"Spider" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "The spider hath woven his web in the imperial palace; And the owl hath sung her watch-song on the towers ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... clearly shows the author's meaning to have been, that if any one departed at once after tasting of the beverage, he would have no knowledge of what he had drunk; {96} but if he remained, some one present might point out to him the spider in the cup, and then "he cracks ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 196, July 30, 1853 • Various
... it will fly off, just as the others did. I never saw such a chap as that spider is. He keeps on spinning a new one every day, for they always get broke, and he don't seem to be discouraged a mite," said Ben, glad to change the subject, as she knew he ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott
... Luther lasted till July 13. Luther concluded his argument with the words: 'I am sorry that the learned doctor only dips into Scripture as deep as the water-spider into the water—nay, that he seems to fly from it as the devil from the Cross. I prefer, with all deference to the Fathers, the authority of Scripture, which I herewith recommend to the arbiters of ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... of the entree to something like a home, because the upper crust of Mycening considered him as "only Dr. Kingston's partner," and the Kingstons themselves had the sort of sense that he was too much for them which makes a spider dislike to have a ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a spider would come and catch it!" went on Rose, quite crossly, "for I do not like to kill it myself!" And here she gave me a little poke with a fork. But not ...
— Dick and His Cat and Other Tales • Various
... the metaphor, it was as though while the Western spider wove his artful web round the innocent fly, the Oriental spider wove another web round him, the threads of which were so subtle as to be altogether invisible. Both East and West leaned with sublime faith on their respective gossamers. nor remembered ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... to cover it up with pretty words, wouldn't you? Well, we've had enough of that. I feel as though my face were covered with spider webs. I want to brush them off and ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... ocean, seen by the diver in the vision-like transparency which engulfs him,—such is the Shambles shoal. There hydras fight, leviathans meet. There, says the legend, at the bottom of the gigantic shaft, are the wrecks of ships, seized and sunk by the huge spider Kraken, also called the fish-mountain. Such things lie in the fearful shadow of ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... analyzed nine hundred types of plant life for toxin content. Bishop has tested innumerable spores and bacteria. Our slide file is immense and still growing. Max has captured several insects. There is one tiny yellow bush-spider with a killing bite, but the species seem to be rare. Bishop has isolated a mold bacterium that could cause a high fever, but its propagation rate is far too low to enable it to last long in ...
— Competition • James Causey
... as grew thy languid mood, To some embow'ring silent wood I led thy careless way; Where high from tree to tree in air Thou saw'st the spider swing her snare. So bright!—as if, entangled there, The ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... now, compared with all that had preceded, in Paradise : so enchanted did I -feel at no longer considering myself as if alone in the world. O, well I can conceive the interest excited in the French prisoner by a spider, even a spider! Total absence of all. of animation in a place of confinement, of which the term is unknown, where volition is set aside, and where captivity is the work of the elements, casts the fancy into a state of solemn awe, of fearful expectation, which I have not words ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... more distinguished by range and extent than by originality. If we require the originality which consists in weaving, like a spider, their web from their own bowels; in finding clay and making bricks and building the house; no great men are original. Nor does valuable originality consist in unlikeness to other men. The hero is in the press of knights and the thick of events; and seeing what men want and sharing ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... great classes a series exists from very complicated to very simple beings; thus in Fish, what a range there is between the sand-eel and shark,—in the Articulata, between the common crab and the Daphnia{479},—between the Aphis and butterfly, and between a mite and a spider{480}. Now the observation just made, namely, that selection might tend to simplify, as well as to complicate, explains this; for we can see that during the endless geologico-geographical changes, and consequent isolation of species, a station occupied in other districts ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... window suddenly, and I saw a gentleman go in. She had caught him like a fisherman hooks a gudgeon. Then I looked at my watch, and I found that they stopped from twelve to twenty minutes, never longer. In the end she really infatuated me, the spider! And then the creature ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... dress looked as if it were made of a million dewdrops turned to diamonds and sprinkled over a lacy spider-web; the web swathing the tall and wandlike figure of Miss Billie Brookton in a way to show that she had all the delicate perfections of a ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... deep and shallow, spiders, skillets, a couple of tea-kettles, a stew kettle, a broiler with a long spider-legged trivet to rest on, a hoe-baker, a biscuit-baker, and waffle-irons with legs like tongs. Each piece of hollow ware had its lid, with eye on top for lifting off with the hooks. Live coals, spread on hearth and lids, did the cooking. To furnish them there was a wrought iron ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... Spider Hagerty warned him. Spider was his chief second. "Make it last as long as you can—them's my instructions from Kelly. If you don't, the papers'll call it another bum fight and give the game a bigger black eye in ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... sat on a tuffett, Eating of curds and whey; There came a great spider Who sat down beside her, ...
— Young Canada's Nursery Rhymes • Various
... times; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every pleasure and every thought and sigh, and everything in thy life, the great and the unspeakably petty alike, must come again to thee, and all in the same series and succession; this spider, too, and this moonlight betwixt the trees and this moment likewise and I myself. The eternal sand-glass of time is always turned again, and thou with it, thou atom of dust'? Wouldst thou not cast thyself down and with gnashing of teeth curse ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... Merrithew, "is that there has to be a young lady. You'd think a likely young man, if he met one of them things, would just kill it on general principles, the same as a snake or a spider." ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... attention was drawn to a spider on the wall, who was laying a net for a fly, and in watching his maneuvers I forgot the lapse of time, until Father S—— had passed his sixthly and seventhly, and was driving furiously away at the eighthly. By this time the spider had caught the fly, whose cries sounded ...
— Homestead on the Hillside • Mary Jane Holmes
... past noon each day the sun covered a crack between two boards on the summer-house floor, and up through that aperture, for three days, had come a leggy, racy-looking, wolfish black spider. Each day, as it grew hotter, she extended her sphere of jerky investigation, vanishing down the crack again when the ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... round—that is to say, only ten hours. His days and nights of five hours each seem short to us, accustomed to measure things by our own estimates. But we must remember that everything is relative; that is to say, there is really no such thing as fast or slow; it is all by comparison. A spider runs fast compared with a snail, but either is terribly slow compared with an express train; and the speed of an express train itself is nothing to the velocity ...
— The Children's Book of Stars • G.E. Mitton
... as an indispensable appliance in the observatory; the use of a spider web reticule instead of wire having improved its efficiency. Gascoigne was one of the earliest astronomers who recognised the value of the Keplerian telescope for observational purposes, and Sherburn affirms that he was the first to construct ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... time of common contagion, they use to carry about them the powder of a toad, and sometimes a living toad or spider shut up in a box; or else they carry arsnick, or some other venemous substance, which draws unto it the contagious air, which otherwise would ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 33, June 15, 1850 • Various
... men of leisure and wealth, John Ruskin said: "Shall one by breadth and sweep of sight gather some branch of the commerce of the country into one great cobweb of which he is himself to be the master spider, making every thread vibrate with the points of his claws, and commanding every avenue with the facets of his eyes?" Shall the industrial or political giant say: "Here is the power in my hand; weakness owes me a debt? Build a mound here ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... The spider who came and sat beside this Miss Muffet was Nicky Easton. He frightened her, but he would not let her ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... loud roar. Then, O monarch, Madhava, inflamed with rage, soon made Duhsasana's car and driver and standard and Duhsasana himself invisible by means of his straight arrows. Indeed, Satyaki entirely shrouded the brave Duhsasana with arrows. Like a spider entangling a gnat within reach by means of its threads, that vanquisher of foes quickly covered Duhsasana with his shafts. Then King Duryodhana, seeing Duhsasana thus covered with arrows, urged a body of Trigartas towards ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... This did not make Jan stop running, so Rollo was dragged after him through the heaps of snow, rolling over and over but clinging tightly until Jan turned and pounced upon him. They tumbled about, sometimes Jan was on top, sometimes Rollo, and they looked like a huge, yellow spider with eight sturdy, furry legs kicking wildly. At last, panting, they sprawled facing each other with pink tongues hanging from their open mouths and ...
— Prince Jan, St. Bernard • Forrestine C. Hooker
... an iron suspension-bridge. This would shorten the road, they said, by some two or three hundred yards of divergence from the old wooden bridge higher up. They built their bridge, which looked like a spider's web spanning the verge of the stupendous cataract, when seen from the St. Lawrence below. It was opened to the public in April, 1856, but was little used for some days, as the conservative habitans, who had gone the crooked ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... enemies of cotton are the cotton boll-weevil, the boll-worm, the cotton red spider, and the cotton-leaf worm. The control of the boll-weevil is considered one of the most serious problems confronting the agricultural men of the country. In the first years after its introduction, it reduced the cotton crop fully fifty per cent., ...
— Checking the Waste - A Study in Conservation • Mary Huston Gregory
... short, the whole romantic cycle of German and Northern poetry, awoke little by little in my memory and laid claim upon my sympathy. It is a poetry of bracing quality, and acts upon one like a moral tonic. Strange charm of imagination! A twig of pine-wood and a few spider-webs are enough to make countries, epochs, and nations live again ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... She's changed to an afternoon costume, sort of an old blue effect with not a frill or a ruffle in sight but with everything toned in, from the spider-webby hat to the suede slippers. And all she has to do to bring Peyton alongside is to ...
— Torchy and Vee • Sewell Ford
... quite fair, it is very noticeable that the I's are very defective, and there is no C in it. The "Gleanings" are excellent, and it would be advisable to have more of them—if indeed such a thing were possible in this case. The spider-work inside shows no acquaintance with the writings of BACH or GLIDDON, and there is nothing about the Spectrum Analysis in any part of the paper. Besides, the paper is too stiff and rattles too much, and PUNCHINELLO could never abide the color of the editor's ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 5, April 30, 1870 • Various
... working for M—— under this new arrangement and being apparently fascinated for the moment by his personality, he seemed to me to gradually lose sight of his ideal, to be actually taken in by the plausible arguments which the latter could spin with the ease that a spider spins gossamer. In that respect I insist that M—— was a bad influence. Under his tutelage L—— gradually became, for instance, an habitue of a well-known and pseudo-bohemian chop-house, a most mawkish and naively imitative affair, intended ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... are standing at the harbour where all the steamers call, and look out towards the sea, you will see a mountain on your left, covered with green trees, and behind the trees a large house built in the shape of a spider. For in the centre there is a round building from which radiate eight wings, that look very much like the eight legs on the round body of a spider. The people who enter the house do not leave it again at will, and some of them stay there for the ...
— In Midsummer Days and Other Tales • August Strindberg
... bands of iron, which, at their fastenings into the floor, were rusted. His hips and loins were bound with lead. A copper girdle held his breast. A silver band enthralled his tongue and hands, and what seemed like a spider's web of thin, light-blue wire encircled his body and gathered itself in a circlet of the same woven material upon his brows. Truly, if ever a man was fast bound, this man was; for, in addition to all these things, there was a ring of gold round his neck, ...
— Edmund Dulac's Fairy-Book - Fairy Tales of the Allied Nations • Edmund Dulac
... a more northerly path, where the water is low. It is impossible to describe the amount of water near the Lake. Rivulets without number. They are so deep as to damp all ardour. I passed a very large striped spider in going to visit Chitunkubwe. The stripes were of yellowish green, and it had two most formidable reddish mandibles, the same shape as those of the redheaded white ant. It seemed to be eating a kind ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... few days. There were other flowers than lilies in the garden, but the lilies were very plentiful. There were white day-lilies, and tiger-lilies which were not sweet at all, and marvellous pink freckled ones which glistened as with drops of silver and were very fragrant. There were also low-growing spider-lilies, but those were not evident at this time of night, and the lilies-of-the-valley, of course, were all gone. There were, however, many other flowers of the old-fashioned varieties—verbenas ...
— Quaint Courtships • Howells & Alden, Editors
... wonderment; and Hunsa, slobbering gutturals of avarice, patted the gems with his gorilla paws. He lifted a large square emerald entwined in a tracery of gold, delicate as the criss-cross of a spider's web, and held it to his ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... as if folks was the only things with sense," Jerry continued, "but seems to me they've got about the least. Why, you can't lose a bird or a bee. And the orneriest little spider knows enough to play dead if you poke him. Inside he's pretty near scared to death, but he's got too much sense to cut and run the way a man would. He curls up his legs, and makes himself look withered up, so you'll say, 'Oh, shucks! he's dead already. What's ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... So she took Amy by the hand, and taught her as she herself had been taught sixty years ago, a process which carried dismay to Amy's soul, and made her feel like a fly in the web of a very strict spider. ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... Mr. Tarbox to spin a web as it is for a spider. To manoeuvre was the profoundest instinct of his unprofound nature. Zosephine felt the slender threads weaving around her. But in her heart of hearts there was a certain pleasure in being snared. It could not, to her, seem wholly bad for Tarbox to play spider, provided he should play the ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... flat hairy spider, about 1 in. in diameter of body, mottled pale brown and grey, brooding over a flat egg capsule almost of the same tints as itself. It was on the trunk of the jack fruit tree, and so closely resembles the egg-capsule produced by contiguous fungi as to be ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... pleasures. There was a spider the past year, that wove his web from yonder beam, and he was a companion, too, that I loved to see; wilt thou look, boy, if there is ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... than compensates for its fearsome nights and torrid noontides. The dew, jewelling a thousand spider-webs, the sparkling brightness of the air, the exquisite purity of the atmosphere, and grandeur of space and loneliness rimmed about by rose-tipped skies and far forget-me-not hills make a magic to catch the heart in a net from which it ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... upon her, Madame von Marwitz, with a singular effect of control, began to weave a spider's-web of intricate, nearly impalpable, sound. "Go, if you please," she ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... impart as treasures of great price to their descendants gathered round the cottage fire on winter evenings—all these antique fancies clustered, all these cobwebs of the brain were spun about the path of the old king, the human god, who, immeshed in them like a fly in the toils of a spider, could hardly stir a limb for the threads of custom, "light as air but strong as links of iron," that crossing and recrossing each other in an endless maze bound him fast within a network of observances from which death or deposition alone could ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... wider circle; his business career describes one larger still; then come his relations to the community in general, while beyond the horizon is a circle of influence that includes the world at large. When the tiny spider standing at the center of its wide-stretching and intricate web, woven for destruction, chances to touch any thread of the web, immediately that thread vibrates to the uttermost extremity. And man stands at ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... the enthusiasm of one who attains an object long desired, with the candor of a child, and the blundering foolishness of an old man utterly without worldly experience, he fell into the life of Mademoiselle Gamard precisely as a fly is caught in a spider's web. The first day that he went to dine and sleep at the house he was detained in the salon after dinner, partly to make his landlady's acquaintance, but chiefly by that inexplicable embarrassment which often assails timid people and makes them ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... But I did not worry. I left that to Hendrik Hamel. To him I reported every detail that occurred when he was not with me; and he, with furrowed brows, sitting darkling by the hour, like a patient spider unravelled the tangle and spun the web afresh. As my body slave he insisted upon attending me everywhere; being only barred on occasion by Yunsan. Of course I barred him from my moments with the Lady Om, but told him in general what passed, with exception of tenderer ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... stare, a look which gave way to one of anxiety as Mrs. Tipping, stepping into the rigging, suddenly lost her nerve, and, gripping it tightly, shook it in much the same fashion as a stout bluebottle shakes the web of a spider. ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs
... Buffalo, the train running off the rails on the way, and that, too, on a viaduct, on which the engine, having broken through the roadway, was hung up in the framework, like a fly in a spider's web. I was anxious to go, via the great lakes, to Green Bay on Lake Michigan, and thence starting from Mackinaw, the old Indian Michillimackinac, to follow up the track of our officers and soldiers and missionaries, who pushed on till ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... his cranium with his forefinger, which he then extended towards the house. "Take that insect there," he said, indicating a little beast that ran along the plaster. "What does it say? It says, 'I am the spider that spins the Virgin's thread.'" And the archaic simpleton added, "One must never judge what people do, for one can never tell ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... the training-grounds and watch the thoroughbreds at exercise; perhaps he is influenced by some enthusiast who bids him risk all he has on certain private information. The fly enters the den and asks the spider, "What price Flora?"—that means, "What odds are you prepared to lay against the mare named Flora?" The spider answers—say seven to one; the fly hands one pound to the spider, and the bet is made. The peculiarity of this transaction is that one of the parties to it is always careful ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... his work well. No sooner had he seen the light of love shining in his friend's face, than he had set to work; and, like the grim spider of evil he resembled, had filled Adrien's mind with the suggestion that Constance loved—in fact, was secretly engaged to, ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... watching lest any one should overturn them. And then, strange to tell it, and not easy to get to the full significance of it, the bravest room in all the house had absolutely nothing in it but a huge, ugly, poisonous spider hanging to the wall with her hands. 'Is there but one spider in all this spacious room?' asked the Interpreter. And the water stood in Christiana's eyes; she had come by this time thus far on her journey also. ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... compel me," she replied, firmly, "to change my mind as to what is seemly," and the courage which failed her if she met a spider, but which stood by her in serious danger as a faithful ally, made her perfectly steadfast as she eagerly added: "Not an hour since you promised me that so long as I remained with you I should need no other protector, and might count on your gratitude. But those were mere words, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... such a wealth of detail, small and remote as they are from ourselves, exhibit wonderful phenomena of maternal love. One of the first articles published by a naturalist on these phenomena, La Psychologie d'une Araignee (The Psychology of a Spider) might serve as the motive of a drama. The spider, as is well known, makes a bag of threads, which she generally attaches to the backs of leaves, and in it she deposits and preserves her eggs; she gets into it herself together with the eggs, to protect the ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... hard and bitter thoughts. The days and weeks passed and soon I felt the breath of warmer winds. On the open places the snow began to thaw. In spots the little rivulets of water appeared. Another day I saw a fly or a spider awakened after the hard winter. The spring was coming. I realized that in spring it was impossible to go out from the forest. Every river overflowed its banks; the swamps became impassable; all the runways of the animals ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... have been known from a period as early as the time of Abraham and Jacob; its inventor is not known, but it is possible that men took a lesson from the ingenious spider, which weaves its web after the same manner. The ancient Egyptians appear to have brought it to great perfection, and were even acquainted with the art of interweaving colors after the ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... the web," he replied. "The spider will be waiting. Petrie, I sometimes despair. Sir Lionel is an impossible man to shepherd. You ought to see his house at Finchley. A low, squat place completely hemmed in by trees. Damp as a swamp; smells like a jungle. Everything ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... term "Annulosa". In these I could not point out to you the parts that correspond with those of the Horse,—the backbone, for instance,—as they are constructed upon a very different principle, which is also common to all of them; that is to say, the Lobster, the Spider, and the Centipede, have a common plan running through their whole arrangement, in just the same way that the Horse, the Dog, and the Porpoise assimilate to ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... entirely satisfied. He was not a very wise youth, but he did know well enough, that, though big arms and legs are very good things, there is something besides size that goes to make a man; and he had heard stories of a fighting-man, called "The Spider," from his attenuated proportions, who was yet a terrible hitter in the ring, and had whipped many a big-limbed fellow, in and out ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... old storehouse on river front ... through trap into the water ... old Webb ... Spider Webb ... ten thousand dollar Moorcliffe jewel robbery ... cash box ... safe behind panelling in bedroom directly opposite the door ... false bottom ... afraid of the Wolf ... last few days ... unfinished ... Wolf does not know ... man and wife upstairs ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... calm yourself, my dear young lady. All I desire is to capture that spider crawling on your left arm. It is a very valuable variety of the red spotted species, and I must have it for my collection. Now just stand ...
— The Motor Boys on the Pacific • Clarence Young
... though originating in the secretion of a tiny caterpillar, is perhaps equally extraordinary. Hundreds of thousands of pounds weight of this slender thread, no thicker than the filaments spun by a spider, give employment to millions of workers throughout the world. Silk, and the many textures wrought from this beautiful material, had long been known in the East; but the period cannot be fixed when man first divested the chrysalis of its dwelling, ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... of London's Magazine of Natural History says, that he lately amused himself for more than an hour in observing the proceedings of a little spider, whose bag of eggs had ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... up a maze Of cobwebs with its dying blaze; Held by a grim black spider fast— Flashing with glory ...
— Daisy Dare, and Baby Power - Poems • Rosa Vertner Jeffrey
... Black Forest, on the mountainside, I saw an ant go through with such a performance as this with a dead spider of fully ten times his own weight. The spider was not quite dead, but too far gone to resist. He had a round body the size of a pea. The little ant —observing that I was noticing—turned him on his back, sunk his fangs into his throat, lifted him ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... another, fighting fiercely until they dropped. Even in his later days according to Hoylake, he was not ashamed of these exploits. The gamblers invented for themselves new refinements of sport or cruelty. Spider-racing. I do not suppose that anyone living to-day knows what spider-racing is. This was the manner of it. At night, when the big black-bellied spiders that haunted the lofts came out to spread their ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... in Ireland numerous words were preserved in common use, "the dregs of the old ancient Chaucer English", as he contemptuously calls it, which had become quite obsolete and forgotten in England itself. For example, they still called a spider an 'attercop'—a word, by the way, still in popular use in the North;—a physician a 'leech', as in poetry he still is called; a dunghill was still for them a 'mixen'; (the word is still common all ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... engine for some time and then crept slowly along a steel bridge that looked like a spider's web, from which she could look into the furnace-room, with its roaring fires, scorching heat and constantly clanging iron doors. For some minutes she gazed silently, then turning quickly, hurried across the bridge, up the greasy ...
— Dick in the Everglades • A. W. Dimock
... inspected the espaliers. Pecuchet tried to discover the buds. Sometimes a spider would scamper suddenly over the wall, and the two shadows of their bodies appeared magnified, repeating their gestures. The ends of the grass let the dew trickle out. The night was perfectly black, and everything remained motionless ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... on y'r sowl!" said he, "as there's plague in y'r body, and hell in the slide of y'r feet, like the trail of the red spider. And out o' that come ye, Heldon, for I know y're there. Out of that, ye beast! . . . But how can ye go back—you that's rolled in that sewer—to the loveliest woman that ever trod the neck o' the world! Damned y' are in every joint ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... love-e, love-e, with a cadence and tenderness in the tone that rang in the ear long afterward. The nest was suspended to the fork of a small branch, as is usual with the vireos, plentifully lined with lichens, and bound and rebound with masses of coarse spider-webs. There was no attempt at concealment except in the neutral tints, which make it look like a natural growth of ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... no sentimentalist,—does not cosset or pamper us. We must see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind drowning a man or a woman; but swallows your ship like a grain of dust.—The way of Providence is a little rude. The habit of snake and spider, the snap of the tiger and other leapers and bloody jumpers, the crackle of the bones of his prey in the coil of the anaconda,—these are in the system, and our habits are like theirs. You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... scortched rag wid lard jes hog lard en den put de belly band on den grease de baby all over. Neber wash de baby till tis over a week ole. Wen de babies had colic I'd take dirt dobber nest and make a tea, den giv did ter de baby. Sometimes If I couldn't fin no dirt dobber nes I would git a spider web and make a tea den giv dis or else jes shake de baby by de heels. If folks would tend ter babies like dey uster why dese people ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Kentucky Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... trips in the SHIKARAS or houseboats, shaded by red-embroidered canopies, coursing along the intricate channels of Dal Lake, a network of canals like a watery spider web. Here the numerous floating gardens, crudely improvised with logs and earth, strike one with amazement, so incongruous is the first sight of vegetables and melons growing in the midst of vast waters. Occasionally one sees a peasant, disdaining to be "rooted to the ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... temperature for them during the winter is about 35deg, and during their season of growth from 55deg to 65deg at night, and 75deg by day, the atmosphere being at the same time well charged with moisture. They are liable to the attacks of thrips and red spider, which do great mischief if not ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... itself is circular: the external area cut up into angles, and separated by walls running to a common centre. The interior is formed of a succession of circles, not inaptly compared by the satirical opponents of the scheme to a spider's web.[54] He afterwards accompanied his plans with minute definitions of the objects and ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... time or thought on country or freedom. No voluntary sacrifices to be expected here. What we want we must buy, and pay for; it is only to see that we do not pay too much for it. Selfish, timid, grasping, these people are a skittish set to deal with. Nobody understands better the game of 'the spider and the fly,' and they are as ready to play it with the state as with smaller opponents, if the state will but let them. From his first visit to this region, to the present time, our able Secretary of the Treasury was, and continues to be, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... dozen wrinkles on his brow, This fly began, around himself to peep, And question whence the building rose, and how? No maker of this work can I perceive, Quoth he—and that there is one, scarce believe; For who should such a maker be? "Art," said a spider sage. "Art built the work you see, For, wheresoever turns your eye, Fix'd laws, and order you descry; And hence, a fair conclusion grows, That from the hand of Art, the building rose." At this the fly, in his conceptions proud, ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... Revolution, and the Unitarian Societies. These insect reptiles, whilst they go on only caballing and toasting, only fill us with disgust; if they get above their natural size, and increase the quantity whilst they keep the quality of their venom, they become objects of the greatest terror. A spider in his natural size is only a spider, ugly and loathsome; and his flimsy net is only fit for catching flies. But, good God! suppose a spider as large as an ox, and that he spread cables about us, all the wilds of Africa would not produce anything ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... and the superfluous labourers were thrown out of employment. Yet it is to be observed, that the work thus executed was inferior in quality; not marketable at home, and merely hurried over with a view to exportation. It was called, in the cant of the trade, by the name of "Spider work." The rejected workmen, in the blindness of their ignorance, instead of rejoicing at these improvements in arts so beneficial to mankind, conceived themselves to be sacrificed to improvements in mechanism. In the foolishness of their hearts they imagined, that the maintenance ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... up the chilly stuff," replied Sam with a laugh. "It don't go with that mighty fine complexion of yours. Say, did you ever see the leading lady in 'The Spider's Web'? Well, you make me think of her, and she was a peacherino. Never seen her? No? Well, you ought to see her some day and think ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... it the best you can, and live one day at a time. The man that does this is conserving his God-given energy, and not spinning it out into tenuous spider threads so fragile and filmy that unkind Fate will probably ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... like to be a spider, an enormous spider, that all men might be drawn to my web as irresistibly as flies. With what satisfaction would I crunch them between my claws! How I would fasten my mouth against their hearts!... And I would suck them.... I would suck them until there wasn't ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... red spider is the money spider, and means good fortune coming to you. It must not be disturbed. Long-legged spiders are also forerunners ...
— Tea-Cup Reading, and the Art of Fortune-Telling by Tea Leaves • 'A Highland Seer'
... Astronomers take a thin thread from a spider's web and stretch it across their object glasses to measure stellar magnitudes. Just as is the spider's line in comparison with the whole shining surface of the sun across which it is stretched, so ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... could not point out to you the parts that correspond with those of the horse,—the backbone, for instance,—as they are constructed upon a very different principle, which is also common to all of them; that is to say, the lobster, the spider, and the centipede, have a common plan running through their whole arrangement, in just the same way that the horse, the dog, and the porpoise assimilate ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... was Court Day in Lexington. From the town, as a centre, white turnpikes radiated in every direction like the strands of a spider's web. Along them, on the day before, cattle, sheep, and hogs had made their slow way. Since dawn, that morning, the fine dust had been rising under hoof and wheel on every one of them, for Court Day is yet the great day of every month throughout the Bluegrass. The crowd had gone ahead of the Major ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... account of his troubles with space-sick voyagers. But I was in no mood to listen. My gaze was down on the spider incline, up which, over the bend of the ship's sleek, silvery body, the passengers and their friends were coming in little groups. The upper deck was already jammed ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... settled upon our spirits, dissimulate as we might, as the car swept into the cobble-paved courtyard of an albergo, a venerable grandfather of a hostelry, old, grim, and forbidding. Out came a large, fair man to welcome us, with calculation in his cold grey eye. He looked to me like a spider in his web, greeting some inviting flies. We broke the ice by asking for coffee, and when we were told that we must have it without milk, as there were no cows within a radius of many miles, I would have staked all my possessions (especially ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... sufficient to prevent any check in growth, and the fruit will be sweeter and ripen faster. The upper blossoms may be pinched off, so as to throw the whole strength of the plant into the lower berries. Keep off all runners; syringe the plants if infested with the red spider, and if the aphis appears, fumigate him ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... as from a swound:— "The Grail in my castle here is found! Hang my idle armour up on the wall, Let it be the spider's banquet-hall; 170 He must be fenced with stronger mail Who would seek and find ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... sitting in her shop-door at the corner of the street of San Simone, like an evil spider in its web, ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... curious ways are discoverable by the mere wood-lounger. At one time your way is barred by the great portcullis of the strong threaded web of the field spider, who sits like a porter in king's livery of black and gold at his gate. Then you have a peep into the winding maelstroem-funnel of another of the spider family. Poe must have suffered metempsychosis into the body of a blue-bottle, when he wrote his "Descent into the Maelstroem"; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... cable streamers. The balloons, anchored to the ground and carrying the nets with them, are sent up to a considerable altitude about large cities and important industrial centres. They are to the night aviators what the spider's web is ...
— Night Bombing with the Bedouins • Robert Henry Reece
... "down-east" plucky lad ships as cabin boy to earn a livelihood. Ned is marooned on Spider Island, and while there discovers a wreck submerged in the sand, and finds a considerable amount of treasure. The capture of the treasure and the incidents of the voyage serve to make as entertaining a story of sea-life as the ...
— Robert Coverdale's Struggle - Or, On The Wave Of Success • Horatio, Jr. Alger
... that I should hear the parody quoted through the years up till now almost as often as the original poem! Smifzer was wiser than Tennyson, for he never spoiled the effect of his poem by admitting, like Tennyson in his "Locksley Hall, Sixty Years After," that it was a good thing that "spider-hearted" Amy threw him over as ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... is the old guitar And moldering into decay; Fretted with many a rift and scar That the dull dust hides away, While the spider spins a silver star In its ...
— Riley Songs of Home • James Whitcomb Riley
... Boyle, with "Dr. Bentley's Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris examined." Swift entered into the war with a light heart, and matched the Ancients in defending them for the amusement of his patron. His incidental argument between the Spider and the Bee has provided a catch-phrase, "Sweetness and Light," to a ...
— The Battle of the Books - and Other Short Pieces • Jonathan Swift
... told," he said. "I had been sleeping like the dead—a perfectly dreamless sleep—till Mary woke us up with her cat-fight. That aroused me so thoroughly that I didn't go to sleep again for more than an hour. Then when I did drop off at nearly morning, I dreamed that there was a spider on my head, and I gave it a tremendous whack to kill it. It was no dream whack, I can tell you, but a real live double-fisted one, that made me see stars. It actually made a dent in my cranium and got me so wide awake that I ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... ground. I found that this was one of the ring-tailed species, the top of the tail being bare for about two inches, and formed like a white ring. 'Possums of this sort use their tails for climbing, like the spider-monkey of Africa. I found I could carry my ring-tailer hanging on to my finger, even ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... we bound most to admire—John Bell's pen or John Bell's needle? It is a difficulty. "The Devil's Webbe" is admirable in both. What a spider-like wretch is he, watching the toils ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... glitters from a random bow. The flies were buzzing in the sun, The bees were busy in the snow Of lilies, and the spider spun, And ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland
... bathe himself in the brook, and put on his finest court suit of pink satin rose-petals trimmed with lace from a spider's web; for the fairy queen had ordered a grand court ball in his honor, and there was no ...
— The Story-teller • Maud Lindsay
... and Mr. Hyde in every one of us. I heard the other day in our laboratory of a man who had taken and grafted one part of the body of an insect on the body of another. He tried it both on the chrysalis and on an insect too. I understood that he took the pupa of a spider and by very careful work grafted upon it the pupa of a fly. Think of what that monstrosity must have been when it passed out from the chrysalis and became a full-fledged living being. One part of it trying to get away from ...
— Winning His "W" - A Story of Freshman Year at College • Everett Titsworth Tomlinson
... burdocks, and the other fuming acid. Other side dishes, of turtles, rats, bats and moles, were garnished with live coals. For the fish course he ate a dish of snakes in boiling tar and pitch. His roast was a screech owl in a sauce of glowing brimstone. The salad proved to be spider webs full of small explosive squibs, a plate of butterfly wings and manna worms, a dish of toads surrounded with flies, crickets, grasshoppers, church beetles, spiders, and caterpillars. He washed all this down with flaming brandy, and for dessert ate the four ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini
... Leveson had a singular fellow-feeling for insects,—he studied their habits, and collected specimens of various kinds in bottles, or 'pinned' them on cardboard trays,—he was an interested observer of the sprightly manners practised by the harvest-bug, and the sagacious customs of the ruminating spider,—as well as the many surprising and agreeable talents developed by the common flea. Leach's virulent hatred of Maryllia Vancourt was not lessened by the apparently useful and scientific nature of the employment ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... monster spiders ran out from the holes and angles of the weir-frame, and spun webs across and across the straddling iron legs below the footbridge, right down to the lowered surface of the water, which had so sunk that each spider had at least four feet more of web than he could have reckoned upon before and waxed fat on the produce of the added superficies of enmeshed and immolated flies. So things went on almost till New ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... Jo, whom the men had nicknamed the "human spider," for his arms and legs were the thinnest of his species. He was saved from being grotesque, however, by a certain care-free grace, a litheness of movement. He had greenish-blue eyes that were set far apart and ...
— Penny of Top Hill Trail • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... that the Spider and the Bee, the Spider and the Bee, do both—something, but in troth I have forgott ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... little awakened in John. He liked best to be with boys, and their rough play suited him better than the amusements of the shrinking, fluttering, timid, and sensitive little girls. John had not learned then that a spider-web is stronger than a cable; or that a pretty little girl could turn him round her finger a great deal easier than a big bully of a boy could ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... upon him. I have been considering his argument against the possibility of any change in price arising out of a change in the value of labor, and I have detected a flaw in it which he can never get over. I have him, sir—I have him as fast as ever spider ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... whose guidance the Pradhna gives birth to all its effects, from the so-called Mahat downwards to individual things. This interpretation is confirmed by the comparisons set forth in the next sloka, 'As the spider sends forth and draws in its threads, as plants spring from the earth, as hair grows on the head and body of the living man, thus does everything arise here from the Indestructible.' The section therefore is concerned only with the Pradhna and the ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... beneath it, over a boulder-encumbered bed. I took in the situation at a glance, and then and there I would have changed that bridge for any swamp I have ever seen, yea, even for a certain bush-rope bridge in which I once wound myself up like a buzzing fly in a spider's web. I was fearfully tired, and my legs shivered under me after the falls and emotions of the previous part of the day, and my boots were slippery with ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... again. This work in itself constituted reason enough for the Allied airmen to sweep the sky of German observers, since only by "putting out the enemy's eye" could such secrets of camouflage be preserved. Wells were being bored by gas engine power and pipes laid, as spider webs, to bring untainted water to man and beast. Then, of course, shallow trenches had to be dug for telephone wires which otherwise would perish in the first onslaught of ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... Richmond. "I've never seen a snail in a towering passion or an oyster slamming its shell behind it. But these are sluggish things. Oysters sulk, which is after all a smouldering sort of rage. And take any more active invertebrate. Take a spider. Not a smashing and swearing sort of rage perhaps, but a disciplined, cold-blooded malignity. Crabs fight. A conger eel in a boat will ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... In shape no bigger than an agate stone On the fore-finger of an Alderman, Drawn with a team of little atomies, Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep: Her waggon spokes made of long spinners' legs; The cover of the wings of grasshoppers; The traces of the smallest spider's web; The collars of the moonshine's watery beams; Her whip of cricket's bone; the lash of film; Her waggoner, a small grey coated gnat, Not half so big as a round little worm, Prickt from the lazy finger of a maid. Her chariot is an empty hazel nut, Made ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... bottom of Kor, of which I was heartily tired. Who could desire to stay in a place where he had not only been involved in a deal of hard, doubtful, and very dangerous fighting from which all personal interest was absent, but where also he was meshed in a perfect spider's web of bewilderment, and exposed to continual insult ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... deserts, dreary wastes of eternal ice, plunged into darkness half the year; are we going simply to ignore these realities when we speak of the Divine indwelling in the world? And, once more, shall we assert this doctrine when we remember the cold cunning of the spider, or the delight in torture displayed ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... what was in your mind, What was in all our minds, and you weren't hinting. Tell you a story of what happened once: I was up here in Salem at a man's Named Sanders with a gang of four or five Doing the haying. No one liked the boss. He was one of the kind sports call a spider, All wiry arms and legs that spread out wavy From a humped body nigh as big's a biscuit. But work! that man could work, especially If by so doing he could get more work Out of his hired help. I'm not denying He was hard on himself. I couldn't find That he kept any hours—not for himself. Daylight ...
— North of Boston • Robert Frost
... indeed everywhere, a man is judged by his friends. Krauss tries to keep in with Rangoon society and poses as a brusque, eccentric sort of a fellow, with a rude manner and a good heart. The days of his grand dinner-parties came to an end some time ago. Now the fat grey spider at 'Heidelberg' has to rely more or less on his wife's pretty niece; she is bright and popular and attracts a lot of useful people into his web. To see that girl pouring out tea, or sitting at the piano, making delicious music, who would suppose that 'Heidelberg' was the headquarters ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... shining bayonet and iron ramrod, remained standing. "A full Treasury and 200,000 well-drilled men would be the one guarantee to your Pragmatic Sanction," Prince Eugene had said. But that bit of insight was not accepted at Vienna; Black-art, and Diplomatic spider-webs from pole to pole, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... much condescension, and in silence the two women crossed the meadows that lay between the shingle bank and the river. Trains were passing all the while, scattering, it seemed, in their noisy passage over the spider-legged bridge, the news from Goodwood. The news seemed to be borne along shore in the dust, and, as if troubled by prescience of the news, Mrs. Randal said, as she ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... the trap. I didn't see the wicked triumph in John Graham's heart. No power could have made me believe then that he wanted to possess only me; that he was horrible enough to want me even without love; that he was a great monster of a spider, and I the fly lured into his web. And the agony of it was that in all the years since Uncle Peter died I had dreamed strange and beautiful dreams. I lived in a make-believe world of my own, and I read, read, ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... A Spider and a Centipede went out to take a walk; The Centipede said frankly, "I will listen while you talk, But I may appear distracted, or assume a vacant stare, Because to keep my feet in step requires my ...
— The Jingle Book • Carolyn Wells
... wholly denuded of hair, And, except for two things, as bare as my nail,— A tuft of a mane and a sprig of a tail. Now such as the beast was, even such was the rider, With head like a nutmeg, and legs like a spider; A voice like a cricket, a look like a rat, The brains of a goose, and the heart of a cat: But now with our horses, what sound and what rotten, Down to the shore, you must know, we were gotten; And there we were told, it concerned us to ride, Unless we ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... spider who spreads with so much care his beautiful nets for gnats, and moths, and smaller flies, finds alike his labour and his toils in vain to secure this rampaging rogue; and, indeed, when the turbulent blue-bottle chances, in his bouncing random flight, to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 269, August 18, 1827 • Various
... are several curious varieties. One of them may be observed building its nest of moistened clay against a wall, and inclosing in each of its numerous compartments a living spider; thus revenging upon this bloodthirsty race the injuries sustained by harmless flies, and providently securing for its own young ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... was the first to look on her dead face, The morn I came: if she'd but lived a day— Just one day longer, she'd have let me go. No living woman could have held me here: But she was dead; and so, I had to stay— A fly, caught in the web of a dead spider. It must be her he favours: and he's got A dogged patience well-nigh crazes me: A husband, born, as I was never born For wife. But, happen, you ken him, well as I, Leastways, his company-side, since he does business At Bellingham? A happy ending, eh! For our mischances, they should make a match: ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
... speck, Looks down: nor in the wonderful and vast Of the dread scene magnificent, she views Alone the Almighty Ruler, but the web That shines in summer time, and only seen In the slant sunbeam, wakes a moral thought. In autumn, when the thin long spider gains 240 The leafy bush's top, he from his seat Shoots the soft filament, like threads of air, Scarce seen, into the sky; and thus sustained, Boldly ascends into the breezy void, Dependent on the trembling line he wove, Insidious, and intent on scenes ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles |
