"Beetle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... some one gave me and which pined away in the dining-room. Still at the same age, in order to make me go to sleep, they had to place not far from me a bottle containing a tree-frog. I knew that here was a faithful friend who would protect me against robbers. The first time that I saw a stag-beetle, I was so overcome by the beauty of its horns that the longing to possess one became an ...
— Romance of the Rabbit • Francis Jammes
... a degree. One was a pot-bellied, rascally-looking fellow, with a great beard, who looked as if he had just come out of a jail. (The caliph winked at his vizier, as much as to say, There is your portrait.) Another was a black-bearded, beetle-browed, hang-dog looking rascal. (Giaffar bowed to the caliph.) And the third was a blubber-lipped, weazen-faced skeleton of a negro. (Mesrour clapped his hand to his dagger with impatience.) In short, your highness, I may safely say, that ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... indulge in mock-heroics and cut rhetorical capers for which Nature never designed him; but these are for public consumption only, and when he is not playing to the gallery he can discuss his political opponents and their sayings and doings as dispassionately as a microscopist examines a black-beetle. Himself a good talker, Mr. Goschen encourages good talk in other people; and in old days, when the Art of Conversation was still seriously cultivated, he used to gather round his table in Portland Place a group ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... finished their hurried breakfast, Ben Tackers appeared, accompanied by two vicious looking hounds, whose red eyes and beetle brows made the boys hesitate to approach ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Rockies • Frank Gee Patchin
... shall I forget your beauteous scenery. Seated in the cool of the evening under one of the noble trees on your shore, the only sounds I heard were the soft ripple of the water, and the late warbling of the redbreast—Yes, I forget the humming beetle as it rapidly passed, and the owl calling to its mate in the distant wood. ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... was hidden from 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 with ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... till he found one of them recorded in a book, and that 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
... the wash-house, a delicate little woman with red, inflamed eyes, who sat in a small glazed closet with account books in front of her, bars of soap on shelves, balls of blue in glass bowls, and pounds of soda done up in packets; and, as she passed, she asked for her beetle and her scouring-brush, which she had left to be taken care of the last time she had done her washing there. Then, after obtaining her number, she entered ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... remember where in the blind pointless ring through which the steamer chugged and wallowed as though it were a superior sort of water beetle and the horizon a circle of its own making, he began to get sufficiently acquainted with his fellow passengers, to understand that they were most of them going abroad in the interest of unrealized estates, and abounded in ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... shortly wrest it from her grasp. But at this point in the history the Arabs experienced a severe reverse. On learning the defeat of his lieutenants, Rustam sent an army to watch the enemy, under the command of Bahman-Dsul-hadjib, or "Bahman the beetle-browed," which encamped upon the Western Euphrates at Kossen-natek, not far from the site of Kufa. At the same time, to raise the courage of the soldiers, he entrusted to this leader the sacred standard of Persia, the famous durufsh-kawani, or leathern apron of the blacksmith Kawah, ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... inerrably as these your wood children find out each other untaught, as the butterfly that has never seen his kindred knows his painted mate, passing on the wing all others by. Only when the lark shall mate with the nightingale, and the honey-bee and the clock-beetle keep house together, shall I wed another maid. Fair maybe she will not be, though fair to me. Wise maybe she will not be, though wise to me. For riches I care not, and of her kindred I have no care. All I know is that just to sit by her will be bliss, just to touch her ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... the wing-cases. The wings are transparent and very delicate. In Corixae the posterior wings, which lie under the hard and horny anterior wings, are a little shorter than the anterior wings; they are not folded up on themselves and are not so delicate and transparent as the wings of the beetle. ...
— Amateur Fish Culture • Charles Edward Walker
... enemies attacking these plants are: the flea- beetle, the cabbage-worm, the cabbage-maggot (root) and "club-root"; directions for fighting all of which will be found in the ...
— Home Vegetable Gardening • F. F. Rockwell
... resolves to get rid of Macduff, that "he may sleep in spite of thunder;" and cheers his wife on the doubtful intelligence of Banquo's taking-off with the encouragement—"Then be thou jocund: ere the bat has flown his cloistered flight; ere to black Hecate's summons the shard-born beetle has rung night's yawning peal, there shall be done—a deed of dreadful note." In Lady Macbeth's speech "Had he not resembled my father as he slept, I had done 't," there is murder and filial piety together; and in urging him to fulfil his vengeance against the defenceless ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... on her boots, located her dart gun, unscrewed the pliers from her stump, put the knife in, and was arranging her scarf so it made a sling for the maimed arm—I wondered why but had no time to waste guessing, even if I'd wanted to, for at that moment a small dull silver plane, beetle-shaped more than anything else, loomed out of the haze beyond the cracking plant and came ...
— The Night of the Long Knives • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... 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
... far as the ambulance, now gave a stifled sob as she watched it lumber, like a huge beetle, over the uneven terrain. Her arms stiffened and her hands closed into little brown fists—for she knew too well what those bumps and plunges were doing to ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... had seen it fully, Mr. Trelawny turned it over so that it rested on its back in a cavity made to hold it in the upper half of the box. The reverse was no less wonderful than the upper, being carved to resemble the under side of the beetle. It, too, had some hieroglyphic figures cut on it. Mr. Trelawny resumed his lecture as we all sat with our heads close to this ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... whose professional engagements might seem more than enough for the nervous energy of one man, and who yet finds time to print essays on the chief current subjects, from the tri-lingual inscriptions, or the Idea of the Infinite among the prehistoric Lapps, to the Colorado beetle and the grape disease in the south of France, is generally praised if not admired for the breadth of his mental range and his gigantic powers of work. Poor Theron, who has some original ideas on a subject to which he has given years of research and meditation, has been waiting ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... figured by Corda on a beetle, was doubtless developed entirely after death, with which event it had probably nothing whatever to do.[T] Sufficient, however, has been written to show that fungi have an influence on insect life, and this might be extended to other animal ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... its tight roots; nor set before us the cup of hemlock; nor bind about our temples the ruby grape of nightshade; nor count over the berries of the yew tree which guards sad places; nor think of the beetle ticking in the bed post, nor watch the wings of the death moth, nor listen to the elegy of the owl—the voice of ruins. Not these! they are the emblems of our sorrows. But the emblems of Sorrow are beautiful ...
— Bride of the Mistletoe • James Lane Allen
... enter Eden by five gates at once. Polygamy is a lack of the realization of sex; it is like a man plucking five pears in mere absence of mind. The aesthetes touched the last insane limits of language in their eulogy on lovely things. The thistledown made them weep; a burnished beetle brought them to their knees. Yet their emotion never impressed me for an instant, for this reason, that it never occurred to them to pay for their pleasure in any sort of symbolic sacrifice. Men (I felt) ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... always been just within my grasp, only to slip away again, through unforeseen circumstances, and my ill luck reminds me of a story and picture in a comic paper that the boys were chuckling over last night. It was of a well-intentioned beetle who fattened a nice green caterpillar for its family's thanksgiving dinner, and the thing went and spun itself into a cocoon ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... 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 Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... also bars and circles and splashes of various colors, dark and bright. Sometimes it dreams of wings—wings of an archangel, no less, Warburton! The next moment there seems to be an impotency to produce even beetle wings!... What a weathercock and variorum I ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... bitten her tongue. She opened her mouth wide with the pain, and I saw the beast lying across her tongue, and out of its body, which was almost bitten in two, came a hideous white-looking substance, oozing out into Norma's mouth; it was of the consistency of a crushed black-beetle just then I awoke and ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... wedges, a beetle [that is, a large wooden hammer], and a few men of my own choice, and I'll take her," he said to General Amherst. He meant to row under the stern of the ship and wedge her rudder so that she would be helpless. Whether the ...
— Once Upon A Time In Connecticut • Caroline Clifford Newton
... Alice he got the first line and a half from a book a boy at school was going to write when he had time. Besides this there were the 'Lines on a Dead Black Beetle that was poisoned'— ...
— The Story of the Treasure Seekers • E. Nesbit
... 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 ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... is hushed, save where the weak-eyed bat, With short, shrill shriek, flits by on leathern wing; Or where the beetle winds His small but ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... "A beetle that has developed the protective instinct till it looks like a splash of white on a rock. Here it is;" ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... a fly, with thin integuments, through which animal matter in solution can readily pass into the surrounding dense secretion, is more efficient in causing prolonged inflection than an insect with a thick coat, such as a beetle. The inflection of the tentacles takes place indifferently in the light and darkness; and the plant is not subject to any nocturnal ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin
... us but a day ago. They came out of the bush in millions, straight for the house. We fled. Caramba! had we remained, we should have been eaten alive. But they swept the house—Hombre! no human hands could have done so well. Every spider, every rat, beetle, flea, every plague, was instantly eaten, and within a half hour they had disappeared again, and we moved back ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... moon is high o'er the ruined tower, When the night-bird sings in her lonely bower, When beetle and cricket and bat are awake, And the will-o'-the-wisp is at play in the brake, Oh then do we gather, all frolic and glee, We gay little elfins, beneath the old tree! And brightly we hover on silvery wing, And dip our small cups in the ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... tent, according to the wise old mother's advice, given sincerely, for prudence counselled her to strike her canvas and be gone. There I should have lain, interested in the progress of a bee, the course of a beetle or a cloud, a spider's business, and the shaking of the gorse and the heather, until good health had grown out of thoughtlessness. The very sight of my father was as a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Protococcus, a common mould, a Chara, a fern, and some flowering plant; among animals we examine such things as an Amoeba, a Vorticella, and a fresh-water polype. We dissect a star-fish, an earth-worm, a snail, a squid, and a fresh-water mussel. We examine a lobster and a cray-fish, and a black beetle. We go on to a common skate, a cod-fish, a frog, a tortoise, a pigeon, and a rabbit, and that takes us about all the time we have to give. The purpose of this course is not to make skilled dissectors, but to give every student a clear and definite conception, by means of sense-images, of the characteristic ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley
... some unexpected grasshopper, some free-and-easy beetle presents itself without invitation or excuse, scampering over our white mats, to see the manner in which Chrysantheme indicates it to my righteous vengeance—merely pointing her finger at it, without another word than "Hou!" ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... taught the truths of life, and he followed the strait path with the tenacity of an insect making for its nest; he was one of those dogged young men who feign death before an obstacle and wear out everybody's patience with their own beetle-like perseverance. Thus, young as he was, he had all the republican virtue of poor peoples; he was sober, saving of his time, an enemy to pleasure. He waited. Nature had given him the immense advantage of an agreeable exterior. His calm, pure brow, the shape of his ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... 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 ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... require a great deal of exploring; and from these delightful rambles they would return laden with treasures—choice bon-bons, exotic flowers and hot- house grapes at five or six shillings a pound; quaint Japanese knick- knacks; books and pictures, and photographs of celebrated men—great beetle-browed philosophers, and men of blood and thunder; also of women still more celebrated, on and off the stage. Mr. Starbrow would have nothing sent; the whole fun of the thing, he assured Fan, was in carrying all their purchases home themselves; ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... that he had boldly asserted that there was no bad snakes on the island, Mickie replied—"That fella no bad. Only make foot big." He never missed a chance of securing a hatful of grubs, which, together with the chrysalides and the full-grown beetle (brown and glossy) were devoured after being warmed through on the ashes. When the tomahawk in the process of cutting out damaged a grub, Mickie with a leer of satisfaction would eat the wriggling insect with a feigned apology—"Me bin cut that fella." ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... 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 which they can never extricate themselves, or be extricated. My Emilie, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... many—rush round wildly, butting each other and everything in 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 ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... history Aright; give ear, endeavour to descry The groves of giant rushes, how they grew Like demons' endlong tresses we sailed through, What mountains yawned, forests to give us vent Opened, each doleful side, yet on we went Till ... may that beetle (shake your cap) attest The springing of a land-wind from the West!" —Wherefore? Ah yes, you frolic it to-day! To-morrow, and the pageant moved away Down to the poorest tent-pole, we and you Part company: no other may pursue Eastward your voyage, ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... I were gloomy enough, as we drove along facing each other in Ballyfuchsia's one 'inside-car'—a strange and fearsome vehicle, partaking of the nature of a broken-down omnibus, a hearse, and an overgrown black beetle. It holds four, or at a squeeze six, the seats being placed from stem to stern lengthwise, and the balance being so delicate that the passengers, when going uphill, are shaken into a heap at the door, which ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... gently strake, Watching the 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 still, more fair Than finest woven cloth." But ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier
... did you know that life to a genius, a god, Is naught but a farce! How well did you look with those eyes As black as a beetle's through all the ridiculous show: Ridiculous war, and ridiculous strife, and ridiculous pomp. Ridiculous dignity, riches, rituals, reasons and creeds. Ridiculous guesses at what the great Silence ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... 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 erroneously called ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 194, July 16, 1853 • Various
... long figure of the lounger propped itself upon its elbow. Curiously enough, lazy as he was, the smallest matter interested him. Had he suddenly discovered a beetle moving on the veranda he would have found food for reflection in its doings. Such was his mind. A smile stole into his indolent eyes, a lazy smile which spoke of tolerant good-humor. He turned so that his voice might carry in through the window ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... black squat beetle, vigorous for his size, Pushing tail-first by every road that's wrong The dung-ball of his dirty thoughts along His tiny sphere of grovelling sympathies— Has knocked himself full-butt, with blundering trouble, Against a mountain he can neither double Nor ever hope to scale. So like a ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... 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 scene. Rather it was as if she gazed into some ...
— The Settling of the Sage • Hal G. Evarts
... was mellowed by distance, to monotonous music. Why should he question the Sphinx of Fate, or quarrel with destinies the high gods had decreed? So had it always been, for ages and ages; so must it ever be. The beetle rends the insect, and the hawk preys on the beetle; order on order, life rises from death and carnage, and higher pleasures from lower agonies. Shall the man be better than nature? Soothing and restful flows the Nile, though underneath its placid surface finny tribes wage cruel war, and the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... 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 marble—blue-gray, buff, and chestnut, ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... at her unperceived and tangled himself in her hair. That was the limit of endurance. With one swift movement Eleanor turned off the gas, with another she pulled down her hair and released the prisoned beetle. Then she twisted up the soft coil again in the dark and went out ...
— Betty Wales Freshman • Edith K. Dunton
... ugly slug to be found under stones in summer streams, is the most tempting bait you can offer a black bass. After a time the hellgrammite comes to the surface and takes to the air as a beetle, but in that state he interests the naturalist rather than ...
— Healthful Sports for Boys • Alfred Rochefort
... head. He was much disappointed. No Sheik meant no ransom for the white girl. Now she was worthless, unless he utilized her for a feast or—a mate. The latter thought aroused him. He spat at a small beetle crawling through the dust before him. He eyed Malbihn appraisingly. These white men were peculiar. They traveled far from their own villages without women. Yet he knew they cared for women. But how much did they care for them?—that was the question ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... without further delay, to widen the hole crossways; but the blade, from so much use, had become "dull as a beetle," and my progress through the hard oaken stave was as slow as if I had been cutting through a stone. I carved away for a quarter of an hour, without making the notch the eighth part of an inch deeper; and I almost despaired of ever ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... little winged object aloft like a large aerial beetle buzzing busily through the still gray morning sky, heading straight with human intelligence in a set line, bent on destruction. The bombs could not be seen as they fell, of course, but while I gazed into the heavens another thunderous explosion ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... this is very evident in a garden, or even more in the nature of insects; of which beasts I have heard it said that the most stolid man in the longest of lives would acquire only a cursory knowledge of even one kind, as, for instance, of the horned beetle, which ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... a wren, as they walked along one night, Saw a big brown beetle on a broomstraw. Said the robin to the wren: "What a pretty, pretty sight— That big brown beetle on a broomstraw!" So they got their plates and knives, Their children and their wives, And gobbled up ...
— The Peter Patter Book of Nursery Rhymes • Leroy F. Jackson
... proclaimed that the Golden Eagle was once more in sight. At first a mere speck against the blue, she rapidly assumed shape and was soon circling above the heads of the onlookers, her engine droning steadily, as if she had been some gigantic beetle. ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... caught and transfixed by McPherson's furious glare, much as a great flopping beetle might be pierced by the sting of a wasp. Mrs. Batholommey prided herself upon her tact. That glare nerved her ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... kind of beetle or butterfly, then, that this philosopher comes down upon here from the heights of his universal science—his science of the nature of things in general, but that great Spenserian monstrosity,—that diseased product of nature, which individual human nature, in spite of ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... two girls shrank from rambling alone in streets thronged with figures that they associated with ruffianly destitution. Sunday had brought all to light, and the large handsome streets were beset with barefooted children, elf-locked women, and lounging, beetle-browed men, such as Lucy had only seen in the purlieus of Whittingtonia, in alleys looked into, but never entered by the civilized. In reality 'rich and rare' was so true that they might have walked there more secure from insult ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... it had come unbuttoned, and a scraggy neck that recalled the handle of a 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 ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... waken up and send honey-seeking amongst the crocuses, primroses, and violets, that were all peeping out from amongst last autumn's dead leaves; flies to hunt out of crevices where they had been asleep all the winter; and old Bluejacket, the watchman beetle, to wake up from his long doze; as well as Nibblenut the squirrel, Spikey the hedgehog, and ever so many more old friends and neighbours; and so, of course, he was not going to be put down by a ...
— Featherland - How the Birds lived at Greenlawn • George Manville Fenn
... does," replied Old Mother Nature. "Also he eats grubs and insects. He dearly loves a fat beetle. He likes meat when he can ...
— The Burgess Animal Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... distributed in Nature, alike among animals and plants. This is indicated by the frequency with which the word "musk" forms part of the names of animals and plants which are by no means always nearly related. We have the musk-ox, the musky mole, several species called musk-rat, the musk-duct, the musk-beetle; while among plants which have received their names from a real or supposed musky odor are, besides several that are called musk-plant, the musk-rose, the musk-hyacinth, the musk-mallow, the musk-orchid, the musk-melon, the musk-cherry, the musk-pear, the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... on the shoulders of priests by means of staves passing through rings in its sides, and was taken into the temple and deposited on a stand. Some of these arks contained, says Wilkinson (Notes to Herod. II. 58, n. 9), the elements of life and stability, and others the sacred beetle of the sun, overshadowed by the wings of two figures of the goddess Thmei. In all this we see the type of the Jewish ark. The introduction of the ark into the ceremonies of Freemasonry evidently is in reference to its loss and recovery; ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... appeared in sight All that's wings beneath the sky, Bat and swallow, wasp and fly, Gnat and sparrow, and behind Comes the crow of carrion kind; Dove and pigeon are descried, And the raven fiery-eyed, With the beetle and the crane Flying on the hurricane: See they find no resting-place, For the world's terrestrial space Is with water cover'd o'er, Soon they sink to rise no more: 'To our father let us flee!' Straight the ark-ship openeth he, And to everything that lives Kindly he admission ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... producing a particularly poetical and fantastic interpretation of Midsummer Night's Dream: in which the artistic prominence was given to Oberon and Titania, or in other words to Bruno and herself. Set in dreamy and exquisite scenery, and moving in mystical dances, the green costume, like burnished beetle-wings, expressed all the elusive individuality of an elfin queen. But when personally confronted in what was still broad daylight, a man looked ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... At my wee, small door; Some one came knocking, I'm sure - sure - sure; I listened, I opened, I looked to left and right, But naught there was a-stirring In the still dark night; Only the busy beetle Tap-tapping in the wall, Only from the forest The screech-owl's call, Only the cricket whistling While the dewdrops fall, So I know not who came knocking, At ...
— Peacock Pie, A Book of Rhymes • Walter de la Mare
... continued subdivisions of polytheism, this great sacred Word,—for so the consecrated animals were called, [Greek (transliterated): ieroi logoi,]—became multiplied, till almost every power and supposed attribute of nature had its symbol in some consecrated animal from the beetle to the hawk. Wherever the powers of nature had found a cycle for themselves, in which the powers still produced the same phenomenon during a given period, whether in the motions of the heavenly orbs, or in the smallest living organic body, there the Egyptian sages ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... are," said Peter, talking to himself as is his way when there is no one else to talk to. Just then a funny little black pollywog wriggled into sight, and while Peter was watching him, a stout-jawed water-beetle suddenly rushed from among the water grass, seized the pollywog by his tail, and dragged him down. Peter stared. Could it be that that ugly-looking bug was as dangerous an enemy to the baby Toad as Reddy Fox is to a baby Rabbit? He began to suspect so, and a little later he knew so, for there ...
— The Adventures of Old Mr. Toad • Thornton W. Burgess
... they even try to?" said he. "I am not sure. You know that according to the old saw the beetle gets used to living in dung; and these people, whether they found the dung sweet or ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... nearly a cup of cream, and beat hard at least five minutes till light and creamy; serve at once, or they will become heavy. If preferred, the potatoes may be rubbed through a hot sieve into a hot plate, or mashed with a potato beetle, but they are less light and flaky when mashed with a beetle. If cream for seasoning is not obtainable, a well-beaten egg makes a very good substitute. Use in the proportion of one egg to about five potatoes. For mashed potatoes, if all utensils and ingredients are first heated, ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... to determine whether I could not possess myself, at a distance, of the evidence which, for a time at least, I failed to find at home; but my daily engagements in the bank fixed me down to Cromarty and its neighbourhood; and I found myself somewhat in the circumstances of a tolerably lively beetle stuck on a pin, that, though able, with a little exertion, to spin round its centre, is yet wholly unable to quit it. I acquired, however, at the close of 1837, in the late Dr. John Malcolmson of Madras, a noble auxiliary, who could ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... order." He looked up and around to find the box with his eyes, and after a moment indicated it to Gerald. "There! Do you see them? The Rostopchine in pale purple, and the Grangeon in an Indian thing all incrusted with green beetle-wings, a thing for a museum. They are talking with a uniform whom I do not know. She was speaking of you this evening—Antonia, asking me what you are doing. She has great faith ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... sung; but with flat and dead voyces without spirit, which hath marred the musique: Of such a Sermon and Preacher, the Countreymans verdict did well, that said, this man may bee a great scholler, but hee wants beetle and wedges to heaw our knotted timber withall, our greene wood will not burn unlesse it be better blown; you shall sometimes see an excellent horse of shape and colour, having many of those markes Du Bartes describes in Caines supposed horse; which yet wanting mettle hath beene ...
— A Coal From The Altar, To Kindle The Holy Fire of Zeale - In a Sermon Preached at a Generall Visitation at Ipswich • Samuel Ward
... old woman, and she liv'd in a shoe, She had so many children, she didn't know what to do. She crumm'd 'em some porridge without any bread; And she borrow'd a beetle, and she knock'd 'em all o' th' head. Then out went the old woman to bespeak 'em a coffin, And when she came back ...
— Rhymes Old and New • M.E.S. Wright
... Lantee and Ragnar Thorvald enter the world of beautiful women. Immensely powerful as they are lovely, these witches control men by thought domination. Shann's victory over the beetle-like Throg and his civilized alliance with the women is told here with that sweep of imagination and brilliance of detail which render Andre Norton a primary talent among writers ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... eighteenth century will note a striking similarity here. Erman points out that the modern Egyptian even of this day holds closely to many of the practices of his remote ancestor. In particular, the efficacy of the beetle as a medicinal agent has stood the test of ages of practice. "Against all kinds of witchcraft," says an ancient formula, "a great scarabaeus beetle; cut off his head and wings, boil him; put him in oil and lay him out; then cook his head and wings, put them in snake fat, boil, and let the ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... have been borrowed from the animal kingdom, such as small birds and quadrupeds, and insects with brilliant colors and of strange forms. What formerly would have been a repulsive object (such as a great longicorn or beetle) is worn with ease by the belles of our time. The use of such objects of natural history, however, has been about confined to the decoration of head-dresses or the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various
... grabs both my hands and shakes 'em warmly for a long time and says do I think my cat can put the whole bunch on the blink?—or words to that effect. And I says it's the surest thing in the world; but why? And he says, then the sooner the better, because it's a barbarous sport and every last beetle ought to be thoroughly killed; and when they are, in case his mother don't find out the crooked work, mebbe he'll be let to raise orchids or do something useful in the world, instead of frittering his life away in the vain pursuit ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... Ireton, and not altogether what we would," said Sevier in the summing-up. "It remains now for General Gates to drive home the wedge we have entered." Then he looked me full in the eyes and asked if I thought Horatio Gates would be the man to beetle that wedge well ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... "raisin's." He was bold and strong and quick. He helped guide and superintend the work. He was the first one up on the bent, catching a pin or a brace and putting it in place. He walked the lofty and perilous plate with the great beetle in hand, put the pins in the holes, and, swinging the heavy instrument through the air, drove the pins home. He was as much at home up ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... 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
... The stag-beetle dies slowly (it was John who collected the beetles). Even on the second day its legs were supple. But the butterflies were dead. A whiff of rotten eggs had vanquished the pale clouded yellows which came pelting across the orchard and up Dods Hill and away on ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... should not indeed think of keeping a goose in a cage, that I might hang him up in the parlour for the sake of his melody, but a goose upon a common, or in a farmyard, is no bad performer; and as to insects, if the black beetle, and beetles indeed of all hues, will keep out of my way, I have no objection to any of the rest; on the contrary, in whatever key they sing, from the gnat's fine treble to the bass of the humble bee, I ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... and collecting shocking details for subsequent magic-lantern lectures on the liquor traffic; so fearful misunderstandings arose, but we gradually educated each other, and I had the best of the affair; for all I had got to teach them was that I was only a beetle and fetish hunter, and so forth, while they had to teach me a new world, and a very fascinating course of study I found it. And whatever the Coast may have to say against me—for my continual desire for hair-pins, and other pins, my intolerable ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... people and to watch what is going on; and he sat down near Bobby and cocked up his ears and wagged his tail and seemed to take a great interest in the weeding. Once in a while he would rush away to chase a butterfly or bark at a beetle that crawled through the garden, but he always came back to the boy and ...
— Mother Goose in Prose • L. Frank Baum
... nearest house when Toto saw a large beetle crossing the path and barked loudly at it. Instantly a wild clatter was heard from the houses and yards. Dorothy thought it sounded like a sudden hailstorm, and the visitors, knowing that caution was no longer necessary, hurried forward to see ...
— The Emerald City of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... vulgar will never cease to be vulgar, though the sun and moon may change their course, and "heaven and earth wax old as a garment." Perhaps, in order to please tender-hearted people, I might have been less true to nature; but if a certain beetle, of whom we have all heard, could extract filth even from pearls, if we have examples that fire has destroyed and water deluged, shall therefore pearls, fire, and water be condemned. In consequence of the remarkable catastrophe which ends my play, I may justly claim ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... silence reigns, Except when heard the beetle's hum, We'll leave the sober tinted plains, To these sweet heights again we'll come; And thou to thy soft lute shalt play A solemn vesper to ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... of courtly manners, Ah! the change from knighthood's code Since the day when oil and spanners Ousted horseflesh from the road! This I realised most fully Last week-end at Potter's Bar When a beetle-flattening bully Held me up in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, May 20, 1914 • Various
... 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
... amulets innumerable; coins of the Ptolemies, Cleopatra, and others; and jewellery of all descriptions, from the golden diadem and the royal signet down to the pottery rings and glass beads worn by the poor. As might be expected in an Egyptian collection, the scarabaeus, or sacred beetle, frequently meets the eye. Here are scarabaei in gold, cornelion, chalcedony, heliotrope, torquoise, lapis-lazuli, porphyry, terra cotta, and other materials; many of them having ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 455 - Volume 18, New Series, September 18, 1852 • Various
... designs. A certain unfrocked preacher of the Remonstrant persuasion, who, according to the fashion of the learned of that day, had translated his name out of Hendrik Sleet into Henricus Slatius, was one of his most unscrupulous instruments. Slatius, a big, swarthy, shag-eared, beetle-browed Hollander, possessed learning of no ordinary degree, a tempestuous kind of eloquence, and a habit of dealing with men; especially those of the humbler classes. He was passionate, greedy, overbearing, violent, and ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... so much of him— (If you say, "you love him"—straight "he'll not be gulled!") 45 "He that seduced me when I was a girl Thus high—had eyes like yours, or hair like yours, Brown, red, white"—as the case may be; that pleases! See how that beetle burnishes in the path! There sparkles he along the dust; and, there— 50 Your journey to ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... quartette went back to the well-lit little building, where the beetle-browed driver again chaffed the police-agents, while the Customs officer placed his rubber stamp upon the paper, scribbled his initials ...
— Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo • William Le Queux
... A hollow edifice erected for the habitation of man, rat, mouse, beetle, cockroach, fly, mosquito, flea, bacillus and microbe. House of Correction, a place of reward for political and personal service, and for the detention of offenders and appropriations. House of God, a building with a steeple and a mortgage on it. House-dog, ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... worsted that had once been scarlet, and above this comforter appeared his nose, which was a prominent aquiline. Nobody ever saw much more of the Major than his nose and his moustache. His hat came low down over his forehead, which was itself low, and a pair of beetle brows, of a dense purple-black, were faintly visible in the shadow of the brim. He never took off his hat in the presence of his fellow-men; and as he never encountered the fair sex, except in the person of the ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... the works of man arose Up from the plains; the caves reverberated The blows of restless hammers that revealed, Deep in the bowels of the fruitful hills, The iron and the faithless gold, with rays Of evil charm. And all the cliffs repeated The beetle's fall, and the unceasing leap Of waters on the paddles of the wheel Volubly busy; and with heavy strokes Upon the borders of the inviolate woods The ax was heard descending on the trees, Upon the odorous bark of mighty pines. Over the imminent upland's utmost brink The blonde ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... death is most in apprehension; And the poor beetle that we tread upon, In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great As when a ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... wasn't in my wages, and for the food as I haven't had, when I'd ought to. What do you call that?" She pointed to a plate of something on the kitchen table. "Is that a dinner for a human being, or is it a dinner for a beetle? D'you think I'd eat it, and me with money in my pocket to buy better? You want to make a walkin' skeleton of me, do you?—but I'll have it out of you, I will—There goes another dish! And here goes a sugar-basin! And here goes ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... all, alert, But somewhat cowed, There sits a stark-faced fellow, Beetle-browed, Whose black soul shrinks away From a lawyer-ridden day, And has thoughts he dare not say ...
— Songs of Action • Arthur Conan Doyle
... nurse, who never From largest beetle ran, And—conscious p'raps of pleasing caps - The housemaids, formed the van: And Bibulus the Butler, His calm brows slightly arched; (No mortal wight had ere that night Seen him with shirt unstarched;) And Bob, the shockhaired knifeboy, ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... fine butterfly found herself poised on the branch of a tree with a soaring ambition in her heart, but a blind sense of danger, also. It was a wise butterfly, by way of change. While it hesitated, a beetle crawled along and offered its services as guide. The pretty, bright thing was sane enough to accept. Do ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... and lay, sir, with your face turned up to wonder, Up to twenty million miles of stars that roll like one, Right across to God knows where, and you just huddled under Like a little beetle with no business of his own, There you'd hear—like growing grass—a funny silent sound, sir, Mixed with curious crackles in a steady undertone, Just the sound of twenty billion stars a-going round, sir, Yus, and you beneath 'em like a wise old ant, alone, Ant upon a stone, Waving of his antlers, ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... that if it caught a whiff from earth to its liking, the beetle might descend from the ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... would not have noticed it, but it was of too considerable weight to travel over his person without making its progress felt. Deterred by none of the superstitious tremors which the unaccountable peregrinations of the gold beetle would have excited in one less intrepid, he quickly thrust his hand into his pocket to close it over another hand already there, a hand which beyond a first little start to escape, lay passive and unresisting, a hand soft and delicate, yet well-muscled withal, ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... those men who are remarkable for thick, massive, and saturnine features. At a first glance he was not at all ill-looking; but, on examining his beetle brows, which met in a mass of black thick hair across his face, and on watching the dull, selfish, cruel eyes that they hung over—dead as they were to every generous emotion, and incapable of kindling even at cruelty itself—it was impossible for any ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... necklace, glittering with priceless jewels, and on his arms were massive bracelets of pure gold. A golden serpent, the symbol of royalty, gleamed from his forehead, and his golden breastplate showed the sacred beetle worked in precious stones, to protect him from evil spirits. Whenever he appeared in the streets of his capital, he was borne in the royal chair on the shoulders of eight of his courtiers, while on each side walked a great noble carrying a fan, shaped ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... walls, cling to every ledge and encumber the broken pavement of the footway. Then as we rise, the castle battlements above appear more menacing, toppling upon the rough edge of the crag, and guarding each turn of the road with jealous loopholes or beetle-browed machicolations, until at last the gateway and portcullis ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... said I; "but, Legrand, I fear you are no artist. I must wait until I see the beetle itself, if I am to form any ...
— Short-Stories • Various |
