"Stilt" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... higher mammals and birds is after all quite limited. By the beginnings of infancy the door for progressiveness was set ajar, but it was not all at once thrown wide open. Conservatism stilt continued in fashion. One generation of cattle is much like another. It would be easy for foxes to learn to climb frees, and many a fox might have saved his life by doing so; yet quickwitted as he is, this obvious device never seems to have occurred to Reynard. Among slightly teachable ...
— The Meaning of Infancy • John Fiske
... can be made from sticks or board strips, of sufficient length for grasping with the hands, and with foot rests nailed at any required height from the ground part. In the "Gadabout" stilt you will notice that the stilt above the foot rest is strapped to the leg, just below the knee, which leaves both hands free. Any boy with tools, timber and leather for straps can make "Gadabouts," and the arm stilt is still simpler. The natives of the Marquesas Islands ...
— Healthful Sports for Boys • Alfred Rochefort
... an effort to simulate another burst of merriment, he caught the stump of his right stilt in a pavement crack, wavered, cut in the air a figure like a geometrical proposition gone mad, and came whacking to earth in ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... lift it from the ground, but evidently aid the great fowl in running, as it holds them outspread while it skims over the plain, perhaps using them mainly as outriggers or balancing poles in its swift passage on its stilt-like legs. The penguins convert their wings into fins while swimming through the water, the feathers ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... Lannis searched this wide, flat expanse of brilliant green. Nothing moved on it save a great heron picking its deliberate way on stilt-like legs. It was well for Quintana that ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... were ringing those first glad notes, caught nearer the Throne than those of any other bird, "Spring o' year! Spring o' year!"; while stilt-legged little killdeers were scudding around the Limberlost and beside the river, flinging from cloudland their "Kill deer! Kill deer!" call. The robins in the orchards were pulling the long dried blades of last year's grass ...
— The Song of the Cardinal • Gene Stratton-Porter
... glance it would seem impossible to avoid the numerous weapons. Imagine a brittle tennis ball stuck full of long slender needles, many tapering to microscopic keenness at the points, climbing stiffly along the edges of rocks by a few of the stilt-like needles, and a very fair figure of the ECHINUS is presented. As a curious and beautiful creature he is full of interest, and as an adjunct to one's diet he is, in due season, full of excellent meat. We take the ugly and forbidding oyster with ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... they were legs in caricatura, and had we seen such proportions on a Chinese or Japan screen, we should have made large allowances for the fancy of the draughtsman. These birds are of the plover family, and might with propriety be called the stilt plovers. Brisson, under that idea, gives them the apposite name of l'echasse. My specimen, when drawn and stuffed with pepper, weighed only four ounces and a quarter, though the naked part of ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 2 • Gilbert White
... there, though in place of the swashbuckling cavalier she found only quiet, slowly-spoken men, with patience most plainly stamped upon their sun-darkened faces. Their hands were hard with the grip of the bridle and plough-stilt in place of the rifle, and the struggle they waged was a slow and grim one against frost and drought ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss |
