"Spider" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The leady traced the ruined span with his metal finger, a tiny spider-web, almost invisible. "You have no doubt seen photographs of this many times, and of the other ...
— The Defenders • Philip K. Dick
... young a lass, with a rose in her cheek for every one; she was come so far without mating because she had snow in her heart! The palace gleamed, the palace shone. All the music of earth—of the world—poured through. The sun had drunk up the mist, time had eaten the thorn-wood, the spider at the gate had vanished into ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... lady, pass up the chilly stuff," replied Sam with a laugh. "It don't go with that mighty fine complexion of yours. Say, did you ever see the leading lady in 'The Spider's Web'? Well, you make me think of her, and she was a peacherino. Never seen her? No? Well, you ought to see her some ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... decidedly pleased, when cheers and cries of "Well run!" greeted his appearance; and most of the other monitors—Cartwright, the quick-tempered, warm-hearted Templeton football captain; Freckleton, the studious "dark man;" Bull, the "knowing one," with his horse-shoe pin; Pledge, the smirking "spider;" of the Sixth, and others—seemed to set no little store by the reception the school was pleased ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... and still possessed of a ruined dignity, but many of them were empty save for dust and the spider. By night there was the clash of steel and the cries of brawlers straying restlessly from inn to inn. Where once gentility abode was now but a rancid and rude incontinence. But here David found housing commensurate to his scant purse. Daylight and candlelight ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... cream of tartar into the dry flour. Rub in the lard and mix with water into a soft dough. Roll to the size of the spider or griddle. When the spider is hot and well greased with lard, lay on the cake and cover. Bake ten minutes on one side, then ten on the other. This can be made quickly without waiting for the oven to heat. Serve ...
— Things Mother Used To Make • Lydia Maria Gurney
... the crushing blow of this adverse decision, which meant a serious loss to them all. He, the master mind, had served them in many a like crisis in the past. Could he do so again? But John Ryder gave no sign. His eyes, still of the same restful blue, were fixed on the ceiling watching a spider marching with diabolical intent on a wretched fly that had become entangled in its web. And as the secretary ambled monotonously on, Ryder watched and watched until he saw the spider seize its helpless ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... conversation at a soiree, and fill up the space between sorbets and supper. To such, any philosophical discussion on the aesthetics of art must seem as puerile an occupation as that of the fairy who spent her time weighing grains of dust with a spider's web. Artists, to whom, through a foreign prejudice which dates back to the barbarism of the Middle Ages, they persist in refusing any high place in the social scale, are to them only petty tradesmen dealing in suspicious wares (in most instances unshrewdly, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... Time, like a spider, knows, be sure, One only wile, though he seems so wise: Death is his web, and Love his lure, And you and ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson, an Elegy; And Other Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... his friend, who sat beside him, "it strikes me that we are to have no breakfast at all to-day. Here have I been holding my breath and tightening my belt, until I feel much more like a spider ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... stay in London, were then read. In the discussion on these documents the court and the prisoner fell to actual wrangling; in the buzz of voices it was hard to tell what was said, until a certain impression was at last made by Coke, who screamed out that Raleigh 'had a Spanish heart and was a spider of hell.' This produced a lull, and thereupon followed an irrelevant dispute as to whether or no Raleigh had once had in his possession a book containing treasonable allusions to the claims of the King ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... clear, transparent water He could see the fishes swimming Far down in the depths below him; See the yellow perch, the Sahwa, Like a sunbeam in the water, See the Shawgashee, the craw-fish, Like a spider on the bottom, On the white ...
— The Song Of Hiawatha • Henry W. Longfellow
... felt the compliment. Mann was short in stature, and, when stripped, as swarthy as a gipsy. He was all muscle, with no incumbrance whatever of flesh; remarkably broad in the chest, with large hips and spider legs; he had not an ounce of flesh about him, but it was where it ought to be. He always played without his hat (the sun could not affect his complexion), and he took a liking to me as a boy, because ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... Actual ill-furnished Workshop he has so long been stumbling in. He can say to himself: 'Tools? Thou hast no Tools? Why, there is not a Man, or a Thing, now alive but has tools. The basest of created animalcules, the Spider itself, has a spinning-jenny, and warping-mill, and power-loom within its head: the stupidest of Oysters has a Papin's-Digester, with stone-and-lime house to hold it in: every being that can live can do something: this ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... may be viewed statically or dynamically. The static Pantheist assumes that all properties are properties of one substance. This was the feature of the vedanta system of Hindu philosophy, which holds that nothing exists but Brahma. "He is the clay, we are the forms; the eternal spider which spins from its own bosom the tissue of creation; an immense fire, from which creatures ray forth in myriads of sparks; the ocean of being, on whose surface appear and vanish the waves of existence; the foam of the waves, and the globules ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... big Sea Spider in a cross voice. "Why do you come around here, then, scaring away my dinner ...
— The Sea Fairies • L. Frank Baum
... the Karoo more than compensates for its fearsome nights and torrid noontides. The dew, jewelling a thousand spider-webs, the sparkling brightness of the air, the exquisite purity of the atmosphere, and grandeur of space and loneliness rimmed about by rose-tipped skies and far forget-me-not hills make a magic to catch the heart in a net from which it never ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... Who promised knowledge ye could not impart! Ye dull deluders, Truth's destructive foes! Ye Sons of Fiction, clad in stupid prose! Ye treacherous leaders, who, yourselves in doubt, Light up false fires, and send us far about!— Still may yon spider round your pages spin, Subtle and slow, her emblematic gin! Buried in dust and lost in silence dwell! Most potent, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... hu'ts em now. Honey, peoples ain' lib peaceful lak dey been lib den. Den peoples ain' cook dey food done lak de food been cook den. My auntie cook aw de bread right dere in de kitchen on de fireplace. I is hab some uv dem spider right here in de yard now. (She showed us two iron spiders about 8 inches deep with three legs. One was being used in the yard as a drinking place for the chickens and the other was carelessly thrown just under the edge of her house.) When I come 'way from ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... vengeance upon Hira for the punishment she had caused to be inflicted on him. At last he sent for Hira, and after one or two days of doubt she came. Debendra showed no displeasure, and made no allusion to what had occurred. Avoiding that, he entered into pleasant conversation with her. As the spider spreads his net for the fly, so Debendra spread his net ...
— The Poison Tree - A Tale of Hindu Life in Bengal • Bankim Chandra Chatterjee
... awoke as from a swound:— "The Grail in my castle here is found! Hang my idle armour up on the wall, Let it be the spider's banquet-hall; 170 He must be fenced with stronger mail Who would seek ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... what is the cause of that appearance so often met with in the autumn, resembling spider-webs. He says, if it be the production of that insect, how do you account for their hanging apparently unsuspended in the air, as it is seen fifty or sixty feet high, without a tree or any other object near to which it ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett
... charger lent him by his friend, a handsome Waler full of mettle and spirit—oats not being yet required for the support of humans—and calling au revoir to Taggart as he rides away from the Hospital gates followed by an orderly of the R.A.M.C. in a spider, pulled by a wiry, shabby little ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... and anger. She wanted to leave Washington the next day, and she hated the very thought of Ratcliffe. There was something in the newspaper style so inscrutably vulgar, something so inexplicably revolting to the sense of feminine decency, that she shrank under it as though it were a poisonous spider. But after the first acute shame had passed, her temper was roused, and she vowed that she would pursue her own path just as she had begun, without regard to all the malignity and vulgarity in the wide United ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... a first-rate substitute for roast oysters these are?" asked Alan, twirling the great metal spider with purplish back and spiral wire legs that hung ...
— Half a Dozen Girls • Anna Chapin Ray
... creditor, he who can take our home and all our belongings away from us. He, Lindkvist, who has come here and ensconced himself in the middle of his web like a spider, to watch ...
— Plays: Comrades; Facing Death; Pariah; Easter • August Strindberg
... endowed with four ears might hear remarkably well; but without eyes it would be of little use in the world. A body with four eyes would have a fourfold power of vision, and would consequently become nearly as sharp-sighted as a spider; but without hearing its powers of sight would avail little. In both cases, half the functions of the human being, whether physical or mental, would be very imperfectly performed. Thus it is with men and women; ...
— Female Suffrage • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... centuries excited the astonishment of contemporaries. The Netherlands and France were equally affected; in Italy the disease became known as tarantism, it being supposed to proceed from the bite of the tarantula, a venomous spider. Like the St. Vitus' dance in Germany, tarantism spread by sympathy, increasing in severity as it took a wider range; the chief cure was music, which seemed to furnish magical means for exorcising ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... seized a newspaper, and swooped down upon the blind, fluttering brown bat. Seizing it as she would a spider, she ran to the window and flung it out, just as the water burst into the room ...
— Ruth Fielding and the Gypsies - The Missing Pearl Necklace • Alice B. Emerson
... Geoffreys of Anjou had been at daggers drawn with the Dukes of Normandy and Brittany, but it had since, like most other such ancient feudal fortresses, become the nucleus of walls and buildings for use, defence, or ornament, that lay beneath him like a spider's web, when he had gained the roof of the keep, garnished with pepper-box turrets at each of the four angles. Beyond lay the green copses and orchards of the Bocage, for it was true, as he had at first suspected, that this was the chateau de Nid de Merle, and that Berenger was a captive in his ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... vanquished by her pupil. Angry at her defeat, she struck the unfortunate maiden on the forehead with the shuttle which she held in her hand; and Arachne, being of a sensitive nature, was so hurt by this indignity that she hung herself in despair, and was changed by Athene into a spider. This goddess is said to have invented the flute,[21] upon {46} which she played with considerable talent, until one day, being laughed at by the assembled gods and goddesses for the contortions which her countenance assumed during these musical efforts, she hastily ran to a fountain ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... to stand erect. The bin was not only pitch-dark, but full of cobwebs and the latter brushed over his face whenever he moved. Then a spider crawled on his neck, greatly adding ...
— The Rover Boys on the Ocean • Arthur M. Winfield
... situation would be his; he would figure for a while as the Father of his People, the Restorer of would be forgotten, or would be remembered only as implicated in the confusion that had ceased; and in a short time there would be parties, factions, divisions, and the beginnings of a new spider-web of Court-government and Absolutism. "Have you not found him at this play all along? And do not all men acknowledge him most exquisite at it?" So the Remonstrance proceeds, page after page, in long, complex, wave-like sentences, every sentence vital, and the ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... a poor prisoner who broke his heart because the gaoler killed a spider he loved," said I, ...
— Monsieur Maurice • Amelia B. Edwards
... has strength, the lamb meekness, the fox shrewdness, and so on. Mankind includes all of these qualities. In the same way various animals have various instincts resembling arts, such as the weaving of the spider, the building of the bird and the bee, and so on. They also subsist on various foods. Man alone combines all arts ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... crying of gulls and the boom of the sea in a thrilling way. The old servants look as if they had never been born and could never die. They are delightfully superstitious and quaint, and not one of them would kill a spider. Neither would I, for the matter of that! I suppose it's my MacDonald blood and my love of Bruce. You ought to see the elaborate precautions that are taken to get rid of a spider in Dunelin Castle without ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... right back with our old friends, the Wizard Traders," Tortha Karf added. "And if they've decided to suspend activities on the Kholghoor Sector, too—" He began drawing a big blue and black spider in the middle ...
— Time Crime • H. Beam Piper
... highways that should link up the continents. He oppresses and destroys the Arab world, which should be the natural junction of the great trunk railways that, to-morrow, shall join Asia, Africa, and Europe in one splendid spider's web. You are going to move the block from the line, and to join the hands of the continents. Understand, and be enthusiastic. I tell you, this joining of the continents is an unborn babe of history that leapt in the womb the moment the British ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... him through the heaps of snow, rolling over and over but clinging tightly until Jan turned and pounced upon him. They tumbled about, sometimes Jan was on top, sometimes Rollo, and they looked like a huge, yellow spider with eight sturdy, furry legs kicking wildly. At last, panting, they sprawled facing each other with pink tongues hanging from their open mouths and eyes ...
— Prince Jan, St. Bernard • Forrestine C. Hooker
... see the trap. I didn't see the wicked triumph in John Graham's heart. No power could have made me believe then that he wanted to possess only me; that he was horrible enough to want me even without love; that he was a great monster of a spider, and I the fly lured into his web. And the agony of it was that in all the years since Uncle Peter died I had dreamed strange and beautiful dreams. I lived in a make-believe world of my own, and I read, read, read; and the thought ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... kith of the Elf-folk went abroad by night to make a soul for the little Wild Thing. And they went over the marshes till they came to the high fields among the flowers and grasses. And there they gathered a large piece of gossamer that the spider had laid by twilight; and the ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany
... clearly shows the author's meaning to have been, that if any one departed at once after tasting of the beverage, he would have no knowledge of what he had drunk; {96} but if he remained, some one present might point out to him the spider in the cup, and then ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 196, July 30, 1853 • Various
... for her full of mystic significance. In them she poured forth her soul, as another might pour it forth in music, finding there an imaginative language far surpassing, in its subtlety of suggestion, articulate speech. There were deserts of net, of spider's web fineness, to be laboriously traversed; hills of difficulty to be climbed, whence far horizons disclosed themselves; dainty flower-gardens, crossed by open paths, and hedged about with curves, sinuous and full of pretty impediments. ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... learned to read at the district school, he escaped into another world. Two lights were now generally seen burning of a night in the Shackford house: one on the ground-floor where Mr. Shackford sat mouthing his contracts and mortgages, and weaving his webs like a great, lean, gray spider; and the other in the north gable, where Dick hung over a tattered copy of Robinson Crusoe by the flicker of the candle-ends which he had captured ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... who got up was like some strange old child. He wore a number of little capes to hide his humped back, and his body, one thought, under his clothes was strapped together. He got on his feet nimbly like a spider, and they heard the click of a pistol lock as he whipped the weapon out of an open drawer, as though it were a habit thus always to keep a weapon at his hand to make him equal in stature with other men. ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... certain ceremonies. From a study of these ceremonies in connection with the myths of the people it seems probable that the hoop used in this game represents the shield of the War God. When the hoop has a netting that fills the center and covers the edges, the netting simulates the magic web of the Spider Woman, a person that frequently figures in the myths and stories of different tribes. Her web generally serves as a protection furnished ...
— Indian Games and Dances with Native Songs • Alice C. Fletcher
... set everything to rights. At the moment we write his cord is seen stretched from the tall, slim, and elegant spire of the Assembly Hall in Edinburgh, which is to receive through his agency a lightning-conductor; and Jack only waits the subsidence of a gale of wind to glide up that filmy rope like a spider. He is altogether a strange boy, Steeple Jack. Nobody knows where he roosts upon the earth, if he roosts anywhere at all. The last time there was occasion for his services, this advertisement appeared in the Scotsman: 'Steeple Jack is wanted at such a place immediately'—and ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal Vol. XVII. No. 418. New Series. - January 3, 1852. • William and Robert Chambers
... talked of love affairs with a young tiger. When I told you it was lamentable to see a man of any intelligence descend, as I have done, to all such petty ways of connecting the thousand threads of this dark web, was I not right? Is it not a fine spectacle to see the spider obstinately weaving its net?—to see the ugly little black animal crossing thread upon thread, fastening it here, strengthening it there, and again lengthening it in some other place? You shrug your shoulders in pity; but return two ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... extensions along the Rhine valley into Switzerland, and fling an arm along the Moldau to Prague, it will be the industrial capital of the old world. Paris will be its West End, and it will stretch a spider's web of railways and great roads of the new sort over the whole continent. Even when the coal-field industries of the plain give place to the industrial application of mountain-born electricity, this great city region will remain, I believe, in its present position ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... slender thread of fused quartz plated with silver, only one one- thousandth of a millimetre in diameter, so tenuous that it could not be seen except in a bright light. It was a thread so slender that it might have been spun by a miscroscopic spider. ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... which in a few hours had been stripped of the pomp of royalty. A melancholy reflection on the vicissitudes of human greatness forced itself on his mind; and he repeated an elegant distich of Persian poetry: "The spider has wove his web in the Imperial palace; and the owl hath sung her watch-song on the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... window. A single glance through the curtains showed the grating untenanted; and boldly poking his head forth, he looked down to see the figure of the gunman, foreshortened unrecognisably, moving down the iron tangle already several flights below, singularly resembling a spider ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... old guitar And moldering into decay; Fretted with many a rift and scar That the dull dust hides away, While the spider spins a silver star ...
— Riley Songs of Home • James Whitcomb Riley
... shaking my heart The awful daring of a moment's surrender Which an age of prudence can never retract By this, and this only, we have existed Which is not to be found in our obituaries Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor In our empty rooms 410 DA Dayadhvam: I have heard the key Turn in the door once and turn once only We think of the key, each in his prison Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison Only at ...
— The Waste Land • T. S. Eliot
... the situation of his house. It stood in an angle of one of those huge spider-webs with which the country was covered, and for his purposes was all that he could expect. It was close enough to London to be extremely cheap, for all wealthy persons had retired at least a hundred miles from the throbbing heart of England; and yet it was as quiet as ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... these spider-like priests weaving webs to catch the flies of youth; and there ought to be a law appointing commissioners to visit such places twice a year, and release every person who expresses a desire to be released. I don't believe in keeping penitentiaries for God. No doubt ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... knelt down and examined the ground carefully, and in a moment he discovered a fuzzy brown spider that had rolled itself into a ball. So he took two tiny pills from his pocket and laid them beside the spider, which unrolled itself and quickly ate up the pills. Then the Scarecrow said ...
— The Scarecrow of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... stood in a row on the brink, paused for a moment to listen to the hum within them, and note that the bees were making ready to swarm, crossed the bridge, and tried the rusty hasp of the door. It yielded stiffly; but as I pulled the door inwards it brushed aside a mass of spider's web, white and matted, that could not be less than a month old. Also it brushed a clump of ivy overgrowing the lintel, and shook down about half an ounce of powdery dust into my hair and eyes. I scarcely troubled to look through. Clearly, the door had not been opened for many weeks—possibly ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... faro game is dead. A passel of conspirators, with Shoestring Griffith in the lead, goes to this room an' reelaxes into a game of draw. Easy Aaron can hear the flutter of the chips through the partition—the same bein' plenty thin—where he's camped like a spider in its web an' waitin' for some sport who needs law to show up. Easy Aaron listens careless an' indifferent to Shoestring an' his fellow blacklaigs as they deals an' antes an' raises an' rakes in pots, an' everybody mighty joobilant ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... that they loved the child for itself? Everybody knows this passage in the life of M. de Lauzun: he was in the Bastile; there, without books, without employment, a prey to lassitude and the horrors of a prison, he took it in his head to tame a spider. This was the only consolation he had left in his misfortune. The governor of the Bastile, from an inhumanity common to men accustomed to see the unhappy, crushed the spider. The prisoner felt the most cutting ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... she had bought him and paid for him, and copyrighted him and got a charter. She cannot be satisfied when she has handcuffed a member, and put a leg-chain and ball on him and plugged his ears and removed his thinker, she goes on wrapping needless chains round and round him, just as a spider would. For she trusts no one, believes in no one's honesty, judges every one by herself. Although we have seen that she has absolute and irresponsible command over her spectral Boards and over every official ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... his father's boots, and made his way to the stove, where his mother was bending over a spider ...
— Tip Lewis and His Lamp • Pansy (aka Isabella Alden)
... flour with half a pint of milk. Let your spider get hot and then grease it with butter or cotton ...
— Ethel Morton's Enterprise • Mabell S.C. Smith
... Charles the Bold, was brought into immediate rivalry with that royal trickster, the "universal spider," Louis XI. Charles was by far the nobler spirit of the two: his vigour and intelligence, his industry and wish to raise all around him to a higher cultivation, his wise reforms at home, and attempts ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... many a thoroughbred measures less in superficial inches. Clearly, a storekeeper from some remote village, where he has battened on the necessities of his neighbors for years, till he has got bloated like an ancient spider in its web. He hobbles up and down, never interchanging a word with his fellows, but unceasingly mumbling his huge toothless jaws; they say he never mutters anything but curses; if so, his daily expense in blasphemy is something fearful to contemplate. I think that cleanliness is as foreign ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... of surf, mingled with the cries of bathers, came from the beach. There was a vista of sand and sky and sea that drew to a mystic point far away in the northward. In the mighty angle, a girl in a red dress was crawling slowly like some kind of a spider on the fabric of nature. A few flags hung lazily above where the bathhouses were marshalled in compact squares. Upon the edge of the sea stood a ship with its shadowy sails painted dimly upon the sky, and high overhead in the still, sun-shot air a great ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... is copied from a French work entitled Archives sur Anatomie:—"A small spider had spread its net between two neighbouring trees, at the height of about nine feet. The three principal points, to which the supporting threads were attached, formed here as they usually do, an equilateral ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 384, Saturday, August 8, 1829. • Various
... bent in the same direction, long before Defoe's novel-period and as early as the Tale of a Tub and the Battle of the Books (published 1704 but certainly earlier in part). The easy flow of the narrative, and the vivid dialogue of the Spider and the Bee in the latter, rank high among those premonitions of novel with which, in this place, we should be specially busied. In the former Peter, Martin, and Jack want but a little more of the alchemist's ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... I'm little Miss Muffet, sir. I sat on a tuffet, eating some curds and whey; but there came a big spider, and I was frightened away. Do you like curds and whey, Father Christmas? I hope so, for here are some in a bowl. (Hands ...
— Christmas Entertainments • Alice Maude Kellogg
... when the fish is struck. By its buoyancy the spearhead, sticking in the body of the fish, compels it to rise, when it is caught.[185] A peculiar device is reported from Dobu, New Guinea. A string long enough to reach to the ground is fastened to a kite. At the end of the string is a tassel of spider's web. The kite is held at such a height that the tassel just skims the water. The fish catching at it entangles its teeth in the spider's-web tassel and is caught.[186] The Chinese have trained cormorants to do ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... out into the night, he took the path that led to the old sunken garden. Nocturnal birds were chirruping; his way was barred with spider-webs, heavy with dew and gleaming in the moonlight like tiny ropes of jewels; the odor of gardenias was overpowering. He passed close by the well, and its gaping black mouth, only half protected by the broken coping, reminded him that he had promised Rosa to cover it ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... whom the men had nicknamed the "human spider," for his arms and legs were the thinnest of his species. He was saved from being grotesque, however, by a certain care-free grace, a litheness of movement. He had greenish-blue eyes that were set far apart and crinkled when they laughed—as ever and oft they did. ...
— Penny of Top Hill Trail • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... love-e, love-e, with a cadence and tenderness in the tone that rang in the ear long afterward. The nest was suspended to the fork of a small branch, as is usual with the vireos, plentifully lined with lichens, and bound and rebound with masses of coarse spider-webs. There was no attempt at concealment except in the neutral tints, which make it look like a natural growth of ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... out the plot of his new five-reel scenario until he was like an unreeled spider. He was all out. The mechanical details interested and refreshed him now. He must order the studio scenery and select the outdoor "locations." He must pick the supporting cast and devise one or two ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... there, retreating before the light, went a veritable army of venomous creatures! I counted no fewer than three of the giant red centipedes whose poisonous touch, called "the zayat kiss," is certain death; several species of scorpion were represented; and some kind of bloated, unwieldy spider, so gross of body that its short, hairy legs could scarce support it, crawled, ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... are even more numerous in the valleys a little south of it, and to a degree I never saw equalled anywhere else: in these valleys they extend in less regular lines, covering the ground with a network, like a spider's web, and with some parts of the surface even appearing to consist wholly of dikes, interlaced ...
— Volcanic Islands • Charles Darwin
... pleased with your "Spider," "your old freemason," as you call him. The three first stanzas are delicious; they seem to me a compound of Burns and. Old Quarles, those kind of home-strokes, where more is felt than strikes the ear,—a terseness, a jocular pathos which makes one feel in laughter. The measure, ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... did not make less sense than the position of a man, or a Dewforth, sitting in a blind cell among thousands of other blind cells down there, drawing tiny lines. Nothing bound him to the drafting room nor even to the Dewforth of the drafting room—not so much as a spider web or a shaft of light. The light pointed to itself. The wind got under his shirt and chilled his navel, ...
— In the Control Tower • Will Mohler
... existence. She even quoted something he happened to say at the table, after the ladies had retired, leaving the men to their cigars, and had added that "that was the way she liked to hear a man talk"—all of which was very encouraging to the well-disposed spider who was weaving the web for these two particular flies. As for Bliss—Walter Bliss, M.D.—he was very much impressed; so much so, indeed, that as the men left their cigars to return to the ladies he managed to ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... the small boy, returning to his goblet; "but I've no end of aliases—such as Mouse, Monkey, Spider, Snipe, Imp, and Little 'un. Call me what you please, it's all one to me, so as you don't call me ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne
... In May let them be unplunged, and lain down on their sides, till all their leaves be free from water. Take off all yellow leaves, and suckers, and let these suckers be plunged into fresh pots of earth, and in a fresh bed of heat, by means whereof the Pinery will always be kept full. The spider is their chief enemy, and therefore should not be permitted to harbour near them, as the smallest of the tribe will kill the crown, and destroy ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... his desk, like a big spider for who time has no meaning. Before him lay two newspapers, folded so as to expose paragraphs heavily indicated by blue pencil-marks. They were not financial journals, and for that reason it was improbable that ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... old storehouse on river front ... through trap into the water ... old Webb ... Spider Webb ... ten thousand dollar Moorcliffe jewel robbery ... cash box ... safe behind panelling in bedroom directly opposite the door ... false bottom ... afraid of the Wolf ... last few days ... unfinished ... Wolf does not know ... man and wife upstairs ... old couple ... keep house for the Spider ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... was no need of going away from home to get beaux," she said complacently to Channing. "Here I've sat, just like a spider in a web, and—look at them all! To say nothing of you," she added, with a little gasp at ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... the lady's companion[30] is adapted from Yorick's fille de chambre connection, and Bock cannot avoid a fleshly suggestion, distinctly in the style of Yorick in the section, the "Spider."[31] The return journey in the sentimental moonlight affords the author another opportunity for the exercise of his broad human sympathy: he meets a poor woman, aday-laborer with her child, gives them a few coins and doubts whether ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... whose shop had a narrow gate; The elves attack with spears of BARLEY, But he drives them off, oh! rarely, Then they shoot him with an ARROW, From bow-strings greased with ear-wigs' marrow, The feathers, moth-wings downy VELVET, The bow-strings, of the spider's net: Thousands come, armed in this PATTERN, Which proves their mistress is no slattern; Some wear the legs and hoof of PAN, And some are in the form of man; But the knight is armed, for in his POCKET He has a talismanic locket, Which once belonged to HERCULES, Who wore it on his ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... compel me," she replied, firmly, "to change my mind as to what is seemly," and the courage which failed her if she met a spider, but which stood by her in serious danger as a faithful ally, made her perfectly steadfast as she eagerly added: "Not an hour since you promised me that so long as I remained with you I should need no other protector, and might count on your gratitude. But those were ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... themselves by hunting beautiful women. It's a game with them. When one of 'em takes a fancy to a girl she's a goner. It may not be Merkle in this case, but—you're the handsomest woman in New York, and I'll bet some old spider is weaving his web for you. When he has spoiled your good name and ruined your chances of marrying or of making an honest living he'll creep out and show himself. They frame innocent men for Sing Sing in this town, so why can't they frame a ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... ordered up from the west had failed, and with it the Master's mighty scheme. Having yet to learn the lesson that his best plans might be foiled, he was furious when doubt was cast upon this pet design. Like a giant of a spider at the nucleus of his web, he watched the broad fan of radiant threads, and the hovering of filmy woof, but without the mild philosophy of that spider, who is versed in the very sad capriciousness ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... in their well-stored hives, the ants had barred their outer doors, and retired to their most secluded apartments; even the garden spider was sheltered in his home—only the once gay butterfly was ...
— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer
... about the corners of the eyes? Lines that diverge like to the spider's joists, Whereon he builds his airy fortalice? They call them crow's feet—has the ugly ...
— The Love-Chase • James Sheridan Knowles
... which to us seems exaggerated and unnatural, appears in many Eastern stories and in the biographies of their distinguished men, especially students. A youth cannot master his lessons; he sees a spider climbing a slippery wall and after repeated falls succeeding. Allah opens the eyes of his mind, his studies become easy to him, and he ends with being ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... for which of them you lie in ambush; for, methinks, you have the mien of a spider in her den. Come, I know the web is spread, and whoever comes, Sir Cranion stands ready to dart out, hale her in, and shed ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... Little Dame Spider had finished her spinning, Just as the warm summer day was beginning, And the white threads of her beautiful curtain Tied she and glued she to make ...
— On the Tree Top • Clara Doty Bates
... you walk into my parlor?' said the spider to the fly, ''Tis the prettiest little parlor that ever you did spy! The way into my parlor is up a winding stair, And I have many curious things to show you when ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... accession of Edward III., of the independence of Scotland in 1329, himself dying the same year, his work done and his glory for ever secured,—not to speak of the beautiful legends which have clustered round his history like ivy round an ancestral tower—of the spider on the wall, teaching him the lesson of perseverance, as he lay in the barn sad and desponding in heart—of the strange signal-light upon the shore near his maternal castle of Turnberry, which led ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... tell her, as he haled her on to the sward beyond the arbor, "here it is, the story you told us yester-e'en. Here is the ring where they danced last night, the little folk, an' here is the glow-worm caught in the spider's web ...
— A Warwickshire Lad - The Story of the Boyhood of William Shakespeare • George Madden Martin
... life, nothing but the thin shadow And blank foreboding, never a wainscot rat Rasping a crust? Or at the window pane No fly, no bluebottle, no starveling spider? The windows frame a prospect of cold skies Half-merged with sea, as at the first creation, Abstract, confusing welter. Face about, Peer rather in the glass once more, take note Of self, the grey lips and long hair dishevelled, Sleep-staring eyes. Ah, mirror, for Christ's love ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... quiet intervals, this still house, and grandfather shut away in his upstairs room, but holding the threads of all their lives as a spider clutches the ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... at the harbour where all the steamers call, and look out towards the sea, you will see a mountain on your left, covered with green trees, and behind the trees a large house built in the shape of a spider. For in the centre there is a round building from which radiate eight wings, that look very much like the eight legs on the round body of a spider. The people who enter the house do not leave it again at will, and some of them stay there for the rest ...
— In Midsummer Days and Other Tales • August Strindberg
... already dark enough, a dull and disagreeable light. Shelves of black wood, filled with labeled boxes; some chairs of cherry wood, covered with yellow Utrecht velvet; a mahogany clock; a yellow, moist, and slippery floor; a ceiling filled with cracks, and, ornamented with garlands of spider-webs; such was the ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... the tramp. "'Will yer walk into my parlour?' said the spider to the fly. I knows that game, and I guess the climate o' ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... dust to carry off electricity in cases of high tension is well known, and I have already mentioned some instances of the kind in the use of the inductive apparatus (1201.). The general operation is very well shown by large light objects, as the toy called the electrical spider; or, if smaller ones are wanted for philosophical investigation, by the smoke of a glowing green wax taper, which, presenting a successive stream of such particles, makes their ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... has been profuse in showering her gifts upon Mr. Burleigh, but all has been bestowed upon his head and heart. There is a kind of eloquence which weaves its thread around the hearer, and gradually draws him into its web, fascinating him with its gaze, entangling him as the spider does the fly, until he is fast: such is the eloquence of C.C. Burleigh. As a debater he is unquestionably the first on the Anti-slavery platform. If he did not speak so fast, he would equal Wendell Phillips; if he did not reason his subject out of existence, he would surpass him. However, ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... Quite as a matter of course she suggested his taking the dog out on some prairie and turning it loose, to know hunger, and perhaps abuse. And yet, he had seen this same tender-hearted little Maizie crying because a spider had been swept down from the porch. No, in his boyish soul he decided that should he live a thousand years, he never would understand women with their inconsistencies and their peculiar viewpoints. ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... to the vacancy. Then, she never threw Mr. Hardie at Lucy's head, contenting herself with speaking of him with veneration when Lucy herself or others introduced his name. She was always contriving to throw the pair together, but no mortal could see her hand at work in it. Bref, a she-spider. The first day or two she watched her niece on the sly, just to see whether she regretted Font Abbey, or, in other words, Mr. Talboys. Well acquainted with all the subtle signs by which women read one another, she observed with some uneasiness that Lucy appeared somewhat listless and pensive ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... buzzed himself so fatally into the spider-webs of other people's love affairs? I asked myself sternly. As soon as Providence plucked me out of one web, back I would bumble into another, though I had no time for a love ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... January. — If a young maiden drink, on going to bed, a pint of cold spring-water, in which is beat up an amulet, composed of the yolk of a pullet's egg, the legs of a spider, and the skin of an eel pounded, her future destiny will be revealed to her in a dream. This charm fails of its effect if tried any other day ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... she was bitten by that Neapolitan spider which, according to the legend, is such a wonderful dance-incentor. She would have the music quicker and quicker. She sank on Kew's arm, and clung on his support. She poured out all the light of her languishing eyes into his face. Their glances ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... again crossed appeared to him blacker, emptier, more lifeless than ever. In the second one Abbe Paparelli saluted him with a little silent bow; in the first the sleepy lackey did not even seem to see him. A spider was weaving its web between the tassels of the great red hat under the baldacchino. Would not the better course have been to set the pick at work amongst all that rotting past, now crumbling into dust, so that the sunlight might stream in freely and restore to ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... requires a scape-goat. As we saw, many of the cases of sweating were found where there was a sub-contractor. To our hasty vision, here seems to be the responsible party. Forty years ago Alton Locke gave us a powerful picture of the wicked sub-contracting tailor, who, spider-like, lured into his web the unfortunate victim, and sucked his blood for gain. The indignation of tender-hearted but loose-thinking philanthropists, short-visioned working-class orators, assisted by the satire of the ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... in December when I went with a younger friend from Oatlands Park for a day's walk. I may have seen at other times, but I do not remember, such winter lace-work as then adorned the hedges. The gossamer spider has within her an inward monitor which tells if the weather will be fine; but it says nothing about sudden changes to keen cold, and the artistic result was that the hedges were hung with thousands of Honiton lamp-mats, instead of the thread fly-catchers ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... lad ships as cabin boy to earn a livelihood. Ned is marooned on Spider Island, and while there discovers a wreck submerged in the sand, and finds a considerable amount of treasure. The capture of the treasure and the incidents of the voyage serve to make as entertaining a story of sea-life as the most captious ...
— Robert Coverdale's Struggle - Or, On The Wave Of Success • Horatio, Jr. Alger
... brilliant azurors, whose name alone defies description; some banded spares, with variegated fins of blue and yellow; the woodcocks of the seas, some specimens of which attain a yard in length; Japanese salamanders, spider lampreys, serpents six feet long, with eyes small and lively, and a huge mouth bristling with teeth; with ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... nine hundred types of plant life for toxin content. Bishop has tested innumerable spores and bacteria. Our slide file is immense and still growing. Max has captured several insects. There is one tiny yellow bush-spider with a killing bite, but the species seem to be rare. Bishop has isolated a mold bacterium that could cause a high fever, but its propagation rate is far too low to enable it to last long in ...
— Competition • James Causey
... positions may be reversed; the victim may play the role of seductress, and displaying charms that excite the passions, ensnare the youth whose feet are not guided by the lamp of experience, wisdom and religion. This is the human spider, soulless and shameless, using splendid gifts of God to form a web with which to inveigle and entrap a too willing prey. And the dead flies, ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... little wall for water. Before he went he gave the ass three kicks on the nose, but the ass did not say a word, he only hiked still more which brought him directly on to the grass, and when the man climbed over the wall the ass commenced to crop the grass. There was a spider sitting on a hot stone in the grass. He had a small body and wide legs, and ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... and goodwill between nations. This also is obvious on a moment's reflection, but it will be rejected as a flat mis-statement by many whose opinion is entitled to respect, and who regard international finance as a bloated spider which sits in the middle of a web of intrigue and chicanery, enticing hapless mankind into its toils and battening on bloodshed and war. So clear-headed a thinker as Mr. Philip Snowden publicly expressed the view not long ago that "the war was the result of secret diplomacy ...
— International Finance • Hartley Withers
... yet warmed a little, at the marriage feast; the ominous dreams of the mother; the desolation of the home, like an empty bird's-nest or an empty fold, when she returns and finds Proserpine gone, and the spider at work over her unfinished embroidery; the strangely-figured raiment, the flowers in the grass, which were once blooming youths, having both their natural colour and the colour of their poetry in them, ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... sign, This is my instrument: nevertheless my power Extends itself far as our queen commands, Through all the parts and climes of Microcosm. I am the root of life, spreading my virtue By sinews, that extend from head to foot To every living part. For as a subtle spider, closely sitting In centre of her web that spreadeth round, If the least fly but touch the smallest thread, She feels it instantly; so doth myself, Casting my slender nerves and sundry nets O'er every particle of all the body, By proper skill perceive the difference Of several ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... field with Cicely in her arms, and was welcomed with acclamations, and forthwith seated on a royal throne of hay; then, under her watchful eyes, the ambitious Ambrose worked feverishly, and threw his arms and legs about like an excited spider. Then Nancy laughed at him, and David pushed him down, and Pennie covered him with hay; and it got into his eyes and down his throat and he choked and kicked, and mother said: "That will do, children!" Then tea was brought out and laid under the great oak-tree, ...
— The Hawthorns - A Story about Children • Amy Walton
... mapped itself before him like square building-blocks on a dark carpet, with railroad and trolley tracks like flashing spider-webs under ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... SPIDER-HOOP. The hoop round a mast to secure the shackles to which the futtock-shrouds are attached. Also, an iron encircling hoop, fitted with ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... the other complied, unrolling several small sheets of photographer's printing-out paper, to which several extraordinarily complicated and minute designs had been transferred—strongly resembling laborious efforts to conventionalize a spider's web. ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... Jean had retired for the night, and again it was Miss Horn who admitted him, and led him to her parlour. It was a low ceiled room, with lean spider legged furniture and dingy curtains. Everything in it was suggestive of a comfort slowly vanishing. An odour of withered rose leaves pervaded the air. A Japanese cabinet stood in one corner, and on the mantelpiece a pair of Chinese fans with painted figures whose faces were ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... appear before Prince Ramses. But on a certain day when the prince came to his residence, he found in his bedchamber a beautiful Phoenician dancer, sixteen years of age, whose entire dress was a golden circlet on her head, and a shawl, as delicate as spider webs, ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... of the house. A pale, gloomy light hardly penetrated this narrow apartment, through a little window of cracked, dirty glass, with a single shutter; a yellowish, dilapidated paper covered the walls; from the broken ceiling hung long spider-webs. The floor, broken in several places, showed the beams and laths of the room below. A deal table, a chair, an old trunk without a lock, and a flock bed with coarse sheets and an old woolen covering—such was the furniture. On the chair was seated the Baroness de Fermont. In the bed ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... gotta be careful," Spider Hagerty warned him. Spider was his chief second. "Make it last as long as you can—them's my instructions from Kelly. If you don't, the papers'll call it another bum fight and give the game a bigger ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... unhitched and the wagons left in a circle round a big camp-fire, where supper was cooked. Polly says her mother used to bake biscuits in an iron spider with red-hot coals heaped on its iron cover, and these biscuits with fried bacon and tea made their meal. They always cooked a big potful of corn-meal mush for the children, and this, with Daisy's milk and a little maple sugar or molasses, was supper and breakfast too. ...
— Stories of California • Ella M. Sexton
... to assert that among a civil population, untrained to arms, the average woman is cooler and more courageous than the average man. Women are nervous about little matters; they may be frightened at a mouse or at a spider; but in the presence of real danger, when shells are bursting in the streets, and rifle bullets flying thickly, I have seen them standing kitting at their doors and talking to their friends across the street when not a single man was ...
— One of the 28th • G. A. Henty
... I came here to-night I was—I hoped—I meant everything that I could to do away with the past, and start fair again. And you meet me with 'nerves,' and silence, and sighs. There's nothing tangible. It's like—it's like a spider's web." ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... while for the appearance of that illustrious ornament of her sex, to whom they were addressed; and the servant's 'petit moment' had become a good petit quart d'heure, when the drawing-room door opened, and in glided, not the Goddess, but the Spider. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... pretty, but it will fly off, just as the others did. I never saw such a chap as that spider is. He keeps on spinning a new one every day, for they always get broke, and he don't seem to be discouraged a mite," said Ben, glad to change the subject, as she knew he ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott
... spider, about 1 in. in diameter of body, mottled pale brown and grey, brooding over a flat egg capsule almost of the same tints as itself. It was on the trunk of the jack fruit tree, and so closely resembles the egg-capsule produced ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... the tiny brushes in my paint-cups, Painting the pale pink rosebuds, minute violets, Exquisite wreaths of dark green ivy leaves. On this leaf, goes a dream I dreamed last night Of two soft-patterned toads—I thought them stones, Until they hopped! And then a great black spider,— Tarantula, perhaps, a hideous thing,— It crossed the room in one tremendous leap. Here,—as I coil the stems between two leaves,— It is as if, dwindling to atomy size, I cried the secret between two universes . . . A friend of mine took hasheesh once, and ...
— The House of Dust - A Symphony • Conrad Aiken
... imagine. Comrade Parker would go to the main boss of the gang—Bat Jarvis, if it was the Groome Street gang, or Spider Reilly and Dude Dawson if he wanted the Three Points or the Table Hill lot. The boss would chat over the matter with his own special partners, and they would fix it up among themselves. The rest of the gang would probably know nothing about it. ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse
... pastime, If June be refulgent With flowers in completeness, All petals, no prickles, Delicious as trickles Of wine poured at mass-time, And choose One indulgent To redness and sweetness; Or if with experience of man and of spider, She use my June lightning, the strong insect-ridder To stop the fresh ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... deprived of human society, I one day made acquaintance with some ants upon my window; I fed them; they went away, and ere long the placed was thronged with these little insects, as if come by invitation. A spider, too, had weaved a noble edifice upon my walls, and I often gave him a feast of gnats or flies, which were extremely annoying to me, and which he liked much better than I did. I got quite accustomed to the sight of him; he would run over my bed, and come and take the precious ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico |
