"Backwater" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... man thought Norma never knew or cared. The surprising blankness of the disappointment made her almost dizzy; she turned aside blindly, and stumbled into the quiet backwater behind a stairway, where she could recover her self-possession and endure unobserved the first pangs of bitterness. It seemed to her that she would die if she could not see Wolf, if she had to endure another minute of loneliness ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... between them and the creek, Laramie prudently said nothing. It was the worst of the journey. Two stretches were filled with backwater. Across these they cautiously waded and swam the horses. When they gained high ground adjoining the creek, Kate breathed more freely. There was a halt for reconnaissance. For this, Laramie and Hawk, after placing Kate where she would be safe whether they should come ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... on my own. Declared it myself, waged it myself, ended it myself. Each of those nicks is for a slave murderer—a good row of them—what? That big one is for Pedro Lopez, the king of them all, that I killed in a backwater of the Putomayo River. Now, here's something that would do for you." He took out a beautiful brown-and-silver rifle. "Well rubbered at the stock, sharply sighted, five cartridges to the clip. You can trust ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... many of their stores as they could. But it was not possible to go bargaining for narwhal ivory, as the flood made their destination inaccessible, so they turned back instead, and started to row up a little backwater called the off-creek, which in summer was too tiny to admit of the passage of even a small boat, but was swollen now to the size of a river. This waterway led straight past the unwholesome habitation of Oily Dave, which faced the main river, ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... night of ceaseless work, Henry Blaine, clear-eyed and alert of brain, was seated at his desk at the stroke of nine when Suraci was ushered in—the young detective who had trailed Walter Pennold from Brooklyn to the quiet backwater where Jimmy Brunell had sought in vain for disassociation from his ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... his sentimental journey, and how he found all the creations of his childhood's imagination still so alive and kicking in a forgotten backwater of his mind that they all hopped out and took objective form—the sprites, the starlight express, the boundless world ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... external fortunes that kept them apart, though they never held together after the death of Brentano's wife in 1806, but that each projected his individuality into his literary work rather than into a common polemic ideal. The path-finding and discovery had already been done; in the quieter backwater it was possible to develop well-rounded ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... Story is one of those books which, for some reason or other, have failed to come down to us, as they deserved, along the current of time, but have drifted into a literary backwater where only the professional critic or the curious discoverer can find them out. "The iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy;" and nowhere more blindly than in the republic of letters. If we were to inquire how it has happened that the true value of Mrs. ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... was over and the unrest grew too strong to be fought, he crept down the black, creaking stairs, through the sleeping backwater of Drayton Mews, and out into the streets. He walked fast, with his head down, guiltily, like a man flying from a crime. But in the grave square where Francey Wilmot lived he slackened speed, and, under the thick mantle of the trees, stood so still that he was only a deeper shadow. ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... Opulence, inflated and moderate, had gone out of town: the former to its country-house, or a foreign hotel; the latter to lodgings at the seaside to bathe out of machines and prey on shrimps. The lull that reigned in and about Sapps Court was no doubt a sort of recoil or backwater from other neighbourhoods, with high salaries or real and personal estate, whose dwellings were closed and not being properly ventilated by their caretakers. It reacted on business there, every bit as much as in Oxford Street; and that was how Tapping's ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... to the corner of the drive, shut off the view to or from the road. Somehow, the whole yard, with its peace and quiet and sunshine and shadow, and above all, its retirement, made a great appeal. It seemed so homelike, so shut away, so comforting, like a sheltered little backwater where a storm-beaten craft might ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... first, and was nearly upset. Natural intelligence, however, and the remembrance of talks to which he had listened between men of his tribe who had already visited the place, taught him to keep close in to the banks, and make as much use of eddies and backwater as possible. The double-bladed paddle hampered him somewhat, as its great length, which was no disadvantage in the open sea, prevented him from keeping as close to the banks as he desired. Despite these drawbacks, however, Raventik soon acquired sufficient ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... state-reforming type; Cecrops, Erechtheus, Theseus, are not splendid, flashing, all-conquering figures like Achilles and Agamemnon. Athens might, it would seem, but for the coming of Homer, have lain stagnant in a backwater of conservatism, content to go on chanting her traditional Spring Songs year by year. It is a wonderful thing that this city of Athens, beloved of the gods, should have been saved from the storm and stress, sheltered from what might have ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... received, this is simply because the image before him was so rounded and stamped. It expressed with pure perfection, it exhausted its character. It was so absolutely and so unconsciously what it was. He had been floated by the strangest of chances out of the rushing stream into a clear still backwater—a deep and quiet pool in which objects were sharply mirrored. He had hitherto in life known nothing that was old except a few statues and pictures; but here everything was old, was immemorial, and nothing so much so as the very freshness itself. Vaguely ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... by Lyly's strange weakness for conceited style. Everybody speaks in antitheses, and the intolerable fancy similes, drawn from a kind of imaginary natural history, are sometimes as prominent as in Euphues itself. Lyly's theatre represents, in short, a mere backwater in the general stream of dramatic progress, though not a few allusions in other men's work show us that it attracted no small attention. With Nash alone, of the University Wits proper, was Lyly connected, and this ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... — N. regress, regression; retrocession^, retrogression, retrograduation^, retroaction; reculade^; retreat, withdrawal, retirement, remigration^; recession &c (motion from) 287; recess; crab-like motion. refluence^, reflux; backwater, regurgitation, ebb, return; resilience reflection, reflexion [Brit.] (recoil) 277; flip-flop, volte-face [Fr.]. counter motion, retrograde motion, backward movement, motion in reverse, counter movement, counter march; veering, tergiversation, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... had dropped the word Woody Island, and a day on Woody Island was a work of art. It lay a couple of miles above the town, long and narrow, formed with a division of the river into its main current and a sluggish backwater. It was covered with dense brushwood, except where here and there a patch of green turf was left bare, and the island was indented with little bays where the river rippled on clean sand and gravel. It was only a little island, but yet you ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... so bad, though, of course, we're in a backwater here," said Lowell. "An Indian reservation gives you a queer feeling that way. The tides of civilization are racing all around, but here ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... search of the craft's tiny cabins and forecastle, they were invited to sample a bottle of choice Madeira, on some four or five dozen of which Leslie willingly paid duty. The next day her sails were unbent and she was taken up the Backwater and laid up, in charge of Simpson; and a month or two later her ballast was taken out of her and stowed away in a shed under which she also was hauled up. A certain portion of this ballast was soon afterwards packed up somewhat carefully ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... yelled at the men still near the edge of the hole. "When it comes over it's going to blow and backwater." ...
— The Thirst Quenchers • Rick Raphael
... seems to have proceeded until Ibsen reached his twenty-first year. In this quiet backwater of a seaport village the passage of time was deliberate, and the development of hard-worked apothecaries was slow. Ibsen's nature was not in any sense precocious, and even if he had not languished in so lost a corner of society, it is unlikely that he would have started prematurely in life ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... we contrived to get into a creek, or backwater, near the Major's gate. Here the men ran the boat up, and we all climbed out, stiff, battered, and terrified, but doing our best to ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... who would not shirk the difficulties of the subject, it is unnecessary here to dwell further on a career which belongs to the history of morbid psychology rather than of painting. After drifting from the stream of social existence into a Bohemian backwater, he found himself in the main sewer. This he thoroughly enjoyed in his own particular way, and rejected fiercely all attempts at rescue or reform. To his other old friends, such as Burne-Jones and Sir Edward Poynter, there must have been something very tragic in ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... mood, or in a fearful or foreboding mood. In truth, bile is the prolific mother of moods. The stream of life flows through the biliary duct. When that is obstructed, life is obstructed. When the golden tide sets back upon the liver, it is like backwater under a mill; it stops the driving-wheel. Bile spoils the peace of families, breaks off friendships, cuts off man from communion with his Maker, colors whole systems of theology, transforms brains into putty, and destroys the ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... thinking of are alongside a stately old French mill, built, towered, and gabled, of fine grey stone; and the image of them brings up in my mind, with the draught and foam of the weir and the glassiness of the backwater, and the whirr of the horse-ferry's ropes, that some of the most delightful moments which one's bicycle can give, are those when the bicycle is resting against a boat's side (once also in Exmouth harbour); or chained to an old lych-gate; or, as I remarked about ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... though the boat contained three times their own number. It is good to read how they wiped out all but those who escaped in terror by swimming! At last only fourteen of the English were left alive and they got hopelessly penned in a backwater. These men charged the army of Sepoys on the banks and made them keep their distance. They secured themselves in a tiny temple on the margin of the river and killed all who approached. At length, seeing preparations made for blowing them up with gunpowder, ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... launches nor lawns tempt him that pursueth the rural Pan. In the hushed recesses of Hurley backwater where the canoe may be paddled almost under the tumbling comb of the weir, he is to be looked for; there the god pipes with freest abandonment. Or under the great shadow of Streatley Hill, "annihilating all that's made to a green thought in a green shade''; or better yet, pushing ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... was a shabby little house standing by itself on the bank where boats could be hired, for they had put in there once to replace an oar, having lost one down a weir in the neighborhood. The weir had not been on the main stream, but they had come upon it in exploring a backwater. It ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... There was too much he couldn't understand. Moreover, he was a lone wolf. Had been since the Second Interplanetary War wrenched him from the quiet backwater of his country home an eternity of eight years before and hammered him into hardness—a cynic who trusted nobody and nothing but Mel ...
— A World is Born • Leigh Douglass Brackett
... "Americanisms" of older parts of the country, including Virginia and New England, are Elizabethan. The early English and French colonists, coming to this country with the language of their times, dropped, over here, into a linguistic backwater. In the mother countries language continued to renew itself as it flowed along, by elisions, by the adoption and legitimatizing of slang words (as for instance the word "cab," to which Dean Swift objected on the ground ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... the edge of a lagoon of yellow water, whose main current was the thoroughfare he was seeking, and between whose houses, submerged to their first stories, a steamboat was really paddling. Other boats and rafts were adrift on its sluggish waters, and a boatman had just landed a passenger in the backwater of the lower half of the street on which he ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... when Americans were unpopular, and the theory was broached that for fear of missing the chance to be rude to an American the Japanese became rude to all outlanders indiscriminately. One indeed gathered the impression that, except in Kyoto, which is a backwater, foreigners are no longer wanted. "Japan for the Japanese" would seem to be the motto: one day, not far distant, to be amended to "The World for Japan." I shall never forget the humiliation I suffered ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... backwater of traffic, and was very silent. He disliked dogs, but a dog even would have been company. His gaze, travelling round the walls, rested on a picture entitled: 'Group of Dutch fishing boats at sunset'; the chef d'oeuvre ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... everything and every one he cared about, and mingled with it there was little good, and that good purely accidental, the result of fortuitous circumstances. He knew that until the war broke out he had lived in a backwater of life, himself and Myra, contented, happy, untried by adversity. Once swung out of that backwater they had been swept away, powerless to know where they went, to guess what ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... suppose, then, you get into one of these, or perhaps stumble on an unknown land up by the Pole and remain lying fast there, how will you extricate yourselves?' To this I would merely reply, as concerns the backwater, that we must get out of it just as surely as we got into it, and that we shall have provisions for five years. And as regards the other possibility, we should hail such an occurrence with delight, for no spot on earth ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... "It'll be something of a bother packing but it'll certainly be a pleasure to get back to New Chicago. Some women's husbands get good posts in half-way civilized parts of the Universe. I don't know why I should always have to be stuck in every backwater, hick ...
— Narakan Rifles, About Face! • Jan Smith
... Ivanovitch. "I'm so dirty. I'm afraid to touch you. I've been so busy, I didn't know when I should be able to tear myself away. And so you're still as ever enjoying your peaceful, quiet happiness," he said, smiling, "out of the reach of the current in your peaceful backwater. Here's our friend Fyodor Vassilievitch who has succeeded in getting ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... Jaffery left us with a "See you as soon as ever I get back," and the day after that he sailed for China. We felt sad; not only because Jaffery's vitality counted for something in the quiet backwater of our life, but also because we knew that he went away a less happy man than he had come. This time it was not sheer Wanderlust that had driven him into the wilderness. He had fled in the blind hope of escaping from the unescapable. The ogre ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... looked indescribably desolate, and yet there was a certain beauty in it, too. I had been told exactly how to reach the House by the Lock, and when, after passing the somewhat weedy-looking lock, I began skirting along a species of backwater, and came in sight of a long, low-browed house close to the river, I knew I had reached ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... social landmarks of the year, the feeling of exile might not be very crushing, might indeed be lost in the sense of change and adventure. But Comus had lived too thoroughly in the centre of things to regard life in a backwater as anything else than stagnation, and stagnation while one is young he justly regarded as an offence against nature and reason, in keeping with the perverted mockery that sends decrepit invalids touring painfully about the world and shuts panthers up in narrow cages. He was being put aside, as a ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... precipitately, to induce an analogy; and it seemed to me, at the time, as if I had forsaken the roar and tumble of the hoarse, tumultuous world, for the inland disassociated peace of an unaware and loitering backwater. ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... in the shadow of a doorway on the Opposite side of the street, staring intently up at the Museum windows. It was a tropically hot afternoon and they stood in deepest shadow. No one else was in Orchard Street—that odd little backwater—at the time, and they stood gazing upward intently and gave me not even a ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... the water front of Quebec. It stood in a backwater where the busy tide of seafaring traffic passed it by. But it was sufficiently adjacent to permit its clientele swift and convenient access to the docks, at once a safety valve and the source of ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... winding about islands and through fields in which stood solitary poplar-trees, formerly haunts of Corot and Daubigny. I could see the spots where they had set their easels—that slight rise with the solitary poplar for Corot, that rich river bank and shady backwater for Daubigny. Soon after I saw the first weir, and then the first hay-boat; and at every moment the river grew more serene, more gracious, it passed its arms about a flat, green-wooded island, on which there was a rookery; and sometimes we saw it ahead of us, looping up the verdant landscape as ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... important first night in London, my inherent weakness for obscure studies and another motive to which I may refer later had caused me to abandon my chambers in the Temple and to retire with my library to this odd little backwater where my only link with Fleet Street, with the land of theaters and clubs and noise and glitter, was the telephone. I scarcely need add that I had sufficient private means to enable me to indulge these whims, otherwise as a working journalist I must have been content ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... kind of backwater of the great river of town life which swept past its entrance with speed and clamour without disturbing the peace within. One long, narrow street led from a roaring thoroughfare into a silent quadrangle of tall ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... found a small bridge had gone out. It cut off the direct road, and, at Elpaso's suggestion, they crossed over to follow the ridge up the valley. Swimming their horses through the backwater that covered the depression to the south, they gained the elevation and proceeded, unmolested, on their way. As they approached Sassoon's place, Elpaso, riding ahead, drew up his horse and sat a moment studying the trail and casting an occasional glance in ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... trooping back from those long-forgotten days of old, each with its appeal to that underself alone; which she, the old Phoebe of this living world, suspected only to disallow! How she might have let the memories of the old mill and the ever-running wheels; of the still backwater where she failed to see the heron she could even now hear her sister's sweet voice calling to her to come—come quickly to!—or she would miss it; of that dear vanished sister's sweet beauty she could dwell upon, forgetful that it also was her own,—how she might have let these memories ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... flowers, down a little narrow street on the south side of the Strand. Many people must have noticed these things, few have had the curiosity to explore further; yet it is well worth while to get down from omnibus or cab and venture into this little backwater of the Savoy. Between eleven and one, and two and four o'clock every day the garden gate is open, and the verger is in the chapel, ready to answer questions. The little graveyard garden, with its waving trees, is a ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... of smooth backwater just in the wake of the island, they drove their canoes up by main force, and fastened them safely by the side of the Indian's, while Amyas, always the foremost, sprang boldly on shore, whispering to the Indian boy to ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... Kumprasi, a few huts close to the embouchure of the iron-bedded Avin streamlet and backwater. The little zinc-roofed hut, called by courtesy a store, belonging to Messieurs Swanzy, was closed. Katubwe, the northern hill on the left bank, had been bought, together with Akromasi Point and the Avin valley, by the late M. Bonnat, who cleared it and began ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... Station. Moreover, there was little of interest in the monotony of camping in lonely places for a young girl to whom her mother wished to give every opportunity of settling in life, whatever might be her own ideas respecting a vocation. Muktiarbad, though a rural backwater of Bengal, and pronounced by the gay-minded, a penal settlement, had matrimonial possibilities not to be despised by anxious parents with daughters to be ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... quiet, as only a backwater of London can be. Occasional hoots from far-away tugs and steamers told of the busy life down below in the crowded Pool. A faint hum of traffic was borne in from the streets outside the precincts, and ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... quietest part of Wainwright; business stopped short of it, and the "fashionable residence section" had overleaped this "forgotten backwater," leaving it undisturbed and unchanging, with that look about it which is the quality of few urban quarters, and eventually of none, as a town grows to be a city—the look of still being a neighborhood. This friendliness ...
— Beasley's Christmas Party • Booth Tarkington
... banked up. The yellow water of the Sobat forms a distinct line as it cuts through the clear water of the main river, and the floating rafts of vegetation brought down by the White Nile, instead of continuing their voyage, are headed back, and remain helplessly in the backwater. The sources of the Sobat are still a mystery; but there can be no doubt that the principal volume must be water of mountain origin, as it is coloured by earthy matter, and is quite unlike the marsh water of the White Nile. The expeditions ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... first talk in Harley Street," said Sir Richmond, "I have been trying myself over in my mind. (We can drift down this backwater.)" ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... in all the chances at a glance, and sped off across the narrow neck to the mainland, tore along the cliff round Pegane and Port a la Jument, then away past the head of Saut de Juan, and down the cliff-side to where the black shelves overhang the backwater of the Gouliot. ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... the belief in her own power. He had faced his difficulties bravely enough, but he had not had the courage to hope; therein lay his weakness, and this girl, this princess, had shown it to him. He had allowed himself to drift into a backwater; it was time he pulled out into the stream again, and fought his way back to his rightful place, inch by inch, against whatever ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner
... Abbey Mill. The feet of the hills are clothed by Wittenham Wood, and above the wood stretches the weir, and round to the west, on another great loop of the river, is Long Wittenham and its lovely backwater. Even in winter, when the snow is falling like bags of flour, and the river is chinking with ice, there is plenty to see and learn, or in the floods, when the water roars through the lifted hatches and the rush of the river throbs across the misty flats, and ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... lads rejoiced over their mission. It was better to ride ahead than to remain with an army that was pulling itself along slowly through the mud. The fort itself was only about three miles away, and as it stood upon low, marshy ground, the backwater from the flooded Tennessee had almost ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... not always keeping its equilibrium, was edged away both across and down the stream. At last it began to move more slowly, and Sakalar found himself under the shelter of a huge iceberg, and then impelled up stream by a backwater current. In a few minutes the ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various
... said Temple; and the tale began. By the time it was ended the boat was at a standstill on the little backwater below the pretties ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... feasibility of the scheme, but nevertheless he decided to give it a trial. Setting to work with our axes, we soon had a raft built, lashing the poles together with the fibre which grows in abundance all over the district. When it was finished, we pushed it out of the little backwater where it had been constructed, and the young engineer jumped aboard. All went well until it got out into midstream, when much to my amusement it promptly toppled gracefully over. I helped my friend to scramble quickly up the ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... up from his novel. He kept reading a few pages and then looking up in a curiously methodical manner, and each time he looked up he took a few cherries out of the bag and ate them abstractedly. Other boats passed them, crossing the backwater from side to side to avoid each other, for many were now moored, and there were now white dresses and a flaw in the column of air between two trees, round which curled a thread of blue—Lady Miller's picnic party. Still more boats kept ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... contractor for the use of invalids and others who may wish to enjoy the pure Dartmoor air. Tavistock itself lies two miles to the west, while across the moor, also about two miles distant, is the larger training establishment of Mapleton, which belongs to Lord Backwater, and is managed by Silas Brown. In every other direction the moor is a complete wilderness, inhabited only by a few roaming gypsies. Such was the general situation last Monday night when the ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... ships of the Jomsborg vikings were both larger, and higher in the gunwale, than were those of Earl Hakon, but nevertheless were they boldly beset from both sides. Vagn Akason pressed the ships of Svein Hakonson so hard that Svein let his men backwater & came nigh to fleeing, whereupon Earl Eirik came up into his place & thrust himself into the battle against Vagn, and Vagn backed his ship, and the craft lay again as they ...
— The Sagas of Olaf Tryggvason and of Harald The Tyrant (Harald Haardraade) • Snorri Sturluson
... the end of Rotten Row, Mark Ashburn continued his walk alone through Kensington High Street and onwards, until he came to one of those quiet streets which serve as a sort of backwater to the main stream of traffic, and, turning down this, it was not long before he reached a row of small three-story houses, with their lower parts cased in stucco, but the rest allowed to remain in the original yellow-brown ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... part of a stifling night moored under a mud-bank with a grove of trees on top from which gigantic fire-flies hung as though the place were illuminated for a garden fete, and then, rowing on again in the comparatively cool hours before dawn, turned into a backwater at cock-crow. ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... and call it ennui, and it may drive you to commit peccadillos and indiscretions of various sorts. You may be attacked in a middle-class apartment house, and call it various names, and it may drive you to cafe life and affinities and alimony. You may have it wherever you are shunted into a backwater of life, and lose the sense of being borne along in the full current of progress. Be sure that it will make you abnormally sensitive to little things; irritable where once you were amiable; glum where once you went whistling about ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... of a privateer owned by Cullerne adventurers. All these had long since sailed for their last port, and of ships nothing more imposing met the eye than the mast of Dr Ennefer's centre-board laid up for the winter in a backwater. Yet the scene was striking enough, and those who knew best said that nowhere in the town was there so fine an outlook as from the upper windows of the ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... ride round the lanes, when the brilliant alternative of the river darted into her mind. Of course, the river! Nothing could be more delightful. She set off at a trot, taking in her inexperience many wrong turnings, but arriving at last at the river, or rather the peaceful backwater of the river which bordered the Percival grounds. To Darsie's mind the spot was the most picturesque on the whole estate, and a good many people could be found ready to agree with her in the conclusion; for the backwater though narrow was bordered ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... that he had found a path under his feet,—a path that was on dry land in the summer-time. We followed it, feeling carefully, and at length, when we had suffered all that we could bear, we stumbled on to a dry ridge. Here we spent another night of torture, with a second backwater facing us coated with a full inch ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... of our men went out to some cabins on the bluff, about one quarter of a mile below the fort, to bring a grind-stone. The backwater of the Mississippi, rendered it so they went in a canoe. On their return they were attacked by a party of Indians, supposed to be about fifty in number; they killed and tomahawked three and wounded one mortally. ...
— Great Indian Chief of the West - Or, Life and Adventures of Black Hawk • Benjamin Drake
... out of reach, but into a curious backwater, which eddied it right under the boat hook of the bowman. In an instant it was seized, and the line made fast to a thwart. 'I've a great mind to trust to it,' said Jarvist Arnold, but caution prevailed, and they made fast a stout rope to the ...
— Heroes of the Goodwin Sands • Thomas Stanley Treanor
... it. They were called wild when most of their wildness was exuberant vitality; their mistakes were magnified, their mad pranks exaggerated. If I'd been married to you, my dear, while Dick was growing up, I wouldn't have let you keep him here in this little backwater of life; he needed more room, more movement. They wouldn't have been so down on him in ...
— The Romance of a Christmas Card • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Lord Rawdon's letter of October 24, 1780. Clarke of Georgia had plundered a convoy of presents intended for the Indians, at Augusta, and the British wrongly supposed this to be likewise the aim of the mountaineers.] Riders spurring in hot haste brought word to the king's commanders that the backwater men had come over the mountains. The Indian fighters of the frontier, leaving unguarded their homes on the western waters, had crossed by wooded and precipitous defiles, and were pouring down to the help of ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... off, and listened to the sounds of a London morning. Their house was in Wickham Place, and fairly quiet, for a lofty promontory of buildings separated it from the main thoroughfare. One had the sense of a backwater, or rather of an estuary, whose waters flowed in from the invisible sea, and ebbed into a profound silence while the waves without were still beating. Though the promontory consisted of flats—expensive, with cavernous entrance halls, ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... politics and culture, the town to which Europeans compiling "impressions" of America devoted one of their longest chapters in the heyday of Elijah Pogram and Jefferson Brick. But the War between the States has changed all that, and Lichfield endures to-day only as a pleasant backwater. ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... spoons to complete the furnishing of my kitchen. As for the obstinate casing that wraps the coconut shell, it is an article of commerce. It must first be soaked for some months in a pit on the slimy bank of the backwater, until all the stuff that holds it together in a stiff and obdurate mass has rotted away and set free those hard and smooth fibres which nothing can rot. These, when thoroughly purged of the foul black pollution in which they have sweltered so long, will go out to all quarters of the ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... was done before my eyes without the visible agency of God or man! As I dropped him and took to the pole, the storm burst. A clap of thunder spoke with the voice of a thousand cannon, and I poled for bare life from that haunted backwater. I was drenched to the skin when I got in, and I ran up all the ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... matter in hand, and as Ann Penhallow said, with the West Point methods of kill or cure. John replied to the rector that he was now given leave to swim with the Westways boys. The pool was an old river-channel, now closed above, and making a quiet deep pool such as in England is called a "backwater" and in Canada a "bogan." The only access was through the Penhallow grounds, but ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell |
