"Vermin" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... much fun," said The Rat. "I feel like one. Every one's my enemy. I'm vermin. I can't fight or defend myself unless I bite. I can bite, though." And he showed two rows of fierce, strong, white teeth, sharper at the points than human teeth usually are. "I bite my father when he gets drunk and beats me. I've bitten him till he's learned to remember." He laughed a shrill, ...
— The Lost Prince • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Joe, at last, he could go to sleep if he liked, at the fire. Joe went to sleep—HOW, I don't know. Then Dad sat beside him, and for long intervals would stare silently into the darkness. Sometimes a string of the vermin would hop past close to the fire, and another time a curlew would come near and screech its ghostly wail, but he never noticed them. Yet ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... the keen fox-hunter endanger his neck and his bones in pursuit of a vermin, which, when killed, is neither fit food for ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... interminable harangues of hill preachers, sheltering for a night in the castle, and day by day was resisting the domination of her mother, her mind rose in revolt against the Presbyterians and all their ways. When she was among men who spoke of those hillmen as if they were vermin to be trapped, and as if no one had breeding or honor or intelligence or sincerity except the Cavaliers, she was again goaded into opposition. Jean had made her choice both of her man and of her cause—for ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... cried, standing close to me and waving the red flag he carried—the emblem of the Terror. "Down with the Czar! Kill the vermin he sends to us! Long live freedom! Kill them!" he shrieked. "They have killed your wives and daughters. Men of Ostrog, remember your duty to-day. Set an example to Russia. Do not let the Moscow fiasco be repeated here. ...
— The Count's Chauffeur • William Le Queux
... and women, yet still most lovely Naples,—of which the most I can say is that the divine aspect of nature can make you forget the situation of man in this region, which was surely intended for him as a princely child, angelic in virtue, genius, and beauty, and not as a begging, vermin-haunted, image kissing Lazzarone. ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... child, who were afraid of miscarrying under the gibbet; and young mothers, who thought the sight might do them a mischief, and mark the gallows upon the foreheads of their unborn babes—poor poets, without a shoe, because their only pair had been sent to the cobbler to mend—and other such vermin, not worth the trouble of mentioning. As I chanced to pass by a cottage I heard a great squalling inside. I looked in; and, when I came to examine, what do you think it was? Why, an infant—a plump and ruddy urchin—lying on the floor under a table which was just beginning ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... Complexion Cyanotic appearance, edema anemic and sallow. The and iciness of extremities. other appearances may be Great decrease of vitality present but come on later in peripheral structures, and are less marked. as shown by asthenic eruptions and production of vermin. ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... Germany, Being equal before God, they perhaps have peace in their hearts, which the other has not, and the invaluable treasure of innocence. But hold up your petticoats, mademoiselle, for fear that you introduce the vermin with which I see they ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... Chatelet, called the Chausse d'Hypocras, in which the prisoners had their feet continually in water, and where they could neither stand up nor lie down; and a cell, called Fin d'aise, which was a horrible receptacle of filth, vermin, and reptiles; as to the Fosse, no staircase being attached to it, the prisoners were lowered down into it by means of a ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... former. "You two halt to cover us just at the water's edge. That'll give the boys time to get aboard, and then we can laugh at the copper-skinned vermin. Look sharp and reload: ...
— Old Gold - The Cruise of the "Jason" Brig • George Manville Fenn
... that haunts him, from which neither reason nor pity will turn him. I have seen such an eye in men possessed—with devils, or with self: sleek, passionless men, who are too refined to be manly, and measure their grace by their effeminacy; crooked vermin, who swarm up in pious times, being drowned out of their earthly haunts by the spring-tide of religion; and so making a gain of godliness, swim upon the first of the flood, till it cast them ashore on the firm beach of wealth and station. I always ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... floating in the atmosphere around us, lying in the dust of corner and closet, growing in the water we drink, and thronging decayed vegetable and animal matter. Everyone knows that mildew and vermin do damage in the home and in the field, but very few understand that, in addition to these visible enemies of man, there are swarms of invisible plants and animals some of which do far more damage, both directly and indirectly, ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark
... the law," Hitchcock sneered. "But go ahead. I'm willing. And hurry up. I can't get out of this camp and away from its vermin ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... indifferent whether he slept in a bed or in the telega, which, when the straw was fresh shaken up and a couple of rugs laid upon it, was by no means uncomfortable. The nights were not cold and no rain had fallen since he left Nijni. He further reflected that probably there would be fleas and other vermin in the post-houses, and that altogether he was a gainer instead of ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... wretch whose existence in his sane moments was a curse; and who now, as he lay back there feeble, vacuous, existing only in body, not in mind, was a mere blot upon the earth, less worthy of the space he occupied than the vilest animal classed as vermin, and which man crushed out of his way without compunction, without a second thought. What sin would it be to quench the flickering life before him? He must give up all hope of ever clasping Myra to his heart, as he had given it ...
— Witness to the Deed • George Manville Fenn
... their starving," the General replied indifferently, "I don't know that I care for that; but I would rather the palace should be rid of the whole vermin race of them, so you may come in and gather them up. But be quick about it, or I'll set the royal ...
— Prince Vance - The Story of a Prince with a Court in His Box • Eleanor Putnam
... neither the same ideas nor the same practices as James, was severe to the Comprachicos. He did his best to crush out the vermin. ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... being circumstantial in details giving an idea of what travelling in Sardinia is. Things are much the same throughout the island. The tourist who sets foot on it must be steeled against brigands, vermin, intempérie, and indifferent fare. “Per aspera tendens” would be his suitable motto. He must be prepared to ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... as a matter of course. Clothes once given up were parted with forever. There were good reasons for this: cold water would not cleanse them or destroy the vermin, and hot water was not always to be had. One blanket to each man was found to be as much as could be carried, and amply sufficient for the severest weather. This was carried generally by rolling it lengthwise, with the rubber cloth outside, tying ...
— Detailed Minutiae of Soldier life in the Army of Northern Virginia, 1861-1865 • Carlton McCarthy
... said Alan. "I am come of kings; I bear a king's name. My badge is the oak. Do ye see my sword? It has slashed the heads off mair Whigamores than you have toes upon your feet. Call up your vermin to your back, sir, and fall on! The sooner the clash begins, the sooner ye'll taste this ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... weak people, hangers-on of weak courts. 'Tis the nature of such to hate and envy the strong, and conspire their ruin; and the conspiracy succeeds very well, and everything presages the satisfactory overthrow of the great victim; until one day Gulliver rouses himself, shakes off the little vermin of an enemy, and walks away unmolested. Ah! the Irish soldiers might well say after the Boyne, "Change kings with us and we will fight it over again." Indeed, the fight was not fair between the two. 'Twas a weak, priest-ridden, woman-ridden man, ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... were obliged to quit the shelter, and walk at noon, at midsummer, and in Sicily, a good mile up a main street, which, beginning in habitations of the dimensions of our almshouses, ends in a few huts intolerably revolting, about which troops of naked children defy vermin, and encrust themselves in filth. At one door we could not help observing that worst form of scabies, the gale a grosses bulles; so we had got, it appeared, from Scylla into Charybdis, and were in the very preserves of Sicilian itch, and we prognosticate it will spread before the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... Tyrconnel; his ears and lips were ever open to pathos and to punch; so Titus kept his station. Immediately after her husband's demise, it had been Lady Rookwood's intention to clear the house of all the "vermin," so she expressed herself, that had so long infested it; and forcibly to eject Titus, and one or two other intruders of the same class. But in consequence of certain hints received from Mr. Coates, who represented the absolute necessity of ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... the fur (or feathers) with lysol solution, 2 per cent. This serves the twofold purpose of preventing the hairs from flying about and entering the body cavities during the autopsy, and of rendering innocuous any vermin that may ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... very idea of drinking after a low-caste carrion-eater. If from the lowest, filthiest, and most poisonous dens in London, you were to take a man, reeking with beer and tobacco, and with his clothes crawling with vermin, and presenting, in short, every appearance of foulness, dirt, and disease; if you were to take that man and place him between two ladies at the administration of the Holy Communion, I do not say ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... such a leader followed by blind zealots like the riff-raff who are insanely trailing after this Mad Mullah who claims divine powers—save the mark—when such leaders and such human vermin as these rise in a community, the people who own property, who have built up the community, who have spent their lives making Harvey the proud industrial center that she is—the people who own property, we repeat, should organize ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... blood of the Lamb?) The Saints smiled gravely and they said: "He's come." (Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?) Walking lepers followed, rank on rank, Lurching bravoes from the ditches dank, Drabs from the alleyways and drug fiends pale — Minds still passion-ridden, soul-powers frail: — Vermin-eaten saints with mouldy breath, Unwashed legions with the ways of Death — (Are you washed in the blood of ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... ostracized at Athens, to secure the State from dangerous rivalries. In other words, they were commonly not men of character and distinction, but just the reverse—persons whose conduct was so destitute of honour as to degrade them, in the eyes of the community, to the level of the worst sort of vermin. And they were treated accordingly. They were held to be unfit to exist as an integral part of the body politic, and either destroyed or, as an alternative, constrained to abjure the realm. The head and front of their offence was not ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... have shown some dexterity in getting into his quarters. As the bogs of Ireland by tradition expel toads and reptiles, he may well defy these small deer in his fastnesses. It seems the latter had not arrived at the exquisite policy adopted by the human vermin "between ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... graveled. But that day is gone by. Our descendants have forgotten us. My grandson lives in a stately house built with money made by these old hands of mine, and I sleep in a neglected grave with invading vermin that gnaw my shroud to build them nests withal! I and friends that lie with me founded and secured the prosperity of this fine city, and the stately bantling of our loves leaves us to rot in a dilapidated cemetery which neighbors ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... dogs. From the bull terrier side he inherits a lively mood, the quality of taking care of himself if attacked by another dog, and of his owner, too, if necessary, the propensity to be a great destroyer of all kinds of vermin if properly trained, and an ideal watch dog at night. No wonder he is popular, he deserves to be. The standard describes him ...
— The Boston Terrier and All About It - A Practical, Scientific, and Up to Date Guide to the Breeding of the American Dog • Edward Axtell
... hunted as he had hunted with his ape people in the past, as Kala had taught him to hunt, turning over rotted logs to find some toothsome vermin, running high into the trees to rob a bird's nest, or pouncing upon a tiny rodent with the quickness of a cat. There were other things that he ate, too, but the less detailed the account of an ape's diet, the better—and Tarzan was ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... families cross the road and pay visits in this garment only, without any sense of impropriety. The younger children wear nothing but a string and an amulet. The persons, clothing, and houses are alive with vermin, and if the word squalor can be applied to independent and industrious people, they were squalid. Beetles, spiders, and wood-lice held a carnival in my room after dark, and the presence of horses in the same house brought a number of horseflies. I sprinkled ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... Sogrange admitted. "Nor have I yet set my heel upon its head and stamped the life from a rat upon the pavement. But one lives and one moves on. Bernadine is the enemy of your country and mine. He makes war after the fashion of vermin. No ordinary cut-throat would succeed against him. It must be you ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the vermin That will silence at last the most impudent lip! Is the world but a bubble, a bauble, a joke? Heigho, Brother Fools, now your bubble is broke, Do you ask for a tear?—or is it worth while? Here's a sigh for you, then—but it ends in a smile! Ho, Brother Death, We would laugh at you, too—if ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... childish. For the rest, he had thought little about her, except that she was a strangely clean and silent woman, and kind, even to tenderness,—to him; but to the very bats in the barn, or old Wart, or any other vermin, as well. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... way through the thickets with some caution. The indications so far had been that local animals had as much good reason to avoid the vicinity of Hovig's machine as human beings, but if there was any poisonous vermin in the area this would be a good place for it to be lurking. Which seemed a fairly reasonable apprehension. Other, equally definite, apprehensions looked less reasonable when considered objectively. If he stumbled ...
— The Star Hyacinths • James H. Schmitz
... soon be at him. No, no, John, sit still and put down your rifle; we can't afford to hurt wolves; their skins won't fetch a half-dollar, and their flesh is not fit for a clog, let alone a Christian. Let the vermin howl till he is tired; he'll be off to the woods ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat
... bread, and a farthing's worth of drink. At her own request she had been permitted to receive her whole allowance in bread; and water, not over clean nor fresh, was supplied for drinking. No living creature came near her save her keeper, who was the bell-ringer at the cathedral—if we except the vermin which held high carnival in the vault, and were there in extensive numbers. It was a dreadful place for any human being to live in; how dreadful for an educated and delicate gentlewoman, accustomed to the comforts of civilisation, it is not ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... basilisks, crocodiles, scorpions, rats, and so forth. Every one knows that swamps, stagnant ponds, dung, fetid bogs, are full of such things; also that noxious insects fill the atmosphere in clouds, and noxious vermin walk the earth in armies, and consume its herbs to the very roots. I once observed in my garden, that in the space of a half yard, nearly all the dust was turned into minute insects, for when it was stirred with a stick, ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg
... Heraclitus having written so many natural tracts concerning the last and general conflagration of the world, died afterwards all filled with water within, and all bedaubed with dirt and dung without. Lice killed Democritus; and Socrates, another sort of vermin, wicked ungodly men. How then stands the case? Thou hast taken ship, thou hast sailed, thou art come to land, go out, if to another life, there also shalt thou find gods, who are everywhere. If all life and sense ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... searched, Mr. Pickwick came and sat by Richard, and with yelp and howl, and at intervals a little epileptic bark, proceeded to disparage all manners and septs of rats, and spake slightingly of all such vermin deer. Having freed his mind on the important subject of rats, Mr. Pickwick returned to silence and his ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... Selwyn, a trifle wearily. "I am not compelling you to decency for the purpose of punishing you; men never trouble themselves to punish vermin—they simply exterminate them, or they retreat and avoid them. I merely mean that you shall never again bring publicity and shame upon your wife—even though now, mercifully enough, she has not the faintest idea that you are what a complacent law ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... herself in comely enough fashion with all those fine garments of enlightened self-government, but underneath those garments are, or were, the same vermin that infested the garments of so many communities less clean—parasites that suck existence from God's gifts to decent people. Indeed, that human vermin at one time infested East Haven even more than the other and neighboring ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... Tiralla, and smiled contentedly. "There's so much vermin in this old house that it's quite dreadful. And we've cockroaches as well in ...
— Absolution • Clara Viebig
... soul is all lit up in friendly radiance for others, the light will be my own defence. Light always scares away the vermin. Lift up a stone in the meadow, let in the light, and see how a hundred secret things will scurry away. And light in the soul scares away "the unfruitful works of darkness"; they cannot dwell with the light. ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... he said slightingly. "What difference does it make what vermin like that mob do? Just for a whim, to endanger ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... your wild ducks morning and evening and keep them quiet, you will soon find that you can get them to lay where you want them to lay, and the places you select will naturally be those where they are secure, or nearly so, from their natural enemies, such as rats, cats, weasels, moles, and other vermin. ...
— Wild Ducks - How to Rear and Shoot Them • W. Coape Oates
... traps and engines set In loop-holes, where the vermin creep, Who from their folds and houses, get Their ducks and geese, and lambs and sheep; I spy the gin, And enter in, And seem a vermin taken so; But when they there Approach me near, I leap out ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... gain!" they pointed out, "these Bushmen have no cattle, no ivory, nothing! They are but vermin, and a poisoned arrow is all you are likely to get from them." But, secure in my knowledge of the riches awaiting me, I was not to be deterred; and there came a day when my wagon, loaded with a goodly stock of "trade" goods, trekked ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... agrees with me to be doing my duty; and in this case my duty is a thorough pleasure. To hunt down vermin is a noble occupation, ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... dem are supposed to be a hundred times bigger dan de eart', how do we feel? We men have invented de telegraph and de telephone, and so many achievements of modern life, yes, dat we have. But when we look up dere, den we have to recognize and understand dat after all we're only vermin, miserable vermin and not'ing else—am I right or wrong, sir? Yes, we are vermin," he answered himself, and nodded up at ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... pride in his own confidence as to his own courage, as he stood there turning it all over in his mind. Very much might be suspected. Something might be found out. But the task of unravelling it all would not be easy. It is the small vermin and the little birds that are trapped at once. But wolves and vultures can fight hard before they are caught. With the means which would still be at his command, let the worst come to the worst, he ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... positively, superlatively. I want to knead it with both my hands and both my feet; I want to smear it all over my body; I want to gorge myself with it to the full. The scrannel pipes of those who have worn themselves out by their moral fastings, till they have become flat and pale like starved vermin infesting a long-deserted bed, ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... to the boarding-house I had my supper, which, as a matter of course, was worse than the dinner, and I could not make out why the right of complaint should be denied me. I was then put to bed, but there three well-known species of vermin kept me awake all night, besides the rats, which, running all over the garret, jumped on my bed and fairly made my blood run cold with fright. This is the way in which I began to feel misery, and to learn how to suffer it patiently. The vermin, which feasted upon ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... ye beasts, and don't say Werner stints vermin good cheer his nuptial-night. Now,' continued the Baron, growing huskier as he talked louder: 'Short and ringing, my devil's pups:—Werner and his Bride! and may she soon give you a young baron to keep you in better order than I can, as, if she does ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... spent an afternoon here a few days ago, helping me cut out certain Red Cross garments known by the charming name of 'vermin shirts.' Susan thinks that name is not quite decent, so I suggested she call them 'cootie sarks,' which is old Highland Sandy's version of it. But she shook her head and I heard her telling mother later that, in her opinion, 'cooties' and 'sarks' were ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... manner the old lady was going on to particularize, as usual, its beneficial effects, in clearing the air, destroying of vermin, &c., when the entrance of Miss Clare put an end ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... dressing propensities of people that live "in many a place that's underneath the world." For all we care, Abd el Kader and his Arabs may stifle themselves up in their greasy blankets swarming with ancestral vermin under a nearly tropical sun; and the good people of Igloolik may bedeck themselves with the spoils of fish, flesh, and fowl, to set the fashions of the Arctic circle. We are going to speak merely of our home acquaintances and our European friends; if these only would be reasonable in their ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... not despair. The little man might rest a day, or oversleep, or strain a sinew, then— Locasto pictured with gloating joy the terror of the Worm as he awoke to find himself overtaken. Oh, the snake! the vermin! On! On! ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... vermin," said the Duke, "and entitled to no law, by the letter of the book of hunting; nevertheless, thou shalt have sixty yards in advance, were it but for the sake of thy unparalleled impudence.—Away, away, sirs!—we will see ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... wouldn't hurt these war makers. No. In spite of the poison gas. In spite of trench feet and the men who have been made blind and the wounded who have lain for days, dying slowly in the wet. Women ought not to hurt. But I would kill. Like killing dangerous vermin. It would go on year by year. Balkan kings, German princes, chancellors, they would have schemed for so much—and come to just a rattle in the throat.... And if presently other kings and emperors began to prance about and review armies, ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... and his kind and judicious religious instructor, who, we hope, will not he displeased with our giving we trust, a correct edition of an anecdote which has been pretty generally circulated. The race of Pepper and Mustard are in the highest estimation at this day, not only for vermin-killing, but for intelligence and fidelity. Those who, like the author, possess a brace of them, consider them as very ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... are shown to horrified tourists. There was no arrangement for having them cleaned by anybody, so that in time they were sure to become horribly dangerous to health. They were small, dark, damp, cold, and infested by vermin, rats, snakes, etc.[1836] Several dungeons in the Bastille were so constructed that the prisoners could neither sit, stand, nor lie, in comfort.[1837] Fiendish ingenuity was expended on the invention of refinements ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... dare to protect; whose grand robes and courtly language alone have made him great; who has not heart enough even to love the gay puppets who have always surrounded him, or courage enough to fight for the unholy wealth he has amassed: this man I say is contemptible. Such creatures are as noxious vermin, whom one loathes, and loathing them destroys. You no less destroy the tiger, who ravages the green fields which your labour has adorned; who laps the blood of your flocks, and threatens the life of your children and ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... of all competitors, and had made his business a monopoly. In spite of a few slight defects of education, his heiress was able to carry it along, and take care of her stores, which were in coachhouses, stables, and old workshops, where she fought the vermin with eminent success. Not troubled with desk or ledgers, for she could neither read nor write, she answered a letter with a blow of her fist, considering it an insult. In the main she was a good woman, with a high-colored ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... in Brunswick, By famous Hanover city; The river Weser deep and wide Washes its walls on the southern side; A pleasanter spot you never spied; But, when begins my ditty, Almost five hundred years ago, To see the townsfolk suffer so From vermin, was ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... suspicious about the wigwam, and especially the old robes offered for bedding, for he had had one unpleasant experience with red men's vermin, as already related in this series. But the wigwam and the robes proved fairly clean after all, and he slept ...
— On the Trail of Pontiac • Edward Stratemeyer
... hermit all the afternoon. It was a most strange menagerie. The chief emulation among them seemed to be, to see which could manage to be the uncleanest and most prosperous with vermin. Their manner and attitudes were the last expression of complacent self-righteousness. It was one anchorite's pride to lie naked in the mud and let the insects bite him and blister him unmolested; it was another's to lean against a rock, all day long, conspicuous ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... at the unconscious communications man. "Surely more than that." He looked up suddenly. "Where the hell did that vermin come from?" ...
— Breaking Point • James E. Gunn
... were coming home. Prison after prison had given up its starving, vermin-eaten inmates, while all along the Northern lines loving hearts were waiting, and friendly hands outstretched to welcome them back to "God's land," as the poor, suffering creatures termed the soil over which waved the Stars and Stripes, for which they had fought so ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... can hear nothing. Yea, my deafness But grows apace with all your talking. Go! Go home, I say: think how you may retrench. I know your house, 'tis overrun with vermin, I mean the servants. Curtail the expenses Your wife has caused: they are most unbecoming For your position. What? I am not here To give you counsel. Home with you, I ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... end—of the story. The listener was first invited to contemplate a scene in human progress when men gathered from the four corners of the earth and underwent incredible hardships of hunger, thirst, disease, lived like beasts and died like vermin for the sake of precious stones in the earth. Thalassa brought up before the young man's eyes a vivid picture of an African diamond rush of that period—a corrugated iron settlement of one straggling street, knee-deep ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... ill-tempered animal, with too much tendency to stupidity, and often annoyed by vermin. He runs awkwardly, with his nose near the ground, and frequently springs his game. He also has the cloven ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... not much that they do approve of!" he retorted. "I begin to weary of your Christians. I begin to think Nero was right, and my father, too! There was a wisdom in treating Christians as vermin! It might not be a bad thing, Marcia, to warn your Christians to procure themselves a charm or two against my weariness of their perpetual efforts to govern me! The Christians, I suppose, have been telling you to keep me out of the arena? Hence this living statuary in the ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... as the speculator who took a right to assume a proposition for the destruction of other propositions, on the express ground that Euclid assumes a proposition to show that it destroys itself: which is as if the curate should demand permission to throttle the squire because St. Patrick drove the vermin to suicide to save themselves from slaughter. He is conspicuous as a speculator who, more visibly than almost any other known to history, reasoned in a circle by way of reasoning on a circle. But {123} what I have chiefly to do with ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... the scanty morsel from them, which now consisted of only one meal a day. "One can hardly conceive," say they in their journal, "what we endured: we had no rest neither night nor day; when we lay down to sleep and gat warm, we were almost devoured with vermin; when we sat up during the day, we were almost suffocated with ...
— The Moravians in Labrador • Anonymous
... grim old prison, that looked like an Egyptian temple, with its huge slanting walls of granite squatting low on Centre Street like a big pot-bellied spider, watching with one eye the brilliant insects of wealth on Broadway and with the other the gray vermin swarming under the Bridge ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... mundungus, tobacco, foul feet, dirty shirts, stinking breaths, and uncleanly carcases, poisoned our nostrils far worse than a Southwark ditch, a tanner's yard, or a tallow-chandler's melting-room. The ill-looking vermin, with long, rusty beards, swaddled up in rags, and their heads—some covered with thrum-caps, and others thrust into the tops of old stockings. Some quitted their play they were before engaged in, and came hovering round us, like so many cannibals, with such ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... heretics, and demons! the vermin of the schools! the dregs of Hell! This fellow here, Marcion, is a sailor from Sinope excommunicated for incest. Carpocras has been banished as a magician; AEtius has stolen his concubine; Nicolas prostituted his own wife; and Manes, ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... some rough-barked or thorny tree. This leathery pouch also protected him from the many leeches, small aquatic lizards, or other animals that infested the marshes or rivers through which he had at times to wade or swim; or served as a protection from the bites of ants or other vermin when, tired, he rested on his haunches on ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... is wholly immaterial, compared with that of character; or rather, its own materialness depends on the prior determination of character. Make your nation consist of knaves, and, as Emerson said long ago, it is but the case of any other vermin—"the more, the worse." Or, to put the matter in narrower limits, it is a matter of no final concern to any parent whether he shall have two children, or four; but matter of quite final concern whether those he has ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... the two vessels were close off Dieppe Harbour; and there, when the tide suited, they were taken inside, and the prisoners put ashore at nightfall and lodged for three days in a filthy round tower, swarming with vermin. On April 1—Easter Sunday, I've heard it was—they were told to get ready for marching, and handed over, making twenty-five in all, with the crews of two other vessels, both brigs—the Lisbon Packet, bound from London to Falmouth with a general cargo, and the Margaret, letter of marque ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... may the more effectually betray them; nor shall I ever pocket the reward granted by the legislature to those by whom robbers are brought to conviction; but I shall always think it my duty to rid my country of that pernicious vermin, which prey upon the bowels of the commonwealth—not but that an incorporated company of licensed thieves might, under proper regulations, be ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... with him. It was just this: "You haven't given me what I want; now I'll kill you." For months after each presidential inauguration the hotels of Washington are roosts for these buzzards. They are the crawling vermin of this nation. Guiteau was no rarity. There were hundreds of Guiteaus in Washington after the inauguration, except that they had not the courage to shoot. I saw them some two months or six weeks after. They were mad enough to do it. I saw it in ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... the progress of arbitrary oppression, and beat down the brutishness of headstrong will: to do his King and country justice, upon such public state thieves as would beggar a kingdom to enrich themselves: these were the vermin whom to his eternal honour his pen was continually pricking and goading; a pen, if not so happy in the success, yet as generous in the aim, as either the sword of Theseus, or the club of Hercules; nor was it less sharp than ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... children. She was resolved that everything was going to the dogs because Goarly's case had been refused. "And what will all those sporting men do for you?" she repeated. "I hate the very name of a gentleman;—so I do. I wish Goarly had killed all the foxes in the county. Nasty vermin! What good are the ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... much swollen. From Leghorn in the S.S. Derna he was shipped to Sardinia, where he had experience of several prisons, including that of Terranuova-Pausania, where water flows down the walls and vermin are everywhere. He received 2.75 lire a day with which to buy his food, and although he is a doctor they refused to let him read any medical books. When I asked him of what he had been guilty, he began by recounting his war work. Over 6000 Italian prisoners were at Knin, and he was ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... Earthly Paradise. Still a number of criminals did doubtfully crawl forth and furnish a retinue for the great Admiral and Viceroy. Trembling, suspicious, and with more than half a mind to go back to their bonds, some part of the human vermin of Spain was eventually cajoled and ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... a malignant ulcer that is undermining and tormenting it. . . to the loathsome disease that is consuming the living flesh."—The solution is self-evident: let us eradicate the ulcer, or at least sweep away the vermin. The Third-Estate, in itself and by itself, is "a complete nation," requiring no organ, needing no aid to subsist or to govern itself, and which will recover its health on ridding itself of the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... ever wore Russia ducks. None of your nonsensical geniuses, like poets or painters or anything like that; but downright, straightforward, no-humbug sort of devil-may-care and bad-luck-to-you kind of chaps,—real Irishmen! Now, it's a strange thing that they both had such an antipathy to vermin, they spent their life in hunting them down and destroying them; and whether they met toads at home or Johnny Crapaud abroad, it was all one. [Cheers.] Just so, boys; they made them leave that; but I see you are impatient, ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... that, from an ordinary, commonplace man I became a machine for the extermination of vermin. That's all I am—an animated magazine of Persian powder—or I do it in any handy way. It's not a sporting proposition, you see, just get rid of them any old way. You ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... does he take bribes from the rich against the poor! His mind seems like a palace of marble with splendid galleries and library and banqueting hall, yet in this palace the spider spins its web and vermin make the foundations to ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... was to descend again, leap from the tree, and crushing the vermin under his feet, make for the bark-cutters. He had made up his mind to this course, and was already half-down, when he remembered the puma! In his alarm at the approach of the ants he had quite forgotten this enemy, and he now remembered that ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... with the recent report that the Sittinghurst Vermin Club had killed 1,175 mice in one day, we are asked to say that the number should be 1,176. It appears that one mouse made its way in a state of collapse to the Club ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 9, 1919 • Various
... Border was peopled then by Dandies and Ailies: nor is the race even now extinct in Liddesdale and Teviotdale, in Ettrick and Yarrow. As for Mustard and Pepper, their offspring too is powerful in the land, and is the deadly foe of vermin. The curious may consult Mr. Cook's work on "The Dandie Dinmont Terrier." The Duke of Buccleugh's breed still resembles the fine example painted by Gainsborough in his portrait of the duke (of Scott's time). "Tod Gabbie," again, as Lockhart says, was studied from Tod ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... "Oh, vermin! Oh, bloodsuckers!" he said. "Horde of unnatural plunderers and robbers! Begone! Leave him and do not stay in a spot hallowed by the gray hairs ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... pause to this race of conquering vermin; a place in the expanse of this vast sea that brought panic to their hearts. And there came to him, as he stowed the remembrance away in his mind, the first glow of hope. These things could fear a mountain; it might be that they could be brought ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... on strae sonks,[46] For gawing[47] his German hurdies[48]; But he sits on our gude king's throne, Amang the English lordies. Auld Scotland! thou'rt owre cauld a hole For nursing siccan[49] vermin; But the very dogs o' England's court Can bark and ...
— The Jacobite Rebellions (1689-1746) - (Bell's Scottish History Source Books.) • James Pringle Thomson
... who made an End of the Dispute: So to Bed they went together that Night; next Day to the Exchange, for several pretty Businesses that Ladies in her Condition want. Whilst they were abroad, came the Vermin of the Parish, (I mean, the Overseers of the Poor, who eat the Bread from 'em) to search for a young Blackhair'd Lady (for so was Bellamora) who was either brought to Bed, or just ready to lie down. ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... of fire behind them. Then this fire, fed by the huge banks of flammable spinifex, the growth of many years, spread into a mighty conflagration, the black smoke covering half the heavens. The hawks and the crows fled before it, swooping down on the vermin that were forced to leave the shelter of log and bush. The great silence that had reigned for so long was broken by the roar, and crash, and crackle of a sea of flames; and beneath this fiery blast every vestige of the ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... to-day, and then to all the inhumanity, all the insubordination of nature. We are to shape our state in a world of uncertain seasons, sudden catastrophes, antagonistic diseases, and inimical beasts and vermin, out of men and women with like passions, like uncertainties of mood and desire to our own. And, moreover, we are going to accept this world of conflict, to adopt no attitude of renunciation towards it, to face it in ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... Time spent in doctoring them does not generally pay. Wormwood and tansy, growing, or gathered and scattered, or steeped and sprinkled about the premises occupied by hens, will protect them from small vermin. Never give them anything salt or sour, unless it be sour milk. The eggs of ducks, turkeys, or geese, may be hatched under hens. Time, thirty days. Hence, if put under with hens' eggs, they must be set ten days earlier, that they may all hatch at once. Fattening chickens ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... of his classic features, but in temperament and habit he bore a singular resemblance to the king of all the falcons. Who more delighted in striking down the partridge or the wild duck? What more assiduous destroyer of ground game and vermin ever existed than Tom Peregrine? There never was a man so happily named and so eminently fitted to fulfil ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... champagne that you stole. That is your account with God; He keeps it, and He will settle it when the clock strikes. In my own case, I have nothing to go on but suspicion, and I do not kill on suspicion, not even vermin like you. But understand: if ever I see any of you again, it is another matter, and you shall eat a bullet. And now take yourself off. March! and as you value what you call your life, keep your hands up as ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... cultured French prelate, took a different view. He inveighed against the "foolish poems, the lies of the poets, the sing-song of the women, the coarse innuendoes of the jesters." "Such vermin flourishes on the stream of temporal abundance; it literally crawls over all food, for, as a rule, the meal is followed by a deluge of idle talk." A reconciliation of the two worlds ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... forests, and exterminated savage beasts; but Nature is no more subdued than before: she only changes her tactics, —uses smaller guns, so to speak. She reenforces herself with a variety of bugs, worms, and vermin, and weeds, unknown to the savage state, in order to make war upon the things of our planting; and calls in the fowls of the air, just as we think the battle is won, to snatch away the booty. When one ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... country, a captive band of such atrocious criminals, who considered themselves most unfortunate at not having been summarily executed. It was a diminishing company of nearly naked skeletons, loaded with irons, covered with dirt, with vermin, with raw wounds, all men of position, of education, of wealth, who had learned to fight amongst themselves for scraps of rotten beef thrown to them by soldiers, or to beg a negro cook for a drink of muddy water in pitiful ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... principles of atomic combination and the doctrine of gases; if he thinks of the ministry, why then, having a thorough acquaintance with science, he will be competent to close the mouths of heretics, infidels, and such vermin. Dr. Aorist, on the other hand, believes that a sound knowledge of "qui with the subjunctive" is a splendid sheet-anchor for every squall in life's rude sea. "I wish my boy to be a civil engineer; what advice would you give me as to his ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... Ganlesse, "I will say that for thee, thou hast a set of the most useless, scoundrelly, insolent vermin about thee, that ever ate up ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... fifteen couple. M. rolled over a white scut with obvious neatness and dispatch, and in shifting over to another hedgerow he shot a jay and gloried in its splendour. The keeper, however, moderated any secret intentions there might have been as to the plumage by one sentence: "That's another for the vermin book. I ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... for expressing their love of women. That night Jack Halloway sat on the moonlit porch of Alexander's house and Bud sat in the vermin-infested cell of the village lockup. But as the hours went on he found a certain recompense in the thought that he was keeping ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... Cordeliers, Well furnished with relics and vermin, Will follow, Lord Westmoreland fears, To effect what their chiefs may determine. Lollard's bower, good authorities say, Is again fitting up for a prison; And a wood-merchant told me to-day 'Tis a wonder ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... was dusk and took the hill-road by Hermiston, where it was not to be believed that they had lawful business. One of the country-side, one Dickieson, they took with them to be their guide, and dear he paid for it! Of a sudden in the ford of the Broken Dykes, this vermin clan fell on the laird, six to one, and him three parts asleep, having drunk hard. But it is ill to catch an Elliott. For a while, in the night and the black water that was deep as to his saddle-girths, he wrought with his staff like a smith at his stithy, and ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "drivers," as they are called, enter houses in myriads, and, penetrating to the minutest recesses, destroy everything that their omnivorous appetite can render eatable. Whatever has the principle of decay in it, is got rid of at once. All vermin meet their fate from these destroyers. Food, clothing, necessaries, superfluities, mere trash, and valuable property, are alike in their regard, and equally acceptable to their digestive powers. They would devour this journal with as little compunction as so much ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... needlessly sets foot upon a worm. An inadvertent step may crush the snail That crawls at evening in the public path; But he that has humanity, forewarned, Will tread aside, and let the reptile live. The creeping vermin, loathsome to the sight, And charged perhaps with venom, that intrudes A visitor unwelcome into scenes Sacred to neatness and repose, the alcove, The chamber, or refectory, may die. A necessary act incurs no blame. The sum is this: if man's convenience, ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... hand and lance on thigh, we fight, and we are the finest fellows in the land!' So they said when they saw the poor devil dragging himself on foot after their horses' heels, shivering in winter and sweating in summer, rusting and decaying in old age. Well, what has happened? That flea, that vermin, has kept them in the memory of men longer than their castles stood, long after their arms and their armour had rusted in the ground. I love those old parchments. I respect and revere them. Like ivy, they clothe the ruins and keep the ancient walls ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... cursed. "Also we reckon it a great vice in Charles, his foolish Pity and Lenity, in sparing these profane, blasphemous Redcoats, that Providence delivered into his hand, when, by putting them to death, this poor land might have been eased of the heavy burden of these vermin of Hell." The Auld Leaven swore terribly in Scotland. The atrocious cruelties of Cumberland after Culloden are stated with much frankness and power. The German soldiers are said to have carried off "a vast deal of Spoil and Plunder into Germany," and the Redcoats had Plays and Diversions ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott |
