"Centipede" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Lillie and took photographs. "Birdie" Bowers and Wright were employed collecting insects, and, with those added by the rest of us, the day's collection included all kinds of ants, cockroaches, grasshoppers, mayflies, a centipede, fifteen different species of spider, locusts, a cricket, woodlice, a parasite fly, a beetle, and a moth. We failed to get any of the dragonflies seen, and, to the great sorrow of the crews who landed ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... has a bewildering iridescence of aspect. Each present impulse is reformatory. Correction, like a centipede, shows a hundred legs and wants to run upon them all. Much of the so-called philanthropy is not well balanced and is run by cranks. Cranks attach themselves to any social movement, as a shaggy gown will gather burrs. It is not all of philanthropy to classify degenerates, ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... directions but instead of my faery a number of confusing images presented themselves. I saw in the hearts of those who were about me faery gardens and infernos, deserts and turnip fields; I saw a comically hopping rainworm who was nibbling at a graceful centipede; I saw a world in which darkness was lord. I saw much else and was ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... upright. He grabbed for a cigarette and inhaled it tremendously. "It's going like cutting butter with a hot knife. I started cross-examining today. I gave him three and a half hours of it, straight off the ice, and I'm not through with him yet. Not half. If he had as many legs as a centipede he'd still not have one left to stand on when I'm through with him. I doubt he'll have his marrow bones to crawl out on, the way he's crumpling up. Even old Hounslow at his worst can't possibly misdirect the jury, the way I've gummed their noses on ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... then after the coup d'etat in which he slaughtered his father's enemies and reestablished Tanoa's rule in Mbau he was called Thakombau (evil to Mbau). At the time he also received another name Thikinovu (centipede) in allusion to his stealthiness in approaching to bite his enemy, but this designation, together with his "missionary" name "Ebenezer," did not survive the test of usage. Miss Gordon Cumming gives an interesting list of Fijian names translated into English. For women they were such as Spray ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... directions; their clothes were torn from them; they were pinched and scratched any- and everywhere; Ballbody kept rolling up them and over them, confining his attentions to no one in particular; the scorpion kept grabbing at their legs with his huge pincers; a three-foot centipede kept screwing up their bodies, nipping as he went; varied as numerous were their woes. Nor was it long before the last of them had fled from the ...
— The Princess and the Curdie • George MacDonald
... Harry. There are a great many things that I have no desire to know. I do not want to know in what words the King of Ashantee says, "Cut off the heads of those women." I do not want to know whether a centipede really has ninety-six legs or one hundred and four. I never did know. I never shall. I have no occasion to know. And I am glad not to have my mind lumbered up with the unnecessary information. On the other hand, that which I have ...
— How To Do It • Edward Everett Hale
... trickled cold shafts of moonlight that fell upon something evil that wriggled across the white 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 ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... History of John Bull swarm with similar errors, if the name of error can be properly applied to that which is unavoidable. It is not easy to make a simile go on all-fours. But we believe that no human ingenuity could produce such a centipede as a long allegory in which the correspondence between the outward sign and the thing signified should be exactly preserved. Certainly no writer, ancient or modern, has yet achieved the adventure. The best thing, on the whole, that an allegorist can do, is to present to his readers a ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and bees the sting is formed of modified parts, accessory in reproduction. In the scorpion, we have the median terminal process of the body specially organized. In the spider, we have a specially constructed antenna; and finally in the centipede a pair ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... largest and the most ferocious ant we know anything about. In an incredibly short space of time they can kill any goat, chicken, duck, hog or dog on the place. In a few hours there is not a rat, mouse, snake, centipede, spider, or scorpion in your house, as they are chased, killed and carried away. We built a fire and slept inside ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... lobsters among the rocks, too, and on some beaches a strange kind of lobsterish delicacy called in Tahiti varo, a kind of mantis-shrimp that looks like a superlatively villainous centipede. They grow from six to twelve inches long and a couple of inches wide, with legs or feelers all along their sides, like the teeth of a pocket-comb. Their shells are translucent yellow with black markings; ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... said that the centipede has a hundred feet. It may have; and it does seem that superstition, or the belief in supernatural things of a trivial nature has quite as many; and, like the fabled animal of ancient times, ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... administration itself. The people have always too much action or too little. Sometimes with a hundred thousand arms it overtakes everything; sometimes with a hundred thousand feet it moves as slowly as a centipede. ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... Of fossil fishes solemn, And glaciers crawl the faster To the feet of their old master! Heaven keep him well and hearty, Both him and all his party! From the sun that broils and smites, From the centipede that bites, From the hail-storm and the thunder, From the vampire and the condor, From the gust upon the river, From the sudden earthquake shiver, From the trip of mule or donkey, From the midnight howling monkey, From the stroke of knife or dagger, From the puma and ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... many poisonous reptiles in this country, but few accidents happen either to the aborigines, or the colonists from their bite. Of these the centipede, tarantula, scorpion, slow-worm, and the snake, are the most to be dreaded; particularly the latter, since there are, I believe, at least thirty varieties of them, of which all but one are venomous in ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... A certain centipede, crawling along the lines marked out by fate, expounded the situation. It was early one morning while Octavia and Mrs. Maclntyre were trimming the honeysuckle on the west gallery. Teddy had risen and departed hastily ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... contrast between their sheltered whiteness and the desert brown of his face.... Milky pale they gleamed at him from the glass.... Bony hard, they flaunted their angles at every move.... He was grateful that he was not a centipede. ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... etchings of all the missions in India ink, wild-flower, fern, and moss work, and, perhaps most popular of all, the pictures on orange wood of the burro, the poppy, and pepper and oranges. Or, if interested in natural history, you can secure a horned toad, a centipede, or a tarantula, alive or dead, and ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... follows, therefore, that at least during the period through which the insect continues to grow, the cuticle must be periodically shed. Thus in the life-story of an insect or other arthropod, such as a lobster, a spider, or a centipede, there must be a succession of cuticle-castings—'moults' or ecdyses as ...
— The Life-Story of Insects • Geo. H. Carpenter
... the Martian official before them had uttered a hissing call, and in answer to it a long shape of shining metal raced into the vast hall and halted beside them. It was like a fifty-foot centipede of metal, its scores of supporting short legs actuated by some mechanism inside the cylindrical body. There was a transparent-walled control room at the front end of that body, and in it a Martian at the controls who snapped ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... Amy sternly. "Well, I'd say you did whack it! Stretch out there and I'll rub it. Oh, shut up! I've rubbed more knees than—than a centipede ever saw! Besides, it won't do to have you laid up, Clint, old scout. Think of what it would mean to the second team—and the school—and the nation! I shudder to contemplate it. That where it is? I thought so from your facial contortions. Lie still, can't you? How ...
— Left Tackle Thayer • Ralph Henry Barbour
... found Tilly up to that time; but when Elsie said that (about being able to move all her legs and arms), I heard a little faint voice say 'You talk as if you were a centipede, Elsie Martin!' ...
— The Sunbridge Girls at Six Star Ranch • Eleanor H. (Eleanor Hodgman) Porter
... was the nearness of the mountain with its Mediterranean flora, so rich that it recalled the Corsican maquis; full of beautiful fungi and varied insects, where, under the flat stones exposed to the burning sun, the centipede burrowed and the scorpion slept; where a special fauna abounded—of curious dung-beetles, scarabaei, the Copris, the Minotaur, etc.—which only a little farther north grow rapidly scarcer ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... is power—he is the primitive, the wild wolf, the striking rattlesnake, the stinging centipede," said Arrellano. ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... attract attention; and presently signs became observable that it was occasioning considerable uneasiness. The galley's sweeps—forty in number—were suddenly rigged out, and she assumed the appearance of a gigantic centipede hurrying over the surface of the sea, her long oars rising and falling swiftly, with a gun-like flash of sunlight off their wet blades, as they churned the water into snow-white foam on ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... "I'm sure Gwen's description sounds exactly like this old lady becoming a ... There!—I've forgotten the word! Something between a centipede and a Unitarian...." ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... idiots had had your way," she observed, "I should have been knitting so many socks for Charlie Sands that he'd have had to be a centipede to wear 'em all, ...
— More Tish • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... murmured Mohi, "Is not this philosopher like a centipede? Cut off his head, and still ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... are called by this name, which properly belongs only to a kind of wingless beetle, found along the hedgerows and moist banks during the summer. The other insect which shares the name is also known as the electric centipede; it is seen about gardens or fields, and has the peculiarity of leaving upon the path it has ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... self-satisfaction upon her face as would have been quite startling to her, if she had ever been startled at any thing; for through that smile she could see lying at the root of it the worm that made it. For some smiles are like the ruddiness of certain apples, which is owing to a centipede, or other creeping thing, coiled up at the heart of them. Only her worm had a face and shape the very image of her own; and she looked so simpering, and mawkish, and self-conscious, and silly, that she made the wise woman feel ...
— A Double Story • George MacDonald
... act under orders. Look thou, underling! that thou obeyest mine.—Stand round me, men. Ye see an old man cut down to the stump; leaning on a shivered lance; propped up on a lonely foot. 'Tis Ahab—his body's part; but Ahab's soul's a centipede, that moves upon a hundred legs. I feel strained, half stranded, as ropes that tow dismasted frigates in a gale; and I may look so. But ere I break, yell hear me crack; and till ye hear THAT, know that Ahab's hawser tows his purpose yet. Believe ye, men, ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... inwardly. It would be the work of half an hour to criticise—that is to say praise—the poem sufficiently to please Charlie. Then I had good reason to groan, for Charlie, discarding his favorite centipede metres, had launched into shorter and choppier verse, and verse with a motive at the back of it. This is ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... pocketbook for the count on this structure—like as not she had to mortgage her Luxor villa to meet the final pay-roll. Den Mut was her architect and he grew rich as the buildings increased. He owned a centipede barge on the Nile, which was the badge of big money in ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... do nothing for skin disease, a form of herpes, with which a great many are afflicted. They probably do not regard it as a disease. (See Pls. LVI et seq.) In case of centipede bites, if on a finger, the affected member is thrust in the anus of a chicken, where, the Negrito affirms, the poison is absorbed, resulting in the ...
— Negritos of Zambales • William Allan Reed
... on Molly, in a reflective tone, "that you can make a catch; but you can try. There is the chaplain—horrid old centipede! And there's old Walford"—Molly never favoured any man with a Mr to his name—"an ugly, spiteful old bear that nobody'll have: he's rich enough; and he might look your way if you play your cards ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt
... she went again to the room, and Aponitolau thought that Aponibolinayen did not tell the truth, so he used his power. "I use my power so that I will become a centipede." So he became a centipede and he went in the crack of the floor where Aponibolinayen was lying. Not long after Aponibolinayen said again, "I am anxious to eat the oranges which belong to Gawigawen of Adasen." "I know now what you want; why did you not tell the truth at ...
— Traditions of the Tinguian: A Study in Philippine Folk-Lore • Fay-Cooper Cole
... presents for an elderly lady. For a gentleman it is more difficult to find souvenirs. We must acknowledge that it is always difficult to select a present for a gentleman. Unless he has as many feet as Briareus had hands, or unless he is a centipede, he cannot wear all the slippers given to him; and the shirt-studs and sleeve-buttons are equally burdensome. Rings are now fortunately in fashion, and can be as expensive as one pleases. But one almost regrets the disuse of snuff, ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... weighing down a blossom of thyme close by, and underneath the stalk a very ugly little centipede. The wild bee, with his little dark body and his busy bear's legs, was lovely to me, and the creepy centipede gave me shudderings; but it was a pleasant thing to feel so sure that he, no less than the bee, was a little mood expressing himself out in harmony ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... or storm; the thunder-imp or hairy, cat-like creature that on the cloud-edges beats his drums in crash, roll, or rattle; the earthquake-fish or subterranean bull-head or cat-fish that wriggles and writhes, causing the earth to shiver, shudder and open; the ja or dragon centipede; the tengu or long-nosed and winged mountain sprite, which acts as the messenger of the gods, pulling out the tongues of fibbing, lying children; besides the colossal spiders and mythical creatures of the old story-books; ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... richly decorated garments, brandishing with his right hand his magic sword, holding in his left a cup containing the draught of immortality, and riding a tiger which in one paw grasps his magic seal and with the others tramples down the five venomous creatures: lizard, snake, spider, toad, and centipede. Pictures of him with these accessories are pasted up in houses on the fifth day of the fifth moon to forfend calamity ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... of the West are now being cut up into small farms. The nester has come, and come to stay. Gone is the buffalo, the Indian warwhoop, the free grass of the open plain;—even the stinging lizard, the horned frog, the centipede, the prairie dog, the rattlesnake, are fast disappearing. Save in some of the secluded valleys of southern New Mexico, the old-time round-up is no more; the trails to Kansas and to Montana have become grass-grown or lost in fields of waving grain; the maverick steer, ...
— Cowboy Songs - and Other Frontier Ballads • Various
... slithered through the shallow sea, with waves breaking against its bulging sides. It came out upon the beach, its wet sides glittering. It was two hundred feet long, and it looked somehow like a gigantic centipede. ...
— Morale - A Story of the War of 1941-43 • Murray Leinster
... kept steadily on, assisted by his owner, who followed and assiduously whacked him with a stout stick, and he reached the top much sooner than any of his biped following. One cannot have too many legs in Clovelly,—a centipede would find ...
— In the High Valley - Being the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series • Susan Coolidge
... words, without moss we could not have had Mary; without an ape we could not have had Abraham; and—shocking blasphemy—without a centipede we could not have had Christ! Praise God, we may turn from this to the words of God; "For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will ...
— The Church, the Schools and Evolution • J. E. (Judson Eber) Conant
... when I went to dress for dinner, I found on my table a nasty-looking black beast about six inches long. It looked very formidable in the half-light, like a scorpion or centipede. It turned out, however, to be quite harmless, and a sort of millipede, and rather handsome, with jet-black rings, and hundreds of orange-coloured legs. There are a great many venomous snakes in Ceylon, ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... is not written impartially, but by one who has had occasion to know some of the baser parts of it, and regards him accordingly with shuddering abhorrence, and just so much fear as he deserves. In him is to be dreaded the crawling of the centipede, not the spring of the tiger—the venom of the reptile, not the strength of the animal—the rancour of the miscreant, not ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... slim white creature, swathed in her veil of long, light golden hair, as she crouched on the bottom of Mercer's swimming pool, and pictured for us, by means of Mercer's thought-telegraph (my own name for the device; he has a long and scientific title for it with as many joints as a centipede), the story ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... the manners and customs of the place and people, particularly those of the coloured servant, Chunga, astonished her immensely. The white lady had a great horror of creeping things of all kinds; she could hardly bear to get into her bath, for she sometimes found a centipede, as long as her ...
— Little Folks (October 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... Giant, "if you continue to dwell upon the philosophical implications of your actions you will end up as helpless and confused as the leg-counting centipede. Better not think. Warriors are not supposed to. They lose their keen fighting edge when they think. And you need all ...
— Rastignac the Devil • Philip Jose Farmer
... the mud right after. I thought I'd a' had to stand an' iron pants for that young heathen till the crack o' doom, an' I had just one pair too many so I had. An' I up an' told her you'd think she kep' a young centipede much less a human boy with only two legs to him. And then I ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... the centipede or scolopender; from petlatl, mat, and coatl, serpent, as they are said to intertwine with each other, like the threads of a mat ...
— Ancient Nahuatl Poetry - Brinton's Library of Aboriginal American Literature Number VII. • Daniel G. Brinton
... little feeble wail sounding in the ears that fingers cannot stop, or to confess that it cried out against a double injustice, that of life and that of death: she had crossed the border of the region of horror, and went about with a worm coiled in her heart, like a centipede in the ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... his gory record and his dauntless eye, come from? Was he born in a buffalo wallow at the foot of some rock-ribbed mountain, or did he first breathe the thin air along the brink of an alkali pond, where the horned toad and the centipede sang him to sleep, and the tarantula tickled him under the chin ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... conceal, And without feeling mock at all who feel; With a vile mask the Gorgon would disown,— A cheek of parchment and an eye of stone. Mark how the channels of her yellow blood Ooze to her skin and stagnate there to mud, Cased like the centipede in saffron mail, Or darker greenness of the scorpion's scale,— (For drawn from reptiles only may we trace Congenial colours in that soul or face,) Look on her features! and behold her mind As in a mirror of itself defined: ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... that was coming. The crest of that living tidal wave was still two days and many miles to the rearward. We had seen the head and a little of the neck. The swollen body of the myriad-legged gray centipede was as ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... seems to have more legs than a centipede when you try to drag it through a narrow space, and they all stick out in different directions. Of course, this one stuck and then there was more trouble, for when I took an axe to dismember it, a cop threatened to arrest ...
— Side Show Studies • Francis Metcalfe
... before tuba-fishing; taken from birds; from pig's liver; the centipede; taken by top-spinning; concerning headhunting; from dreams; from banana leaves before naming children; hunting expeditions abandoned because of; good and evil, ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... observation many weeks, and invariably found that when one was interfered with in any way it used its snake-like aft end as a bogey, curving it round towards the molesting hand. A fowl that will attack an 8-inch centipede without hesitation, makes a sensational fuss and clatter when it detects a stick insect, especially when the stick insect feints, however ineffectually, with its perfectly harmless tail. If it is capable of imposing upon a sagacious fowl, the effect of its terrifying ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... was at his post; and though all were quick, there was no time to spare, for by this time the black column of the enemy was distinctly visible curling along the valley like a great centipede; and, with the daring enterprise so common among the troops of Napoleon, had begun in silence to mount the breach. It was an awful and eventful moment; but the coolness and determination of the little garrison was equal to ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... continued Benson's father, "so much better than the dray-horse, that knew enough to lift his feet until he lifted the right one. I believe if that horse had the feet of a centipede, he would have gone on lifting them until the dog was released. I tell you, boys, if I could get anyone to help me, I'd start ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... streak of lathered lightening Billy went for his clothes. A centipede could have been no more active. He jerked up his suspenders; he jerked on a shirt; he jerked on a coat; he was wiping his face as he darted through the halls and down the stairs. No lift had speed enough for his descent. At the desk ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... quadruped as a sacred thing, which under no circumstances may be utilized by man. We are not fanatical Hindus of the castes which religiously avoid the "taking of life" of any kind, and gently push aside the flea, the centipede and the scorpion. The reasoning powers of such people are strictly limited, the same as those of people who are opposed to the removal by death of the bandits and murderers ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... the mosquito, which is in many places a cruel torment; the centipede, which grows to an unusual size; the locust, of which there is more than one variety; and the scorpion, whose ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... found "Paris eating a General a day" (Chapter LXXVIII). Early in June, 1871 there appeared in the same journal "The International Centipede," "John Bull and the Blanche Albion." The Queen of England, clad in white, holding in her hands a model of the Palace of Westminster, and sundry docks, resists the approach of an interminable centipede, on which ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... cried Robert, and put his foot on a centipede as long as your finger, that crawled and wriggled and squirmed ...
— The Story of the Amulet • E. Nesbit
... about thirty pairs of bearers. They were divided into sections, to every one of which a pair of men was attached, illumined from within, and covered with a rich scaled brocade, in which the bearers themselves were also enveloped, their legs and feet appearing from underneath like the legs of a huge centipede. ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... what distant lands, what tropical forests did I not behold in my dreams! At that time, near the garden bench, in some of the crevices in the stone wall, there dwelt many a big ugly black spider ever on the watch, peeping out of his nook ready to pounce upon any giddy fly or wandering centipede. One of my amusements consisted in tickling the spiders gently, very gently, with a blade of grass or a cherry stalk in their holes. Mystified, they would rush out, fancying they had to deal with some sort of prey, whilst I would rapidly draw back my hand in disgust. ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... Chancellor. "Ah—but what do you know about it? That's the question. How do you know what might have been on the next page—a snake or a worm, or a centipede or a revolutionist, ...
— The Book of Dragons • Edith Nesbit
... are their bites. The horned toad, while not poisonous, is protected by having horny spines upon its head and back. The little rattlesnake known as the "side-winder" is perhaps the most dangerous of all, although the tarantula, centipede, and scorpion are formidable foes. The Gila monster, long believed to be so dangerous, is now considered non-poisonous ...
— The Western United States - A Geographical Reader • Harold Wellman Fairbanks
... been a myriad of years on its way. For that Supreme One is not a God of pity or mercy—not as we recognize these qualities. Think of a God of mercy who would create the typhus germ, or the house-fly, or the centipede, or the rattlesnake, yet these are all His handiwork. They are a part of the Infinite plan. The minister is careful to explain that all these tribulations are sent for a good purpose; but he hires a doctor to destroy the fever germ, and he kills the rattlesnake when he doesn't run from it, ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... sniffed the man, with uplifted eyebrows; "looking at it from that standpoint, I suppose I might be glad I wasn't a centipede ...
— Pollyanna • Eleanor H. Porter
... learn how to turn to the left at each corner, but also at giving himself an opportunity to make remarks about their feet and the position thereof, and at the end of five minutes each girl feels as if she were a centipede, and you, Esmeralda, secretly wonder whether something in the way of mucilage of thumb-tacks might not be used to keep your own riding boots close to the saddle. "And don't let your left foot swing," says the teacher ...
— In the Riding-School; Chats With Esmeralda • Theo. Stephenson Browne
... plate a worm which Barbara promptly threw at his face. Jimmy looked at her reproachfully and proceeded to Aunt Evangeline. Aunt Evangeline's gift was a centipede—a live centipede that ran gaily off the tablecloth on to Aunt Evangeline's lap before anyone could stop it. With a yell that sent William's father to the library with his hands to his ears, Aunt Evangeline leapt to her chair and stood with her ...
— More William • Richmal Crompton
... stay," I cried, casting down my pen. "It is so seldom that he cuddles that I'll sacrifice myself upon the altar of aunthood. Well, once upon a time, Billy, there was a dear little blue hen who stole away—sit still now! You've more legs than a centipede!—who stole away every day and went under the barn where it was so cool and shady, and laid a lovely little smooth, cream-coloured egg. Then when she had laid it, she was so proud that she could never help coming out and ...
— At Home with the Jardines • Lilian Bell
... previously the centipede-like procession of girls of all ages, in charge of nuns and pupil-teachers, in passing over the Gueldersdorp Recreation-Ground, had sustained an experience with which every maiden bosom would have been still vibrating had not an event even more exciting occurred ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... squatted there in the ship, a centipede-like thing about five feet in length and a little less than eighteen inches in diameter, with eight articulated limbs spaced in pairs along his body, any one of which could be used as hand or foot. His head, which was long and snouted, displayed two pairs of violet eyes which kept a constant watch ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Hy, chasin' up and down glass mountains, eatin' prickly pear, drinking rarely, and cullin' a rattlesnake here and there to twine in our locks. It will seem like old times, dropping a rock in your boots in the mornin' to quell the quivering centipede and the upstanding ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... tongue, Scip," said the Doctor. "I'm the talking man here. Yes! gentlemen," addressing the attentive cowboys, "I can cure anything that touches the ground—biped, quadruped, or centipede—glanders, botts, greased hoofs, heaves, blind staggers, it makes no odds. My universal, self-acting, double compound elixir of equestrian ointment will perform a cure in each and every case. It is cheap! It is sure! It is patented! It is the best, and it is here. You ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... dramatically. "Before Myrtella came I never knew what it was to sleep in my own bed, and I had to eat the legs of chickens until I felt like a centipede. There! You are all right; come along. Don't forget to ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... pink flowers on it, is devoting herself to me. This last was Amelia; a cheerful, comely, buxom, and in the main kindly creature, as I remember her. In the kitchen was a well-scrubbed table of about three-quarters of a mile in length, and possessed of as many legs as a centipede, some of which could be moved to support flaps. (To put a measuring-tape over that table nowadays, or over other things in the kitchen, for that matter, might bring disappointment, I suppose.) These legs formed fascinating walls and boundaries for a series of romantic dwelling-places, shops, ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... and feeble gesturings on the shoulders of two staggering young men, and after him came the aged morris dancers, only upheld from collapse in the mire by mutual upholdings, until they seemed like some monstrous animal moving with uncouth sprawls of legs as multifold as a centipede, and wavering drunkenly from one side of the road to the other, lurching into the dewy bushes, then recovering by the joint ...
— The Heart's Highway - A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeeth Century • Mary E. Wilkins
... consonant but the most rounded of all, the nasal liquids n and ng. There is about as much likeness to the Aryan and Semitic languages—you can trace about as much analogy between them—as you can between a centipede and a billiard-ball. ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... easily supported in the water, would be impossible on land. Such apparent exceptions as earthworms, centipedes, and snakes are not difficult to explain, for the earthworm is a burrower which eats its way through the soil, the centipede's long body is supported by numerous hard legs, and the snake pushes itself along by means of the large ventral scales to which the lower ends of very numerous ribs ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... The centipede runs across my head, The vinegaroon crawls in my bed, Tarantulas jump and scorpions play, The broncs are grazing far away, The rattlesnake gives his warning cry, And the coyotes sing their lullaby, While I ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... centipede was happy quite Until the toad, for fun, Said, "Pray, which leg goes after which?" Which wrought his mind to such a pitch, He lay distracted in a ditch ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Centipede went out to take a walk; The Centipede said frankly, "I will listen while you talk, But I may appear distracted, or assume a vacant stare, Because to keep my feet in step requires ...
— The Jingle Book • Carolyn Wells
... press; the naval twelve-pounders, with ten-oxen teams and sailors swinging merrily alongside; infantry marching with the indescribable regular undulation of masses of drilled men, reminding one of the ripple of a centipede's legs; field artillery, horse artillery, transport waggons, more infantry, more guns—they stretch in a long, dark river ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps |
