"Marshy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... local insect found in damp or marshy places." But Morris is sometimes wrong. Sometimes Jacob, choosing a very fine pen, made ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... have cited of the rivers of Russia shows, that the land whence great rivers take their rise, is not necessarily mountainous; in this case the ascent is almost imperceptible, and the summit offers the aspect of a level and marshy plain. Such also occurs in the famous boundary between the United States and Canada, where the highlands that figured in two successive treaties have disappeared, and in their supposed place has been found a series ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... around shore about two miles, only it's farther, as you have to make so many ups and downs over the rocks. Then you leave the shore and go through a low marshy stretch, sort of a Dismal Swamp, and then up a hill. After Ptolemy and I climbed to the top, we looked down and saw, hidden in a clump of lonely looking poplars, a small, rudely built house. We went down to explore and had hard work making our way through a thick growth of—everything. ...
— Our Next-Door Neighbors • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... I do not remember, except that the dull rumble of the wheels told me we were passing over a bridge, and that I saw through the mist before my eyes a sluggish river, a muddy canal, and patches of marshy fields. ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... and his wife, with their family of three children, arrived at their new home in the West. It was early in the spring. The main body of the farm, which was densely wooded, lay upon the eastern bank of a small, sluggish river, with broad, marshy bottom-lands. The cabin, which had been put up the year before on a small clearing, stood on an eminence just above this river, and was five miles away from any other human habitation. It consisted of two rooms and a small loft ...
— Lizzy Glenn - or, The Trials of a Seamstress • T. S. Arthur
... sailor's advice I went down with him and enjoyed a rude but plentiful meal. By the time that we had finished, the lugger had been run into a narrow creek, with shelving sandy banks on either side. The district was wild and marshy, with few signs of any inhabitants. With much coaxing and pushing Covenant was induced to take to the water, and swam easily ashore, while I followed in the smuggler's dinghy. A few words of rough, kindly leave-taking ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... wild beasts and other animals, as well as against the humidity of marshy ground, the Sakais of the plain often build their huts either up a tree or ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... Wayman drove was a disreputable-looking conveyance—half chaise-cart, half gig—and the pony was a vicious-looking animal, with a shaggy mane; but he was a tremendous pony to go, and the dark, marshy country flew past the travellers in the darkness like ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... not attempted, but hardy little ponies, cows, goats, sheep, and pigs were feeding, and picking their way about in the marshy mead below, and a small garden of pot-herbs, inclosed by a strong fence of timber, lay on the sunny side of a spacious rambling forest lodge, only one story high, built of solid timber and roofed with shingle. It was not without strong pretensions to beauty, as well as to picturesqueness, ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... mother-in-law, four children, and an aunt, "all shaking with the ague," were given twenty minutes in which to get their goods into two wagons and start.* The west bank in Iowa, where the people landed, was marshy and unhealthy, and the suffering at what was called "Poor Camp," a short distance above Montrose, was intense. Severe storms were frequent, and the best cover that some of the people could obtain was a tent made of a blanket or a quilt, or even of brush, or the shelter to be had under the wagons ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... river was a little shanty in which was a mass of fishing seine. It stood hospitably open, for the hinges of the door were all rusted away and the dried and shrunken boards lay on the marshy ground before the entrance. Keekie Joe had intended to make sure that there was nothing to eat in the shanty before casting his line in the neighboring water. For there was the barest chance that a petrified crust of bread, ancient remnant of some fisherman's lunch, ...
— Pee-Wee Harris Adrift • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... was crossed at short intervals by marshy hollows. A slope, slippery as glass with the ice, hurried the carriages into them, and there they stuck fast: to draw them out it was necessary to climb on the opposite side a similar slope, where the ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... of age I began going to what we always called the "Port School," because it was kept at Cambridgeport, a mile from the College. This suburb was at that time thinly inhabited, and, being much of it marshy and imperfectly reclaimed, had a dreary look as compared with the thriving College settlement. The tenants of the many beautiful mansions that have sprung up along Main Street, Harvard Street, and Broadway can hardly recall the time when, except the "Dana House" and the "Opposition ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... by assiduous tillage to yield thin crops of rye and oats. In other places, the ancient forests, which the conquerors of the Roman Empire had descended on the Danube, remained untouched by the hand of man. Where the soil was rich it was generally marshy, and its insalubrity repelled the cultivators whom its fertility attracted. Frederic William, called the Great Elector, was the prince to whose policy his successors have agreed to ascribe their greatness. He acquired by the peace of Westphalia several valuable possessions, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... to construct our residences, besides securing proper ventilation and adequate drainage, we ought to select the location for a home on dry soil. Low levels, damp surroundings, and marshy localities not only breed malaria and fevers, but are a prolific cause of colds, coughs, and consumption. Care should be taken not to locate a dwelling where the natural currents of air, or high winds, will be likely to bring the poison of decayed vegetable matter from ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... I knew her well. She was older than me, some. When I was a boy, say twelve year old, Miss Marshy Darracott was a young lady. The pick of the country she was, now I tell ye! Some thought Miss Timothy was handsomer,—she was tall, and a fine figger; her and Mis' Blyth favored each other,—but little Miss Marshy was the one for my money. She used to make me think of a hummin'-bird; ...
— Mrs. Tree • Laura E. Richards
... house, lighted by one small window. This his family and Zillah occupied; somewhat crowded, it is true, yet not at all uncomfortable. A wide hearth was there, and a blazing peat fire kept down the chill of the marshy exhalations. Outside of this was a smaller room, and this was Obed's. A fire was burning here also. A window lighted it, and a stout door opened into the hall. The bed was an old-fashioned ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... becomes narrower and the stream less, though running more swiftly; and here there is a marshy spot with willows, and between them some bulrushes and great bunches of bullpolls. This coarse grass forms tufts or cushions, on which snakes often coil in the sunshine. Yet though so rough, in June the bullpoll sends up tall slender stalks with graceful feathery ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... Chagres lolled with considerable force, now between low marshy shores, now narrowing, between steep, thickly wooded banks. It was liable, as are all rivers in hilly districts, to sudden and heavy floods; and although the padrone, on leaving Gatun, had pledged his soul to land me at Cruces that night, ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... by mere chance that in the year 1869 I discovered the site of ancient Cintla, buried in the thick and fever-haunted forests of the marshy coast, and unknown until then to the Indians themselves. In the course of the excavations which I caused to be made, antiquities of a curious and interesting ...
— The Battle and the Ruins of Cintla • Daniel G. Brinton
... the ox proceeded By the Sound of Sariola strayed; Browsed the grass in marshy places, While his back the clouds were touching; But they could not find a butcher, Who could fell the country's marvel On the list of Suomi's children, 'Mid the mighty host of people, 50 Not among the youthful people, Nor among ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... cut-throat pit, and the vices of Paris run riot there under the cloak of night. This question, frightful in itself, becomes appalling when we note that these dwelling-houses are shut in on the side towards the Rue de Richelieu by marshy ground, by a sea of tumbled paving-stones between them and the Tuileries, by little garden-plots and suspicious-looking hovels on the side of the great galleries, and by a desert of building-stone and old rubbish on the ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... buds not yet swollen to bursting. On the middle of the limb, blackly silhouetted against the golden disk, crouched a raccoon, who sniffed the spring air and scanned the moon-washed spaces. From the marshy spots at the foot of the hill, over toward the full-fed, softly rushing brook, came the high piping of the frogs, a voice ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... them in different places up and down the country. When Isis knew what had been done, she set out in search of the scattered portions of her husband's body; and in order to pass more easily through the lower, marshy parts of the country, she made use of a boat made of the papyrus plant. For this reason, they say, either fearing the anger of the goddess, or else venerating the papyrus, the crocodile never injures anyone who travels in this sort of vessel.[FN307] And this, they say, hath given rise to the report ...
— Legends Of The Gods - The Egyptian Texts, edited with Translations • E. A. Wallis Budge
... was posted a knot of women, compassionate contemplators of the singer's distracted, grief-wrought features. Through the ravine's dark opening I could see the sun sinking below the suburb before plunging into the marshy forest and having his disk pierced by sharp, black tips of pine trees. Already everything around him was red. Already, seemingly, he had been wounded, and was ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... land which we call Shomer and which they themselves called Kengi, which means the "country of the reeds" and which shows us that they had dwelt among the marshy parts of the Mesopotamian valley. Originally the Sumerians had been mountaineers, but the fertile fields had tempted them away from the hills. But while they had left their ancient homes amidst the peaks of western ...
— Ancient Man - The Beginning of Civilizations • Hendrik Willem Van Loon
... WILD FOWL REFUGE on Vermillion Bay, has an area of 13,000 acres. It was presented to the state by Messrs. Ward and McIlhenny, and formally accepted and protected. It contains a great area of fresh-water ponds and marshy meadows, wherein grows an abundant supply of food for wild fowl. It contains several miles of gravel beach, which during the winter season is visited by thousands of wild geese in quest of their indispensable supply of gravel. The ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... hills east of Rio Paraguay; Gran Chaco region west of Rio Paraguay mostly low, marshy plain near the river, and dry forest and ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... heightened when joined to a description of the country. The coasts consisted only of sand-banks or slime, alternately overflowed or left imperfectly dry. A little further inland, trees were to be found, but on a soil so marshy that an inundation or a tempest threw down whole forests, such as are still at times discovered at either eight or ten feet depth below the surface. The sea had no limits; the rivers no beds nor banks; the ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... corps; the 19th Native Infantry. They marched by a different route from ourselves on account of the scarcity of supplies in that desert country; we halted for them at Kochee, which place we reached on the 15th about 3 P.M., after the thirty to forty miles' march I before told you of, across the marshy desert which seems to divide Sinde from Cutch Gundava. This march ought only to have been twenty-six miles; but owing to the stupidity of our guide we went a longer and more circuitous route, and also had the pleasure of losing our way during the ...
— Campaign of the Indus • T.W.E. Holdsworth
... although it is still such a young place by the scale of Europe, it has already begun to be deserted for its neighbour and namesake, North Vallejo. A long pier, a number of drinking-saloons, a hotel of a great size, marshy pools where the frogs keep up their croaking, and even at high noon the entire absence of any human face or voice—these are the marks of South Vallejo. Yet there was a tall building beside the pier, labelled the Star Flour Mills; and sea-going, full-rigged ships lay close ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... place?" Molly was peeping over her aunt's shoulder. "I've always longed to go there but I was afraid it was all sloppy and marshy; ...
— Three Little Cousins • Amy E. Blanchard
... it seemed to me animated by a lively warmth, very different from the insensibility which I had accused[295] her of shedding upon me when she came out of the water. Her breath was pure and fresh, and her goddess-ship, which I had suspected of being something marshy, had no taint of mud about it. If only I might reveal all that she said to me in a confidence which I could have wished longer![295] But apparently she got tired of it[295] and let go my wig. "'Twould be too ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... past all the passengers looked out of the windows, laughing. The more they laughed the straighter Pee-wee sat. All of a sudden, good night, over he went backwards, kerflop, into the marshy land just underneath the sign. All the people ...
— Roy Blakeley's Bee-line Hike • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... stunted oaks. A few hundred feet from the street stood a cottage built of yellow "Milwaukee" brick. It was quite hidden from the street by the oak grove. The lane ended just beyond in a tangle of weeds and undergrowth. On the west side there was an open, marshy lot which separated the cottage in the trees from Stoney Island Avenue,—the artery that connects Pullman and the ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... greater one; when the old image of the god, carved probably out of the stock of an enormous vine, had just come from the village of Eleutherae to his first temple in the Lenaeum—the quarter of the winepresses, near the Limnae—the marshy place, which in Athens represents the cave of Nysa; its little buildings on the hill-top, still with steep rocky ways, crowding round the ancient temple of Erechtheus and the grave of Cecrops, with the old miraculous olive-tree still growing there, and ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... never as yet found more than one nest of the Blue-winged Laughing-Thrush, and this one was found on the 18th May at Mongphoo, at an elevation of about 3500 feet. The nest was placed in a bush (one of the Zingiberaceae), growing in a marshy place, in the midst of dense scrub, at a height of about 4 feet from the ground, and was firmly attached to several upright stems. It was composed of dry bamboo-leaves, held together by the stems ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... margin of the mill-pond, catching flounders, perch, eels, and tom-cod, which came up thither with the tide. The place where they fished is now, probably, covered with stone-pavements and brick buildings, and thronged with people, and with vehicles of all kinds. But, at that period, it was a marshy spot on the outskirts of the town, where gulls flitted and screamed overhead, and salt meadow-grass grew under foot. On the edge of the water there was a deep bed of clay, in which the boys were forced to stand, while they caught their fish. ...
— True Stories from History and Biography • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... front penetrated a region inundated by the Belgians during the desperate German offensives of 1914. The trench system, winding through a mile or so of sand dunes, passed in a southeasterly direction through the marshy sector known as Lombartzyde. Here the bogged front lines were intersected by the Yser canal, the German front trench being some 80 yards away. Allied gas was installed in the Lombartzyde and neighbouring sectors ready for discharge on the first ...
— by Victor LeFebure • J. Walker McSpadden
... But Hannibal anticipated him. The passage of the Apennines was accomplished without much difficulty, at a point as far west as possible or, in other words, as distant as possible from the enemy; but the marshy low grounds between the Serchio and the Arno were so flooded by the melting of the snow and the spring rains, that the army had to march four days in water, without finding any other dry spot for resting by night than was supplied by piling the baggage ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... commerce, such was Amalfi during the tenth and eleventh centuries. In some respects this Republic of the Middle Ages appears as the prototype of the Venice of the Renaissance, for there is not a little in common between the city that was built upon the marshy islets of the Adriatic lagoons, and the city that was erected at the base of the treacherous cliffs of the Tyrrhene Sea. Solely by means of commerce both foundations rose from nothingness to splendour and power: both held the gorgeous East in fee; and both fell lamentably ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... was presently explained. A slight splash told of water encountered. He had been in search of the river, and had found it. This was the Tchernaya—a slow sluggish stream, hidden amidst long marshy grass, and everywhere fordable, as McKay had heard, at this season of ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... the town, I was fortunate enough to overtake the fugitive Kaartans to whose kindness I had been so much indebted in my journey through Bambarra. They readily agreed to introduce me to the King; and we rode together through some marshy ground where, as I was anxiously looking around for the river, one of them called out, geo affili (see the water), and looking forwards, I saw with infinite pleasure the great object of my mission—the ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... could only strike through Roumania and across the Danube and the difficult passes of the middle Balkans. Further, as the Roumanian railways had but single lines, the movement of men and stores to the Danube was very slow. Numbers of the troops, after camping on its marshy banks (for the river was then in flood), fell ill of malarial fever; above all, the carelessness of the Russian Staff and the unblushing peculation of its subordinates and contractors clogged the wheels of the military machine. One result of it was seen in the ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... You appear by night, rising under my eyes Like marshy breath or shadows on the wall; Yet the hound scented you like any evil That feels upon the night for a way out. And do you, then, indeed wend alone? Came you from the West or the sky-covering North Yet saw no thin steel ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... general, somewhat loosely, and, had the pony been a Bucephalus rather than a Rozinante, not a little perilously. Simon is jogging hitherwards toward Roger Acton, as he digs the land-drain across this marshy meadow: let us see how it fares now ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... masts and a large lateen sail." Instead of doubling Cape Ducato, they were driven out to sea northward, and, finally, at one o'clock in the morning, anchored off the Port of Phanari on the Suliote coast. Towards the evening of the next day (November 10) they landed in "the marshy bay" (stanza lxviii. line 2) and rode to Volondorako, where they slept. "Here they were well received by the Albanian primate of the place and by the Vizier's soldiers quartered there." Instead of re-embarking in the galliot, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... spring, but never breeding in any of them, though a few young and non-breeding birds may be seen about at all times of the summer, especially about the harbour. Being a marsh-breeding Gull, and selecting low marshy islands situated for the most part in inland fresh-water lakes and large pieces of water, it is not to be wondered at that it does not breed in the Channel Islands, where there are no places either suited to its requirements or where it could ...
— Birds of Guernsey (1879) • Cecil Smith
... remain, but the enlargement and completion of the monastery was carried out in successive stages and "transition periods," in a style or styles which, perhaps, more by hap than by cunning, Byron rightly named "mixed Gothic" (stanza lv. line 4). To work their mills, and perhaps to drain the marshy valley, the monks dammed the Leen and excavated a chain of lakes—the largest to the north-west, Byron's "lucid lake;" a second to the south of the Abbey; and a third, now surrounded with woods, and overlooked by the "wicked lord's" "ragged rock" below the Abbey, half ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... comfortable, but I am warned not to imagine that all Cape carts are as easy as this one. Away we go at a fine pace through the delicious sparkling morning sunshine and crisp air, soon turning off the red high-road into a sandy, marshy flat with a sort of brackish back-water standing in pools here and there. We are going to call on Langalibalele, and his son, Malambuli, who are located at Uitvlugt on the Cape downs, about four miles from the town. It is a sort of farm-residence; and considering ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... for Marlborough to attack before Villeroy joined the enemy, or to withdraw until a more favourable opportunity presented itself. The right flank of his opponents rested on high hills, which were protected by detached posts, and the left flank on the Danube, while opposite the centre was the marshy valley of the River Nebel, with several branches running through the swampy ground. Marlborough decided that a battle {47} was absolutely necessary and he attacked the next day. Like Hannibal, he relied principally on his cavalry for achieving his decisive success, ...
— Lectures on Land Warfare; A tactical Manual for the Use of Infantry Officers • Anonymous
... being filled with fat, was filled with woods, and a little to the west of the center, where an omelet might have nestled in its smaller prototype, three tents were concealed in the enshrouding foliage. Down at the end of the handle of this frying-pan was good fishing, but it was marshy there, and sometimes after a heavy rain the handle was completely sub-merged. From an airplane the three white tents in the western side of the pan might have seemed like three enormous poached eggs; that is, provided the ...
— Pee-wee Harris on the Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... a coast-line of about 3,000 miles, nearly the whole of which is low and marshy land. A large portion of the island is mountainous, as you may see by looking at the map before you;" and the professor indicated the several ranges with the pointer. "One chain extends nearly the whole length ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... European nor the American can cultivate as laborers. It requires working in marshy land, and though on the Islands it yields two crops a year, none but the Chinaman can raise it successfully. A dry-land or mountain rice has been introduced, which will be treated under the head of ...
— The Hawaiian Islands • The Department of Foreign Affairs
... by a marshy bank girdled with tall yellow reeds and dwarf bamboo, and from our quiet cabin listened to the rainy gusts that swept the valley. Out of the inky clouds the lightning flashed and lighted up each branch and stem and swaying leaf, revealing to our half-blinded ...
— My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard • Elizabeth Cooper
... weaker sister in her pain. The latter was sorely injured too, and cut into little foam-bits; but she kept her wits about her, looking around everywhere for a place to rest. Soon she espied one—a little bowl of marshy ground, hemmed in by rocks, into which a straggling dropping from ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... confines the Nile divided its flood over and over again and hunted the sea in long meanderings over the flat Delta. A few miles above On the separation began and continued to the marshy coast far to the north. From the summit of the great towers of Bubastis and Sais the glistening sinuosities of its branches might ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... Bona on June 5, and, after calling at Cagliari and Chia, arrived at Cape Spartivento on the morning of June 8. The coast here is a low range of heathy hills, with brilliant green bushes and marshy pools. Mr. Webb remarks that its reputation for fever was so bad as to cause Italian men-of-war to sheer off in passing by. Jenkin suffered a little from malaria, but of a different origin. 'A number of the SATURDAY REVIEW here,' he ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... both commanders that the village of Lobositz was the decisive point; and indeed, the nature of the ground was such as to render operations almost impossible, in the marshy plain intersected by rivulets, which in many ...
— With Frederick the Great - A Story of the Seven Years' War • G. A. Henty
... concealment nothing could be seen of their array. Over to the westward on the placid waters of the bay the huge Monadnock was driving shell after shell into the dense underbrush across the abandoned rice fields and the marshy flats that lined the shore. Over to the east resounding cheers and crashing volleys, punctuated by the sharp report of field guns, told that the comrade brigade was heavily engaged and, apparently, driving the ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... southward along the Kinderkamack Road with its high terraced houses to the right and to the left the low marshy land stretching away to the river. Along the road they had to pass several villages before reaching the point where it would be well to leave the road and cut through the country ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... Mlechchha tribes. The mighty son of the wind-god having thus conquered various countries, and exacting tributes from them all advanced towards Lohity. And the son of Pandu then made all the Mlechchha kings dwelling in the marshy regions on the sea-coast, pay tributes and various kinds of wealth, and sandal wood and aloes, and clothes and gems, and pearls and blankets and gold and silver and valuable corals. The Mlechchha kings showered upon ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... extends that rich and valuable country now known by the name of the Eastern Townships. At the mouth of the Chaudiere the banks of the St. Lawrence are bold and lofty, but they gradually lower to the westward till they sink into the flats of Baye du Febre, and form the marshy shores of Lake St. Peter, whence a rich plain extends to a great distance. This district contains several high, isolated mountains, and is abundantly watered by lakes and rivers. To the south lies the territory ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... which is not to tickle the critical ears of ethnologists and philologists, but to touch the hearts of my countrymen on behalf of the poor Gipsy women and children and other roadside Arabs flitting about in our midst, in such a way as to command attention to these neglected, dark, marshy spots of human life, whose seedlings have been running wild among us during the last three centuries, spreading their poisonous influence abroad, not only detrimental to the growth of Christianity and the spread ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... I had crossed a marshy track full of willows, bulrushes, and odd, outlandish, swampy trees; and I had now come out upon the skirts of an open piece of undulating, sandy country, about a mile long, dotted with a few pines, and a great number ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Compare modern English, "lawn," and French, "Landes" — flat, bare marshy tracts in the ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... of the state of Wu was much less favourable than that of Shu Han, though this second southern kingdom lasted from 221 to 280. Its country consisted of marshy, water-logged plains, or mountains with narrow valleys. Here Tai peoples had long cultivated their rice, while in the mountains Yao tribes lived by hunting and by simple agriculture. Peasants immigrating from the north found that their wheat and pulse did not ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... and ponds by twining reeds and rushes, and little knolls of earth. On the farther bank from me the trees rose thickly again, and shut out the view, and cast their black shadows on the sluggish, shallow water. As I walked down to the lake, I saw that the ground on its farther side was damp and marshy, overgrown with rank grass and dismal willows. The water, which was clear enough on the open sandy side, where the sun shone, looked black and poisonous opposite to me, where it lay deeper under the shade of the spongy ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... us, none having been caught since yesterday morning. Two black swans were however shot on the river. Our present situation is by no means enviable: in the first place, there is every chance that the river may be lost in a multitude of branches, among those marshy flats, and farther navigation thus rendered impossible; and in the second, a rise of four feet in the river would sweep us all away, since we have not the smallest eminence to retreat to. Should the river lead through to the westward, and ...
— Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales • John Oxley
... who had done so much for good and cheap literature; Madame Bodichon (formerly Barbara Smith), the great friend and correspondent of George Eliot, who was interesting to me because by introducing the Australian eucalyptus to Algeria she had made an unhealthy marshy country quite salubrious. She had a salon, where I met very clever men and women—English and French—and which made me wish for such things in Adelaide. The kindness and hospitality that were shown to me—an absolute stranger—by all sorts of people were surprising. Mr. and ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... few days later, saw on their left the mouth of the stream to which the Iroquois had given the well-merited name of Ohio, or, the Beautiful River. [Footnote: Called on Marquette's map, Ouabouskiaou. On some of the earliest maps, it is called Ouabache (Wabash).] Soon they began to see the marshy shores buried in a dense growth of the cane, with its tall straight stems and feathery light-green foliage. The sun glowed through the hazy air with a languid stifling heat, and, by day and night, mosquitoes in myriads left them no peace. They floated ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... all over Europe, and one must have travelled in wild, thinly-peopled countries, far away from the chief lines of communication, to realize in full the immense work that must have been performed by the barbarian communities in order to conquer the woody and marshy wilderness which Europe was some two thousand years ago. Isolated families, having no tools, and weak as they were, could not have conquered it; the wilderness would have overpowered them. Village communities alone, working in common, could master the wild forests, the sinking ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... some parts of their country reach to the river Tanais. Beyond the Royal Scythians towards the North Wind dwell the Melanchlainoi, 29 of a different race and not Scythian. The region beyond the Melanchlainoi is marshy and not inhabited by any, so ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... from North Dakota northwest; winters along the Gulf Coast. This species is one of the most beautiful of the Grebes, having in the breeding season buffy ear tufts, black cheeks and throat, and chestnut neck, breast and sides. They breed abundantly in the marshy flats of North Dakota and the interior of Canada. They build a typical Grebe's nest, a floating mass of decayed matter which stains the naturally white eggs to a dirty brown. The number of eggs varies from three to seven. ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... west, away from the river, the town has groped beyond a prairie frontier that had once been sacred to boyish games and the family cow. Now, so thickly was it built with neat white houses, that only with strenuous clairvoyance could famous old localities be identified: the ball-ground; the marshy stretch that made skating in winter, or, in spring, a fascinating place to catch cold by wading; the grassy common where "shinny" was played by day and "Yellow Horn" by night; the enchanted spot where the circus built airy ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... still continued to follow the course of the Arve, which, according to the opinions of some writers, is believed to have, at one period, formed a lake between the mountains which encompass this valley; a conjecture which the marshy appearance of the ...
— A tour through some parts of France, Switzerland, Savoy, Germany and Belgium • Richard Boyle Bernard
... before them was wild and dreary. At some distance off appeared a mass of long rushes, beyond which extended a sheet of water, the opposite shore of which was scarcely visible. Numerous flocks of waterfowl were hovering over the marshy banks of this lake, which I found was of very considerable extent, though inferior to that of Titicaca, the largest ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... is an exception to the general barrenness, it having been gradually formed out of the soil and vegetation brought down the river from more fruitful regions during periods of inundation. It is a low, marshy, heavily-timbered tract, which has been partially drained and laid out as a public park, the so-called English Garden—spot beloved of the people for its welcome shades, where artificial waterfalls, from the "Isar rolling rapidly," add chill to the natural ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... a marshy plain (Fig. 1), in which the first excavation was made. This is protected by longitudinal dikes which lead back the water to it in case of freshets. At the end of this cutting, which is 100 meters in length, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various
... this they were disappointed. They explored the recesses of the swamp from end to end and side to side with the utmost thoroughness, but found nothing further to reward their search. The ground was too soft and marshy to retain any traces of footsteps, and the mare and saddle furnished the only evidence that the object of their quest had been in the neighborhood of the swamp—and of course this evidence was of the most ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... birch wood, and Hans was having trouble with the dog, to make him keep quiet. Mildrid's heart began to throb. Hans arranged with her that he would stay behind, but near the house; it was better that she should go in first alone. He carried her over one or two marshy places, and he felt that her hands were cold. "Don't think of what you're to say," he whispered; "just wait and see how things come." She gave no sound in answer, nor did ...
— The Bridal March; One Day • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... narrow ditch across the flats. Pulling his raft up to the right side of the river, he jumped to the bank, but when he sank ankle-deep in the soft, sticky earth, he climbed hastily back. Poling along he searched for a solid footing, but everywhere the marshy soil gave, and he abandoned his attempts to land. The night ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart
... its name from Guinea, in Africa, where it is found—wild, and in great abundance. It is gregarious in its habits, associating in flocks of two or three hundred, delighting in marshy grounds, and at night perching upon trees, or on high situations. Its size is about the same as that of a common hen, but it stands higher on its legs. Though domesticated, it retains much of its wild ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... earth, but Sandy, having finished his refreshment, without even waiting to return thanks, trotted off across lots at a great pace, 'Bijah following in hot pursuit. Away they splashed through the marshy meadows; jump, they went over the stone walls. "Land!" said 'Bijah. "Where be you a-goin'?" as Sandy leaped across a ditch into the great Kingsbury orchard. Mr. Kingsbury had died a year before. His wife had closed ...
— The Little Gold Miners of the Sierras and Other Stories • Various
... soon became too strait for the increasing multitudes; new ramparts were built—tradition says under the direction of the king Servius Tullius—which, with a great circuit of seven miles, swept around the entire cluster of the Seven Hills. A large tract of marshy ground between the Palatine and Capitoline hills was drained by means of the Cloaca Maxima, the "Great Sewer," which was so admirably constructed that it has been preserved to the present day. It still discharges its waters through a great arch into the Tiber. The land ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... Entering Egypt from the Mediterranean, or from Asia by the caravan route, the traveller sees stretching before him an apparently boundless plain, wholly unbroken by natural elevations, generally green with crops or with marshy plants, and canopied by a cloudless sky, which rests everywhere on a distant flat horizon. An absolute monotony surrounds him. No alternation of plain and highland, meadow and forest, no slopes of hills, or hanging woods, or dells, or gorges, or cascades, or rushing streams, or ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... forest were going up and down, and the great stars came gleaming out to look on the face of Yann. Then the sailors lighted lanterns and hung them round the ship, and the light flashed out on a sudden and dazzled Yann, and the ducks that fed along his marshy banks all suddenly arose, and made wide circles in the upper air, and saw the distant reaches of the Yann and the white mist that softly cloaked the jungle, before they returned again ...
— Tales of Three Hemispheres • Lord Dunsany
... valley in which the Geyser is situated. For many miles we could see its clouds of steam rising to the sky. The roads were tolerable only when they passed along the sides of hills and mountains; in the plains they were generally marshy and full of water. We sometimes lost all traces of a road, and only pushed on towards the quarter in which the place of our destination was situated; and feared withal to sink at every pace into the soft and ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... character. I recollect a history of a buffalo-hunting adventure, told me by a Dutch farmer, who was himself an eye-witness to the scene. He had gone out with a party to hunt a herd of buffaloes which were grazing on a piece of marshy ground, sprinkled with a few mimosa-trees. As they could not get within shot of the herd, without crossing a portion of the marsh, which was not safe for horses, they agreed to leave their steeds in charge of two Hottentots, and to advance on ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... outside, and owned allegiance to none but a grizzly old dictator, royally described as the Panther of the South. One thing was certain, the Empire could never follow Regules to the fever and ambush of the Panther's marshy realm, and Regules was hard pressed indeed when he sought such protection. But he was there now, in that last refuge of Liberalism, alone, wounded, fever stricken, emaciated, but undaunted. Driscoll found him so, and became his ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... breast I see majestic VENICE rest; While round her spires the billows rave, Inverted splendours gild the wave. Fair liberty has rear'd with toil, Her fabric on this marshy soil. She fled those banks with scornful pride, Where classic Po devolves her tide: Yet here her unrelenting laws Are deaf to nature's, freedom's cause. Unjust! they seal'd FOSCARI'S doom, An exile ...
— Poems (1786), Volume I. • Helen Maria Williams
... streets, dusty roads, waste grounds, marshy meadows, and tumbled-down pleasure-gardens, till the clothes-basket turned down a lane, and the bony horse stopped at length before a door in ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... were admirable on the march, and up to the enemy's frontier. The invasion it was, which, in a strategic sense, seems to have been ill combined. Three armies were to have entered Persia simultaneously: one of these, which was destined to act on a flank of the general line, entangled itself in the marshy grounds near Babylon, and was cut off by the archery of an enemy whom it could not reach. The other wing, acting upon ground impracticable for the manoeuvres of the Persian cavalry, and supported by Chosroes the king of Armenia, gave great trouble to ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... hunger, and at present they were better provisioned than in 1848. The turning of the Quadrilateral meant the adoption of a route into Venetia across the Po below Mantua. An objection not without gravity to that route was the unfavourable nature of the ground which, being marshy, is liable after heavy rains to become impassable. But against this disadvantage had to be weighed the advantage of keeping out of the mouse-trap, the fatality of which needed ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... mile of level country to traverse, consisting of fields separated by stone walls. The land was soggy, and here and there in the lower places were areas of water. These he would not take the time to go around, but plunged through them, often going knee deep into the marshy bottom. It was sometimes with difficulty that he was able to extricate his leg from these ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... two or three broods in a season and the change of plumage to duller winter tints seem to exhaust the high spirits of the sweet whistler. For a time he is silent, but partly regains his vocal powers in the autumn, when, with large flocks of his own kind, he resorts to marshy feeding grounds. In the winter he chooses for companions the horned larks, that walk along the shore, or the snow buntings and sparrows of the inland pastures, and will even include the denizens of ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... was on low, flat, marshy ground. It would always be a city, of course, because it was the end of navigation, but Milwaukee would feed and stock the folks who were westward bound. So to Milwaukee went Philip Armour, resolved there to stake his fortune in trade. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... Consentinium. The effect of soil appears also from the fact that those plants which bear most profusely in wild places produce better fruit under cultivation. The same explanation applies to those plants which cannot live except in a marshy place, or indeed in the very water: they are even nice about the kind of water, some grow in ponds like the reeds at Reate, others in streams like the alders in Epirus, some even in the sea like the palms and the squills of which Theophrastus writes. ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... learning that the loss fell upon Chinese only, that no one had been hurt, and that a can of kerosene had exploded, interest in the conflagration dropped, and friends and acquaintances who had met chatted amiably on other subjects. The proximity of the fire and the marshy condition of the ground made it proper for the ladies with well-turned legs to raise their gowns high, displaying garterless stockings held up by the "native twist" above the calf. Accordions and mouth-organs enlivened the ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... northward in the direction of the mountains. They needed no guide to point out their course, as the river which they had resolved upon following upwards was guide enough; usually they kept along its banks, but sometimes a thick marshy jungle forced them to abandon the water-edge and keep away for some distance into the back country, where the path was ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid
... hotel. He remembered that Harriet's room looked out that way, and, hardly knowing why he did so, he walked down the lane till he could see her window. There was a light in the room. For several minutes he stood gazing at the window, feeling his feet sink into the marshy soil. He wondered how he could pass the long hours of the night without speaking to her. He had just resolved that he would go to the hotel and implore Mrs. Floyd to let him see Harriet if only for a moment, when he noticed ...
— Westerfelt • Will N. Harben |
