"Pigmy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... pigmy flower at best, Though in red robe it was dressed. English daisy's lively mien Never in its ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... yap! You defy me?—you pigmy, you insolent scrap! What!—this to my teeth, that have worried a score Of the biggest rats bred in the granary floor! Come on, and be swallowed! I spare you ...
— Verses for Children - and Songs for Music • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... her mother. She grew melancholy, which was remarked and wondered at by the whole court. The best way to divert her, they thought, would be to urge her to marry; which the princess, who was now become less obstinate on that point than formerly, consented to. Trusting that such a pigmy as the Yellow Dwarf would not dare to contend with so gallant a person as the King of the Golden Mines, she fixed upon that prince for her husband. He was exceedingly rich and powerful, and loved her to distraction. The most superb preparations ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... king's. They pay. Whose the generosity? The king's. Then the people love him for being so rich. The king receives a crown from the poor, and returns them a farthing. How generous he is! The colossus which is the pedestal contemplates the pigmy which is the statue. How great is this myrmidon! he is on my back. A dwarf has an excellent way of being taller than a giant: it is to perch himself on his shoulders. But that the giant should allow it, there is the wonder; and that he should admire the height of the dwarf, there ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... in the thickest fire. By Demeter, they'll get no brag while I've a vein to beat! Cleomenes himself was hurtled out in sore defeat. His stiff-backed Spartan pride was bent. Out, stripped of all his arms, he went: A pigmy cloak that would not stretch To hide his rump (the draggled wretch), Six sprouting years of beard, the ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... gaunt and gnarled oak Waving majestic o'er a pigmy race, Pygmalion was; for by the mete of soul Man ranges in the phalanx of his age. His heart was like an ocean, tremulous With radiant aspirations and high thoughts That fretted ever on mortality, Wearing life out with passion and desire, Struggling against ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... now emerged on to fine open well-grassed river flats, lightly timbered, and separated by small spurs of ridges running into them. A chain of small lagoons was passed at 12 miles, teeming with black duck, teal, wood duck, and pigmy geese, whilst pigeons and other birds were frequent in the open timber, a sure indication of good country. At 13 miles a small creek was crossed, and another at 18, and after having made a good stage of 25 miles the party again camped on the Einasleih. ...
— The Overland Expedition of The Messrs. Jardine • Frank Jardine and Alexander Jardine
... the tiny minorities in which the Loyal and Patriotic Union have obligingly exhibited them. The overwhelming character of the Nationalist victory would not have been a tithe so impressive had not our malignant enemies insisted upon coming out in the daylight in review order, and displaying their pigmy insignificance to a wondering world. A string of uncontested elections would have passed off monotonously unimaginatively. It would have been said the country was simply dumb and tame and terrorized. But the ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... I had been great and rare, just as I find myself now pigmy and vulgar by the standard of some past ages, wherein, if no other better qualities concurred, it was ordinary and common to see a man moderate in his revenges, gentle in resenting injuries, religious of his word, neither double nor supple, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... visage. She seemed growing old and unearthly. I, Lucy Snowe, plead guiltless of that curse, an overheated and discursive imagination; but whenever, opening a room-door, I found her seated in a corner alone, her head in her pigmy hand, that room seemed to me ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... it. Everywhere men marvelled at it, but of all those who saw it none could have marvelled more than those sailors, habitual watchers of the stars, who far away at sea had heard nothing of its advent and saw it now rise like a pigmy moon and climb zenithward and hang overhead and sink westward with the ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... room-full of company, to request his Titan of a bride to be seated, that he might greet her with the holy kiss of wedded love! On the other hand, it was by no means unusual to represent the heroine as a mere pigmy; so that the lovers whose destinies we were interested in, might be represented by the following lines from an old sea-song, which, for the benefit of musical readers I beg leave to observe, is generally "said or sung" to the tune ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... Your favourite—Punch a suppliant falls, And humbly for assistance calls; He humbly calls and begs you'll stop The gothic rage of Vander Hop, Wh'invades without pretence and right, Or any law but that of might, Our Pigmy land—and treats our kings Like paltry idle wooden things; Has beat our dancers out of doors, And call'd our chastest virgins whores; He has not left our Queen a rag on, Has forced away our George and Dragon, Has broke our wires, nor was he civil ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... evening the squads returned, desert-stained and weary, to their rest under the lonesome stars. Every morning the sun broke fiercely up from the long level of the eastward plain to pour its hot strength down upon these pigmy creatures, who dared to invade the territory over which he had, for so many ages, held undisputed dominion. Every evening the sun plunged fiercely down behind the purple wall of mountains that shut in the Basin on the west, as if to gather strength ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... was it reported to the vigilant monarch that the magic horseman indicated the approach of an enemy, than His Majesty hastened to the circular hall, selected the table at the point of the compass indicated by the horseman's spear, touched with the point of a magic lance some of the pigmy effigies before him, and belabored others with the butt-end. A scene of confusion at once ensued in the mimic army. Part fell dead, and the rest, turning their weapons upon each other, fought with the utmost fury. The same scene was repeated in the ranks of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... to confer upon me?' To which his mighty ugliness replied, 'Friend Naylor, I know thou hast been very industrious to make many people fools in the upper world, which has highly conduced to my interest.' Then turning to a pigmy aerial, who attended his commands as a running footman, 'Haste, Numps,' says he, 'and fetch me the painted coat,' which was no sooner brought, but by Lucifer's command I was shoved into it, neck and shoulders, by half a dozen swarthy valets de chambre, and in a ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... that Thorwald did not show much sympathy with me, when, our boat having nearly reached the ship's side, I looked up and saw the doctor himself standing on the deck, a pigmy among giants. I was soon by his side, and we embraced before our new-found friends without ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... lodging gone, Must give us pain. There's the respect That makes the patience of a teacher's life. For who would bear the thousand plagues of a school,— The girlish giggle, the tyro's awkwardness, The pigmy pedant's vanity, the mischief, The sneer, the laugh, the pouting insolence, With all the hum-drum clatter of a school, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare hickory? Who would willing bear To groan and sweat ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 5: Some Strange and Curious Punishments • Henry M. Brooks
... swift the slip from tune to twang! Sweets bitter grow, as aye they did; For e'en the Roman poet sang "Surgit amari aliquid." Our pigmy worries turn us grey; And sorrows fierce are less acute; Our hearts are riddled every day With ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 3, 1892 • Various
... time, nestles the little city in the angle of the two rivers; still directly over its head seems to hang in mid-air the massive and frowning fortress, like the gigantic helmet in the fiction, as if ready to crush the pigmy town below.' How like the ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... scorn as well as defiance in her voice—scorn because he stood before her so silently; scorn because the fierce torrent of her anger had flowed unchecked. She had only to stand up to him, it seemed, and like the giant of the fable he dwindled to a pigmy. She was no longer hurt by his passivity. ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... heard it; All that you make this stir about Is but a still which wants a spout. The reverend Dr. Raymond[5] guess'd More probably than all the rest; He said, but that it wanted room, It might have been a pigmy's tomb. The doctor's family came by, And little miss began to cry, Give me that house in my own hand! Then madam bade the chariot stand, Call'd to the clerk, in manner mild, Pray, reach that thing here to the child: That thing, I mean, among the kale; And here's to buy ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... set all the malice of all the pigmy writers at defiance, and thought the friendship of Mr. Pope cheaply purchased by being exposed to their censure and their hatred; nor had he any reason to repent of the preference, for he found Mr. Pope a steady and unalienable friend almost to the ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... respectively. These, it scarcely need be said, are extremely low statures, perhaps as low as have ever been recorded on any group of people. According to Topinard's nomenclature they are all distinctly "pigmy." ...
— The Negrito and Allied Types in the Philippines and The Ilongot or Ibilao of Luzon • David P. Barrows
... the beginning of the seventeenth century, crossed the Atlantic in two pigmy barks—one of twelve, the other of fifteen tons—and ascended the St. Lawrence on an exploring tour. At Hochelaga all was changed. The Indian town had vanished, and not a trace remained of the savage population which Cartier saw there ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.
... muddy stream, and with its low banks, scattered flat sand-bars, and pigmy islands, a melancholy river, straggling through the centre of vast prairies, and only saved from being impossible to find with the naked eye by its sentinel trees standing at long distances from each ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... under James the Second, in Prussia during the Seven Years' War, in the American colonies and the United States, in Portugal, in Greece, in various republics of Central and South America, even the assignats of the French Revolution—seem pigmy frauds in comparison with the present vast inundation of ...
— The Paper Moneys of Europe - Their Moral and Economic Significance • Francis W. Hirst
... man of stature, [3612]Augustus Caesar of the same pitch: Agesilaus despicabili forma; Boccharis a most deformed prince as ever Egypt had, yet as [3613]Diodorus Siculus records of him, in wisdom and knowledge far beyond his predecessors. A. Dom. 1306. [3614] Uladeslaus Cubitalis that pigmy king of Poland reigned and fought more victorious battles than any of his long-shanked predecessors. Nullam virtus respuit staturam, virtue refuseth no stature, and commonly your great vast bodies, and fine features, are sottish, dull, and leaden ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... philosophic term God) can be enjoyed as well as obeyed. He paints life at its darkest and then tells the babe unborn to take the leap in the dark. That is heroic; and to my instinct at least Schopenhauer looks like a pigmy beside his pupil. But it is the heroism of a morbid and almost asphyxiated age. It is awful to think that this world which so many poets have praised has even for a time been depicted as a man-trap into ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... these sons of the forest were presented to him, appeared like a pigmy. Oglethorpe knew how to march his forces on an angle. London society went mad trying to get a glimpse of his savages. He declared that the North American Indians were the finest specimens—intellectually, physically and morally—of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... this side of Rome, where the aqueducts stride over the Campagna, and the ruins of the mighty Claudian tower over the pigmy arches of the Pope, like the genius of ancient over that of modern Rome. The Borghese is the beau ideal of a villa; lofty, spacious apartments, adorned with statues, busts, and marbles, painting and ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... repentance wash away thy sin; From haunts of men to shame and sorrow fly, And, on the verge of death, learn how to die! Vain exhortation! wash the Ethiop white, Discharge the leopard's spots, turn day to night, Control the course of Nature, bid the deep Hush at thy pigmy voice her waves to sleep— Perform things passing strange, yet own thy art Too weak to work a change in such a heart; 440 That Envy, which was woven in the frame At first, will to the last remain ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... spread around the southerly end of the west addition up to Oak and Fell streets, along Octavia. There one puny engine puffed a single stream of water upon the burning mass, but its efforts were like the stabbing of a pigmy at a giant. ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... some sequestered spot where the flame would be unseen. Some of us at once started for a large lagoon that we had passed in the morning, and creeping up through the long grass, found its surface quite covered with water-fowl of every description, from the black swan to the beautiful pigmy goose. A volley, fired at a concerted signal, strewed the surface of the lake with the dead and wounded, and we were compelled to stand idly on the bank until the wind wafted the game ashore, for at the report of the guns two or three heavy splashes ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... is over now, The quarter-deck undone; The carved and castled navies fire Their evening-gun. O, Tital Temeraire, Your stern-lights fade away; Your bulwarks to the years must yield, And heart-of-oak decay. A pigmy steam-tug tows you, Gigantic, to the shore— Dismantled of your guns and spars, And sweeping wings of war. The rivets clinch the iron-clads, Men learn a deadlier lore; But Fame has nailed your battle-flags— Your ghost ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville
... Some of the natives came in to hear him; and as he happened at the time to have perched himself on the top of a roll of matting, as we were all lying down, I was the most elevated of the party, and Eva declared that it looked as if he was some pigmy chief, holding a divan, and that we were his attendants and counsellors. He most certainly seemed fully to feel his importance. When our guests had retired, he jumped down from his throne, and coiled himself away to sleep in a basket, which stood in the corner ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... by the courage and address of a single man. On his proper element Yawkins was equally successful. On one occasion he was landing his cargo at the Manxman's Lake near Kirkcudbright, when two revenue cutters (the 'Pigmy' and the 'Dwarf') hove in sight at once on different tacks, the one coming round by the Isles of Fleet, the other between the point of Rueberry and the Muckle Ron. The dauntless freetrader instantly ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... figures—like the wild possessors of a lost globe, such as Lord Byron has described in "Cain" as beheld by the fratricide, when, guided by Lucifer, he wandered among the shadowy existences of those worlds which had been destroyed to make way for our pigmy earth. I will not attempt further to describe the magnificent vision which a little pill of "brown gum" had conjured up from the realm of ideal being. No words that I can command would do justice to its Titanian ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... N. littleness &c adj.; smallness &c (of quantity) 32; exiguity, inextension^; parvitude^, parvity^; duodecimo^; Elzevir edition, epitome, microcosm; rudiment; vanishing point; thinness &c 203. dwarf, pygmy, pigmy^, Liliputian, chit, pigwidgeon^, urchin, elf; atomy^, dandiprat^; doll, puppet; Tom Thumb, Hop-o'-my-thumb^; manikin, mannikin; homunculus, dapperling^, cock-sparrow. animalcule, monad, mite, insect, emmet^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... of commons. The committee was at once agreed to by ministers; but when Fox made a call for papers, Lord North opposed it, as liable to make discoveries prejudicial to the interests of the country. This drew down upon him a series of odious comparisons. Burke compared him to the "pigmy physician," who watched over the health of Sancho Panza, in the government of Barataria, and who snatched away every dish from his patient's well-supplied table, on various pretences, before he could get one mouthful. The house was convulsed with laughter, but Lord North remained ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... bulk of the rhinoceros, crawled along the plains of South America. They have become creatures of the past, and their places have been taken by others of a similarly curious formation, of which even the giant armadillo, when compared to them, is a mere pigmy. These creatures abound in all parts of the continent, from Paraguay to Venezuela; but, incased as they are in coats of complete armour, and running so quickly, and so rapidly digging into the earth, they can rarely be overtaken ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... lower. Thus, far from being salient, its horizontal section is concave. The sea, rolling direct from the shores of North America, has in fact eaten a chasm into the middle of a hill, and the giant, embayed and unobtrusive, stands in the rear of pigmy supporters. Not least singularly, neither hill, chasm, nor precipice has a name. On this account I will call the precipice the ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... first time in his life he felt humble. He perceived how misguided he had been ever to suppose that he could pit his pigmy wits against this smooth-faced worker ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... to hand. A handful of dirt, a breath, and behold Adam. It suffices for a God to pass by. A God has always passed over the street Arab. Fortune labors at this tiny being. By the word "fortune" we mean chance, to some extent. That pigmy kneaded out of common earth, ignorant, unlettered, giddy, vulgar, low. Will that become an Ionian or a Boeotian? Wait, currit rota, the Spirit of Paris, that demon which creates the children of chance and the men of destiny, reversing the process of the Latin potter, makes ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... I grew to realise facts, to see men and women as they are, not as they appear! Sometimes the bare word 'reality' fills me with such loathing for this paltry world, with its pigmy minds and soulless bodies, that I can hardly control my contempt. I pull myself together, and pray for a new set of nerves, a stronger heart, and a better flow of healthy ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... Megachile (M. sericans, FONSCOL), who fashions her goblets with robinia-, holm-, and terebinth-leaves, were inhabited by Coelioxys octodentata (A Parasitic Bee.—Translator's Note.); those of the Anthidium (A. florentinum, LATR.) were occupied by a Leucopsis. Both kinds were swarming with a colony of pigmy parasites whose name I have not yet been able to discover. In short, my pan-pipe hives, though very useful to me from other points of view, taught me nothing about the order of the sexes among ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... If he were a bachelor, he would go into society; if he were in a fair way to be a Royalist poet with a pension and the Cross of the Legion of Honor, he would be an optimist, and journalism offers starting-points by the hundred. Journalism is the giant catapult set in motion by pigmy hatreds. Have you any wish to marry after this? Vernou has none of the milk of human kindness in him, it is all turned to gall; and he is emphatically the Journalist, a tiger with two hands that tears everything to pieces, as if ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... is enough of itself to arouse enthusiasm, whatever the object of the gathering may be. Ten thousand human beings, more or less, swarming on the floor, clustering on the walls, rising tier above tier, until in dim distance the pigmy throng seems soaring up into the very heavens, is a tremendous, a solemn, a heart-stirring sight, suggestive—I write with reverence—of the Judgment Day. And when such an assembly is convened for the purpose of considering matters of urgent importance, ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... know any more than little mites of Sunday-school children do nowdays. I never could understand why his philosophy was so remarkable, only that he lived in a heathen country and got ahead of all the rest, but if he were living now he would be a pigmy." ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy
... for admittance, secure of an entrance, did you only know the "Open sesame." Between and behind the doors, alternating with flying-buttresses, are a series of deep-niched windows, set with grotesque statues, varying from the pigmy to the colossal size, representing demons rather than saints, though some of the figures are costumed in the style of religious art, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... as if the whole gang had been turned to stone, their self-constituted leader being the most rigid of the crowd, and he stared at Dick Winthorpe as a giant might stare at the pigmy who tried to ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... stature while those of his contemporaries who bulked largest in the eyes of the world have dwindled and shrunk into insignificance in comparison with him. The witty, dissolute king, Charles II., is now seen to be a wretched pigmy: Milton, who died in blindness and political disgrace, is the real king of that era, overtopping all the rulers, cabals, and intriguers. So, too, in Scotland, Burns is the giant of his period. During Burns's life, the Earl ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... to avoid the discipline and frequent stripes inflicted on him by his preceptor, he ran away and concealed himself under the hollow bank of the river. After fasting in that situation for two days, two little men of pigmy stature appeared to him, saying, 'If you will come with us, we will lead you into a country full of delights and sports.' Assenting and rising up, he followed his guides through a path, at first subterraneous and ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... is found in these old, dusty, leather-bound volumes, which is not in the inscriptions and not, alas, in the printed words. They are the chosen home of a race of pigmy spiderlings who love musty theology with an affection found in no one else nowadays. In these dingy homes they live and rear their hideous little progeny: for in the cold light of a microscope these tiny brown book-dwellers are not beautiful; they are flat, crab-like, goggle-eyed, hairy; and they ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... good man Paul would say the same thing if he were here to-day. (Cries from the world of "that's so!" and "hurrah for Paul!") I am satisfied to have a great man like Paul on my side, even if I must know that some of his pigmy disciples are against me." ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... hasty-pudding is thy chiefest dish, With bullock's liver, or some stinking fish: Garbage, ox-cheeks, and tripes, do feast thy brain, Which nobly pays this tribute back again. With daisy-roots thy dwarfish Muse is fed, A giant's body with a pigmy's head. Canst thou not find, among thy numerous race Of kindred, one to tell thee that thy plays Are laught at by the pit, box, galleries, nay, stage? Think on't a while, and thou wilt quickly find Thy body made for labour, not thy mind. No other use of paper thou shouldst ...
— English Satires • Various
... farmers, is the Dodder (Cuscuta trifolii), a destructive vegetable parasite which strangles the plants in a crafty fashion, and which goes by the name of "hellweed," or "devil's guts." It lies in ambush like a pigmy field octopus, with deadly suckers for draining the sap of its victims. These it mats together in its wiry, sinuous coils, and chokes relentlessly by the acre. Nevertheless, the petty garotter— like a toad, ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... Orleans was no longer to figure in lithography as the fantastic Prince Rosolin; no longer were multitudes (in chalk) to shelter under the enormous shadow of M. d'Argout's nose: Marshal Loban's squirt was hung up in peace, and M. Thiers's pigmy figure and round spectacled face were no more to appear in print.* Robert Macaire was driven out of the Chambers and the Palace—his remarks were a great deal too appropriate and too severe for the ears of the great men ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... things vanish away—their bodily structure into the general substance; the very memory of them into that great gulf and abysm of past thoughts. Ah! 'tis on a tiny space of earth thou art creeping through life—a pigmy soul carrying a dead body ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... and outrageous in the idea of the distant objects dwindling and growing dwarfish, the closer objects swelling enormous and intolerable. There is something frantic in the notion that one's own father by walking a little way can be changed by a blast of magic to a pigmy. There is something farcical in the fancy that Nature keeps one's uncle in an infinite number of sizes, according to where he is to stand. All soldiers in retreat turn into tin soldiers; all bears in rout into toy bears; as if on ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... when veil'd in misty shroud, Some men seem kings, through mists of ignorance; Must we have darkness, then, and cloud on cloud, To give our hills and pigmy kings a chance? Must we conspire to curse the humbling light, Lest some one, at whose feet our fathers bow'd, Should suddenly appear, full length, in sight, Scaring to laughter the adoring crowd? ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... The giant didn't know what to say, for he couldn't have believed it of the little fellow. To prove him again, the giant lifted a stone and threw it so high that the eye could hardly follow it. "Now, my little pigmy, let me see you do that." "Well thrown," said the tailor; "but, after all, your stone fell to the ground; I'll throw one that won't come down at all." He dived into his wallet again, and grasping the bird in his hand, he threw it ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various
... since their friends are smit With a base passion—miserable dupes Who seldom mark their own worst bane of all. The black-skinned girl is "tawny like the honey"; The filthy and the fetid's "negligee"; The cat-eyed she's "a little Pallas," she; The sinewy and wizened's "a gazelle"; The pudgy and the pigmy is "piquant, One of the Graces sure"; the big and bulky O she's "an Admiration, imposante"; The stuttering and tongue-tied "sweetly lisps"; The mute girl's "modest"; and the garrulous, The spiteful spit-fire, is "a sparkling wit"; And she who scarcely lives for scrawniness Becomes "a slender ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... enormous tree when it stood in its native soil, at its full height, and with all its branches. I gazed at it with admiration; it seemed like one of the gigantic obelisks which are now and then brought from Egypt to shame the pigmy monuments of Europe; and, in fact, these vast aboriginal trees, that have sheltered the Indians before the intrusion of the white men, are the monuments ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... were the two creatures with the enormous mandibles that had escorted the pigmy men to the larder. But these others were as different as though they belonged to ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... and looked below at the house—a doll's house; at the toy corrals and tiny sheds and stables. Slim, walking down the hill, was a mere pigmy—a short, waddling insect. At least, to a girl unused to gazing from a height, each object seemed absurdly small. Flying U coulee stretched away to the west, with a silver ribbon drawn carelessly through it with many ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... went Alive upon the earth. And I have bent Regard on many a woman, who gave sign God willed her beautiful, when he drew the line That shaped each float and fold of beauty's tent: Her soul, alas, chambered in pigmy space, Left the fair visage pitiful—inane— Poor signal only of a coming face When from the penetrale she filled the fane!— Possessed of thee was every form of thine, Thy very ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... story in height and built of brass blocks), set food before me, and by signs manifested the utmost good will. A long time afterward, when I had learned the language of the country, he explained that he had recognized me as an American pigmy, a race of which he had some little knowledge through a letter from a brother, who had been in my country. He showed me the letter, of which the chief part is ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... pigmy bird, whether it be you fly Or paddle in the stagnant pools that sweltering, festering lie— I curse you and your evil kind for that you do me wrong, Engendering poisons that corrupt my petted muse of song; Go, get thee hence, and nevermore discomfit me and ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field
... weasel, of three inches. I believe there are thirty varieties of antelopes known and described; eighteen of them are found in this country, and there are the largest and smallest of the species; for we have the eland, and we have the pigmy antelope, which is not above six inches high. We see here also the intermediate links of many genera, such as the eland and the gnoo; and as we find the elephant, the rhinoceros, and Wilmot's friend, ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat
... time when the animals reigned on the earth they had killed all but a girl and her little brother, and these two were living in fear and seclusion. The boy was a perfect pigmy, never growing beyond the stature of a small infant, but the girl increased with her years, so that the labour of providing food and lodging devolved wholly on her. She went out daily to get wood for their lodge fire, and took her ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends: North American Indian • Anonymous
... beams of pale red flared out from the giant and bathed the pigmy craft. As they reached it, the white ray that had been sweeping up suddenly vanished, and for an instant the ship hung poised in the air; then it began to swing crazily, like the pendulum of a clock—swung ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... freshening, and the slaver made all sail away from the boat. But as a thresher pertinaciously pursues a whale till it has destroyed it, so did the little gig follow the large brig, which looked large enough to destroy a hundred such pigmy cockle-shells. Jack felt that everything depended on his coolness and the steadiness of his aim. Aided by Terence, well did he do his work. The astonished crew of the slaver must have fancied that they were pursued by evil spirits rather ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... rose above the more intimate throbbing of our screw, and we seemed a pigmy company floating past the workshops of Brobdingnagian toilers. The chill of the near water communicated itself to me, and I felt the protection of my shabby ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... the day I went down to the front line and had leisure to examine the commandant's headquarters, which had been held by our gallant French Allies since November, 1914. It was a dugout in the rear of a ruined windmill, and contained several pigmy rooms. There was a room for the signallers, another for the adjutant and one for the commandant. The French officers had left behind them excellent maps of the German position showing their trenches, also panoramic sketches showing the roads, villages and houses opposite, with compass points. These ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie
... unwitting that he did so or that I saw, he laughed aloud, mockingly and defiantly, at the advancing storm. I see him yet standing there like a pigmy out of the Arabian Nights before the huge front of some malignant genie. He was daring ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... "not a step further! See, see!" There, at the foot of a large tree, with its tail coiled round an upper branch, its body circling the trunk, was a huge python. Our uncle's pet, compared to it, was a mere pigmy. It was pressing with its enormous body a large pig, which, with its huge mouth wide open, it was preparing to swallow. So eager was it that it did not observe us. We stood transfixed with a feeling akin to horror, lest any movement might disturb it. We knew that ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... approximates to mountainous. In other parts of the State the isolated hills generally present a rounded outline, and with a few exceptions do not inspire those strong emotions which one must necessarily experience while standing like a pigmy among the piled-up, craggy hills of northern Berkshire. Here is found the most lofty elevation in the State—Saddle Mountain—whose summit is three thousand six hundred feet above tide water. Its name originated ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... deuce are they to me?" he muttered. "Morbid sensibility of character—coffee? No!—accompanied by vivacity and violence—nux!" He brought his book to the window, contrived to read the label on a pigmy bottle. "Nux! that's it," he ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... were busied here and there, bulking grotesquely as they moved about the fire, seeming disheveled demons of the pit. Like some master imp torturing a pigmy over the flames, old Ben York was kneeling close beside the blaze, holding to the coals a hickory stick, which served as spit for the roasting of a squirrel. The brilliance shone full on the frowsy gray whiskers, and, above them, the blinking, rheumy eyes, so intent ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... with boats sailing in the air 30 and houses built in the clouds, and sundry other ingenious Dutch fantasies. The beaux distinguished themselves by their adroitness in replenishing this pot from a huge copper teakettle which would have made the pigmy macaronis of these degenerate days sweat merely to look at it. To sweeten the beverage, a lump of sugar was laid beside each cup, and the company alternately nibbled and sipped with 5 great decorum; until ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... called forth surprise and gratitude in the United States and smoothed the way for a renewal of commercial relations with the mother country. At the same time they gave genuine anxiety to European diplomats. "This federal republic is born a pigmy," wrote the Spanish ambassador to his royal master. "A day will come when it will be a giant; even a colossus formidable to these countries. Liberty of conscience and the facility for establishing a new population on immense lands, as well as the advantages of the new ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... Juvenal and Tacitus; none certainly exceed them. But they are the last barriers that stem the tide. After them the flood has already rushed in, and before long comes the collapse. In Suetonius and Florus we already see the pioneers of a pigmy race; in Gellius, Fronto, and Apuleius, they are present in all their uncouth dwarfishness. Meanwhile the clamours of the world for guidance grow louder and louder, and there is no one great enough or bold enough ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... I walked to Melton Mowbray, a cleanly, good-looking town in Leicestershire, situated on the little river Eye. One cannot say exactly in regard to Rutlandshire what an Englishman once said to the authorities of a pigmy Italian duchy, who ordered him to leave it in twenty-four hours. "I only require fifteen minutes," said cousin John, with a look and tone which Jonathan could not imitate. This rural county is to the shire-family of England what Rhode Island is to the American family of States—the smallest, ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... River Post, watching for Fanchet, the mail robber. It was there he had heard most about this St. Pierre, and yet no one he had talked with had ever seen him; no one knew whether he was old or young, a pigmy or a giant. Some stories said that he was strong, that he could twist a gun-barrel double in his hands; others said that he was old, very old, so that he never set forth with his brigades that brought down each year a treasure of furs to be exchanged ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... the chalices, The pigmy palaces Where the tint hides, Opal and sapphire Half-pearl and ...
— Lundy's Lane and Other Poems • Duncan Campbell Scott
... From the ANTARCTICK, from the Land of Fire [Footnote 5] To where ALASKA'S [Footnote 6] wintry wilds retire; From mines [Footnote 7] of gold, and giant-sons of earth, To grotts of ice, and tribes of pigmy birth Who freeze alive, nor, dead, in dust repose, High-hung in forests to the casing snows.[a] Now mid angelic multitudes he flies, That hourly come with blessings from the skies; Wings the blue ...
— Poems • Samuel Rogers
... Count's affections, and Blythe was allowing the child to look through the large end of her field-glass,—a source of endless entertainment to them both. Suddenly Cecilia gave a little shriek of delight at the way her good friend, Mr. Grey, dwindled into a pigmy; upon which the Count, attracted apparently by her voice, left his chair and came and sat down ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... all-powerful minister, the curse of Spain, the butcher of the noble Torrijos and his unhappy companions, whom he, the insignificant student, had cast down from his high state! The giant had succumbed before the pigmy; the virtual ruler of the kingdom had fallen by the agency of one whom, a day previously, he might with impunity have annihilated. Events so extraordinary and of such rapid occurrence, were hard to comprehend; and Federico had scarcely convinced himself of their reality, when he ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... evidently quite tall, although she seemed a pigmy among the towering giants that attended her stroll. Her hands were thrust deep into the pockets of a white duck skirt. A glance revealed white shoes and trim ankles in blue. She wore no hat. Her hair was like spun gold, ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... the whole, or if they didn't I made them fit. Here was a splendid end to chaos and blind wrestling with life. And feeling stronger and more sure than ever in my life before, I set out to build my series of glory stories about it all, laying on the color thick to reach a million pigmy readers, grip them, pull them out of their holes, make them sit up and ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... for the two, and they were to ride "turn about"; but Chuar'ruumpeak, the chief, rides, and Shuts, the one-eyed, barelegged, merry-faced pigmy, walks, and points the way with a slender cane; then leaps and bounds by the shortest way, and sits down on a rock and waits demurely until we come, always meeting us with a jest, his face a ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... potatoes may be weighed to within a kilogramme or so, do not permit of this precision. I must therefore rely on the evidence of my sight alone, evidence, for that matter, which is amply sufficient in the present instance. Compared with his mate, the Mantis-hunting Tachytes is likewise a pigmy. We are quite astonished to see him pestering his giantess on ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... chance-dropped seed that rear them, as the tall Chestnuts, and, mightiest of the branching wood, Jove's Aesculus, and oaks, oracular Deemed by the Greeks of old. With some sprouts forth A forest of dense suckers from the root, As elms and cherries; so, too, a pigmy plant, Beneath its mother's mighty shade upshoots The bay-tree of Parnassus. Such the modes Nature imparted first; hence all the race Of forest-trees and shrubs and sacred groves Springs into verdure. Other means there are, Which use by method for itself ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... lower, are not our Streets filled with sagacious Draymen, and Politicians in Liveries? We have several Taylors of six Foot high, and meet with many a broad pair of Shoulders that are thrown away upon a Barber, when perhaps at the same time we see a pigmy Porter reeling under a Burthen, who might have managed a Needle with much Dexterity, or have snapped his Fingers with great Ease to himself, and Advantage to ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... Ithuriel lance of Truth We force to start amid her feign'd caress 5 Vice, siren-hag! in native ugliness; A Brother's fate will haply rouse the tear, And on we go in heaviness and fear! But if our fond hearts call to Pleasure's bower Some pigmy Folly in a careless hour, 10 The faithless guest shall stamp the enchanted ground, And mingled forms of Misery rise around: Heart-fretting Fear, with pallid look aghast, That courts the future woe to hide the past; Remorse, the poison'd ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the dewy grasslands where late the frost hath shone, And lo, what elfin cities are these we come upon! What pigmy domes and thatches, what Arab caravan, What downy-roofed pagodas that have known no touch of man! Are these the oldtime meadows? Yes, the wildgrape scents the air; The breath of ripened orchards still is incense everywhere; Yet do these dawn-encampments bring ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... these look forward to the day when posterity will canonize them, and lift them to the glory of those who were not received by their age because they were in advance of their age. So they regard with contempt the pigmy world, wrap the mantles of their mortified pride about them, and lie down in a delusive ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... petty beginning, like your monumental oak from your pigmy acorn, there grew up a great feud between the families of the two girls, and like a poison the plague of the quarrel spread to Florence, and in a twinkling men were divided against each other in a deathly hatred that in their hearts knew little of the original quarrel, and cared ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... out of his head. Not only when he was engaged in writing, but even in the midst of an ordinary conversation, at supper, or whilst drinking a social glass of wine or rum, he would suddenly exclaim, "See there—there—that ugly little pigmy—see what capers he cuts. Pray don't incommode yourself, my little man. You are at liberty to listen to us as much as you please. Will you not approach nearer? You are welcome." (Here, and occasionally, he would accompany ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... and Jose, unashamed, wiped away a tear upon the back of a leathery hand. "Senor Sanford and me, senor, we teach her when she ees so leetle!" Jose's shaking hand was lowered until it marked the stature of a twelve-inch pigmy. In all things must the old fellow gain his emphasis by exaggeration which more often than not took the form of plain lying. "Never at all unteel one year ago does she leave us and the rancho. We, us two who love her, senor, learn her to walk and to ride and to shoot and to talk. You shall ...
— Judith of Blue Lake Ranch • Jackson Gregory
... make a man throw away canvas and brushes into the bottomless precipices, enough to make one weep with despair at his utter and absolute impotence. Nature is God, Anna, and the greatest artist of us all a pigmy. When I think of those ateliers of ours, the art jargon, the decadents with their flamboyant talk I long for a two-edged sword and a minute of Divinity. ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... however, in comparison with St. Paul's, and an ordinary parish church, called St. Margaret's, which must be, I think, quite as large as Trinity, New York, and stands within a hundred yards of the abbey, is but a pigmy compared with Westminster. I took a position in St. Margaret's church-yard, at a point where the whole of the eastern side of the edifice might be seen, and for the first time in my life gazed ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... that establishes itself by injustice; that only makes itself felt by the outrage it commits: this is the manner in which nature, the sovereign of all beings, in whose system all are equal, would speak to one of these superb monarchs, whom flattery has deified:—"Untoward, headstrong child! Pigmy, so proud of commanding pigmies! Have they then assured thee that thou art a god? Have they flattered thee that thou art something supernatural? Know there is nothing superior to myself. Contemplate thine ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... run on it before she had spoken it; to watch, to follow, adore her; became the business of his life. Meanwhile, as is the way often, his idol had idols of her own, and never thought of or suspected the admiration of her little pigmy adorer. ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the kite, the honey-buzzard, the marsh-harrier, the sparrow-hawk, owls of two kinds (Ketupa ceylonensis and Athene meridionalis), the grey shrike (Lanius excubitor), the common cormorant, the pigmy cormorant (Graeculus pygmaeus), numerous seagulls, as the Adriatic gull (Larus melanocephalus), Andonieri's gull, the herring-gull, the Red-Sea-gull (Larus ichthyo-aetos), and others; the gull-billed ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... the rapids of the St. Louis has been well described: "Like specks on the broad bosom of the waters, two pigmy vessels held their course up the lonely St. Lawrence. They passed abandoned Tadoussac, the channel of Orleans, the tenantless rock of Quebec, the wide Lake of St. Peter with its crowded archipelago, and the forest plain of Montreal. All was solitude. ...
— 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
... each other in deadly conflict, the Trojans marched with noisy shouts, like the clamor of the cranes, when they fly to the streams of Oceanus, in the early morning, screaming, and bringing death and destruction to the Pigmy men; but the Achaieans came on in silence, breathing ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... Spanish Count d'Aranda to his royal master in 1782, "is born a pigmy. A day will come when it will be a giant, even a colossus. Liberty of conscience, the facility for establishing a new population on immense lands, as well as the advantages of the new government, will draw thither farmers and ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... imperial throne, So distant, O ye gods! from every one, The royal virtues are like many a star, From this our pigmy system rather far: Whose light, though flying ever since creation, Has not yet pitched upon our nation. [Footnote: Such was the sublime opinion of the Dutch ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... taken hold of this matter, I may look for that invitation to his house at, any moment. I am perishing to go! I do long to know whether I am only simply a large-sized pigmy among these pigmies here, who tumble over so easily when one strikes them, or whether I am really—." Her thoughts drifted into other channels, for a season. Then she continued:— "He said I could be useful in the great cause of philanthropy, and help in the blessed work of uplifting ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 4. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... for Fred's physique, among his friends he was known as Pigmy and Pee Wee, the former title sometimes being ...
— The Go Ahead Boys and Simon's Mine • Ross Kay
... of Spirits is a deep forest which stretches back and back in a dense and chaotic tangle of strangled sapling and parasitic weed to the edge of the Pigmy forest. No man—white or brown or black—has explored the depth of the Forbidden Forest, for here the wild beasts have their lairs and rear their young; and here are mosquito in dense clouds. Moreover, and this is important, a ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... furniture had been forgotten. And, as he gazed at it, he half thought himself an actor in a fairy portal [tale?]; and would not have been surprised—at least, he would have taken it with the composure of a dream—if the mimic portal had unclosed, and a form of pigmy majesty had appeared within, beckoning him to enter and find the revelation of what had so long perplexed him. The key of the cabinet was in the lock, and knowing that it was not now the receptacle of anything in the shape of family papers, ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... now boiling up round the cutter on every side, our little pigmy of a craft seeming lost in the seething caldron of broken water; but, she was buoyant as a cork, and, although half rilled, breasted the billows in fine style and running before wind and sea at a tearing rate with not a rag of sail on her now, nor an oar, save one Mr Chisholm and I rigged out ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... came right up an' toed the mark like a man an' a gentleman. An' he's toed it ever since. An' I can tell you that the pictures he's paintin' now with his tongue for them poor blind boys to see is bigger an' better than any pictures he could have painted with—with his pigmy paints if he worked on 'em for a thousand years. An' it's YOU that's done it for him, jest by ...
— Dawn • Eleanor H. Porter
... One really has more chance against a tiger. Geronimo stood seventeen hands high, and weighed over sixteen hundred pounds. When he reared on his hind legs and came for you, screaming, his teeth snapping like bear-traps, his black mane flying, a man seemed a pigmy. One blow from those front hoofs and your troubles were over. Once down, he'd trample, bite, and kick until your own mother would hesitate to claim the pile of rags and jelly left. He had served two men so; nothing but his matchless ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... island of anguish, Destined to crush thy proud spirit at last, Doomed amid pigmy tormentors to languish, Facing ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... the only riders that night. Men were carrying along the whole frontier the news that the war had begun, that the death struggle was now on between Mexico and Texas, the giant on one side and the pigmy on the other. ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler
... his peavie. Roaring Dick, like a demon incarnate, threw himself into the work. Forty men attacked the jam at a dozen places, encouraging the movement, twisting aside the timbers that threatened to lock anew, directing pigmy-like the titanic forces into the channel of their efficiency. Roaring like wild cattle the logs swept by, at first slowly, then with the railroad rush of the curbed freshet. Men were everywhere, taking chances, like cowboys before the stampeded herd. And so, out of sight ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... Torrent Mist—to lay the foundation of fifteen generations of Kami, whose birth seems to have been essential to the "making of the land," though their names afford no clue to the functions discharged by them. From over sea, seated in a gourd and wearing a robe of wren's feathers, there comes a pigmy, Sukuna Hikona, who proves to be one of fifteen hundred children begotten by the Kami of the original trinity. Skilled in the arts of healing sickness and averting calamities from men or animals, this pigmy renders invaluable aid to the Great-Name Possessor. But the useful ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... pathetic little braggings about his poverty, seemed all to disappear. He had strolled back to my hearthrug, wishing, I have no doubt now, to be able to exclaim suddenly that it was too late for the pint of beer for which he hadn't the money, and to curse his luck; and the pigmy quality of his colossusship ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... dwarf, and the prolocutor for the Grecians, gave me leave, that am a pigmy, to do an embassage to you from the cranes. Gentlemen (for kings are no better), certain humble animals, called our actors, commend them unto you; who, what offence they have committed I know not (except it be in purloining some hours out of Time's treasury, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... asteroidal pairs travelling in approximately coincident tracks, must date from a remote antiquity. They result, Professor Kirkwood[1029] believed, from the divellent action of Jupiter upon embryo pigmy planets, just as comets moving in pursuit of one another are a consequence of the ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... by the socialistic fools and shallow-pates—this degeneracy and dwarfing of man to an absolutely gregarious animal (or as they call it, to a man of "free society"), this brutalizing of man into a pigmy with equal rights and claims, is undoubtedly POSSIBLE! He who has thought out this possibility to its ultimate conclusion knows ANOTHER loathing unknown to the rest of mankind—and perhaps also a ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... any way with the first two, which she scorns to visit, so sure is her memory. I do the same thing a couple of times more; and the insect always returns to the last perch, without worrying about the others. I stand amazed at the memory of that pigmy. She need but catch a single hurried glimpse of a spot that differs in no wise from a host of others in order to remember it quite well, notwithstanding the fact that, as a miner relentlessly pursuing her underground labours, ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... of all time, and on it placed a lot of little figures, "pigmy minds"—all save one, and he the nearest great, an unworldly person summoned from a cloister, with the vision of genius and the practical incapacity of one who has run away from life, hating men but loving all mankind, eloquent but inarticulate in a large way, incapable of true self expression ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... pigmy scraper wi' his fiddle, Wha used to trysts an' fairs to driddle, [markets, toddle] Her strappin' limb an' gawsie middle [buxom] (He reach'd nae higher) Had holed his heartie like a riddle, And blawn't on ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... with attention sweet Turns to the GNOMES, that circle round her feet; Orb within orb approach the marshal'd trains, And pigmy legions darken all the plains; 5 Thrice shout with silver tones the applauding bands, Bow, ere She speaks, and clap their fairy hands. So the tall grass, when noon-tide zephyr blows, Bends it's green blades in undulating rows; Wide o'er the fields the billowy tumult ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... progress. It was surrounded by an atmosphere absolutely fatal to animal life; an atmosphere which, while it stimulated vegetable growth, no living thing could breathe and continue to live. Hence it was, that vegetation, gigantic almost beyond conception, covered its surface. Fern, which is now a pigmy plant, nowhere higher than a few feet, grew tall and overshadowing like great oaks, while oaks, it is fair to presume, towered thousands of feet towards the sky. These stupendous forests stood alone upon the surface of the earth; no animals ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... every moment it mounted higher. Black pigmy figures were now dancing round it and across the Common other figures were always passing, dragging wood with them. The row of palings towards the river had gone and soon those little cottages that lined the grass must suffer. Surely now the whole of ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... when these graceful pigmy trees Have swayed their last in any breeze, And all is bare, I may again See the ripe heads that pierce the plain, And eat once more before I die Our ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 29, 1914 • Various
... conservatory, always renowned, but now more than ever, as the prototype of the famous Palace of Glass, which, in this Annus Mirabilis, received under its roof six millions of the people of all nations, tongues, and creeds. In extent, the conservatory at Chatsworth is but a pigmy compared with that which glorifies Hyde Park: but it is filled with the rarest Exotics from all parts of the globe—from 'farthest Ind,' from China, from the Himalayas, from Mexico; here you see the rich banana, Eschol's grape hanging in ripe profusion beneath the shadow of immense ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... description. His honest eyes fire up, and sparkle, as if their depths were stirred by something bright. His broad chest heaves with pleasure. His strong loose hands clench themselves, in his earnestness; and he emphasizes what he says with a right arm that shows, in my pigmy view, like ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... divine, charming is —. in the calm light of mild —, teaching by examples Physic to the dogs —, take Physician, is there no —, heal thyself Picture, look here upon this Pierian spring Pigmies are pigmies still Pigmy body, fretted the, to decay Pigs squeak, as naturally as Pilgrim shrines, such graves are Pilot of the Galilean lake Pinch, a hungry, lean-faced villain Pink of courtesy Pines, silent sea of Pin's fee, set my life ...
— Familiar Quotations • Various
... idea of this insipid pigmy leading an army to overthrow the king was as ridiculous as ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... everyone who is allowed to uphold the ark. Many a wise man has attacked Luther, and what has been effected? The Pope curses, the emperor threatens; there are prisons, confiscations, faggots; and all is vain. What can a poor pigmy ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude |
