"Caterpillar" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he was hard at work booting himself; though by no law of propriety that I ever heard of, is any man required to be private when putting on his boots. But Queequeg, do you see, was a creature in the transition state — neither caterpillar nor butterfly. He was just enough civilized to show off his outlandishness in the strangest possible manner. his education was not yet completed. He was an undergraduate. If he had not been a small degree civilized, ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... Violet. 'Go it, old kangaroo,' howls Dig. 'Take your time and tuck in that shoe-lace,' says Marky. 'A million to one on our man,' says I; and then up goes the bar to 5 foot 5; and then you could have heard a caterpillar wink. Old Barnworth looked a little green himself this time; and didn't seem in a hurry to begin. He muffed his first jump, and we all thought the game was up. But no! The beggar hopped over second time as ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed
... insinuating address, and displayed a set of teeth that rivalled crimped skate in their whiteness—a month afterwards they became man and wife. For some years they toiled on together—he, like a caterpillar, getting a living out of cabbages, and she, like an undertaker, out of departed soles! Latterly, however, Jack discovered that his spouse was rather addicted to 'summut short,' in fact, that she drank like a fish, although the beverage she ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... thy butterfly wings in thy light summer garment, thou that hoverest aloft, and flittest over the mountains, and sweepest along the earth! from the airy changeling of the caterpillar, up or down to the lion and to man, ye all of you, fostering a brief momentary spark in you, like the glance from the flint and steel ... gone is the red bubbling up of the spark ... and again a mere slough is lying before us, after its short dream of life and ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... he took a glimpse on me, in all his Irish calibre he almost screamed: Help! St. Patrick, what a metamorphosis is this? Is that you, Father? You look now to me more like a butterfly out of a caterpillar than anything in Ireland. Say, girls, calling his friends from the outside, come in you girls, I take the honor to introduce you to the Father ..., but, my soul, I am ashamed to call you Father, so fashionable a gentleman as you look now. You shall not call me Father, said I, as long as ...
— Conversion of a High Priest into a Christian Worker • Meletios Golden
... never were any fun, as a girl, Dora," observed Mr. Lockwood, at the supper table that night, when his sister uttered her usual criticisms of the twins' conduct. "You squealed if you came across a caterpillar, and a garter snake sent you into spasms, and it tired you to walk half a ...
— The Girls of Central High on Lake Luna - or, The Crew That Won • Gertrude W. Morrison
... caterpillar bowed Down a leaf of Ygdrasil Like a sunset-coloured cloud Sleeping on a quiet hill: Once we came upon a moth Fast asleep with outspread wings, Like a mighty tissued cloth Woven for the ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... caterpillar in a dream, denotes that low and hypocritical people are in your immediate future, and you will do well to keep clear of deceitful appearances. You may suffer a ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... Dudley, that "caterpillar of the commonwealth," who lost his head in the first year of Henry VIII. as a reward for the grist which he brought to the mill of Henry VII.; his father, the mighty Duke of Northumberland, who rose out of the wreck of an obscure and ruined family to ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... is interesting! Pray go and sit on the eggs you have been entrusted with! [To another HEN.] You, walk among the roses and verbenas, and gobble every creature threatening them. Ha, ha! If the caterpillar thinks we will make him a gift of our flowers he can stroke his belly—with his back! [To another.] You, hie to the rescue of cabbages in old neglected corners, where the grasshopper lays siege to them with his vigorous battering-ram! [To the remaining HENS.] You—[Catching ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand
... sentries along the low, reeflike island which stretched away out of the picture. There was the gigantic, lonely pine he knew well, and, yes—he could just make it out—there was his own ramshackle little pier, which stretched in undulating fashion, like a long-legged, wading caterpillar, from the abrupt shore-line of eroded coquina ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... deep velvet black, the lower, ornamented by large particles of satiny yellow, through which the sunlight passes, and few insects can compare with it in beauty, as it hovers over the flowers of the heliotrope, which furnish the favourite food of the perfect fly, although the caterpillar feeds on the aristolochia and the betel leaf and suspends its chrysalis from its ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... mentioned by the "Expedition" near Fetish Rock. The bright clear night showed us silhouettes of dark holms, high and wooded to the north, and southwards banks of papyrus outlying long straggling lines of thin islands like a huge caterpillar. The canoe-men attempted to land at one place, declaring that some king wanted "dash," but we were now too strong for them: these fellows, if allowed, will halt to speak every boat on the river. The wind fell to a dead calm, and ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... birth into some higher life; if all that it changes in us is our body—the mere husk and shell of us—such a change as comes over the snake when he casts his old skin, and comes out fresh and gay, or even the crawling caterpillar, which breaks its prison, and spreads its wings to the sun as a fair butterfly? Where is the sting of death then, if death can sting, and poison, and corrupt nothing of us for which our friends love ...
— Out of the Deep - Words for the Sorrowful • Charles Kingsley
... reason, my lords, there is generally a malevolence in the merchant against the insurer, whom he considers as an idle caterpillar, living without industry upon the labours of others, and, therefore, when he lays down the sum stipulated for security, he is almost in suspense, whether he should not prefer the loss of the remaining part of the value ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 11. - Parlimentary Debates II. • Samuel Johnson
... colors, clouds Grass-buds, and caterpillar shrouds Boughs on which the wild bees settle, Tints that spot the violet's ...
— Flower Fables • Louisa May Alcott
... over the mischief which the swarms of insects had done; such as had never been in his days, nor in the days of his fathers. What the palmer worm had left, the locust had eaten; what the locust had left, the cankerworm had eaten; and what the cankerworm had left, the caterpillar had eaten. Whether these names are rightly rendered, or whether they mean different sorts of locusts, or the locusts in their different stages of growth, crawling at first and flying at last, matters little. What mischief they had done was plain ...
— The Good News of God • Charles Kingsley
... any length of time through field-glasses is no mean feat. He and his mate, with perhaps a few friends, hop about from leaf to leaf looking for quarry, large and small. The manner in which he stows away a caterpillar an inch long is a ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... said the butterfly; "I am engaged to be married to a spider; I have been engaged ever since I was a caterpillar." ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... he forth, "was he that, if he thought he had hurt the feelings of a caterpillar, should have risen from his warm bed the sharpest night in winter to go and pray his pardon of his bare knees. God assoil him, loving and gentle soul! He was all unfit for this rough world. And the dust that Sir Roger cast up at his horse-heels was in my Lord ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... set fire to the whole, And burnt all the way from here to the miller's The nests of the sweet young caterpillars? Grilled fowl, indeed! Why, as I read, You had not even the plea of need; For all you boast Such wholesome roast, I saw no sign at tea or roast, Of even a caterpillar's ghost. ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... indicated. He appeared of a russet hue, not more distinguishable from the scene around him than the green caterpillar from the leaf it feeds on. His progress when actually walking was more rapid than Mrs. Yeobright's; but she was enabled to keep at an equable distance from him by his habit of stopping whenever he came to a brake of brambles, ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... through it,' said Rex, 'and most of us have survived the change. With insects, the caterpillar turns into the pretty moth. With Korps students, the butterfly becomes sooner or later a crawling, philistine grub. The moral superiority of the worm over the moth is manifest in his works. Have you read your ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... Natural History (Vol. iii., p. 166.).—There is a parallel to the curious fact contributed by your Brazilian correspondent in the "vegetable caterpillar" of New Zealand. This natural rarity is described in Angas's Savage Life and Scenes in Australia and New ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 81, May 17, 1851 • Various
... from the top of the rock that prevents me from attaining my object. It is pleasanter to look up than to look down, for, being no climber of mountain peaks, I do not enjoy the sensation of clinging to the side of a precipice like a caterpillar to a leaf. Now comes the real trial. The rest of the rock above me is quite bare of vegetation. By making four or five steps upwards to the left, then to the right, a spot can be reached where the trouble will be over; but ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... is the end of me," he thought in his little round head as he tried to wriggle across the road and couldn't because his back was so stiff. "Now I am an old man and I shall never see another summer. Good-bye." And Fuzzy Caterpillar rolled himself up in a gray blanket and hung himself on the end of a dried twig. "This is the last of me," he said once more as the dried little grub he now was rattled around ...
— Tell Me Another Story - The Book of Story Programs • Carolyn Sherwin Bailey
... were at Brantwood again, now, and could send you my wasp book! It is pathetic, and yet so dreadful,—the wasp bringing in the caterpillar for its young wasp, stinging each enough to paralyze but not to kill, and so laying ...
— Hortus Inclusus - Messages from the Wood to the Garden, Sent in Happy Days - to the Sister Ladies of the Thwaite, Coniston • John Ruskin
... little sigh, arranging the fruit in his slow absent way. Something at the side of the stall caught his eye, a little movement along the board, in and out through the colour and leaves. He lifted a leaf to see. It was a green and black caterpillar, crawling with stately hunch to the back of the stall. Achilles watched him with gentle eyes. Then he leaned over the stall and reached out a long finger. The caterpillar, poised in midair, remained swaying back and forth above the dark obstruction. Slowly it descended and hunched ...
— Mr. Achilles • Jennette Lee
... manner. Another method of fighting this insect is to spread a sheet under the tree, and with a blow jar off the little Turk and secure him on the sheet. But I consider the lime procedure the less trouble and more effective. The tent caterpillar, which is easily seen, should be destroyed at once. We have yet another insect to contend with which infests the apple and pear, commonly called the Coddling Moth, and the larva, the apple-worm (Garpocapsa pomonella). The loss by the ravaaes of this insect ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 433, April 19, 1884 • Various
... current fashion, to glance at a few other considerations affecting this topic. It will be admitted, I suppose, that the lower animals possess, in their degree, similar cerebral or at least nervous mechanism with ourselves; in their degree, I say; for a zooephyte and a caterpillar have brains, though not in the head; and to this day Waterton does not know whether he shot a man or a monkey, so closely is his nondescript linked with either hand to the grovelling Australian and the erect orang outang. Brutes are nerved as ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... whatever is most necessary to our arguments. For that matter, I had plenty of fairly good reasons for suspecting them of containing the sense of direction. When the Hairy Ammophila (A Sand-wasp who hunts the Grey Worm, or Caterpillar of the Turnip-moth, to serve as food for her grubs. For other varieties of the Ammophila, cf. "Insect Life": chapter 15.—Translator's Note.) is searching for the Grey Worm, it is with her antennae, those tiny fingers continually fumbling at the soil, that she seems to recognize ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... just like what Bob Stebbins said the other day in school. He has a big silver watch that he is mighty fond of hauling out of his pocket before everybody. A caterpillar came crawling through the door, and went right toward the teacher's desk at the other end of the room. 'Now,' said Bob, 'if that fellow will only keep straight ahead, I can tell how long the room is.' ...
— Harper's Young People, January 20, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... the creation to our eye are the winged insects, and they are not so originally. They acquire that form and that inimitable brilliancy by progressive changes. The slow and creeping caterpillar worm of to day, passes in a few days to a torpid figure, and a state resembling death; and in the next change comes forth in all the miniature magnificence of life, a splendid butterfly. No resemblance ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... He would not for worlds scare the poor little prisoners who cheer his lonely hours, and who have long since ceased to fear him. A turtle-dove takes peas, and a hedge-sparrow picks ants' eggs from his lips; a white-throat perches on his left hand to snatch a caterpillar from his right. The huge man was in his garden soon after sunrise gathering the dewy leaves for his feathered pets. But he talks and plays longest with the starling which his lost wife gave him. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... plant which has its seeds come on the back of the leaf, and no flower; and it comes up curled like a caterpillar. Aren't ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume I • Susan Warner
... hall, closing the door softly behind me, and listened. Silence abounded. On tiptoe I made my way to the kitchen. It was clean and empty. I noiselessly opened the back door. On the doorstep sat The Seraph busily engaged with a caterpillar. ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... daresay," said Adam, smiling, "and been as long getting into the house as a little ant carrying a caterpillar. Have you ever seen those tiny fellows carrying things four times as big ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... so severe, that the larger plantations have been dug up, and coffee is now raised by patch culture, mainly among the guava scrub which fringes the forests. Oranges suffer from blight also, and some of the finest groves have been cut down. Cotton suffers from the ravages of a caterpillar. The mulberry tree, which, from its rapid growth, would be invaluable to silk growers, is covered with a black and white blight. Sheep are at present successful, but in some localities the spread of a pestilent "oat-burr" is depreciating ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... effect of wind and current, they concealed themselves on deck under a black tarpaulin—that is to say, it had been black, but wind and weather had reduced it to a dirty brown—and there, adopting for the occasion the habits of the dormouse, the bear, the caterpillar, and other ephemeral productions, they lay torpid. But the moment the vessel touched the quay, profiting by the commotion, they emerged, and signed certificates with chalk on my portmanteau; then vanished in the crowd. The Custom-house ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... oil painting representative of some flowers and fruit, half a water melon, a boar's head, and the pendent form of a dead wild duck. Attached to the ceiling there was a chandelier in a holland covering—the covering so dusty as closely to resemble a huge cocoon enclosing a caterpillar. Lastly, in one corner of the room lay a pile of articles which had evidently been adjudged unworthy of a place on the table. Yet what the pile consisted of it would have been difficult to say, seeing that ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... for things he wants, strings or sympathy, and I keep a supply of both on hand for him. And when he brings dreadful bugs and things I never let my heart quake—that is, so he will notice it. A woolly caterpillar was the last test that I stood ...
— Phyllis • Maria Thompson Daviess
... his hand into his pocket and produced . . . a caterpillar, a furry, squirming caterpillar. Marilla saw and clutched at him but she was too late. Davy dropped ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... looking for ethical or poetic values. I am looking for natural truths. I am less interested in the sermons in stones than I am in the life under the stones. The significance of the metamorphosis of the grub into the butterfly does not escape me, but I am more occupied with the way the caterpillar weaves her cocoon and hangs herself up for the winter than I am in this lesson. I had rather see a worm cast its skin than see a king crowned. I had rather see Phoebe building her mud nest than the preacher writing his sermon. I had rather see the big moth emerge from ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... Brook-lime. Buckshorn Plantain. Burnet. Caterpillar. Celery. Celeriac, or Turnip-rooted Celery. Chervil. Chiccory, or Succory. Corchorus. Corn Salad. Cress, or Peppergrass. Cuckoo Flower. Dandelion. Endive. Horse-radish. Lettuce. Madras Radish. Mallow, ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... democracy "mewing its mighty youth" as the world had never seen. He had thought that his brains were to do their share in building up this great national imago, winged, divine, out of the clumsy, crawling, snobbish, comfort-loving caterpillar of Victorian England. With such dreams his life had started, and the light of them, perhaps, had helped him to his rapid success. And then his wife had died, and he had married again and become somehow more interested in his income, and then the rather expensive first ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... of St Francis, like that of his Master, embodied a kind of terrible common-sense. The famous remark of the Caterpillar in 'Alice in Wonderland'—'Why not?' impresses us as his general motto. He could not see why he should not be on good terms with all things. The pomp of war and ambition, the great empire of the Middle Ages and all its fellows begin to look tawdry and top-heavy, under the rationality ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... If I were to write down his thought as he walked, it would be with phrase and distinction peculiar to himself and to the boy-mind,—"It's the real thing with her; it don't make a fellow squirm like a pin put out at a caterpillar. She's good; ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... America and Australia. They are called after their colours, as the speckled manakin, the white-capped South American manakin, the purple-breasted, variegated, purple-throated, and rock manakins. Next to the manakins, are the Indian, African, and American caterpillar eaters; the Malabar and African shrikes; and in the two last cases of the tooth-beaked group, are placed the true butcher-birds ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... high ridges where the thin grass was wilting, the gaunt rabbit sat in the sun. Driving along the low, smooth and sandy margin of a stream, where the thick bushes bore a bloom that looked like a long caterpillar, they reached an iron spring, deep red, a running wound on the face of the earth. They came to an old water mill, long ago fallen into decay and halted to listen to the water pouring over the ruined dam. They turned into a broader road, ...
— Old Ebenezer • Opie Read
... third moult, or when purely-bred bantams partially assume the red plumage of their prototype, we cannot doubt that these qualities were from the first present, though latent, in the individual animal, like the characters of a moth in the caterpillar. Now, if these animals had produced offspring before they had acquired with advancing age their new characters, nothing is more probable than that they would have transmitted them to some of their offspring, ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... confused, bewildered, and more or less frightened out of faith altogether. They must have something tangible to cling to— for instance,"—and he pressed the tips of his fingers delicately together, "there are grades of intelligence just as there are grades of creation; you cannot instruct a caterpillar as you instruct a man. Now there are many human beings who are of the caterpillar quality of brain—what are you to do with them? They would not understand God as manifested in the solar system, but they would try to please some favourite Saint by ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... Haller and Spallanzani experiment on and describe the conditions and phases of generation. Scientists penetrate to the lowest stages of animal life. Reaumur publishes his admirable observations on insects and Lyonnet devotes twenty years to portraying the willow-caterpillar; Spallanzani resuscitates his rotifers, Tremblay dissects his fresh-water polyps, and Needham reveals his infusoria. The experimental conception of life is deduced from these various researches. Buffon already, and especially Lamarck, in their great and incomplete sketches, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... agreeable of nature's performances; his Novum Organum was able to take up the smallest conceivable atom of existence, whether animate or not, and make a study of it. He has no disrespect for caterpillars or any kind of worm or insect; but he is not a caterpillar himself, or an insect of any kind, or a Saurian, or an Icthyosaurian, but a man; and it was for the sake of building up from a new basis a practical doctrine of human life, that he invented that instrument, and put so much ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... silent movement; countless yellow caterpillars hung there, dangling to and fro, each on its slender thread; chaffinches and yellow-hammers swung themselves impetuously from bough to bough, and at every swoop snapped up a caterpillar; but these never became any fewer. Without a pause they rolled themselves down from the twigs, and hung there, so enticingly yellow, swinging to and fro in the gentle breath of the summer day, and ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... arms he bore—and all the people shouted at once when they saw it—the tiger. He had lifted it high up with its back to his breast, his arms clasped under its shoulders; the wretched brute had curled up caterpillar-wise, with its long tail against its belly, and through its filed teeth grinned a fixed and impotent wrath. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... the time was now past when he cared for the Doctor, that he knew he was as good as he, would do as he liked, and ere long meant to shew him he had the best right to the glebe, where he would no longer moil and toil for a caterpillar, that fattened on his labours. The shrill pipe of Davies issuing from his meagre form in a still higher key, insisted that the covenant was our only defence against malignant men, and evil counsellors, Arminians and Jesuits, and that if this godly bond ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... For my part, I do not look down from heights, whence all seems confused and blurred,—the man who prunes a tree with his knife, all one with the caterpillar who devours its leaf; a couple of insects, each at his proper task. Do you, if you choose, perch yourself on the epicycle of the planet Mercury, and thence distribute creation, in imitation, of Reaumur; he, the classes ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... and quiet conviction inherited from his forefathers, and common to all labourers on the land, that just as in the world of plants and animals nothing ceases to exist, but continually changes its form, the manure into grain, the grain into a food, the tadpole into a frog, the caterpillar into a butterfly, the acorn into an oak, so man also does not perish, but only undergoes a change. He believed in this, and therefore always looked death straight in the face, and bravely bore the sufferings that lead towards it, but did not ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... which was struggling for life within him asserted itself and made him ashamed of his shame. He stood still with his head a little higher, and moved on with the slowly moving line of men which crawled towards the desk like a caterpillar. He saw Allbright turn away rejected with a feeling of pity; the old man looked dejected. Carroll reflected with a sensation of pride that at least he did not owe him. He himself was rejected promptly after he had owned to his age. The man four behind him ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Lastly, he greatly degrades the mind of man by causelessly representing death as an evil in itself, which, if it be considered as a crisis, or phenomenal change, incident to a progressive being, ought as little to be thought so, as the casting of the caterpillar's skin to make room for the wings of the butterfly. It is the ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... him out, if he doesn't mind what he is about. In this I glide around the Back Bay, down the stream, up the Charles to Cambridge and Watertown, up the Mystic, round the wharves, in the wake of steamboats which leave a swell after them delightful to rock upon; I linger under the bridges,—those "caterpillar bridges," as my brother professor so happily called them; rub against the black sides of old wood-schooners; cool down under the overhanging stern of some tall Indiaman; stretch across to the Navy-Yard, where the sentinel warns me off from the Ohio,—just as if I should hurt her by lying in ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... is trying to put to sleep. But the kitten is not so accommodating as a doll would be, and just as Polly does not dare to move for fear of waking her, she makes up her mind that a run after a leaf and a play with any chance caterpillar which may be so unlucky as to cross her path, will be very preferable, ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... in fact," he said. "If you find it clearer to understand this way, we burst from our chrysalis and become a caterpillar. Do chrysalides become caterpillars! We do, anyhow. If you come about eight you will find food; if you come later you will also find food of a sketchier kind. People have a habit of dropping in on Sunday evening. There's music if anyone feels ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... not to be the mother's chrysalis. God never intended her to wind herself up into a cocoon. If he had, he would made her a caterpillar. She has no right to bury her womanly nature in the tomb of childhood. It will surely be required at her hands. It was given her to sun itself in the broad, bright day, to root itself fast and firm in the earth, to spread itself ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... we know not that it will be so;—and I do know that to regret the exchange of earthly pleasures for the joys of heaven, is as if the grovelling caterpillar should lament that it must one day quit the nibbled leaf to soar aloft and flutter through the air, roving at will from flower to flower, sipping sweet honey from their cups, or basking in their sunny petals. If these little creatures knew how great a ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... maggot about five days to grow to its full size, and then it turns into a chrysalis. That is, it is shut up in a kind of case that it has spun for itself, like the cocoon of the silkworm or the caterpillar. In about five days more it breaks out of this cocoon and appears as a fly ...
— The Child's Day • Woods Hutchinson
... little game fell to our guns. In those days it was lawful for travelers to shoot game anywhere along the roadside for their own consumption; a farmer would no more think of objecting to a stranger shooting a buck on his veld than a gardener would object to one destroying a caterpillar. ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... destructive to grapes with tender skins and such as grow in compact bunches. Its work is detected usually in compact grape clusters where a number of berries are injured by a "worm." The "worm" is a dark-colored caterpillar, the larva of the grape-berry moth (Polychrosis viteana.) There are two broods of this caterpillar, the first of which feeds on the stems and external portions of the young berries, while the second ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... "By the ring-tailed caterpillar," exclaimed Frank, employing a quaint expression current the last term at Harrington Hall, "where did that caravel of Columbus come from? Why, she's so old you might expect the Ancient Mariner to peer over her rail. ...
— The Radio Boys with the Revenue Guards • Gerald Breckenridge
... course!" The first chill of suspicion that I had been cast for the part of Cinderella crept through me, like a caterpillar walking ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... sympathy be d-d-darned!' sputtered Mrs. Crane, working her long fingers convulsively. 'Walk out of this room in a hurry, before I scratch your eyes out, you soft little caterpillar!' ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... window; and from the dell below rose in the night, now the monotonous chanting of the frogs, and now, as some great bull-frog took the note, a diapason worthy of a Brescian organ. The darkness walled all in; the night was still; a falling caterpillar sounded. Even the rude men at the farthest fire stilled their voices at times; awed, they knew not why, by the silence ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... show it. Ma'am Allen, (the young rogue sticks to that name, in speaking of the gentleman with the diamond,) Ma'am Allen tried to peek into it one day when she left it on the sideboard. "If you please," says she,—'n' took it from him, 'n' gave him a look that made him curl up like a caterpillar on a hot shovel. I only wished he had n't, and had jest given her a little sass, for I've been takin' boxin'-lessons, 'n' I 've got a new way of counterin' I want to try on ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... into one continuous memory of an countryside lying, as it seemed, under snow, with square patches of dimness, white phantoms of roads, rents and pools of velvety blackness, and lamp-jewelled houses. I remember a train boring its way like a hastening caterpillar of fire across the landscape, and how distinctly I heard its clatter. Every town and street was buttoned with street lamps. I came quite close to the South Downs near Lewes, and all the lights were out in the houses, and ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... arm, till he'd given his man time to show what he was worth. Then he'd shake his shoulders, grin a bit with that ugly mouth—never with his eyes—and plant his blow, the kick of a mule, and his man curled up like a caterpillar on a hot brick. That stroke got to be known as James Brownrigg's Waiting Left. I've met him. He kept a public house up in Islington. Died about four years ago, with both fists clenched, and his left still waiting. It's quite possible ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... transfigured before them, and his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light," Matt. xvii, 1, 2. To metamorphose is to make some remarkable change, ordinarily in external qualities, but often in structure, use, or chemical constitution, as of a caterpillar into a butterfly, of the stamens of a plant into petals, or of the crystalline structure of rocks, hence called "metamorphic rocks," as when a limestone is metamorphosed into a marble. To vary is to change from time ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... servant; and while thus no warrant officer, as, in fact, he discharged all his duties well and punctually, was rated among the ship's company, though no one could say at what precise period he changed his caterpillar existence and became the gay butterfly with cords and tops, a striped vest, and a most knowing jerry hat who stalked about the stable-yard and bullied the helpers. Such was Mike. He had made his fortune, such as it was, and had a most ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... Benedict felt its caterpillar feet coming toward the base of his nose. The insect turned neither to the right nor to the left. It rested between its two buzzing wings, on the slightly hooked edge of that learned nose, so well formed to carry spectacles. It cleared the little furrow produced ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... back yonder when all the world was twenty or thereabouts, and when every wild-cherry-bush was an olive tree. But one day the tent caterpillar like a wolf swept down on our fold of cherry-bushes and we fled Arden, never to get back. We lived for a time in town and bought olives in bottles, stuffed ones sometimes, then we got a hill in Hingham, just this side of Arden, still buying our olives, but not our apples now, nor our ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... down; but it being Sunday he did not utter them. In dress, Miss Johnson passed his expectations—a green and white gown, with long, tight sleeves, a green silk handkerchief round her neck and crossed in front, a green parasol, and green gloves. It was strange enough to see this verdant caterpillar turn out of a road-waggon, and gracefully shake herself free from the bits of straw and fluff which would usually gather on the raiment of the grandest travellers ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... consider a law, and an experimental station could have charge of work connected therewith—that one of the provisions we would insist on being put in the law would be one to control the pests which may come. Right in our district today the tent caterpillar is playing havoc with our walnuts; the oyster shell scale is going through our timber in Center County; and I can take you into the mountains five miles from any residence and I can show you oyster shell scale on half a dozen of ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... Gatty. Parables from nature, p. 1. Poulsson. In the child's world, p. 307. Boston collection of kindergarten stories, p. 139. (Adapted.) Harrison. In story-land, p. 96. (Story of the small green caterpillar.) Olcott. Good ...
— Lists of Stories and Programs for Story Hours • Various
... swung down from the grape-vine by his long tail, and tickled the old gentleman on the nose with a straw. Grandpa sneezed, and opened one eye to brush away the fly as he supposed. Then he went to sleep again, and Jocko dropped a caterpillar on his bald head; this made him open the other eye to see what that soft, creepy thing could be. Neddy couldn't help laughing, for he often wanted to do just such things, but never dared, because grandpa was a very stern old gentleman, and no one took liberties with him. Jocko wasn't afraid, ...
— The Louisa Alcott Reader - A Supplementary Reader for the Fourth Year of School • Louisa M. Alcott
... DOYLE. Yes, a caterpillar. Now give your mind to what I am going to say; for it's a new and important scientific theory of the English national character. ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw
... above and sweetness and jam beneath. Every one writes essays nowadays, and tries to stir with his little Gulliver pen the yeasty foam raised by a Carlyle or an Emerson. One might as well watch the effort of a small hairy caterpillar to follow in the wake of a sea-serpent. Oh ye gods and little fishes, could anything ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... Wallace." My difficulty is, why are caterpillars sometimes so beautifully and artistically coloured? Seeing that many are coloured to escape danger, I can hardly attribute their bright colour in other cases to mere physical conditions. Bates says the most gaudy caterpillar he ever saw in Amazonia (of a sphinx) was conspicuous at the distance of yards, from its black and red colours, whilst feeding on large green leaves. If any one objected to male butterflies having been made beautiful by sexual selection, and asked why should they not have been made beautiful ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... Winged Insect is so well known to all. Take the Grasshopper, for instance: with the exception of the wings, it is born in its mature form; but it has had its Worm-like stage within the egg as much as the Butterfly that we knew a few months ago as a Caterpillar. In the same way certain of the higher Radiates undergo all their transformations, from the Polyp phase of growth to that of Acaleph or Echinoderm, after birth; while others pass rapidly through the lower phases of their existence within the egg, and are born in their final condition, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... long in pretty shame, with a soft blush upon her tawny check. But at the mouth of each of those drains, if we can get our flies in, and keep ourselves unseen, we will have one cast at least. For at each of them, in some sharp-rippling spot, lies a great trout or two, waiting for beetle, caterpillar, and whatsoever else may be washed from among the long grass above. Thence, and from brimming feeders, which slip along, weed-choked, under white hawthorn hedges, and beneath the great roots of oak and elm, shall we pick out full many a goodly trout. There, in yon stop-hole underneath that ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... entomologists—I find it in Kirby and Spence—that "some insects in their perfect state, though furnished with organs of feeding, make no use of them"; and they lay it down as "a general rule, that almost all insects in this state eat much less than in that of larvae. The voracious caterpillar when transformed into a butterfly... and the gluttonous maggot when become a fly" content themselves with a drop or two of honey or some other sweet liquid. The abdomen under the wings of the butterfly still represents the larva. This is the tidbit which tempts his insectivorous ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... producing nuts, and with the aid of squirrels, the walnuts are seeding up along fence rows, around farm homes, and in woodlots. Walnut has been observed coming up in a woodlot, and the only possible source is a shade tree half a mile away. The walnut caterpillar defoliates the trees but seldom kills them, although it does lower their value ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Eighth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... and made for the first open flower he saw. But a spider happened to be spending the summer in that vegetable, and it was not long before Mr. Butterfly was wishing himself back atop of that pole, a simple caterpillar. ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... picture for yourself: A slim figure, if you like, held in the posture of the caterpillar slouch, a long length of stocking so thin as to give the effect of shaded skin above high-heeled slippers with sparkling buckles of bright jet, a short skirt, a scrappy, thin, low-necked, short-sleeved blouse ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... the tortoiselike mounds were rising up out of the viscid black depths, dozens of them, and that hundreds of the Bardeks were closing in on him from all directions. Weapons were in their hands, and a huge engine of warfare like a caterpillar tractor was skimming over the sea from the cliff wall with a great grinding and clanking ...
— Wanderer of Infinity • Harl Vincent
... the most singular metamorphoses. In certain cases it forms a free embryo which appears to be complete, having a special form and mode of life, but which finally becomes transformed into an entirely different sexual individual. Thus from the egg of a butterfly there first emerges a caterpillar, which lives and grows for some time, then changes to a chrysalis and finally to a butterfly. The caterpillar and the chrysalis belong to the embryonic period. During this period every animal reproduces in an abbreviated manner certain forms which resemble more or less those ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... Cultivated men often attain a good degree of skill in writing verses; but it is easy to read, through their poems, their personal history: any one acquainted with parties can name every figure: this is Andrew, and that is Rachel. The sense thus remains prosaic. It is a caterpillar with wings, and not yet a butterfly. In the poet's mind, the fact has gone quite over into the new element of thought, and has lost all that is exuvial. This generosity abides with Shakespeare. We say, from the truth and closeness of his pictures, that he knows the lesson by heart. Yet ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... shoulders, while to the lower part of his body were attached the tail and flukes of a shark. To conceal these monstrous appendages he wore over his shoulders a kihei of kapa and allowed himself to be seen only while in the sitting posture. He sometimes took the form of a worm, a moth, a caterpillar, or a butterfly to escape the hands of his enemies. On land he generally appeared as a man squatting, after the manner of a Hawaiian gardener while weeding his ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... cautiously. Upon the very edge of the flying blocks squatted Drake and Ventnor, grotesquely frog-like. I crawled toward them—crawled, literally, like a caterpillar; for wherever my body touched the surface of the cubes the attracting force held it, allowed a creeping movement only, surface sliding upon surface—and weirdly enough like a human measuring-worm I ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... man, with something not quite normal about his bigness—something that made Lady Colin Campbell, who hated him, describe him as 'that great white caterpillar.' You yourself describe the disagreeable impression he made on you physically, in spite of his fine eyes and style. Well, I have always maintained that Oscar was a giant in the pathological sense, and that this explains a good ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... The caterpillar, transformed into a beautiful insect, 74:18 is no longer a worm, nor does the insect return to fraternize with or control the worm. Such a backward transformation is impossible in 74:21 Science. Darkness and light, infancy and manhood, sickness and health, are opposites, - different beliefs, which ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... beings, were to disappear under the magic touch of the instrument of freedom. The chattel was to be transformed into a person, the person into a soldier, the soldier into a citizen—and thus the Negro slave, like the crawling caterpillar, was to leave his grovelling situation, and in new form, wing himself to the sublime heights of free ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... have a poor opinion of themselves, and be frightened at anybody else getting a chance. If I'm offal, let a wise man come and tell me, for I've never heard it yet. And in point of business, I'm not a class of goods to be in danger. If anybody takes to rolling me, I can pack myself up like a caterpillar, and find my feet when I'm let alone. And though, as I may say, you're taking some of our good works from us, which is property bearing interest, I'm not saying but we can afford that, though my mother ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... time he was settin' on a stone in the lower pastur', cryin' again, and he heerd another cur'us little voice. 'T wa'n't like the posy's voice, but 'twas a little, wooly, soft, fuzzy voice, and he see 't was a caterpillar a-talkin' to him. And the caterpillar says, in his fuzzy little voice, he says, "What you cryin' for, Reuben?" And the boy, he says, "I'm powerful scaret o' dyin', that's why," he says. And that fuzzy caterpillar he laughed. "Dyin'!" he says. ...
— Story-Tell Lib • Annie Trumbull Slosson
... lengthened out to suit that extra length, and that means a great deal of waste for that rebuilding, but it is something worse than that. You know perfectly well that out of the butterfly egg there comes the caterpillar, and that caterpillar goes into a cocoon, and during the life of the cocoon every organ is changed there and it comes out a butterfly. That is what we call ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... fourth class, Plants and Insects, is based upon the same conception as that of Flowers and Birds. The insect is represented with the plant which is his habitat when in the stage of caterpillar and larva, or flying above the flowers and plants upon which he subsists on reaching the stage of butterfly and insect. Certain books add to this fourth class ...
— Chinese Painters - A Critical Study • Raphael Petrucci
... that says "Drink Me," Emmeline innocently tries to eat "the never-wake-up berries" and receives a stern rebuke and a lecture about poison from Paddy Button. "The Poetry of Learning" chapter echoes Alice's dialogue with the caterpillar. Like the wily creature smoking a hookah, Paddy smokes a pipe and shouts "Hurroo!" as the children teach him to write his name in the sand. The children lose "all count of time," just as the Mad Hatter does. Whereas Alice grows nine feet taller, ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... check on the excess of insects, and that they keep the balance between plants and insect life. Ten thousand caterpillars, it has been estimated, could destroy every blade of grass on an acre of cultivated ground. In thirty days from the time it is hatched an ordinary caterpillar increases 10,000 times in bulk, and the food it lives and grows on is vegetable. The insect population of a single cherry tree infested with aphides was calculated by a prominent entomologist at no less than twelve ...
— Bird Day; How to prepare for it • Charles Almanzo Babcock
... glory, and the common good, but intend ourselves, and our own private gain and interest; when we serve God upon politic designs. Where this sinful self-love dwells, there dwells no love to God, no love to thy brother, no love to church or state. This sinful self-love is the caterpillar that destroyeth church and commonwealth. It is from this sinful self-love that the public affairs drive on so heavily, and that church-government is not settled, and that our covenant is so much neglected. Of this sin, I cannot now speak; but, when God shall offer opportunity, ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various
... so have I an antipathy. I hate a spider, and as for a naked caterpillar,—I believe I should go into a fit if I had to touch one. I know I turn pale at the sight of some of those great green caterpillars that come down from the elm-trees in ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... your children of it, And let your children tell their children, And their children another generation. That which the palmerworm hath left Hath the locust eaten; And that which the locust hath left Hath the cankerworm eaten; And that which the cankerworm hath left Hath the caterpillar eaten. ...
— Select Masterpieces of Biblical Literature • Various
... among the perpetually blissful, how must the angels laugh when in idle moments they listen to our speculations concerning the Divinity? They peer down at us as we look at ants dragging home a fragment of dead caterpillar. They hear us say ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... world will soon be a dull place. I wish we could leave it for a change," said Ayrault. "I don't mean forever, of course, but just as people have grown tired of remaining like plants in the places in which they grew. Alan has been a caterpillar for untold ages; can he not become the butterfly?" "Since we have found out how to straighten the axis," said Deepwaters, "might we not go one better, and improve the orbit as well?—increase the difference between aphelion and perihelion, and give those ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... metaphor, a parallel is drawn between the life of man and the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into the butterfly; but the comparison may be more just as well as more novel, if for its former term we take the mental progress of the race. History shows that the human mind, fed by constant accessions of knowledge, periodically grows ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... Butterfly may be collected upon the milkweed and brought in, so that the whole life history or metamorphosis of this beautiful insect, from the egg through the larva or caterpillar stage and the pupa or chrysalis stage to the adult butterfly, may be watched. The larvae or caterpillar must be supplied daily with fresh milkweed leaves. Other butterflies and moths and many other insects may be reared in the same way by supplying the larvae with suitable ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... the sneers and the gibes of them that flatter the powerful ones; he is as the winter worm, as the crocodile in the slime of his sleep by the bank, as the sick eagle before moulting. But I say, O King, that he will come forth like the serpent in a new skin, shaming the old one; he slept a caterpillar, and will come forth a butterfly; he sank a star, and lo! ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... necklaces, etc., and her head adorned with a coronet of scarlet cloth, studded with seed-pearls, jewels, glass beads, etc. The common dress is a long robe of indi, a cloth of coarse silk, spun from the cocoon of a large caterpillar that is found wild at the foot of the hills, and is also cultivated: it feeds on many different leaves, Sal (Shorea), ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... a pretty thing up this tree," said Arabella. "A sort of a—caterpillar, of the most loveliest green and yellow you ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... said Lucille. "If you issue any more orders in that tone I'll look like a caterpillar. Now, what really did happen, Marjorie?" she ended in a gentler tone ...
— I've Married Marjorie • Margaret Widdemer
... Caterpillar, on the leaf, "my leaf is the largest here. It hides half the world from me, but I don't ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... Woolly-bear Caterpillar? It is divided into three parts; the middle one brown, the two ends black. Everyone notices the Woolly-bear, because it comes out in early spring, as soon as the frost is over, and crawls on the fences ...
— Woodland Tales • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... ducked precipitately and a flapping, four-buckled overshoe, a relic of the winter gone, hurtled past his head and landed with considerable force upon the unsuspecting stomach of Cal, stretched luxuriously upon his bunk. Cal doubled like a threatened caterpillar and groaned, and Weary, feeling that justice had not been defeated even though he had aimed at ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... right. He felt that there ought to be a fish there waiting for some big fat caterpillar or fly to drop from the leaves above; and his ugly lure had hardly touched the surface of the water before there was a loud smack, a disturbance as if a stone had been thrown in to fall without a splash, and a well-hooked ...
— The New Forest Spy • George Manville Fenn
... provide their natural foods and raise them. That started me to watching for caterpillars and eggs out of doors, and friends of my work began carrying them to me. Repeatedly, I have gone through the entire life process, from mating newly emerged moths, the egg period, caterpillar life, with its complicated moults and changes, the spinning of the cocoons, the miraculous winter sleep, to the spring appearance; and with my cameras recorded each stage of development. Then on platinum ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter
... "What is this coming down the highroad? It seems a small caravan, creeping and writhing like a caterpillar. The head of it seems human. But, by my faith! the rest of it is like nothing I have seen for many years! What ho! Let us be on guard. It may be an enemy of ...
— John of the Woods • Abbie Farwell Brown
... the ichneumon tribe are seen settling upon the back of the caterpillar, and darting at different intervals their stings into its body—at every ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... races o'er its frame, Nor caterpillar weaving, It is never doped with Paris Green, Yet ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-Fourth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... it dreadful? Why, Uncle Robert, the leaves were all eaten off the trees, and you could hardly take a step without squashing a caterpillar." ...
— Uncle Robert's Geography (Uncle Robert's Visit, V.3) • Francis W. Parker and Nellie Lathrop Helm
... to agriculture made its appearance in this month. A destructive grub-worm was discovered in several parts of the cultivated ground; and at the Hawkesbury a caterpillar had commenced its ravages wherever it found any young grain just shooting out of the earth. This occasioned some delay in sowing ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... memoir, exhibiting the strength of the Union, and the weakness of slavery in the mountain districts of the South,' which is well worth careful study at this crisis. Let the reader take the map and trace on it the dark caterpillar-like lines of the Alleghanies from Pennsylvania southward. Not until he reaches Northern Alabama will he find its end. In these mountain districts which form 'the Switzerland of the South,' a population exists on whom slavery has no hold, who are ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... of wheat are greater than have ever been known, and are now nearly secured. A caterpillar gave for a while great alarm, but did little injury. Of tobacco, not half a crop has been planted for want of rain; and even this half, with cotton and Indian corn, has yet ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... remained discreetly in the background after the fighting began, emerged when it was over and gave them a match. In due course out came the wretched Arab. Then they flung themselves on him as marching ants do upon a caterpillar, and despite his cries for mercy, tore him to fragments, literally to fragments. Being what they were, it was hard to blame them. If we had seen our parents shot, our infants pitilessly butchered, our homes destroyed and our women and children marched off in the slave-sticks to be ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... in the fields and woods. I hear locusts yet, singing in the sunny hours, and crickets have not yet finished their song. Once in a while I see a caterpillar,—this afternoon, for instance, a red, hairy one, with black head and tail. They do not appear to be active, and it makes one rather melancholy ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... that had a soporific effect on Peter. He had only stopped behind to oblige John, and personally had little expectation of anything coming of it. Moreover, the night air was chilly. If he could get that cloak from John now! He crawled in to try, but big John was rolled up like a caterpillar. It was warmer inside there than out, anyway. And he could keep watch there just as well as outside; so he propped himself up alongside John, and braced his ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... bending down the fruit-like body, it breaks it off and bears it away in triumph to the nest. All the fruit-like bodies do not ripen at once, but successively, so that the ants are kept about the young leaf for some time after it unfolds. Thus the young leaves are always guarded by the ants; and no caterpillar or large animal could attempt to injure them without being attacked by the little warriors. The fruit-like bodies are about one-twelfth of an inch long, and are about one-third of the size of the ants; so that the ant bearing one away ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... and you're not fusty; but you remind me of him when you make remarks like your first." She brushed a caterpillar from her light summer skirt, and noticing the draggled edge held it up. "There's one answer to your question about taking an active interest in clubs. There are twenty ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... on steadily weaving their way down the slopes, their reserves pressing close on the heels of the skirmishers in greedy swarms. A heavy column of Brown infantry was swinging in toward the myriad-legged, writhing gray caterpillar on the pass road and many field-batteries were trotting along a parallel road. Their plan developed suddenly when a swath of gun-fire was laid across the pass road at the mouth of the defile, as much as to say: "Here we make a gate of death!" At the same time the head of ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... had received, in the language of the pupils, a special and expressive name. There was Spider corner, Caterpillar corner, Wood-louse corner, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... new friend, Nelly went on singing softly as she walked, and presently she found a pretty caterpillar dressed in brown fur, although the day was warm. He lay so still she thought him dead, till he rolled himself into a ball as ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... noise. Away to the right the train, like a luminous caterpillar, was threading across the ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... didn't want the other caterpillar to see the moth's wing, you know; so what must he do but t'y to carry it with all his left legs, and he t'ied to walk on the other set. Of course, he ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 2, December, 1877 • Various
... cane in one hand, a knife in the other, and a basket between their legs, hacking, paring, chewing, and basket-filling, with a persevering assiduity which reminds one of a hungry cow grazing, or of a caterpillar ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... the Fr. chenille, a hairy caterpillar), a twisted velvet cord, woven so that the short outer threads stand out at right angles to the central cord, thus giving a resemblance to a caterpillar. Chenille is used as a ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... draws life from a triple soul, A soul that spreads creeping upon the earth With roots beneath and wings above. A city, The caterpillar builds in its great depths; The bird builds love towards heights ethereal! About all green things live to be thy slaves And trimming ornaments, O palm! How high Skyward thou raisest thy ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... of polywogs, and some delicious bugs, and a big caterpillar that would make your mouth water if you were ...
— The Golden House • Mrs. Woods Baker
... Recently a caterpillar famine began to make itself felt in the parts of the garden near the house, and the enthusiasm of the collectors evaporated at the prospect of searching ...
— Punch, July 18, 1917 • Various
... footing along the curb. Presently from the approaching column came who but Hilary Kincaid, galloping easily over the slippery pavements. Anna saw his eyes sweep the bank of human flowers (with its occasional male caterpillar) on Moody's balcony and light upon Flora. He lifted his kepi and halted. One ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... similarities elsewhere in the world, are combined to make the analogical argument for a future life. For many centuries, in the literature of many nations, a standard illustration of the thought that the soul survives the decay of its earthy investiture has been drawn from the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into the butterfly.5 This world is the scene of our grub state. The body is but a chrysalis of soul. When the preliminary experience and stages are finished and the transformation is complete, the spirit emerges from its cast ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... with the Black, Blue and Dun Midges, (Spring and Autumn excepted), have a decided advantage in general over dubbed or hackle winged flies. In small brooks after a flood, winged flies often kill well, those with Orange, Black, Crimson, and Yellow bodies are the best. Grass Hoppers, the Cabbage Caterpillar, the Breccan or Fern Clock, will all take Trout; but as there are other natural baits to be had at the time these are in season, which I have noted, and which are more to be depended upon, I have not given any special instructions as to the use of the above. The Grass Hopper and Caterpillar are ...
— The Teesdale Angler • R Lakeland
... drop such fruit?" I quoted, as I fished it out on my stick; and just then I heard a distressed voice saying, "Oh, aunt Celia, I've lost my smart little London shoe. I was sitting in a tree, taking a pebble out of the heel, when I saw a caterpillar, and I dropped it into the river, the shoe, you know, not the caterpillar." Hereupon she came in sight, and I witnessed the somewhat unusual spectacle of my nut-brown mayde hopping on one foot, like a divine stork, and ever and anon emitting a ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... change, transformation.) A change of form; a development, as the change of the caterpillar ...
— The Insect Folk • Margaret Warner Morley
... chapter, fourth verse. Joel, first and fourth. "That which the palmer-worm hath left, hath the locust eaten; and that which the locust hath left, hath the canker-worm eaten; and that which the canker-worm hath left, hath the caterpillar eaten." ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... the top is nipped off, to make the leaves stronger and more robust. After this, the buds, which show themselves at the joints of the leaves, are plucked, and then the plants are daily examined, to destroy a caterpillar, of a singular form and grey in colour, which makes its appearance at this stage, and is very destructive to narcotic plants. When fit for cutting, which is known by the brittleness of the leaves, ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... for each. It was some little time longer before they said Brother or Sister Bear, but that came next, and the other day she had heard one little fellow cry, "Ah, Sister Serpent!" to a snake that bit him as he played with it too roughly. Most of them would have nothing to do with a caterpillar, except watch it through its changes; but when at length it came from its retirement with wings, all would immediately address it as Sister Butterfly, congratulating it on its metamorphosis—for which they used a word that meant something like REPENTANCE—and ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... on me, 'tis the caterpillar Sordido! how curst are the poor, that the viper was blest with this ...
— Every Man Out Of His Humour • Ben Jonson
... understood increase of size; by development, increase of structure. And the law is, that great activity in either of these processes involves retardation or arrest of the other. A familiar example is furnished by the cases of the caterpillar and the chrysalis. In the caterpillar there is extremely rapid augmentation of bulk; but the structure is scarcely at all more complex when the caterpillar is full-grown than when it is small. In the chrysalis the bulk ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... middle-aged—territorials, with the light-blue long-coat, good for all weathers and the sharp night, and the peaked cap. Over the top of the dune where the soldiers sat an observation balloon was suspended in a cloudless blue sky, like a huge yellow caterpillar. Beyond the pasteboard stage, high on a western dune, two sentries stood with their bayonets touched by sunlight. To the south rose a monument to the territorial dead. To the north an aeroplane flashed along the ...
— Golden Lads • Arthur Gleason and Helen Hayes Gleason
... of people. All the different trades and industries will be changed, the medical profession will be carried on under different conditions, engineering, science, the theatrical trade, the clerical trade, schools, hotels, almost every trade, will have to undergo as complete an internal change as a caterpillar does when it becomes a moth ... a change as profound as the abolition of private property in slaves would have been in ancient Rome or ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... survival of the fittest. Doubtless this is so. So in the future there will be a survival of the fittest. What is it? Wisdom, gentleness, meekness, brotherly kindness, and charity. Over those who have these traits death hath no permanent power. The caterpillar has no fear as he weaves his own shroud; for there is life within fit to survive, and ere long it spreads its gorgeous wings, and flies in the air above where once it crawled. Man has had two states of being already. One confined, dark, peculiarly nourished, ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... humble caterpillar within, unconscious of the conspicuous position to which he had been elevated, and the distinguished marks of attention he received from many visitors, went slowly on in his progress towards a new stage of being. When the time was fully come, he very coolly gnawed a hole in one end of his ...
— Rollo's Museum • Jacob Abbott
... worthy men. These vertues now are banisht out of towne, Our Civill Wars have lost the civicke crowne. He highest builds, who with most art destroys, And against others fame his owne employs. I see the envious caterpillar sit On the faire blossome of each growing wit. The ayre's already tainted with the swarms Of insects, which against you rise in arms. Word-peckers, paper-rats, book-scorpions, Of wit corrupted the unfashion'd sons. ...
— Lucasta • Richard Lovelace
... reposed an enormous iron tobacco-box endowed, like the shield of Achilles, with supernatural powers, doubtless from bearing the portrait of the blessed Saint Nicholas. Peter Stuyvesant turned like an angry bear upon the foe, and seizing him as he fled by an immeasurable queue, "Ah, caterpillar!" roared he, "here's what shall make worm's meat of thee!" So saying, he whirled his sword and dealt a blow that would have decapitated the varlet, but that the pitying steel struck short and shaved the queue forever from his crown. At this moment an arquebusier levelled his piece ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester |
