"Smell out" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... has no nose,"—but Mr. Theal's educated natives have given it a queer meaning. It is thus interpreted: "This proverb is an exhortation to be hospitable. It is as if one said: Give food to the traveller, because when you are on a journey your foot will not be able to smell out a man whom you have turned from your door, but, to your shame, may carry you to his." It need not be said that this is rather ahead of ...
— Nights With Uncle Remus - Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation • Joel Chandler Harris
... labour, a calm for a day or two gave them some relief, and brought such multitudes of sharks about the ships as were dreadful to behold, especially to such as were superstitious. Ravens are reported to smell out dead bodies from a great distance, and some think that sharks have the same perceptive faculty. They have two rows of sharp teeth in the nature of a saw, with which if they lay hold of a mans leg or arm they cut it off as with a razor. Multitudes of these ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... dollars an ounce. Ambergris, if discovered in the animal itself, is always in a dead or dying body, but it is usually found floating on the ocean or cast up on the shore. Many a day, as kiddies on Vancouver Island beaches, have we turned over bunches of kelp, trying to smell out that solid, fatty, inflammable dull grey substance with its sweet earthy odour. The present-day use of ambergris is to impart to perfumes a floral fragrance. It has the power to intensify and fix any odour. In pharmacy, it is regarded ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... proposals, and probably may not be found in the work itself, when it appears. Hence we may reasonably infer, that the world is indebted for these discoveries to the wonderful acuteness of the Inspectorial nostrils, which can smell out irreligion and infidelity, where no such things are intended, or even dreamt of. If such, indeed, are the intentions of this proposer, he is, doubtless, greatly obliged to his good friend, the Inspector, or rather the would-be inquisitor, for discovering ...
— Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela (1754) • Anonymous
... to tear a man to pieces. Why, that one's a good nine feet long, and there isn't one under six, I should say. But isn't it strange how they seem to smell out danger? You know how they'll follow a ship? Well, these brutes must have been following the canoes, expecting to get something, and this one being wrecked, they're waiting by it as if they were ready for a grab ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... in the house were sunny, and at the window of Joy's there tapped a spray from a rambler rose. There was so much to see and hear and smell out the window that Joy had a hard time getting dressed. She put back on her gray silk. Grandmother had packed all the pretty picture-frocks for her, but she didn't feel as if she could stand wearing any of them yet; but she was beginning ...
— The Wishing-Ring Man • Margaret Widdemer
... inquired a voice we knew too well. "By the ace of stinks, those natives can smell out anything a white man ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... hereditary bull. "Harcourt having agreed with me that the Bill should be introduced into the Lords, and having also agreed with Rosebery that it should be introduced in the Commons, Rosebery again wrote: 'I am afraid if you go on bringing this measure before the peers they will begin to smell out ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... circumstance to his friends, it is immediately perceived that he is under the influence of witchcraft. A learned personage, called an Imyanger or Witch Doctor, is immediately sent for to Nooker the Umtargartie, or smell out the witch. The male inhabitants of the kraal being seated on the ground, the learned doctor, got up like a grizzly bear, appears, and administers a dance of a most terrific nature, during the exhibition of which remedy he incessantly ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... And once more the memory of Lady Casterley's words; the memory of the two figures with joined hands on the balcony above the election crowd; all his latent jealousy of this handsome young Colossus, his animus against one whom he could, as it were, smell out to be always fighting on the winning side; all his consciousness too of what a lost cause his own was, his doubt whether he were honourable to look on it as a cause at all, flared up in Courtier, so that his answer was a stare. On Harbinger's face, too, there had come a look of stubborn violence ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... "Grip will smell out the cussed nigger in the mawnin' ef he's been around," he assured himself before beginning his nightly debauch. "What's mo', Miss Baron ain't so high en mighty now she knows I'm comin' to be the rale boss on the ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... comes in!" said Mickey. "If you could read the papers, you'd know. 'Sterilized,' is what they do to the milk in hot weather to save the slum kids. That's us, Lily. 'Deodorized,' is taking the bad smell out of things. 'Vulcanized,' is something they do to stiffen things. I guess it's ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter |
