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More "Boa" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... needed only one and a half hours to run down stream to the Muara Laong, a Malay kampong at the mouth of the river Laong, which we intended to ascend by boats to the kampong Batu Boa, where the overland journey was to begin. As soon as we arrived in the afternoon the kapala was sent for to help in procuring a sufficient number of prahus for the next day. I brought twenty-nine coolies from Puruk Tjahu to serve as paddlers. The kapala ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... the unfortunate young man to vex people with a lighter satire, yet still characterized by somewhat of snake-like virulence. One day he encountered an ambitious statesman, and gravely inquired after the welfare of his boa constrictor; for of that species, Roderick affirmed, this gentleman's serpent must needs be, since its appetite was enormous enough to devour the whole country and constitution. At another time, he stopped a close-fisted old fellow, of great wealth, but who skulked about the city in the guise ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... returns from the Boa Constrictor are down to-day. Two hundred and seventeen dollars to the ton. I've got all the stuff I can carry, so I don't mind letting you in. The papers will have it to-morrow, though they're doing their best to keep ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... understood Italian, besides being clearly in the servants' eyes the one of the party marked down by age and appearance to pay the bills; and to her, while Mrs. Fisher put the final touches to her toilette, for she was preparing, by means of putting on a hat and veil and feather boa and gloves, to go for her first stroll in the lower garden—positively her first since her arrival—she explained that unless she was given money to pay the last week's bills the shops of Castagneto would refuse credit for the current week's food. Not ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... Bishop Rock United Kingdom Bismarck Archipelago Papua New Guinea Bismarck Sea Pacific Ocean Bissau [US Embassy] Guinea-Bissau Bjornoya (Bear Island) Svalbard Black Rock Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas) Black Sea Atlantic Ocean Boa Vista Cape Verde Bogota [US Embassy] Colombia Bombay [US Consulate General] India Bonaire Netherlands Antilles Bonifacio, Strait of Atlantic Ocean Bonin Islands Japan Bonn [US Embassy] Germany Bophuthatswana South Africa Bora-Bora French Polynesia Bordeaux [US Consulate General] ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... brown velvet gown and an ostrich-feather boa in delicate shades of cream and brown, and a cavalier hat with sweeping white plumes. Her hair was the colour of autumn leaves, or a squirrel's back in the sunshine, and she had grey eyes and piquant, irregular features, ears like shells, and a delicate, softly-tinted skin ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... upon him caused him to look up. Mrs. Devereux, grey and tall, boa'd, gloved, umbrella'd, stood regarding him and his companion from the bank. Instinct prompted him immediately to screen Sanchia by dragging her into the party. He held up the net and plunged. "First prize," he cried ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... while he dissected his beefsteak with the seriousness of a scientific observer. "A man's philosophy is regulated by his stomach. No amount of stoicism can reconcile a man to dyspepsia. If our nationality were not by nature endowed with the digestion of a boa-constrictor, I should seriously consider the propriety ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... the world—" he began. His broken voice was very natural, she thought, but there was amazement in his utterance. He noticed there was little color in her face; the deep boa of fur nestling about her ...
— The Daughter of a Magnate • Frank H. Spearman
... nature droops and is grateful at the return of the rains. The general dank heat stimulates vegetable growth in every scale from mildew to mahogany trees, and multiplies the members of the animal kingdom, be they mosquitoes, elephants or boa constrictors. There would be abundant food but for the superabundant creatures that struggle for it and prey upon one another. For mankind life is at once easy and hard. Food of a sort may often be had for the plucking, and raiment is needless; but aside from the ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... between man and snake known to me is the case of Tyrrell, the Zoo snake keeper, and his "laidly worms." But, then, the friendship is mostly on Tyrrell's side, and, moreover, Tyrrell is rather more than human, as anyone will admit who sees him hang boa constrictors round his neck. Of course one often hears of boys making pets of common English snakes, but a boy is not a human creature at all; he ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... encroachments of Russia in Central Asia had brought her upon the borders of the important khanates of Khiva and Khokand, and, like some huge boa-constrictor, she prepared to swallow them. In 1852 the inevitable military expedition was followed by the customary permanent post. Another row of forts was planted on the Lower Yaxartes, and in 1854 far to the eastward, ...
— Afghanistan and the Anglo-Russian Dispute • Theo. F. Rodenbough
... fold; And though my struggling bosom toil, To heave the monster from its hold— It will not from its victim part. By day or night, in down or dell, Where'er I roam, still, still my heart Is pressed by that sad serpent spell. Aye, as the strangling boa clings Around his prey with fatal grasp, And as he feels each struggle, wrings His victim with a closer clasp; Nor yet till every pulse is dumb, And every fluttering spasm o'er, Releases, what, in death o'ercome, Can strive or struggle now no more; So is my wrestling spirit wrung, ...
— Poems • Sam G. Goodrich
... rose and adjusted her boa. "Swot," she said, "you are the most ungrateful boy I ever knew, and I'm not merely not going to read any more to-day, but I have a good mind not to come to-morrow, ...
— Wanted—A Match Maker • Paul Leicester Ford
... of the boa-constrictor in the Zoo were gems of humanity in comparison with those of the negroid-Egyptian's as he turned to obey, and then stopped mulishly until a third little reminder chipped splinters from the marble at his heel, whereupon he stooped and ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... engine are at present taking their periodical doze like a great boa constrictor. The engineer—a native of Philadelphia—has gone home for the holidays, and will not return till October or November, when the cane harvest begins and his indispensable services will be required. He has unscrewed all the brass fittings, taken out ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... means—what the earliest romances, the Norse myths, and the superstitions of the peasantry in many parts of England to this day assert them to have been—"mighty worms," huge snakes? All will agree that the Python, the representative in the old world of the Boa-constrictor of the new, lingered in the Homeric age, if not later, both in Greece and in Italy. It existed on the opposite coast of Africa (where it is now extinct) in the time of Regulus; we believe, from the traditions of all nations, that it existed to a far later date ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... together. But those of them who wear skirts, generally have delicate white hands, flowing curls, flashing black eyes, and the gift of oratory—and a desire to exhibit them all; while those in pantaloons have their hair combed smoothly back, as if preparing to be swallowed by a boa-constrictor, wear white cravats, talk softly, and show a good deal of the whites of their eyes, from a chronic habit of looking up towards the moon and stars. As a general thing, these latter are of no practical use in the world, and make as good a tail to the kite of the 'strong-minded ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... fur boa impatiently. How complicated the whole thing was getting! What difference did it make to Dorothy for what the five dollars had been expended? It was ...
— Dorothy Dale's Queer Holidays • Margaret Penrose
... be paid under various circumstances. Thus, they are uniformly required after dining at a friend's house, or after a ball, picnic, or any other party. These visits should be short, a stay of from fifteen to twenty minutes being quite sufficient. A lady paying a visit may remove her boa or neckerchief; but neither her shawl ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... a very unusual appearance this evening. Certainly she had laid out the two-pound-ten to advantage. She was in a perfectly decent dark dress with a red stripe in it; she had a large hat and some species of boa round her neck; she even carried a cheap umbrella with a sham silver band and a small hand-bag with one pocket-handkerchief inside it. And to her own mind, no doubt, she was a perfect picture of the ideal penitent—very respectable and even prosperous looking, and yet with a ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... breed, the captains of the liners, and he no more resembled them than did he resemble the bluff-faced, gruff-voiced skippers I had read about in books. By his side stood a woman, of whom little was to be seen and who made a warm and gorgeous blob of colour in the huge muff and boa of red fox in ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... placed on the garden seat with a cushion at her back, she looked away at the back of the houses in the next street. She was dressed in black, it was true, but even Darnell could see that her gown was old and shabby, that the fur trimming of her cape and the fur boa which was twisted about her neck were dingy and disconsolate, and had all the melancholy air which fur wears when it is seen in a second-hand clothes-shop in a back street. And her gloves—they were black kid, wrinkled with much wear, faded to a bluish hue at the ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... 28. The Boa Bidarra, or Rhamnus Jujuba of Linnaeus. This is a round yellow fruit, about the size of a gooseberry; its flavour is like that of an apple, but it has the astringency ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... bear—scandalised as it may be by its name—might even be deemed a creature of moderate appetite in comparison: with their human reason in addition, these people, could they always command the means, would doubtless outrival a glutton and a boa-constrictor together.' ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... this large family; some, like the rattlesnake, cannot climb or swim, but crawl along the ground, the terror of unwary travellers who may tread upon them in the dim forest-paths; others are Water-snakes; some, like the Boa and Python, are dreaded, although not venomous, because, of their enormous strength, and power of crushing their victims in their close embrace; others, like the Cobra, for their deadly bite; while ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... comes his love of space, which makes him less regard the rounding and form of objects themselves, than their relations of light and shade and distance. Therefore Rubens and Michael Angelo made the fiery serpents huge boa constrictors, and knotted the sufferers together with them. Tintoret does not like to be so bound; so he makes the serpents little flying and fluttering monsters like lampreys with wings; and the children of Israel, ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... rather nice," he said stiffly, and then went on: "We shall have to go down now to this fearful lunch, but you had better take your sable boa with you. The great hall is so enormous and all of stone, it may be cold. I will get it for you," and he went back and found it lying by her coat on the chair, and brought it, and wrapped it round her casually, as if she had been a stone, and then held the ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... (as ghosts oft use) To be 'dearheaven'd!' and 'oh'd!' But briskly said: "Good-evenin'; what's the news? Consumption? After boa'd? ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... the spot and cried out, "Fly all of you to the Cave! fly for your lives!" for I saw it was a huge snake, or boa, that would make a meal of one of us, if we did not get ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson Told in Words of One Syllable • Mary Godolphin
... may, by their noose-gins and baited fall-traps, keep down the smaller sort of vermin; but what, except perhaps some such Universal Association, can protect us against whole meat-devouring and man-devouring hosts of Boa-constrictors. If, therefore, the more sequestered Thinker have wondered, in his privacy, from what hand that perhaps not ill-written Program in the Public Journals, with its high Prize-Questions and so liberal Prizes, could have proceeded,—let him now cease such wonder; and, ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... have the charge of a wife, what are you going to say about it? We hope that this rapid review of the question does not make you tremble, that you are not one of those men whose nervous fluid congeals at the sight of a precipice or a boa constrictor! Well! my friend, he who owns soil has war and toil. The men who want your gold are more numerous than ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... banyan trees. In one part of the garden, winding paths led through a tangled tropical growth so dense and wild that one felt as if in the midst of an African jungle where a tiger might spring forth or a boa constrictor drop ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... Mr. Chalk, sitting open-mouthed, was regarding him with the fascinated gaze of a rabbit before a boa-constrictor. Captain Bowers was listening with an appearance of interest which in more favourable circumstances ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... did not snow, though the wind blew from the storm quarter, and Applehead sniffed it and made predictions, and Compadre went with his remnant of tail ruffed like a feather boa. Immediately after supper Luck attached his new hose to the tank faucet and developed the corral scenes which he had taken, with the thin youth taking his first lesson in the dark room. The thin ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... (concelhos, singular-concelho); Boa Vista, Brava, Fogo, Maio, Paul, Praia, Porto Novo, Ribeira Grande, Sal, Santa Catarina, Santa Cruz, Sao Nicolau, Sao Vicente, Tarrafal note: there may be a new administrative structure of 16 districts (Boa Vista, Brava, Maio, Mosteiros, ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... he bought fum 'im, he'd lack ter buy 'im back ag'in. Chloe 'mence' ter pick up a little w'en ole mis' tol' her 'bout dis letter. Howsomeber, bimeby Mars' Dugal' got a' answer fum de spekilater, who said he wuz monst'us sorry, but Jeff had fell ove'boa'd er jumped off'n de steamboat on de way ter Wim'l'ton, en got drownded, en co'se he could n' sell 'im back, much ez he'd lack ter 'bleedge ...
— The Conjure Woman • Charles W. Chesnutt
... River, Gold Coast Drying Cacao Beans, Gold Coast Shooting Cacao from the Road to the Beach, Accra Rolling Cacao, Gold Coast Rolling Cacao, Gold Coast Carrying Cacao to the Railway Station, Gold Coast Wagon Loads of Cacao being taken from Depot to the Beach, Accra The Buildings of the Boa Entrada Cacao Estate, San Thome Drying Cacao, San Thome Barrel Rolling, Gold Coast Bagging Cacao, Gold Coast Surf Boats by the Side of the Ocean Liner, Accra Bagging Cacao Beans for Shipment, Trinidad Transferring Bags ...
— Cocoa and Chocolate - Their History from Plantation to Consumer • Arthur W. Knapp
... effort to save his life, whereas if a rattlesnake has harmed him he usually cures himself. Besides these there were the omnipresent garter snakes, and the grey or silver coach-whip, both harmless. The bull snake is said to grow to an enormous size, and is a kind of North American python or boa. About five miles from our camp was an old hut, which was occupied by a sheep-herder whom I knew. One night he heard a noise, and looking out of his bunk saw by the dim light of the fire an enormous snake ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... suppose that the door of the chateau will be opened for me at this hour; and as for spending the night upon this branch, I possibly might not object to do so, but I declare it is impossible for any other animal than a boa-constrictor to ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... hood bordered with dog-skin. The outer hood is often quite close under the chin, and extends in a very well-fitting way over the shoulders. To a complete dress there also belong a skin neckerchief or boa, and a neck covering of multiple reindeer-skins, or of different kinds of skins sewn together in chess-board-like squares. In summer and far into the autumn the men go bareheaded, although they clip the hair on the crown of the head ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... pleasure. The gastronome is conscious of an expenditure of vital power, an expenditure so vast that the brain is atrophied (as it were), that a second brain, located in the diaphragm, may come into play, and the suspension of all the faculties is in itself a kind of intoxication. A boa constrictor gorged with an ox is so stupid with excess that the creature is easily killed. What man, on the wrong side of forty, is rash enough to work after dinner? And remark in the same connection, that all great men have been moderate eaters. The exhilarating effect of the wing of a chicken ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... began to beat heavily. What if her suspicions were but the advance guard of a painful truth! What if this keen analyst of other men's ideas—she dared not finish the thought. With a sluggish movement the music uncoiled itself like a huge boa about to engulf a tiny rabbit. The simile forced itself against her volition; all this monstrous preparation for a—rabbit! In a concert-hall the poetic idea of the tone-poem was petty. And the churning ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... self-command. His face was only a bit paler, a bit tighter than usual; he was only a trifle slower and more fastidious in his speech. It was midnight when he left Clifford peacefully slumbering in somebody's arm-chair, with a long suede glove dangling in his hand and a plumy boa twisted about his neck to protect his throat from drafts. He walked through the hall and down the stairs, and found himself on the sidewalk in a quarter he did not know. Mechanically he looked up at the name of the ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... robe, which nevertheless permits his slender, manly legs to come out and be visible. He boasts a shovel hat, adorned with a gigantic sprig of shamrock: he sits upon the chest in which, if historical tradition truly speaks, the great boa constrictor of Killarney was shut up and sunk into the waters of the lake. Around his neck is a string of Irish potatoes—in ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... sho' wuz mournful lookin' things, made out of pine boa'ds an' painted wid lampblack; dey wuz black as de night. Dey wuz big at de head an' little at de foot, sort a lak airplanes is. De inside wuz lined wid white clawf, what dey ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume IV, Georgia Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... pass before we could descend and travel over the dry ground; and even then, in what direction should we go? Very probably we should fall into the hands of savages, who would keep us in slavery; at all events, we should have to encounter several wild beasts and venomous serpents,—the mighty boa, or anaconda, or the still more terrible bush-master, or labarri, so dreaded ...
— The Wanderers - Adventures in the Wilds of Trinidad and Orinoco • W.H.G. Kingston
... in the midst of an affecting appeal in Court on a slander case delivered himself of the following flight of genius. "Slander, gentlemen, like a boa constrictor of gigantic size and immeasurable proportions, wraps the coil of its unwieldy body about its unfortunate victim, and, heedless of the shrieks of agony that come from the utmost depths of its victim's soul, loud ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... displeased him. He was bored—he wanted to be off-and off he went. Vaudemont felt that the time was come for him to depart, too; Robert Beaufort—who felt in his society the painful fascination of the bird with the boa, who hated to see him there, and dreaded to see him depart, who had not yet extracted all the confirmation of his persuasions that he required, for Vaudemont easily enough parried the artless questions of Camilla—pressed him to stay with so eager a hospitality, and made Camilla herself ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... hanging down over the backs of the sleigh and cutters—they look very pretty, like the end of mamma's boa." ...
— In The Forest • Catharine Parr Traill
... master, when attacked by the red men of the woods. It was not infrequent to find the negro as a sentinel at the meeting-house door; or serving as a barricade for the master's mansion. The Indian was more of a terror to him than the boa-constrictor; though slaves, they knew that if captured by the Indians their fate would be the same as that of the white man; consequently they fought with a desperation equal to that of the whites, ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... of the various serpent species are tolerant, patient and peaceful to the last degree. You may place together in one cage twenty big Texas rattlers, or twenty ugly cottonmouth moccasins from the Carolinas, a hundred garter snakes, twenty boa constrictors, or six big pythons, and if the various species are kept separate there will be no fighting. You may stir them up to any reasonable extent, and make them keen to strike you, but they do not attack ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... every house in Leith, and searched them with characteristic vigour and lack of ceremony, sometimes entering by the side door, and sometimes by the front, and caring very little whether the owners were at home or not. Mr. Humphrey Crewe discovered her in a boa-stall at Wedderburn,—as his place was called,—for it made little difference to Victoria that Mr. Crewe was a bachelor of marriageable age and millions. Full, as ever, of practical suggestions, Mr. Crewe proposed to telephone to Ripton and put an advertisement ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... of?" said Mattie to Bertie. "I'm proudest of my new red-top boots," said Bertie. "I'm proudest of my new black hat," said Clay. Mattie was proudest of her muff and boa. Little Bell was proudest of her ...
— The Nursery, May 1873, Vol. XIII. - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest People • Various
... others did not see, "sit down and I will tell you all about it,—how I was awakened by a groan, and saw standing in the middle of my tent, a huge fellow, with a long, white beard and white, agonized face; for you must know that my boa-constrictor was squeezing ...
— Billy Whiskers - The Autobiography of a Goat • Frances Trego Montgomery
... with an angry guttural sound, began to put forth its full strength. The arms encircled Landless with a slowly tightening iron band; the great dark shoulder came forward with the force of a battering-ram; the limbs twined like boa-constrictors around the limbs of the other. Locked together, the two reeled into a little fairy glade, where the short grass, pearled with dew, lay open to the moon. Here, borne backwards by the overwhelming force of his assailant, Landless ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... in a black bonnet and short black skirts, had let herself out on the opposite side, and had come round to assist somebody out on this. Was it a ghost, or was it a man? His cheeks were hollow and hectic, his eyes were glistening as with fever, his chest heaved. He had a fur boa wrapped round his neck, and his overcoat hung loosely on his tall, attenuated form, which seemed too weak to support itself, or to get down the fly steps ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... of the coach, and stretching forth my hand, turned the handle cautiously and slowly; I next disengaged my legs, and by a long continuous effort of creeping—which I had learned perfectly once, when practising to go as a boa constrictor to a fancy ball—I withdrew myself from the seat and reached the step, when I muttered something very like a thanksgiving to Providence for my rescue. With little difficulty I now climbed up beside the guard, whose ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... really do exist, and in most cases have no special function in the animal oeconomy, is admitted by the first authorities in comparative anatomy. The minute limbs hidden beneath the skin in many of the snake-like lizards, the anal hooks of the boa constrictor, the complete series of jointed finger-bones in the paddle of the Manatus and whale, are a few of the most familiar instances. In botany a similar class of facts has been long recognised. Abortive stamens, rudimentary floral envelopes ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... eyes were turned on her as she entered the restaurant—a radiant figure in white, with black hat and black chiffon boa, and a deep red rose in her bosom. The maitre d'hotel, in the pride of reflected glory, conducted her to a table near the window. Septimus trailed inconclusively behind. When he seated himself he stared at her silently in a ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... Colonel's slender bank account: a transaction which, to quote his own words as he gallantly drank her health in acknowledgment of the gift, "enabled him to provide for one of the loveliest of her sex—she who graces our boa'd—and to enrich her declining days not only with all the comforts, but with many of the luxuries she was ...
— Colonel Carter's Christmas and The Romance of an Old-Fashioned Gentleman • F. Hopkinson Smith
... To try, at length, if tower and battlement And bastioned wall be not less hard to win, Less tough to break down than the hearts within. First he, in impatience and in toil is The burning AZIM—oh! could he but see The impostor once alive within his grasp, Not the gaunt lion's hug nor boa's clasp Could match thy gripe of vengeance or keep pace With the fell ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... opened by a buxom maiden with rosy cheeks and a lenient smile, which alights on the youthful mistress. Eleanor bounds into the hall, and waves a feather boa joyfully over ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... the circulating library, and the box-office, whenever the announce bills came out for her annual night. There was Mrs Lenville, in a very limp bonnet and veil, decidedly in that way in which she would wish to be if she truly loved Mr Lenville; there was Miss Gazingi, with an imitation ermine boa tied in a loose knot round her neck, flogging Mr Crummles, junior, with both ends, in fun. Lastly, there was Mrs Grudden in a brown cloth pelisse and a beaver bonnet, who assisted Mrs Crummles in her domestic affairs, and took money at the doors, and dressed the ladies, and swept the house, ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... birds roosting for the night. Each tree was bound to the next by vines like tangled ropes, some drawn as taut as the halyards of a ship, and others, as thick as one's leg; they were twisted and wrapped around the branches, so that they looked like boa-constrictors hanging ready to drop upon one's shoulders. The moonlight gave to this forest of great trees a weird, fantastic look. I felt like a knight entering an enchanted wood. But nothing disturbed our silence except ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis
... threadbare black coat and a child-like smile. All the pride of the family seemed to be monopolized by his daughter Miriam, a girl whose very nose Heaven had fashioned scornful. Miriam had accompanied him out of contemptuous curiosity. She wore a stylish feather in her hat, and a boa round her throat, and earned thirty shillings a week, all told, as a school teacher. (Esther Ansell was in her class just now.) Probably her toilette had made old Hyams unpunctual. His arrival was the signal for the commencement ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... chattered in crowds above their heads, and made grimaces like the fiendish spirits of these solitudes; while hideous reptiles, engendered in the slimy depths of the pools, gathered round the footsteps of the wanderers. Here was seen the gigantic boa, coiling his unwieldy folds about the trees, so as hardly to be distinguished from their trunks, till he was ready to dart upon his prey; and alligators lay basking on the borders of the streams, or, gliding ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... first night at the Casino. He remembered the faded, white-rose face, with its peevish crumples that were not yet lines, and the false little smile that tried to draw attention away from them. He noticed that she was no longer shabby, but wore a smart new dress and hat, with a huge boa of ostrich feathers half covering her thin, bare neck. There was a glint of jewels about her as she moved. The man with the young, weak voice gazed at her admiringly, with a half-pitiful, half-comic air of pride in being seen ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... how its weight shook the banks at each stride, while stumps and tree-trunks on which it stepped were pressed out of sight in the ground. A general exodus of the other inhabitants from his line of march began; the moccasins slid into the water with a low splash, while the boa-constrictors and the tree-snakes moved off along the ground when they felt it tremble, and a number of night birds retreated into the denser woods with loud cries at being so rudely disturbed. The huge beast did not stop till ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... invention," that phrase! The bodily wants of a reptile are elastic. If an alligator or a boa-constrictor catches a dog he can swallow him whole and enjoy that one meal in unriotous bliss for weeks. Thereafter if he must put up with no more than a minnow or a mouse he can do that for weeks in unriotous patience. In a spring in one ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... his appearance. She was, above all things, a woman of the moment—fair, almost florid, a little thick-set, with tightly-laced, yet passable figure. Her eyes were blue, her hair light-colored. She wore magnificent furs, and, as she threw aside her boa, she disclosed a mass of jewelry around her neck and upon her bosom, almost barbaric in its ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... ugliest and most poisonous creature, and the strangest and unaccountablest, and the hardest to fight with, and the most difficult to run away from, that ever came out of the earth's inside. It had a tail like a boa-constrictor; its body was like I do not care what; and it had three separate heads, one of which was a lion's, the second a goat's, and the third an abominably great snake's. And a hot blast of fire came flaming out ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... to that; she didn't want to seem unappreciative. It was true she had a new set, warm and serviceable, but—well, a short-haired, dark-brown collarette hasn't the allure of a fluffy, snow-white boa. ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... of umbrellas and parasols, golf sticks, tennis racquets and all sorts of queer things, and was dressed in a most conspicuous and elaborate manner. She was represented as striding up and down a railway platform covered with diamonds, boa, flashy hat and fancy finery, while the English girl, in a close fitting ulster and an Alpine hat, leaned quietly upon her umbrella near a small "box," as they call a trunk, and a modest traveling bag. But that picture ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... beautiful sea anemone, half animal, half vegetable, with its colors as variegated as a rose garden. Seaweed and kelp wave to us as we pass, long-stemmed sea grasses moving by the action of the waves, like a feather boa worn by some sea nymph, twist and turn like a thing alive; tall, feathery plumes, as white as snow, or as green as emerald, toss to and fro, and make obeisance to old Neptune. Sea onions, with stems thirty feet long, and bulbous air-filled sacks, reach out their ...
— Byways Around San Francisco Bay • William E. Hutchinson
... Course it's an everlastin' outrage on me and the cheekiest thing ever I heard of, but what could I do? I was fixed a good deal like an English feller by the name of Gatenby that I used to know in South America. He woke up in the middle of the night and found a boa constrictor curled on the foot of his bed. Next day, when a crowd of us happened in, there was Gatenby, white as a sheet, starin' down at the snake, and it sound asleep. 'I didn't invite him,' he ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln
... luxuriant vegetation that nothing less than an army of men with axes could penetrate them. The land is one great, wild, untidy, luxuriant hot-house, "built by nature for herself." The puma, jaguar and wildcat are here at home, besides the anaconda and boa constrictor, which grow to enormous lengths. The Yaci Ret, or Island of the Moon, is the ideal haunt of the jaguar, and as we passed it a pair of those royal beasts were playing on the shore like two enormous cats. As they caught sight of us, one leapt into the mangrove swamp, out of sight, ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... issue to be looked for? Hangmen and Catchpoles may, by their noose-gins and baited fall-traps, keep-down the smaller sort of vermin; but what, except perhaps some such Universal Association, can protect us against whole meat-devouring and man-devouring hosts of Boa-constrictors? If, therefore, the more sequestered Thinker have wondered, in his privacy, from what hand that perhaps not ill-written Program in the Public Journals, with its high Prize-Questions and so liberal Prizes, could have proceeded,—let him now cease such ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... Villa—the magic word! The Great Man, the salient profile, the unconquerable warrior who, even at a distance, exerts the fascination of a reptile, a boa constrictor. ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela
... quickened his pace to keep step with hers. Miss Nugent with her chin sunk in a fur boa looked neither to the right nor the left, and turning briskly into the alley, turned the handle of Mr. Wilks's door and walked in, leaving ...
— At Sunwich Port, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... Bob now hurried to the window and looked out. In the moonlight they could distinctly see a huge reptile, either a python or a boa-constrictor, coiled up in the angle formed by the juncture of the airplane body and the broad base of the left wing. The creature was so long that its tail passed up over the rounded fuselage and out upon the other wing. Bob flashed his electric pocket lamp upon it, and by the yellow ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... was all-glorious, of course. She certainly looked like an old vulture, in a pelisse of gray velvet, with a chinchilla boa round her long, bare neck, and her big beak, with marabouts overshadowing it, of the same color. Monsieur de Talbrun —well! Monsieur de Talbrun was very bald, as bald as he could be. To make up for the want of hair on his head, he has plenty of it on his hands. ...
— Jacqueline, Complete • (Mme. Blanc) Th. Bentzon
... near Rio there are great snakes called the anaconda, a sort of boa-constrictor on a large scale. Once, while walking in the woods with some friends, we found a little Indian boy dead on the ground, one of these big snakes lying within a foot or so of him, also dead; the snake had a poisoned arrow in his brain, which evidently ...
— Sketches From My Life - By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha • Hobart Pasha
... ignorance, or under some false impression of being able to improve upon nature; but this is conclusive and unpardonable. Again, take the stem of the chief tree in Claude's Narcissus. It is a very faithful portrait of a large boa-constrictor, with a handsome tail; the kind of trunk which young ladies at fashionable boarding-schools represent with nosegays at the top of them, by way of ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... it up but perhaps is arrested by seeing an enormous boa constrictor twisting itself round the crushed body ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... Shame take that smoothness and that sleeke subjection! I am myself, as great in good as he is, As much a master of my Countries fortunes, And one to whom (since I am forc'd to speak it, Since mine own tongue must be my Advocate) This blinded State that plaies at boa-peep with us, This wanton State that's weary of hir lovers And cryes out 'Give me younger still and fresher'! Is bound and so far bound: I found hir naked, Floung out a dores and starvd, no friends to pitty hir, The marks of all hir miseries upon ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... gardens, the contents of which he has been often seen to contemplate with deep interest. This, to be sure, might proceed from a provident regard to health, for it is a well-known fact that he has frequently returned home in the evenings, distended like a Boa-Constrictor after a gorge; yet no person was ever able to come at the cause of his inflation. There were, to be sure, suspicions abroad, and it was mostly found that depredations in some neighboring orchard ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... a reference to the serpents of the genus Python, allied to the boa-constrictor. They attain enormous size in the forests, some specimens having been obtained over twenty-two feet long. Young ones are often kept by the natives in their houses to kill the rats; these snakes become tame ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XII, 1601-1604 • Edited by Blair and Robertson
... laughed. "I shouldn't call that rope. Cable, yes—frankly, when she came into the dining-room the other night I thought it was a feather-boa she had on." ...
— Mrs. Raffles - Being the Adventures of an Amateur Crackswoman • John Kendrick Bangs
... She has a dead white skin, green eyes, and most wonderful hair, hair the color of a well-polished copper samovar. She is an extremely thin woman who affects sheathe skirts and rather reminds me of a boa-constrictor. She always reeks of Apres londre and uses a lip-stick as freely before the world as an orchestra conductor uses a baton or a street-sweeper a broom. She is nervous and sharp-tongued and fearless and I thought, at first, that she was ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... the inexorable framework. He had always felt that the imagination, what is called, for want of a better term, the "creative faculty," was there, but it was lethargic; it sometimes roused itself to spurts and flashes during wakeful nights, but slept like a boa-constrictor that had swallowed a pig when he tried to invoke it. No doubt, as Gora had told him, his life had been too easy and agreeable; he made a good deal of money with no particular effort, he was a favorite with the cleverest men and women in New York, and he had no one to ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... else. In another moment he was seated on the window-seat entranced, dazed and blissfully content with his fate, docile as the rabbit in the presence of the boa constrictor. ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... (concelhos, singular - concelho); Boa Vista, Brava, Fogo, Maio, Paul, Praia, Porto Novo, Ribeira Grande, Sal, Santa Catarina, Santa Cruz, Sao Nicolau, Sao Vicente, Tarrafal; note - there may be a new administrative structure of 16 districts (Boa Vista, ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... of which the railway robbed us. For miles before reaching it, we used to look out for the wooded park, with its herds of mottled deer, and the great lake, where the sight of the swans always brought up that story of the big pike, choked like a boa, with a swan's neck. A story that seems to belong to every ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... with them along the tree-tops, and proclaimed their wonder in every imaginable whistle, and grunt, and howl, had ceased to move their laughter, as much as the roar of the jaguar and the rustle of the boa had ceased to move their fear; and when a brilliant green and rose-colored fish, flat-bodied like a bream, flab-finned like a salmon, and saw-toothed like a shark, leapt clean on board of the canoe to escape the rush of the huge alligator (whose loathsome snout, ere he could stop, actually ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... to kill, or, if possible, recapture it at the very earliest opportunity. Though the Advertiser has succeeded in temporarily securing three lions, a chimpanzee, a couple of hyaenas, and a young hippopotamus in the Vicarage drawing-room, and has managed to envelope a boa-constrictor in a lawn-tennis net, yet, as five full-grown Bengal tigers, and about thirty other wild beasts of a miscellaneous character are at large in the village, and have, to his knowledge, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 93, August 13, 1887 • Various
... a young woman lay on a couch. Horror was depicted upon her countenance, and she was frantically but vainly struggling to free herself from the great boa-constrictor which had coiled his ugly thick body about her. Standing beside her and looking on with a dreadful expression of devilish satisfaction was a representation of Satan, whilst coming in at the open door reeled a young man in a woeful state ...
— Fifteen Years With The Outcast • Mrs. Florence (Mother) Roberts
... wife got me a new silk dress and fur boa, my daughter bestowed a fine pair of No. 6 kid gloves, and each of my sons contributed a pair of skates and a sled. There is nothing like having Santa Claus remember you well, is there?" ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... along the quay, in the dusk of early evening, her mind full of the next day's journey over the mountains to Milan. The wind was cold; about her neck there was a boa of white ostrich feathers, one end of which fluttered gaily over her shoulder. She was continually turning half-way about against the wind to reclaim the truant end of the boa. It was in the act of doing so on one occasion that her attention was drawn to ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... round the town in a hammock, perhaps as a ceremony for the expulsion of evils. The rainbow-god of the Ewe was also conceived to have the form of a snake; his messenger was said to be a small variety of boa; but only certain individuals, not the whole species, were sacred. In many parts of Africa the serpent is looked upon as the incarnation of deceased relatives; among the Amazulu, as among the Betsileo of Madagascar, certain species are assigned as the abode of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... flabby bust, and her ungainly knees seemed to come straight out of her groin. She looked like a seated cow. Her companion was like a terrapin, with her little black evil-looking head at the end of a neck which was too long and very stringy. She kept shooting it out of her boa and drawing it back with the most incredible rapidity. The rest of her body bulged out flat. These two delightful persons were the dressmakers sent for by the Custom-house to value my costumes. They glanced at me in a furtive way, and gave a little bow full of bitterness ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... thoughts. It could easily now have darted away, but it felt that it was driven to bay, and began to show fight in the most vicious fashion, snapping its flat beak, hissing, snorting, rattling its plumage, and undulating its long neck, as it danced about, till it looked like a boa constrictor which had ...
— Diamond Dyke - The Lone Farm on the Veldt - Story of South African Adventure • George Manville Fenn
... of this sort of thing, and have done a summit or two; in imagination we have also been up Mont Blanc and Monte Rosa, and the Matterhorn, and a few of the Hymalaya peaks, and most of the mountains in the moon, and several of the fixed stars, and—haw—are now rather boa-ord with it all than otherwise!" There were men who had done much and who said little, and men who had done little and who spoke much. There were "ice-men" who had a desire to impart their knowledge, ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... such a man of morals, of ethical duty, of certain obligations to an elder sister, of responsibility to host or hostess, or to society, would have been little better than to try to teach table etiquette to a boa-constrictor. There was only one thing that could force him to become sober for one instant and to reflect, and that was the menace of successful rivalry. But even then his sober mood would last only as long as he was maturing panic ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... barrier against their further progress, insisted on returning, although Diaz was convinced that he had reached the southern end of the continent. On the arrival of Diaz at Lisbon, the King, delighted with his discovery, gave to the cape the name of Cabo de Boa Esperanza, or Cape of Good Hope. Dom Joao had in the meantime dispatched overland two envoys with directions to visit the kingdom of Prester John, and was preparing to send out an expedition by sea, when death put ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... often occurred to me since that if the scale of things had been enlarged—if Stoffles, for example, had been a Bengal tiger, and the Dryad a boa-constrictor or crocodile,—the tragedy which followed would have been worthy of the pen of any sporting and dramatic historian. I can only say that, being transacted in such objectionable proximity to myself, the thing ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... rim. I felt sorry that I had not been there to watch it, because after all, what I saw, was only the dead record of something that had been very much alive and vociferatingly noisy. And in another place it had reared and raised its head like a boa constrictor, ready to strike at its prey; up to the flashing, forked tongue it was there. But one spot I remember, where it looked exactly as if quite consciously it had attempted the outright ludicrous: it had thrown up the snow into the semblance ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... of rats is, therefore, well-nigh impossible, though a plan adopted by some Europeans of keeping a boa-constrictor between the roofs and ceilings of their bungalows is ...
— On the Equator • Harry de Windt
... "Tree fall." There is something singularly grand and impressive in the sound of a tree falling in a perfectly calm night like this, as if the agencies which overthrow it did not need to be excited, but worked with a subtle, deliberate, and conscious force, like a boa-constrictor, and more effectively then than even in a windy day. If there is any such difference, perhaps it is because trees with the dews of the night on them ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... to say, proposed—the breakfast being now finished, and the Major gorged, like any Boa Constrictor—that they should start. A barouche being in waiting, according to the orders of that gentleman, the two ladies, the Major and himself, took their seats in it; the Native and the wan page mounted the box, Mr Towlinson ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... to be beautiful and admired. I want two new dresses; a hat with plumes, and a silk petticoat that rustles. I want some new kid gloves and a feather boa (a long one made of ostrich feathers). I wish——" The small, blunt pencil had been lifted in air for the space of three minutes before it again descended; then, with cheeks that burned, Miss ...
— The Transfiguration of Miss Philura • Florence Morse Kingsley
... "the Court of Chancery was like a boa-constrictor, which swallowed up the estates of English gentlemen in haste, and digested ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... an old blackbird badly molted; result perfectly hideous, but the sugar-bowl, clothing, and sundry fund are out of debt and doing well. Had my faded gray dress dyed black, and trimmed the jacket with pieces of my moth-eaten cock's-feather boa; perfectly elegant, almost too gorgeous for my humble circumstances. Mamma looks at me sadly when I don these ancient garments, and almost wishes I had n't such "a wealthy look." I tell her I expect the girls to say, when I walk into the school-yard on Monday, "Who is this that ...
— Polly Oliver's Problem • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... the simple ground that it exists! Under such an argument a howitzer is as good as a plough, a sword is as good as a sickle, a pillory is as good as a baby-wagon. By such reasoning a shark is as useful as a horse. By this logic a boa-constrictor is as good as a reindeer, a tiger is as useful and salutary in his office as an ox or a St. Bernard, and a cancer is as beautiful as a blush. That is, everything is good, not because it is useful and just, but ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... quaint spectacle to the Lowestoft fishermen, for Posh assures me that he always went to sea in a silk hat, and generally wore a "cross-over," or a lady's boa, round his neck. Now a silk hat and a lady's boa aboard a longshore punt would be about as incongruous as a court suit in a shooting field. But FitzGerald was not vain enough to be self-conscious. He knew when he was comfortable, and ...
— Edward FitzGerald and "Posh" - "Herring Merchants" • James Blyth
... he could see the forest and jungles of South America. He saw a sluggish river flowing along between rank green banks, while, from the overhanging trees, long festoons of moss hung down, writhing now and then as the big water anacondas or boa constrictors looped their sinuous ...
— Tom Swift in Captivity • Victor Appleton
... folieto blaspheme : blasfemi. bless : beni. blind : blinda. "window"-, rulkurteno. blond : blonda. blood : sango. blot : makulo. blow : blovi; bato, frapo. blouse : bluzo. blue : blua; -"bell", hiacinto, kampanoleto. boa-constrictor : boao. boast : fanfaroni. boat : boato. bobbin : bobeno. body : korpo. bog : marcxo. boil : boli; absceso. bold : kuragxa, sentima. bolt : rigl'i, -ilo; bolto. bomb : bombo. bombard : bombardi. bond : obligacio, garantiajxo bondage : servuto, sklaveco. bone : osto. bonnet : cxapo. booth ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... place in their mouths; then each one, cutting off at his lips what his mouth cannot hold, passes it over to his companion; or else the gluttons, letting the shreds hang down to the ground, swallow them gradually, as a boa-constrictor swallows an animal, and like it stretched out at full length on ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... moment Agnes opened the door and saw what appeared to be an animated feather-boa dashing about the kitchen, with the bulk of the family ...
— The Corner House Girls at School • Grace Brooks Hill
... river below, coiled his forces around Vicksburg like a boa-constrictor, and held it in his grasp. After forty-seven days of endurance the city surrendered to him. Port Hudson, after the surrender of Vicksburg, gave up the unequal contest, and the Mississippi was open ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... swimming to shore with the hand which was left, and escaped without further injury. In those desert regions, where man is constantly in strife with animated or inanimated nature, they daily speak of similar or corresponding means by which it is possible to escape from a tiger, a great boa, or a crocodile. Every one prepares himself against a danger which may any day befall him, 'I knew,' said the young girl calmly, when praised for her presence of mind, 'that the crocodile lets go his hold when you plunge your fingers in his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... are; marching along by the low grounds here, intending to sweep gradually leftwards towards Janus-Hill quarter; there to sweep home upon him, coil him up, left and rear and front, in their boa-constrictor folds, and end his trifle of an Army and him. "Why not, if we do our duty at all, annihilate his trifle of an Army; take himself prisoner, and so end it?" Report says, Soubise had really, in some moment ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... Old World is quite as formidable as the boa in the New. Perhaps it is even more to be dreaded; for, notwithstanding its great length—twenty-five to thirty feet—it is exceedingly nimble and its muscular strength is immense. There are numerous authentic stories on record of its having crushed the buffalo and the tiger in its huge ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... been manufactured out of a length of blue ribbon and a few paste buttons, while a blue feather necklet had been promoted a step higher, and encircled an old straw hat. The ribbon bow at the end of the boa exactly matched the shade of the waistcoat, and was cocked up at a daring angle, while a becoming new veil and a pair of immaculate new gloves added ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... "Why didn't you confide to me before, that you were physically and mentally incapable of packing? I've often noticed that your hold-alls looked like overfed boa constrictors, but I didn't dream things were as bad as this. You had better let Innocentina and me do the work for you. We're what you call 'nailers' at ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... isn't"—and Charlotte smiled as she looked about for a feather boa that she had laid down on descending from her room—"if it isn't it will have had ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... together. "Oh, do make him!" she implored. "I'll ask them to come in the afternoon—we'll make it into a little tea—a five o'clock. I'll send word at once to everybody!" She gathered up her beruffled boa and sunshade, settling her plumage like a reassured bird. "It will be too lovely!" she ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... wisdom, virtue, knowledge deep Of this our age. From far Morocco to Cathay, and from the Poles unto the Nile, From Boston unto Goa, on the track Of flying Fortune, emulously panting, The empires, kingdoms, dukedoms of the earth I saw, now clinging to her waving locks, Now to the end of her encircling boa. Beholding this, and o'er the ample sheets Profoundly meditating, I became Of my ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... groped their way towards the edge, and had just reached it and were pulling themselves out when a hideous shape rose out of the water behind them. It was like the head of an octopus joined to the body of a boa-constrictor, but head and neck were both of the same ghastly, livid grey as the other two creatures. It was evidently blind, too, for it took no notice of the brilliant glare of the searchlight, but it moved rapidly towards the two scrambling forms, its long white feelers ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith
... districts (concelhos, singular—concelho); Boa Vista, Brava, Fogo, Maio, Paul, Praia, Porto Novo, Ribeira Grande, Sal, Santa Catarina, Santa Cruz, ...
— The 1991 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... had yet encountered, but it was less disgusting than the flies; when they inadvertently touched a dead body, clouds of wet, buzzing flies flew up into their faces, into their eyes and nostrils. Under their feet the earth worked and moved as if boa constrictors were wriggling down there soft bodies, lightly covered. When they had found their way up to the Snout they came upon a pile of corpses, a dozen or more, thrown one on top of another like sacks of flour, faintly discernible in the ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... Florida I had a tame tarpon, which could swallow anything—croquet balls, door scrapers—and once ate an entire cottage pianoforte in half-an-hour. Here I may add that in my travels in Turkestan I was attacked by a boa-constrictor, and, though I escaped with my life, it proceeded to swallow the Bactrian camel on which I was riding. On the following day, however, when the boa was still in a comatose condition, I killed it with a ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various
... Like a boa constrictor, her tremendous curiosity would sleep for months, and then, on awakening, it hungered with a most mighty and ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... for days without a mouthful, and then, when an abundance of food is presented, will gorge himself to an extent that would be sure death to an ordinary human being, after which he will smoke, blink, and doze for several days more, just as the famous boa constrictors of Africa ...
— Camp-fire and Wigwam • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... the Pillars of Hercules; we have coasted down the shores of the African continent, and seen the great breakers of the Spanish Main foaming upon the yellow sand; we have passed the black ivory merchants with their human cargoes; we have faced the terrible storms which blow ever around the Cape de Boa Esperanza; and finally, we have sailed away out over the great ocean beyond, amid the palm-clad coral islands, with the knowledge that the realms of Prester John lie somewhere behind the golden haze which shimmers upon the ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... and the army of Wallace was enveloped in the embrace of a hideous boa-constrictor—tightening, closing, crushing every semblance of life from the victim enclosed in his toils. The flanking parties of horse were forced in upon the centre, and though, as even Turner grants, they fought with desperation, a general flight ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... backwoodsman, Mark, my lad. He didn't 'hanker arter crows' after he had eaten them once. I don't 'hanker arter' snakes, but I'd sooner sit down to a section of boa-constrictor roasted ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... In fancy he could see the forest and jungles of South America. He saw a sluggish river flowing along between rank green banks, while, from the overhanging trees, long festoons of moss hung down, writhing now and then as the big water anacondas or boa constrictors looped their sinuous folds over the ...
— Tom Swift in Captivity • Victor Appleton
... real glad it wasn't a snake, because they always give me the creeps, you remember, I hate 'em so. Just think what a fine pickle we'd be in now if a monster anaconda or a big boa constrictor or python, broke loose from a show, should climb up on our bridge boat, and start to chasin' us all overboard. Things look bad enough as they are without our takin' on a bunch of new trouble. So, Toby, please don't glimpse anything else, and ...
— Afloat on the Flood • Lawrence J. Leslie
... would hit upon sooner than one who is in the beaten track. Do you know, Richard, my dear boy, I've often thought that if we could by any means appropriate to our use some of the extraordinary digestive power that a boa constrictor has in his gastric juices, there is really no manner of reason why we should not comfortably dispose of as much of an ox as our stomachs will hold, and one might eat French dishes without the wretchedness of thinking ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the chief young lady asked what Mr. and Mrs. Fitz would like, and named a thousand things, each better than the other, to all of which Fitz instantly said yes. The wretch was in such a state of infatuation that I believe if that lady had proposed to him a fricasseed elephant, or a boa-constrictor in jelly, he would have said, "O yes, certainly; ...
— A Little Dinner at Timmins's • William Makepeace Thackeray
... reluctantly quickened his pace to keep step with hers. Miss Nugent with her chin sunk in a fur boa looked neither to the right nor the left, and turning briskly into the alley, turned the handle of Mr. Wilks's door and walked in, leaving her companion ...
— At Sunwich Port, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... trees, looming weird and gigantic with their buttressed trunks, all knotted and entwined with hanging lianas and curiously hung with air plants dropping from the branches. Gay-colored birds flashed in the patches of sunlight that filtered through the trees. The Cuban boa-constrictor or Maja, big and cowardly, wound its great length away, and the air was full of the rich—and not always pleasant—insect life characteristic ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... Life-rent, what is the issue to be looked for? Hangmen and Catchpoles may, by their noose-gins and baited fall-traps, keep-down the smaller sort of vermin; but what, except perhaps some such Universal Association, can protect us against whole meat-devouring and man-devouring hosts of Boa-constrictors? If, therefore, the more sequestered Thinker have wondered, in his privacy, from what hand that perhaps not ill-written Program in the Public Journals, with its high Prize-Questions and so liberal Prizes, could have proceeded,—let him now cease such wonder; ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... room-mate) that she was slightly of African blood. Reader,—the consternation and horror which succeeded this "new development," are, without exaggeration, perfectly indescribable. The people drew long breaths, as though they had escaped from the fangs of a boa constrictor; the old ladies charged their daughters, that should Miss —— be seen in that village again, by no means to permit themselves to be seen in the street with her; and many other charges were delivered by ...
— The American Prejudice Against Color - An Authentic Narrative, Showing How Easily The Nation Got - Into An Uproar. • William G. Allen
... carrying her smart bags, and, even with so much assistance, she was draped with extra garments, which hung from her arms in varying and seductive shades of green. She herself was in green of a subtle olive shade, and her plumes and boa, her chains and chatelaine, her hand-bags and camera, marked her as the traveler triumphant and expectant. Like an Arabian princess, borne across the desert to the home of her future lord, she came panoplied ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... than ever opium-eater dreamed. The long processions of monkeys, who kept pace with them along the tree-tops, and proclaimed their wonder in every imaginable whistle, and grunt, and howl, had ceased to move their laughter, as much as the roar of the jaguar and the rustle of the boa had ceased to move their fear; and when a brilliant green and rose-colored fish, flat-bodied like a bream, flab-finned like a salmon, and saw-toothed like a shark, leapt clean on board of the canoe to ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... watch-dog of Hell. It completely filled their wide expanse. Who but Pluto could have viewed without horror that enormous body covered with shaggy spikes, those frightful paws clothed with claws of steel, that tail like a boa constrictor, those fiery eyes that blazed like the blood-red lamps in a pharos, and those three forky tongues, round each of which were entwined a vigorous family of ...
— The Infernal Marriage • Benjamin Disraeli
... held at the waist by a belt of black leather. The great silver buckle of her belt seemed to depress the centre of her body, catching the light stuff of her white blouse like a clip. She wore a short black jacket with mother-of-pearl buttons and a ragged black boa. The ends of her tulle collarette had been carefully disordered and a big bunch of red flowers was pinned in her bosom stems upwards. Lenehan's eyes noted approvingly her stout short muscular body. Rank rude health glowed ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... that he was indebted to it or its authoress. I have no doubt that there are certain exceptional complexions to which the purple tinge, above alluded to, is natural. Nature is fertile in variety. I saw an albiness in London once, for six-pence, (including the inspection of a stuffed boa-constrictor,) who looked as if she had been boiled in milk. A young Hottentot of my acquaintance had his hair all in little pellets of the size of marrowfat peas. One of my own classmates has undergone a singular change of late years,—his ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... rule in dis house dat nobody can use huh chiny or fo'ks or spoons who ain't boa'ding heah, and de odder day when yuh asked me to bring up a knife and fo'k she ketched me coming upstairs, and she says, "Where yuh goin' wid all dose things, Annie?" Ah said, "Ah'm just goin' up to Miss Laura's room with dat knife and fo'k." Ah said, "Ah'm goin' up for nothin' at all, Mis' Farley, ...
— The Easiest Way - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Eugene Walter
... until now can find full justification for itself on the simple ground that it exists! Under such an argument a howitzer is as good as a plough, a sword is as good as a sickle, a pillory is as good as a baby-wagon. By such reasoning a shark is as useful as a horse. By this logic a boa-constrictor is as good as a reindeer, a tiger is as useful and salutary in his office as an ox or a St. Bernard, and a cancer is as beautiful as a blush. That is, everything is good, not because it is useful and ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... gay. Some of the hook-and-ladder trucks are just one mass of golden-rod and hydrangeas, and some of them are all fixed with this red-white-and-blue paper rope, sort of chenille effect, or more like a feather boa. Everybody has on white cotton gloves, and those entitled to carry speaking trumpets have bouquets in the bells of them, salvias, and golden-rod, and nasturtiums, and marigolds, and ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... skipping sprite that your little finger can lift. Lastly, all this is enveloped in the little jaunty silk cloak, which fastens readily enough round the neck on ordinary occasions, but now refuses to meet by the breadth of a hand, and is made secure by a worsted boa of every bright color. Is this all? No,—wait,—I have forgotten the pretty clustering locked head and rosy dimpled face; and, in truth, they were so lost in the mountains of wool and wadding around as to be fairly overlooked. Here a handkerchief is bound round the forehead, ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... wear skirts. Her clothes are like her brother's. Her trousers are made of white bearskin. Her jacket is made of fur. When she goes out sleigh riding, she puts on fur mittens. Do you know what a fur boa is? This little girl wears one around her neck. It is made of the tail of a fox. The strings to it are made of long ...
— Big People and Little People of Other Lands • Edward R. Shaw
... mind this—if he comes, you've got to care for him the whole length of your boa—you won't persuade him to run in couples with anybody else. That's why he broke away the first time—and you were ever so mad with me because you thought I was at the bottom of it. But it was all his pride. He's too real independent to share ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, February 6, 1892 • Various
... Boulevard, and a few steps brought us in view of the stately white shrine on Claremont Heights. But I looked instead at her brilliant face against the velvety background of black hat and feather boa. ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... amount of effort, Henri managed to dispose of his own share; but he was last of being done, and fell in the savages' esteem greatly. The way in which that sticky compost of boiled maize went down was absolutely amazing. The man opposite Dick, in particular, was a human boa-constrictor. He well-nigh suffocated Dick with suppressed laughter. He was a great raw-boned savage, with a throat of indiarubber, and went quickly and quietly on swallowing mass after mass with the solemn gravity of an owl. It mattered not a straw ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... days rest, the division resumed its march for Washington City early on the morning of the 11th of May, and passing through Manchester, crossed the James river and entered the city of Richmond from the south-west. Now, for the first time, it beheld the once great Rebel Capital—the anaconda and boa-constrictor of rebel vengeance. When the command reached the north side of the James, the Libby prison could be seen on the right, where so many of our captured soldiers have languished and died under the cruel care of its keeper. Then, a short distance above the Libby, and on the same side ...
— History of the Eighty-sixth Regiment, Illinois Volunteer Infantry, during its term of service • John R. Kinnear
... daresay you'll be on the lake, or sliding on the snow, And breathing on your hands to make the circulation flow, Nestling your nose among the furs of which your boa's made,— The Fahrenheit here registers a hundred ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various
... see long tails hanging down over the backs of the sleigh and cutters—they look very pretty, like the end of mamma's boa." ...
— Lady Mary and her Nurse • Catharine Parr Traill
... up at me as I buttered his toast, piping hot from the range. "Well, Lady Bird, you're not the kind that'll need paprika, anyway!" he announced as he fell to. And he ate like a boa-constrictor and patted his pajama-front and stentoriously announced that he'd picked a queen—only he pronounced it kaveen, after the manner of our poor ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... of this large family; some, like the rattlesnake, cannot climb or swim, but crawl along the ground, the terror of unwary travellers who may tread upon them in the dim forest-paths; others are Water-snakes; some, like the Boa and Python, are dreaded, although not venomous, because, of their enormous strength, and power of crushing their victims in their close embrace; others, like the Cobra, for their deadly bite; while many—we ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... great breakers of the Spanish Main foaming upon the yellow sand; we have passed the black ivory merchants with their human cargoes; we have faced the terrible storms which blow ever around the Cape de Boa Esperanza; and finally, we have sailed away out over the great ocean beyond, amid the palm-clad coral islands, with the knowledge that the realms of Prester John lie somewhere behind the golden haze which shimmers upon the horizon. After such a flight as that we would feel, as we came back to ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... put a bear-skin or some sort of fur on your shoulders, and tie a lady's boa to you for a tail, and send you into the woods. The gorillas will be sure to mistake you for a relative until you get quite close; then you'll take one pace to the left with the left foot (as the volunteers say), I'll take one to the front with the right—at ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... replied Robert, turning from the canine playfellow he was affectionately patting, "I mean to treat him just the same as though he were a true-born Briton. He isn't to blame for being only an unfortunate Cawnpore boy, born among heathens and boa-constrictors and Juggernauts, and not knowing how to skate, or make snowballs. Good by, mamma, don't trouble yourself about me; I 'll carry myself 'this side up with care.' By by, baby. No, no, old Rover, you can't come; you would n't know how to behave with my lord's Italian greyhound, and my lady's ...
— Stories of Many Lands • Grace Greenwood
... have darted away, but it felt that it was driven to bay, and began to show fight in the most vicious fashion, snapping its flat beak, hissing, snorting, rattling its plumage, and undulating its long neck, as it danced about, till it looked like a boa constrictor which had partially ...
— Diamond Dyke - The Lone Farm on the Veldt - Story of South African Adventure • George Manville Fenn
... near the plate and remains expectant. The spirit of the victim then appears, and stands on the plate, laughing. The thlen begins to swallow the figure, commencing at its feet, the victim laughing the while. By degrees the whole figure is disposed of by the boa constrictor. If the spirit be that of a person from whom the hair, or a piece of his or her cloth, has been cut, directly the thlen has swallowed the spirit, the person expires. Many families in these hills are known, or suspected, to be keepers of a ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... shoulders, staggers off with it as if he were a grenadier carrying a dead comrade from the field. Extending it upon the forecastle deck, he now proceeds cylindrically to remove its dark pelt, as an African hunter the pelt of a boa. This done he turns the pelt inside out, like a pantaloon leg; gives it a good stretching, so as almost to double its diameter; and at last hangs it, well spread, in the rigging, to dry. Ere long, it is taken down; when removing some three ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... From Bua (Bavo or Boa), an island used by the Romans as a place of exile, a comprehensive view of Trau may be obtained, with towers and campanile breaking the line of the houses, with the strait in the foreground, and with boats drawn up on the shore. In a private garden is a palm-tree said to be ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... say riding, I said wyding, walking in the water. Mr. Bulky was wyding, one morning, with rod in hand, when, all of a sudden, he felt something on his leg. Looking down, he sawr a big black water-snyke coiled round his boot, and jabbing awy at his leg. It hung on to him like a boa-constrictor, and squeezed his leg so tight that it gyve him a bad attack of gout. He had to get on shore and sawr it in two with his knife before the snyke would leave go. Fortunately, the brutes are not venomous, but that beggar's teeth scratched Mr. Bulky's boots up ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... the actor's animus alone, apart from the other elements of the performance. As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors. The saint may simply give the universe into the hands of the enemy by his trustfulness. He may by non-resistance cut off ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... him a step in rank) did a certain amount of tiger-shooting and pig-sticking, and a good deal of brandy-swilling, combined with card-playing and gambling. As a husband, he was not a conspicuous success. "He slept," complained Lola, feeling herself neglected, "like a boa-constrictor," and, during the intervals of wakefulness, "drank too much porter." The result was, there were quarrels, instead of love-making, for they ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... hit sorter is. He was a-stayin' at Tom's house, the furriner was, a-dickerin' fer a piece o' lan'—the same piece, mebbe, that you're atter now—an' Tom keeps him thar fer a week to beat him out'n a dollar, an' then won't let him pay nary a cent fer his boa'd. Now, stranger, that's Tom. ...
— 'Hell fer Sartain' and Other Stories • John Fox, Jr.
... "Deliver me from hysterical fluffs like Lilas. I'd rather load a cargo of boa-constrictors than start her for ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... Miss Cardinal?" They shook hands, Miss Avies standing over Aunt Elizabeth like the boa constrictor raised ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... She looked charming with her great boa tied about her throat, and sprang into the dog-cart ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... she told him confidently, and mentally resolved to buy herself, so soon as she was married, a black feather boa, such as she had coveted ...
— Victorian Short Stories of Troubled Marriages • Rudyard Kipling, Ella D'Arcy, Arthur Morrison, Arthur Conan Doyle,
... so lonely, forms and instincts in her which claimed kinship with his own. With her natural elegance stamped on her as by a die, with her dim and disinherited individual refinement of grace, which would have made any one wonder who she was anywhere—hat and veil and feather-boa and smart umbrella-knob and all—with her regular God-given distinction of type, in fine, she couldn't abide vulgarity ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... insufficiently clad; and so the coat was given to an Irish girl with pretty auburn hair standing near, leaning against the gunwale—with an "outside berth" and so more exposed to the cold air. This same lady was able to distribute more of her wraps to the passengers, a rug to one, a fur boa to another; and she has related with amusement that at the moment of climbing up the Carpathia's side, those to whom these articles had been lent offered them all back to her; but as, like the rest of us, she was ...
— The Loss of the SS. Titanic • Lawrence Beesley
... from the church door, is a stone in which are carved fourteen rings: they announce that fourteen farms were given to the cloister, in order that he who moulders here might have this place, fourteen feet within the church door. It was Boa Johnson Grip, a great sinner; but the cloister's power was greater than that of all sinners: the stone on his grave records it with ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... gone, even the wedding ring which had been placed there such a short time before. Had she been robbed? There were no signs of violence visible nor even such disturbances as usually follow despoliation by a criminal's hand. The boa of delicate black net which encircled her neck rose fresh and intact to her chin; nor did the heavy folds of her rich broadcloth gown betray that any disturbance had taken place in her figure after its fall. If a jewel had flashed at ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... There were highly-finished coloured drawings of the dried fish and the breadfruit, and an exquisitely tinted representation of the latter in a mouldy state. But the chef-d'oeuvre was the portrait of the Author himself. He was represented trampling on the body of a boa constrictor of the first quality, in the skin of which he was dressed; at his back were his bow and arrows; his right hand rested on an uprooted pine-tree; he stood in a desert between two volcanoes; at his feet was a lake of magnitude; ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... myself, as great in good as he is, As much a master of my Countries fortunes, And one to whom (since I am forc'd to speak it, Since mine own tongue must be my Advocate) This blinded State that plaies at boa-peep with us, This wanton State that's weary of hir lovers And cryes out 'Give me younger still and fresher'! Is bound and so far bound: I found hir naked, Floung out a dores and starvd, no friends to pitty hir, The marks of all hir miseries ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... Heard welcomed us and stopped tending his ash-cake, peas, and fat back long enough to squint over the top of the "specks dat Ole Mis had give him back in '70", then he took a long look at the mahogany clock that had "sot on her parlor fish boa'd". In spite of his ninety-six years his memory of the old days is still fresh and his body surprisingly active for ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... the most beautiful in the world, and the women are dressed to perfection. They are as clever at the demi-toilette as the Parisian, and the extreme neatness and smartness of their walking-gowns are very refreshing after the floppy, blowsy, trailing dresses, accompanied by the inevitable feather boa of which English girls, who used to be so tidy and "tailor-made," now seem so fond. The universal white "waist" is very pretty and trim on the American girl. It is one of the distinguishing marks of a land of ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... first four or five female patients that favored me with it, made me disbelieve my other senses; but Miss Lusignan is now about the thirtieth who has shown me that marvellous feat, with a calm countenance that belies the herculean effort. Nature has her every-day miracles: a boa-constrictor, diameter seventeen inches, can swallow a buffalo; a woman, with her stays bisecting her almost, and lacerating her skin, can yet for one moment make herself seem slack, to deceive a juvenile physician. The snake is the ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... unfortunate young man to vex people with a lighter satire, yet still characterized by somewhat of snake-like virulence. One day he encountered an ambitious statesman, and gravely inquired after the welfare of his boa constrictor; for of that species, Roderick affirmed, this gentleman's serpent must needs be, since its appetite was enormous enough to devour the whole country and constitution. At another time, he stopped a close-fisted old ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... worm walked leisurely. Death not immediately resulting from this daring act, he controlled his shudders and breathed easier. The worm became less and less terrifying; no longer appearing, say, the size of the boa constrictor. A few moments of this harmless meandering about Mr. Flint's hand and arm, and of a sudden he wore his true colors of an inoffensive and law-abiding larva, anxious only to attend strictly to his own legitimate business, the Gargantuan feeding ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... the mouth of the heater the monstrous body of a boa constrictor lay on the floor. The men Juve had brought into the house were resolute, ripe for anything, but never did they imagine that Fantomas could assume such an unexpected shape. And terrified, overwhelmed with dread, they recoiled ...
— The Exploits of Juve - Being the Second of the Series of the "Fantmas" Detective Tales • mile Souvestre and Marcel Allain
... Butterington who first put me up to the idea. I asked him a simple question about the habits of the Sigalion Boa, a certain worm in whose ways I was taking an interest at the time, and he at once replied that he himself was ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 25th, 1920 • Various
... unbeliever was Monsieur Le Quoi, who merely whispered to the sheriff, that the corps was one of the finest he had ever seen second only to the Mousquetaires of Le Boa Louis! However, as Mrs. Hollister thought there was something like actual service in the present appearances, and was, in consequence, too busily engaged with certain preparations of her own, to make her comments; as Benjamin was absent, and Monsieur Le Quoi too happy ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... :boa: [IBM] /n./ Any one of the fat cables that lurk under the floor in a {dinosaur pen}. Possibly so called because they display a ferocious life of their own when you try to lay them straight and flat after they have been coiled for some time. It is rumored within IBM that channel cables ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... Beach, Accra Rolling Cacao, Gold Coast Rolling Cacao, Gold Coast Carrying Cacao to the Railway Station, Gold Coast Wagon Loads of Cacao being taken from Depot to the Beach, Accra The Buildings of the Boa Entrada Cacao Estate, San Thome Drying Cacao, San Thome Barrel Rolling, Gold Coast Bagging Cacao, Gold Coast Surf Boats by the Side of the Ocean Liner, Accra Bagging Cacao Beans for Shipment, Trinidad Transferring Bags of Cacao to Lighters, ...
— Cocoa and Chocolate - Their History from Plantation to Consumer • Arthur W. Knapp
... velvet gown and an ostrich-feather boa in delicate shades of cream and brown, and a cavalier hat with sweeping white plumes. Her hair was the colour of autumn leaves, or a squirrel's back in the sunshine, and she had grey eyes and piquant, irregular features, ears like shells, and a delicate, softly-tinted skin undefiled by cosmetics. ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... "I shouldn't call that rope. Cable, yes—frankly, when she came into the dining-room the other night I thought it was a feather-boa she had on." ...
— Mrs. Raffles - Being the Adventures of an Amateur Crackswoman • John Kendrick Bangs
... fortunes that were never shaken, but which the laws, promulgated by the Revolution, destroyed, and the present system tends to reconstruct," resumed the old notary, yielding to the loquacity of the "tabellionaris boa-constrictor" (boa-notary). "Monsieur le comte by his name, his talents, and his fortune is called upon to sit some day in the elective Chamber. Perhaps his destiny will take him to the hereditary Chamber, for we know that he has talent and means enough to fulfil that expectation. ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... Agnes opened the door and saw what appeared to be an animated feather-boa dashing about the kitchen, with the bulk of the ...
— The Corner House Girls at School • Grace Brooks Hill
... their fluffy laces burnt and blackened. Chiffon fichus torn in ribbons strewed the carpet. An ivory fan had been trampled into fragments on the hearth-rug, and a snow-storm of feathers from a white boa had drifted over the furniture. On the wash-stand a spangled white tulle hat lay drowning in a ...
— Rosemary - A Christmas story • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... in one hand, and have your knife ready in the other. If it coils round you, cut through it at once. This is a good place for fighting it, for there is nothing here for it to get its tail round; and a boa cannot squeeze very hard, unless he ...
— On the Irrawaddy - A Story of the First Burmese War • G. A. Henty
... be sure we were up early in the morning. There were dolls and toys for the little ones, with hoods and mittens, and for me a lovely squirrel muff, lined with blue, with a soft little boa for my neck. I was a happy girl that Christmas, ...
— The Night Before Christmas and Other Popular Stories For Children • Various
... municipalities (concelhos, singular - concelho); Boa Vista, Brava, Maio, Mosteiros, Paul, Praia, Porto Novo, Ribeira Grande, Sal, Santa Catarina, Santa Cruz, Sao Domingos, Sao Filipe, Sao Miguel, ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... gift of miracles and of miraculous infallibility by inspiration have rendered it of course of little or no application to Christians at present. Yet how can Arminians pray our Church prayers collectively on any day? Answer. See a 'boa constrictor' with an ox or deer. What they do swallow, proves so astounding a dilatability of gullet, that it would be unconscionable strictness to complain of the horns, antlers, or other indigestible non-essentials ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... a bit tighter than usual; he was only a trifle slower and more fastidious in his speech. It was midnight when he left Clifford peacefully slumbering in somebody's arm-chair, with a long suede glove dangling in his hand and a plumy boa twisted about his neck to protect his throat from drafts. He walked through the hall and down the stairs, and found himself on the sidewalk in a quarter he did not know. Mechanically he looked up at the ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... sailing, and soaring, and zigzagging, and crossing over them. But, all of a sudden, Sara made a discovery that stopped her heart in a breath. In a country where the butterflies were as big as peacocks, the caterpillars were as big as boa-constrictors! Sara didn't know the exact size of a boa-constrictor, having met them only in her Geography: but surely they couldn't be any bigger than these! Certainly they were big enough to swallow her as easily as the big black snake Jimmy ...
— The Garden of the Plynck • Karle Wilson Baker
... party marked down by age and appearance to pay the bills; and to her, while Mrs. Fisher put the final touches to her toilette, for she was preparing, by means of putting on a hat and veil and feather boa and gloves, to go for her first stroll in the lower garden—positively her first since her arrival—she explained that unless she was given money to pay the last week's bills the shops of Castagneto would refuse credit for the current week's ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... owl, Jean Jacques will wind the boa-constrictor round his neck like a collar, all for love of those he has lost," answered the Judge with emotion; and he caught M. Fille's arm in the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... value whatsoever; that an Oriental dance and pantomime given in New York by "society" women, led by Mrs. Waldorf Astor, where a rich young woman reaped astonishment and admiration by coiling a live boa constrictor around her neck, was one of the great events of the day, because the newspapers devoted two columns to it, whereas scarcely any mention was made of armies of men being ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... most prominent thing about her was a large and obtruding tooth, which gave her somewhat the appearance of a good-natured walrus; she held a morocco-leather satchel in her unoccupied hand, and wore a large feather-boa round ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... : klingo; (of grass), folieto blaspheme : blasfemi. bless : beni. blind : blinda. "window"-, rulkurteno. blond : blonda. blood : sango. blot : makulo. blow : blovi; bato, frapo. blouse : bluzo. blue : blua; -"bell", hiacinto, kampanoleto. boa-constrictor : boao. boast : fanfaroni. boat : boato. bobbin : bobeno. body : korpo. bog : marcxo. boil : boli; absceso. bold : kuragxa, sentima. bolt : rigl'i, -ilo; bolto. bomb : bombo. bombard : bombardi. bond : obligacio, garantiajxo bondage : servuto, ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... a full-fledged circus and menagerie, but merely a show on its way from one county fair to another. In one cage there was a boa constrictor, untruthfully advertised to be thirty feet long, which a Fat Lady exhibited at each performance, the monster coiled round her neck. In another cage were six performing ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... whirl about faster and faster in the swirling waters. Five times each minute now it made the circuit, and, like the coils of a boa constrictor that is enfolding its victim, ...
— Under the Ocean to the South Pole - The Strange Cruise of the Submarine Wonder • Roy Rockwood
... captain!" said the commander of the fortress, the thunder of whose footsteps, as he approached the house with uncommonly fierce strides, had perhaps broken his slumbers. A frown was on his brow, and the grasp of his hand, in which every finger seemed doing the duty of a boa-constrictor, spoke of a spirit up in arms, and wrestling ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... amazed me. But, then, preachers quite commonly are different on Monday. As we went from cage to cage, he said he had read how boa-constrictors eat, and wouldn't I show him how ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... see a boa-constrictor crawling into my room than see Shaw down on the sidewalk," she ended. "And yet—I know you can understand this—there's a queer kind of relief in the knowledge that at last, and finally, he ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan
... semicircular cage where the condors, in evening dress and white boa around the neck, surveyed the garden with the aloof manner of the higher aristocracy. Gertie waited for an advance; this did not come. Miss Loriner, at the command of Lady Douglass, furnished the hour, and a scream of dismay was given, followed by the issuing ...
— Love at Paddington • W. Pett Ridge
... en fouettant de son aile L'air epais, ou circule un immense soleil. Parfois quelque boa, chauffe dans son sommeil, Fait onduler son dos ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... pictures of the coach road, of which the railway robbed us. For miles before reaching it, we used to look out for the wooded park, with its herds of mottled deer, and the great lake, where the sight of the swans always brought up that story of the big pike, choked like a boa, with a swan's neck. A story that seems to belong ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... water, and to sound for an anchorage. She returned on board, having neither found water nor place to anchor in; wherefore we stood into the bay, and presently got sight of a town and fort belonging to the Hollanders, called Boa de Bachian. The pinnace a-head found water in several places, which were all very steep and in the bottom of the bay, near to which is the Dutch fort very artificially built, and warlike, with a town hard by. We came here to anchor, a sacker ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr
... moment that creature for which no human language has a name, form without substance, a being without life, or life without action. She was under the spell of that timid curiosity which impels women to seek perilous excitement, to gaze at chained tigers and boa-constrictors, shuddering all the while because the barriers between them are so weak. Although the little old man's back was bent like a day-laborer's, it was easy to see that he must formerly have been of medium height. His excessive thinness, the slenderness ...
— Sarrasine • Honore de Balzac
... undecided, tucks up her skirts to cross a gutter, dragging a child by the hand, which compels her to look out for the vehicles; she is a mother in public, and talks to her daughter; she carries money in her bag, and has open-work stockings on her feet; in winter, she wears a boa over her fur cloak; in summer, a shawl and a scarf; she is accomplished in ...
— Another Study of Woman • Honore de Balzac
... spirit of sport the men had borne some of the heated rails to trees near the road; twisted them three or four times around the trunks; and there, as I passed, were the unfortunate trees with their iron boa-constrictors around them—monuments of the playful humor of ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... rendered yet more oppressive to the spirits by the gloomy stillness of the surrounding forests. The rude warriors were filled with sentiments of awe. Not a bark dimpled the waters. No living thing was to be seen but the wild tenants of the wilderness, the unwieldy boa, and the loathsome alligator basking on the borders of the stream. The trees towering in wide-spread magnificence towards the heavens, the river rolling on in its rocky bed as it had rolled for ages, the solitude and silence of the scene, broken ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... River War, by Winston Spencer Churchill, vol. ii., p. 394. "It is the habit of the boa-constrictor to besmear the body of its victim with a foul slime before he devours it; and there are many people in England, and perhaps elsewhere, who seem to be unable to contemplate military operations ...
— With Methuen's Column on an Ambulance Train • Ernest N. Bennett
... like you, Lord Taborley. I have my suspicions of these simply complicated and complicatedly simple women. Set me down as old-fashioned. Having been only once married, I can't enter into the refinements of feeling of such matrimonially inclined boa-constrictors as Mrs. Lockwood. I sha'n't give myself the chance of meeting her. I'm an old man; it would be too upsetting. If I talked with her, I shouldn't understand. So I must take your word for it that, however much appearances may have been against her, her motives were beyond question." ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... of a young woman lay on a couch. Horror was depicted upon her countenance, and she was frantically but vainly struggling to free herself from the great boa-constrictor which had coiled his ugly thick body about her. Standing beside her and looking on with a dreadful expression of devilish satisfaction was a representation of Satan, whilst coming in at the open door reeled a young man in a ...
— Fifteen Years With The Outcast • Mrs. Florence (Mother) Roberts
... children visited the Zoo on Whit-Monday, and one anxious father who had mislaid a couple of infants stayed for a long time in the reptile-house, looking suspiciously at the swollen appearance of the boa constrictor. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 18, 1919 • Various
... three inches over all. Hoc egomet oculis meis vidi. Birmingham anglers who win prizes with takes of four-and-a-half ounces would have recoiled in affright from the monster, even as he lay dead in the entrance hall of the Greville Arms. Old women stand at the street corners with silver eels like boa-constrictors, for which they wish to smite the Saxon to the tune of sixpence each. I vouch for the pike and eels, but confess to some dubiety re the story of a fat old English gentleman, who said, "I don't care for fishing ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... Sixth-Avenue stamp to you. The men who dance on Sixth Avenue hire their dress suits on Third Avenue—it all goes together. Heavens," she sighed, breaking off abruptly, "have we built up a Frankenstein monster? Is that dress suit of yours going to prove as voracious as the fabled boa constrictor?" ...
— Skinner's Dress Suit • Henry Irving Dodge
... power, an expenditure so vast that the brain is atrophied (as it were), that a second brain, located in the diaphragm, may come into play, and the suspension of all the faculties is in itself a kind of intoxication. A boa constrictor gorged with an ox is so stupid with excess that the creature is easily killed. What man, on the wrong side of forty, is rash enough to work after dinner? And remark in the same connection, that all great men have been moderate eaters. The exhilarating effect of the wing of a chicken ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... at all. She just stood still, looking at Jimsy until it seemed as if she were all eyes. "It comes so suddenly,"—Carter had told her—"like the boa constrictor's hunger ... and then ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... Boa-Constrictors are also found, but they are rare, and I have never seen one in freedom. They are the most harmless of all snakes in the Philippines. Sometimes the Visayos keep them in their houses, in cages, ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
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