"Snail" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... little Stuart animals and birds fill in the extra panels, such as the spotted dog who chases a little hare who is never caught, and the gaily-coloured parroquet and kingfisher, which no respectable Stuart picture would be without. The caterpillar, the ladybird, and the snail are all en evidence; and below is a real pond, covered with talc, and containing fish and ducks, the banks being made of tiny branching coral beads and tufted ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... motor turned out to be a light ambulance of a popular Detroit make. Its speeding engine was pure camouflage for its slow progress. It bubbled and steamed at the radiator cap as it pushed along at almost a snail's pace. ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... Ottoman kingdom, he avoided their camp, dexterously inclined to the left, occupied Caesarea, traversed the salt desert and the river Halys, and invested Angora; while the Sultan, immovable and ignorant in his post, compared the Tartar swiftness to the crawling of a snail. He returned on the wings of indignation to the relief of Angora; and as both generals were alike impatient for action, the plains round that city were the scene of a memorable battle, which has immortalized the glory of Timur ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... all countries many refer to insects, birds, animals, persons, actions, trades, food or children. In Chinese rhymes we have the cricket, cicada, spider, snail, firefly, ladybug and butterfly and others. Among fowls we have the bat, crow, magpie, cock, hen, duck and goose. Of animals, the dog, cow, horse, mule, donkey, camel, and mouse, are the favorites. There are also rhymes on the snake and frog, and others ...
— The Chinese Boy and Girl • Isaac Taylor Headland
... our grasp," said he, in answer to some close inquiries of Markland. "There has been a most vigorous prosecution of the works, and a more rapid absorption of capital, in consequence, than was anticipated; but, as you have clearly seen, this is far better than the snail-like progress at which affairs were moving when Mr. Lyon reached the ground. Results which will now crown our efforts in a few months, would scarcely have been reached in as ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... big news is that there is a way for you and me to throw this fellow down. Simple enough, if you are on your guard. Did you notice how Jesus handled him? He quoted Scripture to him. Scripture to the devil is just like salt on a snail. ...
— "Say Fellows—" - Fifty Practical Talks with Boys on Life's Big Issues • Wade C. Smith
... are tall and others short, some straight and others crooked, some strong, others feeble; some of us run, others walk, others snail it. But all, all have their feet upon the same level of the common earth. And America's worst enemy is he—or she—who by word or look encourages another to think otherwise. Head as high as you please; but feet always upon the common ground, never ...
— The Call of the Twentieth Century • David Starr Jordan
... large German Snail, early in the Morning; put them, shells and all, into Salt and Water, for a few Hours, till they purge themselves: then put them into fresh Salt and Water, for a few Hours more, and repeat that a third time, then ...
— The Country Housewife and Lady's Director - In the Management of a House, and the Delights and Profits of a Farm • Richard Bradley
... you want to stay with me you may and I'll give you one-third of what you raise." They decided to stay. When the crop was harvested the master did not do as he had promised. He gave them nothing. Mary slipped away, mounted the old mule "Mustang" and galloped away at a mules snail speed to Newnansville where she related what had happened to a Union captain. He gave her a letter to give to Mr. Jamison. In it he reminded him that if he didn't give Mary's family what he had promised he would be put in jail. ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Florida Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... slender, with a long grave face, spoke but seldom, but what she did say was more intelligible. Now and then a peculiar smile flitted across her features; it almost seemed as if she were highly amused at my good uncle, who had withdrawn into his silken dressing-gown like a snail into its shell, and was vainly endeavouring to push out of sight a treacherous yellow string, with which he fastened his night-jacket together, and which would keep tumbling out of his bosom yards and yards long. At length they rose to depart; ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... shallow stream or ditch running through pasture lands. Now each egg has a sort of lid, which presently opens and lets out a minute, hairy creature who swims away in search of a particular kind of water-snail—the kind called by naturalists Limnaea truncatula. If he finds a snail, he bores his way into its flesh and soon begins to grow and wax fat. Then he brings forth a family—of tiny worms quite unlike himself, little creatures called rediae, ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... a snail's pace but a few feet above the ground—literally feeling our way along through the darkness, for both moons had set, and the night was black with the clouds that are to be found only at Mars's ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... never puts thyself out. I dare be bounden, if the Queen's Grace and all her noble company were to sup in this kitchen at five o' the clock, I should come in and find never a kettle nor a pan on at the three-quarter past. If thy uncle wasn't a sloth, and thine aunt a snail, I'm not hostess of the King's Head at Colchester, thou'rt no more worth thy salt—nay, salt, forsooth! thou'rt not worth the water. Salt's one and fourpence the raser, and that's a deal too much to give for thee. Now set me the kettle on, and then ...
— The King's Daughters • Emily Sarah Holt
... was deeply weather-stained, and, nigh the turfy eaves-trough, all velvet-napped; no doubt the snail-monks founded mossy priories there. The other slope was newly shingled. On the north side, doorless and windowless, the clap-boards, innocent of paint, were yet green as the north side of lichened pines or copperless hulls of Japanese junks, becalmed. The whole base, like those ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... winged wardens of your farms, Who from the cornfields drive the insidious foe, And from your harvest keep a hundred harms; Even the blackest of them all, the crow, Renders good service as your man-at-arms, Crushing the beetle in his coat of mail, And crying havoc on the slug and snail." —FROM "THE ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph, Volume 1, Number 2, February, 1897 • anonymous
... at the tip of his finger and sliding down the air with wings flapping slowly and at the speed of an exceptionally languid snail—was a bee. ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... Weaving spiders, come not here; Hence, you long-legg'd spinners, hence; Beetles black, approach not near; Worm nor snail do no offence. ...
— A Midsummer Night's Dream • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... the surgeon and Williams the colonel chafed at the incessant delays. "The expedition goes on very much as a snail runs," writes the former to his wife; "it seems we may possibly see Crown Point this time twelve months." The Colonel was vexed because everything was out of joint in the department of transportation: wagoners mutinous for want of pay; ordnance stores, camp-kettles, and provisions left behind. ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... close frame of glass, live for months, and even years, with only the original store of air and water. In one of Ward's early experiments, a spire of grass and a fern, which sprang up in a corked bottle containing a little moist earth introduced as a bed for a snail, lived and flourished for eighteen years without a new supply of either fluid. In these boxes the plants grow till the enclosed air is exhausted of the gaseous constituents of vegetation, and till the water has yielded up the assimilable ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... every heavy heeled professor will have heaven? What! every lazy one? Every wanton and foolish professor, that will be stopped by any thing; kept back by any thing; that scarce runneth so fast heavenward as a snail creepeth on the ground? Nay, there are some professors that do not go on so fast in the way of God as a snail doth go on the wall; and yet these think that heaven and happiness is for them. But stay; there are many more that run than there be that obtain; therefore, he that ...
— The Heavenly Footman • John Bunyan
... snail. The unfavorable weather constantly throws me back, and at these baths it is impossible to command one's natural strength. A few days ago, Naegeli, a musical author and poet of considerable repute, ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826 Vol. 2 • Lady Wallace
... knew the whereabouts; and he, Elias, their predestined chief, was left behind! His fiery spirit craved to mount at once and gallop day and night till he rejoined those treasure-seekers; but the frailty of his horse precluded any such transports, and the snail-like pace of his adherents bound him down. At present he was obliged to wait for Aflatun and Faris and the baggage animals, while conscious of the fugitives receding rapidly, sucked in irresistibly to a whirlpool of living light, ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... country, himself taking one. In a very short time he overtakes the noted horse-thief. Gus was sitting in the buggy sound asleep; the lines were hanging down over the dashboard, and the old horse was marching along at a snail's pace. He was out some two miles from town, and, no doubt, had traveled at this gait all the way. He was faced about, and, assisted by the sheriff, drove back to town. He was then placed under ...
— The Twin Hells • John N. Reynolds
... as AEsop telleth in a fable that the snail did. For when Jupiter (whom the poets feign for the great god) invited all the poor worms of the earth unto a great solemn feast that it pleased him upon a time—I have forgotten upon what occasion—to prepare for them, the snail ...
— Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation - With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens • Thomas More
... upon details of adult structure, young crabs pass through a stage when to all intents and purposes they are counterparts of lobsters. Even the twisted hermit crab, which has a soft-skinned hinder part coiled to fit the curve of the snail shell used as a protection, is symmetrical and lobster-like ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... their hives very clean. If a bee dies, they turn it out; or if anything like a snail, for instance, crawled in, which would be too large for them to push out, they would completely cover ...
— Woodside - or, Look, Listen, and Learn. • Caroline Hadley
... bushes, grass,—everything that could help screen him from the keen eye of savage scouts. When he had marked his course he commenced his perilous descent. In an hour he had reached the bottom of the cliff. Dropping flat on the ground, he once more started his snail-like crawl. A stretch of swampy ground, luxuriant with rushes and saw-grass, made a part of the way easy for him, though it led through mud, and slime, and stagnant water. Frogs and turtles warming their backs ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... culture, and a time that is still far off. Their course is related to that of ordinary works as the orbit of Uranus to the orbit of Mercury. For the moment they get no justice done to them. People are at a loss how to treat them; so they leave them alone, and go their own snail's pace for themselves. Does the worm see the eagle as it ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... juncture the block in the traffic was relieved, and the cab bowled smartly on for some fifty yards when it was again halted. George, protruding from the window like a snail, was entertained by the spectacle of the pursuit. The hunt was up. Short of throwing his head up and baying, the stout young man behaved exactly as a bloodhound in similar circumstances would have conducted ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... I tell you what it is? Your head is turned right around! When royalty speaks to me, do I swell out? No! I know my place! I take no notice! But you—you are nosing but a crawling—snail! ...
— Christmas Entertainments • Alice Maude Kellogg
... ruffled by even the faintest breeze. Only a weak swirl of current from the far-off Gulf Stream pushed my hulk onward; and this, I suppose, was helped a little by that attraction of floating bodies for each other which brings chips and leaves together on the surface of even the stillest pool. But a snail goes faster than I was going; and it was only at the end of a full hour of watching that I could see—yet even then could not be quite certain about it—that my position a very little ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... made for her, large enough to hold a couple of eggs comfortably, and this was covered outside with tortoise-shell and lined with lizard-skin. From the little green frogs that hop about the meadows she selected fifty to act as maids of honour, and each of these was mounted on a snail. They had dainty saddles, and rode in dashing style with the leg thrown over the saddle-bow. A numerous bodyguard of rats, dressed like pages, ran before the snails—in short, nothing so captivating had ever been seen before. To crown all, the cap of roses, which never ...
— Old-Time Stories • Charles Perrault
... between his shoulders as he looked up—they were more than vertical—they were actually concave. The Almighty had not only stored riches immeasurable in the hills behind him—He had driven this passage Himself to help puny man to reach them, and yet the wretched road was going toward them like a snail. On the fifth night, thereafter he was back there at the tunnel again from New York—with a grim mouth and a happy eye. He had brought success with him this time and there was no sleep for him that night. He had been delayed by a wreck, it was two o'clock in the morning, and not a horse ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... other, almost indistinguishably. The tubipora of the corals connects with the serpula of the conchylia. In the mollusca the separation of organs becomes more observable; in the higher species there are rudiments of nerves, and an exponent, though scarcely distinguishable, of sensibility. In the snail, and muscle, the separation of the fluid from the solid is more marked, yet the prevalence of the carbonic principle connects these and the preceding classes, in a certain degree, with the vegetable creation. "But the insect ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... 361 when S. Hilary had returned from exile to his bishopric and to his wife and daughter. He had been living the eremitic life on the isle of Gallinaria, shaped so like a snail, off the coast of Albenga, and had nearly poisoned himself with trying to eat hellebore leaves. On reaching Poitiers, he told his old friend the Bishop, that he desired to follow the monastic life in his diocese, and obtained his cheerful consent. Some way ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... the spring And day's at the morn; Morning's at seven; The hill-side's dew-pearled; The lark's on the wing; The snail's on the thorn: God's in his heaven— All's ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... experienced man long-practiced in the art of turning out promptly for these midnight emergencies, and he was pulling on his trousers almost before the door-bell had ceased to ring, but to the anguished gaze of the detective he resembled nothing more than a languid snail with white whiskers. It seemed as if they would never ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... and the men not." From India he proceeds to the island of Lamary, the Lambri of Marco Polo; and by using the Italian term "the star transmontane," at once betrays the source of his plagiarism. His descriptions seem disguised extracts from Polo, with ridiculous exaggerations and additions; as of snail shells so large as to hold many persons. His account of the pretended varieties of the human race, as of nations of Hermaphrodites, and others equally ridiculous, which he places in separate islands of the Indian ocean, are ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... Loop," crept at a snail's pace—for that is the natural gait of the burro—through the town of Silver Plume, and pursued our leisurely journey toward the beckoning, snow-clad heights beyond. No, we did not hurry, for two reasons: First, our little four-footers would not or could not quicken their pace, urge them as we ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts: His acts being seven ages. At first the infant, Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms: And then, the whining school-boy with his satchel, And shining morning-face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to school. And then, the lover; Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad Made to his mistress' eye-brow. Then, a soldier; Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard, Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel; Seeking the bubble reputation Even in the ...
— The Art Of Poetry An Epistle To The Pisos - Q. Horatii Flacci Epistola Ad Pisones, De Arte Poetica. • Horace
... that division of the Animal Kingdom,—without recalling to my readers a Polyp or a Jelly-Fish, a Sea-Urchin or a Star-Fish. Neither can I present the structural elements of the Mollusk plan, without reminding them of an Oyster or a Clam, a Snail or a Cuttle-Fish,—or of the Articulate plan, without calling up at once the form of a Worm, a Lobster, or an Insect,—or of the Vertebrate plan, without giving it the special character of Fish, Reptile, Bird, or Mammal. Yet I insist ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... a roadside ditch or pool in springtime, take from it any bit of stick or straw which has lain undisturbed for a time. Some little worm-shaped masses of clear jelly containing specks are fastened to the stick: eggs of a small snail-like shell-fish. One of these specks magnified proves to be a crystalline sphere with an opaque mass in its centre. And while you are looking, the opaque mass begins to stir, and by-and-by slowly to turn upon its axis like a forming ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... piling which was being driven to support the steelwork. But day after day the snows continued to melt and the rain to fall. Two rivers were now boiling past the camp, one hidden deep, the other a shallow torrent which ran upon a bed of ice. The valley was rent by the sounds of the glacier's snail- like progress. ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... modern buildings. It was a remnant of old Ballarat which had survived the rage for new houses and highly ornamented terraces. Slivers had been offered money for that ricketty little shanty, but he declined to sell it, averring that as a snail grew to fit his house his house had ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... himself invisible, and change men into beasts; but these vaunts are only an advertisement. His true object is to make his account out of unhappy and troubled marriages, and the traces which he leaves behind him in his course are like the slime of a snail, or often like the ruin wrought by a hailstorm. To attain his ends he can persuade people that the box in which a lover is hidden is full of ghosts, or that he can make a corpse talk. It is at all events a good sign that poets and novelists ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... soothe him. But the Colonel clamoured to the heavens. Kennaston he qualified in various ways. And as for Dr. Jeal, he would hold him responsible—"personally, sir"—for the consequences of his dawdling in this fashion—"Damme, sir, like a damn' snail with ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... took up again the pursuit of Rokoff. Now that he was positive that the woman ahead of him was indeed Jane, and that she had again fallen into the hands of the Russian, it seemed that with all the incredible speed of his fleet and agile muscles he moved at but a snail's pace. ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... stopped to send a note to Senator Dilworthy, telling him what he had found, and that he should go at once to New York, and then hastened to the railway station. He had to wait an hour for a train, and when it did start it seemed to go at a snail's pace. ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 6. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... never view things in the same light. You are not the man of the world you should be, Walter. Men of half your merit will eclipse you, winning opulence and distinction—while you, with your common sense notions, will be plodding on at a snail's pace. You are behind the age, and a stranger to its ...
— Home Lights and Shadows • T. S. Arthur
... the frog, "but I could not help laughing to see the snail carrying his house with him ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... the door accordingly, murmuring at the cowardice of the servants; but at such a snail's pace, that it seemed he would most willingly have been anticipated by any one whom his reproaches had roused to exertion. "Cowardly blockheads!" he said at last, seizing hold of the handle of the door, but without turning it effectually round— "dare you not open a door?"—(still ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... respect for ants; but we do not go the length of some of their historians, or believe them to be, any more than ourselves, infallible. We have seen a laborious ant (magni Formica laboris) tugging a snail-shell (for some reason only known to himself) up a hill, stopping to take breath, and going cheerily to work again till he had nearly accomplished his ascent, and found himself on the very edge of its ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... Crumpetty Tree Came the Stork, the Duck, and the Owl; The Snail and the Bumblebee, The Frog and the Fimble Fowl (The Fimble Fowl, with a corkscrew leg); And all of them said, "We humbly beg We may build our homes on your lovely Hat,— Mr. Quangle Wangle, grant us that! ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... 26, 55; Bachaumont, I. 136 (Sept 7,1762). One month after the Parliament had passed a law against the Jesuits, little Jesuits in wax appeared, with a snail for a base. "By means of a thread the Jesuit was made to pop in and out from the shell. It is all the rage—here is no house without ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... by the motion of its long and strong legs, thrusting out two short, hornlike antennae over the top of its mask. It seemed to be eyeing a snail-shell on a stem above, and waiting for the snail's soft body to emerge from the citadel; when on a sudden, through the stems, it caught sight of the basking tadpole. Instantly it became motionless, and ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... again and pressed on. The valley better traveling than the canyon. It was lighter, freer of sage, and there were no rocks. Soon, out of the pale gloom shone a still paler thing, and that was the low swell of slope. Venters mounted it and his dogs walked beside him. Once upon the stone he slowed to snail pace, straining his sight to avoid the pockets and holes. Foot by foot he went up. The weird cedars, like great demons and witches chained to the rock and writhing in silent anguish, loomed up with wide and twisting naked arms. Venters crossed this belt of cedars, skirted ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... tributaries, establishing it as the best watered country encountered in our long overland cruise. Besides the splendid watercourses which marked that section, numerous wagontrails, leading into the hills, were peopled with freighters. Long ox trains, moving at a snail's pace, crept over hill and plain, the common carrier between the mines and the outside world. The fascination of the primal land was there; the buttes stood like sentinels, guarding a king's domain, while the palisaded cliffs frowned down, as if erected by the hand Omnipotent ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... most of them young fellows used to horse and arms, were brigaded as infantry with one of the four divisions of McDowell's men, who converged along different lines toward Fairfax. For nearly a week we lay near the front of the advance, moving on in snail-like fashion, which ill-suited most of us Virginians, who saw no virtue in postponing fight, since we were there for fighting. We scattered our forces, we did not unite, we did not entrench, we did not advance; we made all the mistakes a young army could, worst ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... writhing forward as noiselessly as if I were stalking some prey. There were times when I advanced so slowly it would have puzzled a watcher to determine whether mine was not also the body of the dead. At length, even at that snail's rate of progress, I gained the protection of the tepees upon the other side of the camp, and skulked in among them. The lodge just before me, blackened by paint and weather, must be the one I sought. I rested close within its shadow, striving to assure myself there ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... line. The four night raiders left the American trench at one o'clock in the morning. They crawled on their bellies through snow for one hour before reaching the sniper's post. Seven yards per minute is a snail's pace, but pretty good time in No Man's Land, where you must remain motionless each time a star-shell lights up the darkness around you and makes your ...
— The Fight for the Argonne - Personal Experiences of a 'Y' Man • William Benjamin West
... seemed to travel! It was a snail compared to Jack's eagerness to arrive. He was inclined to think that P.D., Wrath of God, and Jag Ear were faster than through expresses. He kept inquiring of the conductor if they were on time, and the conductor kept repeating that they were. How near that flash of steel at a bend around ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... there and then, all by himself: he would, Mr. Galloway, as I am a living sinner!" she hotly continued. "It's unbeknown how he'd have got here—holding on by the wall, like a snail, or fastening himself on to the tail of a cart; but try at it, in some way, he would! Be quiet, Jenkins! How dare you ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... book to be distributed after his death. A virulent enemy of Sainte-Beuve was not too expressive when he declared that its purpose was "to leave on the life of this woman the gleaming and slimy trace which the passage of a snail leaves on a rose." Abominable in either case, whether or not the implication was unfounded, Sainte-Beuve's numerous innuendoes in regard to Mme. Hugo are an indelible stain on his memory, and his infamy not only cost him his most precious friendships, ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... hours before and crept up the harbour to the whispering flutters of a breeze that could not make up its mind to blow. It was a cool, starlight evening, and they lolled about the poop waiting till their snail's pace would bring them to the anchorage. Willie Smee, the supercargo, emerged from the cabin, conspicuous in his shore clothes. The mate glanced at his shirt, of the finest and whitest silk, and ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... for scarce any weapons but staves and bludgeons had been yet seen among them. The Guard-house was a long, low, ugly building (removed in 1787), which to a fanciful imagination might have suggested the idea of a long black snail crawling up the middle of the High Street, and deforming its beautiful esplanade. This formidable insurrection had been so unexpected, that there were no more than the ordinary sergeant's guard of the city-corps upon duty; even these were without any supply of ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... land of fire," he said, "Frame me a soul like thine: Swift as the snail's soft horn to feel, Yet hard and keen as the tempered steel, And be there a fire in heart and head Demoniac ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... her robe to draw her back, but she turned on him with the spear, whereon he shrank back into his litter like a snail into his shell and left her alone. So following the steep path they marched on, and after them came the two litters with the priests, carried by all the bearers who could still stand, for these old men weighed no more than children. ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... porters, I threaded my way at a snail's pace through the dense crowd of waiting passengers, swarthy-faced sons of Italy, apparently bound for the steerage. The great gray bulk of the Re d'Italia loomed before me, floating proudly at her stern the green, white, and red flag blazoned ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... furiously from her, and stood with nothing but a plain coloured shawl of gauze covered in tinsel twined about her slim waist, "why hast thou wasted precious moments? Why has thou imperilled my chance by infuriating the great man? Out of my way, thou snail." ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... can't wait your snail's pace. My lady in black, Mrs. Donald Bird, has been here all the afternoon, and she offers me twenty-five dollars a month to give up the Baer cubs and tell stories two hours a day in the orphan asylums and the Children's Hospital! Just what I love to ...
— Polly Oliver's Problem • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... Snail we creep; While far ahead the women keep, For when to the devil's house we speed, By a thousand steps ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... and Snails, Dragon-flies, Grasshoppers, and Butterflies are familiar enough to us all; yet how many realise how 'fearfully and wonderfully' they are made? What a marvellously complex weapon is the 'sting' of the bee! What a wonderful 'rasp' the snail possesses! How many can tell how an insect smells, and where its organs of taste and hearing lie? Since these are questions which young people often ask again and again, some of them will be answered in the course of these articles. To explain such matters clearly is a very ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... he walked past it at a snail's pace, staring up at the blank, repellent windows. Not a soul was to be seen. He went on discontentedly. What should he do? The door had been shut in his face once already that day, why he could not imagine. He hesitated, ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... Bat's Wings Bunnies Cats and Mice Flying Bat Four Frogs Quilt Leap Frog Puss-in-the-Corner The Snail's Trail Toad in the Puddle ...
— Quilts - Their Story and How to Make Them • Marie D. Webster
... a man so down-hearted in his work of self-improvement as the constant and bitter experience that it seems to be all of no use; that he is making so little progress; that with immense pains, like a snail creeping up a wall, he gets up, perhaps, an inch or two, and then all at once he drops down, and further down than he was before ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... to her. She paddled along shore quite near them for a while, trying to be resigned to it. And then she waddled out on the grassy bank, and fed them with some newts, and a tadpole, and a few blue-bottle flies, and a snail, and several other delicacies, which they seemed to enjoy quite as much as if they had been young ducks. And then Quackalina, seeing them quite happy, struck out for the very middle of the pond. ...
— Solomon Crow's Christmas Pockets and Other Tales • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... and see nothing of him! Had I not soon after the receipt of your dear and instructive letter gone to Wildbad, and there fallen into indescribable idleness, I should long ago have written to Oxford; for the letter was a great delight to me. The snail had there crept out of his shell and spoke to me as the friend, but now "Your Excellency" appears again; so the snail has ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... coach too. Therefore, resolving to ruin Tom, she complained to the king that he had behaved very insolently to her. The king sent for him in a rage. Tom, to escape his fury, crept into an empty snail-shell, and there lay till he was almost starved; when peeping out of the shell, he saw a fine butterfly settled on the ground. He now ventured out, and getting astride, the butterfly took wing, and mounted into the air with little Tom on his back. Away he flew from field to field, from ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... ascending the opposite side of the gorge—an operation rendered the less agreeable from the consideration that in these perpendicular episodes we did not progress a hundred yards on our journey. But, ungrateful as the task was, we set about it with exemplary patience, and after a snail-like progress of an hour or more, had scaled perhaps one half of the distance, when the fever which had left me for a while returned with such violence, and accompanied by so raging a thirst, that it required all the entreaties of Toby to prevent me from losing all the fruits of my late ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... a horse! a miserable, old, broken-down hack, whose ribs were so prominent that he looked as if he lived upon barrel-hoops instead of oats and hay; his lack-lustre eyes, drooping head, halting gait, and panting breath combined to make him a most pitiable object, and he plodded on at a snail's pace, looking as if he might drop down dead on the road at any moment. Only the three women were in the chariot—the men all walking, so as to relieve their poor, jaded beast as much as possible. The weather was bitterly cold, and ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... summer months of dust and heat Cassidy had been a freighter. From sun-up to sun-down he had dragged with snail-like progress up and down the canons, through the rocky washes and crooked draws; and now that the road had dropped into the Southwestern Basin it was sickening mesa work, with the fine dust running like water ahead of his wheels or whirling up in fantastic, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... hermit crab has taken possession of a sea snail's shell, and set up housekeeping; with body partly hidden he waves his long bony tentacles, while his beady eyes stare at us from the doorway ...
— Byways Around San Francisco Bay • William E. Hutchinson
... ejaculated Mr. Brown, who at the word "scheme" had advanced one step from his retreat, but who now at the last words of the intruder drew back as gently as a snail into his shell; and although his person was far too much enveloped in shade to run the least chance of detection, yet the honest broker began to feel a little tremor vibrate along the chords of his thrilling frame, and a new anathema against the ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... on a level, crusted plateau. Here he braked till Labiskwee overtook him, and they went on, again side by side, with diminishing speed which finally ceased. The lethargy had grown more pronounced. The wildest effort of will could move them no more than at a snail's pace. They passed McCan, again crouched down on his skees, and Smoke roused him ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... blindly adventuring out into the open thoroughfare to avoid some obstacle—some spectral wain or omnibus got hopelessly stranded; while there were muffled cries and calls here, there, and everywhere. They went at a snail's pace, of course. Once, at a corner, the near wheels got on the pavement; the cab tilted over; Miss Burgoyne shrieked aloud and clung to her companion; then there was a heavy bump, and the venerable vehicle resumed its slow progress. Suddenly they beheld a ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... Day fair I searched to find a snail That might my secret lover's name reveal. Upon a gooseberry-bush a snail I found, For always snails near sweetest fruit abound. I seized the vermin, home I quickly sped, And on the hearth the milk-white embers ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... chronology. We had a craze for big figures, and positively liked to believe that the progress made by the child in the womb in a month was represented in prehistoric time by ages and ages. We insisted that Evolution advanced more slowly than any snail ever crawled, and that Nature does not proceed by leaps and bounds. This was all very well as long as we were dealing with such acquired habits as breathing or digestion. It was possible to believe that dozens of epochs had ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... evolution may turn them into uses. It will be easy for the scientific plutocrat to maintain that humanity will adapt itself to any conditions which we now consider evil. The old tyrants invoked the past; the new tyrants will invoke the future evolution has produced the snail and the owl; evolution can produce a workman who wants no more space than a snail, and no more light than an owl. The employer need not mind sending a Kaffir to work underground; he will soon become an underground animal, ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... we shall ever get enough things before the winter," replied David, with his eyes fixed on the short dry turf at his feet. "Oh, look!" he exclaimed suddenly, "there's a funny snail." ...
— Penelope and the Others - Story of Five Country Children • Amy Walton
... parcel. Another mode of transferring warts is to touch each wart with a pebble, and place the pebbles in a bag, which should be lost on the way to church; whoever finds the bag gets the warts." A common Warwickshire custom was to rub the warts with a black snail, stick the snail on a thorn bush, and then, say the folks, as the snail dies so ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... come across a snail, they pounced on it and crushed it, making grimaces with the corners of their mouths, as if they were cracking nuts. They never went out without their grafting implements, and they used to cut the worms in two with such force that the iron of the implement would sink three inches deep. To get ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... said Agatha. "But there's the waggon creeping up at a snail's pace. "Let us run down and see after ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... cavalry, started down the deep-cut road, which in places was not over ten feet wide, and was everywhere sticky with mud, while an entire infantry division was crowded into it behind them. Like all other roads in that country, this one, now densely packed with human beings advancing at a snail's pace along nearly three miles of its length, was bordered on both sides by ...
— "Forward, March" - A Tale of the Spanish-American War • Kirk Munroe
... not have cared about this if it were not that we could look, unseen ourselves, at the infrequent passer-by, for the hedge grew luxuriantly. Further down it became partly a clay bank, and there on the coarse grass used to hang snail-shells of all sizes, and, as I remember them, of shining gold and silver. The inhabitant was the drawback to all that beauty, yet when we found an empty house, it was cold, dull, and ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... not easily enticed out; he had his home where he hid himself like a snail in its shell. He had the responsibility for this little world of five people, and he had not even succeeded in securing it. His strength and industry were not enough even to keep one little home above water; a benefactor ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... and all about ourselves. What is the personality of a lunatic but a personality a little less, or very much less, coherent than ours? What is the personality of a moron? Of an idiot? Of a feeble- minded child? Of a horse? A dog? A mosquito? A bullfrog? A woodtick? A garden snail? And, Leo, what is your own personality when you sleep and dream? When you are seasick? When you are in love? When you have colic? When you have a cramp in the leg? When you are smitten abruptly with the fear of death? When you are angry? When you are exalted with the ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... than an open book, for I read like a snail and cannot write at all.... 'Tis you must bear him the glad tidings—you alone—with your bright hair the color of the old sideboards in the dining-room. Take the front page of a newspaper and run to him. 'Tis for you ...
— If You Touch Them They Vanish • Gouverneur Morris
... broken forest-trees—a circumstance which I would perhaps hesitate to mention in mere human society were it not that I have been credibly informed your own great naturalist, Darwin, tried the experiment himself with one of the biggest European land-molluscs, the great edible Roman snail, and found that it still lived on in vigorous style after immersion in sea-water for twenty days. Now, I myself observed that several of these bits of broken trees, torn down by floods in heavy storm time from the banks of Spanish or Portuguese rivers, ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... in a long spirally-coiled band, forming the wall of a subcylindrical cavity. The cavity of the tube of Helicopsyche, composed of grains of sand, is itself spirally coiled, so that the case exactly resembles a small snail-shell in shape. One species of Limnophilus uses small but entire leaves; another, the shells of the pond-snail Planorbis; another, pieces of stick arranged transversely with reference to the long axis of the tube. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... children have a quaint little rhyme to ask the snail to put out his horns. Translated, its meaning ...
— Little Folks (October 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... snail, laggard!" cried the bandit, at the sight of Pique-Vinaigre; "what have you been ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... even afraid. Dreading the certain cast of the almost unescapable net, the secutor keeps always on the move, and continually alters the direction and speed and manner of his movement, taking one short step and two long, then three short and one long, breaking into a dogtrot, slowing to a snail's-pace, leaping, twisting, curving, zigzagging, ducking and in every way attempting to make it impossible for the retiarius to foretell from the movement he watches what the ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... the spring And day's at the morn; Morning's at seven; The hillside's dew-pearled; The lark's on the wing; The snail's on the thorn; God's in his heaven— All's right with ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... Protococcus, a common mould, a Chara, a fern, and some flowering plant; among animals we examine such things as an Amoeba, a Vorticella, and a fresh-water polype. We dissect a star-fish, an earth-worm, a snail, a squid, and a fresh-water mussel. We examine a lobster and a cray-fish, and a black beetle. We go on to a common skate, a cod-fish, a frog, a tortoise, a pigeon, and a rabbit, and that takes us about all the time we have to ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley
... ease, and crept home at a slow snail's pace. I felt thirsty, luckily for the first time through the whole day, and I went and sought about for a place where I could get a drink. I was a long distance away from the bazaar, and I would not ask at a private house. Perhaps, though, I could wait till I got home; it would take a quarter of ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... found it afterwards to appear to the naked eye an exceeding small white spot, no bigger than the point of a Pin. Afterwards I view'd it every way with a better Microscope and found it on both sides, and edge-ways, to resemble the Shell of a small Water-Snail with a flat spiral Shell: it had twelve wreathings, a, b, c, d, e, &c. all very proportionably growing one less than another toward the middle or center of the Shell, where there was a very small round white spot. I could not certainly discover ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... use my trying to tell you all the shameful things he has done in all these years. There is never a year goes by without his doing something dreadful; and he has made everybody miserable at one time or other by killing their friends or relations, from the snail to the partridge. He is quite merciless, and spares no one; why, his own children are afraid of him, and it is believed that he has pecked several of them to death, though it is hushed up; but people talk about it all the same, sometimes. As for the way he has behaved to the ladies, if I were to ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... flat and as straight as the road to Longford. We never knew when we came to what the innkeeper and postillions call mountains, except by the postillions getting off their horses with great deliberation and making them go a snail's walk—a snail's gallop would be much too fast. Now it is no easy thing for a French postillion to walk himself when he is in his boots: these boots are each as large and as stiff as a wooden churn, and when the man in his boots attempts to walk, he is more ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... they were gone, he crept back out of the subterranean passage. "It is so dangerous to walk on the ground in the dark," said he; "how easily a neck or a leg is broken!" Fortunately, he knocked against an empty snail-shell. "Thank God!" said he. "In that I can pass the night in safety," and got into it. Not long afterwards, when he was just going to sleep, he heard two men go by, and one of them was saying, "How shall we contrive ...
— Grimm's Fairy Stories • Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm
... . The sun is baking hot. The shadows begin to grow shorter and to draw in on themselves, like the horns of a snail. . . . The high grass warmed by the sun begins to give out a strong, heavy smell of honey. It will soon be midday, and Gerassim and Lubim are still floundering under the willow tree. The husky bass and the shrill, ...
— The Cook's Wedding and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... still laughing, when he crawled out, like a snail from under his shell, and got upon his feet, clutching the tub to hurl it at ...
— The Young Surveyor; - or Jack on the Prairies • J. T. Trowbridge
... "A snail, sir," repeated the youth. "I've got a book on natural history, and I've just been reading about them. I saw this one as I was passing, and I went inside to study its habits. They are very interesting little things ...
— Salthaven • W. W. Jacobs
... States. the black or dark brown lizzard we saw at the rock fort Camp at the commencement of the woody country below the great narrows and falls of the Columbia; they are also the same with those of the United States. The snail is numerous in the woody country on this coast; they are in shape like those of the United States, but are at least five times their bulk. There is a speceis of water lizzard of which I saw one only just above the grand rapids ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... the topmost step of the staircase. Black with dust and cobwebs, damp, with slimy snail-tracks on the stones, it went winding down to the lowest story of the old house. The steps were worn and irregular. Long ago they had been built, for this was the most ancient part of the chateau. In their first days the stairs had not ended with the moat, then full of water, but had gone ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... with the guns. The main column disappeared, lost among mountains and hills; this detached number had the wild country, the forbidding road, the December day to themselves. To get the guns and ammunition-wagons along proved a snail-and-tortoise business. Guns and escort ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... conveyed him to Bayswater at a snail's pace, and with more stoppages than ever mortal omnibus was subjected to before, as it seemed to that one eager passenger. At last the fading foliage of the Park appeared between the hats and bonnets of Valentine's opposite neighbours. Even ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... Go back to thy people, and tell them what return the Sagamore of the Pequots makes for thy breach of hospitality. His promise to his brother saves thy life this time. But, beware! A Sagamore does not forget. Be a snail that keeps its head within its shell. If the snail puts it out, Sassacus will step upon ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... man had not been able to urge the beast out of a walk. The loss of time consequent upon his having followed wrong roads during the night and the exhaustion of the pony which retarded his speed to what seemed little better than a snail's pace seemed to assure the failure of his mission, for at best he could not reach Lustadt ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... goes at a snail's pace through the deep sand over the heath; the railroad conveys him in a few hours to Altona and Hamburg. The circle of my friends there is increased within the last years. The greater part of my time I spent with my ...
— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen
... a road—sometimes entirely gutted, sometimes so obstructed with gasoline cans, hubs of wheels and scraps of iron, that I was obliged to lead Cesar by the bridle, while the others would walk ahead and clear a passage. Their progress was snail-like, for there was little oil left in our lantern and they hesitated before casting the refuse into the ditch for fear of profaning ...
— My Home In The Field of Honor • Frances Wilson Huard
... head thrown back, and was continually in the act of wriggling his long chin into his ample neckerchief. He could not ask you how do you do, or say in answer to that question, "I thank you, sare, very well," without stamping prettily with his foot, as if cracking a snail, and tossing his chin into the air as if he were going to balance a ladder upon it. Then, though his features were compressed into a small, monkeyfied compass, they were themselves, individually, upon a magnificent scale. ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... then trot for about ten yards? I thought we should be flying along, like a hunt. I'd rather be on Pixie at home; I could always make him go when I tickled his ears. If we don't hurry up a little more I shall try it on this horse, and see if he won't break into something more interesting than a snail's pace." ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... rippling streams. I am reading of valley and mountain life, and I grow sick at heart and enervated. Why dwell on such things just now? It will be many a long day before we can see all that again. We are going at the miserable pace of a snail, but not so surely as it goes. We carry our house with us; but what we do one day is undone ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... sn which may perhaps be derived from the Latin sinuo, as snake, sneak, snail, snare; so likewise snap and snatch, snib, snub. Bl imply a blast; as blow, blast, to blast, to blight, and, metaphorically, to blast one's reputation; bleat, bleak, a bleak place, to look bleak, or weather-beaten, black, blay, bleach, bluster, blurt, blister, blab, bladder, blew, ...
— A Grammar of the English Tongue • Samuel Johnson
... loud, but deep.' Deep or loud, no purpose would they have answered; the waggoner's temper was proof against curse in or out of the English language; and from their snail's pace neither DICKENS nor devil, nor any postillion in England, could make him put his horses. Lord Colambre jumped out of the chaise, and, walking beside him, began to talk to him; and spoke of his horses, ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth |
