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Spider   Listen
noun
Spider  n.  
1.
(Zool.) Any one of numerous species of arachnids comprising the order Araneina. Spiders have the mandibles converted into poison fangs, or falcers. The abdomen is large and not segmented, with two or three pairs of spinnerets near the end, by means of which they spin threads of silk to form cocoons, or nests, to protect their eggs and young. Many species spin also complex webs to entrap the insects upon which they prey. The eyes are usually eight in number (rarely six), and are situated on the back of the cephalothorax. Note: Spiders are divided into two principal groups: the Dipneumona, having two lungs: and the Tetrapneumona, having four lungs. See Mygale. The former group includes several tribes; as, the jumping spiders (see Saltigradae), the wolf spiders, or Citigradae (see under Wolf), the crab spiders, or Laterigradae (see under Crab), the garden, or geometric, spiders, or Orbitellae (see under Geometrical, and Garden), and others. See Bird spider, under Bird, Grass spider, under Grass, House spider, under House, Silk spider, under Silk.
2.
(Zool.) Any one of various other arachnids resembling the true spiders, especially certain mites, as the red spider (see under Red).
3.
An iron pan with a long handle, used as a kitchen utensil in frying food. Originally, it had long legs, and was used over coals on the hearth.
4.
A trevet to support pans or pots over a fire.
5.
(Mach.) A skeleton, or frame, having radiating arms or members, often connected by crosspieces; as, a casting forming the hub and spokes to which the rim of a fly wheel or large gear is bolted; the body of a piston head; a frame for strengthening a core or mold for a casting, etc.
Spider ant. (Zool.) Same as Solitary ant, under Solitary.
Spider crab (Zool.), any one of numerous species of maioid crabs having a more or less triangular body and ten long legs. Some of the species grow to great size, as the great Japanese spider crab (Macrocheira Kempferi), measuring sometimes more than fifteen feet across the legs when they are extended.
Spider fly (Zool.), any one of numerous species of parasitic dipterous insects of the family Hippoboscidae. They are mostly destitute of wings, and live among the feathers of birds and the hair of bats. Called also bird tick, and bat tick.
Spider hunter (Zool.), any one of several species of East Indian sunbirds of the genus Arachnothera.
Spider lines, filaments of a spider's web crossing the field of vision in optical instruments; used for determining the exact position of objects and making delicate measurements. Fine wires, silk fibers, or lines on glass similarly placed, are called spider lines.
Spider mite. (Zool.)
(a)
Any one of several species of parasitic mites of the genus Argas and allied genera. See Argas.
(b)
Any one of numerous small mites injurious to plants.
Spider monkey (Zool.), any one of numerous species of South American monkeys of the genus Ateles, having very long legs and a long prehensile tail.
Spider orchis (Bot.), a European orchidaceous plant (Ophrys aranifera), having flowers which resemble spiders.
Spider shell (Zool.), any shell of the genus Pteroceras. See Pteroceras.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Spider" Quotes from Famous Books



... the SHIKARAS or houseboats, shaded by red-embroidered canopies, coursing along the intricate channels of Dal Lake, a network of canals like a watery spider web. Here the numerous floating gardens, crudely improvised with logs and earth, strike one with amazement, so incongruous is the first sight of vegetables and melons growing in the midst of vast waters. Occasionally one sees a peasant, disdaining to be "rooted to the soil," towing his square plot ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda

... Spider Jack's, on Thompson Street!"—he was clipping off his words, still holding her tightly by the shoulders, still staring into her eyes. "You know Spider Jack! Jack's little novelty store! Ah, you have not learned all of the underworld yet! Spider Jack ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard

... any weight and makes you feel happy and crinkly like bubbling water. There's no sun on the empty house— sly-looking house— you can't see in its windows that watch you out of their corners. Perhaps there's a big spider there spinning gray threads over the windows till they look like dead people's faces.... Jimmie says: Jimmie's hair is white as a white mouse. His lashes are gold as mama's wedding ring and his mouth feels cool and smooth like ...
— Sun-Up and Other Poems • Lola Ridge

... one fourth of an inch thick, and lay in weak salt water over night. In the morning remove the purple rind and wipe dry, dip in beaten egg, then in fine bread crumbs or cracker dust; fry on the griddle or in a spider in hot butter and drippings until a nice brown. It must cook rather slowly until thoroughly soft, otherwise it ...
— Vaughan's Vegetable Cook Book (4th edition) - How to Cook and Use Rarer Vegetables and Herbs • Anonymous

... Sun did not rise above the horizon, having been held back in the east by a web that Mansche{COMBINING BREVE}, the Spider, had woven about him. But the people succeeded in tearing the web away, and from that time the Sun each day has ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis

... superior bucket shop which on its failure had claimed its fifty thousand victims. The ornate gold lettering on its great plate-glass window had long since been removed, and the big brass plate which announced to the passerby that here sat the spider weaving his golden web for the multitude of flies, had been replaced by a modest, oxidized scroll ...
— The Man Who Knew • Edgar Wallace

... over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday

... fathoms long, for prey. A big turbot was making himself broad in front, quietly enough, but not without casting some suspicious glances aside. A crab clambered over him, looking like a gigantic spider, while the shrimps wandered about in restless haste, like the butterflies and moths ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen

... told of a house in the Boyne valley. It is said that the occupant of the guest chamber was always wakened on the first night of his visit, then he would see a pale light and the shadow of a skeleton "climbing the wall like a huge spider." It used to crawl out on to the ceiling, and when it reached the middle would materialise into apparent bones, holding on by its hands and feet; it would break in pieces, and first the skull and then the other bones would fall ...
— True Irish Ghost Stories • St John D Seymour

... which compels them to perform certain acts without previous thought or reflection; this instinct is in full force at the moment of their birth; it was therefore perfect in the beginning, and has never varied. The swallow built her nest, the spider its web, the bee formed its comb, precisely in the same way four thousand years ago, as they do now. I may here observe, that one of the greatest wonders of instinct is the mathematical form of the honeycomb of the bee, which has been proved by demonstration to be that by which is given ...
— Masterman Ready • Captain Marryat

... teach man to believe, Could I but make small men to grow, To break frail spider webs that weave About their thews and bind them low. Could I but sing one song and lay Grim Doubt; I then could go my way In tranquil silence, glad, serene, And satisfied from off the scene. But Ah! this disbelief, this doubt, This doubt ...
— Giant Hours With Poet Preachers • William L. Stidger

... spider on its thread, with a twist of the rope around one of his legs, Blake had gone down into the ravine, hand under hand, with the agility of a sailor. The tough leather of his chapareras prevented the rope from chafing the leg around which ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet

... very funny insect that you do not often spy, And it isn't quite a spider, and it isn't quite a fly; It is something like a beetle, and a little like a bee, But nothing like a wooly grub that climbs upon a tree. Its name is quite a hard one, but you'll learn it soon, I hope. ...
— A Book for Kids • C. J. (Clarence Michael James) Dennis

... everywhere, a man is judged by his friends. Krauss tries to keep in with Rangoon society and poses as a brusque, eccentric sort of a fellow, with a rude manner and a good heart. The days of his grand dinner-parties came to an end some time ago. Now the fat grey spider at 'Heidelberg' has to rely more or less on his wife's pretty niece; she is bright and popular and attracts a lot of useful people into his web. To see that girl pouring out tea, or sitting at the piano, making delicious music, who would suppose that ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker

... beauty; then her very human form shrank to that of a spider, and so remained. As a spider she spent all her days weaving and weaving; and you may see something like her handiwork ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott

... do," he replied, "but the more he says it the less I believe him. Miss Flora, the fate of all my uncle holds dear is hanging by a thread, a spider's web, a young girl's freak! If ever she gives him a certain turn of the hand, the right glance of her eye, he'll be at her feet ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable

... electricity from the shore, transmitted to a motor and steering relay in the torpedo by an insulated cable. This cable has two cores and is paid out by the torpedo as it travels through the water just as a spider pays out its web. The cable is about half an inch in diameter and two miles long, and the torpedo can be driven at about eighteen miles per hour with a current of thirty amperes and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 841, February 13, 1892 • Various

... famous sermon at Enfield in 1741, on "Sinners in the hands of an Angry God," was inspired to say to the impenitent: "The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you and is dreadfully provoked; His wrath toward you burns like fire; He looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire; He is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in His sight; you are 10,000 times ...
— The Witchcraft Delusion In Colonial Connecticut (1647-1697) • John M. Taylor

... desolate mansion of a hundred successors of the great Constantine, but which in a few hours had been stripped of the pomp of royalty. A melancholy reflection on the vicissitudes of human greatness forced itself on his mind; and he repeated an elegant distich of Persian poetry: "The spider has wove his web in the Imperial palace; and the owl hath sung her watch-song on the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon

... Blue Bonnet's old nurse. She does the most exquisite drawn-work and is going to teach me (it would be as well for you not to mention this when you write) the spider-web stitch and the Maltese cross, so that I can do a waist for Blue Bonnet. She is doing so much for us all that I want to make some return for her hospitality. Blue Bonnet, I ...
— Blue Bonnet's Ranch Party • C. E. Jacobs

... hedge. If I turned seaward I looked beneath the blue and saw the dog-fish gnawing on the whiting. If I walked in the garden I surprised the thrush dragging worms from the turf, the cat slinking on the nest, the spider squatting in ambush. Behind the rosy face of every well-nourished child I saw a lamb gazing up at the butcher's knife. My dear Violet, ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... place was full of cobwebs. To add to Jack's discomfort, a spider occasionally dropped on him. Suddenly overhead ...
— The Ocean Wireless Boys And The Naval Code • John Henry Goldfrap, AKA Captain Wilbur Lawton

... slaughter! As for Humanity, (how Knowles lingered on that word, with a tenderness curious in so uncouth a mass of flesh!)—as for Humanity, it was a study to see it stripped and flouted and thrown out of doors like a filthy rag by this poor old Howth, a man too child-hearted to kill a spider. It was pleasanter to hear him when he defended the great Past in which his ideal truth had been faintly shadowed. How he caught the salient tints of the feudal life! How the fine womanly nature of the man rose exulting in the free picturesque glow of the day of crusader and heroic deed! How ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis

... but she won't do for harbour duty. But the fact is, you're all wrong there, Jack: it's the babbies I likes—I likes to see them both together, hanging at the niggers' breasts, I always think of two spider-monkeys ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat

... is sixty yards, and the bridge which is high above the water forms a considerable curve. The description of the bridge is easy enough, but how shall I describe my feelings, when I had gone a few yards and found myself poised in mid-air like a spider on a web, oscillating, swaying backwards and forwards over a foaming and roaring torrent, the rush of the water if I looked at my feet, made me feel as if I was being violently carried in the opposite ...
— Three Months of My Life • J. F. Foster

... screen of ironwork—a marvel of arabesques and intricate traceries, with baskets of flowers, sea-monsters, Cherubim, tying the filigree-work and looping it together in knots and centres. One panel had for subject a spider midmost in a web, to visit which smiths came hundreds of miles, from all over the country, and wondered. For it was impossible to guess how iron had ever been beaten to such thinness or drawn so ductile. But unhappily-and priceless as was the secret Young John Cara had chosen to let die with ...
— News from the Duchy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... draw-bars of the milking lot was dear and familiar, while their white trumpets whispered of childish play-days and flower-ladies she had set walking in procession under the shadow of some big green leaf. Blue—the soft stars of spider-wort opening among the rocks reminded her of the hue; blue curls and dittany tangled at the path edge; but the very air itself was beginning to wear Creed's colour and put on that wonderful, luminous blue in which the Cumberlands ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan

... on the loom, when one evening, as the expanded sun touched the horizon's rim, a ship's uppermost spars were observed, traced like a spider's web against its crimson disk. It looked like a far-off ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville

... spider in a stubble-field! Truly he needs my bauble who sent them on such an errand," said the jester, rather slowly, as if to take time for consideration. "What's ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... is needed for hunting bears," observed Alexey Alexandrovitch, who had the mistiest notions about the chase. He cut off and spread with cheese a wafer of bread fine as a spider-web. ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy

... for it is a great educator and a mighty missionary of peace and goodwill between nations. This also is obvious on a moment's reflection, but it will be rejected as a flat mis-statement by many whose opinion is entitled to respect, and who regard international finance as a bloated spider which sits in the middle of a web of intrigue and chicanery, enticing hapless mankind into its toils and battening on bloodshed and war. So clear-headed a thinker as Mr. Philip Snowden publicly expressed the ...
— International Finance • Hartley Withers

... was a case of the spider and the fly in human affairs this mild and perfectly equitable reasoning of Mr. Parnell is the illustration. How about the djinn crying inside the sealed jar, and the fate of the credulous fisherman who obeys that voice and breaks the seal which Solomon the Wise ...
— About Ireland • E. Lynn Linton

... bowed them into a room where nothing was in evidence save a punkah, a giant porcelain stove, a huge desk and chair, and a monster man. Cornelius was fleshy to enormity. He was very like a mammoth but benevolent spider. Wealthy as he was fat, while many men had cursed him, many more had blessed him. His business interests were wide and complex, reached into many fields, and usually came to a good end. Also, to be the accredited agent of Cornelius ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle

... practical life was a blind, dull routine. Most men were toiling at tasks which they did not like, by rules which they did not understand. They never looked beyond the edge of their work. The philosophical life was a spider's web—filmy threads of theory spun out of the inner consciousness—it touched the world only at certain chosen points of attachment. There was nothing firm, nothing substantial in it. You could look through it like a veil and see the real world lying beyond. But the ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke

... that dark and dreadful trail were dead men, red and white. Today a spider-web of highways spreads over that Dark Empire of the League, enmeshing half a thousand towns now all a-buzz by day ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers

... a Mountain Sheep Christmas at the Primates' House The Trap-Door Spider's Door and Burrow Hanging Nest of the Baltimore Oriole Great Hanging Nests of the Crested Cacique "Rajah," the Actor Orang-Utan Thumb-Print of an Orang-Utan The Lever That Our Orang-Utan Invented Portrait ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday

... And Jenny Wren's a bride, And larks hang singing, singing, singing, Over the wheat-fields wide, 10 And anchored lilies ride, And the pendulum spider Swings from side ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti

... weeding onions in the garden;—heroines did, in those days;—the currant-bushes had but just leafed out; so George Tucker, going by, saw her; and she, who had seen him coming before she began to weed, accidentally of course, looked up and gave him a very bright smile. That was the first spider-thread, and the fly stepped into it with such ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various

... go of them, you will have to go and get a light to hunt for them by. But I suppose the fairies have some other kind of diamonds than ours, or else they know some other way of using the same kind. Sometimes they use fireflies, caught in spider-web nets, but these are generally for out of doors. To light up their houses they almost always ...
— Fairies and Folk of Ireland • William Henry Frost

... she do but murmur an invitation. As they reached the old stone house and Sibyl greeted them with a bright smile, poor Aunt Faith felt very much like the spider in the old song of the spider and ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March

... but I cannot. He is perfectly proportioned in every measurement, yet, somehow, he has a long-armed and long-legged appearance different from that of any young man in Rome, he gives almost the effect of reminding one of a spider or of a grasshopper or of a daddy-long-legs. It makes him the most conspicuous, the most recognizable man in all Rome. Why, if your son were to mingle in a crowd, habited like any other boy in that crowd ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White

... home—is to get sore and wakeful; while Robert was intently conscious of every sound and if you sleep in a field you hear thousands of them—all the rustlings of the little shy nocturnal animals, tiny squeakings and shrillings in the grass, as well as the cries of the birds of prey. Now and then, too, a spider ran over his face and made him jump, and very early the strong light poured into the mouth of the tent and made it seem absurd to ...
— The Slowcoach • E. V. Lucas

... over into Nassau Street and found Beck in his office. He gazed with melancholy misgivings at this lean man with hair and whiskers of a lifeless black. Beck suggested a starved black spider, especially when you were looking into his cold, amused, malignant black eyes. He made short work of the guileless brewer, who was dazed and frightened by the meshes in which he was enveloped. Staring at the horrid specter of publicity which ...
— The Fortune Hunter • David Graham Phillips

... and have the reputation of being the most mischievous monkeys in the country. On the west coast of South America there are at least three or four species of monkeys, among them a black howler and a Cebus capucinus. The Coitas, or spider-monkeys, are the highest of American quadrumana. They are slender-legged, sluggish, and thumbless, with a most perfectly prehensile tail, terminating in a naked palm, which answers for a fifth hand. The Indians say they walk under the limbs like the sloth. They are the most common ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton

... and motion in the system to which the earth belongs. They then devised the micrometer. This is a complex mechanism placed in the focus of a telescope, and by its use any object, providing it shows a disk, no matter what its distance, can be measured. It consists of spider webs set within a graduated metallic circle, the webs movable by screws, and the whole instrument capable of rotating about the collimation axis of the telescope. The screw head is a circle ruled to degrees and minutes, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various

... have other pleasures. There was a spider the past year, that wove his web from yonder beam, and he was a companion, too, that I loved to see; wilt thou look, boy, if there is hope of his ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper

... was only about 31/2 feet in diameter. we saw the martin, small gees, the small speckled woodpecker with a white back, the Blue crested Corvus, ravens, crows, eagles Vultures and hawks. the mellow bug and long leged spider have appeared, as have also the butterfly blowing fly and many other insects. I observe not any among them which appear to differ from those of our country or which ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al

... a bright, pleasant, frosty morning, perfectly still, with an air like wine. The harvest had vanished from the fields. The sun shone on millions of tiny dew-suns, threaded on forsaken spider-webs. A few small, white, frozen clouds flecked the sky. The purple heather was not yet gone, and not any snow had yet fallen in the valley. The burn was large, for there had been a good deal of rain, but it was not much darker ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald

... busy spider hangs the brush With filmy gossamers, The frogs are croaking in the creek, The sluggish blacksnake stirs, But still the ground is bare of bloom Beneath ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis

... somewhere about Hankow. It will stretch from Lille to Kiel, it will drive extensions along the Rhine valley into Switzerland, and fling an arm along the Moldau to Prague, it will be the industrial capital of the old world. Paris will be its West End, and it will stretch a spider's web of railways and great roads of the new sort over the whole continent. Even when the coal-field industries of the plain give place to the industrial application of mountain-born electricity, this great city region will remain, I believe, in its present ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... a "down-east" plucky lad ships as cabin boy to earn a livelihood. Ned is marooned on Spider Island, and while there discovers a wreck submerged in the sand, and finds a considerable amount of treasure. The capture of the treasure and the incidents of the voyage serve to make as entertaining a story of sea-life as the most captious ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis

... there were some too feeble to exclaim, or to run, and who dragged themselves forward, groaning, upon their hands and knees. There was in the midst of all, a child clothed, not in anything that could be called a shirt, but a kind of spider's web, with a thousand holes, who had no wooden bowl, and who wept with hunger. It stretched out its poor little meagre hands, and joined them together, to supply as well as it could, by this natural receptacle, the absent bowl. The cook poured in a spoonful of the soup. The soup was boiling, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various

... Gregory's gigantic paynim," said Fabian, "why, he lies yonder in the guard-room, the very size, shape, and colour of a spider in ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... of January.—If a young maiden drink, on going to bed, a pint of cold spring water, in which is beat up an amulet, composed of the yolk of a pullet's egg, the legs of a spider, and the skin of an eel pounded, her future destiny will be revealed to her in a dream. This charm fails of its effect if tried any ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay

... as if it were made of a million dewdrops turned to diamonds and sprinkled over a lacy spider-web; the web swathing the tall and wandlike figure of Miss Billie Brookton in a way to show that she had all the delicate perfections of ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson

... tails, by which they hang from branches in true monkey fashion; they lead an arboreal omnivorous existence; they feed off fruits, birds' eggs, insects, and roots; and altogether they are just active, cunning, intelligent, tree-haunting marsupial spider-monkeys. ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen

... three weeks, if a constant supply is wanted. Keep the early crops well supplied with water, and give them frequent sprinklings overhead, to prevent the attacks of red spider. ...
— In-Door Gardening for Every Week in the Year • William Keane

... grandchildren rode on his knee. All children loved him for he could tell them wonderful fairy tales and strange stories of the forest. He told them of the goblins that came at night to water the horses, of how the oxen talked in their stalls on Christmas Eve, of how a spider shut up in a nutshell could cure the fever, and of the marvellous powers possessed by horse shoes and four-leaved clover. He knew more strange things than ...
— The Junior Classics • Various

... sick here, and it is very hard to enter—nearly impenetrable and full of insects, which make fresh-coming people to get cracked and mad. I have from the wrist down not a place to put in a shilling piece which is not a wound, through the very small red spider and other insects. Also my people are the same. Of the five men I took out, two have got fever already, and one ran back. To-morrow I expect other peons, but not a single one from Mengobamba. It is a trouble to get men who will come into the woods, and I cannot have more than eight or ten to ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle

... waste of human spirit and potential. We can ignore this terrible truth no longer. As Franklin Roosevelt warned 51 years ago, standing before this Chamber, he said, "Welfare is a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit." And we must now escape the spider's web of dependency. ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... serious loss to them all. He, the master mind, had served them in many a like crisis in the past. Could he do so again? But John Ryder gave no sign. His eyes, still of the same restful blue, were fixed on the ceiling watching a spider marching with diabolical intent on a wretched fly that had become entangled in its web. And as the secretary ambled monotonously on, Ryder watched and watched until he saw the spider seize its helpless ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein

... are better posted concerning your former employer than you, yourself," informed Little Billy. "Smatt's name is a byword with the Pacific traders—the shrewd old spider! 'Nippon Trading Company' is the same syndicate we have done business with; and those yellow financiers of Hakodate and Tokyo have many irons in the fire besides the fur iron. Opium and coolie smuggling into California—both very profitable. And old Smatt looks after their American interests, fixes ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer

... chamber in order to light the alabaster lamp, which throws a soft and veiled light on the surrounding objects. This room is splendidly furnished in Indian stuff with white ground embroidered with flowers; a mosquito net of muslin, fine as a spider's web, envelopes an immense bed of gilded wood with a headboard of plate-glass, which appears ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue

... not outrage plain sense, just as the stickler for the privileges of her class was large-heartedly charitable to the classes flowing in oily orderliness round about below it—if they did so flow. Unable to read woman's character, except upon the broadest lines as it were the spider's main threads of its web, she read men minutely, from the fact that they were neither mysteries nor terrors to her; but creatures of importunate appetites, humorous objects; very manageable, if we leave the road to their muscles, dress their wounds, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... ah! Like desert pools that shew the stars Once in long leagues—even such the scarce-snatched hours Which deepening pain left to his lordliest powers:— Heaven lost through spider-trammelled prison-bars! Five years, from seventy saved! yet kindling skies Own them, ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine

... positions may be reversed; the victim may play the role of seductress, and displaying charms that excite the passions, ensnare the youth whose feet are not guided by the lamp of experience, wisdom and religion. This is the human spider, soulless and shameless, using splendid gifts of God to form a web with which to inveigle and entrap a too willing prey. And the dead flies, who ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton

... As the spider, after his glistening habitation has been destroyed by some ruthless footstep, goes patiently to work to rebuild it, so the Moor in Granada, with his imperishable instinct for beauty, was making of his little kingdom the most beautiful ...
— A Short History of Spain • Mary Platt Parmele

... serious affairs and quarrels among the other birds and animals. The room was built in the hollow of a dead tree—it was quite snug, but not half so nice as the squirrel house, for there was no pretty wall paper, and a great spider-web instead hung across one corner of the room; on one side was an oval window, out of which could be seen wood and meadow, and on a peg against the wall hung a warm winter cloak of soft moleskin. The owl now gravely folded and sealed several legal-looking documents, ...
— The Pigeon Tale • Virginia Bennett

... enormous tulip-trees, and in the midst of this snare, with its wings entangled, was a poor little bird, uttering pitiful cries, while it vainly struggled to escape. The bird-catcher who had laid this snare was no human being, but a venomous spider, peculiar to that country, as large as a pigeon's egg, and armed with enormous claws. The hideous creature, instead of rushing on its prey, had beaten a sudden retreat and taken refuge in the upper branches of the tulip-tree, for a formidable enemy ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne

... it is very noticeable that the I's are very defective, and there is no C in it. The "Gleanings" are excellent, and it would be advisable to have more of them—if indeed such a thing were possible in this case. The spider-work inside shows no acquaintance with the writings of BACH or GLIDDON, and there is nothing about the Spectrum Analysis in any part of the paper. Besides, the paper is too stiff and rattles too much, and PUNCHINELLO could never abide ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 5, April 30, 1870 • Various

... little bit of sponge. Many a time, when I heard the little thing whining for food, have I got out of bed at night with bare feet; and so she came to cling to me like a child, and could not do without me. No one can know how another feels about such things. My father used to tell us of a spider that beautified the life of a prisoner, and what is a dirty dumb creature like that to my clever, graceful little dog! I have lost my home, and here every one believes the worst of me, although I have done no one any harm, and no one, no ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... through the echoing rooms, and looked out of the low, spider-hung casements, where young ivy-leaves, soft and vivid, had edged their way through the cracks. They stood under ceilings dark with the smoke of fires and lamps that had been lit unnumbered years ago for some old pathetic revelry. In cupboards left ajar by a hurried hand that ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb

... little Miss Muffet, sir. I sat on a tuffet, eating some curds and whey; but there came a big spider, and I was frightened away. Do you like curds and whey, Father Christmas? I hope so, for here are some in a bowl. (Hands gift, and returns ...
— Christmas Entertainments • Alice Maude Kellogg

... keen-witted: friend and liege I summoned, shewed my wrong, and ended thus: "Sirs, ye are ninety-nine, the hundredth I; I counsel that we share this fast among us! To-morrow from the dawn to evening's star No food as bulky as a spider's tongue Shall pass our lips; and thus in one day's time My hundred days of fast shall stand fulfilled." Wrathful they rose, and sware by Peter's keys That fight they would, albeit 'gainst Peter's self; But fast they would not save for personal sins. Signal I made: ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere

... sides of the road crooked trees were tottering to their fall. They had been stripped bare by the devastating army of caterpillars, and instead of their beautiful green leaves they were clothed with the rags of dusty spider-webs; further away the fruitless orchards looked as if they had been burnt with fire, and, stretching to the horizon, as far as the eye could reach, the arid corn-fields had the appearance of being covered with nothing but ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai

... quays and beside the great multitude of ships of all sizes and rigs and nations. In one, sailors were singing at their work; in another, there were men aloft, high over my head, hanging to threads that seemed no thicker than a spider's. Though I had lived by the shore all my life, I seemed never to have been near the sea till then. The smell of tar and salt was something new. I saw the most wonderful figureheads, that had all been far over the ocean. I saw, besides, many old sailors, with ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... one feel as free as air, an' a man come right off an' sat with her right off an' asked her right off whether it was a duck or a drake. Why, she says she never did—not in all her life—an' he told her she could easy tell by catchin' a spider an' givin' it to the duck an' if he took it it was a drake an' if she took it it was a duck. He asked her if it was n't so an' she said she could n't deny it, an' then he went back to his own seat an' she rode the rest of the ...
— Susan Clegg and a Man in the House • Anne Warner

... now almost as often as the original poem! Smifzer was wiser than Tennyson, for he never spoiled the effect of his poem by admitting, like Tennyson in his "Locksley Hall, Sixty Years After," that it was a good thing that "spider-hearted" Amy threw him over ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun

... should be made very clear to the girl who comes up to the city, and that is that the ordinary ice cream parlor is very likely to be a spider's web for her entanglement. This is perhaps especially true of those ice cream saloons and fruit stores kept by foreigners. Scores of cases are on record where young girls have taken their first step towards "white slavery" in places of this character. And it is hardly too much to say that ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various

... memorable essay read before the Riseholme Literary Society, called "Humour in Furniture," and a brass milkcan served as a receptacle for sticks and umbrellas. Equally quaint was the dish of highly realistic stone fruit that stood beside the pot-pourri and the furry Japanese spider that sprawled in a silk ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson

... down all the rich clusters in order to slake its own thirst. Find a man who yields to his desires after his neighbour's goods, and you find a man who will break all commandments like a hornet in a spider's web. Be he a Napoleon, and glorified as a conqueror and hero, or be he some poor thief in a jail, he has let his covetousness get the upper hand, and so all wrong-doing is possible. Nor is it only the second table which covetousness dashes to fragments. It serves the first in ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren

... rather than Slavery! Well might you wish to be quit of that ill, But you were sold by political knavery, Meshed in diplomacy's spider-like skill: And you rejoice to see Slavery banished, While the free servant works well as before, Confident, though many fortunes have vanished, Soon to recover ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... and looked out. There was Fortescue waiting for me, apparently glowing for the good fortune that had come to him. And here was I in the house of Dorothy's brother and unable to put out of mind the hope that Zoe's death would change Dorothy's decision, even while I was grieving for Zoe. Like a spider at its door Fortescue was waiting for me. Whether he or I should be more benefited by Zoe's death remained to be seen. As I left I asked Reverdy to write Dorothy and tell her ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters

... full Treasury and 200,000 well-drilled men would be the one guarantee to your Pragmatic Sanction," Prince Eugene had said. But that bit of insight was not accepted at Vienna; Black-art, and Diplomatic spider-webs from pole to pole, being ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... omitted to hint Where he carried his tinder, his steel, and his flint: That his time was more usefully spent, he might say, In chasing the vagrants and spectres away. Every member of reptile society knew That of insects and grubs he destroy'd not a few: His wife had just miss'd a huge pioneer spider, Who fled to his home, and then rudely defied her, And e'en bang'd his door in her ...
— The Quadrupeds' Pic-Nic • F. B. C.

... And of the goblin that came in the night to water the horses, And of the white Letiche, the ghost of a child who unchristened Died, and was doomed to haunt unseen the chambers of children; And how on Christmas eve the oxen talked in the stable, And how the fever was cured by a spider shut up in a nutshell, And of the marvellous powers of four-leaved clover and horseshoes, With whatsoever else was writ in the lore of the village. Then up rose from his seat by the fireside Basil the blacksmith, Knocked from his pipe the ashes, and slowly extending his right ...
— The Children's Own Longfellow • Henry W. Longfellow

... claimed kindred. To each of these he dedicated one of his minor poems; to Lady Strange, the Tears of the Muses; to Lady Compton, the Apologue of the Fox and the Ape, Mother Hubberd's Tale; to Lady Carey, the Fable of the Butterfly and the Spider, Muiopotmos. And in each dedication he assumed on their part the recognition ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church

... you know, Thomas, that the Spider and the Bee, the Spider and the Bee, do both—something, but in troth I ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various

... That your politicall head is the curst fount 495 Of all the violence, rapine, cruelty, Tyrannie, & atheisme flowing through the realme: That y'ave a tongue so scandalous, 'twill cut The purest christall, and a breath that will Kill to that wall a spider; you will jest 500 With God, and your soule to the Devill tender For lust; kisse horror, and with death engender: That your foule body is a Lernean fenne Of all the maladies breeding in all men: That you are utterly without a soule; ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman

... spider presently appeared, carrying a quart jug with a little mountain of froth—a crater bubbling over and down ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine

... pale pink rosebuds, minute violets, Exquisite wreaths of dark green ivy leaves. On this leaf, goes a dream I dreamed last night Of two soft-patterned toads—I thought them stones, Until they hopped! And then a great black spider,— Tarantula, perhaps, a hideous thing,— It crossed the room in one tremendous leap. Here,—as I coil the stems between two leaves,— It is as if, dwindling to atomy size, I cried the secret between two universes . . . A friend of mine took hasheesh ...
— The House of Dust - A Symphony • Conrad Aiken

... gatherings a well-known Professor was giving a most interesting and appreciated address, illustrated by the limelight, on the subject of "Quartz Fibres." If I remember rightly, he was explaining to the audience that the strands of a spider's web were purposely rough so that the spider could climb them easily, but that a quartz fibre was smooth and glassy, and a spider would never attempt to ascend one. He showed on the sheet a single thread of a spider's web and a single quartz fibre, and amid the breathless ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss

... human sorrow the buds and the robins knew! Sick, in an alien household, the poor French neutral lay; Into her lonesome garret fell the light of the April day, Through the dusty window, curtained by the spider's warp and woof, On the loose-laid floor of hemlock, on oaken ribs of roof, The bedquilt's faded patchwork, the teacups on the stand, The wheel with flaxen tangle, as it dropped ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... time. It is in reality a compromise between what the writer most likes to produce, and what he can produce with the greatest ease to himself. I am sure, too, that I can trace a connection between the general look of the handwritings of my various correspondents and the lines of their Forms. If a spider were to visualise numerals, we might expect he would do so in some web-shaped fashion, and a bee in hexagons. The definite domestic architecture of all animals as seen in their nests and holes shows the universal tendency of each species to pursue their work according to certain ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton

... pleased with your "Spider," "your old freemason," as you call him. The three first stanzas are delicious; they seem to me a compound of Burns and. Old Quarles, those kind of home-strokes, where more is felt than strikes the ear,—a terseness, a jocular pathos which makes ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb

... opposite his shop—and held forth to the crowd on the evils of kings, priests and mutton chops, the "plain man" turned up at intervals like the "theme" of a symphonic movement. "I am only a plain man and I want to know." It was a phrase that sabered the spider-webs of logical refinement, and held them up scornfully on the point. When Crowl went for a little recreation in Victoria Park on Sunday afternoons, it was with this phrase that he invariably routed the supernaturalists. Crowl knew his ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill

... date, analyzed nine hundred types of plant life for toxin content. Bishop has tested innumerable spores and bacteria. Our slide file is immense and still growing. Max has captured several insects. There is one tiny yellow bush-spider with a killing bite, but the species seem to be rare. Bishop has isolated a mold bacterium that could cause a high fever, but its propagation rate is far too low to enable it to last long ...
— Competition • James Causey

... that the two little girls should spend the evening together, and as they entered the garden before the house a rude voice exclaimed, "Holloa! London Nan whimpering. Has my fine lady met a spider or a cow?" and a big rough lad of twelve, in a college gown, spread out his arms, and danced up and down in the doorway to bar ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge

... stretches and along the deltas of the creeks are fragrant, gigantic "spider lilies" (CRINIUM). I do not pretend to catalogue botanically all the plants that contribute to the specific odour of the island. I cannot address them individually in scientific phraseology, though with all I am on terms of easy familiarity, the outcome of seasoned ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield

... deck caught Anderson's eye. He was unable to control a shrill intake of breath as an enormous spider, hairy and swift, darted across to the couch and sprang. It landed next to Ives' knee, sprang again. Paresi swung at it and missed, his hand catching Ives heavily just under the armpit. The spider hit the deck, skidded, righted itself and, abruptly, was gone. ...
— Breaking Point • James E. Gunn

... "Thine for thy pleasure and profite—Abraham Fleming," which, in excuse for taking up so slight a subject, contains a very singular notice of the celebrated John Heywood, the dramatist of the reign of Henry VIII., and of his remarkable poem The Spider and the Fly. The Pretie Paradoxe, by Synesius, next commences, and extends as far as sign. D. v. b. This portion of the tract is, of course, merely a translation, but it includes a passage or two from ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 6. Saturday, December 8, 1849 • Various

... the web," he replied. "The spider will be waiting. Petrie, I sometimes despair. Sir Lionel is an impossible man to shepherd. You ought to see his house at Finchley. A low, squat place completely hemmed in by trees. Damp as a swamp; smells like a jungle. Everything topsy-turvy. He only arrived to-day, and he is working and eating ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer

... drove; and they got us so wide awake we concluded to stay up, though it wasn't really morning yet. But you don't know how good our fried fish did taste! I ate till I was ashamed, and then finished the bits in the spider; and I could have eaten as many more, I guess. Then I cleared everything up ready to break camp, while the professor went off again, and then he came back, and we embarked. This was about six bells, I think. We hadn't gone more than two knots when the boat ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry

... my dear Jack," said Etherington, following him with a thrill of conscious feeling, somewhat perhaps like that of the spider when he perceives his deceitful web is threatened with injury, and sits balanced in the centre, watching every point, and uncertain which he may be called upon first to defend. Such is one part, and not the slightest part, of the penance which never fails to ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott

... of eggs and bantlings as was supposed, but also that he destroys many noxious insects, and is, therefore, a bird of real economic value. The great bulk of his insect diet consists of beetles, grasshoppers, and caterpillars, with a few bugs, wasps, and flies, and an occasional spider and myriapod. The average of insect food for the whole year was 23 per cent, varying from less than 1 per cent in January to over 66 per cent in August, and it is gratifying to know that predaceous beetles and tent caterpillars form a large part of ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser

... the "imperial dreamer," Charles the Bold, was brought into immediate rivalry with that royal trickster, the "universal spider," Louis XI. Charles was by far the nobler spirit of the two: his vigour and intelligence, his industry and wish to raise all around him to a higher cultivation, his wise reforms at home, and attempts to render his father's dissolute and careless ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... of tigers, attacked viciously. Dorothy screamed and started back as a scorpion-like thing with a body ten feet in length leaped at the window in front of her, its terrible sting spraying the glass with venom. As it fell to the ground, a huge spider—if an eight-legged creature with spines instead of hair, many-faceted eyes, and a bloated, globular body weighing hundreds of pounds, may be called a spider—leaped upon it and, mighty mandibles against poisonous sting, the furious battle raged. Several ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby

... spiders, and so on, which we term "Annulosa". In these I could not point out to you the parts that correspond with those of the Horse,—the backbone, for instance,—as they are constructed upon a very different principle, which is also common to all of them; that is to say, the Lobster, the Spider, and the Centipede, have a common plan running through their whole arrangement, in just the same way that the Horse, the Dog, and the Porpoise assimilate to ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley

... weaving by machinery we shall not attempt to trace. To use the phrase of a Nottingham mechanic, "there are machines now that will weave anything, from a piece of sacking to a spider's web." But fine muslins and fancy goods are chiefly ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney

... scape-goat. As we saw, many of the cases of sweating were found where there was a sub-contractor. To our hasty vision, here seems to be the responsible party. Forty years ago Alton Locke gave us a powerful picture of the wicked sub-contracting tailor, who, spider-like, lured into his web the unfortunate victim, and sucked his blood for gain. The indignation of tender-hearted but loose-thinking philanthropists, short-visioned working-class orators, assisted by the satire of the comic journal, has firmly planted ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson

... gas lanterns. And each flickers, still attempting to escape. But to one side, high in the distance, the poisonous moon, The fat fog-spider, lies in wait, smoldering. ...
— The Verse of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein

... into the army. He hasn't any resisting power, hasn't Harry. And there is nothing but temptation in the army. Dear me, Charlotte! We may well pray not to be led into the way of temptation; for if we once get into it, we are no better off than a fly in a spider's web." ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... Centaurus on the last leg of her long journey to Sol. There was no flash, no roar as she swept across the darkness of space. As silent as a ghost, as quiet as a puff of moonlight she moved, riding the gravitational fields that spread like tangled, invisible spider webs between ...
— The Passenger • Kenneth Harmon

... are never satisfied! If I write too lightly, you say it looks as if a spider had scampered over the paper with inky legs; if I bear on harder, you ask me how much horse power I have put on to make such heavy strokes. I don't know what to do! I don't! ...
— The Big Nightcap Letters - Being the Fifth Book of the Series • Frances Elizabeth Barrow

... up was like some strange old child. He wore a number of little capes to hide his humped back, and his body, one thought, under his clothes was strapped together. He got on his feet nimbly like a spider, and they heard the click of a pistol lock as he whipped the weapon out of an open drawer, as though it were a habit thus always to keep a weapon at his hand to make him equal in stature with other ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post

... entrance of the above-said persons than she began to meditate the most expeditious means for their expulsion. In order to this, she had provided herself with a long and deadly instrument, with which, in times of peace, the chambermaid was wont to demolish the labours of the industrious spider. In vulgar phrase, she had taken up the broomstick, and was just about to sally from the kitchen, when Jones accosted her with a demand of a gown and other vestments, to ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding

... full length of Main Street. The street was still filled with loiterers who had spent the day at the fair, and lingered now in town in the vague hope of seeing a brawl or a fight before sundown—cattlemen and cowboys from the northern ranges, sheepmen from the Spider River country, small ranchers and irrigators from the Bear basin, who picked their steps carefully, and spoke with prudence in the presence of roisterers from the Spanish Sinks, and gunmen and gamblers from Calabasas and Morgan's Gap. The Morgans themselves and their following ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman

... drawing-room or library, before Vesta and Gerhardt, she was not less loving, though a little more circumspect. She loved odd puzzles like pigs in clover, the spider's hole, baby billiards, and the like. Lester shared in these simple amusements. He would work by the hour, if necessary, to make a difficult puzzle come right. Jennie was clever at solving these mechanical problems. Sometimes ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser

... of the Gipsey are very destructive to fruit trees, over which they wander during the day, but at night retire into a web like that of a spider. In 1731, they attacked and destroyed most of the ...
— The Emperor's Rout • Unknown

... Is like a foul black cobweb to a spider; He makes it his dwelling and a prison To entangle those ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds

... out into the forest, "I am afraid that the last two visits have been rather a strain. We must find something a little less serious; but I am going to fill up all your time. You had got too much taken up with your psychology, and we must not live too much on theory, and spin problems, like the spider, out of our own insides; but we will not spend too much time in trudging over this country, though it is well worth it. Did you ever see anything more beautiful than those pine-trees on the slope there, with the blue distance between their ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson

... unresting motion of the great stones, giving her a dim, delicious awe as at the presence of an uncontrollable force; the meal forever pouring, pouring; the fine white powder softening all surfaces, and making the very spider-nets look like a fairy lace-work; the sweet, pure scent of the meal,—all helped to make Maggie feel that the mill was a little world apart from her outside everyday life. She was in the habit of taking this recreation as she conversed with Luke, to whom she was very communicative, wishing him ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester

... In my just censure, in my true opinion!— Alack, for lesser knowledge!—How accurs'd In being so blest!—There may be in the cup A spider steep'd, and one may drink, depart, And yet partake no venom; for his knowledge Is not infected; but if one present The abhorr'd ingredient to his eye, make known How he hath drunk, he cracks his gorge, his sides, With violent ...
— The Winter's Tale - [Collins Edition] • William Shakespeare

... the hunter picks from the heart of the yucca, or Spanish bayonet, a few thin leaves, and, on reaching the point where an animal which he wishes to capture has rested, or whence it has newly taken flight, he deposits, together with sacrifices hereinafter to be mentioned, a spider knot (ho-tsa-na mu kwi-ton-ne), made of four strands of these yucca leaves. This knot must be tied like the ordinary cat-knot, but invariably from right to left, so that the ends of the four strands shall spread out from the center as the legs of a spider from its body. The knot is further ...
— Zuni Fetiches • Frank Hamilton Cushing

... bodies and souls of men, than the world has yet seen. I can conceive—may God avert the omen!—centuries hence, some future world-ruler sitting at the junction of all railroads, at the centre of all telegraph-wires—a world- spider in the omphalos of his world-wide web; and smiting from thence everything that dared to lift its head, or utter a cry of pain, with a swiftness and surety to which the craft of a Justinian or a Philip II. were ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley

... other complied, unrolling several small sheets of photographer's printing-out paper, to which several extraordinarily complicated and minute designs had been transferred—strongly resembling laborious efforts to conventionalize a spider's web. ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance

... so wild and shrill? Across the sands o' Dee? Lo, I will stand at thy right hand and keep the bridge with thee! For this was Tell a hero? For this did Gessler die? 'The curse is come upon me!' said the Spider to the Fly. ...
— Marjorie at Seacote • Carolyn Wells

... approaches the valley of Spider River it bends to the southeast, and, by a wide circuit over high and steep hills, it turns the head of Spider River; thence it bends to the northwest until it approaches within about 4 miles of Lake ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson

... a voice behind them. Turning quickly around they beheld a huge purple spider sitting not two yards away and regarding them with its ...
— Glinda of Oz • L. Frank Baum

... spider's silk, lined with strips of bark and with a few lichens attached to its upper surface, in a tree, twenty-five to fifty feet ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography, Vol. II., No. 5, November 1897 - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various

... had had this happen. Every prospector has. The claims which Peter selected were four in number. He started in without delay on the proof. Foot by foot the shafts descended through the red, the white, vein matter. One by one the spider arms of the tunnels felt out into the innermost crevices of the lode. Little by little Peter's table of statistics filled; here a pocket, there a streak, yon a clear ten feet of low-grade ore. The days, the months, even the years slipped by. Summers came and went with a flurry ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White

... who rose, grumbling. He called Pensive. Pensive did not answer; she was talking with a spider that had spun a great web between the branches of an ash-tree, which was glittering in the sun, full of flies. "Why take this long journey?" said the spider to the swallow. "What is the use of changing your climate and putting your life at the mercy of the ...
— Laboulaye's Fairy Book • Various

... are a little altered, with the view of adapting it to "ears polite;" for without some process of this kind, it would not have been presentable. A lady went to the doctor in great distress of mind, and stated to him, that, by a strange accident, she had swallowed a live spider. At first, his only reply was, "whew! whew! whew!" a sort of internal whistling sound, intended to be indicative of supreme contempt. But his anxious patient was not so easily to be repulsed. She became every moment more and more urgent for some means of relief from the dreaded ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 364 - 4 Apr 1829 • Various

... and grows cheerful and happy under it in a way and to a degree marvellous to behold. What singular secret is there among the psychological mysteries of her nature which is able to account for this phenomenon?—A gentle, timid girl of sixteen, whom the sight of a spider or a live snake would have frightened into hysterics, I had once an opportunity, on a tour through Italy, to observe, while she took little or no notice of other works of art, would gaze, as if fascinated, at the writhings of Laocooen and his sons in the folds ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various

... Vague lights and shadows shifting, The sungleams gold-dust sifting Down thro' the latticed leaves; Gray brooks the meadows lacing, Young flow'rs the uplands gracing, Her faery 'broidery tracing The skillful spider weaves. ...
— The Path of Dreams - Poems • Leigh Gordon Giltner

... above the city, made no sense, it did not make less sense than the position of a man, or a Dewforth, sitting in a blind cell among thousands of other blind cells down there, drawing tiny lines. Nothing bound him to the drafting room nor even to the Dewforth of the drafting room—not so much as a spider web or a shaft of light. The light pointed to itself. The wind got under his shirt and chilled his navel, a poignant ...
— In the Control Tower • Will Mohler

... I were only that butterfly!" At that moment the luxurious vagrant, in the midst of its careless sports, and voluptuous banquet, became entangled in a web woven by a great black spider, which sat with eager impatience waiting until it had wound itself into the toils by its fruitless exertions, that he might seize and devour his prey. The heart of Adakar melted with pity; starting up from the spot where he was ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various



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