"Sewer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... eight inches square. It is neither paved nor boarded; and the rough bricks appear both on the sides and top, being neither wainscotted nor plastered; what adds to the dampness and stench of the place, is its being built over the common sewer, and adjoining to the sink and dunghill where all the nastiness of the prison is cast. In this miserable place the poor wretch was kept by the said Bainbridge manacled and shackled for near two months. At length on receiving five guineas from Mr. Kemp, a friend of Solas's, Bainbridge released ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... all this, but we imply it, and we often find that the mere utterance of the one word, "toy gardening," has a magical effect to suggest all the rest and to overwhelm with contrition the bad taste and frivolity of many a misguided attempt at adornment. At that word of exorcism joints of cerulean sewer-pipe crested with scarlet geraniums, rows of whited cobbles along the walk or drive like a cannibal's skulls around his hut, purple paint-kegs of petunias on the scanty door-steps, crimson wash-kettles of verbenas, ant-hill rockeries, and well-sweeps and curbs where ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... off in a heathen land, surrounded by enemies, and not likely to get anything like a fighting chance, but I'm for doing something right now. I'm not going to lie still here and be poisoned, like a rat in a sewer!" ...
— Boy Scouts on Motorcycles - With the Flying Squadron • G. Harvey Ralphson
... das ist nicht war wesen, und hat kein wesen anders dan in dem volkomen, sunder es ist ein zufal oder ein glast und ein schin, der nicht wesen ist oder nicht wesen hat anders, dan in dem sewer, da der glast us flusset, als in der ...
— Memories • Max Muller
... a view of the fish, when a vigorous shove from the rear sent him like a great frog plump towards the bottom of the pool. This was a consummation that Tom had not bargained for, but there was no alternative but to swim for the shore, dripping like a rat from a flooded sewer. That joke had two points to it, and Tom G——had the worst ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... like that," said the big wheelwright. "Why, doctor says he's sewer that he can bring squire reight again, and what more do ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... A few women muffled in tattered military capes crept along the frozen pavement, and a wretchedly clad gamin hovered over the sewer-hole on the corner of the Boulevard. A rope around his waist held his rags together. From the rope hung a rat, still warm ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... indulge in a highly cheerful walk on upper Broadway with Miss Becky Rosenthal, sewer for the Sans Peur Pants and Overalls Company—while in her room Una grieved over his forlorn desire ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... and turned down the track leading to the hamlet. Some planks carried them across the ditch, the main sewer of the community, as Robert pointed out, and they made their way through the filth surrounding one ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... well, whose stagnant waters you shuddered to look upon; a stairway covered with old shells; at the farther end a gallery, with wooden balustrade, and hanging upon it some old linen and the tick of an old straw mattress; on the first floor, to the left, the stone covering of a common sewer indicated the kitchen; to the right the lofty windows of the building looked out upon the street; then a few pots of dried, withered flowers—all was cracked, somber, moist. Only one or two hours during the day could the sun penetrate this loathsome spot; ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... from childhood, on which had been lavished all the raptures of my hopes and all the tears of my hatred.... It is difficult to change gods. I did not believe you then, because I did not want to believe, I plunged for the last time into that sewer.... But the seed remained and grew up. Seriously, tell me seriously, didn't you read all my letter from America, perhaps you didn't read it ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... upon. To be sure, even they would find out in time the deficiencies of his establishment, and report them at home; but meanwhile he hoped to fill his pockets for two or three seasons under cover of The Sewer's puffs, and then, when business fell off, to impose on his landlord with some plausible story, and obtain ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... of dunams of waste arenary soil, proposed in the prospectus of Agendath Netaim, Bleibtreustrasse, Berlin, W. 15, by the cultivation of orange plantations and melonfields and reafforestation. The utilisation of waste paper, fells of sewer rodents, human excrement possessing chemical properties, in view of the vast production of the first, vast number of the second and immense quantity of the third, every normal human being of average vitality ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... cannot make an alliance with France without a certain degree of meanness, but very admirable people, even German princes, in the Middle Ages have used a sewer to make their escape, rather than ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... O tomb, has his blackness ceased, or does thy light indeed, The sheen of the filthy countenance, no more in thee abound? O tomb, thou art neither kitchen-stove nor sewer-pool for me! How comes it then that mire and coal at ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume I • Anonymous
... its day, and in greater or less degree, the end designed by it. Having done that, it has sunk into the general mass of stale and loathed calumnies. It is the very cast-off slough of a polluted and shameless press. Incapable of further mischief, it lies in the sewer, lifeless and despised. It is not now, Sir, in the power of the honorable member to give it dignity or decency, by attempting to elevate it, and to introduce it into the Senate. He cannot change it from what it is, ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... "Slow and sewer's my motter, Mester Vane," grunted the sexton, as he slowly inserted the key. "Don't you hurry no man's beast; you may hev an ass of your own ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn
... did not submit to the decision of the Council he should be allowed to go home. Of those promises only the first was ever fulfilled. John Hus soon found himself caught in a trap. He was imprisoned by order of the Pope. He was placed in a dungeon on an island in the Rhine, and lay next to a sewer; and Sigismund either would not or could not lift a finger to help him. For three and a-half mouths he lay in his dungeon; and then he was removed to the draughty tower of a castle on Lake Geneva. His opinions were examined and condemned by the Council; ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... the seams, then begin at the top of the skirt and baste downward, allowing all unevenness to come out at the bottom. Baste straight and evenly, taking one stitch at a time. Several stitches should never be taken at once on thick or piled goods, as the side next to the sewer is apt to be fuller in that case. When all seams are basted, try on the skirt and make all changes necessary before stitching. Both the outside skirt and any under or "drop" skirt should be fitted as ...
— Textiles and Clothing • Kate Heintz Watson
... citizens may know and participate in the city government. In the first place the publication of monthly itemized statements of all the proceedings is required. Every ordinance appropriating money or ordering any street improvements, or sewer, or the making of any contract shall remain on file for public inspection at least one week before final passage. Franchises are granted not by any legislative body but by direct vote of the people. ...
— Elements of Debating • Leverett S. Lyon
... a little, "I'm a good sewer, I could make money sewing ... and I could do washings for city-folks, summer-times...." Her set mouth told what a price she paid for this voluntary abandonment of the social standing that had been hers by virtue of her idleness. ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... I have never been so far tempted from the straight path as to set foot within one,' the Puritan answered, 'nor have I ever been in that great sewer which is called London. I trust, however, that I with others of the faithful may find our way thither with our tucks at our sides ere this business is finished, when we shall not be content, I'll warrant, with shutting these homes of vice, as Cromwell ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... that nothing can satisfy the thirst of this gulf, not even should you plunge therein the germs of the entire world. Alas! then, my poor boy —his fortune, his generative hopes, his eternal future, his entire self, more than himself, have been engulfed in this sewer, like a grain of corn in the jaws of a bull. By this means become an old orphan I, who speak, shall have no greater joy than to see burning, this demon, nourished with blood and gold. This Arachne who has drawn out and sucked more marriages, more families in the seed, more hearts, more Christians ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 2 • Honore de Balzac
... and dank airs. If one had the secret in his possession, he could go down through the mysterious trap door in the workshop of William Spantz, armourer to the Crown; or he might come up through a hidden aperture in the walls of the great government sewer, which ran directly parallel with and far below the walls of the quaint old building. One could take his choice of direction in approaching this hole in the huge sewer: he could come up from the river, half ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... in the prophecies of the Magi, who saw an omen of victory in the grossest of all the insults, caused him to change his intention and still continue the siege. His perseverance was soon afterwards rewarded. A soldier discovered in the wall the outlet of a drain or sewer imperfectly blocked up with rubble, and, removing this during the night, found himself able to pass through the wall into the town. He communicated his discovery to Kobad, who took his measures accordingly. ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... as you know, with such wonderful success when gathered together in a volume. And he goes on in the same style in the 'Voix du Peuple,' which he himself made a success at the time of the Panama affair by dint of denunciation and scandal, and which to-day is like a sewer-pipe pouring forth all the filth of the times. And whenever the stream slackens, why, he invents things just to satisfy his craving for that hubbub on which both his pride and ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... writes:—'How can it be suffered that all manner of filth should still be thrown even into this street [High Street] continually? How long shall the capital city of Scotland, yea, and the chief street of it, stink worse than a common sewer?' Wesley's Journal, iii. 52. Baretti (Journey from London to Genoa, ii.255) says that this was the universal practice in Madrid in 1760. He was driven out of that town earlier than he had intended to leave it by the dreadful stench. A few years ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... supposed that after this reckless slaughter the tigress and her savage followers burned the cluster of wooden houses that then formed London to the ground. Certain it is, that when deep sections were made for a sewer in Lombard Street in 1786, the lowest stratum consisted of tesselated Roman pavements, their coloured dice laying scattered like flower leaves, and above that of a thick layer of wood ashes, as of the debris of charred wooden buildings. This ruin ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... such times the Dingy City looks great, robed in vague organ-tones of colour. But you must no longer walk on that carpet, even though the angels have laid it for you; you must no longer see your city from that pathway; you must burrow homewards from your work in a sewer-pipe of stink, and deeper rabbit-warrens of burrowing are being prepared for you, and you have no Declaration of Independence that secures to you the undeniable right to breathe fresh air. Long-suffering, patient Londoner! To whom does the ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... filtration, showing the loss of head, shutting down a filter, filling a filter with filtered water from the under-drains, and for turning the water back into the raw-water reservoir, or wasting it into the sewer. From the regulator-houses, the filtered water flows directly to the filtered-water reservoir. Generally, five filters are controlled from one house, but there are two cases where the regulator-houses are smaller, and only two filters are controlled ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXXII, June, 1911 • E. D. Hardy
... last, there is a rift within the lute; or would it better be called a leak in the sewer? Comstockery has not quite the standing that it once had. When it was made generally known that a postoffice official had said that any discussion of sex was obscene, there followed such a rattling fire of reprobation and condemnation even from many ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... melancholy settled upon the flat children. The parents noted it, and wondered if there could be sewer gas in the apartments. One over-anxious mother called in a physician, who gave the poor little child some medicine which made it quite ill. No one suspected the truth, though the children were often heard to say that it was evident ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... don't touch the pavement! You could make shoes for a Parisian girl out of whipped cream, and they'd hold together! If you were to fit her with a pair of ordinary woman's beetle-crushers she'd jump straight into the sewer!" ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... bank of the Tiber. Full of clay, more turbid than ever, and very high between the white embankments hemming it in, the river looked like a big sewer. ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... distances in a frame, called a "sewing bench," for this purpose. No book can be thoroughly well bound if the sewing is slighted in any degree. Insist upon strong, honest linen thread—if it breaks with a slight pull it is not fit to be used in a book. The book is prepared for the sewer by sawing several grooves across the back with a common saw. The two end grooves are light and narrow, the central ones wider and deeper. Into these inner grooves, the cords fit easily, and the book being taken, ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... who's goin' to do all the dirty work?' said Slyme. 'If everyone is to be allowed to choose 'is own trade, who'd be fool enough to choose to be a scavenger, a sweep, a dustman or a sewer man? nobody wouldn't want to do such jobs as them and everyone would be after the ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... from Philadelphia high schools and the ICONOCLAST denounced by certain bewhiskered old he-virgins as obscene! And so it goes. This world is becoming so awfully nice that it's infernally nawsty. It sees evil in everything because its point of view is that of the pimp. Its mind is a foul sewer whose exhalations coat even the Rose of Sharon with slime. A writer may no longer call a spade a spade; he must cautiously refer to it as an agricultural implement lest he shock the supersensitiveness of hedonists and call down upon his head the Anathema Maranatha of ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... I should assign to such men as yourselves all the most disagreeable and dangerous tasks I could find. This I should do because I should know that at once your inventive brains would begin to devise mechanical and other means of doing the work. You would make sewer cleaning as pleasant as any other occupation in the world." There was, of course, nothing original in the reply, but the men of science recognized its force, and it fairly states one important part of the Socialist answer ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... some ash-can or down some sewer on the way to the office," she said to herself. She slipped it into her muff and hurried away. But on the way to the cable-car no ash-can presented itself. True, she discovered the opening of a sewer on the corner where she took ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... beyond this, there are all the offensive, aggressive uses of the ballot. We want a sewer here, a bridge there, a lamp-post or a hydrant yonder. A woman's nose will scent a defective drain where ten men pass it by, but votes get these things looked after. We want a new schoolhouse, or more brains or more fresh air in an old one. Don't you know that women will attend to such needs sooner ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... always laughs at everything; and Mrs. Benton—well, she just pinned the paper in her bosom, and says she: 'I'll know where that is when it's needed.' She's some sense, Sally has, though nothing to boast of, and she's a mighty good sewer of patchwork, though she's no good at pistol pockets. Well, ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond
... of the moderately liberal Novosti ("The News") which managed to survive the shipwreck of the liberal press, became either openly or secretly the official mouthpieces of the Government. The venal Novoye Vremya, which the Russian satirist Shchedrin had branded as "the sewer," embarked, towards the end of the eighties, on the noble enterprise of hunting down the Jews with a zeal which was clear evidence of a higher demand for Judaeophobia in the official world. There was no accusation, however hideous, ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... applying for a position in your city if there be any work of my trade. I am a water pipe corker and has worked foreman on subservice drainage and sewer in this city for ten (10) years. I am now out of work and want to leave this city. I am a man of family therefore I am very anxious for an immediate reply. Please find enclosed self addressed ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... to be an animal," Mrs. Wood went on, "no matter how ugly and repulsive it is, but what has some lovable qualities. I have just been reading about some sewer rats, ...
— Beautiful Joe - An Autobiography of a Dog • by Marshall Saunders
... up everything on the plate all together—made a sort of salad of it, in fact—and ate it with a spoon. A more disagreeable dish I have never tasted since the days when I used to do Willie Evans's "dags," by walking twice through a sewer, and was subsequently, on returning home, promptly put to bed, and made to eat brimstone ...
— Diary of a Pilgrimage • Jerome K. Jerome
... savour, rich repast! Delicious wines the attending herald brought; The gold gave lustre to the purple draught. Lured with the vapour of the fragrant feast, In rush'd the suitors with voracious haste; Marshall'd in order due, to each a sewer Presents, to bathe his hands, a radiant ewer. Luxurious then they feast. Observant round Gay stripling youths the brimming goblets crown'd. The rage of hunger quell'd, they all advance And form to measured airs the mazy dance; To Phemius was consign'd ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... mind to refuse to take offence, as long as by not taking offence you can wriggle yourself forward in the band of journalistic reptiles. You will be revenged on me, in that case, some day; you will lie in wait for me with a dirty bludgeon, and steal on me out of a sewer. If you do, permit me to assure you that I don't care. But if you are already in a rage, if you are about tearing up this epistle, and are starting to assault me personally, or at least to answer me furiously, then there is every hope for you and for your future. I therefore venture ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... a dream a "right godly personage," who advised him to build it on the High Street, and at a certain spot where he would be sure in digging to find a "mallard, imprisoned but well fattened, in the sewer." He hesitated, but all whom he consulted advised him to make the trial, and accordingly, on a fixed day after mass, with due solemnity the digging began. They had not dug long, the story relates, before they heard ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... there or anywhere else, hasn't a farthing to his name, nor a regiment of soldiers; he is not fighting, he is not intending to fight, he means to make no further resistance; in truth, there is but one thing that he is intending to do—give the whole thing up, pitch his crown into the sewer, and run away to Scotland. There are the facts. ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... Dumbarton, is a striking feature. But we have never met any Glasgow man or woman who did not speak of the sail between Glasgow and Greenock as desperately tedious, and by all means to be avoided. Then in warm summer weather the Clyde is nearly as filthy as the Thames; and sailing over a sewer, even through fine scenery, has its disadvantages. So we resolve to go with our friend by railway to Greenock, and thus come upon the Clyde where it has almost opened into the sea. Quite opened into the sea, we might say: for at Greenock the river is three miles broad, while at Glasgow it is ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... used principally for building and paving brick and tile, sewer-pipe, railroad ballast, road material, puddle, Portland cement, and pottery. Clay is mined in almost every state. Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Illinois have the largest production. There has been a considerable importation ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... brooks and streamlets, uniting them in a river, clear and lovely, along whose banks children loved to play. But later on, as it became broad and deep, taking in pollution and garbage, until the clear and joyous river is changed into a great sewer, filling the air with noxious smells, and defiling the face of nature with its liquid blackness. Such is life to some men—Solomon was one, perhaps ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... depredations were committed by human beings under pretext of necessity and of interest in my behalf. I refer now to those remorseless men who came first and tore up the beautiful lawn and cut away the roots of trees and digged a deep, long pit in which to lay sewer pipes; who came again and committed another similar atrocity under plea of laying a water-pipe; who came still again and for the third time abused and seared and seamed and blighted that lawn for the alleged purpose of laying a gas-pipe! O civilization! ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... friend in a joyous manner, and frequently returned very late to his lodging. One evening, when it was very dark and almost midnight, as Mieris strolled home from the tavern, he unluckily fell into the common sewer, which had been opened for the purpose of cleansing, and the workmen had left unguarded. There he must have perished, had not a cobbler and his wife, who worked in a neighboring stall, heard his cries and instantly ran to his relief. Having extricated Mieris, they took all possible care ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... and foul, dank and foul, By the smoky town in its murky cowl; Foul and dank, foul and dank, By wharf and sewer and slimy bank; Darker and darker the further I go, Baser and baser the richer I grow; Who dare sport with the sin defiled? Shrink from me, turn from me, mother ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... white palfrey. After mutual salutation, the old man gave Sir Godfrey to understand, that he resided under his habitation, and that he had great reason to complain of the direction of a drain, or common sewer, which emptied itself directly into his chamber of dais, [A] Sir Godfrey Macculloch was a good deal startled at this extraordinary complaint; but, guessing the nature of the being he had to deal with, he assured the old man, with great courtesy, that the direction of the drain should be altered; ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... figures of an Italian fisher boy and girl kept company with the clock, a huge timepiece, set in a red plush palette, that never was known to go. But at the right of the fireplace, and balancing the tuft of pampa-grass to the left, was an inverted section of a sewer-pipe painted blue and decorated with daisies. Into it was thrust a sheaf of cat-tails, gilded, and tied ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... morning. Let them lower their accursed streets to their thrice-accursed grade; it would but leave him high and dry in his green-embowered island, secure of contamination to his fruit trees from unspeakable gas and sewer pipes. A ten-foot brick wall, with its top set with broken bottles, would defend his quinces and apricots from the incursion of the street Arabs, and wind and sky were as free as ever. Yes, he would hold his own against these vandals of commercialism, while one brick of Arcadia House ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... like to tell you, but perhaps I had better. I have only just found out that a sewer-trap quite close to his shop gives out a most offensive affluvia, especially in this hot weather. The air must be full of germs. I hardly know whet her we ought to eat even this ...
— The Town Traveller • George Gissing
... College, Oxford, the Mallard Night is celebrated annually on the 14th of January, in remembrance of a very singular circumstance, viz. the discovery of a live and excessively large mallard, or drake, supposed to have long ranged in a drain or sewer of considerable depth. The only probable conjecture respecting its extraordinary situation was, that it had fallen when young through the bars or grating at the entrance of the drain, (which was of sufficient ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 345, December 6, 1828 • Various
... no mere social center; here responsible members of the recently enfranchised sex met to discuss civic betterment, schools and municipal budgets, commercialized vice and child labor, library appropriations, liquor laws and sewer systems. Local politicians were beginning to respect the Forum, local newspapers reported ...
— The Treasure • Kathleen Norris
... king's leman and did climb to that splendid eminence by her own unholpen merit from the sewer ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... contemplate the thousands of little waves of life yearly washed into the cellar of being; fragile, helpless innocents, responsible in no way for their presence or environment, yet condemned to a fate more frightful than the beasts of the field; human beings wandering in the dark, existing in the sewer, ever feeling the crushing weight of the gay world above, which thinks little and cares less for them. Infinitely pathetic ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... the day was ashamed to light up this dreadful sewer through which so much misery flows! There is not a spot on that plank where some crime has not sat, in embryo or matured; not a corner where a man has never stood who, driven to despair by the blight which justice has set upon him after his first fault, has not there begun a career, at the ...
— Colonel Chabert • Honore de Balzac
... time this seemed to end the danger, as the waste was soaked up by the soil, and eaten by its hungry bacteria and drunk up again by the roots of plants. But when ten or a dozen houses began to combine and run their drain-pipes together into a large drain called a sewer, then this could not open upon the surface of the ground, but had to be run into some stream, or brook, in order to be carried away. As cities and towns, which had been obliged to give up their wells, were beginning to collect the ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... wine, meats, and dishes, for the service of the knights' table. Before this stood the attendants, near whom were drawn up two lines of pensioners bearing the second course on great gilt dishes, and headed by the sewer. In front of the sewer were the treasurer and comptroller of the household, each bearing a white wand; next them stood the officers-of-arms in two lines, headed by the Garter. The bottom of the hall was thronged with yeomen of the guard, halberdiers, and henchmen. In a gallery at the lower end were ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... as our streets. They convey only water which has been chemically purified and deodorized before it enters them by an apparatus connected with every dwelling. By the same apparatus all solid sewage is electrically cremated, and removed in the form of ashes. This improvement in the sewer system, which followed the great Revolution very closely, might have waited a hundred years before introduction but for the Revolution, although the necessary scientific knowledge and appliances had long been available. The case furnishes merely one instance out of a thousand of the devices for ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... steel, and are symptoms rather of recovery than of illness.—Come, dearest lady, your silence discourages our friends, and wakes in them doubts whether we be sincere in the welcome due to them. Let me be your sewer," he said; and, taking a silver ewer and napkin from the standing cupboard, which was loaded with plate, he presented them on his ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... the servants testified that three days before, while the old man and Brooks were at the store and while the ladies were out, a man with black whiskers, and who wore a black coat, had called at the house and said that he had been sent to search for sewer-gas. He had an order presumably signed by Mr. Colton, and was accordingly shown through the house. He had insisted upon going into the vault-room, declaring that he had located the gas there, but was told that the room was always kept locked. He then went away. The servant ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read
... the water-fronts are the slum wastes where the sewers of politics and business and social life pour forth their fetid filth. Here the journals of yellow shade grub and fatten. In this ooze and slime puddle the hordes of sewer rats, scavengers of the world's garbage, from whose collected stores the editor selects his daily mess for the delectation of the great unwashed, whether of the classes or of the masses, and from which he grabs in large handfuls that viscous mud that sticks and stings ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... be in the cavern," answered Tommy. "When the train robbers chucked us down into this dry sewer the sheriffs were entering the audience ...
— Boy Scouts on the Great Divide - or, The Ending of the Trail • Archibald Lee Fletcher
... rats built a ship of State to save themselves from drowning. It carried them safely for awhile until they grew eager for more passengers, and so took on board all manner of rats that had run away from all sorts of places—Irish rats and German rats, and French rats, and even black rats and dirty sewer rats. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... hands; they were afterwards transferred to other works, which, whilst less in show, (required) still greater toil: such as the erecting benches in the circus, and conducting under ground the principal sewer,[63] the receptacle of all the filth of the city; to which two works even modern splendour can scarcely produce any thing equal. The people having been employed in these works, because he both considered ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... Sewer Gas.—Cesspool emanations usually consist of a mixture of sulphuretted hydrogen, sulphide of ammonium, and nitrogen; but sometimes it is only deoxidized air with an excess ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... defiance of the elements, such security against cold and heat, against fire, flood and tempest! such economy! such immunity from all the ills that domestic life is heir to, from intractable servants to sewer-gas! ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner
... Columbus. At first it was satisfied by the cul-de-sac recess on which Sapps Court opened. But this palled, and no wonder! How could it compete with the public highway out of which it branched, especially when there was a new shore—that is to say, sewer—in ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... confess that our speed slowed down considerably after the first wild burst, but we kept at it steadily. It was hard work, and there is no denying it, just the sort of plain hard work the day labourer does when he digs sewer trenches in the city streets. Only worse, perhaps, owing to the nature of the soil. It has struck me since that those few years of hard labour in the diggings, from '49 to '53 or '54, saw more actual manual toil accomplished ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... term, the ragings of the dog-star, the purgatory of heat and dust, of baking, blistering pavements, of cracked and powdered fields, of dead, stifling night air, from which every tonic and antiseptic quality seems eliminated, leaving a residuum of sultry malaria and all-diffusing privy and sewer gases, that lasts from the first of July to near the middle of September! But when October is reached, the memory of these things is afar off, and the glory of the days is a ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... of Glocester was that day overseer and stood before the Queen bareheaded, Sir Richard Newel was carver and the Earl of Suffolk's brother cup-bearer, Sir John Stewart, Sewer, the Lord Clifford (instead of the Earl of Warwick) Pantler, the Lord Willoby (instead of the Earl of Arundel) chief Butler, the Lord Gray Caterer, Naperer, the Lord Audley (in the stead of the Earl of Cambridge) Almner, the Earl of Worcester was Lord ...
— The History of Sir Richard Whittington • T. H.
... the men. "It would be certain death!" But just beyond the street took a sharp turn to the right and a deep chasm, where extensive excavations for a sewer ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... Shaped, and Enamelled Bricks, Drain-Tiles, Straight and Curved Sewer-Pipes, Fire-Clays, Fire-Bricks, Terra-Cotta, Roofing-Tiles, Flooring-Tiles, Art-Tiles, Mosaic Plates, and Imitation of Intarsia or Inlaid Surfaces; comprising every important Product of Clay employed in Architecture, Engineering, the Blast-Furnace, ...
— Mechanical Drawing Self-Taught • Joshua Rose
... then in the course of our business. I did not like so much night work, and sometimes we had to eat raw pork because we did not wish to build a fire that would attract mosquitoes and sheriffs. So we were liable more or less to trichina and insomnia, but still we were free from sewer gas and poll tax. We did not get our mail with much regularity, but we got a lick at some mighty ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... them at the middle. The muggy dog-day had been very oppressive, even out of doors; but here in the corridor, it was intolerable. To breathe in the horrible concoction of smells, was like drinking from a sewer; the lungs, even as they involuntarily took it in, strove spasmodically to close their passages against it. It was impossible for one unaccustomed to such an atmosphere, to breathe, save by gasps. ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... at the northern gate of the King's Park, thence running northways, is bounded on the left by the King's garden-wall, and the gutter, or kennel, in a line wherewith it crosses the High Street to the Watergate, and passing through the sewer, is bounded by the walls of the Tennis Court and Physic Gardens, etc. It then follows the wall of the churchyard, joins the north west wall of St Ann's Yards, and going east to the clackmill-house, turns southward to the turnstile in the King's Park wall, and includes the whole ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... ourselves that we weren't looking at the whole of it. Poppa acknowledged that his tendency to compare it unfavourably, in spite of the verdict of history, with Chicago was checked by a smell from the Cloaca Maxima, which proved that the Ancient Romans probably enjoyed enteric and sewer gas quite as much as we do, although under names that are to be found only in dictionaries now. Mrs. Malt said the place surprised her in being so yellow—she had always imagined pictures of it to have been taken in the sunset, but now she saw that it was perfectly natural. ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... a gang of over two hundred of these I-talian Blackhanders working right now on a sewer job something about two miles up the road. That's how I know,' he says. 'That's plain enough, ain't it? It's as plain as the back of my hand. What chance would them two defenceless little children have with a ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... just before midnight to post them in the nearest pillar-box. And that was all that ever came of it. In his own words: he might just as well have dropped them all properly addressed and stamped into the sewer grating. ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... yet transforming the gutters into yellow torrents rushing toward the openings of the sewer, but covering the streets with thick, black mud, over which ...
— Zibeline, Complete • Phillipe de Massa
... called Holborn Bars; from whence it passes with many turnings and windings by the south end of Brook Street, Furnival's Inn, Leather Lane, the south end of Hatton Garden, Ely House, Field Lane, and Chick Lane, to the common sewer; then to Cow Cross, and so to Smithfield Bars; from whence it runs with several windings between Long Lane and Charterhouse Lane to Goswell Street, and so up that street northward to ...
— London in 1731 • Don Manoel Gonzales
... and with it the gurgling of the old woman. It was impossible and incredible, that mingling in the fetid air of those two sounds, as if the babble of clear spring water had suddenly broken into and merged with the turgid roll of a city sewer. Mick sat up. "But this is bloody!" ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... a black rat, as black as jet, shark-jawed, star-eyed, elfin-eared, snake-tailed, lean, long-legged, and graceful—a very greyhound among the rats. He was there, in that dancing-floor of the winds by the estuary, because no common or sewer rats were there. They were anathema to him, and they were worse—death in many horrible forms. He had been there all the summer, all the autumn, and all the—— No, by whiskers! he was not going to remain there all the winter. He had his limit, and he hated cold; and here, down by ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... the sewer in the antechamber at the other end of the room had given a signal to one waiting at the head of the stair leading down to the hall, and his lordship was hardly seated, ere—although the kitchen was at the corner of the pitched court diagonally opposite—he bore ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... out-swear him sometimes in order to keep him in his allegiance to me his general: nay, I often check myself to myself, for this empty unprofitable liberty of speech; in which we are outdone by the sons of the common-sewer. ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... Kingfisher (Alcedo ispida), the most gay in colour of all our birds, may still sometimes be seen, darting about the only rivulet which we can boast of at Woodhall, and which rejoices in the unattractive name of “The Sewer,” {46b} although its water, welling up at its source near Well Syke Wood, is beautifully clear and pure. The occurrence, however, of the bird here is rare. An old inhabitant of Kirkby assures me that it is not uncommon on the river Bain, in that parish; ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... made, with a view to the preparation of working specifications for use in Government construction, of bricks, tile, sand-lime brick, paving brick, sewer pipe, roofing slates, flooring tiles, cable conduits, electric insulators, architectural terra cotta, fire-brick, and all shapes of refractories and other clay products, regarding which no satisfactory data for the preparation ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXX, Dec. 1910 • Herbert M. Wilson
... kings mageste, nor even the empowr, should ponnysh any vylayn. Because, say they, peples in general, as well as peplys in particular (that is, yehe man and his ayers), hath an aunchant and ondowghted right to do his dessyer attonys. "Yea sewer," said a myry fellawe (for such as be myrie will make myrye jests)—"even as good right as a pertre to yield peres, and praty pygys to ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 460 - Volume 18, New Series, October 23, 1852 • Various
... way along the ingeniously twisted avenues to the Johnston house. But finally she reached the two-story-and-attic wooden box, which was set in a little grove of maple trees. Two other houses were going up across the street, and a trench for a new sewer had been opened obstructively. At this period of belated spring Bryn Mawr was not a charming spot. Unfinished edges left by the landscape gardener and the contractor showed pitilessly against the leafless, scrubby trees and the rolling muddy fields beyond. It was all covered ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... and ridden them bare-back around the fields, in a kind of Buffalo Bill style, you know. I got "nabbed" occasionally, and then I was candidly told that if I continued "ta dew sich a dangerous thing ony more, ah sud be sewer to catch it." ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... was commenced towards the canal. But it quickly struck a sewer whose odor was more than the workers could endure. It was abandoned, and a tunnel begun eastward, the most difficult part of it being to make an opening in the thick foundation wall. The hope of liberty, however, ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... all her own and her neighbors' children sickening about her would walk miles in a burst shoe to fetch the doctor or a big bottle of medicine, but she won't walk three yards farther than usual to draw her house- water from the well that the sewer doesn't leak into. That is a fact, not a fable; and, in the cases I am thinking of, all medical remonstrance was vain. Uneducated people will take any thing in from the doctor through their mouths, but little or ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... listened to the strains of richest melody, he noticed one of the lights—Saint Peter—change from white to red, and then, as silence fell, speak, enraged at the worldliness of the Holy See. "My cemetery has been made a sewer of blood and stench. When thou returnest to earth, reveal what thou hast heard. Do not thou conceal what I have ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... to the King, He made this pretext, that his princedom lay Close on the borders of a territory, Wherein were bandit earls, and caitiff knights, Assassins, and all flyers from the hand Of Justice, and whatever loathes a law: And therefore, till the King himself should please To cleanse this common sewer of all his realm, He craved a fair permission to depart, And there defend his marches; and the King Mused for a little on his plea, but, last, Allowing it, the Prince and Enid rode, And fifty knights rode with them, to the shores Of Severn, and they ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... course of Triffitt's brief and fairly glorious journalistic career, he had enjoyed and suffered a few startling experiences. He had been fastened up in the darker regions of a London sewer in flood, wondering if he would ever breathe the fine air of Fleet Street again or go down with the rats that scurried by him. He had been down a coal-mine in the bad hour which follows an explosion. He had several times risked his neck; his limbs had often been ...
— The Herapath Property • J. S. Fletcher
... isn't half the woman she was since you took her into the valley. You don't look any better for it, either. No, sir, believe me, beauty's all very well, but it's not good to live with—And, by the way, have you had your well looked at lately? That valley is just a beautiful sewer for the drainage of the hills; a very market-town for all the germs and bacilli of ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... then removed the beautiful white cloth, which covered a variety of fruits and other eatables. Grace was said by one in a student's dress, and a laced bib was placed by a page under Sancho's chin. Another, who performed the office of sewer, now set a plate of fruit before him; but he had scarcely tasted it, when, on being touched by the wand-bearer, it was snatched away, and another containing meat instantly supplied its place. Yet before Sancho could make a beginning it vanished, ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... tunic, a purple toga, and twelve axes in as many bundles of rods. He made a reform of the laws. He built the temple of Jupiter, or the Capitol, laid out the forum for a market-place, made a great sewer to drain the lower valleys of the city, leveled a race-course between the Aventine and Palatine hills, and introduced games like those of the Etruscans. Tarquinius was killed by the sons of Ancus; and Servius Tullius (578-534 B.C.), the son of Ocrisia, ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... and most depraved description, and no other tenants could indeed have been found to make their dwelling there; as in addition to the squalor of the buildings themselves, the deeply-sunk and humid soil, which in fact formed an open sewer that drained the adjacent streets, supported several permanent gibbets arranged in the form of a cross; while the thoroughfares by which it was approached were foul and fetid lanes, breathing nothing save disease ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... Jonathan is going to turn it into a colossal mill-sewer. So make hay while the sun shines, or rather when the rain ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... Spain, hast thou not fruitful Afric nigh? And has she not in sooth offended more Than Italy? yet her to scathe, that high, And noble, enterprize wilt thou give o'er. Alas! thou sleepest, drunken Italy, Of every vice and crime the fetid sewer! Nor grievest, as a hand-maid, to obey, In turn, the nations that have owned ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... constructing the barricades amicably, without angering any one. They do what they can not to annoy the neighborhood. The combatants of the Bourg-Labbe barricades are ankle-deep in mud on account of the rain. It is a perfect sewer. They hesitate to ask for a truss of straw. They lie down in the water ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... with boards and cross pieces of wood, such as is often used when a sewer is dug through the streets, and again wicker-work, or jute bagging, might be used to hold ...
— Ned, Bob and Jerry on the Firing Line - The Motor Boys Fighting for Uncle Sam • Clarence Young
... village called Marly upon the slope of one of its hills. This closeness, without drain or the means of having any, was the sole merit of the valley. The King was overjoyed at his discovery. It was a great work, that of draining this sewer of all the environs, which threw there their garbage, and of bringing soil thither! The hermitage was made. At first, it was only for sleeping in three nights, from Wednesday to Saturday, two or three times a-year, with a dozen at the outside of courtiers, to fill ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... doors fast, so as to give him time to make his escape. After vainly trying to break the bars of the windows, he suddenly remembered that there was a vault running beneath the apartment, which was used as a common sewer; whereupon he seized the tongs, raised a plank in the floor, and let himself down. This vault had formerly led out into the court of the convent; but, most unfortunately, he had only a few days before ordered this opening to be walled up, because, when playing ...
— Stories and Legends of Travel and History, for Children • Grace Greenwood
... whir of wheels, the wheeze of brakes, the tremor of machinery, the rumble of cab, the clatter of hoof-beat, the cry of child and hackman, the haunting murmur of millions like the moan of the sea borne on breezes winged with the odours of saloon and kitchen, stable and sewer—the crash of a storm of brute forces on the senses, tearing the nerves, crushing the spirit, bruising the soul, and strangling the memory of a ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... upon him," said the adjutator; "so give me a napkin that I may look like a sewer, and fetch up the food which I directed ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... the principle lead to this conclusion that every Christian man must have his box at theatre or opera. It by no means follows that such a course would produce the desired effect. It would be just about as pertinent to argue that because a sewer in a certain street needed cleansing, and because a proper array of men and buckets and brooms would cleanse it, therefore every man and woman on the streets, grave doctors of divinity, stately Mr. Dombey, Flora McFlimsey and Edmund Sparkler, should each shoulder ...
— Amusement: A Force in Christian Training • Rev. Marvin R. Vincent.
... too, are settling down into unkempt grounds with dilapidated porches and blinds. Such eyesores as one finds on the trolley-lines in any direction! They may have town-water supply, or they may depend on wells, but they are frequently without sewer-connection. ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... have another book, too, which I shall call 'Metamorphoses, or the Spanish Ovid,' one of rare and original invention, for imitating Ovid in burlesque style, I show in it who the Giralda of Seville and the Angel of the Magdalena were, what the sewer of Vecinguerra at Cordova was, what the bulls of Guisando, the Sierra Morena, the Leganitos and Lavapies fountains at Madrid, not forgetting those of the Piojo, of the Cano Dorado, and of the Priora; and all ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... of dyke punctuated at intervals by an infinitesimal village. Glancing idly at the names of these villages, I noticed that they most of them ended in siel—a repulsive termination, that seemed appropriate to the whole region. There were Carolinensiel, Bensersiel, etc. Siel means either a sewer or a sluice, the latter probably in this case, for I noticed that each village stood at the outlet of a little stream which evidently carried off the drainage of the lowlands behind. A sluice, or lock, would be necessary at the mouth, for at high tide the land is below the level of the sea. ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... this dear world of living things, his throbbing horse beneath him, the birds and beasts round him, and this gallant girl swaying and rejoicing too beside him! What a contrast was all this to that terrible afternoon, only a few hours away—of suspense and skulking like a rat in a sewer; in a dark, close passage underground breathing death and silence round him! An escape with the fresh air in the face and the glorious galloping music of hoofs is another matter to an escape contrived by holding the breath and fearing to move in a mean hiding-hole. And as all this flooded ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... children and home and all outward decency, but every characteristic of truth and honesty and manhood of his own soul. A man, who through self-indulgence and the incessant yielding to unspeakable desires, had become little better than a human sewer, through whom the slime and indescribable filth of fallen and degraded humanity found its unhindered course. A human being, who had become a lazar spot, a walking pest, whose inmost thought rotted and putrified his own mind; and whose words without license were a poison ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... it in crude language. It is the view that appeals to the criminal mind, and in the slang of French criminals the brothel is le cloaque. It was also the view implicitly accepted by medieval ascetic writers, who regarded woman as "a temple built over a sewer," and from a very different standpoint it was concisely set forth by Montaigne, who has doubtless contributed greatly to support this view of the matter: "I find," he said, "that Venus, after all, is nothing more than the pleasure of discharging our vessels, just as nature renders pleasurable ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... more unsightly stable with a pig-sty attached. All the space between the house and vineyard, in every direction, was strewn with corncobs and remnants of haystacks, while straw and manure were banked against the house to keep the cellar warm. In front was a walled sewer, through which the town on the hill was drained, for the Livelies' new home was on "the Flat," as the lower town is called. The view from the front took in only a dreary hillside ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... was crimson velvet, and his horse's trapper purple velvet cut on white satin, embroidered with white lions. The Earl of Oxford was High Chamberlain; the Earl of Essex, carver; the Earl of Sussex, sewer; the Earl of Arundel, chief butler; on whom 12 citizens of London did give their attendance at the cupboard; the Earl of Derby, cup-bearer; the Viscount Lisle, panter; the Lord Burgeiny, chief larder; the Lord Broy, almoner for him and his copartners; and ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... after this event, he left the house for the first time, in his repaired cabriolet, when, as he drove down the rue de Bourgogne and was close to the sewer opposite to the Chamber of Deputies, the axle-tree broke in two, and the baron was driving so rapidly that the breakage would have caused the two wheels to come together with force enough to break his head, had it not been for the resistance of the leather hood. Nevertheless, he was ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... robber wouldn't try the wall," said the old man, turning to look at it. "I've often wondered though that no one ever thought of the sewer out there;" and the old man marked a line in the air with his pipe-stem as though tracing the direction of the great street drain that ran beneath ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... 'em in their teeth. I don't. But that's not saying that I'm no good. You know the old gag of the lion and the little mousie, and how the mouse came along and chewed the lion out of the net. Well, that's me. I'm no lion going 'round seeking whom I may devour.' I'm just a sewer rat. But I can tell you all," he cried, slapping the table with his hand, "that, if it hadn't been for little mousie, every one of you lions would have been shot against a stone wall. And if I can't prove it, you can take a shot at me. I've been the ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis |
