoo Flotation Company, and most unfortunately there was just enough truth in the story in so far as its details went, to lend color to its sensational ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... or two before he replied. "If I choose to run a-muck, there is no reason why you should follow me. I am old and you are young. I want nothing from politics as a profession, and you do. Moreover, you have a congenial subject where you are, and need not disturb yourself. For myself, I tell you, in ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... not afraid of the wrongness that inhabited this muck of house and grove and matted bush. He said this loudly to the prostrate form; then, waiting a little, repeated it. He would smash the print with its fallacious expanse of peace. The broken glass of the smitten picture jingled thinly on the floor. Woolfolk turned suddenly and defeated the ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Solitary Maid II Master Adam Warner grows a Miser, and behaves Shamefully III A Strange Visitor—All Ages of the World breed World- Betters IV Lord Hastings V Master Adam Warner and King Henry the Sixth VI How, on leaving King Log, Foolish Wisdom runs a-muck on King Stork VII My Lady Duchess's Opinion of the Utility of Master Warner's Invention, and her esteem for its Explosion VIII The Old Woman talks of Sorrows, the Young Woman dreams of Love; the Courtier flies from Present ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... had set, and presently a fog rolled down the river, blotting out landscape and stars and making even these willows dim and unreal. Ideal conditions! Now if their guest of honor, with or without his friend, would but stop at this pool to wash the Stock-Landing muck from his horse's shins—but even ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... Muck soils do not seem to have the proper elements for growing clover in the best form. But when these have in them some clay, and especially when they are underlaid with clay not distant from the surface, they will grow good crops of clover, especially ...
— Clovers and How to Grow Them • Thomas Shaw
... "Pilgrim's Progress" you may recall the description of the Man with the Muck-rake, the man who could look no way but downward, with the muck-rake in his hand; who was offered a celestial crown for his muck-rake, but who would neither look up nor regard the crown he was offered, but continued to rake to himself ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... long hand in the form of questions and answers. All Deming's candles, soiled linen, stained napkins and what-not, reported from all directions of the Empire, began to be raked over. There were green, yellow, red, blue telegrams from half the German States. Harassed by this muck and by the leering taunts of the old party, Jim was glad to find, at the noon hour, that the session was postponed to the second ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... ejaculated Jeekie, "he say something true at last; by accident, I think, like pig what find pearl in muck-heap." ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... me, thou poor shaffles? You're as drunk as muck. Do you think I've taken your brass? You've got a wrong pig by the lug if you reckon ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... yet, Mackintosh; Lawns afloat, Paths dirt; Top-coat, Flannel shirt; Lilacs drenched, Laburnums pallid; Spirits quenched, Souls squalid; Tennis "off," Icy breeze; Croak, cough, Wheeze, sneeze; Cramped cricket, Arctic squall; Drenched wicket, Soaked ball; Park a puddle. Row a slough; Muck, muddle, Slush, snow; Hay-fever (No hay!) Spoilt beaver, Shoes asplay; Lilies flopping, Washed-out roses; Eaves dropping, Red noses; Pools, splashes, Spouts, spirts; Swollen sashes. Gutters, squirts; Limp curls, Splashed hose; Pretty girls, Damp shows; ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 100, 13 June 1891 • Various
... mud-acclimated natives of Venus for success. They were as much at home in the mud as they were in the dank, humid air above. They could distinguish one type of mud from another deep beneath the surface, and could carry a dredge-tube down to a lode of the blue-gray muck with the unfailing accuracy of a ...
— The Native Soil • Alan Edward Nourse
... five yards away. A soft glutinous muck, worse than the outer swamp, tugged at his ankles. Corrupt fungi-growth and giant spiked ferns reached far above ...
— One Purple Hope! • Henry Hasse
... discouraging to the driver for pleasure to find in rainy weather almost bottomless muck and mud on portions of the main travelled highway between New York and Buffalo, but that, for the present, is normal. The manufacturer may regret the condition and wish for better, but he cannot be ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... muck ten feet high was charging down the gulch like a squadron of cavalry in solid formation. Logs and tree-branches were sticking out of it, and great rocks were tossing and floating. Another second, and it had passed, and where we ...
— Pluck on the Long Trail - Boy Scouts in the Rockies • Edwin L. Sabin
... I'm no magazine muck-rake, doctor," I said as I got out of the motor (he had taken me up through the Park to Morningside and back, while I was telling him), "and I'll probably be a little shy ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... to confide in me, folk then began pouring out disgusting tales about Queen Draga. So disgusting that I soon cut all tales short so soon as her name occurred. Nor is it now necessary to rake up old muck-heaps. One point though is of interest. Among many races all over the world there is a widespread belief that sexual immorality, whether in the form of adultery or incest will inevitably entail most serious consequences not only upon the guilty parties, but upon the community as ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith
... bridge road is graveled all the way, and if this isn't blue clay I'll eat my hat. It might just be a private road to some farm, and the other road might have swung around after a bit. This muck- hole doesn't ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Air on Lost Island • Gordon Stuart
... den on the other side of the mound—a den which Loll no doubt was at that moment exploring. Her brother-in-law was preparing to spring across one of the little brown pools. . . . Then, to her despair, he stumbled, and one leg went down in the soft muck of the farther edge. As he fell, he tried to throw his rifle to the bank, but the heavy, metal-stayed butt jammed ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... consumed annually, yet instances of this crime do not happen (at least within the scope of our knowledge) above once in two or three years. During my residence there I had an opportunity of being an eyewitness but to one muck. The slave of a Portuguese woman, a man of the island of Nias, who in all probability had never handled an opium pipe in his life, being treated by his mistress with extreme severity for a trifling offence, vowed he would have revenge if she attempted ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... of the refuse-heap, things that human society once needed and then rejected. He collects them again, and now the poor can buy them. And he buys the soldiers' bread too, when they want to go on the spree, and throws it on his muck-heap; he calls it fodder for horses, but the poor buy it of him and eat it. The refuse-heap is the poor man's larder —that is, when the pigs have taken what they want. The Amager farmers fatten their swine there, and the sanitary commission talks about forbidding it; but no one has ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... relish of life! Oh, the speechless mystery, the infinite reality, of death!" He says himself, comparing the degradation of his later experience with the soaring enthusiasm of his youth, "It is as if a star had fallen from heaven upon a hillock of muck, and swine ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... living shows What wide illumination brightness sheds From one big heart,—to conquer man's old foes: The coward, and the tyrant, and the force Of all those weedy monsters raising heads When Song is muck from springs ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... every bit of grass, sir," was the growling objection; and still worse was the suggestion, which gradually rose into a command, that the "muck-heap" should be removed to the said home-field, and never allowed to accumulate in such ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... leading down into a slanting hole in the rock, showed dimly before them,—a massive, chunky, deserted thing in the shadows. About it were clustered drills that were eaten by age and the dampness of the seepage; farther on a "skip", or shaft-car, lay on its side, half buried in mud and muck from the walls of the tunnel. Here, too, the timbers were rotting; one after another, they had cracked and caved beneath the weight of the earth above, giving the tunnel an eerie aspect, ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... of ba'my smell, Farewell the alligator, Special them little ones that dwell In the muck hole with their mater. Farewell, Portate, oh, ...
— The Belted Seas • Arthur Colton
... been worldly-wise enough to become an avowed cynic on the question. He probably knows as well as anybody that to clean up Montreal is in the same category as making Europe safe for the League of Nations; a much harder city to regenerate than even Philadelphia. Muck-raking has no effect, when two-thirds of the population read French papers which never use the rake, and when the boss of three-fourths of the rest is himself often a target for the yellows. Mr. Ames should long ago in ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... as he was from head to foot, could not help laughing at Moise's explanation. Then they all stood and laughed at one another, for they, as well as the saddles and packs, were black with muck. ...
— The Young Alaskans in the Rockies • Emerson Hough
... leave go that muck up yon, it'll be like me dressin' for mass an' no rackin' down me hair, so it would. No, Master Hal, if riches we can't have, cleanness we can. An' that's aye ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... dat whistle on me, huh? I'll show yuh! I'll crash yer skull in! I'll drive yer teet' down yer troat! I'll slam yer nose trou de back of yer head! I'll cut yer guts out for a nickel, yuh lousey boob, yuh dirty, crummy, muck-eatin' ...
— The Hairy Ape • Eugene O'Neill
... think I'm talking fearful flowery stuff. I'd have said Dear me at myself three years ago if I had ever caught myself thinking in terms of stars and roses. But it's all the beastly blood and muck of the war that does it,—sends one back with a rush to things like that. Makes one shameless. Why, I'd talk to you about God now without turning a hair. Nothing would have induced me so much as to mention seriously that I'd even heard of him three years ago. Why, I write poetry now. We all write ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... Puck, "My liege, I'll never lin[9], But I will thorough thick and thin, Until at length I bring her in; My dearest lord, ne'er doubt it. Thorough brake, thorough briar, Thorough muck, thorough mire, Thorough water, thorough fire; And thus goes Puck ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... not stop again until they had cantered up through the awakening bazaar, where unclean-looking merchants and their underlings rinsed out their teeth noisily above the gutters, and the pariah dogs had started nosing in among the muck for things unthinkable to eat. The sun had shortened up the shadows and begun to beat down through the gaps; the advance-guard of the shrivelling hot wind had raised foul dust eddies, and the city was ahum when she halted at last ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... it a point of honour to out-Tommy "Tommy" as troopers, and, when in his company, to show a heavier cavalry-swagger, a broader accent, a quiffier "quiff," a cuttier cutty-pipe, a smarter smartness; to groom a horse better, to muck out a stall better, to scrub a floor better, to spring more smartly to attention or to a disagreeable "fatigue," and to set an example of Tomminess from turning out on an Inspection Parade to waxing ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... down his description, John Sprott, and write that at the words 'Our sovereign Lord' he shied a lump of muck." ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... I was seized with an emotion that made me shudder icily in the glare of the day. For beyond the pageantry of the cavalcade I saw the fields of war, with many of those men and horses lying mangled under the hot sun of August. I smelt the stench of blood, for I had been in the muck and misery of war before and had seen the death carts coming back from the battlefield and the convoys of wounded crawling down the rutty roads—from Adrianople—with men, who had been strong and fine, ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... make it? Our domestic servants both declared that they could not do so; and the elder one, who had been many years in the family, was born and bred in London, and detested the country and everything connected with it, gave her opinion in the most decided manner, that there was quite enough "muck" in the house already, without making more work with butter-making, which she said confidently, would only be fit for the pig when it was made. Here was a pretty state of things! What were we to do? must we give up all hope of eating our own butter, ...
— Our Farm of Four Acres and the Money we Made by it • Miss Coulton
... not Hawthorne either, for he was mildly minded, and it lay not in him to create for us that throb of the miser's pulse, his fretful energy of gusto, his vast arms of ambition clutching in he knows not what: insatiable, insane, a god with a muck-rake. Thus, at least, looking in the bosom of the miser, consideration detects the poet in the full tide of life, with more, indeed, of the poetic fire than usually goes to epics; and tracing that ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... seemed to them how their own talk wouldn't be good enough to say it. And they knew no other, and didn't know what to do. I reckon they'd been reading magazines and thought that writing had to be like that muck. Anyway, they didn't know what to do. I reckon their talk would be good enough for Daleswood when they loved Daleswood like that. But they didn't, ...
— Tales of War • Lord Dunsany
... in a low tone, moved as always by the grandeur and beauty of the scene—"listen! Don't you hear them calling? Don't you feel the mountains sending their message to these poor insects who squirm and wriggle in this bit of muck men call their world? God, man! if only we, in our work, would heed ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... was undoubtedly the blameworthy one in their marital failure, but she had managed to extract a ruinous alimony from him. Twice married and twice divorced, he was traveled through the Orient to write a series of muck raking articles and, incidentally if possible, to forget his last unhappy ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... varnished; luscious vegetables, which she had been warned against; baskets of melon seed and water-chestnuts; men working in teak and blackwood; fan makers and jade cutters; eggs preserved in what appeared to her as petrified muck; bird's nests and shark fins. She glimpsed Chinese penury when she entered a square given over to the fishmongers. Carp, tench, and roach were so divided that even the fins, heads and fleshless spines were sold. There were doorways to peer into, ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... Lewes, that we are over-intent on our own little narrow interests. Here are you and I, busying ourselves in an attempt to throw some little light—a very little it must be—on some petty problems of the origin of our race. We are looking downwards, downwards always; digging in old muck-heaps; raking up all kinds of unsavoury rubbish to prove that we are born out of the dirt. And we have never a thought for the future in all our work,—a future that may be glorious, who knows? Here, perhaps ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... feet in the churned-up muck of the field edge. The ground, covered with a scum of ice at night, was a trap for animals as well as vehicles. Breaking through that glassy surface to the glutinous stuff beneath, they suffered cuts deep enough to ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
... and treated with the utmost rigour of the law? WINSER, the cabman, who gave his false evidence so gaily in the Thirkettle Case, has been had up, and sentenced. Having dealt with WINSER, it is only a short step from WINSER to SLOUGH—but perhaps such a slough of muck, that it wants the pluck of a Hercules in the Augaean stable to commence operations, and a deus ex-machina—that is, the Public Prosecutor from the Treasury—to see that the proceedings are not abortive. Oh, where, and Oh, where ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, January 25th, 1890 • Various
... priests are cutting capers— Priests of beetles, cats, and tapirs, Brutes, who would thy beauty truck, For an inch of yellow muck. ...
— Fringilla: Some Tales In Verse • Richard Doddridge Blackmore
... us, indeed! That's a notion! Look at my hands. D'ye see how dirty they are? And they smell of muck, and of pitch—but yours, see, are white. And what do they ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... till Eliza, the German nurse, comes to take her to bed. The cows merely stand there, and do nothing; yet the mere sight of them is all-sufficient for Jean. She requires nothing more. The other evening, after contemplating them a long time, as they stood in the muddy muck chewing the cud, she said, with deep and reverent appreciation, "Ain't ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... that night, dissected his character before Anastasie. 'One thing, my beautiful,' he said, 'he has learned one thing from his lifelong acquaintance with your husband: the word ratiocinate. It shines in his vocabulary, like a jewel in a muck-heap. And, even so, he continually misapplies it. For you must have observed he uses it as a sort of taunt, in the sense of to ergotise, implying, as it were—the poor, dear fellow!—a vein of sophistry. As for his cruelty to Jean-Marie, it must be forgiven him—it is not his nature, it is ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the pensioner of Clanranald, and Hector the Lamiter, bard of M'Lean, were pre-eminent in this department. The Massacre of Glencoe suggested numerous elegies. There is one remarkable for pathos by a clansman who had emigrated to the Isle of Muck, from which circumstance he is ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... started laughin': "No doctor's muck," says 'e, "A take-'em-break-'em gallop is the only cure for me! [30] They 'unt to-day down 'Orsham way. Bring round the sorrel mare, If them monkeys come inquirin' you can send 'em ...
— Songs Of The Road • Arthur Conan Doyle
... reported to exist in some parts of the east, in which a man is said to run a muck; and these furious maniacs are believed to have induced their calamity by unlucky gaming, and afterwards by taking large quantities of opium; whence the pain of despair is joined with the energy of ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... loiterers at the inn door. They whose company he had quitted were silent for a moment; then said Sir Mortimer, slowly: "I remember now—there was a Thomas Baldry, master of the Speedwell. Well, it was a sorry business that day! If from that muck of blood and horror was ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... "Well, it's a muck of a world," he declared cheerfully, taking off his coarse harvest hat and running his hand through his clustering fair hair. In the mellow light the almost brutal strength of his jaw was softened, and his ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... things had been somewhat digested by Christiana and her company, the Interpreter takes them apart again, and has them first into a room where was a man that could look no way but downwards, with a muck-rake in his hand. There stood also one over His head with a celestial crown in His hand, and proffered him that crown for his muck-rake; but the man did neither look up, nor regard, but raked to himself the straws, the small sticks, and dust of ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan |
