"Vermin" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in without agony. In our hopeless, staring eyes there was the anguish of the great temptation. We looked in each other's death's-head faces. We clasped skeleton hands round our rickety knees, and swayed as we tried to sit upright. Vermin crawled over us in our weakness. We were half-crazy, and ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... clad herself in comely enough fashion with all those fine garments of enlightened self-government, but underneath those garments are, or were, the same vermin that infested the garments of so many communities less clean—parasites that suck existence from God's gifts to decent people. Indeed, that human vermin at one time infested East Haven even more than the other and neighboring towns; perhaps just because its clothing of civilization was more ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... How superior the miracles wrought by Moses and Aaron to those wrought by the wise men and the sorcerers and the magicians of Egypt! Witness the transformation of the rod, Exodus vii. 10-12—the production of the annoying vermin lice—Exodus viii. 16-19—the plague of darkness, Exodus x. 22-24—the dividing of the Red Sea, Exodus xiv. 21-31. These bear all the characters of true miracles. And how far above the pretended supernatural doings of Mohammed, and the alleged ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... farmers in far remote districts. When used for temporary purposes it may be taken off and applied again to another construction. It replaces common Asphalting on Terraces, Lobbies, Counting-houses, Office Floors, etc.; is a great preservative against dampness and vermin, and equalizes the temperature. It is 32 inches wide, and made in rolls of 25 yards ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXIV., No. 12, March 18, 1871 • Various
... town, and built a house there. The parish was small, having a population of about a hundred souls, the church old and tumbledown, reeking with damp; the rain came through the roof; the seats were worm-eaten, and centipedes, with other like vermin, roamed about them near the wall. The vicar was non-resident, and an elderly curate-in-charge ministered to this parish and another in the neighbourhood. The customs of the church were much the same as those described by Canon Atkinson in his Forty Years in a Moorland Parish as existing on his ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... British foes in baulk Prior to trampling them to pulp like vermin; Russia is at your mercy—you can walk Through her to-morrow if you so determine; There is no France to fight— Your gallant WILLIE'S blade ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 26, 1917 • Various
... is, that there are no musquitoes there, and very few of the noxious vermin that destroy the romance of tropical climes. It does very well in poetry, to pen, in pretty phrase, the query ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... of its castle. Bernadette was the sole labourer and creatress; and yet this room, whence she had set out on the day she beheld the Virgin, this cradle, indeed, of the miracle and of all the marvellous fortune of the town, was disdained, left a prey to vermin, good only for a lumber-room, where onions and empty barrels were ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... or in any human sense more scientific, which puts calceolaria and speedwell together,—and foxglove and euphrasy; and runs them on one side into the mints, and on the other into the nightshades;—naming them, meanwhile, some from diseases, some from vermin, some from blockheads, and the rest anyhow:—or the method I am pleading for, which teaches us, watchful of their seasonable return and chosen abiding places, to associate in our memory the flowers which truly resemble, or fondly companion, or, in time kept by the signs of Heaven, ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... tomb and the vermin That will silence at last the most impudent lip! Is the world but a bubble, a bauble, a joke? Heigho, Brother Fools, now your bubble is broke, Do you ask for a tear?—or is it worth while? Here's a sigh for you, then—but it ends in a smile! Ho, Brother Death, We ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... removed at will, and made of light lumber, say one-half inch thick boards. In this way, by opening the lid, the mushrooms are under observation and can be gathered without any trouble. When the lid is shut they are secure from cold and vermin. Thus protected the cellars can be ventilated without interfering with the welfare of the mushrooms. A light wooden frame covered with calico or oiled paper would also make a good top for the boxing, only it ...
— Mushrooms: how to grow them - a practical treatise on mushroom culture for profit and pleasure • William Falconer
... Robert Turold imagined to be the end—of the story. The listener was first invited to contemplate a scene in human progress when men gathered from the four corners of the earth and underwent incredible hardships of hunger, thirst, disease, lived like beasts and died like vermin for the sake of precious stones in the earth. Thalassa brought up before the young man's eyes a vivid picture of an African diamond rush of that period—a corrugated iron settlement of one straggling ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... just as well to keep at a respectful distance from them. It is safest not to interfere with them, especially as those that are not poisonous are usually very useful in destroying rats and mice and other vermin, except perhaps those living in trees and feeding on eggs and young birds, which certainly do not deserve our protection. Of course the rattlesnake is not to be mistaken. The horny appendix to its tail, with which it sounds the warning of its presence, is enough to distinguish ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... of it," said Kelly, and put his arm around her. "These poisonous vermin don't die so ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... report, the situation was normal, in Rotten Row Alley gnawing was heard, and it is thought that the enemy are sapping towards us." Then they have articles about the bad conditions of their trenches, and write home to say that the human vermin simply swarm there, and are swollen to a huge size and have ...
— Letters from France • Isaac Alexander Mack
... Beyond the vermin that infest the skin and the hair, tapeworm, and a few other intestinal worms, little if anything was known of morbific parasites before the Nineteenth Century; but the labors of Van Beneden, Kuechenmeister, Cobbold, Manson, Laveran, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... Lordships to the last visitation that was made of this college. It was visited by order of Lord Cornwallis in the year 1788, upon the complaints made against it which I have already mentioned to your Lordships,—that it was a sink of filth, vermin, and misery. Mr. Chapman, who was the visitor, and the friend of Mr. Hastings, declares that he could not sit in it even for a few minutes; his words are,—"The wretched, squalid figures that from ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... was overjoyed; he thought at once of poor Dick Whittington and his cat, and said he had a creature on board ship that would soon do for all these vermin if she were there. Of course, when the King heard this he was eager to possess ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel
... "Thou art but vermin," said the Duke, "and entitled to no law, by the letter of the book of hunting; nevertheless, thou shalt have sixty yards in advance, were it but for the sake of thy unparalleled impudence.—Away, away, sirs!—we will see ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... first father named above was afflicted by a grievous plague of vermin [chinches—literally, "bedbugs"], seemingly after a request that he might suffer his purgatory on earth. At the time of his death, "raising his voice and saying, In manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum, he expired, without making another movement. Immediately ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXI, 1624 • Various
... chief to whom Hakon had spoken before the boat was run down. He had told the young king that which had led him to crush her as if her crew were vermin, and wondered to see us ...
— A Sea Queen's Sailing • Charles Whistler
... use of was all that was valuable: I had enough to eat and supply my wants, and what was all the rest to me? If I killed more flesh than I could eat, the dog must eat it, or vermin; if I sowed more corn than I could eat, it must be spoiled; the trees that I cut down were lying to rot on the ground; I could make no more use of them but for fuel, and that I had no occasion for but to dress ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... he replied, with a discouraged expression. "Are any other beings ever found in such masses, but vermin? Aimless, staring, vacant-minded,—look at them! I can get no sense whatever of individual worth, or of value in men as a race, when I see them like this. It makes ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.
... persons, but the very laws of the nation.' The Lord Deputy Chichester, however, agreed thoroughly with his attorney-general, for he certainly made no more account of rooting out the 'mere Irish' from their homes than if they were the most noxious kinds of weeds or vermin. 'If,' said he, writing to Lord Salisbury, 'I have observed anything during my stay in this kingdom, I may say it is not lenity and good works that will reclaim the Irish, but an iron rod, and severity of justice, for the restraint and punishment of those firebrands of sedition, ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... the Turks by a present of eighty piastres from the vizier, which, if you consider every thing, and the value of specie here, is nearly worth ten guineas English. He has suffered nothing but from cold, heat, and vermin, which those who lie in cottages and cross mountains in a cold country must undergo, and of which I have equally partaken with himself; but he is not valiant, and is afraid of robbers and tempests. I have no one to be remembered to in England, and wish to hear ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... that seemed pleased to see me; which was lucky, me having no strength left to run. They took me to their kraal, a mile inland, and to a hut where was a man lying in a fever. He was a man covered with dirt and vermin, but at first sight of his face I knew him to be a white man and English. Ever since my first voyage to these parts I carried a small box in my pocket, filled with bark of Peru, which is the best cure for coast fever. I took out some of this bark and managed ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... under an unlucky star," interrupted the old woman who was imprisoned for incendiarism. "Only think, to entice the lad's wife and lock him himself up to feed vermin, and me, too, in my old days—" she began to retell her story for the hundredth time. "If it isn't the beggar's staff it's the prison. Yes, the beggar's staff and the prison don't wait for ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... be buried in Egypt for several reasons. He knew that the soil of Egypt would once swarm with vermin, and it revolted him to think of his corpse exposed to such uncleanness. He feared, moreover, that his descendants might say, "Were Egypt not a holy land, our father Jacob had never permitted himself to be buried there," and they might encourage themselves ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... labors that are inseparable from any operation in the nature of a siege were added insupportable torments, the least of which were vermin. As the summer days drew out and the heat grew more intense, the brooks dried up; the creek lost itself in the pestilential swamp; the wells and springs gave out; the river fell, exposing to the almost tropical sun a wide margin of festering ...
— History of the Nineteenth Army Corps • Richard Biddle Irwin
... accommodation his house would furnish for the night. We turned in early, but the legions of fleas which were our bedfellows exerted themselves to such a degree that for hours sleep was out of the question. The country is terribly plagued with these vermin. I do not know how the settlers get on; perhaps they are accustomed to the infliction, but a stranger ...
— California • J. Tyrwhitt Brooks
... patriots the market-gardeners, who come in daily to feed the starving mob of Paris, with the few handfuls of watery potatoes, and miserable, vermin-eaten cabbages, which that fraternal Revolution still allows them to grow ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... investigation, that the New York sweatshops "in which clothing is manufactured, and which serve at the same time as dwelling-rooms for the bosses, their families, and boarders, are overcrowded, ill-ventilated, over-heated, full of dirt, filth, vermin and stench, and that, consequently, they are in a most unwholesome, health-destroying and disease-breeding condition." The doctor, speaking of one particular case, says: "On the fourth floor I found four very small rooms, ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... meet their disappointments in their youth, not in their old age; then let them come and welcome, not too thick to render us morose, but like Spring mornings, frosty but kindly, the cold of which will kill the vermin, but will let the plant live; and let us rely upon it, that the best men (and women, too) are those ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... chug of the motor boat routs out old sleepy echoes from cracked and crannied ruins; the burnished golden frescoes of Saint Mark's blare at you as with brazen trumpets; every third medieval church has been turned into a moving-picture place; and the shopkeeping parasites buzz about you in vermin swarms and bore holes in your pocketbook until it is all one large painful welt. The emblem of Venice is the winged lion. ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... "Shut up," he said, roughly, partly to hide his own feelings, "Charley's comin' back without a scratch. The good Lord, I reckon, don't make lads as true and white as he to be killed off by a pack of jail vermin. Come to the wall as he told us to. Maybe we'll get a shot at those murderers before the day is done. Come along an' stop that blubberin'," and he grabbed the soft-hearted little darky by the arm and dragged him ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... pleaded for it. Of course, Sahib, a turban is an affair of caste, and I suppose he was feeling a disgrace in going forth without it. It appears that Gulab had taken it as an evidence that he had been killed, but when I sent a man for it she told him that the cloth was possessed of vermin and she had ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... thready. Complexion Cyanotic appearance, edema anemic and sallow. The and iciness of extremities. other appearances may be Great decrease of vitality present but come on later in peripheral structures, and are less marked. as shown by asthenic eruptions and production of vermin. ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... of the people is simple, consisting of small black monkey skins, cat-skins, and the furs of any vermin they can get. These are tucked under a waist-strap, and, according to the number they possess, go completely or only half-way round the body, the animals' heads hanging in front, and the tails always depending gracefully below. These ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... Aunt Viney, with matter-of-fact precision, "that you've been gallivanting all alone, Cecily, on that common plain, where you're likely to meet all sorts of foreigners and tramps and savages, and Heaven knows what other vermin, I shall set my face against a repetition of it. If you MUST go out, and Dick can't go with you—and I must say that even you and he going out together there at night isn't exactly the kind of American Christian example to set to our ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... was not to be believed that they had lawful business. One of the country-side, one Dickieson, they took with them to be their guide, and dear he paid for it! Of a sudden in the ford of the Broken Dykes, this vermin clan fell on the laird, six to one, and him three parts asleep, having drunk hard. But it is ill to catch an Elliott. For a while, in the night and the black water that was deep as to his saddle-girths, he wrought ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... host, leaping into the air, snapping at the flying vermin, trying to knock them down with his paws. Occasionally he succeeded and destroyed one; nor did the combat cease until all the cockroaches, as if at another signal, disappeared into the many cracks, leaving the room ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... know what makes canaries desert their eggs, and how they can be prevented.—[They cannot be "prevented." The most common cause is insect vermin. If these are found, burn all the old nests, use Persian powder freely on the birds, and paint the cracks in the cages with corrosive sublimate, and then varnish ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... decent pair of inexpressibles; it is a stiff subject to meddle with the dressing propensities of people that live "in many a place that's underneath the world." For all we care, Abd el Kader and his Arabs may stifle themselves up in their greasy blankets swarming with ancestral vermin under a nearly tropical sun; and the good people of Igloolik may bedeck themselves with the spoils of fish, flesh, and fowl, to set the fashions of the Arctic circle. We are going to speak merely of our home acquaintances and our European friends; if these only would ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... or else these caitiff rogues Had wreaked themselves on me; good cause is theirs To hate me, for my wont hath ever been To catch my thief, and then like vermin here Drown him, and with a stone about his neck; And under this wan water many of them Lie rotting, but at night let go the stone, And rise, and flickering in a grimly light Dance on the mere. Good now, ye have saved a life Worth somewhat ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... the gallows, I should be following the same course this very evening. So that upon the whole, we ought to be looked upon as the common enemies of mankind; whose interest it is to root us out likes wolves, and other mischievous vermin, against which no fair ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... put to bed. Well, one night, when she thought me at Rouen, I returned unexpectedly. I entered, and found her with a man. And such a man, sir! A miserable looking wretch, ugly, dirty, stinking; shunned by everyone; in a word the bailiff's clerk. I should have killed him, like the vermin that he was; it was my right, but he was such a pitiful object. I took him by the neck and pitched him out of the window, without opening it! It didn't kill him. Then I fell upon my wife, and beat ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... re-sowing the land so thickly that there should be sufficient grain to allow for the depredations of our enemies. I set vermin traps and caught the guinea-fowl. Then the natural enemy appeared in the wild cats, who took the guinea-fowls out of the traps. At first the men were suspected of stealing the birds, but the unmistakable tracks of the wild cats were found close to the traps, and shortly after the ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... this name, in the Isle of Tenedos. He is said by Eustathius, to have been so called from Smynthus, a town near Troy. But, according to other accounts, he received the epithet from the Cretan word sminthos, a mouse; being supposed to protect man against the depredations of that kind of vermin.] ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... mud that's in the trenches Writers make a solemn fuss; For the vermin 'n' the stenches Little ladies pity us; But the yearn that's honest dinkum, 'N' the prayer what ain't a sham Is that Fritz may bust 'n' sink 'em Ships of jam, jam, JAM! For we bolt 'em, chew 'em, drink 'em, Million billion bar'ls of beastly, ...
— 'Hello, Soldier!' - Khaki Verse • Edward Dyson
... In wet meadows, these tubes laid deep would be durable and efficient, and far more reliable than brush or even stones, because they may be better protected from the admission of sand and the ruinous working of vermin. Their economy depends upon the price of the wood and the cost of tiles—which are far better if they can ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... ants eat away floors and sometimes cause the collapse of houses by wearing away the wooden supports. Another frequent guest is the driver ant, which travels in armies and frequently takes complete possession of a house. It destroys all the vermin but the human inmates must beat a retreat while the process ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... soldiers, to burn and to slay; little children converted into demons of destruction, and dropping petroleum into the areas of houses; soldiers in turn forgetting all distinctions of sex and age, and shooting down prisoners like vermin, now by scores and now by hundreds,—all combine to enact on civilized ground, and within the sight and hearing of their fellow-men, scenes which find a parallel only in the infernal regions imagined by prophets and poets. This is ...
— The Insurrection in Paris • An Englishman: Davy
... come walking among them on the night of his coronation day. Most of them thought that the next morning he would order them all to be killed, and their houses burned, because he would only think of them as vermin. ...
— The Land of the Blue Flower • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... if not resigned, and were trampled under foot by their ferocious and unfragrant foes. These were rats and cockroaches. Typee—we use the name he bore during his Julian tribulations—records a singular phenomenon in the nocturnal habits of the last-named vermin. "Every night they had a jubilee. The first symptom was an unusual clustering and humming amongst the swarms lining the beams overhead, and the inside of the sleeping-places. This was succeeded by a prodigious coming and going on the part ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... little or no inconvenience to invalids coming from the rigid climate of the North. I am told that all snakes remain in a torpid state during the winter, and no danger might be expected from them, and as the floors of the hotel would be kept tight no vermin could crawl through. There can be no doubt that the Lake of the Dismal Swamp must become the great centre of health-seekers, and that at an early day. Its location and advantages, the known healthliness of the place, to say nothing of its beauty and former renown, ...
— The Dismal Swamp and Lake Drummond, Early recollections - Vivid portrayal of Amusing Scenes • Robert Arnold
... grasps him, and he is dragged forth among his enemies. Almost as soon as his eyes have seen the light the eager noses of a dozen hounds have moistened themselves in his entrails. Ah me! I know that he is vermin, the vermin after whom I have been risking my neck, with a bold ambition that I might ultimately witness his death-struggles; but, nevertheless, I would fain have saved him that last half hour of ...
— Aaron Trow • Anthony Trollope
... manners and fine sense, Yet wanting sensibility, the man Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm. An inadvertent step may crush the snail That crawls at evening in the public path; But he that has humanity, forewarned, Will tread aside and let the reptile live. The creeping vermin, loathsome to the sight, And charged perhaps with venom, that intrudes, A visitor unwelcome, into scenes Sacred to neatness and repose, the alcove, The chamber, or refectory, may die; A necessary act incurs no blame. Not so when, held within their proper bounds, ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... hag named Rose Lacombe,[33100] forming the usual audience of the Convention; on important days, seven or eight hundred of these may be counted, sometimes two thousand, stationed at the entrance and in the galleries, from nine o'clock in the morning.[33101]—Male and female, "this anti-social vermin"[33102] thus crawls around at the sessions of the Assembly, the Commune, the Jacobin club, the revolutionary tribunal, the sections and one may imagine the physiognomies it offers to view. "It would seem," says a deputy,[33103] ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... generally carried on during this season, the preparations for the coming campaign, including the building of shanties, transporting of traps, etc., are generally made at this time, and unless some preventive is used, the persecutions of the mosquitoes and other winged vermin, become almost unbearable. ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson
... undressing, put his cape under his head— and at once caught a cockroach on his neck! Some young pigs grunted in a corner. The hut was swarming with vermin, blackened by smoke and filled with stenches. Here, where men, calves and pigs herded all together, the Prince lay on his straw, tossing about and scratching. He thought of how, some centuries hence, people would be writing of this age with love, compassion, and tenderness. It would ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... will clean the cooking-vessels even of Muhammadans, but the Thethwar or pure Rawats refuse this menial work. In Mandla, when a man is to be brought back into caste after a serious offence, such as getting vermin in a wound, he is made to stand in the middle of a stream, while some elderly relative pours water over him. He then addresses the members of the caste panchayat or committee, who are standing on the bank, saying to them, 'Will you leave me in the mud or will ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... with a sudden flash of wrathful contempt, "if there's anybody under God's sun I like to slip something over on it's those damned vermin of private detectives! And the swells that employ them! I hope that Mrs. Allistair gets stung ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... one of the most beautiful spots in the world, inhabited by thieves and robbers and liars, also by several honest and truthful men and women. Wherefore, because of the blight cast upon Tahiti's wonderful beauty by the spidery human vermin that infest it, I am minded to write, not of Tahiti, but of the Nature Man. He, at least, is refreshing and wholesome. The spirit that emanates from him is so gentle and sweet that it would harm nothing, hurt nobody's feelings save the feelings of a ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... the same calm weather, with an oppressively hot sun. Suffered exceedingly from thirst, the water in the jug being absolutely putrid and swarming with vermin. We contrived, nevertheless, to swallow a portion of it by mixing it with wine; our thirst, however, was but little abated. We found more relief by bathing in the sea, but could not avail ourselves of this expedient except at long intervals, on account of the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... several perilous inland trips, for the country was infested by banditti. One journey from Syracuse through the centre of the island revealed more wretchedness than Irving supposed existed in the world. The half-starved peasants lived in wretched cabins and often in caverns, amid filth and vermin. "God knows my mind never suffered so much as on this journey," he writes, "when I saw such scenes of want and misery continually before me, without the power of effectually relieving them." His stay in the ports was made agreeable by the officers of American ships cruising in those waters. ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... amusing to witness the exact imitation they gave of the swagger of a certain white with whom they had been dealing, and who had, as they had perceived, evidently wished to assume an air of indifference. Holding up the head and scratching the beard it was hinted might indicate not indifference, but vermin. It is well that we do not always know what they say about us. The remarks are often not quite complimentary, and resemble closely what certain white ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... words of wisdom: 'If Zeus sends bad weather, mice and vermin, it is to stimulate the husbandman's energy, and call forth his inventive capacity.' Misfortune comes ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... landings, and stairs out of Holland; the whole producing a gorgeous effect—to match the glory of the embroidered pillow-cases in the bedrooms. On the roofs were drying-grounds, upon which each tenant had her rightful "day," so that altercations might not arise. I saw an empty flat. The professional vermin exterminator had just gone—for the landlord-company took no chances ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... spread out to the utmost and settled down, pulled it up and found in it various kinds of fish. The Khalif was pleased and said, 'O Kerim, put off thy clothes.' So he put off a gown of coarse woollen stuff, patched in a hundred places and full of disgusting vermin, and a turban that had not been unwound for three years, but to which he had sewn every rag he came across. The Khalif pulled off his cassock and mantle and two vests of Alexandria and Baalbec silk ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume I • Anonymous
... not fight two monsters at once; while I, poor wretch, have lions, cerberuses, cancers, scorpions every day at my sword's point; not to mention smaller vermin—rats, mosquitoes, bugs, and fleas. My troops of friends are turned to enemies. At dinner-tables or social gatherings, in churches and king's courts, in public carriage or public flyboat, scandal pursues me, and calumny defiles my name. Every goose ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... Mr. Pickwick came and sat by Richard, and with yelp and howl, and at intervals a little epileptic bark, proceeded to disparage all manners and septs of rats, and spake slightingly of all such vermin deer. Having freed his mind on the important subject of rats, Mr. Pickwick returned to silence and his ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... a hard road to old England," smiled the Secretary of the Council. "Have a stout heart. By God's grace I shall soon deliver you from these sea vermin." ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... bag full in the evening to a capital dinner, he had better stay at home. To do anything in this country, a man must make his mind up to long and fatiguing marches in the heat of the day, with miserable quarters often at night, in places infested by vermin of every description; in a word, he must be content to rough it. I will also candidly own that, from the accounts I had previously received, I was very much disappointed as regards the quantity of large game to be found in these parts; ...
— Notes in North Africa - Being a Guide to the Sportsman and Tourist in Algeria and Tunisia • W. G. Windham
... upon which the ingenuity of the farmers has been taxed, it is on the invention of a mole trap which would effectually clear their premises of these blind burrowing vermin. Many patented devices of this character are on the market, and many odd pictured ideas on the subject have gone the rounds of the illustrated press, but they all sink into insignificance when tested beside the trap we here present. It has no equal among mole traps, and ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson
... the exception. Why I was spared, I do not know. It just so happened. At first I was vilely treated, beaten by the women and children, clothed in vermin-infested mangy furs, and fed on refuse. They were utterly heartless. How I managed to survive is beyond me; but I know that often and often, at first, I meditated suicide. The only thing that saved me during that period from taking my own life was the fact that I quickly ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... was four days dying—four days dying—of starvation and thirst," Foster went on, as if deciphering some terrible hieroglyphs written on the air. "His thigh swelled to the size of his body. Clouds of flies settled on him—flies and vermin—and he chewed his own arm and drank his own blood. He died mad. And my God! he crawled three miles in those four days! Man! Man! that's how your ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... ah, that sound awakes my woes, And pillows on the thorn my rack'd repose! In durance vile here must I wake and weep, And all my frowsy couch in sorrow steep; That straw where many a rogue has lain of yore, And vermin'd gipsies ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... of the earth of old, A dumb and beastly vermin crawled, For acorns first and holes of shelter, They tooth and nail and helter-skelter, Fought fist to fist; then with a club, Each learned his brother brute to drub; Till more experienced grown, these cattle Forged fit accoutrements for battle. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 20, No. 567, Saturday, September 22, 1832. • Various
... not yield, though heaven and earth should fall. The mass he denounced as the greatest and most horrible abomination, inasmuch as it was 'downright destructive of the first article,' and as the chiefest of Papal idolatries; moreover, this dragon's tail had begotten many other kinds of vermin and abominations of idolatry. With regard to the Papacy itself, the Augsburg Confession had been content to condemn it by silence, not having taken any notice of it in its articles on the essence and nature of the Christian Church. ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... ancient heroes, to stop the progress of arbitrary oppression, and beat down the brutishness of headstrong will: to do his King and country justice, upon such public state thieves as would beggar a kingdom to enrich themselves: these were the vermin whom to his eternal honour his pen was continually pricking and goading; a pen, if not so happy in the success, yet as generous in the aim, as either the sword of Theseus, or the club of Hercules; nor was it less ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... envious, erudite ermine: "There's one thing I cannot determine: When a man wears my coat, He's a person of note, While I'm but a species of vermin!" ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... should meditate and heroes rove, And woman charm, and man deserve her love,— Oh say, was world so bright, but born to grace Its own half-organized, half-minded race[4] Of weak barbarians, swarming o'er its breast, Like vermin gendered on the lion's crest? Were none but brutes to call that soil their home, Where none but demigods should dare to roam? Or worse, thou wondrous world! oh! doubly worse, Did heaven design thy lordly land to nurse The motley ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... friends, and much on the same account. He has no comfort in fixed principles: as soon as anything is settled in his own mind, he quarrels with it. He has no satisfaction but in the chase after truth, runs a question down, worries and kills it, then quits it like vermin, and starts some new game, to lead him a new dance, and give him a fresh breathing through bog and brake, with the rabble yelping at his heels and ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... Words: helminthology, helminthologist, vermeology, vermeologist, vermifugal, verminivorous, vermin, vermiculate, vermiculated, vermiculation, taenifuge, helminthic, helminthiasis, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... of the poor; maintaining of the local roads and bridges; purchasing and repair of parish armor, and mustering of parish contingents; contributions for prisoners and maimed soldiers; the keeping of the parish butts and the stocks; the destruction of frugivorous birds and animals (the statutory "vermin"), etc. ...
— The Elizabethan Parish in its Ecclesiastical and Financial Aspects • Sedley Lynch Ware
... case of the domesticated dog, which finds shelter with its master, has not to seek for its food at night, and is protected from the attacks of stronger animals. In the huts of savages dogs are greatly exposed to the attacks of parasitical insects, for vermin generally abound in such localities. Man is the only species amongst the higher primates that lives for months and years—often indeed from generation to generation—on the same spot. Monkeys change their sleeping places almost daily. The ourang-outang, ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... forth, With all the fires of heaven lit in his breast And godlike courage on his brow, to find New worlds beyond the unknown wastes of sea. He sailed; he found; he died in rusty chains: So that, to-day, the vermin of all climes May thither flock, and there renew the old Familiar toil toward ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... not endure to wet her feet; so modest, that she could not bear to be looked at while she was eating; while at the same time she would scamper into the dirtiest hole after a mouse, and then devour the nasty vermin with a satisfaction quite disgusting to a ...
— Cat and Dog - Memoirs of Puss and the Captain • Julia Charlotte Maitland
... of Australia are very handsome, the green tree-snake and the carpet-snake (a species of python) for examples. The carpet-snake is occasionally kept in the house or in the barn to destroy mice and other small vermin. ...
— Peeps At Many Lands: Australia • Frank Fox
... not even allowed to take along a change of underwear. Then I am locked up with women who have every known variety of vermin. ...
— Moral • Ludwig Thoma
... of our houses, both public and private, with their almost innumerable apartments, their huge halls and their cellars for the storage of wines and other munitions of peace, appear to be extravagantly large for their inhabitants. They are so vast and magnificent that the latter seem to be only vermin which infest them. I am surprised when the herald blows his summons before some Tremont or Astor or Middlesex House, to see come creeping out over the piazza for all inhabitants a ridiculous mouse, which soon again slinks into ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... ye run acrost ary wolves, knock 'em over like vermin," Eli remarked, during the discussion of the subject ...
— The Boy Scouts in the Maine Woods - The New Test for the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... world. Two whites would have taken such a little while to squander; and yet it would have been one more good taste in the mouth, one more smack of the lips, before the devil got the soul, and the body was left to birds and vermin. He would like to use all his tallow before the light was blown out ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... words, they were commonly not men of character and distinction, but just the reverse—persons whose conduct was so destitute of honour as to degrade them, in the eyes of the community, to the level of the worst sort of vermin. And they were treated accordingly. They were held to be unfit to exist as an integral part of the body politic, and either destroyed or, as an alternative, constrained to abjure the realm. The head and front of their offence ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... Colony of British Columbia, with Vancouver's Island (the Madeira of the Pacific); while the largest portion is held, as one great preserve, by the fur-trading Hudson's Bay Company, who, in right of a charter given by Charles II., in 1670, kill vermin for skins, and monopolise the trade with the Native Indians over a surface many times as big again as Great Britain and Ireland. Still, all this land is ours, for it owes allegiance to the sceptre of Victoria. Between ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... sledges had been left, and these served to carry their wounded, as well as some of the captive children. Williams was stripped of the better part of his clothes, and others given him instead, so full of vermin that they were a torment to him through all the journey. The march now continued with pitiless speed up the frozen Connecticut, where the recent thaw had covered the ice with slush ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... we took the battens from the hatches, and opened the ship. A few stifled rats were found; and what bugs, cockroaches, fleas, and other vermin, there might have been on board, must have unrove their life-lines before the hatches were opened. The ship being now ready, we covered the bottom of the hold over, fore and aft, with dried brush ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... a great honour that you have done me, mademoiselle, to associate my name with yours, my humble person with your triumph, and to prove to all this vermin gnawing at my heels that you do not believe the calumnies which have been spread with regard to me. Yes, truly, I shall never forget it. In vain I may cover this magnificent bust with gold and diamonds, I ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... frequently, confound it, and the only thing that I could do was to return evil, to strike at the coward whom I hated, to dishonor and to lower his name, to stick to the fellow who strutted about in his uniform, and who had won the game, from garrison to garrison, as if I had been vermin. That is why I, of my own accord, came to this house, where one belongs to everybody, and have become almost more vicious than any of the other girls, and why I have ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... there is no doubt that alkaloids can be absorbed when rubbed into scratches or into the quick of the nails, and it must be remembered that an unbroken skin is only possessed by those who are free from vermin and who wash regularly, and neither of these conditions would be likely to apply to a mediaeval witch. Cases of poisoning associated with delirium have actually been recorded following the application of belladonna ...
— The Witch-cult in Western Europe - A Study in Anthropology • Margaret Alice Murray
... which all great political convulsions never fail to engender, the streets of Paris present not at this day that vast crowd of beggars, covered with rags and vermin, by which they were formerly infested. This is to be attributed to the partial adoption of measures for employing the poor; and, doubtless, when receptacles come to be established here, according to ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... Alva and the eleventh as interest on the sum which had not been paid quite promptly! It was in July 1573, when the citizens had been reduced by famine to the consumption of {94} weeds, shoe-leather, and vermin, that the ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... the fowl!' says one: 'Mine are all bewitched, I guess; Cocks and hens with vermin run, Mangy, filthy, featherless.' Says another: 'I confess Every hair I drop, I keep— Plague upon it, in a heap Falling ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... slowly and tediously away, and again the Pilgrims went supperless to bed. Again they passed a sleepless night, being kept awake by vermin, hunger, and the noise of the savages. Friday morning they rose before the sun, resolved immediately to commence their journey home. Massasoit was very importunate to have them remain longer ...
— King Philip - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... other dogs. From the bull terrier side he inherits a lively mood, the quality of taking care of himself if attacked by another dog, and of his owner, too, if necessary, the propensity to be a great destroyer of all kinds of vermin if properly trained, and an ideal watch dog at night. No wonder he is popular, he deserves to be. The ...
— The Boston Terrier and All About It - A Practical, Scientific, and Up to Date Guide to the Breeding of the American Dog • Edward Axtell
... for it was not so very long ago that, in the north of Devon, I found sermons, not indeed in stones, but in a creature reputed among the most worthless of sea-vermin. I had been lounging about all the morning on the little pier, waiting, with the rest of the village, for a trawling breeze which would not come. Two o'clock was past, and still the red mainsails of the skiffs hung motionless, and their images quivered ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... "Vermin o' the land, an' mischeevious reptiles they are, an' the mair deid rats we see the morn's mornin' the better pleased Peter'll be," said the old man as they ...
— Hunter's Marjory - A Story for Girls • Margaret Bruce Clarke
... sewers underlay it, and cesspools loaded with filth wafted their poison into the upper rooms. The floors were in so rotten a condition that many of them could not be scrubbed; the walls were thick with dirt; incredible multitudes of vermin swarmed everywhere. And, enormous as the building was, it was yet too small. It contained four miles of beds, crushed together so close that there was but just room to pass between them. Under such conditions, the most elaborate system of ventilation might well ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... which seemed to wither female beauty in the moment that it ripened. The pallidness of the European beauties, sickly as the clime, disgusted him—their venality still more. Female fortune-hunters were far more intolerable to his delicacy than the coarsest hunter of vermin—fox or hare—ever had been at his uncle's hall, whom he began to esteem, and sincerely mourned—when death had removed all of him from his memory but his kindness, his desire to amuse him, the "sulky boy," his substantial goodness and warm-heartedness. Knowing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... fun," said The Rat. "I feel like one. Every one's my enemy. I'm vermin. I can't fight or defend myself unless I bite. I can bite, though." And he showed two rows of fierce, strong, white teeth, sharper at the points than human teeth usually are. "I bite my father when he gets drunk and beats me. I've bitten ...
— The Lost Prince • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... himself; and it's no good wasting eloquence to make you ashamed of yourself. Nor is it any good to curse you for corrupting England; nor are you the right person to curse. It is the English who deserve to be cursed, and are cursed, because they allowed such vermin to crawl into the high places of their heroes and their kings. I won't dwell on the idea that you're Verner, or the throttling might begin, after all. Is there anyone else you could be? Surely you're not some servant of the other rival organization. I can't ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... quoth Oxenham, "my merry men all, make up your minds what mannered men you be minded to be before you take your bounties. I want none of your rascally lurching longshore vermin, who get five pounds out of this captain, and ten out of that, and let him sail without them after all, while they are stowed away under women's mufflers, and in tavern cellars. If any man is of that humor, he had better ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... at St. Edmondsbury," said Father Peter on one occasion, "that many years ago they were so overrun with mice that the good abbot gave orders that all the cats from the country round should be obtained to exterminate the vermin. A record was kept, and at the end of the year it was found that every cat had killed an equal number of mice, and the total was exactly 1,111,111 mice. How many cats do you suppose ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... I cannot recollect; unless it be a large vein of wrangling and satire, much of a nature and substance with the spiders' poison; which, however they pretend to spit wholly out of themselves, is improved by the same arts, by feeding upon the insects and vermin of the age. As for us, the Ancients, we are content with the bee, to pretend to nothing of our own beyond our wings and our voice: that is to say, our flights and our language. For the rest, whatever we have got has been by ...
— The Battle of the Books - and Other Short Pieces • Jonathan Swift
... that remarkable edict?" demanded one of the circle more interested in politics than in individuals. "It is a good thing indeed to rid a land of such vermin; but in Spain they had so much to do with the successful commerce of the country, that it appears as ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... less cruelly in the great wood. There was a brightness and life in the Forest which cheered her. It was pleasant to see Argus's enjoyment of the fair weather; his wild rushes in among the underwood; his pursuit of invisible vermin under the thick holly-bushes, the brambles, and bracken; his rapturous rolling in the dewy grass, where he flung himself at full length, and rolled over and over, and leaped as if he had been revelling in a bath of freshest water; pleasant to see him race up to a serious-minded hog, and scrutinise ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... hardly possible to go forth with safety. And being weary with their journey, they laid themselves down and sought to sleep. And when they looked at the couch, it seemed to be made but of a little coarse straw full of dust and vermin, with the stems of boughs sticking up therethrough, for the cattle had eaten all the straw that was placed at the head and the foot. And upon it was stretched an old russet-coloured rug, threadbare and ragged; and a coarse sheet, full of slits was upon the rug, and ...
— The Mabinogion Vol. 1 (of 3) • Owen M. Edwards
... days, and to burn everything that has been used in connection with them. We've cleared this land of disease germs, if there were germs in it, by turning it bottom-side up; now let's start free from the pestiferous vermin that make a hen's life unhappy. No stock, either old or young, shall be brought here. When we want to change our breeding, we'll buy eggs from the best fanciers and hatch them in our own incubators. It will then be our own fault if we don't ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... The little man might rest a day, or oversleep, or strain a sinew, then— Locasto pictured with gloating joy the terror of the Worm as he awoke to find himself overtaken. Oh, the snake! the vermin! ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... been properly built, and the walls are settled and the plastering dry, it generally comes up to the standard of comfort and health. Here the latest improvements in plumbing will be apt to be found, and there will be no danger of vermin. Then, too, a concession is more apt to be made by the landlord, who is anxious to secure tenants, by remission of a month's or a fortnight's rent, to be taken out after the first month. The landlord of such a house is also readier than the owner of an ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... are neglected or disobeyed, and the ills which they might have averted sink the social state into a condition of degradation and wretchedness so great that the denser accumulations of the people become vast and corrupted swarms of vermin instead of organized communities of men, then plague and fever come in as the last resort—half remedy, half retribution—devised by that mysterious principle which struggles perpetually for the preservation of the human race, to thin off the excessive accumulation ...
— History of King Charles II of England • Jacob Abbott
... impossible to pass through it without the constant thought of what it might be in the hands of an Anglo-Saxon race. Mr. Oliphant was struck with the beauty of the girls of Ajlun, one of whom tried in vain to remove the vermin from his blankets. Dr. Thomson and I lay on a grassy slope, a whole afternoon, at the village of es-Souf, watching the children pelting each other with flowers, and we both agreed that we had never seen an assemblage of merrier or lovelier children. ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... London with whom you ought to associate! But I am not going to argue with you, sir. If you think, and will continue to think, that the slaughtering of vermin is a proper pursuit—" ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... white world's vermin and filth: All the dirt of London, All the scum of New York; Valiant spoilers of women And conquerers of unarmed men; Shameless breeders of bastards, Drunk with the greed of gold, Baiting their blood-stained hooks With cant for the souls ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... without reserve. He complained of the constantly increasing numbers of sectaries in his kingdom, and protested that his conscience would never be easy, nor his state secure until his realm should be delivered of "that accursed vermin." A civil revolution, under pretext of a religious reformation, was his constant apprehension, particularly since so many notable personages in the realm, and even princes of the blood, were already tainted with heresy. Nevertheless, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... consists of a slight wrapper round their waists, sometimes made of bark, at others from skins of animals, or perhaps of blue or white cloth; they eat rice or roots, and indeed any description of food, whether beast, reptile, or vermin: they are extremely filthy; this and bad food give them a cutaneous disorder, with which they are very generally afflicted. Several tribes of them smear themselves with oil and pigments, which gives them the appearance ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... tells us that the tuberous ground-nut (Bunium flexuosum), which has various nicknames, such as "lousy," "loozie," or "lucie arnut," is dug up by children who eat the roots, "but they are hindered from indulging to excess by a cherished belief that the luxury tends to generate vermin in the head." [5] ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer |
