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More "Owl" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Ruby a final good night and went below, and Ruby, who could not persuade himself that it was final, continued to walk the deck until his eyes began to shut and open involuntarily like those of a sick owl. Then he also went below, and, before he fell quite asleep (according to his own impression), was awakened by the bell that called the men to land on the ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
... "The owl sings at night, my son, it is his hour. Now it is dark, Henri, so dark that one might take the day for the night, and I sing what you ought to ...
— Chicot the Jester - [An abridged translation of "La dame de Monsoreau"] • Alexandre Dumas
... in the gathering gloom while he pulled slowly on his pipe. The evening was very quiet; the birds had ceased their twittering; the wind had died away; it was too early for the bay of a wolf, the wail of a panther, or hoot of an owl; there was ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... lay prone, and a few flickering lights in empty streets marked the places where their cities were built. Red and yellow omnibuses were crowding each other in Piccadilly; sumptuous women were rocking at a standstill; but here in the darkness an owl flitted from tree to tree, and when the breeze lifted the branches the moon flashed as if it were a torch. Until all people should awake again the houseless animals were abroad, the tigers and the stags, and the elephants ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... man's hearing with a distinctness that drew his muscles rigid and set his eyes staring about him in wild search. Just beyond the hanging pails a moose-bird hopped out upon the snow. It chirped hungrily, its big, owl-like eyes scrutinizing Dixon. The man stared back, fearing to move. Slowly he forced his right foot through the snow to the rear of his left, and as cautiously brought his left behind his right, working himself backward step by step ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... odd about that," she exclaimed impatiently. "Don't be so enigmatical. If you've anything to say, say it! Don't look at me like an owl!" ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... kindnesses I have done you? I shall soon make you both feel what you deserve." She said no more, but taking water in her hand, threw it in his face with these words, "Quit the form of man, and take that of an owl." These words were soon followed by the effect, and immediately she commanded one of her women to shut up the owl in a cage, and give ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... lay imbedded in the flints of his rock. For so costly was the mould in which Uncle Jack and the Anti-Publisher Society had contrived to cast this exposition of Human Error that every bookseller shied at its very sight, as an owl blinks at daylight, or human error at truth. In vain Squills and I, before we left London, had carried a gigantic specimen of the Magnum Opus into the back parlors of firms the most opulent and adventurous. ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... she said: "Since I have dwelt in your house your fields have yielded larger crops, and you have obtained the highest selling prices. And that is something after all. But now, when young and old, you are comfortably established, you wish to act like the fledgling owl, who picks out his own mother's eyes as soon as he is ...
— The Chinese Fairy Book • Various
... of originating elsewhere, it is to be regretted, for the sake of science, that he did not boldly enunciate the formula of life as taught by the eagle-eyed prophet of the Bible, and not as proclaimed by the owl-eyed professors ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... an owl in the sudden glare. "Good even to you, comrades! Hola! a woman, by my soul!" and in an instant he had clipped Dame Eliza round the waist and was kissing her violently. His eye happening to wander upon the maid, however, he instantly abandoned the mistress ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Discoboli, or Quoit-throwers—was found by the present writer in the Montreal Museum of Natural History; it was, however, banished from public view, to a room where were all manner of skins, plants, snakes, insects, &c., and in the middle of these, an old man, stuffing an owl. The dialogue—perhaps true, perhaps imaginary, perhaps a little of one and a little of the other—between the writer and this old man gave rise ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... her walk home with Bobby, you idiot! He had to take the owl train home, and she won't see him for a month. Didn't you ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... ivirybody's kind to me, honey! But nobody has ivir loved me—that way. The good Lord made me a fright, honey—ain't ye noticed? I've a face like an owl. An' they told me from th' cradle up I'd nivir land a man. An' I didn't, honey; they all ran from me—an' so I become a bride o' th' Church. ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... he acknowledges it!" roared the magician. "Wretch, dotard, owl, mole, miserable buzzard! I have no reason to tell thee now that thy form is monstrous, that children cry, that cowards turn pale, that teeming matrons shudder to behold it. It is not thy fault that thou art thus ungainly: but wherefore so blind? wherefore so conceited of thyself! I tell thee, Poinsinet, ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of the woods floated on the air: the spicy fragrance of the firs; the breath of hidden banks of twin-flower. Muskrats swam noiselessly in the shadows, diving with a great commotion as the canoe ran upon them suddenly. A horned owl hooted from the branch of a dead pine-tree; far back in the forest a fox barked twice. The moon crept up behind the wall of trees and touched the ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... wandring Shepherd did I see, Or Shepherdess, or drew into mine ear The sound of living thing, unless it were The Nightingale among the thick leav'd spring That sits alone in sorrow, and doth sing Whole nights away in mourning, or the Owl, Or our great enemy that still doth howl Against the ...
— The Faithful Shepherdess - The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (Vol. 2 of 10). • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... now—saw them in one age-long instant while he stood in horror on the black shining rock. He saw their heads, red-skinned, pointed, their staring eyes as large as saucers—owl-eyes. They were naked, and their bodies, that would have been almost crimson in the light of day, were blotched and ghastly in the green light. And each one held in long clawlike hands a thing of shining metal—a lava tip ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin
... an' chafe an' lame an' fight — 'e smells most awful vile; 'E'll lose 'isself for ever if you let 'im stray a mile; 'E's game to graze the 'ole day long an' 'owl the 'ole night through, An' when 'e comes to greasy ground 'e splits 'isself in two. O the oont, O the oont, O the floppin', droppin' oont! When 'is long legs give from under an' 'is meltin' eye is dim, The ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling
... with the first shiver of dismay. Her limbs seemed ready to collapse. The flush of anger and excitement left her face; a white, desolate look came in its stead. Her eyes grew wide and she blinked her lashes with an awed uncertainty that boded ill for the stability of her adventure. An owl hooted in mournful cadence close by and she felt that her hair was going straight on end. The tense fingers of one hand gripped the handle of the travelling-bag while the other went spasmodically ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... do I ululate, dear my dearie, Coiled on a nastily mildewed tomb, When the horned owl hoots, and the world is weary, Weary of sorrow, and swamped in gloom? Childie my child, 'tis a cogent question; Dearie my dear, if you wish to know, Tis not that I suffer from indigestion, But that ...
— Rhymes of the East and Re-collected Verses • John Kendall (AKA Dum-Dum)
... through the close-growing firs, starting in fear as an owl flew out above them, hooting dismally. It was not easy to find anything, for the moonlight was scarcely able to filter through the branches. Jim took the lead, and presently they scattered to look for the tree. Something big ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... supported by a tortoise. Mahomet decided that the mountains are great weights to keep the world from being blown away into space. But we refuted these orientals by asking triumphantly what the tortoise stands on? Freethinkers asked which came first: the owl or the egg. Nobody thought of saying that the ultimate problem of existence, being clearly insoluble and even unthinkable on causation lines, could not be a causation problem. To pious people this would have been flat atheism, ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... ten," he cried, running wildly up and down till his dressing-gown flapped round him like the wings of an owl. "So he has made nearly three thousand dollars! I have always had a bad opinion of that man; now I know what he is. He is a rascal—a double dealer. He never advanced the seven thousand either; his whole shop is not worth ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... mother's direction to find her real father. With the help of her grandmother she reaches Kuaihelani. Here she bathes in the taboo pool and plucks the taboo flowers. She is about to be slain for this act when her aunt, in the form of an owl, proclaims her name, and the chief recognizes his daughter. Her beauty shines like a light. Kahikiula, her half brother, on a visit to his father, becomes her lover. When he returns to his wife, Kahalaokolepuupuu in Kahikiku, she follows in the ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... Who smote the wasted cities, and the world Made as a wilderness—SHE, in her turn, Sinks to the gulf oblivious at the voice Of HIM who sits in judgment on her crimes! Who, o'er her palaces and buried towers, Shall bid the owl hoot, and the bittern scream; And on her pensile groves and pleasant shades 80 Pour the deep waters of forgetfulness. On that same night, when with a cry she fell, (Like her own mighty idol dashed to earth,) ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... name was Ko-ko, the Owl; and hearing much of the wonderful achievements of the Wearer of the Ball, Ko-ko put on a big look, and announced that he was going to ...
— The Indian Fairy Book - From the Original Legends • Cornelius Mathews
... to say that Blacky is afraid of the dark. It isn't the dark itself that Blacky fears, but it is one who is abroad in the dark. It is Hooty the Owl. Hooty would just as soon dine on Blacky the Crow as he would on any one else, ...
— Bowser The Hound • Thornton W. Burgess
... simple supper at an "Owl" lunch-cart, totally unaware that, across the street, a couple of Cosmos men were waiting for him to come out. And, after this, buying a Socialist paper, he strolled into Evans Park to sit and read, a while, by the red light of ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... existence. Look where you will, in every high place there sits an Ass, settled beyond the reach of all the greatest intellects in this world to pull him down. Over our whole social system, complacent Imbecility rules supreme—snuffs out the searching light of Intelligence with total impunity—and hoots, owl-like, in answer to every form of protest, See how well we all do in the dark! One of these days that audacious assertion will be practically contradicted, and the whole rotten system of modern society will come ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... and her ugly subjects thou dost fright, And sleep, the lazy Owl of night; Asham'd and fearful to appear, They skreen their horrid shapes, with ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... upward through blues and greens and yellows to a spun-gold glitter at their summits. Jack rabbits loped away through the brush. Now and then a coyote, ears pricked up, trotted along, his tail dragging. Tecolote, the little desert owl, came from his hole and sat on the pile of dirt beside it, while his wife peeked out with her round head just above the ground and gave silent approval to her lord and master's ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins
... ten, the moment approaches; if the light does not leave you time to count beyond five, your escape is fixed for the following night; if it reappears no more, it is fixed for the same evening; then the owl's cry, repeated thrice in the courtyard, will be the signal; let down the ladder when ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... iron chest for years. On mounting the cockade, he hail taken up shooting as a martial exercise, inasmuch as the burning of gunpowder was an attendant of the recreation. He had never killed but one bird in his life, and that, was an owl, of which he took the advantage of daylight and his stocking feet to knock off a tree in the deanery grounds, very early after his arrival. In his trials with John, he sometimes pulled trigger ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... more wicked, and more silent questions, than anyone has ever asked on earth before.{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} Trust in life has vanished; life itself has become a problem.—But let no one think that one has therefore become a spirit of gloom or a blind owl! Even love of life is still possible,—but it is a different kind of love.{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} It is the love for a woman ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... the night-sky, rose the quaint, ponderous, but broken walls of the ancient stronghold, where an owl hooted weirdly in the ivy, and where the whispering of the waters ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... their connection with the British. There was Winamac, the Potawatomi, who afterwards slaughtered the surrendered garrison at Fort Dearborn, and boasted of his murder. There were Silver Heels and Pecan, Five Medals and The Owl. But above them all stood Little Turtle, the Miami. He had been present at the defeat of Harmar and the slaughter of St. Clair's army. He had fought against Wayne at Fallen Timbers. In 1797 he had visited the great white father at Philadelphia, ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... The owl he has eyes that are big for his size, And the night like a book he deciphers; "Too-woop!" he asserts, and "Hoo-woo-ip!" he cries, And he means to remark he is awfully wise; But he lags behind us, who are "on" to the lies ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... the Western Sea, they did,— To a land all covered with trees; And they bought an owl and a useful cart, And a pound of rice, and a cranberry-tart, And a hive of silvery bees; And they bought a pig, and some green jackdaws, And a lovely monkey with lollipop paws, And forty bottles of ring-bo-ree, And no end of Stilton cheese. Far and few, far and few, Are ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... An owl answered with a creepy cry of alarm. Selwyn muttered impatiently at the trick played upon him by his nerves, and turning over, was about to settle again to slumber, when he heard a door softly opening. Light footsteps passed ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... keep off the evil eye. If a weasel crosses his path, he stops, and either throws three pebbles into the road, or, with the innate selfishness of fear, lets someone else go before him, and attract to himself the harm which may ensue. He has a similar dread of a screech-owl, whom he compliments in the name of its mistress, Pallas Athene. If he finds a serpent in his house, he sets up an altar to it. If he pass at a four-cross-way an anointed stone, he pours oil on it, kneels ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... occurred in our regiment at this period. Prior to the action of the Nivelle, an owl had perched itself on the tent of one of our officers (Lieut. Doyle). This officer was killed in the battle, and the owl was afterwards seen on Capt. Duncan's tent. His brother-officers quizzed him on the subject, by telling him that he ...
— Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, in the Peninsula, France, and the Netherlands - from 1809 to 1815 • Captain J. Kincaid
... about half through its leg when the man came. I remember that he had a cat with a little red collar on its neck, and an owl in his hand, both of them dead, for he was Giles, the head-keeper, going round his traps. He was a tall man with sandy whiskers and a rough voice, and he carried a single-barrelled gun ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... and were able to supply themselves with more warlike stores than they had possessed before. Aristotle even says that Pericles himself was before this beaten by Melissus in a sea-fight. The Samians branded the figure of an owl on the foreheads of their Athenian prisoners, to revenge themselves for the branding of their own prisoners by the Athenians with the figure of a samaina. This is a ship having a beak turned up like a swine's snout, but with a roomy hull, so as both to carry ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... without resorting to a book. Count the fauna: Eagle River, Bald Eagle, Buffalo Lake, Great Bear Lake, Salmon Falls, Snake River, Wolf Creek, White Fish River, Leech Lake, Beaver Bay, Carp River, Pigeon Falls, Elkhorn, Wolverine, Crane Hill, Rabbit Butte, Owl, Rattlesnake, Curlew, Little Crow, Mullet Lake, Clam Lake, Turtle Creek, Deerfield, Porcupine Tail, Pelican Lake, Kingfisher, Ravens' Spring, Deer Ears, Bee Hill, Fox Creek, White Rabbit—can any one mistake the animals haunting these places in ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... but not towards us Americans. Towards us you are little and insignificant and superfluous. Your eyes, though of wondrous efficacy in their way, blink in our atmosphere like those of an owl in broad sunlight; and if you come flying here, it is the privilege of the smallest birds—of which you are quite at liberty to esteem me one—to pester you back into your ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... unless there was something living inside of it." When the witch-girl heard this her fright increased, so that, to make matters worse, she pulled her gown in under the bed, upon which Clara kneeled down, lifted the coverlet, and found the owl in its nest. Now she had to creep out weeping and howling, ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... is as a worm in a pumpkin." "Thy friend has an acquaintance, and the acquaintance of thy friend has also an acquaintance; be discreet." The unworthy child of a good father is called "vinegar, the son of wine." "If the opportunity fails the thief, he deems himself honest. The cock and owl await together the morning dawn. Says the cock to the owl, 'Light profits me, but how does it profit thee?' Youth is a crown of roses, old age a crown of thorns. Many preach well, but do not practise well. It is the punishment of liars, that men don't listen ...
— Hebrew Literature
... bit o' turkey yes ever put in yer mouth.' An' so he did; an' he said it was the best show he iver was to, and he wouldn't 'a' missed seein' Mary Moran get the prize fur twice the money. An' so he went home with me, ye see, as sober as an owl, and we bought our own turkey; but if he'd gone to the tavern, not a cint would he had of his week's wages, and been drunk beside! An' he used to be swate on Mary too, so there's no knowin' ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... children. At nightfall the village and its surrounding meadows soon become slumberous. The field-paths and lanes become utterly lonely and solemn. Bats swoop down, and around the isolated farms may be heard the strange cry of the owl. It is little wonder that superstition dies slowly in such an atmosphere; and there was one such superstition that long lingered around the Gannel gorge. Perhaps it is not yet quite dead, but is told by some mothers ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... refer to the position occupied by our army more at length, and shall only refer now to the general position of our encampment, as on a wooded plateau, accessible to attack only from the direction of Corinth, the river being in our rear, Snake Creek and Owl Creek on our right flank, and Lick Creek on our left. In places there were small fields with their adjuncts of deserted cabins. Our troops were camped wherever there was an opening in the woods or underbrush sufficiently large for a regiment. ...
— "Shiloh" as Seen by a Private Soldier - With Some Personal Reminiscences • Warren Olney
... of land-birds were driven on board—a case not uncommon during storms—and an owl and a hawk were observed perched on the swinging table on the poop, without shewing any alarm at the presence of the ship's company. It was not noticed what became of them. This circumstance tended to shew the intensity ...
— The Wreck on the Andamans • Joseph Darvall
... about these prairie-dogs (perhaps, considering their size, we should call them prairie-doggies), another thing about them, we say, was that each doggie lived with an owl, or, more correctly, an owl lived with each doggie! This is such an extraordinary fact that we could scarce hope that men would believe us, were our statement not supported by dozens of trustworthy travellers who have visited and written about these regions. The whole plain was covered with these ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... this," said a deep hollow voice; and looking up, Bevis saw the face of the owl at the mouth of a hole in the pollard-tree. He was winking in the light, and could not persuade himself to come out, which was the reason the council was held at the foot of his house, as it was necessary ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... awfully lonely; not a sound, except the frogs croaking their vespers, and one dismal owl screaming in the distance. And how cold it has turned now the sun has gone down; and how ghostly the beeches look in their green mantles; there is something awful in a wood ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... were so filled with sleep that I could not understand anything he said. When we reached the office, where as yet it was hardly light, the Bailiff, behind a huge inkstand and piles of books and papers, looked at me from out of his huge wig like an owl from out its nest, and began: "What's your name? Where do you come from? Can you read, write, and cipher?" And when I assented, he went on, "Well, her Grace, in consideration of your good manners and extraordinary ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... stood, crying, Alas! Alas! and wept, and gnashed their teeth, and groaned; And with the owl, that on her ruins sat, Made dolorous concert in the ear ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... owl boat. Let the public roar and come home early to its wife. And there's that last car that connects with the 12:45 boat at Twenty-second and Hastings. Cut it out. I can't run it for two or three passengers. Let them take an earlier boat home or walk. This is no time for philanthropy. And ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... himself; but when he wished to see human beings, he found Mr. and Mrs. Thaxter very pleasant. Mrs. Thaxter sent Una a necklace of native shells with a gold and coral clasp, Julian a plume made of white owl feathers, and Rosebud a most exquisite wreath of sea-moss upon a card. I kept a journal for my husband, according to his express injunction. The children missed papa miserably, and I could not bear the trial very well. I could not eat, sitting opposite his empty chair at table, and ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... the moonlight on a crooked, half uprooted elm overhanging the creek, until the world grew worshipfully still as it does twenty miles from a railroad; their quiet, contented thoughts undisturbed by the call of the whippoorwills in the near thickets and the hooting of a great owl far ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... and the upper third in Vermont. Its extreme length from north to south is about thirty miles, its breadth varying from one to three miles. It is semi-circular in form and bestudded with islands; while on its western shore rise mountains of no ordinary attractions, among them Owl's Head, which towers about 2,500 feet above the surface of the lake, affording from its summit a panoramic view of surpassing loveliness. It was at "The Outlet" of this lake there was born, Oct. 27, 1834, Helen Mar, the youngest daughter of Abel B. and Polly JOHNSON; and there she spent—with ...
— Canadian Wild Flowers • Helen M. Johnson
... her former husband's honor'd shade Assiduous worship, daily vows she paid: There, when the night, unroll'd her sable pall She hears his voice in doleful murmurs call, While from the roof the fated owl alone 575 In deep complaint prolongs the funeral tone. Beside, what ills had been foretold before, Now on her mind, a dread impression bore. Her aching eyes did broken slumbers close, AEneas like a vengeful fury rose: 580 Alone—forsaken—distant from ...
— The Fourth Book of Virgil's Aeneid and the Ninth Book of Voltaire's Henriad • Virgil and Voltaire
... cried Peterkin. "Nobly spoken, Jack!—Hand me a drop of water, Ralph.—Why, girl, what's wrong with you? You look just like a black owl blinking in the sunshine!" ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... It is unfortunate that I am so often compelled to corroborate your statements, when all the acumen with which you credit my mind is turned towards the task of proving you a purse-proud fool, puffed up in your own conceit, and as short-sighted as an owl in the summer sunlight. However, let us stick to our text. If what I said had been true, although of course you know it isn't, you have nevertheless enough common sense to be aware that I would certainly show a pardonable reluctance about visiting my father's Palace. It is thronged with spies of ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... deserlate till Cheap Jack took it in hand there ain't a owl in the wood that would have liked to live in it; but Jack hammers a bit of wood here, and a plank there, and a bit o' matting up agen the walla, and puta in a stove from Petersfield, and makes it as snug as a burd's nest. I've smoked many a pipe with him alongside ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... thoughts. He was alone and apparently unconscious of the nearness of his companions until a lad about his own age joined him and inquired, "Say, Ralph, what are you thinking of? You look as wise as an owl." ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... it not I that caught you then, And kiss'd you on the saddle-bow? Did not the blue owl mark the men Whose spears stood like ...
— The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems • William Morris
... break the silence, except the faint murmur which now and then the trees will make in the quietest night, as if they were dreaming, and talked in their sleep; for the motion does not seem to pass beyond them, but to swell up and die again in the heart of them. This and the occasional cry of an owl was all that broke the silent flow of the undivided moments,—glacier-like flowing none can tell how. We seldom spoke, and at length the house within seemed possessed by the silence from without; but we were all ear,—one hungry ear, whose ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... artisan, said to himself; "They say he is a cutter of false stones; if so, he would not fear their being stolen. Just as well to know that. I take! Then again, Mother Mathieu, who comes here so often, is a dealer in real; and those she has in her casket are real diamonds. I will put the Owl up to this!" ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... knew. And then there would be high-balls and stories, and he would hurry home to dinner a little late but feeling good, and a little sorry for the poor Standard Oil Company. On this evening as he entered he heard some one say: "Babbitt was in last night as full as a boiled owl." ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... The Lewiston Hermit The Dead Ship of Harpswell The Schoolmaster had not reached Orrington Jack Welch's Death Light Mogg Megone The Lady Ursula Father Moody's Black Veil The Home of Thunder The Partridge Witch The Marriage of Mount Katahdin The Moose of Mount Kineo The Owl Tree A Chestnut Log The Watcher on White Island Chocorua Passaconaway's Ride to Heaven The Ball Game by the Saco The White Mountains The Vision on Mount Adams The Great Carbuncle Skinner's Cave Yet they call it Lover's Leap Salem and other Witchcraft The Gloucester Leaguers Satan ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... rest of the day he hung about the shack, as solemn as an owl. And once in the night he got up and lighted the lamp and came over and studied my face. I blinked up at him sleepily, for I was dog-tired and had been dreaming that we were back in Paris at the Bal des Quatz Arts and were about to finish up with an early ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... issued full-armed from the brain of Zeus, and in this way the child of both wisdom and power; wears a helmet, and bears on her left arm the aegis with the Medusa's head; the olive among trees, and the owl among animals, were sacred ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... this unpleasant episode, had started to go after him, when the weird cry of an owl, a long drawn, tremulous: "Hoo-oo-oo!" came from somewhere in the forest, close at hand. It startled her. ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... offshoots. One would imagine beforehand that no two birds could be more unlike in every respect than the gaudy, noisy, gregarious cockatoos and the sombre, nocturnal, solitary owls. Yet the New Zealand owl-parrot is, to put it plainly, a lory which has assumed all the outer appearance and habits of an owl. A lurker in the twilight or under the shades of night, burrowing for its nest in holes in the ground, it has dingy brown plumage like the owls, with an ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... on strike," said the Brown Owl (he was head of the Ministry of Wisdom). "They always go on strike if ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 3, 1920 • Various
... be mostly actingers or actorines," he allowed. "Say!" turning ferociously to Francis, "what business has a boy looking like an owl? Loosen up, and have ...
— Penny of Top Hill Trail • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... conquest of himself. The haughty empires one did rear have long since crumbled into dust; the wild goat browses in their deserted capitals, the lizard sleeps upon their broken thrones, and the owl hoots from their forgotten altars and ruined fanes; but the philosophy of the other lives on from age to age, to point the folly of such mad rainbow-chasing as that of him who thought to make the ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... deep folds on each side of his mouth. The round orbits of his eyes radiated fine wrinkles. More than ever he recalled an irritable and staring fowl—something like a cross between a parrot and an owl. He still manifested an outspoken dislike for "intriguing fellows." He seized every opportunity to state that he did not pick up his rank ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... away; still Rosalind remained at the window. As there was no inclination to sleep, she determined to remain in her position until morning. She knew that it must be far beyond midnight, and at the thought there sprung up a faint hope within her breast. But she was startled by the dismal hoot of an owl. She sprang up, with a beating heart, listening intently and painfully; but no other sound was heard. Trying to smile at her trepidation, she again seated herself and listened; in a moment that cry was repeated, now in an opposite direction ...
— The Ranger - or The Fugitives of the Border • Edward S. Ellis
... was a little owl, a dog, a nigger, a bust, a Cupid in gold, bronze, china or enamel, it had to have some human meaning, some recognisable expression which made it lovable and familiar to him. He did not care for the fantastic, ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... either one of two women, throwing the other overboard. He was bound to marry: he was bound to take to himself one of them: and whichever one he selected would cast a lustre on his reputation. At least she would rescue him from the claws of Lady Busshe, and her owl's hoot of "Willow Pattern", and her hag's shriek of "twice jilted". That flying infant Willoughby—his unprotected little incorporeal omnipresent Self (not thought of so much as passionately felt for)—would not be scoffed at as the luckless with women. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... "Brothers of Pity and other tales of men and beasts," will be found Among the Merrows; A Week spent in a Glass Pond; Tiny's Tricks and Toby's Tricks; The Owl in the Ivy Bush, and Owlhoots I. II., whilst Sunflowers and a Rushlight has been put amongst the Flower Stories in ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... serve as the New York home of F. Hopkinson Smith's Colonel Carter of Cartersville, was at one time the quarters of the Tile Club, where, in the golden days, men ceased to be known by the stiff and formal names used in more ceremonious surroundings, and became instead the Owl, or the Griffin, or the Pagan, or the Chestnut, or the Puritan, or the O'Donoghue, or the Bone, or the Grasshopper, or the Marine, or the Terrapin, or the Gaul, or the Bulgarian, or Briareus, or Sirius, ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... ponder like an owl," he said at last; "You always did, and here you have a cause. For I'm a confirmation of the past, A vengeance, and a flowering of ...
— The Man Against the Sky • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... good food we discourse far into the night of weird things tinged with our friend's strange superstition and curious lore. Outside the coyotes howl, far away on the plain, and the mournful cry of the tecolote, or Mexican night owl, faintly reaches my ears, as, wrapped in my blankets with a saddle for a pillow, I fall asleep upon ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... upon a vast group of dark figures and a thousand gleaming eyes peered out of the velvety canopy around us. The mournful distressing notes of the ghost bird broke the stillness. The scream of some passing night bird replied as if in answer to their weird calls. A great horned owl made us shiver with his "hoo, hoo, hoo," as the flame shot upward in scarlet circles. The night wind stirred the branches, which sighed audibly, and died away leaving the place lonelier than before. Then the sharp bark of a fox rang out from a neighboring ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... incident of the passing owl that he had come upon, and startled into uttering its shriek of dread on finding itself suddenly in such close contact with its great enemy, man, having confused him a little as to his direction, and it was some moments before he was ...
— The New Forest Spy • George Manville Fenn
... painting, the vases were decorated with incised patterns filled with white clay. The productions of sculpture were limited to carving of small flat idols of Minerva [Greek: glaukopis][6] of marble, almost in the forms of two discs, which adhered to each other, and upon which the owl's face is rudely scratched. The Trojan treasure certainly shows more art, but it is characterized by an absence of ornamentation. In Mycenae, on the contrary, the monuments which I have brought to light show a high state of civilization, and the ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... it!" she exclaimed. "Now I know why you're sitting there like an owl this morning! In love with a fair unknown, are you, Dick? Be careful. Monte Carlo is full of young ladies whom it would be just as well to know a little about before you thought of taking ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... obey ye, ye was allus a good perwider and I don't perpose to see yer want for nothin', but ye have got to hold up yer right hand and swear to obey me for the rest of yer nateral life,' and he did it. He got well, and he is tougher'n a biled owl, if he is eighty-six. But the cold sorter settled in his ears, and he's deef as an adder. Ef angel Gabriel blew his horn now I'm ...
— Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks - A Picture of New England Home Life • Charles Felton Pidgin
... Vane, "she lies awake and wonders. And then she gets out of bed, and perhaps the moon is up, shining cold and white on the water that lies in front of her window. And the trees are throwing black shadows, and somewhere in the depths of an old patriarch an owl is hooting mournfully. For a while she stands in front of her open window. The air is warm, and the faint scent of roses comes to her from outside. A great pride wells up in her—a great pride and a great love, for the sleeping glory in front of her belongs to her; to her and her father ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... heaven. What I saw was the reflection of the after-glow, but the glow in the sky was hidden. Sometimes, as the rocks were fading again and a star was already glittering like steel against the dark blue, another flush arose in the dusk, and a faint redness still rested upon the high crags, when the owl flew forth with a shriek to hunt along ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... uninhabited, and the keys either lost, or consigned to the care of some aged butler or housekeeper, whose trembling steps, about the middle of the second volume, were doomed to guide the hero, or heroine, to the ruinous precincts? Would not the owl have shrieked and the cricket cried in my very title-page? and could it have been possible for me, with a moderate attention to decorum, to introduce any scene more lively than might be produced by the jocularity of a clownish but faithful valet, or the garrulous narrative ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... jack-rabbit, whose black bead-like eye betrays his presence among the snow-drifts in spite of his snow-white fur, is common enough; and the childlike wailing of the coyotes is heard every night. But with the exception of the shriek of the snow-owl or the yelping of a fox emerged from his lair, there is no sound of life during seven or eight or nine months of winter on the Barren Grounds; unless the traveller is able to hear the rushing sound—some can hear it, others cannot—of ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... black on a purple sky. The after-glow in the west had faded. It was dark in the cloisters. Thunder growled in the distance; an owl ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... of twisted snakes: Which in the nicest fashion curl'd, (Like toupees[2] of this upper world) With flower of sulphur powder'd well, That graceful on his shoulders fell; An adder of the sable kind In line direct hung down behind: The owl, the raven, and the bat, Clubb'd for a feather to his hat: His coat, a usurer's velvet pall, Bequeath'd to Pluto, corpse and all. But, loath his person to expose Bare, like a carcass pick'd by crows, A lawyer, o'er his hands and face Stuck artfully a parchment case. ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... every one in the town knows which way to go," answered their guide; "and it isn't often we have visitors. Last week a gray owl stopped with us for a couple of days, and we had a fine ball in her honor. But you are the first humans that have ever been entertained in our town, so it's quite an event with us." A few minutes later she said: "Here we are, at the Mayor's house," and as they ...
— Twinkle and Chubbins - Their Astonishing Adventures in Nature-Fairyland • L. Frank (Lyman Frank) Baum
... squirrel, with a funny little yelp and a troglodyte habitation, lives in villages or cities of from five hundred to five thousand dens, each (or most of them) tenanted in common with him by a harmless little Owl and a Rattlesnake of questionable amiability. The Owl sits by the mouth of the hole till driven away by your approach, when he follows his confrere's example by diving; the Rattlesnake stays usually below, to give any prowling, thieving prairie-wolf, or other carnivorous intruder, the worst ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... in my face and very wickedly. I gazed at her as with dazzled eyes—I suppose as the feathered prey do at the owl that glares on them by night. I neither moved back nor forward, but stared at her ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... with the ol' man. You don't know what that means. I do. Mos' usually, askin' a lady's pardon for the way of sayin' it, it means Hell. Capital H. An' to-night the ol' man has got the door locked an' he's two games behind an' he's sore as a hoot-owl an' he says that anybody as breaks in on his play is— No, I can't say it; not in the presence of a lady. There's times when the ol' man is so awful vi'lent he's purty near vile ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... industrious Darry with owl-like solemnity. Finally the latter handed a duplicate receipt and a copy of the ...
— Bart Stirling's Road to Success - Or; The Young Express Agent • Allen Chapman
... up the amiable impudence you did, to persuade the commander-in-chief to give me letters to the ambassador: nor could I have got up such a turn-out, nor have fitted the turn-out so well as you do. I should have been as stupid as an owl, just doing what I have done the whole of the blessed morning for want of your company—looking after one of the floating bridges across the river, and spitting into the stream, just to add my mite to the ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat
... nine o'clock on a working day morning, steady, reliable, dependable, automatic Andrew Daney having imbibed Dutch courage in lieu of Nature's own brand, was, for the first time in his life, jingled to an extent comparable to that of a boiled owl. ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... at our desire, The little clamorous owl shall sit Through her still time; and we aspire To make a law (and know not it) Unto the life ...
— Poems • Alice Meynell
... the night an owl hooted, and Nap turned his head sharply, as one accustomed to take note of every sound. A while longer he stood, seeming to listen, every limb alert and tense, then swiftly he wheeled and gazed full at the drooping ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... from the dappled flatting of the heav'ns Looks out the ev'ning star.—— The lover skulking in the neighb'ring copse, (Whose half-seen form shewn thro' the thicken'd air, Large and majestic, makes the tray'ller start, And spreads the story of the haunted grove,) Curses the owl, whose loud ill-omen'd scream, With ceaseless spite, robes from his watchful ear The well known footsteps of his darling maid; And fretful, chaces from his face the night-fly, Who buzzing round his head doth often skim, With flutt'ring wing, across his glowing cheek: For all but him in deep ...
— Poems, &c. (1790) • Joanna Baillie
... though not so loud as a screech owl, and then she tottered, swayed, and lost her senses. If she'd fallen to the left no harm had overtook her; but to the right she fell and dropped unconscious, face forward ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
... in short, carry a map in his brain of any region that he has marched or galloped through. Another man takes no note of any of these things; always follows somebody else's lead when he can, and gets lost if he is left to himself; a mere owl in daylight. Just so some men have an eye for an equation, and would read at sight the one that you puzzled over. It is told of Sir Isaac Newton that he required no demonstration of the propositions in Euclid's Geometry, but ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... of all kinds, rows of bee-hives standing in the sun, roses and raspberries growing side by side. The breaths of thyme and balm, lavender and myrtle, were always in that parlour. You know the sheep-fold and the paddock, the old tree over the west gable where the owl made his nest—the owl that used to come and sit on our school-room windowsill and hoot at night. You know, the sun-dial where the screaming peacock used to perch and spread his tail; the dove-cote, where the silver-necks and fan-tails used to coo and ruffle their ...
— The Late Miss Hollingford • Rosa Mulholland
... it was an owl; The other he said nay; The third said 'twas an old man, And his beard ...
— The Nursery Rhyme Book • Unknown
... the carriage at a half mile beyond Servas, put his head out of the window, made a trumpet of his hands, and gave the hoot of a screech-owl. The imitation was so perfect that another owl answered from ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... night comes like an owl to its lair, The black clouds follow fast, And the sun-gleams die, and the lightnings glare, And the ships go heaving past, past, past— The ships go heaving past! Bar the doors, and higher, higher Pile the faggots on the fire: Now abroad, by ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... the Poema Morale in the same MS. has undergone a drastic revision which sets it apart among the versions of that poem, and the version of the Owl and Nightingale has suffered, though not to the same extent. On the other hand MS. T was copied by a man who was incapable of remodelling it; though a ruin, it often preserves ...
— Selections from early Middle English, 1130-1250 - Part I: Texts • Various
... that he "shall live." Jesus says: "I am the light of the world. He that followeth me shall have the light of LIFE. In him is light, and the light is the LIFE of men." But if the sinner, like the owl, closes his eyes to the light of truth, and his ears to the voice of the Lord, he will abide in death, and, like the owl, love darkness rather ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... 'neath his foot, And made an eerie sound, A neighboring owl began to hoot, All else was ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... right out in the night, like a hoot owl only fiercer!" insisted one of her followers. "And she ain't safe to be loose with a ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... That was why Owl Eyes, the Wisest Medicine-man, invited two of his cronies to sit with him on the bluff overlooking the salt-marsh and watch the ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... God save you, sir, and give you all contentment in your fair choice, here! Before, I was the bird of night to you, the owl; but now I am the messenger of peace, a dove, and bring you the glad wishes of many friends to the ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... dose, we confess, is pretty potent, and skilfully enough prepared. But what shall we say to the ass of Silenus, who, if we may trust to classic lore, by his own proper sounds, without thanks to cat or screech-owl, dismayed and put to rout a whole army of giants? Here was anti-music with a vengeance,—a whole Pan-Dis-Harmonicon in a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... Germans will find it out before I'm gathered to the bosom of Abraham. I have a right to disapprove of my President if I feel like it, but I'll be shot if I'll let anybody else pick on him." And Cappy shook his head emphatically several times like a squinch-owl. ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... followed,—miles and miles beside roaring brooks and mist-filled ravines, through gloomy woods where no light entered, and over bare ridges where the big stars sparkled just over his ears as he hung, limp as a rabbit skin, from his mother's great jaws. An owl hooted dismally, whoo-hooo! and though he knew the sound well in his peaceful nights, it brought now a certain shiver. The wind went sniffing suspiciously among the spruce branches; a startled bird ...
— Northern Trails, Book I. • William J. Long
... stood the crooked and charred stems of furze with which it had been covered before the fire passed. A white owl floated rather than flew by, following the edge of the forest; from far down the slope came the chattering notes of a brook-sparrow, showing that there was water in the hollow. Some large animal moved into the white mist that hung there and immediately concealed it, ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... can,' he called to her; 'tell me if you see a squirrel stirring, or the eyes of an owl looking out ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... pace as I could manage, uttering from time to time a lusty halloo, in hopes of making myself heard by some belated reaper or returning woodman. But my calls had no other effect than to awake the mocking echoes of the wood, or the mysterious and almost human shout of the screech-owl, and to leave me to a still more intense feeling of solitude, when these had died away. I found myself at length in a deep, hollow field-road, like those which abound in South Devon, and high overhead, on the lofty bank, stood a two-branched, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 441 - Volume 17, New Series, June 12, 1852 • Various
... reply to "The Appeal to the Dead," that Barres, like an owl perched on a cypress in a graveyard, ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... leaves would glimmer white in the wind at times. The tree was full of giant birds. Every now and then, one would sweep through, with a great noise. But, except an occasional chirp, sounding like a shrill pipe in a great organ, they made no noise. All at once an owl began to hoot. He thought he was singing. As soon as he began, other birds replied, making rare game of him. To their astonishment, the children found they could understand every word they sang. And what they said was something ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... with herself that she would turn the page before she ate another. In fact she slept. But then her day had been a long one, Mother Stuart had thrown the tea-cosy;—there are formidable sights in the streets, and though Florinda was ignorant as an owl, and would never learn to read even her love letters correctly, still she had her feelings, liked some men better than others, and was entirely at the beck and call of life. Whether or not she was a virgin seems a matter of no importance whatever. Unless, indeed, it is ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... for me in the morning?" the old wheels rattled all the way out the Riverfield ribbon, and I thought an old owl hooted the question at me from a dead tree beside the road, while I felt also that a mocking-bird sang it from a thicket of dogwood in ghostly bloom opposite. "Will there be word in ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... light" in him—caliginem nimiae lucis, which makes him as inaccessible to us as the other, the over-proportion of that glorious majesty of God to our low spirits, being as the sun in its brightness to a night owl, which is dark midnight to it. Hence it is, that those holy men who know most of God, think they know least, because they see more to be known but infinitely surpassing knowledge. Pride is the daughter ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... croon me a lullaby, And trickle the white moonbeams To my face on the balsam where I lie While the owl hoots at ...
— Camping For Boys • H.W. Gibson
... Euripides, The Captain crowed out, "Euoi, praise the God! Ooep, boys, bring our owl-shield to the fore! Out with our Sacred Anchor! Here she stands, Balaustion! Strangers, greet the lyric girl! Euripides? Babai! what a word there 'scaped Your teeth's enclosure, quoth my grandsire's song Why, fast as snow in Thrace, the voyage through, Has she been falling thick in flakes of ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... the gleaming puddles—dimensionless pools of thin, unsubstantial gold. Turning sharply to the left, she followed a narrow wagon road, serving to avoid a dark body on the ground. She looked up as an owl hooted mournfully from a solitary tree. Just ahead of her she could see the trestle that led to the railroad bridge and the steps mounting up to it. The ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... Tacitus, and Livy, and Cicero; after Horatius of the bridge, and Cincinnatus, the farmer oligarch; after Scipio, and Cassius, and Constantine, and Caesar. Her war-eagle, blinded by flying too near the sun, came reeling down through the heavens, and the owl of desolation and darkness made its nest in the forsaken aerie. Mexican Empire, dead! French Empire, dead! You see it is no unusual thing for a government to perish. And in the same necrology of nations, and in the same cemetery of expired governments, will ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... of grass are plump, roly-poly, black-and-white birds, with soft musical voices and the gentlest possible manners. They may have already brought out one brood in thick, deep grassy nests, well lined with rabbit fur or Snow Owl feathers, that they know so well how to tuck under a protecting ledge of rock or bunch of grass. Now and then a male Snowflake will take a little flight and sing as merrily as his cousin the Goldfinch, but he never stays long away from the ground where seeds are ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... they loved to lie up in the airy wooden belfry; the great gaping bell hanging darkly above them, the mouldering cross-beams glimmering far up under the dim shadows of the roof, where dwelt a great brown owl that, unfrightened at their familiar presence, stared down at them with his round, solemn eyes. Below them stretched the white walls of the garden, beyond them the vineyard, and beyond that again the far ...
— Otto of the Silver Hand • Howard Pyle
... corresponding bones of the living apteryx. Among these relics are the 'skulls' and 'mandibles' of two genera, the 'Dinornis' and 'Palapteryx'; and of an extinct genus, 'Notornis', allied to the 'Rallidae'; and the mandibles of a species of 'Nestor', a genus of nocturnal owl-like parrots, of which only two living species ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... owls at midnight, Hooting, laughing in the forest, "What is that?" he cried in terror; "What is that," he said, "Nokomis?" And the good Nokomis answered: "That is but the owl and owlet, Talking in their native language, Talking, scolding at ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... there on the lone praire-e-e Where the owl all night hoots mournfulle-e-e And the blizzard beats and the wind blows free O'er his lonely grave on ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... De big Owl holler en cry fer his mate, My honey, my love! Oh, don't stay long! Oh, don't stay late! My honey, my love! Hit aint so mighty fur ter de Good-by Gate, My honey, my love! Whar we all got ter go w'en we sing out de night, My honey, my ...
— Nights With Uncle Remus - Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation • Joel Chandler Harris
... you having a cosy tte—tte with a young barrister of many inches and little brains," she laughed. "Come, Lorraine, spout away. What is your favourite hors d'oeuvre? Did you feel like a boiled owl at your first appearance? And which horse do you back ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... said the peacock there, "The Lord of Love, that mighty prince, y-wis, He is received here and ev'rywhere: Now Jubilate sing:" "What meaneth this?" Said then the linnet; "welcome, Lord of bliss!" Out start the owl with "Benedicite," "What meaneth all this merry fare?"* ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... 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
... watch her with fascinated eyes; and for every one she has sweet and gracious words and beaming smiles; she holds them to the last. The children troop about her as she is led away to change her bridal-dress for the journey. 'Tis approaching midnight and the "owl train" leaves within the hour; and they hang about the stairways waiting for her reappearance, and hover in mysterious fascination about Captain Ray as he comes in his travelling suit of mufti, and wonder why he should discard his uniform and ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... Sheriff, The egg-nogs gethered him in; And Shelby's boy Leviticus Was, New Year's, tight as sin; And along in March the Golyers Got so drunk that a fresh-biled owl Would 'a' looked 'longside o' them two young men, ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay
... our times, was never found fault with. How finely, how, clearly, has Hippolytus, Bishop of Porto pointed out beforehand the power of Antichrist, the times of Luther! They call him, therefore, "a most babyish writer, an owl." Cyprian, the delight and glory of Africa, that French critic Caussee, and the Centuriators of Magdeburg, have termed "stupid, God-forsaken corrupter of repentance." What harm has he done? He has written On Virgins, On the Lapsed, On the Unity of the Church, such ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion
... a huge saber, Friar Tuck has forgotten his cowl; And we're quite at a stand-still with Weber, For want of a lizard and owl: And then, for our funeral procession, Pray get us a love of a pall; Or how shall we make an impression On feelings, at ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... eyelids again. Or you drive by a little creek where there are bushes and hear the bird, called by the steppe dwellers "the sleeper," call "Asleep, asleep, asleep!" while another laughs or breaks into trills of hysterical weeping—that is the owl. For whom do they call and who hears them on that plain, God only knows, but there is deep sadness and lamentation in their cry. . . . There is a scent of hay and dry grass and belated flowers, but the scent is heavy, ...
— The Bishop and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... of the karan grass and tied to his legs, and made a chain of the grass and let him down to the earth. When he reached the earth he was no longer a man but was an owl." ...
— The Wild Tribes of Davao District, Mindanao - The R. F. Cummings Philippine Expedition • Fay-Cooper Cole
... the grave, omniscient owls, like the foreman of a grand jury, stood a majestic "grand duc," the largest owl of the Pyrenees, resembling much our Virginian species,—a donation from a French savant, Le Frere Ogerien. The owls have ever been to me a deep subject of study, their defiant aspect, thoughtful countenances, in which ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... his way up the stairs, as pleased with the darkness as an owl who grips his prey, opened and shut his door softly, listened to see whether he could hear any noise,—made sure that, to all appearances, Cosette and Toussaint were asleep, and plunged three or four matches into the bottle of the Fumade ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... to stand always on the one spot, felt himself swaying in a drunken stupor. He blinked at the lecturer like an angry owl—the blinking regard of a sodden mind, yet fiery with a spiteful rage. His wrath was rising and falling like a quick tide. He would have liked one moment to give a rein to the Gourlay temper, and let the lecturer have it hot and strong; the next, ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... damnation!" he exclaimed, as he strode away after the encounter; "'tis the ugliest yet. A yellow-faced girl brat, with eyes like an owl's in an ivy-bush, and with a voice like a very peacocks. Another mawking, plain slut that no man will take off ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... received the newcomer in perfect silence, his head raised high, his thin mouth set in an Ugly line—very much as an eagle might receive an owl which floundered by mistake onto the same crag, far above his element. The eagle hesitated between scorn of the visitor and a faint desire to pounce on him and rend him to pieces. That glittering eye, however, was soon dull with wonder, when ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... live full many an age in latter times: Who makes a ballad for an alehouse door, Shall live in future times for evermore: Then ( )[41] thy muse shall live so long, As drafty ballads to thy praise are sung. But what's his device? Parnassus with the sun and the laurel?[42] I wonder this owl dares look on the sun; and I marvel this goose flies not the laurel: his device might have been better, a fool going into the market-place to be seen, with this motto: Scribimus indocti; or, a poor beggar gleaning of ears in the end of harvest, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... garden an owl was hooting and the night air breathed on him its perfume of lilac and violets. How quiet it was and how fragrant and dim! one could scarcely distinguish between the dewy glimmer of turf and the dark island-like thickets of guelder-rose and other flowering ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... war taking its revenge; Bonaparte, in his dawn, had met it in Italy, and superbly defeated it—the old owl fled before the young vulture. The old tactics had been not only overthrown, but scandalized. Who was this Corsican of six-and-twenty years of age? What meant this splendid ignoramus, who, having everything against him, nothing for him, without provisions, ammunition, guns, shoes, almost ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... stuckuppy snipsters, as jaw about quiet and peace, Who would silence the gay "constant-screamer" and line the Thames banks with perlice; Who sneer about "'ARRY at 'Enley," and sniff about "cads on the course," As though it meant "Satan in Eden"? I'll 'owl at sich ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 15, 1891 • Various
... sound is heard in the forest; the sportsmen who look out on the snowy scene around them observe nothing; all without is dreary silence, broken at intervals by the poor ruminating creatures in front, the cry of a solitary owl, the fall of some dead branch which age and the tempest has separated from the giant oak, the sudden spring of the squirrel awakened by the noise, and, in the interior of the cabin, by the soft gurgling of the ruby wine escaping ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... Yet oft I feel thy sacred might, While concords wing their distant flight. 20 Such Power inspires thy holy son Sable clerk of Tiverton! And oft where Otter sports his stream, I hear thy banded offspring scream. Thou Goddess! thou inspir'st each throat; 25 'Tis thou who pour'st the scritch-owl note! Transported hear'st thy children all Scrape and blow and squeak and squall; And while old Otter's steeple rings, Clappest hoarse ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... among the country people that every bird chose its mate on Valentine's day; and at one time it was the custom for young folks to go out before daylight on that morning and try to catch an owl and two sparrows in a net. If they succeeded, it was a good omen, and entitled them to gifts from the villagers. Another fashion among them was to write the valentine, tie it to an apple or orange, and steal up to the ...
— Our Holidays - Their Meaning and Spirit; retold from St. Nicholas • Various
... stubble fields they went, till by-and-by they were taking a short cut through a carriage drive in Owl's Nest Park, as Oscar informed Inna. It was a pretty bowery walk, overarched with beeches and elms in all their autumn glory, and full of the clamour of rooks. Here they met an old lady in a wheel-chair, pushed by a page-boy—such ...
— The Heiress of Wyvern Court • Emilie Searchfield
... midges, Now the tired planes drone homeward through the haze, And distant wood-fires wink behind the ridges, And the first flare some timorous Hun betrays; Now no shell circulates, but all men brood Over their evening food; The bats flit warily and owl and rat With muffled cries their shadowy loves pursue, And pleasant, Corporal, it is to chat In this hushed moment with a man ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 14, 1917 • Various
... silence, except the faint murmur which now and then the trees will make in the quietest night, as if they were dreaming, and talked in their sleep; for the motion does not seem to pass beyond them, but to swell up and die again in the heart of them. This and the occasional cry of an owl was all that broke the silent flow of the undivided moments,—glacier-like flowing none can tell how. We seldom spoke, and at length the house within seemed possessed by the silence from without; but we were all ear,—one hungry ear, whose famine ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... to be heard all around them, but "familiarity breeds contempt," and from Max down they were all accustomed to hearing similar noises whenever they spent nights in the open. The owl would whinny or hoot according to his species; the loon send forth his agonizing and weird shriek from some distant lake; a fox might bark sharply and fretfully, or two quarrelsome 'coons dispute over a bit of food they had discovered—all this went with the camping ...
— At Whispering Pine Lodge • Lawrence J. Leslie
... hours, Gertrude, but my owl-visit to the steamer was highly instructive, and when we get to sea, you all will be delighted to help me complete the study of the marine ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... me! As fresh and lusty Ver foul Winter doth exceed— As morning bright, with scarlet sky, doth pass the evening's weed— As mellow pears above the crabs esteemed be— So doth my love surmount them all, whom yet I hap to see! The oak shall olives bear, the lamb the lion fray, The owl shall match the nightingale in tuning of her lay, Or I my love let slip out of mine entire heart, So deep reposed in my breast is she for her desart! For many blessed gifts, O happy, happy land! Where Mars and Pallas strive to make their glory most to stand! Yet, land, ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... and plaintive air Made delicate music far away: A hill-fox barked before its lair: The white owl ...
— Christmas in Legend and Story - A Book for Boys and Girls • Elva S. Smith
... whose invariable custom is to foretell death, it must, I think, be classified with that species of elementals which I have named—for want of a more appropriate title—CLANOGRIAN. CLANOGRIANS embrace every kind of national and family ghost, such as The White Owl of the Arundels, the Drummer of the Airlies, and the Banshee of the O'Neills ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... villain in all his actions.... That Thugut is caballing.... Pray keep an eye upon the rascal, and you will soon find what I say is true. Let us hang these three miscreants, and all will go smooth." Suvaroff was not more complimentary. "How can that desk-worm, that night-owl, direct an army from his dusky nest, even if he had the sword of ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... mother said that, and Ben gave a faint giggle, as if he would like to join in if he only had the strength to do it. But his legs shook under him, and he felt a queer dizziness; so he could only hold on to Sancho, and blink at the light like a young owl. ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott
... forest song. Jinnie had backed against the wall as she played, and when out of her soul came the twitter of the morning birds, the babbling of the brook on its way to the sea, the scream of the owl in a high woodland tree, Lafe turned to watch her, and from that moment until she dropped exhausted into a chair, he did not take his eyes ...
— Rose O'Paradise • Grace Miller White
... ended in a sheep pasture." The Poquette Carry Road, known to the legislature of its state as "The Rainy-Day Railroad," is even more indifferently located, for it twists for six miles, from water to water, through as tangled and lonely a wilderness as ever owl hooted in. ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day
... chance in five to save my life. Still, I'd be an experiment! Before I went off under the stuff I told them who I was, for I'd heard they were sometimes fairly decent to enemy aviators, and I hoped to get a message through to my people. I was feeling as stupid as an owl, but I did think I saw a change come over the men's faces when they heard my name. Later, putting two and two together, I concluded that Germany was just the kind of business nation to know all about the dear old Governor. ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... spreading shade. The jealous queen started in rage; She kick'd her crown, and beat her page: "Bring me my magic wand," she cries; "Under that primrose, there it lies; I'll change the silly, saucy chit, Into a flea, a louse, a nit, A worm, a grasshopper, a rat, An owl, a monkey, hedgehog, bat. But hold, why not by fairy art Transform the wretch into— Ixion once a cloud embraced, By Jove and jealousy well placed; What sport to see proud Oberon stare, And flirt it with a pet en l'air!" Then thrice she stamp'd the trembling ground, ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... the marble courts of the palace. I love the gloom of night for its softness, the song of the nightingale in the ivory moonlight, the rustle of the breeze in the dark rose-thickets, and the odour of the sleeping flowers in my gardens; I love even the cry of the owl from the prophet's tower, and the soft thick sound of the bat's wings, as he flits past the netting of my window. I love it all, for the whole earth is rich and young and good to touch, and most sweet to live in. And I love ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... plentifully fed; but they were now to know the pains of hunger, and the ills which follow upon a meagre diet. The hunters were daily reporting increasingly bad luck in the chase; some days would yield nothing; upon other days the camp would heartily welcome an owl, an eagle, or a bag of insignificant small birds of any sort, or even a wolf—anything that had flesh on ...
— Lewis and Clark - Meriwether Lewis and William Clark • William R. Lighton
... and Wisconsin lumber camps could arise at 4:30 A.M., eat a patent pail full of dried apples soaked with Young Hyson and sweetened with Persian glucose, go out to the timber with a lantern, hew down the giants of the forest, with the snow up to the pit of his stomach, till the gray owl in the gathering gloom whooped and hooted in derision, and all for $12 per month and ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... resulting-force! It is ever so. Savage fighting Heptarchies: their fighting is an ascertainment, who has the right to rule over whom; that out of such waste-bickering Saxondom a peacefully cooeperating England may arise. Seek through this Universe; if with other than owl's eyes, thou wilt find nothing nourished there, nothing kept in life, but what has right to nourishment and life. The rest, look at it with other than owl's eyes, is not living; is all dying, all as good as dead! Justice was ordained from the foundations of ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... which to rivet the attention of the family group over the fire in the winter evenings,—stop at every ruined wall over which the lizard is harmlessly creeping; stop at every massive tower in which the owl is screeching—at every large isolated stone under which the serpent is hissing; linger along each tortuous path, and your peasant guide will tell you a tradition ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... cautious movement asserting itself even here, and with tremulous, withered hands, lighted his candle. Then he put on his piebald dressing-gown and his carpet slippers, and sat on the declivity of his bed, blinking at the light, as wide awake as any owl. ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... with the wisdom of an old owl, "mark the curl of his lip, and the bold, defiant stare of the eye. Mark the covert smile on that face, as if he were really laughing at us now. All those things are significant—mighty significant. You do not dream of the treachery hidden beneath ...
— Frank Merriwell's Bravery • Burt L. Standish
... land-birds were driven on board—a case not uncommon during storms—and an owl and a hawk were observed perched on the swinging table on the poop, without shewing any alarm at the presence of the ship's company. It was not noticed what became of them. This circumstance tended to shew the intensity of ...
— The Wreck on the Andamans • Joseph Darvall
... in a castle all decay He nestled out of sight. "O why," said he, "should mind like mine "Midst gosling-flock be lost? "In learning I was meant to shine!" And up his bill he tossed. "I'll hide," said he, "and in the dark "I'll like an owl cry out ("In wisdom owls are birds of mark), "And none shall find me out!" And so from turret hooted he At all he saw and heard; Hoo-hoo! Hoo-hoo! What melody! And what a silly bird! At length a Starling which had flown Down on the Castle wall Thus spake: "Why what a simple drone "You are ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... gloomy and sad to him, and the scene was as solemn as a funeral. There were no sounds to be heard but the monotonous chirp of the cricket, and the dismal piping of the frogs in the meadow. Even the owl and the whip-poor-will had ceased their nocturnal notes, and the stars looked more gloomy than he had ever seen ...
— Try Again - or, the Trials and Triumphs of Harry West. A Story for Young Folks • Oliver Optic
... ankles; pitiful old cloth shoes; a patched coat of white drill with frogging across the front such as Chinese mess boys wear; and a battered, rimless straw hat. He drew near the table with weary feet, hesitatingly and dazed, as though he had lost his way, peering about like an owl thrust into the light of mid-day from a ...
— Isle o' Dreams • Frederick F. Moore
... this moment he retires apace. His fires are dark; all sounds have ceased that way Save voice of owl or mongrel wintering there. But, were he nigh, these movements I detail Would knock ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... arrive here, with a few mutilated and shapeless remains of baggage, I cannot tell, because I am no longer myself. I have been travelling in a condition of perpetual fright; and I think that I must have looked awhile ago in this bright city like an owl bewildered by sunshine. To-night it is much worse! Wishing to obtain a glimpse of popular manners, I went to the Strada di Porto, where I now am. All about me animated throngs of people crowd and ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... distinguished with ease. Even Enoch, bred in the wilderness and possessing much knowledge of wood-ranging, heard only the coarser sounds. Therefore he lay half dreaming for some moments after the Indian raised his head and lent an attentive ear to some noise which came from far away. The night-owl's hoot was intermittent; a lone wolf howled mournfully on the hillside; in the swamp a catamount screamed as it pounced upon its prey. But it was none of these sounds which had attracted the Indian's attention. ...
— With Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga • W. Bert Foster
... acknowledges it!" roared the magician. "Wretch, dotard, owl, mole, miserable buzzard! I have no reason to tell thee now that thy form is monstrous, that children cry, that cowards turn pale, that teeming matrons shudder to behold it. It is not thy fault that thou art thus ungainly: but wherefore so blind? wherefore so conceited of thyself! I tell thee, ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... you can,' he called to her; 'tell me if you see a squirrel stirring, or the eyes of an owl looking out of ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... Warwickshire to-day. The halcyon or kingfisher, the white-breasted water-ouzel, the skylark, the "ruddock" or robin-redbreast, the wren, the green plover, the woodcock—these serve for some of his moods; but he mentions eagle, kite, hawk, buzzard, owl, falcon, cormorant, and a number of others, always with discretion and with the full measure of knowledge vouchsafed to his time. Classical lore and country superstitions are sometimes found in his references, but the most of them point to the poet's own loving observation at a time when ...
— William Shakespeare - His Homes and Haunts • Samuel Levy Bensusan
... nearly reached the door of the cottage when once more she halted, rooted in her tracks. Out of the unnatural silence of the night, close upon the edge of the clearing, boomed the cry of the great horned owl. It was a sound she had often heard here in the northern night—this hooting of an owl; but, somehow, this sound was different. Once more her heart thumped wildly against her ribs. Her fists clenched, and she peered tensely toward the wall of the scrub timber that showed silent and ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... shadows by every boulder, and most things looked asleep except the rill that went on running. Only we and the rabbits, and the night moths and the beetles, seemed to be stirring. An occasional bat appeared and vanished like a spectral illusion, and I saw one owl flap across the moor with level wings ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... luck!" he thought. "She is now as blind as an owl. If only I can escape from talking to ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... love, And thou art a strorm That breaks black in the sky, And, sweeping headlong, Drenches and cowers each tree, And at the panting end There is no sound Save the melancholy cry of a single owl— ...
— War is Kind • Stephen Crane
... yonder ivy-mantled tower, The moping owl does to the moon complain Of such as, wandering near her secret bower, Molest ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... that reached my ears was that of my own footsteps. I slowly proceeded, stopping occasionally, and listening and enjoying the profound repose and the solemn, pure light, so suited to the ruined magnificence around me. As I approached the Coliseum the shriek of an owl and the answering echo broke the stillness for a moment, and ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... of this bird. It was one of her legends that a little boy was once standing just outside of the teepee (tent), crying vigorously for his mother, when Hinakaga swooped down in the darkness and carried the poor little fellow up into the trees. It was well known that the hoot of the owl was commonly imitated by Indian scouts when on the war-path. There had been dreadful massacres immediately following this call. Therefore it was deemed wise to impress the sound early upon ...
— Indian Child Life • Charles A. Eastman
... poets for making the owl a bodeful bird. He had himself done so in the Evening Walk, and corrects his epithets to suit his later judgement, putting 'gladsome' ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... entrenched in some quarries quite close to the French trenches which sapped their way forward to those pits. When the guns ceased firing the French soldiers often heard the sound of singing. But above the voices of the Germans there came sometimes a series of piercing cries like the screeching of an owl in a terrible plaint, followed by strange and bloodcurdling laughter. It was the voice of a mad woman who was one of those captured from neighbouring villages and brought into the trenches by the ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... like a gopher," answered her brother, who had listened to the cowboys telling about the little prairie dogs. "And sometimes there are snakes or an owl in the same hole ...
— The Curlytops at Uncle Frank's Ranch • Howard R. Garis
... tell either papa or those people,' she decided, wise as a toy owl. 'And if you tell them, they will surely tell papa, so perhaps you would rather tell him yourself. But I ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... the weary traveller. Edwin was fatigued and faint. He tried to give vent to his complaints; but his tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth: his spirits sunk within him. No sound now reached his ears but the baying of the shepherds dogs, and the drowsy tinklings of the distant folds. The owl, the solemn bird of night, sat buried among the branches of the aged oak, and with her melancholy hootings gave an additional serenity to the scene. At a small distance, on his right hand, he perceived a contiguous object that ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... like an owl! I thought it was nothing less than a stuffed owl coming in. Why can't you wear your hat? That would hide your crown and your ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... WHITE OWL (Strix flammea).—Nested in a barn, another year in a pigeon-loft, and again in an old tub at Otterbourne. To be seen skimming softly along on ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... in the garden at his home, he caught an owl. While struggling with the bird, he broke one of its limbs. Gazing straight into the owl's large, bright eyes, he noticed, at the moment when the bone snapped, the appearance of a black spot in the lower central region of the iris, which area he later found ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... as glum as an owl, and as silent as one of these prairie dogs," went on the engineer. "You haven't said a word for over a mile. Is something ...
— Cowboy Dave • Frank V. Webster
... Fiordelisa loved her directly. When Turritella heard what had happened she came running to the King, and when she saw Fiordelisa with him she was terribly angry, but before she could say a word the Enchanter and the Fairy changed her into a big brown owl, and she floated away out of one of the palace windows, hooting dismally. Then the wedding was held with great splendour, and King Charming and Queen Fiordelisa lived happily ...
— The Green Fairy Book • Various
... letter, written when this was supposed to be lost, he says, 'I liked all your quotations, and wish to read Busbequius; whose name would become an owl.' ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... the companion of my risk, as one against whom the elements could nourish no vengeance. No, Edie, it is not, and cannot be trueit is a fiction of the idle jade Rumour, whom I wish hanged with her trumpet about her neck, that serves only with its screech-owl tones to fright honest folks out of their senses.Let me know how you got into this scrape ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... me! Pocahontas was a gay little hanger-on of the camps,—not like this silent owl! Her mind seems older than her years, and just notice her care of him, will you? I reckon he'd have wandered away and died but for her grip on ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... feline tribe. Lizards, basking motionless upon the rocks, slid off like lightning when aware of our approach. Two splendid eagles from an eyrie on the crags above hovered and wheeled, observing us, their shadows like two moving spots of ink upon the mountain-side. A drowsy owl was put up from a cave, and one of our adherents swore he heard a partridge calling. No other living creature larger than a beetle did we come across ...
— Oriental Encounters - Palestine and Syria, 1894-6 • Marmaduke Pickthall
... brother Cockburn and his son, and the father and brother of my Alison. Ye come to remind me of this; and that, as a reward for the shedding of our blood, the head of the chief of our house has been fixed upon the gate of Edinburgh as food for the carrion crow and the night owl! Go, get thee refreshment, Trotter; then go to rest, and dream of other heads exalted, as your late master's is, and I will be ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... whole owl's nest of a house was in league against me! You had conspired against me, you and your ilk, simply because I was superior to you, that's the reason why you wanted to shoulder me off! Do you suppose I don't realize ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... stacked their arms. The cannon were parked, all pointing back toward Chattanooga. The scene looked weird and picturesque. It was in a dark wilderness of woods and vines and overhanging limbs. In fact, it seemed but the home of the owl and the bat, and other varmints that turn night into day. Everything looked solemn. The trees looked solemn, the scene looked solemn, the men looked solemn, even the horses looked solemn. You may be sure, reader, that we ...
— "Co. Aytch" - Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment - or, A Side Show of the Big Show • Sam R. Watkins
... from their use of the cry of the screech-owl (chathouan) as a signal, were the revolted peasants of Brittany and ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... we observe render us weak in body and unable to follow any worldly pursuits on our own behalf. Hence, one like us cannot possibly know thee.' He then asked me, 'Is there any one who is longerlived than thou'? I answered him, saying, 'There liveth on the Himavat an owl of the name of Pravarakarna. He is older than I. He may know thee. The part of the Himavat where he dwelleth is far off from here.' And at this Indradyumna became a horse and carried me to where that owl lived and the king ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... a distinctness that drew his muscles rigid and set his eyes staring about him in wild search. Just beyond the hanging pails a moose-bird hopped out upon the snow. It chirped hungrily, its big, owl-like eyes scrutinizing Dixon. The man stared back, fearing to move. Slowly he forced his right foot through the snow to the rear of his left, and as cautiously brought his left behind his right, working himself backward step ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... big owl in one of the trees began to call. I knew what it was for Mustagan had taught me. At first Roddy said ...
— Three Boys in the Wild North Land • Egerton Ryerson Young
... is young and amorously inclined you will notice that he never starts for the regions beyond without first providing himself with an owl's skin. This tied on his breast, he tells you, will ensure him favor in the eyes of the females he may meet on the road, and on arrival at ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... During this it was some consolation to the travellers to see the moon, which now, rising above the horizon, lit up the plains with her white beams, and flung her silvery effulgence over the trees. From the direction of the woods came the mournful notes of the great horned owl, and the sound of flapping wings, caused by the vampire bat, as it glided through the aisles of the forest. No other sounds appeared to indicate the presence of living thing except those made by the horses or the ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... territories of Canada—from the basin of Lake Winnipeg, with its white pelicans, to the Arctic circle—swarm with birds, wild swans, geese, ducks, plovers, grouse, cranes, eagles, owls of several kinds—especially the great snowy eagle-owl—red-breasted thrushes, black and white snow-buntings, scarlet grosbeaks (the female green and grey), crested jays, and ravens "of a beautiful glossy black, richly tinged with purple", but smaller in size ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... them. More than once Miss Charity started back in fright, and Miss Hope, who was stronger, shook so with nervousness that she found it difficult to walk. Betty, too, was much overwrought, and it is probable that if either a jack rabbit or a white owl had crossed the path of the three there would have been instant flight. However, they saw nothing more alarming than their own shadows and a few harmless little insects that the ...
— Betty Gordon in the Land of Oil - The Farm That Was Worth a Fortune • Alice B. Emerson
... milder gleam, What time the may-fly * haunts the pool or stream; When the still owl skims round the grassy mead, What time the timorous hare limps forth to feed; Then be the time to steal adown the vale, And listen to the vagrant** cuckoo's tale, To hear the clamorous*** curlew call his mate, Or the soft quail his tender ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... a tremendous controversy with no less a person than Mr Slope, respecting the apostolic succession. These two gentlemen had never seen each other, but they had been extremely bitter in print. Mr Slope had endeavoured to strengthen his cause by calling Mr Arabin an owl, and Mr Arabin had retaliated by hinting that Mr Slope was an infidel. This battle had been commenced in the columns of the daily Jupiter, a powerful newspaper, the manager of which was very friendly to Mr Slope's view of the case. ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... wizards that hate the sun?" queried Dingaan again in an astonished voice. Then he was silent, for out of the first litter came a little man, pale as the shoot from a bulb that has grown in darkness, with large, soft eyes like the eyes of an owl, that blinked in the light, and long hair out of which all the colour seemed to ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... pine was by a woodman fell'd, Which ancient, huge, and hollow tree An owl had for his palace held— A bird the Fates had kept in fee, Interpreter to such as we. Within the caverns of the pine, With other tenants of that mine, Were found full many footless mice, But well provision'd, fat, and nice. The bird had bit off all their feet, And fed them there ...
— A Hundred Fables of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... it moaned softly past me, I fancied—nay, I felt sure I detected something that was not ordinary. I blew my nose, and had barely ceased marvelling at the loudness of its reverberations, before the piercing, ghoulish shriek of an owl sent the blood in torrents to my heart. I then laughed, and my blood froze as I heard a chorus, of what I tried to persuade myself could only be echoes, proceed from every crag and rock in the valley. For some seconds after ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... sure I shall enjoy it immensely;" i.e., "He can't talk any more than a semaphore, and looks as sleepy as an owl." ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, May 17, 1890. • Various
... a whale afforded as much enjoyment to them as it does to a tribe of Eskimos now. Bones of birds and fishes are found in many instances. The salmon appears to have been a favorite among fishes. Among the birds are found some species now only living in cold countries, such as the snowy owl, willow grouse, and flamingo. This is but another proof that the climate of Europe was then ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... told her that they were utterly harmless, that they always fled as soon as their keen eyes or sharp ears revealed the neighborhood of their enemies, the men who coveted their thick and long-haired hides worth a good many dollars. But she saw few living things; once there was a great snowy owl that rose heavily and then flew swiftly and in silence from a stump in a brule, disappearing among the trees like an animated shadow, yes, a shadow of sudden death to hares and partridges cowering beneath the fronds of wide-spreading conifers or in the ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... "The great owl! To go and risk her good name thus. However, thank Heaven she has played this prank with an honest lad that will ne'er expose her folly. But oh, the perverseness! Could she not bestow her nauseousness on thee?" Denys sighed ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... the Owl, That bird of solemn phiz, That truly awful-looking fowl, To represent her wis- Dom, little recked the goddess of The time when she would howl To see a Peanut set ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... past midnight. The cottages were all dark. A single faint light gleamed out from the hallway of the house. There was no sound abroad except the hooting of an old owl in the top of a water-oak, and the everlasting voice of the sea, that was not uplifted at that soft hour. It broke like a mournful ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... suddenly by the creaking of a door. It was an extraordinary thing at that hour. The whole house hold was asleep. Nothing could be heard save the footsteps of the watch-dogs on the sand, or their scratching at the foot of a tree in which an owl was screeching. An excellent opportunity to use his listening-tube! Upon putting it to his ear, M. Gardinois was assured that he had made no mistake. The sounds continued. One door was opened, then another. The bolt of the front door was thrown back with an effort. But neither ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... consider the matter. They called Bradlaugh before them and interrogated him at length as to his belief in a Supreme Being and a life after death. Then they voted, and the ballot stood eight to eight. The chairman, a large white barn-owl, gave the casting vote, declining to accept the affirmation. The matter was reported to the House, and the action duly confirmed. Bradlaugh then, on advice of Labouchere, notified the House that he was willing to accept the regulation oath, all in the interests of amity, it being of course understood ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... the more than Stygian night Descends with slow and owl-like flight, Silent as Death (who comes—we know— Unheard, unknown of all below;) Above that dark and desolate wave, The reflex of the eternal grave— Gigantic birds with flaming eyes Sweep upward, onward through the skies, Or stalk, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... am bound to say, would have guessed it. With his long scrag neck and great moons of spectacles, which he had now drawn down, the better to study me, he suggested an absurd combination of the vulture and the owl. ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... says she likes it, an' I reckon she does. Scripture says them whose deeds is evil likes darkness better'n light. You certainly made a mistake when you clapped 'er in here—that is, if you meant to punish 'er. Ann's a reg'lar bat, if not a' owl." ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... 3 An owl is a bird with a disagreeable scream, instead of a beautiful note; but the mulberries grown about the college would make them sing delightfully. And so would the influence of L, going forth from the college, transform the nature of the tribes ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... sober old Helen," she said, "you'll be an owl for a thousand years after you die! Why can't you caper a little? You don't know ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... Birds, hummingbirds even, nest in the cactus scrub; woodpeckers befriend the demoniac yuccas; out of the stark, treeless waste rings the music of the night-singing mockingbird. If it be summer and the sun well down, there will be a burrowing owl to call. Strange, furry, tricksy things dart across the open places, or sit motionless in the conning towers of the creosote. The poet may have "named all the birds without a gun," but not the fairy-footed, ground-inhabiting, furtive, ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... at the seminary a curst Lazarist, who by undertaking to teach me Latin made me detest it. His hair was coarse, black and greasy, his face like those formed in gingerbread, he had the voice of a buffalo, the countenance of an owl, and the bristles of a boar in lieu of a beard; his smile was sardonic, and his limbs played like those of a puppet moved by wires. I have forgotten his odious name, but the remembrance of his frightful precise countenance remains with me, though hardly can I recollect ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... frightened by the noise of an owl and a cricket, flees through the forest and into a stream, where it crushes a small fish almost to death. The fish complains to the court; and the deer, owl, cricket, and fish have a lawsuit. In the trial comes out this evidence: As the deer fled, he ran into some dry grass, and the seed fell into ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... the hill and losing itself at last amidst thick copses, where day did never more than wink and glimmer, and where, at night, its waters, brawling through their stony channel, seemed like a spirit's wail, and harmonized well with the scream of the gray owl wheeling from her dim retreat, or the moaning and rare ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... making its unobtrusive appeal. Gradually its hypnotic spell works. The distant chimes ring louder and nearer as you cross the borderland of sleep. And then outside the tent some little woods noise snaps the thread. An owl hoots, a whippoorwill cries, a twig cracks beneath the cautious prowl of some night creature—at once the yellow sunlit French meadows puff away—you are staring at the blurred image of the moon spraying through ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... retaliation; how one wrote to ministers to denounce Pope as a traitor, and another brought an image in clay to execute him in effigy; and how successive editions, genuine and spurious, followed each other, distinguished by an owl or an ass on the frontispiece, and provoking infinite controversy amongst rival vendors. It is unpleasant to have ugly names hurled at one by the first writer of the day; but the abuse was for the most part too general to be libellous. Nor would there be any great interest ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... are whist, and the owl is still, The bat in the shelvy rock is hid; And naught is heard on the lonely hill But the cricket's chirp and the answer shrill Of the gauze-winged katydid; And the plaint of the wailing whip-poor-will, ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... Hinnissy. In me heart I'm glad these neefaryous plots iv Willum J. Long an' others have been defeated. Th' man that tells ye'er blessed childher that th' way a wild goat kills an owl is be pretendin' to be an alarum clock, is an undesirable citizen. He ought to be put in an aquaryum. But take it day in an' day out an' Willum J. Long won't give anny information to ye'er son Packy that'll ...
— Mr. Dooley Says • Finley Dunne
... falsehood; he dreads the liberty which inspires me, and I detest the pride with which he is swollen. If our fortunes were equal, and if we were together in a free place, I should not call myself a phoenix; for that title ill becomes me; but he would be an owl. Such people as he imagine, on account of riches ill-acquired, and worse employed, that they are at liberty ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... replied Front-de-Boeuf; "detestable screech-owl! it is then thou who art come to exult over the ruins thou hast ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... says you are English; by the faith, he must be right, or you would never sit musing there like an owl in the sunlight! Take a draught of my burgundy; bright as rubies. I never sell bad wines—not I! I know better than to ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... words to Lady Agnes, so she turned the conversation by pointing to a snow-white cat of great size, who stepped daintily out of the tent. "I should think, as a witch, your cat ought to be black," said Miss Greeby. Mother Cockleshell screeched like a night-owl and hastily pattered some gypsy spell to avert evil. "Why, the old devil is black," she cried. "And why should I have him in my house to work evil? This is my white ghost." Her words were accompanied by a gentle stroking of the cat. "And good ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... was bird, beast, or man I could not say. At the moment, however, a dark cloud passed over the moon, and I saw no more of it. Just then, too, although all the other sounds of the forest had ceased, a species of horned owl with which I was well acquainted began to hoot with great persistency. After that, save for the rustling of trees and reeds when the wind caught them, there was ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... same, and that the deil's got into 'em," said Captain Gillespie gravely, wrinkling up his nose so much and nodding his head, and looking so like an old owl in the bright light of the moon which had rapidly risen, and was already shining with all the fulness and brilliancy it has in these southern latitudes, that it was as much as I could do to keep from bursting out laughing and so betraying my presence ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... of the white owl sweeping Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star. Lone on the fir-branch, his rattle-note unvaried, Brooding o'er the gloom, spins the brown evejar. Darker grows the valley, more and more forgetting: So were it with me if forgetting could ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... under Hugh's foot and the boys stopped short, their breath coming fast. The hoot of an owl directly overhead startled them violently and unconsciously they clutched each other's arm. The giant trees loomed black and forbidding in the darkness, and it was easy to imagine all kinds of things lurking behind to spring ...
— Bob Cook and the German Spy • Tomlinson, Paul Greene
... crocodile, if by that means the occasional presence within the parish limits of either of these anthropophagous brutes could have been established. He brags of no fine society, but is plainly a little elated by "having considerable acquaintance with a tame brown owl." Most of us have known our share of owls, but few can boast of intimacy with a feathered one. The great events of Mr. White's life, too, have that disproportionate importance which is always humorous. To think of his hands having ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell
... the stillness of the country and the loneliness of the dark road. She hurried her steps, jumped at every sound and grew cold from pure terror as the awful stillness and emptiness closed in about her. She stood still every few minutes, staring at blurred bushes beside the road. The screech of an owl almost made her scream. And in the dark the hard lumpy road hurt her feet cruelly. The little slippers were never meant for dark country roads. So Jocelyn had to pick her steps, and with every second's delay ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... poles, about twelve feet long, and borne by two persons. These were perfectly straight, and for the first eight feet free from boughs; above this nine branches were left upon each pole, having at their ends each a bunch of feathers of the hawk or owl. On the top of one of the standards was a bunch of emu feathers. The branches were stripped of all their smaller twigs and leaves, and of their bark. They were painted white, and wound round with ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... extravagant ways, as in his affair with Mlle. Georges, the beautiful but rather tiresome actress. As for Mme. de Stael, she bored him to distraction by her assumption of wisdom. That was not the kind of woman that Napoleon cared for. He preferred that a woman should be womanly, and not a sort of owl to sit and talk with him about the ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... he passed. At this stage he was of the jocular persuasion. "Still an unwelcome visitor, ma'am? No little tidbit of news for me to-day?" There he sat, twiddling his thumbs, reiterating his singsong: "Just so!" and looking wise as an owl. Mahony knew the air—had many a time seen it donned to cloak perplexity—and covert doubts of Rogers' ability began to assail him. But then he fell mentally foul of every one he came in touch with, at present: Ned, for the bare-faced fashion in which he left his cheerfulness ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... tower both night and day, There unto her none repaired; 'Neath the church roof sat the dull owl gray, And at ...
— Queen Berngerd, The Bard and the Dreams - and other ballads • Thomas J. Wise
... shore of the Bay of Ajaccio, with this inscription on a tarnished panel over its hermetically closed door: 'Paganetti Agency, Maritime Company, Bureau of Information.' The bureau is kept by fat gray lizards in company with a screech-owl. As for the railroads, I noticed that all the excellent Corsicans to whom I mentioned them, replied with cunning smiles, disconnected phrases, full of mystery; and not until this morning did I obtain the exceedingly farcical explanation of all ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... by the fire laid down the bread, When lo, as when a blossom blows— To a vast loaf the manchet rose; In angry wonder, standing by, The girl sent forth a wild, rude cry, And, feathering fast into a fowl, Flew to the woods a wailing owl." ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... was alone, he opened one of the windows, and stared down into the dark valley. A gentle wimpling of the river among stones ascended to his ear; the trees upon the other bank stood very black against the sky; farther away an owl was hooting. It was dreary and cold, and as he turned back to the hearth and the fine glow of fire, "Heavens!" said he to himself, "what ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ask you to tell us that, Sir Evelyn, for though he is supposed to be a Roman, he seems to have lived most of his life in your country. As silent as an owl and as inscrutable as a sphinx. Nobody in Rome knows certainly who his father was, nobody knows certainly who his mother was. Some say his father was an Englishman, some say a Jew, and some say his mother was a gipsy. A self-centred man, who never talks about ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... of the service, and, to the great surprise and to the satisfaction of the blower, cut the voluntary at the end unusually short, ending it in an abrupt and discordant way, which, I am sorry to say, the blower described as 'a 'owl,' though any shock that the boy's musical taste sustained was compensated for by the feeling that he would be at home at least ten minutes earlier than ...
— Zoe • Evelyn Whitaker
... When, lo! an object frightful to behold; A grisly SPECTRE, cloth'd in silver-gray, Around whose feet the waving shadows play, Stands in his path!... He stops, and not a breath Heaves from his heart, that sinks almost to death. Loud the owl halloos o'er his head unseen; All else is silent, dismally serene: Some prompt ejaculation, whisper'd low, Yet bears him up against the threat'ning foe; And thus poor Giles, though half inclin'd to fly, Mutters his doubts, and strains his stedfast eye. ''Tis not my crimes thou ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... become unconscious of the chorus of toads and cicadas, my hammock came down by the head. Then I was woke by a sudden bark close outside, exactly like that of a clicketting fox; but as the dogs did not reply or give chase, I presumed it to be the cry of a bird, possibly a little owl. Next there rushed down the mountain a storm of wind and rain, which made the coco-leaves flap and creak, and rattle against the gable of the house; and set every door and window banging, till they were caught and brought to reason. And ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... looking earnestly at one another. Outside, somewhere in the woodland, there sounded the haunting gush of a night-bird's song, shivering through the quietness like a silver bell. The sweet note finished in a frightened squawk, and was followed by the cry of an owl. The song had ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... grandfather was one of the ugliest men in the world. He had one glass eye, and his nose was like an owl's, his mouth large, his teeth ugly and decayed, his face and head very small, his body long and bent, and he was bitter and ill-tempered. His name was Gluinel. Madame de Cornuel one day was reading his grandson's genealogy, and, when she came to his name, exclaimed, "I always suspected, when ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... wait for a few minutes," he said, in a tone of annoyance. "I can't think what's the matter with me, but I feel as giddy and stupid as an owl. I'll be all right presently. Is the ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... own opinion, wise little white owl." Her Highness took her friend in her arms and kissed her, held her at arm's length, drew her to her heart and again kissed her. It was like a farewell. Then she let her go. "If there is anything you need, make yourself at home with my cases." ...
— The Princess Elopes • Harold MacGrath
... were right. It was I who was the idiot, the owl, the dolt, not to have calculated better what the consequences of such a position might be.—But where are we going?" he asked, seeing that they had reached the ...
— Colonel Chabert • Honore de Balzac
... nature. It amused me to go about uttering silly, commonplace phrases. I was never so well thought of in the islands till I began to jabber commercial gibberish like the veriest idiot. Upon my word, I believe that I was actually respected for a time. I was as grave as an owl over it; I had to be loyal to the man. I have been, from first to last, completely, utterly loyal to the best of my ability. I thought he understood something about coal. And if I had been aware that he knew nothing of it, as in fact he didn't, well—I ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... the breeze, which had refreshed them during the day, died away, as if its office were now completed; and none of the dark sounds and sights of hideous Night yet dared to triumph over the death of Day. Unseen were the circling wings of the fell bat; unheard the screech of the waking owl; silent the drowsy hum of the shade-born beetle! What heart has not acknowledged the influence of this hour, the sweet and soothing hour of twilight! the hour of love, the hour of adoration, the hour of rest! when we think of those we ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... canal of Panama. Young man, write "I will" upon your brow, give your heart to God and hope will herald your way to victory as the reward of a well spent life. Keep your eye upon the star of ambition. Don't be like the owl, who when daylight comes hides himself within the shadows of the ivy-bound oak and moans and moans the days of his life away; but rather be like the proud eagle that leaves its craggy summit, starts on its pinion flight through the clouds, rides upon ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... syllabled, might form such a word as dilly-lily; but it is not a musical strain. Indeed, there is no music in his nature, and in all his imitations of other sounds he prefers the harsh to the melodious, such as the voice of the Hawk, the Owl, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... three or four small ones, but I am not 'lit' by a jugful! The idea! Drunk on four high-balls! Why, they just clear my brain—drive the fog out. Maybe it's the Scotch, maybe the soda. A fine combination, the high-ball. I am as stupid as an owl when I am cold sober, but when I drink, I soar! I feel like a lark with nothing between myself and the sun except a little fresh air and exercise. Oh, there's nothing the matter with me; any one ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... hive of twentieth-century civilization scant space has been provided for drones. The drone is a minus quantity in the problem of life; instead of adding to the common weal, he is ever subtracting from it. Like an owl he sits in the gloom of indolence hooting at the caravan of events. The eye of the world is quick to observe the man who is resting on his oars. A more graphic picture of the man who is ever magnifying the world's duty to him, and minimizing his duty to the world, could not be painted than ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... has to take birth as a gadfly. By stealing fruits or roots or cakes one becomes an ant. By stealing Nishpava one becomes a Halagolaka.[514] By stealing Payasa one becomes in one's next birth a Tittiri bird. By stealing cakes one becomes a screech-owl. That man of little intelligence who steals iron has to take birth as a cow. That man of little understanding who steals white brass has to take birth as a bird of the Harita species. By stealing a vessel of silver one becomes a pigeon. By stealing a vessel of gold ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... heard was that of the owl, at which he was greatly terrified, and, quickly descending the tree he had climbed, he ran with alarm to the lodge. "Noko! noko! grandmother!" he cried. "I have ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... green, the upper surface, which is naturally exposed to the light, being darker than the lower which is in shadow. When the caterpillar is large, the green area is often broken up by pale lines, longitudinal as on the larvae of many Owl Moths (Noctuidae) or oblique, as on the great caterpillars of most Hawk Moths (Sphingidae). Such an arrangement tends to make the insect less easily seen than were it to display a continuous area of the same colour. The ...
— The Life-Story of Insects • Geo. H. Carpenter
... away without end, With a burrowing owl, his old neighbour and friend, Who, being a bird in whom marmot confided, Had hired his cottage, in which he resided. The landlord just hinted, that when he lived there, He had kept the old hovel in charming ...
— The Quadrupeds' Pic-Nic • F. B. C.
... now went to the wood, for the sake of getting the place, but one only returned with a sort of explanation; for nobody went far enough, that one not further than the others. However, he said that the sound proceeded from a very large owl, in a hollow tree; a sort of learned owl, that continually knocked its head against the branches. But whether the sound came from his head or from the hollow tree, that no one could say with certainty. So now he got the place ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... Crumpetty Tree Came the Stork, the Duck, and the Owl; The Snail and the Bumblebee, The Frog and the Fimble Fowl (The Fimble Fowl, with a corkscrew leg); And all of them said, "We humbly beg We may build our homes on your lovely Hat,— Mr. Quangle Wangle, grant us that! Mr. ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... were the scenery of this beautiful universe which we inhabit; what were our consolations on this side of the grave—and what were our aspirations beyond it, if poetry did not ascend to bring light and fire from those eternal regions where the owl-winged faculty of calculation dare not ever soar? Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, 'I will compose poetry.' The greatest poet even cannot ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... laughed, but the most were silent. They knew the story of King Agrippa and the owl, and how it had been foretold that this spirit in the form of a bird would appear to him again in the hour of his death, as it had appeared to him in ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... some love no fish, and some Love not their friends, nor their own house or home; Some start at pig, slight chicken, love not fowl, More than they love a cuckoo, or an owl; Leave such, my CHRISTIANA, to their choice, And seek those who to find thee will rejoice; By no means strive, but in humble-wise, Present thee to them in thy ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... handwriting crooked with poignant grief, and blotted at every third word by the violence of virtuous indignation, that "Thersites Junior" was his own son, and that, in one of the last of the "ribald's" caricatures her own venerable features were unmistakably represented as belonging to the body of a large owl! ...
— A Rogue's Life • Wilkie Collins
... bringing some nightingales, too, and some cue-owls. I got them in Italy. The song of the nightingale is the deadliest known to ornithology. That demoniacal shriek can kill at thirty yards. The note of the cue-owl is infinitely soft and sweet—soft and sweet as the whisper of a flute. But penetrating—oh, beyond belief; it can bore through boiler-iron. It is a lingering note, and comes in triplets, on the one unchanging key: hoo-o-o, hoo-o-o, hoo-o-o; then a silence ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... cut in 'em," resumed the narrator, "and he carried a tin box strung to a strap I took for his lunch till it flew open on him and a horn toad hustled out. Then I was sure he was a botanist—or whatever yu' say they're called. Well, he would have owl eggs—them little prairie-owl that some claim can turn their head clean around and keep a-watchin' yu', only that's nonsense. We was ridin' through that prairie-dog town, used to be on the flat just after yu' crossed the south fork ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... over the rim of the world by the backs of the crooked elves. The horse and the two persons made a black, distorted shadow that jerked along as though it were a thing evil and persistent. Far off in the thickets of the hills an owl cried, eerie and weird like a creature in some bitter sorrow. The lane was deep with dust. The horse traveled with no sound, and the distorted black shadow followed, now blotted out by the heavy tree tops, and now only partly to be seen, ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... Owl and Oyster: Did Oliver Oglethorpe ogle an Owl and Oyster? If Oliver Oglethorpe ogled an Owl and Oyster, Where are the Owl and ...
— Peter Piper's Practical Principles of Plain and Perfect Pronunciation • Anonymous
... but his interest waned. He laid the glasses back upon the deck. The choked bubble of boiling water sounded from the cabin, mingled with the irregular sputter of cooking fat and the clinking of plates and silver as Halvard set the table. Without, the light was fading swiftly; the wavering cry of an owl quivered from the cypress across the water, and the western sky changed from paler yellow to green. Woolfolk moved abruptly, and, securing a bucket to the handle of which a short rope had been spliced and finished with an ornamental Turk's-head, ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... to be a romping big girl, she had just as queer ways; too old for a child, though the sober, owl-like look began to soften to an earnest expression, which on occasions verged upon a twinkle in the deep blue eyes. Distant friends were now writing letters of inquiry, and her father's relatives persistently urged Mrs. Barrett to send ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... and asked if he could assist her; she answered, through the medium of a sooty animal at her helm, that she was (like our universities) "satisfied with her own progress"; she added, being under intoxication, "that, if any danger existed, her scheme was to drown it in the bo-o-owl;" and two days afterward he saw her puffing and panting, and fiercely dragging a gigantic three-decker out into deep water, like an industrious flea pulling ...
— Christie Johnstone • Charles Reade
... Whitefoot. There are ever so many who would like nothing better than to dine on plump little Whitefoot. There are Buster Bear and Billy Mink and Shadow the Weasel and Unc' Billy Possum and Hooty the Owl and all the members of the Hawk family, not to mention Blacky the Crow in times when other food is scarce. Reddy and Granny Fox and Old Man Coyote are ...
— Whitefoot the Wood Mouse • Thornton W. Burgess
... was conscious of a return of his old devotion to the fair-haired stranger. He recalled the Frank's many kindnesses—in particular the splendid paint-box, which remained Iskender's own—and, sobbing, prayed from the heart that he might live. The hooting of an owl, or the bark of some dog in the distance, alone broke the stillness, of which the rustle of the tamarisks seemed part, so faint and vague it was. At moments, looking up at the stars, he could have deemed them living creatures, for they seemed ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... as falling stars, slanting athwart the heavens in the direction of the cottage, and increasing in size and brilliancy as it neared the earth, until the wooded ridge and the shore could be seen as distinctly from the ship-deck as by day. A dog howled piteously from one of the out-houses,—an owl whooped from the wood. The meteor descended until it almost touched the roof, when a cock crew from within; its progress seemed instantly arrested; it stood still, rose about the height of a ship's mast, and then began again ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... formerly an Ivy bush (called a tod of Ivy) was universally hung out in front of taverns in England, as it still is in Brittany and Normandy. Hence arose two proverbs—"Good wine needs no bush," i.e., the reputation is sufficiently good without further advertisement; and "An owl in an Ivy bush," as "perhaps denoting originally the union of wisdom or prudence with conviviality, as 'Be ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... vertebrae of the spine. Several times (Dr. 12b and 13b) he is represented apparently with distended abdomen. A distinguishing article of his costume is the stiff feather collar, which is worn only by this god, his companion, the war-god F, and by his animal symbol, the owl, which will both be discussed farther on. His head ornament varies in the Dresden Codex; in the first portion of the manuscript, relating in part to pregnancy and child-birth (see the pictures of women on p. 16, et seq.), he wears on his head several times a figure ...
— Representation of Deities of the Maya Manuscripts • Paul Schellhas
... grave with their inhabitants. The lofty palms have faded away and given place to forest trees, whose roots spring from the crumbled ruins; the bear and the leopard crouch in the porches of the temples; the owl roosts in the casements of the palaces; the jackal roams among the ruins in vain; there is not a bone left for him to gnaw of the multitudes which have passed away. There is their handwriting upon the temple wall, upon the granite slab which ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... shoulder, stubs in the back, a ridge on which it is impossible for the sleeper to balance, the non-elasticity of boughs, the hardness of the ground, the heat, the smoke, the chilly air. Subjects of remarks multiply. The whole camp is awake, and chattering like an aviary. The owl is also awake; but the guides who are asleep outside make more noise than the owls. Water is wanted, and is handed about in a dipper. Everybody is yawning; everybody is now determined to go to sleep in good earnest. A last good-night. There is an appalling ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... door, and after waiting some time, Laurie thought he heard a gruff voice say, "To-who-to-who?" "Why doesn't he come and see instead of asking?" thought Laurie, but just then the door opened, and an old owl ...
— The Pigeon Tale • Virginia Bennett
... obscured the faint light of the stars that struggled to peep through the nebulous masses. At another time the superstitious spirit of the girl would have shrunk from the noises of the wood, and found omens in the hoot of the owl, or the moaning of the wind as it sobbed fitfully through the trees. But now the screech of the night bird and the soughing of the wind fell upon deaf ears for she was so absorbed in the one idea of getting home that ...
— In Doublet and Hose - A Story for Girls • Lucy Foster Madison
... papa, don't say a word till you have heard me. John was a capital gardener; he kept the green-house looking beautiful; and this Mike that we've got now, he's nothing but an apprentice, and stupid as an owl at that! He'll never do ...
— Betty's Bright Idea; Deacon Pitkin's Farm; and The First Christmas - of New England • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... simply recorded the variations of his pulse; and I simply observed his manner. The trick is to introduce some word connected with the supposed crime in a list of words connected with something quite different, yet a list in which it occurs quite naturally. Thus I wrote 'heron' and 'eagle' and 'owl', and when I wrote 'falcon' he was tremendously agitated; and when I began to make an 'r' at the end of the word, that machine just bounded. Who else in this republic has any reason to jump at the name of a newly-arrived Englishman like Falconroy except the ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... worthy of a slave and barbarian, and that now I am indifferent and take no heed of the dawn. When a man has not in him what is loftier and mightier than all external impressions a bad cold is really enough to upset his equilibrium and make him begin to see an owl in every bird, to hear a dog howling in every sound. And all his pessimism or optimism with his thoughts great and small have at such times significance as symptoms and ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... in the evening the guard was relieved. He had told Roger that he was to listen for the cry of an owl outside, twice repeated; and that upon hearing this, he would know that his friends were without. Roger listened anxiously for the password from his new guard; but as it did not come, he concluded that Cuitcatl had not been able to bribe him, and that he must himself overpower ...
— By Right of Conquest - Or, With Cortez in Mexico • G. A. Henty
... performed this feat was not a little ingenious. Having noticed several bees about, he caught one, and with a little gum, attached to it a piece of down from a large owl that somebody had shot. Releasing the insect, it flew directly towards its nest, the unaccustomed burden with which it was laden serving not only to make it easily visible, but also impeding its flight sufficiently to admit of the boy following it. The next was at the ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... to the 24th the Green Drake and Stone Fly, the Owl fly, the Barn fly, the purple Hackle, the purple Gold Hackle, the flesh Fly, the little flesh Fly, the Peacock fly, the Ant fly, the brown Gnat, the little black Gnat, the Green-Grasshopper, the Dun Grasshopper, the ...
— The School of Recreation (1696 edition) • Robert Howlett
... me in the morning?" the old wheels rattled all the way out the Riverfield ribbon, and I thought an old owl hooted the question at me from a dead tree beside the road, while I felt also that a mocking-bird sang it from a thicket of dogwood in ghostly bloom opposite. "Will there be ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... first watch, then," said Shirley. "I'm such a night owl anyway, that I won't mind staying awake. Joy and I can watch until two o'clock, then we'll ...
— The Merriweather Girls and the Mystery of the Queen's Fan • Lizette M. Edholm
... mist, with the snow high-pil'd, In the Winter night, in the forest wild, I heard the wolves with their ravenous howl, I heard the screaming note of the owl: ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... hoot of a distant owl was heard. One of the men holding the rope dropped it, and shivered from head ...
— Raiding with Morgan • Byron A. Dunn
... habits. Work without hope of profits! That cannot be, for it would be self-destruction. He would like to, perhaps; he has not the courage. Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor. The retired proprietor is really the owl of the fable gathering beech-nuts for its mutilated mice until it is ready to devour them. Is society also to be blamed for these effects of a passion so long, so ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... in cogibundity of cogitation.' The terrace terminated at the south-western tower, which, as we have said, was ruinous and full of owls. Here would Scythrop take his evening seat, on a fallen fragment of mossy stone, with his back resting against the ruined wall,—a thick canopy of ivy, with an owl in it, over his head,—and the Sorrows of Werter in his hand. He had some taste for romance reading before he went to the university, where, we must confess, in justice to his college, he was cured of the love of reading in ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... and the originators (it was soon found out that the poem had proceeded from our clique) were severely censured; for nothing of the sort had been seen since Cronegk's and Rost's attacks upon Gottsched. We had besides already secluded ourselves, and now found ourselves quite in the case of the owl with respect to the other birds. In Dresden, too, they did not like the affair; and it had for us serious, if not unpleasant, consequences. For some time, already, Count Lindenau had not been quite satisfied with his son's tutor. For although the young man was by no means neglected, ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... assumed the expression of an owl named Solomon, there was a smile in her eyes, and Patty well knew that her stepmother's views agreed with her own, rather than ...
— Patty in Paris • Carolyn Wells
... side:—(1) (DEAN) angel with book; (2) angel with shield bearing date 1489; (3) lion versus griffin; (4) griffin devouring human leg; (5) owl; (6) mermaid with mirror and hair-brush; (7) two pigs dancing to bagpipe played by a third; (8) Jonah thrown to the whale; (9) man wheeling another who holds a reed and a bag; (10) fox caught carrying off goose by dog and by woman ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ripon - A Short History of the Church and a Description of Its Fabric • Cecil Walter Charles Hallett
... curious coincidence that the obsolete chuet or chewet meant both a round pie and a jackdaw.[30] It is uncertain in which of the two senses Prince Hal applies the name to Falstaff (1 Henry IV., v. 1). It comes from Fr. chouette, screech-owl, which formerly meant also "a chough, daw, ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... there were sounds to be heard all around them, but "familiarity breeds contempt," and from Max down they were all accustomed to hearing similar noises whenever they spent nights in the open. The owl would whinny or hoot according to his species; the loon send forth his agonizing and weird shriek from some distant lake; a fox might bark sharply and fretfully, or two quarrelsome 'coons dispute over a bit of food they had discovered—all this went with the camping ...
— At Whispering Pine Lodge • Lawrence J. Leslie
... barn owl flapped lazily past, hooting weirdly as it went; then all nature became still again, save the dull sound of the tumbling flood. Ambler Jevons, had he been with me, would, no doubt, have acted differently. ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... warrior, with his nerves of iron, have been found dead in their beds, with straining eyeballs and horrent hair, at the first step of the Dread Progress, thinkest thou that this weak woman—from whose cheek a sound at the window, the screech of the night-owl, the sight of a drop of blood on a man's sword, would start the color—could brave one glance of—Away! the very thought of such sights for her makes ...
— Zicci, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... been uninhabited, and the keys either lost, or consigned to the care of some aged butler or housekeeper, whose trembling steps, about the middle of the second volume, were doomed to guide the hero, or heroine, to the ruinous precincts? Would not the owl have shrieked and the cricket cried in my very title-page? and could it have been possible for me, with a moderate attention to decorum, to introduce any scene more lively than might be produced by the jocularity of a clownish but faithful valet, or the garrulous narrative of the ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... wilderness and possessing much knowledge of wood-ranging, heard only the coarser sounds. Therefore he lay half dreaming for some moments after the Indian raised his head and lent an attentive ear to some noise which came from far away. The night-owl's hoot was intermittent; a lone wolf howled mournfully on the hillside; in the swamp a catamount screamed as it pounced upon its prey. But it was none of these sounds which had attracted the Indian's attention. Enoch suddenly roused to see Crow Wing ...
— With Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga • W. Bert Foster
... was mightily comforted by the doctor's visit, but nex' mornin' things looked purty gloomy ag'in. That little foot seemed a heap worse, an' he was sort o' flushed an' feverish, an' wife she thought she heard a owl hoot, an' Rover made a mighty funny gurgly sound in his th'oat like ez ef he had bad news to tell us, but didn't have the ...
— Sonny, A Christmas Guest • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... by the putrid leaves, may impart its poison through the medium of the air in exhalations; and I have known European officers, who were never conscious of having drunk either of the waters above described, take the fever (owl) in the month of May in the Tarae, and in a few hours become raving mad. These tainted waters may possibly act in both ways—directly, and through the medium ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... traveller passes on the right as he leaves Warren summit. Between Owl's Head and Moosilauke there is a deep valley through which winds a road leading from Warren to Benton and Dansville, affording a lonely but pleasant route through ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... a wild Florida forest, and all was still save for the hooting of a distant owl and the occasional plaintive call of a whip-poor-will. In a little clearing by the side of a faint bridle-path a huge fire of fat pine knots roared and crackled, lighting up the small cleared space and throwing its flickering rays in ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... out a beau; From her own head Megaera[1] takes A periwig of twisted snakes: Which in the nicest fashion curl'd, (Like toupees[2] of this upper world) With flower of sulphur powder'd well, That graceful on his shoulders fell; An adder of the sable kind In line direct hung down behind: The owl, the raven, and the bat, Clubb'd for a feather to his hat: His coat, a usurer's velvet pall, Bequeath'd to Pluto, corpse and all. But, loath his person to expose Bare, like a carcass pick'd by crows, A lawyer, o'er his hands and face Stuck artfully a parchment case. No ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... very still in the forest. And when Tommy Fox suddenly heard a cry of "Whoo—whoo—whoo!" he jumped, in spite of himself. Tommy knew, right away, that it was only Mr. Owl. And he felt very sheepish. And then all at once Tommy jumped again. This time he was terribly frightened, for the strangest thing happened. The snow rose right up beneath his feet, and flew in his face. And something struck him a good, hard blow under ...
— The Tale of Tommy Fox • Arthur Scott Bailey
... by a woodman fell'd, Which ancient, huge, and hollow tree An owl had for his palace held— A bird the Fates had kept in fee, Interpreter to such as we. Within the caverns of the pine, With other tenants of that mine, Were found full many footless mice, But well provision'd, fat, ...
— A Hundred Fables of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... themselves while she slept. "Some of you," said her Majesty, "must kill cankers in the musk-rose buds, and some wage war with the bats for their leathern wings, to make my small elves coats; and some of you keep watch that the clamorous owl, that nightly boots, come not near me: but first sing me to sleep." Then they ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... talking faster than they think, and the other, by holding their tongues and not thinking at all. By the first, many a smatterer acquires the reputation of a man of quick parts; by the other, many a dunderpate, like the owl, the stupidest of birds, comes to be considered the very type of wisdom. This, by the way, is a casual remark, which I would not, for the universe, have it thought I apply to Governor Van Twiller. It is true he was a man shut up within himself, like an oyster, and rarely ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... eve come slowly down, The woods are wrapt in deeper brown, The owl awakens from her dell, The fox is heard upon the fell; Enough remains of glimmering light 5 To guide the wanderer's steps aright, Yet not enough from far to show His figure to the watchful foe. With cautious step, and ear awake, He climbs the crag and threads the brake; 10 And not the ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... "An owl!" murmured Dick. Then he was glad he had not shot first, as he had intended. He would only have awakened the others and been laughed at for his pains. Sometimes, he reflected, it was better to hold your fire, even in the west, that region of ...
— The Boy Ranchers on the Trail • Willard F. Baker
... endless time, the long dusty road was desolate of any travellers except this pair of runaways. Sometimes a coyote yelped in the distance; occasionally some creeping thing barred the track before them; and a screech owl sent its blood-curdling cries into their ears. Otherwise they were alone in the wilderness and the night, and beyond speaking distance ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond
... statues of Discoboli, or Quoit-throwers—was found by the present writer in the Montreal Museum of Natural History; it was, however, banished from public view, to a room where were all manner of skins, plants, snakes, insects, &c., and in the middle of these, an old man, stuffing an owl. The dialogue—perhaps true, perhaps imaginary, perhaps a little of one and a little of the other—between the writer and this old man gave rise to ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... guide upon the ground to recover his breath, and point out what was next to be done. Nectabanus was both frightened and angry; but he had felt himself as completely in the power of the robust knight as an owl in the claws of an eagle, and therefore cared not to provoke him to any ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... to palpitate, beat. latrocinio larceny, theft. lavar to wash. lazo knot; bond. leal loyal, faithful. lealtad f. loyalty. leccion f. lesson. lectura reading. lecho bed. lechuza owl. leer to read. legar to bequeath. legitimo legitimate. legua league. legumbre f. vegetable. lejano distant. lejos far off. lengua tongue, language. lento slow, tardy. lenador woodcutter. leon m. lion. leona lioness. lepra leprosy. letania litany. letargo lethargy. ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... weren't doing him any honor. That bow was not for him, but directed toward the Owl, the symbol of the Goddess embroidered on the breast of the white tunic. As an acolyte, after all, he rated just barely above a layman; he had no ...
— Pagan Passions • Gordon Randall Garrett
... bounded this clearing, and beyond the river stretched its high bank, covered with forest trees, the advanced lines, as it were, of the vast wilderness which lay behind. From out the depths of those woods rose the occasional shrieks of an owl, or other night bird, and at intervals the long dismal howl of a wild dog — the only carnivorous animal indigenous in that country. The air was balmy, but there was something in the mournful aspect of the scene that weighed upon the spirits, and made one feel inexpressibly lonely in the ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... wooden shutters were tightly closed, and had it not been for the light which streamed through their crescentic openings the house would have been deemed deserted. The girl started nervously as a night-owl hooted ...
— Peggy Owen and Liberty • Lucy Foster Madison
... quiet and peace, Who would silence the gay "constant-screamer" and line the Thames banks with perlice; Who sneer about "'ARRY at 'Enley," and sniff about "cads on the course," As though it meant "Satan in Eden"? I'll 'owl at sich oafs till ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 15, 1891 • Various
... sons, roped in as a prize-ring where selfish men struggle ignobly for sordid gains The children of the land fled from it sick with despair. Its deserted houses were full of all doleful things. Cormorants and the daughters of the owl lodged ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... is a serpent. Apollo is sometimes connected with the mouse. Along with these identifications of the gods with animals we may mention the animal emblems with which they are generally represented. The eagle is the bird of Zeus, the owl of Athene, the peacock of Hera, the dove of Aphrodite. In this connection we cannot help thinking of the sacred animals of the Egyptian nomes; and the question may be asked whether such animals must be taken to be in Greece also the ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... fleering slavish parasite, In warping profit or a traitorous sleight, 20 Hoops round his rotten body with devotes, And pricks his descant face full of false notes; Praising with open throat, and oaths as foul As his false heart, the beauty of an owl; Kissing his skipping hand with charmed skips, That cannot leave, but leaps upon his lips Like a cock-sparrow, or a shameless quean Sharp at a red-lipp'd youth, and naught doth mean Of all his antic shows, but doth repair More tender fawns,[115] and takes ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... dare to go up to that old owl's-nest Upsala and tell its learned men that the Pope is not God and that he has nothing to ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg
... lady also had a word to say. Her eyes were like brown beads, and her nose very long, which gave her indeed a hawk-like appearance, somewhat unusual in a woman; but her gravity was rather that of the owl. ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... to be heard at night but glasses' clink, boys, Fall of greasy cards and counters' chink, boys; If he won't "declare," Nordahl he will swear Bentzen is stupid as an owl, boys. Bentzen cool, boys, Is not a fool, boys; "You're another!" quickly ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... clown Can never beat love's barriers down: 'Tis better to be like the owl, Comic because so grave a fowl. From him we well may take our cue— By him be ...
— Grimm Tales Made Gay • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... struck with an apoplexy of sense. Wisdom peeps through both thine eyes, like the unexpected apparition of a bed-ridden old woman at a garret window. Thou art the very owl of Minerva, and the little bill, that thou ever carriest with thee, is given thee for this purpose, to peck at man's frailty in the matter of repayment. Come, thou art in danger. I must have ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... my boy, and finish your supper. It was probably fancy, or maybe the hoot of an owl to its mate," said our jovial companion, Dick Buntin, who never allowed any matter to disturb him, if he could help it, while engaged in stowing ...
— Adventures in the Far West • W.H.G. Kingston
... had hobbled up to bed. The kitchen window was open, and Charity seated herself near it, her idle hands on her knee. The evening was cool and still. Beyond the black hills an amber west passed into pale green, and then to a deep blue in which a great star hung. The soft hoot of a little owl came through the dusk, and between its calls the men's voices ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... Luis may have thought of it, there's no telling. If you had watched him closely you would have seen the pupils of his eyes dilate, and then contract—just like those of a caged owl, when he becomes aware of a ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... Rome! my Country! City of the Soul! The orphans of the heart must turn to thee, Lone Mother of dead Empires! and control In their shut breasts their petty misery. What are our woes and sufferance? Come and see The cypress—hear the owl—and plod your way O'er steps of broken thrones and temples—Ye! Whose agonies are evils of a day— A world is at our feet as fragile ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... believe it, that he took everything away from me when I left him, and I have since heard that he raffled all my clothes at a wretched table d'hote where he used to take me to dine. He is wealthy enough, though, and yet with all his fortune he is as miserly as a clay fireball and as stupid as an owl. He would not allow me to drink wine without water, and made me fast on Fridays. Would you believe it, he wanted me to wear black stockings, because they did not want washing as often as white ones. You have no idea of it, he worried me nicely I can tell you. ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... could speak the words which seemed to crowd behind the forehead and in the depths of the eyes, and the commonest sentence would be flashed on by this immortal light. And she overflowed the edges of the dream; he remarked that her softness was like that of some vast snowy owl; she wore a ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... a little owl," he always said. "One can hardly see her eyes. I should love her to come again, though," he added, for he was curious to see Cornelli when she was funny and ...
— Cornelli • Johanna Spyri
... Macbeth and his lady move to the deed under a law which—for a while—has usurped the true moral order and reversed it, he not without misgivings: the spectators all the while knowing the true order, yet held silent, watching the event. Outside the castle an owl hoots as Duncan is slain. The guilty man and woman creep back, whispering; and thereupon—what happens? A knocking on the door—a knocking followed by the growls of a drowsy if not drunken porter: "Here's a knocking ...
— Poetry • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... may have furnished the original for the olive-wreath so common on American coins. They were issued under the auspices of Athene, and bore upon the obverse the head of the goddess. The reverse regularly bore the owl and the olive-bough. These coins were familiarly called owls, just as we speak of eagles in our currency, and just as the English talked of angels and crosses in the time of Elizabeth. Aristophanes jocosely calls the Athenian pieces owls of Laurium, in allusion to the gold mines there, ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 6, June, 1886, Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 6, June, 1886 • Various
... mouth, gnash her teeth, startle with her body, hold her arms and hands stiff, &c.; and then, when an old Mother Nobs hath by chance called her an idle young housewife, or bid the Devil scratch her, then no doubt but Mother Nobs is the witch, and the young girl is owl blasted, &c. They that have their brains baited and their fancies distempered with the imaginations and apprehensions of witches, conjurers, and fairies, and all that lymphatic chimera, I find to be marshalled in one of these five ranks: children, fools, women, cowards, ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... Malvolio, like an owl That hoots the sun rerisen where starlight sank, With German garters crossed athwart thy frank Stout Scottish legs, men watched thee snarl and scowl, And boys responsive with reverberate howl Shrilled, hearing how ...
— Sonnets, and Sonnets on English Dramatic Poets (1590-1650) • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... it was some figment conjured up by my excited brain. Then I ran swiftly forward in the direction where I had seen her, calling loudly upon her, but without reply. Again I called, and again no answer came back, save the melancholy wail of the owl. A second flash illuminated the landscape, and the moon burst out from behind its cloud. But I could not, though I climbed upon a knoll which overlooked the whole moor, see any sign of this strange midnight wanderer. ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... in de moonlight, De owl is set'n high up in de tree; De little stars am twinklin' wid a sof' light, De night seems only jes fu' you an' me. Thoo de trees de breezes am a-sighin', Breathin' out a sort o' lover's croon, Der's nobody lookin' or a-spyin', Nobody but ...
— Fifty years & Other Poems • James Weldon Johnson
... and (b) Two Mycenaean pots (after Schliemann). (a) The so-called "owl-shaped" vase is really a representation of the Mother-Pot in the form of a conventionalized Octopus (Houssay). (b) The other vase represents the Octopus Mother-Pot, with a jar upon her head and another ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... ears to the voice, and his eyes to the light, the promise in the text is that he "shall live." Jesus says: "I am the light of the world. He that followeth me shall have the light of LIFE. In him is light, and the light is the LIFE of men." But if the sinner, like the owl, closes his eyes to the light of truth, and his ears to the voice of the Lord, he will abide in death, and, like the owl, love darkness ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... daughter's faith, and accompanied them to service that morning very readily. Roger appeared in time to take Belle, as usual, but she found him so taciturn and preoccupied that she whispered to Mildred, "You've spoiled him for me. He sits staring like an owl in the sunlight, and seeing just about as much. You ought to be ashamed of yourself to make him so glum. I intend to have a dozen beaux, and ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... merely to give us what is statical in our institutions and rational in our law, but to blend into one elemental creed the spiritual aspirations of Aryan and of Semite. Italy was not a pioneer in intellectual progress, nor a motive power in the evolution of thought. The owl of the goddess of Wisdom traversed over the whole land and found nowhere a resting-place. The dove, which is the bird of Christ, flew straight to the city of Rome and the new reign began. It was the fashion of early Italian painters to represent in mediaeval ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... go down to the seashore, the waves lap my feet and murmur: "Baroja, you will never amount to anything." The wise owl that perches at night on our roof at Itzea calls to me: "Baroja, you will never amount to anything," and even the crows, winging their way across the sky, incessantly shout at me from above: "Baroja, you will never ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... she gave, though not so loud as a screech owl, and then she tottered, swayed, and lost her senses. If she'd fallen to the left no harm had overtook her; but to the right she fell and dropped unconscious, ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
... got one oncle," Annie-Many-Ponies spoke up unexpectedly from her favorite corner. "Big Medicine man. Maybe I write one letter, maybe Noisy-Owl he come, make plenty storm. Noisy-Owl, he got awful strong medicine ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... was in her hand, the lines went all ways but the right; her fairy was a grimy little object, whose second wing could never be put on; the ships were saucers; the kitten might have been the pig; the baby was an owl in an ivy-bush; and to look at the live baby in the cradle only puzzled her the more. Miss Fosbrook gave her real drawing lessons; but boxes, palings, and tumble-down sheds, done with a broad black pencil, did ...
— The Stokesley Secret • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of monsters yet unnamed, The crow's ill-boding croak, the hollow moan Of wild winds wrestling with the restless sea, The wrathful bellow of the vanquished bull, The plaintive sobbing of the widowed dove, The envied owl's sad note, the wail of woe That rises from the dreary choir of Hell, Commingled in one sound, confusing sense, Let all these come to aid my soul's complaint, For pain like mine demands new ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... to be as respectably kept an establishment as there was in the whole forest. Even Miss Jenny Wren, the greatest gossip of the neighbourhood, never found anything to criticise in its arrangements; and old Parson Too-whit, a venerable owl who inhabited a branch somewhat more exalted, as became his profession, was in the habit of saving himself much trouble in his parochial exhortations by telling his parishioners in short to "look ...
— Queer Little Folks • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... is not in love with her, a prescription of a Mohani or love-charm given by the wise women is that she should kill an owl and serve some of its flesh to her husband as a charm. "It has not occurred," Mr. Kipling writes, "to the oriental jester to speak of a boiled owl in connection with intoxication, but when a husband is abjectly ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... in the air, The evening gnats; and there The owl opes broad his eyes and wings to sail For prey; the bat wakes; and the shell-less snail Comes forth, clammy ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... Arthur from above, "I'll be down in a second. Don't wait—I have found an owl's nest up here; and I'm going to collar a young 'un for each of us. Don't tell them. If Railsford asks where I am, tell him I'm walking home. You can go with him on the tandem. I'll be home as soon ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed
... about losing the Roma and getting canned by the boss," explained a fisherman who was passing by. "Boris is sorer than a boiled owl at being run on ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... the Brown Owl (he was head of the Ministry of Wisdom). "They always go on strike if ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 3, 1920 • Various
... called the Frau's voice, "bring me my new jacket from behind the door." And as she took it into the warm room one of the women said, "She looks like an owl. Such children are ...
— In a German Pension • Katherine Mansfield
... "dabbling" in a hundred different directions. Not content with athletics and hunting, the boy will want to collect stamps or birds' eggs, to make a motor-boat and learn telegraphy; to take photographs and try his hand at the cornet; to experiment in chemistry and stuff an owl. Not content with dancing, sewing and cooking, the girl will want to master several poets and make attempts at painting; she will want to become more proficient at the piano and do some singing; she will want her ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... origin, appeared in the heavens. Also, a short time before, a thunderbolt fell at Sirmium, accompanied with a terrific clap of thunder, and set fire to a portion of the palace and senate-house: and much about the same time an owl settled on the top of the royal baths at Sabaria, and pouring forth a funeral strain, withstood all the attempts to slay it with arrows or stones, however truly aimed, and though numbers of people shot ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... for more after he had had his wish. He stole upstairs after Miss Monro, who looked round reproachfully at him if even a nightingale sang, or an owl hooted in the trees outside the open windows, yet who paused to say herself, ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... them in one age-long instant while he stood in horror on the black shining rock. He saw their heads, red-skinned, pointed, their staring eyes as large as saucers—owl-eyes. They were naked, and their bodies, that would have been almost crimson in the light of day, were blotched and ghastly in the green light. And each one held in long clawlike hands a thing of shining metal—a lava tip like the one he had found projected and ended ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin
... chief magistrate. At the second fire stood two chiefs: one on the right, called the great Fox, and one on the left, called the little Fox: these were the war chiefs or generals. At the third fire stood two warriors, who were called respectively the Wolf and the Owl. And at the other fire, two others who were the Eagle and the Tortoise. These four last named were not chiefs but braves of distinction, who held honorable places in the council, and were persons of influence in peace and in war. ...
— Great Indian Chief of the West - Or, Life and Adventures of Black Hawk • Benjamin Drake
... ditches, now floundering through tracts of swamp, or climbing over huge prostrate logs. In my passage I startled the thousand denizens of the dank forest, who greeted me with their cries. The qua-bird screamed; the swamp-owl hooted; the bullfrog uttered his trumpet-note; and the hideous alligator, horribly bellowing from his gaunt jaws, crawled sulkily out of my way, at times appearing as if he would turn ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... awful natural stillness, (here in these dense swamps the freebooter carries his gun, and the fugitive has his conceal'd hut;) O the strange fascination of these half-known half-impassable swamps, infested by reptiles, resounding with the bellow of the alligator, the sad noises of the night-owl and the wild-cat, and the whirr of the rattlesnake, The mocking-bird, the American mimic, singing all the forenoon, singing through the moon-lit night, The humming-bird, the wild turkey, the raccoon, the opossum; A Kentucky corn-field, the tall, graceful, long-leav'd corn, slender, ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... in that Virginia which, settled one hundred and twenty years before, was yet largely forest and stream, had weaned him, he thought, from sounds of the street, and yet to-night he missed them, and would have had the town again. When an owl hooted in the walnut-tree outside his window, and in the distance, as far away as the creek quarter, a dog howled, and the silence closed in again, he rose, and began to walk to and fro, slowly, thinking of the past and the future. The past had its ghosts,—not ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... grow weary of her life. For when she did sacrifice, the pure water would grow black and the wine be changed to blood. Also from the shrine of her husband, which was in the midst of her palace, was heard a voice calling her, and the owl cried aloud from the house-top. And in her dreams the cruel AEneas seemed to drive her before him; or she seemed to be going a long way with none to bear her company, and be seeking her own people in a land that was desert. ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... the rest of the day he hung about the shack, as solemn as an owl. And once in the night he got up and lighted the lamp and came over and studied my face. I blinked up at him sleepily, for I was dog-tired and had been dreaming that we were back in Paris at the ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... gone—" Well, sir," burst out Evans, "don't you see that the real murderer is not that stupid, ignorant owl, Hodges?" ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... Plymouth to-night, along the short road, Caspian patched up but sulky as an owl. Luckily I didn't lose the ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... 'skulls' and 'mandibles' of two genera, the 'Dinornis' and 'Palapteryx'; and of an extinct genus, 'Notornis', allied to the 'Rallidae'; and the mandibles of a species of 'Nestor', a genus of nocturnal owl-like parrots, of which only two living species ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... at once a rose-colored cat and a yellow owl. The cat was carved impressionistically in a series of circles. She was altogether celestial and comfortable. The owl might have ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... continued its silent work, weaving its blanket softer, deeper. The straggling pedestrians of early morning bent their heads into it and drove first paths through the immaculate mantle. The fronts of owl cars and cabs were coated with a sugary white rime. Broadway lay in a white lethargy that is ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... every boulder, and most things looked asleep except the rill that went on running. Only we and the rabbits, and the night moths and the beetles, seemed to be stirring. An occasional bat appeared and vanished like a spectral illusion, and I saw one owl flap across the moor with ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... but crown the altar of Joseph with asses' ears. Such foolish Munchausenisms give to young girls a false idea of the opposite sex, relax their vigilance and imperil their virtue. From such ridiculous romances, solemnly approved by an owl-like priesthood, sprung that false code—so insulting to womankind—that a wife's honor is not committed to her own keeping, but to the tender care of every man with whom she comes in contact. When a wife goes wrong a hypocritical world rises in ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... best, as she sat on the arm of his chair and listened with tactful sympathy to his stories of the big black bass that kept house in the pool at the end of the lake, or of the downy woodpecker's nest in the old hickory, or, perhaps, of the big hoot owl that perched on the granary warm nights to watch for mice. It was with a certain feeling of sadness, as well as of pride, that she watched him grow older, lose his boyhood ways, and become more and more of a man—a ...
— Buffalo Roost • F. H. Cheley
... need ever so much honeysuckle; you know where it hangs thickest—in the Owl's Glen. Olympia will like to see that—the haunt of her favorite bird"; and the busy little maid laughed cheerily, like a disordered goddess, intoxicated by the exhaling odors ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... adventures of Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf? Every nation has a congeries of such tales, and it is curious to mark how the same animal reappears with the same imputed physiognomy in all of them. The fox is always cunning, the wolf ravenous, the owl wise, and the ass foolish. The question has been raised whether such traits were at first actually ascribed to animals, or whether their introduction in story was intended merely as an agreeable figure of speech for classes of men. We cannot doubt but that the former was the case. ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... that day, Simeon Fenellan, thinking of the many things which are nothing, and so melancholy for lack of amusements properly to follow Old Veuve, that he could ask himself whether he had not done a deed of night, to be blinking at his fellow-men like an owl all mad for the reveller's hoots and flights and mice and moony roundels behind his hypocritical judex air of moping composure, chanced on Mr. Carling, the solicitor, where Lincoln's Inn pumps lawyers into Fleet Street through the drain-pipe of Chancery Lane. He was in the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... I have done you? I shall soon make you both feel what you deserve." She said no more, but taking water in her hand, threw it in his face with these words, "Quit the form of man, and take that of an owl." These words were soon followed by the effect, and immediately she commanded one of her women to shut up the owl in a cage, and give him neither meat ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... to see a owl cloce it has offle big eyes, and wen you come to feel it with your fingers, wich it bites, you fine it is mosely fethers, with only jus meat enuf to ...
— The Universal Reciter - 81 Choice Pieces of Rare Poetical Gems • Various
... of long-legged, unhealthy-looking sheep, who crashed through the bushes in wild terror as the riders swept by them. Their plaintive calls were the only sounds which broke the silence of the night, save the occasional dismal hooting of the veldt owl. ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... trembling heart as the sun went down behind the western hills. Slowly the hours dragged on, and many a time she stole out in the deep darkness to listen, but there was nothing to be heard save the distant cry of the night-owl, and she was about retracing her steps for the fifth time, when from behind a clump of rose-bushes started a little dusky form, which whispered ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... with a sad little smile. "Pardon me, mademoiselle. Even were you free of your trothplight—even were I free of my prison, most beautiful lady, I have naught to offer you yonder in that fair land of France. They tell me that the owl and the wolf hunt undisturbed where Arnaye once stood. My chateau is carpeted with furze and roofed with God's Heaven. That gives me a large estate—does it not?—but I may not reasonably ask a woman to share it. So ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... the queerness of the whole business. Why should there be such a mystery about it? and why such care taken to maintain silence? He had just begun to ask himself these questions, and a horrible suspicion was forming itself in his mind, when he heard the hoot of an owl from the direction of the beach. Wondering at an owl being in so unlikely a place, he stooped to gather a fresh load of iron. But suddenly a man sprang out of the gloom, flashing a dark lantern full upon him. Blinded by the light, he staggered back. Then a revolver in the man's hand went off ...
— The Cruise of the Dazzler • Jack London
... "Good evening, Mister Owl!" Bandy-legs called out, with mock respect. "Hope all the little Owls are feeling quite well to-night. Glad to have us for company, are you? Well, we're just tickled to death to be with you, ...
— Chums of the Camp Fire • Lawrence J. Leslie
... said: "So let it be and may it mean so; for never come you here but to stir in me anger or mourning. Ever were you the screech owl or the Osprey that boded ill when you spoke of Tristan; what ...
— The Romance Of Tristan And Iseult • M. Joseph Bedier
... I thought it must be breakin' out in blisters. 'Never see anybody that looked just like me, did you, Sis?' I says to her, when I couldn't stand it any longer. 'No, sir,' she says, solemn as an owl. She was right out and honest, I'll say that for her. That's the only time Marcellus laughed while we was inside that house. I didn't blame him much. Ho, ho! Well, he ain't laughin' now and neither are we—or we hadn't ought to be. ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... rewards you wot not of; and I am of the mould as of the race of those whose swords have conquered thrones. For the rest, your news of the alliance of Louis of Hungary with your Tribune makes it necessary for the friend of Louis to withdraw from all feud with Rome. Ere the week expire, the owl and the bat may seek refuge in ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... paid the scot. Towards midnight Sergeant Inch had so far forgot his rancour as to strike up his song of Robin and the Night Owl—'Robin,' I should explain, being the Earl of Essex, and the 'Night Owl' our own general, so nicknamed for his activities ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... nameless sorrowing look So often thought a whim? God-willed, the willow shades the brook, The gray owl sings a hymn; ...
— Along the Shore • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... John Jay to his senses. He crawled along the aisle and out of the door, blinkling like an owl as he came into the blinding sunshine. Many experiences had convinced him that he was born under an unlucky star. When he went leaping down the hill to the log where he had left his basket, it was with the ...
— Ole Mammy's Torment • Annie Fellows Johnston
... high-balls and stories, and he would hurry home to dinner a little late but feeling good, and a little sorry for the poor Standard Oil Company. On this evening as he entered he heard some one say: "Babbitt was in last night as full as a boiled owl." ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... good as a gift, though, with the cards you held," said Mr. Whitmore, and I heard the coins jingle in changing hands, when from the shrubbery, where the gravel sweep narrowed, there sounded the low hoot of an owl. Being town-bred and unused to owls, I took it for a human cry in the darkness and shrank closer against my ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... toward woodpeckers, bluebirds and their like, the mahogany-like dense heart-wood rots, leaving hollow passages in the trunk and larger limbs, and often in the smaller ones, too. Here are homes for all who seek complete seclusion from storms and enemies. The little screech owl loves these hollows more than those of any other tree, and sings his little quavering night song from the dusky tops, while his mate and her eggs are safely hidden in the blackness of the hollow below. The downy woodpecker bores ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... time which is reasonably valuable to me, however lightly you may regard it, by telling me now about slim men who eat more than you do and yet keep their figures. The woods are full of them; also the owl wagons. The difference between such men as those you have described and such men as you is that they were made to be thin men and to keep on being thin men regardless of their food consumption, and that your sort are naturally predisposed ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... "Owl that I am!" said King Prigio to himself. "I might have better wished for a complete set of sham fairy things which would not work. It would have saved a great deal of trouble; but I am so much out of the habit of using the cap, that I never thought of it. However, what ...
— Prince Ricardo of Pantouflia - being the adventures of Prince Prigio's son • Andrew Lang
... down the great stair, "the Corridors of Time," where the white owl glared his glassy wisdom on the passings and counter-passings, she was haunted with the thought that Harry had seen the extraordinary Kerr before; not shaken hands with him, perhaps—perhaps not even heard his name; but somewhere, across some distance, ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... York City, the sort of places that get themselves called "quaint." No one else manages the affairs of young lovers (on paper) with quite so much of the airy spirit of young love. I can think of no one else who could write such a scene as that in The Owl Taxi, where the dead-wagon, on its way in the night to the vast cemetery in a New York suburb, is held up for the removal of a much-needed corpse. Such material is bizarre. The handling of it must be very deft or the result will be revolting; and yet the thing can be done. In the ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... small wood covers for music and blotting cases, painted by hand, are rather pretty favors. The plain boxes and book covers can be bought and ornamented by the young artists of the family. Nothing is prettier than an owl sitting on an ivy vine for one of these. The owl, indeed, plays a very conspicuous part at the modern dinner-table and luncheon. His power of looking wise and being foolish at the same time fits him for modern society. He enters it as a pepper-caster, a feathered ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... eagles circling about the summit of a lofty tower. I soon became satisfied that there was a nest. Now, in all my collection, I lacked eggs of the native eagle and the large owl. ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... grandmother, "we will stay there long enough to get well rested and enjoy ourselves; but when the sun goes down and it grows dark, then we will go. Then all the little birds are silent in the trees and the old night-owl begins to hoot." ...
— What Sami Sings with the Birds • Johanna Spyri
... early English poems on secular subjects are also worthy of mention, among others, The Owl and the Nightingale, generally assigned to the reign of Henry III. (1216-1272), an Estrif, {26} or dispute, in which the owl represents the ascetic and the nightingale the aesthetic view of life. The debate is conducted with much animation and a spirited use of proverbial wisdom. The Land of ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... of the night he was brought leaping to his feet by a cry out of the dark: a cry that was neither from wolf, coyote, nor screech-owl. Wakened from a deep sleep, his consciousness was aware only of something dreadful. Outside the tent Mary ran to him: her teeth were chattering with terror: she could not speak. Clare crept from her tent. Both women instinctively drew ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... he could only lie still, his teeth chattering, his hair standing up on his head. "Who's that?" exclaimed the terrible voice once more, and then he saw a big black shape drop down from the tree above and settle on a dead branch a few feet above his hiding-place. It was a bird—a great owl, for now he could see it, sharply outlined against the clear starry sky; and the bird had seen and was peering curiously at him. And now all his fear was gone, for he could not be afraid of an owl; he had been accustomed ...
— A Little Boy Lost • Hudson, W. H.
... wind went "Yooooooo!" And the raven croaked in the tangled tarn— When, with a wail, the screech-owl flew Out of her lair in the haunted barn— There came three burglars down the road— Three burglars skilled in arts of sin, And they cried: "What's this? Aha! Oho!" And straightway ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field
... Whenever his back hair has grown so long that it is liable to impede his movements, a posse of grooms is despatched to his lair to rope, throw and shear him with horse-clippers. Last time they did it they swear they lost the instrument twice and that two bats and an owl flew out of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 18, 1919 • Various
... an answer. At last the door was flung open and the pleasantest-faced old gentleman it would be possible to find anywhere, with round pink cheeks, merry eyes, a snowy white upturned moustache and white hair to match, peering through big gold-rimmed spectacles like a cheerful night-owl, stood in the doorway. ...
— The Tale of Lal - A Fantasy • Raymond Paton
... great Minerva chose the Owl, That bird of solemn phiz, That truly awful-looking fowl, To represent her wis- Dom, little recked the goddess of The time when she would howl To see a Peanut set on end, ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... "Hooty the Owl didn't get one of us that time," said Old Mr. Toad to his nearest neighbor with a chuckle of satisfaction. Then he swelled out his music bag and began to sing again. And at once, as abruptly as it had stopped, the great chorus began again as joyous as before, for nothing had happened to bring sadness ...
— The Adventures of Old Mr. Toad • Thornton W. Burgess
... yell right out in the night, like a hoot owl only fiercer!" insisted one of her followers. "And she ain't safe to be loose with a habit ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... dark like an owl," sang back Eleanor, her good-humor restored the instant her paddle touched water,—for boating ...
— Betty Wales Freshman • Edith K. Dunton
... jealous. Anyhow, Solomon Owl declared that there was still another reason why Benjamin did not like Freddie Firefly. Solomon claimed that Benjamin would have liked to EAT Freddie. But he didn't quite dare to grab him for fear of getting ...
— The Tale of Freddie Firefly • Arthur Scott Bailey
... thick purple carpet under the amber light, all too brilliant for her. She had come from a world of darkness, owl-like she must blink before the blaze. Some one came forward to her, some one so kind and comforting, so easy and unsurprised that Maggie suddenly felt herself steadied as though a friend had put an arm around her. Before ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
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