"Beetle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... one of our last books of travel in the wilderness of the Exodus, in which the writer told how, after toiling for hours under a scorching sun, over the hot, white, marly flat, seeing nothing but a beetle or two on the way, and finding no shelter anywhere from the pitiless beating of the sunshine, the weary travellers came at last to a little Retem bush only a few feet high, and flung themselves down and tried to hide, at least, their heads, from those 'sunbeams like ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... This good fellow, quotha? I scorn that base, broking, brabbling, brawling, bastardly, bottle-nosed, beetle-browed, bean-bellied name. Why, Robin Goodfellow is this same cogging, pettifogging, crackropes, calf-skin companion. Put me and my father over to him? Old Silver-top, and you had not put me before my ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... them all, alert, But somewhat cowed, There sits a stark-faced fellow, Beetle-browed, Whose black soul shrinks away From a lawyer-ridden day, And has thoughts he ...
— Songs of Action • Arthur Conan Doyle
... granite colonnade or beneath cool linen awning, it was mellowed by distance, to monotonous music. Why should he question the Sphinx of Fate, or quarrel with destinies the high gods had decreed? So had it always been, for ages and ages; so must it ever be. The beetle rends the insect, and the hawk preys on the beetle; order on order, life rises from death and carnage, and higher pleasures from lower agonies. Shall the man be better than nature? Soothing and restful flows the Nile, though underneath its placid ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... Uncle Teddy, "the way you put things it would take a blind beetle not to see them. You certainly have put Anthony up in an entirely new light. I've nearly got gray hair wondering why he did not profit by our illustrious example here; now you've put the whole thing in a nutshell. ...
— The Campfire Girls on Ellen's Isle - The Trail of the Seven Cedars • Hildegard G. Frey
... the tall cliffs—along the base of which, on a strip of beach two hundred feet below, it crawled between the American continent and the Atlantic Ocean—Captain Oliver Vyell's coach-and-six resembled nothing so nearly as a black-beetle. ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... he passed by a house, out of which came an awful screaming and bellowing; so he turned in and saw a Goody, who was hard at work banging her husband across the head with a beetle, and over his head she had drawn a shirt without any slit for ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... not long in coming—a low, soft, booming buzz of some beetle, which sailed here and there, now close by, now so distant that its hum was almost inaudible, but soon came nearer again till it was right over his head, when there was a dull flip, then a ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn
... the name of 'Ashenel: small as it is, this lion has something of the physiognomy of those magnificent ones which we have borrowed from the bas-reliefs of the Assyrians. Still, the intaglio is in other respects decidedly Phoenician and not Assyrian. Observe, for instance, the beetle with the wings expanded, which fills up the lower part of the field; this is a motive borrowed from Egypt, which a Ninevite lapidary would certainly not have put in such a place."[7107] The Phoenician inscription takes away all doubt as to the nationality. It reads ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... No littlest beetle that he might eat had given evidence that life of any sort existed here, and it was a hungry and thirsty Tarzan who lay down to rest in the evening. He decided now to push on during the cool of the night, ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Silence! Deep silence! Save for the chortle of the night-jar, the tap of the snipe's beak against the tree-trunks, the snores of a weary game-keeper, the chirp of the burying-beetle, the croak of the bat, the wild laughter of the owl and the boom, boom of the frog, deep silence reigned. The crescent moon stole silently above the horizon. Wonderful, significant is that silent, stealthy approach of the moon. Red Head lumbered from his lair and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 17, 1914 • Various
... was noiseless, the forest dark. Now and again a humming night beetle circled round and round her and obstinately pursued her as if he also was a spy sent after her. The poor thing's heart throbbed violently. What if she had lost her way? What if she fell into the hands of the robbers whom ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... in going down an alley, To a castle in a valley, They completely lost their way, And wandered all the day; Till, to see them safely back, They paid a Ducky-quack, And a Beetle, and a Mouse, Who took them ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... frequency with which the word "musk" forms part of the names of animals and plants which are by no means always nearly related. We have the musk-ox, the musky mole, several species called musk-rat, the musk-duct, the musk-beetle; while among plants which have received their names from a real or supposed musky odor are, besides several that are called musk-plant, the musk-rose, the musk-hyacinth, the musk-mallow, the musk-orchid, the musk-melon, the musk-cherry, the musk-pear, the musk-plum, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... my wings are leathery? Catch me, and you will find my wings are like down, my eyes as bright as diamonds. How much you know, writing yourselves down in books as Naturalists! My name is Vespertila; my family are from Servia, at your service. Could you offer me a fly, or a beetle? I was chasing Judge Blue Bottle, or I should not have been trapped. Go to sleep, dears, and leave me to fan you. When you are asleep, I'll bite a hole in your ear, and sup bountifully ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... bed of an extremely soft white sandstone presents here, for nearly half a mile together, its front to the waves, and exhibits, under the incessant wear of the surf, many singularly grotesque combinations of form. The low precipices, undermined at the base, beetle over like the sides of stranded vessels. One of the projecting promontories we find hollowed through and through by a tall rugged archway; while the outer pier of the arch,—if pier we may term it,—worn to a skeleton, and jutting ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... he the king of gods? the royal ape? Shon of a nymph? or wears a demon's shape? The kingly deity of wind and rain? The offshpring of the Pandu-princes' bane? A prophet? or a vulture known afar? A shtatesman? or a beetle? or a shtar? 34 ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... face and very long as to his mouth; which peculiarities, together with a pair of large and bulging eyes (which he usually kept closed), suggested a certain resemblance to a frog. And he had a curious frog-like trick of flattening his eyelids—as if in the act of swallowing a large beetle—which was the only outward and visible sign of emotion ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... thy courage, Claudio; and I quake Lest thou a feverous life should'st entertain, And six or seven winters more respect Than a perpetual honor. Dar'st thou die? The sense of death is most in apprehension; And the poor beetle that we tread upon, In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great As when a giant dies! Ay, Isabella, but to die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction and to rot; This sensible, warm motion to become A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... He bears the Habeas Corpus Act under his arm, but stands aghast and paralysed, it never seeming to have occurred to the artist that this "Monsieur John Boule, Esquire," was well adapted by his beetle-crushers to stamp out the vermin. Perhaps, it is needless to add, that the snake-like form issues from a hole in distant Prussia, meandering through many nations, causing great consternation, and that M. Thiers is finishing off the French ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... nearest house when Toto saw a large beetle crossing the path and barked loudly at it. Instantly a wild clatter was heard from the houses and yards. Dorothy thought it sounded like a sudden hailstorm, and the visitors, knowing that caution was no longer necessary, hurried forward to ...
— The Emerald City of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... When they listen to the streamlet, that makes audible melody only in the hush of night, do they not answer to it from their leafy perch? And when the moth flies hummingly through the recesses of the wood, and the beetle sounds his horn, what are their notes but cheerful responses to these sounds, that break sweetly upon the quiet ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so that I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas! it ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, ...
— The Autobiography of Charles Darwin - From The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin • Charles Darwin
... water (measured after it has boiled an hour) to six gallons of gooseberries, which must be full ripe. Top and tail the gooseberries; put them, a few at a time, into a wooden dish, and with a rolling-pin or beetle break and mash every one; transferring them, as they are done, into a large stone jar. Pour the boiling water upon the mashed gooseberries; cover the jar, and let them stand twelve hours. Then strain and measure the juice, and to each quart ...
— Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches • Eliza Leslie
... not a bug, but a beetle, and arrives in May) has this interesting habit of keeping quiet. If in its flight it strikes the globe of an electric light, it falls at once to the ground, and remains perfectly quiet for a time. After a short interval it recovers and starts out to regain its ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... common sight. His glasses were obviously of a very high power, yet he could scarcely see anything till he clapped his face close down and hunted for it. When he pencilled for me the new Latin name he had given to a small, slender, almost dazzling green, beetle inhabiting the Spanish moss—his own scientific discovery— he wrote it so minutely that I had to use a lens to ...
— Strong Hearts • George W. Cable
... Danes, Swedes, Russians, Prussians, Turks, or Algerines treated American citizens in this way? And yet our federalists can never bear to hear us speak, in terms of resentment, against "the bulwark of our religion." O, Caleb! Caleb! Thou hast a head and so has a beetle.[S] ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... edifice erected for the habitation of man, rat, mouse, beetle, cockroach, fly, mosquito, flea, bacillus and microbe. House of Correction, a place of reward for political and personal service, and for the detention of offenders and appropriations. House ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... had often seen one placed at the end of a road on a hillock, and in the light of the sun its black arms, bending in every direction, always reminded me of the claws of an immense beetle, and I assure you it was never without emotion that I gazed on it, for I could not help thinking how wonderful it was that these various signs should be made to cleave the air with such precision as to convey to the distance of three hundred ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Worm "is another evil, which generally visits them every few years. A beetle deposits its eggs in the young canes; the caterpillars of these remain in the cane, living on its medullary parts, till they are ready to be metamorphosed into the chrysalis state. Sometimes this evil is so great as to injure a sixth or an eighth part of the field; but, ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... light the ground While the beetle goes his round. Follow now the beetle's hum— Little wanderer, ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various
... Marvin's searching fingers encountered a hard object. It proved to be a scarab, or sacred Egyptian beetle, carved in black stone. ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... mantle giving invisibility to a host. Between us and that refuge dead men lay here and there, stiff and stark, with the black paint upon them, and the colored feathers of their headdresses red or blue against the sand. One warrior, shot through the back, crawled like a wounded beetle to the forest. We let him go, for we cared not to waste ammunition ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... of some of the insects deserves to be mentioned. A beetle was immersed in proof spirits for four hours, and when taken out crawled away almost immediately. It was a second time immersed, and continued in a glass of rum for a day and a night, at the expiration of which period it still showed symptoms of life. Perhaps, however, what I from ignorance ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench
... now. And once again, away from the ordered round of the camp where he had been ruled by the desires and requirements of others, he was thinking, planning in freedom. Later (his hand went to the butt of his stunner) perhaps later he might just find a way of extracting an accounting from the beetle-faces, too. ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... and was the cause, not only of serious loss to the farmers, but of the closing of the cotton mills in New England, of a scarcity of cotton cloth and a decided rise in its price. The boll-weevil is a beetle about a quarter of an inch in length. This little beetle eats into the heart of each boll, which ...
— Checking the Waste - A Study in Conservation • Mary Huston Gregory
... is happy! Not a worm that crawls, Or grasshopper that chirps about the grass, Or beetle basking on the sunny walls, Or mail-clad fly that skims the face of glass The river wears in summer;—not a bird That sings the tranquil glory of the fields, Or single sight is seen or sound is heard, But some new pleasure to my full ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... chambers, and some had not finished their chimes when his son, choking, calling wildly upon Heaven to aid him, had fallen in the midst of crowding, obscene things, and, in the instant of his fall, had found the room clear of the waving antennae, the beady eyes, and the beetle shapes. The whole horrible phantasmagoria—together with the odour of ancient rottenness—faded like a fevered dream, at the moment that Dr. Cairn had burst in upon the ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... a water-beetle fussing across the green depths. "One can't tell. I'm a female thing at bottom. I like high tone for a flourish and stars and ideas; but I ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... the delusion proper to Pierrot," said Pantaloon, contemptuously. "This heavy, beetle-browed ruffian, who has grown old in sin, and whose appetite increases with his years, is Polichinelle. Each one, as you perceive, is designed by Nature for the part he plays. This nimble, freckled jackanapes is Harlequin; not your spangled Harlequin into ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... name of Lanio, a victor in many games. With a great helmet on his head, and in mail which formed a ridge in front of his powerful breast and behind, he looked in the gleam of the golden arena like a giant beetle. The no less famous retiarius ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... respectable man, too, with cows and sheep, and a kind man. He would never put anything that wasn't nice into a poem, and he would never run anyone down; but if you were the worst in the world, he'd make you the best in it; and when his wife lost her beetle, he made a song of ...
— Poets and Dreamers - Studies and translations from the Irish • Lady Augusta Gregory and Others
... April was mild; May warm; June hot; July and August a furnace, but Legionnaires drank no less of the heavy, red Algerian wine than before the summer heat engulfed them. Max had heard men say jokingly or solemnly of each other, "He has the cafard." Vaguely he knew that cafard was French for beetle, or cockroach; that soldiers who habitually mixed absinthe and other strong drinks with their cheap but beloved litre were often affected with a strange madness which betrayed itself in weird ways, and that this special madness was ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... remained and had faith. Martial law means passes and explanations, and walking generally in the light of day. Martial law means that the Commander-in-chief, if he be an artist in well doing, may use his boot freely on politicians bland or beetle-browed. No police force ever gave the sense of security inspired by a ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... nor the other; I am in a chrysalis state, which is notoriously a dull one; and I have the further aggravation, which I suppose never occurs to the nymph bona fide, of a miserable uncertainty whether my folded-up wings are those of a purple butterfly or of a poor drudge of a beetle. Besides, it is conceivable that the chrysalis may get weary of his case, and mine is not a silken one. I have been here long enough. My aunt Landholm is very kind; but I think she would like an increase of her household accommodations, and also that she would prefer working it by the rule of subtraction ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... of insects can hardly be estimated at their true dreadfulness by persons unacquainted with the infamous habits of the nocturnal beetle of the tropics. Sluggish creatures in the temperate zone, in warm countries they develop the power of flying, and obstacles successfully interposed to their progress in countries where they merely crawl are ineffectual here. They had entire ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... man was a full seven feet tall, and the most heavy-set Martian I had ever seen. A tremendous, beetle-browed, scowling fellow. He stood with hands on his hips, his leather-garbed legs spread wide; and as I confronted him, I felt ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... morning, it is an omen of evil for that day. To meet an ass, is in like manner unlucky. It is also very unfortunate to walk under a ladder; to forget to eat goose on the festival of St. Michael; to tread upon a beetle, or to eat the twin nuts that are sometimes found in one shell. Woe, in like manner, is predicted to that wight who inadvertently upsets the salt; each grain that is overthrown will bring to him a day of sorrow. If thirteen persons sit at table, one ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... to an old bird's-nest or a caterpillar's nest and deposit them in it. But in this respect the little kettle cannot call the big pot black. The chickadee also will carry away what it cannot eat. One day I dug a dozen or more white grubs—the larvae of some beetle—out of a decayed maple on my woodpile and placed them upon my window-sill. The chickadees soon discovered them, and fell to carrying them off as fast as ever they could, distributing them among the branches of the Norway spruces. Among the grubs was one large white one half the size of one's little ...
— The Wit of a Duck and Other Papers • John Burroughs
... afraid of; he seemed not to notice me. He talked little to her, but always with special cleverness and significance. I gave up working and reading; I even gave up walking about the neighbourhood and riding my horse. Like a beetle tied by the leg, I moved continually round and round my beloved little lodge. I would gladly have stopped there altogether, it seemed ... but that was impossible. My mother scolded me, and sometimes Zinaida herself drove me away. Then I ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... we'll go to the guard-house, and I'll show you a few of our picked men, who are there on duty; real dare-devils, who care no more for a blue than they do for a black-beetle; and then we'll go to the Angers gate. It's there that Lechelle will show himself; and then—and then—why, then we'll go home, and get some breakfast, for it will be nearly time for us to go ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... his opinion of their efficiency. But perhaps the most striking group of all was that in which a thick-necked, bull-headed young fellow, with blood-colored hair, a son of Rousin Redhead's—who, by the way, was himself present—and another beetle-browed slip were engaged in drawing for a wager, upon one of the school-boy's slates, the figure of a coffin and cross-bones. A hardened-looking old sinner, with murder legible in his face, held the few half-pence ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... main structural features, while in others there is great variety of larval form within the order. For example, the caterpillars of all Lepidoptera are fundamentally much alike, while the grubs of beetles of different families diverge widely from one another. A review of a selected series of beetle-larvae will therefore serve well to introduce this branch ...
— The Life-Story of Insects • Geo. H. Carpenter
... up-stream. The moon Glanced on a cluster of pikes, like silver thorns, Three hundred yards away, a little troop Of weaponed men, embarking hurriedly. Their great black wherry clumsily swung about, Then, with twelve oars for legs, came striding down, An armoured beetle on the glittering trail Of some small victim. Just below our wharf A little dinghy waddled. Ben cut the painter, and without one word Drew her up crackling thro' the lapping water, Motioned me to the tiller, ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... particular kind of "game" which he caught in the net, transferring the specimens to the boxes he carried. There were beautiful butterflies, moths and strange bugs in the securing of which the scientist evinced great delight, though when one beetle nipped him firmly and painfully on his thumb his involuntary cry of pain was as real as that of any ...
— Tom Swift in the Land of Wonders - or, The Underground Search for the Idol of Gold • Victor Appleton
... moon is high o'er the ruined tower, When the night-bird sings in her lonely bower, When beetle and cricket and bat are awake, And the will-o'-the-wisp is at play in the brake, Oh then do we gather, all frolic and glee, We gay little elfins, beneath the old tree! And brightly we hover on silvery wing, And dip ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... bylo, bydlo bedzie (It was cattle, it remains cattle); (2) Podawala baba babie przez piec malowane grabie (A woman handed the woman over the stove a painted rake); (3) Chrzaszcz brzmi w trzinie (The beetle buzzes in the pipe). Latin and Greek are also made use of for similar purpose. Treichel cites, among other passages, the following: (1) Quamuis sint sub aqua, sub aqua maledicere tentant (Ovid, Metam. VI. 376); (2) At tuba terribili sonitu taratantara dixit (Virgil, Aen. IX. 503); ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... Trebizond came and sat at our table. He wore carpet socks, and over them slippers with long toes curled upperward like certain specimens one may see in Bethnal Green Museum; on his head a straw-plaited, rusty fez swathed with green silk of the colour of a sun-beetle. ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... prized by ourselves for our own purposes. But in doing this, we have so lowered the general constitutional vigour of the plants or animals that our vines fall an easy prey to oidium and phylloxera, our potatoes to the potato disease and the Colorado beetle; our sheep are stupid, our rabbits idiotic, our domestic breeds generally threatened with dangers to life and limb unknown to their wiry ancestors in the wild state. And when one comes to deal with the infinitely more complex individuality of man, what hope ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... once, down on the ground beside her, a tiny figure became visible, so small that Toinette had to kneel and stoop her head to see it plainly. The figure was that of an odd little man. He wore a garb of green bright and glancing as the scales of a beetle. In his mite of a hand was a cap, out of which stuck a long pointed feather. Two specks of tears stood on his cheeks and he fixed on Toinette a glance so sharp and so sad that it made her feel sorry and frightened and ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... of picric acid be boiled with a strong solution of potassium cyanide, a deep red liquid is produced, owing to the formation of potassium iso-purpurate, which crystallises in small reddish-brown plates with a beetle-green lustre. This, by reaction with ammonium chloride, gives ammonium iso-purpurate (NH{4}C{8}H{4}N{5}O{6}), or artificial murexide, which dies silk and wool a beautiful red colour. On adding barium chloride to either of the above salts, a vermilion-red precipitate was ...
— Nitro-Explosives: A Practical Treatise • P. Gerald Sanford
... it was all the more surprising that a gracious creature like Liane could have sprung from their midst. They were a beetle-browed, dark race, with gnarled muscles and huge, knotted joints, speaking a guttural language all their own. Few spoke ...
— Priestess of the Flame • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... Beetle, grasshopper, and May-fly, From his muzzle must away fly, Or he swallowed them by legions, His huge foot, it was a pillar; When he drank, it was a swiller! Soon ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... was a man to whom misfortune had early taught the truths of life, and he followed the strait path with the tenacity of an insect making for its nest; he was one of those dogged young men who feign death before an obstacle and wear out everybody's patience with their own beetle-like perseverance. Thus, young as he was, he had all the republican virtue of poor peoples; he was sober, saving of his time, an enemy to pleasure. He waited. Nature had given him the immense advantage of an agreeable exterior. His calm, pure brow, the shape of his placid, ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... surface of my block looked rough enough to strike matches on. But impatience is not my besetting sin, and I had endured these little catastrophes before. I waited for the block to dry before I brushed off the sand. I also waited till the little beetle, who had crept into my sky, and was impeded in his pace by my first wash, walked slowly down through all my distances, and quitted the block by the gate in the foreground. This was partly because I did not want to hurt him, and partly because a white ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... little distance, the Secretary found a beetle, and just as he was going to swallow it, the King flew at him in great anger, saying, "Beetles are for kings, not for common chickens. Why did you not give it to me?" So they fought together, and while they were fighting, the beetle ran away ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various
... summons The shard-borne beetle, with drowsy hums, Hath rung night's yawning peal, there shall be done ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.01.12 • Various
... simple. The plough, if we may judge by contemporary illustrations, had in the eleventh century a large wheel and very short handles.[49] In the twelfth century Neckham describes its parts: a beam, handles, tongue, mouldboard, coulter, and share.[50] Breaking up the clods was done by the mattock or beetle, and harrowing was done by hand with what looks like a large rake; the scythes of the haymakers and the sickles of the reapers were very like those that still linger on ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... fades the glimmering landscape on the sight, 5 And all the air a solemn stillness holds, Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight, And drowsy ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... lest you should wish to live, and more respect the trifling term of six or seven winters added to your life, then your perpetual honour! Do you dare to die? The sense of death is most in apprehension, and the poor beetle that we tread upon, feels a pang as great as when a giant dies.' 'Why do you give me this shame?' said Claudio. 'Think you I can fetch a resolution from flowery tenderness? If I must die, I will encounter darkness as a bride, and hug it in my arms.' 'There spoke my brother,' ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... 421: in support of the Peace of Nicias, ratified soon afterward (Grote's 'History of Greece,' Vol. vi., page 492). Trygaeus, an honest vine-dresser yearning for his farm, in parody of the Bellerophon of Euripides, ascends to heaven on a dung-beetle. He there hauls Peace from the bottom of the well into which she had been cast by Ares, and brings her home in triumph to Greece, when she inaugurates a reign of plenty and uproarious jollity, and celebrates the nuptials of Trygaeus ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... the methods to be followed scrupulously by the sick. Cure the stomachache by catching a beetle in both hands and throwing it over the left shoulder with both hands without looking backward. Have you intestinal trouble? Eat mulberries picked with the thumb and ring finger of your left hand. Do you grow old before your time? Drink water drawn silently DOWN ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... was used to an occasional rebuff, and regarded a gruff word from his principal no more than he did the buzz of a beetle, "I know all that very well; but you, robust fellows, with millions at your back, are less likely to respect those subtle and delicate influences which sometimes, notwithstanding, carry mischief with them, than we poor, sensitive valetudinarians, without a guinea in ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... freedman, one-eyed, short, immensely broad, beetle-browed, and grizzled, stood in the door of his wine-shop and watched the crowding press of travellers at the marsh-ford, fore-runners of the throng which nightly descended upon Thorney. Behind him, in ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... the transepts are correspondingly narrow. Though somewhat stiff and formal, the general design derives a certain impressiveness from the lofty clerestory, the immense display of windows, and a profusion of flying buttresses. The fantastic reproduction of Jacob's Ladder, with its beetle-like angels, on the W. front, should be carefully observed, and note should also be taken of the elaborately carved wooden door and the figures above and on either side (Henry VII. and SS. Peter and Paul). The two ladders are flanked ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... gold-bug is that of a man who finds a piece of parchment on which is a secret writing telling where Captain Kidd hid his treasure off the coast of South Carolina. The gold-beetle has nothing whatever to do with the real story, and is only introduced to mystify. It is one of the principles of all conjuring tricks to have something to divert the attention. Poe's detective story is a sort of conjuring trick, but it is ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... paragraph—that paragraph—it takes a genius of the first literary degree to dream a paragraph, though it may only need quite an ordinary fool to write it! Why, what is the matter? What is it? Did you see something? Not a mouse? Not a beetle? I prithee, ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... the crowd proclaimed that the Golden Eagle was once more in sight. At first a mere speck against the blue, she rapidly assumed shape and was soon circling above the heads of the onlookers, her engine droning steadily, as if she had been some gigantic beetle. ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... and must know it when you see him. He is not popular with the ladies; he hates them all, he says. Mother, Loo-loo, come," and breaking off from her very sisterly remarks concerning Hugh, 'Lina sprang up in terror as a large beetle, attracted by the light, fastened itself ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... Mumga, who was very old and had seen many strange things in her long life; but Mumga, being an ape, had a faculty for recalling the trivial. That time when Gunto mistook a sting-bug for an edible beetle had made more impression upon Mumga than all the innumerable manifestations of the greatness of God which she had witnessed, and which, of course, she ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... find a four-leaved clover and a beetle with one eye," said one of them; "for if we can find them, we shall be able to get into the Great Panjandrum's place, and there we can learn whether there is a bag of gold at the end of the ...
— Queer Stories for Boys and Girls • Edward Eggleston
... the vulgar account it extremely dangerous to touch anything which they may happen to find without saining (blessing) it, the snares of the enemy being notorious and well-attested. A pool-woman of Teviotdale having been fortunate enough, as she thought herself, to find a wooden beetle, at the very time when she needed such an implement, seized it without pronouncing a proper blessing, and, carrying it home, laid it above her bed to be ready for employment in the morning. At midnight the window of her cottage opened, and a loud voice was heard calling up some ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... advocate, mocking. "Did you ever gallop, sir, after a hedgehog? have you assisted to draw a badger? I am badgered by him, and will blame him, ay, ban him, for he is my curse, my bane; why should I not curse him as Noah cursed that foul whelp Canaan? Beshrew him for a block-head, a little black-browed beetle, a blot of ink, a shifting shadow, a roving rat, a mouse, yes, sir, a very mouse, that creeps in and out of its hole when the old cat is away. Away, Mr. Notary, away; go, good Monsieur Veuillot. There are more conceptions in man than he ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... and not a beetle was heard, and the guards found great difficulty in keeping awake, Don Perez Goneti came to the house of General Potter, disguised in the robe of a priest. He found the general engaged over dispatches to his ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... the sosogees itself, in a manner past the poor of nature to consiv. They have, to be shure, in London, many things to help work—for in our kitchen there is a smoking-jack to roast the meat, that gangs of its oun free will, and the brisker the fire, the faster it runs; but a potatoe-beetle is not to be had within the four walls of London, which is a great want in a house; Mrs. Argent never hard ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... innumerable; coins of the Ptolemies, Cleopatra, and others; and jewellery of all descriptions, from the golden diadem and the royal signet down to the pottery rings and glass beads worn by the poor. As might be expected in an Egyptian collection, the scarabaeus, or sacred beetle, frequently meets the eye. Here are scarabaei in gold, cornelion, chalcedony, heliotrope, torquoise, lapis-lazuli, porphyry, terra cotta, and other materials; many of them having royal ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 455 - Volume 18, New Series, September 18, 1852 • Various
... him in astonishment. He had always imagined professional pugilists to be bullet-headed and beetle-browed to a man. He was not prepared for one of Mr Joe Bevan's description. For all the marks of his profession that he bore on his face, in the shape of lumps and scars, he might have been a curate. His face ...
— The White Feather • P. G. Wodehouse
... in readiness to receive the Victoria bravely with stones and arrows, but the balloon quickly passed their islands, fluttering over them, from one to the other with butterfly motion, like a gigantic beetle. ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... wren, as they walked along one night, Saw a big brown beetle on a broomstraw. Said the robin to the wren: "What a pretty, pretty sight— That big brown beetle on a broomstraw!" So they got their plates and knives, Their children and their wives, And gobbled up the beetle ...
— The Peter Patter Book of Nursery Rhymes • Leroy F. Jackson
... with sound, I heard my little brothers who move by night rustling in grass and tree. A hedgehog crossed my path with a dull squeak, the bats shrilled high to the stars, a white owl swept past me crying his hunting note, a beetle boomed suddenly in my face; and above and through it all the ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... Word,—for so the consecrated animals were called, [Greek (transliterated): ieroi logoi,]—became multiplied, till almost every power and supposed attribute of nature had its symbol in some consecrated animal from the beetle to the hawk. Wherever the powers of nature had found a cycle for themselves, in which the powers still produced the same phenomenon during a given period, whether in the motions of the heavenly orbs, or in the ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... chemicals had got together to form life everything had lived on something else, and the best livers had always been the best killers. He did not pretend to justify the plan, but there it was; and it worked the same whether it was one microscopic organism preying on another or a bird devouring a beetle or Germany trying to swallow the world. Rapp, Senior, said that was all very well, but these pacifists would keep us out of war yet. Doctor Purdy, with whom he had finished a game of pinochle—Herman Vielhaber ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... pricked with holes like an enormous wasp's nest, the ruined watch-towers, and the soaring, honey-coloured minaret with its intricate carvings, its marble pillars, its tiles and inset enamels iridescent as a Brazilian beetle's wing, all gleamed with a splendour that was an enchantment, in the fire of sunset. The scent of aromatic herbs, such as Arabs love and use to cure their fevers, was bitter-sweet in the fall of the dew, and birds cried to each other from hidden ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... walking-stick insects (exactly like dry twigs), and the fierce, tall, praying mantis with their mock air of meekness and devotion. Let one of the other insects stray within reach and their piety was quickly enough abandoned! One beetle about three-eighths of an inch across was oblong in shape and of pure glittering gold. His wing covers, on the other hand, were round and transparent. The effect was of a jewel under a tiny glass case. Other ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... still nastier things. Often the doctor would look very grave, and say, "The child is not ill; he is bewitched"; and then he would sit down and write out a prescription something like this: "Remedy to drive away bewitchment. Take a great beetle; cut off his head and his wings, boil him, put him in oil, and lay him out. Then cook his head and his wings; put them in snake-fat, boil, and let the patient drink the mixture." I think you would almost rather take ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Ancient Egypt • James Baikie
... his pocket a match-box, the temporary home of a large beetle—a buzzer, Jimmy called it—which had hitherto refused to eat either grass or bran or Indian corn. His gaze then wandered to a hole in his stockings, which he had mended by applying ink to the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 5, 1916 • Various
... suffering again, as the dry argument was resumed. Presently he bethought him of a treasure he had and got it out. It was a large black beetle with formidable jaws—a "pinchbug," he called it. It was in a percussion-cap box. The first thing the beetle did was to take him by the finger. A natural fillip followed, the beetle went floundering into the aisle and lit on its back, and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... vr. to mistake. erguir to erect, raise up straight. erial m. unfilled ground. ermita hermitage. esbirro bailiff, guard. escalera staircase. escalon m. step of a stair. escapar vr. to escape. escape m. escape, flight; a todo —— at full speed. escarabajo beetle. escarbar to scratch. escarlata scarlet. escaso scanty, defective, slight. escena scene. esceptico skeptical. esclavo, -a slave. escoba broom. Escocia Scotland. escombro ruins, rubbish. esconder ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... juice of poppy bruised, With black hellebore infused; Here is mandrake's bleeding root, Mixed with moonshade's deadly fruit; Viper's bag with venom fill'd, Taken ere the beast was kill'd; Adder's skin and raven's feather, With shell of beetle blent together; Dragonwort and barbatus, Hemlock black and poisonous; Horn of hart, and storax red, Lapwing's blood, at midnight shed. In the heated pan they burn, And to pungent vapours turn. By this strong suffumigation, By this ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... and sights of hideous Night yet dared to triumph over the death of Day. Unseen were the circling wings of the fell bat; unheard the screech of the waking owl; silent the drowsy hum of the shade-born beetle! What heart has not acknowledged the influence of this hour, the sweet and soothing hour of twilight! the hour of love, the hour of adoration, the hour of rest! when we think of those we love, only to regret that ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... no kind of beetle or butterfly, then, that this philosopher comes down upon here from the heights of his universal science—his science of the nature of things in general, but that great Spenserian monstrosity,—that diseased product of nature, which individual human ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... powerful reserves, and reinforcements were pouring along in unbroken streams from the great centres of Russian military power. The fierce Cossack from the Don and the Dneister, the Tartar from the Ukraine, the beetle-browed and predatory Baschkir, with all their variety of wild uniform, and "helm and blade" glancing in the summer's sun, crowded on the great military thoroughfares, while fresh supplies of well-appointed and formidable artillery were carefully transmitted. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... night about six, I saw a sight I must try to tell you of. In front of me, right over the top of the forest into which I was descending was a vast cloud. The front of it accurately represented the somewhat rugged, long-nosed, and beetle-browed profile of a man, crowned by a huge Kalmuck cap; the flesh part was of a heavenly pink, the cap, the moustache, the eyebrows were of a bluish gray; to see this with its childish exactitude of design and ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... beautiful jointed stems meet at such perfect angles above the way, and on either side of it, as to imitate almost exactly the elaborate Gothic arch-work of old abbey cloisters. Above the road, shadowing the slopes of lofty hills, forests beetle in dizzy precipices of verdure. They are green—burning, flashing green— covered with parasitic green creepers and vines; they show enormous forms, or rather dreams of form, fetichistic and startling. Banana leaves flicker and flutter ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... PETRUCHIO. A whoreson, beetle-headed, flap-ear'd knave! Come, Kate, sit down; I know you have a stomach. Will you give thanks, sweet Kate, or else shall ...
— The Taming of the Shrew • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... Wingate, whose early training had been free and unrestrained, being brought to order by a Japanese mother-in-law was almost too much for my gravity. It would be like a big black beetle ordering the life of a butterfly. Not without a struggle the conservative grandfather acknowledged that his system had failed. For the first time since I had known him Kishimoto San, with genuine humility, appealed for help. "Madam, my granddaughter ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... with its tawny cousin, the veery, that skulks away to hide in the nearest bushes as you approach, or with the hermit thrush, that pours out its heavenly song in the solitude of the forest, how gracious and full of gentle confidence it seems! Every gesture is graceful and elegant; even a wriggling beetle is eaten as daintily as caviare at the king's table. It is only when its confidence in you is abused, and you pass too near the nest, that might easily be mistaken for a robin's, just above your head in a sapling, ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... extremely funny, when some unexpected grasshopper, some free-and-easy beetle presents itself without invitation or excuse, scampering over our white mats, to see the manner in which Chrysantheme indicates it to my righteous vengeance—merely pointing her finger at it, without ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... the other Orders of insects, I have been able to collect very little reliable information. With the stag-beetle (Lucanus cervus) "the males appear to be much more numerous than the females"; but when, as Cornelius remarked during 1867, an unusual number of these beetles appeared in one part of Germany, the females appeared to exceed the ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... go on excursions for sport, guides would be placed at their disposal, and that all who wished to do so could at any time travel through the country without the slightest fear of molestation. For some time affairs remained in the same condition. The doctor went daily on shore with butterfly and beetle nets, tin boxes, and other paraphernalia. He was generally accompanied by a couple of bluejackets, and always took a native guide to prevent the risk of being lost in the jungle, and also because the man was able to take him to places where villages had stood, and ...
— Among Malay Pirates - And Other Tales Of Adventure And Peril • G. A. Henty
... inferior sheep, and seven and a half cents for the better quality, and a good hand shears from sixty to eighty in a day. It is not likely that sheep-raising will attain anything of the prominence which cattle-raising is likely to assume. The potato beetle "scare" is not of much account in the country of the potato beetle. The farmers seem much depressed by the magnitude and persistency of the grasshopper pest which finds their fields in the morning "as the garden of Eden," and leaves them at ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... on the ground, Shining, quite still, as though they had been stunned By some great violent spirit stalking through, Leaving a deep and supernatural calm Round a dead beetle upturned in a furrow. ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... beetle-bugs, with horns sticking out in every direction. And if here isn't a perfect shape of a lady's slipper! The lady should wear it inside out, so all ...
— Lord Dolphin • Harriet A. Cheever
... contemptuous of it because you do not know it. The terms I use freight no ideas to you. They are sounds, rhythmic and musical, but they are not definite symbols of thought. Their facts you do not grasp. For instance, the prehensile organs of insects, the great toothed mandibles of the black stag-beetle, the amorous din of the male cicada and the muteness of his mate—these are facts which you cannot relate, one with the other, nor can you generalise upon them. Let me add to these related characters, and you cannot discern the law which is alike to all. What to you ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... obscure place which did not inspire confidence. He was a beetle-browed fellow, short, with deep-set furtive eyes, and he struck me as being a thief—or perhaps a receiver of stolen property. The atmosphere of the place ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux
... in sight All that's wings beneath the sky, Bat and swallow, wasp and fly, Gnat and sparrow, and behind Comes the crow of carrion kind; Dove and pigeon are descried, And the raven fiery-eyed, With the beetle and the crane Flying on the hurricane: See they find no resting-place, For the world's terrestrial space Is with water cover'd o'er, Soon they sink to rise no more: 'To our father let us flee!' Straight the ark-ship openeth he, And to everything that lives Kindly he ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... corner. There was frog spawn adrift, tremulous with tadpoles just bursting their gelatinous envelopes; there were little pond snails creeping out into life, and under the green skin of the rush stems the larvae of a big Water Beetle were struggling out of their egg cases. I doubt if the reader knows the larva of the beetle called (I know not why) Dytiscus. It is a jointed, queer-looking thing, very muscular and sudden in its movements, and given to swimming head downward with its tail out of water; the length ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... back room of Rayder's office in Denver. His beady black eyes glistened beneath his beetle brows. A pleased expression shone on his thin face, drawn in wrinkles like stained parchment. Rayder was out, but had left instructions for him to wait. As he sat there his eye caught sight of something interesting on Rayder's ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds
... crowd gave back as Kress speeded up his motor, indicating that he would soon take off. Jeter and Eyer studied the outward outline of Kress' craft. It looked exactly like a black beetle which has just alighted after flight, but has not yet quite hidden its wings. It was black, probably because it was believed a black object could be followed easier from ...
— Lords of the Stratosphere • Arthur J. Burks
... thick, and their boughs spread so far, that it was only here and there a sunbeam could get straight through. All the gentle creatures of a forest were there, but no creatures that killed, not even a weasel to kill the rabbits, or a beetle to eat the snails out of their striped shells. As to the butterflies, words would but wrong them if they tried to tell how gorgeous they were. The princess's delight was so great that she neither laughed nor ran, but walked about with a solemn ...
— A Double Story • George MacDonald
... lamp stood, a droning, slow-winged brown beetle blundering against its chimney. Outside, the distant chant of newly wakened frogs sounded; through the open door the warm air of the April night came straying, bearing the incense of the fields and woodlands, where fires smoldered ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... drift-wood, wet by the lapping of pulsating wavelets, now following up some long, inclining, half submerged log, peeping into every crevice and occasionally dragging forth from its concealment a spider or small beetle, turning alternately its bright yellow breast and olive back towards the light; now jetting his beautiful tail, or quivering his wings tremulously, he darts off into some thicket in response to a call from his mate; ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [May, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... hush the heavy beating of my heart; my lips were stiffened with dread of loud breath, and all power of motion left me. For even a puff of wind might betray me, the ruffle of a spray, or the lifting of a leaf, or the random bounce of a beetle. Great peril had encompassed me ere now, but never had it grasped me as this did, and paralyzed all the powers of my body. Rather would I have stood in the midst of a score of Mexican rovers than thus in ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore |
