"Spider's web" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... calls a Canterbury poke, dear boys," he cried. "Let 'em have it, my lads. The beggars look like so many flies in a spider's web; and we are ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... fore-finger of an Alderman, Drawn with a team of little atomies, Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep: Her waggon spokes made of long spinners' legs; The cover of the wings of grasshoppers; The traces of the smallest spider's web; The collars of the moonshine's watery beams; Her whip of cricket's bone; the lash of film; Her waggoner, a small grey coated gnat, Not half so big as a round little worm, Prickt from the lazy finger of a maid. Her chariot is an empty hazel nut, Made by the joiner squirril, old grub, ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... on which to build. I have found them indiscriminately on the mango, mowah, neem, and other trees. The nest is invariably made either just above or between the fork of two outshooting slender horizontal branches. It is very neatly made, deeply cup-shaped, of grass and fibres, with spider's web on the exterior. The maximum number of eggs is three; they are of a pale whitish colour, marked generally, chiefly at the broad end, with brownish spots. The brown spots vary in size on different eggs. ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... Charlie, and they told us he was sitting up in the ash-tree at the end of the field. In my dream I did not feel at all surprised that Cripple Charlie should have got into the ash-tree, or at finding him there high up among the branches looking at a spider's web with a magnifying-glass. But I thought that the wind was so high I could not make him hear, and the leaves and boughs tossed so that I could barely see him; and when I climbed up to him, the branch on which ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... doubt at all of his state, but lived in the joy of the safety that he supposed his soul, by his conversion, to be in. Oh! thanks to God, says he, I am not in the state of sin, death, and damnation, as the unjust, and this Publican is. What a strange delusion, to trust to the spider's web, and to think that a few, or the most fine of the works of the flesh, would be sufficient to bear up the soul in, at, and under the judgment of God! "There is a generation that are pure in their own eyes, and yet are not washed from their filthiness." This text can be so ...
— The Pharisee And The Publican • John Bunyan
... first a glow of yellow green, then a mass of blossoms, then a throat, chin and face, one after another, all veiled in a gossamer thin as a spider's web, and last—and these I shall never forget—a pair of eyes shining clear below and above the veil, and which gazed into mine with the same steady, full, unfrightened look one sometimes sees on the face of a summer moon when it bursts through a rift ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... tell the whole world about his victory, but instead he flew straight into a spider's web. And there, he who had defeated the King of beasts came to a miserable end, the prey of ...
— The AEsop for Children - With pictures by Milo Winter • AEsop
... of a remarkably viscid and tenacious milky fluid... projected from the tips of the oral papillae" (page 759).) is so stupid as to spit out the viscid matter at the wrong end of its body; it would have been beautiful thus to have explained the origin of the spider's web. ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... most peculiar of birds' eggs found about the Murray is that of the locally-termed 'cat-bird,' the shell of which is veined thickly with dark thin threads as though covered with a spider's web." ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... leaves made them look like a collection of small platforms or round table-tops placed nearly on a level. Through the leaves, to the height of a foot or more above them, a slender dead stem protruded, and from a twig at its summit depended a broken spider's web. A minute dead leaf had become attached to one of the loose threads and threw its small but distinct shadow on the platform leaves below; and as it trembled and swayed in the current of air, the black spot trembled with it or flew swiftly over the bright green surfaces, and was seldom at rest. ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... or wear their bronchos clothespin fashion. And I'll warrant you that were this nation ruled by sure-enough women instead of by a lot of anaemic he-peons of the money-power, Columbia would not be caught unprepared when "the spider's web woven across the cannon's throat shakes its threaded tears ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... kind existing to keep the unwary from tumbling off. At the water level the piles were eaten away by the action of the sea to about the size of a man's wrist, and at every fresh influx the whole structure trembled like a spider's web. In this lay the danger of making fast, for a strong pull from a headfast rope might drag the erection completely over. Flower arrived at the end, where a ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... was sympathetic to actual pain, and had always been morbidly in awe of death. The sight of any poor, lost, and suffering man threw him into instant, profound, and melancholy pity. A dead beetle in the road, a fly caught in a spider's web, a young robin water-soaked and bedraggled, appalled him, even as a boy, and he pondered them with sad and questioning eyes long after his young companions had forgotten them. Where had the light of their eyes fled? he asked himself. He ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... hours ago I would have scoffed at any one who said that a handful of Chinese could tear aside our cloak of civilized security as though it were a spider's web," was the serious reply. "But I have interrupted my own story. I began to think that I would be taken to some awful den in the East End, and held there till some huge sum of money was paid by way of ransom, when the car suddenly quitted the main road ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... vessel so often alluded to; her light low hull dimly seen in the hazy atmosphere that danced upon the waters, and her attenuated masts and sloping yards, with their slight tracery of cordage, recalling rather the complex and delicate ramifications of the spider's web, than the elastic yet solid machinery to which the lives of those within had so often been committed in sea and tempest. Upon the strand, and close opposite to the small gate which now stood ajar, lay ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... plants we incessantly meet with elaborate and perfect contrivances for this same end. It is no exaggeration to assert that, if the use of the talons and tusks of a carnivorous animal, or the use of the viscid threads of a spider's web, or of the plumes and hooks on a seed may be safely inferred from their structure, we may with equal safety infer that many flowers are constructed for the express purpose of ensuring a cross with a distinct plant. From these various considerations, ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... think of, to make it seem like a real expedition,—'cross country and back again. Jerry led us through the scratchy, overgrown part of Wecanicut, and we pretended that it was a long, weary trek through the most poisonous jungles to the coast of Peru; and when Greg walked right into a spider's web with a huge yellow spider gloating in the middle of it, he said he'd been bitten by a tarantula. We told him that we should have to leave him there to die, for we must press on to the sea, but he cured himself by eating a magic sweet-fern ...
— Us and the Bottleman • Edith Ballinger Price
... three hairs, four teeth, a breast Like grasshopper, an emmet's crest, A skin more rugged than thy coat, And drugs like spider's web to boot." ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... lie covered with cobwebs in Duck-lane, a street in London where second-hand books were sold in Pope's day. He calls the cobwebs "kindred," because the arguments of Thomists and Scotists were as fine spun as a spider's web. ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... the irritated man, pausing, and looking at his wife, fixedly, while there sat upon his face an expression of terrible despair; "that pledge can never be renewed! It would be like binding a giant with a spider's web. I am lost! lost! lost! The eager, inexpressible desire that now burns within me, cannot be controlled. The effort to do so would drive me mad. I must drink, or die. And you, my poor wife!—and you, my children! what will become of you? Who will give you sufficient ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... little out of the way, and crept through a hole in a ruinous old wall, which was instantly closed up by spiders' webs. His enemies never imagining any thing could have lately passed where they saw so close a spider's web, after a fruitless search elsewhere, returned in the evening without their prey. Felix finding among the ruins, between two houses, an old well half dry, hid himself in it for six months; and received ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... Eustace been at Lundy? Lucy could throw no light on that matter. It was evidently some by-thread in the huge spider's web of Jesuit intrigue, which was, perhaps, not worth ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... eternal felicity. Accordingly, we find their earnest plea admitted. "It was said unto them, that they should rest."—Their repose can never be disturbed. The "white robes" in which they are arrayed, are not spun out of their own bowels, like the spider's web, either by their services or sufferings; but they are the well known emblems of the imputed righteousness of their Redeemer,—fine linen clean and white, the only righteousness of saints, (ch. xix. 8). Persecution did not terminate under the preceding ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... holding Eliza's hands, and gazing into her eyes, without moving. They stood silent; then there were last words, and sobs, and bitter weeping,—such parting as those may make whose hope to meet again is as the spider's web,—and the husband and ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... eye, Fandor saw this foreign spy system under the form of an immense—a vast spider's web. Could one but lay hands on the originator of the initial thread, or the master-spider himself, then they could strike at the extreme ends of this ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... from flower to flower; The queen tried to catch it for many an hour; Till at last, oh, direful tale to tell, Into a spider's web our hero fell! The spider ran to seize his prey; Tom, with his sword, fought valiantly; Till, alas! the spider's poisonous breath Was the cause of our gallant hero's death. In a bower of roses his tomb they rear'd, And ...
— An Entertaining History of Tom Thumb - William Raine's Edition • Unknown
... of Venezuela were for the first time opened to foreign trade. Her inhabitants were no longer restricted from the enjoyment of the fruits of their own industry. A gigantic system of taxation had been brushed, like a spider's web, away. Two-thirds of the Captain-Generalcy, in a word, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... the manner the roadways, i.e. the whole bridge, is supported. But the idea conveyed is that the supporting-rods, and the ties of every kind, are far more numerous and lighter than in other suspension bridges. The mesh of a spider's web, but with threads running in every direction, is the only thing I can compare it to. I know not who the engineer was, but his name should go down to all posterity. I have travelled in many lands, but I never saw any human achievement that impressed me so much as ...
— The Truth About America • Edward Money
... beheld anything so enchanting as the scene in the shipyard,—the ship with its tall and tapering masts, its spars and yard-arms; the multitudes of ropes like the threads of a spider's web; flags, streamers, red, white, green, blue, yellow, with devices of lions, unicorns, dragons, eagles, fluttering from bowsprit to fore-royal mast, from taffrail to mizzen. Beneath the bowsprit was the bust of Berinthia, ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... forth my hand and seized the cap to replace it upon my head, when I found that it strongly resisted my efforts, and, looking closely to discover the reason, I saw that it had become entangled in a spider's web! Yes, a spider's web! but such a web as I venture to say very few men save myself have ever seen. It hung suspended from a branch quite ten feet above the ground, it was tightly strained between the ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... it would be Johnnie who would have the most to say. Perhaps he would tell Father Pat about one of his thinks: a vision, say, of high roof-bridges, built far above the crowded, noisy streets—arched, steel bridges, swung from the summit of one tall building to another like the threads of a spider's web. Each bridge was to be lighted by electricity, and "I'll push Grandpa's wheel chair all across the top o' N'York!" ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... as she stepped out on the deck. She was fresh as the dew itself, and like a rose. All color of rose was the soft skirt she wore, and the little bolero above, blue, with gold buttons, covered a soft rose-colored waist, light and subtle as a spider's web, stretched from one grass stalk to another of a dewy morning. She was round and slender, and her neck was tall and round, and in the close fashion of dress which women of late have devised, to remind man once more of the ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... wasp," she said. "He was rolled up in the spider's web, and I put him on an ivy leaf, and now ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... farther off, child, or I'll spin you into a spider's web, as sure as you're alive," said Miss Thusa, dipping her fingers into the gourd, which hung at the side of the distaff, while at the same time she stooped down and moistened the fibres, by slipping them through her mouth, as it glided over the ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... good cover for a man to hide in, but nobody is hid in it. There's a big spider's web ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... to Miss Selina de Crespigny's eloquent exposition of the system adopted at De Crespigny House. Then he had torn it all to pieces as one might the delicate fabric of a spider's web, constructed ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... Shah Bagh; cloudy weather, occasionally a very slight shower during the last few days, depending probably on the Punjab rains. To-day, observed a small green caterpillar, climbing up a fine thread, like a spider's web, which hung from the fly of the tent; its motions were precisely those of climbing, the thread over which it had passed was accumulated between its third pairs of legs; it did not use ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... was composed could hardly be recognized. "Well?" asked Pont-de-Veyle. "Well, do you understand?" "Not at all." "Look at that portrait." She pointed with her finger to a wretched portrait in oils, covered with dust and spider's web. "I begin to understand." "Yes," said she, "that is his portrait. As for myself, I never look at it. The one here," striking her breast, "is more like. A portrait is a good thing for those who have ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... always fool flies around. But sometimes that spider's web gets all mussed up and broken. I've broke 'em myself—rather than see the ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... the other is filled by what are called "flats," or narrow bars of iron covered with card clothing. The cylinders move rapidly, the flats slowly, and the cotton passes between them. It comes out in a dainty white film not so very much heavier than a spider's web, and so beautifully white and shining that it does not seem as if the big, oily, noisy machines could ever have produced it. In a moment, however, it is gone somewhere into the depths of the machine. We have seen the last of the fleecy ...
— Makers of Many Things • Eva March Tappan |
