"Hotbed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... stock that had been weakened by infusions of Indian and negro blood, but there were a number of Chinamen, and French Creoles. Besides these, Americans, Britons, and European adventurers had established themselves, and the town was a hotbed of commercial and political intrigue. The newcomers were frankly there for what they could get and fought cunningly for trading and agricultural concessions. The leading citizens of comparatively pure Spanish strain despised the grasping foreigners in their hearts, but as a rule took their money ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss
... induced by a literary friend to break up his New York home and remove with his wife and aunt (her mother) to Philadelphia. The Quaker city was at that time quite a hotbed for magazine projects, and among the many new periodicals Poe was enabled to earn some kind of a living. To Burton's 'Gentleman's Magazine' for 1837 he had contributed a few articles, but in 1840 he arranged with ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... nightly course of profligacy and plunder with impunity. The French authorities, by a law which was strictly enforced, entirely swept away this nuisance from their capital, notoriously, for years, the very hotbed of the vice of gaming; but we were lamentably behind our neighbours; for, while we boasted of a Court pure in morals, and strict in the performance of every religious duty, we allowed the Sabbath to be desecrated, and the Palace of the Sovereign to be contaminated by the ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... Under the Empire the Tuileries was a hotbed of magic. Home, the American, was revered as the equal of a god. In addition to spiritualistic seances he evoked demons at court. One evocation had fatal consequences. A certain marquis, whose wife had died, implored Home to let him see her ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... and place sheets of glass on the pans or pots to check rapid evaporation. If water must be given, immerse the pots for a sufficient time, instead of using the water-can. A cool greenhouse, vinery, or a half-spent hotbed is a good position for the pans, and a range of temperature from 55 deg. to 65 deg. should be regarded as the outside limits ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... recently received a shock from the scion of Blanford, and the Bishop's son, in connection with 'The Purple Kangaroo,' has caused the British lion to hump himself into the hotbed ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... no greenhouse, a hotbed is an important help in the garden. The bed is made by digging a pit two feet deep, seven feet wide, and as ...
— Agriculture for Beginners - Revised Edition • Charles William Burkett
... napkin, settles back in his chair, and goes on with the tale, while Mother slips out quiet. She comes back after a while, springs a nervous little laugh, and announces that it was only the glass in one of the hotbed frames. ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... been weeded out of the city: some by death and imprisonment, others by flight. Boulogne became the hotbed of anarchism: the idlers and loafers, inseparable from any town where there is a garrison and a harbour, practically ruled the city now. Denunciations were the order of the day. Everyone who owned any money, or lived with any comfort was accused of being a traitor and suspected of ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... the sheets again to a neat square and lodged the soap in it, smiling. Silly lips of that chap. Betting. Regular hotbed of it lately. Messenger boys stealing to put on sixpence. Raffle for large tender turkey. Your Christmas dinner for threepence. Jack Fleming embezzling to gamble then smuggled off to America. Keeps a hotel now. They never come ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... morbidly sensitive. She should go into the world, and interest herself in benevolent schemes; and, ultimately, her diseased thoughts would flow into new and healthful channels. The secluded life she leads is a hotbed for the growth of noxious fungi in heart and mind. If you possess any influence over her, persuade her to re-enter society. She is still young enough to find not only a cure for her grief, but an ample share of even ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... could be more false, more hollow, more pernicious than the perpetual attempt to drill numerous classes of youths into a reproduction of the mere manner of the ancient orators. An age of unlimited declamation, an age of incessant talk, is a hotbed in which real depth and nobility of feeling runs miserably to seed. Style is never worse than it is in ages which employ themselves in teaching little else. Such teaching produces an emptiness of thought concealed under a plethora of words. This age of countless oratorical masters ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... more, in the field, than to accept defeat after defeat at the hands of the rebels under that former bandit chief, 'Pancho' Villa. Both the so-called Federals and the rebels, in Mexico, are doing their best to make Mexico a hotbed of incurable anarchy. Scores of American citizens have been murdered ruthlessly, and American women have been roughly treated. British subjects have been shot without the shadow of an excuse, and other foreigners have been maltreated. This country claims to ...
— Dave Darrin at Vera Cruz • H. Irving Hancock
... at Lawrence was the beginning of a plan, originating in that city, to organize insurrection throughout the Territory, and especially in all towns, cities, or counties where the Republican party have a majority. Lawrence is the hotbed of all the abolition movements in this Territory. It is the town established by the abolition societies of the East, and whilst there are respectable people there, it is filled by a considerable number of mercenaries who are paid by abolition societies to perpetuate and diffuse agitation ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 5: James Buchanan • James D. Richardson
... corruption begun by parents. And so the home, the very spot designed by God to become the chief school of human virtue, the seminary of social affections, the keystone of the whole fabric of society, the germ-cell of civilization, becomes a hotbed of corruption, and almost as often on account of a husband's neglect and sins, as on account of a wife's ignorance or frailties or failings. Our stock of advice to wives and mothers seems inexhaustible. Almost every one of the stronger ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... an early start on the garden or for raising plants for field crops, a hotbed is all but indispensable. In making a hotbed what we seek to do is to imitate Nature at her best, so get the best soil and the ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... ask questions," he explained. "And what," he demanded, "what doth a little cavalier in a Puritan hotbed?" ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... has transformed the city of Manila from a fever-infested hotbed of contagious diseases to one of the most healthful cities on the globe. Six thousand lepers have been collected and established in a colony on an island. The number of cases of small-pox has been reduced ...
— Birdseye Views of Far Lands • James T. Nichols
... it was reported about the town that our little circle was a hotbed of nihilism, profligacy, and godlessness, and the rumour gained more and more strength. And yet we did nothing but indulge in the most harmless, agreeable, typically Russian, light-hearted liberal chatter. ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... up one's freedom in June. And how many years before he would breathe the free, rose-haunted air of another June. Twenty. Why, the twentieth century would be dawning before he would be free again. Would his face be any the less hard at the expiration of his term? The penitentiary isn't a hotbed of virtue, and Jim wasn't wax. Nobody wasted any hopes on him,—except the lessees, who, finding him able-bodied, young, and healthy, sent him to the ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... is a fair allowance. Hens prefer to nest in a dark place if possible. A modern, up-to-date coop should have a warm, windproof sleeping room and an outside scratching shed. A sleeping room should be provided with a window on the south side and reaching nearly to the floor. A hotbed sash is excellent for this purpose. The runway or yard should be as large as our purse will permit. In this yard plant a plum tree for shade. The chickens will keep the plum trees free from the "curculio," a small beetle which is the principal insect pest of this fruit. This beetle is sometimes ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... link and a medium between the animal nature of man which its higher reason seeks to subdue, and his divine spiritual nature to which it gravitates, whenever it has the upper hand in its struggle with the inner animal. The latter is the instinctual "animal Soul" and is the hotbed of those passions, which, as just shown, are lulled instead of being killed, and locked up in their breasts by some imprudent enthusiasts. Do they still hope to turn thereby the muddy stream of the animal ...
— Studies in Occultism; A Series of Reprints from the Writings of H. P. Blavatsky • H. P. Blavatsky
... taking our quinine, we turned in and slept that night in the best way that the heat would let us, rising next morning with the vain hope of getting a bathe. Of all the discomforts we experienced at Secocoeni's, the scarcity and badness of the water was the worst. Bad water, when you are in a hotbed of fever, is a terrible privation. And so we had to go unwashed, with the exception of having a little water poured over our hands out of gourds. We must have presented a curious sight at breakfast that morning. ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... is the hotbed of all crimes, do we not want a Lord Lieutenant who shall be able to assess the true value of every indiscretion, from simple murder to compound larceny? As every Irishman may in a few months be in prison, I want a Lord ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari. Vol. 1, July 31, 1841 • Various
... a hotbed of rebellion," he urged. "If these Chouans but learn that we are from Paris and of the King's party, we shall have our throats slit, as I live. There is not a peasant in all this countryside indeed, scarce a man of any sort but is a red-hot Orleanist, anti-Cardinalist, and friend of ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... the intrepid Burton had penetrated to that hotbed of fanaticism, and had by a miracle come back alive. From that day to this none ...
— The River of Darkness - Under Africa • William Murray Graydon
... alike, repaid the public liberality by striking a secret and envenomed blow at the reputation of every one who was not the ready tool of power—who strewed the slime of rankling malice and mercenary scorn over the bud and promise of genius, because it was not fostered in the hotbed of corruption, or warped by the trammels of servility—who supported the worst abuses of authority in the worst spirit—who joined a gang of desperadoes to spread calumny, contempt, infamy, wherever they were merited by honesty or talent on a different ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... England became a new man. Hitherto he had hesitated, temporized, delayed—not with Ireland only, but with the manifold labours which were thrust upon him. At last he was awake. And, indeed, it was high time. With a religious war apparently on the eve of explosion, he could ill tolerate a hotbed of sedition at his door; and Irish sedition was about to receive into itself a new element, which was to make it ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... says that: "Our country is still comparatively free from Communism and Nihilism and similar destructive movements, but who can tell how long this will continue? We have a festering mass of human wretchedness in all our great towns, which is the natural hotbed of such anarchical movements: all the great continental countries are full of this explosive material. Can we depend on our country keeping free from the infection when we have far more poverty in our midst ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... late associates get wind of your whereabouts? In that I don't question your discretion, Mr. Vanringham. And out of pure friendliness I warn you Paris is a very hotbed of hot-headed Jacobites who would derive unmerited pleasure from getting ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... realized that this group must be a band of Radicals. Radicals? And one of them had promised to take her to her friend, Johnny Thompson. Could it be that in Russia, that hotbed of radicalism, Johnny had had his head turned and was at that moment a member of this band? It did not seem possible. She would not for a ...
— Triple Spies • Roy J. Snell |
