"Spider's web" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... made very clear to the girl who comes up to the city, and that is that the ordinary ice cream parlor is very likely to be a spider's web for her entanglement. This is perhaps especially true of those ice cream saloons and fruit stores kept by foreigners. Scores of cases are on record where young girls have taken their first step towards "white slavery" in places of this character. And it is ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... On the fore-finger of an Alderman, Drawn with a team of little atomies, Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep: Her waggon spokes made of long spinners' legs; The cover of the wings of grasshoppers; The traces of the smallest spider's web; The collars of the moonshine's watery beams; Her whip of cricket's bone; the lash of film; Her waggoner, a small grey coated gnat, Not half so big as a round little worm, Prickt from the lazy finger of a maid. Her chariot is ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... saw was first a glow of yellow green, then a mass of blossoms, then a throat, chin and face, one after another, all veiled in a gossamer thin as a spider's web, and last—and these I shall never forget—a pair of eyes shining clear below and above the veil, and which gazed into mine with the same steady, full, unfrightened look one sometimes sees on the face of a summer moon when it bursts through a rift ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... the door, the carriage started at once at a great pace, and the poor little fly was fairly caught in the spider's web. ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... he would tell her, as he haled her on to the sward beyond the arbor, "here it is, the story you told us yester-e'en. Here is the ring where they danced last night, the little folk, an' here is the glow-worm caught in the spider's web to ...
— A Warwickshire Lad - The Story of the Boyhood of William Shakespeare • George Madden Martin
... in the canon? Well, in a day or so Pete would show the Mexican a trick with a large round hole in it—the hole representing the space recently occupied by one of his ponies. Incidentally Pete realized that he was getting deeper and deeper into the meshes of The Spider's web—and the thought spurred him to a keener vigilance. So far he had killed three men actually in self-defense. But when he met up with Malvey—and Pete promised himself that pleasure—he would not wait for Malvey to open ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... surely the one where the inhabitants purchased their fine clothing. He saw crowds of people standing before the little stalls where the merchants spread brocades, stiff satins, heavy gold cloth, shimmery velvet, delicate veiling, and laces as sheer as a spider's web. ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... much loftier and boasted no fire. Lanterns swung from the beams, throwing upwards bars of shadow that criss-crossed with the rafters and trembled slightly as the flames flickered, so that the whole roof seemed spun over by some gigantic spider's web, while the shadow-patterns thrown by the lanterns on to the floor below looked like great spiders dropped from the meshes. In this impalpable tangle sat the men and women—tenants of cottages, labourers, farm servants and their ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... night a spider has made its web from door-post to door-post, and that web is unbroken. If you do not believe me, come and see for yourself. Yet they say the woman came through the doorway and therefore through the spider's web. Oh! Baas, what is the use of wasting thought upon the ways of spooks which, like the wind, come and go as they will, especially in this haunted land from which, as we have all agreed, we should do ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... the spot of all others in that mountain country which most stirs the sthetic and the speculative strains within one. Lovely and remote, all by itself at the foot of a mountain, in a circle of the hills, an old monastery stands, now used as a farm, with one rose window, like a spider's web, spun delicate in stone tracery. There the old monks had gone to get away from the struggles of the main valley and the surges of the fighting men. There even now were traces of their peaceful life; the fish-ponds and the tillage still kept in cultivation. If they had ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... Gertrude at length caught a glimpse of the faint object, and soon succeeded in giving the true direction to the look of her governess also. Nothing was visible but the dim outline, not unaptly described by Wilder himself assembling a spider's web. ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... A spider's web blocks all mine avenue; He catches down and foolish painted flies, That spider wary and wise. Each morn it hangs a rainbow strung with dew Betwixt boughs green with sap, So fair, few creatures guess it ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... 'water shield' [of one of the Zuni War Gods], from which he shook the torrents, was suggested, no doubt, by dew on the web." (Ibid., p.425.) To one unfamiliar with the Indian's habit of mind it may seem strained to connect the beads of dew on a spider's web with the torrential rain, but to one familiar with native thought as expressed in myths where the Indian has dramatized his conceptions of nature and of natural forces and phenomena, the connection ...
— Indian Games and Dances with Native Songs • Alice C. Fletcher
... is thus changed,—has but six months more to live. He, who disregards the deities, or quarrels with the Brahmanas, or one, who, being naturally of a dark complexion becomes pale of hue, has but six months more to live. One, who sees the lunar disc to have many holes like a spider's web, or one, who sees the solar disc to have similar holes has but one week more to live. One, who, when smelling fragrant scents in place of worship, perceives them to be as offensive as the scent of corpses, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... dignity, his knowledge of men, and love of order and uprightness, he gave it that high place which it yet holds, and which it must hold; for when the decisions of the Supreme Court are questioned by a State or people, the fabric of our government is but a spider's web through which anarchy and ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... and Kana grew. Thus they strove, the bluff rising higher and Kana growing taller, until he became as the stalk of a banana leaf, and gradually spun himself out till he was no thicker than a strand of a spider's web, and at last he yielded the ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... it. There was a fountain; it was so snug and exotic that it seemed like a poem. There were the arches of the bridge; in them was the dim reflection of the water. There were two towers; they were as delicate as a spider's web. ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... patience and do our sweeping gently; and we shall be able to separate from the main body the fragments of a sort of extremely fine satin. This transparent, colourless material is the upholstery that keeps out the wet. The Spider's web, if it formed a stuff and not a net, is the only thing that could be ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... went over to the fence. In a bush beside the fence there was a big spider's web. Old Mrs. Ik-to the Black Spider had built the web as a trap to catch flies in. But this time there was something besides a fly in the trap. Ah-mo the Honey Bee had blundered, into the web and was trying hard ...
— The Magic Speech Flower - or Little Luke and His Animal Friends • Melvin Hix
... pale, little woman, with hair as soft and white as the delicate lace that fell like a spider's web over it. The child-like hands, which lay in relief among the folds of her black-satin dress, were withered in their whiteness, like the leaves of a frost-bitten lily. They were quivering, too; and now that she was alone, you might have ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... man, pausing, and looking at his wife, fixedly, while there sat upon his face an expression of terrible despair; "that pledge can never be renewed! It would be like binding a giant with a spider's web. I am lost! lost! lost! The eager, inexpressible desire that now burns within me, cannot be controlled. The effort to do so would drive me mad. I must drink, or die. And you, my poor wife!—and you, my children! what will become ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... England; Spain ceded the Netherlands and all her possessions in Italy to the German empire. And so the fine threads diplomacy had been spinning over the Continent for two centuries were ruthlessly brushed away as a spider's web. ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... Cabul to Shah Bagh; cloudy weather, occasionally a very slight shower during the last few days, depending probably on the Punjab rains. To-day, observed a small green caterpillar, climbing up a fine thread, like a spider's web, which hung from the fly of the tent; its motions were precisely those of climbing, the thread over which it had passed was accumulated between its third pairs of legs; it did not use ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... above. I saw nothing whatever of the web described by Captain Fleeson: the honey-making solitaires were simply confined in cells, where they rested on the bare ground; they were not perched upon "a network of squares, like a spider's web." The "outside" workers observed by me were not black, but very dark yellow, while the "inside" workers were bright yellow ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... hidden from his sight. Even ships lying close in shore can be but faintly discerned through its film, and only the larger spars; the smaller ones, with the rigging-ropes, looking like the threads of a spider's web. ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... network with my knife in order to get at the tree. The lines of those webs were as thick as coarse threads, and pretty strong, as I had reason to know; for when walking back to camp the same evening, meditating deeply on our unfortunate detention, I ran my head into the middle of a spider's web, and was completely enveloped in it, so much so that it was with considerable difficulty I succeeded in clearing it away. I was as regularly netted as if a gauze veil ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... must be, just as there is the puff of wind that drifts the wandering insect to the spider's web—that brought the impression to her mind, was the brief report of a cross-examination in the divorce courts, conducted by J.H. Traill. She knew that in the last two years he had, in a desultory way, been gleaning briefs from the great field where others ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... lovely spider's web there is under the gooseberry bush!" said the farmer's little girl, when she came to fetch the empty bowl of curds ...
— More Tales in the Land of Nursery Rhyme • Ada M. Marzials
... threads. He had luminous final theories about Love and Death and Immortality, odd matters they seemed for him to think about! and all his woven thoughts lay across my perception of the realities of things, as flimsy and irrelevant and clever and beautiful, oh!—as a dew-wet spider's web slung in the morning sunshine across the ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... are bad, and with their pestilent influence; for we are constantly made to feel how much of the good that men endeavour to do is thwarted, counteracted, or destroyed by influences of this sort, and how weak and imitative souls are entangled in the network of traditional influence as in a spider's web. Tradition, in fact, represents to us the accumulated power of past lives as it acts upon us from the outside, just as what men call heredity represents this same influence in ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... talons; and the little steamer made pluckily for Blackfriars. Carts and hansoms, vans and brewers' vans, all silhouetting. Trains slip past, obliterating with white whiffs the delicate distances, the perplexing distances that in London are delicate and perplexing as a spider's web. Great hay-boats yellow in the sun, brown in the shadow—great hay-boats came by, their sails scarce filled with the light breeze; standing high, they sailed slowly and picturesquely, with men thrown in all attitudes; somnolent ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... terror than all her other fears. Sometimes she almost fancied a spell of enchantment had been put upon her, which would render all her efforts to escape her fate as unavailing as the struggles of a gnat in a spider's web. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... specially apt to exert a sexual influence. I have heard of a precisely similar case in a man of intellectual distinction, and another in a lady who acknowledged to a feeling of "exquisite pleasure," on one occasion, at the mere sound of the death agony of a fly in a spider's web. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... into the shelfy nook of shadow where the big trout hovered. Under the surface, floating thus, with the check of ductile influence, the two flies spread their wings and quivered, like a centiplume moth in a spider's web. Still the old trout, calmly oaring, looked at them both suspiciously. Why should the same flies come so often, and why should they have such crooked tails, and could he be sure that he did not spy the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... one who attains an object long desired, with the candor of a child, and the blundering foolishness of an old man utterly without worldly experience, he fell into the life of Mademoiselle Gamard precisely as a fly is caught in a spider's web. The first day that he went to dine and sleep at the house he was detained in the salon after dinner, partly to make his landlady's acquaintance, but chiefly by that inexplicable embarrassment which often assails timid people and makes them fear to seem impolite by breaking off a conversation ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... kept his own counsel, I had learned that the house of the good Martin was a kind of spider's web, and that the silly flies entangled in its meshes were for the most part members of the Fronde. The house was visited by persons of both sexes and of all ranks, from the members of the Royal family downwards. They went there for all sorts of purposes. Some required rare medicines, others charms to ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens
... the darkness of the tunnel at Cleveland Street, and, as they emerged into daylight on the other side, paused for a moment like intelligent animals before the spider's web of shining rails that curved into the terminus, as if to choose the pair that would carry them in safety to the platform. It was in this pause that the passengers on the left looked out with an upward jerk of the ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... and your face comes up against a spider's web woven across the road, what a shock that thin line gives you! You fristle through every ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... are made the best and most delicate buckrams, and those of highest price; in sooth they look like tissue of spider's web! There is no King nor Queen in the world but might be glad to wear them. [NOTE 3] The people have also the largest sheep in the world, and great abundance of ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... struggleth under these distresses, by so much the more doth Satan put forth himself to resist, still infusing more poison, that if possible it might never struggle more, for strugglings are also as poison to Satan. The fly in the spider's web is an emblem of the soul in such a condition—the fly is entangled in the web; at this the spider shows himself; if the fly stir again, down comes the spider to her, and claps a foot upon her; if yet the fly makes a noise, then with poisoned mouth the spider lays hold upon her; if the fly ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... with his grandest courtiers, went to them himself, and both the swindlers raised one arm in the air, as if they were holding something, and said: 'See, these are the trousers, this is the coat, here is the mantle!' and so on. 'It is as light as a spider's web. One might think one had nothing on, but that is the ...
— Stories from Hans Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... a Canterbury poke, dear boys," he cried. "Let 'em have it, my lads. The beggars look like so many flies in a spider's web; and we ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... they are so very delicate, and so precious to us, by a strong bony sheath. At first these nerves are like coarse twine, but they divide and divide until they become as fine as threads of white silk—almost as fine as the stronger part of a spider's web—and they go all over the body, reaching to the ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... Pundits do, but the most illiterate are familiar with its commonplaces, and are ready with their avowal. We often hear, "Is not God everywhere? Does He not pervade all? Is He not all? Is not all evolved from Him, as the spider's web is evolved from its body? Does not all emanate from Him, as the stream flows from the fountain and rays from the sun? Are we not all portions of Him? We may worship anything and everything if only we see God in it. There are differences in the sparks from the ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... The spider's web stretched out over a flower bed with a great fat spider at the centre and the threads along which the spider runs to thrust its poisoned sting into the enmeshed butterfly is nature's most accurate symbol of the vast web of espionage lying over North and South America with secret threads ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis
... made that painful journey, passing levels from which three or four hallways ran out like the radii of a spider's web. He was close to the end of his endurance when he heard a sound, echoed, magnified, from below. It was someone moving. He dragged his body into the fourth level where the light was very faint, hoping to crawl far enough into one of the ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... a little distance, it looks like gossamer work, and as though the wind could blow it away, and waft its filmy fragments out of sight. But the tread of a drove of elephants would not bend nor jar it. The Rock of Gibraltar does not feel firmer under foot than this spider's web of a bridge, over which trains of cars pass one another, as well as ceaseless tides of vehicles and pedestrians. It is estimated that, besides its own weight of six hundred tons, it will sustain a burden of sixteen thousand ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... officials out of it. I laugh sometimes to think how important you think yourselves and how unimportant you really are. The Cathedral laughs too, and once and again stretches out a great lazy finger and just flicks you away as it would a spider's web. I hope you don't ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... after the reception at the palace the chaplain might have been seen daintily picking his way over the cobble-stone pavements. As he walked he thought, and his thoughts were busy with the circumstances which had led him to venture his saintly person so near the spider's web of The Derby Winner. The bishop, London, curiosity, Gabriel, this unpleasant neighbourhood—so ran the links of his chain ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... long and wide ermine stole, and carrying a huge muff to match. Before she touched the electric bell she pulled her large hat forward a little over her face, and adjusted the thick veil, which had a pattern like a spider's web. Then she opened a gold vanity box suspended from her wrist by a chain, and looked at herself in the small mirror it contained. Her face was so shadowed by the hat and disguised by the veil that at a little distance it might ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... if his toe were trodden on; so a man might shrink when a moth shrivelled as if his own hair had caught fire. Man might be a network of exquisite nerves running over the whole universe, a subtle spider's web of pity. This was a fine conception; though perhaps a somewhat severe enforcement of the theological conception of the special divinity of man. For the humanitarians certainly asked of humanity what can be asked of no other creature; ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... army. He hasn't any resisting power, hasn't Harry. And there is nothing but temptation in the army. Dear me, Charlotte! We may well pray not to be led into the way of temptation; for if we once get into it, we are no better off than a fly in a spider's web." ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... interesting. The long horizontal streaks across the sky, which were daily noticeable, took a form that day not unlike the vertebrae of an immense snake, whereas the higher clouds of transparent mist in filaments looked exactly like a huge spider's web. ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... depressing effect upon the family. This poor baby was a weak little bag of bones when first she came to us. The bag was made of shrivelled skin of a dusty brown colour. Her hair was the colour of her skin, and hung about her head like tattered shreds of a spider's web. She sat in a bunch and never smiled. Something about her suggested a spider. Her Tamil name is Chrysanthemum, which by the change of one letter becomes Spider. So we ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... telegraph manager, were recognized by his appointment as general superintendent of the consolidated company. The position was, even then, one of great responsibility and difficulty, the vast net work of lines extending like a spider's web over the face of the country requiring a clear head, and practical knowledge to keep it free from confusion and embarrassment, whilst the delicate and complicated relations in which the telegraph stood with regard to the railroads and the press increased the difficulties of the ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... undergraduates'—yet he realised clearly enough the danger of his correspondence with the Prime Minister, and immediately took steps to counteract it. There was a semi- official agent of the English Government in Rome, Mr. Odo Russell, and around him Manning set to work to spin his spider's web of delicate and clinging diplomacy. Preliminary politenesses were followed by long walks upon the Pincio, and the gradual interchange of more and more important and confidential communications. Soon poor Mr. Russell was little better than a fly buzzing ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... ports of Venezuela were for the first time opened to foreign trade. Her inhabitants were no longer restricted from the enjoyment of the fruits of their own industry. A gigantic system of taxation had been brushed, like a spider's web, away. Two-thirds of the Captain-Generalcy, in a word, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... conduct would serve best to subjugate M. de Talbrun, she became herself—that is to say, a born coquette —venturing from one thing to another, like a child playing fearlessly with a bulldog, who is gentle only with him, or a fly buzzing round a spider's web, while the spider lies ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... called "gentry flies"; in colour and form they are quite like others, but they have a broader breast, a larger belly than the common sort; as they fly they hum loudly and buzz beyond all endurance, and they are so strong that they will break right through a spider's web; or if one is caught, it will buzz there for three days, for it can contend with the spider in single combat. All this the Seneschal had carefully observed, and he argued further that these gentry flies produce ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... were in the Free State. I make no mention here of the thousands of miles of similar blockhouse lines, which made a sort of spider's web of the South ...
— Three Years' War • Christiaan Rudolf de Wet
... day proved one of trial to patience and muscle. The narrow watercourses, which like a spider's web penetrate the marshes with numerous small sheets of water, made travelling a most difficult task. At times I was lost, again my canoe was lodged upon oyster-beds in the shallow ponds of water, the mud bottoms of which would not hear my weight if ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... I like your looks, that's all," replied the other frankly. "And I don't like to see you run into that spider's web." ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... the down-stairs rooms, silent save for a fly buzzing in a spider's web, and together ascended the dusty stairs. The railing was entirely gone; but the concrete ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... I am learning now; it's truth they talk. You would undo the skill of a spider's web And take the inches of it in one line, More easily than know a woman's thought. I'm ugly ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... take a very long thread of raffia in your needle, make seven cross threads and weave a spider's web, having the center fill about one-fourth the space. When the web is finished, buttonhole around the reed to fasten the spirals in position and to give a finish to the frame of ...
— Construction Work for Rural and Elementary Schools • Virginia McGaw
... were here!" she said, in a helpless passion. "If only Theobald were here! To think that they should rob him of his sweetheart because they are caught in Dawson's spider's web. Their own grandchild! It seems unnatural. And you two lovers from ...
— The Story of Bawn • Katharine Tynan
... he seldom emerges, a large variety of spider takes advantage of the hole, and makes its web across the orifice. He is thus furnished with a window and screen gratis; and no one but a Bushman would think of searching beneath a spider's web for a frog. They completely eluded my search on the occasion referred to; and as they rush forth into the hollows filled by the thunder-shower when the rain is actually falling, and the Bechuanas are cowering under their skin garments, the sudden chorus ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... the spider. We pity the fly as (if the image is permissible) the underdog. One of the most agonising of the minor dilemmas in which a too sensitive humanitarian ever finds himself is whether he should destroy a spider's web, and so, perhaps, starve the spider to death, or whether he should leave the web, and so connive at the death of a multitude of flies. I have long been content to leave Nature to her own ways in such matters. I cannot say that I like ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... was neatly bound in thin, tough, plastic tangle-cord, swathed from chin to boot-bottoms, my arms imprisoned, my feet caught. And tangle-cord is about as easy to get out of as a spider's web ...
— The Hunted Heroes • Robert Silverberg
... went away, however, she gave the woman a little shirt of spider's web and a doublet of thistle-down for ...
— The National Nursery Book - With 120 illustrations • Unknown
... Never have I seen such violent twists and bends in a river. At times the waters seemed to loop back on themselves. One great loop bent towards us, and at the arch of this the little ferry of Potgieter's floated, moored to ropes which looked through the field glasses like a spider's web. The ford, approached by roads cut down through the steep bank, was beside it, but closed for the time being by the flood. The loop of river enclosed a great tongue of land which jutted from the hills on the enemy's ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... his client hesitate, he thought that he had lost his chance; he had set himself to frighten and quell La Cibot till she was completely in his power, bound hand and foot. She had walked into his study as a fly walks into a spider's web; there she was doomed to remain, entangled in the toils of the little lawyer who meant to feed upon her. Out of this bit of business, indeed, Fraisier meant to gain the living of old days; comfort, competence, ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... gentler moon; And the myriad gnats that dance like a wall, Or a moving column that will not fall; And the dragon-flies that go burning by, Shot like a glance from a seeking eye— There is one being that loves them all: Not a fly in a spider's web can fall But he cares for the spider, and cares for the fly; He cares for you, whether you laugh or cry, Cares whether your mother smile or sigh. How he cares for so many, I do not know, But it would be too strange if he did not so— Dreadful and ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... dugout. I do not know why he deserted. Perhaps life on a man-of-war with its restrictions irked him, perhaps he was in trouble, and perhaps it was the South Seas and these romantic islands that got into his bones. Every now and then they take a man strangely, and he finds himself like a fly in a spider's web. It may be that there was a softness of fibre in him, and these green hills with their soft airs, this blue sea, took the northern strength from him as Delilah took the Nazarite's. Anyhow, he wanted to hide himself, and he thought he would be safe in this secluded ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... field gun range, trusting that the Turks would not wish prematurely to disclose their artillery positions. So we managed a peep at close quarters, and were startled to see the ramifications and extent of the spider's web of deep, narrow trenches along the coast and on either front of the lines of Bulair. My Staff agree that they must have taken ten thousand men a month's hard work from dark to dawn. In advance of the trenches, Williams in the crow's nest reported that with his ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... costs L70, and is nothing like so durable as the old threads. When we consider that lace to be known as "Old Lace" must be two hundred or three hundred years old, we can understand the strength of this fairy thread, which was like a spider's web in filminess and yet durable enough to last centuries of wear, and remain as a lasting ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... filigree work in solid gold, and over them were canopies of yellow velvet, the folds of which were caught up and draped with bands of green ribbon. And on the thrones were seated two of the sweetest and fairest little maidens that mortal man had ever beheld. Their lovely hair was fine as a spider's web; their eyes were kind and smiling, their cheeks soft and dimpled, their mouths shapely as a cupid's bow and tinted like the petals of a rose. Upon their heads were set two crowns of fine spun gold, worked into fantastic shapes and set with glittering gems. Their robes ...
— The Enchanted Island of Yew • L. Frank Baum
... Shall not these mournful groans pierce thy flinty heart? Wilt thou stop thine ears and shut thine eyes? And wilt thou NOT regard? Take warning, and stop thy journey before it be too late. Wilt thou he like the silly fly, that is not quiet unless she be either entangled in the spider's web or burnt in the candle? O sinner, sinner, there are better things than HELL to be had! There is heaven, there is God, there is Christ, there is communion with an innumerable assembly of saints ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... roads and railways in France converge as surely to the capital as the threads of a spider's web lead to its centre, and in pursuing his route through the bye-ways of Normandy the traveller will be much in the position of the fly that has stepped upon its meshes—every road and railway leading to the capital where 'M. d'Araignee' the enticing, the alluring, the fascinating, ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... brought them to our work place. We found strange boxes with bars of metal inside, with many cords and strands and coils of metal. We found wires that led to strange little globes of glass on the walls; they contained threads of metal thinner than a spider's web. ...
— Anthem • Ayn Rand
... orthodox, and she was handsome as a leopard is handsome, but always she struck me as haunted by a vague fear, a fear of the house, perhaps, and of her mother's power to rule her. I used to fancy, watching her return to their sombre dwelling, that she was drawn back as to a spider's web by the fascination of its tragic silences. The story of her life is like a strange book read by lightning, with many leaves turned over ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... (i.e. Peripatus) shoot out fine threads of a remarkably viscid and tenacious milky fluid... projected from the tips of the oral papillae" (page 759).) is so stupid as to spit out the viscid matter at the wrong end of its body; it would have been beautiful thus to have explained the origin of the spider's web. ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... not a materialist, although he concerned himself much with the functions of the body, and with that strange spider's web of tingling threads which we call the nervous system. The man who sweeps out the temple, who polishes the marble steps and dusts the painted windows, may yet find time to bend in prayer before the altars he helps to keep beautiful, may ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... by black lines, the map will look like a net with irregular meshes. At all the knots are towns, large centres of population which are in constant communication with one another by means of the railways. If we fix our eyes on North Germany, we see what looks like an enormous spider's web, and in the middle of it sits a huge spider. That spider is called Berlin. For as a spider catches its prey in an ingeniously spun net, so Berlin by its railways draws to itself life and movement not only from Germany but from all ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... as she stepped out on the deck. She was fresh as the dew itself, and like a rose. All color of rose was the soft skirt she wore, and the little bolero above, blue, with gold buttons, covered a soft rose-colored waist, light and subtle as a spider's web, stretched from one grass stalk to another of a dewy morning. She was round and slender, and her neck was tall and round, and in the close fashion of dress which women of late have devised, to remind man once more of the ancient ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... knees, and prays with passionate violence). Hear me, O God, in my extremity! In fervent supplication up to Thee, Up to thy heaven above I send my soul. The fragile texture of a spider's web, As a ship's cable, thou canst render strong; Easy it is to thine omnipotence To change these fetters into spider's webs— Command it, and these massy chains shall fall, And these thick walls be rent, Thou, Lord ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... hallowed by some remembrance connected with the playmate of her childhood—the lover of her early youth—the husband of her affections." When, she looked on the dew dancing amid the delicate tracery of the field spider's web—when the joyous whistle of the gay blackbird broke upon her ear—gazing silently on all that was really fresh and beautiful in nature—she felt that, instead of warming, it fell chilly upon her heart. And yet all was as usual—the bright sun, and the smiling landscape. Why, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 580, Supplemental Number • Various
... accident as that could never happen to Matamore," said Herode, with his resounding laugh; "he might fall into a spider's web without breaking ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... to look at a spider's web that the silver light had just touched, making it shine out from its background of dark leaves and verandah post; and there was danger of rupture to the delicate thread of the topic that was weaving so charming a conversation. Wherefore the young lady hastened ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... to which she consented, and they quitted the cottage together. My sister and I were left—truly like two fools, who fancied that they had obtained a golden treasure, till daylight shewed it to be lead—two silly, luckless flies, who had played in sunbeams and were caught in a spider's web. I leaned against the casement, and watched those two glorious creatures, till they disappeared in the forest-glades; and then I turned. Perdita had not moved; her eyes fixed on the ground, her cheeks pale, her ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... she looked at the programme, she thought of the strange complications of feeling that are surely the fruit of an extreme civilisation. She saw herself caught in a spider's web of apparently frail, yet really powerful, threads spun by an invisible spider. Her world was full of gossamer playing the part of iron, of gossamer that was compelling, that made and kept prisoners. What freedom was there for her and ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... ostler told me; and it seems he spent the evening watching him weave his spider's web. But the flies were over-wary. They knew whence he came; they knew the business for which he desired to enrol them—for a rumour had gone round that Condillac was in rebellion against the Queen's commands—and there were ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... "sky-scrapers"—what a brutal name it is when one comes to think of it!—so splendid in the landscape now, did not exist in 1883, but I find it difficult to divide my early impressions from my later ones. There was Brooklyn Bridge though, hung up high in the air like a vast spider's web. ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... loved, above all other amusements, to put flies into a spider's web; and the struggles of the imprisoned insects were wont to bear, in the eyes of this grave philosopher, so facetious and hilarious an appearance, that he would stand and laugh thereat until the tears "coursed one another down his innocent nose." Now it so happened that Spinoza, despite the general ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... experimented on. And horses in the phylo-genetic line are more ancient than dogs: they are lower in the zoologic scale. Much lower still, i.e. among the Arthropoda, occur many other mathematical wonders. I only mention in a cursory way the logarithmic spiral of the spider's web, the precise curves realized without instruments of any kind by the Coleoptera and Hymenoptera in cutting leaves, the stereometry of the aphides. Then, as it were, at the bottom of the scale (if one may still speak of a descent and a bottom) the marvellous plancton filters ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... leafy trees Proclaim the gently swelling breeze, Whilst through my window, by degrees, Its breathings play: The spider's web, all ...
— Cottage Poems • Patrick Bronte
... after this outbreak. He even smiled as he thought how neatly he had walked into the spider's web. Then he shifted his position and prepared to think. But, as he moved his foot struck something. A wallet, it felt like; he reached down, and, by dint of feeling about, managed to ...
— The Girl Aviators' Sky Cruise • Margaret Burnham
... upon the provisions; it is hung from the top of the cupola by a thread which vies with that of a Spider's web for slenderness. The dainty cylinder quivers and swings to and fro at the least breath; it reminds me of the famous pendulum suspended from the dome of the Pantheon to prove the rotation of the earth. The victuals ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... sorting them. English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Georges, and Louises, doubloons and double guineas and moidores and sequins, the pictures of all the kings of Europe for the last hundred years, strange Oriental pieces stamped with what looked like wisps of string or bits of spider's web, round pieces and square pieces, and pieces bored through the middle, as if to wear them round your neck—nearly every variety of money in the world must, I think, have found a place in that collection; and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he replied, "but the more he says it the less I believe him. Miss Flora, the fate of all my uncle holds dear is hanging by a thread, a spider's web, a young girl's freak! If ever she gives him a certain turn of the hand, the right glance of her eye, he'll be at her feet and every hope ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... old barn door; A spider's web hung there As fragile as a little dream, As delicate and fair; They decked it with a thousand gems Of oh! such dazzling sheen, It was the very loveliest thing That ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 19, 1919 • Various
... and fro; And not a wave of their busy wings Is unknown to the Spirit that moveth all things. And the long-mantled moths, that sleep at noon, And dance in the light of the mystic moon— All have one being that loves them all; Not a fly in the spider's web can fall, But He cares for the spider, and cares for the fly; And He cares for each little child's smile or sigh. How it can be, I cannot know; He is wiser than I; ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... often have in this part of the world. When the morning dawned, and the gentle breeze rippled the glassy mirror of the forest lake, all the delicate veils and flags fluttered away into thin air; the waving garlands of the spider's web, the hanging bridges and galleries, or whatever else they may be called, vanished away as if they had never been. Six elves brought me back my sausage skewer, and at the same time asked me to make any request, which they would grant if in their power; so I begged them, if they ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... by land, and away into the mountains, with his father's sword upon his thigh, till he came to the Spider mountains, which hang over Epidaurus and the sea, where the glens run downward from one peak in the midst, as the rays spread in the spider's web. ...
— The Heroes • Charles Kingsley
... of spruce-trees and on delicate lichens they seemed like reduplications of the original growth, and they made the broad, fiat leaves of the arbor-vitae fully twice as wide as before. But this fringe was always on one side only, except when gathered upon dangling fragments of spider's web, or bits of stray thread: these they entirely encircled, probably because these objects had twirled in the light wind while the crystals were forming. Singular disguises were produced: a bit of ragged rope appeared a piece ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... within the door, and at the word he stepped out and flung it to. I sprang forward, but before I reached it the click sounded. I was a prisoner, caught like a fly in a spider's web, and much it helped me to beat on the iron-studded door till my hand bled, to call on him to come in and fight it out like a man, to storm up and down the room in a ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... often gloomy and wrapped in thought and felt that life was not what it ought to be. He had a dim notion that once upon a time a terrible crime had been committed, which it was now everybody's business to hide by practising countless deceptions; he compared himself to a fly caught in a spider's web: the more it struggled to regain its freedom, the more it entangled itself, until at last it died miserably, strangled ...
— Married • August Strindberg |
