"Ant-" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... down and worship you because you have shown it to me. But I will show it to you, that and the significance of what you will be when you are no longer smothered and starved. In all this scrawling ant-heap of humanity, there are only a handful of human beings who ever really live. And we will be among them. All the rest are nothing, less than nothing, to be stamped down if they impede you. They have no other destiny. But we have! ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... is not an ant-heap. But I know you are right. For Lassalle the Fighter the world holds no wife. If I could only be sure that the victory will ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... return for them the next morning. The day after that we climbed Mount Trumbull, and I triangulated from there. One of my sights from Logan was to a conical butte near which we had camped as we came out, and near which we had found a large ant-hill covered with small, perfect quartz crystals that sparkled in the sun like diamonds. When I sighted to this butte, for want of a better name, I recorded it temporarily as Diamond Butte, remembering ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... begetting her forty years ago in the suburbs of Manchester? and once begotten, how could she do other than grow up cheese-paring, ambitious, with an instinctively accurate notion of the rungs of the ladder and an ant-like assiduity in pushing George Plumer ahead of her to the top of the ladder? What was at the top of the ladder? A sense that all the rungs were beneath one apparently; since by the time that George ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... was disarmed on the field, and all the leaders of the queen's army, including, as the most authentic accounts relate, the queen herself, gathered around him in wild exultation. They carried him to a mound formed by an ant-hill, which they said, in mockery, should be his throne. They placed him upon it with taunts and derision. They made a crown for him of knotted grass, and put it upon his head, and then made mock obeisances ...
— Richard III - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... municipal guard passed me with a suspicious glance. The clocks of the city struck six in a solemn jangle of tones. The boats were moving on the river—the great unwieldy barges as big as a ship. The streets were now astir. Paris seemed huge and as populous as an ant-hill. I felt the hopelessness of seeking unaided one who purposely hid ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... ocean liners, flying the Red Cross, lie at their moorings, and lofty electric cranes gyrate noiselessly over supply ships unloading their stores, while animated swarms of dockers in khaki pile up a great ant-heap of sacks in the sheds with a passionless concentration that seems like the workings of blind instinct. And here are warehouses whose potentialities of wealth are like Mr. Thrale's brewery—wheat, beef, fodder, and the four spices dear to the delicate palates of the Indian contingent. Somewhere ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... finally irritates me thoroughly, and I turn my glances to the opposite side. The other end of my house, also a veranda, opens first of all upon a garden; then upon a marvellous panorama of woods and mountains, with all the venerable Japanese quarters of Nagasaki lying confusedly like a black ant-heap, six hundred feet below us. This evening, in a dull twilight, notwithstanding that it is a twilight of July, these things are melancholy. Great clouds heavy with rain and showers, ready to fall, are travelling ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... long practice knows and gives a name to each reindeer, though, as Linnaeus remarks, "to distinguish one from another among such multitudes was beyond my comprehension, for they were like ants on an ant-hill." In Germany shepherds have won wagers by recognising each sheep in a flock of a hundred, which they had never seen until the previous fortnight. This power of discrimination, however, is as nothing compared to that which some florists have acquired. Verlot mentions a gardener who could distinguish ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... Three days afterwards they reached a secure anchorage, which he named the Bay of Rest, as the crew had been long fatigued when the found it. Here a landing was effected, and Allan Cunningham took occasion to measure one of the gigantic ant-hills of that coast. He found it to be eight feet in height and twenty-six in girth, which after all is not so large as some to be seen in that region. All examinations of the country tending to give King ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... dawn had just broken and she saw that she was standing in a small open space in the midst of a sandalwood scrub, and encircled by twenty or thirty ferocious-looking myall blacks all armed with spears and waddies. The strong ant-like odour which emanated from their jet-black skins filled her nostrils and, putting her hands to her eyes, she shuddered and fell upon her knees with ...
— Chinkie's Flat and Other Stories - 1904 • Louis Becke
... differs in many important points from Mr. Motley, as might be expected from his creed and his life-long pursuits. This I shall refer to in connection with Motley's last work, "John of Barneveld." An historian among archivists and annalists reminds one of Sir John Lubbock in the midst of his ant-hills. Undoubtedly he disturbs the ants in their praiseworthy industry, much as his attentions may flatter them. Unquestionably the ants (if their means of expressing themselves were equal to their apparent intellectual ability) could teach him many things that he has overlooked ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... mercilessly showed up the faults of our Russian administration, which was Germanic by origin in its traditions and its sentiments. Indeed, at that moment, when the enemy at the gates was knocking over the fortresses of Poland like ant-hills, intrigues for place and honour were rife everywhere, and Maklakoff was playing the "panther" to ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... with only brief mention the lower orders of mammalia, like the insect-eating forms to which armadillos and ant-bears belong. Of greater interest are the pouched mammals like the kangaroo and opossums, which live almost exclusively in the Australian realm. The kangaroo is endowed with a head somewhat like that of a goat, and well-developed hind legs that enable it to make leaps of astonishing ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... How ant-like seemed the black army crawling up the icy pass, clinging to its slippery face in the blinding buffet of snow and rain! Men dropped from its ranks uncared for and unpitied. Heedless of those that fell, the gap closed up, the march went on. The great army crawled up and over the summit. Far behind ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... influencing the citizen; but no perceptible trace of the citizen influencing the State. You may, if you like, call the ants a democracy as you may call the bees a despotism. But I fancy that the architectural ant who attempted to introduce an art nouveau style of ant-hill would have a career as curt and fruitless as the celebrated bee who wanted to swarm alone. The isolation of this idea in humanity is akin to its religious character; but it is not even in humanity by any means ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... ant-hill on the plain Of a too busy world! Before me flow, 150 Thou endless stream of men and moving things! Thy every-day appearance, as it strikes— With wonder heightened, or sublimed by awe— On strangers, of all ages; ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... wrong conception, and hence that the person who has reached true knowledge is free from his body even while still alive. The same is declared in the /S/ruti passages concerning him who knows Brahman: 'And as the slough of a snake lies on an ant-hill, dead and cast away, thus lies this body; but that disembodied immortal spirit is Brahman only, is only light' (B/ri/. Up. IV, 4, 7); and 'With eyes he is without eyes as it were, with ears without ears as it were, with speech without speech as it were, with a mind without mind as ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... earth. The Spirit's intellectual eye Its kindred beings recognized. The thronging thousands, to a passing view, 100 Seemed like an ant-hill's citizens. How wonderful! that even The passions, prejudices, interests, That sway the meanest being, the weak touch That moves the finest nerve, 105 And in one human brain Causes the faintest thought, becomes a link In the great ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... in this wilderness. These people literally dig their bread out of earth and stone and ant-heaps, scrape it off the trees, distill it out of uneatable fruit. There is the root-digger, whose booty of mountain ovens is said to go to far Turkey to be turned into scent. He would long have given up digging, to live entirely on ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... we first got a clue to a certain obscure Etruscan museum, hidden away in the Carrara Mountains, in Italy. That wonderful little museum and its adjacent potteries, which cover the face of Italy like ant-hills, are to-day contributors to innumerable beautiful interiors in every ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... Break what must be broken, once for all, that's all, and take the suffering on oneself. What, you don't understand? You'll understand later.... Freedom and power, and above all, power! Over all trembling creation and all the ant-heap!... That's the goal, remember that! That's my farewell message. Perhaps it's the last time I shall speak to you. If I don't come to-morrow, you'll hear of it all, and then remember these words. And some day later on, in years to come, you'll understand perhaps ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... an interlude to his ornithological pursuits, followed the career of a gun-runner, acting as such off and on for two and a half years. The particular revolutionary chief whose fortunes he was following finally came into power, and Cherrie immortalized his name by naming a new species of ant-thrush after him—a delightful touch, in its practical combination of those not normally kindred pursuits, ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... the shafts shot from Arjuna's arms. Partha then, O monarch, having routed the Kaurava army, sped many arrows at Dussasana. Those arrows with iron heads, piercing thy son Dussasana through, all entered the earth like snakes through ant-hills. Arjuna then slew Dussasana's steeds and then felled his charioteer. And the lord Arjuna, with twenty shafts, deprived Vivinsati of his car, and struck him five straight shafts. And piercing Kripa and Vikarna ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... leap.... Each leap seemed to last ages. With each, the cave opened out and the number of Selenites visible increased. At first they seemed all running about like ants in a disturbed ant-hill, one or two waving hatchets and coming to meet me, more running away, some bolting sideways into the avenue of carcasses, then presently others came in sight carrying spears, and then others. I saw a most extraordinary thing, ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... jesi. Answerable for, to be respondi pri. Ant formiko. Antagonist kontrauxulo. Antarctic antarktika. Antecedents antauxajxo. Antechamber antauxcxambro. Antedate antauxdatumi. Antelope antilopo. Anterior antauxa. Anteroom antauxcxambro. Anthem antemo, himnego. Ant-hill formikejo. Anthropology antropologio. Antichrist antikristo. Anticipate antauxvidi. Antidote kontrauxveneno. Antimony antimono. Antipathy antipatio. Antipodes antipodoj. Antiquary antikvisto. Antiquated antikva. Antique antikva. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... completely obliterated with the censor's lamp-black,—that's how it reaches the subscriber's hands. As I stood looking at that, my blood rose to boiling-point! I could have hurrah'd for war with Russia on that one account alone. That contemptible idiot of a Czar, sitting there on his ant-hill throne, ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... to the left there, impressive to look on and conducive to solemn thoughts, the mountains rear their crests against the sky, and, crowned with the gathered snows of the centuries whose monuments they are, from aeon to aeon gaze majestically out over the wide plains and the ephemeral ant-like races who tread them, and while they endure think themselves the masters of their little world. And over all—mountain, plain, and flashing stream—the glorious light of the African sun and the Spirit of Life moving now as it once ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... talked over our whole life in those three days, telling each other about our young days; Pa telling me about some girls he used to spark that I never woulda heard about if it hadn't been for that blizzard.... I told him about my first husband ... he's the one who left me the ant-tic broach ... we did get pretty cold ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... accounts probably produced no very extensive impression at the time. He wrote two other tracts—1. "Discovery of the Dangers of ignorant practisers of Physick in England," 1612, 4to; 2. "Cotta contra Antonium, or An Ant-Anthony," Oxford, 1623, 4to; the latter of which, a keen satire against the chymists' aurum potabile, is exceedingly rare. Both are intrinsically valuable and interesting, and written with great vigour of style, and are full of curious illustrations ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... was encouraging him. Once having consciously decided that, she turned no more until she had reached the protection of the fountain in the middle of the Circus. There she stopped and glanced back. He was gone. In all the hundreds of human beings who mingled and churned like a swarm of ants upon an ant-hill, he was nowhere to be seen. With a genuine sigh of relief, she crossed over to the Piccadilly side and walked beside a Hammersmith 'bus, as if slowed gradually down to the regulated place where the conditions of traffic permit vehicles ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... history. Royal persons, favourites, intriguers, bishops, passed like mute phantoms behind their veil of names. All had died: all had been judged. What did it profit a man to gain the whole world if he lost his soul? At last he had understood: and human life lay around him, a plain of peace whereon ant-like men laboured in brotherhood, their dead sleeping under quiet mounds. The elbow of his companion touched him and his heart was touched: and when he spoke to answer a question of his master he heard his own voice full of the ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... in a level plain beyond the visible horizon, and in which he beheld a structure that appeared to have been raised by human industry. M. de Prefontaine, who accompanied him in the expedition, informed him that it was an ant-hill, which they could not approach without danger of being devoured. They passed some of the paths frequented by the labourers, which belonged to a very large species of black ants. The nest they had constructed, which had the form of a truncated pyramid, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... we buried what remained of him in an ant-bear hole, together with an assegai to protect himself with on his journey to a better world. On the third day we marched again, hoping that we might live to return to dig up our buried ivory, and in due ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... could not enjoy torturing his prisoners. He tried that once on a Mexican down Agua Prieta way. After the custom of his nation he pegged out the luckless prisoner near an ant-hill, with his mouth propped open by a wooden gag and a trail of honey ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... ceasing their wild movements and grouping in mild amazement at the strange invasion. And still the dots diverge. It is the advance-guard of our column—heralds of selfish man bringing horrid war into this peaceful vale. As the dots mingle with the ant-heaps on the plain, or are lost in the folds of the grey prairie, a pillar of dust rises from the centre of the fan. A larger mass of brown—the battery and its escort—a great kharki caterpillar creeping across the grey,—it is time to be moving, the ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... presents so many brilliant birds as South America, yet there are extensive families, containing many hundreds of species, which are as plainly coloured as our average temperate birds. Such are the families of the bush-shrikes and ant-thrushes (Formicariidae), the tyrant-shrikes (Tyrannidae), the American creepers (Dendrocolaptidae), together with a large proportion of the wood-warblers (Mniotiltidae), the finches, the wrens, and some other groups. In the eastern hemisphere, also, we have the babbling-thrushes ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... of interest is furnished to a squad of French prisoners being marched along the road. Then a spot of ant-hill-like activity where a German railway company is at work building a new branch line, hundreds of them having pickaxes and making the dirt fly. You half expect to see a swearing Irish foreman. It looks like home—all except the inevitable officer (distinguished by ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... the key to the kingdom of the Messiah was an army which, scattered over the plain, resembled a dark spot spreading out in the desert, as busy and animated as an ant-hill. The chief pointed down to it and said: "Look, there is my weapon. But I shall not conquer with that weapon, nor will you conquer with your words. For my weapons lack words, and your words lack weapons. I need the prophet ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... men is going; the epoch of the ant-hill, of life in multiplicity, is beginning. The century of individualism, if abstract equality triumphs, runs a great risk of seeing no more true individuals. By continual leveling and division of labor, society will become ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... so consumed him that he became quite a skeleton, notwithstanding every remedy which he had tried. At length he tried a sympathetic remedy: he took an egg, and having boiled it hard in his own urine, he then with a bodkin perforated the shell in different parts, and then buried it in an ant-hill. As the ants wasted the egg he found his strength increase, and he soon was completely cured. A daughter of a French officer was so tormented by a paronychia (?) for four days together, that the pain kept her from sleeping; by the order of a medical man she put her finger into a cat's ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... a hill out of an ant-heap," said the old woman, vigorously. "No harm's done. You're a mighty slick girl, and these boys don't see many like you out here in the sage-brush and pinyons. Facts are, you're kind o' upsettin' to a feller like Roy. You make him kind o' drunk-like. ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... consisting of four kinds of forces, occupied a level ground commanding a copious water-supply. And forsaking cemeteries and temples dedicated to the gods, and sacred trees, and grounds covered by ant-hills, that host occupied every other place. And the roads (leading to the city) were blocked up by the divisions of the army, and the secret entrances also were all blocked up by the enemy's camp. And, O Kauravya, like unto ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... On ant-hills screamed cranes with delight; In their rooms were our wives sighing sore. Our homes they had swept and made tight:— All at once we arrived at the door. The bitter gourds hanging are seen, From branches of chestnut-trees high. Three years of toil away we had been, Since ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... learned, partly through a wonderful instinct and partly through her mother's teaching, how to act when there was cause for alarm. Immediately on detecting the presence of an intruder, she lay as still as the stone beside the ant-heap near, trusting that she would not be distinguished from her surroundings. But if flight was absolutely necessary, she sped away towards the nearest gap, and thence over pasture and cornfield, always up-hill if possible, out-distancing ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... MYRMIDONS, "ant-men," so-called because Zeus was said to have peopled Thessaly, from which originally they came, by transforming ants into men; they were the people of AEgina, whose warriors followed Achilles to ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... from head to tail in huge, horny plates, which look like immense finger-nails overlapping each other. His head sharpens out into a long, narrow snout, which contains a sticky, worm-like tongue, and this he can use with great rapidity and effect in raiding an ant-hill. He drops his tongue over the entrance, and the ants attempt to crawl over it and are glued to it. He walks in a very unique way by going upon the backs of his feet. This preserves his wonderful claws for bursting ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... its root the children chiefly subsist. As soon almost as they can walk a little wooden shovel is put into their hands, and they learn thus early to pick about the ground for those roots and a few others, or to dig out the larvae of ant-hills. The gins never carry a child in arms as our females do, but always in a skin on the back. The infant is seized by an arm and thrown with little care over the shoulders, when it soon finds its way to its warm berth, holding by the back of the mother's head while it slides down into it. ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... familiar as a channel marking, teeming as an ant-hill, and when darkness came over it, and he viewed it from the after deck, mystery came, too.... For a while there was a hush, and around the hills gigantic ghosts walked.... One thought of the Phocaeans who had founded it, and to whom the Cannebiere ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... white fist foolishly at the north; "I'm wanting but peace and my books. I keep my ambition in leash, and still and on they must be snapping like curs at Argile. God's name! and I'll crush them like ants on the ant-heap." ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... Iyutch name for the mammals of genus Orycteropus, confined to Africa (see EDEN-TATAI. Several species have been named. Among them is the typical form, O. capensis, or Cape ant-bear from South Africa, and the northern aard-vark (O. aethiopicus) of north-eastern Africa, extending into Egypt. In form these animals are somewhat pig-like; the body is stout, with arched back; the limbs are short and stout, armed with strong, blunt claws; ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... fauna of the Australian and Austro-Columbian provinces; but, seeing that not a trace of a Platyrrhine Ape, of a Procyonine Carnivore, of a characteristically South-American Rodent, of a Sloth, an Armadillo, or an Ant-eater has yet been found in Miocene deposits of Arctogaea, I cannot doubt that they already existed in the ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... a ship go down with all its crew, and commented severely on the injustice of the gods. "They care nothing for a man's character," said he, "but let the good and the bad go to their deaths together." There was an ant-heap close by where he was standing, and, just as he spoke, he was bitten in the foot by an Ant. Turning in a temper to the ant-heap he stamped upon it and crushed hundreds of unoffending ants. Suddenly Mercury appeared, and belaboured him with his staff, saying as he did so, "You villain, ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... who escapes for a while from the great teeming human ant-hill, with its dark foggy lanes and solid firmament of hanging smoke, to draw in a little unadulterated atmosphere at Calcombe Pomeroy, finds himself landed by the Plymouth slow train at Calcombe Road Station, twelve miles by cross-country highway from his final destination. The little ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... wanting only hands: or are there to be knights among us, who will need squires—captains among us, needing crews? Will you have clansmen for your candlesticks, or silver plate? Myrmidons at your tents, ant-born, or only a mob on the Gillies' Hill? Are you resolved that you will never have any but your inferiors to serve you, or shall Enid ever lay your trencher with tender little thumb, and Cinderella sweep your hearth, and be ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... Mother Snail. "Our son shall not go into an ant-hill; if you know nothing better than that, we shall give the commission to the white gnats. They fly far and wide, in rain and sunshine; they know the whole forest here, both ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... beautiful corner of earth. He was learned and profound, and he took himself and the Church and the State seriously. He felt himself a part of an indestructible institution, whereas man and all his works are no more peculiar, no more wonderful than an ant-hill—and last only a day longer. He never realized that he was a part of the great whole that made up mountain, lake, globe, wooded glen and tireless river. He differentiated. He considered himself a man, an educated man, and therefore a little better, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... of the Ant-lion is classic; it does not differ greatly from the others. He excavates a conical pitfall, in which he conceals himself, and seizes the unfortunate ants and other insects whom ill-chance causes ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... unmarried women of the middle-classes are the famous sexless-workers of our ant-industrial society, of which we hear so much. Perhaps all they lack is an occupation: in short, a job. But perhaps we might hear their own opinion, before we ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... in plain sight, and in the central space could be seen a number of ant-like figures which the boys knew ...
— Air Service Boys in the Big Battle • Charles Amory Beach
... lift his head and nicker. One of the men rose silently to a sitting posture, and reached for his rifle. For a moment he seemed to be looking right at me; but his eyes passed on, and he carefully examined every bit of foliage and every ant-hill and grass-mound, and all the time he strained his ears for sounds. I held my breath. At last he lay down again; but in a few minutes he got up, ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... Origin of Species had come into the theological world like a plow into an ant-hill. Everywhere those thus rudely awakened from their old comfort and repose had swarmed forth angry and confused. Reviews, sermons, books, light and heavy, came flying at the new thinker from all sides." (White, A. D., The Warfare of Science ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... Violet, we are getting too serious. I've given you enough ethics for one talk, I think! Do let us have a little play. Lily, what were you so busy about, at the ant-hill in the ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... a young bull-terrier belonging to Mr. Downing. If it is possible for a man to have two apples of his eye, Sammy was the other. He was a large, light-hearted dog with a white coat, an engaging expression, the tongue of an ant-eater, and a manner which was a happy blend of hurricane and circular saw. He had long legs, a tenor voice, and was apparently made ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... been seen, as if at home, Some longish, brownish, buzzing creatures, Much like the bees in wings and features. But what of that? for marks the same, The hornets, too, could truly claim. Between assertion, and denial, The wasp, in doubt, proclaim'd new trial; And, hearing what an ant-hill swore, Could see no clearer than before. "What use, I pray, of this expense?" At last exclaim'd a bee of sense. "We've labour'd months in this affair, And now are only where we were. Meanwhile the honey runs to waste: 'Tis time the judge should show some haste. The parties, ...
— A Hundred Fables of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... sighs o'er, and she sighs o'er gold; Gold will buy all things, even a sweet husband, Else only Heaven is left and—farewell youth! Yet, strangely, in that money-haunted head, The sad, gemmed crucifix and incense blue Is childhood once again. Her memory Is like an ant-hill which a twig disturbs, But twig stilled never. And to see her face, Broad with sleek homely beams; her babied hands, Ever like 'lighting doves, and her small eyes— Blue wells a-twinkle, arch and ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... has been the evolution of the globe itself! What myriads of ages between the first cooling of its mass and the beginnings of life![3112] Of what consequence is the turmoil of our ant-hill compared to the geological tragedy in which we have born no part, the strife between fire and water, the thickening of the earth's crust, formation of the universal sea, the construction and separation of continents! ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... as art is concerned; art supplies wings, not crutches. Alas! D'Aubignac followed rules, Campistron copied models. What does it matter to art? It does not build its palaces for ants. It lets them make their ant-hill, without taking the trouble to find out whether they have built their burlesque imitation of its palace upon ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... I may tell you, That a black snail, with his belly slit, to show his white, or a piece of soft cheese, will usually do as well. Nay, sometimes a worm, or any kind of fly, as the ant-fly, the flesh-fly, or wall-fly; or the dor or beetle which you may find under cow-dung; or a bob which you will find in the same place, and in time will be a beetle; it is a short white worm, like to and bigger than a gentle; or a cod- worm; or a case-worm; any of ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... horrid feet, who used to sit with the negro women when they were at work, and play with bits of paper; and a Quata, who used to be sent to the tavern for wine, and when the children pelted him he put down the wine and threw stones at them. And there are pictures in all the numbers, of birds and ant-eaters and antelopes, and I don't know what. The Mono and the Quata live in the West Indies, I think. You see, I think the A's are rather good numbers; very likely, for there's America, and Asia, and Africa, and Arabia, and Abyssinia, ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... of ants working together in perfect harmony, it is impossible not to ask ourselves how far they are mere exquisite automatons; how far they are conscious beings. When we watch an ant-hill tenanted by thousands of industrious inhabitants, excavating chambers, forming tunnels, making roads, guarding their home, gathering food, feeding the young, tending their domestic animals—each one fulfilling its duties industriously, ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... anaesthetic poison and at the same time, no doubt, the serum capable of turning the solid flesh into fluid. Those two tiny implements, which can just be examined through the lens, must, it seems, have some other object. They are hollow, and in this resemble those of the Ant-lion, who sucks and drains her capture without having to divide it; but there is this great difference, that the Ant-lion leaves copious remnants, which are afterwards flung outside the funnel-shaped trap dug in the sand, whereas the Glow-worm, that expert liquifier, leaves nothing, ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... The cook's moans had now subsided. On two sides black curling clouds of smoke rose and spread from the fires. Through the streets soldiers in various uniforms walked or ran confusedly in different directions like ants from a ruined ant-hill. Several of them ran into Ferapontov's yard before Alpatych's eyes. Alpatych went out to the gate. A retreating regiment, thronging ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... creatures, were tested in the Zoological Gardens. A stuffed snake taken into the monkey-house caused several species to bristle. When Darwin showed the same to a peccary, the hair rose in a wonderful manner along its back. A cassowary erected its feathers at sight of an ant-eater. ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... that I might identify them later I was obliged to give him titles for these. They had no names in our language, and I did not know the native ones, so, remembering that at the foot of one I had found some ant-hills covered with beautiful diamond-like quartz crystals, I called it Diamond Butte, and the other, having a dark, weird, forbidding look, I named on the spur of the moment Solitaire Butte. These ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... and no utterance or word ever came from those far-off and silent spaces. Above, is that awful majesty; around us, everywhere, it stretches off into infinity; and beneath it is this little struggle of life, this poor day's conflict, this busy ant-hill of Time. ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... leaves. As he walks he browses a mouthful of young leaves here, scratches up a root there, tears the bark off a decaying tree and eats the insects underneath, lifts a stone and finds a mouse or a lizard beneath, or loiters for twenty minutes over an ant-hill. With plenty of time, he is never in a hurry, and ...
— Bear Brownie - The Life of a Bear • H. P. Robinson
... Sandy said he wasn't half so strong as Polly, and wanted to give up; but I wanted just no fellow but Sandy. And then Polly has been scared of boats, and rather a land-lubber, ever since his aunt got blown up on a steamer. Besides, he cares more about his menagerie, and was busy training his ant-eater. ...
— Harper's Young People, May 11, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... to sleep, tired to exhaustion. My overcoat was my only covering, and there had been a slight snowfall the day before. I slept, to be awakened ten minutes later by swarms of fleas so numerous that it was like lying in an ant-hill. Three times in the night I went out to shake the fleas from my clothing in the cold night air, and when the first daylight came we turned out and made our ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... old ways, and their motto seems to be, 'Every one for himself, and the devil take the hindmost.' Cheating, lying and stealing are hard words, and I don't mean to apply them to all who swarm about below there like ants on an ant-hill—they have other names for these things, but I'm old-fashioned and use plain words. There's a deal too much dishonesty in the world, and business seems to have become a game of hazard in which luck, not labor, wins the prize. When I was ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... missie; de ant-thrushes, you call them," said the black woman, gleefully. "Now missie's house will be clean; massa is away, all de tings will be turned out," and as she spoke, she seized her mistress's dress, and, gently drawing her to the open door, directed her attention to several dark-coloured, ...
— Little Folks (October 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... many were sent to Blighty. I worried the doctor as to when I should go, and always received the non-committal reply, 'When you are fit to travel.' Saturday, however, found me on board of a hospital ship, and at 9 o'clock that night we arrived at Southampton. Ant-like, the stretcher-bearers went to and fro, from ship to train. For some reason or other they dumped me in a corner with my head nearest the scene of activities, so that I was unable to interest myself in watching ...
— One Young Man • Sir John Ernest Hodder-Williams
... the morning we found Mac "packed up" and ready for the start, and, passing the reins to him, the Maluka said, "You know the road best "; and Mac, being what he called a "bit of a Jehu," we set off in great style across country, apparently missing trees by a hair's breadth, and bumping over the ant-hills, boulders, and broken boughs that lay half-hidden ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... together with lianas, they had hewed a path. Monkeys and parrots chattered at them, and a white miasmatic vapour hung over trees and lakes, burying the clearings in its wreaths, and lifting only at mid-day, to close again upon the woods at night. They talked of alligators, jaguars, the giant ant-eater, and the mysterious bird known to them as the 'ipetata', which in its tail carries a burning fire. In the recesses of the thickets demons lurked, and wild Caaguas, who with a blowpipe and a poisoned arrow slew you and your horse, themselves unseen. ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... rather haltingly when they had reached a sandy, ant-infested path that ran slantingly up among the trees. He affected a certain perplexity. He said he did not understand what it was his wife was "after," what she "thought she was doing" in "making all this trouble"; he wanted to know just what it was she ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... sweetmeats on the ground, and he took out another, and another, and another, until he had taken them all out; but in each he found an ant. "Never mind," he said, "I won't eat the sweetmeats; the ants shall eat them." Then the Ant-Raja came and stood before him and said, "You have been good to us. If ever you are in trouble, think of me and we will come ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Anonymous
... carriages of all sorts and shapes, moved to and fro along the boulevard; everything was bustle, everything was brightness, wherever one chanced to look.... But, strange to say, I had no inclination to forsake my pure dark airy height. I had no inclination to get nearer to this human ant-hill. It seemed as though a hot, heavy, reddish vapour rose from it, half-fragrance, half-stench; so many lives were flung struggling in one heap together there. I was hesitating.... But suddenly, sharp as ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... York, since it took to doing business in towers, has become interesting to look at from the sea; nor is it possible to walk through the overshadowed streets without feeling a pleasing wonder. A city, when enough people swarm in it, is as fascinating as an ant-hill, and its buildings, whatever other charms they may have, are at least as curious and delightful as sea-shells or birds' nests. The purpose of improvements in modern structures may be economic, just as the purpose of castles was military; but both may incidentally please ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... The millet stems were so high that he disappeared within them with a crumpling of dry leaves. The soft ant-hills which it was his daily custom to level off failed to attract his attention. He walked straight on. Parrots flew by, chattering, with their green wings shining in the sun, and huge grasshoppers were jumping ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... no other occasion, of perfect health of mind and body. The aeronauts of the 'Geant' will scarcely condescend to pity those miserable mortals whom they can only faintly recognise by their gigantic works, which appear to them not more dignified than ant-hills! ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion
... it from a distance it looked like an enormous mass of ant-hills, for the low windowless one-story huts, as has been suggested, are made of yellowish sun-dried clay, and are often roofed with clay also—made flat on top with a little trench or gutter for drainage. ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... there is a stile, sitting upon which the view ranges over two adjacent meadows. They are bounded by a copse of ash stoles and young oak trees, and the lesser of the meads is full of rush bunches and dotted with green ant-hills. Among these, just beyond gunshot, two rabbits are feeding; pausing and nibbling till they have eaten the tenderest blades, and then leisurely hopping a yard or so to another spot. Later on in the summer this little meadow which ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... long way to Lakelands. He lived in a big, roaring town in the Northwest where he owned mills, not little mills with pews and an organ in them, but great, ugly, mountain-like mills that the freight trains crawled around all day like ants around an ant-heap. And now you must be told about Father Abram and the mill that was a church, for their stories ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... calculated to make a man report about four times his actual income to keep from swearing to a falsehood. I looked for a loophole, but there did not appear to be any. Inquiry No. 1 covered my case as generously and as amply as an umbrella could cover an ant-hill: ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... problem was insignificant. In the presence of that army the red Notting Hills and the green Bayswaters were alike tiny and straggling groups. In its presence the whole struggle round Pump Street was like an ant-hill under the hoof of an ox. Every man who felt or looked at that infinity of men knew that it was the triumph of Buck's brutal arithmetic. Whether Wayne was right or wrong, wise or foolish, was quite ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... made a note of this dome some time before. It takes a number of such domes to raise a brood of partridges. For this was an ant's nest. The old one stepped on top, looked about a moment, then gave half a dozen vigorous rakes with her daws, The friable ant-hill was broken open, and the earthen galleries scattered in ruins down the slope. The ants swarmed out and quarreled with each other for lack of a better plan. Some ran around the hill with vast energy and little purpose, while a few of the more sensible ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton
... Virgin, not to invoke their names, and to have no fear of them. He then conducts him to the wood, glen, cave or field where the pact with the Devil is concluded, which they call 'the agreement' or 'the word given' (in Tzental quiz). In some provinces the disciple is laid on an ant-hill, and the Master standing above him calls forth a snake, colored with black, white and red, which is known as 'the ant-mother' (in Tzental zmezquiz).[19-[]] This comes accompanied by the ants and other small snakes of the same ...
— Nagualism - A Study in Native American Folk-lore and History • Daniel G. Brinton
... latter are turning out from their bivouacs. They move stiffly from their wet rest, and hurry to and fro like ants in an ant-hill. The tens of thousands of moving specks are largely of a brick-red colour, but the foreign contingent ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... last quarter of an hour, and the sound of their paws making the snow crackle inspired the old man with an indescribable terror. The number of animals seemed momentarily to be augmented; it resembled an ant-heap seen through the magnifying-glass ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... determine the boundaries, as they are indicated by elevated ground, by charcoal [-remnants],[232] by husks,[233] by trees, by a causeway, by ant-hills, by depressions of the soil, by bones, by memorials,[234] and ...
— Hindu Law and Judicature - from the Dharma-Sastra of Yajnavalkya • Yajnavalkya
... Effie into a doorway, and thought she would wait till the people had passed, but she waited and waited, and still they kept on coming backwards and forwards, just for all the world like a number of busy ants swarming about an ant-hill. There was no end to them. They hustled and jostled, and ran and pushed, and talked till Phyllis was utterly bewildered, and said to herself she ...
— Little Folks (November 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... common very well; it was for the most part very uneven ground, covered with heather and dark-green furze bushes, with here and there a scrubby old thorn-tree; there were also open spaces of fine short grass, with ant-hills and mole-turns everywhere; the worst place I ever knew for a ...
— Black Beauty • Anna Sewell
... up as high as possible, as if to strike with it, and shuffle along the ground toward them, scolding all the while in a harsh voice. I feared at first that they might kill him, but I soon found that he was able to take care of himself. I would turn over stones and dig into ant-hills for him, and he would lick up the ants so fast that a stream of them seemed going into his mouth unceasingly. I kept him till late in the fall, when he disappeared, probably going south, and I never saw ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... home look. She said she had seen two or three coffins in a day, during cholera times, carried out of that narrow passage into which her door opened. These avenues put me in mind of those which run through ant-hills, or those which a mole makes underground. This fashion of Rows does not appear to be going out; and, for aught I can see, it may last hundreds of years longer. When a house becomes so old as to be untenantable, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... pleasantry, but the truth. He had been watching an ant-hill, and was so absorbed in observing a dead ant carried off by the living colonists for burial that ...
— Fables in Rhyme for Little Folks - From the French of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... real river greeted the gaze of our travellers, and, by the enormous ant-hills seen in its vicinity, the doctor recognized the Benoue, one of the great tributaries of the Niger, the one which the natives have called ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... and vegetable gardens unbroken by wall or hedge; nothing to cast a shadow on the dead level except an occasional walled town or temple grove! And the horrible land was all alive with swarming, toiling, ant-hill ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... child is forced by law to think his schoolmaster's requirements more important than his mother's? No, Gudge and his friends in the House of Lords and the Carlton Club must make up their minds on this matter, and that very quickly. If they are content to have England turned into a beehive and an ant-hill, decorated here and there with a few faded butterflies playing at an old game called domesticity in the intervals of the divorce court, then let them have their empire of insects; they will ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... air, the sea alternately advanced and retreated beyond its ordinary bounds, and a mountain was torn from Libanus, [84] and cast into the waves, where it protected, as a mole, the new harbor of Botrys [85] in Phoenicia. The stroke that agitates an ant-hill may crush the insect-myriads in the dust; yet truth must extort confession that man has industriously labored for his own destruction. The institution of great cities, which include a nation within the limits of a wall, almost realizes the wish of Caligula, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... black snake that lived in the ant-hill at the back of the house whose movements Jim and the piccanin had been discussing. The snake ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... Strange is that ant-like down's appearance circling the oval of thy face; Yet musky shade is not a stranger within the ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... him: "All other employments are assigned; the people who came first took them and went away; but stop, I will also give one to thee. Go, and having arrived at the entrance of the black ants, where are a great many ant-heads, when thou seest these many heads of the black ants, take them, and fill thy bags with them; then load thy bags upon thy ass, carry them to market, spread mats ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various
... every hollow, he saw the horns of innumerable talking-machines growing out of the ground. Thousands upon thousands of those familiar cornucopias of bright lacquer with gilt edges pointed their open mouths up at him. And each one was the center of a swarming ant-hill of busy gunners ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko
... yet come to read the other side of her, she had a trust in God Almighty that was like the bow anchor of a three-decker. It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth looking at. I don't think your ant-eating specialist, with his sharp nose and pin-head eyes, is the best every-day companion; but any man who knows one thing well is worth listening to for once; and if you are of the large-brained variety of the race, and want to fill out your programme of the Order of Things in a systematic ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... and heaviest four-footed creature now existent on Dunk Island is the so-called porcupine (spiny ant-eater or echidna). An animal which possesses some of the features of the hedgehog of old England, and resembles in others that distinctly Australian paradox, the platypus, which has a mouth which it cannot open—a mere tube through which the tongue is thrust, which in the production ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... birth in their race, make Vali offerings to me for the enhancement of my strength and energy. Verily, let my strength be as great as that of the blessed Narayana when he raised the submerged Earth!—Uttering these mantras, one should make Vali offerings upon an ant-hill. When the maker of day retires to his chambers in the west, upon the ant-hill selected should offerings be made of raw sugar and rice. The ant-hill should previously be scattered with Gajendra flowers, Offerings should ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... band of the Mavericks playing the regiment to camp; for the men were route-marching with their baggage. The rippling column swung into the level—carts behind it divided left and right, ran about like an ant-hill, ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... horse,—there being many instances of its having been done. Its voracity is prodigious. The French naturalist Firmin found in the stomach of an anaconda a large sloth, an iguana four feet long, and a good-sized ant-bear; all three in the same state almost as when they were swallowed—a proof that they had been captured within a short time. Bates relates that an Indian father with his son went one day in their montario to gather fruit a short distance from Egga, when, landing on a sloping, sandy shore, ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... I saw an ant-hill With no ants about; So I said, "Dear little ants, Won't you please come out?" Then as if the little ants Had heard my call— One! two! three! four! five came ...
— Finger plays for nursery and kindergarten • Emilie Poulsson
... require facts, and reject gratuitous suppositions. It should be remembered, that bees do not form the sole republic among insects presenting a similar phenomenon; female ants are also obliged to leave the ant-hills ...
— New observations on the natural history of bees • Francis Huber
... how they came to apply for leave: One day Langley was strolling about just outside the lines, looking for somebody to talk to, when he noticed an apparently very old native man sitting on an ant-heap and regarding him somewhat intently. This old native had been several times seen in the vicinity of the camp, but he never seemed to speak to any one, and he looked so harmless that the police did not even ...
— Stories by English Authors: Africa • Various
... kept in captivity having accidentally escaped, met and recognized their former companions, fell to mutual caresses with their antennae, took them up by their mandibles, and led them to their own nests; they came presently in a crowd to seek the fugitives under and about the artificial ant-hill, and even ventured to reach the bell-glass, where they effected a complete desertion by carrying away successively all the ants they found there. In a few days, the ruche was depopulated. These ants had remained ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... completely round at will, till the claws point forward like those of a bat. But with him, too, the tail is the sheet-anchor, by which he can hold on, and bring all his four feet to bear on his food. So it is with the little Ant-eater, {91b} who must needs climb here to feed on the tree ants. So it is, too, with the Tree Porcupine, {91c} or Coendou, who (in strange contrast to the well-known classic Porcupine of the rocks of Southern Europe) climbs trees after leaves, and swings about like ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... is divided into associations of artists, of merchants, of bookbinders, of carpenters, of masons, of plasterers, of shipwrights, of plumbers. Do you cry out against it? Then you cry out against a tendency divinely implanted. Your tirades will accomplish no more than if you should preach to a busy ant-hill or bee-hive a ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... up here—four or five days ago now? I was coming to tell you to burn the stuff, and then you know one of the youngsters stirred up an ant-bed and drove ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner |
