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More "Snail" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in my prayers to God. I am thinking that I may be likened to stagnant water, that is not good, that nobody drinks, and that does not run down in brooks, upon the banks of which kumara and trees grow. My heart is all rock, all rock, and no good thing will grow upon it. The lizard and the snail run over the rocks, and all evil runs over ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... only there are about three thousand of them. Each one of these is supposed to respond, or vibrate, to a particular tone, or sound. This keyboard, from the fact that, to save space, it is coiled upon itself like a sea-shell, instead of running straight, is called the cochlea (Greek for "snail-shell"); it is also called, because it is the deepest, or innermost, part of the hearing ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... lengthen and grow interminable, and their pace, although rapid, was to Robert like that of a snail. Yet the longest journey must come to an end. The new island rose at last before them, larger than the others but like the rest ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... instantaneously gauged as dyspeptic or eupeptic, friend or foe. On the march, Javert was on the alert, snuffing up the air, until some savory odor crossed his path, when he would shut himself up, like a snail within his shell. Yet he was not sleeping, for no titbit ever passed the portals beneath. Perhaps, however, they were themselves trusty now, having made habit a second nature. I cannot imagine them watering ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... as on the dam. Jim's eighteen hours a day often stretched into twenty, though he sometimes dozed in his office chair or in the automobile with Oscar, reveling in his new-learned accomplishment, driving at a snail's pace. ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... you walk a little faster?" said a whiting to a snail, "There's a porpoise close behind us, and he's treading on my tail. See how eagerly the lobsters and the turtles all advance! They are waiting on the shingle—will you come and join the dance? Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the dance? ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... of the Osage nation was a snail. It was when the earth was young and little. It was before the rivers had become wide or long, or the mountains lifted their peaks above the clouds, that the snail found himself passing a quiet existence on the banks of the River Missouri. His wants and ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends: North American Indian • Anonymous
... wonderful, but at the same time, we think, a universal and important fact, that love permeates the universe. Even a female snail, if we could only put the question, would undoubtedly admit that it loves its ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne
... time crept on at a snail pace the howling of the wintry gale continued unabated, with the roar of the wind through the tree-tops ashore, the dash of the waves on the point above, and the constant wabbling motion of the shanty-boat to remind them ...
— The House Boat Boys • St. George Rathborne
... weeks, the inner sides of the glass will show a green tinge, which soon increases and interferes with the view. This is owing to the growth of a minute confervoid vegetation, which must be kept down. For this purpose the Snail is the natural remedy, being the ready scavenger of all such nuisances. Snails cling to the sides, and clean away and consume all this vegetable growth. The Lymnea is among the most efficient, but unfortunately is destructive, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... But it was no serpent singing, Nor a sacred lizard calling, It was but the mountain-berry Calling to the lonely maiden: "Come, O virgin, come and pluck me, Come and take me to thy bosom, Take me, tinsel-breasted virgin, Take me, maiden, copper-belted, Ere the slimy snail devours me, Ere the black-worm feeds upon me. Hundreds pass my way unmindful, Thousands come within my hearing, Berry-maidens swarm about me, Children come in countless numbers, None of these has come to gather, Come to pluck this ruddy ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... came a change. The passion ebbed out of the face, the paper fluttered out of the loosened fingers, the red-rimmed eyes took on another look. Snail-slow the trembling hand was travelling ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... traffic, was like a gutter. On either side spread the blanket of soft snow crystals. If a man turned into this in an endeavor to pass, his dogs would wallow perforce to their bellies and slow down to a snail's pace. So the men lay close to their leaping sleds and waited. No alteration in position occurred down the fifteen miles of Bonanza and Klondike to Dawson, where the Yukon was encountered. Here the first relays ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... the red-capp'd worm that's shut Within the concave of a nut, Brown as his tooth. A little moth Late fatten'd in a piece of cloth: With withered cherries, mandrakes' ears, Moles' eyes; to these the slain stag's tears The unctuous dewlaps of a snail, The broke-heart of a nightingale O'ercome in music; with a wine Ne'er ravish'd from the flattering vine, But gently press'd from the soft side Of the most sweet and dainty bride, Brought in a dainty daisy, which He fully quaffs up to ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... has to be made at a snail's pace, the precipitous slopes close under our horses' hoofs being frightful to contemplate. This drive is an excellent preparation for an exploration of the Lozere. We are always, metaphorically, going up or coming down ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... little past sunrise, but there was no hint of early summer freshness in the noxious air of the sleeping-car as it toiled like a snail over the infinity of prairie. From behind the green-striped curtains of the berths, now the sound of restless turning and now a long-drawn sigh signified the uneasy slumber due to stifling ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... collapsed, the sides went in, the ice passed over all, and the hut of Peegwish was finally obliterated from off the face of the earth. So, a giant with his foot might slowly and effectually crush the mansion of a snail! ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne
... also gave him a coach drawn by six small mice, This made the queen angry, because she had not a new coach too: therefore, 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 hole, he saw a fine butterfly settle 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 ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... forth, and up the hill, until we were practically on the top. The country was beautiful, and by the roadside we found magnificent red slugs (Arion ater var. lamarckii[3]) and many fine snails, including the so-called Roman snail, Helix pomatia. We accosted the peasants, and enquired about the "fossilen." The word seemed to have no meaning for them, so we tried to elucidate it in the manner of the guide: where were the "stein fossilen"? Immediately, with animation, we were shown a road going westward to the town of ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... with an axe, when I had time, and cut the trunk open. A week elapsed before I again went to the woods, when, on cutting into the cavity of the tree, I found a pair of tree-toads, male and female, and a large, shelless snail. Whether the presence of the snail was accidental, or whether these creatures associated together for some purpose, I do not know. The male toad was easily distinguished from the female by its large head, and more thin, slender, and angular body. The female was much the more beautiful, both in ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... may break his neck. My word! but Mrs. Slooman tells me pretty stories of Sloo's doings with the harriers—jumping over hurdles, and everything that comes in the way, and galloping along the stony lanes as if the wind was a snail compared to his horse. I tell you. Jog, you ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... tell," don Andres replied. "Not even Cupido can find that out. She'll stay until she gets bored, he says. And to be in less danger of that, she has brought her whole establishment along on her back, like a snail." ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... the spring, And day's at the morn; Morning's at seven; The hillside's dew-pearled; The lark's on the wing; The snail's on the thorn; God's in His heaven— All's ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For • Various
... mysterious light became stronger and soon they could make out the conformation of the rock walls they were passing at such a snail's pace. Layers of vari-colored rock showed here and there, and, at one point there was a stratum of gold-bearing or mica-filled rock that glistened with a million reflections and re-reflections. The air grew warmer and more humid as they neared ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... rounded hillock, on which are a snail and spray of possible foxglove, and out of which grow a red carnation and another flower. In the upper right-hand corner is a gabled cottage with a tree, and under it a moth, flower, and caterpillar. Towards the upper left-hand corner is a bank of cloud with red and yellow ...
— English Embroidered Bookbindings • Cyril James Humphries Davenport
... time to the journey's end, we met almost every day long trains of government wagons, laden with stores for the troops and crawling at a snail's ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... Yangtze and those connected with the capital by railway, was common knowledge; but one found it hard to believe that the west and the south-west of the empire were moved by the same spirit of Europeanism, and it will be seen that China in the west moves, if at all, but at a snail's pace: the second part of this volume deals with ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... Excellence Baron de Goldburg, Leading the Dowager Duchess of Snail; Feathers and fringe on the top of her bonnet, Roses and rings on the end of ...
— Five Mice in a Mouse-trap - by the Man in the Moon. • Laura E. Richards
... his head, like a muffin-man carries his tray. It was a great thing, you never would have thought he could have carried it, and it was easy to see that it was as much as he could manage; it bent him nearly double, and he went crawling along like a snail,—it took him quite a time to get to the ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... the sweet form was about to repose. This glance, full of amorous intelligence, awoke the lady's fantasy, who, half laughing and half smitten, repeated "To-morrow," and dismissed him with a gesture which the Pope Jehan himself would have obeyed, especially as he was like a snail without a shell, since the Council had just deprived him of ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... embryo! Sure I was born with budding antlers like a young satyr, or a citizen's child, 'sdeath, to be out-witted, to be out-jilted, out-matrimonied. If I had kept my speed like a stag, 'twere somewhat, but to crawl after, with my horns like a snail, and be outstripped by my ...
— The Way of the World • William Congreve
... do not reason like this jester. But the truth is that it is very difficult for an honest man in the midst of political entanglements as Vaudrey was, to realize his dream. When opportunities arise—those opportunities that march only at a snail's pace—one is not allowed to make use of them, they are snatched from one. They arrive, only to take wings again. And in those posts of daily combat, one has not only against one the enemies who attack one openly, which would be but a slight matter, a touch with a goad or a prick ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... approbation. What, do you think that every heavy-heeled professor will have heaven? What, every lazy one? every wanton and foolish professor, that will be stopt by anything, kept back by anything, that scarce runneth so fast heavenward as a snail creepeth on the ground? Nay, there are some professors that do not go on so fast in the way of God as a snail doth go on the wall; and yet these think that heaven and happiness is for them. But stay, there are many more that run than there be that obtain; therefore ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Vol. 2 (of 10) • Grenville Kleiser
... sir; but mind this: I'm not going to let my stick travel like a snail after a cabbage-leaf this time. I'm going to cut as I should with a sword, only I'm going to hit as if you were made of glass, so as not ...
— The Young Castellan - A Tale of the English Civil War • George Manville Fenn
... left him. The other three could not go much farther. Every article that was of no present use was thrown from the wagon to lighten it, and left lying on the plain; but still the poor brutes were scarce able to drag it along. We went at a snail's pace. ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... adher'd; And, now, in love to household cares, By a shrill voice the hour declares, Warning the housemaid not to burn The roast-meat which it cannot turn. The easy chair began to crawl, Like a huge snail along the wall; There, stuck aloft in public view, And, with small change, a pulpit grew. A bed-stead of the antique mode, Made up of timber many a load, Such as our ancestors did use, Was metamorphos'd into pews: Which still their ancient nature keep, ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... current from the far-off Gulf Stream pushed my hulk onward; and this, I suppose, was helped a little by that attraction of floating bodies for each other which brings chips and leaves together on the surface of even the stillest pool. But a snail goes faster than I was going; and it was only at the end of a full hour of watching that I could see—yet even then could not be quite certain about it—that my position ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... drive the insidious foe, And from your harvest keep a hundred harms; Even the blackest of them all, the crow, Renders good service as your man-at-arms, Crushing the beetle in his coat of mail, And crying havoc on the slug and snail." —FROM "THE BIRDS ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph, Volume 1, Number 2, February, 1897 • anonymous
... sign; or the sign is the shell, and mine host is the snail. He consists of double beer and fellowship, and his vices are the bawds of his thirst. He entertains humbly, and gives his guests power, as well of himself as house. He answers all men's expectations to his power, save in the reckoning; and hath gotten ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... have collected during the last month nothing, but to-day I have been out and returned like Noah's Ark with animals of all sorts. I have to-day to my astonishment found two Planariae living under dry stones: ask L. Jenyns if he has ever heard of this fact. I also found a most curious snail, and spiders, beetles, snakes, scorpions ad libitum, and to conclude shot a Cavia weighing a cwt.—On Friday we sail for the Rio Negro, and then will commence our real wild work. I look forward with dread to the wet stormy regions of the south, but after so much pleasure I must ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... Both king and attendant are enveloped in long robes, in which there is no indication of folds, though fringes and tassels are elaborately rendered. The faces are of a strongly marked Semitic cast, but without any attempt at portraiture. The hair of the head ends in several rows of snail-shell curls, and the king's beard has rows of these curls alternating with more natural-looking portions. Little is displayed of the body except the fore-arms, whose anatomy, though intelligible, is coarse and false. As for minor matters, such as the too high position of the ears, and the unnatural ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... bring clamps and a jackscrew before the new wheel could be adjusted. Even then it had an air of uncertainty that rendered speed impossible. The concluding five miles of the journey were taken at a snail's pace, and Helen reflected ruefully that it was possible to "bruk ze leg" on the level high road as well as on ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... Helston, dusk had fallen. She found a carriage that would drive her the twelve miles to the coast. It was a quiet, grey evening and as they jolted slowly along the dusty roads and climbed the steep hills at a snail's pace, she leaned back too tired to feel anything any longer. And now they were out upon the moors where the gorse was breaking into flowers; and now, over the sea, she saw at last the great beacon of the Lizard lighthouse sweeping the ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... walks avail, To clear the leaf, and pick the snail, Then wantonly to death decree An insect usefuller than thee? Thou and the worm are brother-kind, As low, as ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... length of its course in 24 hours, it would have gone a thousand feet, that is 300 braccia, which is the sixth of a mile. Whence it would follow that the course of the sun during the day would be the sixth part of a mile and that this venerable snail, the sun will have travelled ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... cousinry seizes a victim, he is so carefully gagged and bound that complaint is impossible; he is smeared with slime and wax like a snail in a beehive. This invisible, imperceptible tyranny is upheld by powerful reasons,—such as the wish to be surrounded by their own family, to keep property in their own hands, the mutual help they ought to lend each other, the guarantees given to the administration by the fact ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... the hole in a ring, looking at the creature they had found. It was worth looking at. Its eyes were on long horns like a snail's eyes, and it could move them in and out like telescopes; it had ears like a bat's ears, and its tubby body was shaped like a spider's and covered with thick soft fur; its legs and arms were furry too, and it had hands and feet like ...
— Five Children and It • E. Nesbit
... plays many parts: His acts being seven ages. At first the infant, Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms: And then, the whining school-boy with his satchel, And shining morning-face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to school. And then, the lover; Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad Made to his mistress' eye-brow. Then, a soldier; Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard, Jealous in honour, sudden and quick ...
— The Art Of Poetry An Epistle To The Pisos - Q. Horatii Flacci Epistola Ad Pisones, De Arte Poetica. • Horace
... the rocks through this neck; toward it all trails inside the Gap converge. De Spain gave his horse his head—it was still too dark to distinguish the path—and depended on his towering landmarks for his general direction. He advanced at a snail's pace until he passed the base of El Capitan, when of a sudden, as he rode out from among high projecting rocks full into the opening, faint rays of light from the eastern dawn revealed the narrow, strangely enclosed and perfectly ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... circumstances and at some times, is extreme in her reticences, under other circumstances or at other times, may be extreme in her abandonment. Not that her modesty is an artificial garment, which she throws off or on at will. It is organic, but like the snail's shell, it sometimes forms an impenetrable covering, and sometimes glides off almost altogether. A man's modesty is more rigid, with little tendency to deviate toward either extreme. Thus it is, that, when uninstructed, a man is apt to be impatient with a woman's reticences, and yet shocked ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... relations do. Different genera of caddises differ in their mode of building. Some fasten together fragments of water-weeds and plant refuse, others take tiny particles of stone, of which they make firmly compacted walls, others again lay hold of water-snail shells, which may even contain live inhabitants, and bind these into a limy rampart behind which their bodies are in ...
— The Life-Story of Insects • Geo. H. Carpenter
... moved slowly, slowly, at a snail's pace; the wheels sank into the snow; the entire body of the coach creaked and groaned; the horses slipped, puffed, steamed, and the coachman's long whip cracked incessantly, flying hither and thither, coiling up, then flinging out its length like a slender serpent, ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... great ability, as has been set forth, really derived it, to a great extent, from the secret preferential freight rates that he had on the Vanderbilt railroads. A variety of other coercive methods were used by Vanderbilt. Special freight trains were purposely delayed and run at snail's pace in order to force shippers to pay the extraordinary rates demanded for shipping over the Merchant's Dispatch, a fast freight line ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... she interjected sharply, "and the snail-soup, and the dirty blanket under the hedge, and the constable on the road behind, always just behind, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... soldier, distinguished by the greatest exposure and privation. The occupation of a boatman was more calculated to destroy the constitution and to shorten life than any other business. In ascending the river it was a continued series of toil, rendered more irksome by the snail-like rate at which they moved. The boat was propelled by poles, against which the shoulder was placed, and the whole strength and skill of the individual were applied in this manner. As the boatmen moved along the running board, with their heads nearly touching the plank on which they walked, ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... We watched it crawl, snail-like, over the virgin sky. We panted in its heat. We saw it drop again behind the mountain wall, leaving the sky gorgeously barred with colour from a tawny orange glow to an ice-pale green—a regular pousse cafe of a sunset. Then when the cold and the dark ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... bounds forward to the flowing udder, and with his walling eyes reflecting whole acres of "calf heaven" and his little tail wiggling in speechless bliss, he draws his evening meal from nature's commissariat. The snail lolls in his shell and thinks himself a king in the grandest palace in the world. And how brilliant is the horizon of the firefly when ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... casting a hurried glance in her direction she perceived her tall figure swaying from side to side, as if under an intolerable strain of feeling. Her eyes were on the clock, the hands of which seemed to creep with snail-like pace along the dial, when unexpectedly, and a full minute before the minute hand had reached the stroke of five, Violet caught a movement on her part, saw the flash of something round and white show for an ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... to that of ordinary works as the orbit of Uranus to the orbit of Mercury. For the moment they get no justice done to them. People are at a loss how to treat them; so they leave them alone, and go their own snail's pace for themselves. Does the worm see the ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... broadly what was called the Humanitarian cause. It did not mean the cause of humanity, but rather, if anything, the cause of everything else. At its noblest it meant a sort of mystical identification of our life with the whole life of nature. So a man might wince when a snail was crushed as if his toe were trodden on; so a man might shrink when a moth shrivelled as if his own hair had caught fire. Man might be a network of exquisite nerves running over the whole universe, a subtle spider's web of pity. This was a fine conception; though perhaps a somewhat ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... "now I come to think of it. Only natural they should be going at snail's pace. Carrai! the wonder is the gringo being able for even that, or go at all. I thought I'd given him his quietus, for surely I sent my spear right through his ribs! It must have struck button, or buckle, or something, ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... snail-water for a consumption. Take half a peck of Shell-snails, wipe them and bruise them Shells and all in a Mortar; put to them a gallon of New Milk; as also Balm, Mint, Carduus, unset Hyssop, and Burrage, of each one handful; ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... structural possibilities of that division of the Animal Kingdom,—without recalling to my readers a Polyp or a Jelly-Fish, a Sea-Urchin or a Star-Fish. Neither can I present the structural elements of the Mollusk plan, without reminding them of an Oyster or a Clam, a Snail or a Cuttle-Fish,—or of the Articulate plan, without calling up at once the form of a Worm, a Lobster, or an Insect,—or of the Vertebrate plan, without giving it the special character of Fish, Reptile, Bird, or Mammal. Yet I insist that all ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... most freshwater and land shells is exceedingly easy, the greater number of specimens requiring only to be plunged into boiling water, and the contents removed—an easy operation in the case of the bivalves, and the contents of univalves or snail-like shells being also easily wormed out with a pin or crooked awl. [Footnote: Mr. R. B. Woodward, F.G.S, etc. in one of the very best and most practical of those wonderful little penny "Handbooks" for young collectors, advises ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... the experience of Gootes and myself, parachute landings had been ruled out as too hazardous, but someone happily thought of the use of snowshoes and it was on these clumsy means that tourists, at a high cost and at less than snail's pace, tramped wonderingly over the ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... someone loved me and trusted me to make myself a musician, I'd do it somehow—and I've about as much music in me as a snail!" she cried passionately. "You know I trusted you! It seems to me that if you can't remember for ten minutes, and try to be kind the very hour we're married, the whole thing ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... parents. In one we see the newly created and lovely Eve standing by the side of the sleeping Adam, and regarding him with pleasurable anticipation. Another shows us the animals marching in line to be inspected and named. The snail heads the procession and sets the pace. The lion and the tiger stroll gossiping together. The unicorn walks alone, very stiff and proud. Two rats and two mice are closely followed by two sleek cats, who keep them well covered, and plainly await the time when Eve's amiable indiscretion shall ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... slimy, crawling things!" More than once have I heard this kind of remark from youthful lips when I produced my grand old Roman snails and gave them a pleasant time for exercise upon the dewy lawn. Now in my secret mind I think a snail is a wonderfully curious creature, neither ugly nor "horrid"—it is slimy, but about that I shall have something ...
— Wild Nature Won By Kindness • Elizabeth Brightwen
... as she was watching him with eyes glowing and lips tightly closed, lest a cry of impatient agony should escape her throat, he,—like a snail that has shown its slimy horns too soon, and is not ready to face the enemy as yet,—seemed suddenly to withdraw within his former shell of careless suavity. The earnestness of his tone vanished, giving place to light and easy conversation, ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... she came to the topmost step of the staircase. Black with dust and cobwebs, damp, with slimy snail-tracks on the stones, it went winding down to the lowest story of the old house. The steps were worn and irregular. Long ago they had been built, for this was the most ancient part of the chateau. ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... I sketched was of the shape of a large leaf, upon which all the fibres were marked. It measured ten feet by four. Another bore a resemblance to a great conch-shell. Many were impressed with the roots of shrubs and the images of various surrounding objects—snail-shells, pebbles, twigs, and the like. On a larger scale, bubbling brooks, waterfalls, and whirlpools were represented—now no longer a burning flood, but stiff, stark, and motionless. One sketch, which is reproduced, bore a startling resemblance ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... the Tsay-ee-kah and of the Petrograd Soviet, lay miles out on the edge of the city, beside the wide Neva. I went there on a street-car, moving snail-like with a groaning noise through the cobbled, muddy streets, and jammed with people. At the end of the line rose the graceful smoke-blue cupolas of Smolny Convent outlined in dull gold, beautiful; and beside it the great barracks like faade of Smolny Institute, two hundred yards long and three ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... I'll take him through," said Emerson, stubbornly; and so they crawled their weary way, sore beset with their dragging burden. Slow at best, their advance now became snail-like, for darkness had fallen, and threatened to blot them out. It betrayed them down declivities, up and out of which they had to dig their way. In such descents they were forced to let go the helpless man, whose body rolled ahead of them like a boneless ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... ne'er open my beak, if the gods please, For such mean little fishes as these." He did it for less; | For it came to pass, That not another fish could he see; And, at last, so hungry was he, That he thought it of some avail To find on the bank a single snail. ...
— A Hundred Fables of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... ammonites by simply showing their temporary and systematic transitions into one another. In the fresh water chalk formation of Steinheim, near Heidenheim, in Wuertemberg, scientists have found, on the same place, in an uninterrupted series of strata, the snail valvata or paludina multiformis in all imaginable transitions—from the flat winding, showing the form of a chess-board, up to the sharp form of a tower. And it was not, as Hilgendorf thought, in a series ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... limit is really passed, and no scholar will admit that the perception and representation of a body, as it may take place in the brain of a Berthelot, can present any inferiority as a cognition of the absolute, to the pain felt by the snail I crush under my foot. Nobody except metaphysicians will acknowledge that psychology is a more precise and certain science than physics ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... with women endlessly, with meanness like a snail, and when his blood was up, to the most nonsensical place ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... pick up the thread of the melody but in vain. Then came the inevitable breakdown. She quit trying, and appealed pitifully to Signor Mancinelli for help. He seemed to have lost his head as completely as the lady had her memory. So had the prompter, who pulled his noddle into his shell like a snail and remained as mute. Signor Tamagno entered in character, and indulged in dumbshow to a few detached phrases from the orchestra. Then the awfulness of the situation overwhelmed him, and he fairly ran off the stage, leaving Matilda alone. That lady made a final appeal to the conductor, ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... one's horns; to retract an assertion through fear: metaphor borrowed from a snail, who on the apprehension of danger, draws in his horns, and retires to ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... delight the Frenchman. Also, it is a question whether snails, even if it were possible to obtain the superior Burgundian, fat and juicy and cooked even as our own Oscar used to prepare them for certain Waldorf guests, would ever appeal to the American taste, as even the common hedgerow sort of snail does to ...
— Twenty-four Little French Dinners and How to Cook and Serve Them • Cora Moore
... footmen that lay in squares and the fringe of dead horsemen that had charged them, and above on the slope the dead gunners, who lay round their broken piece. The Guards' column had left a streak right up the field like the trail of a snail, and at the head of it the blue coats were lying heaped upon the red ones where that fierce tug had been before ...
— The Great Shadow and Other Napoleonic Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... forgotten friend, a Snail, Beneath his house, with slimy trail, Crawls o'er the grass; whom, when he spies, In wrath he ...
— Favourite Fables in Prose and Verse • Various
... you heard the groan of a gravelled grouse, Or the snarl of a snaffled snail (Husband or mother, like me, or spouse), Have you lain a-creep in the darkened house Where the wounded ...
— Reginald • Saki
... along the dusty road. For hours the man had not been able to urge the beast out of a walk. The loss of time consequent upon his having followed wrong roads during the night and the exhaustion of the pony which retarded his speed to what seemed little better than a snail's pace seemed to assure the failure of his mission, for at best he could ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... handed the control of the second team to Wilson. He was very eager to have it and will do well I'm sure—but certainly also the dogs will not pull heavy loads—500 pounds proved a back-breaking load for 11 dogs to-day—they brought it at a snail's pace. Meares has estimated to give them two-thirds of a pound of biscuit a day. I have felt sure he ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... kept silent and was very glad he had done so, for, after an hour of snail-like pace through the streets they came in sight of a gigantic structure, in which Rollo could see thousands and thousands of ...
— Rollo in Society - A Guide for Youth • George S. Chappell
... not easily enticed out; he had his home where he hid himself like a snail in its shell. He had the responsibility for this little world of five people, and he had not even succeeded in securing it. His strength and industry were not enough even to keep one little home above water; a benefactor was needed for that! It was not the time to ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... in brown paper, mostly. Cows free in woods. Alligator tail good. Snail built up just like a conch (whelk). They eat good. Worms like a conch. Bile conch. Git it out shell. Grind it sausage grinder. Little onion. Black pepper. Rather eat conch than any kind of nourishment ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves • Works Projects Administration
... other charm, nor conjuror, To raise infernal spirits up, but Fear, That makes men pull their horns in, like a snail, That's both a prisoner to itself and jail; Draws more fantastic shapes than in the grains Of knotted wood, in some men's crazy brains, When all the cocks they think they are, and bulls, Are only in the insides of ...
— Book of Wise Sayings - Selected Largely from Eastern Sources • W. A. Clouston
... conscience smite him at my naming the insects? I hope not. I hope you have not been tempted by Satan to do any harm to the little harmless, and often useful, creatures that cross your path. A butterfly, a cockchaffer, a house-fly, a snail, a caterpillar, a worm—these, and all others, are God's handy-work; and if you could see them through a glass that magnifies very much indeed, you would be more astonished than I can tell you. The small powder, scarcely seen on your finger's end, from the wing of a butterfly, is a lump ...
— Kindness to Animals - Or, The Sin of Cruelty Exposed and Rebuked • Charlotte Elizabeth
... the north, and pillowing her head on a cushioned thwart, gave herself up to dreamy contemplation on the sky. There was scarce a ripple on the lake. A faint breath of an offshore breeze fanned her, drifting the canoe at a snail's pace out from land. Stella luxuriated in the quiet afternoon. A party of campers cruising the lake had tarried at the bungalow till after midnight. Jack Fyfe had risen at dawn to depart for some distant logging point. Stella, once wakened, had ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... that I made seven days from Calais to Paris, by laying out my journeys at the rate of travelling in England, thirty miles a-day; and did not find but that I could have gone in a third of the time! I shall not be such a snail the next time. It is said that on Lord Tavistock's return, he is to decide whom he will marry. Is it true that the Choiseuls totter, and that the Broglios are to succeed; or is there a Charles Townshend at Versailles? ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... as one grown used to numbness, until last summer one Mistress Barbara visited the man-snail in his shell and exorcised him to come forth for an outing, to feed among fresh green leaves and breathe the perfume of flowers and young lives. When lo and behold, on the snail's return, the shell had ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... six small mice. This made the Queen angry, because she had not a new coach too; therefore, 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 a large, empty snail-shell, and there lay for some time, when, peeping out of the shell, he saw a fine butterfly on the ground. He ventured forth and got astride the butterfly, which took wing, and mounted into the air with little Tom on ...
— The History Of Tom Thumb and Other Stories. • Anonymous
... the simplicity of their structure is wont to be involved by many obscurities, it is necessary that we should approach the subject by the observation of the lower, imperfect animals."[19] So he wrote in the De viscerum structura, and accordingly he studied the liver first in the snail, then in fishes, reptiles, mammals, and finally man. In the introduction to his Anatome plantarum (1675), in which he laid the foundations of plant histology, he vindicates the comparative method in the following words:—"In the enthusiasm of youth I applied myself to Anatomy, and although ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... walks on which, from puppyhood, he had always accompanied the Mistress and the Master. Unknown to the old dog, these walks had been shortened, mercifully, and slowed down, to accommodate themselves to Lad's waning strength: But the time came when even a half-mile, at snail-pace, over a smooth road, was too much for his ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... procession following the northern trail. First came Lulu, white-clad, serious, pale, walking with Honey. The others, crowned with flowers and carrying garlands, followed, serious and silent, the women clinging with both hands to the men, who supported their snail-like, tottering progress with one arm about their waists. On the point of the northern reef, a cabin made of round beach-stones fronted the ocean. It fronted the rising sun now and a world, all ocean and sky, over ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... more or less fantastic speculation. The shells begin to assume such strange forms that observers speak occasionally of the "convulsions" or "death-contortions" of the expiring race. Some of the coiled shells take on a spiral form, like that of a snail's shell. Some uncoil the shell, and seem to be returning toward the primitive type. A rich eccentricity of frills and ornamentation is found more or less throughout the whole race. But every device—if we may so regard these changes—is useless, and the devastating agency of the Cretaceous, ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... noiselessly out, meaning to anticipate his ring. A vague foreboding drove the blood from her lips as she stood waiting at the open hall-door. Seeing the streaming light, the boy managed to accelerate his snail's pace. ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... Give me your lance, good man, and stick the point Here in the ground, and then the roof will be Held up in that direction. Thus it throws A broader shadow. Quickly, now! That's right! You other fellow, like a snail, you bear Your house upon your back, unless, perhaps, A house for some one else. Show me the shield! A mirror 'tis, in sooth! 'Tis crude, of course, As all is, here, but in a ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... to drive; she had driven the car at snail's pace the length of the drive leading from Upton House, and tried to turn out of the open ...
— The Second Honeymoon • Ruby M. Ayres
... up of a private car and a diner, was running on a slow order and crawled between the bluffs at a snail's pace. ...
— The Daughter of a Magnate • Frank H. Spearman
... said the woman curtseying. "Here, Tommy, come 'vor, and take off your hat to her Ladyship," and she pulled forward a frightened shrinking boy in a suit of corduroy, who had hidden himself behind her. "Look to mun, my Lady, he that was the most rompageous boy in Ashacombe, so quiet as a snail. And he can't spake, my ...
— The Drummer's Coat • J. W. Fortescue
... proceeds to the island of Lamary, the Lambri of Marco Polo; and by using the Italian term "the star transmontane," at once betrays the source of his plagiarism. His descriptions seem disguised extracts from Polo, with ridiculous exaggerations and additions; as of snail shells so large as to hold many persons. His account of the pretended varieties of the human race, as of nations of Hermaphrodites, and others equally ridiculous, which he places in separate islands of the Indian ocean, are ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... familiar of mollusks is the common snail, which may serve as a type of the "class" of mollusks to which it belongs—the class Gasteropoda. The snail, with the slug, are representatives of land-forms of mollusca, but the bulk of the class and of the whole sub-kingdom ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... up, and followed the chambermaid. Aye, there it was, slowly winding up the steep white road, on which it seemed to move at a snail's pace. ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... disappeared, lost among mountains and hills; this detached number had the wild country, the forbidding road, the December day to themselves. To get the guns and ammunition-wagons along proved a snail-and-tortoise business. Guns and escort fell farther ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... pretty wet, but still laughing, when he crawled out, like a snail from under his shell, and got upon his feet, clutching the tub to hurl it ...
— The Young Surveyor; - or Jack on the Prairies • J. T. Trowbridge
... spurning hamlets behind us, I suddenly called out, "Why, what asses we are! Why, it's She that is brave—she and the donkey. We are safe enough; we are artillery and plate-armour: and she stands up to us with matchwood and a snail! If you had grown old in a quiet valley, and people began firing cannon-balls as big as cabs at you in your seventieth year, wouldn't you jump—and she never moved an eyelid. Oh! we go very fast and very far, ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... is the greatest spectacular night the American knows. The noisy, good-natured crowds in the streets, the jostling, snail-moving crowds; the illuminated canvas-sheets in front of the newspaper offices; the blare of tin horns, the cries, the yells, the hoots and hurrahs; the petty street fights; the stalled surface cars; the swearing cabbies; the newsboys hawking their latest extras, men carrying ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... not before he had been down to scratch like a fowl among the dead leaves under the privet-hedge for grubs, who "kidded" themselves that they were going to be fine, flashing insects next summer. He also prospected a snail or two, and broke through their fortifications by hammering the same upon a stone. And, by some magic process that looked akin to the way in which some men divine water, he divined a worm out of seemingly bare earth. It was there, too, and it came up, not joyfully, but tugged, ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... going at a snail's pace while Frank was still a short distance in the rear and Mr. Temple and Tom Barnum were not yet in sight. It was an open touring car with the top folded back. There were three men in it, one on the seat beside the driver and the third in the rear. He was the ...
— The Radio Boys on the Mexican Border • Gerald Breckenridge
... full-breasted pigeon, with his head thrown back, and was continually in the act of wriggling his long chin into his ample neckerchief. He could not ask you how do you do, or say in answer to that question, "I thank you, sare, very well," without stamping prettily with his foot, as if cracking a snail, and tossing his chin into the air as if he were going to balance a ladder upon it. Then, though his features were compressed into a small, monkeyfied compass, they were themselves, individually, upon a magnificent scale. It was as if there had been crowded half a dozen ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... can't wait your snail's pace. My lady in black, Mrs. Donald Bird, has been here all the afternoon, and she offers me twenty-five dollars a month to give up the Baer cubs and tell stories two hours a day in the orphan asylums and the Children's Hospital! Just what I love to do! Just what I always longed to do! Just ...
— Polly Oliver's Problem • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... blindly adventuring out into the open thoroughfare to avoid some obstacle—some spectral wain or omnibus got hopelessly stranded; while there were muffled cries and calls here, there, and everywhere. They went at a snail's pace, of course. Once, at a corner, the near wheels got on the pavement; the cab tilted over; Miss Burgoyne shrieked aloud and clung to her companion; then there was a heavy bump, and the venerable vehicle resumed its slow progress. Suddenly they beheld a cluster of dim, nebulous, phantom ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... the power of growth, In the snail and the tree, God is the power of growth In the ...
— Lundy's Lane and Other Poems • Duncan Campbell Scott
... trembled. Her car seemed to draw sullenly back. Then it came out—out—really out, which is the most joyous sensation any motorist shall ever know. In excitement over actually moving again, as fast as any healthy young snail, she drove on, on, the young man ahead grinning back at her. Nor did she stop, nor he, till both cars were safe on merely thick mud, a quarter of a ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... the sly creature's front feet were lame from the rheumatism, like Uncle Wiggily's, so the fox couldn't run at all. Bawly knew he could easily hop away from him, as the sly animal couldn't go any faster than a snail. ...
— Bully and Bawly No-Tail • Howard R. Garis
... Bayswater at a snail's pace, and with more stoppages than ever mortal omnibus was subjected to before, as it seemed to that one eager passenger. At last the fading foliage of the Park appeared between the hats and bonnets of Valentine's opposite neighbours. Even those orange tawny trees ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... leg as a specific for the cramp. Then, as he realized his position, he strove madly to rise and straighten the afflicted limb. He was so far successful that he managed to stand, and in the fantastic appearance of a human snail, to shuffle slowly round the kitchen. At first he thought only of the cramp, but after that had yielded to treatment a wild idea of escape occurred to him. Still bowed with the chair, he made his way to the door, and, after two or three attempts, got the latch in his mouth and opened it. ...
— The Skipper's Wooing, and The Brown Man's Servant • W. W. Jacobs
... liberated girls skipped down to the laundry was certainly not snail-like. They had nearly reached it when Ruth's feet became entangled in a piece of string, and, stooping down to loosen it, she discovered a slip of paper fastened to the end, and a large pin which had evidently stuck it fast to ...
— Caps and Capers - A Story of Boarding-School Life • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... the line. The four night raiders left the American trench at one o'clock in the morning. They crawled on their bellies through snow for one hour before reaching the sniper's post. Seven yards per minute is a snail's pace, but pretty good time in No Man's Land, where you must remain motionless each time a star-shell lights up the darkness around you and makes ...
— The Fight for the Argonne - Personal Experiences of a 'Y' Man • William Benjamin West
... left us, and we proceeded through the Gulf with the convoy. Nothing of any importance transpired during our passage of nine long, tedious weeks, when we anchored in the Downs, where I got rid of all our snail-sailing mahogany haystacks. The three days we lay in the Downs I took up my quarters at the "Hoop and Griffin." Bread and butter, with delicious oysters, were my orders of the day, but, alas, my former ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... folk, and the prince of darkness is behind them to urge them on. They sank little charges of powder into my legs and then they exploded them, which makes me a slower walker than ever, though I was never very brisk. 'The Snail' was what I was called at school in Tours, yes, and afterwards at the seminary I was always ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... There were cottagers in this lonely hill hamlet, not only old folk but young persons, who had never seen a train. They had not had the enterprise or curiosity to walk into Overboro' for the purpose. Some of the folk ate snails, the common brown shell-snail found in the hedges. It has been observed that children who eat snails are often remarkably plump. The method of cooking is to place the snail in its shell on the bar of a grate, like a chestnut. And well-educated people have been known, even in these days, to use the snail as ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... and says, "I wonder how Sir Samuel Luke and he should clash, for they are both cubs of the same ugly litter. This Urchin is as ill carved as that Goblin painted. The grandam bear sure had blistered her tongue, and so left him unlicked. He looks like a snail with his house upon his back, or the Spirit of the Militia with a natural snapsack, and may serve both for tinker and budget too. Nature intended him to play at bowls, and therefore clapt a bias upon him. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... to fit the snail, as it were," commented the land baron, patronizingly, gazing around the little cupboard of a room. "At any rate," he added, in an effort to hide his dissatisfaction, "it's a pleasure to become better acquainted with such a—what shall ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... is this? The girl's fainting. Never mind. Here, landlady, bring a light! Lead the way. She's not too heavy to carry. Upstairs with you. What a snail you are, ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... the river, taking many beaver. As a New Year's greeting a shower of arrows from a new tribe, the Pipis, fell amongst them. The trappers killed six of them at one volley, and the rest ran away, leaving twenty-three beautiful longbows behind. The only clothing the dead men had on was snail-shells fastened to the ends of their long locks of hair. The trappers now began to seek more anxiously for the mythical settlements. "A great many times each day," says Pattie, "we bring our crafts to the shore ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... cheat head grain found how treat dead staid ground town beast stead waif hound growl bleat tread rail mound clown preach dread flail pound frown speak thread quail round crown streak sweat snail sound ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... example, among the plants we take the yeast-plant, a Protococcus, a common mould, a Chara, a fern, and some flowering plant; among animals we examine such things as an Amoeba, a Vorticella, and a fresh-water polyp. We dissect a starfish, an earthworm, a snail, a squid, and a fresh-water mussel. We examine a lobster and a crayfish, and a black beetle. We go on to a common skate, a codfish, a frog, a tortoise, a pigeon, and a rabbit, and that takes us about all the time we have to give. The purpose of ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... supply. Seeds planted. Beautiful country. Ride westward. A chopped log. Magnetic hill. Singular scenery. Snail-shells. Cheering prospect westward. A new chain of hills. A nearer mountain. Vistas of green. Gibson finds water. Turtle backs. Ornamented Troglodytes' caves. Water and emus. Beef-wood-trees. Grassy lawns. Gum creek. Purple vetch. Cold dewy night. Jumbled ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... you pass a roadside ditch or pool in spring-time, take from it any bit of stick or straw which has lain undisturbed for a time. Some little worm-shaped masses of clear jelly containing specks are fastened to the stick: eggs of a small snail-like shell-fish. One of these specks magnified proves to be a crystalline sphere with an opaque mass in its centre. And while you are looking, the opaque mass begins to stir, and by-and-by slowly to turn upon its axis like a forming planet,—life ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... darrow Pit, pat, well-a-day Lit-tle Jack Hor-ner sat in a cor-ner Lit-tle Tom Tuck-er Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle A dog and a cat went out together Little Polly Flinders Four and twen-ty tai-lors went to kill a snail A little cock-sparrow sat on a tree Bless you, bless you, bonny bee One day, an old cat and her kittens Doctor Foster went to Gloster John Cook had a little gray mare; he, haw, hum! Dingty, diddlety, my mammy's maid A horse and cart Who ever saw a rabbit Boys ...
— Aunt Kitty's Stories • Various
... mentioned by Lamarck in his Animaux sans Vertebres, which has been pronounced as absurd and ridiculous, and has aided in throwing his whole theory into disfavor, is his way of accounting for the development of the tentacles of the snail, which is quoted ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... Cavalry, he at least may thread his way out, under cloud of night, by the opposite or Daun side," calculates Finck. And Wunsch sets out accordingly: a very questionable, winding, subterranean march; difficult in the extreme,—the wearied SLIPshod horses going at a snail's pace; and, in the difficult passes, needing to be dragged through with bridle and even to be left altogether:—in which, withal, it will prove of no use for Wunsch to succeed! Finck's Generals endeavoring to rank and rearrange through the night, find that their very cartridges are nearly spent, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... was well boiled. I warrant him well boiled. God forbid that a LIVE snail should be seed on any plate of victuals that's served by Robert Creedle....But Lord, there; I don't mind 'em myself—them small ones, for they were born on cabbage, and they've lived on cabbage, so they must be made of cabbage. But she, the close-mouthed little lady, she didn't ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... the snail doth clime the highest tops, Ascending up the stately castle walls; At length the water with continual drops, Doth penetrate the hardest marble stone; At length we are arrived in Albion. Nor could the barbarous Dacian sovereign, Nor yet the ruler of brave Belgia, Stay us from cutting over to this ...
— 2. Mucedorus • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... walked very carefully through the mossy woods until he came upon a caribou trail still comparatively fresh. Nobody but Crooked Nose could have followed the faint indications, but he did so, at first rapidly, then more warily, finally at a very snail's pace. His progress was noiseless. Such a difficult result was accomplished primarily by his quickness of eye in selecting the spots on which to place his feet, and also to a great extent by the fact that he held his muscles so pliantly tense that the weight of ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... most of the clergy and young ladies around. But it was hard that where Rachel really liked and met half-way, the intimate confidence should always be bestowed upon Grace, or even the mother. She had yet to learn that the way to draw out a snail is not to, grasp its horns, and that halfway meeting is not to launch one's self to the opposite starting point. Either her inquiries were too point blank to invite detailed replies, or her own communications absorbed her too much to ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... it. It's been such a long time since I was a freshman, you see. They picked out the hardest theorems, I know—things you couldn't even draw, let alone demonstrate: the pyramid that's cut in slices, for one,—I don't remember its name,—and that sprawling one that looks like a snail crawling out of its shell: the devil's coffin, I believe it's called technically. And—oh, yes! they give you originals—frightful originals, like nothing you've ever had before; and they put a little note at the top of the page telling you ...
— When Patty Went to College • Jean Webster
... lizards; But it was no serpent singing, Nor a sacred lizard calling, It was but the mountain-berry Calling to the lonely maiden: "Come, O virgin, come and pluck me, Come and take me to thy bosom, Take me, tinsel-breasted virgin, Take me, maiden, copper-belted, Ere the slimy snail devours me, Ere the black-worm feeds upon me. Hundreds pass my way unmindful, Thousands come within my hearing, Berry-maidens swarm about me, Children come in countless numbers, None of these has come to gather, Come to pluck this ruddy berry." Mariatta, child ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... four manned an oar and pulled with both hands. It was almost impossible to get started against the wind, and when at last their steady, even pulling overcame the deterring power of the gale they were able to move at but a snail's pace. They followed the shoreline, keeping as close in as they could, preferring the circuitous route to the more perilous row ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... the papers. Now I knew our current fate, and felt as if I heard again the gas gong going continuously. I had the feeling in April, unknown to any snail on the thorn, that the park was deafening with the clangour of pallid, tense, and contending lunatics. The Serpentine had receded from this tumult. Its tranquil shimmering was now fatuous and unbelievable. It was but half seen; its glittering was a distant grimacing and mockery at my troubled ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... which is standing very nearly still, and you will realise that you and your canoe are standing very nearly still too; and that all your exertions are only enabling you to creep on at the pace of a crushed snail, and that it's the water that is going the pace. It's a most quaint and ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... place, in the presence of a sagamore named Begourat, who led them to the war. They were arranged one behind the other, with their bows and arrows, clubs, and round shields with which they provide for fighting. They went leaping one after the other, making various gestures with their bodies, and many snail-like turns. Afterwards they proceeded to dance in the customary manner, as I have before described; then they had their tabagie, after which the women stripped themselves stark naked, adorned with their ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 1 • Samuel de Champlain
... hands and knees, no faster than a snail, feeling every inch of the ground. The surface was wet and slippery, and in places sloped at an angle that made me hang on for dear life to keep from shooting ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout
... think so. Everybody does not stick to a bank-note like a snail to the wall! I returned him ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... d'Herculanum,' in which we find a Silenus, with the usual peculiarities of figure ascribed to the jolly god rather exaggerated, and an owl sitting on his head between two huge horns, which support stands for lamps. Another represents a flower-stalk growing out of a circular plinth, with snail-shells hanging from it by small chains, which held the oil and wick; the trunk of a tree, with lamps suspended from the branches; another, a naked boy, beautifully wrought, with a lamp hanging from ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... has the right of selection—quite a mistake of his I'm sure, for he has no real sense of beauty or fitness, and generally selects most vilely. All the same he is an obstinate brute, and sticks to his brutish ideas as a snail sticks to its shell. I am an obstinate brute!—I am absolutely convinced that I have the right to choose my own woman, if I want one—which I don't,—or if ever I do want one—which ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... leaned gently over. One of the door-posts snapped, the other sloped inwards, the roof collapsed, the sides went in, the ice passed over all, and the hut of Peegwish was finally obliterated from off the face of the earth. So, a giant with his foot might slowly and effectually crush the mansion of a snail! ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne
... on. They wake up this part rarely!... See, now, how the Channel and coast open out like a chart. That patch of mist below us is the town we are bound for. There's the Isle of Slingers beyond, like a floating snail. That wide bay on the right is where the "Abergavenny," Captain John Wordsworth, was wrecked last month. One can see half across to ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... as well as the fingers are encircled by them. The left hand is most loaded; upon the thumb is a signet with hieroglyphics on its surface; three rings on the forefinger; two on the second, one formed like a snail-shell; the same number on the next, and one on the little finger. The right hand carries only a thumb-ring, and two upon the third finger. These hands are cut in wood, and ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... flying-fish are become very numerous, and whole fleets of medusae have passed us; some we have picked up, besides a very beautiful purple sea-snail. This fish has four horns, like a snail, the shell is very beautifully tinted with purple, and there is a spongy substance attached to the fish which I thought assisted it to swim: it is larger in bulk than the ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... had not a new coach too; therefore, 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 a large, empty snail-shell, and there lay for some time, when, peeping out of the shell, he saw a fine butterfly on the ground. He ventured forth and got astride the butterfly, which took wing, and mounted into the air ...
— The History Of Tom Thumb and Other Stories. • Anonymous
... Kingdom,—without recalling to my readers a Polyp or a Jelly-Fish, a Sea-Urchin or a Star-Fish. Neither can I present the structural elements of the Mollusk plan, without reminding them of an Oyster or a Clam, a Snail or a Cuttle-Fish,—or of the Articulate plan, without calling up at once the form of a Worm, a Lobster, or an Insect,—or of the Vertebrate plan, without giving it the special character of Fish, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... that this one was in all probability a drunkard, and that it would be useless, worse than useless, to help him. But he was cold and hungry and penniless, and I knew it. I went as swiftly as I could to overtake him. He had not traveled far, lurching along at a snail's pace, and he was startled when I came up to him. One of his legs was longer than the other; it had been crushed in an accident. They were not pairs, his legs, and neither were his eyes pairs; one was big and blind, with a fixed pupil, and the other ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... in either direction like sheep before a dog—all except one man, who, walking with two sticks, could not move above a snail's pace. ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... soothe him. But the Colonel clamoured to the heavens. Kennaston he qualified in various ways. And as for Dr. Jeal, he would hold him responsible—"personally, sir"—for the consequences of his dawdling in this fashion—"Damme, sir, like a damn' snail with a ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... I reached the car ahead the train had entered a wild gorge circle by one of those astonishing hairpin curves with which engineers defeat Nature. The panting engine slowed almost to a snail's pace, having only a scant fuel ration with which to negotiate curve and grade combined. To our right there was a nearly sheer drop of four hundred feet, with a stream at the bottom boiling among ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... withered grass underfoot. Poterloo points out with his foot this bit of abandoned track, and smiles; "That, that's our railway. It was a cripple, as you may say; that means something that doesn't move. It didn't work very quickly. A snail could have kept pace with it. We shall remake it. But certainly it won't go any quicker. That can't ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... from the cornfields drive the insidious foe, And from your harvest keep a hundred harms; Even the blackest of them all, the crow, Renders good service as your man-at-arms, Crushing the beetle in his coat of mail, And crying havoc on the slug and snail." —FROM "THE ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph, Volume 1, Number 2, February, 1897 • anonymous
... had risen as night closed in swept over the isthmus. The waves in its lakes dashed high, and the Red Sea, which thrust a bay shaped like the horn of a snail into it from the south, was lashed to the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... became stronger and soon they could make out the conformation of the rock walls they were passing at such a snail's pace. Layers of vari-colored rock showed here and there, and, at one point there was a stratum of gold-bearing or mica-filled rock that glistened with a million reflections and re-reflections. The air grew warmer and more humid as they neared the mysterious ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... ship-building (see SNAIL-CREEPING). Also, a cruel practice in one or two American states, now extremely rare, in which a man's eye was squeezed out by his rival's thumb-nail, the fingers being entangled in the ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... her, and stood with nothing but a plain coloured shawl of gauze covered in tinsel twined about her slim waist, "why hast thou wasted precious moments? Why has thou imperilled my chance by infuriating the great man? Out of my way, thou snail." ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... He went a snail's pace, and at last dismounted, and groped his way. He got more than one fall in the snow, and thought himself very fortunate, when, at last, something black towered before him, and it was the ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... like a muffin-man carries his tray. It was a great thing, you never would have thought he could have carried it, and it was easy to see that it was as much as he could manage; it bent him nearly double, and he went crawling along like a snail,—it took him quite a time to get to the end of ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... choose to be disturbed. Ah, Roman, how many times harder the lot of the high than the low! When we drew nigh to the fissure in the arch, the torches were again extinguished, and we proceeded at a snail's pace and with a hyena's foot while we were passing within a few feet of the then, as I doubted not, sleeping Romans. As we came beneath the broken and open part, I was startled by the sound of voices. Soldiers were above conversing. As we paused through apprehension, ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... above it, tumbled into a rough heap, as though carelessly thrown in, a quantity of the same; and I could see also from all the surrounding circumstances, especially the pallid faces of the crowd, that there was something sad about it all. The horse moved slowly along, at almost a snail's pace, while behind walked a poor, sad couple with their heads bowed down, and each with a hand on the tail-board of the cart. They were evidently overwhelmed ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... the famous "Georgetown Loop," crept at a snail's pace—for that is the natural gait of the burro—through the town of Silver Plume, and pursued our leisurely journey toward the beckoning, snow-clad heights beyond. No, we did not hurry, for two reasons: First, our little ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... for it, and the grass and plants put on purpose for it. They were dead, the whole race of them, and these their skeletons were as dust under my feet. Nature sets no value upon life neither of minute hill-snail ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... the leaf. Touch one of them with the end of a fine human hair and the lobes of the leaf instantly close together[2] in virtue of an act of contraction of part of their substance, just as the body of a snail contracts into its shell when one ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... newsboy named "Charley," who slept at Captain Kingwalt's every second night, and who returned my beast to his owner in Washington. The aphorism that a Yankee can do anything, was exemplified by this lad; for he worked my snail into a gallop. He was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, and appeared to have taken to speculation at the age when most children are learning A B C. He was now in his fourteenth year, owned two horses, and employed another boy to sell papers for him likewise. ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... train-boy—he has the word "Boy" on his collar in English—brings fans and bedroom slippers. The fans, which on one side advertised "Hotels in European style, directly managed by the Imperial Government Railway[114]," offered on the other a poem and a drawing. A poem addressed to a snail played with the idea of its giving its life to climbing Fuji. The poem was composed by a poet who wrote many delightful hokku (seventeen-syllable poems), showing a humorous sympathy with the humblest ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... under the application, shriveling up on himself like a snail in a fire, for it was hot and heroic liniment, and strong medicine for strong beasts and tougher men. Banjo's face was a picture of patient suffering, but he said nothing, and had not spoken since Frances entered ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... the mountain-goat. It was all to no avail, however, and they gave up in discouragement, and were about to leave the boys to perish, when the inch-worm came along and offered her services. The animals laughed her to scorn. What could she do, with her snail-pace, when they all, who were so fleet of foot, ...
— Fifty-Two Story Talks To Boys And Girls • Howard J. Chidley
... and Snails, Dragon-flies, Grasshoppers, and Butterflies are familiar enough to us all; yet how many realise how 'fearfully and wonderfully' they are made? What a marvellously complex weapon is the 'sting' of the bee! What a wonderful 'rasp' the snail possesses! How many can tell how an insect smells, and where its organs of taste and hearing lie? Since these are questions which young people often ask again and again, some of them will be answered in the course of these articles. To explain such matters clearly is a very difficult ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... his was the one human being, himself barely excepted, for whose life his sister cared. He charged her of never having forgiven Hilary for making Anna godmother of their flag, and of being in some dark league against him—"hell only knew what"—along with that snail of a cousin whom everybody but Kincaid himself and the silly old uncle knew to be the fallen man's most venomous foe. Throughout the storm the grandmother's fingers pattered soothing caresses, while Flora stood as unruffled by his true surmises as by ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... if she close herded yuh fer a spell till her scare wears off. Bu I've hung around these parts long enough. I fooled them sheriffs a-plenty, stayin' here. Gee! you'r' swift—I don't think!" This last sentence was directed at Keith, who was putting a snail to shame, and making it appear he ...
— Her Prairie Knight • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B. M. Bower
... blazing, they sat down for a little while to rest in the heat. Birds were continually darting down this leafy shaft, and diving away into the dark wood. These birds always had something in their beaks. One would have a worm, or a snail, or a grasshopper, or a little piece of wool torn off a sheep, or a scrap of cloth, or a piece of hay; and when they had put these things in a certain place they flew up the sun-shaft again and looked for something else ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... great warrior, it is customary to include in the funeral procession the hero's favorite horse, his battle-horse, compelled to adapt to the snail-like pace of the cortege the prancing gait which survives the smell of gunpowder and the waving of standards. On this occasion Mora's great coupe, the "eight-spring" affair which carried him to social or political gatherings, occupied ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... present supply, tied up in a cotton pocket-handkerchief. Occasionally you pass a deal table, on which are exposed pen'orths of pickled salmon (fennel included), in little white saucers: oysters, with shells as large as cheese-plates, and divers specimens of a species of snail (wilks, we think they are called), floating in a somewhat bilious-looking green liquid. Cigars, too, are in great demand; gentlemen must smoke, of course, and here they are, two a penny, in a regular authentic ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... plainly enough," Wilton responded. "We shall never view things in the same light. You are not the man of the world you should be, Walter. Men of half your merit will eclipse you, winning opulence and distinction—while you, with your common sense notions, will be plodding on at a snail's pace. You are behind the age, and a stranger to ...
— Home Lights and Shadows • T. S. Arthur
... members of the animal kingdom in virtue of certain apparently slight though really fundamental resemblances which they present. But a man and a fish are members of the same sub-kingdom 'Vertebrata', because they are much more like one another than either of them is to a worm, or a snail, or any member of the other sub-kingdoms. For similar reasons men and horses are arranged as members of the same Class, 'Mammalia'; men and apes as members of the same Order, 'Primates'; and if there were any animals more like men than they were like any of the apes, and yet different ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... throttled his car to a snail's pace or brought it to a full stop to avoid running over one of those children who, so far as self-preservation goes, appear to be deaf, dumb, blind, and without powers of locomotion; and during one of these halts a little girl, walking slowly ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... flowers home?" asked a child one day; "they are so pretty." Clearly, the "talk" was going to lessen, not to deepen the beauty. And animals? The child plays with cat and dog, he feeds the chickens, the horse and the donkey, he watches with the utmost interest caterpillar, snail and spider, but he does not want to be asked questions about them—he does want to talk and perhaps to ask the questions himself—nor does he always want even to draw, paint or model them. Mostly he wants to watch, ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... reached the Hoang Ho, China's sorrow and the engineer's despair. The much-discussed bridge is two miles long, crossing the river on one hundred and seven spans. As the train moved at snail's pace there was plenty of time to take in the desolate scene, stretches of mudflats alternating with broad channels of swirling, turbid water; and, unlike the Yangtse, gay with all sorts of craft, the strong current of the Yellow River rolled along ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... of every variety of hue, and resort to their burrows whenever disturbed in their natural haunts. What they subsist on it is difficult to say, as they are too harmless and insignificant to attack any other animal beyond a mouse or a snail. They are represented as being very difficult to tame, but when domesticated show no disposition to return to their former mode of life. The lady of the Mexican Minister, when in this city, had one of these dogs as a boudoir pet; it was lively and barked quite fiercely. We have not been ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... who love to roam! A snail was chasing a tailor home. And if Old Shears hadn't run so fast, The snail would surely have caught him ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... broached to me what speedily became the leading occupation of his culminating years, Crest Hill. But all the world has heard of that extravagant place which grew and changed its plans as it grew, and bubbled like a salted snail, and burgeoned and bulged and evermore grew. I know not what delirium of pinnacles and terraces and arcades and corridors glittered at last upon the uplands of his mind; the place, for all that its expansion ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... tradesman stood out of his head like a snail's; he really seemed for an instant likely to fling himself upon the stranger. At last he stammered angrily: "I don't know what you 'ave to do with it, but if you're one of their friends, you can tell 'em from me that I'll knock their silly ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... Territory, Idaho, and Montana came next in rapidity of growth. Kansas, with 2.9 per cent. increase, and Nebraska, with only 0.7 per cent., showed the slowest progress, the figures resulting in considerable part from padded returns in 1890. Vermont, Delaware, and Maine crawled on at a snail's pace. In numerical advance New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois led. Texas marched close to them, overhauling Massachusetts. In percentage of increase the southern, central, and western divisions were ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... those of whites. It is perhaps to these anatomical differences that the diverse action of the same poison, in the case of races or species, may be attributed. On certain rodentia belladonna exercises no influence; morphine for a horse is a violent stimulant; a snail remains insensible to digitalis; goats eat tobacco with impunity; and in the Tarentin the inhabitants rear only black sheep, because a plant abounds which ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 303 - October 22, 1881 • Various
... that idiot, that dolt, that sluggard, that snail, with my mail?" Honorine, busy in ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... farmer to urge his horses a trifle faster, and even hint at certain rewards if they should reach Hartford in a given time. But the grumpy old man was proof against coaxing or even bribing, and they jogged along, almost at a snail's pace. ...
— Patty's Summer Days • Carolyn Wells
... mere human society were it not that I have been credibly informed your own great naturalist, Darwin, tried the experiment himself with one of the biggest European land-molluscs, the great edible Roman snail, and found that it still lived on in vigorous style after immersion in sea-water for twenty days. Now, I myself observed that several of these bits of broken trees, torn down by floods in heavy storm time from the banks of Spanish or Portuguese rivers, reached my island in eight ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... the buildings of Saint Swithun's Abbey extending far to their right. The hour was nearly noon, and the space was deserted, except for an old woman sitting at the great western doorway with a basket of rosaries made of nuts and of snail shells, and a workman or two employed on the bishop's ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... she run away from him? With whimsical bravado, she turned off suddenly into the trail that led to the river, her color deepening with the consciousness that, after all, she was vaguely hoping she might see him somewhere before the morning passed. Through the leafy pathway she rode at a snail's pace, brushing the low-hanging leaves and twigs from about her head with something akin to petulance. As she neared the river the neighing of a horse hard by caused her to sit erect with burning ears. Then she relapsed into a smile, ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... would not enter on my list of friends (Though graced with polished manners and fine sense, Yet wanting sensibility) the man Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm. An inadvertent step may crush the snail That crawls at evening in the public path; But he that has humanity forewarn'd, Will tread aside, and let the reptile live. Ye, who love mercy, teach your ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... vehicle had got so far away as to be indistinguishable from other vehicles she saw it stop. It stopped and turned. She held her breath. Slowly, very slowly, it began to creep up the gentle slope again. She supposed it must be the treacherous ground that made it move at such a snail's pace. It moved as if the chauffeur or his client were looking for some one. Gradually it drew up at the curb. It was the curb toward the Park—and from another of the little openings with iron posts to space them off appeared ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King
... without object or result, had aged her prematurely, and although she was still young she did not seem so. It might be said of her that with her habits and manner of life she had wrought a sort of rind, a stony, insensible covering within which she shut herself, like the snail within his portable house. Dona Perfecta rarely came out of ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... the whereabouts; and he, Elias, their predestined chief, was left behind! His fiery spirit craved to mount at once and gallop day and night till he rejoined those treasure-seekers; but the frailty of his horse precluded any such transports, and the snail-like pace of his adherents bound him down. At present he was obliged to wait for Aflatun and Faris and the baggage animals, while conscious of the fugitives receding rapidly, sucked in irresistibly to a whirlpool of living light, his mind's image ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... these large snail shells (when a child I remember holding them to my ear to hear a noise resembling the roar of the ocean), and this small basket, fashioned of twigs and tendrils of grape vine, then dipped in red sealing wax, certainly is a good imitation of ...
— Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled during Her Visit - among the "Pennsylvania Germans" • Edith M. Thomas
... experiences so far disinclined him for any further experiments, at least until he had reconsidered them. But he lifted a sheet of paper, and turned a glass of water pink and then green, and he created a snail, which he miraculously annihilated, and got himself a miraculous new tooth-brush. Somewhere in the small hours he had reached the fact that his will-power must be of a particularly rare and pungent quality, a fact ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... days were the same in all places, and even during the journeys taken by their Majesties, who were thus never separated, except for a few minutes at a time. They passed their lives in one long tete-a- tete. When they travelled it was at the merest snail's pace, and they slept on the road, night after night, in houses prepared for them. In their coach they were always alone; when in the palace it was ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... small white spot, no bigger than the point of a Pin. Afterwards I view'd it every way with a better Microscope and found it on both sides, and edge-ways, to resemble the Shell of a small Water-Snail with a flat spiral Shell: it had twelve wreathings, a, b, c, d, e, &c. all very proportionably growing one less than another toward the middle or center of the Shell, where there was a very small round white spot. I could not certainly discover whether ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... back, with the Prince's chariot trailing after us. Nevertheless, our car did not falter, though the motor panted. Scarcely ever were we able to pass from the first speed to the second, but then (as Beechy remarked), considering all things, we ought to be thankful for any speed above that of a snail. ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... hill hamlet, not only old folk but young persons, who had never seen a train. They had not had the enterprise or curiosity to walk into Overboro' for the purpose. Some of the folk ate snails, the common brown shell-snail found in the hedges. It has been observed that children who eat snails are often remarkably plump. The method of cooking is to place the snail in its shell on the bar of a grate, like a chestnut. And well-educated people have been known, even in these days, to use the snail as an external ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... like that. Percy Darrow had two hundred feet of ascent to make. He could go just so fast; must consume just so much time in his snail-like progress up the face of the hill. During that time he furnished an excellent target, and the loose sandstone showed where each ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... themselves into the past so sluggishly that one is fairly maddened by the snail's pace of them, into the past they must go eventually. Jean had sat and listened to the wheels of the Golden State Limited clank over the cryptic phrase that meant so much. "Letter-in-the-chaps! Letter-in-the ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... once quit of the primitive maternal responsibility, she gave no more thought to them than a thrush gives to its fledglings when she has educated them to their first flights, and to the useful knack of cracking a snail on a stone. ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... disposed as not to fecundate the ova of the same body, but require the co-operation of two individuals, notwithstanding the co-existence in each of the organs of both sexes. Each in turn impregnates the other. The common leech, earth-worm, and snail, propagate in this manner. ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... called out. For he had seen Hubert before him, walking at a snail's pace: the very slightest hill tried him now. The only one left of the wedding-party, for the bridesmaid drove off from the church door. Hubert turned at ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various
... the Cephalopods, to which belong the cuttle-fish and the octopus (sacred to Victor Hugo), may be, for all we can say to the contrary, an order with a future. Their kindred, the Gastropods, have, in the case of the snail and slug, learnt the trick of air-breathing. And not improbably there are even now genera of this order that have escaped the naturalist, or even well-known genera whose possibilities in growth and dietary are still unknown. Suppose some day a specimen of ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... to Bayswater at a snail's pace, and with more stoppages than ever mortal omnibus was subjected to before, as it seemed to that one eager passenger. At last the fading foliage of the Park appeared between the hats and bonnets of Valentine's opposite ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... So, when there was only the one, he felt that the end was, indeed, come upon him. He strove his mightiest, but his might was shrunken to a puny sham. He struggled forward valiantly, but his advance was like the progress of a snail. Then, suddenly, another step became an infinite labor—something of which he could not even think. He lurched forward, and fell against a tree-trunk. The concussion aroused him to a clearer understanding. Very slowly, with ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... warrior. Go back to thy people, and tell them what return the Sagamore of the Pequots makes for thy breach of hospitality. His promise to his brother saves thy life this time. But, beware! A Sagamore does not forget. Be a snail that keeps its head within its shell. If the snail puts it out, Sassacus will ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... virtues possessed by bees, cleanliness is one of the most marked; they will not suffer the least filth in their abode. It sometimes happens that an ill-advised slug or ignorant snail chooses to enter the hive, and has even the audacity to walk over the comb; the presumptuous and foul intruder is quickly killed, but its gigantic carcass is not so speedily removed. Unable to transport the corpse out of their dwelling, and fearing "the noxious smells" arising ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 400, November 21, 1829 • Various
... he turned sharp round, and retreated to a long belt of fine open forest which was close behind him. There was no resisting the invitation upon such favourable ground, and immediately dismounting, we followed him. I now found that my leg was nearly useless, and I could only move at a snail's pace, and even then with great pain. Upon reaching the forest, we found that the rogue had decamped, not wishing to meet us in such advantageous ground. We followed his tracks for a few hundred yards through the wood, till we suddenly ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... adequately expressive of their doctrine of the real presence, and which our Scottish Episcopalians have so recently adopted as the characteristic vignette of their service-book. The toad and the newt had crept over it, and it had borrowed a new tint of brilliancy from the slime of the snail. Destruction had run riot along the walls of this parish church. There were carvings chipped and mutilated, as if in sport, less apparently with the intention of defacing, than rendering them contemptible and grotesque. ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... and Williams the colonel chafed at the incessant delays. "The expedition goes on very much as a snail runs," writes the former to his wife; "it seems we may possibly see Crown Point this time twelve months." The Colonel was vexed because everything was out of joint in the department of transportation: wagoners mutinous for want of pay; ordnance stores, ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... power of growth, In the snail and the tree, God is the power of growth In the heart ...
— Lundy's Lane and Other Poems • Duncan Campbell Scott
... hundred years before the audience had been created; and although "Old Neb" of Babylon had destroyed a million of Hebrews several hundred years previous to the birth of the Bethlehem "Savior of Mankind," the "frog" and "snail" eaters of France were still breaking their lungs and throats in cheering for the ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages. At first the infant, Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms. And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel And shining morning face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to school. And then the lover, Sighing like furnace, with a woful ballad Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier, Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard; Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel, Seeking the bubble reputation Even in the cannon's mouth. ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... it does not seem so bad. I am like a snail—once back in my shell, I do not care what happens. I have given up trying to write The Captive, and so nothing bothers me any more.—I have forgotten all about it now, ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... a fair-sized fire, which we kindled on the floor of the car; it was necessary to shove the burning coals here and there over the surface to avoid burning a hole through it. At one point I noticed a horse-car filled with straw bedding for the animals, and the train going here at a snail's pace enabled me to jump off and chuck an armful of the straw into our car; I did this with my friend of the blankets in mind. I threw the damp straw on top of the live coals and in a few minutes or less the car was filled with rank, reeking smoke that fairly made the eyes water. Up jumped the ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... went out four and twenty strong, Sailors and tailors in a throng; We heard a tale, we saw a sail, And then returned to kill a snail. ...
— Little Folks (November 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... crept on at a snail pace the howling of the wintry gale continued unabated, with the roar of the wind through the tree-tops ashore, the dash of the waves on the point above, and the constant wabbling motion of the shanty-boat to remind ...
— The House Boat Boys • St. George Rathborne
... love. If these elder brethren of ours think they have general reason for their assertion, they must have kept very bad company, or must judge of women's hearts by their own. She must be an abandoned woman, who will not shrink as a snail into its shell at a gross and sudden attempt. A modest woman must be naturally cold, reserved, and shy. She cannot be so much and so soon affected as libertines are apt to imagine. She must, at least, ...
— Clarissa, Volume 5 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... may be owing to my ignorance of some of the facts of the case. There are, on the other hand, two acts of destruction in Nature which leave me unprotesting and pleased. One of these occurs when a thrush eats a snail, banging the shell repeatedly against a stone. I have never thought of the incident from the snail's point of view. I find myself listening to the tap-tap of the shell on the stone as though it were music. I felt the same sort of ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... will crawl along a road slowly enough to exasperate a snail, but let a lamb get away in a bit of rough country, and a racehorse can't head him back again. If sheep are put into a big paddock with water in three corners of it, they will resolutely crowd into the fourth, and die ...
— Three Elephant Power • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... possessing both male and female organs of reproduction is called an hermaphrodite. Such a combination is very rare among higher animals; but it is by no means uncommon among plants and the lower forms of animal life. The snail, the oyster, the earth-worm, and the common tape-worm, are examples of true hermaphrodites. So-called human hermaphrodites are usually individuals in whom the sexual organs are abnormally developed so that they resemble those ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... so thick were the cutting swirls of snow. As the drift heaped denser and denser about his legs, the terrible effort, so long sustained, began to tell on him, till his progress became only a snail's pace. Little by little, in the obstinate effort to conserve strength and vitality, his faculties all withdrew into themselves, and concentrated themselves upon the one purpose—to keep going onward. He began to feel the lure of just ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... of an advanced KRIYA YOGI is influenced, not by effects of past actions, but solely by directions from the soul. The devotee thus avoids the slow, evolutionary monitors of egoistic actions, good and bad, of common life, cumbrous and snail-like to the eagle hearts. ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... sent a moving square of light through the high grating across the floor of the cellar. The damp walls became dimly visible with shining snail-tracks on them, and his great form leaning negligently upon a cask, his hand arrested in the pulling of his long beard, his eyes gleaming upon her, sardonic and amused. The light twisted ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... good, fair start in the pass, we could kape ahead of 'em all the way till we struck the open prairie, when it would be illigant to sail away and watch them falling behind, like a snail trying to ...
— The Cave in the Mountain • Lieut. R. H. Jayne
... sandy hollow which was deep under water in the great January freshet. That freshet deposited a new layer of sand and also bushels of clam and snail shells of all sizes and species. They lie so thick they may be taken up by the shovelful. Two or three dead fish are also found. What a fine fossiliferous stratum will be found here about a hundred million years ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... we call a tread-snail, because it moves on a double row of pads like stumpy feet and leaves a trail like a tractor. The fishpole-aerial thing it had erected out of its head was its stinger, and the yellow stuff was venom. A tenth of a milligram of it in your blood and it's ...
— Four-Day Planet • Henry Beam Piper
... all round him; but by the light of the lamp which the masked figure raised for the purpose, he could perceive nothing but the damp walls which glistened here and there with the slimy traces of the snail. "Oh! oh! a ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... the house to the station had been a long and tedious one. The way back was surprisingly short, even though they walked at snail's pace. There never was a courting such as Tarling's, and it seemed unreal as a dream. The girl had a key of the outer gate and they passed ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace
... swift year's flight I count like miser's gold; I keep the "watches of the night," I wait until the morning light Its glories snail unfold. ...
— Lays from the West • M. A. Nicholl
... the horse and to prick it with a pin. The horse plunged and reared and then set off at a hard gallop, which it continued in spite of its rider's efforts to stop it. When they reached the village, the Hazel-nut child left off pricking the horse, and the poor tired creature pursued its way at a snail's pace. The Hazel-nut child took advantage of this, and crept down the horse's leg; then he ran to his aunt and asked her for a comb. On the way home he met another rider, and did the return journey in exactly the same way. When he handed his mother the comb that his aunt had given him, ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Various
... concentric movement. If two circles are drawn and painted respectively yellow and blue, brief concentration will reveal in the yellow a spreading movement out from the centre, and a noticeable approach to the spectator. The blue, on the other hand, moves in upon itself, like a snail retreating into its shell, and draws away from the spectator. [Footnote: These statements have no scientific basis, but are ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... fore part of the ship. The sharpest and strongest of these deadly weapons is generally stopped or fastened to the fore-tack bumpkin, a spar some ten or twelve feet long, projecting from the bows of a ship on each side like the horns of a snail, to which the tack or lower corner of the foresail is drawn down when the ship is on a wind. This spar, which affords good footing, not being raised many feet above the water, while it is clear of the bow, and very nearly over the ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... out looking grave. More: they looked tombstones and Tennessee-papers-please-copy. They wrote out a diet list to which I was to be restricted. It had everything that I had ever heard of to eat on it, except snails. And I never eat a snail unless it overtakes me and ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... which, from puppyhood, he had always accompanied the Mistress and the Master. Unknown to the old dog, these walks had been shortened, mercifully, and slowed down, to accommodate themselves to Lad's waning strength: But the time came when even a half-mile, at snail-pace, over a smooth road, was too much for his ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... letter lay open on the table. A tear had made a glazed snail's track down Miss Lambert's cheek; and Mary thought that ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... the right on't, father: when a swinging sin is to be committed, nothing will cover it so close as a friar's hood; for there the devil plays at bo-peep,—puts out his horns to do a mischief, and then shrinks them back for safety, like a snail into her shell. ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... before or since has there been anything more pathetic than the sight of the long rows of tired, haggard, perspiring, praying pilgrims, who stood patiently for hours in the broiling August sun, moving only when permitted, and then at a snail's pace, towards their Mecca. Plebeian though the majority of faces were, their devotional, solemn, rapt expressions for the time ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... some little distance without being discovered, he fancied he was safe and rose to his feet, intending to run as fast as his legs could carry him—-which was no snail's pace, indeed! Scarcely had he begun to move forward, however, when he heard a shout, followed by the sound ...
— The Boy Scouts on Picket Duty • Robert Shaler
... rejoined White, grimly; and a few minutes later they had resumed the toilsome progress that was now a race for life. But it was a snail's race, for the task of moving the sled had devolved entirely upon Cabot, White having all he could do to drag himself along. Each step gave him such exquisite pain that, by the time they had accomplished a couple of miles, he was crawling ...
— Under the Great Bear • Kirk Munroe
... line from Catania to Messina, which crossed it on a long bridge supported by stone pillars and buttresses, the bridge which, as Gaspare had said, had recently collapsed and was now nearly built up again. It was already in use, but the trains were obliged to crawl over it at a snail's pace in order not to shake the unfinished masonry, and men were stationed at each end to signal to the driver whether he was to stop or whether he might venture to go on. Beyond the watercourse, upon the side opposite ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... "Water! water!" rises from a hundred lips, the guard joining, for they are suffering like ourselves. Some comfort in that! Past midnight we reach Strasburg and are halted around an old wooden pump. It is broken! No water there. Still on and on at a snail-pace, up and over the almost interminable stretch of Fisher's Hill. At three o'clock in the morning we arrive at a place known by the classical name of Tom's Brook about twenty-five miles from Winchester. Never was nectar more delicious ...
— Lights and Shadows in Confederate Prisons - A Personal Experience, 1864-5 • Homer B. Sprague
... little faster?" said a whiting to a snail, "There's a porpoise close behind us, and he's treading on my tail. See how eagerly the lobsters and the turtles all advance! They are waiting on the shingle—will you come and join the dance? Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the dance? Will ...
— Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Illustrated by Arthur Rackham. With a Proem by Austin Dobson • Lewis Carroll
... a snail, and confident the others would do their part, Keith thrust his knife blade deep into the narrow crack, and began probing after the latch. In spite of all caution this effort caused a slight noise, and suddenly he started back, at the sound of ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... things. The large hall within the elf hill was splendidly decorated; the floor had been washed with moonshine, and the walls had been rubbed with magic ointment, so that they glowed like tulip-leaves in the light. In the kitchen were frogs roasting on the spit, and dishes preparing of snail skins, with children's fingers in them, salad of mushroom seed, hemlock, noses and marrow of mice, beer from the marsh woman's brewery, and sparkling salt-petre wine from the grave cellars. These were all substantial ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... came near Temple Bar, my heart fell a thumping. Not that I forgot the place was deserted and the old home broken; but because it reminded me of what once was before all these troubles began. I crawled at a snail's pace, wishing to put off the pang as long as possible. In fancy I was at my case, as I had been a year ago, clicking the letters into my stick, in time to the chirping of my little mistress who sang at her work within. At my side I could hear the dull groaning of the heavy press, and ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... he perched upon a tiny rock near by and screamed, "Caw," quite suddenly, as one child says, "Boo," to another, to surprise him. Then the bird sang his chatter tune, and found a shallow place near the bank, where he splashed and bathed. After that, the Blue-eyed Girl showed him a little water-snail. He turned it over in his beak and dropped it. It meant no more to him than a pebble. "I think you'll like to eat it, Corbie," said the Brown-eyed Boy, breaking the shell and giving it to him again; "even people ...
— Bird Stories • Edith M. Patch
... other worms the eyes are entirely wanting, or their existence is very doubtful. Whether the black points at the extremities of what Swammerdam calls the horns of the common snail, are organs which really possess the power of vision, is ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 20, No. 562, Saturday, August 18, 1832. • Various
... which was then supplied with beef from Twofold Bay. Forty bullocks were put on board the 'Waterwitch' in five days, and in forty-eight hours they were offered for sale in Hobarton, and fetched fourteen pounds ten shillings a head—all but one, a snail-horned brute, which was very wild. When he landed, a number of soldiers were at drill in the paddock, and he charged the redcoats at once. They prepared to receive cavalry, but he broke through the ranks, scattered the citizens the whole length of Liverpool ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... cross the Hudson until the 4th of December, moving snail-like, although he knew that Washington's army was ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... passed below going at a snail's pace while Frank was still a short distance in the rear and Mr. Temple and Tom Barnum were not yet in sight. It was an open touring car with the top folded back. There were three men in it, one on the seat beside the driver and the third in the rear. ...
— The Radio Boys on the Mexican Border • Gerald Breckenridge
... pretty bad," mused Pawnee Brown. "But I'll go slow—it may be only a trick," and away he crawled as silently as a snail ...
— The Boy Land Boomer - Dick Arbuckle's Adventures in Oklahoma • Ralph Bonehill
... A porch which has as many spiral windings in it as the shell of the periwinkle, or sea-snail.—Steevens. ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... we asked each other. The shouts and gesticulations of the spectators soon told us as to his whereabouts. The peddler's horse had not yet got half way round! A snail could have crawled almost as fast. The animal could not step more than six inches at ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... history is not known, but the infectious stage is undoubtedly taken in with the feed or water, infection being spread by the eggs of the parasite contained in the feces of infested animals. The eggs are perhaps swallowed by some small creature (an insect, worm, or snail) which acts as an intermediate host, and which when accidentally swallowed by a cow while grazing or drinking carries with it into her stomach the infectious stage ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... stare at it, and no more did we. But it was more comfortable to talk with the chair standing still; for though to look at one going it seems to crawl along like a snail, I can tell you to keep up with it you have to step out pretty fast, faster than Peterkin could manage without a bit of running every minute or so, which is certainly not comfortable, and faster than I myself ...
— Peterkin • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... carrying the experiment still further we might apply the speed test. In a 100-yard dash a few men would be found to be particularly fast, a few others would trail away behind at a snail's pace, while the big crowd of men would make the distance in ...
— Principles of Teaching • Adam S. Bennion
... a little past sunrise, but there was no hint of early summer freshness in the noxious air of the sleeping-car as it toiled like a snail over the infinity of prairie. From behind the green-striped curtains of the berths, now the sound of restless turning and now a long-drawn sigh signified the uneasy slumber due to stifling ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... Occasionally you pass a deal table, on which are exposed pen'orths of pickled salmon (fennel included), in little white saucers: oysters, with shells as large as cheese-plates, and divers specimens of a species of snail (wilks, we think they are called), floating in a somewhat bilious-looking green liquid. Cigars, too, are in great demand; gentlemen must smoke, of course, and here they are, two a penny, in a regular authentic ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... not a new coach too; therefore, 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 a large, empty snail-shell, and there lay for some time, when, peeping out of the shell, he saw a fine butterfly on the ground. He ventured forth and got astride the butterfly, which took wing, and mounted into the air with little Tom on his back. Away he flew straight ...
— The History Of Tom Thumb and Other Stories. • Anonymous
... Wilton responded. "We shall never view things in the same light. You are not the man of the world you should be, Walter. Men of half your merit will eclipse you, winning opulence and distinction—while you, with your common sense notions, will be plodding on at a snail's pace. You are behind the age, and a stranger to ...
— Home Lights and Shadows • T. S. Arthur
... and when they moved, the red, blue and yellow lights passed one over the other, staining an inch of the brown earth beneath with a spot of the most intricate colour. The light fell either upon the smooth, grey back of a pebble, or, the shell of a snail with its brown, circular veins, or falling into a raindrop, it expanded with such intensity of red, blue and yellow the thin walls of water that one expected them to burst and disappear. Instead, the drop was left in a second silver grey once more, and the light now settled upon the flesh ...
— Monday or Tuesday • Virginia Woolf
... the act of wriggling his long chin into his ample neckerchief. He could not ask you how do you do, or say in answer to that question, "I thank you, sare, very well," without stamping prettily with his foot, as if cracking a snail, and tossing his chin into the air as if he were going to balance a ladder upon it. Then, though his features were compressed into a small, monkeyfied compass, they were themselves, individually, upon a magnificent scale. It was as if ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... looking admiringly at ARPACHSHAD, who had taken off his coat, and was carefully folding it up, preparatory to overtaking a snail, whose upward march on a peach-tree his keen eye had noted; "but that wasn't my fault. I was dragged into it against my will. It came about this way. Months ago, when Mr. G.'s tour was settled, they said nothing would do but ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., Nov. 22, 1890 • Various
... this: I'm not going to let my stick travel like a snail after a cabbage-leaf this time. I'm going to cut as I should with a sword, only I'm going to hit as if you were made of glass, so as not to ...
— The Young Castellan - A Tale of the English Civil War • George Manville Fenn
... of your farms, Who from the cornfields drive the insidious foe, And from your harvest keep a hundred harms; Even the blackest of them all, the crow, Renders good service as your man-at-arms, Crushing the beetle in his coat of mail, And crying havoc on the slug and snail." —FROM ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph, Volume 1, Number 2, February, 1897 • anonymous
... row?" shouted back the delinquent, hearing her at last, and wriggling himself in from the window like a snail withdrawing itself into its shell, turning round the while his face, slightly flushed with the exertion, to hers—"Anything ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... insult my daughter, suh?" he thundered. "By thunder, suh, I've a good mind to make you smart right proper for your lack of manners, suh! How dare you, suh? You—you contemptible little—little snail, suh! Snail, suh!" And quite satisfied at thus selecting the most fitting word, glaring fiercely and twisting his white mustache and imperial with a very martial air, he seated ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... different," said Pepsy. "If people have something the matter with their hips you can't fix them. Because, anyway, if they're going to die on a Friday even snail water won't fix them." ...
— Pee-wee Harris • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... slight delay of the train, and the snail's pace of the taxicab through the traffic, it would be quite six o'clock before she reached Mrs. Hetty Hills' house in Washington Square; he would be absolutely ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... sidewalk. I resolve to be more careful. The next time I am on a bicycle it is night-time and my acetylene-gas-lamp is misbehaving. I cherish the sickly flame carefully, because of the ordinance. I am in a hurry, but I ride at a snail's pace so as not to jar out the flickering flame. I reach the city limits; I am beyond the jurisdiction of the ordinance; and I proceed to scorch to make up for lost time. And half a mile farther on I am "pinched" by a bull, and the ...
— The Road • Jack London
... of hue, and resort to their burrows whenever disturbed in their natural haunts. What they subsist on it is difficult to say, as they are too harmless and insignificant to attack any other animal beyond a mouse or a snail. They are represented as being very difficult to tame, but when domesticated show no disposition to return to their former mode of life. The lady of the Mexican Minister, when in this city, had one of these dogs as a boudoir pet; it was lively and barked quite ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... thrown in, a quantity of the same; and I could see also from all the surrounding circumstances, especially the pallid faces of the crowd, that there was something sad about it all. The horse moved slowly along, at almost a snail's pace, while behind walked a poor, sad couple with their heads bowed down, and each with a hand on the tail-board of the cart. They ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... ever beset by a dun? ducked by the Goody from thine own window, when "creeping like snail unwillingly" to morning prayers?—Ibid., Vol. IV. ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... the body of certain snails and encysts. The sporocyst, as it is now called, develops into a third generation known as redia which escape from the cyst. The daughter redia or cercaria, as they are now termed, leave the body of the snail and finally become encysted on the stems of grass, cresses and weeds. When taken into the digestive tract of the animal grazing over infested ground, the immature flukes are freed by the digestive juices. They ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... accompanied the Mistress and the Master. Unknown to the old dog, these walks had been shortened, mercifully, and slowed down, to accommodate themselves to Lad's waning strength: But the time came when even a half-mile, at snail-pace, over a smooth road, was too much for his wind ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... junction of Gordon's corps with Mahone and Early, with thirty miles of wagons, containing the special plunder of the Post Doctors, Quartermasters and Post Commissaries of Richmond, they went at a snail's pace, and it would have been no trouble for an enterprising enemy to have overtaken them. Until they arrived at Amelia Courthouse, on the 4th of April, although a body of the enemy had followed them up, no attack had been made, and it was only after leaving the Courthouse that ...
— Lee's Last Campaign • John C. Gorman
... to the top again, and there lie soaring till some shadow affrights them again: when they lie upon the top of the water, look out the best Chub, which you setting your self in a fit place, may very easily do, and move your Rod as softly as a Snail moves, to that Chub you intend to catch; let your bait fall gently upon the water three or four inches before him, and he will infallibly take the bait, and you will be as sure to catch him; for he is one of the leather-mouth'd ...
— The Compleat Angler - Facsimile of the First Edition • Izaak Walton
... to me what speedily became the leading occupation of his culminating years, Crest Hill. But all the world has heard of that extravagant place which grew and changed its plans as it grew, and bubbled like a salted snail, and burgeoned and bulged and evermore grew. I know not what delirium of pinnacles and terraces and arcades and corridors glittered at last upon the uplands of his mind; the place, for all that its expansion was terminated ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... a Cupid on a snail! And page 230 is blank," said the journalist. "Then there are two more blank pages before we come to the word it is such a joy to write when one is unhappily so happy as to ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... of this statement and prove our contention that all we see here is really crystallized thought. Our houses, our machinery, our chairs and tables, all that has been made by the hand of man is the embodiment of a thought. As the juices in the soft body of the snail gradually crystallize into the hard and flinty shell which it carries upon its back and which hides it, so everything used in our civilization is a concretion of invisible, intangible mind-stuff. The thought of ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... bunk on to the floor and hop on one leg as a specific for the cramp. Then, as he realized his position, he strove madly to rise and straighten the afflicted limb. He was so far successful that he managed to stand, and in the fantastic appearance of a human snail, to shuffle slowly round the kitchen. At first he thought only of the cramp, but after that had yielded to treatment a wild idea of escape occurred to him. Still bowed with the chair, he made his way to the door, and, after ...
— The Skipper's Wooing, and The Brown Man's Servant • W. W. Jacobs
... existence very far had been from him this glorious career, though honors lay in wait for an Endicott who took to statecraft. Shallow Horace, sprung from statesman, had found public life a bore. This feeling had saved him perhaps from the fate of Livingstone, who in his snail-shell could see no other America than a monstrous reproduction ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... at a snail's pace but a few feet above the ground—literally feeling our way along through the darkness, for both moons had set, and the night was black with the clouds that are to be found only ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... me, pin in one hand, snail-shell in the other, for a moment in mute astonishment; then, turning more away from me, he went on with his repast, and began insultingly to throw the shells at me over ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... concealed in this crucifix had taken too large a toll of American soldiers at that point in the line. The four night raiders left the American trench at one o'clock in the morning. They crawled on their bellies through snow for one hour before reaching the sniper's post. Seven yards per minute is a snail's pace, but pretty good time in No Man's Land, where you must remain motionless each time a star-shell lights up the darkness around you and makes your ...
— The Fight for the Argonne - Personal Experiences of a 'Y' Man • William Benjamin West
... returned home, and that his report had testified to his diligence and progress. At the end of the letter comes this little touch as to some of the schoolboy belongings which had been left behind in Professor Newman's house. "Harry has left divers snail-shells fastened on pasteboard. Perhaps he did not know how to carry ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... was aroused. It did not know how far the Republicans were prepared to go in their drive for action, so on the day of this flurry in the House the snail-like Rules Committee suddenly met in answer to the call of its chairman, Mr. Pou, and by a vote of 6 to 5 decided to report favorably on the resolution providing for a Woman Suffrage Committee in the House "after all pending war measures have been ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... four and twenty strong, Sailors and tailors in a throng; We heard a tale, we saw a sail, And then returned to kill a snail. ...
— Little Folks (November 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... work-boxes grander both in appearance and size; but, nevertheless, whether from habit or from choice, her custom was, in her daily needlework, to use this old friend. Often and often had Charley played with it many wicked pranks. Once, while Katie had as yet no pretension to be grown up, he had put a snail into it, and had incurred her severe displeasure. He had stuffed it full of acorns, and been rewarded by being pelted with them round the lawn; and had filled it with nuts, for which he had not found it so difficult to obtain pardon. He knew every hole and corner ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... Tree Came the Stork, the Duck, and the Owl; The Snail and the Bumblebee, The Frog and the Fimble Fowl (The Fimble Fowl, with a corkscrew leg); And all of them said, "We humbly beg We may build our homes on your lovely Hat,— Mr. Quangle Wangle, grant us that! ...
— Required Poems for Reading and Memorizing - Third and Fourth Grades, Prescribed by State Courses of Study • Anonymous
... in serpentine knots stretched along the flat land, flashing colours livelier than the spring-meadows bordering their line of passage. Guy, with a nod for all, and a greeting for the best-disposed, pushed on toward the van, till the gathering block compelled him to adopt the snail's pace of the advance party, and gave him work enough to keep his two horses from being jammed with the mass. Now and then he cast a weather-eye on the heavens, and was soon confirmed in an opinion he had repeatedly ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... which the male organs are so disposed as not to fecundate the ova of the same body, but require the co-operation of two individuals, notwithstanding the co-existence in each of the organs of both sexes. Each in turn impregnates the other. The common leech, earth-worm, and snail, propagate ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... put in an appearance until this work was done, and then showed a very pale and gloomy countenance. I took no heed of him, however, and with the first streak of daylight we started in single file and at a snail's pace up the valley, the peasant, whom I placed in Maignan's charge, going before to guide us, and M. d'Agen and I riding in the rear. By the time the sun rose and warmed our chilled and shivering frames we were over the worst of the ground, ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... would afford some protection from the bullets of the enemy. Could they reach it? The road swung to the south abruptly, and the horses took it on a sheer run. The noble animals were at their highest speed and doing their utmost, but to Peggy they seemed to move at snail's pace. The yelling, shouting band of ruffians was undoubtedly coming closer. It was amazing with what speed they had borne down upon the sleigh, but they were better horsed. Suddenly the outcries took ...
— Peggy Owen and Liberty • Lucy Foster Madison
... horses like dogs. There is no confusion, however. The eye readily masses into one line all going in the same direction. Each one is hurrying on at the top of his speed, but from this lofty perch they all seem to be crawling at a snail's pace. ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... a change. The passion ebbed out of the face, the paper fluttered out of the loosened fingers, the red-rimmed eyes took on another look. Snail-slow the trembling hand was travelling ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... ahead easy,' was the order now, and as we crept in not a sound was heard but that of the regular beat of the paddle-floats, still dangerously loud in spite of our snail's pace. Suddenly Burroughs gripped ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... more like the wind,' said Wych Hazel. 'I remember one good canter—but all the rest made one think of the snail that went forward three feet ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... famous "Georgetown Loop," crept at a snail's pace—for that is the natural gait of the burro—through the town of Silver Plume, and pursued our leisurely journey toward the beckoning, snow-clad heights beyond. No, we did not hurry, for two reasons: First, our little four-footers would not or could not quicken their pace, urge them as ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... ridden quite fast, or perchance these two had gone at a snail's pace, but when half-way home they looked about them and found that they ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... slow work, Robert," said the older of the boys as they were poling up the river to a new fishing place. "The old boat creeps over the water no faster than a snail." ...
— Fifty Famous People • James Baldwin
... believe we shall ever get enough things before the winter," replied David, with his eyes fixed on the short dry turf at his feet. "Oh, look!" he exclaimed suddenly, "there's a funny snail." ...
— Penelope and the Others - Story of Five Country Children • Amy Walton
... bent, and a blacksmith had to bring clamps and a jackscrew before the new wheel could be adjusted. Even then it had an air of uncertainty that rendered speed impossible. The concluding five miles of the journey were taken at a snail's pace, and Helen reflected ruefully that it was possible to "bruk ze leg" on the level high road as well as on the ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... by his day's work and MARY'S stupidity, from now on absolutely brutish]. You've had time to cook a dozen meals. You're as slow as a snail. What did you do all the time we were ...
— Washington Square Plays - Volume XX, The Drama League Series of Plays • Various
... of all the persons in the world?" they replied, "Not of all in the world, but of all in the kingdom." The sound of their voice was hissing; and they had round faces, which glistened like the shell of a snail, and the pupils of their eyes in a green plane as it were shot forth lightning, which was an effect of the light of phantasy. We stood in the midst of them, and said, "You believe that you possess all the wealth ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... country. I have collected during the last month nothing, but to-day I have been out and returned like Noah's Ark with animals of all sorts. I have to-day to my astonishment found two Planariae living under dry stones: ask L. Jenyns if he has ever heard of this fact. I also found a most curious snail, and spiders, beetles, snakes, scorpions ad libitum, and to conclude shot a Cavia weighing a cwt.—On Friday we sail for the Rio Negro, and then will commence our real wild work. I look forward with dread to the wet stormy regions of the south, but after so much pleasure I must put ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... which a thousand francs over and above its value was paid by M. Godefroy as a result of a sumptuous snail supper given to that gentleman's coachman by the horse-dealer—thanks to the expensive brown bay which certainly went well, the financier was able to get through his many engagements satisfactorily. He appeared punctually at the Bourse, ...
— The Lost Child - 1894 • Francois Edouard Joachim Coppee
... the epithets of an animal trailing with its slime over the herbage, without blood or bones, and carrying its house upon its back, meaning simply a snail."—Coste] ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... you all the shameful things he has done in all these years. There is never a year goes by without his doing something dreadful; and he has made everybody miserable at one time or other by killing their friends or relations, from the snail to the partridge. He is quite merciless, and spares no one; why, his own children are afraid of him, and it is believed that he has pecked several of them to death, though it is hushed up; but people talk about it all the same, sometimes. As for the way he has behaved to the ladies, if I were ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... Glen assured her. "What's all this business, anyway? Put me wise, Sis, I'm groping like a blind snail in the mulligatawny." ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... each wart with a pebble, and place the pebbles in a bag, which should be lost on the way to church; whoever finds the bag gets the warts." A common Warwickshire custom was to rub the warts with a black snail, stick the snail on a thorn bush, and then, say the folks, as the snail dies ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... agreeable and what is disagreeable. There are definite mathematical laws as to harmony and melody in sound and colour which affect animals and ourselves to a large extent similarly. Sweets are agreeable and bitters are disagreeable, though it is the fact that the snail, which loves sugar, recoils from saccharine, and there are "mites" (Acari) which feed with avidity on bitter strychnine! Excess of heat and of cold is disliked by animals and all men, whilst the ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... clergy and young ladies around. But it was hard that where Rachel really liked and met half-way, the intimate confidence should always be bestowed upon Grace, or even the mother. She had yet to learn that the way to draw out a snail is not to, grasp its horns, and that halfway meeting is not to launch one's self to the opposite starting point. Either her inquiries were too point blank to invite detailed replies, or her own communications absorbed her too much to ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the roof was deeply weather-stained, and, nigh the turfy eaves-trough, all velvet-napped; no doubt the snail-monks founded mossy priories there. The other slope was newly shingled. On the north side, doorless and windowless, the clap-boards, innocent of paint, were yet green as the north side of lichened pines or copperless hulls of Japanese junks, becalmed. The whole base, like those of the neighboring ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... replied. "Not even Cupido can find that out. She'll stay until she gets bored, he says. And to be in less danger of that, she has brought her whole establishment along on her back, like a snail." ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... four-footed transportation possibly obtainable, and started for Fredericksburg to find my regiment. The only directions I had about disposing of this frame of a horse was to "turn the bones loose when you get through with him." He could go only at a snail's pace, and when I reached Fredericksburg it must have been nine o'clock. I crossed the pontoon bridge, which had been laid the morning before under circumstances of the greatest gallantry by Howard's ...
— War from the Inside • Frederick L. (Frederick Lyman) Hitchcock
... latch enters into the catch, and fastens a door." The eyes of the mole are protected by being very small, and buried deep in a cushion of skin, so that the apertures leading to them are like pin-holes in a piece of velvet, scarcely pervious to loose particles of earth. The snail without wings, feet, or thread, adheres to a stalk by a provision of sticking-plaster. The lobster, as he grows, is furnished with a way of uncasing himself of his buckler, and drawing his legs out of his boots when they become too small ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 341, Saturday, November 15, 1828. • Various
... the back under the clothes of the mother, which form a pouch, and from which its tiny head is generally visible over one or the other shoulder, but on being observed by strangers it shrinks like a snail or a marsupian into its snug retreat. When the mother wants to remove it she bends forward, at the same time passing her left hand up the back under her garments, and seizing the child by the feet, pulls it downward to the left; then, passing the right hand under ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... against the steeple rear'd, Became a clock, and still adher'd; And, now, in love to household cares, By a shrill voice the hour declares, Warning the housemaid not to burn The roast-meat which it cannot turn. The easy chair began to crawl, Like a huge snail along the wall; There, stuck aloft in public view, And, with small change, a pulpit grew. A bed-stead of the antique mode, Made up of timber many a load, Such as our ancestors did use, Was metamorphos'd into pews: Which still their ancient nature keep, ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... any day like a rat on a housetop, with only a bundle of musty papers, the tags of broken conversations, and one or two dead, distorted nerves. That is our common risk. But I shall accomplish as much of the road as God permits the snail, and I shall have moulded something; life will have justified itself to me, or I to life. But that is not our ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... in line with his Cabinet people, and the others filed by. Richard, being utterly the democrat, was, of course, utterly the aristocrat, since these be extremes that never fail to meet. Wherefore, Richard did not take his place in the procession and waver painfully forward, at a snail's pace, to shake the Presidential hand. It was a foolish ceremony at which Richard's self-respect rebelled. There was no hand, no masculine hand, at least, which Richard would wait in line ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... suppose. Anyhow, I was looking blankly, but rather pleasantly than otherwise, at another window, uncurtained, but by this time black as a slate with the final night-fall. It seemed to me that something like a snail was on the outside of the window-pane. But when I stared harder, it was more like a man's thumb pressed on the pane; it had that curled look that a thumb has. With my fear and courage re-awakened together, I rushed at the window and then recoiled with a strangled scream that any man but Arthur ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... got up my nostrils, choked my ears, and deadened me to everything, save the all-terrorizing, instinctive knowledge, that the figures by my side, were still there, stalking along as quietly and leisurely as if the horse had been going at a snail's pace. ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... Williams the colonel chafed at the incessant delays. "The expedition goes on very much as a snail runs," writes the former to his wife; "it seems we may possibly see Crown Point this time twelve months." The Colonel was vexed because everything was out of joint in the department of transportation: wagoners mutinous for want ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... generous rental, besides offering Alec employment this winter. He's put out because the town hasn't done anything—and now, he says, he and his wife will look after them and Bennington can save its legal snail tracks." ...
— Rainbow Hill • Josephine Lawrence
... dancing had taken place the previous Christmas; and they sat down in the settle together. "There's the cold fireplace, you see," said Clym. "When that half-burnt log and those cinders were alight she was alive! Little has been changed here yet. I can do nothing. My life creeps like a snail." ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... Ottoman kingdom, he avoided their camp, dexterously inclined to the left, occupied Caesarea, traversed the salt desert and the river Halys, and invested Angora; while the Sultan, immovable and ignorant in his post, compared the Tartar swiftness to the crawling of a snail. He returned on the wings of indignation to the relief of Angora; and as both generals were alike impatient for action, the plains round that city were the scene of a memorable battle, which has immortalized the glory of Timur and the shame ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... gulches, and anon through loose shale on ticklishly sloping banks, characterize the passage through the canon. The sun is broiling hot, and my knee swollen and painful. It is barely possible to crawl along at a snail's pace by keeping my game leg stiff; bending the knee is attended with agony. Frequent rests are necessary, and an examination ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... lost, death would not frighten us at all. Dying is simple enough, and indeed easy, for most of us. But I expect that something very precise and definite happens to us, the moment we die. It is probable, I think, that we shall set about building up a new body to inhabit at once, as a snail builds its shell. We are very definite creatures, all of us, with clearly apportioned tastes and energies, preferences and dislikes. The only puzzling thing is that we do not all of us seem to have the bodies which suit us here on earth: fiery ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... this same hero of his was the one human being, himself barely excepted, for whose life his sister cared. He charged her of never having forgiven Hilary for making Anna godmother of their flag, and of being in some dark league against him—"hell only knew what"—along with that snail of a cousin whom everybody but Kincaid himself and the silly old uncle knew to be the fallen man's most venomous foe. Throughout the storm the grandmother's fingers pattered soothing caresses, while Flora stood as unruffled by his true surmises as by any, a look of cold interest in ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... Snails form the basis, or rather the chief ingredient, of many of these medicines. Indeed, I should fancy that snails must have been almost exterminated in the near vicinity of towns, so largely were they sought for and employed medicinally. There are several receipts for making snail-water, or snail-pottage; here is one of the most ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... calculate whether he might get over to France without paying them, and be able to carry his share of the property with him; and so he went on, pursuing his wretched, uneasy, solitary ride, sometimes sauntering along at a snail's pace, and then again spurring the poor brute, and endeavouring to bring his mind to some settled plan. But, whenever he did so, the idea of his sister's death was the only one which seemed to present either comfort ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... longer the traveller goes at a snail's pace through the deep sand over the heath; the railroad conveys him in a few hours to Altona and Hamburg. The circle of my friends there is increased within the last years. The greater part of my time I spent with my oldest friends Count Hoik, and the resident ...
— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen
... so strive, as to have God's approbation. What, do you think that every heavy-heeled professor will have heaven? What, every lazy one? every wanton and foolish professor, that will be stopt by anything, kept back by anything, that scarce runneth so fast heavenward as a snail creepeth on the ground? Nay, there are some professors that do not go on so fast in the way of God as a snail doth go on the wall; and yet these think that heaven and happiness is for them. But stay, there are many more that run than there ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Vol. 2 (of 10) • Grenville Kleiser
... insensibility of a horse who does not lash his tail when the whip cuts him!... How many times I have been happy and hopeful, and have made enemies and humbled myself for nothing! How many times I have taken flight like an eagle—and returned crawling like a snail whose shell has been crushed!... Where have I not been! What roads have I not travelled!... And the roads are often dirty,' added Rudin, slightly turning away. 'You know ...' he was continuing.... 'Listen,' interrupted Lezhnyov. 'We used once to say "Dmitri and Mihail" to one another. ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev
... dreamest already that our men-at-arms are in thy refectory and thy ale-vaults. But do me one cast of thy holy office, and, come what list of others, thou shalt sleep as safe in thy cell as a snail ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... a wonderful, but at the same time, we think, a universal and important fact, that love permeates the universe. Even a female snail, if we could only put the question, would undoubtedly admit that ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne
... flower garden in front of the house. The garden was Dobbin's pride; and the pride of the garden was a moss-rose tree, which was the peculiar treasure of the labourer's little crippled son, who watched it from the window, and whenever he was well enough, crept out to water it, and pick off any stray snail which had ventured to climb up its rich brown leaves. No mother ever watched her little infant with more eager eyes than Jacob Dobbin did his favourite rose; and no doubt he thought all the more of it because ...
— The One Moss-Rose • P. B. Power
... with fir trees. Apart from its mining aspect, Mons is a city of historic importance. It contains a Gothic cathedral and town hall of medieval architectural note. It also, cherishes a special yearly fete of its own on Trinity Sunday, when in the parade of the Limacon, or snail, the spectacle of St. George and the Dragon is presented. With great pride the citizens of Mons showed the British soldiers of occupation an ancient cannon, claimed to have been used by their forefathers as an ally of the ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... I didn't have no sech idee as askin' you to go, even if you did know who was the best man for the job. The snail thinks he's travelled a long ways when he goes a foot, an' some ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... shock to her. She paddled along shore quite near them for a while, trying to be resigned to it. And then she waddled out on the grassy bank, and fed them with some newts, and a tadpole, and a few blue-bottle flies, and a snail, and several other delicacies, which they seemed to enjoy quite as much as if they had been young ducks. And then Quackalina, seeing them quite happy, struck out for the very middle of the pond. She would have one glorious outing, at least. Oh, how sweet ...
— Solomon Crow's Christmas Pockets and Other Tales • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... it does so, as do certainly the people of the coast near which it is found. He told me that possibly this idea had arisen because the shell, when empty, swims on the surface. The creature, when at the bottom, crawls along like any other snail. Sometimes it dies and falls out, when the shell rises to the surface by means of the gases generated in its chambers; and thus they are seen floating on the waves. Others say, however, that the animal itself with the shell, putting out its head and all its tentacles, spreads ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... their doctrine of the real presence, and which our Scottish Episcopalians have so recently adopted as the characteristic vignette of their service-book. The toad and the newt had crept over it, and it had borrowed a new tint of brilliancy from the slime of the snail. Destruction had run riot along the walls of this parish church. There were carvings chipped and mutilated, as if in sport, less apparently with the intention of defacing, than rendering them contemptible and grotesque. A huge cross of ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... railway line from Catania to Messina, which crossed it on a long bridge supported by stone pillars and buttresses, the bridge which, as Gaspare had said, had recently collapsed and was now nearly built up again. It was already in use, but the trains were obliged to crawl over it at a snail's pace in order not to shake the unfinished masonry, and men were stationed at each end to signal to the driver whether he was to stop or whether he might venture to go on. Beyond the watercourse, upon the side opposite to the town of San Felice, was a series of dense ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... shelly house for themselves; they do this to defend their soft bodies from the attacks of a host of enemies. Some build two shells—the Oyster and Mussel do, as you know. These are called bi-valves; that is, two valves or shells; and others, like the Garden Snail, the Limpet, and Periwinkle, have one shell only, ...
— On the Seashore • R. Cadwallader Smith
... time. Their love of finery and gaudy colours is also most remarkable. Interwoven amongst the twigs of which the bower is composed, and scattered about the ground in its vicinity, are found bleached bones, broken oyster, snail, and cowrie shells, and not unfrequently, in the more civilised districts, pieces of coloured rag, and fragments of ribbon pilfered from some neighbouring station, for, in search of attractive objects to decorate his playground, the bower-bird entirely ignores the eighth commandment, and, I ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... a great snail, clinging to one of its horns, and nearly breaking his poor little back in his efforts to drag it over a blade ...
— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll
... one with the other, they had insensibly relaxed their pace, becoming mere strollers on the outside edge of the throng. The sense of being watched came to both of them at once, and, looking up at the same moment, they saw, approaching at a snail's pace, an open Victoria, in which were two ladies, to whom they were objects of plainly expressed interest. The elder was an insignificant little woman, who looked as though she were being taken out by her costly furs, ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... little sister to lavish it upon that Sarah. This was so unnatural that you may believe it first disgusted, and then irritated me. One day at the club I could not resist saying, 'You are an ass, La Bride, to ruin yourself—worse than that, to ruin your sister, for the sake of a snail, as little sympathetic as Sarah, a girl who always has a cold in her head, and who has already deceived you.' 'Deceived me!' cried La Brede, waving his long arms. 'Deceived me! and with whom?'—'With me.' As he knew I never ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... island was regulated and assisted by this process. Oyster-shells were first introduced; muscle-shells speedily followed; and, as commerce became more complicate, they had even been obliged to have recourse to snail-shells. Popanilla retired to rest with admiration of the people who thus converted to the most useful purposes things apparently so useless. There was no saying now what might not be done even with a nutshell. ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... this letter by the packet of the 24th inst., and am in hopes of sending with it some intelligence from those from whom I have been so long expecting something. Everything moves at a snail's pace here. I find delay in all things; at least, so it appears to me, who have too strong a development of the American organ of 'go-ahead-ativeness' to feel easy under its tantalizing effects. A Frenchman ought to have as many lives as a cat to bring to pass, ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... bank, which is standing very nearly still, and you will realise that you and your canoe are standing very nearly still too; and that all your exertions are only enabling you to creep on at the pace of a crushed snail, and that it's the water that is going the pace. It's a most ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... and also by having recourse to lime, in the preparation of the land for such crops. They conceal themselves in the holes and crevices, only making their appearance early in mornings and late in the evenings. The white slug or snail is likewise very destructive to young turnip crops, by rising out of the holes of the soils, on wet and dewy mornings and evenings. Rolling the ground with a heavy implement, before the sun rises, has been advised as a means of destroying them in these cases. Slugs of this sort are likewise ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... door-posts snapped, the other sloped inwards, the roof collapsed, the sides went in, the ice passed over all, and the hut of Peegwish was finally obliterated from off the face of the earth. So, a giant with his foot might slowly and effectually crush the mansion of a snail! ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne
... Lankester writes to me) was the first to systematically conduct the study of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy in this country by making use of a carefully selected series of animals. His 'types' were the Rat, the Common Pigeon, the Frog, the Perch, the Crayfish, Blackbeetle, Anodon, Snail, Earthworm, Leech, Tapeworm. He had a series of dissections of these mounted, also loose dissections and elaborate manuscript descriptions. The student went through this series, dissecting fresh specimens for himself. After some ten years' experience ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... babe and cared for you; but the parish allowance was stopped when you was fourteen. It shan't be said of us that bare we took you in and bare we turn you out. But marry you must. It's ordained o' nature. There's the difference atwixt a slug and a snail. The snail's got her own house to go into. A slug hasn't. When she's uncomfortable she ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
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