"Bovine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the dulness and monotony of the jingling of the cow-bell made even his stupid childish mind dismal. All the pleasant exhilaration of youth seemed to have deserted the boy, and life to him became as inane and bovine as to the original ringer of that bell grazing all the season in her own ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... of Sherman's army would have been incomplete which omitted the notorious "Bummers." At the end of each corps appeared the strangest huddle of animation, equine, canine, bovine, and human, that ever civilian beheld—mules, asses, horses, colts, cows, sheep, pigs, goats, raccoons, chickens, and dogs led by negroes blacker then Erebus. Every beast of burden was loaded to its capacity with tents, ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... fairest ideals. For is there another city in the world where certain of the vulgar verities of life press themselves more prominently into view than in the Eternal City? Can one anywhere have a more forcible conviction that greasy cookery is bile-provoking, and that it is because the sylvan bovine ruminates so long upon the melancholy Campagna that one's dinners become such a heavy and sorrowful matter in Rome? Is there any city in the universe where fleas dwarf more colossally and fiendishly Blake's famous ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... he was studying so earnestly,—what a transformation he could have brought upon this light-hearted and joyous scene! The scales had so nearly balanced; at the bottom of his heart he was conscious of a certain faint contempt for the almost bovine self-satisfaction of a nation without eyes. Literature and painting, art in all its far-flung branches, even science, were suffering in these days from a general and paralysing inertia. Life which demanded no sacrifice ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... repulsive speedily became natural and ordinary to me. I suppose everything in existence takes its colour from the average hue of our surroundings. Montgomery and Moreau were too peculiar and individual to keep my general impressions of humanity well defined. I would see one of the clumsy bovine-creatures who worked the launch treading heavily through the undergrowth, and find myself asking, trying hard to recall, how he differed from some really human yokel trudging home from his mechanical labours; ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... Streptococcus of bovine mastitis. Streptococcus lanceolatus (Diplococcus pneumoniae or pneumococcus). to contrast with ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... child-like; infantine^, infantile, babyish, babish^; puerile, anile; simple &c (credulous) 486; old-womanish. fatuous, idiotic, imbecile, driveling; blatant, babbling; vacant; sottish; bewildered &c 475. blockish^, unteachable Boeotian, Boeotic; bovine; ungifted, undiscerning^, unenlightened, unwise, unphilosophical^; apish; simious^. foolish, silly, senseless, irrational, insensate, nonsensical, inept; maudlin. narrow-minded &c 481; bigoted &c (obstinate) 606; giddy &c (thoughtless) 458; rash &c 863; eccentric &c (crazed) 503. [Applied to ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Hamerton's clever book on the domestic animals, also expecting to find my divinity duly celebrated, but he passes her by and contemplates the bovine qualities only as they appear in ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... When this bovine soul came to know of Kirtley's presence, she fastened her consuming desires upon him. She had a brother in America and actively developed a hankering to go there and be near him. Yoking up with a Yankee would be a most natural and fitting state in ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... his enthusiasm are perhaps too continuous, too seldom relieved by spaces of repose. It is all too much of a Mazeppa ride; there are times when we pray for a good quarter of an hour of comfortable dulness, or at least of wholesome bovine placidity. The laws of such a poem are wholly determined from within. The only question we have a right to ask is this—Has the poet adequately dealt with his subject, adequately expressed his idea? The division of the whole into five parts may seem to have some correspondency ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... it, lovely charmer," said Allen, like an Ottoman, bowing over his broad, bovine forehead, and breathing the words out like a lute; "it is he—Ethan Allen, the soldier; now, since ladies' eyes visit him, made ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... thought Lennox, as he could dimly make out, spreading to right and left, a line of wagons, but not closed up, for there were wide intervals between; and now a low, dull, crunching sound and the odour of bovine animals plainly announced that there were spans of oxen lying close by the wagons as if ready for some movement in the early morning for which their drivers had ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn
... blaze of light, wherein he saw that the girl's spirit was not with him. He would have stopped the farmer at once, but he had not the heart to do it, even had he felt in himself strength to attract an intelligent response from that strange, grave, bovine fixity of look, over which the human misery sat as a thing not yet ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... went to see her on the morrow, she was grazing peacefully; and she ate the salt he brought her with heart-whole bovine relish—putting out her soft white pad of a tongue, licking it deliberately from his hand, savouring it tranquilly, and crunching the bigger grains with ruminative enjoyment between her teeth. So soon consoled! ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... jealousy, courage, self-sacrifice, hate—these cannot be avoided. We must experience them. So do the animals, who gain from their experiences blind, instinctive repulsions or unreasoning likes and distrusts. There are many ways of escaping from such a bovine acquiescence, content to have felt, not desirous to grasp and know and relate. Poetry, which clears and intensifies like a glass held upon a distant snowpeak, ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... Cox-Raythwaite. "I consider we have done good work. We have found things out. That bank manager is a pompous ass; he's a man of asinine, or possible bovine, mind! Of course, he ought to have revealed these things at both the inquest and the magisterial proceedings!—they'll certainly have to be put in evidence ...
— The Herapath Property • J. S. Fletcher
... again I feel as though preaching in the wilderness) it never occurs to you that there may exist some small difference between the wholly animal—ah—rumination of bovine minds and the discerning, well- apportioned leisure of the finer ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... company, healthy and strong, used to open-air life and hard work. He had steady employment and good wages. Can't you see the man, content with a good digestion, unailing body, and mild pleasures, and enjoying life with bovine placidity? But pretty Louisa Naveret entered his life. The "abysmal fecundity" was stirred and life clamoured to be created. Peacefulness and content vanished. All the forces of his existence impelled him to seize upon and possess ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... live, according to any true definition of living. Therefore complain I not of modern degeneracy, when, even from the open window of the small unlovely farm-house, tenanted by the hard-handed man of bovine flavors and the flat-patterned woman of broken-down countenance, issue the same familiar sounds. For who knows that Almira, but for these keys, which throb away her wild impulses in harmless discords, would not have been floating, dead, in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... his forehead became red. He was mentally appraising all the women, choosing a likely one for himself, and was at the same time embarrassed by his silence. There was nothing at all to talk about; besides that the indifferent importunity of Liuba irritated him. Fat Katie pleased him with her large, bovine body, but she must be—he decided in his mind—very frigid in love, like all stout women, and in addition to that not handsome of face. Vera also excited him, with her appearance of a little boy, and ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... was saying; and answered with a truly human voice,—inexpressibly consolatory to a poor man, in his lonesome pilgrimage, towards the evening of the day! So many voices are not human; but more or less bovine, porcine, canine; and one's soul dies away in sorrow in the sound of them, and is reduced to a dialogue with the "Silences," which is of a very abstruse nature!—Well, whether you write to me or not, I reserve ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... dragon: he tied a pink ribbon round its neck and gave it a saucer of milk. According to them, a course of consistent kindness to Nero would have turned him into something only faintly represented by Alfred the Great. In fact, the policy recommended by this school for dealing with the bovine stupidity and bovine fury of this world is accurately summed up in the celebrated ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... sale, for 225 guineas. It was called the "Drawing-room Rose," from this circumstance, as I afterwards learned. When it was first dropped by the dam, Mr. Webb was confined to the house by indisposition. But he had such a desire to see this new accession to his bovine family, that he directed it to be brought into the drawing-room for that purpose. Hence it received a more elegant and domestic appellation than the variegated nomenclature of high-blooded animals ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... eaten. It is not to be supposed that anyone will defend the eating of such food, so that we are justified in assuming that those who defend flesh-eating believe flesh to be free from such germs and poisons; therefore let the following be noted. It is affirmed that 50 per cent. of the bovine and other animals that are slaughtered for human food are affected with Tuberculosis, or some of the following diseases: Cancer, Anthrax, Pleuro-Pneumonia, Swine-Fever, Sheep Scab, Foot and Mouth Disease, etc., etc., and that to exclude all suspected or actually diseased carcasses ...
— No Animal Food - and Nutrition and Diet with Vegetable Recipes • Rupert H. Wheldon
... "has that woman to my child?" She envied the horrid creature, coarse and stout, with her tanned face, her bovine features, her shapeless figure, who seemed as if Nature had predestined her to give milk and nothing more. Giselle would so gladly have been in her place! Why wouldn't they permit her to nurse ...
— Jacqueline, v2 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... latter were just beginning to dream of dances at Kinsley's, a stated Kirmess, and summer diversions of the European kind, but they had not arrived as yet. The first class, although by far the dullest and most bovine, was still the most powerful because they were the richest, money as yet providing the highest standard. The functions which these people provided were stupid to the verge of distraction; really they were ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... vanished upon one of her periodic visits to the camp of her kindred around the point. Bred out of doors, of a tribe whose immemorial custom it is that the women do all the work, the Siwash girl was strong as an ox, and nearly as bovine in temperament and movements. She could lift with ease a weight that taxed Stella's strength, and Stella Benton was no weakling, either. It was therefore a part of Katy's routine to keep water pails filled from the creek and the wood box supplied, in addition to washing dishes and ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... certain extent, is as beneficial to some plants as to animals; and every intelligent farmer knows that if salt be withheld from the bovine genus for any considerable length of time, the general health droops and parasites are sure to abound. The object of nature in bringing into existence the large family of mildews, each member of which is a perfect plant in its way, and as capable of performing its ...
— The $100 Prize Essay on the Cultivation of the Potato; and How to Cook the Potato • D. H. Compton and Pierre Blot
... peeped into a little room, a dingy, smelling box, which had in it six berths placed across and above each other like the shelves of the reed manchons we build for our silk-worms at home. I wouldn't sleep in one of them, billah! even though they bribe me. This bovine fragrance, the sight of these fine horses, the rioting of the wind above us, should make us forget the brutality of the stewards. Indeed, I am as content, as comfortable here, as are their Excellencies in what is called the Salon. Surely, we are above them—at ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... early Victorian apostle of Yuletide "wassail", can be derived from his having "powlert up and down" in a county abounding with comfortable manor houses and cosy inns. It is a ripe and mellow tradition of good cheer, that is quite distinct from the bovine stolidity of a harvest home in George Eliot's Loamshire or the crude animalism of Meredith's Gaffer Gammon. For Kent, even from the time of Caesar's Commentaries, has been "the civil'st place of all ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... of the "fall" of the various sites, and their available water-power, and he put irrelevant queries concerning ineligible streams in other localities. No man comfortably mounted upon his hobby relishes an interruption. The surveyor would stop with a sort of bovine surprise, and ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... soon betrayed the Bundist's shop, and David hurried off to enlist him. The shopkeeper proved, however, so corpulent and bovine that David's heart sank. But he began bluntly: 'I know ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... maid Who poses as a "cook," She hath a very bovine brain, She hath a bovine look. Oh, prithee, lead her to the kine, Oh, prithee get the hook! Chacun son metier: Les vaches ...
— A line-o'-verse or two • Bert Leston Taylor
... itself into that of a middle-aged man of the laboring class, slow, heavy, and obese. In his rather bovine countenance hardly any spark of intelligence shone. He did not appear to have seen the others as he approached, but evinced neither surprise nor interest ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts
... minutes later the Candidate was introducing me to a roomful of heavy looking Committee men. Committee men in politics, I notice, have always a heavy bovine look. They are generally in a sort of daze, or ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock
... appropriate to the occasion of starting up, he flung out his bullwhip in a flourish of aerial penmanship and drove home the aforesaid remarks with a startling report. Again the bovine procession ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... increase and is doing away with all general education in the humanities—for a mere smattering of Latin and Greek is of no use—we shall come to have men of learning who outside their own subject display an ignorance truly bovine. ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... syllogism by a story from the front. Soldiers stole a cow from a farmyard. It had but the stump of a tail, and foreseeing that there might be a requisition by the owner, who passed for a Union sympathizer, they disguised the creature by attaching a long switch from a dead bovine. Sure enough the man came to headquarters, and from his patriotic plea of having lost much by adhering to the old cause, his demand was accorded. If he could find his lost animal, he was entitled to it and the offenders would ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... the Crown, for it was she who had been the first to begin the transformation of this remote Elizabethan village into the palace of culture that was now reared on the spot where ten years ago an agricultural population had led bovine and unilluminated lives in their cottages of grey stone or brick and timber. Before that, while her husband was amassing a fortune, comfortable in amount and respectable in origin, at the Bar, she had merely held up a small dim lamp of culture in Onslow Gardens. But both her ambition and ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... thirty-six hours, since the night when they had supped on horseflesh and he had contracted a terrible dysentery in consequence, he had been without food, for he was so little able to look out for himself that, notwithstanding his bovine strength, whenever he joined the others in a marauding raid he never got his share of the booty. He would have been willing to give his blood ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... 1814, so shall you find it in 1840. Mutton cutlets and fillet of beef at Flicoteaux's represent black game and fillet of sturgeon at Very's; they are not on the regular bill of fare, that is, and must be ordered beforehand. Beef of the feminine gender there prevails; the young of the bovine species appears in all kinds of ingenious disguises. When the whiting and mackerel abound on our shores, they are likewise seen in large numbers at Flicoteaux's; his whole establishment, indeed, is directly affected by the caprices of the season and the vicissitudes of French agriculture. ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... criminal spider-web woven by the Dernburgs, Bernstorffs and Von Papens, accredited creatures of the Kaiser, who with Machiavellian smiles had professed friendship for those whom their hands itched to slay and strangle. Gradually the camouflage of bovine geniality was lifted from the face of Germany and the dripping fangs of the Blonde Beast were displayed—the Minotaur countenance of one glutted with human flesh, weary with rape and rapine, but still tragically insatiable and lusting for the new sensation ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... open the barriers of utterance, he poured forth a torrent of sarcastic contempt on the young clod-hoppers, who, having just come from herding their fathers' cows, could express their feelings in no more suitable language than that of the bovine animals which had been their principal and fit associates. As he sat down, his eyes rested with withering scorn upon Alec Forbes, who instantly started to his feet amidst a confusion of plaudits ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... fronts were turned towards the dogs as after a momentary indecision they recognized an enemy. With a startled rush the herd drove through the meadow and poured across the unfenced road up to the hill pasture which they had left, whose scanty grasses had doubtless turned slow bovine thoughts to the coolness of the meadow grass, and the pleasure of standing ruminant knee-deep in the river, with wavy tail nicking the flies ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... They blew defiantly, did these Spanish trumpeters, and as loudly as ever they could, just to show us that they were not afraid—that they did not care, not they, pooh! After these came a small detachment of guarda, with arms, who watched the Yankee soldiers with bovine intentness while they came to a halt and ordered arms in front of ...
— The Surrender of Santiago - An Account of the Historic Surrender of Santiago to General - Shafter, July 17, 1898 • Frank Norris
... made of the animals from which man derives strength appears to have been brought about by the subjugation of wild cattle—the bulls and buffaloes. Several wild varieties of the bovine tribe were originally widely disseminated in Europe and Asia, and these forms must have been frequent objects of chase by the ancient hunters. Although in their adult state these animals were doubtless originally intractable, the young were mild-mannered, ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... quiet dreariness had lasted for months past, and seemed likely to last as far into the future that young Ellington faced his prospect with a sort of pained confusion of mind, and began by slow degrees to understand the bovine apathy of the ploughmen. Old Mr. Ellington was a magnate who would have been commended by Mr. John Ruskin. The fashions of other country people did not influence him to imitation, and he steadfastly performed that feat of "living on the land" which is supposed to bring such blessedness ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... woods of the island, had been planned by the man who stood in the centre. Many openings under the eaves gaped windowless; but the congregation, sheltered from a July sun, enjoyed freely the lake air, bringing fragrance from their own fields and gardens. They seemed a bovine, honest people, in homespun and hickory; and youth, bright-eyed and fresh-cheeked, was not lacking. They sat on benches arranged in circles around a central platform which held the Prophet's chair and table. This was his simple plan for making his world ...
— The King Of Beaver, and Beaver Lights - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... getting up from the little ditch where they had rolled, a plaintive call from the "boulder" above identified the creature as belonging to the bovine kingdom. A second "Moo-oo," as the cow passed slowly down the bank to the road, where she hoped to find some one to lead her home, created a wild ...
— Girl Scouts in the Adirondacks • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... the wide-spread distribution of this disease in both the human and the bovine race, the relation of the same to milk supplies is a question of great importance. It is now generally admitted that the different types of tubercular disease found in different kinds of animals ...
— Outlines of Dairy Bacteriology, 8th edition - A Concise Manual for the Use of Students in Dairying • H. L. Russell
... of servants were gossiping in frightened whispers with a couple of large, rather bovine country constables who, bareheaded, without their helmets, which they held under their ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... run we must," thought Bart, at last, as Black Boy slowly and cautiously took him up to within a yard of the shaggy beast, whose bovine breath Bart could smell now ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn
... to correct him by remarking: "My son, you should say 'horsey.' You would thereby avoid confounding the noble animals before you with the no less useful, but undeniably less attractive—in an aesthetic point of view—animals which belong to the bovine race." ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 35, November 26, 1870 • Various
... truth of his origin, Pavonius Nasor never ran the risk of telling it. He kept his sinecure by mastering his tongue, preserving almost bovine speechlessness. When he and Commodus met face to face he never seemed to see the joke of the resemblance, never laughed at Commodus' obscenely vivid jibes at his expense, nor once complained of his ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... They have drunk too much. There goes another. Lucky devils! They have nothing else to do but eat and sleep, while I— no! eight down! Well! I hope soon to eat, too. What an odd way they have of coming to the ground! How different from anything of the bovine tribe I have yet observed! I have never seen buffaloes quieting down before. One would think they were falling as if shot! Two more alongside the rest! They will soon be all upon the turf. So much the better. We can gallop up before they get to their ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... after group of astonished animals became aware of the attack and joined in the mad flight the thunder on the plains swelled louder and louder, until it became one continuous roar—like the sound of a rushing cataract—a bovine Niagara! At first the buffaloes and the horses seemed well matched, but by degrees the superiority of the latter became obvious, as the savages drew nearer and nearer to the flying mass. Soon a puff or two of smoke, ...
— The Prairie Chief • R.M. Ballantyne
... and goals are more dynamic than those of Browne, and he attempts to analyze various embryonic fluids by coagulation and distillation procedures. His experiments reveal, for example, that "coagulations" effected by different acids vary according to the fluid; thus, the addition of "alumina" to bovine amniotic fluid produced a few, fine precipitations, whereas the allantoic fluid was precipitated like urine. By such means Needham was able to demonstrate, however crudely, that there are considerable differences in the various ...
— Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England - Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, October 14, 1967 • Charles W. Bodemer
... constitutionally apathetic. She was a bovine creature who positively refused to get ruffled over obstacles, criticisms, or fate. Her name was Maida Jones. Two large pans of buns had burned. Mary Louise, seeking to fix the responsibility, had failed in doing so and was wracked at the prospect of frequently recurring waste. Responsibility ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... expects to find their wives sitting with clinched hands and set teeth, simply enduring life and praying for death, one is often surprised to see that they are generally stout women, who wear many diamonds and a bovine expression in their eyes. Evidently there is no nervous tension in their house, and the dense man is quite capable of comprehending the a b c of human nature and of keeping his ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... "There are two varieties of them, the common gnoo and the brindled gnoo. They form an intermediate link between the antelope family and the bovine or ox, and ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat
... crowded corrals from where she stood. She could hear the bellowing of the restless cattle as they pushed and horned each other in their forceful, bovine desire to get out to the succulent grass of their beloved pastures. All the men were astir, preparing for their lawless expedition. The saddle-horses, ready for the trail, were hitched to the corral fences. Through the open window she could hear her lover ordering and hectoring, as was ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... driving in a hansom cab westward through Cockspur Street. One, a large individual of a bovine placidity, wore the Queen's uniform, and carried himself with a solid dignity faintly suggestive of a lighthouse. The other, a narrower man, with a keen, fair face and eyes that had an habitual smile, wore another uniform—that ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... from Bob Quirk's herd, though he had previously denied all knowledge of them. The cattle world was a small one, and it mattered little where an animal roamed, there was always a man near by who could identify the brand and give the bovine's past history. With the prospects bright for a new owner on the morrow, these two wayfarers found lodgment among our ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... of temperament between the two boys; for Tom was an excellent bovine lad, and Philip was sensitive, and suffered acute pain when the other ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... at that moment, for I had just discovered that I had an incurable heart disease. I had often feared as much, but now I had it from a scientific source that my heart was going wrong. I could tell by the way I felt. My room-mate noticed me. He was another Western bovine-chaser, a good fellow in his way, but according to my standard, devoid of all the finer qualities that go to ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... were of imperial descent and whose ancestors had been granted fiefs after the conquest of the country. Others, however, had for their first ancestor a local deity long worshipped in the family's home country, such as the ancient agrarian god Huang Ti, or the bovine god Shen Nung. Here the "scholars" stepped in, turning the local deities into human beings and "emperors". This suddenly gave the noble family concerned an imperial origin. Finally, order was brought into this collection of ancient emperors. They were arranged and connected with each other ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... horses, and rode out in the direction from whence had arisen the bovine complaint. The sound was not repeated, and Hazel had begun to chaff Bill about a too-vivid imagination when within a half mile of the clearing he pulled his horse up short in the middle ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... the bushes closed above it I felt as if it had gone down, or been broken into a hundred pieces. Billows of rocks and logs, and chasms of creeks and spring runs, kept it rearing and pitching in the most frightful manner. The steers went at a spanking pace; indeed, it was a regular bovine gale; but their driver clung to their side amid the brush and boulders with desperate tenacity, and seemed to manage them by signs and nudges, for he hardly uttered his orders aloud. But we got through without any ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... timber and stole in the direction of the sound. A glorious bull-fight was taking place when we got within shooting-distance, the cows and calves forming a noisy circle about the combatants, each shaggy brown brute bawling with all the strength of bovine lungs; in that pandemonium of bellowing and trampling I doubt if the report of Mac's carbine could have been heard two hundred yards away. The shot served to break up the fight and scatter the herd, however, ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... by a half-worn and almost imperceptible path leading through the long rough grass, and, turning round a half- demolished shrine, which exhibited the remains of Apis, the bovine deity, he came immediately in front of the philosopher, Agelastes, who, sitting among the ruins, reposed his limbs ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... watching the bovine passengers disembark, and furtively listened the while to an animated argument between two rather rough-looking, red-faced men, clothed in corduroys and carrying long, stout staffs. Mixed up in their conversation I caught the names of royalty, then of celebrities great, and artists ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... bulls, provided at the cost of the Corporation, were baited. Until 1840 our Berkshire town of Wokingham was famous for its annual bull-baiting on St. Thomas's Day. A good man, one George Staverton, was once gored by a bull; so he vented his rage upon the whole bovine race, and left a charity for the providing of bulls to be baited on the festival of this saint, the meat afterwards to be given to the poor of the town. The meat is still distributed, but the bulls are no longer baited. Here at Wokingham there was a picturesque ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... Lebuffle was serving soup, aided by a tired-looking servant. The name under which Sillery had designated the proprietor of the table d'hote might have been a nickname, for this stout person in his shirt-sleeves recommended himself to one's attentions by his bovine face and his gloomy, wandering eyes. To Amedee's amazement, Pere Lebuffle called the greater part of his clients "thou," and as soon as the newcomers were seated at table, Amedee asked Sillery, in a low voice, ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... effectiveness by the representatives of the Bureau of Animal Industry of the national Department of Agriculture; 8640 milch cows were inspected by veterinary practitioners (1905-1907), to learn the prevalence of bovine tuberculosis (of these thirty-six per cent reacted to the tuberculin test); state societies and state departments have been aroused to demand an efficient live-stock sanitary board; magistrates have ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... him following the tail Of that mud-hovel of his slowly-rambling spouse, Like some unhappy bull at the tail of a cow, But with more than bovine, grim, earth-dank persistence, Suddenly seizing the ugly ankle as she stretches out to walk, Roaming over the sods, Or, if it happen to show, at her pointed, heavy tail Beneath the ...
— Tortoises • D. H. Lawrence
... a pink thrush with black wings. Besides the various caravan trains of camels, donkeys, horses, and mules, the road is frequently dotted with ox-carts, run on solid wooden wheels without tires, and drawn by that peculiar bovine species, the buffalo. With their distended necks, elevated snouts, and hog-like bristles, these animals present an ugly appearance, especially when wallowing in ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... of being the strong, silent man with a career to think of and no time for bothering about girls, but he saw that. There was, moreover, a certain alertness in her expression rarely found in the feminine population of Millbourne, who were apt to be slightly bovine. ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... rails, watching the stolid milch cows nuzzling and devouring their evening hay. His humor was interested. They had eaten all day. They would probably eat until their silly eyes closed in sleep. He was not sure they wouldn't continue to chew their cud amidst their bovine dreams. Each cow was already balloon-like, but the inflation was still going on. And each beast was still ready to horn the others ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... some comfort and amusement from the thought of certain operations of mine that Mr. Lawler had not discovered, that would have been matters of peculiar interest to his innocent public: certain extra-legal operations at the time when the Bovine corporation was being formed, for instance. And how they would have licked their chops had they learned of that manoeuvre by which I had managed to have one of Mr. Scherer's subsidiary companies in another state, with property and assets amounting to more than twenty millions, reorganized under ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... souls overtaken by demons—hideous blood-red demons, with feet like lions, with faces half human, half bovine, the physiognomy of minotaurs in fury. One is rending a soul asunder. Another demon is forcing souls to reincarnate themselves in bodies of horses, of dogs, of swine. And as they are thus reincarnated they flee ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... susceptibility that made him peculiarly liable to a strong sense of repulsion. The ox—we may venture to assert it on the authority of a great classic—is not given to use his teeth as an instrument of attack, and Tom was an excellent bovine lad, who ran at questionable objects in a truly ingenious bovine manner; but he had blundered on Philip's tenderest point, and had caused him as much acute pain as if he had studied the means with the nicest precision and the most envenomed spite. Tom saw no reason why they should not ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... regards the intrusion of the housemaid—just a harmless necessary nuisance, and no more. The cattle took the little automatic shells in much the same spirit, but with an addition of wonder—staring at them and snuffing with bovine astonishment. The Kaffir herdsmen first ran yelling in every direction, and then rushed back to dig the shell up, amid inextinguishable laughter. The Hindoo grass-cutter neither ran nor laughed, but awaited destiny with resignation. By the way, there is a Hindoo servant in the 19th ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... that two opposite sides were formed by fresh deer skin tacked in place. The interior of the box was filled with bovine liver. This represented ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... make them as happy as possible and studies their comfort and convenience as far as possible. This is not because he is a sentimentalist, but for the very opposite reason. He knows his cows will give more milk and he will get more money therefrom if they are contented in their bovine minds and not worried by the high cost of living ...
— The Stars & Stripes, Vol 1, No 1, February 8, 1918, - The American Soldiers' Newspaper of World War I, 1918-1919 • American Expeditionary Forces
... favourite, Giovanni loved his father best. But Marco was his mother's son, with the same brown-gold and red complexion, like a pomegranate, and coarse black hair, and brown eyes like pebble, like agate, like an animal's eyes. He had the same broad, bovine figure, though he was only a boy. But there was some discrepancy in him. He was not unified, ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... growled Scholtz, as another burst of whip-musketry, human roars, and bovine bellows broke on their ears, "ant zee confusion ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... sliding doors leading from the corral are opened, and a bull, bounding forward therefrom, stops short a moment and eyes the assembled multitude and the men on horseback with wrathful yet inquiring eye. A moment only. Sniffing the air and lashing his tail, the noble bovine rushes forward and engages the picadores; the little pennants of the national colours, which, attached to a barbed point, have been jabbed into his back by an unseen hand as he passed the barrier, fluttering in the wind created by his rush. Furiously he charges the picadores. If they are ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... a gun. The brave and sonorous language with which our commander set forth his plan of assault captured our imaginations, and we all longed for the moment when the word of command should permit us to swarm up the sides and over the rail of the old bovine. ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... guard, or kill the sheep, both rams and ewes alike. In regard to mutton, to wool, to general character, we think only of their sheepishness, not at all of their ramishness or eweishness. That which is ovine or bovine, canine, feline or equine, is easily recognized as distinguishing that particular species of animal, and has no relation whatever ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... with myself. I was mismanaging this thing in the most idiotic way. Instead of this bovine silence, gay small-talk, the easy eloquence, in fact, of the brisk man of affairs should have been my policy. No wonder Smooth Sam Fisher treated me as a child. My whole bearing was ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... affect it. The staple food to-day is matter of bovine origin. But the Ox is a newcomer in the land, an importation of the Spanish conquest. What did the Megathopae, the Bolbites, the Splendid Phanaeus eat and knead, before the arrival of the present purveyor? The Llama, that ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... with Scraggs he was not to claim the title of captain and was known to the world as the Maggie's first mate, second mate, third mate, quartermaster, purser, and freight clerk. One Neils Halvorsen, a solemn Swede with a placid, bovine disposition, constituted the fo'castle hands, while Bart McGuffey, a wastrel of the Gibney type but slower-witted, reigned supreme in the engine room. Also his case resembled that of Mr. Gibney in that McGuffey's job on the Maggie was the ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... wherefore her husband realized she was thinking considerably about it and, as a result, was not altogether happy. Had he suspected, however, the trend her thoughts were taking, he would have been greatly perturbed. Momentous thoughts rarely racked Mrs. Daney's placid and somewhat bovine brain, but once she became possessed with the notion that Nan Brent was the only human being possessed of undoubted power to create or suppress a scandal which some queer feminine intuition warned her impended, the more firmly did she become convinced that it was her Christian duty to call upon ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... doctrine holds that each word yields its meaning only as being generally related to other factors or only as a part of an injunctive sentence, thus the word gam accusative case of go (cow) means that it is intended that something is to be done with the cow or the bovine genus, and it appears only as connected with a specific kind of action, viz. bringing in the sentence gam anaya—bring the cow. Kumarila however thinks that words independently express separate meanings which are subsequently combined ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... silk curtains that were looped on the corner posts of the pavilion. When she saw the Magister her great, fair face became slowly of a fiery red; slowly and silently she fell, with motions as if bovine, to her knees at the Queen's side. Her gown was all grey, but it had roses of red and white silk round the upper edges of the square neck-place, and white lawn showed ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford
... are Science, high Desires the steeds, And Misery the quarry. Use and Wont No help to human anguish bring, that bleeds For all two thousand years of Christian deeds. Let Use and Wont in styes still feed and grunt, Or, bovine, graze knee-deep in flowering meads. Mount! follow! Onward urge Life's dragon-hunt!" —So cries the sportsman brisk at break of day. "The sound of hound and horn is well for thee," Thus I reply, "but I have other prey; And ...
— Songs, Sonnets & Miscellaneous Poems • Thomas Runciman
... What a contrast between their noses and their mode of grazing! The cow has no upper front teeth; she reaps the grass with the scythe of her tongue, while the horse bites it off and loves to bite the turf with it. The lip of the horse is mobile and sensitive. Then the bovine animals fight with their heads, and the equine with their heels. The horse is a hard and high kicker, the cow a feeble one in comparison. The horse will kick with both hind feet, the cow with only one. In fact, there is not much "kick" in her kind. The tail of the cow is ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... buzzing like a gad-fly. From time to time he stopped to throw a stone at a bird or at a puffed-up black lizard darting among the opuntia cactus. Little impression did death make upon him! Margalida walked at her mother's side, silent, abstracted, her eyes opened very wide, beautiful bovine eyes, which looked in every direction reflecting not a single thought. She seemed to forget that behind her was Don Jaime, the senor, the revered guest of ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... silk and crimson satin and gold brocade and purple velvet and silvery fur enshrine many a blend of villainies and brutal stupidities. What is more cruelly realistic than the leer of the satyr clothed as Francis, King of France; than the bovine dullness of Charles V and the lizard-like dullness of his son; or than that strange combination of wolfish cunning and swinish bestiality with human thought and self-command that fascinates in Raphael's portrait of Leo X and his two cardinals? ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... that all nature is smiling and gay, But the groan may dissemble the laugh; E'en now from the meadow is wafted the sound Of a bovine bewailing ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... obligations as a wife. You see, I had told him at the outset that I was going to live for my baby, and for her alone. That was the ground upon which he had persuaded me not to see you or read any of your letters. I was to ask no questions, and be nice and bovine—and I agreed. But then, a few months ago, my husband came to me with the story of his needs. He said that the doctors had given their sanction to our reunion. Of course, I was stunned. I knew that he had understood me ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair |
