"Beetle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and elegance of manner he has no equal. Such a gentle, high-bred air, and such inimitable ease and composure in his flight and movement! He is a poet in very word and deed. His carriage is music to the eye. His performance of the commonest act, as catching a beetle, or picking a worm from the mud, pleases like a stroke of wit or eloquence. Was he a prince in the olden time, and do the regal grace and mien still adhere to him in his transformation? What a finely proportioned form! How plain, yet ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... gallantly, and clung long to the high notes of Dundee. It was like the wail of the banshee, which sounds clear to the fated hearer above all other noises. We afterward became acquainted with the owner of this voice, and were surprised to find her a meek widow, who was like a thin black beetle in her pathetic cypress veil and big black bonnet. She looked as if she had forgotten who she was, and spoke with an apologetic whine; but we heard she had a temper as high as her voice, and as much to be dreaded as the ...
— Deephaven and Selected Stories & Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... that you do not often spy, And it isn't quite a spider, and it isn't quite a fly; It is something like a beetle, and a little like a bee, But nothing like a wooly grub that climbs upon a tree. Its name is quite a hard one, but you'll learn it soon, I hope. So try: ...
— A Book for Kids • C. J. (Clarence Michael James) Dennis
... of the "Pilgrim," and that that unfortunate had just perished with his crew. The cockroach absorbed him entirely. He did not admire it less, and he made as much time over it as if that horrible insect had been a golden beetle. ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... multiplied by—unbearable! I would swear at the thought, if I had anything to swear by! To be transmuted into the sensoria of forty different nasty carrion crows, besides two or three foxes, and a large black beetle! I'll run away, just like anybody else.... if ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... in a globe of yellow light. In another is the tiniest fly,—his little wings outspread, and raised for flight. Again, she can show us a bee lodged in one bead that looks like solid honey, and a little bright-winged beetle in another. This one holds two slender pine-needles lying across each other, and here we see a single scale of a pine-cone; while yet another shows an atom of an acorn-cup, fit for a fairy's use. I wish you could see the beads, for I cannot tell you the half of their beauty. Now, ...
— The Stories Mother Nature Told Her Children • Jane Andrews
... interdicted room, The moth, the beetle, and the fly were banish'd, And where the sunbeam fell athwart the gloom The very ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... turned to help a white-haired little Italian over the inequalities of the gangway. One thing only they had in common—their deadly industry. One shadow lay over them all—the shadow of death. A momentary gravity passed across Cornish's face. These men were as far removed from him as the crawling beetle is from the butterfly. Who shall say, however, that the butterfly sees nothing but ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... vigorous breezes from the sea Soared buoyantly, till the diminished toy Grew smaller than the falcon when she stoops To dart upon her prey. I sent for cord, Servant on servant hurrying, till the kite Shrank to the size of a beetle: still I called For cord, and sent to summon father, mother, My little sisters, my old halting nurse,— I would have had the whole world to survey Me and my wondrous kite. It still soared on, And I stood bending back in ecstasy, ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... by any argument convince this beetle-head that I was simply speaking the barbarous accents of his ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... quartette went back to the well-lit little building, where the beetle-browed driver again chaffed the police-agents, while the Customs officer placed his rubber stamp upon the paper, scribbled his initials and charged three-lire-twenty ...
— Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo • William Le Queux
... ran up the hill-side till the steepness of the slope broke them into copses of stunted pines among great bluffs of rock and raw red scaurs. The glen was very narrow, and the mountains seemed to beetle above it so as to shut out half the sunlight. The air was growing cooler, with the queer, acrid smell in it that high hills bring. I am a great lover of uplands, and the sourest peat-moss has a charm for me, but ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... However, rotenone rarely kills worms because it is so rapidly biodegradable. Sprayed on plants to control beetles and other plant predators, its powerful effect lasts only a day or so before sun and moisture break it down to harmless substances. But once I dusted an entire raised bed of beetle-threatened bush bean seedlings with powdered rotenone late in the afternoon. The spotted beetles making hash of their leaves were immediately killed. Unexpectedly, it rained rather hard that evening and ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... His brain was in a tumult, there was no reasoning in it. He searched everywhere. Bush that could conceal nothing bigger than a beetle was examined; to his distorted fancy the lightning-stricken tree presented a hiding-place. Further he penetrated into the woods, but always only to return to his brother's side, distraught, weary ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... drank no less of the heavy, red Algerian wine than before the summer heat engulfed them. Max had heard men say jokingly or solemnly of each other, "He has the cafard." Vaguely he knew that cafard was French for beetle, or cockroach; that soldiers who habitually mixed absinthe and other strong drinks with their cheap but beloved litre were often affected with a strange madness which betrayed itself in weird ways, and that this special madness ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... one came knocking At my wee, small door; Some one came knocking, I'm sure - sure - sure; I listened, I opened, I looked to left and right, But naught there was a-stirring In the still dark night; Only the busy beetle Tap-tapping in the wall, Only from the forest The screech-owl's call, Only the cricket whistling While the dewdrops fall, So I know not who came knocking, At all, at all, ...
— Peacock Pie, A Book of Rhymes • Walter de la Mare
... went to another side of the wood pile, and brought a large beetle and an iron wedge. When he got back to his log, he started out the axe which he had left sticking into it. Then Rollo saw that the axe had made a little indentation, or cleft, in the wood. He put the point of the wedge into this cleft, and drove it in a very ...
— Rollo's Experiments • Jacob Abbott
... "I've lived on th' moor with 'em so long. I've watched 'em break shell an' come out an' fledge an' learn to fly an' begin to sing, till I think I'm one of 'em. Sometimes I think p'raps I'm a bird, or a fox, or a rabbit, or a squirrel, or even a beetle, an' I don't ...
— The Secret Garden • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... The potato-beetle, giant water-bug, eastern swallow-tail butterfly, and promothea moth are insects suitable as types to be studied by the pupils of Form I. The giant water-bug is the large, broad, grayish-brown insect that is found on the sidewalks in May and June mornings. ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... the methods to be followed scrupulously by the sick. Cure the stomachache by catching a beetle in both hands and throwing it over the left shoulder with both hands without looking backward. Have you intestinal trouble? Eat mulberries picked with the thumb and ring finger of your left hand. Do you grow old before ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... is hush'd, save where the weak-eyed bat With short shrill shriek flits by on leathern wing; 10 Or where the beetle winds ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... measure their powers of draught. He announces the result that the smallest insects are the strongest proportioned to their size, but that all are enormously strong when compared bulk, for bulk, with vertebrates. A horse can scarcely lift two-thirds of its own weight, while one small species of June-beetle can lift sixty-six times its weight; forty thousand such June-beetles could lift as much as a draught-horse. Were our strength in proportion to this, we could play with weights equal to ten times ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 430, March 29, 1884 • Various
... please her?" insisted Gerald, removing a hideous beetle from her dress with all possible care lest she should hurt it. "I don't want to. I don't care for her, nor she for me. Why should I put myself out for her? What claim has she on me that I should displease myself to ...
— Only an Incident • Grace Denio Litchfield
... A long cart-rope, A frying pan and kettle, An ashes[74] pail, A threshing-flail, An iron wedge and beetle. ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... may be played with a knotted towel, though it is perhaps more skillful and interesting when played with a "beetle," a small cylindrical sack about twenty inches long, stuffed with cotton, and resembling in general ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... to this conclusion, and was applying the flame of the candle to the nose of an inquisitive beetle, when it struck him he heard voices in altercation outside his door. One, clear, ringing, and imperious, yet withal feminine, was certainly not heard for the first time; and the subdued and respectful voices that answered, were ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... an overwhelming power of enthusiasm. Eleanor dressed well and had a handsome, commanding profile with small, compressed lips and large, prominent, melancholy eyes that wickedly reminded Gregory of the eyes of a beetle. Beneath the black feather boa that was thrown round her neck, her thin shoulder-blades, while she talked to Mrs. Forrester and sketched with pouncing fingers the phrasing of certain passages, jerked and vibrated oddly. Mrs. Forrester nodded, smiled, acquiesced. She ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... came out of the bush in millions, straight for the house. We fled. Caramba! had we remained, we should have been eaten alive. But they swept the house—Hombre! no human hands could have done so well. Every spider, every rat, beetle, flea, every plague, was instantly eaten, and within a half hour they had disappeared again, and we moved back into a thoroughly ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... remained within the Russian frontier with powerful reserves, and reinforcements were pouring along in unbroken streams from the great centres of Russian military power. The fierce Cossack from the Don and the Dneister, the Tartar from the Ukraine, the beetle-browed and predatory Baschkir, with all their variety of wild uniform, and "helm and blade" glancing in the summer's sun, crowded on the great military thoroughfares, while fresh supplies of well-appointed and formidable artillery were carefully transmitted. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... until I know more myself. Yes, I do know what baby beetles are called. They are called grubs, and they live in the ground until it is time for them to turn into grown-up beetles. While they are babies they eat as much and as fast as they can, as no baby but a beetle should. The more they eat the sooner they come out into the bright world as a June-bug or some other kind of beetle. They eat all the tender little roots they can find. ...
— Little Busybodies - The Life of Crickets, Ants, Bees, Beetles, and Other Busybodies • Jeanette Augustus Marks and Julia Moody
... on some sacks of corn, wondering why Fritz doesn't lob over a crump or two, just to wake us up. Jezebel is gorging herself close by. Swallow eats a bit, and then suddenly looks up and sniffs nervously. I suppose he has heard a beetle trotting by, or seen a ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... from one pair of shoulders to another, chattering wildly. In course of time, he reached the automobile, landed in a heap on the bosom of the beetle-browed, Roman-nosed passenger in the tonneau, and encircling him with his hairy arms. The beetle-browed man got up and fought for his freedom, clamoring furiously ...
— Owen Clancy's Happy Trail - or, The Motor Wizard in California • Burt L. Standish
... he the king of gods? the royal ape? Shon of a nymph? or wears a demon's shape? The kingly deity of wind and rain? The offshpring of the Pandu-princes' bane? A prophet? or a vulture known afar? A shtatesman? or a beetle? or a ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... eyes and laid the beetle on one side, when his brain fully grasped that this charming vision was waiting to be entertained. She was better to look upon even than the beloved scarabeus, and he advanced to shake hands as though she had just entered the room. Mrs. ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... was the prisoner's name, Ugly in face, and in nature the same; Stubborn, sullen, and beetle-browed, The hardest case in a hardened crowd. The sin-set lines in his face were bent Neither by kindness nor punishment; He hadn't a friend in the prison there, And he grew more ...
— The Life of Jesus Christ for the Young • Richard Newton
... do fear thy courage, Claudio; and I quake Lest thou a feverous life should'st entertain, And six or seven winters more respect Than a perpetual honor. Dar'st thou die? The sense of death is most in apprehension; And the poor beetle that we tread upon, In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great As when a giant dies! Ay, Isabella, but to die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction and to rot; This sensible, warm motion to become A kneaded clod; ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... to the other Orders of insects, I have been able to collect very little reliable information. With the stag-beetle (Lucanus cervus) "the males appear to be much more numerous than the females"; but when, as Cornelius remarked during 1867, an unusual number of these beetles appeared in one part of Germany, the females appeared to exceed ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... way, and end in a general stampede to underground retreats from the region poisoned by sunshine. Next year you will find the grass growing fresh and green where the stone lay—the ground-bird builds her nest where the beetle had his hole—the dandelion and the buttercup are growing there, and the broad fans of insect-angels open and shut over their golden disks as the rhythmic waves of blissful consciousness ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... compose or hush the heavy beating of my heart; my lips were stiffened with dread of loud breath, and all power of motion left me. For even a puff of wind might betray me, the ruffle of a spray, or the lifting of a leaf, or the random bounce of a beetle. Great peril had encompassed me ere now, but never had it grasped me as this did, and paralyzed all the powers of my body. Rather would I have stood in the midst of a score of Mexican rovers than thus in the presence of that one man. And yet was not this the very thing for which I had ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... and wonder of it. No bird, however evident his acknowledgement of my harmlessness, had ever hopped and REMAINED. Many had perched for a moment in the grass or on a nearby bough, had trilled or chirped or secured a scurrying gold and green beetle and flown away. But none had stayed to inquire—to reflect—even to seem—if one dared be so bold as to hope such a thing—to make mysterious, almost occult advances towards intimacy. Also I had never before heard of such ...
— My Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... each other and everything in their way, and end in a general stampede for underground retreats from the region poisoned by sunshine. Next year you will find the grass growing tall and green where the stone lay; the ground-bird builds her nest where the beetle had his hole; the dandelion and the buttercup are growing there, and the broad fans of insect-angels open and shut over their golden disks, as the rhythmic waves of blissful consciousness pulsate ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... half confided his designs. A certain unfrocked preacher of the Remonstrant persuasion, who, according to the fashion of the learned of that day, had translated his name out of Hendrik Sleet into Henricus Slatius, was one of his most unscrupulous instruments. Slatius, a big, swarthy, shag-eared, beetle-browed Hollander, possessed learning of no ordinary degree, a tempestuous kind of eloquence, and a habit of dealing with men; especially those of the humbler classes. He was passionate, greedy, overbearing, violent, and loose of life. He had sworn vengeance upon the Remonstrants in consequence ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... more on breezy shore, at sunset in this glorious June. I hear the dip of gleaming oar. I list the singer's merry tune. Beneath my feet the waters beat and ripple on the polished stones. The squirrel chatters from his seat: the bag-pipe beetle hums and drones. The pink and gold in blooming wold,—the green hills mirrored in the lake! The deep, blue waters, zephyr-rolled, along the murmuring pebbles break. The maples screen the ferns, and lean the leafy lindens o'er the deep; The sapphire, set in emerald green, lies like ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... lulled the eves The song-tired birds to sleep, That other things might tell Their secrecies. The beetle humming neath the fallen leaves. Deep in what hollow do the stern gods keep Their bitter silence? By what ...
— Silverpoints • John Gray
... other? she hates me as she'd hate a hump on her back. She'd do me any devilish turn she could. There isn't a feeling of loathing that she doesn't have for me! She'd like to stamp on me and hear me crack, like a black beetle, and she never opens her mouth but she insults me.' Lionel Berrington delivered himself of these assertions without violence, without passion or the sting of a new discovery; there was a familiar gaiety in his trivial little tone and he had the air of being so sure of what ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... you're deef or dumb, or whether you're nummer'n a beetle! It's my bandbox I'm arter. Isr'el in Egypt! you might grind some folks in a mortar an' you ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... See the beetle-bugs, with horns sticking out in every direction. And if here isn't a perfect shape of a lady's slipper! The lady should wear it inside out, so all could see its ...
— Lord Dolphin • Harriet A. Cheever
... commonly: For the great trees an handsome long, light Ladder of Firpoles, a little, nimble, and strong armed Saw, and sharpe. For lesse Trees, a little and sharpe Hatchet, a broad mouthed Chesell, strong and sharpe, with an hand-beetle, your strong and sharpe Cleeuer, with a knock, & (which is a most necessary Instrument amongst little trees) a great hafted and sharpe Knife or Whittle. And as needfull is a Stoole on the top of a Ladder of eight or moe rungs, with two backe-feet, whereon you may safely ...
— A New Orchard And Garden • William Lawson
... he, after a pause, "that I should still hear the language of courtly falsehood? Awake, my friends, for this is not Austria's imperial capital! It is the world which God created, and here upon our mother earth we stand as man to mail. A little shining beetle is creeping on my boot as familiarly as it would on the sabot of a base-born laborer. If my divine right were written upon my brow, would not the insects acknowledge my sovereignty, as in Eden they its golden wings and leave ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... to the funeral dirge of the Bee, And the Beetle who follows as solemn as he; And see, where so mournful the green rushes wave, The Mole ...
— The Butterfly's Funeral - A Sequel to the Butterfly's Ball and Grasshopper's Feast • J. L. B.
... circle, facing inward, with hands behind body. One player who carries in his hand a towel knotted at one end walks outside the circle. After walking or running a short distance, saying "Beetle is out, don't face about," he puts the beetle in the hands of someone, saying "Beetle move," at the same time taking his place. The one receiving the beetle strikes the player to his right, who, trying to avoid the beetle, runs quickly around the circle to his place. If the one to the right ...
— Games and Play for School Morale - A Course of Graded Games for School and Community Recreation • Various
... father, after two years' trial, sent him to Cambridge with the object of his qualifying for a clergyman. But at Christ's College, in that University, he again took his own line—which was not that of divinity—riding, shooting and beetle-hunting being his chief delights. Nevertheless, at Cambridge as at Edinburgh, he seems to have shown an appreciation for good and instructive society, and in Henslow, the judicious and amiable Professor of Botany, the young fellow found ...
— The Coming of Evolution - The Story of a Great Revolution in Science • John W. (John Wesley) Judd
... unintelligent[Applied to persons], unintellectual, unreasoning; mindless, witless, reasoningless[obs3], brainless; halfbaked; having no head &c. 498; not -bright &c. 498; inapprehensible[obs3]. weak headed, addle headed, puzzle headed, blunder headed, muddle headed, muddy headed, pig headed, beetle headed, buffle headed[obs3], chuckle headed, mutton headed, maggoty headed, grossheaded[obs3]; beef headed, fat witted, fat-headed. weak-minded, feeble-minded; dull minded, shallow minded, lack-brained; rattle-brained, rattle headed; half ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... larva grows flat and big and can swim by itself on the honey acid drink of it, and in the course of time a fat, black beetle comes out of the bee-cell. It is certain that this is not what the little bee wished to effect by its work, and however cunningly and cleverly the beetle may have behaved, it is nevertheless nothing but a lazy parasite, ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... Salisbury road it was soon out of sight over the near down, but half an hour later it emerged once more into sight beyond the great dip, and the villagers who had remained standing about at the same spot watched it crawling like a beetle up the long white road on the slope of the vast ...
— Dead Man's Plack and an Old Thorn • William Henry Hudson
... an item. If he marks any thing curious in the natural world, he 'sticks a pin there,' and keeps it for future reference; any thing from a lady-bug ready to unfold suddenly the gauze upon its hard back, where you would think no wings existed, and fly away, to an offensive black beetle that snuffs the candle, or cracks its head against the wall, thence upward in the scale to the bird which Liberty loves as her sublimest emblem, the proudest of the proud, the bird of our own mountains, and the eagle of ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... Worm "is another evil, which generally visits them every few years. A beetle deposits its eggs in the young canes; the caterpillars of these remain in the cane, living on its medullary parts, till they are ready to be metamorphosed into the chrysalis state. Sometimes this evil is so great as to injure a sixth or an eighth ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... American beetle, the Ambrosia beetle, belonging to the family of Scolytidae, which derives its name from its curious cultivation of a succulent fungus, called ambrosia. Ambrosia beetles bore deep though minute galleries into trees and timber, and the wood-dust provides a bed for the growth of the fungus, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... evidently, carrying into her cottage sunshine in a sieve, there being no window in the house: he cuts out a window for her and is well paid for his trouble. He next comes to a house where an old woman is thumping her goodman on the head with a beetle, in order to force over him a shirt without a slit for the neck, which she had drawn over his head: he cuts a slit in the shirt with a pair of scissors, and is amply rewarded for his ingenuity. His third adventure is similar to that of the ...
— The Book of Noodles - Stories Of Simpletons; Or, Fools And Their Follies • W. A. Clouston
... years pleasing objects have been borrowed from the animal kingdom, such as small birds and quadrupeds, and insects with brilliant colors and of strange forms. What formerly would have been a repulsive object (such as a great longicorn or beetle) is worn with ease by the belles of our time. The use of such objects of natural history, however, has been about confined to the decoration of head-dresses or the manufacture ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various
... three long prongs. He is using the rake to draw towards him a lot of varied stuff that is littered about in front of him—more straw and papers, a broken necklace of beads, and a heart-shaped brooch, besides coins and feathers, and other such things. A large black beetle creeps near his feet. A little further in front of him more rubbish lies in a heap—a book of fashions, a fan, still more straw, some artificial roses and withered leaves, an old lamp, a skull, and a king's crown, all battered ...
— Evangelists of Art - Picture-Sermons for Children • James Patrick
... beetle-like Throgs and his civilized alliance with [an eerie world of beautiful witches] is told with that sweeping imagination and brilliance of detail which render Andre Norton a primary talent among writers ...
— Rebel Spurs • Andre Norton
... imagining that, then. Now imagine something else. The violins are playing a melodious plaint; the flutes are singing gently; the double bass drones like a beetle. ...
— Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev
... Osburghs at Peekskill. Mr. Gryce was touched by her disinterestedness, and, to escape from the threatened vacuity of the afternoon, had taken her advice and departed mournfully, in a dust-hood and goggles: as the motor-car plunged down the avenue she smiled at his resemblance to a baffled beetle. Selden had watched her manoeuvres with lazy amusement. She had made no reply to his suggestion that they should spend the afternoon together, but as her plan unfolded itself he felt fairly confident of being ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... dust before a shout from the crowd proclaimed that the Golden Eagle was once more in sight. At first a mere speck against the blue, she rapidly assumed shape and was soon circling above the heads of the onlookers, her engine droning steadily, as if she had been some gigantic beetle. ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... "your plan is to take up some one section of the subject, and thoroughly exhaust that. Universal laws manifest themselves only by particular instances. They say, man is the microcosm, Mr. Locke; but the man of science finds every worm and beetle a microcosm in its way. It exemplifies, directly or indirectly, every physical law in the universe, though it may not be two lines long. It is not only a part, but a mirror, of the great whole. It has a definite relation to the whole world, and the whole world has a relation to it. ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... said "Oh dear!" Becoss a beetle past him, But still he wor unknown to fear, He'd tell yo if yo asked him; He couldn't help for whispering once, This loin's a varry long un, A chap wod have but little chonce Wi thieves, if here ...
— Yorkshire Ditties, Second Series - To which is added The Cream of Wit and Humour - from his Popular Writings • John Hartley
... is not larger even with its feathers than a large beetle. The colour of its feathers is variable, according to the light they are exposed in; in the sun they appear like enamel upon a gold ground, which delights the eyes. The longest feathers of the wings of this bird are not much more than half an inch long; its bill ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... tortures to suggest. First, he said, let Augusta be watched and deprived of sleep for five or six days. Next, he must be strapped to a shutter, with his head hanging over one end; he must have vinegar rubbed into his nostrils; he must have a beetle fastened on to his stomach; and in this position, with his neck aching, his nostrils smarting, and the beetle working its way to his vitals, he must be kept for two days and two nights. And, third, if these measures ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... over the top of the high Venn. The winds wanted to blow it down, as though it were a tiny beetle. They hurled themselves against it, more and more furiously, yelped and howled as though they were wolves, whined round its wheels, snuffed round its sides, made a stand against it in front and tugged at it from behind as though with greedy teeth: away with it! And away with those ...
— The Son of His Mother • Clara Viebig
... of the gold-bug is that of a man who finds a piece of parchment on which is a secret writing telling where Captain Kidd hid his treasure off the coast of South Carolina. The gold-beetle has nothing whatever to do with the real story, and is only introduced to mystify. It is one of the principles of all conjuring tricks to have something to divert the attention. Poe's detective story is a sort of conjuring trick, but it is all the more interesting ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... in about four hours from this, the line passing through some of the richest and best of the tea- and quinine-growing estates—formerly covered with coffee plantations. The horrid coffee-leaf fungus, Hemileia vastatrix—the local equivalent of the phylloxera, or of the Colorado beetle—has ruined half the planters in Ceylon, although there seems to be a fair prospect of a good crop this year, not only of ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... freedman, one-eyed, short, immensely broad, beetle-browed, and grizzled, stood in the door of his wine-shop and watched the crowding press of travellers at the marsh-ford, fore-runners of the throng which nightly descended upon Thorney. Behind him, in the dim recesses of the smoky shop, ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... matters of business. For a business he had; this of somewhat unusual character. It consisted chiefly in the produce of his gun and insect-net. Many a rare specimen of bird and quadruped, butterfly and beetle, captured and preserved by Ludwig Halberger, at this day adorns the public museums of Prussia and other European countries. But for the dispatch and shipment of these he would never have cared to show himself in the streets of Assuncion; for, like ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... this mysterious world is so inscrutable a mystery as the mind of early youth. It crawls, the beetle creature, in a hard shell, hiding the dim, inner struggle of its growing wings, moving numbly as if in a torpid dream. It has forgotten the lively grub stage of childhood, and it cannot foresee the dragon-fly adventure just ahead. This blind, dumb, ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... will have to be calculated on a sentimental basis for the ornamental trees, and on a commercial basis for the commercial trees. The actual value of the spraying has not yet been determined. This spraying cannot reach the mycelium in the cambium layer; if the disease has been carried in by a beetle or woodpecker your spraying ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Third Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... hyacinths, and milkmaids' dances under the thorns, and mummings when the snow fell. And Dick Ashbridge shot and fished in the most disconsolate abandonment, though the girl yet ran past him "like a ghost" when the beetle and bat were abroad, and he was still mooning about ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... like everything they write about even, let alone read,' Alice said. 'Look at "Ruin seize thee, ruthless king!" and all the pieces of poetry about war, and tyrants, and slaughtered saints—and the one you made yourself about the black beetle, Noel.' ...
— The Wouldbegoods • E. Nesbit
... landscape on the sight, And all the air a solemn stillness holds, Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight, And drowsy tinklings lull ...
— Graded Memory Selections • Various
... musketoon, So gallantly you come, I read you for a bold Dragoon, That lists the tuck of drum."— 40 "I list no more the tuck of drum, No more the trumpet hear; But when the beetle sounds his hum My comrades take ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... theme of "Cricket," without ten allusions to the game, or one indication of ever having stopped to watch it. He discourses deliciously upon Anacreon's "Tettix,"—the modern Cicada,—and then calls it a beetle. There is apt, indeed, to be a pervading trace of that kind of conscious effort which is technically called "book-making," and one certainly finds the entertainment a little frothy, at times, compared with the elder essayists. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... to the guard-house, and I'll show you a few of our picked men, who are there on duty; real dare-devils, who care no more for a blue than they do for a black-beetle; and then we'll go to the Angers gate. It's there that Lechelle will show himself; and then—and then—why, then we'll go home, and get some breakfast, for it will be nearly time for us to ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... dusk rather than the ebon blackness of midnight, and listened more to the nightingale than to the screech-owl. They were quietists, and their imagery was crepuscular. They loved the twilight, with its beetle and bat, solitude, shade, the "darkening vale," the mossy hermitage, the ruined abbey moldering in its moonlit glade, grots, caverns, brooksides, ivied nooks, firelight rooms, the curfew bell and the sigh of the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... their tiny feet, and the sweep of their fine light feathery tails. Sometimes they met with some little shrewmice, running on the snow. These very tiny things are so small, they hardly look bigger than a large black beetle; they lived on the seeds of the tall weeds, which they, might be seen climbing and clinging to, yet were hardly heavy enough to weigh down the heads of the dry stalks. It is pretty to see the footprints of these small shrewmice, on the surface of the fresh ...
— Lady Mary and her Nurse • Catharine Parr Traill
... certain that there could be no foundation of truth in the belief that a priest of Isis—or anyone—assumed after death the form of a beetle?' ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... air. I hated to be ha'sh with him, but he needed some education himself, an' it took a beetle an' wedge to open his mind for it. He lifted his chin so high that the fat swelled out on the back of his neck an' unbuttoned his collar. Then he turned an' said: 'My daughter is too good for this town, an' I don't intend that she shall stay here. She ...
— Keeping up with Lizzie • Irving Bacheller
... coffee Borer is a beetle, about as large as a horsefly, which lays its eggs in any convenient crevice, and generally, it is supposed, near the head of the tree, in the bark, or wood of the coffee tree. After the larvae are hatched they ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... "beetle" at the margin of the lake, close under the old house and castle. It was between eight and nine o'clock on a fine summer morning, everything looked bright and beautiful. Though quite alone, and though she could not ...
— J.S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 5 • J.S. Le Fanu
... moon is high o'er the ruined tower, When the night-bird sings in her lonely bower, When beetle and cricket and bat are awake, And the will-o'-the-wisp is at play in the brake, Oh then do we gather, all frolic and glee, We gay little elfins, beneath the old tree! And brightly we hover on silvery wing, ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... the shape of those large, black, night-moths with pale skull-like effigies painted on their backs as upon tombs, beneath whose feet the furniture creaks and crackles, which makes that tiny invisible beetle hidden between the boards of the beds begin tick-tick-ticking like a fairy watch, eleven times in succession, by way of showing that the witching hour of night is ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... laughing, with her sleeves drawn up above her elbows, flourishing the beetle, Angelique struck the clothes most heartily in the pleasure of such healthy exercise. It was hard work, but she thoroughly enjoyed it, and only stopped occasionally to say a few words or to show her shiny face ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola
... omen in a room is undoubtedly due to the presence in the woodwork of the wall of a minute beetle of the timber-boring genus ANOBIUM, it is a strange fact that its ticking should only be heard before the death of someone, who, if not living in the house, is connected with someone who does live in it. From this fact, one is led to suppose that this minute ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... sometimes kept by children as little pets, and allowed to run upon their hands and clothes, and this was not because of their beauty, but because to possess a gooldie was considered very lucky. To kill a beetle brought rain the ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... first of created beings. His orb itself, or later the god in youthful human form, might be pictured as emerging from a lotus on the primaeval waters, or from a marsh-bird's egg, a conception which influenced the later Phoenician cosmogeny. The Scarabaeus, or great dung-feeding beetle of Egypt, rolling the ball before it in which it lays its eggs, is an obvious theme for the early myth-maker. And it was natural that the Beetle of Khepera should have been identified with the Sun at his rising, as the Hawk of Ra represented ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... crystal-clear liquid, held in the thinnest of envelopes, which I tasted and found sweet. In burr after burr I found these sacks or cysts of sweets secreted by the aphides for the bees to puncture and drain. The largest of them would fill a bee at a draught. Some of the burrs contained big fat grubs of a beetle unknown to me,—the creature that had eaten the seeds, bored the hole at the base, and left the burr cleaned and garnished for the aphides. These in turn invited the bees, and the bees, carrying this "honey-dew" home, mixed it ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... ideas enter her mind, and she was beyond measure astonished that any thing relative to Lord Delacour could so far have interested her attention. "Luckily," said she to herself, "he has not the penetration of a blind beetle; and, besides, he has little snug jealousies of his own: so he will never find me out. It would be an excellent thing indeed, if he were to turn my 'master-torment' against myself—it would be a judgment upon me. The manes of poor Lawless would then be appeased. ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... put asunder; the coming down of the axe and the hah! that helped it,—the straight-grained stick opening at the first appeal of the implement as if it were a pleasure, and the stick with a knot in the middle of it that mocked the blows and the hahs! until the beetle and wedge made it listen to reason,—there are just such straight-grained and just such knotty men and women. All this passes through my mind while Biddy, whose parlor-name is Angela, contents herself ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... You never so much as turn the sixteenth part of an eye in his direction, for even as the oyster-man, should the poor mollusc heave the faintest sigh, is inside with his knife in the twinkling of a star; even as a beetle has but to think of moving its tiniest leg for the bird to swoop upon him,—even so will the least muscular interest in your neighbour give you bound hand ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... likely a pirate," I answered, as visions of the old buccaneers floated through my brain; and Edgar Poe's fanciful story of the "Gold Beetle" occurring to me, I sung out, "Whatever you do, keep any parchment you stumble across," and abandoned myself to thoughts of untold wealth, whilst I wielded a quart pot with the energy ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... has made. I see thee in the crowd alone; I will be thy companion. Quit thy friends as the dead in doom, And build to them a final tomb; Let the starred shade that nightly falls Still celebrate their funerals, And the bell of beetle and of bee Knell their melodious memory. Behind thee leave thy merchandise, Thy churches and thy charities; And leave thy peacock wit behind; Enough for thee the primal mind That flows in streams, that breathes in wind: Leave all thy pedant lore apart; God hid the whole world in thy heart. ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... in the distance, I saw Cousin Emily crawling towards me like a black beetle with her half-shut eyes that see everything except beauty and innocence. Though I avoided her and the day was as lovely as ever, I had become conscious that the world was inhabited and that there were people who didn't whistle—or want ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... adjusted a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles and commenced to mumble eagerly to himself. Mrs. Rheinholdt, who did not understand a word, strolled around the apartment, yawned, and finally interrupted a little stream of eulogies, not a word of which she understood, concerning a green beetle with yellow spots. ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... state. The caterpillar emits a smell much resembling that of musk, and Ray and Linnaeus both supposed it to be the Cossus mentioned by Pliny, as fattened with flour by the Roman epicures for their tables. Later writers have, however, for many reasons, ascribed this to the larva of the stag beetle. ...
— The Emperor's Rout • Unknown
... 't is awnly your bigness of heart, as wouldn't hurt a beetle, makes you speak kind of the boozy auld sweep. I'll soon shaw un wheer he's out if he thinks you ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... think religion's like collecting beetles," she said, summing up the discussion as she went up the stairs with Helen. "One person has a passion for black beetles; another hasn't; it's no good arguing about it. What's your black beetle now?" ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... wine-shop, an obscure place which did not inspire confidence. He was a beetle-browed fellow, short, with deep-set furtive eyes, and he struck me as being a thief—or perhaps a receiver of stolen property. The atmosphere of the place ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux
... an omen of evil for that day. To meet an ass, is in like manner unlucky. It is also very unfortunate to walk under a ladder; to forget to eat goose on the festival of St. Michael; to tread upon a beetle, or to eat the twin nuts that are sometimes found in one shell. Woe, in like manner, is predicted to that wight who inadvertently upsets the salt; each grain that is overthrown will bring to him a day of sorrow. If thirteen persons sit at table, one of them will die within ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... poor beetle, that we tread upon. In corporal suffering finds a pang as great As when a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 384, Saturday, August 8, 1829. • Various
... at him in astonishment. He had always imagined professional pugilists to be bullet-headed and beetle-browed to a man. He was not prepared for one of Mr Joe Bevan's description. For all the marks of his profession that he bore on his face, in the shape of lumps and scars, he might have been a curate. His face looked tough, and ...
— The White Feather • P. G. Wodehouse
... day-dream of youth—maturity—middle age—old age—for they have all their daydreams! Every passion which besets man from the cradle to the grave has its own visionary expectations. Each creature, each animal, from the tiger to the beetle, has its besetting insect, which preys upon it, gnaws it, irritates it, and so have all the ages of the soul and of the heart. Alas for human speculation of all kinds! Alas for every hope and aspiration! ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... just look—the ugly, wrinkled frog is not creeping there to frighten you—he is not thinking about it. He is a gentle beast, conscious of no sin, and does not regard you as an enemy. Do you see a blue beetle fanning with his wings? That is one of the worst insects, a wood-borer, of which one grub suffices to spoil a whole young plantation; and our little friend has fixed on him as a prey. Don't disturb him; look, ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... hear around The churme and chirruping of busy reptiles At hideous banquet on the royal dead:— Full soon methought the loathsome epicures Came thick on me, and underneath my shroud I felt the many-foot and beetle creep, And on my breast the cold ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... Alice he got the first line and a half from a book a boy at school was going to write when he had time. Besides this there were the 'Lines on a Dead Black Beetle that ...
— The Story of the Treasure Seekers • E. Nesbit
... Marsden's pony had had enough On the plain, where the chase was hot; We breasted the swell of the Bittern's Bluff, And Mark couldn't raise a trot; When the sea, like a splendid silver shield, To the south-west suddenly lay; On the brow of the Beetle the chestnut reel'd, And I bid good-bye to M'Crea— And I was alone when the mare fell lame, With a pointed flint in her shoe, On the Stony Flats: I had lost the game, And what was ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... last verse when there came, hurtling through the air, the weird cries of the singing beetle, returning, perchance, from successful foray on Palm-tree Rock. This second advent of the insect put an end to the concert. Within a quarter of an ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... the delusion proper to Pierrot," said Pantaloon, contemptuously. "This heavy, beetle-browed ruffian, who has grown old in sin, and whose appetite increases with his years, is Polichinelle. Each one, as you perceive, is designed by Nature for the part he plays. This nimble, freckled jackanapes is Harlequin; ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... "but, Legrand, I fear you are no artist. I must wait until I see the beetle itself, if I am to form any idea of ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... collection of Gray's books and MSS., in December, 1845, I purchased Gray's copy of Dodsley's collection (2nd edition, 1758), with corrections, names of authors, &c., in his own hand. The Elegy is the first poem in vol. iv. In the 2nd stanza, the beetle's "drony flight" is printed and corrected in the margin into "droning." In the 25th stanza, an obvious misprint of "the upland land" is corrected into "upland lawn;" and, in the 27th stanza, "he would rove" is altered into "would he ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 14. Saturday, February 2, 1850 • Various
... and sultry. The clear and glowing daylight was gone, exchanged for the dull, hazy, and depressing atmosphere of a summer's night. The cricket chirped in the walls, and the beetle hummed his drowsy song, wheeling his lumbering and lazy flight ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... indeed appear to be the best sort, but perhaps that is owing partly to their growing wild, and partly to their being too much in the shade of taller trees. The cocoa-nut tree is in great perfection, but does not abound. Here are, I believe, all the different kinds of palm, with the beetle-nut tree, various species of the aloe, canes, bamboos, and rattans, with many trees, shrubs, and plants, altogether unknown to me; but no esculent vegetable of any kind. The woods abound with pigeons, doves, rooks, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... must not for a moment suppose, because no such transitional forms are known, that the members of the sub-kingdoms are disconnected from, or independent of, one another. On the contrary, in their earliest condition they are all similar, and the primordial germs of a man, a dog, a bird, a fish, a beetle, a snail, and a polype are, in no ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... with the current convention, in which we were all brought up; the theory that the heart of humanity broadens in ever larger circles of brotherhood, till we pass from embracing a black man to adoring a black beetle. Unfortunately it is quite inconsistent with the facts of American history. The facts show that, in this problem of the Old South, the eighteenth century was more liberal than the nineteenth century. There was more sympathy for the negro in the school of Jefferson than in the school ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... the Garden of Birds trouble had begun. There were disputes every morning as to which was the earliest bird who was entitled to the worm. There were quarrels over the best places for nest-building and over the fattest bug or beetle; and there was no one to settle these difficulties. Moreover, the robber birds were growing too bold, and there was no one to rule and punish them. There was no doubt about it; the birds needed a king to keep ...
— The Curious Book of Birds • Abbie Farwell Brown
... tales the wooing winds have dared to utter, Till all are ringing, As if a choir Of golden-nested birds in heaven were singing; And with a lulling sound The music floats around, And drops like balm into the drowsy ear; Commingling with the hum Of the Sepoy's distant drum, And lazy beetle ever droning near. Sounds these of deepest silence born, Like night made visible by morn; So silent that I sometimes start To hear the throbbings of my heart, And watch, with shivering sense of pain, To see thy ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... god, and the type of matter which contains within itself the germ of life which is about to spring into a new existence; thus he represented the dead body from which the spiritual body was about to rise. He is depicted in the form of a man having a beetle for a head, and this insect became his emblem because it was supposed to be self-begotten and self-produced. To the present day certain of the inhabitants of the Sudan, pound the dried scarabaeus or beetle and drink it in water, believing that it will insure them a numerous progeny. The name ...
— Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life • E. A. Wallis Budge
... asked himself whether in the best woman's heart there was not a foundation of cruelty, of unconscious ferocity. He felt the tears start to his eyes; he scarcely could restrain them; he abruptly bowed his head, and began to examine a beautiful horned beetle, which was just crossing the gravel-path at a quick pace, apparently having some very important affairs to regulate. When M. Langis raised his head his eyes were dry, his face serene, his ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... his expedition. The box is placed on the table and opened with great ceremony. I can hear the bursts of laughter and the shouts of the merry party when, instead of the looked-for sweets, he finds, neatly arranged on moss or cotton-wool, a beetle, a snail, a bit of coal, a few acorns, a turnip, or some such thing. Another time in a newly whitewashed room, a toy or some small article of furniture would be hung on the wall and the children would have to fetch it without touching the wall. When the ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... glass lamp stood, a droning, slow-winged brown beetle blundering against its chimney. Outside, the distant chant of newly wakened frogs sounded; through the open door the warm air of the April night came straying, bearing the incense of the fields and woodlands, where fires smoldered like sleepers sending ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... himself the occasional privilege of criticising, and a principal share in consuming, the good things which the common entertainment afforded. We have only to sum up this brief account of the learned Doctor, by informing the reader that he was a tall, lean, beetle-browed man, with an ill-made black scratch-wig, that stared out on either side from his lantern jaws. He resided nine months out of the twelve at St. Ronan's, and was supposed to make an indifferent good thing of it,—especially as ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott |
