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More "Beak" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... there were some whose names had been obviously the result of a sense of propriety in some one. Among the men who were rabidly set on distinguishing themselves in one way or another was a Major Beak. Now, why was it that this Major's nose was an aquiline of the most outrageous dimensions? Surely no one would argue that the nose grew to accommodate the name. Is it not more probable—nay, certain— ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne
... the buried town fly the birds of heaven, the small and the great; they twitter and they sing as best they may, each bird with his beak. ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... hull is painted black, with a white bow, which ends in a long upstanding spiral beak plated with shining tin. The upper deck is shaped like a roof, with narrow steps up to it, and a flat bridge leading from one side to the other. The forward part of the raised deck ends in a double cabin, containing two rooms, with doors to ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... influence known By sighs, and tears, and grief alone. I greet her as the fiend, to whom belong The vulture's ravening beak, the raven's funereal song! She tells of time misspent, of comfort lost, Of fair occasions gone forever by; Of hopes too fondly nursed, too rudely crossed, Of many a cause to wish, yet fear to die; For what, except the instinctive fear Lest she survive, ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... the second time before there was any answer. They heard voices—Massey's and another. Then the druggist came to the entrance, unbolted it and stuck his head out—his gray hair all ruffled up in a tuft which made him, with his big beak and red-rimmed eyes, look like ...
— How Janice Day Won • Helen Beecher Long
... it was met with instant and angry remonstrance. "The ambassador," wrote the grand master to Francis, "has been to me in great displeasure, and has told me roundly that his master is trifled with by us. We give him words in plenty to keep his beak in the water; but it is very plain that we are playing false, and that no honesty is intended. Nor are his words altogether without reason; for many persons declare openly that nothing will be done. If the alliance of England, therefore, appear of importance to your Highness, it would be well ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... the name of a genus of aquatic birds (Diomedea), closely allied to the petrels, and belonging, like them, to the order Tubinares. In the name Diomedea, assigned to them by Linnaeus, there is a reference to the mythical metamorphosis of the companions of the Greek warrior Diomedes into birds. The beak is large, strong and sharp-edged, the upper mandible terminating in a large hook; the wings are narrow and very long; the feet have no hind toe, and the three anterior toes are completely webbed. The best known is the common or wandering ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... this same Jug I empty, could it speak, Might whisper that itself had been a Beak And dealt me Fourteen Days 'without the Op.'— Your Worship, see, my lip is on ...
— Green Bays. Verses and Parodies • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... heaven knows, I never cared the blue end of a finger-nail for that girl. But things have now come to a pretty pass when even a chicken with a broken toe cannot be indisposed in my house without neighbour Gumesinda thrusting her beak ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... enumerated the Jewish types in England. There is (1) the sallow Jew with a beak; (2) the same without a beak; (3) the "hammy" Jew, with pink face like a cochon-a-lait. The Florentine type, with fair hair and beautiful clear face, is not ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... three equal vertical bands of green (hoist side), white, and red; the coat of arms (an eagle perched on a cactus with a snake in its beak) is centered ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... through it, "a large bird stands on the tree. It appears to have a considerable beak. I should say ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... reported to Cochrane when he slipped from the sling in the airlock. "There's no question about it when you are close. It's more nearly a bird than anything else. It was warm-blooded. It has a beak. There are penguins on Earth that have ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... at last, it was won; the advance had been checked by the closer welding of the syntagmata, half his men were down; but Sergius, still unhurt, had stooped and raised the standard, kissing its crimson beak and ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... or pavilion of the spring, which, like a fairy temple, seemed to have been exhaled from in bubbles, was yet capped, as in the broad light of day, by a gilded eagle, from whose beak was suspended a bottle of the water, and no other light was shed upon the scene than the silver and golden radiance emitted together from this bottle, as if ten thousand infinitely small goldfish ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... curb'd the fury of his car And dropt his thirsty lance at thy command. Perching on the sceptred hand Of Jove, thy magic lulls the feather'd king With ruffled plumes, and flagging wing: Quench'd in dark clouds of slumber lie The terror of his beak, and lightnings ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... tears. La Bougival closed the old man's eyes and straightened him on the bed; then she ran to call Savinien; but the heirs, who stood at the corner of the street, like crows watching till a horse is buried before they scratch at the ground and turn it over with beak and claw, flocked in with the celerity of ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... of the rolled edge are the names "New Mexico," "Kansas," "Wyoming," "Montana," "Dakota," "Colorado," "Indian Territory," and "Texas." A profile portrait of General Miles, in relief, is suspended from an eagle's beak in the center, and below are the crossed weapons of the U.S. Army and the Indians surmounted by a ...
— Presentation Pieces in the Museum of History and Technology • Margaret Brown Klapthor
... there will always be more of it as my hole becomes deeper by degrees. And plenty of withered leaves fall on my poor maimed top. I also positively believe that I have an earth-worm up there. How he got there, I don't know: perhaps a bird dropped him out of his beak. But he draws the leaves down into the earth and eats them and turns them into mould. So I say, like the elder-bush, it will be ...
— The Old Willow Tree and Other Stories • Carl Ewald
... he thought to himself, "what with Scheherazade, Golden Beard, and now Ali Baba—by jinx!—he certainly did have an Oriental voice!—and he looked the part, too, with a beak for a nose and a black moustache a ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... scraggy-looking little antique village but what was sought for with avidity and thronged with occupants. Whoever has seen a flock of hungry pigeons, in the spring, alight on the leaf-covered ground, beneath a forest, and apply the busy powers of claw and beak to obtain a share of the hidden acorns that may be scratched up from beneath, may form some just notion of the pressing hurry and bustle that marked life in this place. The enhanced price that ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... killing domestic animals, yet always defended by the priests, who, having confused it with a strange species of owl, considered it as sacred. The rover did not ask permission to slay it. Nobody knew him, or guessed why he was going among the hills. He came upon the bird in the mountains, when its beak was dripping with human blood, and at a mile distance hurled the spear, which flew through the air, as if self-directed, and pierced the creature through and through. For this he was arrested and consigned to the sacrificial altar; but when ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... pot was nearly always of metal, tall, and, in old models, of graceful curve, with a slightly twisted ornamental beak in the form of an S, attached below the middle of the vessel. A handle ornamented in the same way formed a ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... of happy wings Wafts the ocean-news I crave; Rumours of an isle he brings Gemlike on the golden wave: But the baleful beak and plume ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... this country many and divers beasts quite different from those of other parts of the world. Thus there are lions black all over, with no mixture of any other colour; and there are parrots of many sorts, for some are white as snow with red beak and feet, and some are red, and some are blue, forming the most charming sight in the world; there are green ones too. There are also some parrots of exceeding small size, beautiful creatures.[NOTE 5] ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... her; that he would curse, as formerly, all day long, and bite her, and swear at her, in order to attract the neighbors and make them laugh. Then she rushed for the cage and seized the bird, which scratched and tore her flesh with its claws and beak. But she held it with all her strength between her hands. She threw it on the ground and rolled over it with the frenzy of one possessed. She crushed it and finally made of it nothing but a little green, flabby lump which no longer moved or spoke. Then she ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... mystified than ever. At last they caught sight of a large brown bird with a big beak, sitting on a bough and nodding its head, and then laughing away with all its might. They could now no longer have any doubt whence ...
— The Young Berringtons - The Boy Explorers • W.H.G. Kingston
... wings, and with a dive swooped into the glade. He alighted near Deering's dead body. He was a dark, uncanny bird, with long, scraggy, bare neck, a wreath of white, grizzled feathers, a cruel, hooked beak, and cold eyes. ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... on our left I saw perched on the top of a rock a huge bird, its head bent forward as if about to pounce down upon us. Presently we saw its wings expand. It was of great size, with huge claws, a pointed, powerful beak, a neck destitute of feathers, and a huge comb on its forehead. The feathers were of a glossy black hue, with a white ruff at the base of ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... full of pain: thus the Eagle when he moults is sickly; and, to attain his new beak, must harshly dash-off the old one upon rocks. What Stoicism soever our Wanderer, in his individual acts and motions, may affect, it is clear that there is a hot fever of anarchy and misery raging within; coruscations of which ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... that they turned aside, and shouted as they approached so that only one beak had time to tear a strip of flesh from beneath the naked shoulder, ere the flock of vultures rose, hovered a second, and were gone. The two men drew near, and having dismounted, turned the poor thing over, and feeling the faint beating of the heart, with no more ado than if they were setting ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... at once a turquoise coloured box, from which she extracted an envelope that was ornamented on the flap with a white dove holding a true lover's knot in his beak. ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... Some-one, "I like this. It seems a good place." And still No-one laughed. And Wealth touched me, and I was glad. And I said, "Give me millions, or buy a box of matches," and Law seized me and took me to the Cell. Then I said to the Beak, "Your Worship." And the Beak said unto me, "Begging again. Forty shillings." And again I woke. And it was all a striving and a striving and ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 16, 1891 • Various
... ever lived in Hellas itself. When Heine came face to face with Goethe at Weimar, he tells us that he felt as if Goethe must be Jupiter, and that he involuntarily glanced aside to see whether the eagle was not there with the thunderbolt in his beak. He almost addressed him in Greek, but, finding he "understood German," he made the profound remark that the plums on the road were delicious. And now, hear how Heine draws the contrast between the Hellenic ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... where he is. but the moment I call, 'Ben, Ben,' and hold out my finger, wings begin to rustle, and out he flies and perches on my finger. He isn't the least bit in the world afraid, but sits on my head or shoulder, eats out of my mouth, and kisses me with his beak. He is on the pillow at this moment making runs at my pencil, of which he is mortally jealous. It is just so with my combs and brushes if I attempt to do my hair; he cannot bear to have me do any thing but play with him. I do wish I could show him ...
— What Katy Did At School • Susan Coolidge
... small, pale eyes twinkled with a tiger's bloodthirsty greed. Her broad, flat nose, with nostrils expanded into oval cavities, breathed the fires of hell, and resembled the beak of some evil bird of prey. The spirit of intrigue lurked behind her low, cruel brow. Long hairs had grown from her wrinkled chin, betraying the masculine character of her schemes. Any one seeing that woman's face would have ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... obtained gradually exhausted his own troops, while only creating losses in the enemy's, which they easily repaired. It was, as M. Bourrienne has well said, a combat of an Alpine eagle with a flock of ravens: "The eagle may kill them by hundreds. Each blow of his beak is the death of an enemy; but the ravens return in still greater numbers, and continue their attack on the eagle until they at last overcome him." At Champ-Aubert, at Montmirail, at Nangis, at Montereau, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... small, and I had slipped off my knapsack and dropped into a big comfortable chair before I noticed a clean-shaven man with a big hooked nose and gleaming eyes seated in the far corner. It was like the beak of a bird, that nose, and I was so fascinated by it that I didn't answer the landlord when he came in and said 'Good evening.' The man opposite said 'Good evening' too, so I suppose that it must ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... gigantic Indian stork with an enormous beak, about 5 ft. in height, which feeds on carrion and offal, and is useful in this way, as ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... throstle in the lilac, Not far beyond the Nets, Upon a spray of purple His beak severely whets: He hears the players calling, He wonders what they're at, As thunder frequent Yorkers Against the ...
— More Cricket Songs • Norman Gale
... the nest, the beak performs the office of drilling in the leaves the necessary holes, and passing the fibres through them with the dexterity of a tailor. Even such parts in the rear as are not sufficiently firm are sewed ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 386, August 22, 1829 • Various
... with rapture and with terror, mounts into the high saddle; cramps himself on, with knees, heels, hands and feet; and the horse gallops—whither it lists. That the Right Honorable Zero should attempt controlling the horse—Alas, alas, he, sticking on with beak and claws, is too happy if the horse will only gallop any-whither, and not throw him. Measure, polity, plan or scheme of public good or evil, is not in the head of Felicissimus; except, if he could but devise it, some measure that would please his horse ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... suddenly began to cry, and the mother, hearing it, left her washing, and running to the child, forthwith missed the ring, but hearing the raven croak in the tree, she lifted up her eyes, and saw it with the ring in its beak. The woman, in great terror, called her brother, and told him what had happened, adding, that she durst not approach the king if the raven took away the ring. Gaspar, seizing his cross-bow and quiver, ran to the tree, where the raven was yet with the ring, and discharged ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... hall like a flock of starlings in the field upon which a hawk with crooked beak swoops from a height, but they could not surround him, because, in the heat of the fight, instead of looking for a place of defence, he commenced to chase them around the walls and whoever was overtaken died as if thunderstruck. Humiliation, despair, disappointed hope, ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... hen away from the bad fox. They used to think me a slow dull reader for not getting on with my lesson, but I used to sit and picture to myself the red hen, with its wings beating helplessly, screeching in terrified protest, or perhaps, if he had got it by the neck, with beak wide agape and silent, and eyes staring, as it left the farmyard for ever. I have seen blood-spillings and down-crushings and abject defeat here and there in my time, but the red hen has remained in my mind as the type of helpless ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... looked towards my windows, and could see nothing but the clouds and sky. I heard a noise just over my head, like the clapping of wings, and then began to perceive the woful condition I was in; that some eagle had got the ring of my box in his beak, with an intent to let it fall on a rock, like a tortoise in a shell, and then pick out my body, and devour it: for the sagacity and smell of this bird enables him to discover his quarry at a great distance, though better concealed than I could ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... Sacred Bird in Folk-Speech and Child-Song" (198). The latter says: "It is with a sort of awe (Ehrfurcht) that the child looks upon this sacred bird, when, returning with the spring he settles down on the roof, throwing back his beak and greeting the new home with a flap of his wings; or when, standing now on one foot, now on the other, he looks so solemnly at things, that one would think he was devoutly meditating over something or other; or, again, when, on his ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... naturalists. You may know that the slayer was a sparrowhawk by the appearance of the bird, its body untouched, but the flesh picked neatly from the neck and the head gone. That was swallowed whole, after the beak had been cut off. You will find the beak lying by the side of the body. In summertime, when birds are most abundant, after the breeding season, the ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... his ear with a gentle and kindly beak and flew into the air and circled three times round the ...
— The Magic City • Edith Nesbit
... off, leaving me to inspect the diary. Its first page was garnished with the resemblance of a large swan with curly wings; from his beak proceeded the owner's name in full, and underneath were his lucubrations. The first few pages ...
— Wonder-Box Tales • Jean Ingelow
... enable them to take a firm hold upon branch or twig. They have such hard bills because they live upon nuts and seeds. You have seen how Polly holds a nut, and shells it with the sharp point of her beak, keeping her eye on ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... of the dining-room lamp she saw her mother sitting with her back toward her. The Penitentiary was on her right, and his profile seemed to undergo a strange transformation, his nose grew larger and larger, seeming like the beak of some fabulous bird; and his whole face became a black silhouette with angles here and there, sharp derisive, irritating. In front of him sat Caballuco, who resembled a dragon rather than a man. Rosario could see his green eyes, like two lanterns of convex glass. This glow, ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... Lizzie herself), crying so dolefully, close beside her, that she went in among the bushes to see what was the matter. There was the woodpecker, sitting on the ground before a bunch of hair, which was red, and just like what old Seden's had been, and as soon as it espied her it flew up with its beak full of the hair, and slipped into a hollow tree. While my daughter still stood looking at this devil's work, up came old Paasch, who also had heard the cries of the woodpecker, as he was cutting roofing shingles on the mountain, with his boy, and was likewise struck with horror when he saw the ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... first fair wind, and, after a long navigation, the first place we touched at was a desert island, where we found an egg of a roc, equal in size to that I formerly mentioned. There was a young roc in it, just ready to be hatched, and its beak had begun to break the egg. The merchants who landed with me broke the egg with hatchets, and made a hole in it, pulled out the young roc, piecemeal, and roasted it. I had in vain entreated them not to meddle with ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... appreciate snow, but they are very fond of iced beverages. A tom-tit, who often drinks water from a saucer which we put on our window-sill, one day found the water frozen. What did the intelligent creature do? Why, it rapped on the window-pane with its beak till the window was opened, then hopped on to the sideboard, and began trying to peck the cork out of a whiskey bottle! I took the hint, and poured some of the spirit into the saucer; the bird drank it greedily! My wife's comment on this occurrence is really too good to be lost, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 24, 1891. • Various
... briskly, looking for seeds and insects. It actually gave Mary a queer feeling in her heart, because he was so pretty and cheerful and seemed so like a person. He had a tiny plump body and a delicate beak, and slender delicate legs. ...
— The Secret Garden • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... me as indecorous,—for he never came to the house but once, and made no offer; neither did Minard junior or Phellion junior, for that matter. Godeschal is the only one who risked a direct proposal, and he was refused at once, before he dipped his beak in the water." ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... President, I really think that if the ballot were placed in the hands of woman the old American eagle that stands with one foot upon the Alleghanies and the other upon the Rockies, whetting his beak upon the ice-capped mountains of Alaska, and covering half the Southern gulf with his tail, will cease to scream and sink into the pits of blackness of darkness amidst the shrieks of lost spirits that will forever echo and ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... dagger. Dutton, now silent too, is on his guard. Good heavens! after some brief flourishing and flashing,—the gleam of the swift clear steel playing madly in one's eyes,—they, at the first pass, plunge home on one another; home, with beak and claws; home to the very heart! Cheek's rapier is through Dutton's throat from before, and his dagger is through it from behind,—the windpipe miraculously missed; and, in the same instant, Dutton's rapier is through Cheek's body from before, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... native woman, each holding an arm and thrusting her forward between them. She was not at all unlike a native woman of to-day, either in dress or sullenness; she had the beak and the keen eyes and the cruel lips of the "Hills." They showed her to him, and it was quite clear that they compared her to their own women, left behind; the comparison was plainly to ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... were suffering; also Mr. and Mrs. Petherick, and many of my men, one of whom died. My animals were all healthy, but the donkeys and camels were attacked by a bird, about the size of a thrush, which caused them great uneasiness. This bird is of a greenish-brown colour, with a powerful red beak, and excessively strong claws. It is a perfect pest to the animals, and positively eats them into holes. The original object of the bird in settling upon the animal is to search for vermin, but it is not contented with the mere ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... miller at Bex, as he placed a large basket on the floor and took off the covering. Two yellow eyes, with black circles around them, fiery and wild, looked out as if they wished to set on fire, or to kill those around them. The short beak yawned ready to bite and the neck was red ...
— The Ice-Maiden: and Other Tales. • Hans Christian Andersen
... that is of your opinion. There! did you remark its sudden movement? It plunges its head down into the water like a flash of lightning; and now you can see it holds its prey in its beak. Now it is spreading its short black-edged wings in order to take flight, and divide among its young brood the products of its labors. Do you see that beautiful large bird with a tuft on its forehead? That is ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... had also annexed the box and wife that belonged to himself, and a desperate battle followed. The only spectators were the two wives, but they maintained an indifferent aloofness. Arnaux fought with his famous wings, but they were none the better weapons because they now bore twenty records. His beak and feet were small, as became his blood, and his stout little heart could not make up for his lack of weight. The battle went against him. His wife sat unconcernedly in the nest, as though it were ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... begins to excavate his winter quarters, carrying or throwing out the chips, by which this good workman is known, with his beak, while the female may make herself cosey or not, as she chooses, in an abandoned hole. About her comfort he seems shamefully unconcerned. Intent only on his own, he drills a perfectly round hole, ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... man of about forty, thin, wiry, and with a nose resembling the beak of a bird of prey. His eyes, half buried under bushy eyebrows, twinkled like two stars. His mouth was large and smiling; his expression exceedingly benignant. From the face I passed to the costume. The worthy was clad in severe black, with a clerical white cravat: wore a ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... lips and forehead, or cheeks, with vermillion. Some had their noses perforated through the cartilage, in which was fixed part of a goose quill, or a piece of tin, worn as an ornament, while others strutted with the skin of a raven ingeniously folded as a head dress, to present the beak over the forehead, and the tail spreading over the back of the neck. Their clothing consisted principally of a blanket, a buffaloe skin, and leggings, with a cap, which hung down their back, and was fastened to a belt round the waist. Scoutaywaubo, or fire water, (rum) was their principal ...
— The Substance of a Journal During a Residence at the Red River Colony, British North America • John West
... pursued by polyglot maledictions and a throwing stick. They were very skilful on their wings. I have many times seen them, while flying, tear up and devour large chunks of meat. It seems to my inexperience as an aviator rather a nice feat to keep your balance while tearing with your beak at meat held in your talons. Regardless of other landmarks, we always knew when we were nearing camp, after one of our strolls, by the gracefully wheeling figures ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... All that could be seen of his body—legs, arms and chest—was as hairy as the skin of an ape; his hands and feet were crooked, like the claws of a tiger. As to his visage, nothing more fantastic and frightful could be imagined. Amid a thick, bristling beard, a nose like an owl's beak and a mouth whose corners were drawn by a wild-beast-like rictus were just discernible. The eyes were half hidden by his thick, bushy, curly hair. Each curl ended in a spiral, pointed and twisted like a gimlet, and on peering at them closely it could be seen that each of these ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... his cawing, cocked his head on one side, and eyed the tempting morsel. Buttered toast did not often come his way. He dropped down on to the balcony floor, hopped over to the toast, pecked at it, picked it up in his strong beak, and flew with it to the roof of the building opposite. In silence the two ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... Upon the fairy isles of sunny lawn, Amid the enchanted mountains, and the caves Of divine sleep, and on the air-like waves 195 Of wonder-level dream, whose tremulous floor Paved her light steps;—on an imagined shore, Under the gray beak of some promontory She met me, robed in such exceeding glory, That I beheld her not. In solitudes 200 Her voice came to me through the whispering woods, And from the fountains, and the odours deep Of flowers, which, like lips murmuring in their sleep Of the sweet kisses which had lulled ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... left shoulder, in the same direction, rose a staff of deep blue, to which was attached a drooping silver flag crossed with bars of gold. (Its pattern was like the one placed in his grave.) On the top of the staff rested a dove, holding in its beak a wreath, composed of rainbow shades, circling the word Peace in letters whiter than snow. As the new sun continued to rise, the jewelled sky increased in dazzling brilliancy, ten thousand gems of shining ...
— Young Lion of the Woods - A Story of Early Colonial Days • Thomas Barlow Smith
... in a blue fringe. Some lighter fabric was worn under it, and encased the arms. The shapely neck and throat were bare, though almost hidden by a wealth of wavy golden tresses that flowed down her shoulders. Her hat appeared to have been constructed out of the skin of the snowy heron, with its beak and plumage preserved intact, and dressed into the jauntiest style. Leggings of strong buckskin, that formed a protection against the briers and roughness of the forest, were clasped around a slender ankle, ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... and quenching the fires; beats against the stern, and comes forward with the rush of that repulse to meet the incoming wave. Into the boats, the water—anywhere but here. She reels again and groans; and then, as a desperate hero dies, she slopes her huge warlike beak at the hostile water and rushes to her own ruin with a surge and convulsion. The victorious sea sweeps over it and hides it, laughing at her work. She will keep it safely. That is the unsung epic of the Milwaukee, without ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... once, and all Rome turned out to see him; he belonged to an earlier day, to an austerer, perhaps to a better one, and it may be that in "that woman," as he called Caesar, his clearer vision discerned beneath the plumage of the peacock, the beak and talons of the bird of prey. For they were there, and needed only a vote of the senate to batten on nations of which the senate had never heard. Loan him an army, and "that woman" was to give geography such a twist that today whoso says ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... well have held a wildcat, or captured with his bare hands a wild eagle, strong of talon and beak. She tore and raged in ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand
... familiarly as he had done in the days before his marriage. In his strong, almost passionate nature, there was one great weakness; the love and admiration of women was a necessity to him. He could no more help trying to make women love him, than the kingfisher can help thrusting down his beak when the bright speckled sides of his prey flash through the water. It was from neither cruelty nor vanity, for Thorne had less of both traits than usually falls to the lot of men; it was rather ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... crop from destruction by rice birds. These bobolinks timed their southward migration so as to descend upon the fields in myriads when the grain was "in the milk." At that stage the birds, clinging to the stalks, could squeeze the substance from within each husk by pressure of the beak. Negroes armed with guns were stationed about the fields with instructions to fire whenever a drove of the birds alighted nearby. This fusillade checked but could not wholly prevent the bobolink ravages. ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... dead man!" screamed Imre, with a voice full of fury and defiance, and tearing open his vest he drew forth with one hand a dagger and with the other a large hussar pistol. The broken-winged young eagle had turned upon its pursuers, hacking at them with its wounded beak and flapping its still ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... whenever he could get at it, in order to secure the lump of sugar which then rolled out, or lick up the water which ran from the upset cup; he evidently intended to pull the parrot's feathers, but the latter, by turning round as fast as Jack turned, always faced him, and his beak was too formidable to be encountered. I was frequently awakened by the quick trampling of feet at this early hour, and knew it arose from a pursuit of Jack, in consequence of some mischief on his ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... of his Life, that he had himself seen the Holy Ghost in the form of a dove more than once, sitting on Savonarola's shoulder, fluttering his feathers, which were sprinkled with silver and gold, and, putting his beak to his ear, whispering to him his divine suggestions. The prior besides relates in a book of his own composition at great length a dialogue that he held with the devil, appearing like, and having been mistaken by the ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... outline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire bears to a monstrous bird of prey hovering threateningly over Italy. The body of the bird is formed by Hungary; Bohemia is the right wing, Bosnia and Dalmatia constitute the left; the Tyrol represents the head, while the savage beak, with its open jaws, is formed by that portion of the Tyrol commonly known as the Trentino. And that savage beak, you will note, is buried deep in the shoulder of Italy, holding between its jaws, as it were, the Lake of Garda. To continue the simile, it will be seen that the talons of the bird, ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... that if Heaven has bestowed on the eagle a beak and claws, it is to enable him to show his ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... waited many a weary week With bulging eyes and fevered brow, While WILSON pressed upon its beak His League-of-Nations' olive bough, Wondering what amount of weight Its efforts could negotiate, How much, in fact, the bird would stand ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various
... Merrimac tried to ram the little spitz-pup of the navy, but her huge iron beak rode up over the slippery deck of the enemy, and when the big vessel looked over her sides to see its wreck, she discovered that the Monitor was right side up and ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... red race could travel fast, as McGuire knew, but the air monster whose shining, pointed beak hung above them where they lay helpless in the torturing bonds of fine wire, was to give him a ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... forth beside the snake's body, and turned it over with his beak. Finally he spread his wings and began to ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... magnificent bird, when seen with wings expanded, nearly eight feet from tip to tip—and a body three and a half feet in length—his snowy-white head and neck shining in the sun, and his large, hooked, yellow beak open as he espies, afar off, the fish-hawk emerging from the ocean with his struggling prey. Downward he pounces with rapid flight. The fish-hawk sees his enemy approaching, and attempts to escape; but, laden with the fish he has just captured, in spite of the various evolutions ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... picked up and hauled into the boat, though not without inflicting a rather severe wound with its long sharp beak on the hand of the man who grasped it; and we ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... many lands, until one day, in a far eastern country, he found her sitting in a tent, by the side of an old, white-haired hermit. Cherry was wild with delight. He flew to her shoulder, caressed her hair with his beak, and ...
— Stories to Tell to Children • Sara Cone Bryant
... disk bobbin of thread, h, fitting loosely in a case constructed in the form of a bivalve, a and d. This case is furnished with a long beak, usually forming a continuation of the periphery. The beak is intended to enter and detain the loops of upper thread, and lead them so that they ultimately envelop the shuttle, a motion of the thread which is chiefly due to the oscillation of the shuttle in a vertical plane. The ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 598, June 18, 1887 • Various
... sole response was a drag at the pony's head to set it going; swinging her cloak about her, she paddled through the slush towards the gate, supremely disregarding the fact that a gander, having nerved himself and his harem to the charge, had caught the ragged skirt of her dress in his beak, and being too angry to let go, was being whirled out of the yard ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... intentions. But his nerve was obviously shaken by his competitor's undoubtedly fine performance, and he craked indecisively. At 4.30 a.m. I distinctly heard him utter a flat note. At 4.47 he missed the second part of a bar entirely. Thisbe's beak, I must believe, curled derisively; Strong-i'-th'-lung laughed contemptuously, and at 5.10 a.m. Eugene faltered, stammered and fled from ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 21, 1920 • Various
... of Kentucky, and which, though they have lost their eyes, have not lost the foot-stalks which carried their eyes. In describing the varieties which have been produced by pigeon-fanciers, Mr. Darwin notes the fact that along with changes in length of beak produced by selection, there have not gone proportionate changes in length of tongue. Take again the case of teeth and jaws. In mankind these have not varied together. During civilization the jaws have decreased, but the teeth have not decreased ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... holiday. He was a young man, but he was not in his first youth, and under a heavy sunburn he was pale and a trifle worn, but there was about him a look of being hard and very much alive. Under a broad brow there were hawk eyes of greenish gray, a delicate beak, a mouth and chin of cleverness. It was an interesting face and looked as though it had seen interesting things. In fact, Prosper Gael had just returned from his three months of ambulance service in France, and it was the extraordinary success of his play, "The Leopardess," ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... a branch of a tree with a piece of cheese in her beak when a Fox observed her and set his wits to work to discover some way of getting the cheese. Coming and standing under the tree he looked up and said, "What a noble bird I see above me! Her beauty is without equal, ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... to finish, but seized up a peculiar shaped instrument, like a huge hook, with a curved neck and sharp beak. Really it was composed of two metal tubes which ran into a cylinder or mixing chamber above the nozzle, while parallel to them ran another tube with ...
— The Exploits of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... expressive sweep of the hand outward the cashier stood waiting, his tall, narrow head, topped by carefully brushed gray hair, thrust forward in the attitude of a parrot about to strike with its beak. ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... to catch it with the aid of his long arms, would kiss his booty, press it to his heart, and finally put it in his mouth. The hawk, suspended beneath the balcony in a golden cage, was also a spectator; with beak inclined to one side, and with one foot raised, he, too, watched the people attentively. But suddenly a murmur ran through the crowd, and a rumour spread, "They are coming! they are ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... philosopher, but "that most skilful breeder, Sir John Sebright, who used to say, with respect to pigeons, that he would produce any given feathers in three years, but it would take him six years to obtain a head and a beak". I am not saying that the new thought is better than the old; it is no business of mine to say anything about that; I only wish to bring home to the mind, as nothing but instances can bring it home, how matter-of-fact, how petty, ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... curious sympathy between himself and this fierce creature of which he made a companion as another man might of a dog. Even now he noted with a sort of pride that broken-winged and shattered though she was, her talons remained fixed in the back of the quarry, and her beak through ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... upon which some years before one of their priests had immolated a captive {126} chief. From a crevice in this stone, where a little earth was imbedded, there grew a cactus, upon which sat an eagle holding in its beak a serpent. A priest ingeniously interpretated this symbolism as a prophecy of signal and long-continued victory, and, forthwith diving into the lake, he had an interview with Tlaloc, the god of waters, who told him that upon that very spot the people were to build ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... do without my little Mally." And then my little bird-like beak would rise proudly ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... once a mortal and the daughter of Cadmus; she with pity beheld Ulysses the mark of their fierce contention, and rising from the waves alighted on the ship, in shape like to the sea-bird which is called a cormorant, and in her beak she held a wonderful girdle made of sea-weeds which grow at the bottom of the ocean, which she dropt at his feet, and the bird spake to Ulysses, and counselled him not to trust any more to that fatal vessel against which god Neptune had levelled his furious wrath, nor to those ill-befriending ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... an orange-tinted woodpecker was darting to and fro, as though caught in the mesh of foliage, and, in company with a troupe of nimble titmice and blue tree-creepers (visitors from the far-distant North), tapping the bark of the stem with a black beak, and hunting ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... the greatest authority after Abdul on the shahin, took the bird upon his fist, looked at the sunken, piercing eyes which were partially seeled; ran his hand over the narrow body, short tail and black back, and a finger over the large beak and deep mouth; held up the ugly face to the light, examined the flight-feathers and, moving his hand quickly up and down, caused the bird to flutter its wings—and so give him a chance of measuring the distance of the wings from the body. Finding her ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... and haggard; a long beard descended to his waist. His peculiar nose—the most marked characteristic of his race, long and beak-shaped, yet not exactly aquiline—marked the Jew. He ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... see that man? He's Signor Gouroff, the owner. I've talked to him a lot of times. Ain't he great! Golly! look at that beak of his. Don't he make you think of kiosks and hyrems and stuff? Gee! What does he ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... in great profusion, emblematical of the seasons, and forming a fine piece of work; it represents the all-important fact that time flies, by an hourglass borne on the wings of a splendidly-carved eagle, and suspending from the bird's beak are the letters, curiously wrought, forming TEMPUS FUGIT. This rests on a globe, representative of the earth, which is half sunk in a shell of water, overflowing the wheel of time, and shedding on fruit ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... with curiosity, then with hate, then with terror, and lastly—how can I express myself?—with a sort of hellish humor that in another moment might have broken into something like a laugh, if the bird, which I had failed to observe up to this moment, had not waked in its high cage, and, thrusting its beak between the bars, shrilled out in the most alarming of tones: 'Remember Evelyn!' That startled the old man even more than the sight on the floor had done. He turned round, and I saw his fist rise as if against some menacing ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... with the softest bits of leaf and bark. It had two eggs in it, quite white, and each about as large as a small sugarplum. 6. When you approach the spot where one of these birds has built its nest, it is necessary to be careful. The mother bird will dart at you and try to peck your eyes. Its sharp beak may hurt your eyes most severely, and even destroy the sight. 7. The poor little thing knows no other way of defending its young, and instinct teaches it that you might carry off its nest if ...
— McGuffey's Third Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... you he's great, your friend. Keep it up old man. Your description beats Dante and Tchaikovsky combined!" I was not to be lured from my theme, and, stopping only to take breath and a fresh dip of my beak into ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... went with the hand to the fire. There was a ragged gash across the back where the bird's beak had torn it, but no blood oozed from the wound. He noticed with disgust that the nails had grown long ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... resolute pacer scorns discomfort of wet clothes and squealing boots. South-western rain-clouds, too, are never long sullen: they enfold and will have the earth in a good strong glut of the kissing overflow; then, as a hawk with feathers on his beak of the bird in his claw lifts head, they rise and take veiled feature in long climbing watery lines: at any moment they may break the veil and show soft upper cloud, show sun on it, show sky, green near the verge they spring from, of the green of grass in ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... are ever full of pain: thus the Eagle when he moults is sickly; and, to attain his new beak, must harshly dash off the old one upon rocks. What Stoicism soever our Wanderer, in his individual acts and motions, may affect, it is clear that there is a hot fever of anarchy and misery raging within; coruscations of which flash out: as, indeed, how could there be other? Have ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... without it; thou must be tempted, and must escape too. "With the temptation." As sure as Satan is licensed, so sure he is limited; and when Satan has ended all the temptation, he shall depart from thee (Luke 4:13). "He will with the temptation"—by such a managing of it as shall beak its own neck. God can admit Satan to tempt, and make the Christian wise to manage the temptation for ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... stopped, and, looking up, saw the hawk in full swing, not many hundred yards distant, with the bird in its beak, fluttering and ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... through the doorway, traversing the gallery of the peacocks, so called because fifteen of those beautiful birds unite their tails in the centre of the ceiling, painted so naturally as to deceive the beholder, each carrying in his beak a different flower, the most beautiful in China, and bending his neck in such a manner as to present it to the passer below. Traversing this gallery, his majesty with his own hand drew aside the curtain of the library door. His majesty then entered; and, after ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... correspondents has sent us the following treatment with permanganate of potash which he has found the best roup remedy he has ever tried: Dissolve 1 ounce of permanganate of potash in 3 pints of water, hold the fowl's head in this for a second, then open the beak and rinse out the mouth in the solution. Wipe with a clean, soft cloth and apply a very little witch hazel or carbolated salve to the eyes, nostrils and head. Repeat the operation as often as the throat and head become clogged with mucus. Until ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... he had cried the words aloud. He sat up in bed. A white pigeon was on the sill outside his window, tapping with its beak ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... her the cuckoo," said Mary Acton. "Do you remember the young one we found last spring, sprawling all over the nest, and opening its huge, gaping beak?" ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... I behold, From sky to earth it slanted, And pois'd therein a Bird so bold— Sweet bird! thou wert enchanted! He sank, he rose, he twinkled, he troll'd, Within that shaft of sunny mist: His Eyes of Fire, his Beak of Gold, All else of Amethyst! And thus he sang: Adieu! Adieu! Love's dreams prove seldom true. Sweet month of May! we must away! Far, far ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... rapped out the words in tones of unusual vigour, a little, stout, old gentleman, opening a door behind Gotthold, received them fairly in the face. With his parrot's beak for a nose, his pursed mouth, his little goggling eyes, he was the picture of formality; and in ordinary circumstances, strutting behind the drum of his corporation, he impressed the beholder with a certain air of frozen dignity and wisdom. But at the smallest contrariety, his trembling hands and ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and I was determined to develop it to the uttermost. Under my assiduous tuition he progressed in a manner that can only be described as astonishing. He quickly learned to take a letter from the post-girl in his beak and deliver it without error to that member of the family to whom it was addressed. I was in the habit of reading to him extracts from the daily papers, and the interest he took in the course of the recent war and his intelligent appreciation of the finer points of Marshal ...
— Punch, Volume 156, January 22, 1919. • Various
... only by the bill. In short space after it cometh to full maturity, and falleth into the sea, where it gathereth feathers, and groweth to a fowl, bigger than a mallard, and lesser than a goose; having black legs, and a bill or beak, and feathers black and white, spotted in such manner as our magpie, called in some places a Pie-Annet, which the people of Lancashire call by no other name than a tree-goose; which place aforesaid, and all those ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 201, September 3, 1853 • Various
... class. Some of the costumes are very rich and expensive, of satin and velvet heavy with gold. I have seen a distinguished diplomatist in the guise of a gigantic canary-bird, hopping briskly about in the mud with bedraggled tail-feathers, shrieking well-bred sarcasms with his yellow beak. ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... "Nature is red in beak and claw." On land and in sea the animal creation chase and maim, and slay and devour each other. The beautiful swallow on the wing devours the equally beautiful gnat. The graceful flying-fish, like a fair white bird, goes glancing above ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... would you believe it, the villains had the audacity to arraign me before the beak, when I pleaded not guilty, and dared them to ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... moment, before he had time to know what was happening, Methuselah—sleepy old dotard as he seemed—had woke up at once to a sense of danger. Turning suddenly round upon the sleek, caressing hand, he darted his beak with a vicious peck at his assailant, and bit the divine finger of the Pillar of Heaven as carelessly as he would have bitten any child on Boupari. Tu-Kila-Kila, thunder-struck, drew back his arm with a start of surprise and a loud cry of pain. The bird had wounded him. He shook his hand and stamped. ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... climate, food, &c., as the only possible cause of variation. In one limited sense, as we shall hereafter see, this may be true; but it is preposterous to attribute to mere external conditions, the structure, for instance, of the woodpecker, with its feet, tail, beak, and tongue, so admirably adapted to catch insects under the bark of trees. In the case of the misletoe, which draws its nourishment from certain trees, which has seeds that must be transported by certain birds, ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... and then he gave a cheery call and hopped as near to me as he could get and repeated his cries over and over. Somehow his cries took the form of words in my mind. This is what he said to me: "You, you, you, cheer up, cheer up, cheer up." He hopped about from limb to limb, wiping his beak, picking at pieces of bark, but ever and anon hopping back to look at me and cry again. "Cheer up, cheer up, cheer up." This he did for a long time, then he flew away, only to return soon and to peer at me again, crying his merry "You, you, you, cheer up, cheer up, cheer up." For more than ...
— Heart Talks • Charles Wesley Naylor
... formed a resolution then and there to become a good shot, and although he did not succeed exactly in becoming so that day, he nevertheless managed to put several fine specimens of gulls and an auk into his bag. The last bird amused him much, being a creature with a dumpy little body and a beak of preposterously large size and comical aspect. There were also a great number of eider-ducks flying about, but they ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... to get when they come from Hunting; after you have fed them well, let them to their Kennel, and wash their Feet with Beer and Butter, or some such thing, and pick and search their Cleys, for Thorns, Stubs, or the like: If it is in Winter, let a Fire be made, and let them beak and stretch themselves for an hour or so at the fire, and suffer them to lick, pick, and trim themselves; hereby to prevent the Diseases incident to them, upon sudden Cooling, as the Mange, Itch, ...
— The School of Recreation (1696 edition) • Robert Howlett
... when what should the homely bird do but walk right out on the land and up to Bobby. Bobby then saw that it was not a stake-driver, but a long-legged, long-necked, short-bodied gentleman, in a black bob-tail coat. And yet his long, straight nose did look like a stake-driver's beak, to be sure. He was one of the stake-driver fairies, who live in the dark and lonesome places along the creeks in the Hoosier country. They make the noise that you hear, "Ke-whack! ke-whack!" It may be the driving of stakes for the protection ...
— Queer Stories for Boys and Girls • Edward Eggleston
... discovered that they might also aptly be termed limpet-pickers, for they seemed to take these shell fish as their staple food. The modus operandi of feeding is to pounce down upon a rock which the receding tide has left bare, and with a single sharp blow with its beak, detach a limpet, and turning it mouth upward, pick out the fish at its leisure. If it failed to detach the limpet at once it would go on to another, knowing that when once disturbed the limpet requires great force to detach it. Oysters lie in deep waters ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... bivalve shells and two interior armlike processes which served for breathing, appeared in the Algonkian, and had now become very abundant. The two valves of the brachiopod shell are unequal in size, and in each valve a line drawn from the beak to the base divides the valve into two equal parts. It may thus be told from the pelecypod mollusk, such as the clam, whose two valves are not far from equal in size, each being divided into unequal parts by a line dropped from ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... camp, or when two or more were together. No arrow could pierce his feathers, nor could the strongest spear do more than glance from the scales on his face and legs, yet his coward's heart made him afraid for his toes had no claws, and his mouth no beak. ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... left-hand corner loop, we find that it can be identified only with that on the tree in the top or red angular loop. It is true the identification in the other cases is not so certain, but in this case there can be very little doubt, as the green top-knot, the peculiar beak, and green feathers are sufficient of themselves to connect the upper left-hand white loop and figures of this corner with the top red loop and ...
— Notes on Certain Maya and Mexican Manuscripts • Cyrus Thomas
... advanced, as I could hear by the hum of voices as I approached. Even Peter, the jackdaw, in his wicker cage at the open doorway, joined in the clatter of tongues. His quick eye noticed me hurrying to the school, and he sidled awkwardly along his perch, put out his long black beak through the bars of his cage, and flapped his wings with unmistakable ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... his companions rode up to the chief gateway, a grand circular archway, with all the noble though grotesque mouldings, zigzag and cable, dog-tooth and parrot-beak, visages human and diabolic, wherewith the Norman builders loved to surround their doorways. The doors were of solid oak, heavily guarded with iron, and from a little wicket in the midst peered out a cowled head, and instantly ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... literally held their breath. Jumbo was within two or three yards of the island when the foremost of the two swans stooped its long neck and made a savage grab at his hind legs. It seemed impossible that the cruel beak could miss him, yet it did; for poor Jumbo was by that time so exhausted that he suddenly sank and disappeared. The angry, surprised swan dived his head down in search of him; but the current, which swept round here with some force, carried ...
— A Tale of the Summer Holidays • G. Mockler
... "Yes." "Are you well?" "Yes." "Have you had plenty of food?" "Yes." "What a great donkey your Maharaja is!" And then she began to cry very much, and pearls fell from her eyes as she cried. Then she began to laugh very much, and great big rubies fell from her beak as she laughed. The next morning the doorkeeper got up and felt about, and said, "What is all this?" meaning the pearls and the rubies, for he did not know what they were. "I will keep them." So he picked them all up and put them into a corner of ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Anonymous
... while here and there we could see a Bird of Paradise drooping its smart tail-feathers amid the foliage. A little further, and deep in the forest the ear caught the busy tap-tap of the woodpecker, the snap of the toucan's beak, or far away the deep trumpeting of the elephant. Once we startled a leopard that gazed a moment at us with flaming eyes, and then was gone with a wild bound into the thicket. From tree to tree trailed hosts of gorgeous creepers, ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... no reason why he should not pick them up. As he flew down, a snare was drawn about him. The wheat had been put there to tempt pigeons so that they might get caught. It was well for Blue-feather that the snare had been in use a long time and was rotten. By using his beak and wings he got loose, but he lost a few feathers ...
— Fifty Fabulous Fables • Lida Brown McMurry
... quickly around, and saw her hat that had been snatched off in the black beak of a big red and green bird which was perched on the back of ...
— The Curlytops and Their Playmates - or Jolly Times Through the Holidays • Howard R. Garis
... on perceiving him, 'do thou cause thyself to seem like one dead: puff thy belly up with wind, stiffen thy legs out, and lie very still. I will make a show of pecking thine eyes out with my beak; and whensoever I utter a croak, then spring to thy feet ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... Ay, now, 'tis a vulture. O abominable! monstrous! monstrous! has not your vulture a beak? has it not legs, and talons, ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... "Fashoda and Colonial Expansion,'' tries to stretch a friendly hand to the Bear over the Bulldog's head. Then, to offset this proffered assistance to the Bear, the Chinese artist, with characteristic cunning, brings in the New World power. He places the American Eagle over the Philippines, its beak extended towards the Bulldog, and writes upon it the phrase, "Blood is thicker ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... Tartar's in the gap Conspicuous by his yellow cap; 550 The rest in lengthening line the while Wind slowly through the long defile: Above, the mountain rears a peak, Where vultures whet the thirsty beak, And theirs may be a feast to-night, Shall tempt them down ere morrow's light; Beneath, a river's wintry stream Has shrunk before the summer beam, And left a channel bleak and bare, Save shrubs that spring to perish there: 560 Each side the midway path there lay Small ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... Before some beak of rapine be set free, That, after the mountains, shall infest the sea; Before some ravenous eaglet shall be sent After our isles to gorge the continent. I'd rather a goose even from yon egg should come,— If only of the ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... pleased; he laughed but once, and all Rome turned out to see him; he belonged to an earlier day, to an austerer, perhaps to a better one, and it may be that in "that woman," as he called Caesar, his clearer vision discerned beneath the plumage of the peacock, the beak and talons of the bird of prey. For they were there, and needed only a vote of the senate to batten on nations of which the senate had never heard. Loan him an army, and "that woman" was to give geography such a twist that today whoso says ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... thing." Also in Ran and jungle grew that day Friendship amongst the creatures: spotted deer Browsed fearless where the tigress fed her cubs, And cheetahs lapped the pool beside the bucks; Under the eagle's rock the brown hares scoured While his fierce beak but preened an idle wing; The snake sunned all his jewels in the beam With deadly fangs in sheath; the shrike let pass The nestling finch; the emerald halcyons Sate dreaming while the fishes played beneath, Nor hawked the merops, though the butterflies— Crimson and blue ...
— The Light of Asia • Sir Edwin Arnold
... young man of five-and-twenty, with a lengthy olive-hued countenance, black frizzled hair, and deep-set eyes; the wide, dark rings beneath them were completed by the wrinkled purple eyelids above. With a nose like the beak of some bird of prey, a pinched mouth, and cheeks worn lean with study and hollowed by ambition, he was the very type of a second-rate personage on the lookout for something to turn up, and ready to do anything if so he might get ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... sea-fight. The Samians branded the figure of an owl on the foreheads of their Athenian prisoners, to revenge themselves for the branding of their own prisoners by the Athenians with the figure of a samaina. This is a ship having a beak turned up like a swine's snout, but with a roomy hull, so as both to carry a large cargo and sail fast. This class of vessel is called samaina because it was first built at Samos by Polycrates, the despot of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... the speaker and looked full upon the beak nose, cleft cheek and bristling red moustache of an old friend. "Good Lord, The Beachcomber!" I breathed. He started, peered at me and growled, "Captain Dawnay-Devenish, if it's all the same to you, Mister ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 16, 1919 • Various
... sufficient for one skilled in wood-lore, as Don Rafael was. Without a moment's hesitation, he faced in the direction of the sound, and commenced advancing towards it—guided by the measured strokes given by the beak ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... neighbor: "Good morning, pretty lady, always pretty; I, a pretty lady, always pretty, come from that pretty lady, always pretty" (here she points to the girl on her left), "to tell you that she owns an eagle with a golden beak." ...
— My Book of Indoor Games • Clarence Squareman
... not pause to finish, but seized up a peculiar shaped instrument, like a huge hook, with a curved neck and sharp beak. Really it was composed of two metal tubes which ran into a cylinder or mixing chamber above the nozzle, while parallel to them ran another tube with a nozzle of ...
— The Exploits of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... Suli's rocks, and Pindus' inland peak, Robed half in mist, bedewed with snowy rills, Array'd in many a dun and purple streak, Arise; and, as the clouds along them break, Disclose the dwelling of the mountaineer: Here roams the wolf, the eagle whets his beak, Birds, beasts of prey, and wilder men appear, And gathering storms around convulse ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... pounced at last, and well-nigh staked herself on the heron's beak! But we had a long ride, and were well-nigh at the Tyne before we had caught her. Full of pranks, but a noble hawk, as I shall write to my brother by the next messenger that comes our way. I call it a hawk worth her meat that leads one such ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to say, every evening from that time forward, just about sunset, a little bird with plumage gay, called "The Kingfisher," might be seen to haunt the margin of the lake, ready, with its pointed beak, to hook up the tiny fishes, that glided in shoals at nightfall near the surface ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... them away to plot His death. That is what comes of making religion a round of outward observances. The Pharisee is always blind as an owl to the light of God and true goodness; keen-sighted as a hawk for trivial breaches of his cobweb regulations, and cruel as a vulture to tear with beak and claw. The race is not extinct. We all carry one inside us, and need God's help ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... toward us. In front ran a splendid male bird, his feathers of shining black, and his great tail plume waving. Three females of an ashen gray color followed him. They approached us with incredible swiftness, and were within gunshot before they perceived us. Fritz had had the forethought to bind up the beak of his eagle so that, should he bring down an ostrich, he might ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... it!" he exclaimed, and shot forth a blow which one of the juvenile bystanders described as a "stinger on the beak!" ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... thing I had wished for in my boat, all those months ago, was a new flag. And here was the flag, made for me in secret by Mary's own hand! The ground was green silk, with a dove embroidered on it in white, carrying in its beak the typical olive-branch, wrought in gold thread. The work was the tremulous, uncertain work of a child's fingers. But how faithfully my little darling had remembered my wish! how patiently she had ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... neighbouring house. I heard a whizzing through the air, and presently something like a winged serpent, but with a slender neck, and shoulders of considerable breadth, and a head much larger than a serpent's in proportion to the body, and shaped more like a bird's, with a sharp, short beak, sprang upon and coiled round my left arm. That it was trying to sting with an erectile organ placed about midway between the shoulders and the tail I became instinctively aware, and presently felt something like a weak electric thrill over ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... mould of flower-pots for live food, which they will never swallow till it has been previously slain. One of them has espied a cockroach in a corner, and in darting towards the prey a scorpion crosses its path. The venomous reptile hugs the belligerent beak in the hope of conveying to it some of its deadly sting; but the tip of Coco's horny appendage is a long way from his tender points, and Scorpio must travel many an inch before he can make the desired impression. Meanwhile the stork has teased Scorpio's life out, and jerked ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... King of Birds, Rex Avium, looketh at the Sun, intuetur Solem, as indeed he could hardly avoid doing, since in the "cut" the sun was within a hairsbreath of his beak, while his claws were almost touching a crow (Corvus) perched on a dead horse, to exemplify how Aves ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was so tired and frightened, that it lay on the ground, panting, with its feathers ruffled, and its beak wide open, and its eyes half closed. It seemed ready to die. Then the rude, cruel boys pulled the string ...
— The Nursery, October 1873, Vol. XIV. No. 4 • Various
... his yellow eyes on the priest, eyes strangely marked over a nose like the beak of an eagle, and excused himself with more courtesy than his fierce mien led one to expect, for not having at once recognised a person of merit, and ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... how uncertain is happiness either to man or frogs! Two days afterwards, as Jumper was crossing a brook, a lily-white duck, who had been concealed by the rushes, flew at him with open beak ...
— The Comical Creatures from Wurtemberg - Second Edition • Unknown
... suddenly from his dreams, twisted his large neck around to look for the lion, saw a lion's flank, and fastened its eagle beak in it. For the griffin had been artificially made by the King-enchanter, and the two halves had never really got used to each other. So now the eagle half of the griffin, who was still rather sleepy, believed that ...
— The Book of Dragons • Edith Nesbit
... themselves left alone, with nothing in sight that was familiar, except one funny thing. That was a wooden shoe, in which was a fuzzy little yellow chicken hardly four days old. It had been playing in the shoe, when the floods came and swept it off from under the very beak of the old hen, that, with all her other ...
— Dutch Fairy Tales for Young Folks • William Elliot Griffis
... once as well as he knew how. But Mother Starling had no sooner heard the first notes than she gave him a flap with her wings and snapped at him with her beak. "Oh, please stop it!" she cried bitterly. "It sounds so sad that it makes one quite heartsick. Instead of piping like that, get the Anemones to come up. I think it must be time for them. And besides, one always feels warmer when there are ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... snapped his beak again, and Bully jumped back. As he did so the marbles in his pocket rattled, ...
— Bully and Bawly No-Tail • Howard R. Garis
... tame, and would, after a time, follow the girls about, and stalk up to the house of their own accord to be fed, their food always being placed in water, as they never feed by picking upon the ground, for which, indeed, the peculiar construction of their beak is entirely unfitted. They were perfectly fearless of the dogs, which, on their part, were too well trained to touch them; and their funny way and their extreme tameness were a source of constant amusement to ...
— On the Pampas • G. A. Henty
... and slender, with a long face, and high, sharp features, his nose curving like a parrot's beak over a heavy dark mustache. His face was pale and his skin had the clear look of a man who never is exposed to the sun. But his eyes were the objects that attracted my gaze. They were bright as steel points and looked out from under heavy, straight brows with a quick, restless ...
— Mr. Trunnell • T. Jenkins Hains
... Tightly he clutched the greasy thing, and tried to give a sharp twist that should break the vertebrae. But his hand slipped swiftly down to the flat head, which offered no hold for his grasp, the beak ripped through his fingers, and the sapling, which had bent and followed him as Gray Eagle dashed on, snapped back, waving triumphantly its ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... one gets a little sleepy and nods, the others will joggle him off the branch, and then twitter with congratulatory laughter at his tumble. Let us get beneath them quietly. We can see them now, black against the brightening eastern sky. See that fellow give his neighbour a push with his beak, and hear the assaulted one scream out just like Mr. Thomas Sawyer in Sunday-school, whose special chum stuck a pin into him for the pleasure of ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... removal of such obstructions, no special treatment is needed further than to use care and avoid any injury to the beak or throat. Feed nutritious food, as wheat bran mashes and vegetables and see that they have a liberal quantity of good ...
— The Veterinarian • Chas. J. Korinek
... a staff of deep blue, to which was attached a drooping silver flag crossed with bars of gold. (Its pattern was like the one placed in his grave.) On the top of the staff rested a dove, holding in its beak a wreath, composed of rainbow shades, circling the word Peace in letters whiter than snow. As the new sun continued to rise, the jewelled sky increased in dazzling brilliancy, ten thousand gems of shining gold shot out, and ten thousand sapphires too, ...
— Young Lion of the Woods - A Story of Early Colonial Days • Thomas Barlow Smith
... Timor. That afternoon some noddies came so near the boat that one was caught. These birds are about the size of a small pigeon; it was divided into eighteen parts and given by lot. The men were much amused when they saw the beak and claws fall to the lot of the captain. The bird was eaten, bones and all, with bread and ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... bird hovered motionless. It seemed to hang in air as if by a thread. Then it descended with a wide, circling swoop. In less than ten seconds, as it seemed to Hervey, its body and great wings, and even its curved, cruel beak, were plainly visible circling a few yards above the tree. It seemed like a journey from the heavens to the earth, ...
— Tom Slade on Mystery Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... justice of assize, judge of assize; recorder, common sergeant; puisne judge, assistant judge, county court judge; conservator of the peace, justice of the peace; J.P.; court &c (tribunal) 966; magistrate, police magistrate, beak [Slang]; his worship, his honor, his lordship. jury, twelve men in a box. Lord Chancellor, Lord Justice; Master of the Rolls, Vice Chancellor; Lord Chief Justice, Chief Baron; Mr. Justice, Associate Justice, Chief Justice; Baron, Baron of the Exchequer. jurat [Lat.], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... old caretaker held out a piece of cracked wheat to the fledgling who devoured it greedily and opened his beak for more. ...
— Chico: the Story of a Homing Pigeon • Lucy M. Blanchard
... Regicide, late the faithful ally of Great Britain, the Catholic king, that we address our doleful lamentation: it is not to the Prince of Peace, whose declaration of war was one of the first auspicious omens of general tranquillity, which our dove-like ambassador, with the olive-branch in his beak, was saluted with at his entrance into the ark ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... if it was only going into a convent—to be bricked up alive, perhaps. And then I hears a scratch, scratch, scratching, and 'Drat the mice,' says I; but I didn't take any notice, and then there was a little tap, tapping, like a bird would make with its beak on the window-pane, and I went and opened it, thinking it was a bird that had lost its way and was coming foolish-like, as they will, to the light. So I drew the curtain and opened the window, and ...
— In Homespun • Edith Nesbit
... through the winding avenues, presenting their striking and varied emblems, speaking so forcibly to the mind. The white dove with open beak and half spread wing; the harp with the broken string, and the broken column, are all beautiful and significant representations, preaching loudly for the silent dust that slumbers ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... was by birth an Italian of very low degree; a man of crouched stature, and of an uncomely physiognomy, being yellow-skinned and black-haired, with a beak-nose, and little quick eyes of a free and familiar glance, but shrewd withal, and possessed of a pleasant way of winning facetiously on the ladies, to the which his singular skill in all manner of melodious music helped not a little; so ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... a limb, And Reynard the Fox looked up at him; For the Raven held in his great big beak A morsel the Fox would ...
— Fables in Rhyme for Little Folks - From the French of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... of strange things, Of horrors such as nightmare only brings. Asps, and spread eagles without beak or feet, Sirens and mermaids here and dragons meet, And antlered stags and fabled unicorn, And fearful things of monstrous fancy born. Upon the rigid form of morion's sheen Winged lions and the ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... townes end, Cuddenbeak, an ancient house of the Bishops, from a well aduanced Promontory, which intituled it Beak, taketh a pleasant prospect ...
— The Survey of Cornwall • Richard Carew
... we go to the famous Zoo' With Bertie, and Nellie, and Dick, and Sue. And we feel quite ready to jump for glee When the wonderful birds and beasts we see. The pelican solemn with monster beak, And the plump little penguin round and sleek, Have set us laughing—Ha, ha! Ho! ho! And you'll laugh too, if you look below. To the monkey-house then we make our way, Where the monkeys chatter, and climb, and play; At the snakes we peep, then onward stroll, ...
— London Town • Felix Leigh
... had settled and that I was once again upon solid ground, I hastily unbound my turban from its foot and freed myself, and that not a moment too soon; for the bird, pouncing upon a huge snake, killed it with a few blows from its powerful beak, and seizing it up rose into the air once more and soon disappeared from my view. When I had looked about me I began to doubt if I had gained anything ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments • Andrew Lang.
... high green walls of oak and ash, till they saw at the head of the tide Alef's town, nestling in a glen which sloped towards the southern sun. They discovered, besides, two ships drawn up upon the beach, whose long lines and snake-heads, beside the stoat carved on the beak-head of one and the adder on that of the other, bore witness to the piratical habits of their owner. The merchants, it seemed, were well known to the Cornishmen on shore, and Hereward went up with them unopposed; past the ugly dikes and muddy ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... row a goddess sits in the rain: her head is prolonged into that of a bird, holding a fish in its beak. The central picture shows Chac in his boat ferrying a woman across the water from the East. The third illustration depicts the familiar conflict ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... certainly more than a hundred well-marked races. The most noteworthy of these races are, the four great stocks known to the "fancy" as tumblers, pouters, carriers, and fantails; birds which not only differ most singularly in size, colour, and habits, but in the form of the beak and of the skull: in the proportions of the beak to the skull; in the number of tail-feathers; in the absolute and relative size of the feet; in the presence or absence of the uropygial gland; in the number ...
— The Origin of Species - From 'The Westminster Review', April 1860 • Thomas H. Huxley
... studying the old gentleman. His face was of the most prodigious purple hue, and so highly polished that it continually caught the reflection of the small electric lamp in the roof. Huge gold spectacles with glasses so thick that they distorted his eyes, straddled a great beak-like nose. He had doffed his helmet and was mopping his brow, and I saw a high perfectly bald dome-like head, brilliantly polished and almost as red as his face. He was clean shaven and by no means young, for the flesh hung in bags about his face. Long years of the habit of ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... is relatively light, and in some cases the jaws, though bearing teeth, are beak-like at their extremities and appear to have been enveloped in a horny sheath. In the part of the vertebral column which lies between the haunch bones and is called the sacrum, a number of vertebrae may unite together into one whole, and in this respect, as in some details of its structure, ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... confounded with those brought about by external compulsion. They may have the appearance of being vaguely purposive, although we would never attribute purpose to the creature making them. The infant that cries and struggles, when tormented by the intrusive pin, the worm writhing in the beak of a bird,—these act blindly, but it does not appear meaningless to say that they act. The ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... to his horticulturing and walked on till they met a Parrot who was a Swagman, or a Swagman who was a Parrot. He must have been one or the other, if not both, for he had a bag and a swag, and a beak and a billy, and a thundering bad temper into the bargain, for the moment Bill asked him if he had met a singed ...
— The Magic Pudding • Norman Lindsay
... nearest Sark, and found the ground there covered with a fairly deep soil, and green growths that were strange to him. The soil was perforated with holes which at first he ascribed to rabbits, but when he inserted his hand into one he got such a nip from an unusually strong beak that he changed his mind to puffins, and, standing quite still for a time, he presently saw the members of the colony come creeping out behind their great red bills and scurry off across the water ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... who might well have been your own stable-boy, a being who can show you a deeper depth of hell in Hell, wreak his dislike of you in unfair "fatigues," and keep you at the detested job of coal-drawing on Wednesdays; who can achieve a "canter past the beak"[21] for you on a trumped-up charge and land you in the "digger,"[22] who can bring it home to you in a thousand ways that you are indeed the toad beneath the harrow. Fancy having to remember, night and day, that a Sergeant, who can perhaps ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... six or seven feet out of water, disappeared under the swell of the Vulcan's hull. Suddenly the tug swung her blunt beak around with the sidelong blow of an angry swine. Madden went flying to the right rail of the bridge to stare down at the ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... garden, he found her at the swan basin, feeding the gold and silver fishes. An under gardener who had been about the place for thirty years, was at work not far off. The light splash of the falling column which the marble swan spouted from its upturned beak, prevented her from hearing his approach until he was close behind her. She turned, and her fair face took the flush of ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... displayed the parrot, but a parrot was too fine and fierce a bird for Ellen. She would have preferred him as a subject for her imagination, which could not be harmed by his beak and claws, and she liked Cynthia's story about him better than the gorgeous actuality of the bird himself. She shrank back from that shrieking splendor, clinging with strong talons to his cage wires, against which he pressed ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... watched the huge mountaineer with interest. There was no more famous character in all those hills than the giant before him—yet his face was kind and was good-humoured, but the nose and eyes were the beak and eyes of some bird of prey. The little girl had disappeared for a moment. She came back with a blue-backed spelling-book, a second reader and a worn copy of "Mother Goose," and she opened first one and then the other until the attention of the visitor was caught—the black-haired ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... grass he threw him, Hid in his wing his beak and wept, There ceased his sorrows to pursue him, The little dove for ...
— The Bakchesarian Fountain and Other Poems • Alexander Pushkin and other authors
... with painted cheeks, and beads for eyes, dressed up in scraps of colored pina cloth in imitation of fine senoritas. Kite-time and the peg-top season come as in America. The Filipino kites are built like butterflies or birds, and sometimes carry a long beak which is of use in case of war. Kite-fighting is a favorite amusement in the islands, where the native boys are expert in the art of making and manipulating kites. Among the other games they play is one that an American would recognize as "tip-cat," and another which would be more difficult to recognize ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... knitting imaginable. After the builder has fastened many lines to opposite twigs, their ends hanging free, she proceeds to span the little gulf by weaving them together. She stands with her claws clasped one to each side, and uses her beak industriously, looping up and fastening the loose ends. I have stood in the road under the nest looking straight up till my head swam, trying to make out just how she did it, but all I could see was the bird standing ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... irregular flapping of quick, blue wings. Then, like a bullet, he dived into the flashing stream immediately at Clark's feet, and emerged with diamond drops flying from his brilliant plumage and a small, silver fish curving in his sharp, serrated beak, till, a second later, he darted into the covert with his prey. The bird had dared the rapids and found that which he sought. Clark's gray eyes had seen it all, and ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... like a sword drawn at need, went the heron's sharp beak; and the falcon saw it, and swerved and shot past her nearly-taken prey. Again the heron began to tower up and up with a harsh croak that seemed like a cry of mockery; then the wondrous swing and sweep of the long, tireless wings of the ...
— King Alfred's Viking - A Story of the First English Fleet • Charles W. Whistler
... leaning back in his place, softly cracking the knuckle of a forefinger, and, last of all and close to his elbow, his son, his support, his confidant and companion, Harran, so like himself, with his own erect, fine carriage, his thin, beak-like nose and his blond hair, with its tendency to curl in a forward direction in front of the ears, young, strong, courageous, full of the promise of the future years. His blue eyes looked straight into his father's with what Magnus could fancy ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... left I saw perched on the top of a rock a huge bird, its head bent forward as if about to pounce down upon us. Presently we saw its wings expand. It was of great size, with huge claws, a pointed, powerful beak, a neck destitute of feathers, and a huge comb on its forehead. The feathers were of a glossy black hue, with a white ruff at the base of ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... nearly all day long, pushing his beak at times into his mate's ear as though to give her the full benefit of his song. The lady, however, does not seem to appreciate his efforts, but generally pecks him sharply ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph [January, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... me to inspect the diary. Its first page was garnished with the resemblance of a large swan with curly wings; from his beak proceeded the owner's name in full, and underneath were his lucubrations. The first ...
— Wonder-Box Tales • Jean Ingelow
... greyish or brown plumage, the feet of the turkey-cock, as also the beak, but a little more hooked. They have hardly any tail, and their posterior, covered with feathers, is rounded like the croup of a horse. They stand higher than the turkey-cock, and have a straight neck, a little longer in proportion than it is in that ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 575 - 10 Nov 1832 • Various
... 75 percent of the nuts to be wormy, and often infestation reaches 90 to 100 per cent. The small weevil does the most damage, but there are indications that this may not always be true. Because the mouth parts of the adult are situated at the end of an extremely long and slender beak, it can obtain most of its food from beneath the surface of the host plant. For this reason, stomach poisons applied to trees have not been eaten by these weevils, and hence have been of no practical value. As DDT kills by contact, it is necessary ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report - at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948 • Various
... at Lincoln. He became passionately attached to the bishop, but exhibited no liking for anyone else, he considered himself bound to protect his master, driving other people away from him, "As I myself," writes Giraldus Cambrensis, "have often with wonder seen," with his wings and beak. ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting
... soft bright down when she first crept out of her egg-shell. She had a sharp beak and bright clever ...
— Dick and His Cat and Other Tales • Various
... the enemy's masses advanced, and gradually concentrated, so that this war might be compared to the battles of the ravens and the eagle in the Alps. The eagle slays hundreds of his assailants—every blow of his beak is the death of an enemy, but still the vultures return to the charge, and press upon the eagle until ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... fascinated by his work, chaffing gaily with his principal actor as to the rendering of some of his lines. Then there was Fardell, also a schoolfellow, now a police magistrate, full of dry and pleasant humour, called by his intimates "The Beak "; Amberson, poseur and dilettante thirty years ago, but always a good fellow, now an acknowledged master of English prose and a critic whose word was unquestioned. These men, one and all, seemed to be up to the neck in life, kept young and human ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... You may know that the slayer was a sparrowhawk by the appearance of the bird, its body untouched, but the flesh picked neatly from the neck and the head gone. That was swallowed whole, after the beak had been cut off. You will find the beak lying by the side of the body. In summertime, when birds are most abundant, after the breeding season, the ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... had never seen so graceful a figure, or heard so sweet a voice as that which thanked me now. As for her, when I stepped up, my sword still in my hand, some thought that she had only escaped the beak of the vulture to feel the talons of the hawk made ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... comparative anatomist above mentioned, to the order of the Lizards. In this singular reptile (fig. 151) the skull is somewhat bird-like, and the jaws appear to have been destitute of teeth, and to have been encased in a horny sheath like the beak of a Turtle or a Bird. It is possible, however, that the palate was ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... doubt not my thoughts have been far unholier than thine. Thou rememberest not, I am sure; but ere we were professed, I was troth-plight unto a young noble, and always that life that I have lost flitteth afore me, as a bird that held a jewel in his beak might lure me on from flower to flower, ever following, never grasping the sweet illusion. Margaret, sister, despise me not for my confession! But thou wilt see I am no saint, ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... terror of Turkish Sublimities who had outworn his patience. But he knew when to be angry; he could pulverize by fiery outbreaks the Reis Effendi and his master, Abdu-l-Mejid; but as Plenipotentiary to the United States he could "quench the terror of his beak, the lightning of his eye," disarming by his formal courtesy and winning by his obvious sincerity the suspicious and irritable John Quincy Adams. When Menschikoff once insulted him, seeing that a quarrel at that moment would be fatal to his purpose, he pretended to be deaf, and left the Russian ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... idea appealed to her, for the sunbonnet overhanging the meek potato-flowers like a flamingo's beak rose in air, as she stood erect, or as nearly erect as she ever stood nowadays. She tossed a few uprooted weeds over the lilac-hedge, and, clumping up the steps of the porch, slumped into a chair. Chairs had once been her luxury, too. She carried ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... Saracens captured it, laid siege to recover it; surrender grew inevitable; but its Moorish commander, Mirat, though an infidel, was, for his nobility of character, in special favor with the Virgin,—Notre Dame de Puy.[23] In this extremity, she sent to him an eagle bearing in its beak a live fish; and Mirat promptly sent it to Charlemagne, to show his heavenly succor. The king, knowing that there was no possible fishing on the castle hill, perceived that it was a miracle; and lessening his rigor in the face ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... and plucking it out of the child's hand, carried it up into a tree; the child suddenly began to cry, and the mother, hearing it, left her washing, and running to the child, forthwith missed the ring, but hearing the raven croak in the tree, she lifted up her eyes, and saw it with the ring in its beak. The woman, in great terror, called her brother, and told him what had happened, adding that she durst not approach the king if the raven took away the ring. Gaspar, seizing his cross-bow and quiver, ran to the tree, where ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... this time that a caricature was circulated in Rome, representing Sixtus as King Stork and the Romans as frogs vainly attempting to escape from his devouring beak. Merito haec patimur, "We suffer deservedly," was the legend of the picture, and the moral it conveyed was a true one. Rome was in such a state as to require the harshest applications, and the despotic severity of Sixtus did much to restore decency and security ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... parting, bird or fiend!" I shrieked, upstarting— "Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore! Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken! Leave my loneliness unbroken!—quit the bust above my door! Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my ...
— Le Corbeau • Edgar Allan Poe
... not hit, the steersman lost his nerve, and shrank from the coming shock. The galley's helm went up to port, and her beak slid all but harmless along Amyas' bow; a long dull grind, and then loud crack on crack, as the Rose sawed slowly through the bank of oars from stem to stern, hurling the wretched slaves in heaps upon each other; ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... ducks, when freshly killed, have supple feet. If young, the windpipe and beak can be easily broken by pressure of the thumb and forefinger. Young birds also have soft, white fat, tender skin, yellow feet, and ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... right angle and dives into the junction of the beak, straight down to the root. Then the eggs are emitted for nearly half an hour. The layer, utterly absorbed in her serious business, remains stationary and impassive and is easily observed through my lens. A movement ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... he picked out another and another half pilchard, and threw them as far as he could, when, almost as each piece touched the water, a soft-looking grey gull swept down and caught it from the surface with its strong beak, uttering a low peevish-sounding wail as it swept up again, hardly seeming to move ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... insurgent mentalities of the youth and morning vigour of the inexpressible human soul, when, flushed with AEolian light, and, as it were, beaded with those lustrous dews which the eternal Aurora lets fall from her melodious lip; if it escape living from the beak of the vulture (no fable here!), then, indeed, it may aspire to ——, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... a cross where a rotting thing Is slipping down from the nails. And a raven perched on the eyeless skull Opens his beak ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... Pomerania.] which attracted all eyes in the castle, for on the deck stood a noble youth, with a heron's plume waving from his cap, and he held a tame sea-gull upon his hand, which from time to time flew off and dived into the water, bringing up all sorts of fish, great and small, in its beak, with which it immediately flew back to ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... were harmless and full of play put forth claw, and sting, and tooth, and tusk. Birds whet their beak for prey. Clouds troop in the sky. Sharp thorns shoot up through the soft grass. Blastings on the leaves. All the chords of that great harmony are snapped. Upon the brightest home this world ever saw our first parents turned their back and ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... hectocotylization of one or more of the arms of the male cephalopod did not escape Aristotle's eye. And while he speaks of the teeth and that which serves these animals for a tongue, it is plain from the context that he means in the one case the two halves of the parrot-like beak, and in the other the anterior ...
— Fathers of Biology • Charles McRae
... overhead, he looked up, and soon caught sight of two large birds wheeling round and round, each apparently doing its utmost to get above the other. The two, however, were very evenly matched, for, whereas the kite had its strong beak and talons, deadly weapons for seizing and rending when at close quarters, and could make a powerful swoop at his prey—the heron, though an awkward bird in the air, and ungainly in its movements, had yet its long, sharp, bill, with which it could receive its enemy as ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... that branch of it which unfolds the character and habits, physical, moral, and intellectual, of those most interesting and admirable creatures—Birds. It is familiar not only with the shape and colour of beak, bill, claw, talon, and plume, but with the purposes for which they are designed, and with the instincts which guide their use in the beautiful economy of all-gracious Nature. We remember the time when the very word Ornithology would have required interpretation in mixed ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... beak of a bird or the prow of a ship. In America, a place from which a candidate for office energetically expounds the wisdom, virtue ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... thirsty lance at thy command. Perching on the sceptred hand Of Jove, thy magic lulls the feather'd king With ruffled plumes, and flagging wing: Quench'd in dark clouds of slumber lie The terror of his beak, and lightnings of ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... bands of green (hoist side), white, and red; the coat of arms (an eagle perched on a cactus with a snake in its beak) is centered in the ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... under the mimosa thorn now and up to his belly in the warm red grass. Where could the birds be? Whirr! and a great feathered shell seemed to have burst at his very feet. What a covey! twelve brace if there was a bird, and they had all been lying beak to beak in a space no bigger than a cart wheel. Up went John's gun and off too, a little sooner than ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... priest, with a smile, "shudders at the rustling of the wind or the chattering of a stork's beak; a murderer's conscience preys upon his mind till he sees what is not. Poverty drives a man to crimes which he repents of in his wealth. How true is the doctrine of Moshi [Mencius], that the heart of man, pure by nature, is ...
— Stories by English Authors: Orient • Various
... think of all you have done; Only think of all you can do; A false note is really fun, From such a bird as you! Lift up your proud little crest; Open your musical beak; Other birds have to do their best, You need ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 5, March, 1878 • Various
... the iron door, and shut up those evils that threatened to overwhelm the land. But lo! on coming in sight of the tower, a new wonder met their eyes. An eagle appeared high in the air, seeming to descend from heaven. He bore in his beak a burning brand, and lighting on the summit of the tower, fanned the fire with his wings. In a little while the edifice burst forth into a blaze as though it had been built of rosin, and the flames mounted ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... Englishmen, but none of the highborn Cymry might aspire to wed an Englishwoman. Hating the prince under whom they had come to so much disgrace, the Welsh themselves captured poor Gryffyth, and sent his head, his hands, and the beak of his ship, to Edward the Confessor, from whom they accepted the appointment of three of their native ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... a weary week With bulging eyes and fevered brow, While WILSON pressed upon its beak His League-of-Nations' olive bough, Wondering what amount of weight Its efforts could negotiate, How much, in fact, the bird would stand Without collapsing on ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various
... went to crack a crib. I'm shot with a bullet. Hide me in that loose hay there; leave me the bottle, and let nobody come nigh me. The beak will be after me ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... incarnations of the spirits, is of wondrous form and mystic nature. The rare advent of this bird upon the earth is, like that of the kirin or unicorn, a presage of the advent of virtuous rulers and good government. It has the head of a pheasant, the beak of a swallow, the neck of a tortoise, and the features of the dragon and fish. Its colors and streaming feathers are gorgeous with iridian sheen, combining the splendors of the pheasant and the peacock. Its five colors symbolize the cardinal ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... tortoise stopped, whereupon they poked it from behind with their knives. It was a vicious-looking brute, and had a huge horny beak, with which it bit off young trees that stood in its way as though they had been blades of grass. They were passing through a valley about half a mile wide, bordered on each side by woods, when Bearwarden suddenly exclaimed, "Here we ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... took a few seeds and began to coax the bird, until it, in point of fact, performed various tricks, on the stage, clasping in its beak a ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... a bird Slips lightly oceanward— Sail feathering smooth o'er the bay And beak that drinks the wild spray. In his eyes beams cheerily A light like the sun's on the sea, As he watches the waning strand, Where the foam, like a waving hand Of one who mutely would tell ...
— Rose and Roof-Tree - Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... set a negro servant to watch that it did not sink into his gullet, as he fell asleep, and with instructions to take the poultice off whenever the pain abated; and there he lay on his back, whistling through this artificial beak, like a ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... as he hunted the bee, The snake slipt under a spray; The wild hawk stood with the down on his beak, And stared, with his foot on the prey; And the nightingale thought, 'I have sung many songs, But never a one so gay; For he sings of what the world will be When the years have ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... country a common vehicle for the devil and witches to play their pranks in, I verily believed we were haunted; and, in a violent fright, shrank under the bedclothes. This terrible apparition leaped upon the bed, and after giving us several severe dabs with its beak through the blankets, hopped away, and vanished. Strap and I recommended ourselves to the protection of heaven with great devotion, and, when we no longer heard the noise, ventured to peep up and take breath. But we had not been ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... courtyard; at one end, near a chapel, the men were huddled together; one could see nothing but swollen, stupid faces, inflamed nostrils, and twisted mouths; old women as fat and clumsy as melancholy whales; little wizened, cadaverous hags with sunken mouths and noses like the beak of a bird of prey; shamefaced female mendicants, their wrinkled chins bristling with hair, their gaze half ironical and half shy; young women, thin and emaciated, slatternly and filthy; and all, young and old alike, clad in threadbare garments that ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... a very forlorn condition, being covered with egg behind, while the front of the skirt showed a number of dismal rents made by the beak and claws of the angry rooster. I did not think it would be improved by rolling on the grass, but I could not well do ...
— Five Mice in a Mouse-trap - by the Man in the Moon. • Laura E. Richards
... storm-beaten tree, the king of birds struck it such a blow that, dazed and terrified, it dropped the fish, and barely succeeded in getting away. It was not the fishhawk the eagle was after, but fish; and as the active bird saw the fish drop from the beak of the fishhawk, it flew down after it and caught it in mid-air ere it reached the water. Then, in majestic circles, it slowly ascended to its eyrie. This sight under other circumstances would have been enjoyable; ...
— Oowikapun - How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... in the winter of 1615, pursuing one day a remarkable bird "which was the size of a hen, had a beak like a parrot and was entirely yellow, except for a red head and blue wings, and which had the flight of the partridge"—a bird I cannot identify—lost his way in the woods. For two days he wandered in the wilderness, ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... a bindeah bush. But the Galah saw him. She never stopped the hideous noise she was making for a minute, but, still shrieking, followed Oolah. When she reached the bindeah bush she rushed at Oolah, seized him with her beak, rolled him on the bush until every bindeah had made a hole in his skin. Then she rubbed his skin with her own bleeding head. "Now then," she said, "you Oolah shall carry bindeahs on you always, and the stain of ...
— Australian Legendary Tales - Folklore of the Noongahburrahs as told to the Piccaninnies • K. Langloh Parker
... of resemblance, the thing which is so used has others less noble. Our modern repugnance to the vulture as feeding on carcasses was probably not felt by the singer of this song. What he brings into view are the characteristics common to the eagle and the vulture; superb strength in beak and claw, keenness of vision almost incredible, magnificent sweep of pinion and power of rapid, unwearied flight. And these characteristics, we may say, have their analogues in the divine nature, and the emblem not unfitly shadows forth one ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... hand there were some whose names had been obviously the result of a sense of propriety in some one. Among the men who were rabidly set on distinguishing themselves in one way or another was a Major Beak. Now, why was it that this Major's nose was an aquiline of the most outrageous dimensions? Surely no one would argue that the nose grew to accommodate the name. Is it not more probable—nay, certain— that the name grew to accommodate the nose? ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne
... (Asilus), with his nasal, twangy buzz! "Waiow! Wha-a-ar are ye?" he seems to say, and with a suggestive onslaught against the window-pane, which betokens his satisfied quest, is out again at the window with a bluebottle-fly in the clutch of his powerful legs, or perhaps impaled on his horny beak. ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... indeed she—or, at least, like her—her full face displayed, her bosom uncovered, with her hair hanging loose, and with a purse of red velvet in her hands, while behind her a peacock leaned his beak over her shoulder, covering the wall with his immense plumage in the ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... Bird, were rubbing hard at the palm of one hand. There being no trees close by, the men used the sole of a shoe, while Puffy raked away at one paw with the claws of the others, and the Bird pecked a foot with his beak. ...
— The Poor Little Rich Girl • Eleanor Gates
... woodpecker, in the various myths of schamir, is the dark storm-cloud, so the rock-splitting worm or plant or pebble which the bird carries in its beak and lets fall to the ground is nothing more or less than the flash of lightning carried and dropped by the cloud. "If the cloud was supposed to be a great bird, the lightnings were regarded as writhing worms or serpents in its beak. These fiery serpents, elikiai ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... big queen bumble-bee on the ground, looking extremely conspicuous in its black and chestnut coat on the fresh green sward; and thinking it numbed by the cold I picked it up. It moved its legs feebly, but alas! its enemy had found and struck it down, and with its hard, sharp little beak had drilled a hole in one of the upper plates of its abdomen, and from that small opening had cunningly extracted all the meat. Though still alive it was empty as a blown eggshell. Poor queen and mother, you survived the winter in vain, and went abroad in vain in the bitter weather in quest of ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... hens finally awakened Demetrio. They kept silent for a moment; then Panchita, taking out of the bosom of her blouse a young pigeon which opened its beak ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela
... an assembly of strange things, Of horrors such as nightmare only brings. Asps, and spread eagles without beak or feet, Sirens and mermaids here and dragons meet, And antlered stags and fabled unicorn, And fearful things of monstrous fancy born. Upon the rigid form of morion's sheen Winged lions and the Cerberus are seen, And serpents winged ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... painted as they were in churches, and presenting Our Lord with flowers de luce. Above or on one side were the names Jhesus—Maria, and the background was strewn with the royal lilies in gold.[830] She also had a coat-of-arms painted: on an azure shield a silver dove, holding in its beak a scroll on which was written: "De par le Roi du Ciel."[831] This coat-of-arms she had painted on the reverse of the standard bearing on the front the picture of Our Lord. A servant of the Duke of Alencon, Perceval de Cagny, says that ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... The Samians branded the figure of an owl on the foreheads of their Athenian prisoners, to revenge themselves for the branding of their own prisoners by the Athenians with the figure of a samaina. This is a ship having a beak turned up like a swine's snout, but with a roomy hull, so as both to carry a large cargo and sail fast. This class of vessel is called samaina because it was first built at Samos by Polycrates, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... no one had been here? (Shakes his finger at her.) My little song-bird must never do that again. A song-bird must have a clean beak to chirp with—no false notes! (Puts his arm round her waist.) That is so, isn't it? Yes, I am sure it is. (Lets her go.) We will say no more about it. (Sits down by the stove.) How warm and snug it is here! (Turns ...
— A Doll's House • Henrik Ibsen
... break in the strata, by another, perhaps twenty feet higher, the upper portion being curiously wrought by nature's chisel into the shape of a human countenance. The forehead is shelving, the eyebrows heavy and menacing; the nose large and hooked like the beak of a hawk; the upper lip short, the chin prominent and pointed, while a thick growth of ferns in the shelter of the crag forming the nose gives the impression of a small mustache and goatee. Above ...
— Irish Wonders • D. R. McAnally, Jr.
... out the two long arms of Sepia and of the calamaries, and their absence in the octopus; and he tells us, what was only confirmed of late, that with these two long arms the creature clings to the rock and sways about like a ship at anchor. He describes the great eyes, the two big teeth forming the beak; and he dissects the whole structure of the gut, with its long gullet, its round crop, its stomach and the little coiled coecal diverticulum: dissecting not only one but several species, and noting differences that were not observed again till Cuvier re-dissected them. He describes the funnel ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... a pillar of the garden-gate; I looked, hardly daring either to move or breathe; for I feared that if she saw or heard me, she would leave the window. After a lapse of some minutes, the canary touched the sugar with his beak. ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... and, looking up, saw the hawk in full swing, not many hundred yards distant, with the bird in its beak, fluttering ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... the sparrows then, and he craned his neck to see the nest. There was the little mother-bird sitting in the nest with her wings outstretched to protect the nestlings from the deadly fumes. Her beak was wide open ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... the enemy in general was to relax the prepared bent of their souls for battle, and to weaken their tactical arrangements. Presently, however, wheeling his regiments (which were marching in column) to the front, with the effect of strengthening the beak-like (13) attack which he proposed to lead himself, at the same instant he gave the order, "Shoulder arms, forward," and led the way, the ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... in Chinese tradition, the Fung Hwang, which some sinologues identify with the phoenix of the West.(2) According to a commentator on the 'Rh Ya, this "felicitous and perfect bird has a cock's head, a snake's neck, a swallow's beak, a tortoise's back, is of five different colours and more than ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... your pitch was short Or smile to see you in the sanded trench; But Golf (so I extenuate my sin) Brings all men level, like the greens they putt on; One common bunker makes the whole world kin, And Bar may scrap with Beak, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 25th, 1920 • Various
... windows were small, and I had slipped off my knapsack and dropped into a big comfortable chair before I noticed a clean-shaven man with a big hooked nose and gleaming eyes seated in the far corner. It was like the beak of a bird, that nose, and I was so fascinated by it that I didn't answer the landlord when he came in and said 'Good evening.' The man opposite said 'Good evening' too, so I suppose that it must have ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... wary, and constantly on the lookout for tricks. I am told that a live albatross standing on the deck of the ship is a very handsome bird. His back is white, his wings are brown, he has a fine head, carries himself with great dignity, and has a grand eye and countenance. The bird has a pink beak and pretty streaks of a rose color on the cheeks. After death these colors disappear, and are not to be seen in the stuffed specimens such as are found in museums. A good-sized albatross weighs about twenty pounds, though, as before stated, he looks ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox
... everywhere, and learning new phases of the "Christian Dispensation" at every turn in his road. Paris had held him fascinated for a long while, not only because he saw her doom written like that of Babylon in letters of fire, and Ruin, like a giant bird of prey hovering over her with beak and claw prepared to pick the very flesh from her bones,—but also because he had met Angela Sovrani, one of the most rarely- gifted types of womanhood he had ever seen. He recognised her genius at once, and marvelled at it. And still more did ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... more caught sight of Kanaris with his fat thighs and interminable moustache, and of Bobelina and the blackbird. For fully five minutes all present preserved a complete silence—the only sound audible being that of the blackbird's beak against the wooden floor of the cage as the creature fished for grains of corn. Meanwhile Chichikov again surveyed the room, and saw that everything in it was massive and clumsy in the highest degree; as also that everything was curiously ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... day, signifies the lustful man who seeks to lie hidden in his deeds of darkness. The cormorant, so constituted that it can stay a long time under water, denotes the glutton who plunges into the waters of pleasure. The ibis is an African bird with a long beak, and feeds on snakes; and perhaps it is the same as the stork: it signifies the envious man, who refreshes himself with the ills of others, as with snakes. The swan is bright in color, and by the aid of its long neck extracts its ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... of green (hoist side), white, and red; the coat of arms (an eagle perched on a cactus with a snake in its beak) is centered ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... that there was a horny beak, like a parrot's, in the mouth, and that on the under side of the head was a ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... black veil, surrounded her thin, wan face with its narrow, hooded border. A great number of deep, transverse wrinkles ploughed her brow, which resembled yellowish ivory in color and substance. Her keen and prominent nose was curved like the hooked beak of a bird of prey; her black eye was piercing and sagacious; her face was at once ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... Master Roland—the major-domo's mouth was as crooked as a hawk's beak for the whole morning afterwards, and any other page in your room would have tasted the discipline of the porter's lodge for it. But my Lady's favour stood between your skin and many a jerking—Lord send you may be the better for her protection in ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... breast the varnished buds of Spring; When the loosed current, as its folds uncoil, Slides in the channels of the mellowed soil; When the young hyacinth returns to seek The air and sunshine with her emerald beak; When the light snowdrops, starting from their cells, Hang each pagoda with its silver bells; When the frail willow twines her trailing bow With pallid leaves that sweep the soil below; When the broad elm, sole empress of the plain, Whose circling shadow speaks a century's reign, Wreathes in ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... any seafowl we are acquainted with. I directed the bird to be killed for supper, and the blood to be given to three of the people who were the most distressed for want of food. The body, with the entrails, beak, and feet, I divided into 18 shares, and with an allowance of bread, which I made a merit of granting, we made a good supper, compared with our ...
— A Voyage to the South Sea • William Bligh
... a tremendous upheaval as followed. The man, believing that possibly the "devil-bird" had broken out of its cage and was about to carry him off in its gigantic beak, gave a shrill scream of terror, and bouncing up, broke the slender hold Frank had secured ...
— The Aeroplane Boys on the Wing - Aeroplane Chums in the Tropics • John Luther Langworthy
... they; but they, nevertheless, did not let her fly, but took her home with them, and every time she cried they gave her a tap on the beak. ...
— A Christmas Greeting • Hans Christian Andersen
... had two eggs in it, quite white, and each about as large as a small sugarplum. 6. When you approach the spot where one of these birds has built its nest, it is necessary to be careful. The mother bird will dart at you and try to peck your eyes. Its sharp beak may hurt your eyes most severely, and even destroy the sight. 7. The poor little thing knows no other way of defending its young, and instinct teaches it that you might carry off its nest ...
— McGuffey's Third Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... reviewing as he sat there, but not in thought; his knowledge was too deep for words; he was simply feeling, as a child that looked as he looked would naturally be feeling, on that bench between his parents. He opened his little mouth at times, as a small bird will open its small beak, without apparent purpose; and ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... [172] with a black beak, the upper part slightly aquiline, four inches long and in the form of a lancet; namely, the lower part representing the handle and the upper the blade, which is thin, sharp on both sides, and shorter by a third than the other, which circumference ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 2 • Samuel de Champlain
... least more rare, is the account given by Andreas Baccius, of a man who was struck in the hand by a cock, with his beak, and who died on the third day thereafter, looking for all the world like a fighting-cock, to the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... his possession a hen, which answered the purpose of a cat in destroying mice. She was constantly seen watching close to a corn rick, and the moment a mouse appeared, she seized it in her beak, and carried it to a meadow adjoining, where she would play with it like a young cat for some time, and then kill it. She has been known to catch four or five mice a day in ...
— A Hundred Anecdotes of Animals • Percy J. Billinghurst
... voice dropped almost to a whisper, and he told a tale of the sailing of an open galley to Furdurstrandi, of sunsets on the open sea, seen under the curve of the one sail evening after evening when the galley's beak was notched into the centre of the sinking disc, and "we sailed by that for we had no other guide," quoth Charlie. He spoke of a landing on an island and explorations in its woods, where the crew ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... the teeth. Finally at the very bottom of the mammalian scale are two small forms living in the Australian faunal region. The duckbill or Ornithorhynchus is the better known animal, with its close fur, webbed feet, and flattened ducklike beak, while its only other near relative, the Echidna, is somewhat similar to the spiny hedgehog in external appearance. A unique peculiarity of these two forms is that they produce eggs much like those of reptiles ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... ate, this devilish Italian, like three, and I too, I was so hungry,—forgive me, sir,—I did my share. But by the time we reached the cheese, a fine, ripe Camembert, had our coffee, and one thimbleful of green Chartreuse, I was plein jusqu'au bec, gorged up to the beak." ...
— The Rome Express • Arthur Griffiths
... nothing as yet of the child-like obedience paid to the King of Borva by his islanders, thought to himself, "Well, you are a very strong and self-willed old gentleman, but if I were you I should not meddle much with that tall keeper with the eagle beak and the gray eyes. I should not like to be a stag, and know that that fellow was watching me somewhere with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... wind made the pennons cut strange capers. The winged lion of Venice looked as if trying to fly away home; the Chinese dragon appeared to brandish his forked tail as he clawed at the Burmese peacock; the double-headed eagle of Russia pecked at the Turkey crescent with one beak, while the other seemed to be screaming to the English royal beast, "Come on and lend a paw." In the hurry of hoisting, the Siamese elephant got turned upside down, and now danced gayly on his head, with the stars and stripes waving proudly over him. A green flag with ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. V, August, 1878, No 10. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... At the end of some of which, in time, there will be gathered together a knot of matter, which by little and little will take the form of a head and you will, ere long, begin to discern eyes and a beak in it. All this while the first red spot of blood grows bigger and solider, till at length it becomes {85} a fleshy substance, and, by its figure, may easily be discern'd to be the heart; which as yet hath no other inclosure but the ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 36. Saturday, July 6, 1850 • Various
... variation in color probably depends somewhat on their age or food—the red ones are generally supposed to be the most mature. The head is furnished with a pair of pointed mandibles, between which is a pointed beak or sucker (Fig. 2). The legs are eight in number; the two front pairs project forward and the other two backward; they are covered with long stiff hairs; the extremities of the feet are provided with long bent hairs, which are each terminated by a knob. The legs and feet appear to be only used in ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various
... being produced under nature without selection. It would take much to persuade me that a Pouter Pigeon, or a Carrier, etc., could have been produced by the mere laws of variation without long continued selection, though each little enlargement of crop and beak are due to variation. I demur greatly to his comparison of the products of sinking and rising islands (87/6. "I venture to anticipate that a study of the vegetation of the islands with reference to the ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... which had preceded this summer had been too dry to bring any growth here, so that it had not even the remains of a previous season's vegetation, and offered no trace of cover. A long and most exhausting chase did enable Finn to pull down a solitary emu, and of this the pack left nothing but beak and feathers when they passed on, still hungry, ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... to the practical, doubted whether so long and slender a bill could be turned to such a purpose. More recent observation has confirmed White's objection and has established the fact of the woodcock holding the young one between her thighs, the beak being apparently used to steady her burden. Whether the little ones are habitually carried about in this fashion, or merely on occasion of danger, is not known, and indeed the bird's preference for activity in the dusk has invested accurate observation of its habits with some ...
— Birds in the Calendar • Frederick G. Aflalo
... freckles; especially under the eyes, which were of a deep, tranquil blue-grey. She half sat, half lay on her left side; whilst before her, quite close, strutted up and down on the grass, a bird, with blue plumage, coral-red beak, ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... All night the lion remained, roaring at intervals, and Bar Shalmon clung to one of the upper branches afraid to sleep lest he should fall off and be devoured. When morning broke, a new danger threatened him. A huge eagle flew round the tree and darted at him with its cruel beak. Then the great bird settled on the thickest branch, and Bar Shalmon moved stealthily forward with a knife which he drew from his belt. He crept behind the bird, but as he approached it spread its big wings, and Bar Shalmon, to prevent himself being swept from the tree, dropped the knife and ...
— Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends • Gertrude Landa
... convent—to be bricked up alive, perhaps. And then I hears a scratch, scratch, scratching, and 'Drat the mice,' says I; but I didn't take any notice, and then there was a little tap, tapping, like a bird would make with its beak on the window-pane, and I went and opened it, thinking it was a bird that had lost its way and was coming foolish-like, as they will, to the light. So I drew the curtain and opened the ...
— In Homespun • Edith Nesbit
... was the color of old, old ivory. Her nose was like a great strong beak, and on it the skin was stretched very tightly, so that her nose shone dully when the candle was lit. Her eyes were big and as black as pools of ink and as bright as the eyes of a bird. Her hair also was black, it was as smooth as the finest silk, and when unloosened ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... nearly as big a one as I'll play on anybody that tries to drive me away from here. . . . I drove a snake away yesterday," he added. And he looked very thoughtfully at Benny Badger, as if he were picking out a soft place in which to sink his cruel beak. ...
— The Tale of Benny Badger • Arthur Scott Bailey
... however, a magnificent bird, when seen with wings expanded, nearly eight feet from tip to tip—and a body three and a half feet in length—his snowy-white head and neck shining in the sun, and his large, hooked, yellow beak open as he espies, afar off, the fish-hawk emerging from the ocean with his struggling prey. Downward he pounces with rapid flight. The fish-hawk sees his enemy approaching, and attempts to escape; but, laden with the fish he has just captured, in spite of ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... he; "but I think it a pity to let sich a dirty varmint go clear off, to dodge about in the bushes, and mayhap treat us to a poisoned arrow, or a spear thrust on the sly. Howsomedever, it ain't no consarn wotever to Jo Bumpus. How's your beak, ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... there are good points," says Roth, "such as the blending of the two bell forms into the common handle, the happy tapering of the ornamentation into the Normian bird's beak; the increasing size of the side cups as they rise to correspond to the enlarged opening of the bell form; the truthfulness to nature in an essential like the bust of the Negro, all of which betoken a fair amount of artistic feeling. The craftsman who probably ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... caves of Kentucky, and which, though they have lost their eyes, have not lost the foot-stalks which carried their eyes. In describing the varieties which have been produced by pigeon-fanciers, Mr. Darwin notes the fact that along with changes in length of beak produced by selection, there have not gone proportionate changes in length of tongue. Take again the case of teeth and jaws. In mankind these have not varied together. During civilization the jaws have decreased, but the teeth have not decreased ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... about this time that a caricature was circulated in Rome, representing Sixtus as King Stork and the Romans as frogs vainly attempting to escape from his devouring beak. Merito haec patimur, "We suffer deservedly," was the legend of the picture, and the moral it conveyed was a true one. Rome was in such a state as to require the harshest applications, and the despotic ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Major Rennie of the Indian army. In this small flat we shot a new macaw, which I shall carry with me, and preserve the skin, if we get to water to-night. The front part of the neck and underneath the wings is of a beautiful crimson hue, the back is of a light lead colour, the tail square, the beak smaller than a cockatoo's, and the crest the same as a macaw's. After leaving this flat, we passed through some scrub, and came upon another of the same description. Here I narrowly escaped being killed. My ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... dagger and, following her to the bathing place on the river bank, he cut out his own heart, cast it at her feet, and fell down lifeless. The girl fled, terrified, and a crow pounced upon the heart, and carried it to a hollow dao-tree, when it fell from his beak into the hollow and there remained. But the love for the girl was so strong in the heart that it became reanimated and clothed again with humanity in the form of a little child. A hunter, pursuing the ...
— Philippine Folk-Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss, Berton L. Maxfield, W. H. Millington,
... bees, there occurs in the Nuttall Codex 4 (Pl. 3, fig. 4) a curious representation of an insect with a pointed beak-like structure and a spine at the posterior extremity of its human-like body. It is engaged in apparent conflict with a man and ...
— Animal Figures in the Maya Codices • Alfred M. Tozzer and Glover M. Allen
... movement leant forward and sideways to peer, bringing my face near to the boat's rail. In the same instant, I found myself looking down into a white demoniac face, human save that the mouth and nose had greatly the appearance of a beak. The thing was gripping at the side of the boat with two flickering hands—gripping the bare, smooth outer surface, in a way that woke in my mind a sudden memory of the great devilfish which had clung to the side of the wreck we had passed in the previous dawn. I saw ...
— The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" • William Hope Hodgson
... from his dreams, twisted his large neck around to look for the lion, saw a lion's flank, and fastened its eagle beak in it. For the griffin had been artificially made by the King-enchanter, and the two halves had never really got used to each other. So now the eagle half of the griffin, who was still rather sleepy, believed that it was fighting a lion, and the lion ...
— The Book of Dragons • Edith Nesbit
... nothing to forgive," said Anna, watching the gulls; one dropped down suddenly, and rose again with a fish in its beak, the sun for an instant catching the silver of the scales. "It is no affair of mine. It is for Else ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... threw it on the floor of the balcony. The crow stopped his cawing, cocked his head on one side, and eyed the tempting morsel. Buttered toast did not often come his way. He dropped down on to the balcony floor, hopped over to the toast, pecked at it, picked it up in his strong beak, and flew with it to the roof of the building opposite. In silence the two men watched him ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... Desire. However, he was determined not to let this bird fly away; so he took up some water in the palm of his hand and held it to its beak. ...
— The Red Fairy Book • Various
... tell ye they luked like that to me," said Honeybird. "An' just as he was passin' me I seen a wee beak keekin 'out a' his pocket, an' sez I to myself: 'Thon's Father Ryan's bantam hen.'" Honeybird had an attentive audience. "An' sez I to him: 'Drap ...
— The Weans at Rowallan • Kathleen Fitzpatrick
... [nothing else; that was its real quality, whatever fine name they might give it, says the vehement Princess], we heard a sharp tapping at the window; and started up in surprise, to see what it could be. It was a raven, carrying in its beak a bit of bread, which it left on the window-sill, and flew away." [Ib. ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... St. Philemon in greater numbers than anywhere else. The best places were quickly taken, the hollows in the trees, the holes in the walls, the forks of the apple-trees and the elms, and you could see a brown beak, like the point of a sword, sticking out of a wisp of straw between all the rafters of the roof. One year, when all the places were taken, I suppose, a tomtit, in her embarrassment, spied the slit of the letter-box protected by its little roof, at the right of the parsonage ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... a nook in the scraggy-looking little antique village but what was sought for with avidity and thronged with occupants. Whoever has seen a flock of hungry pigeons, in the spring, alight on the leaf-covered ground, beneath a forest, and apply the busy powers of claw and beak to obtain a share of the hidden acorns that may be scratched up from beneath, may form some just notion of the pressing hurry and bustle that marked life in this place. The enhanced price that everything ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... some danger lies O'er her young brood, and, with wild eyes, Straight at the sudden foe she flies, Her full soul spurred To battle with the gnashing beak— A roaring tiger is more meek; And somehow one is bound to speak Well of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 18, 1914 • Various
... and well-nigh staked herself on the heron's beak! But we had a long ride, and were well-nigh at the Tyne before we had caught her. Full of pranks, but a noble hawk, as I shall write to my brother by the next messenger that comes our way. I call it a hawk worth her meat that leads one ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... fitted with gargoyles round the brim for rainy weather. He also made an initial "I," and then was seen in Punch no more until the Almanac for 1882, when he made a full-page ornithological drawing of "Up before the Beak." ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... cat, enters it from her sleeping chamber. She wears a tulle cap, under which hangs awry a front of false hair; her gaping slippers flop as she walks across the room. Her features are oldish and flabby; from their midst springs a nose like the beak of a parrot. Her small fat hands, her person plump as a church rat, her bust too full and tremulous, are all in harmony with the room. About fifty years of age, Madame Vauquer looks as most women do who say ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... and watched them disappear around the corner. There was a vaguely lonesome feeling somewhere in the region of his heart. He went on past the entrance of the San Francisco Stock Exchange and almost collided with a bent-over, shrewd-faced man, whose eagle-beak and penetrating eyes were a ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... Keppel had a gown worthy of the Roman Empress she looks, with that beak nose and nutcracker chin. 'Twas a black velvet petticoat, embroidered in chenille, the pattern a great gold wicker basket filled to spilling over with ramping flowers that climbed and grew all about her person. ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... that worked the will of the gods spread its dark wings and flew back to its eyrie, the Titan endured the cruel mercy of having his body grow whole once more. But with daybreak there came again the silent shadow, the smell of the unclean thing, and again with fierce beak and talons the vulture ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... a printed wedding certificate, done in blue and gold with a colored picture of two clasped hands under a white dove with a gold ring in its beak. Beneath was an idealized boat with silken sails bearing two people down a rose-lined river of life; and the whole was bordered with orange blossoms. It was one of those old-fashioned affairs that country ministers used to give their parishioners in the years ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... sides: but Brutus, seeing into their designs, by the swiftness of his ship extricated himself with such address as to get clear, though only by a moment. From the velocity of their motion they struck against each other with such violence that they were both excessively injured by the shock; the beak, indeed, of one of them being broken off, the whole ship was ready to founder, which circumstance being observed, the ships of Brutus's fleet, which were nearest that station, attack them when in this disorder and sink ...
— "De Bello Gallico" and Other Commentaries • Caius Julius Caesar
... more, And, in the sweep of his Plutonian wings, Dashed to the earth the bust of Pallas fair. The haughty brow lay humbled in the dust, O'ershadowed by the terror-woven wings Of that wild Raven, as by some dark pall. Lift up poor Pallas! bathe her fainting brow With drops of dewy chrism! take the beak Of the false Raven from her sinking soul! Oh, let the Faith Dove nestle in her heart, Her haughty reason low at Jesu's feet, While humble as a child she cons the lore: ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the day was gone, and the night so near, that in the shadows of the tree all was dusky and dim. But there was still light enough to discover that in a niche of the tree sat a huge horned owl, with green spectacles on his beak, and a book in one foot. He took no heed of the intruders, but kept muttering to himself. And what do you think the owl was saying? I will tell you. He was talking about the book that he held upside down in ...
— Cross Purposes and The Shadows • George MacDonald
... went downstairs, he rested his beak on the steps, lifted his right foot and then his left one; but his mistress feared that such feats would give him vertigo. He became ill and was unable to eat. There was a small growth under his tongue like those chickens are sometimes afflicted with. Felicite pulled ...
— Three short works - The Dance of Death, The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller, A Simple Soul. • Gustave Flaubert
... motion of the pulse resembles the hasty pecking of the beak of a bird, there is a defect of spirits in ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... a larger stock of game, can boast of eight or at the most ten couples. They are, as is well known, the largest and most powerful of all the birds of prey inhabiting Europe, measuring from eight to eight and a half feet in the span, and possessing terrible strength of beak, talons and wings. A full-grown golden eagle can easily carry off a young chamois, a full-grown roe or a sheep, none of them weighing less than thirty pounds; and well-attested cases have occurred of young children being thus abstracted. In the fall of 1873 a boy nearly eight years of age ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... tried to ram the little spitz-pup of the navy, but her huge iron beak rode up over the slippery deck of the enemy, and when the big vessel looked over her sides to see its wreck, she discovered that the Monitor was right side up and ready ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... the house to its former position. In the autumn of 1826, six months after he had paid his creditors, he died of a broken heart. The Valentins had on their arms: an eagle of gold in a field of sable, crowned with silver, beak and talons with gules, with this device: "The soul has not perished." ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... life must be made blindly, one does not wonder that primitive men settled dark questions by studying the stars, by interpreting the flight of birds, the whimsical zigzags of the lightning bolt, or the turning of the beak of a fowl this way or that in picking corn. The human mind bewildered is ever looking for crevices in the great mystery that inwraps the visible universe, and ever hoping that some struggling beam from beyond may point ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... out. Mahomet came to the mountain. I liked his face less than ever. It wore an angry scowl now; his dark eyes glittered balefully under the close-knit eyebrows, his lips were drawn down, and the curved nose was like the aggressive beak of ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... vain, and they were greatly distressed as to what they would do for food if they had no harvest to look forward to, when suddenly they saw, perched on a little wayside cross, a tiny robin redbreast holding in its beak an ear of wheat! The monks joyfully took the grain, and, sowing it, reaped an abundant harvest! Accounts vary somewhat in the details of this story. Some say that the bird led the monks to a store of grain, and others question the fact that the bird was a ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... and would not even see that the Banksiae were nodding to her; and as for her old friend the blackbird, how vulgar he looked, bobbing up and down hunting worms and woodlice! could anything be more outrageously vulgar than that staring yellow beak of his? She twisted herself round not to see him, and felt quite annoyed that he went on and sang just the same, unconscious of, or ...
— Bimbi • Louise de la Ramee
... Robert Adams, a man in his faculty of excellent skill, omitted nothing in the description, which either his arte could demonstrate, or any mans iudgement thinke woorthy the memory. After an exquisite suruey of the whole frame he found the length from the beak-head to the sterne (whereupon was erected a lanterne) to containe 165 foote. The breadth in the second close decke whereof she had three, this being the place where there was most extension of bredth, was 46 feet and ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of - The English Nation, Vol. 11 • Richard Hakluyt
... her face her eyes would suffer. She may pick berries on the hills, but may not come near the river or sea for a whole year. Were she to eat fresh salmon she would lose her senses, or her mouth would be changed into a long beak.[119] ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... Which one, he thought, might safely eat; For there another dove he saw.— He felt the snare around him draw! This wheat was but a treacherous bait To lure poor pigeons to their fate. The snare had been so long in use, With beak and wings he struggled loose: Some feathers perish'd while it stuck; But, what was worst in point of luck, A hawk, the cruellest of foes, Perceived him clearly as he rose, Off dragging, like a runaway, A piece of string. The bird of prey Had bound him, in a moment more, Much faster than ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... looking very frail. I could not help a glance round, which showed me what a little shrine he had made of the box he was lying in. The stars and stripes were triced up above and around a picture of Washington, and he had painted a majestic eagle, with lightnings blazing from his beak and his foot just clasping the whole globe, which his wings overshadowed. The dear old boy saw my glance, and said, with a sad smile, 'Here, you see, I have a country!' And then he pointed to the foot of his bed, where I had not seen before a great map of the United States, as he had drawn ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... poor and unknown artizan. Let it be enough for us to know that he was above the medium height, robust, with sandy hair, a face elongated, flushed and freckled, vivid light gray eyes, the nose shaped like the beak of an eagle, and that he always was dressed like a monk. (Bernaldez, Oviedo, Las Casas, and the author of the Libretto, all eye-witnesses.)—H. Harrisse's "Columbus, and the Bank of ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... with us, was very anxious to keep a young cormorant which he had picked up. He took it under his arm, intending to carry off his prize; but the mother bird attacked him so furiously with its long beak, that it nearly put out one of his eyes, and succeeded in severely biting his lip. On this, Nat very naturally let go the youngster, which scuttled off, determined not to be caught again, and, taking to the water, ...
— A Yacht Voyage Round England • W.H.G. Kingston
... startled they were, the three of them, at the unexpected sound of a kind of throaty chuckle near by, and turned in affright to see a large bird regarding them from the shadow of the rocks—a sea bird with rounded wings, light-coloured plumage, and curiously staring eyes above a yellow beak. When it saw it was observed it vanished ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... Coon thought that he would drive Solomon out of his snug house and live in it himself. But he soon changed Solomon Owl—so Fatty discovered—had sharp, strong claws and a sharp, strong beak as well, which curled over his face in a ...
— The Tale of Solomon Owl • Arthur Scott Bailey
... current and ripple are dancing in light. We have roused the night raven, I heard him croak, As we plashed along beneath the oak That flings its broad branches so far and so wide, Their shadows are dancing in midst of the tide. "Who wakens my nestlings," the raven he said, "My beak shall ere morn in his blood be red. For a blue swoln corpse is a dainty meal. And I'll have my share with the pike and ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... knelt down and carefully smoothed the feathers of the great pigeon, thrusting a little cotton-wool into its beak to soak up any moisture that might escape and ...
— Nat the Naturalist - A Boy's Adventures in the Eastern Seas • G. Manville Fenn
... reserving not a morsel for herself. All their gambols and pranks and wild ways she bears with untiring patience. They hop up by twos and threes on her back. They peck at her bill. One saucy little imp actually jumped up and caught hold of the little red lappet above her beak, and, hanging to it, swung back and forth half a dozen times; and she was evidently only amused, and reckoned it ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... least, apparently resting on their travels, for they were all standing motionless, with necks drawn in, as if dozing. They were very stately, handsome birds, clear gray in color, with a black collar on the neck, and red beak and legs. My approach did not disturb them until I was within twenty yards of the nearest—for they were scattered over an acre of ground; then they rose with a loud, rustling noise of wings, only to settle again at a short ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... was only a few yards away. He came up eagerly, a slim, dark man with keen gray eyes and a nose like a hawk's beak. ...
— On Land And Sea At The Dardanelles • Thomas Charles Bridges
... any one would have noticed him in a crowd as an unusual type. Instead of being fair, he was as dark as a Moor; instead of turning up, his immensely long and melancholy nose curved downwards over his thin lips like a vulture's beak as if trying to peck at his chin. His eyes were shadowy and uncertain under his prominent forehead and bushy eyebrows. His beard was a mere black wisp, and the points of his scant moustaches were waxed and stood up stiffly. He was the taller of the two, but his hat hung lower ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... loophole in the awning, in evident terror lest something they ought to see should slip by them. Escaping from the jam, we made our way to the bow, carrying stools, umbrellas, and books, and there, on the very beak of all things, we had a fine view. Duly and dutifully we admired Bingen, Cob-lentz, Ehrenbreitstein, Bonn, Drachenfels, and all the other celebrities, and read Childe Harold on the Rhine. ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... wooer; and the tall, thin, grim old maid, standing stiff, as sentinel, at the bedroom door, and gimleting both her charges alternately with steel-gray orbs; she seemed like an owl, all eyes and beak. ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... I couldn't do without my little Mally." And then my little bird-like beak would rise proudly ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... having exhausted its malignancy without producing any particular effect, ended by gently harmonizing with the captain's sandy hair, reddish beard, and tanned skin. His mouth was like a badly made buttonhole, which gaped a little when he smiled. He had a nose like a parrot's beak, and his eyes were blue, kindly, and wise in their straightforwardness. When he would render his costume absolutely de rigueur, he wore a leathern jacket with manifold pockets, from one to another of which trailed a gold watch-chain with ...
— A Christmas Accident and Other Stories • Annie Eliot Trumbull
... they will never swallow till it has been previously slain. One of them has espied a cockroach in a corner, and in darting towards the prey a scorpion crosses its path. The venomous reptile hugs the belligerent beak in the hope of conveying to it some of its deadly sting; but the tip of Coco's horny appendage is a long way from his tender points, and Scorpio must travel many an inch before he can make the desired impression. Meanwhile the stork has teased Scorpio's life out, and ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... and when Pussy was absent, the pigeon, in return for the protection afforded her against the rats, constituted herself the defender of the kittens—and on any person approaching nearer than she liked, she would fly out and attack them with beak and wings, in the hope of driving them away from her young charges. Frequently, too, after this, when neither the kittens nor her own brood required her care, and the cat went out about the garden or fields, ...
— Stories of Animal Sagacity • W.H.G. Kingston
... temples, beneath his opera hat. His sanguine complexion, however, had all the freshness ef youth, and his eyes sparkled merrily, as though amused at the spectacle of his nose, which was immense, curved, and polished, like an eagle's beak. He wore perfectly-fitting kid gloves, and the collar of his fur wrapper, falling a little open, showed that he was ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... very different structure from that which is found in the adult frog: it is fringed by a pair of broad fleshy lips armed with rows of tiny horny teeth—a curious place for teeth; the mouth itself is furnished with a pair of teeth—also horny—resembling the beak of a parrot. ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... the "Condor," a perfectly hideous bird as large as a cow and as fierce as a tiger. If ever I dared go down that street and disobey my mother, the Condor would "swoop" down over the roofs, snatch me up in his long yellow beak with the blood of the last boy on it, and with thunder and lightning would carry me off far over the clouds and drop me ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... to the window every morning at breakfast-time for a piece of bread-and-butter, and if the window was closed he would rap impatiently upon it with his beak. He roosted in the orchard just across the road on the trunk of an ancient leaning apple-tree. One night Bell heard a terrible fluttering, and looking out saw a fox making off with the peacock; he shouted and the fox dropped the peacock and bolted. ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... and the hands, and the feet; but of all the features, or other appliances of the human frame, the mouth and the nose have the greatest influence in producing an impression of gentility. This was peculiarly the case with the stranger, whose beak, like that of an ancient galley, gave the promise of a stately movement, and whose beautiful teeth and winning smile, often relieved the expression of a countenance that was not unfrequently stern. As he ceased speaking, Dutton ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... big, ungainly, beak-nosed boy, whose sleeves were much too short, and trousers-legs likewise, to hide Nature's abundant gift to him in the matter of bone and knuckle. He was freckled and wore a grin that was ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... succeeded in capturing, in a dark alder-o'ershaded pool, a monstrous individual, nearly three feet in length, and proportionally bulky, with a snout bent over the lower jaw at its symphysis, like the beak of a hawk, and as deeply tinged (though with more of brown in its complexion) as the blackest coal-fish I ever saw. It must have been a bull-trout, a visitor from the neighbouring river; but we all concluded ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... assail the insurgent mentalities of the youth and morning vigour of the inexpressible human soul, when, flushed with AEolian light, and, as it were, beaded with those lustrous dews which the eternal Aurora lets fall from her melodious lip; if it escape living from the beak of the vulture (no fable here!), then, indeed, it may aspire ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... thine eye. Below the glass of that river, the pike darts on his prey; the circle in the wave, the soft plash amongst the reeds, are but signs of Destroyer and Victim. In the ivy round the oak by the margin, the owl hungers for the night, which shall give its beak and its talons living food for its young; and the spray of the willow trembles with the wing of the redbreast, whose bright eye sees the worm on the sod. Canst thou count too, O Man! all the cares, all the sins, that those noiseless rooftops conceal? With every curl of that smoke ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... cuttle-fish and squids, some of them of as great bulk as himself. These cuttle-fish's tentacle discs are as big as soup-plates, and surrounded by hooks as large and sharp as tiger claws; while their mouths are armed with a parrot-like beak capable of rending anything held to them by the tentacles. These disc hooks are often found in ambergris, an excretion of the sperm whale. The sperm whale spouts diagonally, other whales upwards. So-called porpoise leather is made of the skin of the white ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... he began to struggle, whereupon all the other birds took fright and flew away. But presently his mate came back and hovered over him, then alighted on the net, unobserved by the fowler, and fell to picking and pulling at the mesh in which the male bird's foot was entangled with her beak, till she released him and they flew away together. Then the fowler came up and mended his net and seated himself afar off. After awhile, the birds came back and the female pigeon was caught in the net, whereupon all the other ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume II • Anonymous
... now come to the dining-room, at the entrance to which sat a factor, receiving accounts, and, what gave me cause for astonishment, rods and axes were fixed to the door-posts, superimposed, as it were, upon the bronze beak of a ship, ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... base; on another a bunch of lilies of the valley; and another showed a little bough of apple blossoms. On the remaining three the subjects were strangely unusual,—a palm and tent, with a patch of sky; a bird with outstretched wings, soaring upward with open beak, as if singing in its flight; a cherub head with a soft ...
— A Flock of Girls and Boys • Nora Perry
... complexion, either; he had twinkling gray eyes and a pronounced Roman nose, the numerous freckles upon which were deepened by his funereal dress-coat and trousers. He reminded me of Alfred de Musset's blackbird, which, with its yellow beak and sombre plumage, looked like an undertaker eating ...
— Miss Mehetabel's Son • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... fair wind, and, after a long navigation, the first place we touched at was a desert island, where we found an egg of a roc, equal in size to that I formerly mentioned. There was a young roc in it, just ready to be hatched, and its beak had begun to break the egg. The merchants who landed with me broke the egg with hatchets, and made a hole in it, pulled out the young roc, piecemeal, and roasted it. I had in vain entreated them not to meddle with ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... mother-of-pearl. Here we found sundry tents of the Tagaygt-Huwaytt, the half Fellahs that own and spoil the once goodly land; the dogs barked at us, but the men never thought of offering us hospitality. We had an admirable view of the Tihmah Mountains—Zahd, with its "nick;" the parrot-beak of Jebel el-Sht; the three perpendicular Pinnacles and flying Buttresses of Jebel 'Urnub; the isolated lump of Jebel Fs; the single cupola of Jebel Harb; the huge block of Dibbagh, with its tall truncated tower; the little Umm Jedayl, here looking like a pyramid; and the four mighty ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... with these thoughts, two vivid little paroquets alighted near him, to quarrel noisily, then make up and kiss each other like any pair of lovers. It was disgusting. A toucan peered at him with an appearance of exaggerated curiosity, due to its huge, grotesquely proportioned beak. Now and then came the harsh notes of parrots as they fluttered high above the tree- tops. Meanwhile the young man's ears became attuned to the jungle noises, his eyes observant of the many kinds of life ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... flapping away to the middle of the marsh. Now, an hour afterward, he is still standing there, towering above the tall grass. Once when I turned that way I saw, as I thought, a stake, and then something moved upon it,—a bird of some kind. And what an enormous beak! I raised my field-glass. It was the heron. His body was the post, and his head was the bird. Meanwhile, the sandpiper has stolen away, I know not when or where. He must have omitted the tweet, tweet, with which ordinarily he signalizes his flight. He is the first ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... places where the eyes had been; for the eyes themselves were quite gone, and the sockets cleaned out to the very bottom. Now, I reasoned that no quadruped could do this. The holes were too small even for a jackal to get his slender snout into. The work must have been done by the beak of a bird; and what sort of bird. Why, ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... I have dream'd. Hear, and expound my dream. My geese are twenty, which within my walls I feed with sodden wheat; they serve to amuse Sometimes my sorrow. From the mountains came An eagle, huge, hook-beak'd, brake all their necks, 670 And slew them; scatter'd on the palace-floor They lay, and he soar'd swift into the skies. Dream only as it was, I wept aloud, Till all my maidens, gather'd by my voice, Arriving, found me weeping still, and still Complaining, that the eagle ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... Wardens perceived them, they shouted and threw showers of arrows and darts at them, but the hawks evaded all of these until the missiles were spent, and then seized each an apple in his talons. But Brian seized two, for he took one in his beak as well. Then they flew as swiftly as they might to the shore where they had left their boat. Now the King of that garden had three fair daughters, to whom the apples and the garden were very dear, and he transformed ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... the lair; the horror of his mother's paw that smote him down whenever he approached the mouth of the cave; and, later on, the fear of the steep bank, learned by a terrible fall; the fear of the yielding water, learned by attempting to walk upon it; and the fear of the ptarmigan's beak and the weasel's teeth, learned by ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... then twitter with congratulatory laughter at his tumble. Let us get beneath them quietly. We can see them now, black against the brightening eastern sky. See that fellow give his neighbour a push with his beak, and hear the assaulted one scream out just like Mr. Thomas Sawyer in Sunday-school, whose special chum stuck a pin into him for the pleasure of hearing ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... them to their Kennel, and wash their Feet with Beer and Butter, or some such thing, and pick and search their Cleys, for Thorns, Stubs, or the like: If it is in Winter, let a Fire be made, and let them beak and stretch themselves for an hour or so at the fire, and suffer them to lick, pick, and trim themselves; hereby to prevent the Diseases incident to them, upon sudden Cooling, as ...
— The School of Recreation (1696 edition) • Robert Howlett
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