"Cormorant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... went back to Tong Chou Fou by way of the imperial canal. Upon this trip they saw the famous bird "Leutze," fishing for its master. It is a species of cormorant, and is so well trained that it is unnecessary to place either a cord or ring round its neck to prevent it from swallowing any ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... a bundle of faults together—Jodolet, another Priest, is call'd holy Cormorant [Footnote: Ibid.], only because he eats a Turkey, and drinks a Bottle or two of Malaga for his Breakfast; and the Poet is jerk'd because a gormandizing Romish Priest is call'd a Pimp agen; and the Duke's Steward, Manuel, is no witty pleasant fellow, because he ...
— Essays on the Stage • Thomas D'Urfey and Bossuet
... Persian birds are the eagle, the vulture, the cormorant, the falcon, the bustard, the pheasant, the heath-cock, the red-legged partridge, the small gray partridge, the pin tailed grouse, the sand-grouse, the francolin, the wild swan, the flamingo, the stork, the bittern, the oyster-catcher, the raven, the hooded crow, and the cuckoo. ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... water-colours. The first represented clouds low and livid, rolling over a swollen sea: all the distance was in eclipse; so, too, was the foreground; or, rather, the nearest billows, for there was no land. One gleam of light lifted into relief a half-submerged mast, on which sat a cormorant, dark and large, with wings flecked with foam; its beak held a gold bracelet, set with gems, which I had touched with as brilliant tints as my pencil could impart. Sinking below the bird and mast, ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... were very happy along that terrible breaker-hewn coast. Puffin, guillemot, black guillemot, razorbill, cormorant, shag, fulmar petrel, storm petrel perhaps, kittiwake-gull, common gull, eider-duck, oyster-catcher, after their kind, had the great, cliff-piled, inlet-studded, rock-dotted stretch of coast practically to themselves—to themselves ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... the day of your arrival at Christmas Harbour, when you came to the Green Cormorant, I said to myself that in a fortnight, if not in a week, you would have enough of it, and would be sorry you ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... from the huge feeder to cast indignant glances upon his nephew, whose repugnance to rustic labour was the principal cause of his needing a ploughman, and who had been the direct means of his hiring this very cormorant. ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... which had formerly banished the numerous seals that played about the rock, they were now seen in great numbers, having been in an almost undisturbed state for six months. It had now also, for the first time, got some inhabitants of the feathered tribe: in particular the scarth or cormorant, and the large herring-gull, had made the beacon a resting-place, from its vicinity to their fishing-grounds. About a dozen of these birds had rested upon the cross-beams, which, in some places, were coated with their dung; and their flight, as ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... birds Zephaniah speaks, when he prophecies of the downfall of Nineveh, saying, 'The cormorant and the bittern [shall] lodge in the uppermost lintels of it, their voice shall sing in the windows; [when] desolation shall be in the thresholds' (Zeph 2:14). An unseasonable time to sing in; for when death is coming in at the door, mourning should be in the chambers. But this ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... to sight in the chaos of black waves and driving foam. Although they tried their best to keep close together they failed, and each soon became ignorant of the position of the others. The last that they saw of Alf's boat was in the hollow between two seas like a vanishing cormorant or a northern diver. Leo was visible some time longer. He was wielding the steering-oar in an attitude of vigorous caution, while his Eskimos were pulling as if for their lives. An enormous wave rose behind them, curled over their heads and appeared ready to overwhelm them, but the ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... wrecks along this shore last winter,—more than during any season for a quarter of a century. I remember when the first of these lay in great fragments on Graves Point, a schooner having been stranded on Cormorant Rocks outside, and there broken in pieces by the surf. She had been split lengthwise, and one great side was leaning up against the sloping rock, bows on, like some wild sea-creature never before beheld of men, and come there but to die. So strong was this impression that when I afterwards ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... French partridge (Cannabis Rufa), turtledove (Turtur Auritus), horned owl (Asio Otus), hen harrier (Circus Cyaneus), kestrel (Falco Tinnunculus), peregrine falcon (Falco Peregrinus), piebald pheasant (phasianus colchicus), buff pheasant, cormorant (phylacrocorax carbo), jay (corvus glandarius), heron (ardea cinerea), horned owl ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... bottomless pit; it is a cormorant, a harpy, that devours everything. John Bull was flattered by the lawyers that his suit would not last above a year or two at most; that before that time he would be in quiet possession of his business; yet ten long years did Hocus steer his ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot
... fishing with cormorants; and even at the distance at which they saw them, they could perceive that the birds on the boat were no other than cormorants. They were the species known as Phalacrocorax Sinensis; and although differing somewhat from the common cormorant, they possessed all the characteristic marks of the tribe,—the long flat body, the projecting breastbone, the beak curving downward at the tip, and the broad ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid
... of houses for offal. If a hunting party kills an animal, a number soon collect and patiently await, standing on the ground on all sides. After eating, their uncovered craws are largely protruded, giving them a disgusting appearance. They readily attack wounded birds: a cormorant in this state having taken to the shore, was immediately seized on by several, and its death hastened by their blows. The Beagle was at the Falklands only during the summer, but the officers of the Adventure, who were there in the winter, mention many extraordinary instances of the boldness and rapacity ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... pleasure of seeing for the fiftieth time, since I see you passing every morning, noon and evening—precisely. Immured in my apartment for political reasons, I am reduced to this species of amusement; and this hook attached to this thread contained a grain of wheat. It floated far up, and some cormorant devoured it; then the wind ceasing, it had the misfortune ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... on the brows of Ben-Connal, He kens of his bed in a sweet mossy hame; The eagle that soars o'er the cliffs of Clan-Ronald, Unawed and unhunted his eyrie can claim; The solan can sleep on the shelve of the shore, The cormorant roost on his rock of the sea, But, ah! there is one whose hard fate I deplore, Nor house, ha', nor hame in his country has he: The conflict is past, and our name is no more— There 's nought left but sorrow for Scotland ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... inside, and felt alarmed at the velocity of the vehicle, moved to the other end of the seat: this destroyed the equilibrium—over they went, into a four-feet ditch, and Joe lost his match. However, he had the satisfaction of hearing afterwards, that the old cormorant who occasioned his loss, had nearly burst himself ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... beguiled him with false pretenses. Here I have written XIV chapters of this story, which claims to be a mystery, and there stand the letters XV at the head of this chapter and I have not got to the mystery yet, and my friend Miss Cormorant, who devours her dozen novels a week for steady diet, and perhaps makes it a baker's dozen at this season of the year, and who loves nothing so well as to be mystified by labyrinthine plots and counterplots—Miss Cormorant is about to part company with me at this ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... parent. I leave it to you, gentlemen, who have daughters of your own, with pets also, to picture to yourselves the agony of her mind in finding that her favourite had found its way down the throat of that great guzzling, gormandising, cockney cormorant; and then, forsooth, because he is fined for the outrageous trespass, he comes here as the injured party, and instructs his counsel to indulge in Billingsgate abuse that would disgrace the mouth of an Old Bailey practitioner! I regret that instead of the insignificant fine ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... whilst the outer lake beneath the lash Of the wind's scourge, foamed like a wounded thing, And the incessant hail with stony clash Ploughed up the waters, and the flagging wing Of the roused cormorant in the lightning flash 445 Looked like the wreck of some wind-wandering Fragment of inky thunder-smoke—this haven Was as a ...
— The Witch of Atlas • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... any excuse. When I once get on quarter-deck every one must obey orders. Ella, direct Hannah to spread the festive board. You and Mara can lend a hand, and you can put on all we have in five minutes. To think that I should have eaten that delicious jelly you brought, greedy old cormorant ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... then a skein of geese paddle hastily out of sight round a mud-cape; or a brown robber gull (generally Richardson's Skua) raises a tumult of screams, by making a raid upon a party of honest white gulls, to frighten them into vomiting up their prey for his benefit; or a single cormorant flaps along, close to the water, towards his fishing ground. Even the fish are shy of haunting a bottom which shifts with every storm; and innumerable shrimps are almost the only product of the shallow barren sea: beside, all ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... larger tributary, to proceed towards the heights of the Sierra Erere. As dawn begins to redden the sky, large flocks of ducks and of a small Amazonian goose may be seen flying towards the lake. Here and there we see a cormorant, seated alone on the branch of a dead tree; or a kingfisher poises himself over the water, watching for his prey. Numerous gulls are gathered in large companies on the trees along the river-shore. Alligators lie on its surface, diving with a sudden splash at the approach of the canoe. ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... mayhap a thousand times more ancient. There is no lack of life along the shores of the solitary little bay. The shriek of the sparrow-hawk mingles from the cliffs with the hoarse deep croak of the raven; the cormorant on some wave-encircled ledge, hangs out his dark wing to the breeze; the spotted diver, plying his vocation on the shallows beyond, dives and then appears, and dives and appears again, and we see the silver glitter of scales from his beak; and far away in the offing the sunlight ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... a bankrupt landlady. What good can I do this poor devil of a woman? I'll give her twenty pound—there's Warrington's twenty pound, which he has just paid—but what's the use? She'll want more, and more, and more, and that cormorant Morgan will swallow all. No, dammy, I can't afford to know poor people; and to-morrow I'll say Good-bye—to Mrs. Brixham and ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... recently written by a woman who mothered an intellectual child of cormorant appetite. That child learned everything in sight from fairies to grease-traps. What was difficult to manage in that mass of whipcord mental fibre, was put into verse and sung. The book told how the child was nourished ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... all sincerity; and with you and Mr. Rigby, who have always laughed at me in a good-natured way. I don't know how, but I think I like all this as well—I beg his pardon, Mr. Raftor does flatter me; but I should be a cormorant for praise, if I could swallow it whole ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... called either grand or beautiful. But on our southern coasts, the wall-sided cliffs, many hundred feet high, with vast needles and pinnacles standing out in the sea, sharp and solitary enough to serve as perches for the wary cormorant, confer a wonderful beauty and grandeur upon the chalk headlands. And in the East, chalk has its share in the formation of some of the most venerable of mountain ranges, such ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... has resumed his fishing in the tank where the rain is stored for the poppy and sugarcane fields, the sand-pipers bustle along the margin, or wheel in little silvery clouds over the bright waters, the gloomy cormorant sits alert on the stump of a dead date-tree, the little black divers hurry in and out of the weeds, and ever and anon shoot under the water in hot quest of some tiny fish; the whole machinery of life and death is in full play, and our villager shouts to his patient oxen and lives his life. Then gradual ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... are ridiculous, but they have their flavour at a table. Last night, no: I discard all mention of last night. We failed: as none else in this neighbourhood could fail, but we failed. If we have among us a cormorant devouring young lady who drinks up all the—ha!—brandy and water—of our inns and occupies all our flys, why, our condition is abnormal, and we must expect to fail: we are deprived of accommodation for accidental circumstances. How Mr. Whitford could have missed seeing Professor Crooklyn! ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... from the extreme smallness of their persons and the doubt which only strong glasses could dispel as to whether they were really live creatures or only lumps on the rigging. Mr. Pepper with all his learning had been mistaken for a cormorant, and then, as unjustly, transformed into a cow. At night, indeed, when the waltzes were swinging in the saloon, and gifted passengers reciting, the little ship—shrunk to a few beads of light out among ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... money paid was paid previous to that date. The contract did not specify any lump sum, but agreed that the work should be paid for by the yard and by the square foot. No less a sum was paid to Beard for this work—the cormorant Beard, as the report calls him—than 24,200l., the last payment only, amounting to 4000l., having been made subsequent to the date of the contract. Twenty thousand two hundred pounds was paid to Beard before ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... beyond—far out upon which lay an upturned gabion. Within this locked and stranded box lay two dead bodies. Crabs fought their way eagerly through the cracks of the water-sprung door, and over it, breasting the salt breeze, slowly circled a cormorant—curious and amazed at so strange a thing at ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... Severn and Mersey shell German right flank; Cattaro again bombarded by French fleet, attack of Austrian submarines being repulsed; German cruiser Emden sinks five British steamships and captures a sixth in Indian Ocean; British steamer Cormorant sunk. ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... too broad to be jumped, and then for the first time he had her fairly in his arms and swung her across, which was undoubtedly very delightful, but unfortunately soon over. At length, however, they reached the Doctor, who was seated like a cormorant on a wet rock, ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... bemused; it might even have been doubted if he heard, but the voice of the clerk rang about the cabin like that of a cormorant among the ledges ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and the "Kittywich" had received her cargo for home, and with it a new name, for in consideration of her additional carrying capacity, we rechristened her the "Cormorant." Then came the day on which the Blue Peter was seen at her masthead, but what was even better in my eyes, was my own outfit packed in the four huge cases which stood so prominently on ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... Leucothea) saw him; mortal erst Was she, and trod the earth,[22] but nymph become Of Ocean since, in honours shares divine. She mark'd his anguish, and, while toss'd he roam'd, Pitied Ulysses; from the flood, in form A cormorant, she flew, and on the raft Close-corded perching, thus the Chief address'd. Alas! unhappy! how hast thou incensed So terribly the Shaker of the shores, That he pursues thee with such num'rous ills? 410 Sink thee he cannot, wish it as he may. Thus do (for I account thee not unwise) ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... chrysolophus. The eggs of the last-named penguin have been found on the Ile Aride, which is now known as Crozet Island, and the whole group as the Crozet Islands. The Cape Petrel (Daption capensis) nests on Tristan da Cunha and Kerguelen Island. A Cormorant (Phalacrocorax verrucosus) inhabits Kerguelen Island, but its occurrence on the Crozet Islands is doubtful. Finally, Crozet saw on the island on which he landed a white bird, which he mistook for a white pigeon, and argues that a country producing seeds for the nurture of pigeons must exist ...
— Essays on early ornithology and kindred subjects • James R. McClymont
... hawk. A wolf changed by Thetis to marble. Voyage of Ceyx to Delphos. Lost in a storm. Grief of Alcyone. Morpheus acquaints her with her husband's death. Change of both to kingfishers. AEsacus into a cormorant. ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... to the main chance. We are none of your flighty talkers, but a reasoning people, and there is no want of deep thinkers on the little island; and therefore, Sir, taking all together, why England must stick up for her rights! Here is your Dutchman, for instance, a ravenous cormorant; a fellow with a throat wide enough to swallow all the gold of the Great Mogul, if he could get at it; and yet a vagabond who has not even a fair footing on the earth, if the truth must be spoken! Well, Sir, shall England give up her rights ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... on that man, Q., as you come away from the palace," said Mrs. Quiverful, pointing to an angry call for money from the Barchester draper, which the postman had left at the vicarage that morning. Cormorant that he was, unjust, hungry cormorant! When rumour first got abroad that the Quiverfuls were to go to the hospital, this fellow with fawning eagerness had pressed his goods upon the wants of the poor clergyman. He had done so, feeling that he should be paid from the hospital funds, ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... relief to the miserable. Of all the ingenious modes of torture that have ever been invented, that of solitary confinement is probably the most cruel—the mind feeding on itself with the rapacity of a cormorant, when the conscience quickens its activity and feeds its longings. Happily for Adrienne, she had too many positive cares, to be enabled to waste many minutes either in retrospection, or in endeavors to conjecture the future. Far—far more happily ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... The cormorant and the bittern shall possess it; the owl also and the raven shall dwell in it.... They shall call the nobles thereof to the kingdom, but none shall be there, and all her princes shall be nothing. And thorns shall ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... whose food is fish; and which it takes from other birds, because it is not formed to catch them itself; hence it is called by the English a Man-of-war-bird, Voyage to China, p. 88. There are many other interesting anecdotes of the pelican and cormorant, collected from authors of the best authority, in a well-managed Natural History for Children, published by ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... a univalve or the sharp eye of a sole or halibut protruding from the sand. A school of smelt dart by, pursued by a bass; and as the water deepens bands of small fish, gleaming like silver, appear; then a black cormorant dashing after them, or perchance a sea-lion browsing on the bottom in pursuit of prey. Suddenly the light grows dimmer; quaint shadows appear on the bottom, and almost without warning the lookers on are in the depths of ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... goblins are not like our Maori goblins," and, taking courage, offered them sweet potatoes, and even lit a fire and roasted cockles for them. When one of the strangers pointed a walking-staff he had in his hand at a cormorant sitting on a dead tree, and there was a flash of lightning and a clap of thunder, followed by the cormorant's fall there was another stampede into the bush. But the goblins laughed so good-humouredly that the children took heart to return and look at the fallen ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... not far removed from its reptilian ancestors—a bird that is at home under the water and hunts its prey there on the wing—is the black cormorant. There is a colony of several hundred of them on the face of a sea-cliff a ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... of Eden—which far surpass all fairy tales,—Milton relates how Satan, springing lightly over the dividing wall, lands within its precincts, and in the guise of a cormorant perches upon a tree, whence he beholds two God-like shapes "in naked majesty clad." One of these is Adam, formed for contemplation and valor, the other Eve, formed for softness and grace. They two sit beneath a tree, the beasts of the earth ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... you have brought a little of this with you;' and Jabesh opened out his left hand, and tapped the palm of it with the middle finger of his right, by way of showing that he expected some money: not that he did expect any, cormorant that he was; this was not the period of the quarter in which he ever got money ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... place on the coast of Japan there is cormorant fishing. Men go in small boats with flaring torches, hundreds of them. The birds with their long bills reach down into the water and pick up a huge fish, then the master immediately takes it out of the bill, before it can be swallowed, and places it in his ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... to be at with this poor old cormorant," he said, slow and cogitating. "I'm looking for a home for him. But there are no bidders. A bit too good a doer, I guess. Eat 'em out of hearth ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... lagoons were on the flats, surrounded by Polygonums, and frequented by ducks, spoonbills, and various aquatic birds. They had shot, however, only one teal and a spoonbill. In travelling down the creek, we frequently started wallabies. Geophaps plumifera was very frequent on the Ironbark ridges. A cormorant with white breast and belly, and the rose cockatoo were shot; the former tasted as well as a duck. Brown collected a good quantity of the gum of Terminalia, and the seeds of the river bean, which made an excellent coffee. The ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... cares for nothing but itself. It is a snake that swallows and sleeps and wakes to eat again. It is a despot; it is without love, genius, morality. It is against people, against God, against the country. It is as wicked as Nero, as gluttonous as a cormorant; and it makes cowards, slaves, lick-spittles of some of the best of men. In this country, intended to be of free men, where men could grow and come to the best that is in them, already we find these laws and principles mocked—by what? By gold, by riches; and we find talented men and ...
— Mitch Miller • Edgar Lee Masters
... purpose the princes and councillors and all the functionaries, the servants of the six farms of the country of Yamato—even to the males and females of them—have all come and assembled in the fourth month of this year, and, plunging down the root of the neck cormorant-wise in the presence of the sovran gods, fulfil their praise as the Sun of to-day rises ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... Owl Ruffed Grouse Red-headed Woodpecker Great Blue Heron Golden-winged Woodpecker Bittern Barn-swallow Wilson's Snipe Whip-poor-will Long-biller Curlew Night Hawk Purple Gallinule Belted Kingfisher Canada Goose Kingbird Wood Duck Woodthrush Hooded Merganser Catbird Double-crested Cormorant White-bellied Nuthatch Arctic Tern Brown Creeper Great Northern Diver Bohemian Chatterer Stormy Petrel Great Northern Shrike Arctic Puffin ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... was among the Druids an emblem of those traditions connected with the deluge that made an important part of their mysteries. The cormorant was a ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... Explanations, certainly when the luggage came; and off went Jan with a guide to get pack ponies. Halfway back to Alessio was the stable, but the steeds were not ready, so Jan was ushered up into a top room where was a huge fire, over which an Albanian was stewing a cormorant with all its feathers on. There were other Albanians and a very old Montenegrin soldier. He admired everything English, even Jan's tobacco which he had bought ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... waves, the traveller beholds rising out of the sea, "giving," as it is finely expressed, "to this desolate region an air of civilization, and recalling the consciousness of that human society which, presenting elsewhere no visible traces, seems to have abandoned these rocky shores to the cormorant and the gull." On the tombs of the Highland warriors who repose within St. Mary's Church in Iona, are sculptured ships, swords, armorial bearings, appropriate memorials to the island lords, or, as the Chevalier not inaptly ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... forecastles. Thin wreaths of grey mist hung here and there over the still surface of the bay. Patches of purple slime lay unbroken on the unrippled surface. Scraps of shrivelled rack, sucked off the shores of the nearer islands, floated past the Tortoise. A cormorant, balanced on the top of one of the perches outside Delginish, sat with wings outstretched and neck craned forward, peering out to sea. A fleet of terns floated motionless on the water beyond the island. Two gulls with lazy flappings ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... is to confirm his first unalterable principle, that the King must be sure to finger nothing; but be us'd as Fishers do their Cormorant, have his mouth left open, to swallow the prey for them, but his throat gagg'd that nothing may go down. Let them bring this to pass, and afterwards they will not need to take away his Prerogative of making War: He must do that at his own peril, and be sent to fight his ...
— His Majesties Declaration Defended • John Dryden
... forwarded from London; and at intervals confessing how little power or interest these had for him, by yawning fearfully as he looked out on the solitary expanse of waters, which, save from the flight of a flock of sea-gulls, or a solitary cormorant, offered so little of ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... sheep's eye. [excessive desire for money] greed &c. 817a. voracity &c. (gluttony) 957. passion, rage, furore[obs3], mania, manie|; inextinguishable desire; dipsomania, kleptomania. [Person who desires] lover, amateur, votary, devotee, aspirant, solicitant, candidate, applicant, supplicant; cormorant &c. 957. [Object of desire] desideratum; want &c. (requirement) 630; "a consummation devoutly to be wished "; attraction, magnet, allurement, fancy, temptation, seduction, fascination, prestige, height of one's ambition, idol; whim, whimsy, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Grathach and Nerthach the sons of Gwawrddur Cyrfach (these men came forth from the confines of hell); and Huell the son of Caw (he never yet made a request at the hands of any lord.) And Taliesin the Chief of Bards, and Manawyddan son of the Boundless, and Cormorant the son of Beauty (no one struck him in the Battle of Camlan by reason of his ugliness; all thought he was an auxiliary devil. Hair had he upon him like the hair of a stag). And Sandde Bryd Angel (no one touched him with a spear in the Battle of Camlan by reason ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... the smell of fried pilchard and hake; more savory still that of roast porpoise; most savory of all that of fifty huge squab pies, built up of layers of apples, bacon, onions, and mutton, and at the bottom of each a squab, or young cormorant, which diffused both through the pie and through the ambient air a delicate odor of mingled guano and polecat. And the occasion was worthy alike of the smell and of the noise; for King Alef, finding that after the Ogre's death the neighboring ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... halibut and the cormorant, recently reported in the daily Press, has brought us a budget of interesting letters, from which we select the following as agreeable evidence of the return of normal conditions in the ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various
... till at length, when in sight of land, a storm arose that broke his mast, and threatened to rend the raft asunder. In this crisis he was seen by a compassionate sea-nymph, who in the form of a cormorant alighted on the raft, and presented him a girdle, directing him to bind it beneath his breast, and if he should be compelled to trust himself to the waves, it would buoy him up and enable him by swimming to ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... rose bushes round its edge. It was almost covered with a water plant with leaves like a strawberry, which made a dull rose tracery across the reflected blue sky. There were three white ibis, distant dark blue hills and trees, and jungle grass and their reflections; a cormorant and sea swallow were fishing, and a little pagoda, with gleaming golden Hti hung its reflection in the mirror. It was so still and the air so sweet that I felt perfectly happy with never a thing ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... a summer day, it chanced that two Cormorants stood on a great rock, lazily dozing. This rock was by the side of a little river that, only a few miles below, flowed into the sea; for the Cormorant is a marine bird, and haunts the sea-coast. It was a lovely place, although not very far from the habitations of men, and a number of cows had laid themselves down in the grassy field that surrounded an old ruined temple on the gentle slope of a hill above the ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... five islands in the Bay of Honduras, called the Bay Islands; and that she did this in derogation of the declarations of the "Monroe Doctrine," and in direct violation and contempt of the Treaty, which she had so recently entered into; that this same national cormorant immediately surveyed and made a new geographical plan of Central America, in which she extended her province of Balize from the river Hondo, on the north, to the river Sarstoon on the south, and from the coast of the bay westward to the falls of Garbutts on the river Balize; or ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1 • Various
... felt his own position. Was he not a baronet, and a gentleman, and a very handsome fellow, and a man of the world who had been in a crack regiment? If this surfeited sponge of speculation, this crammed commercial cormorant, wanted more than that for his daughter why could he not say so without asking disgusting questions such as these,—questions which it was quite impossible that a gentleman should answer? Was it not sufficiently plain that any gentleman proposing to marry the daughter of such a man as Melmotte, ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... have wept till I could not weep, and the pain Of the burning eyeballs went to my brain. Seven blackened corpses before me lie, In the blaze of the sun and the winds of the sky. I have watched them through the burning day, And driven the vulture and raven away; And the cormorant wheeled in circles round, Yet feared to alight on the guarded ground. And when the shadows of twilight came, I have seen the hyena's eyes of flame, And heard at my side his stealthy tread, But aye at my shout the savage fled: And I threw the lighted brand to ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... air. Many an hour have I sat up yonder, listening to the noises of earth and the noises of heaven, while the shrill note of the gull, the chatter of the guillemot, the heron's bitter scream, the hoarse croaking of the cormorant, have been all around me: and, indeed, the birds know me well enough. There's a pair ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... a bird diving down in the sunny water, and then suddenly come up again with a struggling fish in his bill. The fish was, however, always taken away from the cormorant, and thrown by one of the Fing Fangs into a well at ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... and Man, falls into many doubts with himself, and many passions, fear, envy, and despare; but at length confirms himself in evil, journeys on to Paradise, whose outward prospect and scituation is described, overleaps the bounds, sits in the shape of a Cormorant on the tree of life, as highest in the Garden to look about him. The Garden describ'd; Satans first sight of Adam and Eve; his wonder at thir excellent form and happy state but with resolution to work thir fall; overhears thir discourse, thence gathers that the ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... Fame, that all hunt after in their liues, Liue registred vpon our brazen Tombes, And then grace vs in the disgrace of death: when spight of cormorant deuouring Time, Th' endeuour of this present breath may buy: That honour which shall bate his sythes keene edge, And make vs heyres of all eternitie. Therefore braue Conquerours, for so you are, That warre ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... and was tempted to amuse him in such a manner as would tend to his disgrace and confusion; but, considering that the case was of too criminal a nature to be tampered with, he withstood his desire of punishing this rapacious cormorant any other way than by telling him he would not impart the secret for his whole for-tune ten times doubled; so that the usurer retired, very much dissatisfied with the issue of ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... along men, poling with surprising swiftness slender-built craft on which are perched several solemn and important-looking cormorants. These are the celebrated cormorant fishers of the Chinese rivers. Their craft is simply three or four stems of the giant bamboo turned up at the forward end; on this the naked fisherman stands and propels himself by means of a slender pole. His stock-in-trade ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... that these thirsters after gold and human blood will be disappointed. No Perus or Mexicos here they'll find; but the demon you speak of, tho' he acts in secret, is notoriously known. Lord Paramount is that demon, that bird of prey, that ministerial cormorant, that waits to devour, and who first thought to disturb the repose of America; a wretch, no friend to mankind, who acts thro' envy and avarice, like Satan, who 'scap'd from hell to disturb the regions of paradise; after ransacking Britain and Hibernia for gold, the growth of hell, to feed ...
— The Fall of British Tyranny - American Liberty Triumphant • John Leacock
... more common than for animals to take pleasure in practising whatever instinct they follow at other times for some real good. How often do we see birds which fly easily, gliding and sailing through the air obviously for pleasure? The cat plays with the captured mouse, and the cormorant with the captured fish. The weaver-bird (Ploceus), when confined in a cage, amuses itself by neatly weaving blades of grass between the wires of its cage. Birds which habitually fight during the breeding-season are generally ready to fight at all ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... A cormorant, sitting on a rock near by, twisted its thin neck to stare fearlessly at the visitor. But Charles Turold was not thinking of cormorants. Where was Thalassa? Where was his wife? He believed they were still ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... which the school and the church stand,—on the side towards London. Things there went much against him; the farm was ruinous, and I remember that we all regarded the Lord Northwick of those days as a cormorant who was eating us up. My father's clients deserted him. He purchased various dark gloomy chambers in and about Chancery Lane, and his purchases always went wrong. Then, as a final crushing blow, and old uncle, whose heir he was to have been, married and had a family! The house in London was ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... the present form of government the better. The notion of remedying such an evil by concession, is as puerile as it is dishonest. The larger the concessions become, the greater will be the exactions of a cormorant cupidity. As soon as quiet is obtained by these means, in reference to the leasehold tenures, it will be demanded by some fresh combination to ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... With idlers! Eunoae, pampered minx, the jug! Set it down here—you cats would sleep all day On cushions—Stir yourself, fetch water, quick! Water's our first want. How she holds the jug! Now, pour—not, cormorant, in that wasteful way— You've drenched my dress, bad luck t'you! There, enough: I have made such toilet as my fates allowed. Now for the key o' the plate-chest. Bring ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... attendants at the light-house. This man is created sole lord of the island by the corporation of Bristol, and has the exclusive right of fishing round its shores. The Steep Holme is a lofty and barren rock, tenanted alone by the cormorant and the sea-mew: it is smaller than the Flat Holme. The following lines are so beautifully descriptive of this lonely and desolate spot, that we ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 472 - Vol. XVII. No. 472., Saturday, January 22, 1831 • Various
... Vashon Island, which has many attractive features. Quartermaster's Harbor, at the southern end, is a lovely place; and beautiful shells and fossils are to be found there. Occasionally we came across a great boom of logs, travelling down to some sawmill; or a crested cormorant, seated on a fragment of drift, sailed for a while in our company. We passed on through the "Narrows," and entered Puget Sound proper, named for Peter Puget, one of ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... the city of Nephosis a fraternity of priests, reverenced by the appellation of Gasteres. It is reported that they were not always of their present form, but were birds aquatic and migratory, a species of cormorant. The poet Linus, who lived nearer the transformation (if there indeed was any), sings thus, in his Hymn ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... have we hear?" said his master, curiously examining the dainties. "Why, thou cormorant, thou greedy kite, is't not enough to consume victuals and provender under my own roof, but thou must guttle 'em here too? I warrant there be other company to the work, other grinders at the mill. Now, horrible villain, thou dost smell ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... the water near them is struck with the back of the oar; as soon as one of them has caught a fish, he is called to the boat, and the oar is held out for him to step upon. It requires caution to train a cormorant, because the bird has a habit, when angry, of striking with its beak at its instructor's eye with an exceedingly rapid ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... cormorants was formerly regarded as a traveller's tale. It is quite true, however, that small rafts carrying several of these birds, with a fisherman gently sculling at the stern, may be seen on the rivers of southern China. The cormorant seizes a passing fish, and the fisherman takes the fish from its beak. The bird is trained with a ring round its neck, which prevents it from swallowing the prey; while for each capture it is rewarded with a small piece of ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... cormorant! What! five meals a day ain't enough for you! What? beer ain't good enough for you, hey? [Pulls ...
— The Wolves and the Lamb • William Makepeace Thackeray
... scarlet, Stained the leaves with red and yellow; He it was who sent the snow-flake, Sifting, hissing through the forest, Froze the ponds, the lakes, the rivers, Drove the loon and sea-gull southward, Drove the cormorant and curlew To their nests of sedge and sea-tang In the ...
— The Song Of Hiawatha • Henry W. Longfellow
... is that great bird, sister, tell me, Perched high on the top of the crag?" "'Tis the cormorant, dear little brother; The fishermen call it ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... all me life if I choose, while you can't live under water, or over water, on land or on sea, and while all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't catch me if they were trying till the crack of doom, you could be caught be a few poor, harmless sailors, who wouldn't know a crow from a cormorant, and who'd sell your carcass to make oil for foolish wives to burn an' write letters to other people's husbands an' fill ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... for present consumption, and which were likely to preserve best for future store. Sitting on nests roughly constructed of sticks among the shrubs, were a number of frigate birds (the Tachypetes Aquila). He is a magnificent fellow, allied in some respect to the cormorant, but with shorter legs, and having a forked tail. His plumage is a rich empurpled black, and the beak, both mandibles of which are curved at the tips, is red. His wings are of immense length, and his power of flight is wonderful. ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... admiral, who had—or had not—taken a spite to him in the West Indies thirty years before, else he would have been a post captain by now, comfortably in bed on board a crack frigate, instead of sitting all night out on a rock, like an old cormorant, etc. etc. Who knows not the woes of ancient ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... of a huge, misshapen rock, against which the hoarse waves beat unceasingly. On this rock three pelicans are standing in a defiant attitude. A dark sky lowers in the background, while two sea-gulls and a gigantic cormorant eye with extreme disfavor the floating corpse of a drowned woman in the foreground. A few bracelets, coral necklaces, and other articles of jewelry, scattered around loosely, complete this ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... linked to a prostitute, and retain, at the same time, any, even the smallest degree of affection, for parents or brethren. You may supplicate, you may implore, you may leave yourself pennyless, and your virtuous children without bread; the invisible cormorant will still call for more; and, as we saw, only the other day, a wretch was convicted of having, at the instigation of his prostitute, beaten his aged mother, to get from her the small remains of the means necessary to provide her ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... his wings aslant, Sails the fierce cormorant, Seeking some rocky haunt, With his prey laden; So toward the open main, Beating the sea again, Through the wild hurricane, Bore I ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... by the number of torrents which, in the form of cascades, came tumbling over the bold granite mountains into the sea. The fresh water attracts the fish, and these bring many terns, gulls, and two kinds of cormorant. We saw also a pair of the beautiful black-necked swans, and several small sea-otters, the fur of which is held in such high estimation. In returning, we were again amused by the impetuous manner in which the heap of seals, ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... its character with lightning rapidity. It was in turn a ferry-boat—imitation of passengers descending the gangway by rhythmical patting of hand on thwart; a hospital ship chased by a submarine—cormorant's neck and head naturally mistaken for periscope; a destroyer attacking a submarine—said cormorant kindly obliging with quick diving act when approached; a food-ship laden with bananas represented by rushes culled from the banks; and a smuggler running ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 27, 1917 • Various |
