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High-water mark   /haɪ-wˈɔtər mɑrk/   Listen
High-water mark

noun
1.
A line marking the highest level reached.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"High-water mark" Quotes from Famous Books



... Stages of Greek Religion I have found myself obliged to change its name. I felt there was a gap in the story. The high-water mark of Greek religious thought seems to me to have come just between the Olympian Religion and the Failure of Nerve; and the decline—if that is the right word—which is observable in the later ages of antiquity is a decline not from Olympianism but from the great spiritual and intellectual ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray

... incomparable beach-loving calophyllums yield a profuse but tender fragrance reminiscent of English meadow-sweet, and the flowers of a vigorous trailer (CANAVILA OBTUSIFOLIA), for ever exploring the bare sand at high-water mark, resembles the sweet-pea in form and perfume. The white cedar (MELIA COMPOSITA) is a welcome and not unworthy substitute in appearance and perfume for English lilac. The aromatic pandanus and many varieties of acacia, ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield

... for instance, who represents the high-water mark of a philosophy that will not hold water, pours out the vials of his bottled-up wrath on the poor unfortunates of London who are compelled 'to make a living' by tips in opening the carriage doors or holding the horses of the wealthy. He had nothing but loathing for the pregnant girl who tries ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood

... insignia of popes or other objects equally unsuitable. We see in the oldest obelisks a wonderful ease and an exquisite finish of execution, a maturity of thought and skill which none of the later obelisks reached, and which indicate the high-water mark of man's achievement in that line. There is also "a bloom of youth and of the earth's morning" about them which is quite indescribable, and which doubtless came to them because of the power and reality ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan

... time Jonathan, tired out, sat in his big splint chair at the supper-table. He had been thrashing the brook since daylight,—over his knees sometimes. I could still see the high-water mark on his patched trousers. Another whiff of the frying-pan, and George got up. He dared not poke his nose into Marthy's lap,—there were too many chunks of wood within easy reach of her hand. So he sidled up to Jonathan, rubbing his nose against his big knees, whining ...
— A Gentleman Vagabond and Some Others • F. Hopkinson Smith

... which we heard the night before—tons of earth and shattered rock wrapped about the split and stripped trunks of a half-dozen pines. The slide was started by the dislodged section of a sheer wall close to the top of the 2700-foot cliff. We also saw a boat of crude construction, pulled above the high-water mark; evidently abandoned a great while before. Any person who had to climb the walls at that place had a hard job to tackle, although we could pick out breaks where it looked feasible; there were a few places behind ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb

... I feel that our president in this instance has hit a high-water mark. He has taken hold of a very important idea and has developed it. After making an observation or two I am going to move a vote of appreciation to our president and accompany it with a vote of thanks to Senator Penney for coming down here from Michigan and lending ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various

... along the cliff; the high-water mark was still above their heads. "It's getting exciting, isn't it?" she observed. "But I don't feel nasty. Having you here makes—makes ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand

... that expression Christ's consciousness that He is the light, and enmity to Him darkness. Mark, too, His meek submission, as bowing His head to let the black flood flow over Him. Note that Christ brands enmity to Him as the high-water mark of sin, the crucial instance of man's darkness, the worst thing ever done. Mark the assurance that animated Him, that the eclipse was but for an 'hour.' The victory of the darkness was brief, and it led to the eternal triumph of the Light. By dying He is the death ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... if at a good distance from the sea-beach; for you see, William, the sand by degrees filters the sea-water fresh, and very often when the sand runs in a long way from the high-water mark, if you dig down, you will find good fresh water, at other times it is a little brackish, but still fit ...
— Masterman Ready • Captain Marryat

... destroyer attacking a submarine—said cormorant kindly obliging with quick diving act when approached; a food-ship laden with bananas represented by rushes culled from the banks; and a smuggler running cargoes of French wine contained in an elderly empty bottle discovered in the mud above high-water mark. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 27, 1917 • Various

... hungry they sought out a fisherman's cottage, where, for a small sum, they had a fine meal. Starting out again, they turned an intervening point of land about three o'clock, and then came in view of a lighthouse, located on a pile of rocks, not far from the high-water mark. ...
— The Moving Picture Boys on the Coast • Victor Appleton

... forced back in July and August from the high-water mark of their advance in March and April, had stood on the line of the Somme and the Peronne—Arras road. In the southern sector of the British front the Somme defences had been turned by the brilliant capture of Mont St. Quentin (to the north of and guarding Peronne) ...
— A Short History of the 6th Division - Aug. 1914-March 1919 • Thomas Owen Marden

... as a poet—Poems of Earth's Meaning (he has the habit of bad titles), which came out in 1917, is his high-water mark. I am glad that he reprinted in this volume the elegy on the death of Arthur Upson, written in 1910; there is not a ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps

... the cave, he seemed stupefied and dazzled by the sudden change from the darkness of his cavern. While others were superintending the removal of Meg Merrilies, those who remained with Hatteraick attempted to make him sit down upon a fragment of rock which lay close upon the high-water mark. A strong shuddering convulsed his iron frame for an instant as he resisted their purpose. 'Not there! Hagel! you would not make me ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... led the way, pausing to nose at a patch of seaweed here and there or to glance shrewdly into the shallow pools among the rocks. The cub obediently followed her example, though doubtless with no idea of what he might hope to find. But the upper stretches of the ledge, near high-water mark, offered nothing to reward their quest, having been dry for several hours, and long ago thoroughly gone over by earlier foragers. So the bears pushed on down toward the lower stretches, where the ledges were still wet, and the long, ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts

... said that grounded ice or icebergs floating along a rocky shore might produce similar marks; but they will chiefly be at the level of high-water mark, and, if grounded, they will trend in various directions, owing to the rocking or rotating movement of the iceberg. It has also been urged, that, without admitting any general glacier-period, icebergs and floating ice from more ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various

... Cross of Calvary; wondering at the long, weary path which He who is now declared to be the Judge humbled Himself to travel in the quest of these poor sinful souls whom He has redeemed and glorified. The miracle of miracles is redeeming love; and the high-water mark of Christ's wonders is touched in this fact, that out of men He makes saints; and out of saints He makes ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... of Poe and the calm spirit of the man who followed him is very great. In Henry Wadsworth Longfellow American poetry reached high-water mark. Lafcadio Hearn in his "Interpretations of Literature" says: "Really I believe that it is a very good test of any Englishman's ability to feel poetry, simply to ask him, 'Did you like Longfellow when you were a boy?' If he eats 'No,' then it is no use to talk to him on the subject ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various

... fifteen, least books were read at the age of nine and most at the age of fifteen, and that there was "a gradual rise in amount throughout, the only break being in the case of girls at the age of fourteen and the boys at the age of twelve." For fiction the high-water mark was reached for both sexes at eleven, and the subsequent fall is far less rapid for girls than for boys. "At the age of thirteen the record for travel and adventure stands highest in the case of the boys, phenomenally so. There is a gradual rise in history with age, and ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall

... the Policeman," or "On Going a Journey," or "The Deceased"—this last is perhaps the high-water mark of the book. To vary the figure, this essay dips its Plimsoll-mark full under. It is freighted with far more than a dozen pages might be expected to carry safely. So quietly, so quaintly told, what a wealth of humanity is in it! Am I wrong in thinking that those fellow-artists ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley

... throes. Perchance the mind is capable of suffering worse than the fiercest pangs of hopeless love combined with jealousy; one would not pretend to put a limit to the possibilities of human woe; but for Mallard, at all events this night did the black flood of misery reach high-water mark. ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing

... Shakespeare's thought—is presented, of course, in general outline, as an impersonation of "surviving force:" he has a certain amount of kingcraft also, a real fitness for great opportunity. But still true to his leading motive, Shakespeare, in King Henry the Fourth, has left the high-water mark of his poetry in the soliloquy which represents royalty longing vainly for the toiler's sleep; while the popularity, the showy heroism, of Henry the Fifth, is used to give emphatic point to the old earthy commonplace ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater

... And Marmion registers the high-water mark of Scott's poetical power, not only in relation to the painting of war, but in relation to the painting of nature. Critics from the beginning onwards have complained of the six introductory epistles, as breaking the unity of the story. But I cannot see ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton

... been swallowed to float recklessness up to the high-water mark. There is another fight going on in the vestibule. One of the women has been caught up by the crowd and tossed bodily into the proscenium box, where she is caught and dragged by half a dozen brutes ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe

... soon compelled by the dense fog to lie-to again at a ground-ice, which, when the fog lightened, was found to have stranded quite close to land. The depth here was eleven metres. At this place we lay till the morning of the 10th. The beach, was formed of a sandbank,[235] which immediately above high-water mark was covered with a close grassy turf, a proof that the climate here, notwithstanding the neighbourhood of the pole of cold, is much more favourable to the development of vegetation than even the most favoured parts of the ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold

... miles, generally southwestward, to the Colorado, a mile below the narrows, above the mouth of Black Canyon, where, on December 2, was found a black rocky point, considered a suitable spot for the erection of a warehouse, above high-water mark. This ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock

... recognized by themselves as belonging to an entirely different genre. Hence the distinction drawn between 'The Old Comedy,' of which Cratinus and his younger contemporaries, Eupolis and Aristophanes, were the leading representatives, and which was at high-water mark just before and during the course of the great struggle of the Peloponnesian War, and 'The New Comedy,' a comedy of manners, the two chief exponents of which were Philemon and Menander, writing after Athens had fallen under the ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al

... its high-water mark in England long before the power and prestige of the French monarchy had culminated in the person of Louis XIV. In the sixteenth century—the very century in which the French sovereigns faced constant foreign war and chronic civil commotion—the ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes

... instructive lessons of Lost Opportunity. Allowing for the differences of climate and temperament, it may be taken for granted that no people of any country are constitutionally able to rise above a certain height of enthusiasm; and that when the high-water mark is reached, their enthusiasm cools, and a reaction invariably sets in. For this cause a monarch should never rely too much on the plaudits of the mob in a time of conquest, or public festival of jubilation. He should look upon such acclamation as the mere rising of a wave, which must in due ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli

... the surprise landing of a fresh British army in Suvla Bay in August, and its failure in the battle of Anafarta, through incompetent commanders and a general sloppiness of leading, to cut off and capture Maidos and the Narrows defences.... Meanwhile the Russian hosts, which had reached their high-water mark in the capture of Przemysl, were being forced back first in the south and then in the north. The Germans recaptured Lemberg, entered Warsaw, and pressed on to take Brest Litowsk. The Russian lines rolled ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells

... bow with a mock flourish, and began rolling down his shirt-cuffs; a thrill quivering through him—that thrill only felt by a painter when he is conscious that some work of his brush has reached the high-water mark of his abilities. For only the artist in him had been at work. What stirred him was not the personality of the Countess—not her charm nor beauty but the harmony of the colors playing about her figure: the reflected lights in the blue-black of her hair; the soft tones of ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith

... in the sand; he then proceeded to survey the bank, and found that but a small portion was uncovered at high water; for, trifling as was the rise of the tide, the bank was so low that the water flowed almost over it. The most elevated part was not more than fifteen feet above high-water mark, and that was a small knoll of ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat

... he had reached a high-water mark of self-satisfaction. He had found it easy to carry corruption into high places. A list of those who were in his power—willing or unwilling—would have horrified the whole nation. From O'Hagan in the West ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris

... levied upon inheritances. An excess profits tax was laid upon all corporations and partnerships, rising in amount to sixty per cent of the net income in excess of thirty-three per cent on the invested capital. "This," said a distinguished economist, "is the high-water mark in the history of taxation. Never before in the annals of civilization has an attempt been made to take as much as two-thirds of ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard

... that was a great comfort to her. She could get away by herself, when she chose, and sometimes the necessity for so doing was strong upon her. She wished to think, without Aunt Maria's sharp eyes upon her, searching her thoughts. Emotion in Maria was reaching its high-water mark; the need for concealing, lest it be profaned by other eyes, was over her. Maria felt, although she was conscious of her aunt's covert sympathy for something that troubled her which she did not know ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... waded forward. He soon struck dry ground. He went up a slight slope, feeling his way until he was above high-water mark. He felt rough ledges as he steadied himself against the rough side of the cave and suddenly a shock went through him that thrilled him ...
— The Rushton Boys at Treasure Cove - Or, The Missing Chest of Gold • Spencer Davenport

... graciousness of the sun a special instance has been preserved in my erratic diary. Here it is: November 24, 1908: Spent from 10 a.m. to 1.15 p.m. on the beach and on the Isle of Purtaboi, bare-limbed, bare-bodied, save for scant cotton pants. Above high-water mark the sand was scorchingly hot to the feet. The heat of the glowing coral drift on the Isle forced me promptly to amend my methodic gait to a quick step, though my hardened soles soon became indifferent. Nutmeg pigeons were nesting plentifully on trees and shrubs amongst masses ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield

... crest of a wave, pointing for the place where the blue seas did not break into white. An instant after, you were in the quiet water inside of the surf. Jump out everybody and hold the boat! Then it was pick up the various instruments, and carry them for a quarter of a mile to high-water mark and beyond, over the sharp points ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various

... harbour-bar. The tide was going out rapidly, and Worsley lightened the 'Dudley Docker' by placing some cases on an outer rock, where they were retrieved subsequently. Then he beached his boat, and with many hands at work we soon had our belongings ashore and our three craft above high-water mark. The spit was by no means an ideal camping-ground; it was rough, bleak, and inhospitable—just an acre or two of rock and shingle, with the sea foaming around it except where the snow-slope, running up to a glacier, formed the landward boundary. But some of the larger rocks provided a measure ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton

... your boat before we go out, and pull it above high-water mark," suggested Frank. "Some of the seams may have been opened, as well as this hole being in her, and she ...
— Frank and Andy Afloat - The Cave on the Island • Vance Barnum

... operations in the vicinity of the boat; they were onshore for two or three hours afterwards, but the natives did not make their appearance. The foot-marks of men and boys were evident on the sand below the high-water mark, and the remains of fireplaces, and where the natives had been manufacturing spears, were of recent date. The gentlemen brought off a few shells and some insects, among which was a beautiful sphynx; besides which one of the boat's crew caught a species of vampyrus, apparently ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King

... in view. A glance showed Marjorie that the waves had not yet reached high-water mark. Mechanically she chose the road ...
— The Adventure League • Hilda T. Skae

... short time since for this branch of ingenuity; but it has probably ere now subsided, having been in response to a call for the artist by one or two collectors. Of course, the prices advanced instantaneously to high-water mark, from the certainty that ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt

... the leeward side of the island, and on going to the windward shore it was curious to notice the process by which these islands gradually become covered with vegetation. The whole shore just above high-water mark was covered with little seeds, beans, and various other atoms of vegetation which had been dropped by birds or cast up by the sea, and which in process of time will cover the island with trees and shrubs. The island did not look much bigger than half a dozen times the ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey

... Scheffer, Delacroiz, Horace Vernet—to mention only a few great names at random. Julius Slowacki, Count Krasinski and Adam Mickiewicz were all here editing their poetry in the midst of this brilliant life in the inspiring city by the Seine. This period in Paris signs perhaps the high-water mark of the creative genius of Mickiewicz. He had already written the Ballads and Romances, the third ...
— Sonnets from the Crimea • Adam Mickiewicz

... the natives ran away except Paowang, who was suitably rewarded for his confidence. After a time permission was obtained to get wood, water, and ballast, and whilst trying to lift a stone out of a pool below high-water mark, one of the crew scalded his hand badly. The pool proved to be one of a series of springs running down a spur of the volcano into the sea. Several were tested with the thermometer, and as much as 202 degrees Fahrenheit was attained. Forster found a number of cracks on the ridge from which ...
— The Life of Captain James Cook • Arthur Kitson

... understand: "a primal eternal Being, author of all things, the father and the friend of man, the invisible omniscient guardian of morality," a definition which, while it fixes the high-water mark of monotheism, yet only states with formidable distinctness what, according to Mr. Lang, is found confusedly in the apprehension of the rudest savages. There are two senses in which we can understand an evolution of this idea of God; ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell

... Killiow's steward, flatly refused to execute repairs upon another person's property. The Duchy, being appealed to, told the two parties (in effect) to fight it out. The Highway Board was ready enough to maintain the road down to high-water mark, but, on legal advice, declined to go farther. The Harbour Commissioners held that to repair a private ferry was no business of theirs, and, although the condition of the slipway had for years been a scandal, refused to meddle. The whole dispute ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... onto Madison Street, and, turning to his right, dropped into a continuous vaudeville show in an attempt to coax his spirits back to somewhere near their normal high-water mark. Upon the next day he again haunted the newspaper office without reward, and again upon the third day with similar results. To say that Jimmy was dumfounded would be but a futile description of his mental state. It was simply beyond him to conceive that in ...
— The Efficiency Expert • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... as much time as he could at Ridge House. He came to the hard conclusion, at length, that Doris, in her new environment, had reached her high-water mark. Detached from strain and care, living quietly, and largely in the open, she had responded almost at once—to her limit, and there she remained. How long this improved state would hold was the main thing to be considered; nothing more ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock

... to his cottage first, and I could see that he was proud of it. It wasn't above a cable's-length from high-water mark, but the tide was running out, and there was already a broad stretch of hard wet sand on the other side of the beach road. Jack's bit of land ran back behind the cottage about a quarter of a mile, and he said that some of the trees ...
— Man Overboard! • F(rancis) Marion Crawford

... enthusiasm and, here and there, a passion of hatred rarely seen before in New Zealand politics. It brought division into the Liberal Party in 1893, at the moment when the Progressive movement seemed to have reached its high-water mark, and the feeling it roused was found typified in the curious five years' duel between Mr. Seddon and Sir Robert Stout, which began in 1893 and ended only with Sir Robert's retirement at the beginning of the present ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves

... new theology of the revival was the new psalmody. In general it may be said that every flood-tide of spiritual emotion in the church leaves its high-water mark in the form of "new songs to the Lord" that remain after the tide of feeling has assuaged. In this instance the new songs were not produced by the revival, but only adopted by it. It is not easy for us at this day to conceive the effect that must have been produced in the Christian communities ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon

... Fowler landed with a party of men prepared to cut through the mangroves; but fresh water was discovered to ooze out from amongst them, much below high-water mark; and by digging in the sand at half ebb, our casks might be filled more easily, and with better water than in the gully. Whilst this duty was going on, the carpenters were sent to cut fire wood and pine logs upon the rocky islets, the botanical gentlemen followed their pursuits ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders

... the fourteenth century we find him once more landed on his native shore, and marching, with such of his retainers as the wars had left him, towards the hospitable shelter of Shurland Castle. It was then, upon that very beach, some hundred yards distant from high-water mark, that his eye fell upon something like an ugly woman in a red cloak. She was seated on what seemed to be a large stone, in an interesting attitude, with her elbows resting upon her knees, and her chin upon her thumbs The Baron started; the remembrance of his interview with a similar ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various

... set themselves about the perilous task. The bed of the river at this place is rocky and shelving. At low water, these facts offer no great obstacles in crossing. The case is very different when the torrent has reached high-water mark—then, a single step will often plunge horse and rider into the angry waters beyond their depth. Kit Carson boldly took the lead, and before the infantry had all passed, the horses of the dragoons had to ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters

... papers reported that prices were rising fast, and stock-salesman firms sent circulars to this effect into the districts. But, when I conferred with Jasper, he advised me to hold on. "The figures are climbing," he said, "and they'll reach high-water mark just before ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss

... so abounds. I have not read him so thoroughly as to warrant me in speaking very confidently about him, but from the examination which I have given his poetry, I think that he treats his subjects with as little inflation as possible, and he now and then touches a point of naturalness—the high-water mark of balladry, to which modern poets, with their affected unaffectedness and elaborate simplicity, attain only with the greatest pains and labor. Such a triumph of Mercantini's is this poem which I am about to give. It celebrates the daring and self-sacrifice ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells

... three centuries of searching criticism. It indicates the high-water mark of Shakespearean scholarship. All recognized authorities are represented in the notes and explanatory matter, among them being Dyce, Coleridge, Dowden, Johnson, Malone, White and Hudson. The sets are in thirteen handsome volumes—size ...
— The Mayflower, January, 1905 • Various

... had reached its highest point, for, after remaining stationary an hour, it had begun to fall, and was now a couple of inches lower than "high-water mark." ...
— The Telegraph Messenger Boy - The Straight Road to Success • Edward S. Ellis

... review of Schummel's "Empfindsame Reise" in Frankfurter Gel. Anz. represents the high-water mark of understanding criticism relative to individual work, but represents necessarily no grasp of ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer

... deposits, like those now forming in the Baltic, occur on the eastern side, and upraised strata filled with purely marine shells, now proper to the ocean, on the western coast. Both of these have been lifted up to an elevation of several hundred feet above high-water mark. The rise within the historical period has not amounted to many yards, but the greater extent of antecedent upheaval is proved by the occurrence in inland spots, several hundred feet high, of deposits filled with fossil shells of species now living ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various

... sorts of shells live in deep water, and certain in shallow. You may prove this to yourselves, on a small scale, whenever you go to the seaside. You will find that the shell which crawl on the rocks about high-water mark are different from those which you find at low-tide mark; and those again different from the shells which are brought up by the oyster-dredgers from the sea outside. Now, the lower part of the clay, near here, ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley

... three started for Rocquaine Bay, where a lively scene was being played, for it was the time of vraicing or sea-weed harvest. Lines of carts were ranged above high-water mark, and the patient horses were decked with flowers. The beach and sands swarmed with people all smiling and gay, and for the most part wearing nosegays. Rich and poor from two parishes chatted, laughed and worked hard with sickles at cutting the vraic scie from the low rocks. Very soon, ...
— Where Deep Seas Moan • E. Gallienne-Robin

... some fifty leagues across, but it would also have met with the bar of the prororoca, that terrible eddy which, for the three days preceding the new or full moon, takes but two minutes instead of six hours to raise the river from twelve to fifteen feet above ordinary high-water mark. ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne

... It was a sandy shore; the banks were high, and a clump of mimosas grew above high-water mark. It was there that we dug his grave. My men worked silently and sadly, for all loved Saat. He had been so good and true, that even their hard hearts had learned to respect his honesty. We laid him in his grave on the desert shore, beneath ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker

... background. A romantic love-affair might be defined as a love-affair in other than domestic surroundings. Who can use the word "romantic" with more authority than Coleridge? In Kubla Khan, a poem which some would choose as the high-water mark of English romantic poetry, he gets his effect from the description of a landscape combining the extremes of ...
— Romance - Two Lectures • Walter Raleigh

... quote Lieut. Cruttenden. The Berberah water has acquired a bad name because the people confine themselves to digging holes three or four feet deep in the sand, about half-a-mile from high-water mark. They are reconciled to it by its beneficial effects, especially after and before a journey. Good water, however, can be procured in any of the Fiumaras intersecting the plain; when the Hajj Sharmarkay's towers commanded the town wells, the people sank pits in low ground a few hundred ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton

... counselled him. "That's canting drivvle, made to console the unsuccessful. No man knows when he has reached his high-water mark. Yours may have come on the day you licked Stevie Ballard for gilding the tailless cat; it may not ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller

... philippic against George W. Curtis at the Republican State convention at Rochester as the high-water mark of his oratory. I sat in the seat next to Mr. Curtis when Conkling delivered his famous attack. His admirers thought this the best speech he ever made, and it certainly was a fine effort, emphasized by oratory of a ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew

... powerful reaction which marks the eighteenth century—a reaction against all traditional intellectual authority, and a struggle for the emancipation of the individual, of research, of inspiration and of genius—reached its high-water mark in Germany in the seventies. But with the unrestrained outbursts of the champions of Storm and Stress the problem was by no means solved; there remained the basic conflict between the idea of personal liberty and the strait-jacket of Frederician absolutism, the conflict ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun

... place to pitch the tent with great care. It was easy to find the high-water mark on the shore, and the tent was pitched a little above it, so as to be safe from a disaster like that of the previous night. Harry wanted it pitched on the top of a high bank; but the others insisted that, as long as they were safe from ...
— Harper's Young People, June 29, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... we encountered a rapid current setting outward, and, after rowing a mile and a half to the N.W.b.W., the breadth of the stream varying from one third of a mile to four or five hundred yards, came to some shoal water extending quite across. Landing on the south shore and hauling the boats up above high-water mark, we rambled up the banks of the stream, which are low next the water, but rise almost immediately to the height of about two hundred feet. As we proceeded we gradually heard the noise of a fall of water; and being presently ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry

... of the beauty of a soul that was all radiant with a lustre of loveliness that shames the fragmentary and marred virtues of the best of us, and stands before the world for ever as the supreme type and high-water mark of the grace that is possible to a human spirit. God has lodged in men's nature the apprehension of Himself, and of all that flows from Him, as true, as good, as beautiful; and to these three there correspond wisdom, morality, and art. The latter, divorced from the other two, becomes ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... an egg-patterned snout from a hollow and licked at the stippling of greenish yolk matting his fur. The wolverines had wasted no time in sampling the contents of a wealth of nesting places beginning just above the high-water mark, cupping two to four tough-shelled eggs in each. Treading a path among those clutches, the Terrans climbed a red-earthed slope toward ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton

... Roman, and that if not in the first part of the Roman occupation at least towards the end of those wealthy and populous three centuries, which are the foundation and the making of England, some fortification was built on the brow of the little eminence which here slopes down to the high-water mark. ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc

... the river very uninteresting—flat, desert, and mimosa bush. The soil is not so rich as on the banks of the Blue Nile—the dhurra (grain) is small. The Nile is quite two miles wide up to this point, and the high-water mark is not more than five feet above the present level. The banks shelve gradually like the sands at low tide in England, and quite unlike the perpendicular banks of the Blue Nile. Busy at gunsmith's work. The nights and mornings are now cold, from 60 degrees to 62 ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker

... steamships organized foreign immigration on scale and system never before equaled; a high-water mark of American immigration came in the early eighties. Germans and Scandinavians were rushed by emigrant trains out to the prairies, to fill the remaining spaces in the older States of the Middle West. The census of 1890 showed in Minnesota 373,000 persons of Scandinavian parentage, and ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner

... of the prisoner, were all invented by the poet on that rainy day in the tavern at Ouchy. Even the level of the dungeon, below the water of the lake, turns out to be a mistake, although Bonivard believed it: the floor of the crypt is eight feet above high-water mark. As for the thoughts of the prisoner, they seem to have been mainly occupied with making Latin and French verses of an objectionable sort not adapted for general publication. (See Ls. Vulliemin: Chillon, Etude ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various

... perseverance, and alertness, the Federation has pursued this method to its uttermost possibilities. In Washington it has met with singular success, reaching a high-water mark in the first Wilson Administration, with the passage of the Clayton bill and the eight-hour railroad bill. After this action, a great New York daily lamented that "Congress is a subordinate branch of the American Federation of Labor... The unsleeping ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth

... what little light of the fading day was left was obscured by the masses of storm clouds. The fisherman's hut was on the beach, not far from the high-water mark, and the booming of the surf on the shore came as a sort of melancholy accompaniment to the firing of the ...
— Larry Dexter's Great Search - or, The Hunt for the Missing Millionaire • Howard R. Garis

... this afternoon, and not being herself at the high-water mark of cheerfulness, she was conscious of a certain degree of discouragement. She had liked her so much, she had wanted to be friends with her and to make her life an easier thing, and yet she appeared somehow to have failed. ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... Caudles, but on the words of Mrs. Caudle herself—so freely that legal steps had to be taken to stop the nuisance. The latest edition of this jeu d'esprit is that which has been illustrated by Charles Keene, and it can hardly be doubted that in his drawings he often touches the high-water mark of his artistic execution. ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann

... the manner in which the parchment had come into my possession. The spot where we discovered the scarabaeus was on the coast of the mainland, about a mile eastward of the island, and but a short distance above high-water mark. Upon my taking hold of it, it gave me a sharp bite, which caused me to let it drop. Jupiter, with his accustomed caution, before seizing the insect, which had flown towards him, looked about him for a leaf, or something of that nature, by which to take hold of it. It ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill

... poured out of their chimneys. Slimy gaps and causeways, winding among old wooden piles, with a sickly substance clinging to the latter, like green hair, and the rags of last year's handbills offering rewards for drowned men fluttering above high-water mark, led down through the ooze and slush to the ebb-tide. There was a story that one of the pits dug for the dead in the time of the Great Plague was hereabout; and a blighting influence seemed to have proceeded from it over the whole place. Or else it looked as if it had gradually decomposed ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens

... ventured to spend in Europe was for an engraving of his "St. Hubert," the background of which was said to be from an original Durer plate. There is little doubt, I am afraid, that the background as well as the figures "were put in at a later date," but the purchase at least registered the high-water mark ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams

... way steadily to the wharves. There he left the causeway and descended to the level of the beach. Beneath the pilings, and above the high-water mark, was a little hut. It was not over six feet square, constructed of all sorts of old pieces of boxes, scraps of tin, or remnants of canvas. Overhead rumbled continuously the heavy drays, shaking down, ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White

... that beach is—about a twelve-foot breadth of sand from the bottom of the cliff when the tide's high, with about twenty feet more when it's low. So foot-prints show until the weather rubs them out—takes a tolerable storm, as a rule. Below high-water mark it's different; the sand is covered up and smoothed out twice a day. Well, then, just below high-water mark—that is, about five feet below it, or at quarter-tide mark—I noticed the print of a rowboat's bows on the sand. It had landed there and waited a while—drawn up only part way out of ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance

... sobbed and gurgled along miniature headlands of rock that stretched out on either side of a little bay. The sand-hills straggled down almost to high-water mark, where the winter storms had piled a barrier of kelp and debris. At one place a rough track down to the shingle had been worn in the sand by the feet of fishermen using the cove in fine ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie

... the right-hand bank of the Itecoahy forming at once its main and its only street. The houses stand facing this street, all very primitive and all elevated on palm-trunk poles as far as possible above the usual high-water mark of the river. Everything, from the little sheet-iron church to the pig-sty, is built on poles. Indeed, if there is anything in the theory of evolution, it will not be many generations before the inhabitants and domestic animals are born equipped ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange

... trend of our modern civilisation? Are we easy in our consciences? Have not machines, and the demands of industry run away with our sense of proportion? Grant for a moment that this age marks the highest water so far of British advance. Are we content with that high-water mark? In health, happiness, taste, beauty, we are surely far from the ideal. I do not say that restoration of the land will work a miracle; but I do say that nothing we can do will benefit us so potently as the redress of balance between town ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy

... there is no room for any symbol of joy. But I think that this dedication of a life to grief is not unaccompanied by a secret compensation in the conviction that misfortune is at last complete; it is something to reach the high-water mark of the waters of sorrow. The fate of such sufferers seems to me to be an outpost showing others ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous

... and took no further concern about the matter. But Stair looked out many times at the green trenches closing in the land entrance to the isle, and even as he looked, it seemed that during the night the parallels had crept down a little nearer to high-water mark. ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett

... of the Baghdad as we know it to-day is old. By tradition it was founded in 762 A.D., and became the renowned capital of the Arab empire. It is said that the city grew till it covered some 25 square miles, reaching its high-water mark of splendour and magnificence under the Sultan Haroun-al-Raschid. The fame of its schools and learning was world-wide, and Baghdad became to the East what Rome became ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell

... the men on shore in a most miserable state; many of them were perfectly appalled by the hurricane, never having seen anything of the kind before, and were lying under the lee of the bow of Mr. Walker's boat, which, although he had drawn it up high and dry upon the sandhills, far above the usual high-water mark, was again more than half full of water and seaweed from the waves every now and then breaking over her stern. It was with great difficulty I roused the men and got them to clear out the seaweed, which lightened her somewhat; we then hauled her up a little at a favourable opportunity, and ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey

... The human flood reaches high-water mark everywhere. The three streets are all growing dark as each overflows into another. Some natives cross our path, old men or ill-shapen, contorted in their walk, stunted in the face; and even young people, too, over whom hovers the mystery of secret disorders ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse

... instincts for fifty years. Only pride of family remained. There were but few Tregenzas left and soon there would be none unless Tom carried on the name. Michael was the quintessence of the Tregenza spirit, the fruit of generations, the high-water mark. He stood on that giddy pinnacle which has religious mania for its precipice. To damn a dead woman was easier than to accept a wanton daughter. Better an unfaithful wife than that any soul born of Tregenza blood should be lost. So he washed his hands of both, thanking God, who had launched the ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts

... of the same year, a dreadful hurricane happened at Charlestown, which did great damage, and threatened the total destruction of the town. The lands on which it is built being low and level, and not many feet above high-water mark, the swelling sea rushed in with amazing impetuosity, and obliged the inhabitants to fly for shelter to the second stories of their houses. Happily few lives were lost in town; but a large vessel, called the Rising Sun, belonging ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 1 • Alexander Hewatt

... interesting plants and corals were also added. On the island a large quantity of drift-wood was found, which with that which is growing affords ample supplies of fuel for ships. No fresh water is to be had, except by digging, the island being but a few feet above high-water mark. ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.

... each season, eighty or ninety eggs each time, which are round and as large as an hen's egg, but covered only with a thin white skin, having no shell. When a tortoise goes on shore to lay, she is usually an hour before she returns, as she always chuses her place above high-water mark, where she makes a large hole with her fins in the sand, in which she lays her eggs, and then covers them two feet deep with the sand she had raked out. Sometimes they go on shore the day before, to take ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr

... book was reviewed without making known that it supported the authorship of Hippolytus, which is still disputed by some impartial critics, and was always rejected by Newman. Hippolytus und Kallistus, the high-water mark of Doellinger's official assent and concurrence, came out in 1853. His ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... that," remarks the Captain to Bobby Little, as the contrite Robb is removed. "Keen as mustard. But his high-water mark for beer is somewhere in his boots. All right, now I've ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay

... identical. On the one hand, our highest moral ideals have never become customary; we long, in our best moments, to make them habitual, but seldom actually attain them. The morals of Jesus, of Buddha, of Marcus Aurelius, have never become habits with any but the saints, yet we recognize them as the high-water mark of human morality. On the other hand, many of our customs have no moral aspect. I may have a fixed habit of going from my home to my office by a certain one out of a number of equally advantageous routes. All of the members ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake

... turned without a word, four determined bare legs ploughing through the water, four scared eyes straining toward the land. Through an eternity of toil and fear they kept dumbly on, death at their heels, pride still in their hearts. At last they reach high-water mark—six ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various

... poems of this closing period that exhibit Lanier's characteristic manner at its best. They are the high-water mark of his poetic achievement. They exemplify his musical theories of meter. They show the trend forced upon him by his innate love of music; and though he might have written much more, if his life had been prolonged, it is doubtful whether ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter

... southern margin, some of the buildings being so large that I at once set them down as storehouses. A number of people were moving about the buildings; and quite a dozen boats were hauled up on the beach above high-water mark. ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood

... height, bordered their road on the right. To avoid the soft dry sand of their base the pony often trotted in the shallow flow of the foam, which even yet now and then crept over all the damp beach to the high-water mark. The wind was like spur and lash; the horse fled before it. Eyes and ears grew accustomed even to the threatening of the sea-monsters. The sun of the November afternoon sank nearer and nearer the level of sand and foam; they could not see the ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall

... ballast, one of the men employed in this work, had scalded his fingers in taking a stone up out of some water. This circumstance produced the discovery of several hot springs, at the foot of the cliff, and rather below high-water mark. ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2 • James Cook

... implied conclusion is, that the Atlantic beat Mrs. Partington. Did it? It made, no doubt, a great mess in her house, it put her to flight, it put her to shame. But when I was last at Sidmouth the line of high-water mark was, I believe, much what it was before the great storm of 1824, and though the particular Mrs. Partington had no doubt been gathered to her fathers, the Mrs. Partington of the day was, equally without doubt, living very comfortably ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury

... compel all my students, under pain of rustication, to get those three or four classical pages by heart till they could neither perpetrate nor tolerate bad English any more. This camp-fire tale, told by an old soldier, about a troublesome young recruit and all his adventures, touches, surely, the high-water mark of sweet and undefiled English. Greatheart was not the first soldier who could handle both the sword and the pen, and he has not been the last. But not Caesar and not Napier themselves ever handled those ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte

... know, Madam, are never at high-water mark before Christmas; yet operas flourish pretty well: those on Tuesdays are removed to Mondays, because the Queen likes the burlettas, and the King cannot go on Tuesdays, his post-days. On those nights we have the middle front box, railed in, where ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole

... the race for honor, position, wealth, and happiness. Carelessness as to health fills the ranks of the inferior. The submerged classes that the economists talk about are those that are below the high-water mark of the best manhood and womanhood. Sometimes they are second-rate or third-rate people because those who are responsible for their being and their care during their minor years were so before them, but more and more is it becoming one's own fault if, all through life, he remains second-class. ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden

... until after the Roman occupation of the Mediterranean world was complete. It died out gradually in the theological atmosphere of Alexandria, and on the purely human side ended in Stoicism with an amalgam of universal philosophy and Roman law. The Stoic Empire of the second century A.D. was the high-water mark of the joint efforts of Greeks and Romans to attain unity and humanism in thought and practice. Its brilliance while it lasted the nobility of its leading men, the persistence of the main lines of its structure, are the measure of our debt to the builders ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various

... developments of the later centuries. Walt Whitman also tells us "that nothing can happen more beautiful than death," and he has exprest the humanist view of mortality in a hymn which his admirers regard as the high-water mark of modern poetry. But will this rhapsody bear thinking about? Is death "delicate, lovely and soothing," "delicious," coming to us with "serenades"? Does death "lave us in a flood of bliss"? Does "the body gratefully nestle close to death"? Do we ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser

... said about it being that the loss was entirely voluntary on the part of this charming boy. He would cease to bow, as he passed. Then he found the marbles again, pocketed them as if nothing had happened, smiled, called, and hob-nobbed. A man's high-water mark is his calibre; and at high-water mark Mr. Channing's sea was to us buoyant, rich-tinted, sunlit; a great force, darkening and dazzling with beautiful emotions. He was in those days devoted to the outer ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop

... endowment of our nature from the outset, is there any conceivable way in which we should have been the worse for it? For even as it is there are some people who do make a fairly wise and right choice, and whose high-water mark of excellence is not reached through the crime and folly of the revival meeting convert. Are they the worse because they have never yielded to evil? Is the naturally good man really a less worthy character ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen

... not in existence when the Battle of Mons Grampus was fought. Much rough pioneering work had to be gone through ere it was possible to lay them down. Meantime, the respective positions of the Romans and Caledonians had changed somewhat. The tide of conquest did not remain at the high-water mark of Agricola's advance. The Roman garrisons were withdrawn from Strathearn and from Ardoch. The Wall of Hadrian, between the Solway and the Tyne, was substituted for the frontier chain of forts between the Forth and Clyde, and, in consequence, the ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various

... and that obstructions of all sorts had been placed across the river. Strong booms had been carried from side to side, and iron stakes driven into the bottom at intervals, reaching within two feet of high-water mark. The Chinese having neglected to remove the obstructions, after the admirals had waited several days, Mr Bruce and the French ambassador having arrived, the admiral sent in to say that unless his demands were immediately complied with he should force his way. A force of blue-jackets ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston

... wet clothes; but the crew were warned that they would have to rouse up about midnight, when Captain Billings expected the tide would have gone down sufficiently to enable us to get the long-boat out of danger, and turn her over on the beach beyond high-water mark. ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson

... their work above the surface of the water, for in the air they would die. But the waves break the coral, and heap it up above high-water mark, and carry earth and seeds to drop there till at length a small ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various

... as Beefy Wilson remarked, 'a deal better'n none.' And although the trench was already a foot deep in water, Beefy stated no more than bald truth in saying, 'Come to-morrow there's plenty will put up glad wi' their knees bein' below high-water mark for the sake o' havin' their heads ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable

... Hampstead Heath, which is 443 feet above the Thames. The top of the cross of St. Paul's Cathedral is 407 feet, whilst its base, or ground-line, is 52 feet. The base of the lowest building is that of the Bricklayer's Arms, Kent Road, the sill of the south door of which is only six inches above the high-water mark. The sill of the north entrance-door of Westminster Hall is ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 363, Saturday, March 28, 1829 • Various

... the construction of the lodge, a hollow mound of mud, sticks and stones twelve feet in width and four in height, within which was a dry room, its floor safely above the high-water mark. Two passages led to this room, one straight, for carrying food, the other winding. The main entrance was cleverly concealed beneath the roots of a great tree which had ...
— Followers of the Trail • Zoe Meyer

... fact, spread by the simple country-people, would be sure to reach them. So Oddo carried on shore, at the first stretch of white beach they came to, the brandy-flasks, the bearskins, the tobacco-pouch, the muskets and powder-horns, and the tinder-box. He scattered these about just above high-water mark, laughing to think how report would tell of the sprite's care in placing all these articles out of reach of ...
— Feats on the Fiord - The third book in "The Playfellow" • Harriet Martineau

... their range and in the unerring precision with which they were selected. I recall him at a very impressive moment. Many regard Lowell's Commemoration Ode, read at the Commemoration in 1865 of the Harvard soldiers who had taken part in the Civil War, as the high-water mark of American poetry. Whether or not that claim is just I shall not debate, but it is a great composition and perhaps Lowell's best. The occasion was indeed a noble one. A multitude had collected in the college-yard and through it wound the brilliant procession of soldiers who had taken ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer

... way. The room looked to Malone as if its last inhabitant had died ten years before; only the flowers had been renewed. Everything else had not only the appearance of age, but the look of having been cast up as a high-water mark by the sea, which had receded and ...
— The Impossibles • Gordon Randall Garrett

... upon his retirement from Congress, a hundred or more of his associates were guests, including, of course, the subject of this sketch. Men high in councils of State, leaders of both parties, and of both Houses, had gathered around the board, and good-fellowship and mirth reached the high-water mark. By common consent Fellows and Allen were in undisputed possession of the floor. Such passages-at-arms no pen can describe. Even "John Chamberlain's" in its palmiest days has ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson

... prehistoric Maoris and was largely used by them for food. One of the finest of the endemic flowering plants of the group is the boraginaceous "Chatham Island lily" (Myositidium nobile), a gigantic forget-me-not, which grows on the shingly shore in a few places only, and always just on the high-water mark, where it is daily deluged by the waves; while dracophyllums, leucopogons and arborescent ragworts are characteristic forms ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various

... cliff ran out as on the north side, but, suddenly breaking off as if cleft by some gigantic stroke, left a gloomy column of rock, attached to it only by an isthmus that stood some six or seven feet above high-water mark. This separate mass went by the name of Dead Man's Rock—a name dark and dreadful enough, but in its derivation innocent, having been but Dodmen, or "the stony headland," until common speech perverted it. For this reason I suppose I ought not to call ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... A large portion of its territory has been redeemed from the ocean by the most persevering labor, and by the most unremitting care and watchfulness is it kept from destruction. The sea is higher than the land, the lowest ground in the country being from twenty-four to thirty feet below high-water mark. The keel of the Young America, floating in some of the waters of Holland, would be higher than the ridge-pole of the Dutchman's cottage on the other ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic

... are generally five or six feet above high-water mark. The process of making lime from them is extremely simple and expeditious. They are first dug up and sifted, and then piled over large heaps of dry wood, which are set fire to, and speedily convert the superincumbent mass into excellent lime. When thus made it ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth

... and mind (the latter getting quiet from the former, I suppose) than for the whole of me to rest a while in such a little scollop of the shingle as a new-moon tide, in little crescents, leaves just below high-water mark. And now it was new-moon tide again, a fortnight after the flooding of our fly by the activity of the full moon; and, feeling how I longed to understand these things—which seem to be denied to all ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore

... State the average yield from the boys' acres was larger than the state average, in some cases almost five times as great. One South Carolina boy produced on his acre in 1910 over 228 bushels, and in 1913 an Alabama boy reached high-water mark with nearly 233 bushels. Hundreds of boys produced over 100 bushels to the acre, and the average of the boys in South Carolina was nearly 69 bushels, compared with an average of less than 20 for ...
— The New South - A Chronicle Of Social And Industrial Evolution • Holland Thompson

... electors by its Legislature—a practice now abandoned), and Wirt the 7 of Vermont. Van Buren was chosen vice-president, being nominated in place of Calhoun by the Democratic National Convention, which now for the first time came into operation. The president was now at his high-water mark of popularity—always a dangerous time for a public man. His vehement nature accepted his re-election as a proof that he was right in everything, and he grew more self-confident than ever. More imperiously ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various

... formidable. At its base was a steep beach, disclosed by the retreating tide, which had been formed by the accumulated masses of rock that had fallen in past ages from the cliffs above. These now, from the margin of the water up to high-water mark, were covered with a vast growth of sea-weed, which luxuriated here, and ran parallel to the line of vegetation on the summit of the cliff. On the other side of the strait the scene was different. Here the shores were more varied; in one place, rising high on steep precipices, in ...
— Lost in the Fog • James De Mille

... him he halted and there was nobody between them. Somehow everybody else halted too, some even giving back a little. Over the edge of the stage a ring of staring faces, like a high-water mark, showed where the onward rushing swell of the Stickney city delegates had checked itself. Seemingly to all at once came the realization that the destinies of the fight had by the chances of the fight been entrusted to these two men—to Dancy ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb

... town. For these grants to individuals a certain sum of money is paid, which goes into the treasury of the municipality. The magistrates, however, without special permission, have no power to grant lots of land within a certain number of feet of or below high-water mark. The power is reserved to be exercised by the governor of the province. It being necessary for the convenient landing of ships, and for the discharging and receiving of their cargoes, that the beach in front of ...
— What I Saw in California • Edwin Bryant

... has subterraneous passages, to which the sewers of London are a mere song; and they all lead to a small cave at high-water mark on the sea-beach, covered with brambles and bushes, and just large enough at its entrance to admit of ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)

... beach, we found that it was low water. The boat was at high-water mark. What should we do? We did as the fishermen in that region always do in the same circumstances—took two rollers, perhaps six inches in diameter, lifted the bow of the boat, put one of the rollers ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, September 1878, No. 11 • Various

... way to accomplishment. The achievements of which we can boast are relatively like those of a child of five who boasts that he can count. Our whole world-condition shows us to be racially incompetent, and able to produce no more than incompetent leaders. That is our present high-water mark, and with our high-water mark we ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King

... the increasing influence of this party in the Church; an influence which, as far as concerns the formularies of the Anglican body, was to reach its high-water mark in 1552 and 1553, in the revised prayer-book authorised by Parliament immediately after Somerset's death, and the "Forty-two Articles" promulgated about a ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes

... the myriad graceful fancies of Lyly, on the exquisite snatches of Greene, on the verses, to this day the high-water mark of poetry, in which Marlowe speaks of the inexpressible beauty which is the object and the despair of the poet. This is wonderful enough. But what is more wonderful is, that these lightning flashes are as evanescent as lightning. Lyly, Peele, ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury

... court of Napoleon III just before the debacle of 1870 is a matter of history, and it reached its high-water mark during the Exposition year of 1867, when emperors, kings, and princes journeyed to Paris to do homage to the man of the hour. Court balls, receptions, gala performances at opera and theatre, and military reviews followed each ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse

... the original contour of his ground. Manhattan Island is a low outcrop of gneiss and mica-schist, sloping from an irregular, but practically continuous crest, to the Hudson and East Rivers, with a nearly uniform southerly incline from its precipitous north face on the Haarlem and Spuyten Duyvil to high-water mark at the foot of Whitehall Street. Its natural system of drainage might be roughly illustrated by radii drawn to the circumference of a very eccentric ellipse from its northern focus. Wherever the waste of the entire island may descend, it is met by a seaward tide ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various

... difficulty is in providing an outlet for the drains. This can only be done by artificial means, as the water must be removed from a level lower than high-water mark,—sometimes lower than low-water. ...
— Draining for Profit, and Draining for Health • George E. Waring

... preparation; it is sometimes colorless, but more frequently red, yellow, or blue, and mixed with earthy impurities; this salt was entirely unknown to the ancients, who by rock salt meant that which adheres to the rocks above high-water mark, being lodged there by the spray of the sea, which is evaporated by the heat of the sun; this is the purest salt, and is to be found on the rocks of Sicily, and several ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers

... complete-indifference as the interest zero, and with the 'exploding-point'-of-enthusiasm as the highest interest mark, where would the score mark of my class stand? And if I cannot reasonably hope to keep my class at the high-water mark of interest at all times, what shall I call an attainable standard? If one hundred per cent is to represent the supreme achievement of interest, shall I be satisfied with fifty per cent, with twenty-five per cent, or with complete indifference? ...
— How to Teach Religion - Principles and Methods • George Herbert Betts

... study, which in an ill-lighted room, tuned to drowsiness by the buzzing of youthful mumblers, might have been a chafing task to one who felt not the rowel of a spurring ambition, was to him a pleasure full of thrilling promises. To him the reporter stood at the high-water mark of ambition's "freshet." But when years had passed and he had scrambled to that place he looked down and saw that his height was not a dizzy one. And instead of viewing a conquered province, he saw, falling from ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read

... the danger of floods, but they conserve our waterways, preventing a dangerous high-water mark in the season of heavy rains and melting snows, and then preventing a shrinkage in dry seasons when the only feeders of the rivers are the underground sources. In the summer of 1911, prolonged drought in North Carolina lowered the rivers to such an extent that towns ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark

... must be said; therefore the simple incidents of his narrative are forced into a growth of many instead of few chapters, and the long-drawn cord becomes weak, and will not easily lead us to the end. He also betrays his lack of art by printing verses which stick like deep sea-shells far below the high-water mark of poetry. Nevertheless, there is a fine New England color and flavor in the book which attract us, and a gentle, high-minded peace reigns throughout ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various

... should go as far into the cave as possible—for Alan had told her that the end of it was above high-water mark—and remain there till the tide went down. It would certainly be very horrid, but it was better than going alone in the boat, or Alan trying to climb those ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various

... the draught—they dined in comparative seclusion. Into the selection of that dinner Devenish put a great part of his ingenuity. The man who knows how to choose a meal and savour those intervals between the courses with anecdote, has reached a high-water mark of social excellence. Devenish was the type. He was not hampered with the possession of intelligence. Wit he had, but it was not his own. The man, after all, who can echo the wit of others and suit its application to the moment ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston

... exceeding one-fourth part of the value of such labor or service, to be estimated according to the laws of the State of which the claimant shall be a citizen: but if the service of such negro, mulatto, Indian or other person, captured below high-water mark, shall not be legally claimed by a citizen of these United States, he shall be set ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams

... found lying together in a hollow some twenty yards beyond high-water mark. They examined ...
— With Cochrane the Dauntless • George Alfred Henty

... board, the honest Pat, in the command of the sloop, shortened the tow-rope, and hailed us, telling us when we were well abreast of a little sandy bight, to cast off, pull in, and haul up our boat above high-water mark. We took his advice, and, without much difficulty, found ourselves once ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard

... mean time, his assistants and students were doing all in their power to keep the work of the Museum at high-water mark. The publications, the classification and arrangement of the more recent collections, the distribution of such portions as were intended for the public, the system of exchanges, went on uninterruptedly. The working force ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz

... entirely landlocked, buried in woods, the trees coming right down to high-water mark, the shores mostly flat, and the hill-tops standing round at a distance in a sort of amphitheater, one here, one there. Two little rivers, or rather two swamps, emptied out into this pond, as you might call it ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson

... about?" again demanded the younger man, seizing the rope halter and aiding the mare to flounder out upon the firmer sand below high-water mark. "What are you doing up so early? And what were you ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper

... trust, and appeal, that a queer softness had risen in the Maestro from somewhere down in the regions of his heel, up and up, quietly, like the mercury in the thermometer, till it had flowed through his whole body and stood still, its high-water mark a ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various



Words linked to "High-water mark" :   watermark, water line



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