"Vermin" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... but one, one little kindly word, Not one to spare her: out upon you, flint! You love nor her, nor me, nor any; nay, You shame your mother's judgment too. Not one? You will not? well—no heart have you, or such As fancies like the vermin in a nut Have fretted all to dust and bitterness.' So said the small king moved beyond ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... night comes round me, And the soft chain of thought has bound me, I whisper, "Sir, your eyes are killing— You owe no mortal man a shilling— You never cringe for star or garter, You're much too wise to be a martyr— And since you must, be food for vermin, You don't feel much desire for ermine!" Wisdom is a mine, no doubt, If one can but find it out— But whate'er I think or say, I'm an April fool ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 364 - 4 Apr 1829 • Various
... won't be good for you if he's busy to-night, let me tell you, for the school don't mean to wait any longer, and if that fellow isn't soon removed, you shall both go. Do you hear, little Morrison, we mean to clear the school of all vermin at once?' ...
— That Scholarship Boy • Emma Leslie
... lay passive, if not resigned, and were trampled under foot by their ferocious and unfragrant foes. These were rats and cockroaches. Typee—we use the name he bore during his Julian tribulations—records a singular phenomenon in the nocturnal habits of the last-named vermin. "Every night they had a jubilee. The first symptom was an unusual clustering and humming amongst the swarms lining the beams overhead, and the inside of the sleeping-places. This was succeeded by a prodigious coming and going on the part of those living out of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... itself out at the seams, and enough will survive to repeople the ship in an incredibly short period. In some vessels, the crews of which after a hard fight have given themselves up, as it were, for lost, the vermin seem to take actual possession, the sailors being mere tenants by sufferance. With Sperm Whalemen, hanging about the Line, as many of them do for a couple of years on a stretch, it is infinitely ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... if it did, it would be practically immobile. In a few years the layer will flow enough to plug the hole I have made, but even so, I'll build a couple of space flyers equipped with disintegrating rays as soon as we get down and station them alongside the hole to wipe out any of that space vermin which tries to come through. Let's go home. We've put in ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... forget my first night in that tramp. I soon became conscious of uninvited guests in my bunk, so, striking a light (strictly against rules in the ships of those days), I discovered regiments and army corps of noisome, crawling vermin marching in serried ranks into my bunk under the impression that it was their parade ground. For the remainder of the voyage I slept on the saloon table, a hard but cleanly couch. We lay for a week at Rio de Janeiro loading ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... along the docks, straining leisurely at their mammoth chains, their flanks opened, their cargoes, as it were their entrails, spewed out in a wild disarray of crate and bale and box. Sailors and stevedores swarmed them like vermin. Trucks rolled along the wharves like peals of ordnance, the horse-hoofs beating the boards like heavy drum-taps. Chains clanked, a ship's dog barked incessantly from a companionway, ropes creaked in complaining pulleys, blocks rattled, hoisting-engines ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... vermin-killer, Like to thin the dipterous pest, To the farmer and the miller, Which instruction may suggest. What may be, the question narrows, If they doubt they can but try, Is, if let alone, the sparrows Might keep down the ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 3, 1887 • Various
... Joe and shouts, "I was telling the genneman about the bugs when we first came here!" And Joe lifts his eyebrows, rubs his shoulder against his chair, and laughs, and says with his pipe in his mouth, "Ess, sir!" making a pantomimic gesture supposed to represent the slaughter of vermin. ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... zone of female misery and degradation, there was a belt of masculine stupidity and crime; men with corpulent bodies, bull necks, double chins, pile-driving heads; men of shrunken frames, cadaverous cheeks, deep-set and beady eyes—vermin-covered, disease-devoured, hope-deserted. They clung around him, these concentric circles of humanity, like rings around a luminous planet, held by they ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... 'that as he lies there, disgraced, bought, used; a cloth for dirty hands, a mat for dirty feet, a lying, fawning, servile hound, he is the very last and worst among the vermin of the world. And mark me, Pinch! The day will come—he knows it; see it written on his face, while I speak!—when even you will find him out, and will know him as I do, and as he knows I do. HE renounce ME! Cast your eyes on the ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... which when the old woman saw, she rose to her and offered up prayers for her, saying, 'O my daughter, O thou to whom pertain goodness and beneficence and charity and almsdoing, know that this young man is a stranger, and indeed want and vermin and hunger and nakedness and cold slay him.' When the lady heard this, she gave her alms of that which was with her; and indeed her heart inclined unto Selim, [but she knew him not for ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... in anticipation of the coming greenbacks, for abject dread of the bluebacks that were to bring them. There is one gleam of satisfaction through the gloom of the great fire—it partly purified the city of these vermin and the foul nests they ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... taken up my stand for freedom, I'll jackal to no autocrat; But rogues with hands as red as Edom, Nihilist snake, Anarchist rat, I'd crush, and crime's curst league determine. I have no sympathy with vermin. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 102, May 7, 1892 • Various
... more than fourteen inches space was allotted for each with his bed and bedding; and deprived of the light of the day as well as of fresh air; breathing nothing but a noisome atmosphere ... devoured with vermin.' &c. The doctor, when visiting the sick, 'thrust his wig in his pocket, and stript himself to his waistcoat; then creeping on all fours under their hammocks, and forcing up his bare pate between two, kept them asunder with ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... mosquito-infested island station, and the ludicrous privations she encountered there. There is nothing of the kind more amusing in the whole of Australian fiction. The description of the household pets, and the vermin—including a lizard with an uncanny habit of 'unfastening its tail and making off on its stump when pursued'—rivals the famous verandah scene in Geoffry Hamlyn. An intimation in the preface that these experiences are a faithful record ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... Sunday I Towards seven o'clock a narrow strip, not twenty yards broad, alone was left. This last half hour was what Noel dreaded. To-day it was worse, for the farmer had no cartridges left, and the rabbits were dealt with by hullabaloo and sticks and chasing dogs. Rabbits were vermin, of course, and ate the crops, and must be killed; besides, they were good food, and fetched two shillings apiece; all this she knew but to see the poor frightened things stealing out, pounced on, turned, shouted at, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... though I have a great deal of trouble about it. But what is the result? I don't know whether there is such a thing as the balance of nature, or whether it is merely that the hawks and weasels and other vermin kill off the sickly birds: but I do know that we have less disease among our birds than I hear of anywhere else. I have sometimes shot a weasel, it is true, when I have run across him as he was hunting ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... bare, bald, Zwinglian ideas of the Communion. They do look very bald and bare by the side of modern notions and mediaeval notions resuscitated. Well, I had rather have the bareness than I would have it overlaid by coverings under which there is room for abundance of vermin to lurk. Christ puts the Lord's Supper in the place of the Passover. The Passover was a purely memorial rite. You Christian people will understand the spirituality of the whole Gospel system, and the nature of the only bond which unites men to Jesus and brings spiritual blessings to ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... the sparks of light they emitted, they would have been undiscernible. The expression of his face was like that of a wiry terrier, being derived partly from his occupation, which, in his opinion, required him to be as vigilant in spying out offenders as the aforesaid peppery animal, in scenting vermin, and being partly the gift of nature. But though the person of Basset was small, such was not his opinion of himself. That was in an inverse ratio to his size, and at once the source of his highest ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... naught but a female baggage, and though Master Busy's impassioned protestations of less than half an hour ago, must be still ringing in her ears, she declared emphatically that she could hear the throbbing of that young vermin's heart. ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... angels were looking down, surely it was a pitiful sight—these children of Zion in a strange land, where they were held as dogs and vermin and human scavengers to the Muslim; thinking and speaking and acting as their fathers had done any time for five thousand years before; again judging it expedient that one man should die rather than the whole people be brought ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... of Wisdom—nay, forbear, Lest Wisdom turn on you in wrath, Trampling, with heel that will not spare, The vermin ...
— Phantasmagoria and Other Poems • Lewis Carroll
... his disappointment. Happy are they who, in this world of trial, meet their disappointments in their youth, not in their old age; then let them come and welcome, not too thick to render us morose, but like Spring mornings, frosty but kindly, the cold of which will kill the vermin, but will let the plant live; and let us rely upon it, that the best men (and women, too) are those ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... a King should come walking among them on the night of his coronation day. Most of them thought that the next morning he would order them all to be killed, and their houses burned, because he would only think of them as vermin. ...
— The Land of the Blue Flower • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... kissing ripe, Sir? Double but my farm And kisse her till thy heart ake; these smocke vermin, How eagerly they leap at old mens kisses, They lick their lipps at profit, not at pleasure; And if't were not for th' scurvie name of Cuckold, He should lye with her, I know shee'l labour at length With a good lordship. If he had ...
— The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher - Vol. 2 of 10: Introduction to The Elder Brother • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... a mariner set forth, With all the fires of heaven lit in his breast And godlike courage on his brow, to find New worlds beyond the unknown wastes of sea. He sailed; he found; he died in rusty chains: So that, to-day, the vermin of all climes May thither flock, and there renew the old ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... he had elucidated to his officer. And finally: "It is well, m'sieur, the colonel. One failed to understand that the colonel prefers a live Boche to a dead one. Me, I am otherwise. It appears a pity to let live such vermin. Has the colonel, by chance, heard the things these savages did in Belgium? Yes? But then—Yet I will bring to m'sieur, the colonel, all there is to be desired of German prisoners alive—en vie; ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... reforms, leaves off drinking, and takes to going to church everyday. He becomes a Puseyite, puts up a memorial window to the Baron, and reads the Tracts. At last he goes over to the Pope, walks about in nasty dirty clothes all full of vermin, and gives over his estate to Cardinal Wiseman. Then there are the retainers; they all come to grief, some one way and some another. I do that for the sake of ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... for an eternity, as it seemed to me, I stood there alone. There was a scurrying of the vermin in the place to snatch up a few valuables and flee, as if they had been the crawling things under some soon-to-be-lifted stone, to whom light was a calamity. I was left with the Stillness before me, and the dreadful breathings and inarticulate ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... Rat-catcher would get the Rats and wherever he got them from he was ridding that district of a nuisance. But when the authorities stopped Rat-pits and Rat-coursing, the consequence was that the Rat-catcher left the Rats to breed in thousands. Rats being vermin, I don't see why they should not be killed 50 or 100 at a time in the pit, but the Humane Society maintain that it is cruelty to dogs to put them in a pit with a lot of Rats. I don't see where the cruelty comes in, but from what I have seen of Rat-pits during my time I approve of them, ...
— Full Revelations of a Professional Rat-catcher - After 25 Years' Experience • Ike Matthews
... goats, monkeys, poultry, pigeons, and a variety of birds, with an aged tortoise, who was known to have been there for seventy-five years. The most extraordinary ward was that appropriated to rats, mice, bugs, and other noxious vermin. The overseers of the hospital frequently hire beggars from the streets, for a stipulated sum, to pass a night among the fleas, lice, and bugs, on the express condition of suffering them to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 10, No. 271, Saturday, September 1, 1827. • Various
... I could do no more in the way of making sail; but we mounted eight brass nine-pounders,—very pretty pieces they were, too,—so I had them cleared away and loaded, in readiness for the worst; for I took her to be a French or Spanish privateer, and I had no notion of yielding my ship to any such vermin without making a fight for it; and my own lads were quite of the same mind as myself, not liking the idea of being locked up for years in a ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... become the majesty of Rome to soil her fingers with the blood of such vermin," said Cornelius; ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... observed the young animal's flesh to smell very rank, and the stink was somewhat between a weasel and a fox, but much more disagreeable. I forgot another circumstance (and perhaps I might have the reader's pardon if it were wholly omitted), that while I held the odious vermin in my hands, it voided its filthy excrements of a yellow liquid substance all over my clothes; but by good fortune there was a small brook hard by, where I washed myself as clean as I could; although ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... consistency, compactness and solidity. In the manufacture it is subjected to a pressure of hundreds of tuns, which squeezes out the liquid matter, leaving a substance of the right thickness. It is said to be proof against damp and gnawing of vermin, and it being an excellent non-conductor of heat, must make a warm dwelling in winter and a cool one in summer. It is used in the place of plastering ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... recovered in a few days, but the stuffiness below, the coarse food, the cramped dirty accommodation kept me, if not actually sea-sick, in a state of acute physical wretchedness the whole time. The ship abounded in cockroaches and more intimate vermin. I was cold all the time until after we passed Cape Verde, then I became steamily hot; I had been too preoccupied with Beatrice and my keen desire to get the Maud Mary under way at once, to consider a proper wardrobe for myself, and in particular I lacked a coat. Heavens! how I lacked ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... morrow not entirely disconnected with a rat-trap. Accordingly he lit another lamp and placed it so that it would shine well into the right-hand corner of the wall by the fireplace. Then he got all the books he had with him, and placed them handy to throw at the vermin. Finally he lifted the rope of the alarm bell and placed the end of it on the table, fixing the extreme end under the lamp. As he handled it he could not help noticing how pliable it was, especially for so strong a rope, and one not in use. 'You could hang a man ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker
... what was the good of wasting strength in behalf of a wretch so abandoned? Why should such a man be permitted to live to bring shame and misery on everybody connected with him? and why, when noxious vermin of every other description were hunted down and exterminated, should the vile human creature be spared to suck the blood of his friends? Mr Wentworth grew sanguinary in his thoughts as he leaned back in ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... Mercifully, for it was more like hell than anything I can imagine. The never-ending processions of groaning men being brought in on those horrible blood-soaked stretchers, suffering unimagined tortures, the filth, the cold, the stench, the hunger, the vermin, and the squalor of it all, added to one's utter helplessness to do more than very little to relieve their misery, was almost enough to make ...
— Field Hospital and Flying Column - Being the Journal of an English Nursing Sister in Belgium & Russia • Violetta Thurstan
... for the same reason that nobody thinks it worth while to describe a ditch; both being, in the estimation of these persons, stagnant perfumed entities, rich in peculiarly useless vegetation, abounding in vermin and animalculae, and diffusing a contagious effluvia over the surface of society. This error, like many other errors, is an excuse for ignorance, and only shows the innate uncharitableness of some men; they run down, like other sceptics, what they do not know and cannot understand, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... says these words of wisdom: 'If Zeus sends bad weather, mice and vermin, it is to stimulate the husbandman's energy, and call forth his inventive capacity.' Misfortune comes to help the ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... Englishmen merely travelling for sport, and as they went on they generally managed to shoot deer enough for the needs of the whole party. Occasionally they slept in the kraals of chiefs, but greatly preferred their own little tents as the smoke in them was often blinding, and more than once the attacks of vermin kept them awake. Still, it would have been a slight to refuse such invitations, and they had to go to the kraals as it was necessary to frequently buy supplies of mealies. At times the travelling was very rough, and with the utmost exertions they could not make more than twelve or fourteen ...
— With Buller in Natal - A Born Leader • G. A. Henty
... To these two groups let us add the social parasites, represented by thieves, drunkards, and persons of the baser sort whose business it is to trade in human passion. We revolt from the red aphides upon the plant, the caterpillar upon the tree, the vermin upon bird or beast. How much more do we revolt from those human vermin whose business it is to propagate parasites upon the body politic! The condemnation of life is that a man consumes more than he produces, ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... may be) is not favorable to granaries, where wheat is to be kept for any time. The best, and indeed the only good granary, is the rick-yard of the farmer, where the corn is preserved in its own straw, sweet, clean, wholesome, free from vermin and from insects, and comparatively at a trifle of expense. This, and the barn, enjoying many of the same advantages, have been the sole granaries of England from the foundation of its agriculture to this day. All this is done at the expense of the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... 'em," snorted out "Old Jock," equally pleased at this idea. "No doubt they've gone to the bottom, and good luck to 'em too. One can't feel sorry for such vermin as those that are prowling after honest craft, and who'd cut one's ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... the torrid zone, like things of larger size, as serpents, basilisks, crocodiles, scorpions, rats, and so forth. Every one knows that swamps, stagnant ponds, dung, fetid bogs, are full of such things; also that noxious insects fill the atmosphere in clouds, and noxious vermin walk the earth in armies, and consume its herbs to the very roots. I once observed in my garden, that in the space of a half yard, nearly all the dust was turned into minute insects, for when it was stirred with a stick, ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg
... war. The very building itself was radically defective. Huge sewers underlay it, and cesspools loaded with filth wafted their poison into the upper rooms. The floors were in so rotten a condition that many of them could not be scrubbed; the walls were thick with dirt; incredible multitudes of vermin swarmed everywhere. And, enormous as the building was, it was yet too small. It contained four miles of beds, crushed together so close that there was but just room to pass between them. Under such conditions, the most elaborate ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... headquarters. This is accomplished solely by knowledge. There are hundreds of women behind our lines who make clean and repair the dirty clothes of the troops. Afterwards, they are baked in very hot ovens which utterly destroy the vermin and also, it is said, diseases. We have, too, been issued iron helmets to protect the head against falling shots. It was asked of us all if any had an objection. The Sikhs reported that they had not found any permission ...
— The Eyes of Asia • Rudyard Kipling
... lighted up by a blazing fire, appeared to me a forbidding, uncanny place. Small, peculiar round holes, and dark cracks, suggestive of hidden vermin, gave me a creepy feeling; and although not over-sensitive on the subject of crawling, creeping things, I voiced ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... sexes being together day and night. Among these were eleven children under fourteen years of age. Some slept in rude floorless houses; some in tents on the bare ground, and a few in bunks. The bedding was scant and filthy, and full of vermin. The camps were poorly ventilated, the sleeping quarters being generally sweat-boxes, constructed to prevent escapes. There were no hospitals and no preparations for comfort or medical treatment. ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... and his court sometimes looking on. Coiners of false money were boiled alive at the pig-market; robbers and assassins were broken on the wheel and left to linger in slow agony (tant qu'ils pourraient languir). The Lutherans were treated like vermin, and to harbour them, to possess or print or translate one of their books, meant a fiery death. In 1525 a young Lutheran student was put in a tumbril and brought before the churches of Notre Dame and St. Genevieve, crying mercy from God and Mary and St. Genevieve; he was then taken to the ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... sixth, what might and virtue prayer is of. Men who were before this age, who kept themselves in soothfastness, and spoke nothing idle, won from GOD what they prayed for: and that was shewn to a holy hermit Florentius, who dwelt in a wilderness unknown of men. So much vermin was there about this hermitage, that none durst come thither by a long way. A deacon was in that land, who heard of this hermit, and he came at the last to the place where this hermit was dwelling; ...
— The Form of Perfect Living and Other Prose Treatises • Richard Rolle of Hampole
... Ki was certain that Kapchack was really dead, he returned, and he has gathered to himself a crew of the most terrible ruffians you ever beheld. He has got about him all the scum of the earth; all the blackguards, villains, vermin, cut-throat scoundrels have rallied to his standard; as the old proverb says: 'Birds of a feather flock together'. He has taken possession of the firs, yonder, on the slope (which are the property of my friend the jay), and which command my copse. He has proclaimed himself king, ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... "hardens into a rampart of ebony, whence an innumerable legion of vermin bursts forth one day ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... sun which warm'd thy varied mind; How would I now describe the motley groups Which crowd, in thoughtless ease, thy moving road. Mark the young Confidence of yesterday, Offspring of pride, and fortune's blinded fool, (Engender'd like the vermin of an hour) All would-be fashion, elegance, and ease, While, by his side, the weaker vessel smirks, In tawdry finery, with presuming gait, As though the world were made for them alone; Their liveried Lacquey, half-conceal'd in lace, ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... upon which the ingenuity of the farmers has been taxed, it is on the invention of a mole trap which would effectually clear their premises of these blind burrowing vermin. Many patented devices of this character are on the market, and many odd pictured ideas on the subject have gone the rounds of the illustrated press, but they all sink into insignificance when tested beside the trap we here present. It has no equal among mole traps, and it can be made ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson
... born at all if ye've got ter die so soon! An' more'n all that, if life's the Lord's blessin', as the widder b'lieves, why are so many only born to suffer, or be crippled all their lives? An' why are snakes an' all sorts o' vermin, to say nothin' o' cheatin' lawyers, like Frye, ever born ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... resumed. From Florence to Leghorn he was bound so tightly that his wrists were very much swollen. From Leghorn in the S.S. Derna he was shipped to Sardinia, where he had experience of several prisons, including that of Terranuova-Pausania, where water flows down the walls and vermin are everywhere. He received 2.75 lire a day with which to buy his food, and although he is a doctor they refused to let him read any medical books. When I asked him of what he had been guilty, he began by recounting ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... of grim Cordeliers, Well furnished with relics and vermin, Will follow, Lord Westmoreland fears, To effect what their chiefs may determine. Lollard's bower, good authorities say, Is again fitting up for a prison; And a wood-merchant told me to-day 'Tis a wonder how ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Demosthenes lose his shield and the world cackles over it for two-and-twenty centuries. To digress for a moment, I believe the story of Demosthenes' cowardice as damnable a lie as that relating to Col. Ingersoll's surrender. Even in his day human vermin sought to wreck with falsehood those they feared. The world—unwisely I think—interests itself in the personality of a genius, and somewhat impudently invades his privacy. A young man may muster up sufficient moral courage to lie to his callers, and thus preserve ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... the vermin That will silence at last the most impudent lip! Is the world but a bubble, a bauble, a joke? Heigho, Brother Fools, now your bubble is broke, Do you ask for a tear?—or is it worth while? Here's a sigh for you, then—but it ends in a smile! Ho, Brother ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... thought the sight might do them a mischief, and mark the gallows upon the foreheads of their unborn babes—poor poets, without a shoe, because their only pair had been sent to the cobbler to mend—and other such vermin, not worth the trouble of mentioning. As I chanced to pass by a cottage I heard a great squalling inside. I looked in; and, when I came to examine, what do you think it was? Why, an infant—a plump and ruddy urchin—lying on the floor under a table which was just beginning ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... time he is ready, you and your charge will be snug in Kilgobbin; and another thing, Kearney—for I have thought of the whole matter—you'll take out with you that little vermin Price, the doctor, and treat him well. He'll be as indiscreet as you wish, and be sure to give him the opportunity. There, now, give me your most affectionate grasp of the hand, for there's an attentive public ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... this roof, and the walls, which are of well-beaten clay, are screened from the weather. Inside, the dwellings are clean and comfortable, and before the Arabs came bugs were unknown—as I have before observed, one may know where these people have come by the presence or absence of these nasty vermin: the human tick, which infests all Arab and Suaheli houses, is ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... chains. How shall I avoid thee? or with what spell Dissolve the enchantment of thy magic cell? Ev'n Fox himself can't boast so many martyrs, As yearly fall within thy wretched quarters. Money I've none, and debts I cannot pay, Unless my vermin, will those debts defray. Not scolding wife, nor inquisition's worse; Thou'rt ev'ry mischief crammed ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... indeed, convey the least idea of this peculiar effect. We feel our hearts tremble at the thought that whither that light has gone we must follow. For the first time I realize that we are about to go into the earth,—that we shall presently crawl like insects, burrow like underground vermin, beneath the surface, man's proper place. But such thoughts ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... Lordships to the last visitation that was made of this college. It was visited by order of Lord Cornwallis in the year 1788, upon the complaints made against it which I have already mentioned to your Lordships,—that it was a sink of filth, vermin, and misery. Mr. Chapman, who was the visitor, and the friend of Mr. Hastings, declares that he could not sit in it even for a few minutes; his words are,—"The wretched, squalid figures that from every part ran out ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... thoughts abroad, and entered into a confederacy with certain of the bold, hard-riding lads of Tarrytown, Petticoat Lane, and Sleepy Hollow, who formed a kind of Holy Brotherhood, scouring the country to clear it of Skinner and Cow-boy, and all other border vermin. The Roost was one of their rallying points. Did a band of marauders from Manhattan island come sweeping through the neighborhood, and driving off cattle, the stout Jacob and his compeers were soon clattering at their heels, and fortunate did the rogues esteem themselves if ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... put his life in peril and stand the heat, vermin, and hate? Why try to make friends with these wild bandits? Why care about them at all? He was a baker in his own country in England and might have gone on with this work. It was the love of Christ that gave him the love ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews
... hermit to hermit all the afternoon. It was a most strange menagerie. The chief emulation among them seemed to be, to see which could manage to be the uncleanest and most prosperous with vermin. Their manner and attitudes were the last expression of complacent self-righteousness. It was one anchorite's pride to lie naked in the mud and let the insects bite him and blister him unmolested; it was another's to lean against a rock, all day long, conspicuous to the admiration of the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... or the Farallone and the champagne that you stole. That is your account with God; He keeps it, and He will settle it when the clock strikes. In my own case, I have nothing to go on but suspicion, and I do not kill on suspicion, not even vermin like you. But understand: if ever I see any of you again, it is another matter, and you shall eat a bullet. And now take yourself off. March! and as you value what you call your life, keep your hands ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... accustomed to the dimness, a mob of seething, sweating, sweltering captives, like in aspect as a whole to so many gaunt wild beasts. Some are gibbering like fiends, others jabbering like idiots. They are there young and old; a few—the maniacs those—are chained; all are crawled over by vermin, most are crusted with excretions. The sight made me feel faint at the time, the very recollection of it to this day makes my flesh creep. We were fascinated by this peep at the Inferno. The moment these caged wretches ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... Elder J. with lifted eyes In musing posture stood, Invoked a blessing from the skies To save from vermin, mites and flies, ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... have the inclination, do not know how to live. Biscuit, not half cuit; everything animal and vegetable smeared with butter and lard. Poverty stalking through the land, while we are engaged in political metaphysics, and, amidst our filth and vermin, like the Spaniard and Portuguese, look down with contempt on other nations,—England and France especially. We hug our lousy cloak around us, take another chaw of tub-backer, float the room with nastiness, or ruin the grate and ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... white scut with obvious neatness and dispatch, and in shifting over to another hedgerow he shot a jay and gloried in its splendour. The keeper, however, moderated any secret intentions there might have been as to the plumage by one sentence: "That's another for the vermin book. I gets ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... torch, until in the middle of the blazing hot forenoon we came to Gembloux, which I think must be the place where all the flies in Belgium are spawned. Here on a siding we lay all day, grilled in the heat and pestered by swarms of the buzzing scavenger vermin, while troop trains without number passed us, hurrying along the sentry-guarded railway to the lower frontiers of Belgium. Every box-car door made a frame for a group-picture of broad German faces and bulky German bodies. Upon nearly every car the sportive passengers had lashed limbs of trees and ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... with the crop, large profits might accrue to the cacao-planter, but it rarely happens (perhaps never) during the six months of fruit-ripening that losses are not sustained by hurricanes, disease in the tree, the depredations of parrots, monkeys, rats, and other vermin, etc. Practically speaking, cacao-planting should only be undertaken in this Colony by agriculturists who have spare capital and can afford to lose a crop one year to make up for it in the next. The venture pays handsomely in fortunate seasons, but it is not the line of planting to ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... proclamation of Christianity, when first piercing the atmosphere circumjacent to any oracle; and, in fact, to their gross appreciations, Christian truth was like the scavenger bird in Eastern climates, or the stork in Holland, which signalizes its presence by devouring all the native brood of vermin, or nuisances, as fast as they reproduce themselves under local distemperatures of climate ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... term for one who changes his party for interest: from rats deserting vessels about to sink. These mischievous vermin are said to have increased after the economical expulsion of cats from our dockyards. Thus, in the petition from the ships-in-ordinary, to be allowed to go to sea, even ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... perfect innocence, mother of invention, lent wings to my words, and while thinking all the time: You little vermin, what are you doing here, in that chair, when you should be delving the earth or breaking stones, as befits your kind? I tried to picture myself climbing up Muretta with a theodolite bulging out of my pocket. ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... the vermin, all the impure beasts, are after Stanton, for his not having sent reinforcements to McClellan; but none existed, and McClellan has exhausted and devoured all the reserves. Not reinforcements, but brains, were wanted, ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... in the land!' So they said when they saw the poor devil dragging himself on foot after their horses' heels, shivering in winter and sweating in summer, rusting and decaying in old age. Well, what has happened? That flea, that vermin, has kept them in the memory of men longer than their castles stood, long after their arms and their armour had rusted in the ground. I love those old parchments. I respect and revere them. Like ivy, they clothe ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... like it. I wish you would take the trouble to go and buy me some vermin-killer. That would ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... that his vassals, Riding free on the heath, Came on a stone that was fallen And vermin hid beneath. Rudely plucked from their hiding, Never a word they spoke: A son and his aged father - Last of the ...
— Ballads • Robert Louis Stevenson
... often flowing beneath your feet; courts, many of them, which the sun never penetrates, which are never visited by a breath of fresh air. You have to ascend rotten stair-cases, grope your way along dark and filthy passages swarming with vermin. Then, if you are not driven back by the intolerable stench, you may gain admittance into the dens in which these thousands of beings herd together. Eight feet square! That is about the average size of ...
— Deaconesses in Europe - and their Lessons for America • Jane M. Bancroft
... return with his bag full in the evening to a capital dinner, he had better stay at home. To do anything in this country, a man must make his mind up to long and fatiguing marches in the heat of the day, with miserable quarters often at night, in places infested by vermin of every description; in a word, he must be content to rough it. I will also candidly own that, from the accounts I had previously received, I was very much disappointed as regards the quantity of large game to be found in these parts; still, I was, to a certain extent, indemnified ...
— Notes in North Africa - Being a Guide to the Sportsman and Tourist in Algeria and Tunisia • W. G. Windham
... Long-winged Hawks is about the middle of April, and March for the Short-Winged Hawks. There are two kinds of Mewings. 1. At the stock or stone; so called from its being low upon the ground, free from Noise, Vermin or ill Air. 2. At large; so called from being in a high Room, with open Windows towards the North or North-East. The former is accounted the best Mewing. I shall not insist on the erecting or ordering of this Mew, leaving that to the Discretion of the Faulconer; only before he mews his ...
— The School of Recreation (1684 edition) • Robert Howlett
... escaped from one description of vermin, I became a prey to innumerable gnats. I had passed many uncomfortable nights during my journey, but this was worse than any thing I had ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... agrees with me to be doing my duty; and in this case my duty is a thorough pleasure. To hunt down vermin is a noble occupation, fit ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... crammed with traps and firearms and trinkets to the water-line. The crews of forty, or seventy, or one hundred were relegated to vermin-infested hammocks above decks, with short rations of rye bread and salt fish, and such scant supply of fresh water that scurvy invariably ravaged the ship whenever foul weather lengthened the passage. Having equipped the vessel, the Siberian merchants passed over the management ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... those who might have disturbed the fat trout lying in its shadows; across a gorse-grown common, sacred home of an old dog-fox that had defied the South Meadshire hounds for five seasons; and so, out of her father's property on to that of Jim Graham, in which blood relations of the Kencote game and vermin were protected with equal care, in order that the Grahams might fulfil the destiny appointed for them and the Clintons and the whole race ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall
... soon found a big swollen louse. I crushed it with my thumb-nail so that the blood spurted out. I heard several faint cracks coming from the opposite side of the tent and knew that others were also hunting for vermin. ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... along, and straight opposite like a reflection another solid range of back-premises, with iron stair-ways and horrid little doors and washing and little W. C.'s and people creeping up and down like vermin. Alvina shivered a little, but still smiled. Then slowly she began to take off her hat. She put it down on the drab-painted chest ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... haven't a living male relative of the suitable age except two second cousins that I don't see much of—praise God!" said Peter, fervently; "and Hugh Van Orden looks about half-past ten, whereas I class John Charteris among the lower orders of vermin." ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... friends—that is, outwardly, of course. Within my inmost heart I felt, Sir, that I could never again trust that shameless traitor—that I had in very truth nurtured a serpent in my bosom. But I am proverbially tender-hearted. You will believe me or not, I simply could not turn that vermin out into the street. He deserved it! Oh, even he would have admitted when he was quite sober, which was not often, that I had every right to give him the sack, to send him back to the gutter whence ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... number of criminals did doubtfully crawl forth and furnish a retinue for the great Admiral and Viceroy. Trembling, suspicious, and with more than half a mind to go back to their bonds, some part of the human vermin of Spain was eventually cajoled and chivied on ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... died of sickness in prison; but Chares writes he was kept in chains seven months after he was apprehended, on purpose that he might be proceeded against in full council, when Aristotle should be present; and that growing very fat, and contracting a disease of vermin, he there died, about the time that Alexander was wounded in India, in the country of the Malli Oxydracae, all which came to ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... the flies swarmed over everything, and he remembered having heard a physician say that an enlightened man should be more afraid of a fly than of a Bengal tiger. The boarding-house provided him with a cot and a supply of vermin, but with no blanket, which was a necessity in the mountain regions. So after supper he had to seek out his boss, and arrange to get credit at the company-store. They were willing to give a certain amount of credit, he found, as this would enable the ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... Look here, Izod, I've had half an hour at the ricks this morning, ferreting the rats. A man shoots rats because they are vermin—it's lucky for you, and idlers like you, that you're on two ...
— The Squire - An Original Comedy in Three Acts • Arthur W. Pinero
... at the mirror held out to him, cleft by a crooked crack. Hair on end. As he and others see me. Who chose this face for me? This dogsbody to rid of vermin. It asks ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... parolegeco. Verdant verdanta. Verdict jugxo. Verdigris verdigro. Verdure verdajxo. Verger pedelo. Verify verigi, ekzameni. Verily vere. Veritable vera. Verity vereco. Vermicelli vermicxelo. Vermifuge kontrauxvermajxo. Vermilion cinabro. Vermin insektoj. Vermouth vermuto. Verse verso. Verses, to make versi. Versed (learned) klera. Versifier versisto. Version traduko. Verst versto. Vertebra vertebro. Vertebral vertebra. Vertex supro, pinto. Vertical vertikala. Vertigo kapturno. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... him hurrying off by way of my arm or leg. The moment worn-out nature reasserted itself in me, and I dozed again, that ghoul of a cockroach came back and proceeded with its fell banquet. At length, weakened no doubt by loss of blood and frantic with the thought that a mere piece of determined vermin should thus habitually sup off me, I rose in the dead of a moonless night, turned on the electric light, selected a handy shoe, and then started to have it out, once for all, with that man-eating ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... different kind from our European cats: yet the young cats were the same kind of house-breed as the old one; and both of my cats being females, I thought it very strange. But from these three, I afterwards came to be so pestered with cats, that I was forced to kill them like vermin, or wild beasts, and to drive them from my house ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe Of York, Mariner, Vol. 1 • Daniel Defoe
... people is simple, consisting of small black monkey skins, cat-skins, and the furs of any vermin they can get. These are tucked under a waist-strap, and, according to the number they possess, go completely or only half-way round the body, the animals' heads hanging in front, and the tails always depending gracefully below. ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... vehement actions, casting cakes of deer suet, deer, and tobacco into the fire, howling without ceasing. One of them was "disfigured with a great skin, his head hung around with little skins of weasels and other vermin, with a crownlet of feathers on his head, painted as ugly as the devil." So fat they fed him that he much doubted they intended to sacrifice him to the Quiyoughquosicke, which is a superior power they worship: a more uglier ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... purity, they are largely employed as personal servants. In Chhattisgarh the ordinary Rawats will clean the cooking-vessels even of Muhammadans, but the Thethwar or pure Rawats refuse this menial work. In Mandla, when a man is to be brought back into caste after a serious offence, such as getting vermin in a wound, he is made to stand in the middle of a stream, while some elderly relative pours water over him. He then addresses the members of the caste panchayat or committee, who are standing on the bank, saying to them, 'Will ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... underneath the collar beams above; thus forming a cock-loft above and concealed spaces at the sides which diminished the practically available floor space in the attic. This cock-loft and these concealed spaces became receptacles for rubbish and harbors for vermin, both of which ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 647, May 26, 1888 • Various
... the door she ran. Out into the hall she peered, this way and that, down the dismantled corridor, up the wreckage of the stairs all cumbered, like the office itself, with dust and webs and vermin. ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... former. "You two halt to cover us just at the water's edge. That'll give the boys time to get aboard, and then we can laugh at the copper-skinned vermin. Look sharp and reload: they're coming ...
— Old Gold - The Cruise of the "Jason" Brig • George Manville Fenn
... the governor announced would sail in a couple of days. When, however, they went on board to arrange their sleeping places they found the vessels in so battered and unseaworthy a condition, and so overrun with vermin, that many resolved to remain rather than undergo the risk of a voyage on board them. The officers and crews confessed that they were very unwilling to sail; at the same time, as they were all Protestants, they were anxious to get away from the island. ...
— Villegagnon - A Tale of the Huguenot Persecution • W.H.G. Kingston
... rate of ten or twelve miles a day all over the great desolate steppes which lie south of the Anadyr River. They had experienced great hardships; had lived upon reindeer's entrails and tallow for weeks at a time; had been alive almost constantly with vermin; had spent the greater part of two long months in smoky Chukchi pologs, and had despaired, sometimes, of ever reaching a Russian settlement or seeing again a civilised human being; but hope and courage ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... mair on strae sonks,[46] For gawing[47] his German hurdies[48]; But he sits on our gude king's throne, Amang the English lordies. Auld Scotland! thou'rt owre cauld a hole For nursing siccan[49] vermin; But the very dogs o' England's court Can bark and howl ...
— The Jacobite Rebellions (1689-1746) - (Bell's Scottish History Source Books.) • James Pringle Thomson
... shanty, and James besought her, in the most moving manner, even with tears, to tarry awhile and wash and mend him up, so that he might once more be decent and comfortable; for he was suffering dreadfully with the filth and vermin that had ...
— The Narrative of Sojourner Truth • Sojourner Truth
... that can be expected from them. All the corn raised this year and the next will be saved for seed, and if necessity should oblige us to use it, it would be only a few days' support for the colony; and from the rats and other vermin ...
— A Source Book Of Australian History • Compiled by Gwendolen H. Swinburne
... always poisoning out disease, as we smoke out vermin, is now seeking its last refuge behind the wooden cannon and painted port-holes of that unblushing system of false scientific pretences which I do not care to name in a discourse addressed to an audience devoted to the study of the laws of nature in the light ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... indulgence, but feeling that there is a law above his will, of which he is only the servant, and knowing that if his people and his public life are to be what they should be, his own personal and domestic life must be pure. As for his court and his ministers, he will make a clean sweep of the vermin who swarm and sting and buzz about a throne. The froward, the wicked, privy slanderers, proud hearts, crafty plotters, liars, and evil-doers he will not suffer—but "mine eyes shall be upon the faithful in the land; he that walketh in a perfect way, he shall serve me." He is ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... thorn, or nail in the eyes of the image; if deaf, in its ears; if maimed, cut a limb off the image; if to have a certain disease, will very earnestly that he or she shall have that disease. You may thus, too, torment the object of your aversion with plagues of insects and vermin. ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... and now he had a chance to make another discovery. He had felt sharp stinging sensations which caused him to scratch himself frantically. Then suddenly he realized that he was lying upon a mattress infested with vermin. ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... But we won't be far away. We'll duck behind Vesta or another of the big asteroids and hide so their screens won't pick up our motion. Every now and then we'll sneak out for a look, if the screen seems clear. If those high-vack vermin do find you, get on the landing boat radio and yell for ...
— Rip Foster Rides the Gray Planet • Blake Savage
... Germans can be!"—and also his own alarm over his situation. When would he get back to America at this rate? It was going to cost money to escape from this scrape, and how would his governor and mother feel about it? A few months in a political prison with rats and vermin crawling over him seemed ahead instead of the jolly summer he had planned. He cursed under his breath the member of the CCC who had carelessly let his card get away from ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... and labors that are inseparable from any operation in the nature of a siege were added insupportable torments, the least of which were vermin. As the summer days drew out and the heat grew more intense, the brooks dried up; the creek lost itself in the pestilential swamp; the wells and springs gave out; the river fell, exposing to the almost tropical sun a wide margin of festering ooze. The mortality ...
— History of the Nineteenth Army Corps • Richard Biddle Irwin
... fire I make me bed, and there I lay me down, And think myself as happy as the king that wears a crown. But as you’d be dozing off to sleep a flea will wake you up, Which makes you curse the vermin in the ...
— The Old Bush Songs • A. B. Paterson
... work of vermin, and as such Travis had treated his prisoner. Nancy felt the insult as keenly as she abhorred the cruelty. She fled, hysterical with wrath and despair at her own helplessness. But while she made ready the means of consolation at home, her thinking powers came back, ...
— In Exile and Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... case is not so easily settled; and before the reader is in a condition to judge of our remedy, he ought to know the evil in its whole extent. After all allowances for vermin that waken you before your time, or assassins that send you to sleep before your time, no single Greek nuisance can be placed on the same scale with the dogs attached to every menage, whether household or pastoral. ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... never-filled desire And in close flesh a spiritual fire, A thirst for good their kind shall not attain, A backward cleaving to the beast again. A loathing for the life that I have given, A haunted, twisted soul for ever riven Between their will and mine-such lot I give White still in my despite the vermin live. They hate my world! Then let that other God Come from the outer spaces glory-shod, And from this castle I have built on Night Steal forth my own thought's children into light, If such an one there be. But far away He walks the airy fields of endless day, ...
— Spirits in Bondage • (AKA Clive Hamilton) C. S. Lewis
... she micht be up till, or hoo she micht set aboot it, my leddy. I wad hae ye mistrust her a'thegither. My daddy has a fine moral nose for vermin, an' he canna bide her, though he never had a glimp o' the fause face o' her, an' in ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... a manner that made Frank believe madness could not be far away. "You wouldn't do that! I know why you are here! You have triumphed over me! You wish to see me in all my misery! Well, look at me! Here I have been thrown into this hellish hole, amid rats and vermin, ironed like a nigger! Look till you are satisfied! It will fill your heart with satisfaction! Mock me! Sneer at ...
— Frank Merriwell's Nobility - The Tragedy of the Ocean Tramp • Burt L. Standish (AKA Gilbert Patten)
... "'The feeblest vermin can destroy As sure as stoutest beasts of prey; And only with their eyes and breath, Infect and poison ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... hard and harsh. "Do what you want. We might just as well all go up and get killed at once, instead of dying slowly down here, like vermin in the ground." ...
— The Defenders • Philip K. Dick
... been written latest is always the more correct; that what is written later on is an improvement on what was written previously; and that every change means progress. Men who think and have correct judgment, and people who treat their subject earnestly, are all exceptions only. Vermin is the rule everywhere in the world: it is always at hand and busily engaged in trying to improve in its own way upon the mature deliberations of the thinkers. So that if a man wishes to improve himself in any subject he must guard ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... a confusion of the family, it was impossible that modesty or morality could be maintained. The bed was usually a bag of straw, a wooden log served as a pillow. Personal cleanliness was utterly unknown; great officers of state, even dignitaries so high as the Archbishop of Canterbury, swarmed with vermin; such, it is related, was the condition of Thomas a Becket, the antagonist of an English king. To conceal personal impurity, perfumes were necessarily and profusely used. The citizen clothed himself in leather, a garment which, with its ever-accumulating ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... from our European cats; but the young cats were the same kind of house-breed as the old one; and both my cats being females, I thought it very strange. But from these three cats I afterwards came to be so pestered with cats that I was forced to kill them like vermin or wild beasts, and to drive them from my house as ...
— Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... frequenting the ceilings in preference to the lower parts of houses. Here it is incessantly followed by the rat-snake[2], whose domestication is encouraged by the servants, in consideration of its services in destroying vermin. I had one day an opportunity of surprising a snake that had just seized on a rat of this description, and of covering it suddenly with a glass shade, before it had time to swallow its prey. The serpent, appeared stunned by its own capture, and allowed the rat to escape from its jaws, ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... the estates, and they were often abominably filthy, and infested with loathsome and venomous vermin. For slight offences the slaves were thrust into these prisons for several successive nights—being dragged out every morning to work during the day. Various modes of torture were employed upon those who ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... other dogs. From the bull terrier side he inherits a lively mood, the quality of taking care of himself if attacked by another dog, and of his owner, too, if necessary, the propensity to be a great destroyer of all kinds of vermin if properly trained, and an ideal watch dog at night. No wonder he is popular, he deserves to be. The ...
— The Boston Terrier and All About It - A Practical, Scientific, and Up to Date Guide to the Breeding of the American Dog • Edward Axtell
... to eat, he generally selects a long bough, and pulling off all the lateral branches, leaves a bush at the end forming a sort of whisk to keep off the flies and mosquitoes; for although the hide of the elephant is very thick, still it is broken into crannies and cracks, into which the vermin insert themselves. Sometimes they have the following ingenious method of defending themselves against these tormentors—they put the end of their trunk down in the dust, draw up as large a quantity as they can, and turning their trunks over their heads, pour it out over their skin, ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat) |
