"Ant-hill" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... all built under-ground," replied Uncle Ben. "There are too many boys about, with clumsy feet, for them to build their delicate palaces above-ground. But if you were only to open an ant-hill, and trace out all its entries and passages, and its rooms and granaries, and its stairways and its nurseries, you might have more respect for these little creatures. If you want to see a larger ant-house, you will have to go to Africa. There ...
— Harper's Young People, June 15, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... better than his masters, crawled out of the ant-hill into which he had crept; and as soon as the rain descended, he contrived to pull the heads of the Major and Alexander, who still remained senseless, from out of the ant-hills, and to turn their blackened and swollen faces to the sky. As their clothes became ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... circle round its eyes, its curious webbed feet, its leaping power arising from the long hind legs; she told me also of its wonderful tongue, so long and flexible that it folded back in its mouth, and that the frog would sit at the edge of an ant-hill and throwing out the tongue with its sticky point, would pick off the ants one by one as they came out. When I learnt all this, I began to watch such a curious reptile; my fears vanished, and like Kingsley's ...
— Wild Nature Won By Kindness • Elizabeth Brightwen
... solitudes. Having reached a secluded spot, I have remarked that full-grown bulls lie down on their broad-sides, about the hour of midnight, and sleep for a few hours. The spot which they usually select is an ant-hill, and they lie around it with their backs resting against it; these hills, formed by the white ants, are from thirty to forty feet in diameter at their base. The mark of the under tusk is always deeply imprinted in the ground, proving that they lie upon their sides. I never ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... is calculated ever to forget. When a clear case is made out against a burgher by trial before his commandant the whole commando in laager is summoned to witness the criminal's reward. He is taken out beyond the lines to a spot where the sun shines in all its unprotected fierceness. He is led to an ant-hill full of busy, wicked, little crawlers; the top of the ant-hill is cut off with a spade, leaving a honeycombed surface for the sleepy one to stand upon (not much fear of him sleeping whilst he is there). He is ordered to mount the hill and stand with feet close ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... skin to show; the northern aard-vark has a still thinner coat, and is further distinguished by the shorter tail and longer head and ears. These animals are of nocturnal and burrowing habits, and generally to be found near ant-hills. The strong claws make a hole in the side of the ant-hill, and the insects are collected on the extensile tongue. Aard-varks are hunted for their skins; but the flesh is valued for food, and ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... 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 ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... square foot of it. Seven hundred miles of rice- and millet-fields and vegetable gardens unbroken by wall or hedge; nothing to cast a shadow on the dead level except an occasional walled town or temple grove! And the horrible land was all alive with swarming, toiling, ant-hill humanity. It ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... under the slanting rays of the sun, the young man and the girl went together. Behind them lay the one street of the little mining camp, with its wooden shanties on either side of the railroad track. Down this street Uncle Peter had gone, leading his charges toward the busy ant-hill on the mountainside. Ahead the track wound up the canon, cunningly following the tortuous course of the little river to be sure of practicable grades. On the farther side of the river a mountain road paralleled the railway. Up this road ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... know—I don't know," said Christopher, in a voice which had grown spiritless. Then after an instant in which he stared blankly down at Tucker's ant-hill, he turned hurriedly away and followed the little straggling path ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... the nearest hill they paused and looked over a restless welter of foliage that glittered in the sun, far down into the highway. It bustled like an unroofed ant-hill, for the road was alive with men who seemed from this distance very small. Duke Alessandro's attendants had found him and were clustered in a hubbub about their reviving master. Dwarfish Lorenzino de Medici was the ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... the battles of the frogs and the mice, that the old tales went of." So certainly, if a man meditate much upon the universal frame of nature, the earth with men upon it (the divineness of souls except) will not seem much other than an ant-hill, whereas some ants carry corn, and some carry their young, and some go empty, and all to and fro a little heap of dust. It taketh away or mitigateth fear of death or adverse fortune, which is one ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... wounded men were hobbling towards the hospital; the incessant rush of motors kept up the feverish circulation of a demolished ant-hill. ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... earth. He was learned and profound, and he took himself and the Church and the State seriously. He felt himself a part of an indestructible institution, whereas man and all his works are no more peculiar, no more wonderful than an ant-hill—and last only a day longer. He never realized that he was a part of the great whole that made up mountain, lake, globe, wooded glen and tireless river. He differentiated. He considered himself a man, an educated man, and therefore a little better, and a little ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... towards God; he studied or he contemplated. All day long, he buried himself in social questions, salary, capital, credit, marriage, religion, liberty of thought, education, penal servitude, poverty, association, property, production and sharing, the enigma of this lower world which covers the human ant-hill with darkness; and at night, he gazed upon the planets, those enormous beings. Like Enjolras, he was wealthy and an only son. He spoke softly, bowed his head, lowered his eyes, smiled with embarrassment, dressed ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... four scrambling 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 moved slowly in the direction ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... but when we try to think backwards from that first expedition, we either see nothing clearly, or we find Caesar an insignificant unit in a general disorder, as hard to identify as an individual ant in a swarming ant-hill. In the lives of all 'great men,' which are almost always totally unlike the lives of the so-called 'great,'—those born, not to power, but in power,—there is a point which must inevitably be enigmatical. It may be called the Hour of Fate—the time when ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... the sidewalks, desirous of boarding them, yet afraid to risk their lives in the turmoil and bustle of the intervening space. All this excitement of metropolitan life, this feverish haste, and this pitiless crush, bore the stamp of intense work performed in a human ant-hill, where every one of the countless inmates has to fulfil his duty unremittingly, so that combined toil will ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... metres! Men resemble insects! See, I think it is from this height that we should always look at them, to judge correctly of their moral proportions! The Place de la Comedie is transformed to an immense ant-hill. Look at the crowd piled up on the quays. The Zeil diminishes. We are above the church of Dom. The Mein is now only a white line dividing the city, and this bridge, the Mein-Brucke, looks like a white thread thrown between the two banks ...
— A Voyage in a Balloon (1852) • Jules Verne
... swarmed like an ant-hill with savages. The shore was lined with canoes; the forests and the fields were alive with busy camps. The trade was brisk; and in its attendant speeches, feasts, and dances, there was ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... birch tree was a great ant-hill; the frugal insects were wont to crawl around over the grass, mobile and black. Whether from necessity or from pleasure one cannot tell, they were especially fond of visiting the Temple of Meditation; from the hillock, their capital, to the shores of the spring they had trodden a path, by which ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... of going anywhere at will, bewildering my eyes, reappeared at Pragjyotisha! And then the destroying Danavas of fierce forms suddenly drowned me with a mighty shower of rocks. And, O thou foremost of monarchs, torrents of rocks falling upon me covered me up, and I began to grow like an ant-hill (with its summits and peaks)! And covered along with my horses and charioteer and flagstaffs, with crags on all sides, I disappeared from sight altogether. Then those foremost of heroes of the Vrishni race who were of my army were struck with panic, and all on a sudden ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... the gap, which was like a deep notch cut into the mountain ridge, and here we soon discerned an ant-hill furrowed with the mark of a lodge-pole. This was quite enough; there could be no doubt now. As we rode on, the opening growing narrower, the Indians had been compelled to march in closer order, and the traces became numerous and distinct. The gap terminated in a ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... attempt to rope the beast, Loveless caught him by one hind leg, and the rhino decided to shift his base of operations to an ant-hill in the neighboring clearing. His mode of progression was to walk on three legs and to drag the black horse after him with the other. He reached the ant-hill and demolished it and paused for ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... 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
... all ran about as fast as ants in an ant-hill, and the busiest of all was sixteen-year-old Hannah Sherwin. Since she was my grandmother's grand mother's mother, at last the ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... like that of the 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 with a bright-coloured tablecloth, ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... simply fussing fruitlessly and absurdly with an ordinary "ant-hill," as he persisted in miscalling a termitary. Playing with bugs, that was all. Wasting his time poking into the affairs of termites—and acting, by George, as though those affairs ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... strolled down the riverbank after some reedbuck, which I had been told were to be found there. I wounded a buck; it hobbled away with difficulty. I ran after it, but the grass was long, and I had a difficulty in keeping the animal in sight. In my course stood an ant-hill about four feet high. Endeavoring to get within view of the buck, I sprang to the top of the ant-hill, but it was hollow, and the crust collapsed under me. I looked down and found that several snakes were crawling and writhing about my feet. I had some difficulty in getting out, for as soon ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... 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, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... and, after passing through several of these, came upon a large ant-hill that stood in the middle of one of the openings. The elephant had passed close to the ant-hill—he had stopped there a while—stay, he must ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... through the forest of Guyana, his arriving at a savannah, extending in a level plain beyond the visible horizon, and in which he beheld a structure that appeared to have been raised by human industry. M. de Prefontaine, who accompanied him in the expedition, informed him that it was an ant-hill, which they could not approach without danger of being devoured. They passed some of the paths frequented by the labourers, which belonged to a very large species of black ants. The nest they had constructed, which ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... 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 it, and to whom the Cannebiere was a rope-walk, where ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... strange sight to see an entire population in the streets, busy as ants in an uncovered ant-hill scurrying to save their eggs and larvae. Every horse, and everything on wheels in the city, from hucksters' wagons to automobiles, was being loaded with what effects could be scraped together from houses which the advancing flames were threatening. The sidewalks were covered with well-dressed ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... 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
... equipped with the material of many camel's-hair brushes. Certain modern dreamers say that ants and bees have a society superior to ours. They have, indeed, a civilization; but that very truth only reminds us that it is an inferior civilization. Who ever found an ant-hill decorated with the statues of celebrated ants? Who has seen a bee-hive carved with the images of gorgeous queens of old? No; the chasm between man and other creatures may have a natural explanation, but it is a chasm. We talk of wild animals; ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... field a mile away. He came down and circled the field. It was Titherington's Farman biplane. He hoped that the kindly Englishman had not been injured. He made out Titherington, talking to a group about the machine. Relieved, he rose again, amused by the ant-hill appearance as hundreds of people, like black bugs, ran toward the stalled biplane, from neighboring farms and from a trolley-car standing in ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... was to tie the bushranger hand and foot, and then place him on an ant hill. The black ant of Australia has a bite that is very painful, and when hundreds of thousands of ants are biting a man all at once, the feeling is something fearful. The ant-hill torture was generally successful. After submitting to it for a time, the bushranger generally gave up the secret of the whereabouts of his gold. I do not mean to say that all the police officials indulged in this harsh treatment, but it is certain ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox
... to the earth. The Spirit's intellectual eye Its kindred beings recognized. The thronging thousands, to a passing view, 100 Seemed like an ant-hill's citizens. How wonderful! that even The passions, prejudices, interests, That sway the meanest being, the weak touch That moves the finest nerve, 105 And in one human brain Causes the faintest thought, becomes a link In the great ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... bit directly, and turning the cob's head, began to ride slowly in the direction of Kopfontein, whose granite pile lay like an ant-hill far away, low ...
— Diamond Dyke - The Lone Farm on the Veldt - Story of South African Adventure • George Manville Fenn
... at Shelbyville was a red brick structure with long windows. From the joints of its walls the mortar was falling. It lay all around the building in a girdle of gray, like an encircling ant-hill, upon the green lawn. Splendid sugar-maples grew all about the square, in the center of which the court-house stood, ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... line of ants passing to and from the scene of a terrific false alarm. I had nothing to do but sit perfectly still and let each ant, as it ran up, touch me with its antennae, get the counter-sign, and turn back to the village ant-hill. Not all, however. Some remained to hear me abuse the Cobbs; or, counting on my support, fell to abusing the Cobbs themselves. When I made not a word of reply, except to assure them that I really had not quarrelled with the Cobbs, had nothing against the Cobbs, and was ...
— A Kentucky Cardinal • James Lane Allen
... 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 faint crowing of wounded cocks! What tinkling of guitars and ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... 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 our ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... midnight daylight where with dogs and Indians the whole settlement is still a stirred-up ant-hill. Splendid vegetable gardens are in evidence here,—potatoes, turnips, carrots, cabbages. Should we reach the North Pole itself we would expect there a Hudson's Bay fort, its Old World courtesy and its potato-patch. As we pass the store of the "free-trader," ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... had come into the theological world like a plow into an ant-hill. Everywhere those thus rudely awakened from their old comfort and repose had swarmed forth angry and confused. Reviews, sermons, books, light and heavy, came flying at the new thinker from all sides." (White, A. D., The Warfare of Science and ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... them they only laughed at him, to think that he, who was so young and simple, should try to travel through the world, when they, who were so much wiser, had been unable to get on. However, they all set out on their journey together, and came at last to an ant-hill. The two elder brothers would have pulled it down, in order to see how the poor ants in their fright would run about and carry off their eggs. But the little dwarf said, 'Let the poor things enjoy themselves, I will not suffer you ...
— Grimms' Fairy Tales • The Brothers Grimm
... may be nothing more than a gambling excitement as to the final outcome of your aerial squabble: but to the poor men who had to bear the wrongs, Inquisitions, rack-rents, Waterloos, unspeakable horrors, it was hard earnest, you know! Oh the wretchedness—the deep, deep pain—of that bungling ant-hill, happily wiped out, my God! My sweetheart Clodagh ... she was not an ideal being! There was a man called Judas who betrayed the gentle Founder of the Christian Faith, and there was some Roman king named Galba, a horrid dog, and there was a French devil, ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... the most odious mutilations being resorted to. Occasionally the unfortunate creature was tied to a stake while pepper was rubbed into his eyes until the fearful irritation so produced caused blindness. Or, again, the victim was tied hand and foot upon an ant-hill, and left to the agonies of being consumed slowly by the minute aggressors. The most satisfactory death, perhaps, was that when the condemned man was allowed to be his own executioner. He was made much of for an hour or so ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... economy and the modes of architecture of these African ants. Providence may, if it see fit, make the instincts of the lower orders of creation a medium of divine revelations to the human race: and, at all events, the aforesaid Fourierites might stumble upon hints, in an ant-hill, for the convenient arrangement of those edifices, which, if I mistake not, ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... wave the crowd passed over the barrier, and Constans grasped helplessly at half a hundred out-stretched hands. A babel of voices arose; the arena, filled to overflowing with excited men and women, was comparable only to some gigantic ant-hill. ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... numbers dead upon the field. The prince himself, as soon as he was taken, was disarmed on the field, and all the leaders of the queen's army, including, as the most authentic accounts relate, the queen herself, gathered around him in wild exultation. They carried him to a mound formed by an ant-hill, which they said, in mockery, should be his throne. They placed him upon it with taunts and derision. They made a crown for him of knotted grass, and put it upon his head, and then made mock obeisances before him, ...
— Richard III - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... the stream of time several millions of years—to our own geologic age—and we find the earth swarming with the human species like an ant-hill with ants, and with a vast number of forms not found in the Mesozoic era; and the men are doing to a large part of the earth what the ants do to a square rod of its surface. Where did they come from? We cannot, in our day, believe that a hand reached down from ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... the gully, which I was sure was the one agreed upon, and there awaited Godfrey. He did the same, only chose another gully, equally sure that he was right. And there we sat, each impatiently blaming the other. At last, to pass the time, I fired some shots at an ant-hill; these had the effect of bringing Godfrey over the rise, and we had a good laugh at each other when we discovered that for nearly half an hour we had sat not two hundred yards apart—and each remained firmly convinced that he was right! Godfrey had shot a kangaroo and ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... satisfied with his art of verse till he had brought it to the confines of perfection. He did not philosophize over the animals; he sympathized with them. A philosopher would not have lost a fashionable dinner in his admiration of a common ant-hill. La Fontaine did so once, because the well-known little community was engaged in what he took to be a funeral. He could not in decency leave them till it was over. Verse-making out of the question, this was to be a genuine poet, though, with ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... Lodgings, in Tales of Laughter, is a realistic story which has a scientific spirit and interest. Its basis of truth belongs to the realm of nature study. Its narration of how two Beetles set up housekeeping by visiting an ant-hill and helping themselves to the home and furnishings of the Ants, would be very well suited either to precede or to follow the actual study of an ant-hill by the children. The story gives a good glimpse of the home of the Ants, of their manner of living, and of the characteristics of the Ants and ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... would not have weighed a straw with me against that smile. Yet he asked me to go on with it, which I did lest he should go away, looking up now and then, and seeing him regarding my work with the half-curious interest with which one would watch an ant-hill, till at last I threw down my pencil, and asked him if he would not oblige me with a sketch ...
— The Magician's Show Box and Other Stories • Lydia Maria Child
... she got of London was its aimlessness. It reminded her irresistibly of an ant-hill she had seen disturbed once. Myriads of tiny creatures had scurried passionately, exhaustingly, after each other to and fro, no whence and no whither; the people thronging out of shops and offices at dusk frightened her: there seemed so many of them, and, looking at their tired, ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... straight up into the air and had such sharp eyes that we could perceive all the coasts and boundaries of Europe, and plainly distinguish the fine lines of the railways, we should also see small, dark, short forms running backwards and forwards along them. We should see, as it were, a teeming ant-hill, and after every ant we should see a small puff of smoke. In Scandinavia and Russia the bustle would seem less lively, but in the centre of Europe the ants would scurry about with ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... Beside every ant-hill I behold a monster crouching: This is the ant-lion Death, He thrusteth forth his tongue ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... me, on account of its ideas, more than the other pieces, and yet I think that it will produce the least effect. It is too much crowded, and to hear it partially or piecemeal (stueckweise) would be, by your permission, like beholding an ant-hill (Ameisen haufen). I mean to say, that it is as if Eppes, the devil, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... 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 give under ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... scalebugs are fixed, that is about the end of July or beginning of August. All previous application will clean the tree or plant only for a time, and does not prevent a more or less numerous immigration from the neighboring vegetation, especially if an ant-hill ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various
... found 'no fault'—but that he wanted 'a change.' I quite understood that. The fact is I knew too much—that's all. I had saved a bit, and so, with a few good letters of introduction, went on from Glasgow to London. There, in that great black ant-hill full of crawling sooty human life, I knocked about for a time from one newspaper office to another, doing any sort of work that turned up, just to keep body and soul together,—and at last I got a fairly good berth in the London branch of a big press syndicate. It ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... long. Cities bewilder her with their crowded indifference—men hurrying hither and thither like ants in an ant-hill, heedless of the wide sky above, heedless of each other, heedless of everything except each the small burden he carries on his back. Always she turns home to Jacques and the mountains with a sigh ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... be worth while to know, if we only could, just what our betters—the birds and insects and beasts—do on rainy days. But we cannot find out much. It would be a great thing to look inside of an ant-hill in a long rain. All we know is that the doors are shut tight, and a few sentinels, who look as if India-rubber coats would be welcome, stand outside. The stillness and look of intermission in the woods on a really rainy day is something worth getting wet to observe. It is like ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... Bhima well-skilled in speech said,—'That king who is without exertion, or who being weak and without resources entereth into hostility with one that is strong, perisheth like an ant-hill. It may be generally seen, however, that even a king that is weak may vanquish an enemy that is strong and obtain the fruition of all his wishes, by wakefulness and by the application of policy. In Krishna is policy, in myself strength, in Arjuna triumphs. So like the three (sacrificial) ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... manner of ugly stones. But Mowgli did not trouble his head about the water; little water in the world could have given him a moment's fear. He was looking at the gorge on either side and sniffing uneasily, for there was a sweetish-sourish smell in the air, very like the smell of a big ant-hill on a hot day. Instinctively he lowered himself in the water, only raising his head to breathe from time to time, and Kaa came to anchor with a double twist of his tail round a sunken rock, holding Mowgli in the hollow of a coil, while the water ...
— The Second Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... the Place de la Concorde, swarming with equipages, and on the well-dressed crowds in the gardens below. From the height in which we were placed all those apparently small objects, in incessant movement, looked like a gigantic ant-hill disturbed. ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... thrown into a spectacle of confusion. Upon the incessant and well-ordered activities of the road the burning of the bridge fell like the heel of a heavy boot on an ant-hill; but the railroad men like ants rose to the emergency, and, where the ...
— Whispering Smith • Frank H. Spearman
... Mkungu's women brought pombe, and spent the day gazing at us, till, in the evening, when I took up my rifle, one ran after Bana to see him shoot, and followed like a man; but the only sport she got was on an ant-hill, where she fixed herself some time, popping into her mouth and devouring the white ants as fast as they emanated from their cells—for, disdaining does, I missed the only pongo buck I got a shot at in my anxiety to show the fair one what ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... de Nailles's death, between the acts of Scylla and Charybdis, the principal parts in which were taken by young d'Etaples and Isabelle Ray, the company, as it ate ices, was glibly discussing the real drama which had produced in their own elegant circle much of the effect a blow has upon an ant-hill—fear, agitation, and a tumultuous rush to the scene ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... very hard for it, and wanted it. But Jimmie couldn't see any use in lying with your nose on an ant-hill. As for Peter, he giggled whenever ants were mentioned to him, and seemed not to care much one way or another. Hope, however, was often with Betty, and the two girls, flat on the grass, tried to discover as many mysteries as they could about the busy little fellows. As for Jack, he was as busy as ...
— Little Busybodies - The Life of Crickets, Ants, Bees, Beetles, and Other Busybodies • Jeanette Augustus Marks and Julia Moody
... who wrote a book about ants and their habits, tells a story of a little black ant who was building an arch at the foundation of a new ant-hill. It was necessary to have some means of supporting this arch, which was made of wet mud, until the key-stone should be put in and all made secure. The ant might have put up a couple of props, but this is not their habit in building. Their ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... to a wolf in outline, covered from head to tail in huge, horny plates, which look like immense finger-nails overlapping each other. His head sharpens out into a long, narrow snout, which contains a sticky, worm-like tongue, and this he can use with great rapidity and effect in raiding an ant-hill. He drops his tongue over the entrance, and the ants attempt to crawl over it and are glued to it. He walks in a very unique way by going upon the backs of his feet. This preserves his wonderful claws for bursting open ants' nests, as his chief food consists of ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... had come to live in Waterloo, when the Bank of New Guinea had finally dispensed with Dad's services as manager at Billabong. His wife had picked on this obscure suburb of working men to hide her shame, and Dad who could make himself at home on an ant-hill, had cheerfully acquiesced. He had started in business as a house-agent, and the family of three lived from hand to mouth on the profits that escaped the publican. Not that Dad was idle. He was for ever busy; but it was the busyness of a fly. He would call for the rent, and spend half the morning ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... physician whose wan face betokened a marasmus, and who was induced to try a method not unlike the sympathetic cures. "He took an egg and boiled it hard in his own warm urine; he then with a bodkin perforated the shell in many places, and buried it in an ant-hill, where it was kept to be devoured by the emmets; and as they wasted the egg, he found his distemper to abate and his strength to increase, insomuch that his disease ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... Pennsylvania Dutch—with a dash o' Philadelphia lawyer. I could tell you things about them would surprise you. Religion for one thing; women for another; but I don't know as their notions o' geography weren't the craziest. 'Guess that must be some sort of automatic compensation. There wasn't one blamed ant-hill in their district they didn't know and use; but the world was flat, they said, and England was a day's trek ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... day was dull, the chamber warm, the business to be transacted monotonous; and Blondel, far from well and interested in one thing only—beside which the most important affairs of Geneva seemed small as the doings of an ant-hill viewed through a glass—had fallen asleep, or nearly asleep. Naturally a restless and wakeful man, of thin habit and nervous temperament, he had never done such a thing before: and it was unfortunate that he succumbed on this ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... was ever lonely. What I called "things" were an unfailing resource to me. An ant-hill was entertainment for a whole forenoon; I watched bees and their hives by the hour; my vault kept me busy and happy all day. If Cousin Molly Belle suspected what I was about, she asked no questions, and refrained from spying upon me. When dressed clean ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... Chobe, though from the highest trees we could see nothing but one vast expanse of reed, with here and there a tree on the islands. This was a hard day's work; and when we came to a deserted Bayeiye hut on an ant-hill, not a bit of wood or any thing else could be got for a fire except the grass and sticks of the dwelling itself. I dreaded the "Tampans", so common in all old huts; but outside of it we had thousands of mosquitoes, and cold dew began to be deposited, so we were fain to crawl ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... as he lay thus in bonds, and oppressed with toil, and tormented also by noxious insects, cry aloud and give way to fretfulness, and twist round and round in agony, as a worm does when run through with a pointed needle. It often seemed to him as if he were lying upon an ant-hill, from the torture caused by the insects; for if he wished to sleep, or when he had fallen asleep, they vied with one another.[183] Sometimes he cried to Almighty God in the fullness of his heart: Alas! Gentle God, what a dying is this! When a man is killed by murderers or strong ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... leap.... Each leap seemed to last ages. With each, the cave opened out and the number of Selenites visible increased. At first they seemed all running about like ants in a disturbed ant-hill, one or two waving hatchets and coming to meet me, more running away, some bolting sideways into the avenue of carcasses, then presently others came in sight carrying spears, and then others. I saw a most extraordinary thing, all hands and feet, ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... ground, instead of rising in vertical columns, as it had done during the fine weather season. Then the men began to carry their bedding to the waggons, and others to throw all refuse into the trenches, till the down was lively as an ant-hill. Anne did not want to see John Loveday again, but hearing the household astir, she began to dress at leisure, looking out at the ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... Boar Inn was stirring like an ant-hill, with firefly lanterns flitting up and down, and a cheery glow about the open door. The horses of the company, scrubbed unreasonably clean, snorted and stamped in little bridled clumps about the courtyard, and the stable-boys, ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... goodness; so extraordinary a mixture of the best and the most vile, a humanity in little, with all its defects and all its struggles. It was a question whether it would not be better that a thunderbolt should come and destroy all this corrupt and miserable ant-hill. And after so many terrible Rougons, so many vile Macquarts, still another had been born. Life did not fear to create another of them, in the brave defiance of its eternity. It continued its work, ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... be now eclipsed by twilight; a golden band surrounded the horizon, announcing the approach of the day. Athos threw his cloak over the shoulders of Raoul, and led him back to the city, where burdens and porters were already in motion, like a vast ant-hill. At the extremity of the plateau which Athos and Bragelonne were quitting, they saw a dark shadow moving uneasily backwards and forwards, as if in indecision or ashamed to be seen. It was Grimaud, who in his anxiety had tracked his ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... 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, with ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... 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 them? ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... are a way off, but your footprints point the right way. With many a yawn and sigh subjective, I greatly fear me, many a malediction objective, you are "learning the language of another world." To us, huddled together in our little ant-hill, one is "une bete," and one is "mon ange"; but from that fixed star we are all so far ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... close to find it. These delays 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 by a miracle, till at last, round a corner by a defiant cliff—with a terrible ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... opened, huge and heavy bodies were discharged into the air, the sea alternately advanced and retreated beyond its ordinary bounds, and a mountain was torn from Libanus, [84] and cast into the waves, where it protected, as a mole, the new harbor of Botrys [85] in Phoenicia. The stroke that agitates an ant-hill may crush the insect-myriads in the dust; yet truth must extort confession that man has industriously labored for his own destruction. The institution of great cities, which include a nation within the limits of a wall, almost realizes the wish of Caligula, that the Roman people had ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... by means of long subterranean galleries. Thus there existed beneath the county of Stirling a vast tract, full of burrows, tunnels, bored with caves, and perforated with shafts, a subterranean labyrinth, which might be compared to an enormous ant-hill. ...
— The Underground City • Jules Verne
... 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 ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... Mother Snail, "our boy shall not go into an ant-hill. If you know of nothing better, we will give the commission to the white gnats. They fly far about in rain and sunshine, and they know the ...
— Tell Me Another Story - The Book of Story Programs • Carolyn Sherwin Bailey
... obvious, sir. We are like ants constructing an ant-hill. We have our work to do, and not much time to spare for love and women. That is all very well for those who cannot work, or who do not want to ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... matter of course. He is not born to tread a certain track of conduct or behaviour because others have trodden it before him, following it without thought like the sheep on the mountain, or like the ants as they travel from one ant-hill to another. ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... the crowds going their different ways like ants on an ant-hill, but I could not let a perambulator pass without peering under the lace of the hood at the little cherub face whose angel eyes looked ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... letters, cards, packets, parcels, poured, rushed, leaped, roared into the great sorting-hall. Floods is a feeble word; a Highland spate is but a wishy-washy figure wherewith to represent the deluge. A bee-hive, an ant-hill, were weak comparisons. Nearly two thousand men energised— body, soul, and spirit—in that hall that Christmas-tide, and an aggregate of fifteen thousand eight hundred and seventy-nine hours' work was accomplished by them. They faced, stamped, sorted, ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne
... whiskered villager with flapping trousers came pounding up the single street. His eyes were panic-stricken and his mouth was wide. He emitted the yell in a long, sustained note. Other villagers popped into view like ants from a disturbed ant-hill. Some instantly ran back into their houses. Others began to run toward the outskirts of the village, toward ...
— The Invaders • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... nurture, provision, education. We have to go far down the scale for any instance of organized motherhood, but we do find it in the hymenoptera; in the overflowing industry, prosperity, peace and loving service of the ant-hill and bee-hive. These are the most highly socialized types of life, next to ours, and they ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... accepted the fact as it stood, and made no effort to account for the change in their plans. It was enough for them that two thousand sheep were to be roasted, to the end that every man might eat his fill; and they took an eager hand, next morning, in scooping out the ant-hill and kindling the fires inside. Then, seated on the ground, they spun their yarns while they waited until the white-hot earth on top of the hill gave notice that the oven was ready for ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... start was made. Peregrine watched them from the fells, and as he saw them carrying the blocks of limestone in their hands they seemed to him like an army of stinging ants which had been disturbed in their ant-hill and were carrying their eggs to ...
— Tales of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... will buy all things, even a 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 ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... we came on open swampy ground about half a mile wide; on the opposite side there was more scrub, close to which there were three large ant-hills; Jackey took us up to the centre one, five yards from which poor Kennedy fell; against this ant-hill Jackey placed him when he went after the saddlebags. Jackey told us to look about for broken spears; some pieces were found; he then took us to a place about sixty yards from the ant-hill, where he put Mr. Kennedy, who then told him not to carry him far. About a quarter ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... connected with some such moralizing tradition as is found in Somadeva, "The Story of the Three Brahmin Brothers" (Tawney, 1 : 293), where two older brothers, in order to get rid of the youngest, who has been slandered by their wives ("Potiphar's wife" situation), order him to dig up an ant-hill in which lives a venomous snake. Because of his virtue, however, he finds a pitcher filled with gold! There is nothing else in this story which even in the remotest way suggests ours. While Benfey (1 : 214-215, note) has shown that the conception ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... 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 ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... conducts him to the wood, glen, cave or field where the pact with the Devil is concluded, which they call 'the agreement' or 'the word given' (in Tzental quiz). In some provinces the disciple is laid on an ant-hill, and the Master standing above him calls forth a snake, colored with black, white and red, which is known as 'the ant-mother' (in Tzental zmezquiz).[19-[]] This comes accompanied by the ants and other small snakes of the same kind, which enter at the joints of the fingers, ...
— Nagualism - A Study in Native American Folk-lore and History • Daniel G. Brinton
... think his schoolmaster's requirements more important than his mother's? No, Gudge and his friends in the House of Lords and the Carlton Club must make up their minds on this matter, and that very quickly. If they are content to have England turned into a beehive and an ant-hill, decorated here and there with a few faded butterflies playing at an old game called domesticity in the intervals of the divorce court, then let them have their empire of insects; they will find plenty of Socialists ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... given the title of a book about bees. Hardly less wonderful are ants, concerning whom there is much curious information in the same work, the reading of which makes it ten times more interesting to watch an ant-hill than it was before. One sometimes has to remember that it is as serious for ants to have their camp stirred up by a walking-stick as it would be for New York if Vesuvius were ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... in good time for practical pity. There was to be another high tide that evening, and how would the village stand this second storm of its broken defences? So the order was given to assemble in the street after dinner, and work at the repair of the breaches. The street looked like an ant-hill, as the workers, divided into gangs by houses, with the housemaster at the head of his gang, swarmed on the roadway, clearing it from the debris with pickaxe, spade, and a multitude of hands; re-stacking the cottagers' store of peat-sods, which the waves had ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine
... but meanwhile the enemy had received reinforcements, and the nearest ant-hills were nearly all occupied, so that only three men could go at a time. Such a shower of bullets fell that it was a miracle that we came out of it alive. Fortunately I found a free ant-hill. My brother had to share one with ...
— On Commando • Dietlof Van Warmelo |
