"Slimy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of all was what Davy did one day. He wanted to be kind and nice, and do something for me, so he went off to the pond, and sat there on the hot sunny bank all morning, trying to catch me a fish. To everybody's surprise he did catch one about eleven o'clock,—a slimy-looking little catfish,—and came running straight up to my room with it in his dirty little hands. He smelled so fishy I could scarcely stand it, for it was the day I felt the very worst. But he didn't know that. ...
— The Little Colonel's House Party • Annie Fellows Johnston
... he put a lot of burdocks in my hat so they would get in my hair. Foolish things those were, of course, but he was a constant nightmare to me. Sometimes he would tie a wire across the passages in the upper hall where I had to pass to my room, and when I fell my hands went down against a lot of slimy toads in the dark, for he always somehow managed to have the light go out just as I fell. There were hundreds of things like that, but I needn't multiply them. That's the kind of boy he was. And because he discovered that my father loved me very much, and because he knew my father ...
— Exit Betty • Grace Livingston Hill
... many men, so beautiful! And they all dead did lie: And a thousand thousand slimy things Lived on; and so ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... 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
... they were. One yellow halo hung above a door, That gave on a black passage. Round about Struggled a howling crowd of boys, pell-mell, Pushing and jostling like a stormy sea, With shouting faces, turned a pasty white By the strange light, for foam. They all had clods, Or slimy balls of mud. A few gripped stones. And there, his back against the battered door, His pile of books scattered about his feet, Stood Shelley while two others held him fast, And the clods beat upon him. 'Shelley! Shelley!' The high shouts rang through all the corridors, ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... that they go down to have a look at the dungeon underground. While they were examining that damp, slimy old cell, ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Spies - Dodging the Sharks of the Deep • Victor G. Durham
... sour, &c. Water unclean, milk, oil, vinegar, wine, spices &c. Flesh Parts: heads, feet, entrails, fat, bacon, blood, &c. Kinds: Beef, pork, venison, hares, goats, pigeons, peacocks, fen-fowl, &c. Herbs, Fish, &c. Of fish; all shellfish, hard and slimy fish, &c. Of herbs; pulse, cabbage, melons, garlic, onions, &c. All roots, raw fruits, hard ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... cable train clanged its way harshly across his path. As he looked up, he caught sight of 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 Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... objection to the prevailing religious ceremonial lies in the attitudes of abasement that it enforces upon the faithful. A man would be thought a slimy and knavish fellow if he approached any human judge or potentate in the manner provided for approaching the Lord God. It is an etiquette that involves loss of self-respect, and hence it cannot be pleasing to its object, ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... and treated with unabated vigour and freshness, may well have attracted many readers. A reviewer remarks: "In the eyes of most men...the earthworm is a mere blind, dumb, senseless, and unpleasantly slimy annelid. Mr. Darwin undertakes to rehabilitate his character, and the earthworm steps forth at once as an intelligent and beneficent personage, a worker of vast geological changes, a planer down of mountain sides...a friend of man...and ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... of the slippery stone and guided the boat along the wall. He advanced noiselessly, just grazing the slimy ...
— Twenty-six and One and Other Stories • Maksim Gorky
... 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 ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... is a bit of the touch of God upon life, where the hurt of sin has come in. Only the Lord Jesus can make music where sin had brought in and wrought out such discord. Only He can change the weaving into beauty, where the ugly slimy sin-threads have come in. He can lead up again out of the depths, but only He. His blood, Himself, is the thing added that makes music where no melody had ever been a possible thing; and gives the weaver's threads the transforming touch that works beauty where there was only ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... internal parts of those glands—the cornua as well as the other parts of the uterus were much thickened, and apparently highly injected with blood. On opening the cavity I found it throughout thickly coated with slimy or mucal secretion (the only uterus found by me in this state.) I now extended my examination in front of the womb to the posterior part of the mammae, and in doing so discovered a small gelatinous mass, about twice the ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... pulp and the green stuff made a sort of slimy mildew which ran over Golightly in several directions—down his back and bosom for choice. The khaki color ran too—it was really shockingly bad dye—and sections of Golightly were brown, and patches were violet, and contours were ochre, and streaks were ruddy ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... 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 ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... mistletoe, a plant of great fame for the use made of it by the Druids of old in their religious rites and incantations. It bears a very slimy white berry, of which birdlime may be made, whence its Latin name of viscus, It is one of those plants which do not grow in the ground by a root of their own, but fix themselves upon other plants; whence they have been ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... Birds were so fresh and so fair, That they call'd forth the wonder of all who came there, And the Boa Constrictors so slimy and gay, That they seem'd to have painted themselves for the day. The Green-bonnet Monkey, with speckles bespread, Was proud of the verdigris tuft on his head; For it look'd, as he leap'd in ...
— The Peacock 'At Home' AND The Butterfly's Ball AND The Fancy Fair • Catherine Ann Dorset
... voice, pausing between the words and speaking ever more thickly as the blood from his wound choked him. Then of a sudden it burst in a stream from his lips, and still pointing with an accusing finger at Anscombe, he fell backwards into the slimy pool behind him and there ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard
... fell into the error of believing that the frame of the sponge was the outer case of worms or polypes. Later examination, however, has shown that the frame or sponge, commonly so called, is an internal skeleton, while the vital power is simply composed of a slimy film which coats over every fibre, and which, inert as it appears, possesses the power of secreting the particles essential ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... realised it was too dangerous a venture. The slimy seaweed underneath caused her to slip, and the strong swirl of the tide nearly swept her from her feet. With ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil
... dozen days we ploughed that restless sea. There were days into which the sun shone not; when everybody and everything was sticky with salty distillations; when half the passengers were sea-sick and the other half sick of the sea. The decks were slimy, the cabins stuffy and foul. The hours hung heavily, and the horizon line closed in about us ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... below the village the walls of the ravine disappeared, and the brook was lost in a deep swamp, a maze of tangled foliage and deep pools and idly wandering streams. As the water advanced the forest became submerged, and formed a desolate stretch known as the Drowned Lands. Its slimy, green surface was dotted with rotten stumps and fantastic tree-trunks, pitched together in wild confusion, and above it rose a drear, dead forest of tall pine stems, bleached and scarred, and stripped of every limb. Around this silent, ghostly place the swamp formed a ring through which it was ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... useless metal to the earth, and endeavored to escape from the ditch back into the ravine, where, at least, there was a prospect of supplying themselves with more serviceable weapons from among their slain comrades; but the ditch was deep and slimy and the difficulty of ascent great. Before they could accomplish it, the Americans opened a fire from a bastion, the guns of which, loaded with slugs and musket balls, raked the trench from end to end, and swept ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... in the pool of a slimy eel or a blundering bullhead or a lethargic sucker is bad enough, but the rush in of the pickerel is the advent of the devil himself. Until he is got rid of, all the delicate machinery for the calculation of chances is hopelessly disturbed; and no one could tell what would become of the business ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the story is not in the fact that such men are in prison, but that a Dostoevski should be among them. Here is a delicate, sensitive man of genius, in bad health, with a highly organised nervous system, with a wonderful imagination, condemned to live for years in slimy misery, with creatures far worse than the beasts of the field. Indeed, some of the most beautiful parts of the story are where Dostoevski turns from the men to the prison dog and the prison horse, and there finds true friendship. His kindness ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... had brought he lit a torch of dry wood. By its glare we saw that a hide ladder dangled from an overhanging rock into the deep pit. Down it N'buqu led the way, followed by us all in turn the shipmen with many muttered prayers and misgivings. . . . Slimy and dank was the fearsome place, but the bottom was firm and rocky, and from it there branched a cavern wide enough for us all to walk abreast. Gently it led upward . . . and then we stood in a broader cavern, where the light from the torch in every direction flashed ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... peculiar haunting fiend, every natural phenomenon has its informing spirit; every quality, as hunger, greed, envy, malice, has an embodied visible shape prowling about seeking what it may devour. Where our science, for example, sees (or rather smells) sewer gas, the Japanese behold a slimy, meagre, insatiate wraith, crawling to devour the lives of men. Where we see a storm of snow, their livelier fancy beholds a comic snow-ghost, a queer, grinning old ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... 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 frightened, her heart ...
— Stories from Hans Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... 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 ...
— Our Young Folks—Vol. I, No. II, February 1865 - An Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... commenced descending slowly, while the captain anxiously and watchfully plied out the signal line and hose. He reached bottom which was full of rocks covered with a slimy growth of marine vegetation; the pressure on him was something enormous. It was very dark and he groped for some time without discovering anything. He signaled the boat to move with him as he pursued his explorations. At last his heart was gladdened by the sight of a wreck overgrown with ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... until it had become of the sea, like a half-submerged floating island; brown and many-coloured seaweeds had attached themselves to it; strange creatures, half plant and half animal, grew on it; and little shell-fish and numberless slimy, creeping things of the sea made it their dwelling-place. It was about as big as the floor of a large room, all rough, black, and slippery, with the seaweed floating like ragged hair many yards long around it, and right in the middle of the raft there was a large hole where ...
— A Little Boy Lost • Hudson, W. H.
... tricks which appeared to me to be truly abominable. He played it upon a person reputed to be a brave man, but who was nevertheless horribly frightened. One night, after getting snugly into bed, this gentleman felt something cold and slimy along side of him, he touched it with his foot; it seemed a round elongated body; he placed his hand upon it; it was a serpent coiled upon itself! In an ecstacy of terror, he leaped from the bed with a cry of disgust ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... "oysters" meant! I imagined to myself a creature like a frog. A frog sitting in a shell, peeping out from it with big, glittering eyes, and moving its revolting jaws. I imagined this creature in a shell with claws, glittering eyes, and a slimy skin, being brought from the market. . . . The children would all hide while the cook, frowning with an air of disgust, would take the creature by its claw, put it on a plate, and carry it into the dining-room. The grown-ups would take it and eat it, eat it alive with its ...
— The Cook's Wedding and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... pass to the right and to the left, silent and wan. Each tree bears on its side the scar of wounds where the woodmen have set flowing the resinous blood which chokes it; the powerful liquor still ascends into its limbs with the sap, exhales by its slimy shoots and by its cleft skin; a sharp aromatic ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... hundreds and hundreds, guarding and sanctifying the place. It was like a dark cathedral with white lilies on the high altar. And they saw a cock blackbird wetting his whistle at the pool, and heard two others and a green woodpecker chuckling in the trees close by. And they had no eyes for slimy goblin things, even if there were any. And I ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... door. Thorndyke heard his guide feeling for the bolt and key-hole. The rattling of the keys sounded like a ghostly threat in the empty corridors. The air was as damp as a fog, and the stones were cold and slimy. After a moment the guard succeeded in unlocking the door and roughly pushed the Englishman forward. The door closed with a little puff, and Thorndyke felt about him for the guide; but he was alone. For a moment there was no sound. With the closing ...
— The Land of the Changing Sun • William N. Harben
... to reveal," he says, smoothing a slimy tall hat, "is of a nature so revolting, so 'orrible in its details, that I can 'ardly bring myself to speak it to any 'uming ear!" (Here you will probably prepare to take notes.) "You see before you one who is of 'igh birth but low circumstances!" (At this, you give him up as ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. February 14, 1891. • Various
... liberty of bringing here a number of culture tubes containing beautiful specimens of some of the more common and interesting bacteria. The slimy masses seen on the surfaces of jelly contained in the tubes are many millions of individual plants, which have aggregated themselves in various forms as they have been developed as the progeny of the few ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various
... scale of life as the Monera, we may see the Creative Will in action. The Monera are but tiny bits of slimy, jelly-like substances—mere specks of glue without organs of any kind, and yet they exercise the organic phenomena of life, such as nutrition, reproduction, sensation and movement, all of which are usually associated with an organized structure. These creatures are incapable ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... coiled the great, slimy folds of a hideous monster of that prehistoric deep—a mighty serpent of the sea, with fanged jaws, and darting forked tongue, with bulging eyes, and bony protuberances upon head and snout that formed short, ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... not appear to hear: so his companions made short work of it. They pulled in for the shore of the Red-hill, and laid Roger on the slimy bank:—for they saw no occasion to carry one so heavy and so sulky up to the nice bed of grass which was spread at the top of the red precipice that the waters had cut Oliver knew that there was a knife in Roger's pocket. He took it out, cut the cord which tied his ...
— The Settlers at Home • Harriet Martineau
... the winged lion is much curtailed, excellent Sir, or these things might not be! It is no longer in our power to persuade, or to command, as of old; and our canals begin to be encumbered with slimy weeds, instead of well freighted argosies and ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... ooze: Lethe is the river of oblivion in Hades; its slimy depths of forgetfulness are not even ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... smothered by them, rather than leave his charge without his commander's orders. One graphic word pictures the priests lifting, or, as it might be translated, 'plucking,' the soles of their feet from the slimy bottom into which they had settled down by reason of long standing still. They reach the bank, marching as steadily with their sacred burden as might be over so rough and slippery a road. The first to enter were the last to leave the river's bed. God's ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... to believe himself invincible and infallible He spent more time at table than the Bearnese in sleep Henry the Huguenot as the champion of the Council of Trent Highest were not necessarily the least slimy His invectives were, however, much stronger than his arguments History is a continuous whole of which we see only fragments Infinite capacity for pecuniary absorption Leading motive with all was supposed to be religion Past was ...
— Quotations From John Lothrop Motley • David Widger
... related by that assistant and Uncle Thomas, I felt horrible dread. This craze of Paul's seemed almost a judgment upon my head. Such determined malice against the girl he had slain, yet feared still might rise from her slimy grave, was beyond belief, yet I could not doubt the evidences. My curiosity was increased, and I felt a strong desire to witness Paul's new infatuation. In male disguise I watched from hiding some of this madman's night performances upon ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... honored by a Grand Prix at Paris will always remain one of those mysteries with which the world is laden. Of all disagreeable colour schemes, it is certainly one of the least appealing ever put upon a canvas. It is hardly a scheme at all, since I do not believe the juxtaposition of so many different slimy greens, nowhere properly relieved nor accentuated by a complementary red, can ever be called a scheme. Technically speaking, the canvas is well painted, but it is hardly worthy of the attention its size and subject ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... slippery flagstones of the corridor, sniffing the dead, musty air with distaste. He drew his carefully tailored Terran-styled jacket closer about his shoulders, shivering as his eyes avoided the black, yawning cell-holes they were passing. His foot slipped on the slimy flags from time to time, and finally he paused to wipe the caked mud from his trouser leg. "How much farther is ...
— Letter of the Law • Alan Edward Nourse
... ready, horses rounded up, the "Primera Vista" camp was struck, and the march onward recommenced. But not before The Chaperon had pointed out a terror that "might have been." After breakfast he approached us with a stick held at arm's length, on which hung a dead, slimy-looking, grey snake, about 4 feet long. He explained that this reptile had crawled over the neck of one of the peons as he lay on the grass last night. This had happened before we went to bed, and we felt grateful to The Chaperon for having ...
— Argentina From A British Point Of View • Various
... 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
... which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. I was buried for 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, ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... Indians, though they are less bitter in their hatred of the extremes of wealth and poverty than are the Eastern tribes. Still, the very fact that they have preserved this legend, in which they liken avarice to a slimy sea-serpent, shows the trend of their ideas; shows, too, that an Indian is an Indian, no matter what his tribe; shows that he cannot or will not hoard money; shows that his native morals demand that the spirit of greed must be ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson
... tingling blood—ye maidens, whom not splendour has yet spoiled, will ye not think of the poor?—will ye not shudder in your couches to think how rain, wind, and smoke dwell with the blanketless peasant?—will ye not turn from the sumptuous board to look at those hard-won meals of black and slimy roots on which man, woman, and child feed year after year?—will ye never try to banish wringing hunger and ghastly disease from the home of such piety and love?—will ye not give back its dance to the village—its mountain play to boyhood—its ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... went dashing Into puddles splashing, Under dripping eaves that soaked him through; One of them avoided All the other boy did, Dodging all the slimy, slushy goo. ...
— More Goops and How Not to Be Them • Gelett Burgess
... the mudhole. It was so deep that he laid a 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 ...
— Dick in the Everglades • A. W. Dimock
... shout, and set himself right again by the answering shouts of his comrades who might be so lucky as to be in the path at that moment. After blundering about all night through marshy thickets, slipping upon slimy rocks, and scrambling over the oozy trunks of fallen trees, they reached the Indian camp at daybreak in a somewhat moist and bedabbled plight, as you may well imagine. The Half King seemed overjoyed at seeing his young white brother once more; and, with true ...
— The Farmer Boy, and How He Became Commander-In-Chief • Morrison Heady
... caps, with cruel lips and hard, steely eyes, sitting in solemn state in a gloomy hall and dispensing death, disgrace, or long terms of prison, at the very least, to all comers. For her, the police-station was a dungeon, and she fancied the Count chained to a dank and slimy wall in a painful position, chilled to the marrow by the touch of the dripping stone, his teeth chattering, his face distorted with suffering. Of course he was in a solitary cell, behind a heavy door, braced with clamps ...
— A Cigarette-Maker's Romance • F. Marion Crawford
... that he was to grow rich by gaming. As he went, by day or night, in rain or fog or burning sun, by the margins of turgid south-western rivers, where his "leaders" shied at the alligators asleep in the stage-road; through dreary pine woods, where the owls hooted at silence; over red, reedy, slimy causeways; in cane-breaks and bayous; past villages where civilization looked westward with a dirk between its teeth, and cracked its horsewhip; past rich plantations where the negroes sang afield, and ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... a jungle-like place she experienced something akin to the prized ecstatic shudder as she made out the sleek form of a jaguar slinking into the swamp. The ugliest of the picturesque "properties" was a monstrous green iguana with his prickly crest and horn and slimy eye, basking full five feet ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... and killed. We can find them at night by hunting for them by lamp-light; their slimy track glistens and reveals their presence. A few small bits of slate or half rotten boards with a pinch of bran on them laid here and there about the beds are handy traps; the slugs gather to eat the bran, hide beneath the rotten wood, and can then be caught and killed. ...
— Mushrooms: how to grow them - a practical treatise on mushroom culture for profit and pleasure • William Falconer
... which they sat, a hall young in years but old Gothic in pretense, might have suggested a possessor of the stately and knightly type rather than a little cockatoo like Mr. Early; but man has this advantage over the snail, that, whereas, the snail is obliged to construct a home around its slimy little body, man may build his habitation to match his imagination and ambition. In the West, moreover, it is the custom to leave the low-vaulted past and build more stately mansions as fast as ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... vagabondism of the Arab, confident, as it were, that the world has in reserve better use for him than that. "Day-dawn in Africa" will probably gild his hills sooner than the tufted swamps of Guinea or the slimy huts of the Nile. A class of missionaries quite different from the Livingstones and the Moffatts have devoted themselves to his improvement. They approach him in a different way, and begin on his commercial and industrial side, not on the spiritual. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... "lithe and slimy." "Lithe" is the same as "active." You see it's like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up ...
— Through the Looking-Glass • Charles Dodgson, AKA Lewis Carroll
... the danger from cold and exposure. But awe of the fading light and coming darkness awoke in me. I began to be frightened, and fear is like other live things: once started, it grows. Then first I thought with dismay, which became terror, of the slimy bogs and the deep pools in them. But just as my heart was dying within me, I looked to the hills—with no hope that from them would come my aid—and there, on the edge of the sky, lifted against it, in a dip between two of the hills, was the ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... grasped her skirts and dragged them forward with the gesture a woman always uses when she is going to jump. My good master and I came up with her just as she was taking the fatal leap, and we hauled her forcibly backward. She struggled to get free of our arms; and as the bank was all slimy and slippery with ooze deposited by the receding waters (for the river was already beginning to fall), M. l'Abbe Coignard came very near being dragged in too. I was losing my foothold myself. But as luck would have it, my feet lighted on a root which held me up as I crouched there with my arms round ...
— The Merrie Tales Of Jacques Tournebroche - 1909 • Anatole France
... the grasp on his collar tightened, while with almost superhuman power he was flung backward. With such force did Jack handle his adversary that he sent him flying several yards away, where he fell in a pool of dark, slimy water. ...
— Jack North's Treasure Hunt - Daring Adventures in South America • Roy Rockwood
... means must be employed if they hoped to get the Tramp off the slimy bed before she ...
— The House Boat Boys • St. George Rathborne
... Greatheart's most troublesome pilgrim about them, have at least this, that they carry about a slough with them in their own mind and in their own heart. Have you only henceforth a heart and a hand to help, and see if hundreds of sinking hearts do not cry out your name, and hundreds of slimy hands grasp at your stretched-out arm. Sloughs of all kinds of vice, open and secret; sloughs of poverty, sloughs of youthful ignorance, temptation, and transgression; sloughs of inward gloom, family disquiet and dispute; ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... sartain of it now; what do you think of a grown man—little enough, truly, but out of long coats too—sneaking by night to Pike Island, to count out a little lot of silver, and to guzzle twelve gallipots o' honey? There it was, all hashed up in an old shawl, a slimy mesh like birdlime: no wonder my eye was a leetle blackish, when half-a-dozen earthern crocks were broken against it. I was angered enough, I tell you, to think any man could be such a fool as to bring honey ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... was simple, straightforward violence. It was not the slimy, underhand plotting to deliver her up like a slave, which had sickened her heart and had made her feel in her loneliness that her oppressors were too many for her. She was no longer alone in the world now. She resisted without a moment of faltering, because she ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... at their wounds. Above all, they must not be overturned. An overturn would kill a man who was seriously wounded. Driving meant drawing all her nervous forces into her directing brain and her two hands. A village on fire at night is an eerie sight. A dark road, pitted with shell holes and slimy with mud, is chancy. The car with its human freight, swaying, bumping, sliding, is heavy on the wrist. The whole focused drive of it falls on the muscles of the forearm. And when on the skill of that driver depends the lives of three ...
— Golden Lads • Arthur Gleason and Helen Hayes Gleason
... society has been made by some wiseacre in behalf of the goat. The plain truth is that only one animal can justly lay claim to such a distinction. At the threshold of human society and civilization lies the slimy figure of the snake, who persuaded man to purchase knowledge at the cost of innocence, a lesson which has been learned by heart and been worked out in all the "history of civilization," for verily "the trail of the serpent ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... 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 Sampson and his ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... constituents of many seeds, distinguished by giving slimy or ropy 'solutions' under the action of boiling water are designated 'amyloid.' They are reserve materials, and in this, as in the physical properties of their 'solutions,' they are very similar to starch. They are, however, not affected by ...
— Researches on Cellulose - 1895-1900 • C. F. Cross
... ours like blinded snails to prowl the soggy, slimy night, With a feeler pricking out at every pore For the death that stalks in darkness, or the blinking stab of light, And the other ...
— 'Hello, Soldier!' - Khaki Verse • Edward Dyson
... wharf, at the end of which was ever to be seen a broad-beamed fisherman, sitting upon an uncomfortably wooden chair, from which he dabbled perpetually with his whip-cord line in the shallow water that washed the slimy face-timbers of the wharf. There he sat, day after day, and all day, and, for aught I know, all through the summer-night, a big-timbered, sea-worthy man, reading contentedly a daily paper of local growth, and pulling up never a better bit of sea-luck than the puny, mean-spirited ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... and he was not content. And more and more the domestic atmosphere and the atmosphere of the district fretted and even annoyed him. To-night's affair was not unique. But it was a culmination. He gazed pessimistically north and south along the slimy expanse of Trafalgar Road, which sank northwards in the direction of Dr. Stirling's, and southwards in the direction of joyous Hanbridge. He loathed and despised Trafalgar Road. What was the use of making three hundred and forty-one ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... limits of a Globe; just as it would happen, if a heap of exactly round Balls of soft Clay were heaped upon one another; or, as I have often seen a heap of small Globules of Quicksilver, reduc'd to that form by rubbing it much in a glaz'd Vessel, with some slimy or sluggish liquor, such as Spittle, when though the top of the upper Globules be very neer spherical, yet those that are prest upon by others, exactly imitate the forms of these ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... the albatross following, until one day the Ancient Mariner, in a mad moment, shot the beautiful bird. In punishment for this deed terrible disasters fell upon that ship and its crew. Under a blazing sun, in a hot and slimy sea filled with creeping, crawling things, they ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... is soft, thick, spongy, and wrinkled. It prepares a slimy substance and a fluid. The slimy substance prevents the stomach from being irritated by the food. The fluid ...
— Object Lessons on the Human Body - A Transcript of Lessons Given in the Primary Department of School No. 49, New York City • Sarah F. Buckelew and Margaret W. Lewis
... of his men to find their way as best they could. They were soon lost in the dense woods. The day was hot, and the air was full of mosquitoes. The Frenchmen struggled on through black mud and knee-deep water and over fallen trees and slimy logs, panting under their heavy corselets; but not a sound could they hear to guide them to ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... sinking. Small slimy spots began to appear, which glittered steadily amidst the changeful shine of the water. These grew to broad patches of mud, which widened and spread, with rocks here and there, and floundering fishes and crawling eels swarming about. The people went ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 1 • George MacDonald
... delighted the church as the beauties of endless torment, and listening to the weak wailing of damned infants struggling in the slimy coils and poison folds of the ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... suffice; The towns and houses they possess, The temples and the palaces, Nor Pharaoh nor his gods they fear, Both their importune croakings hear: Unsatiate yet they mount up higher, Where never sun-born frog durst to aspire, And in the silken beds their slimy members place, A luxury unknown before to ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... seemed once to have fallen in heavy folds to my feet, and still, when I rose to walk, though the miserable November mist lay in great drops upon my bare breast, yet was I obliged to wind my raiment over my arm, it dragged so (wretched, slimy, textureless thing! ...
— The Hollow Land • William Morris
... precipitated into the marshes. Forty guns were taken—to that time the largest capture of artillery made by the Allies—and a number of prisoners. Hundreds perished miserably, but General Foch held back his artillery from an indiscriminate slaughter of men made helpless in the slimy mud. Thus ended the "Affair of the Marshes of St. Gond," which broke still further the ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... 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! woe ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... voice muffled by some swift restraint. "You found it. And yo're going back after more?" His forehead was still creased with puzzlement. "Wal, I'm going with ye, eyes or no eyes, an' I'll keep tabs on ye, Bill Simms, by day and night. You can lay to that, you slimy-hearted swab!" ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... murmur of the valley twenty little waters meet, and discoursing their way to the sea, give name to the bay that receives them and the anchorage they make. And here no muddy harbor reeks, no foul mouth of rat-haunted drains, no slimy and scraggy wall runs out, to mar the meeting of sweet and salt. With one or two mooring posts to watch it, and a course of stepping-stones, the brook slides into the peaceful bay, and is lost in larger waters. Even so, however, it is kindly ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... made it, his hand actually slipping along the log which furnished the balancing outrigger. As his fingers tightened on the slimy wood he looked up, and loosed that hold again in time perhaps ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... full of Eastern jottings, and had just explained how a certain boat therein depicted had upset with him on a part of the Upper Nile so swarming with alligators that he had to swim for his life, and even so, barely scrambled up the slimy ...
— Monsieur Maurice • Amelia B. Edwards
... the lands of the outer world were born of the sea, before even the Land of the Sun (Mu) and the Land of the Sea (Atlantis) arose from molten rock and sand, there was land here in the far south. A sere land of rock plains, and swamps where slimy life mated, lived ...
— The People of the Crater • Andrew North
... dominated by gloomy turrets; in narrow entries, terminating in dark vistas; in gloomy forests, crowded with rocky pinnacles; in masses of struggling, mutilated men and horses; in monstrous forms of creeping, crawling, slimy, ghastly horror. By the side of the conceptions of Gustave Dore—teste for instance the weird pictures of "The Wandering Jew" already mentioned—George Cruikshank sinks at times into insignificance; and yet side by side with George Cruikshank, as a purely comic artist or caricaturist, Dore ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... mustang on the wild loneliness of the prairies. "Look at marriage! Who is to say which shall be the one judicious selection out of nine hundred and ninety-nine mistakes! Who shall decide from the first aspect of the slimy creature, which is to be the one eel out of the colossal bag of snakes? That girl on the curbstone yonder, waiting to cross the street when my chariot shall have passed, may be the one woman out of every female creature in this vast universe who could make ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... did rot: O Christ! That ever this should be! Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs Upon the ...
— Lyrical Ballads, With Other Poems, 1800, Vol. I. • William Wordsworth
... lemon; or, as some say, like a saucer with one side flatted, which adheres to the rock. The texture is somewhat like isinglass, or rather more like fine gum-dragon; and the several layers of the matter it is composed of, are very apparent; being fabricated from repeated parcels of a soft slimy substance, in the same manner as the common martins form theirs of mud. Authors differ much as to the materials of which it is composed: some suppose it to consist of sea-worms, of the mollusca kind; others, ...
— Domestic pleasures - or, the happy fire-side • F. B. Vaux
... Bumble himself, impelled by curiousity, ventured to do the same. The turbid water, swollen by the heavy rain, was rushing rapidly on below; and all other sounds were lost in the noise of its plashing and eddying against the green and slimy piles. There had once been a water-mill beneath; the tide foaming and chafing round the few rotten stakes, and fragments of machinery that yet remained, seemed to dart onward, with a new impulse, when freed from the obstacles which had unavailingly attempted ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... dread and despondency began to thrust themselves, like cold heavy mists, between her and the heaven to which she wanted to look for light and guidance. The temptation would come again—that rush of desire might overmaster her the next time—she would slip back again into that deep slimy pit from which she had been once rescued, and there might be no deliverance for her more. Her prayers did not help her, for fear predominated over trust; she had no confidence that the aid she sought would be ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... copious draughts of tea, coffee or water. This superabundance of fluid only serves to distend the stomach and impede digestion. A change of diet is necessary, but not so essential as a change in the habit of eating. Dyspepsia is more or less catarrh of the stomach. Its lining becomes coated with a slimy mucus that arrests the action of the glands, coats the food and prevents the gastric juice from acting ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... proceeding steadily. I had put in a fortnight's attendance at 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
... on whom the disease had broke forth, was dropped from the vehicle by the selfish inhumanity of his comrades, and left to perish by the way. Hard by the gate a waggon paused, and a man with a mask threw out its contents in a green slimy ditch that bordered the road. These were garments and robes of all kind and value; the broidered mantle of the gallant, the hood and veil of my lady, and the rags of the peasant. While glancing at the labour of the masker, the cavalier beheld a herd of swine, ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... trails hind-ways its long pennant of smoke, Where the fin of the shark cuts like a black chip out of the water, Where the half-burn'd brig is riding on unknown currents, Where shells grow to her slimy deck, where the dead are corrupting below; Where the dense-starr'd flag is borne at the head of the regiments, Approaching Manhattan up by the long-stretching island, Under Niagara, the cataract falling ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... to teach me?" asked Sir John angrily. "I meant that he should hear the truth for once, the slimy traitor." ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... gleefully. "I never tried anything like that—any more than you have—but I'll guarantee to be just as low, dirty, coarse, lewd, and crude as you are. Probably more so, because in this particular case it'll be fun. You see, you're a man—you can't possibly despise and detest that slimy stinker either in the same way or as much ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
... and hurtled into the water. For a long time I groped in the depths of the pool. To me it seemed that I struggled there for hours in the blackness; that serpents drew their slimy lengths across my face; that fishes poked their noses with bold inquisitiveness about me and dared to nibble at my hands; that Mr. Pound looked up at me from the abyss, benignly in his triumph, and that his solemn voice joined with the roaring ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... order that Neewa's tender feet might toughen up a bit. They scarcely left the fen, except to go into a nearby clump of trees where Noozak used her claws to shred a spruce that they might get at the juice and slimy substance just under the bark. Neewa liked this dessert after their feast of roots and bulbs, and tried to claw open a tree on his own account. By mid-afternoon Noozak had eaten until her sides bulged out, and Neewa himself—between his mother's milk ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... pray, An earthly belle or dashing bride walk, And how her flounces track her way, Like slimy ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... pray! (Seizing him again) Pray this instant, you dog, you rotten hound, you slimy snake, you ...
— Androcles and the Lion • George Bernard Shaw
... stone from the roadside and aimed it at the slimy little body, but his throw erred, and the missile fell harmlessly into the wheat field beyond, startling a blackbird with scarlet marks, which soared suddenly above the bearded grain and vanished, with a tremulous cry and a flame of outstretched ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... help it. We ain't alone here. This will do as well," he added, as he stooped down, and drove his long knife into the alligator's eye. The monster gave a frightful howl, and lashed violently with its tail, besprinkling us with the black slimy mud ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... to this un-American, immoral and filthy thing, Socialism! To this object this paper now and henceforth pledges its policy; and all decent publications, all citizens who love their country, their God, their homes, their flag, will join with it in a nation-wide crusade to choke this slimy monster of Anarchy and Free-love, and fling it back into the ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... 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 ...
— The Man of Destiny • George Bernard Shaw
... desolate hollow. At the upper end of it on a sort of bench eight feet wide was a depression covered with ice three or four inches thick. With some difficulty pounding a hole through this we found beneath a small amount of thick, slimy water, full of green scum. We drank some, the Uinkarets drank some, but we could not see well enough to get any out for the animals. We tied them to rocks to prevent them from leaving in the night. The Indians thawed a little under ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... once as they were short-handed, torturing Jews and heretics, you know, and stealing their goods, both of which occupations will exactly suit him. I rode with him all the way to Seville, and he tried to make love to me, the slimy knave, but I paid him out," and Inez smiled at some pleasant recollection. "Still, I did not quarrel with him outright, as he may come in useful. Who knows? There's the governor calling me. One moment, ...
— Fair Margaret • H. Rider Haggard
... 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, or stranded ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... reestablished between the two collegians before the coming of Monday morning took Randall Clayton back to his money mill. His first impulse to give up the apartment had returned to him. He now loathed the memory of Arthur Ferris as the slimy snake in the grass; and yet he resisted his desire to shove all the traitor's ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... and then went towards the little tent. It was Vixen sure enough, and Stanton's man, Dan O'Connor—Ticket-of-leave Dan, as they called him—was in charge. He bid us "Good morning" in the oily, slimy tones of the old convict, and said he was just going to bring back our ...
— The Moving Finger • Mary Gaunt
... he rode a slimy eel, (Shovel) With a rinktum bolly kimo. The sun made his complexion peel, (Shovel) With a rinktum bolly kimo. The frog's legs went to join a fry, (Shovel) With a rinktum bolly kimo. The eel became a juicy pie, (Shovel) ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... pannikins, knives, and spoons, sliding up and down everywhere, and the deck was foul with slops of tea, and trodden bread, and marmalade. Now and then, in a wilder roll than usual, a frowsy, huddled object slid groaning down the slant of slimy planking, but in every case the helpless passenger was fully dressed. Steerage passengers, in fact, seldom take off their clothes. For one thing, all their worldly possessions are, as a rule, secreted among their attire, and for another, most ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... hunger; no wonder at that: I had not eaten since leaving the village settlement. To assuage thirst, I drank the water of the lake, turbid and slimy as it was. I drank it in large quantities, for it was hot, and only moistened my palate without quenching the craving of my appetite. Of water there was enough; I had more to fear ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... you it was no easy thing to accomplish with my wet skirts clinging to me. I scratched my hands, and scraped my shoes, and got my sleeves and the whole front of my nice gingham stained with the green slimy moss that ...
— We Ten - Or, The Story of the Roses • Lyda Farrington Kraus
... Champlain, "that we could hardly draw breath, and it was wonderful how cruelly they persecuted us,"—their route lay through swampy soil, where the water at places stood knee-deep; over fallen logs, wet and slimy, and under entangling vines; their heavy armor added to their discomfort; the air was close and heavy; altogether it was a progress fit to make one sicken of warfare in the wilderness. After struggling ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... 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 room, accompanied ...
— Finger Posts on the Way of Life • T. S. Arthur
... moaning, forlorn spirits, of desolate, disappointed loves, of weary, spent souls floating aimlessly on chill, unfathomable sorrow. He swam on, and heard at last the splash of the waves on the shore. His feet touched bottom. He slipped and slid among large slimy stones, worn incredibly smooth by their age-long washing in this sunless place. He struggled forward breast-deep, waist-deep, knee-deep, in the black water. He reached dry ground, crawled upwards till he felt the boulders no longer damp, and knew that he lay above the reach of the ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... anchors, heaps of pearl, Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels, All scatt'red in the bottom of the sea: Some lay in dead men's skulls; and in the holes Where eyes did once inhabit there were crept,— As 'twere in scorn of eyes,—reflecting gems, That woo'd the slimy bottom of the deep, And mock'd the dead bones that ...
— The Life and Death of King Richard III • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... production of asphalt, carbonic acid, carburetted hydrogen, and water are given off. 'May not,' they ask, 'these orifices be the vents by which such gases escape? And in forcing their way to the surface, is it not natural that the liquid asphalt and slimy water should be drawn up and expelled?' They point out the fact, that wherever such volcanoes exist, asphalt or petroleum is found hard by. The mud volcanoes of Turbaco, in New Granada, famous from Humboldt's description of them, lie in an asphaltic country. ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... jets gushed up, and streams spouted out of the mouths and nostrils of stone monsters, and fell in glistening drops; while other rivulets, that had run wild, came leaping from one rude step to another, over stones that were mossy, slimy, and green with sedge, because, in a Century of their wild play, Nature had adopted the Fountain of Trevi, with all its elaborate devices, for her own. Finally, the water, tumbling, sparkling, and dashing, with joyous haste and never-ceasing murmur, poured itself into ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... powder-casks Cromwell had left there; a vaulted chamber for the men of the half-moon battery; a well which was said to have no bottom and which had remained unused for a hundred years, because a wicked uncle had thrown the rightful heir into it; and slimy, creepy-crawly dungeons with chains for your hands and feet; and cachettes where they spilled you through a hole in the floor, and let it go at that; and—but what wasn't there, indeed, in that extraordinary old feudal ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne
... or the extravagance of the party opposed to it. To fancy the ship of state, riding safe at her constitutional moorings, suddenly engulfed by a huge kraken of Abolitionism, rising from unknown depths and grasping it with slimy tentacles, is to look at the natural history of the matter with the eyes of Pontoppidan. To believe that the leaders in the Southern treason feared any danger from Abolitionism would be to deny them ordinary intelligence, though there can be ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... avenues of the forest; but they entered into a scene that tried their nerves. The trees closed in as they advanced, and very soon they entered a leafy tunnel, lit up by a faint light that barely showed up the slimy banks, covered by a network of snake-like roots. The little waves churned up by the screw splashed softly upon the roots, making the only sound that disturbed the sombre silence of the place. So low was the leafy roof at places that ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... 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; ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... 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 line ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... which is as rich and tender in its dyes as if it had never swam in water less glorious than that which crimsons under October sunsets. But a fish-market, even at Rialto, with fishermen in scarlet caps and triglie in sunset splendors, is only a fish-market after all: it is wet and slimy under foot, and the innumerable gigantic eels, writhing everywhere, set the soul asquirm, and ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... you will trip upon the slimy Fucus that fringes the seaward side of every rock. This is one of the few Algae that grow here in luxuriance. The slate has not the deep fissures necessary to afford shelter to the more delicate kinds; and the heavy swell of the sea drags them from their slight moorings. Therefore, though Ulva, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... a broken one-legged stool, and on this he sat and slept, propped as well as might be in a corner. It is difficult to say which would be worse—a fall from the stool by daylight into the embers of a wood fire, or the shuddering slimy waking about midnight, after a nod more vigorous than the rest, to find oneself plunged in eight cold inches ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... after apparently endless wandering, found himself totally unable to proceed further. His legs gave way beneath him. His breath failed. His brain swam. He reeled, stretched forth his hands and clutched at the nearest support. This chanced to be a railing, wet, slimy, cold. He grasped it, leaned against it, and for a few moments remained where he was in a sort of trance. Then, gradually, full consciousness returned. He glanced up and beheld the black garden of a square. Somehow it looked familiar. ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... call a boy a calf, an' bully timid women, an' knock down little Chinks and dagoes! Oh, A know his kind o' thunder-barrel bravery, that makes the more noise the emptier and bigger it is—they're thick as louse ticks under the slimy side of a dirty board in this world, Wayland; an' they're thick in the girth an' thicker in the skull." Matthews had taken one of the Forest axes from the saddle. He left the whiskey ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... arose and went down, proudly, calmly, loftily. Their inborn senses of humor came to their assistance when they entered the living-room. The Slaughter boys looked far more slaughtered than slaughtering. They sat limply in their chairs, nervously twitching their yellowed slimy fingers, their dull eyes intent upon the worn spots in the carpet. It was funny! Even Carol smiled, not the serene sweet smile that melted hearts, but the grim hard smile of the joker when the tables are turned! She flattered herself that this wretched travesty ...
— Prudence Says So • Ethel Hueston
... Transactions," and some more may be published in the "Linnean" if I like—but I think I shall not like. Then I have worked pretty hard, and brought home a considerable amount of drawings and notes about new or rare animals, all particularly nasty slimy things, and they will most likely be published as a separate ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... lawyer returned to Marjorie, while the dominie stood stock still in the road, like a man thunderstruck, repeating: "The Idiot Boy, the Female Vagrant, a pair?—and he was once my friend! A pair, a pair—the Female Vagrant, the Idiot Boy!—and that slimy, crawling, sickening caterpillar of a garden slug was once known to me! Truly, ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... of the river. He closed his eyes. He could not bear to look at the cold, silent water. The soft splashing against the broad, square bow of the old-fashioned ferry served to increase his nervousness. The horrid fancy struck him that Rosabel Vick was out there ahead clawing at the slimy timbers in the vain effort to draw herself out of the water....He wished to God he had ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... dried; the cattle chew'd the cud Low levell'd on the grass; no fly's quick sting Enforc'd the stonehorse in a furious ring To tear the passive earth, nor lash his tail About his buttocks broad; the slimy snail Might on the wainscot, by his many mazes, Winding meanders and self-knitting traces, Be follow'd where he stuck, his glittering slime Not yet wip'd off. It was so early time, The careful smith had in his sooty forge Kindled no ...
— Pastoral Poems by Nicholas Breton, - Selected Poetry by George Wither, and - Pastoral Poetry by William Browne (of Tavistock) • Nicholas Breton, George Wither, William Browne (of Tavistock)
... is in the Zoo he doesn't get anything so large as a deer, but rabbits and small things that he can swallow easily, and frogs, of which all snakes are very fond, perhaps because they are slimy and slip down quickly. There are many other snakes beside the boa, some not so large, but more poisonous. The boa is not poisonous. He relies on his huge strength to kill his enemies; but other snakes, such as ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... Now, this kind of "originality" is not only absolutely valueless, but exceedingly harmful; its only merit is that, like its ideal seaweed, it has no backbone of its own, and we may hope that it will soon betake itself to its natural home, the slimy bottom ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack
... from side to side, That in their writhing oftentimes would glide On to her breast or shuddering shoulders white; Or, falling down, the hideous things would light Upon her feet, and, crawling thence, would twine Their slimy folds ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... in the depths! A sea of heads in wild commotion surges there; the valley swarms with human life as ocean's slimy sands with creeping ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the great barrels from the boat, we climbed the beach to a long but narrow strip of fairly hard ground, on which one solitary thorn-tree had contrived to grow. The further side of the bank fell steeply into the vast swamp of the coast. There the mangrove trees stood rotting in black water and slimy ooze, so thick together that the misty sun never penetrated half-way down their inextricable branches, and even from the edge of the forest one looked into darkness. On the top of that thin plateau between the roaring sea and the impenetrable swamp, M. Jacques had made his home. ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson |
