"Crocodile" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... yelling hawks under charge of a Rajput falconer in the small of his back. 'He has gone now to send word of the letter which I hid. They told me he was in Peshawur. I might have known that he is like the crocodile—always at the other ford. He has saved me from present calamity, but I ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... flowing ease and stirring vitality. His views may have been more or less partial; Philip the Second may have deserved the pitying benevolence of poor Maximilian; Maurice may have wept as sincerely over the errors of Arminius as any one of "the crocodile crew that believe in election;" Barneveld and Grotius may have been on the road to Rome; none of these things seem probable, but if they were all proved true in opposition to his views, we should still have the long roll of glowing tapestry he has woven for us, with all its life-like portraits, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... yellow and black; and with the Aurantes who bury their dead on the tops of trees, and themselves live in dark caverns lest the Sun, who is their god, should slay them; and with the Krimnians who worship a crocodile, and give it earrings of green glass, and feed it with butter and fresh fowls; and with the Agazonbae, who are dog-faced; and with the Sibans, who have horses' feet, and run more swiftly than horses. A third of our company died in battle, and a third died of want. The rest murmured against ...
— A House of Pomegranates • Oscar Wilde
... who lived in the fourth century. It is said that he could walk among serpents unhurt; and when he had occasion to cross the Nile, he was carried on the back of a crocodile. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... shore he came up for a moment, then dived again heading for the island. I dare say I could have potted him through the head with a snap shot, but somehow I did not like to kill a man swimming for his life as though he were a hippopotamus or a crocodile. Moreover, the boldness of the manoeuvre appealed to me. So I refrained from firing and called to the ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... have attempted to give in India performances on European lines. They have purchased the necessary paraphernalia from London and have as much idea of using it to its best advantage as a crocodile has of arranging the flowers on a dinner table. Our Indian Jadoo-wallah usually gets himself into a very tight fitting third or fourth hand evening dress on these occasions, to show, I presume, how European he is. The audience is more concerned with the possibility of its bursting and their ...
— Indian Conjuring • L. H. Branson
... construct, or piece together, as it were, these old-world monsters. You will see the picture of one of them in the new Pocket-book heading. It is called by the long name "Ichthyosaurus"—a Greek term meaning "fish-reptile." This animal was a huge creature something like a crocodile, with four paddles and a tail, and its native element was water. It had a large head with big eyes, and its jaws were well filled with terrible teeth. It possessed features in common with fishes as well as with reptiles, and hence its ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... shedding tears like a crocodile, without moving a feature. Mr. Budlong put the lighted end of a cigar in his mouth and burned his tongue to a blister, while Miss Eyester dropped into a chair and had her sinking spell and recovered without any one remarking it. In an abandonment ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... direction of east, east-south-east, and south-east, but about a mile further, it turned sharply northwards in a bed of soft sand, between sand mounds to the north-east and a sand bank facing north, the top of which, full of humps, was not unlike a crocodile's back. ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... Pharaoh's cat: so the Percnopter becomes Pharaoh's hen and the unfortunate (?) King has named a host of things, alive and dead. It was worshipped and mummified in parts of Ancient Egypt e.g. Heracleopolis, on account of its antipathy to serpents and because it was supposed to destroy the crocodile, a feat with AElian and others have overloaded with fable. It has also a distinct antipathy to cats. The ichneumon as a pet becomes too tame and will not leave its master: when enraged it emits an offensive stench. I brought home for the Zoological Gardens a Central ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... against the coughs of hawks. And though it might be thought that all animals who have lungs do cough; yet in cataceous* fishes, who have large and strong lungs, the same is not observed; nor yet in oviparous quadrupeds: and in the greatest thereof, the crocodile, although we read much of their tears, we find ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... that leads to the sea, We all live happy as happy can be, The crocodile comes and opens his jaws, And the giant crab stretches out his claws, And the sword fish chases the sharp toothed shark, But here we are safe when the day grows dark, And the pale white moon looks down from the sky, And the little star ...
— The Iceberg Express • David Magie Cory
... beautiful maidens and the most noble came out to meet their sovereign, presenting him the keys of the city wreathed with flowers, and singing to the accompaniment of the shepherd's pipe. Passing through the mountain, Charles saw chained to a palm tree in the depths of a grotto a monster crocodile from whose jaws issued flames: this was a representation of the old coat of arms granted to the city by Octavius Caesar Augustus after the battle of Actium, and which Francis I had restored to it in exchange for a model ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the fruitful shore of muddy Nile, Upon a sunny bank outstretched lay, In monstrous length, a mighty crocodile." ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 234, April 22, 1854 • Various
... the grain, I tell you. Poor critters, when they get away back there, they grow as thin as a sawed lath; their little peepers are as dull as a boiled codfish; their skin looks like yaller fever, and they seem all mouth like a crocodile. And that's not the worst of it neither, for when a woman begins to grow saller it's all over with her; she's up a tree then you may depend, there's no mistake. You can no more bring back her bloom than you can the colour to a leaf the frost has touched in the fall. It's gone goose with her, that's ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... indian corn, or rice and beans, boiled in water, without fat or salt. To them nothing comes amiss. They will devour greedily racoon, opossum, squirrels, wood-rats, and even the crocodile; leaving to the white people the roebuck and rabbit, which they sell them when they kill ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... Tantor, or Duro. Histah, the snake, was there. He saw him in the trees in greater numbers than he ever had seen Histah before; and once beside a reedy pool he caught a scent that could have belonged to none other than Gimla the crocodile, but upon none of these did ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... poisons, like the foxglove and kalmia—types of deceit; but all the venomous serpents I have really seen are grey, brick-red, or brown, variously mottled; and the most awful serpent I have seen, the Egyptian asp, is precisely of the color of gravel, or only a little greyer. So, again, the crocodile and alligator are grey, but the innocent lizard green and beautiful. I do not mean that the rule is invariable, otherwise it would be more convincing than the lessons of the natural universe are intended ever ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... I can learn," went on Mr. Preston, "my old rival Waydell has given up the giant idea. He is looking for a two-headed crocodile, said to be somewhere along the Nile river, and he's fitting out an expedition there I understand. I guess we won't be bothered with him. But the giant for mine! If I get that sort of an attraction his two-headed crocodile won't be in it. I hope ...
— Tom Swift in Captivity • Victor Appleton
... Sundays, and sometimes on week-days, too; and he is now a great man of science, and can plan railroads, and steam-engines, and electric telegraphs, and rifled guns, and so forth; and knows everything about everything, except why a hen's egg don't turn into a crocodile, and two or three other little things which no one will know till the coming of the Cocqcigrues. And all this from what he learnt when he was a water-baby, ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... calling her a Monster, or some other ill name. Although they know very well that such sort of Monsters are now a daies so common, that if they were all to be shewn in Booths for farthings a peece, there would be less spectators, then there was to see the Sheep with five legs, or the great Crocodile. ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh
... beasts of prey A novice might nonplus; Yet from the Crocodile you may Tell the Hyena, thus: 'Tis the Hyena if it smile; ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... representative of this antediluvian family? I can scarcely believe it possible; I can hardly believe it true. And yet these marks of powerful teeth upon the bar of iron! Can there be a doubt from their shape that the bite is the bite of a crocodile? ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... nor your young wheat,' said the biggest crocodile, 'if you will give us your daughter in marriage; but if not, we will eat you for throwing stones ...
— Tales Of The Punjab • Flora Annie Steel
... the American Consul-General, and so far back as 1862, when in Alexandria, she mentions having engaged him, and his hopeful prophecy of the good her Nile life is to do her. "My cough is bad; but Omar says I shall lose it and 'eat plenty' as soon as I see a crocodile." ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... limbs and long snaky tail of the lizard with the short, compact body, long powerful hind limbs and three-toed feet of the bird. The skin was probably either naked or covered with horny scales as in lizards and snakes; at all events it was not armor-plated as in the crocodile.[4] They walked or ran upon the hind legs; in many of them the fore limbs are quite unfitted for support of the body and must have been used solely in fighting ...
— Dinosaurs - With Special Reference to the American Museum Collections • William Diller Matthew
... superstitious opinion that is still more unaccountable. They believe that women, when they are delivered of children, are frequently at the same time delivered of a young crocodile, as a twin to the infant: They believe that these creatures are received most carefully by the midwife, and immediately carried down to the river, and put into the water. The family in which such a birth is supposed ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... in that peaceful bay at the mercy of a horde of painted savages—was one of the strange facts almost beyond credence which men encounter at times in the byways of life. It reminded Courtenay of a visit he paid to the crocodile tank at Karachi when he was a midshipman on the Boadicea. He noticed that some of the huge saurians, eighteen feet in length and covered with scale armor off which a bullet would glance, were squirming uneasily, and the Hindu attendant told him ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... screams, 'arf crying with rage. "You wait till I get my 'ands loose and I'll pull you to pieces. The idea o' leaving us like this all night, you old crocodile. I 'eard you ...
— Odd Craft, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... frisolillos o havas con que echan las suertes los sortilegos" [beans used by the sorcerers in casting lots or telling fortunes]; another meaning is "the ridge" (pichijlla, lechijlla, chijllatani, loma o cordillera de sierra); another is "the crocodile" (cocodrillo, lagarto grande de agua); and another "swordfish" (pella-pichijlla-tao, espadarte pescado). Finally, we have chilla-tao, "the great Chilla," given again as one of the names of the highest being. Here it seems to me that the signification "crocodile" is ...
— Day Symbols of the Maya Year • Cyrus Thomas
... Another Egyptian fish deity was the god Rem, whose name signifies "to weep"; he wept fertilizing tears, and corn was sown and reaped amidst lamentations. He may be identical with Remi, who was a phase of Sebek, the crocodile god, a developed attribute of Nu, the vague primitive Egyptian deity who symbolized the primordial deep. The connection between a fish god and a corn god is not necessarily remote when we ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... stiffen to the shape of the legs. A heavy-stocked musket, made at Dieppe or Nantes, with a barrel four and a half feet long, and carrying sixteen balls to the pound,[6] lay over the shoulder, a calabash full of powder, with a wax stopper, was slung behind, and a belt of crocodile's skin, with four knives and a bayonet, went round the waist. These individuals, if the term is applicable to the phenomena ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... gliding beneath the sleek brown hides; and when Muda Saffir rose to the surface with a cry for help upon his lips Ninaka shouted back to him in derision, consigning his carcass to the belly of the nearest crocodile. ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... was on the outside of a pane of glass, with a candle on the inside. There is, I believe, no class of living creatures in which the gradations can be traced with such minuteness and regularity as in this; where, from the small animal just described, to the huge alligator or crocodile, a chain may be traced containing almost innumerable links, of which the remotest have a striking resemblance to each other, and seem, at first view, ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... streamers waved on high But, ah! how changed the scene ere night descends! Hark to the shout that heaven's high concave rends! Hark to that dying cry! Whilst, louder yet, the cannon's roar Resounds along the Nile's affrighted shore, Where, from his oozy bed, The cowering crocodile hath raised his head! What bursting flame Lightens the long track of the gleamy brine! 110 From yon proud ship it came, That towered the leader of the hostile line! Now loud explosion rends the midnight air! Heard ye ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... the great rock-temple of Abou Simbel (Ipsambul) (No. 1, F. 307). It Is the sublimest of stereographs, as the temple of Kardasay, this loveliest of views on glass, is the most poetical. But here is the crocodile lying in wait for us on the sandy bank of the Nile, and we must leave Egypt ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... enrage him, for he now quickened his pace, and seemed to approach me full speed. I attempted to escape, but that only added (if an addition could be made) to my distress; for the moment I turned about I found a large crocodile, with his mouth extended almost ready to receive me. On my right hand was the piece of water before mentioned, and on my left a deep precipice, said to have, as I have since learned, a receptacle at the ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... us on the animals of Egypt, and says, "If the crocodile findeth a man by the water's brim he slayeth him, and then he weepeth over ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... he resumed. "Go you to the place near the Crocodile River where Sandi sits, say Mimbimi the chief loves him, and because of his love Mimbimi will do a great thing. Also he said," the man went on, "and this is the greatest message of all. Before I speak further you must make ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... Kop, situated on the north side of the Olifant's River, where it passes through the ridges; thence about north-north-west to the nearest point of Serra di Chicundo; and thence to the junction of the Pafori River with the Limpopo or Crocodile River; thence up the course of the Limpopo River to the point where the Marique River falls into it. Thence up the course of the Marique River to 'Derde Poort,' where it passes through a low range of hills, called ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... Mr Austin in a voice which made the leafy archway ring again. "Steer straight for the crocodile, Tom; plump the boat right on him; and, bow-oar, lay in and stand by to prod the fellow with your boat-hook. Drive it into him under the arm-pit if you can; that, I believe, ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... and numerous of these Triassic Reptiles seems to have been an animal resembling, in the form of the head, and in the two articulating surfaces at the juncture of the head with the backbone, the Frogs and Salamanders, though its teeth are like those of a Crocodile. As yet nothing has been found of these animals except the head,—neither the backbone nor the limbs; so that little is known of their ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... the Egyptians worshipped a great number of beasts; as the ox, the dog, the wolf, the hawk, the crocodile, the ibis,(344) the cat, &c. Many of these beasts were the objects of the superstition only of some particular cities; and whilst one people worshipped one species of animals as gods, their neighbours held ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... satirise Dr Woodward, then famous as a fossilist; the piece, being personal and indecent, was not only hissed but hooted off the stage. The chief offence was taken at the introduction of a mummy and a crocodile on the stage. To divert his grief, he, at the suggestion of Lord Burlington, who paid his expenses, rambled into Devonshire, went next with Pultney to Aix, in France, and when afterwards on a visit to Lord Harcourt's seat, witnessed the ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... And said: "Be good Enough to look this way; Court Etiquette Do not forget, And mark well what I say: My royal wish Is ev'ry dish Be tasted first by me." "Here's where I smile," Said the Crocodile, And he ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... far as is absolutely necessary for the leaving a posterity. Some creatures cast their eggs as chance directs them, and think of them no farther, as insects and several kinds of fish; others, of a nicer frame, find out proper beds to deposite them in, and there leave them; as the serpent, the crocodile, and ostrich: Others hatch their eggs, and tend the birth, till it is able to shift ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... swift stag from under ground Bore up his branching head: Scarce from his mould Behemoth biggest born of earth upheaved His vastness: Fleeced the flocks and bleating rose, As plants: Ambiguous between sea and land The river-horse, and scaly crocodile. At once came forth whatever creeps the ground, Insect or worm: those waved their limber fans For wings, and smallest lineaments exact In all the liveries decked of summer's pride With spots of gold and ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... of the gape on the mother was to remind her of one class of inhabitants of her native rivers—the crocodile—and cause her laughingly to style the child her "young crocodile." The Malagasy word for crocodile is mamba, and thus the child came by his name, with the usual prefix, Ra-Mamba. After a time his mother became so proud of her young crocodile that she dropped ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... bank, where he stood for a time looking toward the East, and calling upon the antoh Allatala. Then he went into the water, dived, and searched for ten days until he found the cave, inside of which there was a house. This was the home of the crocodile antoh, and was surrounded by men, some of them alive, some half dead, ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... tyrants, who knew no distinction between the tears of a crocodile and the tears of a terrified child, made him go through his catechism to the bitter end. They howled with delight when they heard him call himself Bertie, and paused in dead silence to hear him say whether he was like "papa or mamma"—"or ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... all that occurred, brought in his wagon one morning a strange little yellow animal, almost without paws, with the body of a crocodile, the head of a fox, and a curly tail—a true cockade, as big as all the rest of him. Mme. Lefevre thought this common cur that cost nothing was very handsome. Rose hugged it and asked what its ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... the crocodile; another dreads the ibis, feeder on serpents; here shines the golden image of the sacred ape; here men venerate the fish of the river; there whole towns ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... opinions, and bad customs. Who is there who is unacquainted with the customs of the Egyptians? Their minds being tainted by pernicious opinions, they are ready to bear any torture, rather than hurt an ibis, a snake, a cat, a dog, or a crocodile: and should any one inadvertently have hurt any of these animals, he will submit to any punishment. I am speaking of men only. As to the beasts, do they not bear cold and hunger, running about in woods, and on mountains and deserts? will they ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... their prey behind a bullock; the Gosain Pardhis, who dress like religious mendicants in ochre-coloured clothes and do not kill deer, but only hares, jackals and foxes; the Shishi ke Telwale, who sell crocodile's oil; and the Bandarwale who go about with performing monkeys. The Bahelias have a subcaste known as Karijat, the members of which only kill birds of a black colour. Their exogamous groups are nearly all those of Rajput tribes, as Sesodia, Panwar, Solanki, Chauhan, ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... Buzzard" found in our Foreign Section. It was given to him by the Reverend J. E. Hatch of the South African General Mission. Along with this rhyme came the following in his kind and obliging letter: "We thought the story of how the Crocodile got its scaly skin might ...
— Negro Folk Rhymes - Wise and Otherwise: With a Study • Thomas W. Talley
... existence of this long succession of different species of crocodiles to be accounted for? Only two suppositions seem to be open to us—Either each species of crocodile has been specially created, or it has arisen out of some pre-existing form by the operation of natural causes. Choose your hypothesis; I have chosen mine. I can find no warranty for believing in the distinct creation of a score of successive species ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... crest along its back like an iguana, is found in shallow ponds, also the smooth newt. These efts, or evvets, as the people call them, are regarded with horror by the peasantry. The children speak of having seen one as if it were a crocodile; and an abscess in the arm has been ascribed to having picked up an "evvet in a bundle ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... have lost it when I saw all of you pulling such long faces in the church where you knew you were under observation. Pah! Such hypocrisy! And then, to cap it all, Emily has to force out a few crocodile tears at ...
— The First Man • Eugene O'Neill
... to go anywhere: into the jaws of a crocodile, or even into the jaws of hell, so long as I don't have to stay here. I am horribly bored. I am stupefied by this dullness. Every one here is tired of me. You leave me at home to entertain Anna, but I feel more like ...
— Ivanoff - A Play • Anton Checkov
... the right. About Lilly, I mean. I was rather hateful to her, I confess. Never mind. When she comes downstairs, I'll make up. She's a crocodile, if ever there was one; but, as she's your cousin, I'll be good to her. Kiss me quick to prove ...
— What Katy Did At School • Susan Coolidge
... Bible, as with light, And the shadows of the night, Like Sidmouth, next, Hypocrisy On a crocodile rode ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... wert readily doomed to die with us. Oh, dearest Lady Fleming, pardon, pardon, for the injuries I said to you in my anger—your words were prompted by Heaven to save our lives, and especially that of the injured Queen. But what have we now to do? that old crocodile of the lake will be presently back to shed her hypocritical tears over our dying agonies.—Lady Fleming, ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... The expression "crocodile's tears" has passed into common use, and it therefore may be worth while noting the probable origin of this myth. Shakespeare, with that wide extent of knowledge which enabled him to draw similes from every department of human thought, ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... variants there is one common idea, that of the ingratitude of a rescued animal (crocodile, snake, tiger, etc.), which is thwarted by its being placed back in the situation from which it was rescued. In some cases the bystander who restores equilibrium is alone; in most instances there are three of them; the first two having suffered from man's ingratitude see no reason for ...
— Europa's Fairy Book • Joseph Jacobs
... "Yes, Miss Crocodile, dull with a pattern uncle and his friend—and your admirer." He watched her to see how she would take this last word. Catch her taking it at all. "I am never dull with you, dear uncle," said she; "but a third person, ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... wearie traveller that strayes By muddy shore of broad seven-mouthed Nile, 155 Unweeting of the perillous wandring wayes, Doth meete a cruell craftie Crocodile, Which in false griefe hyding his harmefull guile, Doth weepe full sore, and sheddeth tender teares:[*] The foolish man, that pitties all this while 160 His mournefull plight, is swallowed up unawares, Forgetfull of his owne, ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... unappeasable malignity of Pope he imputes to a very distant cause. After the Three Hours After Marriage had been driven off the stage, by the offence which the mummy and crocodile gave the audience, while the exploded scene was yet fresh in memory, it happened that Cibber played Bayes in the Rehearsal; and, as it had been usual to enliven the part by the mention of any recent theatrical transactions, he said, that he once thought to ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... composite double-sexed creature who should not have a designating personal pronoun) is all-revealing. For talking it out instantly brings to light the weak spots in one's recollection. "What was it the little crocodile said?" "Just how did the little pig get into his house?" "What was that link in the chain of circumstances which brought the wily fox to confusion?" The slightest cloud of uncertainty becomes obvious in a moment. And as obvious becomes one's paucity of expression, one's week-kneed imagination, ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... Harry Gee addressed him as "Crocodile," in that half-jeering, half-bullying tone which is characteristic of self-satisfaction in ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... the only foe for which the orang really has a hatred is the crocodile. It seems to share with man a shuddering fear of snakes, although orangs have no part in making Kentucky famous. But the crocodile is his natural and hereditary enemy. And as if to get even with this ancient foe, who occasionally snaps off a young orang in his prime, the orangs ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... cases where organic nature not only fails to be beautiful, but reveals itself as the reverse. Not again to refer to the case of parasites, what can be more unshapely than a hippopotamus, or more generally repulsive than a crocodile? If it be said that these are exceptions, and that the forms of animals as a rule are graceful, the answer—even apart from parasites—is obvious. In all cases where the habits of life are such as to render ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... North Carolina. They are hunted for their skin, which furnishes an excellent leather for traveling bags, purses, etc., and because of the incessant pursuit are now becoming quite rare in many localities where formerly they were numerous. The American crocodile, very much like the one occurring in the river Nile, is also found at the ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... trade he had a partner—a fair lad of Scandinavian origin named Adolphus. All these orientals have extraordinary faith in the medicinal properties of the gall of out-of-the-way creatures. That of a wallaby is prized; of a "goanna" absolutely precious; while in respect of a crocodile, only a man who has leisure to be ill and is determined to doctor himself on the reckless principle of "blow the expense," could afford any such luxurious physic. It is reckoned next in virtue to a text from the Koran written on board: "Wash ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... often occurred to me since that if the scale of things had been enlarged—if Stoffles, for example, had been a Bengal tiger, and the Dryad a boa-constrictor or crocodile,—the tragedy which followed would have been worthy of the pen of any sporting and dramatic historian. I can only say that, being transacted in such objectionable proximity to myself, the thing was as impressive ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... Jason loitered, and where Sappho sung, He sought the secret-founted wave of Nile, And of their old world, dead a weary while, Heard the priests murmur in their mystic tongue, And through the fanes went voyaging, among Dark tribes that worshipped Cat and Crocodile. ...
— Grass of Parnassus • Andrew Lang
... I've spoken to a clergyman, ma'am. I'm the daughter of a clergyman, and the granddaughter of a clergyman, and I know what a clergyman is when he is brave and good, and gentle and merciful to all women, and when he is a man and a gentleman—not a Pharisee and a crocodile!" ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... against the whale fighteth a fish of serpent's kind, and is venomous as a crocodile. And then other fish come to the whale's tail, and if the whale be overcome the other fish die. And if the venomous fish may not overcome the whale, then he throweth out of his jaws the whale throweth out of his mouth a sweet smelling ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... an old man of Boulak, Who sate on a Crocodile's back; But they said, "Towr'ds the night he may probably bite, Which might vex you, old man ...
— Nonsense Books • Edward Lear
... beside the reedy Nile Thou hast ever held thy way, Where the embryo crocodile In the damp sedge lay; When the river monster's eye Kindled at thy passing by, And the pliant reeds were bending Where his blackened form was wending, And the basking serpent started Wildly when thy light ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard
... elephant stables the chaprassis scurry the visitors through fragrant gardens and under bizarre arches to the crocodile department, where a score of saurians are pastured in an enclosure that is half swamp and half lake and is acres in extent. Visitors are placed at the top of a staircase of masonry descending to the water, while two wild-eyed Hindus seek to rouse the crocodiles from their siesta on a grassy ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... cover the meadows and cluster along the shallow water-courses. No venomous reptiles lurk in these fragrant places: the seed-tick, mosquito, and a spiteful little fly are the greatest annoyances. The horned lizard, which the Indians esteemed so delicate, and the ferocious crocodile, or caiman, haunt the secluded sands and large streams, and the lagoons ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... his five sons and dozen daughters, he has succeeded in making extensive connexions [23], and his sister, the Gisti [24] Fatimah, was married to Abubakr, father of the present Amir. Yet the Gerad would walk into a crocodile's mouth as willingly as within the walls of Harar. His main reason for receiving us politely was an ephemeral fancy for building a fort, to control the country's trade, and rival or overawe the city. Still did he not neglect ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... own; the Game Chicken, as the premature Bob called him, working his way up, took his final grip of poor Yarrow's throat—and he lay gasping and done for. His master, a brown, handsome, big young shepherd from Tweedsmuir, would have liked to have knocked down any man, would "drink up Esil, or eat a crocodile," for that part, if he had a chance: it was no use kicking the little dog; that would only make him hold the closer. Many were the means shouted out in mouthfuls, of the best possible ways of ending ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... he turned around, swung up both heels, struck Mr. Hog under the chin, and knocked him over and over as many as six times. Then Mr. Donkey trotted off slowly, with a smile on his face that was for all the world like Mr. Crocodile's after he ...
— Mouser Cats' Story • Amy Prentice
... Partridge mournfully, "I am so small and weak. But it grows late-we should be getting home; and as it is a long way round by the ford, let us go across the river. My friend the Crocodile will carry us over." ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... enduring ten thousand times more than that for ever. He should hear her shrieking in vain for a drop of water to cool her tongue.... He had never heard a human being shriek but once.... a boy bathing on the opposite Nile bank, whom a crocodile had dragged down.... and that scream, faint and distant as it came across the mighty tide, had rung intolerable in his ears for days.... and to think of all which echoed through those vaults of fire-for ever! Was the thought bearable!—was it ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... of these gins when set produced a vivid impression that it was endowed with life. It exhibited the combined aspects of a shark, a crocodile, and a scorpion. Each tooth was in the form of a tapering spine, two and a quarter inches long, which, when the jaws were closed, stood in alternation from this side and from that. When they were open, the two halves formed ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... all alike. A tear rose to her eye. She bravely dried it with a finger of a white cotton glove, and produced her purse, an imitation crocodile-leather and sham-silver affair, bought in Kentish Town, where you may walk through odorous groves of dried haddocks that are really whiting, and Yarmouth bloaters that never were at Yarmouth, and purchase whole Rambler roses, the latest Paris style, for threepence, and try on feather-boas at ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... Africa to the East men will fight and quarrel and bicker so long as human nerves are human nerves. The irritability lurks in the shades of boundless forests where men may starve for want of animal sustenance; it hovers over the broad bosoms of a hundred slow rivers haunted by the mysterious crocodile, the weird hippopotamus. It is everywhere, and by reason of it men quarrel about trifles and descend to brutal passion ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... methods of the profession adapt themselves to the modern conception of an army of devoted men working as a whole under God for the health of mankind as a whole, broadening out from the frowsy den of the "leech," with its crocodile and bottles and hieroglyphic prescriptions, to a skilled and illuminating co-operation with those who deal with the food and housing and economic life ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... a crocodile's back, you may expect to fall into trouble, from which you will have to struggle mightily to extricate yourself. Heed this warning when dreams of this nature visit you. Avoid giving your ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... on to it as members of the same sub-kingdom of Mollusca; and finally, starting from man, I should have been compelled to admit first, the ape, the rat, the horse, the dog, into the same class; and then the bird, the crocodile, the turtle, the frog, and the fish, into the ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... eyes had a way of not blinking. They held a crocodile fixity. His tone, when he spoke again, did not vary. "I am not a trader, Osterbridge. Nor shall I bandy words with you on this subject. Give me that bird, or I shall ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... illustrated journal of the first century. One there sees odd landscapes; a little island on the edge of the water; a bank of the Nile where an ass, stooping to drink, bends toward the open jaws of a crocodile which he does not see, while his master frantically but vainly endeavors to pull him back by the tail. These pieces nearly always consist of rocks on the edge of the water, sometimes interspersed with trees, sometimes covered with ranges ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... and we regaled ourselves with a delicious haunch. Meantime, little Gale, who never ceased prying about the cracks in the rocks during our mid-day halts in the heat, discovered an ourane, a sand crocodile, five feet long, and made short work of breaking his neck. She ate so much she could not budge. It cost us a pint of water to help her digestion. We gave it with good grace, for we were happy. Tanit-Zerga did not say so, but her joy at knowing that I was thinking ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... cila, nave ain vie, vie cocodri qui te gagnin Dans temps cela en avait un vieux, vieux crocodile qui avait gagne ...
— Nights With Uncle Remus - Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation • Joel Chandler Harris
... raving fancy should direct My trecherous tongue with that detested name To afflict thy unblemishd purity, Belisea. I do confes my error was an act Soe grosse and heathnish that its very sight Would have inforcd a Crocodile to weepe Drops as sincere as does the timorous heart When he ore heares the featherd ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... daring should be a tame possibility, save only the last; but I say that they are all possible; that it was a daring to do not impossible but extravagant feats. As far as quantity is concerned, to eat a crocodile would be more than to eat an ox. Crocodile may be a very delicate meat, for anything I know to the contrary; but I must confess it appears to me to be introduced as something loathsome or repulsive, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 68, February 15, 1851 • Various
... animal wreathed, gathering itself in coils: hence a serpent, or some great reptile. The description in Job xli. is evidently that of a mighty crocodile, though in Psalm civ. leviathan is said to play in "the great and wide sea," which has raised a difficulty as to its identification in the minds of some commentators. In the present passage it is supposed ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... entitled "The Trip to Calais;" in which the author having ridiculed, under the name of Kitty Crocodile, the eccentric Duchess of Kingston she offered him a sum of money to strike out the part. A correspondence took place between the parties, which ended in the Duchess making an application to Lord Hertford, ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... He climbed the platform, holding in one hand an end of the rope. Then he pulled with all his strength, and the monster came in view. The rope was round its neck and the fore part of its body; it was large, and on its back could be seen green moss—to a crocodile what white hair is to man. It bellowed like an ox, beat the reeds with its tail, crouched, and opened its jaws, black and terrifying, showing its long and saw-like teeth. No one thought of aiding the helmsman. When he had drawn the reptile out of the water he put his foot ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... America, are still designated. Like the Assyrian and Chaldean Nargals, chiefs of the Magi, the Mexican Nagual unites in his person the functions of priest and of sorcerer, being served in the latter capacity by a demon in the shape of some animal, generally a snake or a crocodile. These Naguals are thought to be the descendants of Nagua, the king of the snakes. Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg devotes a considerable amount of space to them in his book about Mexico, and says that the Naguals are servants of the evil one, who, in his turn, renders them but a temporary service. ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... branching head: scarse from his mould 470 Behemoth biggest born of Earth upheav'd His vastness: Fleec't the Flocks and bleating rose, As Plants: ambiguous between Sea and Land The River Horse and scalie Crocodile. At once came forth whatever creeps the ground, Insect or Worme; those wav'd thir limber fans For wings, and smallest Lineaments exact In all the Liveries dect of Summers pride With spots of Gold and ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... which was a lion devouring a crocodile, appeared the clown's head, grinning from ear to ear. He was so utterly grotesque that ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... forcibly reminding me of an image I had seen of some Oriental god upon his throne. His eyes were scarcely opened, his breathing was almost imperceptible; a gross animal content appeared in him as of a full-fed, lethargic crocodile. Side by side, he and the gaunt, fierce-eyed old man presented no mean allegory of spirit and body. A table was before them, and in the middle of it a toy the like of which I had never seen in this house ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... inevitable policy of Wiggins; he changes his name! He comes forth, curled and sweetened, and with a smile upon his mealy face, and placing his felon hand above the vacuum on the left side of his bosom—declares, whilst the tears he weeps would make a crocodile blush—that he is by no means the Tory his wicked, heartless enemies would call him. Certainly not. His name is—Conservative! There was, once, to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... effects of the inundation upon the soil of Egypt—Paucity of the flora: aquatic plants, the papyrus and the lotus; the sycamore and the date-palm, the acacias, the dom-palms—The fauna: the domestic and wild animals; serpents, the urstus; the hippopotamus and the crocodile; birds; fish, the fahaka. ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero |
