Now this valley is a very solitary place; the prophet Jeremiah thus describes it: "A wilderness, a land of deserts and pits, a land of drought, and of the shadow of death, a land that no man" (but a Christian) "passeth through, and where no man dwelt.

Dangers in darkness, heaven, hell, and sin, Did compass me, while I this vale was in; Yea, snares, and pits, and traps, and nets did lie My path about, that worthless, silly I Might have been catch'd, entangled, and cast down, But since I live, let Jesus wear the crown.

Volunteers and militiamen used to meet for drill on a large piece of land in the very heart of the locality; troops of charwomen formerly washed their clothes in water pits hard by, and dried them on the green-sward adjoining; and everything about wore a rural and primitive aspect.

Next morning, in a fog, the blue holders of a new line of rifle-pits close under the top of a bluff talked up to the grays in a trench on its crest.

Bomba, the jungle boy on the underground river; or, The cave of bottomless pits, by Roy Rockwood, pseud.

Black pits of Luna, By Robert A. Heinlein.

" We went, picking our way among the snow-covered shell-pits.

But since to jump overboard was the only way to save your own life, now that you are ashore, and dry, and comfortable, your first consideration should be to avoid falling into mires and pits as you go along.

I considered the chances of going forward boldly, walking straight between two pits, and on up the hill.

If I could strike between the connecting pits of the two commands, the thing might be done.

I could see a part of the picket-linethat is, not the men, but the rifle-pits.

Now I could see the pits.

I could see nobody at the pits.

I saw men lying, sitting, and a very few standing down the line at some of the other pits.

What I have narrated had not taken five minutes, for the pits were not more than a hundred yards from the edge of the swamp.

As long as I thought it possible that I could be seen from the pits I went toward the big pine; soon I knew that I was hidden by bushes, and I went as rapidly as I could walk in a southeast direction for nearly an hour.

These Legionaries had nothing but dark pits and runways, unexplored, in the bowels of a huge, fanatic city.

At sight of the perfectly overwhelming masses of wealth that lay there in square pits chiseled out of the solid gold, most of the Legionaries reacted like men drunk or mad.

Wallace sat down heavily on the floor, held his lamp out over one of the pits and stared with blank incomprehension.

For a moment, even their ears were deaf to the muffled tumult outside the door, their senses dulled to every other thing in this world save the incredible hoard there in the golden pits before them.

Not even a man in extremis could have turned away his gaze from the unbelievable masses of shimmering wealth in those square pits of gold.

And, withal, the major's hands and arms in one of the pits made a dry, slithering slide and click as he kneaded, worked, and stirred the gems, dredged up fistfuls and let them rain down crepitantly, again.

A shimmer of unearthly light played over the pits, like the thin, colored flames at the edge of a driftwood fire.

Imagination ran riot there, gazing down upon those jewel-pits.

Then, a few detached themselves from the little group and wandered off into the gloom, away from the pits.