|
|
|
More "Bats" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... going on in the ground beneath us! We know, that in these forests, perhaps near enough to see us, though their forms are hidden by their likeness to their leafy surroundings and the dappled sunlight, are animals as various as elephants, tigers, leopards, foxes, squirrels, and bats; birds as various as hawks, parrots, and finches; and insects from butterflies, bees, and wasps to crickets, beetles, and ants. The forest, we know, in addition to all the wealth of tree and plant life, is teeming with animal and insect life, though ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... Bones of Caesar! The arrows flitted and clipt amongst us like a flight of bats! Dan Golby threw a double-summersault, alighting on his head. Dory Durkee went smashing into the fire. Jerry Hunker was pinned to the sod where he lay fast asleep. Such dodging and ducking, and clawing about for weapons I never ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... are many kinds. One snake, a trigonocephalus, has in some respects the structure of a viper with the habits of a rattlesnake. The expression of this snake's face is hideous and fierce. I do not think I ever saw anything more ugly, excepting, perhaps, some of the viper-bats. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... the other, hoarsely; "I could not keep away. But nobody else has been there. The place is dark and perilous; there are rats, and bats, and eerie creatures all about it. And folks are afraid, because of the Dead ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... those who survived were very highly prized by the Roman Emperors for their grotesque appearance. There were various recipes for dwarfing children. One of the most efficient in the olden times was said to have been anointing the backbone with the grease of bats, moles, dormice, and such animals; it was also said that puppies were dwarfed by frequently washing the feet and backbone, as the consequent drying and hardening of the parts were alleged to hinder their extension. ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... plan of body. This animal is a true rodent, which lengthens its leap from branch to branch by means of a fold of skin stretching between its fore and its hind limbs. It is an animated aeroplane, and it shows in part how bats have originated. The wing of a bat is an elastic membrane stretching not only between the two legs of one side, but also between the greatly lengthened "fingers" of the fore limb. But the bones of arm, wrist, and fingers ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... lost art among men and reptiles. Bats fly, and men ought to. Try a light turbine. Rise a mile straight, fall half a mile slanting,—rise half a mile straight, fall half a mile slanting, and so on. Or slant up and slant down.—Poh! You ain't such a fool as to think ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... and chattels removed for the occasion, he said it was so very comfortable he should now write all his letters here, for at his lodgings he had such a miserable low table he had been forced to prop it up by brick-bats! ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... advertise their wares. Now, when the country and when Europe were on the brink of a bloodier war than all the annals of history contained, they, who presumably knew what the public desired to be informed on, thought that the news which would sell best was that concerned with wooden bats and leather balls, and strong young men in flannels. Michael had heard with a sort of tender incredulity Mrs. Falbe's optimistic reflections, and had been more than content to let her rest secure in them; but was the country, the heart of England, like her? Did it care more for cricket ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... The house is not lofty, but low and wide, with a multitude of bright little windows. It is divided within into numerous stalls, each possessing separate attractions. There is one much frequented by boys, where bats and balls, bows and arrows, models of boats, and little brass guns are seen in great profusion. At another stall there are pretty dolls of every size and shape, wooden, wax, and gutta-percha; some made to open and shut their ...
— The Crown of Success • Charlotte Maria Tucker
... from the Japanese; and when we got inside it was so dark and dank that we could see nothing and could scarcely breathe. Candles had to be lighted, and as they threw feeble flickers of light across the gloom, hideous bats began flying madly about, and dashing to the ground in their fright great shreds of dusty cobwebs that must have been centuries old. Nobody minded that, however; it seemed just the sort of place where millions could really be found in these ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... a stone trap door less than two feet square in the stone floor and through this small entrance we squeezed, candle in hand, and descended a stone stairway to explore the dark crypt underneath. Although the ladies screamed when the bats, disturbed and blinded by the light, flew wildly overhead, they bravely followed the guide. The long passage was but three feet in width and we wondered why the dragoman had brought us down into its close and gloomy recesses; but when magnesium wires were ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... will take very unusual baits. Black bass have been caught on young bats. The famous old trout in the Beaverkill River in New York State, which had refused all the ordinary baits and flies that were offered him for years and that on bright days could be seen in a pool lying deep down in the water, ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... determined to harass the ambitious Clinton; and, although his agents, as late as 1809, sought reconciliation, the society expelled Cheetham and made Clinton an object of detestation. Cheetham, who died in 1810, did not live to wreak full vengeance; but he did enough to arouse a shower of brick-bats which broke the windows of his home and threatened the demolition of ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... grows dusk the bats flitter to and fro by the house; there are moths, then, abroad for them. Upon the cucumber frame in the sunshine perhaps there may be seen an ant or two, almost the first out of the nest; the frame is warm. There are flowers open, despite the cold wind ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... of wild beasts among the ruins. A traveller saw some bones of a sheep in one, the remains, he supposed, of a lion's dinner; but he did not like to go further into the den to see who dwelt there. Owls and bats fill all the dark places. But no men live there, though human bones are often found scattered about, and they turn into dust as soon as they ...
— Far Off • Favell Lee Mortimer
... a cloud and the wind began to moan around the turrets. The black night hawks in the forests flapped their wings warningly, and the black bats flitted low around ...
— The Little Colonel's House Party • Annie Fellows Johnston
... brooks. In such quick summer storms the lightning gives the impression of being far more dangerous than the zigzag paths traced on the autumn sky. The electric cloud seems almost level with the ground and the livid flame to rush to and fro beneath the boughs as the little bats do in ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... the blackbird had ended his song, for evening was falling apace; against the glimmering dusk bats wheeled and hovered, and as the shadows deepened I watched the stars shine forth, while low down in the darkening sky was an effulgence that marked ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... louder; the whole wood seemed to echo; her heart beat high; lights glimmered nearer and nearer, hares and rabbits pattered by and startled her, and pheasants thundered off their roosts with an incredible noise, owls flitted, and bats innumerable, disturbed and terrified by the glaring ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... was no sound but the rustling of the bats' wings as they flew in before dawn, or sometimes the chirping of a swallow which had lost its way, and was frightened to see all the grim marble faces gazing at it. But the quietness did me good, and I waited, hoping that the young King of Sweden would marry, ...
— Wonder-Box Tales • Jean Ingelow
... nebuly coat for a shroud. I should like to fling a stone through their damned badge." And he pointed to the sea-green and silver shield high up in the transept window. "Sunlight and moonlight, it is always there. I used to like to come down and play here to the bats of a full moon, till I saw that would always look into ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... was a bat, for I've always been fond of bats, they are such soft, grey, velvet things; and I should have liked to tell him that he was much more like a chicken hawk, only that would have been vulgar; and, besides, I didn't intend to pose as chicken to his hawk. By way of not letting myself be gobbled up, I remained silent; but I couldn't help ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... now on three sides of a square. The fourth side was the trunk of the baobab. Between them and the trunk, the streaming tendrils swayed and swung, bats flitted and something still invisible sat still ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... plait her dear hair into many plaits, And then, while God's eye look'd upon the thing, In the very likenesses of Devil's bats, Upon the ends of her ...
— The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems • William Morris
... dreadful night And doffs her melancholy mourning state, When May buds burst in blossom and requite Our weary eyes for Winter's tedious wait, Then the pale bard takes down his dusty lyre And strikes the thing with more than usual fire. Myself, compacted of an earthier clay, I oil my bats and greasy homage pay To Cricket, who, with emblems of his court, Stumps, pads, bails, gloves, begins his Summer sway. Cricket in sooth is Sovran King ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 14, 1919 • Various
... toad, the newt, the viper; And people call me the Pied Piper. Yet,' said he, 'poor piper as I am, In Tartary I freed the Cham, Last June, from his huge swarm of gnats; I eased in Asia the Nizam Of a monstrous brood of vampyre bats: And as for what your brain bewilders, If I can rid your town of rats Will you give me a thousand guilders?' 'One? fifty thousand!' was the exclamation Of the ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... or six chickens, managing to escape out of their coop, flew backwards and forwards blindly, with frightened screams, dashing against each other and against the walls of the Projectile, and altogether getting up as demoniacal a hullabaloo as could be made by ten thousand bats that you suddenly disturbed in a cavern where they had slept ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... a woman or priest, landing at night; a dark man stealing documents from a tapestried chamber of some castle, where bats and cobwebs shared the draughty corridors—such scenes were incomplete unless a Night-Wind came in audibly at critical moments. It wailed, moaned, whistled, cried, sang, sighed, soughed or—sobbed. Keyholes and chimneys were its favourite places, but trees and rafters knew it ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... Flats. Malone pictured the scene: there they would be, just one big happy family. Kenneth J. Malone, and a convention of bats straight out of ...
— Brain Twister • Gordon Randall Garrett
... don't know. You meet quite a few people in the theater who are bats on numerology, they use it to pick stage-names. But I'd never have guessed it of Martin. He always struck me as the ...
— No Great Magic • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... Hampton admitted. "I'm probably going bats, but what the hell? It's a nice way to go bats, I'll say that.... Stick around; whoever you are, and let's get acquainted. I sort ...
— Dearest • Henry Beam Piper
... rough little log huts daubed wid mud and de chimblys was made out of sticks and red mud. Mammy said dat atter de slaves had done got through wid deir day's work and finished eatin' supper, dey all had to git busy workin' wid cotton. Some carded bats, some spinned and some weaved cloth. I knows you is done seen dis here checkidy cotton homespun—dat's what dey weaved for our dresses. Dem dresses was made tight and long, and dey made 'em right on de body so as not to waste none of de cloth. All slaves had was ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... out? Me catchie one piecie dleam. You no catchie 'lisky? Why flor you want? Me savvy blook. Long time—one time come glease ship. Up no'lth, sailorman he catchie one fellow walk about one piecie boat alone. Velly sick. Catch 'im bats in 'liskers. Bring um Kim Chee. Sailorman go 'way— —— 'tief! No pay. Qleer fellow velly sick. No eat, no dlink, velly 'ot—all time tlalk, tlalk, about plecie glease. —— fool clazy! Bimeby die. Flind piecie blook under clothes. Kim Chee no savvy. Why ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... factor, the conception of the world,—the world of course in the historical sense of that expression. In presence of that conception the petty nationalities lost their centre of gravity, brute fact dispelled their illusions, they flung their gods to the moles and to the bats (Isaiah ii.). The prophets of Israel alone did not allow themselves to be taken by surprise by what had occurred, or to be plunged in despair; they solved by anticipation the grim problem which history set before them. They absorbed into their religion that conception ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... confirmation of the Fordidge trout: you are to know that this trout is thought to eat nothing in the fresh water; and it may be better believed, because it is well known, that swallows and bats and wagtails, which are called half-year birds, and not seen to fly in England for six months in the year, but about Michaelmas leave us for a better climate than this; yet some of them that have been left behind their fellows, have been found many thousands at a time, in hollow trees, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... Assembly? 2.Cit. I the great Toe? Why the great Toe? Men. For that being one o'th lowest, basest, poorest Of this most wise Rebellion, thou goest formost: Thou Rascall, that art worst in blood to run, Lead'st first to win some vantage. But make you ready your stiffe bats and clubs, Rome, and her Rats, are at the point of battell, The one side must ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... bath sponge; and there's a pear-shaped one striped green and yellow that Mother likes for a darning ball; and there's a sweet smelling one that is as fragrant as possible in your handkerchief case. There are some as big as buckets and some like base ball bats, but I don't ...
— Ethel Morton's Enterprise • Mabell S.C. Smith
... our letters, for you answered them,' said Mr. Apsley, with equal solemnity. 'Why do you want Bats and me?' ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... giving orders to her fairies, how they were to employ themselves while she slept. 'Some of you,' said her majesty, 'must kill cankers in the musk-rose buds, and some wage war with the bats for their leathern wings, to make my small elves coats; and some of you keep watch that the clamorous owl, that nightly hoots, come not near me: but first sing me to sleep.' Then they began ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... has declined, it is evening at present. In the lukewarm air, bats glide. The mountaineers of the surrounding villages depart one by one; a dozen carriages are harnessed, their lanterns are lighted, their bells ring and they disappear in the little shady paths of the valleys. In the ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... must!" shouted Bawly. "Here, we'll make him unwind himself from Grandpa and the toadstool and then hit him with our baseball bats." ...
— Bully and Bawly No-Tail • Howard R. Garis
... Heaven—a happy convergence of natural laws. Among other things opportunity had of late years been denied her of learning to be undignified, for she lived lonely. Isolation on a heath renders vulgarity well-nigh impossible. It would have been as easy for the heath-ponies, bats, and snakes to be vulgar as for her. A narrow life in Budmouth might ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... down and the western horizon was ripped open in a deep red track. The charred skeleton of the oak loomed black and sinister against the afterglow, and at its feet the glory went out of the autumn field. Straight ahead the sound of shots rang out where a flock of bats circled above the road. On the darkening landscape the lights began to glimmer in farmhouses far apart, and to Nicholas they seemed watchful, friendly eyes that looked upon him. All Nature was watchful—all the universe friendly. The glow which irradiated his ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... the picture of desolation and solitude; the doors were all open, those of the cells, the chapel, and the refectory. In the refectory, a vast hall where the tables still stood in their places, Roland noticed five or six bats circling around; a frightened owl flew through a broken casement, and perched upon a tree close by, ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... stars come out; the fragrant shadows fall About a dreaming garden still and sweet, I hear the unseen bats above me bleat Among the ghostly moths their hunting call, And twinkling glow-worms all about me crawl. Now for a chamber dim, a pillow meet For slumbers deep as death, a faultless sheet, Cool, white and smooth. So may I reach the hall With poppies strewn where sleep that is so ...
— Spirits in Bondage • (AKA Clive Hamilton) C. S. Lewis
... They were, I believe, of the broad-bill kind, which, are not so commonly seen at sea as the others. Here, however, they are in great numbers, and flying much about in the night, some of our gentlemen at first took them for bats. After restoring the sportsmen to their boat, we all proceeded for the ship, which we reached by seven o'clock in the morning, not a little fatigued with our expedition. I now learned that our friends the natives ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... Nevertheless the two sexes of some sloths (Edentata) differ in the character and colour of certain patches of hair on their shoulders. (13. Dr. Gray, in 'Annals and Magazine of Natural History,' 1871, p. 302.) And many kinds of bats (Cheiroptera) present well-marked sexual differences, chiefly in the males possessing odoriferous glands and pouches, and by their being of a lighter colour. (14. See Dr. Dobson's excellent paper in 'Proceedings of the Zoological Society,' 1873, p. 241.) In the great order ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... the use of hurrying up an unpleasant job? Let's have some baseball. By the way, Bailey, you were a good kid not to let on to Grimshaw about the candy. Charley Marden would have caught it twice as heavy. He's sorry he played the joke on you, and told me to tell you so. Hallo, Blake! Where are the bats?" ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... very interesting," she said, spurning her words like Noel, "considering that he's more than my friend, Edward." It gave her a sort of pleasure to see him wince. 'These blind bats!' she thought, terribly stung that he should so clearly assume her out of the running. Then she was sorry, his face had become so still and wistful. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... on in his mind-sight in an odd impossible combination, men of meditative faces, strained foreheads, and weak-eyed as bats with constant research; then official characters—such men as governor-generals and lord-lieutenants, in whom he took little interest; chief-justices and lord chancellors, silent thin-lipped figures of whom he ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... large body of spirits with half human, half bird-like forms. They have wings and can fly; their toes are at the back of their feet, and their fingers attach to the wrists and point backward. Often they hang from the branches of trees, like bats, but they are also pictured as having fine houses and great riches. They are sometimes hostile or mischievous, but more frequently are friendly. They play a very important part in the mythology, but not in the ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... That happens in the trees, Cricket in the gander-grass Sings of all he sees; Rimes from bats and butterflies, Crabs and waterfowl; But the best of all he ...
— The Peter Patter Book of Nursery Rhymes • Leroy F. Jackson
... at almost every station now—men and women coming in for the Christmas Week, with racquets, with bundles of polo-sticks, with dear and bruised cricket-bats, with fox-terriers and saddles. The greater part of them wore jackets like William's, for the Northern cold is as little to be trifled with as the Northern heat. And William was among them and of them, her hands deep in her pockets, her collar ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... contained his mother and Trix, and the thought of meeting either of them after an absence of a school-term set his heart bounding, and his pulse throbbing, in a way he would not have owned to his best friends for the choice of bats in the best maker's shop. He loved his father also, but he did not know so much of him. He was a merchant, and his business had necessitated his living very much abroad, while Cairo did not suit his wife's health. His visits to England were ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... Of course before we landed, his cries were heard by his brothers and they were all at the water's edge. They made mulepacks of themselves and transferred the commissary supplies. The ice cream and bats and balls which I found at the ...
— Our Next-Door Neighbors • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... took fright at the unknown shapes figured on the ground. They fled they knew not whither; and the citizens were filled with greater dread, at the convulsion which "shook lions into civil streets;"—birds, strong-winged eagles, suddenly blinded, fell in the market-places, while owls and bats shewed themselves welcoming the early night. Gradually the object of fear sank beneath the horizon, and to the last shot up shadowy beams into the otherwise radiant air. Such was the tale sent us from Asia, from the eastern extremity of Europe, and from ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... sweetness of the hayfields and the honeysuckle in the hedges, owls hooted mysteriously, and the frogs croaked in some distant pond. Creatures never seen in the daytime were now awake and busy. As Lilac ran along, the bats whirred close past her face, and she saw in the grass by the wayside the steady little light of the glow-worms. It was certainly very late; there was hardly a glimmer of hope that anyone would be up at the farm. It was equally certain that, ...
— White Lilac; or the Queen of the May • Amy Walton
... be too many toads or bats. Toads will eat all sorts of flies, potato bugs, squash bugs, rose bugs, caterpillars, and almost anything ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... had laid her strong-minded head on the hard pillow, that I had had to have concocted out of bats of cotton for her, I laid my face against my own made of the soft breast feathers of a white flock of hovering hen-mothers ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess
... the boys, Guy and Edwin, slept, against the low roof of which the father generally knocked his head every morning when he came to call the lads. Its windows were open all summer round, and birds and bats used oftentimes to fly in, to the great delight of ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... as he cautiously advanced, and soon he found himself at the head of an evidently artificial gallery. A crowd of bats rushed forward and extinguished his torch [48] He leant down to relight it and in so doing observed that he had ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... alkali beaten pile, around which no one by any chance ever saw a sign of life. It was a ruin like those pretentious deserted structures sometimes seen in frontier towns—relics of the wide-open days, which stand afterward, stark and sombre, to serve as bats' nests or blind-pigs. The inn at Calabasas looked its part—a haunt of rustlers, a haven of nameless men, a refuge ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... Day's turn is over, now arrives the night's. Oh, lark, be day's apostle To mavis, merle and throstle, Bid them their betters jostle From day and its delights! But at night, brother howlet, over the woods, Toll the world to thy chantry; Sing to the bats' sleek sisterhoods Full complines with gallantry; Then, owls and bats, Cowls and twats, Monks and nuns, in a cloister's moods, Adjourn to ...
— How to Add Ten Years to your Life and to Double Its Satisfactions • S. S. Curry
... ball-playing boys. Does not the gratuitous ingenuity of the young bipeds indicate a far higher degree of intelligence? Does it argue against the quality of that intelligence that any novel phenomenon—a funnel-shaped cloud, the appearance of a swarm of bats or unknown birds—would divert the ball-players from their immediate purpose? Monkeys alone share this gift of gratuitous curiosity. A strange object, a piece of red cloth fluttering in the grass, may excite the interest of a watch-dog or of an antelope. They may approach ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... Wolverine where it swept, deep and strong; its strident chatter to a fling of gravel at occasional bends in the stream; its sucking snarl over a sunken boulder. The movements and whistlings of owls and bats in the dark, moss-clung corridors on either side were quite distinct; so were the whines and snorts of weasels and other small animals, noisy in the underbrush. And undertoning all other sounds, unceasing, ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... conversation and modesty of deportment. In their writings they were chaste without being tame, and elevated without being extravagant. Alas! I little thought to have lived until their light should be hidden by a cloud of delirious bats who had left their native obscurity and madly rushed to uncongenial day, vermin which are likely to be of direful omen to our country unless the land be ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... ready to "invite" the Stable. The Stable having been duly invited, its eight occupants come in, and each finds a place on a palliasse. It is a warm, still night. The great doors of the Coach-house stand wide open. The stars are out thick by this time. Little black bats flit and swoop about in the darkness. If you keep very still you can just hear the gentle "hshshsh, hshshsh" of the sea. The candle flickers as the night gives a little sigh. A few Cubs are rolling about on their straw beds. "Shut up, all!" commands ...
— Stories of the Saints by Candle-Light • Vera C. Barclay
... dreary scene, they go, Where wild Altama murmurs to their woe, Far different these from all that charmed before, The various terrors of that distant shore; Those matted woods where birds forget to sing, But silent bats in drowsy clusters cling; Those poisonous fields with rank luxuriance crown'd, Where the dark scorpion gathers death around, Where at each step the stranger fears to wake The rattling terrors of the vengeful snake, Where crouching tigers wait their hapless prey, And savage men, more murderous ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... ivy-encircled cleft, through which she seemed to have flitted, looked as though it had not been disturbed for centuries, and as he tried to force his way to the gloomy cavern below, a crowd of bats and owls and other foul birds of evil omen, aroused from their repose, rose upwards, and, amidst dismal hootings and fearful cries, almost flung him backward with the violence of their flight. He spent the remainder of the afternoon ...
— Folk-lore and Legends: German • Anonymous
... composed of brown hematite, decomposing to yellow (tertiary), and is very magnetic, the compass being useless. Bituminous pitch found oozing out of the rocks—probably the result of the decomposition of the excrement of bats. It contains fragments of the wing cases of insects, and gives reactions similar to the bituminous mineral or substance found in Victoria. Barometer 28.285; thermometer 63 degrees at 5 p.m. On summit of watershed, barometer 28.15; ...
— Explorations in Australia • John Forrest
... night: and then I loved thee, And show'd thee all the qualities o' the isle, The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place, and fertile. Cursed be that I did so! All the charms Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you! For I am all the subjects that you have, Which first was mine own king: and here you sty[387-95] me In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... passed along the Green Ride, the red light from the Horse Vivian's neck made a sort of heralding ghost before them on the grass. Bats darted above them for a few yards at a time, and were twitched aside as though by a string or a reminding conscience. The telegraph wires, bound for the post office of Faery, run through the Enchanted Forest, and the poles in the faint light ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... they never heard a stoat making its way down the burrow. But I heard it, and by stamping and driving my stick in I was able to make it turn tail and go off, cursing. All stoats, weasels, ferrets, polecats, are of the wrong people, as you may imagine, and so are most rats and bats. ...
— The Five Jars • Montague Rhodes James
... flown, There be flown, there be flown, there be flown, to London-ward; Where they in pomp and pleasure do waste That which Christmas was wonted to feast, Welladay! Houses where music was wont for to ring Nothing but bats and owlets do sing. Welladay! Welladay! ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... of the cupboard doors may be filled in with Japanese lacquer-work or painted decoration, and here and there, in the recesses, nests of shelves may be fitted with projecting brackets, designed as part of them, for pieces of china, vases of flowers, or busts, and not looking like bats stuck ...
— The Private Library - What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought to Know - About Our Books • Arthur L. Humphreys
... the playthings we left stored away in uncle's garret when we went abroad. The bows are in the long box where you found the mallets, fishing-rods and bats. The old quivers and a few arrows are there also, I believe. What is the idea now?" asked Miss Celia in her turn, as Thorny bounced up ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. V, August, 1878, No 10. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... death, then,—and of a man. We listened for the age tolled from the belfry. Fifty-five. Who had departed? The sexton crossed the green on his way to the shop to make the coffin, and informed us. Our bats and balls had lost their interest for us; we did not even ask our tally-man, who cut notches for us on a stick, how the game stood. For Squire Walter Kinloch was the most considerable man in our village of Innisfield. Without being highly educated, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... tower, and began to dispute as to whether or not the flames lighted this evening would continue to burn, and to cast henceforth their cheerful glow on meadow, fields, and woods; and as they doubted whether the new order of things had strength enough to endure, the smoke drove the bats from their home in the chimney, and they came flapping down stupefied on the summit of the tower, while the owls in its crevices shook their round heads and hooted ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... runner's was almost simultaneous, but the umpire said Marston's was there first. Then bedlam! One of my brothers was umpire and the captain of the other team walked threateningly out toward him, followed by two of his men with base-ball bats. As I started off myself towards them I saw, with the corner of my eye, another brother of mine start in a run from the left field, and I wondered why a third, who was scoring, sat perfectly still in his chair, particularly as a well-known, ...
— A Knight of the Cumberland • John Fox Jr.
... Gaston meant to turn "yellow" after promising, but there was no telling whether the rest of the twenty-five would be forthcoming or not. He fell to calculating its worth in terms of new sweaters and baseball bats. If worst came to worst he could threaten to ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... whose pupils appear to him after death as birds.[1224] The bird form of the soul after death is still a current belief in the Hebrides. Butterflies in Ireland, and moths in Cornwall, and in France bats or butterflies, are believed to be souls of the dead.[1225] King Arthur is thought by Cornishmen to have died and to have been changed into the form of a raven, and in mediaeval Wales souls of the wicked appear as ravens, in Brittany as black ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... by the strong wings into the castle if the nearest monsters had not happened to awake and hear the noise of talking and swum to the shore to give battle. The fight was long and hard, and when the king at last beat back his foes another struggle awaited him. At the entrance gigantic bats, owls, and crows set upon him from all sides; but the dragon had teeth and claws, while the queen broke off sharp bits of glass and stabbed and cut in her anxiety to help her husband. At length the horrible creatures ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... to make that racket," said Sandy, "though there are bats in here. I don't know what it could ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Oak Farm - or, Queer Happenings While Taking Rural Plays • Laura Lee Hope
... claim that bedbugs, commonly found on bats, infest the bodies of swifts also, which is one reason why wire netting is stretched across the chimney tops before the birds arrive from ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... some place to experiment with this," he suggested. He expected to be sent to the deepest, dankest cave of all the world as a laboratory, and to find it equipped with pedigreed bats, dried unicorn horns and whole rows of alembics that ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... bonds of night, Out of the gloom where the bats' wings brush me, Free from the crepitous doubts which crush me, Forth I ...
— The Sunny Side • A. A. Milne
... else ask her! Who are we? Bats, that can see in the night? Spirits, who can hear through walls? Nay, we be plain men of ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... don't remember how many counties; but before our cicerone had got half-way into an account of each of them, with their capital towns, the names of the present mayors, and the noble families he had supplied with cricket-bats, we had passed far away among the noble scenery of the oak district; and our friend launched into a description of oak plantations in general—the value of oaks per acre—the sum paid to Lord George for his estate, which was bought ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... in erudition has always been known to have an unfortunate effect upon the intellectual faculty. Too much wine—though it must have required an inordinate quantity in certain mendacious periods—was regarded as provocative of truth; and too many books as clearly put bats in a man's belfry. The explanation is of course simple enough. If one overweights the head the whole structure is apt to become unbalanced. This is the reason why we hold scholars in such light esteem. They are an unbalanced lot. And after all, why should they get paid more than half the ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... thunder-cloud had made the room so dark that she could scarcely see, but she heard a loud buzz-buzzing, as if a great many huge flies had flown in, and soon she saw a crowd of ugly little shapes darting about, with wings like bats and with terribly long stings in their tails. It was one of these that had stung Epimetheus, and it was not long before Pandora began to scream with pain and fear. An ugly little monster had settled on her forehead, and would have stung her ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various
... why myself and all drowsing? What deepening twilight-scum floating atop of the waters, Who are they as bats and night-dogs askant in the capitol? What a filthy Presidentiad! (O South, your torrid suns! O North, your arctic freezings!) Are those really Congressmen? are those the great Judges? is that the President? Then ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... cavern had a stalagmitical appearance, but the recess was so dark that we could not ascertain either its formation or extent. . . . On first entering it we were nearly overpowered by a strong, sulphurous smell, which was soon accounted for by the flight of an incredible number of small bats, which were roosting in the bottom of the cave, and had been disturbed at our approach. We attempted to grope our way to the bottom, but not having a light, were soon obliged to give up its further ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... daughters of Minyas devote themselves to his worship; they cast lots, and one of them offers her own tender infant to be torn by the three, like a roe; then the other women pursue them, and they are turned into bats, or moths, or other creatures of the night. And fable is endorsed by history; Plutarch telling us how, before the battle of Salamis, with the assent of Themistocles, three Persian captive youths were ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... heaven I believe they shall be whom we shall engender? Fill up, up, up, my friend. Let the ruby tide aspire, and all ruby aspirations with it! Up, fill up! Be we convivial. And conviviality, what is it? The word, I mean; what expresses it? A living together. But bats live together, and did you ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... the church is strictly limited to the written Word. Throw away then to the owls and the bats all tradition, and the power of the church to decree rites and ceremonies. It is treason against God to suppose that he omitted anything from his Bible that his church ought to do, or commanded that which may be neglected, although human laws may ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... groans in the dungeon in which she was thrust; a most awful black hole, full of bats, rats, mice, toads, frogs, mosquitoes, bugs, fleas, serpents, and every kind of horror. No light was let into it, otherwise the gaolers might have seen her and fallen in love with her, as an owl that lived up in the roof of the tower ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... friend the grandfather (who, by- the-bye, said he had been a wonderful cricketer in his time) told me, that it was the clergyman himself who had established the whole thing: that it was his field they played in; and that it was he who had purchased stumps, bats, ball, ...
— Sunday Under Three Heads • Charles Dickens
... from the spit were the Harpies' brood, Which the bard sang near Cremona, With a garnish of bats in their leathern wings imp't; And the fish was—two delicate slices crimp't, Of the whale that ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... were ever straying As if impatient to be playing Upon this pipe, as low it dangled Over his vesture so old-fangled.) "Yet," said he, "poor piper as I am, In Tartary I freed the Cham, Last June, from his huge swarm of gnats; I eased in Asia the Nizam Of a monstrous brood of vampire-bats; And as for what your brain bewilders,— If I can rid your town of rats, Will you give me a thousand guilders?" "One? fifty thousand!"—was the exclamation Of the astonished Mayor ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... lived in our epoch neither terrestrial reptiles, nor terrestrial mammals. The mention of Australia, indeed, suggests an illustration which, even alone, would amply prove our case. The Fauna of this region differs widely from any that is found elsewhere. On land, all the indigenous mammals, except bats, belong to the lowest, or implacental division; and the insects are singularly different from those found elsewhere. The surrounding seas contain numerous forms which are more or less strange; and among the fish there exists a species of shark, which is the only living representative of a ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... convent-bells were proclaiming the festival of the ensuing day. The ravine was overshadowed by fig-trees, vines, and myrtles, and the outer towers and walls of the fortress. It was dark and lonely, and the twilight-loving bats began to flit about. At length the soldier halted at a remote and ruined tower apparently intended to guard a Moorish aqueduct. He struck the foundation with the buttend of his spear. A rumbling sound was heard, and the solid stones yawned apart, leaving ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... flash their intermittent lights as they pass amongst the low bushes or herbage, making another twinkling firmament on earth. On other evenings, sitting inside with lighted candles and wide opened doors, great bats flap inside, make a round of the apartment, and pass out again, whilst iris-winged moths, attracted by the light, flit about the ceiling, or long-horned beetles flop down on the table. In this way I made my first acquaintance with many entomological rarities.* (* In moths, ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... flushing and looking towards the house: 'I swear by the Mother of God that I will never return there again if they do not send after me before I pass the ford in the Brown River,' and he rode on, but so very slowly that the sun went down and the bats began to fly over the bogs. When he came to the river he lingered awhile upon the bank among the flowers of the flag, but presently rode out into the middle and stopped his horse in a foaming shallow. Duallach, however, crossed ...
— The Secret Rose • W. B. Yeats
... * * I wanted to write you in the evening, but the air was so heavenly that I sat for two hours or so on the bench in front of the garden-house, smoked and looked at the bats flying, just as with you two years ago, my darling, before we started on our trip. The trees stood so still and high near me, the air fragrant with linden blossoms; in the garden a quail whistled and partridges allured, and over beyond Arneburg lay the last pink ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... groves, Places which pale passion loves, Moonlight walks, when all the fowls Are safely housed, save bats and owls, A midnight bell, a passing groan,— These are the ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... by now, they either could not, or would not free it from the trap. Shann dozed again, untroubled by any dreams, to awake hearing the shrieks of clak-claks. But when he studied the sky he was able to sight none of the cliff-dwelling Warlockian bats. ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... carrying people home because the day's work was done. The streets were clean and bright; and there was plenty of gayness and joy—for them as could grab a share of it. He noticed fine private carriages drawn up round corners, waiting for prosperous tradesmen; young men with tennis-bats in their hands, taking prodigiously long strides, eager to get a game of play before dusk; girls who went by twos and threes, chattering, laughing, making funny short quick steps of it, like as if ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... repeated on the nights of the 14th and 16th, when it was found necessary to close the theatre. Each night the same riotous behaviour was exhibited. In fact, to such an extent had it arrived that the Mayor was at length sent for, and read the Riot Act. The mob outside threw brick-bats, stones, and all sorts of missiles at the windows, which they completely smashed, breaking away even the woodwork of the frames. The people outside kept bawling "Half-price!" and when any of the known adherents of the full price ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... animals, the characters of which are depicted in accordance with their natures and the exigencies of the story. The object is to cultivate the love of animal nature, which most children feel, and especially for such creatures as bats, toads and others, which children are often improperly taught to regard with disgust. The human characters introduced talk and act naturally, and the book will be found very ...
— In the High Valley - Being the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series • Susan Coolidge
... Yankee notions! Tell your Gotham friends that if they are speaking of a ruinous brick wall, they must say dilaterated, from 'later,' a brick, and not 'dilapidated,' from 'lapis,' a stone. One might as well say a man is 'stoned' to death with brick-bats.' . . . WHAT sad and startling contrasts are presented to the eye and mind of one who attentively looks over the illustrated newspapers of the British metropolis! On one hand, pictures of triumphal processions, arches, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... horns came floating from the valley, prolonged by the mountain-echoes. A number of horsemen were seen far below slowly advancing along the road; but when they had nearly reached the foot of the mountain they suddenly struck off in a different direction. The last ray of sunshine departed, the bats began to flit by in the twilight, the road grew dimmer and dimmer to the view, and nothing appeared stirring in it but now and then a peasant lagging ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... gloomy evening, overcast and sad, and I still contended with the same distress. I went out alone, and after walking a little in the park, watching the dark shades falling on the trees and the fitful flight of the bats, which sometimes almost touched me, was attracted to the house for the first time. Perhaps I might not have gone near it if I had been in a stronger frame of mind. As it was, I took the path that led close ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... musician's head swung a hammock from which hung a leg; other hammocks hanging in the semi-gloom called up suggestions of lemurs and arboreal bats. The swinging kerosene lamp cast its light forward past the heel of the bowsprit to the knightheads, lighting here a naked foot hanging over the side of a bunk, here a face from which protruded a pipe, here a breast covered with dark ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... Temple was spoiled, everything in it that could be laid hands upon was sent to the melting-pot, to pay the Assyrian tribute; and then the doors were shut, the lamps extinguished, the fire quenched on the cold altars, and the silent Temple left to the bats and—the Shekinah; for God still abode ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... a leaf stirred, and everything seemed to have dozed off to sleep in the quiet sunshine. Old Ned Brown, the cobbler, and general "handy-man" of the village, who, in days gone by, had often bound bats and done other odd jobs for "Miss Fenleigh's young nevies," laid down his awl, and gazed out of the window of his dingy ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... and press him closer. The hand bent from the wrist and caressed him protectingly, and the warm contact of his velvet body put a change in Skipper's sick dreams, for he began to mutter in cold and bitter ominousness: "Any nigger that as much as bats an eye ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... that the old man gazed at them, troops of fairies continued to arrive, some on the backs of bats, from which they slipped as they whirred past; others descending, apparently, on moonbeams. The old man even fancied that he saw one attempting to descend by a starbeam, which, being apparently too weak to support his weight, broke, and let him down with a crash into the midst of a party who were ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... is one of those things which no person can get to the bottom of, there is so much of it and such variety. It is just wings, and wings, and wings, till you are weary: turkeys, and geese, and bats, and butterflies, and angels, and grasshoppers, and flying-fish, and—well, there is really no end to the tribe; it gives me the heaves just to think of it. But this one hasn't any wings, ...
— A Horse's Tale • Mark Twain
... of women confusedly huddled in amongst armies, it was at that time decreed and enacted that they should expel and drive out of heaven into Egypt and the confines of Nile that whole crew of goddesses, disguised in the shapes of weasels, polecats, bats, shrew-mice, ferrets, fulmarts, and other such like odd transformations; only Minerva was reserved to participate with Jupiter in the horrific fulminating power, as being the goddess both of war and learning, of arts and arms, of counsel and despatch—a goddess ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... no cause for fear; Like a well-mettled hawk, you took your flight Quite out of reach, and almost out of sight. As the strong sun, in a fair summer's day, You rise, and drive the mists and clouds away, The owls and bats, and all the birds of prey. Each line of yours, like polished steel's so hard, In beauty safe, it wants no other guard. Nature herself's beholden to your dress, Which though still like, much fairer you express. Some vainly striving honour to obtain, Leave to their heirs the traffic of ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... forgive them, lad. Too many of the Englishmen who have come here were bad bats from the South, so hot-footed that they burned the grass. Then—don't forget that the Germans have a military government to the south of us—all experienced men—a great many of them unmitigated rascals, ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... venerable, terrible, dark, and dreadfully crowned with her doom. It was not often that anyone dared wander near to Thlunrana by night when the moan of the magicians invoking we know not Whom rose faintly from inner chambers, scaring the drifting bats: but on the last night of all the man from the black-thatched cottage by the five pine-trees came, because he would see Thlunrana once again before the enemy that was divine, but that dwelt with men, ...
— Fifty-One Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... differed from those in other places, as no partitions could, in fact, be discerned. Indeed, the four sides were all alike covered with boards carved hollow with fretwork, (in designs consisting) either of rolling clouds and hundreds of bats; or of the three friends of the cold season of the year, (fir, bamboo and almond); of scenery and human beings, or of birds or flowers; either of clusters of decoration, or of relics of olden times; either of ten thousand characters of happiness or of ten ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... horror of great darkness, like the night In day of which the Norland sagas tell,— The Twilight of the Gods.... Birds ceased to sing, and all the barnyard fowls Roosted; the cattle at the pasture bars Lowed, and looked homeward; bats on leathern wings Flitted abroad; the sounds of labor died; Men prayed, and women wept; all ears grew sharp To hear the doom blast of the trumpet shatter The black sky, that the dreadful face of Christ ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... discovered. We squeezed and wriggled through a big crack or cleft in the side of the mountain for about one hundred feet, when we emerged into a large dome-shaped passage, the abode during certain seasons of the year of innumerable bats, and at all times of primeval darkness. There were various other crannies and pit-holes opening into it, some of which we explored. The voice of running water was everywhere heard, betraying the proximity of ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... shadow over the imaginations of their daughters, before their squires begat upon them, that they might breed a race less ignoble than their own? And under the deepened dusk he felt the thoughts and desires of the race to which he belonged flitting like bats across the dark country lanes, under trees by the edges of streams and near the pool-mottled bogs. A woman had waited in the doorway as Davin had passed by at night and, offering him a cup of milk, ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... species, but of these, that many should be peculiar. We can clearly see why those animals which cannot cross wide spaces of ocean, as frogs and terrestrial mammals, should not inhabit oceanic islands; and why, on the other hand, new and peculiar species of bats, which can traverse the ocean, should so often be found on islands far distant from any continent. Such facts {478} as the presence of peculiar species of bats, and the absence of all other mammals, on oceanic islands, are ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... suspensory moment of the game, admirably chosen by the artist to arrest the wayfarer and promote speculation. For will he let her slip through his fingers when she comes down? or will he have her fast and tight? And in the former case, the bats are tearing their legs off for just number nought. And in the latter, there 's a wicket down, and what you may call a widower walking it bat on shoulder, parted from his mate for that mortal innings, and likely ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... walls of spiders' legs are made Well mortised and finely laid; He was the master of his trade It curiously that builded; The windows of the eyes of cats, And for the roof, instead of slats, Is covered with the skins of bats, ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... towards midnight, a bat flew into the apartment where the Court was; the King immediately cried out, "Where is General Crillon?" (He had just left the room.) "He is the General to command against the bats." This set everybody calling out, "Ou etais tu, Crillon?" M. de Crillon soon after came in, and was told where the enemy was. He immediately threw off his coat, drew his sword, and commenced an attack upon the bat, which flew into the closet where I was fast asleep. I started out of sleep at the ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... sting; little sharks, a yard long, grey and whitish skin, and several rows of teeth, bent back, that are generally known by the name of pantouffles; vespertilios, a kind of red isosceles triangle, half a yard long, to which pectorals are attached by fleshy prolongations that make them look like bats, but that their horny appendage, situated near the nostrils, has given them the name of sea-unicorns; lastly, some species of balistae, the curassavian, whose spots were of a brilliant gold colour, and the capriscus of clear ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... a wizard's cave certainly, just as I had pictured it. At the top of the steeple, a rusty weathercock creaked mournfully; in the dusk, great Bats flew all around the edifice or dived down the throats of the gargoyles; at night, Owls hooted upon the copings of the leads. It was inside, under the immensities of the vault, that my chemist used to perform. What ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... of mammalia, only eight of which belong exclusively to the coast. Sixteen of the other species are to be found in the mountains or in the forests. The relation of this number to the whole of the mammalia of Peru is 1:4, 3. Distributed by single orders, they are in the following proportions:—Bats, four species, of which only one (Vespertilio innoxius, Gerv.) belongs to this region alone. Beasts of prey, ten kinds; among them one of the mephitic class, known to the natives by the name of zorillo, ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... a long time; he heard every quarter strike, and at last, just before the close of the witching hour, he heard the same noise like the rustling of bats, and then she came, he felt the flutter of her white dress, and she stood before him—it ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... mourners insisted on their rights and would go no way but through the Piazza di Venezia. When the dispute was at its height two wagons laden with bricks appeared on the scene. The mourners swarmed upon them, broke the bricks into bats, and hurled them at the police. They had apparently the simple-hearted expectation that the police would stand this indefinitely, but the brickbats hurt, and in their paroxysms of pain the sufferers began firing ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... my esteemed collection of ancient engraved stones to my nephew at school, who shows all the character of the collector. He may swop them for bats, or tarts, or he may learn wisdom from the misfortunes ...
— Punch, Or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, Feb. 13, 1892 • Various
... inner part of their feathers are white, and the outside black, so that they appear all black, unless you extend the feathers. Here are large sky-coloured birds, such as we lately killed on New Guinea, and many other small birds, unknown to us. Here are likewise abundance of bats, as big as young coneys, their necks, head, ears, and noses like foxes, their hair rough, that about their necks is of a whitish yellow, that on their heads and shoulders black, their wings are four ...
— Early Australian Voyages • John Pinkerton
... was doubtless too politic to speak of the Popes to his extremely devout sovereign. Take away the three elements of discord, and there would certainly have been peace in Rome, for there would have been no one to disturb the bats and the ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... You heard the cropping of the goats, the jaws' champ when they chewed the crisp leaves; the flicker of the bats' wings. In the marsh, half a mile away, the chorus of frogs, when it swelled up, drowned all nearer noise; but when it broke off suddenly, those others resumed their hold upon the stillness. ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... Creation itself afore't was done!" So he kept his secret from all the rest Safely buttoned within his vest; And in the loft above the shed Himself he locks, with thimble and thread And wax and hammer and buckles and screws, And all such things as geniuses use;— Two bats for patterns, curious fellows! A charcoal-pot and a pair of bellows; An old hoop-skirt or two, as well as Some wire and several old umbrellas; A carriage-cover, for tail and wings; A piece of harness; and straps and ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For • Various
... on the skill of the builder; but that they should do so for a lifetime—even for a century!—a thing absolutely incredible. Especially you must have been impressed by the nine-inch wall, in which every other course at least consists of bats and closures. You will have marvelled that so large a percentage of bricks can appear to have been delivered broken; but this you would have been able to account for had you watched the builder at work, noting his vicious practice of halving a sound brick whenever he wants a bat. It is an instinct, ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... but mousing owls and bats of low degree may not aspire to bliss so whelming and ecstatic as is found in ye downy ...
— 1601 - Conversation as it was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors • Mark Twain
... by evolutionists that wings as organs of flight have been independently evolved in at least four different lines—namely, in insects, the fossil pterodactyls, birds and bats. That an organ so highly specialized as any one of these wings could be evolved seems improbable; while the evolution of the four different kinds, independently of each other, only increases the improbability. The difficulty, however, is to account for the evolution of any known kind ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... of head, as well as all his confidence in the righteousness of his cause, to keep his heart from fluttering with fear as they stepped along beneath the gloom of the trees, which even when not in leaf cast dense shadows around them. It was in truth a weird spot: owls hooted dismally about them, bats flitted here and there in their erratic flight, and sometimes almost brushed the faces of the boys with their clammy wings. The strange noises always to be heard in a wood at night assailed their ears, and mingled with ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... out of the library years ago. He always had his piano in the library, she explained, and it was there that he and Miss Philippa used to play and sing together. "The same piano stands in the morning-room now. I have so many things that were his. My lady told me to throw away his bats and racquets and such things, but I couldn't do it. And some of them he himself asked me to take care of for him, many years ago in his school-days. He probably forgot all about them, but they were safely kept. Will you come one day and see them, ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... unearthly light, shedding upon the earth's surface an illumination somewhat akin to full moonlight. Usually the planet Venus and a few stars shine out the while in the darkened heaven. Meantime around the observer animal and plant life behave as at nightfall. Birds go to roost, bats fly out, worms come to the surface of the ground, flowers close up. In the Norwegian eclipse of 1896 fish were seen rising to the surface of the water. When the total phase at length is over, and the moon in her progress across the sky has allowed ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... peeled in sections. Third, and most important of all, a string of twine suspended from one side of the room to the other, in front of the fire-place and near the ceiling, and hung with objects that required a moment to recognize. Among them, when closely examined, could be found two or three bats, dried; a string of snake's eggs, blackened by being smoked; a tail and two legs of a black cat; a bunch of the dried leaves of the black hellebore; a snake's skin—not the "shedder" or superficial skin, but the cuticle itself, peeled from the writhing ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... of dusk and mist and midges, Now the tired planes drone homeward through the haze, And distant wood-fires wink behind the ridges, And the first flare some timorous Hun betrays; Now no shell circulates, but all men brood Over their evening food; The bats flit warily and owl and rat With muffled cries their shadowy loves pursue, And pleasant, Corporal, it is to chat In this hushed moment ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 14, 1917 • Various
... quicksilver. The curve of his nose presented an aquiline silhouette, which suggested the Oriental or Jewish type. His hands—thin, slender, full of nerves which projected like strings upon the finger-board of a violin, and armed with claws like those on the terminations of bats' wings—shook with senile trembling; but those convulsively agitated hands became firmer than steel pincers or lobsters' claws when they lifted any precious article—an onyx cup, a Venetian glass, or a dish of Bohemian crystal. This strange ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... flight is an excellent example of adaptation. It has been evolved independently in Pterodactyls, Bats, and Birds. In the two first groups, and to a slight degree in the third, the expanse of the wing is formed by an extension of the skin into a thin membrane, supported by the fore-limbs. It is not ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... he breathed. "Jumping, they were, and leaping, and flying on their leather wings like a lot of black bats out o' hell! And I'm thinkin' that's where they've taken Chet Bullard, and never again will he hold a ship like 'twas in the hollow of his hand, and him settin' it down ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin
... to the bank by the cornfields, with the glorious open stretch of stream. In the evening, the rosy or golden hues of the sunset will be reflected on the surface from the clouds; then the bats wheel to and fro, and once now and then a nighthawk will throw himself through the air with uncertain flight, his motions scarcely to be followed, as darkness falls. Am I mistaken, or are kingfishers less numerous than they were ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... for numbers of these creatures were flitting noiselessly in the darkness, their forms visible for an instant as they passed and repassed between Malchus and the light. He wondered vaguely what they could find to eat here, and then remembered that he had heard that at nightfall numbers of bats could be seen flying up from the openings to the reservoirs to seek food without, returning to their hiding ...
— The Young Carthaginian - A Story of The Times of Hannibal • G.A. Henty
... it's the place you come to at the cool of the day, when the bats are out, and the cummers put by their spinning. And there's nou't there but sport and music. A lawn like a golf green, drink that is not ugly, women would wander with you on to the heather when the moon's rising, and never a thought in their mind of the money in your pocket, but their eyes ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... woodland paths skirting in the evening a world of silver and grey, across which bats sketched zigzag flights. Very nice in the dimpsey light, but stuffy in the daytime. So the moor had it in the end. We would trudge the moor from north to south, never seeing a soul, and, aided by map and compass, learn ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... I return, From the speech of the Dead; I asked them for counsel and word, They twittered like bats when they heard And wailed for the warm ...
— A Legend of Old Persia and Other Poems • A. B. S. Tennyson
... early dusk of a warm September evening the bats were flitting to and fro, as if it were still summer, under the great elm that overshadowed Isaac Brown's house, on the Dipford road. Isaac Brown himself, and his old friend and neighbor John York, ...
— The Queen's Twin and Other Stories • Sarah Orne Jewett
... to the sky, fold her arms across her breast, and lie on the waves as among swelling cushions like a child in a rocking cradle. And here she was allowed the full privileges of a child. She shouted; called to the startled wild geese; teased the night-swallows, and the bats skimming along the surface of the lake in quest of water-spiders. Here she even ventured to sing, and gave voice to charming melodies, which floated over the water like the sounds ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... that bloomed among the cliffs, breathed forth its sweetness; then, too, when the mountain-bee had crept into its blossomed bed, and the hum of every little insect, that had floated gaily in the sun-beam, was hushed, the sound of many streams, not heard till now, murmured at a distance.—The bats alone, of all the animals inhabiting this region, seemed awake; and, while they flitted across the silent path, which Blanche was pursuing, she remembered the following lines, which ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... was done with the horse and mule,—those creatures who had served the exiles so faithfully and so well? Were they left behind to become a prey to the jaguars and the large blood-sucking bats, that kill so many animals in these parts? No—they were not to be left to such a fate. One of them—the mule—had been already disposed of. It was a valuable beast, and partly on that account, and partly from gratitude felt towards it for the well-timed kick ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... such an unusual hubbub in their usually quiet domain, the bats came swooping from their holes in the walls by hundreds, and the torches were extinguished almost instantly. The savages who were near the entrance drew back in haste; those who had entered stood rooted ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... recess was so dark that we could not ascertain either its formation or extent. . . . On first entering it we were nearly overpowered by a strong, sulphurous smell, which was soon accounted for by the flight of an incredible number of small bats, which were roosting in the bottom of the cave, and had been disturbed at our approach. We attempted to grope our way to the bottom, but not having a light, were soon obliged to give up its further examination. . . . From the ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... you the one that banged this 'ere door just now? 'Twas enough to scare the owls and bats and all the other beasties from their holes ...
— Odd • Amy Le Feuvre
... Markland strove to shut out from his mind the light shining in through the little window opened by Mr. Allison; but the effort was in vain. Steadily the light came in, disturbing the owls and bats, and revealing dust, cankering mould, and spider-web obstructions. All on the outside was fair to the world; and as fair, he had believed, within. To be suddenly shown his error, smote him with a painful sense ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... that was reckoned a witch—full of strange spells and devices; Nightly she wandered the woods, searching for charms voodooistic— Scorpions, lizards, and herbs, dormice, chameleons, and plantains! Serpents and caw-caws and bats, screech-owls and crickets and adders— These were the guides of that witch through the dank deeps of the forest. Then, with her roots and her herbs, back to her cave in the morning Ambled that hussy to brew spells ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... proved three times as durable as lignum vitae. Mangrove forests. Monotony of tropical scenery. Trade—a list of exports. Edible birds'-nests. Description of the great Gomanton birds'-nests caves. Mr Bampfylde. Bats' Guano. Mode of collecting nests. Lady and Miss Brassey visit the Madai caves, 1887. Beche-de-mer, shark fins, cuttle fish. Position of Sandakan on the route between Australia and China—importance as a possible naval station. Shipping. Postal arrangements. ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... a striking example. Since the most remote times the inhabitants of the Commune of Bats, composed of 3,300 persons, have intermarried; yet this population is very healthy and vigorous and shows no sign of degeneration. On the other hand, we have seen that contrasts produce a mutual attraction in the domain ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... ghosts are nothing but rats and bats," said Tom. "Come on," he continued. "It's damp enough ...
— The Rover Boys at College • Edward Stratemeyer
... heard the cropping of the goats, the jaws' champ when they chewed the crisp leaves; the flicker of the bats' wings. In the marsh, half a mile away, the chorus of frogs, when it swelled up, drowned all nearer noise; but when it broke off suddenly, those others resumed their hold upon the stillness. It was a breathless ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... by the scruff of the neck an' goes caperin' off up hill with him. An' to give that parent b'ar full credit, she's gettin' along all right an' conductin' herse'f as though Bowlaigs don't heft no more than one of them gooseha'r pillows, when, accidental, she bats pore Bowlaigs ag'in the bole of a tree—him hangin' outen her mouth about three foot—an' while the collision shakes that monarch of the forest some, Bowlaigs gets knocked free of her grip an' goes rollin' down the mountain-side ag'in like a sack of bran. It puts quite a crimp in Bowlaigs. The ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... that the boy be removed from her school—all this according to the earnest biographer. The facts are that the boy had so much energy and restless ambition; was so full of brimming curiosity, mischief and imagination—introducing turtles, bats and mice on various occasions—that he led the whole school a merry chase and wore the nerves of the ancient maiden to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... the errant knight with rested lance; Imps, demons, fays, in antic train succeed, 280 The wandering maiden, and the winged steed! The muttering wizard turns, with haggard look, The bloody leaves of the accursed book, Whilst giants, from the gloomy castle tower, With lifted bats of steel, more dreadful lower! At times, the magic shall prevail Of the wild and wonderous tale; At times, high rapture shall prolong The deep, enthusiastic song. Hence, at midnight, thou shalt stray, 290 Where dark ocean flings its spray, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... reputation of the town it is recorded that "owing to their having had two amusing days previous there was too much work in the game of cricket for their performance to be worth recording, and so threw away their bats and balls and retired to the Indies who were preparing a social cup of tea, making altogether ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... of the dark I return, From the speech of the Dead; I asked them for counsel and word, They twittered like bats when they heard And wailed for the ...
— A Legend of Old Persia and Other Poems • A. B. S. Tennyson
... hastened onward, and the light grew till they could dimly see each other, and dimly they beheld the cave that it was both wide and high. Yet a little further, and their faces showed white to one another, and they could see the crannies of the rocks, and the bats hanging garlanded from the roof. So then they came to where the day streamed down bright on them from a break overhead, and lo! the sky and green leaves ...
— The Story of the Glittering Plain - or the Land of Living Men • William Morris
... world of course in the historical sense of that expression. In presence of that conception the petty nationalities lost their centre of gravity, brute fact dispelled their illusions, they flung their gods to the moles and to the bats (Isaiah ii.). The prophets of Israel alone did not allow themselves to be taken by surprise by what had occurred, or to be plunged in despair; they solved by anticipation the grim problem which history set before them. They absorbed into their religion that conception of the world which was ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... mountains when you're footsore and weary. But we stumbled upon a niche, in a bit of a slope near the top, and turned out the bats and foxes, ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... resurrection, In the grave of Possession; while the knoll[191] 10 Of long-lived parents finds a jovial echo To triple time in the son's ear. I'm cold— I'm dark;—I've blown my fingers—numbered o'er And o'er my steps—and knocked my head against Some fifty buttresses—and roused the rats And bats in general insurrection, till Their cursed pattering feet and whirling wings Leave me scarce hearing for another sound. A light! It is at distance (if I can Measure in darkness distance): but it blinks 20 As through a crevice or a key-hole, in The inhibited ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... patterns, may turn to Mr. Haddon's Evolution of Art. {64c} Mr. Haddon shows how the Portuguese pattern of horizontal triangles is, in the art of the uncivilised natives of Brazil, meant to represent bats. {64d} A cross, dotted, within a circle, is directly derived, through several stages, from a ...
— The Clyde Mystery - a Study in Forgeries and Folklore • Andrew Lang
... him. Some of the party, armed with bows and arrows, started away into the woods, while the others collected sticks and lighted a fire. The hunters soon returned, bringing with them a tree kangaroo and a cuscus, with several large bats. The latter creatures I had seen before, and heard them called flying-foxes. They were very ugly, and one of them; which I took up had a rank, powerful, foxy odour. One of the natives who saw me thought I ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... accustomed to take up winter quarters in the attic of the church, the wood-peckers had pecked numerous holes in the paintless walls. The eaves were daubed with mud carried by the pewees in the building of their yearly nests. Bats, at their own good pleasure, came in and out through the paneless windowsashes and found daytime repose on top of the sagging beam which, just above the windows, spanned ...
— The Deacon of Dobbinsville - A Story Based on Actual Happenings • John A. Morrison
... players arrived. He looked at them closely and his nerves jumped. Gosh! didn't they look big! And what big black bats! ...
— Don Strong, Patrol Leader • William Heyliger
... Apennines that rise around, the loud voices of the dogs echo from cliff to cliff boom down into the abyss, and rattle there like thunder. The night-birds catch up the sound and screech; the frightened bats circle ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... purple mountains of the interior, flank the silvery straits, populous with native proas, coasting steamers, sampans, and the hollowed log or "dug-out" which serves as the Malayan canoe. Patched sails of scarlet and yellow, shaped like bats' wings, suggest gigantic butterflies afloat upon the tranquil sea. The red roofs of whitewashed towns, and the tall shafts of white lighthouses emphasise the rich verdure between the silvery azure of sky and water. The little voyage ends at Tandjon Priok, nine miles from Batavia, for a volcanic ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... he found that the farmer's wife, in clearing out a garret some years before, had found some rubbishy old papers which she had burnt, and which had probably been papers used in the wrapping up of pigs' cheeks to keep them from the bats. 'O, wretched woman!' exclaimed he; 'do you know what you have done?' 'O dear, no!' said the woman, half frightened out of her wits: 'no harm, I hope; for the papers were very old; I dare say as old as the house itself.' This threw him into an additional degree of excitement, ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... the objects of personal devotion: Minerva or Vesta, with handsome niches or shrines in which they might reside. There, too, were the brass crowns, or nimbi which were intended to protect the heads of the gods from bats and birds. There you might buy, were you a heathen, rings with heads on them of Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Serapis, and above all Astarte. You would find there the rings and signets of the Basilidians; amulets too of wood ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... life: darkness may bring thought, but a dull daylight, the uncertain glimmer of a leaden sky, merely make one restless and weary. These indecisive and chaotic states of nature are ugly, like all amorphous things, like smeared colors, or bats, or the viscous polyps of the sea. The source of all attractiveness is to be found in character, in sharpness of outline, in individualization. All that is confused and indistinct, without form, or sex, or accent, is antagonistic to beauty; ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a fine thing to raise the spirits, though to my mind last night they took enough to raise more than they expected—ha, ha, ha! They thought they were attacked by ghosts and goblins, when in reality only a number of bats flew out against them after the foul air had already damped their ardour. The place swarms with the vermin. By the by, if the Senor, my master, will give me the key of the vault, I will get up that beast of a dog, and bury him or hang him up to ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... scatter and that is the end of it, but when we interfere, there is no telling where the matter will end. In 1866, we once closed the park against them, and the consequence was a riot in which the police suffered severely from brick-bats, and the mob finally took hold of the iron fence and tore it away for a long distance along the park, made their entry, and took their own way." "Well could you not have punished those offenders according to due process of law?" I asked. "Yes," he rejoined, ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... umpire's judgment and experience, but managing to get the ball done his own way after all; whilst outside the shop, the rest of the eleven, the less-trusted commons, are shouting and bawling round Joel Brent, who is twisting the waxed twine round the handles of bats—the poor bats, which please nobody, which the taller youths are despising as too little and too light, and the smaller are abusing as too heavy and two large. Happy critics! winning their match can hardly be a greater delight—even if to win it they be doomed! ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 265, July 21, 1827 • Various
... and a quantity of silver. He began to count the silver, putting it on the table, and found that it made up three pounds ten more. "So that, altogether, there's six pounds ten; that's thirty shillings more than— and it won't be wanted till next summer term, because all the bats and balls are bought now. I dare say Montagu won't even open the box again. I know he keeps it stowed away in a corner, and hardly ever looks at it, and I can put back the five pounds the very first day of next term, and it will save ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... heads and faces wrapped in a light muslin veil; they wear also a kind of mantilla of black silk, which gives them a peculiar appearance. When they came riding along, and the wind caught this garment and spread it out, they looked exactly like bats with ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... chattels removed for the occasion, he said it was so very comfortable he should now write all his letters here, for at his lodgings he had such a miserable low table he had been forced to prop it up by brick-bats! ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... halfpenny and at Bathurst a penny each; the bitter Kola, a very different article from the esculent; skewered rots of ground-hog, a rodent that can climb, destroy vegetables, and bite hard if necessary; dried bats and rats, which the African as well as the Chinese loves, and fish cuits au soleil, preferred when 'high,' to use the mildest adjective. From the walls hung dry goods, red woollen nightcaps and comforters, leopards' and monkeys' skins, ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... air," explained the Kid. "Bats in the belfry. Dizzy. See what I mean? It's often like that when a feller puts one in with a bit of weight behind it just where that one landed. Gee! I remember when I fought Martin Kelly; I was only ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse
... sending out another army to take another Sebastopol. More paraphernalia were required to enable these thirty-two lads to play their game with propriety than would have been needed for the depositing of half Gladstonopolis. Every man from England had his attendant to look after his bats and balls, and shoes and greaves; and it was necessary, of course, that our boys should be equally well served. Each of them had two bicycles for his own use, and as they were all constructed with the new ...
— The Fixed Period • Anthony Trollope
... blowing their noses in the dawn. Never a mouse moved in the stable at night but she was aware of it. And when a horse was training for a big event barely a night passed but in the small hours a white, bare-footed figure issued from the partition and came swiftly along the loft, disturbing rats and bats as she came, to lift a trap-door and look down with guardian eye on the hope of the ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... charm'd before, 345 The various terrors of that horrid shore; Those blazing suns that dart a downward ray, And fiercely shed intolerable day; Those matted woods where birds forget to sing, But silent bats in drowsy clusters cling; 350 Those pois'nous fields with rank luxuriance crown'd, Where the dark scorpion gathers death around; Where at each step the stranger fears to wake The rattling terrors of the vengeful snake; Where crouching tigers wait their hapless prey, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... this. when we see sum peeple waulking on the sidewaulks we run by them fast and stamp hard in the pudles and the water spaters all over them. we dont do it to wimmen and girls. but we do to men and fellers. it is lots of fun to hear them sware. Beany got 2 bats in the ear and a kick and i got 3 bats in the ear and 2 kicks. so i beat Beany. one of the kicks was a peeler. ennyway ...
— Brite and Fair • Henry A. Shute
... and the flower-girl laughed a merry peal. "Why, brother of the mole and lord of all the bats, where hast thou been asleep not to know that to-day our young Messer Giovanni is to be ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... innumerable cave temples, which are said to hold no fewer than 446,444 images of Buddha. Huge caves, of which the most noted are the Farm Caves, occur in the hills near Moulmein, and they too are full of relics of their ancient use as temples, though now they are chiefly visited in connexion with the bats, whose flight viewed from a distance, as they issue from the caves, resembles ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... once then, Captain; the delay of half an hour may seal his doom. I will place Barbara in a nook of the old tower, where nothing comes but bats and mice; and, as it overlooks the paths, she can see from it the road that Burrell takes, and so avoid ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... opposed to near (16' i) Buckthorn Brown. Previous to the taking of this specimen, Webb and Jones (1952:277) reported as E. f. pallidus a specimen, saved as a skull only, which was picked up dead at Niobrara. It seems best to assign these two bats from the vicinity of Niobrara, Knox County, to E. ...
— Distribution of Some Nebraskan Mammals • J. Knox Jones
... things!" he breathed. "Jumping, they were, and leaping, and flying on their leather wings like a lot of black bats out o' hell! And I'm thinkin' that's where they've taken Chet Bullard, and never again will he hold a ship like 'twas in the hollow of his hand, and him settin' it ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin
... say the bells of St. Marg'-ret's; Brick-bats and tiles, chime the bells of St. Giles'; Halfpence and farthings, ring the bells of St. Martin's; Oranges and lemons, toll the bells of St. Clement's; Pancakes and fritters, say the bells of St. ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... agitation of the cord alone told us that anything was going on below. At last the rope ceased shaking and a faint shout came rumbling up the well, announcing Ali's safe arrival. Then, far below, a tiny star of light appeared. He had lit the candle, thereby disturbing hundreds of bats that flitted up in an endless stream and as silently as spirits. The rope was hauled up again, and now it was my turn; but, as I declined to trust my neck to the hand-over-hand method of descent, the end of the cord was made fast round my middle and I was lowered bodily into those sacred depths. ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... whither; and the citizens were filled with greater dread, at the convulsion which "shook lions into civil streets;"—birds, strong-winged eagles, suddenly blinded, fell in the market-places, while owls and bats shewed themselves welcoming the early night. Gradually the object of fear sank beneath the horizon, and to the last shot up shadowy beams into the otherwise radiant air. Such was the tale sent us ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... become aware of its existence. For the sake of internal safety a wall has been built round the top of the precipice, and at certain points you may look over this parapet, sheer down some ten or twelve hundred feet, into an abyss fit only to be the habitation of the owls, bats, and birds of prey which frequent its solitudes. There seems no resting-place for any wingless creature: thus the strange birds which haunt the wild recesses of the rocks do so in perfect security, and their varied cries, along with the roar of the water, are the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... ceased to sing, and all the barnyard fowls Roosted; the cattle at the pasture bars Lowed, and looked homeward; bats on leathern wings Flitted abroad; the sounds of labor died; Men prayed, and women wept; all ears grew sharp To hear the doom blast of the ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer
... found out. He led them down into the cellar and showed them some old baseballs, some bats, some gloves, and, best of all, a ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue Keeping Store • Laura Lee Hope
... day and night: and then I loved thee, And show'd thee all the qualities o' the isle, The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place, and fertile. Cursed be that I did so! All the charms Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you! For I am all the subjects that you have, Which first was mine own king: and here you sty[387-95] me In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me The rest o' ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... arising from the constant recurrence of joints. Great insistence must be laid on this point, especially at the junctions of walls, where the admission of closers already constitutes a weakness which would only be increased by the use of other bats ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... that Hercules who enjoys immortal life in heaven among the gods, and is married to Hebe or Youth; but his shadow, which remains below. About him the dead flocked as thick as bats, hovering around, and cuffing at his head: he stands with his dreadful bow, ever ...
— THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES • CHARLES LAMB
... on Huggins for about a week, an' at last effects his rescoo from that hostile jack rabbit an' them crimson rattlesnakes an' blue-winged bats that has j'ined dogs with it in its attempts ag'in Huggins. Later, when Peets sends his charges, this yere ingrate Huggins—lovin' money as I states—wants to squar' it with a quart or two of whiskey checks on the Bird Cage bar. Nacherally, Peets waves ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... above the chin of the ladies, and the dirty shirts and shaggy hair of the young men, who have levelled nobility almost as much as the mobility in France have, have confounded all individuality. Besides, if I did go to public places and assemblies, which my going to roost earlier prevents, the bats and owls do not begin to fly abroad till far in the night, when they begin to see and be seen. However, one of the empresses of fashion, the Duchess of Gordon, uses fifteen or sixteen hours of her four-and-twenty. I heard her journal of last Monday. She first went to Handel's ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... especially unenviable. There was evidently to be a ball game. College boys with crimson H's on their shirts; men with a blue Y; together with a group of short-sleeved players not yet honored with insignia from their universities were hurrying out to the lawn with bats, balls, ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett
... and go straight up to glory, politically and socially and every which way, in a few years, and there's nothing to it. Grant's a good son, and a good brother, and a good friend and neighbor, but"—the Doctor pounds his chair arm vehemently, "there are bats, my dear, bats in his belfry just the same. Don't get excited when you see Grant mount his haystack to jump into the crack o' ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... and the shadows shiver As the wind sweeps by, and the hut doors close, And the bats dip down in the shaft or quiver In the ghostly light, round the grey horse goes; And he feels the strain on his untouched shoulder, Hears again the voice that was dear to him, Sees the form he knew — and his heart grows bolder As he works his shift ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... the many-hued iris, and a multitude of flowers that no man had named; here, too, serpents great and small, of wonderful colorings, and the dull and loathsome moccasin sliding warily off the dead tree; in dimmer recesses the cow alligator, with her nest hard by; turtles a century old; owls and bats, raccoons, opossums, rats, centipedes and creatures of like vileness; great vines of beautiful leaf and scarlet fruit in deadly clusters; maddening mosquitoes, parasitic insects, gorgeous dragon-flies and pretty water-lizards: the blue heron, the snowy crane, the red-bird, the moss-bird, the ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... do this, six cuttings were made in the rock for the reception of the ends of the six great beams of the beacon. Each beam was to be fixed to the solid rock by two strong and massive bats, or stanchions, of iron. These bats, for the fixing of the principal and diagonal beams and bracing-chains, required fifty-four holes, each measuring a foot and a half deep, and two inches wide. The ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
... moistened Pecuchet's forehead, and Bouvard began to gnash his teeth: a cramp gripped his epigastrium; the floor, like a wave, seemed to flow under his heels; the sulphur burning in the chimney fell down in spirals. At the same moment bats flitted about. A cry arose. ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... wert; Even thy child beholding thee in ruins, As if the waters of Oblivion In dark Oblivion's Dale had touched his lips, Left thee; and thou didst writhe like a whole world Engulfed in sounds of woe: Hair-tearings and Breast-beatings, groans of sad despair, night-bats Wandering restlessly, unheeded prayers Of souls condemned, loud thunder peals, fierce glares Of lightnings, and the laughter of ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... open. It was blacker than any night I've ever seen before or since; we couldn't see a foot ahead, and the sounds we heard in the woods didn't make us feel any too comfortable, for all we'd got used to living in the open. We knew, of course, that the sounds came from birds and bats and moths and such, but when a man is out on a job like that his nerves are not what they are at other times—every sound seems unusual and magnified. I didn't like so much silence from the village down below us—it seemed too quiet; and it appeared to me that the noises we heard in the ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... surroundings—the substantial realisation of the concrete-are perfect. So Mr. Phillip had a suit for every purpose—for football, cricket, tennis, bicycle, shooting, dining, and strolling about. In the same way he possessed a perfect armoury of athletic and other useful implements. There were fine bats by the best makers for cricket, rods for trout fishing, splendid modified choke-bores, saddles, jockey caps, and so on. A gentleman like this could hardly long remain in the solitary halls of learning—society must claim him for parties, balls, dinners, and the usual round. It was understood ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... was suicide,—though the woman was a church member and didn't know how to fire a gun off, besides. And then there come along a detective younger and smarter than all the rest, and says he, 'If all you bats have seen everything you can see, I guess I'll take a look around,' says he. Sure enough, there was a rug with 'Welcome' on it layin' in front of the washstand, and when he turned it up he found an elegant diamond stud with a man's full name and address on ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... among swelling cushions like a child in a rocking cradle. And here she was allowed the full privileges of a child. She shouted; called to the startled wild geese; teased the night-swallows, and the bats skimming along the surface of the lake in quest of water-spiders. Here she even ventured to sing, and gave voice to charming melodies, which floated over the water like the sounds of an ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... two louis-d'or upon quicksilver. The curve of his nose presented an aquiline silhouette, which suggested the Oriental or Jewish type. His hands—thin, slender, full of nerves which projected like strings upon the finger-board of a violin, and armed with claws like those on the terminations of bats' wings—shook with senile trembling; but those convulsively agitated hands became firmer than steel pincers or lobsters' claws when they lifted any precious article—an onyx cup, a Venetian glass, or a ...
— The Mummy's Foot • Theophile Gautier
... banana- and oubi-trees; we besides found fresh water here, which comes trickling through the clay in small rills, and has to be gathered in pits dug for the purpose; the island also contains large numbers of bats living in the trees, on which account we have given to it the name of Vleermuys-Eylant [Bats' Island] in the new chart. We have seen no huts or human beings in it, but found unmistakable signs that there had been men here ...
— The Part Borne by the Dutch in the Discovery of Australia 1606-1765 • J. E. Heeres
... old world is sometimes jealous of the chap who means to rise; It sneers at what he's doing or it bats him 'twixt the eyes; It trips him when he's careless, and it makes his way so hard What's left of him is sinew, not a walking tub of lard; But it's only wasting effort, for by George, the guy keeps on When his hopes have crumbled round ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... supplied a Mrs. Williams with milk, but afterwards refused to serve her, and the cause was as follows: Mrs. Braithwaite had up to that time been very successful in churning her butter, but about a month ago the butter would not come. She tried every known agency; she washed and dried her bats, but all to no purpose. The milk would not yield an ounce of butter. Under the circumstances she said Mrs. Williams had witched her. The neighbours believed it, and Mrs. Williams was generally called a witch. Hearing these reports, ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... the 'off' leader down if he bats an eyelash when the train pulls in, I'll be much ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... say that if gold or silver be hid when the moon is in conjunction with the sun, and the place be perfumed with saffron, henbane, and black poppy, the treasure will never be feloniously carried away, for spirits will constantly watch over it. The blood of doves, lapwings, and bats possesses peculiar virtues—attracting spirits to places where they may be required to appear, and exciting ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... the Bats, who hang, head downwards, by their hind-legs from the roof of their caves. A special formation of the toes enables birds to sleep on one leg, which automatically and without fatigue clutches the swaying bough. The Empusa shows me nothing akin to their contrivance. The extremity of her ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... on Arthur's Seat, St Anthon's well aye springin'; The lammies playing at her feet, The birdies round her singin'. The solemn haunts o' Holyrood, Wi' bats and hoolits eerie, The tow'ring crags o' Salisbury, The lowly wells o' Weary, O[62] ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... of unreckoned human misery. These are their views, and when the play begins, they have resolved themselves into a committee of the whole, and are out on a commission of inquiry and administrative reform, armed with bats and clubs and other weapons,—such as came first to hand, intending to make short work of it. This is their peace budget, and as to war, they have some rude notions on that subject, too;—some dim impression that nature intended them for some other ends than to be sold in the shambles, as the ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... the intoxication of her first gold and turquoise day at Monte Carlo. A sense of loneliness—such as a solitary dove might feel in a wilderness of evil bats—oppressed her. Had she not been aware that she was a remarkably attractive woman and the object of innumerable glances, she would have cried. And twenty louis pitched into unprofitable space! Yet she stood ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... that he was really alone. It seemed incredible that in all that huge expanse of sand he should be the only moving, living being, yet, though he knew that there were living creatures in the desert—jackals and other prowling things, and a whole host of bats and tiny insects—they gave no sign of their presence, and it seemed to him that he was the only live ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... up, the moon is up! The larks begin to fly, And, like a drowsy buttercup, Dark Phoebus skims the sky, The elephant, with cheerful voice, Sings blithely on the spray; The bats and beetles all rejoice, Then let me, ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... the owls delight to hoot, the bats go whirring past, the moonbeams surely cast their kindest rays; by day the pigeons coo from the topmost boughs their tales of love, while squirrels sit blinking merrily, or run their Silvios on their ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... on all its surroundings a mild reflecting gleam. Richberta was cold and indifferent to either the pleasures or sorrows of her fellow-men. When night casts her shades upon the earth, all the sweet bright birds and butterflies hide and make room for a host of ghastly animals like owls and bats. So in Richberta's soul all her soft qualities had gone to sleep for want of the tender gleam of love, and only dark and harsh feelings haunted her soul. Immense pride in her own wealth, a bitter envy towards those who possessed more than she did, ...
— Legends of the Rhine • Wilhelm Ruland
... other influence, but the wild drawn face seemed gradually to lose some of its hardness and unhappiness. Every day, through the long monotonous hours, the song of his little guest would come up in snatches to the lonely watcher, and at evening, when the vesper-bell was ringing and the great grey bats slid out of their hiding-places in the belfry roof, the bright-eyed bird would return, twitter a few sleepy notes, and nestle into the arms that were waiting for him. Those were happy days for the Dark Image. Only the great bell of the Cathedral rang out daily its mocking ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... town three days ago, Ana. And the bats also may have flown from the town. Hark to the wailing. Was ever such a ...
— Moon of Israel • H. Rider Haggard
... the spit were the Harpies' brood, Which the bard sang near Cremona, With a garnish of bats in their leathern wings imp't; And the fish was—two delicate slices crimp't, Of ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... began to dispute as to whether or not the flames lighted this evening would continue to burn, and to cast henceforth their cheerful glow on meadow, fields, and woods; and as they doubted whether the new order of things had strength enough to endure, the smoke drove the bats from their home in the chimney, and they came flapping down stupefied on the summit of the tower, while the owls in its crevices shook their round heads and hooted in ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... takes the basket as she says it, and goes into the kitchen. I hurry over this, and go into the little sitting-room. There is a tray with a glass of milk and some oaten cakes upon the table. I am too disturbed to sit down; I stand at the window and watch the bats flitter in the gathering moonlight, and listen with quivering nerves for her step—perhaps she will send for the tray, and not come after all. What a fool I am to be disturbed by a grey-clad witch with a tantalizing mouth! That comes of loafing about doing nothing. ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... the moon was so bright and clear that the shadows of my solitary figure and the "telegraph-postes" were as black and sharp as at noonday. Bats were flitting about up and down. A white owl flew silently across the road. Rabbits were playing in the fields in the silver light. It was all very beautiful, but a little lonely and eerie. I hadn't passed a ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... a dreadful story about the bats, that the servants told—I dare say you never heard it; and I kept thinking. 'Suppose they were at the windows now, behind the blinds.' And then I was afraid to look at the bed; I fancied ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... ghosts to realms of night or day, Points out the long uncomfortable way. Trembling the spectres glide, and plaintive vent Thin hollow screams, along the deep descent. As in the cavern of some rifty den, Where flock nocturnal bats and birds obscene, Cluster'd they hang, till at some sudden shock, They move, and murmurs run through all the rock: So cowering fled the sable heaps of ghosts; And such a scream fill'd all ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... all tennis rackets, golf clubs, baseball bats * * * balls of all kinds, including baseballs * * * sold by the manufacturer, producer, or importer * * *" as applied to articles sold by a manufacturer to a commission merchant for exportation, held a tax on exports within the prohibition of ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... farmers and even peasants with petitions to present, lawyers and their clients, and I know not who besides, through which of all these none were suffered to advance beyond a certain mark where the light began to fall. Speaking in whispers all of these folk flitted to and fro like bats in a tomb. ...
— Moon of Israel • H. Rider Haggard
... wriggled through a big crack or cleft in the side of the mountain for about one hundred feet, when we emerged into a large dome-shaped passage, the abode during certain seasons of the year of innumerable bats, and at all times of primeval darkness. There were various other crannies and pit-holes opening into it, some of which we explored. The voice of running water was everywhere heard, betraying the proximity of the little stream by whose ceaseless corroding the cave and its ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... fell with the dews at even— Her tears fell ere the dews were dried; She could not look on the sweet heaven, Either at morn or eventide. After the flitting of the bats, When thickest dark did trance the sky, She drew her casement-curtain by, And glanced athwart the glooming flats. She only said, "The night is dreary— He cometh not," she said; She said, "I am aweary, weary, I would ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... charcoal-burner, nor of other human being, was seen. Night came, and thick darkness settled around; and all the demons of the forest came forth, and clamored and chattered, and shrieked and howled. But Siegfried was not afraid. The bats and vampires came out of their hiding-places, and flapped their clammy wings in his face; and he thought that he saw ogres and many fearful creatures peeping out from behind every tree and shrub. But, when he looked upwards through the overhanging tree-tops, ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin
... and ignorant dull ages Will quite be swallowed in oblivion; And though this hope by many surly Sages Be now derided, yet they'll all be gone In a short time, like Bats and Owls yflone At dayes approch. This will hap certainly At this worlds shining conflagration. Fayes, Satyrs, Goblins the night merrily May spend, but ruddy Sol shall make them all ...
— Democritus Platonissans • Henry More
... wouldn't deny their guilt. Their condign punishment was to be "fives-batted" publicly in Big School—in which, however, they regained very considerable popularity by the way they took a "spanking" without turning a hair, though it cost no less than a dozen bats before ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... Temple's innermost Shrine is set, Where the bats and shadows dwell, The worn and ancient Symbol of Life, at rest In its oval shell, By which the men, who, of old, the land possessed, Represented their Great Destroying Power. I cannot forget That, just as my life was touching its fullest flower, Love came and destroyed it all in ...
— India's Love Lyrics • Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (AKA Laurence Hope), et al.
... to see the blue sky and breathe the free air again, for the bad odor of the bats which inhabited the tower almost suffocated me. But how terrible the cold was in that cage, open to every wind, and how dazzlingly the snow shone over twenty leagues of country! All the little city of Phalsbourg, with its six bastions, ...
— The Conscript - A Story of the French war of 1813 • Emile Erckmann
... one of the party in Bedlam that night. The room lay at the extreme end of the corridor, round a corner, so that it was in a manner shut off from the rest of the wing. It was an extraordinary place. Stretched on the walls, dried or drying, were specimens of every possible variety,—bats, frogs, snake skins, bird skins. Along the mantelpiece were jars and bottles, all containing other specimens preserved in spirits. In one corner stood part of a human skeleton. It stood on one leg, with a jaunty air, having indeed but one leg to stand on; both arms were wanting, ...
— Peggy • Laura E. Richards
... store yesterday," hastily put in Lady Feng, "I noticed that there were still in those boxes, made of large planks, several rolls of 'cicada wing' gauze of silvery red colour. There were also several rolls with designs of twigs of flowers of every kind, several with 'the rolling clouds and bats' pattern, and several with figures representing hundreds of butterflies, interspersed among flowers. The colours of all these were fresh, and the gauze supple. But I failed to see anything of the kind you speak of. Were two rolls taken (from those I referred to), and a couple of bed-covers ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... whistlings speaking to him."(1) Whistling is also the language of the ghosts in New Caledonia, where Mr. Atkinson informs us that he has occasionally put an able-bodied Kaneka to ignominious flight by whistling softly in the dusk. The ghosts in Homer make a similar sound, "and even as bats flit gibbering in the secret place of a wondrous cavern,... even so the souls gibbered as they fared together" (Odyssey, xxiv. 5). "The familiar spirits make him" (that Zulu sorcerer) "acquainted with what is about ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... tells us that bats possessed the power of rendering the eggs of storks unfruitful. Accordingly, when once a stork's egg was touched by a bat it became sterile; and in order to preserve it from the injurious influence, the stork placed in its nest some branches of the maple, which frightened away every ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... swallows are asleep; The bats are flitting fast in the gray air; The slow soft toads out of damp corners creep; And evening's breath, wandering here and there Over the quivering surface of the stream, Wakes not one ripple from its silent dream. ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... was shining at intervals, for the night was partially clouded. There seemed to be nobody stirring, though his attention was unusually awake, and he could hear the whirr of the bats overhead, and the pulsating croak of the frogs in the distant pools and marshes. Presently he detected the sound of hoofs at some distance, and, looking forward, saw a horseman coming in his direction. The moon was under a cloud at the moment, and he could only observe ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... rows, fish commonly known by the name carpet shark; batfish, a sort of reddish isosceles triangle half a meter long, whose pectoral fins are attached by fleshy extensions that make these fish look like bats, although an appendage made of horn, located near the nostrils, earns them the nickname of sea unicorns; lastly, a couple species of triggerfish, the cucuyo whose stippled flanks glitter with a sparkling gold color, and the bright ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... heavy, boy. No son o' Baldur could keep a light heart in them. Sure ye'd be as much out o' place as a sunbeam in a cave o' bats. If ye care not for your own comfort think o' the poor lad in the green chair. He's that proud and pleased to see them on ye it would be a shame to reject his offer. Sure, if they were dry yer own garments would be good enough, God knows, ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... dead. The historicity of the tale of Julnar the Sea Born and her son King Badr [75] seemed established, Queen Lab and her forbidding escort might have appeared at any moment. On all sides were bowing walls and tenantless houses. Poisonous plants covered the site of the Viceregal Palace, and monster bats hung by their heels at the corners of tombs. Thoughts of Camoens continued to impinge on his mind, and in imagination he saw his hero dungeoned and laid in iron writing his Lusiads. A visit to the tomb of St. Francis Xavier also deeply moved him. To pathos succeeded ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... their shrieks and groans in the dungeon in which she was thrust; a most awful black hole, full of bats, rats, mice, toads, frogs, mosquitoes, bugs, fleas, serpents, and every kind of horror. No light was let into it, otherwise the gaolers might have seen her and fallen in love with her, as an owl that lived up in the roof of the tower ...
— The Rose and the Ring • William Makepeace Thackeray
... College servants flitted round the groups to take instructions, and, if so might be, to extract the balances of extortionate bills out of their departing masters. Dog-fanciers were there also, holding terriers; and scouts from the cricketing grounds, with bats and pads under their arms; and hostlers, and men from the boats, all on the same errand of getting the last shilling out of their patrons—a fawning, obsequious crowd for the most part, with here and there a sturdy Briton who felt that he was only ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... He's not mad, far from it. He's just a bit queer—he's got 'bats in the belfry', as men say. He gets these attacks when he's at home in the dark winter days and has nothing to occupy him. But there's little sign of it in the summer. ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... is very often seen Flying perchance around the village green; But unlike many other bats, its flight Is always made by day and not by night. There may be one exception though,—and that Is when it's aimed at ...
— A Phenomenal Fauna • Carolyn Wells
... shedding upon the earth's surface an illumination somewhat akin to full moonlight. Usually the planet Venus and a few stars shine out the while in the darkened heaven. Meantime around the observer animal and plant life behave as at nightfall. Birds go to roost, bats fly out, worms come to the surface of the ground, flowers close up. In the Norwegian eclipse of 1896 fish were seen rising to the surface of the water. When the total phase at length is over, and the moon in her progress across the sky has allowed the brilliant disc of the sun to spring into ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... comrades in arms, and a unit in counsel. Their views were in full accord as to the necessity of immediately reducing Camp Jackson. Defiance was daily passing between the marshalling hosts, not face to face, but through dubious partisans who passed from camp to camp, flitting like the bats of fable in the confines of conflict. Capt. Lyon's decision, urged thereto by Col. Blair, was made without calling a council of the rest of his advisers. They heard of it, however, and, though brave and loyal men all, they gathered around him in his ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... thriving community, and boasted of a good nine, with whom the St. Louis team expected to cross bats a number of times during the training season. Then, too, in nearby towns, were other teams, some of them semi-professional, who would be called on to sacrifice themselves that the Cardinals might have something to bring out their ...
— Baseball Joe in the Big League - or, A Young Pitcher's Hardest Struggles • Lester Chadwick
... you listen or look, there is not a wave of the wing—the wing never waves! A bird without a feather! a beast that flies! and so cold! as cold as a fish! It is the most supernatural-seeming of natural things. And then to see how when the windows are open at night those bats come sailing ... without a sound—and go ... you cannot guess where!—fade ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... said the Philosopher. "It has been suggested that we go to sleep at night because it is then too dark to do anything else; but owls, who are a venerably sagacious folk, do not sleep in the night time. Bats, also, are a very clear-minded race; they sleep in the broadest day, and they do it in a charming manner. They clutch the branch of a tree with their toes and hang head downwards—a position which I consider singularly ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... immense army of crows, rooks, ravens, screech-owls, and all birds of ill-omen was heard, and at the same instant a huge owl skimmed up to the Princess, and threw over her a scarf woven of spiders' webs and embroidered with bats' wings. And then peals of mocking laughter rang through the air, and they guessed that this was another of the Fairy ...
— The Red Fairy Book • Various
... hour of the day calls into action another race of animals.... When the sun goes down, most of the animals retire to rest ... myriads of luminous beetles now begin to fly about like ignes fatui, and the blood-sucking bats hover like phantoms in the profound darkness of the night.... The traveller does not here meet with the impressions of those sublime and rugged high Alps of Europe, nor, on the other hand, those of a meaner ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... villagers, who busied themselves with watching and reporting the progress of events at Collingwood. Fires were kindled on the marble hearths, and the flames went roaring up the broad-mouthed chimneys, frightening from their nests of many years the croaking swallows, and scaring away the bats, which had so long held holiday in the deserted rooms. Partitions were removed, folding doors were made, windows were cut down, and large panes of glass were substituted for those of more ancient date. ...
— Darkness and Daylight • Mary J. Holmes
... in destroying insects. So of toads and bats. No one should ever be wantonly killed. Boys, old or young, should never be allowed to shoot birds, or disturb their nests, only as they would domestic fowls, for actual use. A wanton recklessness is exhibited about our cities and ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... Green reptiles crawled along the horizontal branches. Parrakeets, a colony of saucy green and red balls, screamed and protested from the lower zones. An agile monkey swung from one of the long sweeping vines, and scolded at us from another tree. Bats, owls, and crows inhabited the upper regions, while the buzzards perched like evil ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... unfastened, falls. And behold! a darling little fairy of about twelve or fifteen years of age, slim, and already a coquette, already a woman—dressed in a long robe of shaded dark-blue china crape, covered with embroidery representing bats-gray bats, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... into ruins, and stars twinkled among their shattered and darkened walls. The moon burned icily above the eastern hills. The nightingales (or John was no true prophet) sang better than they had ever sung before, while bats, hither, thither, flew in startling zig-zags, as if waltzing to the music. And all the air was sweet with the breath of ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... the study of our church bells has made great progress, and many volumes have been written upon the bells of various counties. Too long have our bells been left to the bats and birds, and the belfry is often the only portion of a church which is left uncared for. We are learning better now, and the bells which have sounded forth the joys and sorrows of our villagers for so many generations are ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... vegetables is being used, and consequently only half an egg is needed; the other half should then be reserved for this purpose.) Arrange a circle of balls on a hot dish, have ready the carrots boiled, slice them rather thickly and shape them into the form of tennis bats; place them in the centre, and pour the sauce over them. If curried sauce be used, rice may either be served separately, or a border of it placed round ...
— New Vegetarian Dishes • Mrs. Bowdich
... as it goes. Gives me beans upon occasion, for which Max always swears at me as if it were my fault. I'm not allowed to see by artificial light at all, so after sunset I join the bats. Lucky for me the sun sits up late just now. By the way, I had a positively gushing epistle from old Badgers this morning. He seems almost hysterical at the thought of getting me back again; says that married or single, I've got to go." Noel stopped to take in a long breath of ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... rid of them and substituted clothing for this purpose, except on the top of our heads; but their roots also are very richly supplied with nerves so that they form almost a sort of feelers, or organs of sense. Many animals that move about much in the dark, like cats and bats, for instance, have their lips or faces studded with long, delicate, stiff hairs called whiskers, which act in this way and prevent their bumping into objects in the dark. And it is probable that the bristling of the hair on ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... whisper of the Wolverine where it swept, deep and strong; its strident chatter to a fling of gravel at occasional bends in the stream; its sucking snarl over a sunken boulder. The movements and whistlings of owls and bats in the dark, moss-clung corridors on either side were quite distinct; so were the whines and snorts of weasels and other small animals, noisy in the underbrush. And undertoning all other sounds, unceasing, like a hidden menace, rose the drone ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... any chance ever saw a sign of life. It was a ruin like those pretentious deserted structures sometimes seen in frontier towns—relics of the wide-open days, which stand afterward, stark and sombre, to serve as bats' nests or blind-pigs. The inn at Calabasas looked its part—a haunt of rustlers, a haven of nameless ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... writings is best shown by a cursory examination of the work last mentioned.[20] There we are introduced to a bewildering array of mirabilia, snakes, hippopotami, scorpions, giant-lobsters, forest-men, bats, elephants, bearded women, dog-headed people, griffins, white women with long hair and canine teeth, fire-spouting birds, trees that grow and vanish in the course of a single day, mountains of adamant, and finally sacred sun-trees and moon-trees ...
— The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany • Arthur F. J. Remy
... mulberry orchards were cut down, and much of his property was wrested from him. He was beaten and stoned, and his name cast out as vile. When they were building the church he brought a basket full of stones and brick-bats, which had been thrown through his windows, to be incorporated in the foundation wall. He described the effect of persecution in his own case, thus: "The truth in my heart was like a stake slightly driven into soft ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume II. • Rufus Anderson
... temple there was no sound but the rustling of the bats' wings as they flew in before dawn, or sometimes the chirping of a swallow which had lost its way, and was frightened to see all the grim marble faces gazing at it. But the quietness did me good, and I waited, hoping that the young King of Sweden would marry, ...
— Wonder-Box Tales • Jean Ingelow
... orders of placental mammals, neither the Whales, nor the hoofed creatures, nor the Sloths and Ant-eaters, nor the carnivorous Cats, Dogs, and Bears, still less the Rodent Rats and Rabbits, or the Insectivorous Moles and Hedgehogs, or the Bats, could claim our 'Homo', as ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... And heavy with the scent of steaming leaves, And rosebuds mouldering on the dripping porch; One twilight, without rise or set of sun, Till beetles drone along the hollow lane, And round the leafless hawthorns, flitting bats Hawk the pale moths of winter? Welcome then At best, the flying gleam, the flying shower, The rain-pools glittering on the long white roads, And shadows sweeping on from down to down Before the salt Atlantic gale: yet come In whatsoever garb, or gay, or sad, Come fair, come foul, 'twill still ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley
... would explain why there are no mammalia in islands far from continents, except bats, which can reach them by flying; and also why the birds, insects, plants, and other inhabitants of islands, even when specifically unlike, usually agree generically with those of the nearest continent, it being assumed that the original stock of such species ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... light, Like the dragon that strangles the moon in the night; Fierce sphinxes, long serpents, and asps of the south; Wild birds of huge beak, and all horrors that drouth Engenders of slime in the land of the pest, Vile shapes without shape, and foul bats of the West, Bringing Night on their wings; and the bodies wherein Great Brahma imprisons the spirits of sin, Many-handed, that blent in one phantom of fight Like a Titan, and threatfully warr'd with the light; I have heard the wild shriek that gave signal to close, When ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... this voyage, the admiral, called the Castle of Comfort, George Fenner general[293] of the expedition, and William Bats master; the May-Flower, vice-admiral, William Courtise master; the George, John Heiwood captain, and John Smith of Hampton master; besides a small pinnace. Walter Wren, the writer of the narrative, belonged to ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... place on the prairie, or in winter, on a frozen lake or river, is chosen. Each player has a sort of bat, called "T-ke-cha-ps-cha," about thirty two inches long with a hoop at the lower end four or five inches in diameter, interlaced with thongs of deer-skin, forming a sort of pocket. With these bats they catch and throw the ball. Stakes are set as bounds at a considerable distance from the centre on either side. Two parties are then formed, and each chooses a leader or chief. The ball (T-pa) is then thrown up half way between the bounds, and the game begins, the contestants ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... chase, Winds drive it to Misery's seas, Laughs ascend from sequestered well, Thro' shadows vague it hears its shame. And tomb-thrown groans and sighs we hear— Tho' midnight's near and afrite's sleep: An Owl, perturbed at some strange sound, Scares bats in space and wings for domes. All signs of woe hath flown with fear, No maidens heave their breasts and weep, All wrecks of Flesh lie on the ground, Removed from shoals where Terror moans. On skulls that some in Death hath ...
— Betelguese - A Trip Through Hell • Jean Louis de Esque
... a challenge, not a truce! This is my homage to the mightier powers, To ask my boldest question, undismayed By muttered threats that some hysteric sense Of wrong or insult will convulse the throne Where wisdom reigns supreme; and if I err, They all must err who have to feel their way As bats that fly at noon; for what are we But creatures of the night, dragged forth by day, Who needs must stumble, and with stammering steps Spell out their paths in ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Copyright © 2025 Dictionary One.com
|
|
|
