"Rut" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... aberrant as the latter were commonplace. But to one who knew them as the work of a fashionable, highly-educated clique they seemed merely a reaction of the same spirit that produced the elder style. In striving to get out of the rut of commonplace which had so long held in its grip the wheels of English art, not originality, so much as deliberate, sought-out eccentricity, was the result. The scale of work, starting from the original bathos of domestic ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... that her mother and I made has left its mark on me. The friends we left in the rut behind us looked for my failure, and it seemed then that all the men with money had leagued themselves together to stop me from going on. Somehow I beat them, one by one—big engineers, financiers, financiers' syndicates, corporations—working late and working early, ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... they were given shelter at a farmer's house, and were on their journey again by the rising of the sun, but shortly afterward the cart ran into a rut and one of the wheels was broken. Margaret petulantly wondered if the Lord were trying to keep her from reaching Nashville, ...
— The Starbucks • Opie Percival Read
... chanst to meet men folks. I wuz raised here, and folks allers hed it all cut out fer me to be an old maid. When a woman onct gets that name fixt on her, it's all off with her chances. No man ever comes nigh her, and she can't git out of her single rut. I never could get to go nowhars, and I wa'n't that bold kind that makes up to a man fust, afore ...
— David Dunne - A Romance of the Middle West • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... clouds are mean, A travelling flake of snow Across a barn or through a rut Debates if ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... came back late, wouldn't I catch it?" he said with some irritation, slipping into his evening clothes and looking critically at his rather subdued reflection in the glass. "Jim tells me I'm getting in a rut, middle-aged, showing the wear. Perhaps." He rubbed his hand over the wrinkled cheek and frowned. "I have gone off a bit—sedentary life—six years. It does settle you. Hello! ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... of them, and there will be no living with you. The Major, who is half your age"—I had come early, as was my custom, to pay my respects to the dear woman—"is no better. You are both of you getting into a rut. What you want is some young blood pumped into your shrivelled veins. I am going to hunt up every girl I know and all the boys, including that young Breen you are so wild over, and then I'll send for dear Ruth MacFarlane, who has just come North with her father to live, ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... Rut whether the Elephant is wanted as a beast of burden, or it is only his great tusks that are desired, it is no joke to hunt him. He will not attack a man without provocation (except in very rare cases); when he does get ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... for Mr. Lawson." She affirmed that she saw him then. Mr. Burroughs, it will be borne in mind, was at this time a hundred miles away, at his home in Maine. Hutchinson asked her where she saw him. She said "There," pointing to a rut in the road made by a cart-wheel. He had an iron fork in his hand, and threw it where she said Burroughs was standing. Instantly she fell into a fit; and, when she came out of it, said, "'You have torn his coat, for ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... sheltered road we were travelling, and the wheels rung against its frozen surface as they spun round with a velocity that seemed to add to the excitement of our flying steeds. Ever and anon we bounded and bumped over some rut or inequality that was deeper than usual. Twice we were within an inch of the ditch; once, for an awful hundred yards, we were balancing on two wheels; and still we went faster and faster than ever. The trees and hedges wheeled ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... road was full of ruts and cross ruts and littered with boulders that had ambled down the mountain- side in the spring moving. To save his life, Mr. Blithers couldn't keep to a straight course. He went from rut to rut and from rock to rock with the fidelity of a magnetised atom, seldom putting his foot where he meant to put it, and never by any chance achieving a steady stride. He would take one long, purposeful step and then a couple ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... otherwise, and the baritone a scoundrel, which in real life is not an invariable rule by any means. Indeed, there have been many instances in real life where the villain and the hero have been on excellent terms, and to the great benefit of the hero too. But in this case Balderstone was to follow in the rut, and become the rival of Osborne for the hand of Marguerite Andrews—the heroine. Balderstone was to write a book, which for a time should so fascinate Miss Andrews that she would be blind to the desirability of Osborne as a husband-elect; a book full of the weird and thrilling, dealing ...
— A Rebellious Heroine • John Kendrick Bangs
... gray dawn of the morning of yesterday, and after an early but excellent breakfast, crossed the river from St. Cloud, in order to meet the stage at Sauk Rapids. As we came up on the main road, the sight of a freshly made rut, of stage-wheel size, caused rather a disquieting apprehension that the stage had passed. But my nerves were soon quieted by the assurance from an early hunter, who was near by shooting prairie chickens while they were yet on the roost, that the stage had not ...
— Minnesota and Dacotah • C.C. Andrews
... his foot every time the cutter took a fresh whirl, and called his favourite Odin to witness his dilemma; but Odin paid as much deference to his prayers as Hercules did, of yore, to the waggoner who got the wheel of his cart in the rut. The cutter wearied not in her waltz; but, whether she felt the want of a partner, or the power of the wind, I know not; for when the pilot had lighted his pipe, and given his soul to its soporific ward, she darted unexpectedly out of the ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... and promotion of the fittest was at variance with free choice of the best men, and that it was calculated, if carried out, to strike at the root of the chief source of our prosperity. If every workman of the same class went in the same rut, and were paid the same uniform rate of wages, irrespective of his natural or acquired ability, such a system would destroy the emulative spirit which forms the chief basis of manipulative efficiency and practical skill, and on which, in my opinion, the prosperity of our manufacturing ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... to take things just as they're handed to you. Most people are, and they stick in a rut and wonder who put them there. All this success business is a mystery—listen to how successful men trip themselves up and fall all over their foolish faces when they try to explain to a bunch of nice, clean, young clerks how they stole their success. But I know you'll get it, because you aren't ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... and if I did, was that following Christ who never built a meeting-house, or conducted any service resembling those now held? I read the life of Jonathan Edwards, and settled back into the old Sabbath-keeping rut. Resolving to do my best, I prayed all week, for grace to keep the next Sabbath. I rose early that trial-morning, prayed as soon as my eyes were open, read a chapter, looked out into the beautiful morning, thought about God and prayed—spent ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... Unger out in Chicago to come back and grab it for Broadway. Where's it got me? Nowhere. Because I whiled away the best fifteen years of my life in an up-State burg, and then, when I came down here too late in life, got in the rut of a salaried man. Well, where it 'ain't got me it's going to get my son. I'm missing a chance, to-day that, mark my word, would make me a rich man but for want ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... purpose, and to get the most direct and natural means. If this is too much of a task, just hunt for the obsolete features. Above all things, we must not try to follow another's work. We too often follow unwittingly and to our misfortune even when we try to keep out of the rut. ...
— Industrial Progress and Human Economics • James Hartness
... cold silence. As well as we could tell from her back, she was not so much indignant as she was determined. Thus we do not believe that she willfully drove over every rut and thank-you-ma'am on the road, scattering us generously over the tonneau, and finally, when Aggie, who was the lighter, was tossed against the top and sprained her neck, eliciting a protest ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... past. One could hardly bring heroism into the potato-field and the cow-house; but after this lapse of time, it began to dawn upon her that the man who had fought at Gettysburg and the man who marked out for her the narrow rut of an unchanging existence were one and the same. And as if the moment had come for an expected event, she heard again the jangling of bells without, and the old vivid color rushed into her cheeks, reddened before by the fire-shine. It was as though the other ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... are predisposed to sprains of the fetlock. It generally happens from a misstep, stumbling, or slipping, which results in the joint being extended or flexed to excess. The same result may happen where the foot is caught in a rut, a hole in a bridge, or in a car track, and the animal falls or struggles violently. Direct blows and punctured wounds may also set ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... that time Washington was too busy with its domestic programme to consider such a proposal seriously. "Your two letters," wrote Colonel House in reply, "have come to me and lifted me out of the rut of things and given me a glimpse of a fair land. What you are thinking of and what you want this Administration to do is beyond the power of accomplishment for the moment. My desk is covered with matters of no lasting importance, but which come ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... all!" laughed Rayne as he pulled at his cigar. "I don't like to see you in this rut of hotels. It's bad for you! It only leads to drinks in the bar till late and bad headaches in the morning. You must buck up and get out ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux
... father's injury shocked her out of the mental rut which she had been following. She had to wait on him, hand and foot; and it gave her so many new thoughts and new things to do, that for a time at least Janice Day's old troubles were pretty much ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long
... it's high time we should wet our whistles, and it's but dry talking without something to wash a clear way for the slack. So, boys, be up, and fish up the jemmi-john—I hope it hain't been thumped to bits in the rut. If it has, I shall be in ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... last seclusion spoilt, had already made one of those deep ruts in the mind along which every thought runs when not actually driven in another direction. And each time Miss Ethel's thoughts passed that way, the rut was bound to become deeper. Though she imagined herself so self-controlled, and seemed so safe as she went quietly about her work removing the dust from corners where Caroline had left it, she was indeed a woman in real danger, still ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... was conscious of a wish that he had studied harder at college and was now in a position to be doing something better than hack work for a soulless publishing company. Never before had he been so completely certain that he was sick to death of the rut into which he ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... bore the lovely object of Ulick Brady's affections had not advanced very far, when, in the midst of a deep rut in the road, it came suddenly to with a jolt; the footman, springing off the back, cried 'Stop!' to the coachman, warning him that a wheel was off, and that it would be dangerous to proceed with only three. Wheel-caps had not been invented in those days, as they have since been by ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... use the horsey phrase, given them their heads, and urged them on to their top speed, their hot, wild blood had been bubbling through their veins, making them snort and tear along heedless of rock, rut, and the roughest ground. Marcus had told the driver to check them twice over, but as soon as Lupe was in the chariot and both Marcus and Serge busy seeing to his wound, the speed began to increase, till the chariot was bumping over the open plain faster than ever; and though the charioteer ...
— Marcus: the Young Centurion • George Manville Fenn
... A fault done first in the form of a beast; O Jove, a beastly fault! and then another fault in the semblance of a fowl: think on't, Jove, a foul fault! When gods have hot backs what shall poor men do? For me, I am here a Windsor stag; and the fattest, I think, i' the forest. Send me a cool rut-time, Jove, or who can blame me to piss my tallow? Who ...
— The Merry Wives of Windsor • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... You might punish her until she was afraid to do any of these things, but you could never enlighten her on the subject. The rudest savage can, in a measure, be enlightened, he can be taught the reason why of things, but an animal cannot. We can make its impulses follow a rut, so to speak, but we cannot make them free and self-directing. Animals are the victims of habits inherited ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... to stop, Billy," she said determinedly. "This house has been like a tomb for months, you and Dad are so gloomy and tired you're sights. He needs a change, and so do you. You're getting into a little rut and throwing away your chance to write. You need friends who are writers, you need a lot of fresh ideas to tone you up. There's plenty of money in writing. And I need a change myself. I can't stand this house any ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... time ago. But winners cannot easily go to bed. The thoughtful Treasurer bet his money and deplored this luck. It seemed likely to trap himself and the Governor in a predicament they had not foreseen. All had taken a hand at first, and played for several hours, until Fortune's wheel ran into a rut deeper than usual. Wingo slowly became the loser to several, then Hewley had forged ahead, winner from everybody. One by one they had dropped out, each meaning to go home, and all lingering to see the ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... closer relations into what promised to be ardent affection, but it drooped into bored routine. Yet she existed only for him and for the children, and she was as sorry, as worried as himself, when he gave up the law and trudged on in a rut of ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... and he extended his arm towards the left, pointing to a piece of hedge. The animal threaded its way along, almost concealed by the field, raising only its large ears. Then it swerved across a deep rut, stopped, pursued again its easy course, changed its direction, stopped anew, disturbed, spying out every danger, undecided as to the route it should take; when suddenly it began to run with great bounds of the hind legs, disappearing finally, in a large patch ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... a thousand dangers ahead. A mere breath of wind may carry this atom away, and cast it on that inaccessible rock in the midst of a rut in the road which still contains a little water; or on the sand, the region of famine where nothing grows; or upon a soil of clay, too tenacious to be tunnelled. These mortal accidents are frequent, for gusts of wind are frequent in the windy and already ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... driving his wagon along a miry country road after a heavy rain. The horses could hardly drag the load through the deep mud, and at last came to a standstill when one of the wheels sank to the hub in a rut. ...
— The AEsop for Children - With pictures by Milo Winter • AEsop
... steamers and ten barges. On the Volga he was respected as a rich and clever man, but was nicknamed "Frantic," because his life did not flow along a straight channel, like that of other people of his kind, but now and again, boiling up turbulently, ran out of its rut, away from gain—the prime aim of his existence. It looked as though there were three Gordyeeffs in him, or as though there were three souls in Ignat's body. One of them, the mightiest, was only greedy, and ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... wounded man crawled groaning into the thickets to die, many a chalky cart-rut ran red with blood, and many a white face, with wide-open, sightless eyes, stared up at the blue sky, where the fleecy clouds sailed in ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert
... marriage to drag us down into the kind of rut we see all about us. Take Flora and Vincent. Married five months and she never so much as wears corsets when she takes him to the street car, mornings. And he used to be such a clever dresser, and look at him now. All baggy. Let's not get ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... have been seven years before, when he first arrived from abroad, had he been told that there was no need for him to seek or plan anything, that his rut had long been shaped, eternally predetermined, and that wriggle as he might, he would be what all in his position were. He could not have believed it! Had he not at one time longed with all his heart to establish a republic ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... he whispered. "That rut was made by the wheels of one of our guns; the cart-marks are distinct. No native cart would have cut into the ground ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... of inventory which is as well worth while. It is the inventory which we all need to take of ourselves to be sure that we are making the best of our opportunities instead of drifting along day by day in a rut. She searches out the hidden places in her soul to see if she is just as patient, as thoughtful, as cheerful as she might be ... [Footnote: RECLAMATION RECORD, Feb., 1918, p.55, "Project Women and Their Materials," by ...
— Community Civics and Rural Life • Arthur W. Dunn
... kindly qualities looked at matters only as they applied to herself. When Marilla was eighteen she would come to the freedom of a bound-out girl, too old to begin another life, settled in a rut—if she lived. Was she not one of the little ones that might be rescued and live out a higher life? There were many who could not, but she ...
— A Modern Cinderella • Amanda M. Douglas
... burns a witch the whole prairie catches fire. These people have not the decision and detachment of the doctrinal ages. They cannot do a monstrous action and still see it is monstrous. Wherever they make a stride they make a rut. They cannot stop their own thoughts, though their thoughts are ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... they reached the top, and the team plunged furiously down the slope. He straightened himself in his seat with both hands on the reins, and Agatha held her breath when she felt the light vehicle tilt as the wheels on one side sank deep in a rut. Then something seemed to crack, and she saw the off-side horse stumble and plunge. The other beast flung its head up, Hawtrey shouted something, and there was a great smashing and snapping of undergrowth and fallen branches as they drove in among the birches. Then the team ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... earnestly—"don't tempt me! There are so many things that I should like, and I keep thinking of them, when I should think only of you.—I'd love to be rich, and have a nice house, and play Lady Bountiful at home! I'd love to travel about and see the world, instead of jogging along in one little rut; and, really and truly, I dread turning out to work, and am a coward at heart—but,— that's all! I have always liked you very much as a friend, but I can't imagine ever feeling any different. When I was thinking ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... all in all," he remarked, reflectively, "we're one of the luckiest lot of scouts that ever wandered down the pike. Most fellows experience a regular rut, and never run up against anything out of the way. But I have to shake myself very time I look back over our calendar, for fear it's ...
— The Boy Scouts with the Motion Picture Players • Robert Shaler
... difficulty of Latin and Greek, the highly organized structure of these languages, the need of scrupulous search to find the nearest equivalents for words that differ widely in their scope of meaning from their derivatives in any modern vocabulary, the effort of lifting one's self out of the familiar rut of ideas into so foreign a world, all these things act as a tonic exercise to the brain. And it is a demonstrable fact that students of the classics do actually surpass their unclassical rivals in any field where a fair test can be made. At Princeton, for instance, ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... as they were passing the priest, made the wheel of the wagon, which was going at full speed, sink into a rut, splashing the abbe with mud ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... I lit up, and presently I began to notice that the one next to me, towards whose face the smoke sometimes drifted, seemed to like it very much, and, I would almost have said that she was trying to sniff some of it herself. A little later on, when we came to an unusually big rut in the road, we all went up as usual against the roof, and all came down again, missing the narrow seat. Extracting ourselves from our awkward positions, I came across a foot which certainly seemed to me not to belong to a lady, but, as it happened, ...
— The Chronicles of a Gay Gordon • Jose Maria Gordon
... feel in need of a change. I had been running in a rut, and wanted to get out of it, so I left my lodgings in New York and bought a ticket to St. Louis; arrived there, I determined to come farther. So here I have been, living in communion with nature, seeing scarcely anybody, enjoying myself, on the whole, but sometimes ...
— Do and Dare - A Brave Boy's Fight for Fortune • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... settled down into its old rut. Joe Lanning's father sent him away to military school and Abraham's father began to use his influence to have him reinstated. Mr. Goldstein put forth such a touching plea about Abraham's having ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at School • Hildegard G. Frey
... beastly fault:) and then another fault, in the semblance of a Fowle, thinke on't (Ioue) a fowle-fault. When Gods haue hot backes, what shall poore men do? For me, I am heere a Windsor Stagge, and the fattest (I thinke) i'th Forrest. Send me a coole rut-time (Ioue) or who can blame me to pisse my Tallow? Who comes heere? my Doe? M.Ford. Sir Iohn? Art thou there (my Deere?) My male-Deere? Fal. My Doe, with the blacke Scut? Let the skie raine Potatoes: let it thunder, ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... immediately descended again, to see if I lost the sound; but, without regard to my ascending or descending, it died away in a minute or two, and yet there was scarcely any wind all the while. The old man said that this was what they called the "rut," a peculiar roar of the sea before the wind changes, which, however, he could, not account for. He thought that he could tell all about the weather from the sounds which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... say, in the shafts of such a cart he saw a thin little sorrel beast, one of those peasants' nags which he had often seen straining their utmost under a heavy load of wood or hay, especially when the wheels were stuck in the mud or in a rut. And the peasants would beat them so cruelly, sometimes even about the nose and eyes, and he felt so sorry, so sorry for them that he almost cried, and his mother always used to take him away from the window. ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... bigger proposition than his past—whoever he may be. With your talents and genius you could yet make of yourself a successful and prosperous man, respected by the community—if you could get out of this miserable rut that has helped to drag ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in Society • Edith Van Dyne
... there especially congenial. But they were the men he knew, the men he worked with or worked against; and any young fellow who is lonely in a big city and placed as Dan was is just as liable, until he has found himself and located his rut in life, to mingle with persons as strange, with natures as alien, and to frequent places which in later years fill ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry
... the mood was not on us. It was "too jolly fine to waste time working," as Tom said; so we started off to explore the single street of the squalid town of Pesto that was lost within the walls of dead Poseidonia. It was not a pretty village,—if you can call a rut-riven lane and a dozen houses a village,—nor were the inhabitants thereof reassuring in appearance. There was no sign of a church,—nothing but dirty huts, and in the midst, one of two stories, rejoicing in the name of Albergo del Sole, the first story ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... an expedition into the artistic fakery of London, and he would have dismissed the whole affair as a stimulating and amusing diversion from the ultra-aristocratic rut if the personality of Elise Durwent had not remained with him ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... from space to space on the leather cushions, though she braced herself against the middle seat with her feet and extended her cotton-gloved hands on each side, in order to maintain some sort of balance. Whenever the wheels sank farther than usual into a rut, or jolted suddenly over a stone, she bounded involuntarily into the air, came down again, pushed back her funny little straw hat, and picked up or settled more firmly a small pink sun shade, which seemed to be her chief responsibility,—unless we except a bead purse, into which she looked whenever ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... long it'll take to get that old rut smooth and green like the rest of the yard," he thought. Stephen White absolutely hated ugliness. It did not merely irritate and depress him, as it does everybody of fine fastidiousness: he hated not only the sight of it, he hated it with a sort of ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... of these same roads were, as little Mr. Bouncer feelingly remarked, facts that must be felt to be believed. For, when the wheel of any vehicle is suddenly plunged into a rut or hole of a foot's depth, and from thence violently extracted with a jerk, plunge, and wrench, to be again dropped into another hole or rut, and withdrawn from thence in a like manner, - and when this process ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... alone so long that we've got ourselves into a rut. Everyone we meet may give us something, and receive something ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... thataway, boy," he said. "I've knowed you a heap too long. Git in the fu'ther rut and take your medicine ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... and is really an excellent soil; but it needs crop rotation and more thorough cultivation to bring it back into a high state of fertility. The farmers are slow to take up advanced methods here in the East. We have told them what they ought to do, but they keep right on in the same old rut." ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... into a rocky gorge, with the rut of the road perched high on one side, and the stream brawling away fifty feet below. Goats with tinkling bells were flitting about the crags like so many brown flies. One began to wonder whether the road was not a cul-de-sac, and whether Valledemosa did not ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... have another fly wide open. I should say that my own notions upon this subject will be considered irrational, but at least my gregariousness is satisfied in associating here with the preposterous—or this writer, and those who think in his rut, have to say that they can think of four discharges from one far-distant volcano, passing over a great part of Europe, precipitating nowhere else, discharging precisely over ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... knee, and bow the head To reverence the great unread, The great unread and much-reviewed, Whose lines are treasured like the lewd, His first editions prizes reckoned Because there never was a second. Obscurely famous in his rut, Unknown, unpopular, "uncut," Where Byron thrilled a continent, To thrill an auction-room content, He struggles through oblivion's bogs, To gain a place in—catalogues! And falls asleep and joins the dust In simple hope and modest trust That, though Posterity neglect His bones, his ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... According to the Professor, we have got into the habit of thinking in terms of rock, soil, and water, and we can't get over it. There are some few of us who stand for better things; but the majority keep thinking in the old rut, and we can't sway them. The Professor says that all we need is to get together and agree and then concentrate. But agreement doesn't seem to be necessary. You know that there was a time when everybody, after much concentration, agreed that the world was flat—everybody but one man. Now the world ...
— 'Charge It' - Keeping Up With Harry • Irving Bacheller
... up one street and down another. When any one was ill a sentinel was placed at the gate to hail the doctor, who was as sure to pass as the passenger-train. It was a familiar joke in Clayton that the buggy had a regular track, and that the wheels always ran in the same rut. Once, when Carter Nelson had taken too much egg-nog and his aunt thought he had spinal meningitis, the usual route had been reversed, and again when the blacksmith's triplets were born. But these were especial occasions. It was a matter for investigation ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice
... the show last night...." He paused to seek the proper words, and Catlin relaxed. Frayberg's frame of mind was merely critical. "Sam, we're in a rut. What's ...
— Sjambak • John Holbrook Vance
... to working against time, but cannot do so just yet.... It is impossible to get out of the rut I have got into. I have nothing against going hungry, as I have done in the past, but it is not a question of myself.... I give to literature my spare time, two or three hours a day and a bit of the night, that is, time which is of no use except for short things. In ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... sunset. You can hardly conceive the miseries of this cross-road journey. The route royale was, in fact, completely impassable; because they were repairing it. Alarmed at the ruggedness of the cross-road, where one wheel was in a rut of upwards of a foot deep, and the other elevated in proportion—we got out, and resolved to push on a-foot. We walked for nearly two leagues, before our conveyance overtook us—so harassing and so apparently insurmountable seemed to be ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... father to pay for mending it. We're all awfully sorry, sir. Dr Winter sends his regards, and we shall hear the result of the exam. on Thursday. One of the wheels came off, but I fancy it will go on again. It was a rut did it. We were coming along at a very good pace, and should have been here an hour ago if it hadn't been for the accident. We're sorry to be ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... how much reason there was to fear that treachery might be exercised towards Maitland, he would surely not have suffered him thus to risk his valuable life. Rut he was ignorant of all the peculiar circumstances that had occurred to show that he was a special mark for the vengeance of Coubitant: and the confidence he felt in his courage and ability led him—on this occasion, as on many others—to select him as his ambassador. ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb
... to get out, which would not have been disagreeable but for the necessity of getting in again. The day and the country were beautiful, but impossible to enjoy either in a shut coach. We were rather thankful when the wheels, sticking in a deep rut, we were forced to descend, and walk forwards for some time. We had before seen the view from these heights, but the effect never was more striking than at this moment. The old city with her towers, lakes, and volcanoes, lay bathed in the bright sunshine. Not a cloud was in ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... whole avenue was full of little red lights, like the garden in "Faust" when Mephistopheles performs his magic on it. Here and there the huge headlights of a car shone on the roadway, magnifying every rut in the asphalt, and bringing out strange, vivid shades in the grass and the hydrangea bushes. They were passing a frowning palace set on a piece of velvet turf as small as a pocket handkerchief—so small that the lighted windows were plainly visible ...
— The Beauty and the Bolshevist • Alice Duer Miller
... the imagination is of great service here. Yes, I say the imagination. I do not mean the revelling of mere fancy in the realm of the unthinkable or the impossible. I mean the vivid realization of facts that lie outside the ordinary rut of thought. So exercised, imagination is one ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... in a foul gloom where gum bums with garlic. A sailorman, rustbearded, sips from a beaker rum and eyes her. A long and seafed silent rut. She dances, capers, wagging her sowish haunches and her hips, on her gross belly flapping a ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... elements who take the Bible the way Islam took the Q'ran wind up in the same rut. But as a whole, Europe was sparked enough by the original Islamic explosion that the Renaissance resulted, with what world results ...
— Border, Breed Nor Birth • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... branches of hooked thorns that overhung the broken path; I rode in advance, my face and arms bleeding with countless scratches, while at each rip of a thorn I gave a warning shout— "Thorn!" for those behind, and a cry of "Hole!" for any deep rut that lay in the path. It was fortunately moonlight, but the jungle was so thick that the narrow track was barely perceptible; thus both camels and donkeys ran against the trunks of trees, smashing the luggage, and breaking all that could be broken; nevertheless, the case was ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... description of the place, and explained how the Chinese had gone ahead there, I pointed out as well as I could with my limited vocabulary that if the people of Yuen-nan only had a conscience, and would only get out of the rut of the ages, they, too, might go ahead, explaining incidentally to them that as lights of the church at Tong-ch'uan-fu, it was their sacred duty to raise the standard of moral living among their countrymen wherever they might wander. ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... struggle and a contest—that was, perhaps, the secret! There would be days, no doubt, of gloom and heaviness; days when life would run, like the stream which he could hear murmuring below him, through dark coverts, dripping with rain; days of frost, when nature was leafless and benumbed, and when the rut was barred with icy spikes. But one could live in hope and faith, waiting for the summer days, when life ran swift and bright; under a pale sunset sky, till the streaks of crimson light died into a transparent green; and the stream ran joyfully, under the stars, wondering what sweet unfamiliar place ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... used in the different nations, were, for the first time in history, collected and collated. In presence of the cosmopolitan variety and extent of the international menu thus presented, every national cuisine was convicted of having until then run in a rut. It was apparent that in nothing had the nations been more provincial, more stupidly prejudiced against learning from one another, than in matters of food and cooking. It was discovered, as observing travelers had always been aware, that every nation and country, often every province, ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... taken us to Saint-Paul-du-Var along the road that began to avoid the valley after passing Villeneuve-Loubet. It was one of those routes nationales of which the France of motorists is so proud, hard and smooth and rounded to drain quickly, never allowing itself a rut or a steep grade or a sharp turn. This national highway was like all the easy paths in life. It meant the shortest distance comfortably possible for obtaining your objective. It eliminated surprises. It showed you all the time all there was to see, and kept you kilometrically informed of ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... remarked that "this was through mortification because even the men there had no more rights than women." When another delegate could not be heard she said: "Women have always been taught that it is immodest to speak in a loud voice, and it is hard for them to get out of the old rut." At ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... affected by it that determine whether it is good or bad. All that I shall say in its favor is, that it gives us an advantage with which any of the discomforts of life can not enter into comparison. It drags us out of the rut, it stirs us up, and it is love which satisfies one of our most pressing wants. I think I have already told you that our hearts are made for emotion; to excite it therefore, is to satisfy a demand of nature. What ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... that "the penny siller slew more souls than the naked sword slew bodies." It is one of the defects of business too exclusively followed, that it insensibly tends to a mechanism of character. The business man gets into a rut, and often does not look beyond it. If he lives for himself only, he becomes apt to regard other human beings only in so far as they minister to his ends. Take a leaf from such men's ledger ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... man get out of a rut after he has been in it for years and has settled down to the slow jog-trot that ...
— The Power of Concentration • Theron Q. Dumont
... when school-time was drawing near and the nights were already black, we would begin to sally from our respective villas, each equipped with a tin bull's-eye lantern. The thing was so well known that it had worn a rut in the commerce of Great Britain; and the grocers, about the due time, began to garnish their windows with our particular brand of luminary. We wore them buckled to the waist upon a cricket belt, and over them, such was the rigour ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is a great gift that their excess of passion will bestow on this race: it will give them romance. It will teach them what little they ever will learn about love. Other animals have little romance: there is none in the rut: that seasonal madness that drives them to mate with perhaps the first comer. But the simians will attain to a fine descrimination in love, and this will be their path to the only spiritual heights ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.
... prepared to be depraved; the former would provoke only curiosity and amusement to see bearded men such mere babes, and the latter would breed infinitely more disgust than desire. The man must be prurient and lecherous as a dog-faced baboon in rut to have aught of passion excited by either. And most inept is the conclusion, "So long as Mr. Payne's translation remains defiled by words, sentences, and whole paragraphs descriptive of coarse and often horribly depraved sensuality, it can never stand beside ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... rhinoceros between us and the wagon, which was only twenty yards off. She had calved during the night—a little red beast like a dog. She charged the wagon, split a spoke and a felloe with her horn, and then left. Paul and I jumped into a rut, as the guns were ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... at first to stiffen his body. With extraordinary strength, he had lifted himself above the water, holding his body in an oblique position. Rut the strain was too great. Nevertheless, he struggled, tried to reach some of the beams, felt around him for something to hold to. Then, resigning himself, he ...
— The Flood • Emile Zola
... well for no birds, anyhow, Tom," he exclaimed, dropping his butt to load. "Go and gather that bird, Frank, to save time; he lies in the wagon rut, there. How now? down charge, you Chase, ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... care of two or three whips of differing lengths. The drivers were both jet black—not Kafirs, but Cape blacks—descendants of the old slaves taken by the Dutch. They appeared to be great friends, these two, and took earnest counsel together at every rut and drain and steep pinch of the road, which stretched away, over hill and dale, before us, a broad red track, with high green hedges on either hand. Although the rain had not yet fallen long or heavily, the ditches were all running freely with red, muddy water, and the dust had ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... deftly threw in the high speed gear, and that without the terrific grinding of the cogs that betrays the inexperienced hand. The Whirlwind leaped forward, and the girls clutched their hats. "Jack promised he wouldn't be a minute late," went on Cora as she turned out to avoid a rut. ...
— The Motor Girls • Margaret Penrose
... not prepared. For the truth is that they go mainly by precedent; by the mere fact that men have votes already. So far from being a mutinous movement, it is really a very Conservative one; it is in the narrowest rut of the British Constitution. Let us take a little wider and freer sweep of thought and ask ourselves what is the ultimate point and meaning of this odd business ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... dozen times. In a wet time it rains to-day because it rained yesterday, and will rain to-morrow because it rained to-day. Are the crops in any part of the country drowning? They shall continue to drown. Are they burning up? They shall continue to burn. The elements get in a rut and can't get out without a shock. I know a farmer who, in a dry time, when the clouds gather and look threatening, gets out his watering-pot at once, because, he says, "it won't rain, and 'tis an excellent time to apply the water." Of course, there comes a time when ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... intensely urban and partisan. It reflected city life, the disputes of faction, and the personal quarrels of authors. The politics of the Great Rebellion had been of heroic proportions, and found fitting expression in song. Rut in the Revolution of 1688 the issues were constitutional and to be settled by the arguments of lawyers. Measures were in {165} question rather than principles, and there was little inspiration to the poet in Exclusion Bills and ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... physical vitality and lack of system. She is not efficient because she is not a trained worker. She is easily discouraged because anemia or bloodlessness fails to supply the oxygen necessary to a fight. There is no period in a woman's life when she is more apt to fall into a rut than at this time. Every element, spiritual and physical, which is necessary to stagnation and indifference is present, and it will take a bold and brave effort to resist the temptation to failure which ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... adventure—a high and splendid adventure, and while many of them may snap back after the war to the old egoistic individualistic way of looking at life, their examples will persist, and their lives, when they go back to the old rut, will never be the same lives that ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... thoughtful, brooding through the hours of darkness with his head slightly bent and his eyes, so far as Casey could determine, fixed steadily on the uneven trail where the headlights revealed every rut, every stone, every chuck-hole. But Casey was not deceived by that quiescence. The revolver barrel never once ceased its pressure against his side, and he knew that young Kenner never for an instant forgot that he was riding with ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... barely possible that things might have presently settled down into their old rut and the mystery have lost the bulk of its romantic sublimity in Laura's eyes, if the village gossips could have quieted down. But they could not quiet down and they did not. Day after day they called at the house, ostensibly upon visits of condolence, and ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 2. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... admit, but not very pretty," he smiled grimly, as he wiped the perspiration from his grimy face. "However, you got the car out of the rut, so perhaps we can proceed on our ...
— Tabitha's Vacation • Ruth Alberta Brown
... no more, and to leave alone all questions of practical consequences and applications, questions which will never fail to have due prominence given to them. Else criticism, besides being really false to its own nature, merely continues in the old rut which it has hitherto followed in this country, and will certainly miss the chance now given to it. For what is at present the bane of criticism in this country? It is that practical considerations cling ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... literature, philosophy, and science is full of tranquil pleasure, down to the end of life. If the rich old man has no enjoyment apart from money-making, his old age becomes miserable. He goes on grinding and grinding in the same rut, perhaps growing richer and richer. What matters it? He cannot eat his gold. He cannot spend it. His money, instead of being beneficial to him, becomes a curse. He is the slave of avarice, the meanest of sins. He is spoken of as ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... choose the time for their conception when both parents are in the best physical condition. That children should be brought into the world haphazard, as the result of accident, is to degrade the human race below that of the lower animals, where the female admits the male only at the time of the rut, which in the majority of cases occurs only once ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... going to commence my explanation by talking to the players whose games are not yet formed. At least once every season I go back to first principles to pull myself out of some rut ...
— The Art of Lawn Tennis • William T. Tilden, 2D
... see it that way. The mere flashing by of Stephen Colby had done more for Skinner in that particular than years of affectionate solicitude on her part. "Really," she mused, "some men have to be blasted out of a rut with dynamite!" ...
— Skinner's Dress Suit • Henry Irving Dodge
... interests; wider than he knew. She had a belief that there were possibilities for a country newspaper, and she brought a fresh point of view to operate in a situation where Harkless had fallen, perhaps, too much in the rut; and she watched every chance with a keen eye and looked ahead of her with clear foresight. What she waited and yearned for and dreaded, was the time when a copy of the new "Herald" should be placed in the trembling hands of the man who lay in the Rouen hospital. Then, she felt, if ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... dark, and the road appeared to be growing rougher. Every now and then they jolted over a big stone, or sunk into a deep rut. Ralph ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton
... of Nina. "Grandfather wants Anton to marry Rebecca," Ruth had said more than once; and thus Nina knew well that Rebecca was her rival. "I think he loves her better than his own eyes," Ruth had said to Rebecca, speaking of her uncle and Nina. Rut Rebecca had heard from a thousand sources of information that he who was to have been her lover had forgotten his own people and his own religion, and had given himself to a Christian girl. Each, therefore, now knew that she looked upon an enemy and a rival; but ...
— Nina Balatka • Anthony Trollope
... is along well-oiled grooves, and the diplomatist who steps out of the rut for an instant happens upon strange and unexpected obstacles. Knowing this, the ambassador still hesitated. ...
— Elusive Isabel • Jacques Futrelle
... Our lamps, still lighted, would give the impression of vigilance on our part. And every creature that met us would rely upon us for quartering. [Footnote: "Quartering":—This is the technical word, and, I presume, derived from the French cartayer, to evade a rut or any obstacle.] All this, and if the separate links of the anticipation had been a thousand times more, I saw, not discursively, or by effort, or by succession, but by one flash of horrid ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... should be continued up to the point where the pupil flies without thinking, when it becomes the natural thing for him to use both stick and rudder to correct a bump, and when he thinks no more of it than riding over a rut in a road. He should be able to tell by ear, when volplaning, whether or not he is maintaining sufficient speed to hold it in the air. He should be acquainted with the principle of spinning, and ...
— Opportunities in Aviation • Arthur Sweetser
... effectively only after a concrete interval has passed. The intervals also deflect us from the original paths of direction, and all the old identities at last give out, for the fatally continuous infiltration of otherness warps things out of every original rut. Just so, in a curve, the same direction is never followed, and the conception of it as a myriad-sided polygon falsifies it by supposing it to do so for however short a time. Peirce speaks of an ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... with farcy dissipates the disease; that water evaporated in a close room will not be deposited on the walls, if a vessel of water be placed in the room; that venison pies smell strongly at those periods in which the 'beasts which are of the same nature and kind are in rut'; that wine in the cellar undergoes a fermentation when the vines in the field are in flower; that a table-cloth spotted with mulberries or red wine is more easily whitened at the season in which the plants are flowering than at any other; that washing the hands ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... will-power and confidence takes place every time he attempts to speak, so that with each successive failure, his power to speak correctly becomes steadily lessened. The case of a stammerer might be compared to a road in which a deep rut has been worn. Each time a wagon passes through this rut, it becomes deeper. The stammerer has no more chance of outgrowing his trouble than the road has of outgrowing ...
— Stammering, Its Cause and Cure • Benjamin Nathaniel Bogue
... intelligent, moral, humane human beings of this period? Or are you one of your robust English brotherhood worthy of a Caligula in his prime, lions in gymnastics—for a time; sheep always in the dominions of mind; and all of one pattern, all in a rut! Favour me with an outline of your ideas. Pour them out pell-mell, intelligibly or not, no matter. I undertake to catch you somewhere. I mean to know you, hark you, rather with your ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... forward. The buggy leapt high at a rut. For a frantic minute perhaps everything seemed to be going in ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... you settling down into a rut before it happened, and the old place needed a thorough going over anyhow. You know you couldn't have afforded it, Jerry, if it hadn't been for the fire insurance money coming in so handy like. Now, you'll all move back the first part of the winter, with the new furnace set up, and no cracks for ...
— Kit of Greenacre Farm • Izola Forrester
... pointed far up the giant rut of the stream to where a streak of white water twinkled at the foot of the hills. "We've struck the ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... the first to die, a week after the liquidation of the business, was Anna Markovna herself. However, this frequently happens with people put out of their accustomed rut of thirty years: so die war heroes, who have gone into retirement—people of insuperable health and iron will; so quickly go off the stage former stock brokers, who have happily gone away to rest, but have ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... same old sprint in the morning, boys, to the same old din and smut; Chained all day to the same old desk, down in the same old rut; Posting the same old greasy books, catching the same old train: Oh, how will I manage to stick it all, if I ever ...
— Rhymes of a Red Cross Man • Robert W. Service
... below them. In at least one office important papers are brought first to the chief. His decision is at once given and is sent down the hierarchy for elaboration. In other offices the younger men are given invaluable experience, and the elder men are prevented from getting into an official rut by a system which requires that all papers should be sent first to a junior, who sends them up to his senior accompanied not only by the necessary papers but also by a minute of his own suggesting official action. One of these two types of organisation ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... could never in subsequent days remember. He must have hoisted Jean upon his shoulders and crawled through the brush and brambles, falling a dozen times only to pick himself up and go on again, stumbling at every rut, at every pebble. His indomitable will sustained him, his dogged resolution would have enabled him to bear a mountain on his back. Behind the low wall he found Rochas and the few men that were left of the squad, firing away as stoutly as ever and defending the flag, which the subaltern ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... free enough, bold enough, and wise enough, to claim the Bible itself. Let us unyoke it from tradition, which claims to be superior, or even equal. Let us divorce it from councils, from creeds, from sects and denominations; let us lift it up out of the ecclesiastical rut of ages. Let us with a commendable pride count ourselves worthy and able to formulate our own creeds, make our own prayers and confessions, accounting that the liberties of our fathers have been bequeathed to their children, and that the same God who gave ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild
... the technical word; and, I presume derived from the French carlayer, to evade a rut or ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... little disturbance the Sims couple, lowering their heads, side by side, resolutely regained the smooth rut of their placid existence. Everything in this world is easier than is imagined. Much easier. In the case of the Sims' household, it was just a matter of adding each morning, to the daily shave of Charles-Norton, ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... another; at last, in the very middle of winter, the strong Contrebia (south-east of Saragossa) had fallen. In vain the hard-pressed towns had sent message after message to Pompeius; he would not be induced by any entreaties to depart from his wonted rut of slowly advancing. With the exception of the maritime towns, which were defended by the Roman fleet, and the districts of the Indigetes and Laletani in the north-east corner of Spain, where Pompeius established himself after he had at length crossed the Pyrenees, and made his raw troops bivouac ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... be divine, and the Scriptures inspired. We do not blame them much, for they knew no better. But, if you follow in their footsteps, the world will never give you any credit for originality; your slow chariot will move on in the old rut; you will never accomplish anything; your generation will be in advance of you. Be a man! The field of usefulness, prominence, and honor, opens before you. Think for yourself! The Bible is a book of the past, and you should have more manliness and independence ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... touched overhead. She noticed suddenly a thin, longitudinal gleam of silver upon the road before her, like a bright sword half embedded in the mud. As she came closer she gave a little cry of satisfaction—it was a wagon-rut full of water, and glancing heavenward she saw a light rift of sky and knew ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... disclosed nothing more than many bruises and a state of terrible starvation, the sled was a quarter of a mile away. Dog and man watched it crawling along over the ice. Suddenly, they saw its back end drop down, as into a rut, and the gee-pole, with Hal clinging to it, jerk into the air. Mercedes's scream came to their ears. They saw Charles turn and make one step to run back, and then a whole section of ice give way and dogs and humans disappear. A yawning hole was all that was to be ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... energy, vigorous revolutionary outbursts, which stimulate the will, brace the muscles, and blow the obstacle to smithereens. Our revolution of 1789 was one of these outbursts of heroic energy, dragging mankind out of the rut wherein it had become wedged, and compelling a fresh start. But as soon as the effort has been made and the chariot set in motion, mankind has been only too ready to stick fast in the mire again. Long ago, the French revolution brought ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... peat-cutting and turf-cutting and many a deep-rutted farm road, and tufts of heather and furze. Over them and through them went horse and man—horse rising seven and man twenty off, a well-matched pair in age for a wild ride—headlong towards the north, till a blind rut somewhat deeper than usual put an end to their career, and sent the good horse staggering forward some thirty feet on to his nose and knees, and Tom over his shoulder, on to ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... the human female, being represented in the higher animals by what is familiarly termed the "rut." This is not usually a bloody discharge, however, as in the human female, though such a discharge has been observed ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... himself. "Of course I'm not. This is what I've always wanted. It's my idea of life to a 't.' Only—I suppose everything needs a break in it now and then—if only for the comfort of getting back into the old rut again." ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... habitation but here and there a cowherd's hut under the trees or a chapel standing apart on some grassy eminence. When night fell the waters grew louder, a stinging wind swept the woods, and the carriage, staggering from rut to rut, seemed every moment about to land them in some invisible ravine. Fear and cold at last benumbed the little boy, and when he woke he was being lifted from his seat and torches were flashing on a high escutcheoned doorway set in battlemented walls. ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... death-grip upon the side railing. A brace of truculent beasts of frighteningly saurian mien shuffled ponderously along in the loose harness. From time to time, one or the other would stumble over a turn in his rut and emit a menacing rumble as if he suspected his team ...
— A Transmutation of Muddles • Horace Brown Fyfe
... study the men in the vocation you think of adopting. Does it elevate those who follow it? Are they broad, liberal, intelligent men? Or have they become mere appendages of their profession, living in a rut with no standing in the community, and of no use to it? Don't think you will be the great exception, and can enter a questionable vocation without becoming a creature of it. In spite of all your determination and ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... lady, this is the interlude you've always been longing for. Fate has popped you out of the normal for a few days, and presently she'll pop you back into it. Some day you'll marry and have children; you'll sink into the rut of monotony again and not be conscious of it. On winter nights, before the fire, when the children have been put to bed, your man buried behind his evening paper, you will recall Slue-Foot and the interlude and be happy over it. You'll hug and cuddle it ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... season," said Jeff, "for farmers, shad, maple trees and the Connemaugh river. I know something about farmers. I thought I struck one once that had got out of the rut; but Andy Tucker proved to me I was mistaken. 'Once a farmer, always a sucker,' said Andy. 'He's the man that's shoved into the front row among bullets, ballots and the ballet. He's the funny-bone and gristle of the country,' said Andy, 'and I don't know who we would ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... right hand she detaches the yarn from the distaff that lies inert in the little iron rut before her. With her left hand she seizes the revolving circle of the large spool's top in front of her, holding this spool steady, overcoming the machinery for the moment not as strong as her grasp. This demands a certain effort. Still controlling the agitated spool with her left ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... the old subtle bond of kin, and perhaps—such is our vanity in the new lands—to show them what the stock had come to overseas. They tended to be depressing these visits: the married sister was living in a small way; the first cousin seemed to have got into a rut; the uncle and aunt were failing, with a stooping, trembling, old-fashioned kind of decrepitude, a rigidity of body and mind, which somehow one didn't ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... series of records of the fauna of the older half of the Tertiary epoch, for which we have no parallel in Europe. The researches of Leidy and others have shewn that forms allied to the Hipparion and the Anchitherium are to be found among these remains. Rut it is only recently that the admirably conceived and most thoroughly and patiently worked-out investigations of Professor Marsh have given us a just idea of the vast fossil wealth and of the scientific importance ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... afraid to leave that trail, for it seemed to her that a path along which people had ridden enough to make a deep rut in the sward must be a path that was more or less used all the time. She expected to meet somebody by sticking to this path, or else come ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Cowboy Jack's • Laura Lee Hope
... had been flowing soberly along almost since the days of Thomson. These first attempts smacked so decidedly of the older manner that we cannot censure the critic for failing to foresee that Wordsworth was destined to glorify the "poetry of nature," and to rescue it from the rut of listless and soporific topographical description. Both poems, in the definitive text, are readable, and exhibit here and there a glimmer of the poet's future greatness; yet it must be borne in mind that Wordsworth was continually tinkering at his verse, to the subsequent despair ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... the rut-rifted lane Where the wild roses hang and the woodbines entwine, And the shrill squeaking bat makes his circles again Round the side of the tavern close by the sign. The sun is gone down like a wearisome queen, In curtains the richest ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry |
