"Decayed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his Scourge of Villainy. It would be as reasonable to identify him with Dekker, who wrote the greater part of Satiro-mastix. 'Mastic' is doubtless an adjective formed without recondite significance from the substantive 'mastic,' i.e. the gum commonly used at the time for stopping decayed teeth. No hypothesis of a polemical intention is needed to account for Shakespeare's conception of Ajax or Thersites. There is no trait in either character as depicted by Shakespeare which a reading of Chapman's Homer would fail ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... properly. By the middle of last month the works were very much injured by the daily and frequent heavy fire of the enemy, and almost all the carriages of our guns rendered useless. These were in general in a very decayed state, but even the new ones for the brass mortars that were made during the siege gave way from the almost incessant fire we kept up; so that upon the whole, what from the nature of our defences and the small number of our garrison, we were in a very unfit state to resist the very vigorous exertions ...
— The History of the First West India Regiment • A. B. Ellis
... fall; but in the West chiefly by snow. It falls deep on the high mountains, and, protected there by the pine forests, accumulates all through the winter, and in spring slowly melts. The deep layer of half-rotted pine needles, branches, decayed wood and other vegetable matter which forms the forest floor, receives this melting snow and holds much of it for a time, while the surplus runs off over the surface of the ground, and by a thousand tiny rivulets at last reaches some main stream which carries it toward the sea. In ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... thirty-six years after the event, I, too, traveled the same road that Cummins had traveled and heard from the lips of Pete Sherwood, stage-driver of a later generation, the same thrilling story. The stump by the roadside had so far decayed as to have fallen over; but it needed little imagination to picture the whole tragedy. In Sacramento I looked up the files of the Daily Record Union, which on Sept. 3, 1879, two days after the event, gave a brief account ...
— Forty-one Thieves - A Tale of California • Angelo Hall
... evening of June, I first found myself amongst the mountains—a feature in natural scenery for which, from my earliest days, it was not extravagant to say that I had hungered and thirsted. In no one expectation of my life have I been less disappointed; and I may add, that no one enjoyment has less decayed or palled upon my continued experience. A mountainous region, with a slender population, and that of a simple pastoral character; behold my chief conditions of a pleasant permanent dwelling-place! But, thus far I have ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... looked, if possible, more decayed and dilapidated by daylight than they had upon the preceding night. She went to the windows, but they afforded no more cheering prospect—looking out upon a dark courtyard, round which the vast hotel rose in sombre altitude—dreary, inauspicious, ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... house, who transferred the seat of government to Bagdad, fought successfully against the peoples of Asia Minor, and the reigns of Harun al-Rashid (786—809) and Mamun (813-833) were periods of extraordinary splendour. But the empire as a whole stagnated and then decayed rapidly. Independent monarchs established themselves in Africa and Khorasan (Spain had remained Omayyad throughout), and in the north-west the Greeks successfully encroached. The ruin of the dynasty came, however, from those Turkish slaves who were constituted as a royal bodyguard by Moqtasim ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... precious marbles. In the midst are a few rough columns blackened by time and exposure. The soil is deep, and in places there are pits where excavations have been made. Rubbish lies around; bits of straw, and grass, and hay, and decayed leather, and broken bottles, and old bones. A few dirty shepherds pass along, driving lean and miserable sheep. Further up is a cluster of wine-carts, with still ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... chamber it was, sure enough, and crowded with all kinds of trumpery. It looked like an infirmary for decayed and superannuated furniture; where everything diseased and disabled was sent to nurse, or to be forgotten. Or rather, it might have been taken for a general congress of old legitimate moveables, where every ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... A few decayed leaves and boughs formed our bed, and a scanty supply of yams and taro, brought to us once a day, ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... the vegetable mass decayed slowly; but when the final ruin of the forest came, whole trunks were snapped off close to the roots and flung down. These are now found in numbers on the tops of the coal layers, the barks being flattened and changed to shining ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... "Secondary Records" and took out a book, in which, on examination, he found a representation of a twig of Olea fragrans. Below, was a pond, the water of which was parched up and the mud dry, the lotus flowers decayed, and even the roots dead. At the back ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... has a statue decayed by rust and age, and mutilated in many of its parts, he breaks it up and casts it into a furnace, and after the melting he receives it again in a more beautiful form. As then the dissolving in the furnace ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume I - Basil to Calvin • Various
... parties. But I have been enabled to qualify the narratives of Old Mortality and his Cameronian friends, by the reports of more than one descendant of ancient and honourable families, who, themselves decayed into the humble vale of life, yet look proudly back on the period when their ancestors fought and fell in behalf of the exiled house of Stewart. I may even boast right reverend authority on the same score; for more than one nonjuring bishop, whose authority and income were upon as apostolical ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... of North America. A king who would permit such cruel cuttings-up as these wicked animals were guilty of on the fair face of old England, should live in history only as an invertebrate, a royal failure, a decayed mollusk, and the dropsical ...
— Comic History of England • Bill Nye
... combativeness when he has come to the age of robust manhood and when the vital powers are matured and strong, and (3) against ambitiousness when old age has come on and the vital powers have become weak and decayed." ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... way back I asked Eddie about the Thornhill servants at the house on the other side of Gilbert's, and found they kept but one, "a sort of old lady," Eddie called her, and I guessed easily at the decayed gentlewoman kind of person. It seemed that Mrs. Thornhill was a widow, and there wasn't much money now to keep ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... were six chairs in that Oklahoma, and one table, a great big heavy table, not a good table to hit with your head when rushing madly along. In the course of time I collided with thirty-five chairs and tables enough to stock that dining-room out there. It was a hospital for decayed furniture, and it was in a worse condition when I got through with it. I went on and on, and at last got to a place where I could feel my way up, and there was a shelf. I knew that wasn't in the middle of the room. Up to that ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the sick who, between July and September, are in the hospitals of Valdichiana, and of the Tuscan swamps, and of Sardinia, were in one pit together; and such a stench was issuing forth as is wont to issue from decayed limbs." ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... centuries the cities of this sleeping hemisphere have decayed in solitude. Their very existence has been forgotten. The people who built them have long since passed away, and their civilization is but a shadowy tradition. Historians are astounded that a nation of an hundred million beings ...
— The Last American - A Fragment from The Journal of KHAN-LI, Prince of - Dimph-Yoo-Chur and Admiral in the Persian Navy • J. A. Mitchell
... of privilege—even a village is not an institution to accept of more or less graceful patronage; it thinks extremely well of itself, and is absolute in its own regard. Salem is a sea-port, but it is a sea-port deserted and decayed. It belongs to that rather melancholy group of old coast-towns, scattered along the great sea-face of New England, and of which the list is completed by the names of Portsmouth, Plymouth, New Bedford, Newburyport, Newport—superannuated ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... only contain the materials from which every part of the body is formed, but they are the medium for conveying the waste, decayed particles of matter from the system. They have various names, according to their nature and function; as, the blood, ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... nothing perishable about him, except that very learning which he is said so much to want. He had not, it is true, enough for the demands of the age in which he lived, but he had perhaps too much for the reach of his genius, and the interest of his fame. Milton and he will carry the decayed remnants and fripperies of antient mythology into more distant ages than they are by their own force intitled to extend; and the Metamorphoses of Ovid, upheld by them, lay in a new ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... stick of dry wood she dealt the reptile a blow, but the stick being decayed and brittle, inflicted little injury on the serpent, and only caused it to turn itself towards Mrs. Jameson, and fix its keen and beautiful, but malignant eyes, steadily upon her. The witchery of the serpent's eyes so irresistibly ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... will of course come to nothing. But I believe there is no danger of this, at least for the strongest among them. There may be some weak ones whom the Tractarian heresies may touch; but if so, they will drop off like decayed branches from a strong stem." [8] One of these weak ones who dropped off was James Collinson, a man of an ascetic and mystical piety—like Werner or Brentano. He painted, among other things, "The Renunciation of St. Elizabeth" from Kingsley's "Saint's Tragedy." "The picture," writes Scott, "resembled ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... great Hapsburg states, both decayed in power. Italy, the Hapsburg dependent, lost the last vestiges of her ancient intellectual supremacy. Everywhere the South of Europe gave place to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... hastily, "he is the ugliest creature that ever hopped. The feathers round one eye have all come out and left a bare place, and he is quite blind on the other. Indeed his left eye is gone altogether. His beak is chipped and worn; his wings are so beaten and decayed that he can hardly fly; and there are several feathers out of his tail. He is the most miserable ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... whether they were rising or falling at the time. And our task, if a melancholy, was certainly no uninteresting one. We succeeded in bringing to the surface, from out of the oblivion that had closed over them, many a curious, glittering, useless little thing, somewhat resembling the decayed shells and phosphoric jellies that attach themselves to the bottom of the deep-sea lead. Here we found the tale of a peroration, set as if on joints, that clattered husky and dry like the rattles of a snake; there ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... what her father said was true, neither did she remember of ever having had the toothache in her life; but quickly recovering herself, she said, "Neither have I a decayed tooth. It was more of a faceache, I suppose, than ...
— Tempest and Sunshine • Mary J. Holmes
... dreaded of the armies of the earth. As for Lycurgus, his countrymen worshipped him as a god, and imputed to him all that was noble in their institutions and excellent in their laws. But time brings its inevitable changes, and these famous institutions in time decayed, while the people perished from over-strict discipline or other causes till but a small troop of Spartans remained, too weak in numbers fairly to control ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... There he set up his forges, and taught men the malleability and polishing of metals. Thence he removed to the Liparean islands, near Sicily, where, with the assistance of the Cyclops, he made Jupiter fresh thunder-bolts as the old ones decayed. He also wrought an helmet for Pluto, which rendered him invisible; a trident for Neptune, which shook both land and sea; and a dog of brass for Jupiter, which he animated so as to perform the functions of nature. At the request of Thetis he fabricated the divine armor of Achilles, whose shield ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... yield, for he knew that by conquering he would win all the Spirit had to give. And as the first sun-ray shone on him he became insensible, and when he awoke it was as from a sleep. But by his side lay a large, old, decayed log, covered with moss. He remembered that during the fight he had seemed once to plunge his fist, by a violent blow, completely into the enemy up to his elbow, and there was a hole in it corresponding to this wound. He had torn away the other's scalp-lock, stripping the skin down ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... loving the triumph, though she hated the slave. Yet she had virtues too that balanced her vices, among which we must allow her to have loved Philander with a passion, that nothing but his ingratitude could have decayed in her heart, nor was it lessened but by a force that gave her a thousand tortures, racks and pangs, which had almost cost her her less valued life; for being of a temper nice in love, and very fiery, apt to fly into rages at every accident that ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... who has traversed the delightful environs of the Rhine, from the city of Mentz as far as Coblentz, or from the clear waves of this old Germanic stream gazed upon the grand creations of Nature, all upon so magnificent a scale, the appearance of the old decayed tower which forms the subject of the ensuing tradition forms no uninteresting object. It rises before him as he mounts the Rhine from the little island below Bingen, toward the left shore. He listens to the old shipmaster as he relates with earnest ...
— Folk-lore and Legends: German • Anonymous
... dirty, unpaved, dull town of the middle ages, much decayed from its ancient importance when capital of the country dismembered from Cornouaille, in the sixth century, by Comorre the Breton Bluebeard. It is situated on an eminence, commanding an extensive view of the barren monotonous surrounding country, bounded by the Arre ...
— Brittany & Its Byways • Fanny Bury Palliser
... cruelly alive to the helplessness of her situation. She cast a hurried glance around, but could find no signs of comfort; yet she fixed her last hopes on Marien Rufa, this decayed piece of blanched mortality, like the drowning wretch who snatches at a withered branch, though conscious of the frail support to ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... was a fearfully realised one. On the larger of two small islands at Loch Moy (a beautiful lake, twelve miles from Inverness), may be seen the ruins of an ancient castle. Centuries ago a noble edifice stood where those decayed buildings are, occupied by a cruel chieftain of Clan Chattan. He and his followers had an encounter with another Highland chieftain and his retainers from Glenmorriston, when the latter chief, his fair daughter Margaret, and her lover Allan, the young heir of Alvie, were taken prisoners, ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... cull apples may be divided into two grades. The first grade would include the whole reasonably sound fruit; the second grade the worm-eaten, partially decayed and injured fruit. Do not can any injured or decayed part nor allow apples ...
— Every Step in Canning • Grace Viall Gray
... steadily away till night; when, to their great joy, they found that they had reached the bottom of the bar. They then enlarged the hole inwards, in order that the bar might be pulled back. Fortunately, it was much decayed by age; and they had no doubt that, by exerting all their strength, together they could bend it sufficiently to enable them ...
— With Clive in India - Or, The Beginnings of an Empire • G. A. Henty
... supernatural, the dying woman raised herself with a sudden start in the bed, and her eyes glared upon him with a threatening horror, and her lips parting, disclosed the broken and decayed teeth beneath, ineffectually gnashing, while her long, skinny fingers warned him away. All this time she appeared to speak, but the words were unarticulated, though, from the expression of every feature, it was evident that indignation and reproach made up the entire amount of everything ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... grass, with a dingy greenness, still grew up. The fruit-trees all withered, the vines faded away, and the aspect of the place became so melancholy that the Count, with his people, next year left the castle, which in time decayed and fell ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... and surely, from his size, the father of the herd. Berselius considered the beast to be of great age. One tusk was decayed badly and the other was chipped and broken, and on the skin of the side were several of those circular sores one almost always finds on the body of a rhinoceros, "dundos," as the natives call them; old scars and wounds told their tale of old battles and ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... a cab—an open landau, of ancient and decayed splendour, driven by two white horses. They came dashing up at a wild gallop. The native driver, in his red fez and white cotton jacket, barely gave Freddy time to jump into the carriage after Meg was seated when, with a noisy cracking ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... Chalmers' West Port Mission, on the condition that he should never reveal the name of the donor. She was as careful to conceal her good deeds as she had been to conceal the authorship of the beautiful songs she composed. She gradually became weaker and weaker, but as the "outward man decayed the inward man was renewed day by day." In her song of the "Auld House" she beautifully describes how, at ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... from the by-street there was a square of ancient, handsome houses, now for the most part decayed from their high estate and let in flats and chambers to all sorts and conditions of men: map-engravers, architects, shady lawyers, and the agents of obscure enterprises. One house, however, second from the corner, was still occupied entire; and at the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the most northerly gold-mining town in the world, as it claims. It sprang into existence in 1900 and flourished for a season or two with the usual accompaniments of such florification. In 1906 it was already much decayed, and is now dead. Ever since its start the Koyukuk camp has steadily produced gold and given occupation to miners numbering from one hundred and fifty to three hundred, but the scene of operations, and therefore the depot for supplies, has continually changed. In 1900 the ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... motionless on his grey stone, kept his eye fixed on the increasing waters with a look of seriousness and sorrow, in which I saw little of the calculating spirit of a mere fisherman. Though he looked on the coming tide, his eyes seemed to dwell particularly on the black and decayed hulls of two vessels, which, half immersed in the quicksand, still addressed to every heart a tale of shipwreck and desolation. The tide wheeled and foamed around them, and, creeping inch by inch up the side, at last fairly threw its waters ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... go to the right of the hall steps, you are laid hold of by a bear; and should you go to the left, your case is still worse, for you run full against a wolf!—Nor, when you have attained the door, is your danger over; for the hall being decayed, and therefore standing in need of repair, a bevy of inmates are very probably banging at one end of it with their pistols; so that if you enter without giving loud notice of your approach, you have only escaped the wolf and the bear to expire by the ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... time the roof decayed and fell in, thus giving a sunken appearance to the top of the mound. This view is a cross section of the mound as it was revealed by the workmen. We notice where the roof has fallen in, and the outline of the interior chamber. ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... find that castle, Draw back your foot from the gateway, Let not its peace invite you, Let not its offerings tempt you, For faded and decayed like a garment, Love to a dust will have fallen, And song and laughter will have gone with sorrow, And hope will have gone with pain; And of all the throbbing heart's high courage ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... usually best to leave the lower cane if they are equally vigorous. This brings the buds from which growth will come nearer to the roots, and leaves less of the original cutting, which are advantages. The upper joint between the canes is, moreover, often more or less decayed or imperfect. ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... a thorough Union man, and was a prisoner in the hands of the Secession party. The rebels, to spite the old veteran, dug a trench around his house, for burying their dead, only eighteen inches below the surface. They also ruined his well by throwing in decayed horse-flesh—in fact, ruined his old homestead, by cutting down his fruit-trees, and ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... whole region here are decayed and corroded, as things in the sea by the saltness; for nothing of any value grows in the sea, nor, in a word, does it contain anything perfect, but there are caverns, and sand, and mud in abundance, and filth in whatever parts of the sea there is earth, nor are they ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... the landlady, going to the door, "which I'm often taken that way myself, decayed teeth runnin' in the family, tho', to be sure, mine are stronger than former, a lodger of mine 'avin' bin a dentist, an' doin' them beautiful, instead of payin' rent, not avin' ready cash, his boxes bein' filled with bricks on ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... name of Godsib, which is as much as to say, that they were sib together, that is, of kin together through God. And the child, in like manner, called such his God-fathers, or God-mothers."—Restitution of Decayed Intelligence, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 235, April 29, 1854 • Various
... unfinished condition that I involuntarily stopped my horse and took a long survey of the lonesome structure. Embowered in a forest which had so grown in thickness and height since the erection of this building that the boughs of some of the tallest trees almost met across its decayed roof, it presented even at first view an appearance of picturesque solitude almost approaching to desolation. But when my eye had time to note that the moss was clinging to eaves from under which the scaffolding had never been taken, ...
— The Old Stone House and Other Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... that London had a Park near adjoining to it, stored with such Deer (as doubtless it hath, though not easily known) for some build Alms houses, free schools, causies and Bridges in needful and necessary places, others repair ruinated and decayed churches, relieving Hospitals in a bountiful manner, and are weekly benefactors to Prisons and those performed by such agents faithfully, that the true bestowers are not publicly noted, howsoever they may be easily supposed. But the glory they seek to invade ...
— The History of Sir Richard Whittington • T. H.
... am glad to say that he—or his architect perhaps—has had the good taste to preserve the mediaeval character of the place. He has restored the stonework, renewing all the delicate external tracery where it was lost or decayed, and has treated the interior in the same manner. I have dined with Mr. Granger once or twice since the work was finished, and I must say the place is now one of the finest in Yorkshire—perhaps the finest, in its peculiar way. I doubt if there is so perfect a specimen of gothic domestic architecture ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... upright limb of this F appears still well cut and distinct; but the stone is much hollowed out and destroyed immediately to the right, where the two cross bars of the letter should be. The site of the upper cross-bar of the letter is too much decayed and excavated to allow of any distinct recognition of it. The site, however, of a small portion of the middle cross bar is traceable at the point where it is still united to and springs from the ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... This was a stone building, one story in height, with small grated windows, and stout oaken door studded with iron nails. Inside there were two rooms, one on each side of the entrance. These rooms were low, and the floor, which was laid on the earth, was composed of boards, which were decayed and moulded with damp. The ceiling was low, and the light but scanty. A stout table and stool formed the only furniture, while a bundle of mouldy straw in one corner was evidently intended to be his bed. Into this place Claude entered; the door was fastened, ...
— The Lily and the Cross - A Tale of Acadia • James De Mille
... fact. "The Veronese," says Lord Byron, in one of his letters from Verona, "are tenacious to a degree of the truth of Juliet's story, insisting on the fact, giving the date 1303, and showing a tomb. It is a plain, open, and partly decayed sarcophagus, with withered leaves in it, in a wild and desolate conventual garden—once a cemetery, now ruined, to the very graves! The situation struck me as very appropriate to the legend, being blighted as their love." He might have added, that when Verona itself, with its amphitheatre ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 563, August 25, 1832 • Various
... Trevor. He had what she called a rugged, honest Scotch face, with a very big nose in the middle of it, and little grey eyes overhung by brown and shaggy eyebrows. He spoke with the mere captivating suggestion of an accent. The son of decayed, proud, and now extinct gentlefolk, he presented personal testimonials of ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... resistance, and, leaping into the hole, tore up the mould frantically with his claws. In a few seconds he had uncovered a mass of human bones, forming two complete skeletons, intermingled with several buttons of metal, and what appeared to be the dust of decayed woollen. One or two strokes of a spade upturned the blade of a large Spanish knife, and, as we dug farther, three or four loose pieces of gold and silver coin came ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... no other book we know, the endless quarrel between romance and the rules, between the spirit and the letter, among the English authorities on poetry. It is a quarrel which will obviously never be finally settled in any country. The mechanical theory is a necessary reaction against romance that has decayed into windiness, extravagance, and incoherence. It brings the poets back to literature again. The romantic theory, on the other hand, is necessary as a reminder that the poet must offer to the world, not a formula, but a vision. It brings the poets ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... plants and animals which we see, there are many strange unseen ones floating in the atmosphere around us, lying in the dust of corner and closet, growing in the water we drink, and thronging decayed vegetable and animal matter. Everyone knows that mildew and vermin do damage in the home and in the field, but very few understand that, in addition to these visible enemies of man, there are swarms of invisible plants and animals some of which do far more ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark
... emperors and kings, of heroes and conquerors, from the era of their decline and fall to their ultimate extinction. Some 'Old Mortality' might find as congenial employment in this field of sepulchral research as did the original in clearing up the decayed and moss-grown tombs of the Covenanters. The genealogist makes it his business rather to flatter the great by blazoning the antiquity of their pedigrees, than to teach the world a moral lesson on the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 419, New Series, January 10, 1852 • Various
... requires draining and ditching to carry off the water, otherwise the low lands will continue to produce nothing but weeds. Signs of neglect and desertion are everywhere visible. The chateau of Blet has remained unoccupied since 1748; the furniture, accordingly, is almost all decayed and useless; in 1748 this was worth 7,612 livres, and now it is estimated at 1,000 livres. "The water-power costs nearly as much to maintain as the income derived from it. The use of plaster as manure is unknown," and yet "in the land of plaster it costs almost nothing." ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... few paces from the pathway. There was nothing about it to arrest the attention of a passer-by, except, perhaps, all appearance of extreme but picturesque humility. The walls were riveted together with iron-bands in crossbars and zig-zags; the brickwork was decayed and crumbling away in blotches; the roof was low and thatched. Yet, in spite of these evidences of poverty, the scholar regarded the structure with a reverential aspect, with such an aspect as he might have presented had he contemplated the hut ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... peace they were centres of a true, emotional religiosity. In times of stress, a "messianic" element tended to become prominent: the world is bad and degenerating; morality and a just social order have decayed, but the coming of a savior is close; the saviour will bring a new, fair order and destroy those who are wicked. Tsou Yen's philosophy seemed to allow them to calculate when this new order would start; later secret societies contained ideas from Iranian Mazdaism, ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... between the figures we have sketched, Turks of every variety! Tunisians, Moors, Egyptians, Levantines; and, mingled with that exotic element, a whole multicolored Parisian Bohemia of decayed gentlemen, squinting tradesmen, penniless journalists, inventors of strange objects, men from the South landed in Paris without a sou—all the tempest-tossed vessels to be revictualled, all the flocks ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... Bridge was alsoe then erected, which utterly decayed before the end of Sir Thomas Smith's government, that being the only bridge (any way soe to be called) that was ever in the country. At this time in all these labours, the miserye throughout the wholl Collony, in the scarcitye of foode was equall; which penurious and ...
— Colonial Records of Virginia • Various
... that all the creatures on the ground below went sorrowfully about their daily business. Just then the Nightingale spied a silvery gleam among the dead leaves. It was the Blindworm, a spotted gray streak, writhing noiselessly along towards the decayed wood of a fallen tree, in which he loved to burrow. And the Blindworm was not sad like the others, neither seemed he to care in the least about the Nightingale's music. Worms think little of sweet sounds. He cocked his one eye up towards the Nightingale and winked ...
— The Curious Book of Birds • Abbie Farwell Brown
... decayed vegetable matter even larger and more accessible than he had hoped for. A hundred loads might be got without even using a wheelbarrow; and to all appearances there was enough of it to give a heavy dressing to many acres, ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... traces of it remain even to the present day. You can see traces of it in the civilisation that was destroyed in Peru by the conquerors, the Spanish conquerors, of that land. Some traces of it still remain in India, although degraded and decayed. The note is always the same: the higher, the more burdened; the higher, the harder the life; the higher, the greater the duty. For that is the type of the Master, and the idea ran through the whole of the civilisation. ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... general system of manners, fitted by its piety and simplicity for a pious and simple age, and which therefore even the 17th century had already outgrown. It is not to be inferred that filial affection and reverence have decayed amongst us, because they no longer express themselves in the same way. In an age of imperfect culture, all passions and emotions are in a more elementary state—'speak a plainer language'—and express themselves externally: in such an age the frame and constitution of society is ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... "were their simple desert customs and their religious organization. On the other hand, the Philistines, sprung from one of the great homes of art of the ancient world, had brought with them the artistic instincts of their race: decayed no doubt, but still superior to anything they met with in the land itself. Tombs to be ascribed to them, found in Gezer, contained beautiful jewellery and ornaments. The Philistines, in fact, were the only cultured or artistic race who ever occupied ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... months, when its refreshment was most needed, the dust flew in clouds over the forgotten birthplace of the waters, now their grave. But, in the course of time, a Town Pump was sunk into the source of the ancient spring; and when the first decayed, another took its place,— and then another, and still another,—till here stand I, gentlemen and ladies, to serve you with my iron goblet. Drink, and be refreshed! The water is as pure and cold as that ...
— A Rill From the Town Pump (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Queen of George the Third, who, in failing health and rapidly drawing towards the close of her earthly pilgrimage, had been recommended by her physicians to try the effect of the Bath waters. The excitement which this event occasioned in the then gay, but now decayed western city, is thus referred to by Mrs. Piozzi in two of her contemporary letters to Sir James Fellowes: "The queen has driven us all distracted; such a bustle Bath never witnessed before. She drinks at the Pump Room, purposes going to say her ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... fortnight each was to give a written and sealed decision to the Intendant. Weber, who is, as you know, in the most miserable circumstances, wrote as follows:—"I anxiously desire to follow my gracious master to Munich, but my decayed circumstances prevent my doing so." Before this occurred there was a grand court concert, where poor Madlle. Weber felt the fangs of her enemies; for on this occasion she did not sing! It is not known who was the cause of this. Afterwards there was a concert ...
— The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, V.1. • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
... him—clearness of vision and a marvellous technical execution. So extraordinary is this later execution that, by comparison, the earlier seems timid and weak. His naturalism has expanded and strengthened: mine has decayed and ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... short-lived league to animate the great uprising by which Napoleon fell. Under the influence of that memorable alliance a political spirit was called forth on the Continent, which clung to freedom and abhorred revolution, and sought to restore, to develop, and to reform the decayed national institutions. The men who proclaimed these ideas, Stein and Goerres, Humboldt, Mueller, and De Maistre,[328] were as hostile to Bonapartism as to the absolutism of the old governments, and insisted on the national rights, ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... national, many which are common to them all. Of our own familiar ones several may be tracked among the snows of the Latins and the Greeks, and have sometimes been drawn from "The Mines of the East:" like decayed families which remain in obscurity, they may boast of a high lineal descent whenever they recover their lost title-deeds. The vulgar proverb, "To carry coals to Newcastle," local and idiomatic as it appears, however, has been borrowed and applied ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... open, taking in the water, which is at once the animal's food and air, and which, flowing over the delicate inner surface of the mantle, at once oxygenates its blood, and fills its stomach with minute particles of decayed organized matter. The smaller is shut. Wait a minute, and it will open suddenly and discharge a jet of clear water, which has been robbed, I suppose, of its oxygen and its organic matter. But, I suppose, your eyes will ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... was as flat as a death's-head, his nose crushed down, his lips so thin, so imperceptible, that his mouth seemed cut in his face; when he smiled in a wicked and sinister manner, the ends of his teeth could be seen, black and decayed. Closely shaved to his temples, this man's countenance had an expression austere, sanctified, impassible, rigid, cold and reflecting; his little black eyes—quick, piercing, restless,—were hidden by large ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... faded, and decayed the flower, The birds have ceased to sing in wayside bower, The babbling brook is silenced by the cold, And hill and vale the frost and snow enfold. The life we see seems hasting to the tomb Nor sun, nor star, relieves the dismal gloom; The good man suffers with the ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... but did not prosper as rapidly as she hoped, for, having to deal with people, not things, unexpected obstacles were constantly arising. The "Home for Decayed Gentlewomen," as the boys insisted on calling her two newly repaired houses, started finely and it was a pleasant sight to see the comfortable rooms filled with respectable women busy at their various tasks, surrounded by the decencies and many of the comforts which make ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... as the bag containing these articles, had formerly been placed on the scaffold as is the custom of these people, but had fallen down by accedent. near the scaffold I saw the carcase of a large dog not yet decayed, which I supposed had been killed at the time the human body was left on the scaffold; this was no doubt the reward, which the poor doog had met with for performing the -friendly office to his mistres of transporting her corps to the ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... next. Without much precision of purpose, he walked diagonally across the street, northward toward a large faded sign that read, "Killibrew's Grocery." A little later Peter entered a big, rather clean store which smelled of spices, coffee, and a faint dash of decayed potatoes. Mr. Killibrew himself, a big, rotund man, with a round head of prematurely white hair, was visible in a little glass office at the end of his store. Even through the glazed partition Peter could see Mr. Killibrew smiling as he sat comfortably at his desk. Indeed, ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... gradually hardened over the bones, but remained porous. Water had trickled through it, and that water being probably charged with a superfluity of carbonic acid, had dissolved all the phosphate and carbonate of lime, and the bones themselves had thus decayed and entirely disappeared; but as the sandstone happened to have consolidated by that time, the precise shape of the bones was retained. If that sandstone had remained soft a little longer, we should have known nothing whatsoever of the existence of the ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... that evil at large is none of your business until your business with your private particular evils is liquidated and settled up. A challenge of this sort, with proper designation of detail, is one that need only be made to be accepted by men whose normal instincts are not decayed; and your reflective would-be suicide may easily be moved by it to face life with a certain interest again. The sentiment of honor is a very penetrating thing. When you and I, for instance, realize how many innocent beasts have had to suffer in ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... he had stood sore in need, encompassed by his enemies. Maybe the stout arms and hearts of his Bavarian friends were of some service in the crisis also; but the living helpers were forgotten. The old church and monastery, which latter was a sort of ancient Chelsea Hospital for decayed knights, was destroyed one terrible night some hundred and fifty years ago by a flash of lightning; but the wonder-working image was rescued unhurt, and may still be seen and worshipped beneath the dome of the ...
— Diary of a Pilgrimage • Jerome K. Jerome
... these marks as a Red Indian follows a trail, saw something upon the edge of one of the half-decayed ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... chiefly by the sailors who chanced to be in the port, and by the squalid population in its immediate neighbourhood. Although small, the Red Lion Inn was superior in many respects to its surroundings. It was larger than the decayed buildings that propped it; cleaner than the locality that owned it; brighter and warmer than the homes of the lean crew on whom it fattened. It was a pretty, light, cheery, snug place of temptation, where men and women, and even children assembled at nights ...
— Sunk at Sea • R.M. Ballantyne
... enough to marry, do you think? Won't you wait till you are eighty in the shade? There's a fascination frantic In a ruin that's romantic; Do you think you are sufficiently decayed? KAT. To the matter that you mention I have given some attention, And I think ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... take that rotten tree along with us," murmured Morvyth, pointing to a decayed old stump that stood upright with two withered boughs like scraggy arms outstretched on either side ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... contained, as Mrs. Cheriton had said, any amount of material for the delightful pastime of dressing up. The gauzes were crumpled, to be sure, the gold lace tarnished, and the satins and brocades more or less spotted and decayed; but what of that? The splendours of the Family Chest were too solemn to sport with; here was material for hours and days of joy. Rita was soon arrayed in a scarlet military coat, a habit skirt of dark velvet, and a ...
— Three Margarets • Laura E. Richards
... Devil!" roared the General. "Get up, you miserable, whining cur! Get indoors, you bottle-fed squalling workhouse brat! Get out of it, you decayed gentlewoman!" ... The General bade fair to have a ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... the children obey his injunctions, and having knelt himself, while Henrietta and Mary instantly did the same, "Sweet flower!" he cried, "untimely cropt in years, yet in excellence mature! early decayed in misery, yet fragrant in innocence! Gentle be thy exit, for unsullied have been thy days; brief be thy pains, for few have been thy offences! Look at her sweet babes, and bear her in your remembrance; often will I visit you and revive the solemn scene. Look at her ye, also, ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... put into their hands some tokens of remembrance for his wife and children, kneeled down, laid his head on the block, prayed during a few minutes, and gave the signal to the executioner. His head was fixed on the top of the Tolbooth, where the head of Montrose had formerly decayed. [350] ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... tastes in common have convinced me that my judgment was sound. I was informed that my station would be Capiz, a town on the northern shore of Panay, once a rich and aristocratic pueblo, but now a town existing in the flavor of decayed gentility. I was eager to go, and time seemed fairly to drag until the seventh day of September, on which date the boat of the Compania Maritima would depart for Iloilo, the first stage of ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... he ordered the crew to eat some decayed pumpkins, instead of their allowance of cheese, which he said they had stolen ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... reeked of elderberries, soap, burnt stuff, and decayed leaves. I could not conceive why I had come to ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... heart and they plighted troth. This was but boy and girl love, but it was a love which decayed not, neither did it fade, but flourished and grew, even with the hand of sorrow and trial crushing ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa
... the king, by the advice of the excellent Queen Mary, granted the royal palace of Greenwich to be converted into a hospital for decayed seamen in the Royal Navy. Sir Christopher Wren was appointed as architect, and an annual sum of money was granted to complete and extend the buildings. The foundation of the first new building was laid on the 3rd of ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... eastern Washington, made up of level stretches and undulating hills, is all covered with a soil composed of volcanic ash and the disintegration of basaltic rocks which, together with some humus from decayed vegetation, has made a field of surpassing fertility for the production of the cereals with scant water supply; but under the magic touch of irrigation it doubles its output and makes of it not only a grain ...
— A Review of the Resources and Industries of the State of Washington, 1909 • Ithamar Howell
... son of Allan of Ravenswood (a decayed Scotch nobleman). Lucy Ashton, being attacked by a wild bull, is saved by Edgar, who shoots it; and the two falling in love with each other, plight their mutual troth, and exchange love-tokens at the "Mermaid's Fountain." While Edgar is absent ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... and both face and voice partook of the same calm; though energy and activity were at the same time as plainly manifested in every word and movement. Esther looked at her now, as she went among her beds, stooping here and there to remove a weed or pull off a decayed leaf, talking and using her eyes at the same time. Her yellow hair was combed smooth and flat at both sides of her head and knotted up firmly in a tight little business knot behind. She wore a faded print dress and a shawl, also ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... the mixture of these minerals, hath likewise taken more of some, and lesse of others, as shee thought to be most fit, and expedient for the good and behoofe of mans health, and the recovery and restitution of it decayed; being indeed such a worke, as no Art ...
— Spadacrene Anglica - The English Spa Fountain • Edmund Deane
... with analysis of the moral consciousness but with the conduct of affairs and the reform of institutions. The spectacle of human wretchedness profoundly moved them; their minds were bent on transforming society, so that a man's station and its duties might cease to be what a decayed feudal organisation and an inhuman industrialism had made of them. They revolted against the miserable condition of the masses of mankind, and against the miserable consolations which official ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... offers a strange blank in Indian history. Little can be said except that the power of the Kushans decayed and that northern India was probably invaded by Persians and Central Asian tribes. The same trouble did not affect southern India and it may be that religion and speculation flourished there and spread northwards, as certainly happened in later times. Many of the greatest Hindu ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... upon those that remain the creed of Islam; but keeping in view the whole of the Mohammedan world this fitful activity reminds one only of these green branches sometimes seen on trees, already, and for long, decayed at the core from age."—Food for Reflection, ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... of the pairing of the birds, and subsequent to the Brookfield explosion, Cornelia received a letter from her lover, bearing the tone of a summons. She was to meet him by the decayed sallow—the 'fruitless tree,' as he termed it. Startled by this abruptness, her difficulties made her take counsel of her dignity. "He knows that these clandestine meetings degrade me. He is wanting in faith, to require constant assurances. He will not understand ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Now that decayed glazier was a far-seeing and cunning man—too far-seeing and cunning to allow himself to thrive by simple and straightforward means—and he held his peace, till he could read more plainly the meaning of this riddle, merely adding carelessly, ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... spear and the shark-tooth sword are sold for curiosities. Ten years ago all these things and practices were to be seen in use; yet ten years more, and the old society will have entirely vanished. We came in a happy moment to see its institutions still erect and (in Apemama) scarce decayed. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... A little pile of white and brown lay upon it close to the opposite edge. After a moment of rest I crossed the room to investigate. The white was the bleached human bones—the skull, collar bones, arms, and a few of the upper ribs of a man. The brown was the dust of a decayed military cap and blouse. In a chair before the desk were other bones, while more still strewed the floor beneath the desk and about the chair. A man had died sitting there with his face buried in his ...
— The Lost Continent • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... impossible to lecture at Oxford so soon after his illness, he set off, before the middle of September, with his friends the Hilliards to visit his new possession. They found a rough-cast country cottage, old, damp, decayed; smoky chimneyed and rat-riddled; but "five acres of rock and moor and streamlet; and," he wrote, "I think the finest view I know in Cumberland or Lancashire, with the sunset visible ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... of honour loses its purity, you may be sure that the principle of religion is already decayed or dead. Now the principle of honour being (so to speak) of human origin, depends greatly for existence upon the opinions of men; and when we are emancipated from all great regard for those opinions, it almost inevitably follows ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... other reasons for that in Rome," said Campbell; "the churches are so unfinished, so untidy. Rome is a city of ruins! the Christian temples are built on ruins, and they themselves are generally dilapidated or decayed; thus they are ruins of ruins." Campbell was on an easier subject than that of Anglo-Catholicism, and, no one interrupting him, he proceeded flowingly: "In Rome you have huge high buttresses in the place ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... Havana, called San Cristobel, after the great discoverer, was originally surrounded by a wall, though the population has long since extended its dwellings and business structures far into what was, half a century since, the suburbs. A portion of the old wall is still extant, crumbling and decayed, but it has mostly disappeared. The narrow streets are paved or macadamized, and cross each other at right angles, like those of Philadelphia, but in their dimensions reminding one of continental Toledo, whose ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... The ravages of time, however, have been hard at work, and this place of safety for the crowned heads of Corea is now nothing but a mass of ruins. The roofs of the smaller houses have in most cases fallen through, owing to the decayed condition of the wooden rafters, and the main building itself is in a dreadful state of dilapidation. The ensemble, nevertheless, as one stands a little way off and looks at the conglomeration of dwellings, is very picturesque; this effect being chiefly due, ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... I seldom follow it. And so you think I had better employ a professional companion—a decayed gentlewoman—than save this young girl from going out as a governess and beginning to ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... Boyce," said Mr. Waverton, with an intense sneer. "Harry Boyce, a shabby, scrubby trickster to the eye. You would take him for a starveling usher, a decayed footman. It's a lurker in holes and corners, indeed, a cringing, grovelling fellow. But with a heart full of treason and all the cunning of a base, low hypocrisy. Still a youth, ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... Rome, that had very much decayed away; but still it had retained its place among the lower classes of the Roman people. Of the deeply religious nature of the Greeks, along with their beautiful and sunny effulgences of art, you have a striking proof, if you ...
— On the Choice of Books • Thomas Carlyle
... These must have contained offerings made after the completion of the burial. The blocking is made by planks and bricks, the whole outside of the planking being covered by bricks loosely stacked, as can be seen in the photograph, the planking having decayed away from before them. The chamber was floored with planks of wood laid flat on the sand, without any supporting beams ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... representatives of the people of the same age,—uncorrupted, but corruptible from their age, as we all are. They are sent there young. There is but one thing held out to them,—"You are going to make your fortune." The Company's service is to be the restoration of decayed noble families; it is to be the renovation of old, and the making of new ones. Now, when such a set of young men are sent out with these hopes and views, and with little education, or a very imperfect one,—when these people, from whatever rank of life selected, many from the best, most ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... will always generate fevers. Indeed, there is probably very little difference in the miasm thrown off from decomposed vegetable matter, and that produced from sluggish streams, standing waters and marshes. These, in the great Valley, abound with decayed vegetable matter. Hence, along the streams which have alluvial bottoms (as low lands upon streams are called in the West,) some of which are annually overflowed, and where the timber and luxuriant vegetable ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... his hand or the warmth of the fire, must know that what he has performed is neither more nor less than a very ordinary juggle. The monk who falls a rummaging in the Catacombs, or in any of the old graveyards about Rome, and finds there a parcel of decayed bones, which he passes off as those of Saint Theodosia or Saint Anathanasius, but which are as likely to be the bones of an old pagan, or a Goth, or a brigand, can hardly believe, one should suppose, his own tale. If the Pope believes in his own relics, what conceptions ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... possesses an abundance of them is in a fair way to grow rich easily. But it is necessary that the ruins should be properly matured. No man with an educated taste for food will eat Stilton cheese which is only half decayed. No educated tourist will take long journeys and pay hotel bills in order to look at an immature ruin. The decaying mills of Ireland have not yet reached the profitable stage of development. Their ...
— General John Regan - 1913 • George A. Birmingham
... evolution, which Kant was aware of, and which will always find toleration, even where they do not find patronage. But others there are, a class whom I perfectly abominate, that place our Earth in the category of decaying women, nay of decayed women, going, going, and all but gone. 'Hair like arctic snows, failure of vital heat, palsy that shakes the head as in the porcelain toys on our mantel-pieces, asthma that shakes the whole fabric—these they absolutely fancy themselves to see. They absolutely hear the tellurian lungs ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... way to the forest, White Cloud. It will be a long walk for you. We need dry moss and decayed wood for tinder. Some cold morning we shall wake and find no red coals in the ashes. Then we shall need some pieces of the driest of wood to kindle a ...
— Two Indian Children of Long Ago • Frances Taylor
... yet re-established; I decayed visibly, was pale as death, and reduced to an absolute skeleton; the beating of my arteries was extreme, my palpitations were frequent: I was sensible of a continual oppression, and my weakness became at length so great, that I could scarcely move or step without ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... fell off. In the hurry of finishing, some of the woodwork had but one coat of paint. In Ireland they have not faith in the excellent Dutch proverb, "Paint costs nothing." I could not get my workmen to give a second coat of paint to any of the sashes, and the wood decayed: divers panes of glass in the windows were broken, and their places filled up with shoes, an old hat, or a bundle of rags. Some of the slates were blown off one windy night: the slater lived at ten miles distance, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... this stage is reached. For the gradual revolutions are too slow to be discernible in the short period known to us by history and tradition. Physically and in mental powers men have been pretty much the same in all known ages. The sciences and arts have flourished now and have again decayed, but when they reached the highest perfection among one people, the neighbouring peoples were perhaps wholly unacquainted with them. We are therefore uncertain whether at present man is advancing to his point of perfection or declining from it. ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... as they do so suddenly from no root or seed, and growing one wonders why. I think, too, that some varieties are pretty objects, little fairy tables, centre-tables, standing on one leg. But their growth appears to be checked now, and they are of a brown tint and decayed. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... once suggested to a decayed man of fashion that an excellent profession for him to take up would be the proprietorship of an hotel of this class. 'You know what is really worth eating,' said an influential friend of his, 'and these caterers ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... the Powder Mills, on the same side, further up the canal; this, as well as each of the other permanent structures, was made of brick, having thin walls and light roofs. Wood in the damp atmosphere of the canal speedily decayed. ...
— History of the Confederate Powder Works • Geo. W. Rains
... strewn with vast boulders of rock, which had evidently fallen from the cliff as it had been eaten back by waters toiling through countless bygone ages. Many of these masses of rock lie at some distance from the foot of the falls, and on the partially decayed surfaces of some of them vegetation had evidently been flourishing for an indefinite period of time. Huge masses of rocks and boulders, as you look down the river, seem almost to block up its route towards the western sea, and indeed so completely seem to ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... we knew of no other friend and protector. And when the funeral was over we could not tell which way to turn; for we found our father's land must needs pass to the next male heir, Mr. John Dacre, our distant cousin. He, I know not how, had contrived to thrive where our father had decayed, and had gotten a good share of favour ...
— Andrew Golding - A Tale of the Great Plague • Anne E. Keeling
... see, that in all great houses, after the expiring of some few days, these young married blades are readily sent away to visit their uncles, that in the absence of their wives reposing themselves a little they may recover their decayed strength by the recruit of a fresh supply, the more vigorous to return again and face about to renew the duelling shock and conflict of an amorous dalliance, albeit for the greater part they have neither uncle nor aunt to ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... of Scotland was at one time forest is universally admitted. The remains of magnificent trees are to be constantly met with in the reclamation of land, many of the peat bogs being the formation of decayed vegetation. ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, November 1875 • Various
... the different ages when it had received additions, had a striking and imposing effect. An immense gate, composed of rails of hammered iron, with many a flourish and scroll, displaying as its uppermost ornament the ill-fated cipher of C. R., was now decayed, being partly wasted with rust, partly ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... two pieces of common pottery, a lock and a hinge of iron, some straw and leather soles of women's shoes. He adds: "At the entrance of several of the chambers the stone is worked to receive doors, and here portions of decayed wood were found. And many of the chambers had their walls blackened ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... To this day there is a charm in the remote rural character of the district. There are, about Humble in particular, wooded glades that might well represent the remains of the scene witnessed by Marmion and his troopers. East and West Saltoun are two decayed villages, about five miles S. W. of the county town. Between them is Saltoun Hall, the seat ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... snapped the link which bound Dr. Newman to the English Church. I have a conviction that it cut away the ground on which your father had hitherto most firmly and undoubtingly stood. Assuredly, from 1841 or 1842 onwards, his most fond, most faithful, most ideal love progressively decayed, and doubt nestled and gnawed in his soul. He was, however, of a nature in which levity could find no place. Without question, he estimated highly, as it deserves to be estimated, the tremendous nature ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby
... after having declared my resolution, and accordingly I boldly entered the house; and after narrowly escaping breaking my shins over a turf back and a salting tub, which stood on either side of the narrow exterior passage, I opened a crazy half-decayed door, constructed not of plank, but of wicker, and, followed by the Bailie, entered into the principal apartment of this ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... to pursue the snake and destroy it; but before I could act upon that impulse the reptile had escaped beyond my reach. A hollow log lay near—the trunk of a large tulip-tree, with the heart-wood decayed and gone. The snake had made for this—no doubt its haunt—and before I could come up with it, I saw the long slimy body, with its rhomboid spots, disappear within the dark cavity. Another "sker-r-rr" reached my ears as it glided out of sight. It seemed a note of triumph, ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... still remained, as did the balustrade, rusty, split, and in places twisted. Then suddenly they turned off by a fragile wooden bridge, resting on the supports of the staircase, between high walls on which were dimly visible the remains of huge frescoes, cracked, decayed, and blackened with soot, the hind legs of a horse, a woman's torso undraped, with inscriptions almost illegible on panels that had lost their gilding, 'Meditation,' 'Silence,' 'Trade uniting the nations ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... family, of both sexes, are summoned to attend him. These two days the Tirsan sitteth in consultation, concerning the good estate of the family. There, if there be any discord or suits between any of the family, they are compounded and appeased. There, if any of the family be distressed or decayed, order is taken for their relief, and competent means to live. There, if any be subject to vice, or take ill courses, they are reproved and censured. So likewise direction is given touching marriages, and the courses of life which any of them should take, with divers other the like ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... partly decayed tree gone afloat!" volunteered Bruno, with a merry laugh, as his eager brother ...
— The Lost City • Joseph E. Badger, Jr.
... is the only large one in this section of the country. Its diameter at the base, is said to be one hundred yards, its perpendicular height about eighty feet, and the diameter at its summit, forty-five feet. Trees, of all sizes and of various kinds, are growing on its sides; and fallen [36] and decayed timber, is interspersed among them; a single white oak rises out of a concavity in the centre ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... and curiosity had begun to take the place of the shrinking sensation he had felt on seeing that the woodwork was grey and mossy, much of it greatly decayed, and that the rough door had fallen away from its hinges and lay across the opening which it had been used to close. The timbers had been caulked with moss, and no doubt had had snow piled up against them, to keep out the ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... Lady Hameline, "he would have us believe that in his cold and bleak country still lives the noble fire which has decayed in France and Germany! The poor youth is like a Swiss mountaineer, mad with partiality to his native land—he will next tell us of the vines and olives ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... that evidently he meant to fling him over his shoulders, and the boy barely escaped such discomfiture. The others grinned again, and then the party appeared to fall apart and take different positions. Two vanished in the wood, while the others began hastily gathering dead limbs and decayed leaves. It seemed to Jack that less than three minutes had gone by when he saw the dim outlines of one of the warriors on his knees, striking the flint and steel, such as the pioneers, and, indeed, all persons, used in those days. The little lines of sparks shot back and forth, as they ...
— Camp-fire and Wigwam • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... heard of one who, forced from storms to shroud, Felt the loose walls of this decayed Retreat Rock to incessant neighings shrill and loud, While his horse pawed the floor with furious heat; 175 Till on a stone, that sparkled to his feet, Struck, and still struck again, the troubled horse: The man half raised the stone with pain and sweat, Half ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... 2d January, 1611, I departed with all the three ships from Mokha roads, intending to ply up for Bab-al-Mondub, for three reasons: First, to ease our ground tackle, which was much decayed through long riding at anchor in boisterous weather; second, to seek some place where we could procure water, for which we were now much distressed; and, lastly, to stop the passage of all the Indian ships entering the Red Sea, by which to constrain ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr
... mankind. The Divina Commedia and Paradise Lost have conferred upon modern mythology a systematic form; and when change and time shall have added one more superstition to the mass of those which have arisen and decayed upon the earth, commentators will be learnedly employed in elucidating the religion of ancestral Europe, only not utterly forgotten because it will have been stamped with the ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... was evidently ashamed of the attitude which he had not unnaturally adopted to his correspondent. The first man of letters of his day could not bear to reveal the full degree in which he had fawned upon the decayed dramatist, whose inferiority to himself was now plainly recognized. He altered the whole tone of the correspondence by omission, and still worse by addition. He did not publish a letter in which Wycherley gently remonstrates with his ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... of a spider and scream at the far-off hiss of a serpent. They are full of weaknesses and pains that wear out life and enervate all their mental and spiritual powers. The women of our day grow old in their youth. They often have all the marks of fifty years of age at twenty-five—decayed teeth, sallow skins, sunken cheeks, wrinkled faces, nervous debility, and a whole crowd of female ailments. Our grandmothers at sixty years were stouter and more capable of endurance than our young women at twenty-five. Why is it so? Simply because our girls and their mothers have neglected to ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... in very truth, as they do think the god himself, he must needs fight with the person in whom Too-Keela-Keela doth then dwell, and for this reason: If the holder of the soul can defend himself in fight, then it is clear that his strength is not one whit decayed, nor is his vigor feailing; nor yet has his assailant been able to take his soul from him. But if the Korong in open fight do sleay the person in whom Too-Keela-Keela dwells, he becometh at once a Too-Keela-Keela himself—that is to say, in their tongue, the Lord of Lords, because he hath ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... the hunters entered the fringe of dead trees. By the time they reached the center of the little island where the dead trees were thickest, the little party was nearly overcome by the horrible stench. At every step they crushed in nestfuls of decayed eggs which sent up their protests ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... was, in consequence of its decayed condition, demolished about the year 1870. Becoming aware of what was taking place, I gave instructions that a photograph should be taken of the chapel in which the body of Stradivari was interred. This was ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart |
