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Hotbed   Listen
noun
Hotbed  n.  
1.
(Gardening) A bed of earth heated by fermenting manure or other substances, and covered with glass, intended for raising early plants, or for nourishing exotics.
2.
A place which favors rapid growth or development; as, a hotbed of sedition.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Hotbed" Quotes from Famous Books



... good will you do? You will be cheated and robbed, and even if you are not, you should know that political science has found that private charity is the hotbed of all idleness." ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida

... left Moffat he took his find to Edinburgh and showed the translations to the men who earned the city Smollett's sobriquet, a "hotbed of genius": Robertson, fresh from the considerable success of his two volume History of Scotland (1759); Robert Fergusson, recently appointed professor of natural history at the University of Edinburgh; Lord Elibank, a learned aristocrat, who had been patron to Home and ...
— Fragments Of Ancient Poetry • James MacPherson

... exercising toward him the severest discipline, and inuring him to the cold of the winter and the heat of the summer; she taught him to be judicious, sincere, and compassionate—qualities which she possessed to a remarkable degree. Chaste and pure herself, she considered the court of France a hotbed of voluptuousness and debauchery, and at every opportunity strengthened herself against ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme

... summer resting places, leaving those that are not needed, for it is difficult to calculate too closely without scrimping, in the seed bed, to cut for house decoration, as with the perennials. Of course if annuals are desired for very early flowering, many species may be started in a hotbed and taken from thence to the borders. Biennials that it is desired shall flower the first season are best hurried in this way, yet for the gardenerless garden of a woman this makes o'er muckle ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright

... reported about the town that our little circle was a hotbed of nihilism, profligacy, and godlessness, and the rumour gained more and more strength. And yet we did nothing but indulge in the most harmless, agreeable, typically Russian, light-hearted liberal chatter. "The higher liberalism" and the "higher liberal," that is, a liberal without ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... the enormous waste of time, the solemn gorging, as if the whole end and aim of life were turtle and venison. I do not know whether to dignify such proceedings by the name of luxury. But what shall I say of gentlemen's clubs. They are the very hotbed of luxury. By merely asking for it you obtain almost anything you require in the way of luxury. I am aware that many men at clubs live more carefully and frugally, but I am aware also that a great many acquire habits of self-indulgence which produce idleness ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith

... cool cloudy day. Water the plants thoroughly in the hotbed or cold frame a few hours before lifting them. Lift them with a trowel or small spade, and keep as much earth on their roots as possible. With a transplanting trowel, make holes deep enough so that the plant will be a little deeper in the soil than before ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education

... Matching, without having achieved anything like intimacy with its noble owner. But things of that kind progress more quickly abroad than they do at home. The deck of an ocean steamer is perhaps the most prolific hotbed of the growth of sudden friendships; but an hotel by the side of a Swiss ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope

... degree. All through the wonderful Cinquecento, when each of a dozen or more little Italian city-states was producing genius enough to furnish forth a good average century in modern Europe or America, Italy was also a hotbed of unnatural vices, lurid crimes, wickedness to stock the nine circles of Malebolge. So too Athens at the top of her glory became selfish, grasping, conscienceless and cruel; and those nameless vices grew up and grew ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... April first, in rows five inches apart and five inches apart in each row. Transplant in garden one week after danger of frost is past. The day before transplanting soak the hotbed thoroughly with warm water. In taking them up to transplant use a sharp butcher knife; the ground thus cut out will form a cube five inches in diameter. This block, should be set in a hole ten to twelve inches deep. The ground around the block must be ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various

... story has less of London life and town-bred character than most of its predecessors; but what may thus be gained in variety is lost in raciness, breadth, and effect. The peculiar classes forced into existence by the hotbed of a great city, and owing a part of their gusto to town usage, may be narrow enough if compared with general nature, but they are broader than the singularities whom Mr. Dickens copies or invents as representatives of genteel country life, ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various

... as he drove over the brow of a long hill. He hated the place, knowing it well for what it was—a festering hotbed of gossip and malice, the habitat of all the slanderous rumours and innuendoes that permeated the social tissue of the community. The newest scandal, the worst-flavoured joke, the latest details of the most recent quarrel, were always to ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... planned for early publication are the following: Making a Rose Garden; Making a Lawn; Making a Tennis Court; Making a Fireplace; Making Paths and Driveways; Making a Rock Garden; Making a Garden with Hotbed and Coldframe; Making Built-in Bookcases, Shelves and Seats; Making a Garden to Bloom This Year; Making a Water Garden; Making a Poultry House; Making the Grounds Attractive with Shrubbery; Making a Naturalized Bulb Garden; with ...
— Making a Garden of Perennials • W. C. Egan

... fingered. And why? Cos they're slaves! Fifteen months at fifty pounds—let them as can reckon tot it up for theirselves. That's his first swindle—and there's others, sir! Oh, there's more behind. That man's just a stinkin' hotbed o' crime. But this 'ere slave-owning is enough to settle his ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman

... information. He brought me letters and scraps of paper that Mlle. Balniaux's dark skinned servants had stolen for him. He supplemented this by conversations that the servants had overheard and told to Kim. All this showed me that more by good luck I had stumbled upon the hotbed of the prime mover of the whole intrigue, Mlle. Balniaux. There was not the slightest hope of intimidating or buying over this particular lady's allegiance. I had to learn exactly who was subsidizing her ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves

... ground with a broken shovel, which was the only implement of husbandry possessed at that time by the community. This hole was the oven. The bottom of it she covered with fresh plantain leaves. The stones having been heated, were spread over the bottom of the hole and then covered with leaves. On this hotbed the carcass of the pig was placed, and another layer of leaves spread over it. Some more hot stones were placed above that, over which green leaves were strewn in bunches, and, finally, the whole was covered up with earth and rubbish piled up so as ...
— The Lonely Island - The Refuge of the Mutineers • R.M. Ballantyne

... baubles given by the Queen, but his son had to flee the country. There's Herring. He doesn't sleep because his daughter is going to marry an Italian count. There's Latouche. His place in the cabinet is begotten in corruption, in the hotbed of faction war. There's Kenealy. His wife has led him a dance of deep damnation. There's the lot of them—every one, not an ounce of peace among them, except with old Casson, who weighs eighteen stone, lives like a pig, grows stuffier in ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... hinterland was possible. On the eastern bank of the Mississippi, within the country ceded to England by the Treaty of Paris, was an important settlement over which the French flag still flew, and to which no British troops or traders had penetrated. It was a hotbed of conspiracy. Even while Bouquet was making peace with the tribes between the Ohio and Lake Erie, Pontiac and his agents were trying to make trouble for the British among the Indians ...
— The War Chief of the Ottawas - A Chronicle of the Pontiac War: Volume 15 (of 32) in the - series Chronicles of Canada • Thomas Guthrie Marquis

... cannot be too strongly enforced. Many a wretched midnight burglar commenced his career of vice and folly by stealing fruit, followed by thieving anything that he could HANDSOMELY. Pilfering, unless severely checked, is a hotbed for the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... Poe was induced by a literary friend to break up his New York home and remove with his wife and aunt (her mother) to Philadelphia. The Quaker city was at that time quite a hotbed for magazine projects, and among the many new periodicals Poe was enabled to earn some kind of a living. To Burton's 'Gentleman's Magazine' for 1837 he had contributed a few articles, but in 1840 he arranged with its proprietor to take up the editorship. Poe ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe

... no greenhouse, a hotbed is an important help in the garden. The bed is made by digging a pit two feet deep, seven feet wide, and ...
— Agriculture for Beginners - Revised Edition • Charles William Burkett

... Massachusetts as the hotbed and centre of colonial discontent, and in the autumn of 1768 he sent two regiments of British regulars to that city to assist in enforcing the Townshend acts. The troops and the citizens had frequent disputes, for the colonists ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann

... a rudderless ship at the mercy of a great unknown sea. A sense of drifting was upon him. They were both drifting. Surely this little room, with its dim light and shadows and its faint odour of roses, had become a hotbed of tragedy. He had imagined that death itself was something like this,—a dissolution of all fixed purposes. And with it all, this remnant of life, if it were but a remnant, seemed suddenly to be flowing through his veins ...
— Berenice • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... he journeyed throughout the day with a leisureliness begotten of the desire to enter the ancient city after nightfall only. Toledo was at this time the smouldering hotbed of those political intrigues which some years later burst into flame, and resulted finally in the expulsion of the Bourbons from the throne of Spain. Larralde was sufficiently dangerous to require watching, and, like ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman

... ill-tempered person with considerable talents, who succeeded, at any rate for a time, in mistaking his ill-temper for saeva indignatio, and his talents for genius, is not, I think, too harsh a description of Marston. In the hotbed of the literary influences of the time these conditions of his produced some remarkable fruit. But when the late Professor Minto attributes to him "amazing and almost Titanic energy," mentions "life" several times over as one of the chief characteristics ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury

... occasion, derivation; final cause &c. (intention) 620; les dessous des cartes[Fr]; undercurrents. rudiment. egg, germ, embryo, bud, root, radix radical, etymon, nucleus, seed, stem, stock, stirps, trunk, tap-root, gemmule[obs3], radicle, semen, sperm. nest, cradle, nursery, womb, nidus, birthplace, hotbed. causality, causation; origination; production &c. 161. V. be the cause &c. n of; originate; give origin to, give rise, to, give occasion to; cause, occasion, sow the seeds of, kindle, suscitate[obs3]; bring on, bring to bring pass, bring about; produce; create &c. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... devout turn of mind, he had readily submitted, he had been tossed, as a youthful student, into the freebooting Edinburgh of the forties. Edinburgh was alive in those days to her very paving-stones; town and university combined to form a hotbed of intellectual unrest, a breeding-ground for disturbing possibilities. The "development theory" was in the air; and a book that appeared anonymously had boldly voiced, in popular fashion, Maillet's dream and the Lamarckian hypothesis of a Creation undertaken once ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson

... crop of lettuce in one of his flats by the middle of March and transplanted the tiny, vivid green leaves to the hotbed without doing them any harm. The celery and tomato seeds that he had planted during the first week of the month were showing their heads bravely and the cabbage and cauliflower seedlings had gone to keep the lettuce ...
— Ethel Morton's Enterprise • Mabell S.C. Smith

... thought, at the beginning of her stay there, that the Settlement House was a hotbed of romance. Every ring of the doorbell had tingled through her; every step in the hall had made her heart leap, with a strange quickening movement, into her throat—every shabby man had been to her a possible tragedy, every threadbare woman had been ...
— The Island of Faith • Margaret E. Sangster

... opposite of Earth," Lea told him, dropping the apple core into a dish and carefully licking the tips of her fingers. "I guess you Anvharians would describe Earth as a planetary hotbed of sexuality. The reverse of your system, and going full blast all the time. There are far too many people there for comfort. Birth control came late and is still being fought—if you can possibly imagine that. There are just too many of the archaic religions still ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison

... to banish the most eminent men in his empire; so he tolerated them and hated them,—suspending over their heads the sword of Damocles. This they understood, and kept quiet except among themselves. But France was a hotbed of sedition and discontent during the whole reign of Louis Napoleon, at least among the old government ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume X • John Lord

... but the melted grease which often passes into the pipes mixed with hot water, becomes cooled and solid as it descends, adhering to the pipes, and gradually accumulating until the drain is blocked, or the water passes through very slowly. A grease-lined pipe is a hotbed ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg

... associates get wind of your whereabouts? In that I don't question your discretion, Mr. Vanringham. And out of pure friendliness I warn you Paris is a very hotbed of hot-headed Jacobites who would derive unmerited pleasure from getting a knife into ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell

... set forth the indignation we all felt to be put in quarantine because of a little insignificant epidemic of fever at D'Urban, in coming to a place noted as a hotbed of every variety of fever? If it was measles, or even chicken-pox, we declared we could have understood it. But fever! This sentiment was found very comforting, and it was a great disappointment to find how little convincing it appeared to the authorities. However, the anticipation ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various

... this, Norman," he remarked to Schryhart, on one occasion. "I don't know about this. It's one thing to stir up the public, but it's another to make them forget. This is a restless, socialistic country, and Chicago is the very hotbed and center of it. Still, if it will serve to trip him up I suppose it will do for the present. The newspapers can probably smooth it all over later. ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser

... were such motions as the terrier itself might make trying to walk on its hindlegs. Still backing away, expecting every instant to feel the terrier's teeth in his flesh, Mr. Trimm put one foot into a hotbed with a great clatter of the breaking glass. He felt the sharp ends of shattered glass tearing and cutting his shin as he jerked free. Recovering himself, he dealt the terrier a lucky kick under the throat that sent it back, yowling, to where it had come from, and then, as a door jerked ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb

... Smithers's crisp, hot rolls with a very unpoetic appetite. "To me, the world grows worse every day. It is only a few noble souls devoted to the Ideal and holding their heads steadfastly above the mire of commercialism that keep our so-called civilisation from becoming an absolute hotbed of greed—yes, a hotbed of greed," he repeated, the ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed

... As Ireland is the hotbed of all crimes, do we not want a Lord Lieutenant who shall be able to assess the true value of every indiscretion, from simple murder to compound larceny? As every Irishman may in a few months be in prison, I want a Lord Lieutenant ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various

... man which its higher reason seeks to subdue, and his divine spiritual nature to which it gravitates, whenever it has the upper hand in its struggle with the inner animal. The latter is the instinctual "animal Soul" and is the hotbed of those passions, which, as just shown, are lulled instead of being killed, and locked up in their breasts by some imprudent enthusiasts. Do they still hope to turn thereby the muddy stream of the animal sewer into the crystalline waters of life? And where, on ...
— Studies in Occultism; A Series of Reprints from the Writings of H. P. Blavatsky • H. P. Blavatsky

... Gold" has been the most mirth-provoking of Irish novels published in the last few years, and Mr. Birmingham's new book is a worthy successor. Once more the admirable red-haired curate, "J. J.," appears, and his wild energy turns a peaceful neighbourhood into a hotbed of intrigue and suspicion. The story tells how he discovers in a harmless lady novelist, seeking quiet for her work, a murderess whose trial had been a cause celebre. He forms a scheme of marrying the lady to the local bore, in the ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson

... slaves of Essen are working the whole twenty-four hours, seven days a week, in three shifts a day of eight hours each, under strict martial law. The town is a hotbed of extreme Social Democracy, and as a rule the Socialists of Westphalia are almost as red as those of the manufacturing districts of Saxony. But Socialists though they be, they are just as anti-British as the rest of Germany, and they like to send out their products ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin

... foundation is laid on a sufficiently secure subsoil of public spirit, morality, and intelligence. On the contrary, they exhibit examples of personal corruption and of political profligacy as fine as any hotbed of despotism has ever produced; while they fail in the primary duty of the administration of justice, as none but an effete despotism has ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley

... of the early nineteenth century that a single woman should find shelter under the roof of some family house, however independent, financially, her condition. Latch-key privileges were denied her. Result, the boarding-house of the later half of the century, nominally a family home, actually a hotbed of faultfinding and gossip, most wearing to the teacher and fledgling professional woman, however acceptable to the milliner and seamstress. Privacy could not be maintained in a house built for a family of five made ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards

... finally completed, however, and four days ago I embarked the troops and left Wei-hai-wei for the port of Asan, where we now are, and which was reported to me as being a centre of disaffection, a hotbed of rebellion. But I most certainly never anticipated, when I left, that I should have the pleasure of rescuing a fellow sailor from a most serious predicament. However, to continue. By the convention of 1884 at Tien-tsin, between China ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood

... to nature, the proclamations of the rights of man, all the temerities of Bolingbroke, Collins, Toland, Tindal and Mandeville, the bold ideas of Hume, Hartley, James Mill and Bentham, all the revolutionary doctrines, were so many hotbed plants produced here and there, in the isolated studies of a few thinkers: out in the open, after blooming for a while, subject to a vigorous competition with the old vegetation to which the soil belonged, they failed[4102].—On ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine

... Sardinian or Austrian courts. But these tidings were usually accompanied by a shaking of the head from the old family steward. The timber was to be thinned anew—the tenants to be again amerced. Sir Laurence evidently looked upon the Lexley property as a mere hotbed for his vices. At last the old steward turned surly to our enquiries, and would answer no further questions concerning his master. My grandfather's small farm was the only plot of ground in the parish that did not belong to the estate; and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various

... the hotbed of all that was vivid and revolutionary in literature at that moment, and Robert Greene was the centre of literary Cambridge. When Nash arrived, Greene, who was seven years his senior, was still in residence at his study in Clare Hall, having returned from his travels in Italy and Spain, ready, ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash

... ask questions," he explained. "And what," he demanded, "what doth a little cavalier in a Puritan hotbed?" ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut

... visited the alley, and went to the gap where it opened on to the ditch. There was an admirably efficient hotbed for rearing diseases there. A solid bed of sewage of about two feet deep seemed to fill the hollow, and a thin sheet of filthy water covered this bed—with sickly breaks here and there. Ordure palpable and abominable was plentiful, and the ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman

... the emperor, musingly, "the more so as he assures me with the utmost tranquillity that every German shares his hatred of me; that the whole land is but a hotbed of conspiracy, and that thousands of hands are already armed to pierce my heart. And this young man is in perfect health, bodily and mentally, according to Corvisart, who twice examined him; his pulse is regular, and not in the least feverish. ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach

... said was, "What a pretty frame!" I don't know if Mrs. Moulton and I felt much admiration for the great artist, but he left us convinced that we were all in love with him. We told Mr. Moulton we thought it might get us into trouble if Courbet vibrated between us and the hotbed of Communism. But Mr. Moulton answered, "What does it matter now?" as if the end of the ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone

... at night on account of them. Many times he even got up out of bed, and, putting on his boots without stockings, shivering in his shirt, he traversed the entire garden to throw his own counterpane over his hotbed frames. ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert

... marched thither. As a matter of fact, this so-called high plateau was the sugar-cane country, where, during the summer, the rainfall was prodigious. It was a rich, deep soil, covered with a rank tropic growth, the guinea-grass being higher than the head of a man on horseback. It was a perfect hotbed of malaria, and there was no dry ground whatever in which to camp. To have sent the troops there would have ...
— Rough Riders • Theodore Roosevelt

... that last. Pa Pulsifer recovers his napkin, settles back in his chair, and goes on with the tale, while Mother slips out quiet. She comes back after a while, springs a nervous little laugh, and announces that it was only the glass in one of the hotbed frames. ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford

... drawing right here," began Jack, spreading it out on the table while the boys crowded about. "You look at the drawing as I explain. Myron and Jay have promised to help me make it. It will be a coldframe this year; next fall I shall change it into a hotbed." ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw

... is necessary, by early attention, to ensure a healthy, vigorous growth, therefore, as soon as the runners have emitted the least portion of root, take them off, and prick them out on a rich piece of ground, or on an old hotbed where Radishes or early Potatoes have been grown under hoops, where, when the weather is hot, they are more convenient to shade, ...
— In-Door Gardening for Every Week in the Year • William Keane

... before the intrepid Burton had penetrated to that hotbed of fanaticism, and had by a miracle come back alive. From that day to this none had dared ...
— The River of Darkness - Under Africa • William Murray Graydon

... learn, and the young man another, and the grown-up man another. Let us consider one single instance. The boy has to learn docility, gentleness of temper, reverence, submission. All those feelings which are to be transferred afterwards in full cultivation to God, like plants nursed in a hotbed and then planted out, are to be cultivated first in youth. Afterwards, those habits which have been merely habits of obedience to an earthly parent, are to become religious submission to a heavenly ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various

... we turned in and slept that night in the best way that the heat would let us, rising next morning with the vain hope of getting a bathe. Of all the discomforts we experienced at Secocoeni's, the scarcity and badness of the water was the worst. Bad water, when you are in a hotbed of fever, is a terrible privation. And so we had to go unwashed, with the exception of having a little water poured over our hands out of gourds. We must have presented a curious sight at breakfast that morning. Before us knelt a sturdy Kafir, holding a ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard

... already dug a pit for a twelve-foot hotbed. Now, a twelve-foot hotbed will start an ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd

... weeds, a hotbed of lies, where hypnotised saints sing psalms and worship ghosts, while dogs and horses are pampered and groomed, and children are left to rot, to hunger, and to sink into crime, or ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford

... over-stimulated at the expense of the body. Many a child is at this hour undermining its physical constitution by reading in the house, when it should be playing out of doors, or using its muscular system in some kind of domestic employment. Beware of any cause which shall induce a sickly precocity or a hotbed mental growth. Let no partiality for mental prodigies induce you to make physical invalids. The sacrifice is too great; seek rather a healthy and complete development of the whole child, watching each power as it unfolds, ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various

... nations, is questionable. At any rate, had it accepted as willingly data coming from other sources, it might have assured itself by this time, that not only in Italy and other parts of Europe, but even on sites not very far from those it is accustomed to regard as the hotbed of ancient relics—Babylonia and Assyria—there are other sites where it could profitably excavate. The immense "Salt Valley" of Dasht-Beyad by Khorasson covers the most ancient civilizations of the world; while the Shamo ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various

... yet they passed. Time does pass, at length, even when one is young. It was July. The King of Navarre had moved up to St. Denis, in his siege of Paris, but most folk thought he would never win the city, the hotbed of the League. Of M. le Duc we heard no word till, one night, a chance traveller, putting up at the inn in the village, told a startling tale. The Duke of St. Quentin, though known to have been at Mantes and strongly suspected of espousing Navarre's cause, had ridden calmly ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle

... of persons burned for alleged supernatural acts in Aberdeen—sometimes as many as twenty-three in a year—that city must have been a hotbed of witches. To hunt down witches there, and to bring them to the stake, met with general approval. Men in public office, noble lords, ecclesiastics, and the common people joined in the hunt, with results truly appalling. Under date 21st September ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant

... again, the statesmen of which are more farseeing than the average and have been able to rise to the conception of a political world hygiene, are aware that the systematic crushing of six millions of intellectual and strong-feeling people driven to despair must create a hotbed of the most dangerous anarchistic and revolutionary epidemics, the spreading of which cannot easily be limited to the spot of their origin. Lastly, even the most irreclaimable pessimist will admit at least the possibility that governments may not be entirely inaccessible ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various

... could only have one ending—and that was mutiny, if not murder; and yet this senseless fellow, in defiance of all human law, kept on goading them to it. He was warned by a catspaw (whom even despised bullies can have in their pay) that the forecastle was a hotbed of murderous intent, and that for his own safety he should give the men liberty to go ashore, and advance them what money ...
— Looking Seaward Again • Walter Runciman

... 1869, Paris gathered to rejoice in the centenary of the birth of the First Napoleon. A gathering this of mushroom nobility, soldiery and diplomacy, to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the greatest mushroom that ever sprang to life in the hotbed of ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman

... working throughout the length and breadth of the land in spite of all repressive measures, and King Edward the Fourth, either from policy or indifference, had done little or nothing to check its spread. London—the place of all others which was ever loyal to him—was a perfect hotbed of heresy (in the language of the priests), and that alone was enough to deter the Yorkist monarch from stirring up strife and bringing down upon his head the enmity of the powerful city which served ...
— In the Wars of the Roses - A Story for the Young • Evelyn Everett-Green

... here as in Central Asia, but Russians suffer chiefly from bronchitis and diphtheria, which never fail to make their appearance with the return of spring. Every one suffers continually from catarrh, irrespective of age or race, indeed we all had it ourselves. And yet in this hotbed of pestilence there is no Government infirmary, nor is any provision whatever made for the sick. Mr. Miskievitch (a young medical student and himself an exile) was attending the community, but a total lack of medical and surgical appliances rendered his case a hopeless one. I inquired for the old ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt

... scourging society in all its ramifications, coupled with an atmosphere of physical decay—an atmosphere reeking with filth, heavy with foul odors, laden with disease. In time of any contagion the social cellar becomes the hotbed of death, sending forth myriads of fatal germs which permeate the air for miles around, causing thousands to die because society is too short-sighted to understand that the interest of its humblest member is the interest of ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various

... gasped Paulina, hearing her hotbed shivered. "The poor soul, Fritz, he will cut himself. ACH! what is that?" They both sat up in bed. "WIEDER! ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather

... monarch of a friendly republic; he is no doubt duly looked after. In the future there may be a shaking of the autumnal boughs and a shower of emperors and kings. We do not want Great Britain to become a hotbed of reactionary plotting and the starting-point of restoration raids into the territories of emancipated peoples. This is particularly desirable if presently, after the Kaiser's death—which by all the statistics of Hohenzollern mortality ...
— In The Fourth Year - Anticipations of a World Peace (1918) • H.G. Wells

... having a true value. The "Perseus" of Cellini and some of Gian Bologna's statues belong to a class of aesthetic productions which show how much that is both original and excellent may be raised in the hotbed of culture.[117] They express a genuine moment of the Renaissance with vigour, and deserve to be ranked with the Latin poetry of Poliziano, Bembo, and Pontano. The worst that can be said of them is that their inspiration was factitious, and that their motives had been handled ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds

... danger of the seedlings damping off. Barely cover the seed with finely sifted soil, and place sheets of glass on the pans or pots to check rapid evaporation. If water must be given, immerse the pots for a sufficient time, instead of using the water-can. A cool greenhouse, vinery, or a half-spent hotbed is a good position for the pans, and a range of temperature from 55 deg. to 65 deg. should be regarded as the ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons

... promise,' he said. 'But America has changed. It is likely to be a hotbed of rebellion—perhaps even the scene of a bloody war. I must ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller

... condition in which in some form or other it does not exist. While one class of life may not live in a certain environment, there are other forms to which this environment would be as a hotbed for their production. Life is, indeed, universal, and may be said to be omnipresent. You will find it in the deepest depths of earth, and in the highest reaches of air. It expands on the mountain top, it dwells in the sea; it is organized in the infusoria, it exists in the ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman

... the police, and considered that all that remained for him personally to do was to stay in his room at night with his revolver. But boys will be boys. The only course that seemed to him in any way satisfactory in this his hour of rejuvenation was to visit the bee farm, the hotbed of crime, and keep an eye on it. He wanted ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse

... is time, I want you to do the honors of Marut. Miss Cary especially has as yet seen nothing, and there is a great deal of interest. You know—" turning to her visitors—"Marut is supposed to have been the hotbed of the last rising." ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie

... rank unwholesome vegetation, in whose baleful shade the wretched wanderers who are tempted hither, droop, and die, and lay their bones; the hateful Mississippi circling and eddying before it, and turning off upon its southern course a slimy monster hideous to behold; a hotbed of disease, an ugly sepulchre, a grave uncheered by any gleam of promise: a place without one single quality, in earth or air or water, to commend it: such is this ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens

... reputation, and the inhabitants no longer sent their heavy contingent to the assizes. This change was widely attributed to the influence acquired by the rector, Monsieur Bonnet, over a community which had lately been a hotbed for evil-minded persons whose actions dishonored the whole region. The crime of Jean-Francois Tascheron brought back upon ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac

... Pilate. They were crying, "He stirreth up the people, teaching throughout all Jewry, beginning from Galilee to this place." The mention of Galilee was intended to excite prejudice against Jesus, because Galilee was noted as a hotbed of insurrection. But it set agoing a different train of thought in the mind of Pilate, who asked anxiously if He was a Galilean. It had flashed upon him that Herod, the ruler of Galilee, was in the city at the time, having come for the Passover celebration; ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker

... population was, for the most part, of Spanish stock that had been weakened by infusions of Indian and negro blood, but there were a number of Chinamen, and French Creoles. Besides these, Americans, Britons, and European adventurers had established themselves, and the town was a hotbed of commercial and political intrigue. The newcomers were frankly there for what they could get and fought cunningly for trading and agricultural concessions. The leading citizens of comparatively pure Spanish strain despised the grasping foreigners in their ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss

... freedom in June. And how many years before he would breathe the free, rose-haunted air of another June. Twenty. Why, the twentieth century would be dawning before he would be free again. Would his face be any the less hard at the expiration of his term? The penitentiary isn't a hotbed of virtue, and Jim wasn't wax. Nobody wasted any hopes on him,—except the lessees, who, finding him able-bodied, young, and healthy, sent him to the Branch prison to ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various

... health has transformed the city of Manila from a fever-infested hotbed of contagious diseases to one of the most healthful cities on the globe. Six thousand lepers have been collected and established in a colony on an island. The number of cases of small-pox has been ...
— Birdseye Views of Far Lands • James T. Nichols

... cordiality to the headwaiter, the while his eye roved expertly from table to table as he removed his gloves. He ordered things under glass, so that his table, at midnight or thereabouts, resembled a hotbed that favors the bell system. The waiters fought for him. He was the kind of man who mixes his own salad dressing. He liked to call for a bowl, some cracked ice, lemon, garlic, paprika, salt, pepper, ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber

... ENGLISH EMBASSIES.] The town of Buyukdere, or the deep valley, off which lies the Russian fleet, is also the residence of the Russian, Austrian, and German ambassadors; the very hotbed of plots and etiquette. At Terapia the French and English embassies reside alongside each other; indications of that perfect unanimity which ought to subsist between these two great powers; and, if they remain true to each other, I would confidently back Terapia politics and manoeuvres ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo

... that had darkened the fortunes of the older nations and set up a new standard here, that men of such origins and such free choices of allegiance would ever turn in malign reaction against the Government and people who had welcomed and nurtured them and seek to make this proud country once more a hotbed of European passion. A little while ago such a thing would have seemed incredible. Because it was incredible we made no preparation for it. We would have been almost ashamed to prepare for it, as if we were suspicious of ourselves, our own comrades and neighbors! But ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... bitterness of free and slave State men make daily life a seething cauldron. Southern settlers are pouring into the interior. They shun the cities. In city and country, squatter wars, over lot and claim, excite the community. San Francisco is a hotbed of politicians and roughs of the baser sort. While the Southerners generally control the Federal and State offices, Hardin feels the weakness in their lines has been the journalistic front of their party. Funds are raised. Pro-slavery ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage

... childhood; some, however, have concluded that there may be more in Continental Freemasonry than meets the English eye, and here the Church herself comes forward to assure them that the fraternity abroad is a hotbed of political propaganda, and is responsible for the most disastrous revolutions which have perplexed the modern world; that it is actually, as the exploded Robison described it, a conspiracy against crowned heads; and that it is at the present time the most potent, most secret ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite

... a hotbed of insurrection with Merritt planning resistance in Kansas and Susan reform in New York. Susan mapped out an ambitious itinerary, hoping to canvass with her petitions every county in the state. With her father as security, she borrowed ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz

... downtrodden Isles Should study well conditions e'er I speak As cock-sure as a teacher to his class. I, in triumphant tone, did voice the truth That in our homeland stinking graft prevails, But, ah! I overlook the damning fact That ignorance among our foreign born Hath been the hotbed whence this thistle grew, And that our Governor did get his boost Into the forum through that rotten host Which proudly boasts a "Tammany" as its god. And do the people of our Empire State Evolve the doctrine which I loud proclaimed? No! in the dire ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)

... received a shock from the scion of Blanford, and the Bishop's son, in connection with 'The Purple Kangaroo,' has caused the British lion to hump himself into the hotbed of American politics—'" ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells

... hearth, which, aided by the earnestness of his efforts to convince his host, put poor Sir Willoughby into a most intense perspiration. Russelton, however, seemed enviably cool, and hung over the burning wood like a cucumber on a hotbed. Sir Willoughby came to a full stop by the window, and (gasping for breath) attempted to ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... doubt, the political danger of any Messianic movement was serious; and they would have been glad to put down Nazarenism, lest it should end in useless rebellion against their Roman masters, like that other Galilean movement headed by Judas, a generation earlier. Galilee was always a hotbed of seditious enthusiasm against the rule of Rome; and high priest and procurator alike had need to keep a sharp eye upon natives of that district. On the whole, however, the Nazarenes were but little ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley

... remains for me to say one word in regard to the now reigning sovereign. The ulemas—who have become what the Janissaries were, the hotbed of fanaticism—in their endeavors to overthrow the late sultan, Abdul Medjid, looked upon the present sultan as their champion. If he permits himself to become a tool in their hands, Turkey will lose during his reign what she ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... more, in the field, than to accept defeat after defeat at the hands of the rebels under that former bandit chief, 'Pancho' Villa. Both the so-called Federals and the rebels, in Mexico, are doing their best to make Mexico a hotbed of incurable anarchy. Scores of American citizens have been murdered ruthlessly, and American women have been roughly treated. British subjects have been shot without the shadow of an excuse, and other foreigners have been maltreated. ...
— Dave Darrin at Vera Cruz • H. Irving Hancock

... Midland Counties heard of his fame, and demanded to hear him. He had been Deacon under Gifford at the Bedford Church; but he was in such request as a preacher, that, in 1657, he was released from his duties there as unable to attend to them. Sects were springing up all over England as weeds in a hotbed. He was soon in controversy; Controversy with Church of England people; Controversy with the Ranters, who believed Christ to be a myth; Controversy with the Quakers who, at their outset, disbelieved in his Divinity and in the inspiration of the Scriptures. ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude

... a year's foreign travel. But the laird had been much averse to the plan. France, in his opinion, was a hotbed of infidelity; Italy, of popery; Germany, of socialistic and revolutionary doctrines. There was safety only in Scotland. Pondering these things, he resolved that marriage was the proper means to "settle" the lad. So he entered ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... to prove, that the subject of his inquiry was of infinite consequence to the progress and increase of natural knowledge. But he found no quarter from the vengeful engineer, who now retorted his ironical compliments, with great emphasis, upon this hotbed for the generation of vermin, and advised him to lay the whole process before the Royal Society, which would, doubtless, present him with a medal, and give him a place among their memoirs, as a distinguished promoter of the useful arts. ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett

... a critic, a dabbler in the arts. At coffee-houses or clubs, wheresoever men foregathered, some fellow would mount a table and harangue his friends. The bloods caught the vogue, little foreseeing that it made a hotbed for the airing of discontents, and for the parading of ideals which alone could blot out those discontents. All took to it like ducks to the village pond. There was much ...
— Vigee Le Brun • Haldane MacFall

... England," said the sheikh, "I took a final farewell of all relatives, and of everything belonging to the country from which I shook off the dust on my feet, you only excepted, for I saw that you, too, were called out of the seething hotbed of corruption, which is called civilisation, to the natural life of man. Why disturb the ashes of the ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough

... of my appearance in St. Petersburg the forces of nihilism had assumed proportions greater than they had ever attained before or will ever attain to again, thanks to my activities. The palace itself was a hotbed of conspiracy; the rank and file of the army was so disaffected that the officers never knew whom they could depend upon or whom they might trust; a secret pressure of the thumb, indeterminate in its character but nevertheless significant, was likely to be received from ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman

... to him looks at THIRD PEASANT). Only look! Why, he has a rash on his nose—a rash! He is ill; he is a hotbed of infection!! Did I not give orders, yesterday, that they were not to be allowed into the house, and here they are again? Drive ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al

... be a regular hotbed of German spydom, and apparently with justice. A party of Russian officers coming over on a mission to this country and France some months later were taken off the Bergen-Newcastle packet by a ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell

... soon started out, and again took the road leading to Puerto Lapice, whose outlines they sighted in the afternoon. Don Quixote thought this an opportune time for addressing his squire on the etiquette and laws of knighthood, as they were now approaching a very hotbed ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... mules' backs are packed with ammunition. If you listen, you will hear the roll of drums and the shrill blowing of bugles more often than the soothing bells; if you watch, you will notice that not one man in ten is unprovided with a firearm, for this quiet-looking place is the very hotbed of Carlism; the insurrectionary headquarters for the province of Navarre; the arsenal and recruiting depot for all the provinces in revolt. The disciples of the rod have fled from it, and those of the musket have come in ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea

... out five thousand dollars of it in gold. For this coin the Tribune believed he had been murdered, and that they had a clue to the murderer. The vanished man had several times been seen in the company of a suspicious German, of intelligent but erratic appearance. This queer character lived in a hotbed of socialism on the West Side, and the young broker was supposed to be in his power. In fact, it was known for certain that the erratic German had secured a large sum of money from him, and that Werner had visited his rooms in the slums of the West Side more than once. Moreover, the two had made ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass

... spiritual ignorance, would have been sure to lead me, but for the watchful care of my heavenly Father, still working by means of my blind but sincere reverence for his word. In my native town, Socinianism flourished to a fearful extent; it has long been a very hotbed of that fatal heresy, the holders of which are found among many leading characters of wealth, influence, and high attainments. I knew no more of it than that it was one of the many forms of dissent with which I had nothing to do. I was acquainted with ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth

... were not the craze of the moment. Women were besieging a beehive of corsets and a hotbed of petticoats, reduced (so said huge red letters overhead) to one third of their original price. In less than five minutes Win had secured a costume with the right measurements, and for the two portions of which it consisted, had ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson

... the town is a hotbed of spies, and that our friends in laager outside are nightly communicated with by ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... heart. How many are prompted to remove those evils alone, which by hideous spectacle or clamorous outcry are present to their senses and disturb their selfish enjoyments? Provided the dunghill is not before their parlour window, they are well contented to know that it exists, and perhaps is the hotbed on which their own luxuries are reared. Sensibility ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various

... degraded works, and in one of them, impudently entitled "Catholic Prayers for Church of England People" you will actually see in cold print a prayer for the "Pope of Rome." This work emanates from that hotbed of sacerdotal ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie

... after the termination of the war with Buenos Ayres and Brazil in 1870, knew as lethargic and downtrodden, as if the great dictator, Dr. Francia, whom the country people, speaking in bated breath, called 'El Difunto', had still oppressed the land. Into the turbulent hotbed of Asuncion fell Antequera, one of those Creoles of Peru who, born with talent and well educated, seemed, either from the circumstances of their birth or the surroundings amongst which they passed their ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham

... corruption begun by parents. And so the home, the very spot designed by God to become the chief school of human virtue, the seminary of social affections, the keystone of the whole fabric of society, the germ-cell of civilization, becomes a hotbed of corruption, and almost as often on account of a husband's neglect and sins, as on account of a wife's ignorance or frailties or failings. Our stock of advice to wives and mothers seems inexhaustible. Almost every one of the stronger sex has his fling at woman, ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins

... Pecksniff's estate, this request must be considered rather as a polite compliment that a substantial hospitality. It was the finishing ornament of the conversation; for when he had delivered it, Mr Pecksniff rose and led the way to that hotbed of architectural genius, the ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens

... he started up, struck himself on the forehead and rushed away to the hotbed. He lifted the glass and looked in, and I looked too, for he seemed to be in the depths of despair. Yes, it was dreadful, of course. He had forgotten to shade it from the sun, and it must have been terribly hot under the glass. ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof

... at Lawrence was the beginning of a plan, originating in that city, to organize insurrection throughout the Territory, and especially in all towns, cities, or counties where the Republican party have a majority. Lawrence is the hotbed of all the abolition movements in this Territory. It is the town established by the abolition societies of the East, and whilst there are respectable people there, it is filled by a considerable number ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 5: James Buchanan • James D. Richardson



Words linked to "Hotbed" :   state of affairs



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