"Elephant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... raging showers gave us views of the drowning jungle under another aspect, and between them we awakened vast rolling echoes across the silent flooded world by shooting at flocks of little birds with an army rifle that would have killed an elephant. ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... in mountain-climbing which I should like to speak of, by the way, and which makes it much pleasanter and better exercise. If, after first starting—and, of course, you should start very slowly and heavily, like an elephant—you get out of breath, let yourself stay out of breath. Even emphasize the being out of breath by breathing harder than your lungs started to breathe, and then let your lungs pump and pump and pump until they find their own equilibrium. The result is delightful, and the physical freedom ...
— Nerves and Common Sense • Annie Payson Call
... been already remarked by writers,—though that will not prevent me from repeating it,—that, of all the four-footed friends of man, none, not even that corpulent chap, Elephant, has contributed more voluminously to the literature of anecdote than that first-rate fellow, Dog. Let me also take the liberty of recalling, in corroboration of others who have previously drawn attention to the same fact, that from the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... In its rich affluence of imagery this story is like a picture by Mantegna, and indeed Mantegna might have suggested the description of the pageant in which Denys rides upon a gaily-painted chariot, in soft silken raiment and, for head-dress, a strange elephant ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... female, and a small one. When it re-appeared harpoons and lances were at once driven into it, and it was killed almost immediately. This is not always the result of such an encounter, for this elephant of the polar seas is naturally a ferocious brute, and when bulls are attacked they are prone to show fight ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... is the Elephant Seal, once numerous, but killed by man until now there are few members of this branch of the family. He is a tremendous fellow and has a movable nose which hangs ...
— The Burgess Animal Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... was an elephant, Stately and wise: He had tusks and a trunk, And two queer little eyes, e Oh, ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... down—a deadly stick of a tree like a lance. I could not but admire the wisdom and faith of this great brute; I never saw the riding-horse that would not have lost its life in such a situation; but the cart-elephant patiently waited and was saved. It was a stirring three minutes, I can ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... what two could not," he answered. "Perhaps, if we can get some rollers under her keel, we may be able to do it; and Tamaku is as strong as an elephant." ...
— Twice Lost • W.H.G. Kingston
... walls, would have caused the dullest eye to brighten with amusement, if not with admiration. Of course, the Stars and Stripes hung highest, with the English lion ramping on the royal standard close by; then followed a regular picture-gallery, for there was the white elephant of Siam, the splendid peacock of Burmah, the double-headed Russian eagle, and black dragon of China, the winged lion of Venice, and the prancing pair on the red, white, and blue flag of Holland. The keys and mitre of the Papal States were a hard job, but up they went at last, with the yellow ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott
... his lunch in a little basket on one leg and carrying his bean shooter, and plenty of beans. He knew a deep, dark, dismal stretch of woodland where there were so many mosquitoes that they wouldn't have been afraid to bite even an elephant, if one had happened along. You see there were so many of the mosquitoes that they were bold and savage, like ...
— Bully and Bawly No-Tail • Howard R. Garis
... Epicurian Empress of Ethiopia, Electrified the East End of Egypt by Eagerly and Easily Eating, as an Experiment, an Egg, an Eagle, an Emu, and Electrical Eel, and an Enormous Elephant, larger than the one Exhibited ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... grand elephant to be ready for her the next morning, and when the morning came, and all was ready, she dressed herself in the most lovely clothes, and put on her beautiful jewels; then she mounted her elephant, which was painted blue. In her hand she took ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Collected by Joseph Jacobs
... the path of it. It seemed that he could no more dodge it than he could hope to escape an onrushing locomotive, but it landed on empty air, with Moran around in back of the Russian, and peering impishly up under his arm. It was like an elephant worried by a mosquito. Then Moran's lightning right shot out again, smartly, and seemed just to tap the great hulk on the side of the chin. A ludicrous look of surprise on Slovatsky's face ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... is supposed to be progressive. "I can recall," he would say in trying to make his point, "the picture of a poor devil of a donkey on a treadmill. He keeps on tramping, tramping, tramping, but he never gets anywhere. But," he continued, "there is a certain elephant that's tramping, too, and how much progress is it making?" And then, again, he would grow solemn when he spoke of the average man. Turning aside from the humorous, he would strike a ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... and beautiful creatures as they meekly and lovingly came to him? The mighty lion, shaking the curls of his mane, and fixing his eyes (not then fierce and fiery, but bright and joyous) on the man, who, by God's gift, was mightier than he; the great elephant, putting out his trunk to caress his new master, and passing on to rest under the shadow of some stately tree; the horse, with his arching neck and prancing movements; the fond dog; the gentle sheep; the peacock, with its plumes of blue, and green, and gold; the ...
— Kindness to Animals - Or, The Sin of Cruelty Exposed and Rebuked • Charlotte Elizabeth
... proves a very white elephant on their hands. The site is not well chosen, or the stream difficult, and the restrained water pours round the ends of their dam, cutting them away. They build the dam longer at once; but again the water pours round on its work of destruction. ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long
... the butternut curculios are a serious menace to the butternut, the Japanese walnut and the Persian walnut. Their life history as described at length in U.S.D.A. bulletin 1066, is briefly as follows: The beetles (called elephant bugs by some because the side view resembles the elephant) spend the winter in the ground. As soon as new growth appears on the host tree they begin feeding on the tender leaves and stems. Soon they begin laying their eggs ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Thirty-Fourth Annual Report 1943 • Various
... is a drop or the Pacific Ocean; stone is stone, whether it is a pebble, a granite block, or a solid peak of the Rocky Mountains. It is true that there is a considerable range in size between the microscopic bacterium at one extreme and the elephant or whale at the other, but this is far less extensive than in the case of lifeless things like water and stone. In physical respects, water may be a fluid, or a gas in the form of steam, or a solid, as a crystal of snow or a block of ice. But the essential materials of living things ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... It seems incredible that the same hand could hang an equal majesty on the wall of a tiny shell and on that of a king's palace, and with equal justness of eye. Yet it is done. He will ride a donkey or an elephant with the like mastery; but you will never find Holbein saddling the donkey ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... magnitude of any body. Exaggeration is their forte—in this they excel. Their towering minds soar above common comprehension and common sense, and their fertile imaginations are ever ready to conjure up spectres, ghosts and hobgoblins; or otherwise, where others see a mouse, they behold an elephant; and to their distorted visions, a mole-hill is magnified into a mountain. We look in vain to such writers for a plain, unvarnished, common sense statement of facts, for sound arguments, or logical deductions. Such authors have nothing to do with facts, or things as they exist ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward
... need to mention these trivialities, but that they actually influenced many lives, as trifles will in the world, where a gnat often plays a greater part than an elephant, and a mole-hill, as we know in King William's case, can upset an empire. When Tusher in his courtly way (at which Harry Esmond always chafed and spoke scornfully) vowed and protested that my lady's face was none the worse—the lad broke ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... luggage into the Ark, and which two took the least? The elephant, who took his trunk, while the fox and the cock had only a brush ...
— My Book of Indoor Games • Clarence Squareman
... accompanied only by Marshal Duroc, to visit the basilica of Notre Dame, the works of the archbishopric, those of the central depot of wines, and then, crossing the bridge of Austerlitz, the granaries, the fountain of the elephant, and finally the palace of the Bourse, which his Majesty often said was the handsomest building then existing in Europe. Next to his passion for war, that for monuments was strongest in the Emperor's heart. The cold was quite severe while his Majesty was taking these ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... and the great elephants with long trunks and tusks. Sometimes even a lion is to be met, roused from his sleep by the noise of the hunters; for the lion sleeps in the daytime and generally walks abroad only at night. When you are older you can read the stories of famous lion and elephant hunters, and of strange and thrilling adventures ...
— The Seven Little Sisters Who Live on the Round Ball - That Floats in the Air • Jane Andrews
... thing which possessed none of them, or only one, or two, or even three of them without the fourth, would not be so called. For example, if in the interior of Africa there were to be discovered a race of animals possessing reason equal to that of human beings, but with the form of an elephant, they would not be called men. Swift's Houyhnhnms would not be so called. Or if such newly-discovered beings possessed the form of man without any vestige of reason, it is probable that some other name than that of man would ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... house was too large to be easily rented; the best rent obtainable at present would serve this year to little more than pay for the taxes and necessary improvements; in fact, the lawyer suggested that the whole property was simply a white elephant on Amory's hands. Nevertheless, even though it might not yield a cent for the next three years, Amory decided with a vague sentimentality that for the present, at any rate, he ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... with tremendous seriousness, much like an elephant hunting for peanuts hidden in a bale of hay. He saw no humour in the operation. As a matter of fact, Nature had not intended there should be any humour about it. Thor's time was more or less valueless, and during the course of a summer he absorbed in his system ...
— The Grizzly King • James Oliver Curwood
... Hear him talk! Do you think, sir, that an elephant carries this flat world on his back and walks ...
— Children's Classics In Dramatic Form • Augusta Stevenson
... swept, past a slow-plodding elephant lumbering back to the city with a load of fodder, by groups of tethered camels. Hares started up in alarm and bounded away, grey partridges whirred up and yellow-beaked minas flew off chattering indignantly. The slight morning coolness soon vanished; and Wargrave, soft and somewhat ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... appears to be bearing to north and west. A couple of isolated hills from fifteen to twenty miles off bearing respectively, the southern one 251 1/2 degrees, the northern one 254 degrees. The southern one I have called Mount Elephant, the one to the north Mount McPherson, and the one I am on Margaret. Another in ...
— McKinlay's Journal of Exploration in the Interior of Australia • John McKinlay
... played at pirates together, at the taking of sperm whales; and we have ransacked the Westchester Hills for gunsites against the Mexican invasion. And we have made lists of guns, and medicines, and tinned things, in case we should ever happen to go elephant-shooting in Africa. But we weren't going to hurt the elephants. Once R. H. D. shot a hippopotamus and he was always ashamed and sorry. I think he never killed anything else. He wasn't that kind of a sportsman. Of hunting, as of many other things, he has said the last word. Do you remember the ...
— Appreciations of Richard Harding Davis • Various
... only drink it, but warm it and make with bread a soup out of it. Yesterday, I had a slice of Pollux for dinner. Pollux and his brother Castor are two elephants, which have been killed. It was tough, coarse, and oily, and I do not recommend English families to eat elephant as long as they can get beef or mutton. Many of the restaurants are closed owing to want of fuel. They are recommended to use lamps; but although French cooks can do wonders with very poor materials, when they are called upon to cook ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... spied on a sudden a boat in the lake, made of red sandal wood. It had a mast of fine amber, and a blue satin flag: there was only one boatman in it, whose head was like an elephant's, and his body like that of a tiger. When the boat was come up to the prince and Mobarec, the monstrous boatman took them up one after another with his trunk, put them into his boat, and carried them over the ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... works of very high art. The picture of the mammoth, scratched on a fragment of the mammoth's tusk, is a piece of drawing so skillful that only the greatest living masters can equal it. Not even Rembrandt's drawing of the elephant, which Dr. Holmes celebrates in one of his poems, is more expressive or wrought with more economy of effort. In the same district of southwestern France, Dordogne, that yielded the drawings are found long cave galleries of paintings representing the creatures ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... country; the excess of women over men in every State of the Union so afflicted—or blessed, according to how you look at it; the number of volumes in each of the world's ten largest libraries; the salary of every officer of the United-States Government; the average duration of life in a man, elephant, lion, horse, anaconda, tortoise, camel, rabbit, ass, etcetera-etcetera; the age of every crowned head in Europe; each State's legal and commercial rate of interest; and how long it takes a healthy boy to digest apples, baked beans, cabbage, dates, eggs, fish, green corn, h, i, j, k, l-m-n-o-p, ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... surprising that so few of them appear elsewhere in their entirety. We have however, instances of the husk myth, the youngest son who surpasses his brother, the life of the ogre placed in some external object, the jealous stepmother, the selection of a king by an elephant, the queen whose husband is invariably killed on his ...
— Folklore of the Santal Parganas • Cecil Henry Bompas
... how Gassy mysteriously disappeared, and how he came riding home on the back of an elephant. It is also related how he broke his leg, and fed a hungry family in ...
— The Tale of Ferdinand Frog • Arthur Scott Bailey
... where he stands on the poop—one foot on the rail, and one hand on a shroud—his head thrown back, and his trumpet like an elephant's trunk thrown up in the air. Is he going to shoot dead with sounds, those fellows ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... contains, to be fitted up, till he finds it quite commodious. Remember to make very humble excuses for the unknown friend not sending to the prince either rich palanquins, or even, modestly, a single elephant; for alas! palanquins are only to be seen at the opera; and there are no elephants but those in the menagerie,—though this must make us seem strangely ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... do so, I would not tolerate it," exclaimed Thugut. "My adversaries, whosoever they may be, had better beware of my elephant foot not stamping them into the ground. I hate that boastful, revolutionary France, and to remain at peace with her is equivalent to drawing toward us the ideas of the revolution and of a general convulsion. Short-sighted people will not believe it, and they are my enemies because ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... and beastes, and also their properties, inespecially of these whych be not common to be seene in euerye place, as is Rhinoceros, whyche is a beaste that hathe a horne in hys nose, naturall enemye to the Elephant: Tragelaphus, agoate hart, Duocrotalus, abyrd lyke to a sw, whyche puttyng hys head into the water brayeth lyke an asse, an asse of Inde and an Elephant. The table maye haue an Elephant whom a Dragon claspeth harde aboute, wrapping in his former feete with his tayle. The litle chyld ...
— The Education of Children • Desiderius Erasmus
... his pantomime. He threw himself to one side out of the way of the leap—drew a sword, and stabbed and stabbed—and the triumph in his face told me plainly enough. 'There—he is dead!' Just now he is engaged on another work scarcely less interesting to him. A dealer in ivory sent him an elephant's tusk, and he is covering it with the story of a campaign. You see the warriors setting out on the march—in another picture they are in battle—a cloud of arrows in flight—shields on arm—bows ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... ebony, mangrove, silver tree, teak, unevah, lignumvitae, rosewood, and mahogany. She has birds with the sweetest notes and brightest plumage, and fish and animals in the greatest variety. There are the giant elephant, rhinoceros, and hippopotamus. There the lordly lion roams, the monarch of his native forest, as if conscious of furnishing robes for royalty and symbolizing the flag of a great nation. Where animals of such sagacity, courage, power, and majesty are found, ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Green, came nearly twenty years later. He was a Dutch sailor, a native of Katwijk, on the North Sea, whose ship in trying to steal the islanders' sea elephant oil got in too close and was wrecked. He settled down and married one of the four daughters of the widow, and became eventually headman and marriage officer. Queen Victoria sent him a framed picture of herself, which, unfortunately, has been taken away to the Cape. He ...
— Three Years in Tristan da Cunha • K. M. Barrow
... and his lower hung down like a camel's. Four millstones formed his shield, and on a box-tree close by hung his giant sword. His loin-cloth was fashioned of twelve skins of beasts, and was bound round his waist by a chain of which each link was as big as an elephant's thigh. ...
— The Brown Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... brightest of the standards, on the prince Duryodhan's car, Lordly elephant in jewels proudly shone ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... hour later M. Platzoff came to me. 'I shall start before daybreak for Chinapore,' he said, 'with one elephant and a couple of men. I will take with me the news of my poor friend's untimely fate, and you can come on with the luggage and other effects in the ordinary way. You will find me at Chinapore when you reach there.' Next morning I found that ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 5, May, 1891 • Various
... day, during the worst of my illness, when the kind-hearted doctor was attempting to amuse me with this anecdote, and asking me whether I thought Hannibal would have attempted his march over the Little St. Bernard,—supposing that he and the elephant which he rode had been summoned to explore a route through seventeen similar nuisances,—he went on to mention the one sole accomplishment which his sons had imported from Winchester. This was the Ziph language, communicated at Winchester ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... yourself, Van," Bob chuckled, "but I am morally certain you'll lose your boots. You will just walk off and leave them in some snow-drift or mud puddle and never miss them. They are big enough for an elephant. Where ...
— The Story of Sugar • Sara Ware Bassett
... "An elephant can crush you, but a wasp can sting you," was Kitty's further inward comment, "and that's why he was always nervous when he spoke of her." Then, as the Young Doctor had already done, she noticed the tiny ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... into the menagerie of a traveling circus that had come to Darrowtown while her father was still alive. She had seen there a panther, and the wicked, graceful, writhing body of the beast had frightened her more than the bulk of the elephant or the roaring of the lion. This great cat, crouching close to the snow, its tail sweeping from side to side, all its muscles knotted for another spring, struck Ruth dumb ...
— Ruth Fielding at Snow Camp • Alice Emerson
... been brought in a ship from Goa. Duerer's drawing was engraved and became the parent of innumerable rhinoceroses in lesson-books, doing service right down well into the late century, as Thausing assures us. The unfortunate original was sent as a present to Leo X., who wanted to see him fight with an elephant which had made him laugh by squirting water and kneeling down to be blessed as sensibly as a Christian. So the poor beast was shipped again, only to be shipwrecked near Porto Venere, where he was last seen swimming valiantly, but hopelessly impeded ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... stride of the elephant was eyed, And the capers of the little horse that cantered at his side! How the shambling camels, tame to the plaudits of their fame, With listless eyes came silent, masticating ...
— Riley Child-Rhymes • James Whitcomb Riley
... he came to a city where a dreadful elephant came daily to make a meal off the inhabitants. Many mighty warriors had gone against it, but none had returned. On hearing this the valiant little weaver thought to himself, 'Now is my chance! A great haystack of an elephant will be a fine mark to a man who has shot a mosquito ...
— Tales Of The Punjab • Flora Annie Steel
... perhaps for a month in the year. His uncle had always resided there for a fortnight at Christmas. When Silverbridge was married it would become the young man's duty to do something of the same kind. Gatherum was the White Elephant of the family, and Silverbridge must enter in upon his share of the trouble. He did not know that in saying all this he was offering his son as a husband to Lady Mabel, but she understood it as thoroughly as though ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... inhale but the carbonic acid which it has made. The human being, being the weaker, dies first: but the charcoal dies also. When it has exhausted all the oxygen of the room, it cools, goes out, and is found in the morning half-consumed beside its victim. If you put a giant or an elephant, I should conceive, into that room, instead of a human being, the case would be reversed for a time: the elephant would put out the burning charcoal by the carbonic acid from his mighty lungs; and then, when he had exhausted all ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... the edentates was the Megatherium, a. clumsy ground sloth bigger than a rhinoceros. The bones of the Megatherium are extraordinarily massive,—the thigh bone being thrice as thick as that of an elephant,—and the animal seems to have been well able to get its living by overthrowing trees and stripping off their leaves. The Glyptodon was a mailed edentate, eight feet long, resembling the little armadillo. These edentates survived ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... in Weimar and took quarters in "The Elephant," a hostelry at that time famous throughout Germany and the ante-room, as it were, to the living Valhalla of Weimar. From there I dispatched the waiter with my card to Goethe, inquiring whether he would receive me. The waiter returned with the answer ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Thebes, where there may naturally be a greater and more miscellaneous inrush than through a narrow beadle-watched portal. No doubt there are abject specimens of the visionary, as there is a minim mammal which you might imprison in the finger of your glove. That small relative of the elephant has no harm in him; but what great mental or social type is free from specimens whose insignificance is both ugly and noxious? One is afraid to think of all that the genus "patriot" embraces; or of the elbowing there might be at the day of judgment for those ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... used ivory to write the edicts of the senate on, with a black colour; and the expression of libri elephantini, which some authors imagine alludes to books that for their size were called elephantine, were most probably composed of ivory, the tusk of the elephant: among the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... sight, except in a few cases of solitary individuals, like the one above mentioned. I was once rather ludicrously and very uncomfortably held at bay by a boar who covered the retreat of his family. One evening, after dismissing my amlah, I took up a shot gun, and, ordering the elephant to follow, strolled across some fields to a low scrub-covered hill where I thought I might pick up a few partridges or a peafowl before dusk. On entering the bush which skirted the base of the hill ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... magnificent aviary in his villa at Casinum, but his auditors must have been clear-headed indeed if they could follow his description. [20] And in the De Lingua Latina, wishing to show how the elephant was called Luca bos from having been first seen in Lucania with the armies of Pyrrhus, and from the ox being the largest quadruped with which the Italians were then acquainted, he gives us the following involved note— In ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... Eb," said one of the men who was holding Mr. Daddles. He was a fat man, with ears that stuck out the way an elephant's do, when he waves them. "Better ...
— The Voyage of the Hoppergrass • Edmund Lester Pearson
... dogs is quite extraordinary, and only equalled by that of the elephant. Mr. Swainson, in his work on the instincts of animals, gives the following proof of this. He says that "A spaniel belonging to the Rev. H. N., being always told that he must not follow his master to church on Sundays, used on those days to set off long before the service, and lie concealed ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... Queen's return from the Duchess's, she desired her 'valet de chambre' to bring her billiard cue into her closet, and ordered me to open the box that contained it. I took out the cue, broken in two. It was of ivory, and formed of one single elephant's tooth; the butt was of gold and very tastefully wrought. "There," said she, "that is the way M. de Vaudreuil has treated a thing I valued highly. I had laid it upon the couch while I was talking to the Duchess in the salon; he had the ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... He solved the secret of the diamond makers, and, though he lost a fine balloon in the caves of ice, he soon had another air craft—a regular sky-racer. His electric rifle saved a party from the red pygmies in Elephant Land, and in his air glider he found the platinum treasure. With his wizard camera, Tom took wonderful moving pictures, and in the volume immediately preceding this present one, called "Tom Swift and His Great Searchlight," ...
— Tom Swift and his Giant Cannon - or, The Longest Shots on Record • Victor Appleton
... work their passage over as stokers? As regards wages, payment in kind is generally preferred to money. The baboon is a vegetarian but no bigot, and will eat mutton chops without protest. The great American nature historian, WARD, tells us that we should not give the elephant tobacco, but lays no embargo on its being offered to baboons. They are addicted to spirituous liquors, and on the whole it is best to get them to take the pledge. A valued correspondent of ours, Canon Phibbs, once had a tame gorilla which ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 6, 1917 • Various
... began to talk in this strain his two sons grew excited, and started to perform hunting dances, in which the number of imaginary lions and buffaloes they slew was something enormous. Every now and then, too, the boys killed some imaginary elephant, out of whose unwieldy head they made believe to hack the tusks, which they invariably brought and laid at their young masters' feet, grunting the while ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... said to the little fellow, "suppose you go in there and buy a dragon, or a silk coat, or a tin elephant. Anything to give you a notion as to what is going on in the shop." The lad was off in a moment, and then the Captain ...
— Boy Scouts in a Submarine • G. Harvey Ralphson
... the English governor sat in judgment together, his interest in the intricacies of their laws would give way to the more absorbing occupation of chasing wild boar or shooting at tigers from the top of an elephant. And so he was not only regarded as an authority on many forms of government and of law, into which no one else had ever taken the trouble to look, but his books on big game were eagerly read and his ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... caparisoned elephants solicited our patronage for the ascent. But before making that ascent, there was another ascent to make. We had to ascend the elephants. Ladders were brought to our assistance, and up the ladders we climbed to the howdah, or square seat on the top of the bulky beasts. Each elephant had to carry two passengers. I, on one side of the animal that bore me, had my weight balanced by that of my courier, who rode on the other side. Each of us was compelled to let his legs dangle over the edge of the howdah. ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... should have considered you a bad penny: in place of the true metal of friendship I should have suspected you of palming off plated lead upon me. It is well for you that you are here. You are like the white elephant for whom the Shah of Persia and the Great Mogul are continually at war. The one who is so fortunate as to possess the white elephant makes it always the occasion of an added title. I will follow their ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... passed away, the express brought to Bok one day a beautiful plaque of red clay, showing the elephant's head, the lotus, and the swastika, which the father had made for the son. It was the original model of the insignia which, as a watermark, is used in the pages of Kipling's books and on the cover of the ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... the carpet in the middle of the refectory when he was at the door. It was the night of the match against the Bective Rangers; and the ball was made just like a red and green apple only it opened and it was full of the creamy sweets. And one day Boyle had said that an elephant had two tuskers instead of two tusks and that was why he was called Tusker Boyle but some fellows called him Lady Boyle because he was always at ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... Russ pretended that he was the pirate, and that the others were his prisoners. He made them dig little holes in the sand, and bring in shells and stones as well as seaweed. This last he made believe was hay for a make-believe elephant. ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Cousin Tom's • Laura Lee Hope
... that one was the more or less important accordingly! What is it you admire in him, you men? If it is only the weight of his body which fills the children with terror, then we rats, small as we are, consider ourselves not one grain less than the elephant." He would have said more; but the cat, bounding out of her cage, let him see in an instant that a rat ...
— The Original Fables of La Fontaine - Rendered into English Prose by Fredk. Colin Tilney • Jean de la Fontaine
... over the Moslems in Asia for more than three hundred years. The most celebrated of Abbasid caliphs was Harun-al- Rashid (Aaron the Just), a contemporary of Charlemagne, to whom the Arab ruler sent several presents, including an elephant and a water-clock which struck the hours. The tales of Harun-al-Rashid's magnificence, his gold and silver, his silks and gems, his rugs and tapestries, reflect the luxurious life of the Abbasid rulers. Gradually, however, their power declined, and in 1058 A.D. the Seljuk ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... grand luncheon it was, for it happened that day to be the princess's birth-day, and three of her cousins were coming to dine with her, and they were going to have such a plum-pudding—so very big; and there was to be an elephant and castle, made of sugar, all over gilding, at the top. But, somehow, when the princess sat down to her luncheon, she did not look happy, notwithstanding her birth-day, and her three cousins, and the great plum-pudding they were going ...
— Tales From Catland, for Little Kittens • Tabitha Grimalkin
... morning—a party of twelve, riding on three elephants. For we were in pursuit of a tiger, a destroyer of men, which the villagers had marked down in a patch of jungle by the river side. Of the hunt I need say nothing; we killed the tiger, and, with the huge, striped body slung across the neck of my elephant, we were returning home. It was toward evening, for we had rested in the forest during the heat of ...
— Tales of Destiny • Edmund Mitchell
... wonderful realm of mountain and forest that is called the Terai—that fantastic region of woodland that stretches for hundreds of miles along the foot of the Himalayas, that harbours in its dim recesses the monsters of the animal kingdom, quaint survivals of a vanished race—the rhinoceros, the elephant, the bison, and the hamadryad, that great and terrible snake which can, and does, pursue and overtake a mounted man, and which with a touch of its poisoned fang can slay the most powerful brute. The huge Himalayan bear roams under the giant ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... shine, and excited them to a courteous rivalry. There was a snapping of bright words, a flight of sudden sallies, and the conversationalists broke into groups of two or three. A famous voyager with bronzed skin, recently returned from the farthest deserts, told his two neighbors of an elephant hunt, without any boasting, with as much tranquillity as though he were speaking of shooting rabbits. Farther off, the fine profile and white hair of an illustrious savant was gallantly inclined towards the comtesse, who listened to him laughing—a ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... Once on a time and far away, The elephant stood first in might, He had by many a forest fray At last usurped the lion's right. On peace and reign unquestioned bent, The ruler in his pride of place, Forthwith to life-long banishment Doomed ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... Linnaeus has calculated that if an annual plant produced only two seeds—and there is no plant so unproductive as this—and their seedlings next year produced two, and so on, then in twenty years there would be a million plants. The elephant is reckoned the slowest breeder of all known animals, and I have taken some pains to estimate its probable minimum rate of natural increase: it will be under the mark to assume that it breeds when thirty years old, ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... gay sleek people ever throng To festival and dance and song. A mine is she of gems and sheen, The darling home of Fortune's Queen. With noblest sort of drink and meat, The fairest rice and golden wheat, And fragrant with the chaplet's scent With holy oil and incense blent. With many an elephant and steed, And wains for draught and cars for speed. With envoys sent by distant kings, And merchants with their precious things With banners o'er her roofs that play, And weapons that a hundred slay;(68) All warlike engines framed by man, And every class of artisan. A city rich beyond compare With ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... were attached to each gun, and with drag-ropes ran them about with the greatest rapidity. On the march they were dragged by bullocks; but if a gun stuck, the animals were taken out, and the wheels and drag-ropes manned by bluejackets; and having an elephant to push behind with his forehead, they never failed to extricate a gun from the worst position. This was carrying out to perfection the principle of a ...
— Our Sailors - Gallant Deeds of the British Navy during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... he returned; "but old, very old in experience, and— stay, what was it that you were asking about? Ah, the big game. Well, we have plenty of that in some of the larger of the islands; we have the elephant, the rhinoceros, the tiger, the puma, that great man-monkey the orang-utan, or, as it is called here, the mias, besides wild pigs, deer, and ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... the emblem of Siam," should be, "The elephant is the emblem," etc. "A digraph is the union of two letters to represent one sound." Should be, "A digraph is ...
— Slips of Speech • John H. Bechtel
... than any child yet born, required no less than ten nurses, and after being weaned ate as much as five men! Such being the case, he was able, by the time he was eight years of age, to slay a mad white elephant with a single stroke of his fist. Many similar feats were performed during the boyhood of this Persian Hercules, who longed to fight when the realm was finally invaded by the Tartar chief Afrasiab and war began to ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... They have built, with sand and twigs, a fantastic world peopled with their familiar toys: a grey cloth elephant, a multi-coloured duck as big as that white plush bear. And they are in the jungle, tracking, hunting, killing. Then they dance round to a secret rhythm. Stop to look at them, the game will end. The little mouths will become silent. The child will always hide the ...
— Marie Bashkirtseff (From Childhood to Girlhood) • Marie Bashkirtseff
... they are, yet will they blush, amid A nation that ne'er blushes: some will drag The captive's chain, repair the shattered bark, Or heave it from a quicksand to the shore, Among the marbles of the Libyan coast; Teach patience to the lion in his cage, And, by the order of a higher slave, Hold to the elephant their scanty fare, To please the children ...
— Count Julian • Walter Savage Landor
... mountains of Brazil, with their mines of glittering gems, appeared above the surface of the waters, amid which huge reptile-like whales, ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and cetiosaurs buffeted the billows, and vast saurians, lizards, and alligators, rivalling the elephant in bulk, and twice his length—such as the megalosaurus, the iguanodon, and teleosaurus—crawled along the slimy shores; while giant birds, with wide-spreading feet, stalked across the newly-formed plains, or flew shrieking, with wings of prodigious ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... deserved the gallows; but the offended elephant tramples on men not on worms. Were thy life worth but two words I would ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... the intellect of Man differs from that of the wiser animals, otherwise than in degree? Who has ever done more than to utter nonsense and incoherencies in regard to the difference between the instincts of the dog and the reason of Man? The horse, the dog, the elephant, are as conscious of their identity as we are. They think, dream, remember, argue with themselves, devise, plan, and reason. What is the intellect and intelligence of the man but the intellect of the animal in a higher degree or larger quantity?" In the real explanation of a single ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... made him an offer of money, not as a bribe for any act of baseness, but speaking of it as a pledge of friendship and sincerity. As Fabricius refused this, Pyrrhus waited till the next day, when, desirous of making an impression on him, as he had never seen an elephant, he had his largest elephant placed behind Fabricius during their conference, concealed by a curtain. At a given signal, the curtain was withdrawn, and the creature reached out his trunk over the head of Fabricius with a harsh and terrible cry. Fabricius, however, quietly turned round, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... slain in Africa and India in the course of a year could not furnish half the ivory used in the great markets of the world during that time. Vienna, Paris, London and St. Petersburg keep the elephant-hunters busy, yet it is impossible for them to satisfy all the demands made upon them, and the ivory-diggers must be called upon ...
— Reading Made Easy for Foreigners - Third Reader • John L. Huelshof
... can drive an elephant mad. And Nature's balance is delicate; and what great happenings may follow the slightest disturbance of her infinitely sensitive, her complex, equilibrium? It might ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... somewhat dreary, now that I think of it quietly and without excitement. The creatures looked tired, and as if they had been on the road for a great many years. The animals were all old, and there was a shabby great elephant whose look of general discouragement went to my heart, for it seemed as if he were miserably conscious of a misspent life. He stood dejected and motionless at one side of the tent, and it was hard to believe ...
— Deephaven and Selected Stories & Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... a panther, this is an elephant," was Billy's uncheering opinion. "It's got weight. Listen to that. An' ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... fair Neophytes— Who thirst for such instruction as we give, Attend, while I unfold a parable. The elephant is mightier than Man, Yet Man subdues him. Why? The elephant Is elephantine everywhere but here (tapping her forehead), And Man, whose brain is to the elephant's As Woman's brain to Man's - (that's rule of three),— Conquers the ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... abandon the struggle. The water streamed down the panes of my window opposite my bed. One patch of my ceiling (just above my only bookcase, confound it!) was coloured a mouldy grey, and from this huge drops like elephant's tears, splashed monotonously. (Already The Spirit of Man was disfigured by a long grey streak, and the green back of Galleon's Roads was splotched with stains.) Some one had placed a bucket near the door to catch a perpetual stream flowing from the ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... contrasted strongly with the meagre fare of which Gustave's parents had deemed themselves fortunate to partake at the board of his betrothed; remnants of those viands which offered to the inquisitive epicure an experiment in food much too costly for the popular stomach—dainty morsels of elephant, hippopotamus, and wolf, interspersed with half-emptied bottles of varied and high-priced wines. Passing these evidences of unseasonable extravagance with a mute sentiment of anger and disgust, Madame Rameau ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... GONE!" I was mistress of the bog-wood bedroom set—a set wholly out of harmony with everything else I possessed, and so huge and massive that two men were required to lift the head-board alone. Like many of the previous treasures I had acquired, this was a white elephant; but, unlike some of them, it was worth more than I had paid for it. I was offered sixty dollars for one piece alone, but I coldly refused to sell it, though the tribute to my judgment warmed my heart. I had not the faintest ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... with which he was surrounded, went deeply into the matter in hand, his election. For a while the audience and the animals were quiet, the former listening, the latter eyeing the speaker with grave intensity. The first burst of applause electrified the menagerie; the elephant threw his trunk into the air and echoed back the noise, while the tigers and bears significantly growled. On went Prentiss, and as each peculiar animal vented his rage or approbation, he most ingeniously ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... us," said Dr Marjoribanks. "I am throwing no doubt upon it, for my part; but my conviction was, that Tom Wodehouse died in the West Indies. He was just the kind of man to die in the West Indies. If it's you," said the Doctor, with a growl of natural indignation, "you have the constitution of an elephant. You should have been dead ten years ago, at the very least; and it appears to me there would be some difficulty in proving identity, if anybody would take up that view of the question." As he spoke, Dr Marjoribanks walked round the new-comer, looking at him with medical criticism. ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... had become an elephant; then a moment later, i. e., about ten years before the opening of my story—I mean years as we mortals reckon them—he was elevated to the ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... him an easy victory over anything he ever met, even when tackled one dark night by a young panther. Unfortunately he developed a passion for killing everything that walked on four legs—short of a horse or an elephant—and of domestic pets and of poultry he took heavy toll. Nothing could break him of this propensity; he would take any punishment quite placidly, and then straightway repeat the offence at the first ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... was anything but a regular bee: in fact it was an elephant—as Alice soon found out, though the idea quite took her breath away at first. 'And what enormous flowers they must be!' was her next idea. 'Something like cottages with the roofs taken off, and stalks put to them—and what quantities of honey they must make! I think I'll go down and—no, I won't ...
— Through the Looking-Glass • Charles Dodgson, AKA Lewis Carroll
... cut off by a sudden movement; the children in their playful struggles had, in fact, thrown him down. In a moment more they were on his back and he trotting round the room with the grace of an elephant. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... resembled the mouth of a river. We did not hesitate to follow its course. We went round the bay, but found no traces of man, but numerous herds of the amphibious animal, called sometimes the sea-lion, the sea-dog, or the sea-elephant, or trunked phoca: modern voyagers give it the last name. These animals, though of enormous size, are gentle and peaceful, unless roused by the cruelty of man. They were in such numbers on this desert ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... is not whether the belief that animals so distant as a man, amonkey, an elephant, and a humming bird, asnake, afrog, and a fish, could all have sprung from the same parents is monstrous, but simply and solely whether it is true. If it is true, we shall soon learn to digest ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... in the manufacture of these Magic Wands. Metals or stones will not serve this purpose, unless covered with some organic matter. In any case stones are worthless. The very finest Wands are made from the live ivory of a female elephant. A short Wand, twenty-one inches long, tipped with gold at the largest end and silver or copper at the other, is very powerful. Next to these costly articles are Wands with a gold or copper core, a wire, in fact, cased with ebony, boxwood, rosewood, cedar or sandalwood. English yew also ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... the wheel of man's civilization, entangled so unalterably with his ancient emotions and images, that the artificial product seems more natural than the natural. The dog is not a part of natural history, but of human history; and the real rose grows in a garden. All must regard the elephant as something tremendous, but tamed; and many, especially in our great cultured centres, regard every bull as presumably a mad bull. In the same way we think of most garden trees and plants as fierce creatures of the forest or morass taught at ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... 2. The protective cladding on a {light pipe}. 3. 'keyboard condom': A flexible, transparent plastic cover for a keyboard, designed to provide some protection against dust and {programming fluid} without impeding typing. 4. 'elephant condom': the plastic shipping bags used inside cardboard boxes to protect hardware in transit. 5. /n. obs./ A dummy directory '/usr/tmp/sh', created to foil the Great Worm by exploiting a portability bug in one of its parts. So ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... bulwarks, framed in fog, and as utterly unsupported as the full moon, hung a Face. It was not human, and it certainly was not animal, for it did not belong to this earth as known to man. The mouth was open, revealing a ridiculously tiny tongue—as absurd as the tongue of an elephant; there were tense wrinkles of white skin at the angles of the drawn lips, white feelers like those of a barbel sprung from the lower jaw, and there was no sign of teeth within the mouth. But the horror of the face lay in the eyes, for those were sightless—white, ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... months in the forests of British North Borneo, going many days' journey into the heart of the country, had made fine natural-history collections and had come across a great deal of game, including elephant, rhinoceros, bear, and "tembadu" or wild cattle, huge wild pig and deer of three species being especially plentiful. But above all I had come across a great many "orang-utan" (Malay for "jungle-man") and had been able to study their habits. One of these great apes has the strength of eight men ...
— Wanderings Among South Sea Savages And in Borneo and the Philippines • H. Wilfrid Walker
... elephant sitting upright, imbibing with gusto from a bottle of some much-advertised tonic. Piers broke into a laugh. Other sketches were exhibited, and thus they passed the time until Miss Bonnicastle and Kite ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... with English society, growing out of certain experiences of the author while a member of our Embassy in London. The elephant's experiences, also, are based ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... a bath every day. Dogs and many other animals like to go into the water to bathe. Some of you have seen a great elephant take a bath by showering the water over himself with his trunk. To keep the skin healthy we ...
— First Book in Physiology and Hygiene • J.H. Kellogg
... product of the village—had built his residence—a large, white, pretentious dwelling, surrounded and embellished by all the appointments of wealth. The house was a huge cube, ornamented at its corners and cornices with all possible flowers of a rude architecture, reminding one of an elephant, that, in a fit of incontinent playfulness, had indulged in antics characteristic of its clumsy bulk and brawn. Outside were ample stables, a green-house, a Chinese pagoda that was called "the summer-house," an exquisite garden and trees, among which latter were carefully cherished ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... on me some rich gifts; but the ship had not long been at sea, before it was attacked by pirates, who seized the vessel, and carried us away as slaves. I was sold to a merchant. When my master found that I could use the bow and arrow with skill, he took me upon an elephant, and carried me to a vast forest in the country. My master ordered me to climb a high tree, and wait there until I saw a troop of elephants pass by. I was then to shoot at them, and if one of them fell, I was ...
— Favorite Fairy Tales • Logan Marshall
... gambled heavily in the clubs on Alcala Street. He fought a duel, but with swords, instead of lying on the ground, pistol in hand, as he had formerly pictured to himself, and he came out of the affair with a scratch on his arm, something in the nature of a pin prick in the epidermis of an elephant. He was no longer "the Majorcan with the ounces." The hoard of round gold pieces treasured by his mother had vanished. He now flung bank bills prodigally upon the gaming tables, and when bad luck assailed him he wrote to his administrator, a lawyer, ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... putting them to the sword for several miles, but not without resistance, in consequence of which the brave Captain Garrett and others fell. The Lion himself was seen, and very nearly captured by Fitzgerald and Delamain, as he was escaping on his elephant. ...
— Our Soldiers - Gallant Deeds of the British Army during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... least 80 feet tall and the palms and cocoa-nut trees (ii. 334; iii. 60) are indicated only by their foliage, not by their characteristic boles. The box (ii. 624) is European and modern: in the Eastern "Sakhkharah" the lid fits into the top, thus saving it from the "baggage-smasher." In iii. 76, the elephant, single-handed, uproots a tree rivalling a century-old English oak. The camel-saddle (iii. 247) is neither Eastern nor possible for the rider, but it presently improves (iii. 424 and elsewhere). The emerging ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... us into Mut-mut's arms, and to make us believe our danger was all behind us," he reasoned. "And it's a white elephant to a dead rat he's trudging up this road now to find what Mut-mut's left of us. Perhaps he's heard the two ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming |
