"Beak" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... no reason why he should not pick them up. As he flew down, a snare was drawn about him. The wheat had been put there to tempt pigeons so that they might get caught. It was well for Blue-feather that the snare had been in use a long time and was rotten. By using his beak and wings he got loose, but he lost a few feathers ...
— Fifty Fabulous Fables • Lida Brown McMurry
... quickly around, and saw her hat that had been snatched off in the black beak of a big red and green bird which was perched on the back of ...
— The Curlytops and Their Playmates - or Jolly Times Through the Holidays • Howard R. Garis
... on perceiving him, 'do thou cause thyself to seem like one dead: puff thy belly up with wind, stiffen thy legs out, and lie very still. I will make a show of pecking thine eyes out with my beak; and whensoever I utter a croak, then spring to thy feet ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... Ay, now, 'tis a vulture. O abominable! monstrous! monstrous! has not your vulture a beak? has it not legs, and talons, ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... "Fashoda and Colonial Expansion,'' tries to stretch a friendly hand to the Bear over the Bulldog's head. Then, to offset this proffered assistance to the Bear, the Chinese artist, with characteristic cunning, brings in the New World power. He places the American Eagle over the Philippines, its beak extended towards the Bulldog, and writes upon it the phrase, "Blood is thicker ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... Tartar's in the gap Conspicuous by his yellow cap; 550 The rest in lengthening line the while Wind slowly through the long defile: Above, the mountain rears a peak, Where vultures whet the thirsty beak, And theirs may be a feast to-night, Shall tempt them down ere morrow's light; Beneath, a river's wintry stream Has shrunk before the summer beam, And left a channel bleak and bare, Save shrubs that spring to perish there: 560 Each side the midway path there lay Small ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... Before some beak of rapine be set free, That, after the mountains, shall infest the sea; Before some ravenous eaglet shall be sent After our isles to gorge the continent. I'd rather a goose even from yon egg should come,— If only of the ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... pleased; he laughed but once, and all Rome turned out to see him; he belonged to an earlier day, to an austerer, perhaps to a better one, and it may be that in "that woman," as he called Caesar, his clearer vision discerned beneath the plumage of the peacock, the beak and talons of the bird of prey. For they were there, and needed only a vote of the senate to batten on nations of which the senate had never heard. Loan him an army, and "that woman" was to give geography such a twist that today whoso says ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... thing." Also in Ran and jungle grew that day Friendship amongst the creatures: spotted deer Browsed fearless where the tigress fed her cubs, And cheetahs lapped the pool beside the bucks; Under the eagle's rock the brown hares scoured While his fierce beak but preened an idle wing; The snake sunned all his jewels in the beam With deadly fangs in sheath; the shrike let pass The nestling finch; the emerald halcyons Sate dreaming while the fishes played beneath, Nor hawked the merops, though the butterflies— Crimson and blue ...
— The Light of Asia • Sir Edwin Arnold
... young man of five-and-twenty, with a lengthy olive-hued countenance, black frizzled hair, and deep-set eyes; the wide, dark rings beneath them were completed by the wrinkled purple eyelids above. With a nose like the beak of some bird of prey, a pinched mouth, and cheeks worn lean with study and hollowed by ambition, he was the very type of a second-rate personage on the lookout for something to turn up, and ready to do anything if so he might get ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... sea-fight. The Samians branded the figure of an owl on the foreheads of their Athenian prisoners, to revenge themselves for the branding of their own prisoners by the Athenians with the figure of a samaina. This is a ship having a beak turned up like a swine's snout, but with a roomy hull, so as both to carry a large cargo and sail fast. This class of vessel is called samaina because it was first built at Samos by Polycrates, the despot of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... the speaker and looked full upon the beak nose, cleft cheek and bristling red moustache of an old friend. "Good Lord, The Beachcomber!" I breathed. He started, peered at me and growled, "Captain Dawnay-Devenish, if it's all the same to you, Mister ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 16, 1919 • Various
... sufficient for one skilled in wood-lore, as Don Rafael was. Without a moment's hesitation, he faced in the direction of the sound, and commenced advancing towards it—guided by the measured strokes given by the beak ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... neighbor: "Good morning, pretty lady, always pretty; I, a pretty lady, always pretty, come from that pretty lady, always pretty" (here she points to the girl on her left), "to tell you that she owns an eagle with a golden beak." ...
— My Book of Indoor Games • Clarence Squareman
... not pause to finish, but seized up a peculiar shaped instrument, like a huge hook, with a curved neck and sharp beak. Really it was composed of two metal tubes which ran into a cylinder or mixing chamber above the nozzle, while parallel to them ran another tube with a nozzle of ...
— The Exploits of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... Suli's rocks, and Pindus' inland peak, Robed half in mist, bedewed with snowy rills, Array'd in many a dun and purple streak, Arise; and, as the clouds along them break, Disclose the dwelling of the mountaineer: Here roams the wolf, the eagle whets his beak, Birds, beasts of prey, and wilder men appear, And gathering storms around convulse ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... pounced at last, and well-nigh staked herself on the heron's beak! But we had a long ride, and were well-nigh at the Tyne before we had caught her. Full of pranks, but a noble hawk, as I shall write to my brother by the next messenger that comes our way. I call it a hawk worth her meat that leads one such ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to say, every evening from that time forward, just about sunset, a little bird with plumage gay, called "The Kingfisher," might be seen to haunt the margin of the lake, ready, with its pointed beak, to hook up the tiny fishes, that glided in shoals at nightfall near the surface ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... them away to plot His death. That is what comes of making religion a round of outward observances. The Pharisee is always blind as an owl to the light of God and true goodness; keen-sighted as a hawk for trivial breaches of his cobweb regulations, and cruel as a vulture to tear with beak and claw. The race is not extinct. We all carry one inside us, and need God's help ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... toward us. In front ran a splendid male bird, his feathers of shining black, and his great tail plume waving. Three females of an ashen gray color followed him. They approached us with incredible swiftness, and were within gunshot before they perceived us. Fritz had had the forethought to bind up the beak of his eagle so that, should he bring down an ostrich, he might ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... it!" he exclaimed, and shot forth a blow which one of the juvenile bystanders described as a "stinger on the beak!" ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... thing I had wished for in my boat, all those months ago, was a new flag. And here was the flag, made for me in secret by Mary's own hand! The ground was green silk, with a dove embroidered on it in white, carrying in its beak the typical olive-branch, wrought in gold thread. The work was the tremulous, uncertain work of a child's fingers. But how faithfully my little darling had remembered my wish! how patiently she had ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... neighbouring house. I heard a whizzing through the air, and presently something like a winged serpent, but with a slender neck, and shoulders of considerable breadth, and a head much larger than a serpent's in proportion to the body, and shaped more like a bird's, with a sharp, short beak, sprang upon and coiled round my left arm. That it was trying to sting with an erectile organ placed about midway between the shoulders and the tail I became instinctively aware, and presently felt something like a weak electric thrill over ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... mould of flower-pots for live food, which they will never swallow till it has been previously slain. One of them has espied a cockroach in a corner, and in darting towards the prey a scorpion crosses its path. The venomous reptile hugs the belligerent beak in the hope of conveying to it some of its deadly sting; but the tip of Coco's horny appendage is a long way from his tender points, and Scorpio must travel many an inch before he can make the desired impression. Meanwhile the stork has teased Scorpio's life out, and jerked ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... King of Birds, Rex Avium, looketh at the Sun, intuetur Solem, as indeed he could hardly avoid doing, since in the "cut" the sun was within a hairsbreath of his beak, while his claws were almost touching a crow (Corvus) perched on a dead horse, to exemplify how Aves ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was so tired and frightened, that it lay on the ground, panting, with its feathers ruffled, and its beak wide open, and its eyes half closed. It seemed ready to die. Then the rude, cruel boys pulled the string ...
— The Nursery, October 1873, Vol. XIV. No. 4 • Various
... his yellow eyes on the priest, eyes strangely marked over a nose like the beak of an eagle, and excused himself with more courtesy than his fierce mien led one to expect, for not having at once recognised a person of merit, and ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... how uncertain is happiness either to man or frogs! Two days afterwards, as Jumper was crossing a brook, a lily-white duck, who had been concealed by the rushes, flew at him with open beak ...
— The Comical Creatures from Wurtemberg - Second Edition • Unknown
... suddenly from his dreams, twisted his large neck around to look for the lion, saw a lion's flank, and fastened its eagle beak in it. For the griffin had been artificially made by the King-enchanter, and the two halves had never really got used to each other. So now the eagle half of the griffin, who was still rather sleepy, believed that ...
— The Book of Dragons • Edith Nesbit
... themselves left alone, with nothing in sight that was familiar, except one funny thing. That was a wooden shoe, in which was a fuzzy little yellow chicken hardly four days old. It had been playing in the shoe, when the floods came and swept it off from under the very beak of the old hen, that, with all her other ...
— Dutch Fairy Tales for Young Folks • William Elliot Griffis
... once as well as he knew how. But Mother Starling had no sooner heard the first notes than she gave him a flap with her wings and snapped at him with her beak. "Oh, please stop it!" she cried bitterly. "It sounds so sad that it makes one quite heartsick. Instead of piping like that, get the Anemones to come up. I think it must be time for them. And besides, one always feels warmer when there are ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... snapped his beak again, and Bully jumped back. As he did so the marbles in his pocket rattled, ...
— Bully and Bawly No-Tail • Howard R. Garis
... tame, and would, after a time, follow the girls about, and stalk up to the house of their own accord to be fed, their food always being placed in water, as they never feed by picking upon the ground, for which, indeed, the peculiar construction of their beak is entirely unfitted. They were perfectly fearless of the dogs, which, on their part, were too well trained to touch them; and their funny way and their extreme tameness were a source of constant amusement to ...
— On the Pampas • G. A. Henty
... and slender, with a long face, and high, sharp features, his nose curving like a parrot's beak over a heavy dark mustache. His face was pale and his skin had the clear look of a man who never is exposed to the sun. But his eyes were the objects that attracted my gaze. They were bright as steel points and looked out from under heavy, straight brows with a quick, restless ...
— Mr. Trunnell • T. Jenkins Hains
... Tightly he clutched the greasy thing, and tried to give a sharp twist that should break the vertebrae. But his hand slipped swiftly down to the flat head, which offered no hold for his grasp, the beak ripped through his fingers, and the sapling, which had bent and followed him as Gray Eagle dashed on, snapped back, waving triumphantly its ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... one gets a little sleepy and nods, the others will joggle him off the branch, and then twitter with congratulatory laughter at his tumble. Let us get beneath them quietly. We can see them now, black against the brightening eastern sky. See that fellow give his neighbour a push with his beak, and hear the assaulted one scream out just like Mr. Thomas Sawyer in Sunday-school, whose special chum stuck a pin into him for the pleasure of ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... removal of such obstructions, no special treatment is needed further than to use care and avoid any injury to the beak or throat. Feed nutritious food, as wheat bran mashes and vegetables and see that they have a liberal quantity of good ...
— The Veterinarian • Chas. J. Korinek
... a staff of deep blue, to which was attached a drooping silver flag crossed with bars of gold. (Its pattern was like the one placed in his grave.) On the top of the staff rested a dove, holding in its beak a wreath, composed of rainbow shades, circling the word Peace in letters whiter than snow. As the new sun continued to rise, the jewelled sky increased in dazzling brilliancy, ten thousand gems of shining gold shot out, and ten thousand sapphires too, ...
— Young Lion of the Woods - A Story of Early Colonial Days • Thomas Barlow Smith
... Timor. That afternoon some noddies came so near the boat that one was caught. These birds are about the size of a small pigeon; it was divided into eighteen parts and given by lot. The men were much amused when they saw the beak and claws fall to the lot of the captain. The bird was eaten, bones and all, with bread and ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... bird hovered motionless. It seemed to hang in air as if by a thread. Then it descended with a wide, circling swoop. In less than ten seconds, as it seemed to Hervey, its body and great wings, and even its curved, cruel beak, were plainly visible circling a few yards above the tree. It seemed like a journey from the heavens to the earth, ...
— Tom Slade on Mystery Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... justice of assize, judge of assize; recorder, common sergeant; puisne judge, assistant judge, county court judge; conservator of the peace, justice of the peace; J.P.; court &c (tribunal) 966; magistrate, police magistrate, beak [Slang]; his worship, his honor, his lordship. jury, twelve men in a box. Lord Chancellor, Lord Justice; Master of the Rolls, Vice Chancellor; Lord Chief Justice, Chief Baron; Mr. Justice, Associate Justice, Chief Justice; Baron, Baron of the Exchequer. jurat [Lat.], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... old caretaker held out a piece of cracked wheat to the fledgling who devoured it greedily and opened his beak for more. ...
— Chico: the Story of a Homing Pigeon • Lucy M. Blanchard
... Regicide, late the faithful ally of Great Britain, the Catholic king, that we address our doleful lamentation: it is not to the Prince of Peace, whose declaration of war was one of the first auspicious omens of general tranquillity, which our dove-like ambassador, with the olive-branch in his beak, was saluted with at his entrance into the ark ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... if it was only going into a convent—to be bricked up alive, perhaps. And then I hears a scratch, scratch, scratching, and 'Drat the mice,' says I; but I didn't take any notice, and then there was a little tap, tapping, like a bird would make with its beak on the window-pane, and I went and opened it, thinking it was a bird that had lost its way and was coming foolish-like, as they will, to the light. So I drew the curtain and opened the window, and ...
— In Homespun • Edith Nesbit
... through the winding avenues, presenting their striking and varied emblems, speaking so forcibly to the mind. The white dove with open beak and half spread wing; the harp with the broken string, and the broken column, are all beautiful and significant representations, preaching loudly for the silent dust that slumbers ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... was by birth an Italian of very low degree; a man of crouched stature, and of an uncomely physiognomy, being yellow-skinned and black-haired, with a beak-nose, and little quick eyes of a free and familiar glance, but shrewd withal, and possessed of a pleasant way of winning facetiously on the ladies, to the which his singular skill in all manner of melodious music helped not a little; so ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... a limb, And Reynard the Fox looked up at him; For the Raven held in his great big beak A morsel the Fox would ...
— Fables in Rhyme for Little Folks - From the French of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... of strange things, Of horrors such as nightmare only brings. Asps, and spread eagles without beak or feet, Sirens and mermaids here and dragons meet, And antlered stags and fabled unicorn, And fearful things of monstrous fancy born. Upon the rigid form of morion's sheen Winged lions and the ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... townes end, Cuddenbeak, an ancient house of the Bishops, from a well aduanced Promontory, which intituled it Beak, taketh a pleasant prospect ...
— The Survey of Cornwall • Richard Carew
... we go to the famous Zoo' With Bertie, and Nellie, and Dick, and Sue. And we feel quite ready to jump for glee When the wonderful birds and beasts we see. The pelican solemn with monster beak, And the plump little penguin round and sleek, Have set us laughing—Ha, ha! Ho! ho! And you'll laugh too, if you look below. To the monkey-house then we make our way, Where the monkeys chatter, and climb, and play; At the snakes we peep, then onward stroll, ...
— London Town • Felix Leigh
... had settled and that I was once again upon solid ground, I hastily unbound my turban from its foot and freed myself, and that not a moment too soon; for the bird, pouncing upon a huge snake, killed it with a few blows from its powerful beak, and seizing it up rose into the air once more and soon disappeared from my view. When I had looked about me I began to doubt if I had gained anything ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments • Andrew Lang.
... high green walls of oak and ash, till they saw at the head of the tide Alef's town, nestling in a glen which sloped towards the southern sun. They discovered, besides, two ships drawn up upon the beach, whose long lines and snake-heads, beside the stoat carved on the beak-head of one and the adder on that of the other, bore witness to the piratical habits of their owner. The merchants, it seemed, were well known to the Cornishmen on shore, and Hereward went up with them unopposed; past the ugly dikes and muddy ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... row a goddess sits in the rain: her head is prolonged into that of a bird, holding a fish in its beak. The central picture shows Chac in his boat ferrying a woman across the water from the East. The third illustration depicts the familiar conflict ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... certainly more than a hundred well-marked races. The most noteworthy of these races are, the four great stocks known to the "fancy" as tumblers, pouters, carriers, and fantails; birds which not only differ most singularly in size, colour, and habits, but in the form of the beak and of the skull: in the proportions of the beak to the skull; in the number of tail-feathers; in the absolute and relative size of the feet; in the presence or absence of the uropygial gland; in the number ...
— The Origin of Species - From 'The Westminster Review', April 1860 • Thomas H. Huxley
... studying the old gentleman. His face was of the most prodigious purple hue, and so highly polished that it continually caught the reflection of the small electric lamp in the roof. Huge gold spectacles with glasses so thick that they distorted his eyes, straddled a great beak-like nose. He had doffed his helmet and was mopping his brow, and I saw a high perfectly bald dome-like head, brilliantly polished and almost as red as his face. He was clean shaven and by no means young, for the flesh hung in bags about his face. Long years of the habit of ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... is relatively light, and in some cases the jaws, though bearing teeth, are beak-like at their extremities and appear to have been enveloped in a horny sheath. In the part of the vertebral column which lies between the haunch bones and is called the sacrum, a number of vertebrae may unite together into one whole, and in this respect, as in some details of its structure, ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... confounded with those brought about by external compulsion. They may have the appearance of being vaguely purposive, although we would never attribute purpose to the creature making them. The infant that cries and struggles, when tormented by the intrusive pin, the worm writhing in the beak of a bird,—these act blindly, but it does not appear meaningless to say that they act. The ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... to his horticulturing and walked on till they met a Parrot who was a Swagman, or a Swagman who was a Parrot. He must have been one or the other, if not both, for he had a bag and a swag, and a beak and a billy, and a thundering bad temper into the bargain, for the moment Bill asked him if he had met a singed ...
— The Magic Pudding • Norman Lindsay
... nearest Sark, and found the ground there covered with a fairly deep soil, and green growths that were strange to him. The soil was perforated with holes which at first he ascribed to rabbits, but when he inserted his hand into one he got such a nip from an unusually strong beak that he changed his mind to puffins, and, standing quite still for a time, he presently saw the members of the colony come creeping out behind their great red bills and scurry off across the water ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... who might well have been your own stable-boy, a being who can show you a deeper depth of hell in Hell, wreak his dislike of you in unfair "fatigues," and keep you at the detested job of coal-drawing on Wednesdays; who can achieve a "canter past the beak"[21] for you on a trumped-up charge and land you in the "digger,"[22] who can bring it home to you in a thousand ways that you are indeed the toad beneath the harrow. Fancy having to remember, night and day, that a Sergeant, who can perhaps ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... six or seven feet out of water, disappeared under the swell of the Vulcan's hull. Suddenly the tug swung her blunt beak around with the sidelong blow of an angry swine. Madden went flying to the right rail of the bridge to stare down at the ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... garden, he found her at the swan basin, feeding the gold and silver fishes. An under gardener who had been about the place for thirty years, was at work not far off. The light splash of the falling column which the marble swan spouted from its upturned beak, prevented her from hearing his approach until he was close behind her. She turned, and her fair face took the flush of ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... displayed the parrot, but a parrot was too fine and fierce a bird for Ellen. She would have preferred him as a subject for her imagination, which could not be harmed by his beak and claws, and she liked Cynthia's story about him better than the gorgeous actuality of the bird himself. She shrank back from that shrieking splendor, clinging with strong talons to his cage wires, against which he pressed ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... watched the huge mountaineer with interest. There was no more famous character in all those hills than the giant before him—yet his face was kind and was good-humoured, but the nose and eyes were the beak and eyes of some bird of prey. The little girl had disappeared for a moment. She came back with a blue-backed spelling-book, a second reader and a worn copy of "Mother Goose," and she opened first one and then the other until the attention of the visitor was caught—the black-haired ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... grass he threw him, Hid in his wing his beak and wept, There ceased his sorrows to pursue him, The little dove for ...
— The Bakchesarian Fountain and Other Poems • Alexander Pushkin and other authors
... with painted cheeks, and beads for eyes, dressed up in scraps of colored pina cloth in imitation of fine senoritas. Kite-time and the peg-top season come as in America. The Filipino kites are built like butterflies or birds, and sometimes carry a long beak which is of use in case of war. Kite-fighting is a favorite amusement in the islands, where the native boys are expert in the art of making and manipulating kites. Among the other games they play is one that an American would recognize as "tip-cat," and another which would be more difficult to recognize ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... knitting imaginable. After the builder has fastened many lines to opposite twigs, their ends hanging free, she proceeds to span the little gulf by weaving them together. She stands with her claws clasped one to each side, and uses her beak industriously, looping up and fastening the loose ends. I have stood in the road under the nest looking straight up till my head swam, trying to make out just how she did it, but all I could see was the bird standing ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... irregular flapping of quick, blue wings. Then, like a bullet, he dived into the flashing stream immediately at Clark's feet, and emerged with diamond drops flying from his brilliant plumage and a small, silver fish curving in his sharp, serrated beak, till, a second later, he darted into the covert with his prey. The bird had dared the rapids and found that which he sought. Clark's gray eyes had seen it all, and ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... are ever full of pain: thus the Eagle when he moults is sickly; and, to attain his new beak, must harshly dash off the old one upon rocks. What Stoicism soever our Wanderer, in his individual acts and motions, may affect, it is clear that there is a hot fever of anarchy and misery raging within; coruscations of which flash out: as, indeed, how ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... like a sword drawn at need, went the heron's sharp beak; and the falcon saw it, and swerved and shot past her nearly-taken prey. Again the heron began to tower up and up with a harsh croak that seemed like a cry of mockery; then the wondrous swing and sweep of the long, tireless wings of the ...
— King Alfred's Viking - A Story of the First English Fleet • Charles W. Whistler
... leaning back in his place, softly cracking the knuckle of a forefinger, and, last of all and close to his elbow, his son, his support, his confidant and companion, Harran, so like himself, with his own erect, fine carriage, his thin, beak-like nose and his blond hair, with its tendency to curl in a forward direction in front of the ears, young, strong, courageous, full of the promise of the future years. His blue eyes looked straight into his father's with what Magnus could fancy ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... left I saw perched on the top of a rock a huge bird, its head bent forward as if about to pounce down upon us. Presently we saw its wings expand. It was of great size, with huge claws, a pointed, powerful beak, a neck destitute of feathers, and a huge comb on its forehead. The feathers were of a glossy black hue, with a white ruff at the base of ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... nearly all day long, pushing his beak at times into his mate's ear as though to give her the full benefit of his song. The lady, however, does not seem to appreciate his efforts, but generally pecks him sharply ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph [January, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... me to inspect the diary. Its first page was garnished with the resemblance of a large swan with curly wings; from his beak proceeded the owner's name in full, and underneath were his lucubrations. The first ...
— Wonder-Box Tales • Jean Ingelow
... greyish or brown plumage, the feet of the turkey-cock, as also the beak, but a little more hooked. They have hardly any tail, and their posterior, covered with feathers, is rounded like the croup of a horse. They stand higher than the turkey-cock, and have a straight neck, a little longer in proportion than it is in that ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 575 - 10 Nov 1832 • Various
... 75 percent of the nuts to be wormy, and often infestation reaches 90 to 100 per cent. The small weevil does the most damage, but there are indications that this may not always be true. Because the mouth parts of the adult are situated at the end of an extremely long and slender beak, it can obtain most of its food from beneath the surface of the host plant. For this reason, stomach poisons applied to trees have not been eaten by these weevils, and hence have been of no practical value. As DDT kills by contact, it is necessary ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report - at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948 • Various
... at Lincoln. He became passionately attached to the bishop, but exhibited no liking for anyone else, he considered himself bound to protect his master, driving other people away from him, "As I myself," writes Giraldus Cambrensis, "have often with wonder seen," with his wings and beak. ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting
... soft bright down when she first crept out of her egg-shell. She had a sharp beak and bright clever ...
— Dick and His Cat and Other Tales • Various
... the enemy's masses advanced, and gradually concentrated, so that this war might be compared to the battles of the ravens and the eagle in the Alps. The eagle slays hundreds of his assailants—every blow of his beak is the death of an enemy, but still the vultures return to the charge, and press upon the eagle until ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... fascinated by his work, chaffing gaily with his principal actor as to the rendering of some of his lines. Then there was Fardell, also a schoolfellow, now a police magistrate, full of dry and pleasant humour, called by his intimates "The Beak "; Amberson, poseur and dilettante thirty years ago, but always a good fellow, now an acknowledged master of English prose and a critic whose word was unquestioned. These men, one and all, seemed to be up to the neck in life, kept young and human ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... You may know that the slayer was a sparrowhawk by the appearance of the bird, its body untouched, but the flesh picked neatly from the neck and the head gone. That was swallowed whole, after the beak had been cut off. You will find the beak lying by the side of the body. In summertime, when birds are most abundant, after the breeding season, the ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... had never seen so graceful a figure, or heard so sweet a voice as that which thanked me now. As for her, when I stepped up, my sword still in my hand, some thought that she had only escaped the beak of the vulture to feel the talons of the hawk made ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... comparative anatomist above mentioned, to the order of the Lizards. In this singular reptile (fig. 151) the skull is somewhat bird-like, and the jaws appear to have been destitute of teeth, and to have been encased in a horny sheath like the beak of a Turtle or a Bird. It is possible, however, that the palate was ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... disk bobbin of thread, h, fitting loosely in a case constructed in the form of a bivalve, a and d. This case is furnished with a long beak, usually forming a continuation of the periphery. The beak is intended to enter and detain the loops of upper thread, and lead them so that they ultimately envelop the shuttle, a motion of the thread ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 598, June 18, 1887 • Various
... doubt not my thoughts have been far unholier than thine. Thou rememberest not, I am sure; but ere we were professed, I was troth-plight unto a young noble, and always that life that I have lost flitteth afore me, as a bird that held a jewel in his beak might lure me on from flower to flower, ever following, never grasping the sweet illusion. Margaret, sister, despise me not for my confession! But thou wilt see I am no saint, ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... terror of Turkish Sublimities who had outworn his patience. But he knew when to be angry; he could pulverize by fiery outbreaks the Reis Effendi and his master, Abdu-l-Mejid; but as Plenipotentiary to the United States he could "quench the terror of his beak, the lightning of his eye," disarming by his formal courtesy and winning by his obvious sincerity the suspicious and irritable John Quincy Adams. When Menschikoff once insulted him, seeing that a quarrel at that moment would be fatal to his purpose, he pretended to be deaf, and left the Russian ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... idea appealed to her, for the sunbonnet overhanging the meek potato-flowers like a flamingo's beak rose in air, as she stood erect, or as nearly erect as she ever stood nowadays. She tossed a few uprooted weeds over the lilac-hedge, and, clumping up the steps of the porch, slumped into a chair. Chairs had once been her luxury, too. She carried ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... Saracens captured it, laid siege to recover it; surrender grew inevitable; but its Moorish commander, Mirat, though an infidel, was, for his nobility of character, in special favor with the Virgin,—Notre Dame de Puy.[23] In this extremity, she sent to him an eagle bearing in its beak a live fish; and Mirat promptly sent it to Charlemagne, to show his heavenly succor. The king, knowing that there was no possible fishing on the castle hill, perceived that it was a miracle; and lessening his rigor in the face ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... and plucking it out of the child's hand, carried it up into a tree; the child suddenly began to cry, and the mother, hearing it, left her washing, and running to the child, forthwith missed the ring, but hearing the raven croak in the tree, she lifted up her eyes, and saw it with the ring in its beak. The woman, in great terror, called her brother, and told him what had happened, adding that she durst not approach the king if the raven took away the ring. Gaspar, seizing his cross-bow and quiver, ran to the tree, where ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... this time that a caricature was circulated in Rome, representing Sixtus as King Stork and the Romans as frogs vainly attempting to escape from his devouring beak. Merito haec patimur, "We suffer deservedly," was the legend of the picture, and the moral it conveyed was a true one. Rome was in such a state as to require the harshest applications, and the despotic severity of Sixtus did much to restore decency and security ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... parting, bird or fiend!" I shrieked, upstarting— "Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore! Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken! Leave my loneliness unbroken!—quit the bust above my door! Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my ...
— Le Corbeau • Edgar Allan Poe
... not hit, the steersman lost his nerve, and shrank from the coming shock. The galley's helm went up to port, and her beak slid all but harmless along Amyas' bow; a long dull grind, and then loud crack on crack, as the Rose sawed slowly through the bank of oars from stem to stern, hurling the wretched slaves in heaps upon each other; ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... ducks, when freshly killed, have supple feet. If young, the windpipe and beak can be easily broken by pressure of the thumb and forefinger. Young birds also have soft, white fat, tender skin, yellow feet, and ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... right angle and dives into the junction of the beak, straight down to the root. Then the eggs are emitted for nearly half an hour. The layer, utterly absorbed in her serious business, remains stationary and impassive and is easily observed through my lens. A movement ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... he picked out another and another half pilchard, and threw them as far as he could, when, almost as each piece touched the water, a soft-looking grey gull swept down and caught it from the surface with its strong beak, uttering a low peevish-sounding wail as it swept up again, hardly seeming to move ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... insurgent mentalities of the youth and morning vigour of the inexpressible human soul, when, flushed with AEolian light, and, as it were, beaded with those lustrous dews which the eternal Aurora lets fall from her melodious lip; if it escape living from the beak of the vulture (no fable here!), then, indeed, it may aspire to ——, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... a cross where a rotting thing Is slipping down from the nails. And a raven perched on the eyeless skull Opens his beak ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... Pomerania.] which attracted all eyes in the castle, for on the deck stood a noble youth, with a heron's plume waving from his cap, and he held a tame sea-gull upon his hand, which from time to time flew off and dived into the water, bringing up all sorts of fish, great and small, in its beak, with which it immediately flew back to ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... were harmless and full of play put forth claw, and sting, and tooth, and tusk. Birds whet their beak for prey. Clouds troop in the sky. Sharp thorns shoot up through the soft grass. Blastings on the leaves. All the chords of that great harmony are snapped. Upon the brightest home this world ever saw our first parents turned their back and ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... hectocotylization of one or more of the arms of the male cephalopod did not escape Aristotle's eye. And while he speaks of the teeth and that which serves these animals for a tongue, it is plain from the context that he means in the one case the two halves of the parrot-like beak, and in the other the anterior ...
— Fathers of Biology • Charles McRae
... overhead, he looked up, and soon caught sight of two large birds wheeling round and round, each apparently doing its utmost to get above the other. The two, however, were very evenly matched, for, whereas the kite had its strong beak and talons, deadly weapons for seizing and rending when at close quarters, and could make a powerful swoop at his prey—the heron, though an awkward bird in the air, and ungainly in its movements, had yet its long, sharp, bill, with which it could receive its enemy as ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... that branch of it which unfolds the character and habits, physical, moral, and intellectual, of those most interesting and admirable creatures—Birds. It is familiar not only with the shape and colour of beak, bill, claw, talon, and plume, but with the purposes for which they are designed, and with the instincts which guide their use in the beautiful economy of all-gracious Nature. We remember the time when the very word Ornithology would have required interpretation in mixed ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... beak of a bird or the prow of a ship. In America, a place from which a candidate for office energetically expounds the wisdom, virtue ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... thirsty lance at thy command. Perching on the sceptred hand Of Jove, thy magic lulls the feather'd king With ruffled plumes, and flagging wing: Quench'd in dark clouds of slumber lie The terror of his beak, and lightnings of ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... bands of green (hoist side), white, and red; the coat of arms (an eagle perched on a cactus with a snake in its beak) is centered in the ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... under the mimosa thorn now and up to his belly in the warm red grass. Where could the birds be? Whirr! and a great feathered shell seemed to have burst at his very feet. What a covey! twelve brace if there was a bird, and they had all been lying beak to beak in a space no bigger than a cart wheel. Up went John's gun and off too, a little sooner than ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... priest, with a smile, "shudders at the rustling of the wind or the chattering of a stork's beak; a murderer's conscience preys upon his mind till he sees what is not. Poverty drives a man to crimes which he repents of in his wealth. How true is the doctrine of Moshi [Mencius], that the heart of man, pure by nature, is ...
— Stories by English Authors: Orient • Various
... think of all you have done; Only think of all you can do; A false note is really fun, From such a bird as you! Lift up your proud little crest; Open your musical beak; Other birds have to do their best, You need ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 5, March, 1878 • Various
... the iron door, and shut up those evils that threatened to overwhelm the land. But lo! on coming in sight of the tower, a new wonder met their eyes. An eagle appeared high in the air, seeming to descend from heaven. He bore in his beak a burning brand, and lighting on the summit of the tower, fanned the fire with his wings. In a little while the edifice burst forth into a blaze as though it had been built of rosin, and the flames mounted ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... Englishmen, but none of the highborn Cymry might aspire to wed an Englishwoman. Hating the prince under whom they had come to so much disgrace, the Welsh themselves captured poor Gryffyth, and sent his head, his hands, and the beak of his ship, to Edward the Confessor, from whom they accepted the appointment of three of their native ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... a weary week With bulging eyes and fevered brow, While WILSON pressed upon its beak His League-of-Nations' olive bough, Wondering what amount of weight Its efforts could negotiate, How much, in fact, the bird would stand Without collapsing on ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various |
