"Biped" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... my last madonna, the image and eidolon of whose witching face filled my heart, to that odious little flirt, Baby Blake, a young damsel that hawked her tender affections about at the beck and call of every male biped who might for the moment be enthralled by her charms! It was like his cool impudence. And then, again, his asking me his stupid, inane questions, as if I cared what man, and how many. Lizzie Dangler or any other girl might have "in tow," as he called it. Idiot! ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... the Harn had many things to preoccupy it, but it spared one unit to watch the hole into the other world. So far, nothing much had happened. A large biped had found the opening from the other side. It had been joined by a smaller quadruped; but neither showed any indication yet of coming through. The sun was shining through the hole, a large young yellow sun, and the air was ...
— Cat and Mouse • Ralph Williams
... believe that the bat does suck the blood of cattle and horses, but denies that it will attack man! This is sheer nonsense. What difference to the vampire, whether its victim be a biped or quadruped? Is it fear of the former that would prevent it from attacking him? Perhaps it may never have seen a human being before: besides, it attacks its victim while asleep, and is rarely ever caught ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... closed the door, believing he had left the letter on the floor of Marshal Simon's room. But he had reckoned without Spoil-sport. Whether he thought it more prudent to bring up the rear, or, from respectful deference for a biped, the worthy dog had been the last to leave the room, and, being a famous carrier, as soon as he saw the letter dropped by Loony, he took it delicately between his teeth, and followed close on the heels of the servant, without the latter perceiving ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... once set out with our guns and game-bags, accompanied by the doctor's dog, Jumbo, who was almost as curious-looking as was his master—a perfect nondescript; but the doctor boasted that he had not his equal, was afraid of neither quadruped nor biped, and would face a jaguar, a bear, or a tamanoir (the large ant-eater), while he would stand to his point till he died of starvation, provided the bird chose to stay and be pointed at. We were now to ...
— The Young Llanero - A Story of War and Wild Life in Venezuela • W.H.G. Kingston
... themselves to be driven and beaten by that child, whereas they would have turned upon a dog double her size, and done their best to toss him over the chestnut trees? What is it that the brutes see below the surface of the human being to inspire them with such respect and fear of this biped, even when he or she has just crawled out of the cradle? These bulls, by-the-bye, stopped and looked at me in a way that was anything but respectful, and I delayed the study of the metaphysical question until I could ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... this comparison should by no means vex him: is not a lion as much a quadruped as a poodle?), there is certainly something winged in Litolff's execution, which has, moreover, all the superiority over Dreyschock's which a biped with ideas, imagination, and sensibility has over another biped who fancies that he possesses a surfeit ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... from these springs is in great demand and is not only sought by the human biped, but is also in favor with the equine quadruped. Every morning after the stable doors are thrown open and the horses turned loose they invariably, of their own accord, proceed to the lake, wade out into shallow water and take a bath. They lie down ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk
... some of the greatest horses of the country—horses to which the most ignorant stable-biped knew the great winners of the present traced back their descent or were close akin—and if Colonel Johnston's stable lost anything of prestige, it was not in Robin's telling of it. He was at it now as he stood at the big white gate, gazing up the road, over which ...
— Bred In The Bone - 1908 • Thomas Nelson Page
... miserably mean habitations. I don't wonder the tenants were glad to make our arrival the excuse for running off. Here are men claiming to have been worth forty thousand dollars, half in biped property, half in all other kinds, and they lived in dens such as a drayman would have disdained and a hod-carrier only accepted ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... [extinct]; snake, serpent, viper, eft; asp, aspick[obs3]. [amphibians] frog, toad. [fishes] trout, bass, tuna, muskelunge, sailfish, sardine, mackerel. [insects] ant, mosquito, bee, honeybee. [arthropods] tardigrade, spider. [classificatiopn by number of feet] biped, quadruped. flocks and herds, live stock; domestic animals, wild animals; game, ferae naturae[Lat]; beasts of the field, fowls of the air, denizens of the sea; black game, black grouse; blackcock[obs3], duck, grouse, plover, rail, snipe. [domesticated mammals] ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... the heiress of Lipscombe Park to me?—a girl who might claim alliance with the wealthiest and noblest of the land—to me, who have just that rag of property, enough to keep from open shame one miserable biped? Can a man never make a general reflection upon one of the most general of all topics, without being met by a personal allusion? I thought you had been superior, Griffith, to this dull and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... Lance was crowing like a cock, and the other boys were laughing at Robina for her utter ignorance of the white-fleshed biped she was eating. ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... goat has no protection except elevation and precipitous rocks, and to the hunter who has the energy to climb up to him he, too, is easy prey. Usually his biped enemy finds him and attacks him in precipitous mountains, where running and hiding are utterly impossible. When discovered on a ledge two feet wide leading across the face of a precipice, poor Billy has nothing to ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... blow a will that could have withstood any amount of spiritual or material attrition. She had never seen Flint so clearly as at this moment; in fact, she had never seen him at all. Formerly, he had been a conventionalized masculine biped in a blue-serge covering who paid her salary and struck attitudes that were symbols of predatory instincts rather than an indication that such instincts existed. Life had, after all, been peopled by the ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... in Mans pre-Adamite days to feed and swill, to sleep and breed, Were the Brute-bipeds only life, a perfect life ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... any persons to be found, who are so indolent as not to think continually, on one subject or another. And it is this constant thinking, more than anything else, that creates the necessity of which I am speaking. The mere drudge, whether biped or quadruped—he, I mean, whose thinking powers are scarcely alive—has little need of the relief which is ...
— The Young Mother - Management of Children in Regard to Health • William A. Alcott
... talents—that I should do this reluctantly. I, besides, am so attached to the very name of Mary, that as Johnson once said, 'If you called a dog Harvey, I should love him;' so, if you were to call a female of the same species 'Mary,' I should love it better than others (biped or quadruped) of the same sex with a different appellation. She was an extraordinary woman: she could translate Epictetus, and yet write a song worthy of ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... Lancelot saw Mary Ann he did not remember having seen her before. This time she was a biped, and wore a white cap. Besides, he hardly glanced at her. He was in a bad temper, and Beethoven was barking terribly at the intruder who stood quaking in the doorway, so that the crockery clattered on the ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... as distinct from those biped beasts we've found so far? I doubt it," Loudons replied, finishing his caffchoc and wiping his mustache with the back of his hand. "I think the whole eastern half of the country is nothing but forest like this, and the highest type of life is just ...
— The Return • H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
... and tribal distinctions they added the lofty expansion of sons of the sea. The habit of rising on the surge and falling into the trough behind it enables a biped, as soon as he lands, to take things that are flat with indifference. His head and legs have got into a state of firm confidence in one another, and all these declare—with the rest of the body performing ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... heir, a ragged ruffian some sizes smaller than himself, and of a half-starved jackass, harnessed together to the plow he was holding; occasionally the team was composed of the quadruped and a tattered and fierce-looking female biped, a more terrible object than even the man and boy and ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... grew to be institutions in the Pines, and all the bogs for miles around the site of the first experiment were hired by sanguine farmers. But the cranberry-cultivator has one enemy, which is neither bird, nor worm, nor blight, but biped,—a Rat, two-legged, erect, or moderately so, talking, even, in audible and intelligible speech,—the Pine Rat, namely. Few but New Jerseymen, and of them chiefly those who dwell about the forest, have heard of this human species; it has not yet had its ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... wherever it was his interest that we should forget it, and while we admired him as a man we judged him only as a fox. We doubt whether it would have been possible, if he had been described as an open acknowledged biped in coat and trousers, to have retained our regard for him. Something or other in us, either real rightmindedness, or humbug, or hypocrisy, would have obliged us to mix more censure with our liking than most of us do in the case as it stands. It may be that the dress of the fox throws ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... upon mankind. But I do not think it at all probable that aeronautics will ever come into play as a serious modification of transport and communication—the main question here under consideration. Man is not, for example, an albatross, but a land biped, with a considerable disposition towards being made sick and giddy by unusual motions, and however he soars he must come to earth to live. We must build our picture of the future from the ground ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... so much a primeval wilderness that a big bull moose stalked almost upon their camp before discovering the presence of a strange biped. Big Bill snatched up a rifle and took a shot which sent ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... Remm's gaze to where the biped native sat hunched. The creature was bent into an ungainly position, its body crooked at incongruous angles, in such a way as to allow most of its weight to rest on a packing-box at the base of a middle angle. Its stubby feet, on the ends of thin, pipelike legs, rested against ...
— Vital Ingredient • Charles V. De Vet
... consideration, that, if man is stupid, then who is wise?) But if he is not stupid, he is monstrously ungrateful! Phenomenally ungrateful. In fact, I believe that the best definition of man is the ungrateful biped. But that is not all, that is not his worst defect; his worst defect is his perpetual moral obliquity, perpetual—from the days of the Flood to the Schleswig-Holstein period. Moral obliquity and consequently lack of good sense; for it has long been accepted ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... which would finally rest on the principle that the end sanctifies the means. However, I am not in favour of a compromise on a basis of that sort. Religion may be an excellent means of curbing and controlling the perverse, dull, and malicious creatures of the biped race; in the eyes of the friend of truth every fraus, be it ever so pia, must be rejected. It would be an odd way to promote virtue through the medium of lies and deception. The flag to which I have sworn is truth. I shall remain faithful to it everywhere, and regardless of success, ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... Gall. That after millions of years experience in the creation business—after building the archangels and the devil; after making the man in the moon and performing other wondrous miracles, the straddling six-foot biped who wears a spike-tail coat and plug- hat, a silk surcingle and sooner tie; who parts his name on the side and his hair in the middle; who sucks a cane and simpers like a school-girl struggling with her first compliment; who takes ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... is of no importance to me to know that Tierra del Fuego is inhabited, it is of vital importance to know that the spirits of the departed, and also of those still occupying for a time the moveable biped telephone which we call our body, can, and given the right conditions do, communicate with the physical unconsciousness of the man in the street. It is a fact which properly apprehended would go far to remedy some of the worst evils from ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... times in England since the poor began to speculate upon their condition. Formerly, they jogged on with as little reflection as horses: the whistling ploughman went cheek by jowl with his brother that neighed. Now the biped carries a box of phosphorus in his leather-breeches; and in the dead of night the half-illuminated beast steals his magic potion into a cleft in a barn, and half a country is grinning with new fires. Farmer Graystock said something to the touchy rustic that he did not relish, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... the Senatorial track, The crowd all undecided, as they pass, Whether to cheer the man or cheer the ass. They stop: the man to lower his feet is seen And the tired beast, withdrawing from between, Mounts, as they start again, the biped's neck, And scarce the crowd can say which one's ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... both flanks, as far as one could see, and new ones seemed constantly joining the procession. Among them were several very large bucks with superb antlers, and these seemed very little afraid of the small, quiet biped in leaf-colored rig. They often paused to gaze back with bold, fearless front, as though inclined to call a halt and face the music; but when within a hundred yards, would turn and canter leisurely away. As the herd neared the summit of the low-lying ridge, I tried to make a reasonable guess ...
— Woodcraft • George W. Sears
... slavery as immoral, or crime in itself, tell us that man was not intended for civilization, but to roam the earth as a biped brute? That he was not to raise his eyes to Heaven, or be conformed in his nobler faculties to the image of his Maker? Or will they say that the Judge of all the earth has done wrong in ordaining the means by which alone that end can be obtained? It is true that the Creator can make the wickedness ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... habitation and a body to some ingenious fancy, airy speculation, or bold metaphor: as for example, the procuring of a private peace for a citizen who is weary of the privations of war; or the establishment of a city in Cloud-Cuckoo-Land where the birds shall regulate things better than the featherless biped, man; or the restoration of the eyesight of the proverbially blind god of Wealth. The attention of the audience is at once enlisted for the semblance of a plot by which the scheme is put into execution. The design ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... it is convenient to speak of the British Lion. But Britain is no more an organism than Britain is a lion. The moment we begin to give a nation the unity and simplicity of an animal, we begin to think wildly. Because every man is a biped, fifty men are not a centipede. This has produced, for instance, the gaping absurdity of perpetually talking about "young nations" and "dying nations," as if a nation had a fixed and physical span of life. Thus people will say that ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... had been buried in their watery tomb, not forgetting that of poor Ivan, who we all thought merited an honoured place by the side of his biped brethren of valour—well, after all this had been done the skipper had the pumps rigged and the decks sluiced down to wash away ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... roof is elevated in the middle, and the windows are placed to look to the south: the entry can only admit a person to crawl in; on one side of it is placed the kitchen, and on the other the dog-kennel, but no partition separates the biped from the quadruped inhabitant. If constrained to travel in winter, or to remain at a distance from their usual homes, they build houses of snow, which afford them a tolerably comfortable temporary abode. These ...
— The Moravians in Labrador • Anonymous
... before, for never before had he heard himself so freely criticised. In addition to the not very flattering remarks "the bounders of the Fifth" had to pass on his features, Plunger had to listen to terse descriptions of himself as "that ass, Plunger," "a mixed pickle," "a queer egg," "conceited young biped," ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... intended paying me a short visit, and requested me to send a syce (groom), with a saddle-horse, to meet him at a certain place on the road. The syce, Sidhoo, was a smart, open-chested, sinewy-limbed little fellow, a perfect model of a biped racer. He could run—as is the custom in the East—alongside his horse at a pace of seven or eight miles an hour, for a length of time that would astonish the best English ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... marching-trim. Iglesias bore an umbrella, our armor against what heaven could do with assault of sun or shower. I was weaponed with a staff, should brute or biped uncourteous dispute our way. We had no impediments of "great trunk, little trunk, bandbox, and bundle." A thoughtful man hardly feels honest in his life except as a pedestrian traveller. "La propriete ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... Reddy's swinging form proved too much for the enraged animal. Doubtless he imagined that all his troubles came from that biped or monkey hanging up yonder, just within reach of his claws if he arose on his hind legs. Hence his ...
— The Outdoor Chums After Big Game - Or, Perilous Adventures in the Wilderness • Captain Quincy Allen
... and patrician Roman, and he leaps at the throat of fear in a wild defiance. "What art thou afraid of? Wherefore, like a coward, dost thou forever pip and whimper, and go cowering and trembling? Despicable biped! What is the sum-total of the worst that lies before thee? Death? Well, Death: and say the pangs of Tophet too, and all that the Devil and Man may, will or can do against thee! Hast thou not a Heart; canst thou not suffer whatsoever it be; and, ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... And by the light of this celestial fire they learnt to see those celestial and eternal bonds between man and man, as of husband to wife, of father to child, of citizen to his country, and of master to servant, without which man is but a biped without feathers, and which are in themselves, being independent of the flux of matter and time, most truly facts as they are. And since that time, whatsoever household or nation has allowed these fires to become extinguished, has sunk down again to the level ...
— Phaethon • Charles Kingsley
... my brother, if we were to be spied upon by any of our Court just now, what sort of a reverence should we get, think you? Eh, you rogue, as much as we deserve! I will tell you, good Borso, my own poor opinion of these things. A Duke who cannot be dukely in his shirt, a Pope who is but an afflicted biped between the blankets, is no Duke at all, is a Pope by toleration. There should be some such test at every crowning of our sort. Souse a Bishop in his bath before you let him warm his chair; cry 'Fire!' on the stairs of the Vatican and watch ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... seem, attach value—that he was "a rogue and a vagabond;" confessions which the Captain possibly deemed as absurd an act of "surplusage" as though he were to give a written declaration that he was a vertebrated animal and a biped. ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... confessed. This was perhaps his only weakness, and it was necessary to make him a well-padded dressing-gown. But what a servant he was, clever, zealous, indefatigable, not indiscreet, not talkative, and he might have been with reason proposed as a model for all his biped brothers in the ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... kangaroos around it, showed how scarce this essential element had become in the back country. At such small pools water becomes an object of desire and contest and, so long as it lasts, these spots in times of scarcity are invariably haunted by that omnivorous biped man, to whom both birds and quadrupeds fall an easy prey. We however during a sojourn of more than two months in the Australian wilderness had been abundantly supplied with the finest water from that extraordinary river which we had been tracing, and without which ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... strange-looking figure of the biped species, to whom, however, at the moment, I paid little attention, but of whom I shall have plenty ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... idol for a weak and kindly and easily satisfied worshipper, was to be enthroned as the queen of his affections, to be adopted as the companion of his labors! The boy, led by the commonest instinct, the mere attraction of biped to its female, which accident had favored, had thrown away the dearest possession of manhood,—liberty,—and this bauble was to be his lifelong reward! And yet not a bauble either, for a pleasing person and a gentle ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... day the objects around him, and sending off his emissaries to fetch in the plunder, or, by detection, to be handed off to prison. Pickpockets are the least faithful to each other of all known rogues, and are the most difficult of all biped animals to tame, or make any thing of in the way of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 576 - Vol. 20 No. 576., Saturday, November 17, 1832 • Various
... was the cut-up. As a piece of delicate Athenian wit he got up from his chair and waltzed down the room with a waiter. That dependent, no doubt an honest, pachydermatous, worthy, tax-paying, art-despising biped, released himself from the unequal encounter, carried his professional smile back to the dumb-waiter and dropped it down the shaft to eternal oblivion. Reeves began to make Keats turn in his grave. Mrs. Pothunter told the story of the man who met the widow on the train. Miss ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... companion and constant friend of grave philosophers and thoughtful students. By the ancient Egyptians cats were held in the highest esteem; and we learn from Diodorus Siculus, their 'lives and safeties' were tendered more dearly than those of any other animal, whether biped or quadruped. 'He who has voluntarily killed a consecrated animal,' says this writer, 'is punished with death; but if any one has even involuntarily killed a cat or an ibis, it is impossible for him to escape death: the mob drags him to it, treating him with every cruelty, and sometimes without waiting ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 419, New Series, January 10, 1852 • Various
... basis of society; he had a blind faith in the future. Man must progress in the same way as communities; these reckoned their evolutions by centuries, but man by millions of years. How could a man of to-day be compared to the biped animal of prehistoric times, though bearing visibly the traces of the animalism from which he had lately emerged? Living in fellowship with his ancestors the monkeys, the principal difference being the first babblings of speech, and the first trembling spark that began ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... exist for each, there will be no interdependence if one of the two is denoted, not by that name which expresses the correlative notion, but by one of irrelevant significance. The term 'slave,' if defined as related, not to a master, but to a man, or a biped, or anything of that sort, is not reciprocally connected with that in relation to which it is defined, for the statement is not exact. Further, if one thing is said to be correlative with another, ...
— The Categories • Aristotle
... animal prayers to Tiger Heaven had achieved a response in the shape of Raja Begum. He was to be the instrument to punish me-the audacious biped, so insulting to the entire tiger species! A furless, fangless man daring to challenge a claw-armed, sturdy-limbed tiger! The concentrated venom of all humiliated tigers-the villagers declared-had gathered ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... his teeth and bit it to the bone. Hawes yelled with pain and strove furiously to get his hand away, but Carter held it like a tiger. Hawes capered with agony and yelled again. The first to come to his relief was Mr. Eden. He was at the biped's side in a moment, and pinched his nose. Now, as his lungs were puffing like a blacksmith's bellows, his mouth flew open the moment the other breathing-hole was stopped, and Hawes ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... voice, and, although neither hoarse nor shrill, it is no more musical than the crow of the other biped, who struts about on his widely-spread toes in the yard, to which Christina Fasch has come to feed the pigs. There are five of them, pink-nosed and yellow-coated, and they keep up a grunting and snarling chorus within their wooden enclosure, each struggling to oust a neighbour from his place ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... the home habits of the male biped she gleaned from the telltale hints of the inanimate garments that passed through her nimble hands. She could even tell character and personality from deductions gathered at heel and toe. She knew, for example, that F.C. (in black ink) was an indefatigable fox trotter and she dubbed him ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... society, or sits and shudders at in one's own friends, when the victim, swelling with importance, makes confident mis-statements, draws erroneous conclusions, sums up and gives advice so fatuous that you blush to be a biped ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... up just as the sun was setting, amid a gabbling of ducks, a barking of terriers, mixed with the deep bay of two or three large heavy fox-hounds which had been lounging about in the shade, and a peal of joyous welcome from all beings, quadruped or biped, within hearing. ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... The only living biped they met in their walk was the unfortunate Harry Ap-Heather, with whom they fell in by the stepping-stones, who, seeing the girl of his heart hanging on another man's arm, and, concluding at once that they were "keeping company," ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... cat,—even the wild animals, whose vices, perchance, pale beside your own, may go to Heaven before you. The Supreme Architect is neither a Nero, nor a Stuart, nor a clown. He will recompense all who deserve recompense, be they great or small—biped or quadruped. ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... round all the neighbourhood with invitations. The halls were swept and adorned with the best suit of hangings. All the gentlemen, young and old, all the keepers and verdurers, were put in requisition to slaughter all the game, quadruped and biped, that fell in their way, the village women and children were turned loose on the blackberries, cranberries, and bilberries, and all the ladies and serving-women were called on to concoct pasties of many stories high, subtilties of wonderful curiosity, sweetmeats and comfits, cakes and marchpanes ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of atrocious falsehoods and barefaced calumnies, and a Jack-Ass, which ties cannot be easily dissolved, the affinity or similitude is perceptible to an indifferent observer in the accent, pronunciation, modulation of the voice of the biped animal, and in the braying of the quadruped. This Jack-Ass you might also behold perambulating the streets of ———, a second Judas Iscariot—a houseless, homeless, penniless, forlorn fugitive, like Old Nick or Beelzebub, seeking whom he might betray and injure in the public estimation, ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... abbeys, studying other tourists provides a pleasant way of passing many an otherwise tedious hour. Certain of the European countries furnish some interesting types—notably Britain, which producing a male biped of a lachrymose and cheerless exterior, who plods solemnly across the Continent wrapped in the plaid mantle of his own dignity, never speaking an unnecessary word to any person whatsoever. And Germany: From Germany comes a stolid gentleman, ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... to this Peasant, "Thou shalt ride with me to-day!" And Scholzke, Ploschke others call him,—heavy-footed rational biped knowing the ground there practically, every yard of it,—did, as appears, attend the King all morning; and do service, that was recognizable long years afterwards. "For always," say the Books, "when the King held review here, Ploschke failed not to make ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... one spot rather than another in a space of several score of square miles, and amongst so many and such intricate paths. The braconnier alone is infallible on these points, and curious specimens of the human biped are ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... what more remains of our PEACOCK to say, But that, homeward, triumphant, he wing'd back his way, Proclaim'd his success to the whole Biped Nation, And ...
— The Peacock and Parrot, on their Tour to Discover the Author of "The Peacock At Home" • Unknown
... Others were biped, quasi-human in form, closer in physical appearance to the colonists than to the mermen. And since none of Dalgard's people had penetrated this far to the north, nor had the mermen invaded this taboo territory until Sssuri had agreed to ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... curiosity overcame his fear. He would go a little nearer. He would have a better view of the thing before he took to flight. No matter what it was, it could do no hurt at that distance; and as to overtaking him, pah! there wasn't a creature, biped or quadruped, in all Africa that he could not fling dust ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... horses stirred doubtfully. The driver leapt to the earth to hold their heads, and they became ungovernable. One horse reared up to his full height—the titanic and terrifying height of a horse when he becomes a biped. It was just enough to alter the equilibrium; the whole coach heeled over like a ship and crashed through the fringe of bushes over the cliff. Muscari threw an arm round Ethel, who clung to him, and shouted aloud. It was for such moments ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... a two-wheeler, with a buggy top and poles for the biped horse to trot between, from Nagasaki to a fishing village over the mountains, five miles away, passing at the start through the Japanese quarter, long streets of shops, populous and busy, many diligent in light manufacturing work, and all scant in clothing—the journey continuing ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... animals. They could not know that there had come into possession of this particular pair of creatures of the sort they had occasionally eaten, a trifling thing of wood and sinew string and flint point, which was destined henceforth to make a decided change in the relative condition of the biped and quadruped hunters of the time. How could they know that something small and sharp would fly down and sting them more deeply than they had ever been stung before, that it would sting so deeply that their arteries might be cut, or their hearts pierced and that then they must lie down and die? The ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... with a fellow who peddled brooms and dustpans along the countryside. He was hung both front and back with cheap commodities—a necklace of scrubbing brushes—tins jangling against his knees. A very kitchen had become biped. A pantry had gone on pilgrimage. Except for dogs, which seemed maddened by his strange appearance, it was, he informed me, an engaging livelihood for a man who chafed indoors. Or for one of dreamy disposition the employment of a sandwich man, with billboards ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... at the rear of the control-cabin opened, and Juan Murillo, the seismologist, entered, followed by an assistant, who was not human. He was a biped, vaguely humanoid, but he had four arms and a face like a lizard's, and, except for some equipment on ...
— Ullr Uprising • Henry Beam Piper
... geese, still pouring along in their hurried flight to the south, to escape the elemental foe behind, like the rapidly succeeding detachments of some retreating army, yet not a living creature, biped or quadruped, was anywhere to be heard or seen in the forest beneath. All seemed to have instinctively shrunk away and fled, as from the presence of some impending evil, to their dens and coverts, there to await, cowering and silent, ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... coach was gone. Here followed a long Brutus-and-Cassius discourse between a shilling-buttoned-waistcoatteer of a porter and myself, which ended in my extending mercy to the suppliant coach-owners, and agreeing to accept a place for Monday. All well thus far. The biped knock of the post alighted on the door at twelve, and two letters were placed upon my German dictionary,—your own, which I at first intended to reply to viva voce, had not the second informed me of my brother's arrival in England, his short leave of absence, and his ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... for a thrush, an ortolan, a beccafico, a robin-redbreast, or any other feathered and diminutive biped. He is not so ambitious as to expect a quail. Partridges he has heard of; of one, at least, a sort of phoenix, reproduced from its own ashes, and seen from time to time before an earthquake, or other great catastrophe. As to the hare, he is well aware that it is a fabulous ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... house with my wife, I should not choose a season of the year when the bricks and planks and things were liable to be torn out of her hand, her skirts blown over her head, and she left clinging for dear life to a scaffolding pole. I know the feminine biped and, you take it from me, that is not her notion of a honeymoon. In April or May, the sun shining, the air balmy—when, after carrying up to her a load or two of bricks, and a hod or two of mortar, we could knock off work for a few minutes ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... broke in Jeekie in alarm. "If wonder, not live, if wonder, not be born, too much wonder about everywhere. Can't understand nothing, so give it up. Say, 'Right-O and devil hindermost!' Very good motto for biped in tight place. Better drown here than in City bucket shop. But no drown. Should be dead long ago, but Little Bonsa play the game, she not want to sink in stinking swamp when so near her happy home. Come out all right somehow, as from dwarf. Every cloud have silver lining, Major, ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... ourselves scientific Saturnians, if you will, fairly acquainted with such animals as now inhabit the Earth, and employed in discussing the relations they bear to a new and singular 'erect and featherless biped,' which some enterprising traveller, overcoming the difficulties of space and gravitation, has brought from that distant planet for our inspection, well preserved, may be, in a cask of rum. We should all, at once, agree upon placing him among the mammalian vertebrates; and his lower ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... had been practising up in the woods for about a week, at what the minister had failed so deplorably in, the riding of the little black mare. At first he could absolutely do nothing with her; she would not be ridden by any male biped. But finally he adopted a suggestion of quick-witted Mistress Putnam. He put on a side saddle and a skirt, and rode the animal woman fashion—and all without the least difficulty. The little mare seeming to say by her behavior, ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... its brim, with their muskets, that gallant force of revenue men steadily scoured the neighborhood; and the further they went, the worse they fared. There was not a horse standing down by a pool, with his stiff legs shut up into biped form, nor a cow staring blandly across an old rail, nor a sheep with a pectoral cough behind a hedge, nor a rabbit making rustle at the eyebrow of his hole, nor even a moot, that might either be a man or hold a man inside it, whom or which those active fellows did not circumvent ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... of Huger shall receive due attention. Which Maria did your husband go for, the biped or the quadruped? It is impossible to determine from any thing in your letter. On the subject of busts you are more whimsical than even your father; just now you had something in view; but, on the 22d of February, ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... me!" said another. "It seems too good to be true; but she has the most stupid of husbands! Ah!—Buffon has admirably described the animals, but the biped called husband—" ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... strange spectacle met his view. The pony was sitting on the ground, erect, after the manner of a biped. Its head was in the air, its hind-legs were extended horizontally, its fore-legs were waving impotently up and down'. The ant-bear had carved its way deep into the bowels of the earth, gradually but relentlessly dragging the hapless ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... have read with a feeling of thankfulness the letter of 'A Male Biped,' in this day's Colonist. The writer deserves the thanks of every good woman in the land for the bold and able manner in which he has administered a shaking to a shrewish old mischief-maker who, having failed to secure a husband herself, ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... and Guinevere had been a fish, then a helpless biped, and now suddenly, somewhere between my salad and coffee, she became an aquatic quadruped. Strangest of all, her hands were mobile, her feet useless; and when the dance was at an end, and she sank slowly to the bottom, she came to rest on the very tips of her two longest fingers; her legs ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... has been the favorite companion and constant friend of grave philosophers and thoughtful students. By the ancient Egyptians cats were held in the highest esteem; and we learn from Diodorus Siculus, their "lives and safeties" were tendered more dearly than those of any other animal, whether biped or quadruped. "He who has voluntarily killed a consecrated animal," says this writer, "is punished with death; but if any one has even involuntarily killed a cat or an ibis, it is impossible for him to escape death: the mob drags him to it, treating him with every ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... women left the table, while the entrance of the bear threw the gentlemen present into convulsions of laughter. It was too much for the human biped; he was forced to leave the room, and succumb to ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... she met with the old man, who had seen her alight from the carriage, and had asked the mischievous Victor, "Who was the small biped Richard ...
— Darkness and Daylight • Mary J. Holmes
... restore to softness or pliability. A newer edition of the same class of vehicle was covered by a canvas "'paulin." A huge stack of barley bags was piled at the far end of the corral, guarded from depredation (quadrupedal) by a barrier of wooden slats, mostly down, and by a tattered biped, very ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... hustings, prophesy whether he would turn into a rat at last, or not. She, moreover, understood the language of rats of every degree, and knew even when they said "No," that they meant "Yes,"—two monosyllables, the test of rats, which betray them all sooner or later, and transform the biped into the quadruped, who then turns tail, and runs always to the other side, from whatever side he ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... whatever. There were other times when the red Irish flared up, and he sprang back, strongly tempted to snap and snap hard. But always he reflected that master and mistress set a high valuation on the little biped. And Frank would have been a gentleman if he hadn't ...
— Frank of Freedom Hill • Samuel A. Derieux
... the day a drove of half a hundred oxen, horses, and mules, with their forage behind them, entered Kimberley they were greeted with a tumult of applause never meted out to royal pageant or conquering biped coming! A little whiskey, it was said, had been unearthed; but there was no evidence, circumstantial or oscillatory, to confirm this. Minor windfalls in the way of half-sovereigns, five pound notes, Kruger coins, and trousers buttons had also been picked up and appropriated ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... and biped animal already alluded to, actuated by an overweening desire of notoriety, and in order to catch the applause of some one, grovelling in the morasses of insignificance and vice, like himself, leaves his native obscurity, and indulges in falsehood, calumny, and defamation. I am convinced ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... the fronters of Oude and Rohilcund, was the colonel's starting-point;—and thence on St Patrick's day[6] he set forward for Hurdwar, at the head of a retinue, the members of which, both quadruped and biped, he enumerates seriatim, giving the pas to the former—a precedence perhaps well merited by steeds up to such a welter weight under the climate of India, over such a set of unredeemed and thriftless knaves ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... I wouldn't be compelled to tell you myself of the big and noble act I have done. It was my hope and desire that you, through some one else, would learn of it, and come to understand more fully what a generous and splendid biped I am. I even plotted to give this child of Stevens' a silver dollar if he would get the news to you in some one of his innocent ways. He's done it. And he couldn't have done it better—even for a dollar. Ah, here we are at the cabin. ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... whistle to the orchestra of the mocking-bird. This so-called lark is classed by most naturalists among the starlings, as are two of the blackbirds, which two he resembles in some of his habits, but not in migrating, being about as much of a continental as any other biped American. Nor is he like his cousins in changes of dress. Out of a dozen of the latter that may be brought down at a shot, you will scarcely find three exactly alike. They moult at the South, and the young pass gradually into adult plumage. The male redwing, up to his first autumn, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... the ridiculous simplicity of my emancipation. Yesterday at this hour I was a highly respectable if slightly pampered person with a shrewd sense of my own importance in the economic and social scheme; to-day I'm a mere biped—an instinct on legs, with nothing to recommend me but an amiable disposition and an ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs |
