"Burrow" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... no desire to be brought distinctly before the public; they would by far prefer to burrow in silence. But the war and emancipation have proved an Ithuriel's spear to touch the toad and make him spring up in his full and naturally fiendish form. The sooner and the more distinctly he is seen, the better will it be for the country. We must dispose of rebels abroad and copperheads at ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... absence of acute pain; and from chancre by the absence of the callous edges and base. These ulcers are of a chronic nature, showing little disposition to spread. The ulcers from buboes partake of the same character, the edges being hard and the ulcer disposed to burrow. These edges Mr. C. removes with the knife. The disease is rendered extremely obstinate, where full courses of mercury have been given. The more closely the eruption approaches the papular, the more mild and manageable will ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... Burrow amain; Dig like a mole; Fill every vein With half-burnt coal; Puff the keen dust about, And ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... Clams that burrow deep in the mud and may be found at low tide, by digging where their tell-tale bubble of air arises, and the odd shrimps, so good to eat, the children already knew about. Chinese fishermen catch shrimps in nets, dry them on the hillsides, and send both dry meat and shells ...
— Stories of California • Ella M. Sexton
... has enticed the population out of grim courts and alleys; skipping-ropes are whirling everywhere. The children hardly escape being run over. Coster girls sit wrapped in shawls, contentedly, like rabbits at the edge of a burrow; the men smoke their pipes in sullen groups, their eyes on the closed doors of the public house. At the corner of the great theatre a vendor of cheap ices is rapidly absorbing the few spare pennies of the neighbourhood. The hansom turns out of the lane ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... able to see clearly why the mother fox generally selects a burrow or hole in the open field in which to have her young, except it be, as some hunters maintain, for better security. The young foxes are wont to come out on a warm day, and play like puppies in front of the den. The view being unobstructed on all sides by trees or bushes, ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... were equally exacting. But Leo, though he hated books, did not hate information. He knew every feathered thing by name as far as he could see it. He knew every oak and pine and fir and nut tree as a familiar friend. He knew every rivulet, every ravine, every rabbit-burrow. The streams seemed to him as melodious as the song-birds, and the winds had voices. He knew where to find the first blossom of spring and the latest of autumn, the ripest fruit and most abundant vines. He could tell just where the nests ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... disturbed senses might feel more at home, and eventually finding a place in an overturned wastebasket wedged between a chair and a desk, both suction-cupped to the floor. Frightened and alone, with only his nose poking out of the burrow beneath the trash of the wastebasket, he blinked back at the silent camera through which Bessie observed him, and elicited from ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond
... gun-deck, and berth-deck—and we come to a parcel of Troglodytes or "holders," who burrow, like rabbits in warrens, among the water-tanks, casks, and cables. Like Cornwall miners, wash off the soot from their skins, and they are all pale as ghosts. Unless upon rare occasions, they seldom come on deck ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... had hopped away, probably to go to its burrow and tell a wonderful story, in rabbit language, about having seen some giants in a big wagon drawn by an elephant—for to a rabbit a goat must seem as large as a ...
— The Curlytops on Star Island - or Camping out with Grandpa • Howard R. Garis
... spoken to that way, she thought. Nice to be looked after. Her dad had been fond of her, but his words had lacked the silk, the caress that savored the strength, as it did with Sandy. She snuggled into the warm heat-reflecting sand like a rabbit in its burrow. ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... with these two living proofs to the contrary!" cried Nicholas, in amazement. "Why, Pendle Forest swarms with witches. They burrow in the hill-side like rabbits in a warren. They are the terror of the whole country. No man's cattle, goods, nor even life, are safe from them; and the only reason why these two old hags, who hold sovereign sway over the others, have 'scaped justice so ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... along the table to the opposite end where lay the key to the fetter. Seizing it in a chela he leaped to the floor and scurried rapidly toward the mouth of one of the burrows against the wall, into which he disappeared. For long had the brain been contemplating these burrow entrances. They appealed to his kaldanean tastes, and further, they pointed a hiding place for the key and a lair for the only kind of food that the ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... allow, gave them in charge to his servant, with such orders for their disposal as pleased him, and then started for the swamp, which he reached about daylight, and into which he plunged with as much pleasure as ever a hunted fox entered its secure burrow. Though still very uneasy, he breathed more freely than before since receiving the ...
— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison
... Mole replies: "Had not you despised me, you would have remembered that I burrow within the earth, and that, as I live among the roots, I can tell with certainty whether a tree be ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various
... into the shadeless, fantastic desolation of Ladak; and on, across stark desert and soundless snow-fields, to Leh, the terminus of all caravans from India and Central Asia. Here Lenox had spent two days with one Captain Burrow of the Bengal Cavalry, who, with a handful of half-starved Kashmiri soldiers, upheld the interests of the British Raj on this uttermost edge of Empire. Here also he found a letter from Quita; read and ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... are hushed; I catch Glimpses of vanishing wings. An azure shape Quick darting down the vista of the brook, Proclaims the scared kingfisher, and a plash And turbid streak upon the streamlet's face, Betray the water-rat's swift dive and path Across the bottom to his burrow deep. The moss is plump and soft, the tawny leaves Are crisp beneath my tread, and scaly twigs Startle my wandering eye like basking snakes. Where this thick brush displays its emerald tent, I stretch my wearied frame, for solitude To steal within my heart. How hushed the scene ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... the transformation with intense interest. After the caterpillars had finished eating they travelled in search of a place to burrow for a day or two. Then they gave up, and lay quietly on the sand. The colour darkened hourly, the feet and claspers seemed to draw inside, and one morning on going to look there were some greenish brown pupae. They shone ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter
... of Fort Delaware are very strict, however. To cross the 'dead line' is death; to attempt to burrow is confinement in irons, and other degrading punishments; and to bribe the sentinels invariably resulted in having the whole affair revealed, after they had received the money. It really seemed as if Colonel Mohun were doomed ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... you are of course as bright as Mary, and so you have noticed, as she did right away, the close parallel between what happened to Eurypelma and what happened to the measuring-worms brought by Ammophila to her nest burrow as described in the first story in this book. And so, like Mary, you realize that the vendetta or life feud between the tarantula family and the family of Pepsis, the tarantula hawk, is based on reasons of domestic economy rather than on those of sentiment, which determine vendettas in Corsica ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... its red neck. The drawing wriggles with which its huge length extricated itself were horrible, yet I dared not turn my eyes from them. The moment its tail was free, it lay as if exhausted, wallowing in feeble effort to burrow again. ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... you've got to do is to put a bit of cheese inside. They'll smell it directly, and come running home, and then you shut the door on them. They'll do anything for cheese. Give them plenty of sawdust to burrow in, and some cotton-wool to make a nest, and they're perfectly happy. Shall I wrap the cage up in ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... in which the Anzacs have participated their work as sappers has been a feature. Sappers, by the way, are those men who, in modern warfare, burrow in the earth, planting mines, digging trenches, dugouts and fortifications. The Australians are fitted for this work for a large percentage of them had civil experience in the mines, and on extensive contract ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... badger utter, but he don't know it none. Comin' to the hole, Coyote sees the badger kind o' quiled up at the first bend in the burrow, an' he exultin'ly allows he's plugged him an' tharupon reaches in to retrieve his game. That's where Coyote makes the mistake of his c'reer; that's where he drops ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... the mountain village, a few scattered houses along a frozen stream. The townspeople retired early; light after light was extinguished, until only one in the priest's house remained. A train crept out of one tunnel and into another, like a glowing worm crawling from burrow to burrow. ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... escape from danger, and mentally vowing that the canoe should cross all other treacherous inlets in a fisherman's sloop. I went into camp in a hollow of the beach, where the sand-hills protected me from the piercing wind. All that afternoon I watched from my burrow in the ground the raging of the elements, and towards evening was pleased to note a general subsidence of wind ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... the wallabie burrow in the ground like rabbits, and are dug out. The large rock-wallabies are speared by the natives creeping upon them stealthily among the rugged rocks which they frequent, on the summits of precipitous heights which have craggy or ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... first floor, and down a whitewashed corridor, lit along one side with narrow barred casements. A little more than half-way down the corridor the blank wall facing these casements was pierced by a low arched passage. Into this burrow the Commandant dived; and, standing outside, they heard a key turned in a lock. He reappeared and beckoned ...
— The Westcotes • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... but somewhat damp and dismal. They were not strictly well ventilated, but the atmosphere without was so redolent of smoke and powder that sanitation had lost in importance. Moreover, one could always stick one's head out of the burrow to inhale the outer air if it were considered fresher than what saluted the nostrils within. Of course these shelters did not offer so much security from danger as their occupiers fancied (I have already instanced how ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... suggestion, the exhausted hunter shut up his victim in the new cell, and found it a safe one, for Bun could not burrow through a sheet of zinc, or climb up ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... dark one and the atmosphere was very humid. After we had been on guard possibly an hour, John Officer and I riding in one direction on opposite sides of the herd, and The Rebel circling in the opposite, Officer's horse suddenly struck a gopher burrow with his front feet, and in a moment horse and rider were sprawling on the ground. The accident happened but a few rods from the sleeping herd, which instantly came to their feet as one steer, and were off like a flash. I was riding my Nigger Boy, and as the cattle ...
— The Log of a Cowboy - A Narrative of the Old Trail Days • Andy Adams
... wanted for meat, they felt the privation of the bread to which they had been accustomed very sensibly. One day, while Hector and Louis were busily engaged with their assistant, Wolfe, in unearthing a woodchuck, that had taken refuge in his burrow, on one of the gravelly hills above the lake, Catharine amused herself by looking for flowers. She had filled her lap with ripe May-apples, [Footnote: The fruit of the May-apple, in rich, moist soil, ...
— Lost in the Backwoods • Catharine Parr Traill
... am asking myself how difficult, or how simple, it will be to quite understand these people, and to make them understand me. I greatly doubt its being simple. Layers and layers and layers of centuries must be far from easy to burrow through. They look simple, they do not know that they are not simple, but really they are not. Their point of view has been the point of view of the English peasant so many hundred years that an American point of view, which has had no more than a ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the roots. The Vulture[270] told Dnieper of this, and he put on extra speed, tearing his way through high hills rather than turn on one side. Meanwhile Sozh persuaded the Raven to fly straight to Dnieper, and, as soon as it had come up with him to croak three times; he himself was to burrow under the earth, intending to leap to the surface at the cry of the Raven, and by that means to get before his brother. But the Vulture fell on the Raven; the Raven began to croak before it had caught up the river Dnieper. Up burst Sozh from underground, ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... well enough known, that in the year 1450, one of the natives of the island of Candia, who have never been men of much character, made a sort of mine, or airshaft, or rather perhaps a burrow, like those constructed by rabbits, down which he went and got quite under the church, stealing out gems, money, &c. to a vast amount; but being discovered by the treachery of his companion, was caught and hanged between the two columns that face ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... with great swiftness along the sandy beaches. These crabs even carried off a plover which I had shot, not allowing more than ten minutes to elapse before one of them had it safely (as it thought) stowed away in its burrow. ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... with fatigue, they came toward evening to a miserable RANCHO, which could only have been called a shelter by people not very fastidious, and certainly only travelers in extremity would even have entered it; but Glenarvan and his companions had no choice, and were glad enough to burrow in this wretched hovel, though it would have been despised by even a poor Indian of the Pampas. A miserable fire of grass was kindled, which gave out more smoke than heat, and was very difficult ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... competition, there is one not less powerful arising from the exposure of almost all plants to destruction by animals. The buds are destroyed by birds, the leaves by caterpillars, the seeds by weevils; some insects bore into the trunk, others burrow in the twigs and leaves; slugs devour the young seedlings and the tender shoots, wire-worms gnaw the roots. Herbivorous mammals devour many species bodily, while some uproot and ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... supply for the necessities of the people. Mount Pitt, the highest ground in the island, was observed to be crowded with these birds during the night, for in the day-time they go out to sea in search of food. They burrow in the ground, and the hill was as full of holes as a rabbit-warren; in size they were not bigger than pigeons, but they looked much larger in their feathers. Their eggs were well tasted enough, and though the birds themselves had a fishy flavour, hunger made them acceptable. ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... called coccygodynia. For this latter pain do not, I pray you, as is so often done, have your spine removed by the too ready surgeon. No need of it at all. You might just as sensibly have the muscles cut out for myalgia. Pus in fistulous channels may burrow for several years through the muscular and connective tissue structures before finally forming an external opening through the integument; although its nearness to the surface is frequently marked by a localized puffiness and inflammation, which, ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... and we'll stop up the entrance to our burrow in a way which will give plenty of work to any one to find it!" exclaimed the man; "but we'll put irons first on the claws of this young fighting-cock ...
— Washed Ashore - The Tower of Stormount Bay • W.H.G. Kingston
... cudgelling his brain over this for long. It occurred to him that if this negro could come and go so handily to the outside of this underground prison, there must be a stairway somewhere near, and though he could not enlarge the slit to get at it that way, it might be possible to burrow a passage under the wall itself. For a tool, he had spied a broken crock lying on the floor, and with the idea once in his head, he was not long in putting it to practical effect. He squatted just underneath the slit, and began to quarry the earth at the foot of the wall ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... Hottentots of South Africa. Mr. Moffat records with grateful surprise how he passed a night, of which he had gloomy forebodings, in real comfort, even luxury, by adopting this method. A man may be as comfortable in a burrow as in a den. I shall speak of underground houses under "Hutting;" and for the present will only mention that, in arid countries, dry wells, dug by natives and partially choked by drifted sand, are often to be met with. They are generally found near existing watering-places, where they ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... nose close to the ground, staunch on the trail as the best-blooded hound, and making the air ring with his sharp but musical bark! I tell you that was fun! Ugly always stuck to his game until he had run it to its burrow. He had not the speed to ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... not near the scrub, they would burrow deep into a great drift of snow and sleep in the warmest kind of a nest,—a trick that the husky dogs, which are but wolves of yesterday, still remember. Like all wild animals, they felt the coming of a storm long before the first white flakes began to whirl in the air; and when a great storm ...
— Northern Trails, Book I. • William J. Long
... pollen-collecting apparatus which would have been indispensable if they had stored up food for their own young. Some species of Sphegidae (wasp-like insects) are likewise parasitic; and M. Fabre has lately shown good reason for believing that, although the Tachytes nigra generally makes its own burrow and stores it with paralysed prey for its own larvae, yet that, when this insect finds a burrow already made and stored by another sphex, it takes advantage of the prize, and becomes for the occasion parasitic. In this case, as with that ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... mine, This which my keys in a crowd pressed and importuned to raise! Ah, one and all, how they helped, would dispart now and now combine, Zealous to hasten the work, heighten their master his praise! And one would bury his brow with a blind plunge down to hell, Burrow awhile and build, broad on the roots of things, Then up again swim into sight, having based me my palace well, Founded it, fearless of flame, ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... Nineveh was new; And down the vale long shadows cast When Moses out of Egypt passed, And o'er the heads of Pharaoh's slaves And soldiers rolled the Red Sea waves." "How must the timid rabbit shake, The fox within his burrow quake, The deer start up with quivering hide To gaze in terror every side, The quail forsake the trembling spray, When these old roots at last give way, And to the earth the monarch drops To jar the ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... of his burrow one dark night, he encountered an old beggar-woman who importuned him for alms. He was brushing past her, when one of her exclamations ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... friends was fixed upon the desperate end of the miserable man, Roupall was crawling under a ledge of black rock, that stretched to a considerable distance into the sea, where he calculated on remaining safe until high tide drove him to another burrow. Not so Springall: the moment he saw the Protector on the cliff, he appeared to have forgotten every thing connected with disguise or flight; he no longer sought concealment, but hastened to present himself in ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... the coast by way of the Columbia River. Along the lower levels the old trail ran, avoiding, with the sure instinct of a skilled engineer, nature's obstacles, and taking full advantage of every sloping hillside and every open stretch of woods. Now and then, however, the trail must needs burrow through a deep thicket of spruce and jack pine and scramble up a rocky ridge, where the horses, trained as they were in mountain climbing, had all they could do ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor
... now watching, the man ceased not, and such was his dogged pertinacity that, like the mouse, he won a living. He did more, he saved. At what price? At the price of a fireless life: I mean without cheer, by denial of everything which renders human life superior to that of the rabbit in his burrow. No wife, no children, no niece, or any woman to see to his comforts; no comfort and no pleasure; a bare house and rheumatism. Bill, his principal labourer, Dolly's brother, slept with him in the same bed, master and man, a custom common ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... Bouncer was stricken in years. He sat in the spring sunshine outside the burrow, in a muffler; smoking a ...
— The Great Big Treasury of Beatrix Potter • Beatrix Potter
... refreshed MacRummle rose from lunch, a good deal more like Bacchus, and much less like Nimrod. A rabbit had been watching him from the cliff above nearly all the time he was eating. It moved quietly into its burrow when he rose, though there was no occasion to do so, because, although within easy rifle shot, MacRummle did not see it. When the sportsman was past, the rabbit came out ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... great uneven dun-coloured plain stretched away to the horizon, without a break in its barren gorse-covered surface. Over the whole expanse there was no sign of life, save for an occasional rabbit which whisked into its burrow on hearing our approach, or a few thin and hungry sheep, who could scarce sustain life by feeding on the coarse and wiry grass which sprang from ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... and defiled, is almost always the real thing; there are no fresh readings: and therefore the greatest treasures of art which Europe at this moment possesses are pieces of old plaster on ruinous brick walls, where the lizards burrow and bask, and which few other living creatures ever approach; and torn sheets of dim canvas, in waste corners of churches; and mildewed stains, in the shape of human figures, on the walls of dark chambers, ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... a short burrow and at the end of it make a nice nest of dry grass. Sometimes in summer Mrs. Danny and I make our nest on the surface of the ground in a hollow or in a clump of tall grass, especially if the ground is low and wet. We have several good-sized families in a ...
— The Burgess Animal Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... lurching off. Coming round in a wheel, a hundred yards off, they began yelling and calling him names to revenge themselves for the start they had had. "Ya-ha!" they cried. "Who can't grub his own burrow? Who eats roots like a pig?... Ya-ha!" for even in those days the hyaena's manners were just as offensive ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... of the shot an opening or breach must be made in the walls, and the soldiers can then climb up upon scaling ladders or heaps of small faggots piled up to the height of the opening. Sometimes, too, the besiegers burrow underground till they are just below the wall, then fill the hole with gunpowder, and blow up all above them; in short, instead of, as in former days, a well- fortified city being almost impossible to take, except by starving out the garrison, a siege is ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... hind-legs were extended horizontally, its fore-legs were waving impotently up and down'. The ant-bear had carved its way deep into the bowels of the earth, gradually but relentlessly dragging the hapless pony down until its posterior parts hermetically sealed up the burrow. It was, in fact, only the smallness of the latter which prevented the animal from being completely buried. Eventually, however, the rein snapped, and the pony was thus released from a durance probably unique in equine experience. But I wish to make it quite clear that ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... talked out, not at this time," expostulated Dow, wedded to the old ways. "I have had to burrow deep for it. It ought to be saved carefully—to do business with later! To win a stroke in politics it's necessary to jump the people ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... address in raising and securely fixing crusts or shells of loam as cunabula for their young, the bank-martin terebrates a round and regular hole in the sand or earth, which is serpentine, horizontal, and about two feet deep. At the inner end of this burrow does this bird deposit, in a good degree of safety, her rude nest, consisting of fine grasses and feathers, usually goose-feathers, very ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... is easily killed when you catch him, in the same proportion is he hard to catch. He is shy and wary, scarce ever comes out of his burrow but at night; and even then skulks so silently along, and watches around him so sharply, that no enemy can approach without his knowing it. His eyes are very small, and, like most nocturnal animals, he sees but ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... hospital, he had not sought to place himself strongly. He had gone in and out, here and there, for amusement, but he had returned to the hospital. Now the city was to be his home: somewhere in it he must dig his own little burrow. ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... mouths of every one, and grow brighter as time progresses. Philip and his more warlike son, Alexander, are names familiar to the learned and illiterate, alike; while those who adorned the walks of civil life with virtues, and godlike abilities, are only known to those who burrow in musty old books, and search out the root of civilization enjoyed by modern nations. They who fought at Cannae and Marathon, at Troy and at Carthage, are household names; while those who invented the plough and the spade, and first taught the cultivation ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... incarnation, and the grub has achieved its agonizing passage from larva to winged insect. What a need he has for peace and meditation during these April days so full of the trouble of maturing life! But they come after him to the bottom of his burrow, look him up, drag him from the dark while still so tender in his new-made skin. They toss him into the raw air amongst the hard human race whose follies and hatreds he is expected at the very first moment to accept without ...
— Pierre and Luce • Romain Rolland
... a quiet hill nearer home. Soon a lady began to talk to one of the officers: "It is such folly for them to waste their ammunition like that. How can they ever take a town that has such advantages for defense and protection as this? We'll just burrow into these hills and let them batter away as hard as ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... nothing of the partition-walls, all labour would of course be thrown away; and even if he could bore through it, he must find the solid earth on the other side, and be discovered before he could possibly burrow his way out. As to the window, or rather the iron-barred opening through which came light and air, for any purposes of escape it might as well not have been there, for its lower edge was nearly fourteen feet from the ground; and ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... of my house. Her son is an alderman; her nephew is a bailiff; two or three others of them keep saloons. They are Poles, or Bohemians, or Jews—Heaven knows what. They do business on the premises—they stick to their burrow. Yet we couldn't get a summons served by a constable. And when we finally got the matter before a court—it was continued. No defendants there—only a filthy little creature who called himself their attorney. We were never so blackguarded ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... condition may remain confined to the coronet and break through the skin as an ordinary abscess, or it may, before so doing, burrow beneath the wall, and invade the sensitive laminae. In this case, whenever portions of the secreting layer of the keratogenous membrane are destroyed, or perhaps only temporarily prevented from fulfilling their horn-producing functions, ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... when the man is stupid and dull; it needs no slumber, when man must sleep or drop; ever at its post, ever ready for work, its alacrity never flags, its patience never gives in; its might is stronger than combined hundreds, and swifter than the flight of birds; it can burrow beneath the earth, and walk upon the largest rivers and sink not. This is the green tree; what then shall ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... aviators started off, walking briskly. They kept their eyes alertly open as they proceeded. At the same time, on Tom's suggestion, they continued to act as though still looking for game, even investigating at a burrow that certainly was used by rabbits, ...
— Air Service Boys Over The Enemy's Lines - The German Spy's Secret • Charles Amory Beach
... Notwithstanding the high window, the thick wall, and the palisade, notwithstanding too his want of money, he soon managed to open negotiations with the sentinels, and found, to his great joy, that the next cell was empty. If he could only contrive to burrow his way into that, he would be able to watch his opportunity to steal through the open door; once free he could either swim the Elbe and cross into Saxony, which lay about six miles distant, or else float down the river in a boat till he was out ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... commenced to tighten the crown line, when the rapid and powerful jerks showed that he had something good within his net. "Now, Howarti, look sharp! the bottom is clean sand: haul away, and don't give them time to burrow beneath the leads." ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... the respirations are labored, the general symptoms aggravated, and the animal stands with the front feet spread apart. Cattle are inclined to lie down, unless the lungs are seriously affected. Hogs like to burrow under the litter. ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... descending from the tree; before he can slip it the whitethroat takes him. With a thrust the wind hurls the swift fifty miles faster on his way; it ruffles back the black velvet of the mole peeping forth from his burrow. Apple bloom and crab-apple bloom have been blown long since athwart the furrows over the orchard wall; May petals and June roses scattered; the pollen and the seeds of the meadow-grasses thrown on the threshing-floor ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... and on to the second trenches higher up! But here the Boer in his burrow with his mauser rifle roaring, and his heart fierce with hatred and anger at the surprise, laid down to the bloody work with an ugly determination to punish remorselessly his fellow-citizens of the veld and the others. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the formless mass for this or that volume, but, unable to grant Sir Giles the desire of his heart in respect of my poor field, I did not care to ask of him the comparatively small favour of being allowed to burrow in ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... horribly afraid, Dysart. This grimacing of yours is fear. All you want is to be let alone, to burrow through the society that breeds your sort. Like a maggot in a chestnut you feed on what breeds you. I don't care. Feed! What bred you is as rotten as you are. I'm done with it—done with all this," turning his head toward the flare of light. "Go on and burrow. What nourishes you ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... western Texas and the plains of New Mexico is very mountainous and lonely. Villages of prairie dogs here and there seem to be about all the living things that the traveler sees. These little animals burrow deep in the ground, thousands of them close together, and this is why it is called a prairie dog town. I was told that these little dogs live mostly on roots and drink no water. I give this as it was told me, and do not know how true it is. One thing which I ...
— A Soldier in the Philippines • Needom N. Freeman
... abated; it therefore exerted itself in the abbey.—When a man of fortune had nearly done with time, he began to peep into eternity through the windows of an abbey; or, if a villian had committed a piece of butchery, or had cheated the world for sixty years, there was no doubt but he could burrow his way to glory through ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... to face with what? Ah! who would have thought it?—with the bounteous mother, the comforter of troubled spirits, with the Roman Church, ever kind to repentance, poetic to poets, childlike with children, and yet so profound, so full of mystery to anxious, restless minds that they can burrow there and satisfy all longings, all questionings, all hopes. She cast her eyes, as it were, upon the strangely devious way—like the tortuous rocky path before her—over which her love for Calyste had led her. Ah! Calyste was indeed a messenger from heaven, ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... half a dozen men and a quartermaster-sergeant attached to the transport to look after the horses and to flirt with girls in farms; two mess waiters whose job it is to feed the officers; and there are four men who have the rottenest time of anyone—they're the miners who burrow and dig, dig and burrow day and night towards the German lines; poor half-naked fellows who wheel little trucks of earth to the pit shaft or who lie on their stomachs working away with picks. And it's always an awful ...
— Mud and Khaki - Sketches from Flanders and France • Vernon Bartlett
... Now if Tam and Jock had come into the garden by the wicket gate, as they should have done, this story might never have been written at all, because in that case the rabbit would perhaps have got safely back to her burrow in the woods without being seen, and there wouldn't have ...
— The Scotch Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... one seen was a muskrat that took to the water of a small creek and escaped. This occurred at the spot where we had halted for our night-camp, and after the tents were pitched, several of the party went "rat-hunting." The burrow of a family of these curious little animals was discovered in the bank, and an attempt was made to dig them out, but without success. The family proved to ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... them in a stubble field, I learned something curious and interesting in connection with these mischievous gophers, though just then they were doing no harm. As I strolled through the stubble watching for a chance for a shot, a shrike flew past me and alighted on an open spot at the mouth of a burrow about thirty yards ahead of me. Curious to see what he was up to, I stood still to watch him. He looked down the gopher hole in a listening attitude, then looked back at me to see if I was coming, looked down again and listened, and looked back at me. I stood perfectly ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... you could hit what you aimed at. Slip out of that hole and find Webber and tell him to come here—and you take his burrow." Whereupon Hogan, grinning rueful acquiescence in his commander's criticism, slid backwards into the stream bed and, followed by the chaff of the three or four comrades near enough to catch the words, went crouching from post to post in search ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... for Raven, though he seemed like himself and was a model of crisp action, had no thoughts at all. To Nan it was a long interval from the moment of stopping before the little gray Donnyhill house (and rousing more squalid Donnyhills than you would have imagined in an underground burrow of wintering animals), through indignities they had to show Tira's body, the hopeless effort of rousing it again to its abjured relations with an unfriendly world. And while they worked on the tenant-less ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... danger from the outskirts was soon taken up in the centre of the city, and now nothing was to be seen in any direction but a dashing and a scampering of the mercurial and excitable citizens of the place, each to his lodge or burrow. Far as the eye could reach was spread the city, and in every direction the scene was the same. We rode leisurely along until we had reached the more thickly settled portion of the city, when we halted, and after taking the bridles from our horses to allow ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... that ever lived could not have pulled himself free. Now when a beaver is frightened, he of course makes for deep water. There, he thinks, no enemy can follow him; and, what is more, it is the highway to his lodge, and to the burrow that he has hollowed in the bank for a refuge in case his house should be attacked. So this beaver turned and jumped back into the water the way he had come; but, alas! he took his enemy with him. The heavy trap dragged him to the bottom like a stone, ...
— Forest Neighbors - Life Stories of Wild Animals • William Davenport Hulbert
... with our Food, and Clothing, and Shelter, but with our beds, which are our night-clothes, robbing the nests and breasts of birds to prepare this shelter within a shelter, as the mole has its bed of grass and leaves at the end of its burrow! The poor man is wont to complain that this is a cold world; and to cold, no less physical than social, we refer directly a great part of our ails. The summer, in some climates, makes possible to man a sort of Elysian life. Fuel, except to cook his Food, is then unnecessary; ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... remarkably striking, uses about them a significant figure of speech. He says that, while a true prophet was like a wall of fire to his country, standing in the breach when danger threatened and defending it with his life, the false prophets were like the foxes that burrow among the ruins of fallen cities. What mattered it to them that their country was degraded, if only they had found ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... There was likewise a silver coronation medal of George III. But old Peter Goldthwaite's strong-box fled from one dark corner to another, or otherwise eluded the second Peter's clutches till, should he seek much farther, he must burrow into the earth. ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... barking of the dogs, nor the neighing of the horses and the creaking of the carts, nor the blare of the horns that gave the signal for the hunt could stir Thaddeus from his bed; falling fully dressed on his couch, he had slept like a marmot in its burrow. None of the young men thought of looking for him in the yard; every one was occupied with his own affairs and was hurrying to his appointed place; they ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... certain that, should I fall asleep, death would ensue, and that I must exert all my energies to keep awake. I had not been long seated, doubled up in my burrow like a mummy, before I felt the cold begin to steal over me. My feet were the first to suffer. I tried to keep them warm by moving them about, but it ...
— Snow Shoes and Canoes - The Early Days of a Fur-Trader in the Hudson Bay Territory • William H. G. Kingston
... been carried out, lawyers would have a large supply of that comic but sound literature of which Sir James Burrow's Reports contain a specimen in the following poetical version of Chief Justice Pratt's memorable decision with regard to a woman of English birth, who was the ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... pack. In the country, when a dog gives tongue Bunny sits up and twirls his ears uneasily; then, even if the bark is heard from afar off, the little brown beast darts underground. Alas! there is no friendly burrow in this bleak field, and there is no chance of escape; for the merry roughs will soon finish any rabbit that shows the dogs a ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... mostly earthen, and easily reached from the ground by an outside stair. It would be somewhat difficult to get a sick man and his bed up there, however low, and somewhat free-and-easy dealing with another man's house to burrow through the roof a hole wide enough for the purpose; but there is no impossibility, and the difficulty is part of the lesson of the incident, and is recognised expressly in the narrative by Christ's notice of their 'faith.' We can fancy the blank looks of the four bearers, and the disappointment ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... from end to end of the car. Incredibly sinister, heard thus in the night, and in the rain, mysterious, fearful, those four pistol shots started confusion from out the sense of security like a frightened rabbit hunted from her burrow. Wide-eyed, the passengers of the car looked into each other's faces. It had come to them at last, this, they had so often read about. Now they were to see the real thing, now they were to face actuality, face this danger of the night, leaping ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... grasses. On rare nights, in the places where no grass grows between the shrubs, and the sand silvers whitely to the moon, one sees them whisking to and fro on innumerable errands of seed gathering, but the chief witnesses of their presence near the spring are the elf owls. Those burrow-haunting, speckled fluffs of greediness begin a twilight flitting toward the spring, feeding as they go on grasshoppers, lizards, and small, swift creatures, diving into burrows to catch field mice asleep, battling ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... his young friends, waving his tail in the air, and now and again pausing to investigate a rabbit-burrow or an interesting tuft ...
— The Adventure League • Hilda T. Skae
... first Indian that ever planted corn and beans and "iskooter-squashes" said the same things about the woodchuck that I do, in his own language; and I believe that the woodchuck then, as he does now, just wrinkled his stubby black nose and retired to his burrow to sleep upon it while the ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... there was a swineherd, keeping a herd of swine. And through fear of the swine the queen was delivered. And the swineherd took the boy, and brought him to the palace; and he was christened, and they called him Kilhwch, because he had been found in a swine's burrow. Nevertheless the boy was of gentle lineage, and cousin unto Arthur; and they ...
— The Mabinogion • Lady Charlotte Guest
... with my feet until it come to a hole in the rocks; and when I come to that hole I went right in, fer I was desprit; and I crawled in and crawled in until I come to a big nest of leaves, and then I begin to burrow down into them leaves. And as soon as I had made a hole I pulled them leaves over me and fell to sleep, ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... dying. Ever since Sarka the First, king of scientists, had given mankind the Secret of Life, which prolonged life indefinitely, the Earthlings had multiplied beyond all count, and been forced to burrow deep into the ground and high into the air in the desperate search for the mere room in which to live. There was much civil war. The plight of the children of men was desperate. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... can watch the life beneath the water. The small fry cluster and evade between me and the brink; the half-translucent shrimp glides gracefully undisturbed, or glances away like a flash if you but touch the surface; the crabs waddle or burrow, the smaller species mimicking unconsciously the hue of the soft green sea-weed, and the larger looking like motionless stones, covered with barnacles and decked with fringing weeds. I am acquainted with no better Darwinian than the crab; and however clumsy he may be when taken from ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... shall be pleasant. A persistent fly, a slap, and the woodchuck hears. He turns that dark gray, solemn looking face, and asks mutely, reproachfully, perhaps resentfully, why his reverie has been disturbed. Then he hastily scurries to his burrow and he will not again appear though I ...
— Some Summer Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... the back of one hand made that purpose only too clear to Shann, and he retreated hurriedly from the vicinity of the excavation. They had found an earth-wasp's burrow and were hunting grubs, naturally arousing the ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... great and small, that fly in the air; Ho! Ye Animals, great and small, that dwell in the forests; Ho! Ye Insects that creep among the grasses and burrow in the ground, I bid you hear me! Into your midst has come a new life; Consent ye, I implore! Make its path smooth, that it may reach the brow ...
— Indian Games and Dances with Native Songs • Alice C. Fletcher
... order of the local authorities. But oftener still they are purchased by local authorities at great public cost, or by philanthropic trusts. Then the human rabbits are driven from their warrens to burrow elsewhere and ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... unquiet, not like that which should come from the calm sleep of the sultry summer's afternoon. His was not the profound sleep of the lizard which hardly stirs when dreaming the dream of ancient walls; his was not the comfortable noonday sleep of the badger who sits in his dark earthen burrow and enjoys the coolness. ...
— Romance of the Rabbit • Francis Jammes
... her head. "You have no claim to know what I know, even if it would be any addition to your own knowledge. I shall not, and must not enlighten you. You must burrow for the secret with your own tools, in your own manner, and in a place of your own choosing. I am bound not ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... be a rudiment retained from their remote ancestry, I cannot tell, but any kind of suffering will wake in some a masterful impulse to burrow; and as the boys walked about in their misery, white with cold and hunger, Clare's eyes kept turning to every shallowest archway, every breach in wall or hedge that seemed to offer the least chance of covert, while, every now and then, Tommy would bolt from his side ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... temperature changes with straw packing to height, in center, of three feet and protected from rain by a wood roof of boards, shingles, or prepared roofing resembling, a little, the old wedge tent. To get into the box burrow in under by pulling out the straw in front, but not too large a tunnel, and far enough back to get at the trap door cover where it can be slipped off and scions put in, the door replaced and all the straw crowded back into ...
— Northern Nut Growers Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-First Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... and pushed her way through the drift at the mouth of their burrow. Not until she was standing outside did she realize the extent of the storm. The snow was swept across the country in a thick and heavy curtain, with a wind driving it, against which she knew she ...
— Ruth Fielding at Snow Camp • Alice Emerson
... of animal life the ravens pay no attention whatever. It is beneath their notice; their aims are of a higher order than those of beings who live upon roots and who burrow for their abode. They live on prey that is far above the simple products of animal industry. Carrion is what they aspire to. Therefore they aspire with a lofty mien, prying and peering in every direction for something fallen. They are not far from the eastern brink of the mesa, where the volcanic ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... under the counsel of a good physician if you can; if not, take them judiciously by such advice as we give you, and the distressing, dangerous diseases they cure, which afflict so many millions of the human race, are cast out like the devils of old—they must burrow in the brutes and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various |
