"Spider's web" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Zuni War Gods], from which he shook the torrents, was suggested, no doubt, by dew on the web." (Ibid., p.425.) To one unfamiliar with the Indian's habit of mind it may seem strained to connect the beads of dew on a spider's web with the torrential rain, but to one familiar with native thought as expressed in myths where the Indian has dramatized his conceptions of nature and of natural forces and phenomena, the connection ...
— Indian Games and Dances with Native Songs • Alice C. Fletcher
... spider's web back in its place, that once has been swept away? Can you put the apple again on the bough, which fell at our feet to-day? Can you put the lily-cup back on the stem, and cause it to live and grow? Can you mend the butterfly's broken wing, that you ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various
... it became so dark that neither the stars nor the moon could be seen. The mail cart had entered the forest. Prickly pine branches were continually hitting the student on his cap and a spider's web settled on his face. Wheels and hoofs knocked against huge roots, and the mail cart swayed from side to side as though ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... suddenly sprung up, overspreading the bay, so that the frigate is hidden from his sight. Even ships lying close in shore can be but faintly discerned through its film, and only the larger spars; the smaller ones, with the rigging-ropes, looking like the threads of a spider's web. ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... unknown to the Spirit that moveth all things. And the long-mantled moths, that sleep at noon, And dance in the light of the mystic moon— All have one being that loves them all; Not a fly in the spider's web can fall, But He cares for the spider, and cares for the fly; And He cares for each little child's smile or sigh. How it can be, I cannot know; He is wiser than I; and it ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... deadly length right across our bows! My head was gone in a moment; I did not know which end I stood on; I gasped and could not get my breath; I spun the wheel down with such rapidity that it wove itself together like a spider's web; the boat answered and turned square away from the reef, but the reef followed her! I fled, and still it followed, still it kept—right across my bows! I never looked to see where I was going, I only fled. The awful crash was ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... themselves in really dramatic moments, may impress the mind with extraordinary aptness. At this very moment Spinrobin's eyes noticed in the corner of wall and door a tiny spider's web, with the spider itself hanging in the center of its little net—shaking. And he has never forgotten it. It expressed pictorially exactly what he felt himself. He, too, felt that he was shaking in midair—as in the center of a web whose strands ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... Court Day in Lexington. From the town, as a centre, white turnpikes radiated in every direction like the strands of a spider's web. Along them, on the day before, cattle, sheep, and hogs had made their slow way. Since dawn, that morning, the fine dust had been rising under hoof and wheel on every one of them, for Court Day is yet the great day of every month throughout the Bluegrass. The crowd had gone ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... it always find itself; for by how much the soul struggleth under these distresses, by so much the more doth Satan put forth himself to resist, still infusing more poison, that if possible it might never struggle more, for strugglings are also as poison to Satan. The fly in the spider's web is an emblem of the soul in such a condition—the fly is entangled in the web; at this the spider shows himself; if the fly stir again, down comes the spider to her, and claps a foot upon her; if yet the fly ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... walk at night and your face comes up against a spider's web woven across the road, what a shock that thin line gives you! You fristle through every nerve of ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... emptiness, signifying nothing. For their opinion, too, and that of the society which they helped to form, she had a most complete and wrong- headed contempt. She cared nothing for the ordinary laws of social life, and was prepared to break through them on emergency, as a wasp breaks through a spider's web. Perhaps she guessed that a good deal of breaking would be forgiven to the owner of such a lovely face, and more than twenty thousand a year. With all this, she was extremely observant, and possessed, unknown ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... very clear to the girl who comes up to the city, and that is that the ordinary ice cream parlor is very likely to be a spider's web for her entanglement. This is perhaps especially true of those ice cream saloons and fruit stores kept by foreigners. Scores of cases are on record where young girls have taken their first step towards "white slavery" ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... alternately. There is a singularity in his hair, different from that of all other animals, and, I believe, hitherto unnoticed by naturalists. His hair is thick and coarse at the extremity, and gradually tapers to the root, where it becomes fine as a spider's web. His fur has so much the hue of the moss which grows on the branches of the trees that it is very difficult to make him out when he is ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... 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
... all the bonds of the universe. His legs were encircled with bands of iron, which, at their fastenings into the floor, were rusted. His hips and loins were bound with lead. A copper girdle held his breast. A silver band enthralled his tongue and hands, and what seemed like a spider's web of thin, light-blue wire encircled his body and gathered itself in a circlet of the same woven material upon his brows. Truly, if ever a man was fast bound, this man was; for, in addition to all these things, there was a ring of gold ...
— Edmund Dulac's Fairy-Book - Fairy Tales of the Allied Nations • Edmund Dulac
... mighty roar which made the Indians call the cataract Niagara, or "the thunder of the waters." On leaving here, we cross the river by a suspension bridge, which, from a short distance, looks like a mere spider's web. Over this the cars move slowly, affording a superb view of the Falls and of the ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... Shall not these mournful groans pierce thy flinty heart? Wilt thou stop thine ears and shut thine eyes? And wilt thou NOT regard? Take warning, and stop thy journey before it be too late. Wilt thou he like the silly fly, that is not quiet unless she be either entangled in the spider's web or burnt in the candle? O sinner, sinner, there are better things than HELL to be had! There is heaven, there is God, there is Christ, there is communion with an innumerable assembly of saints ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... horizontal streaks across the sky, which were daily noticeable, took a form that day not unlike the vertebrae of an immense snake, whereas the higher clouds of transparent mist in filaments looked exactly like a huge spider's web. ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... seeing us with vain Terror, forsooth; the trees, a pulpy stock Of toadstools huddled round them; and the flock— Black wings after black wings—of ancient rook By rook; has not the whole scene got a look As though we were the first whose breath should fan In two this spider's web, to give a span Of life more to three flies? See, there's a stone Seems made for us to sit on. Have men gone By here, and passed? or rested on that bank Or on this stone, yet seen no cause to thank For the grass growing here so ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... threads of a remarkably viscid and tenacious milky fluid... projected from the tips of the oral papillae" (page 759).) is so stupid as to spit out the viscid matter at the wrong end of its body; it would have been beautiful thus to have explained the origin of the spider's web. ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... Blackfriars. Carts and hansoms, vans and brewers' vans, all silhouetting. Trains slip past, obliterating with white whiffs the delicate distances, the perplexing distances that in London are delicate and perplexing as a spider's web. Great hay-boats yellow in the sun, brown in the shadow—great hay-boats came by, their sails scarce filled with the light breeze; standing high, they sailed slowly and picturesquely, with men thrown in all attitudes; somnolent ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... his own counsel, I had learned that the house of the good Martin was a kind of spider's web, and that the silly flies entangled in its meshes were for the most part members of the Fronde. The house was visited by persons of both sexes and of all ranks, from the members of the Royal family downwards. They went there for all sorts of purposes. ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens
... to walk into that gray old spider's web like a nice fat fly. And he was going to land without even the aid and comfort of his own particular brand of Dutch courage. For safety's sake, and because of Tiger's playful tendencies when first mounted, ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... here!" she said, in a helpless passion. "If only Theobald were here! To think that they should rob him of his sweetheart because they are caught in Dawson's spider's web. Their own grandchild! It seems unnatural. And you ...
— The Story of Bawn • Katharine Tynan
... republics—had been reached. The ports of Venezuela were for the first time opened to foreign trade. Her inhabitants were no longer restricted from the enjoyment of the fruits of their own industry. A gigantic system of taxation had been brushed, like a spider's web, away. Two-thirds of the Captain-Generalcy, in a ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... seemed to neglect him and to forget him, as of old. Only some weeks later did chance call his attention to the fact that Cain had entered upon a new phase of his life. It was in the afternoon of one of those light days, when the sun seemed to spread its rays, like the glistening threads of a spider's web along the road, from one tract of woodland to the other. The southern wood cast a cool, clear shadow, and where this ended and the sun began to spin its golden web, the line was as sharp as if cut by a knife. Fausch, whose day's work was done, put his short pipe between his teeth, and wandered along ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... to drop on. The top of the bridge is wide enough for the rails only, and the sides of the carriages hang beyond the rails. And there are no parapets. One just looks plumb down. We looked down, and back and forward. The struts and girders of the bridge seemed made of pack-thread and spider's web. We wondered why we should have stopped in the middle of such a place of all places. And the train looked so enormous. We asked the superintendent if the ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... ensconces himself during the months of drought. As he seldom emerges, a large variety of spider takes advantage of the hole, and makes its web across the orifice. He is thus furnished with a window and screen gratis; and no one but a Bushman would think of searching beneath a spider's web for a frog. They completely eluded my search on the occasion referred to; and as they rush forth into the hollows filled by the thunder-shower when the rain is actually falling, and the Bechuanas are cowering under their skin garments, the sudden chorus struck up simultaneously ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... question of moral values, look what the spider can do. What is there in the clammy, not to say messy, honey-comb to be compared with the delicate fabric of the spider's web? Indeed, should we ever have given a single thought to the honey-comb if it had had no honey in it? Do we become lyrical about the wasp's comb? We do not. It is a case where greed and materialism have warped our artistic perceptions. The spider can lower itself ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, August 11, 1920 • Various
... too much for him and away he goes down the hill. 'Whosoever committeth sin is the slave of sin.' Did you ever try to kill a bad habit, a vice? Did you find it easy work? Was it not your master? You thought that a chain no stronger than a spider's web was round your wrist till you tried to break it; and then you found it a chain of adamant. Many men who boast themselves free are 'tied and bound with ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... buzzing fly who is lured within the spider's web! 'Tis easy fluttering in, but there is no ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green
... foolish without antlers. And a terrible voice was absurd, but man should have ears like a spider's web, and eyes like fire. ...
— Myths and Legends of California and the Old Southwest • Katharine Berry Judson
... and terror than all her other fears. Sometimes she almost fancied a spell of enchantment had been put upon her, which would render all her efforts to escape her fate as unavailing as the struggles of a gnat in a spider's web. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... the deep valley the slender structure gradually won its way, supporting itself on its own web as it crawled along like a spider. Indeed, so tall were its towers and so slender its steel cords and beams that from below it appeared as fragile as a spider's web, and the men, poised on the end of swinging beams or standing on narrow platforms hundreds of feet in air, looked not unlike the ...
— Stories of Inventors - The Adventures Of Inventors And Engineers • Russell Doubleday
... other horses in the canon? Well, in a day or so Pete would show the Mexican a trick with a large round hole in it—the hole representing the space recently occupied by one of his ponies. Incidentally Pete realized that he was getting deeper and deeper into the meshes of The Spider's web—and the thought spurred him to a keener vigilance. So far he had killed three men actually in self-defense. But when he met up with Malvey—and Pete promised himself that pleasure—he would not wait for Malvey to ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... down all the rich clusters in order to slake its own thirst. Find a man who yields to his desires after his neighbour's goods, and you find a man who will break all commandments like a hornet in a spider's web. Be he a Napoleon, and glorified as a conqueror and hero, or be he some poor thief in a jail, he has let his covetousness get the upper hand, and so all wrong-doing is possible. Nor is it only the second table which ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... Professor was giving a most interesting and appreciated address, illustrated by the limelight, on the subject of "Quartz Fibres." If I remember rightly, he was explaining to the audience that the strands of a spider's web were purposely rough so that the spider could climb them easily, but that a quartz fibre was smooth and glassy, and a spider would never attempt to ascend one. He showed on the sheet a single thread of a spider's web ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... appears to have been prevalent in Cholula was somewhat different. According to that, Quetzalcoatl was for many years Lord of Tollan, ruling over a happy people. At length, Tezcatlipoca let himself down from heaven by a cord made of spider's web, and, coming to Tollan, challenged its ruler to play a game of ball. The challenge was accepted, and the people of the city gathered in thousands to witness the sport. Suddenly Tezcatlipoca changed himself into a tiger, which so frightened the ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... by machinery we shall not attempt to trace. To use the phrase of a Nottingham mechanic, "there are machines now that will weave anything, from a piece of sacking to a spider's web." But fine muslins and fancy goods are chiefly woven ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... poetry of the present, gigantic, colossal, and enormous, made me forget it. The "sky-scrapers," so splendid in the landscape now, did not exist in 1883; but I find it difficult to divide my early impressions from my later ones. There was Brooklyn Bridge, though, hung up high in the air like a vast spider's web. Between 1883 and 1893 I noticed a great change in New York and other cities. In ten years they seemed to have grown with the energy of tropical plants. But between 1893 and 1907 I saw no evidence of such feverish increase. It is possible that the Americans are arriving ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... back to their former evil ways, showing conclusively that they had been self-deceived and theirs but the hope of the hypocrite which 'shall perish: whose hope shall be cut off, and whose trust shall be a spider's web.' ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... towards her, his personality caused that old, odd feeling of helplessness to steal over her. She, almost, felt as if she were a fly gradually being bound by a greedy spider's web. ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... gnats that dance like a wall, Or a moving column that will not fall; And the dragon-flies that go burning by, Shot like a glance from a seeking eye— There is one being that loves them all: Not a fly in a spider's web can fall But he cares for the spider, and cares for the fly; He cares for you, whether you laugh or cry, Cares whether your mother smile or sigh. How he cares for so many, I do not know, But it would be too strange if he did not so— ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... swelled. He looked desperately at the sticky staircase and the spider's web swinging in the wind above the broken pane. He felt alone, lost in his misery. He looked at the gap in the banisters.... What if he were to throw himself down?... or out of the window?... Yes, what if he were to kill himself to punish them? How remorseful they would be! He heard the noise ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... gorgeousness of the Greenock's saloons and cabins, and the height of her masts, and the multitude of ropes about running in every conceivable direction, crossing and recrossing each other with the bewildering ingenuity of a spider's web; but Uncle Jack took all these wonders as a matter of ...
— Teddy - The Story of a Little Pickle • J. C. Hutcheson
... most peculiar of birds' eggs found about the Murray is that of the locally-termed 'cat-bird,' the shell of which is veined thickly with dark thin threads as though covered with a spider's web." ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... now; it's truth they talk. You would undo the skill of a spider's web And take the inches of it in one line, More easily than know a woman's thought. ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... round by the church. John was talking—rapturously at every step, and Glory was dragging after him like a criminal going to the pillory. At last they came out by Great Smith Street, and he cried: "See, there's the house of God under its spider's web of scaffolding, and here's the Broad Sanctuary—broad enough ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... however, she gave the woman a little shirt of spider's web and a doublet of thistle-down ...
— The National Nursery Book - With 120 illustrations • Unknown
... he would tell her, as he haled her on to the sward beyond the arbor, "here it is, the story you told us yester-e'en. Here is the ring where they danced last night, the little folk, an' here is the glow-worm caught in the spider's web to give them light." ...
— A Warwickshire Lad - The Story of the Boyhood of William Shakespeare • George Madden Martin
... down his pipe as gently upon the fender, as if it had been spun from the unravellings of a spider's web— ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... now and then, after working along quietly for nearly eight hours, everything inside would let go all of a sudden and begin to buzz like a bee, and the hands would straightway begin to spin round and round so fast that their individuality was lost completely, and they simply seemed a delicate spider's web over the face of the watch. She would reel off the next twenty-four hours in six or seven minutes, and then stop with a bang. I went with a heavy heart to one more watchmaker, and looked on while he took her to pieces. Then I prepared to cross-question him rigidly, for this thing ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the engine for some time and then crept slowly along a steel bridge that looked like a spider's web, from which she could look into the furnace-room, with its roaring fires, scorching heat and constantly clanging iron doors. For some minutes she gazed silently, then turning quickly, hurried across the bridge, up the greasy stairs and on to the main saloon where ...
— Dick in the Everglades • A. W. Dimock
... daughter of Abubeker a secret supply of intelligence and food. The diligence of the Koreish explored every haunt in the neighborhood of the city: they arrived at the entrance of the cavern; but the providential deceit of a spider's web and a pigeon's nest is supposed to convince them that the place was solitary and inviolate. "We are only two," said the trembling Abubeker. "There is a third," replied the prophet; "it is God himself." ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... But when the sun rose, it was a glorious sight. The trees and shrubs were covered with rime, and looked like a wood of coral, and every branch was thick with long white blossoms. The most delicate twigs, which are lost among the foliage in summer-time, came now into prominence, and it was like a spider's web of glistening white. The lady-birches waved in the wind; and when the sun shone, everything glittered and sparkled as if it were sprinkled with diamond dust, and great diamonds were lying on ...
— The Pink Fairy Book • Various
... was an iron bridge. A single arch, of four hundred feet span, and twenty feet in height from the chord-line, was to be thrown over the Schuylkill, near Philadelphia. The idea was suggested to him by a spider's web, a section of which the bridge resembled; and the principle he worked upon was, that the small segment of a large circle was preferable to the great segment of a small circle. Paine made a complete model of his bridge, in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... up there to bed?' says I. 'No! you fool!' says he, 'but to avoid the darlin' young 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, I pray, when you settle ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... leopard is handsome, but always she struck me as haunted by a vague fear, a fear of the house, perhaps, and of her mother's power to rule her. I used to fancy, watching her return to their sombre dwelling, that she was drawn back as to a spider's web by the fascination of its tragic silences. The story of her life is like a strange book read by lightning, with many leaves turned ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... as that could never happen to Matamore," said Herode, with his resounding laugh; "he might fall into a spider's web without ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... could be cured by putting a spider into a goose quill, sealing it up, and hanging it about the neck, so that it would be near the stomach. This disease might also be cured by swallowing pills made of a spider's web. One pill a morning for three successive ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... the road, and the foaming Oroncillo tearing its way through the mountain. High over our heads, where fingers of sunlight groped, the railway from Paris to Madrid looped its spider's web along the precipice, winding through tunnel above tunnel in miniature rivalry with the sublimities of the St. Gothard. Below, deep in the shadow of the gorge, crouched the sad village of Pancorbo itself, stricken, desolate, articulate only in its two ruined castles on the height, Santa Engracia ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Amolanas, composed of the cretaceo-oolitic strata, are interlaced with dikes like a spider's web, to an extent which I have never seen equalled, except in the denuded interior of a volcanic crater: north and south lines, however, predominate. These dikes are composed of green, white, and blackish rocks, all porphyritic with ...
— South American Geology - also: - Title: Geological Observations On South America • Charles Darwin
... an awful state of affairs. A wretched wayfarer caught and held like a fly in a spider's web, and not a soul ...
— Queensland Cousins • Eleanor Luisa Haverfield
... armed vessel so often alluded to; her light low hull dimly seen in the hazy atmosphere that danced upon the waters, and her attenuated masts and sloping yards, with their slight tracery of cordage, recalling rather the complex and delicate ramifications of the spider's web, than the elastic yet solid machinery to which the lives of those within had so often been committed in sea and tempest. Upon the strand, and close opposite to the small gate which now stood ajar, lay one of her boats, the crew of ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... his Illuminations we read that "so soon as the Idea of the Deluge had sunk back into its place, a rabbit halted amid the sainfoin and the small swinging bells, and said its prayers to the rainbow through the spider's web. Oh! The precious stones in hiding, the flowers already looking out ... Madame X established a piano in the Alps.... The caravans started. And the Splendid Hotel was erected upon the chaos of ice and night of the Pole" (from the translation by Aline Gorren). ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... walked up the avenue, slipping on the fir needles which lay two inches thick on the ground. It was still, dark, and only here and there in the tops of the trees shimmered a bright gold light casting the colours of the rainbow on a spider's web. The smell of the firs was almost suffocating. Then I turned into an avenue of limes. And here too were desolation and decay; the dead leaves rustled mournfully beneath my feet, and there were lurking shadows among the trees. To the right, in an old orchard, a goldhammer sang a faint ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... of half a century, the kind of flowers of which it was composed could hardly be recognized. "Well?" asked Pont-de-Veyle. "Well, do you understand?" "Not at all." "Look at that portrait." She pointed with her finger to a wretched portrait in oils, covered with dust and spider's web. "I begin to understand." "Yes," said she, "that is his portrait. As for myself, I never look at it. The one here," striking her breast, "is more like. A portrait is a good thing for those who ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... little farm is the spot of all others in that mountain country which most stirs the sthetic and the speculative strains within one. Lovely and remote, all by itself at the foot of a mountain, in a circle of the hills, an old monastery stands, now used as a farm, with one rose window, like a spider's web, spun delicate in stone tracery. There the old monks had gone to get away from the struggles of the main valley and the surges of the fighting men. There even now were traces of their peaceful life; the fish-ponds and the tillage ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... use trying to join things on again," he told himself. "As well try to mend a spider's web when you have ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... the fence. In a bush beside the fence there was a big spider's web. Old Mrs. Ik-to the Black Spider had built the web as a trap to catch flies in. But this time there was something besides a fly in the trap. Ah-mo the Honey Bee had blundered, into the web and was trying ...
— The Magic Speech Flower - or Little Luke and His Animal Friends • Melvin Hix
... my daughter Thecla, like a spider's web fastened to the window, is captivated, by the discourses of Paul, and attends' upon them with prodigious eagerness, and vast delight; and thus, by attending on what he says, the young woman is seduced. Now then do you go, and speak to her, for ...
— The Forbidden Gospels and Epistles, Complete • Archbishop Wake
... there cold and lifeless. A part of the roof of the shed had ended by falling in upon it, and now the rain drenched it at every shower. A bit of the leather harness by which the crane was worked hung down, and seemed to bind the engine like a thread of some gigantic spider's web. And its metal-work, its steel and copper, was also decaying, as if rusted by lichens, covered with the vegetation of old age, whose yellowish patches made it look like a very ancient, grass-grown machine which the winters had preyed upon. This lifeless engine, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... but in a very short time these saline particles shoot out into crystals of incredible tenuity and sharpness, with something like knots here and there, from which these crystals seem to proceed, so that the whole texture in a manner represents a spider's web, though infinitely finer and more minute. These spiculae, or darts, will remain unaltered on the glass for some months. Five or six grains of this viperine poison, mixed with half an ounce of human blood, received in a warm ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... explosives used to sing and burst—sometimes killing and wounding men, sometimes blowing up the bully-beef and biscuits, sometimes falling with a hiss and a column of white spray into the sea. It was here that the field-telegraph of the Royal Engineers became a tangled spider's web of wires and cross wires. They added wires and branch wires every day, and stuck them up on thin poles. Here you could see the Engineers in shirt and shorts trying to find a disconnection, or carrying a huge reel of wire. Wooden shanties sprang up where dug-outs ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... felt better after this outbreak. He even smiled as he thought how neatly he had walked into the spider's web. Then he shifted his position and prepared to think. But, as he moved his foot struck something. A wallet, it felt like; he reached down, and, by dint of feeling about, managed to get his ...
— The Girl Aviators' Sky Cruise • Margaret Burnham
... told me; and it seems he spent the evening watching him weave his spider's web. But the flies were over-wary. They knew whence he came; they knew the business for which he desired to enrol them—for a rumour had gone round that Condillac was in rebellion against the Queen's commands—and there were none so desperate at the Auberge de ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... have up to now been experimented on. And horses in the phylo-genetic line are more ancient than dogs: they are lower in the zoologic scale. Much lower still, i.e. among the Arthropoda, occur many other mathematical wonders. I only mention in a cursory way the logarithmic spiral of the spider's web, the precise curves realized without instruments of any kind by the Coleoptera and Hymenoptera in cutting leaves, the stereometry of the aphides. Then, as it were, at the bottom of the scale (if one may still speak of a descent and a bottom) the marvellous plancton filters of the Appendiculata; ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... my son, that if, having broken her vows to Isis, a woman should repeat them and once more enter the service of the goddess, and then for the second time seek to break them, she and the man for whom she did this thing would be like flies in a spider's web, and that not only in this life, but in any other that may be given ...
— The Ancient Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... the fluttering leafy trees Proclaim the gently swelling breeze, Whilst through my window, by degrees, Its breathings play: The spider's web, all ...
— Cottage Poems • Patrick Bronte
... and attentiveness of manner in his conduct towards her. She had tried to sweep away the objectionable quality in his bearing, by frankness, by indifference, by entire lack of response, but she had remained conscious of its increasing as a spider's web might increase as the spider spun it quietly over one, throwing out threads so impalpable that one could not brush them away because they were too slight to be seen. She was aware that in the first years of his married ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... gulf, and your healthy constitution, and your own care and prudence, and best contrivance, and all your righteousness, would have no more influence to uphold you and keep you out of hell than a spider's web would have to stop a falling rock. . . . There are the black clouds of God's wrath now hanging directly over your heads, full of the dreadful storm and big with thunder; and were it not for the restraining hand of God it would immediately burst ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... a fear had entered either of their minds. Knowing very little of the danger of large cities, they had not dreamed that the foolish little Fly might get caught in some dreadful spider's web. ...
— Little Folks Astray • Sophia May (Rebecca Sophia Clarke)
... pausing, and looking at his wife, fixedly, while there sat upon his face an expression of terrible despair; "that pledge can never be renewed! It would be like binding a giant with a spider's web. I am lost! lost! lost! The eager, inexpressible desire that now burns within me, cannot be controlled. The effort to do so would drive me mad. I must drink, or die. And you, my poor wife!—and you, my children! what will become of you? Who will give you sufficient strength ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... tell the whole world about his victory, but instead he flew straight into a spider's web. And there, he who had defeated the King of beasts came to a miserable end, the prey ...
— The AEsop for Children - With pictures by Milo Winter • AEsop
... brush the cobwebs of interpretation and sophism from this Work of the heart," he cries; "every spider's web in the Mosque, I would sweep away. The garments of your religion, I would have you clean, O my Brothers. Ay, even the threadbare adventitious wrappages, I would throw away. From the religiosity and cant of to-day I call you back to the religion ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... north-east from the narrow neck of water under the bridge was fretted to a majesty of rage by the winds that blew from the black hills around it; but it ended in a dam that was pierced in the middle with some metallic spider's web of engineering; even so would romantic and utilitarian Ellen have designed a loch. And the firs which formed a glade of gloom by the waterside, which by their soughing uttered the very song of melancholy's soul, were cut by the twirling wind ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... reply. For the first time in her life she seemed to comprehend what it meant to have to die; and death seemed much closer when someone else was about to die than when her own life had been imperiled in the spider's web. ...
— The Adventures of Maya the Bee • Waldemar Bonsels
... piles covered with rotten planking, no balustrade of any kind existing to keep the unwary from tumbling off. At the water level the piles were eaten away by the action of the sea to about the size of a man's wrist, and at every fresh influx the whole structure trembled like a spider's web. In this lay the danger of making fast, for a strong pull from a headfast rope might drag the erection completely over. Flower arrived at the end, ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... religious. His soul aspired, at times, to high things. He was sympathetic to actual pain, and had always been morbidly in awe of death. The sight of any poor, lost, and suffering man threw him into instant, profound, and melancholy pity. A dead beetle in the road, a fly caught in a spider's web, a young robin water-soaked and bedraggled, appalled him, even as a boy, and he pondered them with sad and questioning eyes long after his young companions had forgotten them. Where had the light of their eyes fled? he asked himself. He ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... flower-encircled acres, these beautiful fields of peaceful wheat, are the battle-fields of life. For these fertile acres the Romans built their cities and those villas whose mosaics and hypocausts are exposed by the plough, and formed straight roads like the radii of a wheel or the threads of a geometrical spider's web. Thus like the spider the legions from their centre marched direct and quickly conquered. Next the Saxons, next the monk-slaying Danes, next the Normans in chain-mail—one, two, three heavy blows—came to grasp these golden acres. Dearly the Normans ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... a walk. As for the more unpleasant manifestations of humanity; after all they no longer concerned him. Men intent on the great purpose did not suffer the current of their thoughts to be broken by the buzzing of a fly caught in a spider's web, so why should he be perturbed by the misery of a puppy in the hands of village boys? The fly, no doubt, endured its tortures; lying helpless and bound in those slimy bands, it cried out in its thin voice when the claws of the horrible monster fastened on it; but its dying agonies had ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... the shadow of the cave A spider's web was spread; The creature hung upon her web at watch; Unbroken ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... ready to take unto herself all the horses and country places and automobiles and yachts, and in a life lived regardless of expense to bury and forget her better self. But more often, like a fly caught in a spider's web, she wished by one desperate effort (even should it cost her a wing, to carry out the figure) to free herself once ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... monoplane spread-eagling on the ground. I saw her big eyes dilate as they fixed themselves anxiously on the passenger's perch, to which the honoured guest must climb, above the conductor's seat, crawling through the wire stays, or whatever you call them, which were like a spider's web inviting a fly. Diana turned pale. Even her lips were white. The shadows under her eyes darkened as ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... me! {1467} My king, my king, how shall I weep for thee? What shall I speak from heart that truly loves? And now thou liest there, breathing out thy life, In impious deed of death, In this fell spider's web! Yes woe is me! woe, woe! Woe for this couch of thine unhonorable! Slain by a subtle death With sword two-edged, which ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton
... Edit. (viii. 48) instead of the Gate (Bb) gives a Bdhanja Ventilator; for which latter rendering see vol. i. 257. The spider's web is Koranic (lxxxi. 40) "Verily frailest of all houses is ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... day on which the assembly was held, Mistress Anne's woman brought to her a beautiful robe. 'Twas flowered satin of the sheen and softness of a dove's breast, and the lace adorning it was like a spider's web for gossamer fineness. The robe was sweetly fashioned, fitting her shape wondrously; and when she was attired in it at night a little colour came into her cheeks to see herself so far beyond all comeliness she had ever ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... brink, paused for a moment to listen to the hum within them, and note that the bees were making ready to swarm, crossed the bridge, and tried the rusty hasp of the door. It yielded stiffly; but as I pulled the door inwards it brushed aside a mass of spider's web, white and matted, that could not be less than a month old. Also it brushed a clump of ivy overgrowing the lintel, and shook down about half an ounce of powdery dust into my hair and eyes. I scarcely troubled to look through. Clearly, the door had not been opened ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... loud roar is o'er. He's bitten and beaten, he's sick and sore. But a spider's web spread Trapped the Gnat as he sped With the news...He will never fight more— ...
— Fables in Rhyme for Little Folks - From the French of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... 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 we are ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... whole life of nature. So a man might wince when a snail was crushed as if his toe were trodden on; so a man might shrink when a moth shrivelled as if his own hair had caught fire. Man might be a network of exquisite nerves running over the whole universe, a subtle spider's web of pity. This was a fine conception; though perhaps a somewhat severe enforcement of the theological conception of the special divinity of man. For the humanitarians certainly asked of humanity what can be asked of no other creature; no man ever required a dog to understand ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... lay like a floating fortress upon the waves, and overhead her three masts towered up into the very clouds, with their yards set in order, and the ropes crossing from one to the other as intricate as a spider's web. Last of all, from a flagstaff on the stern, brandished the ensign of Great Britain, in defiance of her enemies. And my heart swelled as I gazed upon it, and remembered how that banner had struck terror into the Frenchmen, and Dutch, and Spaniards, in so ...
— Athelstane Ford • Allen Upward
... paused beside the old barn door; A spider's web hung there As fragile as a little dream, As delicate and fair; They decked it with a thousand gems Of oh! such dazzling sheen, It was the very loveliest thing That ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 19, 1919 • Various
... expressed his doubt of God's wisdom in having formed such apparently useless creatures as spiders are. They do nothing but spin a web that has no value. He was to have striking proof that even a spider's web may serve an important purpose. On one occasion he had taken refuge in a cave, and Saul and his attendants, in pursuit of him, were about to enter and seek him there. But God sent a spider to weave its web across the ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... a glow of yellow green, then a mass of blossoms, then a throat, chin and face, one after another, all veiled in a gossamer thin as a spider's web, and last—and these I shall never forget—a pair of eyes shining clear below and above the veil, and which gazed into mine with the same steady, full, unfrightened look one sometimes sees on the face of a summer moon when it bursts through ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... should link up the continents. He oppresses and destroys the Arab world, which should be the natural junction of the great trunk railways that, to-morrow, shall join Asia, Africa, and Europe in one splendid spider's web. You are going to move the block from the line, and to join the hands of the continents. Understand, and be enthusiastic. I tell you, this joining of the continents is an unborn babe of history that leapt in the womb the moment the ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... made of silk from a spider's web, a coat of thistledown, a hat made from the leaf of an oak, tiny shoes made from a mouse's skin, and many other ...
— The Beacon Second Reader • James H. Fassett
... as the best of life's joys, the greatest of life's achievements. The practical life was a blind, dull routine. Most men were toiling at tasks which they did not like, by rules which they did not understand. They never looked beyond the edge of their work. The philosophical life was a spider's web—filmy threads of theory spun out of the inner consciousness—it touched the world only at certain chosen points of attachment. There was nothing firm, nothing substantial in it. You could look through it like a veil and see the real world lying beyond. ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... ascending direction from the orifices. The spider then suddenly let go its hold of the post, and was quickly borne out of sight. The day was hot and apparently calm; yet under such circumstances, the atmosphere can never be so tranquil as not to affect a vane so delicate as the thread of a spider's web. If during a warm day we look either at the shadow of any object cast on a bank, or over a level plain at a distant landmark, the effect of an ascending current of heated air is almost always evident: such upward currents, it has been remarked, ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... in order to get at the tree. The lines of those webs were as thick as coarse threads, and pretty strong, as I had reason to know; for when walking back to camp the same evening, meditating deeply on our unfortunate detention, I ran my head into the middle of a spider's web, and was completely enveloped in it, so much so that it was with considerable difficulty I succeeded in clearing it away. I was as regularly netted as if a gauze veil had ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... of roads and railways in France converge as surely to the capital as the threads of a spider's web lead to its centre, and in pursuing his route through the bye-ways of Normandy the traveller will be much in the position of the fly that has stepped upon its meshes—every road and railway leading to the capital where 'M. d'Araignee' the enticing, the alluring, the ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... the things we found and we brought them to our work place. We found strange boxes with bars of metal inside, with many cords and strands and coils of metal. We found wires that led to strange little globes of glass on the walls; they contained threads of metal thinner than a spider's web. ...
— Anthem • Ayn Rand
... something wrong often think it of not much consequence, because the child is young and the wrong is very slight. You do not know the power of habit, and how one wrong, howsoever slight, leads to a greater one. Habit has been likened to a spider's web, which at first can be easily broken, but after continued indulgence binds its victim as with a strong cable, making reformation almost impossible. The same is true of good and right conduct. At first it may require an effort to perform a certain right act, but after ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... realised clearly enough the danger of his correspondence with the Prime Minister, and immediately took steps to counteract it. There was a semi- official agent of the English Government in Rome, Mr. Odo Russell, and around him Manning set to work to spin his spider's web of delicate and clinging diplomacy. Preliminary politenesses were followed by long walks upon the Pincio, and the gradual interchange of more and more important and confidential communications. Soon poor Mr. Russell was little better than ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... notches on the loom, when one evening, as the expanded sun touched the horizon's rim, a ship's uppermost spars were observed, traced like a spider's web against its crimson disk. It looked like a ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... client hesitate, he thought that he had lost his chance; he had set himself to frighten and quell La Cibot till she was completely in his power, bound hand and foot. She had walked into his study as a fly walks into a spider's web; there she was doomed to remain, entangled in the toils of the little lawyer who meant to feed upon her. Out of this bit of business, indeed, Fraisier meant to gain the living of old days; comfort, competence, and consideration. He and ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... of one who attains an object long desired, with the candor of a child, and the blundering foolishness of an old man utterly without worldly experience, he fell into the life of Mademoiselle Gamard precisely as a fly is caught in a spider's web. The first day that he went to dine and sleep at the house he was detained in the salon after dinner, partly to make his landlady's acquaintance, but chiefly by that inexplicable embarrassment which often assails timid people ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... while she looked at the programme, she thought of the strange complications of feeling that are surely the fruit of an extreme civilisation. She saw herself caught in a spider's web of apparently frail, yet really powerful, threads spun by an invisible spider. Her world was full of gossamer playing the part of iron, of gossamer that was compelling, that made and kept prisoners. What ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... should he? No more now can he build castles in the air, basing them on the power of creditor over debtor. That bubble has burst, leaving him only the reflection, how illusory it has been. Although, for his nefarious purpose, it has proved weak as a spider's web, it is not likely Colonel Armstrong will ever again submit himself to be so ensnared. Broken men become cautious, and shun taking ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... 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 and came to ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... made its web from door-post to door-post, and that web is unbroken. If you do not believe me, come and see for yourself. Yet they say the woman came through the doorway and therefore through the spider's web. Oh! Baas, what is the use of wasting thought upon the ways of spooks which, like the wind, come and go as they will, especially in this haunted land from which, as we have all agreed, we should do well to ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... hear some trig, compact-looking man, seemingly free, all girded and ready, speak of his "furniture," as whether it is insured or not. "But what shall I do with my furniture?"—My gay butterfly is entangled in a spider's web then. Even those who seem for a long while not to have any, if you inquire more narrowly you will find have some stored in somebody's barn. I look upon England today as an old gentleman who is travelling with a great deal of baggage, trumpery which has accumulated from long housekeeping, which he ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... their names on doors or rock-heads, But leave the task to scribblers and to blockheads; Pert, trifling folks, who, bent on being witty, Scrawl on each post some fag-end of a ditty, Spinning, with spider's web, their shallow brains, O'er wainscots, borrowed books, or ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... made that painful journey, passing levels from which three or four hallways ran out like the radii of a spider's web. He was close to the end of his endurance when he heard a sound, echoed, magnified, from below. It was someone moving. He dragged his body into the fourth level where the light was very faint, hoping to crawl far enough into one of the passages to remain unseen from the stair. But he ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... doubloons and double guineas and moidores and sequins, the pictures of all the kings of Europe for the last hundred years, strange oriental pieces stamped with what looked like wisps of string or bits of spider's web, round pieces and square pieces, and pieces bored through the middle, as if to wear them round your neck—nearly every variety of money in the world must, I think, have found a place in that collection; and for number, I am sure they were like autumn leaves, so that my back ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... canopies of yellow velvet, the folds of which were caught up and draped with bands of green ribbon. And on the thrones were seated two of the sweetest and fairest little maidens that mortal man had ever beheld. Their lovely hair was fine as a spider's web; their eyes were kind and smiling, their cheeks soft and dimpled, their mouths shapely as a cupid's bow and tinted like the petals of a rose. Upon their heads were set two crowns of fine spun gold, worked into fantastic shapes and set with glittering ...
— The Enchanted Island of Yew • L. Frank Baum
... for Charlie, and they told us he was sitting up in the ash-tree at the end of the field. In my dream I did not feel at all surprised that Cripple Charlie should have got into the ash-tree, or at finding him there high up among the branches looking at a spider's web with a magnifying-glass. But I thought that the wind was so high I could not make him hear, and the leaves and boughs tossed so that I could barely see him; and when I climbed up to him, the branch on which ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... these novels were of the most elevated class, and tedious as they seem nowadays to us, it was the sentiments, almost more than the action, which fascinated contemporary opinion. Madame de Sevigne herself, the brightest and wittiest of women, confessed herself to be a fly in the spider's web of their attractions. "The beauty of the sentiments," she writes, "the violence of the passions, the grandeur of the events, and the miraculous success of their redoubtable swords, all draw me on as though I were still a little girl." In these modern days of success, ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... doubt at all of his state, but lived in the joy of the safety that he supposed his soul, by his conversion, to be in. Oh! thanks to God, says he, I am not in the state of sin, death, and damnation, as the unjust, and this Publican is. What a strange delusion, to trust to the spider's web, and to think that a few, or the most fine of the works of the flesh, would be sufficient to bear up the soul in, at, and under the judgment of God! "There is a generation that are pure in their own eyes, and yet are not washed from their filthiness." This text can be so fitly applied to none as ...
— The Pharisee And The Publican • John Bunyan
... grin once more at the poor Prince, a Fly darted in, and, blinded by the darkness of the dungeon, flew straight into a spider's web, above the ...
— The Gate of the Giant Scissors • Annie Fellows Johnston
... contrived of the cup of an acorn, through the bottom of which ran a hedgehog's prickle. Balanced on the point was the needle, a spear of dried grass, and over all was a spider's web to serve as glass. ...
— The Flamp, The Ameliorator, and The Schoolboy's Apprentice • E. V. Lucas
... or threads of flesh. With a little care you can pick one of the small fibres into fine threads. Now, if you look at one of these under a microscope you find that it is made of still finer fibres, which are much smaller than the threads of a spider's web. One of these smallest threads is called a muscular fibre. Many thousands of muscular fibres are ...
— First Book in Physiology and Hygiene • J.H. Kellogg
... crystal laid on the pit of her stomach produced rigidity of the whole body. Red grapes produced certain effects, if placed in her hands; white grapes produced different effects. The bone of an elk would throw her into an epileptic fit. The tooth of a mammoth produced a feeling of sluggishness. A spider's web rolled into a ball produced a prickly feeling in the hands, and a restlessness in the whole body. Glow-worms threw her into the magnetic sleep. Music somnambulised her. When she wanted to be cheerful, she requested Kerner to magnetise the water ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... reflections. Connie had gone an hour before—he was too late to have detained her upon a pretext—and while sitting speechless before the dinner he could not eat—his heated imagination wove visions of horror in which his wife was entangled as a fly in a spider's web. What if Connie were really possessed by the influence of some drug which rendered her incapable of willing rationally? What if he missed her at the entrance to the opera? Or what if—most desperate supposition—she should, in the event of his finding her, refuse ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... whole earth; in the fields the grain bowed to Him with a golden wave, rustled the heavy heads of the wheat, and the delicate tasseled oats trembled like a cluster of tiny bells. In the air, filled with brightness here and there, floated the spring thread of the spider's web, blue from the azure of the sky and golden from the sun, as if a veritable thread from the loom of the ...
— Sielanka: An Idyll • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... Beard's chamber in order to light the alabaster lamp, which throws a soft and veiled light on the surrounding objects. This room is splendidly furnished in Indian stuff with white ground embroidered with flowers; a mosquito net of muslin, fine as a spider's web, envelopes an immense bed of gilded wood with a headboard of plate-glass, which appears thus in a ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... exclaim, Let us kill, let us plunder!" Let the leader of the day stop following the current of the day, and he will be crushed as an obstacle or cast off as a piece of wreckage.—Judge if they are willing to be entangled in the spider's web which the Girondins put in their way. Instead of the metaphysical constitution with which the Girondins confront them, they have one in their own head ready made, simple to the last point, adapted to their capacity and their instincts. The ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Allies benefited by this advantage of the battle-ground; there is a network of railways, like the network of a spider's web." ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... thing can come That is not passing clean; No spider's web, no dirt, nor dust, No filth may there be seen. Jehovah, Lord, now come away, And end my griefs and plaints— Take me to Thy Jerusalem, And place me with ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... the south, in order to get a bed and a view of the adjacent locality. Having shot a leche, and made a glorious fire, we got a good cup of tea and had a comfortable night. While collecting wood that evening, I found a bird's nest consisting of live leaves sewn together with threads of the spider's web. Nothing could exceed the airiness of this pretty contrivance; the threads had been pushed through small punctures and thickened to resemble a knot. I unfortunately lost it. This was the second nest I had seen resembling that ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... have it! Destroying a spider's web is sure to bring bad luck, and you'll end by tearing the window-pane with ...
— Modern Icelandic Plays - Eyvind of the Hills; The Hraun Farm • Jhann Sigurjnsson
... Mr Percival Lowell took up the work where Schiaparelli had virtually dropped it, and soon added a great number of "canals'' to those previously known, so that in his charts the surface of the wonderful little planet appears covered as with a spider's web, the dusky lines criss-crossing in every direction, with conspicuous knots wherever a number of them come together. Mr Lowell has demonstrated that the areas originally called seas, and thus named on the earlier charts, are not bodies of water, whatever else they may be. ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... the city, and on Brooklyn Bridge watched the suburbanites going home, crowding surface-car and elevated. From their perch on the giant spider's web of steel, they saw the Long Island Sound steamers below them, passing through a maelstrom of light on ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... from the chonchoids and the cycloids pencilled by the Eternal Geometrician! and these celestial traceries of the dawn, which neither Da Vinci nor Raphaello was able to have followed as a mimic, far less as a rival, we regard as a nuisance claiming the attentions of the window-cleaner; even as the spider's web, that might absorb an angel into reverie, is honoured amongst the things banned by the housemaid. But the reason why the wax-work disgusts is that it seeks to reproduce in literal detail the traits that should be softened under a general diffusive ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... deeply. He was often gloomy and wrapped in thought and felt that life was not what it ought to be. He had a dim notion that once upon a time a terrible crime had been committed, which it was now everybody's business to hide by practising countless deceptions; he compared himself to a fly caught in a spider's web: the more it struggled to regain its freedom, the more it entangled itself, until at last it died miserably, strangled ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... never seen anything like it before. We had become so accustomed to doing without communication trenches that they were a distinct novelty. They, together with the many support trenches, made a perfect labyrinth: like a spider's web, only not quite so ...
— The Emma Gees • Herbert Wes McBride
... back take a very long thread of raffia in your needle, make seven cross threads and weave a spider's web, having the center fill about one-fourth the space. When the web is finished, buttonhole around the reed to fasten the spirals in position and to give a finish to the frame ...
— Construction Work for Rural and Elementary Schools • Virginia McGaw
... one pair of eyes, at least, the police-net was as plainly visible as a spider's web hanging ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... to bathe himself in the brook, and put on his finest court suit of pink satin rose-petals trimmed with lace from a spider's web; for the fairy queen had ordered a grand court ball in his honor, and there was ...
— The Story-teller • Maud Lindsay
... waited for a move from Solomon. In a few minutes he heard a stir in the brush. Then he could dimly see the face of his friend beyond the spider's web. ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... bottom of all these apish and wanton extravagancies. But many have their excuses ready; to wit, their parents, their husbands, and their breeding calls for it, and the like; yea, the examples of good people prompt them to it; but all these will be but the spider's web, when the thunder of the word of the great God shall rattle from heaven against them, as it will at death or judgment; but I wish it might do it before. But alas! these excuses are but bare pretences, these proud ones ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... hairs, four teeth, a breast Like grasshopper, an emmet's crest, A skin more rugged than thy coat, And drugs like spider's web to boot." ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... how he spoke thus, looking at a spider's web. 'Thou cunning little weaver, thou dost teach me perseverance. Let them tear thy web, and thou wilt begin it again, and complete it. Let them destroy it again, and thou wilt resolutely begin to work again—again! That is what we must do, and that ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... deserted. Perhaps life on a man-of-war with its restrictions irked him, perhaps he was in trouble, and perhaps it was the South Seas and these romantic islands that got into his bones. Every now and then they take a man strangely, and he finds himself like a fly in a spider's web. It may be that there was a softness of fibre in him, and these green hills with their soft airs, this blue sea, took the northern strength from him as Delilah took the Nazarite's. Anyhow, he wanted to hide himself, and he thought he would be safe in this ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... changed,—has but six months more to live. He, who disregards the deities, or quarrels with the Brahmanas, or one, who, being naturally of a dark complexion becomes pale of hue, has but six months more to live. One, who sees the lunar disc to have many holes like a spider's web, or one, who sees the solar disc to have similar holes has but one week more to live. One, who, when smelling fragrant scents in place of worship, perceives them to be as offensive as the scent of corpses, has but one week more ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown |
