"Lizard" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... cluster, are to be detected the germs of the trigonocephalus contortrix, than which, when fully developed, no more deadly reptile wriggles upon earth. See this minute agglomeration of yellowish specks on the stalk of the cress. These are the eggs of the lacerta horrida, a lizard that within the large warts with which its epidermis is studded secretes a poison of the most virulent character. Others, too, I discern, but they are too disagreeable to dwell upon—not to speak of one having them dwell inside one, instead—ha! ha! Now, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 33, November 12, 1870 • Various
... company asked him the meaning of the expression in Juvenal, unius lacert. JOHNSON. 'I think it clear enough; as much ground as one may have a chance to find a lizard upon.' ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... pets, very early exhibited a decided repugnance to mine, which I found it impossible to remove. She thought they were vicious. I maintained the contrary; insisted that they were a species of enlarged lizard; and that to take any thing by the tail was always a severe trial of temper. 'Not to inquire,' said I, 'as to the affinity in the words cauda and chordis, (the heart and tail of all things,) I beg to ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... a cruel enemy. But here I am at home; I cast off my furs, I stretch out my arms, I bloom. I believe I shall quite cease to think for a while—I shall forget all storms and troubles, and bask on the sand like a lizard. ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... submarine supernatural being. In some instances it is not water which the heroine has to dread, but light. The true bride must be conveyed to the bridegroom's palace in a darkened vehicle. Her supplanter draws aside a curtain. The sunlight shines in. The princess turns into a lizard or some other animal, and the false bride ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Anonymous
... running a pole into it, that we had not yet dug half-way to the bottom: we discovered, however, two frogs in the hole, and near it we killed a dark rattlesnake, which had swallowed a small prairie dog. We were also informed, though we never witnessed the fact, that a sort of lizard and a snake live habitually with these animals. The petit chien are justly named, as they resemble a small dog in some particulars, although they have also some points of similarity to the squirrel. The head resembles the ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... afternoon in my Brazilian garden. The dazzling blue of sea and sky which characterises a tropical noonday has become subdued and already roseate tints are beginning to prepare the glory of the sunset hour. A lizard crawls lazily up the whitewashed wall. The song of the sabia, that wonderful Brazilian thrush, sounds from the royal palm tree. The air is heavy with the perfume of the orange blossom. There is no long twilight in the tropics. Night will leap down suddenly upon my Brazilian garden ...
— Fairy Tales from Brazil - How and Why Tales from Brazilian Folk-Lore • Elsie Spicer Eells
... turtle were not discovered in his days. There were the guanas, too, in abundance, with their mouths sewed up to prevent their biting; these are excellent food, although bearing so near a resemblance to the alligator, and its diminutive European representative, the harmless lizard. Muscovy ducks, parrots, monkeys, pigeons, and fish. Pine apples abounded, oranges, pomegranates, limes, Bavarias, plantains, love apples, Abbogada pears (better known by the name of subaltern's butter), and many other fruits, all piled in heaps, were to be ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... churn had been tampered with by some witch, like Mabel Martin's mother in Whittier's poem. Witches were sometimes supposed to work a baleful charm on the milk by putting under the doorsill some magical object, such as a picture of a toad or a lizard. ...
— Jean Francois Millet • Estelle M. Hurll
... journal about Dorsetshire and the Isle of Wight is chiefly geological: as this extract shows, it was mainly a search after fossil spoils at Charmouth:—"Would you like to see a creature with the head of a lizard, wings of a bat, and tail of a serpent? Such things have been, as these bones testify; they are called Pterodactyls, and are as big as ravens. Thus, you see, a dragon is no chimera, but attested by a science founded on observation, Geology. As their ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... the flower are evolved out of a simple seed"—you will say at once, "That cannot be; for God has plainly told us of both plants and animals that they were made each 'after its kind,' and therefore there can never have been such a thing as a fish developing into a bird, or a bird into a lizard: nor, so far as I have seen, is any such creature to be ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... blocks and a half away saw the rescue. They said that the auto was nothing but a drab noise with a black speck in the middle of it for Chris, when a big bay horse with a lizard lying on its back cantered up alongside of it, and the lizard reached over and picked the black speck ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... sin in the Buddhist faith. Just so certainly as a man sins he will be punished for it—if not in this life in the next one—and if his sin is sufficiently deadly he will lose again the form of a man and return to the shape of a snake or a lizard to expiate his wickedness through ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... lizard, you will regain your lost reputation or fortune; but if it should escape, you will meet vexations and ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... purple velvet and silvery fur enshrine many a blend of villainies and brutal stupidities. What is more cruelly realistic than the leer of the satyr clothed as Francis, King of France; than the bovine dullness of Charles V and the lizard-like dullness of his son; or than that strange combination of wolfish cunning and swinish bestiality with human thought and self-command that fascinates in Raphael's portrait of Leo X and his two cardinals? On the other hand, what a profusion of strong and noble ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... Meanwhile the children build extensive palaces of pebbles on the bank; the carabaos, up to their noses in the river, dream in the refreshing shade of overhanging trees. The air is vocal with the liquid notes of birds, and fragrant with the heavy scent of flowers. A leaf-green lizard creeps down on a horizontal trunk. The broad leaves of abaca rustle in the breeze; the graceful stalks of bamboo crackle like tin tubes. Around the bend the water ripples at the ford. At evening you will see the tired men from the mountains, bending under heavy loads of hemp, ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... There are two old fresco-painted vases outside my own gate, one on either hand, which are so faint that I never saw them till last night; and only then, because I was looking over the wall after a lizard who had come upon me while I was smoking a cigar above, and crawled over one of these embellishments in his ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... consider the divers killings,—the death of the Stinging Lizard and the Dismissal of Silver Phil, to say nothing of the taking off of the Man from Red Dog—don't you, I say, consider ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... they just scratch, and bite, and claw at your innards till ye die." There was nothing to be done with these terrible lizards but to drink an unmentionable potion, which, I am assured, is strong enough to rout the most determined lizard of them all, and bring him to nought. It is, however, noteworthy that stories of persons being killed by lizards crawling down their throats are widely distributed. There is one of a young Hampshire lady who, the day before she was married, went to sleep in her father's ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... might interest a stranger. He had brought to me a nest of the carouge, a bird which suspends its home, hammock-fashion, under the leaves of the banana-tree;—showed me a little fer-de-lance, freshly killed by one of his field hands; and a field lizard (zanoli t in creole), not green like the lizards which haunt the roofs of St. Pierre, but of a beautiful brown bronze, with shifting tints; and eggs of the zanoli, little soft oval things from which the young lizards will perhaps run out alive ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... the pig tribe. The two are distinct. Such also is the case in respect of the minor groups of the class of reptiles. The existing fauna shows us crocodiles, lizards, snakes, and tortoises; but no connecting link between the crocodile and lizard, nor between the lizard and snake, nor between the snake and the crocodile, nor between any two of these groups. They are separated by absolute breaks. If, then, it could be shown that this state of things had always existed, the fact would ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley
... to proceed with all possible despatch; and O'Brien carried on day and night, generally remaining up himself till one or two o'clock in the morning. We had very favourable weather, and in a little more than a month we passed the Lizard. The wind being fair, we passed Plymouth, ran up Channel, and ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... that he is, should wit larded with malice, and malice forced with wit, turn him to? To an ass, were nothing: he is both ass and ox. To an ox, were nothing: he is both ox and ass. To be a dog, a mule, a cat, a fitchew, a toad, a lizard, an owl, a put-tock, or a herring without a roe, I would not care; but to be Menelaus, I would conspire against destiny. Ask me not what I would be, if I were not Thersites; for I care not to be the louse of a lazar, so I were not Menelaus. Hey-day! ...
— The History of Troilus and Cressida • William Shakespeare [Craig edition]
... reason than because it was known in the vicinity as such, this designation having been adopted by Squier and Davis, as they frankly say, "for want of a better," adding "although the figure bears as close a resemblance to the lizard as any other ...
— Animal Carvings from Mounds of the Mississippi Valley • Henry W. Henshaw
... house she had a strange adventure, for she tried what the result of drinking from a bottle she found in the room would be, and grew so large that the house could hardly hold her. The White Rabbit and some of his friends, including Bill, the Lizard, threw a lot of little pebbles through the window, and these turned into tiny cakes. So Alice ate some and was delighted to find that she began shrinking directly. As soon as she was small enough to get through the door, she ran out of the house, and found quite a crowd of little ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... native of Mexico, has a strange life-history not unlike that of the frog. It has a sort of tadpole stage of existence, in which it is furnished with a collar of gills and lives in the water. After a while it loses its gills, and its tail and legs grow much less fish-like. There is a kind of lizard look about its permanent form. In the first period of its history it is styled axolotl; in the final period it becomes known as amblystome. They say its flesh is esteemed a ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... his hand, and there, sure enough, was the lizard's tail, writhing like a worm, and apparently as full of life as its late owner, but, not being endowed ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... and every now and then, poking and grubbing like a hedgehog, behold a large tortoise out for prey like his brother reptiles. This domiciled the tortoise for me; otherwise I had only associated him with suburban gardens and the "Zoo." Now as he hissed at me angrily I knew him to be a lizard with a shell on his back. I picked up several of them and examined their faces—they didn't like that at all. They have a peculiar clerical appearance, something of the sternness and fixity of purpose which seems to express itself ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... of a Phenembe, a species of lizard which devours chickens; here it is named Salka. It had been flayed by a cut up the back—body, 12 ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... two feet high, but I have seen it higher than my head; that is, at least six feet. Beneath its spreading shade in the south lurks the Gila Monster, terrible in name at any rate, a fearful object to look upon, a remnant of antediluvian times, a huge, clumsy, two-foot lizard. The horned toad is quite as forbidding in appearance, but he is a harmless little thing. Here we are in the rattlesnake's paradise. Nine species are found along the Mexican border; and no wonder. The country seems made for them,—the rocks, cliffs, ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... done probably to shew that he was neither ashamed of his Name or Family, notwithstanding the Envy of his Competitors had often reproached him with both. In the same manner we read of a famous Building that was marked in several Parts of it with the Figures of a Frog and a Lizard: Those Words in Greek having been the Names of the Architects, who by the Laws of their Country were never permitted to inscribe their own Names upon their Works. For the same Reason it is thought, that the Forelock of the Horse in the Antique Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... kangaroo, or the rustle of a wallabi, or a dingo stirring the grass as it creeps to its lair. But there are the whirring of locusts, the demoniac chuckle of the laughing jack-ass, the screeching of cockatoos and parrots, the hissing of the frilled lizard, and the buzzing of innumerable insects hidden under the dense undergrowth. And then at night, the melancholy wailing of the curlews, the dismal howling of dingoes, the discordant croaking of tree-frogs, might well shake the nerves of the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... these formidable teeth had been filed down; but, if threatened, she would still turn on her keeper. The Gibbons eat insects, but appear generally to avoid animal food. A Siamang, however, was seen by Mr. Bennett to seize and devour greedily a live lizard. They commonly drink by dipping their fingers in the liquid and then licking them. It is asserted that they sleep in a ...
— Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature • Thomas H. Huxley
... the Jews for locusts and grasshoppers; but being amongst them, make them my common viands, and I find they agree with my stomach as well as theirs. I could digest a salad gathered in a churchyard as well as in a garden. I cannot start at the presence of a serpent, scorpion, lizard, or salamander: at the sight of a toad or viper I find in me no desire to take up a stone to destroy them. I feel not in myself those common antipathies that I can discover in others; those national repugnances do not touch ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... er lizard tail, Hoo-doo; Not close den a mile o' jail, Hoo-doo; De snake mus' be er rattlin' one, Mus' be killed at set uv sun, But never while he's on ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Kentucky Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... most abundant fertilizers of waterside plants, we can see a tendency in such to suppress their petals, for the flowers to become minute and massed in series that the little visitors may more readily transfer pollen from one to another, and to become fragrant - just what the lizard's tail has done. ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... will you promise me that you will bring me this jar full of the many-coloured water from the spring in the court-yard of the castle?' asked she. 'If you fail to keep your word I will change you into a lizard for ever.' ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Various
... due to the disproportion between his fat, puffy body and his lean little face. His lips were puckered up suavely, and his little trimmed moustaches looked as though they had been fixed on with glue. He was a man with the manners of a lizard. He did not walk, but, as it were, crept along with tiny steps, squirming and sniggering, and when he laughed he showed his teeth. He was a clerk on special commissions, and did nothing, though he received a good salary, especially in the summer, when special and lucrative jobs were found for him. ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... which snarl around their track. But in vain. These are no wolves, but cunning hunters, swiftly horsed, and keenly armed, and who will "shamefully shuffle" (to use Drake's own expression) that vast herd from the Lizard to Portland, from Portland to Calais Roads; and who, even in this short two hours' fight, have made many a Spaniard question the boasted invincibleness of ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... all, myriads of living things, from the cold still limpet on the rock to the burning, throbbing heart of man. Sometimes I found them among the sand of the heath, the sea of golden brown surging up yellow billows six feet high about me, where the dry lizard hid, or basked, of kin, too, to old time. Or the rush of the sea wave brought them to me, wet and gleaming, up from the depths of what unknown Past? where they nestled in the root crevices of trees forgotten before Egypt. The living mind opposite the dead ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... The lizard's leg bones are wired exactly as in a bird and are wrapped with tow or cotton to replace muscles. Wire neck and tail and put the specimen together as shown in ...
— Taxidermy • Leon Luther Pray
... Karoo be a desert. So you doze—it is too hot to sleep—and thank Fortune that you have not to march during the furnace hours of the day. And as you doze, parched and sweating, a little blue-grey lizard pops out from beneath the cart beside you, and, climbing gingerly up the stem of a solitary karoo-bush, surveys you with great, thoughtful, unblinking eyes. He is a complacent little beast, of wonderful skin and marking; and if it were not ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... company of a few of the elder girls, were lounging blissfully under the shade of a big hawthorn tree. The air seemed dancing for very heat; the grasshoppers were chirping away at the edge of the lawn, a lizard lay basking on the stones of the terrace wall, and the sparrows for ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... says, "was all the way in an open plain bounded by hillocks of sand and fine gravel—perfectly hard, but without trees, shrubs, or herbs. There are not even the traces of any living creature, neither serpent, lizard, antelope, nor ostrich—the usual inhabitants of the most dreary deserts. There is no sort of water—even the birds seem to avoid the place as pestilential—the sun was burning hot." In a few days the scene changed, and Bruce is noting that in four ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... shaking the cardboard box in his hands and lifting its cover cautiously to see inside. "Let's try a lizard," he suggested. ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... sat thus enjoying themselves beside Brown's Pool, a small lizard was observed to run over a rock near to them. It stopped for a moment to raise its little head and look at the visitors, apparently with great surprise. A rat was also seen, and chased without success, by ...
— The Lonely Island - The Refuge of the Mutineers • R.M. Ballantyne
... Silver towers fall down Unforeseen, like a dream In its green and red stream, Which lights up the walls Ere one crashes and falls, Like the changeable scale Of a lizard's bright mail. Agate, porphyry, cracks And is melted to wax! Bend low to their doom These stones of the tomb! E'en the great marble giant Called Nabo, sways pliant Like a tree; whilst the flare Seemed ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... kiss-flower, with his sapphire wings and ruby crest, hovers continually, and the painted butterflies vie with him and his flowers in tints and beauty. The very reptiles are beautiful here. The snake and the lizard are singularly so, at least in colour. We found a very large rough caterpillar, each hair or prickle of which is divided into five or six branches; the rings of its body are scarlet, yellow, and brown; and the country people believe that it hurts the udders of cows, and prevents ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... will at once show that, however clearly defined may have been the quarters of various gentes in the traditional village, the greatest confusion prevails at the present time. The families numerically most important, such as the Reed, Coyote, Lizard, and Badger, are represented in all of ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various
... war has, apparently, been won by a fusion of two economic systems which together hold and administer a preponderating mass of fluid capital, and which have partially pooled their resources to prevail. They appear almost as would a gigantic lizard which, having been severed in an ancient conflict, was now making a violent but only half-conscious effort to cause the head and body to unite with the tail, so that the two might function once more as ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... mosquito-bar to the trees and went to bed comfortably. In the boat the mosquitos were horrible, but I fell asleep and slept till voices on the bank woke me. Annie was wandering disconsolate round her bed, and when I asked the trouble, said, "Oh, I can't sleep there! I found a toad and a lizard in the bed." When dropping off again, H. woke me to say he was very sick; he thought it was from drinking the river water. With difficulty I got a trunk opened to find some medicine. While doing so a gunboat loomed up vast and gloomy, and we gave each other a good fright. Our voices doubtless ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... many on board, I resolved to submit patiently to my fate, and contrive to make myself as easy as the nature of the case would allow. We got out of the channel with a prosperous breeze, which died away, leaving us becalmed about fifty leagues to the westward of the Lizard: but this state of inaction did not last long; for next night our maintop-sail was split by the wind, which, in the morning, increased to a hurricane. I was awakened by a most horrible din, occasioned ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... and under stones. In the North Island, I am told that it grows to the length of three or four inches. Here I never saw it longer than an inch and a half. The principal reptile is an almost ubiquitous lizard. ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... regenerate Rishi Vaisampayana too, who slew a Brahmana in ignorance, and was polluted by the slaughter of a child, put down by the gods? In olden times the royal sage Nriga became transmuted into a lizard. He had made gifts of kine unto the Brahmanas at his great sacrifice, but this availed him not. The royal sage Dhundhumara was overwhelmed with decrepitude even while engaged in performing his sacrifices, and foregoing ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... overflow its banks and to threaten an inundation. It is true that intervals were occurring when the sun made his appearance from his cloudy tabernacle, and with his golden rays caused everything around to smile, enticing the butterfly forth from the bush, and the lizard from the hollow tree, and I invariably availed myself of these intervals ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... through Torres Strait. Discovery of an addition to the crew. Pass round Breaksea Spit, and steer up the East Coast. Transactions at Percy Island. Enormous sting-rays. Pine-trees serviceable for masts. Joined by a merchant brig. Anchor under Cape Grafton, Hope Islands, and Lizard Island. Natives at Lizard Island. Cape Flinders. Visit the Frederick's wreck. Surprised by natives. Mr. Cunningham's description of the drawings of the natives in a cavern on Clack's Island. Anchor in Margaret Bay, and under Cairncross Island. Accident, and loss of anchors. ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... passage was also dark, and as narrow almost as a coffin. They continued crawling for several yards more, sometime cutting their arms with the broken stones which covered the bottom, and sometimes placing one of their hands upon some cold substance which moved and felt as if it might be a lizard or a sleeping snake. They neither called nor spoke, for they feared someone might have the child, who would run away with her, if warned of their approach, so they determined to come upon them suddenly. They were greatly exhausted, ...
— Peak's Island - A Romance of Buccaneer Days • Ford Paul
... the evening of Easter Sunday the gypsies of Southern Europe take a wooden vessel like a band-box, which rests cradle-wise on two cross pieces of wood. In this they place herbs and simples, together with the dried carcase of a snake, or lizard, which every person present must first have touched with his fingers. The vessel is then wrapt in white and red wool, carried by the oldest man from tent to tent, and finally thrown into running water, not, however, before ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... purchased in exchange for nails, and pieces of iron-hoops; and I distributed a good many pieces of ribbon, and some buttons, as bracelets, amongst the women in the canoes. One of the men had the figure of a lizard punctured upon his breast, and upon those of others were the figures of men badly imitated. These visitors informed us, that there was no chief, or Hairee, of this island; but that it was subject to Teneooneoo, a chief of Atooi; which island, they said, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... me word, "I have notes of that beautiful bird, the Purple Heron, being killed here (Guernsey) in May, 1845, and in 1849; also in Alderney on the 8th May, 1867." Curiously enough Mr. Rodd records the capture of one, a female, near the Lizard, in Cornwall, late in April of the same year.[20] When at Alderney this summer (1878) I was told that a Heron of some sort, but certainly not a Common Heron, had been shot in that Island about six weeks before my visit ...
— Birds of Guernsey (1879) • Cecil Smith
... and he goes everywhere. Money is power. No matter how you get it. Once gotten, it's divine. Call the man a thief and grafter if you will, but the laws of centuries protect him. There are no rights now except property rights. I'd like to kick him out of the house. I'd as lief a toad or a lizard touched my wife's hand, but he's here to-night, well, because I'm ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... captain impatiently, "what tao that is which has fallen on your back." One of the robbers lights a match. The robbers examine Juan's back, and they see only a little lizard clinging to his worn-out camisa (loose, thin cotton coat). [98] Some of the robbers get angry, and some laugh at Juan's foolishness. The captain tells Juan that he may go away, for he is not worth anything. He also tells Juan not to tell anybody ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... woman? The lizard plots against the cliff on which it suns itself? Then let him plot; and as for Mopo, I ...
— Nada the Lily • H. Rider Haggard
... crouching beneath the bench. I, too, had spent there the fairest hours of my boyhood, with Homer or Telemachus lying open on the grass before me. I loved to lie flat on the warm turf, my elbows resting on the volume, of which a passing fly or lizard would sometimes hide the lines. The nightingales among the branches sang for our home, though we could never find their nest, or even see the branch from which their song burst forth. This grove was the pride, the recollection, the love of all. The idea ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... young girl in ragged boy's clothing, uncoiled her slender length from her blanket and straightened out flat on her stomach. Her yellow hair made a spot like a patch of sunlight on the dead leaves. Her clear golden eyes were as brilliant as a lizard's. ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... the stamping of horses, and I lay still for a while and peered all about me for signs of the animals or their possessors. I moved slowly, then, so as to bring first this open space in line with my eyes, and then that, until, crawling like a lizard, I found my men. They were lying on the ground, wrapped in blankets, all asleep, very near the other end of the grove. In the last open spot of the timber, screened from view from the prairie by clumps of willows and other bushes, were six horses, picketed ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... to develop legless species which then externally become so much like snakes that they are told apart with some difficulty. Thus our so-called glass-snake, common in the Southern states, is not a snake at all, but a lizard, as we may easily see by observing the ear openings on each side of the head, as no snake has ears. This beautiful animal is also known as the joint-snake, and both names have reference to the ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... we pass from one class to another; but the difference between the species, even, is often so great, that the transition appears hardly less difficult. In what quadruped, for instance, do we find the first ancestor of the huge and sagacious elephant? What humble lizard gave birth to those monsters of the fossil world, the plesiosaurus and megalosaurus, thirty or forty feet in length? Man, of course, upon this theory, is only a more perfectly developed monkey, or chimpanzee. With a nod ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... so ugly, so horribly ugly, that he looked like a sea monster. Instead of hair his head was covered with a thick bush of green grass, his skin was green, his eyes were green, his long beard that came down to the ground was also green. He had the appearance of an immense lizard ...
— Pinocchio - The Tale of a Puppet • C. Collodi
... island we named Rat Island, from the quantity of that vermin with which it was infested. We also saw here a few seals, and numbers of a very pretty lizard (figured in the appendix) with its tail covered with spines. Several of these were brought away alive. I had two myself for nine months on board, and afterwards presented them to Lady Gipps. Of those taken by Lieutenant Emery, he was so fortunate ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... disappointed. Even at the worst estimate of Vere, I had imagined he would stick the thing out a little longer than this. Poor Phillida's time of happiness should have lasted more than these few weeks. But the call of New York, of the "lounge lizard's" ease and unhealthy excitement had won already, it seemed. I said nothing at all. The blow was ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... talked after a fashion that would have been intolerable in anyone but Capper. His hands were always in some ungainly attitude, and yet they were wonderful hands, strong and sensitive, the colour of ivory. His eyes were small and green, sharp as the eyes of a lizard. They seemed to take in everything and ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... in fact his idol, and he was careful never to injure it or treat it with contempt. One, for instance, saw his god in the eel, another in the shark, another in the turtle, another in the dog, another in the owl, another in the lizard; and so on, throughout all the fish of the sea and birds and four-footed beasts and creeping things. In some of the shell-fish even, gods were supposed to be present. A man would eat freely of what was regarded as the incarnation of the god of another ...
— The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study - Essay #8 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... sprouted up again from the remains that were put in the pot, seeing the misery and tribulation of her poor lover, and how he was turned in a second to the colour of a sick Spaniard, of a venomous lizard, of the sap of a leaf, of a jaundiced person, of a dried pear, was moved with compassion; and springing out of the pot, like the light of a candle shooting out of a dark lantern, she stood before Cola ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
... their dusky beds, With a tearful dew in their great, pure eyes; The lilies quiver their shining heads, Their pale lips full of a sad surprise; And the lizard darts through the glistening fern— And the squirrel rustles the branches hoary; Strange birds fly out, with a cry, to bathe Their wings in the sunset glory; While the shadows pass O'er the quiet ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... all kinds as shy. They wudn't 'a been if I'd 'a had my traps; but there wa'n't a critter, from the minners in the waters to the bufflers on the paraira, that didn't look like they knowed how this niggur were fixed. I kud git nuthin' for two days but lizard, ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... declared non-existent; and a fiercely driving ambition, not so much for wealth in itself, as for that control ever the destinies of men, and even of nations, with which wealth under modern conditions endows its possessor. He was a pale, dry, lizard-like young man, suggesting light without heat, and excitement without emotion. Early in his career he recognised that the great sources of wealth and power lie with the younger countries, in the development of their natural and industrial resources, of their railways and other forms of ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... doctor of the Kangaroo totem. He said: "My father is a Lizard-man. When I was a small boy, he took me into the bush to train me to be a doctor. He placed two large quartz-crystals against my breast, and they vanished into me. I do not know how they went, but I felt them going through me like warmth. This was to make ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... through my La Fontaine, and noticed the omissions in him. He has neither butterfly nor rose. He utilizes neither the crane, nor the quail, nor the dromedary, nor the lizard. There is not a single echo of chivalry in him. For him, the history of France dates from Louis XIV. His geography only ranges, in reality, over a few square miles, and touches neither the Rhine nor the Loire, neither the mountains nor the sea. He never invents his subjects, but indolently ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Ida, Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die. For now the noonday quiet holds the hill: The grasshopper is silent in the grass: 25 The lizard, with his shadow on the stone, Rests like a shadow, and the winds are dead The purple flower droops: the golden bee Is lily-cradled: I alone awake. My eyes are full of tears, my heart of love, 30 My heart is breaking, and my eyes are dim, And I am all aweary ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... shone, the sky was blue, and the flying clouds were of a dazzling whiteness. Shivering, I remembered the south wall, and went there, since to escape from the wind and bask like some half-frozen serpent or lizard in the heat was the highest good one could look for in such weather. To see anything new in wild life was not to be ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... time His Excellency sat with his hands clasped behind his head, frowning up from the open patio into the hot, cloudless sky. On the ridge of his tiled roof a foul buzzard blinked at him from red-rimmed eyes, across the yellow wall a lizard ran for shelter, at his elbow a macaw compassing the circle of its tin prison muttered dreadful oaths. Outside, as the washerwomen beat their linen clubs upon the flat rocks of the river, the hot, stale air was spanked with sharp reports. In Camaguay theirs was the only industry, ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... family. Nork House has a field in which stands Tumble Beacon, a mound which saw the flares run from the hills of Hampshire to London, when the Armada was breasting the Channel and Hampshire had caught the signal from Dunkerry and the Lizard. Tumble Beacon would not light an alarm now; or if it did, it would burn pine trees and elders and nettles that grow about it, and would scare a hundred rabbits. How did the trees come there? A beacon should not be planted; it should stand open and high and free as when the Spaniards came, ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... right or left, there was nearly always a tail caught. This used to grieve me for hours, and whilst one of the sisters was explaining to us, by figures on the blackboard, the metric system, I was wondering, with my lizard's tail in my hand, how I could fasten it on again. I had some toc-marteau (death watches) in a little box, and five spiders in a cage that Pere Larcher had made for me with some wire netting. I used, very cruelly, to give flies to my spiders, and they, fat and well fed, ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... insect world, that dreamy go-between, hardly silence, hardly to be called noise, keeps us perpetual company, and our eyes must ever be open for beautiful little living things. Now a green and gold lizard flashes across a bit of grey rock, now a dragon-fly disports its sapphire wings amid the yellowing ferns or purple ling, butterflies, white, blue, and black and orange, flit hither and thither, whilst little beetles, blue as enamel ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... to the wind, now wave the reed and thistle! Here, where on golden throne the monarch lolled, Glides, spectre-like, unto his marble home, Lit by the wanlight—wan light of the horned moon, The swift and silent lizard of the stones! ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... lizard when it moved at noon On the grey, sunlit wall; He heard the far-off temple bells, what time He felt ...
— The Miracle and Other Poems • Virna Sheard
... big salmon and a black-spotted lizard that had been flooded out from some dark place in the mountains, Harry found a pretty toy canoe that some small boy had probably been playing with in the stream before the water rose, and Jack was kept busy towing in ...
— The Bobbsey Twins in the Country • Laura Lee Hope
... you give a sudden start, "What's that?" Only a lizard scuttling over the dark-washed bedroom wall, first cousin to the chameleon you saw at Abu Simbel. He is quite harmless and lives on flies. He runs like a little shadow across the wall and sometimes he loses his balance ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... are now hiring your dark hole for one year. There you will have your little garden ... live there enamoured of the pitchfork.... It is something to be able in any spot to have made oneself proprietor even of a single lizard.... None but the wealthy can ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... the cave, a Fisherman so ugly that Pinocchio thought he was a sea monster. In place of hair, his head was covered by a thick bush of green grass. Green was the skin of his body, green were his eyes, green was the long, long beard that reached down to his feet. He looked like a giant lizard with legs ...
— The Adventures of Pinocchio • C. Collodi—Pseudonym of Carlo Lorenzini
... Gecko, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California. The latter is the most gaudily marked of the Geckos found in the United States and is likewise the most abundant. It may be seen at dusk coming out of rock crevices to feed on small insects. Many consider this lizard poisonous and its saliva is supposed to produce painful skin eruptions. Authorities, however, tell us that this is not so. The first three Geckos mentioned live largely in trees, but the Banded Gecko lives on ...
— Pathfinder - or, The Missing Tenderfoot • Alan Douglas
... slow nature was imbibing a misfortune little by little, she had swallowed the whole agony of it at a draught and was brightening again. She could slough off a sadness and replace it by a hope as easily as a lizard ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... man is kept alive by the anxiety to see his granddaughter established in life, the line of the Tamiya assured. He will die within the month. If the old woman hangs on too long"—he halted speech for a moment, then coldly—"give her lizard to eat. A diviner, doubtless Iemon San knows Kondo[u] Rokuro[u]bei by this time. He will never prejudice the man who holds in his hands the purse of the Tamiya. Iemon San and O'Iwa San are left alone. Good luck to you, honoured ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... [g] and [b] are pointer stars to a fifth-magnitude star the lucida of the asterism Lacerta, the lizard ...
— A Field Book of the Stars • William Tyler Olcott
... a winning one, and he usually had something to tell that was of interest—something of what he had seen or done, of the next foot-ball or base-ball game, of the coming boat races, of his driving or exploring, or of how he had added a new stuffed bird to his collection, or a new lizard, and of how a far-away friend had sent him a big turtle as a souvenir of an ocean trip in the South Seas. There is a story that this big turtle got loose one night and alarmed the entire household by crawling through the hallway, looking for a pond ...
— American Boy's Life of Theodore Roosevelt • Edward Stratemeyer
... the Schinck (scincus), an amphibious animal of the lizard species, and sometimes of the land lizard, or crocodile, is said, when reduced to powder and drunk with sweet wine, to act miraculously in exciting the venereal action; it is also prepared for the same object in the form ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... school. I shrank from the toilsome and embarrassing act of button-holing a schoolfellow as he rushed out of class, and of pressing upon him the probably unintelligible question 'Have you found Jesus?' It was simpler to avoid him, to slip like a lizard though the laurels and ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... let the butts of their guns rest on the ground, and exchanged pleasant talk about pretty, dark girls that they had known in far-away Spain. One boldly lighted a cigarrito and the other encouraged by his example did likewise. Hark, what was that? "A lizard in the grass," said Carlos. "Yes, certainly," said Juan. They continued to smoke their cigarritos blissfully, and talk of the pretty, dark girls that they had ...
— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler
... had run back along the path in pursuit of a lively lizard. Only Lynn and Pauline, their sweet little faces ashine with ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... [275] "The lizard Stellio. The Arabs call it Hardun. The Turks kill it, for they imagine that by declining the head it mimics them when they say ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... the cozy effect of the room, and above all never to let Helen guess how she felt about the tea-table. "But next year you better believe I'm hoping for a single room," she confided to the little green lizard who sat on her inkstand and ogled her ...
— Betty Wales Freshman • Edith K. Dunton
... followed them, and came to a fire freshly made, left by the Indians. He went on until he identified the footmarks showing where his grandmother had gone. He made sure they were hers by the extra mark of her stick on the ground. With the assistance of a lizard, then of a big bird, then of a rat, then of a butterfly, he discovered the whereabouts of the old lady. He was by then an old man. Upon perceiving his grandmother he again became a boy, and hurried on—making ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... excuse you," said Don Quixote; "give it to him in reals, and I shall be satisfied; and see that you do as you have sworn; if not, by the same oath I swear to come back and hunt you out and punish you; and I shall find you though you should lie closer than a lizard. And if you desire to know who it is lays this command upon you, that you be more firmly bound to obey it, know that I am the valorous Don Quixote of La Mancha, the undoer of wrongs and injustices; and so, God be with you, ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... with a surface just wind-kissed and strewed with a glory of sun-stars. Away to the east, at a point from which brown hills, dotted with white dwellings, tend in long undulations to the cliffs of the Lizard, under fair clouds all banked and sunny white against the blue, rises St. Michael's Mount, with a man's little castle capping Nature's gaunt escarpments and rugged walls. Between Marazion and Newlyn stretches Mount's Bay; while a mile or two of flat sea-front, over ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... perfect day! What a golden desert this spreading moor! Everywhere sunshine. I wished I could live in it and on it. I saw a lizard run over the crag; I saw a bee busy among the sweet bilberries. I would fain at the moment have become bee or lizard, that I might have found fitting nutriment, permanent shelter here. But I was a human being, and had a human being's wants: I must not linger where there was nothing to supply them. ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... O my soul, of the red sand of Crete; think of the earth; the heat burnt fissures like the great backs of the temple serpents; think of the world you knew; as the tide crept, the land burned with a lizard-blue where the ...
— Hymen • Hilda Doolittle
... moment later it was gone, and I could see again. Above the trees there soared into my vision a huge thing on batlike wings—a creature large as a large whale, but fashioned more after the order of a lizard. Then again something charged the periscope and blotted out the mirror. I will confess that I was almost gasping for breath as I gave the commands to emerge. Into what sort of strange ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... same state as when lent, fair wear and tear alone excepted. B. tries first to get C. to pay for the canoe, and for the rent of the canoe on top, as a compensation for the delay in bringing down his, B's., trade. C. calls B. the illegitimate offspring of a greenhouse-lizard, and pleads further that the floating log was a force majeure—an act of God, and denies liability on all counts. B. then pleads this as his own defence in the case of A. and B. (authorities cited in support of this view); he also ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... object, a monstrosity of indeterminate sex and nature, but surmounted by a woman's head and face of extraordinary, if devilish loveliness, sunk back between high but grotesquely small shoulders, like to those of a lizard, so that it glared upwards. The workmanship of the thing was rude yet strangely powerful. Whatever there is cruel, whatever there is devilish, whatever there is inhuman in the dark places of the world, shone out of the jewelled eyes which were set in that yellow female face, yellow because its ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... an awful big chance, though. You'd expect her to learn by and by that I won't be a parlor lizard. She says we try to 'make her over.' Well, she's always trying to make me over, from a perfectly good M. D. into a damn poet with a socialist necktie! She'd have a fit if she knew how many women would be willing to ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis |
