"Elephantine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 251.—Ba'al Samain is mentioned as early as the ninth century B. C. in the inscription of Ben Hadad (Pognon, Inscr. semit., 1907, pp. 165 ff.; cf. Dussaud, Rev. archeol., 1908, I, p. 235). In Aramaic papyri preserved at Berlin, the Jews of Elephantine call Jehovah "the god of heaven" in an address to a Persian governor, and the same name was used in the alleged edicts of Cyrus and his successors, which were inserted in the book of Esdras (i. 1; vi. 9, etc.)—If there were the slightest doubt as ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... 1709; died 1784. Critic, moralist, lexicographer, and, above all, the hero of Boswell's Life of Johnson. The ponderous philosopher did not disdain, occasionally, to give play to his elephantine wit. ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... out of his mouth, and fell upon his knees. He then walked up to the village, changed his clothes, behaved with elephantine tenderness to his mother, and walked out in the darkness to see his friend, the gardener. He sat on the settle in the low kitchen, and smoked solemnly without speaking. The next night he appeared at the same hour, and spent his evening in the ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... way with elephantine nicety, the motor-car progressed down the Avenue—twilight deepening, arcs upon their bronze columns blossoming suddenly, noiselessly into spheres of opalescent radiance—Mr. Maitland ceased to respond, ceased even to give heed, to the running fire of chaff (largely ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... moment with the words of the captain—his captain forever now—ringing in his ears, he would have gone forth gratefully to tackle the whole team, one after another, from wiry little Charlie DeSoto to the elephantine P. Lentz. ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... heaving and grunting, because our hands were tied together, we contrived to struggle to our feet. The Selenites made way for our elephantine heavings, and seemed to twitter more volubly. As soon as we were on our feet the thick-set Selenite came and patted each of our faces with his tentacles, and walked towards the open doorway. That also was plain enough, and we followed him. We saw that four of the Selenites ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... King Charles's trial, and was for that latter offence assassinated at the Hague one evening by certain high-flying Royalist cut-throats, Scotch several of them; "his portrait represents him as a man of heavy, deep-wrinkled, elephantine countenance, pressed down by the labours of life and ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... of four-footed kind, The aullay-horse, that in his force, With elephantine trunk, could bind And lift the elephant, and on the wind Whirl him away, with sway and swing, E'en like a pebble from a ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... not admiring Mr. Burton in Shakespeare we admired him as Paul Pry, as Mr. Toodles and as Aminadab Sleek in The Serious Family, and we must have admired him very much—his huge fat person, his huge fat face and his vast slightly pendulous cheek, surmounted by a sort of elephantine wink, to which I impute a remarkable baseness, being still perfectly ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... upon his paternal functions. Approaching the high chair in which Johnnyboy was dyspeptically reflecting, with a ponderous wink at the other guests, and a fat thumb and forefinger on Johnnyboy's table, he leaned over him, and with slow, elephantine playfulness said:— ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... virtues. Taking advantage of the well-known carelessness of American readers, and knowing full well how easily they are duped—how easily they are cozened out of their senses and led into false beliefs with mere plausibilities and sophisms—this imperial and far-reaching Wall Street, this elephantine fox of the world, takes possession of American journalism—owns it, controls it. It seizes and subsidizes the metropolitan press. It purchases newspapers and magazines by the score. It establishes bureaus; it buys every purchasable pen, ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... for the real grand, miscellaneous, popular, and populous morning concert! Now for elephantine dimensions and leviathan bills of fare. It is nominally, perhaps, or really, perhaps, the annual benefit concert of some well-known performer, or it is the speculation of a great musical publishing house, in the name of one of their composing or performing proteges. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various
... population of the world, in any age, is the result of the gradual modification of the forms which peopled it in the preceding age,—if that has been the case, it is intelligible enough; because we may expect that the creature that results from the modification of an elephantine mammal shall be something like an elephant, and the creature which is produced by the modification of an armadillo-like mammal shall be like an armadillo. Upon that supposition, I say, the facts are intelligible; upon any other, that I am ...
— A Critical Examination Of The Position Of Mr. Darwin's Work, "On The Origin Of Species," In Relation To The Complete Theory Of The Causes Of The Phenomena Of Organic Nature • Thomas H. Huxley
... the campus paper, the Black and Green. I managed to prevent its publication...." He went on at some length about that. "If I might be permitted access to the drawers of my own desk," he added with elephantine sarcasm, "I could show you ...
— The Edge of the Knife • Henry Beam Piper
... elephant no more closely than any one of a score or more mounds in Wisconsin, except in one important particular, viz, the head has a prolongation or snout-like appendage, which is its chief, in fact its only real, elephantine character. If this appendage is too long for the snout of any other known animal, it is certainly too short for the trunk of a mastodon. Still, so far as this one character goes, it is doubtless true that it is more suggestive ...
— Animal Carvings from Mounds of the Mississippi Valley • Henry W. Henshaw
... or Armored Dinosaurs. Quadrupedal dinosaurs with elephantine feet, short neck, small head, body and tail armored with massive bony plates and often with large bony spines. Teeth in a single row, like those of Iguanodonts. Stegosaurus of the Upper Jurassic, Ankylosaurus ...
— Dinosaurs - With Special Reference to the American Museum Collections • William Diller Matthew
... were their efforts in more execrable taste than the emanations from the pedants of Louvain. The "Rhetoricians" are not responsible for all the bad taste of their generation. The gravest historians of the Netherlands often relieved their elephantine labors by the most asinine gambols, and it was not to be expected that these bustling weavers and cutlers should excel their literary ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... He made some elephantine attempts at smartening his appearance. He gave his fiery mustache a heavenward twist; he dragged into sight a pair of black-edged cuffs, deepened the crease in his middle by tightening his belt another ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... in the night time with the stars and the moon. He was running like a youthful god, she thought, for her mind had not yet been weaned from certain vanities, and she could not see that a gigantic policeman was in his wake, tracking him with elephantine bounds, and now and again snatching a gasp from hurry to blow ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... others. You make your way to the side of a lady whom you have previously encountered at a similar entertainment and assert your delight at revamping the fatuous acquaintanceship. Her facetiousness is elephantine, but the relief of conversation is such that you laugh loudly at her witticisms and simper knowingly at her platitudes—both of which have now been current ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... at such a collection as he has formed, and bethink you that these elephantine bones did veritably carry their owners about, and these great grinders crunch, in the dark woods of which the forest-bed is now the only trace, it is impossible not to feel that they are as good evidence of the lapse of time as the annual rings of ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... are any such beings nowadays as the great Eliphalet, with his large features and conversational basso profundo, seemed to me. His very name had something elephantine about it, and it seemed to me that the house shook from cellar to garret at his footfall. Some have pretended that he had Olympian aspirations, and wanted to sit in the seat of Jove and bear the academic thunderbolt and the aegis inscribed Christo et ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... lion-headed goddess of war wading in blood. For the goddess set to work slaughtering mankind and the land was flooded with blood[191]. Re became alarmed and determined to save at least some remnant of mankind. For this purpose he sent messengers to Elephantine to obtain a substance called d'd' in the Egyptian text, which he gave to the god Sektet of Heliopolis to grind up in a mortar. When the slaves had crushed barley to make beer the powdered d'd' was mixed with it so as ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... Forage there was absolutely none, while even the pasture-land gave small return. The men had done well, however, and were stiffening nicely into field soldiers, while my Teutonic second in command had sufficiently recovered from his wounds to sit his saddle with some elephantine grace. He early proved himself a good soldier, and I learned he had seen ...
— My Lady of the North • Randall Parrish
... you'd a' went on with what you started out to say, I'd a' give fi' dollars—say, I'd a' made it ten dollars—say!" And he laughed again a laugh that seemed to set all the celluloid in the plush covered, satin lined toilet cases on the new counter a-flutter. He walked down the store with elephantine tread, as he laughed, and then the door opened and Dr. Nesbit came in. Five months had put a perceptible bow into his shoulders, and an occasional cast of uncertainty into ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... 24, 1813, to make my journey through Nubia. Assouan is the most romantic spot in Egypt, but little deserving the lofty praise which some travellers have bestowed upon it for its antiquities and those of the neighbouring island of Elephantine. I carried with me nothing but my gun, sabre, and pistol, a provision bag, and a woollen mantle, which served either for a carpet or a covering during the night. I was dressed in the blue gown of the merchants of Upper Egypt. After estimating the expense I was ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... elephantine trumpeting of laughter seemed to set the air a-quivering. Ramiro was lying back in his chair a prey to such a passion of mirth that it swelled the veins of his throat and brow until I thought that they must burst—and, from my soul, I hoped ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... unbent as Mrs Siddons, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Dr Johnson might have unbent, to devise a turn for the Coliseum variety theatre. Not that we would set down the art of the variety theatre as something to be condescended to, or our own art as elephantine. We should rather crave indulgence as three novices fresh from the awful legitimacy of the ...
— Annajanska, the Bolshevik Empress • George Bernard Shaw
... disgrace, a howling shame!" exploded Beef, his elephantine frame swathed in blankets to conceal a lack of vestiture, "Last night, until midnight, that graceless wretch roosted on 'Lookout There' and because the glorious moonlight made him sentimental and slushy, ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... certain morning near the close of our sojourn in Basel, Max, after many elephantine manoeuvres, obtained Yolanda's promise to walk out with him to a near-by hill in the afternoon. It was a Sabbath day, and every burgher maiden in Basel that boasted a sweetheart would be abroad with him in the sunshine. Max could ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... Quincey's humor, a friend once remarked to me, that it always reminded him of an elephant attempting to dance. Now, without any doubt, an elephant could dance after an elephantine fashion; but surely you would never catch him going through the movements of a jig or a Virginia "breakdown." He never lets you forget that he is an elephant. So with De Quincey. Levity is an element farthest removed from his ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... as the eyes of the hawk, took note of this paper, and had caught more than one stray word that stood out in larger and bolder characters than its neighbours, before his brother could fold it; for it is not an easy thing for a man to fold an elephantine sheet of cartridge when he is nervously anxious to fold it quickly, and is conscious that the eyes of an observant ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... went on. It was a remarkable sight—a long procession of "Tommies," burghers, carts, and the naval gun, 18 feet long, an elephantine one when compared with our ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen
... they could not kill. When Rama saw no arms might slay The fiend who like a mountain lay, The glorious hero, swift to save In danger, thus his counsel gave: "O Prince of men, his charmed life No arms may take in battle strife: Now dig we in this grove a pit His elephantine bulk to fit, And let the hollowed earth enfold The monster of ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... suburbs of this village, as good fortune would have it, an empty baggage-wagon bound for the metropolis turned into the main road from a side one. Immediately Israel limps most deplorably, and begs the driver to give a poor cripple a lift. So up he climbs; but after a time, finding the gait of the elephantine draught-horses intolerably slow, Israel craves permission to dismount, when, throwing away his crutch, he takes nimbly to his legs, much to the surprise of ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... chance guess that they were bound upon an orluk hunt proved correct, and Talu had said that the chances were ten to one that such would be the mission of any party leaving Kadabra by the pass through which we entered the valley, since that way leads directly to the vast plains frequented by this elephantine beast of prey. ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... now, the place of the elephantine black horse and the little tram cars and the man was taken by the masts of ships lying beyond. They rose straight and tall, their cordage like spider webs, in a succession of regular spaces until ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... but the Blight had heard much talk of moonshine stills and mountain feuds and the men who run them and I took the risk of denying her nothing. Up and up we went, those two mules swaying from side to side with a motion little short of elephantine and, by and ...
— A Knight of the Cumberland • John Fox Jr.
... to you in that case is, make love to some young lady, directly you reach England; and marry her in a month, before you have begun to assume elephantine proportions. Once hooked, you know, she cannot sue for divorce, on the ground that you have taken her in; and she will have to put up with you, whatever size ...
— Through Three Campaigns - A Story of Chitral, Tirah and Ashanti • G. A. Henty
... ponderosity of frame, not pulpy, like the looser development of our few fat women, but massive with solid beef and streaky tallow; so that (though struggling manfully against the idea) you inevitably think of her as made up of steaks and sirloins. When she walks, her advance is elephantine. When she sits down it is on a great round space of her Maker's footstool, where she looks as if nothing could ever move her. She imposes awe and respect by the muchness of her personality, to such a degree that you probably credit her with far greater moral and ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... of my life, Your ample waist Just fits the gown I fancy for my wife, And suits my taste; Yet there you stand, flat-footed, square and deep, An unresponsive, elephantine heap, Coquetting with the stars while ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... in his usual deliberate, elephantine way. Kate made no sign till he was seated, then she asked what the ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... many of them, am by no means fond of the company of lepers. Indeed, I wish that they would never enter my shop, as they occasionally do to beg. Nothing is more infectious, as I have heard, than leprosy: there is one very virulent species, however, which is particularly dreaded here, the elephantine: those who die of it should, according to law, be burnt, and their ashes scattered to the winds: for if the body of such a leper be interred in the field of the dead, the disorder is forthwith communicated ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... any others. She has modelled the wave-slicing clipper which outsails all your argosies and armadas. She has revolutionized naval warfare once by the steamboat. She has revolutionized it a second time by planting towers of iron on the elephantine backs of the waves. She has invented the sewing-machine to save the dainty fingers of your virtuous grisettes from uncongenial toil, so that Fifine and Fretillon may have more leisure for self-development. She has taught you a whole new system ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... had undergone a change. He had become suave and unctuous, a kind of elephantine irony pervading his laborious attempts at conciliation. He and the Public Prosecutor would be severely blamed for this day's work, if the popular Deputy, relying upon the support of the people of Paris, chose to take ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... period, which extended over two hundred years, we have but one historical document, the Book of Esther, to acquaint us with the conditions of the main body of the Jewish people. The fortunate find, a few years back, of a hoard of Aramaic papyri at Elephantine has given us an unexpected acquaintance with the conditions of the Jewish colony in Upper Egypt during the fifth and fourth centuries, and furnished a new chapter in the history of the Diaspora. But this is an archeological substitute ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... of Tesla. In the back of his brain the city tumbled—an elephantine grimace, a wilderness of angles, a swarm of gestures that beat at his thought. But before his eyes there were no longer the precise patterns of another day. He was no longer outside. He had been sucked into something, the something that ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... his clumsy, elephantine way, showing that, despite Merkle's recent insinuations, he still trusted her. "This is the only woman who ever cared for me, John," he explained, after some hesitation, "and we're going to stick together. We have ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... a real Professor of my acquaintance, who is anything but a fool, I should imagine not. But in that case I am all the more mystified by the incredibly weak fight which he makes in the play in answer to the elephantine sophistries of Undershaft. It is really a disgraceful case, and almost the only case in Shaw of there being no fair fight between the two sides. For instance, the Professor mentions pity. Mr. Undershaft ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... what sex is, of whether it alters this or that, and why, anymore than there is any imaginative grip of the humor and heart of the populace in the popular education. There is nothing but plodding, elaborate, elephantine imitation. And just as in the case of elementary teaching, the cases are of a cold and reckless inappropriateness. Even a savage could see that bodily things, at least, which are good for a man are very likely to be bad for a woman. Yet there is no boy's ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... personal flavour which we call mannerism? To speak of authors well known to all readers—Does not The Rambler taste of Johnson; The Decline and Fall, of Gibbon; The Middle Ages, of Hallam; The History of England, of Macaulay; and The Invasion of the Crimea, of Kinglake? Do we not know the elephantine tread of The Saturday, and the precise toe of The Spectator? I have sometimes thought that Swift has been nearest to the mark of any,—writing English and not writing Swift. But I doubt whether an accurate observer would not trace even here the "mark of the ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... "At Elephantine they worshipped the figure of a man in a sitting posture, painted blue, having the head of a ram, and the horns of a goat which encompassed a disk; all which represented the sun and moon's conjunction at the sign of the ram; the blue color denoting the power ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... with the air peculiar to military Germans, of men who are going to be amused. They said nothing—did not smile—but strode straight forward, three abreast, swinging their kibokos with a sort of elephantine sporty air. They were men of all heights and thicknesses, but each alike impressed me with the Prussian military mold that leaves a man no imagination of his own, and no virtue, but only an animal respect for whatever can make to suffer, or ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... I must try to call him when Raffles is not varnishing my tale, looked a very big man at his enormous desk, but by no means so elephantine as at the tiny table in the Savoy Restaurant a month earlier. His privations had not only reduced his bulk to the naked eye, but made him look ten years younger. He wore the habiliments of a gentleman; ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... learnt from him his lofty monotheism. Doubt was thrown in the last century upon the continuance of the Diaspora in Egypt between the time of Jeremiah and Alexander, but the recent discovery of a Jewish temple at Elephantine and of Aramaic papyri at Assouan dated in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E. has proved that these doubts were not well founded, and that there was a well-established community ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... of mild flirtation. Some of us knew some of them, and in such happy case there followed interchange of pretty pleasantries. Your English middle-class young man and woman are not adepts at the game of flirtation. I will confess that our methods were, perhaps, elephantine, that we may have grown a trifle noisy as the evening wore on. But we meant no evil; we did but our best to enjoy ourselves, to give enjoyment, to make the too brief ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... their outward aspects may differ, they are of the same blood and know it. A featherweight bantam cock will stand up to an elephantine brahma and fight him according to the rules of the ring and next minute pay compliments to his lady in language which she will be at no loss to understand. And if the artificial conditions of their life were removed, they would soon all lapse alike to the image of the ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... Knight of the Sun, &c., or hearing such tales of [5090]lovers, descriptions of their persons, lascivious discourses, such as Astyanassa, Helen's waiting-woman, by the report of Suidas, writ of old, de variis concubitus modis, and after her Philenis and Elephantine; or those light tracts of [5091]Aristides Milesius (mentioned by Plutarch) and found by the Persians in Crassus' army amongst the spoils, Aretine's dialogues, with ditties, love songs, &c., must needs set them on fire, with such like ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... same crevice of the curtain where, only a little while before, the urchin of elephantine appetite had peeped, the butcher beheld the inner door, not closed, as the child had seen it, but ajar, and almost wide open. However it might have happened, it was the fact. Through the passage-way there was a dark vista into the lighter but still obscure interior of the parlor. It appeared ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... playfully at all this show and splendour. His good humour was of the elephantine order, and belied the drawn anxiety of his eyes. Luxurious and peaceful as the scene was, there seemed to Chris to be a touch of electricity in the air, the suggestion of something about to happen. Littimer ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... go into a strange Hotel and sit down at the Breakfast Table and say: "Please pass the Syrup" in a Tone that had all the majestic Significance of an Official Utterance. He would sit there in silent Meditation. Those who sized up that elephantine Form and noted the Gravity of his Countenance and the fluted Wrinkles on his high Brow, imagined that he was pondering on the Immortality of the Soul. As a matter of fact, Jim was wondering whether he would take Ham ...
— People You Know • George Ade
... Letstrayed wouldn't look very well in print," I began; "but it's easy enough to see what happened. The old dope fell asleep, so, of course, as soon as Budd heard those elephantine snores, he sneaked out from his hiding-place under the hay and tied him up with the ropes while he slept, took his revolver away from him, shot it off twice out of pure bravado, and then beat it for ...
— The Adventures of the Eleven Cuff-Buttons • James Francis Thierry
... quite equal to that more famous one of Carlyle's; with historical chapters, such as those in "Blackwood" on the Caesars, worthy of Gibbon; with searching criticisms, such as one on the knocking in Macbeth, and two series on Landor and Schlosser; with the elephantine humor of his lectures on "Murder, considered as one of the fine arts;" and with the deep theological insight of his papers on Christianity, considered as a means of social progress, and on the Essenes. In fact, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... indeed, proved at once so refreshing and so absorbing that he went leisurely, lengthening out the process of production until it came nearer covering the thirty months of elephantine gestation than ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... suppose at some funny canine joke or other, which he could not permit me to share—or else, darting backwards and forwards, gleefully barking and making sundry feints and dashes at me; or, prancing up in his elephantine bounds, with felonious intentions regarding my walking stick, which he considered he had a much better right ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... and going to the mantelshelf, brought a box of matches, one of which she struck, holding it to the end of his cigar. When he had lighted it, he captured her wrist with elephantine playfulness. ...
— Enter Bridget • Thomas Cobb
... amazement he was in when he realized the fact that Major Buckley of the —th was actually towering aloft under the chandelier, and looking round for some one to address! With what elephantine politeness and respect did he show the Major into a private parlour, sweeping off at one round nearly a dozen pint-pots that covered the table, and then, shutting the door, stand bowing and smiling before ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... not Tenu believe that it belongs to thee like thy dogs. Behold this flight that I have made: I did not have it in my heart; it was like the leading of a dream, as a man of Adehi (Delta) sees himself in Abu (Elephantine), as a man of the plain of Egypt who sees himself in the deserts. There was no fear, there was no hastening after me, I did not listen to an evil plot, my name was not heard in the mouth of the magistrate; but my limbs went, my feet wandered, ...
— Egyptian Tales, First Series • ed. by W. M. Flinders Petrie
... certainly blanch at the use to which her name has latterly been put; the kindest thing that has been said about it is that there is probably a good small language screaming to get out from inside its vast, {elephantine} bulk. ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... they took the St. Bernard with them. The sense of freedom which this playful beast felt upon being let loose in our extensive yard proved wholly uncontrollable, and while the Baylors were investigating the sink question the amiable leviathan gallivanted about the premises with that elephantine exuberance which is to be expected of a St. Bernard one year old and weighing one hundred and seventy-five pounds. Adah (who has an eye to the beautiful) had planted a vast number of nasturtiums and red geraniums, and under one of the oak trees had trained numerous graceful, ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... straighten his tie, and grabbing his coat from Bickley, who handed it to him with a malicious smile, forced his perspiring arms into it in a peculiarly awkward and elephantine fashion. ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... recollection of a supple, expressive, un-English bow, and of a deftness of phrase compared with which Trenby's laboured compliment savoured of the elephantine. Swiftly she dismissed the memory, irritably chasing it from her mind, for was it not five long, black, incomprehensible weeks since Peter had vanished from her ken? From the day of the bridge-party at the Edenhall flat, she had neither seen nor heard from ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... mylodon among South American forests—a vast sleepy mass, my elephantine limbs and yard-long talons contrasting strangely with the little meek rabbit's head, furnished with a poor dozen of clumsy grinders, and a very small kernel of brains, whose highest consciousness was the enjoyment ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... classic stiffness and straightness of the First French Empire distinguished the gilded chairs and tables in the drawing-room. There were statues by Chantrey and Canova in the spacious lofty hall; portraits by Lawrence and Romney in the dining-room; a historical picture by Copley over the elephantine mahogany sideboard; a Greek ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... army. Like unto a furious prince of lions of sportive gait, or like the great Indra himself with (earthly) body on the Earth, beholding that invincible Vrikodara, like unto a proud leader of an elephantine herd, stationed in the van (of the army), the warriors on thy side, their strength weakened by fear, began to tremble ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... read, the month's Six Selling Best The Bookman scored with elephantine Jest, Have sold a half a Million in a Year, Yet no one ever heard ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Cayenne • Gelett Burgess
... of mind were against the chances of such an explosion. Selden's calmness seemed rather to harden into resistance, and Miss Bart's into a surface of glittering irony, as they faced each other from the opposite corners of one of Mrs. Hatch's elephantine sofas. The sofa in question, and the apartment peopled by its monstrous mates, served at length to suggest the ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... rere lower down are two additional protuberances, suggestive of potent rectum and tumescent for palpation, which leave nothing to be desired save compactness. Such fleshy parts are the product of careful nurture. When coopfattened their livers reach an elephantine size. Pellets of new bread with fennygreek and gumbenjamin swamped down by potions of green tea endow them during their brief existence with natural pincushions of quite colossal blubber. That suits your ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... your honeymoon," said the lawyer, digging his client in the ribs with elephantine playfulness; "the moon must be in her first quarter, I should think. Go along with you, and leave me to tackle Mr. ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... of Adamant, fair Neophytes— Who thirst for such instruction as we give, Attend, while I unfold a parable. The elephant is mightier than Man, Yet Man subdues him. Why? The elephant Is elephantine everywhere but here (tapping her forehead), And Man, whose brain is to the elephant's As Woman's brain to Man's - (that's rule of three),— Conquers the foolish giant of the woods, As Woman, in her ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... passed rapidly through my mind, and were accompanied with myriads of others. I bethought me of every thing connected with Mr. Tims—his love for Julia—his elephantine dimensions, and his shadow, huge and imposing as the image of the moon against the orb of day, during an eclipse. Then I was transported away to the Arctic sea, where I saw him floundering many a rood, "hugest of those that swim the ocean stream." Then he was ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 13, No. 359, Saturday, March 7, 1829. • Various
... look of speechless indignation and reproach. If she had only supported him! If she had only realised what a beauty she was in contrast with the other women! As superior as he knew himself to be to that little Cobbens, or to the bland and elephantine husband ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... too, left the house and directed his steps toward the far end of the garden, where a small gate led directly into the street at the end of which he dwelt. There! Again Frau Kahle and uncouth, elephantine Lieutenant Pommer! The May bowl, he thought, has been too strong for his addled brain. And he stepped silently aside on the velvety sward, under the clump of lilacs. The nightingale, from the centre of a ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... was about the size of an average child of three years, and Madame Celestina Morella, the queen of fat women, who was credited on the bills with a weight of five hundred and eighty seven pounds. She was certainly massive, but probably fell short a hundred and fifty pounds of these elephantine proportions. ...
— The Young Acrobat of the Great North American Circus • Horatio Alger Jr.
... lighting, and the dust in the streets is laid by a real street sprinkler, and not by throwing the water on from a leathern bag, as I saw it in Damascus. The Cataract Hotel is a large place for tourists, with a capacity of three hundred and fifty people. The Savoy Hotel is beautifully located on Elephantine Island, in front of the town. To the south of the town lie the ancient granite quarries of Syene, which furnished the Egyptian workmen building material so long ago, and still lack a great deal of being exhausted. I saw an obelisk lying here which is said ...
— A Trip Abroad • Don Carlos Janes
... president; else we should hear a most horrible snarling! They have come from the deep woods, and the wild mountains, and the desert sands, and the polar snows, only to do homage to my little Annie. As we enter among them, the great elephant makes us a bow, in the best style of elephantine courtesy, bending lowly down his mountain bulk, with trunk abased, and leg thrust out behind. Annie returns the salute, much to the gratification of the elephant, who is certainly the best-bred monster in the caravan. The lion and the lioness are busy with two beef- ...
— Little Annie's Ramble (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... one clerical twister of language began, and another wrote with the painful and elephantine lightness which was the Puritan idea of humor, an epitaph which may serve as sufficient illustration of the whole unutterably dreary ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... mind to go into the concientious scruples business on my own account! Have I any right to be a party to fettering poor airy fairy little Miss Butterfly, with a heavy iron chain for life and always, to this great lumbering elephantine moral Ernest? Am I justified in tying the cable round her dainty little neck with a silken thread, and then fastening it round his big leg with rivets of hardened steel on the patent Bessemer process? If a couple of persons, duly called by banns in their own respective parishes, ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... waddling uncertainly up the walk, with a certain elephantine effort at jauntiness, he nearly collided with the foreign lady who had crossed his path to reach the further limits of the terrace. Not having a cautioning horn attached to his anatomy to warn heedless trespassers from his way, the large person was forced ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... and nearer, nearer, slowly yet hurriedly, now stopping to cough and gasp, now taking a few steps by elephantine assault. I should have enjoyed the situation if it had not been for poor Faustina in the cave; as it was I was filled with nameless fears. But I could not resist giving that grampus Corbucci one bad moment on account. A crazy hand-rail ran up one wall, ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... new little trunk was put into it, hung the new little satchel up on the wall, showed her how to bolt the door at night, shook hands with her for good-by (good-bys have really no significance for sisters), and left her there. After a while the bells all rang, and the boat, in the awkward elephantine fashion of boats, got into midstream. The chambermaid found her sitting on the chair in the state-room where the sisters had left her, and showed her how to sit on a chair in the saloon. And there she sat until the captain ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... sacred to the baby's slumbers. At six months having, as yet, had none of the diseases supposed to be inevitable, the boy weighed thirty pounds. Then the stately Peter came again into requisition, and in his strong arms the child spent many of his waking hours. Peter, with a long, elephantine gait, slowly wandered over the town, lingering especially in the busy marts of trade. Peter's curiosity had strengthened with years, and, wherever a crowd gathered round a monkey and hand organ, a vender's wagon, an auction stand, or the ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... is such a cry for naturalism in other arts—we have Millet instead of Claude; we have Zola instead of Georges Sand; we have Dumas fils instead of Corneille; we have Mercie instead of Canova; but in music we have precisely the reverse, and we have the elephantine creations, the elaborate and pompous combinations of Baireuth, and the Tone school, instead of the old sweet strains of melody that went straight and clear to the ear and the heart of man. Sometimes my enemies write in their journals that I sing as ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... the task of turning little Wolf from a pest into something approaching a decent canine citizen. It was no sinecure, this educating of the hot-tempered and undisciplined youngster. But Lad brought to it an elephantine patience and an uncannily wise brain. And, by the time Lady was brought back, cured, the puppy had begun to show the results ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... would say; no illustrious steeple, no imposing tower; the water-edge of the town looking bedraggled, like the flounce of a vulgar rich woman's dress that trails on the sidewalk. The New Ironsides lies at one of the wharves, elephantine in bulk and color, her sides narrowing as they rise, like the walls ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... you do for your doctor, or for Harsanyi. I suppose you would have felt quite all right about it, because that relation has a name in good standing. To me, that seems—sickening!" He took a rapid turn about the room and then as Thea remained standing, he rolled one of the elephantine chairs up to the ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... cloistered galleries of the court-yard Clarence sometimes felt himself borne down by the protecting weight of this paternal hand; in the midnight silence of the dormitory he fancied he was often conscious of the soft browsing tread and snuffly muffled breathing of his elephantine-footed mentor. ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... a very charming self it was, so charming, indeed, that even James forgot his learning and the responsibilities of his noble profession and talked, like an ordinary Christian. Indeed, he even went so far as to pay her an elephantine compliment; but as it was three sentences long, and divided into points, it shall not be ...
— Mr. Meeson's Will • H. Rider Haggard
... sight of a young girl who had just arrived in a great state of excitement. She was dressed in dazzling finery, and carrying something in a basket. The boy sprang on to the dock wall, and created much merriment with his elephantine caresses. They shouted to him from the vessel to jump aboard or he would lose his passage. He made a running spring for the main rigging as she was being towed from her berth. A wild cheer went up from the crowd when they saw the smart ...
— Looking Seaward Again • Walter Runciman
... corn-coloured beard turned unwaveringly toward the compass, and his sea-blue eyes fastened upon the west-southwest line. And the face of the compass, in its round copper case, notwithstanding the vessel's elephantine leaps and bounds, never deviated ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... expert with the sewing-machine, and was very efficient help; and even Tulee, though far from skilful with her needle, contrived to make dozens of hospital slippers, which it was the pride of her heart to deliver to the ladies of the Commission. Chloe added her quota of socks, often elephantine in shape, and sometimes oddly decorated with red tops and toes; but with a blessing for "the boys in blue" running through all the threads. There is no need to say how eagerly they watched for letters, and what a relief it was to recognize the writing of beloved ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... him "good for service," for the door opened into a brightly lighted drawing-room into which he followed Arthur Papillon, like a frail sloop towed in by an imposing three-master, and behold the timid Amedee presented in due form to the mistress of the house! She was a lady of elephantine proportions, in her sixtieth year, and wore a white camellia stuck in her rosewood-colored hair. Her face and arms were plastered with enough flour to make a plate of fritters; but for all that, she had a grand air and superb eyes, whose ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... his mewing little laugh, and heard him say, with the elephantine archness affected by ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... as she crossed the parlor and passed the door to Sarah's bedroom, through the thin wood of which came elephantine moanings and low slubberings, she steeled herself to keep the color in her cheeks and the brightness in her eyes. And so well did she succeed that Billy never dreamed that the radiant, live young thing, tripping lightly down the steps to him, had just come ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... reading for all," with Robert Browning, Charles Kingsley and Monckton Milnes among its contributors. Thinking they had a market, an enterprising publisher rushed out a volume, The Lectures of Lola Montez. When a copy reached the editor, it was reviewed in characteristically elephantine ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... not move on at once, the battle began, and then the stranger usually moved on very rapidly. Snap sometimes got worsted, but no amount of sad experience could ever inspire him with a grain of caution. Once, while riding in a cab during the Dog Show, Snap caught sight of an elephantine St. Bernard taking an airing. Its size aroused such enthusiasm in the Pup's little breast that he leaped from the cab window to do battle, ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... curious structure, and one that will repay the trouble of microscopic examination. In the figure the profile is seen, the large compound eye at the side and the long curved tongue, so elephantine-looking in form, though of minute size, is seen unrolled as it is when about to be inserted into flowers to pump up the honey-juice. This little piece of insect apparatus is a mass of muscles and sensitive nerves comprising a machine ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 508, September 26, 1885 • Various
... an idea of barbarism; much more so than the Assyrian collection. About the winged bulls there is a solemn and imposing grandeur; they have a mountainous and majestic nature. These Egyptian things give one an idea of inexpressible ungainliness. They had a clumsy, elephantine character of mind, these Egyptians. There was not wanting grace, but they seemed to pick it up accidentally; because among all possible forms some must be graceful. They had a kind of grand, mammoth civilization, gloomy and goblin. They seem to have floundered up out of Nile mud, like that ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... sigh of relief. He was more at his ease sitting than standing. For the first time in his life he was ashamed of his size. Angela's delicate limbs and hands made his, by contrast, appear elephantine. ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... tortoise, it never budged from the beginning of the conflict to the end. Once, indeed, by strewing dandelion heads in the direction of the enemy's ground she induced him to advance, and at the cry of 'Forward, MacPeters!' he put forth a lazy leg, and with elephantine dignity led the attack, on the way to his favourite food. But (in spite of the fable) his slow pace was against him, and in the ensuing melee he was ...
— Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... ago have left his shaggy coat, but the earmarks still are there, the ponderous strength, the elephantine dignity. His eyes are dull,—never were bright,—but they seem not vacant, and most often fixed on the Golden Gate where the ...
— Monarch, The Big Bear of Tallac • Ernest Thompson Seton
... he was very fond, and sugar-cane. He was a great wonder to the elephant, who could never understand why his pockets were full of all sorts of uneatable things. He loved to go through them, slowly considering each in his elephantine way. The bright metal handle of Alec's pocket-knife pleased Maharaj, and it was always the first thing he abstracted from the pocket and the last he returned, but the bits of string and the ball of wax he worried over. The key of the pigeon-house, ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... believe, at other hours also, by a machine drawn by one of the powerful dray-horses of this country. Whenever an unusually large and fine horse of this breed is produced in the country, he is sent to the London market, and remarkable animals they are, of a height and stature almost elephantine, large-limbed, slow-paced, shaggy-footed, sweeping the ground with their fetlocks, each huge foot armed with a shoe weighing from five to six pounds. One of these strong creatures is harnessed to a street-cleaning machine, which consists of brushes turning over a cylinder and sweeping the dust ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... truism, that the Boers could not long stand up to a British bombardment; and it was an accepted dogma that lyddite was the article utilised to knock them down. We had read and heard (and magnified) much of what lyddite could do; our ideas of its decimating powers were elephantine—and white at that. Sometimes we pitied the Boers; but were not cognisant, of course, in such weak moments, of the disinfecting qualities of bottled vinegar; we did not then know that a portable cruet formed part and parcel of each burgher's kit. It did not need a protest from General Joubert ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... stupor, a half dream, during which I saw visions of astounding character. Monsters of the deep were side by side with the mighty elephantine shepherd. Gigantic fish and animals seemed to ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... Court sword, beating against legs for which the designer was certainly not responsible. First came Gazan; his hat was tilted awry by the bumps of his skull, and the vegetable green of the coat threw into relief the earthy colour and scaly texture of his elephantine visage. At his side was the grim tall Laniboire with purple apoplectic veins and a crooked mouth. His uniform was covered by an overcoat whose insufficient length left visible the end of his sword ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... spoke, and said that Herodotus himself declared that he could not believe that story; but the priest regarded me not. And he said that Herodotus had never caught a crocodile with cold pig, nor did he ever visit Assyria, nor Babylon, nor Elephantine; but, saying that he had been in these lands, said that which was not true. He also declared that Herodotus, when he travelled, knew none of the Fat Ones of the Egyptians, but only those of the baser sort. And ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... of her early impressions was naturally that of the house in which she was to live. It was big and roomy; it was detached, and thus open to light and air. But its elephantine woodwork repelled her, for she had grown up amid the rococo exuberances of Paris apartments. The heavy honesty of black-walnut depressed her after the gilded stucco of her mother's salon. And that huge, portentous orchestrion took up such an immensity ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... I don't think I've ever liked you so much as then. I think you're really much more interesting when you're elephantine. It was quite glorious the way you were planning to go galumphing over all ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... clerk an extravagant fee. ... What's that? you rat, don't try to interrupt me. Don't try to bully me. It never succeeds. Montague Nevitt, I tell you, I WON'T be bullied." And the great Q.C. put his foot down on the path with an elephantine solidity that made the prospect of bullying him seem tolerably unlikely. "I know the facts, and I'll stand no prevarication. Now, tell me, what vile use did you mean to make of your ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... Procopius, Persic. l. i. c. 19. The altar of national concern, of annual sacrifice and oaths, which Diocletian had created in the Isla of Elephantine, was demolished by Justinian with less ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... towards the end of that six months that the event took place which was to restore Sir Oliver to liberty. In the meanwhile those limbs of his which had ever been vigorous beyond the common wont had acquired an elephantine strength. It was ever thus at the oar. Either you died under the strain, or your thews and sinews grew to be equal to their relentless task. Sir Oliver in those six months was become a man of steel and iron, impervious to fatigue, ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... the man, machine, or incident that will make any army laugh after over two months of battle. Individuals were always laughing over incidents; but here hundreds of thousands of men were to see a new style of animal perform elephantine tricks. The price of admission to the theater was the risk of a charge in their company, and the prospect gave increased zest to battalions taking their place for next day's action. What would happen to the tanks? What would they ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... the number of digits had been reduced to four in the fore-foot and three in the hind, but there the reduction stops, for the increasing body-weight made necessary the development of broad and heavy feet. The final members of the series comprise only large, almost elephantine animals, with immensely developed and very various nasal horns, huge and massive heads, and altogether a grotesque appearance. The growth of the brain did not at all keep pace with the increase of the head and body, and the ludicrously small ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... elephantine smile; and then I perceived it was a form of humour with him (or rather, a cheap substitute) to speak of his elder relations by their abbreviated Christian names, without any prefix. 'Marmy's doing very well, thank yah; as well as could be expected. In fact, bettah. ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... down very carefully the broken toy he had been playing with. Peter's elephantine tread was so great that it had almost overstepped its victim. At all events Aymer gave no outward sign that he felt it except in his deepened colour and a faint straightening of ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... of the pretty Parthenon with the sublimity of Virginia Water—to vanish into its own intensely blue sky; disclosing the "Harlequin House that Jack built," and Mr. John Bull's huge paste-board thick head, snoring like thunder, in a "property" summer-house—an elephantine blue-bottle on his proboscis, and a sleeping bull-dog, the size of an Alderney steer, at his feet;—here Master Brown, with a grin, calls the house Victoria Villa, and the paste-board mask his papa. Now enters ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... at Sais, in Egypt. He, indeed, seemed to be trifling with me when he said he knew perfectly well; yet his account was as follows: "That there are two mountains, rising into a sharp peak, situated between the city of Syene, in Thebais, and Elephantine. The names of these mountains are the one Crophi, the other Mophi; that the sources of the Nile, which are bottomless, flow from between these mountains and that half of the water flows over Egypt and to the north, the other half ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... grass, was on his hands and knees, searching. He accomplished a complete circuit of the body, his round-shouldered, stooping figure making grotesque, elephantine shadows under the light of the torch as he moved about slowly, not trusting his eyes, but feeling with his hands every inch of the ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... artists. As the old fable truly says, lions do not make statues; even the cunning of the fox can go no further than the accomplishment of leaving an exact model of the vulpine paw: and even that is an accomplishment which he wishes he hadn't got. There are Chryselephantine statues, but no purely elephantine ones. And, though we speak in a general way of an elephant trumpeting, it is only by human blandishments that he can be induced to play the drum. But man, savage or civilised, simple or complex always desires to see his own soul outside himself; in some material ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... the Cape, and along its face are three creeks or bays, deep inlets showing through their narrow entrances smooth beaches of yellow sand, fenced inland by the forest of cotton-woods and palms, with here and there an elephantine baobab. ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... the habits of a life and the traditions of his rank, he practised the remedy with benefit. His corpulence is now portable; you would call him lusty rather than fat; but his gait is still dull, stumbling, and elephantine. He neither stops nor hastens, but goes about his business with an implacable deliberation. We could never see him and not be struck with his extraordinary natural means for the theatre: a beaked profile like Dante's in the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... men whom she would see, and upon her death in 1789, he was the only male friend to whom her husband turned for consolation. Miss Fox seems to have been the only woman who inspired Bentham with a sentiment approaching to passion. He wrote occasional letters to the ladies in the tone of elephantine pleasantry natural to one who was all his life both a philosopher and a child.[235] He made an offer of marriage to Miss Fox in 1805, when he was nearer sixty than fifty, and when they had not met for sixteen years. The immediate ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... stood in his moccasins, yet seemed not tall, so broad he was and ponderously thick. He had an elephantine leg, with a foot like a black-oak wedge; a chimpanzean arm, with a fist like a black-oak maul; eyes as large and placid as those of an ox; teeth as large and even as those of a horse; skin that was not skin, ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... decade of the Nineteenth century the Frenchman De Morgan has made marvellous discoveries in the Elamite lands. What a noble passion those Frenchmen have for discovery! For Egypt did not Napoleon provide the most elephantine books of monuments and records that printing-presses have yet issued? And from that time to this have not Frenchmen held the primacy in excavations until, even while England holds and rules Egypt, she leaves, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... the teapot; and when they found it, they couldn't make out what had become of the lid, which, turning up at last and being fixed on to the teapot, couldn't be got off again for the pouring in of more water. Fleas of elephantine dimensions were gambolling boldly in the dirty beds; and the mosquitoes!—But let me here draw a curtain (as I would have done if there had been any). We had scarcely any sleep, and rose up with hands and ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... from! Having called a celestial, it is not, however, proper to send him away in vain. Thy intention, O blessed one, it is to have from Surya a son furnished with a coat of mail and ear-rings, and who in point of prowess would be beyond compare in this world! Do thou, therefore, O damsel of elephantine gait, surrender thy person to me! Thou shall then have, O lady, a son after thy wish! O gentle girl, O thou of sweet smiles, I will go back after having known thee! If thou do not gratify me to-day by obeying ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... Held a war-council, sent his provost-marshal, And gave the animals a call impartial— Each, in his way, to serve his high command. The Elephant should carry on his back The tools of war, the mighty public pack, And fight in elephantine way and form; The Bear should hold himself prepared to storm; The Fox all secret stratagems should fix; The Monkey should amuse the foe by tricks. "Dismiss," said one, "the blockhead Asses, And Hares, too cowardly and fleet." "No," said the King; "I use all classes; Without their aid ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various
... to invade Egypt, the eternal rival of the Mesopotamian kings. Herodotus devotes his second book to a description of the marvels of Egypt, through which he travelled as far as Elephantine on the border of Ethiopia. He opens with a plain proof that Egypt is not the most ancient people, for some children were kept apart during their first two years, nobody being allowed to speak with them. They were then heard to ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... were not as numerous then as now, but there were quite enough of them to publish caricatures of me and of my horses. It goes without saying that, profiting by the latitude allowed to caricature, I was represented as of elephantine bulk and appearance, like the god Ganesa, the Hindoo god of wisdom, and that my ponies were shown as no larger than poodles, rats, or mice. It is also true that I could readily enough have carried my pair one under each arm, and taken the ...
— My Private Menagerie - from The Works of Theophile Gautier Volume 19 • Theophile Gautier
... so early that I shall not have it in my power to bid farewell to any one. Unless, indeed," with a glance at Beauclerk, meant, perhaps, to be coquettish, but so elephantine in its proportions as to be almost anything in the world but that, "some of my friends may wish to see ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... time the Ethiopians, who dwell beyond Egypt, advanced as far as the city called Elephantine, with Candace as their leader, ravaging the whole region that they traversed. On learning that Gaius[1] Petronius, the governor of Egypt, was approaching and somewhere near, they hastily retreated hoping ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. 4 • Cassius Dio
... followed stealthily, or as stealthily as the fact that he had not even taken a correspondence course in creeping allowed. And profiting by earlier mistakes, he did succeed in making far less noise than before. In place of his former somewhat elephantine method of progression he adopted a species of shuffle which had excellent results, for it enabled him to brush twigs away instead of stepping flatfootedly on them. The new method was slow, but it ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... though I could have suggested another title to the ownership of dogs—a very common one, too, and good enough till the proper person comes interfering. Boys' dogs are generally held under this tenure. My companion, seeing me at fault, remarked with elephantine waggishness, ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... tame. He lacked altogether the fire, high-wrought nobility of sentiment, and sense of form essential for tragic art. On the other hand, Alfieri composed some comedies before his death which were devoid of humour, grace, and lightness. A strange elephantine eccentricity is their utmost claim to comic character. Indeed, the temper of Alfieri, ever in extremes, led him even to exaggerate the qualities of tragedy. He carried its severity to a pitch of dulness and monotony. His chiaroscuro was too strong; virtue and ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... used to such delicate elephantine compliments. It is just like a man, Miss Benson, to try to kill two birds with one stone —get rid of a rival by sacrificing a useless friend. All the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... The Elephantine papyri have shown that the early Jews of the Diaspora, though untrammeled by the orthodoxy of Jerusalem, maintained the purity of their local cult in the face of considerable difficulties. Hence the gravestones of their Aramaean contemporaries, ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... sympathies—one may say simply fineness of nature. This is, of course, compatible with heroic bodily strength and mental firmness; in fact, heroic strength is not conceivable without such delicacy. Elephantine strength may drive its way through a forest, and feel no touch of the boughs, but the white skin of Homer's Atrides would have felt a bent rose leaf, yet subdue its feelings in glow of battle, and behave itself like iron. I do not mean ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... respects will hardly be denied.[339] The field hand of the plantation of the far South doubtless retained many of his most primitive savage traits. Olmsted, an unprejudiced observer, describes him as on the average a very poor and a very bad creature, "clumsy, awkward, gross and elephantine in movement ... sly, sensual and shameless in expression and demeanor." "He seems to be but an imperfect man, incapable of taking care of himself in a civilized manner, and his presence in large numbers must be considered a dangerous ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... one eye blinded and its long fur smouldering, its rage gave way suddenly into panic. Lifting its giant head high into the air, as if thus to escape its fiery assailants, it turned and scuttled back the way it had come, while the old men swarmed after it, belaboring and jabbing its elephantine ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... forth like a Bennu bird, and to utter words. I have been in the water of the stream, and I have made offerings of incense. I have guided myself to the Shentet tree of the [divine] children. I have been in Abu (or Abu, i.e., Elephantine[?]) in the Temple of the goddess Satet. I have submerged the boat of mine enemies [while] I myself have sailed over the Lake in the Neshmet boat. I have seen the Sahu (i.e., the spiritual bodies) [in] the city of Qem-ur. I ...
— Egyptian Literature
... hour, yesterday, with A. W. Lamb, who was not married when I saw him last. He married a young lady whom I knew. And now I have been talking with their grown-up sons and daughters. Lieutenant Hickman, the spruce young handsomely-uniformed volunteer of 1846, called on me—a grisly elephantine patriarch of 65 now, his grace ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... elephantine playfulness, stretched out his arms to ravish a kiss; but as it required no great agility to elude him, his fair enslaver had vanished before he closed them again; upon which the apathetic youth ate a pound or so of steak with a sentimental ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... have long passed the mental stage at which old John Willet had arrived when he was discovered sitting in his chair in the dismantled bar of the Maypole after the rioters had visited his hostelry. He is apparently unconscious of discomfort when crushed up or partially sat upon by his elephantine colleague, ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... alterations make the hero of the poem a thoroughly incongruous figure, and greatly injure the general design. The poem appeared in this form in 1743, with a ponderous prefatory discourse by Ricardus Aristarchus, contributed by the faithful Warburton, and illustrating his ponderous vein of elephantine pleasantry. ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... because he understood that the Germans were coming. He had not seen them; but when the gun fell silent he heard whining sounds in the air, as if from a litter of elephantine puppies. Sometimes the twigs of trees fell on him, the dirt in front of him flew up into his face; and always, of course, everywhere about him was that roar of bursting shells which he had come to accept ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... despised the wretched JOE, My fag at school, your butt at College. Dull, elephantine, pompous, slow, Choked ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., January 3, 1891. • Various
... candlesticks, a pack of cards, a loaf of bread, a pair of boots, a bunch of cigars, and some clay pipes (the only things, by the way, rendered utterly hors de combat in the assault). But one piece of furniture retained its attitude, and that was the elephantine bedstead, which nothing short of an earthquake could move. Almost at the same moment several acquaintances rushed in, begging me not to be alarmed, as the ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... everybody in her brown poplin that she knew now was different from any other dress she had seen at school. And Jerry could not get that shiny pump out of her mind! Her own feet, in their sturdy black, square-toed shoes, commenced to assume such elephantine proportions that, when the signal came for the debaters to go forward, she ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott
... his fingers very suddenly, and making it stand up like military plumes all over his head. His features, though heavily moulded, had no harsh lines. Their predominant expression was good nature, a kind of elephantine docility, which neutralized the awe inspired by his immense size. On his inauguration morning, when the children beheld him marching slowly through the rows of benches on which they were seated, with a long, black ruler under his arm, and enthrone himself behind a tall, green-covered desk, they crouched ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... from San Antonio to an obscure sheet called the Railway Age, that Brann is not an Englishman as the Age editor in one of his elephantine efforts to be humorous seems to have suggested, and that "all Englishmen in this country repudiate his every utterance." Thanks, awfully; that's the highest compliment ever paid an American sovereign by a British subject. When ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... write to make a request of the most moderate nature. Every year I have cost you an enormous - nay, elephantine - sum of money for drugs and physician's fees, and the most expensive time of the twelve months ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... most graceful of existing ruins. At Phil are two structures, one by Nectanebo, the other Ptolemaic, resembling peripteral temples, but without cella-chambers or roofs. They may have been waiting-courts for the adjoining temples. That at Elephantine (Amenophis III.) has square piers at the sides, and columns only at the ends. Another by Thothmes II., at Medinet Abou, formed only a part (the sekos?) of a larger plan. At Edfou is another, belonging ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... natural enough under the circumstances. At last, however, he mastered his irritation to some degree, and spoke his command briefly. "Well, Smithson, apologize to her. It can't be helped." Then his face lighted with a sardonic amusement. "And, Smithson," he went on with a sort of elephantine playfulness, "I shall take it as a personal favor if you will tactfully advise the lady that the goods at Altman and Stern's are ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... do then, for they were fair inside. "Boiler-plate" was finishing some elephantine pleasantry to Natica, when he saw what I saw. A foolish grin rippled across his wide face. "Hullo!" he said to the Hartopp, who looked properly peevish, and then waspish, as she let her glance travel to Natica, who stood perfectly poised and, I fancied, a trifle ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... for about half an hour, the dog keeping a reproachful eye upon us from the nearest chair, and displaying elephantine delight whenever we made any movement suggestive ...
— Evergreens - From a volume entitled "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow" • Jerome K. Jerome
... hates to be cooped up long." "I guess he's gone to get a drink at the bar," suggested the practical Miss Bredd. "How did you like my Fricka—oh, here's Mr. Dennett—Caspar, Caspar come over here, here!" The big girl stood up in elephantine eagerness, and a jaunty, handsome young man, with a shaven face and an important chin, slowly made his way through the press of people to the Fridolin table. It was Caspar Dennett, the conductor. After a formal presentation to the tall, thin Mrs. Fridolin, the young ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker |
