"Claw" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... boy looked across the room, pleased when the leaping flames sent flaring over floor and wall long shadows from the tall brass andirons or claw-footed chair and table. Sometimes he glanced shyly at the mother, but getting no answering smile kept silence. Once or twice the girl whispered a word to him, as the logs fell and a sheet of flame from the hickory and the quick-burning birch set free the stored-up ...
— Mr. Kris Kringle - A Christmas Tale • S. Weir Mitchell
... her recesses, and full of fears. One day Falk came upon a man gnawing a splinter of pine wood. Suddenly he threw the piece of wood away, tottered to the rail, and fell over. Falk, too late to prevent the act, saw him claw the ship's side desperately before he went down. Next day another man did the same thing, after uttering horrible imprecations. But this one somehow managed to get hold of the broken rudder chains and hung on there, silently. Falk set about trying to save him, and all the time ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... me, old girl, you want to cut out this picking away at Marion behind her back—or to her face, either, for that matter. You two women are going to see a good deal of each other between now and spring, and you'll be ready to claw each other's eyes out if you don't shut them to a ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... small, weird-looking metal room—metal of a dull, grey-white substance like nothing he had ever seen before. With his head still swimming he got up dizzily on one elbow, trying to remember what had happened to him. That fingernail, or claw, had scratched his face. He had been drugged. It seemed obvious. He could remember his roaring senses as he had tried to fight, with ...
— The World Beyond • Raymond King Cummings
... sucked, in blissful ignorance, the thumbs that solaced me in solitude, the thumbs your County Council took from me, and your endearments scarcely will replace! Where, Madam, lay the harm in sucking them? The dog will lick his foot, the cat her claw, his paws sustain the hibernating bear—and you decree no law to punish them! Yet, in your rage for infantine reform, you rushed this most ridiculous enactment—its earliest victim your ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 9, 1890. • Various
... oppressor. It was this 'ero's genius—and, I may say—er—I may say genius—that, unaided, 'it upon the only way for removing the cruel conqueror from our beloved 'earths and 'omes. It was this 'ero who, 'aving first allowed the invaders to claw each other to 'ash (if I may be permitted the expression) after the well-known precedent of the Kilkenny cats, thereupon firmly and without flinching, stepped bravely in with his fellow-'eros—need ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... wonder saw; A whisker first, and then a claw With many an ardent wish She stretch'd, in vain, to reach the prize— What female heart can gold despise? What cat's averse ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... rush inside with the crowd—surged along the passage-ways, the blue and other rooms, and through the great east room. Crowds of country people, some very funny. Fine music from the Marine band, off in a side place. I saw Mr. Lincoln, drest all in black, with white kid gloves and a claw-hammer coat, receiving, as in duty bound, shaking hands, looking very disconsolate, and as if he would give anything ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... use of turning aside or downwards the claw of a table, I don't see; as it must then be reared against a wall, for it will not stand alone. If the use be for carriage, the feet may shut up, like the usual brass feet of ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... out a roll of crisp, new currency to the lieutenant of the gang, who gingerly reached for it, as though he expected the tapering fingers to claw him. ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... He held out his claw-like hand—so dirty that Pollie almost shrank from touching it as she gave him the violets. He took them without a word of thanks, but as she was moving away ...
— Little Pollie - A Bunch of Violets • Gertrude P. Dyer
... say, Jeanie, woman"—here he extended his hand towards her shoulder with all the fingers spread out as if to clutch it, but in so bashful and awkward a manner, that when she whisked herself beyond its reach, the paw remained suspended in the air with the palm open, like the claw of a heraldic griffin—"Jeanie," continued the swain in this moment of inspiration—"I say, Jeanie, it's a braw day out-by, and the roads are ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... to give up expecting that they would, his attention, as well as that of Lucia, was attracted to a little child who was playing with a small hammer in the gravel not far from where they were standing. The mother of the child was sitting on a bench near by, knitting. The hammer was small, and the claw of it was straight and flat. The child was using it for a hoe, to dig a hole ...
— Rollo in Geneva • Jacob Abbott
... kind old man, and he did his best, so we will not say anything about his antique instruments, or the number of times he tied a pocket-handkerchief round an awful-looking claw, and put both into ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... fears of the guests by repeated proclamations that there was plenty of time, and that he would give them due warning before the train started. Those who had flocked out of the cars, to prey with beak and claw, as the vulture-like fashion is, upon everything in reach, remained to eat like Christians; and even a poor, scantily-Englished Frenchman, who wasted half his time in trying to ask how long the cars stopped and in looking at his watch, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... eggs. One came near till Chet could make out the repulsive face and black, staring eyes with their fiery red center. It was one of the things that had captured him; he saw it move swiftly on broad wings. It held a leathery egg in its curled-claw hands while its long tail whipped around and laid the egg open with one slash of a ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin
... prevent the fatigue of dictating two to-morrow. In the first and best place, I am very near recovered; that is, though still a mummy, I have no pain left, nor scarce any sensation of gout except in my right hand, which is still in complexion and shape a lobster's claw. Now, unless any body can prove to me that three weeks are longer than five months and a half, they will hardly convince me that the bootikins are not a cure for fits of the gout and a Very short cure, though they cannot prevent it: ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... motionless. His lantern made visible a struggling, heaving mass of rats, fighting tooth and claw, enormous rats ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... with Anne, carrying a coil of rope to which was attached a claw-like instrument that had been the business end of a grubbing fork. Marilla and Anne stood by, cold and shaken with horror and dread, while Mr. Barry dragged the well, and Davy, astride the gate, watched the group with a face indicative ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... in motion, he must go on. Some ghastly, unnatural thing was clogging his brain; not only in a mental way, but clogging it until there was physical hurt and pain, an awful tightness—something—if he could only reach it with his fingers and claw it away! There was black madness here, and a pain insufferable—a damnable impotence, robbing him of even the power, the faculty to think or reason, or to make himself understand in any logical degree the meaning or the cause of this thing that sent ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... political and historical philosophy had been well-received, and he had also written a novel, "But Some Are More Equal," which, for a few weeks after publication, had managed to claw its way to the bottom of the ...
— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett
... the restaurant for supper after the theatre, for smart Madrid is gay at night, and there is as much dancing and fun there, on a smaller scale of course, as there is in the West End. The pretty dresses, the laughter, the sibilant whispers, and the claw-hammer coat are the same in Madrid and Bucharest as in London or Paris, or any other capital. The hour of midnight is the same hour of relaxation when even judges smile after their day upon the bench, and the blue-stocking will laugh at a ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... suddenly heard the bull voice of a Hun officer hic-coughing gutturals, and they were on him. He had no time to send up an S.O.S. rocket, and his machine-gun jammed. In a minute they were all mixed up, at it tooth and claw as merry as a Galway election, the big Bosch officer, throwing off a hymn of hate, the life and soul of the party. He came for Patrick with an automatic, and Patrick thought all was up; and so it would ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 4, 1917 • Various
... pincers—a claw some eight miles thick, bit into the east side of the salient near Pont-a-Mousson on the west bank of the Moselle River. The other claw of the pincers was about eight miles thick and it bit into the western flank of the salient in the vicinity of the little town of ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... map of Long Island which I send, and agree with me that though graceful in shape it's a long-bodied, short-legged island. Jack says it isn't. He says that I ought to see it's a lobster, and that what I call its legs are its claws. We live on the southern edge of its top, or northeast leg—or claw. If leg, it is kicking Shelter Island, the biggest of the baby islands swimming gaily about within reach. If claw, it is engaged with the aid of its southern mate in trying to grab the morsel. And a dainty morsel, too!—as I have seen for myself to-day by crossing over to the ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... azure wings Light upon her claw-like hand; When she lifts her head and sings, You shall hear and understand: You shall hear a bugle calling Wildly over the dew-dashed down; And a sound as of the falling Ramparts of ...
— The Lord of Misrule - And Other Poems • Alfred Noyes
... and knees for several yards, Rhoda rose and started on a run down the long slope to the open desert. But after a few steps she found running impossible, for the slope was a wilderness of rock, thickly grown with cholla and yucca with here and there a thicker growth of cat's-claw. ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... way, you object!' 'Oh, poor wretch! how horrid-looking he is!' or else jeers, gibes, and laughter. And since I became a man, this kind of a man, I mean," he explained, glancing from Joan to his stunted limbs, huge feet, and claw-like hands, "it has been harder still—harsh words and heavy blows if I did not bring in money enough at shows and fairs. Now, I think the Lord Jesus has seen my loneliness, taken pity upon me, and sent two of His own to cheer me, and brighten a bit of the wilderness for a weary ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... turned sicklier and uglier as his friend had continued to speak. He looked now as if he would like to pounce upon me with his claw-like fingers. He was evidently between the desire to question me outright as to whether anything had passed between me and the Countess, and the dislike of showing openly to a stranger any suspicion of his wife. The latter feeling prevailed, and he regained control of himself. ...
— The Bright Face of Danger • Robert Neilson Stephens
... erecting in the camp a stage of planks, and performing thereon a rude mystery-play. The play thus improvised by a handful of troopers before this motley invading army: before the feudal cavalry of Burgundy, strange steel monsters, half bird, half reptile, with steel beaked and winged helmets and claw-like steel shoes, and jointed steel corselet and rustling steel mail coat; before the infantry of Gascony, rapid and rapacious with their tattered doublets and rag-bound feet; before the over-fed, ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... had intended stopping here for the night; but the cabildo was already filled with a motley crowd of arrieros and others on their way to San Miguel. A tall mestizo, covered with ulcers, sat in the doorway, and two or three culprits extended their claw-like hands towards us through the bars of their cage and invoked alms in the name of the Virgin and all things sacred. We therefore contented ourselves with a lunch under the corridor of a neighboring house, and, notwithstanding it was late in the afternoon, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... to bed, to awake in the morning filled with a desire to reach the mine, to claw at its vitals with the sharp-edged drills, to swing the heavy sledge until his shoulders and back ached, to send the roaring charges of dynamite digging deeper and deeper into that thinning vein. And Harry was beside him ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... second stork had reached the ground. It first scraped its bill with its claw, stroked down its feathers, and then advanced towards the first stork. The two newly made storks lost no time in drawing near, and to their ...
— The Green Fairy Book • Various
... and let ding 2 joosy red tomatoes at him, the ferst whized by his head and he looked around jest in time to get 2th rite in the eye. well it squashed all over his face and he began to sware and to lam round with his cane and claw the tomatoe out of his eyes. then he come rite back to our house and i squat down behine the tomatoe plants. i was in a corner and coodent get out and he made for me with his old cain. i hollered for mother and she come out and stoped him after he had given me 2 bats and nocked ...
— Brite and Fair • Henry A. Shute
... had stolen the heavenly soma, or drink of the gods, and cellared it in some mythical rock or cloud. When the thirsty deities were pining for their much-prized liquor, the falcon undertook to restore it to them, although he succeeded at the cost of a claw and a plume, of which he was deprived by the graze of an arrow shot by one of the demons. Both fell to the earth and took root; the claw becoming a species of thorn, which Dr. Kuhn identifies as the "Mimosa ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... Jacob's son, The favored one of twelve, arose. No warrior paint his tawny skin Bedecked, nor eagle plume, nor claw Of beast adorned his royal head— Base custom that of vulgar herd. He wore a girt of wampum, nor Need had he of other raiment; For form erect, and sinewy frame And kindling eye, bespoke ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... presence of the diamonds in the house of Mr. Shipman and Mr. Knopf? Firstly," he said, putting up an ugly claw-like finger, "Mr. Shipman, then Mr. Knopf, then, presumably, the ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... I, rushing forward and grasping the astonished parson by the hand, which I shook with tremendous violence, "I come on a mission of Charity and Love! I come as a messenger of Benevolence! I come as a dove of Peace with the olive branch in my claw! Porkley, greatest philanthropist of the age, come down, for ...
— My Life: or the Adventures of Geo. Thompson - Being the Auto-Biography of an Author. Written by Himself. • George Thompson
... loom. 6. Ears of Indian corn and strings of dried apples and peaches hung in gay festoons along the walls. 7. These were mingled with the gaud of red peppers. 8. A door left ajar gave him a peep into the best parlor. 9. In this parlor claw-footed chairs and dark mahogany tables shone like mirrors. 10. Andirons, with their accompanying shovel and tongs, glistened from their covert of asparagus tops. [Footnote: Asparagus tops were commonly ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... then, tell of the other sinners; knowst thou any one under the pitch who is Italian?" And he, "I parted short while since from one who was a neighbor to it; would that with him I still were covered so that I might not fear claw or hook." And Libicocco said, "We have borne too much," and seized his arm with his grapple so that, tearing, he carried off a sinew of it. Draghignazzo, also, he wished to give him a clutch down at his legs, whereat their decurion turned round ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... surface—which is the one adjoining the arms and fastened to the table—be divided into five parts. Of these let two parts be given to the member which the Greeks call the [Greek: chelonion], its breadth being one and one sixth, its thickness one quarter, and its length eleven holes and one half; the claw projects half a hole and the "winging" three sixteenths of a hole. What is at the axis which is termed the... face... the crosspieces ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius
... Parnell translated a white bishop quietly and his grey claw went up again to his forehead whereat it rested. An instant after, under its screen, his eyes looked quickly, ghostbright, at his foe and fell once ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... face, his lean, long neck thrust out from the fur of his upturned collar, he resembled a giant bird of prey. The skinny hand thrust through the crook of Commines' arm, and still grasping the crumpled despatch, was the claw of a vulture. Above him, head and shoulders, towered Commines, square-set, burly, muscular, and as full of life and vigour as his master was sapless. Just midway to the threescore years and ten, his bodily powers were at their highest, and in the ten years he had served Louis his mind had ripened ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... to death and doubled up with the rheumatics, would sing out, "Joyful! Joyful!" and 'at it were better to go up to heaven in a coal-basket than down to hell i' a coach an' six. And he would put his poor old claw on my shoulder, sayin', "Doesn't tha feel it, tha great lump? Doesn't tha feel it?" An' sometimes I thought I did, and then again I thought I didn't, ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... been humming with the orchestra, holding a lobster claw in one hand and wielding the little two-pronged fork with the other. She dropped claw, fork, and popular air to stare open-mouthed at Gabe. Then a slow, uncertain smile crept about her lips, although her ...
— Buttered Side Down • Edna Ferber
... jays sent a message Unto the eagle's nest:— Now yield thou up thine eyrie Unto the carrion-kite, Or come forth valiantly, and face The jays in deadly fight.— Forth looked in wrath the eagle; And carrion-kite and jay, Soon as they saw his beak and claw, ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... to oldness in things; for that cause mainly loving old Montague, and old cheese, and old wine; and eschewing young people, hot rolls, new books, and early potatoes and very fond of my old claw-footed chair, and old club-footed Deacon White, my neighbor, and that still nigher old neighbor, my betwisted old grape-vine, that of a summer evening leans in his elbow for cosy company at my window-sill, while I, within ...
— I and My Chimney • Herman Melville
... top were the plans and specifications of a First Order Light, to be made of iron, to be properly packed, and to have three coats of red lead before shipment—together with a cross-section of foundation to be placed on the reef known as "La Garra de Lobo"—The Claw of the Wolf—outside the harbor of San Juan—all at the risk of his Supreme Excellency, Senor Tomas Correntes Garlicho, of the Republic of Moccador, South America—the price of the ironwork to hold good for ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... her calico dress sleeves, patched and darned, but absolutely clean, rolled back, uncovering a pair of plump, strong arms, a saucer of tacks before her, and a tack hammer with a claw head in her hand. She was taking up the carpet. Grace Van Horne, Captain Eben Hammond's ward, who had called to see if there was anything she might do to help, was removing towels, tablecloths, and the like from the drawers in a tall "high-boy," folding them and placing them in an old and battered ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... was beautiful, and I suppose you know what you mean by the word. How then is a beautiful person to be degraded by anything the likes of you, or your fellow-dog, do to her? The thing's absurd. You can't claw her soul or blacken the edges of that. You can't sell that into prostitution or worse. That is her own, and it's that which makes her beautiful,—in spite of the precious pair of you, bickering and mauling each other to possess ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... around, and shouted down the track to his crew. "Hey, boys! Spread out along the right of way and see if you can't find a claw-bar. The devils that do these tricks always throw ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... seas yawn to engulf him: her rocks rise to crush: And the lion and leopard, allied, lurk to rush On their startled invader. In lone Malabar, Where the infinite forest spreads breathless and far, 'Mid the cruel of eye and the stealthy of claw (Striped and spotted destroyers!) he sees, pale with awe, On the menacing edge of a fiery sky, Grim Doorga, blue-limb'd and red-handed, go by, And the first thing he worships is Terror. Anon, Still impell'd by necessity hungrily on, He conquers the realms of his own self-reliance, And the ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... the successful people you can afford to indulge—in moderation—in practicing the good old moralities. Any dirty work you may need done you can hire done and pretend not to know about it. But while you're climbing, no Golden Rule and no turning of the cheek. Tooth and claw then—not sheathed but naked—not by proxy ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... the Ladies Endor, Eldritch, and Cowry, shot up again, hooting across the dormant chief city Old England's fell word of the scarlet shimmer above the nether pit-flames, Rome. An ancient horror in the blood of the population, conceiving the word to signify, beak, fang, and claw, the fiendish ancient enemy of the roasting day of yore, heard and echoed. Sleepless at the work of the sapper, in preparation for the tiger's leap, Rome is keen to spy the foothold of English stability, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... his knife upon a stone, that it might be sharp and do the murder easily, the owl, who, with his leg tied to a tree, was looking on with a very curious and knowing air, turning his head first one way and then another, now scratching it with his untied claw and now shaking it as the beams of the sun came into his eyes, asked him what he was doing. The young hunter, who, being a good and brave warrior, scorned to tell a lie(1) even to an owl, answered that he was making ready to cut ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... although during our stay in Odo, so many barges and shallops had touched there, nothing similar to Media's had been seen. But inquiring whence his sea- equipage came, we were thereupon taught to reverence the same as antiquities and heir-looms; claw-keeled, dragon-prowed crafts of a bygone generation; at present, superseded in general use by the more swan-like canoes, significant of the advanced stage of marine architecture in Mardi. No sooner was this known, than what had seemed almost hideous in my eyes, became merely grotesque. ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... camel's back. It would not be so bad if riches only had wings with which to fly away; but they have claws with which they give a parting clutch that sometimes clips a man's reason, or crushes his heart. It is the claw of riches we ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... doubtful if there is any portion of the earth upon which there are so many deadly struggles as upon the earth around the trunk of a tree. Upon this small arena there are battles fierce and wild; here nature is "red in tooth and claw." When a tree is small and tender, countless insects come to feed upon it. Birds come to it to devour these insects. Around the tree are daily almost merciless fights for existence. These death-struggles occur not only in the ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... of that power, is in action. This unrest I have found in your compositions, even as you must have found it too often in mine without better cause. With this unrest I was, however, better pleased than if comfortable self-contentment had been their prominent feature. I compare it to the claw by which I recognize the lion; but now I call out to you, Show us the complete lion: in other words, write or ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... was Claw-fingered Kitty and Windy Ike living the life of shame, When unto them in the Long, Long Night came the man-who-had-no-name; Bearing his prize of a black fox pelt, out ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... on horseback and in automobiles; and through an open window we caught a glimpse of a splendid-looking general, sitting booted and sword-belted at a table in the Prince de Caraman-Chimay's library, with hunting trophies—skin and horn and claw—looking down at him from the high-paneled oak wainscotings, and spick-and-span aides waiting to take his orders and ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... contained scarabs (of which I am no connoisseur); the second some two dozen intaglios, and of these, by the light of my bull's-eye lantern, I examined five or six before sweeping the lot into my bag—Europa and the Bull, Ganymede in the eagle's claw, Agave carrying the head of Pentheus, Icarus with relaxed wing dropping headlong to a sea represented by one wavy line; each and all priceless. In the third drawer lay an unset emerald, worth a king's ransom, ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... This claw of the beast was rapped, this hair of the devil was pulled by Nathan with extreme cleverness. The marquise began to ask herself seriously if, up to the present time, she had not been the dupe of her head, and whether her education ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... two gilt lustres with prisms, then two hand-screens of woolwork, and in the middle an ormolu clock—"Iphigenia in Aulis"—under a glass shade. In the recess at one side of the fireplace was a tall bookcase with closed doors, but a claw-footed sofa stood out from the wall at an angle that prevented any access to the books. "I can't read Stuffed Animal books," Helena had long ago confided to Lloyd Pryor. "The British Classics, if you please! and Baxter's Saint's Rest, and The ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... at least east and west stand face to face across Nantucket harbor, the cactus holding the sandspit to the north, the heather on the main island to the south. In April the prickly pear is as ugly as sin to the eye with its lobster-claw growth, uglier still to the hand with its steel-pointed thorns, but later it will put forth wonderful yellow, wild-rose like blooms in rich profusion, making up for all its dourness. Professor Asa Gray, the distinguished botanist ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... hundred, and looked a thousand—and he stared at the old, old, wrinkled, yellow face, the unhuman face, in which the beady black eyes burned with wicked fire; at the nearly bald head, thinly covered with a floating wisp or so of wool-like white hair; at the claw-like, shriveled, yellow hands, the stringy neck, the whole sexless meager wreck of what had been a woman. It was a stare made up of wonder, and instinctive dislike, and human pity, and young disgust. She raised ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... youngsters were aware, and which added to the fearfully mysterious aspect of those members. Exactly what they covered, the children never knew, but they saw that one hideous glove enclosed something like a gigantic, withered bird's claw, while within the other there musts have been a repulsive and horrid knob, without proper form, and lacking any remotest attempt at ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... them for a long disbelieving moment. For they were not the hands he had known. They were not the hands of Blair Gaddon. They were not the hands of any man. They were long and tapered and claw-like. There was dark fuzzy fur around ...
— The Monster • S. M. Tenneshaw
... thin, and haggard, and old. Her eyes hurt him. She was sitting up, in a big chair, wearing a bizarre Chinese coat, all orange and black and gold. She looked any age, an exotic little creature. The hand she offered was thin as a bird's claw. ...
— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke
... midship-engine-lever sliding in and out, the low growl of the lift-shunts, and, louder than the yelling winds without, the scream of the bow-rudder gouging into any lull that promised hold for an instant. At last we began to claw up on a cant, bow-rudder and port-propeller together; only the nicest balancing of tanks saved us from spinning like the ...
— With The Night Mail - A Story of 2000 A.D. (Together with extracts from the - comtemporary magazine in which it appeared) • Rudyard Kipling
... Suddenly his eye fell on a package lying on an empty box, and he sprang towards it, tearing it open with claw-like fingers. ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... nude and tender Poetry with her flaming torch. Both raised a dreadful shriek: Policy commanded silence, and Quackery hastened to bind up the wound of Morality, whilst Medicine cut a shred from her robe in payment. Death stretched out his claw from under the mantle of thievish Medicine to seize Morality, but Policy gave him such a blow that he yelled aloud, and grinned most hideously. Poetry was allowed to hop about, because she was naked, and had nothing to be despoiled of. At ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... Spirit and the lesser deities above mentioned, every Indian has his own Manitou, Okki, or guardian power; this divinity's presence is represented by some portable object, often of the most insignificant nature, such as the head, beak, or claw of a bird, the hoof of a deer or cow. No youth can be received among the brotherhood of warriors till he has placed himself, in due form, under the care of this familiar. The ceremony is deemed of great importance: several days of strict fasting are always observed in preparation for the important ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... wolf; but it is scarce. I do think, however, that the young ladies should not venture out, unless with some rifles in company, for fear of another mischance. We have plenty of lynxes here; but I doubt if they would attack even a child, although they fight when assailed, and bite and claw severely." ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat
... manner was. Now the bear had an inkling of the man, and got somewhat slow to move off. Biorn waxed very sleepy where he lay, and cannot wake up, and just at this time the beast betakes himself from his lair; now he sees where the man lies, and, hooking at him with his claw, he tears from him the shield and throws it down over the rocks. Biorn started up suddenly awake, takes to his legs and runs home, and it was a near thing that the beast gat him not. This his fellows knew, for they had spies about Biorn's ways; in the morning they found the shield, and ...
— The Story of Grettir The Strong • Translated by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris
... as her eye fell on familiar objects; there was the claw-footed mahogany centre-table with antique carvings, her straight-backed old rocker, and "father's" dear arm-chair, both newly cushioned, and otherwise brightened up. The sofa, too, of ancient pattern, that had stood in her parlour at Hawthorn for forty years, looked like an old friend in a new ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... always made both Flossie and Freddie laugh. There was running water in the kitchen, and Snoop loved to sit on the edge of the sink and play with the drops as they fell from the bottom of the faucet. He would watch until a drop was just falling, then reach out with his paw and give it a claw just as if he ...
— The Bobbsey Twins - Or, Merry Days Indoors and Out • Laura Lee Hope
... to cry again. And suddenly Lucy was really sorry. She had done this, she had degraded her happy brother to a mere milksop, just because he had happened to plant her out, and leave her planted. Remorse suddenly gripped her with tooth and claw. ...
— Oswald Bastable and Others • Edith Nesbit
... off-world species that would live a minute. Plants and animals on Pyrrus are tough. They fight the world and they fight each other. Hundreds of thousands of years of genetic weeding-out have produced things that would give even an electronic brain nightmares. Armor-plated, poisonous, claw-tipped and fanged-mouthed. That describes everything that walks, flaps or just sits and grows. Ever see a plant with teeth—that bite? I don't think you want to. You'd have to be on Pyrrus and that means you would be dead ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... neon letters spelled TO PASSENGER ENTRANCE ONLY. Bart stumbled forward. The Lhari by the gate thrust out a disinterested claw. Bart held up what Briscoe had shoved into his hand, only now seeing that it was a thin wallet, a set of identity papers and a strip of ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... tiny old lady sat in a wheel chair in the center of the room. Her skin was almost as yellow as the paint on the house and considerably more wrinkled. She had bright black eyes that reminded Rosemary of a bird and little, eager claw-like hands that were strangely bird-like, too. She beamed at the girls, plainly delighted to ...
— Rainbow Hill • Josephine Lawrence
... he woke suddenly next morning to find Miss Pett standing at the side of his bed. He glared at her for one instant of wild alarm and started up on his pillows. Miss Pett laid one of her claw-like hands on ...
— The Borough Treasurer • Joseph Smith Fletcher
... with flight? It seems equally probable that feathers arose as a mutation in place of scales in a reptile, and the feathers were then adapted for flight. Nothing shows the distinction better than convergent adaptation. Owls resemble birds of prey in bill and claw and mode of life, yet they are related to insect-eating swifts and goat-suckers and not to eagles and hawks. Swifts and swallows are similar in adaptive characters, but not in those which show relationship. It may be said that ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... relatively free to seek their own well-being. But an earmark of economic goods is scarcity, that is, there are at a given time and place fewer of them than are desired. Men must therefore compete with one another for goods and services. The lower animals compete for food with tooth and claw; among civilized men government tries to raise competition to an ethical plane by tending to suppress all but ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... chooses a spot beneath a limb; the limb forms a sort of rude hood, and prevents the rainwater from running down into it. It is a snug and pretty retreat, and a very safe one, I think. I doubt whether the driving snow ever reaches him, and no predatory owl could hook him out with its claw. Near town or in town the English sparrow would probably drive him out; but in the woods, I think, he is rarely molested, though in one instance I knew him to be dispossessed ...
— The Wit of a Duck and Other Papers • John Burroughs
... an artistic bow round Narcisse's neck, whereat Blanquette laughed heartily; and when Narcisse bolted beneath a flower-stall and growling dispossessed himself of the adornment, and set to with tooth and claw to rend it into fragments, she threw herself on a bench convulsed with mirth. As Paragot had spent fifty centimes on the chiffon I thought this hilarity exceedingly ill-natured; but when another and a larger dog came up to see what ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... his-self. Well, I just walks up the ladder, pokes my head through the slide and hails him; but instead of answering me in a proper manner, what does he do but jumps off the hatch and square off in this manner, as if he was agoin' to claw me in the face, and he sings out—'Are you a goose or a gobbler, d——n you?' I didn't want to pick a fuss before the rest of the watch, or by the holy Paul I'd a taught him the difference between his officer and a barn-yard fowl in a series of ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... Piccadilly and Knightsbridge was bad enough, but, by the time Hammersmith Broadway, its trams and tram-lines and its butchers' and bakers' and milk carts, was reached and passed, it was as if one had been trying to claw off a lee shore in a gale, and driver and passengers alike felt exceeding limp and sticky. The Londoner who drives an automobile thinks nothing of it, and covers the intervening miles with a cool clear-headedness that is marvellous. We were new to automobiling in England, but ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... began the finest fight of her experience. Regarding her mate's good looks she had more than satisfied herself; here was her opportunity to judge of his prowess, in a world wherein all questions are submitted to the arbitrament of tooth and claw in physical combat. And keenly the handsome dingo judged; watchfully she weighed the varying chances of the fray; not a single movement in all the dazzling swiftness of that fight but received her studious and calculating attention, her expert appraisement of its precise value. As the fight progressed ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... with your hand. This was differently shaped; fatter; and the middle finger was stunted, and shorter than the rest, looking as if it had once been broken, and the nail was crooked like a claw. I called out 'Who's there?' and the light and the hand were withdrawn, and I saw and heard no more ...
— J.S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 5 • J.S. Le Fanu
... The brown claw of the old hunter was never far from the grip of his gun when he lay before a campfire. Jack saw the hand clamp upon the weapon even before ...
— On a Torn-Away World • Roy Rockwood
... barns to catch Bruin napping or lolling in the old hay. I entertain a vendetta toward the ursine family. I had a duello, pistol against claw, with one of them in the mountains of Oregon, and have nothing to show to point the moral and adorn the tale. My antagonist of that hand-to-hand fight received two shots, and then dodged into cover and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... of the snow and spume. They ranged high above her taffrail curling horribly, but one did not want to look at them. The one man on deck had a line about him, and he looked ahead, watching her screwing round with hove-up bows as she climbed the seas. If he'd let her fall off or claw up, the next one would have made an end of her. He was knee deep half the time in icy brine, and his hands had split and opened with the frost, but the sweat dripped from him as he clung to the jarring wheel. One of ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... What a mean, pokey, ugly little dirty hovel it was! The thatch was getting scraggy over the gables and sagging at the back. In the front it was sodden. A rainy brown streak reached down to the little window looking like the claw of a great bird upon the walls. He had been letting everything go to the bad. That might not signify in the ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly
... of the dead. Buried with the person we found a bundle of "devil's claws" (Martynia). These are used by the Mexicans of to-day for mending pottery. They drill holes through the fragments to be joined and pass into them one of these claws, just as we would a rivet. The claw is elastic and strong, and answers the purpose very well. My Mexicans understood at once to what ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... was now but a bundle of fragments possessed me without ceasing. I had tried this conviction on 'The Rhymers,' thereby plunging into greater silence an already too silent evening. 'Johnson,' I was accustomed to say, 'you are the only man I know whose silence has beak & claw.' I had lectured on it to some London Irish society, and I was to lecture upon it later on in Dublin, but I never found but one interested man, an official of the Primrose League, who was also an active member of the Fenian Brotherhood. 'I am ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... there is alone, that doth deform thee; In the midst of thee, O field, so fair and verdant! A clump of bushes stands—a clump of hazels, Upon their very top there sits an eagle, And upon the bushes' top—upon the hazels, Compress'd within his claw he holds a raven, And its hot blood he sprinkles on the dry ground; And beneath the bushes' clump—beneath the hazels, Lies void of life the good and gallant stripling; All wounded, pierc'd and mangled is his body. As the little tiny swallow or the chaffinch, Round their warm and cosey ...
— The Talisman • George Borrow
... that she was standing obliquely towards the coast, on the starboard tack, under her topsails and topgallant-sails. This was confirmed by Ayrton. But by continuing in this direction she must soon disappear behind Claw Cape, as the wind was from the south-west, and to watch her it would be then necessary to ascend the heights of Washington Bay, near Port Balloon—a provoking circumstance, for it was already five o'clock in the evening, and the twilight ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... was a long and tiresome one, considering the distance. There were no hairbreadth escapes; I was not tackled by bears, treed by wolves, or nearly killed by a hand-to-claw "racket" with a panther; and there were no Indians to come sneak-hunting around after hair. Animal life was abundant, exuberant, even. But the bright-eyed woodfolk seemed tame, nay, almost friendly, and quite intent on minding their own business. It was a "pigeon ...
— Woodcraft • George W. Sears
... was rewarded by the discovery of tracks, animal tracks sure enough, without any ribbon, so to speak, printed between them. There they were upon the hard, bare earth, two lines of claw marks, continuing to a point where they disappeared again at the edge of a close cropped field. Evidently his mysterious predecessor had known just where he wished to go and had forsaken the stream bed when it no longer went in his direction. These were no aimless tracks, they were the ...
— Tom Slade on Mystery Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... were there; but this did not satisfy the old man. "You must know, not think," he said. "There should be no doubt about the matter, for I must tell you that if he touches my foot I'll kill him. A cat would travel ten miles and swim a river—and a cat hates water—to claw a gouty foot. Chyd, just put that book ...
— The Jucklins - A Novel • Opie Read
... moderation. Perhaps it is because, in the old days, his calling was a hard one and only those of a singular recklessness were willing to engage in it. The Snow's cook was no exception. He was a big, brawny, black Yankee with a claw foot look in his eyes. Profanity whizzed through the open door like buckshot from a musket. He had been engaged for the voyage and would not give up ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... Theodora gasped, as the little creature shook himself with a vehemence which fairly hoisted him off his hind legs, then flew at the nearest claw of the tiger skin ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... from our place," hissed the cat, "I will claw her eyes out if I get the chance. Why, we've been fairly starving for want of that beetle. She stole it from us just after she had been an invited guest! What do you think of that for honour, Sir Rat? Were your mistress's ancestors followers of ...
— A Chinese Wonder Book • Norman Hinsdale Pitman |
