"Ant-" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the whole story of our problem was insignificant. In the presence of that army the red Notting Hills and the green Bayswaters were alike tiny and straggling groups. In its presence the whole struggle round Pump Street was like an ant-hill under the hoof of an ox. Every man who felt or looked at that infinity of men knew that it was the triumph of Buck's brutal arithmetic. Whether Wayne was right or wrong, wise or foolish, was quite a fair ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... beauty that covers this beautiful corner of earth. He was learned and profound, and he took himself and the Church and the State seriously. He felt himself a part of an indestructible institution, whereas man and all his works are no more peculiar, no more wonderful than an ant-hill—and last only a day longer. He never realized that he was a part of the great whole that made up mountain, lake, globe, wooded glen and tireless river. He differentiated. He considered himself a man, an educated man, and therefore a little better, and a little above, and a little ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... Widely different are the ant-house plants, of which North Queensland has two genera. One is purely an epiphyte, growing attached to a tree like many of the orchids. In both genera the gouty stems are hollow, a feature of which ants take ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... for gain, less ant-like in his economies; he was an artiste, above all; he knew how to make allowances; there was a time for work and a time for play. He often treated himself to the pleasure of taking Lily out; and, each ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... fairies, hot and angry as a swarm of bees. They came and fastened upon the unhappy old man, and began pulling him. "To the ant-hills!" they cried; "off with him to the ant-hills!" But when they found that Toonie still held him, ...
— The Blue Moon • Laurence Housman
... ridge-pole of the world? The great Sun comes round again. It travels over the tops of seas and mountains. Microbes in their dewdrops, seeds in their winds, stars in their courses, worms in their apples, answer it, and the hordes of the ants in their ant-hills run before it. And what does it matter after all, under the great Dome, a few hordes of factmongers more or less, glimmering and wonderless, crawlers on the bottom of the sea of time, lovers of the ooze of knowledge, feeling with slow, myopic ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... How ant-like seemed the black army crawling up the icy pass, clinging to its slippery face in the blinding buffet of snow and rain! Men dropped from its ranks uncared for and unpitied. Heedless of those that fell, the gap closed up, the march went on. The great army crawled up and over the ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... his war on Krishna and young boys, the tyrant Kansa sends various demons to harry and kill them, the present picture showing four stages in one such attack. To the right, the cowherd children, divided into two parties, face each other by an ant-hill, Krishna with arms crossed heading the right-hand group and Balarama the left. Concealed as a cowherd in Krishna's party, the demon Pralamba awaits an opportunity of killing Balarama. The second stage, in the right-hand bottom corner, ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... gaze in that direction, shading their eyes from the hot sun. What was that grey shadow moving? What were those little glints and flashes in the greyness of it? What were all those thousands of little ant-like things crawling forward over the slopes? Thousands and scores of thousands ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... black ant, though deceased, was of some importance, possibly an officer, for the little red ant seized him and bore him bodily to the rear where he in turn collapsed and was carried to the adjoining ant-hill by two of his comrades evidently detailed on ambulance work. "Everybody scraps—even the bugs," said Pete. "Them little red cusses sure ain't scared o' nothin'." Stream after stream of red ants hastened to reinforce their comrades ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... with all the power of his heart. The moon began to be now eclipsed by twilight; a golden band surrounded the horizon, announcing the approach of the day. Athos threw his cloak over the shoulders of Raoul, and led him back to the city, where burdens and porters were already in motion, like a vast ant-hill. At the extremity of the plateau which Athos and Bragelonne were quitting, they saw a dark shadow moving uneasily backwards and forwards, as if in indecision or ashamed to be seen. It was Grimaud, who in his anxiety had tracked his master, and ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... existence so far as art is concerned; art supplies wings, not crutches. Alas! D'Aubignac followed rules, Campistron copied models. What does it matter to art? It does not build its palaces for ants. It lets them make their ant-hill, without taking the trouble to find out whether they have built their burlesque imitation of its palace ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... whole of the jam, which cost me 2s. 6d. per pound. He then humped his swag and started for Melbourne. On his way through the township, since named Beechworth, he took a drink of liquor which disabled him, and he lay down by the roadside using an ant-hill for a pillow. He awoke at daylight covered with ants, which were stinging ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... cautioned his sister about this—the gun would go off in spite of him, and probably register a master-stroke in sporting annals, if within range there should come a "tamandoa assa," a kind of large and very curious ant-eater. ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... signal for the sailors of the Plymouth Adventure to charge aft and finish the business. They found pirates crawling from under the wreckage. It was like a demolished ant-heap. In the smaller cabins and other rooms far aft, which were more or less intact, some of the rascals showed fight but they were remorselessly prodded out with pikes and those unwounded were hustled forward to be thrown into the forecastle. It was difficult to restrain the seamen from dealing ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... their zeal; no one thought of weariness, or the toil of the ascent. But one determination possessed them—to end it all quickly; to carry everything before them! Their victory at the redoubt gave them such sudden, wild confidence that castles seemed no more than ant-hills—to be trampled on! Instinctively every man felt sure of the day and already experienced the glory of conquering that historic hill; that invincible fortress! Over the great valley, so beautiful in its physical features, so inspiring in its associations, should ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... teaching of Greek particles to do with the sense of life?—Thus we can also observe how innumerable men merely live, as it were, a preparation for a man, the philologist, for example, as a preparation for the philosopher, who in his turn knows how to utilise his ant-like work to pronounce some opinion upon the value of life. When such ant-like work is not carried out under any special direction the greater part of it is ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... of the gate and heading straight for the wagon—for, to be quite candid, the South African savage is a little uncertain in his moods, and the man who is to-day in high favour may, as likely as not, find himself staked out on an ant-heap to-morrow, to die the awful "death of the ants" in revenge for some unknown and unintended offence. But upon the arrival of the cavalcade I was quickly reassured by the cordial tone of the king's greeting and the respect with which the indunas saluted me; and ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... Savage. A flock of birds is a single Bird, scattered through the consciousness of all. They wheel in mid-air, they migrate, they obey the deep intelligence called instinct—all as one. The life of any one lion is the life of all—the lion group-soul that manifests itself in the entire genus. An ant-heap is a single Ant; through the bees spreads the consciousness of a ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... said he found 'no fault'—but that he wanted 'a change.' I quite understood that. The fact is I knew too much—that's all. I had saved a bit, and so, with a few good letters of introduction, went on from Glasgow to London. There, in that great black ant-hill full of crawling sooty human life, I knocked about for a time from one newspaper office to another, doing any sort of work that turned up, just to keep body and soul together,—and at last I got a fairly good berth ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... much patient goodness; so extraordinary a mixture of the best and the most vile, a humanity in little, with all its defects and all its struggles. It was a question whether it would not be better that a thunderbolt should come and destroy all this corrupt and miserable ant-hill. And after so many terrible Rougons, so many vile Macquarts, still another had been born. Life did not fear to create another of them, in the brave defiance of its eternity. It continued its work, propagated itself according to its laws, indifferent to theories, marching ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... was dealt with unmercifully by the swift-footed. He became much excited as he desperately chased a middle-aged man, who occasionally turned and fired off his gun, but was suddenly tripped by an ant-hill and fell to the ground, with the other on top of him. The excitement was intense. The bear man returned to his companion, and the dancers gathered in little knots ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... shelter. It was Leonard's purpose to bury his brother at sundown; he might not delay longer, but till then he would watch by him, keeping the last of many vigils. So all that remained of the Basuto Cheat having been dragged forth and thrust unceremoniously into an ant-bear hole by Otter, who while he disposed of the body did not spare to taunt the spirit of his late treacherous foe, the corpse of Thomas Outram was laid in its place, and Leonard sat himself by its side in the gloom of ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... scores of ships were belching cargoes out upon living swarms of scows, tugs, stern-wheelers, and dories. Here and there Eskimo oomiaks, fat, walrus-hide boats, slid about like huge, many-legged water- bugs. An endless, ant-like stream of tenders, piled high with freight, plied to and from the shore. A mile distant lay the city, stretched like a white ribbon between the gold of the ocean sand and the dun of the moss-covered tundra. It was like no other in the world. At ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... follows victory as daylight follows dawn; but when we try to think backwards from that first expedition, we either see nothing clearly, or we find Caesar an insignificant unit in a general disorder, as hard to identify as an individual ant in a swarming ant-hill. In the lives of all 'great men,' which are almost always totally unlike the lives of the so-called 'great,'—those born, not to power, but in power,—there is a point which must inevitably be enigmatical. ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... occasion, of perfect health of mind and body. The aeronauts of the 'Geant' will scarcely condescend to pity those miserable mortals whom they can only faintly recognise by their gigantic works, which appear to them not more dignified than ant-hills! ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion
... wish to preserve a skeleton, they bury an animal in an ant-hill and dig him up after many days with all the perishable matter fairly eaten away. That is the process which great men have to undergo. A vast multitude of insignificant, unknown, and unconscious critics destroy what ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... to join Venice and the pope. At the end of this long campaign of diplomacy, perfidy and blood, in which misery had rioted through ten thousand cottages, whose inhabitants the warriors regarded no more than the occupants of the ant-hills they trampled beneath their feet, it was found that no one had gained any ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... slanting rays of the sun shine through the winged hosts. On careful investigation these insects will prove to be nearly all ants, and, perhaps, to belong to a single species. Looking about on the ground, an unusual activity will be noticed in the ant-hills. This is the swarming of the ants. The autumnal brood of females has appeared, and this ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... "All other employments are assigned; the people who came first took them and went away; but stop, I will also give one to thee. Go, and having arrived at the entrance of the black ants, where are a great many ant-heads, when thou seest these many heads of the black ants, take them, and fill thy bags with them; then load thy bags upon thy ass, carry them to market, spread mats ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various
... hauling some large object to their nest; for the nearest grown-up person was invariably hailed, and pulled, and pushed, and hurried along till the "new flower" was reached. Then, if the object was incautious enough to stoop down to examine it, the ants, ant-wise, would envelope it, climbing, swarming all over it, till there was nothing ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... Holden, Denny was simply fussing fruitlessly and absurdly with an ordinary "ant-hill," as he persisted in miscalling a termitary. Playing with bugs, that was all. Wasting his time poking into the affairs of termites—and acting, by George, as though those ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... the part of Johnson, when he was already under the shadow of his seizure. I had directed his removal, and grudged him no professional attention that it was in my power to bestow. But afterwards, locked into my room, my whole nervous system broke up like a trodden ant-hill, leaving me conscious of nothing but an aimless scurrying terror and the black swarm of thoughts, so that I verily fancied my reason would give ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... had, as an interlude to his ornithological pursuits, followed the career of a gun-runner, acting as such off and on for two and a half years. The particular revolutionary chief whose fortunes he was following finally came into power, and Cherrie immortalized his name by naming a new species of ant-thrush after him—a delightful touch, in its practical combination of those not normally kindred ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... did the wretched boy hesitate to make use of this new and wonderful knowledge. When he had found and broken open an ant-hill, so eager was he that, shutting his eyes, he snatched up the maddened insects by handfuls and swallowed them, dust and ants together, and was then tortured for hours, feeling and thinking that they were still alive within him, running ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... speed along the Corso up to the Piazza di Venezia, where they are stopped, and the judges of the race award the prizes which their owners shall receive. Scarcely have the swift-footed steeds passed, when the throng of people crowd after them like a swarming ant-hillock. This closes the amusements ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... they returned on shore, in hopes of getting more water, but were disappointed; and having now time to observe the country, it gave them no great hopes of better success, even if they had travelled farther within land, which appeared a thirsty, barren plain, covered with ant-hills, so high that they looked afar off like the huts of negroes; and at the same time they were plagued with flies, and those in such multitudes that they were scarce able to defend themselves. They saw at a distance eight savages, with each a staff in his hand, who advanced towards ...
— Early Australian Voyages • John Pinkerton
... snake taken into the monkey-house caused several species to bristle. When Darwin showed the same to a peccary, the hair rose in a wonderful manner along its back. A cassowary erected its feathers at sight of an ant-eater. ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... tinge, and is not without occasional obscurity; and on these accounts probably produced no very extensive impression at the time. He wrote two other tracts—1. "Discovery of the Dangers of ignorant practisers of Physick in England," 1612, 4to; 2. "Cotta contra Antonium, or An Ant-Anthony," Oxford, 1623, 4to; the latter of which, a keen satire against the chymists' aurum potabile, is exceedingly rare. Both are intrinsically valuable and interesting, and written with great vigour ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... still baking and breathless. The insects bit worse than ever, and once or twice Kettle fancied he felt the jaws of a driver ant in his flesh, and wondered if news would be carried to the horde in the ant-hill, which would bring them out to devour their prey without the train of honey being laid to lure them. Moreover, fever had come on him again, and with one thing and another it was only by a constant effort of will ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... are lucky, and God is on our side. Why, after Dundee, when we were retiring, we had to cross a great open plain, never even an ant-hill, and you had put twelve great cannons—I counted them—and Maxims as well, to shoot us as we went; but not one fired a shot. Was it not God's hand that stopped them? ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... thou monstrous ant-hill on the plain Of a too busy world! Before me flow, 150 Thou endless stream of men and moving things! Thy every-day appearance, as it strikes— With wonder heightened, or sublimed by awe— On strangers, of all ages; the quick dance Of colours, lights, and forms; the ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... the crowds going their different ways like ants on an ant-hill, but I could not let a perambulator pass without peering under the lace of the hood at the little cherub face whose angel eyes looked up ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... ant in that one too. So he laid the two sweetmeats on the ground, and he took out another, and another, and another, until he had taken them all out; but in each he found an ant. "Never mind," he said, "I won't eat the sweetmeats; the ants shall eat them." Then the Ant-Raja came and stood before him and said, "You have been good to us. If ever you are in trouble, think of me and ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Collected by Joseph Jacobs
... of balance between the interest on mortgages and the products of the soil. Those who, from 1802 till 1827, had merely laughed at the little man as they saw him trotting to Saint-Thibault and attending to his business, like a merchant living on his vineyards, found the answer to the riddle when the ant-lion seized his prey, after waiting for the day when the extravagance of the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse culminated in the ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... on in this wilderness. These people literally dig their bread out of earth and stone and ant-heaps, scrape it off the trees, distill it out of uneatable fruit. There is the root-digger, whose booty of mountain ovens is said to go to far Turkey to be turned into scent. He would long have given up digging, to live entirely on poaching, but for his hope to ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... alligator. In spite of the enormous jaws of the latter, the jaguar will leap towards the tail of the creature, tear open its side, and devour it even before life is extinct. Only two animals do not fear the jaguar; one is the great ant-eater, which is defended from the monster's attacks by its thick shaggy coat; the other is the little peccary. The latter, however, when caught singly is quickly despatched. When collected in a herd the case is very different. They then so fearlessly assail the jaguar ...
— The Wanderers - Adventures in the Wilds of Trinidad and Orinoco • W.H.G. Kingston
... ant-eater, sir," I replied, divining that I should be wise not to seem too obvious in ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... remember my coming up here—four or five days ago now? I was coming to tell you to burn the stuff, and then you know one of the youngsters stirred up an ant-bed and drove it ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... natural selection, instinct was evolved. Habit is a development in the individual. Instinct is a race-habit. Instinct is blind, unreasoning, mechanical. This was the dividing of the ways in the climb of aspiring life. The perfect culmination of instinct we find in the ant-heap and the beehive. Instinct proved a blind alley. But the other path, that of reason, led on and on even to Mr. Burroughs and you ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... no conception of man and doubted man's existence on any other star. There were plant-people on Venus, ant-people on Andromeda, six-legged and four-armed beings which were equal parts mineral and vegetable on Betelguese—but nothing resembling man. "You are evidently alone of your kind in the cosmos," ...
— McIlvaine's Star • August Derleth
... each of us, on which we lay down to sleep, tired to exhaustion. My overcoat was my only covering, and there had been a slight snowfall the day before. I slept, to be awakened ten minutes later by swarms of fleas so numerous that it was like lying in an ant-hill. Three times in the night I went out to shake the fleas from my clothing in the cold night air, and when the first daylight came we turned out and made our way ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... forms their table, Their dishes, acorn cups; The ant-hills are their barracks high; Their ...
— Mother Truth's Melodies - Common Sense For Children • Mrs. E. P. Miller
... eat these creatures, and say they are very good; and I have heard that white people have also tried them successfully. Their eggs are delicious, and when roasted in hot embers taste just like baked custard. They lay from twenty to thirty in the large ant-heaps which one constantly meets with in the bush, and which when rifled, in January or February, yield a rich harvest of these eggs. A shrub very much like dogwood, with a lilac flower rather like a large ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... became evident that, from sheer malignity, the undisciplined members of the enemy's force would crawl in the darkness to some clump of rocks, or into some ditch-like donga, or behind one of the many ant-hills, and lie there invisible, firing as he saw a chance, and only leaving it when the darkness came ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn
... sound. For dawn had just broken and she saw that she was standing in a small open space in the midst of a sandalwood scrub, and encircled by twenty or thirty ferocious-looking myall blacks all armed with spears and waddies. The strong ant-like odour which emanated from their jet-black skins filled her nostrils and, putting her hands to her eyes, she shuddered and fell upon her knees with a ...
— Chinkie's Flat and Other Stories - 1904 • Louis Becke
... All day long, he buried himself in social questions, salary, capital, credit, marriage, religion, liberty of thought, education, penal servitude, poverty, association, property, production and sharing, the enigma of this lower world which covers the human ant-hill with darkness; and at night, he gazed upon the planets, those enormous beings. Like Enjolras, he was wealthy and an only son. He spoke softly, bowed his head, lowered his eyes, smiled with embarrassment, dressed badly, had ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... everywhere. The cook's moans had now subsided. On two sides black curling clouds of smoke rose and spread from the fires. Through the streets soldiers in various uniforms walked or ran confusedly in different directions like ants from a ruined ant-hill. Several of them ran into Ferapontov's yard before Alpatych's eyes. Alpatych went out to the gate. A retreating regiment, thronging and hurrying, blocked ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... crept round the house to where there was a five-foot stone wall at the back of the stable. Beyond this wall, within the circle of some huts where my Kaffirs lived, was an open space with an ant-heap floor where they did their cooking. Here, facing us, sat Mavovo, while in a ring around him were all the hunters who were to accompany us; also Jack, the lame Griqua, and the two house-boys. In front of Mavovo burned ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... Howrah, "since you are a foreigner with neither influence nor right, do you stay here and behold what you cannot change? Does a snake lie sleeping on an ant-hill? Does a woman watch the butchering of lambs? Yet, do ant-hills cease to be, and are lambs not butchered? Look the other way! Sleep softer ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... Birds and the Beggar of Bagdad," a fairy tale—"Lady Lucy's Petition," an historiette—"the Restless Boy," by Mrs. Opie, and the "Passionate Little Girl," by Mrs. Hofland—all sparkling trifles in prose. Among the poetry is "the African Mier-Vark," or Ant-eater, by Mr. Pringle, and "the Deadly Nightshade," a sweetly touching ballad, dated from Florence; "the Vulture of the Alps" is of similar character; and we are much pleased with some lines on Birds, by Barry Cornwall, one set of which we copy, the best ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 397, Saturday, November 7, 1829. • Various
... rosy lips—and how they could smile! All! of them brought their friends, and la belle Madame de Lavretsky was soon known from Chausee d'Antin to Rue de Lille. In those days—it was in 1836—there had not yet arisen the tribe of journalists and reporters who now swarm on all sides like ants in an ant-hill; but even then there was seen in Varvara Pavlovna's salon a certain M. Jules, a gentleman of unprepossessing exterior, with a scandalous reputation, insolent and mean, like all duelists and men who have been beaten. ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... the bridge, stood to look up and down the river, to watch the gulls, white against the green, to consider the ant-like hurrying of the people on the road below and the clustered houses on the city side, a medley of shapes and colours, rising in terraces, the whole like some immense castle guarding the entrance to the town. And as before, carriages and carts went and came over, schoolgirls ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... worried the doctor as to when I should go, and always received the non-committal reply, 'When you are fit to travel.' Saturday, however, found me on board of a hospital ship, and at 9 o'clock that night we arrived at Southampton. Ant-like, the stretcher-bearers went to and fro, from ship to train. For some reason or other they dumped me in a corner with my head nearest the scene of activities, so that I was unable to interest myself in watching the entraining of others. I feverishly hoped they wouldn't forget ...
— One Young Man • Sir John Ernest Hodder-Williams
... all the fossil bones to the College of Surgeons, casts of them will be distributed, and descriptions published. They are very curious and valuable; one head belonged to some gnawing animal, but of the size of a Hippopotamus! Another to an ant-eater of the ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... the earth. The Spirit's intellectual eye Its kindred beings recognized. The thronging thousands, to a passing view, 100 Seemed like an ant-hill's citizens. How wonderful! that even The passions, prejudices, interests, That sway the meanest being, the weak touch That moves the finest nerve, 105 And in one human brain Causes the faintest thought, becomes a link In the great ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... the animal was doubtless insectivorous. By Professor Owen, the highest living authority on the subject, Amphitherium is believed to be a small Marsupial, most nearly allied to the living Banded Ant-eater (Myrmecobius) of Australia (fig. 158). Amphilestes and Phascolotherium (fig. 184) are also believed by the same distinguished anatomist and palaeontologist to have been insect-eating Marsupials, ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... irregular crackling sounds, a long time since, supported by the solemn growl of the cannon. The enemy, Austrians dressed in white, had quitted the heights, and the plain was studded with long files of men, who looked to me about as big as insects. One might have thought it was an ant-hill in insurrection. Clouds of smoke hung over the battle-field. At times, when these clouds broke asunder, I perceived soldiers in flight, smitten with terrified panic. Thus there were currents of fright which bore men away, and outbursts of shame ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... given to neuropterous insects of the family Sialidae, related to the ant-lions, with long filamentous antennae and four large wings, of which the anterior pair is rather longer than the posterior. The females lay a vast number of eggs upon grass stems near water. The larvae are aquatic, active, armed with strong sharp mandibles, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... it is a novel sight to see the ant-hills that dot the plain all the way along. These tiny creatures build their homes underground, carrying out all the small pieces of rock that are in their way. By and by they build up quite a mound of these ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... This piece of embroidery was probably suggested by the fact that, after the signing and sealing was completed, Carl had taken the lantern and had walked circumspectly to the little hollow to examine his ant-hill. The others had gone quietly into the manse and ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... an ant-hill until the stick has been thrust into it. Mr. Gladstone's Bill for helping to the wiser government of Ireland has brought forth our busy citizens on the top-rubble in traversing counterswarms, and whatever may be said against a Bill that deals roughly with many sensitive ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... learns a changeless faith in some secret and infinite goodness. The green glades are his chosen dwelling and his life is April; he reclines amazed at the mysteries of a tuft of grass; he studies the ant-hills of tiny republicans; he learns to know the birds by their songs; he watches the children playing barefoot in ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... table or sit in a circle, each one being given the name of an animal; the sport of the game will consist largely in choosing unusual or difficult names, such as yak, gnu, camelopard, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, Brazilian ant-eater, kangaroo, etc. ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... municipal guard passed me with a suspicious glance. The clocks of the city struck six in a solemn jangle of tones. The boats were moving on the river—the great unwieldy barges as big as a ship. The streets were now astir. Paris seemed huge and as populous as an ant-hill. I felt the hopelessness of seeking unaided one who purposely hid ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... innumerable talking-machines growing out of the ground. Thousands upon thousands of those familiar cornucopias of bright lacquer with gilt edges pointed their open mouths up at him. And each one was the center of a swarming ant-hill of busy ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko
... big black snake that lived in the ant-hill at the back of the house whose movements Jim and the piccanin had been discussing. The snake ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... junction last mentioned, remained to be ascertained. Parts of the surface in the scrub, which, before the rain, had been quite bare, now presented a crop of lichen, which bore some resemblance to the orchilla. It might have been gathered in any quantity. The ant-hills in this region, presented a different form from any to be seen in the south, consisting of slender cones of hard clay about the size and shape of sugar-loaves on an average, many being larger, or as much as 31/2 feet high, ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... strength on work; and wealth to worthless beings like myself who are always ailing and who never spend a pound with wisdom. Make no dark cryptic mystery of Fate when you paint her. She looks to me like a mischievous monkey poking sticks into an ant-hill." ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... large volumes of water over his back with his trunk, he resumes the path to his forest solitudes. Having reached a secluded spot, I have remarked that full-grown bulls lie down on their broad-sides, about the hour of midnight, and sleep for a few hours. The spot which they usually select is an ant-hill, and they lie around it with their backs resting against it; these hills, formed by the white ants, are from thirty to forty feet in diameter at their base. The mark of the under tusk is always deeply imprinted in the ground, proving that they lie upon their sides. I never remarked that females ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... of living thing around, save the ghastly rattle of the dead bark-tassels which swung from every tree, and far away, the faint clicking of the diggers at their work, like the rustle of a gigantic ant-hill. Was there one among them all who cared for him? who would not forget him in a week with—"Well, he was pleasant company, poor fellow," and go on digging without a sigh? What, if it were his fate to die, as he had seen many a stronger ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... but our search was fruitless, for it seemed not to have rained there for a long time past, and we found no traces of running water, the higher ground being again very barren and unpromising, without any trees, shrubs or grass, but with plenty of high ant-hills in all directions. These anthills consisted of earth thrown up, and from afar somewhat resembled huts for the abode ...
— The Part Borne by the Dutch in the Discovery of Australia 1606-1765 • J. E. Heeres
... instantly took flight again towards his mother. He was worn out, with bleeding feet, alone in the middle of this formidable forest, where it was only at long intervals that he saw tiny human habitations, which at the foot of these trees seemed like the ant-hills, or some buffalo asleep beside the road; he was exhausted, but he was not conscious of his exhaustion; he was alone, and he felt no fear. The grandeur of the forest rendered his soul grand; his nearness to his mother gave him the strength and the ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... another elephant, and supposed to have survived till comparatively recent times. The megatherium is an incongruity of nature, of gigantic proportions, yet ranking in a much humbler order than the elephant, that of the edenta, to which the sloth, ant-eater, and armadilla belong. The megatherium had a skeleton of enormous solidity, with an armour-clad body, and five toes, terminating in huge claws to grasp the branches on which it fed. Finally, beside the dog, cat, squirrel, and bear, we have offered to us, for the first time, oxen, deer, camel, ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... loaded with a bit of bean-pod or half a wheat grain. They no doubt have, on their modest myrmecic scale, their architects and politicians, their magistrates and composers and philosophers. At any rate, what men and cities suggested to me was just so many ant-hills. If you think the similitude too disparaging, look into the Thessalian legends, and you will find that the most warlike tribe there was the Myrmidons, or ants turned men. Well, when I had had enough of contemplation and laughter, I ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... appalling mystery.... We, this throng Of midgets, playing, listening, tense and still, Are sailing on a midget ball of dust We call our planet; will have sailed through space Ten thousand leagues before this music ends. What does it mean? Oh, God, what can it mean?— This weird hushed ant-hill with a thousand eyes; These midget periwigs; all those little blurs, Tier over tier, of faces, masks of flesh, Corruptible, hiding each its hopes and dreams, Its tragi-comic dreams. And all this throng Will be forgotten, ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... to man in general, including women, and not to Thomas Brown in particular, that the earth has been given, we set about asserting our kingships each in his own way, and proclaiming ourselves kings from our little ant-hills of thrones. And then come the strugglings and the down-fallings, and some of us learn our lesson, and some learn it not. But what lesson? That we have been dreaming in the golden hours when the vision of a kingdom rose before us? That there is in short no kingdom at all, or that, if ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... an ant-hill with savages. The shore was lined with canoes; the forests and the fields were alive with busy camps. The trade was brisk; and in its attendant speeches, feasts, and dances, there was ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... control her father begetting her forty years ago in the suburbs of Manchester? and once begotten, how could she do other than grow up cheese-paring, ambitious, with an instinctively accurate notion of the rungs of the ladder and an ant-like assiduity in pushing George Plumer ahead of her to the top of the ladder? What was at the top of the ladder? A sense that all the rungs were beneath one apparently; since by the time that George Plumer became Professor of Physics, or whatever it might be, Mrs. Plumer could only ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... by small processes at either end at the upper side of the arch, the zygapophyses. The normals to the polished facets of these point, in the case of the anterior zygapophyses, up and in (mnemonic: ant-up-in), and in the case of the posterior, down and out. The student should make this, and the other features of vertebrae, out upon ...
— Text Book of Biology, Part 1: Vertebrata • H. G. Wells
... on the ground to steady the glasses as he trained them off in the direction the five men had gone. Twice he saw them cross over ridges. Then a tiny, swift-moving speck came into his field of view, traveling up the slope of a distant divide. The ant-like rider dipped over the crest of it and ...
— The Settling of the Sage • Hal G. Evarts
... ships! Mars must be an interesting spot. And those Martians! Sometimes they are ant-like, and other times worms, and again human freaks! (I still prefer the silver-green messenger I saw on the stage twenty years ago. He was a gentleman and a scholar and no one yet has improved ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... sweet new smell of pine that now perfumed all the air. To the left Bobby could see the shipyards and the skeleton of a vessel well under way. From it came the irregular Block! Block! Block! of mallets; and it swarmed with the little, black, ant-like figures ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... occasion he met with a formidable-looking but comparatively harmless animal, called the great ant-eater. This remarkable creature is about six feet in length, with very short legs and very long strong claws; a short curly tail, and a sharp snout, out of which it thrusts a long narrow tongue. It can roll itself up like a hedgehog, and when in this position might ...
— Martin Rattler • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... you will keep just as quiet as two mice, I will tell you the story of our little black farmers. They are, in some ways, the strangest of all ants. You have seen little ant-hills thrown up in the sand about an inch across; but these ants build great solid mounds, surrounded by a level court-yard, sometimes as much as ten or twelve feet in diameter. Here they do not suffer a blade of grass nor a weed ...
— Harper's Young People, September 7, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... tube forming the body. It is said by the natives to have been invented by one of the singers of the 'Brahma Loka,' or heaven of the Brahmins. The 'kimmori' is made of a pipe of bamboo or blackwood, with frets or screws, which should be fashioned of the scales of the pangolin, or scaly ant-eater, though more often they are made of bone or metal. It has only two strings, one touching the frets, the other carried above them. The tail-piece is always carved like the breast of a kite, and the instrument is frequently ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... ground toward them, scolding all the while in a harsh voice. I feared at first that they might kill him, but I soon found that he was able to take care of himself. I would turn over stones and dig into ant-hills for him, and he would lick up the ants so fast that a stream of them seemed going into his mouth unceasingly. I kept him till late in the fall, when he disappeared, probably going south, and I never saw ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... Mother Snail. "Our son shall not go into an ant-hill; if you know nothing better than that, we shall give the commission to the white gnats. They fly far and wide, in rain and sunshine; they know the whole forest here, both within ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... though they belong to a higher order of insects, widely differing from the true ants. The only thing in common is the principle of division of labor. The termite neuters are subdivided into two classes, soldiers and workers, both wingless and blind. Their great enemy is the ant-eater; but it is a singular fact, noticed by Bates, that the soldiers only attach themselves to the long worm-like tongue of this animal, so that the workers, on whom the prosperity of the termitarum depends, are saved by the self-sacrifice of the fighting caste. The office of ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... British rocket battery that served in Bernadotte's army. Captain Bogue brought it forward to check the charge of a French column against the Swedes. He was shot down, but Lieutenant Strangways poured in so hot a fire that the column was "blown asunder like an ant-heap," the men rushing back to cover amidst the loud laughter ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... after a while it seemed to him that he heard a voice in the sand at his feet. He listened, and heard an ant-king complain, "Why cannot folks, with their clumsy beasts, keep off our bodies? That stupid horse, with his heavy hoofs, has been treading down my people without mercy!" So he turned on to a side path and the ant-king cried out to him, "We will remember you—-one ...
— Household Tales by Brothers Grimm • Grimm Brothers
... Glora close. And suddenly he was laughing—a madness, half hysterical. "Why, this, all this—why look, Glora, it's funny! This little world all excited, an ant-hill, outraged! Look! ...
— Beyond the Vanishing Point • Raymond King Cummings
... life in those three days, telling each other about our young days; Pa telling me about some girls he used to spark that I never woulda heard about if it hadn't been for that blizzard.... I told him about my first husband ... he's the one who left me the ant-tic broach ... we did get pretty cold toward ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... mended the harness I had a look at the scenery. The formation of the country was curious. There were what at first appeared to be hundreds of small mounds like ant-hills—round topped and greyish, or in patches of light brown, with yellow sand deposits exposed to the air on the surface. On getting nearer they appeared to be long flat-topped ridges evidently formed by water-borne matter—probably at the ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... temperate climates have no idea what ants can do in the tropics. The Kafirs of South Africa used to stake down their prisoners (among them a poor friend of mine) upon an ant-hill and they were eaten atom after atom in a few hours. The death must be the slowest form of torture; but probably the nervous system soon becomes insensible. The same has happened to more than one hapless ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... she avoided, beyond confessing that she took her turn with the other ladies in superintending the coffee-room. At length, however, as they passed one of those open stairways that lead to thronged tenements above,—like the entrance to a many-chambered ant-hill, save that this mounts and that descends,—she spoke to a lad on the sidewalk, telling him to give her love to his sister and say that she was coming in to see her the next day. To Millard she explained that the boy's sister was an invalid young woman on one ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... far, oh! far from being a cheerful meal, consisting as it did of water from the lake and the crumbled, ant-ridden fragments of the lemon-jelly layer cake. Once more the thought of a steaming hot cup of tea came to me with compelling insistency, provoking an almost overpowering longing for the comforts of some roofed ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... the window was an ant-hill street. And an ant-hill of days. In the stores they were already selling calendars for the next year. Outside the window was a flat roof. By looking at the flat roof you remembered that Mary James was married. Unexpectedly. You came out of the ant-hill street, climbed the stairs, and sat down ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... tapirs were numerous. My first sight of this peculiar animal of Paraguay I shall never forget. It resembles no other beast I have ever seen, but seems half elephant, with its muzzle like a short trunk. In size it is about six feet long and three and a half feet high. There were also ant-bears, peculiar animals, without teeth, but provided with a rough tongue to lick up the ants. The length of this animal is about four feet, but the thick tail is longer than the body. Whereas the tapir has a hog-like skin, the ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... round and saw that it was the shadow of Zikali, whom I had seen once or twice. There he stood, though whence he came I know not, wagging his great white head that sits on the top of his body like a pumpkin on an ant-heap, rolling his big eyes ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... him, the Maluka said, "You know the road best "; and Mac, being what he called a "bit of a Jehu," we set off in great style across country, apparently missing trees by a hair's breadth, and bumping over the ant-hills, boulders, and broken boughs that lay half-hidden ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... the hermit, horridly austere, Whom clinging vines are choking, tough and sore; Half-buried in an ant-hill that has grown About him, standing post-like and alone; Sun-staring with dim eyes that know no rest, The dead skin of a serpent on his breast: So long he stood unmoved, insensate there That birds build nests ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... reconstructed in such fashion that the foundation stones are carried to the apex, and the swiftness of this transfer is increasing in a sort of geometrical ratio. I see that the result of this is something like that which would take place in an ant-heap if the community of ants were to lose their sense of the common law, if some ants were to begin to draw the products of labor from the bottom to the top of the heap, and should constantly contract the foundations and broaden the apex, ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... toil, and tormented also by noxious insects, cry aloud and give way to fretfulness, and twist round and round in agony, as a worm does when run through with a pointed needle. It often seemed to him as if he were lying upon an ant-hill, from the torture caused by the insects; for if he wished to sleep, or when he had fallen asleep, they vied with one another.[183] Sometimes he cried to Almighty God in the fullness of his heart: Alas! Gentle God, what a dying is this! When a man is killed by murderers ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... was the chubby Man who came in every Evening and told what had happened at the Store that Day, and there was a human Ant-Eater who ...
— People You Know • George Ade
... teeth, though teeth are still found in the embryo. So, again, M. Geoffroy has discovered in birds the groove where teeth were formerly placed. The ant-eater, which belongs to a genus that has long relinquished the habit of masticating its food, is ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... real river greeted the gaze of our travellers, and, by the enormous ant-hills seen in its vicinity, the doctor recognized the Benoue, one of the great tributaries of the Niger, the one which the natives have called "The Fountain ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... once, I beheld that very bird, a solitary female, flittering on over the flat ground before me, perching on the little green ant-mounds and flirting its tail and bobbing as if greatly excited at my presence in that lonely place. I wondered where its mate was, following it from place to place as it flew, determined now I had found a bird ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... sweeping past bends, eagerly, hopefully scanning every empty tangent that opened up ahead of them. They made fast time indeed, but the immensity of the desolation through which they passed, the tremendous scale upon which this country had been molded, made their progress seem slower than an ant-crawl. ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... half a bottle of champagne to pull us up to our usual spirits, as we sat at supper at a window where we could see London spread out beneath us like a huge black velvet flower, dotted with fiery embroideries, sudden flaring stamens, and rows of ant-like fireflies moving in slow zig-zag processions along and across ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... most high born and athletic of Achilles's Myrmidons in the full "tug of war;" whereas the swarms of crawling pigmies which burlesque the triumph of Severus might be supposed the original Myrmidon rabble, just hatched, as the fable reports, from their native ant-hills, and basking in the sun like ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... continues to be reproduced from seed, because in addition to the double and infertile flowers, the seeds always produce a certain number of single, fertile blossoms, and these are used to reproduce the double variety. These single and fertile plants correspond "to the males and females of an ant-colony, the infertile plants, which are regularly produced in large numbers, to the ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... Zambales Mountains in full view running south and bordering the plain, while still farther to the south Mount Arayat [11] rose abruptly from its surrounding levels. Now Arayat is plainly visible from Manila. Here and there solitary rocky hills, looking for all the world like ant-heaps, but in reality hundreds of feet high, broke the uniformity of the plains. Flooded as the whole landscape was with brilliant sunshine, the view was exquisite in respect both of form and of color. But as ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... road one could see far down and far up its entire white, thread-like length. The tiny crawling teams each with its puff of dust crawling with it; the great tumbled peaks of the Sierras; the river so far below as to resemble a little stream, the round Cove with its toy houses and its distant ant-like industry—all these were plainly to be seized by a glance of whatever ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... and how would the village stand this second storm of its broken defences? So the order was given to assemble in the street after dinner, and work at the repair of the breaches. The street looked like an ant-hill, as the workers, divided into gangs by houses, with the housemaster at the head of his gang, swarmed on the roadway, clearing it from the debris with pickaxe, spade, and a multitude of hands; re-stacking the cottagers' store of peat-sods, which the waves had sown broadcast; forming ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine
... to be the only egg that was not mentioned. There were birds' eggs, and reptiles' eggs, and fishes' eggs, and molluscs' eggs, and crustaceans' eggs, and insects' eggs, and frogs' eggs, and Augustus Egg, and the eggs of the duck-billed platypus, which is the only mammal (except the spiny ant-eater) whose eggs are "provided with a large store of yolk, enclosed within a shell, and extruded to undergo development apart from the maternal tissues." I do not know whether it is evidence of the irrelevance of the workings of the human mind or of our implacable greed of knowledge, ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... Maa-ant-f (i.e., Seer of what is brought to him), who comest forth from the house of the god Amsu, I have not lain with the wife of ...
— Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life • E. A. Wallis Budge
... of the nearest hill they paused and looked over a restless welter of foliage that glittered in the sun, far down into the highway. It bustled like an unroofed ant-hill, for the road was alive with men who seemed from this distance very small. Duke Alessandro's attendants had found him and were clustered in a hubbub about their reviving master. Dwarfish Lorenzino de Medici was the ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... tracings the course of a sailing-ship leaves upon the white paper of a chart she is always aiming for that one little spot—maybe a small island in the ocean, a single headland upon the long coast of a continent, a lighthouse on a bluff, or simply the peaked form of a mountain like an ant-heap afloat upon the waters. But if you have sighted it on the expected bearing, then that Landfall is good. Fogs, snowstorms, gales thick with clouds and rain—those are the enemies of ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... have acquired, before the close of the tertiary period, the characters which essentially distinguish their existing faunas. The eastern continent had then, as now, its great pachyderms, elephants, rhinoceros, and hippopotamus; South America its armadillos, sloths, and ant-eaters; Australia a crowd of marsupials; and the very strange birds of New Zealand had predecessors of similar strangeness. Everywhere the same geographical distribution as now, with a difference in the particular area, as respects the northern portion of the continents, answering ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... any question that it was a world which, if not absolutely teeming with inhabitants, like a gigantic ant-hill, at any rate bore on every side the marks of their presence and of their incredible undertakings ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss
... from the headland into V Beach Bay, and, in doing so, passed the limit of the British zone and trespassed upon French territory. The slope, from the beach upward, was as alive with French and Senegalese as a cloven ant-hill is alive with ants. The stores of the whole French army seemed accumulated in the neighbourhood. There was an atmosphere of French excitability, very different from the stillness of the British Zone. Stepping from the British Zone into the French was like turning suddenly from the quiet ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... Motley, as might be expected from his creed and his life-long pursuits. This I shall refer to in connection with Motley's last work, "John of Barneveld." An historian among archivists and annalists reminds one of Sir John Lubbock in the midst of his ant-hills. Undoubtedly he disturbs the ants in their praiseworthy industry, much as his attentions may flatter them. Unquestionably the ants (if their means of expressing themselves were equal to their apparent intellectual ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the singular characteristics of English people, the distance and coldness of their own Channel which they put between them and whoever has not been presented to them in a proper manner. Humanity seems to be an ant-hill on which they tread; they know none of their species except the few they admit into their circle; they ignore even the language of the rest; tongues may move and eyes may see in their presence but neither sound nor look has reached them; to them, the people are as if they were not. ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... dog forms a very useful breed for emu-hunting, and many even of the pure ones are caught young, tamed by the natives, and bred up to hunt emus and kangaroos. They have as many pups as the tame dog, littering either in some hollow log, deserted ant-hill, hole in the ground, or thick brush. They will hunt, kill, and devour a tame dog also, if a troop of them can catch him alone. A settler in the interior informed me, that, while out hunting one morning, he observed his dog running direct ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 10, No. 271, Saturday, September 1, 1827. • Various
... effect—it is the insects which have been transformed; the millions of wood-ants, let us say, inhabiting an old and exceedingly populous nest have been transformed into men, but in form only; mentally they are still ants, all silently, everlastingly hurrying by, absorbed in their ant-business. You can almost smell the formic acid. Walking in the street, one of the swarming multitude, you are in but not of it. You are only one with the others in appearance; in mind you are as unlike them as a man is unlike an ant, ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... and one could all but count the windows of Silao, Irapuato, and other towns; the second, though more than twenty miles away, still in the back foreground of the picture. Thread-like, brown trails wound away over the plain and up into the mountains, here and there dotted by travelers crawling ant-like along them a few inches an hour. Take the most perfect day of late May or early June in our North, brush off the clouds, make the air many times fresher and clearer, add October nights, and multiply the sum total by 365, and it is more easily understood why Americans who settle ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... boat, her terror could hardly have been greater. She felt vividly that certain uncongeniality which, when all is said, forever remains between humanity and the earth which supports it. She recognised the colossal indifference of nature, not hostile, even kindly and friendly, so long as the human ant-swarm was submissive, working with it, hurrying along at its side in the mysterious march of the centuries. Let, however, the insect rebel, strive to make head against the power of this nature, and at once it became relentless, a gigantic engine, a vast ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... insects out of the soft sand far more easily than if it had been straight. We saw vast numbers of the large black goose walking about slowly and feeding. It had a strong black spur on the shoulder, with which it can defend its young. David told us that it forms its nests in ant-hills, and, of course, eats up the inhabitants. Among the several varieties of geese was the Egyptian or Chenalopex Aegyptiaca. It flew along over the surface, but appeared unable to rise. It would have ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... and had to return for them the next morning. The day after that we climbed Mount Trumbull, and I triangulated from there. One of my sights from Logan was to a conical butte near which we had camped as we came out, and near which we had found a large ant-hill covered with small, perfect quartz crystals that sparkled in the sun like diamonds. When I sighted to this butte, for want of a better name, I recorded it temporarily as Diamond Butte, remembering the crystals, and the name became fixed, which shows how unintentionally ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh |
