"Fledgling" Quotes from Famous Books
... of misery. Only last summer I discovered the nest of a wood-sparrow in a hazel-bush, my attention being attracted thither by the parent bird bearing food in her beak. I found the nest occupied, appropriated, monopolized, by a cow-bird fledgling—a great, fat, clamoring lubber, completely filling the cavity of the nest, the one diminutive, puny remnant of the sparrow's offspring being jammed against the side of the nest, and a skeleton of a previous victim hanging among the branches below, with doubtless ... — My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... subconscious Aruna was centuries older than the half-fledged being who hovered on the rim of the nest, distrustful of her untried wings and the pathless sky. That Aruna had, for ally, the spirit of the ages; more formidable, if less assertive, than the transient spirit of the age. And the fledgling Aruna knew perfectly well that the Englishman of her alternative was, confessedly—Roy. His mother being Indian, she innocently supposed there would be no trouble of prejudice; no stupid talk of the gulf that she and Dyan had set out to bridge. The fact that Dyan had failed only ... — Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... see Lucrezia Bendidio. This lady, the wife of Count Paolo Machiavelli, and sister-in-law of Guarini, is said to have been the mistress of Cardinal Luigi d' Este; but Pigna, too, courted her, and brooked no rivalry on the part of fledgling poets. Tasso appears to have paid her imprudent attention in the early days of his residence at Ferrara, and thus incurred the secretary's wrath. The princess Leonora remonstrated with her poet on his folly, and Tasso, by way of palinode, wrote a fulsome commentary ... — Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... it was as she thought—just the hearing how splendidly healthy the place was—that made her travel down to Middlemead in those early spring days, that first sad year after mamma's death, to look for a nest for her little fledgling. She arrived there in pretty good spirits; she had written to a house-agent and had got the names of two or three 'to let' houses, which she at once tramped off from the station to look at, for she was very anxious not to spend a ... — My New Home • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... a century's casual attack of inflammatory rheumatism! And, having annually frosted his feet for some odd centuries—boy and man—we can fancy with what quiet delight he was wont to practise his prognosticating facilities on "the boys," forecasting the coming of the then fledgling cyclone and the gosling blizzard, and doubtless even telling the day of the month by the way his heels itched. And with what wonderment and awe must old chronic maladies have regarded him—tackling him singly or in solid phalanx, only to drop back pantingly, at last, and slink away dumfounded and ... — Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... frequently to be heard in great force upon wine questions. 'This bottle's corked,' says Snobling; and Mr. Sly, the butler, taking it away, returns presently with the same wine in another jug, which the young amateur pronounces excellent. 'Hang champagne!' says Fledgling, 'it's only fit for gals and children. Give me pale sherry at dinner, and my twenty-three claret afterwards.' 'What's port now?' says Gosling; 'disgusting thick sweet stuff—where's the old dry wine one USED to get?' Until the last twelvemonth, Fledgling drank small-beer at Doctor Swishtail's; ... — The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Avenue expressions are a filling meal for the prowling lonely joker; but what will most satisfy his cannibal appetite is the passage of the self-conscious men and women. For here, on a good day, he cannot fail to relish some extreme cases of their whimsical disease: fledgling young men making believe to be haughty to cover their dreadful symptoms, the mask itself thus revealing what it seeks to conceal; timid young ladies, likewise treacherously exposed by their defenses; and very different ladies, but in similar case, being retouched ladies, tinted ladies; ... — Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... every little princeling of those days in Germany took Louis XIV for his model, so every literary fledgling looked upon Voltaire as a god, and modelled his style upon the stiff and pompous verses of the French literary men of ... — Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... illustrated in that wonderfully coiffed hair-like sentence picturing Clara Middleton and "the softly dusky nape of her neck, where this way and that the little lighter-colored irreclaimable curls running truant from the comb and the knot-curls, half-curls, root-curls, vine-ringlets, wedding-rings, fledgling feathers, tufts of down, blown wisps—waved or fell, waved over or up to involutedly, or strayed, loose and downward, in the form of small silken paws, hardly any of them much thicker than a crayon shading, cunninger than long, round locks of gold ... — We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... snow and the fiery sun, blooming and fading hour by hour. They have as it were but a Pisgah view of the promised land, of the spring which they are foremost to proclaim. Next come the clumsy gentians and yellow anemones, covered with soft down like fledgling birds. These are among the earliest and hardiest blossoms that embroider the high meadows with a diaper of blue and gold. About the same time primroses and auriculas begin to tuft the dripping rocks, while frail white fleur-de-lis, like flakes of snow forgotten by the sun, and golden-balled ... — Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... university of the planets, was set among the low hills of the western part of the North American continent. Here, in the nest of fledgling spacemen, boys from Earth and the colonies of Venus and Mars learned the complex science that would enable them to reach unlimited heights; to rocket through the endless void of space and visit new worlds on distant planets millions of ... — Danger in Deep Space • Carey Rockwell
... of trance, Miss Wilson possessed very remarkable powers: remarkable, I mean, not, of course, because peculiar to herself in kind, but because they were so constant, reliable, exact, and far-reaching, in degree. The veriest fledgling in psychical science will now sit and discourse finically to you about the reporting powers of the mind in its trance state—just as though it was something quite new! This simple fact, I assure you, which the Psychical Research Society, only after ... — The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... Freedom! as thy sister spirit, Spring, Pausing above the earth, sees every hue Of her prismatic crown, reflected true In forests and in fields, and fledgling's wing, So thou dost see thy spirit glorying With faith, that man is more than Nature's spew— In human spirit that, from beauty drew First breath to know that soul is ... — Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... The fledgling baronet, except for his too favourable opinion of himself, in which he was unlike only a very few, and an amount of assumption not small toward his supposed inferiors, was not a disagreeable human, ... — There & Back • George MacDonald
... Here was appreciation! No sign of superiority, no condescension from a young lady in long frocks and done- up hair towards a schoolgirl fledgling, but an open avowal of need, an invitation to a heart-to-heart talk on a basis of affectionate equality. She clasped her hands together in the intensity of her delight, and hitched ... — Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... And while the fledgling officers are going on with their billeting, we hear the t-r-r-t of a machine-gun at a machine-gun school about a mile distant, where picked men also from the trenches receive instruction in the use of an arm new to them. There are other schools ... — My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... tipplers to civil life, but that didn't stop it. Little by little the sense and manhood of our people began to tell. Little by little the feeling against stimulant began to develop at the Point. It was no longer a joke to set a fledgling officer to taste the tempter—it was a crime. Four years after I was commissioned we had only one total abstainer out of some fifty officers at the mess, and he was a man whose life and honor depended on it. Three years ago, when I went to see ... — Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... and fear the most? I know a girl who gags and throws up at the mere sight of a bird. Poor kid, when she was a barefoot moppet she stepped on a fledgling robin in the grass. She hasn't gotten over ... — Vigorish • Gordon Randall Garrett
... featherless head of a fowl—the species hitherto unknown to the American continent. The necks pushed forth, then the shoulders, then both shells rolled away in fragments, and the spectators gazed on two fledgling Moas. Te-iki-pa, on inspection, pronounced them to be cock and hen, and in healthy condition. The breed, he ... — The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... into the trough of the sea, and he beholding the while the terrors and wonders of the deep, for the space of three days, at the end of which time Fate cast him upon the Mount of the Bereft Mother, where he landed, weak and giddy as a fledgling bird, for hunger and thirst; but, finding there streams running and birds warbling on the branches and fruit-laden trees, growing in clusters and singly, he ate of the fruits and drank of the streams. Then he walked on till he saw some white thing alar off, and making for it, ... — The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous
... The enthusiasm of men participating in a race's expansion to glory. There was the feeling, even stronger here in space than back on Earth, of man's destiny being fulfilled, that humanity had finally emerged from its infancy, that the fledgling had finally found its wings and ... — Ultima Thule • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... moment that she knew he was coming a strange stillness seemed to fall upon the child. She had grown long-legged and was at the fledgling stage when even a pretty girl sometimes looks plain, and she, who had as yet no claim to beauty, was at her worst. She was quite aware of it, with her intense soul-worship of all beautiful things. Some unreasoned impulse made her keep away from ... — Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... note: fledgling parliament; a 275-member Transitional Federal Assembly; the new parliament consists of 61 seats assigned to each of four large clan groups (Darod, Digil-Mirifle, Dir, and Hawiye) with the remaining 31 seats divided ... — The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... enhancing the childish purity of her skin, and with her blue eyes full of content, Cherry was a picture of exquisite youth and grace and charm. It was not the less winning because she seemed genuinely unconscious of it to-day; perhaps before the girls and Anne's precise little fledgling lawyer no self-conscious thought of conquest had entered ... — Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... heart to beat with ambition; and to keep the weight of his head above the surface was becoming a thing worth the ransom of kings. As he was sinking and turning his eyes upward, he heard a flutter as of fledgling's wings, and the two red ruby eyes of the hawk were visible above him, like steady fires in the gloom. And the hawk perched on him, and buried itself among the wet hairs of his head, and presently taking the Identical in its beak, the hawk lifted him half out of water, ... — The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and in the trees without youths of simian habit clung to advantageous limbs and strained to get a view of the proceedings. Old Judge Kellog who usually dozed on his twenty-first vertebra through testimony and argument—once a young fledgling of a lawyer, sailing aloft in the empyrean of his eloquence, had been brought tumbling confusedly to earth by the snoring of the bench—attested to the unusualness of the occasion by being upright and awake. And Bud White, ... — Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott |