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More "Butterfly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... should one speak of Paris, as to say, "Would that our lord might see thee go so gay About his house!" Gently she'd bend her head Down to her breast and pluck a vagrant thread Forth from her tunic's hem, and looking wise, Gaze at her hand which on her bosom's rise Lit like a butterfly and quivered there. Now in the dusk, with Paris otherwhere At council with the chieftains, into the hall To Helen there, was come, adventuring all, Odysseus in the garb of countryman, A herdsman from the hills, with stain of tan Upon his neck and arms, with staff and ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... tell but that very night, the Spirit of God will touch that man's heart and transform him into one of the holiest and most useful of men. It has often occurred in the past and will doubtless often occur in the future. There sits before you a woman, who is a mere butterfly of fashion. She seems to have no thought above society and pleasure and adulation. Why preach to her? Without the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit, it would be foolishness and a waste of time; but you can never tell, perhaps this very night the ...
— The Person and Work of The Holy Spirit • R. A. Torrey
... his eyes on one huge bud. He saw it swell, burst, spread out its passionate purple velvet, lift the broad flower face to the light for a joyous minute. A few seconds later a butterfly lighted airily to sample its nectar and to brush the pollen from its yellow dusted wings. Scarcely had the winged visitor flown away than the purple petals began to wither and fall away, leaving the seed pod on the stem. The visible change went on in this seed ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... followed from a third party about the 'Butterfly's' having run herself off her legs the first time she ever ran at all; and ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... in a tight riding-dress of green velour cloth, and her white face seemed to come from the close collar like a white lily from its sheath. She was e'er flower-like, asleep or waking, as I have said, and her pretty head was sleek and yellow, like a butterfly's wing. She was so sound that it appeared to me and Marian as though one longer breath might transform the mimicry into the actual thing—death. But by-and-by awe fell from us, as it doth ever fall, even in the presence of that which hath awed us, and my wife and I did return to our discourse ...
— A Brother To Dragons and Other Old-time Tales • Amelie Rives
... As yet the leaves had not begun to fall; they held tenaciously to the living branches, fluttering light heads in the first autumn chill. In the underbrush, where the deerberry showed hectic blotches, a squirrel worked busily, completing its winter store, while in the slanting sun rays a tawny butterfly, like a wind-blown, loosened tiger lily, danced its last mad ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... thence to Australia, are feigned to be able to send their souls away, while their bodies lie passive in the magical tent. The soul wanders over the earthly world, and even to the home of the dead, and returns, in the shape of a butterfly or of a serpent, to the body which has been lying motionless, but uncorruptible, in apparent death. The Indian Yogis can attain that third state of being, all three being unknown to Brahma, which is neither sleeping nor ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... I suppose) when the most aesthetic of souls will forget the snow of lilies, and the down of a butterfly's wing, to revel in the grosser joys of, say, a beefsteak. One cannot rhapsodize upon the beauties of a sunset, or contemplate the pale witchery of the moon with any real degree of poetic fervor, or any degree of comfort, while hunger gnaws at one's vitals, for comfort is ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... to see the various objects around him, though he took very little notice of them. It was a strange thing for him to be shut up in such a place, with no green trees, or grass, or flowers around; but having never turned into a butterfly before, he did not know that there was any thing ...
— Rollo's Museum • Jacob Abbott
... it, careless of consequences. Fortunate for them is it that their summer, is a short one, and the parwong not abundant, or cholera might be added to the other dangers of Arctic residence. But the days of the buttercup and the daisy, and of the butterfly and the mosquito are few. With the winter comes the all-pervading snow, and the keen, bracing north-west wind, the rosy cheek and the frozen nose; but with it also comes rugged health and a steady diet of ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... shall improve. Julia, my dear, you must not allow yourself to be too much excited, you must not. Indeed you must not. Mrs Wititterly is of a most excitable nature, Sir Mulberry. The snuff of a candle, the wick of a lamp, the bloom on a peach, the down on a butterfly. You might blow her away, my lord; you might ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... feeling; without the slightest hesitation or fear of its escaping him, he seizes upon the most delicate, rarest, and mildest emotion, and holds it fast, as though it had hardened at his touch, despite the fact that it may seem like the frailest butterfly to every one else. His music is never vague or dreamy; everything that is allowed to speak through it, whether it be of man or of nature, has a strictly individual passion; storm and fire acquire the ruling power of a personal ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... though it was low in the sky, and its rays glittered on the fine webs on the grass. The leaves shivered in the soft breeze; the wood-pigeon cooed; the lark sang loud enough to make himself hoarse; the sparrows chirped; the bee buzzed, and a yellow butterfly perched on great ...
— The National Nursery Book - With 120 illustrations • Unknown
... does the sleigh, and the house is surpassed next month by a larger and finer one, and as you can't carry it about to show folks, you soon find it is too expensive to invite them to come and admire it. But the wife; oh, Lord! In a general way, there ain't more difference between a grub and a butterfly, than between a sweetheart and wife. Yet the grub and the butterfly is the same thing, only, differently rigged out, and so is the sweetheart and wife. Both critters crawl about the house, and ain't very attractive to look at, and both turn out ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... barrels; also with an extremely handsome young woman, dressed in an astonishing variety of colours. She was high-coloured and frank-eyed, with a great quantity of very black hair twisted into many amazing shapes on the top of her head. In manner she was as brisk as a bee and as restless as a butterfly; and being adorned with a vast quantity of bracelets, and lockets, and brooches, all of gaudy patterns, jingled at every movement. This young lady was Miss Bell Mosk, whom the frequenters of The Derby Winner called 'a dashing beauty,' and Mrs Pansey 'a painted jade.' With her glittering ornaments, ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... one day, I gathered a nosegay of wild flowers, including a species of yellow poppy, anent which Kingigamoot cherishes a pretty superstition. This flower blossoms in profusion about mid June around Cape Prince of Wales, and by the end of July has withered away. Simultaneously a tiny golden butterfly makes its appearance for about a fortnight, and also disappears. I was gravely informed by perhaps the greatest inebriate in the village that the poppy and the insect bear a similar name, for when the former has bloomed for a while it develops a pair of wings and flies away to return ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... principally in order that others, when they looked on the display, might be awed into deference, if not into admiration, by exact knowledge of the number of dollars which dangled from the shoulders of the fashionable butterfly. This boastful parade of information as to how much one expends in this or that article implies an undertone of vulgarity peculiar to those who have nothing but money to be proud of. The cultivated and truly genteel mind is never guilty of it. Yet it somehow ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... a greater array of brooches than had ever been seen together at one time since Cranford was a town, did Mrs Forrester, and Miss Matty, and Miss Pole appear on that memorable Tuesday evening. I counted seven brooches myself on Miss Pole's dress. Two were fixed negligently in her cap (one was a butterfly made of Scotch pebbles, which a vivid imagination might believe to be the real insect); one fastened her net neckerchief; one her collar; one ornamented the front of her gown, midway between her throat ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... had looked upon as a charming butterfly, but who, no doubt, had long shown her native shrewdness and determination in the home, stepped into her husband's shoes when he collapsed from strain, abetted by drink, and now competes in the insurance business with the best of the men. But she had borne the last of her children ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... over these? "Truly," the Saturday Review wrote, "when little Jenny had climbed to the top of the mast, resting on the powerful shoulders of Orso, and from this eminence, suspended above the earth, in danger of death, she outstretched her arms and poised like a butterfly, the circus became silent and all eyes and hearts followed with trembling the movements of this wonderful child. That he who saw her on the mast or on a horse," concluded the Saturday Review, "will never ...
— Sielanka: An Idyll • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... physical body is merely a temporary vehicle for the soul which the latter discards at the proper time. It has nothing to do with the real being of the soul. It is merely the shell which is discarded by the soul, as the chrysalis shell is discarded by the butterfly when it spreads its wings for its aerial flight ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... Off hunting for gophers, I suppose. But here are the travelers at last," and he hurried down the road toward the approaching train, the cat bounding along at his side, or running off every few feet, now this way, now that, to chase a butterfly or mosquito hawk. Once, in her haste to overtake her master, she encountered a horned toad. With a spring to one side, and a loud "spst!" she passed it, for this pet of Father Uria was acquainted with these hated objects, but could never overcome her intense horror of them. We are ...
— Old Mission Stories of California • Charles Franklin Carter
... herself; and Mrs. Clinton was not one to perform a mother's duty faithfully in instilling right views of life into her daughter's mind. Thus, with a depth of feeling, and rich gifts of mind, Alice fluttered on her way like a light-winged butterfly, her soul's pure wells of tender thought unknown to her. How many millions pass through a whole long life, with the deepest and holiest secrets of their being still unlocked by their heedless hands! How few see aught to live for, but the outward sunshine of prosperity, which is an ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... with little incoherent murmurs, gazed at him, wept over him, kissed him again. All the troubles of the intervening days of sadness and privation faded away from her like a disused chrysalis, and she sparkled with life and love like a butterfly new born. ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... that man his ability to write and say what he thought. I studied his profile and admired its worldly distinction. It was a fine modern profile, the straightness of it broken by the silken point of his well-kept moustache, by the perfect curve of his shoulder, and by the butterfly's wing of ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... the long, long summer hours, The golden light should lie, And thick young herbs and groups of flowers Stand in their beauty by. The oriole should build and tell His love-tale close beside my cell; The idle butterfly Should rest him here, and there be heard The ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... hurried departure. Could he have been ignorant that ours is, in general, greater than the Periclean for the very reason that the Divinity is neither the devil nor a bungler; that three thousand years of human consciousness is not nothing; that a whole is greater than its part, and a butterfly than a chrysalis? But it was the assumption that it was therefore in any way great in the abstract that occasioned my profound astonishment, and indeed contempt. Civilisation, if it means anything, can ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... the old Louise," said the major merrily; "still the gay, coquettish, unsteady butterfly, who, with its bright, variegated wings, knows how to escape, even when fairly caught in the toils. I love you just as you are, Louise; I rejoice to find you just what I left you. You will make me young again, child; by your side I will learn again to laugh and ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... the same manner by each individual, performed with eager delight by each breed, and without the end being known,—for the young pointer can no more know that he points to aid his master, than the white butterfly knows why she lays her eggs on the leaf of the cabbage,—I cannot see that these actions differ essentially from true instincts. If we were to see one kind of wolf, when young and without any training, as soon as it scented its prey, stand motionless like a statue, and then slowly crawl ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... mysterious coves, or strike across the slanting sunlight poured from clefts in the impendent hills. Inshore the substance of the ice sparkled here and there with iridescence like the plumelets of a butterfly's wing under the microscope, wherever light happened to catch the jagged or oblique flaws ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... go on excursions for sport, guides would be placed at their disposal, and that all who wished to do so could at any time travel through the country without the slightest fear of molestation. For some time affairs remained in the same condition. The doctor went daily on shore with butterfly and beetle nets, tin boxes, and other paraphernalia. He was generally accompanied by a couple of bluejackets, and always took a native guide to prevent the risk of being lost in the jungle, and also because the man was able ...
— Among Malay Pirates - And Other Tales Of Adventure And Peril • G. A. Henty
... know the answer! Bless you, my treasure! I must go to my housekeeping. Dear Donito Miguelito is staying with us now; you can fancy the joy of tending this saintly old man in his feebleness. I prepare myself the little dishes that please him; it is a sacred task; it is like feeding a holy butterfly. ...
— Fernley House • Laura E. Richards
... hear him. It seemed that the butterfly in her was crushed, as Dr. Forden and Miss ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... draperies and tragic pearls of the labyrinth he had made for her. Grimshaw offered no apologies. He was the uncrowned laureate and kings can do no wrong. He was painted by the young Sargent, of course, and by the aging Whistler—you remember the butterfly's portrait of him in a yellow kimono leaning against a black mantel? I, for one, think he was vastly amused by all this fury of admiration; he despised it and fed upon it. If he had been less great, he would have been utterly destroyed ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... obliged to suppress, as well as he could, from the fear of being supposed to laugh at the passers-by: Sabine's shawl hung on his arm. Specht had, by a bold coup de main, possessed himself of her parasol, and walked on, hoping that some falling blossom, some passing butterfly, might afford him a pretext for beginning a conversation with her. But this was no easy matter, for Fink was on the other side. He was in one of his most malevolent moods, and Sabine could not help laughing against her will at his unmerciful ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... is making a meditation on any subject, the memory of it is lost at once, just as if it had never been thought of. If it reads, what is read is not remembered nor dwelt upon; neither is it otherwise with vocal prayer. Accordingly, the restless little butterfly of the memory has its wings burnt now, and it cannot fly. The will must be fully occupied in loving, but it understands not how it loves; the understanding, if it understands, does not understand how it understands—at ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila
... that silk [61] is originally spun from the bowels of a caterpillar, and that it composes the golden tomb, from whence a worm emerges in the form of a butterfly. Till the reign of Justinian, the silk-worm who feed on the leaves of the white mulberry-tree were confined to China; those of the pine, the oak, and the ash, were common in the forests both of Asia and Europe; but as their education is more difficult, and their produce ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... stimulate his fancy. Some beautiful spring day, perhaps, after he has enjoyed an excursion to a field or meadow or wood, he will want to follow Andersen's Thumbelina in her travels. He will follow her as she floats on a lily pad, escapes a frog of a husband, rides on a butterfly, lives in the house of a field-mouse, escapes a mole of a husband, and then rides on the back of a friendly swallow to reach the south land and to become queen of the flowers. Here there is much play of fancy. But even when the episodes are homely and ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... arresting its flight, hovered waiting. So soon as I came under its radiance, it flew slowly on, lingering now and then above spots where the ground was rocky. Every time I looked up, it seemed to have grown larger, and at length gave me an attendant shadow. Plainly a bird-butterfly, it flew with a certain swallowy double. Its wings were very large, nearly square, and flashed all the colours of the rainbow. Wondering at their splendour, I became so absorbed in their beauty that I stumbled over a low rock, and ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... I know him better, and he says some very bright things occasionally. This is the poem. I am sending it so that you'll see how mistaken I was at first in assuming that Mrs. Blythe was just a kind-hearted little social butterfly, who had taken up housing betterment as a fad. Some of the divine fire that inspired the great reformers of all the ages must burn in her soul, or she couldn't have written this poem that she calls ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston
... absent from home the greater part of the time and could not attend to the education of his little girl as he would like to do. His wife was not of our faith and was also too busily occupied to look after the child. He did not mention that her occupation was that of society butterfly, who sacrificed homelife, husband and child in the pursuit of pleasure. Would Reverend Mother kindly undertake the charge of his little Nita's education, spiritual as well as intellectual? Would she be to the child what father and mother ought to be ...
— The Alchemist's Secret • Isabel Cecilia Williams
... figure, in act of stealing the rigid form, and to the awful yet strangely beautiful face of the messenger of gloom, she had given the streaming hair, the sunken, cavernous but wonderfully radiant eyes of Moritz Retzsch's weird image of Death. A white butterfly fluttered upward, and in mid-air—neither descending nor drifting, but waiting—poised on outspread pinions, hovered the Angel of the Resurrection holding out his hands. Behind and beneath the Destroyer, rolled dense shadows, and all the light in this picture rayed out from the plumes above, ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... autumnal colchicum begin to appear; a month after Gouts and Rheumatisms, for which they grow, have left Vichy and are returned to Paris for the winter. We arrived long before this, in the midst of the butterfly month of July. It was warm enough then for a more southern summer, and both insect and vegetable life seemed at their acme. The flowers, even while the scythes were gleaming that were shortly to unfound ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... absent:—your house affairs must call you hence—or you have directions to give to your children—or the room is too hot, or too cold—the window must be opened—or door shut—or the candle wants snuffing. Nay, without these interruptions, the simple motion of your eye may provoke a speaker; a butterfly, or the figure in a carpet may engage your attention in preference to him; or if these objects be absent, the simply averting your eye, looking through the window in quest of outward objects, will show that your mind has not been abstracted, and will display to him at least your wish ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... forward a little, holding on with his left hand. Next instant in the light of the rising sun I saw a knife flash, saw also that the point of it had been driven through the lower lip of Jana's trunk, pinning it to the bough like a butterfly ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... rather haystack roofed over, and with hay protruding and hanging out. An ox feeding, and putting up his muzzle to pull down a mouthful of hay; but seeing me, a stranger, in the upper part of the field, he remains long gazing, and finally betakes himself to feeding again. A solitary butterfly flitting to and fro, blown slightly on its course by a cool September wind,—the coolness of which begins to be tempered by a bright, glittering sun. There is dew on the grass. In front, beyond ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and Harris, early in the nineteenth century, we encounter examples more nearly typical of the child's book as we regard it to-day. Among them Harris's "Cabinet" is noticeable. The first four volumes, "The Butterfly's Ball," "The Peacock at Home," "The Lion's Masquerade," and "The Elephant's Ball," were reprinted a few years ago, with the original illustrations by Mulready carefully reproduced. A coloured ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... been people silly enough to be led away by sights, sounds, colours, and unrealities, to follow a course of life for which they are not suited, either by education, position, or tastes. No one acts the part of a butterfly among school-boys better than the black-eyed Gipsy girl has done among "fast-goers," swells, and fops. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred she has trotted them out to perfection and then left them in the lurch, and those, when they have come to their ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... want with Victorine?' demanded the bonne. 'Is not the old mother enough for one while, to feast her eyes on her an' Lanty Callaghan, now he has shed the marmiton's slough, and come out in old Ireland's colours, like a butterfly from a palmer? La Jeunesse, instead of Laurent ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the Monarch Butterfly may be collected upon the milkweed and brought in, so that the whole life history or metamorphosis of this beautiful insect, from the egg through the larva or caterpillar stage and the pupa or chrysalis stage to the adult butterfly, ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... beginning to steal into the room. How strange it seemed. Except for the glazed rotunda part its long walls, divided into narrow panels separated by an order of flat pilasters, presented, depicted on a black background and in vivid colours, slender women with butterfly wings and lean youths with narrow birds' wings. The effect was supposed to be Pompeiian and Rita and I had often laughed at the delirious fancy of some enriched shopkeeper. But still it was a display of fancy, a ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... indifference to mice pleases me better than it pleases my household. From an economic point of view, Lux is not worth her salt. Huxley's cat, be it remembered, was never known to attack anything larger and fiercer than a butterfly. "I doubt whether he has the heart to kill a mouse," wrote the proud possessor of this prodigy; "but I saw him catch and eat the first butterfly of the season, and I trust that the germ of courage thus manifested may develop with ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... Yes, this was going to be one of his good days—he willed it so. The mood was not there certainly, but then, now the finishing of the book had become a pressing necessity, the mood never was there; it was like a tantalizing butterfly that flitted a second in his face and then led him a desperate chase through a tangle of undergrowth that ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... spoke through her lips. All the poetry of this most ancient of religions centres in the figure of its little Vestal,—child-bride of ghosts,—as she flutters, [144] like some wonderful white-and-crimson butterfly, before the shrine of the Invisible. Even in these years of change, when she must go to the public school, she continues to represent all that is delightful in Japanese girlhood; for her special home-training keeps her reverent, innocent, dainty in all ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... his transports the lure was still there. She was like a butterfly, he thought, yellow and white or blue and gold, fluttering over a hedge of ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... said he, 'this is a sublime moment! To see you, the gay companion, the good fellow, the butterfly, I may say, of other days, a member of this great body is certainly soul-stirring! So you have realized your ambition? What next? The Senate? And then—then?' he pointed upward, 'higher yet? and still higher? Ha! The White House? Who knows?' he ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... prayed and watched in faithfulness to mother and son—she observed him come out and wander round the garden in great joy. He lifted up the soiled rose and put it in his coat; he released a butterfly caught in some mesh; he buried his face in fragrant honeysuckle. Then she understood that his heart was full of love, and was sure that it would be ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... of the French language and manners, general ignorance, Jacobinism, falsehood, licentiousness, and impiety! The first four or five charges might have been proved with little difficulty, if it were worth while to break a butterfly on a wheel, but it was necessary to distort the meaning and even the text of the original in order to give any ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... out of the cocoon of the three bodies it escapes forever from the law of relativity and becomes the ineffable Ever-Existent. {FN43-10} Behold the butterfly of Omnipresence, its wings etched with stars and moons and suns! The soul expanded into Spirit remains alone in the region of lightless light, darkless dark, thoughtless thought, intoxicated with its ecstasy of joy in God's dream of ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... signal the friends above were informed of the success of his ruse and were now rapidly drawing them up. At first she was too much absorbed in the sport to notice this. When at length her attention was aroused by seeing the great distance of those beneath her, like a butterfly she was about to flit away, when the crafty Hiku, who was ever on the alert, clapped the cocoanut-shells together, imprisoning her within them, and was then quickly drawn up ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... of replevin? This whimsical view of the case only exasperated him the more as it presented the utter hopelessness of approaching her—of ever seeing her again—and, when the dogs came chasing an utterly inconsequential and useless butterfly in his direction, he pelted them with stones until they yelped. Hang the dogs, anyhow. It was all ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... comes and goes irregularly from flower to flower; as the butterfly flutters in a zig-zag course from one sunny place on the garden wall to another—or, as an old woman runs from wrong omnibus to wrong omnibus, at the Elephant and Castle, before she can discover the right one; as a countryman blunders up one street, and down another, before ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... the thing produced being of the same kind as that which produced it. Very few creatures reproduce after their own kind; they reproduce something which has the potentiality of becoming that which their parents were. Thus the butterfly lays an egg, which egg can become a caterpillar, which caterpillar can become a chrysalis, which chrysalis can become a butterfly; and though I freely grant that the machines cannot be said to have more than the germ of a true reproductive system at present, have we not just seen that they have ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... say that the father of all men and animals was the butterfly, Cherwit Make (earth-maker), who fluttered down from the clouds to the Blue Cliffs at the junction of the Verde and Salt Rivers, and from his own sweat made men. As the people multiplied they grew selfish ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... - I am sitting on the top of the cars with a mill party from Missouri going west for his health. Desolate flat prairie upon all hands. Here and there a herd of cattle, a yellow butterfly or two; a patch of wild sunflowers; a wooden house or two; then a wooden church alone in miles of waste; then a windmill to pump water. When we stop, which we do often, for emigrants and freight travel together, the kine first, the men after, the whole plain is heard singing with cicadae. ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... word usually means a milksop, but here it is equivalent to 'a butterfly', 'a weathercock'—a man of changeable disposition. A ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... with Plato, Shakespeare and a throng Of bards beneath some plane-tree's cool eclipse To gaze on glowing meads where, lingering long, Psyche's large Butterfly her honey sips; Or, mingling free in choirs of German song, To learn of Goethe's ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... fortnight she had succeeded in recovering that frank confidence, that childish prattle, which seemed to have been benumbed between the narrow walls of the nunnery. It might be said that on leaving the cocoon the butterfly recognized all the flowers, for it seemed to be enough for her to spread her wings for a moment and warm herself in the sun's rays to lose all the stiffness of the chrysalis. This new life manifested itself in her whole nature. Everything ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... in a smoky town, was my wear, relieved by a few touches of blue. And I should not go as a butterfly, but as a quiet worker in my dark things. I need only buy a new walking costume, and a fresh dinner dress. The costume difficulty was disposed of. Then again, I had been without a day's change for five years; and here was the prospect of one I should enjoy. ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... Administration Concluded 1905-1908 Visits from Humperdinck and Puccini The California Earthquake Madame Sembrich's Generosity to the Suffering Musicians "Madama Butterfly" "Manon Lescaut" "Fedora" Production and Prohibition of "Salome" A Criticism of the Work "Adriana Lecouvreur" ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... longer I live the more I condemn and deplore a rackety life for any girl, and therefore if I do what I myself think right by her and not what others may think right, she shall never be a London butterfly. Would that we could give our girls the ideal society which I suppose we all dream for them—that of the wise and the good of all ages, of the young and merry of their own. No barbarous crowds, no despotic fashions, no senseless omnipotence of custom (see "Childe Harold," somewhere).[77] I ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... you can tell us another bookful about water and fish, and crabs and sky," said Dodo. "So we shall have a bird book, and a butterfly book, and ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... was gay; and with the polite world gayety ranks as happiness, and commands the envy of the crowd. Nobody envies the quiet matron whose domestic life flows onward with the placidity of a sluggish stream. It is the butterfly queen of the hour whom people admire and envy. Lady Judith, blazing in diamonds at a court ball, beautiful, daring, insolent, had half the town for her slaves and courtiers. Even women flattered and fawned upon her, delighted to be acknowledged ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... and insects vie even with flowers. "One fine red admiral butterfly," says Jefferies,[13] "whose broad wings, stretched out like fans, looked simply splendid floating round and round the willows which marked the margin of a dry pool. His blue markings were really blue—blue velvet—his red and the white stroke shone as if sunbeams were in his wings. I wish there ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... howls, a scuffle, a flutter; Ike and Urb fled up the stairs, and the Phoenix swept out through the doorway. The children followed and the Phoenix settled on Robert, 'like a butterfly on a rose,' as Anthea said afterwards, and wriggled into the breast of his Norfolk jacket, 'like an eel into mud,' ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit
... serious historical criticism of these stories would be to break a butterfly. So much as this even has been said only because these wretched fables have gone throughout the world, and it is time that they were swept away into the dust-heaps of history. They represent Mr. and Mrs. Washington as affected and priggish people, given ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... experience to the believer which will be fraught with inestimably good things; that is, the act of dying, and not merely the being dead. It is no doubt as necessary to the nature of the soul, to its psychology, its soul-life, as the changes of the worm, chrysalis, and butterfly, are to the insect. And thus, as in all other things, where sin abounded, grace much more abounds, and even death, like a cross, is turned into a ministration of ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams
... has a soothing effect on me," he explained. "Yellow excites me too much—makes me restless—makes me want to sail 'beyond the bourne of sunset'. I looked at that surge of golden glow down there today till I got all worked up and thought my life had been an awful failure. I found a dead butterfly and had a little funeral—buried it in the fern corner. And I thought I hadn't been any more use in the world than that poor little butterfly. Oh, I was woeful, master. Then I got me this hollyhock and sat down here to look at it alone. When a man's alone, master, he's ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... all at once, 'O! it is much more respectable to be grave and look wise.' 'He has reversed the Pythagorean discipline, by being first talkative, and then silent. He reverses the course of Nature too: he was first the gay butterfly, and then the creeping worm.' Johnson laughed loud and long at this expansion and illustration of what he himself ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... the spider's web back in its place, that once has been swept away? Can you put the apple again on the bough, which fell at our feet to-day? Can you put the lily-cup back on the stem, and cause it to live and grow? Can you mend the butterfly's broken wing, that you crushed with a hasty blow? Can you put the bloom again on the grape, or the grape again on the vine? Can you put the dewdrops back on the flowers, and make them sparkle and shine? Can you put the ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various
... of its dazzling glitter still in her eyes, and had attempted to resume an ordinary existence, to manage her little income and her modest household, she had been the object of a thousand impudent exploitations, of frauds that were easy in view of the ignorance of this poor butterfly that was frightened by reality and came into collision with all its unknown difficulties. Living in Felicia's house, the responsibility became still more serious by reason of the wastefulness introduced long ago by the father and continued by the daughter, ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... Magi, and recited a little poem which declared that, as each one had himself drawn out of the urn of Fate, no one could be angry, let him have procured for himself honor or derision—Fate, and not Merit, being here the ruler. Two little boys, with huge butterfly wings and in flowing garments, bore the presents to the guests. A number, which had been purposely given to one of the elder ladies, was now called out, and the boys brought forward a large, heavy, brown earthen jug. To the same hung ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... Morse Code, you know." He looked about half-interestedly and began kicking leaves into a pile, Peter doing the same. If Nick had any particular purpose in this business, at least you would not have supposed so. He seemed as aimless as a butterfly. "Are you going to ...
— Pee-wee Harris on the Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... Now the butterfly dance followed the others. This was danced by the boys and girls together, and the pairs were equal in size, age and the color of their garments. When all the dances had ended, the dancers marched out with the goose-step. The willow-spray dancers followed the swallow dancers, and Aduan hastened ...
— The Chinese Fairy Book • Various
... constant danger to the foot of the mountain in safety. "But," continued the professor, speaking of this incident to some of his friends, "I was richly repaid for all my trouble and peril, for when I reached the foot of the mountain I captured a new and very rare species of butterfly." Multitudes of practical men cannot appreciate such devotion to pure science, but it is this absorbing passion and pure grit that enable the devotees of science to enlarge its ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 586, March 26, 1887 • Various
... oak-tree tall; And silver caskets at his left support Toy-gardens, Syrian scents enshrined in gold And alabaster, cakes of every sort That in their ovens the pastrywomen mould, When with white meal they mix all flowers that bloom, Oil-cakes and honey-cakes. There stand portrayed Each bird, each butterfly; and in the gloom Of foliage climbing high, and downward weighed By graceful blossoms, do the young Loves play Like nightingales, and perch on every tree, And flit, to try their wings, from spray to spray. Then see the gold, the ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... Attraction, capillary Barley, to transplant, by Messrs. Hardy Beetle, instinct of Books noticed Butterfly, instinct of Calendar, horticultural ——, agricultural Columnea Schiedeana Dahlia, the, by Mr. Edwards Digging machine, Samuelson's Eggs, to keep Farm leases, by Mr. Morton Frost, plants injured by Grapes, colouring Green, German, by Mr. Prideaux ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 185, May 14, 1853 • Various
... several minutes and the canoe drifted slowly on while the two boys gazed with delight at the novel beauty that surrounded them. The dark, stagnant water through which they drifted was nearly hidden from view by great white and gold water-lilies and the butterfly flowers of water hyacinths, the trees on either side stood like beautiful gray ghosts under their festoons of Spanish moss through which flashed the blazing hues of flowering orchids. Brilliant-hued paroquets ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... new to us; and indeed, my two companions had fresh ways of putting things that seemed to make them their own in a manner. Yvon maintained that gaiety was the best that life had to give; that the butterfly being the type of the human soul, the nearer man could come to his prototype, the better for him and for all. Sorrow and suffering, he cried, were a blot on the scheme, a mistake, a concession to the devil; if all would but spread their wings ...
— Rosin the Beau • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... who no longer "smacks at wretched wine or praises detestable custard." A lurking thorn, too, is worrying him throughout this tour; he has "outrun the constable"; that is to say, his expenses have outrun his means, and he will have to make up for this butterfly flight by toiling like a ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... by means of torches, for it is sufficient to place a light in a low and open place to attract a multitude of phalenes and other nocturnal insects. But to have handsome lepidopters, it is best to obtain caterpillars, feed them with the leaves of the plant on which they are found, and pierce the butterfly as soon as he has undergone his change, for the specimens caught in their flight ...
— Movement of the International Literary Exchanges, between France and North America from January 1845 to May, 1846 • Various
... them close in the warm palm of your hand for a time and the dried bits will quiver, the sides partly separate, and behold! you have brought back to life a beautiful Euvanessa, or mourning-cloak butterfly. Lay it upon the snow and soon the awakened life will ebb away and it will again be stiff, as in death. If you wish, take it home, and you may warm it into activity, feed it upon a drop of syrup and freeze it again at will. Sometimes six or eight of ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... anger, like most things he did, was a matter of acting. The Signor understood, and again he smiled faintly. Before he answered he carefully snuffed and trimmed the three wicks of the tall brass lamp on the table. It had a big metal shade in the shape of a butterfly, which he turned so that it screened the light from his eyes and reflected it into his ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... variegation; colors, dichroism, trichroism; iridescence, play of colors, polychrome, maculation, spottiness, striae. spectrum, rainbow, iris, tulip, peacock, chameleon, butterfly, tortoise shell; mackerel, mackerel sky; zebra, leopard, cheetah, nacre, ocelot, ophite[obs3], mother-of-pearl, opal, marble. check, plaid, tartan, patchwork; marquetry-, parquetry; mosaic, tesserae[obs3], strigae[obs3]; chessboard, checkers, chequers; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Sis' Butterfly aimed to work all right, But 'er wings dey was heavy, an' 'er head too light; So she riz in de air, 'ca'ze she see she was made Jes' to fly in de sun in de beauty parade. An' she ain't by 'erself in dat, in dat— An' she ...
— Daddy Do-Funny's Wisdom Jingles • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... across those grave courts and passages turned to glance curiously at the pretty little widow. She had the air of a person not used to be on foot and unattended—a kind of aerial butterfly air, as of one who belonged to the useless and ornamental class of society; utterly different from the appearance of such humble female pedestrians as were wont to make the courts and alleys of the Temple a short-cut ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... hiss of raindrop spilling down, The purr of cat, the trill of bird, And ev'ry whispering I've heard From willy wind in leaves and grass, And all the distant drones that pass. A song as tender and as light As flower, or butterfly in flight; And when I saw it opening, I'd ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... starry train, Sweetly scintillant again, Never sleep while I repose On the petals of the rose. Sweeter couch hath who than I? Quoth the brilliant Butterfly. ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... orchards, where there is some grass all the year round under the shelter of the apple trees; or when a springlike morning appears, about the time of St. Valentine's Day, and the thrushes are singing love-songs to their mates, and the first brimstone butterfly has dared to leave his winter seclusion for the fickle sunshine, to realize that Spring is coming, and the active work of the farm is about to recommence. There is a superstition that when the master sees the firstling of the flock, ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... Brown Anger Charles and Mary Lamb "There Was a Little Girl" H. W. Longfellow The Reformation of Godfrey Gore William Brighty Rands The Best Firm Walter G. Doty A Little Page's Song William Alexander Percy How the Little Kite Learned to Fly Unknown The Butterfly and the Bee William Lisle Bowles The Butterfly Adelaide O'Keefe Morning Jane Taylor Buttercups and Daisies Mary Howitt The Ant and the Cricket Unknown After Wings Sarah M. B. Piatt Deeds of Kindness ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... with a tender flush of scarlet, like a rose bursting into blossom; a garland of lilies-of-the-valley confined the scattered curls of her small, round head,—and two peacock feathers quivered amusingly, like the feelers of a butterfly, above the ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... Paris—the great pageant operas like "Le Prophete," "Lohengrin," and Goldmark's "Queen of Sheba." With the last it shares one element which brings it into relationship also with a number of much younger and less significant works—operas like Mascagni's "Iris," Puccini's "Madama Butterfly," and Giordano's "Siberia." In the score of "Aida" there is a slight infusion of that local color which is lavishly employed in decorating its externals. The pomp and pageantry of the drama are Egyptian and ancient; ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... many words? It is absurd to believe anything else; absurd to believe that man was meant to live like the butterfly, flitting without care from flower to flower, and, like the butterfly, die helpless at the first shower or the first winter's frost. Whatever the text means, it cannot ...
— Sermons for the Times • Charles Kingsley
... I am a Butterfly, and you will see that very soon I shall become most lovely, such gloriously tinted feathers will deck my wings, all the world will be lost in admiration, ...
— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer
... figure was that of a young woman with gay garments and jewelry (Duran, Historia, cap. 94). In the Codex Telleriano-Remensis she is assigned as synonyms Ichpochtli, the Virgin, and Itzpapalotl, literally "the obsidian butterfly," but which was probably applied to a peculiar ...
— Rig Veda Americanus - Sacred Songs Of The Ancient Mexicans, With A Gloss In Nahuatl • Various
... establishment, with a widow's pension of sixteen pounds sterling, were the means of subsistence for herself and her family. When she first returned to Cartside a few religious friends called to welcome her home. The gay and wealthy part of her former acquaintances, who, like the butterfly, spread their silken wings only to bask in the warmth of a summer sun, found not their way to the lonely cottage of an afflicted widow. Her worth, though in after-life rendered splendid by its own fruits, was at this time ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham
... acquainted with the manners of these wandering enthusiasts, "dance, or we will scourge thee with our bow-strings till thou spin as never top did under schoolboy's lash." Thus shouted the reckless warders, as much delighted at having a subject to tease as a child when he catches a butterfly, or a schoolboy upon ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... here seen withdrawing in order that a higher manifestation of the spirit may take place. The same principle can be seen at work in the insect kingdom, when the caterpillar's tremendous vitality passes over into the short-lived beauty of the butterfly. In the human being it is responsible for that metamorphosis of organic processes which occurs on the path from the metabolic to the nervous system, and which we came to recognize as the precondition for the appearance ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... fairy caught a butterfly— Swing, cling, columbine! The last that dared to float and fly When pale the sun did shine; For spring is slow to come, my dear, Is slow to come again, And far away doth summer play, Beyond the ...
— Harper's Young People, March 9, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... to him most. One golden "Venice" of the painter, which hung in a picture-store, always delighted him—a stretch of the Lagoon with a cluster of butterfly sails and a far- away line of palaces, towers, and domes lying like a string of pearls on the horizon. There was another of Kensett's, a point of rocks thrust out like a mailed hand into a blue sea; and a McEntee of October woods, all brown and gold; but the Gifford ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... feel about saying—that word that I don't say. Besides, what you call them are made-up things the People of the Hills have never heard of—little buzzflies with butterfly wings and gauze petticoats, and shiny stars in their hair, and a wand like a schoolteacher's cane for punishing bad boys and rewarding good ...
— Puck of Pook's Hill • Rudyard Kipling
... a measurer of tape Turns butterfly and dandy, Assumes their grace, their air, their shape, I wish a pump were handy! I never to such balls will go, Those poor pretexts for prancing; Where Jenkins dislocates his toe, And Tomkins ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 355., Saturday, February 7, 1829 • Various
... eclat to her Excellency, he pictured to himself an entrancing dream—that of awaking a joyful sympathy between himself and Cyrene through this highly congratulatory matter. She would smile upon him so divinely, so highly applaud his zeal, and begin to compare him favourably with that new butterfly, Repentigny, whose day must ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... sex, it's a butterfly; but it's all the same, as my metaphysical Uncle Ogilvy would undertake to prove to you, thus, a butterfly is white and a gull is white,—therefore, a gull ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne
... ray of sunlight—a second ray of sunlight—the little flowers seem to wake up joyously. They all have their drop of dew which trembles—the chilly leaves are stirred with the breath of morning—in the foliage the birds sing unseen—all the flowers seem to be saying their prayers. Loves on butterfly wings frolic over the meadows and make the tall plants wave—one sees nothing—yet everything is there—the landscape is entirely behind the veil of mist, which mounts, mounts, sucked up by the sun; and as it rises, reveals the river, plated with silver, ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... little tree that we plant today What will you be when we're old and gray? "The savings bank of the squirrel and mouse, For robin and wren an apartment house, The dressing-room of the butterfly's ball, The locust's and katydid's concert hall, The school-boy's ladder in pleasant June, The school-girl's tent in the July noon. And my leaves shall whisper them merrily, A tale of ...
— Ohio Arbor Day 1913: Arbor and Bird Day Manual - Issued for the Benefit of the Schools of our State • Various
... fact that like antecedents are invariably followed by like consequents should be sufficient for our purpose? Why should the fact that a given kind of chrysalis in a given condition will always become a butterfly within a certain time be connected with memory when it is not pretended that memory has anything to do with the invariableness with which oxygen and hydrogen when mixed in certain ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... observations which G. Sandberg has made upon species of lepidoptera in South Varanger, at 69 deg. 40' north latitude. Sandberg succeeded in following the development from the egg onward of some species of the extreme north. Oeneis bore, Schn., a purely Arctic butterfly, may be taken as an example. This species has never been found outside of Arctic regions, and even there occurs only in places of purely Arctic stamp. It flies from the middle of June onward, and lays its eggs on different species of grass. The eggs ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 520, December 19, 1885 • Various
... her profile, became aware that her chin, while of an engaging firmness, had that impalpably soft texture that suggests the powdered wing of a creamy butterfly. He was surprised that he had never noticed it before. The tam slanted obligingly to the other side and left exposed the lobe of a small ear that was as rosy in tint as the delicate tiny clam shells he occasionally ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... where the bonnet stays on; it has a baby bang edge a trifle curled and a substantial cushion atop to hold the hat pins; while No. 4, the one she wore on our arrival, is an elaborate evening toupie with a pompadour rolling over on itself and drooping slightly over one eye while it melts into a butterfly bow and handful of puffs on the crown that in turn end in a single ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... observed Hsi Jen, clapping her hands, after listening to her throughout. "It isn't strange then if she let me have the ten butterfly knots I asked her to tie for me only after ever so many days, and if she said that they were coarsely done, but that I should make the best of them and use them elsewhere, and that if I wanted any nice ones, I should wait until by and bye when she came ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... in those strong ripe Jewish features and those glittering eyes; and yet every line in his face was softened, sweetened; the mask of sneering faineance was gone—imploring tenderness and earnestness beamed from his whole countenance. The chrysalis case had fallen off, and disclosed the butterfly within. She sat looking at him, and passed her hand across her eyes, as if to try whether the apparition would not vanish. He, the subtle!—he, the mocker!—he, the Lucian of Alexandria!—he whose depth and power ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... table afresh, and to it came fearlessly the busy ant and bee, gay butterfly and bird; even the poor blind mole and humble worm were not forgotten; and with gentle words she gave to all, while each learned something of their kind little teacher; and the love that made her own heart bright shone alike ...
— Flower Fables • Louisa May Alcott
... on a hot noontide, Psyche passed down a road, where, on each side The yellow cornfields lay, although as yet Unto the stalks no sickle had been set; The lark sung over them, the butterfly Flickered from ear to ear distractedly, The kestrel hung above, the weasel peered From out the wheat-stalks on her unafeard, Along the road the trembling poppies shed On the burnt grass their crumpled leaves and red; Most lonely was it, nothing Psyche knew Unto ...
— The Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris
... strengthened by bamboo fencing, and radiant with flowers of the loseille-bois,—the creole name for a sort of begonia, whose closed bud exactly resembles a pink and white dainty bivalve shell, and whose open blossom imitates the form of a butterfly. Here and there, on the grass, were nets drying, and nasses— curious fish-traps made of split bamboos interwoven and held in place with mibi stalks (the mibi is a liana heavy and tough as copper wire); and immediately behind the garden hedge ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... a great cross, not to say an embarrassment, when she was gleefully rolling in pursuit of a charming red and gold butterfly, to find herself suddenly stopped short by an armed knight with his ...
— The Pot of Gold - And Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... a prematurely aged, oily little man; a poet in bad circumstances; a decrepit butterfly chained to a disappointed inkstand, will not put out strenuous energies to retain his ancient paramour when a robust young man comes imperatively to demand his mother of him in her person. The colloquy was short between ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Oviparous Insects I have found to be perfectly round every way, like so many Globules, of this sort I have observ'd some sorts of Spiders Eggs; and chancing the last Summer to inclose a very large and curiously painted Butterfly in a Box, intending to examine its gaudery with my Microscope, I found within a day or two after I inclos'd her, almost all the inner surface of the Box cover'd over with an infinite of exactly round Eggs, which were stuck very fast to the sides of it, and in so exactly regular and close ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... lad, his heir, was with the prince; also, the lad's sister, a wee brown sprite, very pretty, very serious, very winning, delicately moulded, costumed like the daintiest butterfly, a dear little fairyland princess, gravely willing to be friendly with the strangers, but in the beginning preferring to hold her father's hand until she could take stock of them and determine how far they were to be trusted. She must ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... long summer hours, The golden light should lie, And thick young herbs and groups of flowers Stand in their beauty by. The oriole should build and tell His love-tale, close beside my cell; The idle butterfly Should rest him there, and there be heard The ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... left the porch, though both boys looked down the lane before going in, to make sure that the queer little butterfly collector was not coming in time to interfere with their ...
— The Aeroplane Boys Flight - A Hydroplane Roundup • John Luther Langworthy
... Betsy Butterfly is the owner of a pair of such beautifully colored wings and her sweet disposition matches them so perfectly that it is a very common occurrence to hear one of the tiny dwellers in Farmer Green's meadow remark: "Why, the sun just has to smile on her!" Of course, any lady so gifted is bound to have ...
— The Tale of Cuffy Bear • Arthur Scott Bailey
... Alice lying on a lounge quite effaced Mrs. Yorke from the Doctor's mind. The next second he had taken the girl's hand, and holding it with a touch that would not have crumpled a butterfly's wings, he was taking a flitting gauge of her pulse. Mrs. Yorke continued to talk volubly, but the Doctor ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... the same effect from every bird and bee and butterfly that crossed his path between Marchfield and the village. No yellowing spray of goldenrod, no blue-eyed ragged-robin, but symbolized the blessings of which he had been cheated. In proportion as the sun ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... then, to the presumption of Glaucus; he mentioned his name, but not more often than that of Clodius or of Lepidus. He affected to class them together as things of a low and ephemeral species; as things wanting nothing of the butterfly, save its innocence and its grace. Sometimes he slightly alluded to some invented debauch, in which he declared them companions; sometimes he adverted to them as the antipodes of those lofty and spiritual natures, to whose order that of Ione belonged. Blinded alike by the pride ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... seemed so very "jolly" that he decided to stay there; so that was why Uncle Jack did not see him when he looked round. Brighteyes, after seeing her brother safely up in the tree, flew off like a bird, here and there and everywhere. First she filled both hands with dandelions. Then she saw a butterfly; down went the dandelions; off went her best hat to serve as a butterfly-net; and away she went. A pretty chase Master Butterfly led her, through last year's brambles and this year's mud, until at last he ...
— Five Mice in a Mouse-trap - by the Man in the Moon. • Laura E. Richards
... father of Clarion, the most beautiful of the race.—Spenser, Muiopotmos, or The Butterfly's Fate (1590). ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... lay crooked, strange, unsightly, shapeless heaps of something turned outside in, or something turned inside out—wild fragments which seemed to be feebly trying to get away from themselves. And, accidentally, under one of the wild projections, they noticed a wonderfully sculptured butterfly, with transparent wings, trembling as though with a weak ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... pursuing me. He was a small, slim, clean-shaven, prim-faced man, flaxen-haired and leanjawed, between thirty and forty years of age, dressed in a gray suit and wearing a straw hat. A tin box for botanical specimens hung over his shoulder and he carried a green butterfly-net ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle
... suggested the Puritan rather than the classic conception of simplicity. The immense rooms were as chill as dungeons, and the forlorn little figure in black, lost in the loneliness of their bleakness, wandered to and fro among her retinue of servants like a butterfly beating its wings against a pane ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... like a flowery expanse moved by the air. This ecstatic effect was not exclusive of facts which kept one's feet well on the earth, or on the roof of one's college barge. Out of that "giddy pleasure of the eyes" business lifted a practical front from time to time, and extended a kind of butterfly net at the end of a pole so long that it would reach anywhere, and collected pennies for the people in boats who had been singing or playing banjos or guitars or even upright pianos. For, it must be explained, there were many in that aquatic crowd who were ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... day old! I wonder if every butterfly comes into the world to find such queer things about him? I was born in prison. I can see right through my walls; but I can't find any door. Right below me (for I have climbed up the wall) lies a queer-looking, ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, September 1878, No. 11 • Various
... she had met somewhere long ago, were presumed not to know it, but could not help remembering it, and agreeing to recognise it as a fact. A strange pleasure filled her heart. While Mrs Barnardiston sat she flitted about the room like a butterfly, looking at one thing after another, and asking now the most ignorant, now the most penetrative question, disturbing not a little the work, but sweetening the temper of the painter, as he went on with his study ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... enlivened many a day in many parts of the world as we have journeyed through life. Moreover, though purchased pictures have other values, the old cases set on the walls of one's den bring back memories that are the joy and solace of many idle moments later in life—each rarer egg, each extra butterfly picturing some day or place of keen triumph, otherwise long since forgotten. Here, for instance, is a convolvulus hawk father found killed on a mountain in Switzerland; there an Apollo I caught in the Pyrenees; here a "red burnet" with "five ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... now been supplied: an artist has been found who unites in himself all desirable qualities. The beauty can now feel assured that she will be depicted with all the grace of her charms, airy, fascinating, butterfly-like, flitting among the flowers of spring. The stately father of a family can see himself surrounded by his family. Merchant, warrior, citizen, statesman—hasten one and all, wherever you may be. The artist's magnificent establishment ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... revel to his heart's content among gaudily coloured Heliconiae, Hesperiae, and Erycinae, or watch the larger butterflies of the restricted genus Papilio, slowly winging their lazy flight among the trees just beyond the reach of his insect net. A common butterfly here (Peridromia amphinome) has the singular habit of frequenting the trunks and limbs of the trees where it rests with expanded wings, and generally manages adroitly to shift its position, and escape when swept at with the ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... new boarders on which to expend time and thought, and Alexina was living a life of rigid usefulness, studying shorthand in secret and helping with the house work, for the Russell mansion was large and servants not numerous. She also made dainty things for that radiant butterfly Madelaine. Alex was a born milliner, but she rather despised her gift, even ...
— The Pleasant Street Partnership - A Neighborhood Story • Mary F. Leonard
... is easy to fancy how Pinocchio felt! He longed to be a cricket, or a mouse, so that he might hide in some hole. How he wished that he were a butterfly or a bird and could fly ...
— Pinocchio in Africa • Cherubini
... pressing her cold little face against the colder window-pane, "I hate winter, and I hate lessons. I would give up being a person in a minute if I might be a—a—what would I best like to be? Oh yes, I know—a butterfly. Butterflies never see winter, and they certainly never have any lessons or any kind of work to do. I ...
— The Cuckoo Clock • Mrs. Molesworth
... machine and Kitty's learnin' to run the thing is about all the returns that Jim can show for the money he's spent in educatin' her. I don't mean," he added, with a quick look at Patches, as though he feared to be misunderstood, "that Kitty's one of them good-for-nothin' butterfly girls. She ain't that by a good deal. Why, she was raised right here in this neighborhood, an' we love her the same as if she was our own. She can cook a meal or make a dress 'bout as well as her mother, an' does it, too; an' she can ride a horse or throw a ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... is sometimes called the borer. This insect does not sting. No thanks to him, though, for not stinging. He has no instrument to sting with. For aught I know, he may have ever so good a will to sting; but he has no power to do so, any more than a grasshopper or a butterfly. ...
— Mike Marble - His Crotchets and Oddities. • Uncle Frank
... half smiling, "it is a pity to think even of a crushed butterfly; but indeed, Colin, if you can bear to listen to me, I think I can show you that it all has been a blessing even by sight, as well as, of course, by faith. Only remember the unsatisfactoriness of our condition—the never seeing or hearing from one another after that day when Mr. Beauchamp ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Leghorn hat, spectacles, and a green gauze net, came sauntering by the garden where the ex-engine-driver was pulling a basketful of scarlet runners: that the prisoner had suddenly dropped his beans, dashed out into the road, and catching the mild gentleman by the throat had wrenched the butterfly net from his hand and belaboured him with ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... organ and function; between organs, mode of life, and environment, leads up to a general law which applies to all plants and animals. The law of growth and development from the simple germ to the mature life form can be seen in the butterfly, the frog, and the sunflower. These laws and others in biology, if developed on concrete specimens, give much insight into the whole realm of nature, more stimulating by far than that based on scientific classifications, as orders, ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry
... in his shirt-sleeves, carrying a butterfly-net and a botany-can. He goes straight up to the bookshelf and takes down a book, which he begins to read on ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... woe-begone Christians!" exclaims the poet; "ye who, in the shortness of your sight, see no reason for advancing in the right path! Know ye not that we are worms, born to compose the angelic butterfly, provided we throw off the husks that impede ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... least afraid of him, but thinking, it part of the game not to be caught. With one push of her foot, she would be floating in the air above his head; or she would go dancing backwards and forwards and sideways, like a great butterfly. It happened several times, when her father and mother were holding a consultation about her in private, that they were interrupted by vainly repressed outbursts of laughter over their heads; and looking ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 1 • George MacDonald
... to pay my bill," thought Persis, with a grim smile, as she watched Diantha turning the gaily colored plates like a butterfly fluttering from blossom to blossom. "I guess she won't go as far as that though, as long as there ain't another dressmaker in Clematis she'd trust to make her a kimono. If she says anything, that'll pave the way for me to give her a good plain talking to, and even if I never get a cent ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... emblem of self- sacrifice. Her path across the desert was marked by the flowers which sprang up beneath her steps; the wild gazelle stept forward trustingly to lick her hand; a single wandering butterfly fluttered round her head. As the group, one by one, caught sight of her, a human tenderness and intelligence seemed to light up every face. The scholar dropt his book, the miser his gold, the savage his weapons; even in the ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... less often, began to grow rusty in the great halls, and the nobles, coming forth from their coats-of-mail like the butterfly from the chrysalis, showed themselves all glistening in silk, pearls in their ears, their heads full of Italian madrigals and mythological similes, a new society was formed, salons of a kind were ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... Ellen ran for the pieces of Bristol board which were to form the backs of the needlebook, and brought them to the library; and explained how room was to be left in the middle of each for a painting, a rose on one, a butterfly on the other; the writing to be as elegant as possible, above, beneath, and roundabout, as the fancy of the ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... creation—was a sight! Then there were the butterflies, so light that they seemed to tumble up into the air, and get down again with difficulty. They bewildered me with their inscrutable variations of purpose. "If I could but see once, for an hour, into the mind of a butterfly," I thought, "it would be to me worth all the natural history I ever read. If I could but see why he changes his mind so often and so suddenly—what he saw about that flower to make him seek it—then why, on a nearer approach, he should decline further acquaintance ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... well enough for people without a conscience in their music; now in the corner of a conservatory, now in a cozy little third room behind a back drawing-room, talking nonsense with some lady foolish enough to be amused with his folly. Tom meant no harm and did not do much—was only a human butterfly, amusing himself with other creatures of a day, who have no notion that death can not kill them, or they might perhaps be more miserable than they are. They think, if they think at all, that it is life, strong in them, that makes them forget death; whereas, in truth, it is death, strong ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... far," said Freddie. "I know my way back. Oh, Flossie! look at that butterfly!" he suddenly called, making a grab for the fluttering creature. The butterfly flew on a little way and Freddie raced after ...
— The Bobbsey Twins on Blueberry Island • Laura Lee Hope
... world as oddly coloured as Harlequin's clothes, with puffs of sentiment dear to the soul of Columbine, and Clownish fun with Pantaloonish wisdom and chuckles. When you were young, you used, I think, to enjoy a butterfly's kiss; and that, you remember, was when your mother brushed your cheek with her eye-lashes. And also when you were young you held a buttercup under other children's chins to see if they liked butter, and they ...
— The Harlequinade - An Excursion • Dion Clayton Calthrop and Granville Barker
... forgot Tony, just as Eagle had forgotten me. Behind Eagle's slight figure towered massively Major Vandyke's splendid bulk; and as I waved my handkerchief to Eagle, while the train slid slowly out, I was vaguely aware of Diana's outstretched arm and a butterfly flutter of something white and small. Eagle's eyes went past me to her, though his smile was for me also; and Di was able deftly to kill her two birds with one stone, at the last. Her farewell look and gesture did equally ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... said the lady, who was crying; her trickling tears and her sopping handkerchief removed what remnants of her "cheeks" the sudden bath in the river had left. As the paint disappeared, one saw how very pretty the poor draggled butterfly was—big, honey-dark eyes, and quite exquisite features. "Oh, my soul and body!—I'll die!" she said, sobbing with cold ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... like Cleopatra, was not prone to argue. He left maintenance and headed toward the wardroom for a game of Uma ni to. But when he met Leda Crannon going up the stairway, all thoughts of card games flitted from his mind with the careless nonchalance of a summer butterfly. ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... throws up a wave of blossom that breaks all creamy white against their feet, and a clump of willows trail their palest green shoots in front of all. The sun sends for an ambassador through the azalea bushes a lordly swallow-tailed butterfly, and his squire very like the flitting 'chalk-blue' of the English downs. The warmth of the East, that goes through, not over, the lazy body, is added to the light of the East—the splendid lavish light that clears but does not bewilder the eye. Then the new leaves of ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... The Butterfly the ancient Grecians made The soul's fair emblem, and its only name— But of the soul, escaped the slavish trade Of earthly life!—For in this mortal frame Our's is the reptile's lot, much toil, much blame, Manifold motions making little speed, And ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... personal service Prince Iyeyasu made changes from the system common to the great military Houses of the time. The castle ward and attendance always were divided up among the immediate vassals of the lord. The basis was strictly military, not domestic. Even the beautiful kami-shimo (X), or butterfly hempen cloth garb of ceremonial attendance was an obvious reminder of the armour ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... like quicksilver from mind to mind, leaping—a shy and shining spark—from brain to brain! I know of nothing since Lord Bacon quite like these ineffably dainty little paragraphs of gilded whim, these rainbow nuggets of wistful inquiry, these butterfly wings of fancy, these pointed sparklers of wit. A purge, by Zeus, a purge for the wicked! Irony so demure, so quaint, so far away; pathos so void of regret, merriment so delicate that one dare not laugh for fear of dispelling the charm—all this ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... du vent, indeed," he said,—"just the white fluttering butterfly,—and now that the wings are clasped above this crimson blossom, I have a chance of capture." And smiling, he gently ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... in toward shore, looked like a giant butterfly; and her name, emblazoned in gold on her prow, was, appropriately, the Farfalla. Earlier in the season, with a green hull and a dingy brown sail, she had been, prosaically enough, the Maria. But since the advent of the girl all this had been changed. The Farfalla dropped her ...
— Jerry • Jean Webster
... the shining expanse of Silverwater, now lying unruffled by any breath of wind, went flickering a little blue butterfly, as blue as if a gentian blossom had taken to itself wings or a speck of sky had fluttered down to meet its bright reflection in the lake. It was a foolish expedition for the little explorer, so far from shore, and over that lonely, treacherous element which has such ...
— Children of the Wild • Charles G. D. Roberts
... insect that's flown into a room of its own accord. I dash against the walls, dash against the windows, flop against the ceiling, do everything on God's earth, in fact, except fly out again. And all the while I'm thinking, like that moth, or that butterfly, or whatever it is, 'The shortness of life! The shortness of life!' I've only one night or one day, and there's this vast dangerous garden, waiting ...
— The Garden Party • Katherine Mansfield
... self-preservation. The most of them are eyeless, so that sunlight exposes them to birds and other enemies. Professor Mast demonstrated that they are very favorably influenced by exposure to sunlight. Dr. Dolly has shown, by a series of very brilliant experiments, that the butterfly will live three times longer in sunlight than in the shadow; and Professor Yerkes has also proven that the jellyfish, while inactive in the dark, becomes ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Mysteries of the Caverns • Roger Thompson Finlay
... months I enjoyed what to me was an entirely new phase of existence—a butterfly idleness; nothing to do, nobody to be responsible to, and untroubled with financial uneasiness. I fell in love with the most cordial and sociable city in the Union. After the sage-brush and alkali deserts of Washoe, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... preferred to spend a quiet hour or two with Mrs. Merton. She is a woman who does things of some importance instead of spending her time upon a giddy butterfly-life. She is a regular tonic, and always inspires me to be ...
— Jess of the Rebel Trail • H. A. Cody
... Like a butterfly whose feet are caught in the incandescent wax of a taper, Rouget rapidly dissipated his remaining strength. In presence of that decay, the nephew remained as cold and impassible as the diplomatists of 1814 during ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... "It would be truly difficult to hold the butterfly and force it to be still without brushing the down from its beautiful wings. But, paint now, Pesne, I will seat myself behind your ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... a little orange stain at the root of the green bill, and the bright red iris of the eye have wonderful effect in warming the color of the whole bird: and with beautiful fancy Mr. Gould has put the Stellaris among yellow water-lilies to set off its gray; and a yellow butterfly with blue and red spots, and black-speckled wings (Papilio Machaon), to harmonize both. It is just as if the flower were gradually turning into the bird. Examples of the Starry Allegret have been 'obtained'—in the ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... reduced to the narrow space of a few toises, and for whom the winds and waves contended in their fury as they floated above the abyss; an event happened which diverted our minds from the horrors of our situation. All on a sudden a white butterfly, of a species common in France, came fluttering above our heads, and settled on our sails. The first thought this little creature suggested was, that it was the harbinger of approaching land, and we clung to the hope with a delirium of joy. ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... a painted butterfly to dazzle him, my friend," said Mrs. Denison. "His eyes are too keen, and go below the surface at a glance. The woman he loves may regard the fact as a ...
— The Hand But Not the Heart - or, The Life-Trials of Jessie Loring • T. S. Arthur
... is the analogy between the insect and his brother butterfly of fashionable life! While yet an embryo, a worm, he grubs his way through a good estate, and not a little ready money. Then, after a long sojourn in the pupa or puppy state—longer far than that of any other maggot—he emerges a perfect butterfly, vain, empty, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... since, a musicsellers's boy was sent to the publisher's for a number of copies of the song "I'd be a Butterfly, arranged for two trebles;" when, on being desired to repeat his order, he replied, "I'd be a Butterfly, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 323, July 19, 1828 • Various
... one of his good days—he willed it so. The mood was not there certainly, but then, now the finishing of the book had become a pressing necessity, the mood never was there; it was like a tantalizing butterfly that flitted a second in his face and then led him a desperate chase through a tangle of ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... The first butterfly you see, Cut off his head across your knee, Bury the head under a stone And a lot of money will be ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... out against the brilliant sky. The ebbing tide plashed on the rocks far below us, and the warm grass through which we walked was alive with grasshoppers, whose scarlet wings, suddenly unfolded when they flew, made me take them for some strange species of butterfly. It was all indescribably bright and joyous-looking, and the air of a transparent clearness that was one of the most striking characteristics of the whole scene, and one of the most delightful.... [In discussing the relative merits of England and America, Dr. Channing once ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... instinctive modes of behavior of lower forms of life. If mind is viewed as an adjustment to external conditions for the purpose of securing control, the human mind is no more wonderful in its way than the homing and migratory instincts of birds; the tropic quality of the male butterfly which leads it to the female though she is imprisoned in a cigar-box in a dark room; or the peculiar sensitivity of the bat which enables it, though blinded, to thread its way through a maze of obstructions hung ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... Sister Magdalen's late favorite; when dignity was required she became the escaped nun; and in her rage she would burst into the melodramatic frenzy dear to the McMeeter audiences; but Colette, the heedless, irresponsible, half-mad butterfly, dominated these various parts, and to this charming personality she returned. Through his own sad experience this spectacle interested him. He subdued her finally by ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... about half-interestedly and began kicking leaves into a pile, Peter doing the same. If Nick had any particular purpose in this business, at least you would not have supposed so. He seemed as aimless as a butterfly. "Are you going ...
— Pee-wee Harris on the Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... that a reproductive system may be in full force without the thing produced being of the same kind as that which produced it. Very few creatures reproduce after their own kind; they reproduce something which has the potentiality of becoming that which their parents were. Thus the butterfly lays an egg, which egg can become a caterpillar, which caterpillar can become a chrysalis, which chrysalis can become a butterfly; and though I freely grant that the machines cannot be said to ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... for them, that Julie might know the "right people." To her mother all people were alike, if they were kind and not vulgar; Margaret felt very differently. It was a matter of the greatest satisfaction to her when Julie blossomed into a fluffy-haired butterfly, tremendously in demand, in spite of much-cleaned slippers and often-pressed frocks. Margaret arranged Christmas theatricals, May picnics, Fourth of July gatherings. She never failed Bruce when this dearest brother wanted her ...
— Mother • Kathleen Norris
... winter he raised fuchsias in a little conservatory the size of a steamer trunk. In the spring he walked in the Easter parade. In the summer he lived at a farmhouse in the New Jersey hills, and sat in a wicker armchair, speaking of a butterfly, the ornithoptera amphrisius, that he hoped to find some day. In the autumn he fed Stuffy a dinner. These were the Old ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... large degree he came to regard culture as the aim of life. And when a man begins to pride himself upon his culture, he hasn't any to speak of. Culture must be merely incidental, and to clutch it is like capturing a butterfly: you do not secure the butterfly at all—you get ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... shrinking from the future when he would be gone forever. From Neil she heard often, but his letters did not do her much good they were so full of regret for the poverty which was keeping her from him and would keep her indefinitely for aught he knew. From her mother she seldom heard. That frivolous butterfly was too busy and gay to give much time or thought to her dying husband and overburdened child. She was still at Nice and still devoted to her American friends, the Rossiter-Brownes, as they called themselves, to the ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... novel-reader. It is not in the nature of a woman. The crown of woman's character is her devotion, which incarnate delicacy and tenderness exalt into perfect beauty of sacrifice. Those qualities could no more live amid the clashings of indiscriminate human passions than a butterfly wing could go between the mill rollers untorn. Women utterly refuse to go on with a book if the subject goes against their settled opinions. They despise a novel—howsoever fine and stirring it may be—if there is any taint of unhappiness to the favorite at the ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... silk [61] is originally spun from the bowels of a caterpillar, and that it composes the golden tomb, from whence a worm emerges in the form of a butterfly. Till the reign of Justinian, the silk-worm who feed on the leaves of the white mulberry-tree were confined to China; those of the pine, the oak, and the ash, were common in the forests both of Asia and Europe; but as their education is more difficult, and their produce ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... not six months old yet?" demanded the mother. "Here, take her, Aunt Sanna, and see if you ever got hold of anything nicer than that! Come, baby, give Aunt Sanna a little butterfly kiss!" And Julia swept the soft little face and unresponsive mouth across the older woman's face before she deposited the baby in ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... careless creature, full of animation and inquisitiveness, buoyant and thoughtless, content to look neither forwards nor backwards, wholly without responsibility or intelligence, just borne along by the pleasure of the moment, perfectly harmless and friendly as a rule, a sort of cheerful butterfly. That is not in the least my waking temperament; but it fills me sometimes with an uneasy suspicion that it is more like myself than ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... returned the Countess; 'but we both serve the same person, as you know - or if you do not, then I have the pleasure of informing you. Your conduct is so light - so light,' she repeated, the fan wavering higher like a butterfly, 'that perhaps you do not truly understand.' The Countess rolled her fan together, laid it in her lap, and rose to a less languorous position. 'Indeed,' she continued, 'I should be sorry to see any young woman in your situation. You began with every advantage - birth, a suitable marriage ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... by euphemistic vulgarity, into Ruby City, Magnolia Vale, Largentville, Idlewild, and the like. Or, if not these, our Anglo-Saxon practically gives us, not Our Lady of the Solitude, nor the City of the Holy Cross, not Fresno, the ash, nor Mariposa, the butterfly, but the momentous repetition of Smithvilles, Jonesboroughs, and Brownstowns, which makes the map of the Mississippi Valley a waste of ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... lord," replied Guarine, "but instinctive suspicion and aversion. The child that, for the first time, sees a snake, knows nothing of its evil properties, yet he will not chase it and take it up as he would a butterfly. Such is my dislike of Vidal—I cannot help it. I could pardon the man his malicious and gloomy sidelong looks, when he thinks no one observes him; but his sneering laugh I cannot forgive—it is like the beast we heard of in Judea, who laughs, ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... only a paraphrase of the old story of the grub and the butterfly. The little, starveling drudge who had found him in the store, that first day, had completely vanished; it was as if she had never been. In her place he discovered a girl all grace and loveliness, her slender ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... was very hot, the sky was blue, and the air was full of the humming and buzzing of bees and flies. A white butterfly flitted by, but soon went away over ...
— Chambers's Elementary Science Readers - Book I • Various
... grudge this pretty fool her short day! Since, with her summer's sun, when her butterfly flutters are over, and the winter of age and furrows arrives, she will feel the just effects of having neglected to cultivate her better faculties: for then, lie another Helen, she will be unable to bear the reflection even of her own glass, and being sunk into the insignificance ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... 's a chess-board—there are kings, Queens, bishops, knights, rooks, pawns; the world 's a game; Save that the puppets pull at their own strings, Methinks gay Punch hath something of the same. My Muse, the butterfly hath but her wings, Not stings, and flits through ether without aim, Alighting rarely:—were she but a hornet, Perhaps there might be vices ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... held her left extended arm to arm, palm to palm. Her right hand was on his shoulder, and she was close to him, looking into his eyes. As they began the gay undulations of the waltz she looked away and then down without answering. Her movements were as light and airy as those of a butterfly. He felt a sudden lightness himself, communicated as by an invisible current. He wanted to match the suppleness of her body with his own, and did. Her arms, the flash and glint of the crimson sequins against the smooth, black silk of her closely fitting dress, her neck, ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... probably soon decide what characters are necessary, but more time may be required to assign the parts. To play the part of a spider, bear, wolf, fairy, sheep, or butterfly does not seem difficult to a child who has entered into the ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... creation in bottles, which is at this moment classifying one hundred and fifty thousand species of insects, giving them all the termination us, so that a Silbermanus is the same individual in all countries for the learned men who dissect a butterfly's legs with pincers—that we still want a nomenclature for the chemistry of the kitchen, to enable all the cooks in the world to produce precisely similar dishes. It would be diplomatically agreed that French should be the language of the ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... affections were already engaged, and, being fully aware that the king flitted from beauty to beauty, like the butterfly from flower to flower, she very frankly intimated to the king that she could not receive his attentions. Louis was heart-broken; for such fragile hearts are easily broken and as easily repaired. He hastened to his mother, and told her that he must leave Paris to conquer his passion. The love-sick ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... tying doors, tying bundles of mud in paper, and then drop it on the pavement. I shall buy a bundle of wood and tie a piece of cord to it, and when some one goes to pick it up, lo! it has vanished—not lost, but gone before. I shall go butterfly-catching, and catch some fish at Snob's Brighton (Lea Bridge). I shall finish up by having a whacking, tearing my breeches, giving a boy two black eyes, and then wake up on Monday morning refreshed and quite happy to make ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... hill, a butterfly, snow white, rested a moment on the young girl's hair. She was again looking at the cliff, and did ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... nom de guerre, by which she is known until her engagement is at an end. Some of these names are so pretty and quaint that I will take a few specimens from the Yoshiwara Saiken, the guidebook upon which this notice is based. "Little Pine," "Little Butterfly," "Brightness of the Flowers," "The Jewel River," "Gold Mountain," "Pearl Harp," "The Stork that lives a Thousand Years," "Village of Flowers," "Sea Beach," "The Little Dragon," "Little Purple," "Silver," "Chrysanthemum," "Waterfall," "White Brightness," ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... His world. He has conducted it as a father leads his child, when the path homeward lies over many a dreary league. He suffers him to beguile the thought of time, by turning aside to pluck now and then a flower, to chase now a butterfly; the butterfly is crushed, the flower fades, but the child is so much nearer home, invigorated and full of health, and scarcely ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... the sand-pit, they could not understand how it was that little parties of the Third were found to be travelling in the same direction. Still more curious were the various articles borne by these little bands of stragglers. One group bore a football; another shouldered a butterfly net, without regard to the fact that butterflies had not been seen for many weeks; a third group fishing-rods, ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... may still do so! Let the world's prudish owl unheeded flutter by; Freedom converts the grub into a butterfly! ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... reconstruct the picture which was in the mind of the author as he wrote "The Village Blacksmith" or "Snowbound," the significance will have dropped out, and the throbbing scenes of life and action become only so many dead words, like the shell of the chrysalis after the butterfly has left its shroud. Without the power of imagination, the history of Washington's winter at Valley Forge becomes a mere formal recital, and you can never get a view of the snow-covered tents, ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... to thee plainly the eternal laws of life; but these sacred hieroglyphics of the goddess which thou decipherest upon their perfumed foreheads, thou wilt find everywhere hidden under other emblems. Let the caterpillar drag itself creeping along, and soon the light butterfly darts rapidly through the air; and let man also, with his power of self- development, follow the circle of his soul's metamorphoses. Oh! then wilt thou remember that the bond which united our spirits was first a germ from ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... where he leaves Chaucer, the spirit of Chaucer leaves the verse. You see plainly that his rule is to change the least that can possibly be changed. Yet the gentle grace, the lingering musical sweetness, the taking simplicity, of the wise old poet, vanishes—brushed away like the down from the butterfly's wing, by the lightest ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... divested of its white paper wrapping, disclosed a blue plush box. A second later Mary was exclaiming over the dainty beauty of the bit of jewelry lying securely on its white satin bed. The pin was fashioned in the form of a golden butterfly, the body of which was ...
— Marjorie Dean High School Freshman • Pauline Lester
... diffused around her a perfume as if rose-leaves were stirred up. She held a dainty handkerchief, edged with real lace, in her little left hand, which glittered with rings. In her right, was a spangled fan like a black butterfly. Mrs. Edes was past her first youth, but she was undeniably charming. She was like a little, perfect, ivory toy, which time has played with but has not injured. Mrs. Slade looked at her, then at Karl von Rosen. ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... The common small white butterfly of Europe (Pontia or Pieris rapae) is now established in North America; and the march of the jigger, or foot-infesting flea (Sarcopsylla penetrans) of tropical America, across Africa, has taken place in quite ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... pale petals of the autumnal colchicum begin to appear; a month after Gouts and Rheumatisms, for which they grow, have left Vichy and are returned to Paris for the winter. We arrived long before this, in the midst of the butterfly month of July. It was warm enough then for a more southern summer, and both insect and vegetable life seemed at their acme. The flowers, even while the scythes were gleaming that were shortly to unfound their ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... Autumn just unfurled themselves in order to be struck at the first broadside of a November frost—the sun was shining so warmly, that the leaves had every reason to be ashamed of their yellow complexions; and a young lady—like a butterfly awakened by the brightness of the day—fluttered forward from the porch of Surbridge Hall, dressed in all the hues of the rainbow. A green bonnet, a pink pelisse, a red shawl, and lilac parasol, were scarcely in keeping with the sylvan scene on which she hurriedly entered. She was very tall ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... the thirteenth century,—it is altogether another art. Between the two there is a great gulf, a distinction forever ineffaceable. The change from one to the other was not that of the child into the man, as we usually consider it; it was that of the chrysalis into the butterfly. There was an entire change in the habits, food, method of existence, and heart of the whole creature. That we know more than thirteenth century people is perfectly true; but that is not the essential difference between us and them. We are different kind of creatures ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... rising from the bed went to the window and leaned out. A large white clematis pushed its moonlike blossom up to her face, as though asking to be kissed, and a bright red butterfly danced dreamily up and down in the late sunbeams, now poising on the ivy and anon darting off again into ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... if the wind sits in that quarter we must see what else there is to be done. What is there, now?... No, I won't send for Elsie; we don't need a wheel to break the butterfly on; we won't go ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... butterfly on the rhubarb-leaves perhaps caught his eye, or at last he cried himself to sleep. These fits were not often, but they caused a shadow in Mrs. Morel's heart, and her treatment of Paul was different from ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... belongs to Kennington's neighbours. Stockwell, which perhaps sees a hansom as often as a motor-car, once named as a native one of the greatest of English racehorses. Camberwell, when willows grew about a village stream, long since dry, named a butterfly; but Camberwell Beauties, though they sleep sometimes in Surrey woodstacks, and flaunt their white-laced wings in Surrey sunshine perhaps twice in a summer, fly no more by brooks in Camberwell. Perhaps in the old days the Tradescants, ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... with pleasure as the little creature bounded toward her. "Oh, it looks like a bird or a butterfly!" she cried as she picked it up; and the dog put its paws on her shoulders and looked at her with eyes "like a Christian's." After that she would never have it out of her sight, and petted and talked to it as if ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... have a yellow streak." His lip curled as he studied the pallid features of the heir to the Van Cleft millions. Fearless himself, he could still understand the tremors of this care-free butterfly: yet he knew he must crush the dangerous thoughts which were developing. "If you mistrust me, hustle for yourself. You have the death-certificate, the services will be over in a few days, and then you will have ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... exercise, rising an octave at the first bound and then fluttering down like some gorgeous butterfly of sound till it rested on the octave below. And at each renewed flight it began a note higher until it climbed at last to high C. Then it ran up in roulades and galloping bravuras, it trilled and sought out new flights; yet always with the pellucid tones ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... WOLSEY, and a long way after, too,—one of the most pathetic pictures ever presented on the stage. So lonely in her grandeur, so grand, and yet so pitiable in her loneliness is this poor Queen of Beauty, this Empress-Butterfly, who can conquer conquerors, and for whose sake not only her noble lovers, but her poor humble serving-maids, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., December 6, 1890 • Various
... the glass, which a woman ne'er misses. Nor ever wants time for a sly glance or two, A butterfly,[1] fresh from the night-flower's kisses. Flew over the mirror, and shaded her view. Enraged with the insect for hiding her graces, She brushed him—he fell, alas; never to rise: "Ah! such," said the girl, "is the pride of our faces, "For which ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... they went on, keeping just where the sand gave place to firm ground, for the birds were excessively tame, and gave evident proof that they were not much disturbed; while every now and then amid the lovely insects which thronged wherever there were flowers, appeared some magnificent butterfly, several inches across its wings, tempting Sir John to cease exploring for ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... resolving to ruin Tom, she complained to the king that he had behaved very insolently to her. The king sent for him in a rage. Tom, to escape his fury, crept into an empty snail-shell, and there lay till he was almost starved; when peeping out of the shell, he saw a fine butterfly settled on the ground. He now ventured out, and getting astride, the butterfly took wing, and mounted into the air with little Tom on his back. Away he flew from field to field, from tree to tree, till at last he flew to the king's court. ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... transformed the butterfly into a new woman. Leonora adored Keller as a ray of light gone astray from the glowing star now extinguished forever; she felt the joy of humbleness, the sweetness of sacrifice, seeing in him not the ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... peacock butterfly flaunted Its four great crimson wings, As over the edge of the chalk it flew Black as a ship on the Channel blue ... When Salomon sailed from Ophir,— He brought, as the high sun brings, Honey ...
— The Lord of Misrule - And Other Poems • Alfred Noyes
... Mariposa, Spanish for butterfly, was a fit name for the pretty Indian maiden. She paid great deference not only to her tall father, Red Cloud, but to the pale faces whenever in their presence. For four years Mariposa, unusually bright, attended the Indian school ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... dew a-layin' soft and cool on the other posies' faces, and the sun a-shinin' warm on 'em as they held 'em up, and sometimes she'd see a butterfly come down and light on 'em real soft, and kind o' put his head down to 'em, 's if he was kissin' 'em, and she thought 'twould be powerful nice to hold her face up to all them pleasant things. ...
— Story-Tell Lib • Annie Trumbull Slosson
... extended her vision to survey a yellow butterfly and a red-and-black butterfly that were flitting along in company, and then became aware that Dick was advancing ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... had decided upon a ball at Rotherwood, and an absolute creation of a gown that was to be sent for from Paris. There would have been some eclat then in emerging from the chrysalis stage of the school-room and becoming a butterfly of society. To make her first grown-up appearance at Mrs. Desmond's dance and in a home-made dress seemed not so much a "coming out" as an "oozing out." There are degrees in butterflies, and she feared her appearance would resemble not the gorgeous "Red Admiral" or ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... wore a paper collar and a butterfly necktie, as befitted a man of his station in life. He was a short, squarely made Scotchman, with sandy whiskers much grayed and with a keen, in-tensely ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... As good a heart as hers, but somewhat given To hunt the nearest butterfly, and light The fire of fancy without hanging o'er it The porridge-pot of practice. ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... feet, so nobody could hear—dances she and I made up together out of stories she used to tell me. The Shadow Dance and the Statue Dance which you saw, came out of those stories, and there are more you didn't see, which I do sometimes—a butterfly dance, the dance of the wheat, and two of the East, which were in stories she told me after we knew Cassim ben Halim. They are the dance of the smoke wreath, and the dance of the jewel-and-the-rose. I could dance quite well even ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... grew to the sound of Annie's voice uttering not Runic Rhymes, but old Scotch ballads, or such few sweet English poems, of the new revelation, as floated across her way, and folded their butterfly wings in ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... methinks that thou dost grow more unmannerly each day. Thou art as unthinking as the butterfly, else thou wouldst not have burdened my ...
— In Doublet and Hose - A Story for Girls • Lucy Foster Madison
... broad-brimmed, Lined with pale pink lining, On them dew-drops often shining— Yes, yes, yes. No butterfly goes near them, No brown bee hums to cheer them, And what these Quaker folks are called I want you all ...
— Harper's Young People, September 21, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... from beneath the leaves that kept them dry Flew many a glittering insect here and there, And darted up and down the butterfly, That seemed a living blossom of the air. The flocks came scattering from the thicket, where The violent rain had pent them; in the way Strolled groups of damsels frolicksome and fair; The farmer swung the scythe ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... long, long summer hours The golden light should lie, And thick young herbs and groups of flowers Stand in their beauty by; The oriole should build and tell His love-tale close beside my cell; The idle butterfly Should rest him there, and there be heard The housewife bee ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... affection. She was never so demonstrative as the other girls. Her devotions had ways of expressing themselves in an occasional compliment tendered perhaps in some whimsical, back-handed fashion, or in a fleeting caress, which came and was gone like the touch of a butterfly's wing. ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Outside World • Margaret Vandercook
... replied, "but in the closet, the jam is kept in a stone crock, while yours was always in the butterfly jar that I ...
— Princess Polly At Play • Amy Brooks
... the nautch-girl to the pipe and wires, Fluttering like some vain, painted butterfly From glade to glade along the forest path, Nor dreamed her light words echoed on the ear Of him, that holy man, who sate so rapt Under the fig-tree by the path. But Buddh Lifted his great brow as the wantons passed, And spake: 'The foolish ofttimes teach the wise; I strain too ...
— The Light of Asia • Sir Edwin Arnold
... crimson sea-weeds of the most delicate tracery. It is much to be regretted that these lower marine animals are not better known. The plumage of the tropical birds, the down on the most brilliant butterfly's wing, are not more beautiful in coloring than the hues of many Radiates, and there is no grace of motion surpassing the movements of some of them in their native element. The habit of keeping marine animals in tanks ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... fact, the sudden outbreak of active hostilities with the Table Hill contingent had had the effect of taking the minds of Spider Reilly and his warriors off Cosy Moments and its affairs, much as the unexpected appearance of a mad bull would make a man forget that he had come out butterfly-hunting. Psmith and Billy could wait; they were not likely to take the offensive; but the Table Hillites ...
— Psmith, Journalist • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... bowls with figures of quadrupeds from Sikyatki 672 CXXXI. Ornamented ladles from Sikyatki 674 CXXXII. Food bowls with figures of reptiles from Sikyatki 676 CXXXIII. Bowls and dippers with figures of tadpoles, birds, etc., from Sikyatki 676 CXXXIV. Food bowls with figures of sun, butterfly, and flower, from Sikyatki 676 CXXXV. Vases with figures of butterflies from Sikyatki 678 CXXXVI. Vases with figures of birds and feathers from Sikyatki 678 CXXXVII. Vessels with figures of human hand, birds, ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes
... from larva to butterfly took place in the young, handsome, and clever Charles-Edouard, Comte Rusticoli de la Palferine. Until this moment of his life he had lived miserably, covering his deficits with an audacity equal to that of Danton. But he now paid his debts; he now, by advice of Maxime, had a ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... you are!" said the flowers. "You must be a butterfly or a poet, Bebee, to be as foolish as that. Some one will do all he did. We are of market value, you know. Care, indeed! when the sun is so warm, and there is not an earwig in the ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... the cabin of that peerless steamer, the New World, and a splendid company were assembled about the table. Among the passengers thus prepared for gastronomic duty, was a little creature of the genus Fop, decked daintily as an early butterfly, with kids of irreproachable whiteness, "miraculous" neck-tie, and spider-like quizzing glass on his nose. The little delicate animal turned his head ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... pavement below. The city seemed to be exuding the soaked-in heat of the long summer's day. The women who floated by were dressed in the lightest of muslins; even the plainest of them gained a new charm in their airy and butterfly-looking costumes. The men walked bareheaded, waistcoatless, fanning themselves with straw hats. Here and there, as they turned into Shaftesbury Avenue, an immaculately turned-out young man in evening dress passed along the baked pavements and dived into one of the ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... happy—the ability to forget all and enjoy the moment. I have watched you for years. It has been so in the past, and will be so in the future. Other men who see me, men born to the plane, have the quality—call it butterfly if you will—to enjoy the 'now.' It appeals to me—I am of their manner born." Their eyes met and she finished slowly, "It's injustice to you, I know; ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... the side of the designer—the morality, unexceptionable certainly, the author's capital. Here are then, to these moralities, a smiling train of mirths supplied by George Cruikshank. See yonder little fellows butterfly-hunting across a common! Such a light, brisk, airy, gentleman-like drawing was never made upon such a theme. Who, ...
— George Cruikshank • William Makepeace Thackeray
... cheerfulness was so infectious, that Sylvia already began to forget her gloom, and hurried away to do her part. Putting on a short, girlish gown, kept for scrambles among the rocks, she improvised a pinafore, and braided her long hair a la Morlena Kenwigs, with butterfly bows at the ends. When she went down, she found her husband in garden jacket, collar turned over a ribbon, hair in a curly tumble, and jackknife in hand, seated on the rug before a roaring fire, and a semicircle of apples, whittling and whistling like a very boy. They ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... flew off and landed right on Susie's paw. Oh, wasn't she glad! And the fairy said: "The ring will last, because that is blue, and I am blue, too. Now, good bye, Susie." And with that she disappeared, changing into a butterfly with golden wings. Then Susie started to get in the golden coach and ride home, but, would you believe me, if those horses didn't run away, upsetting the coach and breaking it, and scattering all the ten boxes of chocolate-covered carrots all over. Oh, how badly Susie felt, ...
— Sammie and Susie Littletail • Howard R. Garis
... a most beautiful butterfly fluttered in the air, in the very middle of the open window. When we first saw it, it was flitting gaily and happily amongst the plants and flowers that were blooming in the balcony, but it gradually became ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 582, Saturday, December 22, 1832 • Various
... own I like not Johnson's turgid style, That gives an inch the importance of a mile; Casts of manure a wagon-load around To raise a simple daisy from the ground; Uplifts the club of Hercules—for what?— To crush a butterfly or brain a gnat; Creates a whirlwind from the earth to draw A goose's feather or exalt a straw; Sets wheels on wheels in motion—such a clatter! To force up one poor nipperkin of water; Bids ocean labour with tremendous roar, To heave a cockle-shell upon ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 394, October 17, 1829 • Various
... that means," answered Amy. "I will be forced to give up my church work and be a useless butterfly again; and besides, the conditions father insists ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... admire Augustus Clarence Percy Marmaduke Grobble (learned in millinery; competent, as modes varied, to discuss harem, hobble, pannier, directoire, slit, or lamp-shade skirts, berthes, butterfly-motif embroideries, rucked ninon sleeves, chiffon tunics, and similar mysteries of the latest ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... tear-stained slates, awful examples and punishments of a hundred lines of Vergil, by wholesome good-cheer and limpid forgetfulness of self in drawing pictures of spiders and noting the difference between a wasp and a bee, a butterfly and a moth, a frog and a toad, a mushroom and a toadstool. And so the reason Rousseau is read is because there is much in his work that is essentially modern. No thinker writes on political economy without quoting the "Social Contract," either for the sake ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... a life must be equal, and how do we lack in this? There are thousands today who flit along on the crest of the wave of life's current, butterfly-like; they never really have a conscious thought. If "it only does not affect me" is their watchword, and freedom from anything serious is their only really serious problem. They know in an indifferent way that hearts break, that tears fall, that there are prayers that stagger ...
— Freedom Talks No. II • Julia Seton, M.D.
... hard-workin' folks sink all their money in a butterfly like that. Bet she uses up the meat bill every month. And look what she gets out of it. Bet she's twenty-six if she's a day. And all she got was Hawkins. I must have looked good to her for a ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... dressed in a costume of white linen with a cloud of chiffon tied about her small hat and a parasol that she had purchased this summer in Paris, which consisted of an enormous gold lace butterfly. She was fuller in figure than before her child had come and in perfect health, though still pale. Fresh and well cared for, she was if not beautiful very attractive and dainty—all that money could make of her human person. Adelle was ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... mighty good keer of sick slaves. He allus called in a doctor for 'em, and kept plenty of castor ile, turpentine, and de lak on hand to dose 'em wid. Miss Emily made teas out of a heap of sorts of leaves, barks, and roots, sich as butterfly root, pine tops, mullein, catnip and mint leaves, feverfew grass, red oak bark, slippery ellum bark, and black gum chips. Most evvybody had to wear little sacks of papaw seeds or of assyfizzy (asafetida) 'round deir necks to ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Georgia Narratives, Part 3 • Works Projects Administration
... sure; I see what it is. He's about growin' a pair of wings for his wit to fly away wid. But musha good gracious, he needn't ha' throubled himself to be gettin' them that sizable. Somethin' the bigness of a hedge-sparrer's, or maybe a weeny white butterfly's, 'ud ha' plinty stren'th enough for the job, if that was all they had to do." Ned meant no harm, but his witticisms did not fall in with Con's humour, so he snatched back the cap and went off affronted, nor did he call at the ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... examined the outer sill with Bob, it seemed all right. So that evening when the children's bedtime came, pansy flower was told by Pansy little girl what her kind mamma and uncle had planned for her benefit, and with what Pansy called a kiss, a very butterfly kiss it was, for the little girl was as afraid of hurting the pansy as if it had been a sensitive plant, the flower-pot was placed on ...
— The Thirteen Little Black Pigs - and Other Stories • Mrs. (Mary Louisa) Molesworth
... and had long golden hair of which she was very proud. She was different from her sister, and never helped with the work, but spent the day combing her hair and catching butterflies. She would catch a pretty butterfly, cruelly stick a pin through it, and fasten it in her hair. Then she would go down to the lake to see her reflection in the clear water, and would laugh to see the poor butterfly struggling in pain. The people disliked her for her cruelty, ...
— Philippine Folklore Stories • John Maurice Miller
... much prejudiced against spiders and every insect in the known world with scarcely an exception. There is a horrid sensation created by their ugly forms that makes me wish them all to Jericho. The butterfly's wings are pretty, but he is dreadful ugly. The is no affectation in this, for my pride will not permit me to show this prejudice to any great degree when I can help it. I do not fear the little wretches, but ...
— The Teacher • Jacob Abbott
... which, when divested of its white paper wrapping, disclosed a blue plush box. A second later Mary was exclaiming over the dainty beauty of the bit of jewelry lying securely on its white satin bed. The pin was fashioned in the form of a golden butterfly, the body of which ...
— Marjorie Dean High School Freshman • Pauline Lester
... had been an August evening instead of a September one, both train and platform would have been crowded. But the butterfly summer maiden had flitted and, as is his wont, the summer man had flitted after her, so the passengers who alighted from the two coaches that, with the freight car, made up the Orham Branch train, were few in number and homely in flavor. There was a very stout lady with ...
— Cap'n Eri • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... 'iron rations,' pair of socks and waterproof sheet. We carried four sandbags just below. Then we had the usual equipment, pouches containing 120 rounds, bayonet, water bottle and entrenching tool. Another 100 rounds in bandoliers, and I had extra an apron containing 12 Mill's bombs and butterfly wirecutters. The whole formed fairly heavy equipment. In the late afternoon when we were all lined up prepared to march off, orders came to cancel all orders. We stood by for two days. On 'X' night the 16th H.L.I. sent ...
— The Seventeenth Highland Light Infantry (Glasgow Chamber of Commerce Battalion) - Record of War Service, 1914-1918 • Various
... have been ignorant that ours is, in general, greater than the Periclean for the very reason that the Divinity is neither the devil nor a bungler; that three thousand years of human consciousness is not nothing; that a whole is greater than its part, and a butterfly than a chrysalis? But it was the assumption that it was therefore in any way great in the abstract that occasioned my profound astonishment, and indeed contempt. Civilisation, if it means anything, can only mean the art by which men live musically together—to the lutings, as it ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... Kathlyn to curb the wild desire to crush Winnie in her arms, arms that truly ached for the feel of her. Even as she fought this desire she could not but admire Winnie's superb acting. She and her father had misjudged this butterfly. To have come all this way alone in search of them, unfamiliar with the customs and the language of the people! How she had succeeded in getting here without ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... coming from the bordering mountains at one end, gone flashing into the mountain-guarded pass at the other. From a distance Kendric heard a bird singing away like mad and saw the sweep and flutter of a butterfly's wing. ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... affliction of the chief official and his dozen or so of underlings. To have the first peaches and the last grapes in the county of York, to decorate her table with the latest marvel in pitcher plants and rare butterfly-shaped orchids, was Lady Laura's ambition; to astonish morning visitors with new effects in the garden her unceasing desire. Nor within doors was her influence less actively exercised. Drawing-rooms and boudoirs, morning-rooms and bedchambers, were always undergoing some improving touch, some ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... the ages pagan elements have mingled in the festivities of Christmas, so in the Catacombs they are not absent. There is Orpheus playing on his harp to the beasts; Bacchus as the god of the vintage; Psyche, the butterfly of the soul; the Jordan as the god of the rivers. The classical and the Christian, the Hebrew and the Hellenic elements had not yet parted; and the unearthing of these pictures after the lapse of centuries affords another interesting clue to the origin of some of the customs of Christmastide. ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... a fountain at Nimes, in which the figures are fine and the drapery noble and distinct in treatment. The serious and comic Muses of the Fountain Moliere are excellent works. He made several separate statues which are well known; his Psyche has a butterfly poised on the upper part of the arm; Atalanta is fastening her sandals; Sappho is in despair. His Niobe group showed his power to represent bold action, and his Prometheus chained, erected in the garden of the ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... one earthly sight, The sun, the day; the stars, the night; Or tree, or butterfly, or flower, Or fish in stream, or bird in bower, ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... Player, The Barrier, The Before the Feast of Shushan Big Bell in Zion, The Black Mammies Brothers Butterfly in Church, A ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... of love and mystery, full of color, charm, and vivacity, dealing with a South American mine, rich beyond dreams, and of a New York maiden, beyond dreams beautiful—both known as the Silver Butterfly. Well named is The Silver Butterfly! There could not be a better symbol of the darting swiftness, the eager love plot, the elusive ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... white butterfly came along the meadow, and instantly he ran out, flung open the gate, rushed down the steps, and taking no heed of the squeak the gate made as it shut behind ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... young girl sings of successive forms she will assume, to avoid the attentions of her suitor, and he, ingeniously, finds the transformation necessary to overcome her. For instance, when she becomes a rose, he changes into a butterfly to kiss her. At last the maiden becomes convinced of the love of her ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... thou thinkest for; eighty odd years may be lengthened into ninety: the patriarchs lived till a hundred and more years, and we believe that the soul outlives the body. Out of the chrysalis we escape from our corruptible bodies, and the beautiful butterfly flutters Godward. Grieve for me a little when I am gone, but grieve not before I go, for I would see thy face always happy, as I remember it in those years long ago in Nazareth. Jesus, Jesus, thou shouldst not weep like this! None should weep but for ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... Chevalier du Halga was still there, and the last deal of a lively mouche was going on. Charlotte de Kergarouet, in despair at Calyste's indifference, was paying attention to his father as a means of promoting her marriage. Calyste wandered hither and thither like a butterfly which had flown into the room by mistake. At last, when mouche was over, he drew the Chevalier du Halga into the great salon, from which he sent away Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel's page ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... answered her, "since being dressed as a butterfly does not prevent one from being an insect, and the best sustained preservation lasts at most till the day ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... calamity. Dying will be an experience to the believer which will be fraught with inestimably good things; that is, the act of dying, and not merely the being dead. It is no doubt as necessary to the nature of the soul, to its psychology, its soul-life, as the changes of the worm, chrysalis, and butterfly, are to the insect. And thus, as in all other things, where sin abounded, grace much more abounds, and even death, like a cross, is turned into a ministration ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams
... wry face; but she only shook her head in a determined way, and announced that she would see to it in person. As for herself, she was as dry as a butterfly which had just emerged from a chrysalis, and I congratulated myself upon the care I had taken of her. But before we reached home she was in a plight almost equal to my own, for the wind had blown the wheat across the path, and it was impossible for ...
— The Love Story of Abner Stone • Edwin Carlile Litsey
... the professor producing his revolver, a weapon that might have proved fatal to a butterfly, but certainly would not be of any effect against the shaggy ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... one touch to sweep away the wintry snow, and with another to clothe the landscape with profuse and luxuriant vegetation. How strange to see the humming-bird dart like a streak of golden light among the fragrant shrubs; stranger still to see the butterfly, attracted by the lines of some stray wild flower, flutter away again, repelled by the chilling neighbourhood of the last remnant of a snow-drift lying in a sheltered corner, where no sunbeam ever ...
— The King's Warrant - A Story of Old and New France • Alfred H. Engelbach
... remember the Butterfly's Ball and the Grasshopper's Feast in the halcyon days of their childhood? These toyful trifles, "light as air," doubtless suggested the Emperor's Rout. Do not start, expectant reader; this is no downfall of a royal dynasty, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 471, Saturday, January 15, 1831 • Various
... in the glass, which a woman ne'er misses. Nor ever wants time for a sly glance or two, A butterfly,[1] fresh from the night-flower's kisses. Flew over the mirror, and shaded her view. Enraged with the insect for hiding her graces, She brushed him—he fell, alas; never to rise: "Ah! such," said the girl, "is the pride of our faces, "For which the ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... this a plea for the transcendental diet that drove Sydney Smith to that pathetic sigh, "Ah, I wish they would allow me even the wing of a roasted butterfly!" But perhaps it would not be amiss to conjure up a terror-demon from these bodies of ours, so that we should fear to violate laws with such merciless penalties,—should have none but well-cooked food, at sensible and systematic hours. Is it strange that little Miss ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... out through the open door into the fresh, soft morning air. The warm scent of the garden blew up to them. A large, yellow butterfly fluttered peacefully by. The dew still lay on leaf and flower, ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... Indians of Arizona say that the father of all men and animals was the butterfly, Cherwit Make (earth-maker), who fluttered down from the clouds to the Blue Cliffs at the junction of the Verde and Salt Rivers, and from his own sweat made men. As the people multiplied they grew selfish and quarrelsome, so that Cherwit Make was disgusted ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... Tegucigalpa, Prale had talked to her and had danced with her twice. He judged her to be about twenty-eight, some ten years younger than himself. She was small and charming, not one of the helpless butterfly sort, but a woman who gave indication that she could care for herself ...
— The Brand of Silence - A Detective Story • Harrington Strong
... my death," said the lady, who was crying; her trickling tears and her sopping handkerchief removed what remnants of her "cheeks" the sudden bath in the river had left. As the paint disappeared, one saw how very pretty the poor draggled butterfly was—big, honey-dark eyes, and quite exquisite features. "Oh, my soul and body!—I'll die!" she said, sobbing with cold ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... essence of Greece felt in our new way. For we've got our new way of feeling things. Rosamund tells us she repeated the words to Jennie Stileman, and Jennie had them set by a young Athenian who's over here studying English. He catches the butterfly, lets it flutter for a moment in his hand and go. He doesn't jab a pin into it as our composers would. Oh, there's Cynthia! I hope she heard the ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... a little old lady—the good fairy of her circle—whose interest in the heart-affairs of her friends wins her this pleasant if slightly sentimental title. But, ungrateful as is the task of breaking so innocent a butterfly upon the wheel of criticism, I'm afraid I must add that I think Miss CLARA TURNBULL has hardly carried out her purpose with sufficient discrimination. In plain fact she has allowed her sympathies to run away with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 21, 1919. • Various
... was served. In the center was a pyramid of spongecake in the form of a temple with melonlike sides, and on the top was an artificial rose with a butterfly of silver paper hovering over it, held by a gilt wire. Two drops of gum in the heart of the rose stood for dew. On the left was a deep plate with a bit of cheese, and on the other side of the pyramid was a dish of strawberries, which ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... the dream of precipitation into that wonderful tornado of worlds has the merit of more colourful idealism than that which was formerly displayed. Taken but as an hypothesis, it holds suggestions ampler than any other conveys. It intimates that just as the butterfly rises from the chrysalis, so does the spiritual rise from the flesh. It indicates that just as the sun cannot set, so is it impossible ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... shoes, picked up the skirt of his habit, and began to dance. The exhilarating drink, the ruddiness of the fire, the discomfort outside, the smoothness of the oak boards,—these were conditions of happiness for Father Baby. This was perhaps the crowning instant of his experience. He was a butterfly man. He saw his lodger, Dr. Dunlap, appear at the door as haggard as the dead. The ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... ground. He picked together half a handful of brownish things which had to be dried leaves. He stuffed them into the pipe, struck a match, and lighted it. He puffed away gloomily, surrounded by wholly monstrous vegetation. A butterfly fluttered over the top of the steel globe. Its wings were fully a yard across. It flittered lightly to a plant and seemed to wait, and abruptly a vivid carmine blossom opened wide; wide enough ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... through which we passed,—where the pine-trees rise so grandly in their awful height, that they seem to look into heaven itself. Hardly a living thing disturbed this solemnly beautiful wilderness. Now and then a tiny lizard glanced in and out among the mossy roots of the old trees, or a golden butterfly flitted languidly from blossom to blossom. Sometimes a saucy little squirrel would gleam along the somber trunk of some ancient oak, or a bevy of quail, with their pretty tufted heads and short, quick tread, would trip athwart our path. Two or three times, in the radiant distance, we descried ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... she prayed and watched in faithfulness to mother and son—she observed him come out and wander round the garden in great joy. He lifted up the soiled rose and put it in his coat; he released a butterfly caught in some mesh; he buried his face in fragrant honeysuckle. Then she understood that his heart was full of love, and was sure that it would ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... after one pattern. Every day as his mood has changed since his last toilet, he will vary the colour, texture, form of his costume. Fashion does not rob him of free will. It leaves him liberty of all expression. Every day there is not one accessory, from the butterfly that alights above his shirt front to the jewels planted in his linen, that will not symbolise the mood that is in him or the ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... raise her finger suddenly, saying, "Fly away [something]." If that something is not capable of flight the other fingers must not move, but if it can fly they must rise also. Thus, "Fly away, thrush!" "Fly away, pigeon!" "Fly away, butterfly!" should cause all the fingers to spring up. But of "Fly away, omnibus!" "Fly away, cat!" "Fly away, pig!" no notice should be taken. The game is, of course, to ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... Naepor, "have watched him catch a butterfly and, holding it uncrushed, walk into a wood, and have seen a woodthrush flutter down to him, take the butterfly from his fingers, speed away with it to feed its young and presently return to his empty hand, as if expecting another insect, perch on his hand, peck at it and remain ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... what?" growled Ercole. "This is a bad world. A man falls in love with a pretty little caterpillar; he wakes up and finds himself married to a butterfly. Oh, this is a very ...
— Whosoever Shall Offend • F. Marion Crawford
... require weeks and months of patient, happy effort to carry out. Beware that no one of them is repeated or continued so long at a time as to become a thing dreaded and disliked. Remember that the attention of a little child is like a constantly flitting butterfly that rests for only a moment or two on anything before dancing ...
— What the Mother of a Deaf Child Ought to Know • John Dutton Wright
... bread for the current day,—of all of these the learned gentleman knows nothing. With all these wretched beings, hard, raw reality wipes off the poetic coloring more easily than does the hand the colored dust of the wings of a butterfly. One look, cast by the professor at those unnumbered female sufferers, would have seriously disturbed his poetically colored picture, and spoiled his concept. The women, whom he sees, make up but a trifling minority, and that these stand upon the plane ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... here! How lovely it is in the country! There are moments when I should like to be a fly or a butterfly and hide in the flowers," said Jeanne ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... little girl slept soundly. She had merry dreams, and finally woke up laughing. She hurried over her breakfast, and then stood ready to go for a butterfly hunt. She looked thoroughly happy, and evidently had found, and was holding tightly, the key to ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... even evinced by insects who never see their offspring. The butterfly uses the utmost care in selecting a suitable leaf on which to deposit her eggs. She selects one that will be nourishing food for the larvae when hatched out, and, after carefully observing whether it is ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... irrepressibly, light-heartedly, and skipped on to the first weed-covered rock that obstructed her path. It was an exceedingly slippery perch. She poised herself with arms outspread, with a butterfly grace as airy ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell
... trill of a bird, voicing an overflow of joy and the humming of bees among the vines of the church yard, where slanting headstones bore quaintly archaic names and life dates of sailors home from the sea. A wandering butterfly had drifted in and was winging its bright way about the place where the sermon had been interrupted. But the bated breath of awed amazement broke at the end of a long-held pause into ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... peculiar to the Radiates, but occurs in all divisions of the Animal Kingdom. There are many Insects that pass through their metamorphoses within the egg, appearing as complete Insects at the moment of their birth; but the series of changes is nevertheless analogous to that of the Butterfly, whose existence as Worm, Chrysalis, and Winged Insect is so well known to all. Take the Grasshopper, for instance: with the exception of the wings, it is born in its mature form; but it has had its Worm-like stage within the egg as much as the Butterfly that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... in terrifying colours a picture of solitude, and at length his despair closed with idiotism. The amiable Gresset could not sport with the brilliant wings of his butterfly muse, without dropping some querulous expression on the solitude of genius. In his "Epistle to his Muse," he exquisitely paints the situation of ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... place. I wish we could leave it for a change," said Ayrault. "I don't mean forever, of course, but just as people have grown tired of remaining like plants in the places in which they grew. Alan has been a caterpillar for untold ages; can he not become the butterfly?" "Since we have found out how to straighten the axis," said Deepwaters, "might we not go one better, and improve the orbit as well?—increase the difference between aphelion and perihelion, and ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... kinds of animals, used to like sitting in a kitchen that was infested with these repulsive creatures, and told me that when she was alone they would run over her dress and were not in the least startled when she took them up. I have heard of a butterfly which used to come and sip sugar from the hand of a lady; and those who have kept spiders and ants declare that these intelligent creatures learn to distinguish their friends. So also fish, like the great ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... Bible-meetings, funerals and festivities, churches and concerts—in short, every thing that lives and moves and has its being awaits the military smile. And the smile is smiled. And so, I tell you what it is, my dear fellow, it amounts to this, that the life of an officer isn't by any means the butterfly existence that you imagine it to be. What with patronizing Tom, Dick, and Harry, inspecting militia, spouting at volunteers, subscribing to charities, buying at bazaars, assisting at concerts, presiding at public dinners, ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... Seigneur, "it is true, I think, what the tailor suggested to my brother—on my soul, I wonder the Abbe gave in, for a more obstinate fellow I never knew!—that a man is born with the disbelieving maggot in his brain, or the butterfly of belief, or whatever it may be called. It's constitutional—may be criminal, but constitutional. It seems to me you would stand more chance with the Jew, Greek, or heretic, than our infidel. He thinks too much—for a tailor, or for nine tailors, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the masses of concert-goers. Gottschalk himself, with his epicurean, easy-going nature, laughed at the lectures read him by the critics and connoisseurs, who would have him follow out ideals for which he had no taste. It was like asking the butterfly to live the life of the bee. Great as were the gifts of the artist, it was not to be expected that these would be pursued in lines not consistent with the limitations of his temperament. Gottschalk appears to have had no desire except to amuse ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... in chase of a swallow-tail butterfly—one of the beautiful insects whose home was in the fens; but after letting him come very close two or three times, the brightly-marked creature fluttered off over the treacherous bog, a place of danger for followers, of safety for ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... yelping, and looking wistfully over the swollen flood, which the poor thing had not the courage to brave. This day, for the first time, I heard the song of the Canada sparrow, a soft, sweet note, almost running into a warble. Saw a small, black velvety butterfly with a yellow border to its wings. Under a warm bank found two flowers of the houstonia in bloom. Saw frogs' spawn near Piny ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... thin, soft, girlish arm, hanging listlessly, was lost in the folds of her pink tunic; in the other she held her fan, and with rapid, short strokes fanned her burning face. But while she looked like a butterfly, clinging to a blade of grass, and just about to open its rainbow wings for fresh flight, her heart ached ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... Scatchett at the piano in the salon beyond the partition, wearing a sweater and fingerless gloves and holding a hot-water bottle on her knees. Three rooms beyond, down the stone hall, the Big Soprano, doing Madama Butterfly in bad German, helped to make an encircling wall of sound in the center of which one might ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the pipe and wires, Fluttering like some vain, painted butterfly From glade to glade along the forest path, Nor dreamed her light words echoed on the ear Of him, that holy man, who sate so rapt Under the fig-tree by the path. But Buddh Lifted his great brow as the wantons passed, And spake: 'The foolish ofttimes teach the wise; I strain too much this string ...
— The Light of Asia • Sir Edwin Arnold
... the spotted flycatchers, seem to have absolutely nothing to say, and accordingly have the wit to hold their tongues; and devote the whole of their small intellect to sitting on the iron rails, flitting off them a yard or two to catch a butterfly in air, and flitting back with ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... rose-bud's breath; The bird's forsaken nest and her new song (And this is all the time there is for Death); The worm and butterfly—it is ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... them were all the fantastic and enormous shapes with which Nature bedecks her robes beneath the fierce suns and fattening rains of the tropic forest. Common were forms and colors of bird, and fish, and butterfly, more strange and bright than ever opium-eater dreamed. The long processions of monkeys, who kept pace with them along the tree-tops, and proclaimed their wonder in every imaginable whistle, and grunt, and howl, had ceased to move their laughter, as much as the roar of ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... place!" I exclaimed, a little surprised, surveying her dress of palest and softest Indian muslin; for she looked to me far too much of a butterfly for such serious work. "Do you really mean it; or are you one of the ten thousand modern young ladies who are in quest of a Mission, without understanding that Missions are unpleasant? Nursing, I can tell you, is not all ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... musicsellers's boy was sent to the publisher's for a number of copies of the song "I'd be a Butterfly, arranged for two trebles;" when, on being desired to repeat his order, he replied, "I'd be a Butterfly, arranged ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 323, July 19, 1828 • Various
... grove, in the interior of the island, was Wallulah's lodge. The path that Multnomah took led through a pleasant sylvan lawn. The grass was green, and the air full of the scent of buds and flowers. Here and there a butterfly floated like a sunbeam through the woodland shadows, and a humming-bird darted in winged beauty from bloom to bloom. The lark's song came vibrating through the air, and in the more open spaces innumerable birds flew twittering in the sun. The ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... trailed its smoke and smouldering fires. A glen beneath, a lonely spot of rest, Hung, scarce discovered, like an eagle's nest. Summer was in its prime;—the parrot-flocks Darkened the passing sunshine on the rocks; 10 The chrysomel[194] and purple butterfly,[195] Amid the clear blue light, are wandering by; The humming-bird, along the myrtle bowers, With twinkling wing, is spinning o'er the flowers, The woodpecker is heard with busy bill, The mock-bird sings—and all beside is still, And look! the cataract that bursts so high, As not to mar the ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... Metrodor, lead the dancers! The first beaker to the fairest, the best, the wisest, the most cherished, the most fervently beloved of women!" As he spoke he waved his goblet aloft, the flute-player, Xuthus, beckoned to the chorus, and the dancer Metrodor, in the guise of a butterfly, led forth a bevy of beautiful girls, who, in the cloud of ample robes of transparent coloured bombyx which floated around them, executed the most graceful figures and now hovered like mists, now flitted to and fro as if borne on wings, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... AND NOSTRILS—The bridge of the nose should be very wide, with a slight ridge where the cartilage joins the bone. (This is quite a characteristic of the breed.) The nostrils should be large, wide, and open, giving a blunt look to the nose. A butterfly or flesh-coloured nose is not objected to in harlequins. EARS—The ears should be small, set high on the skull, and carried slightly erect, with the tips falling forward. NECK—Next to the head, the ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... If the butterfly courted the bee, And the owl the porcupine; If churches were built on the sea, And three times one were nine; If the pony rode his master, And the buttercups ate the cows; And the cat had the dire disaster To be ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... still that he was able to see things that a noisier youngster would have missed altogether. He saw a big bull-frog creep warily from the water and wipe his mouth and eyes with one of his fore legs, and he saw the same frog edge himself softly toward a white butterfly that was flitting about near the edge of the stream. He saw the frog lean forward, and then the butterfly vanished. It seemed like a piece of magic. The child knew that the frog had caught the butterfly, but how? The fluttering insect was more ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... wonderful, Roger? Wants to get drunk on poppies and kiss the writin' and thinks after that he'll be made into a butterfly. Your pa couldn't have been far from bein' a butterfly when he bought this book. There ain't no sense in it. And this—why, it's your pa's writin', Roger! I ain't ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed
... I follow their little butterfly antics until they vanish beyond a thicket of flowering rhododendra, and then my eyes go back to the great facade ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... he went on. Again she made no reply, but the question set her thinking: why had she mixed herself up in this mysterious business? It was quite at variance with the usual methods of her gay and butterfly existence to meddle at all with serious things. Had she acted merely from a desire to see justice done and wickedness punished? Or was it the desire of adventure? Or was it, perhaps, the desire to be of service to His Serene ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett
... smiled, for not a cloud was seen o'er the blue heaven's expanse, As summer's myriad insect tribe led on the winged dance; The gaudy butterfly was there ranging from flower to flower, And by its side the wild bee humm'd amid ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 266, July 28, 1827 • Various
... the time to be a certain small collier lying in the downs, awaiting a fair wind to carry her into the port of London. This collier (a schooner) was named the "Butterfly," perhaps because the owner had a hazy idea that there was some resemblance between an insect flitting about from flower to flower and a vessel sailing from port to port! Black as a chimney from keelson ...
— The Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... with a mass of red-gold hair, as stupid as she was sly, and as rich as she was spendthrift, the lovely Olimpia had been sent adventuring to the bees of Ferrara, not as lacking honey for Venice, but as being too great a treasure for her mother's house. Her mother was La Farfalla—a swollen butterfly in these days—and frankly said that she could not afford such a daughter. Olimpia had no instructions; in fact, needed none. She went cheerfully out to what Monna Nanna and the Blessed Virgin should prepare for her, without kisses (which she ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... misunderstand the mechanical view of things. When we use the word "machine," we call before our minds certain gross and relatively simple mechanisms constructed by man. Between such and a flower, a butterfly, and a human body, the difference is enormous. He who elects to bring the latter under the title of mechanism cannot mean that he discerns no difference between them and a steam engine or a printing press. He can only ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... the sound and plunged into the jungle after it. Sagawa had protested. He could see him yet, his queer little monkeyish face eloquent with fear, his back burdened with specimen cases, in his hands Bassett's butterfly net and naturalist's shot-gun, as he quavered, in Beche-de-mer English: "Me fella too much fright along bush. Bad fella boy, ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... realized it, and felt the pull, for days; but it didn't become insistent until yesterday, when I received a letter from a chap whom I have known for years. He's always had a good deal more money than was good for him, and been a sort of social butterfly. I liked him, although I didn't believe that he had a serious thought in his head, didn't think that he was capable of one, but ... here, read what he has written me," he concluded abruptly, as a temporary ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... the poisonous thing didn't sting you," he said. "You're a naughty little boy to play with snakes, because they're dangerous bad things, and you die if they bite you. And now you must go straight to bed; that's the only punishment that has any effect on such a harebrained little butterfly." ...
— A Little Boy Lost • Hudson, W. H.
... tone—tetigisse periisse. At other times the text would be the passage from Jeremiah, "Mors ascendit per fenestras" This puzzled me still more, for what could be this death which came up through the windows, these butterfly wings which the lightest touch polluted? The preacher pronounced the words with knitted brow and uplifted eyes. But what perplexed me most of all was a passage in the life of some saintly person of the seventeenth century who compared women to firearms which wound from ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... searched for a way round, or returned whence they had come, or climbed the adjacent herbage, with the evident intention of reaching my hand and going up the sleeve of my jacket. From this interesting spectacle my attention was distracted by the yellow wings of a butterfly which was fluttering alluringly before me. Yet I had scarcely noticed it before it flew away to a little distance and, circling over some half-faded blossoms of white clover, settled on one of them. ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... and sunny Sunday morning. The church windows were wide open, and a butterfly came in and set the choir boys to giggling. At the end of my pew a stained-glass window to Carlo Benton—the name came like an echo from the forgotten past—sent a shower of colored light over Willie, turned my blue silk to most unspinsterly hues, and threw a sort ...
— The Confession • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... in the provinces was an English version of "Frou-Frou," made for me by my dear friend Mrs. Comyns Carr, who for many years designed the dresses that I wore in different Lyceum plays. "Butterfly," as "Frou-Frou" was called when it was produced in English, went well; indeed, the Scots of Edinburgh received it with overwhelming favor, and it served my purpose at the time, but when I saw Sarah Bernhardt play ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... with the girl, watching through her eyes a butterfly as it fluttered to rest on a flower and perched there, gently ...
— The Inhabited • Richard Wilson
... happy, a beautiful butterfly came flying past, and the three boys, crying out that it was a flower with wings, set off to try ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various
... A butterfly floated into the room And back again, pausing awhile to bask And wink its painted fans on the warm sill; A bird piped in the roses and there came Into the childless mother's ears a sound Of happy laughing children, ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... often, but his letters did not do her much good they were so full of regret for the poverty which was keeping her from him and would keep her indefinitely for aught he knew. From her mother she seldom heard. That frivolous butterfly was too busy and gay to give much time or thought to her dying husband and overburdened child. She was still at Nice and still devoted to her American friends, the Rossiter-Brownes, as they called themselves, ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... caught at an end of rope, drew it in a second, let go and clutched at a handful of the sail, and then I saw how it had twisted round and swept poor little Faith over, and she had swung there in it like a dead butterfly in a chrysalis. The lightnings were slipping down into the water like blades of fire everywhere around us, with short, sharp volleys of thunder, and the waves were more than I ever rode this side of the bar before or ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... is like a butterfly, thinking only of the pleasures of the moment. Nellie Ribsam came down close to the edge of the creek and threw some crumbs out upon the surface. In the clear water she could see the shadowy figures of the minnows, as they glided upward and ...
— Through Forest and Fire - Wild-Woods Series No. 1 • Edward Ellis
... myself alone," The little opening flower transported cries. "Not to myself alone I bud and bloom; With fragrant breath the breezes I perfume, And gladden all things with my rainbow dyes. The bee comes sipping, every eventide, His dainty fill; The butterfly within my cup doth ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... seemed as if her young spirit had been tempted away from the household paths of thought, far into tangled wilds where it had lost itself—tempted, like other children, by the mere pleasure of the ramble—led on to catch a butterfly, or chase the rainbow. Feeling—passion, had not mingled with the dream at all, and consequently there had been no suffering. I am not sure that on other occasions, when such absent fits fell upon her, Emily Hastings was not more joyous, more full of pure delight, than when, in a gay and sparkling ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... aunt wrote to ask her not to come. Lee Hannaford's aloofness from his wife's relatives had turned to hostility; he spoke of them with increasing bitterness, threw contempt on Dr. Derwent's scientific work, and condemned Irene as a butterfly of fashion. Olga ceased to visit the house in Bryanston Square, and the cousins only corresponded. It was Dr. Derwent's opinion that Hannaford could not be quite sane; he was much troubled on his sister's account, and had often pondered ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... emptiness... It is not the wind that howls without, not the rain streaming in floods; without, Chaos wails and moans, his sightless eyes are weeping. But with us all is peaceful and light and warm and welcoming; something droll, something of childish innocence, like a butterfly—isn't it so?—flutters about us. We nestle close to one another, we lean our heads together and both read a favourite book. I feel the delicate vein beating in thy soft forehead; I hear that thou livest, thou hearest that I am living, thy smile is born on my face ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... fixed on a tortoise-shell butterfly fluttering round the ceiling. The insect seemed to fascinate him, as things which move quickly always fascinate the helpless. Christian ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... luxuries of art, the beauties of genius, lend their splendors with a gorgeous profusion? Still it is only a magnificent prison. We see but little of the blue heaven; scarcely more of the varied tints of earth. The air we breathe is close; and the heart flutters to be free, as the imprisoned butterfly on the first day of spring. Who would not rather go forth into the fresh, free air, than be a prisoner even in a gilded cage? And Nature, is she not more beautiful than Art? Doth not that beauty make the step more buoyant, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... cry, And pale stars blossom in the sky, And twilight's gloom has dimmed the bloom And blurred the butterfly: ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley
... That butterfly did not, however, appear to be hovering from flower to flower in the parterres of rank and fashion. In the daily lists of guests at dinners, receptions, dances, balls, the name of Maltby figured never. Maltby had not ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... everything. The dead grass, the dead rock. . . . But now, what is this on the turf? A gay blue cricket! A cricket—only that? Nay, a war-horse, a magic little steed, a "real fairy, with wings all right." And there too on the rock, like a drop of fire, that gorgeous-coloured butterfly. ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... You pushed poor Nan and Phillis away, and would not let any one come near you but that cross old Dorothy, and you never bade us good-night; but if you promise to be good, I will forgive you and make it up," finished Dulce, with those light butterfly kisses to which she ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... went out, in came the Butterfly and the Moth, who made their calls together. The Moth was clad in grey, and the Butterfly liked that, because it set off his own brilliant ...
— Seven Little People and their Friends • Horace Elisha Scudder
... your hats, and away let us haste To the Butterfly's ball and the Grasshopper's feast; For the trumpeter Gadfly has summoned his crew, And the revels are now only waiting ...
— The Butterfly's Ball - The Grasshopper's Feast • R.M. Ballantyne
... gold clasps undone, and he opened the first page, and there was a beautiful Butterfly all red, and brown, and yellow, and blue, so beautifully painted that it looked as if it ...
— The Book of Dragons • Edith Nesbit
... blades of grass at the sweep of the scythe, before the charge to which his spirit imparted its triumphant energy;—but, be that as it might, there was never in his heart so much cruelty as would have brushed the down off a butterfly's wing. I have not known the man to whose innate kindliness I would ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... one of those strangely constituted beings who cannot bear to see any innocent thing suffer. It matters not whether it be a worm in the dust, a butterfly in the air, a bird, a flower, or a human creature. The first time I saw you I knew that your state of health precluded you from the enjoyment of life natural to your sex and age. I also perceived that the physicians had been ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... of all countries many refer to insects, birds, animals, persons, actions, trades, food or children. In Chinese rhymes we have the cricket, cicada, spider, snail, firefly, ladybug and butterfly and others. Among fowls we have the bat, crow, magpie, cock, hen, duck and goose. Of animals, the dog, cow, horse, mule, donkey, camel, and mouse, are the favorites. There are also rhymes on the snake ...
— The Chinese Boy and Girl • Isaac Taylor Headland
... the Signora Psyche Zenobia. This I know to be a fact. Nobody but my enemies ever calls me Suky Snobbs. I have been assured that Suky is but a vulgar corruption of Psyche, which is good Greek, and means "the soul" (that's me, I'm all soul) and sometimes "a butterfly," which latter meaning undoubtedly alludes to my appearance in my new crimson satin dress, with the sky-blue Arabian mantelet, and the trimmings of green agraffas, and the seven flounces of orange-colored auriculas. As for Snobbs—any person who should look at me would be instantly aware ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Silk-worm in fifty-six days is equal to eighty-six thousand times its primitive weight! On the other hand, after the insect has finished its transformations, it either takes no food at all, as in the May fly, or merely sips the honey of flowers, as in the butterfly, while the June beetle and many others like it eat the leaves of trees, and the tiger and ground beetles feed voraciously on ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... and father of Clarion, the most beautiful of the race.—Spenser, Muiopotmos, or The Butterfly's Fate (1590). ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... and storm, in which the writers of that periodical were summoned to be leaders. Emerson remained in his home. He now and then visited Brook Farm, but was shrewd enough to foresee its catastrophe from the first. The child who sought her lost butterfly with tears, not knowing that it was softly perched upon her head, had a counterpart in the many enthusiasts, who continued to seek in communities or new sects the beauty which had floated before their eyes; but some there were who made the happier discovery that a quiet New England ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... Wun-lee, combing her hair, Saw a blue butterfly float through the air— Saw a blue butterfly flicker and settle On an azalea's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 1, 1914 • Various
... unexpected drop would land her a few feet from their group. She was the only one of the flying-girls who touched the earth. And she always led up to this feat as to the climax of what Honey called her "act." She would drop to the very ground, pose there, wavering like an enormous butterfly, her great wings opening and shutting. Sometimes, tempted by her actual nearness and fooled by her apparent weakness, the five men would make a rush in her direction. She would stand waiting and drooping until they were almost on her. Then in a flash came the ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... killing and skinning the unlucky mice, and (I do not regret to say) getting well stung by the bumble-bees. Others went after butterflies and birds' eggs in their seasons; and Tom found on Hazeldown, for the first time, the beautiful little blue butterfly with golden spots on his wings, which he had never seen on his own downs, and dug out his first sand-martin's nest. This latter achievement resulted in a flogging, for the sand-martins built in a high bank close to the village, consequently out of ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... have a dream for you, Mother, Like a soft thick fringe to hide your eyes. I have a surprise for you, Mother, Shaped like a strange butterfly. I have found a way of thinking To make you happy; I have made a song and a poem All twisted into one. If I sing, you listen; If I think, you know. I have a secret from everybody in the world full of people But I cannot always remember how it goes; It ...
— Poems By a Little Girl • Hilda Conkling
... Christians, wretched weary ones, who, diseased in vision of the mind, have confidence in backward steps, are ye not aware that we are worms born to form the angelic butterfly which flies unto judgment without defence? Why doth your mind float up aloft, since ye are as it were defective insects, even as a worm ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 2, Purgatory [Purgatorio] • Dante Alighieri
... expressive, action, the interpreter of the mind. Feeling was pre-eminent in his Miming; and he used to render the scene of a separation with Columbine as graphic as it was affecting. Excellent were his "statue scenes" and his "catching the butterfly;" so also were his other ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... with all her blessings? She was gay; and with the polite world gayety ranks as happiness, and commands the envy of the crowd. Nobody envies the quiet matron whose domestic life flows onward with the placidity of a sluggish stream. It is the butterfly queen of the hour whom people admire and envy. Lady Judith, blazing in diamonds at a court ball, beautiful, daring, insolent, had half the town for her slaves and courtiers. Even women flattered and fawned upon her, delighted to be acknowledged ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... the human heart. There are other striking resemblances between human organs and certain vegetable forms, The forms of many mechanical contrivances in common use may be traced back to the patterns furnished by nature. Thus, the hog suggested the plow; the butterfly, the ordinary hinge; the toadstool, the umbrella; the duck, the ship; the fungous growth on trees, the bracket. Anyone desirous of proving the oneness of the earthly system will find the resemblances in nature a most ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... the tail and flukes of a shark. To conceal these monstrous appendages he wore over his shoulders a kihei of kapa and allowed himself to be seen only while in the sitting posture. He sometimes took the form of a worm, a moth, a caterpillar, or a butterfly to escape the hands of his enemies. On land he generally appeared as a man squatting, after the manner of a Hawaiian gardener while weeding ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... into the dressing room. A bronze dragon nailed by the tail to a bracket writhed away from the wall in calm convolutions, and held, between the conventional fury of its jaws, a crude gas flame that resembled a butterfly. The room was empty, of course; but, as he stepped in, it became filled all at once with a stir of many people; because the strips of glass on the doors of wardrobes and his wife's large pier-glass reflected him from head to foot, and multiplied ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... night butterfly awakened in broad daylight, like a rare and surprising moth, the dancing-girl from the other compartment, the child who wore the horrible mask. No doubt she wishes to have a look at me. She rolls her eyes like a timid kitten, and then all at once tamed, nestles against me, with a coaxing air of ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... form to No. 227, but without handle; with a double scalloped band around the constricted portion, and a single one around the mouth; figure of an insect on the upper half; apparently intended to represent a butterfly or large moth. ...
— Illustrated Catalogue Of The Collections Obtained From The Indians Of New Mexico And Arizona In 1879 • James Stevenson
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