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More "Snail" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... They have their Exits and their Entrances, And one man in his time plays many Parts, His Acts being seven Ages. At first the Infant Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms: And then, the whining School-boy with his satchel, And shining morning-face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to school. And then the Lover Sighing like furnace, with a woful ballad Made to his Mistress' eye-brow. Then a Soldier Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the Pard, Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... At home his little weaknesses do not strike you. You may not be on the spot when he flies across Piccadilly Circus, pursued, as he fancies, by a Brompton omnibus which has not yet reached St. James's Church, and is moving at a snail's pace; you may not have been with him on that occasion when, in his eagerness to be in time for the 'Flying Dutchman,' he arrives at Paddington an hour before it starts, and is put into the parliamentary train which ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... the turtle with the summer solstice and the snail as the animal associated with the winter solstice. There does not seem to be any one animal used in connection with any one of the cardinal points. In Tro-Cortesianus 88c the dog seems to be associated with the north as shown by the ...
— Animal Figures in the Maya Codices • Alfred M. Tozzer and Glover M. Allen
... God's approbation. What, do you think that every heavy-heeled professor will have heaven? What, every lazy one? every wanton and foolish professor, that will be stopt by anything, kept back by anything, that scarce runneth so fast heavenward as a snail creepeth on the ground? Nay, there are some professors that do not go on so fast in the way of God as a snail doth go on the wall; and yet these think that heaven and happiness is for them. But stay, there are many more that run than there be that ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Vol. 2 (of 10) • Grenville Kleiser
... strolling off the way, in the hope of starting a sage grouse or rabbit from some sheltering clump of brush. During a specially quiet routine like this; the cattle lolling behind the wagons, mostly unattended, keeping the snail pace set by the patient teams; a steer now and again turning aside to appropriate a tuft of bunch-grass; their white horns rising and falling in the brilliant sunlight, with the swaying motion of their bodies as they walked, shimmered like waves of ...
— Crossing the Plains, Days of '57 - A Narrative of Early Emigrant Tavel to California by the Ox-team Method • William Audley Maxwell
... and others short, some straight and others crooked, some strong, others feeble; some of us run, others walk, others snail it. But all, all have their feet upon the same level of the common earth. And America's worst enemy is he—or she—who by word or look encourages another to think otherwise. Head as high as you please; but feet always upon the common ground, ...
— The Call of the Twentieth Century • David Starr Jordan
... therefore be neglected. Of such neglect indeed my passionate love of letters would not admit. With respect to law, though infinitely too slow for the rapidity of my desires, still it was good to be prepared for all events. I therefore entered myself of the Temple, and thus began another snail-pace journey ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... peacock with a fiery tail, I saw a blazing comet drop down hail, I saw a cloud wrapped with ivy round, I saw an oak creep on the ground, I saw a snail swallow up a whale, I saw the sea brimful of ale, I saw a Venice glass full fifteen feet deep, I saw a well full of men's tears that weep, I saw red eyes all of a flaming fire, I saw a house bigger than the moon and higher, ...
— The Little Mother Goose • Anonymous
... hundred horsemen moved out of Lafayette that forenoon amidst the greatest excitement and enthusiasm. Most of them swam their horses across the river, too eager to wait for the snail-like ferry to transport them to the opposite bank. They were fearfully and wonderfully armed and equipped for the expedition. Guns of all descriptions and ages; pistols, axes, knives and diligently scoured swords; pots and pans and kettles; blankets, knapsacks and parcels ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... an overwhelming incubus. I was like a miserable snail, forever lugging my house round on my back—unable to shake it off. A change in our mode of life would not necessarily in itself bring my children any nearer to me; it would, on the contrary, probably antagonize them. I had sowed the seed and I was reaping the harvest. My professional ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... whimsical bravado, she turned off suddenly into the trail that led to the river, her color deepening with the consciousness that, after all, she was vaguely hoping she might see him somewhere before the morning passed. Through the leafy pathway she rode at a snail's pace, brushing the low-hanging leaves and twigs from about her head with something akin to petulance. As she neared the river the neighing of a horse hard by caused her to sit erect with burning ears. Then she relapsed into a smile, ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... hollow which was deep under water in the great January freshet. That freshet deposited a new layer of sand and also bushels of clam and snail shells of all sizes and species. They lie so thick they may be taken up by the shovelful. Two or three dead fish are also found. What a fine fossiliferous stratum will be found here about a hundred ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... this. "I've done some science myself. I did my Biology at University College,—getting out the ovary of the earthworm and the radula of the snail, and all that. Lord! It's ten years ago. But go on! go on! tell me about ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... list, ye braves, who love to roam! A snail was chasing a tailor home. And if Old Shears hadn't run so fast, The snail would surely have caught him ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... not here; Hence, you long-leg'd spinners, hence: Beetles black approach not near, Worm nor snail do ...
— A Fairy Tale in Two Acts Taken from Shakespeare (1763) • William Shakespeare
... now and proceeding at a snail's pace toward the Arc de Triomphe. Her eyes narrowed. He was sure that she clutched her slim fingers tightly although, for an excellent reason, he was not by way of knowing. He was rapturously watching ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... crowded into a closed van with the baggage. When we started in the dark we had the train to ourselves, but as I awoke three hours later from an uneasy sleep and looked out of the van, the rest of the train already swarmed with Italian soldiers who had clambered upon it as it crept along at a snail's pace. And when dawn came we saw ahead of us a long vista of trains stretching out of sight, while behind stood another queue of them, whistling impatiently like human beings at a ticket office; ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... fit the snail, as it were," commented the land baron, patronizingly, gazing around the little cupboard of a room. "At any rate," he added, in an effort to hide his dissatisfaction, "it's a pleasure to become better acquainted with such a—what shall I say?—whimsical ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... her and displaying her palm full of sea treasures. "See the colours of those bits of shell—that's a bit of a mussel; and that is a piece of a snail shell, I think; and aren't ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... cornfields drive the insidious foe, And from your harvest keep a hundred harms; Even the blackest of them all, the crow, Renders good service as your man-at-arms, Crushing the beetle in his coat of mail, And crying havoc on the slug and snail." —FROM "THE BIRDS ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph, Volume 1, Number 2, February, 1897 • anonymous
... only chance. If we had stayed on the other course we might have found enough breeze to carry us home, but we would have gone at a snail's pace, just as we were doing, and there was no chance at all to catch Gladys and the ...
— A Campfire Girl's Happiness • Jane L. Stewart
... we kindled on the floor of the car; it was necessary to shove the burning coals here and there over the surface to avoid burning a hole through it. At one point I noticed a horse-car filled with straw bedding for the animals, and the train going here at a snail's pace enabled me to jump off and chuck an armful of the straw into our car; I did this with my friend of the blankets in mind. I threw the damp straw on top of the live coals and in a few minutes or less the car was filled with rank, reeking smoke that fairly ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... down, And the Hornet, in jacket of yellow and brown; Who with him the Wasp, his companion, did bring, But they promised that evening to lay by their sting. Then the shy little Dormouse peeped out of his hole, And led to the feast his blind cousin, the Mole; And the Snail, with her horns peeping out of her shell, Came, fatigued with the distance, the length of an ell. A mushroom the table; and on it was spread A water-dock leaf, which their table-d'hote made. The viands were various, to each ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... cannot say that I like her in all her processes, but I am content to believe that this may be owing to my ignorance of some of the facts of the case. There are, on the other hand, two acts of destruction in Nature which leave me unprotesting and pleased. One of these occurs when a thrush eats a snail, banging the shell repeatedly against a stone. I have never thought of the incident from the snail's point of view. I find myself listening to the tap-tap of the shell on the stone as though it were music. I felt ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... came out looking grave. More: they looked tombstones and Tennessee-papers-please-copy. They wrote out a diet list to which I was to be restricted. It had everything that I had ever heard of to eat on it, except snails. And I never eat a snail unless it overtakes me and bites ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... of the Tsay-ee-kah and of the Petrograd Soviet, lay miles out on the edge of the city, beside the wide Neva. I went there on a street-car, moving snail-like with a groaning noise through the cobbled, muddy streets, and jammed with people. At the end of the line rose the graceful smoke-blue cupolas of Smolny Convent outlined in dull gold, beautiful; and beside it the great barracks like ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... willing with him. The nature of his experiences so far disinclined him for any further experiments, at least until he had reconsidered them. But he lifted a sheet of paper, and turned a glass of water pink and then green, and he created a snail, which he miraculously annihilated, and got himself a miraculous new tooth-brush. Somewhere in the small hours he had reached the fact that his will-power must be of a particularly rare and pungent quality, a fact of which he had indeed had inklings before, but no certain assurance. The scare ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... compelled me to reprove, and how often have I jeered myself for a fraud as the doughty platform combatant, when shrinking from blaming some lad or lass for doing their work badly. An unkind look or word has availed to make me shrink into myself as a snail into its shell, while, on the platform, opposition makes me speak ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... smallpox : variolo. smart : eleganta; doloreti. smear : sxmiri. smell : flari, odori. smelt : fandi. smock : kitelo. smoke : fumi, (fish, etc.) fumajxi. smooth : glata, ebena. smother : sufoki. smuggle : kontrabandi. snail : heliko. snake : serpento. sneeze : terni. snore : ronki. snowdrop : galanto. so : tiel, tiamaniere. "—much", tiom. soak : trempi. soap : sap'o, -umi. sober : sobra, serioza. social : sociala. society ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... went on with his work in a snail-like manner, as if that were the only job "the boss" had, or was like to have, and he must ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... sloped inwards, the roof collapsed, the sides went in, the ice passed over all, and the hut of Peegwish was finally obliterated from off the face of the earth. So, a giant with his foot might slowly and effectually crush the mansion of a snail! ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne
... on a snail! And page 230 is blank," said the journalist. "Then there are two more blank pages before we come to the word it is such a joy to write when one is unhappily so happy as to be ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... observation the soldiers have been clad in white clothing, but in addition to this it has been necessary for them to lie flat upon their faces in the snow, moving very, very slowly, accomplishing their transfers from point to point literally at snail speed. ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... cobweb i' t' kitchen, Snaw, snaw, coom faster Julius Caesar made a law A weddin', a woo, a clog an' a shoe Chimley-sweeper, blackymoor The Lady-bird Cow-lady, cow-lady, hie thy way wum, The Magpie I cross'd pynot,(1) an' t' pynot cross'd me Tell-pie-tit The Bat Black-black-bearaway The Snail Sneel, sneel, put oot your horn, Hallamshire When all the world shall be aloft, Harrogate When lords an' ladies stinking water soss, The River Don The ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... below going at a snail's pace while Frank was still a short distance in the rear and Mr. Temple and Tom Barnum were not yet in sight. It was an open touring car with the top folded back. There were three men in it, one on the seat beside the driver and the third in the rear. He was the man who had entered the Hampton ...
— The Radio Boys on the Mexican Border • Gerald Breckenridge
... water flowed over the logs, the evaporation of a portion of the carbonic acid gas caused the separation of an equivalent quantity of insoluble carbonate of lime, which, layer by layer, built up the mound. A fragment of the rock which I possess contains leaves, twigs, hazel nuts, and snail shells, which, falling from time to time upon it, were incrusted and finally imprisoned in the ...
— Saratoga and How to See It • R. F. Dearborn
... as successive sweeps of open country, cold under the moon, coarsely patched and seamed with thin rows and heavy clumps of trees. To her right, half a mile down the river, which trailed away behind the light like the shiny, slimy path of a snail, winked the scattered lights of Marietta. Not two hundred yards away at the end of the bridge squatted the station, marked by a sullen lantern. The oppression was lifted now—the tree-tops below her were rocking ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... we shall ever get enough things before the winter," replied David, with his eyes fixed on the short dry turf at his feet. "Oh, look!" he exclaimed suddenly, "there's a funny snail." ...
— Penelope and the Others - Story of Five Country Children • Amy Walton
... your good graces, since forsooth, He stood not as he'd carry us by storm With his perfections! You're for the composed Manly assured becoming confidence! —Get her to say, "to-morrow," and I'll give you... I'll give you black Urganda, to be spoiled With petting and snail-paces. Will ...
— A Blot In The 'Scutcheon • Robert Browning
... small white spot, no bigger than the point of a Pin. Afterwards I view'd it every way with a better Microscope and found it on both sides, and edge-ways, to resemble the Shell of a small Water-Snail with a flat spiral Shell: it had twelve wreathings, a, b, c, d, e, &c. all very proportionably growing one less than another toward the middle or center of the Shell, where there was a very small round white spot. I could ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... which led towards the common. This lane was scarcely wider than a path, and was only divided from the grounds of the villa by a ditch and a slight railing. I was intently occupied in examining an ant's nest, and the various evolutions performed by its black citizens on the sudden fall of a snail among them, which had dropt off a branch of dog-roses while I was gathering it, when all at once a sound as of many people running, joined to loud cries and vociferations, caught my ear. There was something ominous in the noise, and my heart beat quick as I looked with a mixture of fear ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... reasonableness of this statement and prove our contention that all we see here is really crystallized thought. Our houses, our machinery, our chairs and tables, all that has been made by the hand of man is the embodiment of a thought. As the juices in the soft body of the snail gradually crystallize into the hard and flinty shell which it carries upon its back and which hides it, so everything used in our civilization is a concretion of invisible, intangible mind-stuff. The thought of James Watt in time congealed into a steam engine ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... Miki tried. He would have eaten the frog, but Neewa was ahead of him there. The spruce and balsam gum clogged up his teeth and almost made him vomit because of its bitterness. Between a snail and a stone he could find little difference, and as the one bug he tried happened to be that asafoetida-like creature known as a stink-bug he made no further efforts in that direction. He also bit off a tender tip from a ground-shoot, but instead ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... Humanitarian cause. It did not mean the cause of humanity, but rather, if anything, the cause of everything else. At its noblest it meant a sort of mystical identification of our life with the whole life of nature. So a man might wince when a snail was crushed as if his toe were trodden on; so a man might shrink when a moth shrivelled as if his own hair had caught fire. Man might be a network of exquisite nerves running over the whole universe, a subtle spider's web of pity. This was a fine conception; ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... means!" Grant responded, giving the order, and we moved forward but only at snail pace; for I think he wanted to give the settlers plenty of ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... they moved, the red, blue and yellow lights passed one over the other, staining an inch of the brown earth beneath with a spot of the most intricate colour. The light fell either upon the smooth, grey back of a pebble, or, the shell of a snail with its brown, circular veins, or falling into a raindrop, it expanded with such intensity of red, blue and yellow the thin walls of water that one expected them to burst and disappear. Instead, the drop was left in a second ...
— Monday or Tuesday • Virginia Woolf
... she was still young she did not seem so. It might be said of her that with her habits and manner of life she had wrought a sort of rind, a stony, insensible covering within which she shut herself, like the snail within his portable house. Dona Perfecta rarely ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... hope shall shine from heaven, and give To fruit of hard work, sunny cheek, And flowers of grace and love revive, And shrivelled pasturage grow sleek, And corn snail thrive. ...
— Fringilla: Some Tales In Verse • Richard Doddridge Blackmore
... passing now. Then, perhaps, you come across a drove of wild, shaggy buffaloes, or a travelling carriage rattling and jilting along, or a stray priest or so, trudging homewards from some outlying chapel. That red-bodied funereal- looking two-horse-coach, crawling at a snail's pace, belongs to his Excellency the Cardinal, whom Papal etiquette forbids to walk on foot within the city, and whom you can see a little further on pottering feebly along the road in his violet stockings, supported by his clerical secretary, and followed at a respectful distance ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... grain found how treat dead staid ground town beast stead waif hound growl bleat tread rail mound clown preach dread flail pound frown speak thread quail round crown streak sweat snail sound drown feast death ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... Robert," said the older of the boys as they were poling up the river to a new fishing place. "The old boat creeps over the water no faster than a snail." ...
— Fifty Famous People • James Baldwin
... the spring And day's at the morn; Morning's at seven; The hill-side's dew-pearled; The lark's on the wing; The snail's on the thorn: God's in his heaven— All's right with ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... that," he mutters, "now I come to think of it. Only natural they should be going at snail's pace. Carrai! the wonder is the gringo being able for even that, or go at all. I thought I'd given him his quietus, for surely I sent my spear right through his ribs! It must have struck button, or buckle, or ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... cowrie shells; mottled tiger shells; spider shells, with their long, sharp spikes; immense conches, rough, and covered with great knobs on the outside, but smooth and rose-lipped within, and of many delicate hues. There were some that resembled gigantic snail shells, and others shaped like the cornucopias, used to hold sugar-plums for children. One species, the most remarkable of all, was composed of a substance, resembling mother-of-pearl, exquisitely beautiful, but very fragile, breaking easily, if you but set foot on one of them: they were changeable ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... coach drawn by six small mice. This made the queen angry, because she had not a new coach too. Therefore, resolving to ruin Tom, she complained to the king that he had behaved very insolently to her. The king sent for him in a rage. Tom, to escape his fury, crept into an empty snail-shell, and there lay till he was almost starved; when peeping out of the shell, he saw a fine butterfly settled on the ground. He now ventured out, and getting astride, the butterfly took wing, and ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... I was terrified by the presence of this unwelcome intruder, I speak no more than truth. Had I been on horseback, I should have regarded the creature no more than the snail that crawled upon the grass. The grizzly bear is too slow to overtake a horse; but I was afoot, and knew that the animal could outrun me, however swift I ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... but at the same time, we think, a universal and important fact, that love permeates the universe. Even a female snail, if we could only put the question, would undoubtedly admit that it loves its ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne
... Crabs, call'd Stone-Crabs. Smaller flat Crabs. Oysters great and small. Cockles. Clams. Muscles. Conks. Skellop. Man of Noses. Periwinkles, or Wilks. Sea-Snail-Horns. Fidlars. Runners. Spanish or Pearl-Oysters. Flattings. Tortois and Terebin, accounted for ...
— A New Voyage to Carolina • John Lawson
... quantity of the same; and I could see also from all the surrounding circumstances, especially the pallid faces of the crowd, that there was something sad about it all. The horse moved slowly along, at almost a snail's pace, while behind walked a poor, sad couple with their heads bowed down, and each with a hand on the tail-board of the cart. They were evidently overwhelmed ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... river, and were slowly grazing past the wood, I resolved to wait for them to pass on before leaving my concealment. I sat down and tried to be patient, but the brutes were in no hurry, and went on skirting the wood at a snail's pace. It was about six o'clock before the last stragglers had left, and then I ventured out from my hiding-place, hungry as a wolf and afraid of being overtaken by night before finding any human habitation. ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... the great steamer began to move. She went at a snail's pace, as it seemed to me, across the lough to the County Down coast. Very slowly she swept round in a wide circle and steamed back again northward. There was something terrifying in the stately deliberation with which she moved. It was as if some great beast of prey paced as a sentinel ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... instantaneously gauged as dyspeptic or eupeptic, friend or foe. On the march, Javert was on the alert, snuffing up the air, until some savory odor crossed his path, when he would shut himself up, like a snail within his shell. Yet he was not sleeping, for no titbit ever passed the portals beneath. Perhaps, however, they were themselves trusty now, having made habit a second nature. I cannot imagine them watering at sight of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... tried to calculate whether he might get over to France without paying them, and be able to carry his share of the property with him; and so he went on, pursuing his wretched, uneasy, solitary ride, sometimes sauntering along at a snail's pace, and then again spurring the poor brute, and endeavouring to bring his mind to some settled plan. But, whenever he did so, the idea of his sister's death was the only one which seemed to present either comfort ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... at a snail's pace but a few feet above the ground—literally feeling our way along through the darkness, for both moons had set, and the night was black with the clouds that are to be found only at ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the job. They moved, one foot after the other, with a mechanical precision, exhausting even to look at. To keep with them was practically impossible for an ordinary pedestrian. Nothing short of a woman shopping could worthily have matched their pace. In sight their speed was snail-like; out of it they would appear to have stopped, so far did they fall behind. Once I thought they ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... forgotten how to walk faster than a snail?" said Piccolissima to her sister. "These great flies were just now dressed with a cloak of gold, and now they carry their toilet in a bundle; look at the third joint of their largest legs, which they join together and let hang behind ...
— Piccolissima • Eliza Lee Follen
... themselves leaving that guidance, and blindly adventuring out into the open thoroughfare to avoid some obstacle—some spectral wain or omnibus got hopelessly stranded; while there were muffled cries and calls here, there, and everywhere. They went at a snail's pace, of course. Once, at a corner, the near wheels got on the pavement; the cab tilted over; Miss Burgoyne shrieked aloud and clung to her companion; then there was a heavy bump, and the venerable vehicle resumed its slow progress. Suddenly they beheld ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... killed if the gluttonous kern had not wrought me a snail's own wrong!" Then he sounded, and down came kinsmen and clansmen all: "Ten blows, for ten tine, on his back let fall, And reckon no stroke if the blood follow not ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... was more intelligible. Now and then a peculiar smile flitted across her features; it almost seemed as if she were highly amused at my good uncle, who had withdrawn into his silken dressing-gown like a snail into its shell, and was vainly endeavouring to push out of sight a treacherous yellow string, with which he fastened his night-jacket together, and which would keep tumbling out of his bosom yards and yards ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... still laughing, when he crawled out, like a snail from under his shell, and got upon his feet, clutching the tub to hurl it at ...
— The Young Surveyor; - or Jack on the Prairies • J. T. Trowbridge
... the chief of all the documents of life. Well, in spite of his innocent appearance, the Lampyris is an eater of flesh, a hunter of game; and he follows his calling with rare villainy. His regular prey is the Snail. ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... on at a snail pace the howling of the wintry gale continued unabated, with the roar of the wind through the tree-tops ashore, the dash of the waves on the point above, and the constant wabbling motion of the shanty-boat to remind them of ...
— The House Boat Boys • St. George Rathborne
... But come, I'll serve thee; thou shalt be as free As air, despite the waters; let us hence: I'll show thee I am honest—(oh, thou jewel!) Thou shalt be furnished, Werner, with such means 350 Of flight, that if thou wert a snail, not birds[cu] Should overtake thee.—Let me gaze again! I have a foster-brother in the mart Of Hamburgh skilled in precious stones. How many Carats may it weigh?—Come, Werner, I will wing ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... but unlike every other fluke, its life cycle is not fixed to definite intermediate hosts. Depending upon where it is, the fluke adapts. It still must pass through its life cycle, but its intermediate host need not be one species of snail, fish, or copepod. Any cold-blooded host will do. What you have here is a Kardonian variant which has adapted to some particular intermediate host on this world. Until now, its final host was either man or Varl. Now we have a third, the Lani. ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... a roadside ditch or pool in springtime, take from it any bit of stick or straw which has lain undisturbed for a time. Some little worm-shaped masses of clear jelly containing specks are fastened to the stick: eggs of a small snail-like shell-fish. One of these specks magnified proves to be a crystalline sphere with an opaque mass in its centre. And while you are looking, the opaque mass begins to stir, and by-and-by slowly to turn upon its axis like a forming planet,—life beginning in the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... to the station had been a long and tedious one. The way back was surprisingly short, even though they walked at snail's pace. There never was a courting such as Tarling's, and it seemed unreal as a dream. The girl had a key of the outer gate and they passed ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace
... or EXAGGERATION consists in magnifying an object beyond its natural bounds. "As swift as the wind; as white as the snow; as slow as a snail;" and the ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... grass-roots, and writhing forward as noiselessly as if I were stalking some prey. There were times when I advanced so slowly it would have puzzled a watcher to determine whether mine was not also the body of the dead. At length, even at that snail's rate of progress, I gained the protection of the tepees upon the other side of the camp, and skulked in among them. The lodge just before me, blackened by paint and weather, must be the one I sought. I rested close within its shadow, striving ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... Sir Percivale: 'All men, to one so bound by such a vow, And women were as phantoms. O, my brother, Why wilt thou shame me to confess to thee How far I faltered from my quest and vow? For after I had lain so many nights A bedmate of the snail and eft and snake, In grass and burdock, I was changed to wan And meagre, and the vision had not come; And then I chanced upon a goodly town With one great dwelling in the middle of it; Thither I made, and there was I disarmed By maidens each as fair as any flower: But when ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... goes at a snail's pace through the deep sand over the heath; the railroad conveys him in a few hours to Altona and Hamburg. The circle of my friends there is increased within the last years. The greater part of my time I spent with my oldest friends Count Hoik, and the resident Minister ...
— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen
... middle-class cousinry seizes a victim, he is so carefully gagged and bound that complaint is impossible; he is smeared with slime and wax like a snail in a beehive. This invisible, imperceptible tyranny is upheld by powerful reasons,—such as the wish to be surrounded by their own family, to keep property in their own hands, the mutual help they ought to lend each other, the guarantees ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... pace slackened, what insulting expressions, instantly understood by the sensitive animals! "Go on, you wretched snail! Confound you, you slug! I'll roast ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... He went a snail's pace, and at last dismounted, and groped his way. He got more than one fall in the snow, and thought himself very fortunate, when, at last, something black towered before him, and it was ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... your half-tone," Glen assured her. "What's all this business, anyway? Put me wise, Sis, I'm groping like a blind snail in the mulligatawny." ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... had ridden quite fast, or perchance these two had gone at a snail's pace, but when half-way home they looked about them and ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... at the hotel. Early in the fall he had rented a small one-story house situated just off Main Street, set well back from the sidewalk among clumps of oleanders. Into this he retired as a snail into its shell. At first he took his meals at the hotel, but later he imported an impassive, secretive man-servant, who took charge of him completely. Neither master nor man made any friends, and in fact rebuffed all advances. One Sunday, Carroll and Orde, out for a walk, passed ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... Apparently," Trigger said thoughtfully, "they're a good deal like us in a lot of ways. But worse. Much worse! And the Old Galactics were just slow. They thought slow; they moved slow—they did almost everything slow. At full gallop, old Repulsive couldn't have kept up with a healthy snail. Besides, they just liked to grow things and tinker with things and so on. They didn't go in for fighting, and they never got to be at all good at it. So they just got ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... cure is to thrash them with holly, while in some places the juice of the leek mixed with cream is held in repute. To exterminate warts a host of plants have been recommended; the juice of the dandelion being in favour in the Midland counties, whereas in the North, one has but to hang a snail on a thorn, and as the poor creature wastes away the warts will disappear. In Leicestershire the ash is employed, and in many places the elder is considered efficacious. Another old remedy is to prick the wart with a gooseberry thorn passed through a ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... northern neighbours, to whom the use of rifles gives a great superiority. Among the peculiarities of this people, there is nothing more remarkable than the tradition relative to their origin. According to universal belief, the founder of the nation was a snail passing a quiet existence along the banks of the Osage, till a high flood swept him down to the Missouri, and left him exposed on the shore. The heat of the sun at length ripened him into a man, but with the change of his nature, he had not forgotten his native seats on the Osage, ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... it in brown paper, mostly. Cows free in woods. Alligator tail good. Snail built up just like a conch (whelk). They eat good. Worms like a conch. Bile conch. Git it out shell. Grind it sausage grinder. Little onion. Black pepper. Rather eat conch than any kind of nourishment ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves • Works Projects Administration
... cried, as she pulled her clothing furiously from her, and stood with nothing but a plain coloured shawl of gauze covered in tinsel twined about her slim waist, "why hast thou wasted precious moments? Why has thou imperilled my chance by infuriating the great man? Out of my way, thou snail." ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... addressed to him he would know at once that it was the one he was waiting for. He read from morning till evening, and not journals, but serious books—historical works. These prolonged studies, this stillness, this hidden life, like a snail in its shell, suited his spiritual condition to perfection; and for this, if nothing more, thanks to Gemma! But was she alive? Would ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... idea how many fourpenny tortoises would make a meal for a healthy young nun on Monte San Giuliano, where one's appetite is sharpened by the air. They occasionally add a few snails, which are also permitted; there is a kind of snail which is found underground and is considered a luxury by others besides the nuns of ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... borders nurse the fragrant wreath, My fountain murmurs and my zephyrs breathe; Slow glides the painted snail, the gilded fly Smooths his fine down to charm thy curious eye; On twinkling fins my scaly nations play, Or wind, with sinuous train, their trackless way. My plumy pairs, in gay embroidery dressed, Form with ingenious skill the pensile nest; To Love's sweet notes ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... hand he was pulling along at a snail's pace a green leaf, on which a dead bumble-bee lay in state. With the other he was keeping in order a funeral procession of caterpillars. It was a motley crowd of mourners that the energetic forefinger urged along the line of march. ...
— Big Brother • Annie Fellows-Johnston
... child, with its toys beyond, implies that new plans, to be made very soon, will be most beneficial, and will bring much pleasure to the consultant. But as the sausages and snail are not far distant, there is likely to be a marring of the pleasant conditions, caused by an act of unfaithfulness on the part of someone with whom the consultant is ...
— Telling Fortunes By Tea Leaves • Cicely Kent
... not more than three feet in height and was very corpulent; her grizzly skin was gluey and cold, like a snail's and her thin red hair fell in locks of unequal length around her throat, which was disfigured by a goitre. Her large, flat hands looked like the fins of a shark, her dress was made of snail's skins and her mantle of the skins ...
— Old French Fairy Tales • Comtesse de Segur
... coral rock. Some were anchored oyster-like, and of gigantic size, lying as traps with shells apart, like the mouth of some terrible monster lying hidden among the weeds; others with strange, striped shells crawled snail-like over the bottom, amidst many so small that they were mere specks. And all the while, as the boat glided on over the surface, there were flashes of gold, silver, ruby, topaz, sapphire, and amethyst, for shoals of fish, startled by their coming, darted through the sunlit water, to hide in the ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... after the night. And down the hill was passing a stream of people, guarded on either side by soldiers with bayonets. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes to look more closely, for there was something ominous in the snail's pace of ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... only the original store of air and water. In one of Ward's early experiments, a spire of grass and a fern, which sprang up in a corked bottle containing a little moist earth introduced as a bed for a snail, lived and flourished for eighteen years without a new supply of either fluid. In these boxes the plants grow till the enclosed air is exhausted of the gaseous constituents of vegetation, and till the water has yielded up the assimilable matter it ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... 11 is quite at home. He is there in his cell like a snail in his shell. His house goes with him; and he saves the thousand francs it would have cost him to journey from Tiflis to Pekin, second-class. I know he is committing a fraud, and that the law punishes such fraud. He can come out of his box when he likes and take a walk in the van, or even at night ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne
... neck; toward it all trails inside the Gap converge. De Spain gave his horse his head—it was still too dark to distinguish the path—and depended on his towering landmarks for his general direction. He advanced at a snail's pace until he passed the base of El Capitan, when of a sudden, as he rode out from among high projecting rocks full into the opening, faint rays of light from the eastern dawn revealed the narrow, strangely enclosed and perfectly hidden valley before him. The eastern and ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... book, for I read like a snail and cannot write at all.... 'Tis you must bear him the glad tidings—you alone—with your bright hair the color of the old sideboards in the dining-room. Take the front page of a newspaper and run to him. ...
— If You Touch Them They Vanish • Gouverneur Morris
... is this? The girl's fainting. Never mind. Here, landlady, bring a light! Lead the way. She's not too heavy to carry. Upstairs with you. What a snail you ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... express; but you just raise your eyes, my friend, and look at that bank, which is standing very nearly still, and you will realise that you and your canoe are standing very nearly still too; and that all your exertions are only enabling you to creep on at the pace of a crushed snail, and that it's the water that is going the pace. It's a most quaint ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... ground, climbing almost hidden in the withered grass underfoot. Poterloo points out with his foot this bit of abandoned track, and smiles; "That, that's our railway. It was a cripple, as you may say; that means something that doesn't move. It didn't work very quickly. A snail could have kept pace with it. We shall remake it. But certainly it won't go any quicker. That ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... limestones, and perhaps even to those of an older period. But there is a class of ancient marbles in Rome of much more recent geological origin—belonging indeed to the Miocene epoch—which are called Lumachella, from the Italian word signifying snail, on account of the presence in all the species of fossil shells. They vary in colour from the palest straw to the deepest purple. Some of them are exceedingly beautiful and valuable, and they are nearly all more or less rare, ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... moreover, their comrades a mile away laying the line parallel with the wadi were working at a snail's pace now, compared with their previous efforts, and were not making the slightest attempt to swing the line in toward the crossing. This was unpardonable, but the Turks noticed nothing out of the ordinary, and unerringly bombed the working-party in ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... along, like a hunt. I'd rather be on Pixie at home; I could always make him go when I tickled his ears. If we don't hurry up a little more I shall try it on this horse, and see if he won't break into something more interesting than a snail's pace." ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... the ranks, for each succeeding line lost a modicum in the length of the step, till at the rear they were pushing hard and barely moving. No wonder they sobbed, prayed, panted, surged, swayed and pressed. How they reviled the snail-like leaders, not knowing that the sturdy pace lagged in the body of the multitude. So they hasted and progressed only inch ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... are not the man of the world you should be, Walter. Men of half your merit will eclipse you, winning opulence and distinction—while you, with your common sense notions, will be plodding on at a snail's pace. You are behind the age, and a stranger to ...
— Home Lights and Shadows • T. S. Arthur
... hunted, but their proper title, as they called themselves, was "the Wabashas," and from them, in later years, we derive the familiar name of Wabash. A curious tradition of this people, according to the journal of Lewis and Clark, is that the founder of the nation was a snail, passing a quiet existence along the banks of the Osage, till a high flood swept him down to the Missouri, and left him exposed on the shore. The heat of the sun at length ripened him into a man; but with the change of his nature he had not forgotten his native seats on the Osage, towards ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... condition; that this one was in all probability a drunkard, and that it would be useless, worse than useless, to help him. But he was cold and hungry and penniless, and I knew it. I went as swiftly as I could to overtake him. He had not traveled far, lurching along at a snail's pace, and he was startled when I came up to him. One of his legs was longer than the other; it had been crushed in an accident. They were not pairs, his legs, and neither were his eyes pairs; one was big and blind, with a fixed pupil, and the other showed all his feelings. Across his nose ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... shameful things he has done in all these years. There is never a year goes by without his doing something dreadful; and he has made everybody miserable at one time or other by killing their friends or relations, from the snail to the partridge. He is quite merciless, and spares no one; why, his own children are afraid of him, and it is believed that he has pecked several of them to death, though it is hushed up; but people talk about it all the same, sometimes. As for the way he has behaved to the ladies, ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... moving as fast as it was possible it seemed but a snail's pace to Elizabeth. She could realize nothing but that her father was in danger. After hearing Nora's reasons for this sudden journey, she spoke no word but sat rigid, her hands clasped tightly in her ...
— Elizabeth Hobart at Exeter Hall • Jean K. Baird
... him to Bayswater at a snail's pace, and with more stoppages than ever mortal omnibus was subjected to before, as it seemed to that one eager passenger. At last the fading foliage of the Park appeared between the hats and bonnets of Valentine's opposite neighbours. Even those orange ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... showing their temporary and systematic transitions into one another. In the fresh water chalk formation of Steinheim, near Heidenheim, in Wuertemberg, scientists have found, on the same place, in an uninterrupted series of strata, the snail valvata or paludina multiformis in all imaginable transitions—from the flat winding, showing the form of a chess-board, up to the sharp form of a tower. And it was not, as Hilgendorf thought, in a series which can be traced in the strata according to time, but, as Sandberger ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... that they were gone, he crept back out of the subterranean passage. "It is so dangerous to walk on the ground in the dark," said he; "how easily a neck or a leg is broken!" Fortunately he knocked against an empty snail-shell. "Thank God!" said he. "In that I can pass the night in safety," and got into it. Not long afterwards, when he was just going to sleep, he heard two men go by, and one of them was saying, "How shall we contrive to get hold of the rich pastor's silver ...
— Household Tales by Brothers Grimm • Grimm Brothers
... at Poitiers in 361 when S. Hilary had returned from exile to his bishopric and to his wife and daughter. He had been living the eremitic life on the isle of Gallinaria, shaped so like a snail, off the coast of Albenga, and had nearly poisoned himself with trying to eat hellebore leaves. On reaching Poitiers, he told his old friend the Bishop, that he desired to follow the monastic life in his diocese, and obtained his cheerful consent. Some way up the ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... a new tribe, the Pipis, fell amongst them. The trappers killed six of them at one volley, and the rest ran away, leaving twenty-three beautiful longbows behind. The only clothing the dead men had on was snail-shells fastened to the ends of their long locks of hair. The trappers now began to seek more anxiously for the mythical settlements. "A great many times each day," says Pattie, "we bring our crafts to the shore and ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... infantry, there was the artillery, and hundreds of baggage wagons to be got over this piece of road before daylight. Owing to the condition of the soil, almost everyone had frequent falls. The column moved at a snail's pace, probably on an average of not over a mile an hour. We were on our feet all night, crossing the corduroy bridge that spanned the stream at the further side of the swamp as daylight began to show ...
— Personal Recollections of the War of 1861 • Charles Augustus Fuller
... me?" asked Benassis. "I shall not bring you any more rice pudding nor snail broth! No more fresh dates and white bread for you! So you want to die and break your ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... was almost gone now, and he got his men into a series of well-concerted, steady, deadly efforts, that threatened to bring the whole Kingston four over with the snail-like white cord. But Sawed-Off pleaded with his men, and they buried their faces in the board and worked like mad. To the spectators they seemed hardly to move, but under their skins their muscles were crowding and shoving like a gang of ...
— The Dozen from Lakerim • Rupert Hughes
... not enter on my list of friends (Though graced with polished manners and fine sense, Yet wanting sensibility) the man Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm. An inadvertent step may crush the snail That crawls at evening in the public path; But he that has humanity, forewarned, Will tread aside, and let the reptile live. The creeping vermin, loathsome to the sight, And charged perhaps with venom, that intrudes A visitor unwelcome into scenes Sacred to neatness and ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... row?" shouted back the delinquent, hearing her at last, and wriggling himself in from the window like a snail withdrawing itself into its shell, turning round the while his face, slightly flushed with the ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... you walk a little faster?" said a whiting to a snail, "There's a porpoise close behind us, and he's treading on my tail. See how eagerly the lobsters and the turtles all advance! They are waiting on the shingle—will you come and join the dance? Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... men, knew the whereabouts; and he, Elias, their predestined chief, was left behind! His fiery spirit craved to mount at once and gallop day and night till he rejoined those treasure-seekers; but the frailty of his horse precluded any such transports, and the snail-like pace of his adherents bound him down. At present he was obliged to wait for Aflatun and Faris and the baggage animals, while conscious of the fugitives receding rapidly, sucked in irresistibly to a whirlpool of living light, his mind's image ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... the right on't, father: when a swinging sin is to be committed, nothing will cover it so close as a friar's hood; for there the devil plays at bo-peep,—puts out his horns to do a mischief, and then shrinks them back for safety, like a snail ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... soothe him. But the Colonel clamoured to the heavens. Kennaston he qualified in various ways. And as for Dr. Jeal, he would hold him responsible—"personally, sir"—for the consequences of his dawdling in this fashion—"Damme, sir, like a damn' snail with ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... melted from the lid of the pot that Mr. Beale had brought in with the other things from the garden. Also it was melted from the crack of the iron casket. Mr. Beale's eyes, always rather prominent, almost resembled the eyes of the lobster or the snail as their gaze fell on the embroidered leather bag. And when Dickie opened this and showered the twenty gold coins into a hollow of the drab ticking, he closed his eyes and sighed, and opened ...
— Harding's luck • E. [Edith] Nesbit
... entities. It may be that even as communities we have progressed more than we believe, as some future reaction to this war may indicate, but what is brought to the surface now is the old fact that the progress of groups of men is at snail's pace, however men may forge ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... digestion of Cork ploughmen. Every day these hapless creatures complained of hunger and of cold, and Mat and Charles Reilly, another member of the Irish People staff, sometimes found a sombre pleasure in finding and gathering snails for them. Whenever either of them brought a snail to Meehan or to Sheil the famished men would swallow it eagerly, without even stopping to take off the shell. Meehan is now a prominent member of the Dynamite Party in New York. Sheil became insane shortly after his release, and ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... nurse's lap on the bank, paddled out past the first point to the north, and pillowing her head on a cushioned thwart, gave herself up to dreamy contemplation on the sky. There was scarce a ripple on the lake. A faint breath of an offshore breeze fanned her, drifting the canoe at a snail's pace out from land. Stella luxuriated in the quiet afternoon. A party of campers cruising the lake had tarried at the bungalow till after midnight. Jack Fyfe had risen at dawn to depart for some distant logging point. Stella, once wakened, had risen and breakfasted with ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... and in the meantime Arnold Bennett probably wrote three novels of several hundred thousand words each, gained an international reputation, and passed me on the road to fame like an airplane passing a snail. George Ade kept pegging away at his "Fables" with the regularity of a day laborer, and Peter Finley Dunne ground out his "Mister Dooley" like ...
— Goat-Feathers • Ellis Parker Butler
... does it make to me who he belongs to? I don't care if he belongs to Vanderbilt, or Aster'ses family. Principle—that is what I am a workin' on; and the same principle that would hender me from buyin' a feller that was poor as a snail, would hender me from buyin' one that had the riches of Creshus; it wouldn't make a mite of ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... she had not a new coach too; therefore, resolving to ruin Tom, she complained to the King that he had behaved very insolently to her. The King sent for him in a rage. Tom, to escape his fury, crept into a large, empty snail-shell, and there lay for some time, when, peeping out of the shell, he saw a fine butterfly on the ground. He ventured forth and got astride the butterfly, which took wing, and mounted into the air with little Tom on his back. Away he flew straight ...
— The History Of Tom Thumb and Other Stories. • Anonymous
... case in the British Museum. Here the thumbs as well as the fingers are encircled by them. The left hand is most loaded; upon the thumb is a signet with hieroglyphics on its surface; three rings on the forefinger; two on the second, one formed like a snail-shell; the same number on the next, and one on the little finger. The right hand carries only a thumb-ring, and two upon the third finger. These hands are cut in wood, and the fingers ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... him go bounding off at breakneck pace over loose rocks and broken trees and tangled underbrush; rising swift on one side of a windfall without knowing what lies on the other side till he is already falling; driving like an arrow over ground where you must follow like a snail, lest you wrench a foot or break an ankle,— finds himself asking with unanswered wonder how any deer can live half a season in the wilderness without breaking all his legs. And when you run upon a deer at night and hear him go ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... Pepsy. "If people have something the matter with their hips you can't fix them. Because, anyway, if they're going to die on a Friday even snail ...
— Pee-wee Harris • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... sir; but mind this: I'm not going to let my stick travel like a snail after a cabbage-leaf this time. I'm going to cut as I should with a sword, only I'm going to hit as if you were made of glass, so as not ...
— The Young Castellan - A Tale of the English Civil War • George Manville Fenn
... hours, it would have gone a thousand feet, that is 300 braccia, which is the sixth of a mile. Whence it would follow that the course of the sun during the day would be the sixth part of a mile and that this venerable snail, the sun will have travelled ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... theory of the production of the human race from the mud, through the mushroom, the snail, the tortoise, the greyhound, the monkey and the man, which is now such a favorite with atheists, if it were fully proved to be a fact, would only increase the difficulty of getting rid of God. For either the primeval mud had all the germs of the future plants and monkeys, and men's bodies ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... the mansion inhabited by the man who received an annual income of two hundred thousand roubles; for he thought to discern therefrom the nature of its proprietor, even as from a shell one may deduce the species of oyster or snail which has been its tenant, and has left therein its impression. But no such conclusions were to be drawn. The rooms were simple, and even bare. Not a fresco nor a picture nor a bronze nor a flower nor a china what-not nor a book was ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... shells, grit, and even opercula a quarter of an inch in diameter. In weight, size, and number of its constituents this exterior armour is altogether disproportionate to the extreme tenuity of its foundation. Too unsubstantial to sustain its own weight, it sprawls, like the track of a tipsy snail, indeterminately, slowly developing its sinuosities over the irregular surface of a rock, and slightly adherent thereto, throughout its whole length. Of this there seem to be several nicely shaded grades, some in the ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... me your lance, good man, and stick the point Here in the ground, and then the roof will be Held up in that direction. Thus it throws A broader shadow. Quickly, now! That's right! You other fellow, like a snail, you bear Your house upon your back, unless, perhaps, A house for some one else. Show me the shield! A mirror 'tis, in sooth! 'Tis crude, of course, As all is, here, but in a ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... cousin, as AEsop telleth in a fable that the snail did. For when Jupiter (whom the poets feign for the great god) invited all the poor worms of the earth unto a great solemn feast that it pleased him upon a time—I have forgotten upon what occasion—to prepare for them, the snail kept her ...
— Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation - With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens • Thomas More
... barely excepted, for whose life his sister cared. He charged her of never having forgiven Hilary for making Anna godmother of their flag, and of being in some dark league against him—"hell only knew what"—along with that snail of a cousin whom everybody but Kincaid himself and the silly old uncle knew to be the fallen man's most venomous foe. Throughout the storm the grandmother's fingers pattered soothing caresses, while Flora stood as unruffled by his true surmises as by any, a look of ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... even glassier quality than usual. His eyes were by nature a trifle prominent; and to Aline, in the overstrung condition in which her talk with George Emerson had left her, they seemed to bulge at her like a snail's. A man seldom looks his best in bed, and to Aline, seeing him for the first time at this disadvantage, the Honorable Freddie seemed quite repulsive. It was with a feeling of positive panic that she wondered whether he would want her to ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... slow gray slug and snail have trailed Their slimy silver up and down The beds where once the moss-rose veiled Rich beauty; and the mushroom brown Swells where the lily ...
— Weeds by the Wall - Verses • Madison J. Cawein
... the gluttonous kern had not wrought me a snail's own wrong!" Then he sounded, and down came kinsmen and clansmen all: "Ten blows, for ten tine, on his back let fall, And reckon no stroke if the blood follow not at the bite ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... disobey me?" asked Benassis. "I shall not bring you any more rice pudding nor snail broth! No more fresh dates and white bread for you! So you want to die and break your poor mother's heart, ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... roadside ditch or pool in springtime, take from it any bit of stick or straw which has lain undisturbed for a time. Some little worm-shaped masses of clear jelly containing specks are fastened to the stick: eggs of a small snail-like shell-fish. One of these specks magnified proves to be a crystalline sphere with an opaque mass in its centre. And while you are looking, the opaque mass begins to stir, and by-and-by slowly to turn upon its axis like a forming planet,—life beginning in the microcosm, as in the great worlds ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... while since; Hark, now I push its wicket, the moss Hinders the hinges and makes them wince! She must have reached this shrub ere she turned, 5 As back with that murmur the wicket swung; For she laid the poor snail, my chance foot spurned, To feed and ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... in great danger for many days, and Mary crept about the house in the most forlorn manner, for no one took any notice of her, and she dared not go out in the garden, for fear still of meeting some mighty monster of a snail, or something equally alarming. At length Mrs. Wilson grew better, and then she sent for Mary to her room, and talked to her very kindly and very wisely on the folly of fearing things which had not the power to hurt ...
— The Bad Family and Other Stories • Mrs. Fenwick
... in Amboise as Notre Dame in Paris, and from the warmth of his reception La Mothe guessed shrewdly that his coming was expected. Innkeepers were not prone to lavish welcomes on wandering minstrels who carried all their world's gear on their back like any snail. For such light-hearted folk an open window at night was an easier method of payment than ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... do you think that every heavy-heeled professor will have heaven? What, every lazy one? every wanton and foolish professor, that will be stopt by anything, kept back by anything, that scarce runneth so fast heavenward as a snail creepeth on the ground? Nay, there are some professors that do not go on so fast in the way of God as a snail doth go on the wall; and yet these think that heaven and happiness is for them. But stay, there are many more that run than there ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Vol. 2 (of 10) • Grenville Kleiser
... have come off there and then, all by himself: he would, Mr. Galloway, as I am a living sinner!" she hotly continued. "It's unbeknown how he'd have got here—holding on by the wall, like a snail, or fastening himself on to the tail of a cart; but try at it, in some way, he would! Be quiet, Jenkins! How dare you attempt ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... bank, paddled out past the first point to the north, and pillowing her head on a cushioned thwart, gave herself up to dreamy contemplation on the sky. There was scarce a ripple on the lake. A faint breath of an offshore breeze fanned her, drifting the canoe at a snail's pace out from land. Stella luxuriated in the quiet afternoon. A party of campers cruising the lake had tarried at the bungalow till after midnight. Jack Fyfe had risen at dawn to depart for some distant ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... shining star, made of the delicate gold-shells. That was Daddy's present to her on her last birthday. Dear Daddy! There, sitting in the corner, was Mrs. Neptune, the doll which Captain January had carved out of a piece of fine wood that had drifted ashore after a storm. Her eyes were tiny black snail-shells, her hair was of brown sea-moss, very thick and soft ("though as for combing it," said Star, "it is im-possible!"), and a smooth pink shell was set in either cheek, "to make a blush." Mrs. Neptune was somewhat battered, as ...
— Captain January • Laura E. Richards
... twisting their way, the lads managed to plod on through the dense crowd at a snail's pace. Ahead of them, however, Hal could see that the fugitive was making about the same progress. His hopes rose, and he called over ...
— The Boy Allies in Great Peril • Clair W. Hayes
... investigated the space beneath her bed, a light brass affair, hung with a chintz valance; had then peered beneath the dark recess of the dressing-case, and having looked in the deep drawer of the bureau and into the closet, she fastened her door and felt as secure as a snail in a shell. As she never, in this particular business, seemed to have any confidence in Mr. Laughton, in spite of the fact that she admired him and adored him, neither his presence nor his absence ever made any variation in the performance. She had ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... that includes all the structural possibilities of that division of the Animal Kingdom,—without recalling to my readers a Polyp or a Jelly-Fish, a Sea-Urchin or a Star-Fish. Neither can I present the structural elements of the Mollusk plan, without reminding them of an Oyster or a Clam, a Snail or a Cuttle-Fish,—or of the Articulate plan, without calling up at once the form of a Worm, a Lobster, or an Insect,—or of the Vertebrate plan, without giving it the special character of Fish, Reptile, Bird, or Mammal. Yet I insist that all living beings are but the different modes of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... a system equally conchological. He found that the social action in every part of the island was regulated and assisted by this process. Oyster-shells were first introduced; muscle-shells speedily followed; and, as commerce became more complicate, they had even been obliged to have recourse to snail-shells. Popanilla retired to rest with admiration of the people who thus converted to the most useful purposes things apparently so useless. There was no saying now what might not be done even with a nutshell. It was evident ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... the part of the internal ear directly concerned in hearing. It consists of a coiled tube which makes two and one half turns around a central axis and bears a close resemblance to a snail shell (Figs. 151 and 152). It differs in plan from a snail shell, however, in that its interior space is divided into three distinct channels, or canals. These lie side by side and are named, from their relations to other parts, the scala ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... exposed to the glare of the headlight and wave his arms. David sprang between the rails and gesticulated wildly. But in amazement his arms fell to his sides. For the train, now only a hundred yards distant and creeping toward him at a snail's pace, carried no head-light, and though in the moonlight David was plainly visible, it blew no whistle, tolled no bell. Even the passenger coaches in the rear of the sightless engine were wrapped in darkness. It was a ghost of a train, a Flying Dutchman of a train, a nightmare of a train. ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... it make to me who he belongs to? I don't care if he belongs to Vanderbilt, or Aster'ses family. Principle—that is what I am a workin' on; and the same principle that would hender me from buyin' a feller that was poor as a snail, would hender me from buyin' one that had the riches of Creshus; it wouldn't make a mite of difference ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... they passed the day, with strolling about, halting to look at an old tiled roof, a broken iron gate, a wrought iron balcony, a snail-covered garden wall; and when evening was come they went to a hotel to rest; but no sooner had night fallen than they went out again to ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... spring, And day's at the morn; Morning's at seven; The hillside's dew-pearled; The lark's on the wing; The snail's on the thorn; God's in His heaven— All's right ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For • Various
... was made cavernous by thick-planted paper-mulberry and maple trees, while a line of cherry-trees and an old pole-well rose along the road and hedge. As they rode to the rear of the house a little dormer window, like a snail, crawled low along the roof, and a light ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... to call that evening, and when he had heard what had happened he whistled a good deal. "You are a funny kind of a fellow," said he. "You go courting like a snail, with your house ...
— The Magic Egg and Other Stories • Frank Stockton
... the Hudson until the 4th of December, moving snail-like, although he knew that Washington's army was ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... over. One of the door-posts snapped, the other sloped inwards, the roof collapsed, the sides went in, the ice passed over all, and the hut of Peegwish was finally obliterated from off the face of the earth. So, a giant with his foot might slowly and effectually crush the mansion of a snail! ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne
... more coal. The hunters, in the forward part of the car, exchanged remarks now and then: the rest of us read newspapers and looked out of the windows at the monotonous winter landscape. Wondering at the snail's pace at which we moved, I recalled the landlord's mysterious jokes, and at last ventured to ask the little milliner, who sat in the next seat to mine, what he meant by his allusions. "Oh, it was nothing," she replied; "only ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... length the snail doth clime the highest tops, Ascending up the stately castle walls; At length the water with continual drops, Doth penetrate the hardest marble stone; At length we are arrived in Albion. Nor could the barbarous Dacian sovereign, Nor yet the ruler of ...
— 2. Mucedorus • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... troubles me more near Than Buckingham and his rash-levied strength. Come,—I have learn'd that fearful commenting Is leaden servitor to dull delay; Delay leads impotent and snail-pac'd beggary: Then fiery expedition be my wing, Jove's Mercury, and herald for a king! Go, muster men: my counsel is my shield; We must be brief when ...
— The Life and Death of King Richard III • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... come not here; Hence, you long-leg'd spinners, hence: Beetles black approach not near, Worm nor snail do no offence. ...
— A Fairy Tale in Two Acts Taken from Shakespeare (1763) • William Shakespeare
... quadrupeds were the only other sounds audible. I waited deferentially for the great antiquarian, scientist and courtier to resume, amusing myself meantime by turning over the leaves of an official report by the Minister of War on a new and improved process of making thunder from snail ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... body to maturity. Thus the granulations of new flesh to repair the injuries of wounds are visible to the eye; as well as the callous matter, which cements broken bones; the calcareous matter, which repairs injured snail-shells; and the threads, which are formed by silk-worms and spiders; which are all secreted in a softer state, and harden by exsiccation, or by the contact of the air, or by absorption ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... arroyo—rose-quartz arrow heads, notched like saws; an old, rusted Colt's revolver, bearing the date 1858, and a picture of the holding up of a stagecoach engraved around the chamber; queer, tiny shells of some long gone fresh-water snail; bits of yellow pottery, their edges worn smooth and round by the water; to say nothing of birds' nests, villages of ugly water-white scorpions; and lizards, from the tiny ones that change their color, chameleonlike, to "racers" well over a ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour
... roared like a Lion, She dived like a Whale, She swam like a Goose, She crawled like a Snail—Oh yes! ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... tell you!" broke in Sam. "I've seen him more then once, riding along, that is some time ago, 'fore I was knocked out. But when I tried to come up to him he'd vanish. And to look at it you wouldn't think that cayuse of his was any quicker'n a snail!" ...
— The Boy Ranchers in Death Valley - or Diamond X and the Poison Mystery • Willard F. Baker
... see the lands about her as successive sweeps of open country, cold under the moon, coarsely patched and seamed with thin rows and heavy clumps of trees. To her right, half a mile down the river, which trailed away behind the light like the shiny, slimy path of a snail, winked the scattered lights of Marietta. Not two hundred yards away at the end of the bridge squatted the station, marked by a sullen lantern. The oppression was lifted now—the tree-tops below her were rocking the young starlight to a haunted doze. She stretched out ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... animals and plants. As, for example, among the plants, we take a yeast plant, a Protococcus, a common mould, a Chara, a fern, and some flowering plant; among animals we examine such things as an Amoeba, a Vorticella, and a fresh-water polype. We dissect a star-fish, an earth-worm, a snail, a squid, and a fresh-water mussel. We examine a lobster and a cray-fish, and a black beetle. We go on to a common skate, a cod-fish, a frog, a tortoise, a pigeon, and a rabbit, and that takes us about all the time we have to give. The purpose of this course is not to make skilled dissectors, ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... still evenings you get in the summer, when you can hear a snail clear its throat a mile away. The sun was sinking over the hills and the gnats were fooling about all over the place, and everything smelled rather topping—what with the falling dew and so on—and I was just beginning to feel a little soothed by the peace ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... There is nothing that makes a man so down-hearted in his work of self-improvement as the constant and bitter experience that it seems to be all of no use; that he is making so little progress; that with immense pains, like a snail creeping up a wall, he gets up, perhaps, an inch or two, and then all at once he drops down, and further down than he was before ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... with envy, but one between whose word and whose deed there gapes a disparity even wider and deeper than the disparity which divides the word from the deed of the man of winter, of the man who, though he be as tardy as a snail, at least is making some way in the world, in contradistinction from the failure who revolves ever in a single spot, like some barren old maid before the ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... "A snail, sir," repeated the youth. "I've got a book on natural history, and I've just been reading about them. I saw this one as I was passing, and I went inside to study its habits. They are very interesting little things ...
— Salthaven • W. W. Jacobs
... and a time that is still far off. Their course is related to that of ordinary works as the orbit of Uranus to the orbit of Mercury. For the moment they get no justice done to them. People are at a loss how to treat them; so they leave them alone, and go their own snail's pace for themselves. Does the worm see the ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... like that Nick shrank back like a snail into its shell. He was not too young to know that there were worse things than to be locked in Gaston Carew's house. It were better to be a safe-kept prisoner there than to be lost in the sinks of London. And so, knowing this, he made the ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... yard, the grand western front rising in front of them, and the buildings of St. Swithun's Abbey extending far to their right. The hour was nearly noon, and the space was deserted, except for an old woman sitting at the great western doorway with a basket of rosaries made of nuts and of snail shells, and a workman or two employed on the ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... them as the centre, but still imagine more favorable positions and relations than the actual ones, and so we get no valuable report from them at all. In his Italian Travels Goethe jogs along at a snail's pace, but always mindful that the earth is beneath and the heavens are above him. His Italy is not merely the fatherland of lazzaroni and virtuosi, and scene of splendid ruins, but a solid turf-clad soil, daily shined on by the sun, and nightly by the moon. Even the few showers ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... 361 when S. Hilary had returned from exile to his bishopric and to his wife and daughter. He had been living the eremitic life on the isle of Gallinaria, shaped so like a snail, off the coast of Albenga, and had nearly poisoned himself with trying to eat hellebore leaves. On reaching Poitiers, he told his old friend the Bishop, that he desired to follow the monastic life in his diocese, ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... coach, drawn by six small mice. This made the Queen angry, because she had not a new coach too; therefore, resolving to ruin Tom, she complained to the King that he had behaved very insolently to her. The King sent for him in a rage. Tom, to escape his fury, crept into a large, empty snail-shell, and there lay for some time, when, peeping out of the shell, he saw a fine butterfly on the ground. He ventured forth and got astride the butterfly, which took wing, and mounted into the ...
— The History Of Tom Thumb and Other Stories. • Anonymous
... been crucified more than fifteen hundred years before the audience had been created; and although "Old Neb" of Babylon had destroyed a million of Hebrews several hundred years previous to the birth of the Bethlehem "Savior of Mankind," the "frog" and "snail" eaters of France were still breaking their lungs and throats in cheering for ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... the carbonic acid gas caused the separation of an equivalent quantity of insoluble carbonate of lime, which, layer by layer, built up the mound. A fragment of the rock which I possess contains leaves, twigs, hazel nuts, and snail shells, which, falling from time to time upon it, were incrusted and finally imprisoned in ...
— Saratoga and How to See It • R. F. Dearborn
... loiterers. The shop windows were as full as ever, the toilettes of the women as wonderful. Mankind, though khaki-clad, was plentiful. The narrow thoroughfare was so crowded that his taxicab went only at a snail's crawl, and occasionally he heard scraps of conversation. Two pretty girls were talking to two young men ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... brown; Who with him the Wasp, his companion, did bring, But they promised that evening to lay by their sting. Then the shy little Dormouse peeped out of his hole, And led to the feast his blind cousin, the Mole; And the Snail, with her horns peeping out of her shell, Came, fatigued with the distance, the length of an ell. A mushroom the table; and on it was spread A water-dock leaf, which their table-d'hote made. The viands were various, to each of their taste, And the Bee brought the honey to sweeten the feast. Then ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... ever beset by a dun? ducked by the Goody from thine own window, when "creeping like snail unwillingly" to morning prayers?—Ibid., Vol. IV. ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... ice blockade from the 9th of December to the 13th, the slopes in front of the lines were a continuous glare of ice, so that movements away from the roads and broken paths could be made only with the greatest difficulty and at a snail's pace. Men and horses were seen falling whenever they attempted to move across country. A man slipping on the hillside had no choice but to sit down and slide to the bottom, and groups of men in the forts and lines found constant entertainment in watching these mishaps. ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... angry, because she had no a new coach too; therefore, resolving to ruin Tom, she complained to the king that he had spoken insolently to her. The king sent for him. Tom, to escape his fury, crept into an empty snail shell, and lay there till he was almost starved; when peeping out of the shell he saw a fine butterfly settled on the ground: he now ventured out, and getting on it, the butterfly took wing, and mounted into the air with little Tom on his back. Away he flew ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... at that bank, which is standing very nearly still, and you will realise that you and your canoe are standing very nearly still too; and that all your exertions are only enabling you to creep on at the pace of a crushed snail, and that it's the water that is going the pace. It's a ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... snail's fine shell, Which for the colours did excel, The fair Queen Mab becoming well, So lively was the limning; The seat the soft wool of the bee, The cover, gallantly to see, The wing of a pied butterfly; ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... a-wooing ride, Kitty alone, &c.; This frog he would a-wooing ride, And on a snail he got ...
— The Nursery Rhyme Book • Unknown
... have we to do but put it in our poke and getting us to the moneychangers' tables, which you know stand still laden with groats and florins, take as much as we will thereof? None will see us, and so may we grow rich of a sudden, without having to smear walls all day long, snail-fashion.' ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... initial letter! King Rene himself never made a better! Finished down to the leaf and the snail, Down to the eyes on the peacock's tail! And now, as I turn the volume over, And see what lies between cover and cover, What treasures of art these pages hold, All ablaze with crimson and gold, God forgive me! I seem to feel A certain satisfaction ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... that, after six years, I have realized the pretty Eastern proverb, "By patience and perseverance, and a bottle of sweet-oil, the snail at length reaches Jerusalem,"—now that by God's unfailing help I have finished my difficult task, I can but commit the book into the hands of the women who have implanted in me, next to my faith in God, faith in the "Power ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... me—the swift year's flight I count like miser's gold; I keep the "watches of the night," I wait until the morning light Its glories snail unfold. ...
— Lays from the West • M. A. Nicholl
... the journey's end, we met almost every day long trains of government wagons, laden with stores for the troops and crawling at a snail's pace toward ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... on a housetop, with only a bundle of musty papers, the tags of broken conversations, and one or two dead, distorted nerves. That is our common risk. But I shall accomplish as much of the road as God permits the snail, and I shall have moulded something; life will have justified itself to me, or I to life. But that is ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... by Russolo (No. 23), is "a fantastic impression produced not by line but by colour." An elongated insect or snail—is it a man or a grasshopper?—is in the first plane; back of him is a girl's face with pleading eyes; an explosion of light in the background is evidently intended for an electric lamp; the rest ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... Consider the ludicrous spectacle of the rapidly moving legs and the flailing arms, with the actor's face turned toward the audience, as he declaims sonorously of his haste to perform his vital errand, while making but a snail's progress. Truly then his plea of exhaustion would not be without excuse! This is an explanation at once simpler, more potentially comic, more in accord with what we predicate as the spirit of Plautus, and furthermore ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... mountain-goat. It was all to no avail, however, and they gave up in discouragement, and were about to leave the boys to perish, when the inch-worm came along and offered her services. The animals laughed her to scorn. What could she do, with her snail-pace, when they all, who were so fleet of foot, ...
— Fifty-Two Story Talks To Boys And Girls • Howard J. Chidley
... journey from the Red River, and the Ka[']-ka still lived, as it does now, at Ko-thlu-el-lon-ne, when the wonderful Snail People (not snails, as may be inferred, but a tribe of that name), who lived in the "Place of the Snails" (K'ia-ma-k'ia-kwin), far south of where Zuni now is, caused, by means of their magic power, all the game ...
— Zuni Fetiches • Frank Hamilton Cushing
... remember that I made seven days from Calais to Paris, by laying out my journeys at the rate of travelling in England, thirty miles a-day; and did not find but that I could have gone in a third of the time! I shall not be such a snail the next time. It is said that on Lord Tavistock's return, he is to decide whom he will marry. Is it true that the Choiseuls totter, and that the Broglios are to succeed; or is there a Charles Townshend at Versailles? Adieu! my ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... faintest breeze. Only a weak swirl of current from the far-off Gulf Stream pushed my hulk onward; and this, I suppose, was helped a little by that attraction of floating bodies for each other which brings chips and leaves together on the surface of even the stillest pool. But a snail goes faster than I was going; and it was only at the end of a full hour of watching that I could see—yet even then could not be quite certain about it—that my position a ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... the earth creep on at snail's pace: the Republic thunders past with the rush of an express," says a recent American writer. "Think of it!" he continues; "a Great Britain and Ireland called forth from the wilderness, as if by magic, in less than the span of a ...
— The Story of Garfield - Farm-boy, Soldier, and President • William G. Rutherford
... inclined to the left, occupied Caesarea, traversed the salt desert and the river Halys, and invested Angora; while the Sultan, immovable and ignorant in his post, compared the Tartar swiftness to the crawling of a snail. He returned on the wings of indignation to the relief of Angora; and as both generals were alike impatient for action, the plains round that city were the scene of a memorable battle, which has immortalized the glory of Timur ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... warts to whoever opens the parcel. Another mode of transferring warts is to touch each wart with a pebble, and place the pebbles in a bag, which should be lost on the way to church; whoever finds the bag gets the warts." A common Warwickshire custom was to rub the warts with a black snail, stick the snail on a thorn bush, and then, say the folks, as the snail dies so ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... his Excellence Baron de Goldburg, Leading the Dowager Duchess of Snail; Feathers and fringe on the top of her bonnet, Roses and rings on the ...
— Five Mice in a Mouse-trap - by the Man in the Moon. • Laura E. Richards
... fennel mode: The tender, the dulcet, the rosy tone; The passing passion, the forgotten tone; The rosemary, wallflower mode; The rainbow mode and the nightingale mode The English tin, the cinnamon mode, Fresh pomegranates, green linden-bloom mode; The lonely gormandizer mode, The skylark, the snail, the barking tone; And the honey flower, the marjoram mode; The lion's skin, true pelican mode, The ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... to the top of a fresh mole-hill, I fell to my neck in the hole, through which that animal had cast up the earth, and coined some lie, not worth remembering, to excuse myself for spoiling my clothes. I likewise broke my right shin against the shell of a snail, which I happened to stumble over, as I was walking alone and thinking on ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... hundred Highlanders, a few cavalrymen, and Lord George Murray himself tarried with the guns. The main column disappeared, lost among mountains and hills; this detached number had the wild country, the forbidding road, the December day to themselves. To get the guns and ammunition-wagons along proved a snail-and-tortoise business. Guns and escort fell ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... antithesis—an ex-and concentric movement. If two circles are drawn and painted respectively yellow and blue, brief concentration will reveal in the yellow a spreading movement out from the centre, and a noticeable approach to the spectator. The blue, on the other hand, moves in upon itself, like a snail retreating into its shell, and draws away from the spectator. [Footnote: These statements have no scientific basis, but are founded purely ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... beans, and flapjacks when the cooks were in the humor; to hook the teams to the wagons and break corral, and amidst cracking of lashes stretch out into column, then to lurch and groan onward, at snail's pace, through the constantly increasing day until soon we also were wrung and parched by a relentless ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... distant, and that on this far frontier of the solar system the sun could not appear to it larger than the blaze of a tallow candle. To us it was wholly incredible how, in that dim remoteness, it could still hold true to the central force and follow at a snail-pace, yet with unvarying exactitude, its stupendous orbit. Clemens said that heretofore Neptune, the planetary outpost of our system, had been called the tortoise of the skies, but that comparatively it was rapid in its motion, and had become ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Ward, and I had met for our aperitif at the Terrace Larue, by the Madeleine, when the white automobile came snaking its way craftily through the traffic. Turning in to pass a victoria on the wrong side, it was forced down to a snail's pace near the curb and not far from our table, where it paused, checked by a blockade at the next corner. I heard Ward utter a half-suppressed guttural of what I took to be amazement, and ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... down across gulches, and anon through loose shale on ticklishly sloping banks, characterize the passage through the canon. The sun is broiling hot, and my knee swollen and painful. It is barely possible to crawl along at a snail's pace by keeping my game leg stiff; bending the knee is attended with agony. Frequent rests are necessary, and an examination reveals ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... a snail's pace, and at last dismounted, and groped his way. He got more than one fall in the snow, and thought himself very fortunate, when, at last, something black towered before him, and ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... hair, full of duck weed, and tangled With snail shells, and moss and eel-grass It was, and it straggled and dangled Over forehead and shoulders—alas, A wild ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... of all countries many refer to insects, birds, animals, persons, actions, trades, food or children. In Chinese rhymes we have the cricket, cicada, spider, snail, firefly, ladybug and butterfly and others. Among fowls we have the bat, crow, magpie, cock, hen, duck and goose. Of animals, the dog, cow, horse, mule, donkey, camel, and mouse, are the favorites. There are also rhymes on the snake and frog, and others without number on ...
— The Chinese Boy and Girl • Isaac Taylor Headland
... we find "some wigs," "a dainty dishes," "a mutton shoulder," "a little mine," "hog-fat," and "an amelet": the menu is scarcely appetising, especially when among "Fishes and Shellfishes" our Portuguese Lucullus sets down the "hedgehog," "snail," and "wolf." After this such trifles as "starch" arranged under the heading of "Metals and Minerals," and "brick" and "whitelead" under that of "Common Stones" fall almost flat; but one would like to be initiated into the mysteries of ...
— English as she is spoke - or, A jest in sober earnest • Jose da Fonseca
... taking one. In a very short time he overtakes the noted horse-thief. Gus was sitting in the buggy sound asleep; the lines were hanging down over the dashboard, and the old horse was marching along at a snail's pace. He was out some two miles from town, and, no doubt, had traveled at this gait all the way. He was faced about, and, assisted by the sheriff, drove back to town. He was then placed under arrest and sent to jail, ...
— The Twin Hells • John N. Reynolds
... me to go on. She was deeply interested. I could hear her breath coming fast, though we were walking at a snail's pace. I longed to confide in her absolutely, ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... diminutive houses on wheels drawn by a huge motor. What their end and purpose might be, is imaginable. If it is for the comfort of the High Command en campagne, the great clumsy procession rivaling the speed of a snail is a heap of ...
— Lige on the Line of March - An American Girl's Experiences When the Germans Came Through Belgium • Glenna Lindsley Bigelow
... reached together my aunt's cottage, in the ancient Barony of Gruids. It was a low, long, dingy edifice of turf, four or five rooms in length, but only one in height, that, lying along a gentle acclivity, somewhat resembled at a distance a huge black snail creeping up the hill. As the lower apartment was occupied by my uncle's half-dozen milk-cows, the declination of the floor, consequent on the nature of the site, proved of signal importance, from the free drainage which it secured; the second ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... summons, the other proceeded to do what he threatened, systematically laying the district waste, felling the timber and cutting down the fruit-trees, while slowly moving on at the rate of ten or twelve furlongs a day. The Acarnanians, owing to the snail-like progress of the enemy, were lulled into a sense of security. They even began bringing down their cattle from their alps, and devoted themselves to the tillage of far the greater portion of their fields. But Agesilaus only waited till their rash confidence reached its climax; then on the fifteenth ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... about you and found another. We took you up as a babe and cared for you; but the parish allowance was stopped when you was fourteen. It shan't be said of us that bare we took you in and bare we turn you out. But marry you must. It's ordained o' nature. There's the difference atwixt a slug and a snail. The snail's got her own house to go into. A slug hasn't. When she's ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... as lightning, and as rapid, darted through poor Fortune's brain during the few moments that she stood with her hand on David's shoulder, while he drew from his magpie's nest a heterogeneous mass of rubbish—pebbles, snail shells, bits of glass and china, ...
— The Laurel Bush • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... land, flashing colours livelier than the spring-meadows bordering their line of passage. Guy, with a nod for all, and a greeting for the best-disposed, pushed on toward the van, till the gathering block compelled him to adopt the snail's pace of the advance party, and gave him work enough to keep his two horses from being jammed with the mass. Now and then he cast a weather-eye on the heavens, and was soon confirmed in an opinion he ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the Benevolent Despot, the Peter Grievous, and the Martyred Snail, are people to ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... into Egypt with his other sons. They also carried with them choice presents from their father for the ruler of Egypt, things that arouse wonder outside of Palestine, such as the murex, which is the snail that produces the Tyrian purple, and various kinds of balm, and almond oil, and pistachio oil, and honey as hard as stone. Furthermore, Jacob put double money in their hand to provide against a rise in prices in the meantime. And after all these matters were attended to, he spake to his sons, ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... capitalists yourselves for a while, you hard-working farmers. Money is easy and credit long, now. Take your chance at it and make five hundred per cent on your investments. I'm ready to take subscriptions for stock in this new town right now. Why not stop this snail's pace of earnin' and go to livin' like gentlemen—like some Careyville men I know who own hundreds of acres they never earned and they won't improve so's to ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... came a change. The passion ebbed out of the face, the paper fluttered out of the loosened fingers, the red-rimmed eyes took on another look. Snail-slow the trembling hand ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... spring, And day's at the morn, The morning's at seven, The hillside's dew-pearled, The lark's on the wing, The snail's on the thorn; God's in His heaven— ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... little faster?" said a whiting to a snail, "There's a porpoise close behind us, and he's treading on my tail. See how eagerly the lobsters and the turtles all advance! They are waiting on the shingle—will you come and join the dance? Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the dance? Will you, won't you, ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... to say that there was plenty of excitement left for me. Lord, how I made that poor brute travel when I got among the trees! Though we must have made it over fifty miles from Melbourne, we had done it at a snail's pace; and those stolen oats had brisked the old girl up to such a pitch that she fairly bolted when she felt her nose turned south. By Jove, it was no joke, in and out among those trees, and under ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... with some subordinate whom my duty compelled me to reprove, and how often have I jeered at myself for a fraud as the doughty platform combatant, when shrinking from blaming some lad or lass for doing their work badly. An unkind look or word has availed to make me shrink myself as a snail into its shell, while, on the platform, opposition ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... when my hour comes, and not before," Hokosa answered. "We did well yonder, and yet the most of us are alive to tell the tale, for I knew when and how to go. Be ready, king, for the foe press us close, and that mob behind us crawls onward like a snail." ...
— The Wizard • H. Rider Haggard
... packed down fully a foot by the traffic, was like a gutter. On either side spread the blanket of soft snow crystals. If a man turned into this in an endeavor to pass, his dogs would wallow perforce to their bellies and slow down to a snail's pace. So the men lay close to their leaping sleds and waited. No alteration in position occurred down the fifteen miles of Bonanza and Klondike to Dawson, where the Yukon was encountered. Here the first relays waited. But here, intent to kill their first ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... out four and twenty strong, Sailors and tailors in a throng; We heard a tale, we saw a sail, And then returned to kill a snail. ...
— Little Folks (November 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... out speechless thanksgiving to the God of all grace and consolation, who had given him back his friend, and that in the time of his sore need. So true was his heart in its love, that, giving thanks for his friend, he forgot that friend was the Marquis of Lossie, before whom his enemy was but as a snail ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... the leaf. Touch one of them with the end of a fine human hair and the lobes of the leaf instantly close together[2] in virtue of an act of contraction of part of their substance, just as the body of a snail contracts into its shell when one ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... his diligence and progress. At the end of the letter comes this little touch as to some of the schoolboy belongings which had been left behind in Professor Newman's house. "Harry has left divers snail-shells fastened on pasteboard. Perhaps he did not know how ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... group found themselves opposite the beginning of the row of cages containing the menagerie, and started out on a tour of inspection. There was a big crowd and progress could only be made at a snail's pace. By the time they had reached the elephants it was close on to the time set for the show to begin, and after feeding the big brutes a few peanuts they hurried into the main tent. They secured seats ...
— Bert Wilson on the Gridiron • J. W. Duffield
... savages might have wrought in the camp; he could think of nothing but Flora; could only hope and pray that she might have made good her escape. The catamaran was sailing as well as ever, for there was a strong breeze blowing, yet Leslie ground his teeth in a fever of impatience at what he deemed her snail-like pace; for his first business now must be to ascertain the fate of the girl he loved. The very worst that could possibly have happened, apart from harm to her, was comparatively unimportant. Yet, all the same, his mind once set ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... rock a hermit crab has taken possession of a sea snail's shell, and set up housekeeping; with body partly hidden he waves his long bony tentacles, while his beady eyes stare at us from ...
— Byways Around San Francisco Bay • William E. Hutchinson
... year, is nothing at all towards buying Roguin's practice. Little Xandrot, as we call him, thinks, like all the rest of the world, that we are richer than we are. If his father, that big farmer who is as close as a snail, won't sell a hundred thousand francs worth of land Xandrot can't be a notary, for Roguin's practice is worth four or five hundred thousand. If Crottat does not pay half down, how could he negotiate the affair? Cesarine must have two hundred thousand francs dot; ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... and land shells is exceedingly easy, the greater number of specimens requiring only to be plunged into boiling water, and the contents removed—an easy operation in the case of the bivalves, and the contents of univalves or snail-like shells being also easily wormed out with a pin or crooked awl. [Footnote: Mr. R. B. Woodward, F.G.S, etc. in one of the very best and most practical of those wonderful little penny "Handbooks" for young collectors, advises a large spoonful of salt being added to ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... to the door accordingly, murmuring at the cowardice of the servants; but at such a snail's pace, that it seemed he would most willingly have been anticipated by any one whom his reproaches had roused to exertion. "Cowardly blockheads!" he said at last, seizing hold of the handle of the door, but without turning it effectually round— "dare ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... a wonderful, but at the same time, we think, a universal and important fact, that love permeates the universe. Even a female snail, if we could only put the question, would undoubtedly admit that it loves ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne
... letters, to which he hints that I am to answer. In his last, of 31 closely written sides of note-paper, he informs me, with reference to my obstinate silence, that though I think myself and am thought by others to be a mathematical Goliath, I have resolved to play the mathematical snail, and keep within my shell. A mathematical snail! This cannot be the thing so called which regulates the striking of a clock; for it would mean that I am to make Mr. Smith sound the true time of day, which I would by no means undertake upon ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... thrown back, and was continually in the act of wriggling his long chin into his ample neckerchief. He could not ask you how do you do, or say in answer to that question, "I thank you, sare, very well," without stamping prettily with his foot, as if cracking a snail, and tossing his chin into the air as if he were going to balance a ladder upon it. Then, though his features were compressed into a small, monkeyfied compass, they were themselves, individually, upon a magnificent scale. It was as if ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... "now I come to think of it. Only natural they should be going at snail's pace. Carrai! the wonder is the gringo being able for even that, or go at all. I thought I'd given him his quietus, for surely I sent my spear right through his ribs! It must have struck button, or buckle, or something, and ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... not quick enough. The girl, though not nearly as active under the increased pull of gravity as a person of Earth might be, was yet more agile than the Rogans. And she was the faster mover in this tortuous, snail-like race. While the Rogan leader was still several feet away, she retrieved ...
— The Red Hell of Jupiter • Paul Ernst
... dashing as if in mockery, and the cry "Water! water!" rises from a hundred lips, the guard joining, for they are suffering like ourselves. Some comfort in that! Past midnight we reach Strasburg and are halted around an old wooden pump. It is broken! No water there. Still on and on at a snail-pace, up and over the almost interminable stretch of Fisher's Hill. At three o'clock in the morning we arrive at a place known by the classical name of Tom's Brook about twenty-five miles from Winchester. Never was nectar more delicious than the water of this stream, ...
— Lights and Shadows in Confederate Prisons - A Personal Experience, 1864-5 • Homer B. Sprague
... passage obscure. Benedick is represented as challenging Cupid at archery. To challenge at the flight is, I believe, to wager who shall shoot the arrow furthest without any particular mark. To challenge at the bird-bolt, seems to mean the same as to challenge at children's archery, with snail arrows such as are discharged at birds. In Twelfth Night Lady Olivia opposes a bird-bolt to a cannon-bullet, the lightest to the heaviest ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... went down the firepots in the booths would be filled with charcoal, and presently a marvellous smell of frying oil would pervade the air, while thousands upon thousands of little lights would be lighted, all made of big snail-shells filled with olive oil and tallow and each having a tiny wick in it. But the sun was not low yet, and the great bells were ringing to call the people into the Basilica ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... don't," Betty replied wearily. "You see how we've been traveling—not more than a snail's pace, and it won't be very long before we shall have to stop altogether. I'm surprised that Mollie has been able to keep going so long. You will have to keep your eye on her all the time, now, Grace, since it is getting so dark. We don't want ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Bluff Point - Or a Wreck and a Rescue • Laura Lee Hope
... spring And day's at the morn: 20 Morning's at seven; The hillside's dew-pearled; The lark's on the wing; The snail's on the thorn: God's in His heaven— All's ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... the house to the station had been a long and tedious one. The way back was surprisingly short, even though they walked at snail's pace. There never was a courting such as Tarling's, and it seemed unreal as a dream. The girl had a key of the outer gate and they ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace
... it doesn't always work among the human herd. Man considers that he has the right of selection—quite a mistake of his I'm sure, for he has no real sense of beauty or fitness, and generally selects most vilely. All the same he is an obstinate brute, and sticks to his brutish ideas as a snail sticks to its shell. I am an obstinate brute!—I am absolutely convinced that I have the right to choose my own woman, if I want one—which I don't,—or if ever I do ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... certainly the people of the coast near which it is found. He told me that possibly this idea had arisen because the shell, when empty, swims on the surface. The creature, when at the bottom, crawls along like any other snail. Sometimes it dies and falls out, when the shell rises to the surface by means of the gases generated in its chambers; and thus they are seen floating on the waves. Others say, however, that the animal itself with the shell, putting out its head and ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... head grain found how treat dead staid ground town beast stead waif hound growl bleat tread rail mound clown preach dread flail pound frown speak thread quail round crown streak sweat snail sound ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... hundred years before the audience had been created; and although "Old Neb" of Babylon had destroyed a million of Hebrews several hundred years previous to the birth of the Bethlehem "Savior of Mankind," the "frog" and "snail" eaters of France were still breaking their lungs and throats in cheering for the ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... in which is a large basin twelve or fifteen feet deep, at the bottom of which are rocks. From these rocks proceed certain substances that present at first, sight beautiful flowers, but on the approach of a hand or instrument, retire like a snail, out of sight! On examination, there appears in the middle of a disk, filaments resembling spiders' legs, which moved briskly round a kind of petal. The filaments, or legs, have pincers to seize their prey, ...
— Scientific American magazine Vol 2. No. 3 Oct 10 1846 • Various
... place from crown to base, and I hit the homeward trail. Ah, God! it was good, though my eyes were blurred, and I crawled like a sickly snail. In that vast white world where the silent sky communes with the silent snow, In hunger and cold and misery I wandered to and fro. But the Lord took pity on my pain, and He led me to the sea, And some ice-bound whalers heard my moan, and they fed and sheltered me. They fed ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... retorted she; "for no sooner set I my foot out of the door this morrow than I well-nigh stepped of a black snail." ...
— For the Master's Sake - A Story of the Days of Queen Mary • Emily Sarah Holt
... door-drink still on my palate, and I looking for my way home. It was nut-time. I had a pouch of them in my jacket, and I cracked and ate them as I went. Not a star pricked the sky; the dark was the dark of a pot in a cave and a snail boiling under the lid of it. I had cracked a nut and the kernel of it fell on the ground, so I bent and felt about my feet, though my pouch was so full of nuts that they fell showering in the fin dust. I swept every one with a shell aside, hunting for my cracked fellow, ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... health and life is more than, in my opinion, they are both worth; without the former the latter is a burden; and, indeed, I am very weary of it. I think I have got some benefit by drinking these waters, and by bathing, for my old stiff, rheumatic limbs; for, I believe, I could now outcrawl a snail, or perhaps even ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... a coward, indeed," grumbled the host, drawing near to d'Artagnan, and endeavoring by this little flattery to make up matters with the young man, as the heron of the fable did with the snail he had despised ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... I'll take him through," said Emerson, stubbornly; and so they crawled their weary way, sore beset with their dragging burden. Slow at best, their advance now became snail-like, for darkness had fallen, and threatened to blot them out. It betrayed them down declivities, up and out of which they had to dig their way. In such descents they were forced to let go the helpless man, whose body rolled ahead ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... still kneeling down, so it was impossible to form an opinion of his legs, but his arms and shoulders certainly did not look like those of a "snail." ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... smooth that the barrier reefs for once were silent, and one could hear, far across the hushed and shining water, the coo of pigeons in the forest. Under bare steerage way, with the leadsman droning in the fore chains, the ship hugged the shore and steamed at a snail's pace round the island. On the lofty bridge, high above the wondering faces of his command, the white-haired captain, impassive, supreme, and solitary, gave no sign of those inner emotions that were devouring him. Along the shore the sight of the battleship ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... walk a little faster?" said a whiting to a snail, "There's a porpoise close behind us, and he's treading on my tail. See how eagerly the lobsters and the turtles all advance! They are waiting on the shingle—will you come and join the dance? Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the dance? Will you, won't you, will ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... fare, cousin, as AEsop telleth in a fable that the snail did. For when Jupiter (whom the poets feign for the great god) invited all the poor worms of the earth unto a great solemn feast that it pleased him upon a time—I have forgotten upon what occasion—to prepare for them, the snail kept her at home and would ...
— Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation - With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens • Thomas More
... that is the true vocation of the Golden Gardener. It is annoying that it can give us but little or no assistance in ridding us of another plague of the kitchen-garden: the snail. The slime of the snail is offensive to the beetle; it is safe from the latter unless crippled, half crushed, or projecting from the shell. Its relatives, however, do not share this dislike. The horny Procrustes, the great Scarabicus, entirely black and larger than the Carabus, ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... human birth! And now did all the tyrannous crew depart, Knowing there was a storm in Hero's heart, Greater than they could make, and scorn'd their smart. She bow'd herself so low out of her tower, That wonder 'twas she fell not ere her hour, With searching the lamenting waves for him: Like a poor snail, her gentle supple limb Hung on her turret's top, so most downright, As she would dive beneath the darkness quite, To find her jewel;—jewel!—her Leander, A name of all earth's jewels pleas'd not her Like his dear name: "Leander, ...
— Hero and Leander and Other Poems • Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman
... the poet fired to sing The snail's discreet degrees, A rhapsody of sauntering, A gloria of ease; Proclaiming their's the baser part Who consciously forswear The delicate and gentle art Of never ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... Who are the Arabs that the King's favour should be cast among them? The walls of their houses are canvas. Even the common snail has a finer ...
— Plays of Gods and Men • Lord Dunsany
... the same in all places, and even during the journeys taken by their Majesties, who were thus never separated, except for a few minutes at a time. They passed their lives in one long tete-a- tete. When they travelled it was at the merest snail's pace, and they slept on the road, night after night, in houses prepared for them. In their coach they were always alone; when in the ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... In the season of floods such streams are turbid at their entrance, but clear as a mountain-spring where they issue again; so that they must be slowly filling up cavities in the interior with mud, sand, pebbles, snail-shells, and the bones of animals which may be carried away ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... of the woods, and its little yard was made cavernous by thick-planted paper-mulberry and maple trees, while a line of cherry-trees and an old pole-well rose along the road and hedge. As they rode to the rear of the house a little dormer window, like a snail, crawled low along the roof, and a ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... of blank verse puts the poet to the severest test, and Cowper does not survive the test. Had The Task been written in couplets he might have been forced to sharpen his wit by the necessity of rhyme. As it is, he is merely ponderous—a snail of imagination labouring under a heavy shell of eloquence. In the fragment called Yardley Oak he undoubtedly achieved something worthier of a distant disciple of Milton. But I do not think he was ever sufficiently preoccupied with poetry to be a good poet. ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... were busy ones in the valley as well as on the dam. Jim's eighteen hours a day often stretched into twenty, though he sometimes dozed in his office chair or in the automobile with Oscar, reveling in his new-learned accomplishment, driving at a snail's pace. ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... prison, Of flesh and bone, curbs, and confines, and frets 21 Our spirit's wings: despondency besets Our pillows; and the fresh to-morrow morn Seems to give forth its light in very scorn Of our dull, uninspired, snail-paced lives. Long have I said, how happy he who shrives To thee! But then I thought on poets gone, And could not pray:—nor can I now—so on I move to the end in ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... pure willing with him. The nature of his experiences so far disinclined him for any further experiments, at least until he had reconsidered them. But he lifted a sheet of paper, and turned a glass of water pink and then green, and he created a snail, which he miraculously annihilated, and got himself a miraculous new tooth-brush. Somewhere in the small hours he had reached the fact that his will-power must be of a particularly rare and pungent quality, a fact of which he had indeed had inklings before, but no certain ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... in town he sends men out on the roads leading to the country, himself taking one. In a very short time he overtakes the noted horse-thief. Gus was sitting in the buggy sound asleep; the lines were hanging down over the dashboard, and the old horse was marching along at a snail's pace. He was out some two miles from town, and, no doubt, had traveled at this gait all the way. He was faced about, and, assisted by the sheriff, drove back to town. He was then placed under arrest ...
— The Twin Hells • John N. Reynolds
... heart of the Ottoman kingdom, he avoided their camp, dexterously inclined to the left, occupied Caesarea, traversed the salt desert and the river Halys, and invested Angora; while the Sultan, immovable and ignorant in his post, compared the Tartar swiftness to the crawling of a snail. He returned on the wings of indignation to the relief of Angora; and as both generals were alike impatient for action, the plains round that city were the scene of a memorable battle, which has immortalized the glory of Timur and the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... the burning coals here and there over the surface to avoid burning a hole through it. At one point I noticed a horse-car filled with straw bedding for the animals, and the train going here at a snail's pace enabled me to jump off and chuck an armful of the straw into our car; I did this with my friend of the blankets in mind. I threw the damp straw on top of the live coals and in a few minutes or less the car was filled with rank, reeking smoke that fairly made the eyes water. Up jumped the blanket ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... I jeered at myself for a fraud as the doughty platform combatant, when shrinking from blaming some lad or lass for doing their work badly. An unkind look or word has availed to make me shrink myself as a snail into its shell, while, on the platform, opposition makes me ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... shell to fit the snail, as it were," commented the land baron, patronizingly, gazing around the little cupboard of a room. "At any rate," he added, in an effort to hide his dissatisfaction, "it's a pleasure to become better acquainted with such a—what shall ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... home, and that his report had testified to his diligence and progress. At the end of the letter comes this little touch as to some of the schoolboy belongings which had been left behind in Professor Newman's house. "Harry has left divers snail-shells fastened on pasteboard. Perhaps he did not know how to carry ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... gone now, and he got his men into a series of well-concerted, steady, deadly efforts, that threatened to bring the whole Kingston four over with the snail-like white cord. But Sawed-Off pleaded with his men, and they buried their faces in the board and worked like mad. To the spectators they seemed hardly to move, but under their skins their muscles were crowding and shoving like a gang of slaves, and fairly squeezing streams of sweat ...
— The Dozen from Lakerim • Rupert Hughes
... adher'd; And, now, in love to household cares, By a shrill voice the hour declares, Warning the housemaid not to burn The roast-meat which it cannot turn. The easy chair began to crawl, Like a huge snail along the wall; There, stuck aloft in public view, And, with small change, a pulpit grew. A bed-stead of the antique mode, Made up of timber many a load, Such as our ancestors did use, Was metamorphos'd into pews: ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... take the yeast-plant, a Protococcus, a common mould, a Chara, a fern, and some flowering plant; among animals we examine such things as an Amoeba, a Vorticella, and a fresh-water polyp. We dissect a starfish, an earthworm, a snail, a squid, and a fresh-water mussel. We examine a lobster and a crayfish, and a black beetle. We go on to a common skate, a codfish, a frog, a tortoise, a pigeon, and a rabbit, and that takes us about all the time we have to give. The purpose of this course is not ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... O'CONNOR is a declared opponent of both these measures, but that did not prevent him from contrasting the lightning speed of the House when passing coercion for Ireland with its snail-like pace when approaching conciliation. In fifty years it had not given justice to Ireland; it was to be asked to give injustice to Ireland in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, August 11, 1920 • Various
... a troop of angels fly-catching, snail-seeking, and bug-hunting through all lands, lugging through the air, horses, giraffes, elephants, and rhinoceroses, and dropping them at the door of the ark. One has crossed the Atlantic with rattlesnakes, copperheads, and boas twined around ...
— The Deluge in the Light of Modern Science - A Discourse • William Denton
... daily dairy daisy drain dainty explain fail fain gain gait gaiter grain hail jail laid maid mail maim nail paid pail paint plain prairie praise quail rail rain raise raisin remain sail saint snail sprain stain straight strain tail train vain ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... not loud, but deep." Deep or loud, no purpose would they have answered; the waggoner's temper was proof against curse in or out of the English language; and from their snail's pace neither Dickens, nor devil, nor any postilion in England could make him put his horses. Lord Colambre jumped out of the chaise, and, walking beside him, began to talk to him; and spoke of his horses, their bells, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... young crabs pass through a stage when to all intents and purposes they are counterparts of lobsters. Even the twisted hermit crab, which has a soft-skinned hinder part coiled to fit the curve of the snail shell used as a protection, is symmetrical and lobster-like when it ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... out into the open thoroughfare to avoid some obstacle—some spectral wain or omnibus got hopelessly stranded; while there were muffled cries and calls here, there, and everywhere. They went at a snail's pace, of course. Once, at a corner, the near wheels got on the pavement; the cab tilted over; Miss Burgoyne shrieked aloud and clung to her companion; then there was a heavy bump, and the venerable vehicle resumed its slow progress. Suddenly they beheld a cluster of ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... of large muscles about the rocks, many sea-ears, and we often saw shells of pretty large plain chamae. The smaller sorts are some trochi of two species, a curious murex, rugged wilks, and a snail, all which are, probably, peculiar to this place, at least I do not recollect to have seen them in any country near the same latitude in either hemisphere. There are, besides these, some small plain ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... but your faith is rewarded by finding the ground strewn with spirited fruit,—some of it, perhaps, collected at squirrel-holes, with the marks of their teeth by which they carried them,—some containing a cricket or two silently feeding within, and some, especially in damp days, a shelless snail. The very sticks and stones lodged in the tree-top might have convinced you of the savoriness of the fruit which has been so eagerly sought ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... long sigh. "O Monsieur, it is wonderful that people can talk this way on paper. I have tried, but the master could not help laughing and I laughed, too. It was like a snail crawling about and the pen would go twenty ways as if there was an evil sprite in my fingers. But I shall keep on although it is very tiresome and I have such a longing to be out in the fields and woods, chasing squirrels ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... priests clasped her robe to draw her back, but she turned on him with the spear, whereon he shrank back into his litter like a snail into his shell and left her alone. So following the steep path they marched on, and after them came the two litters with the priests, carried by all the bearers who could still stand, for these old men weighed no more than ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... taking many beaver. As a New Year's greeting a shower of arrows from a new tribe, the Pipis, fell amongst them. The trappers killed six of them at one volley, and the rest ran away, leaving twenty-three beautiful longbows behind. The only clothing the dead men had on was snail-shells fastened to the ends of their long locks of hair. The trappers now began to seek more anxiously for the mythical settlements. "A great many times each day," says Pattie, "we bring our crafts to the ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... the train seemed to travel! It was a snail compared to Jack's eagerness to arrive. He was inclined to think that P.D., Wrath of God, and Jag Ear were faster than through expresses. He kept inquiring of the conductor if they were on time, and the conductor kept repeating that ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... standards of desert warfare it must have seemed that Kitchener and his English made war as slowly as grass grows or orchards bear fruit. The horsemen of Araby, darting to and fro like swallows, must have felt as if they were menaced by the advance of a giant snail. But it was a snail that left a shining track unknown to those sands; for the first time since Rome decayed something was being made there that could remain. The effect of this growing road, one might almost say this living road, began to be felt. Mahmoud, the Mahdist ...
— Lord Kitchener • G. K. Chesterton
... in the gathering dark, spurning hamlets behind us, I suddenly called out, "Why, what asses we are! Why, it's She that is brave—she and the donkey. We are safe enough; we are artillery and plate-armour: and she stands up to us with matchwood and a snail! If you had grown old in a quiet valley, and people began firing cannon-balls as big as cabs at you in your seventieth year, wouldn't you jump—and she never moved an eyelid. Oh! we go very fast ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... be goin'. I did think I'd be forehanded in callin', but mother's been dredful wakeful lately, and when daylight comes, it don't seem as if I had the ambition of a snail. She don't like to be left alone for a minit, mother don't, so it's a bit of a puzzle to ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... subtle magic of this sort for which we have no organized science. It is said that if you put snails together and afterwards separate them, placing each upon a copper ground to which electric wires are attached, a shock given to one snail will be registered by the other at the same moment. I have not tried this theory, but the idea is fundamental to a mass of telepathic observations which have found practical expression in wireless telegraphy. Some ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial
... ridden quite fast, or perchance these two had gone at a snail's pace, but when half-way home they looked about them and found that ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... unreserve. His mother saw that he winced, and enjoyed the scratch she had given him. Had she felt less confident of victory she had better have foregone the pleasure of touching as it were the eyes at the end of the snail's horns in order to enjoy seeing the snail draw them in again—but she knew that when she had got him well down into the sofa, and held his hand, she had the enemy almost absolutely at her mercy, and could do pretty much ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... flights of fancy, idiomatic expressions, he sets down among the signs of the times—the extraordinary occurrences of the age we live in. They are marks of a restless and revolutionary spirit: they disturb his composure of mind, and threaten (by implication) the safety of the state. His slow, snail-paced, bed-rid habits of reasoning cannot keep up with the whirling, eccentric motion, the rapid, perhaps extravagant combinations of modern literature. He has long been stationary himself, and is determined that others shall remain so. The hazarding a paradox is like letting off a pistol ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... bank, which is standing very nearly still, and you will realise that you and your canoe are standing very nearly still too; and that all your exertions are only enabling you to creep on at the pace of a crushed snail, and that it's the water that is going the pace. It's a most ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... from a box some of the exquisite little violet snail-shells, and gave them to Lena, who cried out with delight, and instantly resolved to have a pair ...
— Nautilus • Laura E. Richards
... moved out of Lafayette that forenoon amidst the greatest excitement and enthusiasm. Most of them swam their horses across the river, too eager to wait for the snail-like ferry to transport them to the opposite bank. They were fearfully and wonderfully armed and equipped for the expedition. Guns of all descriptions and ages; pistols, axes, knives and diligently scoured swords; pots and pans and kettles; blankets, knapsacks and ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... on my list of friends (Though graced with polished manners and fine sense, Yet wanting sensibility) the man Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm. An inadvertent step may crush the snail That crawls at evening in the public path; But he that has humanity, forewarned, Will tread aside, and let the reptile live. The creeping vermin, loathsome to the sight, And charged perhaps with venom, that intrudes A visitor unwelcome into scenes Sacred to neatness and repose, the alcove, ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... mole-hill, I fell to my neck in the hole, through which that animal had cast up the earth, and coined some lie, not worth remembering, to excuse myself for spoiling my clothes. I likewise broke my right shin against the shell of a snail, which I happened to stumble over, as I was walking alone ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... was a remnant of old Ballarat which had survived the rage for new houses and highly ornamented terraces. Slivers had been offered money for that ricketty little shanty, but he declined to sell it, averring that as a snail grew to fit his house his house ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... Grant in an agonized voice. Even as he spoke a sailor ran swiftly along the deck to the base of the foremast and began to climb rapidly. To those who watched him, however, it seemed as if he progressed at a snail's pace. ...
— The Go Ahead Boys and the Treasure Cave • Ross Kay
... saw that they were gone, he crept back out of the subterranean passage. "It is so dangerous to walk on the ground in the dark," said he; "how easily a neck or a leg is broken!" Fortunately he knocked against an empty snail-shell. "Thank God!" said he. "In that I can pass the night in safety," and got into it. Not long afterwards, when he was just going to sleep, he heard two men go by, and one of them was saying, "How shall we contrive to get hold of the rich pastor's silver and ...
— Household Tales by Brothers Grimm • Grimm Brothers
... would be uncharitable to blame them. They are ignorant poor folk, and the prince of darkness is behind them to urge them on. They sank little charges of powder into my legs and then they exploded them, which makes me a slower walker than ever, though I was never very brisk. 'The Snail' was what I was called at school in Tours, yes, and afterwards at the seminary ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... likened to stagnant water, that is not good, that nobody drinks, and that does not run down in brooks, upon the banks of which kumara and trees grow. My heart is all rock, all rock, and no good thing will grow upon it. The lizard and the snail run over the rocks, and all evil runs ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... frightened deer and sees or hears him go bounding off at breakneck pace over loose rocks and broken trees and tangled underbrush; rising swift on one side of a windfall without knowing what lies on the other side till he is already falling; driving like an arrow over ground where you must follow like a snail, lest you wrench a foot or break an ankle,— finds himself asking with unanswered wonder how any deer can live half a season in the wilderness without breaking all his legs. And when you run upon ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... that my old friend's child might have a roof to her head, and come to no harm. You see I was forced to do her that injury; for, after all, poor young creature, it was a sad lot for her. A dull bookworm like me,—cochlea vitam agens, Mr. Squills,—leading the life of a snail! But my shell was all I could offer ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... one's horns; to retract an assertion through fear: metaphor borrowed from a snail, who on the apprehension of danger, draws in his horns, and ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... all was arranged. Without killing more than a snail or two, which we could not take time to beware of, Walter and I—finding that the window did not open down to the ground in French fashion, for which there were two good reasons, one the fierceness of the winds in winter, the other, the fact that the means of egress ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... flipped a rosebud covered with blight, kicked off a snail which was crawling on the path; then, halfway down the path, he suddenly raised his head and gave ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... before. The wind was strong and cold, blowing the vapory water-smoke in long trails across the surface of the waves. It was not long, however, before some dim white gleams through the mist were pointed out as the shores of Sweden, and the Carl Johan slackened her speed to a snail's pace, snuffing at headland after headland, like a dog off the scent, in order to ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... lance, good man, and stick the point Here in the ground, and then the roof will be Held up in that direction. Thus it throws A broader shadow. Quickly, now! That's right! You other fellow, like a snail, you bear Your house upon your back, unless, perhaps, A house for some one else. Show me the shield! A mirror 'tis, in sooth! 'Tis crude, of course, As all is, here, but in ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... I have been out and returned like Noah's Ark with animals of all sorts. I have to-day to my astonishment found two Planariae living under dry stones: ask L. Jenyns if he has ever heard of this fact. I also found a most curious snail, and spiders, beetles, snakes, scorpions ad libitum, and to conclude shot a Cavia weighing a cwt.—On Friday we sail for the Rio Negro, and then will commence our real wild work. I look forward with dread to the wet stormy regions of the south, ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... the Snail, Miss, among ourselves," said the Porter. "She's oftener be'ind'and nor any ...
— The Railway Children • E. Nesbit
... little doubt that while a certain number may have improved with age, others will have deteriorated and even lost their original point and bearing. It is curious to find in the Solvamhall records our familiar friend the climbing snail puzzle, and it will be seen that in its modern form it has ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... sixty pupils," said I; for I knew the number, and with my usual base habit of cowardice, I shrank into my sloth like a snail into its shell, and alleged incapacity and impracticability as a pretext to escape action. If left to myself, I should infallibly have let this chance slip. Inadventurous, unstirred by impulses of practical ambition, I was capable of sitting ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... and tourist earnings remained low. Production of taro, the primary food export crop, has dropped 97% since a fungal disease struck the crop in 1993. The rapid growth in 1994 of the giant African snail population in Western Samoa is also threatening the country's basic food crops, such ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... failed to get the rascals, did you, Mr. Narkom?" Cleek was saying. "I feared as much; but I couldn't get word to you sooner. We injured the machine in that mad race to the mill, and of course we had to come at a snail's pace afterwards. I'm sorry we didn't get Margot—sorrier still that that hound Merode got away. They are bound to make more trouble before the race is run. Not for her ladyship, however, and not for this dear little chap. Their troubles are at an end, and the ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... croose," replied Gideon Kemp; "for though his castle stands proud in the green valley, the time may yet come when horses and carts will be driven through his ha', and the foul toad and the cauld snail be the only visitors around the unblest ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... head, like a muffin-man carries his tray. It was a great thing, you never would have thought he could have carried it, and it was easy to see that it was as much as he could manage; it bent him nearly double, and he went crawling along like a snail,—it took him quite a time to get to the ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... hate to think of it. Am I to squeeze my body into stays, and straight-lace my will in the trammels of law. What might have risen to an eagle's flight has been reduced to a snail's pace by law. Never yet has law formed a great man; 'tis liberty that breeds giants and heroes. Oh! that the spirit of Herman* still glowed ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... creeping along at a snail's pace now, so even should either boat strike mud bottom, which Jud had declared it to be, ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Afloat • George A. Warren
... Paris, where they are eaten, after being cooked with butter and garlic, as escargots de Bourgogne—but it stuck in his throat, and a catastrophe would have happened but for the sturdy blow which his companion gave him on the 'chine.' That a snail-eater should criticise gipsies for eating cockchafers shows what creatures of ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... the Grand Army of the Potomac was moving southward at a snail's pace; and on the seventh of November, just after reaching Warrenton, General McClellan was relieved from command, and directed to report to the authorities by letter from Trenton, New Jersey. Thus ended another indecisive campaign, which though it had witnessed a greater victory than ever ...
— Three Years in the Federal Cavalry • Willard Glazier
... thy own sweet smile, and tuneful tongue, Delighted BELLIS calls her infant throng. 145 Each on his reed astride, the Cherub-train Watch her kind looks, and circle o'er the plain; Now with young wonder touch the siding snail, Admire his eye-tipp'd horns, and painted mail; Chase with quick step, and eager arms outspread, 150 The pausing Butterfly ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... of a sign; or the sign is the shell, and mine host is the snail. He consists of double beer and fellowship, and his vices are the bawds of his thirst. He entertains humbly, and gives his guests power, as well of himself as house. He answers all men's expectations to his power, save in the reckoning; and hath gotten ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... of the production of the human race from the mud, through the mushroom, the snail, the tortoise, the greyhound, the monkey and the man, which is now such a favorite with atheists, if it were fully proved to be a fact, would only increase the difficulty of getting rid of God. For either the primeval mud had all ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... them consume away like a snail, and be like the untimely fruit of a woman: and let them ...
— The Book of Common Prayer - and The Scottish Liturgy • Church of England
... "Charley," who slept at Captain Kingwalt's every second night, and who returned my beast to his owner in Washington. The aphorism that a Yankee can do anything, was exemplified by this lad; for he worked my snail into a gallop. He was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, and appeared to have taken to speculation at the age when most children are learning A B C. He was now in his fourteenth year, owned two horses, and employed another boy to sell papers ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... With the beginning of her last speech, Sir Thomas had begun to swell, until now he looked as if he were in imminent danger of bursting. His face was purple. To Molly's lively imagination, his eyes appeared to move slowly out of his head, like a snail's. From the back of his throat came ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse
... would not touch any portion of such a snake with their hands: even its skin was supposed by these people to be noxious. Down came the rain; I believe it could not have rained harder. Mrs. Baker in the palanquin was fortunately like a snail in her shell; but I had nothing for protection except an oxhide: throwing myself upon my angarep I drew it over me. The natives had already lighted prodigious fires, and all crowded around the blaze; but what would have been the Great Fire ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... Benson To a Mouse Robert Burns The Grasshopper Abraham Cowley On the Grasshopper and Cricket John Keats To the Grasshopper and the Cricket Leigh Hunt The Cricket William Cowper To a Cricket William Cox Bennett To an Insect Oliver Wendell Holmes The Snail William Cowper The Housekeeper Charles Lamb The Humble-Bee Ralph Waldo Emerson To a Butterfly William Wordsworth Ode to a Butterfly Thomas Wentworth Higginson The Butterfly Alice Freeman Palmer Fireflies Edgar ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... enough;[68] but a huge feeder, Snail-slow in profit, and he sleeps by day More than the wild cat: drones hive not with me, Therefore I part with him; and part with him To one that I would have him help to waste His borrow'd purse.—Well, Jessica, go in; Perhaps, I will return immediately; ...
— The Merchant of Venice [liberally edited by Charles Kean] • William Shakespeare
... learned afterward. Alas! I was getting my triumph early and in one big chunk! I figure that that one huge breakfast of triumph, if properly distributed, would have fed me through the whole two thousand miles of back-strain and muscle-cramp. And yet, through all the days of snail-paced toil that followed, I remained truly thankful ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... the oysters lie in the brackish sluices, and all sorts of fish, from shrimps to sharks, hover around the oyster beds. In the green depths they can be seen, and there the crab darts sidewise, like a shooting star. In the sandy beach grows the mamano, or snail-clam, putting his head from his shell at high tide to suck nutrition from the mysterious food of the sea, and giving back such chowder to man as makes the eater feel his stomach to possess a nobility above the pleasures of the brain. The bay of ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... or ferry, or wherry, or whatever its contemptible inconvenience makes it fitting that this unclean and snail-like craft should be styled, cast off and began to lumber along the edges of the town with its dense cargo of hats and parasols and lunch parcels. We were a most extraordinary litter of man and womankind. There was the severe New England type, improving each ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... the wounded body of Jerry Boyle that the pot-bellied peace officer feared, but the stiffening frame of Hun Shanklin, lying out there in the bright sun. Every time he looked that way he drew up on himself, like a snail. At length Slavens gave him permission to leave, charging him to telephone to Meander for the coroner the moment that he arrived in Comanche, and to get word to Boyle's people ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... me. I had danced with her, I had talked with her under the stars, but what might she expect me not to do? And what was an Occidental, a city man, before her? She retired behind a bird's-nest fern, on the long, lanceolate leaves of which were the shells of the mountain snail. At her feet was the bastard canna, the pungent root of which ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... With head crouched down upon his feet, Till strangers pass his sunny seat— Then quick he pricks his ears to hark And bustles up to growl and bark; While boys in fear stop short their song, And sneak in startled speed along; And beggar, creeping like a snail, To make his hungry hopes prevail O'er the warm heart of charity, Leaves his lame halt ...
— The Dog's Book of Verse • Various
... gauged as dyspeptic or eupeptic, friend or foe. On the march, Javert was on the alert, snuffing up the air, until some savory odor crossed his path, when he would shut himself up, like a snail within his shell. Yet he was not sleeping, for no titbit ever passed the portals beneath. Perhaps, however, they were themselves trusty now, having made habit a second nature. I cannot imagine them watering at sight of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... oar and pulled with both hands. It was almost impossible to get started against the wind, and when at last their steady, even pulling overcame the deterring power of the gale they were able to move at but a snail's pace. They followed the shoreline, keeping as close in as they could, preferring the circuitous route to the more perilous row across ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... that certaine affects of the minde by nature doth chance contrary. For as teares oftentimes trickle downe the cheekes of him that seeth or heareth some joyfull newes, so I being in this fearfull perplexity, could not forbeare laughing, to see how of Aristomenus I was made like unto a snail [in] his shell. And while I lay on the ground covered in this sort, I peeped under the bed to see what would happen. And behold there entred in two old women, the one bearing a burning torch, and the other a sponge and a naked ...
— The Golden Asse • Lucius Apuleius
... pretty wet, but still laughing, when he crawled out, like a snail from under his shell, and got upon his feet, clutching the tub to hurl ...
— The Young Surveyor; - or Jack on the Prairies • J. T. Trowbridge
... quick to give a wicked snap that made the head fall down again. When I saw that Hal had actually conquered the dog and had proved that he-was the splendid hound I had ever considered him to be, I told West to go out at once and separate them. But for the very first time West was slow—he went like a snail. It seemed that one of the dogs had snapped at his leg once, and I believe he would have been delighted if Hal had gnawed the dog flesh and bone. He pulled Hal in by his collar and opened the gate for Turk, and soon things were quite ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... led them to the war. They were arranged one behind the other, with their bows and arrows, clubs, and round shields with which they provide for fighting. They went leaping one after the other, making various gestures with their bodies, and many snail-like turns. Afterwards they proceeded to dance in the customary manner, as I have before described; then they had their tabagie, after which the women stripped themselves stark naked, adorned with their handsomest ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 1 • Samuel de Champlain
... the nervous centres.' At home his little weaknesses do not strike you. You may not be on the spot when he flies across Piccadilly Circus, pursued, as he fancies, by a Brompton omnibus which has not yet reached St. James's Church, and is moving at a snail's pace; you may not have been with him on that occasion when, in his eagerness to be in time for the 'Flying Dutchman,' he arrives at Paddington an hour before it starts, and is put into the parliamentary train which is shunted at ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... they were gone, he came out of his hiding-place. "What dangerous walking it is," said he, "in this ploughed field! If I were to fall from one of these great clods, I should certainly break my neck." At last, by good chance, he found a large empty snail-shell. "This is lucky," said he, "I can sleep here very well," and in he crept. Just as he was falling asleep he heard two men passing, and one said to the other, "How shall we manage to steal that rich parson's silver and gold?" "I'll tell you," cried ...
— My Book of Favorite Fairy Tales • Edric Vredenburg
... The crest acts as a tiny sail (hence the name) and communicates to the animal a slow rotatory movement while drifting before the wind. Two kinds of Janthinae (J. globosa and J. exigua) molluscs with a fragile, snail-like shell, and a vesicular float, were drifting about, and, together with a very active, silvery-blue Idotea, half an inch long, prayed upon the Velellae. At another time, among many other pelagic crustacea, we obtained ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... enemies of our efforts after purity. There is nothing that makes a man so down-hearted in his work of self-improvement as the constant and bitter experience that it seems to be all of no use; that he is making so little progress; that with immense pains, like a snail creeping up a wall, he gets up, perhaps, an inch or two, and then all at once he drops down, and further down than ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... scientific plutocrat to maintain that humanity will adapt itself to any conditions which we now consider evil. The old tyrants invoked the past; the new tyrants will invoke the future evolution has produced the snail and the owl; evolution can produce a workman who wants no more space than a snail, and no more light than an owl. The employer need not mind sending a Kaffir to work underground; he will soon become an underground ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... underlying economic forces should be found to be improving Labor's condition at a snail's pace, instead of actually heaping up more misery, no changes would be required in any of the other statements, or in the conclusion of this paragraph, which, with this exception, undoubtedly expresses the views of the overwhelming ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... carelessly thrown in, a quantity of the same; and I could see also from all the surrounding circumstances, especially the pallid faces of the crowd, that there was something sad about it all. The horse moved slowly along, at almost a snail's pace, while behind walked a poor, sad couple with their heads bowed down, and each with a hand on the tail-board of the cart. They were evidently ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... better still if you would carry me,' said she sweetly, 'but as I don't like to see people giving themselves trouble, you may carry me, and make that snail carry you.' So saying, she pointed languidly with one tiny foot at what the Prince had taken for a block of stone, but now he saw that it was ...
— The Green Fairy Book • Various
... returned. When distant from it only two hundred yards, we saw the girls enter the wood, evidently taking the direction of the seat. At the same moment I caught a glimpse of Neb moving up the road from the landing at a snail's pace, as if the poor fellow dreaded to encounter the task before him. After a moment's consultation, we determined to proceed at once to the grove, and thus anticipate the account of Neb, who must pass so near the summer-house as to be seen and recognised. We met with more obstacles ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... could very well remember that there had been a great many more of them; that they had descended from a large family. They led a very retired and happy life and, as they had no children, they had adopted a little common snail which they brought up as their own child. But the little thing would not grow, for he was only a common snail, although the mother declared that he was getting too large for his shell. And when the father noticed ...
— Tell Me Another Story - The Book of Story Programs • Carolyn Sherwin Bailey
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