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More "Tortoise" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is about a fortnight old the perforation in the septum of the nose is made by drilling it with a sharp-pointed piece of tortoise-shell, but the raised artificial scars, regarded as personal ornaments by the Australians and Torres Strait Islanders, are not made until long afterwards. According to Giaom, who states that among the Kowraregas this scarification is purely voluntary, the patient ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... ship steadily on her course. He had grown accustomed to the complaints of the agitators, and thought they would not go beyond agitation. When pressed to take some repressive measure, he answered that you must wait for the tortoise to put its head out before you hit it, and he appeared to think it would keep its head in. He is one of the most interesting figures of our time; this old President, shrewd, cool, dogged, wary, courageous; typifying the qualities of his people, and strong because he is in sympathy with ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... will see," quoth Obed oracularly. "Now, Panther, don't you be too impatient. Remember that the tortoise beat the hare in the great Greek ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler
... retired, and returned presently equipped for the road. She had indued her feet with goloshes and pinned up her skirts till they looked like some demented Paris mode. An ancient bonnet was tied under her chin with strings, and her equipment was completed by an exceedingly smart tortoise-shell-handled umbrella, which, she explained, had been a Christmas ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... are generally called, made of wood, bone or tortoise-shell are used for all the heavier kinds of crochet work in thick wool or cotton, and steel ones for the finer kinds. The Tunisian crochet is done with a long straight hook, which is made all in one piece. The points ...
— Encyclopedia of Needlework • Therese de Dillmont
... stormed, prancing from one side of the table to the other, shaking the flimsy sheets in an angry hand, and scattering pins and needles broadcast on the carpet, while Eunice, like the tortoise, toiled slowly away, until bit by bit the puzzle became clear to her mind. She discovered that one piece of the pattern stood for half only of a particular seam, while others, such as collar and cuffs, represented a whole; mastered ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... the tail of the line, who are running rapidly. It is a curious but quite inexplicable fact that if you set a hundred men to march in single file in the dark, though the leading man may be crawling like a tortoise, the last man is compelled to proceed at a profane double if he is to avoid being left ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... keeping with the generous bulk of its owner, who had come through the door. He was well past middle-age, with a thatch of gray hair half covering his high forehead. In one hand he held the book that he had been reading, and in the other a pair of big tortoise-shell glasses. ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... avoided, never wash combs, as the water often makes the teeth split, and the tortoise-shell or horn of which they are made, rough. Small brushes, manufactured purposely for cleaning combs, may be purchased at a trifling cost; the comb should be well brushed, and afterwards wiped ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... marks, Austrian kronen, Italian lires, and French francs. Most of the men regarded Europe as a wine list. In their mental geography Rheims, Rhine, Moselle, Bordeaux, Champagne, or Wuerzburg were not localities but libations. The women, for the most part, went in for tortoise-shell combs, fringed silk shawls, jade earrings, beaded bags, and coral neck chains. Up and down the famous thoroughfare of Europe went the absurd pale blue tweed tailleurs and the lavender tweed cape ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... with yellow and salient cheek bones, with eyes small but keen and penetrating, and an expression of countenance resembling at once the polecat and the fox. His head, supported by a long and flexible neck, issued from his large black robe, balancing itself with a motion very much like that of the tortoise thrusting his head out of his shell. He began by asking M. Bonacieux his name, ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... called the great Fox, and one on the left, called the little Fox: these were the war chiefs or generals. At the third fire stood two warriors, who were called respectively the Wolf and the Owl. And at the other fire, two others who were the Eagle and the Tortoise. These four last named were not chiefs but braves of distinction, who held honorable places in the council, and were persons of influence in peace and in war. This lodge of four fires may have existed among these tribes. It is true that their chiefs remain ...
— Great Indian Chief of the West - Or, Life and Adventures of Black Hawk • Benjamin Drake
... evening, when the fire is burning brightly and you are chatting gayly beside it, he should take off one of your shoes and stockings, put your foot on his lap, and in a moment of forgetfulness carry irreverence so far as to kiss it; if he likes to pass your large tortoise-shell comb through your hair, if he selects your perfumes, arranges your plaits, and suddenly exclaims, striking his forehead: "Sit down there, darling; I have an idea how to arrange a ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... rival aspirant in Mrs. Dodd. She educated Julia herself from first to last: but with true feminine distrust of her power to mould a lordling of creation, she sent Edward to Eton, at nine. This was slackening her tortoise; for at Eton is no female master, to coax dry knowledge into a slow head. However, he made good progress in two branches—aquatics ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... subject; but still its aim will be to get to the bottom, and nothing more. With matter it began, with matter it will end; it will never trespass into the province of mind. The Hindoo notion is said to be that the earth stands upon a tortoise; but the physicist, as such, will never ask himself by what influence, external to the universe, the universe is sustained; simply because he is ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... as the tortoise goes, Heavy and slow; And the same rose blooms, and the same sun glows, And the same brook ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Player, who practises on this occasion all the attitudes and wild apprehensions of fear; more ambitious, as it should seem, of representing a Caliban than a Falstaff; or indeed rather a poor unwieldy miserable Tortoise than either.—The painful Comedian lies spread out on his belly, and not only covers himself all over with his robe as with a shell, but forms a kind of round Tortoise-back by I know not what stuffing or contrivance; in addition to which, he alternately lifts ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... was watching that tortoise-shell of yours on the houseboat. She was creeping along the roof, behind the flower-boxes, stalking a young thrush that had perched upon a coil of rope. Murder gleamed from her eye, assassination lurked in every twitching muscle of her body. As she crouched to spring, ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... through the snow. My optical delusions as to colour were perhaps the most remarkable; the protruding rocks invariably appeared of a strange orange yellow, with black lines along them, producing a short of tortoise-shell effect. I took these mysterious appearances at first for dead animals, ponies or sheep, and touched them to try to ascertain the fact. My hands, however, were so utterly devoid of sensation, that they were of no more ...
— A Night in the Snow - or, A Struggle for Life • Rev. E. Donald Carr
... musical instruments at dinner; and their host now brought them some venerable lutes to examine—curiosities only, for most of the metal strings were broken. Beautiful objects, however, they were, in inlaid ivory or tortoise-shell and ebony; made, as the various inscriptions revealed, at Bologna, or Padua, or Venice; and dating, some of them, as far back as 1474. But in the midst of all this, Brand espied another instrument on one of ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... brought me, and which I found delicious. I may here mention that several days later I became aware that this same broth—the origin of which puzzled me at the moment, though not enough to prevent me from taking it—had been prepared from a kind of tortoise, the existence of which in large numbers on the spit Hutchinson had accidentally discovered that very morning, and in pursuit of which he had sent out two of the most slightly wounded with a sack, and instructions to catch and bring in as many of the creatures ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... now They have come out. They have preened And dried themselves After their blood bath. Old men seem a little younger, And tortoise-shell combs Are longer than ever; Earrings weigh down aged ears; And Golconda has given ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... feet from the window. On it was a large brass lamp which cast a brilliant circle of light upon the broad flat top of the desk with its orderly array of letter-trays, its handsome silver-edged blotter and silver and tortoise-shell writing appurtenances. By the light of this lamp Dr. Romain, looking from the doorway, saw that Hartley Parrish's chair was vacant, pushed back a little way from the desk. The rest of the room ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... Even without any anatomical dissection, the similarity of all vertebrated embryos at comparable stages of development admits of being strikingly shown, if we merely place the embryos one beside the other. Here, for instance, are the embryos of a fish, a salamander, a tortoise, a bird, and four different mammals. In each case three comparable stages of development are represented. Now, if we read the series horizontally, we can see that there is very little difference between the eight animals at the earliest ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... fear for the chair," I said, for it creaked under me very fearfully, having legs not so large as my finger; "if the chair breaks, Annie, your fear should be, lest the tortoise-shell run into me. Why, it is striped like a viper's loins! I saw some hundreds in London; and very cheap they are. They are made to be sold to the country people, such as you and me, dear; and carefully kept they will last for almost half a year. Now will you come back from ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... eleven cats at the farm here now. Papa's favorite is a little tortoise-shell kitten he has named "Sour Mash," and a little spotted one "Fannie." It is very pretty to see what papa calls the cat procession; it was formed in this way. Old Minniecat headed, (the mother of all ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... he termed him, which I should be very happy to translate, were my pen capable of rendering into English the robust thundering sentences of his powerful Castilian. I had till then considered him a plain uninformed old man, almost simple, and as incapable of much emotion as a tortoise within its shell; but he had become at once inspired: his eyes were replete with a bright fire, and every muscle of his face was quivering. The little silk skull-cap which he wore, according to the custom of the Catholic clergy, moved ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... ordinary feathers, and which cannot "be more aptly described than by comparing them to a white fowl drawn down a sooty chimney; it is, however," adds Mr. Layard, "a remarkable fact that a male bird of the pure sooty variety is almost as rare as a tortoise-shell tom-cat." Mr. Blyth finds that the same rule holds good with this breed near Calcutta. The males and females, on the other hand, of the black-boned European breed, with silky feathers, do not differ from each other; so that in the one breed black skin and bones, and the same kind of plumage, ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... being suggestive of the appearance of a military man. He halted on one foot, he stooped at the shoulders, and instead of a sword at his side he carried a stick in his hand. After looking sharply through a large pair of tortoise-shell spectacles, first at Mercy, then at the bed, then all round the room, he turned with a cynical composure of manner to the Prussian officer, and broke the silence in ...
— The New Magdalen • Wilkie Collins
... There, casting back his curious gaze, was a bewitching Moorish maid whose physical perfection seemed to cause the very place to glow. The slanting sunbeams shimmered upon her silken garments; from her careless hand drooped an instrument of gold and of tortoise-shell, an instrument strange to the eyes of the monk. Her feet were cased in tiny slippers of soft Moroccan leather; her limbs, rounded and supple and smooth as ivory, were outlined beneath wide flowing ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... I don't know; there are quadrupeds that can trot faster over the measured mile than a Tortoise, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 10, 1892 • Various
... that he was obliged to stoop as he entered the doorway. Within was an ordinary peasant's kitchen, but cleaner than the average. In spite of the weather the floor boards were freshly scrubbed. The hearth was swept, and by the stove lay a sleek tortoise-shell cat. There was a wooden dresser, a chimney shelf with rows of plates standing on it, and in a doorway just beyond an elderly peasant woman ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... (1) torture, tortoise, retort, contort, distortion, extortionate, torch, (apple) tart, truss, nasturtium; (2) tort, tortuous, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... blue, and the towering white clouds looked down through the diamond panes; and the iron-studded door, with the wonderful big key, which his hands were not yet strong enough to turn, stood wide open; and outside, amongst the deep grass that grew upon the graves, he could see the tortoise-shell butterflies sunning themselves upon the dandelions. Then it was that he used to think the outside the best, and fancy (with perfect truth, as I believe) that angels must be looking in, just as much as he was looking out, and gazing down, grave-eyed, upon the little ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... wakes in laughing day, Health that mocks the doctor's rules, Knowledge never learned of schools, Of the wild bee's morning chase, Of the wild flower's time and place, Flight of fowl and habitude Of the tenants of the wood; How the tortoise bears his shell, How the woodchuck digs his cell, And the ground-mole sinks his well; How the robin feeds her young, How the oriole's nest is hung; Where the whitest lilies blow, Where the freshest berries blow, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... of the first of these periods is the free use of small solid figures of animals as decoration—the phoenix, the elephant, the frog, the ox, the tortoise, and occasionally men; shapes grow less austere and less significant, as a comparison between figures 11 and 13 will indicate; then towards the end of the 2nd century A.D. the influence of Buddhism is felt in the general tendency towards suavity of form (fig. 14). ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... that of the Philippines, and resembles that of the Marianas Islands. Their manner of pronouncing words is something like that of the Arabs. The woman who appears to be of highest station has many rings and necklaces of tortoise-shell, that are called here carey; and others of a material that is unknown to us. This material, which somewhat ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 41 of 55, 1691-1700 • Various
... dealer in toilet articles (koma-mono) wandered all the wards of Edo, his little trays fitting neatly into each other, and wrapped in a furoshiki or bundle-handkerchief. His wares formed a marvellous collection of the precious and common place, ranging from true coral and tortoise shell, antique jewelry and curious netsuke of great value, to their counterfeits in painted wood, horn, and coloured glass. "Mobei San, long has been the wait for you. Is there a bent comb in stock?"—"Truly this Mobei is vexing. He humbly makes apology, lady. Here is just the thing.... How ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... to get away from this dangerous neighbourhood; but he sees on the other hand enemies not less terrible; a tortoise forty feet long, and a serpent of thirty, lifting its fearful head and gleaming eyes above ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... a man, and I a woman: we look with differing eyes, each sex to the other, and perceive by contrast. Else—why, how else could you forgive my presumption? He sees me as an eagle sees the creeping tortoise. I see him as the moon the sun, never weary of gazing. I borrow his radiance to observe him by. But I weary you with my garrulous tongue.... Have you no plan at all in your journey? 'Tis not the dangers, but to me the endless restlessness of ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... and wandering through the globe as the descendants of Noah, without a written language. The Hindoo therefore in his belief that the earth was actually drawn up at the flood, by the tusks of a boar, and that it rests at this hour on the back of a tortoise: and the North American Indian in his wild supposition that Waesackoochack, whose reputed father was a snake, formed the present beautiful order of creation after the deluge, by the help of a musk-rat, afford no inconsiderable proof that the ...
— The Substance of a Journal During a Residence at the Red River Colony, British North America • John West
... match held about three inches from it. Finally, I lit it for her, and she seemed to see me for the first time. She looked at me, at once shiftily and sharply. Her eyes narrowed. Suspicion leaped into her face, and she seemed to shrink into herself like a tortoise into its shell. "Oo's 'e?" she ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... knee. They looked haughtily about, and talked English together. I took no notice, just went on smoking. I observed that the ladies were getting angry—over my cigar, doubtless. One looked at me through her tortoise-shell eyeglass. ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... black, white, gray, yellow, striped, spotted, Maltese, tortoise-shell, calico, and tiger cats! Cats of all sizes and all kinds, cats of all ages, from tiny furry babies wheeled in perambulators by their mamas to gray old grandpas hobbling along by the aid of canes or crutches—all the cats of Catnip Island had trooped down to the shore to watch the landing ...
— The Wonderful Bed • Gertrude Knevels
... ladies surveyed me as I stood in the centre of an open space, surveyed me through tortoise-shell glasses on the end of a long handle, and beckoned me ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... the thing has two of these sticking in it to their full length," showing the bone daggers. "I have a recollection, too, of smiting hard with this noble knob-stick, but it was like smiting the hardest kind of tortoise shell. Not yet, however, is the time to talk. Go first, ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... the objects of their worship. They worship many living creatures, such as the ape, the tiger, the elephant the horse, the ox, the stag, the sheep, the hog, the dog, the cat, the rat, the peacock, the eagle, the cock, the hawk, the serpent, the chameleon, the lizard, the tortoise, fishes, and even insects. Of these, some receive much more worship than others, such as the cow, the ox, and the serpent Cobra Capella. I will speak at present only of the worship ...
— Dr. Scudder's Tales for Little Readers, About the Heathen. • Dr. John Scudder
... another project, and this upon a third, all of them equally visionary. His finance is like the Indian philosophy; his earth is poised on the horns of a bull, his bull stands upon an elephant, his elephant is supported by a tortoise; and so ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... due to the same cause that some butterflies on small and exposed islands have their wings reduced in size, as is strikingly the case with the small tortoise-shell butterfly (Vanessa urticae) inhabiting the Isle of Man, which is only about half the size of the same species in England or Ireland; and Mr. Wollaston notes that Vanessa callirhoe—a closely allied South European form of our red-admiral butterfly—is ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... Highness's collection. There is a species of cistus which grows on S. Vincent's rock, which is not, I am told, to be found in any other part of England. Helpless as I am and scoffed at in these matters, I will contrive to get some of it for you. A shoemaker showed us a tortoise shell which he had for sale. I wished to have bought it for La Sophie, but upon inquiry I found it could not be had for less than a guinea; now I thought at the utmost it would not give Sophy above half ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... drew himself up sharply, as if fearful of having said too much, and for a moment there was silence. Then Mr. Mallowe leaned back easily in his chair and, removing his tortoise-shell rimmed eyeglasses, tapped the desk thoughtfully with ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... make you out a list. There are several Madonnas that I want, and several more that I DON'T want. And I do NOT want any of Nattier's pictures or a "Baby Stuart," but I do want some of Hinde's hair curlers—the tortoise-shell kind, I mean—and you can only get ...
— Patty in Paris • Carolyn Wells
... excited his attention, soon reconciled him to the change. In the midst of the woods he observed great numbers of dens, or caverns, which had been dug in the sand-hills, by the gopher, or great land tortoise. ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... owners' embraces and hiding away behind the cages; a family of piebald mice, consisting of a mother and five young ones, which generally went to bed in the daytime, and had to be poked out of their sleeping quarters with a lead pencil to make them show themselves; a morose-looking tortoise that would allow Wilfred to scratch its head, but spat indignantly at the others; and a whole box full of silkworms in various stages, from tiny, wriggling black threads to chrysalids in cocoons. The children were accompanied to the stable by a sharp ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... making choric music black and fuliginous. The sacred Ibis stalked to the silvery steps of the Houris; the Graces held hands. Phoebus Apollo appeared; his face was as a silver shield, so shining was it. He improvised upon a many-stringed lyre made of tortoise shell, and his music was shimmering and symphonious. Hermes and his Syrinx wooed the shy Euterpe; the maidens went in woven paces: a medley of masques flamed by; and the great god Pan breathed into his pipes. Stannum saw Bacchus pursued by the ravening Maenads; saw Lamia and her ophidian ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... forbidden) 'Rat of Ra.' If the unclean animals of Israel were originally the totems of each clan, then the mouse was a totem, {115b} for the chosen people were forbidden to eat 'the weasel, and the mouse, and the tortoise after his kind.' That unclean beasts, beasts not to be eaten, were originally totems, Prof. Robertson Smith infers from Ezekiel (viii. 10, 11), where 'we find seventy of the elders of Israel—that is, the heads of houses—worshipping in a chamber which had on its walls the figures ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... your trained editor. A miraculous sixth sense guides him. A mysterious something warns him of danger lurking within the seemingly innocent oblong white envelope. Without slitting the flap, without pausing to adjust his tortoise-rimmed glasses, without clearing his throat, without lighting his ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... legs, as the smaller birds, for the purpose of escape. Others great length of fin, or of membrane, as the flying fish, and the bat. Others great swiftness of foot, as the hare. Others have acquired hard or armed shells, as the tortoise and the ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... every day; if it were warmer I should get on faster, but I cannot stir into the air without bringing on cough. Tell Ulick O'More that we entertained his brother at tea last evening, we were obliged to desire him to bring his own cup, and he produced the shell of a land tortoise; it was very like the fox and the crane. Poor fellow, it was the first good meal he had for weeks, and I was glad he came in for some famous bread that the General had sent us in. He made us much more merry ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... replied the clerk. "It's a monkey," retorted Buckland, and proceeded to show the whole animal, but without convincing the clerk, who insisted on five shillings for the dog-ticket to London. Nettled at this, Buckland plunged his hand into another pocket and produced a tortoise, and laying it on the sill of the ticket window said, "Perhaps you'll call that a dog too." The clerk inspected the tortoise. "No," said he, "we make no ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... went to see if it were or no." Vainly I endeavored to show him that this view would deprive Columbus of his greatest distinction. He answered invariably, "But without having read it, how could he ever have known it?"—thus putting the earth upon the tortoise and leaving the tortoise to account for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... with the air of soldiers; Jamaica negroes with conical heads and brown Barbados negroes with Cockney accents; English engineers in lordly pugrees, and tourists from New England who seem servants of their own tortoise-shell spectacles; comfortable ebon mammies with silver bangles and kerchiefs of stabbing scarlet, dressed in starched pink-and-blue gingham, vending guavas and green Toboga Island pineapples. Carl gapes ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... once!" screamed Fraulein Rottenmeier. But her voice was drowned by the music. She was making a dash for the boy, when she saw something on the ground crawling towards her feet—a dreadful dark object—a tortoise. At this sight she jumped higher than she had for many long years before, shrieking with all her ...
— Heidi • Johanna Spyri
... his name little need be said. Pausanias' tale, how Dionysus appeared to the poet when a boy, asleep in his father's vineyard, and bade him write a tragedy—-or the account in the Life, how he was killed by an eagle letting fall on his head a tortoise whose shell the bird was unable to crack—-clearly belong to the same class of legends as the story that Plato was son of Apollo, and that a swarm of bees settled upon his infant lips as he lay in his mother's arms. Less supernatural, but hardly more historical, is the statement ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... with a minimum of veils, swayed into sinuous beauty to the monotonous music of kettle-drums, long red flutes and guitars of sand-tortoise shell with goat-skin heads—music furnished by a dozen Arabs squatting on their hunkers half-way down the hall. The gracious weaving of those lithe, white bodies of the girls as they swayed from sunlit filigree to dim shadow, stirred even the coldest heart among the Legionaries, ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... and in colour white, streaked with very light pink, which contained the ashes of Augustus, found in the ruins of his mausoleum, and now in the Vatican; the bust of Julius Caesar, made of the variety tartaruga, from the resemblance of its brownish-yellow markings to tortoise-shell, in the Museum of the Capitol; and the two large blocks of alabastro a pecorella, brought from the Villa of Hadrian, in the fourth portico of the Vatican, the largest and most beautiful specimens of this very rare ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... tortoise-shell He stretched some chords, and drew Music that made men's bosoms swell Fearless, or brimmed ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... trade carried on by the Chinese supercargos of the ships frequenting the port is principally transacted by barter, they giving their manufactures for the produce of their fishery, &c., and for edible birds'-nests, tortoise-shell, beche de mer, mother-of-pearl shell, wax, gold-dust, ...
— Recollections of Manilla and the Philippines - During 1848, 1849 and 1850 • Robert Mac Micking
... too; as, for instance, that of 'Shellyback,' the tortoise, whose little owner wrote a few months after her first letter to say that ...
— The Wallypug in London • G. E. Farrow
... back and consulted St. George through her tortoise-shell glasses, tilting her head high to keep them on her nose and perpetually putting their gold chain over her ear, which perpetually pulled ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... breaks into beautiful clumps of trees, like those in a gentleman's park, and every here and there a placid clear piece of water spreads out, full of pond turtle, which I believe to be one and the same with the tortoise, and eels; the latter of which, by the by, are very sociable creatures, for in the clear moonlight nights, with the bright sparkling dew on the short moist grass, they frequently travel from one pond to ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... hurried off a boy to the Mendez house with word that I was coming, sent out for flowers and made a lovely little fuss about me. I tried to make myself look as pretty as possible in a pale tulle, with little rosy wreaths upon it, and the high old tortoise-shell comb, that had been mother's, in my hair. The excitement gave me more color than I had had for weeks. I thought, "Even if I am not happy, at least ...
— The Other Side of the Door • Lucia Chamberlain
... of the head) was dark and forbidding, its nose a large brick-colored pug, the mouth underneath shaped most extraordinarily—not unlike a barrette, for it was wide and long, and square at the corners, and full of shining tortoise-shell teeth! But the creature had only one tongue. This was loose at both ends, so that there was one tip for her front face, and one for the back. But she had only one pair of eyes. These were reddish. They watched Gwendolyn boldly from the front; ...
— The Poor Little Rich Girl • Eleanor Gates
... Tortoises, the Land, and the Sea-Tortoise; but the Sea-Tortoise or Turtle, is what I mean, which is that which we have about the West-Indies. This is a fine Animal, partaking of the Land and Water. Its Flesh between that of Veal, and that of a Lobster, and is extremely pleasant, either roasted or baked. ...
— The Country Housewife and Lady's Director - In the Management of a House, and the Delights and Profits of a Farm • Richard Bradley
... head of hair in his window and leave it at that—he did, indeed, place there a smiling lady with a wonderful jewelled comb and a radiant row of teeth, but around this he built up a magnificent world of silver brushes, tortoise-shell combs, essences and perfumes and powders, jars and bottles and boxes. Manning was the finest artist in the town. Ponting, at the top of the street just at the corner of the Close, was an artist too, but in quite another fashion. ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... of such couches a good deal of decoration was lavished in the way of veneerings of ornamental wood, or thin plates of ivory or tortoise-shell, or reliefs in bronze or even in gold or silver. The feet might also, in the richer houses, consist of silver or of ivory. For the dining-rooms of people of wealth a special feature was made of such work ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... were he I wouldn't make such a glittering show of myself in that Milan carriage—all gold and silver and tortoise shell, and an angel at every corner—while there are so many hearts ...
— Semiramis and Other Plays - Semiramis, Carlotta And The Poet • Olive Tilford Dargan
... of a Moonee "is confirmed, when, like the tortoise, he can draw in all his members, and restrain them ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... by us, "Dost thou know the king Indradyumna?" And the crane thereupon seemed to reflect a little and then said, "I do not know king Indradyumna." And the crane was asked by us, "Is there any one who is older than thou?" And he answered us, saying, "There dwelleth in this very lake a tortoise of the name of Akupara. He is older than I. He may know something of this king. Therefore, enquire ye of Akupara." And then that crane gave information to the tortoise, saying, "It is intended by us to ask thee ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... that marks the open water of last year is about a mile and a half distant. There is a solitary dry spot near this, the heart of desolation—a tumulus of about half an acre, like the back of a huge tortoise, is raised about five feet above the highest water level. Upon this crocodiles love to bask ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... surveying chain and do other engineering duty, and so forth and so on; and after the Tortoises came another long train of ironclads—stately and spacious Mud Turtles for marine transportation service; and from every Tortoise and every Turtle flaunted a flaming gladiolus or other splendid banner; at the head of the column a great band of Bumble-Bees, Mosquitoes, Katy-Dids, and Crickets discoursed martial music; and the entire train was under the escort and protection of twelve ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... worms and go fishing and catch a dish of minnows for my dinner," said Mr. Jeremy Fisher. "If I catch more than five fish, I will invite my friends Mr. Alderman Ptolemy Tortoise and Sir Isaac Newton. ...
— The Great Big Treasury of Beatrix Potter • Beatrix Potter
... tamed and trained by Lord Erskine; others have been deeply interested in toads, crickets, mice, lizards, alligators, tortoises, and monkeys. Wolsey was on familiar terms with a venerable carp; Clive owned a pet tortoise; Sir John Lubbock contrived to win the affections of a Syrian wasp; Charles Dudley Warner devoted an entire article in the Atlantic Monthly to the praises of his cat Calvin; but did you ever hear of a peacock ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... put that whip down. How very mean of you to whip poor old Tortoise! Pray take the ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... (later), believe that the earth rests on the back of a turtle or tortoise[5], and that this is ruled over by the sun and moon, the first being a good spirit; the second, malignant. The good spirit interposes between the malice of the moon and mankind, and it is he who makes ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... I came here, and then I suddenly found I could. Princess Ruby declares I make it all up—but I don't. I can even understand what some of the animals have to say, and its rather fun sometimes. The other morning in the Gardens I heard a tortoise telling a squirrel——" ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... executed a fearful howl. Timar dared not let the fire out all night, for it alone kept away the wild beasts. When he went inside, the uncomfortable hiss with which snakes receive human beings struck his ear, and a sluggish mass moved under his foot; perhaps he had trodden on a tortoise. Timar kept up the fire all night, and drew fantastic figures in the air with the glowing end of the fire-stick—perhaps the hieroglyphics of ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... being driven about by a cyclone, as they rushed from one sight to another, filling up all the chinks between with shopping, which was irresistible where everything was so pretty and so wonderfully cheap. She herself purchased a tortoise-shell fan and chain for Rose Red, and had her monogram carved upon it; a coral locket for Elsie; some studs for Dorry; and for her father a small, beautiful vase of bronze, copied from one of ...
— What Katy Did Next • Susan Coolidge
... from his eyes. 'They were gone!' he said. 'They had been gone but a few hours, for the fires were still burning, but no trace of them was to be found. I found, however, in a deserted rancho,—this!' and he held up a delicate comb of tortoise-shell." ...
— Rita • Laura E. Richards
... which lay to his hand, whether as mason, tax-collector, or king. Such diligence often rectifies the balance between two men of unequal ability. The plodding tortoise still beats the hare, who believes herself to be so swift that she can afford time to sleep. Any one who looks back on his classmates will see that the cleverest have not proved the most successful, but that the prizes of life have usually gone ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... Betsey stopped again, and taking off her spectacles harangued the tortoise-shell cat, who was sitting on the rug and ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... could do, troubled my mind profoundly with the passive, irremediable horror of the scene. It had the power to drive me out of my conception of existence, out of that shelter each of us makes for himself to creep under in moments of danger, as a tortoise withdraws within its shell. For a moment I had a view of a world that seemed to wear a vast and dismal aspect of disorder, while, in truth, thanks to our unwearied efforts, it is as sunny an arrangement of small conveniences as the ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... to perfect their agilita, which remains defective. Others, although but moderately endowed, have arrived at eminence by sheer persistence and rightly directed study. It is simply a musical version of the Hare and the Tortoise. ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... closed, and while Mr. Yerkes looks out on it from his offices in the Hotel Cecil, Londoners have to look to him to see if he or Pierpont Morgan will not open it to them again. What a pleasant alternative from the asphyxiating Underground or the tortoise-moving omnibus would not a fast, comfortably fitted line of river steamers be! It seems inconceivable that, with such a waterway and such primitive and inadequate alternative means of travel, the people should stand its being closed. What a great, stimulating, suggestive ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... a great tortoise-shell dagger, and a heavy mass of glorious red-gold hair fell about her piquant face, and her pretty milk-white ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... notes there be In the new robin's ecstasy Among astonished boughs; How many trips the tortoise makes, How many cups the bee partakes, — The debauchee ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... Paris, was certainly unique. It was wonderful the amount of decoration she could carry without being the worse for it. Her head alone, over and above its bronze hair, coil on coil and curl on curl, sustained several large tortoise-shell pins, a gold lace fillet, and a rose over each ear. It was no more to her than a bit of black ribbon to a young girl. Old rose and young rose mingled delicately in the silks and gauzes of her gown; here and there a topaz flashed rose from her bodice ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... the small laboratory room, which also had been used as a workshop and a study, were a stuffed crocodile, shark's head, tortoise, fish, and salamander, parts of which were utilized as remedial agents. Their presence provided tangible evidence that the pharmacy dispensed genuine ...
— History of the Division of Medical Sciences • Sami Khalaf Hamarneh
... dried sinews stretched across the shell of a dead tortoise to the concert-grand piano of the present day is a far flight. Yet to this primitive source, it is said, may be traced the evolution of the stringed instrument which reached its culmination in the piano. The latter has ...
— How the Piano Came to Be • Ellye Howell Glover
... pronouncing upon the cause of all things. I am contented to take the phenomena as I behold them, without pretending to erect an hypothesis under the idea of making all things easy. I do not rest my globe of earth upon an elephant [a reference to the Indian myth], and the elephant upon a tortoise. I am content to take my globe of earth simply, in other words to observe the objects which present themselves to my senses, without undertaking to find out a cause why they are ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... I cannot so much as bend my knees!" "For shame!" they answered. "It is fear and not armour that stiffens your legs." Thus rebuked, Sancho endeavoured to move, but fell flat on the earth like a great tortoise; while in the darkness the others made a clash with their swords and shields, and trampled upon the prone governor, who quite gave himself up for dead. But at break of day they raised a cry of "Victory!" and, lifting ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... or other, it came into my head, especially as my friend Padlock had asked me if I wouldn't like to go up to Saratogy—that I'd go, and I went. It was odd enough, to be sure," said Uncle Joe, taking a pinch of rappee from his tortoise-shell box—"very odd, in fact, but somehow or other, Mrs. Padlock, being in poor health, and her sister, a rather volatile and inexperienced young woman, ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... for cutting it the hand of a Being, who then immediately becomes in turn a new knot for us, and a knot harder to untie than the first. An Indian tells you that our globe is suspended in the air on the back of an elephant. And the elephant! It stands on a tortoise. And the tortoise? what sustains that?... You pity the Indian: and yet one might very well say to you as to him—Mr. Holmes, my good friend, confess your ignorance, and spare ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... local cattle industry makes possible the shipment of some $2,500,000 worth of hides and skins annually. Other lines of industry worthy of mention, but not possible of detailed description here, include sponges, tortoise shell, honey, wax, molasses, and henequen or sisal. All these represent their individual thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars, and their employment of scores or hundreds of wage-earners. Those who start for Cuba with a notion that the Cubans are an idle and lazy people, will do ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson
... birds chiefly found in grassy lands, and neither fly to any great distance: at least the quail never does; the turkey will when much disturbed, but not otherwise. Also the water animals, as the tortoise, are to be found in both colonies; but not the platypus, which is confined to the country east of the great river Murrumbidgee and its tributary ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... rested on thy spacious nape; Upon thy neck, like a mere mole, it stood: O thou that took'st for us the Tortoise-shape, Hail, Keshav, hail! Ruler ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold
... of the desert was before them. Millicent lay curled up, like a golden tortoise-shell cat, in the sun; Michael, with his legs doubled up to his chin, rested his head on his knees. He would have been asleep in a few minutes if Millicent had not spoken; ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... states and trying to compose movement out of them, endeavour to make a process coincide with a thing—a movement with an immobility. This is the way to arrive at dilemmas, antinomies, and blind-alleys of thought. The puzzles of Zeno about "Achilles and the Tortoise" and "The Moving Arrow" are classical examples of the error involved in treating movement as divisible.[Footnote: Bergson in Matter and Memory examines Zeno's four puzzles: "The Dichotomy," "Achilles and the Tortoise," "The Arrow" and "The Stadium."] If movement is not everything, ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... before them. The tray of bottles and glasses had been removed from the table, and in their place were to be seen a woman's damaged hat and a small tortoise-shell comb. Mr. Harper's hand was on the former, which was wound about ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... I made with some companions towards the upper part of the Red River, we met with several of these trappers; amongst others, with one weather-beaten old fellow, whose face and bare neck were tanned by sun and exposure to the colour of tortoise-shell. We hunted two days in his company, without noticing any thing remarkable about the man; he cooked our meals, which consisted usually of a haunch of venison or a buffalo's hump, instructed us where to find game, and was aware of the approach of the latter even sooner ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... very first compliment of welcome. Her daughter, then only ten or twelve years old, was very handsome, and a few years later became Duchess de Matalona. The duchess presented me with a snuff-box in pale tortoise-shell with arabesque incrustations in gold, and she invited us to dine with her on the morrow, promising to take us after dinner to the Convent of St. Claire to pay a ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... Lincoln was not suffered to go to a ball which Sandwich made the other night for the Duke, who tumbled down in the middle of a country dance; they imagined he had beat his nose flat, but he lay like a tortoise on the topshell, his face could not touch the ground by some feet. My Lady Anson was there, who insisted on dancing minuets, though against the rule of the night, with as much eagerness as you remember in my Lady Granville. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... carry the problem higher, shall we not be like the Hindus, who put the world upon a tortoise, the tortoise on an elephant, and do not know on what the feet of their elephant may rest? This supreme will, issuing from the contest between God and Matter, this God, this more than God, can He have existed throughout eternity without willing what He afterwards ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... of Edo, his little trays fitting neatly into each other, and wrapped in a furoshiki or bundle-handkerchief. His wares formed a marvellous collection of the precious and common place, ranging from true coral and tortoise shell, antique jewelry and curious netsuke of great value, to their counterfeits in painted wood, horn, and coloured glass. "Mobei San, long has been the wait for you. Is there a bent comb in stock?"—"Truly this Mobei is vexing. He humbly makes apology, ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... Blondine was seated at the entrance of her hut, musing sadly as usual, thinking of her lost friends and of her father, when she saw before her an enormous Tortoise. ...
— Old French Fairy Tales • Comtesse de Segur
... their former existences in admittedly objectionable forms," replied the outrageous Leou. "Sun Chen, your venerated sire, will become an agile grasshopper; your incomparable grandfather, Yuen, will have the similitude of a yellow goat; as a tortoise your leisurely-minded ancestor ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... llamas, which are naturally as quiet and timid as sheep, bit each other very furiously, until they foamed at the mouth. And, lastly, a large mastiff made his appearance, walking in a slow, measured gait, with a sleek tortoise-shell cat on his back; and she, in turn, was surmounted by a mouse, which formed the apex ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... great trader with the countries near home, and sends out many junks to the East Indies, the Malay Islands, and the South Sea Islands, to collect edible birds' nests, trepang, ornamental woods, pearls, pearl-shells, tortoise-shell, and the skins of birds of paradise. At Singapore, there are hundreds of Chinese shopkeepers, who sell all kinds of miscellaneous articles, such as penknives, cotton thread, writing-paper, gunpowder, ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... tried to account for this in his own way: he says the earth does rest upon something; it is supported upon the backs of four great elephants and when he is asked, "Where do they stand?" he replies, "Upon the back of a huge tortoise." This shows the folly of men who have tried to explain what filled the patriarch Job with awe and wonder, even before God had asked him those questions which He alone could answer. "Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... and their period of publication extended from 1598 to 1624. The walghvogel is merely mentioned, but an engraving gives a fanciful representation of the doings of another Dutch crew on the island. Two gallants, elaborately attired, are represented riding on a tortoise; while ten others, seated in a tortoise's shell, are holding a grand symposium. Three birds are depicted in this plate, which the letter-press says are walghvogels, but which our eyes tell us are cassowaries, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 440 - Volume 17, New Series, June 5, 1852 • Various
... of tortoise shell and gold. He opened it deliberately. "If he does, you'll admit that he will hang on the gallows that he has built himself—although intended for another. I'faith! He's not the first booby to be caught in his own springe. There is in this a ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... "seeming"—not a reality. What men call motion is only a name given to a series of conditions, each of which, considered separately, is rest. "Rest is force resistant; motion is force triumphant."[457] The famous puzzle of "Achilles and the Tortoise," by which he endeavored to prove the unreality of motion, has been rendered familiar to the ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... female, and stew the eggs, meat and liver in a dish with some grated nutmeg, a little sweet herbs minced small, and some sweet butter, stew it up, and serve it on fine sippets, cover the meat with the upper shell of the tortoise, and slices ...
— The accomplisht cook - or, The art & mystery of cookery • Robert May
... chew and chew until the most sedate beholder must smile at the paradoxical show. Of course it is the bee that is feeding, though the flower would seem to be masticating the bee with the keenest relish! The counterfeit tortoise soon disgorges its lively mouthful, however, and away flies the bee, carrying pollen on his velvety back to rub on the stigma ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... sat opposite to him, but never looked up. A low table was placed in front, on which there was a two- spouted kettle full of sake, some sake bottles, and some cups, and on another there were some small figures representing a fir-tree, a plum-tree in blossom, and a stork standing on a tortoise, the last representing length of days, and the former the beauty of women and the strength of men. Shortly a zen, loaded with eatables, was placed before each person, and the feast began, accompanied by the noises which signify ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... feet high, access to the top of which is given by a rising arched passage built of white marble. On the top of the mound is an imposing marble structure consisting of a double arch, beneath which is the imperial tablet, a large slab, upon which is carved a dragon standing on the back of a gigantic tortoise. The remains of the emperor are buried somewhere within this mound, though the exact spot is not known: this precaution, it is said, was taken to preserve the remains from being desecrated in a search for the treasures which were buried with him, while the persons ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... was delicately removed by the beaming negresses; and gifts of gold-spangled bonbons, wonderfully iced cakes, crystallized fruit, flowers, gilded bottles of concentrated perfume, mother-o'-pearl and tortoise boxes, gaudy silk handkerchiefs made in Paris for Algerian markets, and little silver fetiches were presented to the bride. She thanked the givers charmingly, though in a manner so subdued and with a face so grave that the visitors would have ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... three hundred and sixty-five days, or eight thousand seven hundred and sixty hours. In so many hours great things may be done; the slow tortoise makes a long journey by losing ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... numbers comparatively small, but still sufficient to occasion much danger and alarm to the early settlers, and to cause their destroyers to be regarded as among the greatest heroes of the time and the greatest benefactors of mankind. The Hindoo tradition of the tortoise on whose back stands the elephant which upholds the world, and the account of Leviathan in the Book of Job, seem to point in the same direction. [Footnote: For additional instances see Tylor's Early ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... own, and were as tame as kittens. Norah loved this trio especially, and always had a game with them on her daily visit. There was a shy gentleman which Norah called a turloise, because she never could remember if he were a turtle or a tortoise. He lived in a small enclosure, with a tiny water hole, and his disposition was extremely retiring. In private Norah did not feel drawn to this member of her charge, but she paid him double attention, from ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... this describes a tramp and vagrant world, adrift in space, with neither elephant nor tortoise to plant the sole of its foot upon. It is a set of stars hurled into heaven without even a centre of gravity to pull against. In other spheres of life it is true that we have got used to living in a state of relative insecurity. The authority of 'the State,' and that of an ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... saw it was an old man bent, At the same moment came into my mind The games at which boys bend thus, High- Cockalorum, Or Fly-the-garter, and Leap-frog. At the sound Of footsteps he began to straighten himself; His head rolled under his cape like a tortoise's; He took an unlit pipe out of his mouth Politely ere I wished him "A Happy New Year," And with his head cast upward sideways Muttered— So far as I could hear through the trees' roar— "Happy New Year, and may it come fastish, too," ...
— Last Poems • Edward Thomas
... so wise a savour, and gilded surrounding objects seemed inevitably to need to be when Miss Barrace—which was the lady's name—looked at them with convex Parisian eyes and through a glass with a remarkably long tortoise-shell handle. Why Miss Barrace, mature meagre erect and eminently gay, highly adorned, perfectly familiar, freely contradictions and reminding him of some last-century portrait of a clever head without powder—why Miss Barrace should have been in particular ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... words and conduct of a considerable number of the clergy, or from certain fierce outbursts of mob riot against Roman Catholics, Methodists, and Jews, it might be argued that if toleration did indeed advance, it was but at tortoise speed. In reality, the advance was very great. Mosheim, writing before the middle of the century, spoke of the 'unbounded liberty' of religious thought which existed in England. Perhaps the expression was somewhat exaggerated. But in what previous age could it have ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... tiny, pointed shells that can be strung into such pretty necklaces. Then we found a great, bright, curly ribbon of seaweed, as wide as two hands, so long that when the little girl held it by the middle she could scarcely lift the ends off the sand, and rich and beautiful in color like dark-red tortoise-shell. The little girl looped one end of it around her head and wound the rest about her body, so that she looked a ...
— The Wagner Story Book • Henry Frost
... bishop, in his stiff cope, creep up to the group with the motion of a tortoise. And, for a moment, his quavering voice pronouncing the absolution was the only ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... products and distributed them throughout all the islands, traveling for nine months, and then returned to pay religiously even for the merchandise that the Chinamen did not remember to have given them. The products which they in exchange exported from the islands were crude wax, cotton, pearls, tortoise-shell, ...
— The Indolence of the Filipino • Jose Rizal
... found that the column was attached to the main army, and that we had to move step by step to the will of the chief. I knew very little about military tactics, but it was a strange kind of pursuit, and made me think of a tortoise chasing ...
— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens
... Sylvia, who would still creep like a tortoise, suddenly stooped down. The August dust was very thick along the way and wagons had already been traveling into town, and yet she picked up a string of red, white and blue beads, which surely were Polly's, since patriotism had been one of her chief studies ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at Sunrise Hill • Margaret Vandercook
... nature's jungle. Why, even the tiny balu of the tribe of Go-lat, the great ape, was better fitted to survive than these, for a balu could at least escape the numerous creatures that menaced its existence, while with the possible exception of Kota, the tortoise, none moved so slowly as did helpless and ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... window and leave it at that—he did, indeed, place there a smiling lady with a wonderful jewelled comb and a radiant row of teeth, but around this he built up a magnificent world of silver brushes, tortoise-shell combs, essences and perfumes and powders, jars and bottles and boxes. Manning was the finest artist in the town. Ponting, at the top of the street just at the corner of the Close, was an artist too, but in quite another fashion. Ponting was the ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... pretty good. 'Bije always did, and I didn't want to fall too fur behind. But," with a chuckle, "you needn't mention the price to anybody. If Abbie—my second cousin keepin' house for me, she is—if Abbie heard of it she'd be for puttin' me in an asylum. Abbie's got a hair breastpin and a tortoise shell comb, but she only wears 'em to the Congregationalist meetin'-house, where she's reasonably sure there ain't likely to be any sneak-thieves. She went to a Unitarian sociable once, but she carried 'em in a bag inside ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... argue against them is no doubt as foolish as arguing against a railway train that is going to crush you. Gladstone could harangue multitudes; so could Disraeli; all honour to them for it. But think of Carlyle or Ruskin doing so! Stroking the shell of a tortoise, or the cupola of St. Paul's, would have been no more attractive to them than addressing the discontented, when in their hundreds and their thousands they descended into the streets. All I claim is that there must be a division of labour, and as little as Wayland ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... you," joined in the wiry old lady, bobbing up and down like a miniature figure moved by the unseen hand of the showman. "Allow me, sir!" And she gravely tendered him a huge snuff-box of tortoise shell, which he ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... vertebrate organization. Even without any anatomical dissection, the similarity of all vertebrated embryos at comparable stages of development admits of being strikingly shown, if we merely place the embryos one beside the other. Here, for instance, are the embryos of a fish, a salamander, a tortoise, a bird, and four different mammals. In each case three comparable stages of development are represented. Now, if we read the series horizontally, we can see that there is very little difference between the eight animals at the earliest of the three stages represented—all having ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... to tack to get away from this dangerous neighbourhood; but he sees on the other hand enemies not less terrible; a tortoise forty feet long, and a serpent of thirty, lifting its fearful head and gleaming eyes above ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... very first thing Steve asked on the following morning, when he poked his head out of his "hole in the wall" like a shrewd old tortoise looking around to learn if the ...
— At Whispering Pine Lodge • Lawrence J. Leslie
... a very essential difference between our disorders. Mr. M—e has been long afflicted with violent spasms, colliquative sweats, prostration of appetite, and a disorder in his bowels. He is likewise jaundiced all over, and I am confident his liver is unsound. He tried the tortoise soup, which he said in a fortnight stuffed him up with phlegm. This gentleman has got a smattering of physic, and I am afraid tampers with his own constitution, by means of Brookes's Practice of Physic, and some dispensatories, which he is continually ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... work within the house, and Paul ran in and out. She spoke to him once about introducing an evil-smelling water- tortoise; he went forth to exploit it in the yard. From time to time his shrill voice reached her; then the frayed edges of David's black trousers of ceremony engaged her, to the exclusion of all else. Between the scissors and the needle, at last, there stole ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... Sooloo, the trade carried on by the Chinese supercargos of the ships frequenting the port is principally transacted by barter, they giving their manufactures for the produce of their fishery, &c., and for edible birds'-nests, tortoise-shell, beche de mer, mother-of-pearl shell, wax, gold-dust, ...
— Recollections of Manilla and the Philippines - During 1848, 1849 and 1850 • Robert Mac Micking
... years spent on a Canadian Indian Reserve, Lydia Mansion still wore real lace, real tortoise shell combs, real furs. If she could not have procured these she would have worn plain linen collars, no combs, and a woven woolen scarf about her throat; but the imitation fabrics, as well as the "imitation people," had no more part in her life than they had in her husband's, ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... by short paddles, or a sail of palm-leaf matting when the wind is fair. Considerable nicety is also shown in the making of fishing lines and hooks. The former are made from the fibres of a species of climber very neatly twisted. The fish-hooks are made of tortoise-shell, or nails procured from wreck timber. They are without barbs, and our fish-hooks are eagerly sought for ...
— The Overland Expedition of The Messrs. Jardine • Frank Jardine and Alexander Jardine
... slow as a tortoise, and more thick-headed than a rhinoceros,' returned his obliging client with ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... latticed windows and high ceilings and the immense dining-rooms opened on broad stone porticos with massive columns and surrounding galleries, on which were Turkish divans for the comfort of the guests. The dark-skinned native servants, with their picturesque, flowing garments and tortoise-shell combs, gave to the whole an oriental air that up to that time we had read about but never seen. We were fanned by great swinging punkas during the dinner hour, the meal being an excellent one, after which we went out to see ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson
... reproaches the poor governor made an attempt to advance, but fell to the ground with such a crash that he fancied he had broken himself all to pieces. There he lay like a tortoise enclosed in its shell, or a side of bacon between two kneading-troughs, or a boat bottom up on the beach; nor did the gang of jokers feel any compassion for him when they saw him down; so far from that, extinguishing their torches they began to shout afresh ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... is different from that of the Philippines, and resembles that of the Marianas Islands. Their manner of pronouncing words is something like that of the Arabs. The woman who appears to be of highest station has many rings and necklaces of tortoise-shell, that are called here carey; and others of a material that is unknown to us. This material, which somewhat ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 41 of 55, 1691-1700 • Various
... not one of your ultra-scientific fighters. He did not favour the American crouch and the artistic feint. He had a style wholly his own. It seemed to have been modelled partly on a tortoise and partly on a windmill. His head he appeared to be trying to conceal between his shoulders, and he whirled his arms alternately ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse
... that plumped him into the middle of the pool. And on the neighboring banks the maiden-hair spread its flat disk of embroidered fronds on the wire-like stem that glistened polished and brown as the darkest tortoise-shell, and pale violets, cheated by the cold skies of their hues and perfume, sunned themselves like white-cheeked invalids. Over these rose the old forest-trees,—the maple, scarred with the wounds which had drained away its sweet life-blood,—the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... young ones!" commanded the crippled girl, in her sharp way. "Remember the hare would have won the race easily if he hadn't laid down to nap beside the course. Come! some tortoise will beat you in French and Latin yet, Helen, if you don't keep to work. And go to work at that English composition, Ruthie Remissness! You'd both be as lazy as Ludlum's dog if it ...
— Ruth Fielding at Briarwood Hall - or Solving the Campus Mystery • Alice B. Emerson
... where the Ladies' Kennel Club had made their vast grand-stand, were a number of pitiful vestiges of the Waterloo of women-kind. There was a shattered Elswick bicycle, about sixteen yards and a half of nun's veiling, and fifty-three tortoise-shell side-combs. I gazed on the debris with apathy mingled with contempt. My movements were languid, my plans of the vaguest. I knew that I wished to avoid my wife, but had no clear idea how the ...
— The War of the Wenuses • C. L. Graves and E. V. Lucas
... your Italian friend, of whom I say, as Charles II. said of the honest yeoman, "I can admire virtue, though I can't imitate it," I think it highly probable that your letter might still remain in a certain box of tortoise-shell and gold (formerly belonging to the great Richelieu, and now in my possession), in which I at this instant descry, "with many a glance of woe and boding dire," sundry epistles, in manifold handwritings, all classed under the one fearful ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... something towards the varnishing of single paper for the making of books, which will do, I think, very well. He did also carry me to a Knight's chamber in Graye's Inne, where there is a frame of his making, of counterfeite tortoise shell, which indeed is most excellently done. Then I took him with me to a picture shop to choose a print for him to vernish, but did not agree for one then. Thence to my wife to take her up and so carried her home, and ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... German professor with full blond beard; deep voiced; wears pince-nez with black tortoise shell rim ...
— Moral • Ludwig Thoma
... There lay the ball on the ground, and nobody but myself near it. The great chance was there to pick it up and perhaps, even with my slow speed, gain 20 to 30 yards for Yale. No such thought, however, entered my head. I wanted that ball and curled up around it and hugged it as a tortoise would close in its shell. My recollection is now that I sat there for about five minutes before anybody deigned to fall on me. At all events, ...
— Football Days - Memories of the Game and of the Men behind the Ball • William H. Edwards
... Great news indeed! But where was the child? Nanna stood stock-still, gazing stupidly around the empty room. "Esmay," she murmured, in a half-whisper, and passed out into the corridor. She went straight to the door leading to Quinton Edge's apartments. A tiny hair-pin of tortoise-shell lay on the floor. Nanna picked it up with a sob and regarded it fixedly. She knocked twice upon the door, but there was no response. She tried her strength against it, and shook her head. Nothing could be done here. ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... heart; and though your cause be naked truth itself, transformed to the heaviest lance, harder than steel, and sharper than steel can be made, and though you throw it with more than herculean force and precision, you shall be no more able to pierce him than to penetrate the hard shell of a tortoise with a rye straw. Such is man, and so must he be understood by those who would lead him, even to his ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... truth, think a great deal of that old tortoise-shell harlot; but I haven't a doubt that in order to impress Susy I was pretending agonies of solicitude which I didn't honestly feel. Sour Mash never gave me any real anxiety; she was always able to take care of herself, and she was ostentatiously vain of the fact; vain of it to a degree which ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... were bewildered by some of these people whose passports were thoroughly sound, but whose costumes aroused deep suspicion. What could they do, for instance, with a young Hindu, dressed as a boy-scout, wearing tortoise-shell spectacles, and a field kit of dangling bags, water-bottles, maps, cooking utensils, and other material suitable for life on a desert isle? Or what could they say to a lady in breeches and top-boots, with a revolver stuck through her belt, and a sou'wester on her head, who was going to nurse ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... forest you have been travelling under gradually breaks into beautiful clumps of trees, like those in a gentleman's park, and every here and there a placid clear piece of water spreads out, full of pond turtle, which I believe to be one and the same with the tortoise, and eels; the latter of which, by the by, are very sociable creatures, for in the clear moonlight nights, with the bright sparkling dew on the short moist grass, they frequently travel from one pond to another, wriggling along the grass like snakes. I have ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... my shipping parish cannot compare with a cathedral city; but antiquity is not the same as richness of experience. One remembers the historic and venerable tortoise. He is old enough, compared with us. But he has had nothing so varied and lively as the least of us can show. Most of his reputed three hundred years is sleep, no doubt, and the rest vegetables. In the experience of Wapping, Poplar, Rotherhithe, ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... his scraper making toadish hops and tortoise-like tips and amblings over the inequalities in the way. She looked after him, a new light shining from her eyes, a new passion stirring her bosom, where his words had fallen like ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... with superhuman ingenuity and diabolical cunning of which he had shown no previous symptom. Hypothesis was piled on hypothesis, as in the old Oriental legend, where the world rested on the elephant and the elephant on the tortoise. It might be worth while, however, to point out that it was at least quite likely that the death of Mr. Constant had not taken place before seven, and as the prisoner left Euston Station at 7.15 A.M. for Liverpool, he could certainly not have got there from Bow in the time; also that it ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... that decidedly uncomplimentary penwiper, where the ass's head declares "There are two of us;" while every child had some absurdity to show; and Miss Moy's shrieks of delight were already audible at a tortoise-shell ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... empty hills. Creepily, you may conjecture the fierce eyes along the rock edge, but nothing shows. In vain we circle about the plain, advance, retire, curtsey, and set to him; our enemy, like the tortoise, "will not join the dance." Nothing is more discouraging. It is like playing to an empty house. However, as young B—— said to me, we did our part anyway, and if they are so ignorant as not to know the counter-moves, ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... them across, they bring them up to the top from the four sides in the shape of a pyramid. They cover it with leaves and mud, and thus construct the roofs of their towers in a rude form of the "tortoise" style. ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius
... nor anything of the kind. Necklaces and ear-rings are worn, but I am glad to say the nose in Ceylon seems to be preserved from the indignity of rings. The men's dress is rather scanty, their weakness being a large tortoise-shell comb, which every one wears; it reaches from ear to ear, and the hair is combed straight back and confined by it. Women are denied this crowning ornament, and must content themselves with a pin in the hair, the head of which, however, is highly ornamented. The Buddhist priests ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... metallurgical poets—but a straightforward yellow, darkening at the roots; and she wore it low down on her neck in great coils that were held in place by a multitude of little golden hair-pins and divers corpulent tortoise-shell ones. Item, her nose was a tiny miracle of perfection; and this was noteworthy, for you will observe that Nature, who is an adept at eyes and hair and mouths, very rarely achieves a creditable nose. Item, ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... be entirely different, or else we should not be conscious of a difference. Mr. Wells must surely realize the first and simplest of the paradoxes that sit by the springs of truth. He must surely see that the fact of two things being different implies that they are similar. The hare and the tortoise may differ in the quality of swiftness, but they must agree in the quality of motion. The swiftest hare cannot be swifter than an isosceles triangle or the idea of pinkness. When we say the hare moves faster, we say that the tortoise moves. And when ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... streams, as well as the lakes of the interior, abound with fish; in the latter, the perch, trout, and carp are very common; in the former, the salmon and white cat-fish, the soft-shelled tortoise, the pearl oyster, the sea-perch (Lupus Maritimes), the ecrivisse, and hundred families of the "crevette species," offer to the Indian a great variety of delicate food for the winter. In the bays along the shore, the mackarel and bonita, the turtle, and, ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... by reptile shapes more strange than poet ever imagined,—dragons, gorgons and chimeras! Perhaps of all the extinct reptiles, the Plesiosaurus was the most extraordinary. An English geologist has described it, grotesquely enough, and yet most happily, as a snake threaded through a tortoise. And here on this very spot, must these monstrous dragons have disported and fed; here must they have raised their little reptile heads and long swan-like necks over the surface, to watch an antagonist or select a victim; here must they have warred and wedded, and pursued all ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... play, Sleep that wakes in laughing day, Health that mocks the doctor's rules, Knowledge never learned of schools: Of the wild bee's morning chase, Of the wild flower's time and place, Flight of fowl, and habitude Of the tenants of the wood; How the tortoise bears ...
— Twilight Stories • Various
... occasion when a member of the club spoke of newspapers as likely to supersede the pulpit, Mrs. Howe replied to him: "God forbid that should happen. God forbid we should do without the pulpit. It is the old fable of the hare and the tortoise. We need the hare for light running, but the slow, steady tortoise wins the goal at last." Religious subjects, however, were not so much discussed at the Radical Club as philosophy and politics,—and in these Mrs. Howe felt herself ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... much given to art magic. Then there are tales from India, told to Major Campbell, who wrote them out, by Hindoos; these stories are 'Wali Dad the Simple-hearted,' and 'The King who would be Stronger than Fate,' but was not so clever as his daughter. From Brazil, in South America, comes 'The Tortoise and the Mischievous Monkey,' with the adventures of other animals. Other tales are told in various parts of Europe, and in many languages; but all people, black, white, brown, red, and yellow, are like each other when they tell stories; for these are meant for children, who like the ...
— The Brown Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... said she with a little laugh. "I'd imagined you a horrid elderly person with a white cravat and tortoise-shell spectacles. It is such ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed
... in upon men and crushing them out of existence? Fantastic myths sprang from the vain attempts to solve these riddles. The Hindoos, for example, imagined the earth as supported by four elephants which stood upon the back of a gigantic tortoise, which, in its turn, floated on the surface of an elemental ocean. The early Western civilisations conceived the fable of the Titan Atlas, who, as a punishment for revolt against the Olympian gods, was condemned to hold up the expanse of ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... about eight o'clock, a stormy night; now it snowed a little, then it rained, then snowed again, seeming as if the weather was determined on some kind of storm, but had not yet made up its mind for snow, rain, or hail. Now the wind roared in the chimney, and started out of her sleep a great tortoise-shell cat, that lay on the rug which Aunt Kindly had made for her. Tabby opened her yellow eyes suddenly, and erected her smellers, but finding it was only the wind and not a mouse that made the noise, she stretched out a great paw and yawned, and then cuddled ...
— Two Christmas Celebrations • Theodore Parker
... thing, laid down the pen he had snatched up as I entered the room, and began gazing at me quizzically through enormous tortoise-shell-rimmed goggles, after the fashion of a precocious infant who tries to look like daddy. What might ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... descendant of so many Emperors of the West! The mistress was completely gained over, and easily carried her point with Louis, who had, indeed, wrongs of his own to resent. His feelings were not quick; but contempt, says the Eastern proverb, pierces even through the shell of the tortoise; and neither prudence nor decorum had ever restrained Frederic from expressing his measureless contempt for the sloth, the imbecility, and the baseness of Louis. France was thus induced to join the coalition; and the example of France determined the conduct of Sweden, then ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... affection of uncle and mother had been trampled down by Pen's wicked extravagance and idleness! I don't envy Pen's feelings (as the phrase is), as he thought of what he had done. He had slept, and the tortoise had won the race. He had marred at its outset what might have been a brilliant career. He had dipped ungenerously into a generous mother's purse; basely and recklessly spilt her little cruse. O! it was a coward hand that ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... this will or ought to end in a revolution, but a considerable diminution of his usurped and unconstitutional power, will, according to all appearances, be the result. The course of these people and that of the cabinets, negotiating a peace, may be compared to the hare and the tortoise in the fable; the former began with long leaps, and rapid strides, and after these preliminaries fell asleep at a little distance from the goal, thinking it easy for him to reach it at any moment; our tortoise, in spite of his tardy movements, may yet attain some of his objects, ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. IX • Various
... no want of lofty mirrors, and The tables, most of ebony inlaid With mother of pearl or ivory, stood at hand, Or were of tortoise-shell or rare woods made, Fretted with gold or silver:—by command, The greater part of these were ready spread With viands and sherbets in ice—and wine— Kept for all comers at all ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... place of the champagne of later days there were Madeira, Port, and Sherry. Round the table, illuminated by wax candles and astral lamps, young and old gathered; the women of a past generation in stiff brocades, powdered puffs, and tortoise-shell combs. From the first to last the Fifth Avenue wedding of those days reflected the patriarchal system ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... a large tortoise-shell paper knife. That, thrust under the door as a wedge, would be almost as good as a lock. At least she might count on it to protect her for those so necessary five minutes. But if she pushed it through to the other side Jim ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... Durby, taking off her tortoise-shell spectacles and laying down her work, "I thought of going next week, if ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne
... savage breast was the soughing of the wind through the trees. Then strings were stretched across a crevice for the wind to play upon and there was the AEolian harp. The second stage was entered when Hermes strung the tortoise shell and plucked it with his fingers and when Athena, raising the wind from her own lungs, forced it through a hollow reed. From these beginnings we have the organ and the orchestra, producing such sounds as ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... this species, we may mention that an assemblage of fossil bones were recently discovered, under a bed of lava, in the Isle of France, and sent to the Paris museum by M. Desjardins. They almost all belonged to a large living species of land-tortoise, called Testudu Indica, but amongst them were the head, sternum, and humerus of the dodo. M. Cuvier showed me these valuable remains in Paris, and assured me that they left no doubt in his mind that the huge bird was ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 531, Saturday, January 28, 1832. • Various
... by these on their shields, with greater noise than injury, for a short time retarded the advance of the Romans; but quickly disregarding these missiles also, some, closing their shields in form of a tortoise, forced their way through the enemy in front; others having, by a short circuit, gained the summit of the hill, dislodged the dismayed Macedonians from their guards and posts, and even slew the greater ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... hammock, I saw a large armadillo crawl out from amidst the brushwood under the trees, he having probably come down from his cave somewhere up in the mountains for change of air. This animal is something like a tortoise, only ever so much bigger; and as the negroes esteem them very good eating, saying they are better than turtle, I at once gave Jake a hail to let him know of the arrival of the strange visitor, when my darkey hastened speedily ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... pick up one or other of the two fat babies who struggled along after their mother, interrupting more or less effectually the business on which she was engaged. A pathetic-eyed yard or so of brown dachshund and a tortoise-shell kitten completed the party. Renata Aston was small and dark, gentle and deliberate of movement, and possessing an elf-like trick of shrinking her entrancing personality into comparative invisibility that bereft one of further vision. She moved from border to ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... a boy to the Mendez house with word that I was coming, sent out for flowers and made a lovely little fuss about me. I tried to make myself look as pretty as possible in a pale tulle, with little rosy wreaths upon it, and the high old tortoise-shell comb, that had been mother's, in my hair. The excitement gave me more color than I had had for weeks. I thought, "Even if I am not happy, at ...
— The Other Side of the Door • Lucia Chamberlain
... on fishing, and without turning his head said: 'I have heard that in Ch'u there is a sacred tortoise which has been dead now some three thousand years. And that the prince keeps this tortoise carefully enclosed in a chest on the altar of his ancestral temple. Now if this tortoise had its choice, which would it prefer: to be ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... kitchen-garden; parsley was there in plenty, and other vaguely familiar green things, curly-leaved and spear-pointed. A warm gust of wind brought mint to his nostrils. A second plot held a small crab-apple tree covered with pink and orange globes. A great tortoise-shell cat with two kittens ornamented the third, and in the middle of the fourth, beside a small wooden table, a woman sat with her back toward the intruder. On the table were one or two tin boxes ...
— Mrs. Dud's Sister • Josephine Daskam
... danger of being wrecked. Several of these fish they caught, using large hooks fastened to chains, and sometimes baited merely with a piece of colored cloth. From the maw of one they took out a living tortoise; from that of another the head of a shark, recently thrown from one of the ships; such is the indiscriminate voracity of these terrors of the ocean. Notwithstanding their superstitious fancies, the seamen were glad to use a part of these sharks for food, ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... them. A second was necessary to disperse them. Two pirogues, the crews of which had jumped into the sea, were captured. Of great length and well made, these boats were decorated in front with a man's head carved, the eyes of which were formed of mother of pearl, the ears of tortoise-shell, and ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... well try to keep a journalist from his writing-paper as country cats from the coverts. They are inveterate and determined poachers, and, alas, they meet with scant mercy from the keeper if he catches them. Many a fireside tabby or tortoise-shell dies a violent death in the course of every year, and is buried in a secret grave. This often gives rise to disturbance, for the cottager, to whom the deceased was as the apple of her eye, may make complaint of the keeper to his master. My friend SYKES, one of the best keepers I ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 28, 1893 • Various
... incorrigible boy returns in half an hour, it will be a wonder," muttered Mr. Belknap, as he came back into the sitting-room. "I wish I knew what to do with him. There is no respect or obedience in him. I never saw such a boy. He knows that I'm in a hurry; and yet he goes creeping along like a tortoise, and ten chances to one, if he does n't forget his errand altogether before he is halfway to Leslie's. What is to be done with ...
— Home Lights and Shadows • T. S. Arthur
... your tortoise-like movements with the Pawns becomes fatally evident. Black has been enabled to make a second Queen, and has an ...
— The Blue Book of Chess - Teaching the Rudiments of the Game, and Giving an Analysis - of All the Recognized Openings • Howard Staunton and "Modern Authorities"
... at his visitor. The latter took a pinch of snuff from a tortoise-shell box, and flicked away a few wandering grains which settled upon the front of ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... exclaimed Cleo, as they entered a corner all decorated with sea trophies, including star fish, the sword of a sword fish, tortoise shells, even fishing rods and queer tackle hung on the background of seine or fish net, that almost covered one side of the marine ...
— The Girl Scouts at Sea Crest - The Wig Wag Rescue • Lillian Garis
... Pons had exchanged a good clock for a better one, till at last he possessed a timepiece in Boule's first and best manner, for Boule had two manners, as Raphael had three. In the first he combined ebony and copper; in the second—contrary to his convictions—he sacrificed to tortoise-shell inlaid work. In spite of Pons' learned dissertations, Schmucke never could see the slightest difference between the magnificent clock in Boule's first manner and its six predecessors; but, for Pons' sake, Schmucke was even more careful among the "chimcracks" than Pons himself. ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... but a polished tortoise-shell, of which the living inhabitant has long since crumbled to dust; but it still gleams in the sun ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... hot. The train, deliberate and determined as a tortoise, moved through a shimmer of light. The drone of insect voices rose in a sleepy chorus and the men drowsed in the wagons. Even the buoyant life of the young girl seemed to feel the stupefying weight of the prairie's deep repose. She rode ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... this quiet backwater it is hard to believe that the world without is turbulent with storm and stress and the ebb and flow of uncertain tides. The little yellow cat rolling on its back among the daisies, the staid tortoise making a stately meal off the buttercups near me, these are great events in this haven of peace. And yet, looking back to the working days, I know how much goodness and loving kindness there is under the ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... trade we might very soon monopolise to ourselves, and a most lucrative one it would prove. The following are the articles to be found in more or less quantities over the whole of the Indian archipelago:—Antimony, tin, gold, diamonds, pearls, sapphires, ivory, gums, camphor, sago, pepper, tortoise-shell, mother-of-pearl, skins, wax, honey, cocoa-nut oil, coffee, rice, and coal, edible birds' nests and trepang; all the varieties of spices, as cinnamon, cloves, nutmegs, can be grown as soon as there is a market for them; the cotton tree nourishes; and, although ...
— Borneo and the Indian Archipelago - with drawings of costume and scenery • Frank S. Marryat
... place as they could, Madame Bonaparte was announced, and entered, leaning on the arm of Talleyrand. She wore a dress of white muslin with short sleeves, and a necklace of pearls. Her head was uncovered; and the beautiful braids of her hair, arranged with charming negligence, were held in place by a tortoise-shell comb. The flattering murmur which greeted her appearance was most grateful to her; and never, I believe, did she display more grace ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... hear the report of the rifle. I lay flat on my stomach, grovelled my face into the sandy soil and lay like a snake and as still as a tortoise. ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... sort of a prize, where I, and even Pot, have only succeeded in drawing blanks. I believe Frank does possess a special qualification, and that is a power of managing and organizing work. Drawing or designing, etc., is not his strong point, though he would often succeed in that, as the tortoise, where many a hare would fail; but give him an erecting job or anything of that sort, and he would so arrange that the work first wanted should be first ready. This does not sound very much to boast of, but it is a very useful knack to have. I certainly do not possess anything of ...
— Canada for Gentlemen • James Seton Cockburn
... her. The 18th, she slept at Pau, the native place of Henry IV. The mountaineers, descending from their heights, banner in hand, with their Basque costumes, came to meet her. The next day she visited the castle where was born the Bearnais, whose cradle, formed of a great tortoise-shell, she saw: it was shaded by draperies and white plumes. The following day she visited the environs. To descend into the valley of Ossun, she donned the felt hat and the red sash worn by the peasants of Bearn. As she was looking at the spring of Nays, a mountaineer ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... expanse of the desert was before them. Millicent lay curled up, like a golden tortoise-shell cat, in the sun; Michael, with his legs doubled up to his chin, rested his head on his knees. He would have been asleep in a few minutes if Millicent had ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... in the vicinity of the Tattoo Land? Was it not so, O Morquan! King of Japan, whose lofty jet they say at times assumed the semblance of a snow-white cross against the sky? Was it not so, O Don Miguel! thou Chilian whale, marked like an old tortoise with mystic hieroglyphics upon the back! In plain prose, here are four whales as well known to the students of Cetacean History as Marius or Sylla to the classic scholar. But this is not all. New Zealand Tom and Don Miguel, after at various times creating ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... at the time when men of fashion wore large wigs, was even at public places an act of gallantry. The combs, for this purpose, were of a very large size, of ivory or tortoise-shell, curiously chased and ornamented, and were carried in the pocket as constantly as the snuff-box. At Court, on the Mall, and in the boxes, gentlemen conversed and combed their perukes "(Sir John Hawkins' "Hist, of Music," vol. ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... [Greek: chelus], tortoise; Lat. testudo), the common lyre of the ancient Greeks, which had a convex back of tortoiseshell or of wood shaped like the shell. The word chelys was used in allusion to the oldest lyre of the Greeks which was said to have been invented by Hermes. According to ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... but quickly. Is Midas's cancer a better way? The rooster's wives and children must die. Are those of Midas immortal? His life is shorter than the life of Midas, but Midas's life is only a sixth as long as that of the Galapagos tortoise. ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... parts; and if he were demanded what is it that solidity and extension inhere in? he would not be in much better case than the Indian before mentioned, who, urging that the world was supported by a great elephant, was asked what the elephant rested on? to which his answer was, a great tortoise. But being again pressed to know what gave support to the broad-backed tortoise I replied, something, he knew not what. And thus here, as in all other cases when we use words without having clear and distinct ideas, we talk like children, who, being questioned what such a thing is, readily give ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... moving forward, often stopping before the count of ten, to be sure that they shall not be caught in motion. The progress thus made may seem slower than that of those who dash forward to the last moment, but as with the famous hare and tortoise, this slower but ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... and they kept a day-school, and taught Sophy to read, write, and cipher. They lived near London, in a lane opening on a great common, with a green rail before the house, and had a good many pupils, and kept a tortoise shell cat and a canary. Not much to enlighten her listener did ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... once learned the form and become perfectly familiar with vaudeville's peculiar requirements, the dramatist and the trained fiction writer will outstrip the untrained novice. Remember that the tortoise was determined, persistent, ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... himself in all Manner of expensive Pleasures. It was but seldom that an Inferior was suffer'd to speak to him; but not a Soul durst contradict him: No Peacock was more gay; no Turtle more amorous; and no Tortoise more indolent and inactive. He made false Glory and false Pleasures his ...
— Zadig - Or, The Book of Fate • Voltaire
... Rain is figured by a dot or semicircle filled with water and placed on the head. The heaven with three disks of the sun is understood to mean three days' journey, and a landing after a voyage is represented by a tortoise. Short sentences, too, can be pictured in this manner. A prescription ordering abstinence from food for two, and rest for four, days is written by drawing a man with two bars on the stomach and four across the legs. We are told even of war-songs and love-songs ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... have nothing in that line to offer you. This evening I can show you some neighbors who resemble the tribes of the Tortoise of the Great Serpent—these are the only natives I can dispose of. At present you will only see my husband, two ladies who are almost widows, and a young lady" ... here Mad. de Lorgeville was seized with a new fit of laughter ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... man, and I a woman: we look with differing eyes, each sex to the other, and perceive by contrast. Else—why, how else could you forgive my presumption? He sees me as an eagle sees the creeping tortoise. I see him as the moon the sun, never weary of gazing. I borrow his radiance to observe him by. But I weary you with my garrulous tongue.... Have you no plan at all in your journey? 'Tis not the dangers, but to me the endless ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... right," said the old lady decisively, dropping her tortoise-shell lorgnon into her lap, and suppressing a yawn. "Only, it is you who are charming! I must go to the Grosvenor as soon as it opens to see if your clever husband, who seems to be able to paint everything and everybody, has done you justice.... But you ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... days are gone, and Nassau is given up to a sleepy trade in sponges and tortoise-shell, and peace is no name for the drowsy tenor of the days under the palm trees and the scarlet poincianas. A little group of Government buildings surrounding a miniature statue of Queen Victoria, flanked by some old Spanish cannon ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... disease which attacks so many of its kind when brought under the influence of a northern climate. Its master appeared to be profoundly affected by its loss, and never quite recovered the level of spirits that he had recently attained. In company with the tortoise, which Colonel John presented to him on his last visit, he potters about his lawn and kitchen garden, with none of his erstwhile sprightliness; and his nephews and nieces are fairly well justified in alluding to him as "Old ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... excellent turtle soup is made of a small native tortoise, called a terrapin, and the article terrapin ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... in every pursuit, and particularly in this. Yours is, too, the time of life to acquire this inestimable habit. Men fail much oftener from want of perseverance than from want of talent and of good disposition: as the race was not to the hare but to the tortoise, so the meed of success in study is to him who is not in haste, but to him who proceeds with a steady and even step. It is not to a want of taste or of desire or of disposition to learn that we have to ascribe the rareness ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... distinct leaning towards an old English sheep dog. He had enormous fawn-coloured silky paws, and was so soft and floppy he seemed as if he had hardly a bone in his body. We used to pick him up and drop him gently in the grass to watch him go out flat like a tortoise. He belonged to Lean, and grew up a rather irresponsible creature with long legs and a lovable disposition. He adored coming down to the ambulance trains or sitting importantly on a car, jeering and barking at his low French friends in the road, on the "I'm the ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... that the day was pretty cold. "You know I ain't built on the same lines as you; and in a case of this kind, the one that c'n go faster just has to accommodate himself to the pace of the slow one. You're the hare, and I'm like the poor old tortoise; but please remember that the turtle came in winner after all in the race. Not always to the swift, you know, does the race go. I may beat you out in the long run, with the endurance test. If I've got anything ...
— The Boy Scouts in the Maine Woods - The New Test for the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... than themselves.[155] Hence some animals have acquired wings instead of legs, as the smaller birds, for purposes of escape. Others, great length of fin or of membrane, as the flying-fish and the bat. Others have acquired hard or armed shells, as the tortoise and ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... another man more difficult to get on with. Headstrong, irascible, rude, he had a sharp tongue which he delighted in using; but he was known to be inflexibly honest, and was supposed to have great executive ability. He was also a friend of McClellan, and if anybody could rouse that tortoise-like general, Stanton might be supposed to be the man. He had been a valiant Democrat, and Democratic support was needed by the government. Lincoln astonished him with his appointment as Secretary of War in January, 1862. Stanton ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... correspondent has complained that he has searched the shops in vain for a tortoise. So far the various Government Departments have maintained ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 26, 1917 • Various
... come back to the grape arbor, and Thea picked out a sunny place on the bench, where a tortoise-shell cat was stretched at full length. She sat down, bending over the cat and teasing his whiskers. "Because he had been awake all night, thinking about her, wasn't it? Maybe that was why ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... A sham tortoise-shell hairpin dropped from her untidy hair on to the floor with a little clatter. Her veil parted at the top from her hat. Little Alfred, terrified by an angry frown from the cornet player, was hastily returning fragments of partially consumed bun to his plate. The air of the place was hot and ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
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