|
|
|
More "Adder" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... woman rushing to Mrs. Seabright and throwing her arms about her neck. Between sobs she said, "Mother, mother, do with me what you will, just so you allow me to be with her when I choose. Oh, mother, how I wish you were now what you were before the adder ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... not th' unbounded greatness of his mind Betray my king to negligence of danger. Perhaps, the clouds of dark conspiracy Now roll, full fraught with thunder, o'er your head. Twice, since the morning rose, I saw the bassa, Like a fell adder swelling in a brake, Beneath the covert of this verdant arch, In private conference; beside him stood Two men unknown, the partners of his bosom; I mark'd them well, and trac'd in either face The gloomy ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... The live adder regarded the assembled group with a sinister look in its small black eye, and the beautiful brown and jet pattern on its back seemed to intensify with indignation. Mrs. Yeobright saw the creature, and the creature saw her: she quivered throughout, ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... all fell through the lust of the eye. I should make a covenant with mine, and pray, 'Turn away mine eyes from viewing vanity.' ... Satan makes unconverted men like the deaf adder to the sound of the gospel. I should pray to be made deaf by the Holy Spirit to all that would tempt me ...
— The Biography of Robert Murray M'Cheyne • Andrew A. Bonar
... et mare coelo Confundas; thunder, lighten, preach hell and damnation, tell them 'tis a sin, they will not believe it; denounce and terrify, they have [2043]cauterised consciences, they do not attend, as the enchanted adder, they stop their ears. Call them base, irreligious, profane, barbarous, pagans, atheists, epicures, (as some of them surely are) with the bawd in Plautus, Euge, optime, they cry and applaud themselves with that miser, [2044]simul ac nummos contemplor in arca: say what you will, quocunque ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... M. Colbert," replied D'Artagnan. "He is an exceptional man, is that M. Colbert. He does not love you; that is very possible; but, mordioux! the squirrel can guard himself against the adder ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... sky. From the trees the bell-bird, the coach-whip, the tewinga, the laughing-jackass, the rifle-bird and regent, filled the air with sound, if not with music. And the black snake, the brown snake, the whip, the diamond, and the death adder glided gently among the fallen leaves and grasses, and held themselves in cheerful readiness for intruders. That was why a condition was attached to the ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner
... an adder, whom athwart the way Some wheel hath crushed, or traveller, passing by, Maimed with a stone, as unaware he lay, And left sore mangled, on the point to die, In vain his coils would lengthen, fain to fly: One half erect, his burning eyes around He darts, and ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... distinct species of snakes peculiar to Australia, of which sixty are venomous, and fifteen amphibious. The most common of the deadly serpents are the death adder, black snake, brown snake, tiger snake, and diamond snake. The latter is so called on account of the color of his skin, which is laid out in lozenges of a diamond shape, alternately brown and white. The death adder, so the keeper told us, ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox
... solitude I feel an overwhelming desire to rush forward and comfort her. You cannot, you see, have acted as nurse to a person for twelve years without wishing to go on nursing them, even though you hate them with the hatred of the adder, and even in the palm of God. But, in the nights, with that vision of judgement before me, I know that I hold myself back. For I hate Florence. I hate Florence with such a hatred that I would not spare her an eternity ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... I have ever seen them growing in Vermont," says I, at last; "yet there are few roots or vegetables, wild or tame, that I don't know something about. There is wake-robin, on the mountains, with its spokes of red berries; and snake-root, and adder's-tongue; but I don't remember clam-bakes among them, and I know they are not cultivated in our parts as garden-sas, I beg pardon, ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... please myselfe. And here might I begin with those notable Pirates in this our paper-sea, those sea-dogs, or lande-Critikes, monsters of men, if not beastes rather than men; whose teeth are Canibals, their toongs adder-forkes, their lips aspes-poyson, their eies basiliskes, their breath the breath of a grave, their wordes like swordes of Turkes, that strive which shall dive deepest into a Christian lying bound before them. But for these barking and biting dogs, ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... besought his sons to intercede for their lives, but they would not. The heart of Hogni was cut out, and Gunnar was cast into a pen of serpents. He struck his harp and lulled the serpents, but an adder stung ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... later we discovered the reason. The horse had shied at a sleeping puff adder which was curled up in the sand of that little frequented road, and on this puff adder Savage had descended with so much force, for he weighed thirteen stone, that the creature was squashed quite flat and never stirred again. This, however, he did not notice in his agitation, ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... only concerned with the injuries inflicted by the venomous varieties of snakes, the most important of which are the hooded snakes of India, the rattle-snakes of America, the horned snakes of Africa, the viper of Europe, and the adder of ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... farthermost mountains; close by my feet hissed and glided the snakes, driven forth from their blazing coverts, and glancing through the ring, unscared by its waning lamps; all undulating by me, bright-eyed, and hissing, all made innocuous by fear—even the terrible Death-adder, which I trampled on as I halted at the verge of the circle, did not turn to bite, but crept harmless away. I halted at the gap between the two dead lamps, and bowed my head to look again into the crystal vessel. Were there, indeed, no lingering drops ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... nobler beast of the forest issues boldly from his den, and the spear of the powerful pierces his heart. The deadly adder lurks in his covert till the unwary ...
— The Indian Princess - La Belle Sauvage • James Nelson Barker
... Alexander said in a low voice. "Watch out for her. She's as deadly as a puff adder and she collects men. The other man is Douglas's father, Henry. The plump redhead beside him is his wife, Anne. The other woman is my mother, Clara, even though Eloise and I don't look like her. ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... a little noise, like a night-adder hissing, and kept on making it, till at last Sad-Eyes turned her head. Then I spoke in a very low whisper, for fear lest I should wake the two guards who were dozing on either side of her wrapped in their blankets, saying, 'It is I, Hans, come to help you.' 'You cannot,' she answered, also ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... he lay in Janet's arms the angry little imps changed their stolen elfin knight into an adder, a snake, a bear, a lion, a toad, an eel, and still, through all these changes, the lady ...
— Stories from the Ballads - Told to the Children • Mary MacGregor
... be followed as a matter of course; in the same way he avoided the adders on the mountain. His old ideals were almost if not quite forgotten; he knew that the female of the bete humaine, like the adder, would in all probability sting, and he therefore shrank from its trail, but without any feeling of special resentment. The one had a poisoned tongue as the other had a poisoned fang, and it was well to leave them both ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... There are gradations. I went to throw myself at the feet of my great-aunt; good old great-aunt Lady de Culme, who is a power in the land. I let her suppose I came for myself, and she reproached me with Lord Adder. I confessed to him and ten others. She is a dear, she's ticklish, and at eighty-four she laughed! She looked into my eyes and saw a field with never a man in it—just the shadow of a man. She admitted the ten cancelled ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... doing so she might once more touch his brow with hers; and unconsciously she would put out her fingers, as though they might find their way into his hand. And then she would draw them back with a shudder, as though recoiling from the touch of an adder. ...
— Nina Balatka • Anthony Trollope
... fell bluntly from the rough country-man, but hardly had they been uttered, when Viola sprang from her chair, as though an adder had stung her. "Uncle," she cried, and a small fist hovered before Gabriel's eyes in such a threatening manner that he involuntarily closed them. But the child, whose features reminded him so strongly of his dead sister, ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German (V.2) • Various
... thrusts in flanconade and tierce, feint and double-feint, and sudden disengagements. The sweat trickled down the vicomte's face; Victor's forehead glistened with moisture. Suddenly Victor stooped; swift as the tongue of an adder his blade bit deeply into the vicomte's groin, making a terrible wound. The vicomte caught his breath in ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... see the devil slink away from thee abashed, issuing like an adder from thy heart, and then, with a sudden Protean change, driven from thy hovel as a thunder-cloud dispersing, when Simon Jennings seized the jar, hugged it as his household-god—and took it home with him—and counted out the gold—and locked the ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... madman turned on his benevolent brother John, who had taken control of affairs in Bohemia during his imprisonment, and poisoned him. It was a new proof of the old adage, it is never safe to warm a frozen adder. ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... overhead, And just alive with larks asinging; And in a twinkling I was swinging Across the windy hills, lighthearted. A kestrel at my footstep started, Just pouncing on a frightened mouse, And hung o'er head with wings a-hover; Through rustling heath an adder darted: A hundred rabbits bobbed to cover: A weasel, sleek and rusty-red, Popped out of sight as quick as winking: I saw a grizzled vixen slinking Behind a clucking brood of grouse That rose and cackled at my coming: And all about ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... more likely, as rings or beads of glass found in tumuli in Wales, Cornwall, and the Highlands are called "serpents' glass" (glain naidr), and are believed to be formed in the same way as the "egg." These, as well as old spindle-whorls called "adder stones" in the Highlands, are held to have magical virtues, e.g. against the bite of a serpent, and are ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... is to have an arm offered to you when you are walking on a level surface, where there is no chance to trip? How agreeable do you suppose it is to have your well-meaning friends shout and screech at you, as if you were deaf as an adder, instead of only being, as you insist, somewhat hard of hearing? I was a little over twenty years old when I wrote the lines which some of you may have met with, for they ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... over I threw myself on a chair; my heart beat wildly. "O, Heaven!" I murmured, "how can it be possible! O, superb monster! O, beautiful reptile! How you writhe, how you coil in and out, sweet adder, with supple and spotted skin! Thy cousin the serpent has taught thee to coil about the tree of life, holding between thy lips the apple of temptation. O, Melusina! Melusina! The hearts of men are thine. You know it well, enchantress, with your soft languor that seems to suspect ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... great-grandmother; neither shalt thou marry thy great-grandfather's widow." She, poor thing! at that time was thinking little of marriage; for even then, though known only to herself and her femme de chambre, that dreadful organic malady (cancer) was raising its adder's crest, under which finally she died. But, in spite of languor interchanging continually with disfiguring anguish, she still impressed one as a regal beauty. Her person, indeed, and figure, would have tended towards such a standard; but all ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... after a few days in the field, I never seriously thought of snakes as a possible, or rather probable, source of danger. In four and a half months, in all kinds of country, much of the time on foot, I saw only six live snakes. They were all small and only two, a puff adder and a little viper, were known to be venomous. Our porters, with bare feet and legs, penetrated all kinds of snaky-looking spots and yet not one was bitten. In fact, I have never heard of any one being bitten by snakes in East Africa, and for this reason I can not avoid the ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... is wolvish: she has tied sharp-toothed unkindness like a vulture on her father's breast: for her husband she is a gilded serpent: to Gloster her cruelty seems to have the fangs of a boar. She and Regan are dog-hearted: they are tigers, not daughters: each is an adder to the other: the flesh of each is covered with the fell of a beast. Oswald is a mongrel, and the son and heir of a mongrel: ducking to everyone in power, he is a wag-tail: white with fear, he is a goose. Gloster, for Regan, is an ingrateful fox: Albany, for his wife, ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... How long will this taciturn reverie last in which you are sunk? You make yourself a laughing-stock—you act like a fool. You resemble a sphinx of the desert engaged in meditating upon a serpent, and who mistakes an innocent adder for a viper." M. Langis understood what she wished to say to him, but he did not throw off his ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... happened but what he had a verse ready. Why, one day when Thad was walking with him over some newly cleared ground, old Joe suddenly clutched his arm, drawing him back and pointing to a little but ugly ground adder that lay in the path, ...
— The House Boat Boys • St. George Rathborne
... that Sarah was treading on dangerous ground, and that something was annoying her host, so she turned to Mrs Clay and said, 'Sarah says I am to choose what we do every day, so may I choose to go and fish in the Adder?' ...
— Sarah's School Friend • May Baldwin
... adder even to tears, So sweet a song, from mouth so full of grace. Before I saw thee, my Odora! ne'er I thought this world could ever grow so fair To me. Love throws a rosy, sparkling tissue On mountain, hill, lake, tree, shrub, leaf and flower, Love sweetens every ...
— Lays of Ancient Virginia, and Other Poems • James Avis Bartley
... title still in use in Utah days; then the "Big Fan," suggested by Jeremiah xv. 7, or Luke iii. 17; then "Brothers of Gideon," and finally "Sons of Dan" (whence the name Danites,) from Genesis xlix. 17: "Dan shall be a serpent by the way, an adder in the path, that biteth the horse's heels, so that his ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... before.[1401] The time draweth nigh. He is born, the man of sin, the child of perdition, the wicked one, the beast vomited forth from the abyss, the abomination of desolation; he came out of the tribe of Dan, of whom it is written: 'Dan shall be a serpent by the way, an adder in the path.' Soon shall return to the earth the prophets Elijah and Enoch, Moses, Jeremiah and Saint John the Evangelist; and soon shall dawn that day of wrath which shall grind the age in a mill and beat it in a ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... indeed—that heart hath long been changed; Worm-like 'twas trampled—adder-like avenged— Without one hope on earth beyond thy love, 400 And scarce a glimpse of mercy from above. Yet the same feeling which thou dost condemn, My very love to thee is hate to them, So closely mingling here, that disentwined, I cease to love thee when I love Mankind: Yet dread not this—the ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... apparently Indian, being made of some kind of dark brown, mottled wood, bearing a marked resemblance to a snake's skin; and the top of the cane was carved in conformity, to represent the head of what I took to be a puff-adder, fragments of stone, or beads, being inserted to represent the eyes, and the whole thing being finished with an artistic realism ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... Old Orpheus drew the Beasts along, By sweet Rhetorick of his learned Tongue, 'Twas deafness made the Adder sin; and this Caus'd him, who should have hum'd the ...
— The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687) • William Winstanley
... comes by suffering? Well, if grief Be gain, mine's double—fleeing thus the snare Of yon luxurious and unnerving down, And widowed from mine Eden. And why widowed? Because they tell me, love is of the flesh, And that's our house-bred foe, the adder in our bosoms, Which warmed to life, will sting us. They must know— I do confess mine ignorance, O Lord! Mine earnest will these painful limbs may prove. . . . . . And yet I swore to love him.—So I do No more ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... would not rest until it had got him back. So the grave was opened, and he really was found with his thumb in his mouth. So they laid him upon a cart and harnessed two oxen before it; and as if stung by an adder, the oxen ran away with the man of the sea over heath and moorland to the ocean; and then the sand ceased flying inland, but the hills that had been heaped up still remained there. All this Juergen heard and treasured in his ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... and biting me on the ankle vanished in the swamp. It must have been some sort of a water-snake, but I did not know. All I knew was that I had been bitten by a snake that might be poisonous. It could easily have been an adder, or a karait—even a cobra—though I had not a minute in which to observe a hood or any distinctive marks. I immediately collected my faculties to think what was the best thing to do. I knew I had no time to lose. Mother was ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... toward the beach. The kingfisher is a sacred bird which should always be respected; knowing this, I let it alight and did not stir, for fear of frightening it. At the same moment I saw a beautiful green adder come from a cleft of the mountain and crawl along the sand toward the bird. When they were near each other, without either seeming surprised at the meeting, the adder coiled itself around the neck of the ...
— Laboulaye's Fairy Book • Various
... ruddy rascal, He the lively Lemminkainen, Struck his left shoe in the snowdrift, Like an adder in the meadow, Pushed his staff of pinewood forward, As it were a living serpent, 200 And he said as he was gliding, Grasping firm the pole he carried: "Let the men who live in Lapland, Help me all to bring the elk home; And let all the Lapland women Set to work to wash the kettles; And let ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... made ample use of the treacherous juice, Which some folks say stings like an adder, They went back again at the handkerchief men, Who slowly got madder ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field
... statement, but much that shows the Greek authors were frequently in error. In the realm of the dead, according to the texts of the Book of the Dead, (chapter LXXXIX. and other places,) the responsible soul or Ba of the deceased, may become a sparrow-hawk, an adder, a crocodile-headed being, etc., but only to deceive its demon enemies;[81] not until after this, is the Khu, the intellectual soul, which accompanies the Ba, which is represented under the symbolized form of ...
— Scarabs • Isaac Myer
... "The Deaf Adder, or Surda Echidna of Linnaeus.—Under this head may be classed all that portion of the spectators (for audience they properly are not) who, not finding the first act of a piece answer to their preconceived notions of what a first act should be, like Obstinate in John Bunyan, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... let alone gods, should die fighting, whether it be with other men, with wild beasts, with snakes, or with devils. Think now, if your master, the Deliverer, saw you crouch thus like a toad before an adder, how he would laugh and say, 'Ho! I thought this man brave. Ho! he talked very loud about fighting the Water Dweller, he who came of a line of warriors; but now I laugh at him, for I see that he is but a cross-bred cur ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... puts on a hundred hideous forms; twining as an adder about her bosom, dancing as a frog upon her stomach, anon like a bat, sharp-snouted, covering her scared mouth with dreadful kisses. What is it he wants? To drive her into a corner, so that conquered and crushed ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... means," he said, "if it will relieve your feelings;—but in justice to me, let me know why you do so! What is my offence? I give you a piece of commonplace information concerning the movements of the Court this afternoon, and you jump off your seat as if an adder had bitten you. Why?" ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... these reptiles, than those of any other sort of live stock. Instances have been known where the tongues of such cattle have been even bitten or stung while grazing or feeding, which have proved fatal. Such stock are, however, seldom attacked by reptiles of the adder kind, except in cases where these are disturbed by the animals in pasturing or feeding; which is the main reason why so many of them are bitten and stung about the head, and occasionally the feet. There ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... cried a man who found An adder coil'd upon the ground, 'To do a very grateful deed For all the world, I shall proceed.' On this the animal perverse (I mean the snake; Pray don't mistake The human for the worse) Was caught and bagg'd, and, worst of all, ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... a rock adder—one of the deadliest of African snakes. Barely more than three inches in length, and a dull gray in color, it was small wonder that Harry in his excitement had not seen it as he was about ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... Beech Ferns The Fragrant Fern The Wood Ferns The Bladder Ferns The Woodsias The Boulder Fern (Dennstaedtia) Sensitive and Ostrich Ferns The Flowering Ferns (Osmunda) Curly Grass and Climbing Fern Adder's Tongue The Grape Ferns: Key to the Grape Fern Moonwort Little Grape Fern Lance-leaved Grape Fern Matricary Fern Common Grape Fern Rattlesnake Fern Filmy Fern Noted Fern Authors Fern Literature Time List for Fruiting of Ferns Glossary Note: Meaning ...
— The Fern Lover's Companion - A Guide for the Northeastern States and Canada • George Henry Tilton
... spoke to one of the women, beautiful or plain, the whole male population knew of it, and smiled derisively upon the husband. Von Blitz had turned an adder loose among these men; it stung swiftly ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... horse-chesnut; most likely the old form of the word gave name to the horse as the big beast where there was not an elephant or other greater one. The dragon-fly is, in some parts called the "tanging ether" or tanging adder, from tang, a long thin body, and a sting. Very few Dorset folk believe that the dragon-fly stings horses any more than that the horse eats ...
— Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect • William Barnes
... remembrances of England, a jackal running across the path, just as a fox would in England, reminded Owen that he was in Africa; and though occasionally one meets an adder in England, one meets them much more frequently in the North of Africa. It was impossible to say how many Owen had not seen lying in front of his horse like dead sticks. As the cavalcade passed they would twist themselves down a hole. As for rats, they seemed to be everywhere, and at home everywhere, ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... he was minded to try the boy's courage, to which end he set a deadly ash-grey adder in the meal-sack, and bade the child bake bread. But he feared when he found something that moved in the meal and had not courage to do the task. Then would Sigmund foster him no longer, but thrust him out from the woods to ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung • William Morris
... public that those who have had the first and closest contact with his efforts are not in any way aroused by their remarkable originality, yet one who may have had opportunities of taking a wide view of the functions of the compositor will not wonder that, like the deaf adder, he systematically closes his ear to ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... and down, and as he came to the letter he spurned it with his foot, like a poisonous adder, too loathsome to touch. "I have deserved this punishment," cried he, laughing ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... take 'em both, Master Scarlett?" said Nat, respectfully. "Black Adder knows me by heart, and I could ride him and take care of him when you didn't want him, or he'd do for master if Thunder was out ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... spider. Whenever she appeared, no public officer was ever to be found. A general epidemic seemed to have fallen upon the offices, and exterminated all the inhabitants. The Colonial Secretary would rush out to luncheon, deaf as an adder to the cries of female distress that rang in the troubled air behind him. The Advocate General, hearing the well-known voice inquiring for him in no friendly key, would hurry away through an opposite door, ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... meant only a passage, a change of abode of the spirit, and the left body crumbled to dust when the spirit went out of it to continue its existence elsewhere, but that those who hated the thought of such change could, by taking thought, prolong life and live for a thousand years, like the adder and tortoise or for ever. But no, he would not leave the poor boy to grope alone and blindly after that hidden knowledge he was burning to possess. He pitied him too much. The means were simple and near ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... ever you saw a snake with red rims to its eyes and the expression of a parrot, you might have some idea of it. She was hobbling along with a stick, in quite the proper manner, but I felt certain that all that was put on, and that she could have glided as swift as an adder if she pleased. I confess I was afraid of her. I had a feeling that she knew everything and ...
— The Five Jars • Montague Rhodes James
... stream The mountain roses fall; And fern and adder's-tongue Grow on the old mill wall. The tarn is on the upland moor, Where not a leaf doth grow; And through the mountain gashes, The merry mill stream dashes Down to the sea below. But in the quiet hollows The red trout groweth prime, For the miller and the miller's ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... was established that all adders bite, would you refuse to believe his adder would bite ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... 'Is it thus? Strong drink is an adder and subtractor, too. Is it the heat or the call of the wild that's ...
— Options • O. Henry
... at my heartless indifference; when I sympathize he declares I'm nudging him closer to his grave—says I'm kicking the crutches out from under him. He's just plain vitriol. I—I'd rather live with an adder!" ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... appointment was, and they were agreed and accorded thoroughly; and wine was fetched, and they drank. Right so came an adder out of a little heath bush, and it stung a knight on the foot. When the knight felt himself stung, he looked down and saw the adder; then he drew his sword to slay the adder, and thought of none other harm. But when the ...
— Stories of King Arthur and His Knights - Retold from Malory's "Morte dArthur" • U. Waldo Cutler
... better than by desert: then the worse luck, or the worse wit, or somewhat, for I shall not now deserve it. Well, then[207], I commit myself to my fortunes and your contents; contented to die, if your severe judgments shall judge me to be stung to death with the adder's hiss. ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... a man shall be like "the deaf adder" (Psal. lviii. 4, 5,) which will not be taken by the voice of the charmers, "charming never so wisely." Let the helm of reason be stirred as well as you can imagine, if there be a contrary wind in the sails of the affections, the ship will not answer ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... forward. And swift as an adder Muldoon kicked him just below the knee cap. Evin screamed, and collapsed. Muldoon staggered out of the way of the falling body, only to fall into the clutches of ...
— Lease to Doomsday • Lee Archer
... majesty vaulted the earth. Sitting down at a table, he beckoned the hostess for his beer, and conversed freely with his acquaintance. By his arch replies I found that I was in company with an original—a man that might stretch forth his arms in the wilderness without fear, and like Paul, grasp an adder without harm. He playfully entwined his fingers with their coils and curled crests, and played with their forked tongues. He had unbuttoned his waistcoat, and as cleverly as a fish-woman handles her eels, let out several snakes and adders, ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini
... of it yourselves when you grow up, for it has been sung in noble poetry and music; and whether it be true or not, it stands forever as a warning to us, not to seek for help from evil persons, or to gain good ends by evil means. For if we use an adder even against our enemies, it will turn ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... behind the mists of apparent forgetfulness, and any light air of suggestion may sweep away the clouds and show it all. What have you laid up in these memories of yours to start into life some day: 'at the last biting like a serpent and stinging like an adder'? 'It is John! It is ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... leaves of his Bible somewhat caressingly. The leaves of that book had dropped blood for him once; they had taken the brightness out of his childhood; from between them had sprung the visions that had clung about him and made night horrible. Adder-like thoughts had lifted their heads, had shot out forked tongues at him, asking mockingly strange, trivial questions that he could ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... the tender spring; Unwholesome weeds take root with precious flowers; The adder hisses where the sweet birds sing; What virtue breeds iniquity devours: We have no good that we can say is ours, But ill-annexed Opportunity Or kills his ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... starts up amongst all the flowers. When the evil act is done—opposite of the prophet's roll—it is sweet in the lips, but oh! it is bitter afterwards. 'At the last it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder!' ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... think, till he did see, what an adder the King nursed in his bosom? Most men counted her a fair white dove, all innocent and childlike: that did I not. I did see far enough, for all the mist, to see she was no child in that fashion; yet children love mischief well ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... that the wholesome roughness of his staff still pricked his hand and forced him to recall his former fall. Instead, therefore, of turning aside, he looked into his book of light, and there he read in fiery letters, "Thou shalt go upon the lion and the adder; the young lion and the dragon shalt thou tread under thy feet:" and this gave him comfort. So, on he went, determining still to read in his book, and not to look at all at that which affrighted him: and ...
— The Rocky Island - and Other Similitudes • Samuel Wilberforce
... position the reptile was lying, or which way his head was pointed, I controlled myself, and remained rooted breathless to the spot. Straining my eyes, but moving not an inch, I at length clearly distinguished a huge puff-adder, the most deadly snake in the colony, whose bite would have sent me to the other world in an hour or two. I watched him in silent horror: his head was from me—so much the worse; for this snake, unlike any other, always rises and ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various
... had given order that if a sword was raised during the consultation over the proposed treaty with Mordred, sound the trumpet and fall on! for he had no confidence in Mordred. Mordred had given a similar order to his people. Well, by and by an adder bit a knight's heel; the knight forgot all about the order, and made a slash at the adder with his sword. Inside of half a minute those two prodigious hosts came together with a crash! They butchered away all day. Then the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... "A good deal of ceremony to-night about crushing an adder." Athos shrunk into his corner, pale ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... round whom the atmosphere seemed refreshed as by the sparkling of a jet d'eau. These, like myself, were novices, who had brought with them the dewy innocence of life's morning hours; but they had not, like me, heard the hissing of the adder among their roses. ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... eyes"? I fear there are some few vipers among us, who, for ten or twenty pounds gain, would sell their souls and their country, though at last it would end in their own ruin as well as ours. Be not like "the deaf adder, who refuses to hear the voice of the charmer, charm ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... mixed with mercy. For once I fell into a creek of the sea, and hardly escaped drowning. Another time I fell out of a boat into Bedford river, but mercy yet preserved me alive. Besides, another time, being in the field with one of my companions, it chanced that an adder passed over the highway, so I, having a stick in my hand, struck her over the back; and having stunned her, I forced open her mouth with my stick, and plucked her sting out with my fingers; by which act, had not God been merciful unto me, I might by my desperateness have brought myself ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Baron Levy the millionaire; but I doubt if at heart he be not more acutely miserable than Randal Leslie the usher. For Levy is a man who has admitted the fiercer passions into his philosophy of life; he has not the pale blood and torpid heart which allow the scotched adder to dose away its sense of pain. Just as old age began to creep upon the fashionable usurer, he fell in love with a young opera-dancer, whose light heels had turned the lighter heads of half the eligans of Paris and London. The craft of the dancer was ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... curved in mockery through the air. He replaced it on his head, drew his rapier, with quick turns of his wrist swished the supple blade through the air till it sang, then flashed it out at me like the tongue of an adder, and said, "Sit you still, Farmer Wheatman, sit you still. Move but your hand and I spit you like a lark on a skewer. So, ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... passage. There is all the truth and all the humour and all the satire in Old Prejudice that our author has accustomed us to in his best pieces. The common people always get the best literature along with the best religion in John Bunyan. 'They are like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear, and which will not hearken to the voice of charmers charming never so wisely,' says the Psalmist, speaking about some bad men in his day. Now, I will not stand upon David's ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... appeased by the signs of contrition, but the nature of Deerslayer did not require proofs of intense feelings so strong in order to bring him down to a level with the regrets felt by the girl herself. He arose, as if an adder had stung him, and the accents of the mother that soothes her child were scarcely more gentle and winning than the tones of his voice, as he now expressed his contrition at having ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... work and rankle, to inflame hearts, to fever human existence, and to poison human society at the fountain springs of life. Very emphatically was it said by one whose whole being had smarted under such affliction, "Adder's ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... Pistoja is lost in his scorn. Coming upon Vanni Fucci continually consumed by the adder, he hears ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... devoured, enjoy their lives until immediately before the catastrophe, takes none of its horror from the mode of death. To be dismembered alive is certainly not an agreeable experience, and I suggest that you should observe how, for instance, a water-adder swallows a frog; how the poor creature, seized by the hind legs, gradually disappears down its throat, while its eyes project staring out of their sockets; how it does not cease struggling desperately even as it ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... attempting the King's life by sorcery. But he had only employed Graham to heal the Earl of Angus, himself dying of witchcraft. Bothwell was charged with employing a retainer, Ninian Chirnside, to arrange more than twenty-one meetings with the wizard Graham; the result being the procurement of a poison, 'adder skins, toad skins, and the hippomanes in the brain of a young foal,' to ooze the juices on the King, 'a poison of such vehemency as should have presently cut him off.' Isobel Gowdie, accused of witchcraft in 1622, confessed to having ...
— James VI and the Gowrie Mystery • Andrew Lang
... the pit of your own heart, Padahoon, and the adder that bites at the root of it. You are jealous of the fame and the office of Simwa, but you shall not sink your venom in the minds of the ...
— The Arrow-Maker - A Drama in Three Acts • Mary Austin
... the Vrouw Grobelaar. "Why can't I mind that as well as anything else? I tell you, my girl, that things are not quite so simple as you take them to be. Even a herd of swine can house a devil, mark you. A bit of stick in the path can be a puff adder, and there are spells tucked away in the words of the Psalms even. And the spruit! Why, you crazy child, a spruit is just the place for things to lurk in wait. Yes, slippery things that have no name in man's speech. Even the Kafirs know of a spirit ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... Garcia's eye darted a look at her which was like the spring of an adder, dwelling for just a second on the girl's face, and then scuttling off in an uncleanly, poisonous way for hiding corners. He saw that she was thin, and believed to a certain extent in Coronado's hints of poison, so that his glance was ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... your private applause—and the hope of vengeance on a woman, who, if she did ill in murdering my father, has been bitterly repaid by nourishing a serpent in her bosom, that had the tooth, but not the deafened ear, of the adder." ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... also a concretion to which magical properties were ascribed. I have seen a specimen, but do not know its history and origin. Glass beads found in prehistoric burial-places are called by old writers "adders' eggs," and "adder-stones," and were said (it is improbable that one should say "believed") to hatch out young adders when incubated with sufficiently silly ceremonies and observances. A celebrated "stone" of medicinal reputation in the East is the "goa-stone." This is a purely artificial product—a mass ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... hill where he came to battle with the stormwinds, and to watch the sunsets and the moon rising over the lake. And then they went down into the glen, where the mountain streamlet tumbled. Here had been wood-sorrel, and a carpet of the white trillium; and now there was adder's tongue, quaint and saucy, and columbine, and the pale dusty corydalis. There was soft new moss underfoot, and one walked as ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... in the lake," said Taliesin, the bard[125]; "a spotted adder on the mountain, a star, a priest. This was long, long ago; since then, I have slept in a hundred worlds, revolved in a ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... fell. There came a note, whose every word bit my heart like an adder. Allen demanded the boy, whom the law gave to his guardianship; and I was warned I must make no attempt to see him after he was taken away, because he would be taught to forget me. I refused. I dared the officer to lay hands on ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... water on it was named the Adder Waterholes, on account of the number of death-adders killed there. The first excursion from there towards the telegraph line, some ninety miles away, resulted, in such days of heat, in conjunction with cracked ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... the same large substratum in his nature, that Lamb had no sense of the rhythmical in prose composition. Rhythmus, or pomp of cadence, or sonorous ascent of clauses, in the structure of sentences, were effects of art as much thrown away upon him as the voice of the charmer upon the deaf adder. We ourselves, occupying the very station of polar opposition to that of Lamb, being as morbidly, perhaps, in the one excess as he in the other, naturally detected this omission in Lamb's nature at an early stage of our acquaintance. Not the fabled Regulus, ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... serpent on fire now flashed like lightning on to the body of one of the other two, piercing him in the navel, and then falling on the ground, and lying stretched before him. The wounded man, fascinated and mute, stood looking at the adder's eyes, and endeavouring to stand steady on his legs, yawning the while as if smitten with lethargy or fever; the adder, on his part, looked up at the eyes of the man, and both of them breathed hard, and sent forth a smoke that mingled ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... "I know, I know, Mr. Sutcliffe, it was mean of me," he said, "and I know I ought to apologise to her. But if you had seen the look on her face, and had suffered what I have suffered, you'd have spoken too. Why, she might think I was an adder. But there, I dare say she knew who I was, and that I had just ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... man may perchance determine what is a heresy; but God only can know who is a heretic. It does not, however, by any means follow that opinions fundamentally false are harmless. A hundred causes may co-exist to form one complex antidote. Yet the sting of the adder remains venomous, though there are many who have taken up the evil thing, and it hurted them not. Some indeed there seem to have been, in an unfortunate neighbour nation at least, who have embraced this system with a full view of all its moral ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... cliffs with my children, after their return from school at noon, to gather wild flowers, it being May-day. We came in with the spring beauty, called miscodeed by the Indians, the adder's tongue, ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... with happy purpose. All is not known yet even in Australia. The number of "observers" who believe that snakes swallow their young in time of danger, and allow them to emerge when it is past, and that the end of the death adder to avoid is the tail, which is fitted with a slightly curved spur, become fewer every year; but we are still sincere in many of the honourable points of ignorance. Some discredit such facts as climbing fish, oysters "growing" on living trees, birds ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... own father's heart. The adder! Oh, the charms of hell o'erpowered me He dwelt within me, to my inmost soul Still to and fro he passed, suspected never. On the wide ocean, in the starry heaven Did mine eyes seek the enemy, whom I In my heart's ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... was now as deaf as the adder of Scripture; and the counsel, let us hope, pleaded not very earnestly. So the substitute buyers—except in the few cases where the long finger of influential patronage could even now intervene—went, as their ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... whole, perhaps his life was uneventful for so far-travelling a dog, though it held its moments of eccentricity, as when he leaped through the window of a four-wheeler into Kensington, or sat on a Dartmoor adder. But that was fortunately of a Sunday afternoon—when adder and all were torpid, so nothing happened, till a friend, who was following, lifted him off the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... his jaws distended, When his frantic struggles ended, Through King Olaf's horn an adder, Touched by ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... thought Sylvie. "She is depraved in mind; and now I am certain the little adder has wound herself round the colonel. She has heard us say he was a baron. To be a baroness! little fool! Ah! I'll get rid of her, I'll apprentice ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... shoes are purple, He is new and high; Makes he mud for dog and peddler, Makes he forest dry; Knows the adder's tongue his coming, And begets her spot. Stands the sun so close and mighty That our minds are hot. News is he of all the others; Bold it were to die With the blue-birds ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... snake with flattened and expanded head, known as the blowing viper, or puff adder, is one of the most amusing representatives of the tendency to "play dead" that could well be found. If you strike him the faintest blow with the lightest stick, he at once goes into apparent convulsions, in which he seems to suffer the ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... blow into the barrel with such fury, that had there been an ounce of wadding left, the blast would have blown it all through the enormous touch-hole. Being well assured after this that neither an adder nor a slow-worm had taken up his domicile within the barrel, he began to load. One charge—two charges—then a third, "as a compliment," and after this, a fourth, "for good luck." On this infernal charge—imperial, as ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... wot, than he had been for many a day, else he would never have rested so quietly with one of the friar's sort so close beside him. As for the friar, had he known who Robin Hood was, you may well believe he would almost as soon have slept with an adder as with the man he had ...
— The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood • Howard Pyle
... youthful Moro's talents that made Francesco choose him, at the age of thirteen, to be the leader of the body of three thousand men which were to join in the Crusade preached by Pope Pius II. On the 2nd of June, 1464, the ducal standard, bearing the golden lion of the house of Sforza and the adder of the Visconti, was solemnly committed to the charge of the young Crusader, before the eyes of the whole court, on the piazza in front of the old palace, which was gaily decorated for the occasion with ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... said Robinson, confidentially, "he picked it up from an old Adder, that he met in ...
— Davy and The Goblin - What Followed Reading 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' • Charles E. Carryl
... the pigmies. And they have no mouth; but instead of their mouth they have a little round hole, and when they shall eat or drink, they take through a pipe or a pen or such a thing, and suck it in, for they have no tongue; and therefore they speak not, but they make a manner of hissing as an adder doth, and they make signs one to another as monks do, by the which every of ...
— The Travels of Sir John Mandeville • Author Unknown
... his mother Rebekah joined hers: "For He shall give His angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways. They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy feet against a stone. Thou shalt tread upon the lion and adder; the young lion and the serpent shalt thou trample under feet. Because he hath set his love upon me, therefore will I deliver him; I will set him on high, because he ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... reputation of being an antidote for poisons and a specific against epilepsy. Culpepper speaks of it as a sure panacea for apoplexy, palsy, and falling sickness, a belief current in Sweden, where finger rings are made of its wood. An old-fashioned charm for the bite of an adder was to place a cross formed of hazel-wood on the wound, and the burning of a thorn-bush has long been considered a sure preventive of mildew in wheat. Without multiplying further illustrations, there can be no doubt that the therapeutic virtues of these so-called ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... hearts waxed gross? Are their ears dull of hearing, and have they closed their eyes? I fear there are some few vipers among us, who, for ten or twenty pounds' gain, would sell their souls and their country, though at last it would end in their own ruin as well as ours. Be not like the deaf adder, who refuses to hear the voice of the charmer, charm he never ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... extremity of the Downs. It is of an octagonal shape, and its name (Cooke's Folly) is said to be derived from the following circumstance:— Several centuries since, the proprietor of the land, a gentleman named Cooke, dreamed that his only son was destined to be killed by the sting of an adder. This idea took such hold of his mind, that in order to avert the dreaded catastrophe, he built this tower, to which he rigidly confined his son. The tradition goes on to relate the futility of all human precautions against ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 398, November 14, 1829 • Various
... mighty spire, where the sides are too precipitous to allow of the snow lying on them; then on past the lonely lake Baringo, where one of our two remaining Askari, having unfortunately trodden on a puff-adder, died of snake-bite, in spite of all our efforts to save him. Thence we proceeded a distance of about a hundred and fifty miles to another magnificent snow-clad mountain called Lekakisera, which has never, to the best of my belief, been visited before by a European, but which ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... advocate, is the work of God for the instruction of man. Plutarch has observed, that the medical science would be brought to the utmost perfection, when poison should be converted into physic. Thus, in the mortal disease of Judaism and idolatry, our blessed Lord converted the adder's venom of Saul the persecutor, into that cement which made Paul the chosen vessel. That manly activity, that restless ardor, that burning zeal for the law of his fathers, that ardent thirst for the blood of ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... had never been deep; and, the moment she fancied she and her son were drawing toward each other, she became to her the thawed adder: she wished the adder well, but was she bound to harbor it after it had begun to bite? There are who never learn to see anything except in its relation to themselves, nor that relation except as fancied by themselves; and, this being a withering ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... no sting, no pain, and the snake lay perfectly still, she ventured to steal a glance at her feet, and saw that it was a piece of a vine that she had caught in her flight, and which her fears had converted into the embrace of an adder. Springing up with the velocity of lightning, she darted along, regardless of the beauty of the stream, in whose limpid waters she had thought to behold her crimson-stained cheeks. She ran on, panting, glowing—the perspiration, hot as drops of molten lead, streaming down her face, looking furtively ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... be by his death: and for my part, I know no cause to spurn at him, But for the general. He would be crown'd:— How that might change his nature, there's the question. It is the bright day that brings forth the adder; And that craves wary walking. Crown him?—That:— And then, I grant, we put a sting in him, That at his will he may do ...
— Practice Book • Leland Powers
... truth, Holy Father, I hardly thought of it myself. What I had done was partly in self-defence, and I did not consider it a crime. And then, he whose life I had taken was an evil man, with the devil's dues in him, and I felt no more remorse after killing him than if I had trodden on a poisonous adder. But now I see things differently. In coming here I exposed you to danger at the hands of the State. I ask your pardon, and I beg you to let ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... not appeare: Cal. Thou must sad chance by fore-cast, wise resist, Or being done say boote-les had I wist. Caes. But for to feare wher's no suspition, Will to my greatnesse be derision. Cal. There lurkes an adder in the greenest grasse, Daungers of purpose alwayes hide their face: Caes. Perswade no more Caesar's resolu'd to go. Cal. The Heauens resolue that hee may safe returne, 1630 For if ought happen to my loue but well: His danger shalbe doubled ...
— The Tragedy Of Caesar's Revenge • Anonymous
... or unclean Hath my insect never seen; But violets and bilberry bells, Maple-sap and daffodels, Grass with green flag half-mast high, Succory to match the sky, Columbine with horn of honey, Scented fern, and agrimony, Clover, catchfly, adder's-tongue And brier-roses, dwelt among; All beside was unknown waste, All was picture ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... The decanter was empty. After the dessert, Mrs. Somers arose and we followed; but she soon left us, and we went to the parlor. The girl, taking a seat beside me, said: "My name is Ann Somers. I am never introduced; Adder, my sister, is in the way, you know. I dare say Ben never spoke of me to you. I am never spoken of, am never noticed. I have never had new dresses; yet pa is ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... thee, or by Him who made The world, thy heart's blood dyes my blade!"— "Thy threats, thy mercy, I defy! 405 Let recreant yield, who fears to die." —Like adder darting from his coil, Like wolf that dashes through the toil, Like mountain-cat who guards her young, Full at Fitz-James's throat he sprung; 410 Received, but recked not of a wound, And locked his arms his foeman ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... himself. Just so have the swifts left the hollow trees and taken to my chimney, the phoebe to my pigpen, the swallow to my barn loft, the vireo to my lilac bush, the screech owls to my apple trees, the red squirrel for its nest to my ice-house, and the flat-nosed adder to the sandy knoll by my beehives. I have taken over from its wild inhabitants fourteen acres in Hingham; but, beginning with the fox, the largest of my wild creatures, and counting only what we commonly call "animals" (beasts, birds, and reptiles), there are dwelling with me, ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... your arms, lady, Into an esk and adder; But hold me fast, and fear me not, I am your ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... or big of its kind, as in horse-radish, or horse-chesnut; most likely the old form of the word gave name to the horse as the big beast where there was not an elephant or other greater one. The dragon-fly is, in some parts called the "tanging ether" or tanging adder, from tang, a long thin body, and a sting. Very few Dorset folk believe that the dragon-fly stings horses any more than that the horse eats ...
— Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect • William Barnes
... step was irrevocable, the instant she had left the barrier behind, repentance set in. Even in the first days of her departure, in the fleeting moments of abandonment, when it may be supposed she might momentarily forget conscience, it was sharply wounding her with its adder stings; and she knew that her whole future existence, whether spent with that man or without him, would be a dark ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... Disciples. (B) —12, 13:—CHRIST'S (B) —17, 18:—CHRIST'S victory over Satan; promise that "they that (whereby is fulfilled the believe" "shall cast out promise "Thou shalt tread devils" and "shall take upon the lion and adder: up serpents:" (as [in S. the young lion and the Luke x. 19] He had given dragon shalt Thou trample the Seventy "power to under feet.") tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the Enemy.") ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... be shot!" he ejaculated. "What an extraordinary experience! Will you believe me, Doctor, when I tell you that as I drew this penknife out of my waistcoat pocket it actually seemed to change into an adder in my hand? There was the flat, wicked-looking head, the malevolent eyes, the characteristic markings of the body, and, above all, there was the feeling of it writhing strongly in my grasp, as though it were trying to get enough of its length clear to turn and strike me! Talk ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... short as if an adder had stung her, uttering a shriek of rage, of pain; for Jasper Losely, who had hitherto listened to her, stupefied, astounded, here burst into a fit of merriment, in which there was such undisguised contempt, such an enjoyment of the ludicrous, ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... be promptly ducked in horse-ponds in the unregenerate days; but the scold was an individual who was usually chastised for making a dead-set at her husband alone. The real shrew is like the puff-adder or the whip-snake—she tries to bite impartially all round; and she is often able to bite in comparative silence, but with a most deadly effect. The vulgar shrieker is a deplorable source of mischief, but she cannot match the reticent stabber who is always ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... not to be deluded that, though he sat by to see fair play, yet it was always with his elbows on the table and his fingers in his ears, regardless of appearing to the priest in the character of the deaf adder. After all, he was not the object, and good Pere Bonami at first thought the day his own, when he found that almost all his arguments against Calvinism were equally impressed upon Berenger's mind, but the differences soon revealed ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... it; the origin, or nature, or name may be as you will, but the deadly reality of the thing is with us, and warring against us, and on our true war with it depends whatever life we can win. Deadly reality, I say. The puff-adder or horned asp is not more real. Unbelievable,—those,—unless you had seen them; no fable could have been coined out of any human brain so dreadful, within its own poor material sphere, as that blue-lipped serpent—working its way sidelong ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... Are their ears dull of hearing, and have they closed their eyes? I fear there are some few vipers among us, who, for ten or twenty pounds' gain, would sell their souls and their country, though at last it would end in their own ruin as well as ours. Be not like the deaf adder, who refuses to hear the voice of the charmer, ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... one's way from woodland lake to woodland lake, through brush-hidden brooklets, without a portage. In this region the liverwort blooms fragrantly beside the snow-bank in early spring, and here the arbutus exists as in New England. The adder-tongues and violets and anemones are here in rare profusion in their time, and the wandering gray wolf, last of his kind, almost, treads softly over knolls carpeted with wintergreen and decorated with scarlet berries. It is a country of blue water and pure air, of forest ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... the face of the Lady Amelia became very dark. Was it not evident that this snake, when taken into their innermost bosoms that they might there warm him, was becoming an adder, and preparing to sting them? There was very little more conversation that evening, and soon after the story of the cook, Crosbie got up and went ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... as the adder, kept on. Conn yelled at his mother to use her control; she remembered that she had one, a thing like an old-fashioned pocket watch, around her neck on a chain, and got the ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... man that lives next door to Betsey said he'd bring us home, an' I thought we'd better come. He's goin' over to the village to-night; he's got folks there. I told him he'd a good deal better stay here, but he won't. He's as deaf as an adder, an' you can't make him hear anythin', anyway. We ain't spoke a word all the way home. Where's Loretty? She came over to ...
— Young Lucretia and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... being an antidote for poisons and a specific against epilepsy. Culpepper speaks of it as a sure panacea for apoplexy, palsy, and falling sickness, a belief current in Sweden, where finger rings are made of its wood. An old-fashioned charm for the bite of an adder was to place a cross formed of hazel-wood on the wound, and the burning of a thorn-bush has long been considered a sure preventive of mildew in wheat. Without multiplying further illustrations, there can be no doubt that the therapeutic virtues of these so-called lightning ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... he prepared from the venom of a kind of swamp adder," she answered. "It produces ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... of the draughtsman are met by the curiosity of all mankind; the appeals of the dramatist answered by their sympathy; the creatures of imagination acknowledged by their fear; but the voice of the colorist has but the adder's listening, charm he never so wisely. Men vie with each other, untaught, in pursuit of smoothness and smallness—of Carlo Dolci and Van Huysum; their domestic hearts may range them in faithful armies round the throne of Raphael; meditation and labor may raise them to the level of the great ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... man look into the cold face of one he loved and not feel, creeping like a thousand-fanged adder into his desolate heart, the awful fear that death's the ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... are purple, He is new and high; Makes he mud for dog and peddler, Makes he forest dry; Knows the adder's tongue his coming, And begets her spot. Stands the sun so close and mighty That our minds are hot. News is he of all the others; Bold it were to die With the blue-birds buccaneering ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... beautiful. But women are like adder's eggs. He is a fool who warms them in his bosom." He turned his slow regard upon Mrs. Sin. "You have stained your hair to look even as hers. It was discreet, my wife. But one is beautiful and many-shadowed ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... of hearing," and have "they closed their eyes"? I fear there are some few vipers among us, who, for ten or twenty pounds gain, would sell their souls and their country, though at last it would end in their own ruin as well as ours. Be not like "the deaf adder, who refuses to hear the voice of the charmer, charm he never ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... if at heart he be not more acutely miserable than Randal Leslie the usher. For Levy is a man who has admitted the fiercer passions into his philosophy of life; he has not the pale blood and torpid heart which allow the scotched adder to dose away its sense of pain. Just as old age began to creep upon the fashionable usurer, he fell in love with a young opera-dancer, whose light heels had turned the lighter heads of half the eligans of Paris ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... slay that traitor, Sir Mordred, 'for I in no wise trust him.' And in like wise spake Sir Mordred unto his host. Then they two met, and agreed on the truce, and wine was fetched and they drank, and all was well. But while they were drinking an adder crept out of a bush, and stung one of the fourteen Knights on his foot, and he drew his sword to slay the adder, not thinking of anything but his pain. And when the men of both armies beheld that drawn sword, ...
— The Book of Romance • Various
... Brought the proud Chieftain to his knee. "Now, yield thee, or, by Him who made The world, thy heart's blood dyes my blade!"— "Thy threats, thy mercy, I defy! Let recreant yield, who fears to die."— Like adder darting from his coil, Like wolf that dashes through the toil, Like mountain-cat who guards her young, Full at Fitz-James's throat he sprung, Received, but reck'd not of a wound, And locked his arms his foeman round.— Now gallant Saxon, hold thine own! No maiden's hand is round thee thrown! That ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... well enough; it takes ladies a few weeks to find out each other's weak points. But then the new Mrs. Tunnygate unexpectedly yet undeniably began to exhibit the serpent's tooth, the adder's tongue or the cloven hoof—as the reader's literary traditions may lead him to prefer. For no obvious reason at all she conceived a violent hatred of Mrs. Appleboy, a hatred that waxed all the more virulent on account of its object's innocently obstinate refusal to comprehend ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... Abbe Mouret and Brother Archangias followed him, chatting. A hundred yards further Vincent surreptitiously bolted, and again glided up towards the church, keeping a watchful eye upon them, and ready to dart behind a bush if they should look round. With adder-like suppleness, he once more glided into the graveyard, that paradise full ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... it was established that all adders bite, would you refuse to believe his adder would bite ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... had been for many a day, else he would never have rested so quietly with one of the friar's sort so close beside him. As for the friar, had he known who Robin Hood was, you may well believe he would almost as soon have slept with an adder as with the man he had for ...
— The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood • Howard Pyle
... unimpeachable, your utility will be much questioned, if you wish to spare a royalist because he is a brave man," said Barrere. "By the same argument, I presume, you would refrain from knocking an adder on the head, because he rose ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... Louise glided like an adder towards the staircase. Catherine rushed after her, and came up with her on the footpath outside the house. Her remonstrances were fruitless; and she followed the girl, fastening her undervest as she hurried ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... the instruction of man. Plutarch has observed, that the medical science would be brought to the utmost perfection, when poison should be converted into physic. Thus, in the mortal disease of Judaism and idolatry, our blessed Lord converted the adder's venom of Saul the persecutor, into that cement which made Paul the chosen vessel. That manly activity, that restless ardor, that burning zeal for the law of his fathers, that ardent thirst for the ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... all the Pisos had lived and flourished, which had protected the rights and nursed the virtues of her great husband and his family, were good enough for her, for her children, and for all. Her ear was closed against the sound of Christianity, as naturally as an adder's against all sound. She could not, and never did hear it. From her I received my principles and first impressions. Not even the history, nor so much as a word of the sufferings, of the Christians ever fell on my ear. I grew up ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... much that Olaf became wrothful and said that Rand should die the worst of deaths. This threat had no effect upon the blasphemer. So, according to the legend, he was taken and tied to a tree. A gag was set between his teeth to open his mouth, and a live adder was forced down his throat. The adder cut its way through his side, ...
— Olaf the Glorious - A Story of the Viking Age • Robert Leighton
... I was awaiting this. Thou wilt inoculate our knightly veins With thy corrupted Jewish blood. Thou 'lt foist This adder on my bosom. Henry Schnetzen Is no weak dupe, whom every lie may start. Make ready, Jew, ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... not the least doubt of it. He was in my eyes at that moment a crawling adder, whose fangs were liable to penetrate the flesh of some one if he was not put out of the way. But I am more than glad I was spared the infliction of ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... more wretched than he is. What, dost thou turn away and hide thy face? I am no loathsome leper; look on me. What! art thou, like the adder, waxen deaf? Be poisonous too and kill thy forlorn queen. Is all thy comfort shut in Gloster's tomb? Why, then, dame Margaret was ne'er thy joy. Erect his statue and worship it, And make my image but an alehouse sign. Was I for this nigh wrack'd upon the sea, And ...
— King Henry VI, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition]
... tell such things about their friends in public conveyances," exclaimed Mistigris. "As for me, I'm not listening to you; I'm deaf: 'discretion plays the better part of adder.'" ...
— A Start in Life • Honore de Balzac
... Dahlia," I said, with dignity, "if you don't want to be in on the ground floor, that is your affair. But you are missing an intellectual treat. And, anyway, no matter how much you may behave like the deaf adder of Scripture which, as you are doubtless aware, the more one piped, the less it danced, or words to that effect, I shall carry on as planned. I am extremely fond of Angela, and I shall spare no effort to bring the sunshine back ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... not accident. I came upon him by accident—I'll claim no more than that. The black rage was there to blind me, make me deaf—mole and adder! But it was not accident, what I did. I'll not cheat you here, and I'll not cheat myself. The name ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... trees the bell-bird, the coach-whip, the tewinga, the laughing-jackass, the rifle-bird and regent, filled the air with sound, if not with music. And the black snake, the brown snake, the whip, the diamond, and the death adder glided gently among the fallen leaves and grasses, and held themselves in cheerful readiness for intruders. That was why a condition was attached to the ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner
... to be the leader of the body of three thousand men which were to join in the Crusade preached by Pope Pius II. On the 2nd of June, 1464, the ducal standard, bearing the golden lion of the house of Sforza and the adder of the Visconti, was solemnly committed to the charge of the young Crusader, before the eyes of the whole court, on the piazza in front of the old palace, which was gaily decorated for the occasion with garlands and tapestries. But the ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... and then he set himself to blow into the barrel with such fury, that had there been an ounce of wadding left, the blast would have blown it all through the enormous touch-hole. Being well assured after this that neither an adder nor a slow-worm had taken up his domicile within the barrel, he began to load. One charge—two charges—then a third, "as a compliment," and after this, a fourth, "for good luck." On this infernal charge—imperial, as he called it—this Vesuvius, this volcano of saltpetre, ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... and fresh fowls; and with the Agazonbae, who are dog-faced; and with the Sibans, who have horses' feet, and run more swiftly than horses. A third of our company died in battle, and a third died of want. The rest murmured against me, and said that I had brought them an evil fortune. I took a horned adder from beneath a stone and let it sting me. When they saw that I did not ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... here only concerned with the injuries inflicted by the venomous varieties of snakes, the most important of which are the hooded snakes of India, the rattle-snakes of America, the horned snakes of Africa, the viper of Europe, and the adder of ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... being able clearly to see in what position the reptile was lying, or which way his head was pointed, I controlled myself, and remained rooted breathless to the spot. Straining my eyes, but moving not an inch, I at length clearly distinguished a huge puff-adder, the most deadly snake in the colony, whose bite would have sent me to the other world in an hour or two. I watched him in silent horror: his head was from me—so much the worse; for this snake, unlike any other, always rises and strikes back. He did not move; ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various
... blood of sacrifice, and in its flash the eye of uncoiled adders, and in the foam the mouth-froth of eternal death. Not knowing what a horrible mixture it is, men take it up and drink it down—the sacrificial blood, the adder's venom, the death-froth—and smack their lips and call ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... the most diabolical imaginable. Among the reptiles of Patagonia, Sir Henry, there is one—a species of black adder, known in the country as the Mynga Worm—whose bite is more deadly than that of the rattler or the copperhead, and as rapid in its action as prussic acid itself. It has, too, a great velocity of movement and a peculiar power of springing and hurling ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... was not over yet. Lucy was sewing at her wedding things. Eliza Monk, smarting at their sight as with an adder's sting, ran away from it to visit a family who lived near Oddingly, an insignificant little place, lying, as everybody knows, on the other side of Worcester, famous only for its dulness and for the strange murders committed there in 1806—which have since ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... fermented wine has been regarded as a poison. In the Bible it is likened to the poison of dragons and the cruel venom of asps. Solomon tells us not to look upon it, for at last it biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an adder. Clement of Alexandria, who lived at the close of the second century, says: "From its use arise excessive desires and licentious conduct. The circulation is accelerated, and the body inflames the soul."—Divine Law as ...
— Personal Experience of a Physician • John Ellis
... Cf. Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, ii. 1: "It is the bright day that brings forth the adder."] ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... King, rose hurriedly and shook and brushed it from their persons with a zeal that was not, I think, inspired by a mere desire for cleanliness. But Zikali only laughed again in his terrible fashion and let it lie on his fresh-oiled body, which it turned to the dull, dead hue of a grey adder. ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... blood shed for us all upon the cross, we are delivered from the burden, guilt, and power of our sins and of our sin. With thy hand in His, and thy will submitted to Him, 'thou shalt tread on the lion and the adder; the young lion and the dragon thou shalt ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... consequence, that man may perchance determine what is a heresy; but God only can know who is a heretic. It does not, however, by any means follow that opinions fundamentally false are harmless. A hundred causes may co-exist to form one complex antidote. Yet the sting of the adder remains venomous, though there are many who have taken up the evil thing, and it hurted them not. Some indeed there seem to have been, in an unfortunate neighbour nation at least, who have embraced this system with a full view of all its ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... daubed with honey; the writer has been promised "an European reputation" (Madame LAFFARGE has a reputation equally extensive), and he is at this moment to be found upon drawing-tables, whose owners would scream—or affect to scream—as at an adder, at SHELLEY. Nay, Shelley's publisher is found guilty of blasphemy in the Court of Queen's Bench; and that within these few months. We should like to know Lord Denman's opinions of Mr. BOONE. What would he ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, December 11, 1841 • Various
... lay in Janet's arms the angry little imps changed their stolen elfin knight into an adder, a snake, a bear, a lion, a toad, an eel, and still, through all these changes, the lady ...
— Stories from the Ballads - Told to the Children • Mary MacGregor
... wash the Kings of Israel and Judah off his shirt, destroy his strings and hooked wires, and keep his Examination-coat for a shooting one. But all their arguments were in vain, and the infatuated little gentleman, like a deaf adder, shut his ears at the ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... find that I had so good a guardian as puss had proved. I turned into bed again and went to sleep. In the morning I discovered that the snake was a very venomous adder, but that the cat was not a bit the worse for eating it. I afterwards learned that there are certain sorts of poison which may be swallowed without danger, yet if it should touch the slightest scratch or excoriation of ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... Medea, or like the Master-maid in Dr. Dasent's 'Tales from the Norse,' or like the hero of the Algonquin tale and the Samoan ballad, she aids her alien lover to accomplish the tasks assigned to him. He ploughs with a plough of gold the adder-close, or field of serpents; he bridles the wolf and the bear of the lower world, and catches the pike that swim in the waters of forgetfulness. After this, the parents cannot refuse their consent, the wedding-feast ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... here, gaeing up and down in my thoughts, a bairn again with my grandmither, gaeing up and down the braes and by the glen. I want to say somewhat to you. When you see an adder set your heel upon it! When a wolf goes by take your firelock and after him! When a denier and a cheat is near you tell the world as much and help to set the snare! Where there are betrayers and persecutors hunt the wild plant shall make a cup like ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... uttered I sat up upon the topmost step of the gallery; for some time I felt stunned in somewhat the same manner as I once subsequently felt after being stung by an adder. I soon arose, however, and retired to my bed, where, notwithstanding what I had done, I was not slow ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... down, hidden by a rock, I saw a kingfisher slowly floating toward the beach. The kingfisher is a sacred bird which should always be respected; knowing this, I let it alight and did not stir, for fear of frightening it. At the same moment I saw a beautiful green adder come from a cleft of the mountain and crawl along the sand toward the bird. When they were near each other, without either seeming surprised at the meeting, the adder coiled itself around the neck of the kingfisher, as if tenderly embracing it; they remained thus entwined for a few ...
— Laboulaye's Fairy Book • Various
... as their appointment was, and they were agreed and accorded thoroughly; and wine was fetched, and they drank. Right so came an adder out of a little heath bush, and it stung a knight on the foot. When the knight felt himself stung, he looked down and saw the adder; then he drew his sword to slay the adder, and thought of none other harm. But when ...
— Stories of King Arthur and His Knights - Retold from Malory's "Morte dArthur" • U. Waldo Cutler
... an unexpressed query in his adder-like eyes. She shrugged her shoulders, and made a gesture as if pointing towards ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... was half tempted to turn him loose. The "major-domo" had singled out Sponsilier and was trying issues with him, Bob Quirk was dropping them right and left, when the deposed commandant sprang upon a table, and in a voice like the hiss of an adder, commanded peace, and the disorder ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... party, at which I assisted, was thrown into while lunching in the garden of a villa, almost in the town of Rio, by a lady jumping up from her seat with a deadly whip-snake hanging on her dress. I once myself sat on an adder who put his fangs through the woollen stuff of my inexpressibles and could not escape. The same thing happened with the lady's dress; in that case also we caught the snake, as it could ...
— Sketches From My Life - By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha • Hobart Pasha
... means that odour of the bean-field; that when Jesus smelled such a scent about Jerusalem or in Galilee, he thought of his Father. And if God means it, it is mine, even if I should never smell it again. The music of the spheres is mine if old age should make me deaf as the adder. Am I mystical again, reader? Then I hope you are too, or will be before you have done with this same beautiful mystical life of ours. More and more nature becomes to me one of God's books of poetry—not his grandest—that is ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... thrust into a monastery, where with hunger and sorrow he pined away to death? Who so ill-favouredly and monstrously put the Emperor Frederick's neck under his feet, and, as though that were not sufficient, added further this text out of the Psalms, "Thou shalt go upon the adder and cockatrice, and shalt tread the lion and dragon under thy feet"? Such an example of scorning and contemning a prince's majesty, as never before that was heard tell of in any remembrance; except, I ween, either of Tamerlane's, the king of Scythia, a wild and ...
— The Apology of the Church of England • John Jewel
... bloated boa convolves before him. All horrent the cobra exalts his hooded head, and the spanning jaws fly open. Quivers and chitters the tail of the cheerful rattlesnake; silently slips out the forked tongue, and is as silently absorbed. The fangless adder warps up the leg of the Professor, lays clammy coils about his neck, and pokes a flattened head curiously into his open mouth. The young man of Colusa is interested; his feelings transcend expression. Not a syllable breathes he, but with a deep-drawn sigh he turns his broad ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... are about to take may lead thee to Paradise. A sand-adder, a scorpion, or a bullet may be the means. Dost thou ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... imagination imminent; but our reason telling us that there is no danger does not suffice. I may mention a trifling fact, illustrating this point, and which at the time amused me. I put my face close to the thick glass-plate in front of a puff-adder in the Zoological Gardens, with the firm determination of not starting back if the snake struck at me; but, as soon as the blow was struck, my resolution went for nothing, and I jumped a yard or two backwards with astonishing rapidity. My will ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... aggregate they were not an inspiring spectacle. A soldier, stripped of his arms and held by his foes, becomes of a sudden a pitiable, almost a contemptible object. You think instinctively of an adder that has lost its fangs, or of a wild cat that, being shorn of teeth to bite with and claws to tear with, is now a more helpless, more impotent thing than if it had been created without teeth and claws in the first place. These similes ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... "Cher Monsieur Vardin." So the letter began. It was clearly a business letter, nothing else. I was about to replace it in the envelope with a thousand regrets in my mind for my want of faith when a single word at the bottom of the page caught my eyes, and I started as if I had been stung by an adder. "Verdun"—that was the word. I looked again. "Ypres" was immediately below it. I sat down, horror-stricken, by the broken desk, and I read this letter, a translation of which I have ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... affording better fun. Some seasons afterwards, when our Hunt was disbanded, the shopkeepers' apprentices continued, with the youngsters, to work our mongrel hounds; but eventually Joker's death from the bite of an adder put an end to their pastime, for the bobtail and the terrier were the only possible leaders of ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... Graham to heal the Earl of Angus, himself dying of witchcraft. Bothwell was charged with employing a retainer, Ninian Chirnside, to arrange more than twenty-one meetings with the wizard Graham; the result being the procurement of a poison, 'adder skins, toad skins, and the hippomanes in the brain of a young foal,' to ooze the juices on the King, 'a poison of such vehemency as should have presently cut him off.' Isobel Gowdie, accused of witchcraft in 1622, confessed to having employed a similar ...
— James VI and the Gowrie Mystery • Andrew Lang
... white-veined leaves were traditionally said to have been lashed with the virgin’s milk, it is doubtless a survivor from the gardens tended and cherished by the monk of old. The Botrychium Lunaria (moonwort) and Ophioglossum (adder’s tongue) are found within 300 yards of the Baths (occasionally intermittent for a season); the Trichomanes (English maidenhair) grows in one solitary place on the inner walls of a closed well, though ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... it and bake some bread. On returning home, Sigmund asked whether his orders had been carried out. The lad replied by showing the bread, and when closely questioned he artlessly confessed that he had been obliged to knead into the loaf a great adder which was hidden in the meal. Pleased to see that the boy, for whom he felt a strange affection, had successfully stood the test which had daunted his brothers, Sigmund bade him refrain from eating of the loaf, for ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... by misadventure of an adder the battle began, where Mordred was slain, and Arthur hurt ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume II (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory
... of a voice, but not the words. The sound was enough. It caused me to start as if stung by an adder. It was the voice of ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... describing thy own father's heart. The adder! O, the charms of hell o'erpowered me; He dwelt within me, to my inmost soul Still to and fro he pass'd, suspected never On the wide ocean, in the starry heaven Did mine eyes seek the enemy, whom I In my heart's heart had folded! ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... soundly under the shade, And dreaming of revelries, An adder crawled upon his breast, And bit him ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... a jackal running across the path, just as a fox would in England, reminded Owen that he was in Africa; and though occasionally one meets an adder in England, one meets them much more frequently in the North of Africa. It was impossible to say how many Owen had not seen lying in front of his horse like dead sticks. As the cavalcade passed they would twist themselves down a hole. As for ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... authors were frequently in error. In the realm of the dead, according to the texts of the Book of the Dead, (chapter LXXXIX. and other places,) the responsible soul or Ba of the deceased, may become a sparrow-hawk, an adder, a crocodile-headed being, etc., but only to deceive its demon enemies;[81] not until after this, is the Khu, the intellectual soul, which accompanies the Ba, which is represented under the symbolized form of a sparrow-hawk ...
— Scarabs • Isaac Myer
... heavens were open above them, behold, her good man, who comes upon her near the old cross. She, at that time lazily swinging her charming little foot over the side of the litter, drew in her head as though she had seen an adder. She was a good wife, for I know some who would have proudly passed their husbands, to their shame and to the ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... pit of your own heart, Padahoon, and the adder that bites at the root of it. You are jealous of the fame and the office of Simwa, but you shall not sink your venom in the ...
— The Arrow-Maker - A Drama in Three Acts • Mary Austin
... they said. "He is unrepentant and he is worthy of death. It is not expedient that the young adder should live. There is poison under his tongue, and he speaks things not lawful for an Israelite to hear. Let him die, that we may see him no more, and that our children be not corrupted ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... atmosphere seemed refreshed as by the sparkling of a jet d'eau. These, like myself, were novices, who had brought with them the dewy innocence of life's morning hours; but they had not, like me, heard the hissing of the adder among their roses. ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... rheumatics, scarlatina, jaundice, bile; Deborah could cure them all, and a dozen diseases besides. But this was not all. What she could not cure by her medicine she could by her charms, for with these she was abundantly supplied. Ringworms, warts, gout, adder's stings, whooping cough, measles, she could charm every one of them, and what was more, no one who was a friend of Deborah's went away uncured, if a cure ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... of such sweet names or quaint as Celandine, and Dwarf Larkspur, and Squirrel-corn, and Dutchman's breeches, and Pearlwort, and Wood-sorrel, and Bishop's—cap, and Wintergreen, and Indian-pipe, and Snowberry, and Adder's-tongue, and Wakerobin, and Dragon-root, and Adam-and-Eve, and twenty more, which must have got their names from some fairy of genius. I should say it was a female fairy of genius who called them so, and that she had her own sex among mortals in mind when she invented their nomenclature, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... she would have jumped from an adder, but she did not spring far—not, indeed, beyond arm's length—and then, quick as thought, she raised her little hand and dealt him a box on the ear with such right goodwill that it sounded among the trees like ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... most intense, in the voice and throat of the bird, which is the air incarnate; and so descending through the various orders of animal life to the vibrating and semi-voluntary murmur of the insect; and, lower still, to the hiss or quiver of the tail of the half-lunged snake and deaf adder; all these, nevertheless, being wholly under the rule of Athena as representing either breath or vital nervous power; and, therefore, also, in their simplicity, the "oaten pipe and pastoral song," which belong to her dominion over the asphodel meadows, and breathe ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... went over to see Crawlie, the adder, who lived in a stony and hilly part of Liberty Forest. He told him all about the death of the old water-snake, and begged that he who could deal such deadly thrusts would undertake the work of vengeance. But Crawlie was not exactly disposed to go ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... that no poison caused a less painful death than the fangs of the asp, she had resolved that the bite of one of these reptiles should release her from the burden of life. The clever Ethiopian had thought of inducing her friend Pyrrhus to procure the adder, but it had required all Aisopion's skill in persuasion, and the touching manner in which she understood how to describe the Queen's terrible situation and severe suffering, to conquer the reluctance of the upright man. At last she succeeded in persuading him to measure a queen ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... be quiet, or you'll have a fit of the mother [hysterics]. Nobody wants to send the lad amongst snakes—I don't know that there's so much as an adder there. As to devils, he'll find them where'er he goeth, and some of them in men's and ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... otherwise and went on, And my head's one that its spite was spent on; Thirty years are fled since that morning, 805 And with them all my head's adorning. Nor did the old Duchess die outright, As you expect, of suppressed spite, The natural end of every adder Not suffered to empty its poison-bladder; 810 But she and her son agreed, I take it, That no one should touch on the story to wake it, For the wound in the Duke's pride rankled fiery, So, they made no search and small inquiry— And when fresh gypsies have paid us a visit, I've 815 Noticed ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... well enough, remembering how the brilliant Chinese doctor once had performed such an operation as this upon poor Inspector Weymouth; how, by means of an injection of some serum prepared (as Karamaneh afterwards told us) from the venom of a swamp adder or similar reptile, he had induced amnesia, or complete loss of memory. I felt every drop of ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... recreated that institution after it had been dead for many years, and invited those gentlemen to come into it, which they did, and so of course they have a right to turn him out if they want to. The difference between Beecher and the man who put an adder in his bosom is, that Beecher put in more adders than he did, and consequently had a proportionately livelier time of it when they got ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... man, throwing her from him, as if stung by an adder. "Birth, education, the prejudices of society, have placed an eternal barrier between us. Impoverished though I be, I never can so far forget myself as to mate ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... preserved me. I was warn'd, And laid not to my breast the pois'nous adder! Accuse not fate! your own deceitful heart It was, the wild ambition of your house. But God is with me. The blow was aim'd Full at my head, but your's ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... no virtue, but the policy Of those who fain must deal perforce with vice: As such I recommend it, as I would 350 To one whose foot was on an adder's path. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... black serpent on fire now flashed like lightning on to the body of one of the other two, piercing him in the navel, and then falling on the ground, and lying stretched before him. The wounded man, fascinated and mute, stood looking at the adder's eyes, and endeavouring to stand steady on his legs, yawning the while as if smitten with lethargy or fever; the adder, on his part, looked up at the eyes of the man, and both of them breathed hard, and sent forth a smoke that ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... self be but last May's elf, wing shifted, eye sheathed— Changeling in April's crib rocked, who lets 'scape rills locked fast since frost breathed— Skin cast (think!) adder-like, now bloom ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... embodied at Quebec. In general form and feature Le Gardeur was a manly reflex of his beautiful sister Amelie, but his countenance was marred with traces of debauchery. His face was inflamed, and his dark eyes, so like his sister's, by nature tender and true, were now glittering with the adder tongues of ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... In his oneness, all alone he shall go out first, mark out and prepare the way of the other Tribes; and the royal seed, the ruling power, shall hide itself in him. "Dan shall be a serpent by the way; an adder in the path that biteth the horses' heels so that his rider shall fall backward." Yes, Dan will be hid among the Gentiles. He will bite them, sting them, frustrating their purposes. Then exclaims Jacob: "I have waited ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild
... and reminded o' the time when I had had a sermon a' tae masel'; but the end crowned a', for I had killed an adder that morning on the road, and put the beast in my pouch for Hamish. In the middle o' the sermon, after the Gadarene swine and the dogs were outside, the adder somewie cam' alive and crawled on to the aisle, and the minister eyed it, and ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... weeping bitterly, and the Star-Child was glad and ran back to his playmates. But when they saw him coming they ran away from him in fear. He went to the well and looked in. Lo, his face was as the face of a toad and his body was scaled like an adder. He flung himself down on the grass, ...
— Tell Me Another Story - The Book of Story Programs • Carolyn Sherwin Bailey
... doubt who composed that inimitable passage. There is all the truth and all the humour and all the satire in Old Prejudice that our author has accustomed us to in his best pieces. The common people always get the best literature along with the best religion in John Bunyan. 'They are like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear, and which will not hearken to the voice of charmers charming never so wisely,' says the Psalmist, speaking about some bad men in his day. Now, I will not stand upon David's natural history here, but his moral ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... the libertine repents who cannot Make done undone, when thro' his dying sense Shrills 'lost thro' thee.' They have built their castles here; Our priories are Norman; the Norman adder Hath bitten us; we are poison'd: our dear England Is demi-Norman. He!— [Pointing ...
— Queen Mary and Harold • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... new she sings: The turtle to her mate hath told her tale. Summer is come, for every spray now springs, The hart hath hung his old head on the pale, The buck in haste his winter coat he flings; The fishes float with new repaired scale, The adder all her slough away she lings; The swift swallow pursueth the flies small; The busy-bee her honey now she mings;* Winter is worn that was the flowers' bale. And thus I see among these pleasant things Each care decays, and yet my ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... don't sting; they bite. They've got poisoned fangs. You can see an adder along here sometimes. Perhaps we shall see one to-day, warming ...
— Burr Junior • G. Manville Fenn
... Tom, turning suddenly round and falling on his knees. "O, my dear young Mas'r; I'm 'fraid it will be loss of all—all—body and soul. The good Book says, 'it biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an adder!' my dear Mas'r!" ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... wife whom he married with a declaration that he disliked her? With such feelings as were his, how could he stand before a clergyman and take an oath that he would love her and cherish her? Would she not ever be as an adder to him,—as an adder whom it would be impossible that he should admit into his bosom? Could he live in the same house with her; and if so, could he ask his mother and sisters to visit her? He remembered well what Mrs. Hittaway had called her;—a nasty, low, scheming, ill-conducted, ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... god! Men, let alone gods, should die fighting, whether it be with other men, with wild beasts, with snakes, or with devils. Think now, if your master, the Deliverer, saw you crouch thus like a toad before an adder, how he would laugh and say, 'Ho! I thought this man brave. Ho! he talked very loud about fighting the Water Dweller, he who came of a line of warriors; but now I laugh at him, for I see that he is but a ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... wolvish: she has tied sharp-toothed unkindness like a vulture on her father's breast: for her husband she is a gilded serpent: to Gloster her cruelty seems to have the fangs of a boar. She and Regan are dog-hearted: they are tigers, not daughters: each is an adder to the other: the flesh of each is covered with the fell of a beast. Oswald is a mongrel, and the son and heir of a mongrel: ducking to everyone in power, he is a wag-tail: white with fear, he is a goose. Gloster, for Regan, is an ingrateful fox: Albany, for his wife, has ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... am hearin' you, hain't I, and been hearin' for a year back, I hain't deef as an adder!" And he jammed his hat down over his ears and went to the barn. But there wuz a sort of a waverin' expression to his linement that ...
— Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition • Marietta Holley
... to be obliged to pass David Milliken a second time; "though there warn't no sign that he cared anything about it one way or 'nother, bein' blind as a bat, 'n' deef as an adder, 'n' dumb as a fish, 'n' settin' stockstill there with no coat on, 'n' the wind blowin' up for rain, 'n' four o' the Millikens layin' in the churchyard with gallopin' consumption." It was in this frame of mind that she purchased the whole pepper, which she could have eaten at that ...
— Timothy's Quest - A Story for Anybody, Young or Old, Who Cares to Read It • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... is a commentary. The eternal duty of resistance is farther taught by the words. Hope of victory, encouragement to struggle, the assurance that even these savage beasts may be subdued, and the lion and adder (the hidden and the glaring evils—those which wound unseen, and which spring with a roar) may be overcome, led in a silken leash or charmed into harmlessness, are given in the command, which is also a promise, 'Rule thou ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... resthrant into a lair in th' comity room. A Congressman came out, coughin' behind his hand, an' put his handkerchief into th' northwest corner iv his coat. 'Ladies,' says he, 'what can I do f'r ye?' he says. 'Ye must save th' ar-rmy fr'm th' malt that biteth like a wasp an' stingeth like an adder,' says they. 'Ye bet ye'er life I will, ladies,' says th' Congressman with a slight hiccup. 'I will do as ye desire. A sojer that will dhrink beer is a disgrace to th' American jag,' he says. 'We abolished public dhrinkin' in th' capitol,' he says. 'We done it to make th' Sinitors onhappy, ...
— Mr. Dooley Says • Finley Dunne
... arrow is your tongue, The arrow sharp, the poison strong, And death attends where'er it wounds: You hear no counsels, cries or tears; So the deaf adder stops her ears Against the ...
— The Psalms of David - Imitated in the Language of The New Testament - And Applied to The Christian State and Worship • Isaac Watts
... man shall be like "the deaf adder" (Psal. lviii. 4, 5,) which will not be taken by the voice of the charmers, "charming never so wisely." Let the helm of reason be stirred as well as you can imagine, if there be a contrary wind in the sails of the affections, the ship will not answer to the helm. ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... such abundance lies our choice, 620 As leaves a greater store of Fruit untoucht, Still hanging incorruptible, till men Grow up to thir provision, and more hands Help to disburden Nature of her Bearth. To whom the wilie Adder, blithe and glad. Empress, the way is readie, and not long, Beyond a row of Myrtles, on a Flat, Fast by a Fountain, one small Thicket past Of blowing Myrrh and Balme; if thou accept My conduct, I can bring thee thither soon. 630 Lead then, said Eve. Hee leading ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... delicate red under their whiteness, like those of a woman. That was why he was called Pretty Pierre. The country had, however, felt a kind of weird menace in the name. It was used to snakes whose rattle gave notice of approach or signal of danger. But Pretty Pierre was like the death- adder, small and beautiful, silent and deadly. At one time he had made a secret of his trade, or thought he was doing so. In those days he was often to be seen at David Humphrey's home, and often in talk with Mab Humphrey; but it was there ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... irritated him furtively. He reveals in this whole dispute a lack of self-control and dignity which shows his weakest side. Usually so anxious as to decorum he now lapses into invectives: The British adder, Satan, even the old taunt ascribing a tail to Englishmen has to serve once more. The points at issue disappear altogether behind the bitter mutual reproaches. In his unrestrained anger, Erasmus avails himself ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... his mustache, muttering, "A good deal of ceremony to-night about crushing an adder." Athos shrunk into his corner, pale ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... nothing on earth is sadder Than the dream that cheated the grasp, The flower that turned to the adder, The fruit that changed to the asp, When the dayspring in darkness closes, As the sunset fades from the hills, With the fragrance of perished roses, And the music of ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... shuffle of hoofs Away to the wild waste land, I can see the sun on the station roofs, And a stretch of the shifting sand; The forest of horns is a shaking sea, Where white waves tumble and pass; The cockatoo screams in the myall-tree, And the adder-head ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... to contain within it a winding footpath, or a rough cart-track. Under its shelter the earliest primroses, anemones, and wild hyacinths were to be found; sometimes the first bird's nest; and, now and then, the unwelcome adder. Two such hedgerows radiated, as it were, from the parsonage garden. One, a continuation of the turf terrace, proceeded westward, forming the southern boundary of the home meadows; and was formed into a rustic shrubbery, with occasional seats, entitled "The Wood Walk." The ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... his much-loved home, of the mother that was so dear to him, what agony of mind she must be undergoing; of his darling Elise, how her dear heart must be full of him. And then there pierced him, like the sting of an adder, the thought of separation, certainly for years, perhaps for ever, from all that happiness: the hopelessness of his condition as a prisoner of war at a time when war seemed chronic in Europe, without ...
— The French Prisoners of Norman Cross - A Tale • Arthur Brown
... style of our adversaries would make us believe) what appellations would those deserve who thus endeavour to sow the seeds of sedition, and are impatient to see the fruits? "But," saith he[20], "the deaf adder stops her ear let the charmer charm never so wisely." True, my Lord, there are indeed too many adders in this nation's bosom, adders in all shapes, and in all habits, whom neither the Queen nor parliament can charm to ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... unworthy of a great soul, which ought not to suffer its equanimity to be disturbed by ingratitude or villainy. The injuries done us by the base are as much unworthy of our angry notice as those done us by the insects and the beasts; and when we crush the adder, or slay the wolf or hyena, we should do it without being moved to anger, and with no more feeling of revenge than we have in rooting up ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... "Hedulio can pick up and handle a puff-adder and it will never strike at him and he can similarly handle any ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... escapes during his early life. Once, he fell into a creek of the sea, once out of a boat into the river Ouse, near Bedford, and each time he was narrowly saved from drowning. One day, an adder crossed his path. He stunned it with a stick, then forced open its mouth with a stick and plucked out the tongue, which he supposed to be the sting, with his fingers; "by which act," he says, "had not God been merciful unto me, I might, by my desperateness, have brought myself to ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... fourth rhyme by a brief and fatal movement among the gamesters. The round was completed, and Thevenin was just opening his mouth to claim another victory, when Montigny leaped up, swift as an adder, and stabbed him to the heart. The blow took effect before he had time to utter a cry, before he had time to move. A tremor or two convulsed his frame; his hands opened and shut, his heels rattled on the floor; ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... strength which comes by suffering? Well, if grief Be gain, mine's double—fleeing thus the snare Of yon luxurious and unnerving down, And widowed from mine Eden. And why widowed? Because they tell me, love is of the flesh, And that's our house-bred foe, the adder in our bosoms, Which warmed to life, will sting us. They must know— I do confess mine ignorance, O Lord! Mine earnest will these painful limbs may prove. . . . . . And yet I swore to love him.—So I do No more than I have sworn. Am I to blame If God makes wedlock that, which if it be ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... towers crown his brow. That cast an awful look below; Whose rugged sides the ivy creeps, And with her arms from falling keeps. 'Tis now the raven's bleak abode; 'Tis now th' apartment of the toad; And there the fox securely feeds. And there the poisonous adder breeds, Concealed in ruins, moss, and weeds; While ever and anon there fall Huge heaps of hoary, mouldered wall. Yet time has seen, that lifts the low And level lays the lofty brow,— Has seen this broken pile complete, ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... other feelings than those of the lowest creatures—fear, hatred, or hunger a populace which has sunk below your appeal in their nature, as it has risen beyond your power in their multitude;—whom you can now no more charm than you can the adder, nor discipline, than ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... Tudor was a rider in a famous circus show; For a pet she had an adder—and the adder ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... all down my spine, my companion looked upon me very kindly from his thoughtful, gentle eyes of blue that faded to grey at the marge, and said, 'Stop up your ears, laddie, like the adder, to any temptin' o' your uncle. Keep watch and ward, and, if need arise, run for me instantly, for, though I'm auld the noo, I'm aye ready for ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease
... some days previous to our reaching the Ojo de Vaca, the doctor had captured a snake of the adder kind, two or three species of lizards, and a hideous-looking animal, called, in hunter phraseology, the horned frog: the agama cornuta of Texas and Mexico. These he had immersed in the spirit for preservation. I had observed him do so, and it was evident that neither my Frenchman nor ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... have sometimes proved fatal to children who have mistaken them for sorrel. The brilliant scarlet coral-like berries which are found set closely about the erect spike of the arum in the autumn [35] are known to country lads as adder's meat—a name corrupted from the Anglo-Saxon attor, "poison," as originally applied to these berries, though it is remarkable that pheasants ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... Lo how the adder egg of vanity can brood in its own dunghill, and hatch itself to persecution, rape, and murder!—Lo how Guilt and Folly couple, and engender darkness to hide their own deformity!—The picture is mine!—Black, midnight rape, and blood red murder! ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... Ishmael, you say, is a usurper, yet to believe an Idumaean sooner than Ishmael is to sting like an adder. By the drunken son of Semele, what it is to be a Jew! All men and things, even heaven and earth, change; but a Jew never. To him there is no backward, no forward; he is what his ancestor was in the beginning. In this sand I draw you a circle—there! Now tell me what more a Jew's life is? ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... past life lies there behind the mists of apparent forgetfulness, and any light air of suggestion may sweep away the clouds and show it all. What have you laid up in these memories of yours to start into life some day: 'at the last biting like a serpent and stinging like an adder'? 'It is John! It is ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... raised during the consultation over the proposed treaty with Mordred, sound the trumpet and fall on! for he had no confidence in Mordred. Mordred had given a similar order to his people. Well, by and by an adder bit a knight's heel; the knight forgot all about the order, and made a slash at the adder with his sword. Inside of half a minute those two prodigious hosts came together with a crash! They butchered away all day. Then the king—however, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... bird. Just as I was stepping off the 'aisle,' a snake passed over my foot, and biting me on the ankle vanished in the swamp. It must have been some sort of a water-snake, but I did not know. All I knew was that I had been bitten by a snake that might be poisonous. It could easily have been an adder, or a karait—even a cobra—though I had not a minute in which to observe a hood or any distinctive marks. I immediately collected my faculties to think what was the best thing to do. I knew I had no time to lose. Mother was away in town shopping for the cold-weather ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... perhaps his life was uneventful for so far-travelling a dog, though it held its moments of eccentricity, as when he leaped through the window of a four-wheeler into Kensington, or sat on a Dartmoor adder. But that was fortunately of a Sunday afternoon—when adder and all were torpid, so nothing happened, till a friend, who was following, lifted him off the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... illustration for his argument. "Some chaps," he said, "'ud be thankful to have toes to be trod on"; and ducking to avoid a coming missile, he added cheerfully, "But there's even an advantage about having wooden legs at times. Heard once of a chap that reckoned 'em just the thing. Trod on a death-adder unexpected-like in his camp, and when the death-adder whizzed round to strike it, just struck wood, and the chap enjoyed his supper as usual that night. That chap had a wooden leg," he added, unnecessarily explicit; and then his argument ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... have they closed their eyes? I fear there are some few vipers among us, who, for ten or twenty pounds' gain, would sell their souls and their country, though at last it would end in their own ruin as well as ours. Be not like the deaf adder, who refuses to hear the voice of the charmer, charm ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... laughed at their laughter as much as at their weeping. Whether they cursed or blessed the world, they have never fitted it. It is true that men have shrunk from the sting of a great satirist as if from the sting of an adder. But it is equally true that men flee from the embrace of a great optimist as from the embrace of a bear. Nothing brings down more curses than a real benediction. For the goodness of good things, like ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... make hath told her tale. Summer is come, for every spray now springs: The hart hath hung his old head on the pale; The buck in brake his winter coat he flings; The fishes flete with new repaired scale. The adder all her slough away she slings; The swift swallow pursueth the flies smale; The busy bee her honey now she mings; Winter is worn that was the flowers' bale. And thus I see among these pleasant things Each care decays, and yet my sorrow springs. ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... the warmhearted ebullition of feeling produced by his appearance had subsided, "so you have returned to us at last; but indeed, you return now to a blank and dismal prospect. Miss Goodwin's adder tongue has charmed the dotage of your silly old uncle ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... and Brother Archangias followed him, chatting. A hundred yards further Vincent surreptitiously bolted, and again glided up towards the church, keeping a watchful eye upon them, and ready to dart behind a bush if they should look round. With adder-like suppleness, he once more glided into the graveyard, that paradise full ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... it befell that an adder, coming out of a bush hard by, stung a knight in the foot; and he, seeing the snake, drew his sword to kill it and thought no harm thereby. But on the instant that the sword flashed, the trumpets blared on both sides ...
— Stories from Le Morte D'Arthur and the Mabinogion • Beatrice Clay
... open above them, behold, her good man, who comes upon her near the old cross. She, at that time lazily swinging her charming little foot over the side of the litter, drew in her head as though she had seen an adder. She was a good wife, for I know some who would have proudly passed their husbands, to their shame and to the great ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... princess' fere, A lovely partner of a lady's bed, A noble head a golden crown to wear: His glosing sire his errand daily said, And sugared speeches whispered in mine ear To make me take this darling in mine arms, But still the adder stopt her ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... the young man, throwing her from him, as if stung by an adder. "Birth, education, the prejudices of society, have placed an eternal barrier between us. Impoverished though I be, I never can so far forget myself as to mate ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... her mind As she plann'd how to thrall me with beauty, and bind My soul to her charms,—and her long tresses play'd From shade into shine and from shine into shade, Like a day in mid-autumn,—first fair, O how fair! With long snaky locks of the adder-black hair That clung round her neck,—those dark locks that I prize, For the sake of a maid that once loved me with eyes Of that fathomless hue,—but they changed as they roll'd, And brighten'd, and suddenly blazed into gold That she comb'd into flames, and the locks that ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... stars preserved me. I was warn'd, And laid not to my breast the pois'nous adder! Accuse not fate! your own deceitful heart It was, the wild ambition of your house. But God is with me. The blow was aim'd Full at my head, but your's it is ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... parch'd Afric's breed doth Ranker poison bear The drowsy Adder will as soon unlock ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... forehead to have a better sight of so strange an attitude for his sister to take. At last Aunt Susan pointed to something gliding away in the grass, and gasped: "A serpent! oh, dear, oh, dear, a serpent!" Vainly did my husband try to calm her fright by explaining that it was only an adder going to seek the moisture of the river-bank and never intending to attack any one, that they were plentiful and frequently to be met with, when their first care was to pass unnoticed; our poor aunt ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... a fenny snake, In the caldron boil and bake; Eye of newt, and toe of frog, Wool of bat, and tongue of dog, Adder's fork, and blind-worm's sting, Lizard's leg, and owlet's wing, For a charm of powerful trouble; Like ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... yet unknown To us, in such abundance lies our choice, 620 As leaves a greater store of Fruit untoucht, Still hanging incorruptible, till men Grow up to thir provision, and more hands Help to disburden Nature of her Bearth. To whom the wilie Adder, blithe and glad. Empress, the way is readie, and not long, Beyond a row of Myrtles, on a Flat, Fast by a Fountain, one small Thicket past Of blowing Myrrh and Balme; if thou accept My conduct, I can bring thee thither soon. 630 Lead then, said Eve. Hee leading swiftly rowld In tangles, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... were growne so secure of their greatnesse, as to contemne all Christian Kings; and Treading on the necks of Emperours, to mocke both them, and the Scripture, in the words of the 91. Psalm, "Thou shalt Tread upon the Lion and the Adder, the young Lion and the Dragon thou shalt Trample ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... sigh, "it was a child, that was. Her name was Mariar, but we called 'er Merry. Her father's name—the Brute's, you know—was Blackadder, and a blacker adder don't wriggle its slimy way through filthy slums nowhere—supposin' him to be yet unscragged, for he was uncommon hard on his wife—that's my Aunt Georgie. Her name was Georgianna. I wonder how it is that people never give people their right names! Well, Mr Aspel, you must know I was ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne
... it is to a large and populous city, the traditions of the past come so strongly upon the mind, that one would rather look for the apparition of a whole band of these inky-haired adder-anointed priests of Montezuma, than expect to meet with the benevolent-looking archbishop, who, in purple robes, occasionally walks under the shade ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... in the country and in town. I remember a terrible fright a large picnic party, at which I assisted, was thrown into while lunching in the garden of a villa, almost in the town of Rio, by a lady jumping up from her seat with a deadly whip-snake hanging on her dress. I once myself sat on an adder who put his fangs through the woollen stuff of my inexpressibles and could not escape. The same thing happened with the lady's dress; in that case also we caught the snake, as it could ...
— Sketches From My Life - By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha • Hobart Pasha
... quite brightly, to see if any one was moving. When the earth people were all asleep was the time he chose for playing with his three dogs. He called them dogs, but the earth people called them snakes, the death adder, the black snake, and the tiger snake. As he looked down on to the earth, with his three dogs beside him, Bahloo saw about a dozen daens, or black fellows, crossing a Creek. He called to them saying, "Stop, I want you to carry my dogs across that creek." But the black fellows, though they ...
— Australian Legendary Tales - Folklore of the Noongahburrahs as told to the Piccaninnies • K. Langloh Parker
... be my playmates but the adder and the frog, That was got beneath a furze-bush and born in a bog? And what should be my singing, that was christened at an altar, But Aves and Credos and Psalms out of ...
— A Few Figs from Thistles • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... lie anywhere near a flat stone," exclaimed Sylvia, "or an adder may come out, and that isn't ...
— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade
... full of lies as of lines, swell like a toade, hiss like an adder, bite like a dog, and chatter like a monkey, my pen is prepared, and my mind; and if you chaunce to find anie worse words than you broughte, let them be put in your dad's dictionarie. Farewell, and be hanged; and I pray God you fare no ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... them was to secure success in law suits and free access to kings. Pliny knew of a Gaulish knight who was executed by the emperor Claudius for wearing one of these amulets.[39] Under the name of Snake Stones (glain neidr) or Adder Stones the beads are still known in those parts of our own country where the Celtic population has lingered, with its immemorial superstitions, down to the present or recent times; and the old story of the origin of the beads from the slaver of serpents was believed by the modern peasantry of Cornwall, ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... there were lunges in quart, there were cuts over and under, thrusts in flanconade and tierce, feint and double-feint, and sudden disengagements. The sweat trickled down the vicomte's face; Victor's forehead glistened with moisture. Suddenly Victor stooped; swift as the tongue of an adder his blade bit deeply into the vicomte's groin, making a terrible wound. The vicomte caught his breath in a ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... hostess for his beer, and conversed freely with his acquaintance. By his arch replies I found that I was in company with an original—a man that might stretch forth his arms in the wilderness without fear, and like Paul, grasp an adder without harm. He playfully entwined his fingers with their coils and curled crests, and played with their forked tongues. He had unbuttoned his waistcoat, and as cleverly as a fish-woman handles her eels, let out several snakes and adders, warmed by his breast, and spread them on ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini
... name for them, meaning "adder." The French termed them "Mingos," from another Algonkin word meaning "stealthy." The English and Dutch colonists in America knew them as the Five Nations. Their own title was "People of the Long House," as if the five nations were one family housed ...
— Boys' Book of Indian Warriors - and Heroic Indian Women • Edwin L. Sabin
... the wine; they that go to seek mixed wine. Look not thou upon the wine when it is red, when it giveth its color in the cup, when it moveth itself aright,'—say, like sparkling Champagne.—'At the last it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder. Thine eyes shall behold strange wonders, and thine heart shall utter perverse things; yea, thou shalt be as he that lieth down in the midst of the sea, or as he that lieth on the top of a mast. They have stricken me, shalt thou say, and I was not sick; they ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... the potatoes. My children frequently took it out in their hands, to show it to their schoolfellows; but my wife, and some others, could not bear the sight of it. I one day took it in my hand, and opened its mouth with a penknife, to show a gentleman how different it was from that of the adder, which I had dead by me: its teeth being no more formidable or terrific than the teeth of a trout or eel; while the mouth of the adder had two fangs, like the claws of a cat, attached to the roof of the mouth, no way connected with its jaw-teeth. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 549 (Supplementary issue) • Various
... said, with dignity, "if you don't want to be in on the ground floor, that is your affair. But you are missing an intellectual treat. And, anyway, no matter how much you may behave like the deaf adder of Scripture which, as you are doubtless aware, the more one piped, the less it danced, or words to that effect, I shall carry on as planned. I am extremely fond of Angela, and I shall spare no effort to bring the sunshine back ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... say," replied the hunter; "and I have as much respect for sich whining hypercrites as I have for a hissing adder: that's why I never took much to meetin's, I suppose. What I gits, I gits honest—don't I, pet?" and he caressed his rifle as if it were a living thing, and understood what he said. "I brings home what the good Lord sends inter the woods an' over the prairies fur me. ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson
... safely say, among hands, they gave him the d——d lie fifty times! James M. Davis, a respectable mechanic, asked him if he would say that to Major Donelson's face? He replied, that he heard the hissing of an adder, or a goose, and went through with certain stereotyped phrases you have all heard from his lips. This call upon him by Mr. Davis was not named in my newspaper report, nor in my letter to Major Donelson. Indeed, I did not anticipate a ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... high-priest in her holiest place, Not to be loudly broken in upon. Oh! friend, thoughts deep and heavy as these well-nigh O'erbore the limits of my brain; but he Bent o'er me, and my neck his arm upstay'd From earth. I thought it was an adder's fold, And once I strove to disengage myself, But fail'd, I was so feeble. She was there too: She bent above me too: her cheek was pale, Oh! very fair and pale: rare pity had stolen The living bloom away, as tho' a red rose Should change into a white one suddenly. Her eyes, I saw, were full ...
— The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... various animals, as well as of man. The "eagle-stone" is also a concretion to which magical properties were ascribed. I have seen a specimen, but do not know its history and origin. Glass beads found in prehistoric burial-places are called by old writers "adders' eggs," and "adder-stones," and were said (it is improbable that one should say "believed") to hatch out young adders when incubated with sufficiently silly ceremonies and observances. A celebrated "stone" of medicinal reputation in the East is the "goa-stone." ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... though it had become the pretty generally received opinion on board, both fore and aft, that we were destined never to reach our station. All sorts of stories were going the round of the decks. An old woman near Plymouth, Mother Adder-fang she was called, had been heard to declare, two nights before the ship went out of harbour, that not a stick of the Orpheus would ever boil a kettle on English ground. Another was said to have cursed the ship and ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... allied, to the part least expecting or prepared to sustain the pang. Not an honest gentlemanly gout that will exhibit itself and meet one fairly toe to toe with the inflammation of undisguised passion; but an adder, a viper of the nerves that stings and flies; and darts and disappears before the flesh has even time to blush for its existence; so subtle yet so tormenting, so deep yet so evanescent, that the patient in his agony half wonders whether it be ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... he'd kept to sighs, No doubt the source is one that never dries; But often diff'rent with expense 'tis found; His wealth was wasted rapidly around He wretched grew; at length for debt he fled, And sought a desert to conceal his head. As on the road he moved, a clown he met, Who with his stick an adder tried to get, From out a thicket, where it hissing lay, And hoped to drive the countryman away: Our knight his object asked; the clown replied, To slay the reptile anxiously I tried; Wherever met, an ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... dog-faced; and with the Sibans, who have horses' feet, and run more swiftly than horses. A third of our company died in battle, and a third died of want. The rest murmured against me, and said that I had brought them an evil fortune. I took a horned adder from beneath a stone and let it sting me. When they saw that I did not ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... the ruddy rascal, He the lively Lemminkainen, Struck his left shoe in the snowdrift, Like an adder in the meadow, Pushed his staff of pinewood forward, As it were a living serpent, 200 And he said as he was gliding, Grasping firm the pole he carried: "Let the men who live in Lapland, Help me all to bring the ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... shadow, Quickly, thickly, comes the crowd— From death's bosom creeps the adder, Trailing ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... thumb; for if so, he was a man of the sea, and the sea would not rest until it had got him back. So the grave was opened, and he really was found with his thumb in his mouth. So they laid him upon a cart and harnessed two oxen before it; and as if stung by an adder, the oxen ran away with the man of the sea over heath and moorland to the ocean; and then the sand ceased flying inland, but the hills that had been heaped up still remained there. All this Juergen heard and treasured ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... visage is wolvish: she has tied sharp-toothed unkindness like a vulture on her father's breast: for her husband she is a gilded serpent: to Gloster her cruelty seems to have the fangs of a boar. She and Regan are dog-hearted: they are tigers, not daughters: each is an adder to the other: the flesh of each is covered with the fell of a beast. Oswald is a mongrel, and the son and heir of a mongrel: ducking to everyone in power, he is a wag-tail: white with fear, he is a goose. Gloster, for Regan, is an ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... contests of an agitated and distracted country are doomed; but if they know not our griefs, neither can they dream of our consolation. We move like the delineation of Faith, over a barren and desert soil; the rock, and the thorn, and the stings of the adder, are round our feet; but we clasp a crucifix to our hearts for our comfort, and we fix our eyes upon the ...
— Falkland, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... want for nothin', but ye have got to hold up yer right hand and swear to obey me for the rest of yer nateral life,' and he did it. He got well, and he is tougher'n a biled owl, if he is eighty-six. But the cold sorter settled in his ears, and he's deef as an adder. Ef angel Gabriel blew his horn now I'm ...
— Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks - A Picture of New England Home Life • Charles Felton Pidgin
... that much of it which was impossible to avoid. But the very first time such talk was begun in my dormitory I spoke out. What I said I don't know, but I felt as if I was trampling on a slimy poisonous adder, and, at any rate, I showed such pain and distress that the fellows dropped it at the time. Since then I have absolutely refused to stay in the room if ever such talk is begun. So it never is now, and I do think the fellows are very ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... is beautiful. But women are like adder's eggs. He is a fool who warms them in his bosom." He turned his slow regard upon Mrs. Sin. "You have stained your hair to look even as hers. It was discreet, my wife. But one is beautiful and many-shadowed like a copper vase, and the other is like a winter sunset ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... that when Jesus smelled such a scent about Jerusalem or in Galilee, he thought of his Father. And if God means it, it is mine, even if I should never smell it again. The music of the spheres is mine if old age should make me deaf as the adder. Am I mystical again, reader? Then I hope you are too, or will be before you have done with this same beautiful mystical life of ours. More and more nature becomes to me one of God's books of poetry—not his grandest—that ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... answered by his notice of the reception of the criticism. An anonymous letter-writer has but one means of knowing the effect of his attack. In this he has the superiority over the viper; he knows that his poison has taken effect, when he hears the victim cry;—the adder is deaf. The best reply to an anonymous intimation is to take no notice directly nor indirectly. I wish Mr. Bowles could see only one or two of the thousand which I have received in the course of a literary life, which, though begun early, has ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... trees of God that grow In Paradise, and various, yet unknown To us; in such abundance lies our choice, As leaves a greater store of fruit untouched, Still hanging incorruptible, till men Grow up to their provision, and more hands Help to disburden Nature of her birth. To whom the wily Adder, blithe and glad. Empress, the way is ready, and not long; Beyond a row of myrtles, on a flat, Fast by a fountain, one small thicket past Of blowing myrrh and balm: if thou accept My conduct, I can bring thee ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... somewhat caressingly. The leaves of that book had dropped blood for him once; they had taken the brightness out of his childhood; from between them had sprung the visions that had clung about him and made night horrible. Adder-like thoughts had lifted their heads, had shot out forked tongues at him, asking mockingly strange, trivial questions that he could not answer, ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... one side, as though by doing so she might once more touch his brow with hers; and unconsciously she would put out her fingers, as though they might find their way into his hand. And then she would draw them back with a shudder, as though recoiling from the touch of an adder. ...
— Nina Balatka • Anthony Trollope
... had much better throw his pack of cards into the fire, wash the Kings of Israel and Judah off his shirt, destroy his strings and hooked wires, and keep his Examination-coat for a shooting one. But all their arguments were in vain, and the infatuated little gentleman, like a deaf adder, shut his ears at the ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... up and down, and as he came to the letter he spurned it with his foot, like a poisonous adder, too loathsome to touch. "I have deserved this punishment," cried he, laughing aloud ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... snakes cannot be played upon in this way: there are some species which are utterly callous to the influences to which the cobra yields itself so readily. No missionary will find any difficulty in getting a snake-charmer to appreciate that Scripture text about the deaf adder which will not listen to the voice of the charmer, ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... common danger, the discoverie thereof may happily profit other men, as much as please myselfe. And here might I begin with those notable Pirates in this our paper-sea, those sea-dogs, or lande-Critikes, monsters of men, if not beastes rather than men; whose teeth are Canibals, their toongs adder-forkes, their lips aspes-poyson, their eies basiliskes, their breath the breath of a grave, their wordes like swordes of Turkes, that strive which shall dive deepest into a Christian lying bound before them. But for these barking and biting dogs, they ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... mad mill stream The mountain roses fall; And fern and adder's-tongue Grow on the old mill wall. The tarn is on the upland moor, Where not a leaf doth grow; And through the mountain gashes, The merry mill stream dashes Down to the sea below. But in the quiet hollows The red trout groweth ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... Master Scarlett?" said Nat, respectfully. "Black Adder knows me by heart, and I could ride him and take care of him when you didn't want him, or he'd do for master if Thunder ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... Wolflake, and came to a hut, painted gray, that stood clear of the ground, upon the bones of four great birds' feet. Upon the four corners of the hunt were carved severally the figures of a lion, a dragon, a cockatrice and an adder, to proclaim the miseries of carnal and intellectual sin, and of pride, and ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... fry were capable of affording better fun. Some seasons afterwards, when our Hunt was disbanded, the shopkeepers' apprentices continued, with the youngsters, to work our mongrel hounds; but eventually Joker's death from the bite of an adder put an end to their pastime, for the bobtail and the terrier were the only possible leaders of the ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... Norfolk, Va., south, the other all over the eastern country from Texas to Massachusetts. They are usually confounded, however, with two perfectly harmless snakes, the cotton mouth with the common water snake, the copperhead with the so-called spreading adder, but as their differences have to be learned from actual inspection and are very hard to express in a description which would help to identify living specimens, it is wisest to keep ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... hath long been changed; Worm-like 'twas trampled—adder-like avenged— Without one hope on earth beyond thy love, 400 And scarce a glimpse of mercy from above. Yet the same feeling which thou dost condemn, My very love to thee is hate to them, So closely mingling here, that disentwined, I cease to love thee when I ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... during his early life. Once, he fell into a creek of the sea, once out of a boat into the river Ouse, near Bedford, and each time he was narrowly saved from drowning. One day, an adder crossed his path. He stunned it with a stick, then forced open its mouth with a stick and plucked out the tongue, which he supposed to be the sting, with his fingers; "by which act," he says, "had not God ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... the last election," met with approval on every side. The "Anti-Revolutionary" lion lay down with the "Christian-Historical" lamb; the "Liberal" bear and the "Clerical" cow fed together; and the sucking "Social-Democrat" laid his hand on the "Reactionary" adder's den. It was idyllic. Real ...
— Fighting For Peace • Henry Van Dyke
... King wax wroth, and swore that Raud should suffer the worst of deaths, and the King commanded that he be taken and bound with his back to a pole and that a bit of wood be placed betwixt his teeth so that his mouth might be open, and caused an adder to be taken and set in his mouth, but the adder would in no wise enter therein but writhed away when Raud blew upon it. Then did the King cause the adder to be taken & put in a hollow stick of angelica and set in the mouth of Raud (albeit ...
— The Sagas of Olaf Tryggvason and of Harald The Tyrant (Harald Haardraade) • Snorri Sturluson
... the occasion of the heedless and reckless conduct of both himself and Capt. Helm. And should not this circumstance be a warning to parents and guardians, to young men and children, "to look not upon the wine when it is red," and remember that at last "it will bite like a serpent and sting like an adder?" Should it not also remind those who have guests to entertain, of the sinfulness of putting the cup to their neighbor's lips? Certainly it should. But I must resume ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward
... The Adder or Serpent is coiled about the denuded stem; the upper branches reach to heaven, and bear at the top a new-born wailing infant, swathed in linen, whilst (here we quote ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... the blood of sacrifice, and in its flash the eye of uncoiled adders, and in the foam the mouth-froth of eternal death. Not knowing what a horrible mixture it is, men take it up and drink it down—the sacrificial blood, the adder's venom, the death-froth—and smack their lips and call it ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... backwards and forwards, almost to falling;—and his inarticulate complaints became terrific. I attempted to steady him by an exertion of strength—I spoke kindly to him, but he writhed in my grasp like an adder, and as an adder was deaf; grief and fear had horrible possession. Myself, almost in a state of desperation—for the sight was pitiful. I at last endeavoured to awe him into a momentary quiescence, and strongly bade him at last to die like a man; but the word "Death" had to him only the effect ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 374 • Various
... him; Mummius, fool-renown'd, Who like his Cheops[422] stinks above the ground, Fierce as a startled adder, swell'd, and said, Rattling an ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... Naepor, "Hedulio can pick up and handle a puff-adder and it will never strike at him and he can similarly handle any kind ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... Atli orders Gunnar to be thrown to the snakes. Though his hands are bound, Gunnar plays so sweetly with his toes on the harp, which Gudrun has sent him, that all the snakes are lulled to sleep, with the exception of an adder, which stings him to the heart, so ...
— The Nibelungenlied • Unknown
... Apostle says; "Awake, thou that sleepest, and rise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light." But the unthankful act against this grace, and ruin it: as Virgil did with this little fly that saved him from death. He lay asleep, and an adder came toward him: but this fly Saura flew before, and lighted on his forehead, and pricked him a little, and therewith he wakened; also the adder came; but this Virgil, in his waking, felt his forehead smart, and smote himself ...
— The Form of Perfect Living and Other Prose Treatises • Richard Rolle of Hampole
... the wine when it is red, when it giveth his color in the cup, at the last it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder,'" continued the chaplain, as he passed out of ...
— Outward Bound - Or, Young America Afloat • Oliver Optic
... in which this was spoken, John saw the necessity of acquiescence. "I did but jest," he said; "and you turn upon me like an adder! Name whom you will, in the fiend's ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... cobra exalts his hooded head, and the spanning jaws fly open. Quivers and chitters the tail of the cheerful rattlesnake; silently slips out the forked tongue, and is as silently absorbed. The fangless adder warps up the leg of the Professor, lays clammy coils about his neck, and pokes a flattened head curiously into his open mouth. The young man of Colusa is interested; his feelings transcend expression. Not a syllable breathes he, but with a deep-drawn sigh he turns his broad back ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... the tramp and shuffle of hoofs Away to the wild waste land, I can see the sun on the station roofs, And a stretch of the shifting sand; The forest of horns is a shaking sea, Where white waves tumble and pass; The cockatoo screams in the myall-tree, And the adder-head gleams in the grass. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... feature Le Gardeur was a manly reflex of his beautiful sister Amelie, but his countenance was marred with traces of debauchery. His face was inflamed, and his dark eyes, so like his sister's, by nature tender and true, were now glittering with the adder tongues of ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... here. But you will hear of it yourselves when you grow up, for it has been sung in noble poetry and music; and whether it be true or not, it stands forever as a warning to us, not to seek for help from evil persons, or to gain good ends by evil means. For if we use an adder even against our enemies, it will turn again and ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... I tell you, brother, according to the flesh: it is just as complete as the lark's is with the adder, no more so, nor ever can. Reconciled, forsooth! To what would I ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... warmest of friends. They shared the same room together, and the newcomer was allowed to look over all her companion's books, drawings,—for she, like her twin brother, was an artist,—keepsakes, and treasures of every sort. One day she came upon something that made her start back as if stung by an adder. It was a little portrait in an oval frame, a man's face, highly idealised by the artist, and yet strikingly true to life. Evidently the hand of love had depicted those lineaments. The eyes were bright, the lips wore a proud smile, the whole ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... to be promptly ducked in horse-ponds in the unregenerate days; but the scold was an individual who was usually chastised for making a dead-set at her husband alone. The real shrew is like the puff-adder or the whip-snake—she tries to bite impartially all round; and she is often able to bite in comparative silence, but with a most deadly effect. The vulgar shrieker is a deplorable source of mischief, but she cannot match the reticent stabber who ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... rock adder—one of the deadliest of African snakes. Barely more than three inches in length, and a dull gray in color, it was small wonder that Harry in his excitement had not seen it as he was about ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... Probus,' replied Macer, 'might you preach the faith of Christ in the ear of the adder! to the very stones of the highways! Aurelian turn from a settled purpose! ha! ha! you have not served, Probus, under him in Gaul and Asia as others have. Never did the arguments of his legions and his great officers on the other side, ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... hands, praying. Finding that his son, the hope of his name, still did not come to him, great tears rose in his eyes, dry so long, and rolled down his withered cheeks. At this moment, Etienne, hearing no further sounds, glided to the opening of his grotto like a young adder craving the sun. He saw the tears of the stricken old man, he recognized the signs of a true grief, and, seizing his father's hand, he kissed him, saying in the voice of ...
— The Hated Son • Honore de Balzac
... started as if an adder had bitten him, and gazed franticly upon the intruder. 'Miss Ward, madam,' he exclaimed involuntarily, 'don't say more, and I'll ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 441 - Volume 17, New Series, June 12, 1852 • Various
... ill-naturedly upon it, to talk slang. All these things and more, people do who call themselves, ladies. There are houses on which should be placed signs, as on pest houses, and whose occupants should be labelled "dangerous," for their tongues are more dangerous than the sting of the adder, and they are in so-called "society." Heaven save ...
— Bohemian Society • Lydia Leavitt
... rims to its eyes and the expression of a parrot, you might have some idea of it. She was hobbling along with a stick, in quite the proper manner, but I felt certain that all that was put on, and that she could have glided as swift as an adder if she pleased. I confess I was afraid of her. I had a feeling that she knew everything and ...
— The Five Jars • Montague Rhodes James
... we esteem those most beautiful, whose functions are the most noble, whether as some, in mere energy, or as others, in moral honor, so that we look with hate on the foulness of the sloth, and the subtlety of the adder, and the rage of the hyena: with the honor due to their earthly wisdom we invest the earnest ant and unwearied bee; but we look with full perception of sacred function to the tribes of burning plumage and choral voice.[34] ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... I remained unscared. I sucked the blood from the tiny punctures, feeling secure, after I had done it. I remembered how Queen Eleanore had saved the life of Richard Coeur de Lion in the Holy Land, when he had been bitten by an adder, by sucking out the venom. I enjoyed the thrill of a repeated ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... person; and this unsolicited usurper of my hearth is nothing whatever to me, unless perhaps the object of my entire abhorrence. Yet am I none the less compelled to justify the ensuing action before an irrational audience, which faces common logic in very much the attitude of Augustine's famed adder! Decidedly I think that, on the whole, I ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... green horse tail, Equisetum fluviatile, with its fluted stem and verticillate series of linear brandies. Two other species of the same genus, Equisetum sylvaticum and Equisetum arvense, flourish on the drier parts of the moor, blent with two species of minute ferns, the moonwort and the adder's tongue,—ferns that, like the magnificent royal fern (Osmunda regalis), though on a much humbler scale, bear their seed cases on independent stems, and were much sought after of old for imaginary virtues, which the modern schools of medicine ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... anguish there is such a potion. The gum of warpy juniper shoots is seethed With the torn marrow of an adder's spine; An unflawed emerald is pashed to dust And mingled there; that broth must cool in moonlight. I have indeed attempted this already, But the poor emeralds I could extort From wry-mouthed earls' women had no force. In two more dawns it ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... gave an exclamation and leaped back out of the grass. "Come out of that grass, Walt," he cried, "I have been bitten by a puff adder. I ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... Sheldon was not sentimental, and any exhibition of feeling appeared to have an irritating effect upon his nerves. There were times when he shrank from some little sudden caress of Charlotte's as from the sting of an adder. Aversion, surprise, fear—what was it that showed in the expression of his face at these moments? Whatever that strange look was, it departed too quickly for analysis; and the stockbroker thanked ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... bowl! though rich and bright, Its rubies flash upon the sight, An adder coils its depths beneath, Whose lure is woe, whose ...
— Elsie's children • Martha Finley
... highest goal, and whispered in his ear, "look not thou upon the wine when it is red, when it giveth its color in the cup, when it moveth itself aright," started him down a course which made him learn from a terrible experience that "at the last it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder." Does any one call a glass of wine a small thing? Read Tom's story and then call it small, if you dare! Whatever he did was done with his might, drinking not excepted. He boasted of his power to drink much ...
— The Children's Portion • Various
... or by Him who made The world, thy heart's blood dyes my blade!"— "Thy threats, thy mercy, I defy! Let recreant yield, who fears to die." —Like adder darting from his coil, Like wolf that dashes through the toil, Like mountain-cat who guards her young, Full at Fitz-James's throat he sprung; Received, but recked not of a wound, And locked his arms his foeman round.— Now, gallant Saxon, hold thine own! No maiden's hand is round thee ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
Copyright © 2024 Free Translator.org
|
|
|
