"Elephantine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... than the emanations from the pedants of Louvain. The "Rhetoricians" are not responsible for all the bad taste of their generation. The gravest historians of the Netherlands often relieved their elephantine labors by the most asinine gambols, and it was not to be expected that these bustling weavers and cutlers should excel their literary superiors ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... lighting, and the dust in the streets is laid by a real street sprinkler, and not by throwing the water on from a leathern bag, as I saw it in Damascus. The Cataract Hotel is a large place for tourists, with a capacity of three hundred and fifty people. The Savoy Hotel is beautifully located on Elephantine Island, in front of the town. To the south of the town lie the ancient granite quarries of Syene, which furnished the Egyptian workmen building material so long ago, and still lack a great deal of being exhausted. I ...
— A Trip Abroad • Don Carlos Janes
... dollars—say, I'd a' made it ten dollars—say!" And he laughed again a laugh that seemed to set all the celluloid in the plush covered, satin lined toilet cases on the new counter a-flutter. He walked down the store with elephantine tread, as he laughed, and then the door opened and Dr. Nesbit came in. Five months had put a perceptible bow into his shoulders, and an occasional cast of uncertainty into ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... new idea. There is no brain-work in the thing at all; no root query of what sex is, of whether it alters this or that, and why, anymore than there is any imaginative grip of the humor and heart of the populace in the popular education. There is nothing but plodding, elaborate, elephantine imitation. And just as in the case of elementary teaching, the cases are of a cold and reckless inappropriateness. Even a savage could see that bodily things, at least, which are good for a man are ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... time with the stars and the moon. He was running like a youthful god, she thought, for her mind had not yet been weaned from certain vanities, and she could not see that a gigantic policeman was in his wake, tracking him with elephantine bounds, and now and again snatching a gasp from hurry to blow furious ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... Odry is a connoisseur of chinaware. The elephantine Lepeintre junior runs into debt and lives the life of ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... the Horse.—There are a great many breeds of horses. The Shetland pony is so small, that many specimens are no larger than a Newfoundland dog; on the other hand, Clydesdale horses sometimes attain to almost elephantine proportions. There is a wide difference between the bull-like Suffolk Punch and the greyhound-like racer. The English and Irish racer is said to owe its origin to a cross between the old English light-legged breed and the Arabian. The most valuable kind of carriage horse ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... presume upon his paternal functions. Approaching the high chair in which Johnnyboy was dyspeptically reflecting, with a ponderous wink at the other guests, and a fat thumb and forefinger on Johnnyboy's table, he leaned over him, and with slow, elephantine playfulness said:— ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... with elephantine lightness. "And at one time or another, every one does. It's a thing ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... Mr. Sagittarius from the room, driving Mr. Ferdinand, in a condition of elephantine horror, before him, and abandoning Madame to an acquaintance with the classics that she had certainly never achieved in the society of ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... were generally comfortable, but which, because of filth and indolence, presented a foul and wretched appearance. Indeed, the appearance of the slave himself was unfavorable. Olmsted describes him as "clumsy, awkward, gross, elephantine in all his expressions and demeanor." The clothing of the slave was of every variety, from the "smart mulatto lady's maid, who wore the still fresh dress that had been her mistress's, down to the pickaninny of three, five, or eight ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... of light that fell on the "Devil" was on a memorable spring evening in 1751. Dr. Johnson (aged forty-two), then busy all day with his six amanuenses in a garret in Gough Square compiling his Dictionary, at night enjoyed his elephantine mirth at a club in Ivy Lane, Paternoster Row. One night at the club, Johnson proposed to celebrate the appearance of Mrs. Lennox's first novel, "The Life of Harriet Stuart," by a supper at the "Devil Tavern." Mrs. Lennox was a lady for whom ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... mind as no other American book ever has, and it may be said to have created a social realm which, with all its whimsical conceit, has almost historical solidity. The Knickerbocker pantheon is almost as real as that of Olympus. The introductory chapters are of that elephantine facetiousness which pleased our great-grandfathers, but which is exceedingly tedious to modern taste; and the humor of the book occasionally has a breadth that is indelicate to our apprehension, though it perhaps ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... Layson with an awkward lightness. "Barbara told me what passed between you two young folks afore you come up to the mountings," he explained. And then, with further elephantine airyness: "I say, jest excuse me—reckon I'm in the way." He made a move ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... else) declared that he is drawn from a real Professor of my acquaintance, who is anything but a fool, I should imagine not. But in that case I am all the more mystified by the incredibly weak fight which he makes in the play in answer to the elephantine sophistries of Undershaft. It is really a disgraceful case, and almost the only case in Shaw of there being no fair fight between the two sides. For instance, the Professor mentions pity. Mr. Undershaft says with melodramatic scorn, "Pity! the scavenger of the Universe!" Now if ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... down very carefully the broken toy he had been playing with. Peter's elephantine tread was so great that it had almost overstepped its victim. At all events Aymer gave no outward sign that he felt it except in his deepened colour and a faint ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... round hurriedly. The Division bell had just rung. The smoking-room was almost empty. This was fortunate. It would have been very awkward for a man in Sir Bartholomew's position to be caught in the act of hearing an Emperor called elephantine. ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... with my usual desire to teach the searcher after knowledge even of little things—though a mammoth is scarcely a "little thing"—briefly gave him some insight of the subject, running over the differences between the mastodontine and the elephantine mammoth; and then remarked to him, incidentally, that an American mastodon giganteus, found not far from where we stood, over in Missouri, a third of a century before, was now in our British Museum, where I had seen it. Of course Arthur had many questions to ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... own virtues. Taking advantage of the well-known carelessness of American readers, and knowing full well how easily they are duped—how easily they are cozened out of their senses and led into false beliefs with mere plausibilities and sophisms—this imperial and far-reaching Wall Street, this elephantine fox of the world, takes possession of American journalism—owns it, controls it. It seizes and subsidizes the metropolitan press. It purchases newspapers and magazines by the score. It establishes bureaus; it buys every purchasable pen, from the pen of the gray philosopher to the ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... word, I've half a mind to go into the concientious scruples business on my own account! Have I any right to be a party to fettering poor airy fairy little Miss Butterfly, with a heavy iron chain for life and always, to this great lumbering elephantine moral Ernest? Am I justified in tying the cable round her dainty little neck with a silken thread, and then fastening it round his big leg with rivets of hardened steel on the patent Bessemer process? If a couple of persons, duly called by banns in their own respective parishes, or furnished ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... soupplate, while on her rere lower down are two additional protuberances, suggestive of potent rectum and tumescent for palpation, which leave nothing to be desired save compactness. Such fleshy parts are the product of careful nurture. When coopfattened their livers reach an elephantine size. Pellets of new bread with fennygreek and gumbenjamin swamped down by potions of green tea endow them during their brief existence with natural pincushions of quite colossal blubber. That suits your book, eh? Fleshhotpots of Egypt to hanker after. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... spirits and was her old self, and a very charming self it was, so charming, indeed, that even James forgot his learning and the responsibilities of his noble profession and talked, like an ordinary Christian. Indeed, he even went so far as to pay her an elephantine compliment; but as it was three sentences long, and divided into points, it ...
— Mr. Meeson's Will • H. Rider Haggard
... such a collection as he has formed, and bethink you that these elephantine bones did veritably carry their owners about, and these great grinders crunch, in the dark woods of which the forest-bed is now the only trace, it is impossible not to feel that they are as good evidence of the lapse of time as the annual ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... Tesla. In the back of his brain the city tumbled—an elephantine grimace, a wilderness of angles, a swarm of gestures that beat at his thought. But before his eyes there were no longer the precise patterns of another day. He was no longer outside. He had been sucked into something, the something that ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... read, the month's Six Selling Best The Bookman scored with elephantine Jest, Have sold a half a Million in a Year, Yet no one ever heard ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Cayenne • Gelett Burgess
... thoroughly incongruous figure, and greatly injure the general design. The poem appeared in this form in 1743, with a ponderous prefatory discourse by Ricardus Aristarchus, contributed by the faithful Warburton, and illustrating his ponderous vein of elephantine pleasantry. ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... reading for all," with Robert Browning, Charles Kingsley and Monckton Milnes among its contributors. Thinking they had a market, an enterprising publisher rushed out a volume, The Lectures of Lola Montez. When a copy reached the editor, it was reviewed in characteristically elephantine fashion by the Athenaeum: ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... with the sewing-machine, and was very efficient help; and even Tulee, though far from skilful with her needle, contrived to make dozens of hospital slippers, which it was the pride of her heart to deliver to the ladies of the Commission. Chloe added her quota of socks, often elephantine in shape, and sometimes oddly decorated with red tops and toes; but with a blessing for "the boys in blue" running through all the threads. There is no need to say how eagerly they watched for letters, and what a relief it was to ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... technician. Everything is relative, and the scale on which Fortuny worked was as true a medium for the exhibition of his genius as a museum panorama. Let us not be misled by the worship of the elephantine. It is characteristic of his temperament that the big battle piece he was commissioned by the Barcelona Academy to paint was never finished. Not every one who goes to Rome does as the Romans do. Dowered by nature with extraordinary ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... fore-shoulders, he seemed to justify the most extravagant tales of pioneer and huntsman. His hind-quarters were trim and fine-lined, built apparently for speed, smooth-haired, and of a grayish lion-color. But his fore-shoulders, mounting to an enormous hump, were of an elephantine massiveness, and clothed in a dense, curling, golden-brown growth of matted hair. His mighty head was carried low, almost to the level of his knees, on a neck of colossal strength, which was draped, together with the forelegs down to ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... artists. As the old fable truly says, lions do not make statues; even the cunning of the fox can go no further than the accomplishment of leaving an exact model of the vulpine paw: and even that is an accomplishment which he wishes he hadn't got. There are Chryselephantine statues, but no purely elephantine ones. And, though we speak in a general way of an elephant trumpeting, it is only by human blandishments that he can be induced to play the drum. But man, savage or civilised, simple or complex always desires to see his own soul outside himself; ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... are any such beings nowadays as the great Eliphalet, with his large features and conversational basso profundo, seemed to me. His very name had something elephantine about it, and it seemed to me that the house shook from cellar to garret at his footfall. Some have pretended that he had Olympian aspirations, and wanted to sit in the seat of Jove and bear the academic thunderbolt and ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... tame. He lacked altogether the fire, high-wrought nobility of sentiment, and sense of form essential for tragic art. On the other hand, Alfieri composed some comedies before his death which were devoid of humour, grace, and lightness. A strange elephantine eccentricity is their utmost claim to comic character. Indeed, the temper of Alfieri, ever in extremes, led him even to exaggerate the qualities of tragedy. He carried its severity to a pitch of dulness and monotony. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... the recollection of a supple, expressive, un-English bow, and of a deftness of phrase compared with which Trenby's laboured compliment savoured of the elephantine. Swiftly she dismissed the memory, irritably chasing it from her mind, for was it not five long, black, incomprehensible weeks since Peter had vanished from her ken? From the day of the bridge-party at the Edenhall ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... which old John Willet had arrived when he was discovered sitting in his chair in the dismantled bar of the Maypole after the rioters had visited his hostelry. He is apparently unconscious of discomfort when crushed up or partially sat upon by his elephantine colleague, which ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... the same crevice of the curtain where, only a little while before, the urchin of elephantine appetite had peeped, the butcher beheld the inner door, not closed, as the child had seen it, but ajar, and almost wide open. However it might have happened, it was the fact. Through the passage-way there was ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... nothing toward unsealing her lips, he pretended indifference. Still the same stubborn silence was maintained. This soon began to amuse the king, and of late he had been trying to be on friendly terms again with his sister through a series of elephantine antics and bear-like pleasantries, which were the most dismal failures—that is, in the way of bringing about a reconciliation. They were more successful from a comical point of view. So Henry was really glad for something that would loosen the tongue usually so lively, and for an opportunity ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... and their whole training and habit of mind were against the chances of such an explosion. Selden's calmness seemed rather to harden into resistance, and Miss Bart's into a surface of glittering irony, as they faced each other from the opposite corners of one of Mrs. Hatch's elephantine sofas. The sofa in question, and the apartment peopled by its monstrous mates, served at length to suggest the turn ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... also belong the land-monsters of bygone days, whose skeletons you may see in museums: such as the Mammoth, or hairy elephant, found in the British Isles, and also over half the globe; the Mastodon, another elephantine extinct monster, whose remains are found in America; the Woolly Rhinoceros, with two large horns on his face, dug out of the frozen soil of Siberia; the Great Irish Deer, whose antlers measured 9 feet from tip to tip; and Giant Sloths ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... out the lad caught sight of a young girl who had just arrived in a great state of excitement. She was dressed in dazzling finery, and carrying something in a basket. The boy sprang on to the dock wall, and created much merriment with his elephantine caresses. They shouted to him from the vessel to jump aboard or he would lose his passage. He made a running spring for the main rigging as she was being towed from her berth. A wild cheer went up from the crowd when they ...
— Looking Seaward Again • Walter Runciman
... being only small fry, stand raking in the mud; the dahuk (coloured herons), merry creatures, dive in the water; other birds of a lighter kind merely fly about. Market-boats sail along at good speed on their own behalf; ferry-boats creep along at elephantine pace to serve the needs of others only: cargo boats make no progress at ...
— The Poison Tree - A Tale of Hindu Life in Bengal • Bankim Chandra Chatterjee
... loins. Then, with one eye blinded and its long fur smouldering, its rage gave way suddenly into panic. Lifting its giant head high into the air, as if thus to escape its fiery assailants, it turned and scuttled back the way it had come, while the old men swarmed after it, belaboring and jabbing its elephantine rump with their ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... friends. Alec used to bring him bazaar sweets, of which he was very fond, and sugar-cane. He was a great wonder to the elephant, who could never understand why his pockets were full of all sorts of uneatable things. He loved to go through them, slowly considering each in his elephantine way. The bright metal handle of Alec's pocket-knife pleased Maharaj, and it was always the first thing he abstracted from the pocket and the last he returned, but the bits of string and the ball of wax he worried ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... was displaying proper firmness, but his hand trembled, his heart beat like a plunger, and he was the victim of an ignoble bashfulness. Chris approached with some timidity; but Maori bounded up to the young man, making elephantine overtures of friendliness, which were resented by Harry's cattle-dog Cop, who walked round and round the mastiff in narrowing circles, bristling like a cat and snarling hoarsely. Maori treated the challenge with a lordly indulgence. Cop went ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... cloistered galleries of the court-yard Clarence sometimes felt himself borne down by the protecting weight of this paternal hand; in the midnight silence of the dormitory he fancied he was often conscious of the soft browsing tread and snuffly muffled breathing of his elephantine-footed mentor. ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... blusterers of the same kidney, talked loud, laughed ditto, criticised the actors and spectators, and disturbed all his neighbours, without any one venturing to call him to order; so powerful, in certain cases, is the influence of an insolent look, a ferocious mustache, and an elephantine build. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... at what is called in polite literature, the grand meridian of life, and was proceeding on his journey downhill with hardly any throat, and a very rigid pair of jaw-bones, and long-flapped elephantine ears, and his eyes and complexion in the state of artificial excitement already mentioned, he was mightily proud of awakening an interest in Miss Tox, and tickled his vanity with the fiction that she was a splendid woman who ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... the unhappy Lad took upon himself the task of turning little Wolf from a pest into something approaching a decent canine citizen. It was no sinecure, this educating of the hot-tempered and undisciplined youngster. But Lad brought to it an elephantine patience and an uncannily wise brain. And, by the time Lady was brought back, cured, the puppy had begun to show the results of his sire's ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... A slight creak which the door made caused the girls to turn their heads, and there stood Susy, shedding articles of her wardrobe, as usual, as she walked. Her flaxen hair was partly unpinned and lay in a rough coil on her fat neck. She came with elephantine weight into the room, and ignoring Annie Forest altogether, held out ...
— Red Rose and Tiger Lily - or, In a Wider World • L. T. Meade
... indeed, proved at once so refreshing and so absorbing that he went leisurely, lengthening out the process of production until it came nearer covering the thirty months of elephantine gestation than the ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... in an elephantine march across the sheet. It was a splendid round, bold hand of her own conception, a style that would have stamped a woman as Minerva's own in more recent days. But other ideas reigned then: Henchard's creed was that proper young girls wrote ladies'-hand—nay, he believed that bristling characters ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... denunciation of the wealthy classes and all their ways, could Lionel Moore put in a word for Lady Adela's poor little literary infant? It would be shrivelled into nothing by a blast of this simulated simoom. It would be trodden under foot by the log-roller's elephantine jocosity. In a sort of despair he turned to Maurice Mangan, and would have entered into conversation with him but that Mangan now rose and said he must be going, nor could he be prevailed on to stay. Lionel accompanied him ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... would have felt quite all right about it, because that relation has a name in good standing. To me, that seems—sickening!" He took a rapid turn about the room and then as Thea remained standing, he rolled one of the elephantine chairs up to the hearth ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... they would never enter my shop, as they occasionally do to beg. Nothing is more infectious, as I have heard, than leprosy: there is one very virulent species, however, which is particularly dreaded here, the elephantine: those who die of it should, according to law, be burnt, and their ashes scattered to the winds: for if the body of such a leper be interred in the field of the dead, the disorder is forthwith communicated to all the corses even below the earth. Such, at least, is our idea in these parts. Lawsuits ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... coyness was elephantine. "Lives six thous'n sev'nty four North S—South Street," ...
— A Good Samaritan • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... a Baron by Napoleon I, and was a Senator under Napoleon III. "With his vast bulk, his bovine face, his elephantine movements, he boasted a delightful rascality; he sold himself majestically, and committed the greatest infamies in the name of duty ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... He looked at Haddo curiously. He asked himself whether he believed seriously these preposterous things, or whether he was amusing himself in an elephantine way at their expense. His mariner was earnest, but there was an odd expression about the mouth, a hard twinkle of the eyes, which seemed to belie it. Susie was vastly entertained. It diverted her enormously to hear occult matters ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... place of the elephantine black horse and the little tram cars and the man was taken by the masts of ships lying beyond. They rose straight and tall, their cordage like spider webs, in a succession of regular spaces until they were lost behind ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... monster lived they could not kill. When Rama saw no arms might slay The fiend who like a mountain lay, The glorious hero, swift to save In danger, thus his counsel gave: "O Prince of men, his charmed life No arms may take in battle strife: Now dig we in this grove a pit His elephantine bulk to fit, And let the hollowed earth enfold The monster ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... and three in the hind, but there the reduction stops, for the increasing body-weight made necessary the development of broad and heavy feet. The final members of the series comprise only large, almost elephantine animals, with immensely developed and very various nasal horns, huge and massive heads, and altogether a grotesque appearance. The growth of the brain did not at all keep pace with the increase of the head and body, and the ludicrously small brain may ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... elephantine jump, he alighted beside her and threw himself on the warm sand with a deep sigh ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... unguarded, Morris and Teacher set out to prepare Mrs. Mowgelewsky's mind for the adoption of Izzie. They found it very difficult. Mrs. Mowgelewsky, restored of vision, was so hospitable, so festive in her elephantine manner, so loquacious and so self-congratulatory, that it was difficult to insert even the tiniest conversational wedge into the structure of ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... terms with their successors. The roguish eye of J——ll, ever ready to be delivered of a jest, almost invites a stranger to vie a repartee with it. But what insolent familiar durst have mated Thomas Coventry?—whose person was a quadrate, his step massy and elephantine, his face square as the lion's, his gait peremptory and path-keeping, indivertible from his way as a moving column, the scarecrow of his inferiors, the brow-beater of equals and superiors, who made a solitude of children ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... the valleys, where the grasses grow, And waves the gold-rod and the meadow queen; Where peaceful streamlets, with a languid flow, Are calmly shimmering in the noonday sheen— There may be peace, and plenty too, I ween; But on the mountain's elephantine height, Where thunder-drums are beat on bassy key, And lightning-flashes glisten through the night; And forests groan with storm-chang'd melody, There let my home, 'mid lofty nature be— That, near the stars, and near the sun and moon, ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... did on the high mountains. The Ice-Maiden sat in her proud castle and arrayed herself in her winter costume; the ice walls stood in glazed frost; where the mountain streams waved their watery veil in summer, were now seen thick elephantine icicles, shining garlands of ice, formed of fantastic ice crystals, encircled the fir-trees, ...
— The Ice-Maiden: and Other Tales. • Hans Christian Andersen
... on to describe an act of Ra, the significance of which it is difficult to explain. The god ordered messengers to be brought to him, and when they arrived, he commanded them to run like the wind to Abu, or the city of Elephantine, and to bring him large quantities of the fruit called tataat. What kind of fruit this was is not clear, but Brugsch thought they were "mandrakes," the so-called "love-apples," and this translation of ...
— Legends Of The Gods - The Egyptian Texts, edited with Translations • E. A. Wallis Budge
... Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... as a Frenchman would say; no illustrious steeple, no imposing tower; the water-edge of the town looking bedraggled, like the flounce of a vulgar rich woman's dress that trails on the sidewalk. The New Ironsides lies at one of the wharves, elephantine in bulk and color, her sides narrowing as they rise, like the walls ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... as she crossed the parlor and passed the door to Sarah's bedroom, through the thin wood of which came elephantine moanings and low slubberings, she steeled herself to keep the color in her cheeks and the brightness in her eyes. And so well did she succeed that Billy never dreamed that the radiant, live young thing, tripping lightly down the steps to him, ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... the Ethiopians, who dwell beyond Egypt, advanced as far as the city called Elephantine, with Candace as their leader, ravaging the whole region that they traversed. On learning that Gaius[1] Petronius, the governor of Egypt, was approaching and somewhere near, they hastily retreated hoping to make good their escape. Overtaken on the road, however, they suffered defeat and ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. 4 • Cassius Dio
... undergone a change. He had become suave and unctuous, a kind of elephantine irony pervading his laborious attempts at conciliation. He and the Public Prosecutor would be severely blamed for this day's work, if the popular Deputy, relying upon the support of the people of Paris, chose ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... in a stupor, a half dream, during which I saw visions of astounding character. Monsters of the deep were side by side with the mighty elephantine shepherd. Gigantic fish and animals ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... to whom her husband turned for consolation. Miss Fox seems to have been the only woman who inspired Bentham with a sentiment approaching to passion. He wrote occasional letters to the ladies in the tone of elephantine pleasantry natural to one who was all his life both a philosopher and a child.[235] He made an offer of marriage to Miss Fox in 1805, when he was nearer sixty than fifty, and when they had not met for sixteen years. The immediate occasion ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... of the quick, ardent temper of my beloved companion bade me relinquish the thought of confidin' in him. No, I dassent, for I knew that his weight wuz but small by the steelyards, and Mr. Pomper's size wuz elephantine, with probably muscles accordin'. No, I felt I must rely on myself. But the feelin's I felt nobody can tell. Thinks I, "It has come onto me jest what I have always read and scorfed at"; for I had always thought and said that no self-respectin' ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... then Mrs. Zapp's elephantine slowness on the stairs from the basement. She appeared, buttoning her collar, smiling almost pleasantly, for she disliked Mr. Wrenn less than she did ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... of the gradual modification of the forms which peopled it in the preceding age,—if that has been the case, it is intelligible enough; because we may expect that the creature that results from the modification of an elephantine mammal shall be something like an elephant, and the creature which is produced by the modification of an armadillo-like mammal shall be like an armadillo. Upon that supposition, I say, the facts are intelligible; upon any other, that I am aware of, ...
— A Critical Examination Of The Position Of Mr. Darwin's Work, "On The Origin Of Species," In Relation To The Complete Theory Of The Causes Of The Phenomena Of Organic Nature • Thomas H. Huxley
... I don't think I've ever liked you so much as then. I think you're really much more interesting when you're elephantine. It was quite glorious the way you were planning to go galumphing over all vice ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... Delta, but the entire tract interposed between the Libyan Desert on the one side and the Arabian Gulf or Red Sea on the other, is a country of nearly the size of Italy. It measures 520 miles from Elephantine to the Mediterranean, and has an average width of 150 or 160 miles. It must thus contain an area of about 80,000 square miles. Of this space, however, at least three fourths is valueless, consisting of bare rocky mountain or ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... against Elam. And only in the last decade of the Nineteenth century the Frenchman De Morgan has made marvellous discoveries in the Elamite lands. What a noble passion those Frenchmen have for discovery! For Egypt did not Napoleon provide the most elephantine books of monuments and records that printing-presses have yet issued? And from that time to this have not Frenchmen held the primacy in excavations until, even while England holds and rules Egypt, she leaves, by special ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... the East, except Parthia. (31) Being (as was supposed) exactly under the Equator. Syene (the modern Assouan) is the town mentioned by the priest of Sais, who told Herodotus that "between Syene and Elephantine are two hills with conical tops. The name of one of them is Crophi, and of the other, Mophi. Midway between them are the fountains of the Nile." (Herod., II., chapter 28.) And see "Paradise Regained," IV., 70: — "Syene, and where the shadow ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... said the major, as they all stood breathlessly waiting for the outburst of the furious monster, which Mark painted mentally as something between a lion and a bear, but elephantine in size. ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... wind and water: Mr. Cooper therefore poured in a whole broadside of printed notices, which were put into every hand, and a huge playbill, which glared at the corner of every street in letters of elephantine size, informing the public that the distinguished performer already mentioned, had kindly consented to act a principal part in the entertainment of the evening. No sooner was this announced than the whole city was in one hubbub of curiosity—one twitter of delight; ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... such a cry for naturalism in other arts—we have Millet instead of Claude; we have Zola instead of Georges Sand; we have Dumas fils instead of Corneille; we have Mercie instead of Canova; but in music we have precisely the reverse, and we have the elephantine creations, the elaborate and pompous combinations of Baireuth, and the Tone school, instead of the old sweet strains of melody that went straight and clear to the ear and the heart of man. Sometimes my enemies write in their journals that I sing as if ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... ii. begins with the Story of Udayana to whom we must be truly grateful as our only guide: he and his son Naravahanadatta fill up the rest and end with lib. xviii. Thus the want of the clew or plot compels a division into books, which begin for instance with "We worship the elephantine proboscis of Ganesha" (lib. x. i.) a reverend and awful object to a Hindu but to Englishmen mainly suggesting the "Zoo." The "Bismillah" of The Nights is ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... p. 251.—Ba'al Samain is mentioned as early as the ninth century B. C. in the inscription of Ben Hadad (Pognon, Inscr. semit., 1907, pp. 165 ff.; cf. Dussaud, Rev. archeol., 1908, I, p. 235). In Aramaic papyri preserved at Berlin, the Jews of Elephantine call Jehovah "the god of heaven" in an address to a Persian governor, and the same name was used in the alleged edicts of Cyrus and his successors, which were inserted in the book of Esdras (i. 1; vi. 9, etc.)—If there were the slightest doubt as to the identity of the god ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... against the bar and puffing thoughtfully at a cigar of elephantine proportions, suddenly took his cigar from his lips, held it poised, examined it with the eye of a connoisseur—of cattle—and remarked slowly: "Now, why didn't I think of it? Wonder you fellas didn't think of it. They need a cook bad! Been without a cook for ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... clumsy swiftness of the elephantine, the man had run after her and opened the cottage gate just as Susan Hetth opened the cottage door with the welcoming announcement that tea ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... South American forests—a vast sleepy mass, my elephantine limbs and yard-long talons contrasting strangely with the little meek rabbit's head, furnished with a poor dozen of clumsy grinders, and a very small kernel of brains, whose highest consciousness was the enjoyment of muscular ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... he stood in his moccasins, yet seemed not tall, so broad he was and ponderously thick. He had an elephantine leg, with a foot like a black-oak wedge; a chimpanzean arm, with a fist like a black-oak maul; eyes as large and placid as those of an ox; teeth as large and even as those of a horse; skin that was not skin, ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... soon. Like all sculptors he hates to be cooped up long." "I guess he's gone to get a drink at the bar," suggested the practical Miss Bredd. "How did you like my Fricka—oh, here's Mr. Dennett—Caspar, Caspar come over here, here!" The big girl stood up in elephantine eagerness, and a jaunty, handsome young man, with a shaven face and an important chin, slowly made his way through the press of people to the Fridolin table. It was Caspar Dennett, the conductor. After a formal presentation to the tall, thin Mrs. Fridolin, ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... bookmakers seemed to be awed by it. They stood on their stands beside blackboards full of horses' names and mystical figures, but they did not yell at you hoarsely, bullyingly, as bookmakers ought to do. If, having looked at the elephantine portrait advertisement of one of them, you wished to bet with him, he would consent in a listless way, and say wearily to his clerk: "Nine-nine-one, seventy shillings to a dollar Polumetis," as he handed you a ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... was the most interested spectator. Maybe I would see that wonderful thing, a man killed. Anyway, I would see a man-fight. Great was my disappointment. Black Matt and Tom Morrisey merely held on to each other and lifted their clumsy-booted feet in what seemed a grotesque, elephantine dance. They were too drunk to fight. Then the peacemakers got hold of them and led them back to cement the new friendship in ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... aullay, hugest of four-footed kind, The aullay-horse, that in his force, With elephantine trunk, could bind And lift the elephant, and on the wind Whirl him away, with sway and swing, E'en like a pebble from ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... Captains visiting the island advised him to walk; and though it broke the habits of a life and the traditions of his rank, he practised the remedy with benefit. His corpulence is now portable; you would call him lusty rather than fat; but his gait is still dull, stumbling, and elephantine. He neither stops nor hastens, but goes about his business with an implacable deliberation. We could never see him and not be struck with his extraordinary natural means for the theatre: a beaked ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... head playfully at all this show and splendour. His good humour was of the elephantine order, and belied the drawn anxiety of his eyes. Luxurious and peaceful as the scene was, there seemed to Chris to be a touch of electricity in the air, the suggestion of something about to happen. Littimer glanced at her admiringly. She was dressed in ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... the equilibrium of the muscles and sinews. It is an endless surprise to me how much work there is to be done in the world; but, thank God, I am able to do my share of it,—and my ability increases daily. What a great, broad-shouldered, elephantine personage I shall become by ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Mr. Hamblin, laying down a boot upon which he was stitching an outer-sole, and rising to make a ponderous, elephantine excursion across the quaking shop to the earthen water-pitcher, from which ...
— The New Minister's Great Opportunity - First published in the "Century Magazine" • Heman White Chaplin
... him emit his mewing little laugh, and heard him say, with the elephantine archness affected by certain ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... to smoke. She held it with both hands, afraid that she might drop it, and carrying it to the dining-room table set it down slowly, looking at him. He seemed huger than ever with his hulk sinking into the gray darkness behind him. There was something elephantine about him as he stood there, soaked to the skin, bending forward a little, breathing slowly and deeply, his fine nostrils distending with perfect regularity, his face in the dim light, yellow, with the large lines almost black. He was hatless ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... of ruthless slaughter prosecuted especially bY sealers in the early days. At the present time Macquarie Island is more favoured by them than probably any other known locality. The name by which they are popularly known refers to their elephantine proportions and to the fact that, in the case of the old males, the nasal regions are enormously developed, expanding when in a state of excitement to form a short, trunk-like appendage. They have been recorded up to twenty feet in length, ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... houses. The corners were possessed by them, and it will be easy for readers who have once listened to Greeks in hot debate to fancy how on this occasion they were heard afar. Yet Sergius went his way unobservant of the remarks drawn by the elephantine ears of his outlandish hood, his tall ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... Adamant, fair Neophytes— Who thirst for such instruction as we give, Attend, while I unfold a parable. The elephant is mightier than Man, Yet Man subdues him. Why? The elephant Is elephantine everywhere but here (tapping her forehead), And Man, whose brain is to the elephant's As Woman's brain to Man's - (that's rule of three),— Conquers the foolish giant of the woods, As Woman, in her turn, shall conquer Man. In ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... having no havens in it for ships. And thus is Egypt walled about on every side. Its length between Pelusium and Siene is two thousand furlongs, and the passage by sea from Plinthine to Pelusium is three thousand six hundred furlongs. Its river Nile is navigable as far as the city called Elephantine, the forenamed cataracts hindering ships from going any farther, The haven also of Alexandria is not entered by the mariners without difficulty, even in times of peace; for the passage inward is narrow, and full of rocks that ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... inquired, with another elephantine smile; and then I perceived it was a form of humour with him (or rather, a cheap substitute) to speak of his elder relations by their abbreviated Christian names, without any prefix. 'Marmy's doing ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... elephantine attempts at smartening his appearance. He gave his fiery mustache a heavenward twist; he dragged into sight a pair of black-edged cuffs, deepened the crease in his middle by tightening his belt another hole, and ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... November 24th, the day we heard of the victory at Ctesiphon or Sulman Pak. That afternoon I crocked my leg at footer and have been a hobbler ever since with first an elephantine calf and now a watery knee, which however, like the Tigris, gets less ...
— Letters from Mesopotamia • Robert Palmer
... hearing such tales of [5090]lovers, descriptions of their persons, lascivious discourses, such as Astyanassa, Helen's waiting-woman, by the report of Suidas, writ of old, de variis concubitus modis, and after her Philenis and Elephantine; or those light tracts of [5091]Aristides Milesius (mentioned by Plutarch) and found by the Persians in Crassus' army amongst the spoils, Aretine's dialogues, with ditties, love songs, &c., must needs set them on fire, with such ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... visiting Egypt, had heard Jeremiah and learnt from him his lofty monotheism. Doubt was thrown in the last century upon the continuance of the Diaspora in Egypt between the time of Jeremiah and Alexander, but the recent discovery of a Jewish temple at Elephantine and of Aramaic papyri at Assouan dated in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E. has proved that these doubts were not well founded, and that there was a well-established ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... machine drawn by one of the powerful dray-horses of this country. Whenever an unusually large and fine horse of this breed is produced in the country, he is sent to the London market, and remarkable animals they are, of a height and stature almost elephantine, large-limbed, slow-paced, shaggy-footed, sweeping the ground with their fetlocks, each huge foot armed with a shoe weighing from five to six pounds. One of these strong creatures is harnessed to a street-cleaning machine, which consists of brushes turning ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... irresistible vocation. Two hundred years later, after Steele and Addison had set the pattern of the eighteenth-century essay, the drama was comparatively neglected, and every man of letters was found striving for the unattainable ease and charm of the 'Tatler' and the 'Spectator.' Even the elephantine Johnson, congenitally incapable of airy nothings and prone always to "make little fishes talk like whales," disported ponderously in the 'Idler' and the 'Rambler.' The vogue of the essay was fleeting also; and a century later it was followed by the vogue of the novel,—a vogue ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... stag, afther all," whispered Quin, who, in spite of elephantine-Indian sport, was somewhat excited by this sudden appearance of the Scottish red-deer. "But they're a long ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... years. The light brought some little cheer to my spirits. I sat down and fell into a dreamy contemplation of that great footprint in the ashes. By and by its outlines began to waver and grow dim. I glanced up and the broad gas-flame was slowly wilting away. In the same moment I heard that elephantine tread again. I noted its approach, nearer and nearer, along the musty halls, and dimmer and dimmer the light waned. The tread reached my very door and paused—the light had dwindled to a sickly blue, and all things about me lay in a spectral twilight. The door did ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... stood for some time suckling her young one, which seemed about two years old; they then went into a pit containing mud, and smeared themselves all over with it, the little one frisking about his dam, flapping his ears and tossing his trunk incessantly, in elephantine fashion. She kept flapping her ears and wagging her tail, as if in the height of enjoyment. Then began the piping of her enemies, which was performed by blowing into a tube, or the hands closed together, as boys do into a key. They call out ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... who was not married when I saw him last. He married a young lady whom I knew. And now I have been talking with their grown-up sons and daughters. Lieutenant Hickman, the spruce young handsomely-uniformed volunteer of 1846, called on me—a grisly elephantine patriarch of 65 now, his ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... which we call mannerism? To speak of authors well known to all readers—Does not The Rambler taste of Johnson; The Decline and Fall, of Gibbon; The Middle Ages, of Hallam; The History of England, of Macaulay; and The Invasion of the Crimea, of Kinglake? Do we not know the elephantine tread of The Saturday, and the precise toe of The Spectator? I have sometimes thought that Swift has been nearest to the mark of any,—writing English and not writing Swift. But I doubt whether an accurate observer would not trace even here the "mark of the beast." ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... jocular introductions, under the name of Jedediah Cleishbotham, are clearly laborious at times. And even his own letters to his daughter-in-law, which Mr. Lockhart seems to regard as models of tender playfulness and pleasantry, seem to me decidedly elephantine. Not unfrequently, too, his stereotyped jokes weary. Dalgetty bores you almost as much as he would do in real life,—which is a great fault in art. Bradwardine becomes a nuisance, and as for Sir Piercie Shafton, he is beyond endurance. ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... try to call him when Raffles is not varnishing my tale, looked a very big man at his enormous desk, but by no means so elephantine as at the tiny table in the Savoy Restaurant a month earlier. His privations had not only reduced his bulk to the naked eye, but made him look ten years younger. He wore the habiliments of a gentleman; even as he sat at his desk his well-cut ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... stealthily as the fact that he had not even taken a correspondence course in creeping allowed. And profiting by earlier mistakes, he did succeed in making far less noise than before. In place of his former somewhat elephantine method of progression he adopted a species of shuffle which had excellent results, for it enabled him to brush twigs away instead of stepping flatfootedly on them. The new method was slow, but it ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... some seven hundred miles up the river Nile from the coast, past Heliopolis, the once famous city of Ancient Egypt, past Memphis, the old capital, past Thebes, with its hundred gates, to Elephantine, the "ivory island," opposite to what is now Assuan, he is more than ever puzzled about its course and the reason of its ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... when he was nearly forty years old, he made his first literary hit with Sartor Resartus which called out a storm of caustic criticism. The Germanic style, the elephantine humor, the strange conceits and the sledge-hammer blows at all which the smug English public regarded with reverence—all these features aroused irritation. Four years later came The French Revolution, which established Carlyle's fame as one of the greatest of ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... playful beast felt upon being let loose in our extensive yard proved wholly uncontrollable, and while the Baylors were investigating the sink question the amiable leviathan gallivanted about the premises with that elephantine exuberance which is to be expected of a St. Bernard one year old and weighing one hundred and seventy-five pounds. Adah (who has an eye to the beautiful) had planted a vast number of nasturtiums and red geraniums, ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... your "Ach, du lieber Augustin" alone; the sum of your sentiment in your "Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten." Wise American journalists, commissioned to explore your soul, have returned characteristically to announce that you "In your German way" (American synonyms: elephantine, phlegmatic, stodgy, clumsy, sluggish) seek desperately to appropriate, in ferocious lech to be metropolitan, the "spirit of Paris" (American synonyms: silk stockings, "wine," Maxim's, jevousaime, Rat Mort). ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... period, which extended over two hundred years, we have but one historical document, the Book of Esther, to acquaint us with the conditions of the main body of the Jewish people. The fortunate find, a few years back, of a hoard of Aramaic papyri at Elephantine has given us an unexpected acquaintance with the conditions of the Jewish colony in Upper Egypt during the fifth and fourth centuries, and furnished a new chapter in the history of the Diaspora. But this is an ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... sit down at the Breakfast Table and say: "Please pass the Syrup" in a Tone that had all the majestic Significance of an Official Utterance. He would sit there in silent Meditation. Those who sized up that elephantine Form and noted the Gravity of his Countenance and the fluted Wrinkles on his high Brow, imagined that he was pondering on the Immortality of the Soul. As a matter of fact, Jim was wondering whether he would take Ham or Bacon ...
— People You Know • George Ade
... suggested another title to the ownership of dogs—a very common one, too, and good enough till the proper person comes interfering. Boys' dogs are generally held under this tenure. My companion, seeing me at fault, remarked with elephantine waggishness, ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... rose up in his list shoes, and with a slow, heavy step (he was of an elephantine build), made for the door. He had a long wide-skirted bottle-green coat on, and a bottle-green pair of trousers, and a bottle-green waistcoat. The Patriarchs were not dressed in bottle-green broadcloth, and yet ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... boy, with elephantine playfulness, stretched out his arms to ravish a kiss; but as it required no great agility to elude him, his fair enslaver had vanished before he closed them again; upon which the apathetic youth ate a pound or so of steak with a sentimental countenance, and fell ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... began making noises. Somebody flipped the switch, and Khreggor Chmidd appeared in it. Erskyll swore softly, and went to face the screen-image of the elephantine ex-slave of the ex-Lord Master, ...
— A Slave is a Slave • Henry Beam Piper
... them as children playing on the sands— as, indeed, he did the Queen and all near to her. But Buonespoir, the pirate, was to him reality and the actual, and he called him Bono Publico. At first Lempriere, ever jealous of his importance, was inclined to treat him with elephantine condescension; but he could not long hold out against the boon archness of the jester, and he collapsed suddenly into as close a friendship as that ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... extinction of the three-bottle men and topers; the change of thought, manners, and habits consequent on the introduction of steam, railways, and the electric telegraph. The casual observer meeting, as he sometimes will, with a portfolio of etchings representing the men with red and bloated features, elephantine limbs, and huge paunches, who figure in the caricatures of the last and the early part of the present century, may well be excused if he doubt whether such figures of fun ever had an actual existence. Our answer is that ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... usual deliberate, elephantine way. Kate made no sign till he was seated, then she asked what the ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... is of the most vague and general kind, the figure simulating the elephant no more closely than any one of a score or more mounds in Wisconsin, except in one important particular, viz, the head has a prolongation or snout-like appendage, which is its chief, in fact its only real, elephantine character. If this appendage is too long for the snout of any other known animal, it is certainly too short for the trunk of a mastodon. Still, so far as this one character goes, it is doubtless true that it is more suggestive of the mastodon ...
— Animal Carvings from Mounds of the Mississippi Valley • Henry W. Henshaw
... or incident that will make any army laugh after over two months of battle. Individuals were always laughing over incidents; but here hundreds of thousands of men were to see a new style of animal perform elephantine tricks. The price of admission to the theater was the risk of a charge in their company, and the prospect gave increased zest to battalions taking their place for next day's action. What would happen to the tanks? What would they do ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... wrong. But foolish bees, Who will contend for points like these, Should not suppose good taste in roses Depends on elephantine noses. ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... very old. There was nothing to eat in it and nothing to drink. They had lost the teapot; and when they found it, they couldn't make out what had become of the lid, which, turning up at last and being fixed on to the teapot, couldn't be got off again for the pouring in of more water. Fleas of elephantine dimensions were gambolling boldly in the dirty beds; and the mosquitoes!—But let me here draw a curtain (as I would have done if there had been any). We had scarcely any sleep, and rose up with hands and arms ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... my quill," one clerical twister of language began, and another wrote with the painful and elephantine lightness which was the Puritan idea of humor, an epitaph which may serve as sufficient illustration of the whole unutterably dreary ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... he understood that the Germans were coming. He had not seen them; but when the gun fell silent he heard whining sounds in the air, as if from a litter of elephantine puppies. Sometimes the twigs of trees fell on him, the dirt in front of him flew up into his face; and always, of course, everywhere about him was that roar of bursting shells which he had come to accept as a natural part ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... lighted drawing-room into which he followed Arthur Papillon, like a frail sloop towed in by an imposing three-master, and behold the timid Amedee presented in due form to the mistress of the house! She was a lady of elephantine proportions, in her sixtieth year, and wore a white camellia stuck in her rosewood-colored hair. Her face and arms were plastered with enough flour to make a plate of fritters; but for all that, she had a grand air and superb eyes, whose commanding ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... make a request of the most moderate nature. Every year I have cost you an enormous—nay, elephantine—sum of money for drugs and physician's fees, and the most expensive time of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... churchyard round it, where the dead lie looking up to the bright southern sun, among huge black yews, upon their knoll of white chalk above the ancient stream. Pleasant white wooden bridge, with its row of urchins dropping flints upon the noses of elephantine trout, or fishing over the rail with crooked pins, while hapless gudgeon come dangling upward between stream and sky, with a look of sheepish surprise and shame, as of a school-boy caught stealing apples, in their foolish visages. Pleasant new national schools at the bridge ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... faced, chubby faced. lubberly, hulky, unwieldy, lumpish, gaunt, spanking, whacking, whopping, walloping, thumping, thundering, hulking; overgrown; puffy &c (swollen) 194. huge, immense, enormous, mighty; vast, vasty; amplitudinous, stupendous; monster, monstrous, humongous, monumental; elephantine, jumbo, mammoth; gigantic, gigantean, giant, giant like, titanic; prodigious, colossal, Cyclopean, Brobdingnagian, Bunyanesque, Herculean, Gargantuan; infinite &c 105. large as life; plump as a dumpling, plump as a partridge; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... has an awful ponderosity of frame, not pulpy, like the looser development of our few fat women, but massive with solid beef and streaky tallow; so that (though struggling manfully against the idea) you inevitably think of her as made up of steaks and sirloins. When she walks, her advance is elephantine. When she sits down it is on a great round space of her Maker's footstool, where she looks as if nothing could ever move her. She imposes awe and respect by the muchness of her personality, to such a degree that you probably credit her with far greater moral and intellectual force than she can fairly ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... "The Titan," which followed in 1914, was almost as well done as "The Financier" had been ill done, and there are parts of it which remain, to this day, the very best writing that Dreiser has ever achieved. But "The 'Genius'"? Ay, in "The 'Genius'" the pendulum swings back again! It is flaccid, elephantine, doltish, coarse, dismal, flatulent, sophomoric, ignorant, unconvincing, wearisome. One pities the jurisconsult who is condemned, by Comstockian clamour, to plough through such a novel. In it there is a sort of humourless reductio ad absurdum, not only of the Dreiser manner, but even of ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... wet grass, was on his hands and knees, searching. He accomplished a complete circuit of the body, his round-shouldered, stooping figure making grotesque, elephantine shadows under the light of the torch as he moved about slowly, not trusting his eyes, but feeling with his hands every inch of ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... RELATIVE, - I write to make a request of the most moderate nature. Every year I have cost you an enormous - nay, elephantine - sum of money for drugs and physician's fees, and the most expensive time of the ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... dreary, hideous, even horrible. The interest of quality does not by any means depend upon its beauty. The point is whether it is strongly and markedly itself. What could be more crammed with quality than an enormous old pig, with its bristles, its elephantine ears, its furtive little eyes, its twitching snout? What a look it has of a fallen creature, puzzled by its own uncleanliness and yet unable ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... smiled. Two long yellow canines shone wetly; the nose, which had nostrils set in the sides, gaped open; blue sparks shot out from it; at the same time the feathered tufts on the ends of the elephantine ears stiffened ...
— Rastignac the Devil • Philip Jose Farmer
... correct, and Talu had said that the chances were ten to one that such would be the mission of any party leaving Kadabra by the pass through which we entered the valley, since that way leads directly to the vast plains frequented by this elephantine beast of prey. ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... poultice applied to a boil on his father's neck, he collected a quantity of soft moss and dried yerba buena leaves, and with the aid of his check apron and of one of his torn suspenders tightly wound round the whole mass, achieved a bandage of such elephantine proportions that he could scarcely move with it. In fact, like most imaginative children, he became slightly terrified at his own alarming precautions. Nevertheless, although a word or an outcry from him would have at that moment brought ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... away the supper dishes, assisted by Mrs. Thomas, who had regarded the opportunity as propitious for certain elephantine coquetries, stopped to regard the gypsy with that peering mixture of amusement and curiosity which she ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... Parthenon with the sublimity of Virginia Water—to vanish into its own intensely blue sky; disclosing the "Harlequin House that Jack built," and Mr. John Bull's huge paste-board thick head, snoring like thunder, in a "property" summer-house—an elephantine blue-bottle on his proboscis, and a sleeping bull-dog, the size of an Alderney steer, at his feet;—here Master Brown, with a grin, calls the house Victoria Villa, and the paste-board mask his papa. Now enters the rat, to eat the ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... not lose its leaves even in winter—a phenomenon due doubtless to the quality of the soil. There is another of the same kind in Cyprus, according to Theophrastus. Likewise within sight of the city of Sybaris (which is now called Thurii) stands an oak having the same characteristic. Again at Elephantine neither the vines nor the fig trees lose their leaves, something that never happens with us. For the same reason many trees bear fruit twice a year, as do the vines near the sea at Smyrna, and the apples in the fields of Consentinium. The effect of soil appears ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... baggage-wagon bound for the metropolis turned into the main road from a side one. Immediately Israel limps most deplorably, and begs the driver to give a poor cripple a lift. So up he climbs; but after a time, finding the gait of the elephantine draught-horses intolerably slow, Israel craves permission to dismount, when, throwing away his crutch, he takes nimbly to his legs, much to the surprise of his honest ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... but she shook her fist in Mr. Merrick's face and danced around in an elephantine fashion and ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in the Red Cross • Edith Van Dyne
... better fly," said Miss de Lisle. "I am pretty wet, and there's lunch to think about." She looked at them in friendly fashion. "Thank you all very much," she said—and was gone, with a kind of elephantine swiftness. ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... of Inspector Letstrayed wouldn't look very well in print," I began; "but it's easy enough to see what happened. The old dope fell asleep, so, of course, as soon as Budd heard those elephantine snores, he sneaked out from his hiding-place under the hay and tied him up with the ropes while he slept, took his revolver away from him, shot it off twice out of pure bravado, and then beat it for parts unknown. If he's as good a runner yet as he was this noon, he must be over ...
— The Adventures of the Eleven Cuff-Buttons • James Francis Thierry
... only accompanied the chorus with the drum, but with a species of dance, which, being a clumsy man, he performed in an extremely elephantine manner. After a ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne
... she discovered that her skirt was almost touching the big black box on the floor. Emitting a sharp squeal, she gave an elephantine leap to the shelter of Anderson's arms, almost ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... I'm in chastened mood, because the hour for action approaches; so I'll own up. I've been keeping something up my sleeve, just for the joy of watching you floundering 'midst deep waters. Of course, you chose the right channel. I knew you would, but it's a treat to see your elephantine struggles. For all that, it's a sheer impossibility that you should guess who put a sprag in the wheel of Hilton's chariot. Give you three ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... I reflectively confided to my wine-glass, "while doubtless amiably intended, are, to his well-wishers, painful. I daresay, though, he doesn't know it. We must, then, smile indulgently upon the elephantine gambols of what he is pleased to ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... scrupulous care the magnificent temple of the ancient Tentyris, and especially the series of astronomical signs which have excited in our days such lively discussions; the remarkable monuments of the mysterious and sacred Isle of Elephantine; the ruins of Thebes, with her hundred gates, before which (and yet they are nothing but ruins) our whole army halted, in a state of ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... Elephantine they worshipped the figure of a man in a sitting posture, painted blue, having the head of a ram, and the horns of a goat which encompassed a disk; all which represented the sun and moon's conjunction at the sign of the ram; the blue color denoting the power of the moon, ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... perhaps, carried on her lap before or since, the extraordinary variety of form-the pure Doric and Ionic of the earlier Ptolemies, the barbaric and confused gorgeousness of the later Roman, and here and there an imitation of the grand elephantine style of old Egypt, its gaudy colours relieving, while they deepened, the effect of its massive and simple outlines; the eternal repose of that great belt of stone contrasting with the restless ripple of the glittering harbour, and the busy sails ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley |
