"Duckling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to their utmost speed, we at length nearly overtook the ostriches; and then I saw a number of little brown duckling-looking birds following at the heels of the female ostrich. Greatly to my surprise, the male ostrich at this moment stopped short, and then wheeling round, darted off on one side. As we were anxious to obtain the young as well as the mother, ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... be no peace for Ireland either. The factions of the Irish party are yearly becoming more and more numerous. In all except hatred to England they are bitterly opposed. All very well to set up Ulster as being the ugly duckling, as being the one dissentient particle of a united Ireland. If every Protestant left the country Ireland would still be divided, and hopelessly divided. Personal reviling, riot, and blackguardism are already ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... sister. I think you cannot but love me a little when you know how entirely I am devoted to you. I can bear to have you near me now and think of you only as the hen thinks of her duckling. For a moment you are out of the pond, and I have gathered you under ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... did Pohjola's old Mistress Answer in the words which follow: "I will give you first the duckling, And the blue-winged duck will give you, When the pike, so huge and scaly, He the fish so plump and floundering. You shall bring from Tuoni's river, And from Manala's abysses; But without a net to lift it, Using not a hand to grasp it. 160 Hundreds have gone forth to seek ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... return to M. Ribot. He writes (p. 14):- "The duckling hatched by the hen makes straight for water." In what conceivable way can we account for this, except on the supposition that the duckling knows perfectly well what it can, and what it cannot do with ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... heroine, demigod, seraph, angel; innocent &c. 946; saint &c. (piety) 987; benefactor &c. 912; philanthropist &c. 910; Aristides[obs3]; noble liver|!, pattern. brick*, trump*, gem, jewel, good fellow, prince, diamond in the rough, rough diamond, ugly duckling|!. salt of the earth; one in ten thousand; one in a million; a gentleman and a scholar; pillar of society, pillar of the community, a man among ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... have led before he came here! Yes, I'm sure New York will stimulate him. A dose of New York is a very good tonic. It regulates one's mental liver. Don't look so worried, Armand—you remind me of those hens who hatch ducklings. I should think a duckling of John Flint's size could be trusted to swim by himself, at his ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... a height of fame he has since risen as a journalist, I confess that I look back upon the days when he thus approached me as a neophyte with some amusement. No doubt I was already, in his eyes, one of the old fogeys of the Press, and it must be admitted that there was something of the ugly duckling about his first appearance in my comparatively tame ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... proceedings, and Mr. Marten produced his account-book, and proved that young Ferret owed him for the following goods sold and delivered, viz. one young rabbit; item, one wood-pigeon; item, one brace of partridges; item, one cock-pheasant; item, one duckling; item, ...
— The Comical Creatures from Wurtemberg - Second Edition • Unknown
... have understood the feeling of a narrow-minded and conventional hen who has brought a strange, intrepid duckling into the world; but her situation was still more wonderful, for she could only compare her sensations to those of some quiet brown Dorking who has brooded an ordinary egg and hatched a bird of paradise. Such an idea had crossed ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... and a curious language in the odd pidgin English that enabled the door boy to announce that "the number one topside foreign devil joss man have makee come," when the English Bishop called, and the table boy to announce a dish of duckling as "one piecee duck pups," or of chicken as "one piecee looster." The social scale among the few foreign residents was very precisely defined, and the social life of the foreign colony highly conventionalized, so that the ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg
... years cherished a dream that her ugly duckling would develop into a swan and fly away with a fabulously wealthy prince. Later she dwindled to a prayer that she might capture a man who ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... poultry-yard in spring, when the first brood of duckling's goes toddling to the waterside, no doubt all the younger or feebler broods, just hatched out of similar eggs, think these innovators dreadfully mistaken. "You are out of place," they feebly pipe. "See how happy we are in our safe nests. Perhaps, by and ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... needn't be polite. I'm one, too. Not a very big one or very tragic. A lame duckling, ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... presenting the finger and then withdrawing it, till at last she leaped a considerable height above the water, and caught her by the said finger, which made it bleed profusely: by this leap she threw herself completely out of the water into the court. At one time a young duckling got into the well, to solace himself in his favourite element, when she immediately seized him by the leg, and took him under water; but the timely interference of Mr Dormer prevented any further mischief than making a cripple of the young duck. At another time a full-grown ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... Chameleon. (More genially) Well then, permit me to draw your attention to item number three. There is plenty of her visible to the naked eye. Observe the mass of oxygenated vegetable matter on her skull. What ho, she bumps! The ugly duckling of the party, longcasted and ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... with each other in adoring the ugly duckling, and in happy Irish fashion regarded her shortcomings as a joke rather than a misfortune. "Seen that youngster of mine?" the Major would cry genially to his friends. "She's worth a visit, I tell you! Ugliest ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... both been trying at intervals for a certain marauding pike reported to them as a ferocious duck destroyer by a gentleman farmer who came down to gossip. He indicated the field and a gravel pit as a guide to the place where his cowman had seen a duckling seized by a pike, and the man embellished his account by swearing that the fish had ploughed his way down the river half out of water, with the ball of feathers bewhiskering his jaws. Manford, it seems, had revenged the raided ducks. A large pike lay at the ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... there appeared to Commander Raffleton the vision of "Cousin Christopher" as a plump, rubicund angel in a panama hat and a pepper-and-salt tweed suit holding out a lifebelt. Cousin Christopher would take to Malvina as some motherly hen to an orphaned duckling. A fairy discovered asleep beside one of the ancient menhirs of Brittany. His only fear would be that you might want to take her away before he had written a paper about her. He would be down from Oxford ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... you, little pigeons. It's small and red, and it's got a bumpy head with hair on it like the fluff of a duckling. It has blue eyes, and ten fingers to its fore paws, and ten toes to ...
— Old Peter's Russian Tales • Arthur Ransome
... deformity which subjected his sensibilities to severe trials and which had the effect of rendering him morose and sour. It was his lament in later life that while his brothers had been sent to college, he was the ugly duckling of the family and came in for his father's neglect and a shrewish step-mother's waspishness. At about fourteen years of age he relieved himself of these home troubles and ran away to sea. During the nine years that he ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... peculiar call. Instantly the young shot out of the cavity that held them, as if the tree had taken an emetic, and came softly down to the water beside their mother. Another observer assures me that he once found a newly hatched duckling hung by the neck in the fork of a bush under a tree in which a brood of Wood ducks ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... persistent disregard of him. She watched the set boyish mouth, the pucker of his forehead—her baby. Terry had always had that pucker for perplexity or disappointment. Why, he had had it when the first down was on his baby head, as soft as a duckling's. ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... and Gillian drove home together, the former laughed quietly. There was an element of pride and triumph in the laughter. Probably the hen who has reared a duckling and sees it sail off into the water experiences, alongside her natural apprehension and astonishment, a somewhat similar pride in the startling proclivities evinced by ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... that a lame duckling might grow up into a wonderful swan, and munched his apple ruminatively. Neither happened to think of a certain incident, much discussed, in which that edible figured prominently. And he did not ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... about five minutes to row out there," Jerry said, "and then we'll have seen it at last. It couldn't be a better time. Why, a newly hatched duckling could swim out ...
— Us and the Bottleman • Edith Ballinger Price
... set his heart upon Humphry's becoming an eminent burgeon, and even altered his will when his boy yielded to the temptation of a laboratory for research. Men also know something of the trouble of the hen who has a chance duckling in her brood, and sees that contumacious chicken run into the water deaf to all the warnings of ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... Parents to themselves: for what Are Tutors, Guardians, and so forth, compared With Nature's genial Genitors? so that A child of Chancery, that Star-Chamber ward, (I'll take the likeness I can first come at,) Is like—a duckling by Dame Partlett reared, And frights—especially if 'tis a daughter, Th' old Hen—by running ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... about a duckling, but let's hope Peter can be mentioned in the same terms in the near future," said Sam, as he drove the fleet Byrd and me before him with the switch, in a scamper to Mammy ...
— Over Paradise Ridge - A Romance • Maria Thompson Daviess
... poor heart that never rejoices," "There are as good fish in the sea as ever were caught"—those are the observations that give stability and permanence to the intercourse of man. They are not clever; they contain no paradox; like the Ugly Duckling, they cannot emit sparks. But one's heart leaps up at hearing them, as at the sight of a rainbow. For, like the rainbow, they are an assurance that while the earth remaineth, seed-time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... between them; and these two wily old judges of human nature had agreed that Trennahan must become the guardian of their joint millions. Magdalena was her father's only misgiving. Would a man with an exhaustive experience of beautiful women be attracted into marriage by this ugly duckling? But Trennahan had passed his youth. Perhaps, like himself, he would have come to the conclusion that it was better to have a plain wife and leave beauty to one's mistresses. He had not the slightest objection to Trennahan ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... the world are but one story in reality—the story of an escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times—how to escape. The stories of Joseph, of Odysseus, of the prodigal son, of the Pilgrim's Progress, of the "Ugly Duckling," of Sintram, to name only a few out of a great number, they are all stories of escapes. It is the same with all love- stories. "The course of true love never can run smooth," says the old proverb, and love-stories are ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... duckling from Redhorse—daughter (they say) of old Calamity Jim—certainly his heiress, with no living relation but an absurd old aunt, who spoils me a thousand and fifty ways— absolutely destitute of everything but a million dollars and a hope in ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... enabled to enjoy the relaxation he loved better than anything else in the world—except gambling; she paid all his charges during his student life at Padua; and now, quite naturally, she would have shed her heart's blood rather than let this son of hers—ugly duckling as he was—miss what she deemed to be the crowning honour of the rectorship; but after all the sacrifices Chiara made, after all the misfortunes which attended Jerome's ill-directed ambition, there is a doubt as to whether he ever was Rector in the full sense of the term. Many times and in divers ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... to thank for giving us hospitality on two occasions, consists mainly of a bay. Viewed by the norma verticalis, it is shaped like an ugly duckling, with an oval (Wellsted says a circular) body of high ground disposed north-east to south-west; and with head and neck drooping westward so as to form a mighty pier or breakwater. The watery plain within is out of all proportion to the amount ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... make your mind quite easy; it is impossible that there should be another man foolish enough in all England to want to make love to such an 'ugly duckling' as ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... of their acquaintance her interest in Markham had not been unlike that of the motherly hen in the doings of the newly hatched duckling with which she differed as to the practical utility of duckponds. She had been intensely interested in his work and in his career which during the winter in Paris had been definitely shaped as a painter of successful portraits. She had liked the man from the first, liked him ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... to door of the ballroom her mother fluttered like a hen with a duckling. Even Celeste was disturbed, for she saw that Nora's conduct was not due to any light-hearted fun. There was something bitter and ironic cloaked by those smiles, that tinkle of laughter. In fact, Nora from Tuscany flirted outrageously. The Barone sulked and tore at his mustache. ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... one had ever fallen in love with her, 'I could not expect them to do so,' she remarked candidly. 'As a girl I was plain featured, and so shy and awkward that your Uncle Joe used to tell me that I was the only ugly duckling that would never turn ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... awake enraptured at the profundity of my thoughts. After years of unquestioning humility I enjoyed a prolonged debauch of intellectual pride, and I marvelled at the little boy of yesterday who had wept because he could not be an imbecile. It was the apotheosis of the ugly duckling, and I saw my swan's plumage reflected in the placid faces of the boys around me, as in the vacant waters of a pool. As yet I did not dream of a moulting season, still less that a day would come when ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... almost embryonic in its build. The helpless young maggot of the wasp, which is fed solely by the parent, may be compared to the human infant, while the lusty young grasshopper, which immediately on hatching takes to the grass or clover field with all the enthusiasm of a duckling to its native pond, may be likened to that young feathered mariner. The lowest animals, as a rule, are at birth most like the adult. So with the earliest known crustacea. The king crabs, and in all ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... from the Morbihan, and, on our right, passed the little rocky island of Teigneuse, with its lighthouse; and, on the left, those of Houat and Haedik (the duck and the duckling); the former famous as the retreat of St. Gildas, who leaped from here with one bound, a distance of ten miles, to the peninsula of Rhuys, where he built his monastery. From Auray to Belle Isle is in all forty-eight ...
— Brittany & Its Byways • Fanny Bury Palliser
... "The Ugly Duckling turned out a swan, you remember. I've always been fond of the boy because he's so genuine and original. Crude as a green apple now, but sound at the core, and only needs time to ripen. I'm sure he'll turn out a capital specimen of the ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... the drawing-room, and taken my bearings, as cousin would say, when the worst Vandal of the lot is marched up to me, and I—green little girl—thought I must be polite to him and every one else. When I think of it all, I see that my chaperon was like a distressed hen with a duckling that would go into the water. Without any effort of mine, that great Goth, Mr. Houghton, submitted himself to my inspection, and instead of being horrified, I have been laughing at him ever since. He struck me as an exceedingly harmless creature, with large capabilities for blundering. ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... poor little duckling did take that, and scampered off to its mother, crying out in such a pitiful voice, "Wheedle-wheedle-wheedle," that the heron forgot his ill-humour and burst out laughing, and felt quite sorry that he had given poor little Yellow-down such a cruel poke in its back with ...
— Featherland - How the Birds lived at Greenlawn • George Manville Fenn
... child-lover! What an eager, delightful audience are these little ones, grieving at the sorrows of the heroes, laughing at their happy successes, breathless with anxiety lest the cat catch the disobedient mouse, clapping hands when the Ugly Duckling is changed into the Swan,—all appreciation, all interest, all joy! We might count the rest of the world well lost, could we ever be surrounded by such blooming faces, such loving hearts, and such ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... nonplussed," he said more seriously, "and I am. I was never more so; but I see no occasion for anxiety. Since when has it been thought necessary to call priest or physician because of a young lady's growing charm? Confronted by an ugly duckling, we ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... to be new," said the duckling. "O, ho!" said the wise old owl, While the guinea-hen cluttered off chuckling To tell all the ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... left her. The dogs also refused to play when she went to them; for they had to watch the house and bark at strangers. Then they also told her to go and play with little Niebla down by the river. Then Alma ran out and caught a little duckling, a soft little thing that looked like a ball of ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... a brood of young ducks about, it would hold out a piece of bread in one hand and, when it had tempted a duckling within reach, seize it by the other, and kill it with a bite in the breast. There was such an uproar amongst the fowls on these occasions, that we soon knew what was the matter, and would rush out and ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... him. All along I've weakened him. I've fussed over him like a hen after her duckling when it takes to the water. I wouldn't let him swim for fear he'd get drowned. And so—he just flops about and looks disgusting. I've made him run away from temptation. That was because I couldn't keep on being disappointed in ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... in the —— Hussars, when his father died, leaving him a moderate fortune, which steadily decreased as years went by. It had approached attenuation by this time, and Mrs. Rolleston felt as distracted and perplexed as a duckling's hen foster-mother, at the vagaries of the happy-go-lucky, reckless Irish blood in Bertie, which did not flow in her ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... low hybrid dishes of the bevy of British-American hotels that surround the Place Vendome and march up the Rue de Castiglione or of such nondescripts as the Tavernes Royale and Anglaise—but Parisian. For instance, my good man, caneton a la bigarade, or duckling garnished with the oozy, saliva-provoking sauce of the peel of bitter oranges. There is a dish for you, a philter wherewith to woo the appetite! For example, my good fellow, sole Mornay (no, no, not the "sole Mornay" you know!), the sole Mornay ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... cause, the consideration, "This creature by the great scheme of nature belongs to me, and is cast upon my care." And, as the tie in the case of the stranger was not complete in the beginning, so neither can it be made so in the sequel. The little straggler is like the duckling hatched in the nest of a hen; there is danger every day, that as the nursling begins to be acquainted with its own qualities, it may plunge itself into another element, and swim away from ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... at her critically. "No," she said, slowly. "She is not exactly pretty now, but she's the ugly-duckling kind. She may turn out to be the most beautiful swan of them all. I like that the best of any of Andersen's fairy tales. Don't you? I used to look at myself in the glass and tell myself that it would be that way with me. That my straight hair and pug nose ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... Fairy Tales, though written in a past century, and for another generation, are just as popular to-day as they ever were, and it seems as if all children (and grown-up people who have kept their child-like hearts) could never tire of these delightful stories. We can all read, and re-read, the 'Ugly Duckling,' or the 'Eleven Wild Swans;' we can sympathise with the love of the faithful 'Tin Soldier;' and who can resist laughing at all the outrageous performances of 'Little Claus and Big Claus?' Truly, Andersen had the key to ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... he began to be conscious that now he was passing to a new sphere, where the girls are supreme and superior, and he began to feel for the first time that he was an awkward boy. The girl takes to society as naturally as a duckling does to the placid pond, but with a semblance of shy timidity; the boy plunges in with a great splash, and hides his shy awkwardness in ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the flocks of Phoebus ever began life as a more ungainly duckling than Ibsen did. The ingenuity of biographers has done its best to brighten up the dreary record of his childhood with anecdotes, yet the sum of them all is but a dismal story. The only talent which was supposed to lurk in the napkin was that for painting. ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... the rest, whom I helped to forward toward the north star. Men of one idea, like a hen with one chicken, and that a duckling; men of a thousand ideas, and unkempt heads, like those hens which are made to take charge of a hundred chickens, all in pursuit of one bug, a score of them lost in every morning's dew—and become frizzled and mangy in consequence; men of ideas ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... be inclined to define it as the age during which girls are asked—and cannot answer—varying forms of the question which so embarrassed the Ugly Duckling: "Can you ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... in his smooth, serious tones, "you're in on your own terms. I've got 'strictly business' pasted in my hat and stenciled on my make-up box. When I dream of nights I always see a five-room bungalow on the north shore of Long Island, with a Jap cooking clam broth and duckling in the kitchen, and me with the title deeds to the place in my pongee coat pocket, swinging in a hammock on the side porch, reading Stanley's 'Explorations into Africa.' And nobody else around. You never was interested in Africa, was ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... young potatoes, a cool salad, sliced cucumber, a tender duckling, and a tart—all there. They all came at the right time. Where they came from, didn't appear; but the oblong box was constantly going and coming, and making its arrival known to the man in the white waistcoat by bumping modestly against ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... their breakfast at their leisure and prepared to drive their ugly duckling into the battle line again and finish the work of ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... title—was now twenty-eight years of age and had developed into a woman of great beauty. She was noted for the peculiarly vivacious and radiant expression which was always on her face. She had a kind of vivid loveliness accompanied by grace, simplicity, and a form of exquisite proportions. The ugly duckling had become a swan, for now there was no trace of her former plainness to ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... sweet I thought I had never heard the like, 'Yes, you're pretty; I want a pretty girl to stay with me and go about selling my things. I love pretty girls; I never was pretty myself. Will you stay with me if I take you up to my room and take care of you? I'll be good to you, little duckling, everybody about here will tell you that; everybody but the children, they don't like me.' I moaned, but it was from happiness. It seemed too good to hear that cooing voice in my ear. I thought of my mother—a dream—and my arms went up as they ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... disgrace, sure of getting consolation and sugar-plums from the sad, lonely woman, though equally sure of being sent away as soon as their tears were dried, and their troubles forgotten. If the poor, abused Ugly Duckling of Hans Andersen's tale had strayed on a wintry day to her door, she would have taken it in, and nourished, and cherished it all through the cold, dark weather; but when the summer was come, and the duckling grown into a swan, spread its broad white wings against ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... his head in an automobile accident, and thus transforms him into that glorious kind of creature known as a "Greek god"—beautiful and innocent beyond belief or endurance. The Turmoil is really not much more veracious, with its ugly duckling, Bibbs Sheridan, who has ideas, loves beauty, and writes verse, but who after years of futile dreaming becomes a master of capital almost overnight. Even The Magnificent Ambersons, with its wealth of admirable satire, does not satirize its own conclusion but rounds out its narrative with ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... brought a great tipsy-cake for the children, and they were all sitting under a table, eating it. It was a pretty picture. I thought I saw in it myself and all my sisters and brothers as we were once. Just such little gypsies and duckling Romanys! And now! And then! What a comedy some lives are,—yea, such lives as mine! And now it is you who are behind the scenes; anon, I shall change with you. Va Pierre, vient Pierette. Then I surprised a little brown maiden imp of five summers ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... hawk's final charge that he had never perceived his victim had escaped him. The cunning of these birds must be seen to be believed. I have often watched a wary old hawk perched most impudently on the stock-yard rails, waiting until a rash chicken or duckling should, in spite of its mother's warning clucks of terror, insist on coming out from under her sheltering wings. If I took an umbrella, or a croquet mallet, or a walking stick, and went out, the bird would remain quite unmoved, even if I ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... had enjoyed but which did not rightfully belong to him. From this time his mother had him more carefully guarded than before, she herself even followed him about anxiously, like a hen who has hatched a duckling, and forbade him ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... on the Ugly Duckling of Hans Andersen about a bumptious boy whom all the nice boys hated. He finds out that he was really at last caressed by the Huxleys and Tyndalls as ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... castle. She may have rather encouraged him to imagine that once she was free from Jim she would listen once more to Skip. But there is no evidence on that point and he must have felt a certain awe of her. His pretty duckling had ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... know the story of the "Ugly Duckling," and how, after all, it became a beautiful white swan. I cannot say whether, in like manner, Bridget grew up to be graceful and pretty, but one thing I am certain of, and that is, that she never regretted following the owl's ...
— Our Frank - and other stories • Amy Walton
... good-bye to him in his own room which he had furnished with the mahogany odds and ends that had started her bridal housekeeping. She had smiled and had not seemed to mind very much his going—not half as much as a hen mother minds its duckling's first dash into water. And yet her eyes—There are some things it hurts and at the same time warms your heart to think of at the other end of ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... Donald and Edinburgh—seven horses—O, and the stallion—eight horses; five cattle; total, if my arithmetic be correct, thirteen head of beasts; I don't know how the pigs stand, or the ducks, or the chickens; but we get a good many eggs, and now and again a duckling or a chickling for the table; the pigs are more solemn, and appear only on birthdays ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... favorable; and when his friend took him to see the child, his heart yearned after her. He took her home to Dorothy, and she had grown up such as we have seen her, a wild, roguish, sweet, forgetful, but not disobedient child—very dear to both the Drakes, who called her their duckling. ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... I promenaded the path beside the waters of the Serpentine lake, I beheld a wheeled cavalcade of every conceivable age, sex, and appearance; senile gaffers and baby buntings; multitudinous women, some plump as a duckling, others thin as a paper-thread; aye, and even priests in sanctimonious black and milk-white cravats, rolling swiftly upon two wheels, and all agog to dash ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... sempiternally, on the anniversary day of his decease, every one of them all be furnished with a quintuple allowance, and that the great borachio replenished with the best liquor trudge apace along the tables, as well of the young duckling monkitoes, lay brothers, and lowermost degree of the abbey lubbards, as of the learned priests and reverend clerks,—the very meanest of the novices and mitiants unto the order being equally admitted to the benefit of those funerary and obsequial festivals ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... though," said Nyuta, looking at Volodya with disgust. "What a wretched, ugly . . . fie, ugly duckling!" ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... the sufferings of the ill-mated poet or painter or sculptor, despoiled of the sympathy he craves, and shackled even in the exercise of his art. And the picture is not out of drawing, for Daudet can see the wife's side of the case also; he can appreciate her bewilderment at the ugly duckling whom it is so difficult for her to keep in the nest. The women have made shipwreck of their lives too, and they are companions in misery, if not helpmeets in understanding. This is perhaps the saddest of all Daudet's books, the least relieved by humor, the most devoid of the gaiety ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... the reign of Elizabeth, was reserved for future issue in separately numbered volumes. The death of Macaulay in December, 1859, left Froude the most famous of living English historians, and the ugly duckling of the brood had become the glory of the family. The reception of his first six volumes was a curious one. The general public read, and admired. The few critics who were competent to form an instructed and impartial opinion perceived that, while there were ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... two elder brothers were such fine strapping fellows! so tall and stout! But as for the youngest one, Ivan, he was like a half-grown lad or a half-fledged duckling, terribly inferior to the others. Well, their old father died. At that very time there came tidings from the King, that his daughter, the Princess Helena the Fair, had ordered a shrine to be built for her with twelve columns, with twelve rows of beams. In that shrine she was sitting ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... some overshoes," she said, fluttering about like a distracted hen whose adopted duckling unexpectedly takes to water. "I also fixed up a medicine-case and a sewing basket. I knew you would never think of them. And, dear, I know how you hate heavy underwear, but pneumonia is so prevalent. You must promise me not to take cold if ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... the decks brown and not white, and yet I can assure you that they are absolutely staunch. She scarcely leaks a tear anywhere; and although she's beamy and heavy-bowed and deep, she isn't such a sluggard either, especially when it's blowing. In fact, dirty weather's our strong point with that ugly duckling of a cutter. She'd sail most of your dandy craft slick under water if it came on really bad. And we got it a week ago by the Dogger here, and last year just to s'uthard of the Bay, as foul as I've ever ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... my father, although this walk was the great event of the week, but attached myself firmly to the side of my Uncle James Addams, in the hope that I should be mistaken for his child, or at least that I should not remain so conspicuously unattached that troublesome questions might identify an Ugly Duckling with her imposing parent. My uncle, who had many children of his own, must have been mildly surprised at this unwonted attention, but he would look down kindly at me, and say, "So you are going to walk with me to-day?" "Yes, please, ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... be common 40 years ago; its presence being notified by our hens cackling, and ducks quacking, as they called together their broods, when they espied it soaring at a considerable height above. If a reckless chick, or duckling, neglected to take the warning, and seek shelter beneath the mother’s wings, there was for a moment a rushing sound, a general confusion in the poultry yard, a half-smothered scream, and the kite flew away with a victim in its claws. {42} I have ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... Cocktail Celery Olives Roast Squab Duckling, Currant Jelly Creamed Mashed Potatoes Peas Lettuce Pimento Dressing Mince Turnover Coffee Cheese and Crackers ...
— Mrs. Wilson's Cook Book - Numerous New Recipes Based on Present Economic Conditions • Mary A. Wilson
... form of diminutives; but these are not many. They are formed by adding the terminations kin, ling, ing, ock, el, and the like; as, "Lamb, lambkin; goose, gosling; duck, duckling; ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... red-gold hair and her viking-coloured eyes, and that touch of the Berserker in her spirit. It was very different with Holly, soft and quiet, shy and affectionate, with a playful imp in her somewhere. He watched this younger daughter of his through the duckling stage with extraordinary interest. Would she come out a swan? With her sallow oval face and her grey wistful eyes and those long dark lashes, she might, or she might not. Only this last year had he been able to guess. Yes, she would be a swan—rather ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... fled after the General, who, though he was obliged to wear whalebone braces in his shoes on account of youth and a waddling and undeveloped gait, scattered over the ground with the elusive clumsiness of a young duckling. Brother blushed, but ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... which happens so often—the production of an eagle in a brood of common barnyard fowls—a miracle, however, which never happens except when the barnyard fowls are of the human species. Benjamin himself, at first, was only an ugly duckling in no ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... so busy playing the ugly duckling,' cried Ursula, with mocking laughter. 'And I don't feel a bit like a humble and pathetic ugly duckling. I do feel like a swan among geese—I can't help it. They make one feel so. And I don't care what THEY think of me. ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... the half-defiant, half-terrified, and wholly curious gaze of a girl. Hardly more than a child she seemed, not over fourteen at the outside, and with a figure that was all flatness and unlovely angles. Certainly an exceedingly ugly duckling, yet there was promise of future swanship in the clean curves of her neck and in the firm poise of the small head. Moreover, her coloring was good, a clear brown through which a scarlet flush, born of the excitement of the moment, glowed intermittently, ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... story of his infant precocity generally circulated, and generally believed, the truth of which I am to refute upon his own authority. It is told[127], that, when a child of three years old, he chanced to tread upon a duckling, the eleventh of a brood, and killed it; upon which, it is said, he dictated to ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... prize Golden Seabright Bantams, hen. Second prize Silver Seabright Bantams, cock. Sixth prize Birchen, cock. First prize Birchen, hen. First prize Black Breasted Red Bantams, cock. Second Prize Black Breasted Red Bantams, hen. Fourth prize Golden Duckling, cock. First prize Golden Duckling, cockerel. Second prize Golden Duckling, pullet. Second prize Silver Duckling, cock. Second prize Silver Duckling, cockerel. First prize Silver Duckling, hen Silver Duckling, pullet. Second prize Red Pyle Game ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... a good woman and remain on the stage, that's what it comes to." In spite of the gravity of the scene, a smile trickled round Evelyn's lips, for she could not help seeing her father like a hen that has hatched out a duckling. He stood looking at her sadly. She had come back—but what new pond would she plunge into? "I am a very unsatisfactory person, I know that. I can't make people happy; but there it is, it can't be otherwise. If I don't ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... large duckling," said she; "none of the others look like that; can it really be a turkey chick? Now we shall soon find out. It must go into the water, even if I have ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... an interesting book, the sort that a boy would like, to cost about six or seven shillings, and have it sent to this address; you can put in my card and say I hope the boy will like it. Are they poor, did you say? No, not very, but this boy is the 'ugly duckling' of the family, and everybody snubs him, they say he is so dull and stupid, and I think a little kindness will help him to assert himself. Then go to the poulterer's, and have a turkey or goose sent ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII. No. 358, November 6, 1886. • Various
... and drawn down so as to make a triangle of a face which, left to itself, would have been square. Her teeth spoilt her; the gaps among them looked like the front row of the stalls during the first scene of a revue, or the last scene of a play by Shakspere. On the whole, she looked like the duckling of the story, serenely conscious of a secret swanhood. She showed unnatural energy even in repose, and lived as though she had a taxi ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... brandy, the carrots, parsley and the onions—the latter slightly browned in drippings—pepper and salt to taste and cook slowly under a covered lid for one hour. Cool off for about an hour, take off the grease, bone and skin the duckling and cut the meat into small pieces; arrange nicely with the vegetables in individual earthenware dishes, cover with the stock and put on ...
— The International Jewish Cook Book • Florence Kreisler Greenbaum
... duckling may be carved in the same manner as a fowl, the legs and wings being taken off first on either side. When the duck is full size, carve it like a goose; first cutting it in slices from the breast, beginning close to the wing and proceeding upward towards the breast bone, as is represented by ...
— The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887) - The Whole Comprising A Comprehensive Cyclopedia Of Information For - The Home • Mrs. F.L. Gillette
... experiences of the "block."[256] This explains how it is that the individual members of certain hostile species know one another from birth—the chicken, for instance, which, immediately it has left the egg, trembles before the hawk hovering above in the air; such is also the reason why a duckling plunges into water as soon as it comes to a pond, and the same instinct impels a bird to leave its nest and trust itself to the air when ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... rat are thus mustered, the ferret, polecat, stoat, weasel, cat, dog, and man. The ferret's powers of destruction are estimated very lightly; the polecats are very rare, prefer game when it can be had, and do little against the rat; the weasel also prefers a chicken or a duckling "to fighting with a rat for a meal." Hence the farmers destroy them, and they do little against the rats. Cats, as a rule, prefer hearth-rugs; and traps, unless quite new, and consequently sweet and free from the smell of rats, are useless. No! There is nothing in Nature ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... none of that flattery of childhood which is so often merely a backhanded way of indulging the vanity of parents. My Mother, indeed, would hardly have been human if she had not occasionally entertained herself with the delusion that her solitary duckling was a cygnet. This my Father did not encourage, remarking, with great affection, and chucking me under the chin, that I was 'a nice little ordinary boy'. My Mother, stung by this want of appreciation, would proceed so far as to declare that she believed that in future times ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... petty faults, and the child's mind became embittered. Her father was reserved and melancholy. Fredrika herself was restless and passionate, although of an affectionate nature. Among the other children she was the ugly duckling, who was misunderstood, and whose natural development was continually checked and frustrated. Her talents were early exhibited in a variety of directions. Her first verses, in French, to the morn, were written ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... Dotty's lamentations could be heard all over the house. It was Katie's odd one, she said, that was gone, the one with a black picture on his back that looked like a clover. Next morning there were nine; and on the tenth day there was but one solitary duckling left to pipe out his sorrows all alone. The anguish of the children was painful to be behold. Dotty's grief affected her somewhat like the jumping toothache. Who could have carried away those dear, dear ...
— Dotty Dimple at Her Grandmother's • Sophie May
... had strolled away and was standing in the gathering darkness a few yards distant, gazing at the boat. The clumsy looking hull, in which the boys had taken refuge, seemed trim and graceful now, and Roy was reminded of the fairy story of the ugly duckling, who was really a swan, but whose wondrous beauty was unappreciated until it found itself among its ...
— Tom Slade at Temple Camp • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... humiliated on our lonely ferry-boat as these leviathans of nautical architecture sweep past us with an imperious curve far out into the stream, and then move steadily and statelily down the middle of the river, like an "ugly duckling" of mammoth proportions. One never gets over the sensation of that sight, nor its impressions as a type of our century,—a vast floating hotel, carrying the population of a village and the luxurious appointments of a palace, gliding as smoothly ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... Monsieur Napoleon Bingle by dining together at Pierre's. This day he is born again—or, at least, prospectively born. Life for him really begins to-day—the sixth of March. It is my treat! I shall be the host on this memorable occasion. Pierre shall give to us the best duckling in his larder ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... at an earlier age. But it is a great mistake, if you intend to form a kennel for show purposes, to sell or part with your puppies too early. It is notorious with all breeds that puppies change very much as they grow. The best looking in the nest often go wrong later, and the ugly duckling turns out the best of the litter. This is especially true of Dachshunds, and it requires an expert to pick the best puppy of a litter at a month or two old, and even he may be at fault unless the puppy is exceptionally ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... 10. One duckling used to scramble upon the dog's head and sit down upon his eye; but the old dog never moved, though the pressure upon the eye must have hurt him. He seemed to think more of his little friends than ...
— Friends in Feathers and Fur, and Other Neighbors - For Young Folks • James Johonnot
... marked out. Why two ova, similarly exposed in the same pool, should become the one a fish, and the other a reptile, it cannot tell us. That from two different eggs placed under the same hen, should respectively come forth a duckling and a chicken, is a fact not to be accounted for on the hypothesis above developed. Here we are obliged to fall back upon the unexplained principle of hereditary transmission. The capacity possessed by an unorganized germ of unfolding into ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... understood their spirit, never looked on them as anything but strangers to her family. They have been to her stray robber wasps, to be driven from the hive; while to the others they have seemed cygnets among her duckling brood. It is very wonderful that the University alone has been able to resist the glamour of Ireland's past, and has failed to admire the persistency of her nationality. There has surely been enough in every century that has passed since the college was ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... never forget how Mr. Dodgson and I sat once under a dear old tree in the Botanical Gardens, and how he told me, for the first time, Hans Andersen's story of the "Ugly Duckling." I cannot explain the charm of Mr. Dodgson's way of telling stories; as he spoke, the characters seemed to be real flesh and blood. This particular story made a great impression upon me, and interested me greatly, as I was very sensitive about my ugly little self. I remember ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... with thanks profuse, The touch that gives your feasts their crowning savour, Whose absence must have marred the duckling mousse, Ruined the neige au Kirsch, and soured the flavour Of Madame MELBA'S peaches— I mean the pledge upon my card, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 24, 1914 • Various
... scared had he not been last summer, when he was still a little yellow-down duckling, every time it had sounded over the reed-stems: "Caesar is coming! Caesar is coming!" When he had seen the brown and white spotted dog with the teeth-filled jowls come wading through the reeds, he ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... kin, let, ling, ock, el, erel, or et: as, lamb, lambkin; ring, ringlet; cross, crosslet; duck, duckling; hill, hillock; run, runnel; cock, cockerel; pistol, pistolet; eagle, eaglet; circle, circlet. All these denote little things, and are ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... brown duck sometimes panted at her task, and sat with open bill, or with wings half raised from the eggs. Then, one night, she heard faint tappings and peepings beneath her. Sturdy young bills began chipping at the inside of the shells, speedily breaking them. Each duckling, as he chipped the shell just before the tip of his beak, would turn a little way around in his narrow quarters; till presently the shell would fall apart, neatly divided into halves; and the wet duckling, tumbling ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... The beast held a wild-duckling in its jaws, and the little body, with its stuck-out webbed feet, flapped and flopped dismally from side to side, as the animal cantered along with a somewhat shuffling, undulating gait. And then the polecat became transfixed. He had recognized the new-comer. He ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... when the curtain rises on our story at Potsdam, and shows us Wilhelmine, an unattractive maid of ten, the Cinderella of her family, for whom there seemed no better prospect than a soldier-husband, if indeed she were lucky enough to capture him. She was, in fact, the "ugly duckling" of a good-looking family, removed by a whole world from her beautiful eldest sister Charlotte, who counted among her many admirers no less exalted a wooer than Prince Frederick William, the King's nephew and heir ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... knowing why, to lean upon her for moral support. In the end she became an authority in her family. Mrs. Wollstonecraft was in time compelled to bestow upon her the affection which she had first withheld. It was the ugly duckling after all who proved to be the swan of the flock. Mr. Wollstonecraft learned to hold his eldest daughter in awe, and his wrath ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... well as I that it does make a difference with nearly everyone, so don't ruffle up like a dear, motherly hen, when your chickens get pecked by smarter birds. The ugly duckling turned out a swan, you know." and Amy smiled without bitterness, for she possessed a ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... questioned Abe, waving back a greeting as well as he could with the treasured cup in one of his hands and the saucer in the other; whereupon Sarah Jane, that ugly duckling, explained that the fellow, being a confirmed woman-hater, cooked all his own meals in the smokehouse, and insisted upon all his orders being left on a slate outside the tool-house door. Abe sniffed disdainfully, contemplating her homely countenance, over which this ...
— Old Lady Number 31 • Louise Forsslund
... an old hen clucking after her duckling in the water," he replied. "She has been fretting and fuming after you all the week. If it had been me out in Sark, she would have slept soundly and ate heartily; as it was you, she has neither slept nor ate. You are quite an old woman's pet, Martin. As for me, there is no ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... birds and animals which the chef presents so artistically in his celebrated plats du jour, and one need not take the journaux comiques too seriously, as once did a gouty milord, who insisted that his duckling Rouennais should, while alive, first be certificated as to the health of its bronches and poumons. All the same one likes to know that due regard is given to the proprieties and necessities of his bedroom, and to know that the kitchen is more or less ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... wheels." Linnet, who had a practical mind, preferred such as dealt with rolling-pins, flat-irons, and shirt-collars, because these were familiar objects, and their histories usually ended cheerfully—(she liked "The Ugly Duckling" because he was a duckling, but objected to much of the tale as being too sad). Annet declared for "The Little Mermaid," which is perhaps the saddest of all; and this was the one she chose to-day, though half-penitently, ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch |
