"Fledgling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a shadow constantly intruded, chilling them, such a shadow, deep and cold, as is cast by an iceberg. The door would open, and his father's face, high and white with ice-blue eyes, would hang above them. Instantly, the man remembered, the boy would cower like a fledgling beneath the sparrow-hawk, but with as much distaste as fear in his cringing. The words that followed always seemed the same—he could reconstruct the scene clearly, but whether it had occurred once or many times he could not tell. His father's ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... was more than curious to see what particular kind of a fledgling could be born to these two parent birds—one so hard and unsympathetic and the other so kind and simple. Jim, I remembered, had always spoken enthusiastically of Ruby, but then Jim always spilled over the edges ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... and in the trees without youths of simian habit clung to advantageous limbs and strained to get a view of the proceedings. Old Judge Kellog who usually dozed on his twenty-first vertebra through testimony and argument—once a young fledgling of a lawyer, sailing aloft in the empyrean of his eloquence, had been brought tumbling confusedly to earth by the snoring of the bench—attested to the unusualness of the occasion by being upright and awake. And Bud White, the clerk, called the court ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... heard, first from one, then from the other egg. From each emerged the featherless head of a fowl—the species hitherto unknown to the American continent. The necks pushed forth, then the shoulders, then both shells rolled away in fragments, and the spectators gazed on two fledgling Moas. Te-iki-pa, on inspection, pronounced them to be cock and hen, and in healthy condition. The breed, he ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... a dozen or more subalterns, fresh from England, undergoing their first rough work in the forests of Virginia. In this fledgling crowd were young Grafton, afterward a general; Mooney, Vedder, Hoicraft and others, whose names, with those of their Virginia companions ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... boots and beard of Allah's Prophet!" he swore, growing freer-tongued now that his liberty of action had been limited. "Here we stand and talk like two old hags, Mahommed Gunga! My word is given. Let us find out now what this fledgling general of thine would have us do. If he is to release my prisoner, at least I would like to ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... who sing best in their native freedom of the skies, like the spotted-breasted, circle-carolling lark, the thicket-haunting blackbird, and the sweet-throated thrush.—It would have afforded her no pleasure to prison up one of these in a cage. But, a little fledgling that had never known what it was to roam at its own sweet will, and who, when offered the liberty of the air, would hardly care to "take advantage of the situation;" that would be the bird which she would like ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... hour. They have as it were but a Pisgah view of the promised land, of the spring which they are foremost to proclaim. Next come the clumsy gentians and yellow anemones, covered with soft down like fledgling birds. These are among the earliest and hardiest blossoms that embroider the high meadows with a diaper of blue and gold. About the same time primroses and auriculas begin to tuft the dripping rocks, while frail white fleur-de-lis, like flakes of snow forgotten by the sun, and golden-balled ranunculuses ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... full of sugared red currants, and heaps of comfits and sweetmeats, which Master Gyles would not allow them even to touch, and saffron cakes with raisins in them, and spiced hot cordial out of tiny silver cups. Bareheaded pages clad in silk and silver lace waited upon them as if they were fledgling kings; but the boys were too hungry to care for that or to try to put on airs, and waded into the meat and drink as if they had been ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... Church, and also in the Episcopal, the novitiate is expected to serve for a time under an older clergyman; but all the other denominations have broken away, and now spring the fledgling on the ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... it would be a blister suddenly formed on Leonetta's hand; at croquet it would be a fledgling just beside her ball; on the beach it would be a peculiar pebble,—anywhere, everywhere, there was always something over which Leonetta would suddenly stand dramatically still, until every male within sight, including ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... darkness with yells, much more unnerved than he would have been by the arrival of any number of Spaniards. The eagle was let loose and not only walked at will up and down the company streets, but also at times flew wherever he wished. He was a young bird, having been taken out of his nest when a fledgling. Josephine hated him and was always trying to make a meal of him, especially when we endeavored to take their photographs together. The eagle, though good-natured, was an entirely competent individual ...
— Rough Riders • Theodore Roosevelt
... surreptitiously effected an entrance into the sacred precincts of the flower-garden, were now diligently prosecuting their experiments in entomotomy right in the heart of a border of choice carnations. When Bioern had chased the marauders to the confines of the poultry yard, and watched the last awkward fledgling scramble through the palings, his master began to repair the damage, and soon became absorbed in the favourite task of tying up the spicy tufts of bloom that deluged the air with perfume as he lifted and bent the slender stems. His ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... knew he was coming a strange stillness seemed to fall upon the child. She had grown long-legged and was at the fledgling stage when even a pretty girl sometimes looks plain, and she, who had as yet no claim to beauty, was at her worst. She was quite aware of it, with her intense soul-worship of all beautiful things. Some unreasoned impulse made her keep away from her master ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... the front door, peeping out, still in his leather jacket and apron of green baize; he was whistling softly to himself, and looked like a grown fledgling that did not dare to let itself tumble out of the nest. A whole world of amazement lay in ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... wings,—they could fly. Would it not have been passing strange, had they continued as they were, contented to cower and to crawl, when they had acquired the power to soar? And will you be content to remain forever only a fledgling, satisfied with having acquired the power of rising, but never actually using the wings which these years of honorable industry ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... and mild As ever nursling summer day Dreamed on the bosom of the bay: For I was twenty then, and went Alone and long-haired—all content With promises of sounding name And fantasies of future fame, And thoughts that now my mind discards As editor a fledgling bard's. ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... mal-nutrition of the initial stage of life condemns him to a permanent state of inferiority. The suckling "prepares himself to walk" by lying stretched out, and spending long, quiet hours in sleep. It is by sucking that the babe begins his teething. So, too, the fledgling in the nest does not prepare for flight by flying, but remains motionless in the little warm shell where its food is provided. The preparations ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... for a long time, thinking how royally I should feast if by some strange unheard-of accident one were to fall disabled to the ground and be at my mercy. But nothing impossible happened, and I had no meat. What meat did I ever have except an occasional fledgling, killed in its cradle, or a lizard, or small tree-frog detected, in spite of its green colour, among the foliage? I would roast the little green minstrel on the coals. Why not? Why should he live to tinkle on his mandolin ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... shouted the picked fledgling at my side as we whizzed under dark cedar boughs that waved funereal plumes over our heads, and over stumps and stones with utter disregard of the heavy new tires. One of the lessons I learned early is that men are timid of a woman's driving them in any vehicle, and ...
— Over Paradise Ridge - A Romance • Maria Thompson Daviess
... she lay above me, Where the casement all the night Shone, softened with a phosphor glow Of sympathetic light, And that her fledgling spirit pure Was pluming ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... their own. Their diagrams were scratched on the walls, cut into the beams upon the playground, and numberless other illustrations were afforded of the living interest they took in the subject. For my own part, as far as experience in teaching goes, I was a mere fledgling—knowing nothing of the rules of pedagogics, as the Germans name it; but adhering to the spirit indicated at the commencement of this discourse, and endeavouring to make geometry a means rather than a branch of education. The experiment was successful, and some of the most delightful ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... enthusiastic students, and the stripling university planted on the edge of civilization in the sands along the Elbe became for a while the religious and theological hub of the world. The students who gathered about Luther knew that they had a real professor in him. The world of his day came to this fledgling doctor with the weightiest questions, and received answers that satisfied. That part of the intelligent world of to-day which has read and studied Luther endorses the verdict of Luther's contemporaries as regards his ample learning and proficiency ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... the range of a yard where a fierce bull-terrier was kennelled. The hen had chicks; and, when about three weeks old, one of them strayed into the dog-kennel. The grim beast within took no notice of the tiny fledgling; but, when the anxious mother ventured in to fetch out the truant, with a growl the dog woke, and nearly snapped her asunder in his great jaws. The cock bird saw the tragic fate of its partner; but, nothing daunted, flew at the dog with a fierce cry, and pecked ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... prowling lonely joker; but what will most satisfy his cannibal appetite is the passage of the self-conscious men and women. For here, on a good day, he cannot fail to relish some extreme cases of their whimsical disease: fledgling young men making believe to be haughty to cover their dreadful symptoms, the mask itself thus revealing what it seeks to conceal; timid young ladies, likewise treacherously exposed by their defenses; and very different ladies, but in similar case, being retouched ladies, ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... ministered to her wants and pleasures. From a father's hand, childhood and youth received their countless natural blessings; and brother or husband, in later years, has stood between her and the rough winds of a stormy world. All at once, like a bird reared, from a fledgling, in its cage, and then turned loose in dreary winter time, she finds herself in the world, unskilled in its ways, yet required to earn her bread ...
— Lizzy Glenn - or, The Trials of a Seamstress • T. S. Arthur
... his stirrup and would not leave him, looking like a fledgling with his beard all new-sprouted on his jaw, and eyes wider than ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... at first aimlessly, like a defenseless fledgling thrust before its time from the nest. He was weak and tremulous and utterly miserable. Yet he felt compelled to go forward. He must escape from ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... "frog," hence his speech angered her and she said: "Since I have dwelt in your house your fields have yielded larger crops, and you have obtained the highest selling prices. And that is something after all. But now, when young and old, you are comfortably established, you wish to act like the fledgling owl, who picks out his own mother's eyes as soon as he is able ...
— The Chinese Fairy Book • Various
... dream. The enthusiasm of men participating in a race's expansion to glory. There was the feeling, even stronger here in space than back on Earth, of man's destiny being fulfilled, that humanity had finally emerged from its infancy, that the fledgling had finally found its wings and got ...
— Ultima Thule • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... to rest, as a mother a dead baby in its coffin. Into the closet went the bits of lingerie from the consignment just arrived from Paris, and the other spoils of the day. When everything was buried she shut the door upon it, as in her heart she was shutting the door on her poor little fledgling hopes. Nothing remained to torment her vision, or distract her from what she had to do. The old gray rag and the battered black hat were all she had ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... crop as stunted as a stubble field. Rowland and Ross! your greasy gifts are vain, You give the hair you're sure to cut again. Unhappy Tomkins! late thy ringlets rare, E'en Wombwell's self to rival might despair. Now with thy smooth crown, nor the fledgling's chops, Nor East-born Mechi's magic razor strops, Can vie! And laughing maids you fly in dread, Lest they should see the horrors of your head! Laurie, like death, hath clouded o'er your morn. Tomkins, you're dish'd! Your Jeune France locks ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... watch till the young are almost ready to bubble over, and then place them in a cage where the old birds come and feed them. There is, then, no reason why the nest itself should not be designed for the safety of the fledgling as well as of the egg. Birds that nest in holes are frequently very prolific, notably the starling, which rears its brood by thousands in the hollow trees of forests. Though not altogether, in part their vast numbers appear due to the fact ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... shamelessly eavesdropping because she was a mother fighting for her fledgling, tiptoed away from the corner of the stack, and went back to the house, wiping her eyes frequently with the corner of her handkerchief that was not embroidered. She went into her room and stayed there ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... with delight. Here was appreciation! No sign of superiority, no condescension from a young lady in long frocks and done- up hair towards a schoolgirl fledgling, but an open avowal of need, an invitation to a heart-to-heart talk on a basis of affectionate equality. She clasped her hands together in the intensity of her delight, and hitched her ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... likely it was as she thought—just the hearing how splendidly healthy the place was—that made her travel down to Middlemead in those early spring days, that first sad year after mamma's death, to look for a nest for her little fledgling. She arrived there in pretty good spirits; she had written to a house-agent and had got the names of two or three 'to let' houses, which she at once tramped off from the station to look at, for she was very anxious not to spend a penny more than she could help. But, oh dear, how her spirits went ...
— My New Home • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... however, could look in the refined face of Walter Colman and imagine him cherishing sordid views of life. Asked what of all things he most admired, he might truly answer, "The imaginative intellect." He was a fledgling poet. He worshiped what he called thoughts, would rave about a thought in the abstract, apostrophize an uncaught idea. When a concrete thinkable one fell to him, he was jubilant over the isolate thing, and with his joy value had nothing to do. He ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... convention that framed the constitution, the representatives of the people exhibited this conservative feeling in a remarkable degree; and the extreme democratic sentiment, such as afterward sympathized with the radicals of the French revolution, was yet only a fledgling, but destined to grow rapidly, and to fly with swift wing over the land. Yet the spirit was manifest, and its coalescence with the state-rights feeling made circumspection in the arrangement of the ceremonials connected with the president and ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... go far," he said with a chuckle. "They never do what they set out to do. Always pecking at new things are the Bandar-log. This time, if I have any eye-sight, they have pecked down trouble for themselves, for Baloo is no fledgling and Bagheera can, as I know, ...
— The Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... how to answer. He had not gone there to discuss this last and really great question with Mr. Flint, but he wondered whether the president actually thought him the fledgling he proclaimed. Austen laid his pass on Mr. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... taste but now that they were bent upon a definite errand and one that promised another meeting with Isabel at the end of the journey he shared the Governor's zest for flight. It was a joy to be free under the broad blue arch of June. Spring is a playtime for fledgling fancy but in summer the heart is strong of wing and dares the heavens. It was Archie who now initiated vocal outbursts, striking up old glee club catches he hadn't thought of since his college days. He was in love. He bawled his scraps of song that the world might know that he was a lover riding ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... the song trembled down to my breast,— (It was sweet, so sweet the singing.) As a dove just out of its fledgling nest, And, putting its wings to the first sweet test, Flutters homeward ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... to dismiss any detail of Nature's work as merely arbitrary and haphazard, is greatly exercised over the reason for the existence of crests on birds. But, surely, may not the sight of snake-skins that first greet the eyes of the fledgling flycatchers as they emerge from the shell be a good and sufficient reason why the feathers on their little heads should stand on end? "In the absence of a snake-skin, I have found an onion skin and shad scales in the nest," says John Burroughs, ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... knowed him ever since he was a fledgling. He come out of th' nest in th' other garden an' when first he flew over th' wall he was too weak to fly back for a few days an' we got friendly. When he went over th' wall again th' rest of th' brood was gone an' he was lonely an' he ...
— The Secret Garden • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Benito, straight and slim, combining in his fledgling soul the austere heritage of Anglo-Saxons with the leaping fires of Castile. Fondly, yet with something anxious in her glance, his mother watched the boy as he sprang nimbly to the saddle of his favorite horse. He was like her husband, strong and self-reliant. Yet,—she ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... of twenty-two, convalescing in country lodgings after an illness that seemed to have taken the marrow out of my bones. Hilaire was in Japan, and I—a callow fledgling from the nest—was very sick and sorry for myself. There were some people living in rather a large house at the other end of the village who took notice of me. They were the only ones, and I have thought since that my ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... heave a sigh from my inmost heart. I cannot forget that loveliness which had no parallel. Pardieu, her eyes were amethysts, her lips were red as the berries of a holly tree. Her hair blazed in the light, bright as the sunflower glows; her skin was whiter than milk; the down of a fledgling bird was not more grateful to the touch than were her hands. There was never any person more delightful to gaze upon, and whosoever beheld her forthwith desired to render love and service ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... tipplers to civil life, but that didn't stop it. Little by little the sense and manhood of our people began to tell. Little by little the feeling against stimulant began to develop at the Point. It was no longer a joke to set a fledgling officer to taste the tempter—it was a crime. Four years after I was commissioned we had only one total abstainer out of some fifty officers at the mess, and he was a man whose life and honor depended ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... does not come to us in visible form to tell us in an audible voice that to cry out to him in sore pain and distress is unlawful. How, then, do we know this thing? For a child cries to its mother, and a fledgling in the nest to its parent bird; and he is infinitely more to us than parent to child—infinitely stronger to help, and knows our griefs as no fellow-mortal can know them. May we not, then, believe, ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... bit and thrashed and tore at him, her bare little body hard as whalebone and slippery with sweat. He could not hold onto her. She kicked herself free of his hands and rushed wildly out of reach, and one of the black hunters pounced in and bore her away, shrieking thinly like a fledgling bird in the jaws ...
— The Stars, My Brothers • Edmond Hamilton
... bearing him down into the trough of the sea, and he beholding the while the terrors and wonders of the deep, for the space of three days, at the end of which time Fate cast him upon the Mount of the Bereft Mother, where he landed, weak and giddy as a fledgling bird, for hunger and thirst; but, finding there streams running and birds warbling on the branches and fruit-laden trees, growing in clusters and singly, he ate of the fruits and drank of the streams. Then he walked ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous
... Katherine's answer was always "Yes." She grudged the boy none of his new-found pleasures, rejoiced indeed to see him interested and gay. Yet to watch the new broom, which sweeps so clean, is rarely exhilarating to those that have swept diligently with the old one. The nest had held her precious fledgling so safely till now; and this fluttering of wings, eager for flight, troubled her somewhat. Not only was Dickie's readiness to be away from her a trifle hard to bear; but she knew that disappointment, of a certainty, lay in wait for him, and that each effort towards wider action would but ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... thy sister spirit, Spring, Pausing above the earth, sees every hue Of her prismatic crown, reflected true In forests and in fields, and fledgling's wing, So thou dost see thy spirit glorying With faith, that man is more than Nature's spew— In human spirit that, from beauty drew First breath to know that soul ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... intellectual capacity that no gleam of knowledge, however fugitive it might be, ever escaped his keen penetration, attached a quite different importance to the youth's words from what the rest did, for the builder had reported them to him as the presumptuous saying of a young fledgling carpenter. This man was the Prince-bishop himself. He had the young man summoned to his presence, that he might inquire further into the import of his words, and was not a little astonished both at his appearance and at his general bearing and character. My kindly reader ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... word "Hallelujah!" It seemed to express all the joy of spring mornings and clear sunshine and bursting blossoms, blended with all that I guessed of the songs of angels, and with all that I had heard and believed, in my fledgling soul, of the glorious One who was born in a manger and died on a cross, that He might reign in human hearts as a king. I wondered why the people did not sing "Hallelujah" more. It seemed like a word sent straight down to us out ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... meeting and an expression of sentiment. Regretful resolutions were passed and various committees appointed; among others, a committee of one was deputed to call on the minister, a fragile, gentle, spiritual new fledgling from an Eastern theological seminary, and as yet unacquainted with the ways of the mines. The committeeman, "Scotty" Briggs, made his visit; and in after days it was worth something to hear the minister tell about it. Scotty was a stalwart rough, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... fledgling spacemen were silent, watching and listening with awe and envy as the Polaris crew continued their indoctrination. They considered themselves lucky to have been drawn by these famous cadets for their ...
— Treachery in Outer Space • Carey Rockwell and Louis Glanzman
... an extinct Volcano of Political World and a sappy Fledgling whose Grandfather laid ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... a burly mate, leaped to the stage and began, with half as many others who ran ashore on it, to heave it aboard. But a sharp "avast" stopped them, and four or five cabin-boys gambolled out on it ashore. A smart hack came whirling up in its own white shell dust, and a fledgling dandy of seventeen sprang down from the seat of his choice by the driver before the vehicle could stop or the white jackets strip it of ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... up at his approach, all the natural impishness of her small face drowned in sorrow. In her open hand she held the body of a tiny bird, all that was left of a fledgling which had tried ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... with a dazzling smile, "when your heart is athirst for knowledge, gaping for it like a fledgling's mouth for food, and, as it chances, though I am not very wise, I can ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... literary wealth stored in Hawaiian memories; second, to those who have kindly contributed criticism, suggestion, material at the different stages of this book's progress; and, lastly, to those dear friends of the author's youth—living or dead—whose kindness has made it possible to send out this fledgling to the world. The author feels under special obligations to Dr. Titus Munson Coan, of New York, for a painstaking revision of ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... than I could have in this life. How could I, not yet six, think otherwise than as she had told me to think, or have a doubt? A mother is more to her child than any other being, human or divine, can ever be to him in his subsequent life. He is as dependent on her as any fledgling in the nest on its parent—even more, since she warms his callow mind or soul as ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... conquest and demanded victories of their own. I have seen their diagrams scratched on the walls, cut into the beams upon the play ground, and numberless other illustrations of the living interest they took in the subject. For my own part, as far as experience in teaching goes, I was a mere fledgling: I knew nothing of the rules of pedagogics, as the Germans name it; but I adhered to the spirit indicated at the commencement of this discourse, and endeavoured to make geometry a means and not a branch of education. The experiment was successful, ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... workmanlike than the Maydes Metamorphosis; but the latter, it should be remembered, is beyond all doubt a very juvenile performance. Turning over some old numbers of a magazine, I found a reviewer of Mr. Tennyson's Princess complaining "that we could have borne rather more polish!" How the fledgling poet of the Maydes Metamorphosis would have fared at the reviewer's hands I tremble to think. But though his rhymes are occasionally slipshod, and the general texture is undeniably thin, still there is something attractive in the young writer's shy tentativeness. The reader ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... while, you must remember, he was borrowing money and running up bills. But this didn't bother him. He was perfectly assured in his own mind concerning his future. He had counted costs. In that May, Bewsher, who from school had gone to Sandhurst, came up on a visit with two or three other fledgling officers, and they had a dinner in Morton's rooms. It turned into rather a 'rag,' as those things do, and it was there, across a flower-strewn, wine-stained table, that Morton had his second revelation. He wasn't drunk—he never got drunk; the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Renanin,[135] because he is the celestial singer.[136] On account of his relation to the heavenly regions he is also called Sekwi, the seer, and, besides, he is called "son of the nest,"[137] because his fledgling birds break away from the shell without being hatched by the mother bird; they spring directly from the nest, as it were.[138] Like leviathan, so ziz is a delicacy to be served to the pious at the end of time, to compensate them for the privations which abstaining ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... led the way into his quarters, motioned Ebor to a perch, and rang for his orderly. "It was just a little remote-controlled apparatus, of course," he said. "The fledgling attempt, you know. But it circled this Moon here, busily taking pictures, and went right back to the planet again, giving us all a terrible fright. There hadn't been the slightest indication they were planning anything ...
— They Also Serve • Donald E. Westlake
... The fledgling baronet, except for his too favourable opinion of himself, in which he was unlike only a very few, and an amount of assumption not small toward his supposed inferiors, was not a disagreeable ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... other day, that I was not a critic. These attenuated volumes of poetry in fancy bindings open their covers at one like so many little unfledged birds, and one does so long to drop a worm in,—a worm in the shape of a kind word for the poor fledgling! But what a desperate business it is to deal with this army of candidates for immortality! I have often had something to say about them, and I may be saying over the same things; but if I do not remember what I ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... spolia opima, as we said at Mareschal College—I bid him rise, and then discoursed him on the dishonour of such a hasty defeat. Then, he confessing himself to me that, though under arms, he was a young fledgeling priest in Popish orders, I began upon him with such words on his disgracing the noble profession of arms as might have made him choose to return to his cloister; when suddenly he fled, and, being young and light-footed, robbed me, not only of such caduacs and casualties as an experienced cavalier ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... around them—the cat with her kittens, the bird with its fledgelings, and still more the mother with her infant, are all common facts and beautiful types of motherhood. Instead of inventing silly and untrue stories as to the origin of the kitten and the fledgeling, it is better and wiser to answer the child's question by a direct statement of fact, that God has given the power to His creatures to perpetuate themselves, that the gift of Life is one of His good gifts bestowed in mercy on all His creatures. The mother's share in this ...
— Youth and Sex • Mary Scharlieb and F. Arthur Sibly |
