"Slimy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... lurching over struck the officer, who fell into the muddy water of the Pamunkey. Always amused at an officer's mishap, cavalry men and drivers laughed. The young man struck out for the farther shore, and came on to a shelving slope of slimy mud, and was vainly struggling to get a footing when an officer ran down the bank and gave him a needed hand. Thus aided, Penhallow gained firm ground. With a look of disgust at his condition, as he faced the laughing troopers he said, with his somewhat formal ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... bushes, cane and reeds, the soil continually growing softer and the vegetation ranker and more gloomy. Often the canes and reeds were so dense that they had difficulty in seeing their leader, as he slipped on ahead. Sometimes snakes trailed a slimy length from their path, and, hardened foresters though they were, they shuddered. Occasionally an incautious foot sank to the knee and it was pulled out again with a choking sigh as the mud closed where it had been. Mosquitoes and many other buzzing and stinging ...
— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... a great tree was Histah, the snake—huge, ponderous, slimy—and in the folds of its deadly embrace was Teeka's little balu, Gazan. Nothing in the jungle inspired within the breast of Tarzan so near a semblance to fear as did the hideous Histah. The apes, too, loathed the terrifying reptile and ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... safely guaranteed to kill in a very short time any man with a modern constitution, unless he were miraculously preserved from rheumatism and other evils of the flesh. The damp oozes perpetually from the slimy rock, and the air is like that of a well. Indeed, there is a little well here called St. milion's Fountain. The spring is intermittent; every two or three minutes the water is seen to rise with one or more bubbles. ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... national peculiarity, and to consider any reflection upon it, on the part of the liberty-loving Swiss, as an insult to the American nation. The sophisms by which slaveholding has been justified from the Bible have left their slimy track even here. Alas! is it thus America fulfils her high destiny? Must she send missionaries abroad to ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... slipping on the slimy mud, and either tumbling over each other or else side-slipping into the morass, which was a jolly sight worse. To make a long story short, we took up our position, which was in the middle of a circular clump of furze within 50 yards of the butts, ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... therefore we must regard them as being literally spirits of devils, here appearing under their own appropriate title. Their mission is to form a confederation of all the gigantic powers of wickedness, slimy and loathsome as the animal to which they are likened, and to array themselves ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... and enfeebled by the attacks of its ravenous parasite, dies, and its decaying body fills the bottom of the cell with a slimy, foul-smelling mass, called "foul-brood." This gives rise to a miasma which poisons the neighboring brood, until the contagion (for the disease is analogous to typhus, jail or ship-fever) spreads through the whole hive, unless promptly checked ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... nearly an hour to find where this slipped into the water. And we were tired and hungry and wet and cold, but we simply had to persevere. It was frightful. At length we found the thing—it looked like a slimy black snake—and we cut it, where the water was a foot deep—the water bit my wrists and ankles as sharply as if it had been sharks—and went back to the house through ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... and coats of mail were to be seen, with heads held in their helmets by the chin-pieces and rolling about like balls; heads of hair were hanging on the thorns; elephants were lying with their towers in pools of blood, with entrails exposed, and gasping. The foot trod on slimy things, and there were swamps of mud although no ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... Reach the range. Grass-trees. Wild beauty of scene. Scarcity of water. A pea-like vetch. Name the range. A barren spot. Water seen from it. Follow a creek channel. Other creeks join it. A confined glen. Scrubby and stony hills. Strike a gum creek. Slimy water. A pretty tree. Flies troublesome. Emus. An orange tree. Tropic of Capricorn. Melodious sounds. Carmichael's Creek. Mountains to the north. Ponds of water. A green plain. Clay-pan water. Fine herbage. Kangaroos and emus numerous. A new tree. Agreeable encampment. Peculiar mountains. High ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... sounding names beguile the reader into an idea of their importance. A lonesome haunt in time of peace, it had lately been the winter quarters of fifteen thousand soldiers, and a multitude of log huts had grown up around it. I tied my horse to the window-shutter of a dwelling, and picked my way over a slimy sidewalk to the ricketty tavern-porch. Four or five privates lay here fast asleep, and the bar-room was occupied by a bevy of young officers, who were emptying the contents of sundry pocket-flasks. Behind the bar sat a person with strongly-marked Hebrew features, and a ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... to the edge of the slimy ooze; trees behind—that was all we could see. We gave our attention to the business of getting our men, our effects, and ourselves ashore. The ooze proved to be just above knee deep. The porters had a fearful and floundering time, and received ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... oars!" shouted a gruff voice, at the foot of the steps, where the salt water, splashing on the snow, had laid bare the green and slimy moss. Two or three volunteers stumbled down the steps, and the first boat got away, swinging down-stream at once, only to be brought slowly back, head to wind. She hung motionless a few yards from the quay, each dip of the oars stirring ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... hoisting myself on a playfellow's shoulders, I looked over the melancholy wall, all bearded with ferns. I saw bottomless stagnant waters, covered with slimy green. In the gaps in the sticky carpet, a sort of dumpy, black-and-yellow reptile was lazily swimming. Today, I should call it a salamander; at that time, it appeared to me the offspring of the serpent and the dragon, of whom we were told such bloodcurdling tales when we sat up at ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... for its sides Gaped wide with many a rift, and its frail joints Swayed with the undulations of the tide. A restless impulse urged him to embark And meet lone Death on the drear ocean's waste; 305 For well he knew that mighty Shadow loves The slimy caverns of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... before the lands of the outer world were born of the sea, before even the Land of the Sun (Mu) and the Land of the Sea (Atlantis) arose from molten rock and sand, there was land here in the far south. A sere land of rock plains, and swamps where slimy life mated, ...
— The People of the Crater • Andrew North
... unlucky traveler who stepped unawares upon their surface; for instantly he found himself caught by the clinging moist clay, to sink farther and farther into the bog until, swallowed up in the mire, he would meet a horrible death beneath its slimy surface. His grandfather had told him never to go near these terrible bogs, and Jack, who was an obedient boy, had always kept away from this part of the wood. But as he paused, again that despairing cry came to his ears, very near ...
— Mother Goose in Prose • L. Frank Baum
... vast cellarage was witness of many a dark encounter, of many a mysterious death; could the slimy walls have told their own tale, it would have been one which would have put to shame the ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... his feet, elevated the torch with infinite precaution, throwing a fan-shaped light over the stretch of sink he had suspected and feared. It flanked the flat, wet path of rock on either side. Here Death spread its slimy trap at ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... to the conclusion that he had dropped into a sewer. To get out the way he had entered appeared impossible. He could not leap upward from the slimy, concave bottom the distance he had dropped. To follow the sewer upward would lead him nowhere nearer escape. There remained no hope but to follow the trickling stream downward toward the river, into which his judgment told him the ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... and black slabs of marble from beneath the door curtain. The moonlight glistened the bronze skin of the silent, crawling thing that was a huge snake, or a giant centipede; it was even like a square-snouted, shovel-headed mugger that had crept up out of the slimy river that circled sluggishly the eastern wall of ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... thatch of matted foliage overhead no faintest ray of sunlight filtered—not even where the stream coiled its slimy way among the tamaracks and spruces. But south of us, along the ascending trail by which we had come, the westering sun glowed red across a ledge of rock, from which the hill fell sheer away, plunging into profound green ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... concerned the superiority of our finny tribes is even more strongly marked than in regard to quantity. In the sluggish streams that abound in "ten degrees of more effulgent clime," the fish partake of the slimy properties of their native element; it is only in the limpid waters of the North that they are found of flavor so unexceptionable as to please an epicurean taste, or exalt them to the dignity of a staple of commerce. Fish possess peculiar qualities to commend them as an ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland
... when he landed on an inclined pan midway of a patch of water between two greater pans. His feet shot out and he began to slide feet foremost into the sea, with increasing momentum, as a man might fall from a steep, slimy roof. The pan righted in the trough, however, to check his descent over the edge of the ice. When it reached the horizontal in the depths of the trough, and there paused before responding to the lift of the ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... in dry air the sea-born stranger roves, Each muscle quickens, and each sense improves; Cold gills aquatic form respiring lungs, And sounds aerial flow from slimy tongues. ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... swimmer in a breaker. The forest was thickly grown and the trees stood about me as alike as water-reeds. Whenever I touched one it pelted me with drops, and I was numbed with cold. My feet slipped, for the ground was slimy with wet. But I was not thinking of comfort, nor ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... are drawn up on their arrival to discharge their cargoes, chiefly at this time consisting of a kind of sprat and an anchovy with a broad lateral silvery band. Baskets of land crabs covered with black slimy mud, of handsome Lupeae, and the large well-flavoured prawns, called Cameroons, are scattered about, and even small sharks (Zygaenae, etc.) and cuttlefish are exposed ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... structure produced by this disease occur in the mucous membrane lining of the stomach and intestines. This membrane becomes red from increased blood supply or from hemorrhage into it, is swollen, and is covered by a coating of slimy mucus. In some especially severe cases the membrane is destroyed in spots, causing the appearance ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... would your spell Be daunting to a cuttle, think you now? We had a bout with one on our way here; It had green lidless eyes like lanterns, arms As many as the branches of a tree, But limber, and each one of them wise as a snake. It laid hold of our bulwarks, and with three Long knowing arms, slimy, and of a flesh So tough they'ld fool a hatchet, searcht the ship, And stole out of the midst of us all a man; Yes, and he the proudest man upon the seas For the rare powerful talisman he'd got. And would yours ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... picture of malignant joy, horrible to contemplate. The lips of his large mouth were compressed and bloodless. He came on with the quiet certainty and deadly ease of a slimy thing sure ...
— The Bronze Hand - 1897 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)
... you to teach me?" asked Sir John angrily. "I meant that he should hear the truth for once, the slimy traitor." ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... made the attempt to go back by keeping as direct a line as she could, for the path was straight as an arrow. But she could not see enough even to start her in a line, and she had not gone far before she found herself hemmed in, apparently on every side, by ditches and pools of black, dismal, slimy water. And now it was so dark that she could see nothing more than the gleam of a bit of clear sky now and then in the water. Again and again she stepped knee-deep in black mud, and once tumbled down in the shallow edge of a terrible pool; after which she gave up the attempt to escape the meshes ...
— A Double Story • George MacDonald
... security. We reached the bed of the stream, where scattered threads of water tinkled as they fell over huge blocks into little pools below, and then went whispering on their way towards the darkness. At the botton of a long slant of greenish slimy stone, patched here and there with moss, I stopped a few minutes, feeling that I could not grasp without an effort the deep gloom and grandeur of my surroundings. The jackdaws had all flown away, and there was no sound ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... On quitting the bomb-proof, she had struck into a narrow winding path, less seen than felt in the deep gloom pervading the wood, and with light steps bounded over obstacles that lay strewed in their course, emitting scarcely more sound than would have been produced by the slimy crawl of its native rattlesnake. Not so, however, with the less experienced tread of her companion. Wanting the pliancy of movement given to it by the light mocassin, the booted foot of the young officer, despite of all his precaution, fell heavily to the ground, ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... yards long, and sloped back half that distance to a slimy wall of rock. On the opposite side of the stream the wall fell sheer into the water, and overhead was a jagged roof that glittered and sparkled in the rays ...
— Canoe Boys and Campfires - Adventures on Winding Waters • William Murray Graydon
... stretch of barren clay, which was a slimy pool, with a green, unhealthy margin for some months of the year, the minister had made such a garden as few in the town could boast. The hawthorn hedge around it, as well as every tree and bush in it, was planted by the minister's ...
— Allison Bain - By a Way she knew not • Margaret Murray Robertson
... bold hands from slimy nest The bedded fish in banks out-wrest; Or curious traitors, sleeve-silk flies, Bewitch poor fishes' ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... this kind of "originality" is not only absolutely valueless, but exceedingly harmful; its only merit is that, like its ideal seaweed, it has no backbone of its own, and we may hope that it will soon betake itself to its natural home, the slimy bottom ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack
... frog he rode a slimy eel, (Shovel) With a rinktum bolly kimo. The sun made his complexion peel, (Shovel) With a rinktum bolly kimo. The frog's legs went to join a fry, (Shovel) With a rinktum bolly kimo. The eel became a juicy pie, (Shovel) ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... rolling about on the surface, and the unhappy man was in this way enabled to get an occasional breath of air; otherwise he must infallibly have been drowned. It was a horrible-looking creature, with a slimy body, and a hideous cavity of a mouth. It is the tentacles of the creature that are so dreaded, on account of the immense ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... furrows, which were immediately devoured by our camels: they were no less famished than ourselves. We had the happiness, on quitting this sandy plain, to enter into a valley surrounded with mountains, where the soil was white and slimy. At the foot of some tall shrubs, of which the branches were artfully formed into an arbour, we found some water, of which we stood in great need. We therefore drank of it with much pleasure, although it was very bitter, ...
— Perils and Captivity • Charlotte-Adelaide [nee Picard] Dard
... in his arms and held him. He was quivering, with awful motions like a spasm. He made no sound, and Jimmie was terrified, thinking that he was dying. Before long Jimmie felt a hot wetness stealing over his hands, first slimy, then turning sticky. He had to sit there, almost fainting with horror; he dared not say anything, for maybe the policeman would strike him also. He sat, clutching in his arms the shaking body, and whispering under his breath, "Poor ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... its concealment in the mud in a vicious arc. Forepaugh leaped back barely in time to escape being swept in and engulfed. The end of the tentacle struck him a heavy blow on the chest, throwing him back with such force as to bowl Gunga over, and whirling the pistols out of his hands into a slimy, bulbous growth nearby, where they stuck in the phosphorescent cavities the force of their impact ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... stagnant or stagnating water originating in bogs are distinguished into Trask, stagna, and Tjernar or Tjarnar (sing. Tjern or Tjarn), stagnatiles. Trask are pools fed by bogs, or water emanating from them, and their bottoms are slimy; Tjernar are small Trask situated within the limits of Mossar.—L.L. Laestadius, om Mojligheten af Uppodlingar ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... grown tired of floral beauty, had, in a sudden malevolent mood, purposely torn and blurred the fair green frondage and twisted every bud awry! Great, jagged leaves covered with prickles and stained all over with blotches as of spilt poison, . . thick brown stems glistening with slimy moisture and coiled up like the sleeping bodies of snakes, . . masses of purple and blue fungi, . . and blossoms seemingly of the orchid species, some like fleshy tongues, others like the waxen yellow fingers of a dead hand, protruded spectrally through the matted foliage,—while all manner ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... streets the infrequent wayfarer never met a carriage. Forty thousand horses had been eaten; dogs, cats and rats were now luxuries, commanding a high price. Ever since the supply of wheat had given out the bread was made from rice and oats, and was black, damp, and slimy, and hard to digest; to obtain the ten ounces that constituted a day's ration involved a wait, often of many hours, in line before the bake-house. Ah, the sorrowful spectacle it was, to see those poor women shivering in the pouring ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... bred generosity in cold ones, kindled emotion in dead ones, uplifted base ones, broadened bigoted ones, and made many and many a stricken one glad and filled it brimful of gratitude, figuratively spit upon in his unoffending coffin by this crawling, slimy, sanctimonious, self-righteous reptile! ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... up a stone from the roadside and aimed it at the slimy little body, but his throw erred, and the missile fell harmlessly into the wheat field beyond, startling a blackbird with scarlet marks, which soared suddenly above the bearded grain and vanished, with ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... before, for their boats are most wretched things, such as I never saw before, having no head or stern, and being made only of the skins of goats, sewed together with dried guts of goats and sheep, and done over with a kind of slimy stuff like rosin and oil, but of a most nauseous, odious smell; and they are poor miserable things for boats, the worst that any part of the world ever saw; a canoe is an excellent contrivance ...
— The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton • Daniel Defoe
... confinement to which he was now condemned. On being first thrust into it, he could not behold all its horror; but when his eyes got accustomed to the semi-darkness, he found himself in a dismal cell under ground, half full of water from the overflowing of the river, and teeming with numerous crawling, slimy things. A little hole, half choked with earth and stones, let in all the place possessed of light and air; and as the only air which could ever visit the place had to pass over a bed of stagnant mud ere it reached the spot, it ...
— The Adventures of a Bear - And a Great Bear too • Alfred Elwes
... tracks. And the men were marched to the rear. Hour after hour the flames of hell swirled in endless waves about this angle of the Southern trenches. Line after line of blue broke against it and eddied down its sides in slimy pools. ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... Green; take it off the Fire, drain the Water well away, and separate the Barks; and take the Green, lay it on some moist floor and close place, and cover it with Weeds; let it lye a fortnight, and in that time it will rot, and turn to a Filthy slimy Substance: Then put it into a Morter, beat it well; take it out and wash it at some running stream, till the Foulness is gone: Then put it in a close Earthen pot; let it stand Four or Five days, look to its Purging, and scum it: When clean, put it into ...
— The School of Recreation (1696 edition) • Robert Howlett
... adequately. (He ate boys for breakfast and girls for tea.) With this person the young man was in eternal conflict (a bear with little ears and big teeth); not open conflict, for that would have meant instant dismissal (not hairy at all—a long slimy eel with a lot of sense), but a veiled unremitting warfare which occupied all their spare attention. The young man knew for an actual fact that some day he would be compelled to hit that chap, and it would be a sorry day for the fellow, because his ability to hit was startling. ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... the mud^; roil. wallow in the mire; slobber, slabber^. Adj. dirty, filthy, grimy; unclean, impure; soiled &c v.; not to be handled with kid gloves; dusty, snuffy^, smutty, sooty, smoky; thick, turbid, dreggy; slimy; mussy [U.S.]. slovenly, untidy, messy, uncleanly. [of people] unkempt, sluttish, dowdy, draggle-tailed; uncombed. unscoured^, unswept^, unwiped^, unwashed, unstrained, unpurified^; squalid; lutose^, slammocky^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Lemon-dab: scales small, smooth, and imbedded; skin slimy, head and mouth very small, colour yellowish brown with ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... before which a constant stream of devotees succeed each other in prayer. This contains an enormous brass image of Buddha, 12 feet in height, thickly plastered with the pilgrims' offerings of gold-leaf. Behind the temple are the sacred tanks, whose green and slimy water is alive with turtles, too lazy or too well fed to eat the dainty morsels thrown to them by the onlookers, but which are pounced upon by hundreds of hawks, who often seize the tit-bits before they reach ...
— Burma - Peeps at Many Lands • R.Talbot Kelly
... with a thump against your ear, as if a great hammer were knocking on your barrel, to see that all within was safe and sound. Then you begin to think of krakens, and sharks, and porpoises, and sea serpents, and all the monstrous, slimy, cold, hobgoblin brood, who, perhaps, are your next door neighbors; and the old blue-haired Ocean whispers through the planks, "Here you are; I've got you. Your grand ship is my plaything. I can do what I like ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... mind tossed and surged with the ocean. . . . I was buried for a thousand years in stone coffins, with mummies and sphinxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed with cancerous kisses by crocodiles; and laid confounded with all unutterable slimy things, among reeds and Nilotic mud. . . . The cursed crocodile became to me the object of more horror than almost all the rest. I was compelled to live ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... place. Having written beforehand to one of the principal inhabitants, Senor Venancio, a house was ready for me on landing. The only recommendation of the dwelling was its coolness. It was, in fact, rather damp; the plastered walls bore a crop of green mold, and a slimy moisture oozed through the black, dirty floor; the rooms were large, but lighted by miserable little holes in place of windows. The village is built on a clayey plateau, and the ruinous houses are arranged ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... they go down to have a look at the dungeon underground. While they were examining that damp, slimy old cell, the ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Spies - Dodging the Sharks of the Deep • Victor G. Durham
... drops. It tasted sweetish and bitterish—I don't exactly know how, but as soon as it was down, I jumped up five times and yelled ‘Out of the way, you little ones, and let me ride’; and after running alongside, and climbing up his slimy scales, I got straddle of a big snake, who turned his head round, blowing his hot, sickening breath in my face. I waved my old wool hat, and kicking him into a fast run, sung out to the little devils to get up behind, and off we started, screeching, ‘Hurrah for Hell!’ ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... abruptly what the stranger might deem a thoroughfare. There is a piece of sluggish, stagnant water on the one hand, thick and turbid, and somewhat resembling in form and colour a broad muddy highway, lined by low walls; not a tuft of vegetation is to be seen on its tame rectilinear sides: all is slimy and brown, with here and there dank, muddy recesses, as if for the frog and the rat; while on the damp flat above, there lie, somewhat in the style of the grouping in a Dutch painting, the rotting fragments of canal passage-boats and ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... hard, steely eyes, sitting in solemn state in a gloomy hall and dispensing death, disgrace, or long terms of prison, at the very least, to all comers. For her, the police-station was a dungeon, and she fancied the Count chained to a dank and slimy wall in a painful position, chilled to the marrow by the touch of the dripping stone, his teeth chattering, his face distorted with suffering. Of course he was in a solitary cell, behind a heavy door, braced with clamps and bolts and locks and studded ...
— A Cigarette-Maker's Romance • F. Marion Crawford
... appearance and there were times when it seemed as if she were right. Certainly when her son ambled home at dusk with every rebellious hair standing upended upon his head and a string of flounders dripping salt from the tips of their slimy tails she was justified to a degree in wishing he had more regard for ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett
... made from the sugar of water-brambles," remarked the frog, with a self-satisfied smile. "No doubt you are surprised at the delicacy and refinement of our tastes. Many human beings are under the deplorable mistake of supposing we live on slimy water and dirty insects—ha, ha, ha! whereas our cuisine is astounding in variety and delicacy of material and flavour. If it were not too late in the season, I wish you could have tasted our mushroom pates and minnows' ...
— The Tapestry Room - A Child's Romance • Mrs. Molesworth
... anodyne within his reach at this the most critical moment of his life. He remembered the last time he had used it—in the desert: two days of forgetfulness to the world, when it all moved by him, the swarming Arabs, the train of camels, the loads of ivory, the slimy crocodile on the sandbanks, the vultures hovering above unburied carcasses, the kourbash descending on shining black shoulders, corrugating bare brown bodies into cloven skin and lacerated flesh, a fight between champions of two tribes who clasped and smote and struggled and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... interrupt a letter by some loud illogical remark. Thus he salved his self-conceit. He also sought relief in reflecting savagely upon the speeches that had been made against him in the debate. He went through them all in his mind. There was the slimy idiot from Baines's (it was in such terms that his thoughts ran) who gloried in never having read a word of Colenso, and called the assembled company to witness that nothing should ever induce him to read ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... dangerous opponent. She was well up the field, and with a neat turn of her stick sent the ball past our Right Back. There was only one girl now to prevent her from getting a goal! Blossom was now fast gaining, and then, just as Veronica came within shooting distance, her foot slipped in the slimy mud, and she lost her balance. Blossom was level with Veronica by this time, and before the Clinton captain could steady herself, she had sent the ball far away from ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... did not blister us; it did not cover us with a slimy ooze and confer upon us an atrocious fragrance; it was not very slimy; and I could not discover that we smelt really any worse than we have always smelt since we have been in Palestine. It was only a different kind of smell, but not ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... landed from the steamer in San Francisco. He was appalled. Deep in him, below any reasoning process or act of consciousness, he had associated power with godhead. And never had the white men seemed such marvellous gods as now, when he trod the slimy pavement of San Francisco. The log cabins he had known were replaced by towering buildings. The streets were crowded with perils—waggons, carts, automobiles; great, straining horses pulling huge trucks; and monstrous cable ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... pierced between his shoulders. He rolled on his back, shoving himself along, both to kill the fire-wasp and coat the sting with cooling mold. Cries of pain told him that he was not the only sufferer, as all dug hands into the slimy stuff under them and slapped it ...
— Voodoo Planet • Andrew North
... palace and gardens, are altogether fraught with melancholy associations. When we last saw them, the grounds and buildings presented a sorry picture of neglect and decay. The mimic lakes and ponds were green and slimy, the grottoes and shell-work crumbling away, the fountains still, and the cascades dry. But the latter are exhibited on certain days during the summer, when the gardens are thronged with gay Parisians. The most ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 377, June 27, 1829 • Various
... Shiny-pate saw its long slimy tongue being uncoiled like a piece of ribbon when the animal yawned; and well he knew that any ant who was unfortunate enough to touch that sticky object would never return to tell the tale; he therefore ...
— Little Folks (October 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... half-an-hour, and taste real Spanish chocolate on Spanish ground. We followed Lieutenant Bundy, but humbly in the providor's boat; that officer going on shore to purchase fresh eggs, milk for tea (in place of the slimy substitute of whipped yolk of egg which we had been using for our morning and evening meals), and, if possible, oysters, for which it is said the rocks ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the vision he digs "into the wall" to see the hidden things that are being done. There he sees every sort of creeping, crawling, slimy, repulsive animal pictured on the walls of this secret chamber, and the leaders of the people burning ...
— Quiet Talks on the Crowned Christ of Revelation • S. D. Gordon
... beauty, and become like great toadstools. But the praises of father or mother do our Selves good, and comfort them and make them beautiful. They never do them any harm. If they do any harm, it comes of our mixing some of our own praises with them, and that turns them nasty and slimy and poisonous. ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • George MacDonald
... the Sierra. For, instead of keeping it at the same level all the year, allowing Nature centuries of time to make new shores, it would, of course, be full only a month or two in the spring, when the snow is melting fast; then it would be gradually drained, exposing the slimy sides of the basin and shallower parts of the bottom, with the gathered drift and waste, death and decay of the upper basins, caught here instead of being swept on to decent natural burial along the banks of the river or in the sea. Thus the Hetch Hetchy dam-lake would be only a rough imitation ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... intricate, and soon It is featureless and proof to the lost forgotten moon. But they could not look above as with blind-drawn feet they move Onwards on the scarce-felt path, with quick and desperate breath, For their circling fingers dread to caress some slimy head, Or to touch the icy shape of a hunched and hairy ape, And at every step they fear in their very midst to hear A lion's rending roar or a tiger's snore.... And when things swish or fall, they shiver ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... belly crushed, and one his breast; Another head or arm, or leg and thigh. Whence some were slain outright, and maimed the rest, While he who was least injured sought to fly. 'Tis so sometimes, with heavy stone oppressed, A knot of slimy snakes is seen to lie, With battered heads and loins where, winter done, They lick their scales, rejoicing ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... astern, we presently picked up the slimy husk of a cocoanut, all over green barnacles. And shortly after, passed two or three limbs of trees, and the solitary trunk of a palm; which, upon sailing nearer, seemed but very recently started on its endless voyage. As noon came on; the dark purple land-haze, ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... and raised her to her feet. And they went back together along the narrow Cliff-path. It was dangerous in the perishing light. He took her hands in his now, and led her sidelong. When her feet slipped in the slimy chalk, he held her up ...
— The Immortal Moment - The Story of Kitty Tailleur • May Sinclair
... was fully developed by this day's rain. Being in dry weather a loose light sand without any apparent consistency, it was now discovered to have a small portion of loam mixed with it, which, without having the tenacity of clay, is sufficient to render it slimy and boggy: I am quite satisfied that two days' rain will at any time render this country impassable. The mortification and distress of mind I felt at being obliged to take a retrograde direction was heightened ...
— Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales • John Oxley
... carburetted hydrogen, and water are given off. 'May not,' they ask, 'these orifices be the vents by which such gases escape? And in forcing their way to the surface, is it not natural that the liquid asphalt and slimy water should be drawn up and expelled?' They point out the fact, that wherever such volcanoes exist, asphalt or petroleum is found hard by. The mud volcanoes of Turbaco, in New Granada, famous from Humboldt's description of them, lie in an asphaltic ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... had had died almost entirely early in December. On the evening of a day when a steady rain had turned the roads into slimy pitfalls, and the ditches to canals, there came, brought by a Belgian corporal, the man who swore that Henri had passed him in his trench while the others slept, had shoved him aside, which was unlike his usual courtesy, and had climbed out ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... regard to what the children are reading. Papers like the Youth's Companion circulated among the members, suggestions as to books in the Sunday School or public library, books loaned to the children and questions as to their reading may save many a soul from the slimy trail of the serpent ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux
... shoulder, ground out "la Paloma" from a hurdygurdy. In the middle of the green plot a fountain sparkled in the yellow light that streamed horizontally from the cafes fuming with tobacco smoke on two sides of the square, and ragged guttersnipes dipped their legs in the slimy basin round about it, splashing one another, rolling like little colts in the grass. From the cafes and the wicker chairs and tables, clink of glasses and dominoes, patter of voices, scuttle of ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... that rolled, and flowed, and rolled, and never rested. The houses, too, were so drunk as to be dangerous. They bowed over him, swaying hideously from their foundations. They seemed to be attracted, just as he was, by that abominable slimy flow and glister of the asphalt. Another wriggle of the latch-key, and they would be over on the ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... nearness to earth's core; and now, a glare Of grateful light relieved their piercing sense; As when, above, the sun his genial streams Of warmth and light darts mingling with the waves, Whole fathoms down; while, amorous of his beams, Each scaly, monstrous thing leaps from its slimy caves. And now, Phraerion, with a tender cry, Far sweeter than the land-bird's note, afar Heard through the azure arches of the sky, By the long-baffled, storm-worn mariner: "Hold, Zophiel! rest thee now—our task is done, Tahathyam's realms ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... waterfowl—swimming and wading about the reedy lagoons or circling up to fly to other feeding grounds. Opposite the steamer the glasses showed with startling distinctness a number of hideous crocodiles crawling out on a slimy mudbank to bask in the sunshine. But nowhere could the searcher discern a trace of man or of ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... to hear: so his companions made short work of it. They pulled in for the shore of the Red-hill, and laid Roger on the slimy bank:—for they saw no occasion to carry one so heavy and so sulky up to the nice bed of grass which was spread at the top of the red precipice that the waters had cut Oliver knew that there was a knife in Roger's pocket. ...
— The Settlers at Home • Harriet Martineau
... There are men and women now in this chapel, sitting listening to me, perhaps half interested, without the smallest suspicion that I am talking about them. The serpent's bite has led to the torpor of their consciences. Which is the worse—to loathe my sin and yet to find its slimy coils round about me, so that I cannot break it, or to have got to like it and to be perfectly comfortable in it, and to have no remonstrance within when I do it? Be sure of this, that every transgression and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... of his chair! He noted the murderous twitching of its short, flat finger-tips, the monstrous muscles of its hideous thumb, and the great, clumsy hollows of its clammy palm. It closed in upon him; its cold, slimy, detestable skin touched his coat—his shoulder—his neck—his head! It pressed him down, squashed, suffocated him! He saw it all in the glass—and then an extraordinary thing happened. Mr. Vance suddenly became animated. He got up and peeped furtively round. Chairs, bed, wardrobe, ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... over the surface of the unwholesome canal, nor was there any appearance of a living thing, save and except a few startled waterfowl, and some guanoes on the trees, and now and then an alligator, like a black log of charred wood, would roll off a slimy bank of brown mud, with a ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... the marshes of the Equatorial regions than up here in the north. The fish were transported in a dog sledge to the vessel, where part of them was placed in spirits for the zoologists and the rest fried, not without a protest from our old cook, who thought that the black slimy fish looked remarkably nasty and ugly. But the Chukches were right it was a veritable delicacy, in taste somewhat resembling eel, but finer and more fleshy. These fish were besides as tough to kill as eels, ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... the night pervaded by "the blackness of darkness," and the rain pouring in torrents. One of the gentlemen was a member of the Legislature, and quite an invalid. Growing faint from exhaustion, he fell into a mud hole, and was fairly immersed in its slimy depths. After a long search we finally found a poor refuge and an execrable bed, but in the morning were favored in securing comfortable ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... is mistletoe, a plant of great fame for the use made of it by the Druids of old in their religious rites and incantations. It bears a very slimy white berry, of which birdlime may be made, whence its Latin name of viscus, It is one of those plants which do not grow in the ground by a root of their own, but fix themselves upon other plants; whence they have been humorously styled parasitical, as being ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... of their fellow creatures? What if the whole theory of hereditary superiority should suddenly exhale? What if it were found out that we were all fellow-worms together, and that those which had crawled highest were not necessarily the least slimy? ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... sat through the opening of the envelope and the rapid survey which Doctor Morgan gave its contents before he began to read, stirred by varying emotions. Suspicion crawled through his brain, leaving her slimy trail; why had there been need of secrecy? Why had all these people been told, and he, John Hunter alone, left out? Nathan Hornby and Luther Hansen witnesses! But most of all, as was to be expected, his suspicions ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... was a thousand fathoms beneath the sea, chained to a rock round which the heavy waters rose as a wall. He felt his own flesh rot and decay, perishing from his limbs piece by piece; and he saw the coral banks, which it requires a thousand ages to form, rise slowly from their slimy bed; and spread atom by atom, till they became a shelter for the leviathan: their growth, was his only record of eternity; and ever and ever, around and above him, came vast and misshapen things—the wonders of the secret ...
— Falkland, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... neck was bent, the nails were rent, no limb or joint was straight; Together glued, with blood imbued, black and coagulate. And, as the sexton stooped him down to lift the coffin plank, His fingers were defiled all o'er with slimy substance dank. ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... "Water-horse," a horse with staring eyes, webbed feet, and a slimy coat, is still dreaded. He assumes different forms and lures the unwary to destruction, or he makes love in human shape to women, some of whom discover his true nature by seeing a piece of water-weed in his hair, and only escape ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... broad-cloth of those who paid their bills—as far as I was concerned—all were inoculated with this strange blindness. It was an overwhelming ophthalmia! The chambermaid, through its fatality, never discovered that my jugs were empty, my bottle clothed with slimy green, my soap-dish left untenanted. A day before this time had been sufficient service for my hand-towel; now a week seemed to render it less fit to taste the rubs of hands and soap. Dust lost its vice, and lay unheeded in the crammed corner of my ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... everybody he meets, and shakes hands with you, and blesses you, and betrays the most tender and astonishing interest in your welfare. You know him to be a quack and a rogue, and he knows you know it. But he wriggles on his way, and leaves a track of slimy flattery after him wherever he goes. Who can penetrate that man's mystery? What earthly good can he get from you or me? You don't know what is working under that leering tranquil mask. You have only the dim instinctive repulsion that warns you, you are in the presence of a knave—beyond which ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Not pray! (Seizing him again) Pray this instant, you dog, you rotten hound, you slimy snake, you ...
— Androcles and the Lion • George Bernard Shaw
... doubly manned we soon came in view of their two figures ahead of us, while they were not likely to observe us, our boat having the 'felze' on, while theirs was uncovered. They shot into a narrow canal just beyond the Giardino Reale, and by the time we were floating up between its slimy walls we saw them getting out of their gondola at the steps which lead up near the end of the Via 22 Marzo. When we reached the same spot they were walking up and down the Via in consultation. Getting out he stood on the lower steps ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... Poverty is about to fasten his fangs, whom the dragon Crime is poisoning with his horrible breath, and about to crunch up and devour? O my royal liege! O my gracious prince and warrior! YOU a champion to fight that monster? Your feeble spear ever pierce that slimy paunch or plated back? See how the flames come gurgling out of his red-hot brazen throat! What a roar! Nearer and nearer he trails, with eyes flaming like the lamps of a railroad engine. How he ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... that goes down beneath the waters of the pool enclosed in a bubble of air, and there builds its nest and rears its young, and lives its little life in that bright sphere down beneath the slimy pool, so let us in this dark world shut ourselves in with Christ in the little circle of each returning day, and so abide in Him, breathing the air of heaven and living in ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... and ran to the pumps. A peculiar gurgling sound had come from the ends of the hose, and the flow depreciated greatly; instead of the steady gush of water, a slimy silt was coming out now, spraying and splattering about on the sides of the drainage ditch. Wildly ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... it would happen, if a heap of exactly round Balls of soft Clay were heaped upon one another; or, as I have often seen a heap of small Globules of Quicksilver, reduc'd to that form by rubbing it much in a glaz'd Vessel, with some slimy or sluggish liquor, such as Spittle, when though the top of the upper Globules be very neer spherical, yet those that are prest upon by others, exactly imitate the forms ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... sea, unsinkable and steady, blown upon by the free winds of all the world. In the half-gale out of the west I note the smell of the shoals, a suggestion of bilge in the brine, not altogether pleasant. I fancy a heavy sea stirs the slimy depths and brings their ooze uppermost. I had noticed this from an incoming liner's deck when off the lightship before, but charged it to the ship. Now I know it for a strange odor of the sea. It makes me half believe the humorous, oft-told tale of skipper Hackett, who ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... specimens of deep sea deposits sent home by naturalists during the first soundings in connection with the Atlantic telegraph cable, there was very often a sort of enveloping slimy mucus in the containing bottles which arrested the attention and excited the curiosity of the specialists to whom they were consigned. It was structureless to all miscroscopic examination. But so is all the protoplasmic ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... has a double object. In the common system of shoeing, to avoid slipping in winter upon the ice, and in the cities upon the wet, slimy surface of pavement, or to assist draft, it is customary to weld a calk upon the toe of a shoe, and to turn up the heels to correspond. In this motion the horse is placed upon a tripod, his weight being entirely upon three points of his foot, and those not the parts intended to bear the shock ...
— Rational Horse-Shoeing • John E. Russell
... begged for all the world, jist like an Indgian. I'd see you hanged fust, said I; I wouldn't touch that are dead tacky hand o' yourn' for half a million o' hard dollars, cash down without any ragged eends; and with that, I turned to run out, but Lord love you I couldn't run. The stones was all wet and slimy, and onnateral slippy, and I expected every minute, I should heels up and go for it: atween them two critters the Ghost and the juicy ledge, I felt awful skeered I tell you. So I begins to say my catechism; what's your name, ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... are very narrow, and our shoulders sometimes rub the slimy moisture from the walls. On every landing in the semi-darkness we perceive galleries running to right and to left. On the little balconies, one on every floor, children born in this Bastille are gasping ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... the ruin, the ivy-clad ruin, With old shaking arches, all moss overgrown, Where the flitter-bat hideth, The limber snake glideth, And chill water drips from the slimy green stone?" ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... and the green stuff made a sort of slimy mildew which ran over Golightly in several directions—down his back and bosom for choice. The khaki color ran too—it was really shockingly bad dye—and sections of Golightly were brown, and patches were violet, and contours were ochre, and streaks were ruddy ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling |
