"Clayey" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... gone, we looked at each other, and then without a word began to gaze after her. We saw her pick her dainty way in the little high-heeled shoes she always wore (because they had been in fashion in her youth), among the yellow pools of stagnant water that had gathered in the clayey soil. John Footman followed, stately, after; afraid too, for all his stateliness, of splashing his pure white stockings. Suddenly my lady turned round and said something to him, and he returned to the carriage with ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell
... through which the Onondaga Salt Group extends, is usually marked by a series of low, gravelly hills, and clayey valleys, on which a stunted growth of timber prevails, known by the name of 'Oak Openings.' Small portions of sulphate of strontia, galena, and blende, with rhomb spar, occur in the upper portion of the group. Gypsum and salt are, however, the only minerals of economical ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland
... know that it sends off to the west the Oxus and the Amou Daria, and to the east the Tarim; we know that it chiefly consists of primary rocks, in which are patches of schist and quartz, red sands of secondary age, and the clayey, sandy loess of the quaternary period which is so abundant in ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne
... dries up and cracks, the plants withering up: 1841, not considered as a dry year, gave only 8-1/2 inches of rain; but in 1831, one of the wettest, the moisture interfered with agriculture more than the drought does, saturating the soil, which rests on a deep impermeable clayey formation.' In April and May, when the snows melt, the steppe is a vast sea of mud, liable to be hardened by occasional frosts, until, as the season advances, myriads of crocuses, tulips, and hyacinths, cover the soil, which perhaps a few days ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 438 - Volume 17, New Series, May 22, 1852 • Various
... o'clock, and start at half-past nine; small plains alternate with a flat forest country, slightly timbered; melon-holes; marly concretions, a stiff clayey soil, beautifully grassed: the prevailing timber trees are Bastard box, the Moreton Bay ash, and the Flooded Gum. After travelling seven miles, in a north-west direction, we came on a dense Myal scrub, skirted by a chain of shallow water-holes. The scrub trending towards, and disappearing in, ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... its crossing, sandy, uneven roads; westward, where large rivulets run into the bays, extend marshes and meadow land, girdled with lofty sand-hills, which, like a row of Alps, raise their peaked summits towards the sea, only broken by the high clayey ridges, from which the waves year by year bite out huge mouthfuls, so that the impending shores fall down as if by the shock of an earthquake. Thus it is there to-day, and thus it was many, many years ago, when the happy pair were sailing ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... sense it denotes the lowest part of a thing, in contradistinction to the top or uppermost part. In navigation, it is used to denote as well the channel of rivers and harbours as the body or hull of a ship. Thus, in the former sense we say "a gravelly bottom, clayey bottom," &c., and in the latter sense "a British bottom, a Dutch bottom," &c. By statute, certain commodities imported in foreign bottoms pay a duty called "petty customs," over and above what they are liable to if imported in British bottoms. ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... it is better not to have manure in it; but very porous and very light it must be, especially for such small seeds as most flowers have. Such a soil may be mixed up from rotted sod (or garden loam), leaf-mould and sharp sand, used in equal proportions. If the loam used is clayey, it may take even a larger proportion of sand. The resulting mixture should be extremely fine and crumbling, and feel almost "light as a feather" in the hand. If the sod and mould have not already been ...
— Gardening Indoors and Under Glass • F. F. Rockwell
... weather has been very rough, and rain has been falling continually. I had the same weather in the Banks Islands; scarcely a day for weeks without heavy rain. Here the sandy soil soon becomes dry again, it does not retain the moisture, and so far it has the advantage over the very tenacious clayey soil of Mota. ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the University town is divided into patches of sandy and of clayey ground. The Common and the College green, near which the old house stands, are on one of the sandy patches. Four curses are the local inheritance: droughts, dust, mud, and canker-worms. I cannot but think that all the characters of a region help ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... summer! We traversed all day the plateau, now become an immeasurable plain. It slightly undulates in parts, but I think we continued to ascend. Some of the surface is wholly naked, having neither herbage or stones scattered about, being of a softish clayey soil, and printed in little diamond squares, like the dry bottom of a small lake on the sea-shore. This, I doubt not, is the action of the rain, which falls at long intervals. Other parts presented the usual black calcined stones, and sometimes pieces of the common limestone and ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... large areas covered by rocky mountains. The best lands lie mainly at the heads of inlets and mouths of the larger streams. There are occasional tracts of swampy lands containing a deep soft fibrous deposit resembling peat. A clayey subsoil was seen in a few places near Cape Ball on the east coast of ...
— Official report of the exploration of the Queen Charlotte Islands - for the government of British Columbia • Newton H. Chittenden
... on the other side of the dal-elv which the road now led us over for the third or fourth time. The picturesque bell-tower of red painted beams, erected at a distance from the church, rose above the tall trees on the clayey declivity: old willows hung gracefully over the rapid stream. The floating bridge rocked under us—nay, it even sank a little, so that the water splashed under the horse's hoofs; but these bridges have such ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... and the bulk of this has to be puddled and so disintegrated before the actual separation of the gold is attempted in the cradle or dish. This is done in the tub by constantly stirring with a shovel, and changing the water as it becomes charged with the floating argillaceous, or clayey, particles. The gravel is then placed in the hopper of the cradle which separates the larger stones and pebbles, the remainder passing down over inclined ledges as the cradle is slowly rocked and supplied with water. At the bottom of each ledge is a ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... say a few words on the Preparation of Soil. If the garden soil be clayey and adhesive, put on a covering of sand, three inches thick, and the same depth of well-rotted manure. Spade it in as deep as possible, and mix it well. If the soil be sandy and loose, spade in clay ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... star beams above my head to-night! How beautiful it appears in the azure vault of heaven where twilight holds the connecting link between day and night. Oh, if my soul were freed from its clayey fetters how swiftly it would fly (if such a journey were possible) to the boundaries of that sweet star! Can that fair planet, seemingly so pure and spotless, be inhabited by beings as frail and erring as ourselves? Can there be any sad souls there ...
— Canadian Wild Flowers • Helen M. Johnson
... Manisees, is an uplift of clayey moorland between Montauk and Gay Head. It was for sailors an evil place and "bad medicine" for Indians, for men who had been wrecked there had been likewise robbed and ill treated—though the honest islanders of to-day deny it—while the Indians had been driven from their birthright after ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... sense of mystery in the desert air breeds fables, chiefly of lost treasure. Somewhere within its stark borders, if one believes report, is a hill strewn with nuggets; one seamed with virgin silver; an old clayey water-bed where Indians scooped up earth to make cooking pots and shaped them reeking with grains of pure gold. Old miners drifting about the desert edges, weathered into the semblance of the tawny hills, will tell you tales like these convincingly. After a little ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... those whose soil of life is inclined to be a little clayey and heavy, is the apple a winter necessity. It is the natural antidote of most of the ills the flesh is heir to. Full of vegetable acids and aromatics, qualities which act as refrigerants and antiseptics, what an enemy ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... the English reader will naturally enquire. 'No, for the mountains are too sharp and rocky, and yet not nearly so barren as those of our principality.' 'Are we in the Pyrenees?' Certainly not; the vegetation is not so rich, few waterfalls are visible, and there is a slovenly appearance about the clayey or sandy surface, reddened here and there by ferruginous streamlets, and covered with weedy-looking brushwood which is quite at variance with the sloping gardens of the sunny south of France. Is the scenery Dolomitic? In a sense it is. The summits of the mountains are often ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... the North. Commandingly near on the left arose the Metropolitan Tower. The studio itself had an unfinished look, with its step-ladders and scaffolding and plaster-panels. In the midst of such ponderous affairs, stood a frail creature in a streaky blouse, exhibiting her clayey hands and smiling pensively. It was only when you looked at the figures in the panels, and at the models in clay, that Vina Nettleton appeared to belong to these matters of a contractor. Marguerite Grey ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... and a vein which runs across near its N. end. It is of that sort of stone called, by mineralogists, Saxum conglutinatum, and consists chiefly of pieces of coarse quartz and glimmer, held together by a clayey cement. But the vein which crosses it, though of the same materials, is much compacter. This vein is not above a foot broad or thick; and its surface is cut into little squares or oblongs, disposed obliquely, which makes it look like the remains ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... anchor on the Grand Banks; for the shore being low, appeared to be at a greater distance than it actually was, and we thought we might as well have staid at Santa Barbara, and sent our boat down for the hides. The land was of a clayey consistency, and, as far as the eye could reach, entirely bare of trees and even shrubs; and there was no sign of a town,—not even a house to be seen. What brought us into such a place, we could not conceive. No sooner had we come to anchor, than ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... relation to the magnitude of the particles. It is for this reason that ground covered with siliceous pebbles cools more slowly than siliceous sand, and that pebbly soils are best suited to the cultivation of the vine, because they advance the ripening of the grape more rapidly than chalky and clayey earths, which cool quickly. Hence we see that in examining the calorific effects of clearing forests, it is important to take into account the properties of the soil laid bare."—Becquerel, Des Climats et ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... in many instances it is only sixty to ninety days. The plants want their food ready at once; there is no time to be lost waiting for manure to rot in the soil. That is a slow process—especially so in clayey or heavy soils. So on your garden use only manure that is well rotted and broken up. On the other hand, see that it has not "fire-fanged" or burned out, as horse manure, if piled by itself and left, is very sure to do. If you keep any animals of your own, see ...
— Home Vegetable Gardening • F. F. Rockwell
... or awake, I have a way of always keeping my eyes shut, in order the more to concentrate the snugness of being in bed. Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey part. Upon opening my eyes then, and coming out of my own pleasant and self-created darkness into the imposed and coarse outer gloom of the unilluminated twelve-o'clock-at-night, I experienced a disagreeable revulsion. Nor did I at all object to the hint ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... situation. At other times, God may hide his face from those whom his soul loves, and cause them to go on their way sorrowing. Possibly this may continue to the close of life! But if it doth, the clouds are all dispersed at the moment of death, No sooner are the clayey tabernacles dissolved, than the veil is rent, and the brightness of celestial glory shines in upon them. Peace eternal and divine, is theirs forever. Clouds will no more hide God's face—Fears and doubts, no more distress ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee
... Well they might do so, for they seemed to have passed a melancholy winter in twig huts, now called "weeps," in a little paled enclosure, not only without the requisites of their order, but with barely bread to their teeth. There was no monastery, not even a plan of one. William FitzJohn and his clayey serfs scowled upon the shivering interlopers, uncertain what injustice might be done to them and to their fathers' homes, in sacrifices to the ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... talked with the melancholy amusement, the sad tolerance of age for the sort of men and things that used to excite us or enrage us; now we were far past turbulence or anger. Once we took a walk together across the yellow pastures to a chasmal creek on his grounds, where the ice still knit the clayey banks together like crystal mosses; and the stream far down clashed through and over the stones and the shards of ice. Clemens pointed out the scenery he had bought to give himself elbowroom, and showed me ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... to one inside slope, one and a half to one outside slope and twenty feet wide on top. The rock throughout was about one foot below the surface. The earth was pretty good material for such a dam, if it was to be built at all, being of a clayey nature, making good puddle. To this the fact of it standing intact since 1881 must be ascribed, as no engineer of standing would have ever tried to so construct it. The fact that the dam was a ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... prevails during those months; vegetation appears completely dead; and all birds of passage abandon the country. The landscape along the coast is alternately formed of naked hills, of a rocky or clayey soil, and low sandy levels, covered with stunted bushes. Further inland, the soil is more fertile, but still deficient in wood. The background every where presents lofty mountains; we visited only those to the north, at the foot of which the Russian settlement ...
— A New Voyage Round the World, in the years 1823, 24, 25, and 26, Vol. 2 • Otto von Kotzebue
... and that they were daubed here and there with red clay. Acting upon this hint, I rode some four miles south-east from Blair, knowing that there is a piece of marsh field, which the highway crosses, that has a reddish, clayey soil. Here, after asking a good many wrong persons, I found at last the right one, in the person of a farmer who, hearing some unusual noise among his cattle, arose before daybreak, and, going toward his barn, noticed two shadowy forms crossing the field just beyond. ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... and many escaped. Every dead rat was plastered with mud underneath, especially on their tails, and it was evident that they had only just arrived when first seen, and had travelled some distance, probably the evening before, along the clayey overhanging bank ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... expeditions; which are now blinder than ever, and done by steam, without even eyesight, not to say intelligence. Precisely where the railway from Leipzig to Dresden crosses the Elbe,—there, if you happen to have daylight, is a flat, rather clayey country, dirty-greenish, as if depastured partly by geese; with a big full River Elbe sweeping through it, banks barish for a mile or two; River itself swift, sleek and of flint-color; not unpleasant to behold, thus far on its journey from the Bohemian Giant-Mountains seaward: precisely ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... a right successive you declare When worms, for ivies, intertwine my hair, Take but this Poesy that now followeth My clayey best with sullen servile breath, Made then your happy ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... so eloquent of the part played by discernment in their selection, becomes still more remarkable when it is accompanied by a corresponding variety in the architecture of the cells. This is more particularly the case with the Three-horned Osmia, who, as she uses clayey materials very easily affected by the rain, requires, like the Pelopaeus, a dry shelter for her cells, a shelter which she finds ready-made and uses just as it is, after a few touches by way of sweeping and cleansing. ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... country. There are no traces of water-courses on the level plains, and it would appear that, whatever moisture descends from the higher grounds, which (where there are any at all,) are seldom less than twelve miles from the Darling, must be taken up by the clayey soil, so as scarcely to find its way down to the river, except it be by springs. The average breadth of the stream at the surface, when low, is about fifty yards, but oftener less than this, and seldom more. The fall of the country through which it passes, in that part ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... hair, now clotted with gore, from the cheek on which it had fallen; and he recognized, too well, the high, thoughtful brow, now white, cold as marble; the large, dark eye, whose fixed and glassy stare had so horribly replaced the bright intelligence, the sparkling lustre so lately there. The clayey, sluggish white of death was already on his cheek; his lip, convulsively compressed, and the left hand tightly clenched, as if the soul had not been thus violently reft from the body, without a strong: pang of mortal agony. His ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... already spoken of as covering large areas of the floor of the Atlantic and Pacific at great depths, and which consists almost wholly of the shells of Foraminifera, gave place at still greater depths to a red ooze consisting of impalpable clayey mud, coloured by oxide of iron, and devoid of traces of organic bodies. As the existence of this widely-diffused red ooze, in mid-ocean, and at such great depths, cannot be explained on the supposition that it is a sediment ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... to the place where the way went down into the valley, cleaving through a clayey bent, so that the slippery sides of the cleft went up high to right and left; wherefore by goodhap there were no big stones anigh to roll down upon them. Moreover the way was short, and they rode six abreast down ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... provide plants with three times as much available water as sand, six times as much as a very coarse sandy soil. It might seem logical to conclude that a clayey garden would be the most drought resistant. But there's more to it. For some crops, deep sandy loams can provide just about as much usable moisture as clays. Sandy soils usually allow more extensive root development, so a plant with a naturally aggressive and ...
— Gardening Without Irrigation: or without much, anyway • Steve Solomon
... through the mist in the horizon. It was like the sight and odor of cake to a schoolboy. He who rides and keeps the beaten track studies the fences chiefly. Near Bangor, the fence-posts, on account of the frost's heaving them in the clayey soil, were not planted in the ground, but were mortised into a transverse horizontal beam lying on the surface. Afterwards, the prevailing fences were log ones, with sometimes a Virginia fence, or else rails slanted over crossed stakes,—and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... "That soil looks pretty clayey," is a good thing to say. (It is hard to say, clearly, too. You had better practise it before trying it out on ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... than eight or more than twenty inches, in a box of twelve feet, would be considered as unsuitable for the board-sluice. Sometimes the upper part of the sluice is made steeper so as to dissolve the dirt, and the lower part has a small grade to catch the gold. The clayey matter of ordinary pay-dirt is fully dissolved in a sluice two hundred feet long with a low grade, so the use of the boxes beyond that length is merely to catch the gold. There are claims however in which the clay is so extremely tough that it will roll in large balls more than a quarter ...
— Hittel on Gold Mines and Mining • John S. Hittell
... to the south-east, hoping at last to strike some of the inhabited townships; and the unvarying solidity of forest was well-nigh disheartening him, when he saw, after several miles' walking, the distinctly defined imprint of a man's foot on some clayey soil near a clump of chestnut trees. Yes, there could be no mistake: some person had passed not long since; and though the tracks led away considerably from the south-easterly direction he had hitherto kept, he turned, without hesitation to follow them, and proceeded as rapidly as possible, ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... young man continued on as before. Thus the slope was left behind; and now began a low, long stretch, lying between meadows, overshadowed by a bordering of willow-trees, and studded with lengths of surreptitious puddles, for the ground was clayey, and the rain was unabsorbed. As Bressant entered upon it, he felt the cold moisture of the air meet his warm face refreshingly; he was breathing deep and regularly, and now let himself out to a yet swifter ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... really was the Provence! A clayey river with flakes of muddy sand, and endless shores of stone-gray gravel; pale-brown fields without a blade of grass, pale-brown slopes, pale-brown hills and dust-colored roads, and here and there near the white houses, groups of black trees, absolutely black bushes ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... by such moments when they came, for she was growing distantly fond of Roger. There was something touching about this pale child, whose hunger for love was so strong that it survived and struggled through the clayey substance of its general being which had smothered all other movements of its soul; who was so full of love itself that it accepted the empty sham of feeling she gave it and breathed on it, and filled it with its own love, and was so innocent that it did not detect that ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... rolled through the doors of their old warehouse. During the early years the Colonel was the chief salesman and spent his days "on the road" up and down the Mississippi Valley, sleeping in rough country taverns, dining on soda biscuit and milk, driving many miles over clayey, rutty roads,—dealing with men, ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... pray that she, too, may one day taste the full horror of being tucked into a high dog-cart alongside of a man who you know cannot drive; the tortures, both mental and physical, of a long walk down dusty roads and over clayey fields to see that old Elizabethan house "only a mile off;" or the loathing induced by a pic-nic among mouldering and utterly uninteresting ruins. All this I swallowed with the equanimity and patience born of many seasons of country-house visiting; I even interviewed the old family and old-fashioned ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 9, 1890. • Various
... the diminished creek, now filmed over with a glaze of young ice. On the other the mountain rose steeply. Fifteen feet up the bluff side a fallen dead tree projected its rotted, broken roots, like snaggled teeth, from the clayey bank. Behind this tree's trunk, in the snow and half-frozen, half-melted yellow mire, Anse Dugmore was stretched on his face. The barrel of the rifle barely showed itself through the interlacing root ends. It pointed downward and northward toward the broad, moonlit place in the road. Its ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... perhaps, have been borne by the unfortunate man—conscientiously mindful of his vow—for better or for worse—to love and cherish his dear Goneril so long as kind heaven might spare her to him—but when, after all that had happened, the devil of jealousy entered her, a calm, clayey, cakey devil, for none other could possess her, and the object of that deranged jealousy, her own child, a little girl of seven, her father's consolation and pet; when he saw Goneril artfully torment the little innocent, and then play the maternal ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... Ancoats Street, lies a great, straggling, working- men's quarter, a hilly, barren stretch of land, occupied by detached, irregularly built rows of houses or squares, between these, empty building lots, uneven, clayey, without grass and scarcely passable in wet weather. The cottages are all filthy and old, and recall the New Town to mind. The stretch cut through by the Birmingham railway is the most thickly built-up and ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... seat, but Preston was not so fortunate. The first I saw of him he was immersed in a pool of water some ten feet distant. Luckily the ground was soft, and he escaped personal injury. When he rose to his feet, his coat, like Joseph's, was of many colors, a dull clayey-red predominating. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... shaggy as a bear. His hair lay smooth on his temples, the top of his head was bald, his eyebrows hardly to be perceived; his bilious-looking skin was covered with large freckles; but when any lively emotion agitated it, this yellow, clayey visage filled with blood, ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... on the Virginia side of the Potomac, at the head of a small stream emptying into the river. It was between two hills, at an elevation of 100 feet above the Potomac, and about a mile from the river. Here I saw many clayey mounds covering burrows scattered over the ground irregularly both upon the banks of the stream and in the adjacent meadow, even as far as ten yards from the bed of the brook. My curiosity was aroused, and I explored several of the holes, finding in each a good-sized crayfish, which Prof. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 446, July 19, 1884 • Various
... Stiff or clayey pastures should never be overstocked, but when fed pretty close the grasses are far sweeter and more nutritious than when they are allowed to grow up rank and coarse; and if, by a want of sufficient feeding, they get the start ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... pits dug near the kitchen. Flies must not have access to these pits. Boards or poles, covered with brush or grass and a layer of earth may be used for this purpose. The strainers should also be protected from flies. Pits of this kind, dug in clayey soil, will not operate successfully. All pits should be ...
— Infantry Drill Regulations, United States Army, 1911 - Corrected to April 15, 1917 (Changes Nos. 1 to 19) • United States War Department
... at this point will not average more than ten yards in breadth. It flows at the bottom of a gully about fifteen feet deep, which traverses the broad valley in a most tortuous course. The water has a white, clayey hue, and is very swift. The changes of the current have formed islands and beds of soil here and there, which are covered with a dense growth of ash, poplar, willow, and tamarisk trees. The banks of the river are bordered with thickets, now overgrown with wild vines, ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... "leader," a thin bed just outside, and parallel to it, and the South Reef, with several others which are at present of much less importance. The term "reef" means a bed or stratum of rock, and these Rand reefs are beds of a sort of conglomerate, consisting of sandy and clayey matter containing quartz pebbles. The pebbles are mostly small, from the size of a thrush's egg up to that of a goose's egg, and contain no gold. The arenaceous or argillaceous stuff in which they lie embedded is extremely hard, and strongly impregnated with iron, usually in the form of iron pyrites, ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... district, the point at which one changes from the express into the local train. She had always other things to do; she was 'preparing' for me. So I had the little journey from Knype to Bursley, and then the walk up Trafalgar Road, amid the familiar high chimneys and the smoke and the clayey mud and the football posts and the Midland accent, all by myself. And there was leisure to consider anew how I should break to my mother the tremendous news I had for her. I had been considering that question ever ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... John's, Newfoundland, coming to anchor on the Grand Banks; for the shore, being low, appeared to be at a greater distance than it actually was, and we thought we might as well have stayed at Santa Barbara, and sent our boat down for the hides. The land was of a clayey quality, and, as far as the eye could reach, entirely bare of trees and even shrubs; and there was no sign of a town,— not even a house to be seen. What brought us into such a place, we could not conceive. No sooner had we ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... bitterest winter weather suspended all military operations after St. Pierre. The rivers were flooded; the clayey lowlands were one far-stretching quagmire; fogs brooded in the ravines; perpetual tempests shrieked over the frozen summits of the Pyrenees; the iron-bound coast was furious with breakers. But Wellington's hardy veterans—ill-clad, ill-sheltered, ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... narrow valley, through which we had our road to the morai, the soil is of a brownish black colour, somewhat loose; but as we advanced upon the high ground, it changed to a reddish brown, more stiff and clayey, though, at this time, brittle from its dryness. It is most probably the same all over the cultivated parts; for, what adhered to most of the potatoes, bought by us, which, no doubt, came from very different spots, was of this sort. Its quality, however, may be better understood from its products, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... use of collars is by no means general, although those who have used them speak highly of their advantages. Except in sandy soils, and in those that are subject to sudden alteration of character, in some of the deposits of red sand-stones, and in the clayey subsoils of the Bagshot sand district, for instance, collars are not found to be essential to good drainage. In the north of England they are used but seldom, and, in my opinion, much less than they ought to be; but this opinion, it is right to state, is opposed, in numerous instances of successful ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... Capabilities of the country it would be vain to attempt giving an opinion. Scarcely any cultivation was passed on the route. The soil is generally deep, more or less yellow, and somewhat clayey; the hollows having a thin superstratum of black mould. Taking the deserted state of the country into account, this part of the Naga range is of little importance, except as forming portion of a most natural and well defined boundary, ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... the entire length of the ravine, surrounded by jets of steam, and little bubbling springs of mineral water; some hissing, some sputtering, others roaring, and others shrieking; the ground being soft and hot, your stick sinking into the clayey ooze, and a puff of spiteful steam following it as withdrawn; your shoes white or yellow, as you tread the chalk or the sulphur banks, and your feet burning with the hot breath of the sulphur ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... was smitten off and his hauberk rent adown, and point and edge reached his living flesh; and he had thrust himself so far amidst the foe that none could follow to shield him, so that at last he fell shattered and rent at the foot of the new clayey wall cast up by the Romans, even as Thiodolf and a band with him came cleaving the press, and the Romans closed the barriers against friend and foe, and cast great beams adown, and masses of iron and lead and copper taken from the smithying-booths of the Wolfings, ...
— The House of the Wolfings - A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark Written in Prose and in Verse • William Morris
... argillaceous particles, of which the ashes were composed;—and, by this means, had a sudden crystallization, and consolidation of those particles taken place, which formed the stones of various sizes, that fell to the ground: but did not harden the clayey ashes so rapidly as the metallic particles crystallized; and, therefore, gave an opportunity for impressions to be made on the surfaces of some of the stones, as they fell, by means of the impinging ...
— Remarks Concerning Stones Said to Have Fallen from the Clouds, Both in These Days, and in Antient Times • Edward King
... related, but somehow they seemed less horrible than the thought of tame, timid, and even affectionate and intelligent creatures, slowly and deliberately tortured to death, for the sake, forsooth, of what? Of this corporeal frame man himself has done his best to vitiate and dishonour, mere clayey envelope—so theologians tell us—of ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... in being much longer and wider; the sides, as is usually the case in the richest gullies, were not precipitous, but very gradual; a few mountains closed the background. The digging was in many places very shallow, and the soil was sometimes of a clayey description, sometimes very gravelly with slate bottom, sometimes gravelly with pipeclay bottom, sometimes quite sandy; in fact, the earth was of ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey
... said Mrs Baxter, putting both her hands together piously. "We're just grass, ain't we, sir! and dust and clay and flowers of the field?" Whether Mrs Proudie had most partaken of the clayey nature or of the flowery nature, Mrs Baxter did not stop ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... Oswald pointed to his heated brow, and Dicky owned it was warm for Polar regions. He had brought the ice-axe (it is called the wood chopper sometimes), and Oswald, ever ready and able to command, set him and Denny to cut turfs from the bank while we heaped stones across the stream. It was clayey here, or of course dam making would have been vain, even for ...
— The Wouldbegoods • E. Nesbit
... Esquimaux attracted our attention; we found a winter sledge raised upon four stones, with some snow-shovels and a small piece of whalebone. An ice-chisel, a knife and some beads were left at this pile. The shores of this bay, which I have named after Sir George Warrender, are low and clayey and the country for many miles is level and much intersected with water, but we had not leisure to ascertain whether they were branches of the bay or freshwater lakes. Some white geese were seen this evening and some young gray ones were caught on the beach being unable to ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... with a puzzled look. "They are clayey-looking in the face. But it can't be possible that they actually ...
— The Boy Settlers - A Story of Early Times in Kansas • Noah Brooks
... had buried them as caught to prevent them being spoilt by the sun, we get aboard again and pull across to the opposite bank of the river. Here, in much deeper water, about fifteen feet right under the clayey bank, we can see hundreds of fine bream, and now and then some small jew-fish. Taking off our sinkers, we have as good and more exciting sport among the bream than we had with the whiting, catching between four and five dozen by six o'clock. Then, after ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... a train for the station nearest to the Foret de Laigue. There they had their hot soup and waited for night, to march into the trenches under cover of the darkness. They told me that it was not a long march, but it was a hard one, as it was up hill, over wet and clayey ground, where it was difficult not to slip back ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich
... ous, ious, eous, y, ey, ic, al, ical or ine: (sometimes with an omission or change of some of the final letters:) as, danger, dangerous; glory, glorious; right, righteous; rock, rocky; clay, clayey; poet, poetic, or poetical; nation, national; method, methodical; vertex, vertical; clergy, clerical; adamant, adamantine. Adjectives thus formed, generally apply the properties of their primitives, to the ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... more significance in the world than his acres, and giants are not proverbial for their intellectual or spiritual qualities. The ant is of more importance than the ass, and the great eye of a beautiful woman is more significant than the whole clayey bulk ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... quadrangle of the time-honored Sorbonne, walked the lean and slippered metaphysician,—oblivious for the moment that his sublime thoughts and tattered wardrobe were famous throughout Europe,—meditating on the theme of his next lecture; at the same time, in the well-worn chambers overhead, some clayey-visaged chemist in ragged robe-de-chambre, and with a soiled green flap over his left eye, was hard at work stooping over retorts and crucibles, discovering new antipathies in acids, again risking strange explosions similar to that whereby he had already ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... and crept into my window just before day was breaking. My new clothes was all greased up and clayey, and I ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... him was the sight of a long, uprooted tree which, coming down the creek, when the water was rapidly falling, had swung around in such position that the roots caught fast in the clayey soil on the bank, and the limbs were imbedded in the sand and mud on the other shore. The result was as good a bridge as a ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis
... material. The substances found in the soluble inorganic matter of soils are lime, magnesia, alumina, silica, phosphoric acid, oxide of iron, oxide of manganese, potash and soda. The insoluble mineral matter is nearly all silica. There is very little clayey matter in any of the soils—not more than about five per cent. All the soils are remarkably free from stones or pebbles, ...
— A start in life • C. F. Dowsett
... rocks under the cliffs, or among logs or roots of trees, or on a clayey bottom, large fresh-water lobsters (poo-ta-ron-ko) are procured in the same way, weighing from two to four pounds each, and of a most delicate and excellent flavour. I have frequently been out with a single native, and seen him spear from ten to sixteen ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... again, "is the emblem of Typhon, because like that animal he is of a reddish color. Now Typhon signifies whatever is of a mirey or clayey nature; (and in Hebrew I find the three words clay, red, and ass to be formed from the same root hamr). Jamblicus has farther told us that clay was the emblem of matter and he elsewhere adds, that all evil and corruption proceeded from matter; which compared with the phrase of Macrobius, ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... Nivelle at its foot, the land slopes down, still wooded and broken, bounded by a long sweep of clayey crumbling cliff. The eye catches the fort of Secoa, at the mouth of the Nivelle—once Wellington's sea-base for his great French campaign. Then Fontarabia, at the Bidassoa mouth; and far off, the cove within which lies the fatal citadel of ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... OR DARE.—This fish is gregarious, and is seldom above ten inches long; although, according to Linnaeus, it grows a foot and a half in length. Its haunts are in deep water, near piles of bridges, where the stream is gentle, over gravelly, sandy, or clayey bottoms; deep holes that are shaded, water-lily leaves, and under the foam caused by an eddy. In the warm months they are to be found in shoals on the shallows near to streams. They are in season about the end of April, and gradually improve till February, when they attain their highest ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... brothers now removed, taking with them their widowed mother, was a farm of about one hundred and eighteen acres of cold clayey soil, close to the village of Mauchline. The farm-house, having been originally the country house of their landlord, Mr. Gavin Hamilton, was more commodious and comfortable than the home they had left. Here the brothers settled down, determined to do all ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... amongst the loamy plains and sandhills, is the number of clay-pans. These are shallow depressions, with no outlet, varying in length from a few yards to half a mile, where the surface is covered with a thin clayey material, which seems to prevent the water from sinking as rapidly as it does ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... march with bier and shroud Down streets plague-spotted toward some cleansing pyre;— Yet, lo! strange lilies bloomed in lightless cells, And passionate spirits burst their clayey shells And sang the stricken hope that bleeds and clings: Earth's bruised heart beat in the throbbing strings, And joy still struggled through the threnody! One stern Hour said unto my marvelings: "Lo, I am Life; ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... suddenly, and he stood a moment absolutely still, every nerve in his slim young body taut as wire, every muscle rigid. For along the passage—not so very far in front of them, from where it seemed to terminate—came the thud of men's feet upon the soft clayey ground. The torch went out in an instant. In another, Cleek had caught Dollops's arm and drawn him into the narrow aperture, where, with faces to the wall, they stood tense and rigid, listening while the steps came nearer and ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew
... owing to its comparative shallowness—its mean depth, being about ninety feet—and the consequent liability to a heavy ground swell. The peculiar features of this body of water are its inferior depth and the clayey nature of its shores, which are generally low; on the south, however, bordered by an elevated plateau, through which the ...
— By Water to the Columbian Exposition • Johanna S. Wisthaler
... Guiana; but the ground gradually rose and soon showed its cultivated plains, where all the vegetables of the North and South grow in perfection, its immense fields, where a tropical sun and the water conserved in its clayey texture do all the work of cultivating, and lastly its prairies of pineapples, yams, tobacco, rice, cotton, and sugarcanes, which extended as far as the eye could reach, spreading out their ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... soil best adapted to the beet is a deep, light, well-enriched, sandy loam. When grown on thin, gravelly soil, the roots are generally tough and fibrous; and when cultivated in cold, wet, clayey localities, they are often coarse, watery, and insipid, worthless for the table, and comparatively of little value ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... course, the excitement and interest which the enterprise involved: but even there the works made slow progress. The breaching artillery was defective in every way: the rain undermined the faces of the bastions; the clayey soil sank beneath the weight of the heavy guns; and the storms of one night frequently destroyed more than a whole ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... is nine miles above on the Scioto, they remark that "the walls of the rectangular work are composed of a clayey loam twelve feet high by fifty feet base.... They resemble the heavy grading of a railway, and are broad enough on the top to admit of the passage of a coach." ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... but only great woods and arable fields (the latter in sadly preponderant numbers) so that we are absolutely at the extreme verge of the world. The whole country is intersected by foot-paths; but the surface over the chalk is clayey and sticky, which is the worst feature in our purchase. The dingles and banks often remind me of Cambridgeshire and walks with you to Cherry Hinton, and other places, though the general aspect of the country is very different. I was looking over my arranged cabinet (the only remnant I have preserved ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... we at first passed over a gently undulating country, with a reddish clayey soil, which, from the heavy crops, appeared to be very fertile. Many rivulets were crossed, some running southwards into the Bua, and others northwards into the Loangwa, a river which we formerly ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... Choctaws. He says, "The manner of playing the game is thus: they make an alley of about two hundred feet in length, where a very smooth clayey ground is laid, which when dry is very hard: they play two together having each a straight pole about fifteen feet long; one holds a stone which is in the shape of a truck, which he throws before him over this alley, and the instant of its departure, they set off and run; in running they cast their ...
— Indian Games • Andrew McFarland Davis
... through this large parish the greatest road in England, and the most frequented, especially by cattle for Smithfield market; this great road has so many branches, and lies for so long a way through the parish, and withal has the inconvenience of a clayey ground, and no gravel at hand, that, modestly speaking, the parish is not able to keep it in repair; by which means several cross-roads in the parish lie wholly unpassable, and carts and horses (and men too) have been almost buried in holes ...
— An Essay Upon Projects • Daniel Defoe
... W. Carter, of Sabine Hall, on the Rappahanock, whose land is principally of that kind of clayey loam common upon that river, once rich but badly worn by cultivation, is so well satisfied that it is profitable to make rich lands still more rich, he buys annually 30 or 40 tons of the best in market. He says he cannot afford to sow wheat without guano—it is foolish and unprofitable. ...
— Guano - A Treatise of Practical Information for Farmers • Solon Robinson
... partridges made them "a very good dish." Upon the sandy soil they fixed their hopes for a generous yield of peas and potatoes. To the "black, fat, and heavy" land they looked for all sorts of corn. From the clayey soil they ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... to Reuben came a vision of the top of an ancient tree-trunk just beneath the bird's feet, just beneath the water's surface. Down, slanting far down through the opaline opaqueness, he saw the huge trunk extend itself, to an immemorial root-hold in the clayey, perpendicular walls of the Perdu. He unfolded the vision to Celia, who understood. "And it's just as wonderful," said the girl, "for how did the ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... are wasted at each, it means a loss of one hour forty minutes. The guns consequently go best pace to their places forward after each beat. What with running at a jog-trot down the rides, shooting hard when in place, and then getting on quickly to the next stand, often along spongy or clayey rides on a nice, warm, moist November day, this is by no means the armchair work which people are fond of calling wood shooting. The variety of scenery in the wood added much to the charm. Sometimes we were in the narrow rides covered with short turf and almost ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... Niagara, the difference of climate between it and Toronto is at once perceived. Here you are on sandy, there on clayey soil. Here all is heat, there moisture. I tried hard for several seasons to bring the peach to perfection at Toronto, only thirty-six miles from Niagara, without success; at Niagara it grows freely, and almost spontaneously, as well as the quince. ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... three to five feet in diameter set in the ground. There were groups of ten or twelve circuits, and the tombs underneath were found at a depth of five or six feet. They consisted of small chambers excavated in the clayey soil, and were well preserved, though they contained no masonry work; still at one place a yoke of oxen while dragging the plough had sunk down into the subterranean cavity. The entrance to such a tomb is from one side, ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... ordinary plunge into the gulf of sleep, and it was required to shake him and to bellow at him—to administer at once earthquake and thunder—before his lizard eyelids would lift over the great, old-world eyes; upon which, like a clayey monster refusing to be informed with heavenly fire, he rolled to the right of his chair and to the left, and pitched forward, and insisted upon being inanimate. Brought at last to a condition of stale consciousness, he looked at his ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... lead me to the happy shores, And floating paeans fill the buoyant wind. Farewell, base earth farewell.—My soul is freed: Far from its clayey cell ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various
... theoretically, is this: Any land that is producing a fair crop of grass or clover, let it lie. Pasture it or mow it for hay. If you have a field of clayey or stiff loamy land, break it up in the fall, and summer-fallow it the next year, and sow it to wheat and seed it down with clover. Let it lie two or three years in clover. Then break it up in July or August, "fall-fallow" ...
— Talks on Manures • Joseph Harris
... quartz rock, forming dykes in the schist rises: the latter in some places adjoin, and run into hills of loose stone, having the appearance of indurated clay. From Cangapundy to Wright's Creek the ground is light-coloured, and of a clayey nature: it forms a series of dry clay-pans, separated from one another by low sandy banks, on which the vegetation was fresh and green. At about seventeen miles from the former place are three large holes with water ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... these sods, See, they're streaked with sticky earth; Yet you spring from clayey clods, Pure, and fresh, and ...
— Pinafore Palace • Various
... observed to mount as high as 83 degrees or 84 degrees; but with us, in this hilly and woody district, I have hardly ever seen it exceed 80 degrees, nor does it often arrive at that pitch. The reason, I conclude, is, that our dense clayey soil, so much shaded by trees, is not so easily heated through as those above-mentioned; and, besides, our mountains cause currents of air and breezes; and the vast effluvia from our woodlands temper and ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 2 • Gilbert White
... cohesion or aggregation, they clarify the muddy waters of their rivers, for immediate use, by stirring them round with a piece of alum in a hollow bamboo; a simple operation which, experience has taught them, will cause the clayey particles to fall to the bottom: and having ascertained the fact, they have given themselves no further trouble to explain ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... ground water from a well or spring; though that again is not necessarily safe. If the well is in good, sandy soil, with no cracks or fissures, even water that has been polluted may be well purified and safe to drink. In a clayey or rocky region, on the other hand, contaminating material may travel for a considerable distance under the ground. Even if the well is protected below, a very important point to look after is the pollution from ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... banks by which our crazy ladder hangs, and every round is damp and slimy with clayey mud. Alas, for my poor pretty gantlets! Mon Amie has ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... Gray had been seated fishing, the bank was about three feet above the surface of the water, and this clayey bank was either perpendicular, or so hollowed out beneath by the action of the river, that if any one had the courage to lower himself into the water, here about four feet deep, and to cling to the tangled vegetation, and wade along close to the overhanging ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... soul is now in part united to the Fountain of life, by loving attendance and obedience, and it is longing to be more closely united. The inward senses are exercised about spiritual things, but the burden of this clayey mansion doth much dull and damp them, and proves a great remora(205) to the spirit. The body indisposes and weakens the soul much. It is life, as in an infant, though a reasonable soul be there, yet overwhelmed with the incapacity of ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... days the little party made their way under these vast arches, over a clayey soil which the foot of man had never trod. They knew this by the quantity of resinous gum that lay in heaps at the foot of the trees, and which would have lasted for native ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne |
