"Beetle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... deposition of a chemical substance called chitine; these rings are arranged in three groups: the head, the thorax, or middle body, and the abdomen or hind body. In the six-footed insects, such as the bee, moth, beetle or dragon fly, four of these rings unite early in embryonic life to form the head; the thorax consists of three, as may be readily seen on slight examination, and the abdomen is composed either of ten or eleven rings. The body, then, seems divided or insected into three regions, ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... No littlest beetle that he might eat had given evidence that life of any sort existed here, and it was a hungry and thirsty Tarzan who lay down to rest in the evening. He decided now to push on during the cool of the night, for he realized that even mighty Tarzan had his limitations ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... another being, been perfected? We see these beautiful co-adaptations most plainly in the woodpecker and the mistletoe; and only a little less plainly in the humblest parasite which clings to the hairs of a quadruped or feathers of a bird; in the structure of the beetle which dives through the water; in the plumed seed which is wafted by the gentlest breeze: in short, we see beautiful adaptations everywhere and in every ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... now why a man has to start young to be a riverman," Welton told Bob, as they bent their steps toward camp. "Poor little John Harvey out on that jam when she broke would have stood about as much chance as a beetle at a ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... have a Mind to imitate the Beetle, that won't give Place to the Eagle. Every one thinks himself an ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... In grace and elegance of manner he has no equal. Such a gentle, high-bred air, and such inimitable ease and composure in his flight and movement! He is a poet in very word and deed. His carriage is music to the eye. His performance of the commonest act, as catching a beetle or picking a worm from the mud, pleases like a stroke of wit or eloquence. Was he a prince in the olden time, and do the regal grace and mien still adhere to him in his transformation? What a finely ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... gangway. One thing only they had in common—their deadly industry. One shadow lay over them all—the shadow of death. A momentary gravity passed across Cornish's face. These men were as far removed from him as the crawling beetle is from the butterfly. Who shall say, however, that the butterfly sees ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... hours I waited impatiently for the water to settle and clear; then I began to introduce the living inmates. I collected prawns and crabs and sea-snails, and a tiny sole or two, a couple of inches long, and by good chance I found a small sepiola, or cuttle-fish, as big as a beetle, which burrowed in the sand and changed color magically from dark brown to faintest buff. I also had a pair of soldier-crabs, which fought each other continually. When the sunlight fell on my aquarium, I saw ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... him is nothing short of statesmanship. For sometimes he will jump furiously at a fly, for very devilishness, without ever meaning to take it, and then, wearying suddenly of his gymnastics, he will snatch sulkily at a grasshopper, beetle, or worm. Trout feed upon an extraordinary variety of crawling things, as all fishermen know who practice the useful habit of opening the first two or three fish they catch, to see what food is that day the favorite. But here, as elsewhere in this world, the best things lie nearest, ...
— Fishing with a Worm • Bliss Perry
... folly, she was ashamed that she could have let such ideas enter her mind, and she was beyond measure astonished that any thing relative to Lord Delacour could so far have interested her attention. "Luckily," said she to herself, "he has not the penetration of a blind beetle; and, besides, he has little snug jealousies of his own: so he will never find me out. It would be an excellent thing indeed, if he were to turn my 'master-torment' against myself—it would be a judgment upon me. The manes of poor Lawless would then be appeased. But it is impossible ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... purely romantic poets haunted the dusk rather than the ebon blackness of midnight, and listened more to the nightingale than to the screech-owl. They were quietists, and their imagery was crepuscular. They loved the twilight, with its beetle and bat, solitude, shade, the "darkening vale," the mossy hermitage, the ruined abbey moldering in its moonlit glade, grots, caverns, brooksides, ivied nooks, firelight rooms, the curfew bell and the sigh of the Aeolian harp.[21] All this is exquisitely ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... the "campo." He rarely visited the capital, except on matters of business. For a business he had; this of somewhat unusual character. It consisted chiefly in the produce of his gun and insect-net. Many a rare specimen of bird and quadruped, butterfly and beetle, captured and preserved by Ludwig Halberger, at this day adorns the public museums of Prussia and other European countries. But for the dispatch and shipment of these he would never have cared to show himself in the streets of Assuncion; for, like all true naturalists, ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... have I, an entire stranger, to come blundering along like a June beetle and disturb your rest? You did not look forward to associations with night editors and like disreputable people when you chose this sheltered nook of the world, and nestled under Mrs. Yocomb's wing. You have the ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... with dew, Paul made his way on the following morning. The songs of the birds delighted him and the homely voices of cattle in the meadows were musical because the skies were blue. A beetle crawled laboriously across the gravel path before him, and he stepped aside to avoid crushing it; a ladybird discovered on the brim of his hat had to be safely deposited on a rose bush, nor in performing this act of charity did he disturb the web of ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... bladderwort and pitcher-plants can only absorb in the form of soup the products of their victims' decay. Flies and gnats drowned in these pitchers quickly yield their poor little bodies; but owing to the beetle's hard shell covering, many a rare specimen may be rescued intact to ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... in their way, and end in a general stampede to underground retreats from the region poisoned by sunshine. Next year you will find the grass growing fresh and green where the stone lay—the ground-bird builds her nest where the beetle had his hole—the dandelion and the buttercup are growing there, and the broad fans of insect-angels open and shut over their golden disks as the rhythmic waves of blissful consciousness pulsate through ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... close to him a brown beetle, sitting on a blackberry leaf. Teddy looked at the beetle for a while in silence, and then he said, "Well, ...
— The Counterpane Fairy • Katharine Pyle
... words of English. Aaron gave the porter an English shilling. The porter let the coin lie in the middle of his palm, as if it were a live beetle, and darted to the light of the carriage to examine the beast, exclaiming volubly. The cabman, wild with interest, peered down from the box into the palm of the porter, and carried on an impassioned dialogue. Aaron stood with one foot ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... the vulgar account it extremely dangerous to touch anything which they may happen to find without saining (blessing) it, the snares of the enemy being notorious and well-attested. A pool-woman of Teviotdale having been fortunate enough, as she thought herself, to find a wooden beetle, at the very time when she needed such an implement, seized it without pronouncing a proper blessing, and, carrying it home, laid it above her bed to be ready for employment in the morning. At midnight the window of her cottage opened, and a loud voice was heard calling up some one within by a ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... years pleasing objects have been borrowed from the animal kingdom, such as small birds and quadrupeds, and insects with brilliant colors and of strange forms. What formerly would have been a repulsive object (such as a great longicorn or beetle) is worn with ease by the belles of our time. The use of such objects of natural history, however, has been about confined to the decoration of head-dresses or the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various
... fashion he had learned from the Malays, he seemed about to hurl it at the little mahout, whose head and shoulders he could see plainly now just beyond Rajah's shabby little tail. "You dare to say another word, and I will pin you where you sit, like the miserable little beetle you are! Now then.—Here, steady, Rajah!—Hold tight, Mister Archie! I am coming to you; but just you make a show of that other spear. You needn't get up, but make believe to be about to chuck it at him if he ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... Wingate, whose early training had been free and unrestrained, being brought to order by a Japanese mother-in-law was almost too much for my gravity. It would be like a big black beetle ordering the life of a butterfly. Not without a struggle the conservative grandfather acknowledged that his system had failed. For the first time since I had known him Kishimoto San, with genuine humility, appealed for help. "Madam, my granddaughter is like new machineries. ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... (which is not a bug, but a beetle, and arrives in May) has this interesting habit of keeping quiet. If in its flight it strikes the globe of an electric light, it falls at once to the ground, and remains perfectly quiet for a time. After a short interval it recovers and starts out to regain its previous activity. ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... is an omen of evil for that day. To meet an ass, is in like manner unlucky. It is also very unfortunate to walk under a ladder; to forget to eat goose on the festival of St. Michael; to tread upon a beetle, or to eat the twin nuts that are sometimes found in one shell. Woe, in like manner, is predicted to that wight who inadvertently upsets the salt; each grain that is overthrown will bring to him a day ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... settled quickly and daintily, while Conn and Anse and Rodney Maxwell sat in the car and watched. Immediately, she began opening like a beetle bursting from its shell, large sections of armor swinging outward. Except for the bridge and the gun turrets, almost the whole ship could be opened; she had been designed to land in the middle of a battle and deliver ammunition when seconds could mean the difference between life ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... collecting shocking details for subsequent magic-lantern lectures on the liquor traffic; so fearful misunderstandings arose, but we gradually educated each other, and I had the best of the affair; for all I had got to teach them was that I was only a beetle and fetish hunter, and so forth, while they had to teach me a new world, and a very fascinating course of study I found it. And whatever the Coast may have to say against me—for my continual desire for hair-pins, and other pins, my intolerable habit of getting into water, the abominations full ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... come back, even if bottom up. And when they reach the shore the two occupants (if any) invert the ship, stick a head in the stem and another in the stern, and carry her home to tea. This process is apt to puzzle the uninformed visitor, who sees a strange and fearful animal, like a huge black-beetle, crawling up the cliffs. He begins to think of "antres huge and deserts vast, and anthropophagi, and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders." He hesitates about landing, but if he be on the Duras, Captain Neal Delargy, ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... droning flight of the beetle, to the drowsy tinklings from a distant fold, to the moping owl in an ivy-mantled tower. Each natural object, either directly or by contrast, reflects the mind of man. Nature serves as a background for the ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... an empty kitchen, and left her sitting on a stool in the middle of it with an A B C in her hand. But Beth took no interest in the alphabet in those days, and hunted black-beetles with the bellows instead of learning it. The hearthstone was the place of execution. When she found a beetle, she would blow him along to it with the bellows, and there despatch him. She had no horror of any creature in her childhood, but as she matured, her whole temperament changed in this respect, and when she met a beetle on the stairs she would turn and fly rather than pass it, and she would feel ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... in fancy, and 'The Celestial Grocery' is as whimsical as it is fresh. 'Bill' is in yet another vein, and proves that Mr. Pain can handle the squalor of reality: while the last half of 'The Girl and the Beetle,' the best of the book, suggests a certain comprehension of ...
— The Black Cat - A Play in Three Acts • John Todhunter
... the midst of our lovers' quarrel, like a cannon-stroke! Ah, ha! Hodge, that was a fine bomb-shell, was it not? And as I said 'Hodge, my dear Hodge,' you tumbled about like a kernel of corn which a dung-beetle blows with his breath. No, no, my worthy and virtuous Gammer Gurton, it was not Tib who called the handsome Hodge, and more than that, I saw Tib, as your contest began, go out at ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... is hush'd, save where the weak-eyed bat With short shrill shriek flits by on leathern wing; 10 Or where the beetle winds His small but ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... only wish other people were half as punctual: 'twould save other people's money and other people's peace of mind. You know I hate a black-beetle! No: I don't hate so many things. But I do hate black-beetles, as I hate ill-treatment, Mr. Caudle. And now I have enough of ...
— Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures • Douglas Jerrold
... among them. By this means several hundred of them have been converted to Christianity; the rest are some heathens, and others of no religion at all, and yet they all stick up to the strict rules of Morality. They all, both Men and Women, Young and Old, Chew of the Beetle Leaf, Areca Nutts, and a sort of white lime, which I believe is made from Coral stone; this has such an effect upon the Teeth that very few, even of the Young people, have hardly any left in their Heads, and those they have are as black as Ink. Their houses are built on posts ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook
... went to hear JOSEPH JOHN GURNEY, one of the most distinguished and influential, it is said, of the English Quakers. He is a thick-set, beetle-browed man, with a well-to-do-in-the-world air of pious stolidity. I was grievously disappointed; for Quakerism has at times looked lovely to me, and I had expected at least a spiritual exposition of its doctrines from the brother of Mrs. Fry. ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... spoke, with a commanding eye. She was a woman, I gathered in that instant, born to command. There seemed, at any rate, no doubt in her mind that she could command me. If I had been a black beetle she could not have looked at me with a more scornful superiority. Her eyes were very large and of a rich, fiery brown colour, and it was these that gave me my first suspicion of her identity. As to the meaning of her words, ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... reign'd. The breath A moment hush'd, 'twas mimic death. The ear, from all assaults releas'd, As motion, sound, and life, had ceas'd. The beetle rarely murmur'd by, No sheep-dog sent his voice so high, Save when, by chance, far down the steep, Crept a live speck, a straggling sheep; Yet one lone object, plainly seen, Curv'd slowly, in a line of green, ...
— The Banks of Wye • Robert Bloomfield
... of the rubber story we may thank a little wood-boring beetle, and the way nature has of helping her children to ...
— The Romance of Rubber • United States Rubber Company
... Indian smith carries his tools, his shop, and his forge about with him, and works in any place where he can find employment. He has a stone instead of an anvil, and his whole apparatus is a pair of tongs, a hammer, a beetle, and a file. This is very much like Gipsy tinkers," &c. It is usual for Parias, or Suders, in India to have their huts outside the villages of other castes. This is one of the leading features ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... beside her, a tiny figure became visible, so small that Toinette had to kneel and stoop her head to see it plainly. The figure was that of an odd little man. He wore a garb of green bright and glancing as the scales of a beetle. In his mite of a hand was a cap, out of which stuck a long pointed feather. Two specks of tears stood on his cheeks and he fixed on Toinette a glance so sharp and so sad that it made her feel sorry and frightened and confused all ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... sense foresee that it was mechanically piling up conundrum after conundrum in his educational path, which seemed unconnected but that he had got to connect; that seemed insoluble but had got to be somehow solved. Rome was not a beetle to be dissected and dropped; not a bad French novel to be read in a railway train and thrown out of the window after other bad French novels, the morals of which could never approach the immorality of Roman history. Rome was actual; it was England; it was ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... informed with what studious, persevering, and unmerciful violation of all gentle decorum and feminine pity, the lovely marble-souled tyranness has, in the course of the last three or four years, turned back from her beetle-browed castle-gate, one by one, as they showed themselves there—a hundred, all worthily born—otherwise more and less meritorious—petitioners for that whip-and-javelin-bearing hand. You are NOW to know, that upon this very morning, an embassy from ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... insect damages that we will not pause to enumerate here. They relate to cattle, horses, sheep and stored grain products of many kinds. Even cured tobacco has its pest, a minute insect known as the cigarette beetle, now widespread in America and "frequently the cause of ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... the man to hear on such a theme. He is a colonel of Companies. But those are his diversion, as the British Army has been to the warrior. Puellis idoneus, he is professedly a lady's man, a rose-beetle, and a fine specimen of a common kind: and he has been that thing, that shining delight of the lap of ladies, for a spell of years, necessitating a certain sparkle of the saccharine crystals preserving him, to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... me in this, and in several other designs, was the original manner in which the Japanese artist had seized upon the traits of the modern battleship,—the powerful and sinister lines of its shape,—just as he would have caught for us the typical character of a beetle or a lobster. The lines have been just enough exaggerated to convey, at one glance, the real impression made by the aspect of these iron monsters,—vague impression of bulk and force and menace, very difficult to express ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... the best sort, but perhaps that is owing partly to their growing wild, and partly to their being too much in the shade of taller trees. The cocoa-nut tree is in great perfection, but does not abound. Here are, I believe, all the different kinds of palm, with the beetle-nut tree, various species of the aloe, canes, bamboos, and rattans, with many trees, shrubs, and plants, altogether unknown to me; but no esculent vegetable of any kind. The woods abound with pigeons, doves, rooks, parrots, and a large bird with black ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... even with its feathers than a large beetle. The colour of its feathers is variable, according to the light they are exposed in; in the sun they appear like enamel upon a gold ground, which delights the eyes. The longest feathers of the wings of this bird are not much more ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... he seemed not to notice me. He talked little to her, but always with special cleverness and significance. I gave up working and reading; I even gave up walking about the neighbourhood and riding my horse. Like a beetle tied by the leg, I moved continually round and round my beloved little lodge. I would gladly have stopped there altogether, it seemed ... but that was impossible. My mother scolded me, and sometimes Zinaida herself drove me away. Then I used ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... have a strangely Christian ring. He was a believer in the resurrection of the body; hence the care that was taken from the time of the Third dynasty onwards to preserve it by embalmment, and to place above the heart the scarab beetle, the symbol of evolution, which by its magical powers would cause it to beat again. Hence, too, the long texts from the Ritual of the Dead which enabled the deceased to pass in safety through the perils that ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... one came knocking At my wee, small door; Some one came knocking, I'm sure - sure - sure; I listened, I opened, I looked to left and right, But naught there was a-stirring In the still dark night; Only the busy beetle Tap-tapping in the wall, Only from the forest The screech-owl's call, Only the cricket whistling While the dewdrops fall, So I know not who came knocking, At all, at all, ...
— Peacock Pie, A Book of Rhymes • Walter de la Mare
... the caterpillar. The eggs are hatched by the warmth of the caterpillar's blood. They produce a brood of larvae which devour the caterpillar alive. A pretty child dances on the village green. Her feet crush creeping things: there is a busy ant or blazoned beetle, with its back broken, writhing in the dust, unseen. A germ flies from a stagnant pool, and the laughing child, its mother's darling, dies dreadfully of diphtheria. A tidal wave rolls landward, and twenty thousand human beings are drowned, or crushed to death. A volcano bursts ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... speech with so disagreeable an inflection that Arved was astonished. He looked around and spat at a beetle. ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... natural world, he 'sticks a pin there,' and keeps it for future reference; any thing from a lady-bug ready to unfold suddenly the gauze upon its hard back, where you would think no wings existed, and fly away, to an offensive black beetle that snuffs the candle, or cracks its head against the wall, thence upward in the scale to the bird which Liberty loves as her sublimest emblem, the proudest of the proud, the bird of our own mountains, and the ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... W. Hegner, 'Experiments with Chrysomelid Beetles,' III., Biological Bulletin, vol. xx. 1910-11.] for example, found that in the egg of the beetle Leptinotarsa, which is an elongated oval in shape, there is at the posterior end in the superficial cytoplasm a disc-shaped mass of darkly staining granules, while the fertilised nucleus is in the middle of the egg. When the protoplasm containing ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... an alley, To a castle in a valley, They completely lost their way, And wandered all the day; Till, to see them safely back, They paid a Ducky-quack, And a Beetle, and a Mouse, Who ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... although on the 18th the trains by that last line were fired at. I wrote home that I could not help thinking of one of the plays of Aristophanes, in which a peasant wings his way to heaven on the back of a gigantic dung-beetle in order to remonstrate with God upon the evils which He has inflicted upon man by war, and finds that God is out, and that His place has been taken by a devil, who is pounding all the powers together in ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... ship in air—a golden beetle, softly humming as it hovered above the desolate scene. Chet had switched on the steady buzz of the stationary-ship signal, and the wireless warning was swinging passing craft out and around their station. Within the quiet cabin a man stood to stare and stare, unspeaking, until his ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... The Pyrophorus noctilucus, or "cucujo," found also in Mexico and the West Indies. It resembles our large spring-beetle. The light proceeds from two eye-like spots on the thorax and from the segments underneath. It feeds on the sugar-cane. On the Upper Amazon we found the P. clarus, P. pellucens, and P. tuberculatus. At Bahia, on the opposite ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... dragged a chair to the corner of the hearth and sat heavily down. He bent forward, a brooding, melancholy figure, a thin old veteran, grey and scarred. The fire-light showed strongly square jaw, hawk nose, and beetle brows. When he spoke, it was in a voice inexpressibly sombre. "I have seen my niece but three times since September. If you ask me now what you asked me then, I shall answer differently. I do not know—I do not know if she knows ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... bring out towards the end of August. This little bird is an instructive pattern of unwearied industry and affection; for, from morning till night, whilst their young ones require support, they spend the whole day in their service. Their food consists of flies, gnats, and a small species of beetle, and they drink as they fly along, sipping the surface of the water. They settle, occasionally, on the ground, to pick up gravel, which is necessary to grind and digest the food of all birds. [Footnote: for the preceding and following account, ...
— Domestic pleasures - or, the happy fire-side • F. B. Vaux
... Prussians, Turks, or Algerines treated American citizens in this way? And yet our federalists can never bear to hear us speak, in terms of resentment, against "the bulwark of our religion." O, Caleb! Caleb! Thou hast a head and so has a beetle.[S] ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... I do fear thy courage, Claudio; and I quake Lest thou a feverous life should'st entertain, And six or seven winters more respect Than a perpetual honor. Dar'st thou die? The sense of death is most in apprehension; And the poor beetle that we tread upon, In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great As when a giant dies! Ay, Isabella, but to die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction and to rot; This sensible, warm motion to become ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... written to deliver the deceased from the Great Crocodile Sui, and the Serpents Rerek and Seksek, and the Lynx with its deadly claws, and the Beetle Apshait, and the terrible Merti snake-goddesses, and a group of three particularly venomous serpents, and Aapep a personification of Set the god of evil, and the Eater of the Ass, and a series of beings who lived by slaughtering the souls of the dead. In Chapter XLII every member of the deceased ...
— The Book of the Dead • E. A. Wallis Budge
... one out when another flew straight at her unperceived and tangled himself in her hair. That was the limit of endurance. With one swift movement Eleanor turned off the gas, with another she pulled down her hair and released the prisoned beetle. Then she twisted up the soft coil again in the dark and went out into the sweet ...
— Betty Wales Freshman • Edith K. Dunton
... woman, and she liv'd in a shoe, She had so many children, she didn't know what to do. She crumm'd 'em some porridge without any bread; And she borrow'd a beetle, and she knock'd 'em all o' th' head. Then out went the old woman to bespeak 'em a coffin, And when she came back she ...
— Rhymes Old and New • M.E.S. Wright
... curiosity seems to be almost as great as your fear of the insect creation. But, really, it is quite a harmless little fellow. See!" and he pointed to a steel beetle set with a view to ornamental effect in the centre of a little rosette ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... ascribed to the lowest animals. I find it hard to believe that an infusory animalcule, a foraminifer, or a fresh-water polype is capable of feeling; and, in spite of Shakspere, I have doubts about the great sensitiveness of the "poor beetle that we tread upon." The question is equally perplexing when we turn to the stages of development of the individual. Granted a fowl feels; that the chick just hatched feels; that the chick when it chirps within the egg may possibly feel; what is to be said of it on the fifth ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... male animals are often violent and obstinate, and the employment of the natural weapons of the species in this way has led to perfecting of these, e.g. the tusks of the boar, the antlers of the stag, and the enormous, antler-like jaws of the stag-beetle. Here again it is impossible to doubt that variations in these organs presented themselves, and that these were considerable enough to be decisive in combat, and so to lead to ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... from a neighbouring farmer, but to my misery the horse did not turn up at the meet; Mr. Golightly, the charming parish priest, said I might drive about in his low black pony-carriage, called in those days a Colorado beetle, but hunting on wheels was no role for me and I did not feel like ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... without a coachman, and vat's the rail, to sich coachmen as is sometimes forced to go by it, but an outrage and an hinsult? As to the ingen, a nasty, wheezin', gaspin', puffin', bustin' monster always out o' breath, with a shiny green and gold back like an onpleasant beetle; as to the ingen as is always a pourin' out red 'ot coals at night an' black smoke in the day, the sensiblest thing it does, in my opinion, is ven there's somethin' in the vay, it sets up that 'ere frightful scream ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... On the plain, where the chase was hot; We breasted the swell of the Bittern's Bluff, And Mark couldn't raise a trot; When the sea, like a splendid silver shield, To the south-west suddenly lay; On the brow of the Beetle the chestnut reel'd, And I bid good-bye to M'Crea— And I was alone when the mare fell lame, With a pointed flint in her shoe, On the Stony Flats: I had lost the game, And what was a ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... admixture of {189} foreign pollen by selecting for pollinating purposes a flower which has not quite opened. If the standard is not erected, it is unlikely to have been visited by Megachile. Lastly, it not infrequently happens that the little beetle Meligethes is found inside the keel. Such flowers should be rejected for ...
— Mendelism - Third Edition • Reginald Crundall Punnett
... brilliant spear shaft through the rent, making it almost like day. A startled peewit cried out, from his nest under the planking, that he had overslept, but was calmed into drowsiness by his wife's assuring tones; and a noisy beetle of some kind boomed and buzzed around, as if intoxicated by the very thought of daylight. Listening intently, amid all this soft murmur of sound, Dan presently began to hear afar the rhythmic beat ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... strong dash of Arab—a smallboned, bald-headed chap, and I was just wondering how it had kept so well in our climate when it sneezed. You ought to have seen the nigger! He fetched a howl and bolted like—like the dog in 'Tom Sawyer,' when he sat on the what's-its-name beetle. He yelped as he ran, and the corpse went on sneezing. I could see it had been sarkied. (That's a sort of gum-poison, pater, which attacks the nerve centres. Our chief medical officer is writing a monograph about it.) So Imam Din and I emptied out the corpse one time, with ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... the sculpture which illustrates this portion of the text at Edfu, two Winged Disks are represented. The first has on each side of it. The disk has an uraeus on each side. The second winged symbol of the god consists of a beetle with outstretched wings, which holds between his forelegs the solar disk, and between his hind legs the symbol of the orbit ...
— Legends Of The Gods - The Egyptian Texts, edited with Translations • E. A. Wallis Budge
... bought the butterfly. With his bird and beetle and butterfly he travelled on and on until he became lost in the jungle. The foliage was so dense that he could not see his way, so he climbed to the top of the tallest tree he saw. From its summit he spied ...
— Tales of Giants from Brazil • Elsie Spicer Eells
... some patches which Fanny thought looked like ants, with a black beetle in front of them, winding ...
— Norman Vallery - How to Overcome Evil with Good • W.H.G. Kingston
... According to Prof. Riley, it was not polymorphism, "but two distinct species"—which, because of our data, we doubt. One kind was larger than the other: color-differences not distinctly stated. One is called the larvae of the common soldier beetle and the other "seems to be a variety of the bronze cut worm." No attempt to explain the occurrence ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... play. He nearly wept, and he drew such a moving picture of a poor helpless musical fantasy being lured into a dark alley by thugs and there slaughtered that he almost had me in tears too. I felt like a beetle-browed brute with a dripping knife and hands ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... is a small leaf-beetle found on Robinia pseudacacia. The chromosomes are comparatively few in number, 16 in the spermatogonia (figs. 58 and 59), and of immense size when one considers the smallness of the beetle. In some ...
— Studies in Spermatogenesis - Part II • Nettie Maria Stevens
... winged wardens of your farms, Who from the cornfields drive the insidious foe, And from your harvests keep a hundred harms; Even the blackest of them all, the crow, Renders good service as your man-at-arms, Crushing the beetle in his coat of mail, And crying havoc ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... want to please her?" insisted Gerald, removing a hideous beetle from her dress with all possible care lest she should hurt it. "I don't want to. I don't care for her, nor she for me. Why should I put myself out for her? What claim has she on me that I should displease myself to ...
— Only an Incident • Grace Denio Litchfield
... are not in danger the way any babies are," said Peter, talking to himself as is his way when there is no one else to talk to. Just then a funny little black pollywog wriggled into sight, and while Peter was watching him, a stout-jawed water-beetle suddenly rushed from among the water grass, seized the pollywog by his tail, and dragged him down. Peter stared. Could it be that that ugly-looking bug was as dangerous an enemy to the baby Toad as Reddy ...
— The Adventures of Old Mr. Toad • Thornton W. Burgess
... earth he had dreaded lay close to his eyes, and seemed beautiful. He saw the structure of the clods. A tiny beetle swung on the grass blade. On his own neck a human hand pressed, guiding the blood back to ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... are, for there the Crows will be very watchful, and follow the Plough very close) it is all soft, and full of whitish guts; a worm that is in Norfolk, and some other Countries called a Grub, and is bred of the spawn or eggs of a Beetle, which she leaves in holes that she digs in the ground under Cow or Horse-dung, and there rests all Winter, and in March or April comes to be first a red, and then a black Beetle: gather a thousand ...
— The Complete Angler 1653 • Isaak Walton
... night after our coming they slaughtered a bull marked much as Apis is, and in the morning we found it lying near the gate of the camp, and pinned to its hide with sharp thorns great numbers of the scarabaeus beetle still living. For again they did not know that among us Egyptians this beetle is no god but an emblem of the Creator, because it rolls a ball of mud between its feet and sets therein its eggs to hatch, as the Creator rolls the world that seems to be round, and ...
— Moon of Israel • H. Rider Haggard
... calls my large gold hair-pins koppa. Perhaps in his imagination they represent horses, as do many other objects also with which he plays. Berries he now calls mamma. He has a sharp eye for insects, and calls them all putika, from the Esthonian puttukas (beetle), which he has ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... does," replied Old Mother Nature. "Also he eats grubs and insects. He dearly loves a fat beetle. He likes meat when he ...
— The Burgess Animal Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... approaching the time when many of his countrymen begin to show the ravages of time. But he bore himself straight as a lath, while his tall stature and his native Highland costume accentuated the fine outline of his form. This costume consisted of a black velvet beetle-shell jacket, which extended from the shoulder half-way down the back, and was continued in a short kilt of the tartan of the McShamuses, which extended from the waist half-way to the thigh. The costume reappeared again after an interval ...
— Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... coffee-tree leaves, the so-called "leaf-miner" being especially troublesome. The Mediterranean fruit fly deposits larvae which destroy or lessen the worth of the coffee berry by tunneling within and eating the contents of the parchment. The coffee-berry beetle and its grub also live within ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... forbid it. She'd drive me mad. No—but my head's running round like a beetle on a pin. I think you'd better go now. But don't go to-morrow. I mean I think I'll go to sleep. I feel as if I'd tumbled off the Eiffel tower and been caught on a cloud—one side of it's cold and the ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... his shoes, adjusted a contrivance resembling a black beetle on the knot to prevent its untying. He also wore “hygienic suspenders,” a discovery of great importance (over three thousand patents have been taken out for this one necessity of the toilet!). This brace performs several tasks ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... permission. He doesn't like orphans, he says, and if he once lets them get a start in his grounds, the place will be infested with them forever. You would think, to hear him talk, that orphans were a pernicious kind of beetle. ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... and the type of matter which contains within itself the germ of life which is about to spring into a new existence; thus he represented the dead body from which the spiritual body was about to rise. He is depicted in the form of a man having a beetle for a head, and this insect became his emblem because it was supposed to be self-begotten and self-produced. To the present day certain of the inhabitants of the Sudan, pound the dried scarabaeus or beetle and drink it in water, believing ...
— Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life • E. A. Wallis Budge
... erupted. It came with the belch of a monstrous beetle, red-eyed and menacing, hastening ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... gunpowder and playing-cards. Well, gentlemen, the delegates from the inland districts are far more numerous than those from the seacoast, and we have not made this division arbitrarily. Since we look upon the free-trade theory as an epidemic, which is afflicting us like the Colorado Beetle, or similar evils, you cannot possibly expect that we should ask the free traders to represent the whole country in matters where we happen to have the choice. Generally speaking, the free traders represent the interests of maritime commerce, of merchants, and of a very few ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... within the Russian frontier with powerful reserves, and reinforcements were pouring along in unbroken streams from the great centres of Russian military power. The fierce Cossack from the Don and the Dneister, the Tartar from the Ukraine, the beetle-browed and predatory Baschkir, with all their variety of wild uniform, and "helm and blade" glancing in the summer's sun, crowded on the great military thoroughfares, while fresh supplies of well-appointed and formidable artillery were carefully transmitted. The foundries of Russia ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... light the ground, While the beetle goes his round: Follow now the beetle's hum; Little wanderer, ...
— Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience • William Blake
... twigs, and there was a beetle hanging to the side of his head which would have interested Gussie Fink-Nottle. To this, however, I paid scant attention. There is a time for studying beetles and a time for ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... no enemies, and the same may be said of diseases. The bulb has a very unpleasant taste, and is somewhat poisonous. It is not eaten by mice or grubs. The black aster beetle is fond of the flowers, and is quite a pest when very abundant. These insects have a preference among colors, and attack the red flowers first, especially a scarlet sort named Bertha. They will single out the spikes ...
— The Gladiolus - A Practical Treatise on the Culture of the Gladiolus (2nd Edition) • Matthew Crawford
... holes which might prove to be rabbit warrens; glaring in truculent threat up some tree which might or might not harbor an impudent squirrel; affecting to see objects of mysterious import in bush clumps; crouching in dramatic threat at a fat stag-beetle which ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... him into the castle, and shows him a bottle containing the life of the queen, another containing the eyes of the forty women; a magic sword which spares nothing, and the ring which moves the castle. Mohammed then sees a beetle,[FN441] which the slave begs him not to kill, as it is his life. He watches it till it enters a hole, and as soon as the slave is asleep, he kills it, and the slave dies. Then he lays hands on the talismans, rushes into the room where the inhabitants ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... foregoing solemnity. But Balder, who deemed this hour the gravest of his life, was taken aback by her unseasonable gayety. Casting about for means to sober her,—an ungracious thing for a lover to do!—he hit upon the gold beetle. ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... with holes like an enormous wasp's nest, the ruined watch-towers, and the soaring, honey-coloured minaret with its intricate carvings, its marble pillars, its tiles and inset enamels iridescent as a Brazilian beetle's wing, all gleamed with a splendour that was an enchantment, in the fire of sunset. The scent of aromatic herbs, such as Arabs love and use to cure their fevers, was bitter-sweet in the fall of the dew, and birds cried to each other from ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... and coverts left, And assembled on the height; Soon I ween appeared in sight All that's wings beneath the sky, Bat and swallow, wasp and fly, Gnat and sparrow, and behind Comes the crow of carrion kind; Dove and pigeon are descried, And the raven fiery-eyed, With the beetle and the crane Flying on the hurricane: See they find no resting-place, For the world's terrestrial space Is with water cover'd o'er, Soon they sink to rise no more: 'To our father let us flee!' Straight the ark-ship ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... bulls, Apis, at Memphis, and Muenis, at Heliopolis, both sacred to Osiris. The crocodile was sacred to Lebak, whose offices are unknown; the asp to Num; the cat to Pasht, whose offices were also unknown; the beetle to Ptah. The worship of these and of other animals was conducted with great ceremony, and sacrifices were made to them of ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... poppy bruised, With black hellebore infused; Here is mandrake's bleeding root, Mixed with moonshade's deadly fruit; Viper's bag with venom fill'd, Taken ere the beast was kill'd; Adder's skin and raven's feather, With shell of beetle blent together; Dragonwort and barbatus, Hemlock black and poisonous; Horn of hart, and storax red, Lapwing's blood, at midnight shed. In the heated pan they burn, And to pungent vapours turn. By this strong suffumigation, By this potent invocation, Spirits! I compel ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... a degree. One was a pot-bellied, rascally-looking fellow, with a great beard, who looked as if he had just come out of a jail. (The caliph winked at his vizier, as much as to say, There is your portrait.) Another was a black-bearded, beetle-browed, hang-dog looking rascal. (Giaffar bowed to the caliph.) And the third was a blubber-lipped, weazen-faced skeleton of a negro. (Mesrour clapped his hand to his dagger with impatience.) In short, your highness, I may safely say, that the three criminals ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... dreamy eyes and laid the beetle on one side, when his brain fully grasped that this charming vision was waiting to be entertained. She was better to look upon even than the beloved scarabeus, and he advanced to shake hands as though she had just entered the room. Mrs. ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... social state. For the most part of fair stature, erect and well built, except for an unusual slenderness of the lower limbs, the AUSTRALIANS have dark, usually chocolate-coloured skins; fine dark wavy hair; dark eyes, overhung by beetle brows; coarse, projecting jaws; broad and dilated, but not especially flattened, noses; and lips which, though prominent, ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... ovipositor, of the same length as the snout. The eggs hatch into the familiar worms found in ripe chestnuts, hickory-nuts and hazel nuts. The large hole in the shell of the nut is made by the full grown worm as it escapes to enter the ground, where it completes its transformation into a beetle. An interesting thing in connection with these weevils is that each species confine its attacks to one particular kind of nut. Even those species that attack acorns show a decided tendency to distinguish between oak species and confine themselves as groups very largely to particular species ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Eleventh Annual Meeting - Washington, D. C. October 7 AND 8, 1920 • Various
... to me." Pugh put the box to his ear. He tapped. "It sounds to me like the echoing tick, tick of some great beetle; like the sort of noise which a deathwatch ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... been a boon to many a poor Mahomedan anxious to turn an honest penny. The "kahwe-wala" has no cry and yet manages to proclaim his presence by sounds which are audible in the inmost darkness of the chals. He is the beetle of the pedlar tribe. He does not sing, he does not cry—he stridulates. Carrying in his hand a large number of small coffee-cups, fitted one within another, he strikes them together like a string of castanets, while in the left hand ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... His brain was in a tumult, there was no reasoning in it. He searched everywhere. Bush that could conceal nothing bigger than a beetle was examined; to his distorted fancy the lightning-stricken tree presented a hiding-place. Further he penetrated into the woods, but always only to return to his brother's side, distraught, weary ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... "but, Legrand, I fear you are no artist. I must wait until I see the beetle itself, if I am to form any idea ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... were of a dark tawny colour, and had long black hair; they chewed a great deal of beetle, and wore a square piece of cloth round their hips, in the folds of which was stuck a large knife. They had a handkerchief wrapped round their heads, and at their shoulders hung another tied by the four corners, which served as a ...
— A Narrative Of The Mutiny, On Board His Majesty's Ship Bounty; And The Subsequent Voyage Of Part Of The Crew, In The Ship's Boat • William Bligh
... she looked at it, then slipped it over her head. There was also a tortoise-shell comb of wonderful beauty to match the necklace. The crown of the comb was formed of turquoises and pearls. Just in the center of the comb was a tiny scarab made of turquoises. The scarab Madge knew to be a beetle sacred to the Egyptians. She wondered if the beautiful set of jewelry had an unusual history. Madge put the comb in her hair, then plunged deeper into the lavender-scented trunk. Under a pile of old-fashioned gowns she found the bundle that she desired, tied up in yellow ...
— Madge Morton's Secret • Amy D. V. Chalmers
... two double-faced frames attached to the top of this case. The more important insects included in this group were the following: Sugar maple borer, elm snout beetles, twig girdler or twig pruner, white marked tussock moth, gypsy moth, brown tail moth, bag worm, forest tent caterpillar, elm leaf beetle, oyster scale, scurfy bark louse, San Jose scale, elm bark louse, cottony maple scale. One plate was devoted to characteristic insects affecting oak, and another to those ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... Ass'n, of 1457 First Ave., New York City—have found that your magazine, Amazing Stories, publishes stories to which the term "literature" may be applied in its real sense. A fine example of this is the story "Murder Madness," by Murray Leinster. Others of the finer novels are: "The Beetle Horde," by Victor Rousseau, and, up to the present installment, "Earth, the Marauder," by Arthur J. Burks. "Brigands of the Moon," by Ray Cummings, was interesting and well-written, but it was not literature (not a story which you will remember and read over again). Of the shorter stories, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... has descended in showers. Go into any of the London theatres now, and the following is your bill of fare. Fairies you have by scores in flesh-coloured tights, spangles, and paucity of petticoats; gnomes of every description, from the gigantic glittering diamond beetle, to the grotesque and dusky tadpole. Epicene princes, whose taper limbs and swelling busts are well worth the scrutiny of the opera-glass—dragons vomiting at once red flames and witticisms about the fountains in Trafalgar Square—Dan O'Connell figuring ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... broken beetle— Sprawls without grace, Her face gray as asphalt, Her jaws sagging as on loosened hinges... Shadows ply about her mouth— Nimble shadows out of the jigging tree, That dances above her its dance of ...
— The Ghetto and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... adrift, tremulous with tadpoles just bursting their gelatinous envelopes; there were little pond snails creeping out into life, and under the green skin of the rush stems the larvae of a big Water Beetle were struggling out of their egg cases. I doubt if the reader knows the larva of the beetle called (I know not why) Dytiscus. It is a jointed, queer-looking thing, very muscular and sudden in its movements, and given to swimming head downward ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... Pem. Hence, beetle-head. And, Pembrook, now bethink How great a tyde of miseries breakes in. First, thou art taxed with the losse of him Whom equall with thy selfe thou holdest Deare; Next, Bellamira is become a Leper, Whose absence Philip carefully laments; Then trecherous Burbon joynes ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... of a century, than I was when the news came fresh and fresh in the newspapers. I do not think I had sense enough to take in the relations and proportions of the events. It was like moving a magnifying glass over the parts of a beetle, and not taking ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... Thorndyke," I exclaimed. "A human life seems to be no more to them than the life of a fly or a beetle." ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... horn beetle, the great Lucanus cervus of the oaks of the Hartz. It has this peculiarity—the right claw divides in five branches. It's a ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... load it with dishonour. He was followed by his friend Brookfield,—a heavily-built, lurching sort of man, with a nose reddened by strong drink, and small lascivious eyes which glittered dully in his head like the eyes of poisonous tropical beetle. The hush among the "lower" class of company at the inn deepened into the usual stupid awe which at times so curiously affects untutored rustics who are made conscious of the presence of a "lord." Said a friend of the present writer's to a waiter in ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... of the works of man arose Up from the plains; the caves reverberated The blows of restless hammers that revealed, Deep in the bowels of the fruitful hills, The iron and the faithless gold, with rays Of evil charm. And all the cliffs repeated The beetle's fall, and the unceasing leap Of waters on the paddles of the wheel Volubly busy; and with heavy strokes Upon the borders of the inviolate woods The ax was heard descending on the trees, Upon the odorous ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... our table. He wore carpet socks, and over them slippers with long toes curled upperward like certain specimens one may see in Bethnal Green Museum; on his head a straw-plaited, rusty fez swathed with green silk of the colour of a sun-beetle. ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... country. In the first years after its introduction, it reduced the cotton crop fully fifty per cent., and was the cause, not only of serious loss to the farmers, but of the closing of the cotton mills in New England, of a scarcity of cotton cloth and a decided rise in its price. The boll-weevil is a beetle about a quarter of an inch in length. This little beetle eats into the heart of each boll, which soon ...
— Checking the Waste - A Study in Conservation • Mary Huston Gregory
... me where amid the tranquil vale The broken stream flows on in silver light, And I will linger where the gale O'er the bank of violets sighs, Listening to hear its soften'd sounds arise; And hearken the dull beetle's drowsy flight, And watch the horn-eyed snail Creep o'er his long moon-glittering trail, And mark where radiant thro' the night Moves in the grass-green hedge the ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... fly by night, have a much longer proboscis rolled up under their chins like a watch spring; which they extend to collect the honey from flowers in their sleeping state; when they are closed, and the nectaries in consequence more difficult to be plundered. The beetle kind are furnished with an external covering of a hard material to their wings, that they may occasionally again make holes in the earth, in which they passed the former ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... unconscious, till he found one of them recorded in a book, and that was the book for him. The curious physical always drew his mind to hate it or to love. In summer he would crawl into the bottom of an old hedge, among the black mould and the withered sticks, and watch a red-ended beetle creep slowly up a bit of wood till near the top, and fall suddenly down, and creep patiently again—this he would watch with curious interest and remember always. "Johnny," said his mother once, "what do you breenge into the bushes to watch ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... excitement, and strolled out into the empty dawn-lit main road, looking vaguely for a cab. He saw nothing in the vacant space except a blue-and-gold glittering thing, running very fast, which looked at first like a very tall beetle, but turned out, to his great ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... human nature, by which we sometimes do our most humorous work when we are saddest, Miss Hosmer produced now in her sorrow her fun-loving "Puck." It represents a child about four years old seated on a toadstool which breaks beneath him. The left hand confines a lizard, while the right holds a beetle. The legs are crossed, and the great toe of the right foot turns up. The whole is full of merriment. The Crown Princess of Germany, on seeing it, exclaimed, "Oh, Miss Hosmer, you have such a talent for toes!" Very true, for ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... tempted to answer; but I am afraid the answer is worth very little—Why not? We cannot help it. You cannot expect us to like people who do not suit us: any more than you can expect us to like a beetle or a spider. We know the beetle or the spider will not harm us. We know that they are good in their places, and do good, as all God's creatures are and do; and there is room enough in the world for them and us: but we have a natural ...
— Town and Country Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... o' leather Gaed through the heather, Through a rock, through a reel, Through an auld spinning-wheel, Through a sheep-shank bane. Sic a man was never seen. Wha had he been? [A beetle.] ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... beetle [that is, a large wooden hammer], and a few men of my own choice, and I'll take her," he said to General Amherst. He meant to row under the stern of the ship and wedge her rudder so that she would be helpless. Whether the plan was carried out, we do not ...
— Once Upon A Time In Connecticut • Caroline Clifford Newton
... general stampede for underground retreats from the region poisoned by sunshine. Next year you will find the grass growing tall and green where the stone lay; the ground-bird builds her nest where the beetle had his hole; the dandelion and the buttercup are growing there, and the broad fans of insect-angels open and shut over their golden disks, as the rhythmic waves of blissful consciousness pulsate through ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin |
