"Ostrich" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... were included in the native ransom, "such that one day men saw at the Infant's table three dishes of the same, as fresh and as good as those of any other domestic fowls." Did the Court of Sagres suppose the ostrich to be some large ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... an easy-chair there. Lady Weybourne, who was on the point of leaving with her husband, hastened back. She stood there while the usual restoratives were being administered, fanning the unconscious woman with a white ostrich fan which hung from her waist. Presently Violet opened her eyes. She recognised Lady Weybourne and ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... pie, sir; there's cold grouse, sir; there's cold pheasant, sir; there's cold peacock, sir; cold swan, sir; cold ostrich, sir,' &c. &c. (as the case ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... them must have been of very large size. Thus the largest footprints hitherto discovered in the Connecticut sandstones are 22 inches long and 12 inches wide, with a proportionate length of stride. These measurements indicate a foot four times as large as that of the African Ostrich; and the animal which produced them—whether a Bird or a Deinosaur—must ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... Maybe that made Old Nature nervous, and she started adding different things. At any rate, Kendall, as finally turned out, had a brain that put him in the first rank of scientists—when he felt like it—the general constitution of an ostrich ...
— The Ultimate Weapon • John Wood Campbell
... knights was not behindhand in the deadly onset; and yet this king was old and blind! His was chivalry in another form! He would have his stroke in the battle, and he plunged into it with his horse tied by its reins to one of his knights on either side. A plume of three ostrich feathers waved from his helmet, and the chroniclers say he laid about him well. After the battle, he and his two companions were found dead, with ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... whatever to fear from group interests so long as it doesn't try to play the ostrich in regard to them. So the burden of national crises is squarely upon the dominant classes who fight so foolishly against the emergent ones. That is what precipitates violence, that is what renders social ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... the Army Regulations for the raiment and insignia of a First Lietenant of Infantry, with such additions as had been suggested by his exuberant fancy. His blue broadcloth was the finest and shiniest. Buttons and bugles seemed masses of barbric gold. From broad-brimmed hat floated the longest ostrich feather procurable in the shops. Shining leather boots, field-marshal pattern, came above his knees. Yellow gauntlets covered his massive hands and reached nearly to his elbows, and on his broad shoulders were great glittering epaulets—then seldom worn by anyone, and still more rarely by ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... such a bonnet as Suzette's in the world. It was black, and full of white roses, and floating a defiant ostrich-plume, and tied with broad red ribbons, whereby she could be recognized from one end of the Luxembourg ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... have her. lets have her! of all things let us have a naked Lady— If she be— handsome Pasquin I'll engage your Farce runs a hundred Nights— I'll hold a Hogshead of Claret to a Gill, she pleases more than the Ostrich. ...
— The Covent Garden Theatre, or Pasquin Turn'd Drawcansir • Charles Macklin
... pastel with the oleograph," dropped out Mrs. Chetwinde, looking abstractedly at an old red woman in a turret of ostrich plumes, who was spread out on the other side of the room ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... Hyena Jackal Thompson's Gazelle Lion Rabbit Waterbuck Impalla Giant Bustard Ostrich Wart-hog Wild Dog Steinbuck ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... wild-boars, deer, etc. become too rare for good sport: another is to tame and break to the harness certain animals counted unmanageable. The zebra is one of these. The society has succeeded perfectly in breaking the zebra and making him work in the field quite like the horse. An ostrich also allows itself to be harnessed to a small carriage and to draw two children in it over the garden. Still another work of the society is to breed new species. A very beautiful animal has been bred by crossing the wild-ass of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... is married to a rustic! Well done! If I wed, I will bring you home a sultana, with half a dozen cities for a dowry, and reconcile you to an Ottoman daughter-in-law with a bushel of pearls, not larger than ostrich ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... mean? Did that reverend Basket-bearer intend, by such designation, to shadow forth my future destiny, or his own present malign humor? Perhaps the latter, perhaps both. Thou ill-starred Parent, who like an Ostrich hadst to leave thy ill-starred offspring to be hatched into self-support by the mere sky-influences of Chance, can thy pilgrimage have been a smooth one? Beset by Misfortune thou doubtless hast been; or indeed by the worst figure ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... nest and eggs taken by him so fully accords with my own experience, that it is but fair to conclude he was correct in his identification. I would add, however, with reference to his remarks, that the nest above alluded to was more elliptical than spherical, being about the size and shape of an Ostrich's egg, that it was constructed throughout of the largest and coarsest blades of various kinds of dry grass, the egg-cavity being lined with grass-bents of a finer quality, and that it was domed over, having a lateral entrance about the middle of the ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... many other things gave her the pretty carved walking-stick of black and white umzimbeet wood, also the two young blue cranes and the kid that afterwards were such pets of hers, and with them the beautiful white feathers of a cock ostrich that had been killed on the veld. In the same way it was he who sent milk and eggs to Dorcas when she was at her wits' end for both, which more than once were found mysteriously at the door of their hut, and not any of his Christian ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... The wily ostrich, bustard, and florikan affect all open places. The guinea-fowl is the most numerous of all game-birds. Partridges come next, but do not afford good sport; and quails are rare. Ducks and snipe appear to love Africa less ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... a couple of eggs, and the ostrich a score; and yet in the same country the condor may be the more numerous of the two. The Fulmar petrel lays but one egg, yet it is believed to be the most numerous ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... necklace of lion's teeth and claws round his neck, and a short petticoat of leopard's skin about his loins. He was armed with a sheaf of light javelins or assegais, he carried in his left hand a long narrow shield of rhinoceros hide decorated with ostrich plumes, and he was mounted on a superb black horse (which he rode bare-backed and managed with the skill of a finished equestrian). His followers, numbering about five hundred, were also fully armed and excellently mounted, ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... a better room," she said, revelling. "There's one in the next 'ouse. I'd 'ave a few sticks o' furnisher in it—a bed an' a chair or two. I'd get some warm petticuts an' a shawl an' a 'at—with a ostrich feather in it. Polly an' me 'd live together. We'd 'ave fire an' grub every day. I'd get drunken Bet's biby put in an 'ome. I'd 'elp the women when they 'ad to lie up. I'd—I'd 'elp 'IM a bit," with a jerk of her elbow ...
— The Dawn of a To-morrow • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Ucatella, who was very fond of Phoebe, but abhorred wagons, stepped out and stalked by the side, like an ostrich, a camelopard, or a Taglioni; nor did the effort with which she subdued her stride to the pace of the procession appear: it was the poetry of walking. Christopher admired it a moment; but the noble expanse tempted him, and he strode forth like a giant, his lungs inflating in the glorious air, and ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... are the miserablest people in the world. The Hodmadods of Monomatapa, though a nasty people yet for wealth are gentlemen to these, who have no houses and skin garments, sheep, poultry, and fruits of the earth, ostrich eggs etc. as the Hodmadods have; and setting aside their human shape, they differ but little from brutes. They are tall, straight-bodied and thin, with small long limbs. They have great heads, round foreheads and great brows. Their ...
— A Source Book Of Australian History • Compiled by Gwendolen H. Swinburne
... which, I had that canvass new-painted, him with a bag of money in his hand, a presentin it to George the Fourth, and a lady in Ostrich Feathers fallin in love with him in a bag-wig, sword, and ...
— A House to Let • Charles Dickens
... in one. You say that it is in the nature of things that God must give us evil that we may enjoy good the more afterwards. But if you clear yourself from all prejudice, you will see that this is the old method of the ostrich of putting its head under the sand and imagining that its entire body is protected. Nay, even worse than that, you don't even protect your head. Any man that gives clear sweep to his reason will see that if God must ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... a great deal of you, or else you are valuable to them, for your chief writes to Mr. Yocomb every day about you; so do some others; and they've sent enough fruit and delicacies to be the death of an ostrich." ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... grove of picturesque cameel-dorn trees, clad in young foliage of the most delicious green. On gaining a gentle eminence about a mile beyond this grove, I looked forth upon an extensive hollow, where I beheld, for the first time for many days, a fine old cock ostrich, which quickly observed us, and dashed away to our left. I had ceased to devote my attention to the ostrich, and was straining my eyes in an opposite direction, when Kleinboy called out to me, "Dar loup de ould carle;" and turning my eyes to the retreating ostrich, I beheld two first-rate ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... her satellites. What was Coralie, with her pink silk, her golden hair and slender limbs, beside this magnificent, full-figured Cleopatra? In a twinkling we were scouring the desert—she and I and the two coal-black horses. Side by side, keeping pace in our swinging gallop, we distanced the ostrich, we outstrode the zebra; and, as we went, it seemed the wilderness blossomed ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... pointed blade, without edge and without guard; large amaranth-colored pantaloons embroidered in gold on the seams, and nankeen boots; a large hat embroidered in gold with a border of white feathers, above which floated four large ostrich plumes with an exquisite heron aigrette in the midst; and finally the king's horse, always selected from the strongest and handsomest that could be found, was covered with an elegantly embroidered sky-blue cloth which extended ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... fancied that she wore the lustrous black silk, with the breadths of white Venetian lace about the neck which he had praised, because he praised it. Her cheeks burned with a Jacqueminot crimson; what should be white in her face was chalky white. She carried a plumed ostrich fan, black and soft, and after giving him her hand, sat down and waved it to and fro slowly, as he remembered her doing the night they first met. She had no ideas, except such as related intimately to herself, and she had no gabble, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the Gran Chaco love to hunt the ostrich, but when they have killed one of these birds and are bringing home the carcase to the village, they take steps to outwit the resentful ghost of their victim. They think that when the first natural shock of death is passed, ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... in other countries, such natural objects as cocoanut shells, and ostrich eggs are ...
— Origin and Development of Form and Ornament in Ceramic Art. • William Henry Holmes
... till his ostrich feather touched the mane of his wall-eyed plough horse, then turned bridle, and regained his ranks at a gait something between a stumble and a rack. The representative of General Washington rejoined his men at ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... on purpose to grace his funeral. And, indeed, the sun, which for many days past had hidden its face in clouds, shone out that morn with wonderful brilliancy, flaming upon the black hearse and its tall ostrich plumes, the mourning coaches, and the long train of aristocratic ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... [Turning away.] I'm not going to admire your stockings, or your ostrich ruffles, or your blue silk garters, or your motifs, or anything that is ...
— Dolly Reforming Herself - A Comedy in Four Acts • Henry Arthur Jones
... have already explained that the penguin is an interesting link in the evolutionary chain, and the object of getting this embryo is to find out where the penguins come in.[357] Whether or no they are more primitive than other nonflying birds, such as the apteryx, the ostrich, the rhea and the moa, which last is only just extinct, is an open question. But wingless birds are still hanging on to the promontories of the southern continents, where there is less rivalry than in the highly populated land ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... Court Godmother," began the Queen, as she sank on an ivory and cloth-of-gold settee in her private Cabinet, and cooled her somewhat heated face with a jewelled ostrich-feathered fan, "I had better tell you frankly that I think both you and that designing little adventuress have behaved in a very underhand way in this business—a way that I naturally resent. Mirliflor, as you very well ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... offensive manner. He ate on his right grinders only, and threw his head over his right shoulder as he snapped the meat. When he had finished, it struck him that he had been behaving strangely, for he said apologetically, 'I don't think I ever felt so hungry in my life. I've bolted like an ostrich.' ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... tall, robust people, in features resembling the Bechuanas; the dress, consisting of prepared ox-hides, hanging doubly over their shoulders. The men, during the engagement, were nearly naked, having on their heads a round cockade of black ostrich feathers. Their ornaments were large copper rings, sometimes eight in number, worn round their necks, with numerous arm, leg, and ear rings of the same material. Their weapons were war-axes of various shapes, and clubs. Into many of their knob-sticks were inserted pieces of iron resembling ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... it was discovered that even the tartan was an anachronism in such case, and that Macbeth and his associates must be clad in stripes, or plain colours. Even the bonnet with the eagle's feather, which Sir Walter Scott induced Kemble to substitute for his "shuttlecock" headdress of ostrich plumes, was held to be inadmissible: the Macbeth of the antiquaries wore a conical iron helmet, and was otherwise arrayed in barbaric armour. But when Garrick first played Macbeth there were good reasons why the reform to be introduced by Macklin at a later date could not be attempted. ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... and passion. Who shall measure the influence of one kind and blameless life? His wife, in her gustier moments, thought it sheer weakness, this persistent turning away from evil, this refusal to investigate and dissect, to take sides, to wrestle. The evil was there, and it was making an ostrich or a vegetable of one's self to go on being calm in the face of it. With the blindness of wives, who are prevented from seeing clearly by the very closeness of the object—the same remark exactly applies to husbands—she did not see that the vicar ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... "I did notice it, and was going to speak about it. He was quite a dandy this morning, with his black ostrich feather and his brass wire band round his forehead. He looked quite smart. He must be ...
— Dead Man's Land - Being the Voyage to Zimbambangwe of certain and uncertain • George Manville Fenn
... griefe. And as touching the second voyage which I inuented for the trade of Barbarie, the liuing God knoweth that I say most true, that when the great sweate was, (whereon the chiefe of those with whom I ioyned in that voyage died, that is to say, Sir Iohn Lutterell, Iohn Fletcher, Henry Ostrich and others) I my selfe was also taken with the same sweate in London, and after it, whether with euill diet in keeping, or how I know not, I was cast into such an extreame feuer, as I was neither able to ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of - The English Nation, Vol. 11 • Richard Hakluyt
... "Why does an ostrich bury its head in the sand? Why does a camel try to get through the eye of a needle? (But perhaps he does not.) I often tell her fat cannot be hidden, ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... shrieks I ever heard brought me upright in bed with every hair standing on end. It was morning. I looked at Virginia's bed. I could see her quite distinctly, parts of her at least. Her head was buried, ostrich-wise, in the blankets, while her feet beat a wild tattoo in the air. Stell woke up and joined the chorus. The cause of it all was a bewildered Navajo buck who stood mutely in the doorway, staring at the havoc he had created. At arm's length he tendered a pair of moccasins for ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... gate is always odious to sensible people. Now, if you were to try and spoil me," expanding herself until she looked twice her size, "I should only bloom out into fresh beauty—approbation, commendation, blindfold admiration would be meat and drink to me. I have the digestion of a young ostrich," continued Elizabeth blandly—"nothing would be too difficult for me to swallow. As for satiety, my dear creature, you need never expect to hear me call ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... no peace war is inevitable." The ostrich may avoid seeing the approach of the fierce simoon by hiding his head in the sand, but cannot stay its onward march. The craze for slaughter, the lust for blood, is abroad in the land. The stars are evil, and Ate, ranging hot from Hell, ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... before breakfast for an appetite, after which he made tea in a large lake, used the sea as a slop-basin, and boiled his kettle on Mount Vesuvius. He lived in great style, and his dinners were most magnificent, consisting very often of an elephant roasted whole, ostrich patties, a tiger smothered in onions, stewed lions, and whale soup; but for a side-dish his greatest favourite consisted of little boys, as fat as possible, fried in crumbs of bread, with plenty ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... schoolmaster than design. All boys have a taste for tent life, and healthy youngsters not quite grown, with ostrich digestions, passing through the nomadic stage, revel in hardships and count it a joy to sleep on the ground where they can look up at the stars, and eat out of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... of July, the 14-gun ship Ostrich, Commander Peter Rainier, on the Jamaica station, in company with the 10-gun armed brig Lowestoffe's Prize, chased a large brig. After a long run, the Ostrich brought the brig, which was the American privateer Polly, to action, and, after an engagement of ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams
... or two every evening; and fixed in recesses intended for the purpose, Sam Roberts, for such was his name, having built the house himself, were comfortable cupboards filled with a variety of delft, several curious and foreign ornaments, an ostrich's egg, a drinking cup made of the polished shell of a cocoanut, whilst crossed saltier-wise over a portrait of himself and of his wife, were placed two feathers of the bird of paradise, constituting, one might ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... while the ship coaled at Steamer Point, on the western side of the rock, three miles from the town proper. Multitudes of Jewish ostrich-feather merchants and Somali boys gave the travellers amusement at the landing and in the coast part of the town. The Americans began to breathe what Hugh ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon
... found himself dressed in splendid attire; his jacket was embroidered with gold, he wore a beautiful mantle on his shoulders, and ostrich feathers hung gracefully down from the top of his helmet, fastened by a brooch of a ruby surrounded by pearls. The hunter went into the castle, presented himself before the czar, and offered to drive away the forces of the enemy on condition that the czar gave him the beautiful Princess Milovzora ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... commotion between the pillars of the Brandenburg Gate, and the host of marshals and generals, resembling a star-spangled avalanche, entered the city. Nothing was to be seen but golden epaulettes, orders glittering with diamonds, embroidered uniforms, and long white ostrich-plumes. Not on them, however, were the eyes of the crowd fixed; they gazed only at that grave, pale man, who rode by himself at the head of the dazzling suite. He wore no orders, no golden epaulettes, no ostrich-plumes. Plain and unpretending ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... The air was full of sand drifting over granite temples, and painted kings and triumphs, and the skulls of a former world; and I was an ostrich, flying madly before the simoon wind, and the giant sand pillars, which stalked across the plains, hunting me down. And Lillian was an Amazon queen, beautiful, and cold, and cruel; and she rode upon a charmed horse, ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... have been knocked flat by a blow of the smallest, cheapest ostrich feather in the hands of any street-merchant. For he came. Anthony came! Not to look meekly up from the pavement below the railing, but to ascend the steps of the terrace, and advance with grave dignity toward ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... prettier things than myself upon the importance of stoicism concerning the opinion of others, when their applause or censure refers to literary character only; and I had determined to lay my work before the public, with the same unconcern with which the ostrich lays her eggs in the sand, giving herself no farther trouble concerning the incubation, but leaving to the atmosphere to bring forth the young, or otherwise, as the climate shall serve. But though an ostrich in theory, I became ...
— The Surgeon's Daughter • Sir Walter Scott
... who was a sea captain. That fact has thrown such a halo round the two ladies that he can't keep away from them. They have allowed him to go to the attic and rummage in the big sea-chests which, he says, are chockful of treasures like ostrich eggs and lumps of coral and Chinese idols. It seems the Miss Watsons won't have these treasures downstairs as they don't look genteel among the 'new art' ornaments admired in Balmoral. All the treasures are ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... part of the day, expose them to the sun, and bury them again in the hot-beds towards evening. Several intermediate steps may also be found between this early stage of communal nesting by proxy and the true hatching instinct; a good one is supplied by the ostrich, which partially buries its eggs in hot sand, but sits on them at intervals, both father and mother birds taking shares by turn in ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... when I was sixteen, I would record the one divine fire that was like to consume me, and now I have eighteen volumes of this 105-degrees-in-the-shade literature, all bound alike in a perfect edition de luxe. I'd rather regret what I have done than what I have not done. You dear old ostrich, I can hear you sigh over me, but don't you waste your gasoline. You, too, should have callouses on ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr
... were often loaded with gold. On killing them, the first thing the French used to do was to strip them. "On le depouilla." Francatripa, for instance, possessed "a plume of white ostrich feathers, clasped by a golden band and diamond Madonna" (a gift from Queen Caroline)—Cerino and Manzi had "bunches of gold chains as thick as an arm suspended across the breasts of their waistcoats, with gorgeous brooches ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... undernourished office boy, and a wooden bench where fretted a woman obviously of "the profession." She was dressed in masses of dirty white furbelows. On her head reared a big hat, above an incredible quantity of yellow hair; on the hat were badly put together plumes of badly curled ostrich feathers. Beneath her skirt was visible one of her feet; it was large and fat, was thrust into a tiny slipper with high heel ending under the arch of the foot. The face of the actress was young and pertly pretty, but worn, overpainted, ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... like the foolish princess, and desire a roc's egg; it will prove a stone, the egg of a rock, indeed. Be content rather with this ostrich-egg I send you; with your own slender fingers lift the lid;—pretty, is it not, the tea-service I send you? The tidy warblers threw out the emptied shells; one by one I picked them up, and have made cups and saucers, bowls and pitchers ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... gloves to which the tissue paper still was clinging. The orchids that Annie had given Norma that morning were standing in a slender vase on the bureau, and as a final touch the girl, regarding these preparations with a sort of enchanted delight, unfurled to its full glory the great black ostrich-feather fan. Norma amused Alice and Mrs. Melrose by refusing tea, and disappeared long before there was need, to begin ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... rabbits are caught in the snare Or the tabby cat's shot on the tiles? Why the tigers and lions creep out of their lair? Why an ostrich will travel for miles? Do you know why a sane man will whimper and cry And weep o'er a ribbon or glove? Why a cook will put sugar for salt in a pie? Do you know? Well, I'll ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... woman's society than poor old Reginald did. After Reginald had been charmed a while, it would be the glass eater's turn. Which he really eat it, and the doctor says that kind always dies before they is fifty. I never knowed his right name, but what he went by was The Human Ostrich. ...
— Danny's Own Story • Don Marquis
... Number 502, reported that there was nothing to bring back. This nettled Javert, and he made and X-ray examination of my person, even tearing out the lining of my hat. Alas for him too late; his search disclosed nothing more damnatory than a French dictionary, which, because I was not an ostrich, I had been unable to get away with in the afternoon. A few addresses had been scribbled therein. He demanded a full account of each name. Some ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... the camel of the desert brought the weapons and merchandise of Europe as well as salt, that indispensable commodity, and where the pirogues of the Niger landed the precious ivory, the surface gold, the ostrich feathers, the gum, the crops, all the wealth of the fruitful valley. He spoke of Timbuctoo the store-place, the metropolis and market of Central Africa, with its piles of ivory, its piles of virgin gold, its sacks of rice, millet, and ground-nuts, its cakes of indigo, its tufts of ostrich ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... Soofi, the Batini, while Musa (Moses) is the Zahid, the Zahiri; and the strange adventures of the twain, invented by the Jews, have been appropriated by the Moslems. He derides the Freewill of man; and, like Diderot, he detects "pantaloon in a prelate, a satyr in a president, a pig in a priest, an ostrich in a minister, and a goose in a chief clerk." He holds to Fortune, the {Greek: Tuxae} of Alcman, which is, {Greek: Eunomias te kai Peithous adelpha kai Promatheias thugataer},—Chance, the sister of Order and Trust, and the daughter of Forethought. The Scandinavian Spinners ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... could suddenly break the stillness, and the heroine could waltz out from behind a lot of dried meat hanging up at one side, dressed in a lavender satin princess dress, en train, with a white reception hat with ostrich feathers, and, wading through the Blood of the steer on the carpet, shout, "Stay ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... privately and publicly that if her ancestors liked a smoky church, they had a perfect right to the enjoyment of it, but that she did n't intend to sit through meeting on winter Sundays, with her white ostrich feather turning gray and her eyes smarting and watering, for the rest of her ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Senora de A——'s head reminded me of that of the Marchioness of Londonderry, in her opera-box. The Marquesa de Vivanco had a riviere of brilliants of extraordinary size and beauty, and perfectly well set. Madame S—-r wore a very rich blonde dress, garnie with plumes of ostrich feathers, a large diamond fastening each plume. One lady wore a diadem which ——- said could not be worth less than a hundred thousand dollars. Diamonds are always worn plain or with pearls; coloured stones are considered trash, which ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... had on a great picture-hat with light-blue ostrich plumes; it was almost the shape of her lavender one that Charles Edward said made her look like a coster's bride. When she bent over me and put both arms around me the plumes tickled my ear. I think that was why I was so cross. I wriggled away from ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... fossil species are extinct, is by no means confined to the mammalia. New Zealand, when first examined by Europeans, was found to contain no indigenous land quadrupeds, no kangaroos, or opossums, like Australia; but a wingless bird abounded there, the smallest living representative of the ostrich family, called the Kiwi by the natives (Apteryx). In the fossils of the Post-pliocene period in this same island, there is the like absence of kangaroos, opossums, wombats, and the rest; but in their place a prodigious number of well-preserved specimens of gigantic birds of ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... dingy dreariness of the picture-place, Turned very nearly bright, Takes on a luminous transiency of grace, And shows no more a scandal to the ground. The very blind man pottering on the kerb, Among the posies and the ostrich feathers And the rude voices touched with all the weathers Of the long, varying year, Shares in the universal alms of light. The windows, with their fleeting, flickering fires, The height and spread of frontage shining sheer, The quiring signs, the rejoicing roofs and spires - 'Tis El Dorado—El ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... he was playing, because of the assiduity with which the principal witness for the prosecution had been "nursed" by the police from the moment he made his confession. Crewe bit hard into his amber mouthpiece in vexation as he recalled the ostrich-like tactics of Inspector Chippenfield, who, having accepted Hill's story as genuine, had officially baulked all his efforts to see the man and ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... an old soft felt hat, with a perfectly abject brim, above his scarlet handkerchief, and every quarter of a mile he would take it off and put the ostrich feather that adorned one side straight up, and attempt to pinch the limp brim ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... away and stood leaning against the chimneypiece, hiding his head ("Poor old ostrich!") in his hands. His attitude expressed a dignified sorrow and a wronged integrity. Barbara stood for a collected instant at ...
— Mr. Waddington of Wyck • May Sinclair
... lend a hand. She knew, if any woman did, the trouble of moving furniture and setting it straight. She prepared for her labours by putting on her black silk blouse and her best skirt, and as William was anchored by the fireside with the newspaper, she decided to wear her new hat with the ostrich feathers, twenty years too young for her face, which she had worn for three months on the quiet out of regard for William's feelings, for it had cost the best part of his week's wages, squeezed out in shillings and sixpences, the price of imaginary ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... indigenous tribes with whom the Phenicians, when they founded their first counting-houses on the north and west coast of Africa, exchanged stuffs and pottery and arms for ivory, ostrich-feathers ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... and solid funeral of Victorian fashion proper to the time. The hearse had been drawn by four black horses with black trappings, and over the invisible coffin nodded a gloomy harvest of black ostrich plumes. There were no flowers, and some children, who crept forward with a little wreath of wild ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... whispered in my ear with an excellent English accent. We then visited the jewellery of the palace, a most beautiful collection; and the sacred armour, which surpasses description. At last we saw something unique—an ostrich race. The man mounts, sits back, puts his legs under the wings, and locks his feet under the breast. The birds go at a tremendous pace, and kick like ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... was on a bright July morning that I found myself whirled away by railroad from Berlin, 'that great ostrich egg in the sand,' which the sun of civilization is said ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... readers compel us to state that White Magic has its opposite pole—that opposite pole known as Black Magic, or the use of psychic force for selfish and unworthy ends. There is no use trying to pursue the ostrich policy regarding these things—it is always better to face them boldly, and then to take means to avoid ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... An eagle flies. Mountains stand. The multitude pursue pleasure. The reaper reaps the farmer's grain. Farmers mow the grass. Farmers' boys spread the hay. The clerk sells the merchant's goods. An ostrich outruns an Arab's horse. Cecrops founded Athens. Gallileo invented the telescope. James Macpherson translated Ossian's poems. Sir Francis Drake circumnavigated the globe. Doctor Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning-rod. Washington Irving ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... went, and drawing a chair to the railing, looked over at Roger below. He had hastily opened a small cupboard, and caught up a broad black hat of Adele's, with a long, willowed ostrich plume. He put it on, so that the feather hung straight down his face, and he kept blowing it out of his eyes. Daisy had offered him a gay, flowered chiffon scarf as he passed her, and he tied it round his waist like ...
— Patty's Social Season • Carolyn Wells
... too short, a black or blue wig, dressed with much skill, was substituted for it; ostrich feathers waved on the heads of warriors, and a large lock, flattened behind the right ear, distinguished the military or religious chiefs from their subordinates. When the art of weaving became common, a belt and loin-cloth of white linen replaced the leathern garment. Fastened round the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... he says, "was all the way in an open plain bounded by hillocks of sand and fine gravel—perfectly hard, but without trees, shrubs, or herbs. There are not even the traces of any living creature, neither serpent, lizard, antelope, nor ostrich—the usual inhabitants of the most dreary deserts. There is no sort of water—even the birds seem to avoid the place as pestilential—the sun was burning hot." In a few days the scene changed, and Bruce is noting that in four days he passes more granite, porphyry, marble, and jasper ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... looked like a young lover lying at the feet of his lady. Evadne was sitting in a low easy chair, with a high back, against which her head was resting. Half her face was concealed by a fan of white ostrich feathers which she held in her left hand, and the moment I looked at her the haunting certainty of having seen her in exactly that position once before recurred to me. She was looking well that afternoon. Her glossy dark brown hair showed ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... an old fogy, you may know by this sign— He don't smoke tobacco, drink lager or wine; And swears that rich gravy, roast pork or chop, Would kill a big ostrich, if ...
— Nothing to Eat • Horatio Alger [supposed]
... were as thick as a Negro's, the nose was flat, he had but one gleaming black eye, for the other was represented by a hollow in the face, and his whole expression was cruel and sensual to a degree. From the large head rose a magnificent plume of white ostrich feathers, his body was clad in a shirt of shining chain armour, whilst round the waist and right knee were the usual garnishes of white ox-tail. In his right hand was a huge spear, about the neck a thick torque of gold, and bound on the forehead ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... serious respect paid to Royalty that there was in my young days. My word! When Queen Victoria was in her prime, with all her young family around her,—their little Royal Highnesses that were princes in their Highland kilts and the princesses in their crinolines and hats with drooping ostrich feathers and broad satin streamers—the people just went wild when she went to a place ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... our Constitution, and then laugh at what we have done, the while we secretly rebel. We have few convictions, and we refuse to face issues squarely and honestly. We pretend to be virtuous before the rest of the world; but we are like the ostrich which hides its head in the sands. We pretend that, just as the eugenists think of the physical attributes of the coming generation, we consider the mental attributes—and we turn around and raise a race of bootleggers. We permit our enormous foreign ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... of the Cape Commercial Bank there has been much depression in South Africa. Ostrich farming, in common with other enterprises, has suffered. Before the crisis a pair of breeding ostriches have been sold for 350 l., now they would not ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... my mother," said a tall, serious faced girl, "that I think it is wrong to wear bird feathers, and she has promised to give up wearing any of them except ostrich plumes." ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... Lady Frances, who was, at the same time, pulling to pieces a superb fan of ostrich feathers, proceeded to open her light ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... into this sketch—which is not a catalogue—is that of the Rhea. Glyptodon, Toxodon, Mylodon, Megatherium, have passed away, leaving no descendants, and only pigmy representatives if any; but among the feathered inhabitants of the pampa the grand archaic ostrich of America survives from a time when there were also giants among the avians. Vain as such efforts usually are, one cannot help trying to imagine something of the past history of this majestic bird, before man came to lead the long chase now about to end so mournfully. Its fleetness, great staying ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... it was cowardice! I was like an ostrich hiding my head in the ground for fear of what I might see. I literally dare not ask until it came to the last moment. Oh, Bridgie, what a week it has been! Going to sleep with the weight on my heart; waking up and thinking, 'What is it? What is it?' and the shock of remembering ...
— More about Pixie • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... followers in the sack of Peru. Many large and magnificent stones were obtained by the Spaniards, but the transcendent gem of all, called by the Peruvians the Great Mother, and nearly as large as an ostrich egg, was concealed by the natives, and all the efforts of Pizarro and his successors to discover ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... the part of the mass between Epistle and Gospel. . . . . At the Placebo We may not forgo The chanting of the daw The stork also, That maketh her nest In chimnies to rest. . . . . The ostrich that will eat A horseshoe so great, In the stead of meat, Such fervent heat His stomach doth gnaw. He cannot well fly Nor sing tunably. . . . . The best that we can To make him our bellman, And let him ring the bells, He can do nothing else. Chanticlere ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... giving also the impression of lines just above the horizon to the west. At sunset we once more saw the glorious effect of the radiation from the west, only instead of being straight lines there were, that time, feathery filaments which rose in graceful curves overhead, like so many immense ostrich feathers. They joined again in a common centre ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... was simplicity itself, according to Mrs. Roberts' ideas of simplicity; yet, from the row of ostrich tips that bobbed and nodded at each other, all around the front of her velvet hat, to the buttons of her neat-fitting boots, she seemed to bring a new atmosphere ...
— Ester Ried Yet Speaking • Isabella Alden
... place. But he came up here to divide authority with me, and only one man can command this crush, and only one man is going to. These fellows, if you let them, always become saucy as soon as they pin ostrich feathers into their hats. They are welcome to the feathers, but they must drop the sauce. So cut along, Mr Intelligence, and see that you get that troop up to time. I don't mind if you lose it; ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... trouvere. We want incident, interest, action: to the devil with your philosophy. When we are well again, and have an easy mind, we shall peruse your important work; but what we want now is a drug. So I, when I am ready to go beside myself, stick my head into a story-book, as the ostrich with her bush; let fate and fortune meantime belabour my posteriors ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Is blossoms only once in a long period of years, and after this it dies. No flower can equal the elegance and extraordinary dimensions of this blossom; its size is proportionate to its leaves, and it usurps the place of the faded crest of green, forming a magnificent crown or plume of snow-white ostrich feathers, which stand upon the summit of the tall stem as though they were the natural ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... the war correspondent threw himself to the ground and, like an ostrich, seemed to try to bury his ...
— The Boy Allies in the Trenches - Midst Shot and Shell Along the Aisne • Clair Wallace Hayes
... just as she was now. Sitting upon her noble Arabian, and leaning upon her hunting spear, her countenance glowing with a higher beauty than ever before, as it seemed to me—her head surmounted with a Parthian hunting-cap, from which drooped a single ostrich feather, springing from a diamond worth a nation's rental, her costume also Parthian, and revealing in the most perfect manner the just proportions of her form—I thought I had never seen even her, when she so filled and satisfied ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... is at nobody's expense but his own. However, nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing. He bolts down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions, all hard things visible and invisible, never mind how knobby; as an ostrich of potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints. And as for small difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... Calderdale, and Ribblesdale" all knew the place of residence of Currer Bell. She compared herself to the ostrich hiding its head in the sand; and says that she still buries hers in the heath of Haworth moors; but "the concealment is but self-delusion." Indeed it was. Far and wide in the West Riding had spread the intelligence that Currer Bell was no other than a daughter of ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... voices and light laughter wake the street, Like notes of woodbirds, and where'er the eye Threads the long way, plumes wave, and twinkling feet Fall light, as hastes that crowd of beauty by. The ostrich, hurrying o'er the desert space, Scarce bore those tossing plumes ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... to dream of seeing ostrich and other ornamental feathers, denotes that she will advance in society, but her ways of gaining favor will ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... stray ostrich pecking on your shutters," said the mistress of Blue Aloes. "You are strange to the Karoo, my dear. When you have been here a month, you'll take no notice of ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... streets of the village on the morning of the performance, and for me the mangy old camels and the pimpled elephants of yore led the procession through accompanying ranks of boys who have mostly been in their graves for half a lifetime; the distracted ostrich thrust an advertising neck through the top of its cage, and the lion roared to himself in the darkness of his moving prison. I felt the old thrill of excitement, the vain hope of something preternatural and impossible, and I do not know what could have kept me from that circus as soon as I ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... that adorn the peacock's back. It had none of the brilliant colours, however, of that proudest of birds, though it was quite as stately, and much larger and taller. In fact, its great height and erect attitude was why Hendrik at first glance had taken it for an ostrich. It was neither peacock nor ostrich, but belonging to a different genus from either—to the genus Otis or bustard. It was the great bustard of South Africa—the Otis kori—called "pauw" by the Dutch colonists, on account of its ocellated plumage and other points of resemblance ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... from top to toe in a delicate shade of grey, which suited her fair skin admirably: the grey was relieved by some broad white ribbons and a vest of soft white silk folds, according to the prevailing fashion. A wide-brimmed grey hat, trimmed with drooping grey ostrich feathers, also became her extremely well. Mrs. Romaine noticed that Caspar Brooke looked at her hard for a minute or two, and then sat with his eyes fixed on the ground, his right hand forming a pillow for his ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... atmosphere that surrounded us, still the audience as a whole remained spellbound in their seats. The medical man now plied the conductor-pianist with the contents of the mysterious phial, and placing a long, white ostrich plume in his hand, he made a signal for the orchestra to begin. The conductor, despite his deafness, appeared to comprehend what was going on and feebly waved the plume in air, and the first gloomy chords of the Marche Funebre ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... naturalist's mind. It bore full fruit at a later date. An important theory then current, that large animals require a luxuriant vegetation, was overthrown at the same time, for there was every reason to believe that the sterility of the surrounding country was no new thing. The South American ostrich and many other animals here afforded material for ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... true kind, and properly so called; which is a restless and unsatiable desire of riches, not for any further end of use, but only to hoard, and preserve, and perpetually increase them. The covetous man of the first kind is like a greedy ostrich, which devours any metal, but it is with an intent to feed upon it, and in effect it makes a shift to digest and excern it. The second is like the foolish chough, which loves to steal money only to hide it. The first does much harm to mankind, ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley
... brain and nerves, too, we shall find, are made up of fibres, and these queer-looking things that are called ganglionic corpuscles. If we take a slice of the bone and examine it, we shall find that it is very like this diagram of a section of the bone of an ostrich, though differing, of course, in some details; and if we take any part whatsoever of the tissue, and examine it, we shall find it all has a minute structure, visible only under the microscope. All these parts constitute microscopic anatomy or 'Histology.' These parts are ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... Her hands lay idle now in her lap, and she no longer tried to extract the white ostrich feather ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... a nasty fidget, am I?" It was going to wring tears from me, I felt, the way she hid her head, ostrich-like, ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... streaming behind him, and the boys yelling at him. We proceeded to investigate the interior of that tent at once, and found that it was a sutler's establishment, and crammed with sutler goods. The panic-struck individual who had just vacated it was of course the proprietor. He had adopted ostrich tactics, had buttoned himself up in the tent, and was in there keeping as still as a mouse, thinking, perhaps, that as he could see nobody, nobody could see him. That cannon ball must have been a rude surprise. In order to have plenty of "han' roomance," we tore down the ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... in the courses. He looked at her critically. She was very handsomely dressed in a walking costume of dove-coloured grey. The ostrich feathers which drooped from her large hat were almost priceless. She had the undeniable air of being a person of breeding. But she was paler even than usual, her hair, notwithstanding its careful arrangement, gave signs of being a little thin in front. There were wrinkles at the corners of ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... tipped with silver. On the whole, the new comers succeeded in making friends of the aboriginal race. One mighty monarch, the Lewis the Great of the isthmus, who wore with pride a cap of white reeds lined with red silk and adorned with an ostrich feather, seemed well inclined to the strangers, received them hospitably in a palace built of canes and covered with palmetto royal, and regaled them with calabashes of a sort of ale brewed from Indian corn and potatoes. Another chief set his ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... to his neck, and felt the ribbon that his stooping posture and violent exercise had forced into a prominence that defied further concealment; then turned away laughing, and, with his face now vying with the Sunset, said, "You have caught an ostrich hiding with its ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... to herself or any other interested party that she has progressed out of the ranks of the plumpened into the congested and overflowing realms of the avowedly obese, why, for just so long may she keep the rest of the world in ignorance too. I take it, the ostrich which first set the example to all the other ostriches of trying to avoid detection by the enemy through the simple expedient of sticking its head in the sand was a lady ostrich, and moreover one typical of her sex. But men are bad enough. I know ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... talkative, affable woman of the world, with a huge experience thereof. I can see her now, dressed in a scarlet satin robe and glittering with jewels. She wore a headdress of diamonds with two long ostrich feathers in it, one of which, a white one, got out of its place and stood bolt upright, as if it was frightened, until some charitable hand laid it down. This was, I fancy, the last ball Princess Letitia ever graced, for she died a very little while ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... now as nothing. We have jumped the old claim of the Alleghanies, we have crossed the prairies, we have spanned the Mississippi with a dozen splendid bridges, and now the great lines of railroad make but a mouthful of the desert, and digest the Rockies as easily as an ostrich his pebbles and tenpennies. The old fables of magic cars, in which magicians could annihilate space and time, are now dull and tame. Like a dream the desert glides by while a sunrise, a sunset, lights up the measureless waste; we pass some low hills, and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... philological trouble for which the Sanscrit could not afford at least a conjectural cure? A dictionary of that extremely venerable tongue is an ostrich's stomach, which can crack the hardest etymological nut. The Sanscrit name for the Lotus is simply Padma. The learned Brahmins call the Egyptian deities Padma Devi, or Lotus-Gods; the second of the eighteen Hindoo Puranas is styled the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... has blistered Thaddeus of Warsaw with his tears, and drawn him in his Polish cap, and tights, and Hessians! William Wallace, the Hero of Scotland, how nobly he has depicted him! With what whiskers and bushy ostrich plumes!—in a tight kilt, and with what magnificent calves to his legs, laying about him with his battle-axe, and bestriding the bodies of King Edward's prostrate cavaliers! At this time Mr. Honeyman comes to lodge in Walpole Street, and brings a set of Scott's novels, for which ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... can say is that it ain't much to look at," sputtered Auntie Gibbs. "It's a nice enough fan, but I wouldn't give a dollar for it. If I were a queen I'd want one with ostrich plumes and ...
— The Merriweather Girls and the Mystery of the Queen's Fan • Lizette M. Edholm
... Life of Sterling is not left to doubt for a moment the author's malignant hostility to the religion of the Bible. In that work, saving faith is described as "stealing into heaven by the modern method of sticking ostrich-like your head into fallacies on earth," that is to say, by believing in the doctrines of the Gospels. How, after this, could the Principal and Professors of the University, the guardians of the faiths and morals of its inexperienced ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... way hindered her, not only from being averse to parting with her adored husband, but also from desiring to visit Madame Annette's and order there a lovely cap, a hat trimmed with a magnificent blue ostrich feather, and a blue Venetian velvet bodice which was to expose to the public gaze the snowy, well shaped breast and arms which no one had yet gazed upon except her husband and maids. Of course Katenka sided with her mother and, in general, there became established between Avdotia and ourselves, ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... kings in clanking chains Urged on by trampling cohorts bronzed and scarred, And wild-eyed wonders snared on Lybian plains, Lion and ostrich and camelopard. ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... nine men, wearing antelope-skins, grouped themselves in front of the opening in the hedge in the middle of the village. And presently, one by one, the men brought all sorts of things—hippopotamus flesh, ostrich-feathers, the fruit of the date palms, red chalk, green chalk, fish from the river, and ibex from the mountains; and the headman received these gifts. There was another hedge inside the first, about a yard from it, so that there was a lane inside between the hedges. And every now and then one of ...
— The Story of the Amulet • E. Nesbit
... coat for autumn nights. There was bracken, like little walking-sticks in spring, and when the leaves uncurled themselves and spread, they made splendid feathers with which to trim a hat or play at ostrich farms; but, best of all and most fearsome, as the stems shot upwards and overtopped a child, the bracken became a forest through which she hardly dared to walk, so dense and interminable it was. To crawl up and down a fern-covered ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... Crow The Ass in the Lion's Skin The Horse and the Oyster The Monkey and the Ass The Merchant and the Fool The Wolf and the Sheep The Ambitious Hippopotamus The Man and the Serpent The Appreciative Man On the Not-Altogether-Credible Habits of the Ostrich The Idol and the Ass The Bee and Jupiter The Lion and the Boar The Tiger and the Deer The Old Man, His Son and the Ass The Shipwrecked Traveler ...
— Fables For The Times • H. W. Phillips
... their observance by heavy fines. The gentlemen dress in the Blue-Coat style, occasionally varying it by a short tunic-like coat instead of the long gown, and surmounting it by a low flat cap, which the nobles ornament by an ostrich feather. The ladies array themselves in long dresses, full of plaits, and often stiff as crinoline—plain for the commonalty, but heavily laden with embroidery, and deeply edged with fur, in the case of the aristocracy. Both sexes, if aspiring to fashion, puff and slash their attire in all directions. ...
— For the Master's Sake - A Story of the Days of Queen Mary • Emily Sarah Holt
... a large and powerful man, but, his legs were remarkably short. His pace, compared with that of Chingatok, was as that of a sparrow to an ostrich. Nevertheless he kept up, for he was agile ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... pair of gloves, without saying scarcely a word about my new uniform? Well, the young Sweepstakes and Lady Diana will talk enough about it, that's one comfort. Is not it time to think of setting out, sir?' said Hal to his uncle. 'The company, you know, are to meet at the Ostrich at twelve, and the race to begin at one, and Lady Diana's horses, I know, were ordered to be at the ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... green satin collegiate hood, and covering his head a black Milanese bonnet, and his snow-white beard fell below his girdle. He carried no arms whatever, nothing but a rosary of beads bigger than fair-sized filberts, each tenth bead being like a moderate ostrich egg; his bearing, his gait, his dignity and imposing presence held me spellbound and wondering. He approached me, and the first thing he did was to embrace me closely, and then he said to me, 'For a long time now, O valiant knight Don Quixote of La Mancha, we who are here enchanted ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... guard yourselves against such problems by delivering elegant and sonorous speeches, in which you recommend the improvement of our laws of liability, without in the least indicating how this can be done. In this way you cannot settle these questions, for you are acting like the ostrich, who hides his head lest he see his danger. The Government has seen its duty and is facing, calmly and without fear, the dangers which we heard described here a few days ago most eloquently and of which we were given ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... to my work with set teeth, and I will force myself to be silent; and I shall succeed, for it is not for the first time that I take myself in hand. And why have I run away? Why do I stop here, vainly hiding my head, like an ostrich? Misfortune a terrible thing to ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... States! My name is Robur. I am worthy of the name! I am forty years old, although I look but thirty, and I have a constitution of iron, a healthy vigor that nothing can shake, a muscular strength that few can equal, and a digestion that would be thought first class even in an ostrich!" ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... steps, at the bottom of which they lay in an exhausted condition with dislocated limbs, until they were restored to their former elevation, when they went at it again as if nothing had happened. Stately swans, that seemed to have a touch of the ostrich in them; for they swam continually after a piece of iron which was held before them, as if consumed with a ferruginous hunger. Whole farm-yards of roosters, whose tails curled the wrong way,—a slight defect, that was, however, amply ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... such pranks with my interior on earth," said Cortlandt, helping himself to both, "as I do on this planet, it would give me no end of trouble, but here I seem to have the digestion of an ostrich." ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... shrill, that the stranger, as it were instinctively, stopped his ears, to preserve his organs of hearing from such a dangerous invasion. The prelude being thus executed, Pipes fixed his eyes upon the egg of an ostrich that depended from the ceiling, and without once moving them from that object, performed the whole cantata in a tone of voice that seemed to be the joint issue of an Irish bagpipe and a sow-gelder's horn: ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... determination that this war shall not be followed by another interim which leads to new disaster—that we shall not repeat the tragic errors of ostrich isolationism—that we shall not repeat the excesses of the wild twenties when this Nation went for a joy ride on a roller coaster which ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... Septocardes, Merdones, Anthropophagoi and other hairy aboriginals used to paddle across, in crazy canoes, to barter the produce of their savage African glens-serpent-skins, and gums, and gazelle horns, and ostrich eggs—for those super-excellent lobsters and peasant girls for which Nepenthe had been renowned from time immemorial. He based this scholarly conjecture on the fact that a gazelle horn, identified as belonging to a now extinct Tripolitan species, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... Thornhill, who thirty years before had stolen away with her lover to be married at the little village church of Paddington, must have yet remained. The interment, as all the world knows, took place in Chiswick Churchyard; a quiet funeral, with more tears than ostrich-plumes, more sorrow than black silk. It was not for some six or seven years after, that the sculptured tomb was erected, and Garrick and Johnson calmly discussed the wording of the epitaph. It is 'no easy thing,' wrote the doctor. Time had something numbed ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... to sink to the lowest practice of the worst class rooms. To define a tendency so sharply that it cannot flow without breaking the definition, is a lecturer's trick for which audiences should stone him. Solemn generalizations which squat upon a book like an ostrich on a goose egg and hatch out vast moral philosophies are to be dreaded like the devil, as are, equally, the critics with pet theories, who, having defined them, make everything from a squib to an ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... character, her indescribable brusquerie of movement and emotion—into that relief which a sapphire gains from a setting of pearls. I can see her now, after the lapse of nearly twenty years, as she stood there singing in blue doublet and white mantle, with the slouched Spanish hat and plume of ostrich feathers, a tiny rapier at her side, and blue rosettes upon her white silk shoes! The Nozze di Figaro was followed by a Ballo. This had for its theme the favourite legend of a female devil sent from the infernal regions to ruin a young man. Instead ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... former loves to pick flaws in its idols and dash them to pieces; the latter, with stolid conservatism, clings loyally to its mediocrities. The latter could have elected Bryan, the former could not; the Democratic stomach is freaky and very squeamish; it swallows many things but digests few; the ostrich-like Republican organ has never been known to ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... greater difficulty in staying his hand than had Barry Whalen, for the sjambok seemed the only reply to the dark suggestion. He realized how, like the ostrich, he had thrust his head into the sand, imagining that no one knew what was between himself and Jasmine. Yet here was one who knew, here was one who had, for whatever purpose, precipitated a crisis with Fellowes to prevent ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... while around the shady margin of the meadow many ferns in beds and vaselike groups spread their beautiful fronds, especially the osmundas (O. claytoniana, regalis, and cinnamomea) and the sensitive and ostrich ferns. ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... waistcoat, and blue trousers, and looked the "canny" Scotchman and Napier that he was. Lady Napier wore a white silk ball-dress, with three flounces of white tulle, puffed and trimmed with black Brussels lace, a corsage, and a head-dress of scarlet velvet with pearls and white ostrich feathers. After the presentations the ball was opened with a quadrille, in which Lord Napier danced with Madame Limburgh, a daughter of General Cass, Mr. Ledyard and Mrs. Seward, Jr., being their vis-a-vis. In the same quadrille was ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... knot in the breast of his jibbeh and took out three white feathers, two small, the feathers of a heron, the other large, an ostrich feather ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... too, we shall find are made up of fibres, and these queer-looking things that are called ganglionic corpuscles. If we take a slice of the bone and examine it, we shall find that it is very like this diagram of a section of the bone of on ostrich, though differing, of course, in some details; and if we take any part whatsoever of the tissue, and examine it, we shall find it all has a minute structure, visible only under the microscope. All these parts constitute microscopic anatomy ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... would have had the fashion of our province to believe that she belonged to the Governor's set there; and she spoke in terms of easy familiarity of the first families of her native city, deceiving no one save herself, poor lady. How fondly do we believe, with the ostrich, that our body is hidden when our head is tucked under our wing! Not a visitor in Philadelphia but knew Terence Flaven, Mrs. Grafton Carvel's father, who not many years since sold tea and spices and soap and glazed teapots ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... thousand dollars' worth of flowers; six bridesmaids in pastel frocks and picture hats, shepherdess' staffs, and baskets of lilies of the valley; a matron of honour, flower girls, ushers; a best man, a papa, an aunty in black satin with a large section of an ostrich farm for ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... The people were still labouring at it, when from out of the forest to the north issued a band of warriors with long spears in their right hands and shields on their arms, their heads bedecked with zebra manes, above which waved plumes of ostrich or eagle feathers, while their robes of skin, as they rushed on, streamed behind them. Rings were round their legs, to which bells were suspended as they ran. On either side of the main body were skirmishers. They shouted and shrieked ...
— Ned Garth - Made Prisoner in Africa. A Tale of the Slave Trade • W. H. G. Kingston
... heavy chains of steel, and to these the sixteen negroes were harnessed. They were naked save for a loin-cloth of scarlet cloth, and on their heads were fillets of shining metal, each adorned with five long ostrich feathers which had been ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... there, by some English lance or yew, laid low. They found him on that field of carnage (field of honor, too, in a sort); his old blind face looking, very blindly, to the stars: on his shield was blazoned a Plume of three ostrich-feathers with "ICH DIEN (I serve)" written under:—with which emblem every English reader is familiar ever since! This Editor himself, in very tender years, noticed it on the Britannic Majesty's war-drums; ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... with straight, good shoulders never carries her arms heaped full of bundles, for that draws them forward and makes them droop as dismally as an ostrich plume in a blizzard. Instead, the "budgets" are carried with the arms down at the sides. Neither does she clutch the back of her skirt in that bantamlike fashion practiced by the woman of less judgment. The back breadths of her new tailor-made are grasped about six inches from ...
— The Woman Beautiful - or, The Art of Beauty Culture • Helen Follett Stevans
... polygamous or promiscuous. There is no mating or pairing in the great bovine tribe, and none among the rodents that I know of, or among the bear family, or the cat family, or among the seals. When we come to the birds, we find mating, and occasional pairing for life, as with the ostrich and ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... a "Pink Spot" out of sight. Henry swears by the "Pink Spot" if there is anything of a wind. I use either a "Quo Vadis," which is splendid for going out of bounds, or an "Ostrich," which has a wonderful way of burying itself in the sand. I followed him to the green at ...
— The Holiday Round • A. A. Milne |
