"Butterfly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sight. The crimson lamps of the magnetic ray bloomed like huge desert flowers on the sand two thousand feet below us; the rays flamed up with the glory of an Italian sunset and, poised in space like a dark butterfly, floated the huge platform bathed in its rosy light. It was beautiful. It was unbelievable. It was horrible. I gazed, fascinated. When would Fraser reach the lamp? When would he turn it on? I stared at the dark shadow that I knew was the laboratory building. My eyes strained through ...
— The Floating Island of Madness • Jason Kirby
... yellow"—we must say what red and what yellow, and how much of each. A magenta-coloured dahlia and a lemon put together would set, I should think, any teeth on edge; yet ripe corn goes well with poppies, but not too many poppies—while if one wing of our butterfly were of its present yellow and the other wing of the same scarlet as the spot, it would be an ugly object instead of one of the delights of God. It is interesting, it is fascinating to take the hint ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... being a novel-reader. It is not in the nature of a woman. The crown of woman's character is her devotion, which incarnate delicacy and tenderness exalt into perfect beauty of sacrifice. Those qualities could no more live amid the clashings of indiscriminate human passions than a butterfly wing could go between the mill rollers untorn. Women utterly refuse to go on with a book if the subject goes against their settled opinions. They despise a novel—howsoever fine and stirring it may be—if there is any taint of unhappiness to the favorite ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... weapon, playing with the lightness of a sun-beam, had evaded a stroke of the great flail and touched for an instant the shoulder of its wielder. Had he put a pound more force into the thrust—A groan crept down the Danish line when the bright blade rose, as lightly as it had fallen, and continued its butterfly dance. It consoled them a little, however, that no cheer went up from the English,—only a low buzz that was half of ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... above stairs or on the street, and the birds came out of the trees to take a peep at him. One of these garments was a frock of silk covered with golden dragons, lotus-flowers, and gilded fringes; and with it he wore a golden butterfly with jeweled wings on his ...
— Little Sky-High - The Surprising Doings of Washee-Washee-Wang • Hezekiah Butterworth
... professor producing his revolver, a weapon that might have proved fatal to a butterfly, but certainly would not be of any effect against the shaggy foes they ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... is always so pleasant and kind, So gentle in manner, so humble in mind, E'en the worms at her feet She would never ill-treat, And to Bird, Bee, and Butterfly always is sweet." ...
— New National Fourth Reader • Charles J. Barnes and J. Marshall Hawkes
... boy! Me boy!" he said tenderly. "The old house at Exham is not a futile ruin. 'Tis the cocoon that gave birth to the butterfly wings of a great hope. Look up, Still! You've friends with you till ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... skater to explore those dark mysterious coves, or strike across the slanting sunlight poured from clefts in the impendent hills. Inshore the substance of the ice sparkled here and there with iridescence like the plumelets of a butterfly's wing under the microscope, wherever light happened to catch the jagged or oblique flaws that veined its ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... by tubers under the hot climate of St. Domingo vary much; Sir R. Schomburgk gives the case of the "Butterfly variety," which the second year produced on the same plant "double and single flowers; here white petals edged with maroon; there of a uniform deep maroon." (11/77. 'Journal of Proc. Linn. Soc.' volume 2 Botany page ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... tell but that very night, the Spirit of God will touch that man's heart and transform him into one of the holiest and most useful of men. It has often occurred in the past and will doubtless often occur in the future. There sits before you a woman, who is a mere butterfly of fashion. She seems to have no thought above society and pleasure and adulation. Why preach to her? Without the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit, it would be foolishness and a waste of time; but you can never tell, perhaps this very night the Spirit of ...
— The Person and Work of The Holy Spirit • R. A. Torrey
... have a yellow streak." His lip curled as he studied the pallid features of the heir to the Van Cleft millions. Fearless himself, he could still understand the tremors of this care-free butterfly: yet he knew he must crush the dangerous thoughts which were developing. "If you mistrust me, hustle for yourself. You have the death-certificate, the services will be over in a few days, and then you will have enough money to live on your father's yacht or terra firma for the rest of your life, ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... means of subsistence for herself and her family. When she first returned to Cartside a few religious friends called to welcome her home. The gay and wealthy part of her former acquaintances, who, like the butterfly, spread their silken wings only to bask in the warmth of a summer sun, found not their way to the lonely cottage of an afflicted widow. Her worth, though in after-life rendered splendid by its own fruits, was at this time hidden, excepting ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham
... come to me at last, Prince Cruel," she said. "Butterfly! Well, and am I not to kiss your hand?" ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... closed, I could see that she was already asleep, and her calm and reasonable sleep reminded me of her agitated and unreasonable life; and I stood looking at her, at this poor butterfly who was lying here all alone, robbed by her friends and associates. But she slept contentedly, having found a few francs that they had overlooked amid the bedclothes, enough to enable her to pass her evening at the Elysee! The prince might be written to; but he, ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... the glory of that Being who made and preserves you, and before whom you must stand to be judged. Made in His image, with an immortal soul, you might dwell forever with the Redeemer, in the mansions he has gone to prepare. But, like the butterfly, you fritter away your earthly existence, and, by so doing, throw away the only cup of real, unadulterated pleasure of this present life; and, when Time, with all its fleeting joys, has passed away forever, where, oh, where! do ...
— A Biographical Sketch of the Life and Character of Joseph Charless - In a Series of Letters to his Grandchildren • Charlotte Taylor Blow Charless
... reascended the stairs towards the terrace. The white horse was still galloping in the direction of the Loire, at the extremity of which, melting into the vapors of the water, a little sail appeared, wave-balanced like a water-butterfly. "Oh!" cried the musketeer, "only a man who wants to fly would go at that pace across plowed lands; there is but one Fouquet, a financier, to ride thus in open day upon a white horse; there is no ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... on the elm are seen, The crawling wretches, like its leaves, are green; Ere chill October shakes the latest down, They, like the foliage, change their tint to brown; On the blue flower a bluer flower you spy, You stretch to pluck it—'tis a butterfly; The flattened tree-toads so resemble bark, They're hard to find as Ethiops in the dark; The woodcock, stiffening to fictitious mud, Cheats the young sportsman thirsting for his blood; So by long living ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... heart I must have a fixed determination, and not a mere fluctuating and soon broken intention. I must have a steadfast affection, and not merely a fluttering love, that, like some butterfly, lights now on this, now on that, sweet flower, but which has a flight straight as a carrier pigeon to its cot, which shall bear me direct to God. And I must have a continuous realisation of my dependence upon God, and of God's ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Sage, Regnard, Piron, Marmontel, and even J.-J. Rousseau, and gave it a body and a living interest, till it became the comedie-vaudeville, and then, discarding even the little snatches of song, the couplets that still marked its origin, spread its butterfly wings as the modern ...
— Bataille De Dames • Eugene Scribe and Ernest Legouve
... through life on stumps instead of legs? The boyish officer—why should he have died? The little sixteen-year-old soldier who had been blinded and who sat all day by the phonograph, listening to Madame Butterfly, Tipperary, and Harry Lauder's A Wee Deoch-an'-Doris—why should he never see again what I could see from the window beside him, the winter sunset over the sea, the glistening white of the sands, the flat line of the surf as it crept in to ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... than mortal beauty ever really be his—his in the common prose of possession that can never be disassociated with marriage—the prose that is to the delicate subtle beauty of love, what the rough touch is to the wings of the butterfly, the bloom of ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... dear friend,' said he, 'this is a sublime moment! To see you, the gay companion, the good fellow, the butterfly, I may say, of other days, a member of this great body is certainly soul-stirring! So you have realized your ambition? What next? The Senate? And then—then?' he pointed upward, 'higher yet? and still higher? Ha! The White House? Who knows?' he ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... of affection and aspiration, its flight must of necessity be higher. Hence the high rank of those strains of song which the soul gives forth when stirred by affection, by love to the children of God, whether they be addressed by Wordsworth to a butterfly, by Burns to a mouse, or by Byron to a friend. You have in English eight brief lines which for this kind of song are a model from their simplicity, tenderness, ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... or none had known and loved you in the world: May be! flower that's full-blown tempts the butterfly, not flower that's furled. But more learned sense unlocked you, loosed the sheath and let expand Bud to bell and out-spread flower-shape at the least warm touch of hand —Maybe throb of heart, beneath which,—quickening farther than it knew,— Treasure oft was disembosomed, ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... in a wife, is not a butterfly of the sunshine, not a giggling nonentity, not a painted doll, not a gossiping gadabout, not a mixture of artificialities which leave you in doubt as to where the humbug ends and the woman begins, but an earnest soul, one that cannot only laugh when you laugh, but ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... the idea of the Soul (the Life) awakened by Love, grasping too soon and impatiently, then losing it, and, unable to rest, struggling on through severe toils and labours till her hopes are crowned even at the gates of death. Psyche, the soul or life, whose emblem is the butterfly, thus even in heathen philosophy strained towards the higher Love, just glimpsed ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... inexpressible, the incomprehensible God. His terrible hand swirls, with unresting power, yonder innumerable congregation of suns in their mighty orbits, and yet stoops, with tender touch, to build up the petals of the anemone, and paint with rainbow hues the mealy wings of the butterfly. ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... the disturbed history of their father and mother at rest as well; his conscience in relation to the marriage likewise at rest. Chillon had a wife. Her writing of the welcome to poverty stirred his knowledge of his wife's nature. Carinthia might bear it and harden to flint; Henrietta was a butterfly for the golden rays. His thoughts, all his energies, were bent on the making of money to supply her need for the pleasure she flew in—a butterfly's grub without it. Accurately so did the husband and lover read his wife—adoring ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... already began to forget her gloom, and hurried away to do her part. Putting on a short, girlish gown, kept for scrambles among the rocks, she improvised a pinafore, and braided her long hair a la Morlena Kenwigs, with butterfly bows at the ends. When she went down, she found her husband in garden jacket, collar turned over a ribbon, hair in a curly tumble, and jackknife in hand, seated on the rug before a roaring fire, and a semicircle ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... than the rest, gathered more flowers than any of them. On being praised by Venus, her companions, being envious of her, told the goddess that Astery had been assisted by Cupid, Venus's son, in culling the blossoms. For this supposed offence she was immediately turned by Venus into a butterfly, and her wings, which before were white, were stained with the colours of all the flowers she had gathered, "for memory of her pretended crime, though crime none ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... smiled, these two, who had never felt more than the merest butterfly wings of love brushing them, light as lashes. No word between them, only an unfinished sweetness, waiting to ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... little white feet were certainly much prettier to look at. "Now," cried Star, "I will go down-stairs and wait for Daddy Captain, and perhaps he will think I am a real fairy. Oh, wouldn't that be fun? I am sure I look like one!" and down the stairs she flitted like a golden butterfly. Once in the kitchen, the housewife in her triumphed for a moment over the fairy: she raked up the fire, put on more wood, and swept the hearth daintily. "But Ariel did such things for Prospero," she said. "I'm Ariel just the same, so I ...
— Captain January • Laura E. Richards
... us that this poem is not built broadly on the human heart; there is too much discussion about the difficulty of becoming a Christian, and the subtile genius flits so quickly through the lines that an ordinary butterfly-net does not catch it. That is well for the genius. But we are of opinion that the human heart will always find in this great poem the solemn and glorious things that belong to it, and more and more so as new and clearer thought is born into the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... rare and beautiful butterfly fluttered close over Mr. Medland's head. He paused and watched it for a moment. Then he looked carefully round him: no one was in sight: the butterfly settled for a moment on a flowerbed. Mr. Medland looked round again. Then he cautiously lifted his soft hat ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... the bee-maggots; in the same way butterflies live on honey, but the previous caterpillar lives on vegetable leaves, while the maggots of large flies require flesh for their food. What induces the bee, who lives on honey, to lay up vegetable powder for its young? What induces the butterfly to lay its eggs on leaves when itself feeds on honey?... If these are not deductions from their own previous experience or observation, all the actions of mankind ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... not, then, ask too much of history. The more beautiful is the dawn, the less one can describe it. The most beautiful things in nature, the flower and the butterfly, should be touched ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... "It's certainly breaking a butterfly," agreed Raymonde. "I'm afraid there's something seriously wrong with Mademoiselle. She's completely altered this last week. She never used to worry about things, and she's suddenly turned as fussy ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... first pulse of the new strength, shaking itself free from the old mouldy remnants of earth-garments, that it may begin in freedom the new life that grows out of the old. The caterpillar dies into the butterfly. Who knows but disease may be the coming, the keener life, breaking into this, and beginning to destroy like fire the inferior modes or garments of the present? And then disease would be but the sign of the salvation of fire; of the agony of the greater life to lift us to itself, out of that ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... well cared for at the nails. His hair was pale brown, curling a little at the ends, and carefully brushed and looking as if it had been freshened by some faintest application of perfumed essence. Three pearl studs fastened his shirt front, and his necktie was tied in a butterfly bow. He displayed some of the nonchalant ease which wealth and position create, smiled a little on catching sight of the jersey worn by a lady who had neglected to fasten the back of her bodice, and strove to decipher the impression the faces conveyed to him. ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... pictures of General Kitchener, William Muldoon, the Duchess of Marlborough, and Benvenuto Cellini. Against one wall was a plaster of Paris plaque of an O'Callahan in a Roman helmet. Near it was a violent oleograph of a lemon-coloured child assaulting an inflammatory butterfly. This was Dulcie's final judgment in art; but it had never been upset. Her rest had never been disturbed by whispers of stolen copes; no critic had elevated his ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... come to me at last, Prince Cruel,' she said. 'Butterfly! Well, and am I not to kiss ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... end? He loved a will-o'-the-wisp; he had married a butterfly. Why continue to play the martyr and follow the fruitless path of rectitude? Hadn't she said, "I can only live once, and so I shall make life spin whichever way I want it to go?" He could only live once, and if life was not to spin with her, let it spin without her. "Who cares?" he said ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... outlook—were alike unimpeachable; and since he had lamentably failed in this respect, she never ceased to reproach him. Diane she regarded with chronic disapprobation, exaggerating all her faults and opposing her joy-loving, butterfly nature with an aloofly ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... as the founder puts his old bronzes into the melting pot in order afterwards to cast them in a mould whence the metal will issue in a different shape, so life liquefies the grub, a mere digesting machine, now thrown aside, and out of its running matter produces the perfect insect, bee, butterfly or beetle, the final ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... the nectar, hustling the noisy honey-eaters and the querulous sun-birds. The radiant blue butterfly sips and is gone, or if it be his intent to pause, tightly folds his wings on the instant of settling, and is transformed from a piece of living jewellery to a brown mottled leaf caught edgeways among the red flowers. ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... Diana stood silent, staring at her sister; then her big black eyes, which had been full of the deepest gloom, brightened. A butterfly passed the entrance to the summer-house, and Diana flew after it, chasing it with a loud shout and a ...
— A Little Mother to the Others • L. T. Meade
... beneath the harrow knows Exactly where each tooth-point goes. The butterfly beside the road Preaches contentment to ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... sense of the beautiful by looking at something which is beautiful; and there is much around us which costs us nothing to look at were we to observe it—the cloud, the sunlight, the tree, the flower, a butterfly—anything of that kind studied for a few minutes each day would continue to develop in man's mind the sense of the beautiful. We should also appreciate carefully our actions and govern them and measure them, as to whether they are just to others—a matter which ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... she said, with pretty diffidence, "I would like to thee Butterfly Thenter." And she blushed like the inside of those pink ...
— Ptomaine Street • Carolyn Wells
... dropped from the sky to the desert below as softly as a butterfly alighting on a flower, and stood there in all his gracious whiteness. And on his back was the veiled ...
— The Magic City • Edith Nesbit
... to see me alone, my child?" he said, seeing a faint trembling like that of a butterfly beginning in her. "All you say to me will be under the seal of confession. It will never ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... part of his body were attached the tail and flukes of a shark. To conceal these monstrous appendages he wore over his shoulders a kihei of kapa and allowed himself to be seen only while in the sitting posture. He sometimes took the form of a worm, a moth, a caterpillar, or a butterfly to escape the hands of his enemies. On land he generally appeared as a man squatting, after the manner of a Hawaiian gardener while ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... coming from Noirmoutiers, laden to the very edge with white salt sparkling all over with shining spangles, and worked by picturesque crews; men with the great three-cornered hat of the Breton salt-worker, and women whose great cushioned caps with butterfly wings were as white and glittering as the salt. Then there were coasting vessels like floating drays, their decks piled with sacks of flour and casks; tugs dragging interminable lines of barges, or perhaps some three-master ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... say, a large part in my life during my childhood, as did also the flies, beetles and lady-bugs and all the insects that are found upon flowers and in the grass. Although it gave me a great deal of pain to kill them, I was making a collection of them, and I was almost always seen with a butterfly net in my hand. Those flying about in our yard, that had strayed our way from the country, were not very beautiful it must be confessed, but I had the garden and woods of Limoise which all the summer long was a hunting-ground ever full of ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... face of these brilliant strangers a sudden and unexpected timidity came upon him. He had heard of a cheap popular hotel, much frequented by the returning gold-miner, who entered its hospitable doors—which held an easy access to shops—and emerged in a few hours a gorgeous butterfly of fashion, leaving his old chrysalis behind him. Thence he inquired his way; hence he afterwards issued in garments glaringly new and ill fitting. But he had not sacrificed his beard, and there ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... arresting its flight, hovered waiting. So soon as I came under its radiance, it flew slowly on, lingering now and then above spots where the ground was rocky. Every time I looked up, it seemed to have grown larger, and at length gave me an attendant shadow. Plainly a bird-butterfly, it flew with a certain swallowy double. Its wings were very large, nearly square, and flashed all the colours of the rainbow. Wondering at their splendour, I became so absorbed in their beauty that I stumbled over a low rock, and lay stunned. When I came to myself, the ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... not afraid of her, are you? You never seemed so before. I thought—I thought you and she were rather good friends." There was a vague tinge of sarcasm in her words and tone but like a wobbly legged pup trying to catch a butterfly he mentally leaped at this offering and began cudgeling his memory in quest of women who ran chocolate shops. Could it be that she was the daughter of the widow Haynes who owned the Bon-Ton in Detroit? Impossible! The widow was ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... slender poplar Shiver aloft in air their rustling leaves. Cool breaths the rising breeze, and with it wakes The worn out spirit from its state of stupor. The lazy boy springs from his mossy bed, To chace the gaudy tempting butterfly, Who spreading on the grass its mealy wings, Oft lights within his reach, e'en at his seer, Yet still eludes his grasp, and o'er his head Light hov'ring round, or mounted high in air Temps his young eye, ...
— Poems, &c. (1790) • Joanna Baillie
... but here and there one flamed out like a gold or red torch among the green, and all the way-sides were blue and gold with asters and golden-rod. It was a very warm morning for the season. When they stopped at one of the stations, a yellow butterfly flew in through an open window and flitted airily about the car. Maria removed her coat, with the solicitous aid of her companion. She cast a conscious glance at the orange and blue ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... gifts, but of more tranquil and phlegmatic composition. But who is ignorant that there is a class of minds characterized by qualities like those I have mentioned; minds with many bright and even beautiful traits; but aimless and fickle as the butterfly; that settle upon every gayly-colored illusion as it opens into flower, and flutter away to another when the first has dropped its leaves, and stands naked in the icy ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... through the long, long summer hours, The golden light should lie, And thick young herbs and groups of flowers Stand in their beauty by. The oriole should build and tell His love-tale, close beside my cell; The idle butterfly Should rest him there, and there be heard ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... or bein' pleased." And what to make of it he didn't know. Then Polly's cap was about the loveliest thing, next to Polly herself, he had ever seen. It was more like a May blossom than anything else, or a beautiful butterfly on the top of a water-lily. In fact, all the rural images of a rude but not inartistic mind came and went as this country boy thought of his beautiful Polly. As he ploughed the field, if he saw a May-blossom in the hedgerow, it reminded him ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... with my dancing," Polly laughed. "Thanks, ever so much, Betty dear; I'll lend you my butterfly stockings when you go up to ...
— Polly's Senior Year at Boarding School • Dorothy Whitehill
... haven't found it so yet," said Alice, "but when you have to turn into a chrysalis, you know, and then after that into a butterfly, I should think it'll feel a little queer, don't you ...
— Alice's Adventures Under Ground • Lewis Carroll
... of Gaiety and Innocence! The moment when the fatal fruit was eaten, They parted ne'er to meet again; and Malice Has ever since been playmate to light Gaiety, From the first moment when the smiling infant Destroys the flower or butterfly he toys with, To the last chuckle of the dying miser, Who on his deathbed laughs his last to hear His wealthy neighbour has ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... was tied under her chin with black ribbons, and her kind old face, very pink and plump and charming, looked out pleasantly upon, the world. She wore her best mantle, heavily trimmed with jet bugles, and her alpaca skirt was looped up uncompromisingly with an old-fashioned skirt-hook made like a butterfly. Hung on one arm was her umbrella, and she carried her reticule in both hands for safety. So, with all her accoutrements on, she sat, pleasantly aware that she was at once self-respecting ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... his hands as they turned the pages; they were clever and kind, she thought, and she wondered if he was an artist or a doctor. Those fingers might set a butterfly's wing, and yet they seemed very strong. She did not know she had sighed until he said, "Am ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... him. "You did it anyhow. And in the second place you got me out of a villainous bad temper and turned an ugly goblin into a very happy butterfly. I'm downright ashamed of myself for being so horrid about Rose de Vigne. She isn't at all a bad sort though she is so impossibly beautiful. Your brother is going to dance with her now. See! There ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... the old Morris chair and smoke and watch her make lacey stuff in a little, round frame. Battenberg, she said it was. He loved to see her fingers manipulate the needle and the thread, and take wonderful pains with her work—but once she showed him a butterfly whose wings did not quite match, and he pointed it out to her. She had been listening to him tell a story of Indians and cowboys and with some wild riding mixed into it, and—well, she used the wrong stitch, but no one would notice it in a thousand ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... time and mellowing, the butterfly eventually merges from the chrysalis; and it was with rapturous delight early June saw us exchange Camp Dodge for Camp Mills, Long Island! We were now on the shores of the Atlantic, and would soon tread the deck of our ship of dreams—a transport ...
— The Greater Love • George T. McCarthy
... the treasure of Franchard," replied her husband, "See, here are the first-fruits; a pine-apple, a dress for my ever-beautiful—it will suit her—trust a husband's, trust a lover's taste! Embrace me, darling! This grimy episode is over; the butterfly unfolds its painted wings. To-morrow Casimir will come; in a week we may be in Paris—happy at last! You shall have diamonds.—Jean-Marie, take it out of the boot, with religious care, and bring it piece by piece into the dining-room. We shall have plate at table! Darling, hasten and prepare ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... perilous escape, she made a second, dashed through La Vendee, embarked at St. Malo for Dunkirk, was captured by the fleet of the Parliament, was released by the Governor of the Isle of Wight, unable to imprison so beautiful a butterfly, reached her port at last, and in a few weeks was intriguing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... Arranged motion-picture presentations for the Famous Players-Lasky Theatres. In association with Ben Ali Haggin produced several tableaux, including "Simonetta," "Dubarry," and "The Green Gong," which were presented in many of the principal cities. Staged the musical comedy "Lady Butterfly," at ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... to Yen-ping he had been stationed at the city of Futsing, about thirty miles from Foochow. Much of his work consisted of itinerant trips during which he visited the various mission stations under his charge. He almost invariably went on foot from place to place and carried with him a butterfly net and a rifle, so that to so keen a naturalist each day's walk was ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... took flight for the Heavenly Country, happier in its escape from the worn chrysalis of his weak and weary body than any glad-winged butterfly that flitteth over the fells ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... platform, and forgot Tony, just as Eagle had forgotten me. Behind Eagle's slight figure towered massively Major Vandyke's splendid bulk; and as I waved my handkerchief to Eagle, while the train slid slowly out, I was vaguely aware of Diana's outstretched arm and a butterfly flutter of something white and small. Eagle's eyes went past me to her, though his smile was for me also; and Di was able deftly to kill her two birds with one stone, at the last. Her farewell look and gesture did equally well ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Most of them had brought silver—shall I say alas! or happily? Generally some pretty trifle which vouched for the sentiment and taste of the gift horse without seeming to tax the poor animal's resources. For instance, Mrs. Guy Sloane brought a silver butterfly intended for a pen-wiper, and my old friend Sam Bolles a silver paper-knife. Polly Flinders (I never remember her married name), who has babies of her own, gave Josephine a silver whistle, ostensibly ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... Ibsen has given us Nora Hebler, a Disagreeable Girl of mature age, who, beyond a doubt, first set George Bernard Shaw a-thinking. Then looking about, Shaw saw her at every turn in every stage of her moth-and-butterfly existence. ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... and spoke almost calmly, for his anger, like most things he did, was a matter of acting. The Signor understood, and again he smiled faintly. Before he answered he carefully snuffed and trimmed the three wicks of the tall brass lamp on the table. It had a big metal shade in the shape of a butterfly, which he turned so that it screened the light from his eyes and reflected it into his ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... this chapter is merely one of definitions and that a definition is a description of something given to it after—not before—it is finished. A definition is a tag, like the label the entomologist ties to the pin after he has the butterfly nicely dead. Of questionable profit it would be to you, struggling to waken your playlet into life, to worry about a definition that might read ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... Drake's essays a minute account of the numerous essayists who flourished, or who made an effort to live, between the close of the eighth volume of the Spectator and the beginning of the present century. Of these a few have still a place on our shelves, but for the most part they enjoyed a butterfly existence, and serve but to prove the immeasurable superiority of the writers who created the ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... eagerness. She flitted about like a butterfly, bent on choosing the best position for the desired snap-shot. Blanche, Mabel, and Elsie came hurrying up anxious to join the group, and fixed themselves ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... and married a third time, died as the Princesse de Chimay. The ninth of Thermidor saved them both from the guillotine. In the days immediately subsequent they had abundant opportunity to display their light but clever natures. Mme. Beauharnais, as well as her friend, unfolded her wings like a butterfly as she escaped from the bars of her cell. Being a Creole, and having matured early, her physical charms were already fading. Her spirit, too, had reached and passed its zenith; for in her letters of that time she describes herself as ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... and my library lacks the presence of madame, it ceases truly to be home, and if I've got to stay here during the month of August alone I must have diversion, else I shall find myself as badly off as the butterfly man, to whom a vaudeville exhibition is ...
— The Enchanted Typewriter • John Kendrick Bangs
... working according to fixed laws. See plants springing up under the sunlight, learn the secrets of plant life, and how their scents and colours attract the insects. Read how insects cannot live without plants, nor plants without the flitting butterfly or the busy bee. Realize that all this is worked by fixed laws, and that out of it (even if sometimes in suffering and pain) springs the wonderful universe around us. And then say, can you fear for your own little life, even though it may have its troubles? Can ...
— The Fairy-Land of Science • Arabella B. Buckley
... poet, Burns's model, once saw a butterfly at the Town Cross; and the sight inspired him with a worthless little ode. This painted countryman, the dandy of the rose garden, looked far abroad in such a humming neighbourhood; and you can fancy what moral considerations a youthful poet would supply. But the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... would be overwhelmed. It wouldn't matter to her that you could bring forward arguments in your own defence. She wouldn't be capable of understanding them. You must see for yourself that mentally—and spiritually—just as bodily—she's as fragile as a butterfly. She couldn't withstand a storm. She'd be crushed ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... with which we need not desire to be too familiar, such as Mosquitoes, Fleas, Wasps, and Bees; but when a "bug" is harmless as well as beautiful, there is no reason why we should not treat it as a friend. Who is afraid of a Butterfly? ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... the necessity of a southern continent as a balance was supposed to be unanswerable; and so it was, till Captain Cook found there was no such thing. We are poor silly animals: we live for an instant upon a particle of a boundless universe, and are much like a butterfly that should argue about the nature of the seasons and what creates their vicissitudes, and does not exist itself to see one ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... could not attend to the education of his little girl as he would like to do. His wife was not of our faith and was also too busily occupied to look after the child. He did not mention that her occupation was that of society butterfly, who sacrificed homelife, husband and child in the pursuit of pleasure. Would Reverend Mother kindly undertake the charge of his little Nita's education, spiritual as well as intellectual? Would she be to the child what father and mother ought to ...
— The Alchemist's Secret • Isabel Cecilia Williams
... butterfly fluttered across the grass, revelling the sunlight. Sanine watched its progress just as intently as ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... its mere vegetative form is here seen withdrawing in order that a higher manifestation of the spirit may take place. The same principle can be seen at work in the insect kingdom, when the caterpillar's tremendous vitality passes over into the short-lived beauty of the butterfly. In the human being it is responsible for that metamorphosis of organic processes which occurs on the path from the metabolic to the nervous system, and which we came to recognize as the precondition for the appearance of ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... BUTTERFLY AND MOTH (the former from "butter" and "fly," an old term of uncertain origin, possibly from the nature of the excrement, or the yellow colour of some particular species; the latter akin to O. Eng. mod, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... common experience that people's ideals of manhood and womanhood vary considerably. The hardened materialist pictures perfection solely in terms of wealth, the butterfly-woman wants little but physical beauty, charm, and the qualities that attract. The sensitive man is apt to depreciate the powers he possesses and exaggerate those he lacks; while his self-satisfied neighbour can see no good in any virtues but his own. It is quite conceivable ...
— The Practice of Autosuggestion • C. Harry Brooks
... beating heart lies still. One word from conscience, one touch of an awakened reflectiveness, one glance at the end—the coffin and the shroud and what comes after these—slay your worldly satisfactions as surely as that falling snow would crush some light-winged, gauzy butterfly that had been dancing at the cliff's foot. Your jewellery is all imitation. It is well enough for candle-light. Would you like to try the testing acid upon it? Here is a drop of it. 'Know thou that for all ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... have another original piece, entitled, 'The Redbreast and the Butterfly,' of which our readers will probably be contented with the ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... seen the butterfly In braw claithing drest? 'T is the poor man gotten rich, In rings ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... her bowed head. "Yes," she whispered. "After all, I have some pride, you know. You mustn't presume to be the butterfly preaching contentment to the toad ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... having approved our aim and accepted the job from us, were to try to force a new aim upon the party and insist that we should all join him in the sport of catching butterflies, we would soon break up. If we could agree on the butterfly program that would be one thing, but if we held to our plan and Bill stood out, he would be a traitor to his party and a fellow of very bad manners. As long as the aims of my party are, in the main, right, I believe ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... Joe drove up to the gate, and Hepsey emerged from her small back room, like a butterfly from a chrysalis. She was radiant in a brilliant blue silk, which was festooned at irregular intervals with white silk lace. Her hat was bending beneath its burden of violets and red roses, starred here and there with some unhappy buttercups which had survived the wreck of a previous ...
— Lavender and Old Lace • Myrtle Reed
... could be found among New York society transferred for the summer to the world of Nature. There was to be a dance or a house party or something of the sort at the end of the drive. Hazel scarcely knew, and cared less. She was becoming utterly weary of her butterfly life. ...
— The Man of the Desert • Grace Livingston Hill
... which spread out over her shoulders, her dainty breasts, her slender figure, her hips widening like the curves of a lyre, her two rounded thighs, the dimples around her knees, and her delicate feet. Not far from her mouth a butterfly is fluttering. The splendour of her body sheds around her a halo of brilliant mother-of-pearl; and all the rest of Olympus is bathed in a rosy dawn, which, by insensible degrees, reaches the heights of ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... divisions of the Animal Kingdom. There are many Insects that pass through their metamorphoses within the egg, appearing as complete Insects at the moment of their birth; but the series of changes is nevertheless analogous to that of the Butterfly, whose existence as Worm, Chrysalis, and Winged Insect is so well known to all. Take the Grasshopper, for instance: with the exception of the wings, it is born in its mature form; but it has had its Worm-like stage within the egg as much ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... farmers see a swallow-tail, or any other rare butterfly hovering over their gardens, they don't know the difference, and it passes safely. If that same farmer knew the value of the specimen he would leave all else to chase the ...
— Girl Scouts in the Adirondacks • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... Spring.—One of the earliest intimations of approaching spring is the appearance of the Phalaena primaria, and of one or two other moths, floating with expanded wings on the surface of ponds and still water. A butterfly, Caltha palustris, is commonly drawn forth from its winter quarters by one of the first warm and sunny days that happen to occur in the month of March: hence it has been termed fallax veris indicium, (the deceitful token of spring.) In the Isle of Wight it has been seen on ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 566, September 15, 1832 • Various
... these few brief hours, Ellice gave herself up to a happiness that she knew could be but fleeting. To-day she would be the butterfly, living and rejoicing in the sun. The darkness would come soon enough, but to-day was ...
— The Imaginary Marriage • Henry St. John Cooper
... now audible outside the door; she opens wide her tawny-hazel eyes, that have a look of gazing on the world in surprise, a smile parts her lips and her whole aspect is as completely changed as that of a butterfly which escapes from the shade into the sunshine where the bright beams are reflected in the metallic lustre ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... a little, and rising from the bed went to the window and leaned out. A large white clematis pushed its moonlike blossom up to her face, as though asking to be kissed, and a bright red butterfly danced dreamily up and down in the late sunbeams, now poising on the ivy and anon darting off again into the mild ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... dark, and that touch is my reality. You might as well say that a sight which makes you glad, or a blow which brings the stinging tears to your eyes, is unreal as to say that those impressions are unreal which I have accumulated by means of touch. The delicate tremble of a butterfly's wings in my hand, the soft petals of violets curling in the cool folds of their leaves or lifting sweetly out of the meadow-grass, the clear, firm outline of face and limb, the smooth arch of a horse's neck and the ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... cocoon or chrysalis in which, as by a miracle (for here natural and supernatural seem one and the same), the caterpillar has undergone his transformation and emerging spreads his wings and forthwith takes his flight a full-grown butterfly with all its senses ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... was served. In the center was a pyramid of spongecake in the form of a temple with melonlike sides, and on the top was an artificial rose with a butterfly of silver paper hovering over it, held by a gilt wire. Two drops of gum in the heart of the rose stood for dew. On the left was a deep plate with a bit of cheese, and on the other side of the pyramid was a dish of strawberries, which had ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... variegation; colors, dichroism, trichroism; iridescence, play of colors, polychrome, maculation, spottiness, striae. spectrum, rainbow, iris, tulip, peacock, chameleon, butterfly, tortoise shell; mackerel, mackerel sky; zebra, leopard, cheetah, nacre, ocelot, ophite[obs3], mother-of-pearl, opal, marble. check, plaid, tartan, patchwork; marquetry-, parquetry; mosaic, tesserae[obs3], strigae[obs3]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... it was if possible a more absolute and transcendental Nameless than that of Lao Tzu. He dwells on the relativity of knowledge; as when asleep he did not know that he was a man dreaming that he was a butterfly, so when awake he did not know that he was not a butterfly dreaming that he was a man. [10] But "all is embraced in the obliterating unity of the tao, and the wise man, passing into the realm of the Infinite, finds rest therein." And this tao, of which we hear so much in Chinese philosophy, ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... of course, in her being crushed as flat as is a broken-winged butterfly that comes in the path of a garden roller. He stood up ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... work booting himself; though by no law of propriety that I ever heard of, is any man required to be private when putting on his boots. But Queequeg, do you see, was a creature in the transition stage—neither caterpillar nor butterfly. He was just enough civilized to show off his outlandishness in the strangest possible manners. His education was not yet completed. He was an undergraduate. If he had not been a small degree civilized, he very probably would not have troubled himself with boots ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... ropes, and when these were pulled through the rings they rode in, they made a screech which compelled the bearer to stop his ears; and often it was necessary to duck his head not to be hit by the heavy ropes or by the awning itself. But Arsinoe only remembered these things to-day as a butterfly sporting in the sun may remember the hideous pupa-case that it has burst and left ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... curtain rose, a little butterfly creature, in the blue-and-scarlet costume of a man,—all frills and fluffs and lace and linen,—came forward, with many trips and skips and grimaces, and pronounced a prologue, which consisted of a panegyric on the King and his government in their ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... passion in the tone of a man who would have a rival's life if he crossed his path. The elderly butterfly of the Empire came down with his whole weight on the poor poet, and tried to frighten and crush him by his self-importance. He grew taller as he gave an embellished account of his perilous wanderings; but while he impressed the poet's imagination, the lover ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... butterfly fluttered above her, and at last settled on the leaf. Thumbelina pleased him, and she, too, was delighted, for now the toads could not reach her, and it was so beautiful where she was travelling; the sun shone on the water and made ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Leonora Blanche Alleyne Lang
... interrogationis carried his ever present question mark from one dry leaf to another asking always that unanswerable "why?" Here Pyrameis huntera, well named the hunter's butterfly, flashed red through the woodland, scouting silently and becoming invisible in ambush as a hunter should. Here a tiny fleck of sky, the spirit bluebird of the spring which the entomologists have woefully named Lycaema pseudargiolus, fluttered along the ground ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... now have my feet on a hearthstone where even he might warm his boot. So get thy best dresses and jewels in order, and look thyself; proud as any in the land. A simple burgher's daughter now, Grete; but so shalt thou not end, my butterfly, or there's neither worth nor wit ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... inner soul, too, eye and ear, With which it can both see and hearken well? 'Tis true it is with eyes of flesh I see The richly glowing color of the rose; But with the spirit's eye I see within A lovely elf, a fairy butterfly, Who archly hides behind the crimson leaves, And singeth of a secret power from heaven That gave ...
— Early Plays - Catiline, The Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans • Henrik Ibsen
... that hot day in the steamy jungle, and the band was refreshed—Mark having hard work to refrain from chasing some gorgeous butterfly of green and gold, or with wings painted in pearl-blue, steel, and burnished silver. At other times some lovely kingfisher, with elongated tail, settled almost within reach. Then it would be a green barbet, with bristle-armed beak and bright ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... is Holiday Time, and all such as can pay, For the Summer-green country are up and away; But what of the poor pale-faced waifs of the slums? Oh, the butterfly flits, and the honey-bee hums O'er the holt and the heather, the hill and the plain, But they flit and they hum for Town's children in vain; Unless—ah! unless—there is hope in that word!— Mrs. JEUNE'S kindly plea by the Public is heard. Heard? Everyone feels 'tis a duty to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 16, 1890 • Various
... met Mr. Hop Toad and his wife out for a stroll," added Limpy-toes. "Yes, and we saw Pete and Dickie Grasshopper, and Madame Butterfly, also." ...
— The Graymouse Family • Nellie M. Leonard
... shrank a little, as if our admiration were something of an affront to her maiden modesty, and blushed, and then she laughed to cover it, and swept a courtesy in her circling shimmer of blue, and tossed her head and flirted a little fan, which looked like the wing of a butterfly, before her face. ...
— The Heart's Highway - A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeeth Century • Mary E. Wilkins
... be much in London during the session—it will be session, not season, that takes us there.... The longer I live the more I condemn and deplore a rackety life for any girl, and therefore if I do what I myself think right by her and not what others may think right, she shall never be a London butterfly. Would that we could give our girls the ideal society which I suppose we all dream for them—that of the wise and the good of all ages, of the young and merry of their own. No barbarous crowds, no despotic fashions, ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... kept faith; she might have been honest, and abided by the bargain. If she had not done so, it was because honesty was beyond her shallow nature. He should have seen before what he now saw so clearly. He should have known her for a lovely, empty husk; a silly, fluttering butterfly; a toy; a thing of ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... labyrinth he had made for her. Grimshaw offered no apologies. He was the uncrowned laureate and kings can do no wrong. He was painted by the young Sargent, of course, and by the aging Whistler—you remember the butterfly's portrait of him in a yellow kimono leaning against a black mantel? I, for one, think he was vastly amused by all this fury of admiration; he despised it and fed upon it. If he had been less great, he would have been utterly destroyed ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... composition and harmony of the work, accordingly, is much like the pattern of that patch-work drapery that is sometimes to be met with in the mansions of the industrious, where a blue tree overshadows a shell-fish, and a gigantic butterfly seems ready to swallow up Palemon and Lavinia. The author has the merit merely of cutting out each of his figures from the piece where its inventor had placed it, and stitching them down together in these ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... A little girl. Uncle Elbert," said Varney, "is a bit of a social butterfly. Mrs. Carstairs is an earnest domestic character. As I gather, that was what they clashed on—the idea of what a home ought to be. When the split came, Mrs. Carstairs took the child and Uncle Elbert was willing enough to have her do it. That was natural enough, ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... go away, but as the Fairy wished it she said nothing—only when the two months were over she stepped joyfully into the butterfly chariot, and could not get back quickly enough to the Flower-Fairy, who, for her part, was equally delighted to ...
— The Green Fairy Book • Various
... had burst like a butterfly into space, crawled back into his cocoon and pondered upon the stars from a worm's ...
— Make Mine Homogenized • Rick Raphael
... "Miss Butterfly sent word one day to all the garden people That she would give a social tea beneath the hollyhock. A robin read the message from a slender pine-tree steeple— A note that begged them sweetly to be there by six o'clock. They came a-wing, they came a-foot, they came ...
— Zodiac Town - The Rhymes of Amos and Ann • Nancy Byrd Turner
... prettily dressed in a costume of white linen with a cloud of chiffon tied about her small hat and a parasol that she had purchased this summer in Paris, which consisted of an enormous gold lace butterfly. She was fuller in figure than before her child had come and in perfect health, though still pale. Fresh and well cared for, she was if not beautiful very attractive and dainty—all that money could make of her human person. Adelle was ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... me before Sir Percy," murmured the young girl, casting shy glances at the elegant cavalier before her, vainly trying to find in the indolent, foppish personality of this society butterfly, some trace of the daring man of action, the bold adventurer who had snatched her and her lover from out the very tumbril that bore them both ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... gracefully. I envied that man his ability to write and say what he thought. I studied his profile and admired its worldly distinction. It was a fine modern profile, the straightness of it broken by the silken point of his well-kept moustache, by the perfect curve of his shoulder, and by the butterfly's wing of ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... wings, in the form and extent of the yellow band, and in the size of the specimens. The most extreme forms, as well as the intermediate ones, are often found in one locality and in company with each other. A small butterfly (Terias hecabe) ranges over the whole of the Indian and Malayan regions to Australia, and everywhere exhibits great variations, many of which have been described as distinct species; but a gentleman in Australia bred two of these ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... strangely fascinated Nick's gaze, there was a hole through the gristle of his right ear, scarred about as if it had been burned, and through this hole the fellow had tied a bow of crimson ribbon, like a butterfly alighted upon his ear. ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... taken off her hat, and her hair was coiled close about her exquisite head. White and black, regular, significant, antique—like a cameo of some Greek woman, long dead. She stood by a little table, one hand on it, the other like some butterfly against her gown.... It was like a pose—but ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... was much at Selwoode. Many people came there now—masculine women and muscleless men, for the most part. They had, every one of them, some scheme for bettering the universe; and if among them Margaret seemed somewhat out of place—a butterfly among earnest-minded ants—her heart was in every plan they advocated, and they found her purse-strings infinitely elastic. The girl was pitiably anxious to be of some use ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... and sunny Sunday morning. The church windows were wide open, and a butterfly came in and set the choir boys to giggling. At the end of my pew a stained-glass window to Carlo Benton—the name came like an echo from the forgotten past—sent a shower of colored light over Willie, turned my blue silk to most unspinsterly ...
— The Confession • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... all snapped costume crackers and adorned themselves with the caps that they discovered inside them, and they set the new Victrola going and danced the butterfly dance that they had learned at Chautauqua and had given at their entertainment for the Christmas Ship. Dusk was coming on when the Ethels said that they must go to the Old Ladies' Home or they would have to run all the way. Grandfather Emerson offered ...
— Ethel Morton's Holidays • Mabell S. C. Smith
... had introduced ourselves, I could not help thinking that there was a sort of hostility between the women. Certainly it was evident that there was as much difference in temperament as between the butterfly and ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... desire to kill them, even for the sake of bringing back a valuable collection. It would have been easy to capture them, as you could touch them several times with your fingers before they would fly away. One butterfly particularly took a great fancy to my left hand, in which I held the reins of my mule, and on which it sat during our marches for several days—much to my inconvenience, for I was afraid of injuring it. It would occasionally fly away and then return. At night ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... turned thy weak brain. But an hour agone enfranchised from Grub Street, thou must sing 'I'd be a butterfly.' Thou art vanity absolute, conceit beyond measure, and presumption out of all whooping. Yea, and but as a fool Pygmalion, not content with loving thine own handiwork, thou must needs fall in love with the goddess that breathed life into its stiff limbs; must yearn, not for Galatea, ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... urgent passion of appealing love, gave her approach the quality of a sacred ceremonial. She bent lower, not breathing, fearful, helpless, and dropt on his forehead a kiss, light as the touch a honey-seeking butterfly leaves on an unstirred flower. He moved a little; she rose in alarm and backed to the door. "Oh! why did I?" she said to herself, reproachful for a moment's delicious weakness. She looked back at the motionless ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... village that shoots up over-swiftly to a city's dimensions. They knew people, to be sure, for the Abbey influence would have opened the way for them into any circle. Stella had made many friends and pleasant acquaintances that summer on the lake, but part of that butterfly clique sought pleasanter winter grounds before she was fit for social activity. Apart from a few more or less formal receptions and an occasional auction party, she found it pleasanter to stay at home. Fyfe himself had spent only ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair |
