"Hoof" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hardly heard, beguiles my homeward way. [U] Air listens, like the sleeping water, still, To catch the spiritual music of the hill, [101] 370 Broke only by the slow clock tolling deep, Or shout that wakes the ferry-man from sleep, The echoed hoof nearing the distant shore, The boat's first motion—made with dashing oar; [102] Sound of closed gate, across the water borne, 375 Hurrying the timid [103] hare through rustling corn; The sportive outcry of the mocking owl; [104] And at long ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... the moment, but seated herself on the Dane's anvil, while Taffy chose a bar of iron and stepped out to examine Aide-de-camp's hoof. He returned and in silence began ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... straight; a line dropped from the point of the shoulder to the ground should divide the knees, canon, fetlock, and foot into two equal parts. When the animal is formed in this way the feet have room to be straight and square, with just the breadth of a hoof between them (Fig. 241). ...
— Agriculture for Beginners - Revised Edition • Charles William Burkett
... Xenophon and Lena Rivers, was drawn in profile, very erect on his slender, nervous legs. He appeared, on the side nearest the observer, to be pawing the ground impatiently with his hoof, a movement which seemed to be facilitated by his rider, who, drawn in a three-quarters view and extending her hand, allowed the reins to fall over the shoulders of her ...
— Zibeline, Complete • Phillipe de Massa
... mother was frying the ham, And boiling the coffee, that reached through the air like a mile o' ba'm, 'N' I bet you I didn't wait to see what it was that the dog Thought he'd got under the stump or inside o' the hollow log! But I made the old cows canter till their hoof-joints cracked—you know That dry, funny kind of a noise that the cows make when they go— And I never stopped to wash when I got to the cabin door; I pulled up my chair and e't like I never had e't before. And mother she set there and watched me eat, and eat, ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... the spark to the world in flames, in his 'Dissuasive from Popery'),—these are the costly gems which glitter, loosely set, on the chain armour of his polemic Pegasus, that expands his wings chiefly to fly off from the field of battle, the stroke of whose hoof the very rock cannot resist, but beneath the stroke of which the opening rock sends forth a Hippocrene. The work in which all his powers are confluent, in which deep, yet gentle, the full stream of his genius winds onward, and still forming ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... in closing, that I may suggest our only sage attitude to be one of always watching for his inevitable arrival, ready to put grateful lips to the waters of Hippocrene as soon as ever they bubble from the blow of his hoof. ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... hard-packed road. It was not unusual in a land where hooch was cheap and stimulating and every drunken roysterer celebrated in the saddle, but there was an ominous, tragic suggestion in the irregularity of the hoof-beats as of an exhausted, failing beast urged on by grim and ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... fluid range Of lawless airs, at last stood out This excellence and solid form Of constant beauty. For the Ox Feeds in the herb, and sleeps, or fills The horned valleys all about, And hollows of the fringed hills In summerheats, with placid lows Unfearing, till his own blood flows About his hoof. And in the flocks The lamb rejoiceth in the year, And raceth freely with his fere, And answers to his mother's calls From the flower'd furrow. In a time, Of which he wots not, run short pains Through his warm heart; and then, from whence He knows not, on his light there falls A shadow; and ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... night, far and near, came to her strained senses, as if her silent chamber were a whispering gallery. The clock struck twelve, and in the silence that followed she missed the music; but voices, talking and laughing, were coming down the lane. There was the clink of a horse's hoof on the stones; now it was lost on the turf; and now they were all trooping noisily past the house. She buried her head in her pillow, and tried to bury with it the consciousness that she was wondering if Evesham were there, laughing with ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... laws of the Jungle, And many and mighty are they; But the head and the hoof of the law is, And the haunch ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... side. It was alive with swift-moving motor cars swarming like twentieth-century pilgrims toward the mecca of cool breezes and comfort. There were proud limousines; comfortable family cars; trim little roadsters; noisy runabouts. Not a hoof-beat was to be heard. It was as though the horseless age had indeed descended upon the world. There was only a hum, a rush, a roar, as ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... Yancy, and turning away he struck off through the pine woods. A brisk walk of twenty minutes brought him to the Ox Road forks, as it was called, where he could plainly distinguish the wheel and hoof marks left by the buggy and team as it went to Scratch Hill, but there was only ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... to remember and look back to and pay for. To stand knee-deep in glass and gladiolas, to smell the mashed and mussed up mignonette and the last fragrant sigh of the scrunched heliotrope beneath the hoof of your horse, while far away the deep-mouthed baying of the hoarse hounds, hotly hugging the reeking trail of the aniseseed bag, calls on the gorgeously caparisoned hills to give back their merry ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... the camp and the clump of timber that lay in the direction of the nearest mountain. After Joanne had blown out her candle the silence of the night seemed to grow deeper about him. The hobbled horses had wandered several hundred yards away, and only now and then could he hear the thud of a hoof, or the clank of a steel shoe on rock. He believed that it was impossible for any one to approach without ears and eyes giving him warning, and he felt a distinct shock when Donald MacDonald suddenly appeared in the moonlight not twenty ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... These busy men, forced to be busy, are a thousand times more self-respecting than if left to lead the listless lives that were theirs before their country called them. I wonder if, after all, Kipling isn't right, and that the hump and hoof and haunch of it all isn't obedience? Not slavish obedience, but obedience founded on a knowledge of one's place and value in ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... little one to follow. She is thinking only of him; and now you see her feet free to take care of themselves. As she rises over the big windfall, they hang from the ankle joints, limp as a glove out of which the hand has been drawn, yet seeming to wait and watch. One hoof touches a twig; like lightning it spreads and drops, after running for the smallest fraction of a second along the obstacle to know whether to relax or stiffen, or rise or fall to meet it. Just before she strikes the ground on the down plunge, see the ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... standest 65 Upon that holy ground, Look thou with heed on the dark rock. That girds the dark lake round, So shall thou see a hoof-mark[21] Stamped deep into the flint: 70 It was no hoof of mortal steed That made so strange a dint; There to the Great Twin Brethren Vow thou thy vows, and pray That they, in tempest and in fight, 75 Will ...
— Narrative and Lyric Poems (first series) for use in the Lower School • O. J. Stevenson
... heard a slight commotion, as if something had happened unexpectedly, and then the hoof of a horse stamping the ground. The sea of heads in the room, pulled by curiosity, bent towards the door, and I realized ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... swift steed, and mounting, started towards the north. On and on he went upon his magic steed, galloping over the plains of Kalevala. And when he came to the shores of the wide sea, he did not halt, but galloped on over the water without even so much as wetting a hoof of his ...
— Finnish Legends for English Children • R. Eivind
... It had seen a lot of use, but less in recent weeks. There were sharp hoof-prints of the animal he had caught, larger hoof-prints, vague pad-marks of various sizes, but nothing that looked human. The trail went under a charred tree trunk at a height that was not comfortable for a man, and the spacing of the steps around the gnarled roots of an ...
— Cat and Mouse • Ralph Williams
... with fear at the sight of him and would recover presently, but he was not quite sure at which end of me returning life would first show itself. About once in every five or six minutes he seemed to get impatient, and then he would paw me with his heavy hoof, uttering a low, hoarse moaning, spattering me with froth from his mouth; but as he showed no disposition to leave, I at last resolved to try a very bold experiment, for my position was becoming unendurable. I waited till the brute's head was turned ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... looking round him and observing a hoof mark in the yielding clay, of which he promptly took a plaster cast. "Another link, ha, ha! the murderer was ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... indeed with terror and newly dispelled drunkenness; and his horse, a great African, coal-black save for one white hoof, seemed to partake of his master's frenzy. With ears lying flat along his head, and eyes that burned into those of Sergius, when he ventured to glance behind him,—glaring sheer through distance and dust like the very eyes of those demons his rider invoked,—the beast thundered on, equalling ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... and then climbed on to the little steed himself; and as soon as they were properly seated the little man said "swish," and away went the steed, galloping over the sea without wetting hair or hoof. But fast as he galloped the nine little pipers were always ahead of him, although they seemed to be going only at a walking pace. When at last he came up rather close to the hindmost of them the nine little pipers disappeared, but the children heard the music playing beneath the waters. ...
— The Golden Spears - And Other Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... for the flying couple save the high-road winding under rock and forest, and here and there a coursing water in the depths of the ravines, that showed like a vein in black marble. They walked swiftly, keeping brisk ears for sound of hoof or foot behind them. Angelo promised her that she should rest after the morning light had come; but she assured him that she could bear fatigue, and her firm cheerfulness lent his heart vigour. At times they were hooded with the darkness, which came on them as if, as benighted ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... him,—this creature in gray. She stood stock-still, and stared at him, so near that he could see her wink her starry eyes, with the white rings round them. She stamped one hoof, kicked an insect from her ear with another, snorted again, wheeled around, and at last broke away for the thick shelter of the trees, lightly and swiftly as a breeze which skims from ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... She sat struggling to keep back the tears when a horse's hoof beats sounded under the trees and Levine ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... knowledge of the wilderness and its people. For the first time in his life he saw the big dog-like tracks made by wolves, the dainty hoof-prints of the red deer and the spreading imprints of a traveling lynx; he pictured the hugeness of the moose that made a track as big as his head, discovered how to tell the difference between the hoof-print of a small moose ...
— The Wolf Hunters - A Tale of Adventure in the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... it," she said, "but it's clumsy. Them men has all they kin lug an' I'm a goin' ter hoof it erlong wid this, jest ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... track of a horse showed in the bare, hard sand. The hoof-marks were large, almost oval, perfect in shape, and manifestly they were beautiful to Lin Slone. He gazed at them for a long time, and then he looked across the dotted red valley up the vast ridgy steps, toward the black plateau and beyond. It ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... Look! there are more." He ceased in breathless suspense and stared fearfully at a line of mounted Indians moving in single file over the ridge to become lost to view in the intervening blackness. A faint rattling of gravel and the peculiar crack of unshod hoof on stone gave ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... sure do hate a Punjabi, but I don't love Greeks! The natives call 'em bwana masikini to their faces—that means Mister Mean White y'know. They're a lawless lot, the Greeks you'll run across in these parts. My advice is, shoot first! Walk behind 'em! If they ain't armed, hoof 'em till they cut an' run! Greeks ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... dark when the carman took his departure, and the smith, a silent youth with sore eyes, caught hold of one of the grey mare's fetlocks and told her to "lift!" He examined each hoof in succession by the light of a candle stuck in a bottle, raked his fire together, and then, turning to ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... the people of God; but the unclean, types of such as were the children of the wicked one. Now I read, that the clean beasts chewed the cud; that is, thought I, they show us, we must feed upon the word of God: they also parted the hoof. I thought that signified, we must part, if we would be saved, with the ways of ungodly men. And also, in further reading about them, I found, that though we did chew the cud, as the hare; yet if we walked with ...
— Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners • John Bunyan
... old and steadfast, Deeply pondered and reflected: "While he seems a man in semblance, And a hero in appearance, Yet his height is but a thumb-length, Scarce as lofty as an ox-hoof." 130 ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... mount Olympus, in imitation of Hercules, whom he proposed to himself as a model in this action. Another time having seized a bull by one of his hinder legs, the beast could not get loose without leaving his hoof in his hands. He could hold a chariot behind, while the coachman whipt his horses in vain to make them go forward. Darius Nothus, king of Persia, hearing of his prodigious strength, was desirous of seeing ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... steeds, and shaking torches' glare, Amidmost of the Grecian folks, amidst of Elis fair, Went glorying, and the name of God and utter worship sought. O fool! the glory of the storm, and lightning like to nought, 590 He feigned with rattling copper things and beat of horny hoof. Him the Almighty Father smote from cloudy rack aloof, But never brand nor pitchy flame of smoky pine-tree cast, As headlong there he drave him down amid the whirling blast. And Tityon, too, the child of Earth, great Mother of all ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... Ones! may we, the rejected, also live long, if this unchallenged judge of art continues any longer to teach his borrowed enthusiasm, and the gallop of that hired steed of which the honest Grillparzer speaks with such delightful clearness, until the whole of heaven rings beneath the hoof of that galumphing enthusiasm. Then, at least, things will be livelier and noisier than they are at the present moment, in which the carpet-slippered rapture of our heavenly leader and the lukewarm eloquence of his lips only succeed in the end ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... the road, till they could have been recovered or cured. "Lord bless you, Sir," replied the man, "I tried at more than fifty places, but nobody would take them in at any price, as they all said they would not have them at a gift, and that they should not tread a hoof upon any of their lands on any account, as the foot ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... chess; and, looking, they perceived a knight upon a dun-coloured horse coming towards them. And marvellous was the hue of the dun horse. Bright red was his right shoulder, and from the top of his legs to the centre of his hoof was bright yellow. Both the knight and his horse were fully equipped with heavy foreign armour. The clothing of the horse from the front opening upwards was of bright red sendal, and from thence opening downwards was of bright yellow sendal. A large gold-hilted ...
— The Mabinogion • Lady Charlotte Guest
... racing lights! I can just hear, distinct, aloof, The gaily clattering hoof Beating the rhythm ...
— Silhouettes • Arthur Symons
... clenched in fury at his own helplessness. He thought he heard movements. Once he was sure he heard a sound like the unshod hoof of an animal on bare stone. Then, quite distinctly, he heard squeakings. He knew that someone or something had picked up Vale's communicator. More squeakings, somehow querulous. Then something pounded the communicator on the ground. There was a ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... I saw in mountain glades Retired (believe it, after years!) Teaching his strains to Dryad maids, While goat-hoof'd satyrs prick'd their ears. Evoe! my eyes with terror glare; My heart is revelling with the god; 'Tis madness! Evoe! spare, O spare, Dread wielder of the ivied rod! Yes, I may sing the Thyiad crew, ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... those long suburban streets, where the houses stand at wide intervals, each behind its trim lawn, or old-fashioned flower-garden, relieved, even in the darkness, against a great rear-wood screen of lofty trees. Up the driveway of one of these he turned, his horse's hoof-beats dropping clear and sharp on the hard macadam. He reined up at the house and rapped a loud tattoo with the stock of his whip on a ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... feeling's blight, and baffled love's defeat, And, on the altar of self-sacrifice, Hope's withered blooms by resignation laid: Nor were it needed that incarnate vice, In human mould, in the same image made, Trampled with iron hoof his fellow man, Virtue's chastised development to aid. For whence was Vice derived? Ere life began, For His own offspring could their Maker trace Their loathsome office, and beneath his ban Place them, accurst (creating ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... have lost my lovely steer, That to me was far more dear Than these kine which I milk here; Broad of forehead, large of eye, Party-colour'd like a pye, Smooth in each limb as a die; Clear of hoof, and clear of horn, Sharply pointed as a thorn; With a neck by yoke unworn, From the which hung down by strings, Balls of cowslips, daisy rings, Interplaced with ribbonings; Faultless every way for shape; Not a straw could him escape, ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick
... view Might mark at least the fortress and main tower Of the true city. Laws indeed there are: But who is he observes them? None; not he, Who goes before, the shepherd of the flock, Who chews the cud but doth not cleave the hoof. Therefore the multitude, who see their guide Strike at the very good they covet most, Feed there and look no further. Thus the cause Is not corrupted nature in yourselves, But ill-conducting, that hath turn'd the world To evil. Rome, that turn'd it unto good, Was wont to boast two suns, whose several ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... boasted justification. The animal world, when not rigorously watched, will always crown with success the machine supplying its appetites. The old dog-world took signal from it. The one-legged devil-god waved his wooden hoof, and the creatures in view, the hunt was uproarious. Why should we seem better than we are? down with hypocrisy, cried the censor morum, spicing the lamentable derelictions of this and that great person, male and female. The plea of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... soon seen was doomed to be superseded. His blocks were nothing but pieces of wood of a hexagon shape—with no cohesion, and no foundation—so that they trusted each to its own resources to resist the pressure of a wheel, or the blow of a horse's hoof; and, as might have been foreseen, they became very uneven after a short use, and had no recommendation except their cheapness and their exemption from noise. The fibre was vertical, and at first no grooves were introduced; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... said, "the tracks that you see, so that you will remember them, and will know them again. The tracks made by the different animals are not all alike. The antelope's hoof is sharp-pointed in front. Notice, too, that when his foot sinks in the mud there is no mark behind his footprint; while behind the footprint of a deer there are two marks, in soft ground, made by the little hoofs that the ...
— When Buffalo Ran • George Bird Grinnell
... Sun-God fetched them in again To draw his car of gold; But you can still see very plain Where each one leapt and rolled; For from each hoof-mark, every one, There sprang a little golden sun, And that same little golden flower People call ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 28th, 1920 • Various
... home," said Mr. King, in dismay at the muddy object splashed from head to foot, with the smart pink cape that had been the cause of the disaster, now torn clear through the middle, by the hoof of a passing horse. He shuddered at the sight of it. "Do ...
— Five Little Peppers Abroad • Margaret Sidney
... clatter of accoutrement or tramp of hoof, without companion or attendant, a white palfrey had appeared through the green arches of the woodlands. A girl was seated upon the saddle, swaying with gentle movement to the motion of her steed. At the sight of her figure as ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... of that!" she warned. "When I have cause to knock, you won't need no ear-trumpet. Put up your hoof." He obeyed, and, stooping swiftly, she began to unlace the shoe which he could no longer reach. Her manner was that of a daughter who tyrannizes over an indulgent father. Her admiration and gratitude, so boyish once, were now replaced by an affection in which the element of sex ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... cottage. There is but one other room pertaining to the genuine birthplace of Robert Burns: it is the kitchen, into which we now went. It has a floor of flagstones, even ruder than those of Shakespeare's house—tho, perhaps, not so strangely cracked and broken as the latter, over which the hoof of Satan himself might seem to have been trampling. A new window has been opened through the wall, toward the road; but on the opposite side is the little original window, of only four small panes, through which came the first daylight that ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... with his advance the head of the defile leading over an obscure road by Lumley's Station to Manchester, and so up to the "barrens." All the other troops were supplied with twelve days' rations of bread, coffee, sugar, and salt, with six days' pork and bacon, and six days' meat on hoof, and were held in readiness to move southward. These movements being made, the next day the entire army pressed forward ...
— The Army of the Cumberland • Henry M. Cist
... northward, and, as I surmised, toward Hanover Court House. If any branch of the military service is feverish, adventurous, and exciting, it is that of the cavalry. One's heart beats as fast as the hoof-falls; there is no music like the winding of the bugle, and no monotone so full of meaning as the clink of sabres rising and falling with the dashing pace. Horse and rider become one,—a new race of Centaurs,—and the charge, the stroke, the crack of carbines, are so quick, ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... her pony with the spur, and as it took the outside of the slanting, narrow trail, its hoof slipped on loose gravel and went over the edge. Dick's arm went out like a streak of lightning and caught ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine
... extent or beauty, for it was thickly studded in some parts with lofty timber, while in others the furze and fern gave richness and variety to the vast wilderness of verdant turf, scarcely marked, except by the light hoof ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... air of heaven, Some boon of strength has Nature given. In forming the majestic bull, She fenced with wreathed horns his skull; A hoof of strength she lent the steed, And winged the timorous hare with speed. She gave the lion fangs of terror, And, o'er the ocean's crystal mirror, Taught the unnumbered scaly throng To trace their liquid path ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... "Thy words have proved true, and thy wonderful skill in the breed of horses is ascertained; but by what mark couldst thou know that the dam of this colt was a buffalo?" The man replied, "My lord, the mark is visible in the colt itself. It is not unknown to any person of observation, that the hoof of a horse is nearly round, but the hoof of a buffalo thick and longish, like this colt's: hence I judged that the dam must certainly have been a buffalo." The sultan now dismissed him graciously, and commanded that he should be allowed daily a mess of pottage, ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... winging bullet did what the sentry's voice had failed to do. There came a clatter of spasmodic hoof-beats, an erratic shower of sparks, a curse in clean-lipped decent Urdu; a grunt, a struggle, more sparks again, and then a thud, followed by a devoutly worded prayer that Allah, the all-wise provider of just penalties, might ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... had grown red and huge when at last in the hard-baked dirt she discovered fresh hoof-prints. These seemed to lead along the line in which she was traveling, and she followed them gladly, encouraged when they were joined by others, for, although they meandered aimlessly, they formed something more like a trail than anything she had as yet seen. Guessing at their general ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... on our track, But a wild plain of far extent, 430 And bounded by a forest black[263]; And, save the scarce seen battlement On distant heights of some strong hold, Against the Tartars built of old, No trace of man. The year before A Turkish army had marched o'er; And where the Spahi's hoof hath trod, The verdure flies the bloody sod: The sky was dull, and dim, and gray, And a low breeze crept moaning by— 440 I could have answered with a sigh— But fast we fled,—away!—away!— And I could neither sigh ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... and nervous reaching of the little gray. But all were moving at top speed, racing desperately across the desert, leaping sand-dunes, dipping into hollows, mounting eagerly over larger dunes, on and on like the wind, sending up with each fling of hoof swirling clouds of dust and gravel. It ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... were in favor of and against the theory; the chief one against it was that if a party of Indians had driven off one cow, they would have taken more. Then, too, the soft earth that had revealed the hoof tracks ought to have shown ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis
... agonizing moment of that eventful night for Phoebe. Strain her ears as she might, naught could she hear but the shake of a bridle, the stamp of an occasional hoof, and the cropping of grass. The next few seconds seemed an hour of miserable uncertainty and suspense. She knew now that she was watched, that perhaps her plans were fully known, and all hope for her lover seemed past. She had called him hither and he would walk alone and unaided ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... of the Gobi, there are vast herds of sheep, goats, cattle and horses, but they are only a fraction of the numbers which the pasturage could support. The cattle and sheep which are exported through China can be sent to Kalgan "on the hoof," for since grass is plentiful, the animals can graze at night and travel during the day. This very materially reduces the cost ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... a couple of yards when rapid hoof-beats were heard in the valley below, and, pausing for a moment to glance down, George saw a mounted figure galloping rapidly up the valley. He recognised it at once as one of their former pursuers, and saw in a moment how completely these pertinacious man-hunters had outwitted ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood
... surprise many, whose knowledge of wild animals is gained from rare, fleeting glimpses of frightened hoof or wing in the woods, to consider that there can be such a thing as a school for the Wood Folk; or that instruction has any place in the life of the wild things. Nevertheless it is probably true that education among the higher order of animals has its distinct place and value. ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... shoot," he repeated warningly. "To make sure, I'm going to fix up that snoring idiot over there before I finish you. An' don't you as much as shuffle your hoof!" Recovering the bundle of thongs, he strode ...
— The Young Railroaders - Tales of Adventure and Ingenuity • Francis Lovell Coombs
... the oak, the olive, the palm came in. The giant sea serpents disappeared; the horse, the ox, the swine, the dog, the quail, the dove came in. The placental mammals developed. The horse grew in size and beauty. When we first come upon his trail, he is a four-hoof-toed animal no larger than a fox. Later on we find him the size of a sheep with one of his toes gone; still later—many hundred thousand years, no doubt—we find him the size of a donkey, with still fewer toes, and so on till we reach ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... look about, and then began a big circle around the train. Finding nothing, I swung a bigger one. That being equally unavailing, I did a larger third. Not a trace of foot or hoof within a half-mile of the cars! I had heard of blankets laid down to conceal a trail, of swathed feet, even of leathern horse-boots with cattle-hoofs on the bottom, but none of these could have been used for such a distance, ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... Barnaby—as indeed he was, in the head, both by the blow he had received, and by his horse's hoof. 'Come away ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... precipice, where the eagle soared and screamed over the fir tops in the abyss below, and where a perpendicular wall rose to giddy heights in the clouds above. The path at times was so narrow, that it seemed that the mountain goat could with difficulty find a foothold for its slender hoof. A false step, or a slip upon the icy rocks would precipitate the traveler, a mangled corpse, a thousand feet upon the fragments of granite in the gulf beneath. As higher and higher he climbed these wild and rugged and cloud-enveloped paths, borne by the unerring ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... was in no condition, therefore, for argument upon the subject. So with the greatest readiness he struck straight out behind and took Saunders what he himself called a "dinnle on the elbuck." Nor was this all, for the razor suddenly levered upwards by Birsie's hoof added another and entirely unprofessional wrinkle to ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... Honora followed, her head on fire, her heart pounding faster than the hoof beats. But the animal she rode, though a good one, was no match for the great infuriated beast which she pursued. Presently she came to a wooded corner where the road forked thrice, and beyond, not without difficulty,—brought her sweating mare to a stand. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... grass, or a leaf of a shrub, was to be seen on all the steep slope, or rather precipice, for there was very little slope about it; nothing but grey loose shingle, which the first hoof-fall of the leading horse invariably sent slipping and sliding, in a perfect avalanche of rubble, down into the soft bright green morass beneath. Of all the bad "tracks" I encountered in my primitive rides, I really believe I suffered more real terror and anguish on that particular hill-side ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... "Yes," said I, for the last time. Twine off! brown paper off. And I learned that the "Sheffield wimble" was one of those things whose name you never heard before, which people sell you in Thames Tunnel, where a hoof-cleaner, a gimlet, a screw-driver, and a corkscrew fold into ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... It was given me as I drove through the bog by a barefooted boy, who had trotted after the car for miles, and at length overtook us by the accident of the horse picking up a stone in his hoof. He said it was for "some one at the castle," and I offered to take charge of it—here it is,' and he produced a square-shaped envelope of common coarse-looking paper, sealed with red wax, and ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... To be read like faint hoof-beats of fawns long gone From respectable pasture, and park and lawn, And heartbeats of fawns that are coming again When the forest, once more, ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... take me fer a haythen? Be the howly! show me the scallywag that would harrum a hair o' the ole 'oman's hid, an' I'd give him sich a pelt on the gob, that he would think he'd got forninst a horse's hoof!' ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... be described as a small tool box, a complex apparatus on which he seemed disposed to linger, pointing out that it included a pair of nippers, a tool for punching holes in wood, and, above all, an instrument for taking stones out of a horse's hoof. The comparative absence of any horse he appeared to regard as irrelevant, as if it were a mere appendage easily supplied. But when the turn came of the gentleman in the black gown, he did not turn out his pockets, but merely spread out ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... shuffling gait, struck him with her whip—a blow which would not have perturbed a mosquito—when he showed a disposition to stop beside Grant, and then, when Huckleberry reluctantly resumed his pacing, pulled him up, and looked back at the figure stooped over the hoof he held upon his knee. He was digging into the caked dirt inside the hoof with his pocketknife, and, though Evadna waited while she might have spoken a dozen words, he paid not the slightest attention—and that in spite of the distinct shadow of her head and shoulders which ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... lame one evening, as he topped a hill, and a long reach of mountain lay before him on his way to a sick-call. There were, of course, a hundred explanations from as many amateurs as to the cause of the accident. Then a quiet farmer, who suspected something, found a long needle driven deep into the hoof. It had gone deeper and deeper as the action of the horse forced it, until it touched the quick, and the horse ran dead lame. The wound festered, and the animal had to be strung up with leather bands to the roof of his stable for three months. Father Letheby felt the matter acutely; but ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... holes in the clay, into which an animal's leg sank halfway to the shoulder. No power on earth, I firmly believe, could have induced those mules to step anywhere else. Each hole was full of muddy water. When the mule inserted his hoof the water spurted out violently, as though from a squirt gun. As a result we were, I believe, the most muddied and bedraggled crew on earth. We tried walking, but could not get on at all. Occasionally we came to a steep little ravine down and up the slippery ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... him just what to do; and then he turned into a clod of earth, and stuck himself between Dapple's hoof and shoe on the near forefoot. So the Princess hunted up and down, out and in, everywhere; at last she came into the stable, and wanted to go into Dapplegrim's loose box. This time he let her come up to him, and she pried high and low, but under his heels she couldn't come, for ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... suddenly a face—a face with a long velvety muzzle, a pair of spreading antlers, and dark eyes, gentle, timorous, liquidly bright. The water stirred with a sibilant lapping sound as the buck's tongue licked at the margin. Once he held up his head to listen, with his hoof lifted, then he bent again to the ripples. There was slight relation between him, the native of these woods, and that wayward waif of the skies; but among the unnumbered influences and incidents of its course it served to save that humble sylvan life for a space. The hunter neither ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... earth to take my chance," Then up to the earth sprung he; And making a jump from Moscow to France, He stepped across the sea, And rested his hoof on a turnpike road, No very great way from a ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... the midst of the country. It was a novel sight to the Venetians to see trees planted in the open air, while hedges and lawns appeared as if by magic. The entire absence of verdure and vegetation, and the silence which reigns in the streets of Venice, where is never heard the hoof of a horse nor the wheels of a carriage, horses and carriages being things entirely unknown in this truly marine city, must give it usually a sad and abandoned air; but this gloom entirely disappeared ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... inscribed on a tiny block of boxwood. Hardly had these playthings been spread out on the matting, when the child, with surprise, beheld the goat (one of whose "miracles" this was no doubt), draw out certain letters with its golden hoof, and arrange them, with gentle pushes, in a certain order. In a moment they constituted a word, which the goat seemed to have been trained to write, so little hesitation did it show in forming it, and Berangere suddenly exclaimed, clasping ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... two-thirds of the way toward the point where he expected to find Longstreet when he heard the sough of a hoof in the mud ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... by the dozen; but to build a moral play upon an "immoral" basis is to court damnation. To construct a noble piece of work on the basis of "improper" relations between your chief characters is to show the cloven hoof. Once the initial scheme granted, the rest may be as bracing as an Alpine breeze; but the critics will scent brimstone. But to build an immoral play upon a "moral" basis—that way gladness lies. Critics, who would rage at the delineation of a character remotely resembling ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... second, and taking him by both arms, bound him in the same manner to another tree. In the meantime Abricotina made the best of her good fortune, and betook herself to her heels, not knowing which way she went. But Leander, missing her, called out to his horse Gris-de-line; who, by two kicks with his hoof, rid himself of the two ruffians who had pursued him: one of them had his head broken; and the other, three of his ribs. And now Leander only wanted to overtake Abricotina; for he had thought her so handsome that he wished to see her again. ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... knoll. He rose and went out to feel it. It was still there. Gudrun had not ridden away with it. Brandur could hear the horseshoes crunching the hard, frozen ground as Gudrun rode off. He stood motionless for a long time, listening to the hoof beats. Then ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... express was off. Horses were waiting every ten miles. What a ride was that! "Speed, speed! faster, faster!" was the cry. Each man tried to do a trifle better than the last, while the thousands on the Pacific coast seemed to be straining their ears for the sound of the galloping hoof beats which brought nearer to them the brave message of the grand new President. And when the last rider came in, making the final ten miles in thirty-one minutes, what a cheer ...
— History of California • Helen Elliott Bandini
... had intended to start for Jerusalem that morning with his goods. But the riding mule he had bought proved to be lame from a prick in the hoof, nor were all his hired camels come down from the mountains, so that he must wait a few days, or so ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard
... sitting very mournfully on the outside of the shop while this conversation was going on. Suddenly he heard the quick, short click of a horse's hoof behind him; and, before he could fairly awake from his surprise, young Master George sprang into the wagon, threw his arms tumultuously round his neck, and was sobbing ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... believe my own measure, for this is about two feet greater than the height of a tall horse. The extreme length was eight feet and two inches. Another cow-moose, which I have since measured in those woods with a tape, was just six feet from the tip of the hoof to the shoulders, and eight feet long ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... storage during summer along with my muff and boa, dear," the Babe replied pleasantly. "Moreover, my mother doesn't like me to talk to strangers in the streets, so ta-ta." The little creature blushed like a tea-rose and stamped its little hoof. "Insolence!" it squeaked. "You—you go back to France by the next boat!" and the Babe perceived to his horror that he had been witty to an Assistant Provost-Marshal! He flung himself down on his knees, licking the A.P.M.'s boots and crying ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 24, 1917 • Various |
