"Web-footed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was easy, for I seed they was web-footed, too. The only diff'rence betwix' them an' the Baptis' is that they are willin' to jine in with any other rigiment, provided allers that you let them 'pint the sappers an' miners an' blaze out the way. Good fellers, tho', an' learned me lots. They beats ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... of penguin, I believe," said Ernest, "distinguished by the name of booby, and so stupid, that I knocked it down with a stick. It is web-footed, has a long narrow beak, a little curved downwards. I have preserved the head and neck for you to examine; it exactly resembles the penguin of ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... soothing and satisfactory symmetry of an unexceptionable dinner. We have detected the same duck through many unprincipled disguises, playing a different part in the farce of domestic economy, with a versatility hardly to have been expected in one of the most generally despised of the web-footed tribe. When travelling at one's own sweet will, one feeds at a different inn every meal; and, except when the coincidence of circumstances is against you, there is an agreeable variety both in the natural and artificial ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume X, No. 280, Saturday, October 27, 1827. • Various
... not. I'd be almost willin' to be arrested if they'd do it quick. A nice, dry lock-up and somethin' to eat wouldn't be so bad, would it? But no constable but a web-footed one would be out this night. Now do as I say—you lay still and give your ...
— Thankful's Inheritance • Joseph C. Lincoln
... magistrates in Harbour Grace, in Newfoundland, had an old dog of the regular web-footed species peculiar to that island, who was in the habit of carrying a lantern before his master at night, as steadily as the most attentive servant could do, stopping short when his master made a stop, and proceeding when he saw him disposed ...
— A Hundred Anecdotes of Animals • Percy J. Billinghurst
... tangle, entangle, ravel; net, knot; dishevel, raddle^. Adj. crossing &c v.; crossed, matted &c, v.. transverse. cross, cruciform, crucial; retiform^, reticular, reticulated; areolar^, cancellated^, grated, barred, streaked; textile; crossbarred^, cruciate^, palmiped^, secant; web-footed. Adv. cross, thwart, athwart, transversely; at grade ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... force. These lobe-footed birds consist first of the Grebes, which are connected with fresh-water ducks; and, secondly, of the Phalaropes, which are a sort of sea-gulls. No bird which is not properly web-footed has any business to think itself either true duck or true gull; but as, both in size and habit of life, the larger grebes and phalaropes are entirely aquatic and marine, I shall take out of them into my class of dabchicks, only ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... Jack of Asia, to the Cattle feeding in our pastures. Among the Birds, this similarity of voice in Families is still more marked. We need only recall the harsh and noisy Parrots, so similar in their peculiar utterance. Or take as an example the web-footed Family,—do not all the Geese and the innumerable host of Ducks quack? Does not every member of the Crow Family caw, whether it be the Jackdaw, the Jay, the Magpie, the Rook in some green rookery of the Old ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... now deluged the unhappy campers was so incessant that they might well have thought that people should be web-footed to live in such a watery region. In these later days, Oregon is sometimes known as "The Web-foot State." Captain Clark, in his diary, November 28, makes this entry: "O! how disagreeable is our situation dureing this dreadfull weather!" The gallant captain's spelling was sometimes ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... bird about the size of a robin, that sings in sweet fluty song all winter and all summer, in storms and calms, sunshine and shadow, haunting the rapids and waterfalls with marvelous constancy, building his nest in the cleft of a rock bathed in spray. He is not web-footed, yet he dives fearlessly into foaming rapids, seeming to take the greater delight the more boisterous the stream, always as cheerful and calm as any linnet in a grove. All his gestures as he flits about amid the loud uproar ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... surface to the water; it would therefore keep its toes extended wherever it swam, and as far as in it lay, would make the most of whatever skin was already at the base of its toes. After many generations it would become web-footed, if doing as above described should have been found continuously convenient, so that the bird should have continuously used the skin about its toes as much ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... transient residents of this sheep station, and those of another on Hualalai, thirty miles off, are the only human inhabitants of a region as large as Kent. Wild goats, wild geese (Bernicla sandvicensis), and the Melithreptes Pacifica, constitute its chief population. These geese are web-footed, though water does not exist. They build their nests in the grass, and lay two or three ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... robbers and most rapacious, harassing the penguins in particular. They steal the eggs and young of the latter and devour a great number of prions—small birds which live in holes in the ground. The skuas are web-footed, but are very ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... SECOND CAPITAL. Only three sides of the original work are left unburied by the mass of added wall. Each side has a bird, one web-footed, with a fish, one clawed, with a serpent, which opens its jaws, and darts its tongue at the bird's breast; the third pluming itself, with a feather between the mandibles of its bill. It is by far the most beautiful of the three capitals ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... on this subject may be here introduced. The early naturalists, having seen only the bill of a Toucan, which was esteemed as a marvellous production by the virtuosi of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, concluded that the bird must have belonged to the aquatic and web-footed order, as this contains so many species of remarkable development of beak, adapted for seizing fish. Some travvellers also related fabulous stories of Toucans resorting to the banks of rivers to feed on fish, and these accounts also encouraged the erroneous views of the ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... animal, an alligator with a human-shaped foot. These Indians have lived in these mud bottoms so long, crossing the streams on rafts made of bundles of tules, and only going to the higher land when their homes are inundated by the floods, that they have become a near approach to a web-footed human being. ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb |
