"Tomtit" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... curious mixture of the unctuousness and benedictory manner of the pulpit and the limp twitterings of the curate at a ladies' tea-fight. This was the head of the Bishop of Ripon. I cannot stare for even a second at this tiny tomtit and artificial figure, with all those lawn sleeves and black gowns, and all the other fripperies and draperies of the parson-peer, who is to every rational man so grotesque and contemptible an intruder in a ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... which I could not but consider as levelled at me. Nevertheless, I did but calmly and solidly pray him to choose a different subject; failing which, I let him know I should be sudden in my resentment. Notwithstanding, he continued in the same tone, and even aggravated the offence, by speaking of a tomtit, and other unnecessary and obnoxious comparisons; whereupon I was compelled to send him a cartel, and we met accordingly. Now, as I really loved the youth, it was my intention only to correct him by a flesh wound or two; and I would willingly that he had named the sword for ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... Stutely, coming up to the stranger, "wipe thine eyes, man! I do hate to see a tall, stout fellow so sniveling like a girl of fourteen over a dead tomtit. Put down thy bow, man! ...
— The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood • Howard Pyle
... these are not birds of passage; they do not leave us at the first cold blast, to find a warmer climate; the least we can do is to recompense them by feeding them when the weather is too severe! Several know me already, and are very tame. There is a blackbird in particular, and a blue tomtit, that are both ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... Orthotrichum pumulum! Phlomoides, and in wet spots are Epilobium. The descent shewed nothing remarkable: towards the nullah I noticed Engelhaardtia, tree fern, and Gaultheria deflexa. Obtained a beautiful woodpecker at 5,000 feet, with the chesnut-pated lesser tomtit, Yunx, and speckled Brachypodium in woods here; this last has the habit and manners of the crooked ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... bush in a garden a little Tomtit Sang "Willow, Tit-willow, Tit-willow!" And I said to him, "Dicky-bird, why do you sit Singing 'Willow, Tit-willow, Tit-willow'?" "I've had nothing to eat for three days," he replied, "Though in searching for berries I've gone far and wide, And I feel a pain here in ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., Dec. 20, 1890 • Various
... seaward and cut and run, but it seemed too hopeless. A step back and they'd have been after me. And out of sheer desperation I began to march towards them up the beach, with slow, heavy steps, and waving my blown-out arms about, in a dignified manner. And inside of me I was singing as small as a tomtit. ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... through one of the window-casements: from a hole without he saw the head of a tomtit protruding. He listlessly watched the bird during the successive epochs of his thought, till night came, without any perceptible change occurring in him. Such fixity would have meant nothing else than sudden death ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... Parnell, and the rest, used to indulge in occasional excesses, which did his feeble constitution no good; and once, according to Colley Cibber, he narrowly escaped a serious scrape in a house of a certain description,—Colley, by his own account, "helping out the tomtit for the sake of Homer!" This statement, indeed, Pope has denied; but his veracity was by no means his strongest point. After writing a "Farewell to London," he retired, in 1715, to Twickenham, along with his parents; and remained there, ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... down to talk that is outside the vocabulary of parrots. That is a bad habit you have got of riding with young ladies over at Pimienta. I've known birds,' says I, 'to be served on toast for less than that. Miss Willella,' says I, 'don't ever want any nest made out of sheep's wool by a tomtit of the Jacksonian branch of ornithology. Now, are you going to quit, or do you wish for to gallop up against this Dead-Moral-Certainty attachment to my name, which is good for two hyphens and at least one set of ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry |
