"Wriggling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... long, bony pair of arms, with long hands on them; a long, lank body, with a long black coat on it; a long, loose pair of legs, with long boots on the feet, all in motion at the same time—all shining, and wriggling, and working with an indescribable vitality, a voice bubbling up from the vast depths below with cheery, spasmodic, and unintelligible words of welcome—this was the wonderful man that stood before me, the great Danish improvisator, ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... so silly?" said cousin Sybil next morning, wriggling back with down-bent head to release herself from what should have been ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... ground were alive with them. They were crawling through the cracks into the shack, wriggling along the floor and walls with their tiny, hair-like legs. They infested the plains for miles around. At night one could feel them crawling ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... on the very best of terms, these two friends of his, possibly because of their absolute unlikeness,—Punch, large, solemn, imperturbable, with a beautifully-curved slow-waving tail and no voice; Scamp, a bundle of wriggling nerves moved by electricity, with a sharp excited bark and not even the stump of a tail. When he needed to wag he wagged the whole of his body ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... fort. But, as I approached the little house where Clark lived, the humming of a crowd came to my ears, and I saw with astonishment that the street was blocked. It appeared that the whole of the inhabitants of Kaskaskia were packed in front of the place. Wriggling my way through the people, I had barely reached the gate when I saw Monsieur Vigo and the priest, three Creole gentlemen in uniform, and several others coming out of the door. They stopped, and Monsieur Vigo, raising his hand for silence, made a speech in French to the people. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... replaced his assistant in the linen cloth before it revived sufficiently to commence wriggling again, and, perhaps, point its supernatural head to some ...
— The Fiery Totem - A Tale of Adventure in the Canadian North-West • Argyll Saxby
... serve as breakfast. For the greater eats the lesser, And the greatest eats the great ones. In this simple manner nature Solves the knotty social question. No more did his smoothness help him, No more his sleek body's wriggling, No more his spasmodic beating With his tail so strong and supple. Tightly held in the indented Beak of the determined parent, He was given to the hopeful Stork-brood, now to be divided; And they held with noisy clatter Solemnly their morning-feast. Nearer to observe this, Werner Had descended ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel
... the threshold, wriggling forward at top speed. We followed, peering fearfully around ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... fisherman of Bagdad, catching enchanted princes disguised as fishes in the sea, ever hooked such a treasure as this defendant hooked when he hooked that basket of eels! [Rustling appreciation of the jest among the jury.] If a squirming, twisting, winding, wriggling eel, gentlemen, can be said at any given moment to have a back, we may distinguish this new-found species as the greenback eel. It is a common saying that no man can hold an eel and remain a Christian. I should like to have viewed the pious equanimity ...
— Eli - First published in the "Century Magazine" • Heman White Chaplin
... the old man driving them like cattle, his heart was deeply touched and he wanted to protest. In the dim light the slowly moving figures of women appeared, and after them came the crouched crawling men. They came down the long row toward him, wriggling into his line of sight like grotesquely misshapen animals driven by some god of the night to the performance of a terrible task. An arm went up. It came down again swiftly. The three-cornered hoe sank into the ground. The slow rhythm ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... amain with snowballs. The filthy creature, waking up with a start, bruised and stifled in snow, with which even her ears were filled, with dishevelled hair, yelling at the top of her voice, and wriggling like an eel, without knowing where to hide, formed a spectacle that diverted people more than half an hour: so that at last the nymph swam in her bed, from which the water flowed everywhere, slushing all the chamber. It was enough to make ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... birch I was chopping fell on me," he said. "I don't know whether it smashed my ankle, or whether I twisted it wriggling clear—the thing pinned me down. It is badly ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... Morgan's wriggling legs came slowly out of the tunnel, John Drillot and Peter Vaudin were almost dancing with excitement, and their first surprise was the sight of him when, by rights, John Trevna should have been the ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... mutton to marsupial, so he let the latter slide and secured the ewe. The death-scene was most imposing. The ground around was strewn with small tufts of white wool. There was a complete circle of eager, wriggling dogs—all jammed together, heads down, and tails elevated. Not a scrap of the ewe was visible. Paddy Maloney jumped down and proceeded to batter the brutes vigorously with a waddy. As the others arrived, they joined him. The dogs were hungry, and fought for every inch of the sheep. Those not laid ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... than the bulk of the outhouse. Manston loosened the plaster with some kind of tool, flinging the pieces into a basket as they fell. Having now stripped clear about two feet area of wall, he inserted a crowbar between the joints of the bricks beneath, softly wriggling it until several were loosened. There was now disclosed the mouth of an old oven, which was apparently contrived in the thickness of the wall, and having fallen into disuse, had been closed up with bricks in this manner. It was formed after the simple old-fashioned ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... joy. Bertje and Wartje and the others all had their stockings off and stood in the water bending down to look, making funnels of their hands in the water, where it rustled in little streams between two grass-sods through which the fish had to pass. Whenever they felt one wriggling in their hands they yelled and screamed and sprang out of the brook to put it into their wooden shoes, which stood on the bank, scooped full of water. There they loitered examining those beasties from close by: those fish were theirs now; and they would let them swim ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels
... turned in and rang the bell, in order that his voice might be calm and his demeanor unshaken. But the fact that Micky, waiting on the porch, knew him and broke into yelps of happiness and ecstatic wriggling ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... deeper lines which were the shadows marking the timber uprights that supported the scaffold at its nearer corners; and also there appeared, midway between the framing shadows, down at the lower end of the slender line of the cord, an exaggerated, wriggling manifestation like the reflection of a huge and misshapen jumping-jack, which first would lengthen itself grotesquely, and then abruptly would shorten up, as the tremors running through the dying man's frame altered the silhouette ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... make Tom Kidd so bloomin' sick 'e can't bugle no more. You 'old 'is 'ands an' I'll kick him," said Lew, wriggling on ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... "isn't that just lovely?" wriggling her toes under the bed-clothes. "Do you think ...
— Five Little Peppers Midway • Margaret Sidney
... frightened useless blares across the churning waters, there was no being blind to the true facts any longer. This was no cargo boat, but a passenger liner; outward bound, too, and populous. And as they came still nearer, they saw her after-decks black and wriggling with people, and Kettle got a glimpse of her structure ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... presence of fish and knowing more than fish do. At the instant of the fish's leap the Professor slackened his line: down came the bass on a limber loop, defeated in his strategy and wearied by his effort, to be hauled quickly to the boat's side and landed, wriggling and tossing, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... either lost his head or else indignation made him reckless. Still half sitting, he kicked out at the wriggling bulk at his feet, and the toe of his shoe took Mink Satterlee in his chest. It was a puny enough kick; it didn't even shake Mink Satterlee loose from where he clung. He gave a bellow and heaved himself up on the stage and, before any of us could move, grabbed Devore by the throat with his left ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... sticklebacks swimming up the stream with a wriggling motion, he was so surprised that he raised his hands suddenly and ...
— A Treasury of Eskimo Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss
... to be sure, boy. You will see a fellow one hour rolling along with a quid in his mouth, as happy as a prince, and the next down with the fever, and wriggling about with pain; and in the morning when you ask after him, if he's on shore, you will hear he is buried already; if he's at sea, the sailmaker will be busy sewing him ...
— Sunshine Bill • W H G Kingston
... it was full of frankness and intelligence, and beaming with honest joy, and close to him moved little Diccon, hardly able to repress his ecstasy within company bounds, and letting it find vent in odd little gestures, wriggling with his body, playing tunes on his knee, or making ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the tiny nests, would be placed near the fire and kept at as regular a degree of warmth as possible, the condition of the eggs would be noted carefully, and in a short time the hopes of the anxious pioneers would be dashed to the ground by wriggling little insects climbing cheerfully out of their winter quarters and hopping about in a vain search for something green to live upon. Often, in sheer desperation, the harassed settler would sweep the hatching brood into the fire, remarking ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... was set around it—to keep the cattle out, perhaps—was tall and sturdy, and grew up boldly towards the trees that studded it at intervals. There was no other entry to it except by gaps we made in the close hedge, and, wriggling through these, we climbed among briars and all kinds of vegetation that made a miniature jungle overhead. Near the top we emerged on stunted grass, with the wide sky over us, and before us the champaign country stretching to the plains of Meath, and the smoke of the city, ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... your room, Alexander, and make ready," repeated the widow, with a glare, and the boy retired slowly, wriggling and snuffling. When his sobs died away and an upstairs door was heard to close with a bang, Mrs. Benker ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume
... hands full with the girl. His hand, rather, for he held her with one arm, leaving his other, his weapon arm, free. She was struggling furiously to break free from his grasp, wriggling, kicking, clawing, using all of her vigorous strength against him. Almost she succeeded. Then he had recourse to brute ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... moaning and trembling and all but fainting in her chair; the young noble like destroying angel, hand in air, and great eye scorching and withering; and the caitiff wriggling out at the door, wincing with body and head, his knees knocking, his heart panting, yet raging, his teeth gnashing, his cheek livid, his eye gleaming with the fire ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... argued the matter too much in his mind. Even when he got far south, among the Florida keys, and saw the legions of the heron and the ibis stalking with stately gait along the wet sand, and every now and then thrusting in their "javelin bills," spiking and bringing out long wriggling flashes of silver that went alive down their throats, he would still be thinking it over. Yes; he was forgetting her. He began to be in better spirits. He was in very good spirits one day in January when, quite unknown to him, the ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... must be on the look-out for serpents, night and day! And just as I'd taken the highest tree in the wood," continued the Pigeon, raising its voice to a shriek, "and just as I was thinking I should be free of them at last, they must needs come wriggling down ...
— Alice in Wonderland • Lewis Carroll
... short way into the forest, and falling on the lower parts of the trunks, the huge roots, and the enormous creepers suspended from the boughs, served to render the rest of the forest more dark and gloomy. Now and then a vulture croaked at us as we passed; and we could see huge snakes twisting and wriggling among the trunks ...
— In the Wilds of Florida - A Tale of Warfare and Hunting • W.H.G. Kingston
... were scarcely spoken when the deer were followed by a drove of peccaries; then came jaguars, pumas, antelopes, and monkeys; panthers and wolves and snakes, great and small, wriggling over the ground with wondrous speed, and creatures the like of which I had never seen before—a regular stampede of all sorts and conditions of reptiles and beasts, and all too much frightened to meddle either ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... her eyes, however, at the querulous whistle of a striped creeper that was wriggling through the intertwined branches of the trumpet-vine in search of insects. Ruth Fielding was always interested in those busy, helpful ...
— Ruth Fielding Down East - Or, The Hermit of Beach Plum Point • Alice B. Emerson
... accustomed to understand the art, but of graceful posturing and bodily contortions, spinning round like a coryphee, with hand aloft, and snapping their fingers or clashing tiny brass cymbals; standing with feet motionless and wriggling the joints, or bending backward until their loose, flowing tresses touch the ground. Persians able to afford the luxury have their womens' apartment walled with mirrors, placed at appropriate angles, so that when enjoying ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... this gulch it was necessary for us to go. The snow was so deep and so soft that I dismounted and put on my snowshoes and started to lead Midget across. She followed willingly. After a few steps, a flounder and a snort caused me to look back, and all I could see of Midget was her two little ears wriggling in the snow. When we reached the other side, Midget came out breathing heavily, and at once shook her head to dislodge the snow from her forehead and her ears. She was impatient to go on, and before I could ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... with twenty miles of view behind her, and he placed the dripping baby on her knee. It shone now with health and beauty: it seemed to reflect light, like a copper vessel. Just such a baby Bellini sets languid on his mother's lap, or Signorelli flings wriggling on pavements of marble, or Lorenzo di Credi, more reverent but less divine, lays carefully among flowers, with his head upon a wisp of golden straw. For a time Gino contemplated them standing. Then, to get a better view, ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... was chopping fell on me," he said. "I don't know if it smashed my ankle, or if I twisted it wriggling clear—the thing pinned me down. ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... minutes, the Sioux began wriggling desperately again, hoping to free himself by sheer strength; but he could not budge his head and shoulders from their vice-like imprisonment, and something like despair must have settled over him when all doubt that he was swelling ...
— The Story of Red Feather - A Tale of the American Frontier • Edward S. (Edward Sylvester) Ellis
... old lady, tripped over his prone form. The sensation of being kicked and sat upon appealed to Jock's sense of humour. The more people avalanched across him the more comic he thought it. And in a moment there was quite a pile of wriggling bodies on top of him. For though the public managed on the whole to leap over, or circumvent, the obstacle presented by Jock's extremely large body, none of his blind comrades ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... well say it out!" she declared, wriggling about in her seat, and pouting her lips with an air of offence. "I hate people who bottle things up when all the time you see them fizzling inside. I suppose you're furious with me about ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... plays we plowed along five or ten yards at a time. Then Ole was given the ball. He went twenty-five yards. Any other man would have been crushed to earth in five. He just waded through the middle of the line and went down the field, a moving mass of wriggling men. It was a wonderful play. They disinterred him at last and he started straight across ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... and while Bill was turning to deal a blow, or to catch hold of him, he had ducked his small black head and escaped. Buttoned tightly in his narrow jacket, which he had not taken off, his straight thin figure offered nothing for the hand to grasp, so that it was like trying to lay hold of a wriggling, slippery eel. It was certainly a much better fight than could have been expected from the unequal size of the rivals, and Bill's face grew a deep red, as much with rage as with his vain efforts to close with Dan, who skipped round him breathless but full of spirit. ...
— Black, White and Gray - A Story of Three Homes • Amy Walton
... on. We saw lumps of iron, intensely white-hot, and in all but a melting state, passed through rollers of various size and pressure, and speedily converted into long bars, which came curling and waving out of the rollers like great red ribbons, or like fiery serpents wriggling out of Tophet; and finally, being straightened out, they were laid to cool in heaps. Trip-hammers are very pleasant things to look at, working so massively as they do, and yet so accurately; chewing up the hot iron, as it were, and fashioning it into shape, with a sort of mighty and gigantic ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... yo' mean dawg," he said to Daws; and the two Dillons—the one sullen and the other crying with rage—moved away with Whizzer slinking close to the ground after them. But at the top of the hill both turned with bantering yells, derisive wriggling of their fingers at their noses, and with other rude gestures. And, thereupon, Dolph and Rube wanted to go after them, but the tall brother stopped them with ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... of the smaller stick, which is pressed convulsively against the further end of the channel among the fine powder there accumulated, as if he had just pierced through and through some little viper that was wriggling and struggling to escape from his clutches. The next moment a delicate wreath of smoke curls spirally into the air, the heap of dusty particles glows with fire, and Kory-Kory, almost breathless, dismounts from ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... legs. This bag contained the three snakes and the small crocodile. The mouth of the bag was threaded with a string, and naturally remained closed until the string was pulled right away when the weight of the wriggling contents caused the mouth to open and the reptiles to fall upon the ground beneath. The crouching position of the magician enabled him to get his legs spanning the ground immediately beneath the ...
— Indian Conjuring • L. H. Branson
... turned its head up and down, to right and to left, moved its claws ... then suddenly darted from the wall, flew with a whirring sound about the room, and again settled, again hatefully and loathsomely wriggling all over, ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... in the week when Auld Licht young men fell in love. Sam'l Dickie, wearing a blue Glengarry bonnet with a red ball on the top, came to the door of a one-story house in the Tenements, and stood there wriggling, for he was in a suit of tweeds for the first time that week, and did not feel at one with them. When his feeling of being a stranger to himself wore off, he looked up and down the road, which straggles ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... upon his back and fairly wallowed at my feet; jumped up and sprang upon me, rolling me upon the ground by his great weight; then wriggling and squirming around me like a playful puppy presenting its back for the petting it craves. I could not resist the ludicrousness of the spectacle, and holding my sides I rocked back and forth in the first laughter ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... who were inexperienced it was somewhat alarming to see the hand of an apparently drowning man with the fingers wriggling violently, but ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... not go to Stinking Lake and sleep. ... And wake with the faint stench of sulphur in his throat. ... And see the worm-like leeches unfolding in the shallows, and the big, reddish water-lizards, livid as skinned eels, wriggling convulsively ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... mouth—that is, his spoken promise—leads him into sin, if he does not fulfil it (comp. Deut. xxiii, 21, 22). He asks release from his promise on the ground that it is a sin of weakness. The 'angel' is best understood as the priest (messenger), as in Malachi ii.7. Such a wriggling out of a vow will bring God's anger; for the 'voice' which promised what the hand will ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... from here; there I won the favour of an old gentleman who sold dickeys. He had a very shabby squad of animals, without soul or spirit; nobody would buy them, till I leaped upon their hinder ends, and by merely wriggling in a particular manner, made them caper and bound so to people's liking, that in a few hours every one of them was sold at very sufficient prices. The old gentleman was so pleased with my skill, that he took me home with him, and in a very little time into partnership. It's a good thing to have ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... really a very frightful and mischievous species of dragon. It is, indeed, difficult to imagine what hideous beings these three sisters were. Why, instead of locks of hair, if you can believe me, they had each of them a hundred enormous snakes growing on their heads, all alive, twisting, wriggling, curling, and thrusting out their venomous tongues, with forked stings at the end! The teeth of the Gorgons were terribly long tusks; their hands were made of brass; and their bodies were all over scales, which, if not iron, were something as hard and impenetrable. They had wings, too, ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... because it was the only place where he could be four thousand miles away from any woman. Think of it, little Asticot of my heart. There are lots of lies told about the moon, he says. He looks down on the earth and sees all of us little worms wriggling in and out and over one another and thinking ourselves so important and he cracks his sides with laughing; and your bald-headed idiots with spyglasses take the cracks for mountain ranges and volcanoes. I'm going to live in the moon, ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... an incline, wriggling forward on their stomachs the last few yards to the shelter of the cactus on the crest. Before them lay a little valley. On the cactus-covered slope opposite a herd of cattle was grazing. No guard was ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... houris of the evening before. At a given signal the music begins, and the girls commence a series of capers which seem utterly ridiculous. It is downright hard work for the girls, however; and those who are not engaged in leaping, or pirouetting, or wriggling, are leaning against the scenery and panting with fatigue. The leader of the ballet storms and swears at them, and is made frantic by every little mistake. The rehearsal occupies several hours. If there is a matinee that day, it is kept ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... Mr. Evringham, half smiling. "No use wriggling, no use staying away from the mother. Might as well yield gracefully. I think Ballard might ...
— Jewel - A Chapter In Her Life • Clara Louise Burnham
... fish disappeared and Astro sank back on the timbers. He trailed one hand over the side in the water, and suddenly, felt the rough scales of the fish brush his fingers. In a flash, Astro closed his hand and snatched the wriggling creature out ...
— Stand by for Mars! • Carey Rockwell
... would have been less violent. The Nabob's millions would have re-established the balance and even made the scale lean to his side. But Paris does not yet place money above every other force, and to realize this, it was sufficient to observe the great contractor wriggling amiably before the great gentleman and casting under his feet, like the courtier's cloak of ermine, the dense vanity ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... that sort of chap. He keeps on wriggling out of small rows till he thinks he can do anything he likes without being dropped on, and then all of a sudden he finds himself up to the eyebrows in a record smash. I don't say young Jackson will land himself like that. All I say is that he's just the sort who does. He's asking for trouble. ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... blood-red jersey and long boots, all shining with moisture, stands at the bows holding up the carcase of a silver-bellied sea-otter from whose pelt the wet drips in moonstones. Now the artist who could paint the silver wash of the mist, the wriggling treacly reflection of the boat, and the raw red wrists of the man would be something ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... time Ruth was seated at her table in the school-room, and the scholars were wriggling and twisting before her on their wooden benches, she saw the matter quite plainly from the Wiggins side. She made up her mind that she would behave just as well as she knew how to the Wigginses when she got home. She planned how she would swing little Mary out ...
— Young Lucretia and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... With him it is the millennium or nothing. He will tolerate no indirect approach. He will give no credit for partial approximations. He insists on holding every one strictly to his first fault. There shall be no wriggling out of a false position, no gradual change in function, no adaptations of old tools ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... them hath not yet after five hundred years and more lost its rejoicing power. The truth is, Epicurus himself allows there are some pleasures derived from fame. And indeed why should he not, when he himself had such a furious lechery and wriggling after glory as made him not only to disown his masters and scuffle about syllables and accents with his fellow-pedant Democritus (whose principles he stole verbatim), and to tell his disciples there never was a wise ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... "My word!" said McTurk, wriggling his shoulder-blades all down the corridor. "That was business! The Prooshan Bates has an infernal ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... hair turned white in a single night. Last night I thought mine was turning. I had a creepy feeling in the roots, which seemed to crawl all the way down inside each separate hair, wriggling as it went. I suppose you couldn't have nervous prostration of the hair? I worried dreadfully, it kept on so long; and my hair is so fair it would be almost a temptation for it, in an emergency, to take the one short step from gold to silver. I didn't dare switch on the light in ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... Mavick, too much pleased with the result to be belligerent, "I let the newspaper do the wriggling." ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Boy was asleep, dreaming of the seaside, the little Rabbit lay among the old picture-books in the corner behind the fowl-house, and he felt very lonely. The sack had been left untied, and so by wriggling a bit he was able to get his head through the opening and look out. He was shivering a little, for he had always been used to sleeping in a proper bed, and by this time his coat had worn so thin and threadbare from hugging that it was no longer any ...
— The Velveteen Rabbit • Margery Williams
... he love it! Look at his dear little nose wriggling with joy. Oh Tom! do look at him waggling his ears!" Debby's voice grew shrill again with excitement. Nibbler hopped out of the basket ...
— Anxious Audrey • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... with, or drain into, any stream through which fish could enter them. Fish are a deadly enemy of the mosquito and devour him in the stage between the egg and the growth of his wings, when he lives in water as a little whitish worm, such as you may have seen wriggling in ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... the 15th of February. It was dreadfully cold. The snow drove against the windows and the wind whistled furiously under the doors. My two aunts, seated at a table in one corner of the drawing-room, gave vent from time to time to deep sighs, and, wriggling in their armchairs, kept casting uneasy glances toward the bedroom door. One of them had taken from a little leather bag placed on the table her blessed rosary and was repeating her prayers, while her sister was reading a volume of Voltaire's correspondence which ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Macumazana think this poor business and he right. Very poor business, any conjurer do better. All common trick"—here his eye fell upon Mr. Savage who was wriggling uneasily in the background. "What matter with that gentleman? Brother ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... is a whirlwind of applause and he is forced to bow again and again. Finally, he is permitted to retire, and the audience prepares to spend the short intermission in whispering, grunting, wriggling, scraping its feet, rustling its programs and gaping at hats. The SIX MUSICAL CRITICS and SIX OTHER MEN, their lips parched and their eyes staring, gallop for the door. As THE GREAT PIANIST comes from the stage, THE JANITOR meets him with a large seidel of ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken
... Then I reached down and gripped him with my thumb and forefinger just back of the ears, and lifted him up, and looked his impotent rage in the face. What gleaming eyes, what an array of threatening teeth, what reaching of vicious claws, what a wriggling and convulsed body! But I held him firmly. He could only scratch my hand and dart fire from his electric, bead-like eyes. In the mean time my dog was bounding up, begging to be allowed to have his way with the weasel. But I knew what he did not: I knew that in anything like a fair encounter the weasel ...
— Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers • John Burroughs
... lost no time to setting her enchantments to work. In a few moments, she heard a great noise of hissing snakes outside of the chamber window; and behold! there was her fiery chariot, and four huge winged serpents, wriggling and twisting in the air, flourishing their tails higher than the top of the palace, and all ready to set off on an aerial journey. Medea staid only long enough to take her son with her, and to steal the crown jewels, together with the king's best robes, and whatever ...
— Tanglewood Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... it? And you ought to appreciate it, for it's so like your own way of doing things. Just think: the gun is resting on its two ends, with hardly an inch to spare. So, if you start wriggling, or moving, or even breathing too hard, either the barrel or the butt end'll give way; and down you go! As for me, I've nothing to ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... escape, and so He stuffs them head-down in a sack, Not quite dead, wriggling in a row, And Fraulein laughed, "Ho, ho! Ho, ho!" And gave my middle a hard smack, I wish that I'd ...
— Country Sentiment • Robert Graves
... is in the separate bottle; do let us look at it again. Oh! really it is a curious creature, why it is as transparent as glass, now it jerks itself about, now it floats without motion in mid-water. What is it?" "I am inclined to think," said Willy, "judging from its wriggling, jerking motions that it must be the larva of some kind of gnat." Right again, my boy, it is the larva of a gnat, and one known to naturalists by the name of Corethra; you see there are eleven divisions or segments in the body; ...
— Country Walks of a Naturalist with His Children • W. Houghton
... activity. They were ever-present annoyances and troubles; no time was free from them. The lice worried us by day and tormented us by night; the maggot-flies fouled our food, and laid in sores and wounds larvae that speedily became masses of wriggling worms. The N'Yaarkers were human vermin that preyed upon and ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... sardines, where my puffs will be mashed as flat as buckwheat cakes, and my train will go home with various gentlemen, clinging in scraps to their boot-heels! Were you ever at the seashore? If you have ever chanced to walk into a settlement of fiddlers, and seen them squirming, wriggling, backward, forward, sideways, you may understand that I am going into a similar promiscuous scramble. Human ingenuity is vastly fertile in the production of fashionable tortures; and when that outraged and indignant poet savagely ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... personalities there were innumerable clergymen and Sir Thomas Gilzean, Edinburgh's romantic draper, who talked French with a facility that his fellow townsmen suspected of being a gift acquired on the brink of the pit, and who had a long wriggling waist which suggested that he was about to pick up the tails of his elegant frock-coat and dance. He was light indeed, but not enough to express the lightness of which life was capable; while the darker side ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... did as he was bade willingly enough, and Haigh nipped down and levered out the stone with his knife. I stayed where I was. I had my arms full. To be accurate, they were wrapped round the third member of our trio, who was wriggling like a demon, and foaming at ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... that nut, Or with thy crackers or thy double teeth; So easily may all things be destroyed! But 'tis not in the power of mortal man To mend the fracture of a filbert shell. There were two great men once amused themselves Watching two maggots run their wriggling race, And wagering on their speed; but, Nick, to us It were no sport to see the pampered worm Roll out and then draw in his folds of fat Like to some barber's leathern powder bag Wherewith he feathers, frosts or cauliflowers, Spruce beau, or ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... stared intently at this, their parsonage home. Then the serious little girl scrambled under the fence, followed closely by the lithe-limbed twins. A pause, a very short one,—and then Prudence, too, was wriggling beneath ...
— Prudence of the Parsonage • Ethel Hueston
... that they were oddly-dressed, haggard, affected women or long-haired, pretentious, grotesque men. I have been at such coteries, too, where they praised each other's work with odd, passionate cries and wriggling, fantastic gestures. That is terrible too, because that is culture which has turned rancid. But at my friend's house it was not rancid at all, it was simply unassimilated. My friend himself handed ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... automatically some six or eight steps in pursuit of the fleeing spectre when, right over my head, the grey stone curdled with a female darkness; the hard and the angular softening in a putrescent explosion of thick wriggling laughter. I started, looked up, and encountered a window stuffed with four savage fragments of crowding Face: four livid, shaggy disks focussing hungrily; four pair of uncouth eyes rapidly smouldering; ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... she presently plumped her line, and the next instant jerked it out again with a wriggling, silvery minnow flashing ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... followed, wriggling as obsequiously as the dog with a stolen mutton-chop upon his conscience. The door slammed, the key turned roughly in the lock. Lady Hannah, oblivious of the absence of outdoor footwear, flew joyously to cram ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... would be the excitement, or the credit of snake charming, if the wriggling beasts were made harmless by pulling out their fangs?" demanded the stage hand. "It would be like a dog fight, with the dogs muzzled. These belong to that heathen Hindoo, the ...
— With Links of Steel • Nicholas Carter
... sideways, peered and listened, locating the presence of the victim worm.—Three or four vigorous pecks—the starlings running elsewhere—to loosen the surrounding soil, and the moist pink living string was steadily, mercilessly, drawn upward into the uncompromising light of day, to be devoured wriggling, bit by bit, with most unlovely gusto.—The chaff-chaff sharpened his tiny saw tipping about the branches of the fir trees in the Wilderness, along with the linnets, ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... that the second portion of the contract would be fulfilled. She knew quite well that the conspirators hoped to turn her presence in the Kosnovian capital to their own account, and when their scheme was balked they would devise some means of wriggling out of the bargain. But she laughed at the notion that she, an unknown student, should have suddenly become a pawn in the game of empire. There was an element of daring, almost of peril, in the adventure that fascinated her. It savored ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... in, and went on, or remained; Brown of the Bulls sent on a drover ahead of the mob to spy out the land, and the second letter left the rack, while all who came in, or went on, or remained, during their stay at the homestead, stood about the posts and uprights waving off flies, and rubbing and wriggling against the posts like so many Uriah Heeps, as they laid plans, gossiped, gave in reports, or "swopped yarns." The Territory is hardly an earthly paradise just before the showers. Still, Cheon did all he could to make things pleasanter, regaling all daily on hop-beer, and ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... breath in expostulation, but grappled with him, and he had rent part of Weston's jacket off his back in the effort to detain him when Devine came running up. Then Weston, wriggling around, struck the storekeeper in the face, and plunged back into the smoke as the latter ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... under the lower jaw ("poverty jaw"). If the fourth stomach of a dead animal is cut open and the contents carefully examined, the parasites, which are from 1/2 inch to 1-1/4 inches in length and about as thick as an ordinary pin, may be seen, if present in any considerable number, actively wriggling about ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... Tullus of Arpinum, Chief of the Volscian aids, And Metius with the long fair curls, The love of Anxur's maids, And the white head of Vulso, The great Arician seer, And Nepos of Laurentum The hunter of the deer; And in the back false Sextus Felt the good Roman steel, And wriggling in the dust he died, Like a worm beneath the wheel: And fliers and pursuers Were mingled in a mass; And far away the battle Went roaring ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... beautiful and calmly you sleep, and yet death, nasty death, was so near to you.' Close beside my breast I saw a small black snake with its head crushed; the little girl had killed the poisonous reptile with a switch from a nut-tree, and just as it was wriggling on to my destruction. Then a trembling of sweet awe fell upon me; I knew that angels often came down from heaven above to rescue men in person from the threatening attack of some evil enemy. I fell upon my knees and raised my folded hands. ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... wriggling for the moment and lay there shaking violently, as though he had malaria. Then the paroxysm passed and he took up ...
— Droozle • Frank Banta
... the holy hush of those brown old monastic aisles, thinking of Harry the Eighth, and the Reformation! How I loved to go a roving with my eye, all along the sculptured walls and buttresses; winding in among the intricacies of the pendent ceiling, and wriggling my fancied way like a wood-worm. I could have sat there all the morning long, through noon, unto night. But at last the benediction would come; and appropriating my share of it, I would slowly move away, thinking how I should like to go home with some of the portly old gentlemen, with ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... as hindrances, they couldn't be allowed to delay the work. If I lost a man, it simply meant so much more work for me. After a couple of months a blacksmith's hammer started thumping in the back of my head, and when I closed my eyes for a couple of hours at night, little fiery snakes went wriggling about in my brain. Tired out? When I looked in the glass, my eyes were just two red balls in my head. But when the four months were up, I was back in the ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... a bin, All powder'd o'er from tail to chin, A lively maggot sallies out, You know him by his hazel snout: So when the grandson of his grandsire Forth issues wriggling, Dick Drawcansir, With powder'd rump and back and side, You cannot blanch his tawny hide; For 'tis beyond the power of meal The gipsy visage to conceal; For as he shakes his wainscot chops, Down every mealy atom drops, And leaves the tartar phiz in ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... explain, after his own fashion, how the oil in the caldrons above, urged by these fires, departed in steam and agony through long pipes called worms, the only outlet from the otherwise air-tight stills, which worms, wriggling out at the end of the building, plunged into a bath of cold water provided for them in a huge square tank fed by a bright mountain-stream winding down from the bluff above in a fashion so picturesque as to be quite out of keeping with its ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... meditating like, when all of a sudden I felt myself very queer in the inside, and pains came on just for all the world as if I had swallowed a score or two of big mackerel, and they were all kicking and wriggling about in my bread-basket. 'They are the smoke-worms the doctor told me about,' thinks I. 'They don't like the taste of his stuff, that's the truth of it.' Well, I felt queerer and queerer, and Southsea ...
— Will Weatherhelm - The Yarn of an Old Sailor • W.H.G. Kingston
... Heaven's mercy that she had not fallen. But her frock was a stout blue gingham, fortunately, and a projecting branch-stump was thrust through it, holding her in a horizontal position along the bough. She was crying and wriggling, and in another minute or so she might have fallen to the ground. There was a slight chance that she would have struck on ...
— The Wishing-Ring Man • Margaret Widdemer
... dare commit the finances of the country to him, so we go scrambling on 'du jour la journee.' Nobody knows what is to happen next—no confidence, no security, great talk of a property tax, to which, I suppose, after wriggling about, we shall at ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... a picture of some blood so infected. Notice that worm- like sheath of undulating membrane terminating in a slender whip- like process by which it moves about. That thing wriggling about like a minute electric eel, always in motion, ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... down, wriggling his toes in the sand. He did not like the idea of the lonely jungle, or the thought of the long hard days between him and Ganassi Peak, ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart
... is turned, looped and suspended with all sorts of lobsters, crabs, sea-turtles, octopi, flounders, etc., wriggling thru it, not seen at first, then in strong evidence, making you wonder why you ...
— Palaces and Courts of the Exposition • Juliet James
... getting out of a shiny gray limousine. Such an unnecessarily pretty lady, all furs and fluffles and veils and perfumes and waved hair! Her cheeks were pink and her expression was placid, and each of her white-gloved hands held tight to a pretty picture-book child who was wriggling with wild excitement. One had yellow frilly hair and one had brown bobbed hair, and both were quaintly, immaculately, expensively kissable. They were the kind of children every girl wishes she could have a set ...
— The Rose Garden Husband • Margaret Widdemer
... caused a boat to be carefully lowered, put in her a trustworthy officer with a boat-compass, and we saw her depart into the fog. During her absence the ship's bell was kept tolling. Then the fires were all out, the ship full of water, and gradually breaking up, wriggling with every swell like a willow basket—the sea all round us full of the floating fragments of her sheeting, twisted and torn into a spongy condition. In less than an hour the boat returned, saying that the beach was quite near, ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... cod of about ten pounds weight was wriggling on the iron hook which Ruby handed up to Dumsby, who mounted with his prize ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne
... of the colour of Brandy, of a fair Yellow: the Leaves of it bruised are very hot biting upon the Tongue: and of these, so bruised, they took some, and having tyed them in the cleft of a long stick, they held them to the Nose of the Ratle-Snake, who by turning and wriggling laboured as much as she could to avoid it: but she was killed with it, in less than half an hours time, and, as was supposed, by the scent thereof; which was done Anno 1657. in the Month of July, at which season, they repute those creatures to be in ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... slipped into her dressing-room, scrambled into her clothes, and rushed from the theater, hurrying to carry the good news to the two who were eagerly awaiting her—her mother and her dog. "At last she saw the lighted windows that told her home was near. In a moment, through a tangle of hat, veil, and wriggling, ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... shoulder slightly, as a polite intimation that his hand need not rest there any longer, but he seemed to misinterpret the movement, and drew her an inch or so nearer, whereupon the wriggling ceased. ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... any better than the other two did, and twice they 'ad to speak to 'im about stopping in the street and trying to make 'imself more comfortable by wriggling. Sam said ...
— Deep Waters, The Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... deal more confidence in you than in the president," he said; "besides, I've other fish to fry," he added, wriggling his wen. "I want to buy a few thousand francs in the Funds while they are at eighty. They fall, I'm told, at the end of each month. You know all ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... So the forty-odd came wriggling down the surrounding slopes toward the willow thicket, keeping as close to the earth as possible, striving to close in before they made their open charge. Uncle Billy waited until he got a good shot, and "turned loose" for the first ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... tellers' cages into the front window. Then she pressed her uncle down into his chair, grasped his face in her hands, and held him while she kissed him on the nose, the left eye, and the right cheek, choosing the spot in every instance with provoking deliberation as she held his wriggling head. He lost his cigar and his spectacles were knocked awry, but he did not appear to be distressed. Phil set his spectacles straight, struck a match for a fresh cigar, and seated ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... had been wriggling since the introduction of this topic. He now gave a cry of exasperation and made a furious motion with his hand. "Oh, don't bother me!" he said. He was enraged against the tattered man, and could have strangled him. His companions seemed ever to play intolerable parts. They were ever upraising the ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... the soul of trade," drowsily murmured Caleb; but as Youth turned to inquire, "Whossay?" the bag upon which he was seated, and upon which, in the enjoyment of his triumph, he had been wriggling somewhat too vivaciously, suddenly gave way, and a pair of snow-white hose came tumbling out. They were at once caught and held admiringly up by ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... ground, and stepped back. In that hour Neewa was willing to accept a truce so far as Challoner was concerned. But it was not Challoner that his half-blinded eyes saw first as he rolled from his bag. It was Miki! And Miki, his awkward body wriggling with the excitement of his curiosity, was almost on the ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... the pit through some natural passage known to them beneath the water. And now I was made to understand my thought of the previous night, that I had seen the flicker of tentacles; for these things below us had each two short and stumpy arms; but the ends appeared divided into hateful and wriggling masses of small tentacles, which slid hither and thither as the creatures moved about the bottom of the valley, and at their hinder ends, where they should have grown feet, there seemed other flickering ...
— The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" • William Hope Hodgson
... You'd gain the prize if one was given for slapping. Una Ursula Urica Urania Urls, You'd gain the prize for teasing little girls. Venus Violet Victoria Veronica Vo-shi, Just learn your task and put away that crochet. Wilmett Walberg Winefride Wilhelmina Wriggling, Now once for all do stop that stupid giggling. Xenodice Xanthippe Xanthisa Xenophona X-cess, You think and talk of nothing else but dress! dress! Yana Yulga Yapeena Yestina Young, Will you behave yourself and just draw in your tongue. And lastly and worst of all, you, Zoe Zora Zillah Zenobia ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... suddenly to the right. They rested upon a pond of dirty water several feet deep lying there. Like a flash he reached out and caught the saloon-keeper in both hands, lifted him clear of the ground, carried him wriggling and cursing to the edge, and tossed him in like a ball. With a splash and a yell Ned went under, came up puffing and blowing, and dashing the water from his eyes and ears. A shout of derision went up ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody |
