"Crawling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... occasional cryptic smile, he did nothing to alarm either of the women. Yet his very silence and inaction were more ominous than threats. He instilled in them a crawling dread, a growing terror and uncertainty that was worse than ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... indicated in sign-language by 'the hands held out on each side, striking the air in the manner of flying.' The Bunaks (another bird tribe) are indicated by an imitation of the cry of the bird. In mentioning the Snakes, the hand imitates the crawling motion of the serpent, and the fingers pointed up behind the ear denote the Wolves. Plainly names of the totem sort are well suited to the convenience of savages, who converse much in gesture-language. Above all, the very nature of totemism shows that it took its ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... ancient people, according as the poets hold for sure, were restored by seed of ants), than it was to see the spirits languishing in different heaps through that dark valley. This one over the belly, and that over the shoulders of another was lying, and this one, crawling, was shifting himself along the dismal path. Step by step we went without speech, looking at and listening to the sick, who could not ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... fresh cocoons from the finest and firmest in the lot should be chosen. These should be strung in sets upon a thread, care being taken not to pierce the chrysalis, and the strings hung in a cool, darkened room. The moths generally emerge from the cocoons early in the morning, and will be seen crawling about over these, the males being noticeable by their smaller abdomens, more robust antennae, and by their greater activity. The moths should be placed, regardless of sex, on a table, where they will soon find their mates and couple. As soon as formed, the couples ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 492, June 6, 1885 • Various
... he lay motionless three men dropped in quick succession from the top of the city wall and hid among the low bushes, crawling noiselessly from one to another and so approaching, by degrees, the little ...
— The Master Key - An Electrical Fairy Tale • L. Frank Baum
... the open door; neither one of them saw the crawling, slinking figure, the pale, fear-stricken face, and the staring eyes which appeared in the doorway, clung there for a moment and then vanished again as noiselessly as they had come. Neither of them, had they seen, could have imagined the fearful interpretation which the ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... tones. They had noticed me, but evidently thought I was one of their own number. Divining the situation in a moment, I walked carelessly on until near the crest of the hill, where I suddenly came upon a dozen more Indians, crawling along on their hands and knees. One of them gruffly ordered me down, and I am sure I lost no time in dropping into the grass. Crawling carefully along, for I knew it would not do to stop, I still managed to keep a good way behind and off to one side. We at ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... that only the eternally damned were doomed to walk the earth, I was tempted to comment on this stricture on her departed parent, but a large cat, much scarred with fighting and named Violet, insisted at that moment on crawling into my lap, and my attention ...
— Sight Unseen • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... end and proceed to haul it in two halves under the whip-cracking of their own headman and the fatherly advice of an R.E. corporal. Looking up the Canal the fatigue party, already late for their dinners, perceive a P. & O. liner about four miles away majestically crawling south. Their only hope is now the horse-ferry, an aged flat-bottomed contrivance wound across by a squad of natives and a chain. With the assistance of a friendly military policeman, the headman of this gang is discovered some hundred of yards away lying asleep with ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... but employ the slaves they have stolen at sea, to labor in their fields. Their houses are not better than barns, and not nearly as strong; for the sides and roof are generally made only of large leaves. They are built upon posts, as in Siam. It is well to be out of the reach of the leeches, crawling on the ground. ...
— Far Off • Favell Lee Mortimer
... ignorant of hours and miles, could not tell me the extent of the forest, I determined to let him and Timoteo make their way through as best they could, crawling through the branches, to the Sun-Worshippers, and secure their help in cutting a way for the horses. After dividing the food I had, we separated. Timoteo and the Indian crept into the forest and were soon ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... fishin' down by th' brook a little while ago," answered the negro, crawling out from under what seemed to be a combined airship and watercraft. "Jack says as how yo' gived him permission t' occupy his indisputatious period of levity in endeavorin' t' extract from th' liquid element some specimens ...
— Five Thousand Miles Underground • Roy Rockwood
... eastern end of the grove. He lay for some minutes listening. A threatening silence, like the hush before a storm, permeated the wilderness. He peered out from his covert; but, owing to its location in a little hollow, he could not see far. Crawling to the nearest tree he rose to his ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey
... Anglo-Irish rulers. The Protestant bishops were chiefly agitated by the vestment controversy. 'Adam Loftus, the titular primate, to whom,' says Mr. Froude, 'sacked villages, ravished women, and famine-stricken skeletons crawling about the fields, were matters of everyday indifference, shook with terror at the mention of a surplice.' Robert Daly wrote in anguish to Cecil, in dismay at the countenance to 'Papistry,' and at his own inability ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... these pictures he saw himself well-fed, serene, healthy, felt warm, even hot! Here, after eating a summer soup, cold as ice, he lay on his back on the burning sand close to a stream or in the garden under a lime-tree.... It is hot.... His little boy and girl are crawling about near him, digging in the sand or catching ladybirds in the grass. He dozes sweetly, thinking of nothing, and feeling all over that he need not go to the office today, tomorrow, or the day after. Or, tired of lying still, he goes to the hayfield, or to the forest for mushrooms, or watches ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... whoop at the top of his voice. In the second place the street is as narrow as a narrow alley, feebly lighted, and has no sidewalks. And the rutty paving stones which stretch from housefront to housefront are crawling with people and goats and dogs and children. Finally, to add zest to the affair,there are lots of loose cows mooning about—for at this hour the cowherd brings his stock to the doors of his patrons. In an Italian city the people get their milk from a cow, instead of ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... minute. She's like Little Miss Muffett, afraid of spiders—only she climbed a stool instead of being frightened away. He glanced down at the broom on the floor where Mrs. Bullfinch had thrown it. A large hairy spider was just crawling out of the broomstraws. ...
— Jerry's Charge Account • Hazel Hutchins Wilson
... veneer off any of us and we're back into the stone age. If I had a free leg or free wing, I'd drop arsenic in every reservoir in Germany. Why, we're even prevented dropping 'coughs' on those long strings of trains we see every day, crawling far beyond the enemy's line carrying supplies from their bases to the firing line, feeding 'em up, feeding 'em up all ...
— The Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor
... snow at a likely spot, and the act saved his life. A bullet, intended for his head, was buried in the snow beyond him, and a body falling down the bank lay quite still at his feet. It was the long Sioux. Wounded mortally, he had followed Dick, nevertheless, with mortal intent, crawling, perhaps most of the time, and with his last breath he had fired what he intended ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... Gray weather and strong wind from the south-southwest. Nordahl, who is cook to-day, had to haul up some salt meat which, rolled in a sack, had been steeping for two days in the sea. As soon as he got hold of it he called out, horrified, that it was crawling with animals. He let go the sack and jumped away from it, the animals scattering round in every direction. They proved to be sandhoppers, or Amphipoda, which had eaten their way into the meat. There were pints of them, both inside and outside of the ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... rather brilliant. Babylon Hill overlooks the country for miles. There was a splendid field of fire. It was a boiling hot day. Rogers's men lay happily on the hill firing spasmodically at khaki figures crawling up the long ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... until a late hour. The incident now began to take on the nature of Helen's long-yearned-for adventure. Some of the party even grew merry in a subdued way. Then, gradually, one by one they tired and went to bed. Helen vowed she could not sleep in a place where there were bats and crawling things. Madeline fancied, however, that they all went to sleep while she lay wide-eyed, staring up at the black bulge of overhanging rock and beyond ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... down which a small river twisted and turned on its way to the sea. Though the Italian positions ran along the top of the hill slope just above us, and though less than a thousand yards away were the Austrian trenches, that valley, for many miles, was literally crawling with men and horses and guns. Indeed it was difficult to make myself believe that we were within easy range of the enemy and that at any instant a shell might fall upon that teeming hillside and burst with the crash ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... black and forbidding. The two end barrels were the bulging, lightless eyes of a non-descript monster, for which the cable chains had multiplied themselves into innumerable legs and tentacles. And this thing was crawling around within the triangle. The anchor-davits were many-headed serpents which danced on their tails, and the anchors themselves writhed and squirmed in the shape of immense hairy caterpillars, while ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... Borrodaile's fellow-citizen leaned heavily on one of the stout scrolls of ironwork which, repeated at regular intervals on each side, divided the seat into six compartments. No call for any one to notice such a man—there are so many of them in these piping times of peace and prosperity. Then, too, they go crawling about our world protected from notice, as the creatures are who take their colouring from bark or leaf or arctic snows. So these other forms of life, weather-beaten, smoke-begrimed, subdued to the hues of the dusty roads they travel, ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... hear the dreaded rattle and the sibilant hiss; rushing toward the fire, I seize the tripod and dash it to the ground, scattering the glowing embers in every direction. My fright becomes terrible, and I imagine the monsters are crawling over my body. With the frenzy of despair I rush to the door that leads out of this chamber of horrors, all the while uttering the most fearful shrieks. In a twinkling I am confronted by Indians, bearing lighted torches; taking in the situation at a glance, they enter the ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... stood in the stable, ready to issue forth on the opening of the doors. Mr. Belcher took his seat in it, in the darkness, and then the vehicle was rapidly driven to Harlem. After ten minutes of waiting, the dazzling head-light of a great train, crawling out of the city, showed down the Avenue. He unlatched the door of his cab, took his satchel in his hand, and, as the last car on the train came up to him, he leaped out, mounted the platform, and vanished in the car, closing the door behind ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... not even give a thought to picking up the scissors, but crawling up on to his feet again, he tried to scamper outside. But just at that very moment Pao-ch'ai and the rest of the young ladies were dismounting from their vehicles, and the matrons and women-servants were closing them in so thoroughly on all sides that not a puff of wind or ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... locust had eaten; what the locust had left, the cankerworm had eaten; and what the cankerworm had left, the caterpillar had eaten. Whether these names are rightly rendered, or whether they mean different sorts of locusts, or the locusts in their different stages of growth, crawling at first and flying at last, matters little. What mischief they had done was plain enough. They had come up 'a nation strong and without number, whose teeth were like the teeth of a lion, and his ...
— The Good News of God • Charles Kingsley
... that this world is no abiding-place; and that, therefore, it is worse than folly to take toil and trouble to climb up a few steps in the ladder which will enable us to look down on our fellow-worms still crawling below us. There is one most important thing parents should teach their children—one most important thing children should desire—"To do their duty in that station of life in which it has pleased God to call them." Their sole motive should be love ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... get near it and try to look up to the top, you think it is a joke, and that really no one actually goes up to the top of it. You see some flies up around the top of it, and when the guide tells you the flies crawling around there are men and women, you think ...
— Peck's Bad Boy Abroad • George W. Peck
... on deck, wriggling her toes at him under a rug to simulate some strange and crawling creature of an invader, he would dare to simulate his own befoolment and quite disrupt Villa's bed with his frantic ferocious attack on the thing that he knew was only her toes. In gales of laughter, intermingled with half-genuine cries of alarm as almost his ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... waves were high, a noise like that made by a bellowing bull was noticed. The ocean and its storms play queer pranks at times, especially at night. White bursts of foam leaping over black rocks assume ghostly shape. Dark and grotesque figures appear crawling into or out of fissures, or hiding behind rocks. Hideous and devilish, snarling and snapping, sounds issue from caverns. In darkness an uninhabited coast becomes peopled with demons who sport and scream and leap ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... things—buzzed right under my hat, and became entangled in the grass by my ear. Now we knew by experience in taking their honey that they could sting sharply if irritated, though good-tempered by nature. How he 'burred' and buzzed and droned!—till by-and-by, crawling up the back of my head, he found an open space and sailed away. Then, looking out again, there was a pair of ears in the grass not ten yards distant: a rabbit had come out at last. But the first delight was quickly over: the ears ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... Shatushka (he's my dear, my darling!) slapped you on the cheeks, my Lebyadkin told me. And what were you afraid of then, when you came in? Who had frightened you then? When I saw your mean face after I'd fallen down and you picked me up—it was like a worm crawling into my heart. It's not he, I thought, not he! My falcon would never have been ashamed of me before a fashionable young lady. Oh heavens! That alone kept me happy for those five years that my falcon was living somewhere ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... began again, and this time the attackers waded out into the softer ooze and flung themselves down, and then began a half-swimming, half-crawling progress behind bits of tree-fern stump, or merely pushing walls of the jellylike mud before them. The white light expanded and grew huge—but it dulled as it expanded, and presently seemed no hotter than molten steel, and later still it was no more than a dull-red ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... Sequoia sempervirens. This mountain and the mountainous country to the south bring the real forest closer to San Francisco than to any other American city. Within the last few years men have killed deer on the slopes of Tamalpais and looked down to see the cable cars crawling up the hills of San Francisco to the south. In the suburbs coyotes still stole in and robbed hen roosts by night. The people lived much out of doors. There is no time of the year, except a short part ...
— The City That Was - A Requiem of Old San Francisco • Will Irwin
... the discovery of the silent one lying by the little stream, and knew that a desire for vengeance would add swiftness to the feet of his pursuers. His own seemed weighted with lead, and he felt that he was crawling; but though he could not realize it he was still running splendidly, and with ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... arrahacounes, squirrells, etc. The clawes thrust through they let hang upon the cheeke to the full view, and some of their men there be who will weare in these holes a small greene and yellow-couloured live snake, neere half a yard in length, which crawling and lapping himself about his neck oftentymes familiarly, he suffreeth to kisse his lippes. Others weare a dead ratt tyed by the tayle, and ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... crossing the entry in two steps, found himself in a small dining-room opening directly out of the kitchen, where three tiny little children were playing, the youngest, who could not have been more than eighteen months, crawling about on the floor. Upon the ragged oilcloth which covered the table, Zilah noticed two pairs of men's gloves, one gray, the other yellow, and a heap of soiled white cravats. Upon a wooden chair, by the open door of the kitchen, was a tub full of shirts, which the young woman had doubtless been ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... constitutional, Nan," he declared. "Haven't had any exercise for this big body of mine all day. Sitting in that car has made me as cramped as a bear just crawling out of his den in ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... confinement to which he was now condemned. On being first thrust into it, he could not behold all its horror; but when his eyes got accustomed to the semi-darkness, he found himself in a dismal cell under ground, half full of water from the overflowing of the river, and teeming with numerous crawling, slimy things. A little hole, half choked with earth and stones, let in all the place possessed of light and air; and as the only air which could ever visit the place had to pass over a bed of stagnant mud ere it reached the spot, it possessed ...
— The Adventures of a Bear - And a Great Bear too • Alfred Elwes
... was raising it to his lips, when his eye fell on an object lying on the rock beside him; he thought it moved. It was a small dog, apparently in the last agony of death from thirst. Its tongue was out, its jaws dry, its limbs extended lifelessly, and a swarm of black ants were crawling about its lips and throat. Its eye moved to the bottle which Hans held in his hand. He raised it, drank, spurned the animal with his foot, and passed on. And he did not know how it was, but he thought ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... Mattock's best stock was a prospect which had its appeal. Drew tossed his haversack back to the platform and added his carbine to it. The army Colts in his belt holsters would not be much hindrance while crawling through cover, but the ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
... sandy beach as far as the entrance of the Sumpudin river. We saw many wild hogs; and on one occasion I was able to get within twenty yards of some ten of them together, among some large drift-wood. Just as I was crawling over a tree and balancing, I found myself confronted by these animals; but they were out of sight almost before I could cock my gun and fire. They were of a large size, and most of them we saw during the evening either dirty white, or white ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... far the most unwelcome of all the Singhalese assailants. The great size, too (little short of a foot in length), to which it sometimes attains, renders it formidable, and, apart from the apprehension of unpleasant consequences from a wound, one shudders at the bare idea of such a hideous creature crawling over the skin, beneath the innermost folds of ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... with numberless marine animals, sea-urchins, holothuria, or sea-slugs, crabs, and several other creatures, many of brilliant hues, which contrasted curiously with the dark mud over which they were crawling. The roots of the trees were also covered with mussels, oysters, and other Crustacea. But the most curious creature was a small fish which I had before seen, called by sailors Jumping Johnny. David called him a close-eyed ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... until he had done his duty. Eager to learn the service, I desired he would give me leave to perform the next operation of that kind; and he consenting, I undressed myself after his example, and crawling along, the ship happened to roll: this motion alarming me, I laid hold of the first thing that came within my grasp with such violence, that I overturned it, and soon found, by the smell that issued upon me, that I had unlocked a box of the most delicious perfume. It was well ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... dinner-time when Tresler saw the ranch again. He returned with the mare jaded and docile. He had recovered from the battle, while she had scarcely energy enough to put one foot before the other. She was conquered. To use Arizona's expression, when, from the doorway of the bunkhouse, he saw the mare crawling up the trail toward ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... how to make it stay up in the air," grinned Sandy. "I just said you had to make it stay up in the air. Then when the mosquitos get tired of staying up in the ambient atmosphere, they'll come crawling down the rope and fall off ...
— Boy Scouts in Northern Wilds • Archibald Lee Fletcher
... window, trickled cold shafts of moonlight that fell upon something evil that wriggled across the white and black slabs of marble from beneath the door curtain. The moonlight glistened the bronze skin of the silent, crawling thing that was a huge snake, or a giant centipede; it was even like a square-snouted, shovel-headed mugger that had crept up out of the slimy river that circled sluggishly the ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... tunnel began near the floor of the cellar, eight or nine feet underground. Its length would need to be seventy or eighty feet. Only one man could work in it at a time, and this he had to do while crawling forward with his face downward, and with such tools as pocket-knives, small hatchets, sharp pieces of wood, and a broken fire-shovel. After the opening had made some progress two men could work in it, one digging, the other carrying back the earth, for ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... guided me to the house. He was fully dressed, sound asleep and breathing heavily. As I was looking a dark shadow fell across the sleeper's face, and on glancing up I perceived, to my horror, a black something crawling on the floor. Nearer and nearer it came, until it reached the side of the bed, when I immediately recognized the evil, smirking face of my hostess. In one hand she held a lamp and in the other a horn-handled knife. Setting the lamp on the floor, ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... morning sunlight lay on the east front of the Capitol until the whole building was hushed in a grand and awful repose. How difficult it was to think of a Gashwiler creeping in and out of those enfiling columns, or crawling beneath that portico, without wondering that yon majestic figure came not down with flat of sword to smite the fat rotundity of the intruder. How difficult to think that parricidal hands have ever been lifted against the Great Mother, typified here in the graceful white chastity ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... think that you are going to have her?' chuckled Miriam to herself, when Philammon went out. 'To make a penitent of her, eh?—a nun, or a she-hermit; to set her to appease your God by crawling on all fours among the mummies for twenty years, with a chain round her neck and a clog at her ankle, fancying herself all the while the bride of the Nazarene? And you think that old Miriam is going to give her up to you for that? No, no, sir monk! Better ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... struck him he moved backward and I shot him twice through the breast, with two arrows; then I threw away the arrows and struck him on the head with my bow, knocking him senseless. After I knocked him down I took his bow and threw it a long ways off so he could not get it. He was crawling on his hands and knees and I took my war club and struck him until I killed him. After I had killed this man, I gathered up my bow and arrows, and went on after the other two. At this time they had got off their horses and were defending themselves as best they ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... every now and then, from a fried-fish or hardware shop, would come out a man in a dirty apron to take the sun and contemplate the scene, not finding in it, seemingly, anything that in any way depressed his spirit. Amongst the constant, crawling, shifting stream of passengers were seen women carrying food wrapped up in newspaper, or with bundles beneath their shawls. The faces of these women were generally either very red and coarse or of a sort of bluish-white; they wore the expression of such ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... am Al-Khizr, the Green Prophet" (upon whom be The Peace),[FN417] and so saying he brushed by the Droll and passed through the door. Now when the second lover had gone forth and escaped, the Flesher arose and donning the ram's skin set its horns upon his head and began crawling out of the closet upon all fours, hands and knees, until he stood before the husband of his beloved, and said to him, "The Peace be upon you!" "And upon you be The Peace," returned the other, "What mayst ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... and she didn't know as it would do any harm to have some of that stuff in the house. But the Doctor didn't offer the Priceless Boon for sale again. He went right from his speech into an imitation of a dog, with a tin can tied to his tail, running down Main Street and crawling under Si Hooper's store at the far end of it—an imitation, he told us, to which the Sultan was powerful partial, "him being a cruel man and delighting in torturing the poor dumb beasts which the Lord has given us to ...
— Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... summer, deeply into the Plain, up and over a rutty track which my driver will have cause to remember. An uncommonly large hawk soaring over his prey, and so near the ground that I could see the light through his ragged plumes, a hare limping through the bents, further off a crawling flock bustling after shepherd and dog, were all the living things I saw. The ground was iron, the colour of what had once been herbage a glaring brown. Of the flowers none but the hardiest had outlived the visitation of the sun. I saw rest-harrow which has a root like ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... parried, with a shrug of his heavy shoulders. "This much I know—that I am brute and man, slave and king. At times I am lower than man, who can be lower than any crawling beast; at times I am more than god, with all the world beneath me. Why? How ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... the keen edge of his knife across the withe that bound the Indian to the tree; first giving him notice, in order that he might be prepared to sustain his own weight. This done, the bee- hunter dropped on the ground, crawling away out of the light; though the brow of the hill almost immediately formed a screen to conceal his person from all near the hut. In another instant he had regained his rifle, and was descending swiftly toward the crossing at ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... about to move off, after pretending to pinch the ear of the infuriated Mr. Wragg, when he noticed a station-fly, with a big trunk on the box-seat, crawling slowly ...
— Short Cruises • W.W. Jacobs
... depositor, who had withdrawn ten thousand dollars after reading of the failure of the Darlington Trust Company, had been paid off first, and following him the line had come, crawling like black ants on the pavement. As I entered the doors, it seemed to me that the face of each man or woman in the throng stood out, separate and distinct, as though an electric search-light had passed over it; and I saw one and all, frightened, satisfied, or merely ludicrous, with a vividness ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... Sailors sprang farther into the rigging or crawled out to the end of the bowsprits; the windows of the warehouses were thrown up, the clerks and employees standing on the sills, balancing themselves by the shutters; even the skylights were burst open, men and boys crawling out edging their way along the ridge-poles of the roofs or holding to the chimneys. Every inch of standing- room was black ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... five days were dying out since they reached the temporary home of the tribe, and now that the start was made at last, how were they moving? In that long line of animals and pacing men advancing like some gigantic, elongated, crawling creature, whose home was the desert sand. Creeping patiently along, step by step, as if time were nothing, while probably the distance might prove to be a thousand miles before they reached, in the ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... down from the Amba the day before, we had met on the road all the prisoners crawling along, many of them in hand and foot chains, having in that condition been obliged to walk down the irregular and steep descent. Their appearance was enough to inspire pity in the most callous heart; many had no other covering than a small piece of rag round ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
... other houses in the serenely moral In-Place would inevitably slam their doors. The cunning of the half-breed was diabolic in its sureness. Anton Farwell could not assume responsibility for Priscilla if all Kenmore turned its back on her, and in that hour the girl would, of course, come running or crawling—never ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... night: casting her eyes down upon her person, as she thought this, they fell upon her hand; and there she distinctly saw the marks left upon her delicate skin by that iron grip to which she had been subjected! As she saw this, all the crawling horror and choking fear of the preceding evening came back thick upon her, and a feeling of faintness which she could scarcely resist: but just then her eye fell upon the crucifix, and with a sensation of self-reproach that she had so long forgotten the supports and comforts of ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... by night, Mountains made from valleys,— Bear me to the light, Flat upon your bellies By the webby window lie, Where the little flies are crawling,— Read me, margin me with scrawling, Do not ...
— Second April • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... Henry," Richard observed grimly, as he turned the handle of the car and they took their places in the little well-shaped space, "better say your prayers. I'm going to drive slowly enough but it's an awful job, this, crawling down the side of a mountain in the dark, with nothing between you and eternity but ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... any supernatural warning. Nothing disturbed the silence and solitude save the bleating of flocks and the cries of birds of prey. Arrived on the platform of Libokovo, they prepared in silence to surprise the guards, believing the castle full of them. They approached crawling, like hunters who stalk a deer. Already they had reached the gate of the enclosure, and prepared to burst it open, when lo! it opened of itself, and they beheld Chainitza standing before them, a carabine in her hand, ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - ALI PACHA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... able to clamber up, and he only hurt himself every time he attempted to escape. There was nothing for it, then, but for him to lie down and howl. He had to satisfy his hunger as best he might, by eating the stray worms and woodlice and fungi, which he found creeping, crawling, and growing round about the roots of the tree. We will leave him there for the present and return ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... world, and that they should hear them and ask them any questions they wish. After which he begins to sing a peculiar song which scarcely any one could understand. Then he either goes into the lodge by crawling under, or sits out side with the rest of the audience, and simply throws something of his wear in the lodge—his blanket or his robe or coat. And immediately the lodge begins to tremble, appearing to be full of wind. Then voices of various kinds are heard from top ...
— History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan • Andrew J. Blackbird
... the scamp?" asked Murden, crawling from his confined quarters, where he had been nearly ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... intense inner surprise, the weary body obeyed, crawling feebly beneath the sheets. She had not realized that she had lain where she had fainted, at the foot of ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... possibly because we know that men of the Dwining stamp, when they have had the control of nations, often do good simply from the dictates of superior wisdom—the wisdom of the serpent—which, no Ramorney ever did. The skill with which the crawling, paltry leech controls his fierce lord; the contempt for his power and pride shown in Dwining's adroit sneers, and above all, the ease with which the latter casts into the shade Ramorney's fancied superiority ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... foments jealousy and sows seeds of discord between the Italian states. His viceroys are elected from the cruelest, the most unjust, the most rapacious, and the most luxurious of the courtiers crawling round his throne. The College of Cardinals is bought and sold. No prince dares move a finger in his family or state without consulting the Iberian senate; still less can he levy troops for self-defense. Yet throughout Europe Spanish victories have been obtained by Italian ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... men and horses lying mangled under the hot sun of August. I smelt the stench of blood, for I had been in the muck and misery of war before and had seen the death carts coming back from the battlefield and the convoys of wounded crawling down the rutty roads—from Adrianople—with men, who had been strong and fine, now shattered, twisted and made hideous by pain. The flowers carried by those cavalry officers seemed to me like funeral ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... upon her face. Immediately a horrid hoarse voice burst from amidst the gloom of her apartment, "Begone! begone from this house!" The bed on which she lay then seemed to be agitated, and directly she perceived some person crawling on its foot. Every consideration, except present safety, was relinquished; instantaneously she sprang from the bed to the floor—with convulsed grasp, seized the candle, flew to the fire and lighted it. She gazed wildly around the room—no new object was visible. With ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... relationship to organic delirium. Knauer reports that in post-rheumatic stupors illusions are frequent—an ice bag thought to be a cannon, or a child, etc.—and there are bizarre misinterpretations of the physical condition, such as lying on glass splinters, animals crawling on the body, and so on. Such illusions are, in our experience, not found in stupor, and, on the other hand, are cardinal symptoms of delirium. Further, Knauer reports that even at the height of post-rheumatic stupor, external stimuli make ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... running headlong, and paying little heed to his steps fell into this hole, and sank in the water. Romulus supposed of course that he would be drowned there, and so turned away and went to find some other enemy. Curtius, however, succeeded in crawling out of the pond into which he had fallen; and in commemoration of the incident the pond was named Lake Curtius, which name it retained for centuries afterward, when, not only had all the water disappeared, but the place itself had been filled up, and ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... It went at full gallop— out and in, out and in. The men stood up in the carts and thrashed away at the horses with the end of the reins, and the swaying loads were hurried along the field-roads, looking like little bristling, crawling things, that have been startled and are ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... turned painfully, tearing itself away with regret from that superb spectacle for which Paris had been waiting four days, rolled back up the avenue, into Rue Montaigne, and down Boulevard Malesherbes, at an unwilling, crawling trot, to the Madeleine. There the crowd was greater, more compact. In the heavy mist, the brightly lighted windows of the church, the muffled strains of the funeral chants behind the black hangings, which were in such profusion that they concealed even ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... thought he had imbibed the smell Which the rank goat exhales, she took the hide, And made him creep into the shaggy fell; Who was well covered by that mantle wide. Him in this strange disguise she from the cell Crawling (for such was her command) did guide, Where, prisoned by a stone, in her retreat, Was hid ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... buttery bills are not wound up with a single penny of fines. He leaves the rooms of a friend in college, rather late perhaps, and after ascending an Atlas-height of stairs, and hugging himself with the anticipation of crawling instanter luxuriously to bed, finds his door broken down, his books in the coal-scuttle and grate, his papers covered with more curves than Newton or Descartes could determine, his bed in the middle of the room, and his surplice ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 530, January 21, 1832 • Various
... bullet would inflict injuries on two or more separate men, not unfrequently dealing lightly with the first and inflicting a fatal injury on the second, or vice versa. The small calibre of the bullet, moreover, allows of the neatest and most exact multiple injuries. Thus in a patient who was crawling up a kopje on all fours, the flexed middle digit of the hand was struck. The bullet entered at the base of the nail, first emerged at the distal interphalangeal flexor fold, re-entered the metacarpo-phalangeal fold, and finally emerged from the back of the hand between ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... in its happiest mood," observed Charley, "but even here under all this beauty are hidden countless serpents and crawling things, while everywhere under this fair ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... Samaritan in this case was a very profane and disreputable one, as many are in this medley world. He had a great, kindly nature, that was crawling and grovelling in all sorts of low, unseemly places, instead of growing straight up ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... something gave me a bite, and you can see the blood on my hand right now, Thad," whined Step Hen, crawling once more into view, and looking as though he could not be convinced to the contrary of his statement, just because of a ...
— The Boy Scouts in the Maine Woods - The New Test for the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... low and then take to his heels. He had caught sight of Sanders' head bobbing over the hedge that separated the road from the common, and feared that Sanders might see him. The congregation who could crane their necks sufficiently saw a black object, which they guessed to be the carter's hat, crawling along the hedge-top. For a moment it was motionless, and then it shot ahead. The rivals had seen each other. It was now a hot race. Sam'l, dissembling no longer, clattered up the common, becoming smaller and smaller to the on-lookers as he ...
— Auld Licht Idyls • J.M. Barrie
... Pietro stood up. He waved his arm, and all those strange forms which had been crawling about the floor and twisting around each other in the air, vanisht. He wiped off the sweat and tears, and drew his ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... feminine curiosity, looked at them every moment, and, no doubt, compared them with the secret unsightliness of her husband. She had squatted herself on ground, with her legs tucked under her, after the manner of tailors, and she kept moving about restlessly, saying that ants were crawling about her somewhere. Monsieur Dufour, annoyed at the presence of the polite strangers, was trying to find a comfortable position which he did not, however, succeed in doing, and the young man with the yellow hair was eating as ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... the peanut stand, and back again, not knowing whether to join in her laughter or not. He didn't see anything funny himself in it, for he had a horror of creeping, crawling things. ...
— Cricket at the Seashore • Elizabeth Westyn Timlow
... Crawling upon the slime of the earth, I do not for all that cease to observe up in the clouds the inimitable height of some heroic souls. 'Tis a great deal for me to have my judgment regular and just, if the effects ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... cannot manage a large group, or handle a progressive series of events. But in a lurid picture of the pit, in a flash-light photograph of an underground den, in a sudden vision of a heap of garbage with unspeakable creatures crawling over it, he ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... kind. I am thrice the man I was, though I limp wofully, which grieves me since it shortens the day's journey, lad. We have been already these many days and yet, as I compute, we have fully eighty miles yet to go. Alas, dear lad, how my crawling ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... be gradually advancing toward his own hammock. Whatever the creature was that made it, its method of progress was not human, but reptilian. Puzzled, suspicious, yet doubtful, Tim lifted the rear side of his net, on which no moonlight fell. Head out, he watched for the crawling thing to come close. ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... ridge and hit the rocks. I can't talk {25} about it yet! I went mad! I laughed! I cried! I howled! There wasn't an ache left in my bones. I forgot that my knees knocked from weakness and that we had not had a bite for twenty-four hours. I yelled at Old Sandy to wake the dead. He came crawling over the ledge and peeked down. "What's the matter?" says he. "Matter," I yelled. "Wake up, you old son of a gun; we are millionaires!" There, sticking right out of the rock, was the ledge where "float" ...
— The Cariboo Trail - A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia • Agnes C. Laut
... animal life of the lower lands disappeared, until at last no signs of such life remained, other than the soaring vultures overhead and the occasional serpent and crawling things under foot. The silence of the waste places was upon the traveler, brooding heavily over Him and all around the places upon which He set His foot, descending more heavily upon Him each ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... the gradual pressing together of the lobes was caused exclusively by captured insects crawling over and repeatedly irritating the sensitive filaments; and this view seemed the more probable when I learnt from Dr. Burdon Sanderson that whenever the filaments of a closed leaf are irritated, the normal electric current is disturbed. Nevertheless, such irritation is by no means necessary, for ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin
... processions, each bearing some pleasant scandal to its burial. Then there had come the dreary funeral feast, and then the days of mournful rehabilitation. Oh, that rehabilitation! There had been three years of it. Three years of exhausting struggle for a position in society, three years of crawling, and pushing, and scrambling, and climbing. There had been a dubious triumph. Then six years of respectable futility, ambiguous courtship, and palpable frustration. After all that, there was something flattering in the thought that, at forty-five, she ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... two or three of the Malays may come down to the village before morning, either to fetch valuables they may have left behind, or to see whether we are still here. They may come tonight, or they may come some time tomorrow, crawling through the plantations behind the houses. At any rate, I will wait here a day ...
— Among Malay Pirates - And Other Tales Of Adventure And Peril • G. A. Henty
... shrew-mouse of the land; but this one always lives on the ice of the sea, and whenever it sees a man it darts at him, entering the toe of his boot and crawling all over him. If the man keeps perfectly quiet, it will leave him unharmed. But if he is a coward, and lifts so much as a finger to brush it away, it instantly burrows into his flesh going directly to his ...
— A Treasury of Eskimo Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss
... reply, and the other busied himself in attempting to unlock a large and much-dented cash-box. From on deck came falsetto cries and the creak and rattle of blocks as the black crew swung up mainsail and driver. Grief watched a large cockroach crawling over the greasy paintwork. Griffiths, with an oath of irritation, carried the cash-box to the companion-steps for better light. Here, on his feet, and bending over the box, his back to his visitor, his hands shot out to the rifle that stood beside ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... standing here, peering round till my eyes ached, when I heard a rustling about fifty yards away. I looked and saw an American hog, of the sort that are common enough in these parts, coming down the glade opposite, crawling along the ground and sniffing to right and left—just as if he'd no business in life but to sniff about for nuts under the fallen leaves and all about the roots of the trees. Boars are common enough, so I gave him a glance and didn't ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... back on the whole proposition, Thea, when you were crawling along with that lantern. I couldn't get a word ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... danger, in order that they might take flight at the right moment. Towards morning, when the moon had set and they could see nothing in front of them but a dark void, they fell into a terrible fright. They fancied they were surrounded by invisible enemies, who were crawling along in the darkness, ready to fly at their throats. At the slightest noise they imagined there were enemies deliberating beneath the terrace, prior to scaling it. Yet there was nothing, nothing but darkness ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... conceivable shapes-rays, rockets, dotted lines, arrowheads, all the freakish impromptu of chaos. Next, the slope lending its aid, the channels had drained into one, and by this time a black rivulet was crawling downward to the margin. One or two readers near had risen, and now eyed me like examining magistrates. I waited for an outbreak, motionless, dazed, muttering words that did not mend the case at all. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... and imagination to image God. In the reverent study of insect and animal life we gain some hint of what we have been and what we may become—something corresponding to the grub, a burrowing thing; to the caterpillar, a crawling thing; and finally to the ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... managed to win free, crawling out near where a smaller stream joined the river. There he lay panting, face down upon the moss. And there they found him, water dripping from his bedraggled finery, the Ana stroking his muddied hair. Thrala cried out with concern and pillowed his head on her knees while Dandtan ...
— The People of the Crater • Andrew North
... heavy loads along the floors of the mine. When the passages were narrow the boys and girls had a girdle fastened round their waists, a chain was fixed to this, and passed between their legs and hooked to the carriage. Then, crawling on hands and knees through the filth and mire, they pulled these trucks as cattle would drag them, whilst their backs were bruised and wounded by knocking against ...
— Beneath the Banner • F. J. Cross
... makes me so nervous," she thought. "I feel as if I should fly, and the dark seems so horrible, as if it was full of creepy, crawling things, ...
— The Little Colonel's House Party • Annie Fellows Johnston
... glittering fish—blue, emerald, green, scarlet, orange, banded, spotted, and striped—that dart hither and thither among the rich-toned sea-weed and the variegated anemones which spread their tentacles upwards as if inviting the gazer to come down. Among these, crabs could be seen crawling with undecided motion, as if unable to make up their minds, while in out of the way crevices clams of a gigantic size were gaping in deadly quietude ready to close with a snap on any unfortunate creature that should give them ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... my! I just can't naturally stand dirt! There, you didn't get that stain off. That's tobacco juice, I guess. Go back and wash that over again." Vandover obeyed, holding the brush in one hand, crawling back along the floor upon one palm and his two knees, a pool of soapy, dirty water very cold gathered about him, soaking in through the old "blue pants" and wetting him to the skin, but he slovened through it indifferently. "Put a little more elbow grease to it," continued the burnisher's ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... are dogs, you women! You haven't a trace of fine feelings in your body. If one gives you a kick, you come crawling back again." ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... says about his smooth ways," interjected Jess. "That is just where he has made his reputation, by his easy way of crawling ...
— Two Boys and a Fortune • Matthew White, Jr.
... incomprehensible secret, which roused in him for the first time a feeling of his own inconceivable insignificance. He felt as small as an earth-worm must feel when on the grass along which it is crawling—the shadow of a vulture falls as it sweeps through the azure sky—and as the worm hides in the crack of a stone, so he sank into the snowy folds of crape and muslin which veiled the walls of that chamber. He felt as weak as if he were not a man of strong ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... then?. . . Seek a protector, choose a patron out, And like the crawling ivy round a tree That licks the bark to gain the trunk's support, Climb high by creeping ruse instead of force? No, grammercy! What! I, like all the rest Dedicate verse to bankers?—play buffoon In cringing hope to see, at last, a smile Not disapproving, on ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand
... comfortably clad sable, and grinned at by the black cat,—the innocent, the vicious, the timid and the savage, the shy and the bold, the chattering slanderer and the screaming prowler, the industrious and the peaceful, the tree-top critic and the crawling biter,—just as it is elsewhere. It makes me blush for my species when I think of it. This charming society is nearly extinct now: of the larger animals there only remain the bear, who minds his own business more thoroughly ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... bright glare of the street. The wind, keen and resinous from the wet Presidio woods, blew at their back down the short block of pavement, and buffeted them, broadside, as they waited on the corner for the slow-crawling little car. In spite of the blustering air Flora insisted on the side seat of the "dummy," and, catching her hat with one hand, pressing down her fluttering skirts with the other, she laughed, now sidelong at Harry, now out at the ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... any attention to Prophet Elias, who had been crawling like a torpid caterpillar. For some moments he had been rigidly motionless in one spot. He was leaning against the front of the vault, his ear closely pressed to the crevice at ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... rest on my bed and read the reliable items in the "Citizen," when a shell burst right outside the window in front of me. Pieces flew in, striking all round me, tearing down masses of plaster that came tumbling over me. When H. rushed in I was crawling out of the plaster, digging it out of my eyes and hair. When he picked up beside my pillow a piece as large as a saucer, I realized my narrow escape. The window-frame began to smoke, and we saw the house was on fire. H. ran for a hatchet and I for water, and we put it out. Another (shell) came crashing ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... we found numbers of large hermit-crabs, crawling, or rather running, about in whelk shells, half a dozen of them occasionally having a grand fight amongst themselves. We picked up at least twenty different sorts of gracefully shaped pieces of coral, and quantities of shells of ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... Forrest was crawling about the floor, uttering her name continually in connection with the most maudlin sentiment, and averring with many oaths that he would never rise till he had found ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... shooting arrows into the group of angry manid[-o]s within, he at the fourth movement lets fly an arrow and gets down into the western "bear's nest." After a short interval he again approaches the door, crawling forward on his hands and knees until he reaches the entrance, where he leaves a present of tobacco and is hastened through the inclosure to emerge at the northern door, where he again turns suddenly upon the angry spirits, and after making threatening movements ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... his own eyes. Thus my memories are confined to a swirl of smoke with steel caps and fierce, eager faces breaking through it, with the red gaping nostrils of horses and their pawing fore-feet as they recoiled from the hedge of steel. I see, too, a young beardless lad, an officer of dragoons, crawling on hands and knees under the scythes, and I hear his groan as one of the peasants pinned him to the ground. I see a bearded, broad-faced trooper riding a grey horse just outside the fringe of the scythes, seeking for some entrance, and screaming the while with rage. ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... black crag and tangled forest. Above the dark and often scarcely penetrable woods upon their flanks, the high, bare crowns of the mountains, white snow, and jagged rock towered upon each flank, leaving a long, winding, tortuous valley in the centre. Up this the little train was slowly crawling. ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... state,—my limbs benumbed with cold, and thinking I should never see daylight,—I suddenly came upon a hard beaten path: this inspired me with new vigour, as it indicated the close vicinity of a shanty. I soon discovered the desired haven, and crawling up the steep bank that led to it, I knocked at the door with my snow-shoes, and was ...
— Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory • John M'lean
... The action, repeated multitudinously into the obscure background, exaggerated in the foreground by magnified shadows tossing and falling on the white walls, suggested the influence of some evil stratum, some vapor subtle and diabolic, crawling ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... Carrington, as he leaned over the rail of the transport, 'Cardigan Castle,' and watched the phosphorescent waters of the Aegean foaming white through the darkness against her tall side. 'Fun!' he repeated rather grimly. 'You won't think it so funny when you find yourself crawling up a cliff with quick-firers barking at you from behind every rock, and a strand of barbed wire to cut each five yards, to say nothing of snipers socking lead at you the whole time. No, Dave, I'll lay, whatever you think, you ...
— On Land And Sea At The Dardanelles • Thomas Charles Bridges |
