"Bats" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... decoration, and here and there, in the recesses, nests of shelves may be fitted with projecting brackets, designed as part of them, for pieces of china, vases of flowers, or busts, and not looking like bats stuck ...
— The Private Library - What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought to Know - About Our Books • Arthur L. Humphreys
... mammals, neither the whales, nor the hoofed creatures, nor the sloths and ant-eaters, nor the carnivorous cats, dogs, and bears, still less the rodent rats and rabbits, or the insectivorous moles and hedgehogs, or the bats, could claim our ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... over, the conduct of the Bats was discussed at the peace conference. Such deceit was unpardonable, and Birds and Beasts made common cause to drive out the Bats. And since then the Bat family hides in dark towers and deserted ruins, flying ...
— The AEsop for Children - With pictures by Milo Winter • AEsop
... much to-night, I should think!" (Dinah was the cat.) "I hope they'll remember her saucer of milk at tea-time. Dinah, my dear! I wish you were down here with me! There are no mice in the air, I'm afraid, but you might catch a bat, and that's very like a mouse, you know. But do cats eat bats, I wonder?" And here Alice began to get rather sleepy, and went on saying to herself, in a dreamy sort of way, "Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?" and sometimes, "Do bats eat cats?" for, you see, as she couldn't answer either question, it didn't much matter which ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... from this is the corridor, a room about one hundred and twenty-five feet long and seventy-five feet in width, with a low, narrow passage, or crawl, leading from the northeast into the Grotto, a dome-shaped room formerly called the Battery, on account of the great number of bats that used to congregate in it. It is about forty feet in diameter and fifty feet in height. On one side of this room is a narrow "squeeze" opening into a passage several feet lower than the floor level of the Grotto and leading to the Spanish Room, which ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... detective stories with clues and hair-breadth escapes. And Tug is like 'Iron-armed Ike,' who took four villyuns, two in each hand, and swung them around his head till they got so dizzy that they swounded away, and then he threw one of 'em through a winder, and used the other three like baseball bats to knock down a gang of desperate ruffians that was comin' to the rescue. Oh, but I tell you, it ...
— The Dozen from Lakerim • Rupert Hughes
... the poor boy was stowed away in a tiny attic, just under the corrugated-iron roof and hardly large enough to hold a man. There he lay in the suffocating heat of those endless days, only coming out at night for a few hours like the bats and owls. No, he ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... says Sandy. "That's a deputation frae the Callyfloor C.C. I gae them a tume orange box a week or twa syne to haud their bats an' wickets, an' they ...
— My Man Sandy • J. B. Salmond
... though there were many of them,—prisoners, who being condemned for lighter offences than murder or forgery, were allowed to walk under the eye of a keeper. I was conscious of passing them, but they only seemed to deepen the gloom, like ravens and bats flapping their wings ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... part is too narrow for a stranger to pass with a ship. I returned on board in the evening, without having discovered any traces of the lost cutter or seen any thing worthy of particular notice; unless it were three of the large bats, called flying foxes at Port Jackson: when on the wing and at a distance, these animals might ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders
... —especially women—drawn from that nameless, mysterious class made up of the human flotsam and jetsam which drifts about every great city. But since she had taken to leaving the gas in the passage unlit at night she had been very little troubled with that kind of visitors, those human bats which are attracted by any kind of light but leave alone ...
— The Lodger • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... in artificial classifications, much like our grouping of bats with birds and whales with fish. All animals, like coral animals and starfishes, whose similar parts were arranged in lines radiating from a centre, were united as radiates, however much they might ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... events happened on lines laid down by the Colonial Office, and men were like papers, to be rolled into packets and properly docketed. He had an Executive Council of people like himself, competent officials and blind bats at anything else. Then there was a precious Legislative Council, intended to represent the different classes of the population. There were several good men on it-one old trader called Mackay, for instance, who had been thirty years in the country-but most were nominees of the ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... But, my dear fellow, what is there nervous about the tent? Do you imagine ghosts lurking in the hangings, or phantoms of dead Arabs clinging, like bats, round that rosette in the roof? You got it up the Nile, ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... Trix, and the thought of meeting either of them after an absence of a school-term set his heart bounding, and his pulse throbbing, in a way he would not have owned to his best friends for the choice of bats in the best maker's shop. He loved his father also, but he did not know so much of him. He was a merchant, and his business had necessitated his living very much abroad, while Cairo did not suit his wife's health. His visits ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... three hundred miles from the mainland.[814] The impoverishment extends therefore to quality as well as quantity, to man as well as to brute. In the island continent of Australia, the native mammalia, excepting some bats, a few rodents, and a wild dog, all belong to the primitive marsupial sub-class; its human life, at the time of the discovery, was restricted to one retarded negroid race, showing in every part of the island a monotonous, ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... glad to see the blue sky and breathe the free air again, for the bad odor of the bats which inhabited the tower almost suffocated me. But how terrible the cold was in that cage, open to every wind, and how dazzlingly the snow shone over twenty leagues of country! All the little city of Phalsbourg, with its six ...
— The Conscript - A Story of the French war of 1813 • Emile Erckmann
... has gone through this performance, and I am told found "plenty plenty" bats, and hedgehogs, and snakes. They could not tell me his name, which I much regretted. As we had no store of bush lights we went no further than the portals; indeed, strictly between ourselves, if I had had every bush light in Congo Francais I personally should not ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... flying creatures, dimly visible by moments under the gloomy sky, were enemies whom I well knew by experience. Many a fine insect specimen have I lost, when the bats were near me in search of their ...
— The Guilty River • Wilkie Collins
... of this snake's face was hideous and fierce; the pupil consisted of a vertical slit in a mottled and coppery iris; the jaws were broad at the base, and the nose terminated in a triangular projection. I do not think I ever saw anything more ugly, excepting, perhaps, some of the vampire bats. I imagine this repulsive aspect originates from the features being placed in positions, with respect to each other, somewhat proportional to those of the human face; and thus we obtain ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... She never bats an eye, Aunty don't. "To be sure," says she. "I think that is precisely what we had in mind all ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... man for a cricketer," was buried close to Lord's ground, aged 86; Barber, who kept the Bat and Ball on Broad Halfpenny Down, was 71; William Fennex, at the age of 75, walked ninety miles in three days, carrying an umbrella, clothes, and three cricket bats (but he died soon after); William Lambert, almost the greatest of Surrey hitters, and the first player who ever made two centuries in the same match, died at 72; Lumpy Stevens, who won L100 for Lord ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... incorruptible death?—creep, like the surreptitious midget you feel yourself to be, up those long and steep inclines of polished stone, watching the gloomy darkness of the narrow walls, the far-off pinpoint of light borne by the Bedouin who guides you, hear the twitter of the bats that have their dwelling in this monstrous gloom that man has made to shelter the thing whose ambition could never be embalmed, though that, of all qualities, should have been given here, in the land it dowered, a life perpetual. Now you know the Great ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... arrived. He looked at them closely and his nerves jumped. Gosh! didn't they look big! And what big black bats! ...
— Don Strong, Patrol Leader • William Heyliger
... about the study; there were some shelves with books on them. There was a little bed let into the wall on one side; there was an easy-chair, and what professed to be a sofa; and there was a pile of miscellanies, consisting of bats and boots and collars and papers, heaped up in the corner, which appeared to be the most abundantly furnished portion of the little room. Stephen sat there, very dismal, and wishing himself home again once more, when the ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... Pale Face Harry impatiently. "He don't count! He'll have bats in his belfry anyway, and if he ain't he'll go off his chump for fair getting stuck on himself when he sees the stunt he'll think he's done. He'll be looking for the wings between his shoulder blades, and hunting for the halo around ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... it be unusually developed in comparison with the same part in closely allied species. Thus, the bat's wing is a most abnormal structure in the class mammalia; but the rule would not here apply, because there is a whole group of bats having wings; it would apply only if some one species of bat had its wings developed in some remarkable manner in comparison with the other species of the same genus. The rule applies very strongly in the case of secondary sexual characters, when displayed ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... homage to the mightier powers, To ask my boldest question, undismayed By muttered threats that some hysteric sense Of wrong or insult will convulse the throne Where wisdom reigns supreme; and if I err, They all must err who have to feel their way As bats that fly at noon; for what are we But creatures of the night, dragged forth by day, Who needs must stumble, and with stammering steps Spell out their ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... doorway or from ceiling at proper height to be caught between the teeth. First successful player receives prize. These prizes should be Hallow-e'en souvenirs, such as emery cushions of silk representing tomatoes, radishes, apples, pears, pickles; or pen-wipers representing brooms, bats, cats, ...
— Games For All Occasions • Mary E. Blain
... cautiously advanced, and soon he found himself at the head of an evidently artificial gallery. A crowd of bats rushed forward and extinguished his torch [48] He leant down to relight it and in so doing observed that he had trod ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... last there in the moonlight. The heat was too intense to veil the windows, and she would not light the candles lest bats or moths should be attracted. At another time the eerieness of the shadowy room would have played upon her nerves, but to-night she was not even aware of it. The shadows within were too ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... sunset: we observed him peeping at us over a hedge, for all the world like the "Spectator" when he was staying with Sir Roger de Coverley. He is supposed to come out at sunset, like the foxes and the bats, and has been seen in the distance on bright moonlight nights striding over the Cotswold uplands. If any one approach him, he hurries away in the opposite direction; yet he is not queer in the head, but strong and ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... the wheat in this very field close to where the hawthorn bush grows now—where you picked the May flowers, you know, my love. They slept there all the summer night, and the fern owls flew to and fro, and the bats and crickets chirped, and the stars shone faintly, as if they were made pale by the heat. The poor papa never had a house, but that little Guido lived to grow up a great man, and he worked so hard, and he was so clever, and every one loved him, which was the best of all things. ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... catcher's mask, gloves for the different field players, half a dozen baseballs and an even dozen of bats. ...
— The Grammar School Boys in Summer Athletics • H. Irving Hancock
... never meant it, and you didn't do it, which is more. You supposed I didn't know. Men may be blind as bats—they usually are; and our Brown is worse than the commonality. But trust an old maid for spying out a love secret. It's like exploring a strange land for her, you know. Lord! Miss Carry, you can't keep a secret from Eliza Casey; but then, why should you? Isn't she bound to ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... sweep over the building in one wide resistless torrent that might have levelled the stoutest edifice;—yet was the mill unharmed by the attack. Then came shrieks and yells, mingled with the most horrid imprecations. Swift as thought, there rushed upon him a prodigious company of cats, bats, and all manner of hideous things, that scratched and pinched him, as he afterwards declared, until his flesh verily "reeked" again. Maddened by the torment, he began to lay about him lustily with a long whittle which he carried for domestic purposes. They gave back at so ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... Bat power was considered extremely dangerous if one did not know how to use it. "My daughter found a bat in a field one day, but an old Indian said that if she didn't know how to treat it, it would eat up her children." Women especially were afraid of bat-talismans and of living bats. The Washo believe that a bat charm is also a powerful love medicine and that a woman once touched by such a charm is powerless in the hands of its owner. "You touch a woman with that thing and it hypnotizes her. She follow the guy and die if she don't ...
— Washo Religion • James F. Downs
... passion, or from pain released; Again they wove their straight, dark, motionless weft Across the moonset-bars; and, west and east, Cloud-giants rose and marched up cloudy stairs; And like sad thoughts the bats ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... For a space it was hard going through the interwoven bushes and briers that tore even Menard's tough skin. The moon was in the sky, and here and there he caught glimpses of the lake lying still and bright. They saw no signs of life save for the flitting bats, and the owls that called weirdly through the reaches of the forest. After another hour they found a trail which led them down close to the water, and at last to a half-cleared space, rank and wild with weed and thistle, and with rotting heaps where lay the trunks of trees, ...
— The Road to Frontenac • Samuel Merwin
... papers; but he found that the farmer's wife, in clearing out a garret some years before, had found some rubbishy old papers which she had burnt, and which had probably been papers used in the wrapping up of pigs' cheeks to keep them from the bats. 'O, wretched woman!' exclaimed he; 'do you know what you have done?' 'O dear, no!' said the woman, half frightened out of her wits: 'no harm, I hope; for the papers were very old; I dare say as old as the house itself.' This threw him into an additional degree of excitement, ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... other 'earth-bound souls' who, from one cause or another, were 'unable to find their way upward,' came into our ken like chilled and desperate bats condemned to whirl in endless outer darkness and silence—poor, abortive, anomalous shadows, whose voices pleaded piteously for release. Nameless, agonized, bewildered, they clung like moths to the light ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... the swallows are asleep; The bats are flitting fast in the gray air; The slow soft toads out of damp corners creep, And evening's breath, wandering here and there Over the quivering surface of the stream, Walkes not one ripple from its ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... especially unenviable. There was evidently to be a ball game. College boys with crimson H's on their shirts; men with a blue Y; together with a group of short-sleeved players not yet honored with insignia from their universities were hurrying out to the lawn with bats, ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett
... 'pop;' the Kola-nut, here worth a halfpenny and at Bathurst a penny each; the bitter Kola, a very different article from the esculent; skewered rots of ground-hog, a rodent that can climb, destroy vegetables, and bite hard if necessary; dried bats and rats, which the African as well as the Chinese loves, and fish cuits au soleil, preferred when 'high,' to use the mildest adjective. From the walls hung dry goods, red woollen nightcaps and comforters, leopards' and monkeys' skins, and ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... me his key; he could not understand what I desired at such an hour in that solitary place, and asked if I wished to sleep there! But I calmed his fears with a peseta—money goes a long way in Spain—and went in alone. The pigs had been removed and all was silent. A few bats flitted to and fro quickly. The light fell away greyly, the cold descended on the ruin, and it became very strange and mysterious. Presently, the roofless chapels seemed to grow alive with weird invisible things, ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... revelers collected bats and balls, cricket stools, bars, poles, and iron weights, carrying them each man to his own house, and in the afternoon the chopping party was augmented by nearly every one of ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... newt, the viper; And people call me the Pied Piper. Yet,' said he, 'poor piper as I am, In Tartary I freed the Cham, Last June, from his huge swarm of gnats; I eased in Asia the Nizam Of a monstrous brood of vampyre bats: And as for what your brain bewilders, If I can rid your town of rats Will you give me a thousand guilders?' 'One? fifty thousand!' was the exclamation Of the ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... that you mistake Your thrift for toleration. Never mind: Renan in any case would hardly break His great, strong, charitable heart to find The bats and owls of your myopic kind Pained by the light that his ideas make. 'Tis Truth's best purpose to shine in at holes Where cower the ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... mist and midges, Now the tired planes drone homeward through the haze, And distant wood-fires wink behind the ridges, And the first flare some timorous Hun betrays; Now no shell circulates, but all men brood Over their evening food; The bats flit warily and owl and rat With muffled cries their shadowy loves pursue, And pleasant, Corporal, it is to chat In this hushed moment ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 14, 1917 • Various
... more (in modern phrase) locomotive he is—the less he likes repose, and seeks unceasingly such perilous stimulants. Observed, on returning, amongst the loose stones scattered upon the surface of The Desert, a great quantity of rubbish, like brick-bats thrown out from a brick-kiln, giving the face of the ground a burnt and volcanic appearance. Picked some up and could hardly believe but what they were burnt bricks. The Ben Weleed, who accompanied Essnousee, instead of the short and direct road through the streets of the Ben Wezeet, took a circuitous ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... too long to relate here. It is so long that when Mr. Hawkins had finished it was too late to reach Tavistock Square before dark. Mr. Hawkins explained that as bats and owls and rats come out only when the sun has disappeared, so there are other things that can be seen best by night. And as he did not go on until the next day at one, he proposed that we should go down to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... out from the maze. The sides of these cliffs, though a quarter of a mile distant, were almost heard to rustle while we looked at them, it was such a leafy wilderness; a place for fauns and satyrs, and where bats hung all day to the rocks, and at evening flitted over the water, and fire-flies husbanded their light under the grass and leaves against the night. When we had pitched our tent on the hillside, a few rods from the shore, we sat looking through ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... their exertions and the moist heat they were breathless, and their bodies dripped with water. Panting, they halted at the entrance of what once had been a tomb. From its black interior came a damp mist; above them, alarmed by their intrusion, the vampire bats whirled blindly in circles. Monica, who by day possessed some slight knowledge of the ruins, had, in the moonlight, lost all ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... sole consolation the remainder of their lives was gazing at each other from the mouths of their respective caverns. For some reason, Plati, to which he next crossed, was of more interest to the Prince than its sister isle. What a cruel exterior the prison at the north end had! Wolves and bats might live in it, but men—impossible! He drew back horrified when told circumstantially of the ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... felt in my life. When I went to bed I didn't think I was going to sleep a wink, and I wouldn't if I'd stayed awake and thought about it. The mosquitoes were perfectly awful. Biggest things I ever saw. I thought once there were bats in the room. Sakes alive! that reminds me I haven't ordered a thing for dinner! I didn't intend to stay here a minute; just stopped by on my way to Mr. Blick's, and here it is after one o'clock! I get so tired of those everlasting three meals a day that I almost ...
— Miss Gibbie Gault • Kate Langley Bosher
... men like Luther and More protested against the "silly and woeful beastes' slaughter and murder." Tennis was so popular that there were 250 courts in Paris alone. The game was different from the modern in that the courts were 121 feet long, instead of 78 feet, and the wooden balls and "bats"—as racquets are still called in England—were much harder. Cards and dice were passionately played, a game called "triumph" or "trump" being the ancestor of our whist. Chess was ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... moonlight, and looked up at the pyramid. The entrance was a good way above his head, of course, and quite fifty or sixty yards from the point where he was standing, but the moonbeams bathed that side of the building in dazzling light so that he was enabled to see a perfect crowd of bats whirling out of ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... but they have been unwinged from birth so they can't fly to you. One of the most talkative people living, in some ways I am strangely speechless. Why! I haven't even told Boggley, though if he had eyes to see instead of being the blindest of dear old bats, my shining face would betray me. I keep on smiling in a perfectly imbecile manner, so that people exclaim, "Well, you are indecently glad to get away," and when they ask Why? I point them to the scene in the Old Testament where Hadad said unto Pharaoh, "Let me depart, that I may go to mine own ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... which in a preceding article, n. 336). In hell are to be seen all those that are evil uses (see just above, n. 338, where they are enumerated). These are wild creatures of every kind, as serpents, scorpions, great snakes, crocodiles, tigers, wolves, foxes, swine, owls of different kinds, bats, rats, and mice, frogs, locusts, spiders, and noxious insects of many kinds; also hemlocks and aconites, and all kinds of poisons, both of herbs and of earths; in a word, everything hurtful and deadly ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg
... Lake Darlot was rather pleasantly situated on rising ground by the side of the blow; behind us, sheer cliffs of conglomerate, worn and weathered into queer little caves, the floors of which were covered inches deep by the droppings of bats and small wallabies; and, stretching away to the South, an open plain enclosed in an endless sea of scrub. Every morning we witnessed the strange phenomenon of a lake appearing in the sky to the South, miles away, above the scrub, a lake surrounded ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... further happened. But while they were at breakfast the next morning, the Count's body-servant told them, with every appearance of real terror, that as he was crossing the court-yard at midnight, he had suddenly heard a noise like bats in the open cloisters, and when he looked he distinctly saw the White Lady gliding slowly through them; but they merely laughed at the poltroon, and though our hussar laughed also, he fully made up his mind, without saying a word about it, to keep a look-out ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... turf on Arthur's Seat, St Anthon's well aye springin'; The lammies playing at her feet, The birdies round her singin'. The solemn haunts o' Holyrood, Wi' bats and hoolits eerie, The tow'ring crags o' Salisbury, The lowly wells o' Weary, O[62] ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... consciousness of demerit once evoked in a man's heart, however imperfectly, as I believe it is in some of your hearts now, must issue in one of two things. Either it will send you further into darkness to get away from the light, as the bats in a cave will flit to the deepest recesses of it in order to escape the torch, or it will bring you nearer to Him, and at His feet you ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... truth about it all. T'sh, you bats, you sheep, what have you in your skulls? When a man will not speak, will not lie to gain a case for his lawyer—or save himself, there is something! Now, listen to me, and I will tell you the story of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... o'clock on a broiling Saturday afternoon in midsummer was one not easily to be forgotten. A younger man, tall and vigorous, clad in a thin suit of blue serge, walked by his side. They were followed by a shouting troop of small boys who overran the pavements, and some of whom were armed with baseball bats. The big trolley car was hailed by a dozen dirty ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... hours went by before a squawk penetrated the death-like stillness. Fruit-bats! It must be night. Very slowly he made his way toward the opening. Unfortunately for Piang the full moon was rising, making the soft, tropical night a wonder of beauty and loveliness. Cautiously he thrust his head through the branches that shielded his retreat. ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart
... are also somewhat rare, and it is doubtful whether rabbits are to be found in any part of the country;[279] ichneumons, which are tolerably common, seem sometimes to be mistaken for them. Gazelles are thought to inhabit Carmel,[280] and squirrels, rats, and moles are common. Bats also, if they may be counted among land-animals, are frequent; they belong, it is probable, to several species, one of which is ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... have levelled nobility almost as much as the mobility in France have, have confounded all individuality. Besides, if I did go to public places and assemblies, which my going to roost earlier prevents, the bats and owls do not begin to fly abroad till far in the night, when they begin to see and be seen. However, one of the empresses of fashion, the Duchess of Gordon, uses fifteen or sixteen hours of her four-and-twenty. I heard her journal of ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... their side goes to the bat the players must immediately return to and seat themselves upon the players' bench and remain there until the side is put out, except when batsman or base runner. All bats not in use must be kept in the bat racks, and the two players next succeeding the batsman, in the order in which they are named on the score, must be ready with bat in hand to promptly take position as batsman; provided, ...
— Spalding's Baseball Guide and Official League Book for 1889 • edited by Henry Chadwick
... house itself, dating from the time of the Plantagenets, was surrounded by a moat covered with broad lilies and floating green scum. Magnificent peacocks sunned themselves on the terraces, while from the surrounding shrubberies there rose the soft murmur of doves, pigeons, bats, owls and partridges. ...
— Winsome Winnie and other New Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... is one of those things which no person can get to the bottom of, there is so much of it and such variety. It is just wings, and wings, and wings, till you are weary: turkeys, and geese, and bats, and butterflies, and angels, and grasshoppers, and flying-fish, and—well, there is really no end to the tribe; it gives me the heaves just to think of it. But this one ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... go out somewhere for the afternoon, but still ordinary precautions to avoid observation had not been neglected. The boys did not repair to the appointed spot in large noisy bodies, but in small groups, quietly and unostentatiously. Some of them took their bats and balls out, and began playing at cricket, and then stole off to the rendezvous, which was close to them. Saurin was first on the ground; he stood under the trees at the edge of the dell with Edwards ...
— Dr. Jolliffe's Boys • Lewis Hough
... become aware of its existence. For the sake of internal safety a wall has been built round the top of the precipice, and at certain points you may look over this parapet, sheer down some ten or twelve hundred feet, into an abyss fit only to be the habitation of the owls, bats, and birds of prey which frequent its solitudes. There seems no resting-place for any wingless creature: thus the strange birds which haunt the wild recesses of the rocks do so in perfect security, and their varied cries, along with the roar of the water, are the only sounds that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... carried by the strong wings into the castle if the nearest monsters had not happened to awake and hear the noise of talking and swum to the shore to give battle. The fight was long and hard, and when the king at last beat back his foes another struggle awaited him. At the entrance gigantic bats, owls, and crows set upon him from all sides; but the dragon had teeth and claws, while the queen broke off sharp bits of glass and stabbed and cut in her anxiety to help her husband. At length the horrible creatures flew away; a sound like thunder was ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Various
... II, p. 195. A game of ball is also described in Historical Collections of Georgia, by the Rev. George White, 3d edition, New York, 1835, p. 670, which took place in Walker County, Georgia, between Chatooga and Chicamauga. The ball was thrown up at the centre. The bats were described as curiously carved spoons. If the ball touched the ground the play stopped and it was thrown up again. Rev. J. Owen Dorsey in a paper entitled "Omaha Sociology," printed in the Third Annual Report of the Bureau ...
— Indian Games • Andrew McFarland Davis
... on the Heath, with a cold dinner. Unfortunately for the older cricketing reputation of the town it is recorded that "owing to their having had two amusing days previous there was too much work in the game of cricket for their performance to be worth recording, and so threw away their bats and balls and retired to the Indies who were preparing a social cup of tea, making altogether ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... draws up in 3 or 4 Folds; and at the joints of those Ribs and the Extremities of the Wings, there are sharp and crooked Claws, by which they may hang on any thing. [A further description of the great bats and their habits follows.] At this Isle also we found plenty of Turtle and Manatee, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898—Volume 39 of 55 • Various
... following the Asuras for smiting them. With maces and spiked bludgeons, and swords and axes and stones, short clubs and mallets, and discs, short arrows and battle-axes with dust and wind, and fire and water, and ashes and brick-bats, and straw and trees, afflicting and smiting, and breaking, and slaying and routing the foe, and hurling them on the hostile ranks, and terrifying them therewith, came Ghatotkacha, desirous of getting at Drona. The Rakshasa Alambhusha, however, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... equal sensibility as regards the low notes a certain individual can hear the highest tones, whilst another cannot hear them at all; and it becomes proved that certain men, with perfectly sound organs, never heard the cricket in the chimney-corner, yet did not doubt but that bats occasionally utter a piercing cry; and attention being once awakened to these singular results, observers have found the most extraordinary differences of sensibility between their right ear ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... with him and tell him to bring along all the rats and mice he can find in the white house, and you can turn them into the ring Monday afternoon when the elephants do their turn, and if an elephant bats an eye I will eat his ears ...
— Peck's Bad Boy at the Circus • George W. Peck
... for that which is best for the public, I would have preferred a continuation of the Croker dynasty. As it is, good sooth! Mr. Croker is destroyed. And your ruin, of whatever character, the resort of owls, the habitat of bats, and all across it flung the melancholy ivy—that verdant banner of victorious decay!—is, at its loveliest, but a spectacle of depression; and one who has witnessed Mr. Croker in his vigor must be at least dimly affected ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... seen the bats flying low over a burnished pool at sunset, and the web of their wings had burned in scarlet flickers, as they stretched across the light. Winged momentarily on bits of tissued flame, threaded with blood, the bats had ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... corrective. A thousand wrongs and abuses that are grown in darkness disappear, like owls and bats, before the light of ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... him with this, not at all aware of the goods and chattels removed for the occasion, he said it was so very comfortable he should now write all his letters here, for at his lodgings he had such a miserable low table he had been forced to prop it up by brick-bats! ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... always be remembered as the purest, cleanest election ever held in the precincts of the city. The citizens' organization turned out in overwhelming force to guarantee that it should be so. Bands of Dr. Boomer's students, armed with baseball bats, surrounded the polls to guarantee fair play. Any man wishing to cast an unclean vote was driven from the booth: all those attempting to introduce any element of brute force or rowdyism into the election ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... determined to harass the ambitious Clinton; and, although his agents, as late as 1809, sought reconciliation, the society expelled Cheetham and made Clinton an object of detestation. Cheetham, who died in 1810, did not live to wreak full vengeance; but he did enough to arouse a shower of brick-bats which broke the windows of his home and threatened the ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... worst of the heat lasted, we left the hunting alone and stayed quietly in the hut, for the heat was extremely uncomfortable. We lay at night with a mosquito net over the bedplace, to keep off the insects; but even then it happened sometimes that blind bats would come flying silently against our nets and tear them. This happened too often to Glahn, because he was obliged to have a trap in the roof open all the time, on account of the heat; but it did ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun
... "Brought some with me, in case of emergency. It's useful stuff. And I just looted Linda Mottram's curling apparatus from her bedroom. Don't you twig? What blind bats you are! I'm going to stick up ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... refused to serve her, and the cause was as follows: Mrs. Braithwaite had up to that time been very successful in churning her butter, but about a month ago the butter would not come. She tried every known agency; she washed and dried her bats, but all to no purpose. The milk would not yield an ounce of butter. Under the circumstances she said Mrs. Williams had witched her. The neighbours believed it, and Mrs. Williams was generally called a witch. Hearing these reports, Mrs. Williams went to Mrs. Braithwaite ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... number of horsemen were seen far below slowly advancing along the road; but when they had nearly reached the foot of the mountain they suddenly struck off in a different direction. The last ray of sunshine departed, the bats began to flit by in the twilight, the road grew dimmer and dimmer to the view, and nothing appeared stirring in it but now and then a peasant lagging homeward ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... cheew! Bones of Caesar! The arrows flitted and clipt amongst us like a flight of bats! Dan Golby threw a double-summersault, alighting on his head. Dory Durkee went smashing into the fire. Jerry Hunker was pinned to the sod where he lay fast asleep. Such dodging and ducking, and clawing about for weapons I never saw. And such genuine Indian yelling—it chills ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... a unit in counsel. Their views were in full accord as to the necessity of immediately reducing Camp Jackson. Defiance was daily passing between the marshalling hosts, not face to face, but through dubious partisans who passed from camp to camp, flitting like the bats of fable in the confines of conflict. Capt. Lyon's decision, urged thereto by Col. Blair, was made without calling a council of the rest of his advisers. They heard of it, however, and, though brave and loyal men all, they gathered around him in his ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... fling a stone through their damned badge." And he pointed to the sea-green and silver shield high up in the transept window. "Sunlight and moonlight, it is always there. I used to like to come down and play here to the bats of a full moon, till I saw that would always look into the loft and ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... convergence of natural laws. Among other things opportunity had of late years been denied her of learning to be undignified, for she lived lonely. Isolation on a heath renders vulgarity well-nigh impossible. It would have been as easy for the heath-ponies, bats, and snakes to be vulgar as for her. A narrow life in Budmouth might ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... beauty throughout nature; for this may be largely attributed to the agency of selection. That beauty, according to our sense of it, is not universal, must be admitted by every one who will look at some venomous snakes, at some fishes, and at certain hideous bats with a distorted resemblance to the human face. Sexual selection has given the most brilliant colours, elegant patterns, and other ornaments to the males, and sometimes to both sexes of many birds, butterflies and other animals. With birds it ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... been pushed open by some fair hand, revealing to a lover waiting beneath in the moonlight the charming countenance of his high-born mistress! Those were brave days. They had passed away long since. The great house had stood empty for who could tell how many years; only bats and vermin were its inhabitants. Where now were those who had built it? and who were they? Probably the very ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... cover us with leaves?" I said, laughing, when we had made up our minds that we were lost. But it seemed more likely that, if any creature paid us this thoughtful attention, it would be bats. As night fell in the Forest, they unhooked themselves from their mysterious trapezes, and whirred past our faces with a soft flap, flap of velvet wings. I don't know what I should have done if one had made a ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... walls of spiders' legs are made Well mortised and finely laid; He was the master of his trade It curiously that builded; The windows of the eyes of cats, And for the roof, instead of slats, Is covered with the skins of bats, With moonshine that ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... (who, by- the-bye, said he had been a wonderful cricketer in his time) told me, that it was the clergyman himself who had established the whole thing: that it was his field they played in; and that it was he who had purchased stumps, bats, ball, and all! ...
— Sunday Under Three Heads • Charles Dickens
... letter, he wrote "Julian and Maddalo". A slight ravine, with a road in its depth, divided the garden from the hill, on which stood the ruins of the ancient castle of Este, whose dark massive wall gave forth an echo, and from whose ruined crevices owls and bats flitted forth at night, as the crescent moon sunk behind the black and heavy battlements. We looked from the garden over the wide plain of Lombardy, bounded to the west by the far Apennines, while to the ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... the recess was so dark that we could not ascertain either its formation or extent. . . . On first entering it we were nearly overpowered by a strong, sulphurous smell, which was soon accounted for by the flight of an incredible number of small bats, which were roosting in the bottom of the cave, and had been disturbed at our approach. We attempted to grope our way to the bottom, but not having a light, were soon obliged to give up its further examination. ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... and boasted of a good nine, with whom the St. Louis team expected to cross bats a number of times during the training season. Then, too, in nearby towns, were other teams, some of them semi-professional, who would be called on to sacrifice themselves that the Cardinals might have something to bring out their own strong ...
— Baseball Joe in the Big League - or, A Young Pitcher's Hardest Struggles • Lester Chadwick |
