"Spider's web" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in which many birds, like our common chaffinch, disguise the outside of their nest with moss and lichen and other trifles felted together, so that the cradle is as inconspicuous as possible. There seems to be a touch of art in fastening pieces of spider's web on the outside ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... was first a glow of yellow green, then a mass of blossoms, then a throat, chin and face, one after another, all veiled in a gossamer thin as a spider's web, and last—and these I shall never forget—a pair of eyes shining clear below and above the veil, and which gazed into mine with the same steady, full, unfrightened look one sometimes sees on the face of a summer moon when it bursts through a ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... streaks across the sky, which were daily noticeable, took a form that day not unlike the vertebrae of an immense snake, whereas the higher clouds of transparent mist in filaments looked exactly like a huge spider's web. ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... of birds, shells, etc., also some fine works on natural history with beautiful coloured plates; an immense collection of specimens of plants bequeathed to the institution. A skeleton riding on horseback made ludicrous by a spider's web resembling a bridle. Thence we visited Mr. Pierpoint's garden. Took tea at Mr. Scholfield's but did not see Mr. Wood. Then set off to an election meeting and heard some good speaking; a little monkey not 8 years ...
— A Journey to America in 1834 • Robert Heywood
... so moody? There are as many furrows on your brow as lines in a spider's web, and your lips are drawn in as if you had dined on green persimmons. Child, what is ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... spot of all others in that mountain country which most stirs the sthetic and the speculative strains within one. Lovely and remote, all by itself at the foot of a mountain, in a circle of the hills, an old monastery stands, now used as a farm, with one rose window, like a spider's web, spun delicate in stone tracery. There the old monks had gone to get away from the struggles of the main valley and the surges of the fighting men. There even now were traces of their peaceful life; the fish-ponds and the tillage still kept in cultivation. If they had lived in these days they ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... and away into the mountains, with his father's sword upon his thigh, till he came to the Spider mountains, which hang over Epidaurus and the sea, where the glens run downward from one peak in the midst, as the rays spread in the spider's web. ...
— The Heroes • Charles Kingsley
... from a woman's hair. Half way between the globes of Life and Death my thread was broken, but the shuttle flew on and vanished. For a moment the thread hung in air, then a wind rose and blew it, so that it floated away like a spider's web, till it struck upon your silver thread of life and began to twist round and round it. As it twisted it grew larger and heavier, till at last it was thick as a great tress of hair, and the silver line bent beneath the weight so that I saw it soon must break. Then while ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... when Manning arrived; he was shortly afterwards removed to become Assistant Under Secretary of State at our Foreign Office. The author of Eminent Victorians is pleased to describe "poor Mr. Russell" as little better than a fly buzzing in Manning's "spider's web of delicate and clinging diplomacy." It is not in the memory of those who were behind the scenes that Odo Russell was such a cipher. Though suave in address, he was by no means deficient in decision or force of character, ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... thus, looking at a spider's web. 'Thou cunning little weaver, thou dost teach me perseverance. Let them tear thy web, and thou wilt begin it again, and complete it. Let them destroy it again, and thou wilt resolutely begin to work again—again! That is what ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... came down to stay with me for a spell, and turned Miss Williams gray by looking for dust in all sorts of improbable corners; or advancing with a terrible silence, a broom in one hand and a shovel in the other, to the attack of a spider's web which she had marked down in the beer cellar. Her presence enabled me to return some of the hospitality which I had received from the La Forces, and brought us still ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... and railways in France converge as surely to the capital as the threads of a spider's web lead to its centre, and in pursuing his route through the bye-ways of Normandy the traveller will be much in the position of the fly that has stepped upon its meshes—every road and railway leading to the capital where 'M. d'Araignee' the enticing, the alluring, the fascinating, ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... he would tell her, as he haled her on to the sward beyond the arbor, "here it is, the story you told us yester-e'en. Here is the ring where they danced last night, the little folk, an' here is the glow-worm caught in the spider's web to give ...
— A Warwickshire Lad - The Story of the Boyhood of William Shakespeare • George Madden Martin
... now and then, after working along quietly for nearly eight hours, everything inside would let go all of a sudden and begin to buzz like a bee, and the hands would straightway begin to spin round and round so fast that their individuality was lost completely, and they simply seemed a delicate spider's web over the face of the watch. She would reel off the next twenty-four hours in six or seven minutes, and then stop with a bang. I went with a heavy heart to one more watchmaker, and looked on while he took her ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... made haste to bathe himself in the brook, and put on his finest court suit of pink satin rose-petals trimmed with lace from a spider's web; for the fairy queen had ordered a grand court ball in his honor, and there ...
— The Story-teller • Maud Lindsay
... bridge is wide enough for the rails only, and the sides of the carriages hang beyond the rails. And there are no parapets. One just looks plumb down. We looked down, and back and forward. The struts and girders of the bridge seemed made of pack-thread and spider's web. We wondered why we should have stopped in the middle of such a place of all places. And the train looked so enormous. We asked the superintendent if the bridge could ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... Blackfriars. Carts and hansoms, vans and brewers' vans, all silhouetting. Trains slip past, obliterating with white whiffs the delicate distances, the perplexing distances that in London are delicate and perplexing as a spider's web. Great hay-boats yellow in the sun, brown in the shadow—great hay-boats came by, their sails scarce filled with the light breeze; standing high, they sailed slowly and picturesquely, with men thrown in all attitudes; somnolent in sunshine ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... boulder-encumbered bed. I took in the situation at a glance, and then and there I would have changed that bridge for any swamp I have ever seen, yea, even for a certain bush-rope bridge in which I once wound myself up like a buzzing fly in a spider's web. I was fearfully tired, and my legs shivered under me after the falls and emotions of the previous part of the day, and my boots were ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... Peripatus) shoot out fine threads of a remarkably viscid and tenacious milky fluid... projected from the tips of the oral papillae" (page 759).) is so stupid as to spit out the viscid matter at the wrong end of its body; it would have been beautiful thus to have explained the origin of the spider's web. ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... grunt, the other complied, unrolling several small sheets of photographer's printing-out paper, to which several extraordinarily complicated and minute designs had been transferred—strongly resembling laborious efforts to conventionalize a spider's web. ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... spider web with the dew upon it," and adds: "The 'water shield' [of one of the Zuni War Gods], from which he shook the torrents, was suggested, no doubt, by dew on the web." (Ibid., p.425.) To one unfamiliar with the Indian's habit of mind it may seem strained to connect the beads of dew on a spider's web with the torrential rain, but to one familiar with native thought as expressed in myths where the Indian has dramatized his conceptions of nature and of natural forces and phenomena, the connection ceases ...
— Indian Games and Dances with Native Songs • Alice C. Fletcher
... and stem in the form of various appendages, whose character depends on the character of the veil. In Cortinarius the veil is made up of delicate threads extending radially from the stem to the margin of the cap without forming a true membrane. From its resemblance to a spider's web such a veil is said to be arachnoid. At maturity mere traces of it can be found on the stem. In many genera the veil consists of a delicate membrane which tears away from the stem and hangs in flakes to the margin of the pileus. In these cases the veil is appendiculate ...
— Studies of American Fungi. Mushrooms, Edible, Poisonous, etc. • George Francis Atkinson
... why he deserted. Perhaps life on a man-of-war with its restrictions irked him, perhaps he was in trouble, and perhaps it was the South Seas and these romantic islands that got into his bones. Every now and then they take a man strangely, and he finds himself like a fly in a spider's web. It may be that there was a softness of fibre in him, and these green hills with their soft airs, this blue sea, took the northern strength from him as Delilah took the Nazarite's. Anyhow, he wanted to hide himself, and he thought he would be safe in this secluded ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... show that my observations differ from those of the gentlemen mentioned above. I saw nothing whatever of the web described by Captain Fleeson: the honey-making solitaires were simply confined in cells, where they rested on the bare ground; they were not perched upon "a network of squares, like a spider's web." The "outside" workers observed by me were not black, but very dark yellow, while the "inside" workers ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... school for the Christmas holidays. It was hard to look up from her bright eyes and rosy cheeks and see this shadow hanging above his calm and ordered life, as in a glowing room one's eye may catch an impending patch of darkness drawn like a spider's web across a ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... after her, closed the door, the carriage started at once at a great pace, and the poor little fly was fairly caught in the spider's web. ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... herself away by the childish vapidness of her talk, and exhibiting not only a lack of mental poise, but also utter tactlessness. However, Catherine rattled on, and Dr. Brayle rattled with her,—Mr. Harland threw in occasional monosyllables, but for the most part was evidently caught in a kind of dusty spider's web of thought, and I spoke not at all unless spoken to. Presently I met Catherine's eyes fixed upon me with a sort of ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... very centre of the highways that should link up the continents. He oppresses and destroys the Arab world, which should be the natural junction of the great trunk railways that, to-morrow, shall join Asia, Africa, and Europe in one splendid spider's web. You are going to move the block from the line, and to join the hands of the continents. Understand, and be enthusiastic. I tell you, this joining of the continents is an unborn babe of history that leapt in the womb the moment the British ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... silk, adorned with gilt fringe and cut low, displaying her snowy neck and magnificent shoulders; her arms were encompassed but not hidden by flowing sleeves of filmy gauze as fine as the tissue of a spider's web; about her neck flashed a collar of brilliant diamonds of enormous value, and on her tapering fingers were rings of emerald, ruby and sapphire; on her head was a red fez, precisely similar to her husband's; her countenance, a perfect revelation of angelic beauty, was wreathed ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... glory over the whole width of the square, and the delicate sculpture of the great rose-window of the Cathedral, centrally suspended between the two tall towers, looked in the fine pale radiance like a giant spider's web sparkling with fairy dew. Again— again!—that weary sobbing cry! It went to the Cardinal's heart, and stirred him to singular pain ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... was Court Day in Lexington. From the town, as a centre, white turnpikes radiated in every direction like the strands of a spider's web. Along them, on the day before, cattle, sheep, and hogs had made their slow way. Since dawn, that morning, the fine dust had been rising under hoof and wheel on every one of them, for Court Day is yet the great day of every month throughout the Bluegrass. ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... was alone, she sat down and sighed bitterly. "There is no end to it," she sobbed despairingly. "It is like a spider's web: every struggle to be free but multiplies the fine yet irresistible thread that seems to bind me. And to-night I thought to be so happy; instead of that, he has left me scarce the heart to do what ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... away he goes down the hill. 'Whosoever committeth sin is the slave of sin.' Did you ever try to kill a bad habit, a vice? Did you find it easy work? Was it not your master? You thought that a chain no stronger than a spider's web was round your wrist till you tried to break it; and then you found it a chain of adamant. Many men who boast themselves free are 'tied and bound with ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... she stepped out on the deck. She was fresh as the dew itself, and like a rose. All color of rose was the soft skirt she wore, and the little bolero above, blue, with gold buttons, covered a soft rose-colored waist, light and subtle as a spider's web, stretched from one grass stalk to another of a dewy morning. She was round and slender, and her neck was tall and round, and in the close fashion of dress which women of late have devised, to remind man once more of the ancient Garden, she seemed to me Eve herself, sweet, ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... made that painful journey, passing levels from which three or four hallways ran out like the radii of a spider's web. He was close to the end of his endurance when he heard a sound, echoed, magnified, from below. It was someone moving. He dragged his body into the fourth level where the light was very faint, hoping to crawl far enough ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... position. His appearance and manner indicated a mystery. Old Hannibal's wool had not grown white for nothing, and he was the last man in the world to go through a mystery as a blundering bumblebee would through a spider's web. He was for leaving the web all intact till he knew who spun it and whom it was to catch. If it was Mr. Allen's work or Miss Edith's, it must stand; if not, he could play bumblebee with a vengeance, and carry off the gossamer of ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... lady,' says he. 'And it's there he threw her down into the deep, cowld, dark lake,' says he. 'Would you like to go up and lie down in his bed?' says he. 'Is it me,' says I, 'to do it? Why my brain is like a spider's web wid lookin' at it,' says I. But a young man that was used to crawling in them unchristian places—them mines—went up; and I thought I could jump through a key-hole, I felt so, to see him do it; and says I, when he came down, 'Young man, I pray, when you ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... Miss Selina de Crespigny's eloquent exposition of the system adopted at De Crespigny House. Then he had torn it all to pieces as one might the delicate fabric of a spider's web, ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... old Tom's when on their drinking bouts. I will sound him, and, if I find he is all serene on the matter, Ashton must have become a more wary fly than he used to be if I do not induce him to enter my spider's web." ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... very clear to the girl who comes up to the city, and that is that the ordinary ice cream parlor is very likely to be a spider's web for her entanglement. This is perhaps especially true of those ice cream saloons and fruit stores kept by foreigners. Scores of cases are on record where young girls have taken their first step towards ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... the shadowy slim rafters slip across the paling sky, mapping its emptiness with intricate design. Like an enormous spider's web of fine dark silk it bulged before the wind. The trellis-work, slung from the sky, hung loose. It moved slowly, steadily, from east to west, trailing grey sheets of dusk that hung from every filament. The maze of lines bewildered ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... up the waters of the rivers, which supply this great lake. At the time he did this, he lived, they add, at Michillimackinac, i.e. a great place for turtles, pronounced Mak-i-naw. He it was who taught the ancestors of the Indians to fish, and invented nets, of which he took the idea from the spider's web. Very many of the northern tribes recognise this same divinity, but the Hurons alone assign Lake Superior as the place of ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... with bars of metal inside, with many cords and strands and coils of metal. We found wires that led to strange little globes of glass on the walls; they contained threads of metal thinner than a spider's web. ...
— Anthem • Ayn Rand
... with vain Terror, forsooth; the trees, a pulpy stock Of toadstools huddled round them; and the flock— Black wings after black wings—of ancient rook By rook; has not the whole scene got a look As though we were the first whose breath should fan In two this spider's web, to give a span Of life more to three flies? See, there's a stone Seems made for us to sit on. Have men gone By here, and passed? or rested on that bank Or on this stone, yet seen no cause to thank For the grass growing here so green ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... dawned to show the truth to these talkative shadows. There was no difficulty for Clerambault, he shone in these eloquent contests. For he had the fatal gift of verbal and rhythmical facility which separates poets from reality, wrapping them as if in a spider's web. In times of peace this harmless web hung on the bushes, the wind blowing through it, and the good-natured Arachne caught nothing but light in her meshes. Nowadays, however, the poets cultivated their carniverous instincts—fortunately rather out of date—and ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... gorgeousness of the Greenock's saloons and cabins, and the height of her masts, and the multitude of ropes about running in every conceivable direction, crossing and recrossing each other with the bewildering ingenuity of a spider's web; but Uncle Jack took all these wonders as a matter of course, and rather ...
— Teddy - The Story of a Little Pickle • J. C. Hutcheson
... cut their names on doors or rock-heads, But leave the task to scribblers and to blockheads; Pert, trifling folks, who, bent on being witty, Scrawl on each post some fag-end of a ditty, Spinning, with spider's web, their shallow brains, O'er wainscots, borrowed books, ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... himself during the months of drought. As he seldom emerges, a large variety of spider takes advantage of the hole, and makes its web across the orifice. He is thus furnished with a window and screen gratis; and no one but a Bushman would think of searching beneath a spider's web for a frog. They completely eluded my search on the occasion referred to; and as they rush forth into the hollows filled by the thunder-shower when the rain is actually falling, and the Bechuanas are cowering under ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... ostler told me; and it seems he spent the evening watching him weave his spider's web. But the flies were over-wary. They knew whence he came; they knew the business for which he desired to enrol them—for a rumour had gone round that Condillac was in rebellion against the Queen's commands—and there were none so desperate at the Auberge de France as to risk their ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... Well, in a day or so Pete would show the Mexican a trick with a large round hole in it—the hole representing the space recently occupied by one of his ponies. Incidentally Pete realized that he was getting deeper and deeper into the meshes of The Spider's web—and the thought spurred him to a keener vigilance. So far he had killed three men actually in self-defense. But when he met up with Malvey—and Pete promised himself that pleasure—he would not wait for Malvey to open the argument. "Got to kill to live," he told ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... knowledge than I possess, and pages of space, to describe the manner the roadways, i.e. the whole bridge, is supported. But the idea conveyed is that the supporting-rods, and the ties of every kind, are far more numerous and lighter than in other suspension bridges. The mesh of a spider's web, but with threads running in every direction, is the only thing I can compare it to. I know not who the engineer was, but his name should go down to all posterity. I have travelled in many lands, but I never saw ...
— The Truth About America • Edward Money
... man. But, when he turned politician, he made himself amenable to the harsh laws of political warfare, and became (as his paper phrased it) "the hoary-headed victim of the unprincipled tyrant who, with the cunning of the serpent and the vindictive ferocity of the hyena, weaves his spider's web of mischief in his dark corner of the City Hall." Uncle Ith retired to private life with a snug property, patiently saved up and thoughtfully invested. But, as Adam went on eating apples, notwithstanding ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... sagacity, his dignity, his knowledge of men, and love of order and uprightness, he gave it that high place which it yet holds, and which it must hold; for when the decisions of the Supreme Court are questioned by a State or people, the fabric of our government is but a spider's web through which anarchy and unreason ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... mind, so that you'll see visions you can't distinguish from reality. I shall lie like a stone in your path, so that you stumble; I shall be the thorn that pricks your hand when you go to pluck the rose. My soul shall spin itself about you like a spider's web; and I shall guide you like an ox by means of the woman you stole from me. Your child shall be mine and I shall speak through its mouth; you shall see my look in its eyes, so that you'll thrust it from you like a foe. And now, beloved house, farewell; ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... moss and down. She hardly dared to put upon the little arm, smaller than her own little finger, a little shift made of the fine white skin of the inside of an eggshell. The boots of the little one had soles cut out of the inside husks of the corn; a poppy leaf made her an ample bonnet. The spider's web which the dew whitens, and the wind winds up in balls, seemed too coarse too weave her sheets with, and the cup of an acorn was big enough for Piccolissima. Her parents obtained all her wardrobe, and all the small furniture for her use from those thousands ...
— Piccolissima • Eliza Lee Follen
... vital part in Willie Spence's inspirational world. Indeed, when Celestina had first come to the weathered cottage on the bluff to keep house for the lonely little bachelor and had discovered that cottage to be one gigantic spider's web, her initial impression was that strings played far too important a part in the household. What a labyrinthine entanglement the dwelling was! Had a mammoth silkworm woven his airy filaments within its interior, the effect could scarcely have been ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... dwarfs who have cannon? You are courageous, but they are cunning, and would conquer you. For the sake of the nineteenth century you must not be vanquished. Do not come; in your simplicity you would be caught in the spider's web of clever mediocrity, and your grand efforts to tear yourself free would only be laughed at. Great man, you would ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... the fence. In a bush beside the fence there was a big spider's web. Old Mrs. Ik-to the Black Spider had built the web as a trap to catch flies in. But this time there was something besides a fly in the trap. Ah-mo the Honey Bee had blundered, into the web and was trying hard to ...
— The Magic Speech Flower - or Little Luke and His Animal Friends • Melvin Hix
... red-breast, the mottled sides of the Saranac trout, the upholstery of a spider's web, the waist of the wasp fashionably small without tight lacing, the lustrous eye of the gazelle, the ganglia of the star-fish, have been discoursed upon; but it is left to us, fagged out from a long ramble, to sit down on a log and celebrate the admirable qualities of a turtle. We refer not to ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... down his pipe as gently upon the fender, as if it had been spun from the unravellings of a spider's web— ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... and double guineas and moidores and sequins, the pictures of all the kings of Europe for the last hundred years, strange Oriental pieces stamped with what looked like wisps of string or bits of spider's web, round pieces and square pieces, and pieces bored through the middle, as if to wear them round your neck—nearly every variety of money in the world must, I think, have found a place in that collection; and for number, I am sure they were like autumn leaves, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... weaving by machinery we shall not attempt to trace. To use the phrase of a Nottingham mechanic, "there are machines now that will weave anything, from a piece of sacking to a spider's web." But fine muslins and fancy goods are chiefly ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... longer than it would have taken to send them round by sea but also gave ten times as much trouble. At last Conflans managed to move out. But he had about as much chance of escape as a fly in a spider's web; for Hawke had cruisers watching everywhere and a battle fleet ready to pounce down anywhere. Conflans had been ordered to save his fleet by all possible means till he had joined the French fleet and army of invasion. So he is not to be ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood
... by twisting the ends. Think of that! spiders' webs for thread! How marvelous would the work of the fair ladies all over the land seem, if the door screens and the window hangings and the dresses and the laces were decorated with designs worked with spider's web thread! ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various
... again and again, until the words seemed blurred and the lines irregular as a spider's web. Then she thought: "We can not part forever like this. I must see him again whatever happens. Perhaps ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... swelled. He looked desperately at the sticky staircase and the spider's web swinging in the wind above the broken pane. He felt alone, lost in his misery. He looked at the gap in the banisters.... What if he were to throw himself down?... or out of the window?... Yes, what if he were ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... tenderest relations are often the most delicate and subtle, and "trifles light as air" may scatter and utterly destroy the sensitive gossamer threads extending between one heart and another, as easily as a child's passing foot destroys the spider's web woven on the dewy grass in the early ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... visit; and remember you have given your word, Fedya, and kiss me. Oh, my dear, it's hard for you, I know; but there, it's not easy for any one. Once I used to envy the flies; I thought it's for them it's good to be alive but one night I heard a fly complaining in a spider's web—no, I think, they too have their troubles. There's no help, Fedya; but remember your promise all the ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... lines of rigging, as seen from the place where Rollo and Jane were seated, looked so fine, and the men appeared so small, that the whole spectacle naturally reminded one of a gigantic spider's web, with black spiders of curious forms ascending and descending upon them, so easily and adroitly did the men pass to and fro and up and down, attaching new lines to new points, and then running off with them, as a spider would do with her thread, wherever they were ...
— Rollo on the Atlantic • Jacob Abbott
... the insuperable difficulty of accomplishing the manual tasks imposed upon me, especially that of sewing on my buttons—how every few seconds the needle would slip through my fingers, till the thread was tangled up in a veritable spider's web, while the button hung as loose as ever, to the derision of my companions and the disgust of the drill-sergeant, whose contemptuous—"You may be a great hand at rhyming, but when it comes to sewing on buttons you're a hundred years behind the ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Italian • Various
... Spain ceded the Netherlands and all her possessions in Italy to the German empire. And so the fine threads diplomacy had been spinning over the Continent for two centuries were ruthlessly brushed away as a spider's web. ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... himself more completely; he takes pleasure in ridiculing her, but whether he praises or blames, she remains mistress of his life; all threads are equally fatal, and each that should have served to bear him out of the trap only goes to bind him faster. A man in love suggests the spider's web, and when he is seeking to escape from a woman that will degrade his life, the cruelty which is added completes and perfects the comparison. A man's love for a common woman is as a fire in his vitals; sometimes it seems ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... With hermaphrodite plants we incessantly meet with elaborate and perfect contrivances for this same end. It is no exaggeration to assert that, if the use of the talons and tusks of a carnivorous animal, or the use of the viscid threads of a spider's web, or of the plumes and hooks on a seed may be safely inferred from their structure, we may with equal safety infer that many flowers are constructed for the express purpose of ensuring a cross with a distinct ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... next present the Suspension Bridge at Niagara, erected by drawing over the majestic stream a cord, a small rope, then a wire, until the whole vast framework was complete. The idea was taken from the spider's web. Thus the humblest may guide the highest; and I love to recall, in this connection, that the lamented Lincoln, some years before signing the Emancipation Proclamation, heard me lecture ...
— Five Hundred Dollars - First published in the "Century Magazine" • Heman White Chaplin
... break Our vows of silence. Many a time Has Robin Hood by kindly words and deeds Done in his human world, sent a new breath Of life and joy like Spring to fairyland; And at the moth-hour of this very dew-fall, He saved a fairy, whom he thought, poor soul, Only a may-fly in a spider's web, He saved her from the clutches of that Wizard, That Cruel Thing, that dark old Mystery, Whom ye all know and ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... republics—had been reached. The ports of Venezuela were for the first time opened to foreign trade. Her inhabitants were no longer restricted from the enjoyment of the fruits of their own industry. A gigantic system of taxation had been brushed, like a spider's web, away. Two-thirds of the Captain-Generalcy, in a ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... their pestilent influence; for we are constantly made to feel how much of the good that men endeavour to do is thwarted, counteracted, or destroyed by influences of this sort, and how weak and imitative souls are entangled in the network of traditional influence as in a spider's web. Tradition, in fact, represents to us the accumulated power of past lives as it acts upon us from the outside, just as what men call heredity represents this same influence ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... own thoughts, no longer listened to him. Charmolue, following the direction of his glance, perceived that it was fixed mechanically on the great spider's web which draped the window. At that moment, a bewildered fly which was seeking the March sun, flung itself through the net and became entangled there. On the agitation of his web, the enormous spider made an abrupt move from his central cell, then with one bound, ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... salts nimbly floating in the liquor, but in a very short time these saline particles shoot out into crystals of incredible tenuity and sharpness, with something like knots here and there, from which these crystals seem to proceed, so that the whole texture in a manner represents a spider's web, though infinitely finer and more minute. These spiculae, or darts, will remain unaltered on the glass for some months. Five or six grains of this viperine poison, mixed with half an ounce of human blood, received in a warm glass, produce no visible effects, either in colour or consistence, ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... in summer, as we often have in this part of the world. When the morning dawned, and the gentle breeze rippled the glassy mirror of the forest lake, all the delicate veils and flags fluttered away into thin air; the waving garlands of the spider's web, the hanging bridges and galleries, or whatever else they may be called, vanished away as if they had never been. Six elves brought me back my sausage skewer, and at the same time asked me to make any request, which they would grant if in their power; so I begged them, if they could, to tell ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... durst not look; and could scarce keep still for trembling—I heard them trampling outside the gap, uncertain which track they should follow. And in that fearful moment, with my soul almost looking out of my body, expecting notice to quit it, what do you think I did? I counted the threads in a spider's web, and the flies he had lately eaten, as their skeletons ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... thin sheet of mycelial threads covering the gills, sometimes remaining on the stem, forming a ring or annulus. This sometimes remains for a time on the margin of the cap when it is said to be appendiculate. Sometimes it resembles a spider's web when it is ...
— The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise - Its Habitat and its Time of Growth • M. E. Hard
... something wrong often think it of not much consequence, because the child is young and the wrong is very slight. You do not know the power of habit, and how one wrong, howsoever slight, leads to a greater one. Habit has been likened to a spider's web, which at first can be easily broken, but after continued indulgence binds its victim as with a strong cable, making reformation almost impossible. The same is true of good and right conduct. At first it may require ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... has suddenly sprung up, overspreading the bay, so that the frigate is hidden from his sight. Even ships lying close in shore can be but faintly discerned through its film, and only the larger spars; the smaller ones, with the rigging-ropes, looking like the threads of a spider's web. ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... irritated man, pausing, and looking at his wife, fixedly, while there sat upon his face an expression of terrible despair; "that pledge can never be renewed! It would be like binding a giant with a spider's web. I am lost! lost! lost! The eager, inexpressible desire that now burns within me, cannot be controlled. The effort to do so would drive me mad. I must drink, or die. And you, my poor wife!—and you, my children! what will become of you? Who will give you sufficient strength ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... demons and witches journeying to a devils' sabbath, and should have gone on my way; but as it was, the phenomenon was absolutely inexplicable to me. I did not believe my eyes, and was entangled in conjectures like a fly in a spider's web.... ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... for those who will exclaim, Let us kill, let us plunder!" Let the leader of the day stop following the current of the day, and he will be crushed as an obstacle or cast off as a piece of wreckage.—Judge if they are willing to be entangled in the spider's web which the Girondins put in their way. Instead of the metaphysical constitution with which the Girondins confront them, they have one in their own head ready made, simple to the last point, adapted to their capacity and their instincts. The ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... work in solid gold, and over them were canopies of yellow velvet, the folds of which were caught up and draped with bands of green ribbon. And on the thrones were seated two of the sweetest and fairest little maidens that mortal man had ever beheld. Their lovely hair was fine as a spider's web; their eyes were kind and smiling, their cheeks soft and dimpled, their mouths shapely as a cupid's bow and tinted like the petals of a rose. Upon their heads were set two crowns of fine spun gold, worked into fantastic shapes and set with glittering gems. Their robes were soft silks ...
— The Enchanted Island of Yew • L. Frank Baum
... fairy went away, however, she gave the woman a little shirt of spider's web and a doublet ...
— The National Nursery Book - With 120 illustrations • Unknown
... near Las Amolanas, composed of the cretaceo-oolitic strata, are interlaced with dikes like a spider's web, to an extent which I have never seen equalled, except in the denuded interior of a volcanic crater: north and south lines, however, predominate. These dikes are composed of green, white, and blackish rocks, all porphyritic with feldspar, and often with large crystals ...
— South American Geology - also: - Title: Geological Observations On South America • Charles Darwin
... barring a flaw, and I congratulate you on its recovery, but I see no human eye in it. I see some indistinct lines, fine as the thread of a spider's web, that is all. There is the breakfast bell, duke. We will go into the drawing room and find Cora. She must be ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... built Versailles and established his Court there. It was the women that made the life of Versailles—and gave their lives to it. The Court was a dazzling spider's web, and many a beautiful favorite became fatally entangled in ...
— The Story of Versailles • Francis Loring Payne
... in really dramatic moments, may impress the mind with extraordinary aptness. At this very moment Spinrobin's eyes noticed in the corner of wall and door a tiny spider's web, with the spider itself hanging in the center of its little net—shaking. And he has never forgotten it. It expressed pictorially exactly what he felt himself. He, too, felt that he was shaking in midair—as in the center ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... at all coherent, but Elizabeth perfectly understood what he meant. Several times during the past weeks she had attempted to open his eyes to the truth; but he would neither see nor hear, and had insisted upon rushing on to his fate like a great blundering bluebottle into a spider's web. ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... a Canterbury poke, dear boys," he cried. "Let 'em have it, my lads. The beggars look like so many flies in a spider's web; and we ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... driving rain. First he looked towards the house and then turning sharply towards the left made his way once more to the edge of the last of the experimental tracks that threaded that distant corner of the park like the lines of a spider's web. ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... just within the door, and at the word he stepped out and flung it to. I sprang forward, but before I reached it the click sounded. I was a prisoner, caught like a fly in a spider's web, and much it helped me to beat on the iron-studded door till my hand bled, to call on him to come in and fight it out like a man, to storm up and down the room in a ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... means returned like the prodigal son. On the contrary, he had sent home a remittance, as it were, by the butler, of more than five thousand pounds. The whole plot had been devised by honest John as the only method of extricating Master Richard from that Monte Carlo spider's web, and had been carried out by the help of the maitre d'hotel, with the squire's approval. And to do the young fellow justice, he never resented the trick that ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... after this outbreak. He even smiled as he thought how neatly he had walked into the spider's web. Then he shifted his position and prepared to think. But, as he moved his foot struck something. A wallet, it felt like; he reached down, and, by dint of feeling about, managed to ...
— The Girl Aviators' Sky Cruise • Margaret Burnham
... strong and high, Reared of hewn stones; but, look! in lieu of gate, There was a glittering cobweb drawn across, And on the lintel there were writ these words: "Ho, every one that cometh, I divide What hath been from what might be, and the line Hangeth before thee as a spider's web; Yet, wouldst thou enter thou must break the line, Or ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow |
