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Dunghill   Listen
noun
Dunghill  n.  
1.
A heap of dung.
2.
Any mean situation or condition; a vile abode. "He... lifteth up the beggar from the dunghill."
Dunghill fowl, a domestic fowl of common breed.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Dunghill" Quotes from Famous Books



... after his death a petition was presented to the Pope, which to his honor he rejected, praying him to order Wycliffe's body to be taken out of consecrated ground and buried in a dunghill. But forty years after, by a decree of the Council of Constance, the old reformer's bones were dug up and burned, and the ashes flung into the little river Swift which "runneth hard by his church at Lutterworth." And so, in the often-quoted words of old Fuller, "as the Swift bear them into the Severn, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... presence (it must be sadly owned) challengings, bickerings, even brotherly quarrels, disturbed more and more the patriarchal peace of Sweetwater Farm. "I dunno what's come over the boys," their father grumbled; "al'ays showing off an' jim-jeerin'. Regilar cocks on a dunghill. A few years agone I'd 've cured it wi' the strap; but now ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... cock, who minded only his hens, and the hens, who were solely employed in scratching a neighbouring dunghill, did not show in any manner that they took the least pleasure ...
— Sketch of Handel and Beethoven • Thomas Hanly Ball

... the conversation; whilst two or three walk up and down the verandah, in solemn consultation as to the best mode of hedging, having unhappily backed a colt for the Margaux Cup that turns out to be a dunghill. ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor

... subjects of the experiment. "A shave from a broken loaf" is thought as little of by the male set of delinquents as by the fair frail. The state of society now leads so much to great accumulations of humanity, that we cannot wonder if it ferment and reek like a compost dunghill. Nature intended that population should be diffused over the soil in proportion to its extent. We have accumulated in huge cities and smothering manufactories the numbers which should be spread over the face of a country; and what wonder ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott

... in the old days Ulysses had reared with his own hand. But ere the dog grew to his full, Ulysses had sailed to Troy. And while he was strong, men used him in the chase, hunting wild goats and roe-deer and hares. But now he lay on a dunghill, and vermin swarmed upon him. Well he knew his master, and, although he could not come near to him, he wagged his tail and drooped ...
— The Story Of The Odyssey • The Rev. Alfred J. Church

... its eyes and rushes blindly forward, will venture to attack an individual who confronts it with a firm and motionless countenance. I say large and fierce, for it is much easier to repel a bloodhound or bear of Finland in this manner than a dunghill cur or a terrier, against which a stick or a stone is a much more certain defence. This will astonish no one who considers that the calm reproving glance of reason, which allays the excesses of the mighty and courageous in our own species, has seldom any other effect than to add to the insolence ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow

... mother's. She asserts that her husband is a greater man than I am." Madame de Berny, he added, had foreseen his mother's and sister's transformation when she told him he was a flower that had sprung up on a dunghill! If Madame de Berny told him this, it was no doubt in a fit of anger against them for endeavouring to sever the liaison, an endeavour they were perfectly justified in. These portions of Balzac's confidences, which reflect upon his character seriously, and besmirch ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton

... Churchill, "for their own idiotic affairs." But the last word came from Lord Morley, the "father of Home Rule." "Give it them," he said, in friendly, private counsel, "give it them; let them have the full savour of their own dunghill civilization." ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement

... and in his bed murthered him the same yeare, the last day of May, crying out, 'Alas, alas, slay me not, I am a Priest.' And so lyke a butcher he lyved, and like a butcher he dyed, and lay 7 monethes and more unburyed, and at last, like a carion, buryed in a dunghill. An. 1546, Maij ult. Ex historia impressa."—(Foxe, edit. 1576, p. 1235.) Sir David Lyndesay thus alludes to the Cardinal's fate, in his poem entitled "The Tragedie of the umquhyle maist reverend Father David, be the mercy of God, Cardinal, and Archebischop ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox

... or God's design must overcome thee. Thy design is to give thy good life, thy good deeds, a part of the glory of thy justification from the curse. And God's design is to throw all thy righteousness out into the street, into the dirt and dunghill, as to that thou art for glory, and for glorying here before God; yea, thou art sharing in the glory of justification when that alone belongeth to God. And he hath said, "My glory will I not give to another." Thou wilt not trust wholly to God's grace in Christ for justification; ...
— The Pharisee And The Publican • John Bunyan

... the things granted A noble people who, being greatly vexed In act, in aspiration keep undaunted? What word will God say? Michel's Night and Day And Dawn and Twilight wait in marble scorn[3] Like dogs upon a dunghill, couched on clay From whence the Medicean stamp's outworn, The final putting off of all such sway By all such hands, and freeing of the unborn In Florence and the great world outside Florence. Three ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning

... courtesans, thieves, warriors, monks, Jews, and travelers,—all the people of his time and our own; and everywhere the specter Death is among them, taunting, threatening, and triumphing. He is absent from one picture only, where Lazarus, lying on a dunghill at the rich man's door, declares that the specter has no terrors for him; probably because he has nothing to lose, and his existence is already ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand

... fancy, we represented to them that it was not surprising if the butcher had perceived some heat in searching amidst entrails which were decaying; neither was it extraordinary that some vapor had proceeded from them; since such will issue from a dunghill that is stirred up; as for this pretended red blood, it still might be seen on the butcher's hands that it was only ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet

... thirty-two pairs of silk stockings, five fine Aubusson tapestries. The plundered mistress of the house was driven out, to live on the charity of her friends. Her aunt, aged ninety-four years, was thrown upon a dunghill, where she died gazing on the peasants whom she had cared for and treated with kindness for years, as they divided among themselves her house-linen, her furniture, her plate, her porcelains, the very doors and windows of her home. All this was in the summer ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert

... under her back, so that she lies on the bare straw; and for her I am troubled a deal more than for myself. For wealth comes and goes; if I have lost now I shall gain another time, and I shall pay for my ox when I can; nor will I ever weep for an ox. And you wept for a dog of the dunghill! Sorrow be his who ever ...
— Aucassin and Nicolette - translated from the Old French • Anonymous

... were not very hardly entreated. But with these it is otherwise, and they all bear grievous pains daily; for the Dusky Men are as hogs in a garden of lilies. Whatsoever is fair there have they defiled and deflowered, and they wallow in our fair halls as swine strayed from the dunghill. No delight in life, no sweet days do they have for themselves, and they begrudge the delight of others therein. Therefore their thralls know no rest or solace; their reward of toil is many stripes, and the healing ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris

... "they've outwitted themselves. I've an old coat and waistcoat as I've nearly done with, but they've got a good bit of wear in them yet. They'll just about fit you, I reckon. You shall go back in them, and keep them and welcome, and we'll make these as they've spoilt a present to the dunghill. I only wish all other bad habits, and more particularly them as comes through rum, brandy, and such like, could be cast away on to the same place. You did quite right, Jim, ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson

... Charles in 1647-8. 'When I think of dying', he wrote, adapting a saying of Cicero, 'it is one of my comforts, that when I part from the dunghill of this world, I shall meet King Charles, and all those faithfull spirits, that had virtue enough to be true to him, the Church, and the Laws unto the last.' (Memoires, p. 331.) Passages in the Memoires show that they were begun after ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various

... think I reasoned at all as to her dangers there; but I was as one who sees a flower on a dunghill. One does not argue about the matter, or question whether it be smirched or not, nor how it got there. Neither did I consider at all how my cousin came to be at Court, nor whether any evil had yet come to her. I did not even consider that I did not know ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson

... chimneys had lost half their original height; the rotten rafters were evidently misplaced; while in many instances the thatch, yawning in some parts to admit the wind and wet, and in all utterly unfit for its original purpose of giving protection from the weather, looked more like the top of a dunghill than a cottage. Before the doors of these dwellings, and often surrounding them, ran open drains full of animal and vegetable refuse, decomposing into disease, or sometimes in their imperfect course filling foul pits or spreading into stagnant pools, while a concentrated solution ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli

... having but just acquired a relish for distinction, each hero or philosopher, for all are dubbed with these new titles, endeavors to make hay while the sun shines; and every petty municipal officer, become the idol, or rather the tyrant of the day, stalks like a cock on a dunghill." ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell

... a voice that sometimes crashed like cannon. Such as it was, it was the gift of all hill-preachers, to a singular degree of likeness or identity. Their images scarce ranged beyond the red horizon of the moor and the rainy hill-top, the shepherd and his sheep, a fowling- piece, a spade, a pipe, a dunghill, a crowing cock, the shining and the withdrawal of the sun. An occasional pathos of simple humanity, and frequent patches of big Biblical words, relieved the homely tissue. It was a poetry apart; bleak, austere, but genuine, ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Thy loving-kindness is infinite toward me, and Thy favour manifest, seeing Thou hast so willed I should lie on a dunghill, like Job and Lazarus, whom Thou didst love so well. And Thou hast given me to know how filthy straw is a soft and sweet pillow to the just man. And Thou, dear Son of God, who didst descend into Hell, bless Thou the sleep of Thy servant where he lies in the gloomy ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France

... a flower; but love cannot, like a flower, grow on a dunghill. It requires a pure, chaste soul, and it requires the fostering sunshine of sympathy and adoration. To a Tahitian a woman was merely a toy to amuse him. He liked her as he liked his food and drink, or his cool plunge into the waves, for the reason that she pleased ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck

... miserable failure! I intended to let them loose on the Lunar Continent at the first favorable opportunity. I often had a good laugh to myself, thinking of your astonishment and the Captain's at seeing a lot of American poultry scratching for worms on a Lunar dunghill!" ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne

... looks," she said. "I suppose Our Lady is in pieces somewhere on a dunghill. Surely, father—I beg your pardon, Mr. Dent—it cannot be the same religion if you have knocked Our Lady to pieces. But then I suppose you would say that she was a superstition, too. And where is the old altar? Is that broken, too? And is that a superstition, too? What ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson

... is it, then, my good man?' interrogated the sexton, as one in authority, and standing on his own dunghill. ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... Astronomical Society, inviting controversy: he was answered by a recommendation to study {297} dynamics. The above pamphlet was the consequence, in which, calling the Council of the Society "craven dunghill cocks," he set them right about their doctrines. From all I can learn, the life of a worthy man and a creditable officer was completely embittered by his want of power to see that no person is bound in reason to enter into controversy with every one who chooses ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan

... men of almost every condition,— popes, sovereigns, lovers, gamblers, monks, soldiers,—are taunted with their fear of Death and do indeed see his approach with terror, Lazarus alone is easy and composed, and sitting on his dunghill at the rich man's door, tells Death that he does not ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold

... at the two small peering faces the human derelict's red-nosed, stubble-coated visage contorted itself into a friendly grimace of recognition; at the same time, with an indescribably droll, swashbuckling swagger he doffed a shocking dunghill of ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall

... as if they had been hungry for a month. And when they had finished they put out the lights, and each sought out a sleeping-place to suit his nature and habits. The ass laid himself down outside on the dunghill, the dog behind the door, the cat on the hearth by the warm ashes, and the cock settled himself in the cockloft, and as they were all tired with their long journey ...
— Household Stories by the Brothers Grimm • Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm

... fancy's boldest wing 155 To soar unwearied, fearlessly to turn The keenest pangs to peacefulness, and taste The joys which mingled sense and spirit yield. Or he is formed for abjectness and woe, To grovel on the dunghill of his fears, 160 To shrink at every sound, to quench the flame Of natural love in sensualism, to know That hour as blessed when on his worthless days The frozen hand of Death shall set its seal, Yet fear the cure, though hating the disease. 165 The one is man that shall ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... Out dunghill: dar'st thou braue a Nobleman? Hub. Not for my life: But yet I dare defend My ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare

... while he was watching over the gold, forgetful of food, he was starved to death; on which a Vulture, standing over him, is reported to have said: "O Dog, you justly meet your death, who, begotten at a cross-road, and bred up on a dunghill, have ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus

... Absurdities they have made Men swallow concerning their own Nature, in spight of what All felt within. In the Culture of Gardens, whatever comes up in the Paths is weeded out as offensive and flung upon the Dunghill; out among the Vegetables that are all thus promiscously thrown away for Weeds, there may be many curious Plants, on the Use and Beauty of which a Botanist would read long Lectures. The Moralists have endeavour'd to rout Vice, and clear the Heart of all ...
— An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, and the Usefulness of Christianity in War • Bernard Mandeville

... and moral corruption. 'Great is Diana of the Ephesians.' The books of Ephesus were a synonym for magical books. Many of us know how rotten to the core the society of that great city was. And there, on the dunghill, was this little garden of fragrant and flowering plants. They were 'saints in Christ Jesus,' though they were 'saints ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren

... the lion skar'd with the 185 throat of a dunghill cock, a fellow that has newly shak'd off his shackles; now does he crow ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman

... bricks appear both on the sides and top, being neither wainscotted nor plastered; what adds to the dampness and stench of the place, is its being built over the common sewer, and adjoining to the sink and dunghill where all the nastiness of the prison is cast. In this miserable place the poor wretch was kept by the said Bainbridge manacled and shackled for near two months. At length on receiving five guineas from Mr. Kemp, a friend of Solas's, Bainbridge released the prisoner from his ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman

... same time looking into every corner of the farmyard with a searching glance. The sun darted its oblique rays through the beech trees by the side of the ditch and athwart the apple trees outside, and was making the cocks crow on the dunghill, and the pigeons coo on the roof. The smell of the cow stable came through the open door, and blended in the fresh morning air with the pungent odor of the stable, where the horses were neighing, with their ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant

... bliss, when it rains in the fields, To live on the transports that shuttlecock yields; Or go crawling from window to window, to see A pig on a dunghill or crow ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various

... mistaken interest! I grant, indeed, that slaves are some times, by half-feeding, half-clothing, over-working and stripes, reduced so low, that they are turned out as unfit for service, and left to perish in the woods, or expire on a dunghill. ...
— The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African - Written By Himself • Olaudah Equiano

... a final squawk, shook out her ruffled feathers, and rushed away to tell her woes to her companions on the dunghill, while the old woman jumped up, smoothed down ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge

... cats, and guinea-pigs they have killed?—not one. So, then, the rabbit dies, and justice takes no notice. This rabbit dead, the Abbe Adelmonte has its entrails taken out by his cook and thrown on the dunghill; on this dunghill is a hen, who, pecking these intestines, is in her turn taken ill, and dies next day. At the moment when she is struggling in the convulsions of death, a vulture is flying by (there are a good many vultures in Adelmonte's country); this bird darts on the ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... article, sir, about the living. Did you think, when you sat down to write it, about the dead?—about that wilderness of white crosses out in France? You're proposing in cold blood to let those devils stay on their own dunghill." ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... monks who broke their vows shared no better. Because a monk had been guilty of hoarding up a large sum of money, contrary to the rules of his order, he was denied Christian burial, and his body was cast upon a dunghill. After mass was said for the miser thirty days, the deceased monk appeared to a brother of his order and told him that he had been in purgatory till that day. From this blessed liberation St. Gregory ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant

... been open and free to all comers, and civil to all (for I could never persuade myself to make it a garrison of war, war being a thing that I prefer to see as remote as may be), has sufficiently merited popular kindness, and so that it would be a hard matter justly to insult over me upon my own dunghill; and I look upon it as a wonderful and exemplary thing that it yet continues a virgin from blood and plunder during so long a storm, and so many neighbouring revolutions and tumults. For to confess the truth, it had been possible enough for a man of my complexion to have shaken hands ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne

... young gentlemen who used the Back Kitchen as a place of nightly entertainment and refreshment. Huxter, who had a fine natural genius for mimicking every thing, whether it was a favorite tragic or comic actor, a cock on a dunghill, a corkscrew going into a bottle and a cork issuing thence, or an Irish officer of genteel connections who offered himself as an object of imitation with only too much readiness, talked his talk, and twanged his poor old long bow whenever drink, ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray

... way wi' some lasses. They're like a cock on a dunghill, when they've teased a silly chap into wedding 'em. It's cock-a-doodle-do, I've cotched a husband, cock-a-doodle-doo, wi' 'em. I've no patience wi' such like; I beg, Sylvie, thou'lt not get too thick wi' Molly. She's not pretty behaved, making such an ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell

... the heap of rags, which she turned up for that purpose; together with a girl's cloak, quite worn out and very old; and the crushed remains of a bonnet that had probably been picked up from some ditch or dunghill. In this dainty raiment, she instructed Florence to dress herself; and as such preparation seemed a prelude to her release, the child complied with ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens

... Fear of God, Bunyan observes—'The poor Christian hath something to answer them that reproach him for his ignoble pedigree, and shortness of the glory of the wisdom of this world. True may that man say I am taken out of the dunghill. I was born in a base and low estate; but I fear God. This is the highest and most noble; he hath the honour, the life, and glory that is lasting.'[7] In his controversy with the Strict Baptists, he chides ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... and beer. Nobody has a right to complain who has at his disposal a competent supply of good brown bread and butter; but to our unpractised palates, the rye-meal, and sour leaven, were not very inviting. Still we set to work, and aided by a cat, and a fine bold fellow of a dunghill cock, both of whom took post beside us, and insisted on sharing our meal, we made a pretty considerable inroad into the good woman's vivres, whose butter and beer were both of them excellent. This, with a rest of half an hour, made us feel up to our work; so ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig

... it once, it being strange to observe the nature of these poor creatures, how they will fight till they drop down dead upon the table, and strike after they are ready to give up the ghost, not offering to run away when they are weary or wounded past doing further, whereas where a dunghill brood comes he will, after a sharp stroke that pricks him, run off the stage, and then they wring off his neck without more ado, whereas the other they preserve, though their eyes be both out, for breed ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys

... 'the god of the theatre.' Voltaire protested against this estimate in a new remonstrance consisting of two letters, of which the first was read before the French Academy on August 25, 1776. Here Shakespeare was described as a barbarian, whose works—'a huge dunghill'—concealed ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee

... pheasants crow upon your perch: But when we fire your coats about your ears, And take your ships before your walled towns, We make a dunghill of your rotten bones, And cram our chickens with your grains ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VI • Robert Dodsley

... meet, anointed Kings whose crowned heads uneasy lie, Whose cup of joy contains no more than tramps that on the dunghill die. ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton

... longing for weeping increased. Horrible awakening! Josephina was not there; only the void was about him. It was useless to seek the past in the field of death. Memories could not be aroused in that cold ground, stirred by worms and decay. Oh, where had he come to seek his dreams! From what a foul dunghill he had tried to raise the roses of ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... under our flag, it is to be observed that no progress whatever, not the least, had been made in mastering the peach-stone, that old central nuisance of the island. The little monster still crowed, and flapped his wings on his dunghill, as had been his custom always in the afternoon for certain centuries. But nothing on earth is immortal: even mighty bantams must have their decline and fall; and omens began to show out that soon there would be a dust with the new ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various

... mornin'. Jim, he'd sweated all night, an' he didn't reckon hisself equal to the talkin' an' the swearin' an' the cryin', an' his mother blamin' him afterwards on the slate. "It spiled my day to think of it," he ses, when we was eatin' our pieces. "So I've fair cried dunghill an' run. Mother'll have to tackle him by herself. I lay she won't give him no hush-money," he ses. "I lay he'll be surprised by the time he's done with her," he ses. An' that was e'en a'most all the talk we had concernin' it. But he's no hunger ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling

... it was. A telegram at a tea-bar, a whisper, a gathering rush, an electric vibration—and all the station and all the train and the very niggers on the dunghill outside knew it. War—war at last! Everybody had predicted it—and now everybody gasped with amazement. One man broke off in a joke about killing Dutchmen, and could only say, ...
— From Capetown to Ladysmith - An Unfinished Record of the South African War • G. W. Steevens

... led him to write in another name than hers because she had refused to support him. He had been a viler beast than the cutpurse poet of old France, without the lilies of verse that bloom pure white above the dunghill of Villon's life. ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes

... Spirit, or as the Chymists esteem it, the Sulphur of Wine, may not only be separated from it by the gentle heat of a Bath, but may be distill'd either by the help of the Sun-Beams, or even of a Dunghill, being indeed of so Fugitive a Nature, that it is not easy to keep it from flying away, even without the Application of external heat. I have likewise observ'd that a Vessel full of Urine being plac'd ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle

... Antiquated Heresy.—It has rotted and putrefied among the worshipers of cats, and monkeys, and holy bulls, and bits of sticks and stones, on the banks of the Ganges, for more than two thousand years; yet it is now hooked up out of its dunghill, and hawked about among Christian people, as a prime new discovery of modern philosophy for getting rid of Almighty God. As the Hindoo Shasters are undoubtedly the sources from which French, German, and American philosophers have borrowed their dogmas, and as ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson

... of asses, goats, and sheep, that dashed against the ruined church like living waves, while swarms of wood-lice and crickets attacked the foundations and reduced them to dust with their sawlike teeth. Yet again, on the other side, there was Desiree's poultry-yard, where the dunghill reeked with suffocating fumes. Here the big cock, Alexander, sounded the assault, and the hens loosened the stones with their beaks, and the rabbits burrowed under the very altars; whilst the pig, too fat to stir, grunted and ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola

... grimalkin[obs3]; gib cat, tom cat. [wild mammals] fox, Reynard, vixen, stag, deer, hart, buck, doe, roe; caribou, coyote, elk, moose, musk ox, sambar[obs3]. bird; poultry, fowl, cock, hen, chicken, chanticleer, partlet[obs3], rooster, dunghill cock, barn door fowl; feathered tribes, feathered songster; singing bird, dicky bird; canary, warbler; finch; aberdevine[obs3], cushat[obs3], cygnet, ringdove[obs3], siskin, swan, wood pigeon. [undesirable animals] vermin, varmint[Western ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... need for any sorrowful heart ever to say, 'I am solitary as well as sad.' He will always come and sit down by us, and if it be that, like poor Job upon his dunghill, we are not able to bear the word of consolation, yet He will wait there till we are ready to take it. He is there all the same, though silent, and will be near all of us, if only we do not drive Him away. 'He will call upon ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... nature. But being now arrived at the very summit of his wicked cruelty, he returned to Lanerk, and at the very place where he had bound Mr. Cargil, one of his drunken companions and he falling at odds, while he was easing himself on a dunghill, his comrade coming out with a sword, ran him through the body till the blood and dirt, with Eglon's, came out. His last words were, "God damn my soul eternally, for I am gone." Mischief shall hunt the violent man, till he ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie

... to his audacious demand for the hand of Lady Frances. On that occasion Mr. Greenwood had been very imperious. Mr. Greenwood had taken upon himself almost the manners of the master of the house. Mr. Greenwood had crowed as though the dunghill had been his own. George Roden even then had not been abashed, having been able to remember through the interview that the young lady was on his side; but he had certainly been severely treated. He had wondered at the moment that such a man as ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope

... fool! is it thus our great aim will be defeated by thy silly conceit? Lo, now, the greatness and the happiness thou art losing for this idle vanity is to be as a dunghill cock matched with an ostrich; and think not to escape the calamities thou bringest on thyself, for as ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... it seemed to be a rustic, ignoble family rather than a royal one." It was appropriate that that family, upon whom was a second time to be fulfilled the declaration in Ps. cxiii. 7, 8: "He raiseth up the poor out of the dust; He lifteth up the needy out of the dunghill, that He may set him with princes, with the princes of His people,"—in which, the second time, the transition should take place from the low condition to the royal dignity, should not be mentioned according to its royal, but according to its rustic character. This explanation of the fact is confirmed ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg

... you imitate the cocks in all things, why don't you scratch up the dunghill, why don't ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al

... idleness gradually disappeared before the energy, activity, and industry which were called into life by the improved communications. Better built cottages took the place of the old mud biggins with holes in their roofs to let out the smoke. The pigs and cattle were treated to a separate table. The dunghill was turned to the outside of the house. Tartan tatters gave place to the produce of Manchester and Glasgow looms; and very soon few young persons were to be found who could not both ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles

... the steaming dunghill; some of them were scratching with one claw in search of worms, while the cock stood up proudly in their midst. When he crowed, the cocks in all the neighboring farmyards replied to him, as if they were uttering challenges ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant

... of a whole system of philosophy. In self-indulgent minds most of these standard images are dramatic, and the cue men follow in unravelling experience is that offered by some success or failure of their own. The sanguine, having once found a pearl in a dunghill, feel a glorious assurance that the world's true secret is that everything in the end is ordered for everybody's benefit—and that is optimism. The atrabilious, being ill at ease with themselves, see the workings everywhere of insidious sin, and conceive ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... to the Holy Mother or to the saints had no need to fear the devil, who, four weeks ago, had come to miller Kierski at midnight—the man who lived at Latalice, north of Gradewitz, and was always swearing and drinking—and had almost wrung his neck off. He had been left on the dunghill behind his barn, where he lay quite stiff and blue in the face; and if St. Peter's cock had not flown on to the roof of the mill and crowed three times, [Pg 41] so that the devil thought it was the miller's cock ...
— Absolution • Clara Viebig

... and listen to me. The next time you look at a public-house say to yourself, Peter Crawley, that is not a public-house to you—it is a hospital, a workhouse, for a dunghill—for if you go in there John Meadows, that is your ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade

... those cyphers of beings who call themselves her relations? Shall they mount the dunghill of their vanity, clap their wings, and exult, as if they too had conquered a Clifton? Even the villain Mac Fane would not fail to scout at me! Nay the very go-between, the convenient chamber-maid herself, forgetting the lightness ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft

... shame on him, quoth I, that shamefull thought Doth entertain within his dunghill breast, Both God and Nature hath my spirits wrought To better temper and of old hath blest My loftie soul with more divine aspires Then to be touchd with such vile ...
— Democritus Platonissans • Henry More

... turns the key wi' cannie thraw, [cautious twist] An' owre the threshold ventures; But first on Sawnie gies a ca', [call] Syne bauldly in she enters; [Then] A ratton rattl'd up the wa', [rat] An' she cried 'Lord preserve her!' An' ran thro' midden-hole an' a', [dunghill pool] An' pray'd wi' zeal an' fervour ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson

... the woods, and feed on the sea-beach, and are so very tame or foolish, as to stand and stare at us till we knocked them down with a stick. The natives may have, in a manner, wholly destroyed them. They are a sort of rail, about the size and a good deal like a common dunghill hen; most of them are of a dirty black or dark-brown colour, and eat very well in a pye or fricassee. Among the small birds I must not omit to particularize the wattle-bird, poy-bird, and fan-tail, on account of their singularity, especially ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, Volume 1 • James Cook

... Mansion. The finding of a treasure. The Story of the Mutton Pies. A Miser's Idea of Death. Bob, the Miser's cur. Griffiths and his Master. How to turn a penny. A substitute for a Fire. The Advantages of keeping a Snuff-box. The Miser dies without a Shirt. The Treasures of a Dunghill—"' ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens

... God—wasted. O! it is a distressing thing to see children die. God gives the most beautiful and precious thing that earth can have, and we just take it and cast it away; we toss our pearls upon the dunghill and leave them. A dying child is to me one of the most dreadful sights in the world. A dying man, a man dying on the field of battle—that is a small sight; he has taken his chance; he is doing his duty; he has had his excitement; he has had his glory, if that will be any consolation ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... illustrious Van Zandt a whit more improbable or repugnant to belief than what is related and universally admitted of certain of our greatest, or rather richest, men, who we are told with the utmost gravity did originally spring from a dunghill! ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving

... hay!' Then the parson himself was frightened; and thinking the cow was surely bewitched, told his man to kill her on the spot. So the cow was killed, and cut up; and the stomach, in which Tom lay, was thrown out upon a dunghill. ...
— Grimms' Fairy Tales • The Brothers Grimm

... a single gesture that shall rend the veil of night. There is Aimar de Ransonnet, President of the Parliament of Paris, one of the most upright of men, who first of all is suddenly dismissed from his office, sees his daughter die on a dunghill before his eyes, his son perish at the hands of the executioner, and his wife struck by lightning; while he himself is accused of heresy and sent to the Bastille, where he dies of grief before he is ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck

... in the barn threshing the corn, The cock's on the dunghill blowing his horn, The cat's at the fire frying of fish, The dog's in ...
— The Nursery Rhyme Book • Unknown

... normal man. The manipulations of sadism or masochism are even utilized to revive a sexual appetite weakened by abuse. Individuals who have become impotent often try to excite themselves by observing the coitus of others. In fact a leaven of corruption and ignominy ferments on the dunghill of venal and artificial excitation ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel

... saw a lawyer killing a viper On a dunghill hard by his own stable; And the Devil smiled, for it put him in mind Of Cain ...
— English Satires • Various

... hated pessimism and all that criticism and self-examination that makes weak men pessimistic, he wanted to help weak men and be helped himself, he was all for that school of optimism that would have each dunghill was a well-upholstered throne, and his nervous, starry contributions to the talk were like patches of water ranunculuses trying to flower in the overflow ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

... else his manly looks. To conclude; the poor man's son by pains-taking will for the most part be learned when the gentleman's son will not take the pains to get it. And we are taught by the Scriptures that Almighty God raiseth up from the dunghill, and setteth him in high authority. And whensoever it pleaseth him, of his divine providence, he deposeth princes unto a right humble and poor estate. Wherefore, if the gentleman's son be apt to learning, let him be admitted; if not apt, let the poor man's child ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various

... Saw his unlettered sire Still by the old log fire, Saw the unpolished dame— And the dunghill from ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster

... which were all he had, not leaving him one to bake him a cake. Thus, in one hour, as the wild Arabs served Job, did the British serve my poor brother, breaking him up root and branch; and, from a state of affluence, reduced him to a dunghill. ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems

... bury for ever? Think of the Lord's dealings with our people—poor, wandering, and despised at first. He had blessings in store for the tried voortrekkers and their children. 'The beggar was raised from the dunghill [asch-hoop, i.e., ash-heap, was the word he used] to sit with princes'—'a table laid for us in the sight of our enemies.' All this is literally fulfilled. Our President and others representing us have been to Europe and sat with princes, ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas

... have not a bit of color on your wings." "True," replied the Crane; "but I soar to the heights of heaven and lift up my voice to the stars, while you walk below, like a cock, among the birds of the dunghill." ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop

... the spoils and tributes of so many nations. This spectacle of the world, how is it fallen! how changed! how defaced! The path of victory is obliterated by vines, and the benches of the senators are concealed by a dunghill. Cast your eyes on the Palatine hill, and seek among the shapeless and enormous fragments the marble theatre, the obelisks, the colossal statues, the porticos of Nero's palace: survey the other hills of the city, the vacant space is interrupted only by ruins and gardens. The forum of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon

... the purpose of extracting some nourishment from them by boiling we regretted our inability to relieve them, but little thought that we should ourselves be afterwards driven to the necessity of eagerly collecting these same bones a second time from the dunghill. ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin

... private individual attempts to lecture us upon its evils and immorality, and the necessity of putting means in operation to secure us from them, in the same moment his tongue shall be cut out and cast upon the dunghill." The Missouri Argus says: "Abolition editors in slave States will not dare to avow their opinions. It would be instant death to them." Finally, the New Orleans True American says: "We can assure those, one and all, who have embarked in the nefarious scheme of abolishing Slavery ...
— No Compromise with Slavery - An Address Delivered to the Broadway Tabernacle, New York • William Lloyd Garrison

... idiot, or lunatic, you know. Well, it was the same with these vilest of the vile. They saw that I was a fool whom God had taken hold of, to break his heart first, and then to craze his brain, and then to fling him on a dunghill to die like a dog. They believe in God, those people. They're the only ones who do, it seems to me. And they wouldn't interfere when they saw what He was doing to me. But I tell you I wasn't drunk. I haven't been drunk. I'm only heart-broken, and crushed out of shape and life—that's ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic

... enjoy eternal consciousness as a part of the Mind." A new passion leaped to his dark eyes. "When I have finished my mission, no more need we be slaves of the dust, subject to all the frightful sufferings of this dunghill of flesh." ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various

... who suddenly come to wealth and honour; in allusion to the stalks of corn which spring up on a dunghill. ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop

... cowardly breach of silence of that taciturn legislative body, emboldened by catastrophe, possessed only traits which aroused indignation. And it was a crime to applaud, in 1814, in the presence of those marshals who betrayed; in the presence of that senate which passed from one dunghill to another, insulting after having deified; in the presence of that idolatry which was loosing its footing and spitting on its idol,—it was a duty to turn aside the head. In 1815, when the supreme disasters filled the air, when France ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... than other men have in their whole fortunes! And as for slaves, damn me if I believe a tenth of them knows the master by sight. The truth is, that these stand-a-gapes are so much in awe of him that any one of them would step into a fresh dunghill without ever knowing it, at a mere nod ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter

... Tantillion. Wilford does it—and he is but a Viscount, and for all his straight nose and fine eyes but five feet ten. Good Lord! he looks down on us who did not pass well at the University, like a cock on a dunghill." ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... absurd opinions upon art of his royal master. Reynolds was bent upon asserting the dignity of his profession. He did not stoop to conceal his appreciation of the fact that as a painter at any rate he was the sovereign's superior—he would be, to use a popular phrase, 'cock on his own dunghill.' When the painter's friends spoke on the subject to Johnson, he said stoutly 'That the neglect could never prejudice him: but it would reflect eternal disgrace on the king not to have employed Sir Joshua.' But Reynolds received only one royal commission: ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook

... tremble, whose houses are privately stored with those materials of beggary and desolation, lately brought over to be scattered like a pestilence among their countrymen, which may probably first seize upon themselves and their families, until their houses shall be made a dunghill. ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift

... to stand up and fib each other about (saying nothing of the practice), why let them do it; or if two dogs worry each other to death for a bone, or two cocks meet and contend for the sovereignty of a dunghill. In these last two cases the appearance of cruelty is out of the question, and how much soever we may be inclined to pity, we are entirely divested of the ability to blame. Dogs naturally quarrel; and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 484 - Vol. 17, No. 484, Saturday, April 9, 1831 • Various



Words linked to "Dunghill" :   muckheap, cumulation, unsanitariness, midden, mound, agglomerate



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