"Vermin" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that night in a little Hole by the side of a Bank, just as though I had been a Fox-cub. I was not in much better case than that Vermin, and I only marvel that my Schoolmaster did not come out next day to Hunt me with horses and hounds. Hounds!—the Black Fever to him!—he had used me like a Hound any time for Six Months past; and often had I given tongue under his Double Thonging. Happily the weather ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... resembles the spent or gas lime of the coal-gas industry. This sulphur, together, no doubt, with the traces of acetylene clinging to it, renders the residue a valuable material for killing the worms and vermin which tend to infest heavily manured and under-cultivated soil. Acetylene lime has been found efficacious in exterminating the "finger-and-toe" of carrots, the "peach-curl" of peach-trees, and in preventing cabbages from ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... talked he ate, and as he ate he drank, for there was much room in him; and anon he paid royally, speaking of Justice and the Law, before whom all Englishmen are equal, and all foreigners and anarchists vermin and slime. ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... nonsense," grumbled Sir Peter, "and I told you from the first you ought never to have let him marry that girl. Her father's the poorest tenant I ever had, soft-headed, London vermin! He doesn't know anything about manure—and he'll never learn. I shall cut down all his trees as soon as I'm about again. As for the girl, keep her out of my sight or I'll wring her neck. I ought to have done it long ago. How ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... passed a very enjoyable night. It was a surprise to find swarms of mosquitoes at this altitude, so free from all mosquito-breeding waters. But the house was well protected against them. Mosquitoes, as well as flies and vermin, are not native to the island. They came in ships not very long ago, and are now very troublesome in certain parts. They came round the Horn. Mr. Aiken's house itself came round the Horn seventy or eighty years ago. It is a quaint, New England type of house, and has a very ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... into further details concerning the vermin on board which it will be as well to spare ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... chose this mad moment to add his artillery to the cataclysm, and turned a merry whizz-bang battery on to the Top. For an hour the racket lasted, and then fell in gradual diminuendo; and Mac thought of sleep notwithstanding vermin, dust and shrapnel. It was not to be. A fatigue party was wanted immediately. A number were told off. Warmly and extensively apostrophizing the originators of this nocturnal expedition, they gathered up their rifles, bandoliers and water-bottles ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... turned round mechanically towards him, as Maelzel's Turk used to turn, carrying his head slowly and horizontally, as if it went by cogwheels.—Cracking up all sorts of things,—native and foreign vermin included,—said ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... was in motion and no other boat to be had for a week; while as for the "bucentaur" or public bark, which was just then getting under way, it was already packed to the gunwale with Jews, pedlars and such vermin, and the captain swore by the three thousand relics of Saint Justina that he had no room on board for so much as ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... companions,—why don't you begin your task? I have known a spider to descend at the tap of a finger, and a rat to come forth when the daily meal was brought, to share it with his fellow prisoner!—How delightful to have vermin for your guests! Aye, and when the feast fails them, they make a meal of their entertainer!—You shudder.—Are you, then, the first prisoner who has been devoured alive by the vermin that infested his cell?—Delightful banquet, ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... burning revenge. There was nothing else the matter with him. It was just this: "You haven't given me what I want; now I'll kill you." For months after each presidential inauguration the hotels of Washington are roosts for these buzzards. They are the crawling vermin of this nation. Guiteau was no rarity. There were hundreds of Guiteaus in Washington after the inauguration, except that they had not the courage to shoot. I saw them some two months or six weeks after. They were mad enough to do it. I saw it ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... sea, a storm may be stilled by a woman uncovering her body merely, even though not menstruating at the time. At any other time, also, if a woman strips herself naked while she is menstruating, and walks round a field of wheat, the caterpillars, worms, beetles, and other vermin will fall from off the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... of being a good shot—indeed, everything points to his having no taste for what is ordinarily known as sport, and that he ever shot kids, goats, or bullocks is highly improbable. That he occasionally went shooting and got good sport in killing the rats and other vermin which made Longwood an insufferable habitation to live in is quite true. It is also quite true that Lowe became demented with fear in case the shooting should have sanguinary and far-reaching effects. Hence the foregoing communication to ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... I could have arranged the affair for him in half-a-dozen different ways. Whereas now it must be a life for a life—the life of an honest young English gentleman for that of a creature who should have been kicked out of the world as vermin!... I have some letters give you, Violet, ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... parlors. There were more beds also, and fewer people in each, than in former years. On the walls of the rooms paint and paper were taking the place of tapestry, and light colors, with brightness and cleanliness, were displacing soft dark tones, dirt, and vermin.[Footnote: Babeau, Les Bourgeois, 9, ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... mentions an antidote against the bite of serpents. He says: "The blood of the turtle was much cried up, which, on account of this extraordinary virtue, the inhabitants dry in the form of small scales or membranes, and carry about them when they travel in this country, which swarms with this most noxious vermin. Whenever any one is wounded by a serpent, he takes a couple of pinches of the dried blood internally, and applies a little of it ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... the world must unite in a vast international association of men pledged to share the world's work justly; to share the produce of the work justly; to yield not a farthing—charity apart—to any full-grown and able-bodied idler or malingerer, and to treat as vermin in the commonwealth persons attempting to get more than their share of wealth or give less than their share of work. This is a very difficult thing to accomplish, because working-men, like the people called their ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... bare dirt for one cent. Black and white men, women and children, are mixed in one dirty mass. These rooms are without light, without air, filled with the damp vapors of mildewed wood and clothing. They swarm with every species of vermin that infest the animal and human body. The scenes of depravity that nightly occur in these lairs of beasts ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... of course, all right to trap bears when they are followed merely as vermin or for the sake of the fur. Occasionally, however, hunters who are out merely for sport adopt this method; but this should never be done. To shoot a trapped bear for sport is a thoroughly unsportsmanlike proceeding. ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... that the world deserves destruction, He stands up from the throne of judgment, and sits on the throne of mercy. The third three hours He sits and feeds all the world, from the horns of the unicorns to the eggs of the vermin. In the fourth three hours He sits and plays with leviathan, for it is said, 'The leviathan, whom thou hast formed to play therein' " (Ps. civ. 26). Rabbi Eliezer says, "The night has three watches, ...
— Hebrew Literature
... developed into something like a cross between a kangaroo and a possum, but the bush has not begun to develop the common cat. She is just as sedate and motherly as the mummy cats of Egypt were, but she takes longer strolls of nights, climbs gum-trees instead of roofs, and hunts stranger vermin than ever came under the observation of her northern ancestors. Her views have widened. She is mostly thinner than the English farm cat—which is, they say, on ...
— On the Track • Henry Lawson
... 'that or the hangman's noose. A man who could devise so monstrous a jest as was your challenge to the Tyrant of Pesaro should be a merry fellow if he would. I need such a one. There are two Fools at my Court, but they are mere tumblers, deformed vermin that excite as much disgust as mirth. I need a sprightlier man, a man of some learning and more drollery; such a man, in short, as ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... only nodded absently and went on peeling an overripe peach, striking out constantly, with the hand that held the knife, at the flies. They were green flies—huge, shiny-backed, buzzing, persistent vermin. There were a thousand of them; there seemed to be a million of them. They filled the shut-in room with their vile humming; they swarmed everywhere in the half light. They were thickest, though, in a corner at the back, where there was a closed, white door. Here a great knot of them, like an iridescent, ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... whack the corruption out o' thee. Master Anthony, indeed! he be another guess sort of thing to thee, I trow. Thee be'st hankering after the good things hereabout; but I'll spoil thy liquorish tooth for tasting. Come, unkennel, vermin!" ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... bleeding flower of the buckwheat; that these roads, bordered with stones placed one on top of the other, without cement or plaster; that these paths, bordered with impenetrable hedges; that these grudging plants; these inhospitable fields; these crippled beggars, eaten with vermin, plastered with filth; that even the flocks, undersized and wasted, the dumpy little cows, the black sheep whose blue eyes had the cold, pale gleam that is in the eyes of the Slav or of the tribade; had perpetuated their primordial state, preserving an identical ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... ordinary paper in consistency, compactness and solidity. In the manufacture it is subjected to a pressure of hundreds of tuns, which squeezes out the liquid matter, leaving a substance of the right thickness. It is said to be proof against damp and gnawing of vermin, and it being an excellent non-conductor of heat, must make a warm dwelling in winter and a cool one in summer. It is used in the place of ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... few hardy species of the genus, and grows wild in many parts of Spain and Italy; it is said to have been found in Guernsey: it affects hilly and dry situations, will grow readily in almost any soil, especially if fresh, and not infested with vermin: it flowers about the middle of April, the blossoms do not expand fully unless exposed to the sun, and are not of long duration: authors describe the wild plants as varying greatly in colour, vid. Clus. they ...
— The Botanical Magazine Vol. 8 - Or, Flower-Garden Displayed • William Curtis
... him as a hermit once more, settled in a deserted cabin not far from the battle-field of Spotsylvania. He had got rid of the vermin in the cabin by burning sulphur, and had stocked his establishment with a canvas-cot and a camp-stool and a lamp and an oil-can, and the usual supply of beans and bacon and rice and corn-meal and prunes. Also ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... last, he could go to sleep if he liked, at the fire. Joe went to sleep—HOW, I don't know. Then Dad sat beside him, and for long intervals would stare silently into the darkness. Sometimes a string of the vermin would hop past close to the fire, and another time a curlew would come near and screech its ghostly wail, but he never noticed them. Yet he seemed to ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... much swollen. From Leghorn in the S.S. Derna he was shipped to Sardinia, where he had experience of several prisons, including that of Terranuova-Pausania, where water flows down the walls and vermin are everywhere. He received 2.75 lire a day with which to buy his food, and although he is a doctor they refused to let him read any medical books. When I asked him of what he had been guilty, he began by recounting his war work. Over 6000 Italian prisoners were at Knin, ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... lord, how that can be," said Allan Redmain scornfully, "for the kingdom of which you boast is but a barren rock in the mid sea, and methinks your beasts of the chase are but vermin ...
— The Thirsty Sword • Robert Leighton
... rats for a long time after this, but at length she got stronger and would kill them and many other such vermin. She had plenty of work, for there were many rats at the farm house. While pursuing a large rat one day, she set her foot into a trap which had been set to catch them, and though she was taken out very carefully by the farmer's daughters who were swinging in an old tree ...
— The Life and Adventures of Poor Puss • Lucy Gray
... of the night? The atmosphere becomes still more foul and pestilential, from the partially closed port-holes, and from the indifference of the nurses to the necessary cleanliness required. The whole becomes alive with cockroaches and other vermin, creeping over the patients; and the mosquitoes prey upon the unfortunate sufferer, or drive him mad with their unceasing humming preparatory to their attacks. Add these new trials to the groans of the dying, which, during my residence on board, never ceased, and at night were more ...
— Borneo and the Indian Archipelago - with drawings of costume and scenery • Frank S. Marryat
... took the battens from the hatches, and opened the ship. A few stifled rats were found; and what bugs, cockroaches, fleas, and other vermin, there might have been on board, must have unrove their life-lines before the hatches were opened. The ship being now ready, we covered the bottom of the hold over, fore and aft, with dried brush for dunnage, ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... wooden heads are all they've brought; Who, false enough to shirk their friends, But too faint-hearted to betray, Are, after all their twists and bends, But souls in Limbo, damned half way. No, no, we nobler vermin are A genus useful as we're rare; Midst all the things miraculous Of which your natural histories brag, The rarest must be Rats like us, Who let the cat out of the bag. Yet still these Tyros in the cause Deserve, ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... subjection of all the adjacent possessions of France. Major Dalling was sent to occupy Port Espagnol, now Sydney. Colonel Monckton was despatched to the Bay of Fundy and the River St. John with an order "to destroy the vermin who are settled there."[594] Lord Rollo, with the thirty-fifth regiment and two battalions of the sixtieth, received the submission of Isle St.-Jean, and tried to remove the inhabitants,—with small success; for out of more than ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... be dieted on rabbits. An Epicurean without his female companion, unless by his own choice, is no more an Epicurean than a Cynic is a Cynic without his rags and his impudence. Wilt thou take from me my Pannychis, an object pleasing to the eye, and leave yonder fellow his tatters and his vermin?" ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... arranged, to admit of being easily raised or removed at will, and made of light lumber, say one-half inch thick boards. In this way, by opening the lid, the mushrooms are under observation and can be gathered without any trouble. When the lid is shut they are secure from cold and vermin. Thus protected the cellars can be ventilated without interfering with the welfare of the mushrooms. A light wooden frame covered with calico or oiled paper would also make a good top for the boxing, only it would not be proof against much cold, or rats or mice. ...
— Mushrooms: how to grow them - a practical treatise on mushroom culture for profit and pleasure • William Falconer
... the contagious influence of the plague and malignant fevers, that it even produces them in hospitals and prisons; that it occasions rheumatisms, by incrusting the skin with dirt, and thereby preventing transpiration; without reckoning the shameful inconvenience of being devoured by vermin—the foul appendage ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... temperature of your morning tub; you, satisfied only with faucets of hot and cold water and a mat to stand on—you know nothing about the joy of bathing. Your bath is a mere part of the daily routine of existence. Try the trenches and get itchy with vermin; then you will know that heaven consists of soap and ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... dingiest, and dirtiest pair of blankets to be found throughout the whole gallery of garrets (those for years past used by long-bearded old-clothesmen Jews), with a wicked leer that would lull all suspicion asleep in a man of a far less inflammable temperament, she literally envelopes him in vermin, and after a night of one of the plagues of Egypt, the Doctor rises in the morning, from top to ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... sewerage, refuse scattered in all directions, and often flowing beneath your feet; courts, many of them, which the sun never penetrates, which are never visited by a breath of fresh air. You have to ascend rotten stair-cases, grope your way along dark and filthy passages swarming with vermin. Then, if you are not driven back by the intolerable stench, you may gain admittance into the dens in which these thousands of beings herd together. Eight feet square! That is about the average size of many of these rooms.... Where ...
— Deaconesses in Europe - and their Lessons for America • Jane M. Bancroft
... all. The Parliament of Paris,—a court of justice,—filled with the idea that law is not a means, but an end, tried to interpose forms between the Master of France and the vermin he was exterminating. That Parisian court might, years before, have done something. They might have insisted that petty quibbles set forth by the lawyers of Paris should not defeat the eternal laws of retribution set forth by the Lawgiver of the Universe. That they had not done, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... his conscience was already uneasy, was simply exasperating, and without the poor excuse he had offered his aunt and sister, he burst out that it was very hard that such a beastly row should be made about a fellow knocking down mere trumpery vermin. ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge
... any stoppage.) Hirerwm and Hiratrwm. (The day they went on a visit three Cantrevs provided for their entertainment, and they feasted until noon and drank until night, when they went to sleep. And then they devoured the heads of the vermin through hunger, as if they had never eaten anything. When they made a visit they left neither the fat nor the lean, neither the hot nor the cold, the sour nor the sweet, the fresh nor the salt, the boiled nor ...
— The Mabinogion • Lady Charlotte Guest
... him with interest and pity, then ordering the table to be cleared, stretched himself on it for the night, wrapped in his cloak, rather than rely on the accommodations of the large room up stairs, common to wayfarers of every grade, and populous with vermin. ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... I told them. "Soon the time will pass; My next permission will come quickly round; We'll all meet at the Gare du Montparnasse; Three times I've come already, safe and sound." (But oh, I thought, it's harder every time, After a home that seems like Paradise, To go back to the vermin and the slime, The weariness, the want, the sacrifice. "Pray God," I said, "the war may soon be done, But no, oh never, never till ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... him into a hard fray with St. Jerome, who cast up to him the writings of his predecessors; but he did not care for that. If this example of St. Augustine had been followed, the pope would not have become Antichrist, the countless vermin, the swarming, parasitic mass of books would not have come into the Church, and the Bible would have kept its ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... that day it may be stated that they were hotbeds of immorality, where children herded with hoary criminals; where no sanitary laws were recognized; where vermin swarmed and disease held forth, and where robbery, tyranny, and cruelty, if not actually permitted, was at least winked at ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... St. Teresa to the formation of an ideal religious family; Fox to the proclaiming of a world-religion in which all men should be guided by the Inner Light; Florence Nightingale to battle with officials, vermin, dirt, and disease in the soldiers' hospitals; Octavia Hill to make in London slums something a little nearer "the shadows of the angels' houses" than that which the practical landlord ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... but they proved to be the vanguard of an aggressive and victorious host that quickly overran our open, hospitable country, as if to give vent to revenge for long years of persecution at the hands of Europeans. "It is a fact that all our more pernicious weeds, like our vermin, are of Old-World origin," says.John Burroughs. "...Perhaps the most notable thing about them, when compared with our native species, is their persistence, not to say pugnacity. They fight for the soil; they plant colonies here and there, and will not be rooted out. Our native weeds are for ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... vermin, all the impure beasts, are after Stanton, for his not having sent reinforcements to McClellan; but none existed, and McClellan has exhausted and devoured all the reserves. Not reinforcements, but brains, were wanted, ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... fought and tried to get at his hand—and in a moment he tossed it carelessly behind a counter. No doubt the thing was only an image of twisted indiarubber, but for the moment—! And his gesture was exactly that of a man who handles some petty biting bit of vermin. I glanced at Gip, but Gip was looking at a magic rocking-horse. I was glad he hadn't seen the thing. "I say," I said, in an undertone, and indicating Gip and the red demon with my eyes, "you haven't many things like that ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... Delia, he is no kin of ours. He is only a Wayland!" returned Mrs. Phoebe, in an accent as if the Waylands were the most contemptible of vermin. ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... about three miles from town, near to Harborne, there are the remains of an old camp or station which Hutton attributes to "those pilfering vermin, the Danes," other writers thinking it was constructed by the Romans, but it is hardly possible that an undertaking requiring such immense labour as this must have done, could have been overlooked in any history of the Roman occupation. More likely it was a stronghold ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... gallows, I should be following the same course this very evening. So that upon the whole, we ought to be looked upon as the common enemies of mankind; whose interest it is to root us out likes wolves, and other mischievous vermin, against which no fair ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... villain, 'twas well done! May hell get you! To suspect me of cutting trees!—me, the most honest woman in the village. To hunt me like vermin! I'd like to see you lose your cursed eyes, for then we'd have peace. You are birds of ill-omen, the whole of you; you invent shameful stories to stir up strife between ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... of wisdom: 'If Zeus sends bad weather, mice and vermin, it is to stimulate the husbandman's energy, and call forth his inventive capacity.' Misfortune comes to help ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... shiver, From the trip of mule or donkey, From the midnight howling monkey, From the stroke of knife or dagger, From the puma and the jaguar, From the horrid boa-constrictor That has scared us in the pictur', From the Indians of the Pampas, Who would dine upon their grampas, From every beast and vermin That to think of sets us squirming, From every snake that tries on The traveller his p'ison, From every pest of Natur', Likewise the alligator, And from two things left behind him, (Be sure they'll try to find him,)— The tax-bill and assessor,— ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... choaking weeds to rid the soil? Why wake you to the morning's care? Why with new arts correct the year? Why glows the peach with crimson hue? And why the plum's inviting blue? Were they to feast his taste designed, That vermin, of voracious kind? Crush, then, the slow, the pilf'ring race; So purge thy ...
— Favourite Fables in Prose and Verse • Various
... Amendment of the same; as also for clearing the Streets of those Vermin called Shoe-Cleaners, and substituting in their stead many Thousands of industrious Poor, now ready to starve. With divers other Hints of great Use ...
— Everybody's Business is Nobody's Business • Daniel Defoe
... to a perennial rivulet running north, the Merungu. Here we met Moamba's people, but declined going to his village, as huts are disagreeable; they often have vermin, and one is exposed to the gaze of a crowd through a very small doorway. The people in their curiosity often make the place dark, and the impudent ones offer characteristic remarks, then raise a laugh, ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... and a number of dishes were brought in for dinner. When they had sat but a short time, a vast number of rats and mice rushed in, helping themselves from almost every dish. The captain wondered at this and asked if these vermin were not very unpleasant. ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... was four days dying—four days dying—of starvation and thirst," Foster went on, as if deciphering some terrible hieroglyphs written on the air. "His thigh swelled to the size of his body. Clouds of flies settled on him—flies and vermin—and he chewed his own arm and drank his own blood. He died mad. And my God! he crawled three miles in those four days! Man! Man! ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... appearance, edema anemic and sallow. The and iciness of extremities. other appearances may be Great decrease of vitality present but come on later in peripheral structures, and are less marked. as shown by asthenic eruptions and production of vermin. ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... a leader followed by blind zealots like the riff-raff who are insanely trailing after this Mad Mullah who claims divine powers—save the mark—when such leaders and such human vermin as these rise in a community, the people who own property, who have built up the community, who have spent their lives making Harvey the proud industrial center that she is—the people who own property, we repeat, should organize to protect it. The Governor suspending while ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... de Beauvoir, or has made such wonderful discoveries. "The bath of Asia, with green jalousies," in which the lady dwells; "the old hotel, with copper lions, in a lonely square;"—were ever such things heard of, or imagined, but by a Frenchman? The sailors, the negroes, the vermin, whom he meets in the street,—how great and happy are all these discoveries! Liston no longer makes the happy poet frown; and "gin," "cokneys," and the "quaterly" have not the least effect upon him! And this gentleman has lived many months amongst us; admires Williams Shakspear, the "grave et ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... incalculable value had been destroyed, but this was a cheap price to pay for the final and complete extermination of the Catholic pest. "There comes a point," it remarked, "when destruction is the only cure for a vermin-infested house," and it proceeded to observe that now that the Pope with the entire College of Cardinals, all the ex-Royalties of Europe, all the most frantic religionists from the inhabited world who had taken up their ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... their men slain. The joy for this victory on the side of the Portuguese was soon miserably abated in consequence of the destruction of their entire magazine of provisions by fire, by which they were reduced to the extremity of famine, and under the necessity of feeding on all kinds of vermin that could be procured. In this extreme distress, they were providentially relieved by a rough sea throwing up vast quantities of crabs or lobsters on the point of land where the chapel of the Virgin stands, which was the only food which could be procured by the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... in ancient or modern times were now reproduced in Paris. Not a revolutionary circumstance, at which the world had shuddered in the accounts of the siege of Jerusalem, was spared. Men devoured such dead vermin as could be found lying in the streets. They crowded greedily around stalls in the public squares where the skin, bones, and offal of such dogs, cats and unclean beasts as still remained for the consumption of the wealthier classes were sold to the populace. Over the doorways of these flesh markets ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... all the passages separating the passages of the urine, and excrements being corroded and destroyed. The whole mass of his body was turned unto universal rottenness; and, though living creatures, and boiled animals, were applied with the design of drawing out the vermin by the heat, by which a vast hive was opened, a second imposthume discovered a more prodigious swarm, as if his whole body was resolved into worms. By a dropsy also his body was grossly disfigured; for although his upper parts were exhausted, and dried to a skeleton, covered only with ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... of Leinster, sent to William Rufus bog oak from the green of Oxmanton, on the Liffey, to serve for the timber of the roof of Westminster Hall; and this wood, enjoying the universal Irish exemption from vermin, is said never to harbor a spider. Morogh was once told that William Rufus intended to make a bridge of his ships, and conquer Ireland. After some musing, Morogh asked, "Hath the King, in his great threatening, said, 'If it please God?'" "No!" "Then, seeing he putteth his trust ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... Turin, Florence, Sienna, Pisa, Mantua, Bologna, Ferrara, Genoa, Venice, a heroic history, sublime ruins, magnificent ruins, and superb cities, you are, like ourselves, poor. You are covered with marvels and vermin. Assuredly, the sun of Italy is splendid, but, alas, azure in the sky does ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... with the recent report that the Sittinghurst Vermin Club had killed 1,175 mice in one day, we are asked to say that the number should be 1,176. It appears that one mouse made its way in a state of collapse to the Club ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 9, 1919 • Various
... me a very great honor, Mademoiselle, to associate my name with yours, my humble self with your triumph, and to prove to all these vermin who are digging their claws into me that you don't believe in all the slanderous reports that are current about me. Really, it is something I can never forget. I might cover this magnificent bust with gold and diamonds and I should still be ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... got ter die so soon! An' more'n all that, if life's the Lord's blessin', as the widder b'lieves, why are so many only born to suffer, or be crippled all their lives? An' why are snakes an' all sorts o' vermin, to say nothin' o' cheatin' lawyers, like Frye, ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... images, to kiss the cross,—sooner would I rush out to the mob that was passing, and let them tear my vitals out. To forswear the One God, to bow before idols,—rather would I be seized with the plague, and be eaten up by vermin. I was only a little girl, and not very brave; little pains made me ill, and I cried. But there was no pain that I would not bear—no, none—rather ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... winter; all deplored the handful of crown-pieces which, hoarded in the hiding-place in the cupboard, would have afforded help in difficult times. And, full of their troubles, they unfolded, before my eyes, a scrap of flannel on which the vermin were swarming: ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... case proved a true prophet. The end of the summer found Klaus's homestead all to pieces. The wind whistled through the broken windows. Rats frolicked about the floor: a lease of the rafters was taken by a society of martens, and Klaus was left the choice of making friends with the vermin, or being dislodged from his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... and for an eternity, as it seemed to me, I stood there alone. There was a scurrying of the vermin in the place to snatch up a few valuables and flee, as if they had been the crawling things under some soon-to-be-lifted stone, to whom light was a calamity. I was left with the Stillness before me, and the ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... Bradley's, who provided us with the best accommodation his house would furnish for the night. We turned in early, but the legions of fleas which were our bedfellows exerted themselves to such a degree that for hours sleep was out of the question. The country is terribly plagued with these vermin. I do not know how the settlers get on; perhaps they are accustomed to the infliction, but a stranger feels ...
— California • J. Tyrwhitt Brooks
... false money were boiled alive at the pig-market; robbers and assassins were broken on the wheel and left to linger in slow agony (tant qu'ils pourraient languir). The Lutherans were treated like vermin, and to harbour them, to possess or print or translate one of their books, meant a fiery death. In 1525 a young Lutheran student was put in a tumbril and brought before the churches of Notre Dame and St. Genevieve, crying mercy from God and ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... his ancles, in which posture he was flogged most unmercifully. There were also, as I heard, two different masters noted for cruelty on the island, who had staked up two negroes naked, and in two hours the vermin stung them to death. I heard a gentleman I well knew tell my captain that he passed sentence on a negro man to be burnt alive for attempting to poison an overseer. I pass over numerous other instances, in order to relieve the reader by a milder scene of roguery. ...
— The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African - Written By Himself • Olaudah Equiano
... Many of our houses, both public and private, with their almost innumerable apartments, their huge halls and their cellars for the storage of wines and other munitions of peace, appear to be extravagantly large for their inhabitants. They are so vast and magnificent that the latter seem to be only vermin which infest them. I am surprised when the herald blows his summons before some Tremont or Astor or Middlesex House, to see come creeping out over the piazza for all inhabitants a ridiculous mouse, which soon again slinks into some hole ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... There are plenty of them about, too, Andrew—as many in this place as any other. I am not going to be content with a negative position as regards evildoers. I am going to set my heel on as many of the human vermin of this city as ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... by the zeal with which they had supported the bill; but such threats only strengthened the general conviction that it was high time to destroy these nests of knaves and ruffians. A fortnight's grace was allowed; and it was made known that, when that time had expired, the vermin who had been the curse of London would be unearthed and hunted without mercy. There was a tumultuous flight to Ireland, to France, to the Colonies, to vaults and garrets in less notorious parts of the capital; and when, on the prescribed day, the Sheriff's officers ventured to cross the boundary, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... The vermin would eat the buttons off one's coat when camping out. Cats and dogs were surfeited from killing them. I told the Chinaman cook of the hotel that I would give him a pound of tobacco if he caught a hundred rats. That night, as I was sleeping on a ...
— Reminiscences of Queensland - 1862-1869 • William Henry Corfield
... sacredness of life. He may not hurt or drive away the insects that torment his naked flesh. 'Patience is the highest good,' he declares, and the rules for sitting and lying conclude with the statement that not to move at all, not to stir, is the best rule. To lie naked, bitten by vermin, and not to disturb them, is religion. Like a true Puritan, the Jain regards pleasure in itself as sinful. "What is discontent, and what is pleasure? One should live subject to neither. Giving up all gaiety, circumspect, restrained, ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... is all lit up in friendly radiance for others, the light will be my own defence. Light always scares away the vermin. Lift up a stone in the meadow, let in the light, and see how a hundred secret things will scurry away. And light in the soul scares away "the unfruitful works of darkness"; they cannot dwell with the light. Light repels the evil one; it acts upon him like ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... has clad herself in comely enough fashion with all those fine garments of enlightened self-government, but underneath those garments are, or were, the same vermin that infested the garments of so many communities less clean—parasites that suck existence from God's gifts to decent people. Indeed, that human vermin at one time infested East Haven even more than the other and neighboring towns; ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... deer, venison horse, equine cow, bovine bull, taurine sheep, ovine wolf, lupine hog, porcine bear, ursine fox, vulpine cat, feline dog, canine fish, piscatorial mouse, vermin rat, rodent mankind, humanity man, masculine woman, feminine childish, infantile ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... the champagne that you stole. That is your account with God, He keeps it, and He will settle it when the clock strikes. In my own case, I have nothing to go on but suspicion, and I do not kill on suspicion, not even vermin like you. But understand! if ever I see any of you again, it is another matter, and you shall eat a bullet. And now take yourself off. March! and as you value what you call your life, keep your hands ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... I should say millions. There's the stink of the dead men as well as the stink of the cheese, there's the dug-outs with the rain comin' in and the muck fallin' into your tea, the vermin, the bloke snorin' as won't let you to sleep, the fatigues that come when ye're goin' to 'ave a snooze, the rations late arrivin' and 'arf poisonin' you when they come, the sweepin' and brushin' of the trenches, work for a 'ousemaid ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... while thus patiently waiting, they were literally starving; for even the misery endured at Harlem had not reached that depth and intensity of agony to which Leyden was now reduced. Bread, malt-cake, horseflesh, had entirely disappeared; dogs, cats, rats, and other vermin, were esteemed luxuries: A small number of cows, kept as long as possible, for their milk, still remained; but a few were killed from day to day; and distributed in minute proportions, hardly sufficient ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Selwyn, a trifle wearily. "I am not compelling you to decency for the purpose of punishing you; men never trouble themselves to punish vermin—they simply exterminate them, or they retreat and avoid them. I merely mean that you shall never again bring publicity and shame upon your wife—even though now, mercifully enough, she has not the faintest idea that you are what a complacent law ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... (said to be a corruption of [Greek: staphis]. and usually written 'Staves-acre') a kind of lark-spur considered efficacious in destroying lice. Cf. Marlowe's Dr. Faustus (i. 4)— 'Stavesacre? that's good to kill vermin; then belike, if I serve you, ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... farm-labourers and armed ploughboys, may be summed up by an adaptation of the refrain of the remonstrance—so frequently urged by one of Lieutenant COLE's funny figures—"Can't you let the birds alone?" Then Mr. HASTING "On Vermin," which doesn't sound nice, though better than if the title were vice versa,—is most interesting, especially where he tells us that "shrews are harmless." If so, why did SHAKSPEARE give us "The ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, July 23, 1892 • Various
... born under an unlucky star," interrupted the old woman who was imprisoned for incendiarism. "Only think, to entice the lad's wife and lock him himself up to feed vermin, and me, too, in my old days—" she began to retell her story for the hundredth time. "If it isn't the beggar's staff it's the prison. Yes, the beggar's staff and the prison don't ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... Neither the Days nor any one else is going to have the benefit of your assistance if you go on living the way you have been. I was at Schwarz's. It is the double drain there that tells on one—eating little and being eaten much. Those old walls are full of vermin. Why ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... which, to the high flourishes of military bands, passed armed hoplites, merchants in long robes, cloaked bedouins, Kelts in bearskins, priests in spangled dresses, tiara'd princes, burdened slaves, kings discrowned, furtive forms—prostitutes, pederasts, human wolves, vermin, sheep—the flux and reflux of the ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... sausage, Und coot him indo ham; Und schwear dey'll serfe all oders Exacdly so - py tam! Sons of France, awake to glory, Let your anciend valor shine! Und shweep dis Prussian vermin Het und ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland
... remained without food, but when the light above had quite faded, three soldiers with clanging swords unbarred the door and pushed through some water in an earthen vessel and some fufu, a kind of dumpling made of mashed African potato. During the night, disturbed by vermin of all sorts, including some horrible little snakes, we slept little, and at dawn we were again visited by our captors. The next day and the next passed uneventfully. For exercise we paced our cell times without number, and when tired would seat ourselves on the rough stone ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... members of the terrier tribe, nor will he be found quarreling with other dogs. From the bull terrier side he inherits a lively mood, the quality of taking care of himself if attacked by another dog, and of his owner, too, if necessary, the propensity to be a great destroyer of all kinds of vermin if properly trained, and an ideal watch dog at night. No wonder he is popular, he deserves to be. The standard describes ...
— The Boston Terrier and All About It - A Practical, Scientific, and Up to Date Guide to the Breeding of the American Dog • Edward Axtell
... are largely employed as personal servants. In Chhattisgarh the ordinary Rawats will clean the cooking-vessels even of Muhammadans, but the Thethwar or pure Rawats refuse this menial work. In Mandla, when a man is to be brought back into caste after a serious offence, such as getting vermin in a wound, he is made to stand in the middle of a stream, while some elderly relative pours water over him. He then addresses the members of the caste panchayat or committee, who are standing on the bank, saying to them, 'Will you leave me in the mud or will you take ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... destroying the seedlings, and let out during the day; and this they continue to do till the plants attain the height of one foot. Water is only retained in the field until the ears are half ripe, otherwise they would ripen indifferently and be destroyed by vermin. A variety of coast paddy, called "moottoo samboo," was introduced into the Kandian province in 1832, which was found to produce a more abundant crop, by one third, than the native. It is of six ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... entering the body of the hut each post passes through an oval disc of wood, a foot and a half in diameter, the object of which is probably to prevent the ingress into the dwelling of snakes, rats, or other vermin, most likely the Mus indicus, with which all the islands to the westward are overrun. To the stout uprights are lashed transverse bars supporting three long parallel timbers running the whole length of the floor; on these seven or eight ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... at least a month before they are wanted for use; but if this cannot be conveniently done, be particular in washing them with boiling water, in which some unslacked lime must be mixed. This will in some measure answer the purpose of paint in effectually destroying the vermin, or the eggs which may have been deposited in the ...
— The art of promoting the growth of the cucumber and melon • Thomas Watkins
... living male relative of the suitable age except two second cousins that I don't see much of—praise God!" said Peter, fervently; "and Hugh Van Orden looks about half-past ten, whereas I class John Charteris among the lower orders of vermin." ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... was pitch black. They say there is a hell. This may or may not be, but more of a hell than the night we passed in this cellar one does not require. Every vile thing in the world seemed to have taken up its abode therein. We sat the whole night sweeping the vermin from us. After a year of horror—as it seemed—came the dawn. In the morning entered the landlord, and demanded a shilling. I had not a farthing, but I had a leather bag which I gave him for the night's ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... turpentine is good to take grease-spots out of woollen clothes; to take spots of paint, &c., from mahogany furniture; and to cleanse white kid gloves. Cockroaches, and all vermin, have an aversion ...
— The American Frugal Housewife • Lydia M. Child
... subject upon which the ingenuity of the farmers has been taxed, it is on the invention of a mole trap which would effectually clear their premises of these blind burrowing vermin. Many patented devices of this character are on the market, and many odd pictured ideas on the subject have gone the rounds of the illustrated press, but they all sink into insignificance when tested beside the trap we here present. It has ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson
... have heard with mine own ears. At the time I was young, but the event so affected me that I have ever since held female kind to be a walking pest, a two-legged plague, whose mission on earth, like flies and other vermin, is only to prevent our being too happy. O, why do not children and young parrots sprout in crops from the ground-from ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... care-free and beautiful. Deep among the ravines and the rocks, these beings lived in noisome caves, lairs for beasts, not human homes; or built them coops of rotten boughs—living trees were banned them—whose mouldy hearts hatched vermin. Fearing infection of some plague, born of this filth, the chiefs of Odo seldom passed that way and looking round within their green retreats, and pouring out their wine, and plucking from orchards of the best, marveled ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... (Eranthis hyemalis), which is not a true Aconite, though closely allied; it then got the name of Wolf's-bane, as the direct translation of the Greek lycoctonum, a name which it had from the idea that arrows tipped with the juice, or baits anointed with it, would kill wolves and other vermin; and, lastly, it got the expressive names of Monk's-hood[10:2] and the Helmet-flower, from the curious shape of the upper sepal overtopping ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... every mail exactly as if we were at headquarters. This is accomplished solely by knowledge. There are hundreds of women behind our lines who make clean and repair the dirty clothes of the troops. Afterwards, they are baked in very hot ovens which utterly destroy the vermin and also, it is said, diseases. We have, too, been issued iron helmets to protect the head against falling shots. It was asked of us all if any had an objection. The Sikhs reported that they had not found any permission in their Law to wear ...
— The Eyes of Asia • Rudyard Kipling
... operatin' peels, Sookers for bairns an' fishin' reels, In fac'-but losh! I'd better stop, The mannie kep' a druggist's shop! An' in his bauchles an' his breeches Cam' grum'lin' doon to get the leeches While, nearly scunnert wi' their squirmin', Aff hirples Girsie wi' the vermin. ...
— The Auld Doctor and other Poems and Songs in Scots • David Rorie
... Anthony Benezet, was accustomed to feed the rats in the area before his house in Philadelphia. An old friend who found him so engaged, expressed some surprise that he so kindly treated such pernicious vermin, saying, "They should rather be killed and out of the way." "Nay," said good Anthony, "I will not treat them so; thou wouldst make them thieves by maltreating and starving them, but I make them honest ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... purchaser. One day he was heard to sing and laugh. This piece of indecorum was told to his master, and the overseer was ordered to re-chain him. He was now confined in an apartment with other prisoners, who were covered with filthy rags. Benjamin was chained near them, and was soon covered with vermin. He worked at his chains till he succeeded in getting out of them. He passed them through the bars of the window, with a request that they should be taken to his master, and he should be informed that he was ...
— Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Written by Herself • Harriet Jacobs (AKA Linda Brent)
... filled with the filth of the soldiery, and then destroyed. And yet no sign. Oh, no. My faith is gone. Now I want to murder and torture and massacre the foul brutes.... I'm going out, Dartrey. In any way. Just a private. I'll dig, carry my load, eat their rations. Vermin: mud: ache in the cold and scorch in the heat. I will welcome it. Anything to stop the gnawing here, ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... dragged as if by a thousand horses from its coiling hold upon the bough—and shaken, lacerated, and affrighted, the hideous reptile unwound itself from the ferocious animal, and fell powerless on the grass, where the vermin of the forest attacked it with their greedy maws ere ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... The mass he denounced as the greatest and most horrible abomination, inasmuch as it was 'downright destructive of the first article,' and as the chiefest of Papal idolatries; moreover, this dragon's tail had begotten many other kinds of vermin and abominations of idolatry. With regard to the Papacy itself, the Augsburg Confession had been content to condemn it by silence, not having taken any notice of it in its articles on the essence and nature of the Christian Church. ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... but the bare ground, and a mass of indescribable filth, as may be imagined. Here, lying on the earth, were five men, with little or no clothing, covered with dirt and vermin. Two of them were in fairly good condition, an evidence that they had not long ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Treasures of the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... on the French shore I shall not easily forget. The poor lad of sixteen years had hip disease, and lay dying. The indescribable dirt I cannot here picture. The bed, the house, and everything in it were full of vermin, and the poor boy had not been washed since he took to bed three or four months before. With the help of a clergyman who was travelling with me at the time, the lad was chloroformed and washed. We then ordered the bedding to be ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... dangerous was the toil that seven men had given up their lives in the course of one winter. The man who owned this tract, and was exploiting it, had gotten the land by the rankest kind of public frauds; there were filthy bunk-houses, vermin, rotten food, poor wages and incessant abuse. And yet, in the spring-time, here came the young son of this owner, on a honeymoon trip with his bride. "And Jesus," said Henderson, "if you could have seen those stiffs turn out and cheer ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... and nearly torn it from her waist, and, in avid curiosity, women with dyed hair peeped out of a suspicious-looking tobacco shop. Over the way, stuck under an overhanging window, was an orange-stall; the proprietress stood watching, whilst a crowd of vermin-like children ran forward, delighted at the prospect of seeing a woman beaten. Close by, in shirt-sleeves, the pot-boy flung open the public-house door, partly for the purpose of attracting custom, half with the intention of letting a little air ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... standing close to me and waving the red flag he carried—the emblem of the Terror. "Down with the Czar! Kill the vermin he sends to us! Long live freedom! Kill them!" he shrieked. "They have killed your wives and daughters. Men of Ostrog, remember your duty to-day. Set an example to Russia. Do not let the Moscow fiasco be repeated here. Fight! Fight on as long as you have a drop of life-blood ...
— The Count's Chauffeur • William Le Queux
... conventionalities, and was as free in denouncing them. The clergy, who from custom cling to old rites and ceremonies, were, in her opinion, "indolent slugs, who guard, by liming it over, the snug place which they consider in the light of an hereditary estate," and "idle vermin who two or three times a day perform, in the most slovenly manner, a service which they think useless, but call their duty." She believed in the spirit, but not in the letter of the law. The scriptural account of the creation is for her "Moses' poetical story," ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... rock floor scantily covered with coarse rice straw, flatly mashed by the emaciated bodies of the Spaniards who had slept upon it. A few articles of Spanish uniforms, tattered and torn, were strewn about. In the cracks of the walls were hordes of vermin. Filth was present everywhere in its most germ-bearing form. In the center of the room were a few live coals and over them a quart cup about one-third full of boiling rice—probably the entire meal for the six doomed prisoners whose home ...
— Bamboo Tales • Ira L. Reeves
... partitions are formed of slats of one inch thick by four inches broad, securely nailed one on the other, so as to form a one inch groove on both sides, to plaster on. This forms a good strong six inch solid wall, fire and vermin proof, and dryer than any built of stone or brick. The stairs to have their skeletons of iron work, filled in solid with cement. The floors of basement and entry to be of earthenware tiles, the kitchen and cellar ...
— Woodward's Country Homes • George E. Woodward
... from the mandarin and was forced to live for two months in a dirty Chinese inn, swarming with vermin, until they realized that she was determined not to be driven away. She eventually obtained a house and while she considers herself comfortable, I doubt if others would care to share her life unless they had an equal amount of determination ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... war is. It isn't great armies moving wonderfully forward "as if on parade," as some of these newspaper fellows tell you. It's a putrid, rotten business. After Loos dead men and horses rotted for days in the sun. War's not a thing of glory; it's rats and vermin and filth and murder. Three weeks ago I killed a German. He hadn't a chance to get his gun up before I stuck him with my bayonet like a pig. As he fell his helmet rolled off; he was about eighteen, with sort of golden hair, and light, light blue eyes. I've been through some hell, ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... By famous Hanover city; The river Weser, deep and wide, Washes its wall on the southern side A pleasanter spot you never spied; But when begins my ditty, Almost five hundred years ago, To see the townsfolk suffer so From vermin, what a pity! ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... into the homes of the poor, bringing the skilled touch of the nurse and the loving heart of Christian womanhood to the service of the neediest. Contagion has no terrors for her; Filth, vermin, and dangerously unsanitary conditions are matters of every-day occurrence. No service so quickly opens the heart to good influences as that which comes in hours of deepest need and helplessness, to lead the heart through human tenderness to the Source of ...
— Home Missions In Action • Edith H. Allen
... hundreds of these unfortunate savages have been ruthlessly slaughtered, not only by the Black Police, but by squatters and stockmen, who deny the poor wretches the right to exist? We have taken away their hunting grounds! We shoot them down as vermin, because, impelled by the hunger that we have brought upon them, they occasionally spear a bullock or horse or two! Why cannot the Government do as my father suggests—reserve a long strip of country for these poor savages, just a small piece of God's earth that shall ...
— Tom Gerrard - 1904 • Louis Becke
... Vatea. Vaterland. Vaterschacht. Vaterstadt. Vaticanus. "Velvets." Venilia. Venus. Vermin. Veronica. Vestice. Vera madre. Violet. Viracocha. "Virginia Reel." Virginity. Virgin Mary. Virgin-Mother. Virgins. Vishnu. Vision-seers (children). ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... mansion, OEdipus! Or is it but the work of melancholy? When the sun sets, shadows, that shewed at noon But small, appear most long and terrible; So, when we think fate hovers o'er our heads, Our apprehensions shoot beyond all bounds; Owls, ravens, crickets seem the watch of death; Nature's worst vermin scare her godlike sons; Echoes, the very leavings of a voice, Grow babbling ghosts, and call us to our graves; Each mole-hill thought swells to a huge Olympus; While we fantastic dreamers heave and puff, And sweat with an imagination's weight; ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... the way for Arthur when they came to any stoppage.) Hireerwm and Hiratrwm (the day they went upon a visit three cantref provided for their entertainment, and they feasted until noon and drank until night and they they devoured the heads of vermin as if they had never eaten anything in their lives. When they made a visit they left neither the fat not the lean, the hot nor the cold, the sour nor the sweet, the fresh not the salt, the boiled nor the raw.) Huarwar ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... appetites to make it even tolerable. Even in later days Frank T. Bullen was able to write: "I have often seen the men break up a couple of biscuits into a pot of coffee for their breakfast, and after letting it stand a minute or two, skim off the accumulated scum of vermin from the top—maggots, weevils, etc—to the extent of a couple of tablespoonsful, before they could shovel the ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... the past, mere fragments she had told him, here flashed back into his mind: humorous little incidents of daily battles she had waged in rotten old tenement buildings with rags and filth and garbage, with vermin, darkness and disease. Mingled with these had been accounts of dances, weddings and christenings and of curious funeral rites. And struggling with such dim memories of Deborah in her twenties, called forth in his mind by the ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... farthing's worth of drink. At her own request she had been permitted to receive her whole allowance in bread; and water, not over clean nor fresh, was supplied for drinking. No living creature came near her save her keeper, who was the bell-ringer at the cathedral—if we except the vermin which held high carnival in the vault, and were there in extensive numbers. It was a dreadful place for any human being to live in; how dreadful for an educated and delicate gentlewoman, accustomed to the comforts of civilisation, it ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... were already in the prairie. As he boarded the little vessel at the stern, a raccoon waddled in noiseless haste over the bow, and splashed into the wet covert of reeds beyond. If only to keep from sharing his quarters with all the refuge-hunting vermin of the noisome wilderness, the one human must move on. He turned the lugger's prow towards the lake, and spread her sails to the faint, cool breeze. But when day broke, ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... flesh, very liable to get torn. But to have the hole torn open is one of the worst social mishaps which can happen to a woman. She is immediately put out of caste for a long period, and only readmitted after severe penalties, equivalent to those inflicted for getting vermin in a wound. When a woman gets her ear torn she sits weeping in her house and refuses to be comforted. At the ceremony of readmission a Sunar is sometimes called in who stitches up the ear with silver thread. [652] Low-caste Hindu and Gond women often wear a large circular embossed silver ornament ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... mutual dependencies of things—how they are created reciprocally for each other, and how the most noxious and apparently unnecessary animal has its uses. Thus those swarms of flies which are so often execrated as useless vermin are created for the sustenance of spiders; and spiders, on the other hand, are evidently made to devour flies. So those heroes who have been such scourges to the world were bounteously provided as themes for the poet and historian, while the poet and the historian were destined to record ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... case is worse. Always open sesame. The cloven sex. Why they fear vermin, creeping things. Yet Eve and the serpent contradicts. Not a historical fact. Obvious analogy to my idea. Serpents too are gluttons for woman's milk. Wind their way through miles of omnivorous forest to sucksucculent her breast dry. Like those ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... fireside. The secret details of each household in the realm being therefore known to the holy office and to the monarch, no infidel or heretic could escape discovery. This invisible machinery was less requisite for the Netherlands. There was comparatively little difficulty in ferreting out the "vermin"—to use the expression of a Walloon historian of that age—so that it was only necessary to maintain in good working order the apparatus for destroying the noxious creatures when unearthed. The heretics of the provinces assembled at each other's houses to practise those rites ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... sort of vermin is supposed to be bred by perspiration. It is an epoch in the civilised traveller's life when he ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... king's maintenance; you know? To be sure, you Romans trouble yourselves more about matters of law and administration than the culture of the arts or the subtleties of thought. Well, it was my father's duty to pay these customs over to Eulaeus, who received them; but the beardless effeminate vermin, the glutton—may every peach he ever ate or ever is to eat turn to poison!—kept back half of what was delivered to him, and when the accountants found nothing but empty air in the king's stores where they ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... recollect, that there is no port of entry in her Majesty's empire for the Icons of British copyright property. They come with a Frenchified air from the press of Galignani; they arrive in vulgarised costume from the cheap manufactories of New England; but the scent of the vermin is familiar to the nose of a collector of customs, and no rat-catching terrier, says my informant, ever pounces upon his Norwegian with half the gusto with which such an official snubs such an intruder. A health, I say, to the fury of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... about 'em," snorted out "Old Jock," equally pleased at this idea. "No doubt they've gone to the bottom, and good luck to 'em too. One can't feel sorry for such vermin as those that are prowling after honest craft, and who'd cut one's throat ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... will be drunk; avoid him: th' argument Is fearful, when churchmen stagger in 't. Look you, six grey rats that have lost their tails Crawl upon the pillow; send for a rat-catcher: I 'll do a miracle, I 'll free the court From all foul vermin. Where 's Flamineo? ...
— The White Devil • John Webster
... some chattering fool. To these imaginary evils was added the reality of some enormous water-rats that issued from an adjacent pool and began to eat Andy's hat and shoes, which had fallen off in his struggle with his captors; and all Andy's warning ejaculations could not make the vermin abstain from his shoes and his hat, which, to judge from their eager eating, could not stay their stomachs long, so that Andy, as he looked on at the rapid demolition, began to dread that they might transfer their ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... every catchpoll, harmon-beck and the like vermin 'twixt this and London town!" says he, and lifted the ale to his lips; but suddenly he sat it down untasted and rose: "Friends, I'm took!" quoth he. "See yonder!" As he spake the narrow doorway was darkened and two rough fellows entered, and each ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... scenery which surrounds him, and does not aspire to an enduring existence. When we come down into the distant village, visible from the mountain-top, the nobler inhabitants with whom we peopled it have departed, and left only vermin in its desolate streets. It is the imagination of poets which puts those brave speeches into the mouths of their heroes. They may feign that ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... safe, to find fault; If a man can't do that, why he's not worth his salt. And never, since critics (and fleas) learned their powers, Was a country more blest with such vermin than ours. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 9, May 28, 1870 • Various
... as death, With beating hearts and bated breath We hurried; far away we heard A dreadful hissing, fierce as fire When rain begins to quench a pyre; And where the smoky torch-light flared Strange vermin beat their bat-like wings, And the wet walls dropped with ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... the church, who raised her to the eighth heaven as patron saint of lust. To him, as to Simon, she was Ennoia, Prunikos, Helen of Troy. She had been Delilah, Lucretia. She had prostituted herself to every nation; she had sung in the by-ways, and hidden robbers in the vermin of her bed. But by Simon she was rehabilitated. It was she, no doubt, of whom Caligula thought when he beckoned to the moon. In Rome she had her statue, and near it was one ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... we cross the Channel every feature is a hundred times intensified. Consider the fighting man in the trenches—and I am still speaking of both officers and men—the most ordinary refinements of life are conspicuously absent. There is no water to wash in. Vermin abound, sleeping and eating accommodations are frankly disgusting. One is obliged for the time to live like a pig. Added to this one is all the time in a state of nervous tension. One gets very little sleep. Every night ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey
... Overrun with vermin, perishing with cold, breathing a stifled, tainted atmosphere, no space allowed them for rest by day, and lying down at night "wormed and dovetailed together like fish in a basket,"—their daily rations only two ounces ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... her children—don't you recognise the beast? married for rank—could you expect otherwise from him? invites my Lord Highgate to his house in consideration of his balance at the bank;—sir, unless somebody's heel shall crunch him on the way, there is no height to which this aspiring vermin mayn't crawl. I look to see Sir Barnes Newcome prosper more and more. I make no doubt he will die an immense capitalist, and an exalted Peer of this realm. He will have a marble monument, and a pathetic funeral sermon. There is a divine in your family, Clive, ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray |
