"Beetle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The potato-beetle, giant water-bug, eastern swallow-tail butterfly, and promothea moth are insects suitable as types to be studied by the pupils of Form I. The giant water-bug is the large, broad, grayish-brown insect that is found on the sidewalks ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... day arrived in which the wood was to be levelled. It was in the month of February, when those birds usually sit. The saw was applied to the butt, the wedges were inserted into the opening, the woods echoed to the heavy blows of the beetle or mallet, the tree nodded to its fall; but still the dam sat on. At last, when it gave way, the bird was flung from her nest; and, though her parental affection deserved a better fate, was whipped down by the twigs, which brought her dead ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... written before the potato-beetle made its appearance. But I think I should say the same thing now—only put it a little stronger. The truth is, it will not pay to "fight the bugs" on a poor crop of potatoes. We must select the best land we have and make ...
— Talks on Manures • Joseph Harris
... trouble about it no more. At the return of spring, by which time the family, if developed according to rule, would have been emancipated, they die. The mighty Spider of the waste-lands, therefore, attains to an even more patriarchal age than her neighbour the Sacred Beetle: {27} she lives for five years at ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... English often long trains of words allied by their meaning and derivation; as, to beat, a bat, batoon, a battle, a beetle, a battledore, to batter, batter, a kind of glutinous composition for food, made by beating different bodies into one mass. All these are of similar signification, and perhaps derived from the Latin batuo. Thus take, touch, tickle, tack, tackle; all imply a local ...
— A Grammar of the English Tongue • Samuel Johnson
... walked down the path to the brook, her big shoes scattering the pebbles right and left, she noticed a large beetle lying upon its back and struggling hard with its little legs to turn over, that its feet might again touch the ground. But this it could not accomplish; so the woman, who had a kind heart, reached down and gently turned the beetle with ...
— American Fairy Tales • L. Frank Baum
... danger the way any babies are," said Peter, talking to himself as is his way when there is no one else to talk to. Just then a funny little black pollywog wriggled into sight, and while Peter was watching him, a stout-jawed water-beetle suddenly rushed from among the water grass, seized the pollywog by his tail, and dragged him down. Peter stared. Could it be that that ugly-looking bug was as dangerous an enemy to the baby Toad as Reddy Fox is to a ...
— The Adventures of Old Mr. Toad • Thornton W. Burgess
... came out again with the air of one dissatisfied. Half-a-dozen times she came out tail first, buzzing warnings and very angry, at the invitation of a bumble-bee queen, a big, hook-jawed, carnivorous beetle in shining mail, and so forth, but she never ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... possible and test them by substitution and interchange. Lastly, to provide science with a solid basis of facts, he must experiment. In this way, the evidence of formal records will one day dispel the fantastic legends with which our books are crowded: the Sacred Beetle (A Dung-beetle who rolls the manure of cattle into balls for his own consumption and that of his young. Cf. "Insect Life", by J.H. Fabre, translated by the author of "Mademoiselle Mori": chapters 1 and 2; and "The Life and Love of the Insect", by J. Henri Fabre, translated by Alexander Teixeira de ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... consciousness, I do not see on what ground it is to be ascribed to the lowest animals. I find it hard to believe that an infusory animalcule, a foraminifer, or a fresh-water polype is capable of feeling; and, in spite of Shakspere, I have doubts about the great sensitiveness of the "poor beetle that we tread upon." The question is equally perplexing when we turn to the stages of development of the individual. Granted a fowl feels; that the chick just hatched feels; that the chick when it chirps within the egg may possibly feel; what is to be said of it ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... his own particular kind of "game" which he caught in the net, transferring the specimens to the boxes he carried. There were beautiful butterflies, moths and strange bugs in the securing of which the scientist evinced great delight, though when one beetle nipped him firmly and painfully on his thumb his involuntary cry of pain was as real as that ...
— Tom Swift in the Land of Wonders - or, The Underground Search for the Idol of Gold • Victor Appleton
... Magyar of the first water. And when he perceived that the crab soup was made with butter, he put down his spoon beside his plate and said he could not eat crabs. Since he had learned that the crab was nought else but a beetle living in water, and since a company had been formed in Germany for making beetles into preserves for dessert, he had been unable to look with undismayed ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... stag beetle which seemed to have been in the wars, for one of its horns was gone, while not a dozen yards farther on we came upon a dissipated cockchafer, with a dent in his horny case, and upon both of these Mercer pounced with delight, transferring them to a flat tin paste-blacking box, inside which we could ...
— Burr Junior • G. Manville Fenn
... book, and that was the book for him. The curious physical always drew his mind to hate it or to love. In summer he would crawl into the bottom of an old hedge, among the black mould and the withered sticks, and watch a red-ended beetle creep slowly up a bit of wood till near the top, and fall suddenly down, and creep patiently again—this he would watch with curious interest and remember always. "Johnny," said his mother once, "what do you breenge into the bushes to ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... appeared in a professional performance. There has been a rather needless fury in his remarks; it is a case doubtless of more sound than sentiment. This, however, is pretty George's way; where some would use a whip he "fillips" people with "a three-man beetle." ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... ten feet below and to one side of its former position. Just then we heard the voice of one of the parent birds, and we quickly paddled to the other side of the stream, fifty feet away, to watch her proceedings, saying to each other, "Too bad! too bad!" The mother bird had a large beetle in her beak. She alighted upon a limb a few feet above the former site of her nest, looked down upon us, uttered a note or two, and then dropped down confidently to the point in the vacant air where the entrance to her nest had been but a few moments before. Here ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... himself, "God forgive a rascal for lying!" And she was handsomer, but the reddleman was far from thinking so. There was a certain obscurity in Eustacia's beauty, and Venn's eye was not trained. In her winter dress, as now, she was like the tiger-beetle, which, when observed in dull situations, seems to be of the quietest neutral colour, but under a full illumination blazes with ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... Carolina. It is the site of Fort Moultrie, where Poe served as a private soldier in Battery H of the First Artillery, United States Army, from November, 1827, to November, 1828. The atmosphere of the place in Poe's time is well preserved, but no such beetle as the gold-bug has been discovered. Poe may have found a hint for his story in the wreck of the old brigantine Cid Campeador off the coast of South Carolina in 1745, the affidavits of the burying of the treasure being still ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... the next they were almost continuously engaged in dragging the sledges over masses of ice, some of which rose to thirty feet above the general level. If the reader will try to imagine a very small ant or beetle dragging its property over a newly macadamised road, he will have a faint conception of the nature of the work. To some extent the dogs were a hindrance rather than a help, especially when passing over broken fragments, for they were always tumbling into holes and cracks, out of ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... of Greece; Opium, Ophion. The sweet reed of Egypt was named [47]Canah, and Conah, by way of eminence; also, [48]Can-Osiris. Cinnamon was denominated from Chan-Amon; Cinnabar, [Greek: kinnabaris], from Chan-Abor; the sacred beetle, Cantharus, from Chan-Athur. The harp was styled Cinnor, and was supposed to have been found out by Cinaras; which terms are compounded of Chan-Or, and Chan-Arez; and relate to the Sun, or Apollo, the supposed inventor of the lyre. Priests and magistrates were particularly ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... fades the glimmering landscape on the sight, And all the air a solemn stillness holds, Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight, And drowsy tinklings lull ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... Aunt Dora came to-day. She's going to stay with us for a time till Mother is quite well again. I didn't remember her at all, for I was only four or five when she went away from Vienna. You dear little black beetle she said to me and gave me a kiss. I didn't like the black much, but Hella says that suits me, that it's piquant. Piquant is what the officers always say of her cousin in Krems, Father says she is a beauty, and she's dark ...
— A Young Girl's Diary • An Anonymous Young Girl
... "Quaint old beetle-hunter you are, for a man who has fought in half-a-dozen battles!" and Scoutbush walked on silently for ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... chimed in a voice from the front seats. "We keep out of the way as much as we can; we eat every kind of troublesome worm and insect,—the cutworm, canker-worm, tent caterpillar, army-worm, rose-beetle, and the common house-fly; we ask for no wages or food or care,—and what do we get in return? Not even protection and common kindness. If we had places where we could live in safety, who could tell the amount of good we might do? Yet I would not have ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... finished object onto a flat-bed trailer. As it swung in the air, Joe realized what it was. It might be called a jet plane, but it was not of any type ever before used. More than anything else, it looked like a beetle. It would not be really useful for anything but its function at the end of Operation Stepladder. Then hundreds of these ungainly objects would cluster upon the Platform's sides, like swarming bees. They would thrust savagely up with their separate jet engines. ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... moon is high o'er the ruined tower, When the night-bird sings in her lonely bower, When beetle and cricket and bat are awake, And the will-o'-the-wisp is at play in the brake, Oh then do we gather, all frolic and glee, We gay little elfins, beneath the old tree! And brightly we hover on silvery wing, And dip our small cups in the whispering spring, While the night-wind lifts lightly ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... it! Stop imagining that, then. Now imagine something else. The violins are playing a melodious plaint; the flutes are singing gently; the double bass drones like a beetle. ...
— Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev
... Lockman tells of a vizier who, having offended his master, was condemned to perpetual captivity in a lofty tower. At night his wife came to weep below his window. "Cease your grief," said the sage; "go home for the present, and return hither when you have procured a live black-beetle, together with a little ghee, (or buffalo's butter.) three clews, one of the finest silk, another of stout packthread, and another of whip-cord; finally, a stout coil of rope."— When she again came to the foot of the tower, provided according to her husband's commands, he directed her ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 354, Saturday, January 31, 1829. • Various
... desirable to guard against the risk of admixture of {189} foreign pollen by selecting for pollinating purposes a flower which has not quite opened. If the standard is not erected, it is unlikely to have been visited by Megachile. Lastly, it not infrequently happens that the little beetle Meligethes is found inside the keel. Such flowers should be rejected for ...
— Mendelism - Third Edition • Reginald Crundall Punnett
... other Orders of insects, I have been able to collect very little reliable information. With the stag-beetle (Lucanus cervus) "the males appear to be much more numerous than the females"; but when, as Cornelius remarked during 1867, an unusual number of these beetles appeared in one part of Germany, the females appeared to exceed ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... She closed the second one. Then, having drawn the curtains, she fumbled for the matches and lit the candles upon her dressing bureau. It was her intention to search for the intruding beetle, ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... my heart; my lips were stiffened with dread of loud breath, and all power of motion left me. For even a puff of wind might betray me, the ruffle of a spray, or the lifting of a leaf, or the random bounce of a beetle. Great peril had encompassed me ere now, but never had it grasped me as this did, and paralyzed all the powers of my body. Rather would I have stood in the midst of a score of Mexican rovers than thus in the presence of that one man. And yet was not this ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... then; it soared aloft, Driven by light vigorous breezes from the sea Soared buoyantly, till the diminished toy Grew smaller than the falcon when she stoops To dart upon her prey. I sent for cord, Servant on servant hurrying, till the kite Shrank to the size of a beetle: still I called For cord, and sent to summon father, mother, My little sisters, my old halting nurse,— I would have had the whole world to survey Me and my wondrous kite. It still soared on, And I stood bending back in ecstasy, My eyes on that small point, clapping my hands, And shouting, ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... gone out, closing the door after her. For a minute I lay perfectly motionless, too weak for thought. Then opening my eyes with an effort, I stared straight up at the white ceiling, against which a green June beetle was knocking with a persistent, buzzing sound that seemed an accompaniment to the crooning lullaby of ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... necessary, then, to know what other insects are employed in holding them in check, by feeding on them. Some of our most formidable insects have been accidentally imported from Europe, such as the codling moth, asparagus beetle, cabbage butterfly, currant worm and borer, elm-tree beetle, hessian fly, etc.; but in nearly every instance these have come over without bringing their insect enemies with them, and in consequence they ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... The Pyrophorus noctilucus, or "cucujo," found also in Mexico and the West Indies. It resembles our large spring-beetle. The light proceeds from two eye-like spots on the thorax and from the segments underneath. It feeds on the sugar-cane. On the Upper Amazon we found the P. clarus, P. pellucens, and P. tuberculatus. At Bahia, on the opposite coast, Darwin ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... on bill or feet and legs should be renewed with oil colors as they fade almost entirely; if of a dark or neutral color originally, a coating of transparent varnish will do. There is a variety of beetle which delights in dining on such hard parts of mounted birds if not protected by paint ...
— Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit • Albert B. Farnham
... against the glands of many tentacles. An insect, such as a fly, with thin integuments, through which animal matter in solution can readily pass into the surrounding dense secretion, is more efficient in causing prolonged inflection than an insect with a thick coat, such as a beetle. The inflection of the tentacles takes place indifferently in the light and darkness; and the plant is not subject to any ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin
... beetles, are the valued prizes of entomologists. Into that tunnelled hole he inserts his long finger, and squash it goes into a large, pulpy, fat, sweet grub. It takes but a moment to draw it out; and if it be a pupa near the bark, so much the better for the aye-aye, so much the worse for the beetle or cossus. I might dilate on this subject, but prefer referring the reader to Professor Owen's memoir, and to his lecture.[22] The aye-aye, in every point of its structure, like every created thing, is full ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... quickly as it had descended but the awful thing clung to it and it was only after a number of vigorous shakes that he succeeded in dislodging it. In his lack of experience he had planted his paw directly upon a giant rhinoceros beetle with bristling, thorn-like "antlers" one of which had penetrated the skin between the pads. The pain was intense so he held up the injured member and wailed for his mother; he was in trouble and ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... (1) Bydlo bylo, bydlo bedzie (It was cattle, it remains cattle); (2) Podawala baba babie przez piec malowane grabie (A woman handed the woman over the stove a painted rake); (3) Chrzaszcz brzmi w trzinie (The beetle buzzes in the pipe). Latin and Greek are also made use of for similar purpose. Treichel cites, among other passages, the following: (1) Quamuis sint sub aqua, sub aqua maledicere tentant (Ovid, Metam. VI. 376); ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... year of the War. Further insists on the same theme, and enlarges on the blessings of Peace. The hero Trygaeus flies to Olympus, mounted on a beetle, to bring back the ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... in the woods! Silence! Deep silence! Save for the chortle of the night-jar, the tap of the snipe's beak against the tree-trunks, the snores of a weary game-keeper, the chirp of the burying-beetle, the croak of the bat, the wild laughter of the owl and the boom, boom of the frog, deep silence reigned. The crescent moon stole silently above the horizon. Wonderful, significant is that silent, stealthy approach of the moon. Red Head lumbered from his lair and crouched beside ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 17, 1914 • Various
... Germans, Dutch, Danes, Swedes, Russians, Prussians, Turks, or Algerines treated American citizens in this way? And yet our federalists can never bear to hear us speak, in terms of resentment, against "the bulwark of our religion." O, Caleb! Caleb! Thou hast a head and so has a beetle.[S] ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... suppose I shall be picked. I don't think I'm good enough!" whispered a very small purple pansy, who had only recently been planted, to a beetle who happened to be crawling by. "I should like to go with the others, though I don't suppose it would cheer anyone to see me, ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... life thousands would be saved from corruption and decay. One death, and a hundred lives in exchange—it's simple arithmetic! Besides, what value has the life of that sickly, stupid, ill-natured old woman in the balance of existence! No more than the life of a louse, of a black-beetle, less in fact because the old woman is doing harm. She is wearing out the lives of others; the other day she bit Lizaveta's finger out of spite; it almost ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... and many of these are such isolated forms that it is impossible to find their allies in any particular country[24]." More than two-thirds of all the species belong to the group of weevils—a circumstance which serves to explain the great wealth of beetle-population, the weevils being beetles which live in wood, and St. Helena having been originally a densely wooded island. This circumstance is also in accordance with the view that the peculiar insect fauna has been in large part evolved from ancestors which reached the ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... it extremely dangerous to touch anything which they may happen to find without saining (blessing) it, the snares of the enemy being notorious and well-attested. A pool-woman of Teviotdale having been fortunate enough, as she thought herself, to find a wooden beetle, at the very time when she needed such an implement, seized it without pronouncing a proper blessing, and, carrying it home, laid it above her bed to be ready for employment in the morning. At midnight the window of ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... coffee-tree leaves, the so-called "leaf-miner" being especially troublesome. The Mediterranean fruit fly deposits larvae which destroy or lessen the worth of the coffee berry by tunneling within and eating the contents of the parchment. The coffee-berry beetle and its grub also live within the ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... down the empty street Made hideous with arcs of purple light... Inevitably I must return to bed. The house is waiting, chairs, and books, and clocks. I am their prisoner. I have no more chance Of escape, when all is said, Than a dying beetle in a box— And life, and love,—and death—have gone ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Marjorie Allen Seiffert
... were written to deliver the deceased from the Great Crocodile Sui, and the Serpents Rerek and Seksek, and the Lynx with its deadly claws, and the Beetle Apshait, and the terrible Merti snake-goddesses, and a group of three particularly venomous serpents, and Aapep a personification of Set the god of evil, and the Eater of the Ass, and a series of beings who lived by slaughtering the souls of the dead. In Chapter ...
— The Book of the Dead • E. A. Wallis Budge
... the more crafty in expression because a wig, seemingly endowed with motion, let the white hairs show on all sides of it as it meandered crookedly across the forehead. An observer taking note of this excellent Norman, clothed in black and mounted on his two legs like a beetle on a couple of pins, and knowing him to be one of the most trustworthy of men, would have sought, without finding it, for the reason ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... few words of English. Aaron gave the porter an English shilling. The porter let the coin lie in the middle of his palm, as if it were a live beetle, and darted to the light of the carriage to examine the beast, exclaiming volubly. The cabman, wild with interest, peered down from the box into the palm of the porter, and carried on an impassioned dialogue. Aaron stood with ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... everything else in their way, and end in a general stampede to underground retreats from the region poisoned by sunshine. Next year you will find the grass growing fresh and green where the stone lay—the ground-bird builds her nest where the beetle had his hole—the dandelion and the buttercup are growing there, and the broad fans of insect-angels open and shut over their golden disks as the rhythmic waves of blissful consciousness pulsate through their ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... nervous, listening to the night sounds, found them far more distracting than any the day could produce. Above the breathing of the three children sleeping near her in the big room, the buzz of a moth-beetle against the ceiling, and the far-off howling of jackals, she could hear something out in the garden sighing with faint, whistling sighs. More disquieting still was a gentle, intermittent tapping on the closed and heavily barred shutters, inside which the windows ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... squeak, and open their beaks directly....I was hoping for them back again the next year, but they say a sportsman here shot them with his gun. And what could he gain by it? It's hardly bigger, the swallow, than a beetle....What wicked men ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... hushed, save where the weak-eyed bat With short shrill shriek flits by on leathern wing, Or where the beetle winds His small but ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... a beetle or a field-mouse this time," she thought. "Now what can I do for him? He is always so ...
— Stories of Birds • Lenore Elizabeth Mulets
... "A beetle that has developed the protective instinct till it looks like a splash of white on a rock. Here it is;" and ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... who was very old and had seen many strange things in her long life; but Mumga, being an ape, had a faculty for recalling the trivial. That time when Gunto mistook a sting-bug for an edible beetle had made more impression upon Mumga than all the innumerable manifestations of the greatness of God which she had witnessed, and which, of course, she had ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... lying on the ground, Shining, quite still, as though they had been stunned By some great violent spirit stalking through, Leaving a deep and supernatural calm Round a dead beetle upturned in ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... and osier heads, In the rushy soaking damps, Where the vapours pitch their camps, Follow me, follow me, For a midnight ramble! O! what a mighty fog, What a merry night O ho! Follow, follow, nigher, nigher - Over bank, and pond, and briar, Down into the croaking ditches, Rotten log, Spotted frog, Beetle bright With crawling light, What a joy O ho! Deep into the purple bog - What a joy O ho! Where like hosts of puckered witches All the shivering agues sit Warming hands and chafing feet, By the blue marsh-hovering oils: O the fools for all their moans! ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... But in truth it is only by being allowed to look beyond that horizon that Man can be kept in line with the rest of Nature's children; for if death means extinction to him, as it means (or seems to mean) to the beetle or the fly, he will have lived to no purpose, having failed to realise in any appreciable degree what every other living thing realises within its appointed limits,—the central tendencies of his being. ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... towards the inside of the calix. A beetle, a little smaller than herself, with brown wing-sheaths and a black breastplate, was sitting at the entrance. He kept his place unperturbed, and looked at her seriously, though by no ...
— The Adventures of Maya the Bee • Waldemar Bonsels
... the production of a species of beetle remarkable for variety of colors and ornamentation of body. We had seen numerous specimens of this insect in southern India and at Singapore, some of which were an inch long, but these of Elephanta were not remarkable for size. They were hardly larger than one's ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... dominant race, helpless as a child and completely at the mercy of his native neighbors, In a deliberate lazy way he set himself to torture me as a schoolboy would devote a rapturous half-hour to watching the agonies of an impaled beetle, or as a ferret in a blind burrow might glue himself comfortably to the neck of a rabbit. The burden of his conversation was that there was no escape "of no kind whatever," and that I should stay here till I died and was "thrown on to the sand." If it were possible to forejudge the conversation ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... caterpillar emits a smell much resembling that of musk, and Ray and Linnaeus both supposed it to be the Cossus mentioned by Pliny, as fattened with flour by the Roman epicures for their tables. Later writers have, however, for many reasons, ascribed this to the larva of the stag beetle. ...
— The Emperor's Rout • Unknown
... the beetle boometh Athwart the thicket lone: At noon the wild bee [1] hummeth About the moss'd headstone: At midnight the moon cometh, And looketh down alone. Her song the lintwhite swelleth, The clear-voiced mavis dwelleth, The callow throstle [2] lispeth, The slumbrous ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... true that Shakespeare says, "The poor beetle that we tread on, in mortal sufferance, feels a pang as great as when a giant dies;" and it is equally true that it is as ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... Ball and the Grasshopper's Feasts Excited the spleen of the Birds and the Beasts: For their mirth and good cheer—of the Bee was the theme, And the Gnat blew his horn, as he danc'd in the beam. 'Twas humm'd by the Beetle, 'twas buzz'd by the Fly, And sung by the myriads that sport through the sky. The Quadrupeds listen'd with sullen displeasure, But the tenants of air were enraged beyond measure. The PEACOCK display'd his bright plumes to the Sun, And, addressing his Mates, thus indignant ...
— The Peacock 'At Home:' - A Sequel to the Butterfly's Ball • Catherine Ann Dorset
... save where the weak-eyed bat, With short, shrill shriek, flits by on leathern wing; Or where the beetle winds His small ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... colours of the bark that at two or three feet distance they are quite undistinguishable. In some cases a species is known to frequent only one species of tree. This is the case with the common South American long-horned beetle (Onychocerus scorpio) which, Mr. Bates informed me, is found only on a rough-barked tree, called Tapiriba, on the Amazon. It is very abundant, but so exactly does it resemble the bark in colour and rugosity, and so ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... on some sacks of corn, wondering why Fritz doesn't lob over a crump or two, just to wake us up. Jezebel is gorging herself close by. Swallow eats a bit, and then suddenly looks up and sniffs nervously. I suppose he has heard a beetle trotting by, or seen a twig fall ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... Boulogne—many days after— awaking to consciousness in his prison bed in the fortress of Givet. Then, as now, he had lain staring, his whole soul sickened by the cruel jar of the jest. Hand of fate, was it? Nay, a jocose and blundering finger, rather, that had flipped him, as a man might flip a beetle, into the night. Then, as now, his soul had welled up in sullen indignation. He blamed no one; for in all the stupid chapter of accidents there was no one to blame. But when the Protestant chaplain in Givet came to his bed he turned his face ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... waddling on a pair of short bandy legs; slovenly, shabby, unbrushed clothes; a big square bilious-yellow face, surmounted by a mop of thick iron-grey hair; dark beetle-brows; a pair of staring, fierce, black, goggle eyes, with huge circular spectacles standing up like fortifications in front of them; a shaggy beard and mustache of mixed black, white, and grey; a prodigious cameo ring on the forefinger of one hairy hand; the other hand ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... The trees were not at all crowded, but their leaves were so thick, and their boughs spread so far, that it was only here and there a sunbeam could get straight through. All the gentle creatures of a forest were there, but no creatures that killed, not even a weasel to kill the rabbits, or a beetle to eat the snails out of their striped shells. As to the butterflies, words would but wrong them if they tried to tell how gorgeous they were. The princess's delight was so great that she neither laughed nor ran, but walked about with a solemn ...
— A Double Story • George MacDonald
... I had often seen one placed at the end of a road on a hillock, and in the light of the sun its black arms, bending in every direction, always reminded me of the claws of an immense beetle, and I assure you it was never without emotion that I gazed on it, for I could not help thinking how wonderful it was that these various signs should be made to cleave the air with such precision as to convey to the distance of three hundred leagues the ideas and wishes of ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... out that motives of delicacy are usually the excuse of weak minds for not speaking the plain truth to their friends. People quit the straight path from motives of delicacy, may be, to a worm or a beetle—vulgar souls, observe, I rank only as worms and beetles; they cross our path every instant in life; and those who fear to give them offence must deviate and deviate, till they get into a labyrinth, from which they can never extricate themselves, or ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... on man. It unravels and weaves anew the web of his moral and social being. It invests him with feelings, associations, and habits, to which he has been an entire stranger. It breaks up the sealed fountain of his nature, and lifts his soul into features prominent as the cliffs which beetle over its surge. ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... that ever was edged like a sword, Could have pierced to his heart with such keen accusation As the silence, the sudden profound isolation, In which he remain'd. "O return; I repent!" He exclaimed; but no sound through the stillness was sent, Save the roar of the water, in answer to him, And the beetle that, sleeping, yet humm'd her night-hymn: An indistinct anthem, that troubled the air With a searching, and wistful, and questioning prayer. "Return," sung the wandering insect. The roar Of the waters replied, "Nevermore! nevermore!" ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... gold we can serve people more." Afanasy reasoned thus with himself, and wished to tell it all to his brother, but Ioann had gone off out of earshot, and was now visible on the opposite mountain, no bigger than a beetle. ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... black and has the following signs, namely a white square 23 upon the forehead, and on the back the likeness of an eagle, and in the tail the hairs are double, and on 24 the tongue there is a mark like a beetle. ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... They are the winged wardens of your farms, Who from the cornfields drive the insidious foe, And from your harvests keep a hundred harms; Even the blackest of them all, the crow, Renders good service as your man-at-arms, Crushing the beetle in his coat of mail, And crying havoc ...
— Conservation Reader • Harold W. Fairbanks
... to settle and clear; then I began to introduce the living inmates. I collected prawns and crabs and sea-snails, and a tiny sole or two, a couple of inches long, and by good chance I found a small sepiola, or cuttle-fish, as big as a beetle, which burrowed in the sand and changed color magically from dark brown to faintest buff. I also had a pair of soldier-crabs, which fought each other continually. When the sunlight fell on my aquarium, I saw the silver ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... London theatres now, and the following is your bill of fare. Fairies you have by scores in flesh-coloured tights, spangles, and paucity of petticoats; gnomes of every description, from the gigantic glittering diamond beetle, to the grotesque and dusky tadpole. Epicene princes, whose taper limbs and swelling busts are well worth the scrutiny of the opera-glass—dragons vomiting at once red flames and witticisms about the fountains in Trafalgar ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... from the crowd proclaimed that the Golden Eagle was once more in sight. At first a mere speck against the blue, she rapidly assumed shape and was soon circling above the heads of the onlookers, her engine droning steadily, as if she had been some gigantic beetle. ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... the sun and moon may change their course, and "heaven and earth wax old as a garment." Perhaps, in order to please tender-hearted people, I might have been less true to nature; but if a certain beetle, of whom we have all heard, could extract filth even from pearls, if we have examples that fire has destroyed and water deluged, shall therefore pearls, fire, and water be condemned. In consequence of the remarkable catastrophe which ends my play, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... to the seductions of the ditch. He caught a big, sleepy beetle and put it on a violet leaf, and sent it sailing out to sea; and when it landed on the farther shore he found a still bigger leaf, and sent it forth on a voyage in another direction, with a cargo of daisy petals, and a hairy caterpillar ...
— Jimbo - A Fantasy • Algernon Blackwood
... and wedges, and a beetle in the canoe, and Gershom was as expert with these implements as a master of fencing is with his foil, to say nothing of the skill of le Bourdon, the tree was soon laid open, and its ample stores of sweets ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... plume. Thou art leaning on my breast, Lean forever there, and rest! Fly from man, that bloody race, Pards, assassins, bold and base; Quit their dim, and false parade For the quiet lonely shade. Leave the windy birchen cot For my own light happy lot; O'er thee I my veil will fling, Light as beetle's silken wing; I will breathe perfume of flowers, O'er thy happy evening hours; I will in my shell canoe Waft thee o'er the waters blue; I will deck thy mantle fold, With the sun's last rays of gold. Come, and on the mountain free Rove a ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... procured a beetle with red stripes across its wing-sheaths, and trained it to show some degree of intelligence. This was for months the sole companion of my solitude, but it was at last discovered in ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... Forster escaped from Newgate through the aid of a clever servant, and got off to France, while the angry Whigs hinted at connivance on the part of persons in high places. The redoubted Brigadier Mackintosh, who figures in descriptions of the time as a "beetle-browed, gray-eyed" man of sixty, speaking "broad Scotch," succeeded in escaping, together with his son and seven others, in a rush of prisoners from the Newgate press-yard. Mr. Charles Radcliffe had an even ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... swear to it. However, we will go back at our leisure and verify it. What a blind beetle I have been, not ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... I hear around The churme and chirruping of busy reptiles At hideous banquet on the royal dead:— Full soon methought the loathsome epicures Came thick on me, and underneath my shroud I felt the many-foot and beetle creep, And on my breast the cold worm coil ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... Greg was the prisoner's name, Ugly in face, and in nature the same; Stubborn, sullen, and beetle-browed, The hardest case in a hardened crowd. The sin-set lines in his face were bent Neither by kindness nor punishment; He hadn't a friend in the prison there, And he grew more ugly and ...
— The Life of Jesus Christ for the Young • Richard Newton
... boy went to another side of the wood pile, and brought a large beetle and an iron wedge. When he got back to his log, he started out the axe which he had left sticking into it. Then Rollo saw that the axe had made a little indentation, or cleft, in the wood. He put the point of the wedge ...
— Rollo's Experiments • Jacob Abbott
... do fear thy courage, Claudio; and I quake Lest thou a feverous life should'st entertain, And six or seven winters more respect Than a perpetual honor. Dar'st thou die? The sense of death is most in apprehension; And the poor beetle that we tread upon, In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great As when a giant dies! Ay, Isabella, but to die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction and to rot; This sensible, warm motion to become A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... Book-in-Hand, and 'twas little like that I'd let the good chance pass—I might never have another; for Gover'ment folk will not easy work a quarrel on their own account. I mind him sittin' there on the settle, his shins against the fire, a long pipe going, and Casey of the Lazy Beetle, and Jobbin the mate of the Dodger, and Little Faddo, who had the fat Dutch wife down by the Ship Inn, and Whiggle the preaching blacksmith. And you were standin' with your back to the shinin' pewters, and the great jug of ale with the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... were held in great favour. They were sometimes kept by children as little pets, and allowed to run upon their hands and clothes, and this was not because of their beauty, but because to possess a gooldie was considered very lucky. To kill a beetle brought rain the ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... justly derives its name from entering people's ears, and either causing deafness, or, by penetrating to the brain, death itself, is with many considered an indisputable fact. The Irish have a large beetle of which strange tales are believed; they term it the Coffin-cutter, and it has some connexion with the grave and purgatory, not now, unfortunately, to be recalled ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 539 - 24 Mar 1832 • Various
... as they have broken through the soil, an enemy awaits them in the small black insect commonly known as the cabbage or turnip fly, beetle, or flea. This insect, though so small as to appear to the eye as a black dot, is very voracious and surprisingly active. He apparently feeds on the juice of the young plant, perforating it with small holes ...
— Cabbages and Cauliflowers: How to Grow Them • James John Howard Gregory
... was one of those slow, insidious poisons. It did not kill the beetle off immediately, but it undermined his constitution. Day by day he would sink and droop without being able to tell what was the matter with himself, until one morning we should enter the kitchen to find him ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... than to have those whom you love looking to you for help and to be unable to give it? But perhaps it won't come to that. Perhaps my father may hold his own for years. Come what may, I am bound to think that all things are ordered for the best; though when the good is a furlong off, and we with our beetle eyes can only see three inches, it takes some confidence in general ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... of exploring; and from these delightful rambles they would return laden with treasures—choice bon-bons, exotic flowers and hot- house grapes at five or six shillings a pound; quaint Japanese knick- knacks; books and pictures, and photographs of celebrated men—great beetle-browed philosophers, and men of blood and thunder; also of women still more celebrated, on and off the stage. Mr. Starbrow would have nothing sent; the whole fun of the thing, he assured Fan, was in carrying all their purchases ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... alert, But somewhat cowed, There sits a stark-faced fellow, Beetle-browed, Whose black soul shrinks away From a lawyer-ridden day, And has thoughts he dare ...
— Songs of Action • Arthur Conan Doyle
... lead, and iron. There are also extensive coal-beds; hence the leading industries are mining and iron working. The eastern portion is a level, treeless plain, adapted for grazing. Agriculture, carried on with irrigation, suffers from insect plagues like the Colorado potato beetle. The climate is dry and clear, and attracts invalids. Acquired partly from France in 1804, and the rest from Mexico in 1848; the territory was organised in 1861, and admitted to the Union in 1876. The capital is Denver (107). There ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... saw close to him a brown beetle, sitting on a blackberry leaf. Teddy looked at the beetle for a while in silence, and then he said, "Well, why ...
— The Counterpane Fairy • Katharine Pyle
... just entered the shop was a short, slight, hunched, beetle-browed man, with long arms and very short bandy legs. Apparently I had interrupted a meal. He stared about the shop with an expression of expectation. This gave way to surprise, and then to anger, as he saw the shop empty. 'Damn ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... abundant with me. But those who cultivate tadpoles must look over the breeding-pond from time to time. My whole batch was devoured one year by "devils"—the larvae of Dytiscus marginalis, the Plunger beetle. I have benefited, or at least have puzzled my neighbours also by introducing to them another sort of frog. Three years ago I bought twenty-five Hyloe, the pretty green tree species, to dwell in my Odontoglossum house and exterminate the insects. Every ventilator there is covered ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... its surface the delicate print of their tiny feet, and the sweep of their fine light feathery tails. Sometimes they met with some little shrewmice, running on the snow. These very tiny things are so small, they hardly look bigger than a large black beetle; they lived on the seeds of the tall weeds, which they, might be seen climbing and clinging to, yet were hardly heavy enough to weigh down the heads of the dry stalks. It is pretty to see the footprints ...
— Lady Mary and her Nurse • Catharine Parr Traill
... little girl, and don't behave as if a little beetle could eat you up alive! If you go through life shrieking out over every trifle, you will some time or other be punished for it; for no one will pay any attention to your screams, even when there is something really ...
— Gritli's Children • Johanna Spyri
... incurable anthropomorphism made us imagine there were human heads inside their masks. The skin, like everything else, looked bluish, but that was on account of the light; and it was hard and shiny, quite in the beetle-wing fashion, not soft, or moist, or hairy, as a vertebrated animal's would be. Along the crest of the head was a low ridge of whitish spines running from back to front, and a much larger ridge curved on either side over the eyes. The Selenite who untied me used ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... from the plains; the caves reverberated The blows of restless hammers that revealed, Deep in the bowels of the fruitful hills, The iron and the faithless gold, with rays Of evil charm. And all the cliffs repeated The beetle's fall, and the unceasing leap Of waters on the paddles of the wheel Volubly busy; and with heavy strokes Upon the borders of the inviolate woods The ax was heard descending on the trees, Upon the odorous bark of mighty pines. ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells |
