"Spawn" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... you first saw them may be a vitrified slag, or a vapor diffused through the planetary spaces. Mysteries are common enough, at any rate, whatever the boys in Roxbury and Dorchester think of "brickbats" and the spawn of creatures that live ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... As when the great pencil dots Heaven with stars, doth scarce begin From its impulses within— Nature's stern necessity, To be schooled in cruelty,— Monster, waging ruthless war:— And with instincts better far Must I have less liberty? Fish are born, the spawn that breeds Where the oozy sea-weeds float, Scarce perceives itself a boat, Scaled and plated for its needs, When from wave to wave it speeds, Measuring all the mighty sea, Testing its profundity ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... all things, write—so that Sahibs may read, and his disgrace be accomplished—that Ram Dass, my brother, son of Purun Dass, Mahajun of Pali, is a swine and a night-thief, a taker of life, an eater of flesh, a jackal-spawn without beauty, or ...
— Soldiers Three • Rudyard Kipling
... His hope was agreeably verified; for by noon, on the 26th, the depth of water was gradually increased to seventeen fathom. On the 28th, our voyagers found the sea to be in many places covered with a brown scum, such as the sailors usually called spawn. When the lieutenant first saw it he was alarmed, fearing, that the ship was again among shoals; but the depth of water, upon sounding, was discovered to be equal to what it was in other places. The same appearance had been observed upon the coasts of Brazil and New Holland, in which ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis
... still the wild deer sip thy springs, The wild duck haunt thy coves, And all the year the fisher fleets Bask o'er thine oyster groves; The strange new bass thy trout pursue. And where the herring spawn, The blue sky opens to let ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... seen but once before, in the gloom of night, one of Wakayoo's big paws sent a great splash of water high in the air, and a fish landed on the pebbly shore. A little while before, the suckers had run up the creek in thousands to spawn, and the rapid lowering of the water had caught many of them in these prison pools. Wakayoo's fat, sleek body was evidence of the prosperity this circumstance had brought him. Although it was a little past the "prime" season ...
— Baree, Son of Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... there's no telling. I arose, I say, to a new heaven and a new earth: a heaven impossibly remote, an earth of sickly horror, an earth of serpents and worms, upon which I crawled and groped, the loathliest of their spawn. I surveyed myself in the glass, faced myself as I was—I the wrecker of homes, the betrayer of ladies, love's atheist! Pale, hollow-cheeked, with eyes distraught, there was good ground for believing that when Dr. Lanfranchi threw me upon my worthless ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... old river was rushing hoarsely along, clear and full, between his ruined temple-columns of basalt, as of old. "What a grand salmon-river this would be, Major!" said I; "what pools and stickles are here! Ah! if we only could get the salmon-spawn through the tropics without its germinating.—Can you tell me, Doctor, why these rocks should take the form of columns? Is there any particular reason for it ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... bearer—well, what I tell you seems even more mad, but it will be true if ever we get to the end of it—that story of the thrice accursed Teo the Greek—you recall it?—he did without doubt cross this river and saw the Pueblos,—this sorcerer is of his spawn—he and his medicine mother come back in good time with their Star God story, and the seeds—the identical seeds of the padre's story! See you not what it all leads to? He has the blood of the Greek in him:—in any Christian land he has enough of it to be broken on the wheel ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... novelties lately; but there Hope sits every day, speculating upon traditionary gudgeons. I think she has taken the fisheries. I now know the reason why our forefathers were denominated East and West Angles. Yet is there no lack of spawn; for I wash my hands in fishets that come through the pump every morning thick as motelings,—little things o o o like that, that perish untimely, and never taste the brook. You do not tell me of those romantic land bays that be as thou goest to Lover's Seat: neither of that little churchling ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... daily labour, In the dear offices of Peace or War; And should you doubt, pray ask of your next neighbour, When for a passport, or some other bar To freedom, he applied (a grief and a bore), If he found not this spawn of tax-born riches, Like lap-dogs, the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... produce not. For the perishing wedded ones, for perishing children it is; the dark-headed people create not. The wailing is for the great river; it brings the flood no more. The wailing is for the fields of men; the gunu grows no more. The wailing is for the fish-ponds; the dasuhur fish spawn not. The wailing is for the cane-brake; the fallen stalks grow not. The wailing is for the forests; the tamarisks grow not. The wailing is for the highlands; the masgam trees grow not. The wailing is for the garden ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... announced. "They come up at certain seasons of the year to spawn. There are only three places on the coast south of the Golden Gate where they run. For three or four nights now while the tide is high and the moon full they'll be swept up on this beach and left to lay their eggs in the wet sand. If you get closer you can see them ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... for the love of him who has laid all this upon me. Wait however until the end, and see whether his seven spirits whom he holds under his magical spell, can save him then; whether his Familiar, that spawn of ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... state, Pelet's worn out frame could not have stood against my sound one. I got him up-stairs, and, in process of time, to bed. During the operation he did not fail to utter comminations which, though broken, had a sense in them; while stigmatizing me as the treacherous spawn of a perfidious country, he, in the same breath, anathematized Zoraide Reuter; he termed her "femme sotte et vicieuse," who, in a fit of lewd caprice, had thrown herself away on an unprincipled adventurer; directing the point of the last appellation by a furious blow, obliquely ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... down the stream, now and then pausing at a likely place to take some trout for dinner, and with an eye out for a good camping-ground. Many of the trout were full of ripe spawn, and a few had spawned, the season with them being a little later than on the stream we had left, perhaps because the water was less cold. Neither had the creek here any such eventful and startling career. It led, indeed, quite a humdrum sort of life under the roots and fallen ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... into the form of a hook at the end. On the outer side was observed a fleshy streak, bordered by a close row of small paunches: these paunches, which were externally open, contained a great quantity of brown atoms, apparently spawn, and evidently in motion. With respect to the Rhizophysae, it has been discovered that they are of the same genus as the Physsophora, the hard part being torn away in the act of catching them; upon this occasion also, several of these separated parts, still in motion, and bearing some resemblance ...
— A New Voyage Round the World, in the years 1823, 24, 25, and 26, Vol. 2 • Otto von Kotzebue
... fish are best some time before they begin to spawn; and are unfit for food for some time after they ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... place to spawn Her fancies in his busy mind. His worth, like health or air, could find No just appraisal ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... situation,—when theft, bribery, and peculation, attended with fraud, prevarication, falsehood, misrepresentation, and forgery—when all these follow in one train,—when these vices, which gender and spawn in dirt, and are nursed in dunghills, come and pollute with their slime that throne which ought to be a seat of dignity and purity, the evil is much greater; it may operate daily and hourly; it is not only imitable, but improvable, and it will be imitated, and will be improved, from the highest ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... and mud,—fetid and crawling, unformed and monstrous. I grant exceptions; and even in the New School, as it is called, I can admire the real genius, the vital and creative power of Victor Hugo. But oh, that a nation which has known a Corneille should ever spawn forth a ——-! And with these rickety and drivelling abortions—all having followers and adulators—your Public can still bear to be told that they have improved wonderfully on the day when they gave laws and models to the literature of Europe; they can bear to hear ——- ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VI • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... other amphibians stand higher in the scale of life than fish; they have acquired legs in place of fins, and lungs instead of gills; they can hop about on shore with perfect freedom. Now, frogs still produce a great deal of spawn, as every one knows: but the eggs in each brood are numbered in their case by hundreds, or at most by a thousand or two, not by millions as with many fishes. The spawn hatches out as a rule in ponds, and we have all seen the little black tadpoles ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... when he bare office in his parish, for an honest man. The spawn of a decayed shopkeeper begets this fry; out of that dunghill is this serpent's egg hatched. It is a devil made sometime out of one of the twelve companies, and does but study the part and rehearse it on earth, to be perfect when he comes to act it in hell; that is ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... dollars, nor with a few millions, with savings and inheritances and prudent thrift. They must have tens of millions at their command. And these millions came through alliances, manipulations, deals, by all sorts of devices whereby money could be made to spawn miraculously.... ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... philosophy as Hasan himself; but this did not stand in his way, and his knowledge of their origin made him the less disposed to render homage to the sacred pretensions of the new imams, whom he contemptuously designated as the spawn of the quacks, charlatans, and the enemies of Islam. He tried to enlist the support of the Abbasside Caliph, but El-Muti replied that Fatimis and Karmatis were all one to him, and he would have nothing to do with either. The Buweyhid prince of Irak, however, supplied Hasan with arms and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... largest monetary returns. This fish migrates to the coast of Norway to spawn and in search of food. The best cod fisheries are in Romsdal, Nordland, and Tromsoe counties, the Lofoten islands in Tromsoe alone furnishing employment to more than four thousand men. The cod weighs from eight to twenty pounds and ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... treasure, them will I glut with my meat; But the others—the misfits, the failures—I trample under my feet. Dissolute, damned, and despairful, crippled and palsied and slain, Ye would send me the spawn of your gutters—Go! take back ...
— Songs of a Sourdough • Robert W. Service
... sorry for the beast; for to see any rampant thing so suddenly stricken with fear, when there was not the least danger nor any intent of harm, was pitiful to see. He wished to assure the buckskin that he was only a boy, a frail boy at that, and not what the animal had apparently taken him to be,—a spawn of Darkness and Terror. He followed up the trembling beast, trying to reassure him and to get near and pet him; but the creature fled wildly at every advance, and when not pursued stood with head aloft, ears cocked, and ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... pay. They will feed their horse on the standing crop, their men on the garnered grain, The thatch of the byres will serve their fires when all the cattle are slain. But if thou thinkest the price be fair,—thy brethren wait to sup. The hound is kin to the jackal-spawn, howl, dog, and call them up! And if thou thinkest the price be high, in steer and gear and stack, Give me my father's mare again, and I'll fight my own way back!" Kamal has gripped him by the hand and set him ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... of the river filled him with speechless delight. Sometimes he saw the waters break and gleam at the leap of a mighty salmon—the king fish of the North on his spring rush to the headwaters where he would spawn and die—and often the canoe sent flocks of waterfowl into flight. Ben dimly felt that on the tree-clad shores larger, more glorious living creatures were standing, hiding, watching the canoe glide past. ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... the abbot were walking on the banks of the great pond, where the water was alive, it alone wakeful in the slumber of the woods, for the moon, which shone in a cloudless sky, sowed a myriad of goldfish, and this luminous spawn, fallen from the planet, mounted, descended, sparkled in a thousand little points of fire, of which the wind as it blew ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... of the eggs of fish about which I read the preceding evening:—"As soon as the female finishes spawning the male will approach the eggs and eject a milky fluid over them to effect fertilization. If this is successful the spawn will have a clear, glassy appearance." The dream-self can turn anything to its use,—I read of certain suffrage activities in England and forthwith dream that I attend a suffrage meeting. But the house at which ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... wings once, in a letter. When they appear in the land, the Pashas and Mudirs and Kaimakams give orders to the people to go out and gather the eggs of the locusts as soon as they begin to settle down to bury themselves in the earth. The body of the female locust is like the spawn of a fish, filled with one mass of eggs. Each man is obliged to bring so many ounces of these eggs to the Pasha and have them weighed and then burned. A tailor of Beirut brought a bag of them, and as it was late, put them in his shop for the night and went home. He was unwell for a few days ...
— The Women of the Arabs • Henry Harris Jessup
... upon horror. And this was the twentieth century of which men boasted; this was civilisation! Built by men's hands, the result of centuries of work. Now look at them; those beautiful architectural monuments, destroyed, in a few months, by the vilest spawn that ever contaminated the earth. A breed that should and would be blotted out of existence as effectively as they had blotted out ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... thing the little rascal did was to write a withering leader denouncing Mr. Scandril as a "demagogue, the degradation of whose political opinions was only equaled by the disgustfulness of the family connections of which those opinions were the spawn!" ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... wretches, spewed up from perdition, whose joy it is to write letters with fictitious signatures. Sometimes they take the shape of a valentine, the fourteenth of February being a great outlet for this obscene spawn. If your nose be long, or your limbs slender, or your waist thick around, they will be pictorially presented. Sometimes they take the form of a delicate threat that if you do not thus or so there will be a funeral at your house, yourself the chief object of ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... spawn of toads is very small, as regards the size of the individual eggs, compared with the size of the full-grown animal. Nothing would be easier than for a piece of spawn or a tiny tadpole to be washed into some hole in a mine or cave, ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... young Earth" was only fit to spawn her frightful monster-brood; Now fiery hot, now icy frore, now reeking wet ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... The crop generally appears in September, when temperature is genial and fairly equable, with sufficient but not superabundant moisture. The artificial production of Mushrooms in the garden needs only reliable spawn, a sweet fertile bed, and some means of maintaining a steady temperature under varying atmospheric conditions. When the principles of Mushroom culture are thoroughly mastered, they may be successfully applied ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... whirlwinds and the blighting and destroying powers which primitive man associated with the desert. An exact parallel of this brood of devils is found in Egyptian mythology where the allies of Set and Aapep are called "Mesu betshet" i.e., "spawn of impotent revolt." They are depicted in the form of serpents, and some of them became the "Nine Worms of Amenti" that are mentioned in the Book of the Dead ...
— The Babylonian Legends of the Creation • British Museum
... branches of trees, and, "are not larger than the little English oysters, that is to say, about the size of a crown-piece. They stick to the branches that hang in the water of a tree called Paretuvier. No doubt the seed of the oysters, which is shed in the tree when they spawn, cleaves to those branches, so that the oysters form themselves there, and grow bigger in process of time, and by their weight bend down the branches into the sea, and then are refreshed twice a day by the flux and reflux ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... While statues, labyrinths, and alleys pent Within their bounds, at least were innocent!— Our modern taste—alas!—no limit knows; O'er hill, o'er dale, through wood and field it flows; Spreading o'er all its unprolific spawn, In ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Phil Blake, ye needn't be winkin' at me that way; it's little I care for the spawn of the ould serpent. [Here great cheers greeted the speaker, in which, without well knowing why, I heartily joined.] I'm going to give a toast, boys,—a real good toast, none of your sentimental ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... waiting impatiently for my work to be done, in order to try out the machine, and if satisfactory, spawn a brood of their own on the same model. I was equally impatient. I hoped to fly off with the biplane before they had ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... young fellows about fighting for their dear Dark Rosaleen, the country that holds men's hearts more than any prosperous mother-land of them all. His name is a name never mentioned in Ireland without a black, bitter curse, for he was a famous informer and spy, own brother to such evil spawn as Corydon, Massey, and Nagle. But 'tis too long a story to tell how the spy masqueraded as Black Shawn, and I think I'll ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... D'ye think as I can't turn ye all out of it neck and crop, if I've a mind? You and Edwin, and the lot of ye! And to-night too! Give me some money now, and quicker than that! I've got nought but sovereigns and notes. I'll go down and get the spawn myself—ay! and order the earth too! I'll make it my business to show my childer—But I mun have some change for my car fares." ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... This was recognized throughout the Northland. "Hell's Spawn" he was called by many men, but his master, Black Leclere, chose for him the shameful name "Batard." Now Black Leclere was also a devil, and the twain were well matched. There is a saying that when two devils ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... swam because the current was there weakest. The large eels were taken, and are still taken, on their downward journey in autumn. It is then that the Thames fills, and at the first big rush of water the eels begin to descend to reach the mud and sands at the Thames mouth, where they spawn. They always travel by night, and it is then that the heavy eel-bucks are lowered. Often hundredweights are taken in a night, all of good size, one of the largest of which there is any record being ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... were cut short by the water which closed over his head as he went down on his back beneath the leaves, spawn and slime. He came up like a cork, choking and sputtering, and started to wade to the shore as the water was only up to his arm-pits. But as he attempted to scramble out, he was pushed back and forced to stand in his wretched ...
— The Unknown Wrestler • H. A. (Hiram Alfred) Cody
... longer space, free this time finally for ever; and he married, and marriage set the seal on his security, and the heir was born, and the nebuly coat was safe. But now a new confuter had risen to balk him. Was he fighting with dragon's spawn? Were fresh enemies to spring up from the—The simile did not suit his mood, and he truncated it. Was this young architect, whose very food and wages in Cullerne were being paid for by the money that he, Lord Blandamer, saw fit to spend upon the church, indeed ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... rank among all porcelains, sometimes mocking the aspect and the sonority of bronze, sometimes blue as summer waters, and deluding the sight with mucid appearance of thickly floating spawn ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... aquarium may be readily obtained in almost any brook or pool, by means of the hand-net or dredge. It will be astonishing to see the variety of objects brought up by a successful haul. Small fish, newts, tadpoles, mollusks, water-beetles, worms, spiders, and spawn of all kinds will be visible to the naked eye; while the microscope will bring out thousands more of the most ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... write, an insect breeze Is but a mungrel prince of bees, That falls before a storm on cows, And stings the founders of his house; From whose corrupted flesh that breed 5 Of vermin did at first proceed. So e're the storm of war broke out, Religion spawn'd a various rout Of petulant Capricious sects, The maggots of corrupted texts, 10 That first run all religion down, And after ev'ry swarm its own. For as the Persian Magi once Upon their mothers got their sons, That were incapable t' enjoy 15 That empire any other way; ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... doctor to Gerard, "but to cauterize the vein when opened and the poisonous blood let free? 'Tis the only safe way. Avicenna indeed recommends a ligature of the vein; but how 'tis to be done he saith not, nor knew he himself I wot, nor any of the spawn of Ishmael. For me, I have no faith in such tricksy expedients; and take this with you for a safe principle: 'Whatever an Arab or Arabist says is right, must ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... Every foolish wench has feelings In these religious days, and thinks it carnal To wash her dishes, and obey her parents— No wonder they ape you, if you ape them— Go to! I hate this humble-minded pride, Self-willed submission—to your own pert fancies; This fog-bred mushroom-spawn of brain-sick wits, Who make their oddities their test for grace, And peer about to catch the general eye; Ah! I have watched you throw your playmates down To have the pleasure of kneeling for their pardon. ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... anchor had splashed into the spawn-skeined water off the Apollo Bunder a native boat drew alongside and a very well-dressed native climbed up the companion-ladder in quest of me. I had sent King a wireless, but his messenger was away in advance of even the bankers' ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy
... They fester and multiply like maggots. They meant nothing—nothing, my dear, nothing. No more than your work people mean here, whose crowning stupidity is their continuing to beget more stupid spawn for ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... the run the bay raced like a steeplechaser tight on the heels of the hounds, leadin' even the master, for Lory could no more hold him than his own glee at the grand way they were takin' gates and walls. But suddenly that bay divil's-spawn swerves from the course, dashes up and stops bang broadside against a barn; and there, with ears laid back tight to his head and muzzle half upturned, for four mortal hours the bay held Lory's off leg ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... weave a cell; Then curious hands this texture take, And for themselves fine garments make. Meantime a pair of awkward things Grow to his back instead of wings; He flutters when he thinks he flies, Then sheds about his spawn and dies. Just such an insect of the age Is he that scribbles for the stage; His birth he does from Phoebus raise, And feeds upon imagin'd bays; Throws all his wit and hours away In twisting up an ill spun Play: This gives him lodging ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... Captain Pharo, waxing more and more wroth; "ye sets some feller t' work there, 't never see salt water, t' make our laws for us; 'lows us to ketch all the spawn lobsters and puts injunctions onter the little ones: like takin' people when they gits to be sixteen or twenty year old, 'n' choppin' their heads off—yer race is goin' to multiply almighty fast, ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... this post the article in the Victorian Institute with respect to frogs' spawn. If you remember in your boyhood having ever tried to take a small portion out of the water, you will remember that it is most difficult. I believe all the birds in the world might alight every day on the spawn of batrachians, ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... thickets, I passed, dashing the branches from my path, and lacerating my skin at every step. Onward, through sluggish rivulets of water, through tough miry mud, through slimy pools, filled with horrid newts, and the spawn of the huge rana pipiens, whose hoarse loud croak at every step sounded ominous in my ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... it," his one overmastering thought was. "Thank heaven, I did it! I held my temper and my tongue, didn't kill that spawn of Hell, and saved the whole situation. I'm out of a job, true enough, and out of the plant; but after all, I'm free—and I ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... aping the elect he will cast round for a suitable coat-of-arms. The proper caper for him would be the caribou rampant with a whitefish flotsam. The whitefish (coregonus clupeiformis) is gregarious, reaching shallow water to spawn. Wherever you see Indian tepee-poles by the side of Northern waters you may guess that to be a good fishing spot. The poles are always hospitably left for the next comer, the Indian merely carrying with him the skin or canvas cover of his tepee. The location ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... greeting are as manna fallen from heaven," boomed a deep, resonant voice, surprising in its volume. "I take heart anew, young man, for surely thou art not the spawn of the scarlet woman, but, verily, one of the chosen people of ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... posterity, progeny, breed, issue, offspring, brood, litter, seed, farrow, spawn, spat; family, grandchildren, heirs; great-grandchild. child, son, daughter; butcha^; bantling, scion; acrospire^, plumule^, shoot, sprout, olive-branch, sprit^, branch; off-shoot, off- set; ramification; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... parallel this Cock, there be divers fishes that cast their spawn on flags or stones, and then leave it uncovered, and exposed to become a prey and be devoured by vermin or other fishes. But other fishes, as namely the Barbel, take such care for the preservation of their seed, that, unlike to the Cock, or the ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... black profound, Stairs, aqueducts, great pillars, gleamed around, And ruined capitals: then was seen a group Of granite elephants 'neath a dome to stoop, Shapeless, giant forms to view arise, Monsters around, the spawn of hideous ties! Then hanging gardens, with flowers and galleries: O'er vast fountains bending grew ebon-trees; Temples, where seated on their rich tiled thrones, Bull-headed idols shone in jasper stones; Vast halls, spanned by one block, where ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... chisel. That little drab we have noticed now and then, our way taking us often past the end of the court, there was nothing by which to distinguish her. She was not over-clean, could use coarse language on occasion—just the spawn of the streets: take care lest the cloak of our ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... execution which is unattainable without immense application and fastidiousness. If patience be genius,—"La patience cherche et le genie trouve,"—and if execution be its chariot, what possible fame can there be for the slipshod writers of to-day, who spawn columns and volumes at so much a minute, regardless of the good name of their mother tongue, devoid of ideas, which are the product only of brains that have been ploughed up and sown with fruitful seed? An author's severest ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... as the blood or milk of an animal after the taking in and digestion of the food. For we never see an egg formed immediately of mud, for it is produced in the bodies of animals alone; but a thousand living creatures rise from the mud. What need of many instances? None ever found the spawn or egg of an eel; yet if you empty a pit and take out all the mud, as soon as other water settles in it, eels likewise are presently produced. Now that must exist first which hath no need of any other thing that it may exist, and ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... nothing of which Nature has been more bountiful than poets. They swarm like the spawn of cod-fish, with a vicious fecundity, that invites and requires destruction. To publish verses is become a sort of evidence that a man wants sense; which is repelled not by writing good verses, but by writing excellent ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... idea, unless it be supplemented by some effective method of combating a grave disadvantage. My own may not commend itself to every one. Each spring I entrust some casual little boy with a pail; he brings it back full of frog-spawn and receives sixpence. I speculate sometimes with complacency how many thousand of healthy and industrious batrachians I have reared and turned out for the benefit of my neighbours. Enough perhaps, but certainly ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... is sliding towards the dawn, And upturned hills crouch at autumn's knees. A torn moon flees Through the hemlock trees, The hours have gnawed it to feed their spawn. ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... "the time would never be well till we had Queen Elizabeth's Protestants again in fashion." He was aware of all the evils arising out of a population beyond the means of subsistence, and dreaded an inundation of men, spreading like the spawn of cod. Hence he considered marriage, with a modern political economist, as very dangerous; bitterly censuring the clergy, whose children, he said, never thrived, and whose widows were left destitute. An apostolical life, according to Audley, required only books, meat, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... very soon that animal life does exist of so transparent a texture that to all intents and purposes it is invisible. The spawn of frogs, the larvae of certain fresh-water insects, many marine animals, are of so clear a tissue that they are seen with difficulty. In the tropics a particular inhabitant of smooth seas is as invisible ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... think that the dabchick likes insects and fish spawn better than fish, or at least more prudently dines upon them. "That fish are taken we have positive evidence from examples having been repeatedly picked up dead by the fishermen of the Thames, with a bull-head or miller's thumb in their throats, and by which ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... living people, spawn of Satan that ye are! what is the reason that ye cannot let me be at rest now that I am dead, and all is over with me? What have I done to you? What have I done to cause you to defame me in every thing, who have a hand in nothing, and to blame me for that of which ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... whether the shelter of Flint's roof had not been, after all, the discreet thing. Was not her headlong flight in company with Stillman more open to criticism than the frank acceptance of her employer's hospitality? But these vagrant questions were the spawn of a colorless spirit of social expediency which fastens itself on weak natures, and in Claire's case they died still-born. She had been too well schooled in loneliness to lean heavily on the crooked stick of public opinion. Accustomed to standing ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... the standing crop, their men on the garnered grain, The thatch of the byres will serve their fires when all the cattle are slain. But if thou thinkest the price be fair, and thy brethren wait to sup, The hound is kin to the jackal-spawn,—howl, dog, and call them up! And if thou thinkest the price be high, in steer and gear and stack, Give me my father's mare again, and I'll fight my own way back!' Kamal has gripped him by the hand and set him upon his feet. 'No talk shall be of dogs,' said he, 'when wolf and grey ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... to read no mean books. Shun the spawn of the press on the gossip of the hour. Do not read what you shall learn without asking, in the street and the train. Dr. Johnson said, "he always went into stately shops"; and good travellers stop at the best hotels; for, though they cost more, they do not cost much more, and there is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... Charley. "I often stand by our pond down there and watch them. The pond is in a damp part of the garden; just what frogs like. In the spring there's a lot of that spotted, jelly-looking stuff, which is the frogs' spawn, or ...
— Woodside - or, Look, Listen, and Learn. • Caroline Hadley
... turning to Simon de Montfort, "be it not time that England were rid of this devil's spawn and his hellish brood? Though I presume," he added, a sarcastic sneer upon his lip, "that it may prove embarrassing for My Lord Earl of Leicester to turn upon his companion ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... toys are here. I win, I always win. For I am the spawn of Mars, of War, and of Hate, the sister of War, and my toys are the things they leave behind." It gesticulated, waving the twisted stuff and now through the haze, they could see them—buildings. The framework of buildings ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... deal of haphazard in the production of offspring. Among fishes, for instance, the eggs and sperms are liberated into the sea, or the shallow bed of a river, and, if the sperms (the milt of the males) are placed near to the spot where the eggs (the spawn) have been laid, fertilisation occurs, for within a short distance the sperms are attracted—in a way that is imperfectly understood—to enter the eggs. By this method there is of necessity great waste in the production of ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... torches from the smelter chimneys, and the pumps in the oil wells kept up their dolorous whining and complaining, like great insects battening upon an abandoned world. In South Harvey the lights of the saloons and the side of the dragon's spawn glowed and beckoned men to death. Money tinkled over the bars, and whispered as it was crumpled in the claws of the dragon. For money the scurrying human ants hurried along the dark, half-lighted streets from the ant hills over the mines. For money the cranes of the pumps creaked their monody. For ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... crumpets, chips, hog's lard, the tender brown judiciously scalped from a fillet of veal (dexterously replaced by a salamander), the tops of asparagus, fugitive livers, runaway gizzards of fowls, the eyes of martyred pigs, tender effusions of laxative woodcocks, the red spawn of lobsters, leverets' ears, and such pretty filchings common to cooks; but these had been ordinary presents, the everyday courtesies of dishwashers to their sweethearts. Brawn was a noble thought. It is not every common gullet-fancier that can properly ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... Special around. A loose vortex—new. There might be a hundred of them, scattered over a radius of two hundred miles. Sisters of the one that had murdered his family—the hellish spawn of that accursed Number Eleven vortex that that damnably incompetent bungling ass had tried to blow up.... Into his mind there leaped a picture, wire-sharp, of Number Eleven as he had last seen it, and simultaneously an idea hit him like a ...
— The Vortex Blaster • Edward Elmer Smith
... which, when paid, honors the giver and the receiver, and then pleads his beggary as an excuse for his crimes. He melts with tenderness for those only who touch him by the remotest relation, and then, without one natural pang, casts away, as a sort of offal and excrement, the spawn of his disgustful amours, and sends his children to the hospital of foundlings. The bear loves, licks, and forms her young, but ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... tread thee in the dust, thou spawn of Hell! And O that I could trample with these feet The witch herself! Haha! I was to take thee Unto his father, unto Samarkand? I fancy That Samarkand ...
— Turandot, Princess of China - A Chinoiserie in Three Acts • Karl Gustav Vollmoeller
... navies burnt at seas; No noise of late spawn'd tittyries; No closet plot or open vent, That frights men with a Parliament: No new device or late-found trick, To read by th' stars the kingdom's sick; No gin to catch the State, or wring The free-born nostril of the ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick
... islands were observed, with a few trees growing on the very top—their outline having the appearance of a cock's comb. It was noticed that the water here was streaked for many miles with a brown scum supposed to be fish-spawn. At evening one of the Cumberland Islands, named Pure Island, provided an anchorage for the three ships; possibly the Lady Nelson alone had been in these waters previously, and it will be remembered, that it was hereabouts she had parted with the Investigator ...
— The Logbooks of the Lady Nelson - With The Journal Of Her First Commander Lieutenant James Grant, R.N • Ida Lee
... on the greater number of the Crioceris-larvae we find, adhering firmly to the skin, certain white specks, very small and of a china-white. Can these be the sowing of a bandit, the spawn of a Midge? ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... thus cooled; their worst enemies thus heated; and rank rebellion again breaking up, out of a soil where they had promised themselves nothing but the richest fruits of passive obedience: and all this by a little, ugly spawn of a Frenchman! It was too much! they could not stand it. Revenge they must and would have; that was certain: and since, with all their efforts, they could not get at Marion, the hated trunk and root of all, they were determined to burn and sweat his branches, ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... chattering cricket, Hear, you spawn of the sod, The strange strong cry in the darkness Of ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton
... this manner every word to its original, and not admitting, but with great caution, any of which no original can be found, we shall secure our language from being overrun with cant, from being crowded with low terms, the spawn of folly or affectation, which arise from no just principles of speech, and of which, therefore, no legitimate ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... find it stocked with a variety of fishes; but in what manner they breed, or whence they come, they cannot tell, and therefore leave that matter to philosophical inquirers to determine. Some think that the spawn of fishes is exhaled from the large lakes of fresh water in the continent, and being brought in thunder-clouds, falls with the drops of rain into these reservoirs of water. Others imagine that it must have remained every where among the sand since that time the sea left ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 2 • Alexander Hewatt
... depends, and the fate of empires. War, as a means of deciding our luck, is no more scientific than dicing for it. The first battle of the Marne holds a mystery which will intrigue historians, separate friends, cause hot debate, spawn learned treatises, help to fill the libraries, and assist in keeping not a few asylums occupied, for ages. If you would measure it as a cause for lunacy, read Belloc's convincing exposition of the battle, and compare that with le Goffic's story of the fighting of the ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... the reader is for the time being in abeyance in order that the thought of the writer may enter. Much reading impairs the power to think originally and consecutively. Few of the great creators of the world have had use for books, and if you aspire to be in their class you will avoid the "spawn of the press." The best plan is to read only great books, and having read for five minutes, think about what ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... believed, and in particular the two enigmatical lines in barbarous Latin, which an evil Norman monk, a bit of a sorcerer, named Tryphon has left on this subject. This Tryphon is buried at the Abbey of Saint-Georges de Bocherville, near Rouen, and toads spawn on his grave. ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... buttons massed together under the soft dirt, and when we came to an umbrella-shaped mound with little cracks on top, we would carefully lift the dirt with a stick and uncover big clusters of buttons of all sizes. We always broke the large buttons off with the greatest care and settled the spawn back in the loose dirt for a future harvest. We often found large mushrooms above ground, and these were delicious baked with cream sauce. They would be about the size of an ordinary saucer, but tender and full of rich flavor—and the buttons would vary in size from ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... joke or this impudence on your part, has gone far enough—listen to me. What did I or my family do, I ask my own conscience in the name of God—what sin did we commit—whom did we oppress—whom did we rob—whom did we persecute—that a scoundrel like you, the bastard spawn of an unprincipled profligate, remarkable only for drunkenness, debauchery, and blasphemy—what, I say, did I and my family do, that you, his son, who were, and are to this day, the low, mean, willing ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... Guise." Our intention therefore was to make the play a Parallel betwixt the Holy League, plotted by the house of Guise and its adherents, with the Covenant plotted by the rebels in the time of king Charles I. and those of the new Association, which was the spawn of the old Covenant. ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... all devils!" shouted De Fervlans, springing toward his horse. "The little monster has set the marsh-grass on fire, and it was I who taught the devil's spawn how to use touchwood! Give chase ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... fish is found in the lake, and nearly all were new to us. The mpasa, or sanjika, found by Dr. Kirk to be a kind of carp, was running up the rivers to spawn, like our salmon at home: the largest we saw was over two feet in length; it is a splendid fish, and the best we have ever eaten in Africa. They were ascending the rivers in August and September, and furnished active and profitable employment ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... mournful musing, and the end of all my meditation has been a useless protest against the Great Inevitable, . . a clamor of disdain hurled at the huge, blind, indifferent Force that poisons the deep sea of Space with an ever- productive spawn of wasted Life! Anon I have flouted my own despair, and have consoled myself with the old wise maxim that was found inscribed on the statue of a smiling god some centuries ago.. 'Enjoy your lives, ye passing tribes of men ... take pleasure in folly, for this ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... babe a while! Endure the stress a little, for ye will not serve him long. And thou," whirling upon Kenkenes, "dreamest thou I fear this bloody God of Israel, or all the gibbering, incense-sniffing, pedestal-cumbering gods of earth? I will show thee, thou ranting rabble spawn! See which of us hath the yellow-haired wanton when I return. For I go to wrest spoil and fighting men from Israel. Then, by all the demons of Amenti! then, I say! look to thy ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... was predicted about a quarter of a century ago in the pages of this Magazine; and many attempts were then made to suppress the nuisance at its fountainhead. Much good was accomplished: but our efforts at that time were only partially successful; for nothing is so tenacious of life as the spawn of frogs—nothing is so vivacious as corruption, until it has reached its last stage. The evidence before us shows that this stage has been now at length attained. Mr Coventry Patmore's volume has reached the ultimate terminus of poetical degradation; and our conclusion, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... his 'Society and Solitude,' says "In contemporaries, it is not so easy to distinguish between notoriety and fame. Be sure, then, to read no mean books. Shun the spawn of the press or the gossip of the hour.... The three practical rules I have to offer are these:—1. Never read a book that is not a year old; 2. Never read any but famed books; 3. Never read any but what you like." ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... "Spawn of the viper, how dare ye come hither to seek for shelter beneath my roof?" exclaimed the woman in a voice which made the young men start, so shrill and fierce did it sound, high above the roar of the thunder, the howling of the wind, and ...
— Won from the Waves • W.H.G. Kingston
... ears cropped in earlier days by order of the Star Chamber, but who had not, apparently, learned charity to others through his own sufferings, published a pamphlet that was spread abroad throughout England. It was called 'The Quakers unmasked, and clearly detected to be but the Spawn of Romish Frogs, Jesuits and Franciscan Friars, sent from Rome to seduce the intoxicated giddy-headed English Nation.' George Fox called the pamphlet in which he answered this charge by an almost equally ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... anything to further his personal ambitions, admitted that he had shown "fearless courage, inflexible honesty, and the highest ideals of private sacrifice to public duty." And they eagerly exaggerated him, to make his white contrast more vividly with the black of the "satanic spawn" in the legislature. His fame spread, carried far and wide by the sentimentality in that supposed struggle between heart and conscience, between love for the wife of his bosom and ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... will murder the little King and put King Mob on the throne. And they be those who have tortured roe. Look at me! This they have done to me." He tore the bandage off and showed his scarred head. "'Quick!" he cried. "I know where they hide, these spawn of hell. Who will follow me? To ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... quarrelsome dotard; the prey and the tool of his vigorous enemies and his intriguing relations. His hatred of Spain and Spaniards was unbounded. He raved at them as "heretics, schismatics, accursed of God, the spawn of Jews and Moors, the very dregs of the earth." To play upon such insane passions was not difficult, and a skilful artist stood ever ready to strike the chords thus vibrating with age and fury. The master spirit and principal ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... mild and considerate. Although there are game-laws in the Province, yet Micmac has a privilege no white man can possess. At all seasons he may hunt or fish; he may stick his aishkun in the salmon as it runneth up the rivers to spawn, and shoot the partridge on its nest, if he please, without fine and imprisonment. Some may think it better to preserve the game than to preserve the Indian; but some think otherwise. For my part, ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... loud, clear voice, "and touch not the innocent child. Spawn of Satan, would you do murder to appease the devils whom you worship? Well shall they repay you, people of Zimboe. Oh! mine eyes are open and I see," he went on, shaking his thin arms above his head in a prophetic frenzy. "I see the ...
— Elissa • H. Rider Haggard
... witch must have stolen my brother's child from the cradle and put that spawn of a starved devil in its place," Dominic would say to me. "Look at him! ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... broodin' mists Where spawn the mother stars, I 'ammered wiv me bloody fists Upon them golden bars; I 'ammered till a devil's doubt Fair froze me wiv affright: To fink wot God would say about The ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... to bloom indoors in winter, and pot all young stocks raised in the greenhouse. Sow early red cabbages, cauliflowers for spring and summer use, cos and cabbage lettuce for winter crop. Plant out winter crops. Dry herbs and mushroom spawn. Plant out strawberry roots, and net currant trees, to preserve the fruit ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... small pieces; then take the small claws and the spawn, put them in a suitable dish, and jam them to a paste with a potato masher. Now add to them a ladleful of gravy or broth, with a few bread crumbs; set it over the fire and boil; strain it through a strainer, or sieve, to the thickness of a cream, and put half of it to your lobsters, ...
— The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887) - The Whole Comprising A Comprehensive Cyclopedia Of Information For - The Home • Mrs. F.L. Gillette
... of squid spawn, the peculiar mollusca upon which the sperm whale feeds, made it ominous, according to the opinion of Captain Locke, that a great new sperm whale fishery had been discovered, the spawn being seen during several days' sail before and after observing the ...
— Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party • Martin Robinson Delany
... was a favourite at the court of Nero. Tacitus calls him the spawn of a cook's-shop and a tippling-house; sutrinae et tabernae alumnus. He recommended himself to the favour of the prince by his scurrility and vulgar humour. Being, by those arts, raised above himself, he became the declared enemy of all good men, and acted a distinguished part among ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... In the early spring, when he is thin and half starved, capelin and smelt in great numbers come to spawn along the north and south shores of the St. Lawrence. With high tide comes the beluga's chance to feed on the spawning fish and he will rush in quite near to shore for his favourite food. So voracious is he that with the fish he takes quantities of sand into his stomach. In eight or ten days ...
— A Canadian Manor and Its Seigneurs - The Story of a Hundred Years, 1761-1861 • George M. Wrong
... leanest. The disadvantage is that products, in the eagerness of competition for a market, are accepted which are of a character to harm and not help the development of the contemporary mind in moral and intellectual strength. The public expresses its fear of this in the phrase it has invented—"the spawn of the press." The author who writes simply to supply this press, and in constant view of a market, is certain to deteriorate in his quality, nay more, as a beginner he is satisfied if he can produce something that will sell without regard to ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... accepted another gold coin; and with a queer sidelong smile, the incentive for which I had not the slightest idea, he vanished. I fronted my host, this Jacob Spawn. Strange fate that should have led me to Spawn! ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... then applied to the Salmon for the age of the Owl. The Salmon answered, "I am as many years old as there are scales upon my skin, and particles of spawn within my belly; yet never saw I the Owl you mention but the same in appearance. But there is one older than I am, and that ...
— Welsh Fairy-Tales And Other Stories • Edited by P. H. Emerson
... all the swarm of orphan children down in the by-streets and outskirt alleys of the capital—children of whom no one has any account, and no one takes any account, who swarm down there only one floor higher, so to speak, than the spawn and small fry which are floating below in the sea among the quay piles, and which will one day become large male ...
— One of Life's Slaves • Jonas Lauritz Idemil Lie
... through the high mountains, and rushes down for nearly a hundred miles of its course an impetuous, roaring mountain stream, abounding in trout at all seasons, and in June, July, and August filled with salmon which have come up here through the Golden Gates from the ocean to spawn. The stage-road follows almost to its source the devious course of the river, and you ride along sometimes nearly on a level with the stream, and again on a road-bed cut out of the steep mountain side a thousand ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... the sea has sometimes had the appearance of being illuminated, and that the light is supposed to proceed from the spawn of ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... be regularly and gradually trained to it, or they will not thrive. Cows should always be kept clean, laid dry, and have plenty of good water to drink. They should never be suffered to drink at stagnant pools, or where there are frogs, spawn, or filth of any kind; or from common sewers or ponds that receive the drainings of stables, or such kind of places; all which are exceedingly improper. One of the most effectual means of rendering their milk sweet and wholesome, ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... separated the rivers containing different kinds of fish. In these ponds we caught only some very small fry, and the question could not be satisfactorily determined, although the natives declared that none of them were the spawn ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... simple and noble. An enemy sat at his gate. That enemy, whose enduring malice had at last begotten equal hostility in the childless baronet, was now married, and would probably have heirs; and, if so, that hateful brood—the spawn of an anonymous letter-writer—would surely inherit Bassett and Huntercombe, succeeding to Sir Charles Bassett, deceased without issue. This chafed the childless man, and gradually undermined a temper habitually sweet, though ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... Frogs and Toads generally go in the spring to lay their eggs in streams and ponds. A Batrachian of Brazil and the hot regions of South America, the Cystignathus ocellatus, no doubt fearing too many dangers for the spawn if deposited in the open water, employs the artifice of hollowing, not far from the bank, a hole the bottom of which is filled by infiltration. It there places its eggs, and the little ones on their birth can lead an aquatic ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... Gravelly, Gentle Streams, and smaller Rivers; not so much abounding in Brooks. He bites best in Spring, till they spawn, and a little after till ...
— The School of Recreation (1696 edition) • Robert Howlett
... the head of the mother, who, on the approach of danger, opens her mouth, and thus saves her progeny; with the loricaria calicthys, or assa, which constructs a nest on the surface of pools from the blades of grass floating about, and in this deposits its spawn which is hatched by the sun. In the dry season this remarkable fish has been dug out of the ground, for it burrows in the rains owing to the strength and power of the spine; in the gill-fin and body it is covered ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 578 - Vol. XX, No. 578. Saturday, December 1, 1832 • Various
... your Honour's servants permit? The jackal spawn is even now in the hands of the police. May his ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... guess; an' 'Dyke Hole' Bill, he'd got a pretty tidy filly wi' him hisself, an' didn't reckon as no daisy from a bum saloon could gi' her any sort o' start. Wal, to cut it short, I guess the boys went dead out fer Bill's gal. It wus voted as ther' wa'n't no gal around Spawn City as could dec'rate the country wi' sech beauty. I guess things went kind o' silent when Shaggy Steele read the ballot. The air o' that place got uneasy. I located the door in one gulp. Y' see Brown was allus kind ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... adds that he has never yet met any one with courage enough to attempt the walk. You do, in fact, come suddenly on salt-water channels in the midst of fields at long distances from the sea, and find cockles on stretches of mud where you might expect frog spawn or black slugs. Therefore, it is quite likely that the high-tide line would really, if it were stretched out straight, reach right across Ireland and far put ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... locusts, the spawn of those conjured up by Moses, and the ship was covered with them. At length, though, it surged on a lifeless blue sea, where they saw no things around them, except from time to time the flying fish skimming along ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... careful of its callow and helpless young that it carries about the unhatched eggs with him under his own tail, in what scientific ichthyologists pleasantly describe as a subcaudal pouch or cutaneous receptacle. There they hatch out in perfect security, free from the dangers that beset the spawn and fry of so many other less tender-hearted kinds; and as soon as the little pipe-fish are big enough to look after themselves the sac divides spontaneously down the middle, and allows them to escape, to shift for themselves in the broad Atlantic. Even so, however, the juniors take care ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... of pregnancy. In the linguistic material at hand we see how this very natural attempt to explain generation finds expression in the words for 'father', 'testicle,' and 'egg.' In Guarani tub means 'father, spawn, eggs,' tupia 'eggs,' and even tup-i, the name of the people (the -i is diminutive) really signifies 'little father,' or 'eggs,' or 'children,' as you please; the 'father' is 'egg,' and the 'child' is 'the little father.' Even ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... then pass upwards through fish with the soft and hard roe, or male and female elements which are familiar to children, and through frogs with their spawn to birds. Here comes in an upward step indeed. "A world that only cared for eggs becomes," as Professor Drummond observes in his Ascent of Man, "a world that cares for its young." The first faint trembling dawn, or at least shadowing forth, of a moral life, in the ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... animated. "Do you know how I picture God myself?" he said. "As an enormous, creative organ beyond our ken, who scatters millions of worlds into space, just as one single fish would deposit its spawn in the sea. He creates because it is His function as God to do so, but He does not know what He is doing and is stupidly prolific in His work and is ignorant of the combinations of all kinds which are produced by His scattered germs. The human mind is a lucky little local, passing accident ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant |
