"Toad" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... plants are armed against the animals, so the animals are armed against each other. Many of the insects and reptiles are extremely poisonous; the greater the heat of their habitat, the more dangerous are their bites. The horned toad, while not poisonous, is protected by having horny spines upon its head and back. The little rattlesnake known as the "side-winder" is perhaps the most dangerous of all, although the tarantula, centipede, and scorpion are formidable ...
— The Western United States - A Geographical Reader • Harold Wellman Fairbanks
... banished. And but for me, be well assured, Thou from this sphere must soon have vanished. In rocky hollows and in caverns drear, Why like an owl sit moping here? Wherefore from dripping stones and moss with ooze embued, Dost suck, like any toad, thy food? A rare, sweet pastime. Verily! The doctor cleaveth still ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Sir Thomas and Lady Vyell (the Protector's grand-daughter), they received instruction at the hands—often very literally at the hands—of the Rev. Isaac Toplady, Curate in Charge of Carwithiel, a dry scholar, a wet fly-fisher, and something of a toad-eater. They had for sole playmate and companion their Cousin Diana, or Di, the seven-year-old daughter of their eldest uncle, Thomas, heir to ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... mistake (a high authority informs me) in the explanation given in the dictionary. Toad-flax is certainly not a "mushroom," neither does it "stink." Is the Welsh word applied to both equivocally as distinct {468} objects? In Withering's Arrangement of British Plants, 7th edit., vol. iii., p. 734., 1830, the Welsh name of Antirrhinum Sinaria, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 58, December 7, 1850 • Various
... quite undisturbed, dropped on all fours and crawled into the black tent, at the tail of the hag. She croaked out a welcome to her visitor, and squatting on a tumbled mattress, leered at him like a foul old toad. Baltic sat down near the opening of the tent, so as to get as much fresh air as possible, and also to watch Mother Jael's face by the glimmer of light which crept in. Spreading his handsome handkerchief on his knee, according to custom, and placing his hat thereon, ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... one put a toad in his new uncle's pocket, and Emmy broke his specs. Then Meetie he dropped his watch. They used his razor to cut the lawn with. And then they took him down to the creek to go fishing, and they put the fish in Uncle's ...
— Our Next-Door Neighbors • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... TOAD EATER. A poor female relation, and humble companion, or reduced gentlewoman, in a great family, the standing butt, on whom all kinds of practical jokes are played off, and all ill humours vented. This appellation is derived from a mountebank's servant, ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... characters with charming indiscriminateness," I said. "Fox is only a sort of toad, you know—he won't ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... toad!" said Mrs. Harbonner, drawing her shawl tight round her for the last time. "But ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... last concluded gallantly, In spite of Ate and her hern-like thigh, Who, sitting, saw Penthesilea ta'en, In her old age, for a cress-selling quean. Each one cried out, Thou filthy collier toad, Doth it become thee to be found abroad? Thou hast the Roman standard filch'd away, Which they in rags of parchment ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... a strange and horrible sickness. The people, in their predisposition to believe in all sorts of extraordinary and rare afflictions, were certain that they knew what this was. Visanteta had a toad in her stomach. She had drunk from a certain spot of the near-by river, and the wicked animal, small and almost unnoticeable, had gone down into her stomach, growing fast. The good neighbors, trembling with stupefaction, flocked to la Soberana's cabin to examine the girl. All, with a certain ...
— Luna Benamor • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... rest, the lovely, flexible chain of stones she had been holding to her breast that night when Harlenden surprised her coming from the garden into the veranda—the thing he had shaken from her hand into her lap as if it had been a toad. She remembered Harlenden, now, as she gazed into the iridescent shapes of light, seeming to see in their brilliant, shallow depths worlds of romance that every-day life knew not of. At last she caught the thing up and kissed it burningly, then pressed it against ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... this world. Satan promised his worshippers unlimited pleasure; he became the redeemer of those whom the clergy persecuted. It is asserted that his worship consisted in an obscene parody of the Mass; according to Michelet, the body of a female worshipper served as the altar on which a toad was consecrated and partaken of instead of the Host. The adept solemnly renounced Jesus and did homage to ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... that will be," said the observant toad. "You will love me best till you have got me; and then I shall love you best; oh, ever ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... rickets plague thee not at all: Had I not been, so hadst thou, sure, Walked thyself off this earthly ball Why here to caverns, rocky hollows slinking, Sit'st thou, as 'twere an owl a-blinking? Why suck'st, from sodden moss and dripping stone, Toad-like, thy nourishment alone? A fine way, this, thy time to fill! The ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... which still held Juan's, by degrees Gently, but palpably confirmed its grasp, As if it said, "Detain me, if you please;" Yet there's no doubt she only meant to clasp His fingers with a pure Platonic squeeze; She would have shrunk as from a toad, or asp, Had she imagined such a thing could rouse A feeling dangerous to ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... no one to eat our feast but a few idle rogues, who would get beef and ale for nothing, we shall but lay ourselves open to mockery, and get further into discredit. Thus, betwixt one fear and another, I lay like a toad under a harrow, all night, in a mortal sweat ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... thought Nelly. And indeed it seemed so, for just then a blackbird, sitting on the garden wall, burst out with a song full of musical joy, Nelly's kitten came running after to stare at the wagon and rub her soft side against it, a bright-eyed toad looked out from his cool bower among the lily-leaves, and at that minute Nelly found her first patient. In one of the dewy cobwebs hanging from a shrub near by sat a fat black and yellow spider, watching a fly whose delicate wings were just caught in the net. The poor fly buzzed pitifully, ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... honors," said he, "I'm able, By means of a secret charm, to draw All creatures living beneath the sun, That creep or swim or fly or run, After me so as you never saw! 75 And I chiefly use my charm On creatures that do people harm, The mole and toad and newt and viper; And people call me the Pied Piper." (And here they noticed round his neck 80 A scarf of red and yellow stripe, To match with his coat of the self-same check; And at the scarf's end hung a pipe; And his fingers, they noticed, were ever straying As if ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... past that problematical animal, the toad-in-a-hole (literal, not culinary) has been one of the most familiar and interesting personages of contemporary folk-lore and popular natural history. From time to time he turns up afresh, with his own wonted perennial vigour, on paper at least, in company with the great sea-serpent, ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... have seen him embark, and your father may have carried a musket under him. Your grandmother may have cried huzza for Marlborough but what is the Prince Duke to you, and did you ever, so much as hear tell of his name? How many hundred or thousand of years had that toad lived who was in the coal at the defunct Exhibition?—and yet he was not a bit better informed than toads seven or eight hundred ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... London tea-shops have of course to supplement their wages by prostitution—probably don't object to that nowadays considering the novels we have. And his effect on the landscape——Until they stopped him he was trying very hard to get Shakespear's Cliff at Dover. He did for a time have the Toad Rock at Tunbridge. Still"—something like a sigh escaped from Toomer,—"his private life appears to be almost as blameless as anybody's can be.... Thanks no doubt to his defective health. I made the most careful ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... to a frog living in the inland parts of New South Wales, Notaden bennettii, Guenth., which tides over times of drought in burrows, and feeds on ants. Called also "Holy Cross Toad." The names are given in consequence of a large cross-shaped ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... she is Pash's companion; she has lived with Lady Pash since the peace. Nor does my Lady take any more notice of her than of the dust of the earth. She calls her "poor Muchit," and considers her a half-witted creature. Mrs. Berry hates her cordially, and thinks she is a designing toad-eater, who has formed a conspiracy to rob her of her aunt's fortune. She never spoke a word to poor Muchit during the whole of dinner, or offered to help her to anything on ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... made to subserve a purpose. In local affairs the most vulgar nicknaming, the most savage irony, vituperation, scorn and contempt were poured out full measure on certain individuals unpopular with the papers. Such epithets as "lickspittle," "toad," "carcass blown with the putrefying gas of its own importance," were read in the ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... monstrosity, all toad-like head and eyes, swam into the light beam and bumped blindly against the glass ball. For an instant it goggled crazily at us. The Professor took its picture. It blundered away. As it reached ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... selection of man-groups and creature-kinds, and things. So they called the people of the southern space the Children of Summer, and those who loved the sun most became the Sun people. Others who loved the water became the Toad people, or Turtle people, or Frog people. Others loved the seeds of the earth and became the Seed people, or the people of the First-growing grass, or of the Tobacco. Those who loved warmth were the Fire or Badger people. According to their natures ...
— Myths and Legends of California and the Old Southwest • Katharine Berry Judson
... [45] Whose are these gold-crested arrows whetted on stones, the lower halves of which are well-furnished with wings of the hue of parrots' feather and the upper halves, of well-tempered steels? [46] Whose is this excellent sword irresistible, and terrible to adversaries, with the mark of a toad on it, and pointed like a toad's head? [47] Cased in variegated sheath of tiger-skin, whose is this large sword of excellent blade and variegated with gold and furnished with tinkling bells? Whose ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... ages and ages ago, the toad had a smooth skin. In those days he was a great gad about. He never could be found in his own house. If any one had a party he was sure to go, no matter how far away from home it was held, or how long it ...
— Fairy Tales from Brazil - How and Why Tales from Brazilian Folk-Lore • Elsie Spicer Eells
... respect, the toad has been treated with great injustice: it is a torpid, harmless animal, that passes the greatest part ...
— Parker's Second Reader • Richard G. Parker
... Toad, that under the cold stone, Days and nights hast thirty-one, Swelter'd venom sleeping got, Boil thou first i' ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... feeling along the wall in stifling closes. It is an eerie and mysterious position to be thus submerged in opaque blackness in an almost unknown town. The silence is terrifying in its possibilities. The touch of cold window-bars to the exploring hand startles the man like the touch of a toad; the inequalities of the pavement shake his heart into his mouth; a piece of denser darkness threatens an ambuscade or a chasm in the pathway; and where the air is brighter, the houses put on strange and bewildering appearances, as if to lead him farther from ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... still alive in the liquor she threw, And loud shrieked the toad as in pieces it flew: And ever, the cauldron as over she bent, She muttered strange words ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... and velvet bind The temples of that cringing thief? Is it so strange a thing to find A toad beneath a ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... where the field mouse and the toad Have burrowed; where, beside the road, The grasshopper and katydid All winter have been safely hid; And when the bumblebee will come A-booming back with pleasant hum? April can tell you, for 'tis she Opens the door ...
— Dew Drops Vol. 37. No. 17, April 26, 1914 • Various
... flying upward to meet the quick-falling skies—O, that universal crash!—greeted in a new-entered world with the execrations of the assembled dead—that hollow, far-echoing, malicious laughter—that hurricane-sound of clattering skulls; to be pent up, stifling like a toad, in a limestone rock for centuries; to be haunted, hunted, hooted; to eat off one's own head with its cruel madly crunching under-jaw; to—but enough of horrors: and as to delights, all that Delacroix suggests of perfume, and Mahomet of Houris, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... alone, for they will spoil any room. One of them has a plain general tone but a suggestion of other colors which give it a blurred and mottled appearance which is singularly disagreeable. Another is plain in color but has a lumpy effect like a toad's back, and is really quite awful. Others are metallic papers, and there is a heavy paper embossed in self color with a conventional design which is apt to have a shining surface. Papers with dashes and little flecks of gold should be avoided, for the gold gives the wall an ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... [Footnote: Richard Baxter, as he himself tells us, sent communications from the country to Edwards. His correspondents were legion, but he concealed their names.] Yet there was a kind of coarse business-like conscientiousness in the toad; and, though he was credulous and unscrupulous in his collections of scandal, I do not believe he invented documents or lied deliberately. I do not doubt, therefore, that Mrs. Attaway, whether she went ultimately to Jericho or to Jerusalem, did know ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... for flowers, over the ragged ascent from whence the boulders came. Everywhere about is the trumpet creeper, but not yet in bloom. The Indian turnip is in blossom here, and so the smaller Solomon's seal, yellow spikes of toad-flax, blue and pink phlox, glossy May apple; high up on the hillside, the fire pink and wintergreen; and, down by the sandy shore, great beds of blue wild lupin, and occasionally stately spikes of ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... Wotan and Loge in search of the gold. Then we meet the Nibelungs and the Nibelights, all livers under a water-cure system; and then—it's like a musical nightmare—Alberich changes himself into a toad and is towed off as a prisoner. Fafner settles Fasolt by a drum-head Court Martial, so that Fafner gets the golden honey, and Fasolt gets the whacks—and—please, Sir, I don't know any more—but some of the music is running river-like and lovely, more is puzzling, and much of it must ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, July 2, 1892 • Various
... the doctor at the threshold. "If you choose to make toad-pie of your life, it's no business of mine. I'll drop in later for a good-night ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... as he gave the prairie dog some crackers and cheese. "You see, dad told me I could pick up some pet animals while I was in Texas, and I got quite a collection while dad was in the hospital. Here is one in my pocket," and the boy took a horned toad out of his pocket, about as big as a soft-shelled crab, and put it in the old ...
— Peck's Bad Boy With the Cowboys • Hon. Geo. W. Peck
... uncouthness. I dare say he would have given worlds if he might have had that little hand within his arm; but, though she still kept silence, she shuddered up away from him, as you shrink from touching a toad. He had said something to her during that walk, you may be sure, which had made her loathe him. He marked and understood the gesture. He held himself aloof while Pierre gave her all the assistance he could in their slow progress homewards. But Morin accompanied ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell
... another round fish, called from its shape the Globe-fish, and from its skin the "Sea-hedgehog"; it is covered with sharp thorns, and has the power, by swallowing air, of so greatly increasing its size (without sharing the fate of the poor toad in AEsop's Fable) that it not only can rise to the surface of the water, but float as long as it pleases. Then there are the blue Flying-herrings, with long fins, which you would see if you took a voyage to Australia. These poor little creatures have enemies both ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... the great cause of degeneration in murder. "Very soon, sir," he used to say, "men will have lost the art of killing poultry: the very rudiments of the art will have perished!" In the year 1811 he retired from general society. Toad-in-the-hole was no more seen in any public resort. We missed him from his wonted haunts—nor up the lawn, nor at the wood was he. By the side of the main conduit his listless length at noontide he would stretch, and pore upon the filth that muddled by. "Even dogs are not what they were, ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... unchristian. Were he proud of her, as a Christian husband ought to be of so elegant a wife, would he still be in Bloomsbury? Envy him! the high gentleman, so true to his blood, all galled and blistered by the moral vulgarities of a tuft-hunting, toad-eating mimic of the Lady Selinas. Envy him! Well, why not? All women have their foibles. Wise husbands must bear and forbear. Is that all? wherefore, then, is her aspect so furtive, wherefore on his a wild, vigilant sternness? Tut, ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... concentrated all his faculties and found all his excitement in vengeance hot and strong, without a grain of sugar. In which I gladly sympathised and aided, for I detested Johnson as a renegade Copperhead, or rather venomous toad to the South, who wished with all his soul to undo Lincoln's work and bring in the Confederacy. And I believe, on my life and soul, that if John Forney had not defeated him, we should have had such disasters as are now inconceivable, the ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... old sinner, "it's hard to say what's best,—powder of toad's bone or the mixture of wormwood and adder's fat. The safest thing ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... towards his home. In approaching the door, his toe kicked something which felt and sounded soft, leathery, and distended, like a boxing-glove. It was a large toad humbly travelling across the path. Oak took it up, thinking it might be better to kill the creature to save it from pain; but finding it uninjured, he placed it again among the grass. He knew what this direct message from the Great Mother meant. ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... most discomposing contretemps, for presently Miss JESSIMINA uttered the complaint that two strangers were regarding herself and Miss SPINK with the brazen eyes of a sheep, and even making personal comments on my nationality, which rendered me like toad under a harrow with ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... the overbearing mastery which Alberich has established in Nibelheim. When Alberich appears, Wotan and Loge cunningly beguile him to exhibit the powers of his new treasures. The confiding dwarf, in order to display the quality of the Tarnhelm, first changes himself into a snake and then into a toad. While he is in the shape of the latter, Wotan sets his foot upon him, Loge snatches the Tarnhelm from his head, and together they bind him and carry him off to the upper air. When he has conveyed his prisoner in safety to the mountain-top, Wotan bids him summon ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... for two pence he shall get at any time the prayers of some poor body that is worth a 1000 of all their curses; Lord Norwich drawing a tooth at a health. Another time, he and Pinchbacke and Dr. Goffe, now a religious man, Pinchbacke did begin a frolick to drink out of a glass with a toad in it that he had taken up going out to shit, he did it without harm. Goffe, who knew sacke would kill the toad, called for sacke; and when he saw it dead, says he, "I will have a quick toad, and will not drink from a ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... Oberon, regard your lotion as an eye-opener, rather than as an eye-closer? You remember the story the storks told the children, of the little girl who was a toad by day, only her sweet dark eyes being left to her. But at night, when the Prince clasped her close to his breast, lo! again she became the king's daughter, fairest and fondest of women. There be many royal ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... city. He had offended Jefferson Davis, then Secretary of War, by his irreverent wit, and was punished by exile to this then almost unknown region, which he called "Sandy Ague," chiefly inhabited by the flea, the horned toad, and the rattlesnake. Mr. Ames, of the Herald, a democratic paper, asked Derby, a stanch whig, to occupy the editorial chair during a brief absence. He did so, changing its politics at once, and furnishing funny articles which later appeared as "Phoenixiana," and ranked him with Artemus ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... do anything for a living, as we would say at home; and they mainly occupy the sea-shore, living on whatever mussels they can manage to pick up, and the blubber of any occasional fish they come across. I'm told they also eat that toad-stool we see growing on the beech trees; and if they'd do that, they'd eat anything! Sometimes they venture out long distances to sea in their rude canoes, like catamarans, which they contrive out of a couple of branches of a tree and ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
... punishments of a hundred lines of Vergil, by wholesome good-cheer and limpid forgetfulness of self in drawing pictures of spiders and noting the difference between a wasp and a bee, a butterfly and a moth, a frog and a toad, a mushroom and a toadstool. And so the reason Rousseau is read is because there is much in his work that is essentially modern. No thinker writes on political economy without quoting the "Social Contract," either for the sake of bolstering his own argument, or to show the folly ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... for a tramp like you to insult gentlemen like us," continued the lackey, in an imposing tone. "And did you not say that when I took Mademoiselle to mass I looked like a green toad upon the box,... thus trying to dishonor my physique and my clothes? Did you not ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... boy who, squatted like a toad on a horse's back, was galloping to market with several skins of milk slung on either side of the saddle, so that there was no ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... is to say he was not a mere screw; but he was acute and malicious; saw everybody's worth and position at a glance; could not bear to expend his choice wines and costly viands on hangers-on and toad-eaters, though at the same time no man encouraged and required hangers-on and toad-eaters more. Lord Marney had all the petty social vices, and none of those petty social weaknesses which soften their harshness or their hideousness. ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... most unfavourable exterior, there was one trait in the features of both which argued alertness and intelligence in the most uncommon degree. This arose from the brilliancy of their eyes, which, deep-set beneath black and shaggy brows, gleamed with a lustre which, like that in the eye of the toad, seemed to make some amends for the extreme ugliness of ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... I must not forget my horned toad, Diego, that I got in California. I keep him in the green-house, and he is very happy catching flies and holding his horny head to be scratched whenever any ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... Excellency, seeing I never asked for anything, but only for his favour. Accordingly, this wholly unexpected way of dealing with me put me in a fury, and I was especially enraged by the manner which that venomous toad assumed in discharging his commission. I exclaimed that if the Duke gave me ten thousand crowns I should not be paid enough, and that if I had ever thought things would come to this haggling, I should not have settled in his service. ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... should be watching for any one to come for the note, they could see him a long way off crossing the fields or in the road. But no, siree! At half-past eight I was up in that tree as well hidden as a tree toad, waiting ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... none? What, I, I, who have shamed kings in luxury,—I to die on the gibbet, among the reeking, gaping, swinish crowd with whom—O God, that I were one of them even! that I were the most loathsome beggar that ever crept forth to taint the air with sores! that I were a toad immured in a stone, sweltering in the atmosphere of its own venom! a snail crawling on these very walls, and tracking his painful path in slime!—anything, anything, but death! And such death! The gallows, the ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... tute (tell you) it was a jomper? for if a toad's a hanimal, jomper must be the ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... very familiar with alchemical literature, Mr Wraxall spends much space which he might have spared in setting out the names and beginnings of the various treatises: The book of the Phoenix, book of the Thirty Words, book of the Toad, book of Miriam, Turba philosophorum, and so forth; and then he announces with a good deal of circumstance his delight at finding, on a leaf originally left blank near the middle of the book, some writing of Count ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary • Montague Rhodes James
... in under the name of one of his creditors, a little toad named Sauvaignou. Desroches, the lawyer, has taken the case, and you'll get a notice to-morrow. This affair will oblige Claparon, Dutocq, and me to raise funds. What would become of me without Claparon! ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... of such aversion or abhorrence than to the state of mind that so regards it; in common use abomination signifies something very much disliked or loathed, or that deserves to be. Choice food may be an object of aversion and disgust to a sick person; vile food would be an abomination. A toad is to many an object of disgust; a foul sewer is an abomination. As applied to crimes, abomination is used of such as are especially brutal, shameful, or revolting; theft is an offense; infanticide is ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... so long—I ax Jesus one day carry me next day! Can't make up my bed. Like an old hog sleep on a tussick." (I always heard it 'Toad on a ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... nearly covered with inscriptions, one dated 1720 and some farther back than that. We had a drink of water from the well, but afterwards, when sitting on the seat, saw at the bottom of the well a great black toad, which we had not noticed when drinking the water. The sight of it gave us a slight attack of the horrors, for we had a particular dread of toads. We saw at the side of the road a large house which was ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... own this wondrous sabre, shape of toad is on the hilt, On the blade a toad is graven, and ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... it. You talk like I'm a horned toad or somethin', to set folks on the run the minute ...
— Isle o' Dreams • Frederick F. Moore
... moonlit air grew sweet, We heard the pad of stealthy feet Dogging us down the thin white road; And the song grew weary again and harsh, And the black trees dripped like the fringe of a marsh, And a laugh crept out like a shadowy toad; And we knew it was neither ghoul nor djinn: It was Creeping Sin! ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... round-joint tapped and riveted tip top and bottom a knife made under an act of Congress at the rate of thirty-six dollars per dozen there is a blade for every day in the week and a handle for your wife to play with on Sunday it will cut cast-iron steam steel wind or bone and will stick a hog frog toad or the devil and has a spring on it like a mule's hind leg and sells in ...
— Twenty Years of Hus'ling • J. P. Johnston
... girl: 'She is enraged at the Harlowes;' she is 'angry at her own mother;' she is exasperated against her foolish and low-vanity'd Lovelace.' FOOLISH, a little toad! [God forgive me for calling such a virtuous girl a toad!]—'Let us stoop to lift the wretch out of his dirt, though we soil our fingers in doing it! He has not been guilty of direct indecency to you.' ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... would go off along the white road that led to Garchester, and on to Crogate and so to Tunbridge Wells, where there was a Toad Rock he had heard of, but never seen. (It seemed to him this must needs be a marvel.) And so to other towns and cities. He would walk and loiter by the way, and sleep in inns at night, and get an odd job here and there ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... permitted the pleasing impression that Ridgwell had unconsciously created to have its full effect upon the Court, and upon everybody present with the exception of Mr. Learned Bore, whose countenance alone wore the disgusted and horrified expression that might have been expected had a great green toad been introduced into the witness-box. Mr. Learned Bore's countenance afforded a strange study of nausea ...
— The Tale of Lal - A Fantasy • Raymond Paton
... young Lieutenant, a page boy in love, Steps out—and stands lost in thought. The baggage train waddles along at the rear. The moon makes everything much stranger. And now and then the drivers cry out: Stop! High up on the shakiest munitions truck, Like a little toad, finely chiseled Out of black wood, hands gently clenched, On his back the rifle, gently buckled, A smoking cigar in his crooked mouth, Lazy as a monk, needy as a dog —He had pressed drops of valerian on his heart— In the yellow moon, ...
— The Verse of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... handkerchiefs, use big words, talk about parties, but who would be quite at a loss how to use a hoop or a jump rope—little pale, candy-fed creatures, with lustreless eyes, flabby limbs, and no more life than a toad imbedded in a rock,—little tailor and milliner "lay ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... skins of turkeys, and they spread their wings out and floated in the air just above the surface of the water, and in this way they got across. There were saved of our people Water, Corn, Lizard, Horned Toad, Sand, two families of Rabbit, and Tobacco. The turkey tail dragged in the water—hence the white on the turkey tail now. Wearing these turkey-skins is the reason why old people have dewlaps under the chin like a turkey; it is also the reason why old people use turkey-feathers ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various
... of adders thine abode, With the earth-crawling serpent and the toad. Trust in the Lord, He will sustain thee there, And without fear thy ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... desert. The road now, but for the shifting of the sands, would have been marked by the bodies of dead cattle, in death scarcely more bone and parchment than for days they had been while alive. The horned toad, the cactus, the rattlesnake long since had replaced the prairie dogs of the grassy floor of the eastern Plains. A scourge of great black crickets appeared, crackling loathsomely under the wheels. Sagebrush and sand took ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... he swore he would come away at that flask, there I left him. I wonder at the civility of these people; when he saw I would drink no more, he would always pass the bottle by me, and yet I could not keep the toad from drinking himself, nor he would not let me go neither, nor Masham, who was with us. When I got home, I found a parcel directed to me, and opening it, I found a pamphlet written entirely against myself, ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... both men were disengaged, and both keenly interested in the case. By that evening, Horace Mayfield was talking it all over with me in the hotel at Southampton. "Well, Hubert, my boy," he said, "a woman, we know, can do a great deal"; he smiled his familiar smile, like a genial fat toad; "but if your Yorke-Bannerman succeeds in getting a confession out of Sebastian, she'll extort my admiration." He paused a moment, then he added, in an afterthought: "I say that she'll extort my admiration; but, ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... wood a nightingale trilled and sang, piped and gurgled. The birches were not thriving, their trunks were black. The beeches built high temples, layer upon layer of streaky green. A toad sat and took aim with its tongue. It caught a fly at every shot. A hedgehog trotted about in the dried, rustling beech leaves. Dragonflies darted about with glittering wings. The people sat down around the luncheon-baskets. ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... alone in the wood, he rejoiced wickedly, and said, "Now I will rid myself of a foe;" and he flew down upon the poor Tintabel, and being a more powerful fairy, he caught him, and pinned his wings together with magic thorns, and fastened him down with them among the fungus and toad-stools of the damp wood. Then he flew away exulting, and painted day and night. It was a magnificent picture, with stately figures, powerful and triumphant, and Orgolino's heart swelled with pride at his work, and he said to himself, "I might ...
— Harper's Young People, February 17, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... recovering from the spectacle of two pounds of the best maize shoving themselves into a brown-paper bag and pushing off down the High Street, when a witch came in. The grocer's heart sank into his boots. He hated witches. If you weren't civil, before you knew where you were, you were a three-legged toad or a dew-pond or something. So you had to be civil. As for their custom—well, it wasn't worth having. They wouldn't look at bacon, unless you'd guarantee that the pig had been killed on a moonless Friday with the wind in the North, and as for pulled figs, if you ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... our woodfolk, Grand-daddy," began Nimble-toes. "No one could write a letter, so they told me what to say. I've said it forty-'leven times, lest I forget. The message is from Pa Field-Mouse, Squire Cricket, Sir Spider, Daddy Grasshopper, Mr. Hop Toad, and Mr. Jack Rabbit. ...
— Grand-Daddy Whiskers, M.D. • Nellie M. Leonard
... lying in her pretty little bed, an old toad crept in through a broken pane in the window. She was very ugly, clumsy, and clammy; she hopped on to the table where Thumbelina lay asleep ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Leonora Blanche Alleyne Lang
... said Jack, laughing. "It's some kind of big frog or toad: they live in such marshy places as this, and they croak and make noises that seem to be ever so far-off, when ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... toad, and said he had no place to put him, but the butterfly was a beauty, and if Mrs. Jo would give him a big pin, he would stick it right ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... defiers of sleep seem not to remember that though it must be granted them that they are crawling about before the break of day, it can seldom be said that they are perfectly awake; they exhaust no spirits, and require no repairs; but lie torpid as a toad in marble, or at least are known to live only by an inert and sluggish locomotive faculty, and may be said, like a wounded snake, to "drag ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... the croaking of the toad, In their caves that make abode; Earthy Dun that pants for breath, With her swelled sides full of death; By the crested adders' pride, That along the clifts do glide; By thy visage fierce and black; By the death's-head on thy back; By the twisted serpents placed For a girdle round thy waist; By ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... their sport because of what had befallen Master Brookes, but continued at the hunting until they had brought down two wild boars and also an animal fashioned like unto nothing I had ever seen before. It was something after the manner of a serpent, but speckled on the stomach as is a toad, and Captain Smith believed the true name of it to be Iguana, the like of which he says that he has often seen in other countries and that its flesh ...
— Richard of Jamestown - A Story of the Virginia Colony • James Otis
... the remainder of which he lapped me up to the head for further security, and in this manner carried me home to his house. There he called his wife, and showed me to her; but she screamed and ran back, as women in England do at the sight of a toad or a spider. However, when she had awhile seen my behavior, and how well I observed the signs her husband made, she was soon reconciled, and by degrees ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... with their umbrellas, as they sit in the front row. The new man is known by his clothes, which incline to the prevalent fashion of the rural districts he has quitted; and he evinces an affection for cloth-boots, or short Wellingtons with double soles, and toes shaped like a toad's mouth, a propensity which sometimes continues throughout the career of his pupilage. He likewise takes off his hat when he enters the dissecting-room, and thinks that beautiful design is shown in the mechanism ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 9, 1841 • Various
... in the streets of our lovely little city, the other day. I met the meanest kind of critter that God ever made—meaner than the horned toad or the Texas lallapaluza! (Laughter.) And do you know what the animile was? He was a knocker! (Laughter ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... broke into a blaze. "I know! Orma Fry, and that toad of a Targatt girl and Ben Fry, like as not. He's going round with her. The low-down sneaks—I always knew they'd try to have me out! As if anybody ever came ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... sights we see in our daily drives Shimmer of lake and shine of sea, Browne's bare hill with its lonely tree, (It was n't then as we see it now, With one scant scalp-lock to shade its brow;) Dusky nooks in the Essex woods, Dark, dim, Dante-like solitudes, Where the tree-toad watches the sinuous snake Glide through his forests of fern and brake; Ipswich River; its old stone bridge; Far off Andover's Indian Ridge, And many a scene where history tells Some shadow of bygone terror dwells,— Of "Norman's Woe" with its tale of dread, Of ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... horribly outraged, but even in that critical moment, justice insisted that Lark's arguments were sound. The professor had certainly asked the scholars to bring him "things to cut up." But a toad! A live one!—And the Ladies' ...
— Prudence of the Parsonage • Ethel Hueston
... any flower people for our house," she said. "It's already rented." And sure enough, there on the green moss couch was a fat brown toad. He was winking and blinking and looking much pleased with his ...
— Five Little Friends • Sherred Willcox Adams
... remaining reptiles in this country are two species of Frog, two species of Toad, and four Newts. They are not only most absolutely harmless, but, the frogs, at any rate, and toads, are ministers to man; and they belong to a class of animals more interesting than any other, perhaps, in the whole ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... trial of Algernon Sidney, at which Jeffreys presided, like a great crimson toad, sweltering and swelling with rage. 'I pray God, Mr. Sidney,' said this Chief Justice of a merry reign, after passing sentence, 'to work in you a temper fit to go to the other world, for I see you are ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... Poor Wrinkled Brown Toad hopped away and Lesa was left alone. "Oh, what shall I do? What shall I do?" she cried. "Oh, my comb, my golden comb! Some harm will surely come to me if I do not find it!" And, throwing herself upon the ground, Lesa sobbed as if her ...
— A Kindergarten Story Book • Jane L. Hoxie
... of a sexual union between the most helpless and enslaved females of the dark race and the most recklessly dominant males of the white. "He enters a world in which there was no place prepared for him." His father was about as sensible of his parental obligations towards him as a toad towards its spawn in the next ditch. To him he "was a broken wineglass from last night's feast." "Often without a family, always without a nation or race, without education or moral training, and despised by the society in which he was born," is it any ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... this war, as the master mind of all the ages said of adversity, that "its uses are sweet," even though they be as a precious jewel shining in the head of an ugly and venomous toad. While the world-war has brutalized men, it has as a moral paradox added immeasurably to the sum of human nobility. Its epic grandeur is only beginning to reveal itself, and in it the human soul has reached the high water ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... lightened from heaven. If I saw up there the warning, 'You shall not!' I would go. But, look on me!" she smote contempt upon her bosom. "He would not call to such a thing as me. Me, now? My skin is like a toad's to him. I've become like something in the dust. I could hiss like adders. I am quite impenitent. I pray by my bedside, my head on my Bible, but I only say, 'Yes, yes; that's done; that's deserved, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Aretino's Angelica, Petrarch's Laura, Catullus's Lesbia, and eight other far-famed objects of poetic adoration, Harvey suddenly denounces her in burlesque rhyme as 'a serpent in brood,' 'a poisonous toad,' 'a heart of marble,' and 'a stony mind as passionless as a block.' Finally he ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... me of that base, dishonourable Presbyterian fellow, Bridgenorth," said Sir Geoffrey; "and I would as lief think of a toad:—they say he has turned Independent, to accomplish the full degree of rascality.—I tell you, Gill, I turned off the cow-boy, for gathering nuts in his woods—I would hang a dog that would so much as kill a hare there.—But what is the matter ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... discussion with a jest. An ill-timed levity often takes me by surprise. On all such occasions I think of a scene at the University, where, in the midst of a grave discussion on the possibility of Absolute Motion, a scholar said he had seen a rock splitopen, from which sprang a toad, who could not be supposed to have any knowledge of the external world, and consequently his motion must have been absolute. The learned Professor, who presided on that occasion, was hardly more startled and ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... original and inward pollution; That, that was my plague and affliction, that I saw at a dreadful rate, always putting forth itself within me; that I had the guilt of, to amazement; by reason of that, I was more loathsome in mine own eyes than was a toad, and I thought I was so in God's eyes too: Sin and corruption, I said, would as naturally bubble out of my heart, as water would bubble out of a fountain: I thought now, that every one had a better heart than I had; I could have changed heart ...
— Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners • John Bunyan
... Lord Glenelg's case showed that colonial secretaries were punished when they got into bad messes, and his passion for messes was punished, in the language of the journals of the day, by the life of a toad under a harrow until he was worried out of office. There was, however, no force in public opinion to prevent the minister from going wrong if he liked; still less to prevent him from going right if he liked. Popular feeling was coloured by no wish to give up the colonies, but ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... been ever so ready to believe my own heart's desire, how could I but stifle it at that? It seemed as if the iron spikes of trouble were thrust from solid bars of fate woven this way and that across me, till with the last and newest complication I grew to knowing no more where to turn than the toad beneath ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the rank credulity of the times. If an old woman scolded a carter, and later on in the day his cart got stuck in the mud or overturned, it was positive evidence that he and his cart and horse had been "bewitched"! If an old woman kept a black cat or a pet toad, it was most assuredly her "familiar," and she was branded as a witch forthwith. If cows sickened and died, it was because a "spell" had been cast over them; and so on and so on. The superstitions of witchcraft were as innumerable as they were extraordinary. Are there ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... be done and then asks us to do them. He longed so for "squirms" that Tony got a wooden box and made little divisions and brings him in a lot of new ones almost every day. They fill Roxanne's days and nights with terror. And it is upsetting to see the fishing-worms in the dirt, while the hop-toad stays out on the bed a good deal of the time; but we have to stand it and smile at it in our voices while talking to him, even if we have terror in our faces. Yesterday Uncle Pompey spent most of his time ...
— Phyllis • Maria Thompson Daviess
... severed neck, and a handle connects the top of the rim with the back of the vessel. The handle being broken off and the vessel inverted, b, there is a decided change; we are struck by the resemblance to a frog or toad. The original legs, having dark concentric lines painted around them, look like large protruding eyes, and the mouth gapes in the most realistic manner, while the two short broken ends of the handle resemble ...
— Origin and Development of Form and Ornament in Ceramic Art. • William Henry Holmes
... of nerve, but not enough to enable him to bear up against this sinister persecution. Yet what could he do? Suppose he did beware to the extent of withdrawing his support from the royalist movement, what then? Bombito. If ever there was a toad under the harrow, he was that toad. And all because a perfectly respectful admiration for the caoutchouc had led him to occupy a stage-box several nights in succession at the theater where the peerless Maraquita tied ...
— A Man of Means • P. G. Wodehouse and C. H. Bovill
... last," and he hurried down the road toward the approaching train, the cat bounding along at his side, or running off every few feet, now this way, now that, to chase a butterfly or mosquito hawk. Once, in her haste to overtake her master, she encountered a horned toad. With a spring to one side, and a loud "spst!" she passed it, for this pet of Father Uria was acquainted with these hated objects, but could never overcome her intense horror of them. We are much afraid this ...
— Old Mission Stories of California • Charles Franklin Carter
... to be some well-known bird, although it has quite baffled me. I have taken some interesting Amphibia; a new Trigonocephalus beautifully connecting in its habits Crotalus and the Viperidae, and plenty of new (as far as my knowledge goes) saurians. As for one little toad, I hope it may be new, that it may be christened "diabolicus." Milton must allude to this very individual when he talks of "squat like a toad" (4/2. "...him [Satan] there they [Ithuriel and Zephon] found, Squat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve" ("Paradise ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... her title. And Walter Butler had been present at that frantic debauch where the False Faces cringed to their prophetess, Magdalen Brant. Perhaps it was there that this man had met his match in the lithe young animal whelped by the Toad-Woman—this slim, lawless, depraved child, who had led the False Faces in their ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... word of it," said his listener with considerable satisfaction, adding as a special descriptive note of her own, "the old toad." ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... in which he always looked so striking. From his big Stetson to his high boots he was typically the big, strong man of Alaska, the Conqueror of the Wild. But his mouth was grim as granite, and his black eyes hard and repellent as those of a toad. ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... me!" said Eustace. "My poor old chap, my only feeling towards you is one of the purest and profoundest pity." He reached out and pressed Sam's hand. "I regard you as a toad beneath the harrow!" ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... is need; but touch not their snuff with your white fingers; a little smutch on YOU will be seen a great way. Remember also that you leave them nowhere, but with these snuff-dishes, that the temple may be cleared of them. Do with the snuff as the neat housewife doth with the toad which she finds in her garden. She takes the fork, or a pair of tongs, and therewith doth throw it over the pales. Cast them away, I say, with fear, zeal, care, revenge, and with great indignation, and then your church, your ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... know about these here fancy city rules ain't sufficient to give a horn-toad a headache—but it's a darn sight more'n I care," Casey declaimed hotly. "I never was asked what I thought of them tin signs you stick up on the end of a telegraft pole, to tell folks when to go an' when to quit goin'. Mebby it's all right ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... murmur from the others: and Colonel Hoskyns gave me a look of very high disdain, as if I had been a toad or a serpent. For myself I said nothing: I remained with my eyes down. Once or twice before I had seen His Majesty in this very mood. For the most part he was the least suspicious man I had ever encountered; but ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... the jewel in the toad's head was a strangely persistent one: it is difficult to imagine what real foundation there could ever have been for the idea. An old writer gives directions for getting this stone, which the toad in his life time ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... the valley, if you listened close, you would hear something sighing, something dying. To the happiest walking there would come strange sinkings of the heart, unaccountable premonitions of overhanging doom. There the least superstitious would start at the sight of a toad, and come upon three magpies at once not without fear. Over all was a breath of imminent disaster, a look of sorrow from which there was no escape. It was not many yards away from a merry high-road, but once in the shade of its lanes, it seemed as though you had ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... "Take a toad and dry him very well in the sun, then put him in a linen bag, and hang him with a string about the neck of the party that bleedeth, and let it hang so low that it may touch the breast on the left side near unto the heart; and this will certainly stay all manner ...
— Notes and Queries, Issue No. 61, December 28, 1850 • Various
... will, O singers all Who sing because you want to sing! Sing! peacock on the orchard wall, Or tree-toad by the trickling spring! Sing! every bird on every bough— Sing! every living, loving thing— Sing any song, and ...
— The Book of Joyous Children • James Whitcomb Riley
... "Like a toad within a stone Seated while Time crumbles on; Which sits there since the earth was curs'd For Man's transgression at the first; Which, living through all centuries, Not once has seen the sun arise; Whose life, to its cold circle charmed, The earth's whole summers have not ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... peculiarity, we may excuse the savage if he regard it as another proof of a distinct personality in plant life. Thus, some years ago, a correspondent of the Botanical Register, describing the toad orchis (Megaclinium bufo), amusingly spoke as follows of its eccentric movements: "Let the reader imagine a green snake to be pressed flat like a dried flower, and then to have a road of toads, or some ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer |
