"Adder" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "Hedulio can pick up and handle a puff-adder and it will never strike at him and he can similarly handle any kind ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... heavens now, and shone brightly down on the waste, though there were a few white clouds high up above him. The rabbits scuttled out of the grass before him; here and there he turned aside from a stone on which lay coiled an adder sunning itself; now and again both hart and hind bounded away from before him, or a sounder of wild swine ran grunting away toward closer covert. But nought did he see but the common sights and sounds of the woodland; nor did ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... and fear in the most sibilant of hisses. The 'Happy Family' were experiencing an amount of beatitude which was evidently too cordial for philosophical enjoyment. A long tongue of flame had crept under the cage, completely singing every hair from the cat's body. The felicitous adder was slowly burning in two and busily engaged in impregnating his organic system with his own venom. The joyful rat had lost his tail by a falling bar of iron; and the beatific rabbit, perforated by a red-hot nail, looked as if nothing would be more grateful than a cool ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... the shadow, Quickly, thickly, comes the crowd— From death's bosom creeps the adder, Trailing ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... an adder had bitten him; the blase composure which is the pride of every British officer had melted in the rays of those blue eyes that for years had been the stars of his worship. It was a very human young man, badly shaken and ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... nearest bark of the wolf; its stealth and cunning more than the strength and courage and address of the bear; its attack more than the rush of the majestic, resistless bison, or the furious pass with antlers lowered of the noble, ambereyed, infuriated elk. Hidden as still as an adder in long grass of its own hue, or squat on a log, or amid the foliage of a sloping tree, it waited around the salt licks and the springs and along the woodland pathways for the other wild creatures. It possessed the strength ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... sorrow? who hath contention? who hath wounds without cause? They that tarry long at the wine, they that go to seek mixed wine. Look not thou upon the wine; at the last it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder." ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... humour and all the satire in Old Prejudice that our author has accustomed us to in his best pieces. The common people always get the best literature along with the best religion in John Bunyan. 'They are like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear, and which will not hearken to the voice of charmers charming never so wisely,' says the Psalmist, speaking about some bad men in his day. Now, I will not stand upon David's natural history here, ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... names Yellow adder's tongue Date collected, May 16th, 1908 Dog tooth violet Botanical name Erythronium Americanum REMARKS: John Burroughs Family Lilies suggests that the name Where found Rockaway Valley near be changed either to Beaver Brook fawn lily because its leaves look like a spotted fawn ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... free;[290] Oh Florence! Florence![291] unto me thou wast 60 Like that Jerusalem which the Almighty He Wept over, "but thou wouldst not;" as the bird Gathers its young, I would have gathered thee Beneath a parent pinion, hadst thou heard My voice; but as the adder, deaf and fierce, Against the breast that cherished thee was stirred Thy venom, and my state thou didst amerce, And doom this body forfeit to the fire.[292] Alas! how bitter is his country's curse To him who for that ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... down within easy reach, I was half tempted to turn him loose. The "major-domo" had singled out Sponsilier and was trying issues with him, Bob Quirk was dropping them right and left, when the deposed commandant sprang upon a table, and in a voice like the hiss of an adder, commanded peace, and the disorder ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... unclean Hath my insect never seen; But violets and bilberry bells, Maple-sap and daffodels, Grass with green flag half-mast high, Succory to match the sky, Columbine with horn of honey, Scented fern, and agrimony, Clover, catchfly, adder's-tongue And brier-roses, dwelt among; All beside was unknown waste, All was ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... cane, lying upon the red leather before me. It was of most unusual workmanship, apparently Indian, being made of some kind of dark brown, mottled wood, bearing a marked resemblance to a snake's skin; and the top of the cane was carved in conformity, to represent the head of what I took to be a puff-adder, fragments of stone, or beads, being inserted to represent the eyes, and the whole thing being finished with an artistic ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... rascal, He the lively Lemminkainen, Struck his left shoe in the snowdrift, Like an adder in the meadow, Pushed his staff of pinewood forward, As it were a living serpent, 200 And he said as he was gliding, Grasping firm the pole he carried: "Let the men who live in Lapland, Help me all to bring the elk home; And let all the Lapland women ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... ugly herbs, with scarce aught that might be called a flower amongst them. Trees there were yet, but the most of them stark dead, and the best dying fast. No beasts she saw, nor fowl; nothing but lizards and beetles, and now and again a dry grey adder coiled up about a sun-burned stone. But of great carrion flies, green and blue, were there a many, and whiles they buzzed about her head till she sickened with loathing of them. All this she found on her way as she went up toward the place where ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... "An adder is a small thing to sting a man," said Ingvar in his grim voice. "Nor will it always hurt him much. Yet if a man is so close among many that he must needs tread on one, and it bites him, and in fleeing that he must set foot on another, and again ...
— Wulfric the Weapon Thane • Charles W. Whistler
... which is not said to have its adders; the gardeners employed at villas close to the metropolis occasionally raise an alarm, and profess to have seen a viper in the shrubberies, or the ivy, or under an old piece of bast. Since so few can distinguish at a glance between the common snake and the adder it is as well not to press too closely upon any reptile that may chance to be heard rustling in the grass, and to strike tussocks with the walking-stick before sitting down to rest, for the adder is only dangerous ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... snake with flattened and expanded head, known as the blowing viper, or puff adder, is one of the most amusing representatives of the tendency to "play dead" that could well be found. If you strike him the faintest blow with the lightest stick, he at once goes into apparent convulsions, in which he seems to suffer the greatest agony. ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... met as their appointment was, and they were agreed and accorded thoroughly; and wine was fetched, and they drank. Right so came an adder out of a little heath bush, and it stung a knight on the foot. When the knight felt himself stung, he looked down and saw the adder; then he drew his sword to slay the adder, and thought of none other harm. But when the hosts on both parties ...
— Stories of King Arthur and His Knights - Retold from Malory's "Morte dArthur" • U. Waldo Cutler
... down this morning near a tree my head was just one yard off a good-sized cobra, coiled up in the sprouts at its root, but it was benumbed with cold: a very pretty little puff-adder lay in the path, also benumbed; it is seldom that any harm is done by these reptiles here, although it is different in India. We bought up all the food we could get; but it did not suffice for the marches we expect to make to get to the Chambeze, where ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... observed, that the medical science would be brought to the utmost perfection, when poison should be converted into physic. Thus, in the mortal disease of Judaism and idolatry, our blessed Lord converted the adder's venom of Saul the persecutor, into that cement which made Paul the chosen vessel. That manly activity, that restless ardor, that burning zeal for the law of his fathers, that ardent thirst for the blood of Christians, did the Son of ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... grave was opened, and he really was found with his thumb in his mouth. So they laid him upon a cart, and harnessed two oxen to it; and the oxen ran off with the sailor over heath and moor to the ocean, as if they had been stung by an adder. Then the sand ceased to fly inland, but the hills that had ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... mountains; close by my feet hissed and glided the snakes, driven forth from their blazing coverts, and glancing through the ring, unscared by its waning lamps; all undulating by me, bright-eyed, and hissing, all made innocuous by fear—even the terrible Death-adder, which I trampled on as I halted at the verge of the circle, did not turn to bite, but crept harmless away. I halted at the gap between the two dead lamps, and bowed my head to look again into the crystal vessel. Were there, indeed, no lingering drops yet left, if but to recruit the lamps for ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... Barbarossa." It is indeed well that the two events should be remembered together. By the help of the Venetians, Alexander III. was enabled, in the twelfth century, to put his foot upon the neck of the emperor Barbarossa, quoting the words of the Psalm, "Thou shalt tread upon the lion and the adder." A hundred and fifty years later, the Venetian ambassador, Francesco Dandolo, unable to obtain even an audience from the Pope, Clement V., to whom he had been sent to pray for a removal of the sentence of excommunication pronounced against the republic, concealed himself (according to the ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... any old adder!" exclaimed Roland Yorke to Arthur, when they left Mr. Galloway alone. "The only possible way in which it can have gone, is through that post-office. The men have forked it; as they ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... me. I was warn'd, And laid not to my breast the pois'nous adder! Accuse not fate! your own deceitful heart It was, the wild ambition of your house. But God is with me. The blow was aim'd Full at my head, but your's it is ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... fights that will divide a state into two armed camps, getting hotter and hotter until old slumbering animosities come crawling out into the open, like poison snakes from under a rock, and new lively ones hatch from the shell every hour or so in a multiplying adder brood. ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... has been dark; But now the rag wick sends a spark That glitters in the icy air, And wakes frost sapphires everywhere; Bright, bitter flames, that adder-like Dart here and there, yet fear to strike The gruesome gloom wherein THEY lie, My comrades, oh, so keen to die! And I, the last — well, here I wait The clock to strike the hour ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... about by himself his mother was in the habit of giving him his plate of porridge and milk to take outside the farm and eat every morning. He had probably done so for long enough, when one day, his mother, happening to go out, saw him seated on the ground eating his porridge in company with an adder, who, however, instead of hurting the child, merely supped up the milk. When the reptile edged a little nearer to the boy than was quite equal, Douglas slapped the adder on his head with his horn spoon, saying, "Keep yer ain side o' the ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... warning its patrons that "Owing to numerous robberies in this hotel, our guests will please lock their doors." This was one of three hotels owned by the same man. One of the others had been described to us as the "tough" hotel, and at the other, a few weeks previous, a friend had found a puff-adder barring his bedroom door. The choice was ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... favour for the lower orders, that is, for the great mass of our fellow-creatures, treated as an indecorum and breach of the harmony of well-regulated society. In short, I prefer a bear-garden to the adder's den; or, to put this case in its extremest point of view, I have more patience with men in a rude state of nature outraging the human form than I have with apes 'making mops and mows' at the extravagances they have first provoked. I can endure the brutality (as it is termed) ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... hearing, and have they closed their eyes? I fear there are some few vipers among us, who, for ten or twenty pounds' gain, would sell their souls and their country, though at last it would end in their own ruin as well as ours. Be not like the deaf adder, who refuses to hear the voice of the charmer, charm he never ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... not sentimental, and any exhibition of feeling appeared to have an irritating effect upon his nerves. There were times when he shrank from some little sudden caress of Charlotte's as from the sting of an adder. Aversion, surprise, fear—what was it that showed in the expression of his face at these moments? Whatever that strange look was, it departed too quickly for analysis; and the stockbroker thanked his stepdaughter for her little affectionate demonstration with his wonted ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... after one is bitten. My father showed it to me a great many years ago, when I was a little shaver, and told me how he had learned about it from an old Indian herb-doctor. He tried it several times for moccasin-and adder-and copperhead-bites among his servants, and it was a cure in every instance. It grows on both sides of this branch, and nowhere else that I know of on the plantation. My father was an ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... made along the skin of the stomach. This was a mistake, for the smaller snakes may be skinned through the mouth, in this wise: Open the jaws of the snake to their fullest extent, taking care, if a venomous one, not to scratch the fingers with the fangs, which, in the adder or viper, lie folded backward along the roof of the mouth. If the fangs are not required to be shown, the safest plan will be to cut them away with a ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... not the least doubt of it. He was in my eyes at that moment a crawling adder, whose fangs were liable to penetrate the flesh of some one if he was not put out of the way. But I am more than glad I was spared ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... after it had been dead for many years, and invited those gentlemen to come into it, which they did, and so of course they have a right to turn him out if they want to. The difference between Beecher and the man who put an adder in his bosom is, that Beecher put in more adders than he did, and consequently had a proportionately livelier time of it when they ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... plenty, in health, in youth; with much of enjoyment actually in our hands, and more in prospect; with just so much mystery over our coming life as to keep alive interest, yet with enough known and understood in its prospects to awaken sympathy; what deafest ear of the deaf adder could ever be so closed against the voice of the charmer, as our minds, so engrossed with the enjoyments and the hopes of earth, are closed against the voice which speaks of the things ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... it and bake some bread. On returning home, Sigmund asked whether his orders had been carried out. The lad replied by showing the bread, and when closely questioned he artlessly confessed that he had been obliged to knead into the loaf a great adder which was hidden in the meal. Pleased to see that the boy, for whom he felt a strange affection, had successfully stood the test which had daunted his brothers, Sigmund bade him refrain from eating of the loaf, for although he was proof against ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... was established that all adders bite, would you refuse to believe his adder would ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... impulse, I should have sprung away, but not being able clearly to see in what position the reptile was lying, or which way his head was pointed, I controlled myself, and remained rooted breathless to the spot. Straining my eyes, but moving not an inch, I at length clearly distinguished a huge puff-adder, the most deadly snake in the colony, whose bite would have sent me to the other world in an hour or two. I watched him in silent horror: his head was from me—so much the worse; for this snake, unlike any other, always rises and strikes back. He did not move; he was asleep. Not ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various
... farewell 200 Struck to the inmost feeling of my soul As with the hand of Death. At once the shade More horrid nodded o'er me, and the winds With hoarser murmuring shook the branches. Dark As midnight storms, the scene of human things Appear'd before me; deserts, burning sands, Where the parch'd adder dies; the frozen south, And desolation blasting all the west With rapine and with murder: tyrant power Here sits enthroned with blood; the baleful charms 210 Of superstition there infect the skies, And turn the sun to horror. Gracious Heaven! What is the life of man? Or cannot these, ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... leprosy, best is a red adder with a white womb, if the venom be away, and the tail and the head smitten off, and the body sod with leeks, if it be oft taken and eaten. And this medicine helpeth in many evils; as appeareth by the blind man, to whom his wife gave an ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... changed with her mind As she plann'd how to thrall me with beauty, and bind My soul to her charms,—and her long tresses play'd From shade into shine and from shine into shade, Like a day in mid-autumn,—first fair, O how fair! With long snaky locks of the adder-black hair That clung round her neck,—those dark locks that I prize, For the sake of a maid that once loved me with eyes Of that fathomless hue,—but they changed as they roll'd, And brighten'd, ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... be devoured, enjoy their lives until immediately before the catastrophe, takes none of its horror from the mode of death. To be dismembered alive is certainly not an agreeable experience, and I suggest that you should observe how, for instance, a water-adder swallows a frog; how the poor creature, seized by the hind legs, gradually disappears down its throat, while its eyes project staring out of their sockets; how it does not cease struggling desperately even as ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... he hopes to create. He will tell you he loves. Yes, he loves, as the hawk loves the harmless dove, as the tyger loves the trembling kid. And is this the man in whose favour I should ever have been weak enough to entertain a partiality? I would tear him from my bosom like an adder. I would ...
— Italian Letters, Vols. I and II • William Godwin
... Sarah was treading on dangerous ground, and that something was annoying her host, so she turned to Mrs Clay and said, 'Sarah says I am to choose what we do every day, so may I choose to go and fish in the Adder?' ...
— Sarah's School Friend • May Baldwin
... trees and taken to my chimney, the phoebe to my pigpen, the swallow to my barn loft, the vireo to my lilac bush, the screech owls to my apple trees, the red squirrel for its nest to my ice-house, and the flat-nosed adder to the sandy knoll by my beehives. I have taken over from its wild inhabitants fourteen acres in Hingham; but, beginning with the fox, the largest of my wild creatures, and counting only what we commonly call "animals" (beasts, birds, and reptiles), there are dwelling with ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... Judge Sewall writhed under the infliction of these lines as they were doubly thrust upon him by the deacon's "lining" and the singing of the congregation; and the words, "The drowsy Adder will as soon unlock his Sullen Ear" seemed to particularly irritate him; doubtless he felt sure that no one could doubt his integrity, but feared that some might think ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... Mr. Courthope does not condescend to italicize his pun; but a swallow-tailed and adder-tongued pun like this must be paused upon. Compare Mr. Murray's Tale of the Town of Lucca, to be seen between the arrival of one train and the departure of the next,—nothing there but twelve churches and a cathedral,—mostly of ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... soldiers have got him!" and, as John was laying down his aunt to come and hear, she rushed up the stairs with, "And it is all your doing, you unnatural, good-for-nothing varmint! That was what you were after all night, you and your aunt, the adder that I have warmed at my bosom! Turning against your own poor father, to set them bloody-minded soldiers on him! And now he'll be taken and hanged, and I shall be a poor miserable widow woman all along ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... deaf as a post,—as said before - And as deaf as twenty similes more, Including the adder, that deafest of snakes, Which never hears the coil ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... the religion under which all the Pisos had lived and flourished, which had protected the rights and nursed the virtues of her great husband and his family, were good enough for her, for her children, and for all. Her ear was closed against the sound of Christianity, as naturally as an adder's against all sound. She could not, and never did hear it. From her I received my principles and first impressions. Not even the history, nor so much as a word of the sufferings, of the Christians ever fell on my ear. I grew up in all things a Piso; the true child ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... aggregate they were not an inspiring spectacle. A soldier, stripped of his arms and held by his foes, becomes of a sudden a pitiable, almost a contemptible object. You think instinctively of an adder that has lost its fangs, or of a wild cat that, being shorn of teeth to bite with and claws to tear with, is now a more helpless, more impotent thing than if it had been created without teeth and claws in the first place. These similes ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... Pax, with a sigh, "it was a child, that was. Her name was Mariar, but we called 'er Merry. Her father's name—the Brute's, you know—was Blackadder, and a blacker adder don't wriggle its slimy way through filthy slums nowhere—supposin' him to be yet unscragged, for he was uncommon hard on his wife—that's my Aunt Georgie. Her name was Georgianna. I wonder how it is that people never give people their right names! Well, ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne
... she would have jumped from an adder, but she did not spring far—not, indeed, beyond arm's length—and then, quick as thought, she raised her little hand and dealt him a box on the ear with such right goodwill that it sounded among the trees like ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... tell such things about their friends in public conveyances," exclaimed Mistigris. "As for me, I'm not listening to you; I'm deaf: 'discretion plays the better part of adder.'" ...
— A Start in Life • Honore de Balzac
... an adder even to tears, So sweet a song, from mouth so full of grace. Before I saw thee, my Odora! ne'er I thought this world could ever grow so fair To me. Love throws a rosy, sparkling tissue On mountain, hill, lake, tree, shrub, leaf and flower, Love sweetens every note of nature seven fold. But ...
— Lays of Ancient Virginia, and Other Poems • James Avis Bartley
... tell you, brother, according to the flesh: it is just as complete as the lark's is with the adder, no more so, nor ever can. Reconciled, forsooth! To what ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... first mintioned be th' stanch an' faithful press. Set here, ol' la-ad, an' warrum ye'er toes by th' fire. Set here an' r-rest fr'm th' gratichood iv ye'er fellow-counthrymen, that, as Shakspere says, biteth like an asp an' stingeth like an adder. R-rest here, as ye might r-rest at th' hearth iv millyons iv people that cud give ye no house ...
— Mr. Dooley's Philosophy • Finley Peter Dunne
... in the lake," said Taliesin, the bard[125]; "a spotted adder on the mountain, a star, a priest. This was long, long ago; since then, I have slept in a hundred worlds, revolved ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... them. I had had this flower under observation more than twenty years, and had never before seen it visited by honey-bees. The same season I saw them for the first time working upon the flower of bloodroot and of adder's-tongue. Hence I would not undertake to say again what flowers bees do not work upon. Virgil implies that they work upon the violet, and for aught I know they may. I have seen them very busy on the blossoms of the white oak, though this is not considered ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... the rough countryman, but hardly had they been uttered, when Viola sprang from her chair, as though an adder had stung her. "Uncle," she cried, and a small fist hovered before Gabriel's eyes in such a threatening manner that he involuntarily closed them. But the child, whose features reminded him so strongly of his dead sister, could not make ...
— A Ghetto Violet - From "Christian and Leah" • Leopold Kompert
... "marriage with your great-grandmother; neither shalt thou marry thy great-grandfather's widow." She, poor thing! at that time was thinking little of marriage; for even then, though known only to herself and her femme de chambre, that dreadful organic malady (cancer) was raising its adder's crest, under which finally she died. But, in spite of languor interchanging continually with disfiguring anguish, she still impressed one as a regal beauty. Her person, indeed, and figure, would have tended towards such a standard; but ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... up and down, and as he came to the letter he spurned it with his foot, like a poisonous adder, too loathsome to touch. "I have deserved this punishment," cried he, ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... the warmhearted ebullition of feeling produced by his appearance had subsided, "so you have returned to us at last; but indeed, you return now to a blank and dismal prospect. Miss Goodwin's adder tongue has charmed the dotage of your silly old uncle to ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... afternoon, as the cows were lazily swishing their tails coming home to milking, and the shadow of the thick hedge had already caused the anemones in the grass to close their petals, there was a slight rustling sound. Out into the cool grass by some cowslips there came a small dark head. It was an adder, verily a snake in the grass and flowers. His quick eye—you know the proverb, 'If his ear were as quick as his eye, No man should pass him by'—caught sight of us immediately, and he turned back. The hedge was hollow there, and the mound ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... was like to think, till he did see, what an adder the King nursed in his bosom? Most men counted her a fair white dove, all innocent and childlike: that did I not. I did see far enough, for all the mist, to see she was no child in that fashion; yet children love mischief well enough betimes; and I counted her, if not white, but ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... came in fashion after the time the Popes were growne so secure of their greatnesse, as to contemne all Christian Kings; and Treading on the necks of Emperours, to mocke both them, and the Scripture, in the words of the 91. Psalm, "Thou shalt Tread upon the Lion and the Adder, the young Lion and the Dragon thou ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... dismounting, she ran through the grass to where the bird lay, and found the body of the maiden Sipelie, pierced to the heart, and covered with blood. Horror-struck, she turned away, but at that instant she trod upon an adder, which suddenly darted its fangs into her foot, inflicting ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3 • Various
... hand, Where the household before her is strown. —Earth, Earth, open and cover thy dead! For they are smitten and fall who bear The corpse to the grave with a prayerless prayer, And thousands are crush'd in the common bed:— —Is it Hell that breathes with an adder's breath? Is it the day of doom, men cry, the Judge that cometh? —'Tis the Black Death, God help us! The black ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... but an irregular border of copse-wood and timber, often wide enough to contain within it a winding footpath, or a rough cart-track. Under its shelter the earliest primroses, anemones, and wild hyacinths were to be found; sometimes the first bird's nest; and, now and then, the unwelcome adder. Two such hedgerows radiated, as it were, from the parsonage garden. One, a continuation of the turf terrace, proceeded westward, forming the southern boundary of the home meadows; and was formed ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... one of George Sheldon's cards, which the clerk looked at. He gave a little start as if an adder ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... well enough; it takes ladies a few weeks to find out each other's weak points. But then the new Mrs. Tunnygate unexpectedly yet undeniably began to exhibit the serpent's tooth, the adder's tongue or the cloven hoof—as the reader's literary traditions may lead him to prefer. For no obvious reason at all she conceived a violent hatred of Mrs. Appleboy, a hatred that waxed all the more virulent on account of its object's innocently obstinate refusal ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... still, But the heart of the sunflower is darker and sadder; When the corn is in stacks on the slope of the hill, And slides o'er the path the striped adder; ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... hands, praying. Finding that his son, the hope of his name, still did not come to him, great tears rose in his eyes, dry so long, and rolled down his withered cheeks. At this moment, Etienne, hearing no further sounds, glided to the opening of his grotto like a young adder craving the sun. He saw the tears of the stricken old man, he recognized the signs of a true grief, and, seizing his father's hand, he kissed him, saying in the voice of ...
— The Hated Son • Honore de Balzac
... roughness of his staff still pricked his hand and forced him to recall his former fall. Instead, therefore, of turning aside, he looked into his book of light, and there he read in fiery letters, "Thou shalt go upon the lion and the adder; the young lion and the dragon shalt thou tread under thy feet:" and this gave him comfort. So, on he went, determining still to read in his book, and not to look at all at that which affrighted him: and so it was, that when he came to the place, he saw that it was only ...
— The Rocky Island - and Other Similitudes • Samuel Wilberforce
... And swift as an adder Muldoon kicked him just below the knee cap. Evin screamed, and collapsed. Muldoon staggered out of the way of the falling body, only to fall into the clutches of Robert's sudden ...
— Lease to Doomsday • Lee Archer
... "Adorned with every fair accomplishment, Of pleasing face and manners was the peer, And of a speech so sweet and eloquent, Him the deaf adder might have stopt to hear; So that of him to Alexandria went Tidings as of a precious thing and rare. She was the daughter of that matron bold, Queen Orontea, that ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... the path, by which Ra travelled day by day as he went about inspecting Egypt, so that it might strike at him as he passed along. We may note in passing that the Banyoro in the Sudan employ serpents in killing buffaloes at the present day. They catch a puff-adder in a noose, and then nail it alive by the tip of its tail to the round in the middle of a buffalo track, so that when an animal passes the reptile may strike at it. Presently a buffalo comes along, does what it is expected to do, and then the puff-adder strikes at it, injects its poison, and the ...
— Legends Of The Gods - The Egyptian Texts, edited with Translations • E. A. Wallis Budge
... Alexander said in a low voice. "Watch out for her. She's as deadly as a puff adder and she collects men. The other man is Douglas's father, Henry. The plump redhead beside him is his wife, Anne. The other woman is my mother, Clara, even though Eloise and I don't look like her. We ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... love and desire, said in pleading accents: "I ask, O king, for my life, and that of my people. If we had all been sold as bondmen and bondwomen, I had held my tongue, great as the evil would have been to thee." The king started, as if stung by an adder, and with a brow dark as wrath, and a voice that sent Haman to his feet, exclaimed: "Thy life! my queen? Who is he? where is he that dare even harbor such a thought in his heart? He who strikes at thy life, radiant creature, plants his presumptuous blow on his monarch's ...
— Half Hours in Bible Lands, Volume 2 - Patriarchs, Kings, and Kingdoms • Rev. P. C. Headley
... were the Salmon, and the Lynx, and the Ling worm, the Seal, the Stone, and the Sea-mew; the Buck-goat, the Apple-tree, the Bull, the Adder, ...
— The House of the Wolfings - A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark Written in Prose and in Verse • William Morris
... widow of sixty, insatiably greedy of such fleshly comforts as had ever come within her knowledge—soft cushions, heavily sweetened dishes, finer clothing than her neighbors. She had cold eyes, and nature had formed her mouth and jaw like the little silver-striped adder that I found one day, mangled by some passing cart, in the yellow dust of the road. Her lips were stretched for ever in that same flat, immutable smile. When she moved her head, you caught the gleam of a string of gold beads, ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... like one of those at the court of Pharaoh, deliberately made an adder out of the dust, knowing the adder would bite, and then played with the adder until it bit some spectator, would the injured man blame the magician or ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... Fortune. But to wake helpless as well as empty-handed, the strength for ever gone from arms that were invincible; to crawl, a poor crushed worm, the mark for all men's pity, where one had thought to win the meed of all men's praise, ah, then to live is agony! Each breath becomes a venomed adder's sting. ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston
... I have done for years—for years—and all for the sake of your private applause—and the hope of vengeance on a woman, who, if she did ill in murdering my father, has been bitterly repaid by nourishing a serpent in her bosom, that had the tooth, but not the deafened ear, of the adder." ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... into a creek of the sea, and hardly escaped drowning. Another time I fell out of a boat into Bedford river, but mercy yet preserved me alive. Besides, another time, being in the field with one of my companions, it chanced that an adder passed over the highway, so I, having a stick in my hand, struck her over the back; and having stunned her, I forced open her mouth with my stick, and plucked her sting out with my fingers; by which act, had not God been merciful unto me, I might by my desperateness have brought ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... in your arms, Janet, An adder and a snake; But haud me fast, let me not pass, Gin ye ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... out of little protuberancies on the side of the sheath, which, by observing the Figure diligently, is easie enough to be perceiv'd; and from several particulars, I suppose the Animal has a power of displaying them, and shutting them in again as it pleases, as a Cat does its claws, or as an Adder or Viper can ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... when this adder's tongue struck his wound. But it told, as intended: the old man ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... whatsoever, in this strange visible and invisible Universe, are equally inflexible of nature; that, they will, one and all, with precisely the same obstinacy, continue to obey their own law, not our law; deaf as the adder to all charm of parliamentary eloquence, and of voting never so often repeated; silently, but inflexibly and forevermore, declining to change themselves, even as sulphuric acid declines to become sweet milk, though you vote so to the end of the world. This, it sometimes seems ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... heavens were open above them, behold, her good man, who comes upon her near the old cross. She, at that time lazily swinging her charming little foot over the side of the litter, drew in her head as though she had seen an adder. She was a good wife, for I know some who would have proudly passed their husbands, to their shame and to the ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... is beautiful. But women are like adder's eggs. He is a fool who warms them in his bosom." He turned his slow regard upon Mrs. Sin. "You have stained your hair to look even as hers. It was discreet, my wife. But one is beautiful and many-shadowed like a copper vase, and the other is like a winter sunset ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... XXXVII. As when an adder, whom athwart the way Some wheel hath crushed, or traveller, passing by, Maimed with a stone, as unaware he lay, And left sore mangled, on the point to die, In vain his coils would lengthen, fain to fly: One half erect, his burning ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... by the signs of contrition, but the nature of Deerslayer did not require proofs of intense feelings so strong in order to bring him down to a level with the regrets felt by the girl herself. He arose, as if an adder had stung him, and the accents of the mother that soothes her child were scarcely more gentle and winning than the tones of his voice, as he now expressed his contrition ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... said, wishing to do her duty by all mankind, even by them as had ever been her bitterest enemies, she would not listen to him. With that she stopped her ears, and shook her head from side to side, to intimate to Mr Dennis that though he talked until he had no breath left, she was as deaf as any adder. ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... diabolical imaginable. Among the reptiles of Patagonia, Sir Henry, there is one—a species of black adder, known in the country as the Mynga Worm—whose bite is more deadly than that of the rattler or the copperhead, and as rapid in its action as prussic acid itself. It has, too, a great velocity of ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... speak to her," said Lyon Berners in extreme anxiety and displeasure, as he left Rosa's side, and made his way around the table, until he stood immediately behind his wife. He touched her on her shoulder to attract her attention. She started as if an adder had stung her, but she ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... stream The mountain roses fall; And fern and adder's-tongue Grow on the old mill wall. The tarn is on the upland moor, Where not a leaf doth grow; And through the mountain gashes, The merry mill stream dashes Down to the sea below. But in the quiet hollows The red trout groweth prime, ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... Oh, Anna Maria, my child, my poor lost child! which I can feel for the tenderness of the inexperienced heart! My Virgin Eve, which the Serpent has entered into your youthful paradise, and you will find; alas! too late, that you have warmed an adder into your bosom!" ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... Christ, he that doth deny the resurrection of the saints, must needs deny the resurrection of Christ, that proves it. Now this error, as it is in itself destructive to all Christian religion: so it, like an adder, carrieth within its bowels, many other ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... (my! what a lot of hunters do collect about the bungalows at night, to be sure!) under the bush, engaged in eating that precise reptilian form of poisoned death known as a night adder, which it had just killed. But the genets had other and private business, and they parted from the mongoose with no more than a snarl, the two genets to appear next—or, rather, to be no more than guessed at—crossing the last ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... Sigmund laughed, and answered: "I have heard of that son of a king, Who might not be scared from his bread for all the worms of the land." And therewith he went to the meal-sack and thrust therein his hand, And drew forth an ash-grey adder, and a deadly worm it was: Then he went to the door of the cave and set it down in the grass, While the King's son quaked and quivered: then he drew forth his sword from the sheath, And said: "Now fearest thou this, that men call the ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... muttering, "A good deal of ceremony to-night about crushing an adder." Athos shrunk into his corner, pale and motionless ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... gloomy. Throw off your sinister air. How long will this taciturn reverie last in which you are sunk? You make yourself a laughing-stock—you act like a fool. You resemble a sphinx of the desert engaged in meditating upon a serpent, and who mistakes an innocent adder for a viper." M. Langis understood what she wished to say to him, but he did not throw off his ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... come fourteen mile' in an open sleigh. The man that lives next door to Betsey said he'd bring us home, an' I thought we'd better come. He's goin' over to the village to-night; he's got folks there. I told him he'd a good deal better stay here, but he won't. He's as deaf as an adder, an' you can't make him hear anythin', anyway. We ain't spoke a word all the way home. Where's Loretty? She came over to stay with you, ...
— Young Lucretia and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... should be my playmates but the adder and the frog, That was got beneath a furze-bush and born in a bog? And what should be my singing, that was christened at an altar, But Aves and Credos and Psalms out of ...
— A Few Figs from Thistles • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... startin' in now down on the flat to make sure no poor sick critter is left in bed in any of them houses. Now's your chance if you want to git up to Daggin's. Go out the back way, follow up the alleys, and go in at the back when you git there. But remember, 'Dan shall be a serpent by the way, an adder in the path that biteth the horse heels, so that his rider shall fall backward!' In Clay County we had to eat up the last mule from the tips of his ears to the end of the fly-whipper. Now we got to pass through the pinches again. We can't stand ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... eluded us, and we soon were of opinion that smaller fry were capable of affording better fun. Some seasons afterwards, when our Hunt was disbanded, the shopkeepers' apprentices continued, with the youngsters, to work our mongrel hounds; but eventually Joker's death from the bite of an adder put an end to their pastime, for the bobtail and the terrier were the only possible leaders of the ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... my boy, not to catch hold of the tail of a puff adder," he exclaimed, as Percy again dismounted. "They are pretty numerous hereabouts, and you may chance to put your hand close to one of their holes while you ...
— Hendricks the Hunter - The Border Farm, a Tale of Zululand • W.H.G. Kingston
... and Syllables—This defect makes the words an ambassador sound like a nambassador, or an adder ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... this was spoken, John saw the necessity of acquiescence. "I did but jest," he said; "and you turn upon me like an adder! Name whom you will, in the fiend's name, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... fallen, and carefully took it up with his left finger and thumb to hold out before the others the head and about an inch or so of the little snake—one much thinner, but otherwise about the size of an English adder. ...
— Rob Harlow's Adventures - A Story of the Grand Chaco • George Manville Fenn
... or by Him who made The world, thy heart's blood dyes my blade!"— "Thy threats, thy mercy, I defy! 405 Let recreant yield, who fears to die." —Like adder darting from his coil, Like wolf that dashes through the toil, Like mountain-cat who guards her young, Full at Fitz-James's throat he sprung; 410 Received, but recked not of a wound, And locked his arms his foeman ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... constitute by far the greater number of pteridophytes, and their general structure corresponds with that of the maiden-hair fern described. There are three orders, of which two, the true ferns (Filices) and the adder-tongues (Ophioglossaceae), are represented in the United States. A third order, intermediate in some respects between these two, and called the ringless ferns (Marattiaceae), has no ...
— Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany - For High Schools and Elementary College Courses • Douglas Houghton Campbell
... and Holly Fern Marsh Fern Tribe The Beech Ferns The Fragrant Fern The Wood Ferns The Bladder Ferns The Woodsias The Boulder Fern (Dennstaedtia) Sensitive and Ostrich Ferns The Flowering Ferns (Osmunda) Curly Grass and Climbing Fern Adder's Tongue The Grape Ferns: Key to the Grape Fern Moonwort Little Grape Fern Lance-leaved Grape Fern Matricary Fern Common Grape Fern Rattlesnake Fern Filmy Fern Noted Fern Authors Fern Literature Time List for Fruiting of Ferns Glossary Note: Meaning ...
— The Fern Lover's Companion - A Guide for the Northeastern States and Canada • George Henry Tilton
... into a monastery, where with hunger and sorrow he pined away to death? Who so ill-favouredly and monstrously put the Emperor Frederick's neck under his feet, and, as though that were not sufficient, added further this text out of the Psalms, "Thou shalt go upon the adder and cockatrice, and shalt tread the lion and dragon under thy feet"? Such an example of scorning and contemning a prince's majesty, as never before that was heard tell of in any remembrance; except, I ween, either of Tamerlane's, the king of Scythia, a wild and ...
— The Apology of the Church of England • John Jewel
... all that this letter would have taught him, and so far from dying, living to a very great age. And this instance shows, that the most dangerous of enemies is the one that never threatens till he actually strikes, resembling not the cobra, but the adder, as Shatrunjaya discovered to ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... adder, stay, that by thy pattern my sister may draw the fashion and work of a rich ribbon, that I may present to my beloved, by which means thy beauty and the excellent order of thy scales shall for ever be preferred before ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... and as mad as an adder. His hair puffed out, his eyes glistened. John rose more leisurely, stepped to the hearth, picked up a piece of box stuff and knocked a ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... we feared," they said. "He is unrepentant and he is worthy of death. It is not expedient that the young adder should live. There is poison under his tongue, and he speaks things not lawful for an Israelite to hear. Let him die, that we may see him no more, and that our children be not corrupted by his ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... of the aged thane, and she hated Agitha because of them. The spirit of evil spread his darkness over her soul. He filled her breast with the poison of asps, her eyes with the venom of the adder that lures ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... Hats—in winter especially, when we are hungry? My young men will say, 'Rome can neither fight nor rule. She is taking her men out of Britain. The Winged Hats will help us to push down the Wall. Let us show them the secret roads across the bogs.' Do I want that? No!" He spat like an adder. "I would keep the secrets of my people though I were burned alive. My two children here have spoken truth. Leave us Picts alone. Comfort us, and cherish us, and feed us from far off—with the hand behind your back. Parnesius understands us. Let him have rule ...
— Puck of Pook's Hill • Rudyard Kipling
... thirteen, to be the leader of the body of three thousand men which were to join in the Crusade preached by Pope Pius II. On the 2nd of June, 1464, the ducal standard, bearing the golden lion of the house of Sforza and the adder of the Visconti, was solemnly committed to the charge of the young Crusader, before the eyes of the whole court, on the piazza in front of the old palace, which was gaily decorated for the occasion with garlands and tapestries. But the Pope died, and the idea of the Crusade was abandoned. Lodovico, ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... flanconade and tierce, feint and double-feint, and sudden disengagements. The sweat trickled down the vicomte's face; Victor's forehead glistened with moisture. Suddenly Victor stooped; swift as the tongue of an adder his blade bit deeply into the vicomte's groin, making a terrible wound. The vicomte caught his breath in a gasp ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... that bind The forest floor-ways, plated close and true— The last love's labour of the autumn wind— Is broken with curled flower buds white and blue In all the matted hollows, and speared through With thousand serpent-spotted blades up-sprung, Yet bloomless, of the slender adder-tongue. ...
— Among the Millet and Other Poems • Archibald Lampman
... then in the midst of his many miseries? What could he do with a wife whom he married with a declaration that he disliked her? With such feelings as were his, how could he stand before a clergyman and take an oath that he would love her and cherish her? Would she not ever be as an adder to him,—as an adder whom it would be impossible that he should admit into his bosom? Could he live in the same house with her; and if so, could he ask his mother and sisters to visit her? He remembered well what Mrs. Hittaway had called her;—a nasty, low, scheming, ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... of it,—nor what you yourself can imagine about it; the origin, or nature, or name may be as you will, but the deadly reality of the thing is with us, and warring against us, and on our true war with it depends whatever life we can win. Deadly reality, I say. The puff-adder or horned asp is not more real. Unbelievable,—those,—unless you had seen them; no fable could have been coined out of any human brain so dreadful, within its own poor material sphere, as that blue-lipped ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... Surely an adder crawled from that tiny golden cylinder and upon the smooth white paper distilled its subtle venom. I, poor fool, exulting in the splendid throes of accomplishment, never dreamed that the real christening of my bantling was the toast the Master of Hell drank as the name "Amalgamated" ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... called a god! Men, let alone gods, should die fighting, whether it be with other men, with wild beasts, with snakes, or with devils. Think now, if your master, the Deliverer, saw you crouch thus like a toad before an adder, how he would laugh and say, 'Ho! I thought this man brave. Ho! he talked very loud about fighting the Water Dweller, he who came of a line of warriors; but now I laugh at him, for I see that he is but a cross-bred cur ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... destruction that wasteth at noonday." The allusion, of course, is to the fact that the great majority of these harlots are full of loathsome physical and moral disease; with the face and form of an angel, these women "bite like a serpent and sting like an adder;" their traffic is not for life, but inevitably for shame, disease, and death. Betrayed and seduced themselves, they in their turn betray ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... 'might you preach the faith of Christ in the ear of the adder! to the very stones of the highways! Aurelian turn from a settled purpose! ha! ha! you have not served, Probus, under him in Gaul and Asia as others have. Never did the arguments of his legions and his great officers on the other side, serve ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... standeth; for in no wise I will not trust for this treaty, for I know well my father will be avenged on me. And so they met as their appointment was, and so they were agreed and accorded thoroughly; and wine was fetched, and they drank. Right soon came an adder out of a little heath bush, and it stung a knight on the foot. And when the knight felt him stung, he looked down and saw the adder, and then he drew his sword to slay the adder, and thought of none other harm. And when the host on both parties saw that sword drawn, then ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume II (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory
... him till he was clean oot o' breath, and then I explained again. But he was deaf as ony adder, and only cried, him and his brither baith, for the officers to throw me oot at the window. Then one of the officers blew a whistle, and I kenned ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... precedent for the course of the carping CARPENTER, except in the case of the classic chap who had warmed a viper which had turned again and rent him. He did not mean to say that Mr. CARPENTER was a viper, but he thought nobody but an Adder would put this and that together as Mr. CARPENTER ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 6, May 7, 1870 • Various
... shot!" he ejaculated. "What an extraordinary experience! Will you believe me, Doctor, when I tell you that as I drew this penknife out of my waistcoat pocket it actually seemed to change into an adder in my hand? There was the flat, wicked-looking head, the malevolent eyes, the characteristic markings of the body, and, above all, there was the feeling of it writhing strongly in my grasp, as though it were trying to get enough of its length clear to turn and strike me! Talk about Aaron's ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... quiet, or you'll have a fit of the mother [hysterics]. Nobody wants to send the lad amongst snakes—I don't know that there's so much as an adder there. As to devils, he'll find them where'er he goeth, and some of them in men's and women's bodies, ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... overpeers the church: But we'll pull down his haughty insolence; And, as Pope Alexander, our progenitor, Trod on the neck of German Frederick, Adding this golden sentence to our praise, "That Peter's heirs should tread on Emperors, And walk upon the dreadful adder's back, Treading the lion and the dragon down, And fearless spurn the killing basilisk," So will we quell that haughty schismatic, And, by authority apostolical, Depose him ...
— Dr. Faustus • Christopher Marlowe
... snake passed over my foot, and biting me on the ankle vanished in the swamp. It must have been some sort of a water-snake, but I did not know. All I knew was that I had been bitten by a snake that might be poisonous. It could easily have been an adder, or a karait—even a cobra—though I had not a minute in which to observe a hood or any distinctive marks. I immediately collected my faculties to think what was the best thing to do. I knew I had no time to lose. Mother was away in town shopping for the cold-weather needs, Dad was out for the day ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... prepared from a glandular secretion of the Chinese swamp-adder is also beyond price. Again-the case upon the pedestal yonder contains five perfect bulbs, three already in flower, as you observe, of an orchid discovered by our chief chemist in certain forests of Burma. It only occurs at extremely rare intervals—eighty years or more—and under ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... of the treacherous juice, Which some folks say stings like an adder, They went back again at the handkerchief men, Who slowly got ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field
... fere, A lovely partner of a lady's bed, A noble head a golden crown to wear: His glosing sire his errand daily said, And sugared speeches whispered in mine ear To make me take this darling in mine arms, But still the adder ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... the bitter cold gave them appetite for even such fodder. I had an almost Irish hatred of snakes, and these meadows were full of them,—striped, green, dingy water- snakes, and now and then an ugly spotted adder by no means pleasant to touch with bare feet. There were great black snakes, too, in the ledges of the neighboring knolls; and on one occasion in early spring I found myself in the midst of a score at least of them,—holding ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... with the Agazonbae, who are dog-faced; and with the Sibans, who have horses' feet, and run more swiftly than horses. A third of our company died in battle, and a third died of want. The rest murmured against me, and said that I had brought them an evil fortune. I took a horned adder from beneath a stone and let it sting me. When they saw that I did not sicken they ...
— A House of Pomegranates • Oscar Wilde
... and in town. I remember a terrible fright a large picnic party, at which I assisted, was thrown into while lunching in the garden of a villa, almost in the town of Rio, by a lady jumping up from her seat with a deadly whip-snake hanging on her dress. I once myself sat on an adder who put his fangs through the woollen stuff of my inexpressibles and could not escape. The same thing happened with the lady's dress; in that case also we caught the snake, as it could not ...
— Sketches From My Life - By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha • Hobart Pasha
... the cliffs with my children, after their return from school at noon, to gather wild flowers, it being May-day. We came in with the spring beauty, called miscodeed by the Indians, the adder's ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... Appropriately enough, it was Eve who discovered it, curled up in the sun right by the gate. Her appeals for assistance brought Wade in a hurry, and the serpent, after an exciting chase through the hedges and flower beds, was finally dispatched. It proved to be an adder of blameless character, but neither Eve nor Miss Mullett had any regrets. Eve declared that a snake was a snake, no matter what any one—meaning Wade—said, and Wade was forced to acknowledge the fact. Armed ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... no! For, adder-like, his sting lay in his tongue. (His "sting" is present, though his "stung" ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... and its name (Cooke's Folly) is said to be derived from the following circumstance:— Several centuries since, the proprietor of the land, a gentleman named Cooke, dreamed that his only son was destined to be killed by the sting of an adder. This idea took such hold of his mind, that in order to avert the dreaded catastrophe, he built this tower, to which he rigidly confined his son. The tradition goes on to relate the futility of all human precautions against the decrees of fate: for a short ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 398, November 14, 1829 • Various
... dishonour born Is in my house; there all shall well adorn The walls whose stones the lapse of Time has laid. Behold again; this life great stories made; All cast aside for love, and then and then Love filched away; the world an adder-den, And all folk foes: and one, the one desire— —How shall we name it?—grown a poisoned fire, God once, God still, but God of wrong and shame A lying God, a curse without a name. So turneth ...
— Poems By The Way & Love Is Enough • William Morris
... passed from the sight. When Roger Montrose sought his pillow that night, 'Twas to dream of La Travers. He thought she became A burning red rose, with each leaf like a flame. He stooped down and plucked it, and woke with a start, As it turned to an adder and struck ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... to one of the women, beautiful or plain, the whole male population knew of it, and smiled derisively upon the husband. Von Blitz had turned an adder loose among these men; it stung swiftly and ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... these noble visitors again another season. For it is noticeable how common such things tend to become when once they are discovered. An enthusiastic botanical collector told me that for years he searched far and near for the adder's-tongue fern, till one day he stumbled upon it in a place over which he had long been in the habit of passing. Marking the peculiarities of the spot he straightway wrote to a kindred spirit, whom he knew to have been engaged in the same ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... having the properties of a charm.] word "Taboo" shrieked in my ears, at some gross violation of its provisions, of which I had unconsciously been guilty. The day after our arrival I happened to hand some tobacco to Toby over the head of a native who sat between us. He started up as if stung by an adder; while the whole company, manifesting an equal degree of horror, simultaneously screamed out "Taboo!" I never again perpetrated a similar piece of ill-manners, which indeed was forbidden by the canons of good breeding as well as ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... know so much know what is in this letter," said Sir John, staring at Fareham's superscription as if he had come suddenly upon an adder. ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... blow fell. There came a note, whose every word bit my heart like an adder. Allen demanded the boy, whom the law gave to his guardianship; and I was warned I must make no attempt to see him after he was taken away, because he would be taught to forget me. I refused. I dared ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... had only employed Graham to heal the Earl of Angus, himself dying of witchcraft. Bothwell was charged with employing a retainer, Ninian Chirnside, to arrange more than twenty-one meetings with the wizard Graham; the result being the procurement of a poison, 'adder skins, toad skins, and the hippomanes in the brain of a young foal,' to ooze the juices on the King, 'a poison of such vehemency as should have presently cut him off.' Isobel Gowdie, accused of witchcraft in 1622, confessed ...
— James VI and the Gowrie Mystery • Andrew Lang
... schoolfellows; but my wife, and some others, could not bear the sight of it. I one day took it in my hand, and opened its mouth with a penknife, to show a gentleman how different it was from that of the adder, which I had dead by me: its teeth being no more formidable or terrific than the teeth of a trout or eel; while the mouth of the adder had two fangs, like the claws of a cat, attached to the roof of the mouth, no way connected with its ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 549 (Supplementary issue) • Various
... words, every one of them an adder, Alfred turned on her furiously, and his long arm shot out of its own accord, and the fingers opened like an eagle's claw. She saw, and understood, but never blenched. Her vindictive eye met his dilating ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... behind the mists of apparent forgetfulness, and any light air of suggestion may sweep away the clouds and show it all. What have you laid up in these memories of yours to start into life some day: 'at the last biting like a serpent and stinging like an adder'? 'It is John! It is John, whom ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... means that odour of the bean-field; that when Jesus smelled such a scent about Jerusalem or in Galilee, he thought of his Father. And if God means it, it is mine, even if I should never smell it again. The music of the spheres is mine if old age should make me deaf as the adder. Am I mystical again, reader? Then I hope you are too, or will be before you have done with this same beautiful mystical life of ours. More and more nature becomes to me one of God's books of poetry—not his grandest—that is history—but ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... whole, perhaps his life was uneventful for so far-travelling a dog, though it held its moments of eccentricity, as when he leaped through the window of a four-wheeler into Kensington, or sat on a Dartmoor adder. But that was fortunately of a Sunday afternoon—when adder and all were torpid, so nothing happened, till a friend, who was following, lifted him off the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy |
