"Duckling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "She's not my ugly duckling. She's a wicked little leprechaun, born under a mushroom, on a black night, but she swims like a fish, and dances like a pixie. I tell ye she's not human at all ...
— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke
... Tifaga Jack, Donald and Edinburgh—seven horses—O, and the stallion—eight horses; five cattle; total, if my arithmetic be correct, thirteen head of beasts; I don't know how the pigs stand, or the ducks, or the chickens; but we get a good many eggs, and now and again a duckling or a chickling for the table; the pigs are more solemn, and appear only ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... button discovered by Rualdus Columbus. Tumble her. Columble her. Chameleon. (More genially) Well then, permit me to draw your attention to item number three. There is plenty of her visible to the naked eye. Observe the mass of oxygenated vegetable matter on her skull. What ho, she bumps! The ugly duckling of the party, longcasted ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... common 40 years ago; its presence being notified by our hens cackling, and ducks quacking, as they called together their broods, when they espied it soaring at a considerable height above. If a reckless chick, or duckling, neglected to take the warning, and seek shelter beneath the mother’s wings, there was for a moment a rushing sound, a general confusion in the poultry yard, a half-smothered scream, and the kite flew away with a victim in its claws. {42} I ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... big, red cross on the top and one on each side. The cots are arranged one above the other, showing clean, white linen, while the attendants are spotlessly uniformed in white. In the middle of each train is a car which might be called the "ugly duckling," for it is a decidedly clumsy looking affair, full of steam boilers with safety valves and tubes sticking out at the top, and is, I fancy, a ...
— Lige on the Line of March - An American Girl's Experiences When the Germans Came Through Belgium • Glenna Lindsley Bigelow
... "The Ugly Duckling turned out a swan, you remember. I've always been fond of the boy because he's so genuine and original. Crude as a green apple now, but sound at the core, and only needs time to ripen. I'm sure he'll turn out a capital specimen of ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... I was myself, George answered, 'FRANK, SHALL IT BE HOCK OR MADEIRA? I could have hugged him to my heart but for the presence of the company. Little did Lady Golloper know what was the cause of the emotion which sent the duckling I was carving into her ladyship's pink satin lap. The most good-natured of women pardoned the error, and ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... one eggshell after another began to crack. From each little egg came "Cheep! cheep!" and then a little duckling's head. ...
— The Child's World - Third Reader • Hetty Browne, Sarah Withers, W.K. Tate
... sort that a boy would like, to cost about six or seven shillings, and have it sent to this address; you can put in my card and say I hope the boy will like it. Are they poor, did you say? No, not very, but this boy is the 'ugly duckling' of the family, and everybody snubs him, they say he is so dull and stupid, and I think a little kindness will help him to assert himself. Then go to the poulterer's, and have a turkey or goose sent to ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII. No. 358, November 6, 1886. • Various
... were such fine strapping fellows! so tall and stout! But as for the youngest one, Ivan, he was like a half-grown lad or a half-fledged duckling, terribly inferior to the others. Well, their old father died. At that very time there came tidings from the King, that his daughter, the Princess Helena the Fair, had ordered a shrine to be built for her with twelve columns, with twelve ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... her knitted hands Beneath a tiny suckling, As one by one of the doleful bands Dived like a fairy duckling. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... your sister. I think you cannot but love me a little when you know how entirely I am devoted to you. I can bear to have you near me now and think of you only as the hen thinks of her duckling. For a moment you are out of the pond, and I have gathered you under my wing. ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... 10. One duckling used to scramble upon the dog's head and sit down upon his eye; but the old dog never moved, though the pressure upon the eye must have hurt him. He seemed to think more of his little friends ...
— Friends in Feathers and Fur, and Other Neighbors - For Young Folks • James Johonnot
... Napoleon Bingle by dining together at Pierre's. This day he is born again—or, at least, prospectively born. Life for him really begins to-day—the sixth of March. It is my treat! I shall be the host on this memorable occasion. Pierre shall give to us the best duckling in his larder and the rarest ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... ducks or my numerous broods of chickens. Upon this question Mr. U—— looked still more unhappy and tried to turn the conversation, but my suspicions were aroused and I persisted; so at last he broke to me, with much precaution, that I was absolutely without a duckling or a chicken in the world! They had been drowned in the night, and nothing was to be seen but countless draggled little corpses, what Mr. Mantilini called "moist unpleasant bodies," floating on the pond or whirling in the eddies of the creek. That was not even the ...
— Station Life in New Zealand • Lady Barker
... her task, and sat with open bill, or with wings half raised from the eggs. Then, one night, she heard faint tappings and peepings beneath her. Sturdy young bills began chipping at the inside of the shells, speedily breaking them. Each duckling, as he chipped the shell just before the tip of his beak, would turn a little way around in his narrow quarters; till presently the shell would fall apart, neatly divided into halves; and the wet duckling, tumbling forth, would snuggle up against the mother's hot breast and ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... seraph, angel; innocent &c. 946; saint &c. (piety) 987; benefactor &c. 912; philanthropist &c. 910; Aristides[obs3]; noble liver|!, pattern. brick*, trump*, gem, jewel, good fellow, prince, diamond in the rough, rough diamond, ugly duckling|!. salt of the earth; one in ten thousand; one in a million; a gentleman and a scholar; pillar of society, pillar of the community, a man among men. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Immediately danger threatened the poultry-yard. For a pig has terrible teeth and he doesn't care what he eats—he would as soon crunch a little duckling as a carrot. So she had to watch every minute, every second even. For besides, in spite of the vigilance of "Labrie," the faithful watchdog, sometimes rats would suck the blood of the young pigeons. Once even a whole litter of rabbits was ...
— The Curly-Haired Hen • Auguste Vimar
... conceive that Tony learned anything in the woods, but as there was never sufficient school money to keep the village seat of learning open more than half the year the boy educated himself at the fountain head of wisdom, and knowledge of the other half. His mother, who owned him for a duckling hatched from a hen's egg, and was never quite sure he would not turn out a black sheep and a crooked stick to boot, was obliged to confess that Tony had more useless information than any boy in the village. He knew just where to find the first Mayflowers, and would bring home the waxen ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the sky there appeared to Commander Raffleton the vision of "Cousin Christopher" as a plump, rubicund angel in a panama hat and a pepper-and-salt tweed suit holding out a lifebelt. Cousin Christopher would take to Malvina as some motherly hen to an orphaned duckling. A fairy discovered asleep beside one of the ancient menhirs of Brittany. His only fear would be that you might want to take her away before he had written a paper about her. He would be down from Oxford at his cottage. Commander Raffleton could not for the ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... she was not omniscient, and she never could have understood the boy. I daresay he was not enough of an ugly duckling to attract special attention, and with many other chicks in the brood he could not have more than the rest, and yet he required it. He ought to have been an only child. If he had been mine, I should have known what his dreaminess meant, why ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... law-abiding and peaceful commercial country. There would be no peace for Ireland either. The factions of the Irish party are yearly becoming more and more numerous. In all except hatred to England they are bitterly opposed. All very well to set up Ulster as being the ugly duckling, as being the one dissentient particle of a united Ireland. If every Protestant left the country Ireland would still be divided, and hopelessly divided. Personal reviling, riot, and blackguardism are already common between the factions, united though they try to appear, ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... bribes, a great deal of mass-singing, store of obits, and that sempiternally, on the anniversary day of his decease, every one of them all be furnished with a quintuple allowance, and that the great borachio replenished with the best liquor trudge apace along the tables, as well of the young duckling monkitoes, lay brothers, and lowermost degree of the abbey lubbards, as of the learned priests and reverend clerks,—the very meanest of the novices and mitiants unto the order being equally admitted to the benefit of those funerary and ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... the least ashamed of the fact. She told me once that no one had ever fallen in love with her, 'I could not expect them to do so,' she remarked candidly. 'As a girl I was plain featured, and so shy and awkward that your Uncle Joe used to tell me that I was the only ugly duckling that would never ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... on our story at Potsdam, and shows us Wilhelmine, an unattractive maid of ten, the Cinderella of her family, for whom there seemed no better prospect than a soldier-husband, if indeed she were lucky enough to capture him. She was, in fact, the "ugly duckling" of a good-looking family, removed by a whole world from her beautiful eldest sister Charlotte, who counted among her many admirers no less exalted a wooer than Prince Frederick William, the King's nephew and heir ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... evolution. The first step towards this is to interpret the phenomena of instinctive behaviour in terms of stimulation and response. It may be well to take a particular case. Swimming on the part of a duckling is, from the biological point of view, a typical example of instinctive behaviour. Gently lower a recently hatched bird into water: coordinated movements of the limbs follow in rhythmical sequence. The behaviour is new to the individual though it is no doubt closely ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... quite easy; it is impossible that there should be another man foolish enough in all England to want to make love to such an 'ugly duckling' as ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... to seeke, everiething misplaced, broken, abused, or gone altogether! The Gate off its Hinges; the Stone Balls of the Pillars overthrowne, the great Bell stolen, the clipt Junipers grubbed up, the Sun-diall broken! Not a Hen or Chicken, Duck or Duckling, left! Crab half-starved, and soe glad to see us, that he dragged his Kennel after him. Daisy and Blanch making such piteous Moans at the Paddock Gate, that I coulde not bear it, but helped Lettice to milk them. ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... heart upon Humphry's becoming an eminent burgeon, and even altered his will when his boy yielded to the temptation of a laboratory for research. Men also know something of the trouble of the hen who has a chance duckling in her brood, and sees that contumacious chicken run into the water deaf to all the warnings ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... reality—the story of an escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times—how to escape. The stories of Joseph, of Odysseus, of the prodigal son, of the Pilgrim's Progress, of the "Ugly Duckling," of Sintram, to name only a few out of a great number, they are all stories of escapes. It is the same with all love- stories. "The course of true love never can run smooth," says the old proverb, and love-stories are but tales of a man or a woman's escape from the desert ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... him. All along I've weakened him. I've fussed over him like a hen after her duckling when it takes to the water. I wouldn't let him swim for fear he'd get drowned. And so—he just flops about and looks disgusting. I've made him run away from temptation. That was because I couldn't keep on being disappointed in him. Because ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... story of his infant precocity generally circulated, and generally believed, the truth of which I am to refute upon his own authority. It is told[127], that, when a child of three years old, he chanced to tread upon a duckling, the eleventh of a brood, and killed it; upon which, it is said, he dictated to his mother the ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... think so?" and Miss Templeton looked relieved; for the moment her serenity had seemed slightly clouded with what her sister always called her "hen and duckling look." ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... worth its weight in gold; and you are my good sensible Esther," my mother said once, when I had hinted rather too strongly at my plainness. Dear soul, she was anxious to appease the pangs of injured vanity, and was full of such sweet, balmy speeches; but girls in the ugly duckling stage are not alive to moral compliments; and, well—perhaps I hoped my mother ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... so in the farmyard, and although there is not much work that the people there can do for each other, there are many kind things to be said, and even the Lame Duckling found that he could make the Blind Horse happy when he tried. It is there as it is everywhere else, and I sometimes think that although the farmyard people do not look like us or talk like us, they are not so very different after all. If you had seen the little Chicken who wouldn't eat gravel ...
— Among the Farmyard People • Clara Dillingham Pierson
... of myself as nonplussed," he said more seriously, "and I am. I was never more so; but I see no occasion for anxiety. Since when has it been thought necessary to call priest or physician because of a young lady's growing charm? Confronted by an ugly duckling, we must congratulate ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... needn't be polite. I'm one, too. Not a very big one or very tragic. A lame duckling, ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... story-telling, dear and sacred to every child-lover! What an eager, delightful audience are these little ones, grieving at the sorrows of the heroes, laughing at their happy successes, breathless with anxiety lest the cat catch the disobedient mouse, clapping hands when the Ugly Duckling is changed into the Swan,—all appreciation, all interest, all joy! We might count the rest of the world well lost, could we ever be surrounded by such blooming faces, such loving hearts, and ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... playing the ugly duckling,' cried Ursula, with mocking laughter. 'And I don't feel a bit like a humble and pathetic ugly duckling. I do feel like a swan among geese—I can't help it. They make one feel so. And I don't care what THEY think of me. ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... shaking her wet plumage, like a duckling; "what for you look that way to me? I didn't do nuffin,—not the leastest nuffin! The water kep' a comin' and ...
— Dotty Dimple's Flyaway • Sophie May
... an automobile accident, and thus transforms him into that glorious kind of creature known as a "Greek god"—beautiful and innocent beyond belief or endurance. The Turmoil is really not much more veracious, with its ugly duckling, Bibbs Sheridan, who has ideas, loves beauty, and writes verse, but who after years of futile dreaming becomes a master of capital almost overnight. Even The Magnificent Ambersons, with its wealth of admirable satire, does not ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... the matter between them; and these two wily old judges of human nature had agreed that Trennahan must become the guardian of their joint millions. Magdalena was her father's only misgiving. Would a man with an exhaustive experience of beautiful women be attracted into marriage by this ugly duckling? But Trennahan had passed his youth. Perhaps, like himself, he would have come to the conclusion that it was better to have a plain wife and leave beauty to one's mistresses. He had not the slightest objection to Trennahan ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... board in a castle. She may have rather encouraged him to imagine that once she was free from Jim she would listen once more to Skip. But there is no evidence on that point and he must have felt a certain awe of her. His pretty duckling had ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... to her to find that Robert was fair, with a snub nose, merry eye, and rather a schoolboy manner. "A serpent in duckling's plumage," was her private comment; merciful chance had revealed him to her ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... Excellent and sane is the outburst of wrath to men, when it stops short of slaughter. For who that locks it up to eat in solitary, can say that it is consumed? Sir Austin had as weak a digestion for wrath, as poor Hippias for a green duckling. Instead of eating it, it ate him. The wild beast in him was not the less deadly because it did not roar, and the devil in him not the less active because he ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... their utmost speed, we at length nearly overtook the ostriches; and then I saw a number of little brown duckling-looking birds following at the heels of the female ostrich. Greatly to my surprise, the male ostrich at this moment stopped short, and then wheeling round, darted off on one side. As we were anxious to obtain the young as well as the mother, we continued ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... duckling," said she; "none of the others look like that; can it really be a turkey chick? Now we shall soon find out. It must go into the water, even if I have to thrust ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... fish in the Vaal river, taken muskelunge and black-bass in Canada, thrown a fly over guapote and cavallo in Central American lakes, and choked the monster eels of the Mauritius with a cunningly faked-up duckling. But I have been shy as a chub at the shadow of ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... viking-coloured eyes, and that touch of the Berserker in her spirit. It was very different with Holly, soft and quiet, shy and affectionate, with a playful imp in her somewhere. He watched this younger daughter of his through the duckling stage with extraordinary interest. Would she come out a swan? With her sallow oval face and her grey wistful eyes and those long dark lashes, she might, or she might not. Only this last year had he been able ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... "Well, the duckling shall come, too," shouted heedless Annie; and Kitty, with the full weight and delirious importance of her secret radiating all over her stout little person, slowly returned to the other members of the ...
— Red Rose and Tiger Lily - or, In a Wider World • L. T. Meade
... a wild-duckling in its jaws, and the little body, with its stuck-out webbed feet, flapped and flopped dismally from side to side, as the animal cantered along with a somewhat shuffling, undulating gait. And then the polecat became transfixed. He had ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... return to M. Ribot. He writes (p. 14):- "The duckling hatched by the hen makes straight for water." In what conceivable way can we account for this, except on the supposition that the duckling knows perfectly well what it can, and what it cannot do with water, owing to its recollection of what it did when it was still ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... absolutely staunch. She scarcely leaks a tear anywhere; and although she's beamy and heavy-bowed and deep, she isn't such a sluggard either, especially when it's blowing. In fact, dirty weather's our strong point with that ugly duckling of a cutter. She'd sail most of your dandy craft slick under water if it came on really bad. And we got it a week ago by the Dogger here, and last year just to s'uthard of the Bay, as foul as I've ever seen ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... swan of the flocks of Phoebus ever began life as a more ungainly duckling than Ibsen did. The ingenuity of biographers has done its best to brighten up the dreary record of his childhood with anecdotes, yet the sum of them all is but a dismal story. The only talent which was supposed to lurk in the napkin was that ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... again fell from her lips. As had often happened in days long past, he again saw his mother crown him for a festival. Pleased with the little new garment which she herself had woven for him and embroidered with a tiny tree with red apples, beneath which stood a bright-plumaged duckling, she led him by the hand in the necropolis to the empty ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... my glass of wine, and waited until the waiter, who had been carving a Rouen duckling on a stand by the side of the table, had stepped ...
— The Great Secret • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... half-defiant, half-terrified, and wholly curious gaze of a girl. Hardly more than a child she seemed, not over fourteen at the outside, and with a figure that was all flatness and unlovely angles. Certainly an exceedingly ugly duckling, yet there was promise of future swanship in the clean curves of her neck and in the firm poise of the small head. Moreover, her coloring was good, a clear brown through which a scarlet flush, born of the excitement of the moment, glowed intermittently, like the flashing of distant ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... or ball of the foot and keep the knees straight. Carry yourself so that a string extended downward from your chest would reach the floor without touching another part of the body. Do not push your head forward and do not be in a hurry so that you will waddle along like a little duckling with absolutely no grace or carriage. Dress comfortably, have your clothing well fastened, and your gown loose enough to give your lungs opportunity for the full expansion that, for the sake of your health, they should have. Make sofa cushions of ...
— The Woman Beautiful - or, The Art of Beauty Culture • Helen Follett Stevans
... educated person were asked—Which seemed to him more wonderful, that a hen's egg should always produce a chicken, or that it should now and then produce a sparrow or a duckling?—can it be doubted what answer he would give? or that it would be the wrong answer? What answer, again, would he make to the question—Which is more wonderful, that dwarfs and giants (i.e. people under four feet six or over six feet six) should be exceedingly rare, or that the human race is not ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... peas, innocent young potatoes, a cool salad, sliced cucumber, a tender duckling, and a tart—all there. They all came at the right time. Where they came from, didn't appear; but the oblong box was constantly going and coming, and making its arrival known to the man in the white waistcoat by bumping modestly against the outside ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... brought into connection with each other in a number of ways. These three concepts are "farmer" (the subject of discourse), "kill" (defining the nature of the activity which the sentence informs us about), and "duckling" (another subject[53] of discourse that takes an important though somewhat passive part in this activity). We can visualize the farmer and the duckling and we have also no difficulty in constructing an image of the killing. In other words, the elements farmer, kill, and duckling ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... looked all around to see that the coast was clear, and then gave a peculiar call. Instantly the young shot out of the cavity that held them, as if the tree had taken an emetic, and came softly down to the water beside their mother. Another observer assures me that he once found a newly hatched duckling hung by the neck in the fork of a bush under a tree in which a brood of Wood ducks ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... to thank for giving us hospitality on two occasions, consists mainly of a bay. Viewed by the norma verticalis, it is shaped like an ugly duckling, with an oval (Wellsted says a circular) body of high ground disposed north-east to south-west; and with head and neck drooping westward so as to form a mighty pier or breakwater. The watery plain within is out of all proportion to the amount of terra firma. ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... tones, "you're in on your own terms. I've got 'strictly business' pasted in my hat and stenciled on my make-up box. When I dream of nights I always see a five-room bungalow on the north shore of Long Island, with a Jap cooking clam broth and duckling in the kitchen, and me with the title deeds to the place in my pongee coat pocket, swinging in a hammock on the side porch, reading Stanley's 'Explorations into Africa.' And nobody else around. You never was interested in ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... The helpless young maggot of the wasp, which is fed solely by the parent, may be compared to the human infant, while the lusty young grasshopper, which immediately on hatching takes to the grass or clover field with all the enthusiasm of a duckling to its native pond, may be likened to that young feathered mariner. The lowest animals, as a rule, are at birth most like the adult. So with the earliest known crustacea. The king crabs, and in all probability the primeval trilobites, passed through their metamorphoses chiefly in the ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... just think of the unfettered life he must have led before he came here! Yes, I'm sure New York will stimulate him. A dose of New York is a very good tonic. It regulates one's mental liver. Don't look so worried, Armand—you remind me of those hens who hatch ducklings. I should think a duckling of John Flint's size could be trusted to swim by himself, at ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... not be a good woman and remain on the stage, that's what it comes to." In spite of the gravity of the scene, a smile trickled round Evelyn's lips, for she could not help seeing her father like a hen that has hatched out a duckling. He stood looking at her sadly. She had come back—but what new pond would she plunge into? "I am a very unsatisfactory person, I know that. I can't make people happy; but there it is, it can't be otherwise. If I don't sing on the stage, I can sing at your concerts. Come downstairs ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... besotted, Lies the drunkard, sadly spotted. People pass with unmoved faces— Why remark such commonplaces? Just another Volstead duckling, Rolling in ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... reform, and to steer clear, if possible, of the political imbroglio, they eventually joined hands with the Reformers. How the egg of the Jameson conspiracy came to be laid no one exactly knew. Certain it was that those who looked for the hatching of a swan, were confronted with a very ugly duckling indeed! Arms and ammunition were purchased, and these, concealed as gold-mining impedimenta, were smuggled into the country. Messrs. Leonard and Phillips, two prominent Reformers, consulted Mr. Rhodes as to future affairs, but Mr. Rhodes was in the awkward ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... deformity which subjected his sensibilities to severe trials and which had the effect of rendering him morose and sour. It was his lament in later life that while his brothers had been sent to college, he was the ugly duckling of the family and came in for his father's neglect and a shrewish step-mother's waspishness. At about fourteen years of age he relieved himself of these home troubles and ran away to sea. During the nine years that he sailed between Bordeaux and the West Indies, he rose from cabin-boy ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... work on Heredity {119} writes (p. 14):—"The duckling hatched by the hen makes straight for water." In what conceivable way can we account for this, except on the supposition that the duckling knows perfectly well what it can and what it cannot do with water, owing to its recollection of what it did when it was still one individuality ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... pigeons. It's small and red, and it's got a bumpy head with hair on it like the fluff of a duckling. It has blue eyes, and ten fingers to its fore paws, and ten toes to its hind ...
— Old Peter's Russian Tales • Arthur Ransome
... three pike. It may be premised that the young men had both been trying at intervals for a certain marauding pike reported to them as a ferocious duck destroyer by a gentleman farmer who came down to gossip. He indicated the field and a gravel pit as a guide to the place where his cowman had seen a duckling seized by a pike, and the man embellished his account by swearing that the fish had ploughed his way down the river half out of water, with the ball of feathers bewhiskering his jaws. Manford, it seems, had revenged the raided ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... but flattering," he muttered to himself; "the old witch must take me for a young duckling ready ...
— A Cardinal Sin • Eugene Sue
... Stella's persistent disregard of him. She watched the set boyish mouth, the pucker of his forehead—her baby. Terry had always had that pucker for perplexity or disappointment. Why, he had had it when the first down was on his baby head, as soft as a duckling's. ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... the hawk's final charge that he had never perceived his victim had escaped him. The cunning of these birds must be seen to be believed. I have often watched a wary old hawk perched most impudently on the stock-yard rails, waiting until a rash chicken or duckling should, in spite of its mother's warning clucks of terror, insist on coming out from under her sheltering wings. If I took an umbrella, or a croquet mallet, or a walking stick, and went out, the bird would remain quite unmoved, even if I held my weapon pointed ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... old hen clucking after her duckling in the water," he replied. "She has been fretting and fuming after you all the week. If it had been me out in Sark, she would have slept soundly and ate heartily; as it was you, she has neither slept nor ate. You are quite an old woman's pet, Martin. As for me, there is no ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... of the ballroom her mother fluttered like a hen with a duckling. Even Celeste was disturbed, for she saw that Nora's conduct was not due to any light-hearted fun. There was something bitter and ironic cloaked by those smiles, that tinkle of laughter. In fact, Nora ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... emerged from the Morbihan, and, on our right, passed the little rocky island of Teigneuse, with its lighthouse; and, on the left, those of Houat and Haedik (the duck and the duckling); the former famous as the retreat of St. Gildas, who leaped from here with one bound, a distance of ten miles, to the peninsula of Rhuys, where he built his monastery. From Auray to Belle Isle is in all forty-eight ...
— Brittany & Its Byways • Fanny Bury Palliser
... amazement the subtly expanding verification of the adage that blood will tell. For Mr. Surface, said Tim, had been a great scholard, and used to sit up to all hours reading books that Thomason, the butler, couldn't make head nor tail of; and so with Surface's boy. He was the strange duckling among chickens who, with no guidance, straightway plumed himself for the seas of printed knowledge. Time rolled on. When Surface was released from prison, as the papers announced, there occurred ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... and Jehosophat's face turned the very same colour. Well he knew who had stolen into the House of the White Wyandottes and put that big duck's egg under Old Mother Hen. And now it had turned out a real little duckling, that black little fellow Mother Wyandotte was ...
— Seven O'Clock Stories • Robert Gordon Anderson
... I that it does make a difference with nearly everyone, so don't ruffle up like a dear, motherly hen, when your chickens get pecked by smarter birds. The ugly duckling turned out a swan, you know." and Amy smiled without bitterness, for she possessed a happy temper and ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... triangle of a face which, left to itself, would have been square. Her teeth spoilt her; the gaps among them looked like the front row of the stalls during the first scene of a revue, or the last scene of a play by Shakspere. On the whole, she looked like the duckling of the story, serenely conscious of a secret swanhood. She showed unnatural energy even in repose, and lived as though she had a taxi waiting at ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... to Davis, have been her children; but she has never understood their spirit, never looked on them as anything but strangers to her family. They have been to her stray robber wasps, to be driven from the hive; while to the others they have seemed cygnets among her duckling brood. It is very wonderful that the University alone has been able to resist the glamour of Ireland's past, and has failed to admire the persistency of her nationality. There has surely been enough in every century that has passed since the college was founded to win it over from alien ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... Pohjola's old Mistress Answer in the words which follow: "I will give you first the duckling, And the blue-winged duck will give you, When the pike, so huge and scaly, He the fish so plump and floundering. You shall bring from Tuoni's river, And from Manala's abysses; But without a net to lift it, Using not a hand to grasp ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... fasten it in place. Elizabeth did it with fingers trembling with happy excitement. The coldness that had so often chilled her was all gone now from the dark eyes. Olga understood. Elizabeth had no more voice than a duckling, but she felt just then as if she could sing like a song sparrow from sheer happiness. It was such a wonderful thing to be happy! Elizabeth had never before known ...
— The Torch Bearer - A Camp Fire Girls' Story • I. T. Thurston
... Fourth prize White African Bantams, pullet. Fifth prize Golden Seabright Bantams, hen. Second prize Silver Seabright Bantams, cock. Sixth prize Birchen, cock. First prize Birchen, hen. First prize Black Breasted Red Bantams, cock. Second Prize Black Breasted Red Bantams, hen. Fourth prize Golden Duckling, cock. First prize Golden Duckling, cockerel. Second prize Golden Duckling, pullet. Second prize Silver Duckling, cock. Second prize Silver Duckling, cockerel. First prize Silver Duckling, hen Silver Duckling, pullet. Second ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... the port, above the muzzle. Officers and men, we were all cooped under the turtle's shell; in order by the open ports, and the guns all ready.... We came to within a mile of the Cumberland, tall and graceful with her masts and spars and all the blue sky above. She looked a swan, and we, the Ugly Duckling.... Our ram, you know, was under water—seventy feet of the old berth deck, ending in a four-foot beak of cast iron.... We came nearer. At three quarters of a mile, we opened with the bow gun. The Cumberland answered, and the ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... fled after the General, who, though he was obliged to wear whalebone braces in his shoes on account of youth and a waddling and undeveloped gait, scattered over the ground with the elusive clumsiness of a young duckling. Brother blushed, but ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... great scheme of nature belongs to me, and is cast upon my care." And, as the tie in the case of the stranger was not complete in the beginning, so neither can it be made so in the sequel. The little straggler is like the duckling hatched in the nest of a hen; there is danger every day, that as the nursling begins to be acquainted with its own qualities, it may plunge itself into another element, and swim away ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... families and orders are marked out. Why two ova, similarly exposed in the same pool, should become the one a fish, and the other a reptile, it cannot tell us. That from two different eggs placed under the same hen, should respectively come forth a duckling and a chicken, is a fact not to be accounted for on the hypothesis above developed. Here we are obliged to fall back upon the unexplained principle of hereditary transmission. The capacity possessed ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... boy found in his arms, and each little girl in her pinafore, a fine fat duckling. And there being eight of them, the two elder children had each a couple. They were rather cold and damp, and slightly uncomfortable to cuddle, ducks not being used to cuddling. Poor things! they struggled hard to get away. But the children hugged them tight, and ran as fast as their ...
— The Adventures of A Brownie - As Told to My Child by Miss Mulock • Miss Mulock
... some overshoes," she said, fluttering about like a distracted hen whose adopted duckling unexpectedly takes to water. "I also fixed up a medicine-case and a sewing basket. I knew you would never think of them. And, dear, I know how you hate heavy underwear, but pneumonia is so prevalent. You must promise me not to take cold if ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... her duckling in flaming silence, ate her salad, ate her ice, drank her coffee, and was glad ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... he come in?" questioned Abe, waving back a greeting as well as he could with the treasured cup in one of his hands and the saucer in the other; whereupon Sarah Jane, that ugly duckling, explained that the fellow, being a confirmed woman-hater, cooked all his own meals in the smokehouse, and insisted upon all his orders being left on a slate outside the tool-house door. Abe sniffed disdainfully, contemplating her homely countenance, over which this ...
— Old Lady Number 31 • Louise Forsslund
... doctor's certificate as to the health of the birds and animals which the chef presents so artistically in his celebrated plats du jour, and one need not take the journaux comiques too seriously, as once did a gouty milord, who insisted that his duckling Rouennais should, while alive, first be certificated as to the health of its bronches and poumons. All the same one likes to know that due regard is given to the proprieties and necessities of ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... just obtained a commission in the —— Hussars, when his father died, leaving him a moderate fortune, which steadily decreased as years went by. It had approached attenuation by this time, and Mrs. Rolleston felt as distracted and perplexed as a duckling's hen foster-mother, at the vagaries of the happy-go-lucky, reckless Irish blood in Bertie, which did not ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... my best," she thought, "but Gwen has always been a trial. I can't imagine whom she takes after. If the ugly duckling's ever going to turn into a ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... to define it as the age during which girls are asked—and cannot answer—varying forms of the question which so embarrassed the Ugly Duckling: "Can you ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... account-book, and proved that young Ferret owed him for the following goods sold and delivered, viz. one young rabbit; item, one wood-pigeon; item, one brace of partridges; item, one cock-pheasant; item, one duckling; item, ...
— The Comical Creatures from Wurtemberg - Second Edition • Unknown
... runaway slave, among the rest, whom I helped to forward toward the north star. Men of one idea, like a hen with one chicken, and that a duckling; men of a thousand ideas, and unkempt heads, like those hens which are made to take charge of a hundred chickens, all in pursuit of one bug, a score of them lost in every morning's dew—and become frizzled and mangy in consequence; men of ideas instead of legs, ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... had swum two yards away from the others and his mother, after a daddy long-legs which had flown down on to the surface of the water, and had opened its little flat beak to seize it, when there was a whirl in the water, a rush and splash, and two great jaws armed with sharp teeth closed over the duckling, which was visible one moment, gone the next, and Robin drew an arrow out ...
— Young Robin Hood • G. Manville Fenn
... natural manner he bestowed the most bountiful praise on my fictions, for their truth; it delighted him to hear the same stories over and over again. Often, during his most glorious works, would he stand with laughing countenance, and listen to the stories of the Top and the Ball, and the Ugly Duckling. I possess a certain talent of improvising in my native tongue little poems and songs. This talent amused Thorwaldsen very much; and as he had modelled, at Nys/, Holberg's portrait in clay, I was commissioned to make a poem for his work, and he ...
— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen
... Rottingdean, swimming in a pond in the middle of the village, in the company of some ducks. At Scarborough, Louth, and Shoreham, it has also been captured or shot, and has been 'found' building nests in Sutherland: and, on the whole, it seems that here is a sort of petrel-partridge, and duckling-dove, and diving-lark, with every possible grace and faculty that bird can have, in body and soul; ready, at least in summer, to swim on our village ponds, or, wait at our railway stations, and make the wild north-eastern ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... have the form of diminutives; but these are not many. They are formed by adding the terminations kin, ling, ing, ock, el, and the like; as, "Lamb, lambkin; goose, gosling; duck, duckling; ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... day there was delightful weather, and the sun shone warmly upon the green leaves when Mother Duck with all her family went down to the canal. Plump she went into the water. "Quack! quack!" cried she, and one duckling after another jumped in. The water closed over their heads, but all came up again, and swam together quite easily. Their legs moved without effort. All were there, even the ...
— Favorite Fairy Tales • Logan Marshall
... himself to her; but no sooner is he domesticated than he becomes polygamous, and makes nothing of owning ten or a dozen wives at a time. As regards the females, they are much more solicitous for the welfare of their progeny in a wild state than a tame. Should a tame duck's duckling get into mortal trouble, its mother will just signify her sorrow by an extra "quack," or so, and a flapping of her wings; but touch a wild duck's little one if you dare! she will buffet you with her broad wings, and dash boldly at your face with her stout beak. ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... the feeling of a narrow-minded and conventional hen who has brought a strange, intrepid duckling into the world; but her situation was still more wonderful, for she could only compare her sensations to those of some quiet brown Dorking who has brooded an ordinary egg and hatched a bird of paradise. Such ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... in their Sunday best; but he began to be conscious that now he was passing to a new sphere, where the girls are supreme and superior, and he began to feel for the first time that he was an awkward boy. The girl takes to society as naturally as a duckling does to the placid pond, but with a semblance of shy timidity; the boy plunges in with a great splash, and hides his shy awkwardness ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... to be so called. But no eggs are in any of them, fresh or otherwise; instead, in each sits a young, half-fledged bird, and one only, as this kind of penguin lays and hatches but a single egg. Many of the nests have old birds standing beside them, each occupied in feeding its solitary chick, duckling, gosling, or whatever the penguin offspring may be properly called. This being of itself a curious spectacle, the disappointed egg-hunters stop awhile to witness it, for they are still outside the bounds of the "penguinnery," ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... at the Orphan Asylum. She clasps her hands over her knees, bends forward toward the firelight, and tells the story with such simplicity and earnestness that I am always glad she is looking the other way and cannot see the tears in my eyes. I cried like a school-girl last night over 'The Ugly Duckling.' She has natural dramatic instinct, a great deal of facial expression, power of imitation, and an almost unerring taste in the choice of words, which is unusual in a girl so young and one who has been so imperfectly trained. I give her an old legend ...
— Polly Oliver's Problem • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... stoat, weasel, cat, dog, and man. The ferret's powers of destruction are estimated very lightly; the polecats are very rare, prefer game when it can be had, and do little against the rat; the weasel also prefers a chicken or a duckling "to fighting with a rat for a meal." Hence the farmers destroy them, and they do little against the rats. Cats, as a rule, prefer hearth-rugs; and traps, unless quite new, and consequently sweet and free from the smell of rats, are useless. No! There is nothing ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... be—a misunderstood genius, an undeveloped artist, an embryonic leader in feminism, nor an ugly duckling who would put on a Georgette hat and captivate the theatrical world. She was an untrained, ambitious, thoroughly commonplace, small-town girl. But she was a natural executive and she secretly controlled ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... and mother with a maiden of genius on their hands were like a hen whose duckling takes to the water. The difference of the training of Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn, as distinguished from their musical education, is effectually indicated by the following letter from their father to Fanny, written when she was fourteen years old. After referring in terms of satisfaction ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... age and had developed into a woman of great beauty. She was noted for the peculiarly vivacious and radiant expression which was always on her face. She had a kind of vivid loveliness accompanied by grace, simplicity, and a form of exquisite proportions. The ugly duckling had become a swan, for now there was no trace of her ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... where the indulgence of the most laudable passion, even benevolence and compassion itself, interferes with, or runs counter to your duty, you must endeavour to suppress it, or it will fare with you, as it did with that hen, who, thinking that she heard the voice of a little duckling in distress, flew from her young ones, to go and give it assistance, and following the cry, came at last to a hedge, out of which jumped a subtle and wicked fox, who had made that noise to deceive her, and devoured ...
— The Governess - The Little Female Academy • Sarah Fielding
... of the Free Frisian. I kept no note of the meal, but I recollect the occurrence at one stage of plovers' eggs (which the Dutch eat hot, dropping them into cold water for an instant to ensure the easy removal of the shell), and at another, some time later, of duckling ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... are parents to themselves; for what Are tutors, guardians, and so forth, compared With Nature's genial genitors, so that A child of Chancery, that Star Chamber ward (I'll take the likeness I can first come at), Is like a duckling by Dame Partlett reared And frights, especially if 'tis a daughter, The old hen by ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... with each other in adoring the ugly duckling, and in happy Irish fashion regarded her shortcomings as a joke rather than a misfortune. "Seen that youngster of mine?" the Major would cry genially to his friends. "She's worth a visit, I tell you! Ugliest child in Galway, though I say it that shouldn't." ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... and which many of his critics at the outset regarded as mere child's play. These were the fairy tales which he began in 1835, and which he published at intervals from that time until his death. The children loved The Ugly Duckling, The Fir Tree and The Snow Queen; but it was not only the children who loved them. Gradually people all over the world began to realize that here was a man who knew how to tell tales to children in so masterly a manner that even grown ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... Said he, "I vote for emigration, 'Twill save us all this botheration!" Our proud Drake turned, in great surprise, While grave rebuke flashed from his eyes. Said he, "it makes my blood run cold, To see young folks so smart and bold. There's not a Duckling of my brood, That would presume to be thus rude; Young sir, I will a lesson give, That may be useful while you live: Wait till your counsel others seek, And then think twice before you speak! For you, the elders of this tribe, I hope you here will still reside. In ...
— The Ducks and Frogs, - A Tale of the Bogs. • Fanny Fire-Fly
... Lady Arabella and Gillian drove home together, the former laughed quietly. There was an element of pride and triumph in the laughter. Probably the hen who has reared a duckling and sees it sail off into the water experiences, alongside her natural apprehension and astonishment, a somewhat similar pride in the startling proclivities evinced ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... is that the individual members of certain hostile species know one another from birth—the chicken, for instance, which, immediately it has left the egg, trembles before the hawk hovering above in the air; such is also the reason why a duckling plunges into water as soon as it comes to a pond, and the same instinct impels a bird to leave its nest and trust itself to the air ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... of certain teachers in schools he had been asked to leave back in his ugly duckling days. How didactically, positively, they clung to their exactitudes—like frightened little children in a chaotic world too big for them to face, hanging on to mother's skirts, ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... popular to-day as they ever were, and it seems as if all children (and grown-up people who have kept their child-like hearts) could never tire of these delightful stories. We can all read, and re-read, the 'Ugly Duckling,' or the 'Eleven Wild Swans;' we can sympathise with the love of the faithful 'Tin Soldier;' and who can resist laughing at all the outrageous performances of 'Little Claus and Big Claus?' Truly, Andersen had the ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... production of an eagle in a brood of common barnyard fowls—a miracle, however, which never happens except when the barnyard fowls are of the human species. Benjamin himself, at first, was only an ugly duckling ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... Sound-steamers are pushing out from their piers. We feel quite humiliated on our lonely ferry-boat as these leviathans of nautical architecture sweep past us with an imperious curve far out into the stream, and then move steadily and statelily down the middle of the river, like an "ugly duckling" of mammoth proportions. One never gets over the sensation of that sight, nor its impressions as a type of our century,—a vast floating hotel, carrying the population of a village and the luxurious appointments of a palace, gliding as smoothly ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... adding of kin, let, ling, ock, el, erel, or et: as, lamb, lambkin; ring, ringlet; cross, crosslet; duck, duckling; hill, hillock; run, runnel; cock, cockerel; pistol, pistolet; eagle, eaglet; circle, circlet. All these denote little things, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... Olives Roast Squab Duckling, Currant Jelly Creamed Mashed Potatoes Peas Lettuce Pimento Dressing Mince Turnover Coffee Cheese and Crackers Nuts ...
— Mrs. Wilson's Cook Book - Numerous New Recipes Based on Present Economic Conditions • Mary A. Wilson
... him to see the child, his heart yearned after her. He took her home to Dorothy, and she had grown up such as we have seen her, a wild, roguish, sweet, forgetful, but not disobedient child—very dear to both the Drakes, who called her their duckling. ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... moral purpose, which is yet so artfully hidden that it requires a certain maturity of intellect to detect it. In this field Andersen has done his noblest work and earned his immortality. Who can read that marvellous little tale, "The Ugly Duckling," without perceiving that it is a subtle, most exquisite revenge the poet is taking upon the humdrum Philistine world, which despised and humiliated him, before he lifted his wings and flew away with the swans, who knew him as their brother? And yet, as a child, ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... fastened, and then unwind the coils again with great discernment. Its chain allowed it to swing down below the verandah, but it could not reach to the ground. Sometimes, when there were broods of young ducks about, it would hold out a piece of bread in one hand, and, when it had tempted a duckling within reach, seize it by the other, and kill it with a bite in the breast. There was such an uproar amongst the fowls on these occasions, that we soon knew what was the matter, and would rush out and punish Mickey (as we called him) with a switch, which ultimately cured him ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... Friends—Nursery Alphabet, Sing-a-Song of Sixpence, The Frog's Wooing, The Three Little Pigs, Puss in Boots, have for many generations delighted the Nurseries of Great Britain. We trust that they and their worthy new companion, The Ugly Duckling, which has come to us from over the Sea, will still afford many hours of quiet amusement ...
— Aunt Friendly's Picture Book. - Containing Thirty-six Pages in Colour by Kronheim • Anonymous
... but lay awake enraptured at the profundity of my thoughts. After years of unquestioning humility I enjoyed a prolonged debauch of intellectual pride, and I marvelled at the little boy of yesterday who had wept because he could not be an imbecile. It was the apotheosis of the ugly duckling, and I saw my swan's plumage reflected in the placid faces of the boys around me, as in the vacant waters of a pool. As yet I did not dream of a moulting season, still less that a day would come when I should envy the ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... This would omit The Ugly Duckling. The Ugly Duckling is a most artistic tale and one that is very true to life. Its characters are the animals of the barn-yard, the hens and ducks familiar to the little child's experience. But the theme and emotional interest working out at length through varied scenes, make it much better ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... tablespoon of brandy, the carrots, parsley and the onions—the latter slightly browned in drippings—pepper and salt to taste and cook slowly under a covered lid for one hour. Cool off for about an hour, take off the grease, bone and skin the duckling and cut the meat into small pieces; arrange nicely with the vegetables in individual earthenware dishes, cover with the stock and put ...
— The International Jewish Cook Book • Florence Kreisler Greenbaum
... Miss Allison eagerly accepted their invitation to be one of the party. Mrs. Lawrence was to remain in charge at home, and was permitted to send for and receive under her wing her own graceless duckling, with the distinct understanding that he was in no wise to be allowed to interfere with Cary's studies or duties. Allison "had no use," as he expressed it, for his nephew Lawrence. He had helped pull the cub through many a scrape, but had tired of it, and having ...
— A Tame Surrender, A Story of The Chicago Strike • Charles King
... risen as a journalist, I confess that I look back upon the days when he thus approached me as a neophyte with some amusement. No doubt I was already, in his eyes, one of the old fogeys of the Press, and it must be admitted that there was something of the ugly duckling about his first appearance in my comparatively ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... duckling who could throw a stone almost as well as could Jimmie, but Alice was not so fond of doing this. She would rather dress up, and play keep house, while Lulu wanted to be off having a good time with her brother. But the three ducklings got along very ...
— Lulu, Alice and Jimmie Wibblewobble • Howard R. Garis
... word, as though both had been children or both old men. Nobody minded them: we used to throw sugar to the picaninny, and watch him fighting with the fowls for it, rolling about on his little black belly like a new-hatched duckling himself. ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... on the Ugly Duckling of Hans Andersen about a bumptious boy whom all the nice boys hated. He finds out that he was really at last caressed by the Huxleys and Tyndalls as one ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... said the cat to the ugly duckling in the fairy tale, and the poor abashed creature had to admit that it could not. Emerson could emit sparks with the most electrical of cats. He is all sparks and shocks. If one were required to name the most non-sequacious author one had ever read, I do not see how one could help nominating Emerson. ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... amazement when, as I promenaded the path beside the waters of the Serpentine lake, I beheld a wheeled cavalcade of every conceivable age, sex, and appearance; senile gaffers and baby buntings; multitudinous women, some plump as a duckling, others thin as a paper-thread; aye, and even priests in sanctimonious black and milk-white cravats, rolling swiftly upon two wheels, and all agog to dash ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... a duckling, but let's hope Peter can be mentioned in the same terms in the near future," said Sam, as he drove the fleet Byrd and me before him with the switch, in a scamper to Mammy ...
— Over Paradise Ridge - A Romance • Maria Thompson Daviess
... the ill-mated poet or painter or sculptor, despoiled of the sympathy he craves, and shackled even in the exercise of his art. And the picture is not out of drawing, for Daudet can see the wife's side of the case also; he can appreciate her bewilderment at the ugly duckling whom it is so difficult for her to keep in the nest. The women have made shipwreck of their lives too, and they are companions in misery, if not helpmeets in understanding. This is perhaps the saddest of all Daudet's books, the least relieved by humor, the most devoid of the gaiety ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... ate their breakfast at their leisure and prepared to drive their ugly duckling into the battle line again and finish the work of destroying ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... folks would look a bit, In such a case below the surface; And when the eels were caught and split By Mrs. Bond, just think of her face, In each inside at once to spy A duckling ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... great event of the week, but attached myself firmly to the side of my Uncle James Addams, in the hope that I should be mistaken for his child, or at least that I should not remain so conspicuously unattached that troublesome questions might identify an Ugly Duckling with her imposing parent. My uncle, who had many children of his own, must have been mildly surprised at this unwonted attention, but he would look down kindly at me, and say, "So you are going to walk with me to-day?" "Yes, please, Uncle James," would ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... dinner is begun; "Quack!" they say when it is done; Though it wasn't known before, "Quack's" a duckling's word for "more." ...
— Brave and True - Short stories for children by G. M. Fenn and Others • George Manville Fenn
... belonging more to them than to yourself! Again, you may draw utterly unsympathetic parents, who will never be able to understand you, and who will do their best to thwart you (as a hen when she has hatched a duckling), and then call you ungrateful because you do not love them; or, again, you may draw parents who look upon you as a thing to be cowed while it is still young, lest it should give them trouble hereafter by having wishes and feelings of ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... so cold! But it would be too sad to relate all the suffering and misery which the duckling had to endure through the hard winter. It lay on the moor in the rushes. But when the sun began to shine again more warmly, when the larks sang, and the lovely spring was come, then, all at once it spread ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... do," he said politely, and Halcyone bowed without speaking. She felt much as Hans Andersen's Ugly Duckling used to feel, and when John Derringham had said a few ordinary things about her having grown out of all likeness, he turned to the Professor again, and almost forgot ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... to a life of action as an hour-old duckling is to water, and this ironical upset of all my plans left me helpless. The very last man whom I wanted to see Mistress Waynflete was here, his plumed hat sweeping to the floor, triumph on his handsome face and ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... those six children five were just the ordinary commonplace little ones such as one would expect to meet in a tailor's household, but the sixth was like the ugly duckling in the fairy tale—a little, strange bird, unlike all the rest, who learned to swim far away and soon left the old ...
— Knights of Art - Stories of the Italian Painters • Amy Steedman
... a great many surprises in the course of their varied career, but the greatest of all was when the Ugly Duckling turned out to be, not a swan, but a golden goose, whose literary eggs found such an unexpected market that in ten years Jo's wildest and most cherished dream actually came true. How or why it happened she never clearly understood, but all of a sudden ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... l'alsacienne. Rehbruecken (venison) a la Conti. Lammviertel a la Provencale. Roast-beef a la Clamart. Artischoken sauce hollandaise. Salat braisirt mit jungen Erbsen. Engl. Sellerie mit Mark. Junge Flageolets a la Maitre. Spanishe Pfefferschoten farcirt. Junge Ente (duckling). Rebhuhn (partridge). Junge Puter. Escarolle-Salat mit Tomaten. Erdbeer-Eiscreme ...
— The Gourmet's Guide to Europe • Algernon Bastard
... earlier age. But it is a great mistake, if you intend to form a kennel for show purposes, to sell or part with your puppies too early. It is notorious with all breeds that puppies change very much as they grow. The best looking in the nest often go wrong later, and the ugly duckling turns out the best of the litter. This is especially true of Dachshunds, and it requires an expert to pick the best puppy of a litter at a month or two old, and even he may be at fault unless the puppy ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... the ugly duckling,' she would say, with tears in her eyes; 'but I shall never turn into a swan like Sara and Lesbia,—not that I want to be like them!'—with a little scorn in her voice. 'Lesbia is too tame, too namby-pamby, for my taste; and Sara is stupid. She ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... A young duckling may be carved in the same manner as a fowl, the legs and wings being taken off first on either side. When the duck is full size, carve it like a goose; first cutting it in slices from the breast, beginning close to the wing and proceeding upward towards ...
— The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887) - The Whole Comprising A Comprehensive Cyclopedia Of Information For - The Home • Mrs. F.L. Gillette
... none of that flattery of childhood which is so often merely a backhanded way of indulging the vanity of parents. My Mother, indeed, would hardly have been human if she had not occasionally entertained herself with the delusion that her solitary duckling was a cygnet. This my Father did not encourage, remarking, with great affection, and chucking me under the chin, that I was 'a nice little ordinary boy'. My Mother, stung by this want of appreciation, would proceed so far as to ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse |
