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Maw   Listen
noun
Maw  n.  
1.
A stomach; the receptacle into which food is taken by swallowing; in birds, the craw; now used only of the lower animals, exept humorously or in contempt. "Bellies and maws of living creatures."
2.
Appetite; inclination. (Obs.) "Unless you had more maw to do me good."
Fish maw. (Zool.) See under Fish.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Maw" Quotes from Famous Books



... distinct, and the voice, if not strong, firm at the least. Not masculine; as feminine as possible; not a croak nor a bawl, but a quick, distinct, and sound voice. Nothing is much more disgusting than what the sensible country people call a maw-mouthed woman. A maw-mouthed man is bad enough: he is sure to be a lazy fellow: but, a woman of this description, in addition to her laziness, soon becomes the most disgusting of mates. In this whole world nothing is much more hateful than a female's under jaw, lazily moving up and down, and ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett

... day of my employment by him, Bonton put me at the mouth of the separator, where the canvas ran rapidly in, carrying the bundles down into the maw of the machine. My job was feeding the bundles to it ... up in the air in the back the threshed straw was kicked high, and the chaff whirled in dusty clouds ... from a spout in the side of the separator the threshed grain poured in an ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp

... the cavern maw; the wolf stood tense and still, by means of the secret wireless of the wild fully aware of the tragic drama, the curtain of which was the dark just fallen; yet Ben's wild, bitter thoughts of the preceding night did not come readily back ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall

... that short campaign are too full of horror to be related. Not only did the demon of war devour strong men, but found dainty morsels for its bloody maw in innocent women and children. Whole families, crazed by the belief that capture was worse than death, fought in the ranks with the soldiers. Women ambushed in coverts shot the Russians as they rummaged the captured ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various

... farmer's muscle. The tenacity of the flax can be seen when it would stand this violent beating; and the cruel blow can be imagined, which the farmer's fingers sometimes got when he carelessly thrust his hand with the flax too far under the descending jaw—a shark's maw was equally gentle. ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle

... upon the pillow, the lad pointed with trembling finger toward the other end of the cabin and whispered, while his eyes grew big with fear, "Sh—, he's full ergin. Bin down ter th' stillhouse all evenin'—Don't stir him, maw, er we'll git licked some more. Tell ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright

... see it melt. Oxford Street became to him as stony-hearted a step-mother as it was to De Quincey, and at melancholy last—while his letters to Barbara became shorter and fewer—he found an enforced way to the pawnbroker's, whither went all which his Uncle's capacious maw would receive; all, except the beloved violin which had so often sung to Barbara, so often sounded Love's sweet lullaby in the quiet of his own chamber. That he could not part with, for he was a true enthusiast when all was told. So he went about ...
— Cruel Barbara Allen - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray

... caused him much pain in his wounded shoulder. He projected his under lip and expelled his breath upwards along his face to blow the mosquitoes away from his eyes. But the situation had its compensation. To be snatched from the maw of death was well worth a little bodily suffering, only it was unfortunate that he should miss the hanging of ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London

... to the 500 Salmon ova said to have been taken from the stomach of a Trout, Ramsbottom is the authority for it, only he says there were nearer 1,000 than 500, and he took them from the maw of a large lake Trout at Oughterard, when netting the spawning Salmon for his artificial propagation. When Ramsbottom was fish breeding for Mr. Peel the year after he first went to Ireland for that purpose, he went into the brooks at night ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett

... caught his hand and kissed it, and burst out crying. The two men looked at each other—one amused, the other shrinking with disgust at his own moral squalor. Then from the floor above came a whimpering cry, and Lily, calling passionately, "Yes, Sweety! Maw's coming!" flew upstairs. ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland

... call it much of a home, but it's better'n nothing," said Tom. "But I'm thankful to you. I'll come, only maybe your maw mightn't be expectin' company—leastwise such as I am," and he looked down ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue in the Big Woods • Laura Lee Hope

... looked at him with languid astonishment. "I reckon paw and maw ain't no objection," she said with the same easy ignoring of parental authority that had characterized Rupert Filgee, and which seemed to be a local peculiarity. "Maw DID offer to come yer and see you, but I told ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte

... Tompkins, speaking to himself, as he stepped into the street from Wolford's dwelling, feeling lighter in heart than he had felt for a long time. "What madness, with the means I have had in my hands, ever to have fed your avaricious maw!" ...
— Finger Posts on the Way of Life • T. S. Arthur

... human victim on a particular day in each year; in failure of which he is to become the prey of the demon, who is very handsomely named Sangrida. The count has sacrificed nine victims before the opening of the piece, and is meditating with himself with what fat offering he shall next glut the maw of Sangrida, in anniversary punctuality. Leolyn, a dumb boy, the rightful heir of the estate and title which Hardyknute had usurped, has been secretly bred up by Clotilda as her own, but Hardyknute discovers him by the mark of a bloody ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter

... strained relations, to insist upon his rights. His eyes were open now, and he saw men and things political as they were; he knew that his bills for the emancipation of the State were prisoners in the maw of the dragon, and not likely to see the light of law. Not a legislative day passed that he did not demand, with a firmness and restraint which did him infinite credit, that Mr. Bascom's and Mr. Butcher's committees report those ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... universality of Death. Simonides had dared to say: 'One horrible Charybdis waits for all.' That was as near a discord as a Greek could venture on. Lucretius describes the open gate and 'huge wide-gaping maw' which must devour heaven, earth, and sea, and ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... eggs, and leave out half the whites, thick cream, grated bread, sugar, salt, currans, rose-water, some beef-suet or marrow, (and if you will) sweet marjoram, time, parsley, and mix all together; then having a sheeps maw ready dressed, put it in and boil ...
— The accomplisht cook - or, The art & mystery of cookery • Robert May

... shifted sidewise and another craft, heavy, lumbersome, and vastly bigger than the light boats of the rest poked its nose into its place,—and that nose was brass and round with a gaping maw,—a small cannon, scarcely big enough for the name, but a roaring braggart ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe

... their race that there are millions instead of thousands of them; for now the swifts and great numbers of tree and barn swallows spend the livelong day in swooping after the unfortunate gauzy-winged motes, which have risen above the toad's maw upon land, and beyond the reach of the trout's leap ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe

... two or three days ago a duplicate of a good review of the 'Origin' by a Mr. Maw (Mr. George Maw, of Benthall Hall. The review was published in the 'Zoologist,' July, 1861. On the back of my father's copy is written, "Must be consulted before new edit. of 'Origin'"—words which are ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin

... anxiously, for the Pike teether had up to this time been the Doctor's prize patient. "I wonder if your Maw remembered the ...
— The Road to Providence • Maria Thompson Daviess

... glimmering light His comrades dear Odysseus saw In the huge Cyclops' hideous maw Engulfed, he wept the ...
— The Consolation of Philosophy • Boethius

... was writ in de papah 'bout dat pore Chile," he was saying. "I sutenly do feel sorry fer he's maw. I ain't got much, but I tole Maria I guess we could do without somethin' ...
— Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch • Alice Caldwell Hegan

... who confidingly slip our daily, and weekly, and monthly mites into the vast mass of current reading turned out for an omnivorous public—let us hope that the world's maw may long remain unsated and ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various

... without some attempt to relieve her on my part. I gave her, as is usual in such emergencies, everything I "could think of," and everything my neighbors could think of, besides some fearful prescriptions which I obtained from a German veterinary surgeon, but to no purpose. I imagined her poor maw distended and inflamed with the baking sodden mass which no physic could ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs

... a branch—a brook—in the Kentucky hills. Their house was log, said Cissy, with a fireplace where Maw had her kettles and where the whole lot of them could sit when winter nights were cold, and Paw could whittle and Maw ...
— Across the Fruited Plain • Florence Crannell Means

... certainty I know, The eagle waits but till you go, (The thing with great concern I say,) To make your little ones her prey." Suspicious dread when thus inspir'd, Puss to her hole all day retir'd; Stealing at night on silent paw, To stuff her own and kittens' maw. To stir nor sow nor eagle dare. What more? fell hunger ends their care; And long the mischief-making beast With her ...
— Aesop, in Rhyme - Old Friends in a New Dress • Marmaduke Park

... poor provider," she said plaintively, alluding to her absent husband. "Maw said to me when I would have him that he was a poor provider; and then he's got into this here way of goin' off like. Time things gets too bad here at home he's got a big scheme up for makin' his fortune somewhars else, and out he puts. He 'lowed he'd be home with ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke

... going to take him at once; he is to finish his educational cramming before then,' said Bounderby. 'By the Lord Harry, he'll have enough of it, first and last! He'd open his eyes, that boy would, if he knew how empty of learning my young maw was, at his time of life.' Which, by the by, he probably did know, for he had heard of it often enough. 'But it's extraordinary the difficulty I have on scores of such subjects, in speaking to any one on ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*

... their property belongs to them as our swords, our horses, our wives belong to you or me. What will not your grasping spirit lead you to!—Take your hand from your dagger!—Not a copper coin from them shall fall into your hungry maw, so help me God! Do not again cast an evil eye on the Mukaukas' son! Do not try my patience too far, man, or else—Hold your head tight on your shoulders or you will have to seek it at your feet; and what I say ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... seems rather to suck in the bait than to bite at it. Much dexterity is required in the hand which holds the line at this moment; for a bungler is apt to be too precipitate, and to jerk away the hook before it has got far enough down the shark's maw. Our greedy friend, indeed, is never disposed to relinquish what may once have passed his formidable batteries of teeth; but the hook, by a premature tug of the line, may fix itself in a part of the jaw so ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall

... fate and death! Thou spirit of fierce hate and parting breath, Thou banisher of joy! O ghastly Law, That gathers countless forces in thy maw! A phantom! curse! and oft a blessing, joy! All Heaven and earth thy hands shall e'er employ. With blessings come, or curses to us bring, The god who fails not with her hovering wing; Nor god, nor man thy coming e'er may ken, O mystery! thy ways ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous

... o'clock in the morning the Americans stole silently away; having first renewed their bivouac-fires, and left their advanced pickets and several small parties to guard for a time the fords of Assumpinck Creek. On his march, about sun-rise, Washington fell in with two British regiments under Colonel Maw-hood, in full march from Princetown, to join the forces at Trenton. At first, the morning being foggy, Maw-hood mistook the Americans for Hessians; but soon discovering his error, he opened a heavy charge of artillery upon them, which threw their van into ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... Hideous Bulk of Honour scape, Nadab that sets the gazing Crowd agape: That old Kirk-founder, whose course Croak could sing The Saints, the Cause, no Bishop, and no King: When Greatness clear'd his Throat, and scowr'd his Maw, Roard out Succession, and the Penal Law. Not so of old: another sound went forth, When in the Region from Judea North, By the Triumphant Saul he was employ'd, A huge fang Tusk to goar poor Davids side. Like a Proboscis in the Tyrants Jaw, To rend and root through Government ...
— Anti-Achitophel (1682) - Three Verse Replies to Absalom and Achitophel by John Dryden • Elkanah Settle et al.

... dominated the economy, later it became the petroleum princes of Texas and elsewhere, but toward the end of the Twentieth Century the communications industries slowly gained prominence. Nothing was more greatly in demand than feeding the insatiable maw of the Telly fan, nothing, ultimately, became ...
— Mercenary • Dallas McCord Reynolds

... thou take to thee, O Hajjaj, the greater Salve."[FN83] Cried the Lieutenant, "What may be that?" and said the youth in reply, "A bittock of hard bread eaten[FN84] upon the spittle, for indeed such food consumeth the phlegm and similar humours which be at the mouth of the maw.[FN85] And let not the blood in the hot bath for it enfeebleth man's force, and gaze not upon the metal pots of the Balnea because such sight breedeth dimness of vision. Also have no connection with ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton

... struggle and their ruth? Are we the eagle nation Milton saw Mewing its mighty youth, Soon to possess the mountain winds of truth, And be a swift familiar of the sun Where aye before God's face his trumpets run? Or have we but the talons and the maw, And for the abject likeness of our heart Shall some less lordly bird be set apart?— Some gross-billed wader where the swamps are fat? Some gorger in the sun? Some ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody

... "Yo' maw said he was a drinkin' man, an' I said to myse'f, from my own 'sperience.... Yo' set inside yeah, Nelia. I'll go down theh an' talk myse'f. We come near buyin' that bo't yistehd'y. Leave hit ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears

... by its never-failing feather of black smoke. On near approach one heard the prolonged thunder of the stamp-mill, the crusher, the insatiable monster, gnashing the rocks to powder with its long iron teeth, vomiting them out again in a thin stream of wet gray mud. Its enormous maw, fed night and day with the car-boys' loads, gorged itself with gravel, and spat out the gold, grinding the rocks between its jaws, glutted, as it were, with the very entrails of the earth, and growling over its endless meal, like some savage animal, some legendary dragon, ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris

... destroyed. What need have we of further conquests, when the land of our fathers has grown too wide for their children? Is it to satisfy the greed of some among us, and can it be that the Country will fill their maw at ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain

... am satisfied that no deliverance is possible. There is not a spot of shore that we can reach—not a point of rock big enough for a sea-mew; and the only question for us is—whether we shall enter the fishes' maw ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey

... different sorts, and after his time new kinds were not so much sought after till Dean Herbert collected and studied them. His monograph of the Crocus, in 1847, contained the account of forty-one species, besides many varieties. The latest arrangement of the family by Mr. George Maw, of Broseley, contains sixty-eight species, besides varieties; of these all are not yet in cultivation, but every year sees some fresh addition to the number, chiefly by the unwearied exertions in finding them in their native habitats, and the ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe

... And the same argument which the Apostle used in the one of these sayings, and our Lord in the other, is valid and full of encouragement when applied to this matter. He that 'satisfies the desires of every living thing,' and fills full the maw of the lowest creature; and puts the worms into the gaping beak of the young ravens when they cry, is not the King to turn a deaf ear, or the back of His hand, to the man who can appeal to Him with this word on his lips, 'My King and my God!' We grasp God when we say that; and all that we see of ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... mawnds kennot rawse to Christiennity lawk hahrs ken, gavner: thet's ah it is. Weoll, ez haw was syin, if a hescort is wornted, there's maw friend and commawnder Kepn Brarsbahnd of the schooner Thenksgivin, an is crew, incloodin mawseolf, will see the lidy an Jadge Ellam through henny little excursion in reason. Yr honor mawt ...
— Captain Brassbound's Conversion • George Bernard Shaw

... of the flames, the crash of falling trees, the howl of the wind,—all these made a combination that was deafening. Added to it was the fierce glow of the fire itself, rising and falling as new patches of woods fell into its never satisfied maw. ...
— The Boy Scouts in the Maine Woods - The New Test for the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter

... in demonstrating to the Duke the dishonourable nature of his intentions. Also he induced his Highness to comprehend that the Pope, though ready to gather all men, and especially princes, into the maw of Rome, could not make a double marriage legal where there was no feasible plea for annulment of the first union. To be politically hostile to Austria was one thing, to enter into open combat with her another. Wirtemberg was not a large enough ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay

... Spoiled a forty-dollar suit of clothes and a two-dollar tie to win a sixty-cent album at a town fair. Got the album to prove it. Got it on the parlor table with the marble top down home in Maryland, and every time Maw looks at it she smiles and says 'Jimmy may be not much good at anything he's tried yet, ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton

... general submergence. His thoughts returned to the automatic operation of the consummation obliterating his person, the inexorable blind movement of the thing in which he had been caught, dragged into the maw of a supreme purpose. It was, of course, the law of mere procreation which he had before contemptuously recognized and dismissed; a law for animals; but he was no longer entirely an animal. Already he had considered the possibility of an additional force in the directing ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer

... happy days, for love and laughter ravished and gone for ever. Above all, the rain and sea saddened the moment—the rain dripping through the ragged foliage and oozing on the wood, the cavernous sea lapping monstrous on the rock that some day yet must crumble to its hungry maw. ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro

... maw it sucks a town. A town with all its hundreds of men and women and children, with its marts of business, its homes, its factories and houses of worship. Then, insatiate still, with a blast like the chaos of worlds ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker

... And, indeed, to doubt Scaife's sincerity and goodness seemed at times gross disloyalty, because he stood, firm as a rock, between the two urchins in his room and the turbulent crowd outside. This defence of the weak, this guarding of green fruit from the maw of Lower School boys, afforded Scaife an opportunity of exercising power. He had the instincts of the potter, inherited, no doubt; and he moulded the clay ready to his hand with the delight of a master-workman. Nobody else knew what the man of millions had said to his boy when ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell

... "I'll ask Maw," murmured Jennie bashfully, but Miss Peggy turned up her small nose and switched her short skirts scornfully as the men on the porch laughed and the Senator emitted a very roar in ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess

... Worsters laureat wreath; yet much remaines To conquer still; peace hath her victories 10 No less renownd then warr, new foes aries Threatning to bind our soules with secular chaines: Helpe us to save free Conscience from the paw Of hireling wolves whose Gospell is their maw. ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton

... days have given fresh activity. This vitiating element is the accession of the peasantry to the ownership of land. In the section 'On Inheritance' is the principle of the evil, the peasant is the means through which it works. No sooner does that class get a parcel of land into its maw than it begins to subdivide it, till there are scarcely three furrows left in each lot. And even then the peasant does not stop! He divides the three furrows across their length, as Monsieur Grossetete ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac

... fight a gorgon fight! A cruel monster hell-born, Whose hungry maw, ignoring law, Mocks misery's tears to scorn. She may not slay the beast, but aye Her blows will badly scratch it; All praise is due the woman true, Who ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation

... diet was of wheaten bread, And milk, and oats, and straw; Thistles, or lettuces instead, With sand to scour his maw. ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various

... outfit of her paw an' maw, an' whar hit stood I built up a leetle mound with a sorter cross on hit, in ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson

... sleep, lose all thy sense of loss. Let thy soul (to another) feel the pain of just reproach: The wise of heart find that their goad and spur. And thou (to a third) breathe on him with thy blood-flecked breath, And with thy vapour, thy maw's fire, consume him; Chase him, and wither ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton

... turned trembling to Sleep. "It was I who brought him hither," said he. "Well then, for my brother Sleep's sake," said the awful and lanky monarch, "you can retrace your steps for the nonce; but beware of me the next time." Having been for some time cramming his gluttonous maw with carrion, he caused his subjects to be called together, and moved from the altar to a very lofty and dreadful throne, to adjudge newly-arrived prisoners. In an instant, lo! the dead in countless multitudes ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne

... diggers, were three immense sharks. Their cruel mouths were partly open, showing three rows of big teeth, and they were slowly turning over on their backs to make a sudden rush and devour the men and boys. Owing to the peculiar shape of its maw a shark can not ...
— Under the Ocean to the South Pole - The Strange Cruise of the Submarine Wonder • Roy Rockwood

... all my company 2 days; and they were indifferent sweet meat. Of the sharks we caught a great many which our men eat very savourily. Among them we caught one which was 11 foot long. The space between its two eyes was 20 inches, and 18 inches from one corner of his mouth to the other. Its maw was like a leather sack, very thick, and so tough that a sharp knife could scarce cut it: in which we found the head and bones of a hippopotamus; the hairy lips of which were still sound and not putrefied, and the jaw was also firm, out of which we plucked a great many teeth, 2 of them ...
— A Voyage to New Holland • William Dampier

... spitting on the ground, disgustedly—, "too much relig'un is a dang'us thing. You've got all of paw's relig'un an' maw's brains, an' ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore

... arraign thee, Hoary with all unclean infamy, worthy to die; First should a tongue, I doubt not, of old so deadly to goodness, Fall extruded, of each vulture a hungry regale; Gouged be the carrion eyes some crow's black maw to replenish, 5 Stomach a dog's fierce teeth harry, ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus

... crossing from Boulogne; and if so the French will soon be here; when God save us all! I've took to drinking neat, for, say I, one may as well have innerds burnt out as shot out, and 'tis a good deal pleasanter for the man that owns 'em. They say that a cannon-ball knocked poor Jim Popple's maw right up into the futtock-shrouds at the Nile, where 'a hung like a nightcap out to dry. Much good to him his obeying his old mother's wish and refusing his ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy

... for Mrs. Maldon. The cutlets were wrapped in newspaper, and Louis rather self-consciously opened the maw of the reticule ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett

... and witty. And Charles Baines, an old time lawyer, Stood here professional top sawyer; He owned a bull dog, arrant thief! Who plundered Agar Yielding's beef; And when friend Yielding sought for law, To deal with canine of such maw, "Why, there is just one simple way," Said Charley, "Make the owner pay;" "I thank you for your judgment brief," Said Agar, "pay me for the beef." "Seven and sixpence worth of prog, Was bolted by your big ...
— Recollections of Bytown and Its Old Inhabitants • William Pittman Lett

... "'Maw,' he'd say, drawlin' a little in his cunnin' way, 'just don't you worry. I'll do all those things, jest like pa said, an' then we'll go an' live in a big house an' you won't have to work so hard any ...
— The Outdoor Girls at the Hostess House • Laura Lee Hope

... bodies were common in those hills, and often were unidentified. The wanderer from the States usually kept his own counsel. None knew who his family might be; and that family, missing a member who disappeared into the maw of the great West of that day of danger, might never know the fate of the ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough

... what is the best food for goldfinches, and whether hemp-seed is injurious to them.—[A very little hemp-seed occasionally is good, and much is very bad, for nearly all birds. The best food is a mixture of canary, millet, oat-grits, and rape or maw-seed, putting about a dozen grains of hemp-seed on the top every day. The bird soon learns the plan, and leaves off scattering the other seed to get at the hemp, as he will ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various

... Half-full and near her setting—midnight. Hark! Through the white mists of this portentous night (Which throng in moving shapes about my way, As they were ghosts of candidates I've slain, To fray their murderer) my open ear, Spacious to maw the noises of the world, Engulfs a footstep. (Enter Estee from his tomb.) Ah, 'tis he, my foe, True to appointment; and so here we fight— Though truly 'twas my firm belief that he Would send regrets, or ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce

... common gear and short slumbers and scanty rest. Toil drove ease far away, and the time ran by at scanty cost. Not as with some men now, the light of whose reason is obscured by insatiate greed with its blind maw. Some one of these clad in a covering of curiously wrought raiment effeminately guides the fleet-footed (steed), and unknots his dishevelled locks, and lets his hair fly ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")

... A brother's body borne From where, from country, king, and law, He went his gallant sword to draw; But swept within destruction's maw, From her had he been torn. She sat and sung with simple tongue, When none could hear or ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller

... shtshie! What a spectacle of physical enjoyment! His throat is bare; his face a glowing carbuncle; his body a monstrous cauldron, seething and dripping with overflowing juices. Shade of Hebe! how he swills the tea—how glass after glass of the steaming-hot liquid flows into his capacious maw, and diffuses itself over his entire person! It oozes from every pore of his skin; drops in globules from his forehead; smokes through his shirt; makes a piebald chart of seas and islands over his back; streams down and simmers in his boots! He is saturated with tea, inside ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne

... cannot well imagine what that forest of timbers cost, from the time they were felled in the pineries beyond Washoe Lake, hauled up and around Mount Davidson at atrocious rates of freightage, then squared, let down into the deep maw of the mine and built up there. Twenty ample fortunes would not timber one of the greatest of those silver mines. The Spanish proverb says it requires a gold mine to "run" a silver one, and it is ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... bad," said he. "We uns know that you are true blue, fur if you wasn't you wouldn't be on that privateer; an' if your maw wasn't true blue, she wouldn't a ...
— Marcy The Blockade Runner • Harry Castlemon

... fearfully? I tell you, man, that I prefer my liberty to an imperial throne. But I waste breath with you. Yet, some day, when your crown shall have passed from you and your power have been engulfed in the Borgia's rapacious maw, remember my offer which might have saved you and which with insults you disregarded, as you disregarded the advice your older ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini

... was some truth in this. The huge slaughter-houses that fed a good part of the world were silent and empty, for lack of animal material. The stock yards had nothing to fill their bloody maw, while trains of cars of hogs and steers stood unswitched on the hundreds of sidings about the city. The world would shortly feel this stoppage of its Chicago beef and Armour pork, and the world would grumble and know ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... of earth! was your banquet of power, But the tocsin has burst on your festival hour— 'Tis your knell that it rings! To the popular tiger a prey is decreed, And the maw of Republican hunger will feed On a banquet ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo

... of their rushing toward the crack, it seemed to be flying at them, widening like the jaws of a terrible dragon. But the ice-boat was as fearless and as gaily jaunty as Siegfried. Straight at the black maw with bits of floating ice like the crunching white teeth of a monster, the ...
— The Dozen from Lakerim • Rupert Hughes

... brought him unto, so that the Marshalsea and Newgate were no Strangers unto him. He was born in Hantshire (if it be every whit the more honour to the County for his Birth) a prodigious Pourer forth of Rhime, which he spued from his Maw, as Tom Coriat formerly used to spue Greek, and that with a great pretence to a Poetical Zeal, against the Vices of the Times; which he mightily exclaim'd against in his Abuses Stript and Whipt, his Motto, Brittains Remembrancer, &c. with other Satyrical Works ...
— The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687) • William Winstanley

... maw," he will call in to his wife. "Wonder where they're headed fer?" His wife will come to the door and look apathetically at the receding dust cloud, and go back somewhere,—perhaps to put fresh soap in the tents to melt. Toward evening the cars are very likely ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower

... stage of the journey was through a dreary wood. Here they were exposed to many unseen dangers. Beasts of prey sprang out upon and devoured them. A big bird swooped down and carried aloft some poor wretch whose fate it was to fill the hungry maw of a baby bird. And many an unfortunate, getting entangled in a soft gray curtain of silk that hung across the path, struggled vainly to extricate himself, till the hairy monster which had woven the snare ...
— Miss Elliot's Girls • Mrs Mary Spring Corning

... and many people were abroad; but for the first six miles he saw nobody but strangers, all hurrying to their several destinations for the night, travellers wending their way into the great metropolis, and carts carrying to its devouring maw the food for the next day. Between the sixth and seventh milestone, however, where the moon was just seen raising her yellow horn beside the village spire, he beheld a man mounted upon a powerful horse, riding towards him, who by his military aspect, broad shoulders, ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James

... one line to thank you for your note and to say that the Bishop of Oxford[35] wrote the Quarterly Review (paid L60), aided by Owen. In the Edinburgh Owen no doubt praised himself. Mr. Maw's Review in the Zoologist is one of the best, and staggered me in parts, for I did not see the sophistry of parts. I could lend you any which you might wish to see; but you would soon be tired. Hopkins and Pictet in France are ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant

... mothers whose sons had fallen like autumn leaves from the Rapidan to the Appomattox. The cries and wails of the thousands of orphans went up to high Heaven pleading for those fathers who had left them to fill the unsatiate maw of cruel, relentless war. The tears of thousands and thousands of widows throughout the length and breadth of the Union fell like scalding waters upon the souls of the men who were responsible for this holocaust. Their ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert

... for an hour. There was nothing. Bleak cold night on the Moon here beneath us. A touch of fading sunlight upon the Apennines. Up near the South Pole, Tycho with its radiating open rills stood like a grim dark maw. ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings

... white of Julia's beautiful eyes showed as she turned indignantly on the speaker. "I wish, cousin Sally, you'd just let up talking to me about that money. You know as well as I do that I allowed to maw I wouldn't take a cent of it from the first! I might have had all the gowns and bonnets"—with a look at Miss Sally's bows—"I wanted from her; she even offered to take me to St. Louis for a rig-out—if I'd been willing to take blood money. But I'd rather stick to this old sleazy ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... rail at speculation are generally quite unaware that their own inexorable demand for goods at low prices is one of the principal efficient causes of that of which they complain. They do not know that the capacious maw of the insatiable public is yearly filled with millions on millions of shirtings and sheetings, and other articles of prime necessity, without one farthing of profit to the jobber. The outside world reason from the assumption, that the jobber might, but will not, avoid taking considerable ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various

... by this lad, I read— As I guide others, so the boy guides me— The frustrate signs of oracles grown dumb. O King, thy willful temper ails the State, For all our shrines and altars are profaned By what has filled the maw of dogs and crows, The flesh of Oedipus' unburied son. Therefore the angry gods abominate Our litanies and our burnt offerings; Therefore no birds trill out a happy note, Gorged with the carnival of human gore. O ponder ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles

... his wings; his shadow hurtles across the fields, and in an instant you see him quietly perched upon some low tree or decayed stub in a swamp or meadow, with reminiscences of frogs and mice stirring in his maw. ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs

... worser nor nobody else! Ast Mammy, ast Uncle Jed! He's got to sleep somewheres when his maw fergits to come home! Ever'body goes an' picks on Danny 'cause he ain't got nobody to take up fer him. 'T ain't fair!" Nance ended her tirade in a burst ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice

... conjured up infernal spirits to reveal to them futurity. Their horrid ingredients were toads, bats, and serpents, the eye of a newt, and the tongue of a dog, the leg of a lizard, and the wing of the night-owl, the scale of a dragon, the tooth of a wolf, the maw of the ravenous salt-sea shark, the mummy of a witch, the root of the poisonous hemlock (this to have effect must be digged in the dark), the gall of a goat, and the liver of a Jew, with slips of the yew tree that roots ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb

... Europe, false and ruthless to itself, was rending its own bosom with its own hands, which was setting up terror as the order of the day, establishing for the punishment of plotters a pitiless tribunal to whose devouring maw it was soon to deliver up its own members; but which through it all, with calm and thoughtful brow, the patroness of science and friend of all things beautiful, was reforming the calendar, instituting technical schools, decreeing competitions in painting ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France

... remarked their visitor, wisely. "And what about your Paw and Maw?" he inquired of Cis, who knew names and dates and facts about her parents, but was completely in the dark as to the whereabouts of any living kinspeople. She had lived in a flat in the next block till her father died. When her mother married Tom Barber, she had moved out of her birthplace ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates

... snow in the Cumberland Gap. He's stopped off thaw to shoot the—ahem!—the wild torkey—a great passion with the Jedge. His half-uncle, Gineral Johnson, of Awkinso, was a torkey-killer of high celebrity. He was a Deshay on his Maw's side. I s'pose you haven't the torkey in ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend

... mouth and even maw; * Yet trees and beasts to it are daily bread: Well fed it thrives and shows a lively life, * But give it water ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton

... is still in his infancy. We have an indigenous land-shark whose maw is so capacious that the rapacity of his appetite in no wise keeps pace with its lightning-like digestion. Congressman William Steel Holman, of Indiana, one of the purest statesmen of these corrupt times, and one of the most thoroughly informed men of the country upon the question of ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune

... spak the Duke, and flyted on his cook, I regaird it as a sensible aspersion, That I would sup ava', an' satiate my maw With the bluid of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... in M. Mabeuf in a low voice. "Yes, it is true that there was a dragon, which, from the depths of its cave, spouted flame through his maw and set the heavens on fire. Many stars had already been consumed by this monster, which, besides, had the claws of a tiger. Bouddha went into its den and succeeded in converting the dragon. That is a good book that you are reading, Mother ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... revelation of the struggle of human souls caught in the maw of machine-made science, I found the picture screen a dull dead thing, and I left the hall and wandered for miles, it seemed, past endless confusion of meaningless revelry. Everywhere was music and gaming and laughter. Men and girls lounged and danced, or spun the wheels of fortune or sat at tables ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings

... ten are thirty, and ten are forty-five—it is just thirty years since the Jacobites were up before! It would seem that half a human life is not sufficient to fill the cravings of a Scotchman's maw, for English gold." ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper

... beggar, and, in addition, have all plagues and misfortune. Now you are going your way [wherever your heart's pleasure calls you] while you ought to preserve the property of your master and mistress, for which service you fill your crop and maw, take your wages like a thief, have people treat you as a nobleman; for there are many that are even insolent towards their masters and mistresses, and are unwilling to do them a favor or service by which to protect ...
— The Large Catechism by Dr. Martin Luther

... there you'll find him. I've watched him often, since Smith first put me up to his tricks, and I have never missed him. There he is making money, and wearing his soul out because he can't make half enough to satisfy his greedy maw. His covetousness is awful. There's nothing that he doesn't speckylate in; there's hardly a man of business in his congregation that he doesn't, either by himself or others, lend money out at usury. I mean ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various

... we didn't care to go back to Hengist and Horsa, and when they let loose a lot of 'Debboroughs' and 'Daybrooks' upon us, maw kicked! We've got a drawing ten yards long, that looks like a sour apple tree, with lots of Desboroughs hanging up on the branches like last year's pippins, and I guess about as worm-eaten. We took that well enough, but when it came to giving us a map of straight lines ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte

... with this fair portion of the earth if I had not snatched it from obscurity in the very nick of time, at the moment that those matters herein recorded were about entering into the widespread insatiable maw of oblivion—if I had not dragged them out, as it were, by the very locks, just as the monster's adamantine fangs were closing upon them for ever! And here have I, as before observed, carefully collected, collated, and arranged them, scrip and scrap, "punt en punt, gat en gat," and ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving

... could result from investigating the causes of the failure of James II.'s designs on civil and religious liberty, than from an inquiry into the artifices by which Jack-the-Giant-killer contrived to escape the maw of the monsters against whom he had pitted himself. What is commonly understood, however, by a Science of History is something far beyond the idea entertained of it by such temperate reasoners as Mr. John Stuart Mill and Mr. Fitzjames Stephen. The science, for the reality of which M. Comte in ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton

... consumer of the brave!—how shall I adequately apostrophise thee? I have looked in thy jaundiced face, whilst thy maw seemed insatiate. But once didst thou lay thy scorched hand upon my frame; but the sweet voice of woman startled thee from thy prey, and the flame of love was stronger than even thy desolating fire. But now is not the time to tell of this, but rather of the ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard

... is Komal. For ages the enemies of Tario have been hurled to this pit to fill his maw, for ...
— Thuvia, Maid of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... why she showed the scouts this partiality, the girl said: "Because I'm going to be a scout myself, as soon as that new Manual gets here. I wrote fer it t'other day, and I've got five schoolgirls ready to start with me. Maw says she will ask the teacher to ...
— Girl Scouts in the Adirondacks • Lillian Elizabeth Roy

... having more than served to fill Their hungry maw, invite from foreign wood Beyond the mountain, wolves of greedier will, With them to be partakers of their food. The bones which Thrasymene and Trebbia fill, And Cannae, seem but few to what are strewed On ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto

... eclipse was but for an 'hour.' The victory of the darkness was brief, and it led to the eternal triumph of the Light. By dying He is the death of death. This Jonah inflicts deadly wounds on the monster in whose maw He lay for three days. The power of darkness was shivered to atoms in the moment of its proudest triumph, like a wave which is beaten into spray as it rises in a towering crest and flings itself ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... false security. In less than ten minutes from that time the sailor was within six feet of the "hammer-head's" open mouth,—in imminent danger of being craunched between those quadruple tiers of terrible teeth, and taken into the monster's capacious maw. ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid

... combs of distant Devonshire, from sunny Sussex wold, From where their Durham pastures the stately short-horns hold; From Herefordshire marches, from fenny Cambridge flat, For London's maw they gather—those oxen fair ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton

... field; of all those lovers dreaming of love in summer dalliance, and of cottages among figs and olives; of all the vigorous manhood and ripe womanhood, with all the skill and courage of successful life in them,—not a tithe was saved. The ghastly maw of the waters covered them and swallowed them. A few sprang, among crashing timbers, on a floor laden with impetuous water—the many perhaps never waked at all, or woke to but one short prayer. The few who were saved hardly knew how they ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various

... that gave thee such power over thy fellows, there is not left so much as a spike of thistle-down for the wind to waft from thy sight. For all thou hast had, there is nothing to show. Where is the friendship in which thou mightst have invested thy money, in place of burying it in the maw of mammon? Troops of the dead might now be coming to greet thee with love and service, hadst thou made thee friends with thy money; but, alas! to thee it was not money, but mammon, for thou didst love it—not for the righteousness ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald

... father came so perilously nigh to entering upon a subterranean voyage to the far-away Pacific. And, luckily as it appeared, they were just in time to see that "big suck" drag another huge tree down into its ever hungry maw. ...
— The Lost City • Joseph E. Badger, Jr.

... as good as Marse Bob. My maw was a puny little woman that wasn't able to do work in the fields, and she puttered round the house for the Missus, doin' little odd jobs. I played round with little Miss Sallie and little Mr. Bob, and I ate with them and ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves. - Texas Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration

... in doubt on a certain point and, for that matter, am still in doubt on it: I am in doubt as to which of two men most fitly typified the spirit of the German Army in this war—the general feeding his men by thousands into the maw of destruction because it was an order, or the pot-wrestling private soldier, the camp cook, going to death with a coffee boiler in his ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb

... sovereign disdain, yawning in their faces, seemed to feel a stirring of anger. First it sniffed and uttered a rumbling growl, it stretched out its forefeet and unsheathed its claws, then it got up, raised its head, shook its mane, opened its huge maw and directed at Tartarin a most ...
— Tartarin de Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet

... fish was opened by the cook, Who suddenly, with wondering look, Runs up, and utters these glad sounds: "Within the fish's maw, behold, I've found, great lord, thy ring of gold! Thy fortune ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... to have been swept clear of ice and snow. They were shorn of their winter shroud. They stood up like black, unsightly, broken teeth, against a cavernous background of fire burning in the maw of some Moloch colossus. They stood out bared to the bone of the ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum

... seeing them approach almost within range of his hideous maw, gathered himself into a coil, and prepared to strike. His eyes scintillated like sparks of fire, and seemed to fascinate the birds; for, instead of retiring, they each moment drew nearer and nearer, now alighting on the ground, then flapping ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid

... has proved sufficiently strong to save it from the hungry maw of a famishing government, and to stand unaffected by the revolutions that surround it; and now and then, when too bitterly assailed by some political reformer, it finds relief in the assassination of the assailant, as in the case of the eloquent member of the last Congress, ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson

... not a dry-eyed one, women in spite of themselves with lips whitening, men grim with pride and an innermost bleeding, sagged suddenly, thinning and trickling back into the great, impersonal maw of the city. Apart from the rush of the exodus, a youth remained at the rail, gazing out and quivering for the smell of war. Finally, he too, ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst

... work, prest work, Net work, most curious pearl or rare Italian cut work, Fine fern stitch, finny stitch, new stitch, and chain stitch, Brave bred stitch, fisher stitch, Irish stitch, and queen's stitch, The Spanish stitch, rosemary stitch, and maw stitch, The smarting whip stitch, back stitch, and the cross stitch.— All these are good, and these we must allow, And these are ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford

... and afternoon, piloted by a naval lieutenant who was in charge of the embarkation. I perched myself high up on the flying-bridge and watched the busy scene below. In the next dock was the Goorkha, into whose commodious maw were pouring the 2nd Lincolnshire Regiment, the 9th Field Company Royal Engineers, the 14th Brigade Staff, the Cavalry Brigade Field Hospital, the Fifth Division Field Hospital, and No. 12 Company Army Medical ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young

... to the Palais-Royal came, Its splendor almost struck him dumb. "I say, whose house is that there here?" "House! Je vous n'entends pas, Monsieur."— "What, Nongtongpaw again!" cries John; "This fellow is some mighty Don: No doubt he 's plenty for the maw, I'll breakfast ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick

... back into the white and green of a giant comber directly behind. The onrushing breaker reared its cruel head . . . then just as another rain-squall broke, hiding it from view, it curled down swift, terrifying, and the whale-boat disappeared in its foaming maw. . ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby

... hath her victories No less renowned than war: new foes arise, Threatening to bind our souls with secular chains. Help us to save free conscience from the paw Of hireling wolves whose gospel is their maw. ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various

... hard sense of the Washington Government wasted no time in utilizing the reaction on its people. The press and the public clamored for a victim, and General Scott was thrown into its maw unhesitatingly. The old hero was replaced by the new, and General McClellan—whose untried and inexperienced talent could hardly have augured his becoming, as he did, the best general of the northern army—was elevated to his place to please ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon

... because the fatal day had come again, when the fourteen victims were to be chosen by lot; and the old people feared lest their sons or daughters might be taken, and the youths and damsels dreaded lest they themselves might be destined to glut the ravenous maw of that detestable man-brute. ...
— Tanglewood Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... there is bestiality and obscenity about both pain and pleasure when in their voracious maw they devour the magic of the unfathomable world. Thus it may be noted that most great and heroic souls hold their supreme pain at a distance from them, with a proud gesture of contempt, and go down at the last with their complex vision unruffled and unimpaired. There is indeed a still deeper "final ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys

... Crusaders at Little Crosby, and it was no fault of hers that we did not find it. We found one of the many old crosses for which Little Crosby is named, and this was quite as much as we merited. It stood at the intersection of the streets in what seemed the fragment of a village, not yet lost in the vast maw of the city, and it calmed all the simple neighborhood, so that we sat down at its foot and rested a long, long minute till the tram came by and took us back into the ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells

... highly rewarded by the liberality of Princes and by the splendid ambition of States, and even after death kept alive in the eyes of the world by the testimony of statues, tombs, medals, and other memorials of that kind; none the less, it is clearly seen that the ravening maw of time has not only diminished by a great amount their own works and the honourable testimonies of others, but has also blotted out and destroyed the names of all those who have been kept alive by any other means than by the right vivacious and ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Volume 1, Cimabue to Agnolo Gaddi • Giorgio Vasari

... the big sister as she stood in the doorway and looked down the street toward the group of small boys: "Chakey, come in alreaty and eat youseself. Maw she's on the table ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers

... him, massa. His paw am dead, an' his maw has a dozen or so of chilun, an' dey are so pooh dat the maw can't get clothes 'nuff to cover dem. Dey say as how dis boy am always braggin' of his dog, and dat the ...
— A Little Florida Lady • Dorothy C. Paine

... lungs to speak of. Ain't no wonder he's sorter wild like. He takes after his grandpaw, my ole mars'. Lor', honey, de mint-juleps jus' nachelly ooze outen de pores ob his grandpaw's skin! But Miss Rufe she ain't like none ob dem Nelsons; she favors her maw. ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice

... opening over one of the mangers. She was the sole recognized occupant of the stable. In a dark corner Tunis Latham saw a huge grain box, for once the Ball farm had supported several span of oxen and a considerable dairy herd, its cover raised and its maw gaping wide. There was something moving there in the murk, ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper

... Sea Monster was quite terrific enough looking before, like the slimy black head of something huge coming out of the water. Now it looks as if it had opened a cavernous maw" (I'm sure he nabbed that from some book) "as black as ink, ready to swallow any unfortunate mariner which came near. Below the base of this fearsome hole roars the cruel surf, ready to engulf a boat which would ...
— Us and the Bottleman • Edith Ballinger Price

... to toast That garment 't were rude to Do more than allude to, Perceived, from his breathing and nodding, the views Of his guest were directed to "taking a snooze:" So he caught up a lamp in his huge dirty paw, With (as Blogg used to tell it) "Mounseer, swivvy maw!" And "marshal'd" him so "The way he should go," Up stairs to an attic, large, gloomy, and low, Without table or chair. Or a movable there, Save an old-fashion'd bedstead, much out of repair, That stood at the end most remov'd from ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton

... it. "Maw," he returns, strivin' to disengage himse'f, "I was never mistook about nothin' in my life but once, an' that's when I shifts from baldface whiskey to hard cider on a temp'rance argyooment. Let me go, woman, till I drill the miscreant an' ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis

... and seized her; he caused the hurricane which waited behind him to pass in front of him, and, when Tiamat opened her mouth to swallow him, he thrust the hurricane into it so that the monster could not close her jaws again. The mighty wind filled her paunch, her breast swelled, her maw was split. Marduk gave a straight thrust with his lance, burst open the paunch, pierced the interior, tore the breast, then bound the monster and deprived her of life. When he had vanquished Tiamat, who had been their leader, her army was disbanded, her host was scattered, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... maiden-flower let him come within a stalk's length, so near that the white splendour of his sleeping lady gleamed within arms' reach, then the great beak was opened, the great claws made a clutch, the gallant's head was yanked from his neck, and as it went tumbling down the maw of the feathered thing his white legs fell spinning through space, and lay knotting themselves in agony upon the ground for a minute or two before they relaxed and became flaccid in the repose of death. Another and another vegetable ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold

... shark, which had, since its first appearance, followed the boat. The still more alarming announcement was that several of their hams, which they had fancied so well cured, were also getting bad. Some were consigned to the maw of the voracious shark, though others, which were only slightly tainted, were kept until the continued heat rendered them uneatable. Pat could not make it out, but it was discovered on examination that neither the smoke nor salt had ...
— The Three Admirals • W.H.G. Kingston

... the son, and is not even a part of the precious stones to fall to your share? Why Katharina? Just a little diamond, a tiny opal might well add to the earthly happiness of the young, though the old must lay up treasure in heaven.—Do not be a fool! The Church's maw is full enough, and really a ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... suddenly, capriciously, sportively, as he sometimes comes; as he had come to Newcastle the summer before, while yet the rest of England was untouched. He had wandered all but harmless about the West country that summer; as if his maw had been full glutted five years before, when he sat for many a week upon the Dartmoor hills, amid the dull brown haze, and sun-burnt bents, and dried-up watercourses of white dusty granite, looking far and wide over the plague-struck ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley

... "And you know, Maw, such a terrible slide has not occurred here-abouts in twenty years," quickly added Polly, dropping back into her ranch vernacular in her anxiety. "It may be another twenty years before such ...
— Polly and Eleanor • Lillian Elizabeth Roy

... "That's what my maw used to say when I'd been swimmin' on Sunday," observed the hill billy as he let his lank form ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby

... side. A moment before, they had been only pines, only so many trees. Now each was different, each had its place in the mind of the man who studied them with a new interest and a new enthusiasm, even though they might fall, one after another, into the maw of the saw for the ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper

... prospects, I was not without hope that that Providence, which, at the very moment when hunger threatened me with dissolution, and when I might easily have been engulfed in the maw of the sea, had cast me upon those barren rocks, would finally direct some ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London

... of his plunderers. Nothing was too small or great for his rapacious maw. He came up the marble steps of the studio ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short

... that a kind Providence had thrust into her hands. How long she hung there she never knew, but finally a little strength returned to her, and presently she realized that it was a pendant creeper hanging low from a jungle tree upon the bank that had saved her from the river's rapacious maw. ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... man-devouring! will thy maw never be full? Know, fair youth, that you are going to torment and to death; for he who met you (I will requite your kindness to another) is a robber and a murderer of men. Whatsoever stranger he meets he entices him hither ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes

... unread to their authors, with a civil note of "extremely sorry to decline," &c. "The Man of Feeling" would be made to feel his insignificance. "Thinks I to Myself" might think in vain; and the "Cottagers of Glenburnie" retain their rural obscurity. So much for the measure of the maw of the circulating library. Of its taste and palate it is difficult to speak with moderation; for those of Caffraria or Otaheite might be put to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various

... to contain a letter in its belly? Ovid tells us of a flower into which Hyacinthus was metamorphosed, that bears letters on its leaves, which Virgil recommended as a miracle to the Royal Society of his day; but no age nor nation hath ever recorded a bird with a letter in its maw. ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding

... seemed, very amicably; but on closer observation, I saw that they were engaged in a cannibal warfare among themselves. Now and then a small one would fall a victim, and immediately disappear down the maw of his voracious conqueror. Every moment, however, the tyrant of the pool, a monster about three inches long, with staring goggle eyes, would slowly issue forth with quivering fins and tail from under the shelving bank. The small fry at this would suspend their hostilities, ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.

... but what they felt: what passed in the hearts of men perishing at sea, in sight of land, houses, fires on the hearth, and outstretched hands, and in the hearts of the heroes that ran their boats into the surf and Death's maw to save them, and of the lookers on, admiring, fearing, shivering, glowing, and of the women that sobbed and prayed ashore with their backs to the sea, just able to risk lover, husband, and son for the honor of manhood and the love of Christ, but not able to look on at their own ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade

... that round chalk maw, and the green slopes and channels and half-circle hollows were brought a mile-stride higher Steynham by the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... an oyster. As he possessed no higher attribute, and neither sacrificed nor vitiated any spiritual endowment by devoting all his energies and ingenuities to subserve the delight and profit of his maw, it always pleased and satisfied me to hear him expatiate on fish, poultry, and butcher's meat, and the most eligible methods of preparing them for the table. His reminiscences of good cheer, however ancient ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne



Words linked to "Maw" :   gob, cakehole, oral cavity, trap



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