"Crocodile" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Lizards from two to eighteen inches long; and he saw one with rainbow colours in his skin, mostly red. He learned afterward it was a great-chameleon; and angry. He saw one small scaled thing, rather like a crocodile in shape, but with a sharp-pointed nose; it waddled by, near enough to show two little black ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... it your charge, so please you, reverend Sir, To see the late Queene safely sent to Florence: My Neece Onaelia, and that trusty Souldier, We doe appoint to guard the infant King. Other distractions Time must reconcile; The State is poyson'd like a Crocodile. ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... three tambos were as follows: First, he must never shake hands with a woman, nor have a woman's hand touch him or any of his personal belongings; secondly, he must never eat clams nor any food from a fire in which clams had been cooked; thirdly, he must never touch a crocodile, nor travel in a canoe that carried any part of a crocodile even if as ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... in the Grand Mastership by Helion de Villeneuve, a knight of exemplary piety and a strict disciplinarian. Under his rule the Order regained those habits of severe simplicity from which they had been allowed to lapse by his predecessor. In 1329 Rhodes was greatly agitated by the fact that a crocodile or serpent—as it is indifferently described—had taken up its abode in the marshes at the foot of Mount St. Etienne, some two miles from the town. This ferocious creature devoured sheep and cattle; also several of the inhabitants had lost their lives by approaching the neighbourhood in which it ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... length. Am I then fated - I, a denizen of earth - to be placed face to face with these representatives of long extinct families? No; surely it cannot be! Yet the deep marks of conical teeth upon the iron pick are certainly those of the crocodile. ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... were so fearfully nice. I'd no idea they liked me so much. Irene May began crying at breakfast-time, and one or another of them has been at it the whole day long. Maddie made me walk with her in the crocodile, and said, "Croyez bien, ma cherie, que votre Maddie ne vous oubliera jamais." It's all very well, but she's been a perfect pig to me many times over about the irregular verbs! She gave me her photograph in a gilt frame—not half bad; you would ...
— The Heart of Una Sackville • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... saurian the teeth interlock, so that the two jaws are brought close together, the teeth in the upper jaw of the Amazonian cayman pass by the lower series outside of them. The latter has therefore much less power. It has a ventral cuirass as well as dorsal, and it is web-footed, while the crocodile has the toes free—another mark of inferiority. Sluggish on land, the alligator is very agile in its element. It never attacks man when on his guard, but it is cunning enough to know when it may do this with safety. It ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... he sez, leaning his hand on my arm to detain me as I was going down below, 'this wasn't a h'English ghost as I sees just now. It was the most outlandish foreign reptile you ever see. A long, big, black snake like a crocodile, only twice the length of the old corvette; with a head like a bird, and eyes as big and fiery as our side-lights. It was a terrible creature, Jim, and its eyes flamed out like lightning, and it snorted like a horse as it swam by the ship. I've had a warning, old shipmate, and ...
— Tom Finch's Monkey - and How he Dined with the Admiral • John C. Hutcheson
... perfect Hercules in stature, with huge arms and limbs, knit together with largely developed ropy-looking muscles. He had a large head, with small eyes, flabby squat nose, and prominent muzzle filled with sharp-pointed teeth, as if in imitation of a crocodile. Farhan told me that when very young he was kidnapped on the Zanzibar coast by the captain of a small Arab vessel. This captain one day seeing him engaged with many other little children playing on the sandy seashore, ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... and they all dashed forward, there being no chance to go back. In the same instant, an appalling head—like that of a thrice magnified and distorted crocodile, with vast, round, painted eyes—was upthrust from the water and came rushing after them at a pace which sent up ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... to this country, who had the good fortune to serve the Doctor as a body servant in the interior of Africa, and he thus describes the manner of his master's death. The Doctor was accustomed to pass his nights in the stomach of an acquaintance-a crocodile about fifty feet long. Stepping out one evening to take an observation of one of the lunar eclipses peculiar to the country, he spoke to his host, saying that as he should not return, until after bedtime, he would not trouble him to sit up to let him in; he would just leave the door open ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... play the part if I did not have my moon. For the next two days I received no notice of another rehearsal, but through Croizette I heard that they were trying my role of Berthe privately. They had given it to a young woman whom we had nicknamed "the Crocodile," because she followed all the rehearsals just as that animal follows boats—she was always hoping to snatch up some role that might happen to be thrown overboard. Octave Feuillet refused to accept the change of artistes, and he came himself to fetch me, accompanied by ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... No, miss, 'caze dey ain't in town. No, miss, dey bofe went oveh to de Lou'siana place 'istiddy.... Yass, miss, on a bah hunt in Bayou Crocodile swamp." ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... Dyaks do not interfere with the crocodile until he has shown some sign of his man-eating propensity. If the crocodile will live at peace with him, the Dyak has no wish to start a quarrel. If, however, the crocodile breaks the truce and kills someone, then the Dyaks set to work to kill the culprit, and keep on catching and ...
— Children of Borneo • Edwin Herbert Gomes
... Isis. Its bite was said to produce a lethargic sleep, ending in death. Cleopatra ended her life by the bite of one, which she ordered to be conveyed to her in a basket of fruit. Some commentators have supposed that the crocodile is here alluded to; but, as others have justly observed, the crocodile has no poisonous sting, but rather a capacity ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... two hundred piastres and let him go. Don't try to make him speak. I have promised this. Then quick to Jarvis Pasha and get him to raid the House of the Crocodile. Question of hasheesh. We must be smuggled out when arrests are made—also Bedr, to ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... never succeeds in crossing that river. He also who sits inactively (in doubt) can never pass it over. The man destitute of the raft of wisdom, in consequence of his having to bear the heavy weight of great faults, sinks down. One that is seized by the crocodile of desire, even if possessed of knowledge, can never make knowledge one's raft.[904] For these reasons, the man of wisdom and intelligence should strive to float over the stream of Time (without sinking in ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... a long cherished plan well suited to my tastes, that of teaching natural history at a university. Now, one day, at the grammar school, I had a visit from a chief inspector which was not of an encouraging nature. My colleagues used to call him the Crocodile. Perhaps he had given them a rough time in the course of his inspections. For all his boorish ways, he was an excellent man at heart. I owe him for a piece of advice which ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... me to make it up with Carlisle. I have refused every body else, but I can't deny her any thing;—so I must e'en do it, though I had as lief 'drink up Eisel—eat a crocodile.' Let me see—Ward, the Hollands, the Lambs, Rogers, &c. &c.—every body, more or less, have been trying for the last two years to accommodate this couplet quarrel to no purpose. I ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... dumb creature; zoophyte. [major divisions of animals] mammal, bird, reptile, amphibian, fish, crustacean, shellfish, mollusk, worm, insect, arthropod, microbe. [microscopic animals] microbe, animalcule &c. 193. [reptiles] alligator, crocodile; saurian; dinosaur [extinct]; snake, serpent, viper, eft; asp, aspick[obs3]. [amphibians] frog, toad. [fishes] trout, bass, tuna, muskelunge, sailfish, sardine, mackerel. [insects] ant, mosquito, bee, honeybee. [arthropods] tardigrade, spider. [classificatiopn ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... faces of the Pharaohs on the great rock-temple of Abou Simbel (Ipsambul) (No. 1, F. 307). It Is the sublimest of stereographs, as the temple of Kardasay, this loveliest of views on glass, is the most poetical. But here is the crocodile lying in wait for us on the sandy bank of the Nile, and we ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... to these regions, the following are especially noticeable:—The tiger, the elephant, the hippopotamus, the crocodile, the monitor, the two-humped camel, the Angora goat, the elk, the monkey, and the spotted hysena, or Felis chaus. The tiger, which is entirely absent from Mesopotamia, and unknown upon the plateau of Iran, abounds in the low tract between the Elburz and the Caspian, in the flat region ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... and on the west by British Bechuanaland. On the east lie Portuguese Territory and British Zululand, on the north Rhodesia, on the west British Bechuanaland, and on the south the Orange Free State and Natal. The important rivers are the Limpopo or Crocodile River, so named in compliment to its reptile inhabitants, and the Vaal, a tributary of the Orange River. This rises among the Drakenberg Mountains, and, curving, flows west as a boundary between the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. The Limpopo rises between Johannesburg ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... Dolores was sitting at the end of the long garden walk, upon a green garden-bench, with a crocodile's head and tail roughly carved. The shouts of the others were audible in the distance beyond the belt of trees. Aunt Lily had driven into the town to meet her sisters, taking Fergus with her, whereas Dolores had never been out in the carriage. There was partiality! Though, to be sure, ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Pompeii is not a gallery of pictures; it is rather an illustrated journal of the first century. One there sees odd landscapes; a little island on the edge of the water; a bank of the Nile where an ass, stooping to drink, bends toward the open jaws of a crocodile which he does not see, while his master frantically but vainly endeavors to pull him back by the tail. These pieces nearly always consist of rocks on the edge of the water, sometimes interspersed with trees, sometimes covered with ranges of temples, sometimes ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... worshipped a great number of beasts; as the ox, the dog, the wolf, the hawk, the crocodile, the ibis,(344) the cat, &c. Many of these beasts were the objects of the superstition only of some particular cities; and whilst one people worshipped one species of animals as gods, their neighbours held the same animals in abomination. ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... the reedy shores of fabled Nile, Has brought, thick-ribbed and ancient as old iron, That venerable beast, the crocodile, And many a skin of many ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... "what have you been doing with yourself since we last met? I wish you had come with us, and had a shot at a crocodile." ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... They have also been found in England, in the Netherlands near Brussels, at Aix in Provence, and in the quarries near Paris. The most remarkable fossils of this class belong, however, to the lizard family. Of these the most remarkable are the plesiosaurus, the megalosaurus, the iguanodon, and the crocodile of Maestricht, all belonging ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... France," "The Master of Ballantrae," "Micah Clarke," "The Raiders," "The Prisoner of Zenda," and the truly primeval or troglodyte imagination which, as we read of a fight between a knob-nosed Kaffir dwarf and a sacred crocodile, brings us in touch with the first hearers of Heracles's or Beowulf's or Grettir's deeds, "so strange that the jaws of the listeners fall apart." Thus we possess outlets for escape from ourselves and from to-day. We can still dwell now and then in the same air of pleasure as our fathers ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... its own. But as it is hardly the Australia of to-day, though it may be the Australia of the future, we must hurry through its great forests and its rich plains. There are wild buffalo to be found on these plains, and in the rivers that flow through them crocodiles lurk. The crocodile is a very cunning creature. It rests near the surface of the water like a half-submerged log waiting for a horse or an ox or a man to come into the water. Then a ...
— Peeps At Many Lands: Australia • Frank Fox
... come, to grant thee that thou mayest crush those who are in their marshes, so that the countries of Mitanni may tremble for fear of thee,—I grant that they may see Thy Majesty like the crocodile, lord of terrors, in the midst of the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... upon the actions of other men. Their malice makes them nimble-eyed, apt to note a fault and publish it, and, with a strained construction, to deprave even those things in which the doer's intents were honest. Like the crocodile, they slime the way of others, to make them fall; and when that has happened, they feed their insulting envy on the life-blood of the prostrate. They set the vices of other men on high, for the gaze of the world, and place their virtues ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... call a religious one. But in those days few men, unfortunately, had the cool wisdom to remain as neutral between Arminian and Calvinist, Papist and Protestant, as between the rival Egyptian sects which, in Juvenal's time, fought for the worship of the ibis or the crocodile. Our comparatively greater safety in these days is due to the large increase of that neutral party, which was so sadly insignificant in the time of Charles. May that party therefore never become less, but constantly ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... coffins, with mummies and sphinxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed with cancerous kisses by crocodiles; and laid confounded with all unutterable slimy things, among reeds and Nilotic mud. . . . The cursed crocodile became to me the object of more horror than almost all the rest. I was compelled to live ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... crocodile had come out of the river and was pursuing him with its jaws wide open. The poor man, distracted, mad with fright, instead of turning to the right or the left, was keeping in a straight line, and so running the risk of being caught. Suddenly ...
— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne
... and legs. But there is a limit to all things, and when Halicarnassus held up both hands in astonishment and admiration, and declared that he saw a kangaroo, and then, in short and rapid succession, a rhinoceros, an armadillo, and a crocodile, I felt, in the words of General Banks, "We have now reached that limit," and shut down ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... of the legs. A heavy-stocked musket, made at Dieppe or Nantes, with a barrel four and a half feet long, and carrying sixteen balls to the pound,[6] lay over the shoulder, a calabash full of powder, with a wax stopper, was slung behind, and a belt of crocodile's skin, with four knives and a bayonet, went round the waist. These individuals, if the term is applicable to the phenomena ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... as frequently and for as long at a time as his will could override his repugnance. But marriage, which she ardently suggested, with due observance of tribal custom, he balked at. Fortunately, taboo rule was strong in the tribe. Thus, Ngurn could never touch bone, or flesh, or hide of crocodile. This had been ordained at his birth. Vngngn was denied ever the touch of woman. Such pollution, did it chance to occur, could be purged only by the death of the offending female. It had happened once, since Bassett's ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... themselves as related by the tie of descent, some to one species of animals or of plants and some to another. From this belief tribes took their names, each member tattooing the figure of his animal ancestor on his person. The Bechuanas, for example, are divided into crocodile-men, fish-, ape-, buffalo-, elephant-, and lion-men, and so on. The hairy or scaly ancestor is the "totem" of the tribe, and they consider that animal sacred, and will not eat the flesh of it. All who bear the same totem regard each ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... tail of the lizard with the short, compact body, long powerful hind limbs and three-toed feet of the bird. The skin was probably either naked or covered with horny scales as in lizards and snakes; at all events it was not armor-plated as in the crocodile.[4] They walked or ran upon the hind legs; in many of them the fore limbs are quite unfitted for support of the body and must have been used solely in fighting ...
— Dinosaurs - With Special Reference to the American Museum Collections • William Diller Matthew
... sunrise without being lost sight of for a longer or shorter time) was honoured as the representation of manhood in full vigour, and was worshipped, from gratitude to the gods, for multiplying the people of the country. The crocodile was also advanced to the dignity of a god. If one killed any of the sacred animals designedly, he was put to death,—if involuntarily, his punishment was referred to the priests; but if a man killed a hawk, a cat, ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... to the woods is the wizard gone; In his grotto the maiden sits alone. She gazes up with a weary smile At the rafter-hanging crocodile, The slowly swinging crocodile. Scorn has she of her master's gear, Cauldron, alembic, crystal sphere, Phial, philtre—"Fiddlededee For all such trumpery trash!" quo' she. "A soldier is the lad for me; ...
— Fairies and Fusiliers • Robert Graves
... ridicule science and the savant; despise all things which they do not know or which they fear; set themselves above all by constituting themselves the supreme judges of all. They would all hoax their fathers, and be ready to shed crocodile tears upon their mothers' breasts; but generally they believe in nothing, blaspheme women, or play at modesty, and in reality are led by some old woman or an evil courtesan. They are all equally eaten to the bone with calculation, with depravity, with a brutal lust to succeed, and if you ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... Crocodile," said a voice to the left. "The water's lovely, and I have such a craving for something sweet. Won't you ...
— My Father's Dragon • Ruth Stiles Gannett
... them prints of objects, and of animals especially, which they have never seen, and in which no sort of proportion is observed. The common prints of animals must give children false ideas. The mouse and the elephant are nearly of the same size, and the crocodile and whale fill the same space in the page. Painters, who put figures of men amongst their buildings, give the idea of the proportionate height immediately to the eye: this is, perhaps, the best scale we can adopt; in every print for children this should be ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... undergrowth. In one the ugly snout of a small crocodile protruded from the muddy, noisome water, and the cold, unwinking eyes stared at elephant and man as they passed. The rank abundant foliage overhung the track and brushed or broke against Badshah's sides, as he shouldered his way ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... drink beer, think beer." Suppose a question of great public interest afloat:—"Reports are abroad, precisely of the proper pitch of absurdity, for the greedy swallowing of the great grey-goggle-eyed public, who may be seen standing with her mouth wide open like a crocodile, with her hands in her breeches-pockets, at the crosses of cities on market-days, gluttonously devouring whatever rumour flings into her maw—nor in the least aware that she is all the time eating wind. People of smallish abilities ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 346, December 13, 1828 • Various
... that ever so many years ago there was a terrible dragon—a monster, part snake, part crocodile, with sharp teeth, a forked tongue, claws, and wings. It could crawl upon the land or swim in the water. Every day it came from its lair and ate the sheep in the pastures around the old city of Berytus. When the sheep were gone ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... offered a guinea the woman looked at it through her spectacles and said she had no change; so the gloves had to be paid for out of Cyril's two-and-sevenpence that he meant to buy rabbits with, and so had the green imitation crocodile-skin purse at ninepence-halfpenny which had been bought at the same time. They tried several more shops, the kinds where you buy toys and scent, and silk handkerchiefs and books, and fancy boxes of ...
— Five Children and It • E. Nesbit
... Orleans, and at Baltimore sought to regain the confidence of Southern politicians by taking decidedly advanced ground toward Southern views on the slavery question. On the sugar plantations of Louisiana he said, it was not a question between the white man and the negro, but between the negro and the crocodile. He would say that between the negro and the crocodile, he took the side of the negro; but between the negro and the white man, he would go for the white man. The Almighty had drawn a line on this continent, ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... his sword, "once warned, I do not care; tell, my son, tell. Is it a crocodile? my sword is sharp, for I use it every week to cut my corns." And Chicot sat down in the armchair with his drawn sword between ...
— Chicot the Jester - [An abridged translation of "La dame de Monsoreau"] • Alexandre Dumas
... will all blow over some day. Hush, I hear the garden gate opening. It is Constance, come to spy what I am doing here with you. She is as jealous as a crocodile—very nearly made a scene yesterday because I played with Nelly against her at tennis. I have to drive her to Bushy Copse ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... and the lion, and none of the princes of this earth are worthy of my hand, neither hath any man seen me unveiled. But my heart is torn with anguish, and my spirit is tossed with desire, for I have heard of thy deeds of prowess, and how thou fearest neither Deev nor lion, neither leopard nor crocodile, and how thy hand is swift to strike, and how thou didst venture alone into Mazinderan, and how wild asses are devoured of thee, and how the earth groaneth under the tread of thy feet, and how men perish at thy blows, and how even the eagle dareth not swoop down upon her prey when she ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... little brook was now before them; and Alan said, "This river must be crossed, and I hope that none of us will be carried away by the current. What we shall do if an Indian springs from behind the bushes, or a crocodile comes out of the sedge, I don't know. Here is the narrowest part of the river. I will lay my stick across it; and, if we make believe very much, it will do ...
— The Nursery, July 1873, Vol. XIV. No. 1 • Various
... irritating Chud. The west darkened and the stars burned more brilliantly. With the hookah gurgling softly at his feet, Mohammed leaned back his head and gazed in silent appreciation at the wonders of the heavens. There was Turka Kabar, the crocodile; and Menish el Tabir, the sleeping beauty; and Rook Hamana, the leopard, and there—up there to the far north—was a shooting star. How gracefully it shot across the sky, leaving its wake of yellow light behind it! It ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... Jane!" cried Millicent, coming in with uplifted hands. "That horrid creature. I'm certain sure he's a Roundhead! Robin has heard him speak such dreadful words! Do, I beseech you, madam, tell the Colonel that he is cherishing a crocodile in his bosom. We shall all be murdered in ...
— The Gold that Glitters - The Mistakes of Jenny Lavender • Emily Sarah Holt
... last we left the Desert drear, To sail upon the Nile, In the Pasha's beautiful diabeheh Past many a crocodile. ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... New Hampshire Taunted the lofty land With little men;— Small bat and wren House in the oak:— If earth-fire cleave The upheaved land, and bury the folk, The southern crocodile would grieve. Virtue palters; Right is hence; Freedom praised, but hid; Funeral eloquence ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... and Ra, and as a god of fertility he is symbolized by the ram. Another Egyptian fish deity was the god Rem, whose name signifies "to weep"; he wept fertilizing tears, and corn was sown and reaped amidst lamentations. He may be identical with Remi, who was a phase of Sebek, the crocodile god, a developed attribute of Nu, the vague primitive Egyptian deity who symbolized the primordial deep. The connection between a fish god and a corn god is not necessarily remote when we consider that in Babylonia and Egypt the harvest was ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... tigmamanuquin, to which they attributed the name of Bathala, which, as above stated, was among them a name for divinity. They worshiped the crow, as the ancients did the god Pan or the goddess Ceres, and called it Meylupa, signifying "master of the earth." They held the crocodile in the greatest veneration, and when they saw it in the water cried out, in all subjection, "Nono," signifying "Grandfather." They asked it pleasantly and tenderly not to harm them, and for that purpose ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... scene ere night descends! Hark to the shout that heaven's high concave rends! Hark to that dying cry! Whilst, louder yet, the cannon's roar Resounds along the Nile's affrighted shore, Where, from his oozy bed, The cowering crocodile hath raised his head! What bursting flame Lightens the long track of the gleamy brine! 110 From yon proud ship it came, That towered the leader of the hostile line! Now loud explosion rends the midnight air! Heard ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... ahead.[13] We have made about eight miles to-day. Saw about two miles above us a number of boats lying to the shore, apparently obstructed by the rapid just mentioned. About the middle of the afternoon, in walking along the shore, saw a crocodile; it was small, about three feet in length. When I came upon him, he was sunning himself on the shore; on seeing me, he ran with great rapidity and plunged ...
— A Narrative of the Expedition to Dongola and Sennaar • George Bethune English
... that of Vertebrata, Articulata, Mollusca, and Radiata. This is not only offensive to man,—but is impiety towards God." (Why?)—"We are told by these naturalists that man belongs to the class called 'Vertebrata.' So does the snake, the monkey, the lizard and crocodile, and many other low and mean animals.—Have these creatures the reasoning faculties of man? Do they walk erect like man? Have they feet, hands, legs, arms, hair upon their heads, or beards upon their faces? Do they speak languages and congregate and worship at ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... little booth, was aware of sundry marvellous curiosities hanging round, such as a dried crocodile, the shells of tortoises, of sea-urchins and crabs, all to her eyes most strange and weird; but Master Lambert was begging her to hasten in at once to his dwelling-room beyond, and let his wife dry her clothes, and at once there came forward ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... shunted to one side, the crocodile swished away, and Frank fell headlong into the agitated waters of the little bay. Jack saw him going and tried to catch him, but did ...
— Boy Scouts in the Philippines - Or, The Key to the Treaty Box • G. Harvey Ralphson
... grass-green sash, knowing that it was a serpent, and yet would do her no harm, she experienced a sensation of creepy delight which was very novel, and curious, and mixed. The kangaroos were a curious people, resembling small donkeys with crocodile tails, sitting erect on their haunches, and moving about with a waltzing hop, which was both graceful and comical. One of them, oddly enough, had a window in the middle of its stomach out of which a baby ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... famous archaeologists. The great forests of the state, extending over a large area of territory, are the habitat of a varied fauna, including the panther, the tapir, wild boars, boa constrictor, crocodile, and other ferocious kinds, as well as deer, and a variety of bright-plumaged birds. Yucatan is without minerals, its geological formation being ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... the prophet, The prophet must to the mountain! In this Laska There's somewhat of the knave mixed up with dolt. 500 Through the transparence of the fool, methought, I saw (as I could lay my finger on it) The crocodile's eye, that peered up from the bottom. This knave may do us service. Hot ambition Won me the husband. Now let vanity 505 And the resentment for a forced seclusion Decoy the wife! Let him be deemed the aggressor Whose cunning and distrust ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Pope and Arbuthnot, produced, in 1717, a comedy, entitled "Three Months after Marriage," to satirise Dr Woodward, then famous as a fossilist; the piece, being personal and indecent, was not only hissed but hooted off the stage. The chief offence was taken at the introduction of a mummy and a crocodile on the stage. To divert his grief, he, at the suggestion of Lord Burlington, who paid his expenses, rambled into Devonshire, went next with Pultney to Aix, in France, and when afterwards on a visit to Lord Harcourt's ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... friends. He persisted: "Lieutenant, you ought to run 'em out as undesirables or under the vagabond law! They're no good—they won't work—and they're the toughest lookin' lot I ever did see! Sure and if I had my way I'd toss the lot into Sears' crocodile hole—the dirty, low-lived, shiftless ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... suggested this triple epithet, obscure as to its meaning, but evidently formed on the principle of Cymric alliteration. In the same triad we have the enigmatic story of the horned oxen (ychain banog) of Hu the mighty, who drew out of Llyon-llion the avanc (beaver or crocodile?), in order that the lake should not overflow. The meaning of these enigmas could only be hoped from deciphering the chaos of barbaric monuments of the Welsh middle age; but meanwhile we cannot doubt that the Cymri possessed an indigenous tradition ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... Mary. Indeed it was a phenomenon familiarly associated in her mind with Forty-second Street restaurants and late hours and strong drink, particularly gin. The crocodile tear for the good woman who stayed at home; who didn't know; who never, please God! should know. The tribute to flower-like innocence—the paper flower-like innocence of the ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... immovable, lying in that peaceful bay at the mercy of a horde of painted savages—was one of the strange facts almost beyond credence which men encounter at times in the byways of life. It reminded Courtenay of a visit he paid to the crocodile tank at Karachi when he was a midshipman on the Boadicea. He noticed that some of the huge saurians, eighteen feet in length and covered with scale armor off which a bullet would glance, were squirming uneasily, and the Hindu attendant told ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... A small crocodile broke water into air which for him held no moisture, looked at the bats, then at us, and slipped back into the world of crocodiles. A cackle arose, so shrill and sudden, that it seemed to have been the cause of the shower of drops from the palm-fronds; and then, ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... absolutely non-existent in nature. When the artist's imagination would construct, e.g., a winged dragon, the concept is always made up of parts which are real—eyes like an alligator, bat-wings, scales of a fish or crocodile, and so forth. All the members or parts are real, put together to form the unreal. I do not believe that any instance of a human conception can be brought forward which on analysis will not conform to ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... saith, that against the whale fighteth a fish of serpent's kind, and is venomous as a crocodile. And then other fish come to the whale's tail, and if the whale be overcome the other fish die. And if the venomous fish may not overcome the whale, then he throweth out of his jaws the whale throweth out of his mouth a sweet smelling smoke, and putteth off the stinking smell, and defendeth ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... of variants to three type forms. The first occurs in two Egyptian versions collected in the present day, as well as in Petrus Alphonsi in the twelfth century, and the Fabulae Extravagantes of the thirteenth or fourteenth: here the ingrate animal is a crocodile, which asks to be carried away from a river about to dry up, and there is only one judge. The second is that current in India and represented by the story in the present collection: here the judges are three. The third is that current among Western Europeans, ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Collected by Joseph Jacobs
... Mark Tapley there Tom Pinch was lonely and welcomed the arrival of Martin, with whom he soon made friends. Mr. Pecksniff folded his new pupil to his breast, shed a crocodile tear and set him to ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... Pox o' your Crocodile's Tears. Why, Sirrah, Sirrah, do you call my Daughter Whore? Hey, Swords and Daggers, Blunderbusses and Pistols, shall I bear this? Hark you, you my Friend, and no Friend, what a Kin do you take me to ...
— The City Bride (1696) - Or The Merry Cuckold • Joseph Harris
... superstitious opinion that is still more unaccountable. They believe that women, when they are delivered of children, are frequently at the same time delivered of a young crocodile, as a twin to the infant: They believe that these creatures are received most carefully by the midwife, and immediately carried down to the river, and put into the water. The family in which such a birth is supposed to have happened constantly put victuals into the river for their amphibious relation, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... The hills around it, the beautiful lake, into which falls many a sparkling stream, rushing down amid rocks and tall trees. Would that we were there now instead of toiling over this arid desert. How delightful it would be to plunge into some cool and sheltered pool where no crocodile or hippopotamus could reach us. What draughts of water we would drink," and the black opened his mouth as if to pour some of ...
— Ned Garth - Made Prisoner in Africa. A Tale of the Slave Trade • W. H. G. Kingston
... this kind, like smoking tobacco or drinking whiskey, cannot be given up all at once. The ancient Egyptians, for many years after they had lost every trace of the intellectual character of their religion, yet worshipped and adored the ox, the bull, and the crocodile. They had not discovered the art, as we Catholics have done, of making a God out of bread, and of adoring and eating him at one and the same moment. This latter piece of sublimity or religious cookery (we don't know which) was reserved for the educated and talented clergy from ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... "crocodile's tears" has passed into common use, and it therefore may be worth while noting the probable origin of this myth. Shakespeare, with that wide extent of knowledge which enabled him to draw similes from every department of human thought, ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... C is the Crocodile Creepy who ate The right hand of Hook and covets its mate He makes a loud ticking wherever he goes For he swallowed a Clock ...
— The Peter Pan Alphabet • Oliver Herford
... AEmillianus [the accuser of Apuleius] never opens his mouth but for slander and calumny—tooth-powder would indeed be unbecoming to him! Or, if he use any, it will not be my good Arabian tooth-powder, but charcoal and cinders. Ay, his teeth should be as foul as his language! And yet even the crocodile likes to have his teeth cleaned; insects get into them, and, horrible reptile though he be, he opens his jaws inoffensively to a faithful dentistical bird, who volunteers his beak ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... at my distrusting him. My faith in his probity was, he said with dignity, the one thing he valued in this world. I dismissed him with a little to tide him over the next week, thoroughly determined that the man's good name should be cleared. The crocodile partner must disgorge, and the eyes of my benevolent friend and of Conn must be finally opened to the injustice they had unwittingly sanctioned. Again I wrote to my friend. As usual, Sir Asher replied kindly and without a trace of impatience. Would I get some intelligible written statement from ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... testify his gratitude to the missionary who had converted him, sent to him, as a present, a large chest of scented wood. When the missionary opened the chest, he found in it a pretty living Nile crocodile. Fancy his delight! Experiences like this teach prudence. So when our excellent friend M. Lerins sends me a present of a beautiful soul, it is natural that I should unpack it with caution, and that before I install this beautiful soul in my ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... throw the doctor's physic out of the window as the doctor went out of the door, as in his day a man required the constitution of a rhinoceros and the stomach of an ostrich, with the external insensibility of a crocodile, to withstand the ordinary doctor of the period and his medications. Napoleon believed that Baron Larrey was the most virtuous, intelligent, useful, and unselfish man in existence; in fact, it is doubtful if any man of his time commanded from this truly ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... The close of the same letter (25th of July), mentioning two pieces of local news, gives intimation of the dangers incident to all Swiss travelling, and of such special precautions as were necessary for the holiday among the mountains he was now about to take. "My first news is that a crocodile is said to have escaped from the Zoological gardens at Geneva, and to be now 'zigzag-zigging' about the lake. But I can't make out whether this is a great fact, or whether it is a pious fraud to prevent too much bathing and liability to accidents. ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... He craved most ardently that sometime an opportunity would occur for such deeds, particularly in defense of Nell. Both invented various dangers and Stas was compelled to answer her questions as to what he would do if, for instance, a crocodile, ten yards long, or a scorpion as big as a dog, should crawl through the window of her home. To both it never occurred for a moment that impending reality would ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... I can learn," went on Mr. Preston, "my old rival Waydell has given up the giant idea. He is looking for a two-headed crocodile, said to be somewhere along the Nile river, and he's fitting out an expedition there I understand. I guess we won't be bothered with him. But the giant for mine! If I get that sort of an attraction his two-headed crocodile won't be in it. I hope you ...
— Tom Swift in Captivity • Victor Appleton
... the inevitable policy of Wiggins; he changes his name! He comes forth, curled and sweetened, and with a smile upon his mealy face, and placing his felon hand above the vacuum on the left side of his bosom—declares, whilst the tears he weeps would make a crocodile blush—that he is by no means the Tory his wicked, heartless enemies would call him. Certainly not. His name is—Conservative! There was, once, to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 12, 1841 • Various
... so that she did not much like reading them. The notes that every one wrote from home were quite enough for her. What she liked best—that is, when Mrs. Bunker could not attend to her—was to wander about the museum, explaining the things to the dolls: "That is a crocodile, Lonicera; it eats people up, and has a little bird to pick its teeth. Look, Clare, that bony thing is a skeleton—the skeleton of a lizard. Paws off, my dear; mustn't touch. That's amber, just like barley sugar, only not so nice; people make necklaces of it. There's a ...
— Little Lucy's Wonderful Globe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... human nerves. The irritability lurks in the shades of boundless forests where men may starve for want of animal sustenance; it hovers over the broad bosoms of a hundred slow rivers haunted by the mysterious crocodile, the weird hippopotamus. It is everywhere, and by reason of it men quarrel about trifles and descend to brutal passion over ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... awaited the princes in his chamber; behind him were ranged the Guises and the principal lords; not a word, not a salutation on their part. After this freezing reception, Francis II. conducted the two brothers to his mother, who received them, according to Regnier de la Planche's expression, 'with crocodile's tears.' The Guises did not follow them thither, in order to escape any personal dispute, and so as not to be hearers of the severe words which they had themselves dictated to the young monarch. The king questioned Conde sharply; but the latter, 'who was endowed ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Partridge, mournfully. "I am so small and weak. But it grows late—we should be going home; and as it is a long way round by the ford, let us go across the river. My friend, the crocodile, will carry ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... in a cage, her mouth muzzled, and her feet in gloves of crocodile leather. Chained she is too; but she gets out often, and sucks the blood of any child she can lay hold of. Happily there are ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... is, with that young imp clasped in her arms, sobbin' her heart out in her cabin; and if you go fur to comfort her, as I did just now, why, she bites your nose off like a crocodile, she dew! She sez we'll all go to the bottom; and that the cap'en and everybody else have runned the ship ashore just to spite her—she knows, she sez, it's ben only done ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... The Limpopo, or Crocodile river, rises as a paltry stream in the Witwaters Rand between Johannesburg and Pretoria, and flows into the Indian Ocean, 80 miles north of Delagoa Bay, covering in ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... size—and the graceful tamarisk. Myriads of shrubs furnish the blue ape with a shelter; the air sparkles with the many-coloured wings of swarms of birds. On the broad bright bosom of the stream spread the large leaves and white flowers of colossal lilies, among which the crocodile and hippopotamus pursue ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... enervated them by opinions, and bad customs. Who is there who is unacquainted with the customs of the Egyptians? Their minds being tainted by pernicious opinions, they are ready to bear any torture, rather than hurt an ibis, a snake, a cat, a dog, or a crocodile: and should any one inadvertently have hurt any of these animals, he will submit to any punishment. I am speaking of men only. As to the beasts, do they not bear cold and hunger, running about in woods, and on mountains and deserts? will they not fight for their young ones till they are ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... little sigh. And when Mr. Clarkson drove off that evening with his bag, she stood by the railings and said to the lady next door: "There goes my gentleman, and him no more fit to do for hisself than a babe unborn, and no more idea of cooking than a crocodile!" ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... nothing, from lapping up Eisel to killing a crocodile, that Paul would not have done, in the fulness of his wondering gratitude, for his dearest lady, he meekly attached the heart to his chain and put ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... impression that the alligator differs from the crocodile in that one moves the upper jaw and the other the lower. Such, however, is not the case. Both animals move the lower jaw, though the raising of the head as the mouth opens sometimes gives the appearance of moving the upper jaw only. But alligators and crocodiles differ ...
— Southern Stories - Retold from St. Nicholas • Various
... "In here," said the crocodile, elevating his distending jaws above the water and beckoning with his tongue—"this ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... so lavishly, that in the brilliancy produced by their combined effect, night and day appeared the same; of Afrasiyab, strong as an elephant, whose shadow extended for miles, whose heart was bounteous as the ocean, and his hands like the clouds when rain falls to gladden the earth. The crocodile in the rolling stream had no safety from Afrasiyab. Yet when he came to fight against the generals of Kaus, he was but an insect in the grasp of Rustem, who seized him by the girdle, and dragged him from his horse. Rustem felt such ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Salaman and Absal • Omar Khayyam and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... battalions marching in order, the men carrying their shields on the left arm, and a lance, a javelin, a bow, a sling, or an axe in the right hand. The soldiers wore helmets adorned with two horse-hair tails. Their bodies were protected by a cuirass of crocodile-skin; their impassible look, the perfect regularity of their motions, their coppery complexion, deepened still more by the recent expedition to the burning regions of Upper Egypt, the desert dust which lay upon their clothes, inspired admiration for their ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... the kings of the firmament to the Sun, and prevent their particular influences from disturbing his, diversely coloured metal stars were brandished at the end of long poles; and all were there, from the dark Neblo, the genius of Mercury, to the hideous Rahab, which is the constellation of the Crocodile. The Abbadirs, stones which had fallen from the moon, were whirling in slings of silver thread; little loaves, representing the female form, were born on baskets by the priests of Ceres; others brought their fetishes and amulets; forgotten idols reappeared, while the mystic ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... darkness was writhing and turning, visible, yet obscure; as the rapids of a glassy, twisting river might look by night. And as one might glimpse beneath the smooth boil and heave of such a river the dim shape of crocodile or water-monster, so in that moving dark there seemed to lie Something from which the mind shrank, appalled. Now gigantic tentacles rolled about a central mass, groping out in unsatisfied greed. Now an ape-like shape seemed to stalk there, rearing up its monstrous ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... liked that best. Remind him of home sweet home. Wiped his nose in curtain too. Custom his country perhaps. That's music too. Not as bad as it sounds. Tootling. Brasses braying asses through uptrunks. Doublebasses helpless, gashes in their sides. Woodwinds mooing cows. Semigrand open crocodile music hath jaws. Woodwind ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... play such a trick," cried Carey, indignantly. "There was a great crocodile that looked five-and-twenty or thirty feet long lying close to the water when I signed to you both to come. It wasn't twenty ...
— King o' the Beach - A Tropic Tale • George Manville Fenn
... shouting, bewildered press—a Persian greyhound between his feet and a cageful of yelling hawks under charge of a Rajput falconer in the small of his back. 'He has gone now to send word of the letter which I hid. They told me he was in Peshawur. I might have known that he is like the crocodile—always at the other ford. He has saved me from present calamity, but I owe ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... to coax the most suspicious and recalcitrant of listeners into reluctant concurrence. M. Mantoux would reproduce that smile to admiration, and his tones when translating Mr. Lloyd George's seductive blandishments into French were enough to cajole a crocodile. ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... "Me! I won't——" but even as I spoke she had taken my arm, and the next thing I knew I was sitting with the thing on my knees and Miss Laura Hinkle opposite, grinning in my face like a flirtatious crocodile. ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... the Spanish lagarto]. The crocodile of America. The head of this voracious animal is flat and imbricate; several of the under teeth enter into and pass through the upper jaw; the nape is naked; on the tail are two ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... his final grip of poor Yarrow's throat—and he lay gasping and done for. His master, a brown, handsome, big young shepherd from Tweedsmuir, would have liked to have knocked down any man, would "drink up Esil, or eat a crocodile," for that part, if he had a chance: it was no use kicking the little dog; that would only make him hold the closer. Many were the means shouted out in mouthfuls, of the best possible ways of ending it. "Water!" but there was none near, and many ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... baffled them by constantly turning, which they were unable to do quickly, on account of their unwieldy make; and we went into the water after them, as natives, and put sharp pieces of timber down their throats; and in short we ran the whole crocodile gauntlet. I did, at least; but I had my doubts of Peggotty, who was thoughtfully sticking her needle into various parts of her face and arms, all ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... modern artist who made no pretence to believe in the existence of such an anthropomorphic river-god. It cannot be counted as religious art at all. And the attributes and accessories of such a figure, the crocodile and hippopotamus, the sphinx and corn and horn of plenty, are all of them symbolic allusions such as are suitable to such a frigid personification. The art of Alexandria is full of such devices; that of Pergamon is more vigorous and dramatic; but in both alike we find the influence of a learned ...
— Religion and Art in Ancient Greece • Ernest Arthur Gardner
... it! You have fixed the halter upon my neck, and at the same price would have done so to your only son! Go, count your accursed guineas I My life would have been safer in the hands of one I had never seen than in yours, whose mouth and whose eyes for ever ran over with crocodile affection!" ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... convict orderly, who was squatting in the bow of the sampan, or boat, uttering a cry, stood up, at the same time pointing to the stern of the boat. Upon looking round, a Chinaman, who had been seated in the stern of the boat, was found to be missing. A crocodile had, as it were, shot up out of the water, and, seizing the Chinaman by the waist, had drawn him down into the river, and nothing more was seen of them at the time. Shortly afterwards, a canoe with a Malay man and his wife in it was upset near the same spot ...
— Prisoners Their Own Warders - A Record of the Convict Prison at Singapore in the Straits - Settlements Established 1825 • J. F. A. McNair
... deviating from custom, it thinks with male intensity, thinks just as much to the purpose as we do. She rose, bade Martin move Peter to another room, made her own very neat and clean, polished the glass globe, and suspended it from the ceiling, dusted the crocodile and nailed him to the outside wall; and after duly instructing Martin, set him to play the lounging sentinel about the street door, and tell the crocodile-bitten that a great, and aged, and learned alchymist abode there, who in his ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... now shall have a defender. For he is afraid of nobody in the desert—neither lion, nor snake, nor crocodile. And he is very ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... wretch!" I could not help muttering to myself. "Hypocritical cries and crocodile tears will not hide your sin. An ear of which you dreamed not has heard your hellish plots, and been witness to your hellish deeds upon the body of your poor babe. You cannot escape. The voice of blood cries from the very ground. The hope of ...
— Off-Hand Sketches - a Little Dashed with Humor • T. S. Arthur
... island. 'Never was there to us a more joyful sight.' Only one man had perished, a very proper young negro, who, leaping into the river of Lagartos to swim, was instantly devoured before them all by a crocodile. The rest, in spite of wet, heat, want of sleep, clean clothes, and shelter, and a diet of rotting fruit, crocodile, sea-cow, tapir, and armadillo, all survived. They had suffered from no pestilence. Schomburgk thinks Ralegh coloured too highly the mineral riches of Guiana. ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... main difficulties. The first is to understand why primitive Man should name his Tribe after an animal or object of nature at all; the second, to understand on what principle he selected the particular name (a lion, a crocodile, a lady bird, a certain tree); the third, why he should make of the said totem a divinity, and pay honor and worship to it. It may be worth while to pause for a moment ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... the Virgin Isles," says the "General Historie," "we spent some time, where with a lothsome beast like a crocodile, called a gwayn [guana], tortoises, pellicans, parrots, and ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Limpopo, and other rivers in Portuguese East Africa. But Natal will soon know this great amphibian no more; and within Cape Colony, where the creature was once abundant even in the swamps that bordered Table Bay, he is now to be found only in the pools along the lower course of the Orange River. The crocodile holds his ground better, and is still a serious danger to oxen who go down to drink at the streams. In Zululand and all along the east coast, as well as in the streams of Mashonaland and Matabililand, there is hardly a pool which does not contain some of these formidable saurians. Even when ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... volley of slang utterly untranslatable, "that is how you treat your betters, is it? Miser, monster, crocodile, serpent! He wanted the money and you refused it? Ah! son of Satan! You live on other men's miseries! Run after him, quick, and give him this, and this, and this, and this; and say you were only in jest, and that the things were worth a Sheik's ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... ridicule. What, for example, could be a more foolish description of Egyptian worship than the following? "Who knows not, O Volusius of Bithynia, the sort of monsters Egypt, in her infatuation, worships. One part venerates the crocodile; another trembles before an ibis gorged with serpents. The image of a sacred monkey glitters in gold, where the magic chords sound from Memnon broken in half, and ancient Thebes lies buried in ruins, with her hundred gates. In one place they venerate sea-fish, in another river-fish; there, whole ...
— Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life • E. A. Wallis Budge
... and heart-piercing strains of the Hungarian's violin, so that old Rochette cried out: "What a pity such a wonder should not be upon the stage!" La Rochette, now retired into private life, wearing an old dress, with her gray hair and her black eyes, like those of a watchful crocodile, took the pleasure in the pantomime that all actors do to the very last in everything connected with the theatre. She cried 'brava' in tones that might reach Italy; she blew kisses to the ...
— Jacqueline, v3 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... sound common-sense in each and all these matters. Hence no one will be surprised to hear that at the house of a lady in London, an ordinary table, after a preliminary performance in tilting, transformed suddenly into a full-grown crocodile, and played touchingly on the piano, after which it again changed into a table, but the gin, the whisky, the pale ale, and the other intoxicants which are indispensable at seances in England, had been entirely consumed by the transcendental reptile to fortify him on his return journey ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... Sowerby His eyes do open wide When he sees the Pasha's chosen In her "bruggam" and her pride. And William William Sowerby, He has a tender smile, Which will bring him in due season To the waters of the Nile And the cheery crocodile!" ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... wild horses. A curious adventure happened to that little foal, which is worthy of record. A year or two after this, the groom took him to the river to wash his legs, and as he turned to come out again, a crocodile bit him; he struggled for a moment and fell; this frightened the crocodile away, and the poor young horse was dragged from the water's edge; the formidable teeth of the reptile had nearly separated the foot from the leg, and it hung by one tendon. There seemed to be no alternative but to shoot ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... will there be a slaughtering of oxen? On account of the death of some Abipon, the word Kahamatek was interdicted, and, in its stead, they were all commanded by the voice of a crier to say, Hegmalkam negerkata? The word nihirenak, a tiger, was exchanged for apanigehak; peu, a crocodile, for Kaeprhak, and Kaama, Spaniards, for Rikil, because these words bore some resemblance to the names of Abipones lately deceased. Hence it is that our vocabularies are so full of blots occasioned by our having such frequent occasions ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham
... truth I believe thou art possessed of the arts of magic. Now, if thou art lost in the hills and devoured by a wolf, upon thine own head be it. Pull in that paw, before thou becomest a foolish sacrifice to the sacred crocodile. I wonder thy self-respect does not keep thee from coming when thou art unwelcome." And subsiding into silence, the sculptor ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... now a great man of science, and can plan railroads, and steam-engines, and electric telegraphs, and rifled guns, and so forth; and knows everything about everything, except why a hen's egg don't turn into a crocodile, and two or three other little things which no one will know till the coming of the Cocqcigrues. And all this from what he learnt when he was a ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... which she was still totally ignorant, and that his love would invent some means or other to prevent a journey, which she flattered herself would be even more affecting to him than to herself; but she was expecting pity from a crocodile. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... you'll understand. I have all the horrors—without any art. I have no 'Ladies of Sorrow,' but I have worse monsters than his 'crocodile'." He ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... but that my raving fancy should direct My trecherous tongue with that detested name To afflict thy unblemishd purity, Belisea. I do confes my error was an act Soe grosse and heathnish that its very sight Would have inforcd a Crocodile to weepe Drops as sincere as does the timorous heart When he ore heares the featherd arrow sing ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... employed to "cure" individual ailments. Very slowly and tortuously do the methods of the profession adapt themselves to the modern conception of an army of devoted men working as a whole under God for the health of mankind as a whole, broadening out from the frowsy den of the "leech," with its crocodile and bottles and hieroglyphic prescriptions, to a skilled and illuminating co-operation with those who deal with the food and housing and ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... a crocodile, perhaps, in Masr," Yuhanna laughingly suggested, with a hand on the shoulder of the visionary. But Elias protested vehemently, swearing by Allah that he knew a crocodile when he saw one. The monster in dispute had been no crocodile, as witness ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... spoke; and hark, what meets the ear, The raging flood is now approaching near; Onward it rolls, o'erwhelming Raschid's plains, All things it sweeps, and not a tree remains, His flocks, his herds, the mighty stream o'erpours, Himself (rash man) a crocodile devours. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19, No. 533, Saturday, February 11, 1832. • Various
... know about these 'last hour conversions,'" said the pessimistic Bess. "I should wring the tears out of the shoulder of my coat and bottle 'em. Only tears I ever heard of Linda's shedding! And they may prove to be crocodile ...
— Nan Sherwood's Winter Holidays • Annie Roe Carr
... it was disturbed by the steamer, or the startled fish, that dashed away on every side as they swiftly ran on towards the land of swamp and jungle, of nipah and betel palm, where the rivers were bordered by mangroves, the home of the crocodile; a land where the night's conversation had roused up thoughts of its being perhaps the burial-place of many a one of the brave hearts throbbing within the timbers of that stout ship—hearts that were to play active parts in ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... hand some of these tracks are! The hind-feet are evidently much larger than the fore-feet. There is the frog-like animal which made them, and what a size! It must be six feet long, and its head looks like that of a crocodile, for its jaws are furnished with formidable rows of long, strong, ...
— Lectures on Popular and Scientific Subjects • John Sutherland Sinclair, Earl of Caithness
... imperfect knowledge of their aquatic habits. He may have seen only a mutilated specimen. But there is no mistaking the hideous ferocity of the countenance, and the "eyes bigger than a fourpenny loaf," as Ramusio has it. Though the actual eye of the crocodile does not bear this comparison, the prominent orbits do, especially in the case of the Ghariyal of the Ganges, and form one of the most repulsive features of the reptile's physiognomy. In fact, its presence on the surface of an Indian ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa |
