"Oozy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... poised on the mountain side, they looked down upon a stream flowing to the northwest. But the joy was short-lived. The descent of this mountain's side was by all odds the most terrible piece of trail we had yet found. It led down the north slope, and was oozy and slippery with the melting snow. It dropped in short zigzags down through a grove of tangled, gnarled, and savage cedars and pines, whose roots were like iron and filled with spurs that were sharp as chisels. The horses, sliding upon their haunches ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... tenements, gazing hungrily at the announcement that "A silver present will be given to every purchaser by a real Santa Claus.—M. Levitsky." Across the way, in a hole in the wall, two cobblers are pegging away under an oozy lamp that makes a yellow splurge on the inky blackness about them, revealing to the passer-by their bearded faces, but nothing of the environment save a single sprig of holly suspended from the lamp. From what forgotten brake it came with a message ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... more than six feet, and the average flow is said not to amount to more than two feet six inches—but even this flux is sufficient to produce large tracts of sea which the reflux converts into square miles of oozy sand. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... of mind, And that best art, the art to know mankind.— Nor was his energy confin'd alone To friends around his philosophick throne; Its influence wide improv'd our letter'd isle. And lucid vigour marked the general style: As Nile's proud waves, swoln from their oozy bed. First o'er the neighbouring meads majestick spread; Till gathering force, they more and more expand. And with ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... lake-dwellings, about these shelters on the deserted shore; two or three large fetichistic stones stand near their entrance; wickerwork objects of dark meaning strew the ground; a few stakes emerge, hard by, out of the placid and oozy waters. In such a cabin, methinks, dwelt those two old fishermen of Theocritus—here they lived and slumbered side by side on a couch of sea moss, among the rude implements of ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... though badly wounded, was flying lamely. My dog retrieved the one and brought it to me; but noticing that the other was diving down into the ditch, I sprang forward to catch it. Trusting to my boots, which came high up the leg, I put one foot forward; it sank in the oozy ground; and so, although I got the goose, the boot of my right leg was full of water. I lifted my foot and let the water run out; then, when I had mounted, we made haste for Rome. The cold, however, was very great, and I felt ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... Pratt presently, flouncing and bridling, and with her a young woman—Heavens! No, but one of the nymphs of the Thames, or rather, for they are somewhat oozy hereabouts, a dryad of the Richmond woods, indeed as beautiful a person as ever I saw in my life. There is not one of our reigning girls to be compared with her for a moment and even my Lord Hervey's Molly Lepel would vanish beside her, nor ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... we spread the fabric of our trade; the engine's iron heart goes throbbing through tunneled mountains and over storm-swept seas to bear us and our wealth to all regions of the globe; we talk to one another from city to city, and from continent to continent along ocean's oozy depths the lightning flashes our words, spreading beneath our eyes each morning the whole world's gossip,—but in the midst of this miraculous transformation, we ourselves remain small, hard, and narrow, without great thoughts or great loves or immortal hopes. ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... spring, but its aspect was totally changed. The young wild apple trees, then flushed with their fragrant blossoms, were now hung thickly with ruddy fruit. Tall grass flourished by the roadside in place of the tender shoots just peeping from the warm and oozy soil. The vines were laden with dark purple grapes, and the slender twigs of the maple, then tasseled with their clusters of small red flowers, now hung out a gorgeous display of leaves stained by the frost with burning crimson. On every side we saw the tokens of ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... where he was at the edge of the moat. He stooped, and waving his torch along the ground he moved to the far angle of the chateau, examining the soft, oozy clay. It was impossible that a man could have clambered out over that without leaving some impression. He reached the corner and found the clay intact; at least, nowhere could he discover a mark of hands or a footprint set as would be that of a ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... Protestants takes place, an union between us is impossible; and this fact it is which would attach disgrace to you, and a want of honor, principle, and gratitude to me. We should necessarily lead the lives of the guilty, and seek the wildest fastnesses of the mountain solitudes and the oozy caverns of the bleak and ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... cry of alarm, and with good reason. His horse had struck a sink-hole, as they are called on the plains, and gone down to his knees. He made such a plunge that poor Hans was thrown over his head, to land full length in an oozy, sticky bog. ...
— The Rover Boys on the Plains - The Mystery of Red Rock Ranch • Arthur Winfield
... plain, half-covered with snow, and strewn with the skulls and bones of buffalo; while, on its farthest verge, they could see the lodges of the Miami Indians, who had made this place their abode. They soon reached a spot where the oozy saturated soil quaked beneath their tread. All around were clumps of alderbushes, tufts of rank grass, and pools of glistening water. In the midst, a dark and lazy current, which a tall man might bestride, crept twisting like a snake among the weeds and rushes. Here were the sources ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... 'tis said, Before was never made, But when of old the sons of morning sung, While the Creator great His constellations set, And the well-balanced world on hinges hung, And cast the dark foundations deep, And bid the weltering waves their oozy ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow—Book 3 - Christmas Poems from 'round the World • Various
... watery grave Her threaten'd purity unstain'd to save.— All these and others to the combat flew, And all combined to wreak the vengeance due On him, whose haughty hand in days of yore From clime to clime his conquering standard bore. Another troop the vestal virgin led, Who bore along from Tyber's oozy bed His liquid treasure in a sieve, to show The falsehood of her base calumnious foe By wondrous proof.—And there the Sabine queen With all the matrons of her race was seen, Renown'd in records old;—and ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... trail, threading its way, now through dark groves of pine or fir; now through jungles of underbrush; now over rocky points; frequently wading the cold mountain brook, waist deep, and tramping through oozy marshes of saw-grass; speaking only in whispers; their rifles loaded, eyes peering into the starlit night, and ears strained to catch the slightest sound that might indicate the hiding-place of any lurking foe who might perchance be on an outpost to announce to his ...
— The Battle of the Big Hole • G. O. Shields
... yet clear. A swampy shallow strip was thick with osiers from the blown catkins of the pollard willows; reeds grew thick as wheat and higher than a man's head—if any man could have walked on the black oozy quagmire; and as Roger had said, the water-fowl, secure from dogs or bowmen, were nested in that wet paradise by scores. There was a heronry among the trees on the edge of it, but otherwise the marsh was not used save as a storehouse for the basket-makers. They made paniers, hampers, mews or ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... of the river have a saffron and sickly hue; and they flow not onwards to the sea, but palpitate forever and forever beneath the red eye of the sun with a tumultuous and convulsive motion. For many miles on either side of the river's oozy bed is a pale desert of gigantic water-lilies. They sigh one unto the other in that solitude, and stretch towards the heaven their long and ghastly necks, and nod to and fro their everlasting heads. And there is an indistinct murmur which cometh ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... inches of slush, the gutters were miniature brooks, and the ground seemed to be completely covered by a thick coating of red, oozy mud. ...
— Polly's Senior Year at Boarding School • Dorothy Whitehill
... crown Mrs. Dangerfield's devotion with his avowal of an answering passion. He pressed forward swiftly like a conqueror; and like a conqueror he whistled. Then he found the clothes-line, suddenly, pitched forward and fell, not heavily, for the mud was thick, but sprawling. He rose, oozy and dripping, took a long breath, and the welkin ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... boot-top had been ripped open and the claws had cut through into the flesh, tearing a set of furrows. It was a bad-looking wound and was bleeding like everything. But the blood was just the ordinary oozy kind, and so we let it come, to clean the wound well. Then we laid some sterilized gauze from our first-aid outfit upon it, to help clot the blood, and sifted borax over, and bound it tight with adhesive plaster, holding the edges of the furrows together. ...
— Pluck on the Long Trail - Boy Scouts in the Rockies • Edwin L. Sabin
... Hy—the Dew. The nursery, where Zeus places it to be brought up, is a cave in Mount Nysa, sought by a misdirected ingenuity in many lands, but really, like the place of the carrying away of Persephone, a place of fantasy, the oozy place of springs in the hollow of the hillside, nowhere and everywhere, where the vine was "invented." The nymphs of the trees overshadow it from above; the nymphs of the springs sustain it from below—the Hyades, those first leaping maenads, who, as the springs ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... which I now lay was of soft, oozy silt; about me were rocks, slippery and covered with a coating of grey-green slime. Spots in the slime moved. I could hear it, or rather feel it—a sort of bubbling quake, mere beginnings of the life impulse. The tops and ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... roped to his tree, there the cloudy forms of Apostles or the Heavenly Host shadowed in masses of crimson or green—and, down below, a slippery purple sea, frothed sanguine at the edges, and wild, half-naked creatures treading out the juice, dancing in the oozy stuff rhythmically, to the music of some wailing air of their own. Saturnia regna indeed, and in the haunt of Sant' Ambrogio, or under the hungry eye of San Bernardino, or other lean ascetic of the Middle Age. But that, after all, is Italian, not necessarily Florentine or Tuscan. I must ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... hand and dry a sponge with water soaked. Next, all which forth we squeeze is spread about Along the pores and intertwined paths Of the loose-textured tongue. And so, when smooth The bodies of the oozy flavour, then Delightfully they touch, delightfully They treat all spots, around the wet and trickling Enclosures of the tongue. And contrariwise, They sting and pain the sense with their assault, According as with roughness they're supplied. Next, ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... and—amazedly she discovered it—he was big. Her vocabulary could not furnish her with the qualifying word, or, rather, epithet for his bigness. Horrible was suggested and retained, but her instinct clamored that there was a fat, oozy word somewhere which would have brought comfort to her brains and her hands and feet. He did not keep his arms quiet, but tapped his remarks into her blouse and her shoulder. Each time his hands touched ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... and, taking the lightest of the guns, they tried first to get it across. Many of the men waded neck deep into the water and strove at the wheels. But the stream went completely over the cannon, which also sank deeper and deeper in the oozy bottom. It then became an effort to save the gun. The Panther put all his strength at the wheel, and, a dozen others helping, they at last got it back to the bank from ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler
... woman who, wandering in our coasts, planted a small town on purchased ground, to whom we gave fields by the shore and laws of settlement, she hath spurned our alliance and taken Aeneas for lord of her realm. And now that Paris, with his effeminate crew, his chin and oozy hair swathed in the turban of Maeonia, takes and keeps her; since to thy temples we bear oblation, and hallow an ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... especially, for use in despatching tomatoes and they never failed to make good. There, upon the bulletin board was a vivid area which looked like the midday sun. From it trickled an oozy mass, down over the list of uncalled for letters, straight through the prize awards of yesterday, obliterating the Council Call, and bathing the list of new arrivals in soft and pulpy red. The "hike for to-morrow," as shown, was through a ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... for the bottom was soft and oozy and there were little patches of green floating on the surface that she did not so much like the looks of. Otherwise conditions were perfect, and Mrs. Budlong submerged like a submarine when she reached the middle of it. She came up and ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... Brave raised his muddy face and hands up thru the choke cherry bushes. With the oozy mud dripping from his features he looked like some very witch just raised from the grave. The boys screamed outright. One fainted. The rest ran yelling up the hill to the village, where each broke at ...
— Myths and Legends of the Sioux • Marie L. McLaughlin
... he in his turn may be agitated with a returning constancy. She prays that as the wanton heifer pursues the steer through woods and glens, till at length, worn out with fatigue, she lies down on the oozy reeds by the banks of the stream, and the night-dew is unable to induce her to withdraw, so Daphnis may be led on after her for ever with inextinguishable love. She buries the relics of what had belonged to Daphnis beneath her threshold. ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... the river, I gazed out upon the sea, which was bounded only by the distant horizon. The sun was slowly sinking into the green of the western wilderness. A huge saurian dragged his mail-clad body out of the water, and settled quietly in his oozy bed. The sea glimmered in the long, horizontal rays of light which clothed it in a sheen of silver and of gold. The wild sea-gulls winnowed the air with their wings, as they settled in little flocks upon the smooth ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... shapely schooner; but it gathers nowhere into the forest of masts and chimneys that fringe the North River and East River. The foul tide rises and falls between low shores where, when it ebbs, are seen oozy shoals of slime, and every keel or paddle that stirs the surface of the river brings up the loathsomeness ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... know how small the part Nature's proud empire yields to striving Art; How, as the tide that rolls around the sphere Laughs at the mounds that delving arms uprear,— Spares some few roods of oozy earth, but still Wastes and rebuilds the planet at its will, Comes at its ordered season, night or noon, Led by the silver magnet of the moon,— So life's vast tide forever comes and goes, Unchecked, resistless, as it ebbs ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... cease, And, hush'd in peace, The flatten'd surges smoothly spread, Deep silence keep, And seem to sleep Recumbent on their oozy bed; ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... up, endeavouring to get a breath of purer air. He rose to his feet, sinking almost to the top of his boots in the oozy slime. Foul gases were belched up to envelop him. He seized at irregularities in the bank, and got his head above the level of the ground. He thrust forward his chin and took great greedy breaths in a very gluttony of air—and never came ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... the splendour of his house and of his bank—saw the misfortunes of the peasantry; the mill, the cottage by the riverside, invaded by the flood; the doors burst open by the tremendous rushing stream, the stables and garners filled with the thick and oozy waters; the poor creatures, yesterday prosperous, clinging to the roof, watching their sheep and cows, their hay, and straw, and flour, the hemp bleached in the summer, the linen spun and woven in the long winter, their furniture ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... of sand Where the water bounds the elfin land, Thou shalt watch the oozy brine Till the sturgeon leaps in the bright moonshine, Then dart the glistening arch below, And catch a drop from his silver bow. The water-sprites will wield their arms And dash around, with roar and ...
— The Culprit Fay - and Other Poems • Joseph Rodman Drake
... miles to the mouth of the Maumee. Darkness overtook them while still on the lake, and the head boats hung out lights for the guidance of those astern; but about midnight a gale came up, and the whole flotilla was nearly swamped, being beached with great difficulty on an oozy flat close to the mouth of the Maumee. The waters of the Maumee were low, and the boats were poled slowly up against the current, reaching the portage point, where there was a large Indian village, on the 24th of the month. Here a nine miles' carry was made to one of the ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... the Dismal Swamp The Search-Light sends its ray! What is that hideous oozy tramp? What creatures crawling 'midst jungle damp Scuttle from ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, September 5, 1891 • Various
... in the sight of one of the lizards, and offered my body to its attack. The challenge was accepted. It swooped like a dropping stone, and I swerved and drove in the lance at its oozy eye. ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... unhung and travelling basket, heavy, iron-ribbed, anciently mossy, oozy of slime, fell with neat exactitude upon the bald, bare cranium of Mr. Alastair Kenneth MacIlwraith, head gardener, and dour, ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... bed, And yet anon repairs his drooping head, And tricks his beams, and with new spangled ore Flames in the forehead of the morning sky: So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high, Through the dear might of Him that walked the waves, Where, other groves and other streams along, With nectar pure his oozy locks he laves, And hears the unexpressive nuptial song, In the blest kingdoms meek of joy and love There entertain him all the Saints above, In solemn troops and sweet societies That sing, and singing in their glory move, And wipe the tears for ever from his eyes. Now, ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... enough for waves to dance upon its surface, and to look like a piece of blue firmament, earthen-circled. The shore has a narrow, pebbly strand, which it was worth a day's journey to look at, for the sake of the contrast between it and the weedy, oozy margin of the river. Farther within its depths, you perceive a bottom of pure white sand, sparkling through the transparent water, which, methought, was the very purest liquid in the world. After Mr. Emerson left us, Hillard ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of soft, oozy blackness. One could tell from the way that Arcot's mind handled it that it was soft. It seemed cold, terribly cold. ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... clinked as the iron palls caught the strain of the cable, the anchor was wrenched from its oozy bed, the vessel's head fell off, and, gathering way, she moved quietly ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... they were taken to the sea-shore to be drowned. While the tide was low two stakes were driven deep into the oozy sand, one close to the water, the other nearer the shore. To the first Margaret McLaughlin was bound; to the second, Margaret Wilson. The shore was crowded with people. Major Windram, with his troop, had charge of the execution. This ...
— Sketches of the Covenanters • J. C. McFeeters
... of many sparkling eyes Kivi pierced green cocoanuts brought him fresh from the climbing, and poured the cool wine of them over the masticated kava. He mixed it thoroughly and then with his hands formed balls of the oozy mass, from which he squeezed the juice into another tanoa glazed a deep, rich blue by its frequent saturation in kava. When this trough was quite full of a muddy liquid, he deftly clarified it by sweeping through it a net of cocoanut fiber. All the while ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... were stopped and turned back at the boom near Drewry's Bluff. McClellan, bent on besieging Richmond in due form, crawled cautiously about the intervening swamps of the oozy Chickahominy. McDowell, who could not advance alone, remained at Fredericksburg. Shields stood behind him, near Catlett's Station, to keep another eye ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... sound of horses' feet were heard on the wet, oozy ground without. The irate widow did not rise, but merely indicated her knowledge of Holcroft's arrival by rocking ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... and still rich under foot, although it froze hard every night; but all along the brook's marge there were many small oozy bubbling springlets, which it required a stinging night to congeal; and round these the ground was poached up by the cattle, and laid bare in spots of deep, soft, black loam; and the innumerable chalkings ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... wave, And dancing to thy own wild chime, Thou laughest at the lapse of time. The same sweet sounds are in my ear My early childhood loved to hear; As pure thy limpid waters run, As bright they sparkle to the sun; As fresh and thick the bending ranks Of herbs that line thy oozy banks; The violet there, in soft May dew, Comes up, as modest and as blue, As green amid thy current's stress, Floats the scarce-rooted watercress: And the brown ground-bird, in thy glen, Still chirps as ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... the heathen Hollanders, whom they aped even to the very patronage of painters; or, at the other end of this bastard brotherhood of righteousness, sore-eyed wretches trundling their flat carts of second-hand goods, or initiating a squalid ghetto of diamond-cutting and cigar-making in oozy alleys and on the refuse-laden borders of treeless canals. Oh! he was tricked, ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... present, it is illuminated at regular intervals by jets of gas, not very brilliantly, yet with lustre enough to show the damp plaster of the ceiling and walls, and the massive stone pavement, the crevices of which are oozy with moisture, not from the incumbent river, but from hidden springs in the earth's deeper heart. There are two parallel corridors, with a wall between, for the separate accommodation of the double ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... my boat among the reeds; I sit and stare about; Queer slimy things crawl through the weeds, Put to a sullen rout. I paddle under cypress trees; All fearfully I peer Through oozy channels when the breeze Comes rustling at ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... voice in his dreams or afloat in the air, Like a spirit born in the Indian corn— Immemorial, vague, forlorn, And disembodied—murmured forever The name of the old creek up the river. "God of blood!" he said unto Herold, As they groped in the dusk, lost and imperilled, In the oozy, entangled morass and mesh Of hanging vines over Allen's Fresh: "The chirp of birds and the drone of frogs, The lizards and crickets from trees and bogs Follow me yet, pursue and ferret My soul with a word which I used to enjoy, As if it had turned on me like a spirit And stabbed my ear with ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... was a marshy piece of land that was full of springs which fed and kept puddles of mud moist through the dryest season. To-day, although everywhere else the dust was fine and white, the path along the spring lot was oozy ...
— Four Little Blossoms at Oak Hill School • Mabel C. Hawley
... again on a furzy opening dotted with old oaks, where the black pigs of the cottagers would by and by feast and grow fat on their common rights. It was a lovely, damp, perilous spot, haunted by the ghost of fever and ague. The soft, vivid turf was oozy there, and the long-rooted stones were clothed with wet, rusted moss. The few cottages of the hamlet wore deep hoods of thatch, and stood amongst prosperous orchards; one of them, a little larger than the rest, being the habitation of Mr. Moxon, the vicar of Littlemire, whose church, dame-school, ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... vine, which likewise had gone rampant out of all human control; so that the two wild things had tangled and knotted themselves into a wild marriage bond, and hung their various progeny—the luscious figs, the grapes, oozy with the Southern juice, and both endowed with a wild flavor that added the final ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... O Heavens, that they were living both in Naples, The King and Queen there! that they were, I wish Myself were mudded in that oozy bed Where my son lies. When ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... strong and rapid stream that issued to the upper air from the bottom of the range. In trying to cross this channel, my horse became entangled in the dense vegetation, whose roots, planted in rich and oozy soil, induced the tops of this remarkable plant to grow ten, twelve, and fifteen feet high. It had a nasty gummy, sticky feel when touched, and emitted a strong, coarse odour of peppermint. The botanical name of this plant is Stemodia viscosa. This vegetation was not substantial enough ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... indeed that I choose to sorrow thus; If I lift my eyes, who would share my joy? Last Spring you were called to the West To carry arms in the lands of Pa and Shu; And this Spring I was banished to the South To nurse my sickness on the River's oozy banks. You are parted from me by six thousand leagues; In another world, under another sky. Of ten letters, nine do not reach; What can I do to open my sad face? Thirsty men often dream of drink; Hungry men often dream of food. Since Spring came, where do my dreams lodge? Ere my eyes ...
— More Translations from the Chinese • Various
... with giant fennel; and a shutter swinging loose on its hinge gave a glimpse of inner dimness. Odo guessed at once that this was the hunting lodge where Cerveno had found his death; and as he stood looking out across the oozy secrets of the marsh, the fever seemed to hang on his steps. He turned away with a shiver; but whether it were the sullen aspect of the house, or the close way in which the wood embraced it, the place suddenly laid a detaining hand upon him. It was as though he had ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... Hither, thither, to and fro, Breathing mists and whisking lamps, Plashing in the shiny swamps; While my cousin Lantern Jack, With cook ears and cunning eyes, Turns him round upon his back, Daubs him oozy green and black, Sits upon his rolling size, Where he lies, where he lies, Groaning full of sack - Staring with his great round eyes! What a joy O ho! Sits upon him in the swamps Breathing mists and whisking lamps! What a joy O ho! Such a lad is Lantern Jack, When he rides the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... before, we pushed into the breast-high grass, and the walking was easy. Once we crossed a patch of oozy turf from which arose a score of jack-snipe; again we skirted a drying pond whose boggy edges were the hunting ground of marsh hens. Yet other trails could be read here: deer, wildcat, raccoon, and innumerable wee things. And here, too, ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... that he should fall, and I was perfectly conscious of intense sympathy with his discomfort; but I found the scene quite inexpressibly diverting, and I still simmer with laughter at the recollection of the disappearance of the trim figure, and his furious emergence, like an oozy water-god, from the pool. It is not in the least an ill-natured laughter. I did not desire the catastrophe, and I would have prevented it if I could; but it was dreadfully funny for all that; and if a similar thing had happened to myself, I should not resent the enjoyment of the scene ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... as bad as it looks!" said Mrs. Carteret, plunging in her hands and heroically smearing her face with a mass of black oozy matter believed to be a sponge. "It's quite becoming if you do it thoroughly. Mind, all of you, get it well into your ears and ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... between Greenland and Iceland. That these radiata were really dredged up from the bottom, and that they had been living and feeding there, appeared from the fact that their stomachs were full of Globigerina, of which foraminiferous creatures, both living and dead, the oozy bed of the ocean at that vast depth was found to be exclusively ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... An anchor is said to be shod when, in breaking it from its bed, a quantity of clayey or oozy soil adheres to the ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... salts is then? You've seen it work? Experienced it, maybe? Hah! You'll understand me. I'm a grain of the Epsom Salt that went through Beersheba, time the Turks had all the booze in sight and we were thirsty. Muddy booze it was too—oozy booze—not fit for washing hogs! Ever heard of Anzacs? Well, I'm one of 'em. Now you know what the scorpion who stung you's up against! You lie there and think about it, cocky; I'll show you his ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... bird, not even the swan, so perfectly and absolutely graceful as the heron. I am leaning now breathless and noiseless against the gate, taking a good look at him, as he stands half-knee deep on the oozy bottom, with his long neck arched over the water, and his keen purple eye fixed eagerly upon the fish below. Though I am still twenty yards from where he poises lightly on his stilted legs, I can see distinctly his long pendent snow-white breast-feathers, his crest of waving black plumes, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... guanas and large lizards which had been shaken from the trees, skimmed and struggled on the surface in glances of fire, like evil spirits watching to seize them as their prey. At length the screaming and shrieking of the birds, and clang of their the cattle, ceased; and the startled fish oozy caverns at the bottom of the sea, disappeared; and all was again black and undistinguishable, the deathlike silence being only broken by the hoarse murmuring of ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... was the high-priest of American politics; he was charged with the meaning of the mysteries, the clue to political hieroglyphics. Through him she hoped to sound the depths of statesmanship and to bring up from its oozy bed that pearl of which she was in search; the mysterious gem which must lie hidden somewhere in politics. She wanted to understand this man; to turn him inside out; to experiment on him and use him as young physiologists use frogs and kittens. If there was good or bad in him, ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... that time the Editor stated many facts, from his own observation, connected with the refusal of sites, and other matters of a similar character. He saw congregations worshipping on bare hill-sides in the Highlands of Sutherland, and on an oozy sea-beach on the coast of Lochiel; he sailed in the Free Church yacht the Betsey, and worshipped among the islanders of Eigg and of Skye. Nor did he shrink from very minutely describing what he had witnessed on these occasions, nor yet from denouncing the persecution that had ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... surrounded the chosen areas with fences of great height and strength, and closely wattled, for the purpose of catching and retaining the young oyster brood. Instead of this, however, they had simply acted as "catch-pits," which had accumulated soft oozy mud to the depth of several feet, and a few dead oyster ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... for the rest, who were straggling about; upon which they all soon came to the boat: but it was past all their strength to launch her, the boat being very heavy, and the shore on that side being a soft oozy sand, almost like a quicksand. In this condition, like true seamen, who are perhaps the least of all mankind given to forethought, they gave it over, and away they strolled about the country again; and I heard ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe Of York, Mariner, Vol. 1 • Daniel Defoe
... and oozy, but as every boy wore either rubber boots or storm rubbers, they did not mind the mud. Perry Phelps said if they were going to explore, he thought it would be a good plan to follow the brook and see ...
— Sunny Boy and His Playmates • Ramy Allison White
... rapidly several times through a gas flame usually emanating from a burner of the Bunsen type. The passage of the thread through the flame is too rapid to allow of the burning down of the threads, but is not too quickly to prevent the loose oozy fibres, present more or less on the surface of all cotton yarns, to be burned away. This process is somewhat expensive, as it burns away perhaps 6 pounds weight of yarn in every 100 pounds. This, however, is obtained back again by the increased price ...
— The Story of the Cotton Plant • Frederick Wilkinson
... proved to be a cumbersome flat-boat of the type used by clam-fishers. In fact the smell that simply swirled up from its oozy bottom left no doubt that the boat had been used for that purpose. A pair of unbelievably heavy oars, cut from a sapling with a hand-axe, trailed in the water from "loose oarlocks." Dave gave a gasp of dismay as he "hefted" ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Air on Lost Island • Gordon Stuart
... prayed,—and here's my answer: Dead of a fever! Why thus? so soon! Only six years for love! While any formal, heartless matrimony, Patched up by Court intrigues, and threats of cloisters, Drags on for six times six, and peasant slaves Grow old on the same straw, and hand in hand Slip from life's oozy bank, to float ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... steered W.S.W, on purpose to make Cape Sumbor on the coast of China. The sea was very rough, and the wind so strong that it blew our main course out of the bolt ropes. The 9th, in lat. 28 deg. 23', we sounded and had forty-nine to forty-five fathoms on an oozy bottom. The weather was clear, yet we could not see land. The 11th we had ground in forty-nine, forty-three, thirty-eight, thirty-seven, and thirty fathoms, the water being very green, and as yet no land ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... hold was passed, the oozy road That separates the marsh, the grove sublime (5) Where reigns the Scythian goddess, and the path By which men bear the fasces to the feast On Alba's summit. From the height afar — Gazing in awe upon the walls of Rome His native ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... research, the exercise of mind, And that best art, the art to know mankind.— Nor was his energy confin'd alone To friends around his philosophick throne; Its influence wide improv'd our letter'd isle, And lucid vigour mark'd the general style: As Nile's proud waves, swol'n from their oozy bed, First o'er the neighbouring meads majestick spread; Till gathering force, they more and more expand, And with new virtue fertilise the land. Thus sings the Muse, to Johnson's memory just, And scatters praise and censure ...
— A Poetical Review of the Literary and Moral Character of the late Samuel Johnson (1786) • John Courtenay
... populous. The crowding sampans, houseboats, and junks stretched far out into its oily, oozy flow, making a floating city as he neared the congested life of the coast, where the ever-increasing population failed to find ground space in its maggoty swarming. As the stream widened until the farther bank disappeared in the artificial mist ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... teeming earth produc'd Spontaneous. Heated by the solar rays, The stagnant water quicken'd;—marshy fens Swell'd up their oozy loads to meet the beams: And nourish'd by earth's vivifying soil, The fruitful elements of life increas'd, As in a mother's womb; and in a while Assum'd a certain shape. So when the floods Of seven-mouth'd Nile desert the moisten'd fields, And to their ancient ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... and the God of the Sea, Sophist and sage, from no Athenian grove, But cogitation in his watery shades, Arose, with locks not oozy, and began, 170 In murmurs, which his first-endeavouring tongue Caught infant-like from the far-foamed sands. "O ye, whom wrath consumes! who, passion-stung, Writhe at defeat, and nurse your agonies! Shut up your ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... in streams majestic flows, Or Naiads in their oozy beds repose While Phoebus reigns above the starry train While bright Aurora purples o'er the main, So long, great Sir, the muse thy praise shall sing, So long thy praise shal' make Parnassus ring: Then grant, Maecenas, ...
— Religious and Moral Poems • Phillis Wheatley
... and scented daisies spread Where with surface dull like lead Arabian pools of slime invite Manticors down from neighbouring height To dip heads, to cool fiery blood In oozy depths of sucking mud. Sing then of ringstraked manticor, Man-visaged tiger who of yore Held whole Arabian waste in fee With raging pride from sea to sea, That every lesser tribe would fly Those armed feet, that hooded eye; Till preying on himself at last ...
— Country Sentiment • Robert Graves
... were sketching by the side of Willey Water, at the remote end of the lake. Gudrun had waded out to a gravelly shoal, and was seated like a Buddhist, staring fixedly at the water-plants that rose succulent from the mud of the low shores. What she could see was mud, soft, oozy, watery mud, and from its festering chill, water-plants rose up, thick and cool and fleshy, very straight and turgid, thrusting out their leaves at right angles, and having dark lurid colours, dark green and blotches of ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... infinite sea breaking their bark-fibre nets; fowl innumerable, migrant in the skies, for their flint-headed arrows; bred horses for their own riding; ships of no mean size, and of all sorts, flat-bottomed for the oozy puddles, keeled and decked for strong Elbe stream and furious Baltic on the one side, for mountain-cleaving Danube and the black lake of Colchos ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... had made that house their inn, that it is now no fitting home for living men. San Michele is the island close before Murano, where the Lombardi built one of their most romantically graceful churches of pale Istrian stone, and where the Campo Santo has for centuries received the dead into its oozy clay. The cemetery is at present undergoing restoration. Its state of squalor and abandonment to cynical disorder makes one feel how fitting for Italians would be the custom of cremation. An island ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... in their cold and narrow coffins pent, Around her lay ancestral ashes heaped, That through the dank and clammy darkness sent Currents in foul and noxious vapours steeped; And loudly through the gloomy stillness went The oozy plashes from the roof that dripped, Marking the minutes as they slid away, With slimy tokens ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... deep in oozy mud as she scrambled on board, but that was a trifle compared with the relief of being ferried over the river. Her knight-errant was neither young nor handsome, being, indeed, rather bald and stout, but no orthodox interesting hero of fiction could have been more welcome ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... the shouting tides, 450 And spears and javelins pierce his blubbery sides; Now the bold Sailor, raised on pointed toe, Whirls the wing'd harpoon on the slimy foe; Quick sinks the monster in his oozy bed, The blood-stain'd surges circling o'er his head, 455 Steers to the frozen pole his wonted track, And bears the ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... reception was chiefly notable for its cake; not cakes, but solid loaves made up in layers with oozy sweetnesses sandwiched in between. Served with neither forks nor napkins, it gave rise to complications; but it was none the less appreciated upon that account. There were two kinds of lemonade, too, one plain, one mixed with home-brewed grape juice. In all surety, ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... machine-guns at work a few yards away from my head, which I ducked below the trench parapet. Splodge! went the officer in front of me, with a yell of dismay. The water was well above his top-boots. Splosh! went another man ahead, recovering from a side-slip in the oozy mud and clinging desperately to some bunches of yarrow growing up the side of the trench. Squelch! went a young gentleman whose puttees and breeches had lost their glory and were but swabs about ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... than two miles below the surface, extending from one continent to the other. This plain is about four hundred miles wide and sixteen hundred long, and there are no currents to disturb the mass of broken shells and unknown fishes that lie on its oozy surface. It was named the "Telegraphic Plateau," with a view to its future use. At either edge of this plateau huge mountains, from four to seven thousand feet high, rise out of the depths. There are precipices of sheer descent down which the cable ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... and sometimes consonants. They are consonants at the beginning of words in English, because their sounds take the article a, and not an, before them; as, a wall, a yard, and not, an wall, an yard. But oo or the sound of e, requires an, and not a; as, an eel, an oozy bog.[94] At the end of a syllable we know they are vowels; but at the beginning, they are so squeezed in their pronunciation, as to follow a vowel without any hiatus, or difficulty of utterance; as, "O worthy youth! ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... the other, he ducked his head and began biting savagely at the leathern wrapping on his leg. But the uselessness of this soon appearing to him, he gave it up, and sought to ease his despair by diving and guttering with his bill among the roots of the oozy bottom. In this absorbing occupation he so far forgot his miseries that all at once he tried to lift himself on the water, flap his wings, and sound his trumpet-call. One wing did give a frantic flap. The other ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... soft as mud could be and not run like the water that covered it at high tide. Even the tall rushes wore an unsteady look; and the few oysters upon its surface evidently required all their balancing powers to lie upon their flat sides and avoid sinking edgewise into the oozy depths. In we sank, over ankles, at the first step, and deeper and deeper till we took a second; for our only safety lay in pushing down the rushes with the inside of one foot and treading upon them, till the other could be withdrawn from its yielding bed, and a spot selected ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... monuments, adorned its two streets, each stump and log, on account of the moist climate, moss-grown and tufted with grass and bushes, but muddy on the sides below the limit of the bog-line. The ground in general was an oozy, mossy bog on a foundation of jagged rocks, full of concealed pit-holes. These picturesque rock, bog, and stump obstructions, however, were not so very much in the way, for there were no wagons or carriages there. There was not a horse on the island. ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... the shadow of the beech there is a sandy, oozy shore, where the footprints of moorhens are often traceable. Many of the trees of the plantation stand in water after heavy rain; their leaves drop into it in autumn, and, being away from the influence of the current, stay and soak, and lie several layers ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... with bilberries, and crowberries, and cranberries—no, I am all wrong: there was nothing out yet but a few furze-blossoms; the rest were all waiting behind their doors till they were called; and no full, slow-gliding river with meadow-sweet along its oozy banks, only a little brook here and there, that dashed past without a moment to say, "How do you do?"—there (would you believe it?) while the same cloud that was dropping down golden rain all about the queen's new baby ...
— A Double Story • George MacDonald |
