"Slimy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... anybody really believe—that a man's head could be driven clean into his body by the force of a fall? Well, perhaps it may be possible, but I, for one, have never believed that it was so with Myrtle. And the grease upon his clothes—'all slimy with grease,' said somebody at the inquest. Queer that nobody got thinking after that! I did—but, then, I had been thinking for a good long time. I've made three ascents—how Dangerfield used to chaff me about my shot-gun—but I've never been high enough. Now, with ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a thousand years in stone 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 ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... three feet and a half deep, very cold, and somewhat slimy. Gypsy had a strong impression that a frog jumped into her neck when she plunged, head first, into the deep mud at the bottom. After a little splashing and gasping, she regained her feet, and stood up to her elbows in the water. But what she could do, Winnie could not. He had sunk ...
— Gypsy Breynton • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... scales small, smooth, and imbedded; skin slimy, head and mouth very small, colour yellowish brown ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... Slimy pools lurked in the 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 ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... arduous than this tracking up a swift river, against constant head winds in bad weather. Much of it is in the water, wading up "snies," or tortuous shallow channels, plunging into numberless creeks, clambering up slimy banks, creeping under or passing the line over fallen trees, wading out in the stream to round long spits of sand or boulders, floundering in gumbo slides, tripping, crawling, plunging, and, finally, tottering to the camping-place sweating like horses, and ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... scarlet leaf already"—Chad could see the rock fence where he had sat that spring day—"it's curious and mournful that you can see in any season a sign of the next to come." And there was the creek where he found Dan fishing, and there the road led to the ford where Margaret had spurned his offer of a slimy fish—ugh! "I do love the autumn. It makes me feel like the young woman who told Emerson that she had such mammoth thoughts she couldn't give them utterance—why, wake up, Mr. Buford, wake up!" Chad came to ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... wooden post and slimy timbers. I had reached one bound of my watery prison. More fire fell from above, and the scream of hysteria ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... its surface crawl The reptile horrors of the night— The dragons, lizards, serpents—all The hideous brood that hate the light; Through poison fern and slimy weed And under ragged, jagged stones They scuttle, or, in ghoulish greed, They lap a dead man's ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... their sinister and slimy habits of life by this outburst of Krakatoa—and no wonder, when it is recorded that in some places "the sea looked like water boiling heavily in a pot," and that "the boats which were afloat were swinging in all directions." At one ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... door was closed behind him. The place in which he found himself was very cold, and the floor beneath his feet was wet and slimy. His teeth chattered and his limbs shuddered as he stood looking around him. The noise of flowing water sounded loud and clear through the silence; it was running from a leaden pipe into a wooden tank, mildewed and green with ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... while the taint, first stealing through her frame, Slipped in, with slimy venom, and the pest Thrilled every sense, and wrapped her bones in flame, Nor yet her soul had caught it, or confessed The fiery fever that consumed her breast; Soft, like a mother, and with tears, she cried, Grieved for her child, and pondering with unrest The Phrygian match, "Ah, woe the ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... and the bottom, when you got to it, was of the softest and most unfathomable mud. Had not Aunt Jane been seen just as she was sinking for the third time, therefore, the chances are that she would never have been seen till doomsday; there was room, and to spare, for all the Malmaison line in the slimy depths of that pool. After the catastrophe, Mr. Pennroyal caused a handsome iron railing to be erected round the scene of it. This act caused it to be said that he might have done it before. Did he ...
— Archibald Malmaison • Julian Hawthorne
... who boil the young plants declare these "greens" are as good as spinach. What sacrilege to reduce crisp, glossy, beautiful leaves like these to a slimy mess in a pot! The tender buds, often used in white sauce as a substitute for capers, probably do not give it the same piquancy where piquancy is surely most needed - on boiled mutton, said to be Queen Victoria's favorite dish. Hawked ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... came to what seemed the end. Silently and dismally the half-dead forest, with its ghostly moss, lowered and darkened, and the black waters spread into a great silent lake of slimy ooze. The dead trunk of a fallen tree lay straight in front, torn and twisted, its top hidden yonder and mingled with ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... entry was at the same time enlarged, cleansed, and partly sutured. The patient vomited once after the anaesthetic, and the bowels remained confined for three or four days after the injury. The extraction wound healed readily, but a considerable amount of slimy, bile-stained discharge was still escaping from the ragged entrance wound on the man's arrival at the Base on the fourteenth day. The abdomen was then normal in appearance, and as to physical signs, except for a tympanitic note over the hepatic ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... which Natalya had fixed the place of meeting, had long ceased to be a pond. Thirty years before it had burst through its banks and it had been given up since then. Only by the smooth flat surface of the hollow, once covered with slimy mud, and the traces of the banks, could one guess that it had been a pond. A farm-house had stood near it. It had long ago passed away. Two huge pine-trees preserved its memory; the wind was for ever droning ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev
... and wept . . . Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song, Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long. But at my back in a cold blast I hear The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear. A rat crept softly through the vegetation Dragging its slimy belly on the bank While I was fishing in the dull canal On a winter evening round behind the gashouse 190 Musing upon the king my brother's wreck And on the king my father's death before him. White bodies naked on the low damp ground And bones ...
— The Waste Land • T. S. Eliot
... swept me from my hut, and they gave me food. Seven days I stayed with the blacksmith, till a boat came and I returned to my house. There was no trace of wall, or roof, or floor—naught but a patch of slimy mud. Judge, therefore, Sahib, how far the river ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... batteries to the south of the town, in case the other efforts should fail." A wetter winter had never been known. The whole complicated network of bends and bayous, of creeks, streams, runs, and tributary rivers, was overflowing the few slimy trails through the spongy forest and threatening the neglected levees which still held back the encroaching waters. There was nothing to do, however, but to keep the men busy and the enemy confused by trying first one ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... when godlike human beings will become truly humane, and learn to put their animal fellow mortals in their hearts instead of on their backs or in their dinners. In the mean time we may just as well as not learn to live clean, innocent lives instead of slimy, bloody ones. All hale, red-blooded boys are savage, the best and boldest the savagest, fond of hunting and fishing. But when thoughtless childhood is past, the best rise the highest above all this bloody flesh and sport business, the wild foundational animal ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... living creatures directly from dead matter without the intervention of other living organisms. The theory is, in substance, an old one. The ancients supposed that the frogs and other small reptiles so abundant in the vicinity of slimy pools and stagnant marshes, were generated spontaneously from the mud and slime in which they lived. This theory was, of course, abandoned when the natural history of reptiles ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... hate a slimy but harmless toad or a stinging fly? It seemed ridiculous, contemptible and pitiable to think of hate in connection with the melancholy figure of this discomfited intriguer, this ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... higher power than any of us. Mr. Ames is the type of man who is slowly turning our Republican form of government into a despotism of wealth. He boasts that his power is already greater than a czar's. You bow before it; and so the awful monster of privilege goes on unhampered, coiling its slimy tentacles about our national resources, our public utilities, and natural wealth. I—I can't see how you, the head of this great nation, can stand trembling by and see him do it. It is to ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... most part so defined as to make a strong impression on the mind of an ordinary observer, and their age is also for the most part approximately indicated by their degrees of hardness, and crystalline aspect. It does, indeed, sometimes happen that a soft and slimy clay will pass into a rock like Aberdeen granite by transitions so subtle that no point of separation can be determined; and it very often happens that rocks like Aberdeen granite are of more recent formation than certain beds of sandstone and ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... be that I dreamed this. So much at least is certain—that I turned one day from the traffic of a city, and came to its docks and saw its slimy wharves going down green and steep into the water, and saw the huge grey river slipping by and the lost things that went with it turning over and over, and I thought of the nations and unpitying Time, and saw and marvelled ...
— Fifty-One Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... on Aprille 4, And now 'tis August 2, I stood upon ye slimy shoore And swere me to be trewe; I sawe yt schippe bear out to sea— O waly, waly! ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... clumsy liar he was! I said nothing at all to him, but hurried down stairs as fast as I could without running. I felt much safer with the Professor,—perhaps he was as big a rascal as the other,—but he wasn't as slimy ...
— The Voyage of the Hoppergrass • Edmund Lester Pearson
... Infinite as to harbor any thought of evil or shame in connection with the specialized organs and functions of sex, let this illumination from on high cast that devil out of your cosmos forever. And if you turn away with soul offended from even 'the slimy gendering of the toad,' you dishonor God who once knew no higher creative formula and still blesses it with ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... memory. "I adored him. He had a head like a nice setter's and he wasn't cold or slimy ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... They were, doubtless, once seated on each side of a propylon, as at Luxor, and in all probability were flanked by obelisks. Whether the temple were destroyed for materials, for more recent structures, or whether it has sunk under the accumulations of the slimy soil, may be decided by ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli
... ourselves for our unsatisfactory breakfast by a characteristically Russian dinner, of which I will omit details, except as regards the soup. This soup was botvinya. A Russian once obligingly furnished me with a description of a foreigner's probable views on this national delicacy: "a slimy pool with a rock in the middle, and creatures floating round about." The rock is a lump of ice (botvinya being a cold soup) in the tureen of strained kvas or sour cabbage. Kvas is the sour, fermented liquor made from black bread. ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... dangerous to his financial standing than the fiercest assault upon his honesty as a financier; for it tore away the foundation of reputation—private character. A faithful transcript throughout, it portrayed him as a bag of slimy gold and gilded slime. He hated his own face staring out at him from a three-column cut in the center of the first page—its heavy jaw, its cynical mouth, its impudent eyes. "Do I look like THAT?" he thought. He was like one who, walking along the streets, ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... and foul, By the smoky town in its murky cowl; Foul and dank, foul and dank, By wharf and sewer and slimy bank; Darker and darker the farther I go, Baser and baser the richer I grow; Who dare sport with the sin-defiled? Shrink from me, turn from me, ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley
... with which Mammy Antonia used to entertain him, now surged through his mind like dreams of the past, which had made a deep impression. He thought of the Chuetas, who, according to popular opinion, were not the same as other people; reputed to be creatures of sordid poverty and slimy to the touch, who, no doubt, concealed terrible deformities. Who could say that ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... voices in a call with the unreasoning obstinacy with which men will cling to hope, but no answer came back to us save a hollow moaning from the depths beneath. Footsore and heart-sick, we retraced our steps and climbed the slimy slope once more. ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... appearance of the tongue, flatulent condition of the stomach, and bloated state of the bowels, followed by diarrhea or manifesting obstinate constipation. Thirst and frequent acid eructations accompany the imperfect digestion. The foul breath, early decay of the teeth, the slimy, glairy stools, having the appearance of the white of eggs, and an intolerable fetor, all are indicative of the ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... the slippery stone and guided the boat along the wall. He advanced noiselessly, just grazing the slimy moss of the stone. ...
— Twenty-six and One and Other Stories • Maksim Gorky
... half-senseless captive to Bothwell's castle of Hermitage. Even then the earl spared his life. He lay in a hideous den, in pitch darkness and dead silence broken only by the splash of drops of fetid water that fell from the slimy arch of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... that he was making himself ridiculous, nevertheless he made the rope fast and swung himself down out of the sunlight, leaving Jacket to stand guard over him. Perhaps fifteen minutes later he reappeared, panting from his exertions. He was wet, slimy; his clothes were streaked and stained with mud. Jacket began to ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... in the biyu becomes the principal support of the Cape York and Muralug people. This is a grey slimy paste procured from a species of mangrove (Candelia ?) the sprouts of which, three or four inches long, are first made to undergo a process of baking and steaming—a large heap being laid upon heated stones, and covered over with bark, wet leaves, and sand—after which they ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... newly born) Sat proudly perking on a rose, With pert conceit his bosom glows; His wings (all glorious to behold) Bedropt with azure, jet, and gold, Wide he displays; the spangled dew Reflects his eyes and various hue. His now forgotten friend, a snail, Beneath his house, with slimy trail, Crawls o'er the grass, whom when he spies, In wrath he to the gardener cries: 'What means yon peasant's daily toil, From choking weeds to rid the soil? Why wake you to the morning's care? Why with new arts correct the year? Why grows the peach's crimson ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... which the witch called her 'peat bog.' Her house stood behind this in the midst of a weird forest. All the trees and bushes were polyps, half animal and half plant; they looked like hundred-headed snakes growing out of the sand, the branches were long slimy arms, with tentacles like wriggling worms, every joint of which, from the root to the outermost tip, was in constant motion. They wound themselves tightly round whatever they could lay hold of and never let it escape. The little mermaid standing outside was quite ...
— Stories from Hans Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... bewailed the fact that he was not more interested in his appearance and there were times when it seemed as if she were right. Certainly when her son ambled home at dusk with every rebellious hair standing upended upon his head and a string of flounders dripping salt from the tips of their slimy tails she was justified to a degree in wishing he had more regard for the niceties ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett
... from the steamer in San Francisco. He was appalled. Deep in him, below any reasoning process or act of consciousness, he had associated power with godhead. And never had the white men seemed such marvellous gods as now, when he trod the slimy pavement of San Francisco. The log cabins he had known were replaced by towering buildings. The streets were crowded with perils—waggons, carts, automobiles; great, straining horses pulling huge ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... icy streets with horses falling down. You see cyclonic clouds of snow whirl savagely around the corners of high buildings, pelting the homegoing hoards, whirling them about, throwing women down upon street crossings. You have a vision of the muddy, slushy subway steps, and slimy platforms, packed with people, their clothing caked with wet white spangles. You see them wedged, cross and damp, into the trains, and hear them coughing into one another's necks. You see emaciated tramps, pausing to gaze wanly into bakery windows: men without overcoats, their ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... Mrs. Garrison,—were of the party. There was some sentiment and much champagne, as a result of which, at one A.M., the big-hearted sea monarch aforementioned swore by the bones of his ancestors in the slimy grasp of Davy Jones that that sweet little woman shouldn't have to go a-begging for accommodations on his ship. If the General would condescend to move into his room, by thunder, he'd sleep up in his foul-weather den next the chart room, and Mrs. Garrison—God bless her!—could take the General's ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... knew that the warm pools which always lie close to every tribal abiding-place were closely linked with the Caspakian scheme of evolution, and that the daily immersion of the females in the greenish slimy water was in response to some natural law, since neither pleasure nor cleanliness could be derived from what seemed almost a religious rite. Yet I was still at sea; nor, seemingly, could Ajor enlighten me, since she was compelled to use words which I could not understand ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... slimy fog crept into the city, as it grew blind. Street lights were gloomy swamp flowers, which flickered on blackish, glowing stalks. Objects and creatures had only chilly shadows and blurred movements. Like a monster, a night ...
— The Prose of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... the newspapers are occasionally naked savages; the streets are imperfectly garmented even by day; and we have our stumbling social anecdotist, our spot-mouthed young man, our eminently silly woman; our slippery one; our slimy one, the Rahab of Society; not to speak of Mary the maid and the footman William. A vigilant mother has to contend with these and the like in an increasing ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Saint Pasquale which he always carried about with him, after a quarter of an hour's devout praying, during which the perspiration oozed from his forehead. The eels, says the writer, had been dead and slimy, but now turned their bellies downwards once more and twisted about in their usual spirals; there began a general weeping among the onlookers, and the fame of the miracle immediately spread abroad. He could do the same with lobsters, cows, ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... taste in wanting to take up his abode in our conservatory. We even defended his personal appearance, praised the invisible green coat which he wore on his back, and his gray vest, and solemn gold spectacles; and though he always felt remarkably slimy when we touched him, yet, as he would sit still, and allow us to stroke his head and pat his back, we concluded his social feelings might be warm, notwithstanding a cold exterior. Who knew, after all, but he might be a beautiful young prince, enchanted there till ...
— Our Young Folks—Vol. I, No. II, February 1865 - An Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... grip of it. I failed, and was swept along, gripping and slipping in a most desperate endeavor, until at last the finger-nails of my right hand stuck somewhere in a crack of the water-soaked and slimy wood, and I held on, feeling that I was safe. I had not the faintest sensation of pain at the time, but I clung to the slimy pillar of that pier so urgently with both hands that my nails were half torn away, and for a fortnight later it was only with great difficulty that I could handle ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... are generally preferred. If you put a knife under the bone of a ham, and it comes out clean, the meat is good; but quite the contrary if the knife appears smeared and slimy. In good bacon the fat is white, and the lean sticks close to the bone; if it is streaked with yellow, the meat is rusty, ...
— Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches • Eliza Leslie
... I wouldn't touch that are dead tacky hand o' yourn' for half a million o' hard dollars, cash down without any ragged eends; and with that, I turned to run out, but Lord love you I couldn't run. The stones was all wet and slimy, and onnateral slippy, and I expected every minute, I should heels up and go for it: atween them two critters the Ghost and the juicy ledge, I felt awful skeered I tell you. So I begins to say my catechism; what's your name, sais I? Rufus Dodge. Who gave you that name? Godfather ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... branch across it to cling to, before venturing in. A big moccasin crawled from under a root beside the pool of mud as Dick stepped in it and the boy shut his teeth tight as he forced himself to wallow through the slimy, snaky mass from which his ...
— Dick in the Everglades • A. W. Dimock
... and for each skin the maiden threw off one of her shirts, until there lay on the floor seven lindorm skins and six snow-white shirts; the seventh she still had on. The lindorm now lay before her as a formless, slimy mass, which she with all her might began to scrub with the lye and ...
— The Pink Fairy Book • Various
... flesh—feeling its way slyly and stealthily towards him—towards the back of his chair! He noted the murderous twitching of its short, flat finger-tips, the monstrous muscles of its hideous thumb, and the great, clumsy hollows of its clammy palm. It closed in upon him; its cold, slimy, detestable skin touched his coat—his shoulder—his neck—his head! It pressed him down, squashed, suffocated him! He saw it all in the glass—and then an extraordinary thing happened. Mr. Vance suddenly became animated. He got up and peeped furtively round. Chairs, bed, wardrobe, ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... man, so near as almost to touch him. It was a shark that had actually turned on its back to seize its prey, and was only prevented from succeeding by being driven from the line of its course by hitting the slimy rock, over which it was compelled to make its plunge. The momentum with which it came on, added to the inclination of the rock, forced the head and half of the body of this terrible assailant into the air, giving ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... lost in a London fog, so thick that he could hardly see his hand before his face. He became seriously alarmed when he found himself in a slimy alley. Then he heard footsteps approaching through the obscurity, and sighed ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... it were a continuation of the Arabian desert, and is composed of a grey, or in parts a whitish, soil impregnated with selenite and common salt, and irregularly superimposed upon a bed of gypsum, from which asphalt oozes up here and there, forming slimy pits. Frost is of rare occurrence in winter, and rain is infrequent at any season; the sun soon burns up the scanty herbage which the spring showers have encouraged, but fleshy plants successfully resist its heat, such as the common salsola, the salsola soda, the pallasia, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... Marazion bathed, sailed, climbed, walked and finished her book. She had a room at St. Michael's Cafe, at the edge of the little town, just above the beach. Across a space of sea at high tide, and of wet sand and a paved causeway slimy with seaweed at the ebb, St. Michael's Mount loomed, dark against a sunset sky, pale and unearthly in the dawn, an embattled ship riding anchored on full waters, ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... from sight toward the outer door. For a second Wilson was tempted to follow. The thought of Jo turned him instantly. He leaped to the left from where the cry had come, holding the lantern above his head. His feet slipped on the slimy ooze covering the clay floors, but by following close to the wall he managed to keep his feet. So he came to an open door. Within, he saw dimly two figures, one apparently bending over the other which ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... His palace and his most exalted courts Bestrewn with fragments of the Peristyle; The broken column, slab and monolith O'erhung with pendant moss and slimy mold; Its dismal haunts and gloomy apertures Become the habitation of the bat, The hissing serpent and the scorpion, The basking lizard dull and indolent, And forms of ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... children are reading. Papers like the Youth's Companion circulated among the members, suggestions as to books in the Sunday School or public library, books loaned to the children and questions as to their reading may save many a soul from the slimy trail of the serpent ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux
... or three hundred yards, there was no rampart, or even intrenchment, but only small ditches, in the low and marshy grounds next the river, which, however, were dry at low water, yet the bottom remained muddy and slimy. Towards the river, no rampart, no batteries, no parapet, on either side appeared, and on the land-side he observed some high ground within the distance of one hundred and fifty or two hundred yards of the town; in which condition, the colonel was told by the engineer, the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... mists of the evening dropped, Dropped as a cloth upon the dead, and rose Above the roofs, and by the Unlighted Shrine Lay as the slimy water of the troughs When murrain thins the cattle of Er-Heb: And through the mist men heard ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling
... toadstools. But the praises of father or mother do our Selves good, and comfort them and make them beautiful. They never do them any harm. If they do any harm, it comes of our mixing some of our own praises with them, and that turns them nasty and slimy ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • George MacDonald
... Others look at the dancing, glittering surface, but you, if you are a wise man, will go down in the diving-bell sometimes, and for a while stop there at the bottom, and turn a bull's-eye straight upon all the slimy, crawling things that are there, and that would die if they ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... without any method that is apparent. The Chief showed up most of them with his torch, and so I fell about only just enough to get used to the feel of the ground as a preliminary to what was coming later. It had rained heavily two or three days before, consequently there were lake districts, slimy reaches of mixed oil and mud and dried, hard-looking islands that were in reality traps to the unwary. The top only was firm, and it had the playful property of sliding rapidly on the greasy substratum and thus sitting you down without ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... girl sank down upon this gloomy shore and cried, clinging to the kanaka's knee: "O father, beat out my brains with this jagged stone, and do not let the eel twine around my neck, and trail with a loathsome, slimy, creeping crawl over my body before I die. Oh! the crabs will pick and tear me before ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... testaceous animals, which are always found floating upon the water, particularly the Helix Janthina and Violacea; they are about the size of a snail, and are supported upon the surface of the water by a small cluster of bubbles, which are filled with air, and consist of a tenacious slimy substance that will not easily part with its contents; the animal is oviparous, and these bubbles serve also as a nidus for its eggs. It is probable that it never goes down to the bottom, nor willingly approaches any shore; for the shell is exceedingly brittle, and that of few fresh-water snails ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... eerie feeling of some new presence in the convent, I strode out of the scullery. A queer little figure startled me. It was a girl in man's clothes, except for a white cap on her head, tight-fitting above her eyes. She was dripping wet and caked in slimy mud, and she faltered forward a ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... severed me. But this was not all; the antipathy which had sprung up between myself and my employer striking deeper root and spreading denser shade daily, excluded me from every glimpse of the sunshine of life; and I began to feel like a plant growing in humid darkness out of the slimy ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... the reeds, the trees, and the village. The grass and the leaves on the trees were covered with dust, the roads and dried-up salt marshes were baked so hard that they rang when trodden on. The water had long since subsided in the Terek and rapidly vanished and dried up in the ditches. The slimy banks of the pond near the village were trodden bare by the cattle and all day long you could hear the splashing of water and the shouting of girls and boys bathing. The sand-drifts and the reeds were already drying up in ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy
... did rot: O Christ! That ever this should be! Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs 125 ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... breath of air. Specimens of Geaster and Bovista are easily separated from the spot on which they grew; when rolling from place to place, the spores are deposited over a large surface. In the Phalloidei the spores are involved in a slimy mucus which would prevent their diffusion in such a manner. This gelatinous substance has nevertheless a peculiar attraction for insects, and it is not altogether romantic to believe that in sucking up the fetid slime, they also imbibe the spores and transfer them from place to place, so ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... Lurking in the utter darkness of the scarce-fathomed deeps of the ocean, what Kraken may not lie, coil on coil; what strange black, slimy, large-eyed forms do their stealthy hunting in perpetual night by the light of phosphorescent lamps they bear upon their bodies? Many of these there are, every year teaches of new species. The land—oh! the land is all well known, even the Arctic and ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... not rat-free) dug-out among the sandbags, the smelly cookhouses, whose improvident fires were the scandal of many a red-hatted visitor to the trenches, the mines, with their population of Colonial miners doing mysterious work in their basements of clay and flinging up a welter of slimy blue sandbags—all these deserve mention, if no more, lest they be too ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... palace rises upward four lofty stories. Above is a square patch of sky, on which a star trembles. The court is full of damp, unwholesome odors. The foot slips upon the slimy pavement. Nobili stopped. The old man came limping after, buttoning ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... ignorance—reckless, because unconscious of danger—had tempted me! But mounting a clean, strong, wide ladder, in the full flood of day, light below, above, around, promising you security by its very fulness of effulgence, is a far different thing from groping your way, step by step, down a slimy, muddy frame which hangs in a straight line from the very start. I shake off a first tremor, draw a full breath, and with fortitude follow my leader carefully. As I look above, after fairly getting ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... Although he had never supposed himself oppressed with scruples, it seemed a sacrilege to touch her. Although she could not realize what he was doing, his hands trembled and his face was flushed as he forced himself to the task of disrobing her. But, at last, he had the cumbering, slimy outer garments free and her body warmly ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... loosened flooring. A wagon wheel gave way, and the wagon lurching over struck the officer, who fell into the muddy water of the Pamunkey. Always amused at an officer's mishap, cavalry men and drivers laughed. The young man struck out for the farther shore, and came on to a shelving slope of slimy mud, and was vainly struggling to get a footing when an officer ran down the bank and gave him a needed hand. Thus aided, Penhallow gained firm ground. With a look of disgust at his condition, as he faced the laughing troopers he said, with ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... to be felt by the five Khaki Boys as they stood in the mud and darkness waiting. For it had rained and the trench was slimy on the bottom in ...
— The Khaki Boys Over the Top - Doing and Daring for Uncle Sam • Gordon Bates
... precisely the kind of weather in which people usually take tea in summer-houses, far less in summer-houses in an advanced state of decay, and overlooking the slimy banks of a great river at low water. Nevertheless, it was in this choice retreat that Mr Quilp ordered a cold collation to be prepared, and it was beneath its cracked and leaky roof that he, in due course of time, received Mr ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... often a long and difficult job to get some of the Algae; with their tender connections unsevered from the hard rock, which must be chipped away with the chisel, and often with the blows of the hammer deadened by being struck under water. It is by lifting up the overhanging masses of slimy fuel, tangles, and sea-grass, that we find the delicate varieties, as the Chondrus with its metallic lustre, and the red Algae, or the stony Corallina, which delights in the obscurity ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... sprawling, hateful thing, Thorny and twisted like a snake, Writhing to work a mischief, in the brake It stands at menace, in its cling Is danger and a venomed sting. It grows on green and slimy slopes, It is a thing of shades and slums, For passing feet it wildly gropes, And loops to catch all feet that run Seeking a path ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... specimens of deep sea deposits sent home by naturalists during the first soundings in connection with the Atlantic telegraph cable, there was very often a sort of enveloping slimy mucus in the containing bottles which arrested the attention and excited the curiosity of the specialists to whom they were consigned. It was structureless to all miscroscopic examination. But so is all the protoplasmic matter of which the lowest animals ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... were," he answered. "No culture can do away with them. Jealousy, like love, is one of the motive powers of progress. It is a great evil—but a necessary one—as necessary as war. Without strife of some sort the world would become like a stagnant pool breeding nothing but weeds and the slimy creatures pertaining to foulness. Even in love, the most divine of passions, there should be a wave of uncertainty and a sense of unsolved mystery to give ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... than a foot of water. A mud-bank, upon which grew some clumps of flags and some water-lilies, descended by a gentle decline from the bank to the middle of the river. The water was very clear, and there was no current; the slippery and slimy mire could ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... dragon Crime is poisoning with his horrible breath, and about to crunch up and devour? O my royal liege! O my gracious prince and warrior! YOU a champion to fight that monster? Your feeble spear ever pierce that slimy paunch or plated back? See how the flames come gurgling out of his red-hot brazen throat! What a roar! Nearer and nearer he trails, with eyes flaming like the lamps of a railroad engine. How he squeals, rushing ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of labour, some few days before, are that the woman's belly, which before lay high, sinks down, and hinders her from walking so easily as she used to do; also there flow from the womb slimy humours, which nature has appointed to moisten and smooth the passage that its inward orifice may be the more easily dilated when there is occasion; which beginning to open at this time, suffers that slime to flow away, which proceeds from the Glandules ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... so completely overcame himself that he gave her his hand; but he drew it back immediately: he felt that he had never touched anything so slimy in his life; he thought he had taken hold of a frog. Philippina acted as if she had not noticed what he had done. But scarcely had he gone into his room, when she turned to Gertrude with a diabolic glimmer in her eyes, and, making full use of her vulgar voice, ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... straddled on to its legs. It jerked itself forward, and rose slowly and uncouthly in the air. They began to paddle upward toward the painted cliffs. The motion was swaying, rocking, and sickening; the contact of the brute's slimy skin was disgusting. All this, however, was merely, background to Maskull, as he sat there with closed eyes, holding on to Oceaxe. In the front and centre of his consciousness was the knowledge that he was ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... HONOR.—Think of a man like that; in whom the passions and vices have burned themselves out, putting on the airs of a saint and claiming to have reformed. Aye, reformed, when there is no longer sweetness in the indulgence of lust. Think of such loathsome bestiality, dragging its slimy body across the threshold of honor and nobility and asking a pure woman, with the love-light of heaven in her eyes, to pass her days with him; to accept him as her lord; to be satisfied with the burnt-out, shriveled forces ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... wherein the animal retreats to an inaccessible depth? The Spider is incapable of breaking the calcareous shell or of getting at the hermit through the opening. Then why should she collect those prizes, whose slimy flesh is probably not to her taste? We begin to suspect a simple question of ballast and balance. The House Spider, or Tegenaria domestica, prevents her web, spun in a corner of the wall, from losing ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... what the white man makes, under that slimy sunshine and putrefying moon. Weary, slack-jointed, low-hearted as they were, the deadly coast-fever fell upon them, and they shivered, and burned, and groaned, and raved, and leaped into holes, or rolled into camp fires. ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... substance interposed between the true skin and the scarf-skin. This substance presents different appearances: and it is described sometimes as a sort of organized network or reticular tissue; at others, as a mere mucous or slimy layer; and it is odd that these somewhat incompatible ideas are both conveyed by the term reticulum mucosum given to the intermediate portion of the skin by its orignal discoverer, Malpighi. There is, no doubt, something plausible in all the theories advanced as to the color and hair of ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... raise, and, like many men who are always trying to seem stronger than they really are, he had determined to choose a moment for making the disclosure when he should be in a thoroughly bad humour. As he walked homewards from the old inn he felt that this moment had arrived. The slimy pavement, the moist wind driving through the streets and round every corner, penetrating to the very joints, contributed to make him feel thoroughly vicious and disagreeable; and the tirade in which he had been indulging before his audience of ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... moist ground and dulled the blue of heaven with smoky clouds amid which the sun, a red sailless boat, floated at anchor among golden and crimson furrows and glimmering far-dotted fleeces. The small lake was slimy, reflecting the trees on its borders as a network of dirty branches. A solitary swan ruffled its plumes and elongated its throat, doubled in quivering outlines beneath the muddy surface. All at once the splash of oars was heard and the sluggish waters were stirred by the passage ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... his finger a piece of slimy crust the size of a halfpenny. Elsley could only shrug ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... Presse was the first to make the leading article subsidiary to the feuilleton. It was, even when not a professed Socialist, a great promoter of Socialism, by the thorough support which it lent to all the slimy, jesuitical corruptions of Guizoism, and all the turpitudes and chicanery of Louis Philippism. When the Presse was not a year old it had 15,000 subscribers, and before it was twelve years old the product ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... a gymnasium under the supervision of Professor Schneipp, the Bavarian Hercules; I had practiced the most approved 'knock-outs' known to my instructor, the famous pugilist, Melchizedeck Cohen (popularly known as 'Slimy' Cohen); I had given up an hour a day to studying the management of the concussor with the aid of a punching-ball; the alarms were ready for fixing, and I even had the address of an undoubtedly disreputable housemaid, when a most unexpected thing happened. ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... stepped unawares upon their surface; for instantly he found himself caught by the clinging moist clay, to sink farther and farther into the bog until, swallowed up in the mire, he would meet a horrible death beneath its slimy surface. His grandfather had told him never to go near these terrible bogs, and Jack, who was an obedient boy, had always kept away from this part of the wood. But as he paused, again that despairing cry came to his ears, very near to him now, ...
— Mother Goose in Prose • L. Frank Baum
... nearer than what they called "the dead line." The prisoners had no shelter from the scorching rays of the sun through the long summer days, nor from the sleety rains and freezing nights of winter. They dug holes in the ground with their hands, and made the cold, damp earth their bed. A slimy brook ran through the grounds, foul with filth from the camps of the Rebels. There was a marsh in the centre of the yard, full of rottenness, where the water stood in green and stagnant pools, breeding flies, mosquitos, and vermin, where all the ooze and scum and slops ...
— Winning His Way • Charles Carleton Coffin
... courts in Liverpool are absolutely without gaslight. It was into one of these now that Bet ventured. She leaned her back against the slimy, slippery, dirty wall, and breathed hard and fast. Her father could not see her nor find her there, and she was in a mood at that moment to fear no other living creature. Boys and men, girls and women, talked and swore and quarreled and jostled one another ...
— A Girl of the People • L. T. Meade
... the lake at the end of the street,—a narrow blue slab of water between two walls. The vista had a strangely foreign air. But the street itself, with its drays lumbering into the hidden depths of slimy pools, its dirty, foot-stained cement walks, had the indubitable ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... once declared war on Roumania. The battle-field in France, owing to continued rains and wet weather, had become one great sea of slimy mud, through which it was impossible to drag the cannon. General Brusiloff in Galicia had pushed back the Austrians for many miles but a lack of ammunition and the arrival of strong German re-inforcements had prevented his re-capturing Lemberg. The Russian generals on the north, ...
— The World War and What was Behind It - The Story of the Map of Europe • Louis P. Benezet
... strangely blended. Abigail's husband had been a smuggler, and she herself was a daring and keen-eyed wrecker. For a season both throve. He had escaped detection in many a heavy run of contraband goods; and she had come in for many a valuable 'waif and stray' which the receding waters left upon the slimy strand. It was, however, her last venture, which, in her neighbors' language, had made her. Made her, indeed, independent of her fellows, but a murderer before her God!... About day-break in a thick misty morning in April, a vessel, heavily laden, was seen to ground on ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... head with an iron bar and then pushing him into the river. At a critical stage, the hero walked serenely on the scene and confronted the villain. The villain assumed the good old stereotyped posture and shouted out with a horrified expression, 'Stand back, stand back, your hands is cold and slimy!' That busted up the show, as the audience, composed largely of the Academy boys, stood up as one and yelled. They finally started a cheer, 'Stand back, stand back, your hands is cold and slimy!' They repeated this cheer vigorously three times, and then crowded out of the house. That cheer ...
— Tales of the Road • Charles N. Crewdson
... room when he tried to interfere. And while he proceeded with the punishment the Chief of Police hurled at the agent who had betrayed him an accompaniment of fearful threats, promising him that before he was hanged he should rot in the bottom-most dungeon of Peter and Paul, in the slimy pits lying under the Neva. Touman, between the two guards who held him, and who sometimes received blows on the rebound that were not intended for them, never uttered a complaint. Outside the invectives ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... Binet. It is only fair to give you warning. Provoke me as you have suggested, and I'll kill you with no more compunction than I should kill a slug, which after all is the thing you most resemble—a slug, Binet; a fat, slimy body; foulness without soul and without intelligence. When I come to think of it I can't suffer to sit at table with ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... It was almost dark, too, lighted only by one badly-trimmed paraffin lamp that swung above the door of the room or office which the keeper occupied during the day. Its flickering rays fell on the deep, sluggish waters of the canal as they lapped and gurgled round the wet, slimy beams on which the planks were supported. Mr. Grey stood somewhat apart from the others, and gazed idly at the shadows cast by the dimly-burning lamp, as they swayed backwards and forwards, up and down, with each slow movement of the water; yet he did not actually ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... stuffed with needles - Live shrimps their patience tax When put down people's backs - Surprising, too, what one can do with fifty fat black beedles - And treacle on a chair Will make a Quaker swear! Then sharp tin tacks And pocket squirts - And cobblers' wax For ladies' skirts - And slimy slugs On bedroom floors - And water jugs On open doors - Prepared with these cheap properties, amusing tricks to play, Upon a friend a man may spend a most ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... inspection terminated with the repairing of a break in the fence inclosing the spring-hole, a small area of bog-land dotted with hummocks of lush grass. Between the hummocks was a slimy, black ooze that covered the bones of more than one unfortunate animal. The heavy, ripe grass lent an appearance of stability, of ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... position, and could have understood how he might be hurt in his mind. She'd never ha' called his delicacies of feelings nonsense—not she; no more would Mr. Roger. He's a merry young gentleman, and over-fond of bringing dirty, slimy creatures into the house; but he's always a kind word for a man who is hurt in his mind. He'd cheer up the squire, and keep him from getting so cross and wilful. I wish Mr. Roger was ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... mean, Ralph?" Walter exclaimed. "We are in the lowest dungeon, and below the level of the river. See how damp are the walls, and the floor is thick with slimy mud. The river must run but just below that loophole, and in times of ...
— Saint George for England • G. A. Henty
... dilapidated small stone houses amid broken walls of other houses which evidently have been equally insignificant. One of these piles was pointed out by the Bethany guides as the ruins of the home of Mary and Martha, and we were then taken to a narrow lane where a dark and slimy stairway led down to the reputed tomb of Lazarus. Our dragoman, who firmly believed in the traditions of the country, said that he could not vouch for the statements made by ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... "that was a near thing," as a huge mass of rocks and slimy moss lunged out a little below them and hurtled away in a ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... "lithe and slimy." "Lithe" is the same as "active." You see it's like a portmanteau—there are two meanings ...
— Through the Looking-Glass • Charles Dodgson, AKA Lewis Carroll
... confinement to which he was now condemned. On being first thrust into it, he could not behold all its horror; but when his eyes got accustomed to the semi-darkness, he found himself in a dismal cell under ground, half full of water from the overflowing of the river, and teeming with numerous crawling, slimy things. A little hole, half choked with earth and stones, let in all the place possessed of light and air; and as the only air which could ever visit the place had to pass over a bed of stagnant mud ere it reached the spot, it possessed but ...
— The Adventures of a Bear - And a Great Bear too • Alfred Elwes
... ravished the soul until it was brought lacerated and captive to the feet of the victorious master magician. The eye was promise-crammed, the ears sealed with bliss, and she felt the wet of the waters. She breathed hard as Alberich scaled the slimy steeps; and the curves described by the three swimming mermaids filled her with the joy of the dance, the free ecstatic movements of free things in the waves. The filching of the Rheingold, the hoarse shout of laughter from Alberich's ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... and the reflection from the gold upon the rock was soft and a beautiful greenish hue. The mermaids, all covered with iridescent scales from waist to tail, glimmered through the waters in a most entrancing way. In that shimmering, changeful light they were in amazing contrast with the slimy, misshapen Alberich, who came from that underworld where only half-blind, ugly, and treacherous creatures live. The mermaids disported themselves quite unconscious of the imp's presence, till he laughed aloud, and then, startled, they swam in haste and affright to ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... his practised eye detected symptoms of a serious nature, and a closer examination of the case convinced him that all his skill would be called into requisition. With a hot, dry skin, slightly flushed face, parched lips, and slimy, furred tongue, there was a dejection, languor, and slight indication of delirium—and much apparent confusion of mind. Prescribing as he thought the case required, he left the ...
— Finger Posts on the Way of Life • T. S. Arthur
... music. But with us in the line there was intentness to remedy any unevenness, strain to hold ourselves just right. We could not look except out of the corners of the eyes; all was done by the touch of the elbows. For a few yards, rods, it was good. We safely crossed a slimy patch where a great puddle had just dried, through which on Monday I tramped ankle deep, and where now a fall would be natural. Then—ah! we expected this! Frothingham, I, Knudsen, found ourselves marching alone, the other men out of touch with us, having drawn away to the right and left. I heard ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French
... a delicacy which I always ascribed to the side-car. His account of Epping Forest, for instance, was simply young love with its soul at its lips. But his Huckley 'Mobiquity' would have sickened a soap-boiler. It chemically combined loathsome familiarity, leering suggestion, slimy piety and rancid 'social service' in one fuming compost that fairly lifted ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... a double object. In the common system of shoeing, to avoid slipping in winter upon the ice, and in the cities upon the wet, slimy surface of pavement, or to assist draft, it is customary to weld a calk upon the toe of a shoe, and to turn up the heels to correspond. In this motion the horse is placed upon a tripod, his weight being entirely upon three points of his foot, and those ...
— Rational Horse-Shoeing • John E. Russell
... (Seizing him again) Pray this instant, you dog, you rotten hound, you slimy snake, ...
— Androcles and the Lion • George Bernard Shaw
... she saw the reptile begin to uncoil itself, as it lay upon her. She hardly dared to breathe, but lay as still as if she were dead, so as not to frighten or anger the horrid creature, which presently seemed to slip like a slimy cord over her bare little legs, and wriggled away to the ...
— Dot and the Kangaroo • Ethel C. Pedley
... stranger, treading as he did so upon a mass of fish which lay writhing and flapping feebly in the bottom of the boat, and instantly assuming, quite unintentionally on his part, you may be sure, a sitting position amongst the thickest of the slimy, scaly cargo. As he boarded forward, I did so aft, and presenting a pistol in each hand, as sternly as I could, while struggling to suppress my laughter at Bob's exploit, ordered the fishermen to surrender, and to keep ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... waters. Shell-fish cling to this lattice; crabs nestle in the hollow trunks; and the seaweeds, drifted to the coast by the winds and tides, remain suspended on the branches which incline towards the earth. Thus, maritime forests, by the accumulation of a slimy mud between the roots of the trees, increase the extent of land. But whilst these forests gain on the sea, they do not enlarge their own dimensions; on the contrary, their progress is the cause of their destruction. Mangroves, and other ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... not take off his clothes. When he slept it was in cat naps, an hour snatched now and again from the fight with the rising tide of wealth that threatened to engulf its owners. He was unshaven, unbathed, his clothes slimy with tar and grease. He ate on the job—coffee, beans, bacon, cornbread, whatever the cooks' flunkies brought him—and did not know what he was eating. Gaunt and dominating, with crisp decision and yet unfailing good-humor, he bossed the gangs ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... leaving their smear upon the cheerful, single-hearted, constant devotion to duty, which is so often seen in the decline of such sufferers, recall the slimy trail left by the snail on the sunny ...
— Notes on Nursing - What It Is, and What It Is Not • Florence Nightingale
... was no coward, as boy or man, but he made no effort to save himself; the slimy water washed him about like a wet rag. He was alone now, if never before in those twenty years; his world of beautiful, cultured, graceful words and sights and deeds was not here, it was utterly gone out; there was no God here, that he thought of; he was quite alone: so, in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... you do, General. Now I suppose I shall be court-martialled. Well, I don't mind being court-martialled; but (with solemn determination) I tell you, General, if ever I catch that innocent looking youth, I'll spoil his beauty, the slimy little liar! I'll make a picture ...
— The Man of Destiny • George Bernard Shaw
... day—that bud, it must be possessed, that blown flower must not be left behind. Lizzie dipped her arm to the elbow, and rejoiced in the soft flowing water. The river rose up into what beautiful views and prospects. The locks, the sensation of the boat sinking among the slimy piles with Frank erect holding her off with the boat-hook, or the slow rising till the banks were overflowed, and the wonderful wooden gates opened, disclosing a placid stream with overhanging boughs and a ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... waterfowl—swimming and wading about the reedy lagoons or circling up to fly to other feeding grounds. Opposite the steamer the glasses showed with startling distinctness a number of hideous crocodiles crawling out on a slimy mudbank to bask in the sunshine. But nowhere could the searcher discern a trace of ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... and the sea right up to the mountain loch, where they rest. But suppose there is a dry summer—and such things have been even in Argyleshire. The heart of the tourist is glad within him, but as the river shrinks and shrinks, a silver thread among slimy green mosses in the streams, a sheet of clear water in the pools, the angler repines. Day after sultry day goes by, and there is no hope. There is a cloud on the distant hill; it is only the smoke from some ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... temptation of a beautiful girl, nor in a working girl deeming herself deserted, temporarily succumbing to the fascinations of a gentleman and regretting it bitterly afterwards. What had become of the girl was a mystery. Hers might have been one of those nameless corpses which the tide swirls up on slimy river banks. The jury must remember, too, that the relation might not have actually passed into dishonour, it might have been just grave enough to smite the girl's conscience, and to induce her to behave as she had done. It was enough that her ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... Therefore—the thumb claw of Groft was extended to its greatest length as he used it to single out the Terrans he had been eyeing—let this one, and that, and that, and the fourth be ready to join with the Salariki party an hour after nooning on this very day and they would indeed teach the slimy, treacherous lurkers in the depths a well ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton |
