"Ant-hill" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the crown of her stepfather's hat among the rest beneath, and was not aware that Lucetta watched the same object with yet intenser interest. He moved about amid the throng, at this point lively as an ant-hill; elsewhere more reposeful, and broken up by ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... midgets, playing, listening, tense and still, Are sailing on a midget ball of dust We call our planet; will have sailed through space Ten thousand leagues before this music ends. What does it mean? Oh, God, what can it mean?— This weird hushed ant-hill with a thousand eyes; These midget periwigs; all those little blurs, Tier over tier, of faces, masks of flesh, Corruptible, hiding each its hopes and dreams, Its tragi-comic dreams. And all this throng Will be forgotten, mixed ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... four times his actual income to keep from swearing to a falsehood. I looked for a loophole, but there did not appear to be any. Inquiry No. 1 covered my case as generously and as amply as an umbrella could cover an ant-hill: ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... no more of the crowds going their different ways like ants on an ant-hill, but I could not let a perambulator pass without peering under the lace of the hood at the little cherub face whose angel eyes looked ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... quiet outside an ant-hill until the stick has been thrust into it. Mr. Gladstone's Bill for helping to the wiser government of Ireland has brought forth our busy citizens on the top-rubble in traversing counterswarms, and whatever ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... honey-comb There had been seen, as if at home, Some longish, brownish, buzzing creatures, Much like the bees in wings and features. But what of that? for marks the same, The hornets, too, could truly claim. Between assertion, and denial, The wasp, in doubt, proclaim'd new trial; And, hearing what an ant-hill swore, Could see no clearer than before. "What use, I pray, of this expense?" At last exclaim'd a bee of sense. "We've labour'd months in this affair, And now are only where we were. Meanwhile the ...
— A Hundred Fables of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... turkey, who grew dull at home, Resolved in the wild woods to roam; Wearied she was of barn-door food, Therefore she chuckled round her brood, And said, "My little ones, now follow; We'll go and dine in yonder hollow." They first upon an ant-hill fell— Myriads of negro-ants, pell-mell— "O gobble, gobble—here's a treat! Emmets are most delicious meat; Spare not, spare not. How blest were we, Could we here live from poulterers free! Accursed man on turkeys preys, Christmas to us no holy-days; When with the oyster-sauce ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... was a red brick structure with long windows. From the joints of its walls the mortar was falling. It lay all around the building in a girdle of gray, like an encircling ant-hill, upon the green lawn. Splendid sugar-maples grew all about the square, in the center of which the court-house stood, and close around ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... directly, and turning the cob's head, began to ride slowly in the direction of Kopfontein, whose granite pile lay like an ant-hill far away, low ...
— Diamond Dyke - The Lone Farm on the Veldt - Story of South African Adventure • George Manville Fenn
... in Somadeva, "The Story of the Three Brahmin Brothers" (Tawney, 1 : 293), where two older brothers, in order to get rid of the youngest, who has been slandered by their wives ("Potiphar's wife" situation), order him to dig up an ant-hill in which lives a venomous snake. Because of his virtue, however, he finds a pitcher filled with gold! There is nothing else in this story which even in the remotest way suggests ours. While Benfey (1 : 214-215, ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... of earth. He was learned and profound, and he took himself and the Church and the State seriously. He felt himself a part of an indestructible institution, whereas man and all his works are no more peculiar, no more wonderful than an ant-hill—and last only a day longer. He never realized that he was a part of the great whole that made up mountain, lake, globe, wooded glen and tireless river. He differentiated. He considered himself a man, an educated man, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... hermit, horridly austere, Whom clinging vines are choking, tough and sore; Half-buried in an ant-hill that has grown About him, standing post-like and alone; Sun-staring with dim eyes that know no rest, The dead skin of a serpent on his breast: So long he stood unmoved, insensate there That birds build nests ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... he has been within 100 and 200 miles from them, but something always interposed to prevent his going to see them. According to those who have seen them, they rise on either side of a mound or level, which contains no stones. Some have called it an ant-hill. One of these fountains is said to be so large that a man, standing on one side, cannot be seen from the other. These fountains must be discovered, and their position taken. The Doctor does not suppose them to be south of the feeders of Lake Bangweolo. In his letter to the 'Herald' ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... ground and will suffer less fatigue. Forel has pointed out that an ant which, surrounded by companions, will readily face death, shows fear and runs away from a much weaker ant when she is alone and some way from the ant-hill. Among men, in like manner, the feeling of the crowd greatly intensifies the reactions of each individual. "This is most evident at a public meeting. In many cases the speaker has hardly opened his mouth before ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... an ant-hill with savages. The shore was lined with canoes; the forests and the fields were alive with busy camps. The trade was brisk; and in its attendant speeches, feasts, and dances, there was ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... No, Gudge and his friends in the House of Lords and the Carlton Club must make up their minds on this matter, and that very quickly. If they are content to have England turned into a beehive and an ant-hill, decorated here and there with a few faded butterflies playing at an old game called domesticity in the intervals of the divorce court, then let them have their empire of insects; they will find plenty of ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... midday halt, when a furious barking from the setter Rough'un took the attention of all, and Mr Rogers and the boys cantered up to a thin cluster of trees, where, on what seemed to be at first a broken stump, but which on nearer inspection proved to be a tall ragged ant-hill, a vicious-looking snake was curled, swinging its head about threateningly, and darting out its forked tongue at the dog, which kept its ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... faint track, so that I had to diverge and look close to find it. These delays fretted me. 'See, a stone loosed from its bed—he must have passed by here.... That twig is newly snapped; no doubt he caught at it.... Ha, the moss there has been crushed; a foot has gone by. And the ants on that ant-hill, with their eggs in their mouths—a man's tread has frightened them.' So, by some instinctive sense, as if the spirit of my savage ancestors revived within me, I managed to recover the spoor again ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... gallant son, the Earl of March, came up with his power; but, he was determined to accept the challenge. He did so, in an evil hour. He was hotly pressed on all sides, two thousand of his men lay dead on Wakefield Green, and he himself was taken prisoner. They set him down in mock state on an ant-hill, and twisted grass about his head, and pretended to pay court to him on their knees, saying, 'O King, without a kingdom, and Prince without a people, we hope your gracious Majesty is very well and happy!' They did worse than this; they cut his head off, and handed it on a pole to the Queen, ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... time several millions of years—to our own geologic age—and we find the earth swarming with the human species like an ant-hill with ants, and with a vast number of forms not found in the Mesozoic era; and the men are doing to a large part of the earth what the ants do to a square rod of its surface. Where did they come from? We cannot, in our day, believe that a ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... order the earth will be transformed into a swarming ant-hill of thickly crowded inhabitants, that complete control over the elemental forces will lead to a destruction of all primitive natural fertility, there is therefore no reason whatever to fear. On the contrary, the ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... in the neighbourhood of the grove; but Natty continued so weak that I did not like to leave him for any length of time by himself. I was one day attracted by a mound a little way off, which I suspected to be an ant-hill. On approaching it, I found that such was the case; but it was ornamented in such a way as I had never seen one of those curious nests adorned before. It was covered with enormous mushrooms. They were perfectly white, their tops nearly eighteen inches in ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... other of his tricks, he put about four hundred foxes, old and young, into Rose's park. It may be imagined what disorder this company made there, and the surprise of Rose and his servants at an inexhaustible ant-hill of foxes come to ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... the venerable furniture which had come from Holland; all the community, great and small, black and white, man, woman and child, was in commotion, forming lines from the houses to the water-side, like lines of ants from an ant-hill; everybody laden with some article of household furniture, while busy housewives plied backward and forward along the lines, helping everything forward by the nimbleness of ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... a strange sight to see an entire population in the streets, busy as ants in an uncovered ant-hill scurrying to save their eggs and larvae. Every horse, and everything on wheels in the city, from hucksters' wagons to automobiles, was being loaded with what effects could be scraped together from houses which the advancing flames were threatening. ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... honour to commend them. But light be the turf upon his breast who taught "Reverence thyself!" We looked down on the unpolished wretches, their impertinent wives, and clouterly brats, as the lordly bull does on the little dirty ant-hill, whose puny inhabitants he crushes in the carelessness of his ramble, or tosses in the air in the ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... Once I saw an ant-hill With no ants about; So I said, "Dear little ants, Won't you please come out?" Then as if the little ants Had heard my call— One! two! three! four! five came out! And ...
— Finger plays for nursery and kindergarten • Emilie Poulsson
... up better than his masters, crawled out of the ant-hill into which he had crept; and as soon as the rain descended, he contrived to pull the heads of the Major and Alexander, who still remained senseless, from out of the ant-hills, and to turn their blackened ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... battles of the frogs and the mice, that the old tales went of." So certainly, if a man meditate much upon the universal frame of nature, the earth with men upon it (the divineness of souls except) will not seem much other than an ant-hill, whereas some ants carry corn, and some carry their young, and some go empty, and all to and fro a little heap of dust. It taketh away or mitigateth fear of death or adverse fortune, which is one of the greatest ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... we have to do is to follow the foothills. We shall probably find Juan and his burro sound asleep on an ant-hill somewhere. He's positively the laziest human being I ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in New Mexico • Frank Gee Patchin
... day, as Gwythyr the son of Greidawl was walking over a mountain, he heard a wailing and a grievous cry. And when he heard it, {103} he sprung forward, and went towards it. And when he came there, he drew his sword, and smote off an ant-hill close to the earth, whereby it escaped being burned in the fire. And the ants said to him, "Receive from us the blessing of Heaven, and that which no man can give we will give thee." Then they fetched the nine bushels of flax-seed which Yspaddaden Penkawr had required of Kilhwch, ...
— The Mabinogion Vol. 2 (of 3) • Owen M. Edwards
... to think that he, who was so young and simple, should try to travel through the world, when they, who were so much wiser, had been unable to get on. However, they all set out on their journey together, and came at last to an ant-hill. The two elder brothers would have pulled it down, in order to see how the poor ants in their fright would run about and carry off their eggs. But the little dwarf said, 'Let the poor things enjoy themselves, I will not suffer you to ...
— Grimms' Fairy Tales • The Brothers Grimm
... eight hundred yards. Men are like insects. See! I think we should always contemplate them from this height, to judge correctly of their proportions. The Place de la Comedie is transformed into an immense ant-hill. Observe the crowd which is gathered on the quays; and the mountains also get smaller and smaller. We are over the Cathedral. The Main is only a line, cutting the city in two, and the bridge seems a thread thrown between the ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... the wretched person to pieces with knives, the most odious mutilations being resorted to. Occasionally the unfortunate creature was tied to a stake while pepper was rubbed into his eyes until the fearful irritation so produced caused blindness. Or, again, the victim was tied hand and foot upon an ant-hill, and left to the agonies of being consumed slowly by the minute aggressors. The most satisfactory death, perhaps, was that when the condemned man was allowed to be his own executioner. He was made much of for an hour or so before the final scene, and was well fed and primed with palm wine. Under ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... Inn was stirring like an ant-hill, with firefly lanterns flitting up and down, and a cheery glow about the open door. The horses of the company, scrubbed unreasonably clean, snorted and stamped in little bridled clumps about the courtyard, and the stable-boys, not scrubbed at all, ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... Jefferson Square resembled an ant-hill after a big boy has trod on it. Such rushing around and talking in excited groups; such goings out and comings in; such wagons colliding at front doors leaving bulky parcels; such errand boys breathless with carrying huge bundles! The like was ...
— Jerry's Reward • Evelyn Snead Barnett
... Indian black bear is a "handy man," like the British Tar—good all round. Its great soft paw is a very serviceable tool and weapon, armed with claws which will take the face off a man or grub up a root with equal ease. When a black bear has found an ant-hill it takes but a few minutes to tear up the hard, cemented clay and lay the deep galleries bare; then, putting its gutta-percha muzzle to the mouth of each, it draws such a blast of air through them ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... observed by the Arunta on the same occasion. When the bones have been taken down from the tree, an arm-bone is put carefully apart from the rest. Then the skull is smashed, and the fragments together with all the rest of the bones except the arm-bone, are buried in a hollow ant-hill near the tree. Afterwards the arm-bone is wrapt up in paper-bark and wound round with fur-string, so as to make a torpedo-shaped parcel, which is kept by a tribal mother of the deceased in her rude hovel of branches, till, after the lapse of some days or weeks, the time comes ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... another high tide that evening, and how would the village stand this second storm of its broken defences? So the order was given to assemble in the street after dinner, and work at the repair of the breaches. The street looked like an ant-hill, as the workers, divided into gangs by houses, with the housemaster at the head of his gang, swarmed on the roadway, clearing it from the debris with pickaxe, spade, and a multitude of hands; re-stacking ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine
... us, for this reason—men with a narrow horizon and no wings must accept all apparent disproportions between cause and effect. A railway collision has other results besides wrecking an ant-hill, but the wise ants do not pursue these in the Insurance Reports. So it only concerns us that the destruction of the schooner led in time to a lovers' difference between Ruby and young Zeb—two young people of no eminence outside of these pages. And, ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... giant may at any moment crush. We dream of the swish of a comet's tail wiping out organic life on the planet, and we see, as a matter of fact, great natural convulsions, such as the earthquake of Lisbon or the eruption of Mont Pelee, treating human communities just as an elephant might treat an ant-hill. It is this sense of the immeasurable disproportion in things that a pessimist poet has expressed in the ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... whack, step, leap.... Each leap seemed to last ages. With each, the cave opened out and the number of Selenites visible increased. At first they seemed all running about like ants in a disturbed ant-hill, one or two waving hatchets and coming to meet me, more running away, some bolting sideways into the avenue of carcasses, then presently others came in sight carrying spears, and then others. I saw a most extraordinary thing, all hands and feet, bolting for cover. The cavern ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... China. What has happened? All this fine, delicate paper machinery has been crashed into by a great war affecting more than half, and nearly two-thirds, of the whole population of the world. Confusion was inevitable. It was just as if one gave a violent kick to an ant-hill. The deadlock was not due to lack of credit in this country; it was due entirely to the fact that there was a failure of remittances from abroad. Take the whole of these bills of exchange. There were balances representing between 350,000,000 pounds and ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... agreed upon, and there awaited Godfrey. He did the same, only chose another gully, equally sure that he was right. And there we sat, each impatiently blaming the other. At last, to pass the time, I fired some shots at an ant-hill; these had the effect of bringing Godfrey over the rise, and we had a good laugh at each other when we discovered that for nearly half an hour we had sat not two hundred yards apart—and each remained firmly convinced that he was right! Godfrey had shot a kangaroo and ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... bushranger hand and foot, and then place him on an ant hill. The black ant of Australia has a bite that is very painful, and when hundreds of thousands of ants are biting a man all at once, the feeling is something fearful. The ant-hill torture was generally successful. After submitting to it for a time, the bushranger generally gave up the secret of the whereabouts of his gold. I do not mean to say that all the police officials indulged in this harsh treatment, but it is ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox
... yon anchorite, towards the orb Of the meridian sun, immovable As a tree's stem, his body half-concealed By a huge ant-hill. Bound about his breast No sacred cord is twined[115], but in its stead A hideous serpent's skin. In place of necklace, The tendrils of a withered creeper chafe His wasted neck. His matted hair depends In ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... almost every square foot of it. Seven hundred miles of rice- and millet-fields and vegetable gardens unbroken by wall or hedge; nothing to cast a shadow on the dead level except an occasional walled town or temple grove! And the horrible land was all alive with swarming, toiling, ant-hill humanity. It was ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... you!" said Mother Snail. "Our son shall not go into an ant-hill; if you know nothing better than that, we shall give the commission to the white gnats. They fly far and wide, in rain and sunshine; they know the whole forest ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... ever examine an ant-hill, dear reader? What a wonderful little cosmos it is—what an epitome of a great city—of the human race! See how the little fellows run bustling along upon their several businesses—see how some get out of each other's way, how others jostle, and others walk ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... aged people, breathless with the unusual exertion of climbing. You could see the church stair, as it was called, from nearly every part of the town, and the figures of the numerous climbers, diminished by distance, looked like a busy ant-hill, long before the bell began to ring for afternoon service. All who could manage it had put on a bit of black in token of mourning; it might be very little; an old ribbon, a rusty piece of crape; but some sign of mourning was shown by every one down to the little child in ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell
... Bernadotti! You are a way off, but your footprints point the right way. With many a yawn and sigh subjective, I greatly fear me, many a malediction objective, you are "learning the language of another world." To us, huddled together in our little ant-hill, one is "une bete," and one is "mon ange"; but from that fixed star we are all so ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... four scrambling Units in the Great Ant-Hill; four tiny Tadpoles in the great Schools that wiggled up and down the main Thoroughfares. It seemed that their only Chance to make an Impression on the huge and callous City was to die and then hold up a line of Street Cars while the Hearse ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... well merited the name of New Amsterdam, given it by its founders. The ground it covers was at one time divided into hill and dale; but with eyes wide open to business, and close sealed against taste, the conscript fathers of our infant Rome shaved smooth every ant-hill that rose in their path, and to their inheritors have bequeathed a love of their trim lines of beauty, for they are proceeding on the levelling system with a worthy pains-taking that will in due time render the whole island as ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... accidentally escaped, met and recognized their former companions, fell to mutual caresses with their antennae, took them up by their mandibles, and led them to their own nests; they came presently in a crowd to seek the fugitives under and about the artificial ant-hill, and even ventured to reach the bell-glass, where they effected a complete desertion by carrying away successively all the ants they found there. In a few days, the ruche was depopulated. These ants had remained ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... the town a tiny bird, A shining speck at sleepy dawn, Forgets the ant-hill so absurd, This self-important Buffalo. Descending twenty miles away He bathes his wings at break of ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... when he was already under the shadow of his seizure. I had directed his removal, and grudged him no professional attention that it was in my power to bestow. But afterwards, locked into my room, my whole nervous system broke up like a trodden ant-hill, leaving me conscious of nothing but an aimless scurrying terror and the black swarm of thoughts, so that I verily fancied my reason ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... whole story of our problem was insignificant. In the presence of that army the red Notting Hills and the green Bayswaters were alike tiny and straggling groups. In its presence the whole struggle round Pump Street was like an ant-hill under the hoof of an ox. Every man who felt or looked at that infinity of men knew that it was the triumph of Buck's brutal arithmetic. Whether Wayne was right or wrong, wise or foolish, was quite a fair ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... almost epic dignity. New York, since it took to doing business in towers, has become interesting to look at from the sea; nor is it possible to walk through the overshadowed streets without feeling a pleasing wonder. A city, when enough people swarm in it, is as fascinating as an ant-hill, and its buildings, whatever other charms they may have, are at least as curious and delightful as sea-shells or birds' nests. The purpose of improvements in modern structures may be economic, just as the purpose of castles was military; but both may incidentally please the contemplative mind ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... your aerial squabble: but to the poor men who had to bear the wrongs, Inquisitions, rack-rents, Waterloos, unspeakable horrors, it was hard earnest, you know! Oh the wretchedness—the deep, deep pain—of that bungling ant-hill, happily wiped out, my God! My sweetheart Clodagh ... she was not an ideal being! There was a man called Judas who betrayed the gentle Founder of the Christian Faith, and there was some Roman king ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... he was never satisfied with his art of verse till he had brought it to the confines of perfection. He did not philosophize over the animals; he sympathized with them. A philosopher would not have lost a fashionable dinner in his admiration of a common ant-hill. La Fontaine did so once, because the well-known little community was engaged in what he took to be a funeral. He could not in decency leave them till it was over. Verse-making out of the question, this was to be a genuine poet, though, with commonplace mortals, ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... is going; the epoch of the ant-hill, of life in multiplicity, is beginning. The century of individualism, if abstract equality triumphs, runs a great risk of seeing no more true individuals. By continual leveling and division of labor, society will become ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... soon as he was taken, was disarmed on the field, and all the leaders of the queen's army, including, as the most authentic accounts relate, the queen herself, gathered around him in wild exultation. They carried him to a mound formed by an ant-hill, which they said, in mockery, should be his throne. They placed him upon it with taunts and derision. They made a crown for him of knotted grass, and put it upon his head, and then made mock obeisances before him, saying, "Hail! king ...
— Richard III - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... their native gloom. There was no sound of living thing around, save the ghastly rattle of the dead bark-tassels which swung from every tree, and far away, the faint clicking of the diggers at their work, like the rustle of a gigantic ant-hill. Was there one among them all who cared for him? who would not forget him in a week with—"Well, he was pleasant company, poor fellow," and go on digging without a sigh? What, if it were his fate to die, as he had seen many a stronger man, there in that lonely wilderness, and sleep for ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... we look at our mechanism of production the more perplexing it seems. Suppose an observer were to look down from the cold distance of the moon upon the seething ant-hill of human labor presented on the surface of our globe; and suppose that such an observer knew nothing of our system of individual property, of money payments and wages and contracts, but viewed our labor as merely that of a mass ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... men and women fulfill at small cost, voluntarily and gratis, and with great effect, the least attractive and more repulsive social needs, thus performing in human society the role which, inside the ant-hill, we see assigned ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... not a pleasantry, but the truth. He had been watching an ant-hill, and was so absorbed in observing a dead ant carried off by the living colonists for burial that ...
— Fables in Rhyme for Little Folks - From the French of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... true,' replied my friend. 'Never have the workmen on buildings had such a fete. Since Paris has become a vast ant-hill in which the work of preparation for 1900 goes on without ceasing, the workmen make magnificent working-days and have no fear of being "laid off." They have before them three magnificent years. But you are ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... the corn grow, also, on that ant-hill behind Manenko's house? He seems to take the same care of her ...
— The Seven Little Sisters Who Live on the Round Ball - That Floats in the Air • Jane Andrews
... another, as if reconnoitering the enemy; but I still kept my place on deck; and at length, tired out, the ragged little crew took to their oars, and rowed into a shallow bay at the lower extremity of the glebe, with a cottage, in size and appearance much resembling an ant-hill, peeping out at its inner extremity among some stunted bushes. I had marked the place before, and had been struck with the peculiarity of the choice that could have fixed on it as a site for a dwelling: it is at once the most inconvenient ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... useful breed for emu-hunting, and many even of the pure ones are caught young, tamed by the natives, and bred up to hunt emus and kangaroos. They have as many pups as the tame dog, littering either in some hollow log, deserted ant-hill, hole in the ground, or thick brush. They will hunt, kill, and devour a tame dog also, if a troop of them can catch him alone. A settler in the interior informed me, that, while out hunting one morning, he observed his dog running direct towards him at full speed, with two large native dogs ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 10, No. 271, Saturday, September 1, 1827. • Various
... Pragjyotisha! And then the destroying Danavas of fierce forms suddenly drowned me with a mighty shower of rocks. And, O thou foremost of monarchs, torrents of rocks falling upon me covered me up, and I began to grow like an ant-hill (with its summits and peaks)! And covered along with my horses and charioteer and flagstaffs, with crags on all sides, I disappeared from sight altogether. Then those foremost of heroes of the Vrishni race who were of my army were struck with ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... thanksgiving day after dinner, would not have weighed a straw with me against that smile. Yet he asked me to go on with it, which I did lest he should go away, looking up now and then, and seeing him regarding my work with the half-curious interest with which one would watch an ant-hill, till at last I threw down my pencil, and asked him if he would not oblige me with a ...
— The Magician's Show Box and Other Stories • Lydia Maria Child
... chaps at work," he said. "It reminds me for all the world of an ant-hill. Never did see so many chaps before. What be they a-doing? Digging a big drain or making ...
— With Lee in Virginia - A Story of the American Civil War • G. A. Henty
... conclusions. The rest accepted the fact as it stood, and made no effort to account for the change in their plans. It was enough for them that two thousand sheep were to be roasted, to the end that every man might eat his fill; and they took an eager hand, next morning, in scooping out the ant-hill and kindling the fires inside. Then, seated on the ground, they spun their yarns while they waited until the white-hot earth on top of the hill gave notice that the oven was ready for ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... men were hobbling towards the hospital; the incessant rush of motors kept up the feverish circulation of a demolished ant-hill. ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... Indian Empire. That of the great African Empire in this year of grace is the direct and simple one which I have indicated. In the evening we had a grand supper of fried eggs, jam, chupatties, and cocoa. This meal immediately followed tea. We made our fire in the best place for one, an ant-hill, about two feet high. The plan is to hack two holes, one in the top, another on the windward side, and to connect the two passages. There is then a fine draught, and you can cook both on the top and at the side. Inside, the substance of the hill itself gets red-hot and keeps ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... skeleton, notwithstanding every remedy which he had tried. At length he tried a sympathetic remedy: he took an egg, and having boiled it hard in his own urine, he then with a bodkin perforated the shell in different parts, and then buried it in an ant-hill. As the ants wasted the egg he found his strength increase, and he soon was completely cured. A daughter of a French officer was so tormented by a paronychia (?) for four days together, that the pain kept her from sleeping; by the order ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... now, not now; for if I were to mix with men now I should fly asunder like a rotten wineskin full of fermenting wine; a swarm of bees is buzzing in my head, and an ant-hill is growing in my bosom. Go now ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... evolution of the globe itself! What myriads of ages between the first cooling of its mass and the beginnings of life![3112] Of what consequence is the turmoil of our ant-hill compared to the geological tragedy in which we have born no part, the strife between fire and water, the thickening of the earth's crust, formation of the universal sea, the construction and separation of continents! Previous to our historical record what a long history ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Beside every ant-hill I behold a monster crouching: This is the ant-lion Death, He thrusteth forth his tongue ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... clocks of the city struck six in a solemn jangle of tones. The boats were moving on the river—the great unwieldy barges as big as a ship. The streets were now astir. Paris seemed huge and as populous as an ant-hill. I felt the hopelessness of seeking unaided one who purposely hid himself ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... last letter we have been at San Agustin de las Cuevas, which, when I last saw it, was a deserted village, but which during three days in the year presents the appearance of a vast bee-hive or ant-hill. San Agustin! At the name how many hearts throb with emotion! How many hands are mechanically thrust into empty pockets! How many visions of long-vanished golden ounces flit before aching eyes! What faint crowing of wounded cocks! What tinkling of guitars and blowing of horns come upon the ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... decided that, she turned no more until she had reached the protection of the fountain in the middle of the Circus. There she stopped and glanced back. He was gone. In all the hundreds of human beings who mingled and churned like a swarm of ants upon an ant-hill, he was nowhere to be seen. With a genuine sigh of relief, she crossed over to the Piccadilly side and walked beside a Hammersmith 'bus, as if slowed gradually down to the regulated place where the conditions of traffic permit vehicles ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... characteristics of English people, the distance and coldness of their own Channel which they put between them and whoever has not been presented to them in a proper manner. Humanity seems to be an ant-hill on which they tread; they know none of their species except the few they admit into their circle; they ignore even the language of the rest; tongues may move and eyes may see in their presence but neither sound nor look has reached them; to them, the people are as if they were ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... Words present to us little pictures of things, lucid and normal, like the pictures that are hung on the walls of schoolrooms to give children an illustration of what is meant by a carpenter's bench, a bird, an ant-hill; things chosen as typical of everything else of the same sort. But names present to us—of persons and of towns which they accustom us to regard as individual, as unique, like persons—a confused picture, which draws from the ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... talking-machines growing out of the ground. Thousands upon thousands of those familiar cornucopias of bright lacquer with gilt edges pointed their open mouths up at him. And each one was the center of a swarming ant-hill of busy gunners carrying ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko
... got of London was its aimlessness. It reminded her irresistibly of an ant-hill she had seen disturbed once. Myriads of tiny creatures had scurried passionately, exhaustingly, after each other to and fro, no whence and no whither; the people thronging out of shops and offices at dusk frightened her: there seemed so many of them, and, looking ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... easier. You've got to remember that these creatures can't be judged by earthly standards; they probably don't feel pain, and they haven't got what we'd call individuality. Any intelligence they have is the property of the whole community—like an ant-heap. That's it! Ants are willing to die for their ant-hill; so are ...
— Valley of Dreams • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... the Mavericks playing the regiment to camp; for the men were route-marching with their baggage. The rippling column swung into the level—carts behind it divided left and right, ran about like an ant-hill, ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... everything was bustle, everything was brightness, wherever one chanced to look.... But, strange to say, I had no inclination to forsake my pure dark airy height. I had no inclination to get nearer to this human ant-hill. It seemed as though a hot, heavy, reddish vapour rose from it, half-fragrance, half-stench; so many lives were flung struggling in one heap together there. I was hesitating.... But suddenly, sharp as the clang of iron bars, the voice of a harlot of the streets floated up to me; ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... were still talking, a carriage rattled up to the door of the hotel, and then another. There began, in a word, that hushed confusion—that running to and fro as of ants upon a disturbed ant-hill—which follows hard upon the footsteps of the grim messenger, who himself is content to come so quietly and unobtrusively. Roden arrived to make inquiries, and Mrs. Vansittart, and a messenger from more than one embassy. Then the Wades came, ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... we are lucky, and God is on our side. Why, after Dundee, when we were retiring, we had to cross a great open plain, never even an ant-hill, and you had put twelve great cannons—I counted them—and Maxims as well, to shoot us as we went; but not one fired a shot. Was it not God's hand that stopped ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... which he should follow as a matter of course. He is not born to tread a certain track of conduct or behaviour because others have trodden it before him, following it without thought like the sheep on the mountain, or like the ants as they travel from one ant-hill to another. ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... Mr. Meredith, of a calamity which destroys an ant-hill and half its inhabitants. Does the Power that runs the universe think us of more ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... no longer any question that it was a world which, if not absolutely teeming with inhabitants, like a gigantic ant-hill, at any rate bore on every side the marks of their presence and of their incredible ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... open swampy ground about half a mile wide; on the opposite side there was more scrub, close to which there were three large ant-hills; Jackey took us up to the centre one, five yards from which poor Kennedy fell; against this ant-hill Jackey placed him when he went after the saddlebags. Jackey told us to look about for broken spears; some pieces were found; he then took us to a place about sixty yards from the ant-hill, where he put Mr. Kennedy, who then told him not to carry him far. About a quarter of ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... are at 800 metres! Men resemble insects! See, I think it is from this height that we should always look at them, to judge correctly of their moral proportions! The Place de la Comedie is transformed to an immense ant-hill. Look at the crowd piled up on the quays. The Zeil diminishes. We are above the church of Dom. The Mein is now only a white line dividing the city, and this bridge, the Mein-Brucke, looks like a white thread thrown between the two banks ...
— A Voyage in a Balloon (1852) • Jules Verne
... and who was induced to try a method not unlike the sympathetic cures. "He took an egg and boiled it hard in his own warm urine; he then with a bodkin perforated the shell in many places, and buried it in an ant-hill, where it was kept to be devoured by the emmets; and as they wasted the egg, he found his distemper to abate and his strength to increase, insomuch that his ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... with it is not universal. On the contrary, in some parts the leaf of the lily is supposed to have curative virtues in cases of cuts and wounds, and Gerarde, the old herbalist, even says that 'the flowers of lily-of-the-valley, being close stopped up in a glass, put into an ant-hill, and taken away again a month after, ye shall find a liquor in the glass, which being outwardly applied, helpeth the gout.' One hears, perhaps, of no modern experiments having been made with this remedy. But if not to cure gout, the flower has, it appears, been used to pay ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... it is possible to seize him suddenly by the tail, as I have often done, without being stung. Apes employ this method, pull out his sting, and crunch the now inoffensive Arachnid. They also like ants, but fear being bitten by them; when they wish to enjoy them, they place an open hand on an ant-hill and remain motionless until it is covered by insects. They can then absorb them at ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... words, Bhima well-skilled in speech said,—'That king who is without exertion, or who being weak and without resources entereth into hostility with one that is strong, perisheth like an ant-hill. It may be generally seen, however, that even a king that is weak may vanquish an enemy that is strong and obtain the fruition of all his wishes, by wakefulness and by the application of policy. In Krishna is policy, in myself strength, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... from the headland into V Beach Bay, and, in doing so, passed the limit of the British zone and trespassed upon French territory. The slope, from the beach upward, was as alive with French and Senegalese as a cloven ant-hill is alive with ants. The stores of the whole French army seemed accumulated in the neighbourhood. There was an atmosphere of French excitability, very different from the stillness of the British Zone. Stepping from the British Zone ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... whose thoughts could walk among the stars, should bend those thoughts to a mean eagerness for gold, a pride in dress, or the building of palaces, which when achieved are not so much as a single grain of dust upon an ant-hill. In a universe, whose arithmetic employs worlds for the ciphers of its reckoning, bigness as associated with man sounds ridiculous; and the biggest fortune or the biggest grief are alike infinitesimal. But when the desire ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... resided in his house, having called the son of Collas Becquet a wizard, it happened that there was one day found in the said Thomas's bed a great number of maggots, which the said Sieur de Lisle saw, and compared to an ant-hill, so lively and thick were they, and they could hardly clear the said child of them, although they put it in different places; afterwards the said child gathered lice in such a manner that although its ...
— Witchcraft and Devil Lore in the Channel Islands • John Linwood Pitts
... a book about ants and their habits, tells a story of a little black ant who was building an arch at the foundation of a new ant-hill. It was necessary to have some means of supporting this arch, which was made of wet mud, until the key-stone should be put in and all made secure. The ant might have put up a couple of props, but this is not their habit in building. Their laws say nothing about props. But the arch must ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... heart. The moon began to be now eclipsed by twilight; a golden band surrounded the horizon, announcing the approach of day. Athos threw his cloak over the shoulders of Raoul, and led him back to the city, where burdens and porters were already in motion, like a vast ant-hill. At the extremity of the plateau, which Athos and Bragelonne were quitting, they saw a dark shadow moving uneasily backward and forward, as if in indecision or ashamed to be seen. It was Grimaud, who, in his anxiety, had tracked his master, and was ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... see a community of ants working together in perfect harmony, it is impossible not to ask ourselves how far they are mere exquisite automatons; how far they are conscious beings. When we watch an ant-hill tenanted by thousands of industrious inhabitants, excavating chambers, forming tunnels, making roads, guarding their home, gathering food, feeding the young, tending their domestic animals—each one fulfilling its ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... advanced and retreated beyond its ordinary bounds, and a mountain was torn from Libanus, [84] and cast into the waves, where it protected, as a mole, the new harbor of Botrys [85] in Phoenicia. The stroke that agitates an ant-hill may crush the insect-myriads in the dust; yet truth must extort confession that man has industriously labored for his own destruction. The institution of great cities, which include a nation within the limits of a wall, almost realizes the wish of Caligula, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... accidents of an unusual nature seemed always to be happening, wandered off with a wedge of pie and a cup of coffee and sat down on an ant-hill. ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... said Christopher, in a voice which had grown spiritless. Then after an instant in which he stared blankly down at Tucker's ant-hill, he turned hurriedly away and followed the little straggling path to the ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... two sides black curling clouds of smoke rose and spread from the fires. Through the streets soldiers in various uniforms walked or ran confusedly in different directions like ants from a ruined ant-hill. Several of them ran into Ferapontov's yard before Alpatych's eyes. Alpatych went out to the gate. A retreating regiment, thronging and ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... every repetition blow through your hollow fist. Or you may catch the soul in your turban, thus. Go out on the night of the full moon and the two succeeding nights; sit down on an ant-hill facing the moon, burn incense, ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer |
