"Rut" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was too busy with its domestic programme to consider such a proposal seriously. "Your two letters," wrote Colonel House in reply, "have come to me and lifted me out of the rut of things and given me a glimpse of a fair land. What you are thinking of and what you want this Administration to do is beyond the power of accomplishment for the moment. My desk is covered with matters of no lasting importance, but which come to me as a part ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... out of a dull, uninspired life. It goes with the energetic, the forceful. The dull soul who is content to plod along year after year in the same rut may be honest, and this one redeeming feature may be of such inestimable value to him that it sweetens and softens his entire days. It will bring him friends ... true-blue friends, who will excuse all other shortcomings because ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... and were climbing the tremendous heights that lie like a barrier between the center of the continent and the Pacific Slope. "How much more of it do we have before us, Frank? I'm getting so filled with wonder and awe that my tongue is getting into a rut with ...
— The Outdoor Chums After Big Game - Or, Perilous Adventures in the Wilderness • Captain Quincy Allen
... once their driver had, to use the horsey phrase, given them their heads, and urged them on to their top speed, their hot, wild blood had been bubbling through their veins, making them snort and tear along heedless of rock, rut, and the roughest ground. Marcus had told the driver to check them twice over, but as soon as Lupe was in the chariot and both Marcus and Serge busy seeing to his wound, the speed began to increase, ...
— Marcus: the Young Centurion • George Manville Fenn
... crossroads, and was now, without doubt, speeding southward on a course parallel with my own, but downhill, whereas the byroad, though shorter, was for the most part uphill, and so rough that I risked spraining my ankle on a stone or in a rut. ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... Anton to marry Rebecca," Ruth had said more than once; and thus Nina knew well that Rebecca was her rival. "I think he loves her better than his own eyes," Ruth had said to Rebecca, speaking of her uncle and Nina. Rut Rebecca had heard from a thousand sources of information that he who was to have been her lover had forgotten his own people and his own religion, and had given himself to a Christian girl. Each, therefore, now knew that she looked upon an ...
— Nina Balatka • Anthony Trollope
... would have been seven years before, when he first arrived from abroad, had he been told that there was no need for him to seek or plan anything, that his rut had long been shaped, eternally predetermined, and that wriggle as he might, he would be what all in his position were. He could not have believed it! Had he not at one time longed with all his heart to establish a republic in Russia; then himself to be a Napoleon; then to ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... and a state of indescribable consternation filled the streets of the metropolis. Several times on the route the Empress was alarmed by the cry that the Cossacks were coming. The day was dark and stormy, and the rain fell in torrents. The pole of the carriage broke as the wheels sunk in a rut. Just at that moment a troop of horsemen appeared in the distance. The Empress, in her terror, supposing them to be the barbarous Cossacks, leaped from the carriage and fled through the fields. Was there ever a more cruel reverse of fortune? ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... come," Selingman declared, without hesitation. "I take my friend Maraton somewhere. As we sit here, Mr. Foley, we have spoken of politics. You are a great man. If any one can lift your country from the rut along which she is travelling, you will do it. A Unionist Prime Minister and you hold out the hand to Maraton! But what foresight! What acumen! You see beyond the thunder-clouds the things that we have ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... in hard service and be cast upon the scrap heap. At first, the life is rich and varied. Then, after a while, the reporter finds his interest growing jaded. The same kind of assignment card keeps cropping up for him, day after day. He perceives that he is in a rut. He tells himself: "I've written that same story ...
— If You Don't Write Fiction • Charles Phelps Cushing
... knee, and bow the head To reverence the great unread, The great unread and much-reviewed, Whose lines are treasured like the lewd, His first editions prizes reckoned Because there never was a second. Obscurely famous in his rut, Unknown, unpopular, "uncut," Where Byron thrilled a continent, To thrill an auction-room content, He struggles through oblivion's bogs, To gain a place in—catalogues! And falls asleep and joins the dust In simple hope and modest trust That, though Posterity ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... too much time to deal with them. Besides which, of course, giving what they want to people who do not listen—to people who in the very face of it, cannot be trusted to notice or consider others—people who are always getting up and going out, who move in an idle thoughtless rut of ultimatums, ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee
... to hide all this activity and cheerfulness from him, but she did. With her woman's enjoyment of a little mystery, and her high resolve to show herself worthy of him, she kept in the old rut as nearly as possible when he was at home. He saw only that she was stronger, and ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... was driving his wagon along a miry country road after a heavy rain. The horses could hardly drag the load through the deep mud, and at last came to a standstill when one of the wheels sank to the hub in a rut. ...
— The AEsop for Children - With pictures by Milo Winter • AEsop
... at the Day homestead was very different now from what it had been when Janice first came there to live. Like many people of the town, the Day family had got into a rut. Uncle Jason was frankly shiftless, although he was a good farmer and able to earn a fair wage at carpenter's work ...
— The Mission of Janice Day • Helen Beecher Long
... harder at college and was now in a position to be doing something better than hack work for a soulless publishing company. Never before had he been so completely certain that he was sick to death of the rut into which he ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... dropped into his rut. For an hour or more Miss Strong's fingers flew as she noted down his dictation, and at the end of that time the letters were answered, and the communications which had so perplexed Amidon were filed away among other things done. The office force breathed freely once more, with ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... to working against time, but cannot do so just yet.... It is impossible to get out of the rut I have got into. I have nothing against going hungry, as I have done in the past, but it is not a question of myself.... I give to literature my spare time, two or three hours a day and a bit of the night, that is, time which is of no ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... about it, lads, how you feel. But you've made me happier than you are yourselves. I was beginning to get into a rut, and seemed to have nothing to live for. The sight of you, my boy, has made me ten years younger. Bun along now, and don't get into any mischief; but I can see with one eye that neither of you have any use ...
— The House Boat Boys • St. George Rathborne
... observations, however, eventually make their way. We blame the Middle Ages for following authority, but what have we been always doing but following authority, except for the geniuses who come and lift us out of the rut and illuminate a new portion of the realm of medicine. After they have come, however, and done their work, their disciples proceed to see with their eyes and to think that they are making observations for themselves when they are merely ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... man, just as they were passing the priest, made the wheel of the wagon, which was going at full speed, sink into a rut, splashing the abbe with mud from ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... side to side like a ship in a gale as it tore down the rough country road! Bruce clutched the big steering wheel with deathlike grip and tried his mightiest to keep the cumbersome vehicle straight! He realized that a loose stone or a deep rut meant death to him and destruction to the motor car! His teeth were clenched and his face was white! The wind had whisked ...
— The Boy Scout Fire Fighters • Irving Crump
... suffered a violent reaction, and wept like a woman. It was the first time he had encountered an open expression of scorn from any man higher than Raffles; and with that scorn hurrying like venom through his system, there was no sensibility left to consolations. Rut the relief of weeping had to be checked. His wife and daughters soon came home from hearing the address of an Oriental missionary, and were full of regret that papa had not heard, in the first instance, the interesting things which they tried to repeat ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... little mid-western community in the first place. Year by year, however, as custom calloused him to the only part in life he seemed fit to play, he forgot about the waste of time in the Interborough cars. Destiny, he said to himself, had hollowed out the subway as the rut in which his life was ordained to travel; destiny had condemned him inescapably ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... think himself out of mental evil; for it is actually the organ of thought that has become diseased, ungovernable, and, as it were, independent. He can only be saved by will or faith. The moment his mere reason moves, it moves in the old circular rut; he will go round and round his logical circle, just as a man in a third-class carriage on the Inner Circle will go round and round the Inner Circle unless he performs the voluntary, vigorous, and mystical act of getting out at Gower Street. Decision is the whole business here; a door must ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... says, Sir, they'd have been here last night, but that the old wheezy-belly horse tired, and the two fore-wheels came crash down at once in Waggon-rut Lane. Sir, they were cruelly loaden, as I understand: my lady herself, he says, laid on four mail trunks, besides the great deal-box, which ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... slap his dishes down before him with a genial crash. A gentleman has his little foibles, and being waited on at meal-time was one of his. Occasionally, to prove to himself that he wasn't one of those fogies who get in a rut, he ordered wheat cakes with maple syrup for breakfast. ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... partisan. It reflected city life, the disputes of faction, and the personal quarrels of authors. The politics of the Great Rebellion had been of heroic proportions, and found fitting expression in song. Rut in the Revolution of 1688 the issues were constitutional and to be settled by the arguments of lawyers. Measures were in {165} question rather than principles, and there was little inspiration to the poet in Exclusion Bills and ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... funerals, where the scrap of ground to hold the dead is sold at its weight in silver, where grief is worked for what it is worth, where the prayers of the Church are costly, and the vestry claim payment for extra voices in the Dies irae,—all attempt to get out of the rut prescribed by the authorities for sorrow ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... said. "You will not fall into the rut? Let me keep the ideal you have given me. For the sake of heaven, do not cloud for me the one bright image I hold! Let me know always that you are growing, and that the pure, noble intelligence which distinguishes you advances, and will not ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... agree on the task to be accomplished; but what are the best means to accomplish it—that is not always so easy to agree upon! The older worker may think the younger worker's plans wild and impracticable. The younger worker may think the older worker stodgy and in a rut. Perhaps both may be right. Happy the fellow workers who can learn to discuss their pet ideas without heat! Happy the fellow workers who can develop just the right combination of initiative ...
— Have We No Rights? - A frank discussion of the "rights" of missionaries • Mabel Williamson
... the clouds are mean, A travelling flake of snow Across a barn or through a rut Debates if ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... few minutes that a slight check was necessary to prevent her scouring over the plains at racing speed. He restrained her, therefore, to a grand canter, with many a stride and bound interspersed, when such a thing as a rut or a little bush ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... south coast automobile run from London is to Brighton, fifty-two miles, via Croyden, Redhill, and Crawley. Many "weekenders" make this trip nearly every Saturday to Monday in the year, and get to know every rut and stone in the roadway and every degenerate policeman of the rapacious crew who hide in hedges and lie in wait for poor unfortunate automobilists who may have slipped down a sloping bit of clear roadway at a speed of twenty ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... seclusion spoilt, had already made one of those deep ruts in the mind along which every thought runs when not actually driven in another direction. And each time Miss Ethel's thoughts passed that way, the rut was bound to become deeper. Though she imagined herself so self-controlled, and seemed so safe as she went quietly about her work removing the dust from corners where Caroline had left it, she was indeed a woman in real danger, ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... quiet courage of her eyes. Her calm, steadfast face showed that she was not given to depression, but nevertheless this evening, as she stood watching for her husband's return, for the first distant speck of him where the cart-rut vanished into the plain, a sense of impending misfortune enfolded her with the dusk. Was it because the first snow had fallen? Ah me! how much it meant. It was as significant for her as the grey pallor that falls on a sick ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... will suit? Spindle-leg in great jack-boot? 20 Pismire crawling in a rut? Or a spigot in a butt? Thus I humm'd and ha'd awhile, When Madam Memory with a smile Thus twitch'd my ear—'Why sure, I ween, 25 In London streets thou oft hast seen The very image of this pair: A little Ape with huge She-Bear Link'd by hapless chain together: An unlick'd mass the one—the other ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... adherence to the great divine truth contained in the inspired Book. The Bible text is God's part of our sermon; and the more thoroughly we get the text into our own souls, the more will we get it into the sermon, and into the consciences of our hearers. To keep out of a rut I studied the infinite variety of Sacred Scripture; its narratives and matchless biographies, its jubilant Psalms, its profound doctrines, its tender pathos, its rolling thunder of Sinai, and its sweet melodies of Calvary's redeeming love. I laid ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... system, contributed to keep Germans unacquainted, except with near neighbors. He, indeed, was a bold man who had gone over the mountains or beyond his native valley. Even a journey of two days caused grave anxieties; the carriage was almost certain to be overturned in some deep rut and the travelers injured or killed; robbers lay in wait in the mountains; protection was almost unheard of; life and property were insecure; every traveler had to be his own policeman, and never issued forth on a journey ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... Nickie's mind while the mare was negotiating about five miles, and wearing much of the wool off Mahdi, and not a little cuticle off Mr. Crips; but he was saved the dread ordeal he anticipated by another disaster. The mare caught a hoof in a rut and came down heavily, and presently Nickie recovered consciousness, lying on his back, blinking at the blue sky, gratified to find that he ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... sweet, spoiled, generous boy, at twenty-two. But Harriet always saw behind Richard Carter, the years that had made him, the patient, straightforward, hard-working clerk who had been sober, and true, and intelligent enough to lift himself out of the common rut long before the golden secret that lay at the heart of the Carter Asbestos Company had flashed upon him. Money had not spoiled Richard; he still held wealth in respect, while Ward ordered his racing car, and Nina yawned ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... else's - right to half the roadway. A few days ago I called the English roads perfect, and England the paradise of 'cyclers; and so it is; but the Normandy roads are even superior, and the scenery of the Arques Valley is truly lovely. There is not a loose stone, a rut, or depression anywhere on these roads, and it is little exaggeration to call them veritable billiard-tables for smoothness of surface. As one bowls smoothly along over them he is constantly wondering how they can possibly keep them in such condition. Were these ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... is the month of gloom, despair, and many suicides. In the wild world, November is the Mad Moon. Many and diverse the madnesses of the time, but none more insane than the rut of the white-tailed deer. Like some disease it appears, first in the swollen necks of the antler-bearers, and then in the feverish habits of all. Long and obstinate combats between the bucks now, characterize the time; neglecting even to eat, they spend their days and nights in rushing about and ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... truth, I had been more or less conscious for some time of my degeneration in this respect, but it is no easy matter to escape from a rut when one is middle-aged. Josephine's stricture concerning the lack of joyousness in my apparel, however, brought me up standing, as the phrase is, and served not merely to spur me to action, but to crystallize a tissue of reflections which ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... chapters 1 and 2; and "The Life and Love of the Insect", by J. Henri Fabre, translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos: chapters 1 to 4.—Translator's Note.) calling on his comrades to lend a helping hand in dragging his pellet out of a rut; the Sphex (A species of Hunting Wasp. Cf. "Insect Life": chapters 6 to 12.—Translator's Note.) cutting up her Fly so as to be able to carry him despite the obstacle of the wind; and all the other fallacies ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... the great cities in this country, the man who fell in love, and was in that city a character at least a little above the ordinary rut of men. He had talent and energy, and there had come to him a hard schooling in city ways, though he was born in the forest, and his youth had been passed upon a farm sloping downward to the shore of the ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... for the time being the machine is a huge projectile, a flying mass, a ton of metal rushing through space; there is no sensation of fear, not a tremor of the nerves, but one becomes for the moment exceedingly alert, with instantaneous comprehension of the character of the road; every rut, stone, and curve are seen and appreciated; the possibility of collision is understood, and every danger is present in the mind, and with it all the thrill of excitement which ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... labor, that's a fact," admitted Aunt 'Mira. "He use ter do a-many things for me, years ago. Oh, yes! Your Uncle Jason warn't allus like he is now. But we got kinder in a rut I 'xpec'. An' I ain't young and good-lookin' like I use ter be, an' that makes a diff'rence ...
— Janice Day at Poketown • Helen Beecher Long
... constant in the male, only periodic in the female. Sometimes the group established for procreation endures throughout the seasons, and from year to year; sometimes the males herd together, as if normally they preferred their own society, until the time of rut comes, when war arises between them for the possession of what they have just discovered ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... have done what he did; how he did it he could never in subsequent days remember. He must have hoisted Jean upon his shoulders and crawled through the brush and brambles, falling a dozen times only to pick himself up and go on again, stumbling at every rut, at every pebble. His indomitable will sustained him, his dogged resolution would have enabled him to bear a mountain on his back. Behind the low wall he found Rochas and the few men that were left of the squad, firing away as stoutly as ever and defending the flag, which ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... incomparably greater advantages of soil and climate than Ulster, with better harbours and a better trading position. But instead of working they stand with folded hands complaining. Instead of putting their own shoulders to the wheel they wait for somebody to lift them out of the rut. Instead of modern methods of agriculture, fishing, or what not, they cling to the ancient ways, and resent advice. The women will not take service; the men will not dig, chop, hammer. They are essentially bone-idle—laziness is in their blood. ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... kept Marie much to the rut in which she had moved since Osborn's departure; but the grief for a parent is so natural and inevitable a grief; it is not as the grief for a husband or a child; and when the first warm days of April came Marie took some very definite steps forward on that road where ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... with farcy dissipates the disease; that water evaporated in a close room will not be deposited on the walls, if a vessel of water be placed in the room; that venison pies smell strongly at those periods in which the 'beasts which are of the same nature and kind are in rut'; that wine in the cellar undergoes a fermentation when the vines in the field are in flower; that a table-cloth spotted with mulberries or red wine is more easily whitened at the season in which the plants are flowering ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... enough the hopelessness of their position; probably with the intensity of youth she exaggerated it, which was scarcely necessary, as a small rut is apt to widen into a bottomless pit if it crosses the path of those who are living up to the utmost verge of a narrow income. As she reviewed the endless instances of her mother's self-abnegation which memory ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... was only a decoy! One must be content not to know!... Then what was left to do since truth was unapproachable? Possibly fortune and honours would console him for it. But he was far enough from them too. He felt that he was on the wrong road, that he was getting into a rut at Carthage, as he had got into a rut at Thagaste. He must succeed, whatever the cost!... And then he gave way to one of those moments of weariness, when a man has no further hope of saving himself save by some ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... rare old yellow gittern, with silver scrolls about the tail-piece, ivory pegs, and a head that ended in an angel's face. It was strung with bright new silver strings, but near the bridge of it there was a little rut worn into the wood by the tips of the fingers that had rested there while playing, and the silken shoulder-ribbon was faded ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... was, the more beautiful it was to Jean-Christophe. Every stone had a meaning for him; he knew them all. The shape of a rut seemed to him to be a geographical accident almost of the same kind as the great mass of the Taunus. In his head he had the map of all the ditches and hillocks of the region extending two kilometers round about the house, and when he made any change in the fixed ordering ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... the novelist shows himself the more kindly autocrat. There is his power, so freely exercised, to bridge time. Whereas destiny makes us to watch those in whom we are interested plod every inch and step of their lives-over each rut, through each swamp, up each hill,-the novelist, upon his characters coming to places dull or too difficult, immediately veils from us their weary struggles. Destiny will never grant such a boon: we must watch our ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... I broke out into the following soliloquy.—Surely, surely mortal man is a chaise: now trailing through the heavy sand of indolence, anon jolted to death upon the rough road of discontent; and shortly after sunk in the deep rut of low spirits; now galloping on the post-road of expectation, and immediately after, trotting on the stony one of disappointment; but the days of our driving soon cease, our shafts break, our leather rots, and we ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... Even beauty had had this sting for him; he had always felt that, however lovely a thing were, there was something more beautiful just round the corner, for ever slipping ahead, like a star reflected in a rain-filled rut. Now for the first time he was aware of a dizzying sensation as though for one moment the gleam had stayed still, as if Beauty for a flash were not withdrawing herself, as though time for one moment stood, and that moment ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... braced herself against the middle seat with her feet and extended her cotton-gloved hands on each side, in order to maintain some sort of balance. Whenever the wheels sank farther than usual into a rut, or jolted suddenly over a stone, she bounded involuntarily into the air, came down again, pushed back her funny little straw hat, and picked up or settled more firmly a small pink sun shade, which seemed to be her chief responsibility,—unless we except a bead purse, into ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... has been compiled with one end in view: to arrange in a convenient and inexpensive form the fundamentals of verse—enough for the student who takes up verse as a literary exercise or for the older verse writer who has fallen into a rut or who is a bit shaky on theory. It is even hoped that there may be a word of ...
— Rhymes and Meters - A Practical Manual for Versifiers • Horatio Winslow
... posting-horses could scarcely drag my light trap through the black slush of the highroad. One day, I remember, was particularly unlucky: three times we got 'stuck' in the mud up to the axles of the wheels; my driver was continually giving up one rut and with moans and grunts trudging across to the other, and finding things no better with that. In fact, towards evening I was so exhausted that on reaching the posting-station I decided to spend the night at the inn. I was given a room with ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... principle was almost universal. This continued, in a measure, even after the establishment of Christianity, and we find phallic rites masquerading in the garb of Christian observances as late as the sixteenth century in parts of Russia and Hungary. Westermarck, in his chapter on the human rut season in primitive times, says: "Writers of the sixteenth century speak of the existence of certain festivals in Russia, at which great license prevailed. According to Pamphil, these annual gatherings took ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... but ill with Romance, and for the passing of Superstition (the child of Imagination and Romance) none can shed a tear. Yet at least it served to raise our daily lives out of the rut of commonplace. Our pulses are no longer stirred at the mere mention of the word MAGIC, and even BLACK MAGIC is coldly discussed where not so very long ago none would have dared to speak it save with ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... about twenty yards, and I sent it on again about a hundred. Unfortunately it landed in a rut. However Myra got it out with great resource, and I was lucky enough with my next to place it inside ...
— The Holiday Round • A. A. Milne
... vehicle swayed this side and that, at every moment, as it seemed, in jeopardy of overthrow. For a mile and a half from the farm the road, or, rather, cart-track, may be described as a kind of steeplechase on wheels, every step of the way showing either a stone- heap or a ditch, the word 'rut' being quite an inadequate definition. Now I saw the hood of the carriage nod to the right, now to the left, as some stone-heap impeded the way; now it curtseyed forward, almost disappearing altogether as some gully was plunged ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... inclined to be down-hearted upon anniversaries. You need not tell me what I know so well of myself. Another year has gone, another year has dawned, and you are in the same old rut of ordering and cooking meals and clearing up after they have been eaten, sweeping, dusting, making and mending clothes, washing, dressing and training children, and the thousand and one nameless tasks that fritter away strength, leaving nothing ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... comes to all, a man must stick to his own Church!" All these others, these St. Georges, and Westropps, and old Ardmore, and the rest of them, had only been waiting to jump on him as soon as he put a foot out of the rut they all walked in. They had waited for the chance to make him a pariah. Now they had it. All right! He could face that. They should soon see how little ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... asked none. The feverish exaltation of the night before had dropped, and she said to herself that he had gone away, indifferently, almost callously, and that now her life would lapse again into the narrow rut out of which he had lifted it. For a moment she was inclined to sneer at herself for not having used the arts that ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... Parsons and his wife called on everyone they felt should not be neglected, later inviting to their own home those who seemed in a position to help them. During these second visits, the conversation was turned to what might be done by "people like ourselves" to prevent getting into a rut. Dozens of helpful activities were recommended, and they made it a business to explore the most valuable, so that they could tell others about forthcoming meetings of discussion groups, plays, lectures, and the like. Within six months, they had entirely overcome the president's objection, ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... enough, when we came to the place he mentioned, there was the wheel-track full of dollars. He and I hoed each side of the rut, which seemed to be in a sort of yellow powder, like the dust of rotten wood, and got out all we could find. We afterwards tried under the opposite wheel, and behind and before the rut, but could find no more, and when ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... laurels in a higher class of work. It is this constant striving that brings ultimate success—financial and artistic. If you allow yourself to be easily content with your work and your receipts therefrom, you will speedily fall into a rut, become "old fogy" and dull, and one day will find yourself with a desk full of rejected MSS., and no ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... a little cynically. Would she have refused Rodney's offer of help, she wondered, if she had known an hour ago, that the two hundred dollars she'd relied on so confidently to pull her out of this rut and give her a fresh start whenever she was ready to attempt it, were gone into the pockets of that ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... little out of the rut, that you have taken a hand, even if it is a dummy's hand, in the game of life! Do you wish to ...
— The Great Secret • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... by the gray dawn of the morning of yesterday, and after an early but excellent breakfast, crossed the river from St. Cloud, in order to meet the stage at Sauk Rapids. As we came up on the main road, the sight of a freshly made rut, of stage-wheel size, caused rather a disquieting apprehension that the stage had passed. But my nerves were soon quieted by the assurance from an early hunter, who was near by shooting prairie chickens while they were yet on the roost, that the stage had not yet ...
— Minnesota and Dacotah • C.C. Andrews
... life's really troublesome mysteries? When an ulcer of the soul—or indeed the most benign little pimple—is to be probed, naturalism can do nothing. 'Appetite and instinct' seem to be its sole motivation and rut and brainstorm its chronic states. The field of naturalism is the region below the umbilicus. Oh, it's a hernia clinic and it offers ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... thief in fear. The text was senseless, I have beaten my head with my fist like a wild man, to try and knock some comprehension into it. For my life had worked itself out along one set groove, deep and narrow. I was in the rut. I had done those things which came to my hand and done them well; but the time was past; I could not turn my hand anew. I, who am strong and dominant, who have played large with destiny, who could buy body and soul a thousand painters and versifiers, was baffled by a few paltry cents' ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... he was respected as a rich and clever man, but was nicknamed "Frantic," because his life did not flow along a straight channel, like that of other people of his kind, but now and again, boiling up turbulently, ran out of its rut, away from gain—the prime aim of his existence. It looked as though there were three Gordyeeffs in him, or as though there were three souls in Ignat's body. One of them, the mightiest, was only greedy, and when Ignat lived according to its ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... remembering their (late) disgrace at the hands of Duryodhana, and proud of the strength of his arms, and conscious also of Krishna looking at him, Vrikodara began to swell in vigour. And fried with anger, Bhima seized the Rakshasa with his arms, as one elephant in rut seizeth another. And the powerful Rakshasa also in his turn seized his adversary, but Bhimasena that foremost of all men endued with strength, threw the cannibal down with violence. The sounds that in consequence of ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... would if I was you," said the latter. "It can't do ye no harm, an' it may do ye some good. The fact is," he continued, "that you ain't out o' danger of runnin' in a rut. It would do you good mebbe to git more acquainted, an' mebbe this'll be ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... to the materials on hand; a beginning was made by examining these materials, and trying to estimate their rigidity, weight, and strength.—All this is reactionary; the age of Reason has come and the Assembly is too enlightened to drag on in a rut. In conformity with the fashion of the time it works by deduction, after the method of Rousseau, according to an abstract notion of right, of the State and of the social compact.[2126] According to this process, by virtue of political geometry alone, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... getting old and wrinkled and pretty soon you'll be as cranky as the rest of them, and there will be no living with you. The Major, who is half your age"—I had come early, as was my custom, to pay my respects to the dear woman—"is no better. You are both of you getting into a rut. What you want is some young blood pumped into your shrivelled veins. I am going to hunt up every girl I know and all the boys, including that young Breen you are so wild over, and then I'll send for dear Ruth MacFarlane, who has just come North with her father to live, and who doesn't ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... I'll write and get my father to pay for mending it. We're all awfully sorry, sir. Dr Winter sends his regards, and we shall hear the result of the exam. on Thursday. One of the wheels came off, but I fancy it will go on again. It was a rut did it. We were coming along at a very good pace, and should have been here an hour ago if it hadn't been for the accident. We're sorry to ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... down on a salary in such a business would be the means of falling into a certain rut, from which it would be hard to extricate myself. And I have thus far never had occasion to regret having ...
— Twenty Years of Hus'ling • J. P. Johnston
... two members of the orchestra. The second violin is a Slovak, a tall, gaunt man with black-rimmed spectacles and the mute and patient look of an overdriven mule; he responds to the whip but feebly, and then always falls back into his old rut. The third man is very fat, with a round, red, sentimental nose, and he plays with his eyes turned up to the sky and a look of infinite yearning. He is playing a bass part upon his cello, and so the excitement is nothing to him; no matter what happens ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... every sign that a frost was going to set in later on. For these reasons the distant rising road was even more distinct now between its high banks than it had been in the declining daylight. Not a track or rut broke the virgin surface of the white mantle that lay along it, all marks left by the lately arrived travellers having been speedily obliterated by the ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy
... little to show that diplomacy has been raised to a higher plane or has won a better reputation in the world at large than it possessed before the nations assembled at Paris to make peace. This failure to lift the necessary agency of international relations out of the rut worn deep by centuries of practice is one of the deplorable consequences of the peace negotiations. So much might have been ...
— The Peace Negotiations • Robert Lansing
... means. If this is too much of a task, just hunt for the obsolete features. Above all things, we must not try to follow another's work. We too often follow unwittingly and to our misfortune even when we try to keep out of the rut. ...
— Industrial Progress and Human Economics • James Hartness
... body and whether a Frenchman is pulling or pushing or driving he likes to express the emotions of the moment. If a piece of transport were stalled there would be a chorus of exclamations and running disputes as to the method of getting it out of the rut, with the result that at the juncture when an outsider might think that utter confusion was to ensue, every Frenchman in sight had swarmed to the task under the direction of somebody who seemed to have made the suggestion which won the favor ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... speak fluently except on rare occasions, this loss of will-power and confidence takes place every time he attempts to speak, so that with each successive failure, his power to speak correctly becomes steadily lessened. The case of a stammerer might be compared to a road in which a deep rut has been worn. Each time a wagon passes through this rut, it becomes deeper. The stammerer has no more chance of outgrowing his trouble than the road has of ...
— Stammering, Its Cause and Cure • Benjamin Nathaniel Bogue
... so comparatively recent, such a sight was rarely witnessed in this section, as a deep-rooted hostility existed between the settlers and Indians, and an undertaking like the present was attended with too great danger for it to be often repeated. The rut of a single wagon, half obliterated by accumulated leaves and rankly-growing grass, showed that this route had been traveled over but once before, and that on the preceding season. At regular intervals, trees were passed with chips hacked from their sides, the ...
— The Riflemen of the Miami • Edward S. Ellis
... the town, pass a house. The country lay in its primitive state. For the purpose of obtaining a good road, an elevated arid ridge had been pursued much of the way. In crossing this, I suffered severely from heat and thirst, and the only place where I saw water was in a rut, which I frightened a wild turkey from partaking of, in order to stoop down to it myself. As soon as I reached the farm house, where I stopped at an early hour, I went down to the creek, and bathed in its refreshing current. ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... sign, The pleasant hollow entered they, and camped— All the long caravan—at sunset's hour. There, in the quiet of the middle night, Deep slumbered these; when, sudden on them fell A herd of elephants, thirsting to drink, In rut, the mada[24] oozing from their heads. And when those great beasts spied the caravan, And smelled the tame cows of their kind, they rushed Headlong, and, mad with must, overwhelming all, With onset vast and irresistible. ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... kings, and priests.[2117] At the first threat of a monarchical and Catholic restoration it will demand of him an eighteenth Fructidor[2118]; otherwise, some Jacobin general, Jourdan, Bernadotte, or Augereau, will make one without him, against him, and they fall back into the rut from which they wished to escape, into the fatal circle ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... any respecter of persons; for we are informed that the carriage of Queen Caroline could not, in bad weather, be dragged from St. James's Palace to Kensington in less than two hours, and occasionally the royal coach stuck fast in a rut, or was even capsized in the mud. About the same time, the streets of London themselves were little better, the kennel being still permitted to flow in the middle of the road, which was paved with ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... it, actually, and quoted it in one of her great speeches. It made the reporter bug out his eyes. He said he had observed of late quite a vein of poetry running through Miss Wilbur's speeches, which lifted them out of the common rut." ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... or been anywhere. Trouble with you is you've been in the rut too long. Thinking there's nothing left in the universe but the commonplace. Right, too, if you stick to the regular routes of travel. But the Nomad's different. I'm just a rover when I'm at her controls, a vagabond in ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... properly when he finally arrives at the breakfast-table, and the best of housekeepers is discouraged and prevented from ever attempting culinary surprises, when they are not to be appreciated. In this way she is innocently driven into a rut from which it is difficult to escape when occasions present ...
— Breakfast Dainties • Thomas J. Murrey
... fellow, so hollow-chested that he had to be sent to Colorado for almost two years for his health. He came back to school looking better but before his diploma was handed to him announcing to the world that he was a full-fledged Bachelor of Arts, he had fallen apparently permanently into the rut of ill-health. In fact I wondered, when we all sang Auld Lang Syne in the fraternity house at the close of college, if I'd ...
— The Story of The American Legion • George Seay Wheat
... thoughtful, brooding through the hours of darkness with his head slightly bent and his eyes, so far as Casey could determine, fixed steadily on the uneven trail where the headlights revealed every rut, every stone, every chuck-hole. But Casey was not deceived by that quiescence. The revolver barrel never once ceased its pressure against his side, and he knew that young Kenner never for an instant forgot that he was riding with Casey Ryan ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... I've tried to make it easy for myself you are mistaken. Is it easy to pull out of the rut and habit of years? Easy to know my friends will jeer and say I've sold out? Easy to have you misunderstand? (Goes to her.) Hilda, I'm doing this for their good. I'm doing it—just as Wallace is—because I ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... don't know," she said; "anything—anything to get out of this rut and be something in the world. It's dreadful to feel that one has power and not be able to ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... as if it had the hiccoughs and made us all talk as though we were affected in the same way. Once Mr. Stewart asked me if I did not think it a "gey duir trip." I told him he could call it gay if he wanted to, but it didn't seem very hilarious to me. Every time the stage struck a rock or a rut Mr. Stewart would "hoot," until I began to wish we would come to a hollow tree or a hole in the ground so he could go in with the rest ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... Speaking generally, the first part of life is the expression of the distant past—of former lives—the second is a mixture of the past and of the energies of the present incarnation; the end of life is nothing but a sinking into an ever-deepening rut for those who crystallise in only one direction; the force of habit sets up its reign, and man finds himself bound by the chains he himself has forged. This is the reason an old man does not like the ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... and Ping Wang walked up to the cart, and putting forth all their strength moved it, at the first attempt, out of the rut in which it had stuck. The Chinaman thanked them profusely for their help. His wife said nothing, but stared at Charlie in a way that made him feel quite uncomfortable. He was much relieved when, in obedience to her husband's call to come and take ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... latter with some difficulty, we found that its floor was about 20 feet below that of the cavern above. It was equally level and covered to a great but unascertained depth with the same dry red earth which had been worn down about five feet in a hollow or rut. ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... determine whether it is good or bad. All that I shall say in its favor is, that it gives us an advantage with which any of the discomforts of life can not enter into comparison. It drags us out of the rut, it stirs us up, and it is love which satisfies one of our most pressing wants. I think I have already told you that our hearts are made for emotion; to excite it therefore, is to satisfy a demand of nature. ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... of her escapade, that would at least shake him out of his soft and well-lined rut. Indeed, Io was frank enough with herself to admit that a perverse desire to explode a bomb under her imperturbable and too-assured suitor had been an element in her projected elopement. Never would that bomb ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... everything we attempt; its beginning is attended with a sort of pleasurable excitement and diligence in the pursuit of the study we have entered upon, which lasts until the novelty begins to wear off. Then comes the time when we find ourselves falling into a rut from which, if we do not try hard to keep up our standard, it will be difficult to extricate ourselves; but, if we summon all our energy and strive to overcome all impediments and will work hard and adopt ...
— Silver Links • Various
... the common law, was, that every freeman, or freeborn male Englishman, of adult age, &c;., was eligible to sit in juries, by virtue of his civil freedom, or his being a member of the state, or body politic. Rut the principle of the present English statutes is, that a man shall have a right to sit in juries because he owns lands in fee-simple. At the common law a man was born to the right to sit in juries. By the present statutes he buys that right when he buys his land. ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... became most serious;— we could not see the branches of hooked thorns that overhung the broken path; I rode in advance, my face and arms bleeding with countless scratches, while at each rip of a thorn I gave a warning shout— "Thorn!" for those behind, and a cry of "Hole!" for any deep rut that lay in the path. It was fortunately moonlight, but the jungle was so thick that the narrow track was barely perceptible; thus both camels and donkeys ran against the trunks of trees, smashing the luggage, and breaking all that could be broken; nevertheless, the case was urgent; ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... be it as thou wilt; I hear, But cannot stop the bursting tear.' The Minstrel tried his simple art, Rut distant far was ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... the rut-rifted lane Where the wild roses hang and the woodbines entwine, And the shrill squeaking bat makes his circles again Round the side of the tavern close by the sign. The sun is gone down like a wearisome queen, In curtains the richest ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... had been in East Dennis four years I began to feel that I was getting into a rut. It seemed to me that all I could do in that particular field had been done. My people wished me to remain, however, and so, partly as an outlet for my surplus energy, but more especially because I realized ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... stirring underman to lay hold upon. Blount, the sober-minded, the self-contained, found a curious transformation working itself out in quickened pulses and exhilarating nerve-tinglings. Boston, the Law School, the East of the narrow walk-ways and the still narrower rut of custom and convention, were fading into a past which already seemed age-old and half forgotten. He threw open the window at his elbow and drank in deep inspirations of the hill-sweeping blast. It was sweet in his nostrils, and the keen crispness of it was as fine wine in ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... a short cut through the shrubbery and reached the road at the point whither the loud voices of the two men led him. He came upon the wagon with one hind wheel stuck in a muddy rut and the other one smashed at the hub. From the shelter of a handy bush Frank surveyed the situation and listened to what the ...
— The Boys of Bellwood School • Frank V. Webster
... colonization..., though they tended on different directions, ... were hardly distinguishable in the earlier phases of their history. Perhaps a fourth type should be added, but this fourth type was what naturalists call an aberrant type, and only comprised two colonizers, Rut and Hore, whose aims were indistinct, and who had no clear idea where they meant to go, or what they meant to do when they ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead
... interest her, only to come home and find it here upon the upper step of her own front porch. She stepped from the doorway and sat down in one of the wicker rockers. She had plenty of time to be interested; there was really no haste for unpacking and settling back into her little country rut. ...
— Miss Theodosia's Heartstrings • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... to die, a week after the liquidation of the business, was Anna Markovna herself. However, this frequently happens with people put out of their accustomed rut of thirty years: so die war heroes, who have gone into retirement—people of insuperable health and iron will; so quickly go off the stage former stock brokers, who have happily gone away to rest, but have been deprived of the burning allurement of risk and hazard; ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... of Winstoun speaks intelligibly would be a waste of her time and my own," said the haughty Constance, with the rudeness in which she then delighted, and for which she has since become known. Rut the duchess was not to be offended until she had completed ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... intellectual heights, I long to raise and educate The masters of the future State. Besides, the people in the plains Are lamentably short of brains, And I have even more than KEYNES. Already in The Herald's page Am I acclaimed as seer and sage; Mine be it then to teach my neighbour To quit the lowly rut of Labour, And scale the heights of Pisgah, Nebo, Or some equivalent gazebo, For even Labour must afford To keep one ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, February 25th, 1920 • Various
... it?" demanded Elliot mercilessly. He was so furious that he forgot to hold the umbrella over Miss Daggett, and the rain drove in her hard, unhappy face. She did not seem to notice. She had led a poisoned life, in a narrow rut of existence, and toxic emotions had become as her native atmosphere of mind. Now she seemed to be about to breathe in a better air of humanity, and she choked ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... December 3, 1721, and he lived nearly thirty years more. His new wife bore him thirteen children, six of them sons, none of whom were remarkable musically, though their mother was more musical than the mother of Bach's first children. Perhaps the newcomers thought it time to take the name out of the rut. ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... deriding nests, he found so much leisure to sing about them. "I wanted to say I didn't get you that time when you told me you'd pretty much done with the world. I though Mum was right: cafard, you remember. But I've swung round into the same rut. It's a rotten system. ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... top-heavy with trunks piled up on the roof. The driver dashed along with his customary recklessness, the six horses breaking into a canter as they turned to come up the rather steep acclivity to the house. The coach was drawn about a foot from its usual rut, one of the wheels struck a projecting stone, and over went the huge vehicle, passengers, trunks, and all. The driver took a terrible leap and was stunned. The horses stopped and looked calmly around on the havoc. There was great consternation in and about the house. Here ...
— That Mother-in-Law of Mine • Anonymous
... selection and promotion of the fittest was at variance with free choice of the best men, and that it was calculated, if carried out, to strike at the root of the chief source of our prosperity. If every workman of the same class went in the same rut, and were paid the same uniform rate of wages, irrespective of his natural or acquired ability, such a system would destroy the emulative spirit which forms the chief basis of manipulative efficiency and practical skill, and on which, in my opinion, the prosperity of ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... now appeared in sight, and the nearer they approached it, the more the paths were thronged with people. Anabella was often separated from her mamma; but this did not at present much disturb her, as by skipping over a rut, or slipping between the people as they passed, she soon got up again to her mother. However, the nearer they approached the market, the crowd of course increased, which kept her eyes in full employment, to spy which way her mother went; but a little chaise drawn by six dogs having ...
— The Looking-Glass for the Mind - or Intellectual Mirror • M. Berquin
... and brother had been left in camp as guards. They were sitting idly warming themselves in the first sunbeams, when their attention was sharply drawn to four buffaloes that were coming to the pool to drink. The beasts came down a game trail, a deep rut in the bluff, fronting where they were sitting, and they did not dare to stir for fear of being discovered. The buffaloes walked into the pool, and after drinking their fill, stood for some time with the water running out of their mouths, idly lashing their sides with their short ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... interminable forest through which he journeyed was lit with a wan glimmer having no point of diffusion, for in its mysterious lumination nothing cast a shadow. A shallow pool in the guttered depression of an old wheel rut, as from a recent rain, met his eye with a crimson gleam. He stooped and plunged his hand into it. It stained his fingers; it was blood! Blood, he then observed, was about him everywhere. The weeds growing rankly ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... made me an offer and I refused him." This she said very sharply;—more so undoubtedly than the circumstances required; and with a brusqueness that was injudicious as well as uncourteous. Rut at the moment, she was thinking of her own position with reference to Lady Lufton—not to Lord Lufton; and of her feelings with reference to the lady—not ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... that things might have presently settled down into their old rut and the mystery have lost the bulk of its romantic sublimity in Laura's eyes, if the village gossips could have quieted down. But they could not quiet down and they did not. Day after day they called at the house, ostensibly ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... in their eyes and their hands the old subtle bond of kin, and perhaps—such is our vanity in the new lands—to show them what the stock had come to overseas. They tended to be depressing these visits: the married sister was living in a small way; the first cousin seemed to have got into a rut; the uncle and aunt were failing, with a stooping, trembling, old-fashioned kind of decrepitude, a rigidity of body and mind, which somehow one didn't see ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... didn't know," he managed to mutter, with a slash at his horse which was vainly endeavoring to pull the cart from the rut in which it had stuck. "I guess I'll go along to the hotel. I've a bag ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... felt certain I had not missed, the smoke hung and the air was too thick to see, and, after a long search, I left the wood and was going home when our old spaniel, Flush, turned his head to examine something in a deep cart rut. Following the direction of his eyes, I saw my woodcock; it must have flown 100 yards or more after I fired. I was still more pleased with the last shot I fired in our old Surrey covers at a woodcock going like an express train—and faster, for they are said to fly at the rate of 150 miles ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory |
