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Ostrich   Listen
noun
ostrich  n.  (Formerly written also estrich)  (Zool.) A large bird of the genus Struthio, of which Struthio camelus of Africa is the best known species. It has long and very strong legs, adapted for rapid running; only two toes; a long neck, nearly bare of feathers; and short wings incapable of flight. The adult male is about eight feet high. Note: The South African ostrich (Struthio australis) and the Asiatic ostrich are considered distinct species by some authors. Ostriches are now domesticated in South Africa in large numbers for the sake of their plumes. The body of the male is covered with elegant black plumose feathers, while the wings and tail furnish the most valuable white plumes.
Ostrich farm, a farm on which ostriches are bred for the sake of their feathers, oil, eggs, etc.
Ostrich farming, the occupation of breeding ostriches for the sake of their feathers, etc.
Ostrich fern (Bot.) a kind of fern (Onoclea Struthiopteris), the tall fronds of which grow in a circle from the rootstock. It is found in alluvial soil in Europe and North America.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Ostrich" Quotes from Famous Books



... country where there were many ostrich farms, a business which was very remunerative. Ostrich chickens cost from twenty- five to fifty dollars apiece. In three years they will furnish plumage worth from twenty-five to thirty dollars each year. A Hottentot told Paul that many of the ostriches ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton

... variety approaching in dimensions the gigantic moa of New Zealand, or the aepyornis of Madagascar, those magnificent creatures of the past which passed away just before their native lands were known to our race. The variations in size of the wild ostrich appear to indicate that this interesting ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler

... cutlet, 'im very good" was whispered in my ear with an excellent English accent. We then visited the jewellery of the palace, a most beautiful collection; and the sacred armour, which surpasses description. At last we saw something unique—an ostrich race. The man mounts, sits back, puts his legs under the wings, and locks his feet under the breast. The birds go at a tremendous pace, ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins

... better than hot water, and the sharp sauced cotelette than leather and vinegar; howbeit, I attacked them with the vigour of an Irishman, and washed them down with a bottle of the worst liquor ever dignified with the venerabile nomen of claret. The bird was tough enough to have passed for an ostrich in miniature; and I felt its ghost hopping about the stomachic sepulchre to which I consigned it, the whole of that evening and a great portion of the next day, when a glass of curacoa ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... that day, when she was sewing up the stuffing in the turkey, and had not had time to look for it; and she was panic struck lest her master had found it roasted in the very middle of the turkey, and was going to ask her if she thought she was cooking for an ostrich, which, as everybody knows, prefers a dinner of iron spikes, pebble stones, and oyster shells ...
— Red, White, Blue Socks, Part First - Being the First Book • Sarah L Barrow

... into strange contortions of embarrassment. It tried to hide like the ostrich, but the Scouts in front parted and revealed a little negro boy in Scout uniform with a tenderfoot badge pinned where ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various

... Libations, to thy memory drank, till pride And gratitude grew dizzy in a brain Never excited by the fumes of wine Before that hour, or since. Then, forth I ran 305 From the assembly; through a length of streets, Ran, ostrich-like, to reach our chapel door In not a desperate or opprobrious time, Albeit long after the importunate bell Had stopped, with wearisome Cassandra voice 310 No longer haunting the dark winter night. Call back, O Friend! [E] a moment ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth

... if I were going out to gather ostrich eggs I wouldn't get many of them in this basket. But I'm not going after eggs. ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue Playing Circus • Laura Lee Hope

... with end ottomans, and lamps in profusion. These rooms, with busts and pictures of kings, swarmed with old nobility, with historic names, stars, red ribbons, and silver bells at their button-holes: ladies in little white satin hats and toques, with a profusion of ostrich or, still better, marabout powder-puff feathers; and the roofs were too low ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth

... as much as a kangaroo looks like an ostrich!" laughed Jeremy. "You're talking wild, Jim. What have you had ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy

... reference to what one shall eat. The average boy ought to have and usually does have an appetite like an ostrich. Three points to remember are; don't eat too much, most healthy boys do; don't eat meat more than once a day; and, third, don't eat anything that you always taste for several hours after you have eaten it, even though ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America

... of this country are the miserablest people in the world. The Hodmadods of Monomatapa, though a nasty people yet for wealth are gentlemen to these, who have no houses and skin garments, sheep, poultry, and fruits of the earth, ostrich eggs etc. as the Hodmadods have; and setting aside their human shape, they differ but little from brutes. They are tall, straight-bodied and thin, with small long limbs. They have great heads, round foreheads and great brows. Their eyelids are always half closed to keep the flies ...
— A Source Book Of Australian History • Compiled by Gwendolen H. Swinburne

... . . . And look at me! My father was merchant of ostrich feathers in Brussels. If I had been content to go in his business, I would 'ave been rich. But I was born to roll—"rolling stone"to voyage is stronger than myself. Luck! . . And you, Ma'moiselle, shall I tell your fortune? [He looks in her face.] You were born for 'la joie de ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... fly!" cried the unhappy prince; "my enemies hunt me like the ostrich of the desert. They follow me like the wind, and allow me neither safety ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving

... going out, and she stood before her mirror to make sure that she looked properly. She was black from head to foot. From the great ostrich plume that nodded over her wide-brimmed hat, to the pointed toe of the patent leather boot that peeped from under her gown—a filmy gauzy thing setting loosely to her slender shapely figure. She laughed at the somberness of her reflection, which she at once set about relieving with a great bunch ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin

... Lady Frances, who was, at the same time, pulling to pieces a superb fan of ostrich feathers, proceeded to open her ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall

... Western Soudan, the frontier town where life ended and met and mingled, whither the camel of the desert brought the weapons and merchandise of Europe as well as salt, that indispensable commodity, and where the pirogues of the Niger landed the precious ivory, the surface gold, the ostrich feathers, the gum, the crops, all the wealth of the fruitful valley. He spoke of Timbuctoo the store-place, the metropolis and market of Central Africa, with its piles of ivory, its piles of virgin gold, its sacks of rice, millet, ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola

... goaded on the question of going to the heathen, like the conscience of a convicted sinner, till a call was presented to some important church; and then they succeeded in laying the subject at once and entirely aside. Like the pursued ostrich, who thrusts her head into the sand, and vainly imagines that she is concealed from her pursuers, so, I fear, some endeavor to elude the convictions of conscience. I put the question to your own good sense, your candor, ...
— Thoughts on Missions • Sheldon Dibble

... dreariness of the picture-place, Turned very nearly bright, Takes on a certain dismal grace, And shows not all a scandal to the ground. The very blind man pottering on the kerb, Among the posies and the ostrich feathers And the rude voices touched with all the weathers Of all the varying year, Shares in the universal alms of light. The windows, with their fleeting, flickering fires, The height and spread of frontage shining ...
— The Song of the Sword - and Other Verses • W. E. Henley

... of your rations. The white ants eat away the flaps of the tents, and the men wake up covered with dust, like children in a hayfield. Even mules die of it in convulsions. It was in this land that the ostrich developed its world-renowned digestive ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson

... of dark blue summer-cloth, fastened with small gold buttons, fine, tiny white linen cuffs and collar, dark blue gloves, dark blue velvet hat with a short, white ostrich plume secured by a small gold butterfly, and she carried in her hand a slender ivory-handled riding-whip, set with a sapphire. Her dress was neat, elegant, and appropriate; and her face was for the moment radiant and beautiful ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth

... before me the idea of a poet's genius to deem myself other than a very humble poet; but in the very possession of the idea, I know myself so far a poet as to feel assured that I can understand and interpret a poem in the spirit of poetry, and with the poet's spirit. Like the ostrich, I cannot fly, yet have I wings that give me the feeling of flight; and as I sweep along the plain, can look up toward the bird of Jove, and can follow ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge

... failure last August of the Cape Commercial Bank there has been much depression in South Africa. Ostrich farming, in common with other enterprises, has suffered. Before the crisis a pair of breeding ostriches have been sold for 350 l., now they would not realize ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various

... inclining down to the right ear, over which were suspended two or more black feathers. Eagle's or hawk's feathers were usually worn by the gentlemen, in the Highlands, while the bonnets of the common people were ornamented with a bunch of the distinguishing mark of the clan or district. The ostrich feathers in the bonnets of the soldiers were a modern addition ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean

... preceded him, till they came to the palace. Then she opened and locked behind them four-and-twenty doors and made them fast with padlocks; and when he came to Mariyah, he found her as she were the downing sun, strown upon a Taif rug of perfumed leather,[FN415] surrounded by cushions stuffed with ostrich down, and not a limb of her quivered. When her maid saw her in this state, she offered to cry out; but Al-Abbas said to her, "Do it not, but have patience till we discover her affair; and if Allah (be He extolled and exalted!) have decreed ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton

... mackerel, now. He's a good fish if you get him fresh, and split him down and fry him with a lump of butter in the pan. There's worse fish than the mackerel, as you'll discover if you go to South Africa, and find yourself living on a bit of some ancient tough beast of an ostrich, or whatever it may happen to be that ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham

... "I have got to unbutton another button. But what sort of an ostrich's stomach have you got, my son? I should think you ...
— Our Young Folks, Vol 1, No. 1 - An Illustrated Magazine • Various

... There were Alsatians and Lorrains who did not like the fracas at all. Yes, the Boches behaved themselves all right at Pont-a-Mousson—there were some vulgarities (grossieretes). One of the soldiers, a big blond, went down the street wearing an ostrich feather hat and a woman's union suit and chemise. It was a scandale. But uncle laughed to kill himself; he was peeping out through the blinds. Right in front of my door were ten cannon, and all the street was full of artillery. Well we had four days of this, hearing never ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan

... the bamboos and sirka. The isolated tufts of bamboos show, in spite of their size, that they are nothing but grass, because the least gush of wind shakes them, and their green crests begin to nod like heads adorned with long ostrich plumes. There were some bamboos there fifty or sixty feet high. From time to time we heard a light metallic rustle in the reeds, but none of us paid much ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky

... money value as all the national banks in the country have on deposit, and this wholesale destruction might largely be prevented if every woman and girl took (and kept) a pledge not to use wings, breasts, or birds on her hats. There is no objection to the use of ostrich feathers, which are carefully plucked from the live birds. The feathers grow again, just as the wool grows on sheep that have been sheared. Neither is there any objection to using the feathers of the barn-yard fowls which ...
— Checking the Waste - A Study in Conservation • Mary Huston Gregory

... their first taking on orbicular shape, and when it might be supposed their hardness and acidity would repulse all save elephantine tusks and ostrich stomachs, they were the prey ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn

... face was red between the eyes and mouth, black by the lower eyelids, and white on the forehead. He wore the costume of the Patagonians on the frontiers, consisting of a splendid cloak, ornamented with scarlet arabesques, made of the skins of the guanaco, sewed together with ostrich tendons, and with the silky wool turned up on the edge. Under this mantle was a garment of fox-skin, fastened round the waist, and coming down to a point in front. A little bag hung from his belt, containing colors for painting his face. His ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne

... 16) that "he who continues to do what he has repented of, is a derider and not a penitent." It would likewise follow that all hypocrisy is a mortal sin, because, according to Gregory (Moral. xxxi, 15) "the ostrich signifies the hypocrite, who derides the horse, i.e. the just man, and his rider, i.e. God." Therefore derision is ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas

... most part, like ostrich-eggs; the giver never knows what is hatched out of them. But once in a thousand times they act as curses are said to,—come home to roost. Give them often enough, until it gets to be a mechanical business, and, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various

... night had fallen, until we had trundled from end to end of Midway in a pair of wheeled chairs, visited the Dahomey Village, the Ostrich Farm, the Chinese Theatre, and the little community of quaint, shy, industrious Javanese, leaving it still in the spirit of adventure, and sauntering, after a dinner in Old Vienna, here and there through a veritable fairyland, glittering, glistening, shining, radiant ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch

... quarter, where I little hoped to have the pleasure of entertaining an old friend. Our worthy doctor here informs us you will soon get strong again, and become more of a tax on my hospitality than you have yet been. No doubt, after your illness, you'll have the appetite of an ostrich. Well, in one way, that will be fortunate, since we are living, as you may see, in a somewhat Homeric fashion. Carrambo! you will be deeming my manners quite as rude as the roughest of Homer's heroes. I am forgetting to introduce you to one of whom you've ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid

... knot in the breast of his jibbeh and took out three white feathers, two small, the feathers of a heron, the other large, an ostrich feather ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason

... confined to the mammalia. New Zealand, when first examined by Europeans, was found to contain no indigenous land quadrupeds, no kangaroos, or opossums, like Australia; but a wingless bird abounded there, the smallest living representative of the ostrich family, called the Kiwi by the natives (Apteryx). In the fossils of the Post-pliocene period in this same island, there is the like absence of kangaroos, opossums, wombats, and the rest; but in their place a prodigious number of well-preserved specimens of gigantic birds ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell

... in the Australian countries, called the emu. In its habits and general appearance it resembles the ostrich, although it does not possess the exquisite plumage of that bird. The long drooping feathers of the emu are brownish-black in color, and covered with hairy fibres. A full-grown bird is five or six feet in height. It never flies, but, like the ostrich, is a very swift runner, and as it is very ...
— Harper's Young People, March 2, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... in the theatre, by accident, the sparrows preserved to show the rapidly fatal action of choke-damp upon life; turns the bladders, which have been provided to tie over bottles, into footballs; and makes daily contributions to the plate of pebbles taken from the stomach of the ostrich, and preserved in the museum to show the mode in which these birds assist digestion, until he quadruples the quantity, and has the quiet satisfaction of seeing exhibited at lecture, as the identical objects, the heap of small stones which he has collected from time to time in the garden of the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various

... got an opening. He grumbled at their dinners. He! who can dine night after night with his precious Freemasons. Does he think she likes them any better? She, doomed to stay at home and eat them. What does he take her for? An ostrich? Whose fault is it that they keep an incompetent cook too old to learn and too obstinate to want to? Whose old family servant was she? Not Elvira's. It has been to please Adolphus that she has suffered the woman. And this is her reward. This! She ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome

... sonny. Back to the bush-league for yours!" replied Carroll, derisively. "You're not fast enough for Kansas City. You look pretty good in a uniform and you're swift on your feet, but you can't hit. You've got a glass arm and you run bases like an ostrich trying to side. That notice was coming to you. ...
— The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories • Zane Grey

... about my new uniform? Well, the young Sweepstakes and Lady Diana will talk enough about it; that's one comfort. Is not it time to think of setting out, sir?" said Hal to his uncle. "The company, you know, are to meet at the Ostrich at twelve, and the race to begin at one, and Lady Diana's horses, I know were ordered to be at the ...
— The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth

... His small mind—we call a child's mind "small" simply by habit; perhaps it is larger than ours, for it can take in almost anything without effort—possessed well-known classifications into which the big stone and the robin fitted comfortably and naturally. But what can a child say to an ostrich or an elephant? It simply smiles and passes on. Thereby showing its superiority to some of our most eminent thinkers. They, confronted by something the like of which they have never seen before—shall we say a League of Nations or Bolshevism?—burst ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley

... dressed in a seal brown silk suit, trimmed with ermine, a large brown beaver flat with ostrich feathers; the wee white mouse face almost hidden, the sharp little pink eyes—for pink they looked—the rims red as usual, and a cold in the head giving them a swollen appearance. She had not forgotten her golden loves, for, from ears, throat, and ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny

... one thing it is much larger, and has nine vertical divisions instead of five. Here, in the tracery, in addition to other heraldic badges, is the "Dragon of the great Pendragonship," holding a banner with the arms of Henry VII. Also there is seen the ostrich feather of the Prince of Wales with ...
— A Short Account of King's College Chapel • Walter Poole Littlechild

... in the third race! Oh, it's a ladybug for certain! You guys play 'Perhaps' to win and you'll go home looking like Pierp Morgan after a busy day. It can't lose, this clam can't! Say, that horse 'Perhaps' wears gold-plated overshoes and it can kick more track behind it than any ostrich you ever see! Why,| it's got ball-bearing castors on the feet and it wears a naphtha engine in the forward turret. Get reckless with the coin, boys, and go the limit, and if the track happens to cave in and it does lose, I'll drag ...
— Get Next! • Hugh McHugh

... to seem that his eyes must remain fixed in that upward stare forever; he wanted to bring them down, but could not face the glare of the world. So the fugitive ostrich is said to bury his head in the sand; he does it, not believing himself thereby hidden but trying to banish from his own cognizance terrible facts which his unsheltered eyes have seemed to reveal. So, too, ...
— Ramsey Milholland • Booth Tarkington

... the steep inclines, past placid lakes, past waving yellow mustard beds, beside highways where the breastplate of Mother Earth gleamed emerald and ruby against the background of billions of tiny, shining diamonds of the iceplant, past the old ostrich tree reproduced by etchers of note the world over, with grinding brakes, sliding down the breathless declivity leading to the shore, Linda stopped at last where the rock walls lifted sheer almost to the sky. She led Donald to a huge circle carpeted with cerise ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter

... ostrich with buried head believes itself hid from observation, so it was with Mr. Fletcher, needing peace, a habit to plunge head and shoulders into a bush and there remain—showing nothing against the sky-line. Long practice had freed the posture from irksomeness. As a young ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson

... spoken of as the order Struthiones from the ostrich (Struthio), which is its typical form. Sometimes these keelless birds are called Ratitae. Besides the ostrich, the rhea, cassowary, and emeu are included within the group; also the small and nocturnal Apteryx of New Zealand and those giants of featherdom, ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various

... had a pleasant ride over a valley-plain, between hedges of cactus in flower and bushes of red roses, past graceful clumps of bamboo waving like ostrich feathers. By-and-by drizzling rain came on and compelled us to seek shelter in the only inn in a poor out-of-the-way hamlet. But I could not stop here, because the best room in the inn was already occupied by a military officer ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison

... impudent laughing nose, its curling mouth (none too small), its big, twinkling blue eyes, was framed in a golden fringe and side curls. She wore a purple velveteen skirt, a purple velveteen jacket with a large lace collar, and a still larger purple velveteen hat with white ostrich feathers that swayed madly from ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair

... of the head. At any other time the gesticulation of the ostrich plume, so close to his face, would have amused him; but there was something eminently pathetic in the diapasm which drifted toward him from ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath

... was coming to this conclusion, Daniel entered the room. He greeted Benda, and said to Dorothea: "There is a girl outside who says she has some ostrich feathers for you. ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann

... long, low building, strewn with packing cases, cardboard boxes and dirt, with a row of pigeon-holes—some big enough to take an ostrich—on one side, and a counter defending a row of haughty officials on the other. Several people were wandering aimlessly about, but no one took the least notice of me, or appeared to realize I was in my nineteenth year. So I approached an official ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 15, 1914 • Various

... mounted in silver and made into a cup, perhaps a century or more ago, is by no means to be despised. Some are beautifully polished and ornamented with incised work. Contemporary with the earlier specimens are pots made of ostrich eggs, mounted in silver, regarded of great value in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Some of the university colleges possess fine examples, and there are many in the hands of London silversmiths. Figs. 23 and 24 represent two cocoanut cups with feet of silver, one engraved ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess

... of the boldest wing and brightest hues—the denizens of the woods and the waters—of every variety of plumage, habit, song, and size—from the splendid macaw and toucan to the uncouth pelican and the shapeless puffin—from the gigantic ostrich to the beautiful but diminutive golden wren; in short, all the birds which are congregated in this spot come, literally, from every corner of our globe. The great alpine vulture may have sailed above the heights of Hohenlinden; the Egyptian vulture have roosted on the terraced roofs ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 552, June 16, 1832 • Various

... have been knocked flat by a blow of the smallest, cheapest ostrich feather in the hands of any street-merchant. For he came. Anthony came! Not to look meekly up from the pavement below the railing, but to ascend the steps of the terrace, and advance with grave dignity toward our table. Within a yard of us he stopped, ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson

... get, he would gain souls, because the negroes might be converted to the faith, which could not be managed with the Moors." Goncalvez obtained ten black slaves, some gold-dust, a target of buffalo-hide, and some ostrich eggs in exchange for two of the Moors, and, returning with his cargo, excited general wonderment on account of the color of the slaves. These, then, we may presume, were the first black slaves that had made their ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... the two widows went shopping together—they purchased a hat adorned with ostrich feathers and a cap at the Palais Royal, and the Countess took her friend to the Magasin de la Petite Jeannette, where they chose a dress and a scarf. Thus equipped for the campaign, the widow looked exactly like the prize animal hung out for a sign ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac

... noisily: "The Planet Magazine is the greatest magazine in the universe. The greatest literary artists and the world's greatest illustrators contribute to our pages." And it stops there. It has repeated this claim so often that it has come to believe it. Such a magazine is the great literary ostrich. It hides by burying its ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... imagination flights. One poet is the eagle; another is the swan; a third modestly compares himself to the bee. But none of these types would have suited Montague. His genius may be compared to that pinion which, though it is too weak to lift the ostrich into the air, enables her, while she remains on the earth, to outrun hound, horse and dromedary. If the man who possesses this kind of genius attempts to ascend the heaven of invention, his awkward and unsuccessful ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... own person, nowhere occurs. Again, what may the unchristian rather than Christian "Diogenes" mean? Did that reverend Basket-bearer intend, by such designation, to shadow-forth my future destiny, or his own present malign humour? Perhaps the latter, perhaps both. Thou ill-starred Parent, who like an Ostrich hadst to leave thy ill-starred offspring to be hatched into self-support by the mere sky-influences of Chance, can thy pilgrimage have been a smooth one? Beset by Misfortune thou doubtless hast been; or indeed by the worst figure of Misfortune, ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle

... poverty-stricken figure that the Gospels present to us, to the man who claims to be His Vicegerent on earth. See him go, crowned three times over, on a throne borne on men's shoulders, with the silver trumpets shrilling before him and the ostrich fans coming on behind, and you will understand why the world cannot take the Church seriously. Look at the court that is about him, all purple and scarlet, and set by that the little band ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson

... inveterate tea-drinker, even among the Kensal Town laundresses, should such happen to be present. I took the precaution, however, of bespeaking a lad of fifteen to accompany me, in case any of the fragments of the feast should yet have to be disposed of, since I knew his powers to equal those of the ostrich in stowing away eatables, especially in the lumpy cake line. Arrived at the hall, however, I found no symptoms of the tea save a steamy sort of smell and the rattle of the retreating cups and saucers. Whether "to my spirit's gain or loss," I had escaped the banquet and yet got in ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies

... various branches resembling a group of pines. These again formed themselves into festoons of white feathery smoke, in the most fanciful manner imaginable, intermixed with the finest particles of falling ashes; which at one time assumed the appearance of innumerable plumes of black and white ostrich feathers surmounting each other; at another, that of the light wavy ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne

... 'e knows above a bit, the bullock's but a fool, The elephant's a gentleman, the battery-mule's a mule; But the commissariat cam-u-el, when all is said an' done, 'E's a devil an' a ostrich an' a orphan-child in one. O the oont, O the oont, O the Gawd-forsaken oont! The lumpy-'umpy 'ummin'-bird a-singin' where 'e lies, 'E's blocked the whole division from the rear-guard to the front, An' when we get him up again—the beggar ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling

... I warn you, lovely Zingara, leads to dyspepsia! It's because he keeps his eye closed and buried in the sand that the ostrich ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand

... France, at that time uninhabited, immediately after the discovery of the passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope. It was of a large size and singular form; its wings short, like those of an ostrich, and wholly incapable of sustaining its heavy body even for a short flight. In its general appearance it differed from the ostrich, cassowary, or any ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 531, Saturday, January 28, 1832. • Various

... happened, and, as evidently, he was not taken by surprise at the event. Nor, indeed, would anyone else have been in the whole community; for Frank's love to Kate had been as palpable to all as the famed ostrich of the story was when it hid its head in the sand and imagined itself invisible to ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson

... good descriptions and there is a well-known picture of one in the British Museum. It is a massive, clumsy bird, ungraceful in its form with heavy movements, wings too short for flight, little or no tail, and down rather than feathers. The body, according to Bontius, is as big as that of the African ostrich, but the legs are very short. It has a large head, great black eyes, long bluish-white bill, ending in a beak like that of a vulture, yellow legs, thick and short, four toes on each foot solid, long, and armed with sharp black claws. The flesh particularly on the ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille

... the whole, he recognised the need of fighting; and his main idea was that, as fight we must, we should organise our forces well, and fight with our heads as well as with our hands. He disdained the policy of the ostrich. The Americans were in active rebellion; it could not be blinked. He praised Chatham while he opposed him. He was 'fighting for his own hand.' Ministers felt the advantage of his aid; they knew his unscrupulous versatility, ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang

... the men to-day, and why they don't come along with the buns and sugar. Once within the zareba, once you have pushed your way between the giraffes and got their noses out of your jacket-pockets, you have really only to be wary of the ostrich. He, mincing delicately around you with his little wicked red eye blinking like a camera shutter, may try with an ill-assumed air of indifference to slip up unnoticed close behind you. If he succeeds he will land you one. And ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason

... philosophy destroys the terror of death. A rational man is aware of the truth expressed by Mill, that death is but one incident in life, and often the least important. He recognises with Bacon that we die daily. He knows that every hour is a step towards death. He does not play, like an ostrich, with the universal law of mortality; nor, on the other hand, does he allow the tomb to cast its chill obscurity over the business and pleasure of life. He lives without hypocrisy, and when the time comes he will die ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote

... the lord of the soil come to seize me for a stray, for entering his fee-simple without leave. Ah, villain, thou wilt betray me, and get a thousand crowns of the king by carrying my head to him; but I'll make thee eat iron like an ostrich, and swallow my sword like a great pin, ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas

... the proposal, and, after promising to send Mary ostrich eggs and jackal skins to take to England, the ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various

... was that night! No air that stirred; the black smoke from the funnels of the mail steamer Zanzibar lay low over the surface of the sea like vast, floating ostrich plumes that vanished one by one in the starlight. Benita Beatrix Clifford, for that was her full name, who had been christened Benita after her mother and Beatrix after her father's only sister, leaning idly over the bulwark rail, ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard

... Lets have her. lets have her! of all things let us have a naked Lady— If she be— handsome Pasquin I'll engage your Farce runs a hundred Nights— I'll hold a Hogshead of Claret to a Gill, she pleases more than the Ostrich. ...
— The Covent Garden Theatre, or Pasquin Turn'd Drawcansir • Charles Macklin

... but in their place abound the Mutun, the Jacu, the Jacami, and the Unicorn (Crax, Penelope, Psophia, and Palamedea), all of which are so remote from the gallinaceous types found farther north, that they remind one quite as much of the bustard, and other ostrich-like birds, as of the hen and pheasant. They differ also from Northern gallinaceous birds in the greater uniformity of the sexes, none of them exhibiting those striking differences between the males and females which we see in the pheasants, the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various

... the meshes of ostrich plume wound around her hat. The head of the pin eluding him there, he tried beneath the brim, his fingers tangling in thick waves of hair. They were soft waves, softer and silkier than the ostrich plume. No man with blood ...
— The Lion's Mouse • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... variation from our long record of work in camp and hospital, we close this chapter with an ostrich story, and venture to take it intact from News from the Front for ...
— From Aldershot to Pretoria - A Story of Christian Work among Our Troops in South Africa • W. E. Sellers

... who believed that we could live under the illusion of isolationism wanted the American eagle to imitate the tactics of the ostrich. Now, many of those same people, afraid that we may be sticking our necks out, want our national bird to be turned into a turtle. But we prefer to retain the eagle as it is—flying high ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt

... as the swine is of drinking up swill: I say, what wilt thou do for them? Children will learn to be wicked of parents—of professing parents soonest of all; they will be tempted to think all that they do is right. I say, what wilt thou say to this? Or art thou like the ostrich whom God hath deprived of wisdom, and hath hardened her heart against her young? Will it please thee, when thou shalt see that thou hast brought forth children to the murderer? or when thou shalt hear them cry, I learnt to go on in the paths of sin by the ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin

... in determination that this war shall not be followed by another interim which leads to new disaster—that we shall not repeat the tragic errors of ostrich isolationism—that we shall not repeat the excesses of the wild twenties when this Nation went for a joy ride on a roller coaster which ended ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... good care of his tomb, which was certainly in excellent preservation before the Calvinists of 1562 began a destruction which was completed by the Revolution. An inscription, however, was left on an adjacent pillar, and this was copied by Dugdale. The ostrich feathers and the order of the garter were shown upon the brass besides the epitaph. In 1866 his coffin was found still in its original position on the right side of the altar, and nothing more is now ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook

... evenly; but at walking the pelican is left behind at once. This makes one suspect the stork's honesty. The pelican has a good beak and wings, and pays for them, like an honest bird, out of its legs, just as the ostrich pays for its neck and legs out of its wings. But the stork is abnormally lucky in beak, neck, legs, and wings together, and even then has material left to lay out in superfluous knobs and wens to hang round its neck, which leads to a suspicion that many of its personal fittings belong properly ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... situation on board a fine bark, commanded by Captain Benjamin Brace, engaged in the African trade. But not that African trade carried on by such ships as the Pandora. No; the merchandise transported in Captain Brace's bark was not black men, but white ivory, yellow gold-dust, palm-oil, and ostrich-plumes; and it was said, that, after each "trip" to the African coast, the master, as well as owner, of this richly laden bark, was accustomed to make a trip to the Bank of England, and there deposit ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid

... you have played the hermit?" inquires her ladyship indifferently, unfurling her fan of ostrich feathers and waving ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli

... not to require continual adjustment, often needed when the hands would be better employed with the reins and whip. It should shade from the sun, and if used in hunting protect the nape of the neck from rain. The recent fashions of wearing the plumes or feathers of the ostrich, the cock, the capercailzie, the pheasant, the peacock, and the kingfisher, in the riding-hats of young ladies, in my humble opinion, are highly to ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey

... the elephant and the camel, and in the ostrich cart. Then Charlie tumbled down in the monkey-house. Oh, how funny the monkeys are! and he" (pointing to Lord de Burgh) "took us to dinner. Such a beautiful dinner in a lovely room! He says he will take us ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander

... antique suit was hoarded, Cover'd with dust; Which had, for many years, afforded An iron dinner to that ostrich, Rust. ...
— Broad Grins • George Colman, the Younger

... on holidays. Their dress is very becoming, and they wear sometimes jewellery to a large amount on their persons; a very common ornament among them is a collar of gold around their necks. Their usual head-dress is either a white straw hat, or a black round beaver hat, with black ostrich feathers. I prefer the straw hat; it is more tasteful than the round hat which always seems to me too masculine for a woman. At the inn at Le Maschere we were waited on by three smart females. The whole road from Le Maschere to Florence ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye

... of its window were curiously variegated. They comprised some elephant tusks and an imperfect set of chessmen, beads and weapons, a box of eyes, two skulls of tigers and one human, several moth-eaten stuffed monkeys (one holding a lamp), an old-fashioned cabinet, a flyblown ostrich egg or so, some fishing-tackle, and an extraordinarily dirty, empty glass fish-tank. There was also, at the moment the story begins, a mass of crystal, worked into the shape of an egg and brilliantly polished. ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells

... law to carry on their exchange in the morning only, when the light is least lovely. Upon canopied wagons drawn by strange animals, with shining horns, were displayed for sale all the pleasantest excuses for commerce—ostrich feathers, gums, gems, quicksilver, papyrus, bales of fair cloth, pottery, wine and oranges. The sellers of salt and fish and wool and skins were forced down under the wharfs of the lagoon, and there endeavoured to attract attention by displaying fanciful and lovely banners and by liberating faint ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale

... found expression also in the clothes he wore. Listen to this description of him: "His fighting jacket shone with dazzling buttons and was covered with gold braid; his hat was looped up with a golden star and decorated with a black ostrich plume; his fine buff gauntlets reached to the elbow; around his waist was tied a splendid yellow sash, and his spurs were pure gold." These spurs, of which he was immensely proud, were a gift from Baltimore women. His battle-flag ...
— Stories of Later American History • Wilbur F. Gordy

... the Ostrich Plume Asters, a name which exactly describes them. About 15 inches tall. The curled flowers are of enormous size, 5 to 6 inches across. About 10 colors, some of ...
— The Mayflower, January, 1905 • Various

... bouquets of flowers woven in all the natural colors. This overskirt was deeply flounced with costly white lace, caught up with bunches of feathers of bright colors. About her shoulders was thrown a fifteen-hundred dollar shawl. She had a head-dress of white ostrich feathers, white lace, gold pendants, and purple velvet. Add to all this a fan, a bouquet of rare flowers, a lace handkerchief, and jewelry almost beyond estimate, and you see Mrs. Judge —- as she ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe

... forests. And the solitary, although he must return at night to his frequented inn, may yet pass the day with his own thoughts in the companionable silence of the trees. The demands of the imagination vary; some can be alone in a back garden looked upon by windows; others, like the ostrich, are content with a solitude that meets the eye; and others, again, expand in fancy to the very borders of their desert, and are irritably conscious of a hunter's camp in an adjacent county. To these last, of course, ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson

... ostrich," said Montes, the plumes in the woman's bonnet catching his eye, "you interrupted me.—If you show me—if I see Valerie and that ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac

... afraid I can. The secret—which is no secret to me or to anyone else in the world, any more than the place where the ostrich has put his head is a secret when his body is sticking up out of the sand—the secret is that, after being for seventeen happy honourable years the wife of the best and tiniest of men—the kindest, most devoted, and most generous of husbands—you ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon

... stuff were they made, by the appointment of the Cabalists of Sanlouand. As for the rings which his father would have him to wear, to renew the ancient mark of nobility, he had on the forefinger of his left hand a carbuncle as big as an ostrich's egg, enchased very daintily in gold of the fineness of a Turkey seraph. Upon the middle finger of the same hand he had a ring made of four metals together, of the strangest fashion that ever was seen; so that the steel did not crash against the gold, nor the silver crush the ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais

... restrain their feelings. But that the hardened beings should be moved mentally at all is wonderful indeed. If you saw them in their savage state you would feel the force of this more.... N.B.—I have got for Professor Owen specimens of the incubated ostrich in abundance, and am waiting for an opportunity to transmit the box to the college. I tried to keep for you some of the fine birds of the interior, but the weather was so horribly hot they were ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie

... exact representation of which is given by D'Ohsson) is a high, hollow, wooden frame, in the form of a cone, with a pyramidal top, covered with a fine silk brocade adorned with ostrich feathers, and having a small book of prayers and charms placed in the midst of it, wrapped up in a piece of silk. (My description is taken from the Egyptian Mahmal.) When on the road, it serves as a holy banner to the caravan; and on the return of the Egyptian caravan, the book ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, No. - 361, Supplementary Issue (1829) • Various

... day, expose them to the sun, and bury them again in the hot-beds towards evening. Several intermediate steps may also be found between this early stage of communal nesting by proxy and the true hatching instinct; a good one is supplied by the ostrich, which partially buries its eggs in hot sand, but sits on them at intervals, both father and mother birds taking shares by turn ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various

... constant dropping of water, with chains too ponderous to lift, but which the parties upon whom they are riveted, clang together as they walk up and down in their cells, and soliloquise. So much for my underground scenery. Above, I people the halls with pages and ostrich feathers, and knights in bright armour, a constant supply of generous wine, and goblets too heavy to lift, which the knights toss off at a draught, as they sit and listen ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat

... of the eggs of the African ostrich or northern sea-birds, with a few fruits, especially those of the palm and the banana of the tropics. The tobacco-plant consoled me when I was depressed; and the affection of my spaniel was a compensation for the loss of human sympathy and society. When I returned from ...
— Peter Schlemihl etc. • Chamisso et. al.

... some means might have been found to avert the calamity that was coming towards them with swift feet. But among the uneducated—the partially educated—nay, even the weakly educated—the feeling exists which prompted the futile experiment of the well-known ostrich. They imagine that, by closing their own eyes to apprehended evil, they avert it. The expression of fear is supposed to accelerate the coming of its cause. Yet, on the other hand, they shrink from acknowledging ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. II • Elizabeth Gaskell

... born and bred among them; and even then the harder, fiercer instinct, which dwells in northern blood, may deceive the student and lead him far astray. The Italian is an exceedingly simple creature, and is apt to share the opinion of the ostrich, who ducks his head and believes his whole body is hidden. Foreigners use strong language concerning the Italian lie; but this only proves how extremely transparent the deception is. It is indeed a singular ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford

... that girl was sent to be a blessing to me," she said to herself; "and my dear old friend's child, too. Oh, why was I given such a creature as Irene to bring up and look after? I can no more manage her than an old hen could manage a fierce young ostrich." ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade

... as an ox, and covered with black bristles, supported upon legs thicker than the girth of a man. As yet this prodigy had not observed us, for it was stalking quietly among the trees, followed by a brood of chickens, each larger than the biggest ostrich I ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes

... tight and hold it fast till morning. But to birds that do not perch this mechanism is only an encumbrance, so many of them, like the plovers, abolish the hind toe entirely, and the prince of all two-legged runners, the ostrich, has got rid of one of the front toes also, retaining ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)

... abundance of such fruit rather than none at all. But a delicately organized man, like Mr. Bryant, cannot eat them; and those who have enjoyed the genuine strawberries of the garden will not. The number of people, however, with the digestion of an ostrich, is enormous, and in multitudes of homes Wilsons, even when half-ripe, musty, and stale, are devoured with unalloyed delight, under the ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe

... ostrich policy for contemporary ecclesiasticism to try to hide its Hexateuchal head—in the hope that the inseparable connection of its body with pre-Abrahamic legends may be overlooked. The question will still be asked, if the first nine ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley

... the rustle of approaching steps, and before Acte had time to see who was coming, Poppaea Sabina appeared in front of the bench with a small retinue of slave women. Two of them held over her head bunches of ostrich feathers fixed to golden wires; with these they fanned her lightly, and at the same time protected her from the autumn sun, which was hot yet. Before her a woman from Egypt, black as ebony, and with bosom swollen as if from milk, bore in her arms an infant ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz

... again his neighbor's ostrich feathers or her hair came in contact with Raphael's head, giving him a pleasurable thrill, against which he sternly fought. In a little while he felt the touch of the soft frill of lace that went round her dress; ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac

... the exclusion of the external air, but much is attributable to antiseptics. One of the principal ingredients in the mummy balsam is colocynth, or bitter apple, powdered. The same drug is employed in Upper Egypt for destroying vermin in clothes' presses, and store-rooms; and ostrich feathers sent to Lower Egypt are sprinkled with it. A recent traveller found in the head of a mummy, of a superior kind, a balsam, in colour and transparency like a pink topaz. It burned with a beautiful clear flame, and emitted a very fragrant odour, in which cinnamon predominated. In the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 398, November 14, 1829 • Various

... without housing. At their head rode one with a white lettered green flag, and beating an immense drum. They were armed with long spears of Indian bamboo, garnished below the slender points with swinging tufts of ostrich feathers. Each carried a woman behind him disdainful of a veil. The feminine screams of exultation rose high above the yells of the men, helping not a little to the recklessness with which the ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace

... question describes how, at a picnic of the animals, a discussion arose as to which of them carried off the palm for superiority of talent. The praises of the ant, the dog, the bee, and the parrot were sung in turn; but at last the ostrich stood up and declared for the dromedary. Whereupon the dromedary stood up and declared for the ostrich. No one could discover the reason for this mutual compliment. Was it because both were such uncouth beasts, or had such long necks, or were neither of them ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer

... consideration. It has for hundreds of years, I expect, been considered as a silly bird. But there never was a greater mistake. If we looked at the thing in the proper light, we would not be at all ashamed to be called a goose. If any one were to call you an ostrich, I don't believe you would be very angry, but in reality it would be much more of an insult than to call you a goose, for an ostrich at times is ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton

... made by nature, by a thousand centuries of heredity, by a thousand centuries of environment. The differences lie in biological roots, and it is futile to fight and rail against nature and biology. The proper thing to do is to recognize the facts and make the best of them. To act the part of the ostrich, deliberately to ignore facts which are not pleasant, may be easy, but ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson

... pearl I've brought, And an ostrich's egg so rare; An Arab pony you should have And a ...
— Christmas Entertainments • Alice Maude Kellogg

... it is observed:—"If we are to place confidence in traveller's tales, the ostrich is swifter than the Arabian horse. During the residence of Mr. Adamson at Pador, a French factory on the south side of the river Niger, he says that two ostriches, which had been about two years in the factory, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 572, October 20, 1832 • Various

... and is absolutely unintelligible, unless one happens to know that the Persian word for "ostrich" ...
— The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany • Arthur F. J. Remy

... phonetic. The pictorial hieroglyphic is the simple picture of the thing signified. Symbolical hieroglyphics are, among others, a crescent for a month, the maternal vulture for maternity, the filial vulpanser for son, the bee for a people obedient to their king, the bull for strength, the ostrich feather with its equal filaments for truth, the lotus for Upper and the papyrus for Lower Egypt. To these we may add the bird, which denotes a cycle of time (in Coptic phanech), and about which such wild fables were received by the credulity ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various

... paradise, but it was not monarchy. It was to that he aspired. As he mused, a rancid-faced woman decked with paint and ostrich-plumes snarled in ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus

... bottom, where it is caught in a hollow rock, and flung upwards into the air, forming a beautiful arch as it falls out into the valley. As it is whirled up thus, feathery curls of spray are constantly driven off and seem to wave round it like the fibres on an ostrich plume. The sun shining through, gave it a sparry brilliance which was perfectly magnificent. If I were an artist, I would give much for such a new form ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor

... the full light, white pillars on either side and red light filtering through hangings behind. White uniformed brown-faced officers follow in attendance with glitter of gold and waving white and red feathers. Lady Minto wears a very big wide hat, blue and white ostrich feathers under the brim—her daughters are in bright summery colours; the three drive off in an open carriage ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch

... hand of the President, my boyish gaze was attracted by the splendid attire of the Chevalier d'Yrujo, the Spanish ambassador, then the only foreign minister near our infant government. His glittering star, his silk chapeau bras, edged with ostrich feathers, his foreign air and courtly bearing, contrasted strongly with those nobility of nature's forming who stood around him. It was a very fair representation of the old world and the new. How often has the same ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing

... mysterious continent into which men of the Northern races but rarely penetrate, into my face. For three months I had been wandering on the borders of that great, unknown world, on the outskirts of that strange world of the ostrich, the camel, the gazelle, the hippopotamus, the gorilla, the lion and the tiger, and the negro. I had seen the Arab galloping like the wind, and passing like a floating standard, and I had slept under those brown tents, the moving habitation of those white birds of the desert, and ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant

... up of bundles of strong fibres The brain and nerves, too, we shall find are made up of fibres, and these queer-looking things that are called ganglionic corpuscles. If we take a slice of the bone and examine it, we shall find that it is very like this diagram of a section of the bone of on ostrich, though differing, of course, in some details; and if we take any part whatsoever of the tissue, and examine it, we shall find it all has a minute structure, visible only under the microscope. All these parts constitute microscopic anatomy or "Histology." These parts are constantly being ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley

... Captain—I mean the Adjutant; but he'll always be the Captain to me—would he take it amiss, think you, little one, if I sent him a bit of the joint, for the sake of old times? He'll like be eating truffled ostrich and locust sauce at the mess; but Paddy'd like to have a hand in his Christmas dinner. It's all I can do for him, and ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller

... Indian holds out the iron to him which he snaps at, and it fastens in his mouth, keeping his jaws open like a gag. The female lays about 100 eggs at a time, as large as goose eggs; but quite spherical, and having shells as thick almost as those of an ostrich. The flesh of the alligator is not fit to be eaten, being very strong and musky; and the very water of the rivers they frequent was so strong of musk that a draught of it was like to suffocate us, yet there are no instances of its being injurious ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr

... quickened, in spite of her apparent ease. She had taken up an ostrich-feather fan—a traditional weapon of the sex—and waved it slowly to and fro, while she waited for ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... bluntly, "even after it has long been lost. They are like people who might discover an ostrich egg-shell after the bird was half grown, and go chasing after it, trying to put it back inside the shell. I think it is Emerson who says that there are quantities of people who are always trying to become settled, whereas our only ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens

... affection I was ever ready and am ready to yield testimony by any good offices, but with such reservations as yourself cannot but allow; for as I was ever sorry that your Lordship should fly with waxen wings, doubting Icarus's fortune, so for the growing up of your own feathers, specially ostrich's, or any other save of a bird of prey, no man shall be more glad. And this is the axletree whereupon I have turned and shall turn, which to signify to you, though I think you are of yourself persuaded as much, is the cause of my writing; and so I commend your Lordship ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church

... phrase "ahead of one's time." Rightly apprehended, great geniuses do live for the future rather than the present, but where the public have the vastness of appetite and scantness of taste peculiar to the ostrich, there it is impossible for a composer to be ahead of his time. It is only where the public are advanced to the stage of intelligent discrimination that a Ninth Symphony and a Nibelung Tetralogy are ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... renounced their prejudices and prayed to be admitted to the ex-slave's receptions. Madame Jansoulet alone, newly landed in France with a stock of Oriental ideas impeding circulation in her mind, as her nargileh, her ostrich eggs and all the rest of her Tunisian trash impeded it in her apartments, protested against what she called impropriety, cowardice, and declared that she would never step foot inside "that creature's" doors. Immediately a slight retrograde movement took place among Mesdames Guggenheim, Caraiscaki, ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet

... delineation of the feathered tribe; and though several forms of birds are represented upon the sculptures of Sargon and elsewhere, there are but three which any writer has ventured to identify—the vulture, the ostrich, and the partridge. The vulture is commonly represented flying in the air, in attendance upon the march and the battle—sometimes devouring, as he flies, the entrails of one of Assyria's enemies. Occasionally he appears upon the battle-field, perched upon the bodies of the slain, ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson

... approached Assuan, I seemed at last to be also approaching the real, the intense Africa that I had known in the Sahara, the enigmatic siren, savage and strange and wonderful, whom the typical Ouled Nail, crowned with gold, and tufted with ostrich plumes, painted with kohl, tattooed, and perfumed, hung with golden coins and amulets, and framed in plaits of coarse, false hair, represents indifferently to the eyes of the travelling stranger. For at last I saw the sands ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens

... brilliant colours, however, of that proudest of birds, though it was quite as stately, and much larger and taller. In fact, its great height and erect attitude was why Hendrik at first glance had taken it for an ostrich. It was neither peacock nor ostrich, but belonging to a different genus from either—to the genus Otis or bustard. It was the great bustard of South Africa—the Otis kori—called "pauw" by the Dutch colonists, on account of its ocellated plumage and other points ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid

... butler's story, or find out what game he was playing, because of the assiduity with which the principal witness for the prosecution had been "nursed" by the police from the moment he made his confession. Crewe bit hard into his amber mouthpiece in vexation as he recalled the ostrich-like tactics of Inspector Chippenfield, who, having accepted Hill's story as genuine, had officially baulked all his efforts to see the man and question him ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson

... bent his body in a peculiar way, and stalked off slowly, turning and gazing here and there, and from time to time lowering his spear, till, as he moved about in the shadowy light, he had all the appearance of some huge ostrich slowly feeding its ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn

... feet below are bay-like valleys, carpetted as with green velvet, from which rise tall palms, tree-ferns with spreading crowns, and rattans shooting their pointed heads, surrounded with feathery foliage, as with ostrich plumes, far above the great trees. Beyond are the Jheels, looking like a broad shallow sea with the tide half out, bounded in the blue distance by the low-hills of Tipperah. To the right and left are the scarped red rocks and roaring waterfalls, shooting ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker

... you in 1862, I should have been bold indeed had I suggested that palaeontology would before long show us the possibility of a direct transition from the type of the lizard to that of the ostrich. At the present moment, we have, in the Ornithoscelida, the intercalary type, which proves that transition to be something more than a possibility; but it is very doubtful whether any of the genera of Ornithoscelida with which we are at present acquainted are the actual linear types ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... sand, a long way before them, something with very long legs is running, almost flying. She knows well what it is, for she has often seen them before, and she calls to one of the servants, "See, there is the ostrich!" and she ...
— The Seven Little Sisters Who Live on the Round Ball - That Floats in the Air • Jane Andrews

... way, the last time I saw your friend Hurst was mounted up in a red baise place that was railed off for the patrons and patronesses, as they called them; there he was in the front row, doing the civil to a very odd-looking old dowager in bright blue velvet, with a neck like an ostrich." ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various

... all heard how the ostrich lays its eggs in the sand, where the sun can shine upon them, and keep them warm, while the parent birds are away in search of food during the middle of the day. The South American ostrich (an engraving of which is given on the ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, July 1878, No. 9 • Various

... seat. On a whatnot in a corner which had been devoted to the child's belongings were Franky's paint-box and some of his toys. The mother's eyes turned from Deleah, now well appointed in her pretty muslin and hat with its long ostrich feather, ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann

... a carrousel from which came the blare of a steam orchestrion playing the "Marseillaise," one of their popular songs. From where I sat I could perceive the circle of gaudily painted beasts that revolved about this musical atrocity. A fashion of horses seemed to predominate, but there was also an ostrich (a bearded Frenchman being astride this bird for the moment), a zebra, a lion, and a gaudily emblazoned giraffe. I shuddered as I thought of the evil possibilities that might be suggested to my two companions by this affair. For the ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson

... giraffe now flagging at each stride—until, as I was coming up hand-over-hand, and success seemed certain, the cup was suddenly dashed from my lips, and down I came headlong—my horse having fallen into a pit, and lodged me close to an ostrich's nest, near which two of the old birds were sitting. Happily, there were no bones broken, but the violence of the shock had caused the lashings of my previously-broken rifle to give way, and had doubled the stock in half, the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various

... and she remarked privately and publicly that if her ancestors liked a smoky church, they had a perfect right to the enjoyment of it, but that she did n't intend to sit through meeting on winter Sundays, with her white ostrich feather turning gray and her eyes smarting and watering, for the ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... of natives came on board the ship with curiosities to sell, such as choice shells, toys, leopard skins, and ostrich feathers. There are plenty of these birds running wild but a little way inland, and some are kept in domestic confinement on account of the feathers which they yield; but the tame birds do not develop such fine plumage as do the wild ones. The ladies purchased choice specimens of these elegant ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou

... ignorance, to be some sort of blue and green parrot, which, though I do not admire their noise, might scream and yell at their pleasure if hung up in the hall among the armour. But your emu, it seems, stands six feet high on his stocking soles, and is little better than a kind of cassowary or ostrich. Hang them! they might [eat] up my collection of old arms for what I know. It reminds me of the story of the adjutant birds in Theodore Hook's ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott

... a trading expedition as far as Dongola, carrying merchandise and exchanging it for gum, and ostrich and marabout feathers. He had been allowed a little venture on his own account, and had embarked it all in the latter article of commerce—marabout feathers—and had been rather lucky in his bargain. On returning to Cairo he expected to go back to England, and that made him none the less ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough



Words linked to "Ostrich" :   person, genus Struthio, ratite, someone, individual, flightless bird, Struthio



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