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Pit   Listen
verb
Pit  v. t.  (past & past part. pitted; pres. part. pitting)  
1.
To place or put into a pit or hole. "They lived like beasts, and were pitted like beasts, tumbled into the grave."
2.
To mark with little hollows, as by various pustules; as, a face pitted by smallpox.
3.
To introduce as an antagonist; to set forward for or in a contest; as, to pit one dog against another.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Pit" Quotes from Famous Books



... her head. "It's no use. Richard is so ... well, so queer in some ways, Tilly. Besides, you know, I don't think it would be right of me to really pit my will ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson

... urged that Richard rest from the trail for one season, and at the same time give the animals an opportunity to increase. This he had done, and during the previous winter, when Bob also was at home, he and Bob had occupied their time in the woods with the axe and pit saw, cutting a quantity of ...
— The Gaunt Gray Wolf - A Tale of Adventure With Ungava Bob • Dillon Wallace

... of Ilion is rent By shaft and pit; foiled waters wander slow Through plains where Simois and Scamander went To war with Gods and heroes long ago. Not yet to tired Cassandra, lying low In rich Mycenae, do the Fates relent: The bones of Agamemnon are a show, And ruined is ...
— Rhymes a la Mode • Andrew Lang

... gentlemen enough, so many early mushrooms, whose best growth sprang from a live by begging: be thou one of them practise the art of Wolner in England, to swallow all 's given thee: and yet let one purgation make thee as hungry again as fellows that work in a saw-pit. I 'll go ...
— The White Devil • John Webster

... wedded her at once, but repented it after the first night, as he could scarcely put down his foot in the morning for all the toads that were about the room, and when he saw her real face he was so enraged against the brother that he had him thrown into a pit full of serpents. He was so angry, not merely because he had been deceived, but because he could not get rid of the ugly wretch that was now tied to him ...
— The Pink Fairy Book • Various

... presently the fields fell away a bit from the road with boulders and patches of gorse here and there. The next moment we were slackening speed. We drew up by a rough track which led off the road and vanished into a tangle of stunted trees and scrub growing across the yellow face of a sand-pit. ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams

... employed this kind of person, and expected to have a kind of Arabian Nights entertainment, returned richer by his experience but, usually, unless he was very very careful, with the sensations of having just emerged from a garbage pit. ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett

... prescribe it (saffron) to be worn with camphire in a bag at the pit of the stomach for melancholy; and others affirm that, so ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 51, October 19, 1850 • Various

... three fathoms from this point of the meeting waters, and beneath it, just where the curve is deepest, a single crag, as large as a drinking-table and no larger, juts through the foam, and, if a man could reach it, he might leap from it some twelve fathoms, sheer into the spray-hidden pit beneath, there to sink or swim as it might befall. This crag is called ...
— Eric Brighteyes • H. Rider Haggard

... indulged in his polite, Hellenic doubts; the Carthaginian priest, while he believed, with all Marcia's fervour, in a theology to which Marcia's was tender as the divine fellowship of the Phaeacians, yet conceived that it was entirely legitimate to play tricks upon his fiend-gods—to pit his cunning against theirs. If they caught him, perhaps they would laugh, perhaps consume him in the flames of their wrath. It depended on their mood—whether they had dined well, perhaps; and he would take his chances. He stood, now, toward his deities, just where ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne

... belongs. First, there is the deliberate lie. This species needs no particular definition. All are acquainted with it, all have met it, some have uttered it. You all know it when you see it; it is barefaced and shameless; it reeks with the mire of falsity and is foul with the slime of the pit infernal. This lie contains not an atom of truth, is tinctured not with a grain of fact, but is a full-blooded, thoroughbred, out and out lie. Then we have the campaign lie. A large, open-faced fellow, loud-voiced and ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins

... caper in connection with taking snap-shots these days is to buy a developing outfit and upset the household from pit to dome while you are squeezing out pictures of every dearly beloved ...
— You Should Worry Says John Henry • George V. Hobart

... loved Joseph more than all his other sons, and made him a coat of many colours; but his elder brothers hated him, and one day, when far away from home, proposed to kill him. They cast him into a pit instead, and afterwards sold him as a slave to some merchants who were travelling from Gilead to Egypt. When they returned to their father, they took Joseph's coat of many colours, which they had dipped in blood, and brought it to Jacob, saying: "This ...
— Mother Stories from the Old Testament • Anonymous

... boys!" yelled Dan, and the men, bowing their heads, advanced five feet, directing the streams into the fiery pit. For a minute the flames were driven back by the concentrated rush of water; two minutes, and then a gush of fire flared through the break. It broke as a stream hit it, but its ghost, in the guise of hot gases, choked ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry

... spring gun being laid alongside a deer path in the jungle. A string stretched across the path, when touched, releases a bolt and spring, which latter impels a bamboo arrow with great force across the path. This spring gun is called ka riam siat. A pit-fall, with bamboo spikes at the bottom, is called u 'liw lep, and a trap of the pattern of the ordinary leopard trap is called ka riam slung. A noose attached to a long rope laid in a deer run is named ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon

... Rolled inward, and a spacious gap disclosed Into the wasteful deep: the monstrous sight Struck them with horror backward, but far worse Urged them behind: headlong themselves they threw Down from the verge of heaven; eternal wrath Burnt after them to the bottomless pit. ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various

... love can be without jealousy Old age is a prison wall between us and young people Orderliness, from which men are privately exempt People were virtuous in past days: they counted their sinners Professional Puritans Regularity of the grin of dentistry That pit of one of their dead silences The beat of a heart with a dread like a shot in it The good life gone lives on in the mind The shots hit us behind you The spending, never harvesting, world The terrible aggregate social woman Venus of nature was ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger

... before stated, Munich is situated on what was formerly the bed of a lake: the ground, therefore, is full of springs, and from these the water-supply of the inhabitants has always been obtained. There is a well in the court of almost every house, in close proximity to the vault, the refuse-pit and the drain, and well impregnated also, doubtless, with that bugbear of Munich hygienists, "the ground-water." The most ignorant citizen knows that the well-water is not fit to drink, and avoids it as a beverage; still, its use necessarily enters largely ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various

... must learn for thyself, from life itself; yet somewhat of it I can impart unto thee, and it will keep thee in the path of safety, which is not easily trodden by those who are in the counsels of great kings. Mark now these four precepts, and obey them, and thou wilt avoid many of the pit-falls ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston

... his hapless hope. Now when he's at Venus' altar at his orisons, I'll put me on my great carnation-nose, and wrap me in a rowsing calf-skin suit, and come like some hobgoblin, or some devil ascended from the grisly pit of hell, and like a scarbabe make him take his legs: I'll play the devil, I ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various

... he warm his blue hands by holding them up to the grand northern lights? Would not Lazarus rather be in Sumatra than here? Would he not far rather lay him down lengthwise along the line of the equator; yea, ye gods! go down to the fiery pit itself, in order to ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville

... which was placed for him between the side-scenes, a gentleman took possession of it, and when Johnson on his return civilly demanded his seat, rudely refused to give it up; upon which Johnson laid hold of it and tossed him and the chair into the pit. Foote, who so successfully revived the old comedy by exhibiting living characters, had resolved to imitate Johnson on the stage, expecting great profits from his ridicule of so celebrated a man. Johnson being informed of his intention, and being at dinner at Mr. Thomas Davies's ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various

... often water to be seen in these Lowlands. A spring-fed lake far down in a caldron pit, spilling into a trench; low-lying, land-locked little seas; canyons, some of them dry, others filled with tumultuous flowing water. Or great gashes with water sluggishly flowing, or standing with a heavy slime, and a pall of uprising vapor in ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various

... your reading of Hamlet when you get your legs in profile. The last Hamlet as I dressed, made the same mistakes in his reading at rehearsal, till I got him to put a large red wafer on each of his shins, and then at that rehearsal (which was the last) I went in front, sir, to the back of the pit, and whenever his reading brought him into profile, I called out "I don't see no wafers!" And at night ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens

... Thither he went, because he feared to be alone; and there, among happy faces, walked to and fro, and heard the tunes go up and down, and saw Berger beat the measure, and all the while he heard the flames crackle, and saw the red fire burning in the bottomless pit. Of a sudden the band played Hiki-ao-ao; that was a song that he had sung with Kokua, and at the strain courage returned ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... my gratitude to God for His great blessings and mercies to me. I am like David, who said, 'Come, all ye who fear the Lord, and I will tell you what He hath done for my soul.' He has taken me out of the pit of sin, and set me on the rock. So I rejoice, for I have felt and tasted of His love. When I think of what he has done for me, and then think of what I have been, I feel that I am not worthy even to stand up in ...
— By Canoe and Dog-Train • Egerton Ryerson Young

... celebrated dramatist produced a piece in which the hero performed prodigies under the excitement of patriotism, and the labor of his pen was incontinently damned for his pains; both pit and boxes—the galleries dissenting—deciding that it was out of all nature to represent a monikin incurring danger in this unheard-of manner, without a motive. The unhappy wight altered the last scene, by causing his hero to be rewarded by a good, round ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper

... and stagger, whereat the Old Un, standing upon his chair, hugs himself in an ecstasy, and forgetful of such small matters as five-dollar bills, urges, prays, beseeches, and implores the Guv to "wallop the blighter on the p'int, to stab 'im on the mark, and to jolt 'im in the kidney-pit." ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol

... lasted many seconds, and yet it seemed to Cousin Hans that in these moments he had toppled from ledge to ledge, many fathoms down, into a deep, black pit. He supported himself with both hands against an old, high-backed easy-chair; he neither heard, saw, nor thought; but half mechanically he repeated to himself: "It was not she—it ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland

... threatening ills. Such portrayal would not be against a realistic ideal of art, but a more perfect and balanced use of realism. The rise of people on "stepping-stones of their dead selves to higher things" is quite as dramatic as the succession of falls that land them in the pit of despair. The struggles that succeed are quite as capable of exciting emotional response as are those ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer

... we live and learn," said his father whimsically. "Our blunders are often very expensive. The only redeeming thing about them is that we pass our experience on to others and save them from tumbling into the same pit. Thus it was with the early railroad builders. When the Boston and Providence Road was constructed this mistake was not repeated and a flexible wooden roadbed was laid. In the meantime a short steam railroad line had been built from Boston to Newton, a distance of seven miles, and gradually the ...
— Steve and the Steam Engine • Sara Ware Bassett

... nothing more commonly seen even in the very streets of Manila itself, than a man squatted down on his heels with one of these fowls, in order that it might become accustomed to the noise, so that it might not grow confused or become frightened in the pit. There are men who take heed of nothing else or have other thought during the day than ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin

... with black budge of lamb's wool. Essex, to vex him, came to the lists with a body-guard of two thousand retainers all dressed in orange tawny, so that Raleigh and his men should seem a fragment of the great Essex following. The story goes on to show that Essex digged a pit and fell into it himself; but enough has been said to prove his malignant intention. We have little else but anecdotes with which to fill up the gap in Raleigh's career between December 1597 and March 1600. This was an exceedingly quiet period in his life, ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse

... Sleeman gives you a pathetic picture of this lonely old gray figure: all day and all night "she remained sitting by the edge of the water without eating or drinking." The next morning the body of the husband was burned to ashes in a pit eight feet square and three or four feet deep, in the view of several thousand spectators. Then the widow waded out to a bare rock in the river, and everybody went away but her sons and other relations. All day she sat there on her rock in the blazing sun without food or drink, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... urged, the aborigines of Japan. The most accurate researches go to prove that they were immigrants, who reached Yezo from the Kuriles, and subsequently crossing Tsugaru strait, colonized a great part of the main island of Japan, exterminating a race of pit-dwellers to whom they gave the name of koro-pok-guru (men with sunken places). These koro-pok-guru were of such small stature as to be considered dwarfs. They wore skins of animals for clothing, and that they understood the potter's art and used flint arrow-heads ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... thing as separation. We shall draw from our little box a small white packet, and, though Nostradamus may offer us every secret of magician or alchemist in exchange for it, we shall refuse offhand. How shall he lure us with a shadow, a ghostly visitant, savoring of the pit and summoned only by the most marrow-freezing incantations? Here in our hand is a mysterious, more potent charm, bringing us the warm, human personality of the man. We are not spiritualists, yet here sealed in the white packet is an incorporal presence. Given but ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park

... day. Or he can use the old fashioned hand-fired type, with or without the services of a man of all work. There will be dust and dirt as well as the morning and evening rituals of stoking, adjusting dampers, shaking, and cleaning out the ash pit. There will be the periodic chore of sifting ashes and carrying them out for either carting away or for filling in hollow places in the driveway. But his fire will burn, no matter what happens to the current of the local light ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley

... are just a woolly lamb and want a dog to look after you. Who is he? On a first night he gives away his stall and sneaks into the pit. When you send him to a picture-gallery, he dodges the private view and goes on the first shilling day. If an invitation comes to a public dinner, he asks me to go and eat it for him and tell him what it's all about. That doesn't suggest the ...
— Tommy and Co. • Jerome K. Jerome

... life. The tone of these pictures was glad and gay; and, what is remarkable, they had no trace of the funeral ritual or the god Osiris. These were not like tombs, but rather like homes. To secure the body from all profanation, it was concealed in a pit, carefully hidden in the solid masonry. These tombs belong to the ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke

... increasing in density as the pits do in depth: in this occur strata of lignite very imperfectly formed, which gives the grey mineral a slaty fracture, and among this the amber is found. {78} The deepest pit was about 40 feet, and the workmen had then come to water. All the amber I saw, except a few pieces, occurred as very small irregular deposits, and in no great abundance. The searching occupies but ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith

... first to perceive. As those were particularly hot times in the general hullaballoo Bloom sustained a minor injury from a nasty prod of some chap's elbow in the crowd that of course congregated lodging some place about the pit of the stomach, fortunately not of a grave character. His hat (Parnell's) a silk one was inadvertently knocked off and, as a matter of strict history, Bloom was the man who picked it up in the crush after witnessing the occurrence meaning ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... been no Nell, he could not have gone back to Luce. And there was Nell! Yes, thank God! there was Nell, his dear, sweet, beautiful Nell! His girl love, the girl who was like a pure star shining in God's heaven compared with a flame from—yes, from the nethermost pit. Love! He, who now knew what love meant, laughed scornfully at the idea in connection with Lady Luce. Passion it might be—but love! And she had left him with a kiss, as if she were convinced that she had recovered him! Oh, ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice

... magnificent ... there could be no mistake at all about the honest enthusiasm of the audience. The gallery (and this, of course, was very gratifying, because not to be expected at a play of Browning) took all the points quite as quickly as the pit, and entered into the general feeling and interest of the action far more than the boxes.... Altogether the first night was a triumph."—Robert Browning and Alfred Domett, 1906, ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons

... drew from his uniform his automatic. He popped a fresh clip into the pocket fold of his girdle. The pistol he slung high up beneath his arm-pit. ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt

... dropping back to the marble pavement again, and gazing impotently up at the row of figures outlined against the sky. "I must look like a bear in the bear-pit at the Zoo," he growled. "They'll be throwing buns to me next." He could see the two elder sisters talking to Mrs. Downs, who was evidently explaining his purpose in going down to the stage of the theatre, and he could see the ...
— The Princess Aline • Richard Harding Davis

... moral as well as a physical restoration. For years, they had not felt towards him the deep and yearning tenderness that now warmed their bosoms. They longed to rescue him, not for their sakes, but for his own, from the horrible pit and the miry clay into which ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur

... Babel was built over the mouth of Hell it would be wise to explore its site and make proper excavations, so as to settle the geography and physical character of the bottomless-pit. The Churches are sadly in want of a little information about hell, and here is an opportunity for them to acquire it, We hope the explorers will all be selected for their extreme piety, so that they may be as fire-proof as Shadrach, Meshach, ...
— Bible Romances - First Series • George W. Foote

... wife's labours in these parts, have been of essential service;—helped some sunken ones out of a pit, strengthened some weak hands, and confirmed some wavering ones, as well as comforted the mourners. She has no cause to be discouraged about her labours, ...
— The Annual Monitor for 1851 • Anonymous

... inspire Castanet with more horror than the instruments of torture, and while he addressed the executioner as "brother," he called out to the priests, "Go away out of my sight, imps from the bottomless pit! What are you doing here, you accursed tempters? I will die in the religion in which I was born. Leave me alone, ye hypocrites, leave me alone!" But the two abbes were unmoved, and Castanet expired cursing, not the executioner ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... had ceased. Perhaps some of their number had ventured out and returned scatheless. They speedily took advantage of this immunity. While the attacks with the pickaxe were not relaxed for a moment, a score of men had brought the trunk of a young larch from the saw-pit at the back of the house. Poised by forty strong arms, this improvised battering-ram was hurled against the front door, carrying it clear off its hinges. In the naked entry a crowd of rough men jostled one another, as they ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various

... spent all my adult life on Wolf. Juli had been a child under the red star. But it was a pair of wide crimson eyes and black hair combed into ringlets like spun black glass that went down with me into the bottomless pit ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley

... was full. The boxes, the orchestra, the pit, were overflowing. In the front stalls sat the Burgomaster Van Tricasse, Mademoiselle Van Tricasse, Madame Van Tricasse, and the amiable Tatanemance in a green bonnet; not far off were the Counsellor Niklausse and his family, ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne

... a slow stream of cold water on his face and down his neck. When this had no effect he continued the stream over his body, clad in linen clothes, much as one waters a flower bed. The children held their breath and watched. Signs of returning life were visible. As the cold shower struck the pit of his stomach, one knee hitched. Encouraged, Herbert spilt the last pint in his upturned face. It contorted, he choked, ...
— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke

... was a moving sight—a crowd of men standing round a pit, at the bottom of which appeared a little puddle, which when emptied out would gradually drain in again, the spectators watching its progress with greedy eyes. Never had "Duster's" celebrated home-made ginger-beer tasted so refreshing as this muddy liquid. Jack sighed in an ecstasy ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery

... being dead tired, did not awake, he put him gently into a clay-pit close by, and covered him up with clay. Then he took the ogre's head, and going to the King, claimed half the kingdom and the Princess in marriage, as his reward for slaying ...
— Tales Of The Punjab • Flora Annie Steel

... sat in the Strangers' Gallery, and heard your great speakers; I have been in the pit of the opera, and seen your fine ladies; I have walked your streets; I have lounged in your parks, and I say that I can't fall in love with a faded dowager, because she fills ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... two men were skirting the disused quarry, now a rabbit warren, which gave the locality its name; they followed the rising edge of the excavation, treading on a broad strip of turf, purposely freed of encroaching briers lest any wandering stranger might plunge headlong into the pit. Near the highest part of the rock wall there was a slight depression in the ground; and here, except during the height of a phenomenally dry Summer, ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy

... upwards and downwards. Even in the same species, there is often very considerable variation in the exact shape of the valves, more especially of the terga. The adductor muscle is always attached to a point not far from the middle of the scuta, and it generally has a pit for its attachment. In several genera, namely, Paecilasma, Dichelaspis, Conchoderma, and Alepas, the scuta show a tendency to be bilobed or trilobed. The valves are placed either at some distance from each other, or close together; but their ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin

... down into the pit and perceived a young bull in it. Smoker, who was with him, began ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat

... counterplots; Wallenstein, through personal ambition and evil counsel, slowly resolving to revolt; and Octavio Piccolomini, in secret, undermining his influence among the leaders, and preparing for him that pit of ruin, into which, in the third Part, Wallenstein's Death, we see him sink with all his fortunes. The military spirit which pervades the former piece is here well sustained. The ruling motives of these captains and colonels are a little more refined, or more disguised, ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle

... watch fob. He drew a rare thimble from the swell's pit. He took a handsome watch ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.

... circle, And with their tears besought him to hear what the Lord had done for them. Ever he shook them off, not roughly, nor smiled at their transports. Then the preachers spake and painted the terrors of Judgment, And of the bottomless pit, and the flames of hell everlasting. Still and dark he stood, and neither listened nor heeded: But when the fervent voice of the while-haired exhorter was lifted, Fell his brows in a scowl of fierce and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various

... world today, the surging and understandable tide of nationalism is marked by widespread revulsion and revolt against tyranny, injustice, inequality and poverty. As individuals, joined in a common hunger for freedom, men and women and even children pit their spirit against guns and tanks. On a larger scale, in an ever more persistent search for the self-respect of authentic sovereignty and the economic base on which national independence must rest, peoples sever old ties; seek new alliances; experiment—sometimes ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... was a great gaping hole in the hillside. Numbers of rocks had come down with it and rolled into the excavation made by the boys and girls, carrying with them great quantities of earth, so that it was no longer an open pit. The whole appearance of the ravine had been changed by the falling of ...
— The Campfire Girls on Ellen's Isle - The Trail of the Seven Cedars • Hildegard G. Frey

... hairy-chested. His great hands were extended to grasp or to parry—his head lowered with a ferocious scowl—and across his forehead swayed a tuft of black, shaggy hair. He might have stood for one of those northern barbarians whom the Romans loved to pit against their native champions in the arena. He was the greater because of the opponent he faced, and it was upon this opponent that the eyes of ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick

... that the prisoner might be permitted to speak freely, it was that every Assistant might be convinced by his own ears of the boldness wherewith rebellion to constituted authority, impudently bursting from the bottomless pit, ventured to obtrude into a court of justice, and to boast of its misdeeds. Was a child of the covenant of grace, and our brother in Christ, to be reproached with the sins which he had committed when in the gall of bitterness and bonds of iniquity, and which ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams

... across at the cropped sward of Denbies and the long line of the North Downs stretching away towards Reigate. Tender grays and greens melted into one another on the larches hard by; Betchworth chalk-pit gleamed dreamy white in the middle distance. They had been talking earnestly all the way, like two old friends together; for they were both of them young, and they felt at once that nameless bond which often draws one closer to a new acquaintance at first sight than ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen

... I ken ye're thinkin', A certain Bardie's rantin', drinkin', Some luckless hour will send him linkin' To your black pit; But, faith, he'll turn a corner jinkin', And cheat ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones

... him as shallow and a trifler; culture condemns him for pushing his hatred of spiritual falsehood much too seriously; Christian charity feels constrained to unmask a demon from the depths of the pit. The plain men of the earth, who are apt to measure the merits of a philosopher by the strength of his sympathy with existing sources of comfort, would generally approve the saying of Dr. Johnson, that he ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various

... and as I hurried down the canyon and the morning burgeoned like a rose, my spirits mounted invincibly. It was the joy of the open road and the care-free heart. Like some hideous nightmare was the memory of the tunnel and the gravel pit. The bright blood in me rejoiced; my muscles tensed with pride in their toughness; I gazed insolently ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service

... the stone suddenly subsided and fell in such a manner that with some sloping of one side of the excavated pit they were able to drag ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts

... however, the rainy season that reveals to the full the horrors of Chinese travelling. The loess is slippery beyond description, and the litter or cart in which you travel may be stuck for hours in a pit of greasy mud, black by reason of the coal dust so plentiful throughout the district, so deep that nothing but the mule's head is visible, the plunging body being hidden in the black mass. Your only hope at such a moment is to throw yourself ...
— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable

... here); al inf. upon, on, at, when. abandonar abandon, forsake, leave. abandono m. abandonment, surrender, yielding. abarcar embrace, contain. abatir overthrow, lay low. abierto, -a open. abismo m. abyss, hell, bottomless pit. ablandarse soften, relent, give. abonar improve, warrant, favor, become. abrasado, -a burning, hot. abrasar burn. abrazo m. embrace. brego m. southwest wind. abreviar shorten. abrir open, expand, cut; —se open, yawn, unfold, split. abrojo m. ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup

... custodian gave me, in rather dusty and stuffy conditions, as the incident vaguely comes back to me, a glimpse that was like a moment's stand at the mouth of a deep, dark mine. I didn't descend into the pit; I did, instead of this, a much idler and easier thing: I simply went every afternoon, my stint of work over, I like to recall, for a musing stroll upon the Lizza—the Lizza which had its own unpretentious but quite insidious art of meeting the lover of old stories halfway. ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James

... and another officer would lead us to a spot where we could get glimpses of the plain. What a plain! Pit-heads, superb vegetation, and ruined villages—tragic villages illustrating the glories and the transcendent common-sense of war and invasion. That place over there is Souchez—familiar in all mouths from Arkansas to Moscow for six months past. What an object! Look ...
— Over There • Arnold Bennett

... kicking, struggling, scratching; striking with elbows and fists. He caught one of the three by his collar, and tore his jacket open from the neck to the waist; he drove his foot into the pit of the stomach of another, and knocked him breathless. The other lads not in the fight stood upon the benches and the beds around, but such was the awe inspired by the prestige of the bachelors that not one of them dared to lend hand to help ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle

... physical exercise such as only boys, at that time, were accustomed to. She became expert in rowing, riding, skating and shooting, developed great endurance, filled her room with snakes and insects and birds' nests, and in a clay pit at the end of her father's garden ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson

... line! Neither Shakspeare, Fielding, nor Sheridan have given us a better standing jest than this incident affords. It reminds us of the fellow who refused to take off Tom Ashe's coat, because it was felony to strip an ash; or the tanner who would not help the exciseman out of his pit without twelve ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XIII, No. 369, Saturday, May 9, 1829. • Various

... lower or main floor a shallow pit of varying dimensions, but usually about a foot square, is made for a fireplace, and is located immediately under the opening in the hatchway. The intention in raising the hatchway above the level of the roof and in elevating the ceiling in the middle is to prevent the fire from ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various

... lard or fat with all that cleaueth to the skin. This they take with them, leauing the bodies behind, and so go to shore. Where they digge pits, in the grounde of a fadome and an halfe deepe, or thereabout, and so taking the fat or lard off from the skinne, they throw it into the pit, and cast in among it boat burning stones to melt it withall. The vppermost and purest is sold, and vsed to oile wool for cloth, the grosser (that is of a red colour) they sell to ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation v. 4 • Richard Hakluyt

... Horse, who vied with each other in carrying it home (it weighs 137lbs.) Then gun-cotton was thrust up the breech into the body of the gun. A vast explosion told the Boers that "Tom" had gone aloft, and his hulk lay in the pit, rent with two great wounds, and shortened by a head. The sappers say it seemed a crying shame to wreck a thing so beautiful. The howitzer met the same fate. A Maxim was discovered and dragged away, and then the return began. It was now three o'clock, and by four daylight comes. The difficulty ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson

... sevenscore as fair archers as are in all merry England? Nay, good David, what thou tellest me maketh me to desire the prize even more than I else should do. But what sayeth our good gossip Swanthold? Is it not 'A hasty man burneth his mouth, and the fool that keepeth his eyes shut falleth into the pit'? Thus he says, truly, therefore we must meet guile with guile. Now some of you clothe yourselves as curtal friars, and some as rustic peasants, and some as tinkers, or as beggars, but see that each man taketh a good bow or broadsword, in case need should arise. As for myself, I will ...
— The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood • Howard Pyle

... mercy. But not only during their lifetime, but after their death, too, the hand of the Church fell heavily on all those who had strayed beyond her pale; their bodies were dragged from their graves and thrown into the carrion-pit. A man whom the Church had excommunicated was buried in the cemetery of a German convent. The Archbishop of Mayence ordered the exhumation of the body, threatening to interdict divine service in the ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka

... seemed to fall upon their hearts. They resumed their work with fresh zeal, and before morning, the joyful cry came up from the pit that the men were found—alive. Never was a word more in season ...
— The King's Daughter and Other Stories for Girls • Various

... "In England the pit and the gallery of the audience come to the theater, turn in their hard-earned shillings, and demand much. Failing to get what they expect, the theater is filled with boos and cat-calls at the end of the play. This does not mean that the play has failed. It more nearly means ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman

... cover themselves in open ground in an emergency. The division was astride the East Point road, the centre in open fields where no timber could be got for revetment, and only fence rails to give some support to the loose earth. Giving the order to make the light trench of the rifle-pit class, where the earth is thrown outward and the men stand in the ditch they dig, in fifteen minutes by the watch the work was such that I reckoned it sufficient cover to repel an infantry attack, if it came. It would be an extraordinary occasion when we did not have more warning of an impending ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox

... stretched this silent, mysterious muskeg, already green and fair to the eye, an alluring pasture to the unwary. An experienced eye might have judged it too green—too alluring. Could a more perfect trap be devised by evil human ingenuity than this? Think for one instant of a bottomless pit of liquid soil, absorbing in its peculiar density. Think of all the horrors of a quicksand, which, embracing, sucks down into its cruel bosom the despairing victim of its insatiable greed. Think of a thin, solid crust, spread like icing upon a cake ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum

... caused a great sensation in the capital. The lieutenant had been killed, and the ferocious band of rebels seized his widow and daughter eleven years old. The child was ravished to death, and they were just digging a pit to bury the mother alive when she was rescued and brought to Manila in the steam-launch Mariposa raving mad, disguised as a native woman. Aguinaldo, personally, was humanely inclined, for at his headquarters he held ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman

... claimed the game of Tener, who was umpiring, which the latter gave him by a technical score of 9 to 0, the score books showing 8 to 2. That night was our last in Naples, and by invitation of the American Minister we occupied boxes at the San Carlos Theater, which was packed from pit to dome by the wealth and fashion ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson

... wrists tiring him, weighing on the pit of his stomach, numbing the back of his brain, making his limbs as heavy as ponderous lead. It seemed to the wearied engineer that there was nothing in this world to be desired but a good sound sleep; he fought against it desperately, but after a long struggle ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt

... You will do the conventional and necessary pieces of politeness, but not one act of impulse from the heart ever comes from you. You discharge 'the duties of religion.' What a phrase! You discharge the duties of religion. Ah! My brother, if you had been down into the horrible pit and the miry clay, and had seen a hand and a face looking down, and an arm outstretched to lift you; and if you had ever known what the rapture was after that subterraneous experience of having your feet set upon a ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... what it means, Dick," he said bitterly, "but it seems to me that, like Lucifer, you've been falling from dawn to dewy eve, and now you are likely to consort with the devils in the pit. Are you the old Dick who used ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter

... likin' to drop down anywhere, an' jump up any time, years ago. As for cookin' in the woods she says that part of Elijah's editorial is too much for every one. She says she never hear of roastin' a ox whole in a pit in her life; she says how is the ox to be got into the pit an' what's to cook him while he's in there an' when he's cooked how's he to be got out again to eat? She says she thinks Elijah has got a ox an' a clam mixed in his mind, an' a pit an' a pile. She says she knows they cook clams ...
— Susan Clegg and a Man in the House • Anne Warner

... purposes. Most of its history cannot be written, for two reasons: That these crimes are kept secret as far as possible, and that they are so revolting that their details cannot be published and ought not to be read anywhere outside of the bottomless pit. ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various

... my help. This seems to me to be in principle the temptation of Judas, only that Satan did not dare to tempt me so openly. But he might have led me by little and little, as he led Judas, to the same pit of destruction. ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila

... without rest or sleep, and keep well, where a strong man would break down. Mesmerism brings forward multitudes of like facts. There are, for example, the well-attested facts concerning the transfer of the senses: that people under the influence of animal magnetism can read with their forehead, the pit of their stomach, or the back of their head. We have seen a weak boy, some thirteen years old, when magnetized, lift a chair with three heavy men standing on it. Clairvoyance, or seeing things at a distance, though not so well proved, ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke

... Odysseus speaks to us, and when from his sepulchre of flame the great Ghibelline rises, the pride that triumphs over the torture of that bed becomes ours for a moment. Through the dim purple air fly those who have stained the world with the beauty of their sin, and in the pit of loathsome disease, dropsy-stricken and swollen of body into the semblance of a monstrous lute, lies Adamo di Brescia, the coiner of false coin. He bids us listen to his misery; we stop, and with dry and gaping lips he tells us how he dreams day and night of the brooks of clear water that in cool ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde

... produced by gentle manipulations over the head toward the eyes, or upon the chest down to the epigastrium (pit of the stomach). The reason of these processes was entirely unknown until my discovery of the organ of Somnolence in the temples, and the corresponding region in the body showed that the results were produced by manipulations which concentrated the nervous action ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 - Volume 1, Number 5 • Various

... Martian engineers in fitting it artificially to support life, had roughed it into a sphere and pulverized quantities of the rock into soil. Here, at the apex, was a ring of rough naked hills enclosing a pit into which the sun could not look. Ling, catching up with Parr on the brow of the circular range, pointed ...
— The Devil's Asteroid • Manly Wade Wellman

... and content prevailed; but they afterwards revolted, and many gave up their allegiance. The rebels were cast down from on high into the pit of darkness. Hereupon succeeded the transmigration of souls; every animal and every plant was animated by one of the fallen angels, and the remarkable amiability of the Hindoos towards animals is owing to this belief. ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer

... as elastic as the gas of gunpowder, and a sentence in a book, or a word dropped in conversation, sets free our fancy, and instantly our heads are bathed with galaxies, and our feet tread the floor of the Pit. And this benefit is real, because we are entitled to these enlargements, and, once having passed the bounds, shall never again be quite the miserable pedants ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... of their sufferings, and expected the healing remedy perhaps, without contemplating any personal sacrifices of their indulgences, or alteration of favourite habits, he often cut short their narratives by putting his fore-finger on the pit of their stomachs, and observing, "It's all there, sir;" and the never-failing pill and draught, with rigid restrictions as to diet, and injunctions as to exercise, invariably followed, although perhaps rarely attended to; for persons in general ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 493, June 11, 1831 • Various

... me their malice digg'd a pit, But there themselves are cast; My God makes all their mischief light On their ...
— The Psalms of David - Imitated in the Language of The New Testament - And Applied to The Christian State and Worship • Isaac Watts

... day.' I pulled out my card and asked him if that was the way he spelt his name: he answered, yes. I suspect that it was a blackguard navy surgeon, who attended a young travelling madam about, and passed himself for a lord at the post-houses. He was a vulgar dog—quite of the cock-pit order—and a precious representative I must have had of him, if it was even so; but I don't know. He passed himself off as a gentleman, and squired about a Countess * * (of this place), then at Venice, an ugly battered woman, of ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore

... impossible to say: perhaps a long time; but at last I came to myself and struggled up from the debris, like a mole coming to the surface of the earth to feel the genial sunshine on his dim eyeballs. I found myself standing (oddly enough, on all fours) in an immense pit created by the overthrow of a gigantic dead tree with a girth of about thirty or forty feet. The tree itself had rolled down to the bottom of the ravine; but the pit in which it had left the huge stumps of severed roots was, I found, situated in a gentle slope at the top of the bank! How, ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson

... of the fibula, Fig. 217, was made at Stamford, Lincolnshire. It was found in the process of enlarging a stone-pit in the parish of Castle Bytham. It is described by Mr. Akerman, in his "Pagan Saxondom," as "a ring fibula, of white metal, gilt, in very excellent preservation, and set with four gems closely resembling carbuncles. An irregular interlacing pattern ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt

... tell you what I heard. I was going from Stony Ridge to Shashkino; I went first through our walnut wood, and then passed by a little pool—you know where there's a sharp turn down to the ravine— there is a water-pit there, you know; it is quite overgrown with reeds; so I went near this pit, brothers, and suddenly from this came a sound of some one groaning, and piteously, so piteously; oo-oo, oo-oo! I was in such a fright, my brothers; it was late, and the voice was so miserable. I felt as if I ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev

... greater bitterness of soul. I strove to comfort her, but she would not listen to my words; for oh, they were as the blind leading the blind; we both were struggling in the slough of despair—both were in the pit of dark, bewildering misery. We sometimes sat looking at each other, like criminals whose last hour is come; and even when our grief wore itself into a "calm sough," there was something in our silence as dismal and ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton

... a Tresidder, Jasper; they are all as deep as the bottomless pit, and as cruel as the fiend ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking

... my mind with the exact study of dead languages for seven long years. It was the strangest of detachments. We would sit under the desk of such a master as Topham like creatures who had fallen into an enchanted pit, and he would do his considerable best to work us up to enthusiasm for, let us say, a Greek play. If we flagged he would lash himself to revive us. He would walk about the class-room mouthing great lines ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells

... —Life's fair white flower of manhood in the dust; Ten thousand thousand hearts made desolate; My troubled world a seething pit of hate; My helpless ones the victims of thy lust;— The broken maids lift hopeless eyes to Me, The little ones lift handless arms to Me, The tortured women lift white lips to Me, The eyes of murdered white-haired sires and dames Stare up at Me. And the ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers



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