"Scarecrow" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... brazen scarecrow,—what's your meaning?' retorted Quilp. 'Why do you talk to me of combining together? Do I combine? Do I know anything ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least, but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes without coming to a total disagreement ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... afternoon in throwing stones at a scarecrow. His aim was fairly good, and he succeeded in knocking off the hat and finally prostrating the wooden framework. Followed—an exciting chase ...
— More William • Richmal Crompton
... altogether. She was absolutely unattainable to me, for Heaven knows I didn't want the real Lisa Fitch—"real" meaning, of course, the one who was real to me. I suppose in the end Carter's Lisa Fitch was as real as the skinny scarecrow ...
— The Point of View • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... public eye, like a succession of cinematograph pictures. It did not occur to Stephen that he was an object of pity, but he felt that through his own folly and that of another, he had become a kind of scarecrow, a figure of fun: and because until now the world had laughed with instead of at him, he would rather have faced a shower of bullets than a ripple ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... quickly opened his lips, and scarcely had he spoken the words when he was changed, as it were from an owl to a nightingale, from an ogre to a beautiful youth, from a scarecrow to a fine gentleman. Vastolla, seeing such a transformation clasped him in her arms and was almost beside herself with joy. Then they were married ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
... beggarman, sir," replied Johnston, "who was on his way to my uncle's to stop there for the night. Divil a scarecrow in Europe would exchange clothes with him ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... scarecrow!" said Yozhov, convincingly and pitifully, with a shrug of the shoulder. "Is there anything in that? Why, I am anyway half dead already from ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... ne'er speak that makes a woman speak! She talks now sure for all the time that's pass'd: Her tongue is like a scarecrow in a tree, That clatters still with every puff of wind. I have so haunted her from place to place: About the hall, from thence into the parlour, Up to the chamber, down into the garden, And still she ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... retrace my steps to the open ground below; in my exhausted condition, as it was already long past midnight, I was making up my mind to roost with the owls on the fork of a tree; and was even anticipating the possibility of becoming a permanent scarecrow there, when my very bones would be concealed in the thicket from the anxious search ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 441 - Volume 17, New Series, June 12, 1852 • Various
... strongest manner—but to no purpose. This was a cousin of Miss Moreton's, a respectable clergyman. Mrs. Freke was so much incensed by his insolent interference, as she was pleased to call it, that she made an effigy of Mr. Moreton dressed in his canonicals, and hung the figure up as a scarecrow in a garden close by the high road. He was so much beloved and respected for his benevolence and unaffected piety, that Mrs. Freke totally failed in her design of making him ridiculous; her scarecrow was torn to pieces by his parishioners; ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... in Crown Office Row, in his exquisite way has sketched the benchers of the Temple whom he had seen pacing the terrace in his youth. Jekyll, with the roguish eye, and Thomas Coventry, of the elephantine step, the scarecrow of inferiors, the browbeater of equals, who made a solitude of children wherever he came, who took snuff by palmfuls, diving for it under the mighty flap of his old-fashioned red waistcoat. In the gentle Samuel Salt we discover a portrait of the employer of Lamb's ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... choose that alternative," McClellan said. "I hate to see brave men imprisoned if only for a day; and braver men than those across yonder stream are not to be found. My officers and men are astonished. They seem so thin and worn as to be scarce able to lift a musket, their clothes are fit only for a scarecrow, they are indeed pitiful objects to look at; but the way in which they fight is wonderful. I could not have believed had I not seen it, that men could have charged as they did again and again across ground swept by a tremendous ...
— With Lee in Virginia - A Story of the American Civil War • G. A. Henty
... I encountered a cart of faggots, drawn by a hound so lean that stroking him might have hurt a dainty hand. I was shocked—angry, till I noticed his fellow beast of burden pushing the cart from behind. Such a scarecrow of an old woman! There was little to choose between them. I walked with them a little way. She lived near Waterloo. All day she gathered wood in the great forest, and starting at three o'clock each morning, the two lean creatures between them dragged the cart nine miles to ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... indeed improved. His shore clothes, which, with grease, coal-dust, tar, salt-water, and the rents made by the fight with Monkey, were (as the boatswain said) "not fit for a 'spectable scarecrow to wear of a Sunday," were exchanged for a blue flannel shirt and a pair of trim white canvas trousers. A neat black silk handkerchief was knotted around his neck, and his battered "stiff-rim" replaced by a jaunty ...
— Harper's Young People, April 6, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... by the civil and commercial codes. Then, as this argument served only to make them the laughing-stock of their antagonists, they assumed the offensive; and, showing that the socialists understood nothing at all themselves of this organization that they held up as a scarecrow, they ended by saying that it was but a new socialistic chimera, a word without sense,—an absurdity. The latest writings of the economists are ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... did not chill the strange emotion which seemed to have entered the air. The scarecrow by the fire had won a kind ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... honest, Sirs, and that's enough, Though his soul's bullet, and his body buff. He spits fore-right; his haughty chest before, Like battering rams, beats open every door: And with a face as red, and as awry, As Herod's hangdogs in old tapestry, Scarecrow to boys, the breeding woman's curse, Has yet a strange ambition to look worse; Confounds the civil, keeps the rude in awe, Jests like a licensed fool, commands like law. Frighted, I quit the room, but leave it so As ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... know," roars the abbot bitterly. "I don't know; people don't kill here, and we don't know how it is done. Perhaps that is as it should be—to kill and then bring the murdered man to his mother's threshold. What are you gaping at, you scarecrow?" ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... Then, he looked again, for the boy's eyes were discomfortingly on his fat, black face, and the porter straightway decided to be polite. Yet, for all his specious seeming of unconcern, Samson was waking to the fact that he was a scarecrow, and his sensitive pride made him cut his meals short in the dining-car, where he was kept busy beating down inquisitive eyes with his defiant gaze. He resolved after some thought upon a definite policy. It was a very old policy, but to ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... In his scarecrow-making the Japanese farmer seems to have great faith in the Western-style cap, felt hat, or even umbrella, if he can get hold of one. Ordinarily, the bogey man has a bow with the arrow strung. Occasionally a farmer seeks to scare birds by means of clappers ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... wonder that you ask," returned the man. "I must look like a scarecrow. I'm Barney Custer. Don't you remember me now? Who did ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... spin—an error that might not have been dispelled without longer and closer observation than he seemed to court; for his progress up Abersush Street, toward the Home in the gloom of the winter evening, was not visibly faster than what might have been expected of a scarecrow blessed with youth, health, and discontent. The man was indisputably ill-clad, yet not without a certain fitness and good taste, withal; for he was obviously an applicant for admittance to the Home, where poverty was a qualification. In the army of indigence the uniform is ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... shadow, then in the doorway the figure of a man, a tattered scarecrow of a man whose feet were bare and whose brown calves were exposed through flapping rags. His breast was naked where thorns had tried to stay him; his beard, even his hair, were matted and unkempt, and the mud of many trails ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... five or six different languages. There is a delightful freedom from conventionalism in the matter of dress. At one moment you meet a man in a black or white silk hat, at another a grinning Kaffir bears down upon you with the costume of a scarecrow; you next pass a couple of dignified Malays with long silken robes and the inevitable tarbush, volubly chattering in Dutch or even Arabic. These Malays form a particularly interesting section of the population. They are largely the descendants of ...
— With Methuen's Column on an Ambulance Train • Ernest N. Bennett
... she said to herself "what birds may come to gether worms an' golachs (beetles) aboot the boody craw (scarecrow), Sanny Grame!" ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... "That isn't the idea, my dear Pat," he explained, smiling. "Marian says Hiram has too much brains to look like a scarecrow for ignorant people to look down on, so she's making him fit, merely to enlighten them as to ...
— Miss Pat at Artemis Lodge • Pemberton Ginther
... of iron-grey colour and reached down to his waist. His garb was composed of rags, tied to his body by the free use of rope. He once told my mother that he had more than once changed clothes with a scarecrow. Sometimes this queer person would never be seen by mortal man for months together, unless it were that I disturbed his solitude occasionally; but then, of course, I was only a boy. "Luke" had a bad name amongst us lads. I know people couldn't fairly make out where he lived; he was wonderfully ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... should want to have such a thing in his home no one can say. Some naturalists believe that he uses it as a scarecrow to frighten his enemies away. But I do not think he could give a reason ...
— Friends and Helpers • Sarah J. Eddy
... blooming spangled orf'cer!" shrieked Simmons; "I'll make a scarecrow of that orf'cer!" ...
— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling
... Rabecque. The alacrity with which the lackey stirred from his bed upon hearing who it was that had arrived impressed the host not a little, but not half so much as it impressed him presently to observe the deference with which this great Monsieur Rabecque of Paris confronted the scarecrow below stairs when he was ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... of the versions is concerned, it would be small loss if none of them were available. They form a mechanical frame-work as devoid of beauty as the skeleton scarecrow in Percy Mackaye's play, which was based on Hawthorne's "Feathertop" in "Mosses from an Old Manse." It was only when the dry bones were clothed and breathed into by the actor's personality that the dramatizations lived. One can recall no plot that moves naturally in these versions; the transformation ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Rip van - Winkle • Charles Burke
... tranquil he sounded. A scarecrow of a figure arose almost at his right from a smoldering bush, a giant clothed in smoking rags. In the strange illumination of the search beams he seemed ...
— Slaves of Mercury • Nat Schachner
... go about alone. The situation was really most painful, for a word to so sensitive a man would drive him away in shame and for good; and still, to let him parade the ground in the state, compared with his natural self, of scarecrow, and with the dreadful habit of talking to himself quite rageing, was a horrible alternative. Mrs. Baerens at last directed her husband upon the General, trembling as though she watched for the operations of a fish torpedo; and other ladies ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... even moths dead and dangling by the tongue from the wicked little charmers. If the flower assimilated their dead bodies as the pitcher plant, for example, does those of its victims, the fly's fate would seem less cruel. To be killed by slow torture and dangled like a scarecrow simply for pilfering a drop of nectar is surely an execution of justice medieval ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... completeness; 'martext', 'carrytale', 'pleaseman', 'sneakcup', 'mumblenews', 'wantwit', 'lackbrain', 'lackbeard', 'lacklove', 'ticklebrain', 'cutpurse', 'cutthroat', 'crackhemp', 'breedbate', 'swinge-buckler', 'pickpurse', 'pickthank', 'picklock', 'scarecrow', 'breakvow', 'breakpromise', 'makepeace'—this last and 'telltruth' (Fuller) being the only ones in the whole collection wherein reprobation or contempt is not implied. Nor is the list exhausted yet; there are further 'dingthrift' prodigal (Herrick), 'wastegood' (Cotgrave), ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... shed tears. Even her confidence in the perfection of her own toilet could hardly sustain her against the horror of being presented by such a scarecrow. ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... Lawless; "the old scarecrow ran in here like a lamp-lighter, as soon he saw me bowling after him, and has left the key in the lock; so I shall take the liberty of exploring a little; I've a strong though undeveloped taste ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... how certain man, our American man,—how he holds himself cool and unquestioned master above all pains and bloody mutilation.... This, then, what frightened us all so long! Why, it is put to flight with ignominy—a mere stuffed scarecrow of the fields. Oh, death, where is thy sting? Oh, grave, ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... danced a little war dance, and congratulated B. and turned to get the meaning of a queer little gurgling gasp behind us. There was Fundi! That long-legged scarecrow, not content with running to get us and then back again, had trailed us the whole distance of our mad chase over broken ground at terrific speed in order to be in at the death. And he was just about all in at the death. ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... having so much to do, was going to church vicariously, that is to say, Joe and I were going. In his working—clothes, Joe was a well-knit characteristic-looking blacksmith; in his holiday clothes, he was more like a scarecrow in good circumstances, than anything else. Nothing that he wore then fitted him or seemed to belong to him; and everything that he wore then grazed him. On the present festive occasion he emerged from his room, when the blithe bells were going, ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... door, took the rope from Red Jim's saddle, and with it bound the arms of Perris to his side. Then he lifted the hanging body—how light a weight it was!—and placed it in a chair, where it doubled over, limp as a loosely stuffed scarecrow. Hervey tossed more wood on the fire and when he turned again, Perris was showing the first signs of returning consciousness, ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... She gave us wit when she placed us naked and miserable on the shore of this great ocean-world. Swim who can, and whoso is too clumsy let him sink. The right is with him that prevails. Family honor? A valuable capital for him that knows how to profit by it.—Conscience? An excellent scarecrow with which to frighten sparrows from cherry-trees.—Filial love? Where is the obligation? Did my father beget me because he loved me? Did he think of me at all? Is there anything holy in his gratification of carnal appetite? Or shall I love ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... "A scarecrow, a mere fancy, a figment of some fanatic's brain;" and Ellis Whitford rejected the idea in ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... wit in your dreaming, old scarecrow,' said Sagaris. 'If I had had a dream such as that a second time, not to speak of a third, do you think I should not have learnt the way. But you were always ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... must not make a scarecrow of the law, Setting it up to fear the birds of prey, And let it keep one shape, till custom make it Their ...
— Measure for Measure - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... avenue of eucalypti planted some forty years ago. Detesting, as I do, the whole tribe of gum trees, I never lose an opportunity of saying exactly what I think about this particularly odious representative of the brood, this eyesore, this grey-haired scarecrow, this reptile of a growth with which a pack of misguided enthusiasts have disfigured the entire Mediterranean basin. They have now realized that it is useless as a protection against malaria. Soon enough they will learn that instead of preventing the disease, it ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... Scarecrow Skitter Farmerettes Fancy Popcorn Waltz Orchard One-step Pumpkin Pie Walk Red Ear Dance ...
— Entertaining Made Easy • Emily Rose Burt
... a scarecrow or bogey in a parti-coloured dress in the spacious kennel of a hound while he was absent from it. When the dog wished to return to his kennel, he drew back at the sight of it, and barked for a long while. After going backwards and forwards, snuffing suspiciously, he decided ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... absolute governments, with their following of parsons, professors, country squires and officials, it served as a welcome scarecrow ...
— The Communist Manifesto • Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
... long ungainly strides, his coat-tails flapping like a scarecrow's. The coat, in fact, was a cast-off one of Mr. Wesley's, narrow in the chest, short in the sleeves, but inordinately full in the skirts. The Rector had found and taken Johnny from the Charity School at Wroote to help him with the maps and drawings for ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... street. At the apex of it rode a little bunch of travelers, evidently just in from the desert. Incuriously his eyes watched the party as it moved toward the headquarters of Pasquale. Some impulse led him to put his scarecrow of a ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... represented as eccentric and splenetic, but himself philosophical and by no means ridiculous. Even in the severe period of national struggle which preceded the Revolutionary war, and for some time after the beginning of that war itself, the scarecrow-comic Anglais was slow to make his appearance. Pigault-Lebrun himself, as was noted in the last volume, indulges in him little if at ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... you take me for? A scarecrow, to keep people away from the house? That fine husband of yours, I'll have you know, is my husband's brother. You expect me to shut the door in his face and spit fire at him when he comes around? But, after all, what do I care?... I don't ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... significance; his trousers were most atrociously rent and tattered; he walked with a limp, and shivered in the cold night air. This unpromising-looking person approached the priest and addressed him with an elaborate courtesy oddly out of keeping with his scarecrow-like appearance, but with words appropriate enough to the figure that ...
— Captain Dieppe • Anthony Hope
... flat-pleated frill completed his costume. In the middle of the shirt-frill twinkled a small gold locket, in which might be seen, under glass, a little temple worked in hair, one of those pathetic trifles which give men confidence, just as a scarecrow frightens sparrows. Most men, like other animals, are frightened or reassured by trifles. Old Canquoelle's breeches were kept in place by a buckle which, in the fashion of the last century, tightened them across the stomach; from the belt hung on each side a short steel chain, composed of ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... bully because of his unquestioned physical courage. He was popular in a way with those of his fellows who looked upon a gunman—a killer—as a kind of hero. The foreman of the T-Bar-T found him valuable as a sort of animate scarecrow. Gary's mere presence often served to turn the balance when the T-Bar-T riders had occasion to substantiate a bluff or settle a dispute with some other outfit riding the high country. And because Gary imagined that Bailey of the Concho had deliberately sent such youngsters ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... that in my present state of mind I would make a magnificent addition to his chosen band; but I have since had some reason to believe that he was leading me on for the sole purpose of making a scarecrow of me—setting me up in some spot frequented by the redskins, to become their target, while he and his comrades scooped down from some ambush and wiped out a score or two of them after I had perished ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... portrait in this very year, 1300, we may always look for the central mediaeval idea in any subject: and observe how he represents Cupid; as one of three, a terrible trinity, his companions being Satan and Death; and he himself "a lean scarecrow, with bow, quiver, and fillet, and feet ending in claws,"[155] thrust down into Hell by Penance, from the presence of Purity and Fortitude. Spenser, who has been so often noticed as furnishing the exactly intermediate type of conception ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... him better, though she already hated him. His face attracted her strangely, and his voice was pleasant, close to her ear. He had not in the least the look of the traditional lady-killer, of whom the tradition seems to survive as a moral scarecrow for the education of the young, though the creature is extinct among Anglo-Saxons. He was, on the contrary, a manly man, who looked as though he would prefer tennis to tea and polo to poetry—and men to women for company, as a rule. She felt that if she had not heard him talking ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford
... Duc de Belleisle,' (1762) it is asserted that Charles was offered the leadership of the attack on Minorca (April 1756), and that he declined, saying, 'The English will do me justice, if they think fit, but I will no longer serve as a mere scarecrow' (epouvantail). In January 1756, however, Knyphausen, writing to Frederick from Paris, discredited the idea that France meant ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang
... piece of something like drugget nailed flat across all the lower half of the window to make the light fall from upwards; two or three horsehair chairs, nearly worn out; a table in a corner, littered with books and papers; a horrible lay-figure, at the present moment dressed apparently for a scarecrow; a large easel, on which stood a half-finished oil-painting—these constituted almost the whole furniture of the room. With his pocket-handkerchief Percivale dusted one chair for Wynnie and another for me. Then standing ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... thinks I don't see through her. That scarecrow of a girl is old enough to be your mother, and she has not a penny to her marriage portion, either. A fine match for a boy like you! Why, you can get the best girl ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... in vain. Zounds! not a soul Will pass and do obeisance to the cap. But yesterday the place swarm'd like a fair; Now the old green looks like a desert, quite, Since yonder scarecrow hung ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... lose my cause. The penalty is totally disproportioned to the delict, and the consequence is, that means are found out of evasion by legal fictions and the like. The judges listen to these; they become frequent, and the rule of Court ends by being a scarecrow merely. Formerly, delays of this kind were checked by corresponding amendes. But the Court relaxed this petty fine too often. Had they been more strict, and levied the mulct on the agents, with no recourse upon their ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... himself, though he cannot always make another feel as much; and that the worth of his art exists only just in so far as he can say what he feels; and then I thought of my old friend's mind as I might think of a scarecrow among lonely fields, a thing absurd, ragged, and left alone, while real men went about their business. I did not say it, but I thought it in my folly. So I told my young friend that story; and ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... deserves a new paragraph. Long, lean and hollow cheeked, the term "gangling" fits him better than any other. Mr. Luther Barr's black suit hung on him as baggily as the garments of a cornfield scarecrow and Mr. Luther Barr's sharp features were not improved by a small growth of gray hair; of the kind known as a "goatee" that sprouted from his lower rip. For the rest of the boys noticed that Mr. Barr was gifted ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... weather eye, then began to look for a possible shelter from the coming shower. On either side, the fields stretched away in undulating lines, with no sign of a habitation in sight. A dejected old scarecrow, and a tumble-down shed in the distance were the ...
— Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories • Alice Hegan Rice
... are thrust under my nose and drawing an inference. I must tell you that my grandfather was a notable lawyer, and who knows but that a scrap of his mantle may not have descended upon me! Now to answer your question right away—you will admit that pretty often your aunt is dressed like a last year's scarecrow; that she is drowsy, stupefied, and generally inaccessible. At another time she is real smart and vivacious, and puts other women in the shade. Then suddenly she disappears, shuts herself up along with Lily ayah, and not a soul may approach her—no, not even ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... Arkansas ass know about it? Fame's nothing—the market price of your marble scarecrow is the thing to look at. It took you six months to chisel it, and you can't sell it for a hundred dollars. No, sir! Show me fifty thousand dollars and you can have my daughter —otherwise she marries young Simper. You have just six months to ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... treated to a dose of "the cat" now and then, it might add considerably to the peace and comfort of the borough. Flogging by proxy was not unknown in some of the old scholastic establishments, but whipping a scarecrow seems to have been the amusement on February 26th. 1842, when Sir Robert Peel, at that day a sad delinquent politically, was publicly flogged ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... unteachable, untamable creatures men are. They learn wisdom about all the little matters of daily life by experience, but they do not seem to do so about the higher. Even a sparrow comes to understand a scarecrow after a time or two, and any rat in a hole will learn the trick of a trap. But you can trick men over and over again with the same inducement, and, even whilst the hook is sticking in their jaws, the same bait will tempt them once more. That is very largely the case because they ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... gloomy sages did I bid them laugh, and whoever had sat admonishing as a black scarecrow on the ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... sprawled aft, and at a nearer sight of him some of the men broke out into nervous titters. There was some excuse, for surely such a scarecrow had never before been the sport of wind and wave. A thing of shreds he was, elaborately ragged, a face overrun with a scrub of beard, and preternaturally drawn, surmounted by a stiff-dried, dirty, cloth semi-turban, with a wide, forbidding stain along the side, worked out the ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... binding. Then, swift from the west, came running footfalls, the corporal with a willing comrade or two, wondering was Five in further danger. There, silent and regretful, stood the post commander, counting in surprise the score of scarecrow forms now plainly visible, sitting, standing, or squatting along the mesa edge. Northernmost in view, nearly opposite Blakely's quarters, were two, detached from the general assembly, yet clinging close together—two slender figures, gowned, and it was at these the agent Daly was staring, as ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... old scarecrow apparently had other plans for himself, for he had already vanished from the scene as swiftly and noiselessly as a shadow from ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... had been selected for his trust on account of his pre-eminent goodness, which, as seems to be invariably the case, was associated with an absence of personal beauty trenching upon the scarecrow. Possibly an excess of strong and disproportionate carving in nose, mouth and chin, accompanied by weak eyes and unexpectedness of forehead, may tend to make the Evil One but languid in his desire for the capture of its human exemplar. This may help account for the otherwise rather curious ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 15, July 9, 1870 • Various
... himself). Let me at him! Isn't he the pleasant sort of a scarecrow for any woman to be crossing the ocean with! It's back from the docks of New York he'd be turned (trying to rush at him again), with a lie in his mouth and treachery in his heart, and another man's wife by his ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... ethics. There can be quite as little doubt that such an accusation of narrowness is itself almost grotesquely narrow. To take an example from comparatively current events: we all know that it was not uncommon for a man to be considered a scarecrow of bigotry and obscurantism because he distrusted the Japanese, or lamented the rise of the Japanese, on the ground that the Japanese were Pagans. Nobody would think that there was anything antiquated or fanatical about distrusting a people because ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... who lived near Jack's house. He was somewhat younger than myself and small for his age, but a sharp, intelligent little fellow, though amusingly ignorant of affairs in general. His chief employment was acting the part of a scarecrow by frightening birds from the cornfields, and running on errands into Bideford for any of the neighbours, by which means he enabled his mother to eke out her scanty pittance. I used to share with him my school pasty, and now and then ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... poet's genius—the Franc-Archer de Bagnolet. The francs-archers of Charles VII.—a rural militia—were not beloved of the people; the miles gloriosus of Bagnolet village, boasting largely of his valour, encounters a stuffed scarecrow, twisting to the wind; his alarms, humiliations, and final triumph are rendered in a monologue which expounds the action of the piece ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... it, and become an empty Semblance or Clothes-suit; and highest king's-cloaks, mere chimeras parading under them so long, are getting unsightly to the earnest eye, unsightly, almost offensive, like a costlier kind of scarecrow's-blanket,—here ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... village, who thought it worth his while to walk up to the Hall, and drive a bargain with the stingy Squire. He not only assisted in gathering the fruit, for fear he should be robbed, but often acted as scarecrow to the birds, whom he reviled as noisy, useless nuisances, vexatiously sent to destroy the ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... enough; then he daubs and trims and pares and pulls and squeezes the thing about, draws the nose and chin out of their sheaths, knocks in the cheeks, eats ruts into the forehead, till he has turned it into a scarecrow; and then at last he gets ashamed, smashes the whole wretched concern to pieces, and shovels it over with earth that all the world may not see his disgrace. Your cheeks too, smooth and polisht as they are, will not be so like a roseleaf by and by. Here! let me look! verily you have ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... kine. The thin and withered ears had devoured the good ears. The season of rich harvest was over, and the period of famine had begun. All that is squalid and miserable might now be summed up in the word Poet. That word denoted a creature dressed like a scarecrow, familiar with compters and spunging-houses, and perfectly qualified to decide on the comparative merits of the Common Side in the King's Bench prison and of Mount Scoundrel in the Fleet. Even the poorest pitied ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... cataract of "hideous verse," Marvell invited the scarecrow to dinner, and waits while he dresses. As they turn to leave, for the room is so small that the man who comes in last must be the first to go out, they meet a friend of the poet on the stairs, who makes a third at dinner. After dinner Flecknoe produces ten quires of paper, from which the ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... but are you not laughing at our beards, old scarecrow? What think you, Mustapha?" continued the pacha, turning to him. "What ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... Japan did the brow of Jonathan wrinkle more deeply. But every Briton swore that his kinsman would bar the yellow man's way to Hawaii, California, and the Philippines, and put him in the fields of Asia only as a terror to the Russians or a scarecrow to the Germans. A doubt remained, nevertheless; and we missed the chance of a strong insurance against Japanese encroachment. Stroked caressingly ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... to look like a scarecrow, and not get asked again, I've got a dress that'll do PERFECTLY," Undine threatened, in a ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... go callin' me ye 'good woman' in them breeches an' ye shirt all tore! An' look at ye 'at—I seen better on a scarecrow, I 'ave! You're trash apeing y'r betters—poor trash, that's wot you are! Good woman indeed! You tell 'im wot we think of 'im, Neddy—tell 'im plain an' p'inted!" Instantly the little man set thumb to nose and, spreading his fingers, wagged them at me in a highly offensive manner, at the same ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... Aunt Peggy was dead! She who had been a kind of scarecrow in life, how terrible was the thought of her now! The severest threat to an unruly child was, "I will give you to Aunt Peggy, and let her keep you." But to think of Aunt Peggy in connection with darkness, and silence, and the grave, was dreadful ...
— Aunt Phillis's Cabin - Or, Southern Life As It Is • Mary H. Eastman
... remember you had the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman to help you conquer those enemies," suggested the Wizard. "Just now, my dear, there is not a ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.
... sat a scarecrow, which had been there since spring and which protected the leafless branches with its ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... any rate, I would prefer any of them to such an ill looking scarecrow as you," she retorted. "It is bad enough when they kill off some of those Gauls, who are far too good for such work; but the best of them I have seen in the arena lacks six inches, both in height and breadth ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... would have been more general and less obscure. In fact, the old cry of Disunion has lost its terrors, if it ever had any, at the North. The South itself seems to have become alarmed at its own scarecrow, and speakers there are beginning to assure their hearers that the election of Mr. Lincoln will do them no harm. We entirely agree with them, for it will save them ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... what he does. A few days ago he put up an old saint among the vines as a scarecrow, with a broken hat ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... "What an old scarecrow!" he exclaimed, laughing. "Whatever could your aunt have been thinking of to send it! We will despatch it to be chopped up for firewood, and buy ...
— Tom, Dot and Talking Mouse and Other Bedtime Stories • J. G. Kernahan and C. Kernahan
... West Indies. His dress consisted of a loose pair of trousers and shirt of blue cotton check; and, on the top of his white woolly head was fixed on in some mysterious fashion a battered fragment of a straw hat, just of the sort that would be used by an English farmer as a scarecrow to frighten off the birds ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... illustrious book heroes and heroines wended their midnight way toward their various houses and boarding places. The Wayne Hall girls marched across the campus, Emma Dean parading ahead with outspread arms, her rags flapping about her, giving her the appearance of a scarecrow which had just emerged from ...
— Grace Harlowe's Fourth Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... and his comic, scarecrow pal who originated from the dark side of trouble, on Earth and out here, too, were fading ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... amounted to anything, and he meant to amount to something, it would be all due to Tony and her Uncle Phil. The two of them had saved him in more ways than one, had faith in him when he wasn't much but a scarecrow, ignorant, profane, unmoral, miserable, a "gutter brat" as some one had once called him, a phrase he had never forgotten. It had seemed to brand him, set him apart from people like the Holidays ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... heard a cricket's cymbals play, A scarecrow lightly flapped his rags, And a pan that hung by his shoulder rang, Rattled and thumped in a listless way, And now the wind in the chimney sang, The wind in the chimney, The wind in the chimney, The wind in the chimney, Seemed to say:— "Dream, boy, dream, If you anywise can. ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay
... because me no run after dem.' When this apparition reached me and stood as still as it could, I perceived it consisted of a boy who said his name was 'Jack de bird driver.' I suppose some vague idea of the fitness of things had induced them to send this living scarecrow into the cornfield, and if he had been set up in the midst of it, nobody, I am sure, would have imagined he was anything else; but it seems he was expected to run after the feathered fowl who alighted ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... scarecrow, for he hardly had any more the resemblance to a human being, hearing the noise of the crowd that was round me, moved in my direction. He staggered and dragged himself till he got quite close, then bending his trembling head forward, made ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... at your being disquieted about W. Thomson. Tell George from me not to sit upon you with his mathematics. When I threatened your tropical cooling views with the facts of the physicists, you snubbed me and the facts sweetly, over and over again; and now, because a scarecrow of xy has been raised on the selfsame facts, you boo-boo. Take another dose of Huxley's penultimate G. S. Address, and send George back to college. (383/2. Huxley's Anniversary Address to the Geological Society, 1869 ("Collected Essays," VIII., page 305). ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... Social-Democracy, they are also cheering, but to another tune.—'To-morrow! To St. Petersburg! Russian ascendency, the menace of civilization, must be obliterated!' The Kaiser waving the tyranny of another country as a scarecrow to his people! . . ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... cried, "I can't leave you in this dreadful place! You look like a ghost, and a scarecrow, too! I want you to go and get some decent clothes and come home on ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... she sobb'd, "Look here!" I saw it in the wheel entangled, A weather beaten rag as e'er From any garden scarecrow dangled.' I. ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... the heath came a jolly knave, Like a scarecrow, all in rags: It made me crow to see his old duds All abroad in the wind, like flags;— So up he came to the timber's foot And pitch'd down ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... number I'd tipped them to, but she called it before the dice stopped rolling. That left me thirteen chips. Half absent-mindedly, I put three of them on the "Pass" side of the line and tipped the dice to twelve. Mostly I was looking at this scarecrow beside me. ...
— Vigorish • Gordon Randall Garrett
... this is thy place. Be quiet at home and scare sparrows from the pea field instead of the scarecrow." ...
— Folk Tales from the Russian • Various
... the stranger and little Daffydowndilly went wandering along the highway, and in shady lanes, and through pleasant villages; and whithersoever they went, behold! there was the image of old Mr. Toil. He stood like a scarecrow in the cornfields. If they entered a house, he sat in the parlor; if they peeped into the kitchen, he was there. He made himself at home in every cottage, and stole, under one disguise or another, into the most splendid mansions. Everywhere there was sure to be somebody ...
— Little Daffydowndilly - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... well known upon 'Change, with four thousand pounds in the three-and-a-half per cents, the idea of which had been a comfort to me for many a long year, ready to forfeit the whole sum in exchange for the raggedest pair of pantaloons that ever dangled from a scarecrow, and ready, too, to go down upon my bare knees to any ministering angel of an old Jew who would propose the bargain. I grinned a despairing laugh at the thought of such an absurd compact, and then groaned aloud as the conviction overcame me, that in my ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 458 - Volume 18, New Series, October 9, 1852 • Various
... Jack, "there could not be a more dignified profession than that of the scarecrow. The greatest dunderhead in Christendom might simply, by going a star-gazing, pass himself off as an adept in the occult sciences, and claim the right of being a benefactor of mankind ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... with the price and the Scarecrow dodges swiftly into the crowd. The Farmer peruses the card and frowns in a puzzled way; then the date catches his eye and he curses and tears the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 21, 1920 • Various
... little apart, grim mirth in his eyes, as Tiffany ushered into the circle a lean, shabby country-gentleman, whose habit would have shamed a scarecrow. Tiffany disappeared and the new-comer made Brilliana an awkward bow. "Sweet lady, you sent for me and I ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... a thief. But he proudly said to himself that he must let it all go; for if he had not been a thief, he had been a beggar and a menial, he had come out of a hovel at home, and his mother went about like a scarecrow, and it mattered little what kind of shame she ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... but capable of endless delight. The time had been when now and then he read a good book and dreamed noble dreams. Even yet the stuff of which such dreams are made, fluttered in particoloured rags about his life; and colour is colour even on a scarecrow. ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... draw the line somewhere, and I should say that was the very place! If you elect to appear in a scarecrow costume of that type, I shall send you ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells
... goodness' sake, you aren't going to enter that thing in the contest?" she exclaimed when she saw it. "Why, it looks perfectly crazy. Everybody will laugh at it. I'd rather stay out of the contest than enter such a looking kite. It looks like a scarecrow! For goodness' sake, don't ...
— The Camp Fire Girls Do Their Bit - Or, Over the Top with the Winnebagos • Hildegard G. Frey
... exhorter. Crowds liked to listen to him; the radicals and radically inclined throughout the West swore by him; he had had two terms in Congress, had got a hundred-odd votes for the nomination for President at the last national convention of the opposition. A splendid scarecrow for the Wall Street crowd, but difficult to nominate over Goodrich's man Simpson in a ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... the chief beckoned the bearers to follow him, and led the way into the temple. Mounting a platform eight or ten feet high, he advanced to an ugly scarecrow of an idol, slapped it, kicked it, and toppled it to the ground. Then, with vast labor and much joyful shouting, the ponderous form of Father Higgins was hoisted aloft, and installed in the seat of the dethroned deity. Next Professor Heller was set down upon his feet beside an altar ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... wrested the revolver from her. I fired pointblank, I fired again (the Colt's did not fail); they swept by, hooting, jostling; they thudded on; and rising I screeched and waved, as bizarre, no doubt, as any animated scarecrow. ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... shriveled creature, hung with charms and amulets in tobacco bags until he looked like a scarecrow. He had an eye even wilder and shiftier ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner |
