"Moth" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and velocities of the heavenly bodies. So that he concludes by striking into us some sense of that disproportion of things which Shelley has illuminated by the ironical flash of these eight words: The desire of the moth for the star. ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... men leaped to their feet, cursing, and fired repeatedly at the Germans carrying the flaming jets. Here and there the shots were true. A man hunched under a cylinder exploded like a fat moth caught in a candle-flame. But that advancing line of fire after the long bombardment was too much for the rank and file, whose clothes were smoking and whose bodies were scorched. In something like a panic they fell back, abandoning the cratered ground in ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... if it should pleeas Him who orders all things, To call yo away to rest under His wings,— Tho' to part wod be hard, yet this comfort is giv'n, We shall know 'at awr treasures are safe up i' Heaven, Whear no moth an noa rust can corrupt or destroy, Nor thieves can braik in, nor troubles annoy. Blessins on thi! wee thing,—an whativver thi lot, Tha'rt promised a mansion, tho' born in a cot, What fate is befoor ...
— Yorkshire Lyrics • John Hartley
... hedge he found a Rational Person, led hither by a Clothes' Moth, working out the problem of the hundred wickets in consonance with the most approved methods. 'I have very nearly solved it,' the Rational Person said, in genteel triumph, 'but this evening grows too dark for any further ciphering, ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... as it attracts most young men. Paris, with its glare and glitter, its superficial gaiety, its bright boulevards, and its feminine beauty, is the candle to the moth of youth. I revelled in Paris just as many a thousand other young men had done before me. I knew French, Italian and German, and I was vain enough to believe that I might have within me the making of a cosmopolitan. So many young men believe that—and, alas! so many fail on account of either ...
— Hushed Up - A Mystery of London • William Le Queux
... dwells the lore which we cannot formulate into thought, but can only come indescribably to know by loving the pictures. "The meaning of all things that are" is there, if we can only find it. It flames in the sunset, or flits by us in the twilight moth, thunders or moans or whispers in the sea, unveils its bosom in the moonrise, affirms itself in mountain-range and rooted oak, sings to itself in solitary places, dreams in still waters, nods and beckons amid sunny foliage, and laughs its great green ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... knowledge of geology, for example, as will make every quarry and railway cutting an object of interest. A very little zoology will enable you to satisfy your curiosity as to what is the proper name and style of this buff-ermine moth which at the present instant is buzzing round the lamp. A very little botany will enable you to recognize every flower you are likely to meet in your walks abroad, and to give you a tiny thrill of interest when you chance ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Of emmets' eggs; what would he more? But beards of mice, a newt's stew'd thigh, A bloated earwig, and a fly; With the red-capt worm, that's shut Within the concave of a nut, Brown as his tooth. A little moth, Late fatten'd in a piece of cloth; With wither'd cherries, mandrakes' ears, Moles' eyes: to these the slain stag's tears; The unctuous dewlaps of a snail, The broke-heart of a nightingale O'ercome in music; with a wine Ne'er ravish'd from the flattering vine, But gently prest from the soft ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick
... girl that seemest the mother of all, Dear Ceres-Aphrodite, with every lure That draws the bee to honey, with the call Of moth-winged night to sinners, yet as pure As the white nun that counts the stars for beads; Thou blest Madonna of all broken needs, Thou Melusine, thou sister of sorrowing man, Thou wave-like laughter, thou dear sob in the throat, Thou all-enfolding mercy, and thou song That gathers up each wild ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... ragged Tattered and iagged Rudely rain-beaten Rusty and moth-eaten If ye talke well therewyth Yt hath in it ...
— Animaduersions uppon the annotacions and corrections of some imperfections of impressiones of Chaucer's workes - 1865 edition • Francis Thynne
... on that piece of card. Gently, my dear boy, gently; the down upon these things is so exquisitely fine, that the least touch spoils them. Look at that Atlas moth by your elbow. Isn't ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... retrace the pilgrimage of our own years. Let us recall the blessings by the way—the streams in the desert, the pillar of fire that led us in the night. And yet what is the quality of our faith? It is often weak and reluctant, riddled with timidities, or moth-eaten with worldly ease. It is not mighty and daring, riding forth every morning like a chivalrous knight to inevitable conquest. It creeps along, like Mr. Halting, and Miss Much-Afraid, ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... a new country is often fair.—Every horticulturist knows that apples grown in a new country, that is suited to them, are healthy and fair; but, sooner or later, the scab, and codling moth, and bitter rot, and bark louse arrive, each to begin its particular mode of attack. Peach trees in new places, remote from others, are often easily grown and free from dangers; but soon will arrive the yellows, borers, leaf ...
— Seed Dispersal • William J. Beal
... the divine balance. He falls asleep on his pile; of imaginary spiritual wealth, and awakening finds he has nothing in his hands. He has laboured for himself, not for God, and therefore receives his reward from himself and not from God. Like a moth, he singes his wings in the flame of a merit which is truly imaginary, no work being really meritorious except that which is done in a state of grace, and with God for ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... greed. What was he in this world of contending ambitions? A child sacrificing everything to the pursuit of pleasure and the gratification of vanity; a poet whose thoughts never went beyond the moment, a moth flitting from one bright gleaming object to another. He had no definite aim; he was the slave of circumstance—meaning well, doing ill. Conscience tortured him remorselessly. And to crown it all, he was penniless and exhausted ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... thoughts of venality from your mind. The worst moth that gets into papers and destroys them is the gold of the dishonest litigant, who bribes the Scribes to make away with evidence which he knows to be hostile. Thus, then, be ready always to produce to suitors genuine old documents; and, ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... even ground to the friendly trees and found ourselves in a thin strip of shadow. Beneath the trees, waiting for us, was the Indian maid. She would not speak or tarry, but flitted before us as dusk and noiseless as a moth, and we followed her into the darkness beyond the firelight. Here a wigwam rose in our path; the girl, holding aside the mats that covered the entrance, motioned to us to enter. A fire was burning within the lodge and it showed us ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... that of sweet briar, others like honeysuckle, others like jasmine, and so attract the females. Other butterflies are known which produce repulsive odours, and so protect themselves from being eaten by birds and lizards. Again, there are moths (for instance, the emperor moth, Saturnia), the females of which produce a perfume which attracts the males, and is of far-reaching power. The French entomologist, Fabre, placed one of these female moths in a box covered with ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... and expense can be avoided if you will only take the precaution this spring to put away your clothing and furs in the Howard Moth Proof Garment Bags. Strongly constructed of a heavy and durable cedar paper, and made absolutely moth-proof by our patented closing device, the Howard bag provides ...
— How to Write Letters (Formerly The Book of Letters) - A Complete Guide to Correct Business and Personal Correspondence • Mary Owens Crowther
... yellow with age. "Them was part of my fittin' out. I spun an' wove 'em myself, whilst Sprigg an' me was walkin' out together," she explained, carefully peering into the folds of the cloth, in search of any vagrant moth. ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... gone, and disinterested advice it is of mine, for what is to become of me without Amy remains to be proved. Laura, poor thing, looks like Patience on a monument. I wonder whether Philip's disgrace has anything to do with it. Hum! If mamma's old idea was right, the captain has been more like moth and candle than consistent with his prudence, unless he thought it "a toute epreuve". I wonder what came to pass last autumn, when I was ill, and mamma's head full of me. He may not intend it, and she may not know it, but I would by no means answer for Cupid's being guiltless of that harassed ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... didn't go out. A moth had flown down its chimney, was sizzling, charring, inside ... Paul lifted off the globe. Burnt his hands, but said nothing ... flicked the wingless, blackened body to ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... a moth in the flame of the candle. She carried it to the window. "You will come back soon, of course?" her back ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... gets the better of discretion, but fortunately soon finds its natural level: the violent ultra-tory, and the violent ultra-demagogue sink alike, after a few years of excitement, into the moth-eaten receptacle of newspaper renown, alike unheeded, and alike forgotten, by a newer and more enlightened generation, who find that, to the cost of the real interest of the people, the mouthing orator, the agitator, the exciter, is ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... one after the other, with his long, slender bill. That long, tubular, fork-shaped tongue may be sucking up the nectar from those rather small cylindrical blossoms, or it may be capturing tiny insects housed away there. Much more like a large sphynx moth hovering and humming over the flowers in the dusky twilight, than like a bird, appears this delicate, fairy-like beauty. How the bright green of the body gleams and glistens in the sunlight. Each imperceptible stroke ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [December, 1897], Vol 2. No 6. • Various
... and he with me as far as the Old Exchange talking of many ingenuous things, musique, and at last of glasses, and I find him still the same ingenuous man that ever he was, and do among other fine things tell me that by his microscope of his owne making he do discover that the wings of a moth is made just as the feathers of the wing of a bird, and that most plainly and certainly. While we were talking came by several poor creatures carried by, by constables, for being at a conventicle. They go like lambs, without ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... Wen's ire was actually stirred up, and her beautiful moth-like eyebrows contracted, and her lovely phoenix eyes stared wide like two balls. So she immediately shouted ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... hours, when the little blind boy Wove round me the spells of his Paphian bower; When I dipped my light wings in the nectar of joy, And soared in the sunshine, the moth of the hour! From beauty to beauty I passed, like the wind; Now fondled the lily, now toyed with the Rose; And the fair, that at morn had enchanted my mind, Was forsook ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... retorted. "I don't require the shave, thank goodness, but I certainly need a bath—and clothes. I wish I had the gray suit that's probably getting all moldy and moth-eaten at the Pine River cabin. I wonder if I can get ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Three Star managed to find many hours for holiday-making. The ranch ran well on its own routine, and Molly was a princess to be entertained. Kate Nicholson emerged from her chrysalis and became almost a butterfly rather than the pale gray moth they had fancied her. Even Miranda revised her opinion. The Nicholsons, it came out, had been a family of some consequence and a fair degree of riches in South Carolina before an unfortunate speculation had taken everything. Kate Nicholson, left alone soon ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... transformed into the butterfly. He had shuffled off the grog-shop, and fluttered into one of the brightest of Cleveland hotels. The bright-winged moth singes itself in the brilliant gaslight sometimes where ...
— Three People • Pansy
... wise men of Greece, born at Priene, in Ionia; lived in the 6th century B.C.; many wise sayings are ascribed to him; was distinguished for his indifference to possessions, which moth and rust can corrupt, and thieves break ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... "am Pietro Moresco. I have-a da nice political posish, an' nice-a barber-shop on Mulberry-a Strit. Some-a day I getta on da force—da pollis-force. Sure t'ing. I been-a home to see ma moth. I go-a back to make-a da more mon." He pulled out from his corded bundle of red quilts and coats and rugs some bottles of cheap wine. "I getta place for all you men." He was beginning, thus early in the voyage of these would-be citizens, ...
— The Old Flute-Player - A Romance of To-day • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... only a piker at it," I replied, modestly. "I can do a few moth-eaten tricks with the cards and I've studied out a few of the illusions, enough to know how to do them without breaking an ankle, but I'm not cute enough to ...
— You Can Search Me • Hugh McHugh
... four-and-twenty hours, during which time she was to be kept without meat or drink. It was supposed that one of her imps would come during that interval and suck her blood. As the imp might come in the shape of a wasp, a moth, a fly, or other insect, a hole was made in the door or window to let it enter. The watchers were ordered to keep a sharp look out, and endeavour to kill any insect that appeared in the room. If any fly ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... magnificence, his sister, Madame Mancini, was the wife of a petty Italian baron, who was struggling to bring up her five daughters on a pathetically scanty purse—as far removed from her magnificent brother as a moth from a star. There was, on the face of things, every reason why the great and all-powerful Cardinal should leave his nieces to their genteel poverty; and we can imagine both the astonishment and delight with which Madame Mancini received the summons to Paris which meant such a revolution ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... entirely spoiled by her matter-of-fact way, and what was worse still he felt in her presence as if he did not amount to much, and that she knew it; and yet, like the poor moth that singes its wings around the lamp, he could not ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... are fewer in number than might be expected in the case of so nutritive a plant. Against the weevil, the moth, and the fly, we are comparatively powerless, and perhaps the safest course is occasionally to dust the plants with lime or soot, in which case the work must be carefully done, or the leaf growth will be checked, to the injury of the crop. Light dustings will suffice ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... after his gloom and chagrin at dinner, should now be beaming, was not so clear. Bel thought, "The poor moth! Lottie has been dazzling him with her dangerous smiles. ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... with deer's horns," he repeated as he walked on, and then the gathering gloom of the wood suggested an addition: "And some day I shall find in the wood that moth of which I have dreamed since childhood—the dark moth with the face of ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... grubs make use of this habit when they imagine themselves in danger. For instance, the "fever worm," the larva of one of our common moths,—the Isabella tiger-moth,—is a noted death-feigner, and will "pretend dead" on the slightest provocation. Touch this grub with the toe of your boot, or with the tip of your finger, or with a stick, and it will at once curl up, to all appearances absolutely ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... whose health had been bad for some time, published some work upon the "mesoblast" of the Death's Head Moth. What the mesoblast of the Death's Head Moth may be, does not matter a rap in this story. But the work was far below his usual standard, and gave Hapley an opening he had coveted for years. He must have worked night and day to make the most ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... life, and its happiness, are real blessings, which are from the Divine: this the Lord also teaches in Luke: 12 ch., 33-34. "Make to yourselves a treasure that faileth not in the heavens, where the thief cometh not, nor the moth corrupteth; for where your treasure is, there ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... in guttural tones from a strange voice. Glancing hastily out, she saw some Indians below, talking with one of the men, who was shaking his head and motioning to them that they must go on, that this was no place for them to stop. The Indian motioned to his squaw, sitting on a dilapidated little moth-eaten burro with a small papoose in her arms and looking both dirty and miserable. He muttered as though he were ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... not come yet, nor the pleasure of seeing the way again, the lifting of the darkness leaves heaviness beneath it, and if a rashly early bird flops down upon the grass, he cannot count his distance, but quivers like a moth. ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... the city had taught her many things. She showed no surprise at the amount named. "That will be satisfactory, Dr. Munster. But I want to ask you, please don't tell Moth—Mrs. Eby anything about it. I—it's to be paid by a friend. I know Mrs. Eby would almost faint if she knew so much money was going to be spent for her. She knows that many hospitals have free rooms and thinks some operations are ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... turned my sight towards the dead forms in the motley collection, and lo, in my trance or my vision, life returned to them all!—to the elephant and the serpent; to the tiger, the vulture, the beetle, the moth; to the fish and the polypus, and to yon mockery of man ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... each hour radiant with the radiancy of duty well done, and radiant hours will make radiant years. But the missing of privileges and the neglecting of duties will leave days and years marred and blemished and make the life at last like a moth-eaten garment. We must catch the sacred meaning of our opportunities if we would live up ...
— Making the Most of Life • J. R. Miller
... feet. I haven't the full measure of things yet. But the play's a big thing. They're out for the game we've been playing. Say, they're combining every old mill we've left over. All the derelicts and moth-bounds. Their hands are out grabbing all over the country. Well, that wouldn't scare me worth a cent, only they've never let up in fifteen years, and there's talk about big British finance getting ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... in Chicago. No, sir! It takes a small town mother to have the time and patience for that kind of work. She's the kind whose kitchen smells of ginger cookies on Saturday mornings. And I'll bet if she ever found a moth in the attic she'd call the fire department. He's her only son. And he's come to the city to work. And his name—his ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... as the glare passed. The full moon was climbing up the sky, and so bright that scarcely a star was visible in the blue grey of the heavens. Houses gleamed white a mile away, and ever and again a moth would flutter and hang in the light of the lamps, and then vanish again in ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... woke her dames; For shouts were heard 'mid fire and smoke, And twice ten hundred voices spoke - "The playhouse is in flames!" And, lo! where Catherine Street extends, A fiery tail its lustre lends To every window-pane; Blushes each spout in Martlet Court, And Barbican, moth-eaten fort, And Covent Garden kennels sport A bright ensanguined drain; Meux's new brewhouse shows the light, Rowland Hill's Chapel, and the height Where Patent Shot they sell; The Tennis Court, so fair and tall, Partakes the ray, with Surgeons' Hall, The Ticket-Porters' ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... with the show, I guess, except Monolith, the moth-eaten old elephant, and the big tortoise in the sideshow. They say the elephant's over a hundred, and some think the tortoise is two hundred years old. So they go Scalawag a ...
— The Corner House Girls Growing Up - What Happened First, What Came Next. And How It Ended • Grace Brooks Hill
... seated motionless at her central post, I take a straw and, wielding it dexterously, so as to respect the resting- floor and the spokes, I pull and root up the spiral, which dangles in tatters. With its snaring-threads ruined, the net is useless; no passing Moth would allow herself to be caught. Now what does the Epeira do in the face of this disaster? Nothing at all. Motionless on her resting- floor, which I have left intact, she awaits the capture of the game; she awaits ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... Suppose you see one of these fixed stars suddenly increase in brightness, and are told that a satellite has fallen into it and is burning up, its career finished, its capacities exhausted? Curious, is it not; but what does it matter? Just as much as the burning up of a moth at your candle." ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... grotesque, goatish-looking deer which did not interest him, and came suddenly upon a paddock containing a bull moose, two cows, and a yearling calf. The calf looked ungainly and quite content with his surroundings. The cows were faded and moth-eaten, but well fed. He had no concern for them at all. But the bull, a splendid, black-shouldered, heavy-muffled fellow, with the new antlers just beginning to knob out from his massive forehead, appealed to him strongly. The ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... old, moth-eaten hangings about the walls here and there, and I took one down and laid it over Hollins, wondering while I did this office for him what strange secret it was that he had carried away into death, and why that queer and puzzled expression had crossed his face in death's very moment. And ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher
... away; even rusty nails find their way to the bazar. The miscellanies of a stall might upon occasion be what is left behind after a house removal. On one table at Batum I observed two moth-eaten rusty fezes, a battered but unopened tin of herrings in tomato-sauce, another tin half-emptied, a guitar with one string, a good hammer, a door-mat worn to holes, the clearing of a book-case, an old saucepan, an old kerosene ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... room was a facsimile of her own—the same bed with the same quilt over it and the same crucifix above it, the same little table with the same books of devotion, the same washstand with the same tiny jug and basin, the same rusted, fireless grate. The wardrobe, like her own, was merely a pair of moth-eaten tartan curtains, concealing both pegs and garments from her curiosity. The only sense of difference came subtly from the folding windows, below whose railed balcony showed another view of the quarter, with steam-trams—diminished to toy trains—puffing past ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... others. We just scorch ourselves as we please. My cousin, Noctilia Glow-worm, who is out late o' nights on the grass-bank in poor company—the Katydids, who board for the season with the widow Poplar—a two-sided, deceitful woman—she does not care where I go, and never shrieks out, 'A burnt moth dreads the lamp chimney.' If she sees me wingless, she coughs, and throws out a green light, but says nothing. Don't mind ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... clouds, they went, and down again, towards the defenceless Earth, that could not flee from the chariot of the Sun. Great rivers hid themselves in the ground, and mountains were consumed. Harvests perished like a moth that is singed in ...
— Old Greek Folk Stories Told Anew • Josephine Preston Peabody
... watch on his expenditure; and they had no scruple to send home complaints against him behind his back, as they did against one another. A secretary in Dublin like Geoffrey Fenton is described as a moth in the garment of every Deputy. Grey himself complains of the underhand work; he cannot prevent "backbiters' report:" he has found of late "very suspicious dealing amongst all his best esteemed associates;" ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... not what men call love; But wilt thou accept not The worship the heart lifts above And the Heavens reject not: The desire of the moth for the star, Of the night for the morrow, The devotion to something afar From ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... had been the lumber-room in Caleb's household. In an instant the whole troop had thrown themselves on the motley contents. Stray joints of clumsy fishing-rods; artificial baits; a pair of worn-out top-boots, in which one of the urchins, whooping and shouting, buried himself up to the middle; moth-eaten, stained, and ragged, the collegian's gown-relic of the dead man's palmy time; a bag of carpenter's tools, chiefly broken; a cricket-bat; an odd boxing-glove; a fencing-foil, snapped in the middle; and, more than all, some ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the haunting stillness of this house where splendour had turned to mould—where form had become effaced and colour dimmed; where only the shadowy film of texture still remained, and where even that was slowly yielding—under the attacks of Time's relentless mercenaries, moth ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... double-winged water-flies, which swim down the stream, are usually found in the middle of the day, such as the willow-fly; and the cow-dung-fly is sometimes carried on the water by winds. In March there are several flies found on most rivers. The grannam, or green-tail-fly, with a wing like a moth, comes on generally morning and evening, from five till eight o'clock, A.M. in mild weather, in the end of March and through April. Then there are the blue and the brown, both ephemerae, which come on, the first ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XII., No. 324, July 26, 1828 • Various
... moth, and get your poor little wings singed. When the cruel fair has done trampling on you I'll come right along and mop up the remains. If, on the other hand, your temerity meets with the success it deserves, we can celebrate suitably later on." And, linking his arm in his friend's, he drew ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... again!... I'm beginning to feel like those old ghosts about it. The same moth-eaten tune for three or four thousand years. I'd like a ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... some extra work to pay for it. I ain't beholden to nobody. Elmira swept and dusted the settin'-room and the spare chamber, and washed the breakfast an' dinner dishes, and I guess she paid for that old dress ample. It had been laid up with camphor in a cedar chest, but it had some moth holes in it. It wa'n't worth such a ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... were passing between a double row of high poplar-trees, something whirred above them; a dark moth, as big and strong as a ...
— The Adventures of Maya the Bee • Waldemar Bonsels
... Approaching the summit none were found. The bees resembled our hive bee in appearance, the butterflies resembled the small white variety common in our gardens, which has yellow and black upon its wings. One large moth, striped across the abdomen, and measuring nearly two inches in length of body, was found. Upon our return, long after the sun's rays had grown strong, we observed some of the butterflies showed signs of reanimation. We ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... is practically free from blight; the coddling moth is under perfect control. There is nothing, Mr. Pederstone, and you know it too, nothing in the world to prevent the Valley's production of fruit from increasing year by year as the younger orchards come to bearing age and fresh orchards ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... believe in God I do believe in avenging gods Who plague us for sins we never sinned But who avenge us. That's why I'll never have a child, Never shut up in a chrysalis in a match-box For the moth to spoil and crush its bright colours, Beating its ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... bees clean out the cells after the young bees are born, and make them fit to receive honey, while others guard the entrance of the hive to keep away the destructive wax-moth, which tries to lay its eggs in the comb so that its young ones may feed on the honey. All industrious people have to guard their property against thieves and vagabonds, and the bees have many intruders, such as wasps and snails and slugs, which creep ...
— The Fairy-Land of Science • Arabella B. Buckley
... sat on a heavy cross-beam and looked down upon the packed contents while into her nostrils crept subtly the odour of old herbs and spicy defences against moth and mould which had been renewed from time to time through the lagging decades until her ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... Alden's comment. "God! Imagine having one of those great things swooping down on you. Hey, Alden, look at that big devil over there! He must have a wing spread of thirty feet. Big as a Moth plane, isn't he?" ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... the midst of a curious litter. Clusters of dried herbs hung from the ceiling, and all among them were clumps of old boots, shriveled skins, battered pans, scrap-iron, sheep-skins, useless touloupes, and on the floor musty old clothes, moth-eaten furs, and sheep-skin coats that even a moujik of the swamps would not have deigned to wear. Here and there were old teeth, ragged finery, dilapidated hats, and jars of strange herbs ranged upon some rickety shelving. Between the set ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... across the middle of the wings there is a whitish line shading off into a clay-colored border. In the centre of each wing there is a long reddish-white spot, and on the tip of each fore-wing is a dark bluish eye. On the head are delicate feathered antennae. Mamma found a picture of the moth in a book. We are sure it belongs to the genus Attacus, and we think it is the kind called ...
— Harper's Young People, September 21, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... but, oddly enough, most of them paid or promised to do so. For instance, she had started a grove of paper-shelled pecans, which was soon due to bear; the ranch house and its clump of palms was all but hidden by a forest of strange trees, which were reported to ripen everything from moth-balls to bicycle tires. Blaze Jones was perhaps responsible for this report, for Alaire had shown him several thousand eucalyptus saplings and ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... Caterpillar's gluey thread; 495 Chase the fierce Earwig, scare the bloated Toad, Arrest the snail upon his slimy road; Arm with sharp thorns the Sweet-brier's tender wood, And dash the Cynips from her damask bud; Steep in ambrosial dews the Woodbine's bells, 500 And drive the Night-moth from her honey'd cells. So where the Humming-bird in Chili's bowers On murmuring pinions robs the pendent flowers; Seeks, where fine pores their dulcet balm distill, And sucks the treasure with proboscis-bill; 505 Fair CYPREPEDIA ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... I will anticipate so far as to say that, in my view, the question must be negatived. At any rate, we must exclude all creeds which tolerate the idea of a creation in the popular sense of the word, or of a final catastrophe. True, the individual objects, great or small, from a galaxy to a moth, which have to us apparently a separate existence, have all been evolved out of preceding modes of being, by a process which seems to us to involve a beginning, and to ensure an end. But in the view of Pantheism, properly so-called, the transference ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton
... shoulders crept, And with her bosom, whence the azalea breathed, She did my face full favourably smother, To hide the heaving secret that she wept! Now would I keep my promise to her Mother; Now I arose, and raised her to her feet, My best Amelia, fresh-born from a kiss, Moth-like, full-blown in birthdew shuddering sweet, With great, kind eyes, in whose brown shade Bright Venus and her Baby play'd! At inmost heart well pleased with one another, What time the slant sun low Through the plough'd ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... 'buses for hours together over the beastliest district in Europe. Of an evening the Carlton and the Piccadilly, the Bing Boys and the Bing Girls, all the delights of London were ready to their hands, while poor devils like himself, shorn of leave, were condemned to languish in a moth-eaten Mess in the society of such people as the Adjutant. Where was the sense in it, where the justice, and when the deuce were they, any of them, going to get ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 2, 1917 • Various
... hysterical, defiant note she left under the door. Her father and mother must wait and not worry. There are thousands of homes, I suppose, in which are buried just such letters as Minnie's farewell to her parents; rebellious, passionate, yearning, pitiful. Ah, well! The moth must break its chrysalis. The flower must rend its bonds toward the light. Little Minnie was "going on the stage." A garish and perilous stage it was, whereon Innocence plays a part as sorry as it is brief. ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Great Mullein, Velvet or Flannel Plant or Aaron's Rod; Moth Mullein; Butter-and-eggs or Yellow Toadflax; Blue or Wild Toadflax or Blue Linaria; Hairy Beard-tongue; Snake-head, Turtle-head or Cod-head; Monkey-flower; Common Speedwell, Fluellin or Paul's Betony; American Brooklime; Culver's-root; Downy ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... quoth he, marie and shalt: bring vs a pint of syder of a fresh tap into the three cups here, wash the pot, so into a backe roome he lead mee, where after hee had spit on his finger, and pickt off two or three moats of his olde moth eaten veluet cap, and spunged and wrong all the rumatike driuell from his ill fauoured Goates beard, he badde me declare my minde, and there vpon he dranke to me on the same. I vp with a long circumstance, alias, a cunning shift of the seuenteenes, ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... well; but it could have been done much better, very much better. You have a talent for your work, that's evident; but you lack experience; you become elated by a trifling advantage, or discouraged by a mere nothing; you fail, and yet persist in holding fast to a fixed idea, as a moth flutters about a candle. Then, you are young. But never mind that, it's a fault you will outgrow only too soon. And now, to speak frankly, I must tell you that you have made ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... in the atmosphere above, has been loud and persistent over the hayfields, so that there must have been the usual myriads of the insects that cause this sound. While I was thinking in this way a swallow alighted on the turf, picked up a small white moth from among the short grass, and went off with it. In gloomy overcast weather the swallows at the sea-side frequently alight on the pebbles of the beach to pick up the insects which will not rise ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... Casting a white moth quietly over the stream, I noticed beyond the shadows a round mass rising from the centre of the current, moving against the flood, and sinking noiselessly out of sight. There could be no doubt that the shape and motion were those of an ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... comes he positively beams over it. Difficult to say whether he enjoys himself more in an over-wet season, or in one of drought. His special and ever-recurring joy is the discovery of some insect breaking out in a fresh place. He is always on the look-out for the Mottled Amber Moth, or the Frit-fly, or the Currant Scale, or the Apple-bark Beetle, or the Mustard Beetle,—"Black Jack," as he familiarly calls him. To see, as is not unfrequent, a promising apple-tree, cherry-tree, or damson-tree, fading ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, November 15, 1890 • Various
... of the stalks of the baobab-tree, in a perpendicular position, by lines the thickness of coarse thread. The fibres of which it was composed radiated from a central point, where the creature was lying in wait for its prey, when it found the tip of my nose instead of an unwary moth or butterfly. The web was about a yard in diameter, so that it completely enveloped my face and head. Though very disagreeable to me, the occurrence, I really believe, did Natty good. It was pleasant to hear even a faint shout of ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... being unable to continue this sort of Mayfly-shooting dialogue, but her first charming readiness had affected the proficient social gentleman very pleasantly, and with fascinated eyes he hummed and buzzed about her like a moth at a lamp. Suddenly his head dived: 'Nothing, nothing, signorina,' he said, brushing delicately at her dress; 'I thought it might be paint.' He smiled to reassure her, and then he dived again, murmuring: 'It must be ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... picture of the ease and perfection with which the clownish chrysalis may be metamorphosed into the scarlet moth of war. Catch the animal young, and you may turn him into any shape you please. He will learn to wear silk stockings, scarlet plush breeches, collarless coats, with silver buttons; and swing open a gate with a grace, or stand ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... and busied himself about the place. After him came an aged woman, half gipsy, it seemed. She approached the seat by the window. Her worn mantle, her wide sleeve, seemed to touch the deep stone sill. She was gone like a moth. Glenfernie's eye discovered a folded paper lying in the window. It had not been there five minutes earlier. Now it lay before him like a sudden outgrowth from the stone. He put out a hand and took it up. The woman was gone, the serving-man was gone. Outside flowed ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... away. As she did so, she looked exactly like a crushed brown moth. In the passage she stopped, glanced furtively around her, and then, shocking to relate, put her ear to the key-hole. She felt both sore and angry; they were saying horrid things of Beatrice, and Miss ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... the moment to conversation, but when the last sausage had gone the way of all flesh, Vaughan returned to the sore subject like a moth to ...
— The Pothunters • P. G. Wodehouse
... mite wore out, an' fur all you'll need one it's plenty good enough. I only had it two years and I guess folks won't remember; an' what if they do—they all know you get my things. Same way with that collarette. It's a little moth-eaten, but it won't matter fur you.... The gray suit you can easy cut down fur ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... I with"—O'er his branches just then something flew; It seemed like moth, large and grayish of hue. But it was a Fairy. Her voice soft did sound, "Be the tree that bears apples all the ...
— The Adventures of A Brownie - As Told to My Child by Miss Mulock • Miss Mulock
... Selection,' 1871.) to the Duke's criticisms, making some specially good remarks on those which refer to orchids. He shows how, by a "beautiful self-acting adjustment," the nectary of the orchid Angraecum (from 10 to 14 inches in length), and the proboscis of a moth sufficiently long to reach the nectar, might be developed by natural selection. He goes on to point out that on any other theory we must suppose that the flower was created with an enormously long nectary, and that then by a special act, an insect was created fitted to visit the flower, ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... "laying up riches where moth and rust do corrupt." He walked to the door and stood, hands in pockets, looking out over the plains. Then he turned to ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... to the lower 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 weeding his ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... to be the flower of men, I give myself to him!" She makes that lofty inward exclamation while the hand is detaching her from the roots. Even so strong a self-justification she requires. She has not that blind glory in excess which her younger sister can gild the longest leap with. And if, moth-like, she desires the star, she is nervously cautious of candles. Hence her circles about the dangerous human flame are wide and shy. She must be drawn nearer and nearer by a fresh reason. She loves to sentimentalize. Lady Blandish had been sentimentalizing for ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... had himself seen, and if people asked him how they were possible, he answered simply, "I can no more explain these phenomena than I can explain the law of gravitation, or the transformation of a caterpillar into a moth. The first principles of everything are inexplicable. The difference in our surroundings is only that some things are frequently ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... The broad glare of day is so garish and extravagant. Besides, there is a restlessness and a buz no human being, at least no sensible human being, can endure. Everything is on the stir. Every creature, however paltry and insignificant, whether moth, mote, or atom, seems busy. Whereas, one serene soft gaze of the moon appears to allay nature's universal disquiet. The calm and mellow placidity of her look, so heavenly and undisturbed, lulls the soul, and subdues its ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... little cat, which is what she once called me, than to be moth-eaten on the inside, like that!" she commented. Then she went on: "With Miss Farnham out of it—and I knew she must be out of it, since Broffin didn't strike—there was still Mr. Galbraith. You didn't know why I was so anxious to have you get acquainted with him, but you ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... is black with slippery ice, in that hour when Jane Eyre first sees Mr. Rochester; and again the scene in the summer garden, just before the thunderstorm, when Mr. Rochester calls her to look at the great hawk-moth drinking from the flower chalice. Such scenes have a vitality that makes them as real to me as scenes upon which my own eyes ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... horse. It belonged to a class of carriages brought into vogue by diminished fortunes, which at that time bore the candid name of "demi-fortune"; at its first introduction it was called a "seringue." The cloth lining of this demi-fortune, sold under the name of caleche, was moth-eaten; its gimps looked like the chevrons of an old Invalide; its rusty joints squeaked,—but it only cost four hundred and fifty francs; and Max bought a good stout mare, trained to harness, from an ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... feeble-minded persons who now receive any official consideration are those who have already become dependent or delinquent, many of whom have already become parents. We lock the barn-door after the horse is stolen. We now have state commissions for controlling the gipsy-moth and the boll weevil, the foot-and-mouth disease, and for protecting the shell-fish and wild game, but we have no commission which even attempts to modify or to control the vast moral and economic forces represented by the feeble-minded persons at large ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... years since this was first done, and the latest fragment of this book is more than ten years old. You can see the creases of time in them, and, indeed, they were never properly rounded. Take them, however, collected and reprinted, as a token (the only token I can give) that the moth and rust of time have not eaten away the affection which I had for you all, and that those two thieves, Change and Death, which were so early busy with us, have not been able to undermine the house of our Love, nor abstract the treasure ...
— Memoranda Sacra • J. Rendel Harris
... rent off robe and wreath, * so as a sloughing serpent doth, Laid them at the rhymer's feet, * shed down wreath and raiment both, Stood in a dim and shamed stole, * like the tattered wing of a musty moth. ...
— Poems • Francis Thompson
... and he told me that his name was Yellow Moth, and that he was a Christian. Also, he inquired about the Mole, and I was obliged to relate the circumstances of ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... pistache trees. We have five different species of stock on which to grow them, and we ought to learn all the best varieties in the world. But unfortunately some of the best varieties in Sicily are infested with a moth which lays its eggs in the twigs just below the leaf scar and it is impossible for the entomologist to detect these eggs without destroying the buds. That apparently trivial circumstance has made it impossible for us to get these cuttings in from Sicily ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Eleventh Annual Meeting - Washington, D. C. October 7 AND 8, 1920 • Various
... an impassioned speech advocates conciliation all round in Ireland, and refers to Mr. JOHN REDMOND as "a moth-eaten, moss-gathering ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 25, 1914 • Various
... The small dust-colour'd beetle climbs with pain O'er the smooth plantain-leaf, a spacious plain! Thence higher still, by countless steps convey'd, He gains the summit of a shiv'ring blade, And flirts his filmy wings, and looks around, Exulting in his distance from the ground. The tender speckled moth here dancing seen, The vaulting grasshopper of glossy green, And all prolific Summer's sporting train, Their little lives by various pow'rs sustain. But what can unassisted vision do? What, but recoil where most it would ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... advice, so often given me? Why did I linger in the neighbourhood of a danger, of which a kind voice had warned me? These are now unavailing questions; I was blinded by a fatality, and remained, fluttering like a moth around the candle, until I have been scorched to ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... the influence of luxury and excitement and refinement in attracting the girl of the people, as the flame attracts the moth, is indicated by the fact that it is the country-dwellers who chiefly succumb to the fascination. The girls whose adolescent explosive and orgiastic impulses, sometimes increased by a slight congenital lack of nervous balance, have been ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... a very valuable insect: it is produced from an egg of a yellowish colour, about the size of a small pin's head, that is laid by a moth, or butterfly. The above cut represents a male and female, and her eggs, of which she lays several hundreds: the moths live but a few days; they never eat, and die directly after the ...
— The History of Insects • Unknown
... hearts had turned within from all their wanderings: For beauty called to beauty and there thronged at the enchanter's will The vanished hours of love that burn within the Ever-living still. And sweet eternal faces put the shadows of the earth to rout, And faint and fragile as a moth your white hand fluttered and went out. Oh, who am I who tower beside this goddess of the twilight air? The burning doves fly from my heart and melt within her bosom there. I know the sacrifice of old they offered to the mighty queen, And this adoring love has ...
— The Nuts of Knowledge - Lyrical Poems New and Old • George William Russell
... first piece of writing of mine that spread itself through the newspapers and brought me into public notice. Consequently, the 'Saturday Press' was a cocoon and I the worm in it; also, I was the gay-coloured literary moth which its death set free. This simile has been ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... announcements, although the others were not couched in such breezy language. There were chairs, cushions, tables, pictures, golf clubs, rugs and all sorts of things advertised for sale, while one chap sought a purchaser for "a stuffed white owl, mounted on a branch, slightly moth-eaten. Cash ...
— Left End Edwards • Ralph Henry Barbour
... Lady Bird! make a short shrift— Here's a hair-shirted Palmer hard by; And here's Lawyer Earwig to draw up your will, And we'll witness it, Death-Moth ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 10, No. 270, Saturday, August 25, 1827. • Various
... keeping a straight face, sat all this time solemnly watching him with the expression of a schoolgirl looking at her matinee idol at about the juncture in the last act when that hero puts on his kingly robes which have been hidden for a hundred years in the moth closet of his twenty-story apartment house ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... "There is no bird that compares with it in destroying the female canker-worm moths and their eggs," writes a well-known entomologist. He calculates that as a chickadee destroys about 5,500 eggs in one day, it will eat 138,750 eggs in the twenty-five days it takes the canker-worm moth to crawl up the trees. The moral that it pays to attract chickadees about your home by feeding them in winter is obvious. Mrs. Mabel Osgood Wright, in her delightful and helpful book "Birdcraft," tells us how she makes a sort ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... a rhyme to God, Singing His praise when other songs are done. But thou, who knewest paths Teresa trod, Losing thyself, what is it thou hast won? O bleeding feet, with peace and glory shod! O happy moth, that ...
— Main Street and Other Poems • Alfred Joyce Kilmer
... asked the mother rose wearily of the butterfly. He did not know; but his cousin the death's-head moth, asleep under a magnolia leaf, looked down with a grim smile on his ...
— Bimbi • Louise de la Ramee
... Take whatever you wish to protect—your furs, your flannel, or your clothes—and pack each article carefully in a newspaper, joining the edges with a double fold, well pinned. If this joining is properly done, the Moth will never get inside. Since my advice has been taken and this method employed in my household, the old damage has ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... little forethought she had about putting away her woolens. I sat behind her once in meetin' when I was stoppin' with the Tremletts and so occupied a seat in their pew, an' I see between ten an' a dozen moth millers come workin' out o' her fitch-fur tippet. They was flutterin' round her bonnet same's 'twas a lamp. I should be mortified to death to have such ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... 'Thus far and no farther!' And since then I seem to own something right here in my breast which not even Jon of Lon can take away from me. I think I am now beginning to understand what is meant in the Scriptures by 'the treasure which neither moth nor rust can currupt.' ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... snake across your path Stretches in his golden bath: Mossy-footed squirrels leap Soft as winnowing plumes of Sleep: Yaffles on a chuckle skim Low to laugh from branches dim: Up the pine, where sits the star, Rattles deep the moth-winged jar. Each has business of his own; But should you distrust a tone, Then beware. Shudder all the haunted roods, All the eyeballs under hoods Shroud you in their glare. Enter these ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... standing at street corners, we are very apt to forget, but which we need to remember, and that is that the rate of growth is swift when the duration of existence is short. A reed springs up in a night. How long does an oak take before it gets too high for a sheep to crop at? The moth lives its full life in a day. There is no creature that has helpless infancy so long as a man. We have the slow work of mining; the dynamite will be put into the hole one day, and the spark applied— and then? So 'an inheritance may be gotten hastily ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... pounds more; for she had been made willing to act out those precious exhortations: "Having food and raiment, let us be therewith content." "Sell that ye have, and give alms; provide yourselves bags which wax not old, a treasure in the heavens that faileth not, where no thief approacheth, neither moth corrupteth." "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal." Respecting ...
— The Life of Trust: Being a Narrative of the Lord's Dealings With George Mueller • George Mueller
... through the Microscope to be more then half of the surface of the Feather which is open and visibly pervious; which conjecture will yet seem more probable from the texture of the brushie wings of the Tinea argentea, or white Feather wing'd moth, which I shall anone describe. But Nature, that knows best its own laws, and the several properties of bodies, knows also best how to adapt and fit them to her designed ends, and whoso would know those properties, must endeavour to trace Nature in its working, ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... any man, let his rank be what it may," Doctor Chantry retorted, "dining in his bedroom, in England. And look at these walls!—papered with two or three kinds of paper, the bare spots hung with tapestry moth-eaten and filled with spiders! And what have we for table?—a board laid on cross-bars! And the oaken chairs are rush-bottomed, and so straight the backs are a persecution! The door hinges creak in these inns, ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... him think that the wood was full of searching warders, closing in on him. An owl, swooping noiselessly towards him, brushed his shoulder with its wing, making him jump with the horrid certainty that it was a hand; then flitted off, moth-like, laughing its low ho! ho! ho! which Toad thought in very poor taste. Once he met a fox, who stopped, looked him up and down in a sarcastic sort of way, and said, "Hullo, washerwoman! Half a pair of socks ...
— The Wind in the Willows • Kenneth Grahame
... and a piano hitting up ragtime about three feet from one's tympanum, would be false economy. Here, fanned by cool breezes and surrounded by passably fair women and brave men, one may do a certain amount of tissue-restoring. Moreover, there is little danger up here of being slugged by our moth-eaten acquaintance of this afternoon. We shall probably find him waiting for us at the main entrance with a black-jack, ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse
... a shepherd with a flock of starry lambkins, The wind is like a whisper to the mountains from the sea, The sun a gold moth browsing on a flower's pearl-dusted pollen; But my words can scarcely utter what my love is like ...
— Stories in Verse • Henry Abbey
... be expected of them. So many of the things to be talked about—motors, wireless, airplanes, new wrinkles and changed conditions—are better understood by them than the old people. It is easy for them to get the feeling that the old people's ideas are rather moth-eaten and of not much account. It is for the rising generation to tell and explain what's doing now and for the setting generation to listen and ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... the flippant would put it—Triestia. Indeed, he read and re-read with an almost morbid interest both the Tristia and the Ex Ponto. [272] Ovid's images seemed applicable to himself. "I, too," he said, "am a neglected book gnawed by the moth," "a stream dammed up with mud," "a Phalaris, clapped, for nothing in particular, into the belly of a brazen bull." Like Ovid, too, he could and did pronounce his invective against the Ibis, the cause of all his troubles, that is to say, Rashid Pasha, whose very name was as ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... lies. (Chord. ALGERNON comes on from R. I and conducts and then Exits.) I still trust you, my husband, though the police want you for stealing moth balls. (Crash off.) What's that? (Runs to door.) Oh, it's the health department. They have come with the garbage wagon to arrest you. Quick, in there. (Points to ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... far from one o'clock, and around her the terrible silence of a still night. All those small sounds lost in the hum of midday life now came into relief—a ticking in the wainscot, a crack now and then in the joining of the furniture, and occasionally the tap of a moth against the window pane from outside, sounds sharp and odd, which made her wish the stillness of the ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... Church was put upon him, and seen the sympathy of eye and hand that welcomed him to the blessed company, has not felt that for this poor, despised race there are riches laid up in that kingdom 'where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal'? Who that has stood in a Southern forest on some Sunday afternoon, in the early Southern spring, when the woods are resonant with the songs of birds, and heard a negro congregation ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... with red and bordered with black, and others eye-shaped with crescents of pale blue? It must have taken an hour for all this to come about—for the great wings to unfurl to their widest extent and the cecropia moth to show himself in all his beauty to our ...
— Miss Elliot's Girls • Mrs Mary Spring Corning
... diseases, may pass that red lantern entrance at first, but at the next block his tainted imagination will have overcome the fear, and with the reckless confidence that he will know how to protect himself and that he will have good luck he, too, like the moth, will feel attracted toward the red light and will turn back. We can prohibit alcohol, but we cannot prohibit the stimulus to sexual lust. It is always present, and the selfish desire, made rampant by a society ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... "But that was before Andy had promised to let me play the lead in his new eight-reel feature, 'The Singed Moth.' I've been chipper enough since, ...
— Torchy and Vee • Sewell Ford
... and this species I found the most difficult to pair in captivity. Two moths emerged on the 5th of March, a male and a female, and a pairing was obtained; but the weather being then too cold, the ova were not fertile, the female moth, after laying about two hundred eggs, lived till the 22d of March, which is a very long time; this was owing to the low temperature. The moths emerged afterward from the 8th of April till the 25th of June. A ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various
... the trees of the square, as though Night, like a great downy moth, had brushed them with her wings. The lamps were still alight, all pale, but not a soul ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... honor," said the wind, who wished to say something agreeable to him as he sat there boldly looking down upon the people in the street. There was one stepping along, proud of his purse; another, of the key he carried behind him, though he had nothing to lock up; another took a pride in his moth-eaten coat; and another, in his mortified body. "Vanity, all vanity!" he exclaimed. "I must go down there by-and-by, and touch and taste; but I shall sit here a little while longer, for the wind blows pleasantly at my back. I shall remain here as long as the wind blows, and enjoy a little ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... most private and not at all professional papers—papers evidently, and on the face of them, connected with the state of the spy's own soul—came into my hands as good lot would have it just the other night. The moth-eaten chest was full of his old papers, but the pieces that took my heart most were, as it looked to me, actually gnashed through with his remorseful teeth, and soaked and sodden past recognition with his sweat and his tears ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... too," said Geoffrey, abstractedly. "The desire of the moth for the star, you know. Those things make you feel queer when they come to you out here, with all these lights and dusks and smells. ...
— Geoffrey Strong • Laura E. Richards
... ready they crowded up the straight starlit stairs. At the top they crawled out through the sky door, one by one, into the branches. Eric followed Ivra, and saw a great black moth-like thing poised in air by the tree's top. But it was hollowed like a boat and a shadowy woman was standing upright in it. A dark cloak covered her, but the hood had fallen back, and her face in the starlight ...
— The Little House in the Fairy Wood • Ethel Cook Eliot
... moth is primarily egoistic and unsocial in the ordinary sense during its entire life-history, until the final reproductive act which has a value to the species. The caterpillar larva devotes all of its energies ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... conservatory and gazed in upon a ruin of limp leaves and flaccid petals, killed by the powerful gases. Suddenly, with an exclamation of astonishment, the investigator stooped and lifted from the floor a marvel of ermine body and pale green wings. The moth, spreading nearly a ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... must have a similar protection. I had just ascertained from Mr. Jenner Weir that one of our common white moths (Spilosoma menthastri) would not be eaten by most of the small birds in his aviary, nor by young turkeys. Now, as a white moth is as conspicuous in the dusk as a coloured caterpillar in the daylight, this case seemed to me so much on a par with the other that I felt almost sure my explanation would turn out correct. I at once wrote to Mr. ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... you never noticed those places," the man said. "Inside of that are the eggs of a moth that eats things up and does a great deal of harm. Those eggs would hatch when it gets warm enough, and little worms would come out, and they would begin to eat, and the worms would change into moths later on, and the moths would lay more eggs. We are trying to get rid of them, so we paint ...
— The Doers • William John Hopkins
... her word, and the very stormy afternoon when Jill got into trouble, Merry was working busily at her little bower. In the blue chest she found a variety of treasures, and ignoring the moth holes, used them to the best advantage, trying to imitate the simple comfort with a touch of elegance which prevailed in Mrs. Minot's ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... clearly have very largely as their object an appeal to the insects who secure plant fertilization, such appeal having as its basis the fact that among insects themselves olfactory sensibility has in many cases been developed in their own mating.[54] There is, for example, a moth in which both sexes are similarly and inconspicuously marked, but the males diffuse an agreeable odor, said to be like pineapple, which attracts the females.[55] If, therefore, the odors of flowers have developed because ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... are new furnished with the powers of reproduction; and that they now differ from each other in sex, which does not appear in their caterpillar or grub state. In some of them the change from a caterpillar into a butterfly or moth seems to be accomplished for the sole purpose of their propagation; since they immediately die after this is finished, and take no food in the interim, as the silk-worm in this climate; though it is possible, it might take honey as food, if it was presented to it. For in general it would ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... love of God and our neighbor is all we take with us. I will be so delighted with a home that I can call mine, forever. I like nice wearing apparel but I will not be deceived by spending my time and means for that which will hinder me from having them where moth and rust doth not corrupt and where thieves do not break through and steal. So I wish to make to myself friends of the mammon of unrighteousness and not enemies, for the hoarded dollars are bitter foes that ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... gladness from their winding paths, Deep in o'erarching grass, where playful winds, Stirring the loaded stems, should shower the dew Upon the grassy water. Newly-blown Roses, by thousands, to the garden-walks Should tempt the loitering moth and diligent bee. The longest, brightest day in all the year Should be the day on which thy cheerful eyes First opened on the earth, to make thy haunts Fairer and gladder for thy kindly looks. Thus might a poet say; but I must bring A birthday offering of an humbler ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... her lord's summons with speed, And proceeded her visiting tablets to read, That those of her subjects, whose homage was booked In that coveted record, might not be o'erlooked. Then the Bufftip[4] began to write each moth a card, Having one for herself just by way of reward. "First ask," says the Emperor, "the Glory of Kent,[5] On having much beauty my mind is quite bent; The Belle, too, of Brixton,[6] the Marvel du Jour,[7] And the Peach-blossom[8] moth you'll invite, I am sure; The ...
— The Emperor's Rout • Unknown |
