rut

And so standing, his head pressed against the top, a rut in the road, jolting the wagon and its contents, caused his head to bump violently.

A CARTER was driving a wagon along a country lane, when the wheels sank down deep into a rut. The rustic driver, stupefied and aghast, stood looking at the wagon, and did nothing but utter loud cries to Hercules to come and help him.

ever to get out of the common rut. But Abraham fell out, and I got the job.

How horrified he would have been seven years before, when he first arrived from abroad, had he been told that there was no need for him to seek or plan anything, that his rut had long been shaped, eternally predetermined, and that wriggle as he might, he would be what all in his position were.

A shallow pool in the guttered depression of an old wheel rut, as from a recent rain, met his eye with a crimson gleam.

The shaft-horses were tilted against the shafts by the ruts, but the dexterous driver sitting on the box held the shaft over the ruts, so that the wheels ran on the smooth part of the road.

Here we saw a cart heavily laden with bricks; the wheels had stuck fast in the stiff mud of some deep ruts, and the carter was shouting and flogging the two horses unmercifully.

But this morning he was in a mood more becoming a man of business, and in the course of his ride along the Basset lanes, with their deep ruts,--lying so far away from a market-town that the labor of drawing produce and manure was enough to take away the best part of the profits on such poor land as that parish was made of,--he got up a due amount of irritation against Moss as a man without capital, who, if murrain and blight were abroad, was sure to have his share of them, and who, the more you tried to help him out of the mud, would sink the further in.

In both cases they flowed in ruts worn deep by time and habit, and the man who should have proposed to divert them by reason and argument would have had a long contract on his hands.

But now the mist, helped by the evening darkness, was more of a screen than he desired, for it hid the ruts into which his feet were liable to slip--hid everything, so that he had to guide his steps by dragging his whip along the low bushes in advance of the hedgerow.

At this moment one of those heavy wagons, drawn by bullocks, which carry the wood cut in the fine forests of the country to the ports of the Loire, came out of a byroad full of ruts and turned on that which the two horsemen were following.

"Their minds run in ruts. It is the unexpected that upsets their stereotyped calculations--any new combination, any strange factor, any fresh variant.