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verb
Rut  v. t.  To cover in copulation.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Rut" Quotes from Famous Books



... saw such a girl as you are!" exclaimed Winn, impatiently. "You are always making objections to my plans, and telling me that I'm only a boy. You'd rather any time travel in a rut that some one else had made than mark out a track for yourself. For my part, I'd much rather think out my own plans and try ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe

... 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 urgent; march ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker

... 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); ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton

... the Devil, one day, "you're not getting out of this thing all the fun there is in it. You go poking along in the same old rut with never a suspicion that you have it in your power to enjoy every pleasure of human life. Why don't you break away from the old restraints? Why don't you avail yourself of ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field

... Rut not infrequently these playful brutes get themselves tethered in some fashionable promenade, and the consequence is demoralizing to white people. We speak within the limits of possibility when we say that we have seen no less than seven women and children ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile

... nausea and faintness; for her fear lest the field should be built upon and the 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 fighting all the great forces of change ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose

... leisure to sing about them. "I wanted to say I didn't get you that time when you told me you'd pretty much done with the world. I though Mum was right: cafard, you remember. But I've swung round into the same rut. It's a rotten system. ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown

... downtown—that is, he got into a snow rut that led him downtown. He sat slouched down very low in his seat, much too dispirited to care ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... extant, and 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 ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy

... their every movement. These facts impressed the young country lad far more than the tall buildings and fine streets. His own active nature bounded with admiration at the life and dash on every hand. He had been reared among sleepy people—people in a rut, whose blood flowed as slowly as the sluggish current upon which they floated towards ...
— The Boy Broker - Among the Kings of Wall Street • Frank A. Munsey

... essayed to drag a stage-waggon over, or rather, I should say, through, a track of mud and ruts impossible to picture. The stage fare amounted to $6, or 4s. for 34 miles. An extra dollar reserved the box-seat and gave me the double advantage of knowing what was coming in the rut line and taking another lesson in the idiom of the American stage-driver. This idiom consists of the smallest possible amount of dictionary words, a few Scriptural names rather irreverently used, a very large intermixture of "git-ups" and ejaculatory ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler

... exert himself to get out of them, and expecting chastisement, the horse springs and struggles to avoid it before he has recovered his feet, and goes down with a tremendous impetus. If he has to cross a rut to the right he probably forces his horse across it when the right foot is on the ground. In this case, unless the horse collects himself and jumps—if he attempts to step across it, the probability is that in crossing his legs he knocks one against the other and falls. The reverse of all this should ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood

... only periodic in the female. Sometimes the group established for procreation endures throughout the seasons, and from year to year; sometimes the males herd together, as if normally they preferred their own society, until the time of rut comes, when war arises between them for the possession of what they have just discovered to be ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... sideways. Presently we reached a ledge, narrow enough at first, but which widened as we followed it, and moreover sloped inwards like the petal of a flower, so that as we followed it we gradually got into a kind of rut or fold of rock, that grew deeper and deeper, till at last it resembled a Devonshire lane in stone, and hid us perfectly from the gaze of anybody on the slope below, if there had been anybody to gaze. This lane (which appeared to be a natural formation) ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard

... in a rut, as his wife often said; but if it was a rut, it was a support too; it kept him from wobbling: She always talked as if the flowery fields of youth lay on either side of the dusty road he had been going so ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... concerning her possessions had been aroused by the physical evidence of the same, balanced on a rut and surveyed ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.

... reject the clear fulfillment of prophecy, in our past experience, you will as clearly prove that you know but a very little more. But after all you have said and done, you are following hard on in the track—the same old deep-cut rut, made by your predecessors. Pharaoh's host like, the ruts so deep you can neither back nor turn out; but on you drive after them, thinking, no doubt, that you are going to accomplish something for God and his cause. The only ...
— A Vindication of the Seventh-Day Sabbath • Joseph Bates

... said. "You will not fall into the rut? Let me keep the ideal you have given me. For the sake of heaven, do not cloud for me the one bright image I hold! Let me know always that you are growing, and that the pure, noble intelligence which distinguishes you advances, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... diagnosis of disease, the diathesis is all-important. All signs fail in a drought, because the predisposition, the diathesis, is so strongly toward fair weather; and the opposite signs fail during a wet spell, because nature is caught in the other rut. ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs

... 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, and who doesn't know a soul, ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith

... Those of the club members to stay behind must get together some day and talk them over. One thing was certain, the club motto must be lived up to bravely. If not in one way, why in another. There must be no slipping back into the old dreary rut and routine. It lay with themselves as to what their winter ...
— The S. W. F. Club • Caroline E. Jacobs

... man, just 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

... now," he said, in the course of his address; "I've got you in the right rut if you will but stick in it." Here he looked very hard out of the window for some seconds. "You've learned soberness and industry, and with those things you can always make up any loss you may sustain. I guess there isn't one of ye that won't remember my ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle

... took an eighth of the time it has taken me to tell it. But as I shook off my dream of the woods, I realized that, while Thornton still talked, he had got out of his uninteresting rut into his interesting one. Without hearing what he said I knew that from the look of the men's faces. Each man's eyes were bright, through a manner of mistiness, and there was a sudden silence which was perhaps what ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews

... end of September, 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 of the game, a buttoned top-coat. They smelled noisomely of blistered ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the 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 ...
— Minnesota and Dacotah • C.C. Andrews

... hands 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

... the bell toll as I loitered along the roadside, pulling a dandelion here and there, for it was in the month of May, and throwing it in the rut for the next wheel to crush. When I reached the schoolhouse I saw through the open door that the New Testament exercise was over. The teacher, Mrs. Desire Cushman, a tall, slender woman, in a flounced calico dress, ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard

... enough the hopelessness of their position; probably with the intensity of youth she exaggerated it, which was scarcely necessary, as a small rut is apt to widen into a bottomless pit if it crosses the path of those who are living up to the utmost verge of a narrow income. As she reviewed the endless instances of her mother's self-abnegation which memory supplied—her cheerful industry, ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander

... made a night of noon. High banks of earth and great boulders walled it in right and left for twenty feet above. The track, what with pack-horses' feet, and what with the wear and tear of five hundred years' rain-fall, was a rut three feet deep and two feet broad, in which no horse could turn. Any other day Hereward would have cantered down it with merely a tightened rein. Today he turned to ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley

... was out of the rut of his despondency; already the rust was knocked off his back, and the eagerness to crowd up to the starting-line was on him as fresh again as on the day when he had walked away from all competitors in the examination for a license ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden

... sorrow kept Marie much to the rut in which she had moved since Osborn's departure; but the grief for a parent is so natural and inevitable a grief; it is not as the grief for a husband or a child; and when the first warm days of April came Marie took some very definite steps forward ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton

... he answered, as if reasoning to 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

... the present epoch. There is little to show that diplomacy has been raised to a higher plane or has won a better reputation in the world at large than it possessed before the nations assembled at Paris to make peace. This failure to lift the necessary agency of international relations out of the rut worn deep by centuries of practice is one of the deplorable consequences of the peace negotiations. So much might have been ...
— The Peace Negotiations • Robert Lansing

... a short cut through the shrubbery and reached the road at the point whither the loud voices of the two men led him. He came upon the wagon with one hind wheel stuck in a muddy rut and the other one smashed at the hub. From the shelter of a handy bush Frank surveyed the situation and listened to what the recent captors ...
— The Boys of Bellwood School • Frank V. Webster

... of his rich talent the poverty of heart alone determined his choice of satire. And how could we otherwise explain the fact that he could pursue so long a road without ever issuing from its narrow rut? Whatever may be the variety of matter and of external forms, we see the inner form return everywhere with its sterile and eternal uniformity, and in spite of his so productive career, he never accomplished in himself the circle of humanity, that circle which we see ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... 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,' ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry

... 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]

... forme of a beast, (O Ioue, a 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, to the tune of Greenesleeues, haile-kissing ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare

... 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

... you put it?" demanded Elliot mercilessly. He was so furious that he forgot to hold the umbrella over Miss Daggett, and the rain drove in her hard, unhappy face. She did not seem to notice. She had led a poisoned life, in a narrow rut of existence, and toxic emotions had become as her native atmosphere of mind. Now she seemed to be about to breathe in a better air of humanity, ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley

... 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 get ...
— Rhymes of a Red Cross Man • Robert W. Service

... much benefit to the one who wins it. It does not satisfy for long, but it is valuable in other ways. For instance, success, based on service, is a benefit to the community. If, it were not for successful people of this type the ordinary man in the rut would have a bad time. Also, the winning of success builds up character. One who would be successful in the battle of life, must be prepared to be tested and tried in every possible way. One who survives them all is built up in character in almost every direction. Even ...
— Within You is the Power • Henry Thomas Hamblin

... compiled with one end in view: to arrange in a convenient and inexpensive form the fundamentals of verse—enough for the student who takes up verse as a literary exercise or for the older verse writer who has fallen into a rut or who is a bit shaky on theory. It is even hoped that there may be a word of help for some ...
— Rhymes and Meters - A Practical Manual for Versifiers • Horatio Winslow

... and brother had been left in camp as guards. They were sitting idly warming themselves in the first sunbeams, when their attention was sharply drawn to four buffaloes that were coming to the pool to drink. The beasts came down a game trail, a deep rut in the bluff, fronting where they were sitting, and they did not dare to stir for fear of being discovered. The buffaloes walked into the pool, and after drinking their fill, stood for some time with the water running out of their ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt

... don't stop soon something is going to happen," was Tom's comment, and scarcely had he spoken when they went down into a rut and Sam was flung up and over a wheel into some brushwood. Then the team went on ...
— The Rover Boys on the Farm - or Last Days at Putnam Hall • Arthur M. Winfield (AKA Edward Stratemeyer)

... 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 ...
— A Rebellious Heroine • John Kendrick Bangs

... the decline; the thaw had not yet reached the 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 ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville

... developed by remaining in a rut. Experience is not only the best teacher, but the very finest developer of thought, and of a vivid and facile imagination. Thus constant practice causes the building of plots to become ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds

... his suspicions with your by-play and giggling, I will deceive the ingenuous youth in a way that will surprise you as well as him. Good acting must have proper support. This is something new,—out of the rut; and I am bound to make it a brilliant jest that we can laugh over all our lives. So remember, Julian, you will disconcert me ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe

... 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 ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... is sold at its weight in silver, where grief is worked for what it is worth, where the prayers of the Church are costly, and the vestry claim payment for extra voices in the Dies irae,—all attempt to get out of the rut prescribed by the authorities for sorrow ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac

... horse. And down the road they raced, till they saw by the loom of the open bush where the boundary fences ceased. The leader turned his horse in his stride, and the four behind turned theirs. A fallen log; a rut; a snag; and one rider's race would be done; for the pace they were going left no escape if once a horse came down. Through the low-grown brush they crashed. A rider ducked to miss a branch that was level with his head; a horse swerved sharp to the right to dodge an old and charred ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott

... probably lost all the better feelings of their nature in such a service, are appealed to entirely through the medium of their tails, and the operation occasionally results in the whole creaking mass being safely deposited in some capacious rut, there to remain until "the Fates" — assuming, perhaps, the appearance of three additional bullocks — arrive to draw it out again. Occasionally, too, the institution comes to a halt for the night, comfortably drawn up in the centre of the line of traffic, with a delightful disregard ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight

... its beginnings and not in its ends; the aspirations of the soul are supposed to be explained in their totality when biological and psychological names are given them; enthusiasm and conviction, which leave the level of the daily rut and the conventionalities of society, are branded as signs of shallowness and even of insanity. We are in the midst of plenty, and feed on husks. The situation will not be altered until we turn from intellect to intuition—which is no other than a turn ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones

... The buggy leapt high at a rut. For a frantic minute perhaps everything seemed to be going ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells

... with a sort of pleasurable excitement and diligence in the pursuit of the study we have entered upon, which lasts until the novelty begins to wear off. Then comes the time when we find ourselves falling into a rut from which, if we do not try hard to keep up our standard, it will be difficult to extricate ourselves; but, if we summon all our energy and strive to overcome all impediments and will work hard and adopt perseverance as our ...
— Silver Links • Various

... measure, even after the establishment of Christianity, and we find phallic rites masquerading in the garb of Christian observances as late as the sixteenth century in parts of Russia and Hungary. Westermarck, in his chapter on the human rut season in primitive times, says: "Writers of the sixteenth century speak of the existence of certain festivals in Russia, at which great license prevailed. According to Pamphil, these annual gatherings took place, as a rule, at the end of June, the day before ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir

... 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 ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis

... the strike came in the railroad shops. The Sunday before it was called, Saxon and Billy had dinner at Bert's house. Saxon's brother came, though he had found it impossible to bring Sarah, who refused to budge from her household rut. Bert was blackly pessimistic, and they found him singing ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London

... said judiciously, "I suppose you will all be satisfied now that you are back in your old rut wretchedly doing your duty ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston

... 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 ...
— The Chronicles of a Gay Gordon • Jose Maria Gordon

... roar of sound and a glaring light. Allan went down one side of the gulley with some ease, but it was another thing to climb the other. However, up he got, almost to the top—and then pitched forward, clutching at the growth of sedge along the crest. It held him steady, and he settled into a rut of yellow earth and tried to think it over. Endeavouring to draw himself a little higher, a minie ball went through his shoulder. The grey charge passed him, roaring on ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston

... furiously muttered: "You brute, you brute!" and seizing her son's hand, "Give him a cut with the whip!" she exclaimed. The young man did not do that, but he urged on his horse and then, just as they were passing the Abbe, suddenly let the wheel of the gig drop into a deep rut. There was a splash, and, in an instant, the priest was covered with mud from head to foot. Rosalie laughed all over her face, and turning round, she shook her fist at the abbe as he stood wiping himself ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893

... good and new. Then, in some unguarded moment, he asks himself: "But what the devil has all this to do with me?" In the meantime he has grown old and has become accustomed to it all; and therefore he continues in his rut—just as in ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche

... 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 ...
— The Boy Scouts with the Motion Picture Players • Robert Shaler

... mean just for a little trip. I mean to live. Take a little two-room apartment in one of the new buildings—near my studio—and relax. Enjoy yourselves. Meet new men and women. Live! You're in a rut—both of you. Besides, dad needs it. That rheumatism of his, with these ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various

... Mr. Balfour and the late Mr. George Wyndham were the only pupils of Chittenden's who made names for themselves. The rest of us were content to plod along in the rut, though we had been taught to concentrate, to ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton

... a steady downpour, it sang its mournful song through poplar and shrub. Soon the grey tiled roof of the cottage poured its libation into spouting gutters, and every rut of the road became a miniature ditch. But, with dogged persistency, the five watchers ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer

... etc., 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 up ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture

... to test its poisoning powers on a dog—got elaborately ready for the experiment, and then discovered that he had no dog. A wiser person would have kept such a thing discreetly to himself, but with this harmless creature everything comes out. He hurts his foot in a rut two thousand years old in exhumed Pompeii, and presently, when staring at one of the cinder-like corpses unearthed in the next square, conceives the idea that maybe it is the remains of the ancient ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... 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. Their ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle

... has transformed novel writing in Italy, and that its effect in Germany has been not less pronounced. The virtue of this influence on German letters was undoubtedly great. It made an end of sentimentality, it shook literature out of the sleepy rut into which it had fallen and forced ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson

... in 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

... in full blast. The vessel could get under weigh at once. In fact, nothing delayed immediate departure but the consideration that two miles of sounding line were still to be hauled up from the ocean depths. Rut the Captain, after a moment's thought, unwilling that any more time should be lost, determined to cut it. Then marking its position by fastening its end to a buoy, he could haul it up at his ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne

... the top of the load, steadying a basket of eggs with one foot, keeping a tin can of something from upsetting with the other, and both arms stretched around a very big and very square picture-frame that knocks against my nose or my chin every time the cart goes over a stone or drops into a rut, and the wind threatening to blow my hat off, and blowing it off, and my "back-hair" tumbling down,—and the old house is at last despoiled. The rooms stand bare and brown and desolate. The sun, a hand-breadth above the horizon, pours in through the unblinking windows. The last load ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... 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 ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux

... known 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 ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb

... grains of sand as large as able bodied paving-stones. Also, as we passed through a picturesque mud-village which ought to have pleased everybody, it blew into our noses smells which Lady Biddell knew would give us plague. As if this were not enough, the sandcart nearly turned over in a rut, and Miss Hassett-Bean said that she must go home or be left to die in the desert. I had to lead the little stallion before she would consent to go on, and realized when I had ploughed through fifty yards of sand, that the manicured snob of a leader was a thin brown ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson

... the common law, was, that every freeman, or freeborn male Englishman, of adult age, &c;., was eligible to sit in juries, by virtue of his civil freedom, or his being a member of the state, or body politic. Rut the principle of the present English statutes is, that a man shall have a right to sit in juries because he owns lands in fee-simple. At the common law a man was born to the right to sit in juries. By the present statutes he buys that right when he buys his land. And thus this, the greatest ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner

... 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

... was carrying two boxes of oranges and a crate of California cabbages in out of the sun, and a limp individual in blue gingham shirt and dirty overalls had shouldered the mail sack and was making his way across the dusty, rut-scored ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower

... 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 'infinitesimal' tendency to diversification. ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James

... 71st Street, New York,} "Tuesday, February 3, 1891. } "Dear Brother:—I am drifting along in the old rut—in good strength, attending about four dinners out per week at public or private houses, and generally wind up for gossip at the Union League club. Last night, discussing the effect of Mr. Windom's death and funeral, several prominent gentlemen ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman

... to get into a rut and stay there. Long before the old-time grafting circuses grew scarce and scarcer, and before the street-fairing concessions progressed out of their primitive beginnings into orderly and recognized organizations, he had quitted ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb

... convincing demonstration of how completely the fashionable world had abandoned the Academy of Music than the giving of a subscription season of only four weeks' duration. Within this period, moreover, there was no sign of effort to get out of the old rut into which Colonel Mapleson's repertory had sunk. "Carmen" was given three times, "Il Trovatore" twice, "Lucia di Lammermoor" twice, "L'Africaine" twice, "La Sonnambula" once, "La Favorita" once, ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... got 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 longer. After all, I've got my own life to live. ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole

... will become of me to-night! I am just in the condition of an out-lying deer, that's beaten from his walk for offering to rut. Enter ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott

... 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

... with spears and the look of official guards, and a Terran with a 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 mate ...
— A Transmutation of Muddles • Horace Brown Fyfe

... "still, I am glad you have it. It's very much in the picture, and lifts the sentiment of the place out of the awful suburban rut. It's a little symbolic of you yourself, too, Dominic—there's style, and poetry, and breeding about it. Only, thank the powers, you differ from it mightily in this, that its best days are over, while you are but in the flower of your age. And your rooms are delightful—they're ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet

... on their journey to the other side of the forest, the verderers eating what Humphrey had brought for them as they walked along. It was a tedious and painful journey for the wounded man, who shrieked out when the cart was jolted by the wheel getting into a rut or hole; but there was no help for it, and he was very much exhausted when they arrived, which was not till past midnight. Corbould was then taken to his cottage and put on the bed, and another verderer sent for a surgeon: those who had been ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat

... Duryodhana, and proud of the strength of his arms, and conscious also of Krishna looking at him, Vrikodara began to swell in vigour. And fried with anger, Bhima seized the Rakshasa with his arms, as one elephant in rut seizeth another. And the powerful Rakshasa also in his turn seized his adversary, but Bhimasena that foremost of all men endued with strength, threw the cannibal down with violence. The sounds that in consequence of those mighty combatants pressing ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa

... I will spin down for you every few days," Margaret said, falling readily in with the plan. "I'm glad you're not going to simply get into a rut the way some of the other girls have,—cooking and babies and ...
— Mother • Kathleen Norris

... never-varying regularity 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 when the doctor's buggy ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice

... after nightfall, yet the interminable forest through which he journeyed was lit with a wan glimmer having no point of diffusion, for in its mysterious lumination nothing cast a shadow. A shallow pool in the guttered depression of an old wheel rut, as from a recent rain, met his eye with a crimson gleam. He stooped and plunged his hand into it. It stained his fingers; it was blood! Blood, he then observed, was about him everywhere. The weeds growing rankly by the roadside showed it in blots and splashes on their big, ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce

... after 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 ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... get into the tonneau. Several times he got one leg almost over the back, only to be dislodged as the car bumped into a rut or over a stone. Once he almost lost his grip entirely. But a final effort gave him a leg-hold, and slowly—very slowly—he climbed over to the leather cushions ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin

... had even. grown attached to Claude as well as to his sisters. The boy looked back at the ranch. It was rapidly being left behind, but he could still see the green patch of corn that covered the place where the alkali used to be. Rut the boy was, not thinking of the alkali patch alone. A look of reverent thankfulness came into his face. "Mother will be glad I ever met ...
— Out of the Triangle • Mary E. Bamford

... 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 ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs

... conventional Group of ordinary 6-7/8 Mortals had lived in a Rut. At each meal-time they rounded up and mechanically devoured what was doled out to them and folded their Napkins and broke Ranks. Each day was the Duplicate of another and Life had petered down ...
— People You Know • George Ade

... toward creating moments of amusement and happiness. Her presence acts as a deterrent and repeated failures to overcome this domestic cloud finally result in a complete cessation of all effort. Things fall into a rut and each member of the family seek their various forms of diversion outside ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague

... borne the loss of two harvests, and the disaster which followed in the wake of the blizzard that killed off his stock; but it seemed unfair that he should endure cold and hunger too, and when one wheel sank into a rut and the jolt shook him in every stiffened limb, he broke out with a hoarse expletive. It was his first protest against the fate that was too strong for him, and almost as he made ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss

... roadster, "Billy," was pretty well trained, the combined effect was a little too much for his nerves. He gave a sidelong leap and started to run. His master checked him sharply, and veering from the road, he ran the wheels into a deep rut, and over went the buggy ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume VIII, No 25: May 21, 1887 • Various

... exercise and animation; Arthur talking fast about the covers and the game, and Violet in such high spirits, that she volunteered a history of their trouble with Skylark, and 'some dear little partridges that could not get out of a cart rut.' ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge

... assiduous adoption of such signs of love sickness as I had occasionally observed in other people, I only succeeded for two days (and that at intervals, and mostly towards evening) in reminding myself of the fact that I was in love, and finally, when I had settled down into the new rut of country life and pursuits, I forgot about my affection ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy

... providence; For all Thy perfect processes of life; For the minute perfection of Thy work, Seen and unseen, in each remotest part; For faith, and works, and gentle charity; For all that makes for quiet in the world; For all that lifts man from his common rut; For all that knits the silken bond of peace; For all that lifts the fringes of the night, And lights the darkened corners of the earth; For every broken gate and sundered bar; For every wide-flung window of the soul; For that ...
— Bees in Amber - A Little Book Of Thoughtful Verse • John Oxenham

... Berlioz over for some of them. I thus heard him conduct some classical works, such as a Mozart symphony, and was amazed to find a conductor, who was so energetic in the interpretation of his own compositions, sink into the commonest rut of the vulgar time-beater. Certain of his own compositions, such as the more effective fragments from the Romeo and Juliet Symphony, again made a particular impression on me, it is true; but I was now more consciously awake ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner

... I would if I was you," said the latter. "It can't do ye no harm, an' it may do ye some good. The fact is," he continued, "that you ain't out o' danger of runnin' in a rut. It would do you good mebbe to git more acquainted, an' mebbe ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott

... a flying mass, a ton of metal rushing through space; there is no sensation of fear, not a tremor of the nerves, but one becomes for the moment exceedingly alert, with instantaneous comprehension of the character of the road; every rut, stone, and curve are seen and appreciated; the possibility of collision is understood, and every danger is present in the mind, and with it all the thrill of excitement which ever ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy

... is said and done the illustrator's strongest asset is spirit. Technique and a grain of insight will help a man over many a rut in portraiture, and a knowledge of patting clay and using a chisel has saved many a sculptor, but technical equipment alone never made an illustrator, because he deals too directly with life in action. Slack drawing and impatience of method will always be pardoned ...
— The Building of a Book • Various

... sure, Mas—sir," opined Mr. Lasher at length; "if there's any one as has got into his right rut, so to speak, in this world, it's you. I always said you was ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman

... thought than done. Dreda deliberately slackened pace until Hereward and Gurth had passed on ahead, then turned in at the opened gate, and after a few minutes' painful wobbling to and fro found a deep rut along which her wheels could make a fairly easy progress. The sound of agitated puffings and pantings from behind made her aware that another rider had been rash enough to follow her lead; but she dared ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... Serge's mind, and he was afraid. At that moment, when his fate was being decided, he hesitated to go deeper into the rut where he had already been walking too long. He stood silent and undecided. Confused thoughts crowded his brain; his temples throbbed, and a buzzing noise sounded in his ears. But the thought of giving up his liberty, and again ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet

... decry science, but it should be cried on the housetops of education, the world around in this twentieth century, that science is in a rut of dealing solely with things and that the pronoun of science is It. While it is obvious that neuter knowledge should have its place in any real scheme of life, it is also obvious that most of us, making locomotives, playing with mist, fire and water and lightning, and the great ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee

... vapid of face, deaf and dumb, frowsy of dress, and a world removed from the thought of a morning bath. It might be picturesque in a way—but it wasn't a way Madison liked. Somehow, he'd have to jerk the old chap out of his rut and get him rigged up a little more becomingly, before the trusting public, simple as they were, were invited down to see the exhibit. Madison's dramatic instinct, which was developed to a keen sense of what the public craved for, rebelled ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard

... down, Perfessor," he urged, with great cordiality. "Well, well, well! It's good to see you again, be hanged if it ain't now! How's things down to the bluffs? Joggin' along, joggin' along in the same old rut, the way the feller with the wheelbarrer went to market? Eh? Haw, haw, haw! Have a ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln

... 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 already ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various

... 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 to it and stifle it. It subserves interests not its own. Our organs of criticism ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold

... road was being repaired, so, at a certain place, the boys had to turn off on a side road for a distance of nearly a mile. Here the going was anything but good, and they went down in more than one rut or hollow. ...
— The Rover Boys in New York • Arthur M. Winfield

... her head save her heels, but she takes another kind 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 Mrs. ...
— Community Civics and Rural Life • Arthur W. Dunn

... salaries, hasn't any method in his establishment, and has a dozen leaks that he can't find, but which could easily be located by a professional leak finder. There are a lot of men in business who are honest and willing to work, but who are in a rut and can't see the new things coming, and who could be put on their feet by an injection of a little outside ginger and a readjustment of their business on more modern methods. They are the ones who need help ...
— Drusilla with a Million • Elizabeth Cooper

... 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 been deprived of the burning allurement of risk and hazard; so, ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin

... were hardly distinguishable in the earlier phases of their history. Perhaps a fourth type should be added, but this fourth type was what naturalists call an aberrant type, and only comprised two colonizers, Rut and Hore, whose aims were indistinct, and who had no clear idea where they meant to go, or what they meant to do when ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead

... Rut the wolf would not go away, even when Uncle Wiggily asked him to, most politely, making a ...
— Uncle Wiggily and Old Mother Hubbard - Adventures of the Rabbit Gentleman with the Mother Goose Characters • Howard R. Garis

... depend upon the adherence to the great divine truth contained in the inspired Book. The Bible text is God's part of our sermon; and the more thoroughly we get the text into our own souls, the more will we get it into the sermon, and into the consciences of our hearers. To keep out of a rut I studied the infinite variety of Sacred Scripture; its narratives and matchless biographies, its jubilant Psalms, its profound doctrines, its tender pathos, its rolling thunder of Sinai, and its sweet melodies of Calvary's redeeming love. I laid hold of the great ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler

... 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 is being simultaneously repeated, with discordant variations, ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede

... been pushed over the edge of a precipice, a rut across the path is devoid of menace; nor do the destitute tremble at the departing watchman's cry: 'Sleep ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah

... Martin Sutter decided life was too short to continue in the rut that had been his existence for more than twenty years. He withdrew his savings from the Explosion City Third Federal Bank, stopped in a display room and informed a somewhat surprised clerk he was taking the electric runabout with the blue bonnet. ...
— Made in Tanganyika • Carl Richard Jacobi

... 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 ...
— Stammering, Its Cause and Cure • Benjamin Nathaniel Bogue

... furnishes us with a consecutive 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 of these deposits. I have had the advantage of glancing over the collections in ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell

... She is quite shut out! She might call and shout, But no one about Would ever call back, "Who's there?" There is never a hut, Not a door to shut, Not a footpath or rut, Long road or short ...
— A Double Story • George MacDonald



Words linked to "Rut" :   anestrus, turn over, estrus, channel, groove, heat, physiological state, physical condition, furrow, be, delve, routine, dig, rutty, physiological condition, oestrus, modus operandi



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