"Beetle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... (Aphis gossypii). Among the lepidoptera may be mentioned, Cocaecia rosaceana, or "Leaf-roller," so called from its habit of curiously rolling the leaves of the Cotton plant and then feeding inside the roll. Then grasshoppers and locusts occasionally do some damage, as well as a beetle named Ataxia crypta, which is noted for attacking the stalks of the Cotton plants, but it should be pointed out this beetle does not prey upon healthy and ...
— The Story of the Cotton Plant • Frederick Wilkinson
... parroquets, falcons, owls, geese, white and grey herons, and other water fowl; nightingales and other birds of sweet song, many kinds of which have very beautiful plumage. There is one kind of bird very remarkable for its astonishing smallness, not being larger than a grasshopper or large beetle, which however has several very long feathers in its tail. Along the coast there is a species of very large vulture, the wings of which, when extended, measure fifteen or sixteen palms from tip to tip. These birds often make prey of large seals, which they attack ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... respectable man, too, with cows and sheep, and a kind man. He would never put anything that wasn't nice into a poem, and he would never run anyone down; but if you were the worst in the world, he'd make you the best in it; and when his wife lost her beetle, he made a song of fifteen ...
— Poets and Dreamers - Studies and translations from the Irish • Lady Augusta Gregory and Others
... stumbled into a room, radiantly scarlet with roses. The jangling bell attached to the door aroused no curiosity whatever in the white-faced girls bending over these gay garlands. It was a signal, though, for a thick-set beetle-browed young fellow to bounce in from the next room ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... Not a worm that crawls, Or grasshopper that chirps about the grass, Or beetle basking on the sunny walls, Or mail-clad fly that skims the face of glass The river wears in summer;—not a bird That sings the tranquil glory of the fields, Or single sight is seen or sound is heard, But some new pleasure to my ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... boy 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 ...
— Rollo's Experiments • Jacob Abbott
... queen had destroyed her own people in that jeweled sea, a king had fled from those delicate mountains. But now sea and land were for lovers. A fly with shining wings journeyed among the leaves of the myrtles, a beetle crept over the hot sandy ground leaving a minute pattern behind it; and Rosamund and Dion forgot all about Artemisia, as they brooded, wide-eyed, over the activities of the dwellers in the waste. At such ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... wings are like down, my eyes as bright as diamonds. How much you know, writing yourselves down in books as Naturalists! My name is Vespertila; my family are from Servia, at your service. Could you offer me a fly, or a beetle? I was chasing Judge Blue Bottle, or I should not have been trapped. Go to sleep, dears, and leave me to fan you. When you are asleep, I'll bite a hole in your ear, and sup bountifully on ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... a brood of these youngsters find something that puzzles them, as when they meet with a hard-shelled beetle, who looks too big to eat and yet ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, July 1878, No. 9 • Various
... the haze of smoke on to the black beams of the ceiling, the dust-red brick of the walls and floor, and the cavernous depths of the great fireplace. Sitting cross-legged on the table in the centre of the room was the pedlar, a little, dark, beetle-browed man, and at his side were his wares, his pack flung open, and cloths of green and gold and blue and red flung pell-mell at his side. Leaning against the table, her hands on her hips, was the girl, dark like her father, tall and flat-chested, with a mass ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... the forest dark. Now and again a humming night beetle circled round and round her and obstinately pursued her as if he also was a spy sent after her. The poor thing's heart throbbed violently. What if she had lost her way? What if she fell into the hands of the robbers whom they were now actually pursuing through the woods? Yet still greater ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... offered for sale was a beetle. "What is the special advantage of this beetle?" asked ...
— Tales of Giants from Brazil • Elsie Spicer Eells
... said: "Only the kind of person that can't lift a large hammer. It is not a question of force or courage between the sexes. It's a question of lifting power in the shoulders. A bold woman could commit ten murders with a light hammer and never turn a hair. She could not kill a beetle with a ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... the frequently removed and easily cleaned rugs for carpets will greatly lessen the danger from the destructive moth and beetle grubs. Carpets laid on tight floors are much less liable to injury than where numerous cracks furnish safe retreats for the insects. Tarred paper under a carpet is ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume IV. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • Grant Hague
... his mother again, in Picardy, as he had seen her years before, kneeling in front of their door, and washing the heaps of linen, by her side, in the stream that ran through their garden. He almost fancied that he could hear the sound of the wooden beetle with which she beat the linen, in the calm silence of the country, and her voice, as ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... strange relics from Egypt and the East. Tall, angular figures bearing burdens or weapons stalked in an uncouth frieze round the apartments. Above were bull-headed, stork-headed, cat-headed, owl-headed statues, with viper-crowned, almond-eyed monarchs, and strange, beetle-like deities cut out of the blue Egyptian lapis lazuli. Horus and Isis and Osiris peeped down from every niche and shelf, while across the ceiling a true son of Old Nile, a great, hanging-jawed crocodile, was ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... else in their 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 pulsate through their ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... extensive injury to this crop. It is true that ants do sometimes destroy a few hills on certain soils, by sucking the cotyledons of the plant before it has attained any considerable size and strength. But this is, by no means, general. Even the voracious and ubiquitous Colorado Beetle manifests no taste for this plant, although it has had abundant opportunity to test its edible qualities. To the credit of insects generally, be it said, ...
— The Peanut Plant - Its Cultivation And Uses • B. W. Jones
... I do fear thee, Claudio; and I quake, 75 Lest thou a feverous life shouldst entertain, And six or seven winters more respect Than a perpetual honour. Darest thou die? The sense of death is most in apprehension; 75 And the poor beetle, that we tread upon, In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great As ...
— Measure for Measure - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... '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 'm tinkering ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... did not like it and stopped nibbling almost at once, after which he looked at it again, moving the soft sensitive end of his nose rapidly for a second or so, and then hopped away to attend to his own affairs. A very large and handsome green stag-beetle crawled from one end of The Rat's crutches to the other, but, having done it, he went away also. Two or three times a bird, searching for his dinner under the ferns, was surprised to find the two sleeping figures, but, as they lay so quietly, there seemed nothing ...
— The Lost Prince • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... carbon bisulphide, benzene, and petroleum. If a solution of picric acid be boiled with a strong solution of potassium cyanide, a deep red liquid is produced, owing to the formation of potassium iso-purpurate, which crystallises in small reddish-brown plates with a beetle-green lustre. This, by reaction with ammonium chloride, gives ammonium iso-purpurate (NH{4}C{8}H{4}N{5}O{6}), or artificial murexide, which dies silk and wool a beautiful red colour. On adding barium chloride to either of the above salts, a vermilion-red precipitate ...
— Nitro-Explosives: A Practical Treatise • P. Gerald Sanford
... a thousand lives saved from decay and death. One death, and a hundred beings restored to existence! There's a calculation for you. What in proportion is the life of this miserable old woman? No more than the life of a flea, a beetle, nay, not even that, for she is pernicious. She preys on other lives. She lately bit Elizabeth's finger, in a fit of passion, and nearly bit ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... is a very handsome beetle, about three-quarters of an inch long, cylindrical in form, of a pale brown color, with two broad, creamy white stripes running the whole length of its body; the face and under surface are hoary white, the antennae and legs gray. The females are larger than the males, and have ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 443, June 28, 1884 • Various
... walking-stick insects (exactly like dry twigs), and the fierce, tall, praying mantis with their mock air of meekness and devotion. Let one of the other insects stray within reach and their piety was quickly enough abandoned! One beetle about three-eighths of an inch across was oblong in shape and of pure glittering gold. His wing covers, on the other hand, were round and transparent. The effect was of a jewel under a tiny glass case. Other beetles were of red dotted with black, or of black dotted with red; they sported ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... of the Merced—bravest and strongest river of the valley—were coloured like beds of purple pansies; or they were vivid green, glinting with sparks of gold, like the wings of a Brazilian beetle. Far down in the clear depths, Angela caught glimpses of darting fish, swift as silver arrows shot from an unseen bow. And close to the sky, high on the rocky sides of the Yosemite treasure-chest, were curiously traced bas-reliefs, which might have been carved by ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... verify. General Osten-Sacken 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 ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... me where amid the tranquil vale The broken stream flows on in silver light, And I will linger where the gale O'er the bank of violets sighs, Listening to hear its soften'd sounds arise; And hearken the dull beetle's drowsy flight, And watch the horn-eyed snail Creep o'er his long moon-glittering trail, And mark where radiant thro' the night Moves in the grass-green ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... Association, and collecting shocking details for subsequent magic-lantern lectures on the liquor traffic; so fearful misunderstandings arose, but we gradually educated each other, and I had the best of the affair; for all I had got to teach them was that I was only a beetle and fetish hunter, and so forth, while they had to teach me a new world, and a very fascinating course of study I found it. And whatever the Coast may have to say against me—for my continual desire for hair-pins, ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... sensation to note the utterly urbane and cheerful countenance with which Mr. Vanringham disclosed the meditated atrocity. This unprincipled young man was about to run me through with no more compunction than a naturalist in the act of pinning a new beetle among his collection may momentarily be ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... History of Europe during the last quarter of a century, than I was when the news came fresh and fresh in the newspapers. I do not think I had sense enough to take in the relations and proportions of the events. It was like moving a magnifying glass over the parts of a beetle, and not taking ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... destinies, as she, too, was working out hers, and each doubtless looking upon their own as the central point of the universe. A few months for the gnat, a few years for the girl, but each was happy now in the heavy summer air. A beetle scuttled out upon the gravel path and bored onwards, its six legs all working hard, butting up against stones, upsetting itself on ridges, but still gathering itself up and rushing onwards to some all-important appointment somewhere in the grass plot. A ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... stillness reign'd. The breath A moment hush'd, 'twas mimic death. The ear, from all assaults releas'd, As motion, sound, and life, had ceas'd. The beetle rarely murmur'd by, No sheep-dog sent his voice so high, Save when, by chance, far down the steep, Crept a live speck, a straggling sheep; Yet one lone object, plainly seen, Curv'd slowly, in a line of green, On the brown ...
— The Banks of Wye • Robert Bloomfield
... and on the stage, the vulgar will never cease to be vulgar, though the sun and moon may change their course, and "heaven and earth wax old as a garment." Perhaps, in order to please tender-hearted people, I might have been less true to nature; but if a certain beetle, of whom we have all heard, could extract filth even from pearls, if we have examples that fire has destroyed and water deluged, shall therefore pearls, fire, and water be condemned. In consequence of the remarkable catastrophe which ends my play, I may justly claim for ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... the difficulty must be got over somehow, and at any rate the plan seems to promise better than anything I had thought of. The first difficulty is how to get the ruffians for such a business. I cannot go up to the first beetle browed knave I meet in the street and say to him, 'Are you disposed to aid me in ...
— By England's Aid or The Freeing of the Netherlands (1585-1604) • G.A. Henty
... great merit," he said, "in telling how many plays have ghosts in them, and how this ghost is better than that. You must show how terror is impressed on the human heart. In the description of night in Macbeth the beetle and the bat detract from the ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... because it is found in a species of palm vulgarly called the groogroo—is the larva of a large-sized beetle, the Prionus, which is peculiar to the warm latitudes of America. With the exception of a slight similarity about the region of the head, the worm bears no resemblance to the parent beetle. When full-grown, it is about ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 451 - Volume 18, New Series, August 21, 1852 • Various
... old man, tugging his pony round. "Be careful, nephew, be careful; I do not wish to be crushed like a beetle." ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... is sometimes known as ladybug, and the bug is the little, round, reddish beetle whose wings are black dotted. It is a pretty, harmless beetle that gardeners like to see around their plants. Children repeat the rhyme when they find the beetle in the house and always release it to "fly away ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... breathe in balm; And the bat flickers up in the sky, And the beetle hums moaningly by; And to rest in the brake speeds the deer, While the nightingale ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... how clearly I can see that spring day, with the green English fields, the windy English sky, and the yellow, beetle- browed cottage in which I had grown from a child to a man. I see, too, the figures at the garden gate: my mother, with her face turned away and her handkerchief waving; my father, with his blue coat and his white shorts, leaning upon his stick with his hand shading his ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... all the copper pots and pans in line, A burnished army of bright utensils, shine; And the stern butler heedless of his bunion Looks happy, and the tabby-cat of the house Forgets the elusive, but recurrent mouse And purrs and dreams; And in his corner the black-beetle seems A plumed Black Prince arrayed in gleaming mail; Whereat the shrinking scullery-maid grows pale, And flies for succour to THOMAS of the calves, Who, doing nought by halves, Circles a gallant arm about her waist, And takes ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, June 4, 1892 • Various
... strikes were swingled again, and from the refuse called swingle-tree hurds, coarse bagging could be spun and woven. After being thoroughly cleaned the rolls or strikes were sometimes beetled, that is, pounded in a wooden trough with a great pestle-shaped beetle over and over again ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... regarding the man whom I had looked upon as a friend flitted through my brain, I saw to my amazement, standing boldly before me, the woman Petre with two men, one a dark-bearded, beetle-browed, middle-aged man of Hindu type—a half-caste probably—while the other was the young man who ...
— The Sign of Silence • William Le Queux
... by any argument convince this beetle-head that I was simply speaking the barbarous ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... 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 is about the same length, and pointed ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... Trebizond came and sat at our table. He wore carpet socks, and over them slippers with long toes curled upperward like certain specimens one may see in Bethnal Green Museum; on his head a straw-plaited, rusty fez swathed with green silk of the colour of a sun-beetle. ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... even try to?" said he. "I am not sure. You know that according to the old saw the beetle gets used to living in dung; and these people, whether they found the dung sweet or ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... manner would be intolerable in an emperor to a black-beetle,"' quoted Beverley. 'Well, what are we ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... back is caused by a beetle which bores into the twigs. The twigs above the point where the beetle enters dies and then, of course, buds come out from healthy wood below. No treatment has been devised against it, though its breeding ground is limited if all dead wood and brush and litter is cleaned up and twigs are cut ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... sport, guides would be placed at their disposal, and that all who wished to do so could at any time travel through the country without the slightest fear of molestation. For some time affairs remained in the same condition. The doctor went daily on shore with butterfly and beetle nets, tin boxes, and other paraphernalia. He was generally accompanied by a couple of bluejackets, and always took a native guide to prevent the risk of being lost in the jungle, and also because the man was able to take him to places where villages had stood, and it was in these ...
— Among Malay Pirates - And Other Tales Of Adventure And Peril • G. A. Henty
... seized one in each hand; then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so that I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas! it ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... while in others there is great variety of larval form within the order. For example, the caterpillars of all Lepidoptera are fundamentally much alike, while the grubs of beetles of different families diverge widely from one another. A review of a selected series of beetle-larvae will therefore serve well to introduce this ...
— The Life-Story of Insects • Geo. H. Carpenter
... I forbid it. She'd drive me mad. No—but my head's running round like a beetle on a pin. I think you'd better go now. But don't go to-morrow. I mean I think I'll go to sleep. I feel as if I'd tumbled off the Eiffel tower and been caught on a cloud—one side of it's cold and the ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... wedges, a beetle [that is, a large wooden hammer], and a few men of my own choice, and I'll take her," he said to General Amherst. He meant to row under the stern of the ship and wedge her rudder so that she would be helpless. Whether the plan was carried ...
— Once Upon A Time In Connecticut • Caroline Clifford Newton
... Realism,—i.e. the treatment of sacred and all other subjects in a realistic manner. He is described in Crowe and Cavalcaselle from Filippino Lippi's Martyrdom of St. Peter, as a sullen and sensual man, with beetle brows, large fleshy mouth, etc., etc. Probably he was a strong man, and intense in physical and ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... dexterity, prudence, and activity which every animal has ceaselessly to make through its whole life; if, approaching the matter more closely, we contemplate the untiring diligence of wretched little ants, the marvellous and ingenious industry of the bees, or observe how a single burying-beetle (Necrophorus vespillo) buries a mole of forty times its own size in two days in order to deposit its eggs in it and insure nourishment for the future brood (Gleditsch, Physik. Bot. Oekon. Abhandl., III, 220), at the same time calling to ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... grasp, only to slip away again, through unforeseen circumstances, and my ill luck reminds me of a story and picture in a comic paper that the boys were chuckling over last night. It was of a well-intentioned beetle who fattened a nice green caterpillar for its family's thanksgiving dinner, and the thing went and spun itself into a ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... 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 males ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... 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 close ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... at her like an entomologist over a favorite beetle. Take her for what she seems, and chuck analysis. She is decorative. She satisfies the ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... Pyetushkov was on the point of getting up, and twenty times he huddled miserably under the sheepskin.... At last he really did get down from the stove and determined to go home, and positively went out into the yard, but came back. Praskovia Ivanovna got up. The hired man, Luka, black as a beetle, though he was a baker, put the bread into the oven. Pyetushkov went again out on to the steps and pondered. The goat that lived in the yard went up to him, and gave him a little friendly poke with his horns. Pyetushkov looked at him, and for some unknown reason said 'Kss, Kss.' Suddenly ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... this great sacred Word,—for so the consecrated animals were called, [Greek (transliterated): ieroi logoi,]—became multiplied, till almost every power and supposed attribute of nature had its symbol in some consecrated animal from the beetle to the hawk. Wherever the powers of nature had found a cycle for themselves, in which the powers still produced the same phenomenon during a given period, whether in the motions of the heavenly orbs, or in the smallest living organic body, there the Egyptian sages predicated life and mind. Time, ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... close to him a brown beetle, sitting on a blackberry leaf. Teddy looked at the beetle for a while in silence, and then he said, "Well, ...
— The Counterpane Fairy • Katharine Pyle
... grasshoppers, and crickets attack the coffee-tree leaves, the so-called "leaf-miner" being especially troublesome. The Mediterranean fruit fly deposits larvae which destroy or lessen the worth of the coffee berry by tunneling within and eating the contents of the parchment. The coffee-berry beetle and its grub also ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... about us, thick as daisies in a summer meadow. For my own part, I know not what a walk, or a talk, or a peep into a book may lead me to. Brunel hit upon the notion of a tunnel-shield, from the casual sight of a certain water-beetle, to whom the God of Nature had given a protecting buckler for its head. Newton found out gravitation, by reasoning on the fall of an apple from the tree. Almost every invention has been the suggestion of an accident. Even so, to descend from great things to small, did a solitary stroll in ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... feet and legs should be renewed with oil colors as they fade almost entirely; if of a dark or neutral color originally, a coating of transparent varnish will do. There is a variety of beetle which delights in dining on such hard parts of mounted birds if not protected by ...
— Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit • Albert B. Farnham
... of a dark tawny colour, and had long black hair; they chewed a great deal of beetle, and wore a square piece of cloth round their hips, in the folds of which was stuck a large knife. They had a handkerchief wrapped round their heads, and at their shoulders hung another tied by the four corners, which served as a bag for their ...
— A Narrative Of The Mutiny, On Board His Majesty's Ship Bounty; And The Subsequent Voyage Of Part Of The Crew, In The Ship's Boat • William Bligh
... the shed and showed her the traveling-cranes that could pick up a locomotive between their long fingers and carry it across the long room like a captured beetle. ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... lie on your face, like me?' began Shubin. 'It's ever so much nicer so; especially when you kick up your heels and clap them together—like this. You have the grass under your nose; when you're sick of staring at the landscape you can watch a fat beetle crawling on a blade of grass, or an ant fussing about. It's really much nicer. But you've taken up a pseudo-classical pose, for all the world like a ballet-dancer, when she reclines upon a rock of paste-board. You should ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... beautiful co-adaptations most plainly in the woodpecker and the mistletoe; and only a little less plainly in the humblest parasite which clings to the hairs of a quadruped or feathers of a bird; in the structure of the beetle which dives through the water; in the plumed seed which is wafted by the gentlest breeze: in short, we see beautiful adaptations everywhere and in every part ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... a chair to the corner of the hearth and sat heavily down. He bent forward, a brooding, melancholy figure, a thin old veteran, grey and scarred. The fire-light showed strongly square jaw, hawk nose, and beetle brows. When he spoke, it was in a voice inexpressibly sombre. "I have seen my niece but three times since September. If you ask me now what you asked me then, I shall answer differently. I do not know—I do not know if ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... forge, malleate, beetle, weld, hammer; belabor, maul, buffet, smite, flagellate, whack, pelt, strike; See whip; overcome, vanquish, surpass, conquer, eclipse, subdue, checkmate, rout, excel, outdo; cheat, swindle, defraud; throb, pulsate; pulverize, comminute, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... difficulty must be got over somehow, and at any rate the plan seems to promise better than anything I had thought of. The first difficulty is how to get the ruffians for such a business. I cannot go up to the first beetle-browed knave I meet in the street and say to him, Are you disposed to aid me in the abduction ...
— By England's Aid • G. A. Henty
... Frontier of —-. A Cavalry outpost recently arrived is sitting in a hollow in a vile temper, morosely gouging hunks of tepid bully beef out of red tins. Several thousand mosquitos are assiduously eating the outpost. There is nothing to do except to kill the beasts and watch the antics of the scavenger beetle, who extracts a precarious livelihood from the sand by rolling all refuse into little balls and burying them. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 10, 1916 • Various
... Edgar Noble whom they were coaxing. He did n't want to go a bit,—I 'll say that for him,—but they were determined that he should. I didn't mind his going to dinners and minstrels, of course, but when they spoke of being out until after midnight, or to-morrow morning, and when one beetle-browed, vulgar-looking creature offered to lend him a 'tenner,' I thought of the mortgage on the Noble ranch, and the trouble there would be if Edgar should get into debt, and I felt I must do something to stop him, especially ...
— Polly Oliver's Problem • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... and all living creatures. And the sixth Redeemer was a tall shadow-colored person with two long gray plumes affixed to his shaven head: he carried a sceptre and a thing which, Miramon said, was called an ankh, and the beast he rode on was surprising to observe, for it had the body of a beetle, with human arms, and the head of a ram, and the four ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... The stag-beetle dies slowly (it was John who collected the beetles). Even on the second day its legs were supple. But the butterflies were dead. A whiff of rotten eggs had vanquished the pale clouded yellows which came pelting across the orchard and up Dods Hill and away on to ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... were among the first to arrive, Julia in a dress of rich black silk, with some green about it, and a number of iridescent beetle-wings serving as a relief. Miss Netty Cahere was a vision of ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... 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 ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... flowered gowns and evening skies and women with scarfs about their shoulders. Ah! what a beautiful evening it was! And how well do I remember the poet comparing the darkening sky to a blue veil with the moon like a gold beetle upon it. One of the women had brought a guitar with her, and again Augusta's voice streamed up through the stillness, till, compelled by the beauty of the singing, we drew nearer; as the composer sang her songs ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... then or repelled by their proximity. I think that our incurable anthropomorphism made us imagine there were human heads inside their masks. The skin, like everything else, looked bluish, but that was on account of the light; and it was hard and shiny, quite in the beetle-wing fashion, not soft, or moist, or hairy, as a vertebrated animal's would be. Along the crest of the head was a low ridge of whitish spines running from back to front, and a much larger ridge curved on either side over the eyes. ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... 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
... did not die even when the Salem people came to their senses. In the Merrimac valley the devil found converts for many years after: Goody Mose, of Rocks village, who tumbled down-stairs when a big beetle was killed at an evening party, some miles away, after it had been bumping into the faces of the company; Goody Whitcher, of Ameshury, whose loom kept banging day and night after she was dead; Goody Sloper, of West Newbury, who went home lame directly that a man had struck his axe into the beam ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... decay. One death, and a hundred lives in exchange—it's simple arithmetic! Besides, what value has the life of that sickly, stupid, ill-natured old woman in the balance of existence! No more than the life of a louse, of a black-beetle, less in fact because the old woman is doing harm. She is wearing out the lives of others; the other day she bit Lizaveta's finger out of spite; it ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... his own particular kind of "game" which he caught in the net, transferring the specimens to the boxes he carried. There were beautiful butterflies, moths and strange bugs in the securing of which the scientist evinced great delight, though when one beetle nipped him firmly and painfully on his thumb his involuntary cry of pain was as real as ...
— Tom Swift in the Land of Wonders - or, The Underground Search for the Idol of Gold • Victor Appleton
... little beetle was used formerly in the neighbourhood of Llanidloes as a prognosticator of the weather. First of all the lady-bird was placed in the palm of the left hand, or right; I do not think it made any difference which hand was used, and the person ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... 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 listening well Where ...
— Silverpoints • John Gray
... to our Scottish Reminiscences of judges and lawyers, if we omitted the once celebrated Court of Session jeu d'esprit called the "Diamond Beetle Case." This burlesque report of a judgment was written by George Cranstoun, advocate, who afterwards sat in court as judge under the title of Lord Corehouse. Cranstoun was one of the ablest lawyers of his time; he was a prime scholar, and ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... is hushed, save where the weak-eyed bat, With short, shrill shriek, flits by on leathern wing; Or where the beetle winds His small but ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... works of man arose Up from the plains; the caves reverberated The blows of restless hammers that revealed, Deep in the bowels of the fruitful hills, The iron and the faithless gold, with rays Of evil charm. And all the cliffs repeated The beetle's fall, and the unceasing leap Of waters on the paddles of the wheel Volubly busy; and with heavy strokes Upon the borders of the inviolate woods The ax was heard descending on the trees, Upon the odorous bark of mighty pines. Over the ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... quartzose sand, varying in thickness from two to twenty-seven feet. Below this sand are forty-five beds of alternating lignite and clay. No shells or bones of mammalia, and no insect, with the exception of one fragment of a beetle (Buprestis); in a word, no organic remains, except plants, have as yet been found. These plants occur in fourteen of the beds— namely, in two of the clays, and the rest in the lignites. One of the beds is a perfect mat of the debris of a coniferous ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... the shoulders of priests by means of staves passing through rings in its sides, and was taken into the temple and deposited on a stand. Some of these arks contained, says Wilkinson (Notes to Herod. II. 58, n. 9), the elements of life and stability, and others the sacred beetle of the sun, overshadowed by the wings of two figures of the goddess Thmei. In all this we see the type of the Jewish ark. The introduction of the ark into the ceremonies of Freemasonry evidently is in reference to its loss and recovery; and hence its ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... came through the open window,—the croaking of frogs and tree-toads, the chirping and whistling of insects and reptiles, while I could see a party of fireflies glistening among the curtains of the bed. Now and then a huge beetle would make its way into the room, and go buzzing about round and round, till to my infinite relief it darted out of the window! But the noises and the stings of the mosquitoes drove sleep from my eyelids. Presently I heard some one talking outside; ...
— Paddy Finn • W. H. G. Kingston
... the winged wardens of your farms, Who from the cornfields drive the insidious foe, And from your harvests keep a hundred harms; Even the blackest of them all, the crow, Renders good service as your man-at-arms, Crushing the beetle in his coat of mail, And crying havoc on ...
— Conservation Reader • Harold W. Fairbanks
... beetle-headed, flap-ear'd knave! Come, Kate, sit down; I know you have a stomach. Will you give thanks, sweet Kate, or else shall I?— What's ...
— The Taming of the Shrew • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... sign that they would not remain impenetrably closed for ever. And the flowers sent out colour and fragrance into the whole world, for they kept not their best for themselves, but would imitate the sun and the stars, which poured their warmth and radiance over the spring. And many a little gnat and beetle burst the narrow cell in which it was enclosed and crept out slowly, and, half asleep, unfolded and shook its tender wings, and soon gained strength, and flew off to untried delights. And as the butterflies came forth from their chrysalids in all their gaiety and splendour, so did every ...
— Peter Schlemihl etc. • Chamisso et. al.
... observe in what ground most are, for there the Crows will be very watchful, and follow the Plough very close) it is all soft, and full of whitish guts; a worm that is in Norfolk, and some other Countries called a Grub, and is bred of the spawn or eggs of a Beetle, which she leaves in holes that she digs in the ground under Cow or Horse-dung, and there rests all Winter, and in March or April comes to be first a red, and then a black Beetle: gather a thousand or two of these, and put ...
— The Compleat Angler - Facsimile of the First Edition • Izaak Walton
... within, so that your finger can feel the soft glow in the centre of the blossoms. But it is not for you to penetrate into the secret of their love mystery. Leave that to the downy bee, the soft-winged moth, the flying beetle, who, seeking their own pleasure, carry the life-bestowing pollen from flower to flower. Your heavy hand would bruise the soft flesh and discolor its purity. Be content to feast your eyes upon its beauty, and breathe its wonderful fragrance, floating on the air like the breath of love ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... were not at all crowded, but their leaves were so thick, and their boughs spread so far, that it was only here and there a sunbeam could get straight through. All the gentle creatures of a forest were there, but no creatures that killed, not even a weasel to kill the rabbits, or a beetle to eat the snails out of their striped shells. As to the butterflies, words would but wrong them if they tried to tell how gorgeous they were. The princess's delight was so great that she neither laughed ...
— A Double Story • George MacDonald
... 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 twig ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... or "cucujo," found also in Mexico and the West Indies. It resembles our large spring-beetle. The light proceeds from two eye-like spots on the thorax and from the segments underneath. It feeds on the sugar-cane. On the Upper Amazon we found the P. clarus, P. pellucens, and P. tuberculatus. At Bahia, on the ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... Sahib, a representative of the dominant race, helpless as a child and completely at the mercy of his native neighbors, In a deliberate lazy way he set himself to torture me as a schoolboy would devote a rapturous half-hour to watching the agonies of an impaled beetle, or as a ferret in a blind burrow might glue himself comfortably to the neck of a rabbit. The burden of his conversation was that there was no escape "of no kind whatever," and that I should stay here till I died and ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... of Tuscany, was seen to flash its sudden sparks among the foliage, while the cicala, with its shrill note, became more clamorous than even during the noon-day heat, loving best the hour when the English beetle, ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... During the whole of that day and the next they were almost continuously engaged in dragging the sledges over masses of ice, some of which rose to thirty feet above the general level. If the reader will try to imagine a very small ant or beetle dragging its property over a newly macadamised road, he will have a faint conception of the nature of the work. To some extent the dogs were a hindrance rather than a help, especially when passing over broken fragments, for they were always tumbling into holes and cracks, out of which they ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... have I, an entire stranger, to come blundering along like a June beetle and disturb your rest? You did not look forward to associations with night editors and like disreputable people when you chose this sheltered nook of the world, and nestled under Mrs. Yocomb's wing. You have the prior ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... garden you have to make war on the weeds, bugs and beetles," said Mr. Blake. "A bean-leaf beetle is eating ...
— Daddy Takes Us to the Garden - The Daddy Series for Little Folks • Howard R. Garis
... many remarkable incidents then in embryo would have passed into the mists of what might have been. For instance, she would not have deigned to notice Count Edouard Marigny's further existence. The next time she met him he would fill a place in the landscape comparable to that occupied by a migratory beetle. But her heart was leaping for joy, and her cry of thankfulness quite drowned in her ears the ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... beetle pierced on the needle of Fate; A wretch in a cosmic death-cell, peaks for my prison bars; 'Whelmed by a world stupendous, lonely and listless I wait, Drowned in a sea of silence, strewn with confetti ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... Enger made light of the story when it was told to him, and, with remarkable insight for a character in a witch story, "supposed they were drunke." But a few days later the same servant fell into conversation with Mother Sutton, when a beetle came and struck him. He fell into a trance, and then went home and told his master. The next night the servant said that Mary Sutton entered his room—the ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... kind," cried I, too angry to be civil. "Of course I know I am one of the people. What do you mean? Am I to maintain that black beetles are cherubim, because I am a black beetle? Truth is truth. The Crown is God's, not the people's. When He chose to make the present King—King James of course, not that wretched Elector— the son of his father, He distinctly told the people whom He wished them to have for their king. What ...
— Out in the Forty-Five - Duncan Keith's Vow • Emily Sarah Holt
... entertained him in the French language in a dark parlour smelling of onions. And oh! issuing from the adjoining dining-room (where was a dingy vision of a feast and pewter pots upon a darkling tablecloth), could that lean, scraggy, old, beetle-browed yellow face, who cried, "Ou es tu donc, maman?" with such a shrill nasal voice—could that elderly vixen be that blooming and divine Saltarelli? Clive drew her picture as she was, and a likeness of Madame Rogomme, her mamma; a Mosaic youth, profusely jewelled, and scented at once with ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... 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
... deposits of gold, silver, lead, and iron. There are also extensive coal-beds; hence the leading industries are mining and iron working. The eastern portion is a level, treeless plain, adapted for grazing. Agriculture, carried on with irrigation, suffers from insect plagues like the Colorado potato beetle. The climate is dry and clear, and attracts invalids. Acquired partly from France in 1804, and the rest from Mexico in 1848; the territory was organised in 1861, and admitted to the Union in 1876. The capital is Denver (107). ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... 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 rich his color,—the bright russet of his back, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • 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 ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... We have with us Professor Herrick, who will present his paper on the subject of the scolytus beetle. Professor Herrick has prepared his paper at our request since we ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Second Annual Meeting - Ithaca, New York, December 14 and 15, 1911 • Northern Nut Growers Association
... shoes, adjusted a contrivance resembling a black beetle on the knot to prevent its untying. He also wore “hygienic suspenders,” a discovery of great importance (over three thousand patents have been taken out for this one necessity of the toilet!). This brace performs several tasks at the same time, ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... emotion, was troubled and moved and yet wildly happy. She looked away down the centre avenue, and she began to speak fast with a little catch in her breath, and Hector clinched his hands together and gazed at a beetle in the grass, or otherwise he would have taken her ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn
... hundred thousand pound a mile, paid in adwance afore the coach was on the road? And as to the ingein, - a nasty, wheezin', creakin', gaspin', puffin', bustin' monster, alvays out o' breath, vith a shiny green-and-gold back, like a unpleasant beetle in that 'ere gas magnifier, - as to the ingein as is alvays a pourin' out red-hot coals at night, and black smoke in the day, the sensiblest thing it does, in my opinion, is, ven there's somethin' in the vay, and ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens
... 422 B.C.—tenth year of the War. Further insists on the same theme, and enlarges on the blessings of Peace. The hero Trygaeus flies to Olympus, mounted on a beetle, to bring back the goddess Peace ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... response. The door was unlocked and angrily jerked open by a short, squarely formed, beetle-browed, stern-looking woman, clothed in a black stuff gown and having a stiff ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth
... 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 ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... Beauty of Mind The Beetle who went on his Travels The Bell The Bell-deep The Bird of Popular Song The Bishop of Borglum and his Warriors The Bottle ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... the voice of one of the parent birds, and we quickly paddled to the other side of the stream, fifty feet away, to watch her proceedings, saying to each other, "Too bad! too bad!" The mother bird had a large beetle in her beak. She alighted upon a limb a few feet above the former site of her nest, looked down upon us, uttered a note or two, and then dropped down confidently to the point in the vacant air where the entrance to her nest had been but ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... familiar worms found in ripe chestnuts, hickory-nuts and hazel nuts. The large hole in the shell of the nut is made by the full grown worm as it escapes to enter the ground, where it completes its transformation into a beetle. An interesting thing in connection with these weevils is that each species confine its attacks to one particular kind of nut. Even those species that attack acorns show a decided tendency to distinguish between oak species and confine ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Eleventh Annual Meeting - Washington, D. C. October 7 AND 8, 1920 • Various
... foreign pollen by selecting for pollinating purposes a flower which has not quite opened. If the standard is not erected, it is unlikely to have been visited by Megachile. Lastly, it not infrequently happens that the little beetle Meligethes is found inside the keel. Such flowers should ...
— Mendelism - Third Edition • Reginald Crundall Punnett |
