"Spider" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... out in Grassdale that he is going for a few days with Mr. Peters and Mr. Tucker to look over some iron ore property in West Virginia. He wires J. Smith that he will set foot in the spider web on a given date; and the three of ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... multitude of cells, the so-called lasso-cells, each one of which conceals a coiled-up thread. These organs serve to seize the prey, shooting out their long threads, thus entangling the victim in a net more delicate than the finest spider's web, and then carrying it to the mouth by the aid of the lower part of the tentacle. The complication of structure in these animals, a whole community of which, numbering from twenty to thirty individuals, is not more than ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... Talbrun, she became herself—that is to say, a born coquette— venturing from one thing to another, like a child playing fearlessly with a bulldog, who is gentle only with him, or a fly buzzing round a spider's web, while the ...
— Jacqueline, v3 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... lady,' says he. 'And it's there he threw her down into the deep, cowld, dark lake,' says he. 'Would you like to go up and lie down in his bed?' says he. 'Is it me,' says I, 'to do it? Why my brain is like a spider's web wid lookin' at it,' says I. But a young man that was used to crawling in them unchristian places—them mines—went up; and I thought I could jump through a key-hole, I felt so, to see him do it; and says I, when he came down, 'Young man, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... tenderest relations are often the most delicate and subtle, and "trifles light as air" may scatter and utterly destroy the sensitive gossamer threads extending between one heart and another, as easily as a child's passing foot destroys the spider's web woven on the dewy grass in the ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... into my parlor?' said the spider to the fly, ''Tis the prettiest little parlor that ever you did spy! The way into my parlor is up a winding stair, And I have many curious things to show you when ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... they go on only caballing and toasting, only fill us with disgust; if they get above their natural size, and increase the quantity, whilst they keep the quality, of their venom, they become objects of the greatest terror. A spider in his natural size is only a spider, ugly and loathsome; and his flimsy net is only fit for catching flies. But, good God! suppose a spider as large as an ox, and that he spread cables about us, all the wilds of Africa would not produce anything ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... her nest," he said, "almost above our seat. Look, Lucy, it is made out of willow down and spider webs, bound round and round the twig. Don't you want to see the eggs? Look!" He bent the limb until the dainty white treasures, half buried in the fluffy down, were revealed—but still she ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... bent without a blush to do its service. What, then, in these circumstances could the friends of freedom hope to achieve? The nation had been caught in the snare of slavery, and was in Church and State helpless in the vast spider-like web of wrong. The more the reformer pondered the problem, the more hopeless did success look under a Constitution which united right and wrong, freedom and slavery. As his reflections deepened, the conviction forced its way into his mind that ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... that entangles all mens honesties, And lives like a Spider in a Cobweb lurking, And catching at all Flies, that pass his pit-falls? Puts powder to all States, to make 'em caper? Would he ...
— The Spanish Curate - A Comedy • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... yucca, or Spanish bayonet, a few thin leaves, and, on reaching the point where an animal which he wishes to capture has rested, or whence it has newly taken flight, he deposits, together with sacrifices hereinafter to be mentioned, a spider knot (ho-tsa-na mu kwi-ton-ne), made of four strands of these yucca leaves. This knot must be tied like the ordinary cat-knot, but invariably from right to left, so that the ends of the four strands shall spread out from the center as the legs of a spider ...
— Zuni Fetiches • Frank Hamilton Cushing
... account of his troubles with space-sick voyagers. But I was in no mood to listen. My gaze was down on the spider incline, up which, over the bend of the ship's sleek, silvery body, the passengers and their friends were coming in little groups. The upper deck was already ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... calculate the soul-havoc of a Rousseau, going on with a very enthusiasm of iniquity, with fiery imagination seizing upon all the impulsive natures of his day? or David Hume, who employed his life as a spider employs its summer, in spinning out silken webs to trap the unwary? or Voltaire, the most learned man of his day, marshaling a great host of skeptics, and leading them out in the dark land of infidelity? or Gibbon, who showed an uncontrollable grudge against religion in his history of one ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... hearing him lie down, I resolved to open a little—a very, very little crevice in the lantern. So I opened it—you cannot imagine how stealthily, stealthily—until, at length a simple dim ray, like the thread of the spider, shot from out the crevice and fell full upon the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... in men and women, love, And, sick with vanity thereof, I, saying loud, 'I love her,' told My secret to myself, behold A crisis in my mystery! For, suddenly, I seem'd to be Whirl'd round, and bound with showers of threads, As when the furious spider sheds Captivity upon the fly To still his buzzing till he die; Only, with me, the bonds that flew, Enfolding, thrill'd me through and through With bliss beyond aught heaven can have, And pride to dream myself ...
— The Victories of Love - and Other Poems • Coventry Patmore
... is precisely the characteristic note of our modern art that all of it that is good for anything is home-made or self-made. Each artist has had to create his art as best he could out of his own temperament and his own experience—has sat in his corner like a spider, spinning his web from his own bowels. If the art so created was essentially fine and noble the public has at last found it out, but only after years of neglect have embittered the existence and partially crippled the powers of its creator. ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... district school, he escaped into another world. Two lights were now generally seen burning of a night in the Shackford house: one on the ground-floor where Mr. Shackford sat mouthing his contracts and mortgages, and weaving his webs like a great, lean, gray spider; and the other in the north gable, where Dick hung over a tattered copy of Robinson Crusoe by the flicker of the candle-ends which he had captured during ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... neighborhood relations describe a wider circle; his business career describes one larger still; then come his relations to the community in general, while beyond the horizon is a circle of influence that includes the world at large. When the tiny spider standing at the center of its wide-stretching and intricate web, woven for destruction, chances to touch any thread of the web, immediately that thread vibrates to the uttermost extremity. And man stands at the center of a vast web of wide-reaching influence, woven not for ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... entirely, solely: never of style, never of self, never of critics, cracked or sound. Like the miles of an open country, and of an ignorant population, when they are correctly measured they become smaller. In the loftiest rooms and richest entablatures are suspended the most spider-webs; and the quarry out of which palaces are erected is the ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... the brink, Chill'd by watery fears, how that beauty might sink With my life in her arms to her garden, and bind me With its long tangled grasses, or cruelly wind me In some eddy to hum out my life in her ear, Like a spider-caught bee,—and in aid of that fear Came the tardy remembrance—Oh falsest of men! Why was not that beauty remember'd till then? My love, my safe love, whose glad life would have run Into mine—like a drop—that our fate might ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... Utrecht) Gibraltar passed to England; Spain ceded the Netherlands and all her possessions in Italy to the German empire. And so the fine threads diplomacy had been spinning over the Continent for two centuries were ruthlessly brushed away as a spider's web. ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... come to her face an expression as of a great fear. This man who knew so little, was teaching of that little to her, who knew so much.... At length she swept that fear from her, as one might brush aside the ugly web of a sullen spider.... Again she was the woman who did not know the Known, ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... finds alike his labour and his toils in vain to secure this rampaging rogue; and, indeed, when the turbulent blue-bottle chances, in his bouncing random flight, to get entangled in the glutinous meshes, he shakes and roars, and blusters so loudly, until he breaks away, that the spider affrighted, invariably takes advantage of his long legs to scamper off to his sanctum in the cracked wainscot—like some imbecile watchman, who fearing to encounter a tall inebriated bruiser, sneaks away with admirable ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 269, August 18, 1827 • Various
... this, and indeed everywhere, a man is judged by his friends. Krauss tries to keep in with Rangoon society and poses as a brusque, eccentric sort of a fellow, with a rude manner and a good heart. The days of his grand dinner-parties came to an end some time ago. Now the fat grey spider at 'Heidelberg' has to rely more or less on his wife's pretty niece; she is bright and popular and attracts a lot of useful people into his web. To see that girl pouring out tea, or sitting at the piano, ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... of the piston itself, or the "spider," with its follower and its rings removed, which are shown in Fig. 2. Fig. 3 is a cross section of another form of the piston, to be presently described, but which will serve to explain that shown in Figs. 1 and 2. Next to the core of the spider are two narrow internal ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various
... desk, like a big spider for who time has no meaning. Before him lay two newspapers, folded so as to expose paragraphs heavily indicated by blue pencil-marks. They were not financial journals, and for that reason it was improbable that ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... and some are very large and fierce. Out in the country I once fairly ran away from a great spider, which made for my foot with a courage and ferocity such as one would not expect to find in an animal of the kind. But they are not altogether unwelcome in a house, because they help to keep down the population of the insect world. There is a handsome little spider who spins no ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... Arachne with the tip of the spear which she sometimes carried; and the maiden was changed at once into a nimble spider, which ran into a shady place in the grass and began merrily to spin ...
— Old Greek Stories • James Baldwin
... localities, but was propagated by the sight of the sufferers, and for over two centuries excited the astonishment of contemporaries. The Netherlands and France were equally affected; in Italy the disease became known as tarantism, it being supposed to proceed from the bite of the tarantula, a venomous spider. Like the St. Vitus' dance in Germany, tarantism spread by sympathy, increasing in severity as it took a wider range; the chief cure was music, which seemed to furnish magical means for exorcising the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... elates me, thus reposed and safe, To void the stuffing of my travel-scrip And share with thee whatever Jewry yields. A viscid choler is observable In tertians, I was nearly bold to say; And falling-sickness hath a happier cure Than our school wots of: there's a spider here Weaves no web, watches on the ledge of tombs, Sprinkled with mottles on an ash-gray back; Take five and drop them,.. but who knows his mind, The Syrian runagate I trust this to? His service payeth me a sublimate Blown up his nose to help the ailing eye. ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... the Father of his People, the Restorer of would be forgotten, or would be remembered only as implicated in the confusion that had ceased; and in a short time there would be parties, factions, divisions, and the beginnings of a new spider-web of Court-government and Absolutism. "Have you not found him at this play all along? And do not all men acknowledge him most exquisite at it?" So the Remonstrance proceeds, page after page, in long, complex, wave-like ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... monster sea-spider, about forty inches high, was watching me with squinting eyes, ready to spring on me. Though my diver's dress was thick enough to defend me from the bite of this animal, I could not help shuddering with horror. Conseil and the sailor of the Nautilus awoke at this moment. Captain Nemo pointed ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... The closet, in short, is but a wee corner of my kingdom, where to-day and to-morrow are the same—past and present one. A maid-of-honor wishes to go to town. I'll send her in the closet. My slave, the geometrical spider, must spin her a warm cobweb—and when you open the closet, be sure and ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... yarn, a piece of frieze, a pig, a cow, or a heifer. In fact, nothing that possessed value came wrong to him, so that it is impossible to describe adequately the web of mischief which this blood-sucking old spider contrived to spread around him, especially for those whom he knew to be too poor to avail themselves of ...
— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton
... mean something, must symbolize something. But what does it mean? what does it symbolize? Continually we seem just on the point of penetrating the secret; we almost touch the explanation, but are baffled. A dog, a cat, a snake, a crocodile, a spider,—what does each mean? why were they made? why this infinite variety of form, color, faculty, character? Animals thus in their unconscious being, as expressions of God's thoughts, ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... and the old tub was wheezing away as if she had the asthma. The 44 was old; she was homely; she was rickety; but Bartholomew Mullen wiped her battered nose as deferentially as if she had been a spick-span, spider-driver, tail-truck mail-racer. She wasn't much—the 44. But in those days Bartholomew wasn't much: and the 44 ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... the most part, nearly flat. It is much rent by fissures, which during the night are seen to glow with a ruddy glare, emanating from the hot materials beneath, and giving to the floor the appearance of being overspread with a fiery tissue, like a spider's web. From the bottom there usually rise one or two small craters of eruption, whence continually issue sulphurous fumes, and which, at pretty regular intervals, discharge showers of ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... upholsterer bee was not the only one who worked in the rose-bushes. There was also a spider, a quite unparalleled spider. It was bigger than any spider I have ever seen; it was bright orange with a clearly marked cross on its back, and it had eight long, red-and-white striped legs, all equally well marked. You ought to have seen it spin! Every thread was drawn out with the greatest ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... aromatic odor, such as is sometimes wafted over the footlights into the audience, gave the deserted place a theatrical flavor which was heightened by the presence of gilded papier-mache statuettes and a huge representation of the god Buddha leaning against the bare brick wall. A spider had spun a web above one of this god's bare shoulders; it glinted in a chance ray of direct sunlight which had entered through a tear in the curtain overhead. Above me a staging held a kitchen chair, some fire pails, and several pots whose sides were ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... at last to find what had happened to Islay, for whose death she blamed me, and back she went without a word to me, like a hot spider to spin a stronger web. This time she appealed to Tuscaloosa. They were of one mind in many things, and between them they kept all ...
— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al
... clatter showed signs of abatement he stole away to where his horse was tied, his sorrel coat gleaming with frost sparkles in the moonlight. "It's you and me to hit the trail, Spider," he croaked to the horse, and with his bare hand scraped the frost ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... had a quieter time at the dressing station than yesterday's two. The latter returned about 8 and said "Arthur" was too busy playing with a spider and he left ...
— The Incomparable 29th and the "River Clyde" • George Davidson
... her eyes moved in her wrinkled, brown face, and reflected the candle standing on the mantelpiece above his head. She sat with her hands crooked over one another in her lap, like some image wrought of ebony and dark oak. Once a large house-spider suddenly and silently appeared upon the sheet that covered the breast of the dead. It flashed along for a foot or two, then sat motionless; and she, whose inclination was to loathe such things unutterably, put forth her hand and caught it without ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... they hang from branches in true monkey fashion; they lead an arboreal omnivorous existence; they feed off fruits, birds' eggs, insects, and roots; and altogether they are just active, cunning, intelligent, tree-haunting marsupial spider-monkeys. ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... Boyle's philosophy could not make him endure the sight of a spider, although he had no such aversion to toads, venomous snakes, etc. Pare mentions a man who fainted at the sight of an eel, and another who had convulsions at the sight of a carp. There is a record of a young lady in France who fainted on ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... to make it seem like a real expedition,—'cross country and back again. Jerry led us through the scratchy, overgrown part of Wecanicut, and we pretended that it was a long, weary trek through the most poisonous jungles to the coast of Peru; and when Greg walked right into a spider's web with a huge yellow spider gloating in the middle of it, he said he'd been bitten by a tarantula. We told him that we should have to leave him there to die, for we must press on to the sea, but he cured himself ...
— Us and the Bottleman • Edith Ballinger Price
... eel-like living creatures, had fastened themselves to the bottom, and stretched out arms, fathoms long, for prey. A big turbot was making himself broad in front, quietly enough, but not without casting some suspicious glances aside. A crab clambered over him, looking like a gigantic spider, while the shrimps wandered about in restless haste, like the butterflies and ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... with his claws, until he punished himself severely. The Gnat thus prevailed over the Lion, and, buzzing about in a song of triumph, flew away. But shortly afterwards he became entangled in the meshes of a cobweb and was eaten by a spider. He greatly lamented his fate, saying, "Woe is me! that I, who can wage war successfully with the hugest beasts, should perish myself from this spider, the most ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... days;—the currant-bushes had but just leafed out; so George Tucker, going by, saw her; and she, who had seen him coming before she began to weed, accidentally of course, looked up and gave him a very bright smile. That was the first spider-thread, and the fly stepped into it with such ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... training-grounds and watch the thoroughbreds at exercise; perhaps he is influenced by some enthusiast who bids him risk all he has on certain private information. The fly enters the den and asks the spider, "What price Flora?"—that means, "What odds are you prepared to lay against the mare named Flora?" The spider answers—say seven to one; the fly hands one pound to the spider, and the bet is made. The peculiarity of this transaction ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... that order which pervades the universe; would make you realize something of the music of the spheres. For on that familiar checkerboard of the days are numerical arrangements which are mysterious, "magical"; each separate number is as a spider at the center of an amazing mathematical web. That is to say, every number is discovered to be half of the sum of the pairs of numbers which surround it, vertically, horizontally, and diagonally: all of the pairs add to the same sum, and the ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... a mouthful of smoke over a spider which was just about to kill a fly. This caused the spider to fall into the river, from where a ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... could get up lace so cheap that the people of the town frequently cover their gooseberry bushes with it to keep off the insects. Spider-webbing is a scarcely more gossamer-like fabric. Sixteen square yards of this lace only weigh about an ounce! If the negroes on one of the South Carolina Sea-island plantations could have been shut into that dressing-room for two whole minutes, with the mercury at 120 degrees, they ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... flower to flower; The queen tried to catch it for many an hour; Till at last, oh, direful tale to tell, Into a spider's web our hero fell! The spider ran to seize his prey; Tom, with his sword, fought valiantly; Till, alas! the spider's poisonous breath Was the cause of our gallant hero's death. In a bower of roses his tomb they rear'd, And ...
— An Entertaining History of Tom Thumb - William Raine's Edition • Unknown
... were torn and clutched and held and stung. The way was a flat, sandy pass between low mountain ranges. There were open spots and aisles and squares of sand; and hedging rows of prickly pear and the huge spider-legged ocatillo and hummocky masses of clustered bisnagi. The day grew dry and hot. A fragrant wind blew through the pass. Cactus flowers bloomed, red and yellow and magenta. The sweet, pale Ajo lily gleamed ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... said the spider to the fly, "zat I can get for you permission if you will come to ze ...
— The Log of a Noncombatant • Horace Green
... Lady Mary, first seeing humming-birds when I was about your age, while walking in the garden. It was a bright September morning, and the rail-fences and every dry twig of the brushwood were filled with the webs of the field-spider. Some, like thick white muslin, lay upon the grass; while others were suspended from trees like forest lace-work, on the threads of which the dewdrops hung like strings of shining pearls; and hovering round the flowers were several ruby-throated humming-birds, the whirring of whose wings ...
— Lady Mary and her Nurse • Catharine Parr Traill
... fire-fly lighting up a maze Of cobwebs with its dying blaze; Held by a grim black spider fast— Flashing with glory to ...
— Daisy Dare, and Baby Power - Poems • Rosa Vertner Jeffrey
... its ever-widening influence. He became obsessed by this idea; he schemed and he contrived; he used to the utmost the powers of his Oriental mind. From his vantage-point above the cloister he heard the monks droning at their Latin; his somber glances followed them at their daily tasks. Like a spider he spun his web, and when one victim broke through it he craftily repaired its fabric, ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... content: nothing would come of the operation. Loverless and inexpectant of love, I was as safe from spies in my heart-poverty, as the beggar from thieves in his destitution of purse. I turned, then, and fled; descending the stairs with progress as swift and soundless as that of the spider, which at the same ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... news is printed, Gray faces and bright eyes, weary and cynical Discuss fresh wonders of the old cabal. But nothing of its work in type is hinted: Taxes are high! The mentors of the town Must keep their taxes down On buildings, presses, stocks In gas, oil, coal and docks. The mahogany rooms conceal a spider man Who holds the taxing bodies through the church, And knights with arms concealed. The mentors search The spider man, the master publican, And for his friendship silence keep, Letting him herd the populace like sheep For self and for the insatiable desires ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... passed, leaving her conscious of her utter impotence. That, too, passed as her spirit rebounded. But she had again caught a glimpse of dark underhand domination, running its secret lines this time into her own household. Like a spider in the blackness of night an unseen hand had begun to run these dark lines, to turn and twist them about her life, to plait and weave a web. Jane Withersteen knew it now, and in the realization further coolness and sureness came to her, and the ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... was tarnished and broken, the lace had holes in it and the furniture was decrepit and unsteady; but the proprietor cared nothing for such defects. All was very old, and he knew the tourist was eager to buy. So he scattered his wares inside and outside his salesroom, much as the spider spreads his web for the unwary, and waited for the inevitable tourist with a desire to ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... that a spider may be among the most daring, skilful, and predatory of his species, that he may be gifted with the most constant watchfulness and appetite, and yet, whether by the intrusion of an accidental walking-stick or broom (which would assuredly ...
— Young Mr. Barter's Repentance - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... from the Atlantic. "'Tis early days yet, hows'ever—time enough, my sons—plenty time!" promised Un' Benny Rowett, patriarch of the fishing-fleet and local preacher on Sundays. Some of the younger men grumbled that "there was no tellin': the season had been tricky from the start." The spider-crabs—that are the curse of inshore trammels—had lingered for a good three weeks past the date when by all rights they were due to sheer off. Then a host of spur-dogs had invaded the whiting-grounds, ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... I calls a Canterbury poke, dear boys," he cried. "Let 'em have it, my lads. The beggars look like so many flies in a spider's web; and ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... them to perform certain acts without previous thought or reflection; this instinct is in full force at the moment of their birth; it was therefore perfect in the beginning, and has never varied. The swallow built her nest, the spider its web, the bee formed its comb, precisely in the same way four thousand years ago, as they do now. I may here observe, that one of the greatest wonders of instinct is the mathematical form of the honeycomb ...
— Masterman Ready - The Wreck of the "Pacific" • Captain Frederick Marryat
... disposition incline men to observe and commend what appears best in our neighbour; so malignity of temper and heart prompt to seek and to find the worst. One, like a bee, gathers honey out of any herb; the other, like a spider, sucks poison out of the ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... "Not if that long-legged spider that took dinner with us the other night gets in her fine work. I'll bet that she handed me a few when you ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... Bye, Baby Bye Here's a fly You'd better be careful Else he will sting you And here's a spider too. And if you hurt him he will sting you And don't you hurt him And his ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... Miss POTTS abruptly ended her beautiful bronchial noise with violent distortion of countenance, as though there were a spider in her mouth, and sank upon a chair in ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 14, July 2, 1870 • Various
... if it were made of a million dewdrops turned to diamonds and sprinkled over a lacy spider-web; the web swathing the tall and wandlike figure of Miss Billie Brookton in a way to show that she had all the delicate ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... Coating the cave-top as a brow its eye, Creeps down to touch and tickle hair and beard, And now a flower drops with a bee inside, 10 And now a fruit to snap at, catch and crunch,— He looks out o'er yon sea which sunbeams cross And recross till they weave a spider-web, (Meshes of fire, some great fish breaks at times) And talks, to his own self, howe'er he please, Touching that other, whom his dam called God. Because to talk about Him, vexes—ha, Could He but know! and time to vex is now, When talk is safer ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... the mainland began to go down on the horizon, before she came to her unhomely destination, and lay-to at last where the rock clapped its black head above the swell, with the tall iron barrack on its spider legs, and the truncated tower, and the cranes waving their arms, and the smoke of the engine-fire rising in the mid-sea. An ugly reef is this of the Dhu Heartach; no pleasant assemblage of shelves, and pools, and creeks, about which a child might play for a whole summer ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... looked very droll, did Daddy Pavilly, with his great, spider legs and his little body, his long arms and his pointed head, surrounded by a flame of red hair on the ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... dozing behind the wainscot in the dining-room, and the squeak of irritation had been due to a passing spider. The apt quotation reached him through ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... the spider to the fly. 'It's the beautifulest house you ever did spy,'" quoted Julia, purposely changing parlor to house. "Just walk in. You can stand up—well, almost—if you stoop a little bit. This is the kitchen," she continued, for she had ...
— A Little Florida Lady • Dorothy C. Paine
... Claymore Hill, I rode bang into a flock of sheep and came down with a smash. You never saw such a ruin. The lamp and bell were lost completely, the handle-bars were twisted into corkscrews, the tires were cut to ribbons, the spokes looked like part of a spider's web, my hands and my knees were cut, and the worst of it was that the shepherd's dog mistook me for an enemy and I had to beat him off with the monkey-wrench, until the farmer heard the noise ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... the final crisis came. Philip—haughty, gloomy, and ambitious Philip, unskilled in arms, but persistent in his plans—sat in his palace at Madrid like a spider forever spinning webs that enemies tore down. Drake and the English had thrown the whole scheme of the Armada's mobilization completely out of gear. Philip's well-intentioned orders and counter-orders had made confusion worse confounded; and though the Spanish ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... word:— "Fab. When she was invited to an early wedding, She'd dress her head o'ernight, sponge up herself, And give her neck three lathers. Gaar. Ne'er a halter.") Laugh and lye downe Launcepresado Law, the spider's cobweb Legerity Letters of mart Leveret Limbo Line of life Linstock Long haire, treatise against (An allusion to William Prynne's tract The Unlovelinesse of Love-Lockes.) Loves Changelings Changed, MS. play founded on Sidney's Arcadia Low ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... several spiders and of some larvae. The spider, it appears, is an "undescribed species of Erigone," and the larvae are probably lepidopterous. A small shrike was also secured as a specimen. We saw several species of gulls, a snowy owl—which by the way was very shy—a few lemmings, and the tracks of ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... together in the dim light. The light looked weary and faint, as if with having forced its way through the dust of years on the windows; and Donal felt as if gazing from a clear conscious present out into a faded dream. Sometimes he would leave his nest, and walk up and down among spider-legged tables, tall cabinets, secret-looking bureaus, worked chairs—yielding himself to his fancies. He was one who needed no opium, or such-like demon-help, to set him dreaming; he could dream at his will—only his dreams were brief and of rapid change—probably not ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... great Sanford Quest? This surely cannot be the greatest detective in the world walking so easily into the spider's web!" ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. He sits motionless, like a spider in the center of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. He does little himself. He only plans. But his agents are numerous and splendidly organized. Is there a crime to be done, a paper to be abstracted, we will say, ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... the original growth, and they made the broad, fiat leaves of the arbor-vitae fully twice as wide as before. But this fringe was always on one side only, except when gathered upon dangling fragments of spider's web, or bits of stray thread: these they entirely encircled, probably because these objects had twirled in the light wind while the crystals were forming. Singular disguises were produced: a bit of ragged ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... scape-goat. As we saw, many of the cases of sweating were found where there was a sub-contractor. To our hasty vision, here seems to be the responsible party. Forty years ago Alton Locke gave us a powerful picture of the wicked sub-contracting tailor, who, spider-like, lured into his web the unfortunate victim, and sucked his blood for gain. The indignation of tender-hearted but loose-thinking philanthropists, short-visioned working-class orators, assisted by the satire of the comic journal, ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... water—barely sufficient to prevent any check in growth, and the fruit will be sweeter and ripen faster. The upper blossoms may be pinched off, so as to throw the whole strength of the plant into the lower berries. Keep off all runners; syringe the plants if infested with the red spider, and if the aphis appears, ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... should be secured. Story of the rescue. Feelings of displeasure against what is wrong. The teacher under moral obligation, and governed, himself, by law. Description of the Moral Exercise. Prejudice. The scholars' written remarks, and the teacher's comments. The spider. List of subjects. Anonymous writing. Specimens. Marks of a bad scholar. Consequences of being behindhand. New scholars. A Satirical ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... moment or two before Nell's burning eyes could accomplish the task of deciphering the lines of handwriting which seemed to have been formed by a paralytic spider that had fallen into the ink and scrambled spasmodically across the paper. There was no need to tell her to read slowly, and she stumbled over every other word of the letter, which ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... worked out a plot as he rode through the night from the Dillon ranch— one so safe and certain that it pointed to sure success. Jed was no coward, but he had a spider-like cunning that wove others as dupes into the web ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... and grows cheerful and happy under it in a way and to a degree marvellous to behold. What singular secret is there among the psychological mysteries of her nature which is able to account for this phenomenon?—A gentle, timid girl of sixteen, whom the sight of a spider or a live snake would have frightened into hysterics, I had once an opportunity, on a tour through Italy, to observe, while she took little or no notice of other works of art, would gaze, as if fascinated, at the writhings of Laocooen and his sons in the folds and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... of noble things, who was all for splendid achievements and the service of mankind, peers to-day, by virtue of such acquiescences, from between preposterous lawn sleeves or under a tilted coronet, sucked as dry of his essential honour as a spider ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... spirits to carry out a plan she had long had, to delight the whole family with some eggs scrambled in Margery's fashion; after the milk was strained and put away she went about it, while Nancy set the table. A nice bed of coals was prepared; the spider set over them, the eggs broken in, peppered and salted, and she began carefully to stir them as she had seen Margery do. But instead of acting right the eggs maliciously stuck fast to the spider ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... Is like a foul black cobweb to a spider; He makes it his dwelling and a prison To entangle those ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... very sharp, and would make a thousand holes through you in an instant," remarked the spider, thoughtfully. "But perhaps I can help you. If you are willing to grant me a favor in return, I will gladly build a bridge, so you may cross the river ...
— The Surprising Adventures of the Magical Monarch of Mo and His People • L. Frank Baum
... already at the beginning of your life that you are done with it. My child, the human heart is much too weak to be able to bear such a grief for many years. It gradually grows tired of it and finally drops it, and perceives then all at once that it is quite empty. Tedium, with its long spider- legs, will then creep over you and draw its dusty network around and no one will tear away this network, because nobody will be there to do this salutary service, for you will have driven people away from your side and preferred loneliness to ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... pricking points; presenting a key-board of nerve-pulps, not as yet tanned or ossified, to finger-touch of all outward agencies; knowing nothing of the filmy threads of this web of life in which we insects buzz awhile, waiting for the gray old spider to come along; contented enough with daily realities, but twirling on his finger the key of a private Bedlam of ideals; in knowledge feeding with the fox oftener than with the stork,—loving better the breadth of ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... I must weave always as the spider does.... Meanwhile time passes. I, like you, am now the servitor of Demetrios. I am his factor now at Calonak. I buy and sell. I estimate ounces. I earn my wages. Who forbids it?" Here the Jew shrugged. "And to conclude, ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... replied through Charles Boyle, with "Dr. Bentley's Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris examined." Swift entered into the war with a light heart, and matched the Ancients in defending them for the amusement of his patron. His incidental argument between the Spider and the Bee has provided a catch-phrase, "Sweetness and Light," to a combatant of ...
— The Battle of the Books - and Other Short Pieces • Jonathan Swift
... seemed to have no ulterior meaning in the suggestion. But before she could make any reply, Dawson reappeared, driving a handsome mare harnessed to a light, spider-like vehicle. He had also assumed, evidently in great haste, a black frock coat buttoned over his waistcoatless and cravatless shirt, and a tall black hat that already seemed to be cracking in the sunlight. ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... settling the date of a Roman or Celtic ruin, I forget which; and the intervention of the beggar, who has no archaeological system, but who has seen the edifice in question both built and fall to decay. Reason as much as you like; if your reasonings do not accord with facts, you will have woven spider's webs, of admirable fineness perhaps, ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... spare, For the creature was wholly denuded of hair, And, except for two things, as bare as my nail,— A tuft of a mane and a sprig of a tail. Now such as the beast was, even such was the rider, With head like a nutmeg, and legs like a spider; A voice like a cricket, a look like a rat, The brains of a goose, and the heart of a cat: But now with our horses, what sound and what rotten, Down to the shore, you must know, we were gotten; And there we were told, it concerned ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... Now, as the spider sucks poison out of the sweetest flower, so the most part of souls suck nothing but delusion and presumption and hardening out of the gospel. Many souls reason for more liberty to sin from mercy. But behold, how the Lord ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... affirming, denying, Holding, risposting, subjoining, All's like ... it's like ... for an instance I'm trying ... There! See our roof, its gilt moulding and groining Under those spider-webs lying? ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... wanted to borrow; couldn't lend to everybody; hadn't the funds; much as he could do to stand up himself.' There was no sincerity in his look. I saw his soul skulking away behind his subterfuges like a spider in the depths of his flimsy web. He seems to thrive, however, in the midst of general ruin. I've no doubt he lives like a vulture, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... gold-striped pear-tree wood. A head of a Merovingian style, resting against a bowl, a bearded man, at once resembling a Buddhist priest and an orator at a public reunion, touching the ball of a gigantic cannon with his fingers; a frightful spider revealing a human face in its body. The charcoal drawings went even farther into dream terrors. Here, an enormous die in which a sad eye winked; there, dry and arid landscapes, dusty plains, shifting ground, volcanic ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... sweaty uniforms penetrated the miserable garret I slept in with suffocating acridity. I lay awake for hours thinking of the fate of thousands of human beings dependent on such men as Petar Karageorgevitch, with his blood-stained hands; his hoary father-in-law, Nikola, weaving spider webs; the decadent Russian, fanatical and cruel; the Levantine Slav, agent of France; the Italians like a pack in full cry with the victim in sight; the Greek Varatassi mainly playing bridge, but plotting behind ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith
... whose very appearance inspires a wholesome dread of a nearer acquaintance, but which are harmless enough if let alone. In fact, on board the steamers, almost every cabin is tenanted by one large spider, whose presence is tolerated on account of his being a deadly foe to cockroaches, which abominable creatures swarm on board. Sometimes he is not visible for a fortnight or more at a time; but he leaves tokens of "having been there," in the shape of the empty husks of cockroaches, from which ...
— Harper's Young People, January 6, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... They had white bread that had been made on the place. Corn meal, rice, potatoes, syrup vegetables and home-cured meat. Food was cooked in iron pots hung over the fireplace by rings made of the same metal. Bread and pastries were made in the "skillet" and "spider." ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Florida Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... (Pl. 4, fig. 4) there is represented a stout-bodied form of spider with two sharply pointed chelicerae projecting from the conventionalized mouth. These characteristics together with the absence of any web, suggest a large predacious species, probably the tarantula (Tarantula sp.) which is common in Mexico. The acute powers of observation shown by the artist ...
— Animal Figures in the Maya Codices • Alfred M. Tozzer and Glover M. Allen |
