"Minnow" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Anthony, "a frog. He wasn't much of a frog, as frogs go. In fact, with the exception that he had no home and no friends, he was a very ordinary frog indeed. One day when he was sick and tired of being alone, he went out and bought a tame minnow. Considering how poor he was, it was very reckless, because it meant that there were now two mouths to feed instead of one, but the minnow and the frog became such great friends that that didn't seem to matter. At last, sure enough, the day of reckoning arrived. The larder was empty, ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... take a small Roach, Dace, Loach, Minnow, Smelt, small Trout, or Pearch, cutting off the Finns on the back, or small Eels well scoured in Wheat-Bran, which will keep them better and longer, taking a way the slime and watery substance, that causes them to rot or ...
— The School of Recreation (1696 edition) • Robert Howlett
... up from the valley,— From the valley!" Once he caught her, Swerving down a sidelong alley, For a moment, by the hand. "Tell me, tell me," he besought her, "Sweetest, I would understand Why so cold thy palm, that slips From me like the shy cold minnow? The wood is warm, and smells of fern, And below the meadows burn. Hard to catch and hard to win, oh! Why are those brown finger tips Crinkled as with ...
— Ride to the Lady • Helen Gray Cone
... Remote down air an owl hallooed. The black twig dropped without a twirl; The bud in jewelled grasp was nipped; The brown leaf cracked a scorching curl; A crystal off the green leaf slipped. Across the tracks of rimy tan, Some busy thread at whiles would shoot; A limping minnow-rillet ran, To hang upon ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... fiction, among many other sins,—as a nice old lady told me once,—now I have to deal with facts; and foul scorn would I count it ever to make believe that I caught that fish. My length at that time was not more than the butt of a four-jointed rod, and all I could catch was a minnow with a pin, which our cook Lydia would not cook, but used to say, "Oh, what a shame, Master Richard! they would have been trout in the summer, please God! if you would only a' let 'em grow on." She is living now, and will bear me out ...
— Crocker's Hole - From "Slain By The Doones" By R. D. Blackmore • R. D. Blackmore
... a proof-room is like fishing for trout: the big ones always get away. Or, as Old Bill Byrne puts it, while you're fishing for a minnow a whale comes up and bites you in ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... "Minnow-poles," as they called them, could be cut from the bushes at the margin, and little fish could be taken at the same time that they were trying for large ones. They found too, before long, that sometimes a very respectable perch or bass would stoop ...
— Dab Kinzer - A Story of a Growing Boy • William O. Stoddard
... that he could straddle the inlet, and he used to stand that way every morning and wait for the whales to pass beneath him. As soon as one came along he used to scoop it up just as easily as other men scoop up a minnow. And he ate the whole whale just as other men eat a ...
— A Treasury of Eskimo Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss
... time to put in a little fishing. The last of the Yosemites dodged behind the trees, watching him and probably envying him the lone minnow which ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... Chippy took the largest minnow, and, by the light of the fire, deftly worked it over the hook and lead until the latter was hidden in the body ...
— The Wolf Patrol - A Tale of Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts • John Finnemore
... ponds—rarely in Witham; rudd (Cyprinus Erythrophthalmus), Witham; bream (Abramis Brama), Witham; silver bream (Abramis Blicca), ponds; roach (Leuciscus rutilus), ponds, canals, Bain; dace (Leuciscus vulgaris), ponds, canal, Bain; blick (Alburnus lucidus), Witham; minnow (Leuciscus Phoxinus), Bain; tench, (Tinca vulgaris), ponds; perch (Perca fluviatilis), canal; loach (Nemachilus barbatulus), canal and river Waring; gudgeon (Gobio fluviatilis), canal, Bain, Waring, Witham; miller’s thumb (Gobio cottus), canal; stickleback or blue-eyed sailor (Gasterosteus ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... all of us now and then betrayed into an extravagance. The keen tradesmen who tempt us are like the fishermen who dangle a minnow, a frog, or a worm before the perch or pickerel who may be on the lookout for his breakfast. But Mr. Quaritch comes among us like that formidable angler ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... branches above her head would be filled with the birds that came thither to listen, and the thickets around her, and the waters rolling beside her, would be crowded with beasts and fishes attracted to the nearest brink or covert by the same sweet sounds. From the minnow to the porpoise, from the sparrow to the eagle, from the snail to the lobster, from the mouse to the mole—all hastened to the spot to listen to the charming songs of the hideous Marshpee maiden. And various, but sufficiently noisy and dissonant, were the means by which the creatures testified ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... in all directions. As his hook, baited with a lively shiner, floated over the spot, a long, yellow object shot from out that shaded lair. There was a splash, not unlike that made by the sharp edge of a paddle impelled by a short, powerful stroke, the minnow disappeared, and the broad tail of the fish flapped on the water. The instant Alfred struck, the water boiled and the big fish leaped clear into the air, shaking himself convulsively to get rid of the hook. He made mad rushes up and down the pool, under the ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... so that I thought the trout would not rise to a fly, and I put on a small spoon, which I dropped into the rapids at the end of a long rod. After catching three or four they grew suspicious, and I changed my lure for an artificial minnow, and with it I had better success, though I have often tried it in Western trout-streams ineffectually. I got about a dozen, from four ounces to a pound weight: they were sea-trout, Salmo Canadensis, and the first of that species that I ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... abundant in the lake; but with all my endeavours to obtain some specimens, I have succeeded in seeing only two sorts—one similar to those taken at Ujiji, of a perch-like form, and another very small, resembling our common minnow, but not found in the Ujiji market. The quantity of mosquitoes on the borders of the lake is perfectly marvellous; the grass, bushes, and everything growing there, are literally covered with them. As I walked along its shores, disturbing ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... of Minnow. Minnow's second favourite, as perhaps you know. It would delight Lambson-Bowles to see me 'go under'; and as I'm so certain of Black Riot that I've mortgaged every stick and stone I have in the world to back her, I should ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... then, as he grows stronger, he gets from the dead, still water, into the sharp streams, and the gravel, and there tubs off these worms or lice; and then as he grows stronger, so he gets him into swifter and swifter streams, and there lies at the watch for any fly or minnow that comes near to him; and he especially loves the May-fly, which is bred of the cod-worm or caddis; and these make the trout bold and lusty, and he is usually fatter and better meat at the end of that month (May) than at any time of ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... broke surface or collided against the hidden legs. At last the chief fisherman entered the trap. He waded around everywhere, carefully. But there were no fish boiling up and out upon the sand. There was not a sardine, not a minnow, not a polly- wog. Something must have been wrong with that prayer; or else, and more likely, as one grizzled fellow put it, the wind was not in its usual quarter and the fish were elsewhere in the lagoon. In fact, there had been no fish ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... and broken shells. During the afternoon, it being nearly a calm, we found ourselves surrounded by quantities of fish, about the size of the mackerel, and apparently in pursuit of a number of small and almost transparent members of the finny tribe, not larger than the minnow. ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... chit, pigwidgeon^, urchin, elf; atomy^, dandiprat^; doll, puppet; Tom Thumb, Hop-o'-my-thumb^; manikin, mannikin; homunculus, dapperling^, cock-sparrow. animalcule, monad, mite, insect, emmet^, fly, midge, gnat, shrimp, minnow, worm, maggot, entozoon^; bacteria; infusoria^; microzoa [Micro.]; phytozoaria^; microbe; grub; tit, tomtit, runt, mouse, small fry; millet seed, mustard seed; barleycorn; pebble, grain of sand; molehill, button, bubble. point; atom &c (small quantity) 32; fragment ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... see now it is a harder matter to catch a Trout then a Chub; for I have put on patience, and followed you this two hours, and not seen a fish stir, neither at your Minnow nor ...
— The Complete Angler 1653 • Isaak Walton
... said our friend, rising and taking down his coat. "Yes," he continued, "it wur sixteen year ago, come the third o' next month, that I landed him. I caught him just below the bridge with a minnow. They told me he wur in the river, and I said I'd have him, and so I did. You don't see many fish that size about here now, I'm thinking. Good-night, ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... must look for those methods of accurate observation, comparison, and the study of causes without which it could not advance farther. And modern psychology has advanced far enough to see that we must include in its purview the 'soul' of a minnow as well as of a man. Descartes had stopped too short, for to him animal life, as distinct from human, showed only the movements of automata. But now, just as the biologist conceives man as part of one ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... line of the receding tide to snap up imprudent snails and the numerous minute crustaceae which drift about in these brackish waters. The familiar kingfisher was also there, coming down with an occasional arrowy dash on some unsuspecting minnow, and then flapping away leisurely for a quiet meal in the shady recesses of a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... inches of water, on the very edge of the ford road, great tails and back-fins are showing above the surface, and swirling suddenly among the tufts of grass, sure sign that the large fish are picking up a minnow-breakfast at the same time that they warm their backs, and do not mean to look at a fly for many an hour ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... arrived with the only porter of the tiny station laden with traps. She hesitated about a private sitting-room, but eventually we compromised matters, as I was willing to share it with the other visitor. I got into knickerbockers at once, collared a boy to get me worms and minnow for the morrow, and as I felt too lazy to unpack tackle, just sat in the shiny armchair (made comfortable by the successive sitting of former occupants) at the open window and looked out. The river, not the trout stream, winds ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... like perverseness, if he chose to thrust his kitchen under the public's very nose, what should the generally fagged-out, half-famished representative of that dignified public do but reel in his dead minnow, shoulder his fishing-rod, clamber over the back fence of the old farmhouse and inquire within, or jog back to the city, inwardly anathematizing that very particular locality or the whole rural district in ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... with worm and minnow, came down to inform S. that he had already landed four perch, and that the shoal was still unfrightened. With a recommendation to his friend to do likewise, he returned to his station, and his basketed perch might soon have recited, "Master, we are seven." Thereabouts ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... to the rivers, English or continental, on the eastern side of the Straits of Dover; while the rivers on the western side were originally tenanted, like our Hampshire streams, as now, almost entirely by trout, their only Cyprinoid being the minnow—if it, too, be not an interloper; and I might ask you to consider the bearing of this curious fact on the former ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... they were at all events curdling, and his activities might reasonably turn elsewhere. He had served the school for many years, and it was really time he should be entrusted with a boarding-house. The headmaster, an impulsive man who darted about like a minnow and gave his mother a great deal of trouble, agreed with him, and also agreed with Mrs. Jackson when she said that Mr. Jackson had served the school for many years and that it was really time he should be entrusted with a boarding-house. Consequently, when Dunwood House fell vacant ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... Field. I have also seen very big specimens which had been speared by Indians in the Thompson and sold as "salmon"; two of them I weighed myself and found to be 15lb. and 12lb. respectively. While, therefore, there is some evidence to show that these large fish may be caught with spoon and minnow, it may be stated as a broad fact that the rainbow is not often caught with the fly over the weight of 4lb., and that up to this ...
— Fishing in British Columbia - With a Chapter on Tuna Fishing at Santa Catalina • Thomas Wilson Lambert
... rise to a fly at such times in the rapids; but no allurement excepting the troll will bring them to the surface in still water. When the river is rising, or the water is clouded with mud or drift, bass scorn all surface-diet; but the live minnow or crawfish, hellgramite or fish-worm, will capture them on trout-line or hook attached to the soul-absorbing bob. A clothes-line wire cable, furnished with well-assorted hooks baited with cotton, dough, and cheese well mixed together, and stretched in eddy-water when the river is muddy, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... and you're not Pollen. They're the whales in this pond. You're only a nervous minnow. I'm working with bigger men than you. And perhaps I've got some convictions of my own, had 'em for years. If I hadn't, no money of yours would buy me. I believe the people want this war to settle once and for all whether that wishy-washy King or us is going to direct the ...
— Makers of Madness - A Play in One Act and Three Scenes • Hermann Hagedorn
... explanation. His lips twitched in the shadow of a smile. "At such times I find nothing quite so soothing as to drop a line into water for a while. I've got some thinking to do, too. So let's get down to the dock. There ought to be a little bait left in the minnow pail." ...
— Gone Fishing • James H. Schmitz
... good, and if great anticipations exist on this score, I must say that they will not, in my opinion, be realized. Small fish on which the trout feed are abundant, as also the cadis worm and fly, and the trout do not take readily an artificial bait, either fly or minnow. I cannot, therefore, say that I think many trout can be caught. There is also much fishing with small nets. I can, however, teach Danish to an Englishman, although my knowledge of English is imperfect; but on the other hand, if the advertiser will teach my ...
— A Danish Parsonage • John Fulford Vicary
... out over the depths where lay the sturgeon and the pickerel and trout and whitefish. The gulls swooped at them; then, frightened, soared away in wide, rushing circles, dropping here and there for an overbold minnow. The afternoon went by with hardly the passing of a word. Each of them, the Captain, the maid, the priest, looked over the burnished water, now a fair green or blue sheet, now a space of striped yellow and green and purple, newly marked ...
— The Road to Frontenac • Samuel Merwin
... three townsmen nibbled at them with their eyes. You may reckon that the diamond of La Beaupertuys sparkled less than their little minnow eyes. ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... after many sugar-coated words, and several premeditated misdeals on both sides, one draws a blank and the other a booby. After patiently angling in the matrimonial pool, one draws a sunfish and the other a minnow. One expects to capture a demigod, who hits the earth only in high places, but when she has thoroughly analyzed him, she finds nothing genuine, only a wilted chrysanthemum and a pair of patent leather shoes, while he ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... on the edge of the hole and bearing attached to the line a red flannel flag which the biting fish will strike and carry into the depths with him when he goes off to swallow the bait. The fishermen understand well the ways of the aristocrat pickerel when he swallows a proletariat minnow. No lordly capitalist ever took in a plebeian inventor with more grace—and finality. Often the flag just drops from the support and lies on the surface of the water while the two get acquainted. The pickerel has the minnow, but his grip is not what he wants. He is particular ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... with you, Jerry?" asked Bluff, who had been fixing a phantom minnow on a troll, in the expectation of picking up a fish or ...
— The Outdoor Chums at Cabin Point - or The Golden Cup Mystery • Quincy Allen
... conscience, but for the fact that earthly politics, social theories, and social instincts were less to him now than to an inhabitant of the dark body that tumbles and fumbles around Sirius. Less than the difference between the minnow and the roach to the ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... therefore did those three often consume valuable hours, (yet also I hope not altogether wasted)—videlicet, Alice and Charles, and the honourable Viscount—in endeavouring to catch the finny tribe, yet seldom with much success. But whatever was the result of their industry—yea, though it was but a minnow—it was brought and presented to my Waller by the honourable hands of the young man, with so loving an air, that it was easy to behold how gladly he would have consented, if she had been the companion of their sports, if ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... the river for about a mile beyond Courbevoie. moored our boat to a friendly willow, put our fishing-tackle together, and composed ourselves for the gentle excitement that waits upon the gudgeon and the minnow. ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... fish up, The fish from the stream. Allie calls, Allie sings, Up they all swim. First there came Two gold fish, A minnow and a miller's thumb, Then a pair of loving trout, Then ...
— Country Sentiment • Robert Graves
... water, kept tempting and urging that sturdy boy, who, with his shirt collar unbuttoned, and flung back as far as it could go, sat fanning his flushed face with a spelling book, wishing himself a whale, or a minnow, or a fly, or anything but a boy at school, on that ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... never find him again. I often break my top joint; so, as I never carry string, I splice it with a bit of the line, which I bite off, for I really cannot be troubled with scissors and I always lose my knife. When a phantom minnow sticks in my clothes, I snap the gut off, and put on another, so that when I reach home I look as if a shoal of fierce minnows had attacked me and hung on like leeches. When a boy, I was—once or twice—a bait-fisher, ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... quite a number of fish frozen in the ice—the larger ones about the size of a herring and the smaller of a minnow. We imagined both had been driven into the slushy ice by seals, but to-day Gran found a large fish frozen in the act of swallowing a small one. It looks as though both small and large are caught when one is chasing ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... being snubbed, dressing and dancing and feasting and flirting, did she soar higher and higher in her butterfly career. The denouement comes when they are cut out by "Ye rising Minnows"—an American sculptor—one Pygmalion F. Minnow—whose wife was twice as ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... Mr. Button. "I suppose you think that other boat was hiding behind the rock ready to jump out at you the way a pickerel starts for a minnow." ...
— Go Ahead Boys and the Racing Motorboat • Ross Kay
... right, but many have not the virtue to resist wrong. Ambition prompts for success the expedient: and hence the laxity of political morals. This is slipping the cable that the ship may swing from her anchorage and drift with the tide; any minnow may float with the current, but it requires a strong fish to stem and progress against the stream. A man, to brave obloquy and public scorn, requires strong moral courage; but when his judgment convinces him that he is right, ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... the ice has long ago gone out of the ponds around Carson I reckon we won't get any chance to try that queer sort of pickerel fishing," Steve observed; "but I brought my minnow seine along, so we ought to scoop up plenty of live bait, and they take with pickerel every time. You can trust Uncle Steve for bringing in an occasional mess of ...
— Chums of the Camp Fire • Lawrence J. Leslie
... three days of afternoons. When the sun cleared the port-hole of Ardita's cabin an hour after dawn she rose cheerily, donned her bathing-suit, and went up on deck. The negroes would leave their work when they saw her, and crowd, chuckling and chattering, to the rail as she floated, an agile minnow, on and under the surface of the clear water. Again in the cool of the afternoon she would swim—and loll and smoke with Carlyle upon the cliff; or else they would lie on their sides in the sands of the southern beach, talking little, but watching the day ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... trail up Moose Creek. Then had come the struggle with the four feet of untouched snow that was really not snow, but frost-crystals, so lacking in cohesion that when kicked it flew with the thin hissing of granulated sugar. In three days they had wallowed thirty miles up Minnow Creek and across the series of low divides that separate the several creeks flowing south into Siwash River; and now they were breasting the big divide, past the Bald Buttes, where the way would lead them down Porcupine ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... my line," said he, "with a piece of meat or minnow on the hook. Then I stick a stick down in the bank, two or three feet long, and take a half hitch around the top. It acts as a sort of rod and gives when the fish bites. He pulls down and swallows the bait, and the spring of the stick holds him safer than a straight pull ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... Odin had experienced a feeling akin to this. It was the time when he had used Ato's belt, and Gunnar had flung him into space as though he had been a minnow at the end of a snapping line. But that experience had been momentary. This built itself up—until Odin felt himself expanding and contracting at each pulse beat. His heart seemed to beat slower and slower. Waves of smothering pain ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... braes and woodlands of his own native country. And Frank's enthusiasm did not depend entirely on his success. It was a standing joke among his school-fellows that Frank would walk six miles any day for the chance of a nibble from the ghost of a minnow. Indeed he was often taunted by his ruder comrades with being such a keen fisher that he was quite content if he only hooked a drowned cat during a day's excursion. But Frank was good-natured; he smiled at their jests, and held ...
— Ungava • R.M. Ballantyne
... little squirrels each carried a fat minnow; but Nutkin, who had no nice manners, brought no present at all. He ...
— The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin • Beatrix Potter
... plains, where the Gauls had long lived in security, and reports were everywhere heard of villages harried by wild horsemen, with short double-headed battle-axes, and a horrible short pike covered with iron and with several large hooks, like a gigantic artificial minnow, and like it fastened to a long rope, so that the prey which it had grappled might be pulled up to the owner. Walled cities usually stopped them, but every farm or villa outside was stripped of its valuables, set on fire, the cattle ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... the fishes are as common as the schoolboy's familiar friend, the minnow. Others, like the cat-fish and sea-horse, are rare—in England, at any rate. Then there are kinds known to every lover of angling, such as the perch and pike. Seldom has a popular name been so aptly ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... the fish can be seen its eye is visible. The glimmer of scales, the grace of perfect motion, the rare golden pavilion with its jeweled floor and heavy violet curtains, complete a scene whose harmony of color, radiance and animal life is perfect. The minnow and sun-perch are the pages of the tourney on the cloth of gold. There is a fearless familiarity in these playful little things, a social, frank intimacy with their novel visitor, that astonishes while it pleases. They crowd about him, curiously ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... think I can help you out of your difficulty. Every minnow in this stream—they are very scarce, ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... cannot weave a net so fine that some minnow will not slip through and become leviathan! It escaped and has grown. Well, that too was in the nature of things." He took the ash-stick from the corner of the hearth and handled it as though he were again holding down burning papers. "So things ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... go to my perch, toss the minnow into the air, and as it falls catch it head first and swallow it whole. I tell you this because you ought to know ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography, Vol. II., No. 5, November 1897 - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... grew darker and darker, and he more and more resembled the shadows in which he lived. His great delight was to watch from the depths of some cave-like hollow under an overhanging bank until a star-gazer, or a herring, or a minnow, or some other baby-eater came in sight, and then to rush out and swallow him head first. He took ample revenge on all those pesky little fishes for all that they had done and tried to do to him and his ...
— Forest Neighbors - Life Stories of Wild Animals • William Davenport Hulbert
... consisted of two repeating rifles, one a Savage and the other a Winchester, a double-barreled shotgun, three fishing rods, one each of steel, split lancewood and split bamboo, and a collection which included trout flies, landing nets, minnow pail, reels, lines, cartridge belt, loading set and other paraphernalia. A guide-boat of the latest style and of superior workmanship was a part of the sportsman's outfit. This boat was kindly loaned by the manufacturer, Mr. Fred W. Rice, formerly ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... might never have been save only in dreams. They are not nearly so real as the Eastern world of the stories I read yesterday, but I know where they lie—common fields nowadays, and seldom visited. Yet, there was a child once who knew every inch of them as well as the ant her anthill, or the silvery minnow her brown well under the stone cover, to which one ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... will furnish fish that are beautiful or interesting to watch, e.g., killies, sunfish, cat-fish, carp, shiners, blacknosed dace, minnows—the mud minnow that seems to stand on his tail—darters, etc. If you get your supply from dealers, buy gold fish, of which there are several varieties, fan-tailed, comets, fringe tails and telescope eyed. Mirror carp are lively. Paradise fish are as beautiful ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... drawn from life by Mr. Harrison Weir, is an accurate portrait of the one I now possess in the Crystal Palace Aquarium. There he is, just as he steals round the corner of a bit of rock. He is glaring at a minnow, at which he is taking most accurate aim; he hardly seems to move, but yet he does by a very trifling motion of the edge of his back fin—sometimes resting a little on the tips of his two foremost fins, as they touch the ground, carefully calculating ...
— Chatterbox Stories of Natural History • Anonymous
... woods Tookhees never forgets the dangerous possibilities. His progress is a series of jerks, and whisks, and jumps, and hidings. He leaves his doorway, after much watching, and shoots like a minnow across the moss to an upturned root. There he sits up and listens, rubbing his whiskers nervously. Then he glides along the root for a couple of feet, drops to the ground and disappears. He is hiding there under a dead leaf. A moment of stillness and he jumps like a jack-in-abox. ...
— Secret of the Woods • William J. Long
... the twitching body of a bass on the teak deck, while the big man came aft, trailing his bait and slowly reeling up his line. As the minnow glimmered in towards the yacht's black side, there came a heavy plunge, the bishop's rod bent double, and the line sang off his reel. He was a famous fisherman, and Clark watched him admiringly. To every ounce of pliant bamboo on his six ounce rod there was, down in the brown water, a pound of ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... the mother going free. God would not let the mother-bird suffer in one day the loss of her young and her own liberty. And he who regarded in olden time the conduct of man toward the brutes, to-day looks down from heaven and is interested in every minnow that swims the stream, and every rook that cleaves ...
— Bird Day; How to prepare for it • Charles Almanzo Babcock
... at a fly unless it falleth lightly, just above his mouth, and floateth dry over him, for all the world like the natural ephemeris. And we may no longer angle with worm for him, nor with penk or minnow, nor with the natural fly, as was your manner, but only with the artificial, for the more difficulty the more diversion. For my part I may cry, like Viator in your book, "Master, I can neither catch with the first nor second ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... about: they are probably of the same kind as those seen by Captain Cook at Thirsty Sound and by Captain Flinders at Keppel Bay,* on the east coast. Captain Cook describes the species he saw to be a small fish, about the size of a minnow, furnished with two very strong breast fins, by the assistance of which it leaped away upon being approached, as nimbly as a frog. The fish I have just noticed appeared to be of a very similar description, excepting that ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King
... invention," that phrase! The bodily wants of a reptile are elastic. If an alligator or a boa-constrictor catches a dog he can swallow him whole and enjoy that one meal in unriotous bliss for weeks. Thereafter if he must put up with no more than a minnow or a mouse he can do that for weeks in unriotous patience. In a spring in one of our Northampton gardens I saw a catfish swallow a frog so big that the hind toes stuck out of the devourer's mouth for four days; but they went in at last, ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... and bream each as large and as thick as your hand, and eels three feet in length are sometimes caught in the basin at night. Two miles away, in the direction of the "run," there are on Woodboo plantation two similar basins connected by a shallow streamlet, and with no outlet which a minnow could navigate: one of them is large enough for a little skiff to float on, and the gray rock slopes down to a centre depth of ten feet. Just where the sides meet is a long, irregular fissure, out of which huge bass, pike, jack ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... the flies and put on one of those phantom minnows which have immortalised the name of a certain Mr. Brown. The minnow swung on a long line as the boat passed back and forth across the current, once, twice, three times—and on the fourth circle there was a sharp strike. The rod bent almost double, and the reel sang shrilly to the first rush of the fish. He ran; he doubled; he went to the bottom ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... You see the minnow's waves that rock The cradled lily leaves. From a far field some farmer's song, Singing among his sheaves, Comes mellow to you where you sit, Each man with boatman's poise, There, in the shimmering water ...
— Songs, Merry and Sad • John Charles McNeill
... refinement of a book-loving nature. "You may think me rude," said Lyman, "but I should not regard dining at his house a great privilege. Leaving out the respect I have for the young woman, it would not be as inspiring a meal as a canned minnow ...
— Old Ebenezer • Opie Read
... her behaviour, as in the manner of her apparell, is most ruffian like, is accounted the most gallant wench." Now, it appears, that the ruff, or pope, is not only, as Walton says, "a greedy biter," but is extremely voracious in its disposition, and will devour a minnow nearly as big as itself. Its average length is ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 223, February 4, 1854 • Various
... bass of that weight are very rare, from three to four pounds being the average of what are known as good fish. These afford excellent sport, and are taken with a variety of bait. The habitues of the river commonly employ live minnow, chub, catfish, suckers, sunfish—in fact, any fish under six inches in length. The bass has also a well-marked predilection for small frogs, or indeed for frogs of any dimensions. It sometimes rises well at a gaudy, substantial fly or a deft simulation of a healthy Kansas grasshopper; ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... fell from the boat, for there was a great swirl in the water where his minnow was spinning along, a broad tail came out and hit the water with a tremendous splash, and he struck but did not hook the fish, which, however, he saw ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... for minnows ourselves, my dear boy, we should have been less bewildered if you had asked us to fish for a mermaid! Do you see, now, one reason why I have let you go thus early into the world? Well, but amongst these minnow-fishers there was one who fished with an air that made the minnows ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a deep, still reach; and there he saw the water forests. They would have looked to you only little weeds; but Tom, you must remember, was so little that everything looked a hundred times as big to him as it does to you, just as things do to a minnow, who sees and catches the little water creatures which you can ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... to a rich fishing club; and the master of the pool was therefore secure against the treacherous assaults of net or dynamite. Many times each season fishermen would come and pit their skill against his cunning; but never a fly could tempt him, never a silvery, trolled minnow or whirling spoon deceive him to the fatal rush. At some new lure he would rise lazily once in awhile, revealing his bulk to the ambitious angler,—but never to take hold. Contemptuously he would flout the cheat with his broad flukes, and go down again ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... cartload of bouquets slung all over her, her neat figure, her pink-and-white complexion and her matchless staying powers in a ballroom, will descend upon the devoted victim Barker, beak and talons, like the fish-hawk on the poor, simple minnow innocently disporting itself in the crystal waters of happiness. There will be wedding presents, and a breakfast, and a journey, and a prospect of everlasting misery. All these things, thought he, must come to every man in time, ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... fight. To her imagination, the great League, which all the ranchers were joining, was a mere form. Single-handed, Annixter fronted the monster. But for him the corporation would gobble Quien Sabe, as a whale would a minnow. He was a hero who stood between them all and destruction. He was a protector of her family. He was her champion. She began to mention him in her prayers every night, adding a further petition to the effect that he would become ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... young fellow and out of a place, I always made it a rule to take the first job that offered, and to use it for bait. You can catch a minnow with a worm, and a bass will take your minnow. A good fat bass will tempt an otter, and then you've got something worth skinning. Of course, there's no danger of your not being able to get a job with the house—in fact, there is no real way in which you can escape getting one; but I ...
— Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... and the dogwood soon will bloom, With the blossoms ten times thicker than the green leaves are in June, And if yer want some pleasure that I nominate divine, Just git yer minnow bucket, and yer hook and pole and line, And slip away some mornin', when the weather's bright and still, And hang a four-pound jumper at ...
— The Old Hanging Fork and Other Poems • George W. Doneghy
... semblance. Think how in winter you can sink a line down straight in a pasture through snow and through ice, and pull up a bright, slippery, dumb, subterranean silver or golden fish! It is curious, also, to reflect how they make one family, from the largest to the smallest. The least minnow that lies on the ice as bait for pickerel, looks like a huge sea-fish cast up on the shore. In the waters of this town there are about a dozen distinct species, though the inexperienced would ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... me: but that's the way with that sort of people, just to draw back and draw back, to make a poor young gentleman follow them all the keener, as a trout does a minnow, ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... whereas our wives and little ones have none; ourselves will be in straits to get our living if the Kingdom be delayed in its coming, for what good are fishermen except along the sea coast or where there is a lake or a river, and here there isn't enough water for a minnow to swim in. Our wives and our children are better off than we are, for they'll be getting someone to fish for them, and will stand at the doors at Capernaum waiting for the boats to return, praying that the nets weren't let down in vain; but we aren't as sure of the Kingdom as we were of ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... clear of rubbish of her long-past wreck; Her colors struck, but not by human hands; Her masts the driftwood of what distant strands! Her frowning ports, where, at the Admiral's beck, Grim-visaged cannon held the foe in check, Gaped for the frolic of the minnow bands. The seaweed banners in her fo'ks'le waved, A turtle basked upon her capstan head; Her cabin's pomp the clownish sculpin braved, And, on her prow, where the lost figure-head Once turned the brine, a name forgot was graved, It was ...
— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston
... now had melted into a dark warm fluid which oozed between his fingers, dripping to the ground. But Manuel held tightly to what remained between his palms, and he felt, they say, that in the fluid was struggling something small and soft and living, as though he held a tiny minnow. ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... him deny that there was another Shew made of the little Minnow his brother, Dodrans ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... sparkling oriole picks string for his hammock on the sycamore, and the sparrows twitter in pairs. The old elms throw down their dingy flowers, and color their spray with green; and the brooks, where you throw your worm or the minnow, float down whole fleets of the crimson blossoms of the maple. Finally the oaks step into the opening quadrille of spring, with grayish tufts of a modest verdure, which by-and-by will be long and glossy leaves. ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... was sharp enough to know that he might hide in a bush, or swarm up a tree, and, altogether, had more chance there than in the open. If he had not known that, he would have been foolisher than a mouse or a minnow. ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... mass of the appliances of study, interspersed with saucers of water in which were bathing paper photographs, and every shelf of books had a fringe of others on glass set up to dry. On the table lay a paper of hooks, a three-tailed artificial minnow, and another partly clothed with silver twist, a fly-book, and a quantity ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the boys have gone to fish; They bothered me, too, to go, But for fun like that I hadn't a wish, For I think it's mighty "slow" To sit all day at the end of a rod For the sake of a minnow or two, Or to land, at the farthest, an eel on the sod: I'd rather have nothing ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... over my body!" remonstrated Nick. "I never professed to be more than a minnow among Tritons, and quite a lean ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... colour. And some make a paste for the winter months, at which time the Chub is accounted best, for then it is observed, that the forked bones are lost, or turned into a kind of gristle, especially if he be baked, of cheese and turpentine. He will bite also at a minnow, or peek, as a Trout will: of which I shall tell you more hereafter, and of divers other baits. But take this for a rule, that, in hot weather, he is to be fished for towards the mid-water, or near the top; and in colder weather, nearer the bottom; and if you fish for him ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... her, to all intent watching the process but ready for anything. And not without need, for her dirty husband crept softly out after her, thinking to catch me unawares. I flashed at him like a jack at a minnow, wrenched a wretched old blunderbuss out of his hands, and with the butt of it knocked him sprawling back ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... walks but indifferently, as may readily be imagined from the position of the legs, so very far back. It is pleasant to watch the parent bird feeding her young: down she dives with a quick turn, and presently rises again with, five times out of six, a minnow, or other little fish, glittering like silver in her bill. The young rush towards the spot where the mother has come up, but she does not drop the fish into the water for them to receive until she has well shaken it about and ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... other through these slates. But where? whence on earth did these Syenite pebbles come? Let us walk round to the cliff on the opposite side and see. It is worth while; for even if my guess be wrong, there is good spinning with a brass minnow round ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... concluded to try another minnow, hoping that the bass were arousing from their mid-day nap and would feel like partaking ...
— Dick the Bank Boy - Or, A Missing Fortune • Frank V. Webster
... when the Prince arrived—and the fact that Nipigon had had a record summer, with large parties of sportsmen working its reaches steadily all the time. The fish were certainly shy, particularly, it seemed, of fly, and the best catches were made with a small fish, a sort of bull-headed minnow called cocatoose, that creeps about ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... city—are yet sweet to the living. "They have only a pleasure like that of the brutes," we say with scorn. But what a racy and substantial pleasure is that! The flashing speed of the swallow in the air, the cool play of the minnow in the water, the dance of twin butterflies round a thistle-blossom, the thundering gallop of the buffalo across the prairie, nay, the clumsy walk of the grizzly bear; it were doubtless enough to reward existence, could we have joy like such as these, and ask no more. This is the hearty ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... closing as Paul, chewing the cud of his bitter fancies, found himself on London Bridge. He paused there, and leaning over the bridge, gazed wistfully on the gloomy waters that rolled onward, caring not a minnow for the numerous charming young ladies who have thought proper to drown themselves in those merciless waves, thereby depriving many a good mistress of an excellent housemaid or an invaluable cook, and many a treacherous Phaon of letters beginning ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... too hot and clear and still that morning for the most expert of fishermen to cast his fly with any hope of success. The broad pale-green lily pads lay motionless on the unruffled breast of Silverwater. Nowhere even the round ripple of a rising minnow broke the blazing sheen of the lake. The air was so drowsy that those sparks of concentrated energy, the dragonflies, forgot to chase their aerial quarry and slept, blazing like amethysts, rubies and emeralds, on the tops of the cattail rushes. Very lazily ...
— Children of the Wild • Charles G. D. Roberts
... the close of Hamilton's speech, the chairman had the good sense to declare the meeting adjourned—thus shutting off all reply, as well as closing the mouths of the minnow orators who usually pop up to neutralize the impression that ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... make poetry a mechanic art, than the circumstance that Walton is much nearer to us, in his likings, than to the men between 1670 and 1770. Gay was to sing of angling, but in 'the strong lines that are now in fashion.' All this while Piscator has been angling with worm and minnow to no purpose, though he picks up 'a trout will fill six reasonable bellies' in the evening. So we leave them, after their ale, in fresh sheets that smell of lavender.' Izaak's practical advice is not of much worth; we read him rather for sentences like ...
— Andrew Lang's Introduction to The Compleat Angler • Andrew Lang
... and buzzard breast the azure breeze. With many a foaming fall and glimmering reach Of placid murmur, under elm and beech, The creek goes twinkling through long glows and glooms Of woodland quiet, poppied with perfumes: The creek, in whose clear shallows minnow-schools Glitter or dart; and by whose deeper pools The blue kingfishers and the herons haunt; That, often startled from the freckled flaunt Of blackberry-lilies—where they feed and hide— Trail a lank flight along the forestside ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... fish and insects, his accustomed fare. When the fish do not approach his station, he flies along, just over the water, and occasionally hovers with rapidly moving wings over the spot where he sees a trout or minnow. In the next instant, descending with a quick spiral sweep, he seizes a fish, with which he rises to his post and swallows it in an instant. All these proceedings were watched frequently by the children, with intense delight, as they stood concealed ...
— Frank and Fanny • Mrs. Clara Moreton
... display this minnow as his captive after the whales had got away, but he hoped to find her useful in solving some of the questions the Weblings had left unanswered when they bolted into eternity. Besides, he had no intention of letting Marie Louise escape to warn the other conspirators ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... bones, and then in his heart he said there is no God. Once, to relieve the pain of his soul's woe, he asked aloud, who is God, anyway, and then laughed as he thought that the bass nibbling at his minnow would soon think he, John Barclay, was God. The analogy pleased him, and he thought that his own god, some devilish fate, had the string through his gills at that moment and was preparing to cast him into the fire. Up in the office in the ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... brook; here it would make a pool, dark and brooding and still, where we bent to look at our mirrored faces; then it grew communicative and gossiped shallowly over a broken pebble bed where there was a diamond dance of sunbeams and no troutling or minnow could glide through without being seen. Sometimes its banks were high and steep, hung with slender ashes and birches; again they were mere, low margins, green with delicate mosses, shelving out of the wood. Once it ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... as by a jeweler, is more wonderful, and not a whit more difficult to keep. But to be amused by such unfamiliar neighbors as a tankful of fish there is no real need either to stray abroad or to spend any money. The ordinary minnow, which you can catch in any stream and pop into a jar, will serve to introduce you to a new world—a world of silent progressions, of incredible celerities, ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... of Commons, when he suddenly disappeared with all his money in his pocket, and returned penniless, followed by a waggon containing 372 copies of rare editions of the Bible? All were fish that came to his net. At one time you might find him securing a minnow for sixpence at a stall—and presently afterwards he outbids some princely collector, and secures with frantic impetuosity, "at any price," a great fish he has been patiently watching year after year. His hunting-grounds were wide and distant, and there were ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... old times! how brightly ye return! How, rubbed afresh, your phosphor traces burn! The ramble schoolward through dewsparkling meads, The willow-wands turned Cinderella steeds, The impromptu pin-bent hook, the deep remorse O'er the chance-captured minnow's inchlong corse; The pockets, plethoric with marbles round, That still a space for ball and peg-top found, Nor satiate yet, could manage to confine Horsechestnuts, flagroot, and the kite's wound twine, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... Piscifauna (fishes of a region), Associated words: ichthyology, ichthyologist, ichthyophagy, ichthyophagist, ichthyography, ichthyolatry, piscatology, pisciculturist, piscary, piscine, shoal, kench, minnow, aquarium, piscivorous, piscatorial, warren, spawn, cauf, creel, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... which not only much resembles the salmon in appearance, but, like it, requires running water and access to the sea. Many a time I have vainly tried to lure them from their watery depths, but no bait would tempt them that I could ever hit on, though I have little doubt that a fly or artificial minnow would prove killing. We could see them in the Macalister, lying with their heads pointed up stream, and seemingly motionless but for the slight waving of the tail that retained them in their places. Having cut several slender switches, not thicker than ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... not pretend to compare myself with Mr. Winthrop in any way. It would be like the minnow claiming fellowship ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter |
