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More "Downhill" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... thousand times in as many feet last night," Scotty commented. "It's easy by day, but don't try it by night." He led the way through clear spaces between the thorny patches, always going downhill. ...
— The Blue Ghost Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... present—the ever-fleeting present. It lies, then, in the very nature of our existence to take the form of constant motion, and to offer no possibility of our ever attaining the rest for which we are always striving. We are like a man running downhill, who cannot keep on his legs unless he runs on, and will inevitably fall if he stops; or, again, like a pole balanced on the tip of one's finger; or like a planet, which would fall into its sun the moment it ceased to hurry forward on its way. Unrest ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism • Arthur Schopenhauer
... mass quartered over the ground like some unwieldy prehistoric reptile. Houck knew that if he lost his footing he was done for. Once, as the cluster of fighters swung downhill, the outlaw found himself close to the edge of the group. He got his arms free and tried to beat off those clinging to him. Out of the melee he staggered, a pair of arms locked tightly round his thighs. Before he could free himself another body flung itself at ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... the street, as if they were little stern-windows in a ship. And a door opens out of the sitting-room on to a little open gallery with plants in it, where one leans over a queer old rail, and looks all downhill and slant-wise at the crookedest black and yellow old houses, all manner of shapes except straight shapes. To get into this room we come through a china closet; and the man in laying the cloth has actually knocked down, in that repository, ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... and left him suspicious and bitter. He had been forced to put down his equipages and change his fashionable lodgings for cheaper ones; when he lounged in the park his old acquaintances failed to see him; when he gambled he lost. Downhill he was going, and there was naught to stop him. For one man in England he had, even in his most flourishing days, cherished a distaste—the man who was five inches taller than himself, who was incomparably handsomer, and whose rank was such, that to approach ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... My next experience was along a stream of very clear water. It did not appear to be a very large stream, but its remarkable character impressed me as singular. It flowed gently. It was not swift, but glided smoothly along, uphill and downhill the same. Its speed never varied, and this unaccountable characteristic struck me with surprise that waked me. This is my interpretation of my dream," said he: "The clear stream of water represents what the Christian ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... a descent into a profound ravine of these mountain solitudes at length enables the driver to start the team at a rate which makes it impossible for them to stop, and he vaults lightly into his place as we spin merrily downhill. Our troubles are not over, for on the next upward grade the old game of rearing, backing, and futile attempts at buck-jumping, begins again. Despairing eyes rest on a thatched booth at the roadside, ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... seeing them, did not weep; was not moved; received the impression but was not sensitive to it; felt the tug but did not respond to the pull. Rather, indeed, was apt to be a little impatient." It is not necessary to expand. Keggo was fast going downhill. Rosalie could have wept to see the downhill signs; but somehow, seeing them, did not weep; was not moved... rather, indeed... impatient. She had ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... it do him to be 'noticed' by noisy crowds of people? God his Maker already noticed him. He, Cromwell, was already there; no notice would make him other than he already was. Till his hair was grown gray; and Life from the downhill slope was all seen to be limited, not infinite but finite, and all a measurable matter how it went,—he had been content to plough the ground, and read his Bible. He in his old days could not support it any longer, without ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... was right: it was like walking with a dumb man. They left the wood and walked downhill beside a ploughed field, and in the shelter of a high wall. An open lane brought them to a gate, the gate opened on a rough road through yet another wood of larch and spruce and fir. The road was deeply rutted and they walked in single file until Charles turned, saying, 'This ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... had to make good. I had to show your father and you that I had not thrown away all your kindness. So I quit travelling that downhill road on which I ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... weary, and invigorated by nothing but the light, but, having that at least to strengthen us, we made at once for the main range, knowing very well that, once we were over it, it would be downhill all the way, and seeing upon our maps that there were houses and living men high in the further Andorran valley, which was not deserted like this vale of the Aston, but inhabited: full, that is, of Catalans, who would soon make us forget the inhuman loneliness of the heights, for by this time ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... sea there is, within certain degrees of latitude and longitude, an uphill and a downhill, made by the convexity of the globe, we, perhaps, may have reached the meridian of the great voyage, and may have begun to feel the inclination which will set us forward more swiftly to the end. The power of the great consummation will be waxing stronger ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams
... of the perambulator, and looked at that other fellow's baby. In the shade of the hood, with the frilly clothes, it seemed to him lying with its head downhill. It had scratched its snub nose and bumpy forehead, and it stared up at its mother with blue eyes, which seemed to have no underlids ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... previous to the construction of the railways across the Pyrenees. One particular coach I travelled in was practically a box on four wheels, with a very narrow seat running on each side, and very low in the roof. Going downhill the horses—such as they were—went as fast as they could, and every time we struck a hole in the road down went the box, up we banged our heads against the roof, and then we collapsed quietly on to the ...
— The Chronicles of a Gay Gordon • Jose Maria Gordon
... Balancin loved hunting, and it was his custom to spend several mornings every week chasing the boars which abounded in the mountains a few miles from the city. One day, rushing downhill as fast as he could go, he put his foot into a hole and fell, rolling into a rocky pit of brambles. The king's wounds were not very severe, but his face and hands were cut and torn, while his feet were in a worse plight still, for, instead of proper hunting boots, he only wore sandals, to ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Various
... small rise at Sherman," he rises to explain, " and another still smaller at the Alleghanies; all the balance is downhill to the Atlantic. Of course you'll have to 'boat it' across the Frogpond; then there's Europe - mostly level; so is Asia, except the Himalayas - and you can soon cross them; then you're all 'hunky,' for there's no mountains to speak of in China." Evidently Alkali Bill is a person who points ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... out!" cried the driver, as he tried to put on the brake. "The lion's cage is running away downhill! Look out, everybody! Look out behind there, Bill on the tiger's ...
— Nero, the Circus Lion - His Many Adventures • Richard Barnum
... was inserted through the centre of the wheel, so that long ends extended about a yard on each side. If any straw remained, it was made up into torches at the top of tall sticks. At a given signal the wheel was lighted, and sent rolling downhill. If this fire-wheel went out before it reached the bottom of the hill, a very poor harvest was promised. If it kept lighted all the way down, and continued blazing for a long time, the harvest would be exceptionally abundant. Loud cheers and shouts accompanied the progress ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... saying to herself, "Shall I give her the money, shall I keep it?" and her heart would thrill, and then sink, and inside her she kept saying, "There is no harm in it?—It is all the same in the end." And then, almost before she knew what she was doing, she had taken the easy, crooked, downhill path, with its rocks and thorns so ...
— The Making of Mona • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... Pennsylvania mining country to transport coal from the mines at Summit down to the Lehigh Valley for shipment. An amusing story is told of this railroad, too. It extended down the mountainside in a series of sharp inclines between which lay long stretches of level ground. Now you know when you coast downhill your speed will give you sufficient impetus to carry you quite a way on a flat road before you come to a stop. So it was with this railroad. But the force the cars gained on the hillside could not carry them entirely across these long levels, ...
— Steve and the Steam Engine • Sara Ware Bassett
... a tree in a hedgerow, or follow a cart along a country road. You turn to the city, and see children, dwarfed by distance into pigmies, at play about suburban doorsteps; you have a glimpse upon a thoroughfare where people are densely moving; you note ridge after ridge of chimney-stacks running downhill one behind another, and church spires rising bravely from the sea of roofs. At one of the innumerable windows you watch a figure moving; on one of the multitude of roofs you watch clambering chimney-sweeps. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... Eleanor cried, as we paused to gain breath at the bottom. "Now you've come there'll be four of us to run downhill. We shall nearly stretch across ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... this in. Oh, golly, how you look! if you ain't a sight to see!" and he shouted with laughter as he surveyed Charlie, to whom the pillow had imparted the appearance of a London alderman. "If you don't look like Squire Baker now, I'll give it up. You are as big as old Daddy Downhill. You are a ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... meadow. Past the schoolroom, With knees well bent Fingers a-flicking, They dancing went. Up sides and over, And round and round, They crossed click-clacking, The Parish bound, By Tupman's meadow They did their mile, Tee-t-tum On a three-barred stile. Then straight through Whipham, Downhill to Week, Footing it lightsome, But not too quick, Up fields to Watchet, And on through Wye, Till seven fine churches They'd seen skip by - Seven fine churches, And five old mills, Farms in the valley, And sheep ...
— Peacock Pie, A Book of Rhymes • Walter de la Mare
... mentioned here that the people of the Vindhyan or Bundelkhand Districts where the Dahaits live do not perforate the nostrils of bullocks, and drive them simply by a rope tied round the mouth. In consequence they have little control over them and are quite unable to stop a cart going downhill, which simply proceeds at the will of the animals until it reaches the level or bangs up against some obstacle. In Bilaspur a widow is expected to remain single for five years after her husband's death, and if she marries within that time she is put out of caste. Divorce is permitted, ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... I went now downhill into an overgrown water-course (very much like the one in which I used to sleep and eat away back by the artillery big gun). Here were willows and brambles with ripe blackberries, and wild-rose bushes with scarlet hips. "Just like England!" ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... vanished in search of a mild siesta. It inflated his uxorious breast with pride to have his Henrietta shine in hospitality thus. But his lean shanks wearied, keeping time to the giddy music. Wistfully he feared he must be going downhill, wasn't altogether the man he used to be, since he found the business of pleasure so exhaustingly strenuous. And that was beastly unfair to his lovely wife—wouldn't do, would not do at all, by Gad! Therefore ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... again, Tom, because we have no means of knowing how they got the money. Some of them are often supplied with larger amounts than seem to be good for them. Unless you know positively, don't start the snowball rolling downhill, because it keeps on growing larger every time some one ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Snowbound - A Tour on Skates and Iceboats • George A. Warren
... goes abruptly downhill to the railway track, first between deep red gulches, and then between rows of negro cabins, each with its garden of rosebushes, now (early April) in full bloom. The deep sides of the gulches were draped with ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... sped as though downhill, and the driver's spirits rose with the exhilarating speed. The snow groaned ceaselessly under the prow of the pulk, and the frosty creaking under the hoofs of the flying Ren was like the gritting of mighty teeth. Then came ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... outside the fringe; indeed, I don't know how he kept on his feet so long, but he went downhill fast towards the end. A plucker of plump pigeons, an expensive friend to smart young subalterns and boys about town. Cards, bets, loans arranged, and that kind of thing! All the same, he had his good points when I first ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... the path runs downhill. Consequently we soon find ourselves tramping along below the ground-level, with a stout parapet of clay on either side of us. Overhead there is nothing—nothing but the blue sky, with the larks singing, quite regardless of ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... happy man is hampered and thwarted in a great work by annoyances and disasters, he behaves like an Arab horse on a heavy march. At first it moves at a brisk trot, uphill and downhill, and it goes faster and faster as its strength begins to flag. And when at last it is thoroughly out of breath and ready to drop, it breaks ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... rode with his fellows somewhat shamefaced that they had seen that sudden madness in him; but was presently of better cheer than he had been yet. He rode beside Clement; they went downhill speedily, and the wilderness began to better, and there was grass at whiles, and bushes here and there. A little after noon they came out of a pass cleft deep through the rocks by a swift stream which had once been far greater than then, ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... quietly to the side of the road. And Ruth did the same. She was too well trained in the things of the hills not to know that if there was trouble, then it was no time to be weakening horses' knees in mad and useless dashes downhill. ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher
... folded it, in a very intricate manner, squeezed a downhill direction in one corner: 'To Mary, Housemaid, at Mr. Nupkins's, Mayor's, Ipswich, Suffolk'; and put it into his pocket, wafered, and ready for the general post. This important business having been transacted, ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... swung his legs and hips to one side or the other, as occasion required, and, after hundreds of glides had been made, he became so skilful in maintaining the equilibrium of his machine that he was able to cover a distance, downhill, of 300 yards. ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton
... mirage which so often greets one in the region thereabouts. A much later explorer tells how the curious atmospheric effects made the land seem to tip up in front of him in whichever direction he walked, making level land and even downhill look like uphill, so uplifting is ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... convenience at a cavernous spring such as he describes. Caverns, moreover, are not always near the summits of hills; they may be at the foot of them; and water, even the Thames at London Bridge, always leaps downhill—more or less. Of more importance is old Chaupy's discovery of the northerly aspect of one of these springs—"thee the fierce season of the blazing dog-star cannot touch." There may have been a cave at the back of the ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... little as though it could not make up its mind whether to slide into the Pit or move across the open. But it seemed easiest to go downhill, and the children felt one soft puff after another slip and sidle down the slope in fragrant breaths that baffed on their eyelids. The little whisper of the sea by the cliffs joined with the whisper of the wind over the grass, the hum of insects in the thyme, the ruffle and ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... 'by the help of Brooks, who knew his master's ways, I have pottered on, to my own wonderment; but Brooks is past work, my downhill-time is coming, high farming has outrun us both, and I know that we are not doing as Humfrey would wish by his inheritance. Now I believe that nothing could be of greater use to me, the people, or the place, than that you should be in charge. We could put some deputy under your control, ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... meat held out there was no very great temptation for him beyond the dip and the slope. Two or three times a day he went down to the creek; and every morning and afternoon—especially about sunset—he had his fun rolling downhill. In addition to this he began taking his afternoon naps in the crotch of a small sapling. As Miki could see neither sense nor sport in tobogganing, and as he could not climb a tree, he began to spend more and more time in venturing up and down the foot of the ridge. ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... experiences, but I don't remember how; and then at last, abruptly, our fight in the Warren stands out. The Warren, like most places in England that have that name, was not particularly a warren, it was a long slope of thorns and beeches through which a path ran, and made an alternative route to the downhill carriage road between Bladesover and Ropedean. I don't know how we three got there, but I have an uncertain fancy it was connected with a visit paid by the governess to the Ropedean vicarage people. But suddenly Archie and I, in discussing a game, fell into a dispute ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... upon a subject of proverbial delay, I must remind my reader of the progress of a stone rolled downhill by an idle truant boy (a pastime at which I was myself expert in my more juvenile years), it moves at first slowly, avoiding by inflection every obstacle of the least importance; but when it has attained its full impulse, and draws near the conclusion of its career, it smokes and thunders ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... to the equator as the season advances. This it does then irrespective of gravity. No natural force propels it, and the inference is forthright and inevitable that it is artificially helped to its end. There seems to be no escape from this deduction. Water only flows downhill, and there is no such thing as downhill on a surface already in fluid equilibrium. A few canals might presumably be so situated that their flow could, by inequality of terrane, lie equatorward, but not all....Now it is not in particular but by general consent that the canal-system of Mars ...
— Is Mars Habitable? • Alfred Russel Wallace
... old man stopped for a while. He was puffing and snorting, tired from the hard walk uphill. Having reached the summit, he turned around, looked downhill, straightened up, and took a deep breath. "This is an excellent way of getting rid of your tired feeling," said he. "Turn around and look downhill: then your ...
— In Those Days - The Story of an Old Man • Jehudah Steinberg
... on its downhill way in those days, and almost at the bottom of the decline. It was considered a post of penance by enlisted men and officers alike, nested up there in the high plateau against the mountains in its place of wild beauty and ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... we 're going uphill, and at the other locks, when we were going downhill, the water ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... (p. 180): "The generally received theory that 'the great descent which leads towards the Kingdom of Mien,' on which 'you ride for two days and a half continually downhill,' was the route from Yung-ch'ang to T'eng-Yueh, must be at once abandoned. Marco was, no doubt, speaking from hearsay, or rather, from a recollection of hearsay, as it does not appear that he possessed any notes; but there is good reason for ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... there was a splendid service of express trains running from London to Worcester without a stop, and coming downhill into the Vale, through the tunnel and towards Evesham, the speed approximated to a mile a minute. I was talking to one of my men, a hedger, working near the line which bounded a portion of my land, when one of the express trains came dashing ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... kindly settle a matter involving a wager between myself and a friend? A. bet B. that a pedestrian in walking downhill over a given space and alternately stepping with either foot, covers more ground than a man coasting over the same road on a bicycle. Which ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... was speaking to him, telling him they would see the moon-path. They must set off downhill. He felt her arm clasped firmly, joyously, round his waist. Therein was his stability and warm support. Siegmund felt a keen flush of pitiful tenderness for her as she walked with buoyant feet beside him, clasping ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... Boers must have been lying there almost under the feet of our men, if they did not actually join the ranks for a time to escape detection. But a sound greeted their ears at that moment, and knowing what it meant, they scampered downhill without waiting to hear more. It was a ringing British cheer followed by strident commands to "Fix bayonets and give the devils cold steel." Begun by Major Karri Davis, the order ran along from Imperial Light Horse to Carbineers, who had not a bayonet amongst them, ...
— Four Months Besieged - The Story of Ladysmith • H. H. S. Pearse
... It went downhill under the archway when you did go in, and you came to a step. If you did not tumble owing to the suddenness and depth of this step, you came to another; and were stupefied by reaching the ground four inches sooner than you expected, and made conscious that your skeleton ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... guard had been short and a little high on purpose to lead him on, and now it took me all my time to turn his point aside. I saw the steel shoot past, grazing my left arm. Then with so long a recovery, and the loss of balance from lunging downhill, he was ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... two brothers went on till they came to the top of a high mountain, where there lay a very great round rock, or a mighty boulder. And being full of fun, they turned it over with great sticks, saying to it, "Now let us run a race!" Then it rolled downhill till it stopped at the foot, they rushing along by it all the time. And when it rested they jeered it, and bade it race with them again, when ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... again, but half an hour later he got up, and, unable to restrain his uneasiness, went into the street and strode towards the church. It was dark and deserted in the square near the church . . . . Three soldiers were standing silent in a row where the road began to go downhill. Seeing Ryabovitch, they roused themselves and saluted. He returned the salute and began to ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Jesse pointed to the ragged perspective ahead of them that plunged downhill into the fog. 'I lay there's a cord an' a half o' firewood, let alone faggots, 'fore we get anywheres anigh ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... dull sound, ploughing along the black soil, the clean dirt almost up to the axletree, and then, as the wheels, rimmed you might always think with silver, reach the road, macadamised till it acts like a railway, how glides along downhill the moving mountain! And see now, the growing Stack glittering with a charge of pitchforks! The trams fly up from Dobbin's back, and a shoal of sheaves overflows the mire. Up they go, tossed from sinewy arms like feathers, and the Stack grows before ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... by his manoeuvre, was now heading for the Citadel gate; beside which—so far away that we saw them as toys—stood a sentry-box and the figure of a sentry beside it. Could he reach this gate? His altered course had taken him a little downhill, to the left of the ridge, and to regain it by the Citadel he must fetch a slight loop. Luckily the bull could not reason: he followed his enemy. But there was just a chance that by running along the ridge the chase might be headed off. The crowd ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... been obliged to turn most of my Navy bills into cash, and at the same time, to my great concern, am very deficient in my balance. This gives me great uneasiness, nor shall I live or die in peace till the whole is restored." He had, however, made the first false step, after which the downhill career of dishonesty is rapid. His desperate attempts to set himself right only involved him the deeper; his conscious breach of trust caused him a degree of daily torment which he could not bear; and the discovery of his ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... is breasting the hill-brow. Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Pan is near: Joy runs trembling back to fear. Cuckoo! Cuckoo! All my blood Knocks through the heart whose every thud Chokes me, blinds me, drains my madness. As one half-drowned, I feel life's gladness Ooze from each pore. Towards the sun Downhill I reel that fain would run. Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Thornless seem Briars that part as in a dream. Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Hazel-boughs Hurt not ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... goes directly west and in a mile reaches Tillington, which has a Transitional church modernized and practically rebuilt by the Earl of Egremont; here are several interesting tombs and brasses. A divergence two miles further will take us downhill across the Rother to Selham (with a station close to the village). The Norman and Early English church has a chancel arch with finely carved and ornamented capitals. Proceeding westwards between high banks of red sandstone our road soon approaches Cowdray ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... it was," said Annie in answer to his query;" so I will make a favour of telling you. Do you remember the Rev. Mr. Darner, rector of Downhill Market?" ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... how a flood will sweep over a bend instead of following it. Still, Jack and the sorrel had the start, and nearly all the way it was a downhill road. ...
— Crowded Out o' Crofield - or, The Boy who made his Way • William O. Stoddard
... picnicking in the big forest. It was a day of spongy dampness underfoot, sweet and wild with breezes, blue of sky, and still cold in the shade, if it was heavenly warm in the sun. Alix, who was hot and panting from the scrambling and slipping downhill, hung on a bank, with her arm crooked about a sapling oak, for support, her hat slipped back and hanging childishly about her neck, and her already brief tramping skirt displaying an even unusual amount of sensibly booted leg. Below her Peter ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... separated. Though they had some general idea of their direction, they did not really know where they were walking, and stumbled blindly on through heather and bilberry bushes, over stones and rocks, only feeling that they were going downhill. It was very slow progress. Ralph stopped continually to consult his compass, and occasionally gave a loud "cooee", in case they might find some wandering shepherd or countryman who would be able to help them. ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... remained where they were, was a stimulus that made everyone put forth all his energies. Beds, furniture, cooking utensils—first the stores of the Dobryna, then the cargo of the tartan—all were carried down with the greatest alacrity, and the diminished weight combined with the downhill route to make the labor proceed ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... said. "I know exactly what it will do, by instinct. Going uphill it will jamb the wheel so effectively that we shall have to carry the machine bodily. The air at the top of the hill will do it good, and it will suddenly come right again. Going downhill it will start reflecting what a nuisance it has been. This will lead to remorse, and finally to despair. It will say to itself: 'I'm not fit to be a brake. I don't help these fellows; I only hinder them. I'm ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... of Devon which lies between the Exe and the Axe seems actually hotter than other regions which undoubtedly have a higher temperature. After some hours of walking with not a little of uphill and downhill, I began to find the heat well-nigh intolerable. I was on a hard dusty glaring road, shut in by dusty hedges on either side. Not a breath of air was stirring; not a bird sang; on the vast sky not a cloud appeared. If the vertical sun had ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... it means only straight, or level—that is, successful and easy—the saying enforces the not less solemn truth that sin deceives as to its results, and that the path of wrong-doing, which is flowery and smooth at first, grows rapidly thorny, and goes fast downhill, and ends at last in a cul-de-sac, of which death is the only outlet. We are not to trust our own consciences, except as enlightened by God's Word. We are not to listen to sin's lies, but to fix it well in our minds that there is ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... haven he imagined it. More than once, seeking to alight on a field which appeared to him, as he was high above it, to be level as a billiard table, a pilot has found, when it is too late, that the ground has sloped so steeply that his machine, after landing, has run on downhill and ended by crashing into ...
— Learning to Fly - A Practical Manual for Beginners • Claude Grahame-White
... away. Nora, however, did not second her mother's efforts, and Emma was anxious to go. It was getting late, she said, confusedly. She had better be at home; and she hastily took her leave. As soon as she stood outside the house, she made one big spring, and never stopped running, downhill and then up, till she stood on her own door-step; and then she suddenly reflected that she was not expected to come back so soon, and that her brothers were sure to make some unpleasant remarks on her quick return; so she ...
— Gritli's Children • Johanna Spyri
... ear of my companion, and we both leaped to our feet in a second. 'Separate! separate!' he shouted, and as we did so, the bear chose me for his meat. I ran downhill as fast as I could, but he was gaining. 'Dodge around a tree!' screamed Young-Man-Afraid. I took a deep breath and made a last spurt, desperately circling the first tree I came to. As the ground was steep just there, I turned a somersault one way and the bear the other. ...
— Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... anywhere else. The place is too remote from civilization. A spot one might enjoy, perhaps, on the downhill side of sixty; but in youth or active middle age every sensible man should shun seclusion. A man has to fight against an inherent tendency to lapse into ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... spies finally betook themselves into the sheltering forest. Before they could hide under the branches of the oaks, the tall man was seen to stumble at the top of a rather steep declivity and roll all the way to the bottom, as though he might be a barrel that some mischievous lad had started downhill for the ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Flying Squadron • Robert Shaler
... up uncertainly, with the disappearance of the focus for its concerted bloodlust. The police asked many questions but none of the right ones. Finally, Cam, Ev, and Curt escaped to the waiting limo and started the long slow crawl downhill. ...
— Telempathy • Vance Simonds
... continued to go downhill. Following some random counsel, he changed the name of it and advanced the price—two blunders. Then he was compelled to reduce the subscription, also the advertising rates. He was obliged to adopt a descending scale of charges and ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... past eight at night before his toil was rewarded and he issued at last out of the forest on the firm white high-road. It lay downhill before him, with a sweeping eastward trend, faintly bright between the thickets; and Otto paused and gazed upon it. So it ran, league after league, still joining others, to the farthest ends of Europe, there skirting the ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... whiskey-runner guided the train, by winding draws, into the hills back of the post. Above a small gulch, at the head of it, the teams were stopped and unloaded. The barrels were rolled downhill into the underbrush where they lay cached out of sight. From here they ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... to go, li'l' hawss," he chatted on. "Downhill all the way soon an' then a drink to wash out yore mouth an' the best feed in Caroca fo' the pair ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... necessarily spoil a man's temper, as in France one is sometimes led to believe; for these excellent under-paid Italians carry theirs as lightly as possible, and their answers to your inquiries don't in the least bristle with rapiers, buttons and cockades. After leaving Modane you slide straight downhill into the Italy of your desire; from which point the road edges, after the grand manner, along those It precipices that stand shoulder to shoulder, in a prodigious perpendicular file, till they finally admit you to a distant glimpse he ancient ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... by the road, and that we would race each other, walking, to see who got home first. They agreed to this, and set off together at a great rate; but as soon as they were out of sight behind the hedge I buckled my satchel to my shoulders and started running to warn Marah. It was all downhill to the brook, and I knew that I should find Marah there,—for he had said that he was coming earlier than usual that afternoon to finish off a model boat which we were to sail after tea. I ran as I had never run ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... "Or run backwards downhill. I'm a passenger in a car of that kind. Near to the top, but not reaching it. So I get ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... good wife, luck, and a friend with insight and skill, pulled Aleck Gray out of that bottomless pit, the gutter. Aleck had been a bookkeeper; but he didn't get on well with his employers, lost his job, got to drinking, and went so far downhill that his wife had to take their two children and go home to her people several hundred miles away. Aleck finally drifted into a bureau for homeless men, where the agent became interested in him and worked with him for six months, getting him job after job, which he always lost through ...
— Broken Homes - A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment • Joanna C. Colcord
... of resignation and a little too much patience with regard to his eighteen years—this was for the moment his net profit from the process of going downhill. ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... important dinner parties might have been likened to ill-matched fours-in-hand, and Holder had sometimes felt more of pity than of amusement as she sat with an expression of terror on her face, helplessly watching certain unruly individuals taking their bits in their teeth and galloping madly downhill. On one occasion, when he sat beside her, a young man, who shall be nameless, was suddenly heard to remark in the midst of an ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... is the next thing to a miracle. All this came upon him in consequence of keeping bad company. Learn from it to avoid evil company and betting. The boy that suffers himself to bet the smallest amount, has already entered the downhill road of the gambler's career. And there is no evil that can be named but he may be drawn into, who begins to keep bad company. You might as well expect to go into lazarhouse, without being infected, as to go into bad company, and not ...
— Anecdotes for Boys • Harvey Newcomb
... the same time I heard a sobbing or crying from the same woman. I opened my door and held out my lantern, and just as far as the light would reach I saw a woman: she turned her head when the light sheened on her, and then hurried on downhill. I hung up the lantern, and was curious enough to pull on my things and dog her a few steps, but I could see nothing of her any more. That was where I had been when you came up; and when I saw you I thought you were the ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... In the downhill of life, when I find I'm declining, May my lot no less fortunate be Than a snug elbow-chair can afford for reclining, And a cot ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... had given a thousand crowns, in the shape of two hundred and fifty gold ducats of Naples, for the pleasure of being half-strangled by a young woman, thrown out of the window by her rescuer, and finally kicked downhill for a distance of at least two hundred and fifty yards by an unseen boot. As an equivalent for so much money these mishaps were unsatisfactory; but what the sufferer now most desired was to save some remnant of his dignity before his servants, and then to be avenged ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... considering this principle of selection. Of the principle itself, he remarks that it is neither a theory nor an hypothesis, but the expression of a necessary fact; that to deny it is very much like denying that round stones will roll downhill faster and farther than flat ones; and that the question of the present day in natural history is not whether there be natural selection, or even whether forms are derived from other forms, but to comprehend how, in what proportions, ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... turned out lovely, and if my cough had not been so bad, I should have enjoyed the drive down from Mount Morgan. The pitches were just as steep, but they were nearly all downhill, which made our progress seem quicker and pleasanter. The country looked very pretty; the ferns were quite lovely, and the lilies in full bloom. The pleasure of the drive was further marred by the dreadful odours arising from the decaying carcasses of unfortunate bullocks which had been left ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... that high, thin voice, and his promise. And the harness business was slithering downhill with dreadful rapidity, as the automobile business began its amazing climb. Jo tried to stop it. But he was not that kind of business man. It never occurred to him to jump out of the down-going vehicle and catch the up-going one. He stayed on, vainly ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... own mare took fright; we were abruptly swung forward, and, had I not—mindful of the Colonel's warning—been "sitting tight," I should undoubtedly have been thrown out. We dashed downhill at a terrific rate, our mare mad with terror, and on peering over my shoulder I saw, to my horror, the white steed tearing along not fifty yards behind us. I was now able to get a vivid impression of the monstrous ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... what they said. Nothing except one phrase, which the strange man repeated twice, very emphatically. 'Tomorrow night,' he said, and I noticed that his voice had not the Highland inflection which I looked for. Gresson nodded and glanced at his watch, and then the two began to move downhill towards the road I ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... DOWNHILL I came, hungry, and yet not starved; Cold, yet had heat within me that was proof Against the North wind; tired, yet so that rest Had seemed the sweetest thing ...
— Poems • Edward Thomas
... resent it; they've gone their own way lately, and it's been decidedly downhill. I'm persuaded they're playing some deep and surreptitious game at present. I wish ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... settled again through the sunshine about his feet, or the rumble of the cart died away into distance, the thought vanished like a nightmare in the dawn. It ran away over the switchback of the years, uphill to Midsummer, downhill to Christmas, jumping a ditch at Easter, and a hedge at that terrible thing known as ''Clipse of the Moon.' The leaves of the elm trees whispered overhead. He was moving through an avenue that led towards ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... yell I was after him, making five yards to his one. He tumbled along the best he could, and, to my great surprise, directly away from his hole. It was steep downhill. I should land upon him in ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... time. The extra wraps were at once requisitioned, a ration from the spirit flask was rapidly given to each, and then, forcing them to sit down on the sledge, Sally again encouraged Surefoot to take the trail. Downhill, they managed to move along, but the heavy thatch of snow made progress difficult on the level and almost impossible uphill, just when exhaustion made marching impracticable even with a line from the sledge lashed to their arms. Sally ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... Blue Book received seventy-nine UFO reports compared to ninety-nine in April. It looked as if we'd passed the peak and were now on the downhill side. The 178 reports of the past two months, not counting the thousand or so letters that we'd received directly from the public, had piled up a sizable backlog since we'd had time to investigate and analyze only the better reports. During June we planned to clear out ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... next to Rhes, looking through a screen of leaves, downhill towards the perimeter. They were both wrapped in heavy furs, in spite of the midday heat, with thick leggings and leather gauntlets to protect their hands. The gravity and the heat were already making Jason dizzy, but he forced himself ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... to the centre into which they slipped their feet with their own boots on. It was not a particularly graceful game in those days. Runners armed themselves with poles some 8 feet long on which they leant heavily when running downhill. This school soon gave way to the more modern school, which proved that the carrying of two sticks was better than one only. A great many books on the technique of Ski-ing followed each other fast and furiously—Zdarsky and Lilienfeld, Caulfeild and Lunn, Roget Hoeg ...
— Ski-running • Katharine Symonds Furse
... or back firing. On favorable ground, where some choice is offered, much may be done by falling timber inward so as to leave few tops near the uncut timber and by the location of skidroads. So far as practicable fire lines should be on the tops of ridges, for, being slower to go downhill than up, fire is more easily discouraged just as it reaches a crest. Bottoms of gulches are next in ...
— Practical Forestry in the Pacific Northwest • Edward Tyson Allen
... intended to give "verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative." And the sighing of the bullets gave young Bradshaw exactly what he wanted—the assurance that he was not the victim of a practical joke. He threw his weight forward and, lifting his feet, coasted downhill at forty miles an hour into the main street of Blakeney. Ten minutes later, when the car followed, a mob of men so completely blocked the water-front that Ford was forced to stop. His head-lights illuminated hundreds of faces, anxious, sceptical, eager. A gentleman with a white mustache and ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... passed a humorous remark at his expense—"just like I'll jump you, stranger, if you don't keep your trap closed. I say who can read those secrets, who can harness those forces? The man who can has got the world by the tail and a downhill pull. Now then, for the plot of my story, and it will pay you to do a week of listening in the next five minutes. Awhile ago an eminent scientist, unknown to me or to my partner, Mr. Stoner, came into our office, which is at your backs, one flight up, second ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... to be feared that Aubrey would have badly flunked any quizzing on the chapters of Somebody's Luggage which the bookseller had read aloud. His mind was swimming rapidly in the agreeable, unfettered fashion of a stream rippling downhill. As O. Henry puts it in one of his most delightful stories: "He was outwardly decent and managed to preserve his aquarium, but inside he was impromptu and full of unexpectedness." To say that he was thinking of Miss Chapman would imply ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... good-bye to Calmenare in the Duke's presence; and I would have pressed a gold piece into his hand for "opening my prison door," but he would not have it. Afterwards, while we followed the grey car on the downhill road to Madrid, Pilar told the whole story with dramatic effect ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... I went for an afternoon's rest into the cottage of one of our country people of old statesman class; cottage lying nearly midway between two village churches, but more conveniently for downhill walk towards one than the other. I found, as the good housewife made tea for me, that nevertheless she went up the hill to church. 'Why do not you go to the nearer church?' I asked. 'Don't you like the ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... However, enough men did know about it in those dear, damp days beyond recall to make me independent of the pawnshop, to say the least. And, having cleaned up a good pot with whisky running down men's gullets, I reckoned I'd see what I could do with water running downhill. Do you get me at all ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... seven miles to Lugano, and though all the way was downhill, yet fatigue threatened me. These short cuts over marshy land and through difficult thickets are not short cuts at all, and I was just wondering whether, although it was already evening, I dared not rest a while, when there appeared at a turn in the ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... was already going out of the gate. In a trice the collars were on the horses again, the traces hitched, the reins unwound, and Karl was seated upon the box. He was glad for himself, though he thought it a very long pull for the horses. The road went downhill over most of the way, however, and Karl reflected that when his master was once in the carriage behind him, he could drive as slowly as he pleased. Just as he was ready, Frau von Sigmundskron and Hilda appeared ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... make a loveless marriage. Helen isn't exactly pretty, but she's extremely attractive. Her figure is perfect, and she's the most stylish thing in the world. I am very happy today as I think that I have lanceed her in the best New York can offer. It has not been all downhill work. Her father's name entitled her to it; but he hated society, so he was more of a drawback than anything else. I couldn't boast of any social position in Buffalo, and it's extraordinary how well ...
— The Smart Set - Correspondence & Conversations • Clyde Fitch
... began whimpering like a tormented child. But even as she wept, she turned her sledge about to follow the edge of the wood. She was too much downhill, she thought, and must bear ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... reviling the poor wretch, fully ten minutes to get him started again. A little later he made the end of the gaff, where, astride the spar itself, he had a better chance for holding on. He cleared the sheet, and was free to return, slightly downhill now, along the halyards to the mast. But he had lost his nerve. Unsafe as was his present position, he was loath to forsake it for the more ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... head chief of the village was absent, and there were but few "soldiers," a sort of Indian police, who among their other functions usually assumed the direction of a buffalo hunt. No man turned to the right hand or to the left. We rode at a swift canter straight forward, uphill and downhill, and through the stiff, obstinate growth of the endless wild-sage bushes. For an hour and a half the same red shoulders, the same long black hair rose and fell with the motion of the horses before me. Very little was said, though once I observed an old man severely ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... of progress, during which the road seemed better, and they appeared to get along some distance before there was another jerk up and another jerk down, and then a series of jumps as if they were going downhill; and then the cart gave a ...
— In the King's Name - The Cruise of the "Kestrel" • George Manville Fenn
... way for Zola. It justified a new aim for the modern fiction of so-called unflinching realism. The saddest thing about the book is its lack of pity, of love. Emma Bovary is a weak woman, not a bad woman; she goes downhill through the force of circumstances coupled with a want of backbone. And she is not responsible for her flabby moral muscles. Behind the story is an absolutely fatalistic philosophy; given a certain environment, any woman (especially ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... outside woke me up (for I don't sleep heavy), and at the same time I heard a sobbing or crying from the same woman. I opened my door and held out my lantern, and just as far as the light would reach I saw a woman: she turned her head when the light sheened on her, and then hurried on downhill. I hung up the lantern, and was curious enough to pull on my things and dog her a few steps, but I could see nothing of her any more. That was where I had been when you came up; and when I saw you I thought you were the ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... annoyed, because all of a sudden it struck me that, in revenge for my straight talk, Weekes had been wanting me to call day by day that he might watch me going downhill; and that now he was gloating to see me reduced to a Blanchminster gown. So I said, 'You blackguard, you may look your fill, and carry the recollection of it to the Throne of Judgment, where I hope it may help you. But this is your ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the hills; every time we took a position it was always uphill, until we got over Pozieres Ridge and then our work was downhill for the time. We arrived at the firing line on the 29th of August, 1916. The accompanying map will convey a general idea of the object intended to be attained by the great drive. The German organization in this district was fed by railroads having terminals at Bapaume and it was clearly ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... that it was a pity St. Cuthbert's was going downhill so fast; but apart from being angry there was nothing for me to do, except wait. Our dons, taken in the mass, wanted us to work and be quiet; they did not care what happened to our eight or our eleven, and when a man got his blue he was generally told that he must not allow it to interfere with ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... have crushed those eyes which, a moment ago, he had loved so dearly, have torn the blood into those lifeless cheeks. He continued to climb with Mme. Verdurin, that is to say that each step took him farther from Odette, who was going downhill, and in the other direction. A second passed and it was many hours since she had left him. The painter remarked to Swann that Napoleon III had eclipsed himself immediately after Odette. "They had obviously arranged it between them," he added; "they must ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... halting and wiggling his nose at every bush, till he heard our approach and rose on his hind legs to listen. He gave a great jump as Unk Wunk hove into sight, covered all over with the dead leaves that his barbed quills had picked up on his way downhill, and lay quiet where he thought the ferns would ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... darkness, the red wreck of sunset, the yellow and lurid moon, the long fantastic shadows, actually created that sense of monstrous incident which is the dramatic side of landscape. The bare grey slopes seemed to rush downhill like routed hosts; the dark clouds drove across like riven banners; and the moon was like a golden dragon, like the ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... with his fellows somewhat shamefaced that they had seen that sudden madness in him; but was presently of better cheer than he had been yet. He rode beside Clement; they went downhill speedily, and the wilderness began to better, and there was grass at whiles, and bushes here and there. A little after noon they came out of a pass cleft deep through the rocks by a swift stream which ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... with him to the forest, tied to the sledge, and wrapt in the remnants of his old sheepskin and a shawl. Uphill and downhill over the hummocks bumped the sledge, until they arrived on level ground, where the slanting rays of the sun, endlessly reflected from the snow-crystals, fell into their eyes. The child began ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... moment our own mare took fright; we were abruptly swung forward, and, had I not—mindful of the Colonel's warning—been "sitting tight," I should undoubtedly have been thrown out. We dashed downhill at a terrific rate, our mare mad with terror, and on peering over my shoulder I saw, to my horror, the white steed tearing along not fifty yards behind us. I was now able to get a vivid impression of the monstrous beast. Although the night ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... they sped as though downhill, and the driver's spirits rose with the exhilarating speed. The snow groaned ceaselessly under the prow of the pulk, and the frosty creaking under the hoofs of the flying Ren was like the gritting of mighty teeth. Then came the level stretch from Nystuen's hill to Dalecarl's, and as they whirled ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... rain, but dry out at the close of the storm, do a good deal of the work; thawing and freezing of the water contained in the mass of detritus help the movement, for, although the thrust is in both directions, it is most effective downhill; the wedges of tree roots, which often penetrate between and under the stones, and there expand in their process of growth, likewise assist the downward motion. The result is that on ordinary mountain slopes the layer of fragments ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... Look out!" cried the driver, as he tried to put on the brake. "The lion's cage is running away downhill! Look out, everybody! Look out behind there, Bill on ...
— Nero, the Circus Lion - His Many Adventures • Richard Barnum
... conclusion, from the absence of any subsequent motion or movement on board, the deck being as steady now as any platform on dry land, although rather downhill on one side, from the vessel heeling ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... given a vivid description of the desolate state of parts of Georgia and the Carolinas, once among the richest specimens of soil and cultivation in the world; and even the more recently colonized Alabama, as he shows, is rapidly following in the same downhill track. To slavery, therefore, it is a matter of life and death to find fresh fields for the employment of slave labor. Confine it to the present States, and the owners of slave property will either be speedily ruined, or will have to find means of reforming and renovating their agricultural ...
— The Contest in America • John Stuart Mill
... much in the habit of flying. She ran downhill a few yards flapping her shawl, and then she jumped ...
— The Great Big Treasury of Beatrix Potter • Beatrix Potter
... that?" asked Mirabell. "There isn't any snow now, though there was some for Christmas. How can you make a sliding downhill thing ...
— The Story of a Lamb on Wheels • Laura Lee Hope
... flying downhill now, and the giant's weight was telling. On the opposite side of the valley was another pinewood. If he could only reach that, between the good going and the up-gradient Anthony felt that there was a bare chance. The thing ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... chase occurs when the farm-dog gets close upon one in the open field, as sometimes happens in the early morning. The fox relies so confidently upon his superior speed, that I imagine he half tempts the dog to the race. But if the dog be a smart one, and their course lie downhill, over smooth ground, Reynard must put his best foot forward, and then sometimes suffer the ignominy of being run over by his pursuer, who, however, is quite unable to pick him up, owing to the speed. But when they mount the hill, or enter the woods, the superior nimbleness and agility ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... stopped at the log-landing in Pennington's camp, the locomotive uncoupled and backed in on the siding for the purpose of kicking the caboose, in which Shirley and Colonel Pennington had ridden to the woods, out onto the main line again—where, owing to a slight downhill grade, the caboose, controlled by the brakeman, could coast gently forward and be hooked on to the end of the log-train for the ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... him somewhat altered, but the lieutenant said: "I am in excellent health now, Stephen. Your disappearance, and Cochrane's letter telling me that he feared that he could give me no hope whatever, broke me down a good deal, and I felt myself that I was going downhill rapidly. However, I have been picking up fast ever since I got your letter giving me an account of your journey across South America. Now that I have you home again I shall soon be completely myself. I have ...
— With Cochrane the Dauntless • George Alfred Henty
... and easy—the saying enforces the not less solemn truth that sin deceives as to its results, and that the path of wrong-doing, which is flowery and smooth at first, grows rapidly thorny, and goes fast downhill, and ends at last in a cul-de-sac, of which death is the only outlet. We are not to trust our own consciences, except as enlightened by God's Word. We are not to listen to sin's lies, but to fix it well in our minds that there is only one way which leads to life and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... between two high hills, there appeared a tiny speck of greenish ice. Rapidly it increased in size. A gigantic glacier came sliding downhill. Huge stones were being pushed into the valley. With the noise of a dozen thunderstorms torrents of ice and mud and blocks of granite suddenly tumbled among the people of the forest and killed them while they slept. Century old trees were crushed into kindling wood. And ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... most difficult feat—he swung his legs and hips to one side or the other, as occasion required, and, after hundreds of glides had been made, he became so skilful in maintaining the equilibrium of his machine that he was able to cover a distance, downhill, of ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton
... path, walking with knees a little bent, like an old labourer who has lived a life of stooping, and came out into the dry and dusty lane. One moment his instinct hesitated as to which turn to take—only a moment; he was soon walking swiftly, almost trotting, downhill with this vivid exaltation in the huge dark night in his heart, and Sheila merely a little angry Titianesque cloud on a scarcely perceptible horizon. He had no notion of the time; the golden hands of his watch were indiscernible in the gloom. But presently, as he passed by, ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... He stopped on the downhill path, took her cloak from her arm, and with kind carefulness laid it about her shoulders. As he arranged it he touched one of the soft curls that lay on her white neck, and again a thrill passed through him. He began ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... almost under the feet of our men, if they did not actually join the ranks for a time to escape detection. But a sound greeted their ears at that moment, and knowing what it meant, they scampered downhill without waiting to hear more. It was a ringing British cheer followed by strident commands to "Fix bayonets and give the devils cold steel." Begun by Major Karri Davis, the order ran along from Imperial Light Horse to Carbineers, who had not a bayonet amongst ...
— Four Months Besieged - The Story of Ladysmith • H. H. S. Pearse
... his pseudo-heroic poetry, and his dissipated life,—over which he contrived to throw a veil of romantic secrecy,—made him a magnet of attraction to many thoughtless young men and foolish women, who made the downhill path both easy and rapid to one whose inclinations led him in that direction. Naturally he was generous, and easily led by affection. He is, therefore, largely a victim of his own weakness and ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... build dams of stones and turf across a narrow part of the burn, while Jean sat and watched them on a little round knoll. Then, when plenty of water had collected in the pool, they would break the dam and let it all run downhill in a little flood; they called it a "hurly gush." And in winter they would slide on the black, smooth ice of the boat-pool, beneath the ...
— The Gold Of Fairnilee • Andrew Lang
... deserted, save for the yellow pariahs, and one or two carrion birds. It was so still, in that little town, that the pirates thought they would surprise the place, as Drake had surprised Nombre de Dios. But while they were marching downhill, they saw three horsemen watching them from a lookout place, and presently the horsemen galloped off to raise the inhabitants. As they galloped away, John Watling chose out forty of the ninety-two, ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... sweetheart when I was young and trusting. If I was to draw a picture of my life it would look like one of those charts that the weather bureau gets out—one of those high and low barometer things, all uphill and downhill like a chain of mountains ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... home was all downhill. The scouts swung along gayly. The prospect of penetrating Lonesome Woods shortened the miles. What would they find? What strange ...
— Don Strong, Patrol Leader • William Heyliger
... about gravitation that they laughed at Columbus when he said the earth was round. "Why, if the earth were round," they argued, "the water would all flow off on the other side." They did not know that water flows downhill because the earth is pulling it toward its center by gravitation, and that it does not make the slightest difference on which side of the earth water is, since it is still pulled ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... on till they came to the top of a high mountain, where there lay a very great round rock, or a mighty boulder. And being full of fun, they turned it over with great sticks, saying to it, "Now let us run a race!" Then it rolled downhill till it stopped at the foot, they rushing along by it all the time. And when it rested they jeered it, and bade it race with them again, ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... gang, you mean!" She drew herself up very finely—very stately. Very lovely she was to look at in that half-light, with the shadows of Tippoo Tib's* old stairway hiding her tale of years. But I felt my regard for her slipping downhill (and so, I rather think did Yerkes). "You look well, Lord Montdidier, trapesing about the earth with a leash of mongrels at your heel! Falstaff never picked up a more sordid-looking pack! What do you feed them—bones? Are there no young bloods left ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... children to bang on on the morning of the Fourth of July. I would make a solemn affidavit to the fact that the maker of a baby-carriage never dreamed of its possible use as an impromptu toboggan for a couple of small boys to coast downhill on in midsummer. Yet these things have been used for these various purposes in our own household experience. A megaphone can be used as a beehive, and a hammock can be turned into a fly-net for a horse, but you never think of doing so; and, furthermore, you ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... downhill of life, when I find I'm declining, May my lot no less fortunate be Than a snug elbow-chair can afford for reclining, And a cot that o'erlooks the wide sea; With an ambling pad-pony to pace o'er the lawn, While I carol away ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... the Vindhyan or Bundelkhand Districts where the Dahaits live do not perforate the nostrils of bullocks, and drive them simply by a rope tied round the mouth. In consequence they have little control over them and are quite unable to stop a cart going downhill, which simply proceeds at the will of the animals until it reaches the level or bangs up against some obstacle. In Bilaspur a widow is expected to remain single for five years after her husband's death, and if she marries within that time ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... his manoeuvre, was now heading for the Citadel gate; beside which—so far away that we saw them as toys—stood a sentry-box and the figure of a sentry beside it. Could he reach this gate? His altered course had taken him a little downhill, to the left of the ridge, and to regain it by the Citadel he must fetch a slight loop. Luckily the bull could not reason: he followed his enemy. But there was just a chance that by running along the ridge the chase might be headed off. The crowd saw this and set ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... serious vocation. They tell him he has a special disposition for mission work, too. So Laughing Anne's boy will lead a saintly life in China somewhere; he may even become a martyr; but poor Davidson is left out in the cold. He will have to go downhill without a single human affection near him ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... at home. Since the death of his good old mother and of Felix Underwood, Sir Adrian Vanderkist had been rapidly going downhill; as though he had thrown off all restraint, and as if the yearly birth of a daughter left him the more free to waste his patrimony. Little or nothing had been heard direct from poor Alda till Clement was summoned by a telegram from Ironbeam Park to find ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to action. His words were jest, yet they held a hint of earnest. With her heart at her throat Carley stepped on the first rock, and, poising, she calculated on a running leap from stone to stone. Once launched, she felt she was falling downhill. She swayed, she splashed, she slipped; and clearing the longest leap from the last stone to shore she lost her balance and fell into Glenn's arms. His kisses drove away both ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... running on as fast as his snow-shoes would permit, and having reloaded, Dave and Barringford followed. They were going downhill once more, but now the elk made a turn and darted into a belt of timber lining the river. Reaching the stream, he paused for a moment, looked despairingly at his wounded and bleeding flank, and ...
— On the Trail of Pontiac • Edward Stratemeyer
... abruptly downhill to the railway track, first between deep red gulches, and then between rows of negro cabins, each with its garden of rosebushes, now (early April) in full bloom. The deep sides of the gulches were draped with pendent lantana branches full of purple flowers, or, more beautiful ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... nights in the shaft. Each morning on awaking I discovered that I had slipped a couple of yards downhill. I made further full acquaintance, too, with the completeness of the doctor's snoring capabilities. Down in that shaft he must have introduced a new orgy of nasal sounds. It commenced with a gentle snuffling that rather resembled the rustling of the waters against the bows of a racing ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... prison-breaker; but the sun and the wind play freely over the foundations of the jail. Nor is this the only memorial that the pavement keeps of former days. The ancient burying-ground of Edinburgh lay behind St. Giles's Church, running downhill to the Cowgate and covering the site of the present Parliament House. It has disappeared as utterly as the prison or the Luckenbooths; and for those ignorant of its history, I know only one token that remains. In the Parliament Close, trodden daily underfoot by advocates, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Kant Strasse, running downhill from the royal castle to the river, and the Kneiphof'sche Langgasse, leading southward to the Brandenburg gate and the great world—must needs make use of the Kramer Brucke. Here, it may be said, every man in the town must sooner or later pass in the execution of his daily ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... path led downhill from the cleared space. Trix set off down it, swinging her hat airily by the brim the while. Presently the sense of uncanniness abated somewhat; the elfin in her went out to meet the weirdness ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... at her heart, and a nameless dread as if a phantom of evil were pursuing her, Bryda fled downhill with a speed which surprised herself, and reached the ferry just as ...
— Bristol Bells - A Story of the Eighteenth Century • Emma Marshall
... means two Communions with definite resolves, two definite upward stages in life. If you let yourself go till you get back to the crutches of school, you will have gone two very definite stages downhill. ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... in a choked voice, 'It is the first time I ever stole anything, and I can tell you I have felt very bad about it ever since. I don't know how it is. I am sure I didn't think once that I should ever come to be a thief. First I took to drinking and then to quarrelling. Since I began to go downhill everybody gives me a kick; you are the first people who have offered me a helping hand. My wife is sickly and my children are starving. You have sent them many a meal, God bless you! Yet I stole the hides from you, meaning to sell them the first chance I could get. ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... hedgerow, or follow a cart along a country road. You turn to the city, and see children, dwarfed by distance into pigmies, at play about suburban doorsteps; you have a glimpse upon a thoroughfare where people are densely moving; you note ridge after ridge of chimney-stacks running downhill one behind another, and church spires rising bravely from the sea of roofs. At one of the innumerable windows you watch a figure moving; on one of the multitude of roofs you watch clambering chimney-sweeps. The ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... end he was outside the fringe; indeed, I don't know how he kept on his feet so long; but he went downhill fast. A plucker of plump pigeons, an expensive friend to smart young subalterns and boys about town. Cards, bets, loans arranged, and that kind of thing. All the same, he had his good points when I first ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... Anklam, Pomerania, and even from his early school-days dreamed and planned the conquest of the air. His practical experiments began when, at the age of thirteen, he and his brother Gustav made wings consisting of wooden framework covered with linen, which Otto attached to his arms, and then ran downhill flapping them. In consequence of possible derision on the part of other boys, Otto confined these experiments for the most part to moonlit nights, and gained from them some idea of the resistance offered by flat surfaces to the air. It was in 1867 that the two brothers began really practical ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... healthy, happy man is hampered and thwarted in a great work by annoyances and disasters, he behaves like an Arab horse on a heavy march. At first it moves at a brisk trot, uphill and downhill, and it goes faster and faster as its strength begins to flag. And when at last it is thoroughly out of breath and ready to drop, it breaks into ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... in London; at night the streets were infested with brutal ruffians, and, as late as Queen Anne's time, by bands of "fine gentlemen" not less brutal, who amused themselves by overturning sedan chairs, rolling women downhill in barrels, and compelling men to dance jigs, under the stimulus of repeated pricks from a circle of sword points, until the victims fell fainting from exhaustion. Duels were frequent, on the slightest provocation. Highwaymen abounded both in the city and without, and, ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... half an hour," answered Grandpa Ford. "We'll be there before you know it. It's downhill, and the horses are anxious to get to their ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Grandpa Ford's • Laura Lee Hope
... all the world, uninhabited, without tree or gate or hedge. Her eyes were heavy with lack of sleep, smarting with the bite of the north wind, which neither ceased nor eased until, towards ten o'clock, the carriage began to lumber downhill towards Two Bridges, under the lee of Crockern Tor. Beyond came a heavy piece of collar work, the horses dropping to a walk as they heaved through the drifts towards a depression between two tors closing the view ahead. Dorothea's eyes, avoiding the wind, ...
— The Westcotes • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... miles a day were written in his very whiskers. His manners were a canter; his conversation a round trot. He was a fast coach upon a downhill turnpike road; he was all pace. A wagon couldn't have moved slowly, with that guard and his key ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... person following up the course of a stream will always ascend at a greater or less inclination. Mr. Gill therefore, was much astonished when walking up the bed of this ancient river, to find himself suddenly going downhill. He imagined that the downward slope had a fall of about 40 or 50 feet perpendicular. We here have unequivocal evidence that a ridge had been uplifted right across the old bed of a stream. From the moment ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... unsaddled for dinner in the shade of a tree by the wayside. A hundred yards from the road was a dense copse of undergrowth and bushes on the edge of the forest. Off to the east flowed the majestic Rhine, a league distant, and to the north ran the road like a white ribbon, stretching downhill to the valley and up again to the top of another hill, ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... boys, who were good-humoured and respectable and selfish, who bothered me; one wanted to shake them as a terrier shakes a rat—but there was nothing to get hold of. They were a credit to themselves and to their parents and to the school; and yet they went downhill with every success." ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... climbing,' he said, 'not only the walls of Italy, but also those of Rome. The worst is past, and the rest of the way lies downhill, and will be smooth and easy to travel. We have but to fight one, or at most two, battles, and Rome ...
— The Red Book of Heroes • Leonora Blanche Lang
... it. His Pleasure is not in Praise but Production; the last makes him now and then a little feverish; the other, or its want, never. Just at last, 'twas hard Work to us both; he was like a Wheel running downhill, that must get to the End before it stopped. Mother scolded him, and made him promise he would leave off for a Week or so; at least, she says he did, and he says he did not, and asks her whether, if the Grass had promised not to grow ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... to turn most of my Navy bills into cash, and at the same time, to my great concern, am very deficient in my balance. This gives me great uneasiness, nor shall I live or die in peace till the whole is restored." He had, however, made the first false step, after which the downhill career of dishonesty is rapid. His desperate attempts to set himself right only involved him the deeper; his conscious breach of trust caused him a degree of daily torment which he could not bear; and the discovery of his defalcations, ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... still was over all the high country when they got astir and began to care for the horses on their picket ropes and to finish the cooking of their remaining food. Then, each now leading his horse, they began to thread their way downhill. Over country where now they had established the general courses, it was easier for such good mountain travelers to pick out a feasible way down. They crossed the canyon at about the same place, but swung off more to the right, and early in the morning were descending a timbered slope which ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... overflowing still, though very slowly. Its furrows all curve downward; and it is, in fact, as one of our party said, 'a black glacier.' The pitch, expanding under the burning sun of day, must needs expand most towards the line of least resistance, that is, downhill; and when it contracts again under the coolness of night, it contracts, surely from the same cause, more downhill than it does uphill; and so each particle never returns to the spot whence it started, but rather drags the particles above it ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... all goin' downhill now, and there's a moon, and it'll be easy work. And if so be we're sure the Five Sisters ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... was a splendid service of express trains running from London to Worcester without a stop, and coming downhill into the Vale, through the tunnel and towards Evesham, the speed approximated to a mile a minute. I was talking to one of my men, a hedger, working near the line which bounded a portion of my land, when one of the express trains came dashing along and passed us with ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... to attract enemies from afar, and be quickly shot by a man or torn to pieces by wolves? Not he! With the keen intelligence of the wounded wild ruminant, he chose the line of least resistance, and on three legs fled downhill. He went on down, and kept going, until he reached the bottom of the biggest and most tortuous coulee in his neighborhood. And then what? Instead of coming to rest in a reposeful little valley a hundred feet wide, he chose the most rugged branch he could find, the one with the steepest and ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... under the ash bough there," said the weasel, "and when you are outside the thicket turn to your left and go downhill, and you will come to the timber—and meantime I will send for the dragon-fly, ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... thus little save hunger to fear so long as they were in the open country. They marched on, breaking into a trot whenever their course led downhill, during the whole of the day on which their retreat began. Each man still had a small supply of meat left, and portions of this they ate raw as they proceeded. At dusk the foremost of the Balotsi were some distance behind, and after marching for about two hours longer ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... but the path runs downhill. Consequently we soon find ourselves tramping along below the ground-level, with a stout parapet of clay on either side of us. Overhead there is nothing—nothing but the blue sky, with the larks singing, ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... a subject of proverbial delay, I must remind my reader of the progress of a stone rolled downhill by an idle truant boy (a pastime at which I was myself expert in my more juvenile years), it moves at first slowly, avoiding by inflection every obstacle of the least importance; but when it has attained its ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... "It's downhill here, gen'lemen, all the way to the shaft, and even if we could face it, the water must be five-foot deep in another ten minutes, and round the next turn it'll be six, and beyond that the ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... perhaps least in his estimation, he had given a thousand crowns, in the shape of two hundred and fifty gold ducats of Naples, for the pleasure of being half-strangled by a young woman, thrown out of the window by her rescuer, and finally kicked downhill for a distance of at least two hundred and fifty yards by an unseen boot. As an equivalent for so much money these mishaps were unsatisfactory; but what the sufferer now most desired was to save some remnant of his dignity before his servants, and ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... Lombardy on both banks of the Po, at the foot of the Alps, telling them that at that moment they were crossing not only the walls of Italy but of the Roman capital; that the rest of the march was easy and downhill." The situation of Hannibal and his Carthaginians surveying Italy for the first time is in some respects closely analogous to that of Cortes pointing out the Valley of Mexico ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... into a muddy road downhill," Kippy laughed. "Up there in Little Prairie Bend hit's caved right through the old levee, and they had to loop around. Now they've ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... back firing. On favorable ground, where some choice is offered, much may be done by falling timber inward so as to leave few tops near the uncut timber and by the location of skidroads. So far as practicable fire lines should be on the tops of ridges, for, being slower to go downhill than up, fire is more easily discouraged just as it reaches a crest. Bottoms of gulches are next in strategic value, ...
— Practical Forestry in the Pacific Northwest • Edward Tyson Allen
... began its long slither downhill, still through a whole necklace of tunnels, which fortunately no longer stank. So down and down, till the plain appears in sight once more, the Arno valley. But then began the inevitable hitch that always happens in Italian travel. The ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... conscience. Now I've come here to-day"—she raised her voice to a note of warning—"to give you a chance. To make you think, by pointing out the path you are treading. You are young, and it is my duty to let no young person go downhill without one warning word. You have brought much evil on our village—why you, a stranger, should be bent on making us all unhappy I can't imagine. You hypocritically try to pretend that what plain people call evil is really good. But your last action, forcing Emma Hancock ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... "Don't be afraid. I didn't change into first speed quickly enough and stalled, or stopped my engine. I'll start up again in a minute. But I guess I'd better put some stones under the wheels, to block them so they won't slide downhill as I start up again with the ...
— The Curlytops and Their Playmates - or Jolly Times Through the Holidays • Howard R. Garis
... consider those putts in which it is not all plain sailing from the place where the ball lies to the hole. The line of the putt may be uphill or it may be downhill, or the green may slope all the way from one side to the other, or first from one and then the other. There is no end to the tricks and difficulties of a good sporting green, and the more of them the merrier. The golfer's powers of calculation are ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... Bogoyavlensky Street. At last the road began to go downhill; his feet slipped in the mud and suddenly there lay open before him a wide, misty, as it were empty expanse—the river. The houses were replaced by hovels; the street was lost in a multitude ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... back was rather shorter, downhill almost all the way, the horses going along at a good steady trot, knowing ...
— Chateau and Country Life in France • Mary King Waddington
... very well. You feel completely happy. I know all that. Only, on the downhill path of a lonely, dreamy life, you never know where you are going. Oh! I understand you perfectly; you are incapable of doing any wrong. But sooner or later you might lose your peace of mind. Some morning, when it is too late, you will ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... disappearing, aghast with astonishment. They were positively leaving me behind! In a moment my mind was made up; and, leaving the gasping young groom to look after the horse and cart, I set off to run too. It was only a chance, of course; but in this weather the train might be late. It was all the way downhill. I thought I could do it, and I did. My feet were balled with snow; I was hotter than I had been for years; I was completely out of breath; but when I puffed into the little road-side station, five minutes after the train was due, I could see that it was not yet ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... a little as though it could not make up its mind whether to slide into the Pit or move across the open. But it seemed easiest to go downhill, and the children felt one soft puff after another slip and sidle down the slope in fragrant breaths that baffed on their eyelids. The little whisper of the sea by the cliffs joined with the whisper of the wind over the grass, the ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... the office Gordon looked up at him. "That poor old fellow called you out to talk about me," he said quietly. "I know I'm going downhill." ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... unengaging. With all his attainments he had preserved unspoiled a certain natural modesty, which led him to attribute his advancement to accident or fate. He once told me that he owed all his success in life to the fact that, as a country boy in Ohio, while driving his father's cart downhill at daybreak, he fell asleep and was jolted off his seat, breaking his leg. During the weeks of enforced seclusion that followed he taught himself to read, and developed a studious turn of mind, which, his ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... Tom, because we have no means of knowing how they got the money. Some of them are often supplied with larger amounts than seem to be good for them. Unless you know positively, don't start the snowball rolling downhill, because it keeps on growing larger every time ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Snowbound - A Tour on Skates and Iceboats • George A. Warren
... has done good service and all that sort of thing, but when a fellow of his age gets going downhill with debts and drinking and cards—well, you know how it has been in your ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... it; they've gone their own way lately, and it's been decidedly downhill. I'm persuaded they're playing some deep and surreptitious game at present. I wish I ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... be found elsewhere. Steadily climbing like some mountain railway, it reaches at last the short tunnel on the summit level, and then dashes out into the blinding blaze of a new sunshine. The other goes merrily enough, at first, downhill, but at last it comes to the edge of the abyss, and there it stops, but the traveller does not. He goes over; and nobody can see the darkness into which ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... lower part of the hillside until hunger drove him back to camp. And, as it sometimes happens that what a man fails to come upon when he seeks with method and intent he stumbles upon by accident, so now Hollister, coming heedlessly downhill, found the corner stake he was seeking. With his belt-axe he blazed a trail from this point to the flat below, so that he ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... people are prosperous, they do not lose flesh; on the contrary, they are inclined to grow stout; and she really began to grow corpulent. It came so gradually that she had no idea of it until it was too late. Bang! The downhill journey is ever a fast journey, and in her case it was accom-plished with startling rapidity. She tried every remedy—in vain! She kept the best table in the whole town, but she starved herself, and the more she ...
— In Midsummer Days and Other Tales • August Strindberg
... the impact. He was drinking a cup of coffee and thinking about his own problems. But a delicately balanced rock a hundred yards below his camp site toppled over and slid downhill. It started a miniature avalanche of stones and rocks. The loose stuff did not travel far, but the original balanced rock bounced and rolled for some distance before it ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... of his best; yet a moment ago there was a tear in his eye, and now he is grinning like a child at play. And at play he is, though he be paid for playing, and though the game is only being won after weeks and months of uphill labor and downhill joy. ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... suddenly fired on from a farmhouse flying the Red Cross flag, and sustained five or six casualties. We were detailed to a section of the defence of Bakenlaagte, which was practically surrounded. We lay down on the slopes with our heads downhill, and kept the enemy well away, taking the opportunity to improvise some sort of head-cover whenever their fire slackened. Although we fully expected an attack in the night, or at dawn, none was made, there being no sign of the ...
— The Second Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers in the South African War - With a Description of the Operations in the Aden Hinterland • Cecil Francis Romer and Arthur Edward Mainwaring
... wouldn't mind being there in London now! Howsomdever, old ship'—I added on to what I was saying, seeing that the fellows laughed and cheered up a bit at Magellan's comical way—'if we ever hopes to get there we must trudge on now. Our course is all downhill, thank goodness, and perhaps we'll meet with a river at last— as soon as we get ...
— The Penang Pirate - and, The Lost Pinnace • John Conroy Hutcheson
... stomach next to Rhes, looking through a screen of leaves, downhill towards the perimeter. They were both wrapped in heavy furs, in spite of the midday heat, with thick leggings and leather gauntlets to protect their hands. The gravity and the heat were already making Jason dizzy, but he forced himself to ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... law. I'm a free man now and any political work I do is going to be along the lines of the simple, childish ideas I brought home from college with me. I had begun to feel that all this political idealism was sheer rubbish, but I put the brakes on before I got too far downhill. If a few of us who have run with the machine and know the tricks will turn and help the bewildered idealists, we can make idealism effective. Most of the people don't want a handful of crooks to govern them, but there's a kind of cheap ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... the girls realized that it was getting too dark even to distinguish the path at all. They stumbled blindly on through the heather, conscious only that they were going downhill, but whether they were really retracing their steps or not, it was impossible to tell. Spot, whose spirits had failed him, followed at their heels. Faster and faster fell the darkness; the girls linked arms to avoid getting separated. They ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... an engineer, you'll show us why the water doesn't run downhill in our bean patch, as it ought to do," Imogene ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... following up the course of a stream will always ascend at a greater or less inclination. Mr. Gill therefore, was much astonished when walking up the bed of this ancient river, to find himself suddenly going downhill. He imagined that the downward slope had a fall of about 40 or 50 feet perpendicular. We here have unequivocal evidence that a ridge had been uplifted right across the old bed of a stream. From the moment the river course was thus arched, the water must necessarily have been thrown ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... rough ground; though he could not help reflecting that he could never have found it in his conscience to hustle a horse of hers as she hustled his. There were two or three valleys to cross, which gave the animals a little respite, but not much, for Lady Eleanor went equally fast, uphill, downhill and on the level. So that when they arrived at the Hall Colonel George, after seeing Lady Eleanor run in to the children, only looked at his horse's heaving flanks, shook his head, and led him off to the stable to look after him himself. There he heard the whole story from the Corporal, and ...
— The Drummer's Coat • J. W. Fortescue
... machine—always a most difficult feat—he swung his legs and hips to one side or the other, as occasion required, and, after hundreds of glides had been made, he became so skilful in maintaining the equilibrium of his machine that he was able to cover a distance, downhill, ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton
... speaking to him, telling him they would see the moon-path. They must set off downhill. He felt her arm clasped firmly, joyously, round his waist. Therein was his stability and warm support. Siegmund felt a keen flush of pitiful tenderness for her as she walked with buoyant feet beside him, clasping him so happily, ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... it?" and her heart would thrill, and then sink, and inside her she kept saying, "There is no harm in it?—It is all the same in the end." And then, almost before she knew what she was doing, she had taken the easy, crooked, downhill path, with its rocks and thorns ...
— The Making of Mona • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... Rayburn—and as we now knew the way, and as almost the whole of it was downhill, our return was accomplished rapidly—some of the joyous strength that we had gained seemed to be imparted to him. He opened his eyes as we stooped over him, and there seemed to be more life in them than there had been through ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... a terror at her heart, and a nameless dread as if a phantom of evil were pursuing her, Bryda fled downhill with a speed which surprised herself, and reached the ferry just as the Bristol clocks ...
— Bristol Bells - A Story of the Eighteenth Century • Emma Marshall
... think, cards. Not that I cheated, you understand. I will allow no man to say that of me. But that was what was said. A gentleman of spirit, you understand, could not remain in a regiment when such things could be said. Then we tumbled downhill; and I've been at this for four years. And, you know, sir, it might ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... a reassuring kiss upon her. They sat on the bowlder for a few minutes, then scrambled downhill to the jack-pine flat, and built their evening fire. And for the first time in many days Roaring Bill whistled and lightly burst into snatches of song in the deep, bellowing voice that had given him ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... cause of tariff reform was going rapidly downhill. Austen Chamberlain, the son of Joseph Chamberlain, strove hard to keep it to the fore, and frequently at intervals in the House of Commons the protectionist proposals were brought forward. Lloyd George had a characteristic word to say about ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... of the Imperial Light Horse that Boers must have been lying there almost under the feet of our men, if they did not actually join the ranks for a time to escape detection. But a sound greeted their ears at that moment, and knowing what it meant, they scampered downhill without waiting to hear more. It was a ringing British cheer followed by strident commands to "Fix bayonets and give the devils cold steel." Begun by Major Karri Davis, the order ran along from Imperial Light Horse to Carbineers, who had not a bayonet amongst ...
— Four Months Besieged - The Story of Ladysmith • H. H. S. Pearse
... credit of the reporter and makes his veracity to be called in question. For instance it is natural for a stone to roll down hill, it is unnatural for it to roll up hill: but a stone moving uphill is as much the object of sense as a stone moving downhill; and all men in their senses are as capable of seeing and judging and reporting the fact in one case, as in the other. Should a man then tell you, that he saw a stone go uphill of its own accord, you might question his veracity; but ...
— The Trial of the Witnessses of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ • Thomas Sherlock
... said, softly. "I could hear no words, but I know that you have been wise. Between you and me," he added, in a lower tone, "she is going downhill. She is in with the wrong lot here. She can't seem to keep away from them. They are on the very fringe of Bohemia, a great deal nearer the arm of the law than makes for respectable society. The man to whom I saw you introduced is a millionaire ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... times in as many feet last night," Scotty commented. "It's easy by day, but don't try it by night." He led the way through clear spaces between the thorny patches, always going downhill. ...
— The Blue Ghost Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... down in ten minutes," I promised him; and I went to pull on my Pontiacs and heavy half boots over them and started downhill through the sandy snow. It was bitterly cold; it had been a cold winter. The bay—I could see it from my window—was frozen over for a dozen miles east and west and thirty north and south; and that had not happened ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... after one long, sharp look at the oncoming horseman, pulled in quietly to the side of the road. And Ruth did the same. She was too well trained in the things of the hills not to know that if there was trouble, then it was no time to be weakening horses' knees in mad and useless dashes downhill. ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher
... no longer young, that my hair is already half gray, that my strength is fading, now I'm starting again at the beginning and as a child! Again, he had to smile. Yes, his fate had been strange! Things were going downhill with him, and now he was again facing the world void and naked and stupid. But he could not feed sad about this, no, he even felt a great urge to laugh, to laugh about himself, to laugh ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... in another report of the headlong rush of the fire and the direction of the wind that fanned it. He learned that all Genessee was out, fighting to keep the flames from sweeping down across the valley. Three hundred men were fighting it, the supervisor told him. They would check it on the downhill slope, where it would burn more slowly; and if the wind did not change in the night it would probably be brought under control by morning. After that the supervisor very discreetly inquired after the welfare of ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... had thus little save hunger to fear so long as they were in the open country. They marched on, breaking into a trot whenever their course led downhill, during the whole of the day on which their retreat began. Each man still had a small supply of meat left, and portions of this they ate raw as they proceeded. At dusk the foremost of the Balotsi were some distance behind, and after marching for ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... everywhere, until excitement about fashion and "family" reached Saint X; how he was then gradually dropped until he, realizing what was the matter, haughtily "cut" all his former friends and associates. "We've certainly been racing downhill these last few years. Where the Wilmots used to be about the only silly people in town, there are scores of families now with noses in the air and eyes looking eagerly about for chances to snub. But, on the other hand, there's the university, and Arthur—and Dory." She ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... eye. They do want the good thing. They don't always know it when they see it, but they want it. These qualities, in combination with material strength, give America her chance. Yet, if she does not set her face against "Gadarening," we are all bound for downhill. If she goes in for spreadeagleism, if her aspirations are towards quantity not quality, we shall all go on being commonised. If she should get that purse-and-power-proud fever which comes from national success, we are all bound for another world flare-up. The burden of proving that democracy ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... that the sun was getting low, and said it was time to be going back. She made the remark again and again, but, every time, the princess begged her to go on just a little farther and a little farther; reminding her that it was much easier to go downhill, and saying that when they did turn they would be at home in a moment. So on and on they did go, now to look at a group of ferns over whose tops a stream was pouring in a watery arch, now to pick a shining stone ...
— The Princess and the Goblin • George MacDonald
... (apparently) beyond expression in words. He slapped his pocket cheerfully, and that was all. Leading the way inland, he went downhill, and uphill again—then turned aside towards the eastern extremity ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... rattled again, downhill through the wood, and up on the further side—still always on the edge of the moss. She loved the villages, and their medley of grey houses wedged among the rocks; she loved the stone farms with their wide porches, and the white splashes on ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... animal that would run away and dare not. There is no knowing how long we might have stood there staring at each other, but for a sudden gust of wind that whisked off my hat, whereupon the young man and I both started downhill in pursuit. The wind was playful, and led us a fine dance; we were obliged to laugh. When at last he caught and handed back to me my property, we were thoroughly exhausted and sat down at the foot of the hill on the mossy tree-roots. I am sure we must have looked very silly, for we were so out ...
— The Wings of Icarus - Being the Life of one Emilia Fletcher • Laurence Alma Tadema
... crows, and once and again falls the tap, tap of woodmen's axes—scarce heard, for they are high above. They strip the young oaks of their bark as far as they can while the saplings stand, then fell them, and as they all lie downhill there are parallel streaks of buff (where the sap has dried) drawn between the yellow-green masses of living leaf. The pathway winds in among the trees at the base of the rocky hill; light green whortleberries ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... the moist, pungent odour of the woodland, the rhythmical trot of the horses, the rattle of the splinter-bar chains as the traces slackened going downhill, above all the presence of the man beside him, were pleasantly stimulating to Richard Calmady. The boy was still a prey to much innocent enthusiasm. It appeared to him, watching Ormiston's handling of the reins and whip, there was nothing this man could not do, and do skilfully, yet all ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... into the hands of a much more agreeable interlocutor. He talked with a ready, easy command of words, so that his discourse flowed smoothly. He was fluent. He introduced you to a lady whose speech possessed smoothness and ease in too great degree; it fairly rolled along, as a hoop does downhill. The lady was voluble. Into your triangular group broke a newcomer whose speech had in it a flippant, or at least a superficially clever, fluency. He was glib. Leaving these three to fight (or talk) it out as best they might, you grabbed your hat and hurried ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... sanctioning gross sin. If it means only straight, or level—that is, successful and easy—the saying enforces the not less solemn truth that sin deceives as to its results, and that the path of wrong-doing, which is flowery and smooth at first, grows rapidly thorny, and goes fast downhill, and ends at last in a cul-de-sac, of which death is the only outlet. We are not to trust our own consciences, except as enlightened by God's Word. We are not to listen to sin's lies, but to fix it well in our minds that there is only one way ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... because we 're going uphill, and at the other locks, when we were going downhill, the water ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... yards by his manoeuvre, was now heading for the Citadel gate; beside which—so far away that we saw them as toys—stood a sentry-box and the figure of a sentry beside it. Could he reach this gate? His altered course had taken him a little downhill, to the left of the ridge, and to regain it by the Citadel he must fetch a slight loop. Luckily the bull could not reason: he followed his enemy. But there was just a chance that by running along the ridge the chase might be headed off. The crowd ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... it's downhill, Percy, or we should never find our way to the water's edge. If we keep descending, we must be there, ...
— The Young Franc Tireurs - And Their Adventures in the Franco-Prussian War • G. A. Henty
... and baked pine-cones; and presently turn left into a still narrower street, with tailors and boot-makers and smiths all at work in the open air; and pass through the Piazzetta Mondragone, and turn again to the left, but this time downhill; then lose yourself amid filthy little alleys, where the scent of oil and chestnuts and pine-cones is stronger than ever; then emerge on a little terrace where there is a noble view of the bay and of Capri; then turn abruptly between walls overhung with fig-trees and orange-trees ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... herself to him. If she trusted him so far, he could trust her. She trusted, poor child! Two years later he married up on his higher plane—your plane—and laughingly offered a second best place to her. It was the only bargain she could make then! The rest was an easy downhill grade. ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... in the habit of flying. She ran downhill a few yards flapping her shawl, and then she jumped off ...
— A Collection of Beatrix Potter Stories • Beatrix Potter
... then, Grace, give him some temporary encouragement, even though it is over-early. For when I consider the past I do think God will forgive me and you for being a little forward. I have another reason for this, my dear. I feel myself going rapidly downhill, and late affairs have still further helped me that way. And until this thing is done I ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... plenty?' Jesse pointed to the ragged perspective ahead of them that plunged downhill into the fog. 'I lay there's a cord an' a half o' firewood, let alone faggots, 'fore we get ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... loved hunting, and it was his custom to spend several mornings every week chasing the boars which abounded in the mountains a few miles from the city. One day, rushing downhill as fast as he could go, he put his foot into a hole and fell, rolling into a rocky pit of brambles. The king's wounds were not very severe, but his face and hands were cut and torn, while his feet were in a worse plight still, for, instead of proper ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Various
... we could walk to Oppenau in one day, now that we were in practice; so we set out the next morning after breakfast determined to do it. It was all the way downhill, and we had the loveliest summer weather for it. So we set the pedometer and then stretched away on an easy, regular stride, down through the cloven forest, drawing in the fragrant breath of the morning in deep refreshing draughts, and wishing we ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... paved the way for Zola. It justified a new aim for the modern fiction of so-called unflinching realism. The saddest thing about the book is its lack of pity, of love. Emma Bovary is a weak woman, not a bad woman; she goes downhill through the force of circumstances coupled with a want of backbone. And she is not responsible for her flabby moral muscles. Behind the story is an absolutely fatalistic philosophy; given a certain environment, any woman (especially if assisted a bit ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... went downhill and still downhill through openings among batches of great forest trees. The new leaves were just coming out in pinks and russets, so that the effect at a little distance was almost precisely that of our autumn foliage in its duller phases. So familiar were made some of the low rounded knolls ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... lines were on the hills; every time we took a position it was always uphill, until we got over Pozieres Ridge and then our work was downhill for the time. We arrived at the firing line on the 29th of August, 1916. The accompanying map will convey a general idea of the object intended to be attained by the great drive. The German organization in this district was fed by railroads having terminals at Bapaume and it was ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... added my companion, after promising to join the party in a few moments. "This arrangement about the schooner leaves us both captains, and prevents anything like your downhill work, which is always unpleasant business. Captain Marble and Captain Wallingford sound well; and I hope they may long sail in company. But natur' or art never meant me ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... leads also into the bush, to the banana patch and by a second bifurcation over the left branch of the stream to the plateau and the right hand of the gorges. In short, it leads to all sorts of good, and is, besides, in itself a pretty winding path, bound downhill among big woods to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Good companies and bad, established concerns and promoters' flotations, auspicious ventures and forlorn hopes—he had been associated with them all, and from each one he emerged with untroubled calm while the unhappy machine, its steering gear usually crippled by his hand alone, went plunging downhill over the cliff into the ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... professional lumberman better understands how to transport lumber to a desired place than beavers. They realise the value of water transportation and thoroughly appreciate that trees can only be removed downhill. From tame beavers we have learned that they remove smaller limbs by seizing them with their teeth, throwing the loose end over their shoulder, and then dragging them ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... carpet. And she thought onions wouldn't be so wearin' on her as turkeys, for onions, she said, will stay where they are put, but turkeys are born wanderers and hikers. And they led her through sun and rain, swamp and swale, uphill and downhill, a-chasin' 'em up, but she made well by 'em. Well, in puttin' in her onion seed, she overworked herself and got a crick in her back, so she couldn't stir hand nor foot for two days. And bein' only just them two, her husband had to stay ...
— Samantha on the Woman Question • Marietta Holley
... London now! Howsomdever, old ship'—I added on to what I was saying, seeing that the fellows laughed and cheered up a bit at Magellan's comical way—'if we ever hopes to get there we must trudge on now. Our course is all downhill, thank goodness, and perhaps we'll meet with a river at last— as soon as we get ...
— The Penang Pirate - and, The Lost Pinnace • John Conroy Hutcheson
... the downhill of life, when I find I'm declining, May my lot no less fortunate be Than a snug elbow-chair can afford for reclining, And a cot that o'erlooks the wide sea; With an ambling pad-pony to pace o'er the lawn, While I carol away idle sorrow, And blithe as ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... rest of his evening by his forest fire to unthorning himself, while we proceeded to wade a swift, deepish river that crossed the path he told us led into Egaja, and then went across another bit of forest and downhill again. "Oh, bless those swamps!" thought I, "here's another," but no—not this time. Across the bottom of the steep ravine, from one side to another, lay an enormous tree as a bridge, about fifteen feet above a river, which rushed beneath ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... a clear space ahead of him, and in a little, sinking on his knees on a bank, was peering downhill to an old-fashioned, Jacobean manor-house, from whose chimney smoke was lazily wreathing upward. Between him and the house a meadow sloped for a hundred yards, and the back of the house was ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... well named. A lonely little station set down in the midst of thick woods, and a road that wound slightly downhill and away among the trees were all that met the eye. They strolled down this road, passing occasional homes. These were usually well back from the road and almost concealed among the trees. In fact, in some places the house itself was not visible, the only indication of a residence being an ornamental ...
— The Sheridan Road Mystery • Paul Thorne
... all the afternoon before you," replied Mr. Thimblefinger. "Besides it will be downhill all the way. I was just going to tell you a story, but if you really want to go I'll put off the telling of it until some of your grandchildren tumble in the spring when the wet water has run out and the dry water has ...
— Little Mr. Thimblefinger and His Queer Country • Joel Chandler Harris
... huge beast swung from side to side. It was going faster; it was no good, she dared not jump out. Anyhow, they must be quite away from Mabel by now. Faster and faster went the dinosaurus. The floor of its stomach sloped. They were going downhill. Twigs cracked and broke as it pushed through a belt of evergreen oaks; gravel crunched, ground beneath its stony feet. Then stone met stone. There was a pause. A splash! They were close to water the lake ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... enough to bear his own cross," said Jungel, seizing his long crutches. Only "Dancing Gundel" lingered in Miltenberg through sympathy in the fate of the companion who had reached the height of fame, while she, the former "Phyllis," had gone swiftly downhill. It was a Christian duty, she said to the blind boy who begged their bread, not to let Kuni, who had once held so lofty a position, take the last journey without a suitable escort. When she heard that her former companion had received the sacrament, she exclaimed to her blind son, while slicing ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... you followed her special path, which went in at the corner of the forest, until by and by the trees thinned on either side, and it widened into a glade, and you went downhill and crossed the brook at the bottom and went up the other side until it was all trees again, and the first and the biggest and the oldest and the loveliest was hers. And you turned round and sat with your ...
— Once on a Time • A. A. Milne
... do, sir," returned the old man, "This house here belonged to the same family at one time; though when I was born it was another branch of the family, second cousins or something, that lived in it. But even then it was something on to the downhill road, ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... Dale was going downhill headlong to Gadarene catastrophe. He had no eyes or ears or thoughts for any one in the world but for a certain Lola Brandt, a brazen creature from a circus, the shape of whose limbs was the common knowledge ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... what good could it do him to be 'noticed' by noisy crowds of people? God his Maker already noticed him. He, Cromwell, was already there; no notice would make him other than he already was. Till his hair was grown gray; and Life from the downhill slope was all seen to be limited, not infinite but finite, and all a measurable matter how it went,—he had been content to plough the ground, and read his Bible. He in his old days could not support it any longer, without selling himself to Falsehood, that he might ride in gilt ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... longest road, and Joan, whose return journey from the holy well was for the most part downhill, soon found herself back again in Penzance. The fire of devotion still actuated her movements, and she walked fearlessly, doubting nothing, to the post-office. There would be a letter to-day; she knew it; she felt it in ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... Vicar's Walk led directly into the Close, a large green space surrounded by the houses of dignitaries, from a quiet road lined with elms, which skirted the wall of the Deanery garden and after several twists and turns among the shadows of great Gothic walls found its way downhill into the narrow streets of the small city. One of the houses in the Close had been handed over to the Theological College, the Principal of which usually occupied a Canon's stall in the Cathedral. Here were the lecture-rooms, and here lived Canon Havelock the Principal, ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... toggery with her. The girls was excited enough when they found out you had to dress especial for it. They was willing to listen to anything like that if New York society was really mad about it, even if it conflicted with lifelong habits—no one in Red Gap but small boys having ever slid downhill. ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... Even the imperturbable Miss Harrison rose from her place rather sooner than usual. Rameyev went to his own room to get his hour's nap. The young people went into the garden. Misha and Elena ran downhill to the river. They had a keen desire to run one after the other and ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... living anywhere else. The place is too remote from civilization. A spot one might enjoy, perhaps, on the downhill side of sixty; but in youth or active middle age every sensible man should shun seclusion. A man has to fight against an inherent tendency ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... compose the nation, and the conclusion is clearly apparent. Since, in the eyes of the tailor, the property of individual Frenchmen belongs to all the French, he, the tailor, has a right to at least the quota which belongs to him.—One travels fast and far on this downhill road, for every mob considers that this means immediate enjoyment, and enjoyment according to its own ideas. There is no care for neighbors or for consequences, even when imminent and physical, and in twenty places the confiscated property perishes ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... do that?" asked Mirabell. "There isn't any snow now, though there was some for Christmas. How can you make a sliding downhill thing without snow?" ...
— The Story of a Lamb on Wheels • Laura Lee Hope
... give up; and now the elk took a turn and went downhill, with Theodore Roosevelt pitching after them, ready to drop from exhaustion, but full of that grit to win out which has since won the admiration of all who know the man. The second bull fell; and now but one ...
— American Boy's Life of Theodore Roosevelt • Edward Stratemeyer
... of mind. It was part of his job to protect his employers' property; that was what he was there for. He had taken ordinary precautions, too, so far as the dam was concerned. But he had entirely overlooked the fact, as obvious as that water runs downhill, that if his canal were cut at the coulee its contents must flow back into the river. Everything was now set back. With this second outrage land sales would stop altogether. It was a sickening jolt. He thought of the questions ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... describe. My next experience was along a stream of very clear water. It did not appear to be a very large stream, but its remarkable character impressed me as singular. It flowed gently. It was not swift, but glided smoothly along, uphill and downhill the same. Its speed never varied, and this unaccountable characteristic struck me with surprise that waked me. This is my interpretation of my dream," said he: "The clear stream of water represents what ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... was," said Annie in answer to his query;" so I will make a favour of telling you. Do you remember the Rev. Mr. Darner, rector of Downhill Market?" ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... briskly, upon which she sends the others after it, holding the ends of each in her hand; and when she reaches the town, she finds a "ravelled hank" instead of her neat balls of worsted. In another version a man goes to market with two bags of cheese, and sends them downhill, like the Gothamite. After waiting at the market all day in vain, he returns home, and tells his wife of his misfortune. She goes to the foot of the hill and finds ...
— The Book of Noodles - Stories Of Simpletons; Or, Fools And Their Follies • W. A. Clouston
... operations are done in a minute, and correspond in some degree to turning the rudder of a ship. The object is that the plough, which has been turning the earth one way, shall now (as it is reversed to go downhill) continue to turn it that way. If the change were not effected when the plough was swung round, the furrow would be made opposite. Next he leans heavily on the handles, still standing on the same spot; this lifts the plough, so that it turns easily ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... bad stretch; now it'll be downhill an' green fields all th' way." Nye nodded at the narrow opening between two hills lying ahead. "Glad to get this band in on all four legs an' ...
— Rebel Spurs • Andre Norton
... a small rise at Sherman," he rises to explain, " and another still smaller at the Alleghanies; all the balance is downhill to the Atlantic. Of course you'll have to 'boat it' across the Frogpond; then there's Europe - mostly level; so is Asia, except the Himalayas - and you can soon cross them; then you're all 'hunky,' for there's no mountains to speak of ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... however, a fine afternoon for our drive back, a quick downhill journey along the edge of a tremendous precipice, clothed with beech-trees and brushwood. A most beautiful road it is, and the two little lakes looked lovely in the sunshine, encircled by gold-green swards and a delicate screen of alder branches. Through pastures white with meadow-sweet ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... would like your temperate drinker to pause, and reflect upon the fact, that the quantity of brandy or rum that he took at a drink, when he commenced this downhill course, has been gradually increased; so that in the second year, what had been quite sufficient to please his palate and produce all the desired effects in the first, was then insipidly small; and more so in the third year, if, mayhap, he could ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... setting the tray on a stand and dropping into a chair. "After the war is over I shall repent and take up godly ways. For the present I am a lost soul, and given over to Satan. Andy, the lie I told yesterday about the river road was the beginning of my downfall. How easily we glide downhill." ...
— Then Marched the Brave • Harriet T. Comstock
... of morning still was over all the high country when they got astir and began to care for the horses on their picket ropes and to finish the cooking of their remaining food. Then, each now leading his horse, they began to thread their way downhill. Over country where now they had established the general courses, it was easier for such good mountain travelers to pick out a feasible way down. They crossed the canyon at about the same place, but swung off more to ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... to be suffering any particular discomfort from the enormous increase of his waist. On the next day there was a blizzard, duly predicted by Wilson's twinges of rheumatism, and on the 8th Scott reluctantly records that the dogs were steadily going downhill. 'The lightening of the load is more than counter-balanced by the weakening of the animals, and I can see no time in which we can hope to get the sledges ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... worse trouble at home. Since the death of his good old mother and of Felix Underwood, Sir Adrian Vanderkist had been rapidly going downhill; as though he had thrown off all restraint, and as if the yearly birth of a daughter left him the more free to waste his patrimony. Little or nothing had been heard direct from poor Alda till Clement was summoned by a telegram from Ironbeam Park to find his sister in the utmost danger, ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... boat going up will want a lock full, and that water too. And that's why an empty boat going downhill takes more water than a loaded one, and less ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... operations of private cupidity. This is not the first time nor the second that I have had to urge that the greatest danger to us in the sphere of foreign politics is the tendency of capital to run away from civilization: the one running downhill to hell as naturally as the other struggles uphill to the Celestial City. The Englishman is allowed to produce the subsistence of himself and his family only on condition that he produces the subsistence of the capitalist and his retainers as well; ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... market-place (owing to the number of people punished with amputation of a foot); the people are smarting with a sense of wrong, and are longing for the advent (of the CH'EN family), whom they love as a parent, and towards whom they tend, just as water runs downhill. Under these circumstances, even if they did not want to gain the people over, how can they avoid it? The last surviving member of that branch of the CH'EN family who traced his descent to previous dynasties has still left his spirit ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... King is going downhill as before, but seems to be a long time in the descent. All kinds of intrigues are going on about change of Ministry, and all kinds of hopes and fears afloat. Nothing is more improbable than that I should be made a Bishop, and, if I ever had the opportunity, I am now, when far removed from ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... the ground like some unwieldy prehistoric reptile. Houck knew that if he lost his footing he was done for. Once, as the cluster of fighters swung downhill, the outlaw found himself close to the edge of the group. He got his arms free and tried to beat off those clinging to him. Out of the melee he staggered, a pair of arms locked tightly round his thighs. Before he could free himself another body flung ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... heel and walked swiftly away. She went downhill with more haste than dignity, turned to her right, and struck out through the ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... based solely on the ever-fleeting present. Essentially, therefore, it has to take the form of continual motion without there ever being any possibility of our finding the rest after which we are always striving. It is the same as a man running downhill, who falls if he tries to stop, and it is only by his continuing to run on that he keeps on his legs; it is like a pole balanced on one's finger-tips, or like a planet that would fall into its sun as soon as it stopped hurrying onwards. Hence unrest is ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... putting his feet down unsteadily, Mr. Trimm left the clearing, heading as well as he could tell eastward, away from the railroad. After a mile or two he came to a dusty wood road winding downhill. ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... awkward enough already. The Red Cross men were kept busy, staggering away downhill with stretchers laden with the wounded. There was no possibility of returning the enemy's fire, and in the darkness the ships could not help. All the Colonials could do was to crouch as low as possible, flattening themselves against the ...
— On Land And Sea At The Dardanelles • Thomas Charles Bridges
... on as fast as his snow-shoes would permit, and having reloaded, Dave and Barringford followed. They were going downhill once more, but now the elk made a turn and darted into a belt of timber lining the river. Reaching the stream, he paused for a moment, looked despairingly at his wounded and bleeding flank, and ...
— On the Trail of Pontiac • Edward Stratemeyer
... little while And feed upon some nourishing employ But otherwise shake their wise heads and smile— Protesting that one man can no more move the mass For good or ill Than could the ancients kindle the sun By tying torches to a wheel and rolling it downhill. But not the wet circumference of the seas Can quench the living light in even these, These who forget, Eating the fruits of earth, That nothing ever has been done To spur the spirit of mankind, Which has not come to pass Forth ...
— The New World • Witter Bynner
... shrug. "You can't get lost. If you should lose your bearings, just walk downhill and you'll come to food and water. Follow the shore line until you get back, either direction. And, I reckon, the way things go now, you ain't goin' to hurt yourself. We won't worry about you none. We're all gettin' along all right, so you needn't ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... changed. The chestnut avenue opened into a road, smooth but narrow, which led into the untouched country. She followed it for over a mile. Its little hesitations pleased her. Having no urgent destiny, it strolled downhill or up as it wished, taking no trouble about the gradients, nor about the view, which nevertheless expanded. The great estates that throttle the south of Hertfordshire were less obtrusive here, and the appearance of the land was neither aristocratic nor suburban. To define ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... if all their gods had crashed and the heavens still stood. Order and law had passed away from the universe; but the sun still shone, the wind still blew, the flowers still bloomed—that was the amazing thing about it. That water should continue to run downhill was a miracle. All the stabilities of the human mind and human achievement were crumbling. The one stable thing that remained was Goliah, a madman on an island. And so it was that the whole population of San Francisco went forth next day in colossal ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... out of the ravine and headed across the hills. From the crest the valley was broad and dark below him, and on the opposite side the hills were blacker still. He let the pinto go down the steep slope at a walk, for there is nothing like a fast pace downhill to tear the heart out of a horse. Besides, it came to him after he started, were not the men of Bill Dozier apt to miss this sudden swinging of ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... on the crest of a depression. There was nothing visible, but he could hear a confused rattle and snapping of twigs, and shook himself as he remembered the speed with which even a badly-wounded deer can make downhill. He had his choice of a long and possibly fruitless chase or another supperless night that would be followed by a very scanty breakfast on the morrow. Alton did not care to anticipate what might happen after that, because he had discovered on previous ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... and Jazia had pictured it for him. This had to be part of the ridge wall of the valley in which lay the buildings of the fairing. In these heights was the Shrine of Phutka where Jazia had hidden out. To the west now lay the Rover village, so he had to work his way left, downhill, in order to reach the hole where the Baldies had gone to ground. Ross made that progress with the stealth of ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... been making no progress towards health; indeed, was going slowly downhill. He makes fun of his condition when writing to condole with Mr. Spencer on falling ill again after the unwonted spell of activity already mentioned; but a few weeks later discovered the cause of his weakness and depression in an affection of the heart. This ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... he thought that he would never sink. First the imagination is inflamed, then the wish begins to draw the soul to the sin, then conscience pulls it back, then the fatal decision is made, and the deed is done. Sometimes all the stages are hurried quickly through, and a man spins downhill as cheerily and fast as a diligence down the Alps. Sometimes, as the coast of a country may sink an inch in a century until long miles of the flat seabeach are under water, and towers and cities are buried beneath the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... because all of a sudden it struck me that, in revenge for my straight talk, Weekes had been wanting me to call day by day that he might watch me going downhill; and that now he was gloating to see me reduced to a Blanchminster gown. So I said, 'You blackguard, you may look your fill, and carry the recollection of it to the Throne of Judgment, where I hope it may help you. But this is your last ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... that it consumes, and it is almost the same thing to say that the refinement of a household is measured by the amount of water it uses. The poorer a family, the greater struggle it is to keep up the appearance of cleanliness, and no surer sign of rapid progress on a downhill road can be found than neglect of those practices which tend toward personal neatness. As the life of the farmer, then, becomes easier, as his condition becomes more prosperous, and as his family ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden
... the Senate, and fight it out"—he smiled whimsically—"some day for the nomination for the Presidency. The poor old commonwealth is in a bad way, and it needs just such boys as you two are. The war started us downhill, but we might have done better—I know I might. The earth was too rich—it made life too easy. The horse, the bottle of whiskey, and the plug of tobacco were all too easily the best—and the pistol always ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... found him somewhat altered, but the lieutenant said: "I am in excellent health now, Stephen. Your disappearance, and Cochrane's letter telling me that he feared that he could give me no hope whatever, broke me down a good deal, and I felt myself that I was going downhill rapidly. However, I have been picking up fast ever since I got your letter giving me an account of your journey across South America. Now that I have you home again I shall soon be completely myself. I have invested all that money of yours in good securities, and as soon as I got your letter ...
— With Cochrane the Dauntless • George Alfred Henty
... furniture and yellow silk brocade," she answered, and ran downhill. She scattered a few cows at a gap with a flourish of a ground-ash that Iggulden had cut for her a week ago, and singing as she passed under the holmoaks, sought the farm-house at the back of Friars Pardon. The old man was not to be found, ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... nations. Once there was—I am willing to admit that possibility. Once, from all accounts received, the English rose was the fitting emblem of the English woman, but now, since the world has grown so wise and made such progress in the art of running rapidly downhill, is even the aristocratic British peer quite easy in his mind regarding his fair peeress? Can he leave her to her own devices with safety? Are there not men, boastful too of their "blue blood," who are perhaps ready ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... of the department," he said, "we're the 'Valiants.' I'll be there in twenty-five minutes if I have to kill the horses. It's downhill most of the way, anyhow. Jim, you run ...
— The Girl Aviators' Motor Butterfly • Margaret Burnham
... not like the improvements, either, or the changes in the dingy Quartier, to which she was accustomed. It was, in fact, a little hard for her to see all these embellishments just when she was going downhill so fast over the piles of brick and mortar, while she was wandering about ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... hopping and halting and wiggling his nose at every bush, till he heard our approach and rose on his hind legs to listen. He gave a great jump as Unk Wunk hove into sight, covered all over with the dead leaves that his barbed quills had picked up on his way downhill, and lay quiet where he thought the ferns ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... They were positively leaving me behind! In a moment my mind was made up; and, leaving the gasping young groom to look after the horse and cart, I set off to run too. It was only a chance, of course; but in this weather the train might be late. It was all the way downhill. I thought I could do it, and I did. My feet were balled with snow; I was hotter than I had been for years; I was completely out of breath; but when I puffed into the little road-side station, five minutes after the train was due, I could see that it was not yet in, and that ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... tree in a hedgerow, or follow a cart along a country road. You turn to the city, and see children, dwarfed by distance into pigmies, at play about suburban doorsteps; you have a glimpse upon a thoroughfare where people are densely moving; you note ridge after ridge of chimney-stacks running downhill one behind another, and church spires rising bravely from the sea of roofs. At one of the innumerable windows you watch a figure moving; on one of the multitude of roofs you watch clambering chimney-sweeps. The wind takes a run ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... in the Duke's presence; and I would have pressed a gold piece into his hand for "opening my prison door," but he would not have it. Afterwards, while we followed the grey car on the downhill road to Madrid, Pilar told the whole story with dramatic ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Man, and act white! Not just to square yourself with her, but because you're going downhill pretty fast, if you only knew it. You ain't anything like you were two years ago, when we bached together. You've got to brace up pretty sudden, or you'll be so far gone you can't climb back. And when a man has got a wife to look after, it seems to me he ought to be the best it's in him to ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... Seventy breezy miles a day were written in his very whiskers. His manners were a canter; his conversation a round trot. He was a fast coach upon a downhill turnpike road; he was all pace. A wagon couldn't have moved slowly, with that guard and his key bugle ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... two years that followed. From time to time I saw her, always with some wonder, for she preserved to the end that delicate and superb quality which so distinguished her. The scandal of the brawl was the small thing that was needed to turn Bertin's course downhill; almost from that day one could mark his decline. It was not a matter of incidents; it was simply that within a year most of us were passing him without recognition, and there was talk of debts that troubled him. He had deteriorated, too; whereas of old ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... steadily things had gone downhill with me for a long time, till, in the end, I was so curiously bared of every conceivable thing. I had not even a comb left, not even a book to read, when things grew all too sad with me. All through the summer, up in the churchyards or parks, where I used to sit and write my articles for ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... fun. We left one sledge on the top of ski-slope and just took what was necessary on the other, such as our bags, etc. It was my first experience of steep downhill sledging. Instead of anybody pulling forward we all had to hang back and guide the sledge down the slippery incline without letting it take charge or getting upset. It is great fun. On reaching the head of the Bay, however, we had quite a dangerous little ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... that could hardly have slaked their thirst with any convenience at a cavernous spring such as he describes. Caverns, moreover, are not always near the summits of hills; they may be at the foot of them; and water, even the Thames at London Bridge, always leaps downhill—more or less. Of more importance is old Chaupy's discovery of the northerly aspect of one of these springs—"thee the fierce season of the blazing dog-star cannot touch." There may have been a cave at the back of the "Fontana del Fico"; the ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... things had gone downhill with me for a long time, till, in the end, I was so curiously bared of every conceivable thing. I had not even a comb left, not even a book to read, when things grew all too sad with me. All through the summer, up in the churchyards or parks, ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... moved, ejected the pebble. Their four empty water bulbs were in the front of his blanket tunic, pressing against his ribs. It was now—or die, because soon he would be too weak to make the attempt at all. He darted for the first stand of bush downhill. ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton
... Huntington's cough suddenly increased, and he began to go downhill so rapidly as to cause much uneasiness to his friends. General Keith urged him to go up to a little place on the side of the mountains which had been quite ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... hour," answered Grandpa Ford. "We'll be there before you know it. It's downhill, and the horses are anxious to get ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Grandpa Ford's • Laura Lee Hope
... generally received theory that 'the great descent which leads towards the Kingdom of Mien,' on which 'you ride for two days and a half continually downhill,' was the route from Yung-ch'ang to T'eng-Yueh, must be at once abandoned. Marco was, no doubt, speaking from hearsay, or rather, from a recollection of hearsay, as it does not appear that he possessed any notes; but there is good reason for supposing that he had personally visited ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... that these mysterious agencies," he said quietly, "may be due to some kind of life we cannot understand. Why should water only run downhill? Why should trees grow at right angles to the surface of the ground and towards the sun? Why should the worlds spin for ever on their axes? Why should fire change the form of everything it touches without really ...
— The Man Whom the Trees Loved • Algernon Blackwood
... possess in duplicate—to come off the shelf, and have one more fling. I'm stiff! I'm stiff! And, ye gods, I'm only four-and-thirty! I always thought I'd go till sixty at least. I entered Parliament just to keep going; but that's only a steady progress downhill—a sort of frog's march in which you kick and are kicked, but don't do much besides. I'm a fighter, kiddie. I wasn't made to ornament the shelf. I'm not a hero; only an ordinary, restless, discontented mortal. They told me this afternoon that it was time I did something, that I was ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... that he had never enjoyed a run more than he did on this occasion. A brisk wind was blowing behind them, they found there was more downhill than up, the road was absolutely clear, and they were able to take the declines at a pace which took the ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster
... were positively leaving me behind! In a moment my mind was made up; and, leaving the gasping young groom to look after the horse and cart, I set off to run too. It was only a chance, of course; but in this weather the train might be late. It was all the way downhill. I thought I could do it, and I did. My feet were balled with snow; I was hotter than I had been for years; I was completely out of breath; but when I puffed into the little road-side station, five minutes ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... it. They resent it; they've gone their own way lately, and it's been decidedly downhill. I'm persuaded they're playing some deep and surreptitious game at present. I wish I ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... as we now knew the way, and as almost the whole of it was downhill, our return was accomplished rapidly—some of the joyous strength that we had gained seemed to be imparted to him. He opened his eyes as we stooped over him, and there seemed to be more life in them than there had been through all ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... and out of the door in a jiffy. Two men fled before us at the stable, scrambled over the fence, and went tumbling downhill. We bridled our horses with all speed, leaped upon them, and went rushing down the steep road, our swords in hand, like an avalanche. They tried to stop us at the foot of the hill, but fell away as we came near. I could hear the snap of their ...
— D'Ri and I • Irving Bacheller
... full length and went to sleep. There he lay, his great paunch sagging—prosperity exuding from every pore—an emblem and type of what in the West we call a "successful" man. And the other? The other, no doubt, was going downhill. Both, of course, were Japanese types; but the civilisation of the West chose the one and rejected the other. And if civilisation is to be judged, as it fairly may be, by the kind of men it brings to the top, there is much ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... "played"; how Baby allowed me to roll him downhill, crawling and puffing up again each time, with perfect good humor; how he climbed a young sapling after my Panama hat, which I had "shied" into one of the topmost branches; how after getting it he refused to descend until it ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... Exmoor. The uphill and downhill of Devonshire scorns compromise or mitigation by detour and zigzag. But here geography is on a scale so far more vast, and the roadway is so far worse metalled than with us in England—knotty masses of talc and nodes ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... mare had a notion she was being stolen, for no sooner had her rider remounted than she struck off into a lane on the right hand, avoiding the road to Polperro where her present owner dwelt; and so, fetching a circuit by a second lane—this time to the left— clattered downhill past the sleeping hamlet of Crumplehorn, and breasted the steep coombe and the road that winds up beside it past the two Kellows to Mabel Burrow. Here on the upland she pulled herself together, and reaching out into a gallant stride, started ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... and Francois made remarkable progress. Ere they returned to camp he knew enough to stop at "ho," to go ahead at "mush," to swing wide on the bends, and to keep clear of the wheeler when the loaded sled shot downhill ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... the girls ran downhill to where there was a spring, and kept hauling pails and buckets of water up the hill, and, pouring it into the engine, ran down again. Olga and Marya and Sasha and Motka all brought water. The women and the boys pumped the water; the ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... be royal," said the wife of Mr. Cheeseman, "though a going-downhill kind of royalty, perhaps, and yet he might be glad, Mrs. Shanks, to come where the butter has the milk spots, and none is in ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... an inch of wood was left in sight. A pole was inserted through the centre of the wheel, so that long ends extended about a yard on each side. If any straw remained, it was made up into torches at the top of tall sticks. At a given signal the wheel was lighted, and sent rolling downhill. If this fire-wheel went out before it reached the bottom of the hill, a very poor harvest was promised. If it kept lighted all the way down, and continued blazing for a long time, the harvest would be exceptionally abundant. Loud cheers and shouts accompanied the progress ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... Calmenare in the Duke's presence; and I would have pressed a gold piece into his hand for "opening my prison door," but he would not have it. Afterwards, while we followed the grey car on the downhill road to Madrid, Pilar told the whole story with dramatic effect to ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... at the foot of the street on which the Bobbsey house stood. The street went downhill to the tracks, and the railroad passed through what Charley had ...
— The Bobbsey Twins in the Great West • Laura Lee Hope
... surrounded by civilization. However we four may deny being old, we cannot certainly claim to be young. We have all reached the meridian of life, and though feeling few, if any, of the infirmities of age, still, our next move will be in the downhill direction. Yet, notwithstanding all this, we talk and act, and think, and feel, too, like boys. I do not speak this reproachfully, but as a fact which develops a curious attribute of ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... Perdu—the Street of Lost Time. Down this shadowy vista we all come to peer with tear-dimmed eyes sooner or later. Usually this pensive retrospection is the premonitory sign that one is nearing the last milestone before the downhill side of life begins. But to some this yearning backward glance comes early; they feel its compelling power while still in the vigor of middle life. Why this is so it is not easy to say, but imaginative, brooding natures ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... card, ruled it downhill with a pencil, and wrote on it a few cramped-up words, huddled close together like ...
— The Twin Cousins • Sophie May
... brands. However, enough men did know about it in those dear, damp days beyond recall to make me independent of the pawnshop, to say the least. And, having cleaned up a good pot with whisky running down men's gullets, I reckoned I'd see what I could do with water running downhill. Do you get me at all ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... he even at church. The first year of Anders' marriage the only cow he owned was found dead beyond the north side of the house, where it was tethered, and no one could find out what had killed it. Several misfortunes followed, and he kept going downhill; but the worst of all was when his barn, with all that it contained, burned down in the middle of the winter; no one knew ...
— A Happy Boy • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... materials, dirty paint-pots and plant, they all set out together for the yard, to put all the things away before going to the office for their money. Sawkins took the handle of the cart, Slyme and Crass walked at one side and Owen and Bert at the other. There was no need to push, for the road was downhill most of the way; so much so that they had all to help to hold back the cart, which travelled so rapidly that Bert found it difficult to keep pace with the others and frequently broke into a trot to ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... it The old dog went along soberly and without much effort, save when we came to hills or sandy places, when I always got out and ran on behind. Uncle Eb showed me how to brake the wheels with a long stick going downhill. I remember how it hit the dog's heels at the first down grade, and how he ran to keep out of the way of it We were going like mad in half a minute, Uncle Eb coming after us calling to the dog. Fred only ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... "It's lucky that it's downhill, Percy, or we should never find our way to the water's edge. If we keep descending, we ...
— The Young Franc Tireurs - And Their Adventures in the Franco-Prussian War • G. A. Henty
... member of his audience who had passed a humorous remark at his expense—"just like I'll jump you, stranger, if you don't keep your trap closed. I say who can read those secrets, who can harness those forces? The man who can has got the world by the tail and a downhill pull. Now then, for the plot of my story, and it will pay you to do a week of listening in the next five minutes. Awhile ago an eminent scientist, unknown to me or to my partner, Mr. Stoner, came into our office, which is at ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... Jack. I would like your temperate drinker to pause, and reflect upon the fact, that the quantity of brandy or rum that he took at a drink, when he commenced this downhill course, has been gradually increased; so that in the second year, what had been quite sufficient to please his palate and produce all the desired effects in the first, was then insipidly small; and more so in the third year, if, mayhap, he could with any decency lay claim to the title of temperate ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... daughter, Balancin loved hunting, and it was his custom to spend several mornings every week chasing the boars which abounded in the mountains a few miles from the city. One day, rushing downhill as fast as he could go, he put his foot into a hole and fell, rolling into a rocky pit of brambles. The king's wounds were not very severe, but his face and hands were cut and torn, while his feet were in a worse plight still, ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Various
... moved; received the impression but was not sensitive to it; felt the tug but did not respond to the pull. Rather, indeed, was apt to be a little impatient." It is not necessary to expand. Keggo was fast going downhill. Rosalie could have wept to see the downhill signs; but somehow, seeing them, did not weep; was not moved... rather, indeed... impatient. She had ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... level—that is, successful and easy—the saying enforces the not less solemn truth that sin deceives as to its results, and that the path of wrong-doing, which is flowery and smooth at first, grows rapidly thorny, and goes fast downhill, and ends at last in a cul-de-sac, of which death is the only outlet. We are not to trust our own consciences, except as enlightened by God's Word. We are not to listen to sin's lies, but to fix it well in our minds that there is only one way which leads to ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... bring before the House, but that propriety cannot be contingent upon some other proceeding of another person, quite unconnected with it. It was a poor tu quoque which has got him into a scrape, and will contribute to the downhill impulsion of the Government; it is a fresh bit of discredit thrown upon them. John Russell too has been a personal antagonist of the Bishop of Exeter, and should have been the last man to attack him in this irregular way. Out of ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... those putts in which it is not all plain sailing from the place where the ball lies to the hole. The line of the putt may be uphill or it may be downhill, or the green may slope all the way from one side to the other, or first from one and then the other. There is no end to the tricks and difficulties of a good sporting green, and the more of ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... Randolph was driving through our town yesterday and was passing Captain Jones's sample-room, where the colonel lately shot Moses Widlake in the street, the horses took alarm and started violently downhill. The colonel kept his seat till rounding the corner by the Clayville Bank, when his wheels came into collision with that edifice, and our gallant townsman was violently shot out. He is now lying in a very ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... he said, softly. "I could hear no words, but I know that you have been wise. Between you and me," he added, in a lower tone, "she is going downhill. She is in with the wrong lot here. She can't seem to keep away from them. They are on the very fringe of Bohemia, a great deal nearer the arm of the law than makes for respectable society. The man to whom I saw ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the desert at night is a relatively gentle breeze that comes down from the cool mountain slopes toward the ocean. It tends to blow the lighter particles of sand along in a regular dune, rolling it over and over downhill, leaving the heavier particles behind. This is reversed in the daytime. As the heat increases toward noon, the wind comes rushing up from the ocean to fill the vacuum caused by the rapidly ascending currents of hot air that rise from the overheated pampas. During the early afternoon this wind reaches ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... Scarnham lay at the further end of the street called Finkleway. It was a queer, open space which sloped downhill from the centre of the ridge on which the middle of the town was built to the valley through which the little river meandered. Save where the streets, and the road leading out to the open country and Ellersdeane cut ...
— The Chestermarke Instinct • J. S. Fletcher
... life has soon or late a tragic end. It is only a question of how long it can hold out against its foes. But Rag's life was proof that once a rabbit passes out of his youth he is likely to outlive his prime and be killed only in the last third of life, the downhill third ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton
... paces of them before they discovered us; they cocked their ears for an instant, and both rolled over at the same moment to the front shot. Away dashed the herd, trumpeting and screaming as they rushed through the high grass. For a few moments my game leg grew quite lively, as it was all downhill work, and I caught up an elephant and killed him with the left-hand barrel. Getting a spare gun, I was lucky enough to get between two elephants who were running abreast towards the jungle, and I bagged them by a right and left shot. Off went the herd at a slapping pace through the jungle, ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... cause, as shoes which are too narrow across the toes, or not long enough, or those with high heels which throw the toes forward so that they are compressed by the toe of the boot, especially in walking downhill. ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume I (of VI) • Various
... westward. Mr. Olmsted has given a vivid description of the desolate state of parts of Georgia and the Carolinas, once among the richest specimens of soil and cultivation in the world; and even the more recently colonized Alabama, as he shows, is rapidly following in the same downhill track. To slavery, therefore, it is a matter of life and death to find fresh fields for the employment of slave labor. Confine it to the present States, and the owners of slave property will either be speedily ruined, or will have to find means of reforming and renovating their agricultural ...
— The Contest in America • John Stuart Mill
... turned and galloped back, and since he had been one of the first in the advance, he was naturally one of the last to retreat. There had been a rare burst of a downhill mile or two, and his horse, unfed and unwatered within the last twelve hours, was in need of mercy. He rode the poor beast tenderly, caressing him as he went, and looking up he was aware of an officer in staff uniform, who was rounding up the stragglers. ...
— VC — A Chronicle of Castle Barfield and of the Crimea • David Christie Murray
... Mrs. Batty was right: it was like walking with a dumb man. They left the wood and walked downhill beside a ploughed field, and in the shelter of a high wall. An open lane brought them to a gate, the gate opened on a rough road through yet another wood of larch and spruce and fir. The road was deeply rutted and they walked in single file until Charles turned, saying, 'This is what I've brought ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... what bitterness yours has known, unless it's the bitterness of a bad conscience. Now I've come here to-day"—she raised her voice to a note of warning—"to give you a chance. To make you think, by pointing out the path you are treading. You are young, and it is my duty to let no young person go downhill without one warning word. You have brought much evil on our village—why you, a stranger, should be bent on making us all unhappy I can't imagine. You hypocritically try to pretend that what plain ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... existed in London; at night the streets were infested with brutal ruffians, and, as late as Queen Anne's time, by bands of "fine gentlemen" not less brutal, who amused themselves by overturning sedan chairs, rolling women downhill in barrels, and compelling men to dance jigs, under the stimulus of repeated pricks from a circle of sword points, until the victims fell fainting from exhaustion. Duels were frequent, on the slightest provocation. Highwaymen abounded both in the city and without, and, unless one went ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... direction, hopping and halting and wiggling his nose at every bush, till he heard our approach and rose on his hind legs to listen. He gave a great jump as Unk Wunk hove into sight, covered all over with the dead leaves that his barbed quills had picked up on his way downhill, and lay quiet where he thought the ferns ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... you'll show us why the water doesn't run downhill in our bean patch, as it ought to do," ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... beneficial in latitudes where frosts are severe and long continued, is just the reverse in the far South. There our snow is rain, and the upturned furrows are washed down into a smooth, sticky mass by the winter storms. On steep hillsides, much of the soil would ooze away with every rain, or slide downhill en masse. In the South, therefore, unless a clay soil is to be planted at once, it must not be disturbed in the fall, and it is well if it can be protected by stubble or litter, which shields it from the ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... by," grunted Dick, "though enough. I have done twenty and one score once, but that was somewhat downhill." ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... as we paused to gain breath at the bottom. "Now you've come there'll be four of us to run downhill. We shall nearly stretch ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... returned the old man, "This house here belonged to the same family at one time; though when I was born it was another branch of the family, second cousins or something, that lived in it. But even then it was something on to the downhill road, I believe." ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... deer usually works downhill, a hunted Grizzly climbs. Jack knew nothing of the country, but he did know that he wanted to get away from that mob, so he sought the roughest ...
— Monarch, The Big Bear of Tallac • Ernest Thompson Seton
... the figure of Isabel Rivers. My first impressions of her were of a rather ugly and ungainly, extraordinarily interesting schoolgirl with a beautiful quick flush under her warm brown skin, who said and did amusing and surprising things. When first I saw her she was riding a very old bicycle downhill with her feet on the fork of the frame—it seemed to me to the public danger, but afterwards I came to understand the quality of her nerve better—and on the third occasion she was for her own private satisfaction climbing a tree. On the intervening occasion we had what seems now ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... time. Water, of course, flows because of its own pressure; so does ice, only the pressure has to be vastly greater. A drop of water on the table does not flow, but, pile it high enough, and it will. The old ice sea flowed mainly south, not because it was downhill in that direction, but because the accumulation of ice and snow at the North was so great. If through any climatic changes, the snowfall were ever again to be so great that more snow should fall in winter than could melt in summer, after the lapse of thousands of years, we should ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... could see a clear space ahead of him, and in a little, sinking on his knees on a bank, was peering downhill to an old-fashioned, Jacobean manor-house, from whose chimney smoke was lazily wreathing upward. Between him and the house a meadow sloped for a hundred yards, and the back of the house was bounded ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... down into the city again, taking a new route past the Northern Club, a lofty and unsightly building, whose members are notoriously hospitable, and much given to whist and euchre. Downhill a short distance, and we come to the Albert Barracks, where newly-arrived immigrants are housed, and where most of our sometime shipmates now are. They are comfortably quartered here for the present, but no incitement is held out to them to remain long, and every inducement ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... is under the ash bough there," said the weasel, "and when you are outside the thicket turn to your left and go downhill, and you will come to the timber—and meantime I will send for the dragon-fly, ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... when they found out you had to dress especial for it. They was willing to listen to anything like that if New York society was really mad about it, even if it conflicted with lifelong habits—no one in Red Gap but small boys having ever slid downhill. ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... shortens the longest road, and Joan, whose return journey from the holy well was for the most part downhill, soon found herself back again in Penzance. The fire of devotion still actuated her movements, and she walked fearlessly, doubting nothing, to the post-office. There would be a letter to-day; she knew ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... start and could run downhill better than I could, especially in the dark. It seemed to me that every step I went plunging out into space. My empty stomach became demoralized, the blood rushed to my head. "Gosh dern a cow, anyway!" By the time we had reached Westbury's and started ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... in life's journey are generally awful places. We meet there, as a rule, the devil and his angels—they tear us and rend us, they shake us to our very depths with awful and overpowering temptation; if we yield, it is all over with us, we rush at headlong speed downhill. ...
— A Girl in Ten Thousand • L. T. Meade
... in the shaft. Each morning on awaking I discovered that I had slipped a couple of yards downhill. I made further full acquaintance, too, with the completeness of the doctor's snoring capabilities. Down in that shaft he must have introduced a new orgy of nasal sounds. It commenced with a gentle snuffling that rather resembled ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... from some purple gears? And how the sceptres witness whence they got Their briar-wood, crackling through the atmosphere's Foul smoke, by princely perjuries, kept hot? Forgive me, ghosts of patriots,—Brutus, thou, Who trailest downhill into life again Thy blood-weighed cloak, to indict me with thy slow Reproachful eyes!—for being taught in vain That, while the illegitimate Caesars show Of meaner stature than the first full strain ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... than any that can be found elsewhere. Steadily climbing like some mountain railway, it reaches at last the short tunnel on the summit level, and then dashes out into the blinding blaze of a new sunshine. The other goes merrily enough, at first, downhill, but at last it comes to the edge of the abyss, and there it stops, but the traveller does not. He goes over; and nobody can see the darkness into which ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... rights are well mixed up all through this region," said old Vittum, who had been spokesman for his fellows on her first meeting with them. He gave her a demure wink. "The main idea is, God is making this water run downhill just now, and it doesn't seem right for mortal man to stop it ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... time to be going back. She made the remark again and again, but, every time, the princess begged her to go on just a little farther and a little farther; reminding her that it was much easier to go downhill, and saying that when they did turn they would be at home in a moment. So on and on they did go, now to look at a group of ferns over whose tops a stream was pouring in a watery arch, now to pick a shining stone from a rock ...
— The Princess and the Goblin • George MacDonald
... Imperial Light Horse that Boers must have been lying there almost under the feet of our men, if they did not actually join the ranks for a time to escape detection. But a sound greeted their ears at that moment, and knowing what it meant, they scampered downhill without waiting to hear more. It was a ringing British cheer followed by strident commands to "Fix bayonets and give the devils cold steel." Begun by Major Karri Davis, the order ran along from Imperial Light ...
— Four Months Besieged - The Story of Ladysmith • H. H. S. Pearse
... over rough ground; though he could not help reflecting that he could never have found it in his conscience to hustle a horse of hers as she hustled his. There were two or three valleys to cross, which gave the animals a little respite, but not much, for Lady Eleanor went equally fast, uphill, downhill and on the level. So that when they arrived at the Hall Colonel George, after seeing Lady Eleanor run in to the children, only looked at his horse's heaving flanks, shook his head, and led him off to the stable to look after him himself. There he heard the whole story from ...
— The Drummer's Coat • J. W. Fortescue
... as Greif was already going out of the gate. In a trice the collars were on the horses again, the traces hitched, the reins unwound, and Karl was seated upon the box. He was glad for himself, though he thought it a very long pull for the horses. The road went downhill over most of the way, however, and Karl reflected that when his master was once in the carriage behind him, he could drive as slowly as he pleased. Just as he was ready, Frau von Sigmundskron and Hilda appeared ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... the main point, but not a stone of the many he smelled under turned him out a cougar or a big-horn. Hunting was over for that day, and so much time had been consumed that Two Arrows felt like running to make it up. He did but walk, however, and as the road was now all the way downhill, like a bad man's life, he walked easily. The great gorge widened until its broken walls stretched away to the right and left, and the eager-hearted explorer came out from among the scattered rocks at a point from which he could suddenly ...
— Two Arrows - A Story of Red and White • William O. Stoddard
... way-off the highroad now, and down dark defiles that set the camels moaning, while their riders yelled alternately to Allah and apostrophized their beasts in the monosyllabic camel language. Camels hate downhill work, especially when loaded, and fall unless told not to in a speech they understand, in that ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... another apartment higher up the street promising lively sport for which we were disinclined at that hour, we moved laboriously into the chestnut woods overhead. Fine old timber, part of that mysterious Ciminian forest which still covers a large tract, from within whose ample shade one looks downhill towards the distant Orte across a broiling stretch of country. There were golden orioles here, calling to each other from the tree-tops. My friend, having excavated himself a couch among the troublesome ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... a good wife, luck, and a friend with insight and skill, pulled Aleck Gray out of that bottomless pit, the gutter. Aleck had been a bookkeeper; but he didn't get on well with his employers, lost his job, got to drinking, and went so far downhill that his wife had to take their two children and go home to her people several hundred miles away. Aleck finally drifted into a bureau for homeless men, where the agent became interested in him and worked with him for six months, getting him job after job, which ...
— Broken Homes - A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment • Joanna C. Colcord
... into his seat, clicked his tongue, and we went downhill. The brake squeaked horribly from time to time. At the foot he eased off the noisy mechanism and said, turning half round on ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... the outside, but quite as likely on account of the mirage which so often greets one in the region thereabouts. A much later explorer tells how the curious atmospheric effects made the land seem to tip up in front of him in whichever direction he walked, making level land and even downhill look like uphill, so uplifting is ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... long black tunnel, you see. It's downhill to Christmas, of course, and then uphill all the way to the summer holidays. But the uphill part's ...
— Jimbo - A Fantasy • Algernon Blackwood
... must be cut up and conveyed to the dam. No professional lumberman better understands how to transport lumber to a desired place than beavers. They realise the value of water transportation and thoroughly appreciate that trees can only be removed downhill. From tame beavers we have learned that they remove smaller limbs by seizing them with their teeth, throwing the loose end over their shoulder, and then dragging them ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... and a little ivory cross, Merle grasped a poker, and Clive was armed with the hatchet from the wood-pile. So long as they were on the uplands and could see the stars they marched along tolerably bravely, but presently Tinkers' Lane turned downhill, and, like most of its kind in Devon, ran between high fern-grown banks, on the tops of which grew trees whose boughs almost met overhead and made an archway. To plunge down here was like taking a dip into Dante's ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil
... The moon-jeep crunched and clanked loudly over the trail that led downhill. There was no sound outside, of course. There was no air. But the noise inside the moon-vehicle was notable. The steam-motor, in particular, ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... soon forgotten, and the boys dashed off downhill as hard as they could go, neither of them hearing a shout, nor seeing the little monk come panting up, to stand gazing ruefully after them and wiping the great drops of perspiration off ...
— The King's Sons • George Manville Fenn
... accident. Thinking a ride would be beneficial to her health, when the rest of the party drove one afternoon to Sommieres, she accompanied them on horseback. She had not a proper saddle, and her horse being eager to keep up with the carriage set off downhill at so rapid a rate as to throw her to the ground. The cap of one knee was displaced by the fall, and, although she soon recovered so as to be able to walk, the limb continued to be subject to weakness ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... attained the summit of the great dune, the sight that met you almost took your breath away: as far as the eye could reach, the bluest of skies melting into the bluest of seas, which broke its foam-flecked edge against the flat, brown reefs that fringed the shore. Then, downhill—with a trip and a flounder that sent the sand man-high—and at last you were on what Laura and Pin thought the most wonderful beach in the world. What a variety of things was there! Whitest, purest sand, hot to the touch as a zinc roof in summer; rocky ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... first volley from the English line had mowed his soldiers down like ripe wheat. At the second volley the ranks broke and the ground was thick strewn with the dead. When the English charged, the French fled in wildest panic downhill for the St. Charles. Wounded and faint, Montcalm on his black charger was swept swiftly along St. Louis road in the blind stampede of retreat. Near the walls a ball passed through his groins. Two soldiers caught him from falling, and steadied him on either side of his ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... mare took fright; we were abruptly swung forward, and, had I not—mindful of the Colonel's warning—been "sitting tight," I should undoubtedly have been thrown out. We dashed downhill at a terrific rate, our mare mad with terror, and on peering over my shoulder I saw, to my horror, the white steed tearing along not fifty yards behind us. I was now able to get a vivid impression of the monstrous beast. Although the night was dark, a strong, lurid glow, which seemed to emanate ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... can swim along a bit, but the first hundred, I shall never forget it! Afterwards it is just the same; the proportions are changed, that is all. The first twenty thousand is very uphill work, the second is on the flat, the third is going downhill—it brings itself along." ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... years ago she had the sum then standing transferred to the boy's name, telling me frankly, at the time, that she did so to save trouble, in case anything happened to her. I fancy, from what she said, that for the last year or two she had been going downhill. I had a chat with her, the last time she came in. She told me that she had been consumptive, and that it was for the sake of her health ...
— With Kitchener in the Soudan - A Story of Atbara and Omdurman • G. A. Henty
... and dropping into a chair. "After the war is over I shall repent and take up godly ways. For the present I am a lost soul, and given over to Satan. Andy, the lie I told yesterday about the river road was the beginning of my downfall. How easily we glide downhill." ...
— Then Marched the Brave • Harriet T. Comstock
... clearly apparent. Since, in the eyes of the tailor, the property of individual Frenchmen belongs to all the French, he, the tailor, has a right to at least the quota which belongs to him.—One travels fast and far on this downhill road, for every mob considers that this means immediate enjoyment, and enjoyment according to its own ideas. There is no care for neighbors or for consequences, even when imminent and physical, and in twenty places the confiscated ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... rising road they sped as though downhill, and the driver's spirits rose with the exhilarating speed. The snow groaned ceaselessly under the prow of the pulk, and the frosty creaking under the hoofs of the flying Ren was like the gritting of mighty ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... talk about it a bit. You see, I know 'tis all my fault—I know that, an' with that we can let it be. But before I went an' took this woman—Hanne, I mean—before that it all began ... slowly it began, slowly—but downhill right along. First thing, a good bonehandled whip broke. After that, I remember it right well, I drove over my dog an' he died. 'Twas the best little dog I had. Then, one right after another, three o' my horses ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... cart along a country road. You turn to the city, and see children, dwarfed by distance into pigmies, at play about suburban doorsteps; you have a glimpse upon a thoroughfare where people are densely moving; you note ridge after ridge of chimney-stacks running downhill one behind another, and church spires rising bravely from the sea of roofs. At one of the innumerable windows you watch a figure moving; on one of the multitude of roofs you watch clambering chimney-sweeps. The wind takes a run and scatters the smoke; bells are ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... shooting at a mark with his bow and arrows, but the moment he saw the ball, which was made of glass whose blues and greens and whites, all frosted over, kept changing one into the other, he flung down his bow, and stooped to pick the ball up. But as he did so it began to roll very gently downhill. The boy could not let it roll away, when it was so close to him, so he gave chase. The ball seemed always within his grasp, yet he could never catch it; it went quicker and quicker, and the boy grew more and more excited. That time he almost touched it—no, ...
— The Brown Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... horseman, pulled in quietly to the side of the road. And Ruth did the same. She was too well trained in the things of the hills not to know that if there was trouble, then it was no time to be weakening horses' knees in mad and useless dashes downhill. ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher
... thoughts. No ulterior object has ever been present to me in this pursuit. My ambition is fully gratified by the satisfactory completion of my task, and I am now happy to go on jog-trot at Botany till the end of my days—downhill, in one sense, all the way. I shall never have such another object to work for, nor shall I feel the want of it...As it is, the craving of thirty years is satisfied, and I now look back on life in a way I never could previously. ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... "Me? I'm going downhill fast. Let's have it before I hit rock-bottom and really get around to reacting. And let's have a few straight answers. You could have by-passed the first block that makes Timmy an idiot. O. ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... come next Woodchuck day, and could see to read without glasses. He had been ailing all his life, ever since the fever he took in the war. He used to remark triumphantly that he had now outlived six doctors who had each given him but a year to live; 'and the seventh is going downhill fast, so I hear!' This last was his never-failing answer to the attempts of my conscientious mother and anxious, dutiful father to check the old man's reckless indifference to any of the rules ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... beating, he felt that he now hated Odette, he would gladly have crushed those eyes which, a moment ago, he had loved so dearly, have torn the blood into those lifeless cheeks. He continued to climb with Mme. Verdurin, that is to say that each step took him farther from Odette, who was going downhill, and in the other direction. A second passed and it was many hours since she had left him. The painter remarked to Swann that Napoleon III had eclipsed himself immediately after Odette. "They had obviously arranged it between them," he added; "they must have agreed to ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... dinner in the shade of a tree by the wayside. A hundred yards from the road was a dense copse of undergrowth and bushes on the edge of the forest. Off to the east flowed the majestic Rhine, a league distant, and to the north ran the road like a white ribbon, stretching downhill to the valley and up again to the top of another ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... and less resistance to her tendency to let go, to leave loose ends ungathered, to allow opportunities to slip out of her grasp, to be inexact and unsystematic. There was urgent need of a strong hand at Dinard's, if the business was to be kept from running gradually downhill, and Gabriella became convinced, as the days passed, that hers was the only hand in the house strong enough to check the perilous descent to failure. Her plans were made, her scheme arranged, but, as Madame was both jealous and suspicious, she saw that she must move ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... debtors, no more cage for the old, acknowledged prison-breaker; but the sun and the wind play freely over the foundations of the jail. Nor is this the only memorial that the pavement keeps of former days. The ancient burying-ground of Edinburgh lay behind St. Giles's Church, running downhill to the Cowgate and covering the site of the present Parliament House. It has disappeared as utterly as the prison or the Luckenbooths; and for those ignorant of its history, I know only one token that remains. In the Parliament Close, trodden daily underfoot by advocates, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... by Ralph's side, and they started. For half an hour they kept on, then Ralph cried, "Halt. I am certain I am going downhill, it may be because I have changed my direction, or it may be because there is a change in the lay of the ground. What ...
— One of the 28th • G. A. Henty
... thought that he would never sink. First the imagination is inflamed, then the wish begins to draw the soul to the sin, then conscience pulls it back, then the fatal decision is made, and the deed is done. Sometimes all the stages are hurried quickly through, and a man spins downhill as cheerily and fast as a diligence down the Alps. Sometimes, as the coast of a country may sink an inch in a century until long miles of the flat seabeach are under water, and towers and cities are buried beneath the barren waves, so our lives may be gradually lowered, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... November 25 we were tired of waiting, and started again. On the 26th we were overtaken by a raging blizzard. In the thick, driving snow we could see absolutely nothing; but we felt that, contrary to what we had expected — namely, a further ascent — we were going rapidly downhill. The hypsometer that day showed a descent of 600 feet. We continued our march next day in a strong wind and thick, driving snow. Our faces were badly frozen. There was no danger, but we simply could see nothing. Next day, ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... gently and looked aloft. The night, before so starry, was now clouded over. The troopers—I could hear their horses' hoofs above the whoops and yells of their chorusing—were winding downhill by a sunken way within ten yards of me. A gravel path lay between me and the hedge overlooking it. This I saw by the faint upcast rays of the lanterns they had lit for guidance. I tip-toed across to the hedge, and, peering over, was relieved of my last doubt: for at the tail ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... were Queery and Drolly, contemptuously so called, and they answered to these names. I remember Cree best as a battered old weaver, who bent forward as he walked, with his arms hanging limp as if ready to grasp the shafts of the barrow behind which it was his life to totter uphill and downhill, a rope of yarn suspended round his shaking neck, and fastened to the shafts, assisting him to bear the yoke and slowly strangling him. By and by there came a time when the barrow and the weaver seemed both palsy-stricken, and Cree, gasping ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... burning zone, another fanciful obstacle beset the mariner who proposed to undertake a long voyage upon the outer ocean. It had been observed that a ship which disappears in the offing seems to be going downhill; and many people feared that if they should happen thus to descend too far away from the land they could never get back again. Men accustomed to inland sea travel did not feel this dread within the regions of which they had experience, but it assailed them whenever ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... taking her with him to the forest, tied to the sledge, and wrapt in the remnants of his old sheepskin and a shawl. Uphill and downhill over the hummocks bumped the sledge, until they arrived on level ground, where the slanting rays of the sun, endlessly reflected from the snow-crystals, fell into their eyes. ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... present. It lies, then, in the very nature of our existence to take the form of constant motion, and to offer no possibility of our ever attaining the rest for which we are always striving. We are like a man running downhill, who cannot keep on his legs unless he runs on, and will inevitably fall if he stops; or, again, like a pole balanced on the tip of one's finger; or like a planet, which would fall into its sun ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism • Arthur Schopenhauer
... progress, during which the road seemed better, and they appeared to get along some distance before there was another jerk up and another jerk down, and then a series of jumps as if they were going downhill; and then the cart gave a big bump and ...
— In the King's Name - The Cruise of the "Kestrel" • George Manville Fenn
... mind. It was part of his job to protect his employers' property; that was what he was there for. He had taken ordinary precautions, too, so far as the dam was concerned. But he had entirely overlooked the fact, as obvious as that water runs downhill, that if his canal were cut at the coulee its contents must flow back into the river. Everything was now set back. With this second outrage land sales would stop altogether. It was a sickening jolt. He thought of the questions he would have to answer. He would be asked why he hadn't done this. ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... Bertin frequently during the two years that followed. From time to time I saw her, always with some wonder, for she preserved to the end that delicate and superb quality which so distinguished her. The scandal of the brawl was the small thing that was needed to turn Bertin's course downhill; almost from that day one could mark his decline. It was not a matter of incidents; it was simply that within a year most of us were passing him without recognition, and there was talk of debts that troubled him. He had deteriorated, too; whereas ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... throw into the drive. Breed too was thrown, but the deer was turned again and running with less than half his former speed, one hind leg powerless. Peg was angling across to turn him still another time but Breed overhauled him first and slashed at the other leg, and as the deer rolled downhill the three-legged coyote dodged the churning hoofs and ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts
... has not been made here. Those that flame from the hill slope above Portland station only succeed in emphasizing the general bleakness of their surroundings. At Easton clock tower a street called "Straits" turns left and east and presently a broad road leads downhill to the right to the gates of Pennsylvania Castle, built, it is said, at the suggestion of George III by John Penn, Governor of Portland, and a descendant of the great Penn in whose honour it was named. A narrow ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... the cause of tariff reform was going rapidly downhill. Austen Chamberlain, the son of Joseph Chamberlain, strove hard to keep it to the fore, and frequently at intervals in the House of Commons the protectionist proposals were brought forward. Lloyd George had a characteristic word ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... Ireland, to Trinity Bay in Newfoundland; and except upon one sharp incline about 200 miles from Valentia, I am not quite sure that it would even be necessary to put the skid on, so gentle are the ascents and descents upon that long route. From Valentia the road would lie downhill for about 200 miles, to the point at which the bottom is now covered by I,700 fathoms of sea-water. Then would come the central plain, more than a thousand miles wide, the inequalities of the surface of which would be ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... finished, would cross the muskeg with a slight ascent; but the bank sank as they worked at it, and the track now led downhill toward its end. The foreman failed to remember this in his ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... day, and not many miles before reaching our destination we looked back upon the downhill route traversed which, so far as one could see, might have been a dead level. At a distance of nearly twenty miles Gafsa was plainly visible—white buildings piercing a dusky line of palms—an hour's walk, it seemed. I observed in the brushwood a couple of bustards, their heads peering above ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... wisps of hair over the bald top of his head, the spots on his waistcoat, the mud on his boots, and again as she watched Grace make this summary, love and protection for that unhappy man filled her heart. For unhappy he was! She saw at once that he had had a long slide downhill since his last visit to her. He was frightened—frightened immediately now of Grace and the room and the physical world—but frightened also behind these things at some spectre all his own. Grace sat down and tried to recover herself. She began to talk in ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... the wind that fanned it. He learned that all Genessee was out, fighting to keep the flames from sweeping down across the valley. Three hundred men were fighting it, the supervisor told him. They would check it on the downhill slope, where it would burn more slowly; and if the wind did not change in the night it would probably be brought under control by morning. After that the supervisor very discreetly inquired after the welfare ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... a pretty hard time this next 100 miles I expect. If it was difficult to drag downhill over this belt, it will probably be a good deal more difficult to drag up. Luckily the cracks are fairly distinct, though we only see our cairns when less than a mile away; 45 miles to the next depot and 6 days' food in hand—then pick up 7 days' food (T. -22 deg.) and 90 miles to ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... my cabman, for no reason whatever, suddenly began to beat his horse in the hatefulest way, leaning down with his whip and striking the horse underneath, as we were going downhill on the Rue de Freycinet. I screamed at him, but he pretended not to hear. The cab rocked from side to side, the horse was galloping, and this brute beating him like a madman. It made me wild. I was being bounced around like corn ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... the train ran downhill with brakes on and steam shut off, he put his head out of the window and one by one saw the old familiar landmarks in the dusk. They stared at him like dead faces in a dream. Queer, sharp feelings, half poignant, half sweet, stirred in ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... the native huts and without them. It was downhill going, as the village, in African fashion, was built on the side of a rise which culminated in the chief's hut, while Mwezi lived, very close to the source of the river I have mentioned. We emerged ...
— The Priest's Tale - Pere Etienne - From "The New Decameron", Volume III. • Robert Keable
... beginning to get into good form, so that these habitual tumbles were taken with the best grace we could muster. I surprised myself during the afternoon, when my turn came as forerunner, by covering two and a half miles at a jog-trot without a break. The grade was slightly downhill and the sledges moved along of their own accord, accelerated by jerks from the dogs, gliding at right angles to the knife-edge crests of ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... does not belong to it, when in practice and in its grasp the commune and department cease to be private companies in order to become administrative compartments.—According to the opportunity and the temptation, it glides downhill, now toward the surrender of its duty, and now toward the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... end of the perambulator, and looked at that other fellow's baby. In the shade of the hood, with the frilly clothes, it seemed to him lying with its head downhill. It had scratched its snub nose and bumpy forehead, and it stared up at its mother with blue eyes, which seemed to have no underlids ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... and invigorated by nothing but the light, but, having that at least to strengthen us, we made at once for the main range, knowing very well that, once we were over it, it would be downhill all the way, and seeing upon our maps that there were houses and living men high in the further Andorran valley, which was not deserted like this vale of the Aston, but inhabited: full, that is, ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... there was sensitiveness left in the thick nose, humour in the eyes, though they so often watered; the face had gone to flabbiness at last, but not without some lines and dents, as if the head had resisted the body for a space before the whole man rolled contentedly downhill. ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... calm, but her mind was working rapidly: The wagon was in the lean-to! Could she get him into it? The road was downhill.... Almost ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... brothers went on till they came to the top of a high mountain, where there lay a very great round rock, or a mighty boulder. And being full of fun, they turned it over with great sticks, saying to it, "Now let us run a race!" Then it rolled downhill till it stopped at the foot, they rushing along by it all the time. And when it rested they jeered it, and bade it race with them ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... cough suddenly increased, and he began to go downhill so rapidly as to cause much uneasiness to his friends. General Keith urged him to go up to a little place on the side of the mountains which had been quite ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... train ran downhill with brakes on and steam shut off, he put his head out of the window and one by one saw the old familiar landmarks in the dusk. They stared at him like dead faces in a dream. Queer, sharp feelings, half poignant, half sweet, stirred in ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... have been lying there almost under the feet of our men, if they did not actually join the ranks for a time to escape detection. But a sound greeted their ears at that moment, and knowing what it meant, they scampered downhill without waiting to hear more. It was a ringing British cheer followed by strident commands to "Fix bayonets and give the devils cold steel." Begun by Major Karri Davis, the order ran along from Imperial Light Horse to Carbineers, who had not a bayonet amongst them, ...
— Four Months Besieged - The Story of Ladysmith • H. H. S. Pearse
... attainments he had preserved unspoiled a certain natural modesty, which led him to attribute his advancement to accident or fate. He once told me that he owed all his success in life to the fact that, as a country boy in Ohio, while driving his father's cart downhill at daybreak, he fell asleep and was jolted off his seat, breaking his leg. During the weeks of enforced seclusion that followed he taught himself to read, and developed a studious turn of mind, which, his leg having been permanently weakened by ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... a picturesque group near; these belonged at one time to the stables, now removed. Not far off is the bamboo garden, in a flourishing condition, with large clumps of feathery bamboos bravely enduring our rough climate; in another part is a succession of terraces, through which a stream runs downhill through a number of basins linked by a circling channel; the basins are covered with water-lilies, and the whole is laid out in imitation of a Japanese garden. Alpine plants are specially tended in another ...
— The Kensington District - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... behind! In a moment my mind was made up; and, leaving the gasping young groom to look after the horse and cart, I set off to run too. It was only a chance, of course; but in this weather the train might be late. It was all the way downhill. I thought I could do it, and I did. My feet were balled with snow; I was hotter than I had been for years; I was completely out of breath; but when I puffed into the little road-side station, five minutes after the train was ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... come out of the shop, and enter the car, and be borne swiftly away into the downhill of palpable dusk, with Ursula and Birkin! What an adventure life seemed at this moment! How deeply, how suddenly she envied Ursula! Life for her was so quick, and an open door—so reckless as if not only this world, but the world that was ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... taken with the best grace we could muster. I surprised myself during the afternoon, when my turn came as forerunner, by covering two and a half miles at a jog-trot without a break. The grade was slightly downhill and the sledges moved along of their own accord, accelerated by jerks from the dogs, gliding at right angles to the ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... the same day I had an interview with the ex-Khedive Ismail, who had gone downhill. He always had a certain difficulty in collecting his ideas and putting them into words, but on this occasion it went farther than I had previously known. He wished to impress on me the necessity for defending Egypt against the ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... save hunger to fear so long as they were in the open country. They marched on, breaking into a trot whenever their course led downhill, during the whole of the day on which their retreat began. Each man still had a small supply of meat left, and portions of this they ate raw as they proceeded. At dusk the foremost of the Balotsi were some distance behind, and after marching for about two hours longer the ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... light. It seemed as light as day, only soft, mellow, and the air held a transparent sheen. He ran up the bare ridges and down the smooth slopes, and, like a goat, jumped from rock to rock. In this light he knew his way and lost no time looking for a trail. He crossed the divide and then had all downhill before him. Swiftly he descended, almost always sure of his memory of the landmarks. He did not remember having studied them in the ascent, yet here they were, even in changed light, familiar to his sight. What he had once seen was pictured ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... swiftly descended, and raced after the guide. He came upon the goat at last, but winded as he was, and with the sweat in his eyes, he shot too high, cutting the skin above the spine. The goat plunged downhill and the hunters plunged after him, pursuing the elusive animal ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... foot of the street on which the Bobbsey house stood. The street went downhill to the tracks, and the railroad passed through what Charley had called ...
— The Bobbsey Twins in the Great West • Laura Lee Hope
... least, was our conclusion, from the absence of any subsequent motion or movement on board, the deck being as steady now as any platform on dry land, although rather downhill on one side, from the vessel heeling ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... half shout got through to alert the men on the jungle floor. True to their nature, the rock apes, now streaming downhill, were coughing their challenges, advertising their attack. And it was only that peculiarity of their species ...
— Voodoo Planet • Andrew North
... poultry demanded consideration. As we left them behind, the agitation of two led horses necessitated a still further reduction of speed. We lost such time as I had made, and more also. Still, we were going downhill, and, as if impatient of the check, the car sprang forward.... We rose from the bottom with the smooth rush of a non-stop elevator. As we breasted the rise, I saw another and steeper dale before us. The road was ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... with the disappearance of the focus for its concerted bloodlust. The police asked many questions but none of the right ones. Finally, Cam, Ev, and Curt escaped to the waiting limo and started the long slow crawl downhill. ...
— Telempathy • Vance Simonds
... morning. He took his guest up a rough mountain road in a light carriage drawn by two ponies, and when some distance from the plain below, turned the carriage round and allowed the ponies to run away—as it seemed—downhill. In the terror of approaching disaster, the atheist was lifted out of his reasoned convictions and prayed aloud for help, when the colonel reined in his ponies, and with the remark that the whole drive ...
— The Loss of the SS. Titanic • Lawrence Beesley
... directly west and in a mile reaches Tillington, which has a Transitional church modernized and practically rebuilt by the Earl of Egremont; here are several interesting tombs and brasses. A divergence two miles further will take us downhill across the Rother to Selham (with a station close to the village). The Norman and Early English church has a chancel arch with finely carved and ornamented capitals. Proceeding westwards between high banks of red sandstone our road soon approaches Cowdray Park, across which it runs without ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... always in an atmosphere of fried oil and roasted chestnuts and baked pine-cones; and presently turn left into a still narrower street, with tailors and boot-makers and smiths all at work in the open air; and pass through the Piazzetta Mondragone, and turn again to the left, but this time downhill; then lose yourself amid filthy little alleys, where the scent of oil and chestnuts and pine-cones is stronger than ever; then emerge on a little terrace where there is a noble view of the bay and of Capri; then turn abruptly between walls overhung with ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... sometimes felt more of pity than of amusement as she sat with an expression of terror on her face, helplessly watching certain unruly individuals taking their bits in their teeth and galloping madly downhill. On one occasion, when he sat beside her, a young man, who shall be nameless, was suddenly heard to remark in the midst of ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... about it in those dear, damp days beyond recall to make me independent of the pawnshop, to say the least. And, having cleaned up a good pot with whisky running down men's gullets, I reckoned I'd see what I could do with water running downhill. Do you get me ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... feared that Aubrey would have badly flunked any quizzing on the chapters of Somebody's Luggage which the bookseller had read aloud. His mind was swimming rapidly in the agreeable, unfettered fashion of a stream rippling downhill. As O. Henry puts it in one of his most delightful stories: "He was outwardly decent and managed to preserve his aquarium, but inside he was impromptu and full of unexpectedness." To say that he was thinking of Miss Chapman would ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... mistress of the house. She went to the market, paid the bills, superintended the cook and the washwoman, and rejoiced with exceeding great and fiendish joy when she saw how rapidly everything was going downhill, downhill irresistibly and as sure as ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... to the corner of Whitehall. It was hardly worth while taking a cab to Bond Street, and I intended to cross in front of King Charles's statue. It is an awkward place, and a lot of 'buses, cabs, and vans were bowling along downhill from the Strand and St. Martin's Church. I waited a moment on the kerbstone, watching for a favourable opportunity, when suddenly I was pitched head foremost in front of a passing 'bus. My escape from instant death was solely ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... the skin against septic infection and favors the introduction of the hand and arm. The hand should be inserted with the thumb and fingers drawn together like a cone. Whether standing or lying, the mare should be turned with head downhill and hind parts raised as much as possible. The contents of the abdomen gravitating forward leave much more room for manipulation. Whatever part of the foal is presented (head, foot) should be secured with a cord and running noose before it is pushed back ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... wordless; he gets pale, but sharp an' deadly; an' his notion is to fight for a finish. Peets is haughty an' sooperior on the few o'casions when he onbends in battle, an' comports himse'f like a gent who fights downhill; the same, ondoubted, bein' doo to them book advantages of Peets which elevates him an' lifts him above the common herd a whole lot. Enright who's oldest is of course slowest to embark in blood, an' pulls his weepons—when he does ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... action. His words were jest, yet they held a hint of earnest. With her heart at her throat Carley stepped on the first rock, and, poising, she calculated on a running leap from stone to stone. Once launched, she felt she was falling downhill. She swayed, she splashed, she slipped; and clearing the longest leap from the last stone to shore she lost her balance and fell into Glenn's arms. His kisses drove away both her panic ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... girls realized that it was getting too dark even to distinguish the path at all. They stumbled blindly on through the heather, conscious only that they were going downhill, but whether they were really retracing their steps or not, it was impossible to tell. Spot, whose spirits had failed him, followed at their heels. Faster and faster fell the darkness; the girls linked arms to avoid getting separated. ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... ever counted," the boy said. "Some miles she goes faster, and some miles she goes slower. A good deal depends on whether it's uphill or downhill." ...
— The House of Martha • Frank R. Stockton
... said the wife of Mr. Cheeseman, "though a going-downhill kind of royalty, perhaps, and yet he might be glad, Mrs. Shanks, to come where the butter has the milk spots, and none is in ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... but profoundly moving. Village masons could still create in stone at the time when Jacques Coeur was building himself the first "residence worthy of a millionaire" that had been "erected" since the days of Honorius. But that popular art pursued the downhill road sedately while plutocratic art went with a run is a curious accident of which the traces are soon lost; the outstanding fact is that with the Renaissance Europe definitely turns her back on the spiritual view of life. With that renunciation the power of creating significant form ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... and steadily things had gone downhill with me for a long time, till, in the end, I was so curiously bared of every conceivable thing. I had not even a comb left, not even a book to read, when things grew all too sad with me. All through the summer, up in the churchyards or parks, where I used to sit and write my articles ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... of Bogoyavlensky Street. At last the road began to go downhill; his feet slipped in the mud and suddenly there lay open before him a wide, misty, as it were empty expanse—the river. The houses were replaced by hovels; the street was lost in a multitude ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... that again, Tom, because we have no means of knowing how they got the money. Some of them are often supplied with larger amounts than seem to be good for them. Unless you know positively, don't start the snowball rolling downhill, because it keeps on growing larger every time some one ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Snowbound - A Tour on Skates and Iceboats • George A. Warren
... invited to the wedding, nor was he even at church. The first year of Anders' marriage the only cow he owned was found dead beyond the north side of the house, where it was tethered, and no one could find out what had killed it. Several misfortunes followed, and he kept going downhill; but the worst of all was when his barn, with all that it contained, burned down in the middle of the winter; no one knew how ...
— A Happy Boy • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... a strong seaway, the omnibus crossed Seventh Avenue and sped downhill toward Sixth with dangerous momentum. Shortly, however, this began to be modified by the brakes, a precaution against mishap which even the fugitive must approve. Ahead loomed the gaunt structure of the Sixth Avenue "L," bridging the roadway at so ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... that it's downhill, Percy, or we should never find our way to the water's edge. If we keep descending, we must be ...
— The Young Franc Tireurs - And Their Adventures in the Franco-Prussian War • G. A. Henty
... have a pretty hard time this next 100 miles I expect. If it was difficult to drag downhill over this belt, it will probably be a good deal more difficult to drag up. Luckily the cracks are fairly distinct, though we only see our cairns when less than a mile away; 45 miles to the next depot and 6 days' ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... changed at the A & P," Jerry decided. And went so fast in that direction that the bag holding the potatoes fell out of the cart and broke and Jerry lost two of them down a sewer. After that he went more slowly, though he found it hard to make the heavy cart go downhill slowly. It made his ...
— Jerry's Charge Account • Hazel Hutchins Wilson
... was a minister's daughter, and I don't remember ever havin' been deserted by my sweetheart when I was young and trusting. If I was to draw a picture of my life it would look like one of those charts that the weather bureau gets out—one of those high and low barometer things, all uphill and downhill like a chain of mountains in ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... a gap between two high hills, there appeared a tiny speck of greenish ice. Rapidly it increased in size. A gigantic glacier came sliding downhill. Huge stones were being pushed into the valley. With the noise of a dozen thunderstorms torrents of ice and mud and blocks of granite suddenly tumbled among the people of the forest and killed them while they slept. Century old trees ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... and singing, the people turned and went downhill. The Harvester gathered the Girl in his arms and carried her to the lake. He laid her in his boat and taking the oars sent it along the bank in the shade, and through ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... could bring about, I have learned nothing. How wondrous is this! Now, that I'm no longer young, that my hair is already half gray, that my strength is fading, now I'm starting again at the beginning and as a child! Again, he had to smile. Yes, his fate had been strange! Things were going downhill with him, and now he was again facing the world void and naked and stupid. But he could not feed sad about this, no, he even felt a great urge to laugh, to laugh about himself, to laugh about this ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... good look round where the lane curved away now, and ran downhill past the big sand-pit at the dip; and then on away down to where the little river gurgled along, sending flashes of sunshine in all directions, while the country rose on the other side in a beautiful slope of furzy common, hanging ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn
... seeking to alight on a field which appeared to him, as he was high above it, to be level as a billiard table, a pilot has found, when it is too late, that the ground has sloped so steeply that his machine, after landing, has run on downhill and ended by crashing into a ...
— Learning to Fly - A Practical Manual for Beginners • Claude Grahame-White
... ran downhill to where there was a spring, and kept hauling pails and buckets of water up the hill, and, pouring it into the engine, ran down again. Olga and Marya and Sasha and Motka all brought water. The women and the boys ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Once you've made a thousand pounds you can swim along a bit, but the first hundred, I shall never forget it! Afterwards it is just the same; the proportions are changed, that is all. The first twenty thousand is very uphill work, the second is on the flat, the third is going downhill—it brings itself along." ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... heart shortens the longest road, and Joan, whose return journey from the holy well was for the most part downhill, soon found herself back again in Penzance. The fire of devotion still actuated her movements, and she walked fearlessly, doubting nothing, to the post-office. There would be a letter to-day; she knew it; she felt it in her consciousness, as a certainty. And when she asked for it and mentioned ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... speed and force, breaks into a huge comber, and directly before this the surf-board swimmer is propelled with a speed which we timed and found to exceed forty miles per hour. In fact, he goes like lightning, always just ahead of the breaker, and apparently downhill, propelled by the vehement impulse of the roaring wave behind him, yet seeming to have a speed ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... except upon one sharp incline about 200 miles from Valentia, I am not quite sure that it would even be necessary to put the skid on, so gentle are the ascents and descents upon that long route. From Valentia the road would lie downhill for about 200 miles, to the point at which the bottom is now covered by I,700 fathoms of sea-water. Then would come the central plain, more than a thousand miles wide, the inequalities of the surface of which would be hardly perceptible, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... and walked swiftly away. She went downhill with more haste than dignity, turned to her right, and struck out through the woods ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... runs into the Fraser. This lake drains into that little lake. There's another lake east of here, according to the story; and when we get there we'll strike a deep, clear creek which will take us pretty soon into the Parsnip River. From there it's all downhill." ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Trail • Emerson Hough
... or level—that is, successful and easy—the saying enforces the not less solemn truth that sin deceives as to its results, and that the path of wrong-doing, which is flowery and smooth at first, grows rapidly thorny, and goes fast downhill, and ends at last in a cul-de-sac, of which death is the only outlet. We are not to trust our own consciences, except as enlightened by God's Word. We are not to listen to sin's lies, but to fix it well in our minds that there is only one way which leads ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... You will be delighted. It will be so very pretty." I thought of Dr. Johnson and the herdsman with his "See, such pretty goats." [See Boswell's Tour to the Hebrides, Sept. 1 1773. "The Doctor was prevailed with to mount one of Vass's grays. As he rode upon it downhill, it did not go well, and he grumbled. I walked on a little before, but was excessively entertained with the method taken to keep him in good humour. Hay led the horse's head, talking to Dr. Johnson as much as he could and, (having heard him, in the forenoon, ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... The boy spat it out, and made a face, then, pushing the barrel before them, they began to roll it downhill to the beach, Emmeline running ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... he said. He would have let me go slower, but my spirit was up, and I was off again as fast as before. The air was frosty, the moon was bright; it was very pleasant. We came through a village, then through a dark wood, then uphill, then downhill, till after an eight miles' run, we came to the town, through the streets and into the market-place. It was all quite still except the clatter of my feet on the stones—everybody was asleep. The church clock struck three as we drew up at Dr. White's door. John rang the bell ...
— Black Beauty, Young Folks' Edition • Anna Sewell
... over I shall repent and take up godly ways. For the present I am a lost soul, and given over to Satan. Andy, the lie I told yesterday about the river road was the beginning of my downfall. How easily we glide downhill." ...
— Then Marched the Brave • Harriet T. Comstock
... great deal called on to handle abrading and sometimes frozen ropes, you will want a pair of heavy buckskin gauntlets. An extra pair of stout high-laced boots with small Hungarian hob-nails will come handy. It is marvelous how quickly leather wears out in the downhill friction of granite and shale. I once found the heels of a new pair of shoes almost ground away by a single giant-strides descent of a steep shale-covered thirteen-thousand-foot mountain. Having no others I patched them with hair-covered rawhide and a bit of horseshoe. It sufficed, ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... trouble at home. Since the death of his good old mother and of Felix Underwood, Sir Adrian Vanderkist had been rapidly going downhill; as though he had thrown off all restraint, and as if the yearly birth of a daughter left him the more free to waste his patrimony. Little or nothing had been heard direct from poor Alda till Clement was summoned by a telegram from Ironbeam Park to find his sister in the utmost danger, ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... who it was," said Annie in answer to his query;" so I will make a favour of telling you. Do you remember the Rev. Mr. Darner, rector of Downhill Market?" ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... that had been on the road previous to the construction of the railways across the Pyrenees. One particular coach I travelled in was practically a box on four wheels, with a very narrow seat running on each side, and very low in the roof. Going downhill the horses—such as they were—went as fast as they could, and every time we struck a hole in the road down went the box, up we banged our heads against the roof, and then we collapsed quietly on to the floor, beautifully ...
— The Chronicles of a Gay Gordon • Jose Maria Gordon
... along a country road. You turn to the city, and see children, dwarfed by distance into pigmies, at play about suburban doorsteps; you have a glimpse upon a thoroughfare where people are densely moving; you note ridge after ridge of chimney-stacks running downhill one behind another, and church spires rising bravely from the sea of roofs. At one of the innumerable windows you watch a figure moving; on one of the multitude of roofs you watch clambering chimney-sweeps. The wind takes a run and scatters the smoke; bells ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... said: "We are the only Idealists left." This remark may have been made in a moment of careless impulse, but if it is taken at its face value, the moment it was made that moment his idealism started downhill. A grasp at monopoly indicates that a sudden shift has taken place from the heights where genius may be found, to the lower plains of talent. The mind of a true idealist is great enough to know that a monopoly ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... Captain Zelotes began by being what he considered diplomatic. Having assured his wife before leaving home, and the alarmed Miss Donaldson subsequently, that there was to be no trouble whatever—everything would be settled as smooth and easy as slidin' downhill; "that feller won't make any fuss, you'll see"—having thus prophesied, the captain felt it incumbent upon himself to see to the fulfillment. So he began by condescendingly explaining that of course he was kind of sorry for the young man before him, young folks were ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... that's exaggeration—well, that was the way I spent four years in Moscow. I can't tell you, my dear sir, how quickly, how fearfully quickly, that time passed; it's positively painful and vexatious to remember. Some mornings one gets up, and it's like sliding downhill on little sledges.... Before one can look round, one's flown to the bottom; it's evening already, and already the sleepy servant is pulling on one's coat; one dresses, and trails off to a friend, and may be smokes a pipe, drinks weak tea in glasses, ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... she continued, 'by the help of Brooks, who knew his master's ways, I have pottered on, to my own wonderment; but Brooks is past work, my downhill-time is coming, high farming has outrun us both, and I know that we are not doing as Humfrey would wish by his inheritance. Now I believe that nothing could be of greater use to me, the people, or the place, than ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... allowed me to roll him downhill, crawling and puffing up again each time, with perfect good humor; how he climbed a young sapling after my Panama hat, which I had "shied" into one of the topmost branches; how after getting it he refused to descend until it suited his pleasure; how when he did come down he persisted ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... movement, the moist, pungent odour of the woodland, the rhythmical trot of the horses, the rattle of the splinter-bar chains as the traces slackened going downhill, above all the presence of the man beside him, were pleasantly stimulating to Richard Calmady. The boy was still a prey to much innocent enthusiasm. It appeared to him, watching Ormiston's handling of the reins and whip, there was nothing this ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... all this, when, nearly at the top, I was thrown up the hill of the stairs as if it had suddenly become downhill. My feet flew from stair to stair to escape falling, and I flew, or fell, apparently upward, until, at the top, I hung on for dear life while the stern of the Elsinore flung skyward ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... footgear is the most common cause, as shoes which are too narrow across the toes, or not long enough, or those with high heels which throw the toes forward so that they are compressed by the toe of the boot, especially in walking downhill. ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume I (of VI) • Various
... years that followed. From time to time I saw her, always with some wonder, for she preserved to the end that delicate and superb quality which so distinguished her. The scandal of the brawl was the small thing that was needed to turn Bertin's course downhill; almost from that day one could mark his decline. It was not a matter of incidents; it was simply that within a year most of us were passing him without recognition, and there was talk of debts that troubled him. He had deteriorated, too; whereas of old ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... they do not lose flesh; on the contrary, they are inclined to grow stout; and she really began to grow corpulent. It came so gradually that she had no idea of it until it was too late. Bang! The downhill journey is ever a fast journey, and in her case it was accom-plished with startling rapidity. She tried every remedy—in vain! She kept the best table in the whole town, but she starved herself, and the more she ...
— In Midsummer Days and Other Tales • August Strindberg
... I find myself overshadowed by the thought that I do not want to do worse, to go downhill, to decline. I do not feel at all sure that I can write a better book, or so good a one indeed. I should dislike failing far more than I like having succeeded. To have reached a certain standard makes it incumbent ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... air. With the people it was as if all their gods had crashed and the heavens still stood. Order and law had passed away from the universe; but the sun still shone, the wind still blew, the flowers still bloomed—that was the amazing thing about it. That water should continue to run downhill was a miracle. All the stabilities of the human mind and human achievement were crumbling. The one stable thing that remained was Goliah, a madman on an island. And so it was that the whole population of San Francisco went forth ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... may think of it. His Pleasure is not in Praise but Production; the last makes him now and then a little feverish; the other, or its want, never. Just at last, 'twas hard Work to us both; he was like a Wheel running downhill, that must get to the End before it stopped. Mother scolded him, and made him promise he would leave off for a Week or so; at least, she says he did, and he says he did not, and asks her whether, if the Grass had promised not to grow she ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... endless hours of the weary day drag on like a terrible nightmare, but a descent into a profound ravine of these mountain solitudes at length enables the driver to start the team at a rate which makes it impossible for them to stop, and he vaults lightly into his place as we spin merrily downhill. Our troubles are not over, for on the next upward grade the old game of rearing, backing, and futile attempts at buck-jumping, begins again. Despairing eyes rest on a thatched booth at the roadside, containing a row of bottles ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... late in the afternoon when the Professor and I took our way towards the east whence I knew Jonathan was coming. We did not go fast, though the way was steeply downhill, for we had to take heavy rugs and wraps with us. We dared not face the possibility of being left without warmth in the cold and the snow. We had to take some of our provisions too, for we were in a perfect desolation, and so far as we could see through the snowfall, there was not even ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... anxious to go. It was getting late, she said, confusedly. She had better be at home; and she hastily took her leave. As soon as she stood outside the house, she made one big spring, and never stopped running, downhill and then up, till she stood on her own door-step; and then she suddenly reflected that she was not expected to come back so soon, and that her brothers were sure to make some unpleasant remarks on her quick return; so she tried to think what she could do with herself for ...
— Gritli's Children • Johanna Spyri
... patrol, fire fighting or back firing. On favorable ground, where some choice is offered, much may be done by falling timber inward so as to leave few tops near the uncut timber and by the location of skidroads. So far as practicable fire lines should be on the tops of ridges, for, being slower to go downhill than up, fire is more easily discouraged just as it reaches a crest. Bottoms of gulches are next in ...
— Practical Forestry in the Pacific Northwest • Edward Tyson Allen
... had arrived at what is called in polite literature, the grand meridian of life, and was proceeding on his journey downhill with hardly any throat, and a very rigid pair of jaw-bones, and long-flapped elephantine ears, and his eyes and complexion in the state of artificial excitement already mentioned, he was mightily ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... merely suggests that these mysterious agencies," he said quietly, "may be due to some kind of life we cannot understand. Why should water only run downhill? Why should trees grow at right angles to the surface of the ground and towards the sun? Why should the worlds spin for ever on their axes? Why should fire change the form of everything it touches without really destroying them? To say these things follow the law of their being explains ...
— The Man Whom the Trees Loved • Algernon Blackwood
... hill-brow. Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Pan is near: Joy runs trembling back to fear. Cuckoo! Cuckoo! All my blood Knocks through the heart whose every thud Chokes me, blinds me, drains my madness. As one half-drowned, I feel life's gladness Ooze from each pore. Towards the sun Downhill I reel that fain would run. Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Thornless seem Briars that part as in a dream. Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Hazel-boughs Hurt not though ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... into the open again and moonlight and dust—past a motor by the roadside, its owner, in court dress, sweating at its works—dust, moonlight, and black silk—a Whistler by Jove! Now we pass a slow going gharry, and now two young hatless soldiers in a high dog cart pass us under the trees, downhill at a canter, an inch between us, and half an inch between their off wheel and the edge of the road, and the sea ten feet beneath. Then along the lines of tents, with their curtains open and occupants going to bed.... We too must experience that tent life, but not in town if ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... up Allister, and we were off for the manse. As soon as we were out of the yard, however, we met Turkey, breathless. He had given Mrs. Mitchell the slip, and left her searching the barn for him. He took Allister from Kirsty, and we sped away, for it was all downhill now. When Mrs. Mitchell got back to the farmhouse, Kirsty was busy as if nothing had happened, and when, after a fruitless search, she returned to the manse, we were all snug in bed, with the door locked. After what ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... the lower part of the hillside until hunger drove him back to camp. And, as it sometimes happens that what a man fails to come upon when he seeks with method and intent he stumbles upon by accident, so now Hollister, coming heedlessly downhill, found the corner stake he was seeking. With his belt-axe he blazed a trail from this point to the flat below, so that he could ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... right on the main point, but not a stone of the many he smelled under turned him out a cougar or a big-horn. Hunting was over for that day, and so much time had been consumed that Two Arrows felt like running to make it up. He did but walk, however, and as the road was now all the way downhill, like a bad man's life, he walked easily. The great gorge widened until its broken walls stretched away to the right and left, and the eager-hearted explorer came out from among the scattered rocks at a point from which he could suddenly see a great ...
— Two Arrows - A Story of Red and White • William O. Stoddard
... his nodding horses uphill and downhill through his native village across the border; and in Drauburg, in Lavamuend, in Voelkermarkt, and Klagenfurt, all the inn-keepers waited for him as the bringer of joy. And he was the lad for that. He sang all the way along the windblown road, and from all the ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... Jeffrey, after one long, sharp look at the oncoming horseman, pulled in quietly to the side of the road. And Ruth did the same. She was too well trained in the things of the hills not to know that if there was trouble, then it was no time to be weakening horses' knees in mad and useless dashes downhill. ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher
... returned to Rayburn—and as we now knew the way, and as almost the whole of it was downhill, our return was accomplished rapidly—some of the joyous strength that we had gained seemed to be imparted to him. He opened his eyes as we stooped over him, and there seemed to be more life in them than there had been through all ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... Though God knows—'twas a wise enough rascal! At all events Klavs liked to feel himself on the highroad, and the longer the trip the happier he would be. He took it all with the same good temper—up hills where he had to strain in the shafts, and downhill where the full weight of the cart made itself felt. He would only stop when the hill was unusually steep—to give Lars Peter an opportunity ...
— Ditte: Girl Alive! • Martin Andersen Nexo
... moon, for no one argued with her. Grim led the way-off the highroad now, and down dark defiles that set the camels moaning, while their riders yelled alternately to Allah and apostrophized their beasts in the monosyllabic camel language. Camels hate downhill work, especially when loaded, and fall unless told not to in a speech they understand, in that ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... Amsterdam, in the Eighties. It had been a shining new development once, but it was beginning to slide downhill now. The metal on the windowframes was beginning to look worn, and the brickwork hadn't been cleaned in a long time. Where chain fences had once protected lonely blades of grass, children, mothers and baby carriages held sway now, and the grass was gone. Instead, the ...
— Out Like a Light • Gordon Randall Garrett
... road, and that we would race each other, walking, to see who got home first. They agreed to this, and set off together at a great rate; but as soon as they were out of sight behind the hedge I buckled my satchel to my shoulders and started running to warn Marah. It was all downhill to the brook, and I knew that I should find Marah there,—for he had said that he was coming earlier than usual that afternoon to finish off a model boat which we were to sail after tea. I ran as I had never run before—I thought ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... infinitely prefer living anywhere else. The place is too remote from civilization. A spot one might enjoy, perhaps, on the downhill side of sixty; but in youth or active middle age every sensible man should shun seclusion. A man has to fight against an inherent tendency ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... shorter, downhill almost all the way, the horses going along at a good steady trot, knowing they were ...
— Chateau and Country Life in France • Mary King Waddington
... and I remember a classmate of mine saying, "Why, man, can't you let anything alone?" I said, "I let everything alone that you can show me is not itself moving in the wrong direction, but I am not going to let those things alone that I see are going downhill"; and I borrowed this illustration from an ingenious writer. He says, "If you have a post that is painted white and want to keep it white, you cannot let it alone; and if anybody says to you, 'Why don't you let that post alone,' you will say, 'Because ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... the shelf, and have one more fling. I'm stiff! I'm stiff! And, ye gods, I'm only four-and-thirty! I always thought I'd go till sixty at least. I entered Parliament just to keep going; but that's only a steady progress downhill—a sort of frog's march in which you kick and are kicked, but don't do much besides. I'm a fighter, kiddie. I wasn't made to ornament the shelf. I'm not a hero; only an ordinary, restless, discontented mortal. They told me this ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... earth in the air—a reek of upturned mould; but what that may have been I cannot say. I soon started downhill and, presently, striking a path to the north, entered the chestnut woods and was at my hotel an hour after midnight. That is my story and I propose to-day to revisit the spot. I shall engage the local police who have orders to assist us—that ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... a thousand times in as many feet last night," Scotty commented. "It's easy by day, but don't try it by night." He led the way through clear spaces between the thorny patches, always going downhill. ...
— The Blue Ghost Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... is based solely on the ever-fleeting present. Essentially, therefore, it has to take the form of continual motion without there ever being any possibility of our finding the rest after which we are always striving. It is the same as a man running downhill, who falls if he tries to stop, and it is only by his continuing to run on that he keeps on his legs; it is like a pole balanced on one's finger-tips, or like a planet that would fall into its sun as soon as it stopped hurrying onwards. ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... inclination, slope, slant, crookedness &c. adj.; slopeness[obs3]; leaning &c. v.; bevel, tilt; bias, list, twist, swag, cant, lurch; distortion &c. 243; bend &c. (curve) 245; tower of Pisa. acclivity, rise, ascent, gradient, khudd[obs3], rising ground, hill, bank, declivity, downhill, dip, fall, devexity|; gentle slope, rapid slope, easy ascent, easy descent; shelving beach; talus; monagne Russe[Fr]; facilis descensus ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Those that flame from the hill slope above Portland station only succeed in emphasizing the general bleakness of their surroundings. At Easton clock tower a street called "Straits" turns left and east and presently a broad road leads downhill to the right to the gates of Pennsylvania Castle, built, it is said, at the suggestion of George III by John Penn, Governor of Portland, and a descendant of the great Penn in whose honour it was named. A narrow passage by the castle wall ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... "Shall I give her the money, shall I keep it?" and her heart would thrill, and then sink, and inside her she kept saying, "There is no harm in it?—It is all the same in the end." And then, almost before she knew what she was doing, she had taken the easy, crooked, downhill path, with its rocks ...
— The Making of Mona • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... man is hampered and thwarted in a great work by annoyances and disasters, he behaves like an Arab horse on a heavy march. At first it moves at a brisk trot, uphill and downhill, and it goes faster and faster as its strength begins to flag. And when at last it is thoroughly out of breath and ready to drop, it breaks ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... I've never been inside. But stop a moment—you haven't heard the half of it yet! There's a road comes downhill to the shore, between the churchyard wall—there's a heap of greyish silvery-looking stuff, by the way, growing on the coping—something like lavender, with yellow blossoms—Where was I? Oh yes, and on the other side of ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... go, li'l' hawss," he chatted on. "Downhill all the way soon an' then a drink to wash out yore mouth an' the best feed in Caroca fo' the pair ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... career of vice, his reformation from which is the next thing to a miracle. All this came upon him in consequence of keeping bad company. Learn from it to avoid evil company and betting. The boy that suffers himself to bet the smallest amount, has already entered the downhill road of the gambler's career. And there is no evil that can be named but he may be drawn into, who begins to keep bad company. You might as well expect to go into lazarhouse, without being infected, as to go into bad company, and not ...
— Anecdotes for Boys • Harvey Newcomb
... is flat, but the path runs downhill. Consequently we soon find ourselves tramping along below the ground-level, with a stout parapet of clay on either side of us. Overhead there is nothing—nothing but the blue sky, with the larks singing, quite regardless of ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... find that we have been busy," rejoined Clark. "The barge will go down well loaded in the spring. They'll have the best of it—downhill, and over ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... good. I had to show your father and you that I had not thrown away all your kindness. So I quit travelling that downhill road on ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... they were, was a stimulus that made everyone put forth all his energies. Beds, furniture, cooking utensils—first the stores of the Dobryna, then the cargo of the tartan—all were carried down with the greatest alacrity, and the diminished weight combined with the downhill route to make the labor proceed ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... lay at the further end of the street called Finkleway. It was a queer, open space which sloped downhill from the centre of the ridge on which the middle of the town was built to the valley through which the little river meandered. Save where the streets, and the road leading out to the open country and Ellersdeane cut into it, it was completely enclosed by old houses of the sort which Starmidge had ...
— The Chestermarke Instinct • J. S. Fletcher
... remember her father had been a crooked man. And her mother had known it. He had dragged her to her ruin. That degradation had killed her. Ellen realized that with poignant sorrow, with a sudden revolt against her father. Had Gaston Isbel truly and dishonestly started her father on his downhill road? Ellen wondered. She hated the Isbels with unutterable and growing hate, yet she had it in her to think, to ponder, to weigh judgments in their behalf. She owed it to something in herself to be fair. But what did it matter who was ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... at the same time I heard a sobbing or crying from the same woman. I opened my door and held out my lantern, and just as far as the light would reach I saw a woman: she turned her head when the light sheened on her, and then hurried on downhill. I hung up the lantern, and was curious enough to pull on my things and dog her a few steps, but I could see nothing of her any more. That was where I had been when you came up; and when I saw you I thought you ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... once," said Bunny. "And I rolled all the way downhill. But I didn't get hurt, for I rolled into ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue and Their Shetland Pony • Laura Lee Hope
... above it, but vulnerable to fire, both from Lennox Hill, a slightly higher eminence on the other side of a Nek to the south-east, and from a salient protruding from the northern extremity of the hill. From the wall bounding the upper terrace, however, other walls, running downhill, intersected this face of the mountain at right angles, and served as low traverses affording some protection from flanking fire. These formed the enclosures of Smith's farm, a group of tree-encircled buildings around an open space at the base of the mountain, near its centre, and some 400 feet ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... close of the storm, do a good deal of the work; thawing and freezing of the water contained in the mass of detritus help the movement, for, although the thrust is in both directions, it is most effective downhill; the wedges of tree roots, which often penetrate between and under the stones, and there expand in their process of growth, likewise assist the downward motion. The result is that on ordinary mountain slopes the layer ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... thousand dollars ought to be ample to put the ranch on a paying basis. And don't blame your dad for collecting it now, when it will do the most good. I could see no benefit in waiting and suffering, and letting you get farther downhill all the while, making it that much harder to climb back. Go at once to your claim, and do your best—that is what will make your dad happiest. You will get well, and you will make a home for you and Vic, and ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... eight at night before his toil was rewarded and he issued at last out of the forest on the firm white high-road. It lay downhill before him, with a sweeping eastward trend, faintly bright between the thickets; and Otto paused and gazed upon it. So it ran, league after league, still joining others, to the farthest ends of Europe, there skirting the sea-surge, here ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... had ever before seen driven. They could not all get through that narrow gateway to the corrals. Pan wondered how his few riders could have done so well. Luck! The topography of the valley! The wild horses took the lanes of least resistance; and the level or downhill ground favored a broad direct line toward the fence trap Pan ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... that will freshen in a few days. About six days ago she seemed weak in her hind legs and on going downhill would drag or stumble for 10 or 12 feet, then catch herself and ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... that point, and there, to your wonder and your surprise, at your feet nestles the loveliest of smiling canyon-like valleys, filled with trees, aspen, oak, and pine, with here and there a tent or red roof gleaming through the green, and a noisy brook hurrying on its way downhill. By a steep scramble you reach the lower level, birds singing, flowers tempting on every side, and the picturesque, narrow trail leading you on, around the ledge of rock, over the rustic bridge, till you reach ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... by the fire, which had come from a ruin above, had spread downhill on the opposite side of the valley. Charred posts still stood like lone teeth in a skull to mark what must have once been one of the stockade walls of a post. But all they now guarded was a desolation from ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... named. A lonely little station set down in the midst of thick woods, and a road that wound slightly downhill and away among the trees were all that met the eye. They strolled down this road, passing occasional homes. These were usually well back from the road and almost concealed among the trees. In fact, in some places ...
— The Sheridan Road Mystery • Paul Thorne
... she whispered behind me. She had come to lean again upon the back of the bench. "Am I alone to blame? Can the iron withstand the lodestone? Can the rain help falling upon the earth? Can the stream flow other than downhill?" She sighed. "Woe me! It is I who should be angered that you have made free of my lips. And yet I am here, wooing you to forgive me for the ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... irrespective of gravity. No natural force propels it, and the inference is forthright and inevitable that it is artificially helped to its end. There seems to be no escape from this deduction. Water only flows downhill, and there is no such thing as downhill on a surface already in fluid equilibrium. A few canals might presumably be so situated that their flow could, by inequality of terrane, lie equatorward, but not all....Now it is not in particular ...
— Is Mars Habitable? • Alfred Russel Wallace
... give him some temporary encouragement, even though it is over-early. For when I consider the past I do think God will forgive me and you for being a little forward. I have another reason for this, my dear. I feel myself going rapidly downhill, and late affairs have still further helped me that way. And until this thing is done I ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... fast as his snow-shoes would permit, and having reloaded, Dave and Barringford followed. They were going downhill once more, but now the elk made a turn and darted into a belt of timber lining the river. Reaching the stream, he paused for a moment, looked despairingly at his wounded and bleeding flank, and then started ...
— On the Trail of Pontiac • Edward Stratemeyer
... in some sort connects very diverse topics, is that of considering this principle of selection. Of the principle itself, he remarks that it is neither a theory nor an hypothesis, but the expression of a necessary fact; that to deny it is very much like denying that round stones will roll downhill faster and farther than flat ones; and that the question of the present day in natural history is not whether there be natural selection, or even whether forms are derived from other forms, but to comprehend how, in what proportions, and by what means hereditary deviations ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... Tavernake," he said, softly. "I could hear no words, but I know that you have been wise. Between you and me," he added, in a lower tone, "she is going downhill. She is in with the wrong lot here. She can't seem to keep away from them. They are on the very fringe of Bohemia, a great deal nearer the arm of the law than makes for respectable society. The man to whom I saw you introduced is a millionaire one day and a thief ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... tomahawks, hunting-knives, rifles, and a good dog. On arriving at the ravine, Hobbs told McIntire to cross over to the other side and climb the hill, but on no account to go down into the ravine, as a grizzly is more dangerous when he has a man on the downhill side. Hobbs then went to where he thought the elk might be if he had died by the bank of the stream; but as soon as he came near the water, he saw that a large grizzly had got there before him, having scented the animal, and was ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... imaginative lines about the demon lover and the waning moon. The darkness, the red wreck of sunset, the yellow and lurid moon, the long fantastic shadows, actually created that sense of monstrous incident which is the dramatic side of landscape. The bare grey slopes seemed to rush downhill like routed hosts; the dark clouds drove across like riven banners; and the moon was like a golden dragon, like the Golden Dragon ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... gate fastened back, and a lodge on the left-hand side. So much he could make out dimly through the November darkness; and as he stood there hesitating, he thought he could see somewhere below him a few other lights burning through the masses of leafless trees through which the drive went downhill. ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... him go with you," said Anthea, "you'll soon see what I mean! How would you like to suddenly see a poor little helpless baby spinning along downhill beside you with its feet up on a bicycle it ...
— Five Children and It • E. Nesbit
... that he was run away with, determined to do his best to stick on, hoping that by going up some hill or other the pony might be brought up. He forgot how high the forest was situated, and that it was chiefly downhill the pony would have to go. He did stick on, and bravely too, but very frequently he thought it would be in vain, and that he must be thrown off. He felt happier when he saw the attempts made by his friends to overtake him, even though they ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston
... tumbles were taken with the best grace we could muster. I surprised myself during the afternoon, when my turn came as forerunner, by covering two and a half miles at a jog-trot without a break. The grade was slightly downhill and the sledges moved along of their own accord, accelerated by jerks from the dogs, gliding at right angles to the ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... The first volley from the English line had mowed his soldiers down like ripe wheat. At the second volley the ranks broke and the ground was thick strewn with the dead. When the English charged, the French fled in wildest panic downhill for the St. Charles. Wounded and faint, Montcalm on his black charger was swept swiftly along St. Louis road in the blind stampede of retreat. Near the walls a ball passed through his groins. Two soldiers caught him from ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... him to her companion, who, it appeared, came from Toronto; and then she explained that they had climbed the mountain so that her friend might see the surroundings of the city. They walked back together until they reached a spot where two roads led downhill, and ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... is only a question of how long it can hold out against its foes. But Rag's life was proof that once a rabbit passes out of his youth he is likely to outlive his prime and be killed only in the last third of life, the downhill third we call ...
— Lobo, Rag and Vixen - Being The Personal Histories Of Lobo, Redruff, Raggylug & Vixen • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... suffering any particular discomfort from the enormous increase of his waist. On the next day there was a blizzard, duly predicted by Wilson's twinges of rheumatism, and on the 8th Scott reluctantly records that the dogs were steadily going downhill. 'The lightening of the load is more than counter-balanced by the weakening of the animals, and I can see no time in which we can hope to get the sledges along without ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... is an intense realisation of the "separateness" of all our souls. The most heroic and human love-poetry of the world is never mere passion; precisely because mere passion really is a melting back into Nature, a meeting of the waters. And water is plunging and powerful; but it is only powerful downhill. The high and human love-poetry is all about division rather than identity; and in the great love-poems even the man as he embraces the woman sees her, in the same instant, afar off; a virgin and ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... brushwood-pile," said his companion; and all his trouble was at an end. He took a pony, because he understood that this was the Thirty-Mile Ride and he must ride swiftly, and raced through the clattering tunnels and round the curves, always downhill, till he heard the sea to his left, and saw it raging under a full moon, against sandy cliffs. It was heavy going, but he recognised the nature of the country, the dark-purple downs inland, and the bents that whistled in ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... sapling she had held in her hand, and flung the fragments into the road. The Laird was groping in his pocket for half a crown, and thinking meanwhile what answer to make. But disdaining both his reply and his peace-offering, Meg strode defiantly downhill ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... having reached the highest point of our right flank, began riding downhill to where the roll of musketry was heard but where on account of the smoke nothing could be seen. The nearer they got to the hollow the less they could see but the more they felt the nearness of the actual battlefield. They began to meet wounded men. One ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... the foot of the street on which the Bobbsey house stood. The street went downhill to the tracks, and the railroad passed through what Charley had called ...
— The Bobbsey Twins in the Great West • Laura Lee Hope
... right-for they would be worthy forms, who would hand on those traditions which seemed to him so necessary and great. And then there broke on him one of those delirious waves of natural desire, against which he had so often fought, so often with great pain conquered. He got up, and ran downhill, leaping over the stones, and the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... high-pitched voice that she regarded as the hall-mark of good breeding, and, in that silent rush downhill, Medenham could not avoid hearing each syllable. It was eminently pleasing to listen to Cynthia's praise of his car, and he was wroth with the other woman for wrenching the girl's thoughts away ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... instructed, and sanctioning gross sin. If it means only straight, or level—that is, successful and easy—the saying enforces the not less solemn truth that sin deceives as to its results, and that the path of wrong-doing, which is flowery and smooth at first, grows rapidly thorny, and goes fast downhill, and ends at last in a cul-de-sac, of which death is the only outlet. We are not to trust our own consciences, except as enlightened by God's Word. We are not to listen to sin's lies, but to fix it well in our minds that there is ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... All this, with his social position, his pseudo-heroic poetry, and his dissipated life,—over which he contrived to throw a veil of romantic secrecy,—made him a magnet of attraction to many thoughtless young men and foolish women, who made the downhill path both easy and rapid to one whose inclinations led him in that direction. Naturally he was generous, and easily led by affection. He is, therefore, largely a victim of his own weakness ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... heading for the Citadel gate; beside which—so far away that we saw them as toys—stood a sentry-box and the figure of a sentry beside it. Could he reach this gate? His altered course had taken him a little downhill, to the left of the ridge, and to regain it by the Citadel he must fetch a slight loop. Luckily the bull could not reason: he followed his enemy. But there was just a chance that by running along the ridge the chase might be headed off. The crowd saw this and set off anew, with Master Archibald ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... a little figuring on the margin of his map, "we're going downhill pretty fast, it seems to me, as we go north. The Grand Rapids drop only fifty-five feet. From Athabasca Landing to McMurray there is a drop of eight hundred and sixty feet in the two hundred and fifty-two miles. That's going some. And here we drop a hundred ...
— Young Alaskans in the Far North • Emerson Hough
... tree by the wayside. A hundred yards from the road was a dense copse of undergrowth and bushes on the edge of the forest. Off to the east flowed the majestic Rhine, a league distant, and to the north ran the road like a white ribbon, stretching downhill to the valley and up again to the top of another hill, distant ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... rise at Sherman," he rises to explain, " and another still smaller at the Alleghanies; all the balance is downhill to the Atlantic. Of course you'll have to 'boat it' across the Frogpond; then there's Europe - mostly level; so is Asia, except the Himalayas - and you can soon cross them; then you're all 'hunky,' for there's no mountains to speak of in China." Evidently ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... witnesses; and great as the noise, and fearful as the horrid gasping of the engine may be, we are not prepared to say that terror may not as naturally be excited in the heart of the most gallant of Houyeneans by the thunder and glitter of a fast coach, rushing downhill at the rate of sixteen miles an hour. In fact, the horse that has ceased—like a young lady after her second season—to be shy, will care no more for a steam-engine than a tilted waggon. And it is decidedly our private and confidential opinion, from a long ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... imagined it. More than once, seeking to alight on a field which appeared to him, as he was high above it, to be level as a billiard table, a pilot has found, when it is too late, that the ground has sloped so steeply that his machine, after landing, has run on downhill and ended by crashing ...
— Learning to Fly - A Practical Manual for Beginners • Claude Grahame-White
... to the side of the road. And Ruth did the same. She was too well trained in the things of the hills not to know that if there was trouble, then it was no time to be weakening horses' knees in mad and useless dashes downhill. ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher
... to sea. And a year later I went to prison because a woman I was living with was a jealous cat and got the blame thrown on to me for something I knew nothing about. D'you see? Prison. Never mind the details. When I came out of prison I was going downhill as fast as a barrel; and then I saw an advertisement of Templecombe's for a skipper. I saw him, and told him all about myself; and he agreed to overlook my little time in prison if I signed on with him to look after this yacht. Now you see I haven't got ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... with a shrug. "You can't get lost. If you should lose your bearings, just walk downhill and you'll come to food and water. Follow the shore line until you get back, either direction. And, I reckon, the way things go now, you ain't goin' to hurt yourself. We won't worry about you none. We're all gettin' along all right, so you ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... he rolled over and over down the slope, to be stopped from the precipice only by the happy accident of a scrub tree in the way. Frightened by this sight, my animal plunged, and he, too, lost his footing. Had I been riding side-saddle, nothing could have saved me, for the downhill was on the near side; but instead I swung out of the saddle on the off side and landed in a heap on the uphill, still clutching the bridle. That act saved my horse's life, probably, as well as my own. For the sudden weight ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... sip. The boy spat it out, and made a face, then, pushing the barrel before them, they began to roll it downhill to the beach, Emmeline running before ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... him unengaging. With all his attainments he had preserved unspoiled a certain natural modesty, which led him to attribute his advancement to accident or fate. He once told me that he owed all his success in life to the fact that, as a country boy in Ohio, while driving his father's cart downhill at daybreak, he fell asleep and was jolted off his seat, breaking his leg. During the weeks of enforced seclusion that followed he taught himself to read, and developed a studious turn of mind, which, his leg having been permanently weakened by the accident, ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... an hour," answered Grandpa Ford. "We'll be there before you know it. It's downhill, and the horses are anxious to get ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Grandpa Ford's • Laura Lee Hope
... Then he turned downhill, riding fast until we came to a place where rocks lay loose and scattered everywhere, and our horses stumbled among them. There he reined up suddenly, holding up his hand, and shouting through the uproar ...
— King Alfred's Viking - A Story of the First English Fleet • Charles W. Whistler
... the door open gently and looked aloft. The night, before so starry, was now clouded over. The troopers—I could hear their horses' hoofs above the whoops and yells of their chorusing—were winding downhill by a sunken way within ten yards of me. A gravel path lay between me and the hedge overlooking it. This I saw by the faint upcast rays of the lanterns they had lit for guidance. I tip-toed across to ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... the law of egoism and competition and struggle for existence; to the law that "might is right,"—tends from the very nature of the case towards decay and disintegration. The movement of material progress is in some sense a downhill movement. No doubt it evokes much seeming virtue, such as is necessary to secure the end; but the motive force is one with regard to which man is passive rather than active, a slave rather than a master, ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... surrounded by the houses of dignitaries, from a quiet road lined with elms, which skirted the wall of the Deanery garden and after several twists and turns among the shadows of great Gothic walls found its way downhill into the narrow streets of the small city. One of the houses in the Close had been handed over to the Theological College, the Principal of which usually occupied a Canon's stall in the Cathedral. Here were the lecture-rooms, and here lived Canon Havelock the Principal, ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... territory as Torgul and Jazia had pictured it for him. This had to be part of the ridge wall of the valley in which lay the buildings of the fairing. In these heights was the Shrine of Phutka where Jazia had hidden out. To the west now lay the Rover village, so he had to work his way left, downhill, in order to reach the hole where the Baldies had gone to ground. Ross made that progress with the stealth of ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... make good. I had to show your father and you that I had not thrown away all your kindness. So I quit travelling that downhill road on ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... she declared she was going for one more ride downhill, and this time with Jim. "For," she said to herself, "I would like one ride ...
— Patty's Social Season • Carolyn Wells
... when dinner was ended. It was a provoking conversation. Even the imperturbable Miss Harrison rose from her place rather sooner than usual. Rameyev went to his own room to get his hour's nap. The young people went into the garden. Misha and Elena ran downhill to the river. They had a keen desire to run one after the other and ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... our conclusion, from the absence of any subsequent motion or movement on board, the deck being as steady now as any platform on dry land, although rather downhill on one side, from the vessel heeling as she took ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... against the railing and gasped. He wanted to run downhill after the 'rickshaw, but that was impossible; so he went forward with most of his blood in his temples. It was impossible, for many reasons, that the woman in the 'rickshaw could be the girl he had known. She was, he discovered later, the wife of a man from Dindigul, or ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... country to transport coal from the mines at Summit down to the Lehigh Valley for shipment. An amusing story is told of this railroad, too. It extended down the mountainside in a series of sharp inclines between which lay long stretches of level ground. Now you know when you coast downhill your speed will give you sufficient impetus to carry you quite a way on a flat road before you come to a stop. So it was with this railroad. But the force the cars gained on the hillside could not carry them entirely across these long levels, and ...
— Steve and the Steam Engine • Sara Ware Bassett
... out lovely, and if my cough had not been so bad, I should have enjoyed the drive down from Mount Morgan. The pitches were just as steep, but they were nearly all downhill, which made our progress seem quicker and pleasanter. The country looked very pretty; the ferns were quite lovely, and the lilies in full bloom. The pleasure of the drive was further marred by the dreadful odours ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... hillside to take the homeward path to his father's place, Playmore. With the challenge and the monstrous good-bye, a stone came flying up the hill after him and stopped almost at his feet. He made no reply, however, but waved a hand downhill, and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... I was young and trusting. If I was to draw a picture of my life it would look like one of those charts that the weather bureau gets out—one of those high and low barometer things, all uphill and downhill like a chain of ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... destiny. For this system of ours allows no room for standing still — nothing can loiter on the road and check the progress of things upwards towards Life, or the rush of things downwards towards Death. The stern policeman Fate moves us and them on, on, uphill and downhill and across the level; there is no resting-place for the weary feet, till at last the abyss swallows us, and from the shores of the Transitory we are hurled into the sea of ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... different matter, and Wilbur found himself wondering how his horse kept his footing. He was not riding Kit, for which he was glad, as in leaving the trail and plunging downhill he had struck some parts of the forest where undergrowth was present, and his favorite mare's slender legs would have been badly scratched. Also the footing grew dangerous and uncertain. There had been many windfalls in the forest, ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... good could it do him to be 'noticed' by noisy crowds of people? God his Maker already noticed him. He, Cromwell, was already there; no notice would make him other than he already was. Till his hair was grown gray; and Life from the downhill slope was all seen to be limited, not infinite but finite, and all a measurable matter how it went,—he had been content to plough the ground, and read his Bible. He in his old days could not support it any ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... experience was along a stream of very clear water. It did not appear to be a very large stream, but its remarkable character impressed me as singular. It flowed gently. It was not swift, but glided smoothly along, uphill and downhill the same. Its speed never varied, and this unaccountable characteristic struck me with surprise that waked me. This is my interpretation of my dream," said he: "The clear stream of water represents what the Christian should be. Its transparency symbolizes the clear thought ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... and moves the road-bat so as to push the coulter aside. These operations are done in a minute, and correspond in some degree to turning the rudder of a ship. The object is that the plough, which has been turning the earth one way, shall now (as it is reversed to go downhill) continue to turn it that way. If the change were not effected when the plough was swung round, the furrow would be made opposite. Next he leans heavily on the handles, still standing on the same spot; this lifts the ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... otherwise sound? Did he go limping about over the landscape, to attract enemies from afar, and be quickly shot by a man or torn to pieces by wolves? Not he! With the keen intelligence of the wounded wild ruminant, he chose the line of least resistance, and on three legs fled downhill. He went on down, and kept going, until he reached the bottom of the biggest and most tortuous coulee in his neighborhood. And then what? Instead of coming to rest in a reposeful little valley a hundred ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... a marvellously clear day, and not many miles before reaching our destination we looked back upon the downhill route traversed which, so far as one could see, might have been a dead level. At a distance of nearly twenty miles Gafsa was plainly visible—white buildings piercing a dusky line of palms—an hour's ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... in vain before me? knew I not What stench arises from some purple gears? And how the sceptres witness whence they got Their briar-wood, crackling through the atmosphere's Foul smoke, by princely perjuries, kept hot? Forgive me, ghosts of patriots,—Brutus, thou, Who trailest downhill into life again Thy blood-weighed cloak, to indict me with thy slow Reproachful eyes!—for being taught in vain That, while the illegitimate Caesars show Of meaner stature than the first full strain (Confessed incompetent to conquer Gaul), They swoon as feebly and cross ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... coaching, something of a rehearsal and then that scene went on again, with Ruth and Alice "fleeing" from the pursuers, and the police charging downhill after the men. ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Sea - or, A Pictured Shipwreck That Became Real • Laura Lee Hope
... swim along a bit, but the first hundred, I shall never forget it! Afterwards it is just the same; the proportions are changed, that is all. The first twenty thousand is very uphill work, the second is on the flat, the third is going downhill—it brings itself along." ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... tracks on Exmoor. The uphill and downhill of Devonshire scorns compromise or mitigation by detour and zigzag. But here geography is on a scale so far more vast, and the roadway is so far worse metalled than with us in England—knotty masses of talc and nodes of sandstone cropping up at dangerous turnings—that only ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... a miracle. All this came upon him in consequence of keeping bad company. Learn from it to avoid evil company and betting. The boy that suffers himself to bet the smallest amount, has already entered the downhill road of the gambler's career. And there is no evil that can be named but he may be drawn into, who begins to keep bad company. You might as well expect to go into lazarhouse, without being infected, as to go into bad company, and ...
— Anecdotes for Boys • Harvey Newcomb
... the emotion that rose in Bull was the sadness he felt when he watched old Maggie stumbling among the rocks. There was something wrong with the forelegs of Maggie, and she was only half a horse when it came to going downhill on broken ground. He had always thought of the great strength that once must have been hers, and he pitied her for the change. He found himself pitying Uncle Bill Campbell in much ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand
... overflowed, and is overflowing still, though very slowly. Its furrows all curve downward; and it is, in fact, as one of our party said, 'a black glacier.' The pitch, expanding under the burning sun of day, must needs expand most towards the line of least resistance, that is, downhill; and when it contracts again under the coolness of night, it contracts, surely from the same cause, more downhill than it does uphill; and so each particle never returns to the spot whence it started, ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... a smell of earth in the air—a reek of upturned mould; but what that may have been I cannot say. I soon started downhill and, presently, striking a path to the north, entered the chestnut woods and was at my hotel an hour after midnight. That is my story and I propose to-day to revisit the spot. I shall engage the local police who have orders to assist ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... us like a swarm of assailants, swooping downhill on us, swerving, recoiling, and falling away, rising swiftly above us again for a charge, and then careering at us with abandon on the next declivity of glass. A boat would hesitate above us, poised and rocking on the snowy ridge of an upheaval, and vanish as the Windhover canted ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... above a party of phantom men and girls sliding downhill on their derrieres and ending in a heap at the bottom. A nice change from traveling under their own power. Their maximum speed while swift and incomprehensible to mortals, seemed relatively slow to one of Hell's old timers. Only Nick and his best scout, Cletus, ...
— Satan and the Comrades • Ralph Bennitt
... rolled onward, like a ball downhill. Being his teacher, his aunt was his playmate as well. Luba Mayakin used to come, and when with them, the old woman readily became ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... running downhill, crossed a bridge, and came into the town of Plattville. On ordinary nights, doubtless, the place would be quiet enough at this hour; but Saturday was different. Quite a number of persons were on the main street, and cast curious glances ...
— The Boys of Columbia High on the Gridiron • Graham B. Forbes
... over several years; they were much like these first ones. I soon learned, however, that life in the Methodist Church was all uphill or downhill at a smart spiritual canter. In these days it is nearly as easy to be a Methodist as it is ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... 'It is the first time I ever stole anything, and I can tell you I have felt very bad about it ever since. I don't know how it is. I am sure I didn't think once that I should ever come to be a thief. First I took to drinking and then to quarrelling. Since I began to go downhill everybody gives me a kick; you are the first people who have offered me a helping hand. My wife is sickly and my children are starving. You have sent them many a meal, God bless you! Yet I stole the hides from you, meaning ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... Aquila will surely send to slay them, and he will put a worse man in my place." "That may well be true," said he, and gave me his hand. "Better the devil we know than the devil we know not, till we can pack you Normans home." And so, too, said his Saxons; and they laughed as we drove the pigs downhill. But I think some of them, even then, began not to ...
— Puck of Pook's Hill • Rudyard Kipling
... will find that we have been busy," rejoined Clark. "The barge will go down well loaded in the spring. They'll have the best of it—downhill, and ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... which commanded a distant view, far and wide, points out to them Italy and the plains of Lombardy on both banks of the Po, at the foot of the Alps, telling them that at that moment they were crossing not only the walls of Italy but of the Roman capital; that the rest of the march was easy and downhill." The situation of Hannibal and his Carthaginians surveying Italy for the first time is in some respects closely analogous to that of Cortes pointing out the Valley of ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... were giving mother a ride on it, and she's too heavy— especially going downhill. She thought we were holding it, but it got away. We yelled to her to put on the brake, but she didn't, and it went bang ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... nothing I could bring about, I have learned nothing. How wondrous is this! Now, that I'm no longer young, that my hair is already half gray, that my strength is fading, now I'm starting again at the beginning and as a child! Again, he had to smile. Yes, his fate had been strange! Things were going downhill with him, and now he was again facing the world void and naked and stupid. But he could not feed sad about this, no, he even felt a great urge to laugh, to laugh about himself, to laugh about ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... from the golden long ago To the land that we ne'er shall find; And it's uphill here, but it's downhill there, For the road is wise and kind, And all rough places and cheerless faces Will ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... they remained where they were, was a stimulus that made everyone put forth all his energies. Beds, furniture, cooking utensils—first the stores of the Dobryna, then the cargo of the tartan—all were carried down with the greatest alacrity, and the diminished weight combined with the downhill route to make the labor proceed ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... ash bough there," said the weasel, "and when you are outside the thicket turn to your left and go downhill, and you will come to the timber—and meantime I will send for the dragon-fly, ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... thought onions wouldn't be so wearin' on her as turkeys, for onions, she said, will stay where they are put, but turkeys are born wanderers and hikers. And they led her through sun and rain, swamp and swale, uphill and downhill, a-chasin' 'em up, but she made well by 'em. Well, in puttin' in her onion seed, she overworked herself and got a crick in her back, so she couldn't stir hand nor foot for two days. And bein' only just them two, her husband had to stay home to ...
— Samantha on the Woman Question • Marietta Holley
... breathing holes testified. The visit and inspection were as satisfactory as we hoped, and after a short rest and hasty lunch, we started on our return journey, which, as it would be in our old tracks, and for the most part downhill, would be very much easier than the ...
— Five Years in New Zealand - 1859 to 1864 • Robert B. Booth
... Pomerania, and even from his early school-days dreamed and planned the conquest of the air. His practical experiments began when, at the age of thirteen, he and his brother Gustav made wings consisting of wooden framework covered with linen, which Otto attached to his arms, and then ran downhill flapping them. In consequence of possible derision on the part of other boys, Otto confined these experiments for the most part to moonlit nights, and gained from them some idea of the resistance offered ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... not design it as a toy bass-drum for the children to bang on on the morning of the Fourth of July. I would make a solemn affidavit to the fact that the maker of a baby-carriage never dreamed of its possible use as an impromptu toboggan for a couple of small boys to coast downhill on in midsummer. Yet these things have been used for these various purposes in our own household experience. A megaphone can be used as a beehive, and a hammock can be turned into a fly-net for a horse, but you never think of ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... the mistress of the house. She went to the market, paid the bills, superintended the cook and the washwoman, and rejoiced with exceeding great and fiendish joy when she saw how rapidly everything was going downhill, downhill irresistibly and as sure as ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... practicing law. I'm a free man now and any political work I do is going to be along the lines of the simple, childish ideas I brought home from college with me. I had begun to feel that all this political idealism was sheer rubbish, but I put the brakes on before I got too far downhill. If a few of us who have run with the machine and know the tricks will turn and help the bewildered idealists, we can make idealism effective. Most of the people don't want a handful of crooks to govern them, but there's a kind of cheap cynicism abroad that discourages the men who ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... Horse that Boers must have been lying there almost under the feet of our men, if they did not actually join the ranks for a time to escape detection. But a sound greeted their ears at that moment, and knowing what it meant, they scampered downhill without waiting to hear more. It was a ringing British cheer followed by strident commands to "Fix bayonets and give the devils cold steel." Begun by Major Karri Davis, the order ran along from Imperial ...
— Four Months Besieged - The Story of Ladysmith • H. H. S. Pearse
... country is that objects do not always seem to stand square with the world. In approaching a mountain and moving on an up grade the plane of incline is suddenly reversed and gives the appearance and sensation of going downhill. In some inexplicable manner sense and reason seem to conflict and the discovery of the disturbed relation of things is startling. You know very well that the mountain ahead is above you, but it has the appearance of standing below you in a hollow; and the water in the brook at your ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk
... lighted altars, or like huge gas-jets suddenly turned on. Adam saw one log lying endwise downhill, one side of which was crumbling into coals of fierce and tremulous heat, while from the other side still sprung unsinged a delicate ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... this anxiety. The children were all agog to see the drama out. Would Mr. Samuel recover? And, if not, what would be done to Tom Trevarthen? They discussed this in eager groups. If any of them had an impulse to run downhill and cry the news through the village, Mrs. Purchase's determined slamming and bolting of the playground gate restrained it—that, and perhaps a thought that by running with the news they would start ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Armour. He was acclaimed throughout the length and breadth of his native land, his poems were read by the wise and by the ignorant, he was the poet of Scotland, and the nation, proud of its gifted son, stood ready to honor and follow him. But the old habits were too strong, and Burns took the downhill road. To this element of dissipation we owe his occasional bitterness, railing and coarseness, which make an expurgated edition of his poems essential to one ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... poignant, and more permanent than any that can be found elsewhere. Steadily climbing like some mountain railway, it reaches at last the short tunnel on the summit level, and then dashes out into the blinding blaze of a new sunshine. The other goes merrily enough, at first, downhill, but at last it comes to the edge of the abyss, and there it stops, but the traveller does not. He goes over; and nobody can see the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... him at Pride's Fall with a buckboard and a pair of half-broken little Morgans; and away they tore into the woods, scrambling uphill, plunging downhill, running away most of the time to the secret satisfaction of Malcourt, who cared particularly for what ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... his fellows somewhat shamefaced that they had seen that sudden madness in him; but was presently of better cheer than he had been yet. He rode beside Clement; they went downhill speedily, and the wilderness began to better, and there was grass at whiles, and bushes here and there. A little after noon they came out of a pass cleft deep through the rocks by a swift stream which had once been ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... came out into the road not a hundred yards distant, and instantly rode down on us at a run. Before we could get as swift a pace, they were close upon us; and then it was a wild and perilous race downhill for the river, with yells, curses, and pistol-balls flying, I as helpless, meanwhile, as a child. The big roan kept well up to the front near the captain. Looking back, through dust and smoke, I saw our pursuers were better horsed and were gaining. A man ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... must say we usually succeeded. It is wonderful what a young fellow will endure cheerfully for the sake of passing it on to some one else the next year. I remember I was pretty mad when my Eta Bita Pie brethren headed me up in a barrel and rolled me downhill into a creek without taking the trouble to remove all the nails. It seemed like wanton carelessness. But long before my nose was out of splints and my hide would hold water I was perfecting our famous "Lover's Leap" for the next year's bunch. That was our greatest triumph. There was an abandoned ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... Ralph's side, and they started. For half an hour they kept on, then Ralph cried, "Halt. I am certain I am going downhill, it may be because I have changed my direction, or it may be because there is a change in the lay of the ground. What do ...
— One of the 28th • G. A. Henty
... how much the change really amounted. The Assyrian Empire was no more. This is a momentous fact, not to be esteemed lightly. The final catastrophe has happened only six years before our date; but the power of Assyria had been going downhill for nearly half a century, and it is clear, from the freedom with which other powers were able to move about the area of her empire some time before the end, that the East had been free of her interference for years. Indeed, so near and ...
— The Ancient East • D. G. Hogarth
... sometimes frozen ropes, you will want a pair of heavy buckskin gauntlets. An extra pair of stout high-laced boots with small Hungarian hob-nails will come handy. It is marvelous how quickly leather wears out in the downhill friction of granite and shale. I once found the heels of a new pair of shoes almost ground away by a single giant-strides descent of a steep shale-covered thirteen-thousand-foot mountain. Having no others I patched them with hair-covered rawhide and a bit of horseshoe. ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... go downhill. Following some random counsel, he changed the name of it and advanced the price—two blunders. Then he was compelled to reduce the subscription, also the advertising rates. He was obliged to adopt a descending ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... curve.... Then some poultry demanded consideration. As we left them behind, the agitation of two led horses necessitated a still further reduction of speed. We lost such time as I had made, and more also. Still, we were going downhill, and, as if impatient of the check, the car sprang forward.... We rose from the bottom with the smooth rush of a non-stop elevator. As we breasted the rise, I saw another and steeper dale before us. The ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... be feared that Aubrey would have badly flunked any quizzing on the chapters of Somebody's Luggage which the bookseller had read aloud. His mind was swimming rapidly in the agreeable, unfettered fashion of a stream rippling downhill. As O. Henry puts it in one of his most delightful stories: "He was outwardly decent and managed to preserve his aquarium, but inside he was impromptu and full of unexpectedness." To say that he was thinking ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... starshine out-of-doors. Miss Theodosia was too late to see the nurse-angel riding on her star, her little cap and halo awry with the downhill glide through space. She was too late to see her go into the dark little House of Children—but she saw her come out. Distinctly, a misty little blur of white against the velvet background. Miss Theodosia ...
— Miss Theodosia's Heartstrings • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... flushed. The moon-jeep crunched and clanked loudly over the trail that led downhill. There was no sound outside, of course. There was no air. But the noise inside the moon-vehicle was notable. The steam-motor, in particular, made a ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... dispute waxed warm, and, while they stopped to argue it out at leisure, I went on. My cook, engaged through the kind offices of the Inland Mission, was a man of strong convictions; and in the last I saw of the dispute he was pulling the unfortunate coolie downhill by the pigtail. When he overtook me he was alone and smiling cheerfully, well satisfied with himself for having settled that little dispute. The road became more level, and we ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... last years she had offered less and less resistance to her tendency to let go, to leave loose ends ungathered, to allow opportunities to slip out of her grasp, to be inexact and unsystematic. There was urgent need of a strong hand at Dinard's, if the business was to be kept from running gradually downhill, and Gabriella became convinced, as the days passed, that hers was the only hand in the house strong enough to check the perilous descent to failure. Her plans were made, her scheme arranged, but, as Madame was both jealous and suspicious, she ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... can't nobody find it, unless they're wise enough to follow cow tracks—and of course, we don't expect that of strangers. But if you ever git lost and you're within ten miles of home jest take the first cow trail you see and follow it downhill and you'll go into one end or the other of Hidden Water canyon. Sure, it's what you might call the Hello-Central of the whole Four Peaks country, with cow paths instead of wires. The only thing lackin' is the girls, to talk back, and call you down for your ungentlemanly language, ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... I said. "I know exactly what it will do, by instinct. Going uphill it will jamb the wheel so effectively that we shall have to carry the machine bodily. The air at the top of the hill will do it good, and it will suddenly come right again. Going downhill it will start reflecting what a nuisance it has been. This will lead to remorse, and finally to despair. It will say to itself: 'I'm not fit to be a brake. I don't help these fellows; I only hinder them. I'm ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... be at him again. Sultan, without more urging, had made the furlongs fly in gallant style, and it was time to be looking out for my landmarks. Nance had made me letter-perfect in them. Here, on the right, was the woodward's cottage where the road began to run downhill into a bottom dark with ancient elms: there, on my left, in an open space among the boles, the moon showed up a worn, grey column which marked the spot where, in the wild days of the Roses, a Parker Putwell had slain a Blount in unfair fight for a light of love not worth the blood of a rabbit. Nance ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... rests is the present—the ever-fleeting present. It lies, then, in the very nature of our existence to take the form of constant motion, and to offer no possibility of our ever attaining the rest for which we are always striving. We are like a man running downhill, who cannot keep on his legs unless he runs on, and will inevitably fall if he stops; or, again, like a pole balanced on the tip of one's finger; or like a planet, which would fall into its sun ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism • Arthur Schopenhauer
... said it was time to be going back. She made the remark again and again, but, every time, the princess begged her to go on just a little farther and a little farther; reminding her that it was much easier to go downhill, and saying that when they did turn they would be at home in a moment. So on and on they did go, now to look at a group of ferns over whose tops a stream was pouring in a watery arch, now to pick a shining stone ...
— The Princess and the Goblin • George MacDonald
... inserted through the centre of the wheel, so that long ends extended about a yard on each side. If any straw remained, it was made up into torches at the top of tall sticks. At a given signal the wheel was lighted, and sent rolling downhill. If this fire-wheel went out before it reached the bottom of the hill, a very poor harvest was promised. If it kept lighted all the way down, and continued blazing for a long time, the harvest would be exceptionally ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... thinking, was unlike any that I had ever witnessed in the pulpit, and appeared to me to resemble rather that of a very earnest speaker at the hustings than the usual pulpit style. His sentences seemed to run downhill, with continually increasing speed till they came to a full stop at the bottom. It was, I think, the only sermon I ever heard which I wished longer. He carried me with him completely, for the century was in those days, like me, ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... describing reform or conservation are foolish and beside the mark. The Conservative was then the only possible reformer. If a man did not strengthen the remains of Roman order and the root of Roman Christianity, he was simply helping the world to roll downhill into ruin and idiotcy. Remember all these evident historical truths and then turn to the account given by Charles Dickens of that great man, St. Dunstan. It is not that the pert cockney tone of the abuse is irritating to the nerves: it is that he has got the whole hang of the thing wrong. His head ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... now become noticeable, and seems greater on this easterly shoulder of the ridge. We are grateful for the rapid downhill trot, which makes two breezes blow where one breeze blew before. Even that one is less marked on this side of the col, and as we descend, turn by turn, beyond the limits of snow patches and into the zone ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... and Accident.—As Colonel Randolph was driving through our town yesterday and was passing Captain Jones's sample-room, where the colonel lately shot Moses Widlake in the street, the horses took alarm and started violently downhill. The colonel kept his seat till rounding the corner by the Clayville Bank, when his wheels came into collision with that edifice, and our gallant townsman was violently shot out. He is now lying in a very precarious condition. This may relieve Tom Widlake of the duty of shooting the ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... the trail we made," remarked Ted. "It wound around and then climbth the hill. We could thee about where the cabin lay, and I made a bee line downhill ...
— Pathfinder - or, The Missing Tenderfoot • Alan Douglas
... they reached the gap, through which a brown stream flowed, and he could see nothing except dim hillsides and the black trough of the hollow. Pete said they must follow the water, and they stumbled downhill among the stones beside the burn. As they descended, a valley opened up and a rough track began near a sheepfold. Although it was dark, Foster saw that they were now crossing rushy pasture, and they had to stop every now and then to open ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss
... the 1st October, we continued our journey to Kusatsu. The road was uphill for a distance of 550 metres, downhill for nearly as far, then up again, and ran often without any protecting fence past deep abysses, or over high bridges of the most dangerous construction. It was, therefore, impossible for any wheeled vehicle to traverse it, so ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
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