"Elephant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... required for embryonic development to reach the point where the young may live independently of the mother. This point is reached more quickly with small animals than with large. The mouse, for example, generally brings forth its young in three weeks, whereas the pregnancy of the elephant lasts two years. In human beings, counting from the time of conception to the time of delivery, pregnancy continues approximately 273 days. This number is merely an estimate calculated from hundreds of cases in which there was no question as to the underlying ...
— The Prospective Mother - A Handbook for Women During Pregnancy • J. Morris Slemons
... society Of Grub-street and themselves: they rather beg That they may be united both in one. They also hope your majesty's acceptance Of certain curiosities, which in That hamper are contain'd, wherein you'll find A horse's tail, which has a hundred hairs More than are usual in it; and a tooth Of elephant full half an inch too long; With ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... seduce the King; 770 Nor for the worship of us men, Though we have done as much for them. Th' AEgyptians worshipp'd dogs, and for Their faith made internecine war. Others ador'd a rat, and some 775 For that church suffer'd martyrdom. The Indians fought for the truth Of th' elephant and monkey's tooth, And many, to defend that faith, Fought it out mordicus to death. 780 But no beast ever was so slight, For man, as for his God, to fight. They have more wit, alas! and know Themselves and us better than so. But we, who only do infuse 785 The rage in them like Boute-feus; ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... Lincoln, who was being shaved, "I don't know as I have any apprehension in that quarter. When you have an elephant on your hands, and he wants to run away, better let ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... an elephant that has corns, and is about to be operated on by a chiropodist. There is a largeness, approaching to sublimity, in the idea of an elephant with corns, though it naturally suggests the query, "What ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 7, May 14, 1870 • Various
... the pot-banks. The glare of the Hanbridge furnaces was subdued to a faint glimmer. The shout of a laughing crowd outside the Blood Tub drew Edwin closer. He perceived in the midst of the throng an elephant covered with Union Jacks. On its back stood Denry Machin, the famous Card of the Five Towns, thrice Mayor ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 9, 1914 • Various
... out—who can say how far, for no European has ever penetrated it?—and out of it rise, jungle-covered, the Rumbow hills. The elephant, the rhinoceros, the royal tiger, the black panther, the boar, the leopard, and many other beasts roam in its tangled, twilight depths, but in this fierce heat they must be all asleep in their lairs. The Argus-pheasant too, ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... arms extraordinarily long and stout. Their heads were too big for their bodies and their faces were decidedly ugly to look upon. Some had long, curved noses and chins, small eyes and wide, grinning mouths. Others had flat noses, protruding eyes, and ears that were shaped like those of an elephant. There were many types, indeed, scarcely two being alike; but all were equally disagreeable in appearance. The tops of their heads had no hair, but were carved into a variety of fantastic shapes, some having a row of points or balls around the top, others designs resembling flowers or vegetables, ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.
... recognizing his real nature, and his possibilities, as he awakens into a consciousness of his powers and capabilities, he laughs at the old despondent, pessimistic ideas, and discards them like a worn-out garment. Man on the Mental Plane of consciousness is like a huge elephant who knows not his own strength. He could break down barriers and assert himself over nearly any condition or environment, but in his ignorance of his real condition and power he may be mastered by ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... evident, that he must be reached through her. In a Hindoo fable, Vishna is represented as following Maga through a series of transformations. When she is an insect, he becomes an insect; she changes to an elephant, and he becomes one of the same species; till at last she becomes a woman, and he a man; she a goddess, and he a god. So, outside the regions of fable, if woman is ignorant and frivolous, man will be ignorant and frivolous; if ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams
... particular direction, by which exercise new developments of organs took place, ending in variations sufficient to constitute new species. In this way the swiftness of the antelope, the claws and teeth of the lion, the trunk of the elephant, the long neck of the giraffe have been produced, it is supposed, by a certain plastic character in the construction of animals, operated upon for a long course of ages by the attempts which these animals make to attain objects which their previous organization did not place within their reach. This ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... amount of all this is necessary, but don't give your life over to it. The waste of time is enough to make one want to be a Patagonian lady whose sole adornments in the beautifying line consist of a necklace of elephant's teeth and a few Patagonian babies. When beautifying gets to the stage where one has no time for mental refurbishing it ceases to be beauty culture, and is simply ...
— The Woman Beautiful - or, The Art of Beauty Culture • Helen Follett Stevans
... and the manner in which it is collected. Process of washing it. Its value in Africa. Of ivory. Surprise of the Negroes at the eagerness of the Europeans for this commodity. Scattered teeth frequently picked up in the woods. Mode of hunting the elephant. Some reflections on the unimproved state of ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... particular creature he is reading about, and therefore the reading is not mere reading. It is not mere repetition of words; but every term employed in the description, we will say of a horse, or of an elephant, will call up the image of the things he had seen in the rabbit, and he is able to form a distinct conception of that which he has not seen, as a modification of that which ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... a fracas last night, Your Highness, outside a certain palace gate." He pronounced the word to rhyme with jackass, but Gungadhura was not in a mood to smile. "An escaped elephant bumped into the gate and bent it. The guard took to their heels; so I've locked 'em all up, solitary, to think ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... smooth-bore muzzle-loader, and in the course of forty years has acquired one notable improvement after another—percussion cap; fixed cartridge; rifled barrel; efficiency at half a mile how is it that such a gun, sufficiently good on an elephant hunt (Christian Science) from the beginning, and growing better and better all the time during forty years, has always collapsed back to its original flint-lock estate the moment the huntress trained it on any other creature than ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... a good helm; to his side he suspended his word Caliburn; his legs he covered with hose of steel, and placed on his feet spurs most good. The king with his weeds leapt on his steed; men reached to him a good shield; it was all clean of elephant's bone (ivory). Men gave him in hand a strong shaft; there was at the end a spear most fair; it was made in Caermarthen by a smith that hight Griffin; Uther it possessed, who was ere king here. When that the stern man was weaponed, then gan he to advance; then might he behold, ...
— Brut • Layamon
... was with Mr. Fletcher. He began first to interfere with Kalee's religion. 'Oh, terrible, Janette!' cried Ady, on another day; 'master cut off head of Kartekeya's peacock, and smashed de tail of Garoora.' On another day, 'Right eye of elephant head of Ganeso knocked into de skull.' Another day, this time in tears, weeping awfully, 'Oh, Janette! tail of holy cow clean snapt ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... co-pilot amiably. "I tried it once, for the devil of it. Those things fly with the grace of a lady elephant on ice skates! Did you, by any chance, notice that they haven't got any wings? And did you notice ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... trees of the forest we had passed through, and as we could not go farther that night, we agreed to camp where we were. It was important to keep up the fire, as we might otherwise receive an unwelcome visit from a lion, elephant, or leopard, or perhaps from a huge species of ape, numbers of which we had reason to suspect were in the neighbourhood, though we had not as yet seen any. It was, of course, settled that we should ...
— The Two Supercargoes - Adventures in Savage Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... elephant stable!" The sahibs communicate their desire to do so. Mahouts with pikestaffs lead the way, and a myriad of hangers-on swarm in the train of the visitors. The accoutrements seen en route to the stable are interesting, surely, especially the howdahs. Some of these are of silver. One was used ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... in dreams,' &c. does not refer to a being different from the seeing person within the eye spoken of in the first chapter, (but treats of the same topic) as appears from the introductory clause, 'I shall explain him further to you.' Moreover[187], a person who is conscious of having seen an elephant in a dream and of no longer seeing it when awake discards in the waking state the object which he had seen (in his sleep), but recognises himself when awake to be the same person who saw something in the ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... "Just as," said Dr. Pellkins, in a fine passage,—"just as when we see a pig in a litter larger than the other pigs, we know that by an unalterable law of the Inscrutable it will some day be larger than an elephant,—just as we know, when we see weeds and dandelions growing more and more thickly in a garden, that they must, in spite of all our efforts, grow taller than the chimney-pots and swallow the house from sight, so we know and reverently acknowledge, that when any power in human politics has ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... use at the Court of Delhi that were not less than a fathom across; and Tod speaks of them in Rajputana as "about 8 or 10 feet in diameter." The Tartar Nakkarahs were usually, I presume, carried on a camel; but as Kublai had begun to use elephants, his may have been carried on an elephant, as is sometimes the case in India. Thus, too, P. della Valle describes those of an Indian Embassy at Ispahan: "The Indian Ambassador was also accompanied by a variety of warlike instruments of music of strange kinds, and particularly by certain Naccheras of such immense size ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... present, most probably, in the first instance, from the author, having an inscription on the fly leaf, apparently in Bunyan's autograph, 'This for my good and dearly beloved frend mistris Backcraft.' It has a false title, bearing the imprint of 'London, Printed for Francis Smith, at the Elephant and Castle without Temple Barr, 1669.' The editor's copy, soiled and tattered, cost him twenty shillings, a striking proof of its rarity. This has the original title, with the real date, 1665, but without a printer's or publisher's name-from which ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... borders have enough air and space around their eyes to give them a semblance of liberty. For the special feast-day on which we visited it the place had been arranged with particular adaptation to the character of the time. There were elephant-races and rides upon the camels free to all ladies who would make the venture. In addition to the zebras, gnus and Shetlands, there was that species of race-horse which never wins and never spoils ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... witch-doctors, "Whirl ye the deadly voo-doo rattle, Harry the uplands, Steal all the cattle, Rattle-rattle, rattle-rattle, Bing. Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM," With a philosophic pause. A roaring, epic, rag-time tune From the mouth of the Congo To the Mountains of the Moon. Death is an Elephant, Shrilly and with a heavily accented metre. Torch-eyed and horrible, Foam-flanked and terrible. BOOM, steal the pygmies, BOOM, kill the Arabs, BOOM, kill the white men, HOO, HOO, HOO. Like the wind in the chimney. ...
— The Congo and Other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... two beautiful ponies. The circus line had been formed, and the parade began. Behind him was a circus wagon, or rather a cage on wheels, through the gratings of which could be seen a tiger, crafty and cruel looking. In front was an elephant, with two or three performers on his back. Kit was dressed in street costume, his circus dress ...
— The Young Acrobat of the Great North American Circus • Horatio Alger Jr.
... anything but a regular bee: in fact it was an elephant—as Alice soon found out, though the idea quite took her breath away at first. 'And what enormous flowers they must be!' was her next idea. 'Something like cottages with the roofs taken off, and stalks put to them—and ...
— Through the Looking-Glass • Charles Dodgson, AKA Lewis Carroll
... wreath of flowers over her head, before she should be aware of his approach. But, as it happened, there was no need of his treading so very lightly. He might have trod as heavily as he pleased—as heavily as a grown man—as heavily, I was going to say, as an elephant—without much probability of Pandora's hearing his footsteps. She was too intent upon her purpose. At the moment of his entering the cottage, the naughty child had put her hand to the lid, and was on the point of opening the mysterious ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... on hunting, and he gave me the most curious details on hunting the hippopotamus, the tiger, the elephant and ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... glowed with fiery indignation. It was not in his nature to hesitate, as to means. He wanted these 12,000,000 thalers for the army—and was not that enough? True, he could not say in the open that he wished to expel Austria—but must an elephant step on your foot? ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... died out, after a time its spirits died too. Some, but by no means all, of these spirits of human origin, as is the case among the Negro Effiks, undergo reincarnation. The Doctor told me he once knew a man whose plantations were devastated by an elephant. He advised that the beast should be shot, but the man said he dare not because the spirit of his dead father had ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... interrupted by horrible growlings, barks, and howlings. As Faust looks towards the poodle he sees it rapidly swelling up into a monstrous form—huger than an elephant or hippopotamus, with fiery eyes and enormous tusks in its gaping mouth. He tries to exorcise the phantom with 'Solomon's key' and other magic formulae, and at length, when he threatens it with the mystic formula of the Trinity, it dissolves into mist, and out of the mist steps forth ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... our perusal, and so we parted. Only there was walking in the gallery some of the Barbary company, and there we saw a draught of the arms of the company, which the King is of, and so is called the Royall Company, which is, in a field argent an elephant proper, with a canton on which England and France is quartered, supported by two Moors. The crest an anchor winged, I think it is, and the motto too tedious: "Regio floret, patrocinio commercium, commercioque Regnum." Thence back by water to Greatorex's, and there he showed me his varnish ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... incense,' 'stools upset towards heaven,' 'part of elephant's eyes,' 'squares,' 'chains,' 'plum blossom,' and 'willow leaves." ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... at hand. Oor watter is no fit for ki drinking; an' there's fient a thing but watter in the weet dock. My heart bleeds when I go roond the shore an' see all the ships sailin' oot o' the herbir, an' no' a livin' sowl comin' in. Gentlemen, that herbir's growin' a gijantic white elephant." ...
— My Man Sandy • J. B. Salmond
... this work with tremendous seriousness, much like an elephant hunting for peanuts hidden in a bale of hay. He saw no humour in the operation. As a matter of fact, Nature had not intended there should be any humour about it. Thor's time was more or less valueless, and during the course of a summer he absorbed in his system a good many hundred thousand ...
— The Grizzly King • James Oliver Curwood
... sand the riders swept, past a slow-plodding elephant lumbering back to the city with a load of fodder, by groups of tethered camels. Hares started up in alarm and bounded away, grey partridges whirred up and yellow-beaked minas flew off chattering indignantly. The slight morning coolness soon vanished; and Wargrave, ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... pleased Browning's imagination. It was his habit to rise early, and after a light breakfast to visit the Public Gardens with his sister. He had many friends—Mrs Bronson is our informant—whose wants or wishes he bore in mind—the prisoned elephant, the baboon, the kangaroo, the marmosets, the pelicans, the ostrich; three times, with strict punctuality, he made his rounds, and then returned to his apartment. At noon appeared the second and more substantial ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... protracted and heroic defence of the Danes rendering the attempt impracticable, Colonel Brock, during the hard-fought battle, remained on board the Ganges; and at its close he accompanied Captain Fremantle to the Elephant, 74, Nelson's flag ship, where he saw the hero[15] write his celebrated letter to the Crown Prince of Denmark. Savery Brock was also on board the Ganges, and while in the act of pointing one of her quarter deck guns, his cocked hat was torn from his ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... Mr Preddle's highly-pitched voice which I heard, and it was the sailor who had sat talking to the steersman who answered, and soon after I heard the chair squeak very loudly, as big Mr Preddle, looking as large as an elephant now, sat down by the boy on the tub, and leaned his head back ...
— Sail Ho! - A Boy at Sea • George Manville Fenn
... of the controversy was this: The treaty of 1825 between Great Britain and Russia had declared that the boundary, dividing British and Russian America on that five-hundred-mile strip of land which depends from the Alaskan elephant's head like a dangling halter rope, should be drawn "parallel to the windings of the coast" at a distance inland of thirty miles. The United States took the plain and literal interpretation of these words in the treaty. The Canadian contention was that within the meaning of the treaty the ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... "You are too severe. I consider man the highest form of animal life—after the dog and the elephant." ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell
... I tell you, it was touch and go. He nearly broke my arm—would have done it, if I hadn't gone limp to him; and your cousin Conny Jopp, little Conny Jopp, was as near Kingdom Come as a man wants at his age. I saw an elephant go 'must' once in India, and it was as like O'Ryan as putty is to dough. It isn't all over either, for O'Ryan will forget and forgive, and Jopp won't. He's your cousin, but he's a sulker. If he has to sit up nights to do it, he'll try to get back on O'Ryan. He'll sit up nights, but ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... guessed the identity of the mighty creature as Elephas africanus, or, as the ancients commonly described it, African elephant. ...
— The Lost Continent • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the stars scattered promiscuously in the sky. Having with much deliberation satisfied himself of the sufficiency of these dots, he forthwith began to run a free bold line from one to the other, and as he did so the form of an animal—horse, buffalo, elephant, or some kind of antelope—gradually developed itself. This was invariably done with a free hand, and with such unerring accuracy of touch, that no correction of a line was at any time attempted. I understood from the lad that this was the plan which was invariably pursued by his kindred ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... affairs. Mir Jaffeir(583) and Cossim Aly Cawn, and their deputies Clive and Sullivan, or rather their principals, employ the public attention, instead of Mogul Pitt and Nabob Bute; the former of whom remains shut Up in Asiatic dignity at Hayes, while the other is again mounting his elephant and levying troops. What Lord Tavistock meaned of his invisible Haughtiness'S(584) invective on Mr. Neville, I do not know. He has not been in the House of Commons since the war of privilege. It must have been something he ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... afternoon, and pounced upon him with fury. The boy showed every sign of guilt and terror, but refused to say why he had come or what he wanted. As he was hustled out of the door a voice from above was heard to cry, "The ivory elephant for your own, mind, and a box of the kind with nuts in it!" Sometimes Jocko could imitate ...
— Mrs. Tree • Laura E. Richards
... general are sagacious in proportion as they cultivate society. The elephant and the beaver show the greatest signs of this when united; but when man intrudes into their communities they lose all their spirit of industry and testify but a very small share of that sagacity for which, when in a social state, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... animal known in South Africa. Not only do the carnivora greedily devour them, but also animals and birds of the game kind—such as antelopes, partridges, guinea-fowls, bustards, and, strange to say, the giant of all—the huge elephant—will travel for miles to overtake a migration of locusts! Domestic fowls, sheep, horses, and dogs, devour them with equal greediness. Still another strange fact—the locusts eat one another! If any one of them gets hurt, so as to impede his progress, the ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... living quadrupeds having existed contemporaneously with mollusca, all still inhabiting the adjoining sea, is certainly a most striking fact. It is, however, far from being an isolated one; for, during the late tertiary deposits of Britain, an elephant, rhinoceros, and hippopotamus co-existed with many recent land and fresh-water shells; and in North America, we have the best evidence that a mastodon, elephant, megatherium, megalonyx, mylodon, an extinct horse and ox, likewise co- existed ...
— South American Geology - also: - Title: Geological Observations On South America • Charles Darwin
... in number to the Arabian Nights; but some were rather hackneyed and tedious; others I did not feel warranted in betraying into print; and many more were of the old general's relating, and turned principally upon tiger-hunting, elephant-riding, and Seringapatam; enlivened by the wonderful deeds of Tippoo Saib, and the excellent ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... henceforth. Absurd enough: but—as every man who is acquainted with old mythical cosmogonies must know—no more absurd than twenty similar guesses on record. Try to imagine the gradual genesis of such myths as the Egyptian scarabaeus and egg, or the Hindoo theory that the world stood on an elephant, the elephant on a tortoise, the tortoise on that infinite note of interrogation which, as some one expresses it, underlies all physical speculations, and judge: must they not have arisen in some such fashion as that which I ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... imagination of the people. It was declared that the presents brought for the emperor consisted of everything that was rare in other countries and unknown in China. It was gravely asserted that among the animals, there was an elephant not larger than a monkey, but as fierce as a lion, and a cock which was fed upon coal. Everything which came from England was supposed to differ from anything hitherto seen in Pekin, and to possess the very opposite qualities to those usual ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... country, generally shows itself in the feet, and extends up as far as the calves of the legs. These portions of the body, when so affected, are greatly swollen, and covered with scurf and blotches, so that they really might be taken for those of an elephant. ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... we saw an opening made in the dense jungle by the passage of an elephant, which had evidently crushed through into the road since we had passed. Wild elephants are very numerous hereabouts, and a hundred were killed not long since by one sportsman in a comparatively short time. Another hunter made great preparations for sport, and spent a considerable time in the ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... children wanted it, and then they began playing in it. Russ pretended that he was the pirate, and that the others were his prisoners. He made them dig little holes in the sand, and bring in shells and stones as well as seaweed. This last he made believe was hay for a make-believe elephant. ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Cousin Tom's • Laura Lee Hope
... skins, the corpse placed therein, with weapons, ornaments, etc., and covered over with saplings of the mountain aspen; on top of these the removed bowlders were piled, forming a huge cairn, which appeared large enough to have marked the last resting place of an elephant. In the immediate vicinity of the graves were scattered the osseous remains of a number of horses which had been sacrificed no doubt during the funeral ceremonies. In one of the graves, said to contain the body of a chief, in addition to a number of articles useful and ornamental, ...
— An introduction to the mortuary customs of the North American Indians • H. C. Yarrow
... least as far as the Sivalik Hills of India, but never across the Bering Sea Isthmus. The only truly African animal which reached America, and which flourished here in an extraordinary manner, was the elephant, or rather the mastodon, if we speak of the elephant in its Miocene stage of evolution. However, the resemblance between America and Africa is abundantly demonstrated by the presence of great herds of horses, of rhinoceroses, both long and short limbed, of camels in great variety, including ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... body. Exaggeration is their forte—in this they excel. Their towering minds soar above common comprehension and common sense, and their fertile imaginations are ever ready to conjure up spectres, ghosts and hobgoblins; or otherwise, where others see a mouse, they behold an elephant; and to their distorted visions, a mole-hill is magnified into a mountain. We look in vain to such writers for a plain, unvarnished, common sense statement of facts, for sound arguments, or logical deductions. Such authors have nothing to do with facts, or things as they exist ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward
... Larva. "I want to grow up to be a Joey in a Circus. I fairly ache to sit in a Red Wagon just behind the Band and drive a Trick Mule with little pieces of Looking Glass in the Harness. I want to pull Mugs at all the scared Country Girls peeking out of the Wagon Beds. The Town Boys will leave the Elephant and trail behind my comical Chariot. In my Hour of Triumph the Air will be impregnated with Calliope Music and the Smell of Pop-Corn, modified by ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... force and solidity, the actual wedding of East and West; an empire firm on the ground and in the blood of the people, instead of an empire of aliens, that would bear comparison to a finely fretted cotton-hung palanquin balanced on an elephant's back, all depending on the docility of the elephant (his description of Great Britain's Indian Empire). 'And mind me,' he said, 'the masses of India are in character elephant all over, tail to proboscis! servile till they ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Van," Bob chuckled, "but I am morally certain you'll lose your boots. You will just walk off and leave them in some snow-drift or mud puddle and never miss them. They are big enough for an elephant. Where did you ...
— The Story of Sugar • Sara Ware Bassett
... 1.200)—namely a thick, circular disk like a cake; so we find in the Insectivora, Chiroptera, Rodents, and Apes. This discoplacenta lies on one side of the chorion. But in the Sarcotheria (both the Carnivora and the seals, Pinnipedia) and in the elephant and several other Deciduates we find a zonoplacenta; in these the rich mass of villi runs like a girdle round the middle of the ellipsoid chorion, the two poles of it being ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... have thought the whole matter out, and I am convinced of it. Look at his hands. He could strangle an elephant. Not that he could have had any particular reason for liquidating his father-in-law. He is rich enough without Flavia's share, but I always thought he would kill somebody one of these days, ever since ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... an eruption, think of the crater. It was said by his master that Jumbo would never hurt a fly, but that was not the point with those who were not flies, and all these stood in great fear of him. It is very little satisfaction to one who meets an elephant in his morning's walk, in a narrow way, to have read that that creature is the most gentle of mammals (or mammoths); and similarly there was no knowing what catastrophe might not take place from the presence of Jumbo, though he might not mean to bring it about. He was positively ...
— Harper's Young People, December 23, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... these priceless manuscripts; and then had my cup of happiness filled absolutely to overflowing by the glad discovery that in every one of the gold boxes, of which there were nine in all, treasures of a like sort were stored. In the supplemental volume (in elephant folio) to my Pre-Columbian Conditions on the Continent of North America these wonderful manuscripts are reproduced in fac-simile; and when that great work is published the surpassing value of my discovery ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... which knocked him over into the moat and broke two of his ribs, and it was also maintained with equal truth that when she came to the wharf it was found she had brought away a small brass gun on her bowsprit, into which she had thrust it like the long trunk of an elephant." ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... the b'ar went slap over, an' I believe I'm well within the mark when I say that that b'ar turned five complete somersaults before it got to the bottom, where it came to the ground with a whack that would have busted an elephant. I don't think we found a whole bone in its carcass when the ornithologist helped me to cut it up that night ...
— Twice Bought • R.M. Ballantyne
... alone on a trail, I heard one of this band approaching; half a mile above me his noise preceded him. Down he came over brush and stones. I stepped quietly beside a bush and waited as I would for an oncoming elephant. With gun at right shoulder arms, knapsack and canteen rattling, spiked shoes crunching, he marched past me, eyes straight ahead; walking within ten yards and never saw me. Twenty deer must have seen him where he saw one. ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... processes in the brain. The two processes may be wholly disparate if we regard their objects only and forget their seat, as Athena is in no way linked to an elephant's tusk; yet in perception all processes are contiguous and exercise a single organism, in which they may find themselves in sympathetic or antipathetic vibration. On this circumstance hangs that subtle congruity between subject and vehicle which is ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... took most luggage into the Ark, and which two took the least? The elephant, who took his trunk, while the fox and the cock had only a brush and a comb ...
— My Book of Indoor Games • Clarence Squareman
... spoke the walrus ascended almost under his nose, with a loud bellow, and the Irishman started back in terror, as he surveyed at close quarters, for the first time, the colossal and horrible countenance of this elephant of the Northern Seas. O'Riley was no coward, but the suddenness of the apparition was too much for him, and we need not wonder that in his haste he darted the harpoon far over the animal's head into the sea beyond. Neither need we feel surprised that when Fred took aim at its forehead, the sight ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... hurry and bustle there appears to be on board of the Yungfrau—Smallbones here, Smallbones there—Corporal Van Spitter pushing to and fro with the dog-trot of an elephant; and even Snarleyyow appears to be unusually often up and down the hatchway. What can it all be about? Oh! Mr Vanslyperken is going on shore to pay his respects and continue his addresses to the widow Vandersloosh. ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat
... morning, when it was just getting light, our advance party were just on the point of stumbling on to the German outpost, when what should happen but an elephant suddenly walked in between and scattered our opposing parties in all directions. I was in the rear of our little column, and was left in bewilderment, all our carriers dropping their loads and every one disappearing into the bush. After a few minutes we got ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... prototypes in the forms of fossil species which were extinct before man was created, and hence "indicate a faint and shadowy knowledge of a previous state of organic existence." The Hindoos dreamed that the earth rested on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise, and the tortoise on a serpent; and though it may be an unimportant coincidence, it will not be out of place here to state, that a fossil tortoise has lately been discovered ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... he took so long a time to make up his mind that, when, in desperation, he finally did so, the unwelcome discovery was made that his fairy friend, disgusted at the delay and vacillation, had vanished without bestowing upon him so much as even one poor ginger-bread elephant. It was that boy's first and last opportunity, and he lost it. He never again met a fairy, though he wandered through the forest, day after day, week after week, and year after year, until he became an old man, dying at last in ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... in the most robust health. Voltaire, if you had not come now I should have considered you a bad penny: in place of the true metal of friendship I should have suspected you of palming off plated lead upon me. It is well for you that you are here. You are like the white elephant for whom the Shah of Persia and the Great Mogul are continually at war. The one who is so fortunate as to possess the white elephant makes it always the occasion of an added title. I will follow their example, and from this time my title shall run thus: 'Frederick, by the ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... managed to do a good deal of execution with them. One of them was a single-barrelled, smooth bore, fitted for percussion caps—a roer we called it—which threw a three-ounce ball, and was charged with a handful of coarse black powder. Many is the elephant that I killed with that roer, although it generally knocked me backwards when I fired it, which I only did under compulsion. The best of the lot, perhaps, was a double-barrelled No. 12 shot-gun, but it had flint locks. Also there were some old tower muskets, which might or ...
— Allan's Wife • H. Rider Haggard
... The whole is kept as perfectly as a garden, amazing as the work of one white man with only a staff of unskilled native labourers—at present only eighty of them. The coffee planted is of three kinds, the Elephant berry, the Arabian, and the San Thome. During our inspection, we only had one serious misunderstanding, which arose from my seeing for the first time in my life tree-ferns growing in the Ogowe. There were three of them, ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... its presentation. Most of Stockton's stories are of this type: notably his "The Lady, or the Tiger?" Mark Twain, too, usually writes in this vein, as in "The Jumping Frog" and "The Stolen White Elephant." ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... tended store in Concord in my childhood. This was George H. Derby, better known as John Phoenix. He was also very fond of small boys. I remember his making me what I thought a wonderful and beautiful work of art, by taking a sheet of stiff paper of what was called elephant foolscap, and folding it into a very small square, and then with a penknife cutting out small figures of birds and beasts. When the sheet was opened again these were repeated all over the sheet, and made it appear like a ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... method—a method by no means restricted to the Tossafists—did not blind him to its defects. "They try to force an elephant through the eye of a needle," he sarcastically said of some of the French casuists. Nachmanides thus possessed some of the independence characteristic of the Spanish Jews. He also shared the poetic spirit of Spain, and his hymn for the Day of Atonement is one ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... no, no," cried Prudy; "we've got all over that; and I tell you, auntie, now you've come home, I feel as if an elephant had rolled ...
— Prudy Keeping House • Sophie May
... our hot red coats and heavy knapsacks, and flower-pot busbies, with a round white ball like a child's plaything on the top; but no matter how tired he was, Harry Lant had always something to say or do, and even if the colonel was close by, he'd say or do it. Now, there happened to be an elephant walking along by our side, with the captain of our company, one of the lieutenants, and a couple of women in the howdah; while a black nigger fellow, in clean white calico clothes, and not much of 'em, and a muslin turban, and a good deal of it, was striddling ...
— Begumbagh - A Tale of the Indian Mutiny • George Manville Fenn
... body, which bear the same name, derived from some resemblance they hold with different parts of the animal so well known in the countries to which these disorders are peculiar. That which was first so named is the leprosy, which brings a scurf on the skin not unlike the hide of an elephant. The other affects the patient with such enormous swelling of the legs and feet, that they give the idea of those shapeless pillars which support that creature; and therefore this disease has also been called elephantiasis by the Arabian physicians; who, together with the Malabrians, among whom ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... into still more whimsical extremes. He accepts, in all apparent seriousness, the theory of his favourite, Mr. Shandy, that a man's name influences his character. Thus, for example, a man called Minoret-Levrault must necessarily be 'un elephant sans trompe et sans intelligence,' and the occult meaning of Z. Marcas requires a long and elaborate commentary. Repeat the word Marcas, dwelling on the first syllable, and dropping abruptly on the second, and you will see that the man who bears it must be a martyr. The zigzag of the initial implies ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... to his publisher in December, 1863; "but will set about it soon, though with terrible reluctance, such as I never felt before. I am most grateful to you," he went on, "for protecting me from that visitation of the elephant and his cub. If you happen to see Mr.——, of L——, a young man who was here last summer, pray tell him anything that your conscience will let you, to induce him to spare me another visit, which I know he intended. I really am not well, and ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... hasn't gone off to find a cow or an elephant or a camel or something like that to make us a present of," said Mrs. Brown with ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue on an Auto Tour • Laura Lee Hope
... “hated me.” She could not endure his mannerisms, but mimicked his gestures and curious demeanours; calling him “a despot,” “the old literary Colossus,” an “envious calumniator,” “surly Samuel Johnson,” “the massive Being,” “the old elephant,” and “a growler.” ...
— Anna Seward - and Classic Lichfield • Stapleton Martin
... mine hostess from her door come out, (Having a great wart rampant on her snout.) The tapsters, hostlers, one another call, The chamberlains with admiration all, Were filled with wonder, more than wonderful, As if some monster sent from the Mogul, Some elephant from Africa, I had been, Or some strange beast from the Amazonian Queen. As buzzards, widgeons, woodcocks, and such fowl, Do gaze and wonder at the broad-faced owl, So did these brainless asses, all amazed, With admirable Nonsense talked and gazed, They knew my ...
— The Pennyles Pilgrimage - Or The Money-lesse Perambulation of John Taylor • John Taylor
... action of each verse, and when, as a climax in the last verse, the colonel gave the order to "charge!" Hamed uttered a roar, sprang up, seized his great sabre, and caused it to whistle over his friends with a sweep that might have severed the head of an elephant! ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... will probably be the first rendezvous of the whole fleet. Then we shall separate: some will sail direct for Bantam, in the island of Java; others will have orders to trade down the Straits for camphor, gum, benzoin, and wax; they have also gold and the teeth of the elephant to barter with us: there (should we be sent thither) you must be careful with the natives, Mynheer Vanderdecken. They are fierce and treacherous, and their curved knives (or creeses, as they, call them) are sharp and deadly poisoned. I have had hard ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... conference upon this overture. Nelson availed himself of this critical moment to get his crippled ships under weigh, and the imminent danger from which he had extricated them soon became apparent. His own ship, the Elephant, and three others remained fixed upon the shoal for many hours. Nelson left the Elephant soon after she took the ground, observing as he left her: "I have fought contrary to my orders, and I shall perhaps be hanged. Never mind, let them." It ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... dogs is quite extraordinary, and only equalled by that of the elephant. Mr. Swainson, in his work on the instincts of animals, gives the following proof of this. He says that "A spaniel belonging to the Rev. H. N., being always told that he must not follow his master to church on Sundays, used on those days ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... sprang up upon my legs, and being bred upon the roads, and able to fight a little, I squared as he came running in upon me, and had a round or two with him. Lord bless you, young man, it was like a fly fighting with an elephant—one of those big beasts the show-folks carry about. I had not a chance with the fellow, he knocked me here, he knocked me there, knocked me into the hedge, and knocked me out again. I was at my last shifts, ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... carter. To be sure, the fellow has a dry sort of humour about him; but he was universally hated among the servants, for his abusive tongue and perverse disposition, which often brought him into trouble; for, though the fellow is as strong as an elephant, he has no more courage naturally than a chicken; I say naturally, because, since his being a member of knight-errantry, he has done some things that appear altogether ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... reptiles, fishes, birds, monkeys, and other mammalia but little known. M. Cuvier has enriched this work with a very comprehensive treatise on the axolotl of the lake of Mexico, and on the genera of the Protei. That naturalist has also recognized two new species of mastodons and an elephant among the fossil bones of quadrupeds which we brought from North and South America. For the description of the insects collected by M. Bonpland we are indebted to M. Latreille, whose labours have so much contributed to the progress of entomology ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... deforestation; desertification; wildlife populations (such as elephant, hippopotamus, giraffe, and lion) threatened because ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... of his judgment. "As to a Nisi-prius lawyer (said Burke) giving an opinion on the duration of an Impeachment—as well might a rabbit, that breeds six times a year, pretend to know any thing of the gestation of an elephant."] took the wrong, the pedantic, and the unstatesmanlike side of the question,—while in all these indications of the spirit of that profession, and of its propensity to tie down the giant Truth, with its ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... at the knees, might even behold a portent new to his experience, the emperor's elephant. Haroun El Raschid, the great Sultan of the 'Arabian Nights' had sent it to Charles, and it accompanied him on all his progresses. Its name was 'Abu-Lubabah', which is an Arabic word and means 'the father of intelligence[A]', and it ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... Kielmansegge and Schulenberg, whom he created respectively Countess of Darlington and Duchess of Kendal. The duchess was tall, and lean of stature, and hence was irreverently nicknamed the Maypole. The countess was a large-sized noblewoman, and this elevated personage was denominated the Elephant. Both of these ladies loved Hanover and its delights; clung round the linden-trees of the great Herrenhausen avenue, and at first would not quit the place. Schulenberg, in fact, could not come on account of her debts; but finding the Maypole would not come, ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... upon the handsome sister of the young wirth, a noted beauty of the neighborhood. "Their house was full already. Nine guests, who had never sent word beforehand, were quite out of the question, but the Herrschaft could be accommodated at the Elephant opposite, which ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... long stories at times come out as awkwardly as an elephant being steered backwards through a gate. He pauses frequently to impress upon us not only the romance of the fact he is stating but the romance of the circumstances in which somebody discovered it. In Chance and Lord Jim he is not content to tell us a straightforward story: ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... disturbance that stretched over a distance of nearly a hundred feet, began to travel shoreward. It grew heavier and heavier as the water grew shallower. Then a leather-colored mountain of a back heaved itself up through the smother and a colossal form, that would make the hugest elephant a pigmy, came ponderously ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... shoulders and with them splash through the breakers, or in the bazaars for hours he would bargain with the Indian merchants, or in the great mahogany hall of the Ivory House, to the whisper of a punka and the tinkle of ice in a tall glass, listen to tales of Arab raids, of elephant poachers, of the trade in white and black ivory, of the great explorers who had sat in that same room—of Emin Pasha, of Livingstone, of Stanley. His comic opera lacked only a heroine and the ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... consider his education completed, and his head would even then be as great a wonder as that of the schoolmaster in the "Deserted Village." In the same way, a man might have seen a horse, (if only a clothes-horse,) a dog, a cat, and a tadpole, and yet never have seen the elephant,—a most blame-worthy neglect of opportunities. But let us apply Mr. Choate's syllogistic process to the list of this extraordinary nameless person's acquirements. The Republican Party do not know any of these amazing things; ergo, they must ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... It was! She was there to meet me with a mushroom hat over her face, looking as solemn as ever, and never in all my life did I see a poor creature work so hard at trying to enjoy herself. She runs like an elephant, and puffs like a grampus; says, "One, two, three," at the edge of the streams, then gives a convulsive leap, and lands right in the middle of the water. She was splashed from head to foot, and quite pink in the cheeks imagining she was going to be drowned, and in the next ...
— The Heart of Una Sackville • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... M'Buffer has been at it now for thirteen years. He began with nothing; he had neither blood nor money; and God knows he had no social merits to recommend him. He is as vulgar as a hog, as awkward as an elephant, and as ugly as an ape. I believe he never had a friend, and was known at his club to be the greatest bore that ever came out of Scotland; and yet for thirteen years he has lived on the fat of the land; for five years he has been in Parliament, his wife ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... king dispatched Sir Robert Holmes upon a second expedition to Africa in 1663 with orders to protect the company's rights. As a further means of encouragement Charles II ordered all gold imported from Africa by the Royal Company to be coined with an elephant on one side, as a mark of distinction from the coins then prevalent in England.[35] These coins were called "Guineas"; they served to increase the reputation and prestige of the company. Moreover, the king with many of his courtiers made important additions to their ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... happy it is impossible to be happier, and I honestly don't care very much. I should like Uncle Bernard to leave me a nice message, and I shouldn't at all object to a legacy, which would provide my trousseau; but the Court itself would be a white elephant to me now. Donald adores his work, and would not give it up for any consideration, so we could ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... the next morning, they went to the elephant place. It was a great big place, and a high, strong fence was around it on three sides, and on the fourth side was the river. And, next to the river, were great piles of teak-wood logs, and the logs were piled very nicely and evenly, so that the piles wouldn't fall down. ...
— The Sandman: His Sea Stories • William J. Hopkins
... an elephant, Stately and wise: He had tusks and a trunk, And two queer little eyes. e Oh, what funny ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf; a Practical Plan of Character Building, Volume I (of 17) - Fun and Thought for Little Folk • Various
... modifications of Indian beliefs and practices. The god who was most often depicted upon the ancient Maya and Aztec codices was the Indian rain-god Indra, who in America was provided with the head of the Indian elephant[137] (i.e. seems to have been confused with the Indian Ganesa) and given other attributes more suggestive of the Dravidian Naga than his enemy, the Aryan deity. In other words the character of the American god, known as Chac ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... respectfully entertained, and treated to wine and other things the whole day. But when she was ready to go back in the evening, a terrible shouting was heard outside. They heard people running and crying: "Oh, oh! A mad elephant has escaped from his stable and is running around ...
— Twenty-two Goblins • Unknown
... demonstrate that the intellect of Man differs from that of the wiser animals, otherwise than in degree? Who has ever done more than to utter nonsense and incoherencies in regard to the difference between the instincts of the dog and the reason of Man? The horse, the dog, the elephant, are as conscious of their identity as we are. They think, dream, remember, argue with themselves, devise, plan, and reason. What is the intellect and intelligence of the man but the intellect of the animal in a higher degree ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... then and there, the last-named extras would have proved a dead letter. Seigneurial rights were being abolished, or rather surrendered, at the very time that this transaction was under consideration. As Arthur Young tells us, he might as well have asked for an elephant at Moulins as for a newspaper. No one knew, or apparently cared to know, what was taking place in Paris. On asking his landlady for a newspaper, she replied she had none, they were too dear. Whereupon the irate ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... same custom of king-killing is said to prevail at Quonde and Wukari as well as at Gatri." In the three Hausa kingdoms of Gobir, Katsina, and Daura, in Northern Nigeria, as soon as a king showed signs of failing health or growing infirmity, an official who bore the title of Killer of the Elephant ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... said Constable Daly, "and be the same token, this win' ud skin a tanned elephant. It's on'y bogged and drenched we'd git. Look at what's comin' up over there. That rain's snow on the hills, every could drop of it; I seen Ben Bawn this mornin' as white as the top of a musharoon, and it's thickenin' wid sleet here this minute, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... on the horizon had grown by noon to a beetle, and by three o'clock to something more like an elephant, and it now diffused itself into a huge black cloud, that gradually overspread the heavens; and at last, about half an hour before sunset, came a peculiar chill, and then, in due course, a drop or two fell upon the parched ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... a fine horse fearfully cut by a charging pig, and a determined boar over and over again break through a line of elephants, and make good his escape. There is no animal in all the vast jungle that the elephant dreads more than a lusty boar. I have seen elephants that would stand the repeated charges of a wounded tiger, turn tail and take to ignominious flight before the onset of ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... our course, and arrived at Bamoo about 5.5 P.M.; the greater part of the journey extended through the Kioukdweng, or defile, in which some terrific places occur, one in particular known by two rocks which are called the Elephant and Cow. Passed several small villages before we made our exit from the K. dweng: all inhabited by Poans. Between this and Bamoo the country along the river is truly magnificent, and is well inhabited. The largest village contains about 70 houses; at least seven or eight ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... of all is the beautiful Victoria Memorial Hall with its tall clock tower and chimes. In front of this white building is the black statue of an elephant, presented to the city by the king of Siam to commemorate the first visit ever paid to a foreign city by a Siamese monarch. In the neighborhood of the Cathedral and Memorial Hall are the hotels, which are good in most respects but whose charges to transient guests are usually exorbitant: ...
— Wanderings in the Orient • Albert M. Reese
... children. About twelve years before a cyst in the right iliac region was tapped. The woman presented the following appearance: The navel hung below her knees, and the skin near the umbilicus resembled that of an elephant. The abdomen in its largest circumference measured 68 inches, and 27 inches from the ensiform cartilage to the umbilicus. The umbilicus was five inches in diameter and three inches in length. Eight gallons and seven pints of fluid were removed by tapping, much remaining. The whole ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... basses), because it is such a convincing illustration of the humorous possibilities inherent in fugal style. The way in which the voices chase each other about—compared by Berlioz[160] with the gambols of a delighted elephant—and their spasmodic attempts at assertion, produce an effect irresistibly droll. The humour is as broad as that of Aristophanes or Rabelais. Words are powerless to describe the thrill of the last fifty ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... stage-play in which the God of Wine should return in triumph from the East. In the cathedral square the pageant was presented, amid an intolerable noise of every kind of pipe-music, with Denys in the chief part, upon a gaily-painted chariot, in soft silken raiment, and, for headdress, a strange elephant-scalp with gilded tusks. ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... have gone farther and taken four horses; so extreme was my haste, running as I was before the terrors of an awakened conscience. But I feared to be conspicuous. Even as it was, we attracted only too much attention, with our pair and that white elephant, the seventy-pounds-worth ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... him away, which, with such power as he must possess, seems unlikely. Let us see," he continued, "parts of two legs remain unaccounted for. Perhaps, on account of their shape, he has been able the more easily to carry or roll them off, for we know that elephant foot makes a ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... the middle of a great war with all his soldiers. I had just firmly established fire superiority and was actually on the verge of launching a huge offensive—the one that was going to win the war, in fact—when, as I said, in butted this great clumsy elephant and knocked half ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, February 25th, 1920 • Various
... and harassed on every side by the lower charges of the Gas Coy. They were reluctantly constrained to admit that the attempt to undermine the Gasworks was a melancholy failure, and that the Mugsborough Electric Light and Installation Coy. was a veritable white elephant. They began to ask themselves what they should do with it; and some of them even urged unconditional surrender, or an appeal to the arbitration of the ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... a photograph of such carvings found in the Mahakan or Upper Kotei river. They included fragments of a cylindrical column and what seems to be a caparisoned kneeling elephant. QUER DURCH ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... stop?" he mused, ignoring her remark. "Oh—I know. The Knight was going forth to quest the Elephant with golden tusks for the High Tower Princess who wanted them in her crown. Why do Princesses always want ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... the early days, is now carried on in a small way only, by a New Zealander, who keeps a few men stationed at the island during part of the year for the purpose of rendering down sea elephant and penguin blubber. Their establishment was known to be at the north end of the island near ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... have never heard much about the Hindoos, you will be astonished to learn how numerous are the objects of their worship. They worship many living creatures, such as the ape, the tiger, the elephant the horse, the ox, the stag, the sheep, the hog, the dog, the cat, the rat, the peacock, the eagle, the cock, the hawk, the serpent, the chameleon, the lizard, the tortoise, fishes, and even insects. Of these, some receive much more worship than ...
— Dr. Scudder's Tales for Little Readers, About the Heathen. • Dr. John Scudder
... consideration entertained by the mind which induces us to act, this tells us nothing. It is like the case of the Indian philosopher(23), who, being asked what it was that kept the earth in its place, answered, that it was supported by an elephant, and that elephant again rested on a tortoise. He must be endowed with a slender portion of curiosity, who, being told that uneasiness is that which spurs on the mind to act, shall rest satisfied with this explanation, and does not proceed ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... one elephant, five foot-soldiers, and three horses form one Patti; three pattis make one Sena-mukha; three sena-mukhas are called a Gulma; three gulmas, a Gana; three ganas, a Vahini; three vahinis together are called a Pritana; three pritanas form a Chamu; three ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... no need to mention these trivialities, but that they actually influenced many lives, as trifles will in the world, where a gnat often plays a greater part than an elephant, and a mole-hill, as we know in King William's case, can upset an empire. When Tusher in his courtly way (at which Harry Esmond always chafed and spoke scornfully) vowed and protested that my lady's ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... scouring the countryside in search of an elephant that had escaped from the menagerie and wandered off. He inquired of an Irishman working in a field to learn if the fellow had ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... graceful and agile, and so delicately colored that she looked like a cheerful thought more than a physical reality; while Peony expanded in breadth rather than height, and rolled along on his short and sturdy legs as substantial as an elephant, though not quite so big. Then the mother resumed her work. What it was I forget; but she was either trimming a silken bonnet for Violet, or darning a pair of stockings for little Peony's short legs. Again, however, and again, and yet ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... as deer do," he said. "Twill only scare 'em off. They're a heap too cute to be taken in by an onnatural big star floating over the water. But 'taint the lucky side of the moon for us. She'll rise late, and her light'll be so feeble that it wouldn't show us an elephant clearly if he was under our noses. So if I succeed in coaxing a bull to the brink of the water, I'll open the jack, and flash our light on him. He'll bolt the next minute as quick as greased lightning on skates; ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... out very rainy, and the drill was gone through in a dense white mist, which caused every horse to loom large as an elephant, and every rider to look a Gog or Magog. The young ladies, so fond of a change of costume at this time in Priorton, could do no shopping; the walk in the meadows at sunset with the lounging yeomen had to be given up. The green meadows were not inviting, ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... built his residence—a large, white, pretentious dwelling, surrounded and embellished by all the appointments of wealth. The house was a huge cube, ornamented at its corners and cornices with all possible flowers of a rude architecture, reminding one of an elephant, that, in a fit of incontinent playfulness, had indulged in antics characteristic of its clumsy bulk and brawn. Outside were ample stables, a green-house, a Chinese pagoda that was called "the summer-house," ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... one o'clock the following morning saw the Black Pyramid and soon after entered Bass Strait by the passage on the south side of King's Island. After running into the latitude of Sea Elephant Bay on the east side of King's Island, in an unsuccessful search after some rocks laid down in the French charts but not noticed in those of Captain Flinders, we bore up; and at eleven p.m. ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King
... the trees, were busy picking off officers. On the 9th, General Sedgwick was superintending the placing of a battery in the front. Seeing a man dodging a ball, he rebuked him, saying, "Pooh! they can't hit an elephant at this distance." At that moment he was himself struck, ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.
... were all kept at Barrackpore, and the elephant-lines had a great attraction for children, especially for a small great-nephew of mine, now a Lieut.-Colonel, and the father of a family, then aged six. The child was very fearless, but the only elephant he was allowed to approach ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... He took the rotundity of the moon, and the curves of creepers, and the clinging of tendrils, and the trembling of grass, and the slenderness of the reed, and the bloom of flowers, and the lightness of leaves, and the tapering of the elephant's trunk, and the glances of deer, and the clustering of rows of bees, and the joyous gaiety of sunbeams, and the weeping of clouds, and the fickleness of the winds, and the timidity of the hare, and the vanity of the peacock, and ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... with sand and twigs, a fantastic world peopled with their familiar toys: a grey cloth elephant, a multi-coloured duck as big as that white plush bear. And they are in the jungle, tracking, hunting, killing. Then they dance round to a secret rhythm. Stop to look at them, the game will end. The little mouths will ...
— Marie Bashkirtseff (From Childhood to Girlhood) • Marie Bashkirtseff
... it is harder, its fibres are differently arranged, and its action is incessant, whereas that of muscle alternates with the state of rest; he gives a good account of the valves and of the vessels; and notices especially the bony ring formed in the heart of the horse, elephant and other ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... is to dot out all the letters of the word except the first and the last. You would put "Elephant" on the paper thus, E......t, and tell your companion it was the name of an animal. Or you might write "Peppermint" thus, P........t, and tell him it was the name of ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... dreaming," thought Josette, as she saw her mistress flying down the staircase like an elephant to ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac |
