"Centipede" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Chancellor. "Ah—but what do you know about it? That's the question. How do you know what might have been on the next page—a snake or a worm, or a centipede or a revolutionist, or ...
— The Book of Dragons • Edith Nesbit
... man," continued Benson's father, "so much better than the dray-horse, that knew enough to lift his feet until he lifted the right one. I believe if that horse had the feet of a centipede, he would have gone on lifting them until the dog was released. I tell you, boys, if I could get anyone to help me, I'd start an Animal Rescue ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... "The centipede was happy, quite, Until the toad for fun Said, 'Pray which leg comes after which?' This worked her mind to such a pitch She lay distracted in a ditch, ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... stretching. It follows, therefore, that at least during the period through which the insect continues to grow, the cuticle must be periodically shed. Thus in the life-story of an insect or other arthropod, such as a lobster, a spider, or a centipede, there must be a succession of cuticle-castings—'moults' or ecdyses as ...
— The Life-Story of Insects • Geo. H. Carpenter
... centipede he had killed, and then looked among the waste paper for more, standing with his bare foot raised, and with ready slipper, for the bite of this insect, which grows to a large size in Porto Rico, is anything but pleasant, though ...
— The Motor Girls on Waters Blue - Or The Strange Cruise of The Tartar • Margaret Penrose
... Fates' lieutenant; I act under orders. Look thou, underling! that thou obeyest mine.—Stand round me, men. Ye see an old man cut down to the stump; leaning on a shivered lance; propped up on a lonely foot. 'Tis Ahab—his body's part; but Ahab's soul's a centipede, that moves upon a hundred legs. I feel strained, half stranded, as ropes that tow dismasted frigates in a gale; and I may look so. But ere I break, yell hear me crack; and till ye hear THAT, know that Ahab's hawser tows his purpose yet. Believe ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... after him came the aged morris dancers, only upheld from collapse in the mire by mutual upholdings, until they seemed like some monstrous animal moving with uncouth sprawls of legs as multifold as a centipede, and wavering drunkenly from one side of the road to the other, lurching into the dewy bushes, then recovering by the ...
— The Heart's Highway - A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeeth Century • Mary E. Wilkins
... of lathered lightening Billy went for his clothes. A centipede could have been no more active. He jerked up his suspenders; he jerked on a shirt; he jerked on a coat; he was wiping his face as he darted through the halls and down the stairs. No lift had speed enough for his descent. At the desk he flung some gold pieces at the ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... thoroughly enough since that time. I well remember my first astonishment at the side of a galley in Alexandria, and the roar of laughter with which my fellow-students greeted my not unreasonable remark, that it looked very like a centipede.' ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... woodthrush, the veery, the scarlet tanager an' the rest of the thrillin' songsters—and the music was more delicious 'n any opera I've heard in London an' Paris. I wasted a full hour watchin' a fool centipede that had gotten himself tangled in a spider's web—watched th' manoeuvres of that spider for ...
— Kiddie the Scout • Robert Leighton
... earwig, or a black-beetle, or a wood-louse, or a centipede? There are lots of insects more offensive than the grasshopper, and personally I would much rather be called a grasshopper than an earwig, which gets into people's sponges and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 21, 1920 • Various
... a Centipede went out to take a walk; The Centipede said frankly, "I will listen while you talk, But I may appear distracted, or assume a vacant stare, Because to keep my feet in step ...
— The Jingle Book • Carolyn Wells
... moss we could not have had Mary; without an ape we could not have had Abraham; and—shocking blasphemy—without a centipede we could not have had Christ! Praise God, we may turn from this to the words of God; "For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will bring ...
— The Church, the Schools and Evolution • J. E. (Judson Eber) Conant
... chrysanthemum-trees, And the minstrel, playing his culverin, Made for mine ears a merry din, If I were the Sultan, and he were I, Here i' the grass he should loafing lie, And I should bestride my zebra steed, And ride to the hunt of the centipede: While the pet of the harem, Dandeline, Should fill me a crystal bucket of wine, And the kislar aga, Up-to-Snuff, Should wipe my mouth when I sighed, "Enough!" And the gay court poet, Fearfulbore, Should sit in the hall when the hunt was o'er, And chant me songs ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... what would be the quick, convulsive writhing motion with which one would shrink aside and endeavor to get instantaneously away from it, when told that an asp, a centipede or a young rattlesnake was lying on the shoulder, and ready to strike its deadly fangs into the neck. But it is not easy to imagine that even a nervous woman, afraid of a cockroach and habitually screaming at a ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... United States. About twenty-five of them go by the general name of "thousand-legs" or millipedes, as each has from forty to fifty-five cylindrical rings in the body, and two pairs of legs to each ring. The other fifteen belong to the "centipede" group, the body consisting of about sixteen flattened segments, or rings, each bearing a single pair of legs. When disturbed, the "thousand-legs" generally coils up and remains motionless, shamming death, or "playing possum," ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... what a merry, merry time we shall have, Hy, chasin' up and down glass mountains, eatin' prickly pear, drinking rarely, and cullin' a rattlesnake here and there to twine in our locks. It will seem like old times, dropping a rock in your boots in the mornin' to quell the quivering centipede and the ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... before the long-house of a peaceful river tribe. The chest he hid in the underbrush close by his boat, and with the girl ascended the notched log that led to the verandah of the structure, which, stretching away for three hundred yards upon its tall piles, resembled a huge centipede. ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... tongue, Scip," said the Doctor. "I'm the talking man here. Yes! gentlemen," addressing the attentive cowboys, "I can cure anything that touches the ground—biped, quadruped, or centipede—glanders, botts, greased hoofs, heaves, blind staggers, it makes no odds. My universal, self-acting, double compound elixir of equestrian ointment will perform a cure in each and every case. It is cheap! It is sure! It is patented! It is the best, and it is here. You may roll up, you may tumble ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... inwardly. It would be the work of half an hour to criticise—that is to say praise—the poem sufficiently to please Charlie. Then I had good reason to groan, for Charlie, discarding his favorite centipede metres, had launched into shorter and choppier verse, and verse with a motive at the back of it. ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... unexplored. I rushed impetuously out of the cage of my provincialism and looked eagerly about the brilliant universe. My question was, What have we here?—not, What does this mean? That query came much later. When I now become retrospectively introspective, I fall into the predicament of the centipede in the rhyme, who got along very smoothly until he was asked which leg came after which, whereupon he became so rattled that he couldn't take a step. I know I have come on a thousand feet, on wings, winds and ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... dreams! At that time, near the garden-bench, in some of the crevices in the stone wall, dwelt many a big, ugly, black spider always on the alert, peeping out of his nook ready to pounce upon any giddy fly or wandering centipede. One of my amusements consisted in tickling the spiders gently, very gently, with a blade of grass or a cherry-stalk in their webs. Mystified, they would rush out, fancying they had to deal with some sort of prey, while I would rapidly draw back my hand in disgust. Well, ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... his knees and the striking contrast between their sheltered whiteness and the desert brown of his face.... Milky pale they gleamed at him from the glass.... Bony hard, they flaunted their angles at every move.... He was grateful that he was not a centipede. ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... in feet between a biped, a quadruped, and a centipede, and say whether the foot of Mr. Joseph Hume, being just as broad as it is long, may not be ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 23, 1841 • Various
... and a confusion. Two legs would have confused Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson like two Monuments in London. That having had one good leg he should have another—this would be to use vain repetitions as the Gentiles do. She would have been as much bewildered by him as if he had been a centipede. ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... here to ask—What is the meaning of these integrations? The evidence seems to show that they are in some way dependent on community of function. The eight segments which coalesce to make the head of a centipede, jointly protect the cephalic ganglion, and afford a solid fulcrum for the jaws, &c. The many bones which unite to form a vertebral skull have like uses. In the consolidation of the several pieces which constitute a mammalian pelvis, and in the anchylosis of from ten to nineteen vertebrae ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... guaranteed weather-controlled future summer day dawned on the Mississippi Valley, the walking mills of Puffy Products ("Spike to Loaf in One Operation!") began to tread delicately on their centipede legs across ...
— Bread Overhead • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... had your way," she observed, "I should have been knitting so many socks for Charlie Sands that he'd have had to be a centipede to wear 'em all, ...
— More Tish • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... said that the centipede has a hundred feet. It may have; and it does seem that superstition, or the belief in supernatural things of a trivial nature has quite as many; and, like the fabled animal of ancient times, has ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... and concealing the base of the antennae, as in the Centipedes and Pauropus. Indeed, the head of any Thysanurous insect seen from above, bears a general resemblance in some of its features to that of the Centipede and its allies. So in a less degree does the head of the larvae of certain Neuroptera and Coleoptera. The eyes are compound, the single facets forming a sort of heap. The clypeus and labrum, or upper lip, is, in all the Thysanura, carried far down on the under side of the head, ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... travellers chiefly notice the mosquito, which is in many places a cruel torment; the centipede, which grows to an unusual size; the locust, of which there is more than one variety; and the scorpion, ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... tramping and sketching about the northern suburbs of New York, and it was late in the afternoon when I reached the edge of that high ground overlooking the two rivers. I could see through an opening in the woods the outline of the great aqueduct,—a huge stone centipede stepping across on its sturdy legs; the broad Hudson, with its sheer walls of rock, and the busy Harlem crowded with boats and braced with bridges. A raw wind was blowing, and a gray mist blurred the edges of the Palisades where they ...
— A Gentleman Vagabond and Some Others • F. Hopkinson Smith
... break that alcohol bottle. That centipede mayn't be as dead as he looks! The horrid leg-gy thing! How in the world did I ever fancy it? Take care!" warned Dorothy, as Leslie dropped an uncouth Indian ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond
... said Aunt Jane. "Yesterday I went shopping with Kate, and sat in the carriage while she bought under-sleeves enough for a centipede. It is always so with that child. People talk about the trouble of getting a daughter ready to be married; but it is like being married once a month to ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... on Molly, in a reflective tone, "that you can make a catch; but you can try. There is the chaplain—horrid old centipede! And there's old Walford"—Molly never favoured any man with a Mr to his name—"an ugly, spiteful old bear that nobody'll have: he's rich enough; and he might look your way if you play your cards well. Any way, you'll not have much chance else; so you'd better keep your eyes ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt
... to have more legs than a centipede when you try to drag it through a narrow space, and they all stick out in different directions. Of course, this one stuck and then there was more trouble, for when I took an axe to dismember it, a cop threatened to arrest ...
— Side Show Studies • Francis Metcalfe
... of having forty-four feet," he cried, "if the centipede can not get on faster than a carabus, which only ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... ounces of aloes, 3 drachms of opium, 1 ounce of mandrake-root, 5 drachms of salanum, 7 drachms of poppy-seed, 1/2 ounce of assafoetida, and 1/2 ounce of parsley. As soon as the saucepan containing these ingredients began to boil Hamar threw into it two adders' heads, three toads and a centipede. ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... as fresh as if they had been new laid. Fresh! Carrying them down to the boat one of my nigger chaps dropped one on a rock and it smashed. How I lammed into the beggar! But sweet it was, as if it was new laid, not even smelly, and its mother dead these four hundred years, perhaps. Said a centipede had bit him. However, I'm getting off the straight with the story. It had taken us all day to dig into the slush and get these eggs out unbroken, and we were all covered with beastly black mud, and naturally I was ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... contempt that possesses you as you watch them. I believe one has a half-defined illusion that we are growing greater as they are growing smaller. Ants and flies! ants and flies! with here and there a fiery centipede in the shape of a District train dashing in and out amongst them. We lose the power of understanding their motions, and their throngs and movements do indeed seem as purposeless at this height as the hurry-scurrying ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... long, dislocated trunk of a wild Banian; like a huge centipede crawling on its hundred branches, sawn of even lengths for legs. This table was set out with wry-necked gourds; deformities of calabashes; and shapeless trenchers, dug out ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... went to dress for dinner, I found on my table a nasty-looking black beast about six inches long. It looked very formidable in the half-light, like a scorpion or centipede. It turned out, however, to be quite harmless, and a sort of millipede, and rather handsome, with jet-black rings, and hundreds of orange-coloured legs. There are a great many venomous snakes in Ceylon, but they always get out of the way as fast as they can, and never ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... boldest might shrink? Zarah would weep at a tale of suffering, turn faint at the sight of blood. She was not any means courageous, and her young cousins, Solomona's sons, had been wont to make mirth of her terror when a centipede had once been found nestling under a cushion near her. Could such a soft silken thread bear the strain of a blast which might snap the strongest cable? Hadassah trembled for her darling, and would willingly have consented to bear any torture, to have been able to exchange places ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... apprehension and alarm. I have had these strange creatures under observation many weeks, and invariably found that when one was interfered with in any way it used its snake-like aft end as a bogey, curving it round towards the molesting hand. A fowl that will attack an 8-inch centipede without hesitation, makes a sensational fuss and clatter when it detects a stick insect, especially when the stick insect feints, however ineffectually, with its perfectly harmless tail. If it is ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... beyond which there is no going. Words can end with no consonant but the most rounded of all, the nasal liquids n and ng. There is about as much likeness to the Aryan and Semitic languages—you can trace about as much analogy between them—as you can between a centipede and ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... surface, although they smouldered still within their breasts. They would go with him, they said. But let him look to himself, they swore threateningly. If he betrayed them again, there were men among them who would kill him as remorselessly as they would stamp on a centipede. If he behaved himself and the expedition on which he was to lead them proved successful, they might forgive him—all but old Hornigold. Truth to tell, there was no one among them who felt himself so wronged or so badly treated as the one-eyed ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... My child isn't a centipede. Considering the way they move us about in those horrid jungle stations, without a decent bungalow to set one's foot in, I consider I've got a hearthless child, rather than a childless hearth. ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... many poisonous reptiles in this country, but few accidents happen either to the aborigines, or the colonists from their bite. Of these the centipede, tarantula, scorpion, slow-worm, and the snake, are the most to be dreaded; particularly the latter, since there are, I believe, at least thirty varieties of them, of which all but one are venomous ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... who make the discovery, and we who live, are identical. From that moment we both live, and know that we live. Moreover, such is the essential unity of our natures that our living must now express our knowing, and our knowing guide and illuminate our living. Consider the allegory of the centipede. From the beginning of time he had manipulated his countless legs with exquisite precision. Men had regarded him with wonder and amazement. But he was innocent of his own art, being a contrivance of nature, perfectly constructed to do her bidding. One day the centipede discovered life. He ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... cat-like creature that on the cloud-edges beats his drums in crash, roll, or rattle; the earthquake-fish or subterranean bull-head or cat-fish that wriggles and writhes, causing the earth to shiver, shudder and open; the ja or dragon centipede; the tengu or long-nosed and winged mountain sprite, which acts as the messenger of the gods, pulling out the tongues of fibbing, lying children; besides the colossal spiders and mythical creatures of the old story-books; the foxes, badgers, cats and other creatures ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... that car over in the valley," Emmet called, without turning. "It crawls through the darkness like an illuminated centipede." ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... He grabbed for a cigarette and inhaled it tremendously. "It's going like cutting butter with a hot knife. I started cross-examining today. I gave him three and a half hours of it, straight off the ice, and I'm not through with him yet. Not half. If he had as many legs as a centipede he'd still not have one left to stand on when I'm through with him. I doubt he'll have his marrow bones to crawl out on, the way he's crumpling up. Even old Hounslow at his worst can't possibly misdirect the jury, the way I've gummed their noses on ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... skin disease, a form of herpes, with which a great many are afflicted. They probably do not regard it as a disease. (See Pls. LVI et seq.) In case of centipede bites, if on a finger, the affected member is thrust in the anus of a chicken, where, the Negrito affirms, the poison is absorbed, resulting in the death of ...
— Negritos of Zambales • William Allan Reed
... or taint, Bitter had been thy punishment Tied to the hornet's shardy wings, Tossed on the pricks of nettles' stings, Or seven long ages doomed to dwell With the lazy worm in the walnut-shell; Or every night to writhe and bleed Beneath the tread of the centipede; Or bound in a cobweb dungeon dim, Your jailer a spider huge and grim, Amid the carrion bodies to lie Of the worm, and the bug and the murdered fly: These it had been your lot to bear, Had a stain been found on the earthly fair. Now list and mark our ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... 1878), p. 17.] A few of their crew threw away their arms and came ashore with their captors; others escaped to the remaining boats, and immediately afterward the flotilla made off in disorder having lost 91 men. The three captured barges were large, strong boats, one called the Centipede being fifty feet long, and more formidable than many of the American gun-vessels. The Constellation's men deserve great credit for their defence, but the British certainly did not attack with their usual obstinacy. When the foremost ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... it. I was never meant to go shouldering arms and making two legs of a long centipede, and crawling about. It's like getting back into real happiness. Waited table last night for the fust time. Didn't you ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... at the problem in a light which Redi never dreamt of. Any flesh of one of the higher animals suits the fly's family. Will it be the same if the food supplied be of a lower organism and consist of fish, for instance, of frog, mollusk, insect, centipede? Will the worms accept these viands and, above all, can they manage to liquefy them, which is the ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... had tempted him also; but what had particularly seduced and drawn him thither was the nearness of the mountain with its Mediterranean flora, so rich that it recalled the Corsican maquis; full of beautiful fungi and varied insects, where, under the flat stones exposed to the burning sun, the centipede burrowed and the scorpion slept; where a special fauna abounded—of curious dung-beetles, scarabaei, the Copris, the Minotaur, etc.—which only a little farther north grow rapidly scarcer and then ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... wept—Italian tears. When lo! a shout of triumph, and from a remote corner of the shop, quite forty feet from us, in a place where we had not been, under a big vase, they found that ring! If it had had the wings of a swallow it could not have flown there. If it had had the legs of a centipede it could not have crawled there. The proprietor was radiant in his unctuous satisfaction. "It had rolled there!" Rolled! That ring! It had no more chance of rolling than a loaded die! We all sniffed, and sniffed publicly. ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... fine gold. Hattie smote her pocketbook for the count on this structure—like as not she had to mortgage her Luxor villa to meet the final pay-roll. Den Mut was her architect and he grew rich as the buildings increased. He owned a centipede barge on the Nile, which was the badge of ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... make it as dangerous to the traveller as other tropical countries in which ferocious animals abound. Hardly a tree or a shrub can be found that does not contain or conceal some stinging abomination. The whole of these are not, of course, deadly, but a tarantula bite, or a centipede sting, will cripple a strong man for weeks, while a feeble constitution stands a fair chance of succumbing. But of all these pests, none can equal the snakes, which not only swarm, but seem to have no fear of man, selecting dwellings by choice for an abode. These horrible reptiles are of all ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... "I'm sure Gwen's description sounds exactly like this old lady becoming a ... There!—I've forgotten the word! Something between a centipede ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... is power—he is the primitive, the wild wolf, the striking rattlesnake, the stinging centipede," ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... directions; their clothes were torn from them; they were pinched and scratched any- and everywhere; Ballbody kept rolling up them and over them, confining his attentions to no one in particular; the scorpion kept grabbing at their legs with his huge pincers; a three-foot centipede kept screwing up their bodies, nipping as he went; varied as numerous were their woes. Nor was it long before the last of them had fled from the kitchen ...
— The Princess and the Curdie • George MacDonald
... says Mr. Morris, laughing again heartily. "'Twas not in my country's service that I lost my leg—'twas but a runaway accident with two fiery little ponies in Philadelphia! But, indeed," he goes on, still laughing, "I do not miss it greatly, and can get around as easily as though I were a centipede and had a hundred good legs at ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... spoke, the Martian official before them had uttered a hissing call, and in answer to it a long shape of shining metal raced into the vast hall and halted beside them. It was like a fifty-foot centipede of metal, its scores of supporting short legs actuated by some mechanism inside the cylindrical body. There was a transparent-walled control room at the front end of that body, and in it a Martian at the controls who snapped open a door from which a ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... centipede, crawling along the lines marked out by fate, expounded the situation. It was early one morning while Octavia and Mrs. Maclntyre were trimming the honeysuckle on the west gallery. Teddy had risen and departed hastily before daylight in response to word that a flock of ewes had been scattered ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... only aimed at having them learn how to turn to the left at each corner, but also at giving himself an opportunity to make remarks about their feet and the position thereof, and at the end of five minutes each girl feels as if she were a centipede, and you, Esmeralda, secretly wonder whether something in the way of mucilage of thumb-tacks might not be used to keep your own riding boots close to the saddle. "And don't let your left foot swing," says the teacher in closing his exhortations; "hold it perfectly ...
— In the Riding-School; Chats With Esmeralda • Theo. Stephenson Browne
... universal West Indian look of comfort; and its noble span of roof overhead, all cut from island timber—another proof of what the wood-carver may effect in the island hereafter. Certainly distractions were frequent and troublesome, at least to a newcomer. A large centipede would come out and take a hurried turn round the Governor's seat; or a bat would settle in broad daylight in the curate's hood; or one had to turn away one's eyes lest they should behold—not vanity, but—the magnificent head of a Cabbage-palm just outside the opposite window, with the ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... white get-up, 'bout every five minutes, an' he'd walk straight outside an' wallow in the mud right after. I thought I'd a' had to stand an' iron pants for that young heathen till the crack o' doom, an' I had just one pair too many so I had. An' I up an' told her you'd think she kep' a young centipede much less a human boy with only two legs to him. And then I ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... grasp of fire is laid On bark and slabs that rot, and breed Squat ugly things of deadly shade, The scorpion, and the spiteful seed Of centipede. ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... 24. petlacoatl, the centipede or scolopender; from petlatl, mat, and coatl, serpent, as they are said to intertwine with each other, like the threads of a mat (Sahagun, Lib. ...
— Ancient Nahuatl Poetry - Brinton's Library of Aboriginal American Literature Number VII. • Daniel G. Brinton
... me you're running them 'Desert Glimpses' into the ground," her mother grumbled comfortably. "You've got a stack higher than your head, now. And some of these days you'll get bit with a snake or a centipede or—" ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... swathed in her veil of long, light golden hair, as she crouched on the bottom of Mercer's swimming pool, and pictured for us, by means of Mercer's thought-telegraph (my own name for the device; he has a long and scientific title for it with as many joints as a centipede), the story of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... like lightning while the enemy are still working theirs. If your oarsmen can do the trick in time, you can now ride down the whole of the foemen's exposed oar bank, while saving your own. He is left crippled and helpless, like a huge centipede with all the legs on one side stripped away. You can now back off deliberately, run out your oars, an in cold blood charge his exposed flank. If he does not now surrender, his people are dead men. ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... for a centipede bite is a plaster of garlic mashed until the juice flows. The plaster must ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... inexperienced young lady, and the manners and customs of the place and people, particularly those of the coloured servant, Chunga, astonished her immensely. The white lady had a great horror of creeping things of all kinds; she could hardly bear to get into her bath, for she sometimes found a centipede, as long as her hand, ...
— Little Folks (October 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... any of us found Tilly up to that time; but when Elsie said that (about being able to move all her legs and arms), I heard a little faint voice say 'You talk as if you were a centipede, Elsie Martin!' ...
— The Sunbridge Girls at Six Star Ranch • Eleanor H. (Eleanor Hodgman) Porter
... a white-legged centipede," muttered Sandy, under his breath. But more evolutions were coming. These preliminaries having been finished, the solemn procession went back to the kitchen regions, and presently came forth again, bearing a glittering array of shining ...
— The Boy Settlers - A Story of Early Times in Kansas • Noah Brooks
... word of the cult. The rattlesnake is "deadly." The copperhead and moccasin are "deadly." So is the wholly mythical puff adder. In hardly less degree is the tarantula "deadly," while varying lethal capacities are ascribed to the centipede, the scorpion, the kissing-bug, and sundry other forms of insect life. The whole matter is based upon the slenderest foundations. I don't mean, by this, that these ill-famed species are wholly innocuous. It would be highly inadvisable to snatch ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... across the prairie. Then the mines were no longer separate: they joined together and became like a fiery reptile, a dragon in the outcrop, clawing deep with every joint, wounding the earth with every claw, as a centipede wounds with every poisoned foot. The white residues gleamed beneath the moon, from every smoke stack poured smoke: the dragon breathed. Then the great white cyanide tanks were like bosses on the beast; ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... I may now count you as one of my child-friends. I am fond of children (except boys), and have more child-friends than I could possibly count on my fingers, even if I were a centipede (by the way, have they fingers? I'm afraid they're only feet, but, of course, they use them for the same purpose, and that is why no other insects, except centipedes, ever succeed in doing Long Multiplication), ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... He had made a discovery. He had found on a map that there was quite a big place—it was shown in block capitals—called Salonika, tucked away in a corner of the Balkans right down by the sea. The map furthermore indicated by means of an interminable centipede that a railway led from this place Salonika right away up into Serbia, and on from thence towards the very heart of the Dual Monarchy. Here was a chance of starting an absolutely new hare. The Chancellor, allegro con fuoco, ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... down Billy's back on tiny needle-pointed fringe of feet like a centipede. There was a sudden constriction in his throat and a leaden weight on each eye. He could not have opened them if he had tried, for a great white light stabbed across them and seemed to be holding them down for inspection. ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... for blood, originated. Where did this young Jesse James, with his gory record and his dauntless eye, come from? Was he born in a buffalo wallow at the foot of some rock-ribbed mountain, or did he first breathe the thin air along the brink of an alkali pond, where the horned toad and the centipede sang him to sleep, and the tarantula tickled him under the chin with ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... the first place, that he is to do all the errands, to go to the store, to the post office, and to carry all sorts of messages. If he had as many legs as a centipede, they would tire before night. His two short limbs seem to him entirely inadequate to the task. He would like to have as many legs as a wheel has spokes, and rotate about in the same way. This he sometimes tries to do; and people who have seen him "turning ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... feeble wail sounding in the ears that fingers cannot stop, or to confess that it cried out against a double injustice, that of life and that of death: she had crossed the border of the region of horror, and went about with a worm coiled in her heart, like a centipede in the ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... once thought to play a trick on Charles Darwin. They took the body of a centipede, the wings of a butterfly, the legs of a grasshopper and the head of a beetle, and glued these together to form a weird monster. With the composite creature in ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... deities,[1603] or from phenomena that are held to be produced immediately by deities. The flight of owls, bats, or rails, according to its direction, indicates the result of a battle or a war; the howling of a dog is a sign of coming misfortune; if a centipede crawls on the top of a mat it is a good omen, if on the bottom of a mat it is bad; it is unfortunate when a lizard crosses one's path; if a basket be found turned upside down in a road, this is a sign of evil; the way in which sacred stones fall to the ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... short man said, with insolent familiarity. (Among the bayfarers he had gained the nickname of "The Centipede" on account of his long arms.) "Hello, Taft," he repeated, with the same touch of insolence. "Wot 'r you growlin' ...
— Tales of the Fish Patrol • Jack London
... be found "Paris eating a General a day" (Chapter LXXVIII). Early in June, 1871 there appeared in the same journal "The International Centipede," "John Bull and the Blanche Albion." The Queen of England, clad in white, holding in her hands a model of the Palace of Westminster, and sundry docks, resists the approach of an interminable centipede, on which she stamps, vainly endeavouring to impede ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... (nereidina and serpulina,) and which may often be found beneath stones on a sea-beach. One of these, figured by Mr. Murchison, is furnished with feet in vast numbers all along its body, like a centipede. The occurrence of annelids is important, on account of their character and status in the animal kingdom. They are red-blooded and hermaphrodite, and form a link of connexion between the annulosa (white-blooded worms) and a humble class of the vertebrata. ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... convey it. Everything is anti-human. How extraordinary, strange, and incomprehensible are the creatures captured out of the depths of the sea! The distorted fishes; the ghastly cuttles; the hideous eel-like shapes; the crawling shell-encrusted things; the centipede-like beings; monstrous forms, to see which gives a shock to the brain. They shock the mind because they exhibit an absence of design. There ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... Gran went up with Lillie and took photographs. "Birdie" Bowers and Wright were employed collecting insects, and, with those added by the rest of us, the day's collection included all kinds of ants, cockroaches, grasshoppers, mayflies, a centipede, fifteen different species of spider, locusts, a cricket, woodlice, a parasite fly, a beetle, and a moth. We failed to get any of the dragonflies seen, and, to the great sorrow of the crews who landed with us, missed capturing a most beautiful ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... The centipede along the threshold crept, The cobweb hung across in mazy tangle, And in its winding-sheet the maggot slept, At every nook ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... camped around in the woods near the Park, and we visited them quite often. An Indian has as many angles in his makeup as a centipede has legs. Just about the time you think you have one characteristically placed, you put your finger down and he isn't there. Charge one with dishonesty, and the next week he will ride a hundred miles to deliver ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... to 'ave the big gal. I will say that for ye. She's a gad-about grinny, she is, if ever was. A gad-about grinny. Mucked up my mushroom bed to rights, she did, and I 'aven't forgot it. Got the feet of a centipede, she 'as—ll over everything and neither with your leave nor by your leave. Like a stray 'en in a pea patch. Cluck! cluck! Trying to laugh it off. I laughed 'er off, ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... had a few; while as to "bronco busting," the virtue par excellence of western cattle-men, even Bronco Bill was heard to acknowledge that "he wasn't in it with the Dook, for it was his opinion that he could ride anythin' that had legs in under it, even if it was a blanked centipede." And this, coming from one who made a profession of "bronco busting," was unquestionably high praise. The Duke lived alone, except when he deigned to pay a visit to some lonely rancher who, for the marvellous charm of his talk, ...
— The Sky Pilot • Ralph Connor
... write. This way and that the raging fates tug the hapless reader, pillowed he upon the vast brown bosom of his maternal earth, or lurefully beckoning the dim shadow-shapes of dodecahedronic cataplasmatic centipede fatally conditioned to the everlasting pyramid of a star-pointing ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 19, 1891 • Various
... on Barbara's plate a worm which Barbara promptly threw at his face. Jimmy looked at her reproachfully and proceeded to Aunt Evangeline. Aunt Evangeline's gift was a centipede—a live centipede that ran gaily off the tablecloth on to Aunt Evangeline's lap before anyone could stop it. With a yell that sent William's father to the library with his hands to his ears, Aunt Evangeline leapt to her chair and stood with her ...
— More William • Richmal Crompton
... telling it. If I tell the whole truth just as it happened I shan't spare myself. My first idea was a—Karamazov one. Once I was bitten by a centipede, brother, and laid up a fortnight with fever from it. Well, I felt a centipede biting at my heart then—a noxious insect, you understand? I looked her up and down. You've seen her? She's a beauty. But she was beautiful ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... the torpedo and submarine U-boats are named after him. This wonderful animal used to have eight feet, for swiftness. That was when Woden rode him, but, in course of time, four of his legs dropped off, so that the horse of Santa Klaas looks less like a centipede and more like other horses. Whenever Santa Klaas walks, Pete has to go on foot also, even though the chests full of presents for the children are very heavy and Pete has to ...
— Dutch Fairy Tales for Young Folks • William Elliot Griffis
... armed bandits. They were dressed in sheepskins and warm materials, had sheepskin caps on their heads; there was he with his bare arms, in well-worn grey trousers, his shirt fastened together at the neck with a piece of wood. Sitting among them, defenceless as a centipede, without anyone belonging to him, puffing clouds of smoke, he inwardly blessed this adventure, in which everything had turned out so well. The Cossacks looked at the fire, and they too said: 'This is very nice, ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... of to-day has a bewildering iridescence of aspect. Each present impulse is reformatory. Correction, like a centipede, shows a hundred legs and wants to run upon them all. Much of the so-called philanthropy is not well balanced and is run by cranks. Cranks attach themselves to any social movement, as a shaggy gown will gather burrs. It is not all of philanthropy to classify ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... gentleman it is more difficult to find souvenirs. We must acknowledge that it is always difficult to select a present for a gentleman. Unless he has as many feet as Briareus had hands, or unless he is a centipede, he cannot wear all the slippers given to him; and the shirt-studs and sleeve-buttons are equally burdensome. Rings are now fortunately in fashion, and can be as expensive as one pleases. But one almost regrets the disuse of snuff, as that gave occasion for many beautiful boxes. ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... accidental pressure or unguarded touch is resented and retorted by a bite, makes the centipede, when it has taken up its temporary abode, within a sleeve or the fold of a dress, by far the most unwelcome of all the Singhalese assailants. The great size, too (little short of a foot in length), to which it sometimes attains, renders it formidable, and, apart from ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... exclaimed Connie dramatically. "Before Myrtella came I never knew what it was to sleep in my own bed, and I had to eat the legs of chickens until I felt like a centipede. There! You are all right; come along. Don't forget to ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... row on either side of the midvein, and at right angles to it, the indusium appearing to be double. (Scolopendrium is the Greek for centipede, whose feet the sori were thought to resemble. Phyllitis is the ancient Greek name for a fern.) Only one species in the ...
— The Fern Lover's Companion - A Guide for the Northeastern States and Canada • George Henry Tilton
... the sleeping camp at night, "Some damn thing's bit me;" and matches are struck, while a sleepy warrior hunts through his blankets for the soldier ant whose great pincers draw blood, or lurking centipede or scorpion. For in these dry, hot, dusty countries these nightly visitors come to share the warm softness of the army blanket. Next morning, sick and shivering, they come to show to me the hot red flesh or swollen limb with which the night wanderer ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... due to maggots from the ova of a fly, which had been deposited in the nose while the patient was asleep. Tomlinson gives a case in which maggots traversed the Eustachian tube, some being picked out of the nostrils, while others were coughed up. Packard records the accidental entrance of a centipede into the nostril. There is an account of a native who was admitted to the Madras General Hospital, saying that a small lizard had crawled up his nose. The urine of these animals is very irritating, blistering any surface it ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... I cried, casting down my pen. "It is so seldom that he cuddles that I'll sacrifice myself upon the altar of aunthood. Well, once upon a time, Billy, there was a dear little blue hen who stole away—sit still now! You've more legs than a centipede!—who stole away every day and went under the barn where it was so cool and shady, and laid a lovely little smooth, cream-coloured egg. Then when she had laid it, she was so proud that she could never help coming out and cackling at the top of her voice, ...
— At Home with the Jardines • Lilian Bell
... Britain is no more an organism than Britain is a lion. The moment we begin to give a nation the unity and simplicity of an animal, we begin to think wildly. Because every man is a biped, fifty men are not a centipede. This has produced, for instance, the gaping absurdity of perpetually talking about "young nations" and "dying nations," as if a nation had a fixed and physical span of life. Thus people will say that Spain has ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... administration itself. The people have always too much action or too little. Sometimes with a hundred thousand arms it overtakes everything; sometimes with a hundred thousand feet it moves as slowly as a centipede. ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... the fact that they are unpalatable food, as is believed to be the case with the colors of certain brilliantly-colored caterpillars; it may be in other ways. In Kirby and Spence one case is recorded in which the phosphorescence of the common phosphorescent centipede (Geophilus electricus) was actually seen apparently to serve as a means of defence against an enemy. "Mr. Shepherd," says that authority, "once noticed a scarabeus running round the last-mentioned insect when shining, as ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... the approach of the astounding coach, which looked like a drunken centipede, the farmers stopped their plows or came to the thresholds, shading their eyes; while the cattle in the fields put up their tails and bolted, flinging out their heels, amid triumphant cheers ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson |
