|
|
|
More "Snail" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... big news is that there is a way for you and me to throw this fellow down. Simple enough, if you are on your guard. Did you notice how Jesus handled him? He quoted Scripture to him. Scripture to the devil is just like salt on a snail. ...
— "Say Fellows—" - Fifty Practical Talks with Boys on Life's Big Issues • Wade C. Smith
... are tall and others short, some straight and others crooked, some strong, others feeble; some of us run, others walk, others snail it. But all, all have their feet upon the same level of the common earth. And America's worst enemy is he—or she—who by word or look encourages another to think otherwise. Head as high as you please; but feet always upon the common ground, never ...
— The Call of the Twentieth Century • David Starr Jordan
... large German Snail, early in the Morning; put them, shells and all, into Salt and Water, for a few Hours, till they purge themselves: then put them into fresh Salt and Water, for a few Hours more, and repeat that a third time, then ...
— The Country Housewife and Lady's Director - In the Management of a House, and the Delights and Profits of a Farm • Richard Bradley
... you want to stay with me you may and I'll give you one-third of what you raise." They decided to stay. When the crop was harvested the master did not do as he had promised. He gave them nothing. Mary slipped away, mounted the old mule "Mustang" and galloped away at a mules snail speed to Newnansville where she related what had happened to a Union captain. He gave her a letter to give to Mr. Jamison. In it he reminded him that if he didn't give Mary's family what he had promised he would be put in jail. ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Florida Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... slender, with a long grave face, spoke but seldom, but what she did say was more intelligible. Now and then a peculiar smile flitted across her features; it almost seemed as if she were highly amused at my good uncle, who had withdrawn into his silken dressing-gown like a snail into its shell, and was vainly endeavouring to push out of sight a treacherous yellow string, with which he fastened his night-jacket together, and which would keep tumbling out of his bosom yards and yards long. At length they rose to depart; ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... shallow stream or ditch running through pasture lands. Now each egg has a sort of lid, which presently opens and lets out a minute, hairy creature who swims away in search of a particular kind of water-snail—the kind called by naturalists Limnaea truncatula. If he finds a snail, he bores his way into its flesh and soon begins to grow and wax fat. Then he brings forth a family—of tiny worms quite unlike himself, little creatures called rediae, ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... a snail's pace but a few feet above the ground—literally feeling our way along through the darkness, for both moons had set, and the night was black with the clouds that are to be found only at Mars's ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... never puts thyself out. I dare be bounden, if the Queen's Grace and all her noble company were to sup in this kitchen at five o' the clock, I should come in and find never a kettle nor a pan on at the three-quarter past. If thy uncle wasn't a sloth, and thine aunt a snail, I'm not hostess of the King's Head at Colchester, thou'rt no more worth thy salt—nay, salt, forsooth! thou'rt not worth the water. Salt's one and fourpence the raser, and that's a deal too much to give for thee. Now set me the kettle on, and then ...
— The King's Daughters • Emily Sarah Holt
... was deeply weather-stained, and, nigh the turfy eaves-trough, all velvet-napped; no doubt the snail-monks founded mossy priories there. The other slope was newly shingled. On the north side, doorless and windowless, the clap-boards, innocent of paint, were yet green as the north side of lichened pines or copperless hulls of Japanese junks, becalmed. The whole base, like those ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... winged wardens of your farms, Who from the cornfields drive the insidious foe, And from your harvest keep a hundred harms; Even the blackest of them all, the crow, Renders good service as your man-at-arms, Crushing the beetle in his coat of mail, And crying havoc on the slug and snail." —FROM "THE ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph, Volume 1, Number 2, February, 1897 • anonymous
... at the tip of his finger and sliding down the air with wings flapping slowly and at the speed of an exceptionally languid snail—was a bee. ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... Weaving spiders, come not here; Hence, you long-legg'd spinners, hence; Beetles black, approach not near; Worm nor snail do no offence. ...
— A Midsummer Night's Dream • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... the surgeon and Williams the colonel chafed at the incessant delays. "The expedition goes on very much as a snail runs," writes the former to his wife; "it seems we may possibly see Crown Point this time twelve months." The Colonel was vexed because everything was out of joint in the department of transportation: wagoners mutinous for want of pay; ordnance stores, camp-kettles, and provisions left behind. ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... close frame of glass, live for months, and even years, with only the original store of air and water. In one of Ward's early experiments, a spire of grass and a fern, which sprang up in a corked bottle containing a little moist earth introduced as a bed for a snail, lived and flourished for eighteen years without a new supply of either fluid. In these boxes the plants grow till the enclosed air is exhausted of the gaseous constituents of vegetation, and till the water has yielded up the assimilable ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... every heavy heeled professor will have heaven? What! every lazy one? Every wanton and foolish professor, that will be stopped by any thing; kept back by any thing; that scarce runneth so fast heavenward as a snail creepeth on the ground? Nay, there are some professors that do not go on so fast in the way of God as a snail doth go on the wall; and yet these think that heaven and happiness is for them. But stay; there are many more that run than there be that obtain; therefore, he that ...
— The Heavenly Footman • John Bunyan
... snail. The unfavorable weather constantly throws me back, and at these baths it is impossible to command one's natural strength. A few days ago, Naegeli, a musical author and poet of considerable repute, ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826 Vol. 2 • Lady Wallace
... knew the whereabouts; and he, Elias, their predestined chief, was left behind! His fiery spirit craved to mount at once and gallop day and night till he rejoined those treasure-seekers; but the frailty of his horse precluded any such transports, and the snail-like pace of his adherents bound him down. At present he was obliged to wait for Aflatun and Faris and the baggage animals, while conscious of the fugitives receding rapidly, sucked in irresistibly to a whirlpool of living light, ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... country, himself taking one. In a very short time he overtakes the noted horse-thief. Gus was sitting in the buggy sound asleep; the lines were hanging down over the dashboard, and the old horse was marching along at a snail's pace. He was out some two miles from town, and, no doubt, had traveled at this gait all the way. He was faced about, and, assisted by the sheriff, drove back to town. He was then placed under ...
— The Twin Hells • John N. Reynolds
... as AEsop telleth in a fable that the snail did. For when Jupiter (whom the poets feign for the great god) invited all the poor worms of the earth unto a great solemn feast that it pleased him upon a time—I have forgotten upon what occasion—to prepare for them, the snail ...
— Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation - With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens • Thomas More
... upon details of adult structure, young crabs pass through a stage when to all intents and purposes they are counterparts of lobsters. Even the twisted hermit crab, which has a soft-skinned hinder part coiled to fit the curve of the snail shell used as a protection, is symmetrical and lobster-like ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... their hives very clean. If a bee dies, they turn it out; or if anything like a snail, for instance, crawled in, which would be too large for them to push out, they would completely cover ...
— Woodside - or, Look, Listen, and Learn. • Caroline Hadley
... bushes, grass,—everything that could help screen him from the keen eye of savage scouts. When he had marked his course he commenced his perilous descent. In an hour he had reached the bottom of the cliff. Dropping flat on the ground, he once more started his snail-like crawl. A stretch of swampy ground, luxuriant with rushes and saw-grass, made a part of the way easy for him, though it led through mud, and slime, and stagnant water. Frogs and turtles warming their backs ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... culture, and a time that is still far off. Their course is related to that of ordinary works as the orbit of Uranus to the orbit of Mercury. For the moment they get no justice done to them. People are at a loss how to treat them; so they leave them alone, and go their own snail's pace for themselves. Does the worm see the eagle as it ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... juncture the block in the traffic was relieved, and the cab bowled smartly on for some fifty yards when it was again halted. George, protruding from the window like a snail, was entertained by the spectacle of the pursuit. The hunt was up. Short of throwing his head up and baying, the stout young man behaved exactly as a bloodhound in similar circumstances would have conducted ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... I tell you what it is? Your head is turned right around! When royalty speaks to me, do I swell out? No! I know my place! I take no notice! But you—you are nosing but a crawling—snail! ...
— Christmas Entertainments • Alice Maude Kellogg
... ruffled by even the faintest breeze. Only a weak swirl of current from the far-off Gulf Stream pushed my hulk onward; and this, I suppose, was helped a little by that attraction of floating bodies for each other which brings chips and leaves together on the surface of even the stillest pool. But a snail goes faster than I was going; and it was only at the end of a full hour of watching that I could see—yet even then could not be quite certain about it—that my position a very little ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... made for her, large enough to hold a couple of eggs comfortably, and this was covered outside with tortoise-shell and lined with lizard-skin. From the little green frogs that hop about the meadows she selected fifty to act as maids of honour, and each of these was mounted on a snail. They had dainty saddles, and rode in dashing style with the leg thrown over the saddle-bow. A numerous bodyguard of rats, dressed like pages, ran before the snails—in short, nothing so captivating had ever been seen before. To crown all, the cap of roses, which never ...
— Old-Time Stories • Charles Perrault
... between his shoulders as he looked up—they were more than vertical—they were actually concave. The Almighty had not only stored riches immeasurable in the hills behind him—He had driven this passage Himself to help puny man to reach them, and yet the wretched road was going toward them like a snail. On the fifth night, thereafter he was back there at the tunnel again from New York—with a grim mouth and a happy eye. He had brought success with him this time and there was no sleep for him that night. He had been delayed by a wreck, it was two o'clock in the morning, and not a horse ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... other, almost indistinguishably. The tubipora of the corals connects with the serpula of the conchylia. In the mollusca the separation of organs becomes more observable; in the higher species there are rudiments of nerves, and an exponent, though scarcely distinguishable, of sensibility. In the snail, and muscle, the separation of the fluid from the solid is more marked, yet the prevalence of the carbonic principle connects these and the preceding classes, in a certain degree, with the vegetable creation. "But the insect ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... 361 when S. Hilary had returned from exile to his bishopric and to his wife and daughter. He had been living the eremitic life on the isle of Gallinaria, shaped so like a snail, off the coast of Albenga, and had nearly poisoned himself with trying to eat hellebore leaves. On reaching Poitiers, he told his old friend the Bishop, that he desired to follow the monastic life in his diocese, and obtained his cheerful consent. Some way ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... the spring And day's at the morn; Morning's at seven; The hill-side's dew-pearled; The lark's on the wing; The snail's on the thorn: God's in his heaven— All's ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... experienced man long-practiced in the art of turning out promptly for these midnight emergencies, and he was pulling on his trousers almost before the door-bell had ceased to ring, but to the anguished gaze of the detective he resembled nothing more than a languid snail with white whiskers. It seemed as if they would never ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... and the men not." From India he proceeds to the island of Lamary, the Lambri of Marco Polo; and by using the Italian term "the star transmontane," at once betrays the source of his plagiarism. His descriptions seem disguised extracts from Polo, with ridiculous exaggerations and additions; as of snail shells so large as to hold many persons. His account of the pretended varieties of the human race, as of nations of Hermaphrodites, and others equally ridiculous, which he places in separate islands of the Indian ocean, are ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... Loop," crept at a snail's pace—for that is the natural gait of the burro—through the town of Silver Plume, and pursued our leisurely journey toward the beckoning, snow-clad heights beyond. No, we did not hurry, for two reasons: First, our little four-footers would not or could not quicken their pace, urge them as we ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts: His acts being seven ages. At first the infant, Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms: And then, the whining school-boy with his satchel, And shining morning-face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to school. And then, the lover; Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad Made to his mistress' eye-brow. Then, a soldier; Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard, Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel; Seeking the bubble reputation Even in the ...
— The Art Of Poetry An Epistle To The Pisos - Q. Horatii Flacci Epistola Ad Pisones, De Arte Poetica. • Horace
... that division of the Animal Kingdom,—without recalling to my readers a Polyp or a Jelly-Fish, a Sea-Urchin or a Star-Fish. Neither can I present the structural elements of the Mollusk plan, without reminding them of an Oyster or a Clam, a Snail or a Cuttle-Fish,—or of the Articulate plan, without calling up at once the form of a Worm, a Lobster, or an Insect,—or of the Vertebrate plan, without giving it the special character of Fish, Reptile, Bird, or Mammal. Yet I insist ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... a roadside ditch or pool in springtime, take from it any bit of stick or straw which has lain undisturbed for a time. Some little worm-shaped masses of clear jelly containing specks are fastened to the stick: eggs of a small snail-like shell-fish. One of these specks magnified proves to be a crystalline sphere with an opaque mass in its centre. And while you are looking, the opaque mass begins to stir, and by-and-by slowly to turn upon its axis like a forming ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... piling which was being driven to support the steelwork. But day after day the snows continued to melt and the rain to fall. Two rivers were now boiling past the camp, one hidden deep, the other a shallow torrent which ran upon a bed of ice. The valley was rent by the sounds of the glacier's snail- like progress. ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... modern buildings. It was a remnant of old Ballarat which had survived the rage for new houses and highly ornamented terraces. Slivers had been offered money for that ricketty little shanty, but he declined to sell it, averring that as a snail grew to fit his house his house had ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... himself invisible, and change men into beasts; but these vaunts are only an advertisement. His true object is to make his account out of unhappy and troubled marriages, and the traces which he leaves behind him in his course are like the slime of a snail, or often like the ruin wrought by a hailstorm. To attain his ends he can persuade people that the box in which a lover is hidden is full of ghosts, or that he can make a corpse talk. It is at all events a good sign that poets and novelists ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... soothe him. But the Colonel clamoured to the heavens. Kennaston he qualified in various ways. And as for Dr. Jeal, he would hold him responsible—"personally, sir"—for the consequences of his dawdling in this fashion—"Damme, sir, like a damn' snail with ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... took up again the pursuit of Rokoff. Now that he was positive that the woman ahead of him was indeed Jane, and that she had again fallen into the hands of the Russian, it seemed that with all the incredible speed of his fleet and agile muscles he moved at but a snail's pace. ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... stopped to send a note to Senator Dilworthy, telling him what he had found, and that he should go at once to New York, and then hastened to the railway station. He had to wait an hour for a train, and when it did start it seemed to go at a snail's pace. ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 6. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... never view things in the same light. You are not the man of the world you should be, Walter. Men of half your merit will eclipse you, winning opulence and distinction—while you, with your common sense notions, will be plodding on at a snail's pace. You are behind the age, and a stranger to its ...
— Home Lights and Shadows • T. S. Arthur
... the frog, "but I could not help laughing to see the snail carrying his house with him ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... the door accordingly, murmuring at the cowardice of the servants; but at such a snail's pace, that it seemed he would most willingly have been anticipated by any one whom his reproaches had roused to exertion. "Cowardly blockheads!" he said at last, seizing hold of the handle of the door, but without turning it effectually round— "dare you not open a door?"—(still ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... respect for ants; but we do not go the length of some of their historians, or believe them to be, any more than ourselves, infallible. We have seen a laborious ant (magni Formica laboris) tugging a snail-shell (for some reason only known to himself) up a hill, stopping to take breath, and going cheerily to work again till he had nearly accomplished his ascent, and found himself on the very edge of its ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... Crumpetty Tree Came the Stork, the Duck, and the Owl; The Snail and the Bumblebee, The Frog and the Fimble Fowl (The Fimble Fowl, with a corkscrew leg); And all of them said, "We humbly beg We may build our homes on your lovely Hat,— Mr. Quangle Wangle, grant us that! ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... 26, 55; Bachaumont, I. 136 (Sept 7,1762). One month after the Parliament had passed a law against the Jesuits, little Jesuits in wax appeared, with a snail for a base. "By means of a thread the Jesuit was made to pop in and out from the shell. It is all the rage—here is no house without ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... by the motion of its long and strong legs, thrusting out two short, hornlike antennae over the top of its mask. It seemed to be eyeing a snail-shell on a stem above, and waiting for the snail's soft body to emerge from the citadel; when on a sudden, through the stems, it caught sight of the basking tadpole. Instantly it became motionless, and ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... again and pressed on. The valley better traveling than the canyon. It was lighter, freer of sage, and there were no rocks. Soon, out of the pale gloom shone a still paler thing, and that was the low swell of slope. Venters mounted it and his dogs walked beside him. Once upon the stone he slowed to snail pace, straining his sight to avoid the pockets and holes. Foot by foot he went up. The weird cedars, like great demons and witches chained to the rock and writhing in silent anguish, loomed up with wide and twisting naked arms. Venters crossed this belt of cedars, skirted ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... tributaries, establishing it as the best watered country encountered in our long overland cruise. Besides the splendid watercourses which marked that section, numerous wagontrails, leading into the hills, were peopled with freighters. Long ox trains, moving at a snail's pace, crept over hill and plain, the common carrier between the mines and the outside world. The fascination of the primal land was there; the buttes stood like sentinels, guarding a king's domain, while the palisaded cliffs frowned down, as if erected by the hand Omnipotent ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... most of them young fellows used to horse and arms, were brigaded as infantry with one of the four divisions of McDowell's men, who converged along different lines toward Fairfax. For nearly a week we lay near the front of the advance, moving on in snail-like fashion, which ill-suited most of us Virginians, who saw no virtue in postponing fight, since we were there for fighting. We scattered our forces, we did not unite, we did not entrench, we did not advance; we made all the mistakes a young army could, worst ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... writhing forward as noiselessly as if I were stalking some prey. There were times when I advanced so slowly it would have puzzled a watcher to determine whether mine was not also the body of the dead. At length, even at that snail's rate of progress, I gained the protection of the tepees upon the other side of the camp, and skulked in among them. The lodge just before me, blackened by paint and weather, must be the one I sought. I rested close within its shadow, striving to assure myself there ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... line. The four night raiders left the American trench at one o'clock in the morning. They crawled on their bellies through snow for one hour before reaching the sniper's post. Seven yards per minute is a snail's pace, but pretty good time in No Man's Land, where you must remain motionless each time a star-shell lights up the darkness around you and makes your ...
— The Fight for the Argonne - Personal Experiences of a 'Y' Man • William Benjamin West
... seemed to travel! It was a snail compared to Jack's eagerness to arrive. He was inclined to think that P.D., Wrath of God, and Jag Ear were faster than through expresses. He kept inquiring of the conductor if they were on time, and the conductor kept repeating that they were. How near that flash of steel at a bend around ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... there and then, all by himself: he would, Mr. Galloway, as I am a living sinner!" she hotly continued. "It's unbeknown how he'd have got here—holding on by the wall, like a snail, or fastening himself on to the tail of a cart; but try at it, in some way, he would! Be quiet, Jenkins! How dare you ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... book to be distributed after his death. A virulent enemy of Sainte-Beuve was not too expressive when he declared that its purpose was "to leave on the life of this woman the gleaming and slimy trace which the passage of a snail leaves on a rose." Abominable in either case, whether or not the implication was unfounded, Sainte-Beuve's numerous innuendoes in regard to Mme. Hugo are an indelible stain on his memory, and his infamy not only cost him his most precious friendships, ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... hours before and crept up the harbour to the whispering flutters of a breeze that could not make up its mind to blow. It was a cool, starlight evening, and they lolled about the poop waiting till their snail's pace would bring them to the anchorage. Willie Smee, the supercargo, emerged from the cabin, conspicuous in his shore clothes. The mate glanced at his shirt, of the finest and whitest silk, and ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... for scarce any weapons but staves and bludgeons had been yet seen among them. The Guard-house was a long, low, ugly building (removed in 1787), which to a fanciful imagination might have suggested the idea of a long black snail crawling up the middle of the High Street, and deforming its beautiful esplanade. This formidable insurrection had been so unexpected, that there were no more than the ordinary sergeant's guard of the city-corps upon duty; even these were without any supply of ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... land of fire," he said, "Frame me a soul like thine: Swift as the snail's soft horn to feel, Yet hard and keen as the tempered steel, And be there a fire in heart and head Demoniac ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... her robe to draw her back, but she turned on him with the spear, whereon he shrank back into his litter like a snail into his shell and left her alone. So following the steep path they marched on, and after them came the two litters with the priests, carried by all the bearers who could still stand, for these old men weighed no more than children. ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... porters, I threaded my way at a snail's pace through the dense crowd of waiting passengers, swarthy-faced sons of Italy, apparently bound for the steerage. The great gray bulk of the Re d'Italia loomed before me, floating proudly at her stern the green, white, and red flag blazoned ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... furiously from her, and stood with nothing but a plain coloured shawl of gauze covered in tinsel twined about her slim waist, "why hast thou wasted precious moments? Why has thou imperilled my chance by infuriating the great man? Out of my way, thou snail." ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... can't wait your snail's pace. My lady in black, Mrs. Donald Bird, has been here all the afternoon, and she offers me twenty-five dollars a month to give up the Baer cubs and tell stories two hours a day in the orphan asylums and the Children's Hospital! Just what I love to ...
— Polly Oliver's Problem • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... Snail we creep; While far ahead the women keep, For when to the devil's house we speed, By a thousand steps ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... and Snails, Dragon-flies, Grasshoppers, and Butterflies are familiar enough to us all; yet how many realise how 'fearfully and wonderfully' they are made? What a marvellously complex weapon is the 'sting' of the bee! What a wonderful 'rasp' the snail possesses! How many can tell how an insect smells, and where its organs of taste and hearing lie? Since these are questions which young people often ask again and again, some of them will be answered in the course of these articles. To explain such matters clearly is a very ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... he walked past it at a snail's pace, staring up at the blank, repellent windows. Not a soul was to be seen. He went on discontentedly. What should he do? The door had been shut in his face once already that day, why he could not imagine. He hesitated, ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... Bat's Wings Bunnies Cats and Mice Flying Bat Four Frogs Quilt Leap Frog Puss-in-the-Corner The Snail's Trail Toad in the Puddle ...
— Quilts - Their Story and How to Make Them • Marie D. Webster
... a man so down-hearted in his work of self-improvement as the constant and bitter experience that it seems to be all of no use; that he is making so little progress; that with immense pains, like a snail creeping up a wall, he gets up, perhaps, an inch or two, and then all at once he drops down, and further down than he was before ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... to her. She paddled along shore quite near them for a while, trying to be resigned to it. And then she waddled out on the grassy bank, and fed them with some newts, and a tadpole, and a few blue-bottle flies, and a snail, and several other delicacies, which they seemed to enjoy quite as much as if they had been young ducks. And then Quackalina, seeing them quite happy, struck out for the very middle of the pond. ...
— Solomon Crow's Christmas Pockets and Other Tales • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... and see nothing of him! Had I not soon after the receipt of your dear and instructive letter gone to Wildbad, and there fallen into indescribable idleness, I should long ago have written to Oxford; for the letter was a great delight to me. The snail had there crept out of his shell and spoke to me as the friend, but now "Your Excellency" appears again; so the snail has ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... coach too. Therefore, resolving to ruin Tom, she complained to the king that he had behaved very insolently to her. The king sent for him in a rage. Tom, to escape his fury, crept into an empty snail-shell, and there lay till he was almost starved; when peeping out of the shell, he saw a fine butterfly settled on the ground. He now ventured out, and getting astride, the butterfly took wing, and mounted into the air with little Tom on his back. Away he flew from field to field, from ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... ascending the opposite side of the gorge—an operation rendered the less agreeable from the consideration that in these perpendicular episodes we did not progress a hundred yards on our journey. But, ungrateful as the task was, we set about it with exemplary patience, and after a snail-like progress of an hour or more, had scaled perhaps one half of the distance, when the fever which had left me for a while returned with such violence, and accompanied by so raging a thirst, that it required all the entreaties of Toby to prevent me from losing all the fruits of my late ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... a horse! a miserable, old, broken-down hack, whose ribs were so prominent that he looked as if he lived upon barrel-hoops instead of oats and hay; his lack-lustre eyes, drooping head, halting gait, and panting breath combined to make him a most pitiable object, and he plodded on at a snail's pace, looking as if he might drop down dead on the road at any moment. Only the three women were in the chariot—the men all walking, so as to relieve their poor, jaded beast as much as possible. The weather was bitterly cold, and ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... summer months of dust and heat Cassidy had been a freighter. From sun-up to sun-down he had dragged with snail-like progress up and down the canons, through the rocky washes and crooked draws; and now that the road had dropped into the Southwestern Basin it was sickening mesa work, with the fine dust running like water ahead of his wheels or whirling up in fantastic, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... hermit crab has taken possession of a sea snail's shell, and set up housekeeping; with body partly hidden he waves his long bony tentacles, while his beady eyes stare at us from the doorway ...
— Byways Around San Francisco Bay • William E. Hutchinson
... ejaculated Mr. Brown, who at the word "scheme" had advanced one step from his retreat, but who now at the last words of the intruder drew back as gently as a snail into his shell; and although his person was far too much enveloped in shade to run the least chance of detection, yet the honest broker began to feel a little tremor vibrate along the chords of his thrilling frame, and a new anathema against the ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... on a level, crusted plateau. Here he braked till Labiskwee overtook him, and they went on, again side by side, with diminishing speed which finally ceased. The lethargy had grown more pronounced. The wildest effort of will could move them no more than at a snail's pace. They passed McCan, again crouched down on his skees, and Smoke roused him ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... blindly adventuring out into the open thoroughfare to avoid some obstacle—some spectral wain or omnibus got hopelessly stranded; while there were muffled cries and calls here, there, and everywhere. They went at a snail's pace, of course. Once, at a corner, the near wheels got on the pavement; the cab tilted over; Miss Burgoyne shrieked aloud and clung to her companion; then there was a heavy bump, and the venerable vehicle resumed its slow progress. Suddenly they beheld a ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... Day fair I searched to find a snail That might my secret lover's name reveal. Upon a gooseberry-bush a snail I found, For always snails near sweetest fruit abound. I seized the vermin, home I quickly sped, And on the hearth the milk-white embers ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... chronology. We had a craze for big figures, and positively liked to believe that the progress made by the child in the womb in a month was represented in prehistoric time by ages and ages. We insisted that Evolution advanced more slowly than any snail ever crawled, and that Nature does not proceed by leaps and bounds. This was all very well as long as we were dealing with such acquired habits as breathing or digestion. It was possible to believe that dozens of epochs had ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... evolution may turn them into uses. It will be easy for the scientific plutocrat to maintain that humanity will adapt itself to any conditions which we now consider evil. The old tyrants invoked the past; the new tyrants will invoke the future evolution has produced the snail and the owl; evolution can produce a workman who wants no more space than a snail, and no more light than an owl. The employer need not mind sending a Kaffir to work underground; he will soon become an underground animal, ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... we shall ever get enough things before the winter," replied David, with his eyes fixed on the short dry turf at his feet. "Oh, look!" he exclaimed suddenly, "there's a funny snail." ...
— Penelope and the Others - Story of Five Country Children • Amy Walton
... parcel. Another mode of transferring warts is to touch each wart with a pebble, and place the pebbles in a bag, which should be lost on the way to church; whoever finds the bag gets the warts." A common Warwickshire custom was to rub the warts with a black snail, stick the snail on a thorn bush, and then, say the folks, as the snail dies so ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... come across a snail, they pounced on it and crushed it, making grimaces with the corners of their mouths, as if they were cracking nuts. They never went out without their grafting implements, and they used to cut the worms in two with such force that the iron of the implement would sink three inches deep. To get ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... said Agatha. "But there's the waggon creeping up at a snail's pace. "Let us run down and see after ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... cavalry, started down the deep-cut road, which in places was not over ten feet wide, and was everywhere sticky with mud, while an entire infantry division was crowded into it behind them. Like all other roads in that country, this one, now densely packed with human beings advancing at a snail's pace along nearly three miles of its length, was bordered on both sides by ...
— "Forward, March" - A Tale of the Spanish-American War • Kirk Munroe
... not have cared about this if it were not that we could look, unseen ourselves, at the infrequent passer-by, for the hedge grew luxuriantly. Further down it became partly a clay bank, and there on the coarse grass used to hang snail-shells of all sizes, and, as I remember them, of shining gold and silver. The inhabitant was the drawback to all that beauty, yet when we found an empty house, it was cold, dull, and ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... not easily enticed out; he had his home where he hid himself like a snail in its shell. He had the responsibility for this little world of five people, and he had not even succeeded in securing it. His strength and industry were not enough even to keep one little home above water; a benefactor ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... and all about ourselves. What is the personality of a lunatic but a personality a little less, or very much less, coherent than ours? What is the personality of a moron? Of an idiot? Of a feeble- minded child? Of a horse? A dog? A mosquito? A bullfrog? A woodtick? A garden snail? And, Leo, what is your own personality when you sleep and dream? When you are seasick? When you are in love? When you have colic? When you have a cramp in the leg? When you are smitten abruptly with the fear of death? When you are angry? When you are exalted with the ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... than an open book, for I read like a snail and cannot write at all.... 'Tis you must bear him the glad tidings—you alone—with your bright hair the color of the old sideboards in the dining-room. Take the front page of a newspaper and run to him. 'Tis for you ...
— If You Touch Them They Vanish • Gouverneur Morris
... broken forest-trees—a circumstance which I would perhaps hesitate to mention in mere human society were it not that I have been credibly informed your own great naturalist, Darwin, tried the experiment himself with one of the biggest European land-molluscs, the great edible Roman snail, and found that it still lived on in vigorous style after immersion in sea-water for twenty days. Now, I myself observed that several of these bits of broken trees, torn down by floods in heavy storm time from the banks of Spanish or Portuguese rivers, ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... in a long spirally-coiled band, forming the wall of a subcylindrical cavity. The cavity of the tube of Helicopsyche, composed of grains of sand, is itself spirally coiled, so that the case exactly resembles a small snail-shell in shape. One species of Limnophilus uses small but entire leaves; another, the shells of the pond-snail Planorbis; another, pieces of stick arranged transversely with reference to the long axis of the tube. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... children have a quaint little rhyme to ask the snail to put out his horns. Translated, its meaning ...
— Little Folks (October 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... even afraid. Dreading the certain cast of the almost unescapable net, the secutor keeps always on the move, and continually alters the direction and speed and manner of his movement, taking one short step and two long, then three short and one long, breaking into a dogtrot, slowing to a snail's-pace, leaping, twisting, curving, zigzagging, ducking and in every way attempting to make it impossible for the retiarius to foretell from the movement he watches what the ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... Protococcus, a common mould, a Chara, a fern, and some flowering plant; among animals we examine such things as an Amoeba, a Vorticella, and a fresh-water polype. We dissect a star-fish, an earth-worm, a snail, a squid, and a fresh-water mussel. We examine a lobster and a cray-fish, and a black beetle. We go on to a common skate, a cod-fish, a frog, a tortoise, a pigeon, and a rabbit, and that takes us about all the time we have to ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley
... ease, and crept home at a slow snail's pace. I felt thirsty, luckily for the first time through the whole day, and I went and sought about for a place where I could get a drink. I was a long distance away from the bazaar, and I would not ask at a private house. Perhaps, though, I could wait till I got home; it would take a quarter of ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... found it afterwards to appear to the naked eye an exceeding small white spot, no bigger than the point of a Pin. Afterwards I view'd it every way with a better Microscope and found it on both sides, and edge-ways, to resemble the Shell of a small Water-Snail with a flat spiral Shell: it had twelve wreathings, a, b, c, d, e, &c. all very proportionably growing one less than another toward the middle or center of the Shell, where there was a very small round white spot. I could not certainly discover ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... use my trying to tell you all the shameful things he has done in all these years. There is never a year goes by without his doing something dreadful; and he has made everybody miserable at one time or other by killing their friends or relations, from the snail to the partridge. He is quite merciless, and spares no one; why, his own children are afraid of him, and it is believed that he has pecked several of them to death, though it is hushed up; but people talk about it all the same, sometimes. As for the way he has behaved to the ladies, if I were to ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... flat and as straight as the road to Longford. We never knew when we came to what the innkeeper and postillions call mountains, except by the postillions getting off their horses with great deliberation and making them go a snail's walk—a snail's gallop would be much too fast. Now it is no easy thing for a French postillion to walk himself when he is in his boots: these boots are each as large and as stiff as a wooden churn, and when the man in his boots attempts to walk, he is more ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... they were gone, he crept back out of the subterranean passage. "It is so dangerous to walk on the ground in the dark," said he; "how easily a neck or a leg is broken!" Fortunately, he knocked against an empty snail-shell. "Thank God!" said he. "In that I can pass the night in safety," and got into it. Not long afterwards, when he was just going to sleep, he heard two men go by, and one of them was saying, "How shall we contrive ...
— Grimm's Fairy Stories • Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm
... . The sun is baking hot. The shadows begin to grow shorter and to draw in on themselves, like the horns of a snail. . . . The high grass warmed by the sun begins to give out a strong, heavy smell of honey. It will soon be midday, and Gerassim and Lubim are still floundering under the willow tree. The husky bass and the shrill, ...
— The Cook's Wedding and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... still laughing, when he crawled out, like a snail from under his shell, and got upon his feet, clutching the tub to hurl it at ...
— The Young Surveyor; - or Jack on the Prairies • J. T. Trowbridge
... "A snail, sir," repeated the youth. "I've got a book on natural history, and I've just been reading about them. I saw this one as I was passing, and I went inside to study its habits. They are very interesting little things ...
— Salthaven • W. W. Jacobs
... States. the black or dark brown lizzard we saw at the rock fort Camp at the commencement of the woody country below the great narrows and falls of the Columbia; they are also the same with those of the United States. The snail is numerous in the woody country on this coast; they are in shape like those of the United States, but are at least five times their bulk. There is a speceis of water lizzard of which I saw one only just above the grand rapids ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... the topmost step of the staircase. Black with dust and cobwebs, damp, with slimy snail-tracks on the stones, it went winding down to the lowest story of the old house. The steps were worn and irregular. Long ago they had been built, for this was the most ancient part of the chateau. In their first days the stairs had not ended with the moat, then full of water, but had gone ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... with the guns. The main column disappeared, lost among mountains and hills; this detached number had the wild country, the forbidding road, the December day to themselves. To get the guns and ammunition-wagons along proved a snail-and-tortoise business. Guns and escort ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... conveyed him to Bayswater at a snail's pace, and with more stoppages than ever mortal omnibus was subjected to before, as it seemed to that one eager passenger. At last the fading foliage of the Park appeared between the hats and bonnets of Valentine's opposite neighbours. Even ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... Go back to thy people, and tell them what return the Sagamore of the Pequots makes for thy breach of hospitality. His promise to his brother saves thy life this time. But, beware! A Sagamore does not forget. Be a snail that keeps its head within its shell. If the snail puts it out, Sassacus will step upon ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... man had not been able to urge the beast out of a walk. The loss of time consequent upon his having followed wrong roads during the night and the exhaustion of the pony which retarded his speed to what seemed little better than a snail's pace seemed to assure the failure of his mission, for at best he could not reach Lustadt ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... goes at a snail's pace through the deep sand over the heath; the railroad conveys him in a few hours to Altona and Hamburg. The circle of my friends there is increased within the last years. The greater part of my time I spent with my ...
— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen
... a road—sometimes entirely gutted, sometimes so obstructed with gasoline cans, hubs of wheels and scraps of iron, that I was obliged to lead Cesar by the bridle, while the others would walk ahead and clear a passage. Their progress was snail-like, for there was little oil left in our lantern and they hesitated before casting the refuse into the ditch for fear of profaning ...
— My Home In The Field of Honor • Frances Wilson Huard
... head thrown back, and was continually in the act of wriggling his long chin into his ample neckerchief. He could not ask you how do you do, or say in answer to that question, "I thank you, sare, very well," without stamping prettily with his foot, as if cracking a snail, and tossing his chin into the air as if he were going to balance a ladder upon it. Then, though his features were compressed into a small, monkeyfied compass, they were themselves, individually, upon a magnificent scale. ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... then trot for about ten yards? I thought we should be flying along, like a hunt. I'd rather be on Pixie at home; I could always make him go when I tickled his ears. If we don't hurry up a little more I shall try it on this horse, and see if he won't break into something more interesting than a snail's pace." ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... rippling streams. I am reading of valley and mountain life, and I grow sick at heart and enervated. Why dwell on such things just now? It will be many a long day before we can see all that again. We are going at the miserable pace of a snail, but not so surely as it goes. We carry our house with us; but what we do one day is undone ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... sn which may perhaps be derived from the Latin sinuo, as snake, sneak, snail, snare; so likewise snap and snatch, snib, snub. Bl imply a blast; as blow, blast, to blast, to blight, and, metaphorically, to blast one's reputation; bleat, bleak, a bleak place, to look bleak, or weather-beaten, black, blay, bleach, bluster, blurt, blister, blab, bladder, blew, ...
— A Grammar of the English Tongue • Samuel Johnson
... loud, but deep.' Deep or loud, no purpose would they have answered; the waggoner's temper was proof against curse in or out of the English language; and from their snail's pace neither DICKENS nor devil, nor any postillion in England, could make him put his horses. Lord Colambre jumped out of the chaise, and, walking beside him, began to talk to him; and spoke of his horses, ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... the hotel. Early in the fall he had rented a small one-story house situated just off Main Street, set well back from the sidewalk among clumps of oleanders. Into this he retired as a snail into its shell. At first he took his meals at the hotel, but later he imported an impassive, secretive man-servant, who took charge of him completely. Neither master nor man made any friends, and in fact rebuffed all advances. ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... his time plays many parts: His acts being seven ages. At first the infant, Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms: And then, the whining school-boy with his satchel, And shining morning-face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to school. And then, the lover; Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad Made to his mistress' eye-brow. Then, a soldier; Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard, Jealous in honour, sudden ...
— The Art Of Poetry An Epistle To The Pisos - Q. Horatii Flacci Epistola Ad Pisones, De Arte Poetica. • Horace
... to the good. The day following I was desperate, and I rafted together the foremast, the fore and main booms, and the fore and main gaffs. The wind was favourable, and I had thought to tow them back under sail, but the wind baffled, then died away, and our progress with the oars was a snail's pace. And it was such dispiriting effort. To throw one's whole strength and weight on the oars and to feel the boat checked in its forward lunge by the heavy drag behind, ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... other, with a mechanical precision, exhausting even to look at. To keep with them was practically impossible for an ordinary pedestrian. Nothing short of a woman shopping could worthily have matched their pace. In sight their speed was snail-like; out of it they would appear to have stopped, so far did they fall behind. Once I thought they had turned ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... any of these islands are found many small white snail shells, called siguei. The natives gather them and sell them by measure to the Siamese, Cambodians, Pantanes, and other peoples of the mainland. It serves there as money, and those nations trade with it, as they do with cacao-beans in Nueva ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVI, 1609 • H.E. Blair
... to take your liking me, without examining too curiously into the materials it is made of. Only we need not walk at a snail's' pace.' ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... four and twenty strong, Sailors and tailors in a throng; We heard a tale, we saw a sail, And then returned to kill a snail. ...
— Little Folks (November 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... charlatans to tell their fortunes, when a little wine is clearer than the most mystic ball of crystal. Before the bottle the priests of Egypt and the Delphic oracle seem as faint, my son, as the echoes in a snail shell. Palmistry and astrology—let us fling them into the whirlpool of vanity! But give a man wine enough, and any observer can tell his possibilities. A touch of it—and where are the barriers with which he has surrounded himself? Another drop, and how futile are all ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... that!" said Burkin. "There are plenty of people in the world, solitary by temperament, who try to retreat into their shell like a hermit crab or a snail. Perhaps it is an instance of atavism, a return to the period when the ancestor of man was not yet a social animal and lived alone in his den, or perhaps it is only one of the diversities of human character—who knows? I am not a natural ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... very late; in a kind of snail-train they call the express. These Italian trains go at about the rate of ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... mode: The tender, the dulcet, the rosy tone; The passing passion, the forgotten tone; The rosemary, wallflower mode; The rainbow mode and the nightingale mode The English tin, the cinnamon mode, Fresh pomegranates, green linden-bloom mode; The lonely gormandizer mode, The skylark, the snail, the barking tone; And the honey flower, the marjoram mode; The lion's skin, true pelican mode, ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... is a sandy hollow which was deep under water in the great January freshet. That freshet deposited a new layer of sand and also bushels of clam and snail shells of all sizes and species. They lie so thick they may be taken up by the shovelful. Two or three dead fish are also found. What a fine fossiliferous stratum will be found here about a ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... been crucified more than fifteen hundred years before the audience had been created; and although "Old Neb" of Babylon had destroyed a million of Hebrews several hundred years previous to the birth of the Bethlehem "Savior of Mankind," the "frog" and "snail" eaters of France were still breaking their lungs and throats in cheering for ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... roadside ditch or pool in springtime, take from it any bit of stick or straw which has lain undisturbed for a time. Some little worm-shaped masses of clear jelly containing specks are fastened to the stick: eggs of a small snail-like shell-fish. One of these specks magnified proves to be a crystalline sphere with an opaque mass in its centre. And while you are looking, the opaque mass begins to stir, and by-and-by slowly to ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... amphibious love for the water and the task he had set for himself was easy. But his fear for Bert and his impatience at the delay before he could help him made it seem to him as though he were going at a snail's pace, although in reality he was cleaving the water like ...
— Bert Wilson in the Rockies • J. W. Duffield
... truth, I generally go about In strict incognito; and yet one likes To wear one's orders upon gala days. I have no ribbon at my knee; but here At home, the cloven foot is honourable. 265 See you that snail there?—she comes creeping up, And with her feeling eyes hath smelt out something. I could not, if I would, mask myself here. Come now, we'll go about from fire to fire: I'll be the Pimp, and you ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... Like house-encumber'd Snail we creep; While far ahead the women keep, For when to the devil's house we speed, By a thousand ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... would find themselves leaving that guidance, and blindly adventuring out into the open thoroughfare to avoid some obstacle—some spectral wain or omnibus got hopelessly stranded; while there were muffled cries and calls here, there, and everywhere. They went at a snail's pace, of course. Once, at a corner, the near wheels got on the pavement; the cab tilted over; Miss Burgoyne shrieked aloud and clung to her companion; then there was a heavy bump, and the venerable vehicle resumed its slow ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... forest-trees—a circumstance which I would perhaps hesitate to mention in mere human society were it not that I have been credibly informed your own great naturalist, Darwin, tried the experiment himself with one of the biggest European land-molluscs, the great edible Roman snail, and found that it still lived on in vigorous style after immersion in sea-water for twenty days. Now, I myself observed that several of these bits of broken trees, torn down by floods in heavy storm time from the banks of ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... aneurism of the heart. On Tuesday, went to Dr. Walsh, who told him he hadn't. On Wednesday I met him in a cab in the Square here, and he got out to talk to me. I walked about with him a little while at a snail's pace, cheering him up; but when I came home, I told them that I thought him much changed, and in danger. Yesterday at 2 o'clock he died of spasm of the heart. I am going up to Highgate to look for ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... road ahead of him under the glare of the dancing lamps, to the road map spread out at his feet, upon which, from time to time, he focused his pocket flashlight. And then, finally, he slowed the car to a snail's pace—he should be very near his destination—that very ultra-exclusive ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... rewarded by finding the ground strewn with spirited fruit,—some of it, perhaps, collected at squirrel-holes, with the marks of their teeth by which they carried them,—some containing a cricket or two silently feeding within, and some, especially in damp days, a shelless snail. The very sticks and stones lodged in the tree-top might have convinced you of the savoriness of the fruit which has been so eagerly sought after ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... at a snail pace the howling of the wintry gale continued unabated, with the roar of the wind through the tree-tops ashore, the dash of the waves on the point above, and the constant wabbling motion of the shanty-boat to remind them of ...
— The House Boat Boys • St. George Rathborne
... very effectively did. I reported next morning that the only chance of seeing what it was was to go out in the daytime; and it was suspicious enough to justify the risk. I donned a green suit and with a snail's progress crawled through the long grass and discovered that the Germans had laid a five-inch pipe from their trenches to within fifty yards of an indentation in our own. They would be able to enfilade us with gas before we could don our masks. We looked on our ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... I stayed in that place about a month, with much content and gladness, enjoying good wines and excellent food, and treated with the greatest kindness by the Count; every day I used to ride out alone along the seashore, where I dismounted, and filled my pockets with all sorts of pebbles, snail shells, and sea shells of great ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... industry. The economy continued to falter in 1994, as remittances and tourist earnings remained low. Production of taro, the primary food export crop, has dropped 97% since a fungal disease struck the crop in 1993. The rapid growth in 1994 of the giant African snail population in Western Samoa is also threatening the country's basic food crops, such ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... skillful, quick and brave. Onward he dashed, never for an instant taking his eagle eye from the tracks which formed his compass. Think not that such tracks are easily traced. None but a practised and ready eye can follow them to any advantageous end. To trace them even at a snail's pace, for an unpractised eye, is like the child putting pen and ink to paper through his first copy-book of penmanship. Many and many an awful blot and horribly crooked line will doubtless carry the simile fully and strikingly to the mind. But the ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... to give out. One of them fell dead, and we left him. The other three could not go much farther. Every article that was of no present use was thrown from the wagon to lighten it, and left lying on the plain; but still the poor brutes were scarce able to drag it along. We went at a snail's pace. ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... carbonic acid gas caused the separation of an equivalent quantity of insoluble carbonate of lime, which, layer by layer, built up the mound. A fragment of the rock which I possess contains leaves, twigs, hazel nuts, and snail shells, which, falling from time to time upon it, were incrusted and finally imprisoned in ...
— Saratoga and How to See It • R. F. Dearborn
... pupils," said I; for I knew the number, and with my usual base habit of cowardice, I shrank into my sloth like a snail into its shell, and alleged incapacity and impracticability as a pretext to escape action. If left to myself, I should infallibly have let this chance slip. Inadventurous, unstirred by impulses of practical ambition, I was capable of sitting twenty years teaching infants ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... had ridden quite fast, or perchance these two had gone at a snail's pace, but when half-way home they looked about them and found that they ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... minute, and every minute marking a day. I supposed the laboratory had been destroyed and I had come into the open air. I had a dim impression of scaffolding, but I was already going too fast to be conscious of any moving things. The slowest snail that ever crawled dashed by too fast for me. The twinkling succession of darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye. Then, in the intermittent darknesses, I saw the moon spinning swiftly through her quarters from new to full, and had a faint glimpse of the circling stars. ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... plants and animals. As, for example, among the plants we take the yeast-plant, a Protococcus, a common mould, a Chara, a fern, and some flowering plant; among animals we examine such things as an Amoeba, a Vorticella, and a fresh-water polyp. We dissect a starfish, an earthworm, a snail, a squid, and a fresh-water mussel. We examine a lobster and a crayfish, and a black beetle. We go on to a common skate, a codfish, a frog, a tortoise, a pigeon, and a rabbit, and that takes us about all the time we have to give. The purpose of this course is not to make skilled dissectors, ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... found too illegible to allow of its being copied; and over the tomb was spread a pall of silk, striped in red, green, and white, but much faded. Against a pillar, which supports the roof, were hung rows of coloured rags and threads of yarn, with snail-shells and sea-shells strung among them by way of further ornament. A wooden bowl, at one end of the tomb, was probably intended to receive alms for the support of the devotee who claims the place, and who practises the curing of diseases by charms ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... time of the ice blockade from the 9th of December to the 13th, the slopes in front of the lines were a continuous glare of ice, so that movements away from the roads and broken paths could be made only with the greatest difficulty and at a snail's pace. Men and horses were seen falling whenever they attempted to move across country. A man slipping on the hillside had no choice but to sit down and slide to the bottom, and groups of men in the forts and lines ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... falter, though the motor panted. Scarcely ever were we able to pass from the first speed to the second, but then (as Beechy remarked), considering all things, we ought to be thankful for any speed above that of a snail. ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Russolo (No. 23), is "a fantastic impression produced not by line but by colour." An elongated insect or snail—is it a man or a grasshopper?—is in the first plane; back of him is a girl's face with pleading eyes; an explosion of light in the background is evidently intended for an electric lamp; the rest ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... semblance of a snail grown paralytic, Concerning whom your victims daily speak In florid language, fearsome and mephitic, Enough to redden any trooper's cheek: Let them, I say, hold forth till all is blue; ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 26, 1916 • Various
... breeze. Only a weak swirl of current from the far-off Gulf Stream pushed my hulk onward; and this, I suppose, was helped a little by that attraction of floating bodies for each other which brings chips and leaves together on the surface of even the stillest pool. But a snail goes faster than I was going; and it was only at the end of a full hour of watching that I could see—yet even then could not be quite certain about it—that my position a very little ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... life of a snail. The unfavorable weather constantly throws me back, and at these baths it is impossible to command one's natural strength. A few days ago, Naegeli, a musical author and poet of considerable repute, wrote to me ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826 Vol. 2 • Lady Wallace
... to a very curious use by the bees. "A snail[10] having crept into one of M. Reaumur's hives early in the morning, after crawling about for some time, adhered by means of its own slime to one of the glass panes. The bees having discovered the snail, surrounded it and formed a border of propolis round the verge of its shell, ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... insidious foe, And from your harvests keep a hundred harms; Even the blackest of them all, the crow, Renders good service as your man-at-arms, Crushing the beetle in his coat of mail, And crying havoc on the slug and snail. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... Campbell that Peter might go away from Riverton. Yet now he was going, and it had been taken for granted that she, Emma, who, as she said, had "raised 'im from a puppy up'ards," wouldn't mind staying on here after his departure. Fetching a cold sigh from the depths of an afflicted bosom, Emma moved snail-like toward the work in hand; and as she worked she howled dismally that nobody knew the trouble she saw, "nobody knew but ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... two miles an hour when the going was good. All we passed were the pedestrians,—a few of them,—and we usually found ourselves tailing along behind a camel-train or waiting for a wheelbarrow to get out of the way. In the side streets, or hutungs, we shouted ourselves along at a snail's pace, cleaving the dense throngs of inattentive citizens, whose right to the middle of the road was as great as ours, and who didn't purpose to be disturbed. Once on turning a corner, the groom pulled the bridle off one ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... insensibly relaxed their pace, becoming mere strollers on the outside edge of the throng. The sense of being watched came to both of them at once, and, looking up at the same moment, they saw, approaching at a snail's pace, an open Victoria, in which were two ladies, to whom they were objects of plainly expressed interest. The elder was an insignificant little woman, who looked as though she were being taken out by her costly furs, while the younger was a ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... the same. It curls through the bottom like the tail o' a cur-dog; an' nigher the Massissippy, it don't move faster than a snail 'ud crawl. I reck'n the run o' the river 'll not help 'em much. The'll hev a good spell o' paddlin' afore they git down to Massissippy; an' I hope that durned Mormon 'll blister his ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... speed of between two and three miles per hour; the engines needing to be just started, and then stopped again for a few minutes in order to keep the speed down to this very low limit. But they were all as yet so new to Arctic scenery—everything was so entirely novel to them—that even this snail's pace failed to prove wearisome, especially as the weather ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... gust of a kind of angry courage came into my heart. My uncle had sent me here, certainly to run great risks, perhaps to die. I swore I would settle that "perhaps," if I should break my neck for it; got me down upon my hands and knees; and as slowly as a snail, feeling before me every inch, and testing the solidity of every stone, I continued to ascend the stair. The darkness, by contrast with the flash, appeared to have redoubled; nor was that all, for my ears were now troubled ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... after purity. There is nothing that makes a man so down-hearted in his work of self-improvement as the constant and bitter experience that it seems to be all of no use; that he is making so little progress; that with immense pains, like a snail creeping up a wall, he gets up, perhaps, an inch or two, and then all at once he drops down, and further down than he ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... under separate cover, some samples of cherry tree leaves that have been attacked by a small snail or slug. Kindly let me know what they are, and how to rid the ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... reprove, and how often have I jeered at myself for a fraud as the doughty platform combatant, when shrinking from blaming some lad or lass for doing their work badly. An unkind look or word has availed to make me shrink myself as a snail into its shell, while, on the platform, opposition makes ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... fighting in the heart of the Ottoman kingdom, he avoided their camp, dexterously inclined to the left, occupied Caesarea, traversed the salt desert and the river Halys, and invested Angora; while the Sultan, immovable and ignorant in his post, compared the Tartar swiftness to the crawling of a snail. He returned on the wings of indignation to the relief of Angora; and as both generals were alike impatient for action, the plains round that city were the scene of a memorable battle, which has immortalized the glory of Timur and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... to do but put it in our poke and getting us to the moneychangers' tables, which you know stand still laden with groats and florins, take as much as we will thereof? None will see us, and so may we grow rich of a sudden, without having to smear walls all day long, snail-fashion.' ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... rounded hillock, on which are a snail and spray of possible foxglove, and out of which grow a red carnation and another flower. In the upper right-hand corner is a gabled cottage with a tree, and under it a moth, flower, and caterpillar. Towards the upper left-hand corner ...
— English Embroidered Bookbindings • Cyril James Humphries Davenport
... temperature of the water and of the atmosphere, but ordinarily takes place in three or four days. This precaution is adopted for the purpose of getting the young shoots as quickly as possible out of the way of a small snail, which abounds in some of the watered lands of Kashmir, but sometimes proves insufficient to defend it against the activity of this destructive enemy. When the farmer suspects, by the scanty appearance of the plants above the water in which the grain ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... Colonel, I am charmed to be here. Gad! the possession of the only chariot in the Colony is a burdensome honor! I thought dinner would be over, and the stirrup cup in order while I was creeping, like a snail with his house on his back, over these 'fair and pleasant roads'—as I call them in my book, eh, Dick! But you have a goodly company, I see; Ludwell, Fitzhugh, Carey, Anthony Nash, mine ancient enemy Lawrence, Wormeley, Carrington ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... by having recourse to lime, in the preparation of the land for such crops. They conceal themselves in the holes and crevices, only making their appearance early in mornings and late in the evenings. The white slug or snail is likewise very destructive to young turnip crops, by rising out of the holes of the soils, on wet and dewy mornings and evenings. Rolling the ground with a heavy implement, before the sun rises, has been advised as a means of destroying them in these ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... sea and land warfare appealed the more vividly to one fresh from the front in France. What infinite labour for an army to get one big gun into position! How heralded the snail-like travels of the big German howitzer! Here was ship after ship, whose guns seemed innumerable. One found it hard to realize the resisting power of their armour, painted to look as liquid as the sea, and the stability of their construction, which was able to bear the strain of firing the great ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... life, no creature is so vast, or so minute, that you cannot deal with it, or bring it into service; the lion and the crocodile will couch about your shafts; the moth and the bee will sun themselves upon your flowers; for you, the fawn will leap; for you, the snail be slow; for you, the dove smooth her bosom; and the hawk spread her wings toward the south. All the wide world of vegetation blooms and bends for you; the leaves tremble that you may bid them be still under the marble snow; the thorn ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... food there is a wide difference in taste. One people will regard as a luxury a viand or condiment which is repugnant to another. Locusts have been used from time immemorial for food by different tribes of Arabs. Snail soup was once regarded in Europe as a delicious dish. In the West Indies and South America the guano, a species of lizard, is devoured with gusto. Bird's nests command enormous prices as an edible in China, where also dogs and cats are ordinary food. At Rome camels' ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... with thy own sweet smile, and tuneful tongue, Delighted BELLIS calls her infant throng. 145 Each on his reed astride, the Cherub-train Watch her kind looks, and circle o'er the plain; Now with young wonder touch the siding snail, Admire his eye-tipp'd horns, and painted mail; Chase with quick step, and eager arms outspread, 150 The pausing Butterfly from mead ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... freighter to a snail's pace when he approached the dredged channel, and at last the leadsman found suitable bottom. Both anchors ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... feast of happiness when the frolicsome calf bounds forward to the flowing udder, and with his walling eyes reflecting whole acres of "calf heaven" and his little tail wiggling in speechless bliss, he draws his evening meal from nature's commissariat. The snail lolls in his shell and thinks himself a king in the grandest palace in the world. And how brilliant is the horizon of the firefly when ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... You are not the man of the world you should be, Walter. Men of half your merit will eclipse you, winning opulence and distinction—while you, with your common sense notions, will be plodding on at a snail's pace. You are behind the age, and a stranger to ...
— Home Lights and Shadows • T. S. Arthur
... precipitous and narrow right-hand stroke aptly presents the slippery, uphillward struggle of a virtuous course I remember to have seen, as a child, another and a similar emblem which impressed me much. On the one side of the picture a snail was slowly creeping up a steep path; on the other a stag rushed and bounded unrestrained down the sheer proclivities of a wide and darkening hill. Improvement is ever slow and difficult; degeneracy is too often startling ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... last came, that is to say, a day finally dawned upon a long and weary night of impatience; and then the hours until "one" were snail-paced, dreary, and innumerable. But even Stamboul, it is said, shall have an end, and there came an end to this long delay. The clock struck. As the last echo ceased, I stepped into B—'s and ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... twigs or leaves cut to a suitable length and laid side by side in a long spirally-coiled band, forming the wall of a subcylindrical cavity. The cavity of the tube of Helicopsyche, composed of grains of sand, is itself spirally coiled, so that the case exactly resembles a small snail-shell in shape. One species of Limnophilus uses small but entire leaves; another, the shells of the pond-snail Planorbis; another, pieces of stick arranged transversely with reference to the long axis of the tube. To admit of the free ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... story were by, the door-drink still on my palate, and I looking for my way home. It was nut-time. I had a pouch of them in my jacket, and I cracked and ate them as I went. Not a star pricked the sky; the dark was the dark of a pot in a cave and a snail boiling under the lid of it. I had cracked a nut and the kernel of it fell on the ground, so I bent and felt about my feet, though my pouch was so full of nuts that they fell showering in the fin dust. I swept every one with a shell aside, hunting for my ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... assassinated by some thieves, among them being the notorious Dannepont, alias La Pouraille. The trial of this crime was called in May, 1830. [Scenes from a Courtesan's Life.] They were well-to-do folk and, according to Cesar Birotteau who knew them, old man Crottat was as "close as a snail." [Cesar Birotteau.] ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... melted from the lid of the pot that Mr. Beale had brought in with the other things from the garden. Also it was melted from the crack of the iron casket. Mr. Beale's eyes, always rather prominent, almost resembled the eyes of the lobster or the snail as their gaze fell on the embroidered leather bag. And when Dickie opened this and showered the twenty gold coins into a hollow of the drab ticking, he closed his eyes and sighed, and opened ...
— Harding's luck • E. [Edith] Nesbit
... cottage, in the ancient Barony of Gruids. It was a low, long, dingy edifice of turf, four or five rooms in length, but only one in height, that, lying along a gentle acclivity, somewhat resembled at a distance a huge black snail creeping up the hill. As the lower apartment was occupied by my uncle's half-dozen milk-cows, the declination of the floor, consequent on the nature of the site, proved of signal importance, from the free drainage which it secured; the second ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... from 'disorganisation of the nervous centres.' At home his little weaknesses do not strike you. You may not be on the spot when he flies across Piccadilly Circus, pursued, as he fancies, by a Brompton omnibus which has not yet reached St. James's Church, and is moving at a snail's pace; you may not have been with him on that occasion when, in his eagerness to be in time for the 'Flying Dutchman,' he arrives at Paddington an hour before it starts, and is put into the parliamentary train which is shunted at Slough to let the 'Dutchman' pass; but when ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... wounded body of Jerry Boyle that the pot-bellied peace officer feared, but the stiffening frame of Hun Shanklin, lying out there in the bright sun. Every time he looked that way he drew up on himself, like a snail. At length Slavens gave him permission to leave, charging him to telephone to Meander for the coroner the moment that he arrived in Comanche, and to get word to Boyle's people at the earliest ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... Nut-field, which was set apart for such festivals, and was on this occasion decked out in the most beautiful manner. In the middle, upon a molehill prettily covered with small pebbles, stood the throne for the good King and his fair daughter; it was made of snail-shells and mussel-shells, and cushioned with feathers. A long alley of lilies-of-the-valley, six deep, led up to the throne; and when the royal procession galloped up on squirrels, all the little lily-bells rang with a lovely melody; for at each lily was stationed a spider, ...
— The King of Root Valley - and his curious daughter • R. Reinick
... make to me who he belongs to? I don't care if he belongs to Vanderbilt, or Aster'ses family. Principle—that is what I am a workin' on; and the same principle that would hender me from buyin' a feller that was poor as a snail, would hender me from buyin' one that had the riches of Creshus; it wouldn't make a ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... when they were free of the house, she ran ahead to the waiting auto-car, leaving Kent and Elinor to follow at a snail's pace down the leaf-covered walk to the gate. There was a cedar hedge to mark the sidewalk boundary, and while it still screened them Kent bent quickly to the ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... and pushed up the lane for nearly two miles, till a winding path called Snail-Creep sloped up a hill and entered a hazel copse by a hole like a rabbit's burrow. In he plunged, vanished among the bushes, and in a short time there was no sign of his existence upon earth, save an occasional rustling ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... to soothe him. But the Colonel clamoured to the heavens. Kennaston he qualified in various ways. And as for Dr. Jeal, he would hold him responsible—"personally, sir"—for the consequences of his dawdling in this fashion—"Damme, sir, like a damn' snail with a ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... utterly to Jim. The days now were busy ones in the valley as well as on the dam. Jim's eighteen hours a day often stretched into twenty, though he sometimes dozed in his office chair or in the automobile with Oscar, reveling in his new-learned accomplishment, driving at a snail's pace. ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... door I walked me slow upon the floor And just outside the Doctor's study A youth I met all in a hurry; His name perhaps I had better not tell But like a snail ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... and snail have trailed Their slimy silver up and down The beds where once the moss-rose veiled Rich beauty; and the mushroom brown Swells where the lily tossed ...
— Weeds by the Wall - Verses • Madison J. Cawein
... the gluttonous kern had not wrought me a snail's own wrong!" Then he sounded, and down came kinsmen and clansmen all: "Ten blows, for ten tine, on his back let fall, And reckon no stroke if the blood follow not ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... he had seen little—and that little from the gutters. To-day in the brilliant sunshine, in clothes better than any he had ever worn before, and side by side with a woman whom every one seemed honoured to know, he looked upon it with different eyes. They drove along Bond Street at a snail's pace and stopped for a few minutes at one of the smaller galleries, where she took him in to see a wonderful Russian picture, about which every one was talking. Fancying that he looked tired she insisted upon tea, and they stopped at some curious little rooms, and sat together ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... living here like a snail in its shell," said Dame Joanna, fixing her bright eyes on ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the snail, whose tender horns being hit, 1033 Shrinks backwards in his shelly cave with pain, And there, all smother'd up, in shade doth sit, Long after fearing to creep forth again; 1036 So, at his bloody view, her eyes are fled Into the deep ...
— Venus and Adonis • William Shakespeare
... wish I could go with you," cried a voice from the road-side. It was Fred, who had not been able to finish his work before, and who had only painted his last snail just in season to throw his now illustrated list ...
— Gritli's Children • Johanna Spyri
... roots of the hedge-row made a thinness. We should not have cared about this if it were not that we could look, unseen ourselves, at the infrequent passer-by, for the hedge grew luxuriantly. Further down it became partly a clay bank, and there on the coarse grass used to hang snail-shells of all sizes, and, as I remember them, of shining gold and silver. The inhabitant was the drawback to all that beauty, yet when we found an empty house, it was cold, dull, ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... the railway line from Catania to Messina, which crossed it on a long bridge supported by stone pillars and buttresses, the bridge which, as Gaspare had said, had recently collapsed and was now nearly built up again. It was already in use, but the trains were obliged to crawl over it at a snail's pace in order not to shake the unfinished masonry, and men were stationed at each end to signal to the driver whether he was to stop or whether he might venture to go on. Beyond the watercourse, upon the side opposite to the town of San Felice, was a series ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... of our first parents. In one we see the newly created and lovely Eve standing by the side of the sleeping Adam, and regarding him with pleasurable anticipation. Another shows us the animals marching in line to be inspected and named. The snail heads the procession and sets the pace. The lion and the tiger stroll gossiping together. The unicorn walks alone, very stiff and proud. Two rats and two mice are closely followed by two sleek cats, who keep them well covered, and plainly await the time when Eve's amiable indiscretion ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... each soft vibration owns With sweet responsive sympathy of tones; So the fair flower expands it's lucid form To meet the sun, and shuts it to the storm;— 15 For thee my borders nurse the fragrant wreath, My fountains murmur, and my zephyrs breathe; Slow slides the painted snail, the gilded fly Smooths his fine down, to charm thy curious eye; On twinkling fins my pearly nations play, 20 Or win with sinuous train their trackless way; My plumy pairs in gay embroidery dress'd Form with ingenious bill the pensile nest, To Love's ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... fellow, was the apprentice boy, Horatio. His employer said, "Horatio, did you ever see a snail?" "I—think—I—have," he drawled out. "You must have met him then, for I am sure you never overtook one," said the "boss." Your creditor will meet you or overtake you and say, "Now, my young friend, you agreed to pay me; you have not done it, you must give me your note." ...
— The Art of Money Getting - or, Golden Rules for Making Money • P. T. Barnum
... me that the Benevolent Despot, the Peter Grievous, and the Martyred Snail, are people to avoid in choosing ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... pig, and arbutus for us! We make a clean sweep down the hillside "jumping" a rabbit from its form under a brush-pile, discovering where a partridge roosts in a low-spreading hemlock; coming upon a snail cemetery in a hollow hickory stump; turning up a yellow-jackets' nest built two thirds underground; tracing the tunnel of a bobtailed mouse in its purposeless windings in the leaf-mould, digging ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... fury, goaded out of all politeness and reserve by the surface false acquiescence of his tone; "do you never go away? I wish you would! I wish"—(speaking between laughing and crying)—"that you could take your abbey up on your back, as a snail does its shell, and march off with it into ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... the third class, and two are black dragon-pearls of medium quality. Of the seven smaller pearls two are serpent-pearls, and five are mussel-pearls. The remaining pearls are in part sea-crane pearls, in part snail and oyster-pearls. They do not approach the great pearls in value, and yet few will be found to equal ...
— The Chinese Fairy Book • Various
... of a little snail bleached In the grass; chip of flint, and mite Of chalk; and the small birds' dung ...
— Last Poems • Edward Thomas
... will lay herself to death; of the disquiet and grief displayed by all migratory animals if they are prevented from migrating. A captive cuckoo will always die at the approach of winter through despair at being unable to fly away; so will the vineyard snail if it is hindered of its winter sleep. The weakest mother will encounter an enemy far surpassing her in strength, and suffer death cheerfully for her offspring's sake. Every year we see fresh cases of people who have been ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... condition is enough to make one weep, and that in spite of my constant attention and repeated dabbings with spirits of wine. And this is not the dampest part of the island by any means. Do not suppose, however, that damp is the only enemy to one's toilette here. I found a snail the other day in my wardrobe which had been journeying slowly but effectively across some favorite silken skirts. Cockroaches prefer tulle and net, and eat their way recklessly and rapidly through choicest lace, besides nibbling ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... where they are eaten, after being cooked with butter and garlic, as escargots de Bourgogne—but it stuck in his throat, and a catastrophe would have happened but for the sturdy blow which his companion gave him on the 'chine.' That a snail-eater should criticise gipsies for eating cockchafers shows what creatures of prejudice we ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... and fashion it into wallets, in which to heap up the pollen-dust which she gleaned from the flowers by means of a brush carried on her abdomen. Or else, springing from a genus akin to the cotton-workers, she used to build resin partitions in the spiral stairway of a dead Snail. Such was the ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... considerably diminished as to make them resemble nothing so much as those playthings manufactured at Carlsruhe. This was the effect produced by a microscopic train, which whistled very faintly to attract our attention, and which seemed to creep along at a snail's pace, though doubtless going at the rate of thirty miles an hour, and was enveloped in a minute cloud of smoke. What a lasting impression this microscopic neatness makes on us! What is that white puff I see down there? the smoke of a cigar? ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion
... but still laughing, when he crawled out, like a snail from under his shell, and got upon his feet, clutching the tub to hurl it ...
— The Young Surveyor; - or Jack on the Prairies • J. T. Trowbridge
... little sister to lavish it upon that Sarah. This was so unnatural that you may believe it first disgusted, and then irritated me. One day at the club I could not resist saying, 'You are an ass, La Bride, to ruin yourself—worse than that, to ruin your sister, for the sake of a snail, as little sympathetic as Sarah, a girl who always has a cold in her head, and who has already deceived you.' 'Deceived me!' cried La Brede, waving his long arms. 'Deceived me! and with whom?'—'With me.' ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... art, and you are not so bold as to deny it. You say no more about it. You feel that you have nothing to answer to this great argument which nature brings against you. The disposition of a fly's wing, a snail's organs suffices to bring you ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... other worms the eyes are entirely wanting, or their existence is very doubtful. Whether the black points at the extremities of what Swammerdam calls the horns of the common snail, are organs which really possess the power of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 20, No. 562, Saturday, August 18, 1832. • Various
... regulated and assisted by this process. Oyster-shells were first introduced; muscle-shells speedily followed; and, as commerce became more complicate, they had even been obliged to have recourse to snail-shells. Popanilla retired to rest with admiration of the people who thus converted to the most useful purposes things apparently so useless. There was no saying now what might not be done even with a nutshell. It was evident that the nation who contrived to be the richest ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... My fourth in luck, but not in fate. My fifth in ship, but not in boat. My sixth in atom, not in mote. My seventh in man, but not in boy. My eighth in trouble, not in joy. My ninth in head, but not in tail. My tenth in turtle, not in snail. My eleventh in cake, but not in bread. My twelfth in yellow, not in red. My thirteenth in wrong, but not in right. My fourteenth in squire, not in knight. My fifteenth in run, but not in walk. My sixteenth in chatter, ...
— Harper's Young People, September 7, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... accompanied the Mistress and the Master. Unknown to the old dog, these walks had been shortened, mercifully, and slowed down, to accommodate themselves to Lad's waning strength: But the time came when even a half-mile, at snail-pace, over a smooth road, was too much ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... a dun? ducked by the Goody from thine own window, when "creeping like snail unwillingly" to morning prayers?—Ibid., Vol. IV. ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... with him. The nature of his experiences so far disinclined him for any further experiments, at least until he had reconsidered them. But he lifted a sheet of paper, and turned a glass of water pink and then green, and he created a snail, which he miraculously annihilated, and got himself a miraculous new tooth-brush. Somewhere in the small hours he had reached the fact that his will-power must be of a particularly rare and pungent quality, ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... and membranes, and even bones, acquire new sensations; and the parts of mutilated animals, as of wounded snails and polypi and crabs, are reproduced; and at the same time acquire sensations adapted to their situation. Thus when the head of a snail is reproduced after decollation with a sharp razor, those curious telescopic eyes are also reproduced, and acquire their sensibility to light, as well as their adapted muscles for retraction on ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... larva builds for itself a snail-shaped, fairly firm case, fastened by a slender girdle of silk to a piece of wood or other support. Keep this over winter, and in March, or early April, the black-and-blue-and-gold ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... Cato and Ferdinand, they devote the major part of their time. Their love of finery and gaudy colours is also most remarkable. Interwoven amongst the twigs of which the bower is composed, and scattered about the ground in its vicinity, are found bleached bones, broken oyster, snail, and cowrie shells, and not unfrequently, in the more civilised districts, pieces of coloured rag, and fragments of ribbon pilfered from some neighbouring station, for, in search of attractive objects to decorate his playground, the bower-bird entirely ignores the eighth commandment, ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... style it requires eight or nine hours to accomplish it. Needless delay is the rule here, and forms a national infirmity; but in the present instance we did not feel in special haste, nor regret the snail's pace at which the cars were run, as the road lay mostly through a very beautiful valley, lined on either side by high hills extending back until they terminated in lofty, snow-clad ranges. The contrast between these ice-crowned ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... soldier, distinguished by the greatest exposure and privation. The occupation of a boatman was more calculated to destroy the constitution and to shorten life than any other business. In ascending the river it was a continued series of toil, rendered more irksome by the snail-like rate at which they moved. The boat was propelled by poles, against which the shoulder was placed, and the whole strength and skill of the individual were applied in this manner. As the boatmen moved along the running ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... necessary to shove the burning coals here and there over the surface to avoid burning a hole through it. At one point I noticed a horse-car filled with straw bedding for the animals, and the train going here at a snail's pace enabled me to jump off and chuck an armful of the straw into our car; I did this with my friend of the blankets in mind. I threw the damp straw on top of the live coals and in a few minutes or ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... never known so slow a day. The minutes lagged unaccountably, the hours crawled forward at the most snail-like pace, and his impatience at this was tempered to a satirical amusement by the fact that the entire world of his friends seemed banded together in a conspiracy to engage his ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... contact with civilization; then Cesca, the lean and stoical product of an ancient and terrible savagery; and Alchise, her mate. Finally Molly—squat, dirty Molly—the stupid, squalid aborigine, as distinct from Cesca's type as is the brown snail from ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... braid brain complain daily dairy daisy drain dainty explain fail fain gain gait gaiter grain hail jail laid maid mail maim nail paid pail paint plain prairie praise quail rail rain raise raisin remain sail saint snail sprain stain straight strain tail train ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... 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 itself to me, or I to life. But that is not ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... I'm ready, you unnerstand. My house ain't much for to see, sir, but it's hearty at your service if ever you should come along with Mas'r Davy to see it. I'm a reg'lar Dodman, I am,' said Mr. Peggotty, by which he meant snail, and this was in allusion to his being slow to go, for he had attempted to go after every sentence, and had somehow or other come back again; 'but I wish you both well, and I ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... is represented as challenging Cupid at archery. To challenge at the flight is, I believe, to wager who shall shoot the arrow furthest without any particular mark. To challenge at the bird-bolt, seems to mean the same as to challenge at children's archery, with snail arrows such as are discharged at birds. In Twelfth Night Lady Olivia opposes a bird-bolt to a cannon-bullet, the lightest to ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... solely upon details of adult structure, young crabs pass through a stage when to all intents and purposes they are counterparts of lobsters. Even the twisted hermit crab, which has a soft-skinned hinder part coiled to fit the curve of the snail shell used as a protection, is symmetrical and lobster-like when it is ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... shameful things he has done in all these years. There is never a year goes by without his doing something dreadful; and he has made everybody miserable at one time or other by killing their friends or relations, from the snail to the partridge. He is quite merciless, and spares no one; why, his own children are afraid of him, and it is believed that he has pecked several of them to death, though it is hushed up; but people talk about it all the same, sometimes. As for the way he has behaved ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... by his day's work and MARY'S stupidity, from now on absolutely brutish]. You've had time to cook a dozen meals. You're as slow as a snail. What did you do all the time we were in ...
— Washington Square Plays - Volume XX, The Drama League Series of Plays • Various
... forgotten friend, a Snail, Beneath his house, with slimy trail, Crawls o'er the grass; whom, when he spies, In wrath he ...
— Favourite Fables in Prose and Verse • Various
... those shells fell and exploded, earth and stone and iron melted into dust under the terrific force of the exploding gases, and the air-ships, moving with a velocity compared with which the utmost speed of the aerostats was as a snail's pace, flitted hither and thither wherever a battery got into action, and destroyed it before the ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... quick and brave. Onward he dashed, never for an instant taking his eagle eye from the tracks which formed his compass. Think not that such tracks are easily traced. None but a practised and ready eye can follow them to any advantageous end. To trace them even at a snail's pace, for an unpractised eye, is like the child putting pen and ink to paper through his first copy-book of penmanship. Many and many an awful blot and horribly crooked line will doubtless carry the simile fully and strikingly ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... disobey me?" asked Benassis. "I shall not bring you any more rice pudding nor snail broth! No more fresh dates and white bread for you! So you want to die and break your poor mother's heart, ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... hail bail flail slay fray nail bait frail vain mail gray clay paid dray bray main wail pray raise saint stray snail faint staid away paint faith train gayly spray chain plain maid stain strain waist braid drain grain praise strait twain claim ...
— The Beacon Second Reader • James H. Fassett
... land, flashing colours livelier than the spring-meadows bordering their line of passage. Guy, with a nod for all, and a greeting for the best-disposed, pushed on toward the van, till the gathering block compelled him to adopt the snail's pace of the advance party, and gave him work enough to keep his two horses from being jammed with the mass. Now and then he cast a weather-eye on the heavens, and was soon confirmed in an opinion he had repeatedly ejaculated, that ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... could, from the resources at hand. To make blue, he pounded up a piece of an old stone he had brought from Canterbury. Gilding was done by making gold-leaf out of real gold. The Tyrian purple was made from a gastropod of the seas near Byzantium, and a little snail-like mollusk of Ireland would serve to make a crimson like it. Thinning it, the painter could make pink. There was no vermilion to be had, and red lead must be used for that color and made by roasting white ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... head raised by means of a turned-down chair, and here I was reposing comfortably when the brother arrived. It was late in the forenoon when the minister reached home, his rickety wagon creaking through the snow, and drawn at a snail's pace by a long-furred, knock-kneed horse. The tall but not very clerical figure was wrapped in a shawl and swathed round the throat with many turns of a woolen tippet. The daughter ran out with eagerness to greet her father and tell of the wonderful arrival. I was received with genuine ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... helped them. Immediately afterwards, however, the obscurity was enveloping. Their faces were wet and shiny with moisture. Even the fingers of Lane's gloves which gripped the wheel were sodden. He proceeded at a snail's pace, keeping always on the inside of the road and only a few inches from the wall or bank. Once he lost his way and his front wheel struck a small stump, but they were going too slowly for disaster. Another time he failed to follow the turn of the road and found himself in a rough cart track. ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... eight thousand francs a year, is nothing at all towards buying Roguin's practice. Little Xandrot, as we call him, thinks, like all the rest of the world, that we are richer than we are. If his father, that big farmer who is as close as a snail, won't sell a hundred thousand francs worth of land Xandrot can't be a notary, for Roguin's practice is worth four or five hundred thousand. If Crottat does not pay half down, how could he negotiate the affair? ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... with the racing motor turned out to be a light ambulance of a popular Detroit make. Its speeding engine was pure camouflage for its slow progress. It bubbled and steamed at the radiator cap as it pushed along at almost a snail's pace. ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... on, his local interests revived. Whenever he went out he could see the island that was once his home lying like a great snail upon the sea across the bay. It was the spring of the year; local steamers had begun to run, and he was never tired of standing on the thinly occupied deck of one of these as it skirted the island and ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... he flipped a rosebud covered with blight, kicked off a snail which was crawling on the path; then, halfway down the path, he suddenly raised his head and gave ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... Zoology and Comparative Anatomy in this country by making use of a carefully selected series of animals. His 'types' were the Rat, the Common Pigeon, the Frog, the Perch, the Crayfish, Blackbeetle, Anodon, Snail, Earthworm, Leech, Tapeworm. He had a series of dissections of these mounted, also loose dissections and elaborate manuscript descriptions. The student went through this series, dissecting fresh specimens ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... that place from crown to base, and I hit the homeward trail. Ah, God! it was good, though my eyes were blurred, and I crawled like a sickly snail. In that vast white world where the silent sky communes with the silent snow, In hunger and cold and misery I wandered to and fro. But the Lord took pity on my pain, and He led me to the sea, And some ice-bound whalers heard my moan, and they fed and sheltered me. They fed the feeble scarecrow ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... was aroused. It did not know how far the Republicans were prepared to go in their drive for action, so on the day of this flurry in the House the snail-like Rules Committee suddenly met in answer to the call of its chairman, Mr. Pou, and by a vote of 6 to 5 decided to report favorably on the resolution providing for a Woman Suffrage Committee in the House "after all pending war measures have been ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... Seeds planted. Beautiful country. Ride westward. A chopped log. Magnetic hill. Singular scenery. Snail-shells. Cheering prospect westward. A new chain of hills. A nearer mountain. Vistas of green. Gibson finds water. Turtle backs. Ornamented Troglodytes' caves. Water and emus. Beef-wood-trees. Grassy lawns. Gum creek. Purple vetch. ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... guilty. At other times, a bar of red hot iron was passed along the leg, or the arm was thrust into scalding water, and if the natural effect followed, the person's head was immediately struck off. Snail shells, applied to the temples, if they stuck, inferred guilt. When a dispute arose between man and man, the plan was, to place shells on the heads of both, and make them stoop, when he, from off whose head the ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... The point was one on which Stevenson himself felt strongly. In a letter of instructions to his wife found among his posthumous papers he writes: "It is never worth while to inflict pain upon a snail for any literary purpose; and where events may appear to be favourable to me and contrary to others, I would rather be misunderstood than cause a pang to any one whom I have known, far less whom I have loved." Whether an editor or biographer would be justified in carrying out this ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... apprehend or apply that little axiom? The Duchess of Portland killed three thousand snails in order that she might complete the shell-work for which she received so much credit; Dulcie would not have put her foot voluntarily on a single snail for ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... really fundamental resemblances which they present. But a man and a fish are members of the same sub-kingdom 'Vertebrata', because they are much more like one another than either of them is to a worm, or a snail, or any member of the other sub-kingdoms. For similar reasons men and horses are arranged as members of the same Class, 'Mammalia'; men and apes as members of the same Order, 'Primates'; and if there were any animals more like men than they were like any of the ...
— A Critical Examination Of The Position Of Mr. Darwin's Work, "On The Origin Of Species," In Relation To The Complete Theory Of The Causes Of The Phenomena Of Organic Nature • Thomas H. Huxley
... after goat-feathers, and in the meantime Arnold Bennett probably wrote three novels of several hundred thousand words each, gained an international reputation, and passed me on the road to fame like an airplane passing a snail. George Ade kept pegging away at his "Fables" with the regularity of a day laborer, and Peter Finley Dunne ground out his "Mister Dooley" ...
— Goat-Feathers • Ellis Parker Butler
... his Excellence Baron de Goldburg, Leading the Dowager Duchess of Snail; Feathers and fringe on the top of her bonnet, Roses and rings on the end ...
— Five Mice in a Mouse-trap - by the Man in the Moon. • Laura E. Richards
... are the winged wardens of your farms, Who from the cornfields drive the insidious foe, And from your harvest keep a hundred harms; Even the blackest of them all, the crow, Renders good service as your man-at-arms, Crushing the beetle in his coat of mail, And crying havoc on the slug and snail." —FROM "THE ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph, Volume 1, Number 2, February, 1897 • anonymous
... slowly grazing past the wood, I resolved to wait for them to pass on before leaving my concealment. I sat down and tried to be patient, but the brutes were in no hurry, and went on skirting the wood at a snail's pace. It was about six o'clock before the last stragglers had left, and then I ventured out from my hiding-place, hungry as a wolf and afraid of being overtaken by night before finding any human habitation. I had ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... a kind of snail-train they call the express. These Italian trains go at about the rate of ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... passing outside sent a moving square of light through the high grating across the floor of the cellar. The damp walls became dimly visible with shining snail-tracks on them, and his great form leaning negligently upon a cask, his hand arrested in the pulling of his long beard, his eyes gleaming upon her, sardonic and amused. The light twisted round ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... I, lass; an' if thou be not my wife ere that snail-coming new moon doth thrust out her horns, my name is not Hacket, ...
— A Brother To Dragons and Other Old-time Tales • Amelie Rives
... has ever been flourished in American politics. The advance made in this direction is small compared to the actual needs of an efficient national organization, and considering the mass of interest and prejudice which it must continue to overcome, it can hardly continue to progress at more than a snail's pace. The great obstacle to American national fulfillment must always be the danger that the American people will merely succumb to the demands of their local and private interests and will permit their political craft to drift into a compromising situation—from which the penalties of rescue ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... sweet responsive sympathy of tones; So the fair flower expands it's lucid form To meet the sun, and shuts it to the storm;— 15 For thee my borders nurse the fragrant wreath, My fountains murmur, and my zephyrs breathe; Slow slides the painted snail, the gilded fly Smooths his fine down, to charm thy curious eye; On twinkling fins my pearly nations play, 20 Or win with sinuous train their trackless way; My plumy pairs in gay embroidery dress'd Form with ingenious bill the pensile nest, To Love's sweet notes ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... was a snail with a broken shell; for him they built a beautiful little house, and he made little rush brooms and sold them to the passers-by; but he lived ever after close ...
— The Grey Brethren and Other Fragments in Prose and Verse • Michael Fairless
... They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts: His acts being seven ages. At first the infant, Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms: And then, the whining school-boy with his satchel, And shining morning-face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to school. And then, the lover; Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad Made to his mistress' eye-brow. Then, a soldier; Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard, Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel; Seeking the bubble reputation Even in the cannon's ...
— The Art Of Poetry An Epistle To The Pisos - Q. Horatii Flacci Epistola Ad Pisones, De Arte Poetica. • Horace
... system the sun could not appear to it larger than the blaze of a tallow candle. To us it was wholly incredible how, in that dim remoteness, it could still hold true to the central force and follow at a snail-pace, yet with unvarying exactitude, its stupendous orbit. Clemens said that heretofore Neptune, the planetary outpost of our system, had been called the tortoise of the skies, but that comparatively it was rapid in its motion, ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... was a hansom drawn by a snail. The automobile, running without lights, went no faster, kept a certain distance behind us all the way from the Place Pigalle to the apartment of Mademoiselle Reneaux. What have you to say to that? Furthermore, when Mademoiselle ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... conducted tours of the grass. After the experience of Gootes and myself, parachute landings had been ruled out as too hazardous, but someone happily thought of the use of snowshoes and it was on these clumsy means that tourists, at a high cost and at less than snail's pace, tramped wonderingly over the ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... men, to one so bound by such a vow, And women were as phantoms. O, my brother, Why wilt thou shame me to confess to thee How far I faltered from my quest and vow? For after I had lain so many nights A bedmate of the snail and eft and snake, In grass and burdock, I was changed to wan And meagre, and the vision had not come; And then I chanced upon a goodly town With one great dwelling in the middle of it; Thither I made, and there was I disarmed By maidens each as fair as any flower: But ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... moving in a tiny ebullition of dust along the white trail. It looks so small. It moves so slowly, crawling, seemingly, at a snail's pace. It is ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... row?" shouted back the delinquent, hearing her at last, and wriggling himself in from the window like a snail withdrawing itself into its shell, turning round the while his face, slightly flushed with the exertion, to ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... you can't put all boys to one trade, nor send all girls to the same service. One chap will make a London clerk, and another will do better to plough, and sow, and reap, and mow, and be a farmer's boy. It's no use forcing them; a snail will never run a race, nor a ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... caterpillars: that is the true vocation of the Golden Gardener. It is annoying that it can give us but little or no assistance in ridding us of another plague of the kitchen-garden: the snail. The slime of the snail is offensive to the beetle; it is safe from the latter unless crippled, half crushed, or projecting from the shell. Its relatives, however, do not share this dislike. The horny Procrustes, the great Scarabicus, entirely black and larger ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... extraordinary variety—we have bunches of horns great and small, and bunches of imitation centipedes, and bunches of mock holly leaves, prickly coils and velvety balls; mimic concertinas, and bits of quaint embroidery; imitation snail-shells, croziers, pods with frills at the seams, spiked caskets with curious indentations, clusters of stars, bladders like soft paper, and plaited spirals wound into a tiny cocoanut, that, untwisted, ...
— Parables of the Christ-life • I. Lilias Trotter
... down the hill at a snail's pace, I was overtaken by a countryman on his way to church. "Ye'll hae come," he said, addressing me, "wi' the great man last night?" "I came in the steamer," I replied, "with your Member, Mr. Dundas." "O, aye," rejoined the man; "but I'm no sure he'll be our Member next time. The Voluntaries ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... went to kill a snail; The best man among them durst not touch her tail. She put out her horns like a little Kyloe cow. Run, tailors, run, or she'll kill you all ...
— The National Nursery Book - With 120 illustrations • Unknown
... it very effectively did. I reported next morning that the only chance of seeing what it was was to go out in the daytime; and it was suspicious enough to justify the risk. I donned a green suit and with a snail's progress crawled through the long grass and discovered that the Germans had laid a five-inch pipe from their trenches to within fifty yards of an indentation in our own. They would be able to enfilade us with gas before we could don our masks. We looked on our dangerous ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... nettles Disfigur'd his beds, Nor cabbage nor lettuce was seen, The slug and the snail Show'd their mischievous heads, And eat ev'ry ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... we asked each other. The shouts and gesticulations of the spectators soon told us as to his whereabouts. The peddler's horse had not yet got half way round! A snail could have crawled almost as fast. The animal could not step more than six inches at once, ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... antithesis—an ex-and concentric movement. If two circles are drawn and painted respectively yellow and blue, brief concentration will reveal in the yellow a spreading movement out from the centre, and a noticeable approach to the spectator. The blue, on the other hand, moves in upon itself, like a snail retreating into its shell, and draws away from the spectator. [Footnote: These statements have no scientific basis, but are ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... on a moment's introspection, that thought makes language for itself to live in, just as a snail makes its own shell or a soul makes its own body. Who has not felt the anguish of not being able to find a word to hit off his thought exactly?—which surely means that the thought was already there unclothed, awaiting its embodiment. As the soul disembodied is not ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... some reference to the sheep, great companies of which roam the sunlit expanse with their attendant guardians—man and dog (who deserve a chapter to themselves). Southdown mutton has a fame that is extra-territorial; it has been said that the flavour is due to the small land snail of which the sheep must devour millions in the course of their short lives. But the explanation is more probably to be found in the careful breeding of the local farmers of a century or so ago. Gilbert White refers to two distinct breeds—"To the west of the Adur ... all had horns, smooth white faces ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... to fit the snail, as it were," commented the land baron, patronizingly, gazing around the little cupboard of a room. "At any rate," he added, in an effort to hide his dissatisfaction, "it's a pleasure to become better acquainted with such a—what shall I ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... He went a snail's pace, and at last dismounted, and groped his way. He got more than one fall in the snow, and thought himself very fortunate, when, at last, something black towered before him, and it ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... Possession's nine points were with me; and here I sat and faced him; and here he stormed, and would do this and should do that; and I went on with my work. Then he would buy my Colisyum, and I wouldn't sell it for all his puffball lordship might offer. Isn't the house of the snail as much to him as the turtle's shell to the turtle? I'll have no upstart spilling his chemicals here, or devilling the stars from a seat on my roof." "Last autumn," said I, "David Claridge was housed here. Thy palace was a prison then." ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... was fifty-four. And when I saw him a week ago, he looked like sixty-four. His eyes were as yellow as the slime of a garden snail and bloodshot from drunkenness; but also because he'd shed tears of blood over his vices and misery. His face was brown and swollen like a piece of liver on a butcher's table, and he hid himself ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... view things in the same light. You are not the man of the world you should be, Walter. Men of half your merit will eclipse you, winning opulence and distinction—while you, with your common sense notions, will be plodding on at a snail's pace. You are behind the age, and a stranger to ...
— Home Lights and Shadows • T. S. Arthur
... march through long ponds and pools of water, and mud up to the knees, in the direction opposite Gloucester Point, and near a point opposite to the enemy's fleet of gunboats. Through mud and water we floundered and fell, the night being dark. Mile after mile we marched at a snail's gait until we came to a large opening, surrounded by a rail fence. This was about midnight. Here we were ordered to build great fires of the rails near by. This was done, and soon the heavens were lit up by this ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... Blagovo, suddenly losing his temper and getting up. "I say! If a snail in its shell is engaged in self-perfection in obedience to the moral law—would you ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... saw that they were gone, he crept back out of the subterranean passage. "It is so dangerous to walk on the ground in the dark," said he; "how easily a neck or a leg is broken!" Fortunately he knocked against an empty snail-shell. "Thank God!" said he. "In that I can pass the night in safety," and got into it. Not long afterwards, when he was just going to sleep, he heard two men go by, and one of them was saying, "How shall we contrive to get hold of the rich pastor's silver and gold?" "I could tell thee that," ...
— Household Tales by Brothers Grimm • Grimm Brothers
... they have many natural enemies. The slug, the snail, the wire-worm, the impudent sparrow, and the most impudent and insolent chaffinch, who all seem to have an idea that the seed is put into the ground entirely for their benefit. As soon as the pea-shoot comes above the earth, the slug has a mouthful in its tenderest ...
— The Book of Sports: - Containing Out-door Sports, Amusements and Recreations, - Including Gymnastics, Gardening & Carpentering • William Martin
... men were not better nor worse than the average man. They were the average men of their generation, selfish, narrow, material, encrusted in their prejudices like snails in their shells, struggling upward at a snail's pace to the larger life, with its added sweetness and humanities, but experiencing many a discomfiture by the way from those foul and triple fiends, the World, the ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... and enjoyed the trip, though many of my fellow passengers were pale and limp. Whirling to Paris in an easy car, through the beautiful wheatfields and vineyards, I thought of the old lumbering diligence, in which we went up to Paris at a snail's pace forty years before. I remained in Paris until October, and never enjoyed six months more thoroughly. One of my chief pleasures was making the acquaintance of my fourth son, Theodore. I had seen but little ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... But the Colonel clamoured to the heavens. Kennaston he qualified in various ways. And as for Dr. Jeal, he would hold him responsible—"personally, sir"—for the consequences of his dawdling in this fashion—"Damme, sir, like a damn' snail with a wooden leg!" ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... word she turned her head away, and slowly, slowly the carriage moved and began its snail's-pace ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann
... the brother, eagerly. "When you put a snail on the fire it cries out and squeaks just like a little child. Stargoli means ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... from a box some of the exquisite little violet snail-shells, and gave them to Lena, who cried out with delight, and instantly resolved to have a pair of ear-rings ...
— Nautilus • Laura E. Richards
... slug and snail have trailed Their slimy silver up and down The beds where once the moss-rose veiled Rich beauty; and the mushroom brown Swells where the lily ...
— Weeds by the Wall - Verses • Madison J. Cawein
... class, and two are black dragon-pearls of medium quality. Of the seven smaller pearls two are serpent-pearls, and five are mussel-pearls. The remaining pearls are in part sea-crane pearls, in part snail and oyster-pearls. They do not approach the great pearls in value, and yet few will be found to ...
— The Chinese Fairy Book • Various
... kingdom, he avoided their camp, dexterously inclined to the left, occupied Caesarea, traversed the salt desert and the river Halys, and invested Angora; while the Sultan, immovable and ignorant in his post, compared the Tartar swiftness to the crawling of a snail. He returned on the wings of indignation to the relief of Angora; and as both generals were alike impatient for action, the plains round that city were the scene of a memorable battle, which has immortalized the glory of Timur ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... said I; for I knew the number, and with my usual base habit of cowardice, I shrank into my sloth like a snail into its shell, and alleged incapacity and impracticability as a pretext to escape action. If left to myself, I should infallibly have let this chance slip. Inadventurous, unstirred by impulses of practical ambition, I was capable of sitting ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... of the jungle where a few occasional strokes of a machete were all that were required to enable the laden animals to pass. Under such circumstances progress was necessarily slow, and also fatiguing; but the Englishmen forgot not only the snail-like nature of their progress, but also the oppressive heat and fatigue of the march, for they were now in a new and wonderful world, more strange and beautiful than anything that the most fanciful imagination among them had ever pictured. To men like themselves, seamen, accustomed ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... tried the patience of the boy, for Old Rocks seemed to crawl forward like a snail, taking advantage of every cover that would shield them from the sight ...
— Frank Merriwell's Bravery • Burt L. Standish
... at the rate of two miles an hour when the going was good. All we passed were the pedestrians,—a few of them,—and we usually found ourselves tailing along behind a camel-train or waiting for a wheelbarrow to get out of the way. In the side streets, or hutungs, we shouted ourselves along at a snail's pace, cleaving the dense throngs of inattentive citizens, whose right to the middle of the road was as great as ours, and who didn't purpose to be disturbed. Once on turning a corner, the groom pulled the bridle ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... whole fortune on my back; all that remains of my ancient house I should bear, snail-fashion, upon my head and shoulders. No, little dreamer, of two facts you may rest assured: one is that I shall never wear these jewels; the other that I never shall be a bride. Come, let me undress you; your blue eyes are so sleepy they are growing ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... good. The day following I was desperate, and I rafted together the foremast, the fore and main booms, and the fore and main gaffs. The wind was favourable, and I had thought to tow them back under sail, but the wind baffled, then died away, and our progress with the oars was a snail's pace. And it was such dispiriting effort. To throw one's whole strength and weight on the oars and to feel the boat checked in its forward lunge by the heavy drag behind, was not ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... this life sometimes dazzles, the lack of conveniences appalls. The post left London once a week. A journey to the country must be made in your own lumbering carriage, or on the snail-slow stagecoach over miserable roads, beset with highwaymen. The narrow, ill-lighted streets, even of London, could not be traversed safely at night; and ladies, borne to routs and levees in their sedan chairs, were lighted by link-boys, and were carried by stalwart, broad-shouldered ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... his nurse's lap on the bank, paddled out past the first point to the north, and pillowing her head on a cushioned thwart, gave herself up to dreamy contemplation on the sky. There was scarce a ripple on the lake. A faint breath of an offshore breeze fanned her, drifting the canoe at a snail's pace out from land. Stella luxuriated in the quiet afternoon. A party of campers cruising the lake had tarried at the bungalow till after midnight. Jack Fyfe had risen at dawn to depart for some distant logging point. Stella, once wakened, ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... that she met the sad end to which I have before alluded. She must have been very drunk, for the man told us that, in consequence of the darkness, and the fact that his horses were tired, he was proceeding at little more than a snail's pace. ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... with satisfaction. We take soup, then wait a few minutes for the fish; a few minutes more and the plates are changed, and the roast beef comes; another change and we take peas; change again and take lentils; change and take snail patties (I prefer grasshoppers); change and take roast chicken and salad; then strawberry pie and ice cream; then green figs, pears, oranges, green almonds, etc.; finally coffee. Wine with every course, of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... so it was impossible to form an opinion of his legs, but his arms and shoulders certainly did not look like those of a "snail." ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... Blackbird—effort, which uplifts and ennobles the lowest! For which reason, you, contemner of every sublime aspiration, I contemn! And that fragile roseate snail, struggling unaided to silver over ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand
... Annette. "I'm sure I could do it. I could fit into all this like a like a snail into a shell. I'd want shoes that didn't slide on the parquet; and then oh, if only ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... half-tone," Glen assured her. "What's all this business, anyway? Put me wise, Sis, I'm groping like a blind snail ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... a cat develops into a spinster aunt; a monkey into a mischievous urchin; a pig into a gourmand; a sheep into a country bumpkin; a weasel into a lawyer; a dancing bear into a garrotter; a shark into a money-lender; a snail into the schoolboy to which Shakespeare likens him; a fish into a toper, and so on. These "developments" (twenty in number), which were dedicated to Mr. Darwin, are signed "C. H. B." and these are the initials of CHARLES H. BENNETT, one of the gentlest, ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... almost gone now, and he got his men into a series of well-concerted, steady, deadly efforts, that threatened to bring the whole Kingston four over with the snail-like white cord. But Sawed-Off pleaded with his men, and they buried their faces in the board and worked like mad. To the spectators they seemed hardly to move, but under their skins their muscles were crowding and shoving like a gang of slaves, and fairly ...
— The Dozen from Lakerim • Rupert Hughes
... puppyhood, he had always accompanied the Mistress and the Master. Unknown to the old dog, these walks had been shortened, mercifully, and slowed down, to accommodate themselves to Lad's waning strength: But the time came when even a half-mile, at snail-pace, over a smooth road, was too much for his wind ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... the stupid Peruonto, hanging down his head as if he was going to gaol. Away he went, walking as if he were a jackdaw, or treading on eggs, counting his steps, at the pace of a snail's gallop, and making all sorts of zigzags and excursions on his way to the wood, to come there after the fashion of a raven. And when he reached the middle of a plain, through which ran a river growling and murmuring at the bad manners of the stones that were stopping ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
... eye an exceeding small white spot, no bigger than the point of a Pin. Afterwards I view'd it every way with a better Microscope and found it on both sides, and edge-ways, to resemble the Shell of a small Water-Snail with a flat spiral Shell: it had twelve wreathings, a, b, c, d, e, &c. all very proportionably growing one less than another toward the middle or center of the Shell, where there was a very small round ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... to the island of Lamary, the Lambri of Marco Polo; and by using the Italian term "the star transmontane," at once betrays the source of his plagiarism. His descriptions seem disguised extracts from Polo, with ridiculous exaggerations and additions; as of snail shells so large as to hold many persons. His account of the pretended varieties of the human race, as of nations of Hermaphrodites, and others equally ridiculous, which he places in separate islands of the Indian ocean, are ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... blacksmith had to bring clamps and a jackscrew before the new wheel could be adjusted. Even then it had an air of uncertainty that rendered speed impossible. The concluding five miles of the journey were taken at a snail's pace, and Helen reflected ruefully that it was possible to "bruk ze leg" on the level high road as well as on ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... "some wigs," "a dainty dishes," "a mutton shoulder," "a little mine," "hog-fat," and "an amelet": the menu is scarcely appetising, especially when among "Fishes and Shellfishes" our Portuguese Lucullus sets down the "hedgehog," "snail," and "wolf." After this such trifles as "starch" arranged under the heading of "Metals and Minerals," and "brick" and "whitelead" under that of "Common Stones" fall almost flat; but one would like to be initiated into the mysteries of "gleek," "carousal," and "keel," which are gravely asserted ...
— English as she is spoke - or, A jest in sober earnest • Jose da Fonseca
... slowly and the kind clergyman attributed her leisurely pace to dejection, but as a matter of fact, Edith was feeling quite happy and much interested in the tiny bright yellow snail shells the beach was providing for entertainment. She had been spared all that was possible of the depression and sorrow of the past weeks. Daddy had been poorly for years and Edith could not remember him as ever well and strong. His loss affected her more ...
— The Spanish Chest • Edna A. Brown
... deep, narrow ditch with steep sides, full of undergrowth and brambles. Now we could hear distinctly the voices of men all around us, as it seemed, and to right and to left and in front we caught at intervals glimpses of red flames through the trees. We could only proceed at a snail's pace lest the continual rustle of our footsteps should betray us. So each advanced a few paces in turn; then we all paused, and then the next one went forward. We could no longer crawl; the undergrowth was too thick for that; we had to go forward ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... floor. Two of the Germans sat in the cushioned seat while the two linemen, the one who had been hit still unconscious, were pitched in beside him. The other two Germans were in front, and the car began to move at a snail's pace. The man beside the driver began speaking in German; his companion replied. But one of ...
— Facing the German Foe • Colonel James Fiske
... at that bank, which is standing very nearly still, and you will realise that you and your canoe are standing very nearly still too; and that all your exertions are only enabling you to creep on at the pace of a crushed snail, and that it's the water that is going the pace. It's a most quaint and ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... accumulation of all those symbols with which the ancient Mexicans conveyed the idea of water: a tub of standing water, drops springing out—not two, as heretofore in the symbol for Atl, water—but four drops; the picture for moisture, a snail; above, a crocodile, the king of the rivers. In the midst of these symbols you notice the profile of a man with a fillet, and a smaller one of a woman. There can be doubt these are the Mexican Noah, Coxcox, and his wife, Xochiquetzal; and at ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... hay-carts swayed, peasants shrieked maledictions or shook fists; but always, crawling at snail's pace, we managed to scrape past without accident. Sometimes we frightened cows; and a couple of great yellow dogs, drawing a cart which contained two peasant girls in costume, swore ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... tailors Went to kill a snail, The best man among them Durst not touch her tail. She put out her horns Like a little Kyloe cow: Run, tailors, run, Or she'll kill you ...
— Harry's Ladder to Learning - Horn-Book, Picture-Book, Nursery Songs, Nursery Tales, - Harry's Simple Stories, Country Walks • Anonymous
... wist aforetime," retorted she; "for no sooner set I my foot out of the door this morrow than I well-nigh stepped of a black snail." ...
— For the Master's Sake - A Story of the Days of Queen Mary • Emily Sarah Holt
... in his Animaux sans Vertebres, which has been pronounced as absurd and ridiculous, and has aided in throwing his whole theory into disfavor, is his way of accounting for the development of the tentacles of the snail, which is ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... spires? At length they in the rubbish spy A thing resembling a goose-pie. Thither in haste the Poets throng, And gaze in silent wonder long, Till one in raptures thus began To praise the pile and builder Van: "Thrice happy Poet! who may'st trail Thy house about thee like a snail: Or harness'd to a nag, at ease Take journeys in it like a chaise; Or in a boat whene'er thou wilt, Can'st make it serve thee for a tilt! Capacious house! 'tis own'd by all Thou'rt well contrived, ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... ocean' or 'the beauteous land' to which they contribute. A balloon is no more wonderful than an air-bubble, and were you to build an Atlantic liner as big as the Isle of Wight it would really be no more remarkable than an average steam-launch. Nobody marvels at the speed of a snail, yet, given a snail's pace to start with, an express train follows as a matter of course. Movement, not the rate of movement, is the mystery. Precisely the same materials, the same forces, the same methods, are employed in the little as in the big of these examples. Why should mere accumulation, ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... had risen and his jaw had fallen to their uttermost limits. His hair, disturbed by contact with the pillow, gave the impression of standing on end. His eyes seemed to bulge like a snail's. He ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... good, and pure, Like snail, should keep within her door; But not, like snail, with silver track, Place all her wealth upon her back. ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... you what it is? Your head is turned right around! When royalty speaks to me, do I swell out? No! I know my place! I take no notice! But you—you are nosing but a crawling—snail! ...
— Christmas Entertainments • Alice Maude Kellogg
... of between two and three miles per hour; the engines needing to be just started, and then stopped again for a few minutes in order to keep the speed down to this very low limit. But they were all as yet so new to Arctic scenery—everything was so entirely novel to them—that even this snail's pace failed to prove wearisome, especially as the ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... forward as noiselessly as if I were stalking some prey. There were times when I advanced so slowly it would have puzzled a watcher to determine whether mine was not also the body of the dead. At length, even at that snail's rate of progress, I gained the protection of the tepees upon the other side of the camp, and skulked in among them. The lodge just before me, blackened by paint and weather, must be the one I sought. I rested close within its shadow, ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... walk a little faster?" said a whiting to a snail, "There's a porpoise close behind us, and he's treading on my tail. See how eagerly the lobsters and the turtles all advance! They are waiting on the shingle—will you come and join the dance? Will ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... have gone more deeply to his heart than these sounds—the rolling ocean—the free ocean—on which one can be borne throughout the world, fly with the wind, and wherever one went have one's own house with one, as the snail has his—to stand always upon home's ground, even in ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... accordingly, murmuring at the cowardice of the servants; but at such a snail's pace, that it seemed he would most willingly have been anticipated by any one whom his reproaches had roused to exertion. "Cowardly blockheads!" he said at last, seizing hold of the handle of the door, but without turning it effectually round— "dare you not ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... last, of 31 closely written sides of note-paper, he informs me, with reference to my obstinate silence, that though I think myself and am thought by others to be a mathematical Goliath, I have resolved to play the mathematical snail, and keep within my shell. A mathematical snail! This cannot be the thing so called which regulates the striking of a clock; for it would mean that I am to make Mr. Smith sound the true time of day, which I would by no means undertake upon a clock ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... be very little doubt that while a certain number may have improved with age, others will have deteriorated and even lost their original point and bearing. It is curious to find in the Solvamhall records our familiar friend the climbing snail puzzle, and it will be seen that in its modern form it ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... year's at the spring And day's at the morn; Morning's at seven; The hill-side's dew-pearled; The lark's on the wing; The snail's on the thorn; God's in his heaven— ...
— How to Add Ten Years to your Life and to Double Its Satisfactions • S. S. Curry
... rocks through this neck; toward it all trails inside the Gap converge. De Spain gave his horse his head—it was still too dark to distinguish the path—and depended on his towering landmarks for his general direction. He advanced at a snail's pace until he passed the base of El Capitan, when of a sudden, as he rode out from among high projecting rocks full into the opening, faint rays of light from the eastern dawn revealed the narrow, strangely enclosed and perfectly hidden valley before him. The eastern and southern sides ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... "I must be goin'. I did think I'd be forehanded in callin', but mother's been dredful wakeful lately, and when daylight comes, it don't seem as if I had the ambition of a snail. She don't like to be left alone for a minit, mother don't, so it's a bit of a puzzle to keep up ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... species, and "one of the most plentiful on the Phoenician coast."[288] It is unlikely that the ancients regarded it as a different shell from Murex trunculus. The Helix ianthina has a wholly different character. It is a sort of sea-snail, as the name helix implies, is perfectly smooth, "very delicate and fragile, and not more than about three-quarters of an inch in diameter."[289] All these shell-fish contain a sac or bag full of colouring ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... saw the very desk SHAKSPEARE used, after creeping unwillingly to school with a shining face like a snail's. I was pained to see evidence of the mischievousness of the juvenile genius, for it was slashed and hacked to such a doleful degree as to be totally ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... the shape of a large leaf, upon which all the fibres were marked. It measured ten feet by four. Another bore a resemblance to a great conch-shell. Many were impressed with the roots of shrubs and the images of various surrounding objects—snail-shells, pebbles, twigs, and the like. On a larger scale, bubbling brooks, waterfalls, and whirlpools were represented—now no longer a burning flood, but stiff, stark, and motionless. One sketch, which is reproduced, bore a startling ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... water is dashing as if in mockery, and the cry "Water! water!" rises from a hundred lips, the guard joining, for they are suffering like ourselves. Some comfort in that! Past midnight we reach Strasburg and are halted around an old wooden pump. It is broken! No water there. Still on and on at a snail-pace, up and over the almost interminable stretch of Fisher's Hill. At three o'clock in the morning we arrive at a place known by the classical name of Tom's Brook about twenty-five miles from Winchester. Never was nectar more delicious than the water of this stream, nor downy pillow ...
— Lights and Shadows in Confederate Prisons - A Personal Experience, 1864-5 • Homer B. Sprague
... my tardy steps: here shalt thou rest Upon this holy bank, no deadly Snake Upon this turf her self in folds doth make. Here is no poyson for the Toad to feed; Here boldly spread thy hands, no venom'd Weed Dares blister them, no slimy Snail dare creep Over thy face when thou art fast asleep; Here never durst the babling Cuckow spit, No slough of falling Star did ever hit Upon this bank: let this thy Cabin be, This other set with Violets ...
— The Faithful Shepherdess - The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (Vol. 2 of 10). • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... the brown bay—for which a thousand francs over and above its value was paid by M. Godefroy as a result of a sumptuous snail supper given to that gentleman's coachman by the horse-dealer—thanks to the expensive brown bay which certainly went well, the financier was able to get through his many engagements satisfactorily. He appeared ...
— The Lost Child - 1894 • Francois Edouard Joachim Coppee
... not effect this, he did the next thing to it, and employed all the restoratives suggested by Luke Hatton. He bathed in milk, breakfasted on snail-broth, and swallowed a strange potion prepared for him by the apothecary, which the latter affirmed would make a new man of him and renovate all his youthful ardour. It certainly had produced an extraordinary effect; and when he presented himself before Aveline, his gestures were so ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 2 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
Copyright © 2024 Free-Translator.com
|
|
|
