"Biting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... forehead clouded, her gaze, dark and blank, was fixed on her lap, and biting her under-lip, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... tale of the sainted Master Tressilian, and will be welcome to some folks, as a purse of broad pieces to me.—Hark ye, fellow," he continued, addressing Wayland, "thou shalt not give Puss a hint to steal away we must catch her in her form. So, back with that pitiful sheep-biting visage of thine, or I will fling thee from the window of the tower, and try if your juggling skill can save ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... about to many a young and pretty Russian whose mother had a large fortune and thirteen dogs. The old lady appeared perfectly clear headed on every subject outside of dogs. A fortnight before my visit she owned fifteen, but the police killed two on a charge of biting somebody. She was inconsolable at their loss, took her bed from grief, and seriously contemplated going into mourning. I asked Garnier what would be the result if every dog of the thirteen should have his day. "Ah!" ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... disgrace he entered the merchant-service as a chief mate; but his love of strong drink still pursuing him, he was again cashiered at sea, and degraded before the mast by the Captain. After this, in a state of intoxication, he re-entered the Navy at Pensacola as a common sailor. But all these lessons, so biting-bitter to learn, could not cure him of his sin. He had hardly been a week on board the Neversink, when he was found intoxicated with smuggled spirits. They lashed him to the gratings, and ignominiously scourged him under the eye of his old friend ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... you would say that he was a bad manager of asses or horses or oxen, who had received them originally neither kicking nor butting nor biting him, and implanted in them all these savage tricks? Would he not be a bad manager of any animals who received them gentle, and made them fiercer than they were when he received ...
— Gorgias • Plato
... again to walk, biting his nails with an air of deep thought. For some moments, such was the tension of his mind, large drops of sweat stood on his yellow brow. He walked up and down, stopped, stamped with his foot, now raised his eyes as if in search of an inspiration, and now scratched his head ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... name to Sandy, he would maintain a disdainful silence or turn the talk with abruptness; while if Sandy's name was spoken before Pitcairn, the great lawyer would raise his eyebrows, shrug his shoulders, or make some biting criticism which rendered me resentful and ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... there. I described her hat with the blue wings, her companion with the Pomeranian, the very hour of her visit, but my persistence brought only the information that hundreds of the shop's patronesses wore blue wings and thousands carried Pomeranians. The sinuous young woman became so cold and biting in her tone that I was sure that she believed that I had been fascinated by her own charms and was using a ruse for the pleasure of this brief interview, so I made a hasty retreat. My only clew to the owner of the blue-winged hat had failed me, and all that was left to me was to patrol ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... for June had now Set in with all his usual rigor! Young Zephyr yet scarce knowing how To nurse a bud, or fan a bough, But Eurus in perpetual vigor; And, such the biting summer air, That she, the nymph now nestling there— Snug as her own bright gems recline At night within their cotton shrine— Had more than once been caught of late Kneeling before her blazing grate, Like a young worshipper of fire, With hands uplifted to the ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... the top of the larger box, which tilted over very easily, he rolled himself into a ball, and childlike, played with his feet. An additional evidence of his changed affective attitude toward his task, especially in connection with definite failures, appeared in his rough handling and biting of the boxes. When most ...
— The Mental Life of Monkeys and Apes - A Study of Ideational Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... deepened. The girl's incredulity amused him. He understood. To her the Skandinavia Corporation was the beginning and end of all things. In her eyes it was the last word in power and influence and wealth. She knew nothing beyond—the Skandinavia. A man in her place would have received prompt and biting retort. But she was a girl, and Bull was young, and strong, and at the beginning of a great manhood. ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... Goshen, flowing with soup, was piled up a heap of halves of loaves, while endless other loaves were ranged along the shelves as for a giant's table. Esther looked ravenously at the four-square tower built of edible bricks, shivering as the biting air sought out her back through a sudden interstice in the heaving mass. The draught reminded her more keenly of her little ones huddled together in the fireless garret at home. Ah! what a happy night was in store. She must not let them devour the two loaves to-night; that would be criminal extravagance. ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... had at once asked for a cigar, and while Mr. Langham was speaking he had been biting it between his teeth, with the serious satisfaction of a man who had been twelve hours without one. He knocked the ashes from it and considered the burning end thoughtfully. Then he glanced at Hope as she stood among ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... broad street there were many dogs lying idle in the sunshine or biting each other. A small wagon with a team of nine dogs carried a quantity of tea and sugar from the Variag's boats to a warehouse. When the work was finished I took a ride on the wagon, and was carried at good speed. I enjoyed the excursion until the vehicle ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... came down stiff-legged. But Judd had curled his legs tightly about the body and buried his toes in its flanks. His powerful hands each gripped a long ear which he twisted and squeezed at his pleasure. Dynamite bellowed with rage and shot about the ring, kicking, biting, rearing; but unable to throw off ...
— Over the Line • Harold M. Sherman
... costumes, and dialects observed among our emigrant population from that land are little noticed, and never regarded as marking districts of the fatherland from which they severally sprung. One of the most fruitful themes of pleasant humor and biting sarcasm in our periodical literature and in the popular mouth, is the ignorance betrayed by enlightened foreigners, and especially foreign journalists, in regard to the geography of our country; as though America were, par excellence, THE land, and on whatever other ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... desired to live one minute longer for the sake of any other good in life, but doing good and living to the glory of God.' A cenotaph has been placed by her grave to the memory of her father, but it can not wipe away the error of the past, and this expression of regret only recalls a biting line from ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the FOOD-CONTROLLER, "of cheese running out during the coming winter." A pan of drinking water left in the larder will always prevent its running out and biting ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 11, 1919 • Various
... both be, I'm thinkin'," muttered Patrick, gathering up the reins with a shiver; for it was really a very cold evening indeed, damp and gray, with a biting ...
— A Bachelor's Dream • Mrs. Hungerford
... rapidly during the day. An occasional snow flurry and biting gusts of wind added to the discomfort of the rescue crews, but they ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... beautiful; full of classical learning and allusion, and sparkling as a casket of diamonds, thrown upon, and rolling along, a Wilton carpet. It seemed to be his pleasure to taunt the opposition to enforce an angry or irritable reply, and then to launch the arrows of his biting wit and sarcasm at whoever dared the response, in such rapid profusion, as to astonish the House, and ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... suddenly. Mollie was frowning and biting her lips in obvious discomfort; Victor Druce's drooping lids once more hid his eyes from sight as he stood with folded arms leaning against the palm. It was Jack Melland who had spoken—Jack Melland, roused for once to ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... a huge rush-drain three miles broad, fordable nearly to the right bank, where we had to ferry in boats, and the cows to be swum over with men holding on to their tails. It was larger than the Katonga, and more tedious to cross, for it took no less than four hours mosquitoes in myriads biting our bare backs and legs all the while. The Luajerri is said to rise in the lake and fall into the Nile, due south of our crossing-point. On the right bank wild buffalo are described to be as numerous as cows, but we did not see any, though the country is covered with ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... season when these are most dried up, and their margin is overgrown with reeds and rushes. Among these the natives wade with stealthy pace, so quietly indeed, that they even creep upon wild fowl and spear them. The turtles swim lazily along the surface of the water, biting and smelling the various aquatic plants they meet with, but as soon as they are alarmed, they sink to the bottom instantly. The pursuer puts out his foot, (the toes of which he uses to seize anything, almost as we use our fingers,) and gropes about with it among the weeds at the bottom ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... his scheming and cringing he fell foul of everybody, always saying some biting remark with dove-like gentleness. Ministers, generals, fortunate people and their families, were the most ill-treated. He had, as it were, usurped the right of saying and doing what he pleased; nobody daring to be angry with him. The Grammonts alone ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... tricks, and drolleries, and scoundrelisms; but this I may mention, that he had the propensity ascribed many centuries ago to the Scandinavian horses for sharing and practically asserting his share in the angry passions of a battle. He would fight, or attempt to fight, on his rider's side, by biting, rearing, and suddenly wheeling round, for the purpose of lashing out when he found himself within kicking range. [20] This little monster was coal black; and, in virtue of his carcass, would not ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... divined that the cause thereof was in the counting-room itself, whence issued sounds of much bumping and falling, as if a dozen children were playing leap-frog on the floor. Jamie McMurtagh was seated on the stool in the outer den that was called the bookkeeper's, biting his pen, with even a sourer face ...
— Pirate Gold • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... Roaring Bill paced slowly, looking straight ahead of him with a fixed, absent stare, his teeth closed on his nether lip. Hazel blinked wonderingly. Many an hour in the last three months she had walked the floor like that, biting her lip in mental agony. And then, while she was looking, Bill abruptly extinguished the candles. In the red gleam from the hearth she saw him go into the kitchen, closing the door softly. After that there was no sound but the swirl of the ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... from the sharp irony of her tongue as he would not have shrunk before her father's violence. Biting rejection was in her tones. He knew dimly that the thing he shrank from belonged to nothing Romany in her, but to that scornful pride of the Gorgios which had kept the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... remarked that he was so lovable that she could never leave him without giving him a bite. In the Arabic Perfumed Garden there are many references to love-bites, while in the Indian Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana a chapter is devoted to this subject. Biting in love is also common among the South Slavs.[76] The phenomenon is indeed sufficiently familiar to enable Heine, in one of his Romancero, to describe those marks by which the ancient chronicler states that Edith Swanneck recognized Harold, after ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... corrupt court, from the courtesans that usurped the place of the wife, from the insolence and selfishness of men who scorned even the appearance of virtue and did not hesitate to degrade even their wives and sisters. She would disprove the biting sarcasm ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... Otway was biting a blade of grass; he smiled and said nothing. Mrs. Borisoff glanced from him to Irene, who also was smiling, but ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... a moment, knitting his brows and biting his lips, as if he were trying to discover some means of solving the mystery. In point of fact, he was seeking for some adroit phrase which might lead this woman to show him the register in which all travelers are compelled to inscribe their full names, profession, ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... martyred mother. Her name and agony are too sacred to be named in a political argument," and she uttered these last words with intense bitterness. Then rising to end the interview, she continued coldly in biting sarcasm, "Mr. Clancy, I have no relations with the North. I do not deal in cotton, and none of its fibre has found ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... time?—a long warm cloak and a chamois jacket for cold weather, snow overshoes, warm gloves and mittens too, and some woollen stockings. Be sure you take flannels. This is the advice of one who never wears them at any other time. A veil or two is very useful, as the wind is often high and biting, and I was much annoyed with wisps of hair around my eyes, and also with my hair coming down while on horseback, until I hit upon the device of tying a brown liberty silk veil over the hair and partially over the ears before putting ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... tenderly love, as it is one of the most bitter and biting evils which attend human life, so it wants the lenitive which palliates and softens every other calamity; I mean that great reliever, hope. No man can be so totally undone, but that he may still cherish expectation: ...
— From This World to the Next • Henry Fielding
... the several walls as he turned, marched and countermarched at Jackson's commands, filled Bentley with self-loathing. He found himself repulsive. His body perspired freely impregnating the ape skin with a harsh odor that was biting and terrible in his nostrils. It was sickening. He tried to close his mind to the repulsiveness ...
— The Mind Master • Arthur J. Burks
... had stirred depths in his nature never touched before. The very things she had said to him were so evidently born out of a nature great in its passion for truth and in its capacity for feeling that, even though her words were biting and stung, he could not but rejoice in the beauty and strength of ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... the slightest heed to boy or cow, but rolled and threshed, biting at the fragment of spear-handle, giving vent to his rage and pain in a hoarse, ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... through the biting wind, then, saying her morning prayer, she enters the vast hall. At a glance she sees the lonely boy. In a twinkling she knows it is Kay. Her little bare feet carry her like wings across the ice floor. Her ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... hand came in contact with the other's throat just above the rim of his collar. Instantly his fingers closed about yielding flesh, their ends biting deep ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... beauty did not harmonize with her surroundings. Fair-haired, white-faced, violet-eyed, she emanated tragedy. He watched her profile, clear cut as a cameo, fine brow, straight nose, sensitive lips, strong chin. She was biting those tremulous lips. And when she turned again to him they were red. The short-bowed upper lip, full and sweet, the lower, with its sensitive droop at the corner, eloquent of sorrow—all at once Lane ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... Robinson". The Cornish and Liverpool witnesses agreed in the description of his person, his height, the colour of his hair, his general appearance, and, more particularly, it was mentioned that he had a peculiar habit of biting his nails, and that he had a great fondness ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... knowing what will happen sooner or later. And then at last, in the northern twilight, the great herd begins to move. The impulse is simultaneous, irresistible, their heads are all turned in one direction. They move slowly at first, biting still, here and there, at the bunches of rich moss. Presently the slow step becomes a trot, they crowd closely together while the Laps hasten to gather up their last unpacked possessions, their cooking utensils and their ...
— A Cigarette-Maker's Romance • F. Marion Crawford
... said pleasantly; "do not vent your wrath upon this good fellow. Believe me, though his actions may have deprived you of a few thousand francs, they have also saved you from lasting and biting remorse. This document, which you stole from M. de Marsan and so ingeniously duplicated, involved the honour of our King and our country, as well as the life of an innocent man. My sister's fiance would never have survived the loss of the document ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... L265,000 to make over to Scotland in relief of Local Taxation and promotion of Education. Scotch Members don't object to the money, but take exception to its plan of distribution. Member after Member rises from Opposition Benches, biting at hand that proffers the boon. "Crude and wasteful," BUCHANAN calls this scheme, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 9th, 1892 • Various
... nights, his clumsy wits galloping and frisking under the lash of the alcohol, and fancy himself thrashing his wife, till a sudden frenzy of rage would overcome him, and he would shake all over, rolling upon the bed and biting the mattress. ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... time we heard terrible human cries proceeding from the snare, and, hurrying thither, found in it a young mountain lion. It looked dangerous, and was biting in every direction. I admit that I was prepared to leave in haste, but not so Tish. She fetched her umbrella, without which she never travels, and while the animal set its jaws in it—a painful necessity, as it was her best umbrella—Tish ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... he was, he was not as quick as his adversary, who ripped open the side of his head with a lucky blow, and stretched him gasping upon the ground. Black Bruin then reached down and biting the kicking dog through the neck, finished ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... [44] The biting of the thumb is here a mark of vexation: to bite one's thumb at a person was considered an insult (Rom. and Jul., ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... of a fine pink and purple colour inside the valves, and a new species of Cyclas with longitudinal ribs. Small black ants, and little flies with wings crossing each other, annoy us very much, the one creeping all over our bodies and biting us severely, and the other falling into our soup and tea, and covering our meat; but the strong night-breeze protects us from the mosquitoes. A pretty lizard (Tiliqua) of small size, with yellowish spots on a brown ground, was caught, and ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... request was refused, and the manuscript returned. Superstition ultimately succeeded where natural affection had failed; for the ex-Emperor, having inscribed maledictions on each of the five volumes of the Sutra with blood obtained by biting his tongue, and having hastened his demise by self-inflicted privations,—he died (1164) eight years after being sent into exile—the evils of the time were attributed to his unquiet spirit and a shrine was built to ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... they were cries of pain or joy; but they started up precipitately with that inquietude and alarm which every little thing inspires in an unknown country. The noise was made by two naked girls, who tripped along the mead, while two monkeys were pursuing them and biting their buttocks. Candide was moved with pity; he had learned to fire a gun in the Bulgarian service, and he was so clever at it, that he could hit a filbert in a hedge without touching a leaf of the tree. ...
— Candide • Voltaire
... illusion is like an east wind to the confidences of the shy, and if they stay within its range they are blighted before their hearts have time to unfold. They long for a less biting air, for vernal hours in sheltered dells, where without sheaths and unguarded the hearts of flowers lie open to their neighbours and to heaven. There was once a simple day when religion set hearts interflowing, but now it can melt them only within the precincts; the fire which is ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... breath! Folly may here mean death! Yon gleam the lights of the capital's towers; Here let thy pace be slow; Frederick, thy crafty foe, Plots there to lay thee low, Fearing thy powers; He of the "empty purse", Stung by thy biting verse, Using a woman's hate, Offers a tempting bait; Both thy approach await, ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... practitioner. I get chiefly patients who can't pay me. I should like them best, if I had nobody to pay on my own side." Lydgate waited a little, but Bulstrode only bowed, looking at him fixedly, and he went on with the same interrupted enunciation—as if he were biting an ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... hiding under our beds and biting pieces out of our feet before long," said Egbert, and from what Amanda knew of this particular otter she felt that the possibility was not a ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... the strong spiritual assertion of Emerson with the purely negative attitude of the French satirist was a common mistake in those days, and the Lowell of 1838 needs small excuse for it. He must have been in a biting humor at this time, for there is a cut all round in his class poem, although it is the most vigorous and highly-finished ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... Barbee go. Then, drawn back into a corner of the room, sullen and vigilant, he stood biting nervously at a big, clenched, ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... Tavia was biting her lips. She felt every moment the laugh would get the better of her and get out on its own accord, but she tried ...
— Dorothy Dale • Margaret Penrose
... waste-paper baskets a torrent of tales, verses and violent articles, warning men of this deluge of barbaric denial. But he seemed to be getting no nearer his enemy, and, what was worse, no nearer a living. As he paced the Thames embankment, bitterly biting a cheap cigar and brooding on the advance of Anarchy, there was no anarchist with a bomb in his pocket so savage or so solitary as he. Indeed, he always felt that Government stood alone and desperate, ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... an object to present to his lord. Of such, the choice which the room afforded was straitly limited, and when for the second time he had selected one of the knobs of a chest of drawers, endeavouring to detach this by dint of biting it off, the fresh-faced nurse was advised of his intention, and a log of wood was procured to be kept in a corner. Thereafter twice a day the billet ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... the matter, he is," returned the doctor. "A man who has been three years biting his nails on a desert island, Jim, can't expect to appear as sane as you or me. It doesn't lie in human nature. Was it cheese you said he had ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... do), barking, then rolling on a square of sunlit carpet, and, after that, lying on his back, his legs out stiff, his ridiculous "Imperial" pointed and ironical, then suddenly turning, with a twist on his legs, rushing at last up to Jeremy, barking at him, laughing at him, licking him, and even biting his stockings—last of all seizing a bedroom slipper and rushing wildly into the schoolroom ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... did turn definitely and went up the stairs, and Raven presently followed. In his room he stood for a moment thinking, not of Dick, who was troublesome, in an irritating way incident to biting young cubs just aware of their teeth, but of the challenge that was Nan. Here she was, all beauty, all wisdom, in the natal gifts of her, telling him, with every breath, she loved him and only him. And yet, his knowledge of life was quick to answer, it was the accretion of ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... looking-glass door on the other, a dressing-table to one side of the window, a few prints on the plain blue walls, and a dark blue drugget carpet on the floor; and all these ordinary appurtenances of a bedroom etched themselves into Michael's mind, biting their way into it by the acid of ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... a little curious to see what turn the convent affairs would take, and as she sat biting the end of her pen, thinking, the sound of an axe awoke her from her reverie. Trees were being felled in the garden; "and an ugly, red-brick building will be run up, in which children of city merchants will be taught singing and the piano." Was it contempt for the world's ignorance ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... and undergoing. He was no sentimentalist, to pay himself with fine feelings whether for mean action or slack inaction. He had an insatiable zest for all experiences, not the pleasurable only, but including the more harsh and biting—those that bring home to a man the pinch and sting of existence as it is realised by the disinherited of the world, and excluding only what he thought the prim, the conventional, the dead-alive, and the cut-and-dry. On occasion the experimentalist ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he hug bleak Zembla's bolted snow, Now to Arabia's heated deserts turn, Yet bids the biting blast more fiercely blow, The scorching sun ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... his well-known hostility to every species of superstition, remained silent, biting her lips and shaking her gray ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... but at a smile. Where joy doth most abound, there I do sorrow place, And them I chiefly persecute that pleasure did embrace. What greater grief can fall to man in all his life, Than after sweet to taste the sour, in peace to be at strife? It is a biting thought that fretteth on the heart, To say, the time was when I joy'd, though now oppress'd with smart. If ever mighty king did 'scape untouch'd of me, If ever year, or month, or day, or if an hour might be, Wherein I ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VI • Robert Dodsley
... who had worn Redmayne's clothes and had tried to shoot Brendon in his absence. It was Jenny, of course, who had assisted me to dig Marco's grave on Griante and who shared my disappointment when we found that Brendon had escaped my revolver. Even so only the accident of biting his tongue saved him. Had I not seen blood flowing from his lips, ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... biting chill from Jack Frost in this home. In the short time I sat there I wondered if the occupants appreciated the good things around them. How could they, if they had never known ...
— Twenty Years of Hus'ling • J. P. Johnston
... have tried to bite and scratch This funny looking thing; But now they thought it might have hid A sharp and biting sting. ...
— Baby Chatterbox • Anonymous
... supplies from the surrounding country for man and beast. He had no tools for entrenching purposes, only such as he captured from the enemy, and expected to cross deep and unfordable rivers without a pontoon train. With the dead of winter now upon him, his troops had no shelter to protect them from the biting winds of the mountains or the blinding snow storms from overhead save only much-worn blankets and thin tent flys five by six feet square, one to the man. This was the condition in which the commanding General found himself and troops, in a strange and hostile country, completely ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... need to detail all their sufferings. In less than two hours both were crazed with the blistering sun, and the ravening of the foul and biting insects. ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... beat Quicker because on earth is something sweet; I shall no more be I If the ancestral voices no more sigh Familiar in my brain, And leave me to cold silence and its pain, And the bewildered stare On an unhomely land in biting air: ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... his wife. As he turned with reluctant feet into his own yard he fairly shrank in anticipation under the sharp hail of her biting words. ...
— The Calico Cat • Charles Miner Thompson
... mulberry-trees; I sat down under their shade, and found by my watch that it was just one quarter of an hour since I had left the village market. I fancied it was a dream; but no, I was indeed awake, as I felt by the experiment I made of biting my tongue. I closed my eyes in order to collect my scattered thoughts. Presently I heard unintelligible words uttered in a nasal tone; and I beheld two Chinese, whose Asiatic physiognomies were not to be mistaken, even had their costume not betrayed their ...
— Peter Schlemihl etc. • Chamisso et. al.
... feet ever since he had opened a hamper and produced a pair of frizzled fowls, creatures of an extraordinary aspect, toothed all over like a dandelion plant, with every feather sticking inside out. When I saw them, I tried for my life not to laugh, and biting my lips very hard, quite succeeded, until the cock opened up a pair of sleepy eyes, covered with comb and very sad inversions, and glancing with complacency at his wife (who stood beneath him, even more ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... biting or horned animals do not, although able, rescue [a person attacked], he shall pay the lowest fine: but, if there was a cry for ...
— Hindu Law and Judicature - from the Dharma-Sastra of Yajnavalkya • Yajnavalkya
... with power so sweet The listeners ne'er forgat him. Evermore, Parting, he planted in the ground a cross, And bade the neighbours till their church was built Round it to pray. Meanwhile his youthful mate Changed by degrees. The ever varying scene, The biting breath and balmy breast of spring, And most of all that old man's valiant heart Triumphed above his sadness, fancies gay Pushing beyond it like those sunnier shoots That gild the dark vest of the vernal pine. He took account of all things ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... morning he was getting his regular beating, he willingly fell to the floor, grabbed his mistress' foot, bit her very hard. She tried very hard to pull away from him, he held on still biting, she ran around in the room, Isaac still holding on. Finally, she stopped beating him and never attempted to strike ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves: Indiana Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... or moon in the sky this night. The wind had changed, and came from the north. In it was the biting chill of the Arctic, and overhead was a gray-dun mass of racing cloud. A dozen times Jean turned his face anxiously from the fire into the north, and held wet fingers high over his head to see if in the air was that peculiar sting by which the forest ...
— God's Country—And the Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... perspiring hands to turn over the volumes; then he will thump the white vellum with gloves covered with all kinds of dust, and with his finger clad in long-used leather will hunt line by line through the page; then at the sting of the biting flea the sacred book is flung aside, and is hardly shut for another month, until it is so full of the dust that has found its way within, that it resists ...
— The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury • Richard de Bury
... truth who says that you should sell them, fails. Believe me, Lady liege, he tells a crammer; You'll set your people biting all their nails, If you put up your horses to ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... cloak under the fall of lace, and, when Brady had slipped into his overcoat, Adams turned back to open the hall door, which let in a biting draught. ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... no fish," the lawyer muttered to himself, biting his lips. "But the priest will help me—spite of himself, he will help me. A health to Holy Mother Church! She would not do much if all her ministers were like this country clod. He is without ambition. He ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... effect; but if the man were shamming, as he probably was in spite of the great consistency of his symptoms, the chances were that, with all his nerve and foreknowledge of what was in store for him, the sudden biting of the fiery liquid into his naked flesh would bring him to his feet dancing with pain and cursing and banning to the utmost ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... Stored with the gladness and the gain of life, Or sadden'd by its unproductiveness; And Winter like a prophecy would come To warn me of the end that draweth nigh. Each falling leaf that flutter'd from its bough, Pale with the sereness of keen-biting frosts, Would teach me that the ties of earth must loose, One after one, the interests and joys That made life's excellent completeness up, Until the trunk, stripped of its verdant dress, Stand in the naked dreadfulness of death. Thus will my soul learn wisdom true and deep, Not in the school ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... Theodore, came from Philadelphia. If you are anxious to know what incidents of such an event would fix themselves in the mind of a child of two, they were these: She made her first attempt to say "Theodore," and "Philadelphia," and she tried her baby trick of biting her glass, for which she had doubtless been reproved, and watched its effect upon her father. "I recall perfectly the feeling with which I turned my eye to him, expecting to see that brow cloud with displeasure, but it was smooth as love could make it. That consciousness, ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... mist of circumstance, the millions of souls that make up the great city pursued their millions of destinies, undeterred by biting cold and grisly fog. For it was a day in the life of England's capital; and every day there is a great human drama that must be played—a drama mingling tragedy and humour with no regard to values or proportion; a drama that does ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... considerable number of lightning flashes in the northeast. They were not accompanied by any thunder, but alarmed us considerably. We feared the expected November storms might be ahead of time. We closed the tent door on account of a biting wind. Owing to the ventilating device at the top of the tent, we managed to breathe fairly well. Mountain climbers at high altitudes have occasionally observed that one of the symptoms of acute soroche is a very annoying, racking cough, as violent ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... protection, of the Roman pontiff, who assumed, with propriety and weight, the character of an angel of peace, the common father of the Christians. By his voice, the sword of Charles was chained in the scabbard; and the Greek ambassadors beheld him, in the pope's antechamber, biting his ivory sceptre in a transport of fury, and deeply resenting the refusal to enfranchise and consecrate his arms. He appears to have respected the disinterested mediation of Gregory the Tenth; but Charles was insensibly ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... made of 1-1/2 or 2 inch rope, having attached to it two cross-pieces or diameters of the same material; it acts by the ends of these pieces biting on the interior of ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... held his harmonica in his mouth and blew blasts upon it as he fought. The Rev. Simeon Calthrop, in a loud agitated voice, sang hymns as he swung his cutlass. And, among the legs of the combatants, leapt and snapped Teddy the Pomeranian, biting friend and foe indiscriminately upon ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... on Lizzie Tuoey's evidence that McGeorge's conversion to such ridiculous claims rested. She was not capable of invention, he pointed out, and continued that no one could make up details such as that, finally, of the Rock of Ages. The irony was too biting and inevitable. Her manner alone put ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... empty on account of the cold weather, but that didn't make them any warmer for us. We entered them through hatchways in the top of the car; the boxes were constructed of galvanized iron, and in that biting weather were not pleasant to the touch. We lay there, shivered and shook, and with chattering teeth held a council wherein we decided that we'd stay by the ice-boxes day and night till we got out of the inhospitable plateau region and down into the ...
— The Road • Jack London
... to put over his head when I open the stall door. That'll put him out of the biting business, till it's peeled away from his jaws, after he's got a real good rubbing. But he'll likely wriggle, a lot. And I'll need you to sit on his head. Likewise to carry this bowl and the sponge, while I'm opening the door and getting the bag over ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... (1667-1745), in "The Tale of a Tub," has this passage: "He was troubled with a disease, reversed to that called the stinging of the tarantula, and would run dog-mad at the noise of music, especially a pair of bag-pipes." Again: "This Malady has been removed, like the Biting of a Tarantula, with the sound of a ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... on gorging her, every speculative 'stuffed monkey' increasing his nervous tension. Her white teeth, biting recklessly into the cake, made him itch to slap her rosy cheek. Confectionery palled at last, and Fanny led the way out. Elias followed, chattering with feverish gaiety. Gradually he ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... houseboats of fishermen moored among the tules, and the women and children, like the men in the boats, were dark-skinned, black-eyed, foreign. As they proceeded up the river, they began to encounter dredges at work, biting out mouthfuls of the sandy river bottom and heaping it on top of the huge levees. Great mats of willow brush, hundreds of yards in length, were laid on top of the river-slope of the levees and held in place by steel cables and thousands of cubes ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... earnings had been the pence flung to him from the windows as he stood singing in the snow-covered streets, either alone or in the company of other youths as destitute as himself. But now spring had come; the glorious sun had chased away the snow and the biting frost, and the poor chorister felt its genial rays quickening the life-blood in his veins, and awakening his cramped muscles to action. It is only the pinched and starved human beings of this great Northern Hemisphere who ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... in places and at stiff angles always, but it was easier going up this lane than on the outside rough rock, because the rocks in it had been smoothed by mountain torrents during thousands of wet seasons, and the walls protected one from the biting wind, a wind that went through me, for I had been stewing for nine months and more in tropic and ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... Mordaunt means biting. Power is generally Anglo-Fr. le poure (le pauvre) and Grace is for le gras, the fat. Jolige represents the ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... out for the conquest of England. The scene is the seashore. The Church a naked Andromeda, with dishevelled hair, fastened to the trunk of an ancient disbranched tree. The cross lies at her feet, the cup overturned, the serpents of heresy biting at her from behind with uplifted crests. Coming on before a leading breeze is the sea monster, the Moslem fleet, eager for their prey; while in front is Perseus, the Genius of Spain, banner in hand, with the legions of the faithful laying not raiment before him, but shield and helmet, the apparel ...
— English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century - Lectures Delivered at Oxford Easter Terms 1893-4 • James Anthony Froude
... such as these, unwilling did me expel and exclude me unwilling from his dwelling: but the bit of Jupiter[53] perforce constrained him to do this. And straightway my person and my mind were distorted, and horned, as ye see, stung by the keenly-biting fly, I rushed with maniac boundings to the sweet stream of Cerchneia, and the fountain[54] of Lerna; and the earth-born neatherd Argus of untempered fierceness, kept dogging me, peering after my footsteps with thick-set eyes. Him, however, an unlooked-for sudden fate bereaved of life; ...
— Prometheus Bound and Seven Against Thebes • Aeschylus
... fell upon it. Then she sat a long time at her table with both letters before her, and did not move, except to take her handkerchief out of her pocket and dry her eyes, from which the tears began at once to drip again. At last she started forward, and caught pen and paper toward her, biting her lip and frowning as if to keep herself firm, and she said to the central figure in the photograph case which stood at the back of the table, "I will, I will! You ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... very evidently possessed that peculiar combination of quickness of intellect and readiness of tongue which enables those who possess it to say very sharp and biting things, when vexed or out of humor. It is a brilliant talent, though it always makes those who possess it hated and feared. Elizabeth was often wantonly cruel in the exercise of this satirical power, considering very ...
— Queen Elizabeth - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... dead leaves flit by with thin wierd tunes, Like failing murmurs of some conquered creed, Graven in mystic markings with strange runes, That none but stars and biting winds may read; Here I will wait a little; I am weary, Not torn with pain of any lurid hue, But only still and very gray and dreary, ...
— Among the Millet and Other Poems • Archibald Lampman
... school-house. There I was driven by sheer exhaustion to the shelter of the doorway, and in the narrow refuge I huddled, waiting and listening. The keen wind found me out and seemed to take joy in rushing in on me in biting gusts and then whirling away over the flat. By and by it brought me the rollicking air my brother whistled, and then came the sound of foot-falls. In a moment he would be passing, and I arose, intending ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... "Oh, nothing—nothing," biting her lips in vexation. "The name merely recalled something. But really I must go, Mr. Keith, or I shall be late at the theatre. You have not attended since ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... over their cuirasses, hear their horses puff, and a hundred paces away we could see the lances rise and fall, the long sabres stretch out, and the men bend down to thrust under; the furious horses, rearing, biting, and neighing frightfully, and then men under the horses' feet were trying to get up, and sheltering ...
— Waterloo - A sequel to The Conscript of 1813 • Emile Erckmann |
