"Feathered" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the unobtrusive small deer of life—the snails, and beetles, and flies, and earthworms—and especially with the winged things: birds, bats, and butterflies. In the very earliest days of my islands' existence, indeed, a few stray feathered fowls of the air were driven ashore here by violent storms, at a time when vegetation had not yet begun to clothe the naked pumice and volcanic rock; but these, of course, perished for want of food, as did also a few later arrivals, ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... on the vowels and consonants; but a friend that was with me solved the difficulty at once, by assuring me that the French women scarce did anything else the whole day than sit and instruct their feathered pupils; and that the birds were thus distinct in their lessons ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... wild and sylvan notes When morn's full chorus pours Rejoicing from a thousand feathered throats, And the ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... "I wish you hadn't—I wish we hadn't. I know just exactly what he feels like now. He feels as if he'd like to kill you for it, and I daresay he would if you hadn't been a craven, white-feathered skulker and ...
— New Treasure Seekers - or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune • E. (Edith) Nesbit
... happened at this very moment to be emerging stealthily from the woods below the house. Slowly and deliberately he made his way toward the front till he reached a bench where he sat down under a tree to ruminate over the situation and inspect the feathered prize which he had lately acquired by certain, devious means known only to Uncle Billy. Wiping his forehead with his ragged sleeve and holding the bird up by its tied feet he regarded it with the eye of an expert, and ...
— The Littlest Rebel • Edward Peple
... I blush to add, gladly! Some evidences of a world awakening were perceptible about me now. Feathered choirs hailed the new day joyously. Carrying the mysterious contrivance which I had captured from the enemy, I set out in the direction of my house, my mind very busy with conjectures respecting the link between this bird snare and the cry like that of a nighthawk which we had heard at the moment ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... nests are those made by the birds called weavers. These feathered workmen serve no apprenticeship; their trade comes to them by nature; and how well they work at it! But then you must admit that Nature is a skillful teacher and birds are ...
— Reading Made Easy for Foreigners - Third Reader • John L. Huelshof
... detective was on the alert in a moment. It was a well-known signal. Was the owl a feathered one ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... Cantwell called them all tyrants and sons of Belial, and what not; and though Dr. Bathurst said differently, who was to know what was right? Dr. Bathurst had had his day, and this was Cantwell's turn. There was a comedown now of feathered hats, and point collars, and curled hair; and leathern jerkin should have its day. And as for being an informer, he would keep his own counsel; at any rate, the reward he would have. It was scarcely likely to be a hanging matter, after all; and if the gentleman, whoever he might ...
— The Pigeon Pie • Charlotte M. Yonge
... say nothing of the traces of Birds in the Secondary deposits, because the so-called bird-tracks seem to me of very doubtful character; and it is also my opinion that the remains of a feathered animal recently found in the Solenhofen lithographic limestone, and believed to be a bird by some naturalists, do not belong to a genuine bird, but to one of those synthetic types before alluded to, in which reptilian structure is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... going? What is it you say? Mother knew your song and used once to tell it to her babe. How your wings flash through the ether! Heedless of cloud and tempest, on, on, past the stars, and still on! Her wishes take flight with the feathered songsters, but Tonio brings her rudely to earth. He pleads for a return of the love which he says he bears her, but she bids him postpone his protestations till he can make them in the play. He grows desperately urgent and attempts to rape a kiss. She cuts him across the face with a donkey ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... he again took up his gun, it was still because of his love of life: it was to enable him to enumerate, inventory, and interrogate his new compatriots, his feathered fellow-citizens of Srignan; to inform himself of their diet, to reveal the contents of their crops ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... imaginable. His fur is extremely long and soft, without a colored hair. His tail is broad and carried proudly aloft, curling over toward his back when walking. His face is full of intelligence: his ears well-tipped and feathered, and his ruff a thing of beauty and ...
— Concerning Cats - My Own and Some Others • Helen M. Winslow
... took off two dollars on account of his illness. Poor fellow! he was laid up more than a month. Then there was a band of nigger minstrels, called the 'Metropoliganians.' They were regular humbugs; and so the mob took them, and tarred and feathered them in the back lot. Damage to furniture on that occasion was only sixteen dollars; and I got every cent of it, by holding on to their trunks. There have been a good many such little affairs in this village. I mention these two ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... vied with one another in encouraging the delusion in Yulia Mihailovna. The poor woman became at once the sport of conflicting influences, while fully persuaded of her own originality. Many clever people feathered their nests and took advantage of her simplicity during the brief period of her rule in the province. And what a jumble there was under this assumption of independence! She was fascinated at the same time by ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... warriors, with as many women and children, to the camp at Fort Cumberland. They were objects of great curiosity to the soldiers, who gazed with astonishment on their faces, painted red, yellow, and black, their ears slit and hung with pendants, and their heads close shaved, except the feathered scalp-lock at the crown. "In the day," says an officer, "they are in our camp, and in the night they go into their own, where they dance and make a most horrible noise." Braddock received them several times in ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... clearly proved that he was not a Christian, nor possessed of any refinement. But he took more pleasure in catching Robin-redbreasts than in anything else, and for this purpose he used bird-lime. He had caught and killed so many that at last King Robin of Birdland issued invitations to all his feathered subjects and to the beasts of the field, asking them to a meeting at which they might discuss the best means of putting Sigli to death, or punishing him in some other way, for the cruelty of which he was ...
— Tales from the Lands of Nuts and Grapes - Spanish and Portuguese Folklore • Charles Sellers and Others
... snows! from out the sky The feathered flakes, how fast they fly, Like little birds, that don't know why They're on the chase, from place to place, While neither can the other trace! It snows, it snows! a merry play Is o'er us, on this ...
— The Youth's Coronal • Hannah Flagg Gould
... the head of a New Zealand chief; some red snow, or rather, red water (for it was melted), brought home by Captain Ross; a piece of granite from the Croker mountains; a kitten in spirits, with two heads and twelve legs; and half-a-dozen abortions of the feathered or creeping tribes. Everything went off well. The two last fees he had received were sacrificed to have the party announced in the Morning Post, and Doctor Feasible's ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... clothed with a silvery softness more delicately fair than the coverlid in the cradle of a king. I have watched them develop into full-grown leaves with lobes as rounded and finely formed as the tips of ladies' fingers and I have noted how well the mass of your foliage has protected your feathered friends and their naked nestlings from the peltings of the hail, the drenchings of the rain and the scorching of the summer sun. I have gloried in the grateful shade you gave alike to happy children in their play and to tired parents weary and worn with the ...
— Some Summer Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... wanted to know, for instance, what the clergy of the Church of England did for the L3,500,000 a year "wasted on them," while he summed up the Nonconformists in the scornful phrase: "Exeter Hall!" He considered anthropomorphism to explain satisfactorily not only the swan maiden, and the other feathered ladies [526] of the Nights, but also angel and devil. Both Arbuthnot and Payne regarded him as a Mohammedan. Another friend described him as a "combination of an Agnostic, a Theist and an Oriental mystic." Over and over ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... and the gulf stream. Gaspard saw, and smiled. In a moment the vessel's nose was towards the bay, and she sailed in, dipping a shoulder to the sudden foam. On she came past reef and bar, a pretty tumbril to the slaughter. The spray feathered up to her sails, the sun caught her on deck and beam; she was running dead for ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... steel trap, and the last nimbler than a buck-shot. I wish it was hot noon, now, grand'ther; and that there was an acre or two of your white swans or of black feathered ducks going south, over our heads; you or Ellen, here, might set your heart on the finest in the flock, and my character against a horn of powder, that the bird would be hanging head downwards, in five minutes, and that too, with a single ball. I scorn a shot-gun! No man can say, he ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... dawning morn with songs thou dost prevent, Sets hundred notes unto thy feathered crew, So each one tunes his pretty instrument, And warbling out the old, begin anew, And thus they pass their youth in summer season, Then follow thee into a better Region, Where winter's never felt in ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... away, quietly aided and abetted by Mrs. Tracy, who never failed to roll her eyes and shrug her shoulders when Harold's name was mentioned, and openly pushed on by Peterkin, until Tom Tracy went to him one day and threatened to have him tarred and feathered and ridden on a rail, if he ever breathed Harold's name again in ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... shingle dart, His elder pop-gun with its hickory rod, its sharp explosion and rebounding wad, His corn-stalk fiddle, and the deeper tone That murmurs from his pumpkin-stalk trombone, Conspire to teach the boy. To these succeed His bow, his arrow of a feathered reed, His windmill, raised the passing breeze to win, His water-wheel, that turns upon a pin; Or, if his father lives upon the shore, You'll see his ship, "beam ends upon the floor," Full rigged, with raking masts, and timbers ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... light of day. The couple were very glad: night and day they caressed the royal babe, and they would have made for him a cage of gold had not God forbidden them to do so. Every year a cock was born into the royal family, until the feathered sons numbered thirteen. But these sons were jealous of one another: each thought that the others had no right ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... them indicates any emotion analogous to the laughter of Man, excepting Dog. True it is, that we hear of a "horse-laugh." There is a beast, too, called the "laughing hyena," and a dismal beast he is. Among the feathered tribes there flourishes an individual named the "laughing falcon." From inanimate creation the poet has evoked for us "Minni Haha," or the "laughing water"; and the expression, "it would make a cat laugh," is frequently made ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... Sun was smiling his broadest. The Merry Little Breezes of Old Mother West Wind were dancing happily here and there over the Green Meadows, looking for some good turn to do for others. The little feathered people to whom Old Mother Nature has given the great blessing of music in their throats were pouring out their sweetest songs. So it seemed as if there was no good reason why Longlegs should feel out of sorts. The fact is the ...
— The Adventures of Grandfather Frog • Thornton W. Burgess
... same way as the other side. Both figures are enclosed in a flat oval border of gold thread, broad at the top and narrowing towards the foot. In the corners are symmetrical arabesques thickly worked in gold, and within the larger spaces in each corner-piece are the 'remains' of feathered caterpillars, now skeleton forms of threads only. The back of the book is particularly good, and most beautifully worked. It is divided into five panels, within each of which is a conventional flower, a cornflower alternating with a carnation, and the colours ...
— English Embroidered Bookbindings • Cyril James Humphries Davenport
... remarkable for beauty of plumage, and vocal melody. Predacious animals are chiefly distinguished for their nocturnal habits; and ideas of rapine, terror and blood, are ever associated with the tiger, the hyena, and the wolf. Among the feathered tribes, the owl and the bat, also companions of darkness, are shunned by many, as horrible objects, and full of ill-omen. Haunted castles, ruined battlements, and noisome caverns, are the chosen abodes of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 581, Saturday, December 15, 1832 • Various
... when vehement and irresistible winds burst forth to make howling havoc on the bleakest heights—so they seem then—that man's foot ever trod. There are times when not one harebell nods its head in the calm air, not one seed falls from the feathered grass, in the tender serenity of a quiet world; and there are times, too, when Nature aroused puts forth her terrible strength, so that man ventures abroad at his great peril, and ropes must be stretched along the roads by which the ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... community no men stand higher in the estimation of their fellows than do the smiths and the casters of copper. The writer spent many hours watching I-o, the brass and copper worker of Cibolan, while he shaped bells, bracelets, and betel boxes at his forge on the outskirts of the village (Plate XXVII). Feathered plungers, which worked up and down in two bamboo cylinders, forced air through a small clay-tipped tube into a charcoal fire. This served as a bellows, while a small cup made of straw ashes formed an excellent crucible. The first day I watched I-o, he ...
— The Wild Tribes of Davao District, Mindanao - The R. F. Cummings Philippine Expedition • Fay-Cooper Cole
... Adverting to the feathered tribes which have been observed in this neighbourhood, Mr. Machen remarks—"The birds in the Forest do not differ much from those met with in other parts of the west of England. I have been struck with the contrast in the smaller number of large birds, mostly of the falcon kind, which ...
— The Forest of Dean - An Historical and Descriptive Account • H. G. Nicholls
... over them breathlessly, and saw in fancy eighteen balls of yellow down, teetering on toothpick legs. Then her imagination leaped ahead, and the cream-colored eggs had become eighteen lusty, pin-feathered fowls, worth forty cents a pound in city markets. Peggy's heart gave a jubilant flutter. Many a fortune had started, she was sure, with less than that basket ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... comest now And only to contrast my gloom, Like rainbow-feathered birds that bloom A moment on some autumn bough That, with the spurn of their farewell Sheds its last leaves,—thou once didst dwell With me year-long, and make intense To boyhood's wisely vacant days Their fleet but all-sufficing grace Of trustful ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... with his beaver on, His cuishes on his thighs, gallantly armed, Rise from the ground like feathered Mercury, And vaulted with such ease into his seat, As if an angel dropped down from the clouds, To turn and wind a fiery Pegasus, And witch the world ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... Hondecoeter, born in 1636, died in 1695, chose the feathered tribe for his subjects. He has been called 'the Raphael of bird painters.' He painted especially poultry, peacocks, turkeys, and pigeons, which he usually represented alive, and treated with great truthfulness and picturesque feeling. Among his ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... like giants stand, To sentinel enchanted land. High on the south, huge Benvenue Down to the lake in masses threw Crags, knolls, and mounds, confusedly hurled, The fragments of an earlier world; A wildering forest feathered o'er His ruined sides and summit hoar. While on the north, through middle air, Ben-an heaved high ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... else, than to the residence of this same lady! Look you, I have learned this. She is, as you say, the sister of the Earl of Banbury, and is for the time at the town house in Knightwell Terrace. Moreover, if that news be worth while to so white-feathered a swain as yourself, the other, damsel, the dark one—the one with the mighty pretty little foot—lives there for the time as the guest of Lady Catharine. They are rated thick as peas in a pod. True, we are strangers, yet I venture we have made a beginning, and if we venture ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... Here, Queen of Pride, surpassed By none whose temples whiten this the world. Through heaven I roll my lucid moon along; I shed in hell o'er my pale people peace; On earth I, caring for the creatures, guard Each pregnant yellow wolf and fox-bitch sleek, And every feathered mother's callow brood, And all that love green haunts and loneliness. Of men, the chaste adore me, hanging crowns 10 Of poppies red to blackness, bell and stem, Upon my image at Athenai here; And this dead Youth, Asclepios ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... throats They cleared for action with their sweetest notes; Twisted their ears (they'd oft tormented mine) And damned them roundly all along the line; Clubbed the whole crew from the Parnassian slopes, A wreck of broken heads and broken hopes! What gained I so? I feathered every curse Launched at the village bards with lilting verse. The town approved and christened me (to show its High admiration) Chief of ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... twenty little pigs of elephants. That show I also attended, and was well repaid for going. Near the entrance of the tent was a large cage, peopled with the gayest denizens of tropic life, macaws, cockatoos, paroquets—what know I?—a feathered iridescence, that sulked prehensile or perched paradisiacal in their iron house. Two youths entered; one paused admiringly. 'Come along, Jack,' remonstrated the other, hurrying him on by the arm, 'them darned things is only painted.' He wasn't going to see his friend ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... friend Lord Hunsdon, "with Captain Clarke made a voyage to the Islands of Terceras and the Canaries, to beguile the time with labour, I writ this book, rough, as hatched in the storms of the ocean, and feathered in the surges of many perilous seas." On August 26th, 1591, Lodge sailed from Plymouth with Sir Thomas Cavendish in the Desire, a galleon of 140 tons. The freebooters sailed to Brazil and attacked the town of Santa, ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... having before long killed seven large birds of the plover species, two ground doves of a beautiful plumage, three parrots, and a monkey, which the doctor said he preferred to any members of the feathered tribe. ...
— The Young Llanero - A Story of War and Wild Life in Venezuela • W.H.G. Kingston
... the I. W. W. have been tarred and feathered. Frank H. Meyers was tarred and feathered by a gang of prominent citizens at North Yakima, Washington. D. S. Dietz was tarred and feathered by a mob led by representatives of the Lumber Trust at Sedro, Wooley, Washington. John L. Metzen, attorney ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... of the kind that I had ever seen alive, I at once recognized the feathered visitors to be water ouzels. The birds preceded me on my way along the water course towards camp, and were never quiet a minute. They would hop on a rock in mid-stream and bob up and down in a most solemn but comical manner for a moment before plunging fearlessly into the cold white spray ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... Where the Saxon now inherits golden field and silver mere; And beside the mound where burried lies the dark-eyed maid he loves, Some tall warrior, wan and wearied, in the misty moonlight moves. See—he stands erect and lingers—stoic still, but loth to go— Clutching in his tawny fingers feathered shaft and polished bow. Never wail or moan he utters and no tear is on his face, But a warrior's curse he mutters ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... sense of security for the young birds was upset by the long flapping wings of a couple of great black-backed gulls which kept on sailing round and round, waiting till the opportunity came to make a hawk-like swoop and carry off some well-fatted, half-feathered young auk. One met its fate, in the midst of a rippling purring cry, just as Aleck laid in his boat-hook and proceeded to step the mast, swaying easily the while with the boat, which was now well afloat on the rising ...
— The Lost Middy - Being the Secret of the Smugglers' Gap • George Manville Fenn
... to be sure," was the rough-toned answer. "I thought thee had had enough of gentlefolks, without bringing another fair-feathered bird to the nest." There was something in the expression with which this was said, that seemed to have a powerful effect on ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... not yet favour Mauleverer exclusively, by hinting to her the hopes and expectations of her uncle and father. Brandon, now taking leave of his brother, mounted to the drawing-room in search of Lucy. He found her leaning over the gilt cage of one of her feathered favourites, and speaking to the little inmate in that pretty and playful language in which all thoughts, innocent yet fond, should be clothed. So beautiful did Lucy seem, as she was thus engaged in her girlish and caressing employment, and so utterly unlike one meet to ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... family group, the principal figure in which was a young lady displaying too little modesty and too much bosom. Another may have been a Vandyk, while one or two were early works representing gallants of Elizabeth's time in ruffs and feathered caps. The rest were for the most part but wooden ancestors displaying curled wigs, legs which lacked drawing, and high-heeled shoes. A few old cabinets remained, and a glorious suite of chairs of Queen Anne's time—these, however, were perishing, ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... day the kingfisher laid one egg, and that day she laid her egg as usual. But when the egg hatched out, it was no feathered nestling, but a baby-boy, that broke ...
— Philippine Folk-Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss, Berton L. Maxfield, W. H. Millington,
... Jupiter Ammon for his father, if many Roman Emperors extorted altars and sacrifices in their lifetime, if, even in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, an English nobleman[13] encouraged the belief of his descent from a swan, and was complimented in a dedication upon his feathered pedigree, a similar infatuation may be the less inexcusable in Kien-Long, a monarch, the length and happiness of whose reign, the unlimited obedience of whose incalculable number of subjects, and the health and vigour of whose body, have hitherto kept out of his view most of ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... and its weird effects. Bird of the silent wing and expansive eye, grimalkin in feathers, feline, mousing, haunting ruins" and towers, and mocking the midnight stillness with thy uncanny cry! The owl is the great bugaboo of the feathered tribes. His appearance by day is hailed by shouts of alarm and derision from nearly every bird that flies, from crows down to sparrows. They swarm about him like flies, and literally mob him back into his dusky retreat. Silence is as the breath of his nostrils to him, and the ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... the flowers all white; you get deep, rosy flowers, and the leaves are all brown and bitten. They're neither one thing nor another. They're just like heliotropes,—no bloom at all, only scent. I've torn up myriads, to the ten stamens in their feathered case, to find where that smell comes from,—that is perfectly delicious,—and I never could. They are ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... hand a haughty, dark, And deadly face; I could not recognise it, Yet I had seen it, though I knew not where: The features were a Giant's, and the eye Was still, yet lighted; his long locks curled down On his vast bust, whence a huge quiver rose With shaft-heads feathered from the eagle's wing, 90 That peeped up bristling through his serpent hair.[ae] I invited him to fill the cup which stood Between us, but he answered not; I filled it; He took it not, but stared upon ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... feathers is probably due to the depluming mite. Dust well with buhach through the feathered portion of the bird and apply carbolated vaseline to the bare skin and the edges of the feathers where the insects work. Do this daily as long as needed. When vaseline is not on hand, a mixture of coal ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... a forest further to the right, skirted a broad plain which stretched out to the beach, the bright waters beyond expanding and melting into the horizon, while to the right it was bounded by a hilly ridge feathered with palm-trees, the whole bathed in sunshine, and ...
— Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay • Miss Emma Roberts
... and the arrivals were astonished to see a lot of Indian toggery piled up on tables and chairs, imitation buckskin suits, feathered headdresses, bows, arrows, tomahawks, and so forth. On Merriwell's table was a full supply ...
— Frank Merriwell at Yale • Burt L. Standish
... territory. The first one notified to leave was William Phillips, a lawyer of Leavenworth, and upon his refusal the mob forcibly seized him, took him across the river, carried him several miles into Missouri, and then tarred and feathered him, shaving one side of his head and committing other gross indignities upon his person. Judge Lecompte, chief justice of the territory, Colonel L. N. Burns, of Weston, Missouri, and others, took part in and made speeches at a bitterly partisan meeting, the tendency of which ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... vigour, in some after and higher state; as if the sleep of powers, as well as of bodies, were the season and condition of their growth. Accordingly, we find these instincts again, and with them a wonderful synthesis of fish and insect, as a higher third, in the feathered inhabitants of the air. Nay, she seems to have gone yet further back, and having given B C D in the birds, so to have sported with one solitary instance of B D A in that curious animal the dragon, the anatomy of which has been recently given to the public by Tiedemann; from whose work it ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... with scorn the bird of night, Declares his folly, or his spite. Then too, how partial is his praise! The lark's, the linnet's chirping lays 20 To his ill-judging ears are fine; And nightingales are all divine. But the more knowing feathered race See wisdom stamped upon my face. Whene'er to visit light I deign, What flocks of fowl compose my train! Like slaves they crowd my flight behind, And own me of superior kind.' The farmer laughed, and thus replied: 'Thou dull important lump of pride, 30 Dar'st thou with that harsh ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... fancy." In addition, they saw an old chaise, once the yellow postchaise, the pride and glory of the establishment, now reduced from its wheels and ignominiously degraded to a hen house. On the grass-grown roof, a cock had taken his stand, with an air of protective patronage to the feathered ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... feathered occupant in the cage—it was empty, and with a fresh feeling of disappointment, Magdalen stood by the window again, looking out at the bright morning, and wondering what she could do to comfort poor Hoodie. Outside, ...
— Hoodie • Mary Louisa Stewart Molesworth
... answered his question. A black corselet with shoulder pieces, and a feathered steel cap raised Basterga's huge stature almost to the gigantic. Nor did it need this to render him singular; to draw the eye to him a second time and a third. The man himself in this hour of his success, this moment of conscious ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... hedge and was rapping at the cottage door. No one answered. She lifted the latch and entered, I at her heels. The kitchen—an ordinary cottage kitchen—was empty A guttered candle stood on the table to the right, and beside it lay a feathered cap. Margery stepped toward this and had scarce time to touch the brim of it before a voice hailed us in the doorway ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... loud report travelled all over the wide lake, creating a great commotion among the feathered people, and they rose up with a general ...
— A Little Boy Lost • Hudson, W. H.
... luxuriant elegance. The audience, too, so totally different from the mingled, ill-dressed, and irregular assemblage that fills a city theatre; blooming girls and showy matrons, range above range, feathered and flowered, glittering with all the family jewels, and all animated by the novelty of the scene before them, formed an exhibition which, for the night, inspired me with the idea, that (strolling excepted) ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... made—no sound but this great rustling of feathers which grew greater now than ever. When they began to settle on the sands, along the ropes of the ship—anywhere and everywhere except the trees—the Doctor could see that they had blue wings and white breasts and very short, feathered legs. As soon as they had all found a place to sit, suddenly, there was no noise left anywhere—all was ...
— The Story of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting
... the company were moving in those wagons toward Dixie—toward mocking-bird-haunted Bowling Green, where the underfed, unclothed, unarmed body of Albert Sydney Johnston's army lay, with one half-feathered wing stretching into the Cumberland hills and the frayed edge of ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... ornamented gun, while pouches and horns were suspended from the branches around. Each warrior was encircled with a belt of hide, in which glittered the usual implements of the chase and war. Some of the inferior ones carried only a stout ash bow, a sheaf of feathered arrows, and a weighty club of bone, adorned ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... pointer, who had tugged at his chain in a wild endeavor to point the whole heterogeneous mass of feathered creatures from sparrow to swan, lost his head and howled dismally until dragged off by the lean-legged student who was attached to the other end of ...
— In the Quarter • Robert W. Chambers
... that torpid circulation was slow, and before its powers failed it could certainly overtake and slay its assailant. But now, as the two monsters hounded us to the very foot of the stairs, a drift of darts came whistling from every chink in the cliff above them. In a minute they were feathered with them, and yet with no sign of pain they clawed and slobbered with impotent rage at the steps which would lead them to their victims, mounting clumsily up for a few yards and then sliding down again to the ground. But at last the poison worked. One of them gave a deep rumbling ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... head. Amid all of those about him, he saw only the face of Annadoah, golden as sunlight and pink as the lichen blossoms of spring. Through her open ahttee, or fur garment, he saw her breasts as tender as those of eider-feathered birds. The sight of her melted his heart, the streams of spring were loosened within him. Yet, with an agonized pang, he observed her gaze adoringly and eagerly at the tall stranger's hard face; he saw her quiver at the sound of his harsh, gruff voice. Olafaksoah's brutal masculinity for the ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... Peter P. Pellican. Mr. Jonathan J. Twang replied in the following determined refusal:—"I beg to inform the last speaker, Mr. Peter P. Pellican, from the back-woods, that I'll see him tee-totatiously tarred, feathered, and physicked with red-hot oil and fish-hooks, before I'll retract one eternal syllable of my pretty ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 23, 1841 • Various
... musical instrument called a mouthharp, but nature, in six weeks, out of a little blue or brown egg constructs a feathered music-box that automatically conveys itself from tree to tree. But the mystery that has gone on in that tiny blue egg lying in the nest is just as great as if some housewife had planted an old spinning-wheel ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... fine to jeer at it now in cold print but it goes down like hot cake that stuff. He was in the bakery line too, wasn't he? Why they call him Doughy Daw. Feathered his nest well anyhow. Daughter engaged to that chap in the inland revenue office with the motor. Hooked that nicely. Entertainments. Open house. Big blowout. Wetherup always said that. Get a grip of them ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... from the east and the West from the west, And, behold! in the gravid deeps of the lower dark, While, above, the wind was fanning the dawn as a spark, The East and the West took form as the wings of a lark. One wing was feathered with facts of the uttermost Past, And one with the dreams of a prophet; and both sailed fast And met where the sorrowful Soul on the earth was cast. Then a Voice said: 'Thine, if thou lovest enough to use;' But another: 'To fly and to sing is pain: refuse!' Then the Soul said: 'Come, ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... fragrant with flowers and melodious with the low piping of a tame thrush in a wild gilded cage, who had the sweet habit of warbling his strophes to himself very softly now and then, before venturing to give them full-voiced utterance. A bright-eyed, feathered poet he was, and an exceeding favorite with his fair mistress, who occasionally leaned back in her low chair to look at him and murmur an encouraging "Sweet, sweet!" which caused the speckled plumage on his plump breast to ruffle up with ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... poultry-yard here, planting trees there, with the full zeal of the rural landlord. His family letters are given to accounts of little country doings: "The goose war is happily terminated: Mr. Jones' squadron has left my waters, and my feathered navy now plows the Tappan Sea in triumph. I cannot but attribute this great victory to the valor and good conduct of the enterprising little duck, who seems to enjoy great power and popularity among both geese and ganders, and absolutely ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... priest in the strange, feathered attire approached the king, carrying some small object in his hand. I wondered what it could be, till the sound of a report reached my ears and I saw the man begin to jump round upon one leg, holding the other with both his hands at the knee ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... appear to be two of us. I have been expecting a passionate declaration—but the recollections of a feathered beauty who once lived in a fairy palace, in a wonderland where you dine upon red herrings—she is my hated rival. I am more beautiful, observe—that is conceded, but he cannot understand me. The feathered hat has become my salvation. My great big brother ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... a summer's day! For tropic airs are blowing As soft as whispered roundelay From unseen lips that seem to say To feathered songsters going To sunnier, southern climes afar, "Stay where you are—stay ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... has invented, so exquisite in mechanism as to reveal the voice of the tiniest insect. She put it to my ear, and the bellowing of the animals in battle, the chirp of the insects and the voices of the feathered mites could be clearly heard, but attenuated like the delicate note of two threads of spun glass ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... to this proposal and were soon busy trying to scheme out some means to take their feathered prey alive. ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... is said to be intended for Lord Portmore, in the habit he first appeared at Court, on his return from France. The cane dangling from his wrist, large muff, long queue, black stock, feathered chapeau, and shoes, give ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... spread the skin upon a frame of wicker-work; the head and neck are supported by a stick thrust through them. The skin they fix on one of their sides, and carry the head and neck in one of their hands, while the other holds the bow and arrows. In this disguise—of course with the feathered side of him presented to the bird or beast he would get near to—he walks along, pecking with the head at the bushes, and imitating the motions of the ostrich. By this stratagem he very often is enabled to get within shot of the other ostriches, or the quaggas ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... behind. Away then went the birds, pursued and pursuers, till, like a falling star the falcon stooped, and then, maybe, the other a moment later, down upon the quarry; and a minute later there was the falcon back again shivering with pride and ecstasy, or all ruffle-feathered with shame, back on his master's wrist, and another torn partridge, or maybe two, in the bottom of the lad's bag; and arguments went full pelt, and cries, and sometimes sharp words, and faults were found, and praise was given, and so, on ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... listening to them for the last half-hour," her mother said. "Isn't everything sweet to-night, with the soft air and the elms all feathered out, ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... you ready, ye wight young men, That shooting will I see! Busk you, my merry young men, Ye shall go with me! And I will wit the Sheriff's faith; True and if be he!" When they had their bows ybent, Their tackles feathered free, Seven score of wight young men Stood by ROBIN's knee. When they came to Nottingham, The butts were fair and long, Many were the bold archers That shooted with bowes strong. "There shall but six shoot with me, The others shall keep my head, And stand with good bows bent That I be not ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... at least the next to the humblest, London house has some leafy breathing-place behind it where the birds may nest and sing, and our lodging in the street which was almost Belgravian was not without its tree and its feathered inmates. When the first really warm days came (and they came at the time appointed by the poets), the feathered hostess of the birds, in a coop under the tree, laid an egg in honor of her friends building overhead. This was a high moment of triumph for the landlord's whole family. ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... the feathered folk in Pleasant Valley said that old Mr. Crow was the noisiest person in the neighborhood. But they must have forgotten all about Mr. Crow's knavish cousin, Jasper Jay. And it was not only in summer, either, that Jasper's shrieks and laughter woke the echoes. Since it was his habit to spend ...
— The Tale of Jasper Jay - Tuck-Me-In Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... Corinthian; the tout ensemble is very excellent; a darkey sexton gave us a pew, and there were some handsome ladies present, dark Richmond beauties, haughty and thinly clothed, with only here and there a jockey-feathered hat, or a velvet mantilla, to tell of long siege and privation. We saw that those who dressed the shabbiest had yet preserved some little article of jewelry—a finger-ring, a brooch, a bracelet, showing how ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... heart, and threw me into this slow fever." Racine, who died of his extreme sensibility to a royal rebuke, confessed that the pain which one severe criticism inflicted outweighed all the applause he could receive. The feathered arrow of an epigram has sometimes been wet with the heart's blood of its victim. Fortune has been lost, reputation destroyed, and every charity of life extinguished, by ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... furred and feathered, have undergone severe persecution since the extension of pheasant-covers, and of these the first nine have more or less succumbed—namely, pine-marten, polecat, eagle, buzzard, falcon, kite, horned owl, harrier, and raven. The remaining ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... in, and at a certain moment, when the solution has become supersaturated, splendid branches of crystal shoot out over the screen. A dozen square feet of surface are now covered by those beautiful forms. With another solution we obtain crystalline spears, feathered right and left by other spears. From distant nuclei in the middle of the field of view the spears shoot with magical rapidity in all directions. The film of water on a window-pane on a frosty morning exhibits effects quite as wonderful as these. ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... country was all one huge forest. The walls were not more than five feet high, over which hung the deep and heavy roof, covered with moss, and the thatch was overlaid with a heap of black mould, which afforded plentiful nourishment to stonecrops, and various tufts of beautifully feathered grass, which waved in fantastic plumes over it. The door, the frame of which was all aslant, seemed almost buried in, and pressed down by this roof, placed in which were two of those old windows which show that the roof itself formed the upper chamber ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... life's experience in the science. They travelled about with an aviary. And while Andrew, now unreproached, frowned, pencil in hand and notebook by his side, over the strategics of the Franco-Prussian War, Elodie, always in her slatternly wrapper, spent enraptured hours in putting her feathered troupe through their pretty tricks or in playing with them foolishly as one plays ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... rantipole, racketing high-bred woman of fashion of Sir John Vanbrugh's play as the flimsy elegance of my silver-embroidered, rose-colored tulle dress was unlike the elaborate splendor of her hooped and feathered and high-heeled, patched-and-powdered magnificence, with its falling laces and standing brocades. The part of Lady Townley was not only beyond my powers, but has never been seen on the English stage since the days of ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... this free harvest. She had given up the life she liked, the people she knew, the comforts she craved, for that and for nothing else, and what a mess she had made of the venture! Other girls not half so smart, not half so pretty as she, had feathered their nests right here before her eyes, while she was wasting her time. They had kept their heads, and they would go out in the spring, first class, with good clothes and a bank-roll in the purser's safe. Some of them were married and respectable. "Never again!" she whispered to herself. ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... where the tall grass made itself hoary in the breeze, or where some trail of dun brown ran up through all intermediate tints to break in a glory of gold at the foot of the screen of woods that far away gloomed like a frowning fortress of shade, but, approaching, feathered off its tips in the glow, and let the mellow warmth of olive light gild to a lustrous depth all its darkly verdurous hollows. Near them the vireos ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... to the cotton woods of low valleys. The oaks, which are scattered through the lower pine zone, supply a large share of its food. Its habit of hoarding food is well known, and these stores are the source of unending quarrels with its numerous feathered enemies. I have laid its supplies under contribution myself, when short of provisions and lost from the command on which I had been traveling, by filling my saddlebags with half-dried acorns from under the loose ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph [April, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... favourite custom of his majesty, who invariably rose betimes, to saunter in the park whilst the day was young and pass an hour or two in stroking the heads of his feathered favourites in the aviary, feeding the fowls in the pond with biscuits, and playing with the crowd of spaniels ever attending his walks. For his greater amusement he had brought together in the park a rare and valuable collection of birds and beasts; amongst which were, according to a quaint authority, ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... cream in the air. Mr. Shaynor fed the dispensary stove, and we sucked cayenne-pepper jujubes and menthol lozenges. The brutal east wind had cleared the streets, and the few passers-by were muffled to their puckered eyes. In the Italian warehouse next door some gay feathered birds and game, hung upon hooks, sagged to the wind across the ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling |
