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More "Rat" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was only looking for Jessie. No one had seen her. Janet suggested that she had taken a rat for a ghost, and they began to look and call in all quarters, till at last she appeared, looking rather white and scared at having lost herself, being bewildered by the voices and steps echoing here, there, and everywhere. The barrenness and ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... insult our men. But they can fight, Madre de Dios! I like see General Castro take your little Commodore Sloat by the neck. He look like a little gray rat." ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... said the landlord, now rising resolutely, and seizing Marner by the shoulder, "if you've got any information to lay, speak it out sensible, and show as you're in your right mind, if you expect anybody to listen to you. You're as wet as a drownded rat. Sit down and dry yourself, and speak ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... beaten—by just one card—upon the playing of his seemingly unbeatable hand and after the haunting and elusive odor of eau de rodent had become plainly perceptible all over the ship, he began, as the saying goes, to smell a rat himself, and straightway declined to make good his remaining losses, amounting to quite a tidy amount. Following this there were high words, meaning by that low ones, and accusations and recriminations, and at eventide when the sunset was a welter of purple and gold, there was a sudden smashing ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... that Featherhead had lately been forming alliances such as no reputable squirrel should even think of. He had more than once been seen going out evenings with the Rats of Rat Hollow,—a race whose reputation for honesty was more than doubtful. The fact was, further, that old Longtooth Rat, an old sharper and money-lender, had long had his eye on Featherhead as just about silly enough for their purposes,—engaging ...
— Queer Little Folks • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... therefore less sterile and desolate, than the coast and the sub-maritime regions; and here one can well imagine large towns being built. At last, after walking about an hour and a half ( four miles and a half) towards the Shrr, with our backs turned upon our goal, the rat-faced little intriguer, Hasan, declared that he knew nothing about El-Khulasah, but that Zibayyib lay there! pointing to a bright-red cliffy peak, "Ab'l-brid," on the left bank of the Wady, and to others whose ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... Dubrovnik, Dugi Rat, Omisalj, Ploce, Pula, Rijeka, Sibenik, Split, Vukovar (inland waterway ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... where the rat was demanding the passport when she recognized the President's step outside the door. In another moment he was standing beside her chair, looking at ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... like a rat in a trap, but his foxy eyes had seen us. He sprang to his feet, hesitated for a fraction of a moment, saw the murder in our faces, then did what any man but a fool would ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... themselves, and so the subject dies away from them; but if you write rejoinders they have a contributor working for them for nothing, and one whose writing will be much more acceptable to their readers than any that comes from their own anonymous scribes. It is very disagreeable to be worried like a rat by a dog; but why should you go into the kennel and unnecessarily put yourself in the way of it?" The Doctor had said this more than once to clerical friends who were burning with indignation at something that had been written about them. But ...
— Dr. Wortle's School • Anthony Trollope
... a backfire and the chauffeur would have a dislocated wrist. But there was no accident. The engine started as smoothly as it had never done before. Mr. and Mrs. Anderson went to the Railway refreshment rooms. There they were informed that no tea was available. A dead rat had been found under one of the tables in the first class refreshment room, and as plague cases had been reported earlier in the week, the station master had ordered the rooms to be closed till they had been thoroughly disinfected. ...
— Indian Ghost Stories - Second Edition • S. Mukerji
... back stroked by the clouds, and yet he saw everything below him on the earth more distinctly than ever before. Even the smallest things appeared perfectly clear to his sharpened eyes, and yet he seemed to see them as if reflected in a brilliant mirror. He could distinguish even the hairs on the rat and suddenly another impulse came over him—the impulse to stoop down and catch the long-tailed vermin in his beak and claws. Wendelin had been changed into a falcon, and the rat struggled in vain to escape ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... were Marten, and Grouse, and Pheasant, and Kit Beaver, and other animals sweet against the tongue. Surely the Dog-Wolf had lingered too long in that barren Southern country, where there was only the rat-faced Gopher, who was but a mouthful; with, perhaps, the chance of a Buffalo Calf caught away from the Herd. Even that chance was gone now, for man was killing them all off. Yes, it was well that they should trail to the Northland, each ...
— The Outcasts • W. A. Fraser
... fool you must be," mused Ramiro. "Why at your age should you seek to be rid of life, seeing that you have no more chance against me than a rat in a corner against a terrier dog? Look!" and suddenly he lunged most viciously straight at his heart. But Adrian was ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... looking at his watch sometimes, and humming tunes, and playing rat-a-tat-tat upon the table. He says he don't mind waiting ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... shouted through the key-hole and made off; for within, it was supposed, the plague lay ambushed like a basilisk, ready to flow forth and spread blain and pustule through the city. What a terrible next-door neighbour for superstitious citizens! A rat scampering within would send a shudder through the stoutest heart. Here, if you like, was a sanitary parable, addressed by our uncleanly forefathers to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... have a shot in one's locker; beg one's bread; tirer le diable par la queue[Fr]; run into debt &c. (debt) 806. render poor &c. adj.; impoverish; reduce, reduce to poverty; pauperize, fleece, ruin, bring to the parish. Adj. poor, indigent; poverty-stricken; badly off, poorly off, ill off; poor as a rat, poor as a church mouse, poor as a Job; fortuneless[obs3], dowerless[obs3], moneyless[obs3], penniless; unportioned[obs3], unmoneyed[obs3]; impecunious; out of money, out of cash, short of money, short of cash; without a rap, not worth a rap &c.(money) 800; qui ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... ambushing convoys, for capturing isolated detachments, for wrecking trains, and for himself eluding capture when fairly ringed round with keen pursuers beyond all counting, few could rival him. Like hunted Hereward, he seemed able to escape through a rat hole, and by his persistence in guerilla tactics not only seriously prolonged the war and enormously increased its cost, but also went far to make the desolation of his pet Republic complete. So there Lord Roberts sat and heard this sung by one of ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... added bitterly. "Nature has shaped me in such puny mould, I'm so miserably weak—" Here the arm tightened and, conscious thus of all the throbbing strength and vitality of her, I felt my own weakness the more. "Oh, I'm a miserable, undersized rat!" I groaned. ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... of the large, or grey kangaroo, to which the natives give the name of 'patagaran'.* But there are (besides the kangaroo-rat) two other sorts. One of them we called the red kangaroo, from the colour of its fur, which is like that of a hare, and sometimes is mingled with a large portion of black: the natives call it 'bagaray'. It rarely attains to more than forty pounds weight. The third sort is very rare, ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench
... him!" he drawled. "Sell the man that made you; that trusted you; that never turned his back on a rat yet—much less a pal." He spat into the sea curling at his feet. "What was it old Diamond says?—'We're all—traitors,' says he, poor old horse; 'but we are men, only Fat George. And ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant
... finest possible digestive upon which to go to bed. Mr. Simcox found himself cut off from both these necessities of a congenial life and it depressed him beyond conception. Dressing in the morning he would hear the postman come splendidly rat tatting along the square and would hold his breath for that glorious thunder to come echoing up from his own front door—and it never did. Only the sound of the footsteps ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... refreshing piquancy. It brought a breath of summer into the grey chillness of a London winter, a suggestion of rustling foliage about the chandelier, and the scent of the hay over the gaslights. "My dear!" I exclaimed to the partner of my bosom (a tame white rat that likes to perch there), "Have we ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... said earnestly. "Promise me that you won't. I am going to die, and, like a poisoned rat, I ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... the knife from his shaking hand and started up with a cry that died away in a gurgle, an inhuman, nightmare croak. He looked about wildly, like a rat in a trap, then backed towards the wall. The men about the table got up, then cleared away in a circle, leaving the fat man. It was all like a dream to the college boy, who had never seen a thing ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... rat-tat came up the road. Valmond bowed. "Sire," the old man continued, "I would not act till I had ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... done before him) and fancies he has written an English Grammar; and divines applaud, and schoolmasters usher him into the polite world, and English scholars carry on the jest, while Horne Tooke's genuine anatomy of our native tongue is laid on the shelf. Can it be that our politicians smell a rat in the Member for Old Sarum? That our clergy do not relish Parson Horne? That the world at large are alarmed at acuteness and originality greater than their own? What has all this to do with the formation of the English ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... man said nothing. He stood there looking down, dogged, quiet, like one tongue-tied. Littimer thundered out his question again. He crossed over, laying his hands on his son's shoulders and shaking him as a terrier might shake a rat. ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... would make the old rat hole look like blazes and it is bad enough as it is. Come on down ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... in the middle of the night. I've seen as much myself when I waked up in the middle of the night. I took a rat for ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... secured himself a comfortable underground retreat, with two exits, both of which are known to us. We shall catch him like a rat in a trap, if we ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... are, Renee. It's just a bit of nonsense—nothing that matters. I want him to lend me his bulldog for a rat-fight at my club to-morrow. I've made a bet that he'll kill a hundred in two minutes. And with that I ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... O-ho-li (or albino antelope). The Wolf seized and threw him. The Jack Rabbit was let out. The Eagle poised himself for a moment, then swooped upon him. The Cotton Tail came forth. The Prey Mole waited in his hole and seized him; the Wood Rat, and the Falcon made him his prey; the Mouse, and the Ground Owl quickly ...
— Zuni Fetiches • Frank Hamilton Cushing
... summarized in Pope; and the easy neatness of his verses is quaintly representative of the Georgian peace. Defoe and Swift had both done their work; and the latter had withdrawn to Ireland to die like a rat in a hole. Bishop Berkeley, indeed, was convinced of the decadence of England; but his Essay towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain (1721) shows rather the effect of the speculative mania which culminated in the South Sea Bubble upon a noble moral nature than a genius for political ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... intensely human. Reading human character with rare sympathy, he was profoundly touched by the poetry and the pathos of these miserable lives. Through all these studies runs a quaint vein of humor, relieving the pathos of the situations. The picturesque costume of the old Rat Killer tickles the sense of humor, and conveys somehow a delightful suggestion of his humbuggery which offsets the touching squalor of the grotesque little apprentice. And none but a humorist could have created the swaggering hostler's boy holding the ...
— Rembrandt - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... right now. It must be white with frost down on the levels. But it's most likely the last this year.... Yes, they swore the tractors would be delivered two days ago.... Call up the station agent. ... By the way, you catch Hanley for me. I forgot to tell him to start the 'rat-catchers' out with the second instalment of fly-traps.... Yes, pronto. There were a couple of dozen roosting on my screen this morning.... Yes.... ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... Wretch that I am; just like a rat, this day I've come to destruction through betrayal ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... Rat was properly the Gerboa of Arabia and North Africa, which the Arabs also regard as a dainty. There is a kindred animal in Siberia, called Alactaga, and a kind of Kangaroo-rat (probably the same) is mentioned as very abundant on the Mongolian Steppe. There is also the Zieselmaus of Pallas, a Dormouse, I believe, which he says the Kalmaks, even of distinction, count a delicacy, especially cooked in sour milk. "They eat not only ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... the shop, it must have been darker along the rat-burrows of stairs, and the loft-like rooms near the roof, but either up above or down below, the scent of cassia and sandal-wood clung everywhere inside the curio shop, smelling strongest around the glass cases and bales ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... to a maple limb, And drummed a tattoo that was fun for him, "No breakfast here! It's too hard for that." He said, as down on his tail he sat, "Just listen to this: rrrr rat-rat-tat." ...
— Ohio Arbor Day 1913: Arbor and Bird Day Manual - Issued for the Benefit of the Schools of our State • Various
... day, had applauded him, and done him homage; and at this time writing over to Bolingbroke, from Ireland, he says, "It is time for me to have done with the world, and so I would if I could get into a better before I was called into the best, and not to die here in a rage, like a poisoned rat ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... torch lighted up the mean, pinched face of Brisley, blanched now by fright, gleamed upon the sharp, hooked nose and into the cunning little brown eyes. Brisley licked his lips. In Kerry's muscular grip he bore quite a remarkable resemblance to a rat in the ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... thought, "explains the noise which the poor baron heard in the next room! And I said to him: 'Nonsense! it is a rat!'" ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... Europe more than one hundred years ago, causes during certain seasons a very great loss to the wheat crop. The Argentine ant has been brought to us from South America and is proving a most destructive pest. The Norway rat was brought to our country on sailing vessels and causes more loss than most of us realize. The English sparrow has spread over much of the country and is driving many of the native birds from their homes, because of its quarrelsome disposition. It makes itself a nuisance ...
— Conservation Reader • Harold W. Fairbanks
... turned furiously on the Tracer. "You lie, you old gray rat!" he cried. "That ain't no mummy; that's a plain dead girl! And there ain't no extrydition for body snatchin', so I guess them niggers at Cairo ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... gloomy. Not long after eight the housemaid brought in a lighted lamp, and set it, as usual, upon the little black four-legged table in the drawing-room. And in the same moment the knocker of the front door sounded a vigorous rat-tat-tat, a visitor's summons. ...
— The Paying Guest • George Gissing
... stopped, sank back, then looked again into the steaming kettle. "I see a wee leetle man like this—" She raised the cane beside her, and Waldstricker, startled, leaned nearer the ragged grey head. "I see ye huntin' the leetle man—like a dog hunts a rat." ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... the simile of a panther at bay, anxious to escape, but ready with tooth and claw, might be applied to Sir Rufus Isaacs, something more like "a rat in a corner" might be suggested by the restless, snapping, furious little figure which succeeded. Let us compromise by saying that Mr. Lloyd George was singularly like a spitting, angry cat, which had got, perhaps, out of serious danger from her pursuers, but which caterwauled and spat and swore ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... begun to rebuke Michael, when "rat-tat" went the iron ring that hung at the door. Some one was knocking. They looked out of the window; a man had come on horseback, and was fastening his horse. They opened the door, and the servant who had been ...
— What Men Live By and Other Tales • Leo Tolstoy
... botanists as a surprise when our countryman Ellis first discovered that some plants catch and devour insects. This he observed in a North American plant, Dionsea, the leaves of which are formed something like a rat-trap, with a hinge in the middle, and a formidable row of spines round the edge. On the surface are a few very sensitive hairs, and the moment any small insect alights on the leaf and touches one of these ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... was treading on risky gound, that he might smell a rat at any moment; but I felt, also, that when he heard why manufacturers of my type were able to undersell the big old firms he would find my talk too tempting to cut it short. And so I rushed on. I explained that the Russian cloak-manufacturer ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... with the girl—or so long as he had been active in her behalf—the minutes were filled with sufficient interest to make them pass unreckoned. But to sit here and wait, to sit here and watch the seconds wasted, to sit here and be conscious of each one of them as it bit, like a thieving wharf rat, into his dwindling Present and carried the morsel of time back to the greedy Past, was a different matter. When finally Saul appeared with a fat cigar in one corner of his chubby mouth, Donaldson was halfway across ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... my home-sick desires; always thither the wings of my hopeless fancy bore me first of all; it was, oh! to tread that sunlit grassy brink once more, and to watch the merry tadpoles swarm, and the green frog takes its header like a little man, and the water-rat swim to his hole among the roots of the willow, and the horse-leech thread his undulating way between the water-lily stems; and to dream fondly of the delightful, irrevocable past, on the very spot of all where I and mine were ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... with dew a-falling, I saw the Dog Star bleak and grim, I saw a slim brown rat of ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume II. • Walter de la Mare
... of the watch who had been aft and fancied that I had been carried overboard, when they found that I was safe, instead of expressing any satisfaction, joined the cook in rating me for my folly. Feeling as I suppose a half-drowned rat might do, I was glad to make my escape below, where, with the assistance of Jim, I shifted into dry clothes, while he hurried on deck to obtain a fresh supply of materials for the captain's pudding. Shortly after this the gale abated, and the brig was again ...
— Peter Trawl - The Adventures of a Whaler • W. H. G. Kingston
... you "In your German way" (American synonyms: elephantine, phlegmatic, stodgy, clumsy, sluggish) seek desperately to appropriate, in ferocious lech to be metropolitan, the "spirit of Paris" (American synonyms: silk stockings, "wine," Maxim's, jevousaime, Rat Mort). Announce they also your "mechanical" pleasures, your weighty light-heartedness, your stolid, stoic essay to take unto yourself, still in tigerish itch to be cosmopolitan, the frou-frouishness of the flirting capital over the frontier. Wise old philosophers! ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... not. There's no dinner worth coming to. You and the children may eat the rat pie. A man who has battled for his country, and bled till all his veins were empty, and it took two men to hold him up, and yet waved his Sword at the head of them—it is the downright contradiction of the world in everything for him to poke about with pots and tubs, like ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... gap ban cap an bad bag can map as mad gag fan nap at pad hag pan rap ax sad lag ran hap rat gad tag tan jam sat ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... drowned rat, Joe," declared Jasper, bursting into a laugh, which was such a relief to all concerned that in a minute it really seemed like a pleasure excursion. ...
— Five Little Peppers and their Friends • Margaret Sidney
... hotchiwitchu barbecued, or ragout of boror. 'You are but half Rommany, brother,' they would say, 'and you feed gorgiko-nes (LIKE A GENTILE), even as you talk. Tchachipen (IN TRUTH), if we did not know you to be of the Mecralliskoe rat (ROYAL BLOOD) of Pharaoh, we should be justified in driving you forth as a juggel-mush (DOG MAN), one more fitted to keep company with wild beasts and Gorgios than ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... or two'—'fancy breed'—ho! yes, I should think so. Game cocks! Fighting cocks! Oh, you old rat! You'll be a dry nurse to a burro, and keep a hospital for infirm puppies, but you will fight game cocks. Oh, Lord! Why, Sarria, this is as good a grind as I ever heard. There's the Spanish ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... The rat-hunting referred to in the foregoing "summary" was not a mere fiction of Buzzby's brain. It was a veritable fact. Notwithstanding the extreme cold of this inhospitable climate, the rats in the ship increased to such a degree that at last they became a perfect nuisance. Nothing ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... bread, the staff of life, and also a fragment of cheese; and now, methinks, I discern something dark at the back of the shelf." The Dominie extended his hand, and immediately withdrew it, jumping from his chair, with a loud cry. He had put his fingers into a rat gin, set by the old woman for those intruders, and he held up his arm and stamped as he shouted out with the pain. I hastened to him, and pressing down the spring, released his fingers from the teeth, which, however, had drawn blood, as well as bruised him; fortunately, like most of the ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... making her pudding, and Poppy had that moment succeeded in inveigling Angela into the cupboard under the stairs and turning the key on her, when footsteps came up the path, a letter dropped in through the letter-box, and a postman's rat-tat sounded to the furthermost corner ...
— The Carroll Girls • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... contrive to light a fire. With their swords they cut rashers from a dead horse, and grill them in the flames, using gunpowder for salt to eat them with. Two others return from a search, with a dead rat and some candle-ends. Their meal shared, some try to repair their gaping shoes and to tie up their feet, that are chilblained ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... was never completed, being interrupted by a thundering rat-tat-tat at the front door, followed by a pealing at the bell, which indicated that the visitor was manfully following the printed injunction to "Ring also." The door was opened and a man's voice was heard in the hall-a loud, confident ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... for to Adrian's racked nerves and distorted vision this ghost of the good man whom he had betrayed was no child of phantasy. He had woken in the night and seen it standing at his bedside, plague-defiled and hunger-wasted, and because of it he dreaded to sleep alone, especially in that creaking, rat-haunted mill, whose very board seemed charged with some tale of death and blood. Heavens! At this very moment he thought he could hear that dead voice calling down the gale. No, it must be the curlew, but at least he would ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... We'll get along well enough, but those that can't control you are fools; like master like man's a true saying. I can hardly hold myself in and I'm not hot-headed by nature, but once let me get a start and I don't care two cents for my own mother. All right, I'll catch you in the street, you rat, you toadstool. May I never grow an inch up or down if I don't push your master into a dunghill, and I'll give you the same medicine, I will, by Hercules, I will, no matter if you call down Olympian ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... for a few seconds striving to collect himself. He could not return the way he had come. He would be caught like a rat in the trap with the arrival of dawn, if not before. Perhaps his pursuers were on his trail already. The thought spurred his numbed body to action, and lifting his head he glanced along the flat roof. Toward the center of it rose a box-like structure with apparently an arched skylight above it. ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... found that "paying price" was considerably below "selling price." Moscow is the place, by the way, to see the coats intended for "really cold weather" journeys, made of bear skin and of reindeer skin, impervious to cold, lined with downy Siberian rat or other skins, which one does not see in ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... is the house that Jack built. This is the malt that lay in the house that Jack built. This is the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house, etc. This is the cat that killed the rat that ate the malt, etc. This is the dog that worried the cat that killed the rat, etc. This is the cow with a crumpled horn that tossed the little dog over the barn, that worried ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... talking, up pulls a passenger train to the depot near by. A person in a high hat gets off on the wrong side of the train and comes tripping down the track towards us. He was a little, fat man with a big nose and rat's eyes, but dressed expensive, and carrying a hand-satchel careful, as if it had eggs or railroads bonds in it. He passes by us and keeps on down the track, not appearing to ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... the buffalo and other animals. Their life is one continued scene of peril, both from the wild animals which they encounter in their lonely excursions, and the hostile Indians with whom they come in contact. These men procure the furs of the beaver, the otter, the musk-rat, the marten, the ermine, the lynx, the fox, and the skins of many other animals. This is their business, and by this they live. There are forts, or trading posts—established by adventurous merchants—at long distances from each other; and at these forts the trappers exchange their furs ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... portion of the cellar contained a large quantity of loose packing-straw, covering the floor to an average depth of two feet; and this straw afforded shelter, especially at night, for a large colony of rats, which gave the place the name of "Rat Hell." ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... days ago, and it wasn't in his hall, or in his dining room, or in his drawing room, for though there are changes there, that settle isn't one of them. It's his treasure case that's so altered. The snuff-box is gone, and the cigarette case and the piece of Bow china, and instead there's a rat-tail spoon which he used to have on his dinner-table, and made a great fuss with, and a bit of Worcester china that used to stand on the mantelpiece, and a different cigarette case, and a bead-bag. I don't know where that same from, but if he inherited it, he didn't inherit much ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... seal the iron door against the wooden casement, which would swell and press always tighter against the rock, and that boring would be closed for ever. And if any man should be inside the tunnel when the sea broke through, there he must stop, drowned like a rat in its hole, unless by a miracle he could make his way along the tunnel ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... this laboratory, you're going to come out of your foolish belief that man is a creature apart from other living organisms. You—the conscious you—is no greater, no more important in the final balance than the spark of consciousness in that rat. When your body and the rat's body give up their atoms to nature's laboratory, the little enslaved mind-electron that is you and the one that is ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... were conscious of another approach, as like as could be, coming from behind me. On they came, making the very ground quake with their weight, till I judged that both were about on the edge of the clearing, two vast rat-like shadows, but as big as elephants, and bringing a most intolerable smell of sour slime with them. There, on the edge of the amphitheatre, each for the first time appeared to become aware of the other's presence—the footsteps stopped dead. I could hear the water dripping from the ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... about once a week, so his time is spent with Kitty and books and horses and the trees and flowers; and if you could see the difference it makes, Mamma, in a man! His eyes do not have a bit the look of a terrier after a rat, and he does not always answer literally to everything you say, and if you speak about books or art or anything of other countries, he is familiar with it all, and listens and isn't bored, and hardly attending, so anxious to get his anecdote in, as lots of them ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn
... as Basil could see. They were shaped like truncated cones, about three feet in diameter at the base, and not over two in height. Near the top of each was the entrance—a hole not much larger than would have been used by a rat. There was no grass immediately around this hole, although the sides and tops of the mounds were clothed with a smooth green turf that gave them the appearance of having been constructed a ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... OF Wilhide's Celebrated Noiseless Self-setting Rat and Mouse Traps. Thoroughly introduced. Traps sold by all dealers. Address Owners ...
— Scientific American, Volume 40, No. 13, March 29, 1879 • Various
... narrowed shrewdly. "Did you ever see a rat caught in a trap?" she asked. "It can't help itself. It can't get out. No more can they. They can't even ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston
... the regent to his friends—those are the important things. But the other day he gave eighty thousand livres to Madame Chateauthiers, as a little present. He gave two hundred thousand livres to the Abbe Something-or-other, who asked for it, and another thousand livres to that rat Dubois. The thief D'Argenson ever counsels him to give in abundance now that he hath abundance, and the regent is ready with a vengeance with his compliance. Saint Simon, that priggish duke, has had a million given him to repay a debt his father took on for the king a generation ago. To the ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... a little further, and she met a rat. So she said: "Rat! rat! gnaw rope; rope won't hang butcher; butcher won't kill ox; ox won't drink water; water won't quench fire; fire won't burn stick; stick won't beat dog; dog won't bite pig; piggy won't get over the stile; and I shan't get home ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... Ce rat i est un animal fort singulier. Il a deux pattes de derrire sur lesquelles il marche, et deux pattes de devant dont il fait usage pour tenir les journaux. Cet animal a le peau noir pour le plupart, et porte un ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... strength. That afternoon were summoned in haste the members of his Council: fat old Friese, young Marschall with the rat face, austere Bayerl with the white skin and burning eyes, and others. And to them all the King disclosed his royal will. There was some demur. Friese, who sweated with displeasure, ranted about old enemies and broken pledges. But, after all, the King's will was dominant. ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... with great loss of property though not of life, in the Guadaloupe earthquake of 1843, when 5000 lives were lost in the town of Point- a-Pitre alone. The only well-marked effect which Dr. Davy could hear of, apart from damage to artificial structures, was the partial sinking of a causeway leading to Rat Island, in the harbour of St. John. No wonder: if St. John's harbour be—as from its shape on the map it probably is—simply an extinct crater, or group of craters, like English Harbour. A more picturesque or more uncanny little hole than ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... collecting my books, I said, to carry them into the other room, where there was a little shelf with a curtain in front on purpose for them, as we only kept our nicest books in the drawing-room, when this rat-a-tat knock ...
— My New Home • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... be a good tinker, and worship god Pan, or I might grind scissors as sharp as the noses of bakers. But, as a matter of fact, I'm a piper, not a rat-catcher, you understand, but just a simple singer of sad songs, and a mad ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... Achmet was a comparatively respectable man. He thought no more of cutting off a human head than of docking a rat's tail; but then he did not take a particular pleasure in this employment, and was not naturally cruel, which is more than could be said of many of his predecessors. He was also said to be a kind husband and a fond father, but as no one, save the wives and children in question, knew anything of the ...
— The Pirate City - An Algerine Tale • R.M. Ballantyne
... with the usual negro exuberance of words to address the warriors; at which he was not at all sparing of jeers at them and at M'Rua. He declared to them, pointing at Kamba, that "that thief in the cap made of rat's skin" cheated them through many rainy and dry seasons and they fed him on beans, flesh of kids, and honey. Is there another king and nation as stupid in the world? They believed in the power of the old deceiver ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... way, ye fool! We're a going out o' the buffuler country, an' into perts where theer ain't a anymal bigger than a rat. On t'other side o' the mountings, theer ain't no beests o' any kind— neery one; an' its jess theer we'll want that eer bag o' meel. Ef we don't take it along, we'll ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... as the Father of Falsehood himself! When thorns produce figs, or the deadly nightshade nectarines; when eaglets are hatched in owls' nests and young lions spring from rat holes, then I may believe these foul slanders of Ishmael and his parents. Shame on you, Claudia Merlin, for repeating them! You have shown me much evil in your heart to-night; but nothing so bad as that! Ishmael is nature's gentleman! His mother must have been pure and lovely and loving! ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... to himself he added, "by Jingo, it's serious! Well, well! However, he's as poor as a rat ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... was had out, which that traveler Timothy had brought from Paris among other things, and the best cut glass and rat-tailed silver. Old William, assisted by Hester and Priscilla, had been busy polishing most of the day—while the cook and the "young person from the village" were contriving wonders in the vast kitchen. And punctually at seven in ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... man. For in such cases it frequently happens that the imported species thrives quite as well in its new as in its old home, and indeed often supplants the native species. As the Maoris say,—"As the white man's rat has driven away the native rat, so the European fly has driven away our fly, so the clover kills our fern, and so will the Maori himself disappear ...
— The Scientific Evidences of Organic Evolution • George John Romanes
... halfpenny—and when Dicky said, 'Come on, Oswald; don't be a sneak,' he proved that he was not one, and went back and helped with the ladder. But he was a little distant to Dicky, till all disagreeableness was suddenly buried in a rat Pincher found ...
— Oswald Bastable and Others • Edith Nesbit
... that have rendered possible the changes produced by man, have been determined at the right time and place by the Creator. Every race produced by the florist or breeder, the dog or the pigeon fancier, the rat-catcher, the sporting man, or the slave-hunter, must have been provided for by varieties occurring when wanted; and as these variations were never withheld, it would prove that the sanction of an all-wise and all powerful Being has been given to that which the highest human minds consider ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... trying to persuade myself that the noise I heard was just a pack rat, a puffing, blowing sound at the window took me tremblingly out to investigate. I knew some ferocious animal was about to devour me! But my precious flowers were the attraction. A great, gaunt cow had taken the last delectable bite from my pansy bed ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... satisfaction in living—or happiness. I've played the game, played it hard. I've been hard, they say. Probably I have. I didn't care. A man had to walk on others or be walked on himself. I made money. Money—I poured it into her hands, like pouring sand in a rat-hole. She lived for herself, her whims, her codfish-aristocracy standards, spending my money like water to make a showing, giving me nothing in return, nothing but whining and recrimination if I crossed her ever so little. She made a lap dog of her son the first twenty-five years of his life. She ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... necessary when rats are very numerous, but rats appear to be very capricious, abounding in some seasons and scarce in others. My particular rat-catcher was not a very highly evolved specimen of humanity; he was thin and hungry-looking with an angular face, bearing a strong resemblance to the creatures against whom he waged warfare; he had a wandering, restless and furtive expression, and appeared to be perpetually ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... walking downstairs, I unlocked and opened the library-door, and found, as I anticipated, the room in utter darkness. I examined the fastenings of the shutters—they were secure as I had left them; I looked into the strong-room—not even a rat lay concealed there; I turned the cocks of the gas lights—but no gas whistled through the pipes, for the service to the library was separate from that of the rest of the house, and capable of being shut off at pleasure. I, mindful of ...
— The Uninhabited House • Mrs. J. H. Riddell
... best exterminated by the use of a trap or some preparation such as "Rough on Rats". Traps should be set nightly and should be scalded and aired after a mouse has been caught. Rat holes may be stopped by sprinkling with chloride of lime and then filling with mortar ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Household Science in Rural Schools • Ministry of Education Ontario
... smelled smoke, and in a second I knew the depot was on fire. I tried to raise the trap-door, but it had a snap lock and had been dropped so hard in my mad efforts to get away, that it was securely locked. Good God! was I to be burned like a rat in a trap? All was quiet save the crackling of the flames as they licked up the depot. Something must be done and quickly at that, or there would be one operator who would receive his conge in a manner that was anything but pleasant. Feverishly, I groped around, ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... an' a couple hundred shafts an' tunnels leadin' to nothin'. Reckon this P. Casey is a prospector, Sam. One of them half crazy old-timers, nosin' round tryin' to pick up lost leads. One of the 'riginal crowd that called the dump Hopeful, like enough. Desert Rat. Them fellers is born with hope an' it's the ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... Two species of rat occur here—one is the large bandicoot of India, Mus giganteus, doubtless introduced by some wrecked vessel, the other is the pretty little Mus indicus, found on all the islands of the north-east coast and Torres Strait. Among the birds, we found numbers of the Megapodius, ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... not forget to record that we had rather a disturbed night on Saturday. First, there was heavy rain and it came through the ceiling close to where Ellen was sleeping; then the cat caught a rat under the table, and Rob went for her wishing to share the spoil. This is the first rat I have seen here, though I have heard them in the house. They are in shoals all over the mountains, and eat the fruit in the orchards. There have been no peaches ...
— Three Years in Tristan da Cunha • K. M. Barrow
... one morning with a 22-calibre rifle. He had shot one after another and seen them drop from sight into the crannies of the lumber-pile, when the old Cat came running along the wall from the dock, carrying a small Wharf Rat. He had been ready to shoot her, too, but the sight of that Rat changed his plans: a rat-catching Cat was worthy to live. It happened to be the very first one she had ever caught, but it saved her life. She threaded the lumber-maze to the cracker-box and ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... Street, bowing to others of the committee on their way to the town-hall, a structure of parti-coloured brick in harlequin patterns, with a peaked roof, all over little sham domes, which went far to justify its title of the Rat-house, since nothing larger could well use them. The facade was thus somewhat imposing; of the rear the less said the better; and as to the interior, it was at present one expanse of dust, impeded by scaffold-poles, ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in this manner, they were obliged to fly; and they retreated with the loss of a great part of their forces. Sethon, when he returned home, ordered a statue of himself to be set up in the temple of Vulcan, holding in his right hand a rat, and these words to be inscribed thereon:—LET THE MAN WHO BEHOLDS ME LEARN ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... if I don't give my name, ma'am. My false friend, the rat, got me into a sad scrape once; and Rowley insists upon it that a duck destroyed me, which is all ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... very same night as they lay on the mat, What should come rushing in but a great big rat; Up jumped Mr. Ponto and gave a loud bark, And that rat scampered off ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... of a conspiracy against us. I was going west the other morning when I heard a crier announcing a general war upon Stone Boy and his people. The crier was a Buffalo, going at full speed from west to east. Again, I heard the Beaver conversing with the Musk-rat, and both said that their services were already promised to overflow the lakes and rivers and cause a destructive flood. I heard, also, the little Swallow holding a secret council with all the birds of the air. He said that he had been appointed ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... hands and form a circle. One is chosen "rat" and stands inside the circle. Another is the "cat" and takes her place outside. The "cat" tries to catch the "rat". The players favor the "rat" and allow him to run in and out of the circle, but try to prevent the ...
— Games and Play for School Morale - A Course of Graded Games for School and Community Recreation • Various
... Mrs. O'Brien favoured the match as soon as Dry Valley's intentions were disclosed. Being the mother of a woman child, and therefore a charter member of the Ancient Order of the Rat-trap, she joyfully decked out Panchita for the sacrifice. The girl was temporarily dazzled by having her dresses lengthened and her hair piled up on her head, and came near forgetting that she was only a slice of cheese. It was nice, too, to have as good a match as Mr. Johnson paying ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... the intruder produced a revolver and levelled it at Carmichael. Caught like a rat in a trap, the latter, after a moment's hesitation, handed over the despatches and leaned back with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 28, 1914 • Various
... they say, Was haunted with a jolly ghost, that shook The curtains, whined in lobbies, tapt at doors, And rummaged like a rat: no servant stayed: The farmer, vext, packs up his beds and chairs, And all his household stuff, and with his boy Betwixt his knees, his wife upon the tilt, Sets out, and meets a friend who hails him, 'What! ...
— Fairy Tales; Their Origin and Meaning • John Thackray Bunce
... of trade.' 30 The captive cat, with piteous mews, For pardon, life, and freedom sues: 'A sister of the science spare; One interest is our common care.' 'What insolence!' the man replied; 'Shall cats with us the game divide? Were all your interloping band Extinguished, of expelled the land, We rat-catchers might raise our fees, Sole guardians of a nation's cheese!' 40 A cat, who saw the lifted knife, Thus spoke, and saved her sister's life: 'In every age and clime we see, Two of a trade can ne'er agree. Each hates his neighbour for encroaching; Squire ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... that their mother had caught a nice fat rat, and instead of eating it all herself, as Mr. Gander did the frog, she brought it to her kittens. Now there was plenty of meat for both, and neither could have devoured the whole of it, yet those two youngsters stood there and snarled, and spit, and ...
— The Gray Goose's Story • Amy Prentice
... rain, summoned a kind of little, white, wooden sarcophagus which was skipping near us on the waves, sculled by two yellow boys stark naked in the rain. The craft approached us, I jumped into it, then through a little trap-door shaped like a rat-trap that one of the scullers threw open for me, I slipped in and stretched myself at full length on a mat in what is called ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Saxon style with narrow holes, scorpions, and large square gratings over narrow loopholes. There was no window on it, but here and there slits, old embrasures of pierriers and archegayes. At the foot of this high wall was seen, like the hole at the bottom of a rat-trap, a little wicket gate, very elliptical in ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... to the knowledge of the entire Rue Saint Jacques, a gambler and a drunkard and, in all likelihood, a thief. But you prefer, it appears, the Montignys to me. An ill cat seeks an ill rat. Very heartily do I wish you joy of them. You will not promise? ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... danced and Polly squealed, while the rotund lady managed to step on young Back Bay's toes and almost forgot to "beg pardon," but Mr. Possum hung on by his long rat-tail ...
— Andrew the Glad • Maria Thompson Daviess
... "foul play" roused the lion in Lincoln. He hated unfairness, and at once resented it. He suddenly put forth his Samson-like strength, grabbed the champion of the Clary Grove Boys by the throat, and, lifting him from the ground, held him at arm's length and shook him as a dog shakes a rat. Then he flung him to the ground, and, facing the amazed and yelling crowd, he cried: "You cowards! You know I don't want to fight; but if you try any such games, I'll tackle the whole lot of you. ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... and had known him for years. There were few old-timers in that section of the city who did not know Jim Farland. The man who faced the detective now was small, stoop-shouldered, a sort of a rat of a man who had considerably more money to his credit than his appearance indicated, and who was not eager to have the world in general know how he ...
— The Brand of Silence - A Detective Story • Harrington Strong
... and put a few drops of rhodium inside; they are fond of it. Cats are, however, the most reliable rat-traps. There is no difficulty in poisoning rats, but they often die in the walls, and create a dreadful odor, hard to get rid of. When poisoning is attempted, remove or cover all water vessels, even the ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... pin, like a malefactor from his gibbet. From amongst these cloaks, and behind that curtain, the Nun was said to issue. I did not believe this, nor was I troubled by apprehension thereof; but I saw a very dark and large rat, with a long tail, come gliding out from that squalid alcove; and, moreover, my eye fell on many a black-beetle, dotting the floor. These objects discomposed me more, perhaps, than it would be wise to say, as also did the dust, lumber, and stifling heat of the place. The last inconvenience ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... look at her whenever it's possible, and I don't want her to know it. It would worry her. It might—frighten her, Simmy, and God knows I wouldn't harm her by word or deed for anything on earth. Only she wouldn't understand. D'you see?" He shook Simmy as a dog would have shaken a rat, not in anger ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... creak of the garden-gate, as he waited for the last post. When at length a step was heard crunching on the gravel, he rushed from the room, and Mrs. Cohn heard the hall-door open. Her ear, disappointed of the rat-tat, morbidly followed every sound; but it seemed a long time before her boy's returning footstep reached her. The strange, slow drag of it worked upon her nerves, and her heart grew sick ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... horse again spoke to the boy, and said: "Wa-ti-hes Chah-ra-rat-wa-ta." To-morrow the Sioux are coming in a large war-party. They will attack the village, and you will have a great battle. Now, when the Sioux are drawn up in line of battle, and are all ready to fight, ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... goes to keepin' books fur a whisky house in Loueyville, 'n' he holds the job down steady fur twenty years. The only time he quits pen-pushin' is when they race at Churchill Downs. From the first minute the meetin' opens till get-away day comes he's bright eyes at the rat hole. He don't add up no figgers fur nobody then. He just putters around the track. He's doped out as sort-a ...
— Blister Jones • John Taintor Foote
... without a word. Sometimes horrible barkings would be heard and the man would not come up again. Three phalangites, in the fourth dilochia of the twelfth syntagmata, killed one another with knives in a dispute about a rat. ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... medicine has a sort of credit about it; so far at least it is clear that you are not professional, and to that extent the chances are narrowed that you get your bread out of the public pocket. To be sure, it is still possible that you may be a stay-maker, or a rat-catcher. But these are out-of-the-way vocations, and nobody adverts to such narrow possibilities. Now, on the other hand, to be a connoisseur in painting or in sculpture, supposing always that you are no practising artist, in other words, supposing ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... tat! Rat, tat, tat! went the drum on the parade ground, and soon the three companies which comprised the Putnam Hall Battalion were duly assembled, with Major Larry Colby in command of the whole, and Dick at the head of Company A, Fred Garrison at ...
— The Rover Boys on the River - The Search for the Missing Houseboat • Arthur Winfield
... large, and fat of body. We found the whole country to be a warren of a strange kind of coneys; their bodies in bigness as be the Barbary coneys, their heads as the heads of ours, the feet of a want [mole], and the tail of a rat, being of great length. Under her chin is on either side a bag, into the which she gathereth her meat, when she hath filled her belly abroad. The people eat their bodies, and make great account of their skins, for their king's coat was made of ...
— Sir Francis Drake's Famous Voyage Round the World • Francis Pretty
... has that yellow Satan," he said. "I would sacrifice a year of my life to see his rat's body on ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... over to Sausalito; consequently the launchman she hired couldn't find it down in Mission Bay, and back to the beach she came. After a couple of days had passed, however, she commenced to smell a rat, so she came down to my office and asked me if I'd seen ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... vulgar make images, and adore them, which is absurd; for adoration is the homage due from a creature to its creator; now here man is the creator; so the statues ought to worship him, and would, if they had brains enough to justify a rat in worshipping them. But even this abuse, though childish enough to be modern, is ancient. The pagan vulgar in these parts made their images, then knelt before them, adorned them with flowers, offered incense to them, lighted tapers before them, carried them in procession, ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... off. He was not by any means a physical coward, and possessed a good deal of the cornered kind of courage of the fighting rat. Dodge's first two or three blows were neatly parried. Then he began to mix it up in a lively way, and three heavy blows landed on Dick's body. But Dodge didn't get back out of it unscathed. One hard thump on his ...
— Dick Prescott's Second Year at West Point - Finding the Glory of the Soldier's Life • H. Irving Hancock
... with her, but the moment that Mrs. O'Brien came into the house he would get as far away from her as he could, and then lie perfectly still and watch her, for all the world, as John said once, like a rat in a trap watching a cat. Ellen said that it was because he always remembered that it was Mrs. O'Brien who had dropped him once. To this John replied: "Then maybe he'ld be making you less trouble, Ellen, if you was to drop him yourself once or twice." But Mrs. O'Brien said that ...
— Fairies and Folk of Ireland • William Henry Frost
... disbelieve my stories, you think it well to be sceptical yourselves. I don't care, however, whether you believe me or not. The fact remains that I have eaten one fried pyramid and countless stewed icicles, and the stewed icicles were finer than any diamond-back rat Confucius ever had served at ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... and our hearts were gay as we gazed on the gorgeous scene; And we laughed with glee as we caught the flea of the wolf and the wolverine; Yea, our hearts were light as the parasite of the ermine rat we slew, And the great musk ox, and the silver fox, and the moose and the caribou. And we laughed with zest as the insect pest of the marmot crowned our zeal, And the wary mink and the wily "link", and the walrus and the seal. And with eyes aglow on the scornful snow we danced a rigadoon, ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... countenance—I could point it out, but it is difficult to describe upon paper. It should be mild, serene, and expressive. The animal should be fine in the bone, with clean muzzle, a tail like a rat's, and not ewe-necked; short on the legs. He should have a small well-put-on head, prominent eye, a skin not too thick nor too thin; should be covered with fine silky hair—to the touch like a lady's glove; should have a good belly to hold his meat; should be straight-backed, ...
— Cattle and Cattle-breeders • William M'Combie
... years. M'lissy makes the best doughnuts I ever e't, an' I calculated we'd be married sometime, though I ain't never mentioned it special. But when I went to call on M'lissy this afternoon, there set Tom Peters in the big rockin' chair holdin' M'lissy's yeller cat an' lookin' as cheerful as a rat in a shipload of cheese. It come over me all at once what a marryin' critter he is. The old punkin'-head's had two wives already, ...
— Cape Cod and All the Pilgrim Land, June 1922, Volume 6, Number 4 • Various
... DISEASES. The coffee tree, its wood, foliage, and fruit, have their enemies, chief among which are insects, fungi, rodents (the "coffee rat"), birds, squirrels, and—according to Rossignon—elephants, buffalo, and native cattle, which have a special liking for the tender leaves of the coffee plant. Insects and fungi are the most bothersome pests on most plantations. Among the ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... If ye go, I guess it'll be aboard a liner, where ye'll be penned up like a rat in a trap. That's the way people travel these days, 'in luxury,' they call it. But give me my old Flyin' Queen, a strong breeze abeam, and ye kin have all yer iron or steel tubs ...
— Rod of the Lone Patrol • H. A. Cody
... After a little wandering about among ash-bins and apple-bins, reservoirs and coal-heaps and cobwebs, she discovers the hanging-shelf which has been the ignis fatuus of her search. Something extremely cold crossing her shoeless feet at this crisis suggests pleasant fancies of a rat. Keturah is ashamed to confess that she has never in all the days of the years of her pilgrimage set eyes upon a rat. Depending solely upon her imagination, her conception of that animal is a cross between ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... myself, 'drop those things at once!' and I made for him with my fist. He dodged me. I ran after him; but he threaded his way like a rat through the statues and cases of antiquities, and bolted down the passage out of the door, where he upset Monteagle and the lantern, and disappeared in the darkness and rain. I then returned to the scene of his labours. Monteagle was too frightened, owing to the rather ghostly ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... protection, for, instead of bolting into the undergrowth, he raced around and around in a circle, and then inside this tent and that, so that it was laughable to watch him popping in and out like a terrified rat. And Malamalama, so overcome with gin that he could barely see, fired and fired and fired from the four boxes of his cartridges. Then, when all was finished, he rose and went home, while the children crowded the line and shouted, "Professor ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... there was as great an outcry as if they were trying to bring down the walls of Jericho a second time. Some boys even flung at me everything they could find in the mire of the streets. The most delightful articles! There was actually a dead rat! I can see its tail flying now! Our village lads know how to aim better. Before the worst came, by the advice of the equerry and our wise chaplain, whom I consulted, we had done what was necessary, and summoned the guard at the Frauenthor to our ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... him by the collar of his coat and the seat of his breeches, and shook him as a mastiff would a rat. ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... damned if I know what for. For money,—just money stewin' in its own juice in a bank,—not money I can use. Well, everybody's trained so, I'm thinkin'. Anyway I took it friendly of you to put it so delicate, so fanciful as you did, so as them charity ladies didn't smell a rat. I appreciated that, an' thought the more of what you said. I'm ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... When Mrs. Rat saw Miss Kitty Cat washing her face, she knew it meant rain. And she wouldn't let her husband leave home ...
— The Tale of Benny Badger • Arthur Scott Bailey
... scarce finished my breakfast the next morning when I heard a loud rat-tat-tat upon the street door-surely the footman of some person of consequence. And Scipio was in the act of announcing the names when, greatly to his disgust, the visitors themselves rushed into my bedroom and curtailed the ceremony. They were none other than Dr. Courtenay and my Lord Comyn ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... property. Still, in spite of all that could be done, matters were rapidly coming to a terrible pass. In a week, at the latest, the horses of the cavalry would be eaten. For a fortnight London had almost lived upon horse-flesh. In the poorer quarters there was not a dog to be seen, and a sewer rat was considered a delicacy. ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... now the pet of the house, and the canary bird, and the yeast, and look in the vinegar barrel to see that all was right, and be sure and scald the milk-pans, and turn them up in the sun for an hour, and keep the doors locked, and the silver up in the scuttle-hole; and if she heard the rat which baffled and tormented them so long, get some poison and kill it, but not on any account let it get in the cistern; and keep the door-steps clean, and the stoop, and once in a while sweep the low roof at the back of the house, and not sit up late nights, or sleep very long in the morning; and ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... leopardess, the liver of a forest rat, the tongue of a Baroto bird—these must I have to mix with thy blood to be drunk by thy man ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... expectancy at once. But he was only a rudimentary human being, and his brain power had slept so far. I showed him Caldecott's wonderful "House that Jack Built," and he gloated over that delightful villain of a dog; the cat and the rat he understood, but he knew nothing of the cow. I let him stare at the dog as long as he chose, and he chuckled like a magpie all the time. He proposed to remove the picture-book, and it was only with difficulty that I persuaded him to ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... come, honey," said Uncle Remus, in a soothing tone, "I'll des snatch down yo' pa buggy umbrell' fum up dar in de cornder, des lak I bin a-doin', en I'll take'n take you und' my arm en set you down on Miss Sally h'a'th des ez dry en ez wom ez a rat'-nes' inside ...
— Nights With Uncle Remus - Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation • Joel Chandler Harris
... comes to me of a bunk-house on an Arizona range. The time was evening. A half-dozen cowboys were sprawled out on the beds smoking, and three more were playing poker with the Chinese cook. A misguided rat darted out from under one of the beds and made for the empty fireplace. He finished his journey in smoke. Then the four who had shot slipped their guns back into their holsters and resumed their ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... great business of the day, especially in small sailing vessels like the "Black Hawk;" although anything is good enough for me when I can't get nothin' better, which is the true philosophy of life. If there is a good dish and a bad one set before me, I am something of a rat, I always choose ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... years, yet little had been added to the stock of natural history which had been acquired in the first year or two of its infancy. The Kangaroo, the Dog, the Opossum, the Flying Squirrel, the Kangaroo Rat, a spotted Rat, the common Rat, and the large Fox-bat (if entitled to a place in this society), made up the whole catalogue of animals that were known at this time, with the exception which must now be made of an ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... upon them, and afterwards could be seen trickling down the stems beneath and silently entering the ground. The surface of the mill-pond leapt up in a thousand spirts under the same downfall, and clucked like a hen in the rat-holes along the banks as it undulated under the wind. The only dry spot visible from the front windows of the mill-house was the inside of a small shed, on the opposite side of the courtyard. While Mrs. Loveday was noticing the threads of rain descending ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... grand- mother commented. "It's servants'-hall talk and cottage gossip, and plenty made itself up out o' beer drunk in th' tap-room at th' Wool Park. In a place where naught much happens, people get into th' way 'o springin' on a bit o' news, and shakin' and worryin' it like a terrier does a rat. It's nature. That lad's given 'em lots to talk about ever since he coom. He's been a blessin' to 'em. If he'd been gentry, he'd not ha' been nigh as lively. Th' village lads tries to talk through their ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... shall find The superior powers of woman, both in body and in mind. She shall teach us how to study, how to ride, and run, and row; How to box and play at cricket; how the heavy weight to throw; How to shoot the trembling pigeon; how the wily rat to slay; How at football and at racquets; how at whist and chess to play; How to drive the rapid tandem; how to jump, and how to walk; (For young women, trust me, Clio, can do something more than talk) How to ...
— Sagittulae, Random Verses • E. W. Bowling
... little squeal it drove its big yellow teeth into me behind. Oh! how they hurt! I was near the rat-hole. I rushed at it, scrabbling and wriggling. The big rabbit pounced on me with its fore-feet, trying to hold me, but too late, for I was through, leaving some of my fur behind me. I ran, how I ran! without stopping, till at length I found my mother in the ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... arrangement. Finally the result in which I landed, and which fulfilled all the conditions laid down was this:—Let me premise, however, what at any rate the existing darkness attests, that some disturbance of the text must in some way have arisen; whether from the gnawing of a rat, or the spilling of some obliterating fluid at this point of some critical or unique MS. It is sufficient for us that the vital word has survived. I suppose, therefore, that Lamia had replied to the friend who praised the sweetness of his voice, ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... you on your way to heaven, you had only to recite this verse, and the serpent would be powerless to harm you: "Hail, thou serpent Rerek! advance not hither. Stand still now, and thou shalt eat the rat which is an abomination unto Ra (the Sun-God), and thou shalt crunch the bones ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Ancient Egypt • James Baikie
... prevented his noticing the rustle and stir of a new-comer who had crowded up behind him, until he caught the wondering glances of those in front and saw that the Israelite was staring past him, his money forgotten, his eyes beady and sharp, his rat-like teeth showing in a grin of admiration. Swede Sam glared from under his unkempt shock and felt uncertainly towards the open collar of his flannel shirt where a kerchief should have been. The men who were standing gazed at ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... civilisation. A fable will best explain what is meant. Let the scene be the Zoological Gardens in the quiet hours of the night, and suppose that, as in old fables, the animals are able to converse, and that some very wise creature who had easy access to all the cages, say a philosophic sparrow or rat, was engaged in collecting the opinions of all sorts of animals with a view of elaborating a system of absolute morality. It is needless to enlarge on the contrariety of ideals between the beasts that prey and those they prey upon, between those of the animals that have to ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... world. It was impossible to tell what it had originally been constructed of. Generations of attackers had bruised, broken, and undermined it. Repairs had been quickly made, patches thrust roughly into place and fixed there. Crude masonry crumbled and gave way to a rat's nest of woven timbers. This overlapped a length of pitted metal, large plates riveted together. Even this metal had been eaten through and bursting sandbags spilled out of a jagged hole. Over the surface of the wall detector wires ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... to this sentiment, read La Fontaine's fable of "The Rat and the Elephant." La Fontaine fully comprehended its social and psychological bearing. "To believe one's self an important personage is very common in France.... A childish vanity is peculiar to us. The Spaniards are vain, but in another way. It is ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... this. Thou art not yet the man that shall hold fast the devil! Still cheat his senses with your magic revel, Drown him in dreams of endless youth; But this charm-mountain on the sill to level, I need, O rat, thy pointed tooth! Nor need I conjure long, they're near me, E'en now comes scampering one, who presently will ...
— Faust • Goethe
... a load of the white man's grass that has a tail like a rat; and give him also some of the long white seed, a pile as high as a man's knees, so that the pony might eat and be ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... Elma lived. By dint of asking half a dozen children and three or four policemen she at last reached Constantine Road, and presently found the right house. She ran up the steps and sounded a rattling rat-tat on the knocker. The moment she did so a girl with a mop of untidy red hair peeped up at ...
— Wild Kitty • L. T. Meade
... not, Ellen—would you? I'd rather err on the safe side, seems to me. Do let's be polite, at least! Yes, I'll knock," and a timid rat-tat-tat, made by a small kid-covered knuckle, announced the first visit of the present owner of the great ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... dames ensues a meeting, the nature of which may be guessed, the whole trouble lying in the fact that neither thinks it necessary to name the article under dispute. No wonder that discussion under the disadvantage of so great a misunderstanding ends in violence. Doctor Rat, the curate, is now called in; but again Diccon is equal to the occasion. Having warned Dame Chat that Hodge, to balance the matter of the cock, is about to creep in through a breach in the wall and kill her chickens, he persuades Doctor Rat that if he will creep through this same opening ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... very low rate of interest. For a few weeks he had let it lie idle; then he had appropriated it, and step by step his creditor had increased his demands up to a bill of exchange and a usurious rate of interest. And now the vagabond grew insolent. Was he like the rat who foresees the sinking of the ship, and tries to escape from it? The baron laughed so as to make Lenore shudder; why, he was not the man to fall resistless into the hands of his adversary; the next day would bring help. Ehrenthal could never ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... together. How often has many a tired old man envied the superannuated family cat, stretched upon the rug before the fire, letting the genial warmth tranquilly diffuse itself through all her internal arrangements! No more watching for mice in dark, damp cellars, no more awaiting the savage gray rat at the mouth of his den, no more scurrying up trees and lamp-posts to avoid the neighbor's cur who wishes to make her acquaintance! It is very grand to "die in harness," but it is very pleasant to have the ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... of the house might be rat-ridden and desolate. The coulee might wear always the look of emptiness; but here, under the bluff by the spring, and in the room Jean called hers, one felt the air of occupancy that gave the lie ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... stable he was as wet as a "drowned rat," but he looked well satisfied, and the old trainer, after he had talked with him a few ...
— Bred In The Bone - 1908 • Thomas Nelson Page
... to the great ladder of animal life, beginning low down in molluscs and feeble sea creatures, then up rung by rung through reptiles and fishes, till at last we came to a kangaroo-rat, a creature which brought forth its young alive, the direct ancestor of all mammals, and presumably, therefore, of everyone in the audience. ("No, no," from a sceptical student in the back row.) If the young gentleman in the ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... fellow mostly bluffs when he's scared, or he's in a corner—like a rat. See? Now it's to my interest to see Fyles beat clean out of Rocky Springs. It's that set me gassin'. Get me? So just keep easy, and take what I got to hand out. I'm wise to the game. It's my business to keep wise. Those two crooks of yours, ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... Baba,[352] said to be a deified ghost of the aboriginal races, reappears as Goresvara and is counted a form of Siva, as is also Khandoba or Khande Rao, a deity connected with dogs. Ganesa, "the Lord of Hosts," the God who removes obstacles and is represented with an elephant's head and accompanied by a rat, is recognized as Siva's son. Another son is Skanda or Kartikeya, the God of War, a great deity in Ceylon and southern India. But more important both for the absorption of aboriginal cults and for its influence ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... ball he took up his feet and ran. The hard clash of the skates, the determined onrush of the broad-built, implacable figure, were terrible to withstand. What was to be done against a man who didn't skate, but tore, who fell upon a ball as a terrier plunges, eyeless and intent, into a rat-hole? The personal safety of himself or others never occurred to Winn. He remembered nothing but the rules of the game. These he held in the back of his mind, with the ball in ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... to calling inanimate or artificial things "creatures of God" is the personification of all sorts of things, animate and inanimate; thus, a rat is "an old man," a dipper is "a boy." Not infrequently the object or idea thus personified is given a title of respect; thus, "Corporal Black" is the night. Akin to personification is bold metaphor and association. In this there may or may not be some ...
— A Little Book of Filipino Riddles • Various
... for though there are changes there, that settle isn't one of them. It's his treasure case that's so altered. The snuff-box is gone, and the cigarette case and the piece of Bow china, and instead there's a rat-tail spoon which he used to have on his dinner-table, and made a great fuss with, and a bit of Worcester china that used to stand on the mantelpiece, and a different cigarette case, and a bead-bag. I don't know where that same from, but if he inherited it, he ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... You wonder what he could be doing in the hole of a poor legal rat like myself—eh? These awfully great people have their sentimental curiosities like common sinners. But if I were you, Kirylo Sidorovitch," he continued, leering and laying a peculiar emphasis ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... its daily march, faltering, staggering, blinded and buffeted by the incessant northeast winds, cruel, merciless, keen as knife-blades. Hope long since was dead; resolve wore thin under friction of disaster; like a rat, hunger gnawed at them hour after hour; the cold was one unending agony. Still Bennett was unbroken, still he urged them forward. For so long as they could move he would drive ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... on another straw mattress, she could hear her husband breathing steadily. Then, upon the bare boards of the floor, which were but a few inches below her little cot-bed, she thought she heard the patter of small feet. A squirrel, perhaps, or, horrible to think of, it might be a rat. She was sure rats would eat straw beds, and her first impulse was to wake Mr. Archibald; but she hesitated, he was sleeping so soundly. Still she listened, and now she became almost certain that what she heard was not the patter of small ...
— The Associate Hermits • Frank R. Stockton
... bothered by fears of the supernatural, no matter what the old house was, or had been. Now, a good-sized rat might have made her ...
— Ruth Fielding and the Gypsies - The Missing Pearl Necklace • Alice B. Emerson
... in the same identical moment or bisection of a moment. Possibly his first little wolfish howl (for it would be monstrous to think that he or even Remus condescended to a vagitus or cry such as a young tailor or rat-catcher might emit) may have symphonized with the ear-shattering trumpet that proclaimed the inauguration of the first Olympic contest, or which blew to the four winds the appellation of the ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... punished him, cannot, will not punish me, who have done nothing." A strange sound attracted the young man's attention. He looked round him, and saw on the mantel-shelf, just below an enormous crucifix, coarsely painted in fresco on the wall, a rat of enormous size engaged in nibbling a piece of dry bread, but fixing all the time, an intelligent and inquiring look upon the new occupant of the cell. The king could not resist a sudden impulse of fear and disgust: he moved back towards the door, uttering a loud cry; and ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Ugly had paced off that way, that I need not see her from my window. I put the bars up again, and lay in wait behind the bushes. Soon I heard her approaching. I come forward as she comes near, on that rat-like pony of hers, who holds his head down as if searching for something lost in the road. I stand in doubt whether to laugh at her predicament, or advance in a gentlemanly manner to remove the obstacle I had put in her way. ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... quarters,' said Mr. Puffington, who now smelt a rat; 'good quarters—nice girls—fine fortune—fine place, Jawleyford Court. Well, book me for the next visit,' added he. 'I will,' said Sponge, 'and no mistake. What ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... that the various domesticated forms have arisen. Such, for example, is the case in the rabbit, where most of the colour varieties are recessive to the wild agouti form. Such also is the case in the rat, where the black and albino varieties and the various pattern forms are also recessive to the wild agouti type. And with the exception of a certain yellow variety to which we shall refer later, such is also the case with the many fancy varieties ...
— Mendelism - Third Edition • Reginald Crundall Punnett
... rocks. The interest of all around is instantly centred on the lost cigar-holder. The Tommies begin to roll the rocks away, endangering the limbs of the men below them, and half the kopje is obliterated. They are as keen as terriers after a rat. The officers sit above and give advice and disagree as to where that cigar-holder hid itself. Over their heads, not twenty feet above, the shells chase each other fiercely. But the officers have become accustomed to shells; a search for ...
— Notes of a War Correspondent • Richard Harding Davis
... I'm the professor of musical glasses —tap, tap! ( Ahab to himself.) There's a sight! There's sound! The greyheaded woodpecker tapping the hollow tree! Blind and dumb might well be envied now. See! that thing rests on two line-tubs, full of tow-lines. A most malicious wag, that fellow. Rat-tat! So man's seconds tick! Oh! how immaterial are all materials! What things real are there, but imponderable thoughts? Here now's the very dreaded symbol of grim death, by a mere hap, made the expressive ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... you ought to catch on to it without being told: Unk's a stubborn old rat and he hasn't really a grain of sense, in spite of all the money he made. All you've got to do is to egg him on as if you thought it might be a little uncertain and then sort o' dare to make a big bet with him. I'll get busy ...
— Radio Boys Cronies • Wayne Whipple and S. F. Aaron
... to introduce Mr. Peter Bell to the respectable family of the Fudges. Although he may fall short of those very considerable personages in the more active properties which characterize the Rat and the Apostate, I suspect that even you, their historian, will confess that he surpasses them in the more peculiarly ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... Regina C[oe]li is constructed on the principle of a rat-trap. It is an oblong room divided into three compartments longitudinally, the partition walls being composed of wire and resembling cages. The middle compartment is occupied by the armed warder in ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... tolerable fineness, hardening them by exposure to a slow, steady degree of heat till she was able to work with them, and even mend her clothes with tolerable expertness. By degrees, Catharine contrived to cover the whole outer surface of her homespun woollen frock with squirrel and mink, musk-rat and woodchuck skins. A curious piece of fur patchwork of many hues and textures it presented to the eye,—a coat of many colours, it is true; but it kept the wearer warm, and Catharine was not a little proud of her ingenuity and industry,—every new patch that was added was a source of fresh ...
— Lost in the Backwoods • Catharine Parr Traill
... letters—a thing which took place constantly—he took a piece from the pile, wrapped it in the letter and sent it out by the servant. Money ran through his fingers. When he went to see Charles X. at Prague, and the king questioned him in reference to his affairs, his response was, "I am as poor as a rat." ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... height, with four very short legs, the feet armed with long claws of a brilliant scarlet, and resembling coral in substance. The body was covered with a straight silky hair, perfectly white. The tail was peaked like that of a rat, and about a foot and a half long. The head resembled a cat's, with the exception of the ears—these were flopped like the ears of a dog. The teeth were of the same brilliant scarlet as ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... discovered by my wise mentor to be "watch-eyed," "rat-tailed," with a swollen gland on the neck, would shy at a stone, stand on hind legs for a train, with various other minor defects. I grew fainthearted, discouraged, cynical, bitter. Was there no horse for me? I became town-talk as "a drefful fussy old ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... at the top of his voice. Oliver understood the epithet, it meant that he wore clean linen, polished shoes, and perhaps, now and then, a pair of gloves. He had heard the same outcry in his own city, for the slang of the street-rat is Volapuk the world over. But he did not resent the assault. He was too tired to chase any boys, and too despondent to answer ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... intended to have written for a week or more, for you have so many correspondents and are so punctual in reply that I fear the waste of precious time; but I am as pleased with your letter as an old dog- fancier when a terrier-pup catches his first rat—it is something to see my boy hunt out and hunt down that old ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... us, and of an evening he had the run of the smoking room. After ten p.m. the 'open sesame' to our door was a rattle on the letter box and Louis' fancy for the mysterious was whetted by this admittance by secret sign, and we liked his special rat-a-tat for it was the forerunner of an hour or ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton
... Hilprecht, Babylonian Expedition, Series D, Vol. V, Fasc. 1, plate, Rev., l. 8; the photographic reproduction clearly shows, as Dr. Poebel suggests (Hist. Texts, p. 61 n 3), that the line should read: ((isu)elippu) si-i lu (isu)ma-gur-gur-ma sum-sa lu na-si-rat na-pis-tim, "That ship shall be a magurgurru (giant boat), and its name shall be 'Preserver of Life' (lit. 'She that ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... and I'm the professor of musical glasses —tap, tap! ( Ahab to himself.) There's a sight! There's sound! The greyheaded woodpecker tapping the hollow tree! Blind and dumb might well be envied now. See! that thing rests on two line-tubs, full of tow-lines. A most malicious wag, that fellow. Rat-tat! So man's seconds tick! Oh! how immaterial are all materials! What things real are there, but imponderable thoughts? Here now's the very dreaded symbol of grim death, by a mere hap, made the expressive sign of the help and hope ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... served's the rule things go by, so stir your stumps, an' put in the best licks you know how—an' may the devil take the hindmost. Hey there! that drummin' noise, it's stopped—wonder if they got out to the sloop or else smell a rat an' are lyin' low till they make it a dead certainty? Gosh, but ain't this all mighty thrillin' though, and how it does tickle me most to death," muttering which Perk, still listening, actually held his breath the better to catch any sound ...
— Eagles of the Sky - With Jack Ralston Along the Air Lanes • Ambrose Newcomb
... been held in check by fear of Shackleby, but there was some spirit in him, and, perhaps because he had injured Thurston, had always hated him. Now when his case seemed desperate, with the boldness of a rat driven into a corner, he determined to tear the ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... done afore. There was hardly a man as 'ud speak civil to each other, and the wimmen was a'most as bad. Cats and dogs and such-like began to act as if the place belonged to 'em, and seven people stopped Mr. Bunnett one day to tell 'im that Joe Parsons 'ad been putting down rat-poison and killed five little ...
— Ship's Company, The Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... revenge. Might one not screw the neck of this base prince, who abuses the confidence of cavaliers so perfidiously? To die I care not; but to be caught in a trap, and die like a rat lured by a bait of toasted cheese—Faugh! my countly blood rebels ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... by brooks,—only 'in low wet places.' Buffon, however, takes it with the land-rail; Gould and Yarrell put it between the little crake and water-hen. Gould's description of it is by no means clear to me:—he first says it is, in action, as much "like a rat as a bird;" then that it "bounds like a ball," (before the nose of the spaniel); and lastly, in the next sentence, speaks of it as "this lath-like bird"! It is as large as a bantam, but can run, like the Allegretta, on floating leaves; ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door; but 'tis enough, 'twill serve: ask for me to-morrow, and you shall find me a grave man. I am peppered, I warrant, for this world.—A plague o' both your houses!—Zounds, a dog, a rat, a mouse, a cat, to scratch a man to death! a braggart, a rogue, a villain, that fights by the book of arithmetic!—Why the devil came you between us? I was ...
— Romeo and Juliet • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... just finished making her pudding, and Poppy had that moment succeeded in inveigling Angela into the cupboard under the stairs and turning the key on her, when footsteps came up the path, a letter dropped in through the letter-box, and a postman's rat-tat sounded to the furthermost corner ...
— The Carroll Girls • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... fun and exercise is the way to begin if possible. A woman who has had all the fresh air and interesting exercise she needs, will shake off the first sign of morbid emotions as she would shake off a rat or any other vermin. ...
— Power Through Repose • Annie Payson Call
... and brought definite punishment; it was the hard-hearted, virtuous, ambitious, sensible boys, who were good-humoured and respectable and selfish, who bothered me; one wanted to shake them as a terrier shakes a rat—but there was nothing to get hold of. They were a credit to themselves and to their parents and to the school; and yet they ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Cronje's surrender, after the three days' shelling of his laager at Paardeberg. Hence satisfaction, not only of victory but of compassion, since a sense of horror had weighed on the hearts of even the least sentimental at thought of the stubborn thousands, penned in that flaming rat-trap of the dry river-bed, ringed about by sun-baked rock and sand and death-belching guns. To-day came news of the relief of long-beleaguered Ladysmith, and London was shaken by emotion, under the bleak moisture-laden March ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... the foremen what wages these men and women received. He told me. It seemed impossible that human life could be maintained upon such a pittance. I then asked whether they ever ate meat. "No," he said, "except when they had a rat or mouse" "A rat or mouse!" I exclaimed. "Oh yes," he replied, "the rats and mice were important articles of diet,—just as they had been for centuries in China. The little children, not yet able to work, fished ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... loathing to practice. As the latter necessary, if uninteresting, pursuit was left entirely to her own discretion—for no one ever dreamed of ordering Norah to the piano—it is small wonder if it suffered beside the superior attractions of riding Bobs, rat trapping, "shinning up" trees, fishing in the lagoon and generally disporting herself as a maiden may whom conventional restrictions have ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... Nan at once, 'and there is another like that that the collier-boats can't stand. If you call out to a collier, "There's a rat in your chains" he'd drive his schooner ashore ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... carried under their aprons bags which they filled with sugar from the casks; or they took with them bladders for stealing the rum. Some waded about in the mud at low tide to catch anything that was thrown to them from the ships. Some obtained admission to the ship as rat-catchers, and in that capacity were able to carry away plunder previously concealed by their friends; some, called scuffle-hunters, stood on the quays as porters, carrying bags under their long white aprons in which to hide whatever they could pilfer. It was estimated that, taking one year with ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... a bit as his keen little rat-like eyes turned towards that quarter of the heavens; but the frown was not for Waldo, nor ...
— The Lost City • Joseph E. Badger, Jr.
... emerging insects; titmice chatter; the bold, clear whistle of the cardinal sounds never so gaily; and song sparrows pipe from every wayside shrub and fence post. Coons and opossums stir in their dens, musk-rat and ground-hog inspect the weather, while squirrels race along branches and bound from tree to ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... was no more to him than a copper to coves like us. So we sailed away and our hearts were gay as we gazed on the gorgeous scene; And we laughed with glee as we caught the flea of the wolf and the wolverine; Yea, our hearts were light as the parasite of the ermine rat we slew, And the great musk ox, and the silver fox, and the moose and the caribou. And we laughed with zest as the insect pest of the marmot crowned our zeal, And the wary mink and the wily "link", and the walrus and the seal. And with eyes aglow on the scornful snow we danced ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... was a knowledge of how to swim, and a dawning consciousness that scouting meant helping people and all that sort of thing. Thanks to a long course of disobedience to his poor mother, he had learned to swim like a water rat. He had had somewhat the advantage of other boys in this respect for he had gone swimming Mondays when they were ...
— Pee-Wee Harris Adrift • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... happens in very cold winters that the holes communicating with their dwellings under the water are so blocked by ice that they cannot break through them. When this is the case, and they have no provisions left in the house, they begin to eat one another. At last there may be only one rat left out of a whole lodge. They occasionally eat fish, but in general feed very cleanly, and when fat are good eating. They are easily tamed and soon grow fond of their owner. They are very cleanly and playful, and 'smell exceedingly ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... hypermetropic and astigmatic, and two had a slight degree of astigmatism. They also examined other animals, and the same proportion of hypermetropia existed. These gentlemen found that as an optical instrument the eye of the horse, cow, cat and rabbit is superior to that of the rat, mouse and guinea pig. ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various
... Hewitt. "With that hint, and finding the black stuff on his hands, he'll smell a rat instantly! Come, Mr. Potswood—you can show us the nearest way to his house, at any rate! Come—we ...
— The Red Triangle - Being Some Further Chronicles of Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... in your debt, too, did they, Square?" asked the tailor, as he finished the hurried tale of recent disclosures. "If he's in debt to you, you've a plenty of company. A good many were took in by the rascals. I begun to smell the rat after it was too late. Each of 'em owes me now for a suit of Sunday clothes. When I set pressing 'em off at midnight, I little thought they would be run-away suits, and I was working so hard for nothing. But I must pocket the loss, I suppose, ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee
... active in her behalf—the minutes were filled with sufficient interest to make them pass unreckoned. But to sit here and wait, to sit here and watch the seconds wasted, to sit here and be conscious of each one of them as it bit, like a thieving wharf rat, into his dwindling Present and carried the morsel of time back to the greedy Past, was a different matter. When finally Saul appeared with a fat cigar in one corner of his chubby mouth, Donaldson was halfway across the sidewalk to ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... a "property" summer-house—an elephantine blue-bottle on his proboscis, and a sleeping bull-dog, the size of an Alderney steer, at his feet;—here Master Brown, with a grin, calls the house Victoria Villa, and the paste-board mask his papa. Now enters the rat, to eat the good things that lay in the house that John built, represented by a stealthy seedy gentleman, who, after reading a board intimating that apartments were to let, crept slyly past the sleepy Bull, to mount the house-steps; and there deliver himself of the following ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... nothing. He stood there looking down, dogged, quiet, like one tongue-tied. Littimer thundered out his question again. He crossed over, laying his hands on his son's shoulders and shaking him as a terrier might shake a rat. ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... did not visit the Priory that day, but on the morrow, after lunch, I took my heavy stick and strode up the gravel path and gave a very important rat-a-tat-tat at the great oak door. The servant who answered my summons informed me, much to my disappointment, that both Mr. Johnson and his son had gone to Liverpool the previous day, the former to see the latter off. Something of importance, the servant thought, had caused him to depart ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... for present use in huts not far from the house; but the rest are sent abroad to certain fields, where they dig up roots, eat several kinds of herbs, and search about for carrion, or sometimes catch weasels and luhimuhs (a sort of wild rat), which they greedily devour. Nature has taught them to dig deep holes with their nails on the side of a rising ground, wherein they lie by themselves; only the kennels of the females are larger, sufficient to hold ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... anything. In the first place, she met Bob Henderson there, and a better boy-chum a girl never had than Bob. Although Bob had been born and brought up in a poorhouse, and at first knew very little about himself and his relatives, even a girl like Betty could see that this "poorhouse rat" as he was slurringly called by Joseph Peabody, possessed natural refinement ...
— Betty Gordon at Mountain Camp • Alice B. Emerson
... great article of trade; and they have noble granaries for depositing it. Apparently there is a great conflux of people, and much business stirring. I quickly perceived, in the midst of this ever-moving throng, my old friend the vender of rat-destroying powders—busied in the exercise of his calling, and covered with his usual vestment of white, spotted or painted with black rats. He found plenty of hearers and plenty of purchasers. All was animation and ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... if they dare to force one farthing of their coin upon me in the payment of an hundred pounds. It is no loss of honour to submit to the lion; but who, with the figure of a man can think with patience of being devoured alive by a rat? He has laid a tax upon the people of Ireland of seventeen shillings at least in the pound; a tax, I say, not only upon lands, but interest-money, goods, manufactures, the hire of handicraftsmen, labourers ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... were returned, the depositors having refused to pay the charges. The rest of the customers in large measure responded. But the game was nearly up. There were scare-heads in the papers. Miller saw detectives on every corner, and, like a rat leaving a sinking ship, Schlessinger scuttled away for the last time with a bag of money on the evening of Tuesday, November 21st, 1899. The rest of the deposits were crammed into Miller's desk and left there ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train
... sense of a difficulty not quite easily or completely overcome which Little Eyolf produces. To mention but one technical matter; there are but four characters, properly speaking, in the play—since Eyolf himself and the Rat-Wife are but illustrations or symbolic properties—and of these four, one (Borgheim) is wholly subsidiary. Ibsen, then, may be said to have challenged imitation by composing a drama of passion with only three characters in it. By a process of elimination this has been done ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... 'olidays, an' I'm damned if I know what for. For money,—just money stewin' in its own juice in a bank,—not money I can use. Well, everybody's trained so, I'm thinkin'. Anyway I took it friendly of you to put it so delicate, so fanciful as you did, so as them charity ladies didn't smell a rat. I appreciated that, an' thought the more of what you said. ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... miscarriages, the last conception terminating as such. Her husband was away, and returned October 9, 1869. She did not again see her husband until the 3d or 4th of January. The date of quickening was not observed, and the child was born June 8, 1870. During gestation she was much frightened by a rat. The child was weak, the testes undescended, and it lived but eighteen days, dying of symptoms of atrophy. The parents were poor, of excellent character, and although, according to the evidence, this pregnancy ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... the rat-tat-tat. We all gazed expectantly at the closed door. Glancing at Holmes, I saw his face turn rigid, and he leaned forward in intense excitement. Then suddenly came a low guggling, gargling sound, and a brisk drumming upon woodwork. Holmes sprang frantically across the room ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... the work of that miserable poorhouse rat, Dave Porter," Link told some of his cohorts. "Just wait—I'll fix him for it some day, see if I don't!" Then he wrote a most abusive letter to Dave, but in his rage he forgot to address it properly, and it ...
— Dave Porter at Star Ranch - Or, The Cowboy's Secret • Edward Stratemeyer
... bought it at a bazar for ten dollars, the day before I brought it around. When you went out for lunch Cap. he comes in. We done for the plug in a minute, and as Mighty Marda was all but gone, on account of his rat diet, we finished him, too. Then we wrecked the place up some, took a couple of turns about the horse with Mardo, called in Doc. Forbes, who stood in, to fix up the fictitious fracture, and then ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... evening at Mount Bulla Bulla, on the edge of the Jungalla Creek. The supper would have been very scant, if McNabbs had not killed a large rat, the mus conditor, which is highly spoken of as an article of diet. Olbinett roasted it, and it would have been pronounced even superior to its reputation had it equaled the sheep in size. They were obliged to be content with it, however, and it ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... to him and he gave them money for it and continued his journey with the cat and the otter. Presently he saw a crowd of men and he went up to them and asked what they were doing: and they told him that they were hunting a rat which was always gnawing the Raja's pens and papers and the Raja had offered a reward for it, and they had driven it out of the palace, but it had taken refuge in a hole and they were going to dig it out Then Lita offered ...
— Folklore of the Santal Parganas • Cecil Henry Bompas
... After the chariot followed a vast procession of rats, each of whom carried a torch, and the sparks which flew from the torches fell to the earth as jewels. Some of the rats were shouting "Zurkielis" incessantly; and whenever a rat uttered this cry, a piece of gold fell from his mouth. The procession was followed by a great number of fantastic forms, which collected the gold from the ground, and put it into large sacks. When ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... Suddenly Rat-tat, tat, tat, tat, tat, tat, tat! above our heads. Three Hun aeroplanes right on top of us; Eric drives headlong in a spiral curve at full speed, smoke trailing out behind. The gun! I fumble. Can't get round to ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... employed by the Russian settlers on this part of the Amoor attracted my attention. Stakes were driven into the ground a foot apart and seven feet high. Willow sticks were then woven between these stakes in a sort of basket work. The fence was impervious to any thing larger than a rat, and no sensible man would attempt climbing it, unless pursued by a bull or a sheriff, as the upper ends of the sticks were very sharp and about as convenient to sit upon as ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... were perfect, and two little nut-like eyes still lurked in the depths of the black, hollow sockets. The blotched skin was drawn tightly from bone to bone, and a tangled wrap of black coarse hair fell over the ears. Two thin teeth, like those of a rat, overlay the shrivelled lower lip. In its crouching position, with bent joints and craned head, there was a suggestion of energy about the horrid thing which made Smith's gorge rise. The gaunt ribs, with ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... there existed in Oregon in vast numbers a species of wood-rat, and our inspection of the graveyard showed that the canoes were thickly infested with them. They were a light gray animal, larger than the common gray squirrel, with beautiful bushy tails, which made them strikingly resemble ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... Paris; Faculties of Domestic Animals; Increase of Mankind; Larva of the Gad-fly, which deposits its eggs in the bodies of the human species; Luminousness of the Sea, a valuable contribution; Motions in water caused by the respiration of Fishes; Cannibalism in New Guinea; Heron swallowing a Rat; Mr. Vigors on American Quails; Mr. Yarrell's experiments to preserve White Bait; On the fascination of Serpents; Notes on the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 488, May 7, 1831 • Various
... know the bland emollient saponaceous qualities both of sack and silver, yet if any great man would say to me, 'I make you Rat-catcher to his Majesty, with a salary of L300 a-year and two butts of the best Malaga; and though it has been usual to catch a mouse or two, for form's sake, in public once a year, yet to you, sir, we shall not stand on these things,' I cannot say I ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... night and day among from ten to twenty pails full of milk, and never once break the cream of one of them with the tip of his tongue; nor would he suffer cat, rat, nor any other creature ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... tragedy, translated by 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 M. Prudhomme's ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... and he manufactured his own. The nocturnal raccoon edged his way through the alders here, in the old summer nights, and the muskrat built his house among the reeds. Not a raccoon nor a muskrat is the wayfarer likely to meet with here to-night; but the gray rat of civilization is to be dimly discerned, as he lopes along the gutters in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... dropped to his chair again I sat down by him. The silence of a minute or two was broken by a thunderous rat-tat at the house-door. Christopherson leapt to his feet, rushed from the room; I, half fearing that he had gone mad, followed to the head ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... installed myself to study, and which I seldom entered except at night to sleep, became, during the beautiful month of June, my palace of delight, and I went there after dinner to enjoy the long, and mild, and beautiful twilights. I had invented a sport which I deemed an improvement upon the rag-rat trick that the dirty little street urchins whisked, at the end of long strings, about the feet and legs of the passers-by. My game amused me greatly and I prosecuted it with vivacity. It would, I think, amuse me still if I dared play it, and I hope that my trick will be imitated ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... had no regrets at departure, and went away with something of the satisfaction of a rat leaving a sinking ship. But with old Hannibal ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... setter, though his coloring was similar. A politely disposed person would have called him a retriever, and his curly back and general appearance might have carried this off, but for his tail, which, instead of being straight and rat-like, was as plumy as the Prince of Wales's feathers, and curled unblushingly over his back, sideways, like a pug's. "It was a good one to wag," his master said, and, apart from the question of high breeding, it was handsome, and Rufus ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... sight of Vienna. It was just a clean sweep. We had eaten up three different armies in succession, and had wiped out four Austrian generals; one of them—a white-haired old chap—was burned alive at Mantua like a rat in a straw mattress. We had conquered peace, and kings were begging, on their knees, for mercy. Could a man have done all that alone? Never! He had the help of God; that's certain! He divided himself up like the five loaves of bread in the Gospel; he planned battles at night and directed ...
— Folk-Tales of Napoleon - The Napoleon of the People; Napoleonder • Honore de Balzac and Alexander Amphiteatrof
... says Heiney, gettin' excited. "Ze poison for ze r-r-rat. I keep heem in one tin can, same as ze salt. I am what you call intoxicate. I make ze mistak'. Ah, diable! Deux, trois—t'ree hundred guests are zere. Zey eat ze soup. Zen come by me ze maitre ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... blond face flushed scarlet at this statement. He looked at the dripping little brown rat beside him, and returned impulsively, "I'd rather play with you than ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... might stay asleep a minute," he muttered in an injured voice. "Now, don't you speak a single word and I'll tell you all about it," after a long pause, in which they heard nothing but a rat nibbling ...
— The Adventures of Joel Pepper • Margaret Sidney
... lady Feng; so that, unmindful of distinguishing black from white, he as soon as that person arrived in front of him, speedily clasped her in his embrace, like a ravenous tiger pouncing upon its prey, or a cat clawing a rat, and cried: "My darling sister, you have made me wait till I'm ready ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... nunnery still more isolated and miserable than that in which she had dragged out twenty years of her broken life. Here she remained for seven years, until, on the Tsar's death, an even worse fate befell her. She was then, by Catherine's orders, taken from the convent, and flung into the most loathsome, rat-infested dungeon of the fortress of Schlussenberg, where she remained for two years of ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... fact attested by the quantity of their dung, which, as in the case of the living hyaena, is of nearly the same composition as bone, and almost as durable. In the cave were found the remains of the ox, young elephant, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, horse, bear, wolf, hare, water-rat, and several birds. All the bones have the appearance of having been broken and gnawed by the teeth of the hyaenas; and they occur confusedly mixed in loam or mud, or dispersed through a crust of stalagmite which covers it. In these and many other cases it is supposed ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... ago. They gave you a proof of it, the night of the fancy ball; that ugly cut on your arm was the beginning. Ever since, they have had one eye open all the time. They had begun to feel easier, when all of a sudden, yesterday, ma foi, they began to smell a rat!" ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... Ranees. Then the nurse took the hundred and one little innocent children—the hundred little boys and the one little girl—and threw them behind the palace on the dust-heap, close to some large rat-holes; and after that, she and the twelve Ranees placed a very large stone in each of the babies' cradles, and said to Guzra Bai, "Oh, you evil witch in disguise, do not hope any longer to impose by your arts on the Rajah's credulity. ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... once, in the very strangest place, in the very strangest way, Bobby came upon Auld Jock. A rat scurrying out from a foul and narrow passage that gave to the rear of the White Hart Inn, pointed the little dog to a nook hitherto undiscovered by his curious nose. Hidden away between the noisy tavern and the grim, island crag was the old cock-fighting pit of a ruder day. There, ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... applaud, and schoolmasters usher him into the polite world, and English scholars carry on the jest, while Horne Tooke's genuine anatomy of our native tongue is laid on the shelf. Can it be that our politicians smell a rat in the Member for Old Sarum? That our clergy do not relish Parson Horne? That the world at large are alarmed at acuteness and originality greater than their own? What has all this to do with the formation of the English language or with the ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... which produces little or no hydrochloric acid, the process of putrefaction continues all the way through the alimentary canal, giving rise to the same poisonous substances which are present in the putrefying carcass of a dead rat or any other dead animal, and produces intestinal or alimentary toxemia with the multitude of mischiefs which grow out of this condition, among which may be mentioned all sorts of skin troubles, high blood-pressure, apoplexy, ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Seventh Annual Meeting • Various
... part of the season, I used to make an imitation mouse of a piece of musk-rat fur. This is a killing bait for trolling either for black bass or maskilonge—as the season advances, a red and white rag, or a small green-frog. But the best bait for the larger fish, such as salmon-trout and maskilonge, is a piece ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland
... boards. The place was abominably dusty: the striped yellow curtains had lost half their rings and drooped askew from their soiled vallances. Across one of the wall-panels ran an ugly scar. A smell of rat pervaded the air. The present occupiers had no use for a room so obviously unsuitable to games of chance, as they understood chance: and I doubt if a servant entered it once a month. Gervase had ordered candles and a fire: but the ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... if you have ever seen one of the rat-hunts. It is a curious sight, especially in a fodder-loft. The man and dog climbing up ladders and running along beams with marvellous assurance and agility, the dog sniffing every hole in the wall, playing the ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... Arvid Horn; yield thee to our unconquerable nozzle," came the summons from the yacht; "yield thee, or I will drown you out like a rat in a cheese-press!" ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... lion in Lincoln. He hated unfairness, and at once resented it. He suddenly put forth his Samson-like strength, grabbed the champion of the Clary Grove Boys by the throat, and, lifting him from the ground, held him at arm's length and shook him as a dog shakes a rat. Then he flung him to the ground, and, facing the amazed and yelling crowd, he cried: "You cowards! You know I don't want to fight; but if you try any such games, I'll tackle the whole lot of ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... Round this shoulder of the house, and into the main yard (that turn'd churlishly toward the hillside), the wind howled like a beast in pain. I climb'd off Molly, and pressing my hat down on my head, struck a loud rat-tat ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch
... man had hurried to Sullivan, and, seizing him in his great hands, shook the drowsy one like a rat, cursing and beating a goodly share of warmth back into him. Then he dragged the listless burden to the canoe and forced him to a seat ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... into his hands, that he might see with his own eyes the calamity which had befallen the watch that had been destined to minister such consolation to his time- inquiring mind, he took me gingerly, and stared at me as if I had been a toad or a dead rat. ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... I have to give orders about my new bridle and saddle-cloth, and speak to the rat-catcher about his dogs: Miss Grey must ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... popped from his head as he struggled furiously to tear away the steel-sinewed hand that had stopped off his breath. Death was staring him in the face, and he could not cry out. His strength left suddenly as the fingers dug in deeper, and Eddie shook him as he would a rat. In a surprisingly short time he had slumped to the floor, and not until his squirmings ceased did Eddie ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... scuttle her. Moreover, I am a very meek and lowly individual on board this ship. There's a lot of difference between being in supreme command with all kinds of authority to bolster you up and being a rat in a trap as I am now. Up in Copperhead Camp I was a nabob, here I'm a nobody. Up there I was the absolute boss of five or six hundred men,—I won't say I could boss the women,—and I made 'em all walk chalk without once losing step. There were murderers and crooks, blacklegs ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... there is loose fodder. The drippings from the animals falling on the fodder render it poisonous and dangerous to animal life if eaten. Familiarity with its use has in many instances tended to breed contempt for its potency as a poison. Rat poisons often contain arsenic. The excessive use of arsenic as a tonic, or of "condition powders" containing arsenic, has been the means of poisoning many animals. This is the common poison used by malicious persons with criminal intent. The poison may also be absorbed through wounds ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... because his poverty had brought him to live in a hay- loft. This character he assumed, and no doubt it fitted him better than either the English cobbler or the German doctor; besides, as he said, sham court costume is always the easiest to contrive: but Cherry was by no means prepared to find the Rat-like poet the secret admirer of a daughter of the Serene Highness who ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the signs of poverty; but the angel of mercy was too 'cute' to be taken in; so he walked up stairs. Every thing presenting there the same aspect of abject poverty that prevailed below, the angel of mercy looked around him, and discovered a ladder leading to the garret. The angel of mercy "smelt a rat," and mounted the ladder. In the garret he found half a cord of wood, and any quantity of goodies for the table. Another denouement and tableau. Moral: as before. If the story has taught me any thing, it ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... before referred to—was the black background and cellar of the institution. Like a rat, he came from the coal heap or a hidden corner unawares and was gone into further darkness before you could turn to learn the cause of the noise he made. His shadowy participation in home management contributed to the family's progress as ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... the preachers encourage such idees and talk about Adam and Eve being allegories. As a result, the graveyard has become the slowest place in town. You simply can't ha'nt anything around here. A man hears a groan in his room and he gets up and closes the shutters tighter, or throws a shoe at a rat, or swears at the wind in the chimney. A few sperrits were hanging around when I was first dead, but they were complaining very bad about the hard times. There used to be plenty of good society in the burying-ground, ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... and aft our schoolroom was dark, and the distance between decks so narrowed that we could only explore those extremes of the hold by going on hands and knees—with the chance, too, of starting some big rat, an old grey navigator, perhaps, who, believing firmly in "Don't give up the ship!" could not get over his surprise at seeing his once rolling and well-stored residence now stationary, and furnishing no better victuals than book-leaves, chalk, and sometimes the crumbs of a ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... like a terrier that suddenly discerns a large and promising rat hole. "Come through," ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... and Sara, consequently, at home by three o'clock, when she stood, armed with a pattern and some formidable- looking shears, about to attack a light gray pair of these, when there came a quick little "rat-tat-tat" at ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... lecturer to the great ladder of animal life, beginning low down in molluscs and feeble sea creatures, then up rung by rung through reptiles and fishes, till at last we came to a kangaroo-rat, a creature which brought forth its young alive, the direct ancestor of all mammals, and presumably, therefore, of everyone in the audience. ("No, no," from a sceptical student in the back row.) If the young gentleman in the red tie who cried "No, no," and who presumably ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... muddying the water, and away she went in a rage. The guardian of the well was enraged, so he wished her three evil wishes, as a punishment for her wickedness. He wished that she should become three times as ugly as she was, that a dead rat should fall from her mouth whenever she laughed, and that the fox-tail grass might spring up in the footsteps wherever she trod. So it was. From that day the wicked girl was called Maiden Foxtail, and very much ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends; Scandinavian • Various
... in these parts, sir, you must know, called Tom Connor, and he had a cat that was equal to any dozen of rat-traps, and he was proud of the baste, and with rayson; for she was worth her weight in goold to him in saving his sacks of meal from the thievery of the rats and mice; for Tom was an extensive dealer in corn, and influenced ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... to claim his walk, so I will go and find out about the card," he says, and blesses that little rat of a bell-boy ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... set very finely on a hill; the old church is disused, or used, rather, only for a Sunday school. Upon Sunday scholars, from a Norman wall, looks down a hideous stone corbel. A clown's face stretches a devil's mouth wide open with hands like rat's paws; the sharp teeth grin like rat's teeth; perhaps in the Sunday school they make ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... the stable he was as wet as a "drowned rat," but he looked well satisfied, and the old trainer, after he had talked with him a few minutes, was ...
— Bred In The Bone - 1908 • Thomas Nelson Page
... nothing else left, one pull'd up a wooden Image of the Virgin Mary, rotten, and rat-eaten, and embracing it in his Arms, try'd to swim ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... disarmed in this manner, they were obliged to fly; and they retreated with the loss of a great part of their forces. Sethon, when he returned home, ordered a statue of himself to be set up in the temple of Vulcan, holding in his right hand a rat, and these words to be inscribed thereon:—LET THE MAN WHO BEHOLDS ME LEARN TO REVERENCE ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... whose mean and truculent face contrasted forcibly with those about him pushed forward and stood before the captain, who gave him a comprehensive glance, noting not only the mean and bad face, but the wiry and well-knit figure, and the eyes quick and watchful as a rat's. ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... an effort to throw Ginger off, was shaking his head, as a terrier would in killing a rat. ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Rockies • Frank Gee Patchin
... in passion, do you, Hermann?" I said cheerily. "The passion of fear will make a cornered rat courageous. Falk's in a corner. He will take her off your hands in one thin frock just as she came to you. And after ten years' service it isn't a bad ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... complexion, and wore heavy gray whiskers, trimmed with the utmost nicety, and meeting under a sharp, narrow chin. His face was large, his jaws wide, and his nose pointed and prominent, but his mouth was small and gathered in at the corners like a rat's; and, as if to add to the rat resemblance, its puny, white teeth seemed borrowed from that animal. There was a stately precision in his manner and a stealthy softness in his tread not often seen in combination, which ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... blink; Gavroche had just managed to ignite one of those bits of cord dipped in resin which are called cellar rats. The cellar rat, which emitted more smoke than light, rendered the interior of the ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... a little proud of her collection of jewels, although she seldom wore anything but her pearls. She had left it when she went abroad, in the safe deposit vault, and she sent a quick terrified glance in the coffer's direction like that of a cornered rat. ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... do smaller dogs, which are probably descended from jackals. When a piece of brown biscuit is offered to a terrier of mine and she is not hungry (and I have heard of similar instances), she first tosses it about and worries it, as if it were a rat or other prey; she then repeatedly rolls on it precisely as if it were a piece of carrion, and at last eats it. It would appear that an imaginary relish has to be given to the distasteful morsel; and to effect this the dog acts in his habitual ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... by the collar of his coat and the seat of his breeches, and shook him as a mastiff would a rat. ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... next day that Robert Fairfax saw him in his cell. The man's face was ashen with coward's terror. He was like a caught rat ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... vile submission! Alla stoccata carries it away. [Draws.] Tybalt, you rat-catcher, will ...
— Romeo and Juliet • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... and shook Roger like a rat, and finally flung him into the center of the muddy road. "Help! help!" screamed the cook, at the full pitch of his voice. "Help! a thief, a thief! ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... same Starke wished to know whither Nevins had gone, and whether anything new had started him. This time no horse or mule had disappeared, but the tracks of two quadrupeds were found on the Mesa coming from "Rat Hell," as Captain Post, who had done time in Libby, named the gambling ranch outside the reservation—to a point within one hundred yards of the corral, and thence bore away southward straight as the flight of the crow. Two reprobates in the captain's company ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... on As You Like It, iii. 2. "I was never so be-rhymed since Pythagoras's time that I was an Irish rat." A short time ago the subject of "rhyming rats to death" was discussed anew ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... once or twice, but only to find the man inscrutable. Yet he was by no means taciturn; but seemed, as his warpaint of soot and vermilion wore thinner, to thaw into what (for an Indian) might pass for geniality. After a successful rat-hunt he would even grow loquacious, seating himself on the bank and jabbering while he skinned his spoils, using for the most part a jargon of broken French (in which he was fluent) and native words of which Barboux understood very few and ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... can get him to stay will you stay too, Jombateeste? I don't like to see a rat leaving a ship; the ship's sure to sink, if he does. How do you suppose I'm going to run Lion's Head without you to throw down hay to the horses? It will be ruin to me, sure, Jombateeste. All the guests know how you play on the pitchfork out there, and ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... were supplied, and then lo! he had no money to pay for them. "I'll owe you till I come back from sea, my bo," said he coolly. On this the landlord collared him, and David shook him off into the road, much as a terrier throws a rat from him; then there was a row, and a naval officer, who was cruising about for hands, came up and heard it. There was nothing at all unseamanlike in David's conduct, and the gentleman took a favourable view ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... at the sight of his nephew's name in the daily journals; a novel sentiment of social indignation was expressed by his crying out, at the next request for money: 'Money to prime you to turn the country into a rat-hole? Not a square inch of Pennsylvanian paper-bonds! What right have you to be lecturing and orationing? You've no knowledge. All you've got is your instincts, and that you show in your readiness to exhibit them like a monkey. You ought to be turned inside out ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... chunk of a man walked into a shipping office on the East Side, and inquired for the Manager of the Line. He had kindly blue eyes, a stub nose, and a mouth that shut to like a rat-trap, and stayed shut. Under his chin hung a pair of half-moon whiskers which framed his weather-beaten face as a spike ...
— A List To Starboard - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... dog made no attempt to move, and Sunny began to lose patience. "Come along, pups," he cried, with increasing force. "Come on, you miser'ble rat. Don't stan' ther' waggin' your fool tail like a whisk-broom. Say, you yaller cur, I'll—" He started to fetch the creature, but in a twinkling it had fled, to the accompaniment of a ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... deluging me with an ocean of Kirschenwaesser, which he poured in a continuous flood, from one of the long-necked bottles that stood him instead of an arm. My agony was at length insufferable, and I awoke just in time to perceive that a rat had run off with the lighted candle from the stand, but not in season to prevent his making his escape with it through the hole, Very soon a strong, suffocating odor assailed my nostrils; the ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... face them. Meet your death! Escape is—impossible! Impossible! They are watching you like a rat. In a moment they know you can stand this strain no longer! Face them, I say! Show ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... wet as a drowned rat," his sister said. "Come on up and get some dry clothes, Ford. I'm sure you're awful kind, Mrs. Gallup. I will telephone for the doctor ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... a test was not hard to find in the form of a spiny rat that he dug out of a decayed stump and holding the rodent in one hand he pricked the tender skin with the point of the arrow. The rat struggled and squeaked, but when he released it a few minutes later it scurried to cover. Choflo's treachery ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... Gold Dust maverick, with the Ramblin' Kid swaying uncertainly on her back, had appeared on the track for the two-mile run, the tout, his eyes like those of a harried rat, sneaked out of the crowd in front of the book-makers' booths and hurried toward the Santa Fe railroad yards. An hour later he slipped into an empty freight car—part of a train headed for the West—and Eagle Butte saw ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman
... hood of a Beguine, And mine was the foot to falter; Three cowled monks, rat-eyed, were seen; The Cross was of bones ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... muscular, and its bony hands were armed with eleven fingers each, upon which were nails or claws shaped like fish hooks and keen as razors. This boogaboo had skinny wings like a huge bat, and at the end of its rat-like tail was a sting more deadly than the ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... of," said Jack, carelessly; "a rat, I believe, gave me three or four flaps with its tail, but I soon ...
— The Story of Jack and the Giants • Anonymous
... his reply, "the woman will give the whole thing to the newspapers. They have smelled a rat so long they would pay well for a tip. She has all the documents. So if you want to swing and ruin everybody concerned, ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... dry-rot Were filled with gruesome visitants in wax, Inhuman, hushed, ghastly with Painted Eyes), I wandered; and no living soul Was nearer than the pay-box; and I stared Upon them staring—staring. Till at last, Three sets of rafters from the streets, I strayed upon a mildewed, rat-run room, With the two Dancers, horrible and obscene, Guarding the door: and there, in a bedroom-set, Behind a fence of faded crimson cords, With an aspect of frills And dimities and dishonoured privacy That made you hanker and hesitate ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... at the door and Mike walked in. He was not alone. Those near enough to see, saw that he was accompanied by Jellicoe's clock-work rat, which moved rapidly over the floor in the ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... "it ur a branch made by the rain: we're a follerin it down; an' thurfor must kum to the river jest whur we want to git. Oncest thur, we'll soon find our way, I reck'n. Wagh! how the durned rain kums down! It 'ud drown a muss-rat. Wagh!" ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... doorway, blinking in the sun, lay a good-looking fox terrier. His nose was laid between his paws, and within two yards of that nose a large brown rat disported itself with a crust ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... him as a terrier shakes a rat, and seemed to shake things off him—among others a revolver which described a circle in the air and fell heavily on the ground, where the concussion discharged ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... key-hole and made off; for within, it was supposed, the plague lay ambushed like a basilisk, ready to flow forth and spread blain and pustule through the city. What a terrible next-door neighbour for superstitious citizens! A rat scampering within would send a shudder through the stoutest heart. Here, if you like, was a sanitary parable, addressed by our uncleanly ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... harboring malice, cut large pieces of flesh from the body of the kangaroo and fed him. He greedily devoured all that was offered, and wagged his long, rat-like tail in satisfaction. When, however, he had nearly demolished one fore-quarter of our prize, he walked a short distance from the fire and renewed his howling, commencing on a low key, and gradually ascending, until the yells could ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... Berkeley, he had known in youth the bitterness of poverty and dependence. Afterward he wrote himself into influence with the Tory ministry, and was promised a bishopric, but was put off with the deanery of St. Patrick's, and retired to Ireland to "die like a poisoned rat in a hole." His life was made tragical by the forecast of the madness which finally overtook him. "The stage darkened," said Scott, "ere the curtain fell." Insanity {190} deepened into idiocy and a hideous silence, and for three years before his death he ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... "Alice!" brought the prompt response, "Here I is. Jus' push de gate down and come on in." When a little rat terrier ran barking out of the house to challenge the visitor, Alice hobbled to the door. "Come back here and be-have yourself" she addressed the dog, and turning to the interviewer, she said: "Lady, ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... Skipper Tommy and the twins at the Rat Hole—the skipper established in comfort by the stove, a cup of tea at his hand, his stockinged feet put up to warm: the twins sitting close, both grinning broadly, each finely alert to anticipate the old man's wants, who now had acquired ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... accounts of the moor-hen, flapper, coot, water-rail, dab-chick, and sand-piper, to say nothing of rats in abundance, and an otter now and then. If you crept upon the islet very quietly, you could hear the rats before you saw them. Carefully listening to the sounds, you frequently discovered the rat himself, generally on the stump of some old tree, or on the bare part of the bank overhanging the water. There he would be, sitting upon his hind-legs, holding in his fore-feet the root of a bulrush, and champing away with his sharp teeth ...
— A Vanished Hand • Sarah Doudney
... frightened when the White Thing began to roll so fast. He wondered if it would ever stop, when—Bump! Splash!—he found he was in the water, and something big with a smooth coat was close beside him. It was a kind water-rat who had seen the poor little ...
— The Story of the Three Goblins • Mabel G. Taggart
... a time a fat, sleek Rat was caught in a shower of rain, and being far from shelter he set to work and soon dug a nice hole in the ground, in which he sat as dry as a bone while the raindrops splashed outside, making little ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... all go ahead and I'll go quiet the distractions. I suppose Mrs. Hummins has seen another rat in the dairy. No—thank'ee—I like to kill my own rats myself and then I know ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... the usual pink rat sort of madness. The thing's obvious," he said, shrugging his shoulders. It was not obvious to her; he had put her into a maelstrom of puzzles, but she did not tell him so. She preferred to think it out for herself. But suddenly she coupled ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... eyes, sir, daren't look me in the face and tell me you weren't. I saw you there myself. And I know you found in the books what you wanted; for you paid the clerk an extravagant fee. ... What's that? you rat, don't try to interrupt me. Don't try to bully me. It never succeeds. Montague Nevitt, I tell you, I WON'T be bullied." And the great Q.C. put his foot down on the path with an elephantine solidity that ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... frenzy he dashed his head and body relentlessly against the unyielding bars of the cage. He fell back crushed and bleeding, foaming at the mouth with a bloody froth, and making inarticulate beast noises in his throat. Then, as the madness again took hold of him, shaking him as a terrier shakes a rat, he flung himself once more at the bars, and, after another fearful paroxysm, fell back inert upon the floor. For hours he lay exhausted, but wildly restless, too spent to struggle and too demented and tortured ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... drop it right there," said his father, in a disgusted tone. "When you come to finding something to like in that rat, I surrender." ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... huge gray rat scuttled across the floor, startling the boys so that they almost cried out. Little by little their courage returned, however, and they advanced a few steps. They listened intently, but no sound came to their ears. Hugh's flashlight revealed the stairs leading to the first floor ...
— Bob Cook and the German Spy • Tomlinson, Paul Greene
... old Water-rat put his head out of his hole. He had bright beady eyes and stiff grey whiskers and his tail was like a long bit of black india-rubber. The little ducks were swimming about in the pond, looking just like a lot of yellow canaries, and their mother, ...
— The Happy Prince and Other Tales • Oscar Wilde
... bowing and smiling, a sneer is on his face. And when he speaks to the horse his voice is harsh and mean. He holds an unlighted cigar in his mouth as a terrier might hold a loathed rat; working the muscles of his lips at times viciously but saying nothing. The soft, black hat of his youthful days is replaced by a high, stiff, squarely sawed felt hat which he imagines gives him great dignity. His clothes ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... do the predatory Wasps; he accepts it as hazard presents it to him. Among his finds there are little creatures, such as the Shrew-mouse; animals of medium size, such as the Field-mouse; and enormous beasts, such as the Mole, the Sewer-rat and the Snake, any of which exceeds the powers of excavation of a single grave-digger. In the majority of cases transportation is impossible, so disproportioned is the burden to the motive-power. A slight displacement, caused ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... a club, which we called the Cock and Spur, and had a rat-pit and cock-fights in the cellar, on which occasions we invited out young actors from the Boston Museum and Howard Athenaeum stock companies. These in turn pressed us with invitations to similar festivities of ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... dog of Chihuahua and this is, perhaps, the smallest of all canine creatures. Full-grown specimens have been seen, whose dimensions did not exceed those of the common rat; and a singular fact, well authenticated, is, that this dog, when transported from Chihuahua to any other place—even to the city of Mexico itself— invariably becomes larger, or degenerates, as the Mexicans have it! There is also in Mexico a hairless dog. It ...
— Quadrupeds, What They Are and Where Found - A Book of Zoology for Boys • Mayne Reid
... influence egging on the Iroquois, the treachery of the Huron chief, The Rat, lashed the vengeance {165} of the Five Nations to a fury. He had come down to Fort Frontenac to aid the French. He was told that the French had again arranged peace with the Iroquois, and deputies were even now on their way ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... harbors: Dubrovnik, Dugi Rat, Omisalj, Ploce, Pula, Rijeka, Sibenik, Split, Vukovar (inland ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... is said to be tender and toothsome, but that overpowering smell of musk proved too much for our determination. You may break, you may shatter the rat if you will, but the scent of the musk-rose will cling to it still. There is a limit to every one's scientific research, and, personally, until insistent hunger gnaws at my vitals and starvation looms round the edge of the next iceberg, I draw the ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... Quick! quick! The police are here! The commissary is asking for you. Quick! Get away, or you'll be caught like a rat in a trap. You know the way. Leave ...
— The White Lie • William Le Queux
... Pontiac, whose name is as prominent in the history of the past as the names of the Onondaga Garangula, the Huron Kondiaronk (Rat), the Mohawk Thayendenagea (Brant), and the Shawanoese Tecumseh. He was the son of an Ottawa chief and an Ojibway mother, and had a high reputation and large influence among the {271} tribes of the ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... was the silver, slimy trace of slugs in all directions; I could fancy, too, the hundred other creeping things that were about. As the match died out, a noise among the stones near the wall caused me hastily to strike another, just in time to see a large rat whisk into its hole. ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... to Pagan poets and philosophers. The people were so ignorant, and such implicit believers, that it could be done with security. But now the case is altered. The people are beginning to "smell a rat." It dawns upon them that if so many fine things were said by those old Pagans—not to mention the still more ancient teaching of India and Egypt—Christianity can hardly merit such epithets as "unique" and "wonderful." Accordingly it is becoming the fashion in clerical circles to avoid ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... course, you do not know where to find a wife between the time the hawk stoops and the rat squeaks in its claws. How should you who have never thought of the matter? Also," he continued, with a smile, "it is well that you have not thought of it, since she whom I shall give to you could not live in the second hut in your kraal and call another 'Inkosikazi' ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... the ship and find me gone they'll telegraph to London," said the old man. "I won't be caught like a rat in a trap." ...
— The Skipper's Wooing, and The Brown Man's Servant • W. W. Jacobs
... he had left Cloudsdale, for he never passed the house on any of his numerous expeditions without running in for ten minutes' chat, so that the girls were getting accustomed to see his head appear at the window as they sat at work, or to hear the loud rat-tat on the door which heralded his coming. They soon had practical demonstration of his "managing powers," for more than once, after definitely making up their minds that nothing would induce them to stir from the house, they found themselves meekly putting on hats and jackets to join a tobogganing ...
— Sisters Three • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... that there was a rat in the nursery, and thus he forgot to tell her the wonderful news. It did not much matter, for Judy was only three and she would not have understood. But Punch was five; and he knew that going to England would be much nicer than a trip ...
— Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, Book II • Rudyard Kipling
... am a Flemyng, what for all that Although I wyll be dronken other whyles as a rat. ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... that you are right. You know how to make yourself respected, I believe. But many women like to be beaten. I know that I should love the man who could beat me. But he would have to fight with me first. My husband is as timid as a Norway rat. You don't see him here often." Gudrid had never seen him. "He comes when I send ...
— Gudrid the Fair - A Tale of the Discovery of America • Maurice Hewlett
... that the lady was a person of unblemished reputation, and that she was placed in a false position through no fault of her own. In plain English, she was divorced. Ah, my dear (to speak in the vivid language of the people), do you smell a rat? ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... rabbit-hutch, they are as useless as they are harmless. The usual ornament of an animal's hind quarters is denied them; and were it not for this fact, and also for their difference in colour, the Shaksperean locution, "a rat without a tail," would designate them ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... the corporation as he sat Looking little though wondrous fat; Nor brighter was his eye, nor moister Than a too-long-opened oyster, Save when at noon his paunch grew mutinous For a plate of turtle green and glutinous), "Only a scraping of shoes on the mat Anything like the sound of a rat Slakes my heart ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... grew angry, and caught Theseus round the neck, and shook him as a mastiff shakes a rat; but he could not shake ...
— The Heroes • Charles Kingsley
... being no particular detriment to the crab, would be but slightly affected by natural selection, though open to the cumulative effects of disuse. The disused but better protected eyes of the blind cave-rat are still "of large size" (Origin of Species, ...
— Are the Effects of Use and Disuse Inherited? - An Examination of the View Held by Spencer and Darwin • William Platt Ball
... adresse—c'est Leycesster Sqvare, Et pour reference j'espere Que la statue de Shakespeare vous suffira,' 'Ah! connais-tu ma mie, La fille du sergent?' 'Si; Mais elle est morte comme un rat!' ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... was as much at home in water as an otter or a musk-rat. Indeed he had been known among his playmates in the old country as the "Water-rat." When, therefore, he plunged into the river, as described, he took care to hold his breath as if for a long dive, and drifted with the current a considerable distance as motionless ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne
... a rat-tat sounded from without, and, having advised Lilian to lock the door, Mrs. Wade crossed to the other room. ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... stick in the wall," said Betty, contemptuously. "Find you the meat, and I'll find the deceit: for he is as poor as a rat into the bargain. Nay, nay, God Almighty will never have the heart to burn us two for such a trifle. Why 't is no more than cheating a froward child ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... breeding experiments. Tame rats, for instance, are very docile; their offspring can be handled without a bit of trouble. The wild rat, on the other hand, is not at ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... all the people were, Mr. Mouse picked up his feet and ran down a rat hole; but Miss Pussy Cat sat down by the side of the road to eat a little. She was sitting there, spreading out all her good country sausage and good country ham and such things, when a town cat came prowling ...
— Tell Me Another Story - The Book of Story Programs • Carolyn Sherwin Bailey
... point about it, too. If this outsider who has taken on the job for them should really turn out to be Jocelyn Thew, I'd have banked on his working the scheme from Chicago. He knows the back ways of the city, or rather he used to, like a rat. Gee, it would be a queer thing if after all these years one were to get the bracelets ...
— The Box with Broken Seals • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... like a drowned rat." Kirkwood eyed him sheepishly. "I suppose you're the man who threw me that line? I'll have to wait till my head clears up before I can ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... confess, but to me more serious than L's and sky-scrapers; yes, than love. Mine is an infinite labor: first to shape the true tool, and then to master the material! I grant you I may die any day like a rat on a housetop, with only a bundle of musty papers, the tags of broken conversations, and one or two dead, distorted nerves. That is our common risk. But I shall accomplish as much of the road as God permits the snail, and I shall have moulded something; life will have justified ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... I had gone through I should still not succeed in carrying my prize into port. Had I been followed by the curse of some revengeful old witch I could scarcely have been compelled to encounter more difficulties and mishaps; such a witch as Shakespeare describes as sailing in a sieve, and like a rat without ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... shut one's eyes, but one can't do away with one's nose!" persisted Miss Barton. "There was the most horrible and peculiar and objectionable odour in the hall yesterday morning, all the time I was painting. I came to the conclusion that a rat must have died recently behind the panelling. Then Mrs. Marsden came in with some milk-cans, and she raised a lid from a big pot close to where I was sitting. What do you think was inside? Twelve pounds of beef that ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... Instead of the idea being horrid, we were glad to know that "necessity is the mother of invention," and that the idea had originated in the mind of genius. We at once acted upon the information, and started out rat hunting; but we couldn't find any rats. Presently we came to an old outhouse that seemed to be a natural harbor for this kind of vermin. The house was quickly torn down and out jumped an old residenter, who was old and gray. I suppose that he had been chased before. But we had ...
— "Co. Aytch" - Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment - or, A Side Show of the Big Show • Sam R. Watkins
... newes, that thou com'st in so bluntly? Rat. Bad news my Lord, Mourton is fled to Richmond, And Buckingham backt with the hardy Welshmen Is in the field, and still his ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... Bingo spent in our shanty, living the life of a blubbery, fat, well-meaning, ill-doing puppy; gorging himself with food and growing bigger and clumsier each day. Even sad experience failed to teach him that he must keep his nose out of the rat trap. His most friendly overtures to the cat were wholly misunderstood and resulted only in an armed neutrality that varied by occasional reigns of terror, continued to the end; which came when Bingo, who early showed a mind of his own, got a notion for sleeping at the barn ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton
... produced of his pace,—how he had beaten that horse, giving him two pounds; how he had been beaten by that, but only on a mile course; the Leger distance was just the thing for Prime Minister; how by a lucky chance that marvellous quick rat of a thing that had won the Derby had not been entered for the autumn race; how Coalheaver was known to have had bad feet. "He's a stout 'orse, no doubt,—is the 'Eaver," said Mr. Pook, "and that's why the betting-men have stuck to him. But he'll be nowhere on Wednesday. They're ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... on the quarters, his fore feet about the horns, and drew the head backward with such force as to break the back of the animal. On another occasion the same hunter saw a lion who took a heifer in his mouth, and though its legs trailed on the ground, he carried it off as a cat would a rat, and jumped across a wide ditch without difficulty. These accounts of the lion's strength were articles of faith with James Rounders. He had been told that the royal Bengal tiger of Asia was the equal in strength, if not the superior, of the African ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... man's wrist protruding from holes in the cliff into which they were driven. Es-sat's four handlike members and his long, sinuous tail permitted him to move with consummate ease whither he chose—a gigantic rat upon a mighty wall. As he progressed upon his way he avoided the cave mouths, passing either above or below those that ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... some four feet above the smooth grass below, he sprang down. Scarcely had he touched the ground when a man, leaping suddenly out of a thick clump of bushes near that side of the house, caught him in a savage grip and shook him with all the fury of an enraged mastiff shaking a rat. Taken thus unawares, and rendered almost breathless by the swiftness of the attack, Clifford struggled in the grasp of his assailant and fought with him desperately for a moment without any idea of his identity,—then as by a dexterous twist of body he managed to partially extricate himself, ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... the ship's cat coming across the deckload toward him, in his yellow eyes a singularly pleased expression and in his mouth a singularly large rat. ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... "The Rat Catcher then said 'Look behind.' I looked behind, and there on the seat was strapped a larger cake. This contained 145 live ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 24, 1920 • Various
... abut on pitchy darkness! I wonder why it is not enough that these distrustful genii stand agape at one's dreams all night, but there must also be round open portholes, high in the wall, suggestive, when a mouse or rat is heard behind the wainscot, of a somebody scraping the wall with his toes, in his endeavours to reach one of these portholes and look in! I wonder why the faggots are so constructed, as to know of no effect but an agony of heat when they are lighted and replenished, and an agony ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... ants, musquitoes, nor any of the tormenting insects so common in tropical climates; no beast of prey, no destructive worm nor serpent; even the scorpion (of which a small sort is to be met with) here loses its poison. The only plague of this kind is a large rat, which does much mischief in the fields, and sometimes even bites the Tahaitians ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... and purges for the use of poorer neighbors. The daily business of this good lady was to scold the maids, collect eggs, feed the turkeys and assist at all lyings-in that happened within the parish. Alas! this being is no more seen, and the race is, like that of her pug dog and the black rat, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... from it all at the last moment. Presently, however, he was aware that the Corn-chandler had seated himself on the other side of the chiffonier, puffing, and panting with heat, and indignation,—where he was presently joined by another individual,—a small, rat-eyed man, who bid Mr. Grimes a ...
— The Money Moon - A Romance • Jeffery Farnol
... gross and barbarous composition, which would not be supported by the lowest populace in France and Italy. Hamlet goes mad in the second act, Ophelia in the third; he takes the father of his mistress for a rat, and runs him through the body. In despair, the heroine drowns herself. Her grave is dug on the stage, while the grave-diggers enter into a conversation suitable (!) to such low wretches, and play, as it were, with dead men's bones! Hamlet ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 552, June 16, 1832 • Various
... feeling his pocket, "what does the rogue want with his friendship? I'm as poor as a rat. Who is he?" ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... me to quit," he muttered. "I'd be a blooming jackass to waste any more time here. I'll have to work it naturally, though, or Lynch will smell a rat." ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... old mouse, or rat—the rabbis of Talmud have not yet agreed concerning the species—perceiving by this perfume that this shrew-mouse was appointed to guard the grain of Gargantua, and had been sprinkled with virtues, invested with full powers, and armed at all points, was alarmed lest ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... time to get out of the ship, you rat," Pyotr Stepanovitch was thinking as he went out into the street. "Well, if that 'imperial intellect' inquires so confidently of the day and the hour and thanks me so respectfully for the information I ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... but life was sweet to him, and to die like that—like a drowned rat in a hole—to be able to do nothing but wait for that swift and sure oncoming death! He reeled against the damp rock wall, and for a moment sea and sky and prisoning headlands and white-lined tide whirled ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... no difference; but I should rather make a struggle for my life before I die, than be drowned like a rat in a hole." ...
— With Cochrane the Dauntless • George Alfred Henty
... longer than me, so I suppose I mustn't object to the order of precedence." She looked at him mockingly, then, with a quick, fierce movement, she took his face between her hands. And an intelligent and bewhiskered old water rat regarded the subsequent proceedings with ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... hardly a man as 'ud speak civil to each other, and the wimmen was a'most as bad. Cats and dogs and such-like began to act as if the place belonged to 'em, and seven people stopped Mr. Bunnett one day to tell 'im that Joe Parsons 'ad been putting down rat-poison and killed five little baby ...
— Ship's Company, The Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... scampered and scurried now behind the wainscoting as though conscious of their release. "Even the rats are glad," Maggie thought to herself. In the uncertain candle-light the fancy seized her that one rat, a very large one, had crept out from his hole, crawled on to the bed, and now sat on the sheet looking at her father. It would be a horrible thing did the rat walk across her father's beard, and yet for her life she could not move. She waited, fascinated. She fancied that the beard ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... again; for although the fellow had probably not understood a single word of what Jose had said, he had sense enough to know that the two ruffians before him had scuttled the ship, and that if locked up in his pantry again he would probably drown there, like a rat in a trap. His entreaties, how ever, were of course unavailing with two men who knew not the meaning of mercy; there was a Spanish oath or two, the sound of a scuffle, mingled with further cries of distress from the steward, the slamming of a door, the sharp click ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... cat in the garden laying for a rat, There's a boy with a catapult a-laying for the cat, The cat's name is Susan, the boy's name is Jim. And his father round the corner is a-laying ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... others. It is rather exciting wandering about in front of the line, as lights go up every now and then and show a bright white light in the air for a minute or two like a rocket. When one goes up you fall flat and pretend you are a sandbag or a milk-can or a rat. You may meet Fritz on the same job sometimes; I always have a bomb handy to ...
— Letters from France • Isaac Alexander Mack
... Messrs. Omer and Joram. All the mixed mirth and sadness of the story are skilfully drawn into the handling of this portion of it; and, amid wooings and preparations for weddings and church-ringing bells for baptisms, the steadily-going rat-tat of the hammer on the ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... burst my stays all to pieces in saving it from being squeezed out of shape, and now this old brute has made a brandy-bottle of it."—"Oh! oh! my young Miss in disguise," replied the farmer, "I thought I smelt a rat when the Captain left the coach, under pretence of walking up the hill—what, I suppose vou are bound for Gretna, both of ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... gazed at them with intense relish. He realized the joy of a coup. He had never been very important in his own estimation nor that of others. Now he knew what it was to be important. "Yes," he said, gayly; "they say she give her rat poison. They've sent for the ...
— The Shoulders of Atlas - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... a little money," said Mr. Watson, "is just like a cat with a bell around its neck. Every rat knows exactly where it is and what it ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... rutting leopardess, the liver of a forest rat, the tongue of a Baroto bird—these must I have to mix with thy blood to be drunk by thy man when the ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... filled up and useless. We left Delemy's castle in the afternoon, about two or three o'clock, and we went at a pace called by the Arabs el herka[119], over a plain country infested with rats, and the haunts of serpents, our horses continually stumbling over the rat-holes. We were, to the best of my recollection, about four hours going. We found Tomie, an open road, not altogether calculated to form an advantageous commercial establishment. Its situation with respect to the sea being somewhat objectionable. ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... dislocated wrist. But there was no accident. The engine started as smoothly as it had never done before. Mr. and Mrs. Anderson went to the Railway refreshment rooms. There they were informed that no tea was available. A dead rat had been found under one of the tables in the first class refreshment room, and as plague cases had been reported earlier in the week, the station master had ordered the rooms to be closed till they had been thoroughly disinfected. ...
— Indian Ghost Stories - Second Edition • S. Mukerji
... the rats at Harwan, but their conduct was exemplary compared with that of the rats of Rainawari! I had been writing my journal, according to my custom, before going to sleep, and hardly had "lights out" been sounded than a rat went off with my candle, literally from below my very nose. Then, from the inadequately partitioned chamber where the invalid vainly sought repose, came sounds of strife—boots and curses flying—followed by an extraordinary scraping and scuffling. ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... the seaman. "D—n your rat's eyes! none of your—hang thee! fish my top-masts! if the rope was fairly reeved, and the tackle sound, d'ye see"—Mr. Clarke, who was present, began to stare, while the knight assured Ferret, that if he was really able and willing to serve Captain Crowe in ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... falling in love with each other was not a result to justify much surprise. Indeed, there was a special propriety in their doing so. The Shackfords had always been reputable people in the village,—down to Lemuel Shackford, who of course as an old musk-rat. The family attributes of amiability and honesty had skipped him, but they had reappeared in Richard. It was through his foresight and personal energy that the most lucrative branch of the trade had been established. His services entitled him to a future interest in the ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... the spot where a man can pick and choose, so I wiped the shell grit from my drill suit and told myself that I had better accept the berth instead of waiting in expectation of something better turning up. Pierre the Rat, who ran "The Rathole," where penniless seamen and beachcombers lodged, was my creditor, and when Pierre was very solicitous in obtaining employment for one of his boarders, it was a mighty good intimation that the boarder's credit had ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... sun dipped, and ever dipped toward the west, when suddenly a sound afar rekindled her fainting spirits. Listening more attentively, she was assured imagination had not deceived her; it was the faint patter of a horse's hoofs. Nearer it drew; quicker beat her pulses. Moreover, it was the rat-a-tat of galloping. Some one was pursuing the coach on horseback. Impatient to glance behind, she only refrained ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... completed, being interrupted by a thundering rat-tat-tat at the front door, followed by a pealing at the bell, which indicated that the visitor was manfully following the printed injunction to "Ring also." The door was opened and a man's voice was heard in the hall-a loud, confident voice, at ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... only in memory. That part of the county seat is a ghost town. Timbermen and loggers gather no more for revelry at the riverfront saloon. And should you ask the reason, the old river rat will answer with a slow-breaking smile, "See off yonder—locks and dams! Can't run the logs ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... the horse again spoke to the boy, and said: "Wa-ti-hes Chah-ra-rat-wa-ta." To-morrow the Sioux are coming in a large war-party. They will attack the village, and you will have a great battle. Now, when the Sioux are drawn up in line of battle, and are all ready to fight, you jump on me, and ride as hard as you can, ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... bushy tail which serves you for ornament. This reminds me that you are not like the dogs I used to know—the dogs that talked with their tails, caressed with their tongues, and were never over-clean or well-behaved. Where are they now—collies, rat-worrying terriers, hounds, spaniels, pointers, retrievers—dogs rough and dogs smooth; big brute boarhounds, St. Bernard's, mastiffs, nearly or quite as big as you are, but not so slender, silky-haired, and sharp-nosed, and without your refined expression ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... Chinese cigar-makers," cried Marcus, in a passion, brandishing his fist. "It's them as is ruining the cause of white labor. They are, they are for a FACT. Ah, the rat-eaters! Ah, ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... from before me, moving backwards and keeping his eyes fixed upon mine, as I have seen a rat do when a snake is about to swallow it. Now we were upon the edge of the crater, and looking over I saw an awful sight. For there, some thirty feet beneath us, the red-hot lava glowing sullenly beneath a shifting pall of smoke, rolled and spouted ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... picture he presented as he poked and pried in those dim regions, by the dim rays of the lamp. Spiders, roaches and a great gray rat or two were his only companions—those, ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... interfere with no-one and no-one didn't interfere with us. We 'ad some old 'tatoes about, but mocely we lived on rats. Ours was a old 'ouse, full of rats, and the famine never seemed to bother 'em. Orfen we got a rat. Orfen. But moce of the people who lived hereabouts was too tender stummicked for rats. Didn't seem to fancy 'em. They'd been used to all sorts of fallals, and they didn't take to 'onest feeding, not till it was too late. ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... than once, stealing into the room, when it was her watch off, she would catch the two men glaring ferociously at each other, wild animals the pair of them, in Hans's face the lust to kill, in Dennin's the fierceness and savagery of the cornered rat. "Hans!" she would cry, "wake up!" and he would come to a recollection of himself, ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... He did not believe that Akers cared a penny piece for a membership, and pooh-pooh it as he would, this trifling affair would not let him alone. It gnawed under the great sorrow of Jane's absence, like a rat gnawing under his ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... from which dangled rags of uniform and rags of flesh: falling on faces of the unburied dead that it was helping to dissolve into, their primal pulp of clay. War! always war! and no theatre of scarlet and gold and cavalry charges, but a rat's war of mud and cold and fleas and unutterable, nerve-dissolving fatigue. Not far off occasionally the rustle of clothes or the tinkle of an entrenching tool, as a sleeper turned over or the group sentry shifted arms ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... he took her hand, "it was a hunt where I came upon unexpected game, but how could you ever feel any love for a poor river-rat?" ...
— Shawn of Skarrow • James Tandy Ellis
... that little rat. I mean the big fellow with the heavy jaw and a face like a rattlesnake. He's trying to charm ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... pointed to one spot where he supposed they were, and then to others, and demanded by signs how they should get there. The black clapped his hands, and began looking about the cabins as a terrier hunts for a rat. ...
— Paul Gerrard - The Cabin Boy • W.H.G. Kingston
... and divines applaud, and schoolmasters usher him into the polite world, and English scholars carry on the jest, while Horne Tooke's genuine anatomy of our native tongue is laid on the shelf. Can it be that our politicians smell a rat in the Member for Old Sarum? That our clergy do not relish Parson Horne? That the world at large are alarmed at acuteness and originality greater than their own? What has all this to do with the formation of the English language or with the first conditions and necessary ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... worked and eased my pig off under my cloak till I got him to roll down behind the bed. I knew," said Mr. Ringgan, laughing, "I knew by the captain's eye, as well as I knew anything, that he smelt a rat; but he kept our counsel, as well as his own; and when he was gone we took the pig out into the woods behind the shanty and roasted him finely, and we sent and asked Capt. Sears to supper; and he came and helped us eat the pig with a great deal of appetite, and never asked no questions ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... Nobody knew what was the matter of the animals, until an old negro, who lived near, came out and said, "You uns ought to know better than to let you horses eat dat sneeze weed. Dat is poison. Kills animals, just like rat poison." And then he showed us a weed, with a square stem, that grew there, and which was called sneeze weed. He said native animals would not touch it, but strange animals eat it because it was nice and green. Well, ...
— How Private George W. Peck Put Down The Rebellion - or, The Funny Experiences of a Raw Recruit - 1887 • George W. Peck
... little. Ha! What is't thou says't?—Her voice was ever soft, Gentle, and low; an excellent thing in woman:— I kill'd the slave that was a hanging thee. And my poor fool is hang'd! No, no, no life: Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, And thou no breath at all? O, thou wilt come no more, Never, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... long night wore away, till at length Rachel woke with a start thinking that a hand had been laid upon her face, to see by the faint light of dawn which struggled into the hut through the cracks of the door-boards that the hand was only a great rat that had crawled over her and now nibbled at her hair. She sat up, frightening it and its companions away, then rose and washed herself with water that stood by in great gourds while without she heard the women ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... mind with the morning; I have no guess what I should do. 'Tis easy to say that the public duty should brush aside these little considerations of personal dignity; so it is that politicians begin, and in a month you find them rat and flatter and intrigue with brows of brass. I am rather of the old view, that a man's first duty is to these little laws; the big he does not, he never will, understand; I may be wrong about the Chief Justice and the Baron and the state of Samoa; ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... wild fowl, now falling to ruin for want of use. Guided by the radiant moonlight, I could see the very spot on which Mary and I had stood to watch the snaring of the ducks. Through the hole in the paling before which the decoy-dog had shown himself, at Dermody's signal, a water-rat now passed, like a little black shadow on the bright ground, and was lost in the waters of the lake. Look where I might, the happy by-gone time looked back in mockery, and the voices of the past came to me with their ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... actually the whole rat's nest was stamped out without attention being brought to it so far as the Magnitogorsk public is concerned." He nodded heavily again. "You can almost always be depended upon to do the right thing, Ilya. If you ...
— Freedom • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... and fetch the mouse-trap out of the cellar," said her Godmother, and Cinderella hurried to get it. There were six mice in the trap, and the old woman harnessed them to the pumpkin, put a rat on the top to drive them, and two lizards behind, and then waved her wand over them. Immediately the pumpkin turned into a gorgeous coach, the mice into six beautiful horses, the rat into a stately coachman, and the lizards into tall footmen, with powdered hair and silk stockings. "There," said ...
— Favorite Fairy Tales • Logan Marshall
... "You rat!" he yelled. "Double-cross me, will yeh?" He heard the sound of a body moving over loose stones and halted, weaving in his tracks and peering into ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... him, "you can't stay here. You'd starve to death like that poor devil that some prospectors found in that gulch yonder—turned to dusty bones, with a pack rat's nest in his chest and a rock under his head. You'd ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... hippopotamuses, mended watches and musical boxes for black chiefs, patched his own clothes and made clothes for some of his men, invented rat-traps and machines for making rockets, tamed baby lions and baby hippopotamuses, cleaned guns, raided the camps of slavers, nursed the sick, and fed the hungry. And day and night he worked to rid the land of slavery; to teach ...
— The Story of General Gordon • Jeanie Lang
... put his hand to his mouth and yelled: "Spad, spad," at the top of his voice. Oliver understood the epithet, it meant that he wore clean linen, polished shoes, and perhaps, now and then, a pair of gloves. He had heard the same outcry in his own city, for the slang of the street-rat is Volapuk the world over. But he did not resent the assault. He was too tired to chase any boys, and too despondent to ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... enough, rat." Nick spat contemptuously, and a puff of gray smoke spread rapidly over walls, ceiling and floor. "That will hold you," he jeered, and opened the door. Aping the Minister's important waddle, he walked over to ...
— Satan and the Comrades • Ralph Bennitt
... business altogether," returned young Ashiel. "I don't know which part of it is the worst. There's my uncle dead, shot down like a rat by some cold-blooded scoundrel; and now my cousin David, poor chap, in jail, and under charge of murder. It seems impossible to believe it of him, and yet, what is one to believe? One can only suppose that ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce
... which would follow upon the deed, the package of rat-poison would be found under the chest of drawers in the maid's room, half empty. It would be discovered that every alternate paper of Matilde's medicine had been tampered with, and it would be supposed that Matilde had at the first time taken one of those containing ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... to himself.) There's a sight! There's sound! The greyheaded woodpecker tapping the hollow tree! Blind and dumb might well be envied now. See! that thing rests on two line-tubs, full of tow-lines. A most malicious wag, that fellow. Rat-tat! So man's seconds tick! Oh! how immaterial are all materials! What things real are there, but imponderable thoughts? Here now's the very dreaded symbol of grim death, by a mere hap, made the expressive sign of the help and hope of most endangered life. ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... sound behind, such as a rat might have made, and Hampton glanced aside apprehensively. In that single second Slavin was upon him, grasping his pistol-arm at the wrist, and striving with hairy hand to get a death-grip about his throat. Twice Hampton's left drove straight ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... that isn't a rat!" cried the little boy. "Rats can scratch, but rats can't mew. Only cats can do that! Here, pussy!" he called. "Come ...
— The Bobbsey Twins at Home • Laura Lee Hope
... out for that, sir," replied the captain. "He and his chum were looking for this fellow this morning, and found out where he lay, from the shore. I think he will be able to locate him from the water, and if he does I'll have the rat out of his hole in a brace of shakes, provided you will ...
— The Hilltop Boys on Lost Island • Cyril Burleigh
... I'd be sorer'n a scalded wharf rat in a barrel of pepper. But I don't count. There's the real one ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... arm through the wind and rain, summoned a kind of little, white, wooden sarcophagus which was skipping near us on the waves, sculled by two yellow boys stark naked in the rain. The craft approached us, I jumped into it, then through a little trap-door shaped like a rat-trap that one of the scullers threw open for me, I slipped in and stretched myself at full length on a mat in what is called ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... thought well of him, every one had believed that his future career would be brilliant. Now it had ended in this obscure and dreadful fashion, as ends the life of a trapped rat. ...
— The Bittermeads Mystery • E. R. Punshon
... temperament as Murphy's, a life like this was happiness itself. He was sociable, and loved company intensely, though preferably the company of Man. Solitude he abhorred; games were his delight; for killing things, even were it a rat from one of the thousand holes he met with when walking by the river, he never cared, and indeed appeared never quite to understand. "Live and let live" was his motto, while playing always the game ...
— 'Murphy' - A Message to Dog Lovers • Major Gambier-Parry
... which resolved itself into two ideas: to leave the house, and get to the wharves. He did not think these ideas, he saw them written in fiery letters on the darkness. Once at the wharves he could hide all day, return at night for his treasure, then conceal himself, like a rat, in the hold of some vessel and escape without any one suspecting his whereabouts. But to do all this, money, gold, was his first necessity,—and he ...
— Juana • Honore de Balzac
... crazed with funk. It was no time for gentlemanly reproof, so I turned round and felled him like an ox. He up and at me. We closed just as an awful sea made for the ship. All hands saw it coming and took to the rigging, but I had him by the throat, and went on shaking him like a rat, the men above us yelling, "Look out! look out!" Then a crash as if the sky had fallen on my head. They say that for over ten minutes hardly anything was to be seen of the ship—just the three masts and a bit of the forecastle ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... as a continual remembrancer. But Mrs. Moggs never exulted over his defeat; and, though once compelled to harshness, continued to be to Montezuma a most excellent wife. The shop looks lively now—and the bell to the door is removed; for Moggs, with his rat-tat-tat, is ever at his post, doing admired execution on the dilapidated boots and shoes. The Moggses prosper, and all through the efficacy of a bucket of cold water. We should not wonder if, in the end, the Moggs family were to become rich, through the force of industry, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... many diverse paths had crossed and re-crossed each other, that the dog had a hard task to retain any hold on the track he followed. But he kept on his way, though the cold pierced him to the bone, and the jagged ice cut his feet, and the hunger in his body gnawed like a rat's teeth. He kept on his way, a poor gaunt, shivering thing, and by long patience traced the steps he loved into the very heart of the burgh and up to the ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... weasel of New England is about the size of a big rat; that is, it is sixteen inches long and all brown with the exception of white chin, throat, breast, and paws, and black tip to the tail. In winter it turns white except the tail tip; that does ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... way between a mouse and a rat, five or six inches long, with a tail perhaps five inches more, about as big around as a man's thumb, bushy, but of even size the whole length, top of head dark gray, yellowish circles about the shining black ...
— Some Summer Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... says Mrs. Bear. Growl in the house. Mrs. Bear says, says she, 'Oh, you can rip and rear, but Brother Rabbit goes about with his head combed, and he looks lots better that way than them that go about with rat nests ...
— Little Mr. Thimblefinger and His Queer Country • Joel Chandler Harris
... the warriors of our day, and which is in conformity to the custom of ancient heroes, who scorned to defend themselves in rear. His face, rendered exceeding terrible and warlike by a pair of black mustachios; his hair strutting out on each side in stiffly pomatumed ear-locks, and descending in a rat-tail queue below his waist; a shining stock of black leather supporting his chin, and a little but fierce cocked hat, stuck with a gallant and fiery air over his left eye. Such was the chivalric port ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... wholesale business. They leave the small necessity of their next-door neighbor to the retailers, who are poorer in statistics and general facts, but richer in the every-day charities. Mr. Bernard felt, at first, as one does who sees a gray rat steal out of a drain and begin gnawing at the bark of some tree loaded with fruit or blossoms, which he will soon girdle, if he is let alone. The first impulse is to murder him with the nearest ragged stone. Then one ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... attachment. And it took all the principle I had by me to git up even a emotion of pity for the one-eyed watcher, whose only recreation seemin'ly durin' that long, long day wuz to watch our party as clost as any cat ever watched a rat hole, and to kinder hang round us. Faith kep' pretty clost to me all day and seemed to take a good deal of comfort watchin' the ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... death.... We have seen an American sun, and an American moon, and American stars, and we think they "get up these things better than we do." We have had several fresh squalls, and one heavy gale; we have shipped sundry seas; we have had rat-hunting and harpooning of porpoises; we have caught several ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
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