"Ostrich" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... slippers, pantalons of cashmere, with feather pillows worn as a protection strapped over the knees, a bolster being wound round the body to safeguard the chest, ribs, and spinal column. A broad gay, coloured satin sash with a cocked hat and ostrich feathers completes the costume. The last to indicate, owing to the risks and dangers in which the combatants may be involved, its association with le vrai champs de bataille, to which, but for the "new provisions" it would bear such a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 1, 1890 • Various
... for Flamby. At one moment she felt that she could never again suffer the presence of Sir Jacques, at another that if she must remain in Lower Charleswood and not die of shame she must pretend that she did not suspect him to have been the intruder. The subterfuge, ostrich-like, woman-like, finally was adopted; and meeting Sir Jacques in Babylon Lane she managed to greet him civilly, employing her mother's poor state of health as an excuse for discontinuing her visits to Hatton Towers. But if ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... . . . And look at me! My father was merchant of ostrich feathers in Brussels. If I had been content to go in his business, I would 'ave been rich. But I was born to roll—"rolling stone"to voyage is stronger than myself. Luck! . . And you, Ma'moiselle, shall I tell your fortune? [He looks in ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... bumpy cattle, The tiger from his lair, Go down into the battle Beside the timid hare. The elephant and camel, The ostrich and emu, Weird things, both bird and mammal, And old ...
— War Rhymes • Abner Cosens
... wealth of a world can give; I saw in the arena below animals of the most extraordinary kind, and which have rarely been seen living in modern Europe—the giraffe, the zebra, the rhinoceros, and the ostrich from the deserts of Africa beyond the Niger, the hippopotamus from the Upper Nile, and the royal tiger and the gnu from the banks of the Ganges. Looking over Rome, which, in its majesty of palaces and temples, and in its colossal aqueducts bringing water ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... Doves, he discarded his garments of hide, including the picturesque zebra-skin trousers, and appeared dressed in smart European clothes which he had contrived to obtain from Durban, and a large hat with a white ostrich feather, that struck Rachel as even more ludicrous than the famous trousers. Also he was continuously sending presents of game and of skins, or of rare karosses, that is, fur rugs, which he ordered to ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... do live forever; nor do their laws know any change, however we in our poor wigs and church-tippets may attempt to read their laws. To steal into Heaven,—by the modern method, of sticking ostrich-like your head into fallacies on Earth, equally as by the ancient and by all conceivable methods,—is forever forbidden. High-treason is the name of that attempt; and it continues to be punished as such. Strange enough: here once more was a kind of Heaven-scaling Ixion; and to him, as to the ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... moments he dashed past the window in hot pursuit of a fowl of venerable appearance, but of a style of going that would have put to shame any ostrich that Dr. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2, No. 27, October 1, 1870 • Various
... but it was intimated to a few neighbors that they would be welcomed at Fernleigh on a certain evening. At this gathering the most regal figure, who, in the ancient finery of her apparel, wearing a headdress topped with an ostrich plume, may be said to have eclipsed the most distinguished guests, was Susan Augusta Cooper, granddaughter of the novelist, representing, as it were, the very foundation of the village. Miss Cooper was one of the most characteristic survivals of the old regime in Cooperstown. ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... would support us in our self-deception. So it did, for a time. But, being in the main composed of very fairly honest and sensible persons, it has grown tired of sentimental lying, of helping us to bury our heads ostrich-like in the sand. It has gone over to the side of truth—that very far from flattering or pretty truth to which I have just alluded—with this result, among others, that my engagement has come to an abrupt and really ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... mounted in silver and made into a cup, perhaps a century or more ago, is by no means to be despised. Some are beautifully polished and ornamented with incised work. Contemporary with the earlier specimens are pots made of ostrich eggs, mounted in silver, regarded of great value in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Some of the university colleges possess fine examples, and there are many in the hands of London silversmiths. Figs. 23 and 24 represent two cocoanut cups with feet of silver, one ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... there's cold grouse, sir; there's cold pheasant, sir; there's cold peacock, sir; cold swan, sir; cold ostrich, sir,' &c. &c. ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... dingy dreariness of the picture-place, Turned very nearly bright, Takes on a certain dismal grace, And shows not all a scandal to the ground. The very blind man pottering on the kerb, Among the posies and the ostrich feathers And the rude voices touched with all the weathers Of all the varying year, Shares in the universal alms of light. The windows, with their fleeting, flickering fires, The height and spread of frontage shining sheer, The glistering signs, the rejoicing roofs and spires— 'Tis El ...
— The Song of the Sword - and Other Verses • W. E. Henley
... and in other countries, such natural objects as cocoanut shells, and ostrich eggs ...
— Origin and Development of Form and Ornament in Ceramic Art. • William Henry Holmes
... heard the whisper, "Miss Hungerford, you are driving me to the last extreme of idol worship. I shall, keep on addressing my petitions to that ostrich tip in your hat until you give me, at least, the benefit of ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... entered an extensive grove of picturesque cameel-dorn trees, clad in young foliage of the most delicious green. On gaining a gentle eminence about a mile beyond this grove, I looked forth upon an extensive hollow, where I beheld, for the first time for many days, a fine old cock ostrich, which quickly observed us, and dashed away to our left. I had ceased to devote my attention to the ostrich, and was straining my eyes in an opposite direction, when Kleinboy called out to me, "Dar loup de ould carle;" and turning my eyes to the retreating ostrich, I beheld ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... emeralds. The wheat ears themselves were as red as rubies, and each bore five sparkling grains as white as snow, as sweet as honey, and as fragrant as musk. At first the grains were as big as an ostrich's egg, but in the time of Enoch they diminished to the size of a goose's egg, and in Elijah's to that of a hen, while at the commencement of the common era, they shrank so small as not to be larger than grapes, according to ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... lionesses, also one or two giraffes, some camels, a polar bear,—who plunged into a pool of water for bits of cake,—and two black bears, who sat on their haunches or climbed poles; besides a wilderness of monkeys, some parrots and macaws, an ostrich, various ducks, and other animal and ornithological trumpery; some skins of snakes so well stuffed that I took them for living serpents till J——- discovered the deception, and an aquarium, with a good many common ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... black face went into strange contortions of embarrassment. It tried to hide like the ostrich, but the Scouts in front parted and revealed a little negro boy in Scout uniform with a tenderfoot badge pinned ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... envelope of furs in which he had been wrapped by Servadac and the lieutenant, they found themselves face to face with a shrivelled little man, about five feet two inches high, with a round bald head, smooth and shiny as an ostrich's egg, no beard unless the unshorn growth of a week could be so described, and a long hooked nose that supported a huge pair of spectacles such as with many near-sighted people seems to have become a part of ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... in some respects quite as remarkable, bore not the slightest resemblance to this of Mistress Madison's. It was a Turkish turban of white satin and velvet, with a jeweled crescent in front clasping a bunch of nodding white ostrich-plumes. Her gown, of pale pink satin, was heavily trimmed with ermine, and she wore gold chains about her waist and wrists, and carried a jeweled snuff-box in her hand. She was truly regal-looking, and I did not ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... expression also in the clothes he wore. Listen to this description of him: "His fighting jacket shone with dazzling buttons and was covered with gold braid; his hat was looped up with a golden star and decorated with a black ostrich plume; his fine buff gauntlets reached to the elbow; around his waist was tied a splendid yellow sash, and his spurs were pure gold." These spurs, of which he was immensely proud, were a gift from Baltimore women. His battle-flag was a gorgeous ...
— Stories of Later American History • Wilbur F. Gordy
... then it does not—and it's all over. I will set to work, with my teeth clenched, and make myself be quiet; it's as well, it's not the first time I have had to hold myself in. And why have I run away, why am I stopping here sticking my head in a bush, like an ostrich? A fearful thing to face trouble... nonsense! Anton," he called aloud, "order the coach to be brought round at once. Yes," he thought again, "I must grin and bear it, I must keep myself ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... like the d'Harcourt, crowded at night with noisy women tawdry in ostrich plumes, cheap feather boas, and much rouge. The d'Harcourt at midnight is ablaze with light, but the crowd is common and you move on up the boulevard under the trees, past the shops full of Quartier fashions—velvet coats, with standing collars buttoning ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... conversing, Ucatella, who was very fond of Phoebe, but abhorred wagons, stepped out and stalked by the side, like an ostrich, a camelopard, or a Taglioni; nor did the effort with which she subdued her stride to the pace of the procession appear: it was the poetry of walking. Christopher admired it a moment; but the noble expanse tempted him, and he strode forth like a giant, his lungs inflating in ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... that the Gospels present to us, to the man who claims to be His Vicegerent on earth. See him go, crowned three times over, on a throne borne on men's shoulders, with the silver trumpets shrilling before him and the ostrich fans coming on behind, and you will understand why the world cannot take the Church seriously. Look at the court that is about him, all purple and scarlet, and set by that the little ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson
... had a pleasant ride over a valley-plain, between hedges of cactus in flower and bushes of red roses, past graceful clumps of bamboo waving like ostrich feathers. By-and-by drizzling rain came on and compelled us to seek shelter in the only inn in a poor out-of-the-way hamlet. But I could not stop here, because the best room in the inn was already occupied by a military officer of some distinction, a colonel, ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... night! No air that stirred; the black smoke from the funnels of the mail steamer Zanzibar lay low over the surface of the sea like vast, floating ostrich plumes that vanished one by one in the starlight. Benita Beatrix Clifford, for that was her full name, who had been christened Benita after her mother and Beatrix after her father's only sister, leaning idly over ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... by a solemn oath, that he never would lay any claim to the throne of England, or do any thing to disturb King Henry in his possession of it. He cried out, in a loud voice, in the hearing of the people, "Long live King Henry, and Prince Edward his son!" He wore an ostrich feather, too, in his armor, which was the badge of Prince Edward. The people of York were satisfied with these protestations, ...
— Richard III - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... writers now-a-days. Somehow, he began to think of the drawing-rooms of a former generation, and of the pictures of herself his grandmother had drawn for him many a time. Had she a high waist to that white silk dress in which she ran away to Gretna? and did she have ostrich feathers on her head? Anyhow, he entirely believed what she had told him of the men of that generation. They were capable of doing daring things for the sake of a sweetheart. Of course his grandfather had done boldly and well in whirling the girl off to the Scottish borders, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... discovery of a young woman of loose character who looked much like the Queen. Whether her name was d'Essigny or Gay d'Oliva, is uncertain; she is usually called by the latter. She was hired and taught; and with immense precautions, this ostrich of a cardinal was one night introduced into the gardens of the Trianon, and shown a little nook among the thickets where a stately female in the similitude of the Queen received him with soft spoken words of kindly greeting, allowed him to kneel and kiss a ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... forest,—Brocheliaunde, I think. I knew it must be autumn, for the grass was brown and every leaf upon the trees was brown. And she too was all in brown, and her big hat, too, was of brown felt, and about it curled a long ostrich feather dyed brown; and my first thought, as I now remember, was how in the dickens could any mediaeval lady have come by such a garb, for I knew, somehow, that this was a woman ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... has nothing whatever to fear from group interests so long as it doesn't try to play the ostrich in regard to them. So the burden of national crises is squarely upon the dominant classes who fight so foolishly against the emergent ones. That is what precipitates violence, that is what renders social co-operation ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... evergreens; the yellow coconut palms on the nearest spur of hill throwing back the tender-blue of the higher mountains; the huge central group of trees—Saman, {81c} Sandbox, {81d} and Fig, with the bright ostrich plumes of a climbing palm towering through the mimosa-like foliage of the Saman; and Erythrinas {81e} (Bois immortelles, as they call them here), their all but leafless boughs now blazing against the blue sky with vermilion flowers, trees of red coral sixty feet in height. ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... offensive manner. He ate on his right grinders only, and threw his head over his right shoulder as he snapped the meat. When he had finished, it struck him that he had been behaving strangely, for he said apologetically, 'I don't think I ever felt so hungry in my life. I've bolted like an ostrich.' ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... is sometimes spoken of as the order Struthiones from the ostrich (Struthio), which is its typical form. Sometimes these keelless birds are called Ratitae. Besides the ostrich, the rhea, cassowary, and emeu are included within the group; also the small and nocturnal Apteryx of New Zealand and those giants of featherdom, the huge species of dinornis, ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... has the hinder part developed to an enormous size, so that the graceful peacock-like neck and shoulders appear as if lost in the huge proportions of the body, and the little wings are totally unfit to raise it in the air; while it lays almost daily eggs as large as those of the ostrich and of peculiar richness and flavour. Nearly all the domestic birds kept for the sake of eggs or feathers have wings that look as if they had been clipped, and are incapable of flight. Creatures valued for their ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... be? It is so funny how you put on these clothes, like the ostrich, and think no one will guess who you are. If you wore his suit of feathers you would still look like British ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... was to attack the employers one by one— to call out the hands of one particular workshop until the employers were subdued and obeyed the commands of the Union; and then to attack another employer in the same way. The sagacity of this policy very much resembled that of the ostrich, which hides its head in hole and thinks it is concealed. The employers knew the drift of the policy, and took ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... of beasts and sheep we bought from them, they would eat them half raw and all bloody, in a most beastly and disgusting manner. They had bracelets about their arms of copper or ivory, and were decorated with many ostrich feathers and shells. The women were habited like the men, and were at first very shy; but when here on our return voyage, they became quite familiar, even lifting their rat-skins: But they are very loathsome objects, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... containing no tree or shrub of any sort,—nothing but one dense mass of ferns. In the centre was a patch of the sensitive fern (Onoclea sensibilis), while around this, and filling nearly the entire circle, was a magnificent thicket of the ostrich fern (Onoclea struthiopteris), with sensibilis growing hidden and scattered underneath. About the edge were various other species, notably Aspidium Goldianum, which I here found for the first time, and Aspidium aculeatum, var. Braunii. ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... ambergris," says Mas'udi, "is found on the islands and coasts of the Sea of Zinj (Eastern Africa); it is round, of a pale blue, and sometimes as big as an ostrich egg.... These are morsels which have been swallowed by the fish called Awal. When the sea is much agitated it casts up fragments of amber almost like lumps of rock, and the fish swallowing these is choked thereby, ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... wife. A waste-paper basket by night and a hat by day. Genuine ostrich feathers growing on it. Becoming to all styles of feminine beauty. What am I bid on this sure tickler of the feminine palate? Three dollars? Why, ladies and gents, the dooty on it alone was twelve. It's a Paris hat, ladies. Your sister, your mother, ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly
... "Making ostrich plumes and artificial flowers. It's not factory labor, of course, but that doesn't alter the point that at least half the output of artificial flowers is made by the cramped fingers of children, generally ...
— The Boy With the U.S. Census • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... moving speck—or rather two specks—on the horizon. As they drew nearer it was soon seen to be a Gaucho of the Pampas in full chase of an ostrich. They did not come straight towards our wanderers, but passed within half a mile of them. The picturesque hunter, bending over his steed's neck, with his scarlet poncho streaming behind him, and the bolas whirling round his head, was so eager in the pursuit that he either did not observe, ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... two pet bantam hens laid very small eggs troubled little Johnny. At last he was seized with an inspiration. Johnny's father, upon going to the fowl-run one morning, was surprised at seeing an ostrich egg tied to one of the beams, with this ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... reminiscences. Olim—her name was chronicled on Patrick's night, by every Castle reporter. They made, it is to be lamented, as Irish reporters will make, sad mistakes at times. The once poor injured lady had been attired in canary-colored lute-string, and an ostrich plume remarkable for its enormity while she, the libeled one, had been becomingly arrayed in blue bombazine, and of any plumage imported from Araby the ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various
... Her hands lay idle now in her lap, and she no longer tried to extract the white ostrich feather ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... in clanking chains Urged on by trampling cohorts bronzed and scarred, And wild-eyed wonders snared on Lybian plains, Lion and ostrich ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... entered a country where there were many ostrich farms, a business which was very remunerative. Ostrich chickens cost from twenty- five to fifty dollars apiece. In three years they will furnish plumage worth from twenty-five to thirty dollars each year. A Hottentot told Paul that many of the ostriches that then stood around in sight ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... none at all. But a delicately organized man, like Mr. Bryant, cannot eat them; and those who have enjoyed the genuine strawberries of the garden will not. The number of people, however, with the digestion of an ostrich, is enormous, and in multitudes of homes Wilsons, even when half-ripe, musty, and stale, are devoured with unalloyed delight, under the illusion ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... waistcoat; a large solitary star glittered on his breast, and the grand cross of the Legion of Honour sparkled at his buttonhole; his black neckerchief had been taken off; and his cocked hat lay beside him on a sofa, massively laced, the edges richly ornamented with ostrich down; his head was covered with a red velvet cap, with a thick gold cord twisted two or three turns round it, and ending in two large tassels of heavy bullion; he wore very large epaulets, and his sword had been inadvertently, ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... the young Sweepstakes and Lady Diana will talk enough about it, that's one comfort. Is not it time to think of setting out, sir?' said Hal to his uncle. 'The company, you know, are to meet at the Ostrich at twelve, and the race to begin at one, and Lady Diana's horses, I know, were ordered to be at ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... underlined the definition, in a perfectly natural and yet ingenious and skilful way. The day happens to be Lady Windermere's birthday, and at the beginning of the act her husband has given her a beautiful ostrich-feather fan. When he sends off the invitation, she turns upon him and says, "If that woman crosses my threshold, I shall strike her across the face with this fan." Here, again, many a dramatist might be content to bring down his curtain. The announcement ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... sweltering toads and slimy vipers, a constant dropping of water, with chains too ponderous to lift, but which the parties upon whom they are riveted, clang together as they walk up and down in their cells, and soliloquise. So much for my underground scenery. Above, I people the halls with pages and ostrich feathers, and knights in bright armour, a constant supply of generous wine, and goblets too heavy to lift, which the knights toss off at a draught, as they sit and listen to the ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... There was a woman sitting in the endmost chair just across the aisle in line with them. She had a pale face and looked worn and middle-aged. The effect of "refinement" made on Miriam by the congregation seemed to radiate from her. There was a large ostrich feather fastened by a gleaming buckle against the side of her silky beaver hat. It swept, Miriam found the word during the Psalms, back over her hair. Miriam glancing at her again and again felt that she would like to be near her, watch her and touch her and find out the ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... dozen highholders on a hollow elm, telephone bells shrilled, shouting pressmen came and went, unkempt copy boys trailed back and forth with their festoons of limp galley proof, and Hubbart, with close-set eyes and a forehead like a bisected ostrich egg, sat at the City Desk, calmly presiding ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... strong fibres The brain and nerves, too, we shall find are made up of fibres, and these queer-looking things that are called ganglionic corpuscles. If we take a slice of the bone and examine it, we shall find that it is very like this diagram of a section of the bone of on ostrich, though differing, of course, in some details; and if we take any part whatsoever of the tissue, and examine it, we shall find it all has a minute structure, visible only under the microscope. All these parts constitute microscopic anatomy or "Histology." These parts are constantly ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... woven in all the natural colors. This overskirt was deeply flounced with costly white lace, caught up with bunches of feathers of bright colors. About her shoulders was thrown a fifteen-hundred dollar shawl. She had a head-dress of white ostrich feathers, white lace, gold pendants, and purple velvet. Add to all this a fan, a bouquet of rare flowers, a lace handkerchief, and jewelry almost beyond estimate, and you see Mrs. Judge —- as she appears ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... occurs in most birds; but Nitzsch (in his 'Pterylographie,' 1840, p. 55) states that it is absent in two species of Columba, in several species of Psittacus, in some species of Otis, and in most or all birds of the Ostrich family. It can hardly be an accidental coincidence that the two species of Columba, which are destitute of an oil-gland, have an unusual number of tail-feathers, namely 16, and in ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... but he meant to fathom it, all the same, to the very bottom—to find out why, for example, in Uganda, whoever appears before the king must appear stark naked, while in England, whoever appears before the queen must wear a tailor's sword or a long silk train and a headdress of ostrich-feathers; why, in Morocco, when you enter a mosque, you must take off your shoes and catch a violent cold, in order to show your respect for Allah; while in Europe, on entering a similar religious building, you must uncover your head, no matter how draughty the place may be, since ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... foretell. And first: to make my observation right, I place a statesman full before my sight, A bloated minister in all his gear, With shameless visage and perfidious leer: Two rows of teeth arm each devouring jaw, And ostrich-like his all-digesting maw. My fancy drags this monster to my view, To shew the world his chief reverse in you. Of loud unmeaning sounds, a rapid flood Rolls from his mouth in plenteous streams of mud; With these the court and senate-house he plies, Made up of noise, and impudence, ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... that the landing was no darker for Kirk than any other place, and added: "You're apt to be stepped on here—I nearly smashed you. Hop along and tell Maggie that I'm as hungry as an ostrich." But however hungry Ken may have been as he trudged home from the docks, he was not so now. A cold terror seized him as he leaned above his mother, who could not, indeed, stop her tears, nor tell him more than ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price
... locked behind them four-and-twenty doors and made them fast with padlocks; and when he came to Mariyah, he found her as she were the downing sun, strown upon a Taif rug of perfumed leather,[FN415] surrounded by cushions stuffed with ostrich down, and not a limb of her quivered. When her maid saw her in this state, she offered to cry out; but Al-Abbas said to her, "Do it not, but have patience till we discover her affair; and if Allah (be He extolled and exalted!) have decreed ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... he 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
... Tolerates? Why, Society encourages, because Society shares the benefits. Take this especial vacation of mine. Society had two five-o'clock teas, four of the swellest dinners you ever sat down to, a cotillion where the favors were of solid silver and real ostrich feathers, a whole day's clam-bake on Reggie's steam yacht, with automobile runs and coaching trips galore. Nobody ever declines one of Reggie's invitations, because what he has from a Society point of view ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... number of natives came on board the ship with curiosities to sell, such as choice shells, toys, leopard skins, and ostrich feathers. There are plenty of these birds running wild but a little way inland, and some are kept in domestic confinement on account of the feathers which they yield; but the tame birds do not develop such fine plumage as do the wild ones. The ladies purchased choice specimens ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... edge cut off a detour on the other side. Weary of waiting, Mr. Fogo cautiously rose, pushed his easel under the bushes, and began to creep up towards the ridge, holding his umbrella in front of him as a screen. This was rather after the fashion of the ostrich, which, to avoid being seen, buries its head in the sand; nor was it likely that the beast, if irritated at sight of a man, would acquiesce in the phenomenon of an umbrella at large, and strolling ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... answer was, "Because we never do anything properly at the Cape." "Ah, sir!" he said; "that is a great mistake to leave so fine a bay without harbor conveniences. It is a great deal better than Table Bay. We enjoyed ourselves capitally there, had some good shooting; one of us shot an ostrich, a fine fellow, but he got away. Unfortunately, we lost one of our officers there—one whom we all respected—as fine an officer as ever trod this ship's deck. He was in a boat in the bay, shooting wild fowl; he drew his gun towards him, the barrel in his hand; the trigger caught, the charge passed ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes
... happened, and, as evidently, he was not taken by surprise at the event. Nor, indeed, would anyone else have been in the whole community; for Frank's love to Kate had been as palpable to all as the famed ostrich of the story was when it hid its head in the sand and imagined itself invisible to ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... and as he dictated he looked up at the ceiling. This ceiling was of mosaic work, showing four winged creatures that veiled their faces with crimson and orange-tawny wings; suspended from this ceiling by bronze chains hung ostrich eggs, bronze lamps and ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... up the stuffing in the turkey, and had not had time to look for it; and she was panic struck lest her master had found it roasted in the very middle of the turkey, and was going to ask her if she thought she was cooking for an ostrich, which, as everybody knows, prefers a dinner of iron spikes, pebble stones, and oyster ...
— Red, White, Blue Socks, Part First - Being the First Book • Sarah L Barrow
... species of game than we could tell the names of. Birds, especially, he brought home on his saddle and in his bag; birds of all sizes, from the little luscious dove to the black swan itself; and one day he actually came along up the avenue with a dead ostrich. He could ride that mule of his anywhere. I believe he could have ridden along the parapet of London Bridge, so we were never surprised to see Dugald draw rein at the lower sitting-room window, within the verandah. He was always ...
— Our Home in the Silver West - A Story of Struggle and Adventure • Gordon Stables
... variation from our long record of work in camp and hospital, we close this chapter with an ostrich story, and venture to take it intact from News from the Front ...
— From Aldershot to Pretoria - A Story of Christian Work among Our Troops in South Africa • W. E. Sellers
... silver buttons, its silver embroidery and scarlet facings, a white cloth skirt is worn, while in lieu of the helmet now in use by the regiment, the empress has adopted the old-fashioned, broad-brimmed cavalier hat, with the flowing white ostrich plumes which the officers of the corps were wont to don in the early part of the last century. Thus attired, the empress takes her place by the side of her husband at the saluting point at any of the grand reviews at which she ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... languages; into English by Rockliffe (3rd edition, 1866). The fable in question describes how, at a picnic of the animals, a discussion arose as to which of them carried off the palm for superiority of talent. The praises of the ant, the dog, the bee, and the parrot were sung in turn; but at last the ostrich stood up and declared for the dromedary. Whereupon the dromedary stood up and declared for the ostrich. No one could discover the reason for this mutual compliment. Was it because both were such uncouth beasts, or had such long necks, or were neither of them particularly clever ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... man by a rigid formula is to sink to the lowest practice of the worst class rooms. To define a tendency so sharply that it cannot flow without breaking the definition, is a lecturer's trick for which audiences should stone him. Solemn generalizations which squat upon a book like an ostrich on a goose egg and hatch out vast moral philosophies are to be dreaded like the devil, as are, equally, the critics with pet theories, who, having defined them, make everything from a squib to an epic ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... It had none of the brilliant colours, however, of that proudest of birds, though it was quite as stately, and much larger and taller. In fact, its great height and erect attitude was why Hendrik at first glance had taken it for an ostrich. It was neither peacock nor ostrich, but belonging to a different genus from either—to the genus Otis or bustard. It was the great bustard of South Africa—the Otis kori—called "pauw" by the Dutch colonists, on account of ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... the mosques and the schools they are teaching, or causing to be taught, strange and new ideas. No village is too far off for this propaganda to reach. It is well to believe in others as we would be believed in ourselves, Effendi, but England is like the ostrich which buries its head in the sand. I grieve to tell the ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... the most beautiful effect of evening sky—the evening sky when sunset is fading into blue-green and the first stars are twinkling. And around this arch was chalked a kind of heavy festoon of drooping ostrich feathers. The picture when finished was certainly very beautiful, and I have it in my possession at the present moment. But it conveyed absolutely nothing to me, and certainly brought back no recollection to my memory ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... among the navvies toward the arrowy lad who confronted them. Deschaillon balanced himself on one leg, French boxing fashion, ready to kick out with the deadly accuracy of an ostrich. Hogan gave a brief happy laugh, broken by his jump, the crack of his fist against some jaw and the stumbling ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... a very humble poet; but in the very possession of the idea, I know myself so far a poet as to feel assured that I can understand and interpret a poem in the spirit of poetry, and with the poet's spirit. Like the ostrich, I cannot fly, yet have I wings that give me the feeling of flight; and as I sweep along the plain, can look up toward the bird of Jove, and can follow ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... comprised some elephant tusks and an imperfect set of chessmen, beads and weapons, a box of eyes, two skulls of tigers and one human, several moth-eaten stuffed monkeys (one holding a lamp), an old-fashioned cabinet, a flyblown ostrich egg or so, some fishing-tackle, and an extraordinarily dirty, empty glass fish-tank. There was also, at the moment the story begins, a mass of crystal, worked into the shape of an egg and brilliantly polished. And at that two people, who stood outside the window, were looking, one of them ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... modern tack-hammer and a medieval back-scratcher—and fit it to its haft. Then you lie flat upon your face on the wet grass, and having scratched up some small lumps of turf, proceed to build these into a parapet. Into the hole formed by the excavation of the turf you then put your head, and in this ostrich-like posture await further instructions. Private Mucklewame is of opinion that it would be equally effective, and infinitely less fatiguing, simply to lie down prone ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... of decorum which some of his countrymen regarded as the stamp of democracy. At his receptions he wore a black velvet suit with gold buckles at the knee and on his shoes, and yellow gloves, and profusely powdered hair carried in a silk bag behind. In one hand he held a cocked hat with an ostrich plume; on his left thigh he wore a sword in a white scabbard of polished leather. He shook hands with no one; but acknowledged the courtesy of his visitors by a very formal bow. When he drove, it was in a coach ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... see Zenobia just as she was now. Sitting upon her noble Arabian, and leaning upon her hunting spear, her countenance glowing with a higher beauty than ever before, as it seemed to me—her head surmounted with a Parthian hunting-cap, from which drooped a single ostrich feather, springing from a diamond worth a nation's rental, her costume also Parthian, and revealing in the most perfect manner the just proportions of her form—I thought I had never seen even her, when she so filled and satisfied the eye and the mind—and, ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... rain-drops sieving through on a sou'west wind, the same warmth glowed up in her the moment her eyes opened. Whether the lawn below were a field of bright dew, or dry and darkish in a shiver of east wind, her eyes never grew dim all day; and her blood felt as light as ostrich feathers. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... everybody. It was made out of red plush velvet and trimmed wid white satin ribbons. In de front, a ostrich feather stood up high and two big turkey feathers flanked de sides. Oh, de treasures of memory to de blind. I's happy to sit here and talk to you 'bout dat day! I ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... ten thousand if there was one, and terrible as an army with banners. I speak feeguratively, for they hadna the scrap of a flag among them. They were beating the war-drums, and the young men were dancing with their big skin shields and wagging their ostrich feathers, so I saw they were out for business. I'll no' say but what my blood ran cold, but the Governor's eye got brighter and his back stiffer. "Kings may be blest," I says to ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... true that a Plynck at rest is a beautiful sight; but it is nothing to the charm and wonder of a Plynck in motion. (The same, as we shall see in a moment, is true in a lesser degree of a Snoodle.) Its long, rosy plumes, like those of an ostrich, only four times as long, went waving through the air with an indescribably dreamy grace; and now Sara could actually see the perfume, which before she had only smelled. It rained down through the air, as the Plynck circled slowly round and round the fountain, and ...
— The Garden of the Plynck • Karle Wilson Baker
... But that the hardened beings should be moved mentally at all is wonderful indeed. If you saw them in their savage state you would feel the force of this more.... N.B.—I have got for Professor Owen specimens of the incubated ostrich in abundance, and am waiting for an opportunity to transmit the box to the college. I tried to keep for you some of the fine birds of the interior, but the weather was so horribly hot they were ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... children, and obsequious hangers-on of various nationalities, black, bronze, and cafe au lait in colour, offer him perpetual incense. Rich worshippers of the Prophet and the Prophet's priests send him presents from afar; camels laden with barley, donkeys staggering beneath sacks of grain, ostrich plumes, silver ornaments, perfumes, red-eyed doves, gazelles whose tiny hoofs are decorated with gold-leaf or painted in bright colours. The tributes laid before the tomb of Cheikh Sidi El Hadj Ali ben Sidi El Hadj ...
— Halima And The Scorpions - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... high-heeled shoes, embroidered with silver, and a light-blue sash with silver and tassel, tied at the left side. My watch was suspended at the right, and my hair was in its natural curls. Surmounting all was a small white hat and white ostrich feather, confined by brilliant band ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... the banks of the Niger and Senegal—I would call attention to the fact that the Blackamoor King, who at the beginning of the poem steps from his white tent like an eclipsed moon, is beloved by a black beauty over whose dusky features nod white ostrich plumes. But, eager for war, he leaves her, and enters into the battles of the blacks, "where rattles the drum decorated with skulls," but, alas! here he finds his black Waterloo, and is sold by the victors unto the whites. They take the noble African to Europe and here we find him ...
— Atta Troll • Heinrich Heine
... out meant, "See the Sultan Cowloo, the great ostrich, with a feather on his back as big as a palm leaf; fight for him, ...
— Hair Breadth Escapes - Perilous incidents in the lives of sailors and travelers - in Japan, Cuba, East Indies, etc., etc. • T. S. Arthur
... time the sex relations of animals are freely discussed with the growing child, let the mother or father wisely call attention to the fact that but very few of the animals live family lives as do human beings. In this connection valuable use—by way of illustration—can be made of the ostrich and some of the ape family who are loyal and ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... determination that this war shall not be followed by another interim which leads to new disaster—that we shall not repeat the tragic errors of ostrich isolationism—that we shall not repeat the excesses of the wild twenties when this Nation went for a joy ride on a roller coaster which ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... Godmother," began the Queen, as she sank on an ivory and cloth-of-gold settee in her private Cabinet, and cooled her somewhat heated face with a jewelled ostrich-feathered fan, "I had better tell you frankly that I think both you and that designing little adventuress have behaved in a very underhand way in this business—a way that I naturally resent. Mirliflor, ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... and blind! His was chivalry in another form! He would have his stroke in the battle, and he plunged into it with his horse tied by its reins to one of his knights on either side. A plume of three ostrich feathers waved from his helmet, and the chroniclers say he laid about him well. After the battle, he and his two companions were found dead, with their horses ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... among the meshes of ostrich plume wound around her hat. The head of the pin eluding him there, he tried beneath the brim, his fingers tangling in thick waves of hair. They were soft waves, softer and silkier than the ostrich plume. No man with ...
— The Lion's Mouse • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... much as I have sence I've been tryin' to start my garden this spring. As fur back as the time I was gittin' the seed in, them hens of Widder Sidene Pike, that lives next farm to mine, began their hellishness, with that old wart-legged ostrich of a rooster of her'n to lead 'em. They'd almost peck the seeds out of my hand, and the minit I'd turn my back they was over into that patch, right foot, left foot, kick heel and toe, and swing to pardners—and you couldn't see ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... exterior of snowy whiteness was relieved by the rich coloring of the arms of Carignan and Soissons emblazoned on the panels; the interior was cushioned with purple velvet embroidered in gold. To this sumptuous vehicle were harnessed six white horses, whose head-gear of velvet was adorned with ostrich-plumes so delicate, that, as the air breathed upon them, they looked like wreaths of snowy vapor. Perched high above the hammer-cloth, which in color and material corresponded with the inner decorations of the carriage, sat the chub-faced ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... where Asako was sleeping peacefully. He was very English. Only the first surprise of the girl's kiss had startled his loyalty. With the ostrich-like obtuseness, which our continental neighbours call our hypocrisy, he buried his head in his principles. As Asako's husband, he could not flirt with another woman. As Reggie's friend, he would not flirt ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... are rather smaller than those of the ostrich. They are of a dark green colour and the shell is very thick. They are deposited by the bird almost upon the ground, in the vicinity of a few bushes, or tufts of grass, and usually in a country ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... copper wire, and Kafir 'truck' generally, lay out the remainder of your money in an elephant gun and ammunition for it, your rifle, and your sporting gun, and—trek right up-country into the interior after ivory and ostrich feathers. By the time that you have completed your preparations the war will be over and the natives will be not only perfectly quiet and peaceful, but more than eager to trade with you upon highly advantageous terms. By so doing, you could, in the course ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... females, gave small opportunities for privacy by night or day, for neither the double washstand, nor the thus far unimagined bathroom, nor even indeed the humble and serviceable screen, had been realized, in these dark ages of which I write. Accordingly, like the irrational ostrich, which defends itself by the simple process of not looking at its pursuers, Emma Jane had kept her Latin letter in her closed hand, in her pocket, or in her open book, flattering herself that no one had noticed her pleased bewilderment at its ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... was by no means so well understood in those days as it has been since, and mine was out of all correctness. I was made to sport an enormous plume of black ostrich-feathers, such as never was worn by any Highland chief, and had a huge tiger-skin sporran to dangle like an apron before innumerable yards of plaid petticoat. The tartan cloak was outrageously hot and voluminous; it was the dog-days, and all these ...
— The Fitz-Boodle Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... neutral or blind-eyed about George Harley. He had followed all the moves that had forced the war upon the nations whose spineless and inefficient governments had so long been playing the policy of the ostrich. He had nothing but detestation for the vile and ruthless methods of the German war party and nation and nothing but contempt for the allied politicians who had made such methods possible. He had followed ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... Londonderry, in her opera-box. The Marquesa de Vivanco had a riviere of brilliants of extraordinary size and beauty, and perfectly well set. Madame S—-r wore a very rich blonde dress, garnie with plumes of ostrich feathers, a large diamond fastening each plume. One lady wore a diadem which ——- said could not be worth less than a hundred thousand dollars. Diamonds are always worn plain or with pearls; coloured stones are considered ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... he who amongst many other things gave her the pretty carved walking-stick of black and white umzimbeet wood, also the two young blue cranes and the kid that afterwards were such pets of hers, and with them the beautiful white feathers of a cock ostrich that had been killed on the veld. In the same way it was he who sent milk and eggs to Dorcas when she was at her wits' end for both, which more than once were found mysteriously at the door of their hut, and not any of his Christian flock, as ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... nights, were attended by the grace and beauty of New York. On one of these occasions an incident occurred which might have been attended by serious consequences. Owing to the lowness of the ceiling in the drawing-room, the ostrich feather in the head-dress of Miss McIver, a belle of New York, took fire from the chandelier, to the no small alarm of the company. Major Jackson, aide-de-camp to the President, with great presence of mind and equal gallantry, flew to the rescue ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... resumed her office at the toilet, came Isidore, a little before twelve, coiffure and all, which was so pretty that I quire forgave him all his sins. It was of green leaves and white FLEUR-DE-LIS, with a white ostrich feather drooping on one side. I wear my hair now plain in front, and the wreath was very flat and classical in its style. My dress was black velvet with a very rich bertha. A bouquet on the front of FLEUR-DE- LIS, like the coiffure, ...
— Letters from England 1846-1849 • Elizabeth Davis Bancroft (Mrs. George Bancroft)
... been born and bred among them; and even then the harder, fiercer instinct, which dwells in northern blood, may deceive the student and lead him far astray. The Italian is an exceedingly simple creature, and is apt to share the opinion of the ostrich, who ducks his head and believes his whole body is hidden. Foreigners use strong language concerning the Italian lie; but this only proves how extremely transparent the deception is. It is indeed a singular fact, but one which may often be observed, ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... the name! I am forty years old, although I look but thirty, and I have a constitution of iron, a healthy vigor that nothing can shake, a muscular strength that few can equal, and a digestion that would be thought first class even in an ostrich!" ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... always beneficent or important, but when they are it is precisely because they help to develop human faculty and to enrich human life. To imagine that by means of them we can escape from human nature and survey it from without is an ostrich-like illusion obvious to all but to the victim of it. Such a pretension may cause admiration in the schools, where self-hypnotisation is easy, but in the world it makes its professors ridiculous. For in their eagerness to empty their mind of ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... saw some beauties in the Seabright kennels. Wouldn't one of them look fine on the lawn?—lemon and white, and so tall and silky. I saw one down there, and he wasn't a year old, but his tail looked like a great white ostrich feather, and it touched the ground. Wouldn't it be grand to have such a dog follow me when I rode. Say, Dad, why ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... and she braves all kinds of weather, And when the rain or fog or mist drive rival crimps a-wreck, Her fluffy hair goes curling like a kinked-up ostrich feather Around her ears and forehead and the white nape of ...
— The Kingdom of Love - and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... woman in a roomy litter, over which waved a canopy entirely of white ostrich-plumes, which the evening breeze swayed like a thicket of fern-leaves. This throne was borne by ten black and ten white slave-girls, and before it two fair children rode on tame ostriches. The tall heir of a noble ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of them. No woman could have done fairer with those men than you did, ma'am; those mahogany coffins with silver-plated handles were good enough for the patriarchs and prophets, and the President of the United States himself daren't ask anything better than a hearse with real ostrich feathers and horses that are ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... Last of the Rookes was a good man to have at your side. It was Freddie who suggested that Derek should recline in the arm-chair which he had vacated; Freddie who nipped round the corner to the all-night chemist's and returned with a magic bottle guaranteed to relieve an ostrich after a surfeit of soda-water bottles; Freddie who ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... the ostrich, I believe that the wings have been reduced, and are not in course of development, because the whole structure of a bird is essentially formed for flight; and the ostrich is essentially a bird. You will see at page 182 of the "Origin" a somewhat analogous discussion. ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... usual, with bringing a young plantain-tree, and laying it down at the king's feet. After this a prayer was repeated by the priests, who held in their hands several tufts of red feathers, and also a plume of ostrich feathers, which I had given to Otoo on my first arrival, and had been consecrated to this use. When the priests had made an end of the prayer, they changed their station, placing themselves between us and the morai; and one of them, the same ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... and beautiful, wearing her becoming sables and her toque with its long black ostrich plume, appeared on the scene, and a minute later Davidson announced that the carriage ...
— The School Queens • L. T. Meade
... a most severe quantity of the delicacies before her; and as that good old girl would not cause him a moment's disappointment on any day, least of all on such a day, for any consideration, she imperils her digestion fearfully. How young Woolwich cleans the drum-sticks without being of ostrich descent, his anxious mother is ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... seventy-five dollars, in the distance, gives no more of an impression in the matter of figure to an admiring world than your original grandmother used to make without any further sartorial embellishment than an ostrich feather in her hair, and as for the men—well, if you see any value in the change in men's garments over those which prevailed in my day, you can see what I cannot, and what is going to be the result? The time will come when tailors' bills will be regarded as a curse. Fathers of families who, ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... George's Chapel, which was the best part, as it did not last long ... Their dresses were very magnificent. The Knights, before they were installed, were in white and silver, like the old pictures of Henry VIII., and afterwards they had a purple mantle put on. They had immense plumes of ostrich feathers, with a heron's feather in ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... am afraid I have been hiding my head like an ostrich, and trying not to look forward, but your view is the healthier, and I'll try to adopt it. I don't give up all idea of teaching, though big schools are impossible. Perhaps they would take me at some small, old-fashioned seminary where sports are considered ...
— Tom and Some Other Girls - A Public School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... till his ostrich feather touched the mane of his wall-eyed plough horse, then turned bridle, and regained his ranks at a gait something between a stumble and a rack. The representative of General Washington rejoined his men at a hard trot, rising two feet from his saddle at ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... conduct. I would advise your lordship to bring even your own name into question, as little as possible. My lord Chesterfield compares a statesman, who has been celebrated for influence during the greatest part of the present reign, to the ostrich. The brain of an ostrich, your lordship will please to observe, though he be the largest of birds, may very easily be included in the compass of a nut-shell. When pursued by the hunters, he is said to bury his head in the sand, and having done ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... daisies, and liatris of different species, while around the shady margin of the meadow many ferns in beds and vaselike groups spread their beautiful fronds, especially the osmundas (O. claytoniana, regalis, and cinnamomea) and the sensitive and ostrich ferns. ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... hath gone forth, and it says, Hamadan shall be to thee for a spoil, and desolation shall fall upon Babylon. And there shall the wild beasts of the desert lodge, and howling monsters shall fill their houses, and there shall the daughters of the ostrich dwell, and there shall the screech-owl pitch her tent, and there shall the night-raven lay her eggs, and there shall the satyrs hold their revels. And wolves shall howl to one another in their palaces, and dragons in their voluptuous pavilions. Her time is near at hand; her days shall not be prolonged; ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... buries its head in the sand. We quite agree with our esteemed contemporary about Mr. Balfour's foreign policy, but we fear it is getting its metaphors mixed. Surely it is not thinking of the camel which, when pursued, buries its head in the sand, but of the ostrich which, when pursued, runs its ...
— An Adventure With A Genius • Alleyne Ireland
... many interesting things in the parade, which bring out specific class peculiarities. In one college you may see gray-haired men walking behind an immense Sacred Bird, as it is called. This Bird—the creation of an ingenious mind—is the size of an ostrich and has all the semblance of life, with many lifelike ...
— Football Days - Memories of the Game and of the Men behind the Ball • William H. Edwards
... your brother Sandie's hint about the agents for the hunters; and at last I fell in with a merchant, who, on my inquiry, showed me an invoice that I could have sworn to as in Archie's hand, and described his white hair. It seems he has been acting as manager on an ostrich farm for the last three years, far up the country. So I lost no time in sending up a note to him, telling him, if he had not forgotten old times, to come down and see me while I was lying off Durban Bay. I heard no more for ten days, and had ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... with a drayman, who was calling alternately to his horse as it sucked in and out of the mud and to a woman on the plank walk. She had on a hat with velvet and ostrich plumes, a black frock, a side bag with a lace handkerchief. She was not young and she wore spectacles; but there was something nervous about her step, a slight tremolo as she responded to the drayman, which suggested an adventure or the hope of it. ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... rich. You with a sure income beyond your needs, in your own right, with youth and health and beauty, with all your life before you, wishing to revert to what you used to say was a living burial? That's equivalent to holding that the ostrich philosophy is the true one—what you cannot see does not exist. That ignorance is better than knowledge—that—that—Hang it, my dear, are you going to turn reactionary? But that's ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Mrs. Kybird in the snug seclusion of the back parlour was one thing; Mrs. Kybird in black satin at its utmost tension and a circular hat set with sable ostrich plumes nodding in the breeze was another. He felt that the public eye was upon them and that it twinkled. His gaze wandered ...
— At Sunwich Port, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... type for me," said Miss Jim, removing an ostrich tip from her angle of vision; then she continued in a side whisper: "Say, would you mind making Nick take this bottle of milk at twelve o'clock, and resting a little? He ain't as strong as he lets on, and he has sort of sinking ...
— Mr. Opp • Alice Hegan Rice
... course, but I should know that I'd had my chance. The idea at home seems to be that a woman's goodness depends on someone else keeping it for her: that she should stick her head into the sand like an ostrich and, since she sees nothing, be womanly. If I have a soul at all, and it can't sail beyond a harbor's breakwater, I have nothing to lose, but if it can go out and come back safe it has the right to do it. That's what ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... of stoicism concerning the opinion of others, when their applause or censure refers to literary character only; and I had determined to lay my work before the public, with the same unconcern with which the ostrich lays her eggs in the sand, giving herself no farther trouble concerning the incubation, but leaving to the atmosphere to bring forth the young, or otherwise, as the climate shall serve. But though an ostrich in theory, I became in practice a poor hen, who has no sooner made her deposit, but ...
— The Surgeon's Daughter • Sir Walter Scott
... seen him in the street Of the little Boston of Winthrop's time, His rapier dangling at his feet Doublet and hose and boots complete, Prince Rupert hat with ostrich plume, Gloves that exhaled a faint perfume, Luxuriant curls and air sublime, And superior manners ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... gaping uncovered for the summer, the woodwork, painted yellow with an artificial graining, and a stiff set of ebonized chairs, their dingy crimson plush backs protected by elaborate thread antimacassars, seemed to hold and reflect the misfortunes of their owner. Jeremy picked up an ostrich egg, painted with a clump of viciously green coconut palms and a cottony surf; he put it down with an absent smile and impatiently fingered a volume of "The Life of Harriet Atwood Newell." She was one of the missionaries who had gone out on the Caravan, with Augustine Heard, to ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... another is the swan; a third modestly compares himself to the bee. But none of these types would have suited Montague. His genius may be compared to that pinion which, though it is too weak to lift the ostrich into the air, enables her, while she remains on the earth, to outrun hound, horse and dromedary. If the man who possesses this kind of genius attempts to ascend the heaven of invention, his awkward and unsuccessful efforts expose him to derision. But if he will be content to ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own. However, nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing. He bolts down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions, all hard things visible and invisible, never mind how knobby; as an ostrich of potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints. And as for small difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly, good-natured hits, ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... Negro's, the nose was flat, he had but one gleaming black eye, for the other was represented by a hollow in the face, and his whole expression was cruel and sensual to a degree. From the large head rose a magnificent plume of white ostrich feathers, his body was clad in a shirt of shining chain armour, whilst round the waist and right knee were the usual garnishes of white ox-tail. In his right hand was a huge spear, about the neck a thick torque of gold, and bound on the forehead ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... first examined by Europeans, was found to contain no indigenous land quadrupeds, no kangaroos, or opossums, like Australia; but a wingless bird abounded there, the smallest living representative of the ostrich family, called the Kiwi by the natives (Apteryx). In the fossils of the Post-pliocene period in this same island, there is the like absence of kangaroos, opossums, wombats, and the rest; but in their place a prodigious number of well-preserved ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... afternoon wanderlust, the draught upon the delicatessen store for home-made comforts, the furor for department store marked-down sales, the feeling of superiority to the lady in the third-floor front who wore genuine ostrich tips and had two names over her bell, the mucilaginous hours during which she remained glued to the window sill, the vigilant avoidance of the instalment man, the tireless patronage of the acoustics of the ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... approacheth neere unto him, [he] gathereth up himselfe into the roundnesse of a ball, but running from him, stretcheth himselfe into the length of a tree.' Perhaps the fame of this creature's powers grew in the transmission of the narrative from the banks of the Nile to the banks of the Thames. The ostrich was human in its vanity according to Lyly; men and women sometimes pull out their white hairs, but 'the Estritch, that taketh the greatest pride in her feathers, picketh some of the worst out and burneth ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... emu is the most remarkable. It is nearly as tall as an ostrich, and has beautiful soft feathers, though not as beautiful as the ostrich's. But the most curious point in the emu is,—it has no tongue. You may suppose, therefore, that it is neither a singing bird, nor a talking bird; it only makes a little noise ...
— Far Off • Favell Lee Mortimer
... larger, and has nine vertical divisions instead of five. Here, in the tracery, in addition to other heraldic badges, is the "Dragon of the great Pendragonship," holding a banner with the arms of Henry VII. Also there is seen the ostrich feather of the Prince of Wales with ...
— A Short Account of King's College Chapel • Walter Poole Littlechild
... be, it is not to be—and all is over. I will betake me to my work with set teeth, and I will force myself to be silent; and I shall succeed, for it is not for the first time that I take myself in hand. And why have I run away? Why do I stop here, vainly hiding my head, like an ostrich? Misfortune a terrible thing to look in ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... reptiles; also bees, crabs, and toads, incinerated after drying; amber, shells, coral, claws, and horns; hair from deer and cats; ram's wool, partridge feathers, ants, lizards, leeches, earth-worms, pearl, musk, and honey; eyes of the wolf, pickerel, and crab; eggs of the hen and ostrich, cuttlefish bone, dried serpents, and ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... better schoolmaster than design. All boys have a taste for tent life, and healthy youngsters not quite grown, with ostrich digestions, passing through the nomadic stage, revel in hardships and count it a joy to sleep on the ground where they can look up at the stars, and eat out of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... ourselves, our wives and children, the work may be done without clerks of inventory. Certainly, if the domains of your Highnesses have no other sources of revenue than the proceeds of this confiscation, wherewith to feed the ostrich-like digestions of those about you, 'tis to be feared that ere long they will be in the same condition as were ours, when we were obliged to come together in Hoogstraaten to devise means to keep ourselves, our wives, and children alive. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... reverence for the proprieties," P. Sybarite replied without stirring, "keeps me emulating the fatuous ostrich. I don't pretend it's comfortable, but I, believe me, madam, am a plain man, of modest tastes, ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... was not admiration for her person which he openly displayed. During the whole time he stood there his eyes seldom rose to her face; they lingered mainly-and this was what aroused my curiosity—on the great fan of ostrich plumes which this opulent beauty held against her breast. Was he desirous of seeing the great diamond she thus unconsciously (or was it consciously) shielded from his gaze? It was possible, for, as ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green
... that will," said the dwarf sullenly; "thou hast not been in haste to obey my summons, nor can I walk fast enough to follow your long strides—you do not walk like a man, but bound like an ostrich in the desert." ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... They were apparently all of the Grallae or stilt order of birds,—an order to which the cranes, herons, and bustards belong, with the ostriches and cassowaries, and which is characterized by possessing but three toes on each foot (one species of ostrich has but two), or, if a fourth toe be present, so imperfectly is it developed in most of the cases, that it fails to reach the ground. And in almost all the footprints of the primeval birds of the Connecticut there are only three toes exhibited. Peculiar, ill understood laws regulate ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... points, the heavy mantle of blue velvet, with its lining of taffeta and shoulder-knots of white satin, the crimson surcoat, the great embullioned tassels, and the chain of linked gold, and the plumes of ostrich and heron uprising from the black velvet hat—these things had for him little significance save as a fine setting, a finer setting than the most elaborate smoking-suit, for that perfection of aspect which the gods had given him. This was indeed the ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm |
