"Beetle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of these are such isolated forms that it is impossible to find their allies in any particular country[24]." More than two-thirds of all the species belong to the group of weevils—a circumstance which serves to explain the great wealth of beetle-population, the weevils being beetles which live in wood, and St. Helena having been originally a densely wooded island. This circumstance is also in accordance with the view that the peculiar insect fauna has been in large part ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... DDT has given very encouraging results in the control of the weevil. The weevils have sometimes been called curculios, under which name they were well discussed by Brooks and Cotton.[3] The Japanese Beetle is also a serious pest as chestnut leaves are among its favorite foods. Control methods have been given by Hadley.[4] Another insect pest which feeds on the leaves is the June bug or May beetle. It works mainly at night and feeds on the newest leaves. It is seldom seen and usually disappears about ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Report • Various
... honey. I do think you've awfully little consideration for human failings. If one goes wrong in the least thing, even in one's spelling, you say something that sounds as pleasant as possible, and all the same it transfixes one just as you stick a pin through a beetle. You are very hard, you are—mean with those who would like to be friends with you. When it's mere strangers and cottagers and people of that sort, who don't care a brass farthing about you, then I believe you're all gentleness and kindness; but to your real friends the edge ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... from a blossom without a lawful cause, and study it accordingly? Fragrance, abundant pollen, and bright-colored petals naturally attract many insects; but roses secrete no nectar. Some species of bees, and a common beetle (Trichius piger) for example, seem to depend upon certain wild roses exclusively for pollen to feed themselves and their larvae. Bumblebees, to which roses are adapted, require a firmer support than the petals would give, and so alight on the center of the flower, where the pistil receives ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... not a bug, but a beetle, and arrives in May) has this interesting habit of keeping quiet. If in its flight it strikes the globe of an electric light, it falls at once to the ground, and remains perfectly quiet for a time. After a short interval it recovers and starts out to regain its previous activity. But this recovery ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... issue of life and death; and in spite of all that she calmly decides to go away. Whether I should perish or beat my head against the wall, she never so much as considered. She will be more at ease when she ceases to see me writhing like a beetle stuck on a pin; she will be no longer afraid of my kissing her feet furtively, or startling that virtuous conscience. How can she hesitate when such excellent peace can be got, at so small a price as cutting somebody's throat! Thoughts like these spun across my brain ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... into the familiar worms found in ripe chestnuts, hickory-nuts and hazel nuts. The large hole in the shell of the nut is made by the full grown worm as it escapes to enter the ground, where it completes its transformation into a beetle. An interesting thing in connection with these weevils is that each species confine its attacks to one particular kind of nut. Even those species that attack acorns show a decided tendency to distinguish between oak species and confine themselves ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Eleventh Annual Meeting - Washington, D. C. October 7 AND 8, 1920 • Various
... shall never again fall to thy lot to see, hear, and smell all these. Here shalt thou linger out thy remaining days; thy companions the toad, the eft, the spider, the beetle; and when thou diest of hunger and thirst, which will eventually be thy lot, this cell shall be thy coffin. Here shalt ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... dreamed the wedding, but that paragraph—that paragraph—it takes a genius of the first literary degree to dream a paragraph, though it may only need quite an ordinary fool to write it! Why, what is the matter? What is it? Did you see something? Not a mouse? Not a beetle? I ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... his sister; 'and I quake, lest you should wish to live, and more respect the trifling term of six or seven winters added to your life, then your perpetual honour! Do you dare to die? The sense of death is most in apprehension, and the poor beetle that we tread upon, feels a pang as great as when a giant dies.' 'Why do you give me this shame?' said Claudio. 'Think you I can fetch a resolution from flowery tenderness? If I must die, I will encounter darkness as a bride, ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... winged wardens of your farms, Who from the cornfields drive the insidious foe, And from your harvests keep a hundred harms; Even the blackest of them all, the crow, Renders good service as your man-at-arms, Crushing the beetle in his coat of mail, And crying havoc on ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... gods!—the manna has descended in showers. Go into any of the London theatres now, and the following is your bill of fare. Fairies you have by scores in flesh-coloured tights, spangles, and paucity of petticoats; gnomes of every description, from the gigantic glittering diamond beetle, to the grotesque and dusky tadpole. Epicene princes, whose taper limbs and swelling busts are well worth the scrutiny of the opera-glass—dragons vomiting at once red flames and witticisms about the fountains in Trafalgar Square—Dan O'Connell ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... strange things—leaf insects, walking-stick insects (exactly like dry twigs), and the fierce, tall, praying mantis with their mock air of meekness and devotion. Let one of the other insects stray within reach and their piety was quickly enough abandoned! One beetle about three-eighths of an inch across was oblong in shape and of pure glittering gold. His wing covers, on the other hand, were round and transparent. The effect was of a jewel under a tiny glass case. Other beetles were of red dotted ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... that of musk, and Ray and Linnaeus both supposed it to be the Cossus mentioned by Pliny, as fattened with flour by the Roman epicures for their tables. Later writers have, however, for many reasons, ascribed this to the larva of the stag beetle. ...
— The Emperor's Rout • Unknown
... animals that ranged the country. But Uya the Cunning did not sleep, but sat with a bone in his hand and scraped busily thereon with a flint, a thing no animal would do. He was the oldest man in the tribe, beetle-browed, prognathous, lank-armed; he had a beard and his cheeks were hairy, and his chest and arms were black with thick hair. And by virtue both of his strength and cunning he was master of the tribe, and his share was always ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... succession of rings, or segments, more or less hardened by the deposition of a chemical substance called chitine; these rings are arranged in three groups: the head, the thorax, or middle body, and the abdomen or hind body. In the six-footed insects, such as the bee, moth, beetle or dragon fly, four of these rings unite early in embryonic life to form the head; the thorax consists of three, as may be readily seen on slight examination, and the abdomen is composed either of ten or eleven rings. The body, then, seems ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... The Archdeacon motioned to the clerk to remove the oak cover, and the old man, with the air of an officious waiter, lifted it with a flourish, disclosing, inside the cracked font, a white pudding-basin, inside which, again, reposed a species of beetle known as a "devil's coach-horse." The Archdeacon, peering in and evidently recognizing the insect and its popular designation, and looking much shocked, exclaimed with some warmth: "Dear me! I should scarcely have expected to find that ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... once, down on the ground beside her, a tiny figure became visible, so small that Toinette had to kneel and stoop her head to see it plainly. The figure was that of an odd little man. He wore a garb of green bright and glancing as the scales of a beetle. In his mite of a hand was a cap, out of which stuck a long pointed feather. Two specks of tears stood on his cheeks and he fixed on Toinette a glance so sharp and so sad that it made her feel sorry and frightened and confused ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... crowded, but their leaves were so thick, and their boughs spread so far, that it was only here and there a sunbeam could get straight through. All the gentle creatures of a forest were there, but no creatures that killed, not even a weasel to kill the rabbits, or a beetle to eat the snails out of their striped shells. As to the butterflies, words would but wrong them if they tried to tell how gorgeous they were. The princess's delight was so great that she neither laughed nor ran, but walked about ...
— A Double Story • George MacDonald
... basis: he clung to this money like limpet to its rock; and so intense and rapid were his thoughts and schemes how to retain it a little longer, that David's apologies buzzed in his ear like the drone of a beetle. ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... beetle that he might eat had given evidence that life of any sort existed here, and it was a hungry and thirsty Tarzan who lay down to rest in the evening. He decided now to push on during the cool of the night, for he realized that even mighty Tarzan had his limitations and that where there was no ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... over together I found myself pushed against a tall man with an immense gray moustache standing out across his face like the horns of a beetle. He looked down on me from time to time, and when I apologised for crowding him his face flushed a little, and he tried to bow as well as he could in the press, and said something with a German accent which seemed to be courteous. But I was separated ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... General Osten-Sacken remained within the Russian frontier with powerful reserves, and reinforcements were pouring along in unbroken streams from the great centres of Russian military power. The fierce Cossack from the Don and the Dneister, the Tartar from the Ukraine, the beetle-browed and predatory Baschkir, with all their variety of wild uniform, and "helm and blade" glancing in the summer's sun, crowded on the great military thoroughfares, while fresh supplies of well-appointed and formidable ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... the dominant race, helpless as a child and completely at the mercy of his native neighbors, In a deliberate lazy way he set himself to torture me as a schoolboy would devote a rapturous half-hour to watching the agonies of an impaled beetle, or as a ferret in a blind burrow might glue himself comfortably to the neck of a rabbit. The burden of his conversation was that there was no escape "of no kind whatever," and that I should stay here till I died and was "thrown on to the sand." If it were possible to forejudge the conversation ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... had been a Captain Hull in command of the "Pilgrim," and that that unfortunate had just perished with his crew. The cockroach absorbed him entirely. He did not admire it less, and he made as much time over it as if that horrible insect had been a golden beetle. ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... outpost recently arrived is sitting in a hollow in a vile temper, morosely gouging hunks of tepid bully beef out of red tins. Several thousand mosquitos are assiduously eating the outpost. There is nothing to do except to kill the beasts and watch the antics of the scavenger beetle, who extracts a precarious livelihood from the sand by rolling all refuse into little balls and burying them. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 10, 1916 • Various
... fellow, quotha? I scorn that base, broking, brabbling, brawling, bastardly, bottle-nosed, beetle-browed, bean-bellied name. Why, Robin Goodfellow is this same cogging, pettifogging, crackropes, calf-skin companion. Put me and my father over to him? Old Silver-top, and you had not put me before my father, I ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... different from school! Never believe a great, broad-faced, beetle-browed Spoon, when he tells you, with a sigh that would upset a schooner, that the happiest days of a man's life are those he spends at school. Does he forget the small bed-room occupied by eighteen boys, the pump you had to run to on Sunday mornings, when decency and the usher commanded you to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 351 - Volume 13, Saturday, January 10, 1829 • Various
... bass-viol. I went up to her, and, with a perfunctory scrape of my heels, invited her to the dance. She was wearing a dress of faded rosebud pink, not full-blown rose colour; on her head quivered a striped and dejected beetle of some sort on a thick bronze pin; and altogether this lady was, if one may so express it, soaked through and through with a sort of sour ennui and inveterate lack of success. From the very commencement of the evening she had not once stirred from ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... surprise you," she asked, "to know that I could be cruel? I mean exactly what the word means. Like a little boy who tears the legs off a beetle. Can you imagine me hurting some one frightfully, whom I needn't have hurt at all? Some one who was trying in his own way ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... Stephens," said Kemp, presenting them. A swift look of wonderment passed under the reverend gentleman's beetle-brows as he bent over her hand. Could this tall, beautiful girl be the daughter of little Jules Levice? Where did she get that pure Madonna face, that regal bearing, that mobile and expressive mouth? The explanation ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... and regal, and her voice was soft and low and gentle like the Niger on a summer evening. Her dress was the wing of the sacred beetle, and whenever the wind stirred it played the dreamiest of music. Her feet were bound with golden sandals, and on her head was a crown ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... came out in another magazine. I like Harl Vincent, Ray Cummings, Arthur Burks, and Martian stories best. Interplanetary stories always agree with me. Burroughs is an excellent author. I like his Martian books. "The Beetle Horde" in the first two issues was very good. But why not give a sequel about the other and more terrible creatures in the earth whom the madman spoke of? Fourth dimensionals are sometimes good. You should have reprints by Burroughs, Cummings and Merritt. I am eagerly ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... changed a Fox into a human shape, while she was sitting as a Mistress on a royal throne, she saw a beetle creeping out of a corner, and sprang nimbly towards the well-known prey. The Gods of heaven smiled; the Great Father was ashamed, and expelled the Concubine, repudiated and disgraced, addressing her in these words: "Live on in the manner that you deserve, you, who cannot make a ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... thrushes eat young frogs? They are strangely abundant with me. But those who cultivate tadpoles must look over the breeding-pond from time to time. My whole batch was devoured one year by "devils"—the larvae of Dytiscus marginalis, the Plunger beetle. I have benefited, or at least have puzzled my neighbours also by introducing to them another sort of frog. Three years ago I bought twenty-five Hyloe, the pretty green tree species, to dwell in my Odontoglossum house and exterminate ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... A thick bed of an extremely soft white sandstone presents here, for nearly half a mile together, its front to the waves, and exhibits, under the incessant wear of the surf, many singularly grotesque combinations of form. The low precipices, undermined at the base, beetle over like the sides of stranded vessels. One of the projecting promontories we find hollowed through and through by a tall rugged archway; while the outer pier of the arch,—if pier we may term it,—worn to a skeleton, and jutting outwards with a knee-like ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... Mister Masters was presently obvious to Mr. Blagdon and to others. So the spider, sleepily watching the automatic enmeshment of the fly, may spring into alert and formidable action at seeing a powerful beetle blunder into the web and threaten by his stupid, aimless struggles to set the fly at liberty and to destroy the whole fabric spun ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... common cause for soil and light, each but one of many, the fibre being better when so grown—as is also the fibre of men. Impenetrable and therefore weedless; for no plant life can flourish there, nor animal nor bird. Scarce a beetle runs bewilderingly through those forbidding colossal solitudes. The field-sparrow will flutter away from pollen-bearing to pollen-receiving top, trying to beguile you from its nest hidden near the edge. The crow and the blackbird will ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... of mutton into steaks with a bone in each; trim them nicely, and scrape clean the end of the bone. Flatten them with a rolling pin, or a meat beetle, and lay them in oiled butter. Make a seasoning of hard-boiled yolk of egg and sweet-herbs minced small, grated bread, pepper, salt, and nutmeg; and, if you choose, a little minced onion. Take the chops out of the butter, and cover them with the seasoning. Butter some half sheets ...
— Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches • Eliza Leslie
... credence, all venomous; and that the Ear-wig most justly derives its name from entering people's ears, and either causing deafness, or, by penetrating to the brain, death itself, is with many considered an indisputable fact. The Irish have a large beetle of which strange tales are believed; they term it the Coffin-cutter, and it has some connexion with the grave and purgatory, not now, unfortunately, to be recalled ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 539 - 24 Mar 1832 • Various
... facing inward, with hands behind body. One player who carries in his hand a towel knotted at one end walks outside the circle. After walking or running a short distance, saying "Beetle is out, don't face about," he puts the beetle in the hands of someone, saying "Beetle move," at the same time taking his place. The one receiving the beetle strikes the player to his right, who, trying to avoid the beetle, runs quickly around the circle to his place. ...
— Games and Play for School Morale - A Course of Graded Games for School and Community Recreation • Various
... curiosity seems to be almost as great as your fear of the insect creation. But, really, it is quite a harmless little fellow. See!" and he pointed to a steel beetle set with a view to ornamental effect in the centre of a little rosette ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... constantly occupied the remaining eighteen (the time for divine service only excepted) in study. At Cambridge he superintended the exhibition of a Greek play of Aristophanes, among the machinery of which he introduced an artificial scarabaeus, or beetle, which flew up to the palace of Jupiter, with a man on his back, and a basket of provisions. The ignorant and astonished spectators ascribed this feat to the arts of the magician; and Dee, annoyed by these suspicions, found it expedient to withdraw to the ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... give you the dress. I have decided on it already. Sir Samuel doesn't like it on me, so I don't mind parting with it; but it's very handsome, and cost me a great deal of money when I was getting my trousseau. It is scarlet satin trimmed with green beetle-wing passementerie, ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... deepened into night. Then the LUCCIOLA, the fire-fly of Tuscany, was seen to flash its sudden sparks among the foliage, while the cicala, with its shrill note, became more clamorous than even during the noon-day heat, loving best the hour when the English beetle, with less offensive sound, ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... he huddled miserably under the sheepskin.... At last he really did get down from the stove and determined to go home, and positively went out into the yard, but came back. Praskovia Ivanovna got up. The hired man, Luka, black as a beetle, though he was a baker, put the bread into the oven. Pyetushkov went again out on to the steps and pondered. The goat that lived in the yard went up to him, and gave him a little friendly poke with his horns. Pyetushkov looked at him, and for some ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... of us, the Inns and the School Board place—as it was then—Somerset House, the big hotels, the great bridges, Westminster's outlines ahead, had an effect of grey largeness that reduced him to the proportions of a busy black beetle in a crack ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... fades the glimmering landscape on the sight, 5 And all the air a solemn stillness holds, Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight, And drowsy tinklings lull the ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... Trebizond came and sat at our table. He wore carpet socks, and over them slippers with long toes curled upperward like certain specimens one may see in Bethnal Green Museum; on his head a straw-plaited, rusty fez swathed with green silk of the colour of a sun-beetle. ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... beetle, weld, hammer; belabor, maul, buffet, smite, flagellate, whack, pelt, strike; See whip; overcome, vanquish, surpass, conquer, eclipse, subdue, checkmate, rout, excel, outdo; cheat, swindle, defraud; throb, pulsate; pulverize, comminute, bruise, bray, triturate; ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... great part of the fertile Vega, watered by the Cazin and the Xenil; from this he made frequent sallies, sweeping away the flocks and herds from the pasture, the laborer from the field, and the convoy from the road; so that it was said by the Moors that a beetle could not crawl across the Vega without being seen by Count Tendilla. The peasantry, therefore, were fain to betake themselves to watch-towers and fortified hamlets, where they shut up their cattle, garnered their corn, and sheltered their wives and children. Even ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... tubs; a set of pails and bowls; a large and small sieve; a beetle for mashing potatoes; a spade or stick for stirring butter and sugar; a bread-board, for moulding bread and making pie-crust; a coffee-stick; a clothes-stick; a mush-stick; a meat-beetle, to pound tough meat; an egg-beater; a ladle, for working butter; a bread-trough, (for a large family;) flour-buckets, ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... narrow. Though somewhat stiff and formal, the general design derives a certain impressiveness from the lofty clerestory, the immense display of windows, and a profusion of flying buttresses. The fantastic reproduction of Jacob's Ladder, with its beetle-like angels, on the W. front, should be carefully observed, and note should also be taken of the elaborately carved wooden door and the figures above and on either side (Henry VII. and SS. Peter and Paul). The two ladders ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... also unique in the production of a species of beetle remarkable for variety of colors and ornamentation of body. We had seen numerous specimens of this insect in southern India and at Singapore, some of which were an inch long, but these of Elephanta were not remarkable for size. They were hardly larger than one's little finger nail, ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... question, it was composed, and after a lapse of nearly one hundred years, the images which impressed the mind of the inspired poet came fresh at every turn. It is true the curfew did not toll, but the "lowing herd" were as distinctly audible as the beetle wheeling his droning flight. The yew tree's shade—that identical tree, to which, to a moral certainty, the poet had reference—is represented in the cut, in the corner of the inclosure, as distinctly as the smallness of the scale admitted, underneath ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... with so disagreeable an inflection that Arved was astonished. He looked around and spat at a beetle. ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... we could obey, O'er our startled heads he cast, Spider-like, a webby grey Net that held us prisoned fast; How we screamed, he only grinned, It was such a lonely place; And he said we should be pinned Safely in his beetle-case. ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... their way, and end in a general stampede for underground retreats from the region poisoned by sunshine. NEXT YEAR you will find the grass growing tall and green where the stone lay; the ground-bird builds her nest where the beetle had his hole; the dandelion and the buttercup are growing there, and the broad fans of insect-angels open and shut over their golden disks, as the rhythmic waves of blissful consciousness pulsate through their ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... breathe, and each pulsation of her heart sent cold chills of apprehension down her spine. Once she endured agonies through a mad desire to sneeze, and once her lips opened to scream as something suspiciously like the antennae of a huge beetle, and which she subsequently discovered was a "devil's coach-horse," tickled the calf of her leg. She fancied, too, that all sorts of queer shapes lurked in the passage behind her, and that innumerable unseen eyes were malignantly rejoicing in her terror. At last, the climax to her suspense ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... which will become softened in a few hours, and is then easily removed by washing with cold water. If, after the wood has dried, it becomes cracked, apply a solution of hot size with a brush, which will bind it well together and make it better for varnishing, as well as destroy the beetle which is often met with in old oak, and is ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 194, July 16, 1853 • Various
... but our service is small, according to the smallness of our strength, but with this gold we can serve people more." Afanasy reasoned thus with himself, and wished to tell it all to his brother, but Ioann had gone off out of earshot, and was now visible on the opposite mountain, no bigger than a beetle. ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... That short, thick, beetle-browed, bandy-legged, obese man, that so many fresh tourists find so charming, is a Turkish official. He and his ancestors have ruled the land since 1517. A Wilberforce in sentiment, he is the representation ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... lying on the ground, Shining, quite still, as though they had been stunned By some great violent spirit stalking through, Leaving a deep and supernatural calm Round a dead beetle upturned ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... join in the fight. He was almost within gunshot of the place before he dismounted and allowed the horse to graze. She watched his progress as he covered the last half-mile on foot. He had discarded his heavy chaps, his blue and white shirt and overalls giving him the appearance of some great striped beetle as he crawled up a shallow ravine. The figures were small from distance, even when viewed through the glasses, thus lending her a feeling of detachment and lessening the personal element and the grim reality of ...
— The Settling of the Sage • Hal G. Evarts
... of the War. Further insists on the same theme, and enlarges on the blessings of Peace. The hero Trygaeus flies to Olympus, mounted on a beetle, to bring back the goddess ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... tiny feet, and the sweep of their fine light feathery tails. Sometimes they met with some little shrewmice, running on the snow. These very tiny things are so small, they hardly look bigger than a large black beetle; they lived on the seeds of the tall weeds, which they, might be seen climbing and clinging to, yet were hardly heavy enough to weigh down the heads of the dry stalks. It is pretty to see the footprints of these small shrewmice, on the surface of the fresh fallen snow in the deep ...
— Lady Mary and her Nurse • Catharine Parr Traill
... troop; light-yellow hair has he; though a bag of red-shelled nuts were spilled on his crown, not a nut of them would fall to the ground because of the twisted, curly locks of his head. Bluish-grey as harebell is one of his eyes; as black as beetle's back is the other; the one brow black, the other white; a forked, light-yellow beard has he; a magnificent red-brown mantle about him; a round brooch adorned with gems of precious stones fastening it in his mantle over his right shoulder; a striped tunic of silk with a golden ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... a nice respectable man, too, with cows and sheep, and a kind man. He would never put anything that wasn't nice into a poem, and he would never run anyone down; but if you were the worst in the world, he'd make you the best in it; and when his wife lost her beetle, he made a song of fifteen verses ...
— Poets and Dreamers - Studies and translations from the Irish • Lady Augusta Gregory and Others
... little garden That I'm cultivating lard in, As the things I eat are rather tough and dry; For I live on toasted lizards, Prickly pears and parrot gizzards, And I'm really very fond of beetle pie. ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... the soiled base of the box, he showed them a little painted army, like a swarm of flies: in the middle sat a man on a charger, the size of a beetle, evidently the leader of the troop; he had made his horse rear, as though he wanted to leap into the skies; one hand he held on the bridle, the ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... that our incurable anthropomorphism made us imagine there were human heads inside their masks. The skin, like everything else, looked bluish, but that was on account of the light; and it was hard and shiny, quite in the beetle-wing fashion, not soft, or moist, or hairy, as a vertebrated animal's would be. Along the crest of the head was a low ridge of whitish spines running from back to front, and a much larger ridge curved on either ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... colours, and enhances his lights by deepening and consolidating his shadows, so that they come into strong contrast, and his technique gains a richer impasto. He has a marvellous faculty for keeping his colour pure, and his greens shine like a beetle's wing. A nature-lover in the highest degree, his painting of animals and plants evinces a mind which is steeped in the magic of outdoor life. A subject of which he was particularly fond, and which he seems to have undertaken for half the collectors of Europe, ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... The fireflies, too, which sparkled most vividly in the darkest places, now and then startled him, as one of uncommon brightness would stream across his path; and if, by chance, a huge blockhead of a beetle came winging his blundering flight against him, the poor varlet was ready to give up the ghost, with the idea that he was struck with a witch's token. His only resource on such occasions, either to drown thought or drive away evil spirits, was to sing psalm tunes; and the good ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... swingled again, and from the refuse called swingle-tree hurds, coarse bagging could be spun and woven. After being thoroughly cleaned the rolls or strikes were sometimes beetled, that is, pounded in a wooden trough with a great pestle-shaped beetle over and over ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... sinful world, passion and prejudice should fail to stir the mind, one learned coleopterist will fill ten attractive volumes with descriptions of species of beetles, nine-tenths of which are immediately declared by his brother beetle-mongers to be no ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... noxious. To offset this list we have given Europe the vilest of all weeds, a parasite that sucks up human blood, tobacco. Now if they catch the Colorado beetle of us, it will go far toward paying them off for the rats and the mice, and for other ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... in a very serious tone, "a small beetle of the order of Coleoptera making its way ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 21, 1919. • Various
... are—whether we worship her and observe her ordinances or find our pleasure in breaking them and mocking her who will not be mocked. But it is sad for those who have the feeling of kinship for all living things, both great and small, from the whale and the elephant down even to the harvest mouse and beetle and humble earthworm, to know that killing—killing for sport or fun—is not forbidden in her decalogue. If the killing at home is not sufficient to satisfy a man, he can transport himself to the Dark Continent and revel in the ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... was offered for sale was a beetle. "What is the special advantage of this beetle?" ...
— Tales of Giants from Brazil • Elsie Spicer Eells
... light that o'er its heaped coils brake In glittering waves. Within its small, wise glance, Flame silent slept, or quick in baleful dance Before my startled gaze quivering did wake. Fair is thy woof, soft woven, yet the snake Out-dazzles it. The beetle that doth boom Its dull life out among the tangled gloom, Lift his wide wing above thy weft, or trail His splendor there, and thy poor web will pale; Yea, the red wayside lily that doth snare The girdled bee, is softer ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier
... of the body, and between those underneath the insect there was a slight projection, with two little lumps on each side. In this projecting part there appeared to be an opening. When it was taken out of the water it stood upright on its legs and crawled a little like a large beetle, but soon died. In the water it swam with the legs, and the last joint appeared to be feathered. It will be seen that there is a great irregularity in the position of the legs of this insect. The specimen appeared to me to be in some respects imperfect; but ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... was to fence in the field securely, which is done in the following way. Trees of a straight growth and straight also in the grain are selected and cut into twelve feet lengths, and are then, by the means of a beetle and wedges, split into rails as nearly four inches square as possible. The rails are then laid in a zigzag direction, crossing each other about a foot from the end, making an angle of about six feet. Seven rails in height, crowned ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland
... some patches which Fanny thought looked like ants, with a black beetle in front of them, winding down ...
— Norman Vallery - How to Overcome Evil with Good • W.H.G. Kingston
... see him sitting quite still for a few moments on a branch of a tree in his most characteristic nuthatch attitude, on or under the branch, perched horizontally or vertically, with head or tail uppermost, but always with the body placed beetle-wise against the bark, head raised, and the straight, sharp bill pointed like an arm lifted to denote attention,—at such times he looks less like a living than a sculptured bird, a bird cut out of beautifully variegated ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... spring morning. The young wife bade him a hearty good-by, and stood in the doorway watching him, gay and debonair, riding off, on his stout black charger Beetle, in the direction of the town in which court was to be ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... broken through the soil, an enemy awaits them in the small black insect commonly known as the cabbage or turnip fly, beetle, or flea. This insect, though so small as to appear to the eye as a black dot, is very voracious and surprisingly active. He apparently feeds on the juice of the young plant, perforating it with small holes the size of a pin point. He is so active when disturbed ...
— Cabbages and Cauliflowers: How to Grow Them • James John Howard Gregory
... them mighty grand things; but I have long since found out that motives of delicacy are usually the excuse of weak minds for not speaking the plain truth to their friends. People quit the straight path from motives of delicacy, may be, to a worm or a beetle—vulgar souls, observe, I rank only as worms and beetles; they cross our path every instant in life; and those who fear to give them offence must deviate and deviate, till they get into a labyrinth, from ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... to another side of the wood pile, and brought a large beetle and an iron wedge. When he got back to his log, he started out the axe which he had left sticking into it. Then Rollo saw that the axe had made a little indentation, or cleft, in the wood. He put ...
— Rollo's Experiments • Jacob Abbott
... was the book for him. The curious physical always drew his mind to hate it or to love. In summer he would crawl into the bottom of an old hedge, among the black mould and the withered sticks, and watch a red-ended beetle creep slowly up a bit of wood till near the top, and fall suddenly down, and creep patiently again—this he would watch with curious interest and remember always. "Johnny," said his mother once, "what do you breenge into the bushes to watch ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... beetle of a car; that agile, cheerful, rut-jumping model known as a "bug"; with a home-tacked, home-painted tin cowl and tail covering the stripped chassis of a little cheap Teal car. The lone driver wore an old black raincoat with an atrocious corduroy collar, and a new plaid ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... insects can hardly be estimated at their true dreadfulness by persons unacquainted with the infamous habits of the nocturnal beetle of the tropics. Sluggish creatures in the temperate zone, in warm countries they develop the power of flying, and obstacles successfully interposed to their progress in countries where they merely crawl are ineffectual here. They had entire possession ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... JOSEPH JOHN GURNEY, one of the most distinguished and influential, it is said, of the English Quakers. He is a thick-set, beetle-browed man, with a well-to-do-in-the-world air of pious stolidity. I was grievously disappointed; for Quakerism has at times looked lovely to me, and I had expected at least a spiritual exposition of its doctrines from the brother of Mrs. Fry. But his manner was as wooden as his matter, and ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... on this principle, and they throve, and the children with them. Many of these could not read a printed page, but all of them could read the shepherd's weather-glass in sky and flower; all of them knew the worm that was harmful to the crops, the beetle that was harmless in the grass; all knew a tree by a leaf, a bird by a feather, an insect ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... on the grass, and so lay, with chin propped on both palms, staring at the thing as if it had been some strange beetle—staring till my eyes ached. But now I took it in my fingers again and prised the edges a little wider. Below the smear came a blank space, and below this were five lines ruled in ink with a number of dotted marks between them. . . . A smudged stave of music? Yes, ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... This is sometimes known as ladybug, and the bug is the little, round, reddish beetle whose wings are black dotted. It is a pretty, harmless beetle that gardeners like to see around their plants. Children repeat the rhyme when they find the beetle in the house and always release it to "fly ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... bay glistened the roof of a barn under construction. An object the size of a beetle was crawling over ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... is a very handsome beetle, about three-quarters of an inch long, cylindrical in form, of a pale brown color, with two broad, creamy white stripes running the whole length of its body; the face and under surface are hoary white, the antennae and legs gray. The females are larger than the males, and have ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 443, June 28, 1884 • Various
... letter and a specimen from a Mr. W.D. Crick, which illustrated a curious mode of dispersal of bivalve shells, namely, by closure of their valves so as to hold on to the leg of a water-beetle. This class of fact had a special charm for him, and he wrote to 'Nature,' describing the ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... these mansions of misery, his ears were invaded with a hoarse and dreadful voice, exclaiming, "You, Bess Beetle, score a couple of fresh eggs, a pennyworth of butter, and half a pint of mountain to the king; and stop credit till the bill is paid:—He is now debtor for fifteen shillings and sixpence, and d—n me if I trust him one farthing more, if he was the best king in Christendom. And, d'ye hear, ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... vol. ii. p. 224., they mention "the terrific and protended jaws of the stag-beetle of Europe, the ...
— Notes and Queries, Issue No. 61, December 28, 1850 • Various
... chimed in a voice from the front seats. "We keep out of the way as much as we can; we eat every kind of troublesome worm and insect,—the cutworm, canker-worm, tent caterpillar, army-worm, rose-beetle, and the common house-fly; we ask for no wages or food or care,—and what do we get in return? Not even protection and common kindness. If we had places where we could live in safety, who could tell the amount of good we might ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... their disposal, and that all who wished to do so could at any time travel through the country without the slightest fear of molestation. For some time affairs remained in the same condition. The doctor went daily on shore with butterfly and beetle nets, tin boxes, and other paraphernalia. He was generally accompanied by a couple of bluejackets, and always took a native guide to prevent the risk of being lost in the jungle, and also because ...
— Among Malay Pirates - And Other Tales Of Adventure And Peril • G. A. Henty
... in the distance, I saw Cousin Emily crawling towards me like a black beetle with her half-shut eyes that see everything except beauty and innocence. Though I avoided her and the day was as lovely as ever, I had become conscious that the world was inhabited and that there were people who didn't whistle—or want to ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... Zura Wingate, whose early training had been free and unrestrained, being brought to order by a Japanese mother-in-law was almost too much for my gravity. It would be like a big black beetle ordering the life of a butterfly. Not without a struggle the conservative grandfather acknowledged that his system had failed. For the first time since I had known him Kishimoto San, with genuine humility, appealed for help. "Madam, my granddaughter is like new ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... spangling marble found In many a ruined shrine that stands Half seen above the Libyan sands. The walls were richly sculptured o'er, And charactered with that dark lore Of times before the Flood, whose key Was lost in the "Universal Sea."— While on the roof was pictured bright The Theban beetle as he shines, When the Nile's mighty flow declines And forth the creature springs to light, With life regenerate in his wings:— Emblem of vain imaginings! Of a new world, when this is gone, In which the spirit still ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... mistaken. He was by nature deeply religious. His soul aspired, at times, to high things. He was sympathetic to actual pain, and had always been morbidly in awe of death. The sight of any poor, lost, and suffering man threw him into instant, profound, and melancholy pity. A dead beetle in the road, a fly caught in a spider's web, a young robin water-soaked and bedraggled, appalled him, even as a boy, and he pondered them with sad and questioning eyes long after his young companions had forgotten them. Where ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... subject: but as not being a recognised agriculturist myself, I did not wish it called by my name,—so it is only known in the markets (chiefly I have heard in Essex) as "Mummy Wheat." Talking of declined honours in nomenclature, I may here mention that a new beetle, found by Vernon Wollaston and urged by him to be named after the utterly "unsharded" me (who had however gratified that distinguished entomologist by my poem on Beetles) was respectfully refused the prefix of my name, ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... with a knotted towel, though it is perhaps more skillful and interesting when played with a "beetle," a small cylindrical sack about twenty inches long, stuffed with cotton, and resembling in general proportions a ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... occupations they cast surprised glances at Giovanni and his companion, whom they all hated as a favoured person. One of them was finishing a drinking-glass, rolling the pontil on the arms of the working-stool; another, a beetle-browed fellow, swung his long blow-pipe with its lump of glowing glass in a full circle, high in air and almost to touch the ground; another was at a 'bocca' in the low glare; all were busy, and the air was very hot and close. The men looked ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... profess to have said anything original upon the subject, but I gave a short sketch of the characteristics of the beetle, and ran over the more common species, with some allusions to the specimens in my own little collection and to the article upon "Burying Beetles" which I had contributed to the Journal ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Professor's garden to the south towards the red-roofed village of Echo Bank and the long ridge of Liberton, crowned by the square tower on which a stone dining-room table had been turned up, its four futile legs waving in the air like a beetle overset on its back. ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... written to deliver the deceased from the Great Crocodile Sui, and the Serpents Rerek and Seksek, and the Lynx with its deadly claws, and the Beetle Apshait, and the terrible Merti snake-goddesses, and a group of three particularly venomous serpents, and Aapep a personification of Set the god of evil, and the Eater of the Ass, and a series of beings who lived by slaughtering the souls of the dead. In Chapter XLII every member of the deceased ...
— The Book of the Dead • E. A. Wallis Budge
... Tiger Beetle (Cicindela campestris) constructs a hole about the size of a feather quill, disposed vertically, and of a depth, enormous for its size, of forty centimetres. It maintains itself in this tube by arching its supple body along the walls at a height sufficient for ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... calls my large gold hair-pins koppa. Perhaps in his imagination they represent horses, as do many other objects also with which he plays. Berries he now calls mamma. He has a sharp eye for insects, and calls them all putika, from the Esthonian puttukas (beetle), which he has got from ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... least, when it had extracted the plain, bare statement which it had hunted down through the many-recessed corners of her heart, that stern sense of reality let her alone. She no longer felt like a beetle impaled on a pin. She was free now to move as she liked and look unmolested at what she pleased. Honesty had no more power over her than to make sure she saw what she ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... the most of the little wind she could gain to fly on her new course. Swaying first to one side, then to the other, like a stag beetle on the wing, the fair vessel beat to windward on her zigzag flight to the south. Sometimes she was hidden from sight by the straight column of smoke that flung fantastic shadows across the water, then gracefully she shot out clear of ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac |
