"Boomerang" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... rapidity. It charged me like a tilting knight, seemed to hack at my head, and pass by. Sometimes when we went round a curve of road, the effect was yet more awful. It seemed as if some tree or windmill swung round to smite like a boomerang. The sun by this time was a blazing fact; and I saw that all Nature is chivalrous and militant. We do wrong to seek peace in Nature; we should rather seek the nobler sort of war; and see all the trees as ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... with which some of them throw pebbles would lead us to believe they have already reached the degree of civilisation that many tribes of savages had reached only a few years ago, when they learned to use the boomerang and lasso. Some naturalists claim that monkeys actually set pitfalls for their enemies and lie in wait for them to be caught, just as ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... weapon, the trombash, that is used by these people, somewhat resembling the Australian boomerang; it is a piece of flat, hard wood, about two feet in length, the end of which turns sharply at an angle of about 30 degrees. They throw this with great dexterity, and inflict severe wounds with the hard and sharp ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... the goods; he made his offer; whereat the wild man swung his boomerang disagreeably, and indicated that he must have "more, more." Tears of self-pity flooded Sinkum's eyes. He had no choice but to obey, and at last the black-fellow left with a sack containing ten times the value of the goods the storeman had been forced to buy. He had been ...
— Queensland Cousins • Eleanor Luisa Haverfield
... occupations lingering on into civilised life from the savage state, the new demand for labour of an intellectual kind is enormous. The invention, construction, and working of one Krupp gun, though its mere discharge hardly demands more crude muscular exertion than a savage expends in throwing his boomerang, yet represents an infinitude of intellectual care and thought, far greater than that which went to the shaping of all the weapons of a primitive army. Above all, in the domain of politics and government, where once a king or queen, aided by a handful ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... him. They start with him, they stare with him, they stagger with him, they share an inexpressible vitality in the air which emanates from this violent and capering satirist. Trabb's boy is among other things a boy; he has a physical rapture in hurling himself like a boomerang and in bouncing to the sky like a ball. It is just exactly in describing this quality that Dickens is Dickens and that no one else comes near him. No one feels in his bones that Felix Holt was strong as ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... first diamond found in Australia. He was for a short time one of the members for the Port Phillip electorate, but resigned, as he found faithful discharge of the duties to be incompatible with his office. He patented the boomerang screw propeller, and was the author of many educational and other works, including a translation of the Lusiad of Camoens. Although a strict martinet in his official duties, and subject to a choleric ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... shore to the other. I saw at the same time the weapons that man has made, from a rude club, such as was grasped by that savage when he crawled from his den, from his hole in the ground, and hunted a snake for his dinner—from that club to the boomerang, to the sword, to the cross-bow, to the blunderbuss, to the flint-lock, to the cap-lock, to the needle-gun, up to the cannon cast by Krupp, capable of hurling a ball of 2,000 pounds through eighteen inches of solid steel. I saw, too, the armor from ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... is that they play their game for the sake of the game, not to gain the plaudits of an idle crowd or in expectation of reward. Rivalry there undoubtedly is among them, but the rivalry is disinterested. No chaplet of olive-leaves or parsley decorates the brow of him who so throws the boomerang that it accomplishes the farthest and most complicated flight. As the archers of old England practised their sport, so do the blacks exhibit their strength and skill, not as the modern lover of football, who pays others to play for his amusement, and ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... the chariot, O Laeg!" said Cuchulain. And Laeg yoked the chariot at that, and Cuchulain went into the chariot, and he cast his sword at the birds with a cast like the cast of a boomerang, so that they with their claws and wings flapped against the water. And they seized upon all the birds, and they gave them and distributed them among the women; nor was there any one of the women, except Ethne ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... is gained by these polemical controversies, when conducted in the spirit of unfairness, or with greater asperity than the true interests of journalism demand. The beauty of its kindly advice to us, as a "scientific critic," was that every word of it came back, as a cruel boomerang, into the writer's ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... to talk," said the Governor. "He brought my heart up in my mouth as no one has done in years. Now, I must get word to some of the people in New York to find out who he is, and if this case has any concealed boomerang in it." ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... idyll. They declared that we are all careering through space, clinging to a cannon-ball, and the poets ignore the matter as if it were a remark about the weather. They say that an invisible force holds us in our own armchairs while the earth hurtles like a boomerang; and men still go back to dusty records to prove the mercy of God. They tell us that Mr. Scott's monstrous vision of a mountain of sea-water rising in a solid dome, like the glass mountain in the fairy-tale, is actually a fact, and men still go back to the ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... inches. All spears are thrown with the 'wommera', or throwing stick. A rudely made stone tomahawk is in use among the Cape York natives, but it is now nearly surperseded by iron axes obtained from the Europeans. I have seen no other weapons among them; the boomerang and nulla-nulla ...
— The Overland Expedition of The Messrs. Jardine • Frank Jardine and Alexander Jardine
... came back on the reformers like a boomerang. Leading politicians determined to do something to vindicate the leading citizen who had been accused. They elected him to the State Senate! A city of a hundred thousand can by either a positive or a negative process, destroy ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... fortresses, and up the paths leading to them, cut out in a defile in the vertical cliffs, we passed with difficulty coolies carrying on their backs the enormous loads, which are the wonder of all who have seen them, their backs straining under the boomerang-shaped frames to which the merchandise was lashed. Hundreds passed us on their toilsome journey with tea, lamp-oil, skins, hides, copper, lead, coal and white wax from Yuen-nan, and with salt, English ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... onward march was of even less force than the diatribes of the Mohammedan priests. The coffee houses continued to be as much frequented as before, and the people drank no less coffee in their homes. Indeed, the indictment proved a boomerang, for consumption received such an impetus that the merchants of Lyons and Marseilles, for the first time in history, began to import green coffee from the Levant by the ship-load in order to meet ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... had a single wreath of coarse daisies around the crown, and her mitts were darned in many places, nevertheless you could not entirely spoil her; God had used a liberal hand in making her, and her father's parsimony was a sort of boomerang that flew back chiefly ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... an' we-all goes over to the corral to size it up. It's consid'rable of a hoss, too, standin' three hands higher than the tallest of our ponies. Also, it has a ewe neck an' lib'ral legs. It's name is 'Henry of Navarre,' but we sees at once that sech'll never do, an' re-christens him 'Boomerang Bob.' ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... plenty of time for that and Lord's—if only I hadn't boiled all the cricket out of me. So I came up here and lay down there. But what I hadn't boiled out was that beastly drug. It got back on me like a boomerang. I closed my eyes for a minute—and it was well on in the afternoon when ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... worth knowing, all with the assistance of Mr. Andrews, so remarkably agreeable and gentlemanly a gentleman; they played into each other's hands and mine delightfully, and Fanny's, and Honora's, and the ball came to everybody pat, in turn. The ball did I say? Boomerang I should have said, for it came back always nicely ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... A New Zealander is said to speak from his diaphragm, hands clenched at the sides, as the old Maoris used. What we know of first-class Australian oratory shows us the same alertness, swift flight, and clean delivery as a thrown boomerang. I had half expected in Canadian speeches some survival of the Redskin's elaborate appeal to Suns, Moons, and Mountains—touches of grandiosity and ceremonial invocations. But nothing that I heard was referable to any primitive stock. There was a dignity, a restraint, and, above all, a weight ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... a brown haze of boxing-glove. Occasionally his hand met something solid which he took to be Allen, but this was seldom, and, whenever it happened, it only seemed to bring him back again like a boomerang. Just at the most ...
— The Pothunters • P. G. Wodehouse
... a miracle! the land But yesterday was all unknown, The wild man's boomerang was thrown Where now great busy cities stand. It was not much, you say, that these Should win their way where none withstood; In sooth there was not much of blood No war ...
— Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... with elephant heads. Africa is a negress, with the characteristic grass-rope basket containing dates. North America is an Indian, but the civilization of the land is indicated by an anchor, beehive and cog-wheel. Australia is a gin, with a waddy, boomerang and kangaroo. South America sits on a cotton-bale, has a condor by her side, and at her feet are ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... unhappiness. The great room was filling with dusk, and in the twilight pictures gathered and dissolved. What girlish dreams and revolts had gone to make that unfortunate book, which after endless boomerang-like returns from the publishers, had appeared, only to be denounced by Jewry, ignored by its journals and scantily noticed by outside criticisms. Mordecai Josephs had fallen almost still-born from the press; the sweet secret she had hoped ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... paint as fresh as a man-o'-war. Jack always was a good painter. There was a nice parlour on the ground floor, and Jack had papered it and had hung the walls with photographs of ships and foreign ports, and with things he had brought home from his voyages: a boomerang, a South Sea club, Japanese straw hats and a Gibraltar fan with a bull-fight on it, and all that sort of gear. It looked to me as if Miss Mamie had taken a hand in arranging it. There was a bran-new polished iron Franklin stove set into the old fireplace, and a red table-cloth ...
— Man Overboard! • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... setting off he followed at a respectful distance. Whether he also intended to hunt or not, we could not tell; his only weapons were a bundle of lances, and a piece of hard wood shaped something like a scimitar—called, we found, a boomerang—which he ...
— Twice Lost • W.H.G. Kingston
... thee, Thou strangely-feeding maid! Nay, lift not thus thy boomerang, I meant not to upbraid! Come, let me taste those yellow lips That ne'er were tasted yet, Save when the shipwrecked mariner Passed through them for ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... called this constellation "The Boomerang." To the Hebrews it was "Ataroth" and by this name it is known in the East to-day. No two of the seven stars composing the Crown are moving in the same direction or at ...
— A Field Book of the Stars • William Tyler Olcott
... whole of their worldly property about with them, and the Australian hunter is thus equipped: round his middle is wound, in many folds, a cord spun from the fur of the opossum, which forms a warm, soft and elastic belt of an inch in thickness, in which are stuck his hatchet, his kiley or boomerang, and a short heavy stick to throw at the smaller animals. His hatchet is so ingeniously placed that the head of it rests exactly on the centre of his back, whilst its thin short handle descends along the backbone. In his hand he carries his throwing-stick and several spears, ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... skill. Some of the tribes of Southern Africa prowling about in search of roots, and living concealed on the wild and arid plains, are sufficiently wretched. The Australian, in the simplicity of the arts of life, comes nearest the Fuegian: he can, however, boast of his boomerang, his spear and throwing-stick, his method of climbing trees, of tracking animals, and of hunting. Although the Australian may be superior in acquirements, it by no means follows that he is likewise superior in mental capacity: indeed, from what I saw of the Fuegians when on board ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... perhaps, for a season violate these laws with impunity; but, even in their cases, every serious indiscretion, if not immediately felt, is as a draft on them, bearing some future date, sure of presentation, while the payment is absolute. It may be five, fifteen, or fifty years ere the boomerang of indiscretion returns, but come it will. Invalids will need to watch and guard against all pernicious habits, and to forego doing many things which they were accustomed to do while in health, but which under the altered ...
— Minnesota; Its Character and Climate • Ledyard Bill
... although hundreds of misguided individuals act as though they think so. Nor is a good introduction the one that begins with a comic incident supposedly with a point pat to the occasion or topic, yet so often miles wide of both. The funny story which misses its mark is a boomerang. Even the apparently "sure-fire" one may deliver a disturbing kick to its perpetrator. The grave danger is the "o'er done or come tardy off" of Hamlet's advice to the players. Humor must be distinctly marked off from the merely comic or witty, ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... loose logs and torn trees went clattering and whirling: for I was in danger of life. A band of the savage natives were stealthily creeping on my track,—the natives in those parts were not then so much awed by the white man as now. A boomerang(1) had whirred by me, burying itself amongst the herbage close before my feet. I had turned, sought to find and to face these dastardly foes; they contrived to elude me. But when I moved on, my ear, ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... altars, Stonehenges and Karnaks. His picture-writing grew into hieroglyphs and cuneiforms, and finally emerged, by imperceptible steps, into alphabetic symbols, the raw material of the art of printing. His dug-out canoe culminates in the iron-clad and the 'Great Eastern'; his boomerang and slingstone in the Woolwich infant; his boiling pipkin and his wheeled car in the locomotive engine; his picture-message in the telephone and the Atlantic cable. Here, where the course of evolution has really been ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... I hate to say it, but it seems to me that you go too minutely into particulars in describing the feats of the aboriginals. I felt it in the boomerang-throwing. ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... he didn't sit down on his boomerang infernal-machine, and then set it a-going: he might a been on the moon by this time, where the fool belongs, with the other lunatics. If he ever comes into my new ice-cream parlor—(twelve by sixteen, gas-lights, three tables, ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... tea-carriers, bear the weight of their burden on their shoulders, carrying it as we do a knapsack, not in the ordinary Chinese way, with a pliant carrying pole. They are all provided with a short staff, which has a transverse handle curved like a boomerang, and with this they ease the weight off the back, while ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... the finish of its flight, it is quite long enough to effect the most radical alteration in what happens afterwards. In that short space of time a spinning motion is put upon the ball, and a curious impulse which appears to have something in common with that given to a boomerang is imparted, which sooner or later take effect. In other respects, when a distant slice is wanted, the same principles of striking the ball and finishing the swing as governed the ordinary drive are to be observed. What I mean by a distant slice ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... an invention of the would-be-free. It was a brilliant flash of genius of a seeker after freedom. However, it became a boomerang. By multiplication and hereditary transmission, the inferiority and the number of the slaves created a new overwhelming problem for the superior few, the upper crust of the free. At last the problem grew into the problem of problems, the problem of government, that threatened ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... to the editors of various magazines for their consideration. But in those days there were no literary agents or Authors' Societies to help young writers with their experience and advice, and the bulky manuscript always came back to my hand like a boomerang, till at length I wearied of the attempt. Of course I sent it to the wrong people; afterwards the editor of a leading monthly told me that he would have been delighted to run the book had it fallen into the hands of his firm. ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... them. This track is shaped like a rounded cone, or, more often, like a boomerang, with a short arm running north-westwards to its place of turning and a long arm running northeastwards until its force is spent. The point of turning is always in the West Indies zone. As the storm is at its worst at the point of turning, it is always in the West Indies ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... composition the return of the eye over its course, as in circular observation, is practically eliminated. While the circle and ellipse offer a succession of items and events, one the sequence of the other, so that the vision concludes like a boomerang, angular composition sends a shaft ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... thirdly sincerely contrite. In the present instance, waiving the purely academic question whether the awakening of George at a little before five was due to natural instinct on his part, or to the accidental passing of a home-made boomerang through his bedroom window, the dear children frankly admitted that the blame for his uprising was their own. As the eldest ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... habitual silence. "Scoffer," he said, "you did not realize when you offered me poison that my life is one with your own. Except for my knowledge that God is present in my stomach, as in every atom of creation, the lime would have killed me. Now that you know the divine meaning of boomerang, never again ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... result was altogether different from what they had anticipated. That's why I say submarine activities off the American coast will prove a boomerang to the foe." ...
— The Boy Allies with the Victorious Fleets - The Fall of the German Navy • Robert L. Drake
... taught Mary, that, in dealing with infants of changeable and rudimentary mind, honesty was an impossible policy and candor a very boomerang, which returned and smote one with savage force. So she stooped to guile and detested the flannel all the more deeply because of the state to which it was debasing an upright conscience and ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly
... with the calmness of despair. But then it occurred to me that there was a way of using the weapon which threatened, as a boomerang. ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... to dispose of the illusion that they were actually rejects from some old-time camp. Is it not reasonable to suppose that the original design was copied from this elemental model, as, in like manner the boomerang is traceable to a leaf? The pattern is so profoundly persistent in the minds of the blacks of to-day, that in fashioning a hook from a piece of straight wire they invariably form a crescent, though the superiority ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... indescribably slack; hardly energy to struggle against the heat and the myriads of flies. I came out of it radiant. The Turks are beat. Five lines of their best trenches carried (or, at least, four regular lines plus a bit extra); the Boomerang Redoubt rushed, and in two successive attacks we have advanced 1,000 yards. Our losses are said to be moderate. The dreaded Boomerang collapsed and was stormed with hardly a casualty. This was owing partly to the two trench mortars lent us by the French ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... stout heart of Cambo was overcome, and beat visibly—the perspiration streamed from his breast, and he was about to sink to the ground, when he at length suddenly darted from my presence; but he speedily returned, bearing in one hand his club, and in the other his boomerang, with which he seemed to acquire just fortitude enough, to be able to stand on his legs, until I finished the sketch (See ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... touched their pillows. They had asked to share the same room, and as they had sleepily undressed, they congratulated each other on the fact that Mike Muldoon's cowardly act had resulted in nothing but good to them. It looked as though it might even prove a boomerang to him. ...
— Madge Morton, Captain of the Merry Maid • Amy D. V. Chalmers
... of pressure distributions on plane surfaces moving through a resisting medium, a group of striking demonstrations is possible involving this notion, and by simple combination of it with the precession of a rotating body the boomerang may be brought in and its action for the major part ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... out of his mouth. "News!" he roared. "A fake story ten years old, news? That ain't news! It's spite work. Even your dirty paper, Waldemar, wouldn't rake that kind of muck up after ten years. It'd be a boomerang. You'll have to put up a stronger line of blackmail and bluff ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... that the Abipones shear sheep with the jaw.[171] Such cases might be pursued into great detail. They show acute observation, great ingenuity, clever adaptation, and teachableness. The lasso, bola, boomerang, and throw knife, as well as the throw stick, are products of persistent and open-minded experience. The selection and adaptation of things in nature to a special operation in the arts often show ingenuity as great as that manifested in ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... Buck Denham, and as he shouted he snatched off Dean's hat and sent it skimming like a boomerang right away over the bushes, though, unlike a boomerang, it did not ...
— Dead Man's Land - Being the Voyage to Zimbambangwe of certain and uncertain • George Manville Fenn
... invisible, overpowering poison: turning on the gas—the crime of a white man. And there is only one kind of club that can be thrown out of a window, turn in mid-air and come back to the window next to it: the Australian boomerang. You'll see some of them in the ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... laboriousness and nicety, all the experiments of Hythe, Vincennes, and Jacobabad. The resulting curve, which the longitudinal section of the perfect "slug" shows, is as subtile and incapable of modification, without loss, as that of the boomerang; no hair's thickness could be taken away or added without injury to its range. Such a weapon and such a missile, in their perfection, could never have come into existence except in answer to the demand of a nation of hunters ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... seen were armed with long lances and a piece of wood shaped like a scimitar. This was the famous "boomerang," so effective a weapon in the hands of the natives, so ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... BOOMERANG.—This sign means news from Australia, or that some unexpected development will lead to your having a great interest in that country; with signs of travel, that you will ...
— Telling Fortunes By Tea Leaves • Cicely Kent
... valid excuse for murder; there is none for nonsense rhymes. They seem to be a necessary evil to be classed with smallpox, chicken-pox, yellow fever and other irruptive diseases. They are also on the order of the boomerang and eventually rebound and inflict much suffering on the unlucky verse-slinger. So you see nonsense, like a little learning is a dangerous thing and should be handled with as much care as the shotgun which is never ...
— Poems for Pale People - A Volume of Verse • Edwin C. Ranck
... these latter are original native words. The blacks had a way of picking up white men's slang and adding it to their very limited vocabulary; thus the evil spirit is known among them as the "debbil-debbil.") Another weapon the aboriginal had, the boomerang, a curiously curved missile stick which, if it missed the object at which it was aimed, would curve back in the air and return to the feet of the thrower; thus the black did not lose his weapon. The boomerang shows an extraordinary knowledge ...
— Peeps At Many Lands: Australia • Frank Fox
... decidedly not of a warlike disposition. They show the greatest inclination to take whatever they can, but will run no unnecessary risk in so doing. They seldom carry any weapon, except a shield and a large kind of boomerang, which I believe they use for killing rats, etc. Sometimes, but very seldom, they have a large spear; reed spears seem to be quite unknown to them. They are undoubtedly a finer and better-looking race of men than the blacks on the Murray and Darling, and more peaceful; but in other respects ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... commented Mr. Minturn. "Get the idea and work on it. Every rough, heartless thing they attempt, if at all possible, make it a boomerang to strike them their own blow; but you reserve blows as a last resort. There is the bell." Mr. Minturn called: "Boys! The breakfast bell ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter
... holding-ground. It was quiet in Bowen when the Spray arrived, and the good people with an hour to throw away on the second evening of her arrival came down to the School of Arts to talk about the voyage, it being the latest event. It was duly advertised in the two little papers, "Boomerang" and "Nully Nully," in the one the day before the affair came off, and in the other the day after, which was all the same to the editor, and, for that matter, it was ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... the case of Angelo. No one could demonstrate it, no one could with safety even hint at it; any charge that the court was anything but impartial would prove a boomerang to the defense; and yet the facts remained that the whole proceeding from start to finish had been conducted unfairly and with illegality, that the jury had been duped and deceived, and that the pretense that the guilty Angelo had been given an impartial ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... W. Howitt, after many years' observation in Australia, reports that the boomerang, though a singular, is not the marvellous instrument which we are told of in some books of travel; especially does he deny it the power of continuing its flight after striking its object, and also the power of returning with exact aim to the thrower's ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... boomerang that comes back to hit the emitting skull with a hint of its kindred woodenness. It reveals the writer more than the written of. Allan was a bigger man than you would gather from Wilson's account of his Gargantuan revelry. He had a ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... was it!" he said. "Full to the scuppers, poor little wretch! Minnie, I am hoist with my own petard, which in this case was a boomerang." ...
— Where There's A Will • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the fowling among the marshes. The spears were laid aside on this kind of expedition, and instead, Tahuti and his father were armed with curved throw-sticks, shaped something like an Australian boomerang. But, besides the throw-sticks, they had with them a rather unusual helper. When people go shooting nowadays, they take dogs with them to retrieve the game. Well, the Egyptians had different kinds of dogs, too, which they used for hunting; but when they went fowling they took with them ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Ancient Egypt • James Baikie
... from being unprecedented in warfare, proved an exceedingly short-sighted one, and acted almost immediately after the manner of a boomerang. The able-bodied men of each family who had remained loyal or at least neutral, so long as they were permitted to live undisturbed on their few acres, were not content to exist on the charity of a city, and they swarmed over to the insurgent ranks ...
— Cuba in War Time • Richard Harding Davis
... though simpler, and better adapted to illustrate natural selection; because the change of direction—your necessity—acts gradually or successively, instead of abruptly. Suppose I hit a man standing obliquely in my rear, by throwing forward a crooked stick, called a boomerang. How could he know whether the blow was intentional or not? But suppose I had been known to throw boomerangs before; suppose that, on different occasions, I had before wounded persons by the same, or other indirect and apparently ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... laugh, in which the black joined, showing his white teeth with childish delight as he came close up, holding out something hung on the end of his spear, and carrying what appeared to be a bag made of bark in his left hand, in company with his boomerang, his war-club being stuck in the skin loin-cloth which was ...
— The Dingo Boys - The Squatters of Wallaby Range • G. Manville Fenn
... the Tagus joins the Hooghly I have bowled the wily googly, I have heard the howdah's howl at Hyderabad; On a rickshaw I've gone sailing, with my boomerang impaling Hooded cobras on the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 15, 1919 • Various
... spontaneously, as some would have us believe, in different countries; there is no truth in the theory that men pressed by necessity will always hit upon the same invention to relieve their wants. If this were so, all savages would have invented the boomerang; all savages would possess pottery, bows and arrows, slings, tents, and canoes; in short, all races would have risen to civilization, for certainly the comforts of life are as agreeable to one people ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... illustrious cook of yours stand by and clap their hands. But I do not give you much credit. You are merely an inconsiderate blunderer, to say no more. You did not plan anything; I did that, and when my plans don't work one way, they do in another. This one was like a boomerang that did not hit what it was aimed at, but came banging and clattering back all the same. And now I will remark that I have given up that sort of thing. I can throw as well as ever, but I am too old to stand ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton
... called Antipataringa, where the mythical snake is said to have halted in his wanderings. The same two men acted as before, but this time one of them carried on his head a curious curved bundle shaped like an enormous boomerang. It was made of grass-stalks bound together with human hair-string and decorated with white down. This sacred object represented the Wollunqua himself.[138] From this spot the snake was believed to have travelled on to another place called Tjunguniari, ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... our brother society, but he haughtily refused to accept the compliment. The reunion was only a fortnight away, and the programme had not been printed, so now the president took the situation in hand and peremptorily ordered me to accept the nomination or be suspended. This was a wholly unexpected boomerang. I had wished to make a good fight for equal rights for the girls, and to impress the boys with the fact of our existence as a society; but I had not desired to set the entire student body by the ears nor to be forced to prepare ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... could do very much with a boomerang; but I could throw a spear to a hair's breadth, as many a chicken had occasion to discover. When you go home for Christmas I hope you will remember that all this was very wrong, and that you will consider ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... consideration. It was easy enough to tell her about these people. Merely to say that they were an itinerant company of actors and actresses would be sufficient to ensure them a speedy conge from Blanford. But was it wise to do this? Did he want them to go? A hasty action is often like a boomerang. It returns on the toes of the person who thoughtlessly launches it in flight. No, on the whole they had better remain, he told himself. The palace would form an excellent background for the sensational exposure he hoped ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... were all heavily-laden, some with wood, and others with burdens of various sorts, their lords and masters condescending to carry nothing but a couple of light wooden spears, a waddy, or native club, and a boomerang. ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... as the red and raging face of a policeman appeared above the wall, Turnbull struck the horse with a terrible cut of the whip and the two went whirling away like a boomerang. ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... hard when he talks. Meighen has often been bold both in speech and action. In the Commons last session he paid his respects to Mr. Crerar by calling the National Progressives "a dilapidated annex to the Liberal party." Which adroit play to the gallery with a paradox came back in the shape of a boomerang from a Westerner who called the Government party "an exploded blister." On a previous occasion talking to the boot manufacturers in convention at Quebec he took a leap into the Agrarian trench with this pack of muddled metaphors. "I see the Agrarians a full-fledged army ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... Juist, [see Map B] abutting on the Ems delta, lies an extensive sandbank called Nordland, whose extreme western rim remains uncovered at the highest tides; the effect being to leave a C-shaped island, a mere paring of sand like a boomerang, nearly two miles long. but only 150 yards or so broad, of curiously symmetrical outline, except at one spot, where it bulges to the width of a quarter of a mile. On the English chart its nakedness was absolute, save for a beacon at the south; but the ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... greater, and still greater. At this point I should warn you that all the best occult teachings warn students against using this power for base ends, improper purposes, etc. Such practices tend to react and rebound against the person using them, like a boomerang. Beware against using psychic or occult forces for improper purposes—the psychic laws punish the offender, just as do ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... apparent renewal of the original impetus. If you take a flat stone and throw it so that it will spin, it will go some way straight, then rise, turn aside, describe a half-circle, and fall. If the impetus kept in it, it would soar like the hawk, but this does not happen. A boomerang acts much in the same manner, only more perfectly: yet, however forcibly thrown, the impetus soon dies out of a boomerang. A skater gets up his utmost speed, suddenly stands on one foot, and describes several circles; but in two minutes comes to a ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... Australian and Maori words which have been incorporated unchanged in the language, and which still denote the original object—as Kangaroo, Wombat, Boomerang, Whare, Pa, Kauri. ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... man has a right to control his bodily health, though in a state of siege he may give his body to be starved. Thus, though the patriotic defence was a sincere defence, it is a defence that comes back on the defenders like a boomerang. For it proves only that Prohibition ought to be ephemeral, unless war ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... natural hatchery for trout, and its waters are alive with them; it is about four miles long, shaped like a boomerang; the margins are shallow, with a thick growth of rushes, among which the fish lie, feeding largely on a small brown fly, which may be seen on their stalks. In order to catch these, the fish may be seen ...
— Fishing in British Columbia - With a Chapter on Tuna Fishing at Santa Catalina • Thomas Wilson Lambert
... was heard from one of the sentries. The men stooping round the fire leaped to their feet, just in time to see one of the constables struck from his horse by a boomerang, while a dozen spears whizzed through the air at the other. He fell forward on his horse, which carried him up to the fire; as he fell from the saddle, as it stopped, he was caught by two of the others. ...
— A Final Reckoning - A Tale of Bush Life in Australia • G. A. Henty
... the life of the woman you love a happy one; but this is it, Can you assure me that there is nothing in the past that may reach forward later and touch my daughter through you—no ugly story, no oats that have been sowed, and no boomerang that you have thrown wantonly and that has not ...
— Gallegher and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... Miss Patsy, when she read this circular. "If I'm not much mistaken, Mr. Hopkins has thrown a boomerang. Every woman who attended the fete is now linked with us as an ally, and every one of them will ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work • Edith Van Dyne
... world ever attempted to wrong another without being injured in return,—someway, somehow, sometime. The only weapon of offence that Nature seems to recognize is the boomerang. Nature keeps her books admirably; she puts down every item, she closes all accounts finally, but she does not always balance them at the end of the month. To the man who is calm, revenge is so far beneath him that he cannot reach it,—even by stooping. When ...
— The Majesty of Calmness • William George Jordan
... them, and never had any practice therein. What IS to know how to do a thing? Surely to do it. What is proof that we know how to do a thing? Surely the fact that we can do it. A man shows that he knows how to throw the boomerang by throwing the boomerang. No amount of talking or writing can get over this; ipso facto, that a baby breathes and makes its blood circulate, it knows how to do so and the fact that it does not know its own knowledge ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... of the whole Bar T outfit who had suffered from the boomerang of his evil plans. It had been through him that Larkin was forced to accompany Bissell home after the stampede; and now he passed days and nights of misery, watching the progress of Bud's very evident suit. Chained down by his daily round ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... Now I should think that would be fine; you'll have a chance to see western life in earnest. So you are interested in mines! Well, I thought something of the kind when you said you were out on business. No wonder you were so cool with old Boomerang this morning, and didn't care for any of ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... translation here given makes no profession of absolute, verbal literalness. One can not transfer a metaphor bodily, head and horns, from one speech to another. The European had to invent a new name for the boomerang or accept the name by which the Australian called it. The Frenchman, struggling with the English language, told a lady he was gangrened, he meant he was mortified. The cry for literalism is the cry for an impossibility; ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... thin for skating and the snow is not right for skis, about the only thing to do is to stay in the house. A boomerang club will help to fill in between and also furnishes good exercise for the muscles of the arm. A boomerang ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... close of the Base Ball season the Brotherhood League dealt what it believed to be a death blow to the National League by the purchase of the Cincinnati franchise. It proved to be a boomerang, for before the first day of January, 1891, the Brotherhood League had passed out of existence. The backers of the organization, tired of the general conduct of the sport, were only too willing to come to an ...
— Spalding's Official Baseball Guide - 1913 • John B. Foster
... widower, and lived with Tom, his only son, in the village of Shopton, New York State. Mrs. Baggert kept house for them, and an aged colored man, Eradicate Sampson, with his mule, Boomerang, did "odd jobs" about the ...
— Tom Swift and his Aerial Warship - or, The Naval Terror of the Seas • Victor Appleton
... to Patricia Scott. She had not looked for this result, and though she had not made the complaint in person, her criticism of Harriet had been a boomerang that had returned and hit Patricia. This made the girl even more ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls Under Canvas • Janet Aldridge
... To make it go like that, you would have to take it in one hand, and swing it round your head—and then you couldn't without a string tied to it. Or perhaps it was a sabre, and he was so strong he could send it like a boomerang!" ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... to break two days later ... only a few people here, a dozen there, but enough to confirm the direst newspaper predictions. The boomerang was completing ...
— The Coffin Cure • Alan Edward Nourse
... not want to talk his "leg ached." When his heart sank in despair his "leg ached." But Polly, a little thinner, a little more dim as to far-off visions, caught every mood of Peter's and sent it back upon him like a boomerang. She met his silent hours with such a flare of talk that Peter responded in self-defence. His black hours she clutched desperately and held them up for him to look at after she had charged them with memories ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... could not have answered the hypothetical question on a bet, for his remark had been a chance shot simply intended to annoy. No one would have been more surprised than himself to learn that this same shot would develop the qualities of a boomerang. ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... found westward of the mountains, they make a light spear of a reed, similar to that of which the natives of the southern islands form their arrows. These they use for distant combat, and not only carry in numbers, but throw with the boomerang to a great distance and with unerring precision, making them to all intents and purposes as efficient as the bow and arrow. They have a ponderous spear for close fight, and others of different sizes ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... Weary Roue. The Good Stockbroker looked pained and cleared his throat. At this formidable signal, the Family Egotist—whose irritation had been increasing like the alleged circulation of a newspaper—showed every sign of hurling the boomerang of his opinion into the fray. This would have meant the death of all liveliness for some hours to come, and a general sigh had begun to heave, when once more our brave Bluestocking ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... of a discreet player of sound judgment is, indeed, a powerful weapon greatly feared by the adversaries; when used by the unskilled, it becomes a boomerang of ...
— Auction of To-day • Milton C. Work
... exactly divine; but it is safe to say that on the whole he was not entirely satisfied with this boomerang speech. He rather thought that he had better not ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... was clear, Rick thought. Like many such schemes, the moment a suspicion of foul play developed, the plan began to boomerang. ...
— The Electronic Mind Reader • John Blaine
... danger and considered the outcome in horrified dismay, regretting his rash flurry of sympathy. It had become a boomerang. What if Brian's protege in a fit of remorse saw fit to keep his sister posted? Kenny would indeed find clues. The possibility filled him ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... as a weapon of offence and defence is now almost a thing of the past. It is rapidly going the way of the tomahawk and the boomerang—into the collector's cabinet. There is a law in Singapore that forbids its being worn, and outside of Johore and the native states it is seldom seen. It is still used as an executioner's knife by the protected Sultan of Selangor, ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... The kiley, or boomerang, is a thin curved missile, which can be thrown by a skilful hand so as to rise upon the air, and its crooked course may be, nevertheless, under control. It is about two feet four inches in length, and nine and a half ounces in weight. One side, the uppermost ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... relit my pipe. The tobacco I had purchased in Paris, and it was of the customary vileness. Perhaps I could smoke out Mein Herr. But the task resulted in a boomerang. He drew out a huge china pipe and began smoking tobacco which was even viler than mine, if that could be possible. Soon I ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... also another semi-member of the household, to wit, Eradicate Sampson, an eccentric colored man, who owned a mule called Boomerang. Eradicate did odd jobs around the place, and the mule assisted his owner—that is when the ...
— Tom Swift Among The Diamond Makers - or The Secret of Phantom Mountain • Victor Appleton
... from directly behind is not so good, since the motor acts as a protection). In vain he tried to get out of this poor position; I did not give him the chance. I came so close to him that my machine was smutted by the ensuing explosion of his 'plane. He fell, twisting like a boomerang. The observer fell out of the machine before ...
— An Aviator's Field Book - Being the field reports of Oswald Boelcke, from August 1, - 1914 to October 28, 1916 • Oswald Boelcke
... reveal their purpose; as the tombo darts hither and thither, even the tints appear to be those of a real dragon-fly; and even the sound of the flitting toy imitates the dragon-fly's hum. The principle of this pretty invention is much like that of the boomerang; and an expert can make his tombo, after flying across a large room, return into his hand. All the tombo sold, however, are not as good as this one; we have been lucky. Price, ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... Maggie's entertainment, tried to get up the blacks to engage in a corroboree, and give an exhibition of boomerang and spear-throwing; but the inner man had been too largely satisfied, and they declined violent exertion, so the toys were distributed and our ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... business proved a boomerang," was Tom's comment. "It's a pity we didn't dig out for the shore, signal to the steam yacht, and tell father and the others about ...
— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - or The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht. • Edward Stratemeyer (AKA Arthur M. Winfield)
... unknown hand on the window of the Emporium a newspaper account of that Jew drummer's taking off. The newspaper could offer no theory and merely recited the fact that the man suffered from a heavy-calibred bullet. But always the talk turned back at last to that crowning atrocity, the Boomerang, with its windrows of little calves, starved for water, lying ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... his genial and affable disposition, but also by his apparent and deliberate sincerity. And while it was true that she had determined upon a method which was originally intended to redound to her own advantage, she soon learned that she was playing with a boomerang which soon put her upon the defensive against the very strategy which she had ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... a small opening in the land, a little to the northward of Double Point, the Asp was observed on shore with a signal for assistance, which was immediately sent, when she was got off without damage. At this place, as Lieutenant Simpson informed me, a boomerang was obtained from the natives; we had not before observed this singular weapon upon the north-east coast, and its use is quite unknown on the north coast from Cape York to Port Essington. This one too was painted green, a colour which I never heard of elsewhere among the Australians, ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... Swift. Tom was taking it to a lawyer, when he was waylaid, and chloroformed. Later he traced the gang, and, with the assistance of Mr. Damon and Eradicate Sampson, an aged colored man who made a living for himself and his mule, Boomerang, by doing odd jobs, the lad found the thieves and recovered a motor-boat which had been stolen. But ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Runabout - or, The Speediest Car on the Road • Victor Appleton
... adopted "a religion of indifference and unbelief." Thus, though attacking them as Puritans and Socialists (this phrase was aimed at Brook Farm), he denied that they were Puritans at all. Clear understanding of anything from a writer with so much of the boomerang in his mind was not to be expected. But neither would one easily guess the revolting vulgarity with which he was about to view "The Scarlet Letter." He could discover in it nothing but a deliberate attempt to attract readers by ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... no equivalent or substitute for precision. It is often its worst enemy. A man may mould himself to think in curves and zig-zags, and not in right lines. He sends never an arrow, but a boomerang. Or he thinks in poetry instead of prose, deals in analogy where it should be analysis, puts rhetoric for logic, scatters and not concentrates, and while he radiates never irradiates. A late divine was suspected of heresy, partly because of his poetic bias; and one of his volumes was ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... consisted in running sideways or in file, stamping with great violence, and emitting an inharmonious grunt, gesticulating violently all the time, and brandishing and striking together their weapons. The peculiar feature in this corrobory, was the throwing of the kiley, or boomerang, lighted at one end; the remarkable flight and extraordinary convolutions of this weapon marked by a bright line of fire, had a singular ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... made signs of encouragement for him to come on, at the same time moving towards him. At last we arrived on the banks of the creek, he on one side, and I on the other. He had a long spear, a womera, and two instruments like the boomerang, but more the shape of a scimitar, with a very sharp edge, having a thick place at the end, roughly carved, for the hand. The gestures he was making were now signs of hostility, and he came fully ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... following a clue given him by Eradicate Sampson, an aged colored man, who, with his mule, Boomerang, went about the country doing odd jobs, got on the trail of the thieves in a deserted mansion in the woods at the upper end of the lake. Our hero, with the aid of Mr. Damon, and some friends of the latter, raided the old house, ...
— Tom Swift and his Airship • Victor Appleton
... though I do think you and Miss Moore are asking me to be ridiculous. I do hereby solemnly swear to be, for the rest of this day, the most unaccommodating young person in the whole world. But beware, Ruth Stuart! The boomerang may return and strike you. Don't dare request me to do you a favor until after the bells chime midnight, when I shall be released ...
— The Automobile Girls At Washington • Laura Dent Crane
... dogs, two of a light sandy, and one of a kind of German colley colour. These natives were armed with an enormous number of light barbed spears, each having about a dozen. They do not appear to use the boomerang very generally in this part of the continent, although we have occasionally picked up portions of old ones in our travels. Mr. Tietkens gave each of these natives a small piece of sugar, with which they seemed perfectly charmed, and in consequence patted the seat of ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... camp. Mr. Campbell went up to one mob and tried to make them understand by signs that we had peaceable intentions towards them, but they from his account seemed fully bent on having us off the ground. When he was returning to the camp Jemmy saw one of the blacks hold his boomerang as if he intended throwing it at Mr. Campbell, but he was probably advised by others not to do so. I am not surprised that they were vexed, as we would not allow them to come up to the camp, although they showed a bunch of hawk feathers ...
— Journal of Landsborough's Expedition from Carpentaria - In search of Burke and Wills • William Landsborough
... the world, some young men left the camp where they lived to get some food for their wives and children. The sun was hot, but they liked heat, and as they went they ran races and tried who could hurl his spear the farthest, or was cleverest in throwing a strange weapon called a boomerang, which always returns to the thrower. They did not get on very fast at this rate, but presently they reached a flat place that in time of flood was full of water, but was now, in the height of summer, only a set of pools, each surrounded with ...
— The Brown Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... at the points of flame on the white candles. "I suppose it would be so with you; for you fit into the age. You are a part of this variable uncertain quantity called democracy, which some of us old-fashioned folk look upon as a boomerang." ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... bird-of-paradise, while about the room were scattered gorgeous shells from the southern seas, delicate sprays of coral sprouting from barnacled pi-pi shells and cased in glass, assegais from South Africa, stone axes from New Guinea, huge Alaskan tobacco-pouches beaded with heraldic totem designs, a boomerang from Australia, divers ships in glass bottles, a cannibal kai-kai bowl from the Marquesas, and fragile cabinets from China and the Indies and inlaid ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... extraordinarily well under these trying circumstances, and said nothing more tart than that, if she ever were so foolish as to move again, she should insist on building a house to suit herself; which struck me as rather a boomerang of a speech, seeing that it implied a lurking doubt on her part as to whether she had been wise in moving at all. I even came near admitting to her in consequence that I was thankful we had moved, and that, surface indications to the contrary notwithstanding, I was extremely happy ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... control is subject to a popular vote, is a boomerang. The appointment of a citizen in a town arouses the anger of many others who think they are more deserving. I appealed to the farmers with the simple question whether old Westchester should be controlled by federal authority in a purely State matter of ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... rising around me amid damp delightful thickets under rainy skies, I felt that in a deeper sense it is rather we who build for permanence or at least for a sort of peace. It is something more than comfort; a relative and reasonable contentment. And there came back on me like a boomerang a rather indescribable thought which had circled round my head through most of my journey; that Christendom is like a gigantic bronze come out of the furnace of the Near East; that in Asia is only the fire and in Europe the form. The nearest to what I mean was suggested in that very ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... flew up off to one side of her, and she turned at right angles out of the furrow; but as she got to the top of the bed, Milker-Tim, flinging back his arm, with the precision of a bushman, sent his stick whirling like a boomerang skimming along the ground ...
— The Long Hillside - A Christmas Hare-Hunt In Old Virginia - 1908 • Thomas Nelson Page
... look-out. Thence, too, darts and stones could be hurled at the besiegers. With the help of a throwing-stick, or rather whip, wooden spears could be thrown in the sieges more than a hundred yards. Ignorant of the bow-and-arrow and the boomerang, the Maoris knew and used the sling. With it red-hot stones would be hurled over the palisades, among the rush-thatched huts of an assaulted village, a stratagem all the more difficult to cope with as Maori pas seldom contained wells or springs of water. The courage and cunning ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... work covered with pinon pith mats and girdles, threads of fibre or hair, and sandals plaited of yucca leaves. Wads of cotton and pieces of pottery were found in many places; and an interesting find was a "boomerang" similar to that used to this day by the Moqui Indians for killing rabbits. The handle is plainly seen, but the top is broken. The implement, which is made of very hard, reddish wood, has but a slight curve. We discovered many smooth pieces of iron ore that had probably been used for ceremonial purposes, ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... office secretary and say: "You've got to send Neill's new book to the printer." Then this lady will order the office-boy to take the MS. to the printer . . . and I bet the little devil reads Deadwood Dick on the Boomerang Prairie as he crawls to the printer's office with my ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... have hurt her more awfully whatever he had said. To be treated like a naughty girl! But it served her right, and she knew it. Her plea had come back like a boomerang. ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... thought himself sure to make enormous gains; but Lee's insight into his purposes, and lightning celerity in checkmating these, foiled both movements, giving the mine operation, moreover, the effect of a deadly boomerang. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... the commonest wattles exhibit singularity of foliage well worth notice. Upon the germination of the seeds the primary leaves are pinnate. After a brief period this pretty foliage is succeeded by a boomerang-shaped growth, which prevails during life. Botanists do not speak of such trees as possessing leaves, but "leaf-stalks dilated into the form of a blade and usually with vertical edges, as in Australian acacias." If one of these wattles is burnt to the ground, but yet retains ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... singing heart. She saw everything and everybody. She wondered how many of them carried happy secrets, like hers, in their thoughts—how many of them were going toward thrilling experiences. She shot her imagination, like a boomerang, at every passing face, in the hope of getting back secrets that lay behind the masks. She was unaware how her direct gaze riveted attention to her own eager face. She thought the people who smiled at her were friendly, and she tossed them back as good as they gave. Even ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke
... didn't know you were so crazy about silk stockings. We just thought it would be a good joke—but it was a little too good. It was a boomerang. I don't know when I've felt so contemptible. So I went down and got you some real silk stockings—a dollar and a half a pair,—and I'm glad to ...
— Prudence Says So • Ethel Hueston
... with a bow and arrows, two lances, sword and shield. In Firdusi's Book of Kings we read that the lasso was also a favorite weapon. Hawking was well known to the Persians more than 900 years ago. Book of Kabus XVIII. p. 495. The boomerang was used in catching birds as well by the Persians as by the ancient Egyptians and the present savage ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers |
