"Carrion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... according to his usual note, but not one of them of any kind that I knew. As for the creature I killed, I took it to be a kind of hawk, its colour and beak resembling it, but it had no talons or claws more than common. Its flesh was carrion, ...
— Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... a story, and tells it inimitably. My readers have heard of the ballad of the 'Two Corbies,' which the writer of the ballad has made to meet and tell gruesomely where and on what carrion their feast has been. Suppose the writer of the ballad had been a painter, he might have painted the story as intelligibly by the lone hill-side, the bleaching bones of the faithful hound and gallant grey, ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... my own elephant, we moved for home, a group of fifty horsemen now forming our escort. The headless bodies of our enemies were left as fitting spoil for the jackals and the vultures, the latter of whom, scenting the carrion, were already beginning to drop down, it might seem, from the blue vault ...
— Tales of Destiny • Edmund Mitchell
... and birds of prey making life rather hard for them." Mr Danford further speaks of the chamois-eagle as "not rare in the higher mountains." The fisher-eagle "generally distributed." The king-eagle also "not rare." The carrion-vulture "common throughout the country," also the red-footed falcon. At one time and another I have myself seen most of these birds in the Carpathians, which form the ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... your teachers tell you? Can your race add anything to this dog's stock of morals and magnanimities?" He spoke to the creature, who jumped up, eager and happy, and apparently ready for orders and impatient to execute them. "Get some men; go with the dog—he will show you that carrion; and take a priest along to arrange about insurance, for death ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... indignation which he could scarcely control any more. He could have roared out, could have jumped up, run out, and shouted to mankind from the depths of his soul asking why he had been tossed there, why he would have to lie there until he had turned into carrion or a crazy man. How could he have let himself be driven out there? He could not understand it. He saw no meaning to it all, no aim. All he saw was that hole in the earth, those rotting corpses outside, and nearby, but one step removed from all that madness, ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko
... this digression, we find in the Diptera the habit of obtrusion and intrusion, of coming in actual contact with our food and our persons, combined with another propensity—that of feeding upon carrion, excrement, blood, pus, and morbid matter of all kinds. This is a combination far more serious than is generally imagined. If the fly—which may at any moment settle upon our lips, our eyes, or upon an abraded part of our skin—were cleanly in its habits, we need feel little annoyance at its visits. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 303 - October 22, 1881 • Various
... Greedy for carrion, and sure that this must be a fresh corpse, the bird swooped down upon the boy. But he was awake now, and perceiving the eagle, he determined by ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Leonora Blanche Alleyne Lang
... are right, Miss Porter," he said, "but I do not think that any of us need worry about our carrion-eating acquaintance. The chances are that he is some half-demented castaway who will forget us more quickly, but no more surely, than we shall forget him. He is only a beast of the jungle, ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Were as a carrion's cry To lullaby Such as I'd sing to thee, Were I thy bride! A feather's press Were leaden heaviness To my caress. But then, unhappily, ...
— Bab Ballads and Savoy Songs • W. S. Gilbert
... eagle has perhaps the darkest plumage of all the eagles. This species does not live up to its name. It feeds largely on carrion, and probably never catches anything larger than a rat. The imperial eagle is common about Mussoorie except in the rains. Captain Hutton states that he has seen as many as fifty of them together in the month of October when they reassemble after ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... it raw and quivering, yet that only numbs when its fury is spent, and will not kill? That time after time, when its throes are on me, I have turned craven and begged Claudius for a potion to end it all?" He laughed shortly, with no sound of merriment. "I marry again—a rotten hulk fit only for carrion!" ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... jackrabbits get some sort of a plague and die in great numbers. Indeed some years at the ranch they seemed almost to have disappeared. Their carcasses are destroyed almost immediately by the carrion creatures, and their delicate bones, scattered by the ravens, buzzards, and coyotes, soon disintegrate and pass into the soil. One does not find many evidences of the destruction that has been at work; yet he will see tens instead of myriads. I have been at the ranch when one was ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... pictures we have two characteristic features of the Priestly narrative, in the ship grounded on a rock, and in the bow set in the cloud; we have also two characteristic features of the Jehovistic narrative, in the smoking altar of sacrifice, and in the carrion bird. There is therefore manifest connection between the constellation grouping and both ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... so much time spent in plans and schemes, in alterations and regrets. There was this to be done and that to be completed; one thing to be begun, another to be cleared away; always in search of the peace which one never found; and if one did achieve it, then it was surrounded, like some cast carrion, by a cloud of poisonous thoughts, like buzzing blue-flies. Now at last one lived indeed; but there grew up in the soul, very gradually and sweetly, the sense that one was resting, growing accustomed to something, learning the ways of the new place. I became more and more aware that I was not ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... to death poore wretches not worth striking, But fawne with slavish flattery on damn'd vices, So great men act them: you clap hands at those, Where the true Poet indeed doth scorne to guild A gawdy Tombe with glory of his Verse Which coffins stinking Carrion; no, his lines Are free as his Invention; no base feare Can shape his penne to Temporize even with Kings; The blacker are their crimes he lowder sings. Goe, goe, thou canst not write; 'tis but ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... all the time he has been, in his own person, guilty of it. To carry a thing under our cloak caressingly, hides from us its identity with something that stands before us on the public pillory. Many a man might read this and assent to it, who cages in his own bosom a carrion-bird that he never knows for what it is, because there are points of difference in its plumage from that of the bird he calls by ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... Oh, give him back to me, give him back, I say, Or I will tear your body limb from limb, And to the common gibbet nail your head Until the carrion crows have stripped it bare. Better you had crossed a hungry lioness Before you came between me and my love. [With more pathos.] Nay, give him back, you know not how I love him. Here by this chair he knelt a half hour since; 'Twas there he stood, and there he looked ...
— The Duchess of Padua • Oscar Wilde
... were aliue, were constrained to eate vp those which were dead; and (as a marchant reported vnto me who sawe it with his owne eyes) that the liuing men deuoured and tore with their teeth, the raw flesh of the dead, as dogges would knawe vpon carrion. Towards the border of the sayd prouince there be many great lakes: vpon the bankes whereof are salt pits or fountaines, the water of which so soon as it entereth into the lake, becommeth hard salte like vnto ice. And out ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... do exactly what I say you will be lying there with that carrion," cried Morgan, kicking the prostrate body savagely with his ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... carrion meat," shouted Phormio, shaking his fists under the helpless creature's nose. "Honest men have their day at last. There's a gay hour coming before Zeus claps the lid over you ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... its back before deserting its eggs, and may even let you take its photograph while you are thus engaged. On one occasion I removed a Turkey Vulture's egg from beneath the sitting bird. It merely hissed feebly as I approached, and a moment later humbly laid at my feet a portion of the carrion which it had eaten a short time before—a well-meant but not wholly ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson
... of carrion at the foot of the Great Staircase, and open wide the Palace doors, that men may note my vengeance at the same time as ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... rest die in age, and age also dies and determines all. Nor do all these, youth out of infancy, or age out of youth, arise so as a Phoenix out of the ashes of another Phoenix formerly dead, but as a wasp or a serpent out of a carrion or as a snake out of dung." We can comprehend how an audience composed of men and women whose ne'er-do-weel relatives went to the theatre to be stirred by such tragedies as those of Marston and Cyril Tourneur would themselves snatch a sacred pleasure from awful language of ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... themselves on Hanover, the CASE OF THE HANOVER FORCES, and innumerable other Hanoverian cases, griefs and difficulties! So pungently vital to somnambulant mankind at that epoch; to us fallen dead as carrion, and unendurable to think of. My friends, if you send for Gentlemen from Hanover, you must take them with Hanover adhering more or less; and ought not to quarrel with your bargain, which you reckoned so divine! No doubt, it is singular to see a Britannic Majesty neglecting his own Spanish War, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Mr. Hume, at one time separated the Indian Carrion-Crow from Corvus corone under the name C. pseudo-corone. In his 'Catalogue' he re-unites them. I quite agree with him that the two ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... wrack, rags; sent for guano, tried to manufacture it himself; and, pushing his principles to the farthest point, he would not suffer even urine or other refuse to be lost. Into his farmyard were carried carcasses of animals, with which he manured his lands. Their cut-up carrion strewed the fields. Bouvard smiled in the midst of this stench. A pump fixed to a dung-cart spattered the liquid manure over the crops. To those who assumed an air of disgust, he used to say, "But 'tis gold! 'tis gold!" And he was sorry that he had not still more manures. Happy the land where natural ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... enough; the banquet of birds and beasts who feed on the skin of Pharsalia is even worse. [66] The details are too loathsome to quote. Suffice it to say that the list includes every carrion-feeder among flesh and fowl ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... corruption, and peculation, and that a worse air for the lungs of a chief-justice could not be found in the world. If his lungs wanted the benefit of pure air, he would even have put himself in the focus of a rebellion, to have kept at a distance from the smell of carrion and putrid corruption of every kind that was at Lucknow. A chief-justice may go to a place where a rebellion is raging, he may die a martyr to his honor; but a chief-justice who puts himself into ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... to the grating). The fools, it seems, Smell out my door as carrion-vultures smell ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... Red, Dymock Red, Eggleton Styre, Kingston Black or Black Taunton, Skyrme's Kernel, Spreading Redstreak, Carrion apple, Cherry Norman, Cummy Norman, Royal Wilding, Handsome Norman, Strawberry Norman, White Bache or Norman, Broad-leaved Norman, Argile Grise, Bramtot, De Boutville, Frequin Audievre, Medaille d'Or, the last five being French sorts introduced ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... probably would do so with the lion and the tiger if these animals had not an unpleasant way of dealing with jokers. And the tomtit and canary have, no doubt, at least private agreement that the utterances of the nightingale are galimatias, while the carrion crow thinks the eagle a fool for dwelling so high and flying so much higher. But as for the other side of the matter, how thin and poor and puerile even those smartest things of Voltaire's, some of which have been quoted and praised, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... as within, reigned a profound silence. Not a living thing in sight—save the black vultures—a score of which, perched on the dead-woods overhead, and fetid as their food, were infecting the air with their carrion odour. Although within easy range of my rifle, the foul birds took no heed of my movements; but sat still, indolently extending their broad wings to the sun—now and then one coming, one going, in slow silent flight— their very shadows ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... malodorous bouquet, till it became perfectly pestilential; the Livarots, ruddy in hue, and as irritating to the throat as sulphur fumes; and, lastly, stronger than all the others, the Olivets, wrapped in walnut leaves, like the carrion which peasants cover with branches as it lies rotting in the hedgerow ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... "combining to hinder the orderly gathering" of the Weymouth church at this time, was fined L2. Edward Sylvester for the same offence was fined and disfranchised. Ambrose Martin, another friend of Lenthal's, for calling the church covenant of the Boston divines "a stinking carrion and a human invention," was fined L10, while Thomas Makepeace, another Weymouth malcontent, was informed by those in power that "they were weary of him," or, in modern slang, that "he made them tired." Parson Lenthal himself, being sent for by the convention, ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... hurl'd therein full many a precious name Where millions soon unto the bottom sank: Hardly in every thousand one was found That was not in the gulf quite lost and drown'd; Yet all about great store of birds there flew, As vultures, carrion crows, and chattering pies, And many more of sundry kinds and hue, Making lewd harmony with their loud cries: These, when the careless wretch the treasure threw Into the stream, did all they could devise, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19, No. 528, Saturday, January 7, 1832 • Various
... harmony with the general forecast and economy of nature. Of the self-originating spring of life, some of the examples adduced by the author are proofs, and of which we have familiar illustrations in cheese-mites, maggots in carrion, and the green fly that breeds so profusely in weak and decaying vegetation; in all which by some inscrutable law the organic germ, without an antecedent, appears to evolve from the dead or putrifying mass for ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... Dawson city with the howlings of dogs, but the towns of the Sanjak have no better music than the croaking of carrion crows. ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... it was then called, received the rich deposit brought down by the river in the spring, and, when the river retired into its banks, became a series of mud flats, described as "mere quagmires of black dirt, stretching along for miles, unvaried except by the limbs of half-buried carrion, tree trunks, or by occasional yellow pools of what the children called frog's spawn; all together steaming up vapors redolent of the savor of death." In the previous year—not an unusually bad one—one-ninth of the Indian population on these flats had died in two months. The Mormons ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... with the wolves. The village boys amused themselves by throwing frogs to him, which he caught and devoured; and when a bullock died and was skinned, he resorted to the carcass like the dogs of the place, and fed upon the carrion. His body smelled offensively. He remained in the village during the day, for the sake of what he could get to eat, but always went off to the jungle at night. In other particulars, his habits resembled those already described. We have only to add respecting ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 446 - Volume 18, New Series, July 17, 1852 • Various
... bullets of white men. On the other hand, we did not molest the hyenas; the harm which they now and then did by the theft of a sheep was more than compensated for by their usefulness as devourers of carrion. They are shy, cowardly beasts, which do not readily attack anything that is alive; but in the character of unwearied sanitary police they scour field and forest for dead animals. In the list of beasts not to be spared stood at first the hippopotamuses, ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... so addicted to gluttony that it will go a thousand miles to eat a carrion [carcase]; therefore is it that ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... a thousand lawless raids, in a few minutes you will be but a great load of carrion. It cannot be otherwise." Then I swung my lasso and sent it whistling over his head. But not so fast; he was yet far from being subdued, and, before the supple coils had fallen on his neck he seized the noose and, with one ...
— Lobo, Rag and Vixen - Being The Personal Histories Of Lobo, Redruff, Raggylug & Vixen • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... trilliums attract insects by their large white and purple flowers, which are held up by their long stalks high above the three broad leaves. The strong carrion-like odour of the purple trillium is attractive to flies and beetles, while bees and butterflies find the fragrance of the white ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... the instrument of his purposes. He extracts all its interest and meaning from himself. His own shadow falls upon it all. If he is selfish, that is, if he interprets the self that is in him as vulturous, then the whole outer world and his fellow-men fall for him into the category of carrion, or not-carrion. If he knows himself as spirit, as the energy of love or reason, if the prime necessity he recognizes within himself is the necessity to be good, then the universe becomes for him an instrument wherewith moral character is evolved. In ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... disturbance, or sight of an enemy, until we came nearly to the edge of the town and saw the glistening roof of the church appear above the foliage,—where sat sundry carrion-loving buzzards, elbowing each other, shuffling to and fro with outspread wings, and chuckling, doubtless, over the promise of glorious times. As we go on, suddenly heads appear over the bushes less than a hundred yards in front, and we hear the vindictive whistle of Minie-balls ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... England who would give it me," she raved, whispering. "That would there, I swear! But there would be dullards and dastards who would not. He would give it—he! Ay, mock as thou wilt! But between his high honour and love and me thy carrion ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... legs possess well-defined segments and are often spiny. Such a larva is evidently far less unlike its parent beetle than a caterpillar is unlike a butterfly. Perhaps of all beetle larvae, the woodlouse-like grub (fig. 12 b) of a carrion-beetle (Silpha) or of a semi-aquatic dascillid such as Helodes shows the least amount of difference from the typical adult, on account of the conspicuous jointed feelers. The larval glow-worm, however, is of the same woodlouse-like aspect, and in ...
— The Life-Story of Insects • Geo. H. Carpenter
... skulls, bones, fragments of burial clothes, and mutilated human bodies. The coffin plunderer, on replacing the corpse in the grave, merely throws some loose sand over it, and the consequence is that the remains of the dead frequently become the prey of dogs, foxes, and other carrion feeders. When the family of a deceased person can contribute nothing to defray the funeral expenses, the body is conveyed privately during the night to the churchyard. In the morning it is ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... kinsmen's blood, Or drag them captive at his chariot wheels— For Polyneices 'tis ordained that none Shall give him burial or make mourn for him, But leave his corpse unburied, to be meat For dogs and carrion crows, a ghastly sight. So am I purposed; never by my will Shall miscreants take precedence of true men, But all good patriots, alive or dead, Shall be ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles
... art. Or course it is open to any one to say, "It may repel you, but it does not repel me." But this is very cheap sophistry. We do not require to be told, in the words which shocked Lord Chesterfield but do not annoy a humble admirer of his, that "One man's meat is another man's poison." Carrion is not repulsive to a vulture. Immediately before writing these words I was reading the confession of an unfortunate American that he or she found The Roundabout Papers "depressing." For my part, I have ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... the cowardly thief. If it were not for mixing the Princess's name with such carrion as ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... saw in those slaughter-houses, and the enormous things that were done in them? In the first place, you must understand that all who work in them, from the lowest to the highest, are people without conscience or humanity, fearing neither the king nor his justice; most of them living in concubinage; carrion birds of prey; maintaining themselves and their doxies by what they steal. On all flesh days, a great number of wenches and young chaps assemble in the slaughtering place before dawn, all of them with bags which come empty and go away full of pieces of meat. Not a beast is killed ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... warfare against them, and his gun could be heard as early as five o'clock in the morning, while the shots would often come pattering down harmlessly on my greenhouse. There came a time when some thieving carrion crows were robbing my half-tame wild duck's nests of their eggs, and Jarge was, of course, detailed to tackle them. Weeks elapsed without any result; the depredations continued, and the men began to chaff him; finally Bell "put the lid on," as people say nowadays, by the following ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... Bromli kites, that seemed then as at all times, an essential part of the sunshine. To the bush-folk of the Never-Never, sunshine without Bromli kites would be as a summer's day without the sun. All day and every day they hover throughout it, as they search and wait and watch for carrion, throwing dim, gliding shadows as they wheel and circle, or flashing sunshine from brown wings by quick, sudden swoops, hovering and swooping throughout the sunshine, or rising to melt into blue depths of the heavens, where other arching, floating specks tell of myriads there, ready to ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... "There's neay carrion can kill a craw." "It's a good horse that duz never stumble, And a good wife that duz never grumble." "Neare is my sarke, but nearer is my skin." "It's an ill-made bargain whore beath parties rue." "A curst cow hes short horns." "Wilfull fowkes ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... Hugo will that no priest should officiate at his burial, he ordered that none should approach his bed. But the carrion crows of the death-chamber were not to be deterred by his well-known wishes. The Archbishop of Paris offered to visit the dying heretic and administer to him the supreme unction on behalf of the Church. M. Lockroy, the poet's son-in-law, politely declined the offer. Our newspapers, especially ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... JOE? Nay, it needs no apology To say you are out in your new ornithology. The Vultures are carrion-birds, be it said; And the Man and the Cause you detest are not dead! Much as his decease was desired, he's alive, And the Cause is no carcase. So, JOE, you must strive To get nearer the truth. Shall we help you? All fowls Are not Vultures. For instance, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 6, 1892 • Various
... the fort on the morning of the 6th and securing no answer, Lisiansky again played his cannon on the barricade. That night a curious sound, that was neither chant nor war-cry, came from the thick woods. At daylight carrion crows were seen circling above the barricade. Three hundred Russians landed. Approaching cautiously for fear of ambuscade, they clambered over the {314} palisades and looked. The fort was deserted. Naught of the Sitkans remained but thirty dead warriors and all their children, murdered during the ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... teach you to keep back where you belong, you murdering brute, you slaughtering savage, you! You infidel, you robber of churches! Next time I will rip you open from neck to heel, you carrion-cater! Esclavo!" ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... severely, he instinctively thrust them into his mouth to allay the smart. No sooner had Fafnir's blood thus touched his lips than he discovered, to his utter surprise, that he could understand the songs of the birds, many of which were already gathering round the carrion. Listening attentively, he found that they were telling how Regin meditated mischief against him, and how he ought to slay the old man and take the gold, which was his by right of conquest, after which he ought to partake of the heart and blood of the dragon. As this coincided ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... can be taught the habits of the barn door fowl. The Red Indian prefers his hunting ground to cultivated fields and stately cities: the gipsy, sheltered by a commodious roof, and provided with meat in due season, still pines for the ragged tent on the moor and the meal of carrion, and even so Ferguson became weary of plenty and security, of his salary, his house, his table and his coach, and longed to be again the president of societies where none could enter without a password, the director of secret presses, the distributor of inflammatory pamphlets; to ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... emblem of their Republic. If his disposition be considered, he would be a more fit emblem for a band of robbers—for a more absolute robber and tyrant does not exist among the feathered races. He robs the osprey of his fish, and the vulture of his carrion; in short, lords it over every creature weaker than himself. Now this is not the character of the nation he represents—far from it. It is true they have shown a desire to extend their territory, and have made conquests to this end. But what is the ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... with the times, Would only feed us, like the Press, On squalid "mysteries," ugly crimes, Scandals and all that carrion mess, I see no solid reason why Dramatic Art should ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 17, 1920 • Various
... must pierce the diaphragm; then the heart was torn out, to the admiration of all present. The corpse, however, gave out such a bad smell, that they were obliged to burn incense; but the vapor, mixed with the exhalations of the carrion, only augmented the stink, and began to heat the brain ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... weary months, during which these hunger-driven men roamed the wretched island rocks both night and day, searching for shell-fish for food—men who were even thankful at the times when they were able to kill and eat the carrion crows that fed upon the flesh of their drowned comrades cast up by the tide. Some Indians surprised them by a visit, and stayed for several days, and with them they were able to barter cloth and beads for some dogs, and these ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... which he had a collection at Nevers. Thank Heaven they are dead! Thank Heaven he is dead! Thank Heaven he lost most of the money for which he preyed on his kind. He was a vulture, a scaly-headed vulture. He was the carrion kite above every rotten financial concern in London and Paris. That which went near to ruin my poor vain fool of a father-in-law filled his bulging pockets. I hated him living and ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... for the rich carrion would be less keen; the zeal of opposition, as usual, would be measured by the stomach, whereon hope and overlooking have always ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... you won't have 'em," replied Life. Reaching up his long right arm, and grasping the man by the throat, he dragged him from the animal in the twinkling of an eye, pitching him on the ground as though he had been a piece of carrion; and he lay there looking at the stalwart form of the Kentuckian, not much inclined ...
— A Lieutenant at Eighteen • Oliver Optic
... religion which reverenced the strong rather than the good, and which regarded as meritorious the unrestrained indulgence of the passions, it delighted to sing the praises of some coarse debauch or pitiless slaughter. The voice of its scalds was often but the scream of the carrion-bird, or the howl of the ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... never been able to give worship to the God who made you! Miscreants, whom the example of the Noachides, the learned Chinese, the Parsees and all the sages, has never been able to lead! Monsters, who need superstitions as crows' gizzards need carrion! you have been told it already, and there is nothing else to tell you—if you have two religions in your countries, they will cut each other's throat; if you have thirty religions, they will dwell in peace. Look at the great Turk, he governs Guebres, Banians, Greek Christians, Nestorians, Romans. ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... astir save the darkness slipping down by slow degrees—and perchance under its cloak, already stealthily afoot, the ghoulish robbers of the dead that haunt the track of battle. They were the human forerunners of the vulture breed, with even a keener scent for prey, for as yet the feathered carrion-seekers held aloof; two or three only were descried from the field hospital, perched on the boughs of a dead tree near the river, presently joined by another, its splendid sustained flight impeded somewhat by the rain, battling with its big, strong wings against the downpour of ...
— The Lost Guidon - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... necessary in the purlieus of St. Giles's, the Lowlights of Newcastle, and such like places, where human carrion can be picked up, to be permitted to go to India. However, to show you the knave has some grace, there are the notes of which you were robbed. You will find them the very same paper which you lost, except a small sum which the rogue had spent, but which a friend has made up, in compassion for ...
— The Surgeon's Daughter • Sir Walter Scott
... functionaries bore to three grave-pits in the prison-yard three lumps of lifeless clay, that a few short hours before had been three of God's noblest creatures. Like carrion, they were flung into those unconsecrated pits, and strewed with quicklime. For this was British law. The wolf and the tiger leave some vestiges of their victims; but a special ordinance of English law required even the corpses of those ...
— The Dock and the Scaffold • Unknown
... Princes and Tyrants, see who sits by the side of you in council, and count how many times a day this aim of human life is indicated to you by your councillors. Better would it be for you, like swallows, to fly low down than, like kites, to make lofty circles over carrion. ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... lay at the head of a steep gorge. Several low wickiups had been fashioned by binding the tops of bushes together and throwing skins or tattered blankets over the arched stems. Offal and carrion were strewn all about the place; it swarmed with flies. Nesting vultures would have built more carefully and been fully as fastidious. When the warrior reached the spot the rocks became alive with ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... hoarse, and yet turn aside before the badger was unearthed; she had seen him climb the scaurs, and hang dizzily in mid-air over the black water, to secure the wildfowl he had shot, and it was but carrion; and once, Joan and Madge, to whom he was wont to be indulgent in a condescending, superior way, trembled before the stamp of his foot and the kindling flash of his eye. Some affair abroad had disturbed him and he came into the hall, ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... an eagle from a carrion-crow?" returned the wiser man. "Would Winsnow, or The-Sword, or the Chief, or the powah, do ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... false to everything, and afterwards let your beads and your masses and your saints help you if they can. We'll talk it over when we meet again elsewhere. And now, my Lord Abbot, lead me to your gate, remembering that I follow with my sword. Jeffrey, set those carrion crow in front of you, and watch them well. My Lord Abbot, I ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... for peace; And so, about this tomb of mine. I fought 15 With tooth and nail to save my niche, ye know: —Old Gandolf cozened me, despite my care; Shrewd was that snatch from out the corner South He graced his carrion with, God curse the same! Yet still my niche is not so cramped but thence 20 One sees the pulpit o' the epistle-side, And somewhat of the choir, those silent seats, And up into the aery dome where live The angels, and a sunbeam's sure to lurk: And I shall fill my slab ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... a victim of bromidrosis; proximity to him was insufferable to his courtiers and mistresses, who said that his odor was like that of carrion. Tallemant says that when his wife, Marie de Medicis, approached the bridal night with him she perfumed her apartments and her person with the essences of the flowers of her country in order that she might be spared the disgusting odor ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... method of God's dealing, as the hearer of prayer, with the practice of a judge who is manifestly vile and venal. Nor is a word of explanation or apology interposed. He who thus simply brings sweet food from noisome carrion, has all power in heaven and in earth; His ways are not as our ways, nor his thoughts ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... fell and the ways were darkened. Slowly the eastern sky grew silver with the moon. A night-fowl's voice was heard from afar, it drew nearer; then through the shadow of the pyre the black wings fluttered into the light, and the carrion bird fixed its talons and its beak on the Wanderer's neck. Then he moved at length, tossed up an arm, and caught the bird of darkness by the neck, and broke it, and dashed it on the ground. His sick heart was mad with the little sudden ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang
... shade too methodically at times, the racking torments of hunger and thirst, the dreary importunity of the rain, the loathsomeness of the all-invading mud, the sickening horror of the carrion smells, the pathetically ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... my watch. Dark have been my forebodings, standing first on one foot and then on the other, through the night hours, preyed upon by visions, holding my eyelids open by my will, while strange thoughts like vultures over their carrion, wheeling about above me, assail me, tear me with their beaks and talons. Dark looms the cloud bank through the black portals of the river. The fog holds the bleared eyes of the morning. And I, stiff with watching, suspect some evil. Some ...
— The Treason and Death of Benedict Arnold - A Play for a Greek Theatre • John Jay Chapman
... heard of it—four men and eight men With the edges of Skrymir to aid me I have urged to their flight from the battle. Now the singer, the steward of Odin, Hath smitten at last even Bersi With the flame of the weapon that feedeth The flocks of the carrion crows." ...
— The Life and Death of Cormac the Skald • Unknown
... tricksters and sharpers, attended by the carrion flock of women who always hover after these wreckers and wastrels, came to Ascalon by scores. It began to appear a question, in time, of what they were to subsist upon, even though they turned to the ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... rejoined the stranger, "for charity's sweet sake, hand me forth a cup of cold water." The girl said she would go to the spring and fetch it. "Nay, give me the cup, and suffer me to help myself. Neither manacled nor lame, I should merit burial in the maw of carrion crows, if I laid this task upon thee." She gave him the cup, and he turned ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... fate of a place the abode of serpents, and of carrion, of toads and frogs, solely chosen to avoid expense. Such was the bad taste of the King in all things, and his proud haughty pleasure in forcing nature; which neither the most mighty war, nor ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... swim, it manages occasionally to get hold of oceanic birds; in fact, nothing alive which it can master seems to come amiss, and failing to make a meal from something it has caught and killed, the Arctic fox is glad, like foxes in more favoured lands, to feed on carrion. ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... Waterton also observed that the day after the planter had burnt the trash in a cane-field, the King Vulture might be seen feeding on the snakes, lizards, and frogs, which had suffered in the conflagration. Indeed the vulture is of real service in this respect, for he clears the carrion away from the hot countries he inhabits, which would otherwise putrify and infect the air. In some places, as at Paramaribo, the value of these birds, on this account, is so fully recognized, that they are protected by law, a fine being imposed on ...
— Mamma's Stories about Birds • Anonymous (AKA the author of "Chickseed without Chickweed")
... Guardsman stood above him, his features flushed and dark with rage, his eyes literally blazing with fury, his lips working under his tawny, leonine beard. At every syllable he could have thrown himself afresh upon the Jew and flung him out of his presence as so much carrion; yet the impotence that truth so often feels, caught and meshed in the coils of subtlety—the desperate disadvantage at which Right is so often placed, when met by the cunning science and sophistry of Wrong—held the ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... the toils. Silent you are still a man; give tongue and you are simple carrion. You must come to the knees of Burgundy. You shall be the ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... blood while there was still life in the animal, muttering the short Mussulman creed as he did so. For his religion enjoins this hygienic practice—borrowed by the Prophet from the Mosaic law—to guard against long-dead carrion being eaten. At the touch of the Colonel's hand Badshah sank to its knees; and Wargrave, very annoyed with himself for his slowness in detecting the deer, forced his way through the undergrowth to examine it. The stag was a fine beast fourteen hands high, ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... more upon the ground, panting like a fish; and I saw rising in his face the same dusky flush that had mantled on my father's. 'I feel ill,' he gasped, 'horribly ill; the swamp turns around me; the drone of these carrion flies confounds me. Have you ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... vast littered floor of wilted marine growths, some already rotting away, while others, more hardy, or with roots reaching into as yet undried ooze, retained a sort of freshness. Crab-like creatures scuttled in all directions, apparently feasting upon the plentiful carrion. The stench was terrible, almost overpowering at first, but after a few minutes we became accustomed to it, and, in the intensity of the work we ...
— The Terror from the Depths • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... if the sun breed maggots in a dead dog, being a god, kissing carrion,——Have you a daughter?] i.e., Hamlet having just remarked that honesty is very rare in the world, adds, that since there is so little virtue, since corruption abounds everywhere, and maggots are bred by the sun, which is a god, even in a dead dog, Polonius ought to take ...
— Hamlet • William Shakespeare
... they're bidden, everywhere Are carrion tossed about of all the vultures of the air. To-night their converse, ay, and all their secret charms are thine, But on the morn their leg and wrist fall to another's share; Like to an inn in which thou lodg'st, departing with the dawn, ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume III • Anonymous
... those multitudinous and admiring eyes, brave, ready for battle, his attitude a challenge. He sees his enemy: horsemen sitting motionless, with long spears in rest, upon blindfolded broken-down nags, lean and starved, fit only for sport and sacrifice, then the carrion-heap. ...
— A Horse's Tale • Mark Twain
... three o'clock in the morning to make the juice, go and fetch the water while the others were getting their grub. At last, he'd wormed himself in everywhere, he came to be one of the family, the rotter, the carrion. He did it so he wouldn't have to do it. He seemed to me like an individual that would have earned five quid honestly with the same work and bother that he puts into forging a one-pound note. But there, he'll get his skin out of it all right, he will. At the front he'd be lost ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... species of birds. The one is about the size of a pigeon, the plumage as white as milk. They feed along-shore, probably on shell-fish and carrion, for they have a very disagreeable smell. When we first saw these birds we thought they were the snow-peterel, but the moment they were in our possession the mistake was discovered; for they resemble them in nothing but size and colour. These are ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2 • James Cook
... shot all this lot used to go about saying he'd shoot me at one time; but I need 'ardly tell you he gave it up as a bad job, and went an' did what some folks call a worse instead. He didn't get much show 'ere, I can tell you; that little foreign snipe won't either, nor yet any other carrion that think they want my blood. I'd empty this shooter o' mine into their in'ards as soon as look at 'em, I don't give a curse who they are! Just as well I wasn't brought up ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... putrid fish thrown upon the beach during the storms. Pigs only could have relished their food. It consisted of large pieces of whale, already putrified, the odour of which impregnated the air for some distance. One of them tore the carrion in pieces with his teeth, and handed the bits to his companions, who devoured them with the ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... all come, like crows that smell carrion. How odious is the selfishness of this world! But here is Mr Gumarabic. How do you do, sir? ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... tremendous tide of traffic through that deep canon set his thoughts to whirling like drink-maddened bacchanals dancing round a punch-bowl. "That woman!" he exclaimed suddenly. "What asses they make of us men! And all these vultures—I'm not carrion yet. But THEY soon will be!" And he laughed and his thoughts began their crazy ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... flashed like a gem thrown from shrub to shrub: this oiseau mouche is found scattered throughout Midian; we saw it even about El-Muwaylah, but I had unfortunately twice forgotten dust-shot. The Egyptian Rakham (percnopter), yellow with black-tipped wings; a carrion-eater, now so rare, and the common brown kite, still so common near civilized Cairo, soared in the sky; while the larger vultures, perching upon the rock-ridges, suggested Bedawi sentinels. The ravens, here as elsewhere, are a plague: flights of them occupy favourite places, and ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... voiced the sentiment of all of us, "'twould take two weeks or more to bring Dunbar up, and what are we to do meantime? Sit here and eat this carrion?" and he looked disgustedly at the mess of unsavory beef on the table, which was, to tell the truth, most odoriferous. "'Tis rank folly to even ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... when he comes like a woman, With lovely, smiling eyes, Black dreams float over his golden head Like a swarm of carrion flies. ...
— Main Street and Other Poems • Alfred Joyce Kilmer
... very sure; Say, shall we wring this haughty soul a little? Tame this proud spirit, curb this untrain'd charger? We will not weigh too heavily, nor grind Too hard, but, having bow'd him to the earth, Leave the pursuit to others—carrion birds, Who stoop, but not until the falcon's gorg'd Upon the prey he ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 539 - 24 Mar 1832 • Various
... before her the bloody evidence of the deed—'and here is the tongue of Lagrange,—the tongue that would have proclaimed your shame and effected your ruin, had its owner lived; but he now lies a cold corpse, and this once mischievous member is now as powerless as a piece of carrion beneath a ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... sought to soften her, and said beseechingly, "Don't beat the boy quite to pieces, or he won't be able to look for the lost cow. We shall get more profit out of him if you don't quite kill him." "True enough," said the woman, "his carrion won't be worth as much as the good beef." Then she gave him a few more good whacks, and packed him off to look for the cow, saying, "If you come back without the cow, I'll beat you to death." The boy ran from ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... the San Diego Indian would not eat. Snakes, half roasted and even raw, were toothsome dainties. The horned toad and the lizard had favorite places at each repast. Human parasites were not refused, and mice, gophers, bats, caterpillars, worms, entrails, and even carrion, were consumed with a greed that did not stop at pounds. Hittel says that twenty-four pounds of meat in a day was not too much for a Californian Indian, and Baegart mentions the case of one native who ate seventeen watermelons at a sitting. ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... them; as if the prophet should say, O ye troublers of God's people! howsoever it appears to you in this your bloody rage, that God regards not your cruelty, nor considers what violence you do to his poor afflicted, yet shall you he visited, yea, your carcases shall fall and lie as stinking carrion upon the face of the earth, you shall fall without hope of life, or of a blessed resurrection; yea, howsoever you gather your substance, and augment your families, you shall be so scattered, that you shall leave ...
— The Pulpit Of The Reformation, Nos. 1, 2 and 3. • John Welch, Bishop Latimer and John Knox
... in a swampy-field of battle, With bones and skulls I made a rattle To frighten the wolf and carrion crow And the homeless dog—but they would not go; So off I flew—for how could I bear To see them gorge their ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... to the now highly excited rabble. "Shove the boats off, half a dozen of you!" I ordered. "Some of you others take up that carrion there and throw it into the sea. The gold upon it is for your pains. You there with the wounded shoulder you have no great hurt. I'll salve it with ten pieces of eight from the captain's own share, the ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... He has taken it!" voices cried. "That's not the Plague! The old carrion-crow is drunk; But stand away. What ails you, Nash my lad?" Then, through the clamour, as through a storm at sea, The master's voice, the voice of Ben, rang ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... The carrion festering we snuff, And gathering down upon the breeze, Release the valley from disease; If longing for more fresh a meal, Around the tender flock we wheel, A marksman doth some bush conceal. This very morn, I heard an ewe Bleat in the thicket; there I flew, With lazy wing slow circling round, Until ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... possessed about a dozen in three separate styes. These are fed only upon grain and the kitchen wash supplied from hotels; but she assured me that the disgusting story I had heard at Nice was true. There are certain pork-rearing establishments in the department at which carrion is purchased and boiled down for fattening pigs. My hostess seemed quite alive to the unwholesomeness of such a practice, and we had a long talk about pigs, of which I happen to know something; ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... make the entrance of the eels agreeable and their exit impossible. The "sporting" side of these traps is that a good deal of judgment is needed to set them in the right places in a river. Many people think that eels like carrion and favour mud. Mr. Bambridge says his experience is different, and his "advice to those about to fish" with this kind of eel-trap is suggestive of new ideas about eels. He says that "for bait nothing can beat about a dozen and a-half of small or ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish |
