"Quagmire" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... bounded part of the mill-pond, on the edge of which, at high water, we used to stand to fish for minnows. By much trampling, we had made it a mere quagmire. My proposal was to build a wharf there fit for us to stand upon, and I showed my comrades a large heap of stones, which were intended for a new house near the marsh, and which would very well suit our purpose. Accordingly, in the evening, when the workmen were gone, I assembled a ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... have guessed that she was in monetary difficulties on her own account. Denry, as a chivalrous lover, had assisted her out of the fearful quagmire of her rent; but she owed much beyond rent. Yet, when some of her quarterly fees had come in, her thoughts had instantly run to Llandudno, joy, and frocks. She did not know what money was, and she never would. This was, perhaps, part of her superior ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... and disgust the first month, as she expected and almost hoped for. On the contrary, at the end of half a year it had seemed to her that she had known no other life. Her young mind having been unskilfully permitted to glance at better things, and then thrown back again into the hopeless quagmire of barbarism, full of strong and uncontrolled passions, had lost the power to discriminate. It seemed to Nina that there was no change and no difference. Whether they traded in brick godowns or on the muddy river bank; ...
— Almayer's Folly - A Story of an Eastern River • Joseph Conrad
... from my letter-book that on the 21st of June I reported to him tersely and truly the condition of facts on that day: "This is the nineteenth day of rain, and the prospect of fair weather is as far off as ever. The roads are impassable; the fields and woods become quagmire's after a few wagons have crossed over. Yet we are at work all the time. The left flank is across Noonday Creek, and the right is across Nose's Creek. The enemy still holds Kenesaw, a conical mountain, with Marietta behind it, and has his flanks retired, to cover that town and the railroad behind. ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... promptly to feed the wretched horses; the poor, woe-begone looking creatures, hardly one of which was properly picketed, were standing expectantly amid a perfect cobweb of muddy, tangled picketing ropes in the quagmire, which represented their lines. One of the fellows, who had passed the night under our ox waggon, on lifting his rain-sodden blanket, found to his surprise and disgust a fine iguana, about four feet long, nestling against his body. The sun began to smile upon us, and we advanced to a ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... good are a pack of City lubbers!" returned Stephen. "Don't we know a quagmire when we see one, better ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... the trail, filled her with awe. A single misstep, a little instant of hesitation in a crisis, might precipitate her a thousand feet down the canyon to her death. Dead trees swayed, threatening to fall; snow slides roared and rumbled on the far steeps; the quagmire sucked with greedy lips, the trail wandered dimly,—as if it were trying to decoy her away into the fastnesses where the wilderness might claim her. No one had to tell her how easy it would be to lose the trail, never to find it again. The forests were endless; ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... knowledge, or indulging in much thought, but he can't play such tricks upon Agriculture. She is very much like a donkey: unless you are thoroughly acquainted with her playful ways, she will upset you in a quagmire. Perhaps it is due to my readers that I should say here that I have read a great many valuable treatises upon this subject, among which may be named, "Cometh up as a Flour," "Anatomy of Melon-cholly," "Sowing ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 18, July 30, 1870 • Various
... impossible that any German should be left alive in this quagmire, but there was still a rattle of machine-guns from holes and hillocks. Not for long. The bombing-parties searched and found them, and silenced them. From the heaps of earth which had once been trenches German soldiers rose and staggered in a dazed, drunken ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... himself thinks it narrowest and safest, he is pretty sure to find the earth rotten and crumbling, and to pay for his obstinacy by a wetting; whilst in the case of a swamp the consequences are even more serious, and the horse often gets badly strained in floundering out of a quagmire. ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... extremely soft and boggy, that we found it impossible to proceed above three-quarters of a mile on our eastern course. We therefore returned, resolving to keep close to the river's edge, until we should be enabled to sound the vein of quagmire, with which we appeared to be hemmed in. In this attempt we were equally unfortunate, the horses falling repeatedly: one rolled into the river, and it was with difficulty we saved him: my baggage was on him, and was entirely spoiled; the ...
— Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales • John Oxley
... women, sunk in that putrefying well of abominations; they have oozed in upon London, from the universal Stygian quagmire of British industrial life; are accumulated in the well of the concern, to that extent. British charity is smitten to the heart, at the laying bare of such a scene; passionately undertakes, by enormous subscription of money, or by other enormous ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... him from view. With a rapid glance at the darkening flat, he then seized his gun, and springing to the spongy bank, half crouching half crawling through reeds and tussocks, he made his way to the brush. A foot and eye less experienced would have plunged its owner helpless in the black quagmire. At one edge of the thicket he heard hoofs trampling the dried twigs. Calvert's horse was already there, tied to a ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... top of the fierce rush of the river, when our helmsman run us plump against one of Johnny's huge impalers. The shock of the blow threw the mate into an immense basket of fresh eggs. He fell with a squelch past all power of forgetting, and lay wriggling in a very quagmire of yolk and white and fragments of shells. We pulled him out blind and streaming with eggs. His aspect was so preposterously absurd that the helmsman, rendered almost imbecile by laughter, let the boat drive into a second pile, when, as I live to write it, the mate, ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... a fabrication, was the elaboration of a myth. But neither of these alternatives will bear investigation. On the one hand, it is absurd to suppose that the temple of truth could be erected on the quagmire and morass of falsehood—impossible to believe that the one system in the world of mind which has attracted the true to its allegiance, and been the stimulus of truth-seeking throughout the ages, can have originated in a tissue of deliberate ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... prepared him a little for what he found. All the way from Balaclava his horse struggled knee-deep in mud: a very quagmire of black, sticky slush. Yet this was the great highway—the only road between the base of supply and an army engaged eight miles distant in an arduous siege. Along it the whole of the food, ammunition, and material had ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... Sidney Lanier was teaching in Prattville, Alabama, a town built on a quagmire by Daniel Pratt, of whom one of his negroes said his "Massa seemed dissatisfied with the way God had made the earth and he was always digging down the hills and filling up the hollows." Prattville was a small manufacturing town, and Lanier was about as appropriately placed there as Arion ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... "Wartah"precipice, quagmire, quicksand and hence sundry secondary and metaphorical significations, under which, as in the "Semitic" (Arabic) tongues generally, the prosaical and material sense of the word is clearly evident. I noted this in ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... water full of vegetation. These alternate with places where the ground, being higher, yawns with wide cracks crumbling at the edge, the heat causing the clay to split and open. In winter it must be an impassable quagmire; now it is ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... ordinary men. They were men whose manhood had been tried by four awful years of the supreme test, men such as had charged with Pickett up the bloody ridge at Gettysburg, and disputed with the soldiers of Grant every inch of tangled quagmire in the ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... pursuit—beyond the scent of savage hounds, and the trailing of men almost as savage as they; for the place cannot be approached by water-craft, and is equally unapproachable by land. Even a dog could not make way through the quagmire of mud, stretching immediately around it to a distance of several hundred yards. If one tried, it would soon be snapped up by the great saurian, master of this darksome domain. Still is there a way to traverse the treacherous ground, for one knowing it, as does Darke's runaway slave. ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... again or not. All I cared about was reaching the Khan and putting down my bag. We found tracks where some scrubby plants were growing, where the surface was passable, but as we neared the entrance to the Khan, where carts and horsemen had made a veritable quagmire, we stuck, all three, without apparently any prospect of getting on at all unless we abandoned our baggage. However, some Arabs came to our assistance and relieved us of our burdens, so that we gained ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... point I found great difficulty. A brook coming down from the hills had overflowed the land until a swamp or quagmire had been formed, whereon huge trees rotted in slime, while creeping plants hid the deformity ...
— Alfgar the Dane or the Second Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... dote on rookeries. Lucy, can't city governments be clean? Is human nature normally and habitually corrupt when it comes to governing a city? The Mayor and all his appointees are simply wading through the vast quagmire of the common citizen's indifference, fought every step by the vile creatures who batten on the administration of the city's affairs. Do you suppose that if the schools laid tremendous stress on clean citizenship and began in the kindergarten ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... seventy years, mournfully asks itself and Mirabeau, "M. le Comte, would there have been in Prussia, for example, any Trade at all, any Nation at all, had it always been left 'Free'? There would have been mere sand and quagmire, and a community of wolves and bisons, M. le Comte. Have the goodness to terminate that Litany, and take ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... dying Salisbury doth groane, It irkes his heart he cannot be reueng'd. Frenchmen, Ile be a Salisbury to you. Puzel or Pussel, Dolphin or Dog-fish, Your hearts Ile stampe out with my Horses heeles, And make a Quagmire of your mingled braines. Conuey me Salisbury into his Tent, And then wee'le try what these ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... he began a long rambling speech, in which he pretended not to know what things are and what are not wonderful. The Boy Hunters young gentleman fell headlong into the quagmire of definitions, but the oldest sister, who had her own ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... us, and so she was more sensitive like. She can't understand she was loving a dream. So I say it might do her good if somebody that knew, could tell her, but I swear to gracious, I never could. I've heard her out at the edge of that quagmire calling in them wild spells of hers off and on for the last sixteen years, and imploring the swamp to give him back to her, and I've got out of bed when I was pretty tired, and come down to see she didn't ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter
... not certain as to the prevalence of this weed in the swampy places of the North-West, I can affirm that I have scarcely ever seen a very dangerous quagmire that has not been covered with this exquisite little plant; and if I could credit the stories of the nursery, I would be able to believe that those malignant fairies who live about dangerous springs and shaking swamps, cover the ground with these dainty sprays of green to lure men to their ...
— Annette, The Metis Spy • Joseph Edmund Collins
... her into the garden to show her the state of the lawns, coldly scintillant with standing water and rimmed by regular canals. Lord's would be like them, only fifty times worse; play had no doubt been abandoned on that quagmire for the day. Miss Belsize was not so sure about that; why should we not drive over and find out? I said that was the surest way of missing Teddy. She said a hansom would take us there and back in a half-an-hour. I gained time disputing that statement, but said if we went at all I was sure ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... habiliments. We noticed that they never sat down, though a bench was close by them; they would squat for an hour at a time. The day following we took our last horseback ride in South America. It was short, but horrible. Through quagmire and swamp, and down a flight of rocky stairs, in striking imitation of General Putnam's famous ride—over rocks, too, made wondrously slippery by a pitiless rain, but which our unshod Indian horses descended with great dexterity, only one beast and his rider taking ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... this point 'The Ghostseer' is a well-told and readable yarn, with only just philosophizing enough to give it a touch of dignity. In the second book it runs off into a quagmire of abstruse speculation, Schiller had got the idea—and it interested him for personal reasons—of carrying his hero through a debauch of skepticism. This he thought would give weight and distinction ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... more pleasantly than ever, answered, "I kin." Suiting the action to the word, he flung his burden into the Slough of Despond. The pond was a thin piece of canvas painted to represent the quagmire. The burden made a sound as of the house falling down. Jake wiped the perspiration from his face and, spitting a mouthful of tobacco juice to one side, he gazed on the audience and smiled. It was too much for even the staid old church members. The laughter was ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... bridles, pack-saddles and strings of bells, mules and men, lanterns, torches, sacks, provender, barrels, cheeses, kegs of honey and butter, straw bundles and packages of many shapes, were crowded confusedly together in this thawed quagmire and about the steps. Up here in the clouds, everything was seen through cloud, and seemed dissolving into cloud. The breath of the men was cloud, the breath of the mules was cloud, the lights were encircled by cloud, speakers close at hand were not ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... wrong when they refused all the offers of the towns to send bodies of footmen to fight beside us; had they been there, they might have faced those terrible archers of yours, for they at least would have been free to fight when we were all but helpless in that quagmire. I see that you have knightly spurs on, ...
— At Agincourt • G. A. Henty
... dingy pools, clumps of rotting willows, narrow winding water lanes and sinking paths. The tules grow inconceivably thick in places, standing man-high above the water; cattle, no, not any fish nor fowl can penetrate them. Old stalks succumb slowly; the bed soil is quagmire, settling with the weight as it fills and fills. Too slowly for counting they raise little islands from the bog and reclaim the land. The waters pushed out cut deeper channels, gnaw off the edges of ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... hostile ghosts, of deadly spirits and of fierce enemies, gleams luridly through every line. The fen and the forest are dim and dark; will-o'-the-wisps flit above them, and gloom closes them in; wolves and wild boars lurk there, the quagmire opens its jaws and swallows the horse and his rider; the foeman comes through it to bring fire and slaughter to the clan-village at the dead of night. To these real terrors and dangers of the mark are added ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... as long as he can get over the ground, but the links here is like a quagmire when it rains. But never mind, we'll have a good chummy afternoon. And I've got some bully gingersnaps. Do you like gingersnaps?" Joel replied in the affirmative, and West produced a box of ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour
... certain that he pursued both in the personages of his satire through "Every Man Out of His Humour," and "Cynthia's Revels," Daniel under the characters Fastidious Brisk and Hedon, Munday as Puntarvolo and Amorphus; but in these last we venture on quagmire once more. Jonson's literary rivalry of Daniel is traceable again and again, in the entertainments that welcomed King James on his way to London, in the masques at court, and in the pastoral drama. As to Jonson's personal ambitions with respect ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... must accept her husband's opinion, at all events about men.' He plunged on into the ancient quagmire. 'A man may know with impunity what is injurious if ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... end of the long log. Stepping down, she found that the quagmire was not so deep. But for some minutes they continued to plow through it, but walking ...
— Ruth Fielding at the War Front - or, The Hunt for the Lost Soldier • Alice B. Emerson
... often assisted them as far as his own hitherto humble means would allow; and now, he had resolved that before leaving the neighbourhood, he would make them such a present as would lift them, once for all, out of the quagmire of adversity in which they had floundered ...
— The Golden Shoemaker - or 'Cobbler' Horn • J. W. Keyworth
... and soaked it full; when it reached a comfortable bed between the roots of trees, it almost decided to stay and be a pond, and it dallied so long before it found a tiny opening and straggled out, that if it did not result in a pond, it did accomplish a treacherous quagmire. In fact that undecided, feeble-minded streamlet totally "demoralized" the whole hillside, and with its vagaries I had to contend at every step of ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... marsh to cross, a hideous quagmire, and our pursuers were close. We started over the quaking ground, then, suddenly, I saw her sink. I rushed to aid her, and I, too, sank. We were to our necks in the soft ooze, and there on the bank, watching us, was the foremost of our hunters. ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... of "goose" land, after selling for $5 and then $15 an acre, was subdivided and sold as garden soil for $125 an acre. Three brothers who were market gardeners bought farms and settled there with their families. They found the soil, when wet, to be a quagmire and when dry to be possible of cultivation only with dynamite. After three years of utter failure they were forced to abandon their homes, having lost their money, time, and labor, and having reaped a bitter feeling ...
— A Stake in the Land • Peter Alexander Speek
... with a secret which I am pledged to keep. I will not allow your father to lead me into any quagmire of ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... about his own size. Rolling up his own clothing in as small a bundle as possible, he concealed it in the bog, at some distance from the place where the picket had fallen. Dragging the corpse to a quagmire, he sunk it beneath the muddy waters, and it passed from his view. After taking the precaution to straighten up the long grass, which might have betrayed his movements, he advanced ...
— The Young Lieutenant - or, The Adventures of an Army Officer • Oliver Optic
... outskirts were beaten motionless and sodden by the onslaught of consecutive storms; the southeast trades brought the saline breath of the outlying Pacific even to the busy haunts of Commercial and Kearney streets; the low-lying Mission road was a quagmire; along the City Front, despite of piles and pier and wharf, the Pacific tides still asserted themselves in mud and ooze as far as Sansome Street; the wooden sidewalks of Clay and Montgomery streets were mere floating bridges or buoyant pontoons superposed ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... Roman empire were hastening the ruin of the existing civilization. It was in such an age and amid such surroundings that the Gospels and the Epistles came forth as the lotus springs, pure and radiant from the foul and fetid quagmire. What could have produced them? The widely accepted rule that religions are the products of their environments is surely at fault here. Neither in the natural impulses of a dozen Judean fishermen and peasants, nor in the bigoted breast ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... bewitchments, Sesphra, I confess that through love men win to sick disgust and self-despising, and for that reason I will not love any more. Now breathlessly the tall lads run to clutch at stars, above the brink of a drab quagmire, and presently time trips them—Oh, Sesphra, wicked Sesphra of the Dreams, you have laid upon me a magic so strong that, horrified, I hear the truth come babbling from long-guarded lips which no longer obey me, ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... almost every one: one day in my house he called Grote's 'History' "a fetid quagmire, with nothing spiritual about it." I always thought, until his 'Reminiscences' appeared, that his sneers were partly jokes, but this now seems rather doubtful. His expression was that of a depressed, almost despondent yet benevolent man; and it ...
— The Autobiography of Charles Darwin - From The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin • Charles Darwin
... know," echoed from every one. No powder could be found; the Norwegian having taken possession of the porter bottle, and placed it in his pocket, had doubtlessly fallen with it into the quagmire; and they had ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... country it happened to be raining hard, but the men and women toiled in the paddies. They were breaking up the flooded clods with a tool resembling the "pulling fork" used in the West for getting manure from a dung cart. On other farms the task of working the quagmire was being done by two persons with the aid of a disconsolate pony harnessed to a rude harrow. The men and women in the paddies kept off the rain by means of the usual wide straw hats and loose straw mantles, admirable in their way in their combination ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... interests in the Empire. A gifted poet, and an enthusiastic advocate of universal peace, he was a man who might be counted on, if in [Page 163] the power of man, to hold the dogs of war in leash. But he, too, had been consul at Canton and he knew by experience the quagmire in which the best intentions ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... shortlived mortals to feel a reasonable assurance that whether the origin of the An was a tadpole or not, he is no more likely to become a tadpole again than the institutions of the Vril-ya are likely to relapse into the heaving quagmire and certain strife-rot of ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... shoeing of a horse to the repair of a watch, and embraced everything between. He was never taken by surprise—accidents never came unexpected, and strange events never disconcerted him. He would whistle "Yankee Doodle" while his horses were floundering in a quagmire, and sing "Hail Columbia" while plunging ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... the rain of the night before had converted them into a perfect quagmire, which the splashing water- spouts from the gables, and the filth and offal cast from the different houses, swelled in no small degree. These odious matters being left to putrefy in the close and heavy air, emitted an insupportable ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens
... upon the road, and took with him twenty knights. And as he went he did great good, and gave alms, feeding the poor and needy. And upon the way they found a leper, struggling in a quagmire, who cried out to them with a loud voice to help him for the love of God; and when Rodrigo heard this, he alighted from his beast and helped him, and placed him upon the beast before him, and carried him with him ...
— Chronicle Of The Cid • Various
... is true, but as for rest, I might as well, or better, have been awake. I fell from one dream into another; found myself wandering through impossible places; started in an agony of fear, and then dozed again, only to plunge into some deeper quagmire of trouble; and through all there was a vague feeling I was pursuing a person who eluded all my efforts to find him; playing a terrible game of hide-and-seek with a man who always slipped away from my touch, panting up mountains and running down declivities after one who had better ...
— The Uninhabited House • Mrs. J. H. Riddell
... next morning, which generally proved to be half-past two, and then, whether it snowed or rained, the traveller must rise and make ready, by the help of a horn-lantern and a farthing candle, and proceed on his way over bad roads, sometimes getting out to help the coachman lift the coach out of a quagmire or rut, and arrived in New York after a week's hard travelling, wondering at the ease as well as the expedition with which our journey ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... friends, broader and deeper than ever: here they wind down into the hollow; and there, you may see where they have floundered through that vile pool, that is still turbid, where they crossed it. A horrible quagmire! But courage, my fair cousin: it is only such difficulties as these which the road ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... today is Boone County, Kentucky, was one of the greatest and oldest animal rendezvous in North America, geologists claim. It took its name doubtless from the variety of bones of prehistoric and later fauna found imbedded in the salty quagmire. ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... towards the king's retreat; but Bruce's scouts were on the watch and brought him news of their coming. The king with his party retired until they reached a morass, through which flowed a running stream, while beyond a narrow passage led through a deep quagmire. ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... words bitterly. Constance was confirmed in her original suspicion of him now. Halsey was getting deeper and deeper into the moral quagmire. She had seen his interest in Mrs. Noble. Had Bella LeMar hoped that she, too, would play will-o '-the-wisp ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve
... to was not a march at all, but the "quagmire theme," from which queer faces threateningly mock ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... large and calamitous part of his career was spent. As the student plods along one of the dreariest wastes of the national annals, his name gleams across the tedious page. When from time to time he flits over the stage, the quagmire of Court intrigues and jobbing favouritism is illuminated with a ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... From out this quagmire of corruption and rascality emerged the Colossus, a man so stupendously rich and with such unlimited powers for evil that the world has never looked upon his like. The famous Croesus, whose fortune was estimated at only eight millions in our money, was a pauper ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... four whole days and nights, and the low-lying ground is like a quagmire in places. In the sunlight the whole mountains glisten with running streams and falling water. I feel a strange kind of elation, but from no visible cause. Aunt Janet rather queered it by telling me, as she said good-night, to be very careful of myself, as ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... reached and become involved in an exceptionally bad spot—a spring apparently rendering the clay so soft that the entire road for about thirty yards had been worked into a perfect quagmire, into which we sank above our knees at every step, the tenacious clay holding our feet almost as though they had been in a vice—when, without the slightest warning of any kind, a withering volley of musketry was poured in upon the devoted band from the bushes on both ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... feet that spread and became one. So I made the men mark time and abused them roundly for being slack about it, they grumbling greatly because our prisoner was marched away to shelter, whereas we must stand without. I bullied them as much as I dared, and we stamped the road into a veritable quagmire, as builders tread mud for making sun-dried bricks, so that when three-quarters of an hour had passed and a man came running back with a message from Ranjoor Singh there was a little warmth in us. I did not need to use force to get the ...
— Hira Singh - When India came to fight in Flanders • Talbot Mundy
... than the earlier ones. Unfortunately, this is not the case. On continuing Mr. Blunt's article, I find the later Pantheists a hundredfold more perplexing than the earlier ones. With Kant, Schelling, Fichte, and Hegel, we feel that we are with men who have been decoyed into a hopeless quagmire; we understand nothing of their language-we doubt whether they understand themselves, and feel that we can do nothing with them but look at them ...
— God the Known and God the Unknown • Samuel Butler
... on through the endless forest of palms, and waded through a quagmire at least eight miles in extent, where the green slime reached up to the saddle-flaps. On that day we came to a sluggish stream, bearing the name of "Aptikpangmakthlaingwainkyapaimpangkya" (The Place Where the Pots Were Struck When They Were About to Feast). ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... nearly reached her waist, She called aloud in frantic haste: "I sink, I sink in quagmire sable, To free myself ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... cinched until one could almost hear their bones crack, climbed, straining, struggling, panting, wild eyed and steaming from over-exertion under the lash of angry and profane drivers, until they sank to their haunches, helpless and exhausted, in some quagmire. Such common misfortune necessitated the unloading of the poor beast at the loss of time and patience, not only of his own driver, but those following, as any obstruction to this narrow trail was greeted ...
— The Trail of a Sourdough - Life in Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... excellent in their way, without which it is difficult to see how society could get on at all, but when they have done their best there still remains this great and appalling mass of human misery on our hands, a perfect quagmire of Human Sludge. They may ladle out individuals here and there, but to drain the whole bog is an effort which seems to be beyond the imagination of most of those who spend their lives in philanthropic work. It is no doubt better than nothing to take the individual ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... the saddle-horn, swung up, and put the pony to the pull. The muscles of the bronco's legs stood out as it leaned forward and scratched for a foothold. The calf blatted with pain, but presently it was snaked out from the quagmire to the ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... innumerable difficulties. There was no firm foundation on which to work, and no trees to assist in forming hurdles. All we could do was to bind together large quantities of swamp weeds and lay them across the quagmire. It was but the semblance of a road, without firmness ...
— The Battle of New Orleans • Zachary F. Smith
... the same afternoon Jackson, leaving Elk Run Valley, which was immediately occupied by Ewell, with 8000 men, marched up the river to Port Republic. The track, unmetalled and untended, had been turned into a quagmire by the heavy rains of an ungenial spring, and the troops marched only five miles, bivouacking by the roadside. May 1 was a day of continuous rain. The great mountains loomed dimly through the dreary mist. The streams which ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... are a mystery to him; only rumour or fable knows what goes on within them. For, when you have passed the woods and the dense, tangled thickets, in the depths you come upon a great rampart of stumps, logs, and roots, defended by a quagmire, a thousand streams, and a net of overgrown weeds and ant-hills, nests of wasps and hornets, and coils of serpents. If by some superhuman valour you surmount even these barriers, farther on you will meet with still greater danger. At each step there lie in wait for you, like ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... out the words, and immediately Ben's company found itself all but surrounded. To go into this quagmire had certainly been a grave error, but all leaders make mistakes sometimes; and Major Morris was suffering as ...
— The Campaign of the Jungle - or, Under Lawton through Luzon • Edward Stratemeyer
... this unfortunate rain, which had converted a good road into a quagmire. We detected a rattlesnake crawling along this morning but there are not nearly so many of them in this country ...
— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle
... but fortunately circumstances combined to render it merely ridiculous, as reflected in the mirror of memory. The rain still fell heavily, lying in places to the depth of nearly a foot, and converting all the ground that was not rocky into a slippery quagmire. So profound was the darkness, that it was literally impossible to see any object six inches from one's eyes, and it was only by the occasional flashes from the firelocks of the persevering enemy and the forked lightning that we could realise the surrounding scene. ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... flown no further, no Board could ever have been so terribly curse-laden. To find oneself at last utterly stopped, after proceeding with great strain to one's horse for half a mile through an artificial quagmire of slush up to the wheelbox, is harassing to the customary traveller; and men at that crisis did not bethink themselves quite so frequently as they should have done, that a people perishing from ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... poem involved literature, and to stand, as he did, under the same roof with the nymphs who had long bodied forth his pictorial ideal, was to invite a public avowal of his proposed championship of free art. He was lured the farther into this quagmire by the guileless questioning of one of his listeners, who lingered in obvious fascination after his fellows had departed, and, in happy ignorance that the cherubic youth was the son of an artist of distinction, and himself no mean critic of things artistic, Shelby ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... angle at E; while the old man, with his axe and a fresh stake, tramped around to the eastern side of the slough. Having got the range of the stakes, he was moving slowly back toward them, holding his stake before him, when the youth signalled him to stop just in the edge of the quagmire. ...
— The Young Surveyor; - or Jack on the Prairies • J. T. Trowbridge
... somehow, that for a long time she had wandered in a darkness so thick that she could not see her hand before her. She had lost her way and knew not whither she had strayed, and with every step she had been afraid of sinking into a quagmire or stumbling headlong into an abyss. Now some one had called to her not to go any farther, but to sit down and wait for the break of day. She was glad that she would not have to continue her perilous wanderings; now she sat quietly waiting ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... as the one who had dragged her parents into this quagmire, was silently wondering what she could do to help them out of it; and then her mother ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... for following this precept himself and, with one eye significantly cast upon the jury, is likely to lead his witness a merry dance until the latter is finally "bogged" in a quagmire of absurdities. Not long ago, shortly after the publication of his book, the lawyer had occasion to cross-examine a modest-looking young woman as to the speed of an electric car. The witness seemed conscious that she was about to undergo a severe ordeal, ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... the moose-calf tries his wobbly legs, and one day finds himself gazing out upon a plain where grass is. He has no use for grass—does not even know what grass is for. Only he sees no paths out there. The grass covers a quagmire, but of quagmires the moose-calf knows nothing, having ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... way back by the shore, a good deal longer; now over rough, rocky stretches where he stumbled in the darkness, now through marshy, sodden ground where he sank as in a quagmire time and again over his ankles. It was even longer than he had counted on, and time, with the Weasel on one hand and the return of the police on the other, was a factor to be reckoned with again, as, ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... woodland glades and soft green swards; the air was glorious and cool, for though the sun was powerful there was an abundance of shade. One drawback, however, a drawback sufficient to mar our happiness, was not denied us. Every mile or so we had to plunge through a quagmire, equal to the worst South African mudhole, which is saying a great deal. Much care had to be exercised to prevent the horses getting fairly bogged or breaking their legs, but all passed without an accident, though our condition at the end of the day was awful. We were bespattered ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... among boys and young men of relating filthy stories, indulging in foul jokes, making indecent allusions, and subjecting to lewd criticism every passing female, is a most abominable sin. Such habits crush out pure thoughts; they annihilate respect for virtue; they make the mind a quagmire of obscenity; they lead to overt ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... long and Uncle Terry's old horse slow, and the road in the hollows a quagmire of half-frozen mud. Gone were all the leaves of the scrub oaks, and beneath the thickets of spruce still remained a white pall of snow. A half gale was blowing over the island, and when they reached the hilltop that overlooked the Cape, it was so dark that only scattered lights ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... hostile forces came face to face again, Gonsalvo being forced by the exigencies of the campaign to encamp in a deplorable situation, a region of swamp, which had been converted by the incessant rains into a mere quagmire. The French occupied higher ground and were much more comfortably situated. But Gonsalvo refused to move. He was playing his old waiting game, knowing that the French dared not attack his intrenched camp, and that time would ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris
... very uncomfortable," said Ben Franklin one day to his comrades, while they were standing mid-leg deep in the quagmire. ...
— True Stories from History and Biography • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... The lair of such a monster would not have been disturbed for hundreds—or thousands—of years. Moreover, these creatures must have occupied places quite inaccessible to man. A snake who could make himself comfortable in a quagmire, a hundred feet deep, would be protected on the outskirts by such stupendous morasses as now no longer exist, or which, if they exist anywhere at all, can be on very few places on the earth's surface. Far be it from me to ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... accompanied you on the thorny and bloody path to victory, will forsake you, and you will not be aware of it, for conquerors and tyrants are always blind. You will conquer and dominate. And you will plunge into injustice, and you will not feel the quagmire under your feet.... Every tyrant thinks he stands on firm ground so long as he ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... was situated on the stiff London clay, and, after weeks of summer rains and the traffic caused by collecting the heavy engines and machinery and the materials used in the construction of the sheds and buildings, the ground was churned into a quagmire of clay and water, so that in places it was impassable, and some of the exhibits were isolated. Thousands of wattled hurdles were purchased in Hampshire, and laid flat on the mud along the main routes to the tents and sheds, ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... place in Lincolnshire." 'Twas even so at Benton Barracks. When weary of reading, I would turn and look a while through the little window at the side of my bunk that gave a view of the most of the square which the barracks inclosed. The surface of the earth was just a quagmire of mud and water, and nothing stirring abroad could be seen save occasionally a mounted orderly, splashing at a gallop across the grounds. Since then I have frequently read "Bleak House," and whenever that chapter is reached ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... one when he sees bodies of British troops moving along the roads. He is glad when his motorcar gets held up by some old wagons slithering axle-deep in the quagmire on the side of the paved highway, so that he can put his head out and shout a "Hullo, boys! How's it going? And who are you?" After all the thrill of the recruiting days, ill the excitement of the send-off, all the enthusiasm with which they sang Tipperary ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... breaking of the great frost created appalling conditions on this countryside, which for some time was an absolute quagmire. Even now things are pretty bad, though the weather ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... The roads are a quagmire. The querulous voice of the man who lost his camera claims our attention. "I thought I would be able to get out and run behind and pick flowers." Turning and introducing ourselves, we find the troubled one to be an English doctor ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... and his eyes flashed a bitter hatred at the lad. Again and again he struggled furiously to escape from the oozy quagmire. His body sank lower and lower, until the surface of the bog was almost level with his armpits. Then his rage ...
— The Camp in the Snow - Besiedged by Danger • William Murray Graydon
... kindliness; and when he entered the refectory and threw himself into a chair by the fire, he looked wearied out in body and mind, shivered and coughed, and said with unwonted depression that the sullen fellows would make a quagmire of their camp after all, since a French reinforcement had come up, and the vigilance that would be needed would occupy the whole army. At supper he ate little and spoke less; and when James would have related his ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... It was a circular quagmire of festering black mud about a hundred yards across. Near at hand they could see the mud heaving, very slowly, as though abysmal forms of life were tunneling along just under the surface. They glanced toward the center of the bog, which was occupied ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... had fallen without interruption for several days, and now the track on which we were travelling could not, without poetical license, be described as a road. In some parts it resembled a water-course, in others a quagmire, and at least during the first half of the journey I was constantly reminded of that stage in the work of creation when the water was not yet separated from the dry land. During the few moments when the work of keeping my balance and preventing my baggage from being lost did not engross all my ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... ankle deep through a soft limy surface. It was soon a most difficult task to move transport on the roads. Lorries skidded, and double teams of horses could only make slow progress with limbers. Off the road it became almost impossible to move. The ground was a quagmire. On the sodden hills the troops bivouacked without a stick to shelter them. The wind was strong and drove walls of water before it, and there was not a man in the attacking force with a dry skin. Sleep on those perishing heights was quite ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... with lips tight shut like a vise, with a muddy complexion and thin arms, treat themselves to the malicious pleasure of promenading their Adolphe through the quagmire of falsehood and contradiction: they question him (see Troubles within Troubles), like a magistrate examining a criminal, reserving the spiteful enjoyment of crushing his denials by positive proof at a decisive moment. Generally, in this supreme ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... Crow, "one time there was an old woman that lived near a well. For a long time nobody thought she was a witch, but after a while people began to have their suspicions. There was a quagmire in the road right in front of the old woman's house, and every traveler passing that way was sure to get mud on his feet. No matter whether he was riding horseback or in a buggy, it was all the same. He was sure to get his feet muddy. And the mud was so black, and thick, ...
— Little Mr. Thimblefinger and His Queer Country • Joel Chandler Harris
... tamed. There were most excellent reasons why I should not go there. Much of it was impenetrable. Only a few trees had been taken out; oilmen were just invading it. In its physical aspect it was a treacherous swamp and quagmire filled with every plant, animal, and human danger known in the worst of such ...
— At the Foot of the Rainbow • Gene Stratton-Porter
... that consideration induces the officials, the good citizens, and soul reformers, to stifle the voice of truth. He finds them all a compact majority, unscrupulous enough to be willing to build up the prosperity of the town on a quagmire of lies and fraud. He is accused of trying to ruin the community. But to his mind "it does not matter if a lying community is ruined. It must be levelled to the ground. All men who live upon lies must be exterminated like vermin. You'll bring it to such ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... that tenet of our order, "that we do for others as we would have others do for us, and that if I find my brother in distress, I must bind up his wounds, lift him from the quagmire of despond and set him on his feet." If any lesson stands out boldly before the mind of the Odd-Fellow it is truth. He finds it on his banner wherever he goes. Friendship is ephemeral. It lasts only through life. It may die, it will die. The grave ends ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... moorland he dashed, and through quagmire he plashed, His pace never daring to slack; Till the hostel he neared, for greatly he feared Old Grindrod would ...
— Bygone Punishments • William Andrews
... to its lowest depth of ingratitude and sin when poor Judas changed sides and sold his Lord. What a change it was! Alas, alas, what a quagmire of uncertainties and shifting sand unsanctified human nature ...
— Our Master • Bramwell Booth
... excited by this letter, because I had been in that quagmire myself. A student of Doctor Witherspoon once came to him and said, "I believe everything is imaginary! I myself am only an imaginary being." The Doctor said to him, "Go down and hit your head against the college door, and if you are imaginary and the ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... was worth what it cost. The spectacle of a man prevented by religious scruples from photographing children at prayers, while plotting at the same time to rob his employer, has been a kind of chart to me that has piloted me through more than one quagmire of queer human nature. Nothing could stump me after that. The man was just as sincere in the matter of his scruple as he was rascally in ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... rubber vine grows and thrives; where you go knee-deep in slush and catch at a tree-bole to prevent yourself going farther, cling, sweating at every pore and shivering like a dog, feeling for firmer ground and finding it, only to be led on to another quagmire. The bush pig avoids this place, the leopard shuns it; it is bad in the dry season when the sun gives some light by day, and the moon a gauzy green glimmer by night, but in the rains it is terrific. Night, then, is black as the inside of a trunk, and day is so feeble that your hand, held before ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... Pope of Rome and stands ready at all times to serve the wishes and obey the orders of that Italian pontiff, and our officials were aware of this fact and they did not want to stir up the Catholic officials for fear of losing a few votes, as both of our old parties have sunk so low into the quagmire of filth that they would allow their country to sink to the level of Romish abominations if they thought by so doing they could control the Catholic vote for ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg
... Poppy declared, soft mothering tones in her voice. "All the same we must keep our heads screwed on the right way. So, tell me, will it be of any personal advantage to you to help pull these elderly plungers out of the quagmire?" ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... and against Tchagan Hou's advice I decided to try bullying the weather, and when the rain came on again I refused to stop. As a result we were all soaked through, and after getting nearly bogged, all hands of us in a quagmire, I gave it up and we camped on the drenched ground, and there we stayed till the middle of the next day—spending most of our time trying to get dry. The argols were too wet to burn, but we made a little blaze with the wood of my soda-water box. For two days we had tried ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... the village of Tezcuco. I had to take a by-way to avoid the Guadalupe road, which was blocked up in consequence of the holiday. In doing so, I had to leap a ditch or canal, in which both I and my horse came near closing our pilgrimage in a quagmire; but in time we were again upon the road. It is a dreary place about the hill of Tepeyaca, or Guadalupe, and if the Virgin had not smiled upon the barren hill and made roses grow out of it, it would be as uninviting as one of the hills ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... snatched away up the ravines amidst the eternal ice and snow; {73a} then plunged again into an enormous flood of seething brimstone to be parched, stifled, and choked by the direful stench; thence to a quagmire of vermin, to embrace hellish reptiles far more noxious than serpents or vipers. After that the devils took knotted rods of fiery steel from the furnace, wherewith they beat them so that their howls resounded throughout all Hell, so inexpressibly ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... worked very conscientiously upon this undertaking: he read up to any extent,—wrote, talked, and perhaps thought, Islamically—and he trips up his reader with some allusion verse after verse, tumbling him to the bottom of the page, with its quagmire of explanatory footnotes. In 1815 appeared the National Airs; in 1816, Sacred Songs, Duets, and Trios, the music composed and selected by Stevenson and Moore; in 1818, The Fudge Family in Paris, again a great hit. ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... likewise been restored, and holy mass and psalm now ascend daily from it. The wretched hovels around the gates, where miserable peasants herded like swine in their sties, have been cleared away, and places fit for human habitation have been erected in their stead. That fearful quagmire, in which so many wretched travellers have lost their lives, has been drained, and a causeway built across it. Basildene is becoming a blessing to all around it; and so long as thou art lord here, my Raymond, it will remain a blessing to all who come within ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... white man could even direct the work, and the ubiquitous Chinaman, proof against every ill that flesh is heir to in Java, was deputed to superintend the solution of abstruse professional problems, between the short and hasty visits of Dutch and English engineers. Quagmire and quicksand, stagnant pool and sluggish stream, succeed in weary iteration. Bleached skeletons of dead trees writhe in weird contortions against the dark background of jungle, as though some wizard's curse had blighted life and growth amid ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... symmetrical, and chaste. By properly adjusting it, a railroad conductor can easily lift a recalcitrant passenger, and project him through one of the windows of the car, (provided said window is large enough to admit of such exit,) into any selected pool, or pond, or quagmire, or any other sort of mire, of the miasmatic salt meadows, with the produce of which Morris and Essex stock is so ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 16, July 16, 1870 • Various
... vnwildie swizers wallowing in their gore, like an oxe in his doung, there the sprightly French sprawling and turning on the stayned grasse, like a roach newe taken out of the streame, all the ground was strewed as thicke with battle axes, as the carpenters yard with chips. The plaine appeared like a quagmire, ouerspread as it was with trampled dead bodies. In one place might you beholde a heape of dead murthered men ouerwhelmed with a falling steed, in stead of a tombe stone, in another place a bundle of bodies fettered together in theyr owne bowels, and as the tyrant Romane Empereurs ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... supremacy she acknowledged with the futile uprearing of any angry woman, were against her. She eyed the lawyer, Eliphalet Means, with particular distrust. She had always held all legal proceedings as a species of quagmire to entrap the innocent and unwary. She watched while the lawyer took some documents from his bag and laid them on the table. "I won't sign a thing, nohow," she avowed to herself, ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... considered that he had ample time to reduce Knodsenburg before Prince Maurice could return to its assistance. Two great rivers barred the prince's return, and he would have to traverse the dangerous district called the Foul Meadow, and the great quagmire known as the Rouvenian Morass. But Prince Maurice had now an opportunity of showing the excellence of the army he had raised ...
— By England's Aid • G. A. Henty
... twice over, against the Turks; first as Brandenburg Captain, learning his art; and afterwards as Kaiser's Generalissimo, in 1542. He did no good upon the Turks, on that latter occasion; as indeed what good was to be done, in such a quagmire of futilities as Joachim's element there was? "Too sumptuous in his dinners, too much wine withal!" hint some calumniously. [Paulus Jovius, &c. See Pauli, iii. 70-73.] "Hector of Germany!" say others. He tried some small prefatory Siege or scalade of Pesth; could not do it; ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... your situation had not made me grave. Till the campaign is ended, I shall be in no humour to smile. For the war, when it will be over, I have no idea. The peace is a jack o' lanthorn that dances before one's eyes, is never approached, and at best seems ready to lead some follies into a woful quagmire. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... ill-chosen site. What must European diplomats have thought of a capital city where snakes two feet long invaded gentlemen's drawing-rooms, and a carriage, bringing home the guests from a ball, could be upset by the impenetrable depth of quagmire at the very door of a foreign minister's residence. A description of the city given by Mr. Mills, a Representative from Massachusetts, in 1815, is ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... a prominent settler, was once with others on a hunting expedition, when they surprised a small party of Indians. They killed several, but one active young brave ran off, with White close at his heels. The Indian leaped from a precipice, alighting in a quagmire in which he sank to his waist. White, with tomahawk in hand, jumped after him. In the struggle which ensued, White buried his weapon in the red man's skull. The victim's father was among those who escaped, and for a long time—McWhorter says "several years"—he lurked about the settlements trailing ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... covered with blood and mud and were in great fear of exhausting our mounts. For a long distance we had to get down and lead them. At last we entered a broad meadow covered with bushes and bordered with rocks. Not only horses but riders also began to sink to their middle in a quagmire with apparently no bottom. The whole surface of the meadow was but a thin layer of turf, covering a lake with black putrefying water. When we finally learned to open our column and proceed at big intervals, we found we could ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... very witty," Miss Newville remarked. "He asked the selectmen several times to give their attention to a quagmire in the road near his house. After long delay, they stepped into a chaise and rode to the spot. Suddenly they found themselves stuck in the mud. Mr. Byles opened his window and remarked that he was glad they were stirring in the ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... or a little more since Harrisburg. The brazen heat had given way to torrents in mid-August, and the rain had made quagmire traps of roads, forming rapids of every creek and river—bogging down horses, men, and guns. But it had not bogged down Bedford Forrest. And one section of his small force, under the command of General Buford leading the Kentuckians, had held the Union ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
... the poor beast's face as he bellowed in an agony of fear. The Maharajah directed the men who had gathered around the scene to fell some saplings, which were conveyed to the nala by some smaller elephant and pushed into the quagmire towards "Kennedy". The poor entrapped animal seemed to understand that efforts were being made to rescue him, and he obeyed his driver's now soothing voice and held himself still. At last, the combined labours of men and brother-elephants provided a safe footing ...
— Bengal Dacoits and Tigers • Maharanee Sunity Devee
... should prefer to err with the slow and cautious rather than with the rash and over-bold; the former may for a while serve as a drag upon the chariot wheels of progress, the latter are sure to thrust us out of the road and land us at last in some quagmire whence it will be very hard to get back into the ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... neglected stretch full of dangerous holes; and worst of all, running through the great forests, long pieces of road from which the stumps had been only partly extracted, and where the sunlight barely penetrated. Here the soaked earth became little less than a quagmire. ...
— Painted Windows • Elia W. Peattie
... because it was certainly necessary for him to oppose pride with pride, and before the eyes of Evelyn demonstrate his indifference to that lady's choice of Mr. Lee for the minuet and Mr. Lightfoot for the country dance. This last thought had far to travel from some unused, deep-down quagmire of the heart, but it came. For the rest, the image of Audrey decked in silk and lace, turned by her apparel into a dark Court lady, a damsel in waiting to Queen Titania, caught his fancy in both hands. He wished to see her thus,—wished it ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... ARCHITECT: I'm all right on the gravel question. You don't catch me building in anybody's quagmire. There's plenty of rheumatism and fever 'n' ague lying around loose without digging for 'em, and then building a house over the hole to keep 'em in. I don't want to say anything against any man's building-lots, but how in the light ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... streets like the beads of a rosary when the string is snapped. Perhaps you haven't noticed how serious this letter is. I'm frowning as I write—a habit most bad on the eyebrows—surest of signs that I am sinking again into the quagmire of love. ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr
... hypochondriacal humour which had fallen black upon him that day of deliverance and made him yearn, with an intensity increasing every moment, to separate himself from his repugnant associates and haste the moment of solitude and silence, he might have been rescued, then and for ever, from the quagmire in which perverse circumstances ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... 17th General Barrett paraded for the attack the bulk of his force. After a trying march through a veritable quagmire, the troops sometimes up to their waists in slush, the division at about 9 A.M. came within range of the Turkish position, and the leading brigade, the Belgaum, (Major Gen. Fry,) deployed ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... marshy ground. As it was impossible to get near enough without crossing a marsh, which did not afford a safe footing for their horses, they left them in charge of the Hottentots, and proceeded on foot, thinking, that if the Buffaloes should turn upon them, it would be easy to retreat by crossing the quagmire, which, though firm enough to support a man, would not bear the weight of a Buffalo. They advanced accordingly, and, under shelter of the bushes, approached with such advantage, that the first volley brought down three of the fattest of the herd, and so severely ...
— Delineations of the Ox Tribe • George Vasey
... poor Tom? whom the foul fiend hath led through fire and through flame, and through ford and whirlpool, o'er bog and quagmire; that hath laid knives under his pillow, and halters in his pew; set ratsbane by ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding |
