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More "Flea" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... same—Know one, know all Exceeding variety and quantity of things money can buy He will be a part of every history (the fool) I never pay compliments to transparent merit I haven't got the pluck of a flea Love dies like natural decay Pleasant companion, who did not play the woman obtrusively among men Silence is commonly the slow poison used by those who mean to murder love The woman seeking for an anomaly wants a master The backstairs of history (Memoirs) To be her master, however, ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger
... colony of prairie dogs might from planless burrows; only these had more venom in their bite than prairie dogs and came from structural instead of natural, from flea-bepeppered instead of grass-grown dirt. Man, woman and child—the grown men armed, the women veiled in dirt-brown, some of them, and some (mostly the better-looking) unveiled and unashamed, the little children mostly naked and colored with all the human hues ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... next time I get the misery you can hold my hand as long as your little heart desires. 'Leven hundred to the good! Good night! Get down off my shoulder, you little flea, you. I got to turn in here and take a drink on the strength of that! 'Leven hundred ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... certainly was not the case. All had the same start, many had similar environments. Yet witness the motly products of evolution: Man, ape, elephant, skunk, scorpion, lizard, lark, toad, lobster, louse, flea, amoeba, hookworm, and countless microscopic animals; also, the palm, lily, melon, maize, mushroom, thistle, cactus, microscopic bacilli, etc. All developed from one germ, all in some way related. Mark well the difference in size between the elephant, louse, and microscopic ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... Gould (Lives of the Saints. London, 1874), using probably a version of the legend reading pulicem, instead of pollicem suum, has clapped a flea into ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... maid, inside the room, who, having announced that there was a gentleman asking for Miss Morris, was waiting for an answer. Was the follower to be sent about his business, with a flea in his ear, having come, slyly, craftily, and wickedly, in Lady Fawn's absence; or would Miss Morris brazen it out, ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... the only member of the party who from habit insisted on leggings and boots. Their horses were steady, flea-bitten little beasts, not unlike mustangs, and mounts had been provided for the gun-bearers, to the huge delight of all three. Gholab Singh also demanded a horse, which he obtained, as ...
— The Rogue Elephant - The Boys' Big Game Series • Elliott Whitney
... squeaking voice through his nose, to express a timid and weak fellow, who is always thrashed by the other actors, and always boasts of victory after they are gone."—Tolondron, p. 324. In Italian, Policinello is a little flea, active and biting and skipping; and his mask puce-colour, the nose imitating in shape the flea's proboscis. This grotesque etymology was added by Mrs. Thrale. I cannot decide between "the hen-chicken" of the scholar ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... boys," he said, "and I don't believe they dogged the sheep. Why, they've only got a Newfoundland pup, and an old lame, one-eyed sheep-dog that couldn't hurt a flea. Now, father, this sort of thing has been going on long enough. What difference does a few paltry acres make to us? The country is big enough, God knows! Ross is a straight man and—for God's sake, give the man a chance to get ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... in his awkward antics and eternal persistence, even though he was a pest. Johnny saw more in him than his companions could find, and had quite a little sport with him: he made fine practice for roping, for he was about as elusive as a grasshopper and uncertain as a flea. Johnny was in the same general class and he could sympathize with the irrepressible nuisance in its efforts to stir up a little life and excitement in so dull a crowd; Johnny hoped to be as successful in his mischievous deviltry when he reached the town at ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... can get one of those," cried Peter, "Old man Gilman ought to get a dozen. I'll tell them he's the author of the longest and dullest history of their flea-bitten empire that was ever written. And he's a real professor and a real author, and I can prove it. I'll show them the five volumes with his name in each. How much did that thing ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... me, then; and by all means stir on the youth to an answer. I think oxen and wain-ropes cannot hale them together. For Andrew, if he were open'd, and you find so much blood in his liver as will clog the foot of a flea, I'll eat the ...
— Twelfth Night; or, What You Will • William Shakespeare [Hudson edition]
... the ear or cheek with his dagger, by which he will sometimes bring three or four heads at once to his general. When it is proposed to send these heads taken in war to be seen by the king or the khan, they very adroitly flea off the skin of the head and face, which they stuff up with straw like a foot-ball, and so send them by ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... you, old girl," he told her one afternoon, "I'd go crazy with the flea bitings of the Enemy. But you, bless your wicked soul, are an honest part of the game. I was bred from the beginning to fight floods. You attack in the open, like an honest vixen. Wait till I get my clutches on ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... he was small, very small—not in stature, for he was a six-footer, but small in mind and small in heart; his soul was no bigger than a flea's. "Zeb, my boy," says he to me one day, "always be neuter in elections. You can't get nothing by them but ill-will. Dear, dear! I wish I had never voted. I never did but oncest, and, dear, dear! I wish ...
— Humour of the North • Lawrence J. Burpee
... jump over the creek, unless he was a human flea or a Rocky Mountain goat. Come, since you won't show us where he is, we'll take the liberty of sarchin' your premises. But stay, your daughter's got the name o' bein' a religious gal. If there's any truth in that she'd be above tellin' a lie. ...
— Twice Bought • R.M. Ballantyne
... the flea can bite before he's pinched," said Max. His heart was thumping, for despite his knowledge of la boxe he knew that he might be pounded into a jelly in another minute. This man was a heavyweight. He was a lightweight. But whatever happened he would show ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... Enniskillens, to be ridden by "Baby Grafton," of the same corps, a feather-weight, and quite a boy, but with plenty of science in him. These were the three favourites; Day Star ran them close, the property of Durham Vavassour, of the Scots Greys, and to be ridden by his owner; a handsome, flea-bitten, grey sixteen-hander, with ragged hips, and action that looked a trifle string-halty, but noble shoulders, and great force in the loins and withers; the rest of the field, though unusually excellent, did ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... Mr. Somers, "of a very curious and original painting I saw in England. It represented the ghost of a flea". ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... to observe them. Cold and heat, hunger and thirst, such things did not exist for the gentleman. The armor of his soul was so complete that it was proof not only against the great ills of life but even against the small ones; so the flea-bitten Nigel lay grimly still while ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... remote from the rest of the civilised world. From having been the prey of the inexpressible foreigner in his shooting season, it suddenly becomes, and remains during about five months, the happy hunting ground of the silent flea, the buzzing fly and the insinuating mosquito. The streets are, indeed, still full of people, and long lines of carriages may be seen towards sunset in the Villa Borghesa and in the narrow Corso. Rome and the Romans are not easily ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... hideousness. The California Indian not the Indian of the Leatherstocking tales. A stop at the Buckeye Rancho. Start for Pleasant Valley Rancho. The trail again lost. Camping out for the night. Growling bears. Arrive at Pleasant Valley Rancho. Flea-haunted shanty. Beauty of the wilderness. Quail and deer. The chaparrals, and their difficulty of penetration by the mules. Escape from a rattlesnake. Descending precipitous hill on muleback. Saddle-girth breaks. Harmless fall from the saddle. Triumphant entry into ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... I play a trick on you? Come, sir, and you will see her presently, all dressed up and decked with jewels. Her damsels and she are all covered with diamonds, and rubies, and cloth of gold. And what is more, they are riding three flea-bitten gambling hags, the like of which ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... to place with wonderful agility. Johnson sat in great impatience till the gentleman had finished his tedious narrative, and then burst out (playfully however,) 'It is a pity, Sir, that you have not seen a lion; for a flea has taken you such a time, that a lion must ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... lots of such little properties which are of no use to him at all. What do you say, for instance, to an estate of one hundred acres or so; it would be a mere flea-bite to him. But flea-bite or no flea-bite that's all one to me. I wish him to give it me and give it he must. I mean to pick ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... Kalev, did you lock up our old mother in the kitchen just like a mouse in a trap, while she was baking cakes?" "O yes," said the hero; "and I suppose she roared, and made up a bed among the boxes of peas, and for aught I know she may be sleeping there still, unless a flea has woke her up." "Have you stolen Sarvik's good sword?" asked Tuehi again. "Perhaps I may have taken the weapon too, dear brother," answered the hero. "Who can separate a man and his sword? One is worth nothing without the other." Then Tuehi asked ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... canter; Rob' Burns his mother called him at his birth. Though handicapped by rum and much a ranter, He won the madcap race in Tam O'Shanter. He drove a spanking span from Scottish heather, Strong-limbed, but light of foot as flea or feather— Rhyme and Reason, matched and yoked together, And reined them with light hand and limber leather. He wrote to me once on a time—I mind it— A bold epistle and the poet signed it. He thought to cheat ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... about vastness—mere extension in space? There is a sense in which the infinitesimally small is more marvellous, more disquieting, than the infinitely great. The ant, the flea, nay, the phagocyte in our blood, is really a more startling phenomenon than all the mechanics and chemistry of the heavens. In worrying about the bigness and the littleness of things, we are making the human body our standard—the body whose dimensions are no ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... from the same mysterious source,—"The feature upon which the question hinges!" The only man who could have properly painted this was the enthusiastic BLAKE, who so successfully limned the ghost of a flea! These matters, however, are to be considered as merely supplementary ornaments to great themes. The grand subjects are to be sought for in Hansard's Reports, in petitions against returns of members, in the evidence that comes out in the committee-rooms, in the abstract principles of right ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 23, 1841 • Various
... her own progress"; she added, being under intoxication, "that, if any danger existed, her scheme was to drown it in the bo-o-owl;" and two days afterward he saw her puffing and panting, and fiercely dragging a gigantic three-decker out into deep water, like an industrious flea pulling his phaeton. ...
— Christie Johnstone • Charles Reade
... my lad, and can, perhaps, give you a lift. Skip shall have a flea in his ear before the whistle sounds again; but, of course, it's none of my business what happens after ...
— Down the Slope • James Otis
... enjoyed was turning himself into some small commonplace creature to plague his friends on board—a mouse, one day, a flea the next, a fly on the third. Quite naturally, no one suspected his ability to adopt such fantastic disguises. So little did they guess—he had one or two narrow escapes from being swatted or ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... "You'll only get a flea in your ear, John," remarked Aunt Deb. "Sir Reginald will just consider you troublesome. You are much more likely to succeed if you ...
— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston
... de cyprus swamp; Need n't wake de gent'man, not fu' me. Mule, you need n't wake him w'en you switch an' stomp, Fightin' off a 'skeeter er a flea. Florida is lovely, she's de fines' lan' Evah seed de sunlight f'om de Mastah's han', 'Ceptin' fu' de varmints an' huh fleas an' san' An' de nights ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... height, and some much less[37]. They have small shrill voices like women, and are of very dark complexions, some blacker than the rest. Their only food is the flesh of goats. They are all circumcised and follow the Jewish law, and when any Mahometan falls into their hands they flea him alive. We found a hole at the foot of the mountain out of which there flowed an abundant source of water, at which we laded 16,000 camels, giving great offence to the Jews. These people wander about ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... kitchen wench, "If she lives till doomsday she'll burn a week longer than the whole world!" And Falstaff, cracking a kindred joke on Bardolph's carbuncled nose, avows his opinion that it will serve as a flaming beacon to light lost souls the way to purgatory! Again, seeing a flea on the same flaming proboscis, the doughty knight affirmed it was "a black soul burning in hell fire." In this element of mediaval life, this feature of mediaval literature, a terrible belief lay under the gay raillery. Here is betrayed, on a wide scale, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... there was once reigning, Who had a goodly flea, Him loved he without feigning, As his own son were he! His tailor then he summon'd, The tailor to him goes: Now measure me the youngster For jerkin and ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... saith the proverb of the ancients, Wickedness proceedeth from the wicked: but mine hand shall not be upon thee. After whom is the king of Israel come out? after whom dost thou pursue? after a dead dog, after a flea. The Lord therefore be judge, and judge between me and thee, and see, and plead my cause, and deliver ...
— The Dore Gallery of Bible Illustrations, Complete • Anonymous
... thinking about when he made the like of you. Let me not see you casting sheep's eyes at my son again. There never was an O'Flaherty yet that would demean himself by keeping company with a dirty Driscoll; and if I see you next or nigh my house I'll put you in the ditch with a flea in ...
— O'Flaherty V. C. • George Bernard Shaw
... chorus would interrupt him!—a chorus of agreement. Then would follow a description of that terrible flea-bitten mare, and of Johnnie's bravery; of the fierce kick, and the boy's quiet bearing of his agony, all closing with a word about ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... island half a dozen times a week, and again we don't hear nothing of him for months; sometimes he just stops here for days and mebbe weeks, and again he's here one minute and gone the next. Jumps round like a flea on a griddle, I say; you can't never tell nothing about what he's going to do or where he'll be next.... My land o' mercy, Mr. Searle! What a start ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... "That's a flea-bite. Let her keep it. You're in for it now, and you'd better say nothing about money. He has a decent solicitor, and let him arrange about the settlements. And look here, Jane;—get it done as ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... and lasses, (No bee could blither be, or brisker,)— A Pickwick somehow turned John Ziska, His bump of firmness swelling up Like a rye cupcake from its cup. And there, too, was his English tea-set, 19 Which in his ear a kind of flea set, His Uncle Samuel for its beauty Demanding sixty dollars duty, ('Twas natural Sam should serve his trunk ill; For G., you know, has cut his uncle,) Whereas, had he but once made tea in't, His uncle's ear had had the flea ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... man of all spirit. To grapple with this rigour one should have fed all one's life on blubber. I defy a man to be brave when he is half-frozen. I feel a match for any three men now; but on the heights a flea would have ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... became converted at a Methodist camp-meeting, and as he became a kind of preacher among his own people, he staid converted. He had one fault, to speak not of others. He was irascible to a great degree; a mosquito or a flea would drive him into a passion. But throughout his long career as guardian of his master, he had been never known to lose patience with him. Even mothers become vexed exceedingly with undutiful ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... lady that had never been talked about, Caesar might have searched London for a wife in vain. Good Mr. Lumley professed a great affection for me, and would occasionally favour me with long and technical dissertations on the interior economy of the flea, for example; and once in the fullness of his heart confided to his wife that "Miss Coventry was really a dear girl; it's my belief, Madge, that if she'd been a man she'd have been a naturalist." These little dinners ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... men must act upon realities not fancies; he must learn to have an eye to the main chance, and eschew heroics: what was life without money! It was not as if he gave it grudgingly, for he made him heartily welcome. The property was in truth but a flea-bite to him! He hoped the Macruadh would live long to enjoy it, and make his father-in-law the great grandfather of chiefs, perpetuating his memory to ages unborn. There was more to the same effect, void neither of eloquence nor ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... was writing that last chapter a flea appeared upon the page before me, as there once did to St. Dominic." He proceeds to say that his flea was a flea of flea-flesh, but that ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... Chris both knaw I be gwaine to have it out this night. Mother sez I be right, but that Miller will send me packing wi' a flea in my ear; Chris sez I be wrong to ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... keeps twenty-three servants, every blessed one of whom is a near relation of my own. [He sits paralysed. She goes on.] That bald-headed old owl—[with a wave towards the door]—that wanted to send you off with a glass of beer and a flea in your ear—that's my uncle. The woman that opened the lodge gate for you is my Aunt Amelia. The carroty-headed young man that answered the door to you is my cousin Simeon. He always used to insist on kissing ...
— Fanny and the Servant Problem • Jerome K. Jerome
... spared not to doe all necessary things that appertained to a good housewife indifferently for them both, as in making cleane their Cabin, and euery other thing that appertained to his ease: for when he was seasicke, she would make him cleane, she would kill and flea the dogs for their eating, and dresse his meate. [Sidenote: The shamefastess and chastity of those Sauage captiues.] Only I think it worth the noting, the continencie of them both: for the man would neuer shift hemselfe, ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, Vol. XII., America, Part I. • Richard Hakluyt
... out with the fingers without its causing them pain. The superfluous flesh was often cut out, which caused them to eject much blood through the mouth. Afterwards, a violent pain seized their arms and legs, which remained swollen and very hard, all spotted as if with flea-bites; and they could not walk on account of the contraction of the muscles, so that they were almost without strength, and suffered intolerable pains. They experienced pain also in the loins, stomach, and bowels, had a very bad cough, and ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 2 • Samuel de Champlain
... monstrous!" Simon repeated. "The command to do no manner of work is absolute and emphatic. The killing of a flea on the Sabbath is as heinous as the butchering of a bullock. The preservation of life itself is inhibited. Moses had the son of Shelomith stoned to death for gathering sticks on it. Shammai occupied six days of the week in thinking ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus
... me restless, and restlessness made me want exercise. It was no good walking about the city. The weather had become foul again, and I was sick of the smells and the squalor and the flea-bitten crowds. So Blenkiron and I got horses, Turkish cavalry mounts with heads like trees, and went out through the suburbs into ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... very teazing sand-flea, which penetrates and breeds under the skin of the feet, but particularly at the toes. It must be removed, or it occasions dreadful sores. The operation is effected by a needle; but the sac which contains the brood must not be broken, or the whole foot would ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... the inhabitants of the moon (for we now found we were in Madam Luna) fly about on these birds. The king, we found, was engaged in a war with the sun, and he offered me a commission, but I declined the honor his majesty intended me. Everything in this world is of extraordinary magnitude! a common flea being much larger than one of our sheep: in making war their principal weapons are radishes, which are used as darts: those who are wounded by them die immediately. Their shields are made of mushrooms, and their darts (when radishes are out of season) of the tops ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... it?' he said. 'The understanding of a flea, a hopping flea with a proboscis. Why should you crawl abject before ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... by the bare shoulder and spoke him burning words. "Canalla," he cried him, "horrible flea! Thou makest the air to reek—impossible to breathe. Fly, thou gnat of the midden, or I crack ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... heat; he wisheth himself a saddle for her to sit on, a posy for her to smell to, and it would not grieve him to be hanged, if he might be strangled in her garters: he would willingly die tomorrow, so that she might kill him with her own hands. [5469]Ovid would be a flea, a gnat, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... under his arm, astride a white mule with scarlet ear-tassels and bells and a saddle of scarlet leather. He gazed across the sands to the sea, and turned to St. Neot, who towered at his side upon a flea-bitten grey. ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... what you're talking about, sir," answered the voice, which seemed to be that of his housekeeper; "but you can't see Joe; he's gone out with a flea in his ear. The idea of his letting you get ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... enthusiastic pilgrims ever started in such high feather to see a dramatic and terpsichorean feast as did we. There was an expression of mystery and expectancy on every face. Mary Garden and all she does would be a mere flea bite to what we should see of pure and simple naughtiness. But alack and alas for our blasted hopes and the human weakness that had been worked on by the adroit press agent! The show was a "fake:" there was nothing naughty about it—and very little that was nice. No refrigerating plant ever ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... her bitters while Mary Ellen did her behests. Each of us cuddled his own puppy, and Giftie began an energetic search for a flea. ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... he cried. "A flea bite in the ocean. It will right itself as the public realize how they are being taken in by these American and German impostors. The Cure can't fail. And let me tell you, Dennymede, my son, the Cure is going to flourish as it has ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... goin' to git tired o' hearin' you cuss my proxy," Mr. Gibney bawled after him, "an' when that fatal time arrives I'll scatter a can o' Kill-Flea over you an' the shippin' world'll know ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... the cube exemplified in the animal kingdom. The agile flea, the nimble ant, the swift-footed greyhound, and the unwieldy elephant form a series of which the next term would be an animal tottering under its own weight, if able to stand or move at all. The kingdom of flying animals shows a similar ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... Willie Wink, Wae's me, drear, dree, and dra, A waeful thocht, a fearsome flea, A wuther wind, ...
— What Katy Did At School • Susan Coolidge
... you mercy, sir; I saw not you. I think I have sent the scholar away with a flea in his ear. I trow, he'll come no more ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... gentle, was absurd and she knew it. Margaret could go where she liked. It would all be chaste as a piano-recital. But the flea that she had been trying to put in the girl's ear seemed very ineffective. She is just as I was at her age, thought this lady, who, in ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... outcome of the search, got a start. Yonder, far away on the other side of the river, between a little wood and the Staria Derevnia, a light boat drew to the shore, and a little black spot jumped from it like a flea. Koupriane recognized the little black spot as Kathanna. She was safe. Now he could not reach her. It would be useless to search the maze of the Bohemian quarter, where her country-people lived in full control, with customs and privileges that had never been infringed. The entire ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... must go mine while I'm head-gardener at Wanless,' he says. That's what Mr. Menzies told him, the elderly man that he is—and now look at this. Young Glyde turns his back upon him, with no more notice taken than you or I would have of a flea on the arm. Insolence, that is. Downright insolence of an elderly man. Ah," said Mrs. Benson with tightening lips, "if you come ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... bright cushion, and a pile of picture magazines. It made a big bundle when she had them together, and she was dubious if she ought to try to carry them all; but Bud, whom she consulted on the subject, said, loftily, it "wasn't a flea-bite for the Kid; he could carry anything ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... would never earn the wages here that he needed for his child. For he usually earned about fifteen shillings, except in the Christmas season, when trade was brisk. Then he drew more than a pound. This sum of money, which had formerly satisfied his wants, now seemed a mere flea-bite. ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... to me! Who sent you here? It wasn't your father—he hasn't the smeddum of a flea—but he wouldn't send you to do what he dassn't do himself. I suppose it was some of them confounded old maids at the ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... left the court, shook their heads as they returned the money into their leathern pouches, and said, 'that the lad was clever, but they would like to see more of him before they engaged him in the way of business—they did not like his lowping away like a flea in a blanket.' ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... my host warmly for his timely gift, and, as I buckled the historic weapon to my side, glanced at the horse which he had placed at my disposal. It was a beautiful flea-bitten gray, with a small, fiery head, arched neck, sloping shoulders, deep chest, powerful quarters, well-bent hocks, and "clean" shapely legs—a very model of a horse, and as it seemed, ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... the argumentative villagers, a lazy flop in the tank as a raho rose to the surface, an occasional outburst from the ducks, an angry clamour from the water-hens and blue-fowl. My dogs were lying round me blinking and winking, and making an occasional futile snap at an imaginary fly or flea. It was a drowsy and peaceful scene. I was nearly dropping off to sleep, from the heat and the monotonous drone of the putwarrie, who was intoning nasally some formidable document about fishery rights ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... an agent and counsel; ane's sure o' fair play. Ye are a bonny lass, too, an ye wad busk up your cockernony a bit; and a bonny lass will find favour wi' judge and jury, when they would strap up a grewsome carle like me for the fifteenth part of a flea's hide and ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... until seven, so Jean and I went out for a walk; as Hippolyte advised us to try and find a chemist and buy some flea powder. "Je trouverai ca plus prudent," he said. Jean is getting quite natural with me now, and isn't so awfully polite. The chemist took us for a honeymoon couple (as, of course, if I had been French I could not have gone for a walk with Jean alone). He—the chemist—was so sympathetic, he ...
— The Visits of Elizabeth • Elinor Glyn
... Weimar, [Wilhelmina's acquaintance; wedded, not without difficulty, to a superfluous Baireuth Sister-in-law by Wilhelmina ( Memoires de Wilhelmina, ii. 185-194): Grandfather of Goethe's Friend;—is nothing like fairly out of his wits; only has a flea (as we may say) dancing occasionally in the ear of him. Perhaps it is so with the rest of these Serenities, here fallen upon evil tongues?] Gotha, Waldeck, Hoym, and the whole lot of them, brought upon the carpet:—and after our good Host had got considerably drunk, we rose,—and ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... those places as the forms mentioned hitherto. Among these organisms there are several species of worms, spiders, gnats, and, above all, crustaceans of the lower class. The most interesting of the latter is perhaps a variety of the sand flea (Fig. 8—Gammarus pulex). The crustacean found in the pits of mines, which is related to the sand flea, shows, according to Dr. R. Schneider, a slight degeneration of the organ of sight, which has taken place in consequence of its adaptation to the dark places, in which this variety ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 664, September 22,1888 • Various
... course, in human experience, which is incapable of containing the heart of a flea, much less what may be endured in remoter spheres. But if an intelligence were constructed ad hoc there is nothing real that might not fall within the scope of experience. The difference between existence and truth on the one side and knowledge or representation on the other ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... require a volume. The process is scarcely less complex in insects. Lyonnet found 3,993 muscles in a caterpillar, and while a large proportion belong to the internal organs, over a thousand assist in locomotion. Hence the muscular power of insects is enormous. A flea will leap two hundred times its own height, and certain large, solid beetles will move enormous weights as compared to the bulk ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... one magician who, about the year Fifteen Hundred, made a box with a glass cover that magnified the contents. This great man would catch a flea and show it to the people. Then he would place the flea in the box and show it to them, and they would see that it had grown enormously in an instant. The man could make it big or little, by just taking off and putting on the cover of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... thinking how I may impart more power to the muscles in the legs of a flea, so that it may more readily escape from its enemies. The equilibrium of attack and defence has been ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... he'd do with Devers if he only had him under his command, yet the very men so confident they could bring him to time were not infrequently the ones who subsequently found him too adroit for their straightforward methods. Black Bill told Tintop that Devers was as bad as the Irishman's flea,—put your thumb on him and he isn't there. "I'll cinch him," said Tintop in reply, "if he tries any of his damned nonsense on me." But with every intention of doing his level best, "Topsy" little knew the infinite resources ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... which the epithet of cunning may be best ascribed, is, I think, the flea. If you doubt this, try to catch one. What double backsprings he will turn, what fancy dodges he will execute, and how, at last, you will have to give up the game and acknowledge yourself beaten ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... called him hard names and turned him out of the palace, neck and heels; so back poor Peter went to his mother with a flea in his ear, as the saying is. Now he was poor again, and everybody called him a dull block, for he rode no great white horse ...
— Pepper & Salt - or, Seasoning for Young Folk • Howard Pyle
... the chief thunder-god, fell violently in love with the same Aino woman. Said one of them to the other, in a joking way: "I will become a flea, so as to be able to hop into her bosom." Said the other: "I will become a louse, so as to be able to ...
— Aino Folk-Tales • Basil Hall Chamberlain
... said. "Anyway, we've got a space drive—flea sized. Now the question before the board becomes, just what are we going to do with it? Turn it over ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond
... at him by my aunt, half in mockery and half in wrath, eyeing him from head to foot, would have said plainly enough to other men than Master Peter—who, for his part made her a right humble and well-turned speech—"Wait awhile, young fellow! I am here now! And if you find a flea in your ear, you have me to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... benign and almost paternal glance. "You're tremendously sweet to put that flea in my ear, Kay. It's a wonderful prescription, but it lacks one small ingredient—the wealthy, courageous and self-sacrificing friend who will consent to run the sandy on your astute parent, ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... is indispensable to the owner, as much so as (to use the classical illustration) the dog to the flea; but the owner is no more indispensable to the worker than a flea to a dog. As dogs would be much better off without fleas, so would ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... box here. Can't you see plain enough, by his having lost an arm, that he earns a livelihood by the work of his hands; so lest he should be riotous for being detained, let me advise you to be off. I'll send him off after you with a flea in ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... You doggone little rascal, I'd rather herd a flea on a hot plate! I've a plumb good notion to hog-tie yuh for awhile. Can't trust yuh a minute nowhere. Now look what you got to wear ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... flea—when you try to put your hands on him he isn't there," answered Shadow. "And say, that puts me in mind of another story. Once ...
— Dave Porter and the Runaways - Last Days at Oak Hall • Edward Stratemeyer
... incredible, so flat, so stale, No more to be recalled than old wife's tale; And scorned him, saw him neither high nor low, Not villain and not hero, who would go Midway 'twixt baseness and nobility, And not be fierce, if fierceness hurt a flea Before his eyes. The man loved one thing more Than all the world, and made his mind a whore To minister his heart's need, for a price. All which she loathed, yet chose not to be nice With the snug-revelling ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... excited; but again they remained vague. The autopsy showed a state of things not precisely to be called peculiar to poisoning cases the intestines, which the fatal poison had not had time to burn as in the case of the d'Aubrays, were marked with reddish spots like flea-bites. In June Penautier obtained the post that had been held by ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... ten miles off, on Anderson's Creek, that was superseded, as improvement marched, by a horse-power one. To this Lincoln, as a lad of sixteen or seventeen, would carry the corn in a bag upon an old flea-bitten gray mare. One day, on unhitching the animal and loading it, and running his arm through the head-gear loop to lead, he had no sooner struck it and cried "Get up, you de——," when the beast whirled around, and, lashing out, kicked him in the forehead so that he fell to the ground insensible. ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... honour, to drive with him. He is such a queer fellow; he's cracked, you know, and his nickname is the Flea. I don't know how you ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... in the manner to which a set of blockhead land-men submitted. 'None of your coquette airs, therefore, with me, madam,' said he, 'for I am resolved to have you this night. No struggling nor squalling, for both will be impertinent. The first man who offers to come in here, I will have his skin flea'd off at the gangway.' He then attempted to pull me violently towards his bed. I threw myself on my knees, and with tears and entreaties besought his compassion; but this was, I found, to no purpose: I then had recourse to threats, and endeavoured to frighten him with the consequence; ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding
... French. Talk mostly with those three or four Frenchmen going on permission to somewhere via New York. One has an accordion. Like second class. Wait till you see the gratte-ciels, I tell 'em. They say "Oui?" and don't believe. I'll show them. America. The land of the flea and the home of the dag'—short for dago of course. My spirits are constantly improving. Funny Christmas, second day out. Wonder if we'll dock New Year's Day. My God what a list to starboard. They say a waiter broke his arm when it happened, ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... Norwegian, and squeezed little notes out of it not bigger than a cambric needle, and as smooth as a book agent. The female singer was fair, though nothing to brag on, while the male grasshopper sufferers sang as well as was necessary. But the most agile flea-catcher that has been here since Anna Dickinson's time, was sixteen-fingered Jack, the sandhill crane that had the disturbance with the piano. We never knew what the row was about, but when he walked up to the piano smiling, and shied his castor into the ring, everybody ...
— Peck's Compendium of Fun • George W. Peck
... monstrous arrogance! Thou liest, thou thread, Thou thimble, Thou yard, three-quarters, half-yard, quarter, nail! Thou flea, thou nit, thou winter-cricket thou! Brav'd in mine own house with a skein of thread! Away! thou rag, thou quantity, thou remnant, Or I shall so be-mete thee with thy yard As thou shalt think on prating ...
— The Taming of the Shrew • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... finishing my breakfast, I walked out with them to the tavern yard, where I had my pick among the sorriest-looking dozen of nags in England, and finally bought from the red-haired man, for five pounds, bridle, saddle, and a flea-bitten grey that seem'd more honestly raw-boned than the rest. And the owner wept tears at the parting with his beast, and thereby added a pang to the fraud he had already put upon me. And I rode from the tavern door suspecting laughter in the eyes ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch
... snug as a flea, Lay all this time a snoring, Nor dream'd of harm, as he lay warm, ...
— The Old Bell Of Independence; Or, Philadelphia In 1776 • Henry C. Watson
... I suspected!" she exclaimed furiously. "You are waiting here to find that out! How can you play the spy for him! You talk about shooting a man! Why, you haven't the moral courage to kill a flea! The kindest interpretation I can put upon your actions is to assume that you ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... his side. "None but the brave deserve the fair," said his cousin. "I shall stick to it," said Tom Spooner. "Labor omnia vincit," said his cousin. But what should be his next step? Gerard Maule had been sent away with a flea in his ear,—so, at least, Mr. Spooner asserted, and expressed an undoubting opinion that this imperative dismissal had come from the fact that Gerard Maule, when "put through his facings" about income ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... face. Something in it I felt was like my own sensation when Simson in the midst of his scepticism was struck dumb. Jarvis felt satisfied that his veracity had been put beyond question. I never spoke to a servant of mine in such a peremptory tone before. I sent him away "with a flea in his lug," as the man described it afterwards. Interference of any kind was intolerable to ...
— The Open Door, and the Portrait. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... when the summer sun was still sleeping an Elf came up from below, tickling an oak-tree's foot, skipping like a flea, and whispering mischievously ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... die, to expire. yew (yu), a kind of tree. dye, to color. eye, the organ of sight. draught (draft), drawing I, myself. ay, yes. draft, a bill of exchange. aye, an affirmative vote. dun, a dark color. flee, to run away. done, performed. flea, an insect. fate, destiny. flew (flu) , did fly. fete, a festival. flue, a passage ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... Sandburr's bony, spectacled face was thrust forward. "I would not have missed it for a great deal. I would like to capture a specimen of a Patagonian alive and take him home in a cage. The Patagonian dog-flea, too, I ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... upstairs, and hide under the bed. I'll send him off wid a flea in his ear, whoever ...
— Phil the Fiddler • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... again! Turmoil and flurry may be characteristic of the manners of to-day; both are far from the ideal of beautiful manners which should be as assured, as smooth, as controlled as the running of a high-grade automobile. Flea-like motions are no better suited to ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... Russia, Dec. 14, 1830, of a multitude of small, black insects, said to have been gnats, but also said to have had flea-like ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... chance. I've fought tooth and nail, myself, for my place at the top, and I like a game scrapper, even if he is on the wrong side. You've tried to get me for years, but as I knew you couldn't, I didn't bother with you, any more than I would with a trained flea, and I bear no malice. D—d if I don't ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... going to say, looked back upon that deadly, monotonous, starved, dusty, flea-bitten coach-ride of three days and two nights as a species of Elysium, and in the result was perennially importuning Laurence to take a stroll down to Booyseus, "Just for a constitutional, you know." And ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... "Well," firmly, "I shall put a flea in Edith's ear. She must call a halt. She is simply letting that crazy imagination of hers run rampant. I shall ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... and perhaps our purses, perhaps our lives, by taking a Turkish soldier as a combined guide and guard. We sent to the proper official, and two savage-looking fellows came to the monastery. They swore by the beard of Mohammed that our lives would be worth less than that of a Tiberian flea if we went alone, or even with one soldier; they talked our few remaining powers of resistance to death, and we took them at their own price, less one-half, which was conceded to be very liberal on our part. We felt we had a new lease of life, and spent the rest of the afternoon in sweet ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... preparations she opened fond eyes, that smiled and winked in advance of the little secret thrills, sneezes, squints, and trances of the page who was about to lie at her feet, separated from her by the jump of an old flea; and in fact she advanced so much and so near the square of velvet where the poor child should kneel, whose life and soul she trifled with, that had he been a saint of stone, his glance would have been constrained to follow the flexousities ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... say: "You must come out and tighten the tent ropes with this gale blowing, it won't be funny if the whole thing blows over in the night." But none of the horrors she depicted ever persuaded me to turn out once I was safely tucked up in my "flea bag" with "Tuppence" acting as a weight to keep the top blankets in place. In the morning when I awoke after a sound night's sleep, I would exclaim triumphantly: "There you are, 'Squig,' what price the tent blowing down? It's as safe as a rock and ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... remarks on the chigo, or sand-flea (Pulex penetrans). It is very minute, not exceeding one twenty-fifth of an inch in length. It burrows between the cuticle and true skin, and there lays its eggs—producing a swelling containing a bluish white sac, about the tenth of an inch in diameter, filled with ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... or boy, That long life and happiness all may enjoy; May they of potatoes and herrings have plenty, With butter and cheese, and each other dainty; And may their sleep never, by night or day, Disturbed be by even the tooth of a flea: Until at the Quaaltagh again we appear, To wish you, as now, all a happy ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... times a day; so at last he went by the name of 'Old Duty.' I think I see him now, walking up and down with his spy-glass under his left arm, and the hand of the other pushed into his breast, as if he were fumbling for a flea. His hat was always split and worn in the front, from constantly taking it off, instead of touching it, when he came on the quarter-deck; and, as soon as it was too far gone in front to raise the purchase off his head, he used to shift it end for end, ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... man. "I know the guy, and how to handle him. You just watch him like he's watching you, Mr. Mershone, and if anything happens you skip as lively as a flea. I can use that two hundred in ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in Society • Edith Van Dyne
... permitted to retire. Besides, people who know how to take an eviction gracefully usually know enough to get out before they are put out. But Abbie had to be pushed, and she went, heartbroken, disgraced, resentful. Jake sulked after her. They moved like a couple of old flea-bitten mongrels spoken ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... Ranger, "that is a well known, game old elderly spinster lady commonly called the Moon; and that other on the branch chittering swear words is nothing in the world but a Douglas squirrel hunting—I think he is really hunting—a flea to mix in his spruce ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... the manager he had quietly walked into the office, asked for his bill, and ordered a cab to be sent for and his luggage to be brought down. Apparently the doctor attending him had tried to protest, and had been sent away with a flea in his ear. I can only assume that the old fellow was subject to some violent malady, which comes and goes suddenly, one of whose attacks he has been ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... once that my youngest brother Davie, a very little fellow then, for he could not speak plainly, came running in great distress to Kirsty, crying, "Fee, fee!" by which he meant to indicate that a flea was rendering his life miserable. Kirsty at once undressed him and entered on the pursuit. After a successful search, while she was putting on his garments again, little Davie, who had been looking very solemn and thoughtful for some time, said, not in a questioning, but ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... valleys and over snow-clad mountains, until they found that it was impossible to overtake the red men. The sagacious Indians broke up their party into small squads of two and three and scattered in all directions. To continue the pursuit would be like chasing "a flea upon the mountains." ...
— Christopher Carson • John S. C. Abbott
... from home, embittering me. A squaw-man, a flaneur and dilettante took my virtue. For years I was his mistress—no one knew. I learned from him the parasite cunning With which I moved with the bluffs, like a flea on a dog. All the time I was nothing but "very private," with different men. Then Daniel, the radical, had me for years. His sister called me his mistress; And Daniel wrote me: "Shameful word, soiling our beautiful love!" But my ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... Badoura in her sleep was carried to the bed of Prince Camaral'zaman that she might see him, Danhasch changed himself into a flea, and bit her lip, at which Badoura awoke, saw the prince sleeping by her side, and afterwards became his wife.—Arabian Nights ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... economy, as well as in every other part of life, to have the proper attention to proper objects, and the proper contempt for little ones. A strong mind sees things in their true proportions; a weak one views them through a magnifying medium, which, like the microscope, makes an elephant of a flea: magnifies all little objects, but cannot receive great ones. I have known many a man pass for a miser, by saving a penny and wrangling for twopence, who was undoing himself at the same time by living above ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... are you not charmed with the splendid accommodations of your fancy ship?" whispered the mischievous Jim. "There is not room for a flea to hop, without giving him the cramp in ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... growled Shoop. "But I got to do this personal. This here pen is like a rabbit gone loco. Now, here I set like a bag of beans, tryin' to tell John Torrance why I'm quittin' this here job without makin' him think I'm glad to quit—which I am, and I ain't. It's like tryin' to split a flea's ear with a axe; it can't be did without mashin' the flea. Now, if John was here I could tell him in three jumps. The man that invented writin' must 'a' been tongue-tied or had sore throat some time when he wanted to talk awful ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... I get the misery you can hold my hand as long as your little heart desires. 'Leven hundred to the good! Good night! Get down off my shoulder, you little flea, you. I got to turn in here and take a drink on the strength of that! 'Leven hundred to the good! ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... and the Lord avenge me Of thee; but mine hand shall not be upon thee. 13. As saith the proverb of the ancients, Wickedness proceedeth from the wicked: but mine hand shall not be upon thee. 14. After whom is the king of Israel come out? after whom dost thou pursue? after a dead dog, after a flea. 15. The Lord therefore be judge, and judge between me and thee, and see, and plead my cause, and deliver me out of thine hand. 16. And it came to pass, when David had made an end of speaking these words unto Saul, that Saul said, Is this thy voice, my son David? And Saul lifted up his voice, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... are not, it amounts to the same thing. Every dog knows that you meant to be there, or at any rate, that to be there was the scheme of someone equally bad. The slightest rustle of the wind, the call of a bird, the ejaculation responsive to a flea—any of these, anything ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... who leaned against a netting and looked vaguely out upon the horizon, waiting for the outcome of the search, got a start. Yonder, far away on the other side of the river, between a little wood and the Staria Derevnia, a light boat drew to the shore, and a little black spot jumped from it like a flea. Koupriane recognized the little black spot as Kathanna. She was safe. Now he could not reach her. It would be useless to search the maze of the Bohemian quarter, where her country-people lived in full ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... our minds the terror of the Turks, let us consider his false sleight, for this tale he telleth us to make us forget him. But let us remember well that, in respect of himself, the Turks are but a shadow. And all that they can do can be but a flea-bite in comparison with the mischief that he goeth about. The Turks are but his tormentors, for he himself doth the deed. Our Lord saith in the Apocalypse, "The devil shall send some of you to prison, to tempt you." He saith not that men shall, but that the devil shall, himself. For ...
— Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation - With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens • Thomas More
... because he was all muddy anyway, where he fell down the cellar; and how could it matter to anybody that had any sense at all? Well, then we had the rixual, and—and—why, the teeny little paddlin' he got wouldn't hurt a flea! It was that little coloured boy lives in the alley did it—he isn't anyways near HALF Georgie's size but Georgie got mad and said he didn't want any ole nigger to paddle him. That's what he said, and it was his own foolishness, because Verman won't let ANYBODY call him ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... eternal persistence, even though he was a pest. Johnny saw more in him than his companions could find, and had quite a little sport with him: he made fine practice for roping, for he was about as elusive as a grasshopper and uncertain as a flea. Johnny was in the same general class and he could sympathize with the irrepressible nuisance in its efforts to stir up a little life and excitement in so dull a crowd; Johnny hoped to be as successful ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... tell Helen when she comes back home," he announced. "Cal'late I'll put a flea in her ear. 'Helen,' I'll say, 'don't feel too bad now, don't cry and get your handkerchief all soakin', or nothin' like that. I just feel it's my duty to tell ye that your little Albert is sparkin' up to somebody else. He's waitin' on a party by ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... riding on red roan steeds—or, to be more explicit, on a paint and a flea-bitten sorrel—two wooers. One was Madison Lane, and the other was the Frio Kid. But at that time they did not call him the Frio Kid, for he had not earned the honours of special nomenclature. His name ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... life?" he said. "Know then that Godric's life is such as this:—Godric, at first a gross rustic, an unclean liver, an usurer, a cheat, a perjurer, a flatterer, a wanderer, pilfering and greedy; now a dead flea, a decayed dog, a vile worm, not a hermit, but a hypocrite; not a solitary, but a gad-about in mind; a devourer of alms, dainty over good things, greedy and negligent, lazy and snoring, ambitious and prodigal, one ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... Man of the Dee, Who was sadly annoyed by a flea; When he said, "I will scratch it," They gave him a hatchet, Which grieved that Old Man of ...
— Book of Nonsense • Edward Lear
... hams, one's intellect is apt to fall into neglect: a moral sentiment which applies out of Pigdom. This creature would not have passed muster at a county fair; no Suffolk blood compacted and rounded him; he belonged to the "racers," and skipped about his pen with the alacrity of a large flea, wiggling his curly tail as expressively as a dog's, and "all but speakin'," as Israel said. He was always glad to see Miss Lucinda, and established a firm friendship with her dog Fun, a pretty, sentimental, German spaniel. Besides, he kept tolerably clean by ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... first night is generally very uncomfortable, because one is not accustomed to the tickling and biting of the fleas. I am sure, in the morning, there was not a space on my legs the size of a shilling which had not its little red mark where the flea had feasted. ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... Klutchem had some game up his sleeve. But if that is so, why bring his daughter? My lawyer told me to-day the assault and battery case is all settled, so it can't be that. Wonder if the Colonel has converted Klutchem as to the proper way of running a bank? No, that's nonsense! Klutchem would skin a flea and sell the tallow, no matter what the Colonel said to him. Coming to ...
— Colonel Carter's Christmas and The Romance of an Old-Fashioned Gentleman • F. Hopkinson Smith
... patriarchs of Jerusalem.' 'Two feathers of the phoenix tayle' I do not remember at Oxford, nor 'a cherrystone holding ten dozen tortoiseshell combs, made by Edward Gibbons.' But I think the Ashmolean collection still holds the 'flea chains of silver and gold, with 300 links apiece, and yet but an inch long,' and, of course, the Oxford dodo's skin is famous. It was not a dodo, though, to John Tradescant. It was a 'dodar, from the island of Mauritius: it is not able to flie, being so big.' The ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... had grown very strong. The good old King did all in his power to dissuade her from this wish, representing Men as fierce and selfish giants: "No living creature," said he, "is secure from their mastery; the biggest elephant is obliged to dance to their will, as well as the smallest flea." But all was of no avail; his daughter had taken it into her head to visit the world, and go she would. The thought of this preyed upon her mind, and she grew more and more melancholy and thin; until at length the King resolved to grant her wish, in the hope that the sight would frighten her for ...
— The King of Root Valley - and his curious daughter • R. Reinick
... agreeable to me? I always despised the critter; always thought he wuz a turrible fool—and now I'm convinced on't. I'm completely disgusted wit him—and I let him know it to-night. I gin him a piece o' my mind 't I guess he'll be apt to remember for a spell. I ruther think he went off with a flea in his ear. Why, Cappen—did ye ever hear of such a piece of audacity in all yer born days? for him—Tim Crane—to durst to expire to my hand—the widder o' Deacon Bedott, jest as if I'd condescen' to look at him—the old numbskull! He don't know B from a broomstick; but if he'd a-stayed ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... Christmas fire is to them like the heats of the dog-days. Though they are frequently heard by day, yet is their natural time of motion only in the night. As soon as it grows dusk, the chirping increases, and they come running forth, and are from the size of a flea to that of their full stature. As one should suppose, from the burning atmosphere which they inhabit, they are a thirsty race, and show a great propensity for liquids, being found frequently drowned in pans of water, milk, broth, or the like. Whatever is moist they affect; ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... turning himself into some small commonplace creature to plague his friends on board—a mouse, one day, a flea the next, a fly on the third. Quite naturally, no one suspected his ability to adopt such fantastic disguises. So little did they guess—he had one or two narrow escapes from being swatted or ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... How! a Christian fellow to a dog, or a cat, a mouse, or a rat! no, no, sir; if you turn me into any thing, let it be in the likeness of a little pretty frisking flea, that I may be here and there and every where: O, I'll tickle the pretty wenches' plackets! I'll be ...
— The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus • Christopher Marlowe
... heading up-stream. It may be that I shall find myself going west and southwest into the country of the Ilongotes, who are enemies of the ones I am now with. I have to go much lighter than what I am now to keep up with the little black Negrito. He is like a flea; here to-day, there to-morrow, and ever on the move when food is gone, and at rest, when he has a supply, long enough to consume it. He is at outs with the particular people I am with ...
— The Negrito and Allied Types in the Philippines and The Ilongot or Ibilao of Luzon • David P. Barrows
... yew (yu), a kind of tree. dye, to color. eye, the organ of sight. draught (draft), drawing I, myself. ay, yes. draft, a bill of exchange. aye, an affirmative vote. dun, a dark color. flee, to run away. done, performed. flea, an insect. fate, destiny. flew (flu) , did fly. fete, a festival. flue, a passage ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... do with folk who teem by the billion, like the Chinese and Japs and orientals altogether. Only vermin teem by the billion. Higher types breed slower. I would have loved the Aztecs and the Red Indians. I KNOW they hold the element in life which I am looking for—they had living pride. Not like the flea-bitten Asiatics—even niggers are better than Asiatics, though they are wallowers—the American races—and the South Sea Islanders—the Marquesans, the Maori blood. That was the true blood. It wasn't frightened. All the rest are craven—Europeans, Asiatics, Africans—everyone at his own individual ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... boteleto. Flat plata. Flat (music) duontono sube. Flatten platigi. Flatter flati. Flatterer flatulo. Flattering flatema. Flavour gusto. Flaw difekto. Flax lino. Flay senhauxtigi. Flea pulo. Flee flugi. Fleece sxaflano. Fleecy laneca. Fleet (quick) rapida. Fleet sxiparo. Flesh (meat) viando. Flesh karno. Flexibility fleksebleco. Flexible fleksebla. Flexion flekso. Flicker lumsxanceli. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... them and Professor Sandburr's bony, spectacled face was thrust forward. "I would not have missed it for a great deal. I would like to capture a specimen of a Patagonian alive and take him home in a cage. The Patagonian dog-flea, too, I ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... that husband of hers! He's a nice one, he is! Would you b'lieve it, he come along and she spoke to him, and he swore at her somethin' dreadful. That's why she's cryin'. Poor critter, I guess by the looks she's used to it. Well, I give HIM a piece of my mind. He went away with a flea in his ear. I do despise a profane man above all things. Yes, the baby's all right, Mrs. Saunders. I'm a-comin'. Good-night, Cap'n Hedge. I s'pose I shall see you all in the mornin'. You ought to be careful ...
— Cap'n Eri • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... want to do one thing, and that is to give up my keys as soon as possible. I am tired of this profession of jailer. Besides, I shall not be able to stay here much longer. This escape has put a flea into the ear of the authorities, and they are going to give me an assistant, a former police sergeant, who is as bad as a watchdog. Ah! the good days of M. de Boiscoran are over: no more stolen visits, no more promenades. He is to be ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... Mike Flannery, "ye would not say that same, for to the flea professor th' flea is as big as a house. He studies him throo a telescope, Mrs. Muldoon, that magnifies th' flea a million times. Th' flea professor will take a dog with a flea on him, mam, and look at th' same with his telescope, ...
— Mike Flannery On Duty and Off • Ellis Parker Butler
... and then to express it in as quaint a manner as possible became the chief aim of English poets during the first three-quarters of the seventeenth century. Donne had encountered trouble in obtaining his wife from her father. Finding one morning a flea that had feasted during the night on his wife and himself, he was overcome by its poetic ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... resemble the rash of measles. Fleas, unlike lice, do not breed on the body, but as soon as they are satiated leave their host. Their eggs are laid in cracks in floors, on dirty clothes and similar spots, and it is only the mature flea which preys upon man. The human flea may infest the dog and return to man, but the dog flea is a distinct species, and never remains permanently on the human host. For these reasons it is not difficult to get rid of fleas after ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume I (of VI) • Various
... The turnip flea-beetle quickly destroys young plants of the cruciferae family by eating their leaves. Paris-green, one part to twenty parts of pulverized gypsum (land plaster) dusted on the plants while damp, helps to ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... have no doubt that the exercise assisted to keep me in good health. I used to remove my clothing, which I turned inside out and shook very carefully. Then I bathed from head to foot in some villainous brandy that no respectable flea would or could endure; after this ablution was ended, I donned my garments, wrapped in my blanket, and proceeded to dream that I was a hen with thirteen chickens, and doomed to tear up an acre ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... useless life a thousand lives saved from decay and death. One death, and a hundred beings restored to existence! There's a calculation for you. What in proportion is the life of this miserable old woman? No more than the life of a flea, a beetle, nay, not even that, for she is pernicious. She preys on other lives. She lately bit Elizabeth's finger, in a fit of passion, and ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... luxe, the breach of faith as to places, and the discomforts of the journey; but never a glimmering conception seems to flit across the popular mind that here is a Colossal Wrong, compared to which Monte Carlo is but as a flea-bite to the Asiatic cholera. This chartered abuse connects the three biggest towns in France—Paris, Lyon, Marseilles—and is absolutely without competitors. It can do as it likes; and it does it, regardless—I say "regardless," without qualification, because the P.L.M. regards ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... in the earth. For the oyster-shell bark louse, apply linseed oil. Paris green, in water, will kill the canker worm. Tobacco water does the work for plant lice. Peach-tree borers are excluded with tarred or felt paper, and cut out with a knife. Jar the grape flea beetle on an inverted umbrella early in the morning. Among small-fruit insects, the strawberry worms are readily destroyed with hellebore, an ounce to a gallon of warm water. The same remedy ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... the spray a pound of fresh lime to each pound of the arsenical should be added; or, better yet, Bordeaux mixture should be employed as a diluent instead of water. This mixture has some insecticidal value, is a most valuable fungicide, and is also a powerful deterrent of flea-beetle attack, acting to a less degree against other insects which are apt to be found on the tomato. In applying any spray a sprayer costing not less than $7 ...
— Tomato Culture: A Practical Treatise on the Tomato • William Warner Tracy
... uttermost quarters of the earth, how should he escape the ruin that he carried? We have heard of living men who have been fettered to the dead; the grievance, soberly considered, is no more than sentimental; the case is but a flea-bite to that of him who should be linked, like poor M'Guire, to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... seed get a handful or twaine To save against March, to make flea to refraine: Where chamber is sweeped and Wormwood is strowne, No flea, for his life, dare abide to be knowne. What saver is better (if physick be true), For places infected than Wormwood and Rue? It is as a comfort for hart and the ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... vanity, but I am obliged to ask that important men make an observation here. Taking the size of a man to be about five feet, the figure we strike on Earth is like that struck by an animal of about six hundred thousandths[2] the height of a flea on a ball five feet around. Imagine something that can hold the Earth in its hands, and which has organs in proportion to ours—and it may very well be that there are such things—conceive, I beg of you, what these things would think of the battles that allow a vanquisher ...
— Romans — Volume 3: Micromegas • Voltaire
... most part, blind to what took place immediately around her. General Bellairs himself (who vaguely supposed that some man might try to make love to his daughter five years hence, and thereupon be promptly sent off with a flea in his ear) was not more unconscious than she that there was, had been, or might be anything, as the phrase runs, 'between' the two junior members of the party. Lady Deane had no hints to give and no questions to ask; she seated herself placidly in a corner and began ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... reached the cool glade of topmost Tinnaburra, he found that his arrival had caused considerable perturbation among a small mob of brumbies, or wild horses, consisting of some seven or eight mares and foals, led by a flea-bitten old grey stallion, who snorted angrily as he saw Finn, and minced forward toward the Wolfhound, his long chisel teeth bared, his four-foot tail billowing out behind him like a flag, and his black ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... But even the flea season was a matter of indifference to the hapless folk who lay around us, and although we fussed and railed we could not persuade them to go forward before dawn broke. Then, though, they struggled to their feet and started without argument. But an hour after the start we reached the ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... Hugo, and he roared; and let the rest of the world judge whether, under such circumstances, there was majesty in the roar. The spectacle of Hugo, prancing on the ramparts and hurling bad names at the German armies, recalls the persistent but painful manoeuvres of a lion with a flea. Both are terribly in ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... all," coolly replied the officer. "We can't be bothered with a single prisoner. What is one flea on a blanket? Another time, if we come across you again with enough of your comrades to make the game worth while, why then, perhaps we may give ourselves the pain of keeping you. You've seen that we have enough food to feed your whole trench, ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... head at one blow of his scymitar.[308] He then makes a hole in the ear or cheek with his dagger, by which he will sometimes bring three or four heads at once to his general. When it is proposed to send these heads taken in war to be seen by the king or the khan, they very adroitly flea off the skin of the head and face, which they stuff up with straw like a foot-ball, and so send them by ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... will stamp the Brusselette carpet you bought at Wren's auction. In their horseplay with Moll the romp to find the buck flea in her breeches they will deface the little statue you carried home in the rain for art for art' sake. They will violate the secrets of your bottom drawer. Pages will be torn from your handbook of astronomy to make them pipespills. And they will spit ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... The flea, as well as the fly, is a valiant and industrious purveyor of disease. From beast to beast they hop, carrying their toxic germs with them: and the dog, displeased with his persecutors, scratches them ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... critic's critic, and a daily paper favors us with some critical remarks on the performance of the writer in the Weekly, who has criticised the critical notice in the Monthly of the critical essay in the Quarterly on the critical work we started with. And thus we see that as each flea "has smaller fleas that on him prey," even the critic himself cannot escape the common lot of being bitten. Whether all this is a blessing or a curse, like that one which made Pharaoh and all his household run to their toilet-tables, is a question about which ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... absurd and she knew it. Margaret could go where she liked. It would all be chaste as a piano-recital. But the flea that she had been trying to put in the girl's ear seemed very ineffective. She is just as I was at her age, thought this lady, who, in ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... studies, not so light as doth his own brother. For myself, the matter furnishes no surprise at all. As for you, you had never confidence in me, nor in yourself. Gad! Will, hadst but the courage of a flea, what days we two might have together here ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... deep-water bark, she is enough sight. And the fust mate's got a uniform cap on, like a purser on a steamboat. Make that artist feller take that cap off him, Jim. He's got to. I wish he could have seen some of my mates. They wa'n't Cunarder dudes, but they could make a crew hop 'round like a sand-flea in a ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... sitting-room as well. But I won't have any more of it, not if I know it. Sh—h! Hold your tongues, you brats there, and wipe your noses, too; if you don't, I'll come and do it. I never saw the like of such people. Here they walk in out of the street, without even a penny to buy flea-powder, and begin to kick up rows in the middle of the night and quarrel with the people who own the house, I don't mean to have any more of it, do you understand that? and you can go your way, every one who doesn't belong home ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... up in the cook-house she would say: "You must come out and tighten the tent ropes with this gale blowing, it won't be funny if the whole thing blows over in the night." But none of the horrors she depicted ever persuaded me to turn out once I was safely tucked up in my "flea bag" with "Tuppence" acting as a weight to keep the top blankets in place. In the morning when I awoke after a sound night's sleep, I would exclaim triumphantly: "There you are, 'Squig,' what price the tent blowing down? It's as safe as ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... Maryage, MS. play Father-in-law Feare no colours Feeres Felt locks Feltham's Resolves Fend ( make shift with) Fins (a very doubtful correction for sins) Fisguigge Flat cap Flea ( flay) Fletcher, John, MS. copy of his Elder Brother; his share in the authorship of Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt Flewd Fly boat (see Addenda to vol. i.) Fool (play on the words fool and fowl) Fooles paradysse For I did but kisse her (See Appendix) Fortune my foe Fox ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... hundred had found him on the scene at most of its exciting events. Where Fate refused to take him, he asserted his strong hand and took Fate, until that weary lady was forced to go hopping about the map of South Africa with the agility of a sand flea. ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... for nothing could be a more terrible or ferocious antagonist than many of our well-known insects, if sufficiently enlarged. No animal now alive has more than a small fraction of the strength, in proportion to its size, of the minutest spider or flea. It may be that through lack of food, difficulties imposed by changing climate, and the necessity of burrowing in winter, or through some other conditions changed from what they were accustomed to, their ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... solidity and sense. The body, however, was but a pompous trifle, and I had for many a day held his observes and admonishments in no very reverential estimation. So that, when I heard him address me in such a memorializing manner, I was inclined and tempted to set him off with a flea in his lug. However, I was enabled to bridle and rein in this prejudicial humour, and answer him in his ...
— The Provost • John Galt
... wives have often told how they Saw Cupid bitten by a flea; And thereupon, in tears half drown'd, He cried aloud: Help, help the wound! He wept, he sobb'd, he call'd to some To bring him lint and balsamum, To make a tent, and put it in Where the stiletto pierced the ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... of 'Little Russia' and is much cleaner than 'Great Russia.' I brought with me a few fleas from Great Russia and have the greatest sympathy for Tibi for the time she was exposed to flea companionship. How they bite ...
— Nelka - Mrs. Helen de Smirnoff Moukhanoff, 1878-1963, a Biographical Sketch • Michael Moukhanoff
... purgatory before leaving its tenement of clay, those torments were endured by myself last night. When I rose from my blankets this morning, after a sleepless night, I do not think there was an inch square of my body that did not exhibit the inflammation consequent upon a puncture by a flea, or some other equally rabid and poisonous insect. Small-pox, erysipelas, measles, and scarlet-fever combined, could not have imparted to my skin a more inflamed and sanguineous appearance. The multitudes of these insects, however, have been generated by Indian filthiness. They do not ...
— What I Saw in California • Edwin Bryant
... a gash in his chin). Is it not a hard thing for a man to be late for his breakfast and the rain falling, falling, and the wind rising, rising. It's destroyed I am with the loss of blood and no food in my stomach would keep the life in a flea. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 4th, 1920 • Various
... aristocratic humanity. He has the good taste to refuse condescension sufficient to allow him to eat at table with a Frederick Douglass, a Samuel R. Ward, or a Dr. Pennington. Poor light little soul! It can borrow a pair of flea's legs, and, hopping up to the magnificent lights of public opinion, sit looking down upon the whole colored ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... The rough, ungarnished coffin of stained deal lay bare and unsightly on the floor of an old market- cart; a woman sat beside, steadying it with her feet. The husband drove; and the most depressed of the three was the horse, a broken- kneed, flea-bitten grey. It was pathetic, this bringing home in death of the old father whom, while he lived, they had been too poor to house; it was at no small sacrifice that they had spared him that terror of old age, a pauper's grave, and brought him to lie by his wife in our quiet churchyard. ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... say you'd not," retorted Mrs. Jenkins. "All the world knows you are soft enough for anything. I have sent him away with a flea in his ear; that's what I ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... thinking how to give greater power to the leg-muscles of the flea, that he may more easily escape from his enemies. The balance of attack and defence is broken.... ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... minister about her shoes, an' what do you think, Mrs. Lathrop, what do you think! The minister had clean forgot himself! He was sittin' there on his piazza advisin' Mrs. Brown to make her pound-cake by sayin' 'One, two, three, Mother caught a flea,' the flea bein' the butter, an' Mrs. Macy says it was plain to be seen as he was n't a bit pleased at her comin' in that way to have his memory ...
— Susan Clegg and a Man in the House • Anne Warner
... such diseases as Rocky Mountain spotted fever, African tick fever, and other infections. The bedbug is also by no means the harmless creature which it is generally regarded. To its credit are placed such maladies as relapsing fever. The flea has been responsible for such terrible diseases as the plague. It often operates by means of rats as its carrier to the human being. The louse is one of the direst offenders in the insect line, as it must take the responsibility not only for many cases ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... fairy tales, boy. That steer was all right. He broke away from the drove, but he wouldn't hurt a flea." ...
— The Rover Boys on the Plains - The Mystery of Red Rock Ranch • Arthur Winfield
... deserted huts about the village is accounted for by the erratic habits of the people, which induce them never to stay long in one set of houses, but to flit from one side of the valley and from one settlement to another as the fancy strikes them. That the large increase of the flea population among such a race, however, may have something to do with their restlessness, seems more ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... break the wind. The fleas bit the sheep, and the sheep bit the ground, and the sore had spread to this extent. It is astonishing what a great sore a little scratch breedeth. Who knows but Sahara, where caravans and cities are buried, began with the bite of an African flea? This poor globe, how it must itch in many places! Will no god be kind enough to spread a salve of birches over its sores? Here too we noticed where the Indians had gathered a heap of stones, perhaps for their council-fire, which, ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... enyronn'd[52] plies[53]; 50 Loude dynns[54] the arrowe ynn the wolfynn's eare; Hee ryseth battent[55] roares, he panctes, hee dyes. Forslagenn att thie feete lett wolvynns bee, Lett thie floes drenche theyre blodde, bott do ne bredrenn flea. ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton
... of eight-and-forty hours from the occurrence of the rigor (in the majority of cases), the eruption comes out; and shows itself first on the face and neck in minute flea-bite spots. In the course of the next four-and-twenty hours in some cases, and in others not until the expiration of two or three days, it completely covers the body; not being confined exclusively to the skin, but frequently extending to the mouth and throat, and even ...
— The Maternal Management of Children, in Health and Disease. • Thomas Bull, M.D.
... reproached herself, now that it was too late, with her mistrust of his powers of retaining a secret. See how keenly alive he was to the need of keeping Sally's parentage in the dark! And that was what the whole thing turned on. Gerry's continued ignorance might be desirable, but was a mere flea-bite by comparison. In her strained, sleepless, overwrought state the wish that "the Major" should know of her happiness while they could still speak of it together grew from a passing thought of ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... him. Like the flea in the American story, when you've got your finger on him is the time he ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... and knew myself for a law-breaker. One lingering hope remained—that the Captain had pushed ahead into the woods, and that, as yet, Mr. Jack Rogers (whose good nature I might almost count upon) had alone detected me and would pack me home to the ship with nothing worse than a flea in my ear. ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... Wood of the Evangelist had sent their latest luxury and style to flout the tombs of the past with the ghastly flippancy of to-day. The cheap tripper was there—the latest example of the Darwinian theory—apelike, flea and curio hunting! Shamelessly inquisitive and always hungry, what did he know of the Sphinx or the pyramids or the voice—and, for the matter of that, what did they know of him? And yet he was not half bad in comparison with the "swagger people,"—these people who ...
— New Burlesques • Bret Harte
... sitting astride a flea-bitten gray mare that seemed to be in a perpetual doze, looked more like an Apache squaw than a boss cowboy. The old man's clothes were even more ragged than when Hardy had seen him at Bender, his copper-riveted hat was further reinforced by a buckskin ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... no more comparable to the Productions of many other Natural Philosophers, who are now every where busie about greater things; then my little Objects are to be compar'd to the greater and more beautiful Works of Nature, A Flea, a Mite, a Gnat, to an Horse, an ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... bring yourself home we don't care,' said Blanche, treating the loss of the junk with far more resignation than did Tom that of the flea. ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... wife, though the woman spared not to doe all necessary things that appertained to a good housewife indifferently for them both, as in making cleane their Cabin, and euery other thing that appertained to his ease: for when he was seasicke, she would make him cleane, she would kill and flea the dogs for their eating, and dresse his meate. [Sidenote: The shamefastess and chastity of those Sauage captiues.] Only I think it worth the noting, the continencie of them both: for the man would neuer shift hemselfe, except he had first caused the ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, Vol. XII., America, Part I. • Richard Hakluyt
... know. Can't keep track of HIM. Might's well try to put your finger on a flea. He's here to-day and gone yesterday, as the Scriptur' says. He ate a little mite of supper, but not much, and then off he puts. Says he's goin' to walk the fog out'n his head. I told him, s' I, 'You'll walk a plaguey sight more in than you do out, THIS night,' but he went just the same. He was ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... observe, a flea Has smaller fleas that on him prey; And these have smaller still to bite 'em. ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... from being rational, our notions on cleanliness are in the highest degree superficial. We make a great fuss over a flea; hardly mention it in polite company; but we tolerate the dirty housefly on all our food. We eat high game which our cook's more natural taste calls muck. We are only just beginning to realise the indescribable filthiness of carious teeth, than ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... the tropic jungle, Miss Drexel and Juanita, her Indian maid, led the way. Her brother, carrying the three rifles, brought up the rear, while in the middle Davies and Wemple struggled with Mrs. Morgan and the two decrepit steeds. One, a flea-bitten roan, groaned continually from the moment Mrs. Morgan's burden was put upon him till she was shifted to the other horse. And this other, a mangy sorrel, invariably lay down at the end of a quarter of a mile ...
— Dutch Courage and Other Stories • Jack London
... your reply would lead one to infer that Gossamer proceeded from spiders in general; and if it be meant that all true spiders spin, it is no doubt correct; but the Gossamer which "A Young Inquirer" asks about is the production of a small black spider about the size of a flea, which was a true aeronaut long before Montgolfier or Lunardi, and if "A Young Inquirer" has access to either the "Linnean Transactions" or the first series of Loudon's "Magazine of Natural History," he will find particulars in the latter, showing that ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett
... know how it would have ended, or whether dawn would have found us still staring like barnyard cats, for chance, and a dog, suddenly settled the matter. The dog, a forlorn, flea-driven cur, snuffed the fresh trail, followed it to the tree, and snarled out a shout of protest. He snarled but once. The Indian drew his knife, stooped, and I heard the sound of tearing hide and spouting blood. It was ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... answered. "Will and I lay and scratched, while you rested, with proper flea-food for protection! Don't worry, we'll find you ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... end to end. On this plank-bridge sat the Christ, His legs hidden in this tomb, holding a cross. His face was haggard and hollow, He was crowned with green thorns, and His emaciated body was spotted all over by the ends of the scourges as if the wounds were flea-bites. Over Him, in the air, floated the instruments of the Passion: the nails, the sponge, a hammer and a spear; to the left, on a very small scale, were the busts of Jesus and of Judas, near a pedestal on which lay three rows ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... waltz. The plumes in the hats of the cunning little ladies nodded hither and thither, and the tiny swords of the cunning little gentlemen bobbed this way and that as the throng of dancers swept now here, now there. With one tiny foot, upon which she wore a lovely shoe made of a tanned flea's hide, the fairy queen beat time, yet she heard every word which the gallant elf prince said. So, with the fairy queen blushing, the mellow lamps swaying, the elf prince wooing, and the throng of little folk dancing hither and thither, the fairy ...
— A Little Book of Profitable Tales • Eugene Field
... fishes, the drifting of the snow, the white crystals of the frost, the shrieking of the ice, the boom of the bittern, the barking of the sea lions, the honk of the wild geese, the skulking coyote who knows that each beast is his enemy and has not even a flea to help him "forget that he is a dog," the leap of the salmon, the ecstasy of the mocking-bird and bobolink, the nesting of the field-mice, the chatter of the squirrel, the gray lichen of the oak, the green moss on the log, the poppies of the field and ...
— Life's Enthusiasms • David Starr Jordan
... underneath the nail, or sometimes to the soles of the feet. When a person feels an irritation in these parts, he must immediately look at the place; and if he discern a tiny black point, surrounded by a small white ring, the former is the chigoe, or sand- flea, and the latter the eggs which it has deposited in the flesh. The first thing to be done is to loosen the skin all round as far as the white skin is visible; the whole deposit is then extracted, and a little snuff strewn in the empty space. The blacks ...
— The Story of Ida Pfeiffer - and Her Travels in Many Lands • Anonymous
... Carps, and one great one, all Male Carps, draw them and take out all the Melts, flea the twelve small Carps, cut off their Heads and take out their Tongues and take the fish from the bones of the flead Carps, and twelve Oysters, two or three yelks of Hard eggs, mash altogether, season it with ...
— The Compleat Cook • Anonymous, given as "W. M."
... will you, Rob?" exclaimed Merritt, pretending to be horrified. "If ever there was a case where eyes were bigger than a stomach, it's right here. Millions of them, Tubby wants now; seven is only a flea-bite to him." ...
— The Boy Scouts on Belgian Battlefields • Lieut. Howard Payson
... jigger results from the introduction of the eggs of the sand-flea (Pulex penetrans) into the tissues. It occurs in tropical Africa, South America, and the West Indies. The impregnated female flea remains attached to the part till the eggs mature, when by their irritation they cause localised inflammation ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... who, about the year Fifteen Hundred, made a box with a glass cover that magnified the contents. This great man would catch a flea and show it to the people. Then he would place the flea in the box and show it to them, and they would see that it had grown enormously in an instant. The man could make it big or little, by just taking off and putting on the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... I'm goin' to git tired o' hearin' you cuss my proxy," Mr. Gibney bawled after him, "an' when that fatal time arrives I'll scatter a can o' Kill-Flea over you an' the shippin' world'll ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... one thing she would fall for in a rank outsider—superlative manners. His being poor is rather in his favor. I'll put a flea in her ear—" ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... not far from where they had met on the previous morning, but no officer appeared to interrupt their combat. Both men looked nervous and worn, especially Broderick, who had spent the night in a flea-infested hut on the ocean shore at the suggestion of his seconds who feared further interference. Terry had fared better, being quartered at the farm house of a friend who provided breakfast and ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... A flea some blockhead's shoulder bit, And then his clothes refused to quit. 'O Hercules,' he cried, 'you ought to purge This world of this far worse than hydra scourge! O Jupiter, what are your bolts about, They do not put these foes ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... particular friends, Atterbury and Warburton. The misfortune is that the more just his satire, the more perishable is its interest; and if we regard the 'Dunciad' simply as an assault upon the vermin who then infested literature, we must consider him as a man who should use a steam-hammer to crack a flea. Unluckily for ourselves, however, it cannot be admitted so easily that Curll and Dennis and the rest had a merely temporary interest. Regarded as types of literary nuisances—and Pope does not condescend in his poetry, though the want is partly supplied ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... in a ditch to have a go at him, but he would ride by, looking for all the world as if he would shoot a flea off the tail of a shnipe, so that, with all the whisky in the world to help me, I dared not do it,' was his explanation ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... lad, and can, perhaps, give you a lift. Skip shall have a flea in his ear before the whistle sounds again; but, of course, it's none of my business what ...
— Down the Slope • James Otis
... man!' cried my lady in wrath. He had come near to oversetting her plate. 'What flea ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... of his tail some gay ribands she bound, Marrowbones, cherrystones, Bundle'em jig. And then at the races he tript o'er the ground, And bore off the prize, 'ere a flea could hop round: Though the slowest of Donkeys the winner is found, He's an ambling, scambling, Braying-sweet, turn-up feet, Mane-cropt, tail-lopt, High-bred, thistle-fed, Merry old ...
— Deborah Dent and Her Donkey and Madam Fig's Gala - Two Humorous Tales • Unknown
... flurry may be characteristic of the manners of to-day; both are far from the ideal of beautiful manners which should be as assured, as smooth, as controlled as the running of a high-grade automobile. Flea-like motions are no better suited ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... attributed to the late king, or, it may be, to the aventures galantes of a financier with a ballet girl. M. Blaizot was never tired of listening to him. This M. Blaizot was a little old man, dry and neat, in flea-coloured coat and breeches and grey woollen stockings. I admired him very much, and could not think of anything more glorious than, like him, to sell books at the Image of ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... mentioned hitherto. Among these organisms there are several species of worms, spiders, gnats, and, above all, crustaceans of the lower class. The most interesting of the latter is perhaps a variety of the sand flea (Fig. 8—Gammarus pulex). The crustacean found in the pits of mines, which is related to the sand flea, shows, according to Dr. R. Schneider, a slight degeneration of the organ of sight, which has taken place in consequence of its adaptation to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 664, September 22,1888 • Various
... farther down into the recesses of my flea-bag, though its linings had broken down and my feet stuck out at the bottom. Then I pulled my British Warm over me and muffled my head and ears in it to escape the regularly-repeated roar of the 9.2. Though the whole house seemed ...
— Attack - An Infantry Subaltern's Impression of July 1st, 1916 • Edward G. D. Liveing
... Gerard de Nerval, and they include: (1) Chants de la fete de Paques; (2) Paysans sous les tilleuls; (3) Concert des Sylphes; (4 and 5) Taverne d'Auerbach, with the two songs of the Rat and the Flea; (6) Chanson du roi de Thule; (7) Romance de Marguerite, "D'amour, l'ardente flamme," and Choeur de soldats; (8) Serenade de Mephistopheles—that is to say, the most celebrated and characteristic pages of the Damnation (see ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... hurry. Old Aunt Minnie, over at Clayton, has just had her hundredth descendant. She had sixteen children of her own and all of them have had their share of children and grandchildren. I know it's so because I just sold one of the great-granddaughters some hair straightener and a box of flea powder and she thought of getting some talcum powder for the new baby, but decided to ...
— The Comings of Cousin Ann • Emma Speed Sampson
... half, they arrived at Shellal, a village of a few mud huts and a station, a jetty with a steamer or two, which took travellers farther to the south, to Wadi Haifa and Khartoum. About the place itself there was little of interest; it was a one-horse show with a few Arabs, Bedouins and Sudanese, many flea-bitten mongrels and clouds of flies. But this island-studded expanse of water was the great Assuan Dam. The gates had been closed at this season for about a month, and the rising tide had just reached the floor of the beautiful Temple ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... like him to forget all about the herder and the promise of pinochle that night. He went eagerly to the decrepit little shed which housed Rambler, his long-legged, flea-bitten gray; saddled him purposefully and rode away toward the violet hills at the trail-trot which eats up the miles ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... back at their loopholes, the rest were busy loading the spare muskets, and everyone with a red face, you may be certain, and a flea in his ear, ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... proper attention to proper objects, and the proper contempt for little ones. A strong mind sees things in their true proportion; a weak one views them through a magnifying medium, which, like the microscope, makes an elephant of a flea; magnifies all little objects, but cannot receive great ones. I have known many a man pass for a miser, by saving a penny, and wrangling for two-pence, who was undoing himself at the same time, by living above his income, and not attending to essential articles, which were ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... Renoir, that it took him twenty years to find out that painting was not sculpture. Those earlier and heavy impasto studies of his are the evidence of this worthy deduction. It was significant, too, when he said that Gaugin was but "a flea on his back," and that "he does nothing but ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... what I suspected!" she exclaimed furiously. "You are waiting here to find that out! How can you play the spy for him! You talk about shooting a man! Why, you haven't the moral courage to kill a flea! The kindest interpretation I can put upon your actions is to assume that you ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... Papists, our rulers, we know, Had been trying their talent for many a day; Till Farnham, when all had been tried, came to show, Like the German flea-catcher, "anoder goot way." ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... invading my blankets, urged me to return with him to his island domain, where he might have an opportunity to make me comfortable. The kind gentleman little knew how hardened I had become to such annoyances as hard floors and the active flea. Such inconveniences had been robbed of their discomforts by the kind voices of welcome which, with few exceptions, came from every southern gentleman whose territory had been invaded by the ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... kinds in bottles, or 'pinned' them on cardboard trays,—he was an interested observer of the sprightly manners practised by the harvest-bug, and the sagacious customs of the ruminating spider,—as well as the many surprising and agreeable talents developed by the common flea. Leach's virulent hatred of Maryllia Vancourt was not lessened by the apparently useful and scientific nature of the employment he had newly taken up under the guidance of his reverend instructor,—and whenever he caught a butterfly and ran his murderous pin through its quivering body ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... year's first sub. Then a provisional Varsity was formed and the Second Team began doing business with Bi at right guard again. The left guard on the Varsity was Bannen—"Slugger" Bannen. He didn't weigh within seven pounds of Bi, but he had springs inside of him and could get the jump on a flea. He was called "Slugger" because he looked like a prizefighter, but he was a gentle, harmless chap, and one of the Earnest Workers in the Christian Association. He could stick his fist through an oak panel same as you or I would put our fingers through a sheet of paper. ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour
... pretty and coquettish barberess. M. Gillenormand admired his own discernment in all things, and declared that he was extremely sagacious; here is one of his sayings: "I have, in truth, some penetration; I am able to say when a flea bites me, from what woman ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... manners and it's not straight. What I'm going to do or not going to do in the Cathedral to-morrow is none of your business: and if I catch sight of you hanging about the place to-morrow after your work's done, I'll send you home with a flea in your ear. Now you mind that.' Of course I said I was very sorry and that, and equally of course I went off and laid my plans with Evans. We knew there was a stair up in the corner of the transept which you can get up to the triforium, and in them days the door to it was pretty ...
— A Thin Ghost and Others • M. R. (Montague Rhodes) James
... churches and chapels, plastered and nicely warmed, and comfortably seated, could have dropped in upon us and spent an hour. Of course, they would have had the back-ache and cold feet, and, perhaps, carried away a flea or two, even in March, but they would have gone home saying, "If people can meet in such a place, some refined, intelligent ladies even, and continue to go night after night, I ought to be very, very willing to go to my church whenever the Lord calls a meeting and my presence and voice are ...
— The American Missionary—Volume 39, No. 07, July, 1885 • Various
... possible in some cases, the water flea, for example, for the female to produce young without the necessity of fertilization by the male. In order to perform the necessary work to insure food supplies for the winter other insects have developed highly specialized workers, ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... years ago. That air thresher is jist like the feller all fixed up with lace and fallals called the Piccador, who used to stir up the animile with squibs and crackers and make him fly round like a dawg when he's kinder tickled with a flea under his tail; and the sword-fish, as you calls them outlandish things, are sunthen' like the Matador that gives the bull his quietus with his wepping. That air power of blood that you see, I guess, is from them, and not from t'other's ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... Jan to Suleiman, 'should this rat-flea escape, thy soul and thy body shall pay, for I will put out thine eyes with glowing charcoal and hang thee in the skin of a pig, if I have to follow thee to Cabul to do it—yea, to Balkh or Bokhara. See to it.' And Suleiman put his head upon my brother's feet, poured ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... knew nothing. He was, too, a bad hand at galloping, but with a shambling, half cantering trot, which he had invented for himself, he could go along all day, not very quickly, but in such fashion as never to be left altogether behind. He was a flea-bitten horse, if my readers know what that is,—a flea-bitten roan, or white covered with small red spots. Horses of this colour are ugly to look at, but are very seldom bad animals. Such as he was, Crocker, who did not ride much when up ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... been many other benevolent and economical schemes for keeping your cake after you have eaten it, for skinning a flint, and boiling a flea down for its tallow and glue, and this one of cheap art may just go ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... I knew what was the matter, darling," he said at last in a dispirited voice. "Good heavens! what flea has bitten you?" ...
— Absolution • Clara Viebig
... working. I can but enumerate their names, and I take this opportunity of saying that this is the last time I shall put on record the names of competitors who give no sort of clue to the process by which their answers were obtained. In guessing a conundrum, or in catching a flea, we do not expect the breathless victor to give us afterwards, in cold blood, a history of the mental or muscular efforts by which he achieved success; but a mathematical calculation is another thing. The names of this "mute inglorious" ...
— A Tangled Tale • Lewis Carroll
... inflicts much damage on the potato, tomato, eggplant, and other garden plants. The accompanying figure shows the common striped flea-beetle which lives on the tomato. The larva of this beetle lives inside of the leaves, mining its way through the leaf in a real tunnel. Any substance disagreeable to the beetle, such as plaster, soot, ashes, or tobacco, will repel its attacks ...
— Agriculture for Beginners - Revised Edition • Charles William Burkett
... kangaroo rats come out of their box peering and blinking. The cockatoo finds an audience in them, for they sit listening to him, now and then catching a flea, or rubbing the backs of their heads with their fore-paws. But a buck 'possum, who stealthily descends by a pillar from unknown realms of mischief on the top of the house, evidently discredits cocky's stories, and departs ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... for their city o' refuge, t'others run the two gals off into the big woods at the side o' the road. Then Mister Hoss-Captain picks up the Afrikin, chucks him on a hoss and sends him a-kiting with his flea in his ear; after which he climbs his hoss and makes tracks hisself—not to ketch up with the gals, ez you mought reckon, but off yon way," pointing across the creek and down the road to ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... before every young gentleman in Great Britain; and to judge by the mental stamina it affords him in most cases, what a waste of good food it is! The dishes are so numerous and so quickly changed, that he has no time to decide on which he likes best. Like an industrious flea, rather than a bee, he hops from flower to flower in the educational garden, without one penny-worth of honey to show for it. And then—though I feel how degrading it is to allude to so vulgar a matter—how high ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... flared in the little coffee-house. In one circle of yellow light two bearded Sheiks were playing dominoes with imperturbable gravity; the other lamp flickered over an empty table beneath which the thin, flea-bitten legs of a ragged urchin were showing in the oblivion of his tired sleep. In the shadow beyond sat a young American with a keen, impatient face, and a one-eyed Arab shrouded ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... it was a flea-bite! and I said, 'Gott in Himmel, Milly, dost thou want to swear my eyes away? My enemies shall have such a flea-bite.' And because Red Rivkah was in the room, Milly said I was shedding her blood in public, and she began ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... The little boy laughed disdainfully, thinking his question satisfactorily answered. "I guess those ole Rebels couldn't whipped a flea! They didn't know how to fight any at all, did ...
— Ramsey Milholland • Booth Tarkington
... a drag net out. All the roads, all the railroads, all the airports are guarded. The river and the water front, every wharf in New York and New Jersey is taken care of. You would think a flea couldn't get through. They've picked ...
— Death Points a Finger • Will Levinrew
... the same time he had orders not to accept of any terms. But the French being aware of the true nature of his errand received him coolly, and after a stay of eight weeks he was sent packing with a "flea in ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... "Doesn't the flea have something to do with plague? They say there's plague in the city now. You knew all about the Dutch. Do you know anything about ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... send him a cow-cabbage, or a root of mangel-wurzel, with a serious note, stating, that they hear it is a great curiosity in his line; if an entomologist, they are sure to send him away "with a flea in his ear." If he affects poetry, the fast fellows make one of their servants transcribe, from Bell's Life, Scroggins's poetical version of the fight between Bendigo and Bungaree, or some such stuff; and, having got the slow fellow in a corner, insist upon having his opinion, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... interrupt him!—a chorus of agreement. Then would follow a description of that terrible flea-bitten mare, and of Johnnie's bravery; of the fierce kick, and the boy's quiet bearing of his agony, all closing with a word about ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... Indian of the Leatherstocking tales. A stop at the Buckeye Rancho. Start for Pleasant Valley Rancho. The trail again lost. Camping out for the night. Growling bears. Arrive at Pleasant Valley Rancho. Flea-haunted shanty. Beauty of the wilderness. Quail and deer. The chaparrals, and their difficulty of penetration by the mules. Escape from a rattlesnake. Descending precipitous hill on muleback. Saddle-girth breaks. Harmless fall from ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... Fred answered. "Will and I lay and scratched, while you rested, with proper flea-food for protection! Don't worry, ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... have them caught in the current and drowned," he said. "Let the flea-bitten old devil go, ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... Never trust me, then; and by all means stir on the youth to an answer. I think oxen and wain-ropes cannot hale them together. For Andrew, if he were open'd, and you find so much blood in his liver as will clog the foot of a flea, I'll eat the rest ...
— Twelfth Night; or, What You Will • William Shakespeare [Hudson edition]
... eager, even to passion. He throws himself into the work as if he were composing an epic. To be very mean, and to attack that which is great, is in itself a brilliant action. It is a fine thing to be a flea ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... the great ills of life are nothing—the loss of your fortune is a mere flea-bite; the loss of your wife—how many men have supported it and married comfortably afterwards? It is not what you lose, but what you have daily to bear that is hard. I can fancy nothing more cruel, after a long easy life of bachelorhood, than to have to sit day after ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... appearance and the bulging saddle-bags. But he did not stop. Neither did he return. The young man with the old horse looked to him like a fighter—and even if the saddle-bags were stuffed with gold they would prove but a flea bite to the stake which he had ...
— The Harbor Master • Theodore Goodridge Roberts
... glorieth not a litle in it. And he that hath moste of suche handkerchers, is compted the valeauntest manne. There are many also that sowe together these skinnes of menne, as other doe the skinnes of beastes, and weare theim for their clothyng. Some of them flea the right hand of their enemies beyng slaine, so that the nailes also remain vpon the fingres, and make couers of ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... "Why should I play a trick on you? Come, sir, and you will see her presently, all dressed up and decked with jewels. Her damsels and she are all covered with diamonds, and rubies, and cloth of gold. And what is more, they are riding three flea-bitten gambling hags, the like of which won't ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... though that brought us to this shore," said a voice behind them and Professor Sandburr's bony, spectacled face was thrust forward. "I would not have missed it for a great deal. I would like to capture a specimen of a Patagonian alive and take him home in a cage. The Patagonian dog-flea, too, I understand, is ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... like a flea than a glow-worm," said Hinpoha. "It's never where you expect to find it. I really believe Nyoda has lost control of the car and it is taking her wherever it ...
— The Campfire Girls Go Motoring • Hildegard G. Frey
... alternation of ascent and descent constitutes one of life's main charms, as fortune is solely determined by comparison. And to the man with a programme, who wants to remedy the sad circumstance that the hawk eats the dove, and the flea eats the hawk, I have this question to put: why should it be remedied? Life is not so mathematically idiotic that it lets only the big eat the small, but it happens just as often that the bee kills the lion, or drives it to ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... staggers and perplexes Lenny Fairfield as to the gospel accuracy of his theoretical dogmas. Masters, parsons, and landowners! having, at the risk of all popularity, just given a coup de patte to certain sages extremely the fashion at present, I am not going to let you off without an admonitory flea in the ear. Don't suppose that any mere scribbling and typework will suffice to answer the scribbling and typework set at work to demolish you,—write down that rubbish you can't; live it down you may. If you ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... it's madness; that, and the world says genius. And some people have a peculiar gift for discovering it. Those who set themselves to it can find genius in a flea's jump." ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... Yuncas abound, And torment the people full sore, With boiling water they are killed, And I, poor flea,[FN73] must also die. ...
— Apu Ollantay - A Drama of the Time of the Incas • Sir Clements R. Markham
... their city o' refuge, t'others run the two gals off into the big woods at the side o' the road. Then Mister Hoss-Captain picks up the Afrikin, chucks him on a hoss and sends him a-kiting with his flea in his ear; after which he climbs his hoss and makes tracks hisself—not to ketch up with the gals, ez you mought reckon, but off yon way," pointing across the creek and down the road to ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... the monsters of mythology and geology, for nothing could be a more terrible or ferocious antagonist than many of our well-known insects, if sufficiently enlarged. No animal now alive has more than a small fraction of the strength, in proportion to its size, of the minutest spider or flea. It may be that through lack of food, difficulties imposed by changing climate, and the necessity of burrowing in winter, or through some other conditions changed from what they were accustomed to, their size has been reduced, and that the fire-flies, huge as they seemed, are ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... and I so frightened her, by telling her the plain truth in the plainest words, that she shrank from seeing her old lover any more, and begged me to send him about his business. And I did, too, 'with a flea in his ear,' as the saying is; for I repeated to him every word as little Kitty had said to me, as a warning to him for the futur' not to go tempting any more young girls to marry him for his money and then wish him dead for the ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... power, for I see that I cannot be good without God's assistance,—I will not trust in my own selfe, and Isa's health will be quite ruined by me,—it will indeed." "Isa has giving me advice, which is, that when I feal Satan beginning to tempt me, that I flea him and he would flea me." "Remorse is the worst thing to bear, and I am afraid that I will ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... not a law of excess, the economy of life would have meagre results. I think it is Turgeniev who speaks somewhere of her as a gigantic Titan, working in gloomy silence, with the same savage intentness upon a subtler twist of a flea's joints as ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... vivacity than of historical recollections compiled out of histories, or filched out of handbooks. But to speak of the best inn in a place needs no apology: that, at least, is useful information. As every person intending to visit Gibraltar cannot have seen the flea-bitten countenances of our companions, who fled from their Spanish venta to take refuge at the club the morning after our arrival, they may surely be thankful for being directed to the best house of accommodation in one of the most unromantic, ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... hold John Law, and his studies, not so light as doth his own brother. For myself, the matter furnishes no surprise at all. As for you, you had never confidence in me, nor in yourself. Gad! Will, hadst but the courage of a flea, what days we two might have together here in ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... The Flea, the Grasshopper, and the Skipjack once wanted to see which of them could jump highest; and they invited the whole world, and whoever else would come, to see the grand sight. And there the three famous jumpers were ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... all which can goe to Mecca in this habite, doe so, and are thought to merite more then the other, but they which cannot doe so make a vowe to sacrifice a Ramme at the mountaine of pardons; and after they bee washed, it is not lawfull for any man or women, to kill either flea or lowse with their handes, neither yet to take them with their nailes, vntill they haue accomplished their vowed orations in the mountaine of pardons abouesayd: and therefore they cary with them certaine stickes made ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, Volume 9 - Asia, Part 2 • Richard Hakluyt
... that appertained to a good housewife indifferently for them both, as in making cleane their Cabin, and euery other thing that appertained to his ease: for when he was seasicke, she would make him cleane, she would kill and flea the dogs for their eating, and dresse his meate. [Sidenote: The shamefastess and chastity of those Sauage captiues.] Only I think it worth the noting, the continencie of them both: for the man would ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, Vol. XII., America, Part I. • Richard Hakluyt
... understood, mam," said Mike Flannery, "ye would not say that same, for to the flea professor th' flea is as big as a house. He studies him throo a telescope, Mrs. Muldoon, that magnifies th' flea a million times. Th' flea professor will take a dog with a flea on him, mam, and look at th' same with his telescope, and ...
— Mike Flannery On Duty and Off • Ellis Parker Butler
... not to leave little Inez in these poor lodgings. "Goodness knows," Bess remarked, "if she gets out of our sight now we may never find her again. She's just as elusive as a flea!" ...
— Nan Sherwood's Winter Holidays • Annie Roe Carr
... he said in a deep, rumbling voice. "Why are you back here so soon, and why do you bring this flea of a white ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... twice a week at matinees. James now gave two performances each evening—and he always had some audience. So that Alvina had opportunity to come into contact with all the odd people of the inferior stage. She found they were very much of a type: a little frowsy, a little flea-bitten as a rule, indifferent to ordinary morality, and philosophical even if irritable. They were often very irritable. And they had always a certain fund of callous philosophy. Alvina did not like them—you were ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... I hope I haven't. If I thought I had I'd take something for it, dontcherknow! When I cannot live among my fellows without surrendering my independence— forswearing freedom of speech and liberty of thought; without having to play the canting hypocrite or go hungry—to fawn like a flea-bitten fice to win public favor—I'll make me a suit of leather, take to the woods and chop bee trees. I'd rather my babes were born in a cane-brake and reared on bark and wild berries, with the blood of independence burning in their veins, than ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... much more about men than I do about horses, and no doubt he describes me professionally to his colleagues as a "flea-bitten fellow standing about eighteen hoofs"; but when he is not being technical I like to think that he sums me up to himself as a nice man. At any rate I am not allowed to wear spurs, and that must weigh with a ...
— The Sunny Side • A. A. Milne
... present city. He had offended Jefferson Davis, then Secretary of War, by his irreverent wit, and was punished by exile to this then almost unknown region, which he called "Sandy Ague," chiefly inhabited by the flea, the horned toad, and the rattlesnake. Mr. Ames, of the Herald, a democratic paper, asked Derby, a stanch whig, to occupy the editorial chair during a brief absence. He did so, changing its politics at once, and furnishing ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... (And hit her, dead as nail i' post o' door,) Then abiit—What's the Ciceronian phrase? Excessit, evasit, erupit—off slogs boy; Off like bird, avi similis—(you observed The dative? Pretty i' the Mantuan!)—Anglice Off in three flea skips. Hactenus, so far, So good, tam bene. Bene, satis, male,— Where was I with my trope 'bout one in a quag? I did once hitch the Syntax into verse Verbum personale, a verb personal, Concordat—"ay", agrees old Fatchops—cum Nominativo, ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... Simon repeated. "The command to do no manner of work is absolute and emphatic. The killing of a flea on the Sabbath is as heinous as the butchering of a bullock. The preservation of life itself is inhibited. Moses had the son of Shelomith stoned to death for gathering sticks on it. Shammai occupied six days of the week in thinking how he could best ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus
... three-mile limit, thank Heaven!" said Pyecroft. "Fall in, push-party, and proceed with land-transport o' pinnace. I'll protect your flanks in case this sniffin' flea-bag ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... Ralph. "Thou were best let that flea stick on the wall. For to-day, at least, I have seen thee play at sharps ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... army's off to war— Not a soldier knows what for. But he knows about his rifle, How to shoot it, and a trifle Of the proper thing to do When it's he who is shot through. Like a cleverly trained flea, He can follow instantly Orders, and some quick commands Really make severe demands On a mind that's none too rapid, Leaden brains tend to the vapid. But how beautifully dressed Is this army! How impressed Tommy is when at his heel All his baggage ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... shade. The jealous queen started in rage; She kick'd her crown and beat her page: "Bring me my magic wand," she cries; "Under that primrose there it lies; I'll change the silly, saucy chit, Into a flea, a louse, a nit, A worm, a grasshopper, a rat, An owl, a monkey, hedge-hog, bat. Ixion once a cloud embraced, By Jove and jealousy well placed; What sport to see proud Oberon stare, And flirt it with a pet-en Pair!" Then thrice she stamped the trembling ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... Like the wind, like the sea, Whose raging will hearken to no man; Like a mill, like a pill, Like a flail, like a whale, Like an ass, like a glass Whose image is constant to no man; Like a shower, like a flower, Like a fly, like a pie, Like a pea, like a flea, Like a thief, like—in brief, She's like nothing ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... some cases, the water flea, for example, for the female to produce young without the necessity of fertilization by the male. In order to perform the necessary work to insure food supplies for the winter other insects have developed ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... was sent for, and after a consultation of a few minutes I was told I might have one if I paid for it, but it could be only a covered cart. "Very well," said I, "any port in a storm." We were now informed it was time to go to rest. This was no punishment; and notwithstanding being bug- and flea-bitten, I slept well and forgot all my sorrows. At six I was roused by the men at arms, had a tolerable good breakfast, and stepped into my travelling machine with two of my officers, the top of the cart being so low we were obliged to lie ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... with him, and played Trampy Wheel-Pad in the Western States, with any amount of success, by Jove! Encores, packets of tobacco, a new suit of clothes! And, by way of entr'acte, the girl—"Tramp Wheel-Pad's Jumping Flea," as she was called—turned somersaults and flip-flaps. But she would have killed him, this dark girl with great dark eyes,—this girl with a boy's figure, all muscle and sinew, keeping him awake all night and talking of nothing but smackings, as though she had ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... faith as to places, and the discomforts of the journey; but never a glimmering conception seems to flit across the popular mind that here is a Colossal Wrong, compared to which Monte Carlo is but as a flea-bite to the Asiatic cholera. This chartered abuse connects the three biggest towns in France—Paris, Lyon, Marseilles—and is absolutely without competitors. It can do as it likes; and it does it, regardless—I say "regardless," without qualification, ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... you, the person spoken to. ern, the sea-eagle. die, to expire. yew (yu), a kind of tree. dye, to color. eye, the organ of sight. draught (draft), drawing I, myself. ay, yes. draft, a bill of exchange. aye, an affirmative vote. dun, a dark color. flee, to run away. done, performed. flea, an insect. fate, destiny. flew (flu) , did fly. fete, a festival. ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... and upon his love for the Demoiselle de Puysange; and, to himself, he swore gloomily that if she had a mind to Hugues she must have Hugues, come what might. Having reached this conclusion, Adhelmar wheeled upon his men, and cursed them for tavern-idlers and laggards and flea-hearted snails, ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... meeting, as he had so unreasonably been doing, he began to look forward to it. It should afford him the means of setting a definite term to this persecution of which he had been the victim. He would crush this insolent and persistent flea that had been stinging him at every opportunity. Borne upward on that wave of optimism, he took presently a more hopeful view ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... him to lay down on his stummick, because he was all muddy anyway, where he fell down the cellar; and how could it matter to anybody that had any sense at all? Well, then we had the rixual, and—and—why, the teeny little paddlin' he got wouldn't hurt a flea! It was that little coloured boy lives in the alley did it—he isn't anyways near HALF Georgie's size but Georgie got mad and said he didn't want any ole nigger to paddle him. That's what he said, and it was his own ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... not birds perched on the tree under which he had been lodging; he thought he felt something dropping on his head,—some moss belike. Alas for Thor and his weapon! For once he found himself worsted, and his mightiest efforts regarded as mere flea-bites; for Skrymir's talk about leaves and acorns and moss was merely a sly piece of humor, levelled at poor crestfallen Thor, as he afterwards acknowledged. After this incident, Thor and his two companions, the peasant's children, Thjalfi and Roeska, and Skrymir went their ways, and came to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... find it diverting to probe down into that unsatisfactory fellow-creature and try to reach some common root of feeling other than those physiological needs which we share with every beast of earth. Diverting; hardly profitable. It would be like looking for a flea in a haystack, or a joke in the Bible. They can perhaps be found; at the expense ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... Mrs. Thomas. The gypsy, in her usual careless, almost masculine attire, stood in the door of her cabin gazing out at the mountains in all their mellow and triumphant glory, the evanescent glory of late autumn. A pick and fishing rod lay across the door sill and a lean, flea-bitten dog dozed at her feet. Her arms were akimbo and a pipe was ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... sinful to kill critters. All the things in the woods likes him. Once he got into a holler log to sleep, and some squirrels warned him to move out, they settled there first; and he done it. I don't allow he'd pick a flea off his own hide for fear he'd break its legs so it couldn't hop ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... will be no more comparable to the Productions of many other Natural Philosophers, who are now every where busie about greater things; then my little Objects are to be compar'd to the greater and more beautiful Works of Nature, A Flea, a Mite, a Gnat, to an Horse, an Elephant, ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... has lots of such little properties which are of no use to him at all. What do you say, for instance, to an estate of one hundred acres or so; it would be a mere flea-bite to him. But flea-bite or no flea-bite that's all one to me. I wish him to give it me and give it he must. I mean to ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... patient way in which you pursue some clew in the labyrinth of biology is admirable. I met a man last week—a man I knew in college—and upon my asking what he was doing he replied, gravely, 'For the last six months I've been making a study of the parasites in the abdomen of the flea!'" Here Clarke's sneering laugh broke out. "Yet that man despised me—called me a fool—because I, forsooth, was intent on the laws which govern the return of the dead." His laugh died, he became very earnest and very sincere. "Now, men of science, all we ask of you is to apply your precision of ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... regard each wild bird or quadruped as a sacred thing, which under no circumstances may be utilized by man. We are not fanatical Hindus of the castes which religiously avoid the "taking of life" of any kind, and gently push aside the flea, the centipede and the scorpion. The reasoning powers of such people are strictly limited, the same as those of people who are opposed to the removal by death of the bandits and murderers ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... wish to insult anybody. I was so excited I didn't always notice what I did say, it just seemed playful and funny and in the spirit of the rest. I went up to Charlie Hunt and spoke to him. I put a flea in his ear, and I'm positive from his face that he didn't know me. I came near going up to you when you were talking with that Mr. Guerra, but I was too much afraid you'd recognize me; you're so sharp, and, then, ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... the Turks, let us consider his false sleight, for this tale he telleth us to make us forget him. But let us remember well that, in respect of himself, the Turks are but a shadow. And all that they can do can be but a flea-bite in comparison with the mischief that he goeth about. The Turks are but his tormentors, for he himself doth the deed. Our Lord saith in the Apocalypse, "The devil shall send some of you to prison, to tempt you." He saith not that ...
— Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation - With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens • Thomas More
... and exercise. I'll teach you how to sail a schooner and how to go about barefoot and swab decks. It's a life for a man out there, I tell you. If you've nothing better to do than living here snug like a flea on a dog's back, until you get married, ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... time to breathe in. Well, in half an hour out comes my Carry as lively as a flea. She got into a passing cab and away she went. Fortunately I can run a bit, and reached the Palais Royal in time to see Caroline change two notes of two hundred francs ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... to think of the Admiral of the Ocean Seas and Viceroy of the Indies who thus takes what can only be called a mean advantage of a poor seaman in his employ? It would have been a competence and a snug little fortune to Rodrigo de Triana; it was a mere flea-bite to a man who was thinking in eighth parts of continents. It may be true, as Oviedo alleges, that Columbus transferred it to Beatriz Enriquez; but he had no right to provide for her out of money that in all equity and decency ought to have ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... fight the whole of yesterday, and thou art weary and exhausted. Let me fight this day." When the warriors caught sight of Judah's lion face and his lion teeth, and heard his lion voice, they were greatly afraid. Judah hopped and jumped over the army like a flea, from one warrior to the next, raining blows down upon them incessantly, and by evening he had slain eighty thousand and ninety-six men, armed with swords and bows. But fatigue overcame him, and Zebulon took up his station at his ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... I make me bed, and there I lay me down, And think myself as happy as the king that wears a crown. But as you’d be dozing off to sleep a flea will wake you up, Which makes you curse the vermin in the ...
— The Old Bush Songs • A. B. Paterson
... else; and the chances of the stranger within their gates approached those of an icicle in Hades, as our friends across the water would say. Finally, in despair, Draycott rushed into the road and seized a venerable flea-bitten grey that was ambling along with Monsieur, Madame, and all the little olive-branches sitting solemnly inside the cab. He embraced Madame, he embraced the olive-branches; finally—in despair—I believe he embraced ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... have broken through the soil, an enemy awaits them in the small black insect commonly known as the cabbage or turnip fly, beetle, or flea. This insect, though so small as to appear to the eye as a black dot, is very voracious and surprisingly active. He apparently feeds on the juice of the young plant, perforating it with small holes the size of a pin point. He is so active when disturbed that his motions cannot ...
— Cabbages and Cauliflowers: How to Grow Them • James John Howard Gregory
... settled upon the bare foot of a Wrestler and bit him, causing the man to call loudly upon Hercules for help. When the Flea a second time hopped upon his foot, he groaned and said, "O Hercules! if you will not help me against a Flea, how can I hope for your assistance ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... passage of time in this wooden prison? I make for myself the action, I make for myself the theatre. Born for the grace of life, deprived of it, let me have the horrors! In effect, I would not hurt the safety of a flea; in appearance, I desire blood, ...
— Nautilus • Laura E. Richards
... these plants are: the flea- beetle, the cabbage-worm, the cabbage-maggot (root) and "club-root"; directions for fighting all of which will be found ...
— Home Vegetable Gardening • F. F. Rockwell
... Potts' ears or one of his shoulders, I was perfectly satisfied—first, because that sort of thing was good for the whole dog; and, second, because the thing would get about even when Potts' head would reach around and bite a flea off my hind legs or snap ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... quatrefoil. Then he will use his wet and perspiring hands to turn over the volumes; then he will thump the white vellum with gloves covered with all kinds of dust, and with his finger clad in long-used leather will hunt line by line through the page; then at the sting of the biting flea the sacred book is flung aside, and is hardly shut for another month, until it is so full of the dust that has found its way within, that it resists the effort to ...
— The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury • Richard de Bury
... of his sort here," the girl remarked; "his soul would fit in a flea-track." She spied the Bronco Kid sauntering back towards her and joined him. He leaned against the wall, watching the gossamer thread of smoke twist upward from his cigarette, seemingly oblivious to the surroundings, ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... won. And all proverbs were on his side. "None but the brave deserve the fair," said his cousin. "I shall stick to it," said Tom Spooner. "Labor omnia vincit," said his cousin. But what should be his next step? Gerard Maule had been sent away with a flea in his ear,—so, at least, Mr. Spooner asserted, and expressed an undoubting opinion that this imperative dismissal had come from the fact that Gerard Maule, when "put through his facings" about ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... in 1645, state that 'their said Familiar hath some big or little Teat upon their body, wher he sucketh them: and besides their sucking, the Devil leaveth other markes upon their bodies, sometimes like a Blew-spot, or Red-spot like a flea-biting'. Sir George Mackenzie, the famous Scotch lawyer, describing in 1699 what did and did not legally constitute ...
— The Witch-cult in Western Europe - A Study in Anthropology • Margaret Alice Murray
... the stockman a black boy on a young colt, leading a sturdy flea-bitten grey, laden with a pack bag on either side. He jumped off as lightly as Moongarr Bill and hitched his horses also to the veranda posts. Except that he was black as a coal, save for the whites of his eyes and his gleaming teeth, he seemed a grotesque understudy of the stockman—moleskins, ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... King's, subjects, in that region, from seeing them on the river in small boats—a piece of reasoning which was rather ingenious than ingenuous. It had its effect in sending away the Briton with "a flea in his ear." "English Turn," the name given to a great bend in the stream some miles below New Orleans, keeps alive the memory of that piece of shrewdness. Not far distant, by the way, is the field where, in 1815, the British regulars, under ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... scores a Flea will jump Of his own length from Head to Rump Which Socrates and Chaerephon In vain essayed so ...
— The Symposium • Xenophon
... were going to say, looked back upon that deadly, monotonous, starved, dusty, flea-bitten coach-ride of three days and two nights as a species of Elysium, and in the result was perennially importuning Laurence to take a stroll down to Booyseus, "Just for a constitutional, you know." And the latter would laugh, and good-naturedly acquiesce. It was a cheap way of setting up ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... was invited, less to be talked to than to be stared at. He was far too proud in his temper, and too pure in his ambition, to feel his vanity elated by sharing the enthusiasm of the circles with a German prince or an industrious flea. Accordingly he soon repelled the advances made to him, was reserved and supercilious to fine ladies, refused to be the fashion, and became very unpopular with the literary exclusives. They even began to run down the works, because they were dissatisfied with the author. ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... looked upon me as below notice; but, morally, he assured me that he would give me a written character of the very best description, whenever I chose to apply for it. "You're honest," he said; "you're willing, though lazy; you would pull, if you had the strength of a flea; and, though a monstrous coward, you don't run away." My own demurs to these harsh judgments were not so many as they might have been. The idiocy I confessed; because, though positive that I was not uniformly an idiot, ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... an Old Man of the Dee, Who was sadly annoyed by a flea; When he said, "I will scratch it," They gave him a hatchet, Which grieved that Old Man of ...
— Book of Nonsense • Edward Lear
... Cape Town. The year of grace nineteen hundred had found him on the scene at most of its exciting events. Where Fate refused to take him, he asserted his strong hand and took Fate, until that weary lady was forced to go hopping about the map of South Africa with the agility of a sand flea. ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... accessible to all, at a trifling cost. Besides, they reveal nothing new relating to the Hamlet of our present play. Nor need we more than mention "the surprising adventures of the renowned Baron Munchausen." His lunarians being over thirty-six feet high, and "a common flea being much larger than one of our sheep," [56] Munchausen's moon must be ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... passion for Leandro. I protest I have no reason to think she cares a button for anything but her own art. I never tried; but it's my impression that if I had ever whispered a word in her ear I should have got a flea in my ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... of them, a small man, somewhat round, whom we had nicknamed "pupuce" (little flea). Pupuce always appeared to me to be kindness itself: intent on his work, good to his men and fair to his helpers. His position as head of a hospital where most of the men were French, was not an easy one. He was disliked ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... oyster-shell bark louse, apply linseed oil. Paris green, in water, will kill the canker worm. Tobacco water does the work for plant lice. Peach-tree borers are excluded with tarred or felt paper, and cut out with a knife. Jar the grape flea beetle on an inverted umbrella early in the morning. Among small-fruit insects, the strawberry worms are readily destroyed with hellebore, an ounce to a gallon of warm water. The same remedy destroys ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... blades from Pittsburgh or boulevardeers from Bucyrus—not a New Yorker in sight. He said he'd been reading where a wealthy nut had seat out an expedition to the North Pole to capture a certain kind of Arctic flea that haunts only a certain rare fox—but he'd bet a born New Yorker was harder to find. He said what this millionaire defective ought to of done with his inherited wealth was to find a male and female born here and have 'em stuffed and mounted under glass ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... her head (or, just as likely, a kerosene can) looks as if she had just stepped out of eternity for the sake of the picture. And not all the kings and kaisers, cardinals and courtezans rolled into one great swaggering splurge of majesty could hold a candle to a ragged Bedouin chief on a flea-bitten pony, on the way ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... There broken vows and death-bed alms are found, And lovers' hearts with ends of riband bound, The courtiers promises, and sick man's prayers, The smiles of harlots, and the tears of heirs, Cages for gnats, and chains to yoke a flea, Dried butterflies and tomes ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... put a flea into the ear of the hotel clerk, too. But the thing is, what do you suppose your father ...
— The Rover Boys out West • Arthur M. Winfield
... hospitals or for government offices. None of them contained sleeping accommodations, even of the most primitive kind; all of them were crowded; and if one arrived in the village, as we did, at a late hour of the night, there was nothing to be done but bivouac somewhere on the dirty, flea-infested floor of an open piazza, or lie out on the ground. One of the largest and most commodious buildings in the village, a one-story house with a high front stoop or porch, had been used, apparently, during the Spanish occupation of the place, as a store or shop. ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... you," said the section chief, "I haven't had to read mine yet. The doctor fixed up the baths in town and yesterday he passed around those flea charms. ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... other, back to the forefather who marched under King Saul against the Philistines, and was the first to take to his heels. But look! Oxheady is all ready—he has bowed his head for the fourth time; now he is jumping like a flea at the Holy, Holy, Holy, and feeling cautiously ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... makes some interesting remarks on the chigo, or sand-flea (Pulex penetrans). It is very minute, not exceeding one twenty-fifth of an inch in length. It burrows between the cuticle and true skin, and there lays its eggs—producing a swelling containing a bluish white sac, about the tenth of an inch in diameter, ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... comical in his awkward antics and eternal persistence, even though he was a pest. Johnny saw more in him than his companions could find, and had quite a little sport with him: he made fine practice for roping, for he was about as elusive as a grasshopper and uncertain as a flea. Johnny was in the same general class and he could sympathize with the irrepressible nuisance in its efforts to stir up a little life and excitement in so dull a crowd; Johnny hoped to be as successful in his mischievous deviltry when he reached the town at the ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... Picayune defines a quandary thus:—"A baker with both arms up to the elbows in dough, and a flea in the leg of his trowsers." We have just heard a story which conveys quite as clever an idea of the thing as the Picayune's definition. An old gentleman, who had studied theological subjects rather too much for the strength of his brains, determined ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... life a thousand lives saved from decay and death. One death, and a hundred beings restored to existence! There's a calculation for you. What in proportion is the life of this miserable old woman? No more than the life of a flea, a beetle, nay, not even that, for she is pernicious. She preys on other lives. She lately bit Elizabeth's finger, in a fit of passion, and ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... with dove-coloured eyes manages to squeeze out a tear and at the same moment depart in wrath to her room and lock the doors, refusing to answer—the trouble being why in heaven's name must a pound-and-a-half spaniel called Monster, nothing but a flea-bearing dust mop, do nothing but sit and yap for chocolates?—what man is going to dare do otherwise than suppress a little profanity and then go and whisper apologies ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... of life, would require a volume. The process is scarcely less complex in insects. Lyonnet found 3,993 muscles in a caterpillar, and while a large proportion belong to the internal organs, over a thousand assist in locomotion. Hence the muscular power of insects is enormous. A flea will leap two hundred times its own height, and certain large, solid beetles will move enormous weights as compared to the bulk of ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... must be, to be running on in such a fashion about a lad that's not only a wellnigh helpless cripple, but I'm afeared is going bad ways. 'Twas nearer midnight nor sundown before he came in frae t' street last night, and I sent him to bed wi' a flea in ...
— Derrick Sterling - A Story of the Mines • Kirk Munroe
... that addressed Orpheus, in the infernal regions, and offered him for food a roasted ant, a flea's thigh, butterflies' brains, some sucking mites, a rainbow tart etc., to be washed down with dew-drops and beer made from seven barleycorns—a very heady liquor.—King, Orpheus and ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... which the others have manufactured. The wolf hunts, fights, and tears its victim in pieces; and then, by means of that interior labor which I have spent so much time in describing, transforms it into nourishing liquid: and when all this is accomplished, the little flea, who lives hidden among his hairs, coolly draws out for his own use the valuable blood obtained with so much effort. There are many parasites in the world, my dear child—yourself, for instance, to begin ...
— The History of a Mouthful of Bread - And its effect on the organization of men and animals • Jean Mace
... What I'm going to do or not going to do in the Cathedral to-morrow is none of your business: and if I catch sight of you hanging about the place to-morrow after your work's done, I'll send you home with a flea in your ear. Now you mind that.' Of course I said I was very sorry and that, and equally of course I went off and laid my plans with Evans. We knew there was a stair up in the corner of the transept which you can get up to the triforium, ...
— A Thin Ghost and Others • M. R. (Montague Rhodes) James
... was a flea—bite, last night, but, mercy, I am as stiff and sore as a gentleman need be. How do you feel? I see you have one of your fins ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... you, Monsieur le Garcon, he is. He slept here—he didn't find your bed comfortable—he came to us to complain of it—here he is among my men—and here am I ready to look for a flea or two in his bedstead. Renaudin! (calling to one of the subordinates, and pointing to the waiter) collar that man and tie his hands behind him. Now, then, ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... wooden bazaar, entered a wretched khan, and ascending a sort of staircase, were shown into a room with dusty mustabahs; a greasy old cushion, with the flock protruding through its cover, was laid down for me, but I, with polite excuses, preferred the bare board to this odious flea-hive. The more I declined the cushion, the more pressing became the khan-keeper that I should carry away with me some reminiscence of Sokol. Finding that his upholstery was not appreciated, the khan-keeper went to the ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... kill an animal on any account, not even a fly, or a flea, or a louse,[NOTE 7] or anything in fact that has life; for they say these have all souls, and it would be sin to do so. They eat no vegetable in a green state, only such as are dry. And they sleep on the ground stark naked, without a scrap of clothing on ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... same thing. Every dog knows that you meant to be there, or at any rate, that to be there was the scheme of someone equally bad. The slightest rustle of the wind, the call of a bird, the ejaculation responsive to a flea—any of these, anything to set the ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... sat perfectly still, doing nothing. At last she pushed the spoilt paper aside, took afresh piece, and was beginning to write, "On May the 14th, 1842," when there was a crunch on the gravel, and a furious voice said, "I am sorry for Flea Thompson." ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... reflective turn of mind. He became converted at a Methodist camp-meeting, and as he became a kind of preacher among his own people, he staid converted. He had one fault, to speak not of others. He was irascible to a great degree; a mosquito or a flea would drive him into a passion. But throughout his long career as guardian of his master, he had been never known to lose patience with him. Even mothers become vexed exceedingly with undutiful children; but this care of Mat for his worthless master exceeded even ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... nephew. "Sometimes I think that is why he hates to part with a book. He keeps a secondhand bookshop, you know, and he's positively insulting to customers who try to buy any of the books. The old boy is really queer in his head, but there's nothing to be afraid of. He wouldn't hurt a flea, would he, Elinor?" ...
— Betty Gordon in Washington • Alice B. Emerson
... were of the huckleberry or flea-bitten variety,—a freckled white. Perhaps the quack had fed them with his refuse pills. These knobby-legged unfortunates we of course named Xanthus and Balius, not of podargous or swift-footed, but podagrous or gouty race. Xanthus, like his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... seem steel dun bear there creak bore ball wave chews staid caste maize heel bawl course quire chord chased tide sword mail nun plain pour fate wean hoard berth isle throne vane seize sore slight freeze knave fane reek Rome rye style flea faint peak throw bourn route soar sleight frieze nave reck sere wreak roam wry flee feint pique mite seer idle pistol flower holy serf borough capital canvas indict martial kernel carat bridle lesson council collar levy accept affect deference ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... mouth of the nations, when they are crying like babies, in order to silence them, and thereupon pull the wool quietly over their eyes. But it is true, the nations really are like babies; they do not become reasonable and wise, and the accursed word 'liberty,' which Bonaparte puts as a flea into their ears, maddens them still as though a tarantula had bitten them. They have seen in Italy and France what sort of liberty Napoleon brings to them, and what a yoke he intends to lay on their necks while telling them that he wishes to make freemen ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach
... seldom coming within their province. But the complaining moans of "Ali-Akbar" from "The Aged," the guttural grunts of disapproval from the mirza and the mudbake, and the impatient growls of "kek" (flea) from the khan, tell of their being at least partial companions in misery; but, being thicker-skinned, and withal well seasoned to this sort of thing, their sufferings ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... aunt," he said, "'twouldn't be no manner of good if it come down to a runnin' chase. Nearest depot's fifty mile' across the county line. Racin' this car ag'in' the sheriff's 'ud be like matchin' a flea ag'in' a grasshopper. Dern it, she's balked ag'in." He wrestled with the crank, conquered it and the machine shivered like a hunting dog while his aunt adjusted spark and gas. She nodded to him to start and they moved off, Miranda waving ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... made his appearance at the hide-house. He did not seem at all fatigued, had made three or four dollars, got a glass of brandy, and was in fine spirits. The brig kept on her course, and the government officers, who had come down to forbid her sailing, went back, each with something like a flea in his ear, having depended upon extorting a little more money from ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... in a woolly blanket, than a leg-bail monk in this wilderness of mountains, forests, and precipices! But the flea may be caught, and so shall the monk. I have said it. He is well spotted, with his silver crown and his uncropped ears. The rascally heretic! But his vows shall keep him, though he won't keep his vows. The whining, ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... myself was This queer stranger. Solitary I had on this rocky island Sung this song of my dear Schwarzwald. I went as a wand'ring scholar To far countries, to Italia; With much art became acquainted, Also with bad vetturinos, And with many burning flea-bites; But the sweet fruit of the lotus, Which doth banish love of country And the longing to return there, I ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel
... Little an' dark an' quiet he was, an' jus' crazy fer dogs. Any old mutt'd do fer him—jus' so's it was in the shape of a pup. He was fair wild fer 'em. He picked up a yeller cur out there the day after the Yangtsin fight, an' that there no-account, mangy, flea-bitten mutt had ter stay with us the whole time. If the pup didn't stand in me an' Buck an' Ranch, he swore he'd quit too, so we had to let him come, an' he messed an' bunked with our outfit right ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... breaking off and throwing an affable nod towards Godolphus who, having attracted no attention by flinging himself on the grass with a lolling tongue and every appearance of fatigue, was now filling up the time in quest of a flea. "No breed, but he has points. Where did you ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... I feel a girl a-sleep, Underneath her frock I peep, There to sport, and there I play; Then I bite her like a flea, ...
— Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age • Various
... in the East, is really efficacious. It is the powdered "Pire oti" (or flea-bane), mentioned in Curzon's 'Armenia' as growing in that country; it has since become an important article of export. A correspondent writes to me, "I have often found a light cotton or linen bag ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... smells to the Nth degree, and set half the populace to singing. We establish in every second doorway a mother with her offspring tucked between her knees and forcibly held there while the mother searches the child's head for a flea; anyhow, it is more charitable to say it is a flea; and we add a special touch of ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
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