"Slimy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... really a broad arm of the basin, extending up to Windsor, and beyond in a small stream, and would have been a charming river if there had been a drop of water in it. I never knew before how much water adds to a river. Its slimy bottom was quite a ghastly spectacle, an ugly gash in the land that nothing could heal but the friendly returning tide. I should think it would be confusing to dwell by a river that runs first one way and then the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... men going to break in? And at low water, too! Fifteen feet at least of oozy, slimy wall would stand up between the boat and the foot of the doorway; twenty feet to the nearest row of windows. Chippy could not form any idea of their tactics, but he meant to ...
— The Wolf Patrol - A Tale of Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts • John Finnemore
... blister us; it did not cover us with a slimy ooze and confer upon us an atrocious fragrance; it was not very slimy; and I could not discover that we smelt really any worse than we have always smelt since we have been in Palestine. It was only a different kind ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the brink; and even Mr. Bumble himself, impelled by curiousity, ventured to do the same. The turbid water, swollen by the heavy rain, was rushing rapidly on below; and all other sounds were lost in the noise of its plashing and eddying against the green and slimy piles. There had once been a water-mill beneath; the tide foaming and chafing round the few rotten stakes, and fragments of machinery that yet remained, seemed to dart onward, with a new impulse, when ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... lure Vane to Spring Gardens is not of much consequence. The fellow had a soft, slimy tongue and an oily manner. Moreover, Rofflash's shrewd guess at Vane's absence of will power after a drinking bout ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... the kind of weather in which people usually take tea in summer-houses, far less in summer-houses in an advanced state of decay, and overlooking the slimy banks of a great river at low water. Nevertheless, it was in this choice retreat that Mr Quilp ordered a cold collation to be prepared, and it was beneath its cracked and leaky roof that he, in due course of time, received Mr Sampson and ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... that their close association in Amphioxus renders it necessary to treat them in common. The alimentary canal is a perfectly straight tube lined throughout by ciliated epithelium. As food particles pass in through the mouth they become enveloped in a slimy substance (secreted by the endostyle) and conveyed down the gut by the action of the vibratile cilia as a continuous food-rope, the peristaltic movements of the gut-wall being very feeble. The first part of the alimentary canal consists of the pharynx or branchial sac, the side ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... mariners, long, long ago, and had floated about the sea until it had become of the sea, like a half-submerged floating island; brown and many-coloured seaweeds had attached themselves to it; strange creatures, half plant and half animal, grew on it; and little shell-fish and numberless slimy, creeping things of the sea made it their dwelling-place. It was about as big as the floor of a large room, all rough, black, and slippery, with the seaweed floating like ragged hair many yards long around it, ...
— A Little Boy Lost • Hudson, W. H.
... sight of a coiled rope made me jumpy and I dreamed of snakes writhing, coiling, moving in undulating lines. At noon one day I was alone, making up the paper. I stood at the form table working, when I turned abruptly. A snake's slimy head was thrust through a big knothole in the floor. Its beady eyes held me for a moment, as they are said to hypnotize a bird. I could neither ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... express herself in public on all questions of morals and religion, the Rev. Mrs. Crane began with fine sarcasm: "To women has always unquestionably been allowed the being good. They are called too good to enter the slimy pool of politics. They are complimented often in the spirit of the man who said to his wife: 'Angelina, you get up and make the fire; it will seem so much warmer if laid by your fair hands!' To women is ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... Muraena Bostoniensis, the only species of eel known in the State, a slimy, squirming creature, informed of mud, still squirming in the pan, is speared and hooked up with various success. Methinks it too occurs in picture, left after the deluge, in many a ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... stayed and the potatoes saved; but if the damp weather continue, the number of spotted leaves among the potatoes increases day by day, until the spotted leaves are the majority; and then the haulm dies, gets slimy, and emits a characteristic odor; and it will be found that the tubers beneath the soil are but half developed, and impregnated with the disease to an extent which ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 595, May 28, 1887 • Various
... Beats on his back, or bursts upon his head. Yet dauntless still the adverse flood he braves, And still indignant bounds above the waves. Tired by the tides, his knees relax with toil; Wash'd from beneath him slides the slimy soil; When thus (his eyes on heaven's expansion thrown) Forth bursts the hero ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... at the passage of the Red Sea the ten miracles wrought were as follows: (1) the waters divided; (2) the waters were like a tent, or a vault; (3) the sea-bed was dry and hard; (4) but when the Egyptians trod upon it, it became muddy and slimy; (5) the sea was divided into twelve parts, one for each tribe; (6) the waters became as hard as stone; (7) the congealed waters appeared like blocks of building-stone; (8) the water was transparent ...
— Pirke Avot - Sayings of the Jewish Fathers • Traditional Text
... Commissioner, who was purple with rage. "Search for him! Seize him, for which my command shall be your warrant. Draw the wood. I'll to the Abbey, where perchance the fox has gone to earth. Five golden crowns to the man who nets the slimy traitor." ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... "Water-horse," a horse with staring eyes, webbed feet, and a slimy coat, is still dreaded. He assumes different forms and lures the unwary to destruction, or he makes love in human shape to women, some of whom discover his true nature by seeing a piece of water-weed in his hair, and only escape with difficulty. Such a water-horse was forced to ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... beneath the shade Of bushy rock-weed tangled, dusk, and brown, She sees the wreck of founder'd vessel laid, In slimy silence, many a fathom down From where the star-beam trembles; o'er it thrown Are heap'd the treasures men have died to gain. And in sad mockery of the parting groan, That bubbled 'mid the wild unpitying main, Quick gushing o'er the bones, the ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... classic Ilm are sluggish and slimy in places, and in places clear and brooklike, but always a dull dark green in color. They flow in the shadow of pensive trees, and by the brinks of sunny meadows, where the after-math wanders in heavy windrows, and the children sport joyously over the smooth-mown surfaces in all the freedom that ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... strange experiences, and inured to the brooding silence and dark avenues of the forest; but they entered into a scene that tried their nerves. The trees closed in as they advanced, and very soon they entered a leafy tunnel, lit up by a faint light that barely showed up the slimy banks, covered by a network of snake-like roots. The little waves churned up by the screw splashed softly upon the roots, making the only sound that disturbed the sombre silence of the place. So low was the leafy roof at places that ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... same time the grasp on his collar tightened, while with almost superhuman power he was flung backward. With such force did Jack handle his adversary that he sent him flying several yards away, where he fell in a pool of dark, slimy water. ...
— Jack North's Treasure Hunt - Daring Adventures in South America • Roy Rockwood
... imagined. Crossing a street on these things was a perilous traverse watched with great interest by spectators on either side. Often the hardy adventurer, after teetering for some time, would with a descriptive oath sink to his waist in the slimy mud. If the wayfarer was drunk enough, he then proceeded to pelt his tormentors with missiles of the sticky slime. The good humor of the community saved it from absolute despair. Looked at with cold appraising ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... a delicacy, squid are esteemed, and even the devilfish is on the tables, hideous, repellent, slimy, horned, and tentacled; not mighty enough to crush out the life of the fisher, as was the horrific creature in Victor Hugo's "Toilers of the Sea," whom his hero fought, yet menacing even when dead. ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... they find it not quite so shallow, as they had supposed from seeing the garzones wading about with but the slightest portion of their shanks below the surface. For at the bottom is a substratum of mud; a soft slimy ooze, firm enough to support the light birds, but through which the heavier quadrupeds, further weighted with themselves and their baggage, ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... Of this sum the freedmen raised $200,000.00! This was conclusive proof that emancipation was no mistake. Slavery was a twofold cross of woe to the land. It did not only degrade the slave, but it blunted the sensibilities, and, by its terrible weight, carried down under the slimy rocks of society some of the best white people in the South. Like a cankerous malady its venom has touched almost every ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... that they go down to have a look at the dungeon underground. While they were examining that damp, slimy ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Spies - Dodging the Sharks of the Deep • Victor G. Durham
... this strange little fish are rolled into a mass by the two parents. By curling their long, slimy bodies around the eggs, a closely-packed ball is the result. This precious ball of eggs is then taken care of, and guarded by the two fish. In this nursery both the father and mother fish take their share ...
— Within the Deep - Cassell's "Eyes And No Eyes" Series, Book VIII. • R. Cadwallader Smith
... now," she said, peering into the blackness; "fancy going round and round like a mouse in a pail, clutching at the slimy sides, with the water filling your mouth, and looking up to the little patch of ...
— Lady of the Barge and Others, Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... loyal; to fall is an unconquerable necessity of their nature; they have always preferred, to the voice of an honorable man, the perfidious whisper of the evil spirit, which shows its painted face among the leaves and wraps its slimy coils ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... acute diseases, whether they represent healing crises or disease crises, is perfectly natural, because the entire organism, including the mucous membranes of stomach and intestines, is engaged in the work of elimination, not assimilation. Nausea, slimy and fetid discharges, constipation alternating with diarrhea, etc., indicate that the organs of digestion are throwing off disease matter, and that they are not in a condition to take ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... Frequent vomitings now appear, slimy, and evidently containing gall. The animal becomes visibly thinner, obstinately refuses all solid food, and only manifests thirst. He begins to stagger as he walks; he withdraws himself from observation; he anxiously seeks some dark place ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... young man's, could not describe him adequately. (He ate boys for breakfast and girls for tea.) With this person the young man was in eternal conflict (a bear with little ears and big teeth); not open conflict, for that would have meant instant dismissal (not hairy at all—a long slimy eel with a lot of sense), but a veiled unremitting warfare which occupied all their spare attention. The young man knew for an actual fact that some day he would be compelled to hit that chap, and it would ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... the dreary winds and waves incur. And in the hush of waters was the sound Of pebbles rolling round, For ever rolling with a hollow sound. And bubbling sea-weeds as the waters go Swish to and fro Their long, cold tentacles of slimy grey. There was no day, Nor ever came a night Setting the stars alight To wonder at the moon: Was twilight only and the frightened croon, Smitten to whimpers, of the dreary wind And waves that journeyed blind— And then I loosed my ear ... O, it was sweet To hear a cart go ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... intelligence of the struggling men; they scrambled to their feet, looked wildly about them, and set off in pursuit. But they had no command of their limbs; they staggered clumsily this way and that, and finally found their level in the slimy ditch ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... all was what Davy did one day. He wanted to be kind and nice, and do something for me, so he went off to the pond, and sat there on the hot sunny bank all morning, trying to catch me a fish. To everybody's surprise he did catch one about eleven o'clock,—a slimy-looking little catfish,—and came running straight up to my room with it in his dirty little hands. He smelled so fishy I could scarcely stand it, for it was the day I felt the very worst. But ...
— The Little Colonel's House Party • Annie Fellows Johnston
... apparently obstinate soil is made to reflect the sunlight from a covering of golden grain; when gardens and orchards bloom and yield fruit where once the willows dipped their drooping branches in the slimy fluid below, and frogs regaled the passer-by with their festive songs. Roses now twine over the rural cottage and send their fragrance into the wholesome air, where once the beaver reared his rude dwelling, and disease lurked in every breath, ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... white sides of the cliff the projections seemed ready to afford a foothold bearing somewhat toward the right, the descent was not so abrupt as it was immediately in front. The chalk of a truth looked slimy and green, and might cause the unwary to trip, but there was that to see down below and that to do, which would make any danger of a fall ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... simple, straightforward violence. It was not the slimy, underhand plotting to deliver her up like a slave, which had sickened her heart and had made her feel in her loneliness that her oppressors were too many for her. She was no longer alone in the world now. She resisted ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... prone to dwell on the "earthworm's slimy brood." Compare Childe Harold, Canto II. stanzas v., vi. Dallas (Recollections of Lord Byron, 1824, p. 124) once ventured to remind his noble connection "that although our senses make us acquainted with the chemical decomposition of our bodies," ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... of French possess the Court, Pimps, priests, buffoons, i' the privy-chamber sport. Such slimy monsters ne'er approached the throne Since Pharaoh's reign, nor so defiled a crown. I' the sacred ear tyrannic arts they croak, Pervert his mind, his good intentions choke; Tell him of golden Indies, fairy lands, Leviathan, and absolute commands. ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... conceivable line that does not hop, skip, and jump about our bodies. We, coz, are the spoilt, the cockered children of the formation: and this is why the common rabble of nature are so malicious and envious toward us. Their slim wretched fashion is next door to the slimy eel: there is nothing edifying in such an edifice. From that piece of monotony to the prawn is already a good step; and how far above that is the seal! how do we surpass them both, as well as the seastar, the crab, and the lobster, my trustiest cousin, in our excursive ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... greater your talent, so much more will be jealousy of it, from those, at least, so on the alert to decry that which they cannot create; so much more will be contumely; so much more will be innuendoes which can not be met openly, as they certainly will not be in the slimy words and manner of utterance of bitter heartlessness, that is to say, if you be made of that stuff which presents to the world an artist, who is nothing if ...
— Violin Making - 'The Strad' Library, No. IX. • Walter H. Mayson
... years but old Gothic in pretense, might have suggested a possessor of the stately and knightly type rather than a little cockatoo like Mr. Early; but man has this advantage over the snail, that, whereas, the snail is obliged to construct a home around its slimy little body, man may build his habitation to match his imagination and ambition. In the West, moreover, it is the custom to leave the low-vaulted past and build more stately mansions as fast as ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... after that, as though to point his words, we fell together into a slimy ditch, and it seemed to me that Le Marchant lay ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... already"—Chad could see the rock fence where he had sat that spring day—"it's curious and mournful that you can see in any season a sign of the next to come." And there was the creek where he found Dan fishing, and there the road led to the ford where Margaret had spurned his offer of a slimy fish—ugh! "I do love the autumn. It makes me feel like the young woman who told Emerson that she had such mammoth thoughts she couldn't give them utterance—why, wake up, Mr. Buford, wake up!" Chad came to with ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... choosing the noxious from the useful. And in my dreams I shall be hauling on recalcitrants, and suffering stings from nettles, stabs from citron thorns, fiery bites from ants, sickening resistances of mud and slime, evasions of slimy roots, dead weight of heat, sudden puffs of air, sudden starts from bird-calls in the contiguous forest - some mimicking my name, some laughter, some the signal of a whistle, and living over again at large ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... more varied mountain scenery than this; its waters are also very clear, and it has the advantage of several very picturesque islands; but the dead volcanoes, the wastes of volcanic sand and ashes covered only by interminable sagebrush, the bitter, alkaline, dead, slimy waters, in which nothing but worms live; the insects and flies which swarm on its surface, and which are thrown upon its shore in such quantities as to infect the air,—all these produce a sense of desolation and death which is painful; it destroys entirely the beauty ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... occupation he was to pay sixpence a mile, as if he had been riding a mustang on the wild loneliness of the prairies. "Look at marriage! Who is to say which shall be the one judicious selection out of nine hundred and ninety-nine mistakes! Who shall decide from the first aspect of the slimy creature, which is to be the one eel out of the colossal bag of snakes? That girl on the curbstone yonder, waiting to cross the street when my chariot shall have passed, may be the one woman out of every female creature in this vast universe who could make me a happy man. ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... and down the slight incline, and presently found myself in a little valley. The grass was rank and high, sometimes nearly up to my chin, and the ground was slimy and treacherous. I slipped into several shell holes and was almost over my head in ...
— A Yankee in the Trenches • R. Derby Holmes
... had had died almost entirely early in December. On the evening of a day when a steady rain had turned the roads into slimy pitfalls, and the ditches to canals, there came, brought by a Belgian corporal, the man who swore that Henri had passed him in his trench while the others slept, had shoved him aside, which was unlike his usual courtesy, and had climbed ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... garden, but Nancy, Ambrose, and David had lately struck out the bold idea of joining their plots of ground and digging a well. It was a delightful occupation, and when the hole got deep it was pleasant to see how the small frogs and other slimy reptiles crawled about at the bottom; but, after much heated labour, there were no signs of water. Interest flagged then, and the well was deserted, until the ever-ready Pennie suggested the game of ...
— The Hawthorns - A Story about Children • Amy Walton
... days the vast cellarage was witness of many a dark encounter, of many a mysterious death; could the slimy walls have told their own tale, it would have been one which would have put to shame the ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... the production of asphalt, carbonic acid, carburetted hydrogen, and water are given off. 'May not,' they ask, 'these orifices be the vents by which such gases escape? And in forcing their way to the surface, is it not natural that the liquid asphalt and slimy water should be drawn up and expelled?' They point out the fact, that wherever such volcanoes exist, asphalt or petroleum is found hard by. The mud volcanoes of Turbaco, in New Granada, famous from Humboldt's description of them, lie in an asphaltic country. They are much larger ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... taken the liberty of bringing here a number of culture tubes containing beautiful specimens of some of the more common and interesting bacteria. The slimy masses seen on the surfaces of jelly contained in the tubes are many millions of individual plants, which have aggregated themselves in various forms as they have been developed as the progeny ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various
... stickleback and the pipe-fish. Among these eminently moral amphibians, it is the father, not the mother, who takes entire charge of the family. The female lays her spawn in the shape of long strings or rolls, looking at first sight like slimy necklaces. I have seen them as much as a couple of yards long, lying loose on the grass where the frog lays them. As soon as she has deposited them, however, the father frog hops up, twists the garlands dexterously in loose festoons round his legs ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... sickness next day. It was impossible to take heavy exercise in the heat of the day; the evening usually saw a rain-storm which made the country a quagmire; and in the early morning the drenching dew and wet, slimy soil made walking but little pleasure. Chaplain Brown held service every Sunday under a low tree outside my tent; and we always had a congregation of a few score troopers, lying or sitting round, their strong hard faces turned toward the ...
— Rough Riders • Theodore Roosevelt
... tree which had fallen into the pool in a former caving-in of the bank. In that dark deep wherein his foot was held fast, his mind's eye could see it all well enough—the water-soaked, brown-green, slimy, inexorable coil, which had yielded to admit the unlucky member, then closed upon the ankle like the jaws of an otter trap. He could feel that grip—not severe, but uncompromisingly firm, clutching the joint. As he considered, he began to draw comfort, however, from the ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... far down the scale of life as the Monera, we may see the Creative Will in action. The Monera are but tiny bits of slimy, jelly-like substances—mere specks of glue without organs of any kind, and yet they exercise the organic phenomena of life, such as nutrition, reproduction, sensation and movement, all of which are usually associated with ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... of father or mother do our Selves good, and comfort them and make them beautiful. They never do them any harm. If they do any harm, it comes of our mixing some of our own praises with them, and that turns them nasty and slimy and poisonous. ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • George MacDonald
... head seemed to bristle with indignation. "Oh, no you don't, Rupert Ralestone! You don't get me away from here when there are exciting things going on. I hardly think that our friend with the slimy manner will use machine-guns to blast us out. And if he does—well, it wouldn't be the first time that this house was used as a fortress. I'm not going one step out of here unless you ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... in the mire; slobber, slabber[obs3]. Adj. dirty, filthy, grimy; unclean, impure; soiled &c. v.; not to be handled with kid gloves; dusty, snuffy[obs3], smutty, sooty, smoky; thick, turbid, dreggy; slimy; mussy [U.S.]. slovenly, untidy, messy, uncleanly. [of people] unkempt, sluttish, dowdy, draggle-tailed; uncombed. unscoured[obs3], unswept[obs3], unwiped[obs3], unwashed, unstrained, unpurified[obs3]; squalid; lutose[obs3], slammocky[obs3], slummocky[obs3], sozzly[obs3]. nasty, coarse, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... is over. The muddy trench, the deadly shrapnel, the perfidious gas, the roaring cannon, the forced marches on the slimy roads of Flanders, the heroic dashes and agonizing retreats of struggling armies, the lurking submarines, the treacherous, owlish zeppelins, the long-protracted vigil on the deep—all these grim realities of four, long, endless years have melted away in the blaze of a glorious victory. ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... where there is discord, the upward turn again of the valley road, all this is a bit of the touch of God upon life, where the hurt of sin has come in. Only the Lord Jesus can make music where sin had brought in and wrought out such discord. Only He can change the weaving into beauty, where the ugly slimy sin-threads have come in. He can lead up again out of the depths, but only He. His blood, Himself, is the thing added that makes music where no melody had ever been a possible thing; and gives the weaver's threads the transforming ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... half a century or more, but an open drain, especially if deep, has a constant tendency to fill up. Besides, the action of frost and water and vegetation has a continual operation to obstruct open ditches. Rushes and water-grasses spring up luxuriantly in the wet and slimy bottom, and often, in a single season, retard the flow of water, so that it will stand many inches deep where the fall is slight. The slightest accident, as the treading of cattle, the track of a loaded cart, the burrowing of ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... hundred yards from the battery. One or two others, disregarding her signal, shared her mishap; and two were sunk by the American fire. Under these circumstances a seaman, sounding with a boat hook, declared that he found along side three or four feet of slimy mud. This was considered decisive, and ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... ibis and the crocodile trembled at. I was buried for a thousand years in stone coffins, with mummies and sphinxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed with cancerous kisses by crocodiles, and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things, among reeds and ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... butt of a pistol—newly purchased. "I go armed, Binet. It is only fair to give you warning. Provoke me as you have suggested, and I'll kill you with no more compunction than I should kill a slug, which after all is the thing you most resemble—a slug, Binet; a fat, slimy body; foulness without soul and without intelligence. When I come to think of it I can't suffer to sit at table with you. ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... made from the sugar of water-brambles," remarked the frog, with a self-satisfied smile. "No doubt you are surprised at the delicacy and refinement of our tastes. Many human beings are under the deplorable mistake of supposing we live on slimy water and dirty insects—ha, ha, ha! whereas our cuisine is astounding in variety and delicacy of material and flavour. If it were not too late in the season, I wish you could have tasted our mushroom pates and ...
— The Tapestry Room - A Child's Romance • Mrs. Molesworth
... form upon the floor of the cell; and as by degrees his sight became more able to penetrate the obscurity within, he began plainly to perceive the form of the miserable woman, crouched on her knees upon the damp slimy pavement of the wretched hole. She was already dressed in the sackcloth robe of the penitents condemned to the stake, and her poor grey hairs were without covering. So motionless was her form that for a moment the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... dried; the cattle chew'd the cud Low levell'd on the grass; no fly's quick sting Enforc'd the stonehorse in a furious ring To tear the passive earth, nor lash his tail About his buttocks broad; the slimy snail Might on the wainscot, by his many mazes, Winding meanders and self-knitting traces, Be follow'd where he stuck, his glittering slime Not yet wip'd off. It was so early time, The careful smith had ...
— Pastoral Poems by Nicholas Breton, - Selected Poetry by George Wither, and - Pastoral Poetry by William Browne (of Tavistock) • Nicholas Breton, George Wither, William Browne (of Tavistock)
... patience tax When put down people's backs - Surprising, too, what one can do with fifty fat black beedles - And treacle on a chair Will make a Quaker swear! Then sharp tin tacks And pocket squirts - And cobblers' wax For ladies' skirts - And slimy slugs On bedroom floors - And water jugs On open doors - Prepared with these cheap properties, amusing tricks to play, Upon a friend a man may spend a ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... a carriage. Forty thousand horses had been eaten; dogs, cats and rats were now luxuries, commanding a high price. Ever since the supply of wheat had given out the bread was made from rice and oats, and was black, damp, and slimy, and hard to digest; to obtain the ten ounces that constituted a day's ration involved a wait, often of many hours, in line before the bake-house. Ah, the sorrowful spectacle it was, to see those poor women shivering in the pouring rain, their feet in the ice-cold mud and water! ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... fierce onslaught. It lasted long and when it had gone another silence, as ominous as the preceding one, followed. The rain ceased entirely and the pony again stepped forward, making his way slowly, for the trail was now slippery and hazardous. The baked earth had become a slimy, sticky clay which clung tenaciously ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... as I bade him, and when I had lit the lantern I cast its rays about the gulf beneath me till I found the continuation of the broken stairway above, and then picking my way carefully down the dank, slimy steps, I led the way into the heart of the rock, the rest following, guided by the spreading ray of light ...
— The Romance of Golden Star ... • George Chetwynd Griffith
... brink of the pond—a green, dank, dark, slimy sour, stinking pond. His coat-tails were gone by this time, and sundry rents and damages appeared in—in another useful garment. One pulled him, another pushed him, a third shook him by the collar, half a dozen buffeted ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... Mosse;" in Vautr. edit. "the slimy mosse." Solway Moss derives its name from the Solway Frith, a well known arm of the sea, which forms the boundary between England and Scotland for upwards of fifty miles. The Moss lies on the Cumberland side of ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... least desirable of marine phenomena is that which is known as the "blanket weed," which floats ashore in loathsome blobs, a hand's breadth and more, the centre a grey, solidified slime, with a periphery of long, dull green, slimy, shapeless fringes Individual plants coalesce on the sand and, mingling with other weeds, cover respectable beaches with a woolly, compact mass not unlike a rough, thick blanket, but teeming with unpleasantnesses. Isolated plants cling to ropes, which ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... became sore in busying themselves with the harsh and inhospitable stones. My feet slipped from the smooth and slimy masonry beneath the water; and several times my face came in rude contact with the wall, when my foothold gave way on the instant that I seemed to have found some diminutive rocky cleat upon which ...
— The Man In The Reservoir • Charles Fenno Hoffman
... is done by the bath-man, should you prefer the assistance of another. Within this chamber was a smaller one, containing similar basins, and to one of these I moved, followed by one of the men, who, after lathering me from head to foot with a sort of slimy caustic soap, scrubbed me down with a brush made of aloe shreds. Having overwhelmed me once more with cold and hot water, and given a finishing pull or two at my limbs, he left me to duck myself, if I thought fit; but I had had quite enough, and hurried back ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... the fishes and reptiles, who had their own grievances against humanity. They held a joint council and determined to make their victims dream of snakes twining about them in slimy folds and blowing their fetid breath in their faces, or to make them dream of eating raw or decaying fish, so that they would lose appetite, sicken, and die. Thus it is that snake and fish dreams are ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... frightfully bad going; the sun had baked the black soil till great gaping cracks, a couple of feet wide and ten feet deep, were opened in the ground. The buffaloes had wallowed in the wet season and made round well-like holes that were now hard, dry pitfalls. Here and there a treacherous, slimy watercourse wound its slinking way along, making a bog in which a horse would sink to his shoulders; and over all these traps and pitfalls the long waving jungle-grass drew a veil. Every now and then belts of small bamboo were crossed, into which the horses dashed blindly, forcing their ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... Lemon-dab: scales small, smooth, and imbedded; skin slimy, head and mouth very small, colour yellowish brown with large round ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... cow-punchers that handled the herd—they grazed, guarded, watered, night-herded the cattle day after day, night after night. Pasturage had been sufficient, if not abundant. The creeks were running low and slimy with the advance of summer, but there had been sufficient water to let the herd drink its fill at least ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... the scene was oppressively solemn: on all sides the gurgling waters kept up a peculiar sound that filled the air with sullen murmurs; the moonbeams slept upon the slimy surface of the mud, and made the dismal landscape more ghastly still. Silence followed the ebb, broken occasionally by the wild whistle of a bird like the curlew, of which a few wheeled through the air: till the harsh roar of the bore was heard, to which ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... is a sprawling, hateful thing, Thorny and twisted like a snake, Writhing to work a mischief, in the brake It stands at menace, in its cling Is danger and a venomed sting. It grows on green and slimy slopes, It is a thing of shades and slums, For passing feet it wildly gropes, And loops to catch all feet that run Seeking a path ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... fellows dashed the useless metal to the earth, and endeavored to escape from the ditch back into the ravine, where, at least, there was a prospect of supplying themselves with more serviceable weapons from among their slain comrades; but the ditch was deep and slimy and the difficulty of ascent great. Before they could accomplish it, the Americans opened a fire from a bastion, the guns of which, loaded with slugs and musket balls, raked the trench from end to end, and swept away all that ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... its peculiar haunting fiend, every natural phenomenon has its informing spirit; every quality, as hunger, greed, envy, malice, has an embodied visible shape prowling about seeking what it may devour. Where our science, for example, sees (or rather smells) sewer gas, the Japanese behold a slimy, meagre, insatiate wraith, crawling to devour the lives of men. Where we see a storm of snow, their livelier fancy beholds a comic snow-ghost, a queer, grinning old man under a ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... its long slimy tongue being uncoiled like a piece of ribbon when the animal yawned; and well he knew that any ant who was unfortunate enough to touch that sticky object would never return to tell the tale; he therefore ...
— Little Folks (October 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... believing that the frame of the sponge was the outer case of worms or polypes. Later examination, however, has shown that the frame or sponge, commonly so called, is an internal skeleton, while the vital power is simply composed of a slimy film which coats over every fibre, and which, inert as it appears, possesses the power of secreting the particles ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... built. When the waters of the Hansag chain rose, the muddy undercurrent threw up great mounds of earth, like enormous excrescences on a diseased body. One of these huge mounds burst open at the top and emitted a black, slimy mud that inundated the surrounding morass ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... gloomy deep, And only stir themselves in storms, Rising like islands from beneath, And snorting through the angry spray, 70 As the frail vessel perisheth In the whirls of their unwieldy play; Look down! Look down! Upon the seaweed, slimy and dark, That waves its arms so lank and brown, Beckoning for thee! Look down beneath thy wave-worn bark Into the cold depth of the sea! Look down! Look down! Thus, on Life's lonely sea, 80 Heareth the marinere Voices sad, from far and near, Ever singing full of fear, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... later it began to rain, a light drizzle at first that increased until it reached the steady pounding of a tropical downpour. Tom awoke first, opening the flap of his sleeping bag only to get his face full of slimy water that spilled in. Spluttering and coughing he sat up and saw that the campfire was out and the campsite was already ...
— The Revolt on Venus • Carey Rockwell
... results. Choose carcasses between a hundred and seventy-five and a hundred and fifty pounds in weight, of a fresh pinky white hue, free of cuts, scratches, or bruises, the skin scraped clean, and firm, not slimy, to touch, the fat firm and white, the lean a lively purplish pink. Two inches of clear fat over the backbone, and the thick of the ribs should be the limit. Anything more is wasteful—unless there is a great need of lard in the kitchen. The pig should ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... clifts. they are now ripe of a pale red colour, about the size of a common goosberry. and like it is an ovate pericarp of soft pulp invelloping a number of smal whitish coloured seeds; the pulp is a yelloish slimy muselaginous substance of a sweetish and pinelike tast, not agreeable to me. the surface of the berry is covered with a glutinous adhesive matter, and the frut altho ripe retains it's withered corollar. this shrub seldom rises ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... and its frail joints Swayed with the undulations of the tide. A restless impulse urged him to embark And meet lone Death on the drear ocean's waste; 305 For well he knew that mighty Shadow loves The slimy caverns of the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... have been one of the fifteen. I'm not quite clear on that point. Indeed I'm somewhat muddled in the main; but I suspect the SQUIRE is up to some deed of infamy, and I have done my best to plumb its slimy depths." ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 27, 1893 • Various
... river. Little parties could be seen in the distance washing their clothes; others cleaning or bathing what cattle they had; occasionally far away could be seen a collection of shiny, ebony-looking human beings taking a dip in the green, slimy, insanitary ...
— Under the Rebel's Reign • Charles Neufeld
... o'er the slimy-weeded sea, 'Lo! here beneath,' another coward cries, 'The cursed land of sunk Atlantis lies; This slime will suck us down—turn while thou'rt free!' 'But no!' I said, 'freedom bears West for me!' Yet when the long-time stagnant winds arise, And day by day the keel to westward flies, My Good my ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... neck was bent, the nails were rent, no limb or joint was straight; Together glued, with blood imbued, black and coagulate. And, as the sexton stooped him down to lift the coffin plank, His fingers were defiled all o'er with slimy ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... nature waste; view this globe often convulsed both from within and without; pouring forth from several mouths, rivers of boiling matter, which are imperceptibly leaving immense subterranean graves, wherein millions will one day perish! Look at the poisonous soil of the equator, at those putrid slimy tracks, teeming with horrid monsters, the enemies of the human race; look next at the sandy continent, scorched perhaps by the fatal approach of some ancient comet, now the abode of desolation. Examine the rains, the convulsive storms of those climates, where masses of sulphur, bitumen, ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... the entire dozen of them surrounded the Glass Cat and clung to her claws and tail and ears and made her a prisoner. Then they forced her out of the tent and down to the banks of the stream. The monkeys had noticed that these banks were covered with thick, slimy mud of a dark blue color, and when they had taken the Cat to the stream, they smeared this mud all over the glass body of the cat, filling the creature's ears and eyes with it, so that she could neither see nor hear. She was no longer transparent and so thick was the mud upon her that ...
— The Magic of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... of a few yards; and teeming, then, with rank unwholesome vegetation, in whose baleful shade the wretched wanderers who are tempted hither, droop, and die, and lay their bones; the hateful Mississippi circling and eddying before it, and turning off upon its southern course a slimy monster hideous to behold; a hotbed of disease, an ugly sepulchre, a grave uncheered by any gleam of promise: a place without one single quality, in earth or air or water, to commend it: such ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... glitveturilo. Slender maldika. Slender (graceful) gracia. Slice trancxajxo. Slide glitejo. Slide gliti. Slight maldika. Slip faleti. Slip, let preterlasi. Slipper pantoflo. Slippery glata. Slim gracia. Slime sxlimo. Slimy sxlima. Sling (stones) sxtonjxetilo. Slit fendo. Sloe prunelo. Slop versxeti. Slope deklivo. Slope (cut out) eltrancxi. Sloth mallaboremo. Slothful mallaborema. Slough sxlimejo. Sloven negligxulo. Slow malrapida. Slowness malrapideco. Slug limako. Sluggard ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... wanted her face at its tables, and as there was nothing else open, in very desperation she went. She turned into a smaller room where the private tables were, to which she belonged; at first they had tried to teach her to dance, but she would not learn. The furniture was worn, with a slimy polish in spots; an unclean, stifling smell in the air; a few coarse prints of racers and champions hung around; and in one place a drunken artist had sketched one night a Crucifixion on the wall; the owner was angry enough, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... from seaport to seaport. Kind-hearted, generous, forsooth! as prostitutes are, and thieves. And the gold that flowed into that luxurious and vicious receptacle, spattering everything, even the walls, seemed to him now to bring with it all the dregs, all the filth of its impure and slimy source. That being so, there was but one thing for him, de Gery, to do, and that was to go, to leave as soon as possible the place where he ran the risk of compromising his name, all that there was of ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... pleasant one. The path, first wild and rugged, finally led to a charming little valley, through which Beckey's creek hurries down to the river. Leaving this, we traveled up the side of a ravine, through which a little stream fretted and fumed, and dashed into spray against slimy rocks, and then gathered itself up for another charge, and so pushed gallantly on toward the ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty
... and pleasant smell. In a more advanced stage, the gills become of a chocolate color; and it is then more liable to be confounded with other kinds of dubious quality: but the species which most nearly resembles it is slimy to the touch, and destitute of the fine odor, having rather a disagreeable smell. Further, the noxious kind grows in woods, or on the margin of woods; while the true Mushroom springs up chiefly in open pastures, and should be ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... I saw in the space of a quarter of a mile, scarcely stopping and following Captain Nemo, who beckoned me on by signs. Soon the nature of the soil changed; to the sandy plain succeeded an extent of slimy mud; we then traveled over a plain of seaweed of wild and luxuriant vegetation. This sward was of close texture and soft to the feet, rivaling the softest carpet woven by the hand of man. While verdure was spread at our feet, it did not abandon our heads. ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... remember a Scotch smouser, who was called Peter Piper, who sold pills like a chemist, and everybody liked him and respected him, till he had his great dispute with the Predikant at Dopfontein. But this little man was like a slimy thing made to crawl on its belly; and many is the time he would have been sjamboked from a door, were it not for—well, I don't know. But he was such a mean helpless thing, that, when he shrank away and looked up, with his white eyes staring and his ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... in case the other efforts should fail." A wetter winter had never been known. The whole complicated network of bends and bayous, of creeks, streams, runs, and tributary rivers, was overflowing the few slimy trails through the spongy forest and threatening the neglected levees which still held back the encroaching waters. There was nothing to do, however, but to keep the men busy and the enemy confused ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... sailed, climbed, walked and finished her book. She had a room at St. Michael's Cafe, at the edge of the little town, just above the beach. Across a space of sea at high tide, and of wet sand and a paved causeway slimy with seaweed at the ebb, St. Michael's Mount loomed, dark against a sunset sky, pale and unearthly in the dawn, an embattled ship riding anchored on full waters, or stranded ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... reptile of some kind seized my leg. In my fright, I struck a blow which loosened its hold, but I could not tell whether I had killed it; it was so dark, I could not see what it was; I only knew it was something cold and slimy. The pain I felt soon indicated that the bite was poisonous. I was compelled to leave my place of concealment, and I groped my way back into the house. The pain had become intense, and my friend was startled by my look of anguish. I asked her to prepare a poultice ...
— Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Written by Herself • Harriet Jacobs (AKA Linda Brent)
... given by government for the destruction of locust eggs. Each female deposits two small cases or sheaths beneath the ground, containing thirty or forty eggs in each. The position is easily distinguished by a shining slimy substance. A certain sum per oke is given, and the people gladly avail themselves of the opportunity of earning money at the same time that they destroy the ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... another. The cruel pathos of the story is not in the fact that such men are in prison, but that a Dostoevski should be among them. Here is a delicate, sensitive man of genius, in bad health, with a highly organised nervous system, with a wonderful imagination, condemned to live for years in slimy misery, with creatures far worse than the beasts of the field. Indeed, some of the most beautiful parts of the story are where Dostoevski turns from the men to the prison dog and the prison horse, and there finds true friendship. His kindness to the neglected ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... of this hurried retreat had been sitting there for two hours. The slimy moving surface of the river had entered into his brain; the restless silence of the African forest alone kept him awake. He hardly realised that the sound momentarily gaining strength within his ears was that of a paddle—a single, weakly, irregular ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... hast beheld His palace and his most exalted courts Bestrewn with fragments of the Peristyle; The broken column, slab and monolith O'erhung with pendant moss and slimy mold; Its dismal haunts and gloomy apertures Become the habitation of the bat, The hissing serpent and the scorpion, The basking lizard dull and indolent, And forms ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... ground around the stockyard they took up the trail leading into the bush at a point where Jones was seen to go. Working up this for some two hundred yards and pointing out various signs as they proceeded, they arrived at a small slimy lagoon or pond, on the edge of which they picked up something they called "white man's fat." Some of them now dived into the pond, where they discovered the body of Jones, ...
— Five Years in New Zealand - 1859 to 1864 • Robert B. Booth
... bar and then pushing him into the river. At a critical stage, the hero walked serenely on the scene and confronted the villain. The villain assumed the good old stereotyped posture and shouted out with a horrified expression, 'Stand back, stand back, your hands is cold and slimy!' That busted up the show, as the audience, composed largely of the Academy boys, stood up as one and yelled. They finally started a cheer, 'Stand back, stand back, your hands is cold and slimy!' ...
— Tales of the Road • Charles N. Crewdson
... in the fog, and I says to my mate—boy by the name of 'Ucklebridge, only chiefly called Slimy, to distinguish him—I says—I says that was my guv'nor, safe and square, by the token of the sound of it. And then I catches him up in the fog, follerin' by the sound. My word, missis, he was bad! Wanted to holler me over the ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... animals" said a little slimy Whiting. "They put on different scales two or three times a day, and they emit sounds which they call speaking. We don't put on scales, and we make ourselves understood in an easier way, simply by twitching the corners of our mouths and ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... still larger, but these I perceived were not loose, but half buried, and fast as rocks could be. They were only the projecting ends of great masses that formed the strength of the reef. All, both large ones and small ones, were coated over with a black, slimy substance, and here and there great beds of seaweed, of different kinds, among which I recognised some sorts that were usually cast up on our beach, and passed by the name of "sea-wreck." With these I had already formed a most intimate acquaintance, for more than one hard day's ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... year, allowing Nature centuries of time to make new shores, it would, of course, be full only a month or two in the spring, when the snow is melting fast; then it would be gradually drained, exposing the slimy sides of the basin and shallower parts of the bottom, with the gathered drift and waste, death and decay of the upper basins, caught here instead of being swept on to decent natural burial along the banks of the ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... sandals, arms, and coats of mail were to be seen, with heads held in their helmets by the chin-pieces and rolling about like balls; heads of hair were hanging on the thorns; elephants were lying with their towers in pools of blood, with entrails exposed, and gasping. The foot trod on slimy things, and there were swamps of mud although no ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... speaking she turned her eyes to the water rushing past the hull, just as a dull, wallowing shape flashed by the bow, assuming form right under her eyes—a dark, soughing, coughing derelict, moving in the waves spinelessly, like a serpent; black, slimy, repulsive, with broken, hemp-littered masts and rusty chains ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry
... to the pumps. A peculiar gurgling sound had come from the ends of the hose, and the flow depreciated greatly; instead of the steady gush of water, a slimy silt was coming out now, spraying and splattering about on the sides of the drainage ditch. Wildly ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... around, as he moved forward. On all sides the walls were wet and slimy. He advanced with care, resolved to avoid all pitfalls, were it possible to do so. He was in a place where the roofing was no higher than his shoulders, so he had to ...
— The Mansion of Mystery - Being a Certain Case of Importance, Taken from the Note-book of Adam Adams, Investigator and Detective • Chester K. Steele
... communicated F. Muller's observation on the fertilisation of a bright-red-flowered species of Hedychium, which is visited by Callidryas, chiefly the males of C. Philea. The pollen is carried by the tips of the butterfly's wing, to which it is temporarily fixed by the slimy layer produced by the degeneration ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... very deep did rot: O Christ! That ever this should be! Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... one discovered that he had lost himself, he would shout, and set himself right again by the answering shouts of his comrades who might be so lucky as to be in the path at that moment. After blundering about all night through marshy thickets, slipping upon slimy rocks, and scrambling over the oozy trunks of fallen trees, they reached the Indian camp at daybreak in a somewhat moist and bedabbled plight, as you may well imagine. The Half King seemed overjoyed at seeing his young ...
— The Farmer Boy, and How He Became Commander-In-Chief • Morrison Heady
... door was closed behind him. The place in which he found himself was very cold, and the floor beneath his feet was wet and slimy. His teeth chattered and his limbs shuddered as he stood looking around him. The noise of flowing water sounded loud and clear through the silence; it was running from a leaden pipe into a wooden tank, mildewed and green ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... he did not take off his clothes. When he slept it was in cat naps, an hour snatched now and again from the fight with the rising tide of wealth that threatened to engulf its owners. He was unshaven, unbathed, his clothes slimy with tar and grease. He ate on the job—coffee, beans, bacon, cornbread, whatever the cooks' flunkies brought him—and did not know what he was eating. Gaunt and dominating, with crisp decision and yet unfailing good-humor, he bossed the gangs under him and led ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... sail, had followed; and some ballast-lighters, shaped like a child's first rude imitation of a boat, lay low in the mud; and a little squat shoal-lighthouse on open piles stood crippled in the mud on stilts and crutches; and slimy stakes stuck out of the mud, and slimy stones stuck out of the mud, and red landmarks and tidemarks stuck out of the mud, and an old landing-stage and an old roofless building slipped into the mud, and all about us was stagnation ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... his waist, and it was only a question of minutes ere the slimy ooze would close over his head. It was a situation that demanded instant action. For a moment Charley stood silent beside the captain gazing hopelessly at his doomed chum. Then he turned swiftly and darted away like ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... would, too, if I weren't tied up with a law suit which an irate traction company is waging against the city of Oakdale. Although I am not a woodsman, still I know the difference between a tree and a stump, and during my long and useful career I have killed numbers of slimy, slithery snakes." ...
— Grace Harlowe's Golden Summer • Jessie Graham Flower
... cooking of "Yankee beans," as we called them, was simply atrocious. As you know, beans should be cooked until they are thoroughly done; otherwise they are decidedly harmful. Well, we would not cook them much more than half enough, the result being a sloppy, slimy mess, its looks alone being well-nigh sufficient to extinguish one's appetite. And as for the rice—the horrible messes we would make of that defy description. I know that one consequence with me was I contracted such an ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... cannot describe to you the muddy conditions out here. Mud lies inches thick on the roads, and is kept damp and slimy by the continual passage of limbers, horses, guns, wagons and lorries—the final result being a veritable swamp. The other day a man of the 19th Hussars was watering two horses when he got himself and the two animals hopelessly bogged beside the pond in a swamp which he mistook for ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... and wistful expression seems to rest upon the firm features. Then his eyes open wide. For a moment he lies, staring up at the green fronds which afford shade no longer, then starts up into a sitting posture. And simultaneous with the movement here and there a faint circular ripple widens on the slimy surface of the lagoon, as each of those dark specks, representing the snout ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... upper end of it on a sort of bench eight feet wide was a depression covered with ice three or four inches thick. With some difficulty pounding a hole through this we found beneath a small amount of thick, slimy water, full of green scum. We drank some, the Uinkarets drank some, but we could not see well enough to get any out for the animals. We tied them to rocks to prevent them from leaving in the night. The Indians thawed a little under the influence of the fire, but they would barely speak when spoken ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... at once that they were in an underground cavern. To right and left stretched a gloomy passage, ten feet wide. The sides and roof were of jagged, slimy rock, dripping ...
— The Camp in the Snow - Besiedged by Danger • William Murray Graydon
... a false stroke, I believe for the first time in his life, snapped an oar and overturned a lantern. Some drift-wood, covered with slimy weeds, washed heavily up at our feet. I remember that a little disabled ground-sparrow, chased by the tide, was fluttering and drowning just in sight, and that Myron drew it out of the water, and held itup for a ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... neat turn of her stick sent the ball past our Right Back. There was only one girl now to prevent her from getting a goal! Blossom was now fast gaining, and then, just as Veronica came within shooting distance, her foot slipped in the slimy mud, and she lost her balance. Blossom was level with Veronica by this time, and before the Clinton captain could steady herself, she had sent the ball far ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... out of fear of Pete Leddy," he continued, "that dinosaur would know that I was such insignificant prey he would not even take the trouble to knock me down with a forepaw. He would swallow me alive and running! Think of that slimy slide down the red upholstery of his gullet, not to mention the misery of a total loss of ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... head and duck's beak, darted after fish, and crept up to the surface of the earth through the slimy ways ...
— Weird Tales from Northern Seas • Jonas Lie |
