"Ant-" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and at the same time, no doubt, the serum capable of turning the solid flesh into fluid. Those two tiny implements, which can just be examined through the lens, must, it seems, have some other object. They are hollow, and in this resemble those of the Ant-lion, who sucks and drains her capture without having to divide it; but there is this great difference, that the Ant-lion leaves copious remnants, which are afterwards flung outside the funnel-shaped trap dug in the sand, whereas the Glow-worm, that ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... the course of a sailing-ship leaves upon the white paper of a chart she is always aiming for that one little spot—maybe a small island in the ocean, a single headland upon the long coast of a continent, a lighthouse on a bluff, or simply the peaked form of a mountain like an ant-heap afloat upon the waters. But if you have sighted it on the expected bearing, then that Landfall is good. Fogs, snowstorms, gales thick with clouds and rain—those are the ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... engineers, weavers, physicists, chemists and surgeons who have forestalled most of our human inventions. I need not here remind the reader of the wasps' and bees' genius for building, the social and economic organization of the hive and the ant-hill, the spider's snares, the eumenes' nest and hanging egg, the odynerus' cell with its neat stacks of game, the sacred beetle's filthy but ingenius ball, the leafcutter's faultless disks, the ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... miles north-east of Ladysmith, Rietfontein[105] farmhouse lay by a branch of the Modder Spruit, south-west of a long, low ridge, which descended to the railway line in smooth and easy slopes dotted with ant-heaps, with on its forehead a sparse eyebrow of stones. Beyond the crest line, to the northward, the ground sank with a gentle sweep, broken only by two rough under-features jutting from the western extremity of the ridge, to rear itself again ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... the Edentata the only example in Ceylon is the scaly ant-eater, called by the Singhalese, Caballaya, but usually known by its Malay name of Pengolin[1], a word indicative of its faculty, when alarmed, of "rolling itself up" into a compact ball, by bending its head towards ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... sale at public auction; and yet come to read the other side of her, she had a trust in God Almighty that was like the bow anchor of a three-decker. It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth looking at. I don't think your ant-eating specialist, with his sharp nose and pin-head eyes, is the best every-day companion; but any man who knows one thing well is worth listening to for once; and if you are of the large-brained variety of the race, and want to fill out your programme of the Order of Things in ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... as Gwythyr the son of Greidawl was walking over a mountain, he heard a wailing and a grievous cry. And when he heard it, {103} he sprung forward, and went towards it. And when he came there, he drew his sword, and smote off an ant-hill close to the earth, whereby it escaped being burned in the fire. And the ants said to him, "Receive from us the blessing of Heaven, and that which no man can give we will give thee." Then they ...
— The Mabinogion Vol. 2 (of 3) • Owen M. Edwards
... the latter was at least occasionally in land communication with Asia. During this time a very peculiar fauna grew up in South America, some of the types resembling nothing now existing, while others are recognizable as ancestral forms of the ant-eaters, sloths, and armadillos of to-day. It was a peculiar and diversified mammalian fauna, of, on the whole, rather small species, and without any representatives of the animals with which man has been most familiar during his career ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... familiar as a channel marking, teeming as an ant-hill, and when darkness came over it, and he viewed it from the after deck, mystery came, too.... For a while there was a hush, and around the hills gigantic ghosts walked.... One thought of the Phocaeans who had founded ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... Mother Snail. "Our son shall not go into an ant-hill; if you know nothing better than that, we shall give the commission to the white gnats. They fly far and wide, in rain and sunshine; they know the whole forest here, ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... when they had failed. This proceeding would have been a reflection upon our superior weapons, and I declined the proposal, as too dangerous to the men. I sent the natives to the summit of a white ant-hill about 7 feet high; from this they espied the animal lying in the yellow grass, but so indistinct that it was impossible to determine her exact position. I accordingly instructed the men to keep a sharp look-out, and to throw their spears ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... of great men is going; the epoch of the ant-hill, of life in multiplicity, is beginning. The century of individualism, if abstract equality triumphs, runs a great risk of seeing no more true individuals. By continual leveling and division of labor, society will become everything and ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the signal for the sailors of the Plymouth Adventure to charge aft and finish the business. They found pirates crawling from under the wreckage. It was like a demolished ant-heap. In the smaller cabins and other rooms far aft, which were more or less intact, some of the rascals showed fight but they were remorselessly prodded out with pikes and those unwounded were hustled forward to be thrown into ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... On ant-hills screamed cranes with delight; In their rooms were our wives sighing sore. Our homes they had swept and made tight:— All at once we arrived at the door. The bitter gourds hanging are seen, From branches of chestnut-trees high. Three years of toil away we had been, Since such a ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... partakes partly of the character of that of the equatorial regions of South America, and of the semi-tropical districts of Mexico. There are several varieties of ant-eaters, similar to those found in the valley of the Amazon, while the grey squirrel of more northern latitudes skips playfully amid the forests of the interior. In the woods and wide savannahs are two or more varieties of deer—one resembling the European deer in colour, but ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... on the little bed, in the round wattle and daub hut, and pressed her fingers against her eyes to still their throbbing. Then she looked round at her surroundings, and a little wry smile twisted her lips. A rough floor of ant-heap composition and cow-dung hardened to cement, with some native reed matting laid down; a small stretcher bed; a packing-case for a washhand-stand, and enamel ware. Another packing-case for a dressing-table, and a little cheap glass nailed to the wall. ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... the water swept all craft on, so a like tide seemed hurrying all men, all horses, all vehicles on the land. As ant-hills, the bridge arches crawled with processions of carts, coaches, drays, every sort of wheeled, rumbling thing, the noses of the horses behind touching the backs of the vehicles in advance, all bespattered with ebon mud—ebon mud that stuck like Jews' pitch. At times ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... quite half a bottle of champagne to pull us up to our usual spirits, as we sat at supper at a window where we could see London spread out beneath us like a huge black velvet flower, dotted with fiery embroideries, sudden flaring stamens, and rows of ant-like fireflies moving in slow zig-zag processions ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... nothing to say, and he went away, to go down to the dam. The Irishman was sitting on an ant-heap away in the sun, and Jan passed him without speaking, and walked down to the place of explosions. He was looking at the marks of fire on the rocks, when it seemed to him he heard a shout, and ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... snowflake on the sea; but Zeppa saw it, or regarded it, not. On the shore of the island furthest from the mountain, the clustering huts of a native village could be seen; but Zeppa looked at it without a gleam of interest, and passed it over as if it were a group of ant-hills. ...
— The Madman and the Pirate • R.M. Ballantyne
... "De pittas, missie; de ant-thrushes, you call them," said the black woman, gleefully. "Now missie's house will be clean; massa is away, all de tings will be turned out," and as she spoke, she seized her mistress's dress, and, gently drawing her to the open door, directed her attention to several dark-coloured, ...
— Little Folks (October 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... arms, to arms, to arms! arm, to arms, arm, to arms, arm":—like the hue-and-cry after wolves; and all diverse tongues, according to their nations; and you saw them come out of their tents and little lodgings, as thick as little ants when you uncover the ant-hills, to bring help to their comrades, who were having their throats cut like sheep. Their cavalry also came from all sides at full gallop, patati, patata, patati, patata, pa, ta, ta, patata pata, ta, eager to be in the thick of the fighting, to ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... filled. These fly forward with the original motion and impetus of the shell itself, spreading as they go. Horizontal fire is easy to find cover against, but these discharges from on high are much more difficult to evade. For instance, ant-hills are excellent cover against rifles, but none at all against these shells. It is shrapnel, as this kind of shell is called, that does the most mischief. The round bullets (200 to a caseful) lie scattered about in the dust, and mixed with them are very different little slender ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... if to strike with it, and shuffle along the ground toward them, scolding all the while in a harsh voice. I feared at first that they might kill him, but I soon found that he was able to take care of himself. I would turn over stones and dig into ant-hills for him, and he would lick up the ants so fast that a stream of them seemed going into his mouth unceasingly. I kept him till late in the fall, when he disappeared, probably going south, and I ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... suddenly he was laughing—a madness, half hysteria. "Why, this, all this—why look, Glora, it's funny! This little world all excited, an ant-hill, outraged! Look! There's ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... after a while it seemed to him that he heard a voice in the sand at his feet. He listened, and heard an ant-king complain, "Why cannot folks, with their clumsy beasts, keep off our bodies? That stupid horse, with his heavy hoofs, has been treading down my people without mercy!" So he turned on to a side path and the ant-king cried out to him, "We will remember you—-one ...
— Household Tales by Brothers Grimm • Grimm Brothers
... are a couple of pens, And whose head is an ant-hill of units and tens, Though Plato denies you, we welcome you still As a featherless biped, in ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... interlude to his ornithological pursuits, followed the career of a gun-runner, acting as such off and on for two and a half years. The particular revolutionary chief whose fortunes he was following finally came into power, and Cherrie immortalized his name by naming a new species of ant-thrush after him—a delightful touch, in its practical combination of those not normally ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... by the cast of the wonderful megatherium of the Pampas, and the skeleton of the North American mastodon. The megatherium is described zoologically as having combined the characteristics of the armadillo, sloth, and ant-eater. In height it averaged eight feet; its feet were a yard in length; and its claws were of terrible strength; it was encased in an impenetrable scaly armour; and it lived upon roots. The mastodon was of the elephant ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... they had invented. Michael Angelo, da Vinci, Aretino, Cellini; would the strong figures of men ever so dominate the world again? Today everything was congestion, the scurrying of crowds; men had become ant-like. Perhaps it was inevitable that the crowds should sink deeper and deeper in slavery. Whichever won, tyranny from above, or spontaneous organization from below, ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... fretted me. 'See, a stone loosed from its bed—he must have passed by here.... That twig is newly snapped; no doubt he caught at it.... Ha, the moss there has been crushed; a foot has gone by. And the ants on that ant-hill, with their eggs in their mouths—a man's tread has frightened them.' So, by some instinctive sense, as if the spirit of my savage ancestors revived within me, I managed to recover the spoor again and again ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... concern us, for this reason—men with a narrow horizon and no wings must accept all apparent disproportions between cause and effect. A railway collision has other results besides wrecking an ant-hill, but the wise ants do not pursue these in the Insurance Reports. So it only concerns us that the destruction of the schooner led in time to a lovers' difference between Ruby and young Zeb—two young people of no eminence outside of these pages. ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... also; and, when this request is complied with, they too perform the same ceremonies, and lament over their dead comrade, after which the late combatants may visit each other in peace. Sometimes the head of the slain is taken and buried in an ant-hill, till all the flesh is gone; and the lower jaw is then worn as a trophy by the slayer; but this we never saw, and the foregoing information was obtained ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... the doctor as to when I should go, and always received the non-committal reply, 'When you are fit to travel.' Saturday, however, found me on board of a hospital ship, and at 9 o'clock that night we arrived at Southampton. Ant-like, the stretcher-bearers went to and fro, from ship to train. For some reason or other they dumped me in a corner with my head nearest the scene of activities, so that I was unable to interest myself in watching the entraining of others. I feverishly hoped they wouldn't forget ...
— One Young Man • Sir John Ernest Hodder-Williams
... really wanted to get at the bottom of a matter which had troubled him. "Air you a bug-hunter by trade, or what? I've hauled you around fer more'n a month now, and ain't figgered it out what you're after. We've dug up ant-hills and busted open most of the rocks between here and the North Fork of Powder River, but I've never seen you git anything yet that ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... direction. As they advanced on the plain, they discovered what the haze had prevented their seeing at early dawn, that the plain was covered with a variety of beautiful flowers, of the amaryllis and other tribes, and with the hills of ants and the ant-eaters' holes, which latter were very ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... haltingly when they had reached a sandy, ant-infested path that ran slantingly up among the trees. He affected a certain perplexity. He said he did not understand what it was his wife was "after," what she "thought she was doing" in "making all this trouble"; he ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... their common everyday appliances—and on the wings of air and rays of light they hear and know all that goes on in every country. Our wars and politics are no more to them than the wars and politics of ants in ant-hills,—they have passed beyond all trivialities such as these. They have discovered the secret of life's ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... ladders to the first story and rush the private apartments, and murder him in his morning bath or in his bed! What a surprising and unexplained apparition it would have been! But now, and for the future, he would know that daily about this time a large ant-like colony was running about under him, very strong of arm, very active of leg; and what protection, he wondered, from peril of sudden inroad was that search under his bed on the ninth day of every ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... to run away to sea. And yet he had done that very thing at the age of fifteen. It was enough, when you thought it over, to give you the idea of an immense, potent, and invisible hand thrust into the ant-heap of the earth, laying hold of shoulders, knocking heads together, and setting the unconscious faces of the multitude towards inconceivable ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... Front. Big ocean liners, flying the Red Cross, lie at their moorings, and lofty electric cranes gyrate noiselessly over supply ships unloading their stores, while animated swarms of dockers in khaki pile up a great ant-heap of sacks in the sheds with a passionless concentration that seems like the workings of blind instinct. And here are warehouses whose potentialities of wealth are like Mr. Thrale's brewery—wheat, beef, fodder, and the four spices dear to the delicate palates of ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... other of his tricks, he put about four hundred foxes, old and young, into Rose's park. It may be imagined what disorder this company made there, and the surprise of Rose and his servants at an inexhaustible ant-hill of ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... distance of about seven hundred yards from the camps there was a giant ant-hill, and the patrol rode toward it. By the aid of the lightning flashes they made their way through a dripping wood and over soil which the rain had turned into thick black mud. When the party drew ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... foundation stones are carried to the apex, and the swiftness of this transfer is increasing in a sort of geometrical ratio. I see that the result of this is something like that which would take place in an ant-heap if the community of ants were to lose their sense of the common law, if some ants were to begin to draw the products of labor from the bottom to the top of the heap, and should constantly contract the foundations and broaden the apex, and should thereby also force the remaining ants to betake ...
— The Moscow Census - From "What to do?" • Lyof N. Tolstoi
... time? And don't their wings manifestly drop off as soon as the end of that skyward movement has been achieved? If the gods had made me poetical, I would sonnetise on this idea. Do you know any poet with a fondness for the ant-philosophy? If so, offer him this suggestion with liberty to "make any use ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... path. The millet stems were so high that he disappeared within them with a crumpling of dry leaves. The soft ant-hills which it was his daily custom to level off failed to attract his attention. He walked straight on. Parrots flew by, chattering, with their green wings shining in the sun, and huge grasshoppers ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... the next, like imps of darkness, into their native gloom. There was no sound of living thing around, save the ghastly rattle of the dead bark-tassels which swung from every tree, and far away, the faint clicking of the diggers at their work, like the rustle of a gigantic ant-hill. Was there one among them all who cared for him? who would not forget him in a week with—"Well, he was pleasant company, poor fellow," and go on digging without a sigh? What, if it were his fate to die, as he had seen many a stronger man, ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... and will suffer less fatigue. Forel has pointed out that an ant which, surrounded by companions, will readily face death, shows fear and runs away from a much weaker ant when she is alone and some way from the ant-hill. Among men, in like manner, the feeling of the crowd greatly intensifies the reactions of each individual. "This is most evident at a public meeting. In many cases the speaker has hardly opened his mouth before he communicates some of his own emotion to every one of ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... said James. He looked at the girl, and thought her pretty and pathetic, with a vulgar, almost tragic, prettiness and pathos. She was anaemic and painfully thin. Her blouse was puffed out over her flat chest. She looked worn out with the miserable little tediums of life, with constant stepping over ant-hills of stupidity and petty hopelessness. Her work was not, comparatively speaking, arduous, but the serving of hot coffee and frankfurters to workingmen was not progressive, and she looked as if her principal diet was the left-overs of the stock in trade. She seemed to exhale an odor ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... behind the mask, and went through its allotted part. His self of all selves, the quiet, remote, crowned, and inscrutable I, sat apart, alike curious and indifferent, watched the others, and knew how little worth the while was the stir in the ant-hill. ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... consumed him that he became quite a skeleton, notwithstanding every remedy which he had tried. At length he tried a sympathetic remedy: he took an egg, and having boiled it hard in his own urine, he then with a bodkin perforated the shell in different parts, and then buried it in an ant-hill. As the ants wasted the egg he found his strength increase, and he soon was completely cured. A daughter of a French officer was so tormented by a paronychia (?) for four days together, that the pain kept her from sleeping; by the order of a medical man ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... labouring together to bring in Socialism at large. A tendency so stupid and so selfish is like to prove invincible; and if Socialism be at all a practicable rule of life, there is every chance that our grand-children will see the day and taste the pleasures of existence in something far liker an ant-heap than any previous human polity. And this not in the least because of the voice of Mr. Hyndman or the horns of his followers; but by the mere glacier movement of the political soil, bearing ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... important points from Mr. Motley, as might be expected from his creed and his life-long pursuits. This I shall refer to in connection with Motley's last work, "John of Barneveld." An historian among archivists and annalists reminds one of Sir John Lubbock in the midst of his ant-hills. Undoubtedly he disturbs the ants in their praiseworthy industry, much as his attentions may flatter them. Unquestionably the ants (if their means of expressing themselves were equal to their apparent intellectual ability) ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... we have been at San Agustin de las Cuevas, which, when I last saw it, was a deserted village, but which during three days in the year presents the appearance of a vast bee-hive or ant-hill. San Agustin! At the name how many hearts throb with emotion! How many hands are mechanically thrust into empty pockets! How many visions of long-vanished golden ounces flit before aching eyes! What ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... the shape of Ant-hills.—That most accurate observer, Pierre Huber, writes as follows concerning the nests of the yellow ants, which are abundantly to be found in the Swiss Alps and in some other mountainous countries. ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... look. She said she had seen two or three coffins in a day, during cholera times, carried out of that narrow passage into which her door opened. These avenues put me in mind of those which run through ant-hills, or those which a mole makes underground. This fashion of Rows does not appear to be going out; and, for aught I can see, it may last hundreds of years longer. When a house becomes so old as to be untenantable, it is rebuilt, and the new one is fashioned like the old, so far as regards ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... to preserve a skeleton, they bury an animal in an ant-hill and dig him up after many days with all the perishable matter fairly eaten away. That is the process which great men have to undergo. A vast multitude of insignificant, unknown, and unconscious critics destroy what has no genuine power of resistance, and leave the remainder for posterity. ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... showed as a black band a quarter of an inch high. Behind, the forest he had already left lay dwarfed in a ruled, serried line. But that was not all. Something was moving out upon the spotless plain of snow, something which appeared to be no more than crawling, ant-like, but was really traveling very fast. It looked like a smudged dot, nothing more; but it was a horse, really, galloping hard, with a light sleigh, and a man in it, behind. The horse had no bells, and it was not a reindeer as usual. Pace ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... M'pongwe, of bamboo, and he surrounds himself with European-made articles. The neat houses, fitted with windows, with wooden shutters to close at night, and with a deal door—a carpenter-made door—are in sharp contrast with the ragged ant-hill looking performances of the Akkas, or the bark huts of the Fan, with no windows, and just an extra broad bit of bark to slip across the hole that serves as a door. On going into an Igalwa house you will see a four-legged table, often covered ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... main and mizzen-mast."—Webster's Dict., "I only mean to suggest a doubt, whether nature has enlisted herself as a Cis or Trans-Atlantic partisan?"— Jefferson's Notes, p. 97. "By large hammers, like those used for paper and fullingmills, they beat their hemp."—MORTIMER: in Johnson's Dict. "Ant-hill, or Hillock, n. s. The small protuberances of earth, in which ants make their nests."—Ib. "It became necessary to substitute simple indicative terms called ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... puff-ball tribe; and he is particularly requested to collect these in every stage of growth, especially in the earliest, and, if possible, to preserve some of the younger specimens in spirits. One or two species are produced on ant-hills, the knowledge of the early state of which is ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... scene of a marvellous transformation. In the dry season all is hot and desolate, the ground has only patches of wiry scrub, with an occasional parched acacia tree, all is stones and sand; there is no sign of animal life save for the thousand ant-hills. Then suddenly the rainy season sets in. Torrents fill the rivers, and the sandy plain is a sheet of water. Almost as suddenly the rain ceases, the streams dry up, sucked in by the thirsty ground, and as though literally ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... where the struggle for life is keen and practical enough, and its inhabitants have little time or inclination to bestow on the pursuit of poetry. As in all the towns of the Terra di Lavoro, as this collection of human ant-hills on the eastern side of Naples is sometimes designated, the old command given to the first parents of mankind—"by the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread"—is scrupulously observed in Torre del Greco. It is little enough, however, that these ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... (not real but) caused by wrong conception, and hence that the person who has reached true knowledge is free from his body even while still alive. The same is declared in the /S/ruti passages concerning him who knows Brahman: 'And as the slough of a snake lies on an ant-hill, dead and cast away, thus lies this body; but that disembodied immortal spirit is Brahman only, is only light' (B/ri/. Up. IV, 4, 7); and 'With eyes he is without eyes as it were, with ears without ears as it were, with speech without speech as it were, with a mind without mind as it were, ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... now crossing a wide plain with rocks. Here and there were ant-hills, by the side of each of which grew a dark-leaved tree called the "Mollopie." Near our camp was a rain-pool, at which our animals were watered. Jan here captured a large frog in which, when he cut it open, for the purpose of preparing it for cooking, he found a whole mouse, two or three ...
— Adventures in Africa - By an African Trader • W.H.G. Kingston
... the site, fifty yards west of an ant-heap, and about a quarter of a mile from a forest of machabel. He had camped on the spot before, ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... ruffled condition to an assault on the part of Johnson, when he was already under the shadow of his seizure. I had directed his removal, and grudged him no professional attention that it was in my power to bestow. But afterwards, locked into my room, my whole nervous system broke up like a trodden ant-hill, leaving me conscious of nothing but an aimless scurrying terror and the black swarm of thoughts, so that I verily fancied my reason would ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... sweet husband, Else only Heaven is left and—farewell youth! Yet, strangely, in that money-haunted head, The sad, gemmed crucifix and incense blue Is childhood once again. Her memory Is like an ant-hill which a twig disturbs, But twig stilled never. And to see her face, Broad with sleek homely beams; her babied hands, Ever like 'lighting doves, and her small eyes— Blue wells a-twinkle, arch and lewd and pious— To darken all sudden into Stygian ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... that is worst in human nature. The fire, indeed, cleanses the city from the last dregs of the plague which are still lingering there, but it also stirs up the city until its inhabitants present the appearance of ants upon a disturbed ant-hill. And not the least busy among them, continually fussing about in all directions, is the diarist himself, eagerly planning for the preservation of his money, dragging it hither and thither from hiding-place to hiding-place in the city, ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... in all things!" In the terrific energies of the stellar universe, and the smallest song of the birds. In the seething struggle of modern industrialism, as much a part of nature, of those works on which His hands are laid, as the more easily comprehended economy of the ant-heap and the hive. This sense of the personal presence of an abiding Reality, fulfilling and transcending all our highest values, here in our space-time world of effort, may well be regarded as the differential mark of real spiritual experience, wherever found. ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... the yard the day before the launching. The schooner seemed to be an ant-heap where all the ants were stirring, and all were on the outside, so many men were at work. The club boys were quite numerously represented through their friends. Sid's father was flourishing a paint-brush high up on a staging. Pip's father and also Juggie's cousin were swinging ...
— The Knights of the White Shield - Up-the-Ladder Club Series, Round One Play • Edward A. Rand
... looked, on every hill and in every hollow, he saw the horns of innumerable talking-machines growing out of the ground. Thousands upon thousands of those familiar cornucopias of bright lacquer with gilt edges pointed their open mouths up at him. And each one was the center of a swarming ant-hill of busy ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko
... commonly known as ant-eater. The preceding sentence probably refers to the flying lemur (note ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXI, 1624 • Various
... themselves,—constructed of rough boards, with the protruding ends. Against some of them the earth is heaped up to the roof, or nearly so; and when the grass has had time to sprout upon them, they will look like small natural hillocks, or a species of ant-hills,—something in which Nature has a larger share than man. These huts are placed beneath the trees, oaks, walnuts, and white-pines, wherever the trunks give them space to stand; and by thus adapting themselves to natural ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... water-carts, was a seething mass of humanity and mules. Few of the men spoke, beyond a welcoming "How do, cobber," or a "Glad you've come, mate." They appeared out of the darkness and passed into it again with an air of steady practical purpose. Ant-like, they passed in continual streams from barges to stacks of boxes, whose ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... snake that lived in the ant-hill at the back of the house whose movements Jim and the piccanin had been discussing. The snake dealt ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... thing he could not enjoy torturing his prisoners. He tried that once on a Mexican down Agua Prieta way. After the custom of his nation he pegged out the luckless prisoner near an ant-hill, with his mouth propped open by a wooden gag and a trail ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... towards the east and south-east is rocky on the top, covered with sandy soil growing grama and very few cedar bushes, studded with ant-hills, and devoid of all remains of human structures so far as I could see. Pottery and obsidian are ever present, but become perceptibly less and almost disappear further east. The rills which drain the eastern slope carry ...
— Historical Introduction to Studies Among the Sedentary Indians of New Mexico; Report on the Ruins of the Pueblo of Pecos • Adolphus Bandelier
... a ship go down with all its crew, and commented severely on the injustice of the gods. "They care nothing for a man's character," said he, "but let the good and the bad go to their deaths together." There was an ant-heap close by where he was standing, and, just as he spoke, he was bitten in the foot by an Ant. Turning in a temper to the ant-heap he stamped upon it and crushed hundreds of unoffending ants. Suddenly Mercury appeared, and belaboured him ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... seemed gasping for air. The bare wooden buildings, with their long rows of windows and doors all of the same pattern; the smooth, beaten yards, all just alike; the swarms of children making it seem anything but Sunday-like with their noise; the teeming population, which made the tenements resemble ant-hills, and seemed to forbid any idea of privacy, looked very ...
— Katie Robertson - A Girls Story of Factory Life • Margaret E. Winslow
... me with a suspicious glance. The clocks of the city struck six in a solemn jangle of tones. The boats were moving on the river—the great unwieldy barges as big as a ship. The streets were now astir. Paris seemed huge and as populous as an ant-hill. I felt the hopelessness of seeking unaided one who purposely hid ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... dropping an arrowy shower,—the multitude of cars (I will lead) constituting its thunder, and the speed of my horses, the wind in advance. Discharged from my bow, my arrows like venomous snakes will pierce Partha's body, like serpent penetrating through an ant-hill. Pierced with well-tempered and straight shafts endued with golden wings and great energy, behold ye today the son of Kunti decked like a hill covered with Karnikara flowers. Having obtained weapons from that best of ascetics—the son of Jamadagni, I would, relying ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... The mammoth was another elephant, and supposed to have survived till comparatively recent times. The megatherium is an incongruity of nature, of gigantic proportions, yet ranking in a much humbler order than the elephant, that of the edenta, to which the sloth, ant-eater, and armadilla belong. The megatherium had a skeleton of enormous solidity, with an armour-clad body, and five toes, terminating in huge claws to grasp the branches on which it fed. Finally, beside the dog, cat, squirrel, and ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... tell you, That a black snail, with his belly slit, to show his white, or a piece of soft cheese, will usually do as well. Nay, sometimes a worm, or any kind of fly, as the ant-fly, the flesh-fly, or wall-fly; or the dor or beetle which you may find under cow-dung; or a bob which you will find in the same place, and in time will be a beetle; it is a short white worm, like to and bigger than a gentle; or a cod- worm; or a case-worm; any of these ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... river greeted the gaze of our travellers, and, by the enormous ant-hills seen in its vicinity, the doctor recognized the Benoue, one of the great tributaries of the Niger, the one which the natives have called "The ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... on this bird, and the Major's spoil would have borne the honors of the day, had not Robert come across an animal a few miles further on, and bravely killed it. It was a shapeless creature, half porcupine, half ant-eater, a sort of unfinished animal belonging to the first stage of creation. A long glutinous extensible tongue hung out of his jaws in search of the ants, which formed ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... though more than twenty miles away, still in the back foreground of the picture. Thread-like, brown trails wound away over the plain and up into the mountains, here and there dotted by travelers crawling ant-like along them a few inches an hour. Take the most perfect day of late May or early June in our North, brush off the clouds, make the air many times fresher and clearer, add October nights, and multiply the sum total by 365, and it is more easily understood why Americans ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... bending under the weight of the rich nutritious fruit, tall cocoanut-trees with half a ton of ripening nuts in every tuft top, ant-hills nearly as high as native houses, rippling cascades, small rivers winding through the green valleys, tall flamingoes presiding over tiny lakes, and flowers of every hue and shape, together with birds such as one gazes at with curiosity in northern museums, all crowded upon ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... gain, less ant-like in his economies; he was an artiste, above all; he knew how to make allowances; there was a time for work and a time for play. He often treated himself to the pleasure of taking Lily out; and, each time, as usual, ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... only answer that the case admitted of, and when Lucy Stone closed the discussion with some pungent, yet pathetic remarks on the sort of opposition that had been manifest, it was evident that if any of the rowdies had an ant-hole in the bottom of his boot, he would inevitably have sunk through ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... to utter a sound. For dawn had just broken and she saw that she was standing in a small open space in the midst of a sandalwood scrub, and encircled by twenty or thirty ferocious-looking myall blacks all armed with spears and waddies. The strong ant-like odour which emanated from their jet-black skins filled her nostrils and, putting her hands to her eyes, she shuddered and fell upon her knees ...
— Chinkie's Flat and Other Stories - 1904 • Louis Becke
... the ground to steady the glasses as he trained them off in the direction the five men had gone. Twice he saw them cross over ridges. Then a tiny, swift-moving speck came into his field of view, traveling up the slope of a distant divide. The ant-like rider dipped over the crest ...
— The Settling of the Sage • Hal G. Evarts
... largest cabin was turned out and adorned in his honour, and orders were given by which barrels of fruit and some cases of wine should be brought off to vary the plain food of an ocean-going trader. In the evening the Governor's baggage began to arrive—great iron-bound ant-proof trunks, and official tin packing-cases, with other strange-shaped packages, which suggested the cocked hat or the sword within. And then there came a note, with a heraldic device upon the big red seal, to say that Sir Charles Ewan made his compliments to Captain Scarrow, and that ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... day. On other mornings it would be as if he shivered perplexed on the brink of a fathomless abyss, and life engulfed him like chill waters, and he would strive, defensively, to divest himself of himself and be but as one of millions of the ant-like creatures that scurry over the earth's face, of no more significance to himself than were the myriad others. He could just achieve this state of impersonality while he lay in bed. But when he got up, stood on the floor, looked at the world no longer from beyond its rim but from ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... what to the dabbler in many lines seems perfectly natural and reasonable. Larssen, a master-mind, had his peculiar limitations as well as smaller men. His brain had been trained to see the world as an ant-heap into which some Power External had stamped an iron heel. The ants fought blindly with one another to reach the surface—to live. That was the law of life as he saw it—to fight one's way to ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... snow-flurries, and the pond was half frozen over. Then, in haste, the beavers brought up a quantity of mud and grass roots, and plastered the domes of their houses thickly till they no longer looked like heaps of sticks, but rather resembled huge ant-hills. No sooner was this task done than, as if the beavers had been notified of its coming, the real cold came. In one night the pond froze to a depth of several inches; and over the roof of the House in the Water was a casing ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... but the truth. He had been watching an ant-hill, and was so absorbed in observing a dead ant carried off by the living colonists for burial that he ...
— Fables in Rhyme for Little Folks - From the French of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... Units in the Great Ant-Hill; four tiny Tadpoles in the great Schools that wiggled up and down the main Thoroughfares. It seemed that their only Chance to make an Impression on the huge and callous City was to die and then hold up a line of Street Cars while the Hearse and the five Carriages ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... kinkajou, and peccari. South America is characterized by possessing many peculiar gnawers, a family of monkeys, the llama, peccari, tapir, opossums, and, especially, several genera of Edentata, the order which includes the sloths, ant-eaters, and armadilloes. North America, on the other hand, is characterized (putting on one side a few wandering species) by numerous peculiar gnawers, and by four genera (the ox, sheep, goat, and antelope) of hollow-horned ruminants, ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... beak is more slender and curving than those of his brethren, and he has an extremely long, barbed tongue, which, he uses to probe ant-hills. The sticky substance in the bird's mouth covers the little barbs on its tongue, and thus he is able to catch a great many ants at a time. He is one of our ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... kept in captivity having accidentally escaped, met and recognized their former companions, fell to mutual caresses with their antennae, took them up by their mandibles, and led them to their own nests; they came presently in a crowd to seek the fugitives under and about the artificial ant-hill, and even ventured to reach the bell-glass, where they effected a complete desertion by carrying away successively all the ants they found there. In a few days, the ruche was depopulated. These ants had remained four months without ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... sun shine through the winged hosts. On careful investigation these insects will prove to be nearly all ants, and, perhaps, to belong to a single species. Looking about on the ground, an unusual activity will be noticed in the ant-hills. This is the swarming of the ants. The autumnal brood of females has appeared, and ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... the band of the Mavericks playing the regiment to camp; for the men were route-marching with their baggage. The rippling column swung into the level—carts behind it divided left and right, ran about like an ant-hill, ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... to produce a war would exist, in spite of the establishment of Socialism in both countries. Ants are as completely Socialistic as any community can possibly be, yet they put to death any ant which strays among them by mistake from a neighboring ant-heap. Men do not differ much from ants, as regards their instincts in this respect, where- ever there is a great divergence of race, as between white men and yellow men. Of course the instinct of race-hostility ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... the rains, this ant-raised earth is washed into the rivulets and borne away to fertilize distant valleys, or is carried to the ocean, where, along the coast line, it "sows the dust ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... that the boils had come in consequence of their neglect of serpent-worship, and that the children would be cured if my parents would again worship snakes. These reptiles often take up their abode in white-ant-hills, after the ants have vacated them. My parents had been in the habit of worshipping serpents two or three times a year. Their custom was to pour milk, clarified butter, curds, etcetera, etcetera, ...
— Old Daniel • Thomas Hodson
... which cost me 2s. 6d. per pound. He then humped his swag and started for Melbourne. On his way through the township, since named Beechworth, he took a drink of liquor which disabled him, and he lay down by the roadside using an ant-hill for a pillow. He awoke at daylight covered with ants, which were stinging and ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... all sorts and shapes, moved to and fro along the boulevard; everything was bustle, everything was brightness, wherever one chanced to look.... But, strange to say, I had no inclination to forsake my pure dark airy height. I had no inclination to get nearer to this human ant-hill. It seemed as though a hot, heavy, reddish vapour rose from it, half-fragrance, half-stench; so many lives were flung struggling in one heap together there. I was hesitating.... But suddenly, sharp as the clang of iron bars, the voice of a harlot of ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... thought fit to put in an appearance, so I was left to my own devices. My first attempt to "rush" Pornic up the steep sand-banks showed me that I had fallen into a trap exactly on the same model as that which the ant-lion sets for its prey. At each step the shifting sand poured down from above in tons, and rattled on the drip-boards of the holes like small shot. A couple of ineffectual charges sent us both rolling down to the bottom, half choked with the torrents of sand; and I was constrained to turn ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... upon it on that June evening far away, it was girt and crowned with batteries. The banks of the St. Lawrence, that define what we have called the throat of the bull, are precipitous and lofty, and seem by mere natural strength to defy attack, though it was just here, by an ant-like track up 250 feet of almost perpendicular cliff, Wolfe actually climbed to the plains of Abraham. To the east of Quebec is a curve of lofty shore, seven miles long, between the St. Charles and ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... furniture which had come from Holland; all the community, great and small, black and white, man, woman, and child, was in commotion, forming lines from the houses to the water side, like lines of ants from an ant-hill; everybody laden with some article of household furniture; while busy housewifes plied backwards and forwards along the lines, helping everything forward by ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... been the evolution of the globe itself! What myriads of ages between the first cooling of its mass and the beginnings of life![3112] Of what consequence is the turmoil of our ant-hill compared to the geological tragedy in which we have born no part, the strife between fire and water, the thickening of the earth's crust, formation of the universal sea, the construction and separation of continents! Previous ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... expected. The angry barks of the wolves had increased during the last quarter of an hour, and the sound of their paws making the snow crackle inspired the old man with an indescribable terror. The number of animals seemed momentarily to be augmented; it resembled an ant-heap seen through the ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... Pikermi he has discovered the group of the Simocyonidae intermediate between bears and wolves; the genus Hyaenictis which connects the hyaenas with the civets; the Ancylotherium, which is allied both to the extinct mastodon and to the living pangolin or scaly ant-eater; and the Helladotherium, which connects the now isolated giraffe with ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... chasing each other all over the graves with a lantern. This piece of embroidery was probably suggested by the fact that, after the signing and sealing was completed, Carl had taken the lantern and had walked circumspectly to the little hollow to examine his ant-hill. The others had gone quietly into the ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... teeth are furnished with small pointed eminences or "cusps;" and the animal was doubtless insectivorous. By Professor Owen, the highest living authority on the subject, Amphitherium is believed to be a small Marsupial, most nearly allied to the living Banded Ant-eater (Myrmecobius) of Australia (fig. 158). Amphilestes and Phascolotherium (fig. 184) are also believed by the same distinguished anatomist and palaeontologist to have been insect-eating Marsupials, and the latter is supposed to find its nearest living ally in the ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... die. I've lost heart, and death is over me. Death is close to me, and I know I have got to end. But think of all the hopes I had only a little time ago, the sense of fine beginnings!... It was all a sham. There were no beginnings.... We're just ants in ant-hill cities, in a world that doesn't matter; that goes on and rambles into nothingness. New York—New York doesn't even strike me as horrible. New York was nothing but an ant-hill kicked ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... we are lucky, and God is on our side. Why, after Dundee, when we were retiring, we had to cross a great open plain, never even an ant-hill, and you had put twelve great cannons—I counted them—and Maxims as well, to shoot us as we went; but not one fired a shot. Was it not God's hand that stopped ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... we have to do is to follow the foothills. We shall probably find Juan and his burro sound asleep on an ant-hill somewhere. He's positively the laziest human being I ever ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in New Mexico • Frank Gee Patchin
... in hand, armed, besides, with loaded muskets, went in advance not only to scour the way and warn us of danger, but to cut the branches and briers that soon impede an untravelled path in this prolific land. They marched within hail of the caravan, and shouted whenever we approached bee-trees, ant-hills, hornet-nests, reptiles, or any of the Ethiopian perils that are unheard of in our American forests. Behind these pioneers, came the porters with food and luggage; the centre of the caravan was made up of women, children, guards, ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... this particular Sunday, all these seats were filled by aged people, breathless with the unusual exertion of climbing. You could see the church stair, as it was called, from nearly every part of the town, and the figures of the numerous climbers, diminished by distance, looked like a busy ant-hill, long before the bell began to ring for afternoon service. All who could manage it had put on a bit of black in token of mourning; it might be very little; an old ribbon, a rusty piece of crape; but some sign of mourning was shown by every one down to the little child in ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell
... of temperate climates have no idea what ants can do in the tropics. The Kafirs of South Africa used to stake down their prisoners (among them a poor friend of mine) upon an ant-hill and they were eaten atom after atom in a few hours. The death must be the slowest form of torture; but probably the nervous system soon becomes insensible. The same has happened to more than one hapless ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... his coat of mail. Towards evening he burrows deep holes in the earth, and searches for the larvae of insects, or he ventures out of the forest, and visits the yucca fields, where he digs up the well-flavored roots. The ant-eater rakes up with his long curved claws the crowded resorts of ants, stretches out his long, spiral, and adhesive tongue, into the midst of the moving swarm, and draws it back covered with a multitude of ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi |
