"Beetle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... She closed the second one. Then, having drawn the curtains, she fumbled for the matches and lit the candles upon her dressing bureau. It was her intention to search for the intruding beetle, and then retire. ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... juice of poppy bruised, With black hellebore infused; Here is mandrake's bleeding root, Mixed with moonshade's deadly fruit; Viper's bag with venom fill'd, Taken ere the beast was kill'd; Adder's skin and raven's feather, With shell of beetle blent together; Dragonwort and barbatus, Hemlock black and poisonous; Horn of hart, and storax red, Lapwing's blood, at midnight shed. In the heated pan they burn, And to pungent vapours turn. By this strong suffumigation, By this potent invocation, Spirits! ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... pleased the King and Queen very much, and they made up their minds to do something for Anty and Sandy. The other guests had come, and it was time for the King and Queen. At last their coach drew up in front of the door. It was a beautiful, shiny green beetle shell drawn by two gnats. Two little liveried green midges tumbled off the coach-box, opened the coach-door, and the King and Queen stepped out, while the guests bowed low to the ground as they passed up the entrance to the house where Anty and Sandy were waiting. Anty Hill bowed ...
— The Cheerful Cricket and Others • Jeannette Marks
... her over, for she disappeared from the Points, and no clue could be got of her," returns the man, pausing for a moment, then resuming his story. "A week ago yesterday she turned up again, and I got wind that she was in a place we call 'Black-beetle Hole'—" ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... book may help to correct a prevailing misconception as to the morals and mind of the typical English peasantry. It is certain that the conventional peasant of literature, the broad-mouthed rustic in a smock-frock, dull-eyed, mulish, beetle-headed, doddering, too vacant to be vicious, too doltish to do amiss, does not exist as a type in England. What does exist in every corner of the country is a peasantry speaking a patois that is often of varying inflections, but is always full of racy poetry, ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... him. He is not popular with the ladies; he hates them all, he says. Mother, Loo-loo, come," and breaking off from her very sisterly remarks concerning Hugh, 'Lina sprang up in terror as a large beetle, attracted by the light, ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... whose early training had been free and unrestrained, being brought to order by a Japanese mother-in-law was almost too much for my gravity. It would be like a big black beetle ordering the life of a butterfly. Not without a struggle the conservative grandfather acknowledged that his system had failed. For the first time since I had known him Kishimoto San, with genuine humility, appealed for help. "Madam, my granddaughter is ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... is most in apprehension; And the poor beetle, that we tread upon, In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great As when a giant dies. Measure for Measure, ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... the works of man arose Up from the plains; the caves reverberated The blows of restless hammers that revealed, Deep in the bowels of the fruitful hills, The iron and the faithless gold, with rays Of evil charm. And all the cliffs repeated The beetle's fall, and the unceasing leap Of waters on the paddles of the wheel Volubly busy; and with heavy strokes Upon the borders of the inviolate woods The ax was heard descending on the trees, Upon the odorous bark of ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... the kind," cried I, too angry to be civil. "Of course I know I am one of the people. What do you mean? Am I to maintain that black beetles are cherubim, because I am a black beetle? Truth is truth. The Crown is God's, not the people's. When He chose to make the present King—King James of course, not that wretched Elector— the son of his father, He distinctly told the people whom He wished them to have for their ...
— Out in the Forty-Five - Duncan Keith's Vow • Emily Sarah Holt
... the slope of the world in a battle line that covered a wide sector of the southwestern horizon, steamed four German battle cruisers. They were four sea eagles dashing at a little water beetle of a tug—the hammer of Thor swinging forward to crush an insect. The submarine had signaled by wireless the whole German South Atlantic ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... were hauled through the thundering waves and their boat was left to sink. Then, before they could adjust their unaccustomed feet to the different balance of the Puncher's heaving deck, the gongs clanged and the destroyer leaped ahead like a dripping sea-soused water beetle, into her utmost speed ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... beetle brows the Turk amazed bent, He wrinkled up his front, and wildly stared Upon the cloud and chariot as it went, For speed to Cynthia's car right well compared: The other seeing his astonishment How he bewondered was, ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... moon, the evening star, the clatter of the fern-owl, the beetle's hum. He was born on the earth in the tent, and he has lived like a species of human wild animal ever since. Of his own free will he will have nothing to do with rites or litanies: he may perhaps be married in a place of worship—to make ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... this scarab, this sacred beetle, which has been shaped by some workman down in Thebae on the Nile. We may be sure that no people believes more intensely in a future life. What compliment they pay this physical frame of men when they hold that embalmment ...
— An Easter Disciple • Arthur Benton Sanford
... insects and worms have fallen in and burst or changed their appearance?" "The water is disallowed." A black beetle, though not burst nor changed, disallows it, since it is like a pipe. Rabbi Simon and R. Eliezer, the son of Jacob, said, "the wheat-worm and the grain-worm are allowed, because there is ...
— Hebrew Literature
... interior, scrupulously furnished with all the implements of domestic comfort and philosophic enquiry: the Holy Bible open majestically before him, and beside it that other revelation—the terrestrial globe. His hand might be pointing to a microscope set for examining the internal constitution of a beetle: but for the moment his eye should be seen wandering through the open window, to admire the blessings of thrift and liberty manifest in the people so worthily busy in the market-place, wrong as many a monkish notion might be that still ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... thing which was offered for sale was a beetle. "What is the special advantage of this beetle?" ...
— Tales of Giants from Brazil • Elsie Spicer Eells
... that the term "bug" was regularly used in the early days of telegraphy to refer to a variety of semi-automatic telegraphy keyers that would send a string of dots if you held them down. In fact, the Vibroplex keyers (which were among the most common of this type) even had a graphic of a beetle on them! While the ability to send repeated dots automatically was very useful for professional morse code operators, these were also significantly trickier to use than the older manual keyers, and it could take some practice to ensure ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... same length as the snout. The eggs hatch into the familiar worms found in ripe chestnuts, hickory-nuts and hazel nuts. The large hole in the shell of the nut is made by the full grown worm as it escapes to enter the ground, where it completes its transformation into a beetle. An interesting thing in connection with these weevils is that each species confine its attacks to one particular kind of nut. Even those species that attack acorns show a decided tendency to distinguish between oak species and confine themselves as groups very largely ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Eleventh Annual Meeting - Washington, D. C. October 7 AND 8, 1920 • Various
... extent, and sometimes in large flocks, through the interior of the United States, they are chiefly and most abundantly found on the coast. This species has a very small hind toe. It is a very familiar bird to sportsmen and gunners, to whom it is generally known by the names of "Bull-head," or "Beetle-head Plover." They are very numerous in the fall, during which season the underparts are entirely white. The eggs are either laid upon the bare ground or upon a slight lining of grasses or dead leaves. They are three or four in number, ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... Cleopatra, and others; and jewellery of all descriptions, from the golden diadem and the royal signet down to the pottery rings and glass beads worn by the poor. As might be expected in an Egyptian collection, the scarabaeus, or sacred beetle, frequently meets the eye. Here are scarabaei in gold, cornelion, chalcedony, heliotrope, torquoise, lapis-lazuli, porphyry, terra cotta, and other materials; many of them having royal ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 455 - Volume 18, New Series, September 18, 1852 • Various
... common sight. His glasses were obviously of a very high power, yet he could scarcely see anything till he clapped his face close down and hunted for it. When he pencilled for me the new Latin name he had given to a small, slender, almost dazzling green, beetle inhabiting the Spanish moss—his own scientific discovery— he wrote it so minutely that I had to use a ...
— Strong Hearts • George W. Cable
... before we could obey, O'er our startled heads he cast, Spider-like, a webby grey Net that held us prisoned fast; How we screamed, he only grinned, It was such a lonely place; And he said we should be pinned Safely in his beetle-case. ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... animals are often violent and obstinate, and the employment of the natural weapons of the species in this way has led to perfecting of these, e.g. the tusks of the boar, the antlers of the stag, and the enormous, antler-like jaws of the stag-beetle. Here again it is impossible to doubt that variations in these organs presented themselves, and that these were considerable enough to be decisive in combat, and so to lead to the ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... a romantic child," observed Ailsa, digging vigorously in the track of a vanishing May beetle. But when she disinterred him her heart failed her and she let him ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... I am in a chrysalis state, which is notoriously a dull one; and I have the further aggravation, which I suppose never occurs to the nymph bona fide, of a miserable uncertainty whether my folded-up wings are those of a purple butterfly or of a poor drudge of a beetle. Besides, it is conceivable that the chrysalis may get weary of his case, and mine is not a silken one. I have been here long enough. My aunt Landholm is very kind; but I think she would like an increase of her household accommodations, and also that ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... gone over to the pagan Mohammedan faith. But, of course, it wouldn't have come to torture then, because I should only have had to say at that instant to the mountain, 'Move and crush the tormentor,' and it would have moved and at the very instant have crushed him like a black-beetle, and I should have walked away as though nothing had happened, praising and glorifying God. But, suppose at that very moment I had tried all that, and cried to that mountain, 'Crush these tormentors,' and it hadn't crushed ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... he drank a dew From a convenient grass, And then hopped sidewise to the wall To let a beetle pass. ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... soldier-crab, and a whole army of them slowly advanced out of the sea and marched across the land, devouring all the insects they encountered in their progress. Now and then two of them would stop and have a fight over a beetle or a spider, when perhaps a third would step up and carry off the cause of dispute. We found the spiders' webs stretching in every direction between the bushes. The spiders themselves were great, ugly, black fellows, very disagreeable to look at, and ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... some man who was especially useful at "raisin's." He was bold and strong and quick. He helped guide and superintend the work. He was the first one up on the bent, catching a pin or a brace and putting it in place. He walked the lofty and perilous plate with the great beetle in hand, put the pins in the holes, and, swinging the heavy instrument through the air, drove the pins home. He was as much at home up ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... him sitting quite still for a few moments on a branch of a tree in his most characteristic nuthatch attitude, on or under the branch, perched horizontally or vertically, with head or tail uppermost, but always with the body placed beetle-wise against the bark, head raised, and the straight, sharp bill pointed like an arm lifted to denote attention,—at such times he looks less like a living than a sculptured bird, a bird cut out of beautifully variegated ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... British New Guinea employ a charm to aid the hunter in spearing dugong or turtle. A small beetle, which haunts coco-nut trees, is placed in the hole of the spear-haft into which the spear-head fits. This is supposed to make the spear-head stick fast in the dugong or turtle, just as the beetle sticks fast to a man's skin when it bites him. When a Cambodian hunter has set his nets ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... strikes. The strikes were swingled again, and from the refuse called swingle-tree hurds, coarse bagging could be spun and woven. After being thoroughly cleaned the rolls or strikes were sometimes beetled, that is, pounded in a wooden trough with a great pestle-shaped beetle over and over ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... crawled into the hut, looking like a gigantic white-headed beetle as he did so, a creature, I remembered, to which I had once compared him in the past. I followed, carrying the historic stool, and when he had seated himself on his kaross on the further side of the fire, took up my position opposite to him. ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard
... Lantee and Ragnar Thorvald enter the world of beautiful women. Immensely powerful as they are lovely, these witches control men by thought domination. Shann's victory over the beetle-like Throg and his civilized alliance with the women is told here with that sweep of imagination and brilliance of detail which render Andre Norton a primary talent among writers of science fiction."—Virginia ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... Another enormous mass of gneiss is called the Kuruminiagalla, or the Beetle-rock, from its resemblance in shape to the back of that insect, and hence is said to have been derived the name of ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... acid be boiled with a strong solution of potassium cyanide, a deep red liquid is produced, owing to the formation of potassium iso-purpurate, which crystallises in small reddish-brown plates with a beetle-green lustre. This, by reaction with ammonium chloride, gives ammonium iso-purpurate (NH{4}C{8}H{4}N{5}O{6}), or artificial murexide, which dies silk and wool a beautiful red colour. On adding barium ...
— Nitro-Explosives: A Practical Treatise • P. Gerald Sanford
... fortress of Givet. Then, as now, he had lain staring, his whole soul sickened by the cruel jar of the jest. Hand of fate, was it? Nay, a jocose and blundering finger, rather, that had flipped him, as a man might flip a beetle, into the night. Then, as now, his soul had welled up in sullen indignation. He blamed no one; for in all the stupid chapter of accidents there was no one to blame. But when the Protestant chaplain in Givet came to his bed he turned ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... bonnie, in her green and white paint, lying like a great water-beetle ready to scamper over the smooth surface. Alec sprang on board, nearly upsetting the tiny craft. Then he held it by a bush on the bank while Curly handed in Annie, who sat down in the stern. Curly then got in himself, and Alec and him seized each ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... condemnation of this outrage on free speech. If the conditions had been reversed, if a Catholic had shot down the defamer of Catholic women, the country would have rung with denunciations of Catholic bigotry. But the Baptist beetle-browed can for months plan the death of a man who has exposed their hypocrisy and the assassination is taken as one of the few "occurrences" which diversify life in those monotonous ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... that he has been troubled at times at the thought of all he would lose. But I doubt that it was ever more keenly felt than in my case; I doubt, too, that it is common or strong in English boys, considering the conditions in which they exist. For restraint is irksome to all beings, from a black-beetle or an earthworm to an eagle, or, to go higher still in the scale, to an orang-u-tan or a man; it is felt most keenly by the young, in our species at all events, and the British boy suffers the greatest restraint during the period when ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... erected for the habitation of man, rat, mouse, beetle, cockroach, fly, mosquito, flea, bacillus and microbe. House of Correction, a place of reward for political and personal service, and for the detention of offenders and appropriations. House of God, a building with a steeple and a mortgage on it. ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... unique in the production of a species of beetle remarkable for variety of colors and ornamentation of body. We had seen numerous specimens of this insect in southern India and at Singapore, some of which were an inch long, but these of Elephanta were not remarkable for size. They were hardly larger than ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... as a crawling beetle tangled in the grass," answered Nostromo, and his voice seemed deadened by the thick veil of obscurity that felt warm and hopeless all about them. There were long periods when he made no sound, invisible and inaudible as if he ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... fish. Feeble thinkers, indeed, always suppose that distinction of kind involves meanness of style; but the meanness is in the treatment, not in the distinction. There is a noble way of carving a man, and a mean one; and there is a noble way of carving a beetle, and a mean one; and a great sculptor carves his scarabaeus grandly, as he carves his king, while a mean sculptor makes vermin of both. And it is a sorrowful truth, yet a sublime one, that this greatness of treatment cannot be taught by talking about it. No, nor even by enforced ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... many places.... Will not the sensations be multiplied by—unbearable! I would swear at the thought, if I had anything to swear by! To be transmuted into the sensoria of forty different nasty carrion crows, besides two or three foxes, and a large black beetle! I'll run away, just like anybody else.... if anybody existed. Come, ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... box to me." Pugh put the box to his ear. He tapped. "It sounds to me like the echoing tick, tick of some great beetle; like the sort of noise which a deathwatch ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... buyers. The great buildings on the right of us, the Inns and the School Board place—as it was then—Somerset House, the big hotels, the great bridges, Westminster's outlines ahead, had an effect of grey largeness that reduced him to the proportions of a busy black beetle in a crack ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... pull her broken quills, help her dress herself, and bestow a few extra caresses. He guided her to his favourite place for a sun bath; and followed the farmer's plow in the corn field until he found a big sweet beetle. He snapped off its head, peeled the stiff wing shields, and daintily offered it to her. He was so delighted when she took it from his beak, and remained in the sumac to eat it, that he established himself on an adjoining thorn-bush, where the snowy blossoms of a wild morning-glory made a ...
— The Song of the Cardinal • Gene Stratton-Porter
... feelest it—well, it shall never again fall to thy lot to see, hear, and smell all these. Here shalt thou linger out thy remaining days; thy companions the toad, the eft, the spider, the beetle; and when thou diest of hunger and thirst, which will eventually be thy lot, this cell shall be thy coffin. ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... so far, that it was only here and there a sunbeam could get straight through. All the gentle creatures of a forest were there, but no creatures that killed, not even a weasel to kill the rabbits, or a beetle to eat the snails out of their striped shells. As to the butterflies, words would but wrong them if they tried to tell how gorgeous they were. The princess's delight was so great that she neither laughed nor ran, but walked about with a solemn ...
— A Double Story • George MacDonald
... were in readiness to receive the Victoria bravely with stones and arrows, but the balloon quickly passed their islands, fluttering over them, from one to the other with butterfly motion, like a gigantic beetle. ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... that rude boor unto whom it beseemeth thee to give the appellation of father, and shalt attain to the-all-to-be-desired greatness of my love, even as the resplendent sun condescends to shine down upon the earth-crawling beetle." ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... another flew straight at her unperceived and tangled himself in her hair. That was the limit of endurance. With one swift movement Eleanor turned off the gas, with another she pulled down her hair and released the prisoned beetle. Then she twisted up the soft coil again in the dark and went out into ...
— Betty Wales Freshman • Edith K. Dunton
... answered our distinguished guest, and he placed the bowl with all its contents on his plate. Bite by bite the salad disappeared, while he discoursed on the proper method of killing the Yellow Pine Beetle. ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... end in a general stampede to underground retreats from the region poisoned by sunshine. Next year you will find the grass growing fresh and green where the stone lay—the ground-bird builds her nest where the beetle had his hole—the dandelion and the buttercup are growing there, and the broad fans of insect-angels open and shut over their golden disks as the rhythmic waves of blissful consciousness pulsate ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... I don't spend the morning in looking in the glass and talking evil of my neighbours; I don't scream when I see a beetle, or go into convulsions because there's a mouse in the room. I've got two legs, very good legs, Aunt Horsingham—shall I show you them?—and I like to use them, and to be out of doors amongst the trees and the ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... very desirable, but full of traps to the unwary. Quite unexpectedly, one day, a particularly fine butterfly found herself poised on the branch of a tree with a soaring ambition in her heart, but a blind sense of danger, also. It was a wise butterfly, by way of change. While it hesitated, a beetle crawled along and offered its services as guide. The pretty, bright thing was sane enough to accept. Do ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... is getting dusk and mosquitoes are coming out by hundreds, they have not annoyed me before, but I think I must use my net to-night. I lie on my bed after dinner smoking with a lighted candle by my side. A hornet flies in and settles on my hand, then a large beetle comes with a buzz and a thud against me, making me start. Sundry moths, small flies, and beetles, are playing innocently round the flame. In half an hour I shall be able to make a fair entomological collection but as I neither (Ha! I've killed the hornet) desire them in my hat ...
— Three Months of My Life • J. F. Foster
... built a second glider which he named the 'Beetle,' because, as he said, it looked like one. In this the square-cut wings formed almost a continuous plane, rigidly fixed to the central body, which consisted of a shaped girder. These wings were built up of five transverse bamboo spars, with two shaped ribs running ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... her; yet he asked himself whether in the best woman's heart there was not a foundation of cruelty, of unconscious ferocity. He felt the tears start to his eyes; he scarcely could restrain them; he abruptly bowed his head, and began to examine a beautiful horned beetle, which was just crossing the gravel-path at a quick pace, apparently having some very important affairs to regulate. When M. Langis raised his head his eyes were dry, his face ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... comes to the task of making a home with this habit already formed. Her student life may have cast no shadow of the future. When she was reading AEschylus or Berkeley, or writing reports on the Italian despots, or counting the segments of a beetle's antennae, she may not have foreseen the hours when the manner of life and the manner of death of human beings would depend upon her. She was merely sanely absorbed in the tasks of her present. But in later life she comes ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... stomach of animals; but the bladderwort and pitcher-plants can only absorb in the form of soup the products of their victims' decay. Flies and gnats drowned in these pitchers quickly yield their poor little bodies; but owing to the beetle's hard shell covering, many a rare specimen may be rescued intact ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... which we sometimes do our most humorous work when we are saddest, Miss Hosmer produced now in her sorrow her fun-loving "Puck." It represents a child about four years old seated on a toadstool which breaks beneath him. The left hand confines a lizard, while the right holds a beetle. The legs are crossed, and the great toe of the right foot turns up. The whole is full of merriment. The Crown Princess of Germany, on seeing it, exclaimed, "Oh, Miss Hosmer, you have such a talent for toes!" Very true, for this statue, with the several copies made from it, ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... such a trail aright upon such a night. Down yonder, a crooked black line in a white field, was the stream which many miles further on flowed into the American. Rising abrupt beyond it were the broken, precipitous cliffs of granite such as beetle above the mountain tributaries of the American. The rocks, like the river, were black, and looked far colder than the white world ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... old, childish loyalty, and the other half's ambition. The creature's myself. There are also bars and circles and splashes of various colors, dark and bright. Sometimes it dreams of wings—wings of an archangel, no less, Warburton! The next moment there seems to be an impotency to produce even beetle wings!... What a weathercock and variorum I am, thou art, ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... animals we examine such things as an Amoeba, a Vorticella, and a fresh-water polyp. We dissect a starfish, an earthworm, a snail, a squid, and a fresh-water mussel. We examine a lobster and a crayfish, and a black beetle. We go on to a common skate, a codfish, a frog, a tortoise, a pigeon, and a rabbit, and that takes us about all the time we have to give. The purpose of this course is not to make skilled dissectors, but to give every student a clear ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... preacher of the Remonstrant persuasion, who, according to the fashion of the learned of that day, had translated his name out of Hendrik Sleet into Henricus Slatius, was one of his most unscrupulous instruments. Slatius, a big, swarthy, shag-eared, beetle-browed Hollander, possessed learning of no ordinary degree, a tempestuous kind of eloquence, and a habit of dealing with men; especially those of the humbler classes. He was passionate, greedy, overbearing, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Martial law means passes and explanations, and walking generally in the light of day. Martial law means that the Commander-in-chief, if he be an artist in well doing, may use his boot freely on politicians bland or beetle-browed. No police force ever gave the sense of security inspired ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... wings, and this will gradually diminish the development of the wings themselves, till after a sufficient number of generations these will either disappear altogether, or be seen in a rudimentary condition only. For each beetle which has made but little use of its wings will be liable to leave offspring with a slightly diminished wing, some other organ which has been used instead of the wing becoming proportionately developed. ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... been so tragic,—and his outstretched hand still held the mallet at the end of the blow. The carpenter's mouth was open in amazement. Neddie Benson, the first to move or break the silence, had spread his hands as if he were about to clutch at a butterfly or a beetle; dropping them to his side, he gasped huskily, "She said there'd be a light man and a dark ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... by Scott, they hid the prophets of the Covenant "by fifties in a cave." One Williamhope is said to have been out at Drumclog, or, perhaps, Bothwell Brig. This laird, of enormous strength, was called the Beetle of Yarrow, and was a friend of Murray of Philiphaugh. His son, in the Fifteen, was out on the Hanoverian side, which was not in favour with the author of The Death-Wake. He married a daughter of Veitch of The Glen, ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart
... rest satisfied until I had gone to Egypt and had personally broken into the tomb of some sleeping Pharaoh or some crumbly old Rameses, and with my own hands had ravished from it a mummified specimen of that fabled beetle which the ancients worshiped and buried with them in their tombs. But not long ago I made the discovery that, in coloring, habits, customs and general walk and conversation, the scarab of the Egyptians was none other than the common tumblebug of the Southern ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... before a shout from the crowd proclaimed that the Golden Eagle was once more in sight. At first a mere speck against the blue, she rapidly assumed shape and was soon circling above the heads of the onlookers, her engine droning steadily, as if she had been some gigantic beetle. ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... on the sight, And all the air a solemn stillness holds, Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight, And drowsy tinklings ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... diplomacy, to land him is nothing short of statesmanship. For sometimes he will jump furiously at a fly, for very devilishness, without ever meaning to take it, and then, wearying suddenly of his gymnastics, he will snatch sulkily at a grasshopper, beetle, or worm. Trout feed upon an extraordinary variety of crawling things, as all fishermen know who practice the useful habit of opening the first two or three fish they catch, to see what food is that day the favorite. But here, as elsewhere in this world, ...
— Fishing with a Worm • Bliss Perry
... Britt was mistaken. He was by nature deeply religious. His soul aspired, at times, to high things. He was sympathetic to actual pain, and had always been morbidly in awe of death. The sight of any poor, lost, and suffering man threw him into instant, profound, and melancholy pity. A dead beetle in the road, a fly caught in a spider's web, a young robin water-soaked and bedraggled, appalled him, even as a boy, and he pondered them with sad and questioning eyes long after his young companions had forgotten ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... interpreter of the languages of the brute creation rises up amongst us. As another instance of her breadth of sympathy with beasts, let us turn to "A Week Spent in a Glass Pond" (which also came out in Aunt Judy's Magazine for 1876), and quote her summary of the Great Water-beetle's views on life: ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... Geraldine merrily. 'You look much too high over her head, but you see I don't; and such a little sparkling diamond beetle is a ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a boy, who, ignorant of natural objects, as was always the case in villages forty years ago, thought it a rare foreign specimen. It was a thatched cottage, but if it had been slated the moor-hen might have taken the roof for a sheet of water by moonlight, as the Great Water-Beetle has been known to do, and come down the chimney in like manner. A brood comes constantly to be fed ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... saved you from those street ruffians. You don't deserve to live. Well, the crows will soon have you! You Egyptians believe in a judgment of the dead; what defence can you make before the court of Osiris[99] for being privy to a foul murder? You'll come back to earth as a fly, or a toad, or a dung-beetle, to pay the penalty for ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... and the storm of her grief broke out afresh: while the greater storm overhead, having accomplished its evil work, rolled rapidly northward, with the colossal unconcern of a giant who crushes a beetle in his path; and the first stupendous downrush of water subsided into a ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... air. I hated to be ha'sh with him, but he needed some education himself, an' it took a beetle an' wedge to open his mind for it. He lifted his chin so high that the fat swelled out on the back of his neck an' unbuttoned his collar. Then he turned an' said: 'My daughter is too good for this town, an' I don't intend that she shall stay here. She ...
— Keeping up with Lizzie • Irving Bacheller
... pretty pair, Thorndyke," I exclaimed. "A human life seems to be no more to them than the life of a fly or a beetle." ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... could have been reading the definitive material on the life-cycle of the beetle insofar as any stir of his ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... Beetle was blind, and the Bat was blinder, And they went to take tea with the Scissors-grinder. The Scissors-grinder had gone away Across the ocean to spend the day; But he'd tied his bell to the grapevine swing. The Bat and the Beetle heard ...
— The Jingle Book • Carolyn Wells
... halted. Presently a fat eunuch glittering in his gold- wrought garments like some bronzed beetle in the sunlight, came waddling back towards me. He was odious and I knew that we ...
— The Ancient Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... of the winter was, at my wife's incessant request, a beetle for her flax, and some carding-combs. The beetle was easily made, but the combs cost much trouble. I filed large nails till they were round and pointed, I fixed them, slightly inclined, at equal distances, in a sheet of tin, and raised the edge like a box; I then poured melted lead ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... love looking to you for help and to be unable to give it? But perhaps it won't come to that. Perhaps my father may hold his own for years. Come what may, I am bound to think that all things are ordered for the best; though when the good is a furlong off, and we with our beetle eyes can only see three inches, it takes some confidence in general principles ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... depend on truth. There is no great merit in telling how many plays have ghosts in them, and how this Ghost is better than that. You must shew how terrour is impressed on the human heart. In the description of night in Macbeth[272], the beetle and the bat detract from the general ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... mother again, in Picardy, as he had seen her years before, kneeling in front of their door, and washing the heaps of linen, by her side, in the stream that ran through their garden. He almost fancied that he could hear the sound of the wooden beetle with which she beat the linen, in the calm silence of the country, and her voice, as she called ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... Association, and collecting shocking details for subsequent magic-lantern lectures on the liquor traffic; so fearful misunderstandings arose, but we gradually educated each other, and I had the best of the affair; for all I had got to teach them was that I was only a beetle and fetish hunter, and so forth, while they had to teach me a new world, and a very fascinating course of study I found it. And whatever the Coast may have to say against me—for my continual desire for hair-pins, and ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... hair has been added to or taken from a blossom without a lawful cause, and study it accordingly? Fragrance, abundant pollen, and bright-colored petals naturally attract many insects; but roses secrete no nectar. Some species of bees, and a common beetle (Trichius piger) for example, seem to depend upon certain wild roses exclusively for pollen to feed themselves and their larvae. Bumblebees, to which roses are adapted, require a firmer support than the petals would give, and so alight on the center of the flower, where ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... hush'd, save where the weak-ey'd bat, With short shrill shriek flits by on leathern wing, Or where the beetle winds ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... among the first to arrive, Julia in a dress of rich black silk, with some green about it, and a number of iridescent beetle-wings serving as a relief. Miss Netty Cahere was a vision of ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... essence, did not aim at a world beyond. Beautiful was this world, looking at it thus, without searching, thus simply, thus childlike. Beautiful were the moon and the stars, beautiful was the stream and the banks, the forest and the rocks, the goat and the gold-beetle, the flower and the butterfly. Beautiful and lovely it was, thus to walk through the world, thus childlike, thus awoken, thus open to what is near, thus without distrust. Differently the sun burnt the head, differently the shade of the forest cooled him down, differently the stream and the ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... so. An' 't is awnly your bigness of heart, as wouldn't hurt a beetle, makes you speak kind of the boozy auld sweep. I'll soon shaw un wheer he's out if he thinks you 'm tinkering ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... it pay 190 To fear thet meaner bully, old 'They'll say'? Suppose they du say; words are dreffle bores, But they ain't quite so bad ez seventy-fours. Wut England wants is jest a wedge to fit Where it'll help to widen out our split: She's found her wedge, an' 'tain't for us to come An' lend the beetle thet's to drive it home. For growed-up folks like us 'twould be a scandle, When we git sarsed, to fly right off the handle. England ain't all bad, coz she thinks us blind: 200 Ef she can't change ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... Egypt and the East. Tall, angular figures bearing burdens or weapons stalked in an uncouth frieze round the apartments. Above were bull-headed, stork-headed, cat-headed, owl-headed statues, with viper-crowned, almond-eyed monarchs, and strange, beetle-like deities cut out of the blue Egyptian lapis lazuli. Horus and Isis and Osiris peeped down from every niche and shelf, while across the ceiling a true son of Old Nile, a great, hanging-jawed crocodile, was slung in ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... vulgar will never cease to be vulgar, though the sun and moon may change their course, and "heaven and earth wax old as a garment." Perhaps, in order to please tender-hearted people, I might have been less true to nature; but if a certain beetle, of whom we have all heard, could extract filth even from pearls, if we have examples that fire has destroyed and water deluged, shall therefore pearls, fire, and water be condemned. In consequence of the remarkable catastrophe which ends my play, I may justly claim for it a place among books ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... pomp,—their brightest and final one. Which of the six hundred individuals in plain white cravats that have come up to regenerate France might one guess would become their king? For a king or a leader they, as all bodies of men, must have. He with the thick locks, will it be? Through whose shaggy beetle-brows, and rough-hewn, seamed, carbuncled face, there look natural ugliness, small-pox, incontinence, bankruptcy,—and burning fire of genius? It is Gabriel Honore Riquetti de Mirabeau; man-ruling deputy ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... the way any babies are," said Peter, talking to himself as is his way when there is no one else to talk to. Just then a funny little black pollywog wriggled into sight, and while Peter was watching him, a stout-jawed water-beetle suddenly rushed from among the water grass, seized the pollywog by his tail, and dragged him down. Peter stared. Could it be that that ugly-looking bug was as dangerous an enemy to the baby Toad as Reddy Fox is to a baby Rabbit? He began to suspect so, and a little later he knew so, for there ...
— The Adventures of Old Mr. Toad • Thornton W. Burgess
... in a book, and that was the book for him. The curious physical always drew his mind to hate it or to love. In summer he would crawl into the bottom of an old hedge, among the black mould and the withered sticks, and watch a red-ended beetle creep slowly up a bit of wood till near the top, and fall suddenly down, and creep patiently again—this he would watch with curious interest and remember always. "Johnny," said his mother once, "what do you breenge into the bushes to watch ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... do, fillip me with a three-man beetle. A man can no more separate age and covetousness than 'a can part young limbs and lechery: but the gout galls the one, and the pox pinches the other; and so both the ...
— King Henry IV, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Chiswick edition]
... struck me in this, and in several other designs, was the original manner in which the Japanese artist had seized upon the traits of the modern battleship,—the powerful and sinister lines of its shape,—just as he would have caught for us the typical character of a beetle or a lobster. The lines have been just enough exaggerated to convey, at one glance, the real impression made by the aspect of these iron monsters,—vague impression of bulk and force and menace, very difficult to express by ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... an Egyptian beetle of varying size; I have seen lots of living specimens on the Nile. The ancients believed that if this beetle were placed in the coffin or grave of the dead, no harm could come to them, and that its presence ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... and carrying blankets. We chose to consider their good clothes and equipments an aggravation of their offense and an insult to ourselves. We had at that time quite a squad of negro soldiers inside with us. Among them was a gigantic fellow with a fist like a wooden beetle. Some of the white boys resolved to use these to wreak the camp's displeasure on the Galvanized. The plan was carried out capitally. The big darky, followed by a crowd of smaller and nimbler "shades," would approach one of ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy |
