"Scavenger" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... utterly deserted when Democrates threaded them. There was no moon, neither he nor his companion were overcertain of the way. Once they missed the right turn, wandered down a blind alley, and plunged into a pile of offal awaiting the scavenger dogs. But finally the seaman stopped at a low door in a narrow street, and a triple rap made it open. The scene was squalid. A rush-candle was burning on a table. Around it squatted seven men who rose and bowed as the ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... All this, if she is to remain in good condition. In gratitude for it she will give milk, three or four times as much as a small household can consume. Possibly a market can be found for this excess or one can turn to butter making and add a pig to the barnyard family. Even this accommodating scavenger cannot live by skim milk alone but must have it augmented by corn or prepared feed. He must also have proper shelter and a run. Thus does one thing lead to another, once one gets beyond the chicken stage of farming. ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... them a Christmas-box: such as a piece of salt fish, or money, or what may be. Then, when you enter your house, you will find on your table, with the heading, "A Happy Christmas," a book of little leaflets, printed with verses. These are the petitions of the postman, scavenger, telegraph man, newsboy, &c., asking you for a Christmas-box. Poor fellows! they get little enough, and a couple of francs is well bestowed on them once a year. After mid-day breakfast or luncheon is over, rich and poor walk out and take the air, and a gaudy, pompous ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... climbed over fortifications which had shut us in for so long. Not a sound or a living thing. On the ground, however, there were many grim evidences of the struggle which had been so long proceeding. Skulls picked clean by crows and dogs and the dead bodies of the scavenger-dogs themselves dotted the ground; in other places were pathetic wisps of pigtails half covered with rubbish, broken rifles, rusted swords, heaps of brass cartridges—all proclaiming the bitterness with which the warfare had been waged ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... examination, where the medical inquisition awaits them, with every species of mental torture to screw their brains instead of their thumbs, and rack their intellects instead of their limbs,—the chair on which the unfortunate student is placed being far more uneasy than the tightest fitting "Scavenger's daughter" in the Tower of London. After an anxious hour, Mr. Jones returns, with a light bounding step to a joyous extempore air of his own composing: he has passed. In another twenty minutes Mr. Saxby walks fiercely in, calls for his hat, condemns the examiners ad ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... sense of the terrifying effect produced by one's first experience of the night orgies of Oriental dogs, it curdles your blood to recall it. Seen by daytime, the dogs are harmless enough, as they go about their scavenger work among the heaps of refuse and filth. But by night they are howling demons, stampeding about the streets in mad groups, barking to and at each other, whining piteously one moment, roaring ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... roadways are asphalted or paved with wood, and are also clean: things that must be thrown away are not thrown into the streets: they are collected in carts and carried away. You think that the streets of cities are kept clean by the rain? Not so: if we had only the rain as a scavenger we should be in a ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant
... frequently met with by physicians in practice, but which is rarely seen, although it is very often felt, by mankind, especially by those unfortunates who are forced by circumstances to dwell amid squalid and filthy surroundings. Sarcoptes hominis is eminently a creature of filth, and is primarily a scavenger living on the dead and cast-off products of the skin. It is only when the desire for perpetuating its race seizes it that it burrows into the skin, thereby producing the intolerable itching which has given to it its very appropriate ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... of the many difficulties, little understood in Europe, which bar the progress of Indian sanitary reform. The sweepers cannot be readily coerced because no Hindoo or Musalman would do their work to save his life, nor will he pollute himself even by beating the refractory scavenger. A strike of sweepers on the occasion of a great fair, or of a cholera epidemic, is a most dangerous calamity. The vested rights described in the text are so fully recognized in practice that they are frequently the subject ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... Not like many others in London, who will run you down and leave you to your fate, the heir of his fader's whimsicalities stopped short in the inauspicious set-out of his rapid career; and "dirty end," he exclaimed, "to the scavenger that didn't think of the gentleman's boots!" And at the same time the mother of this hopeful representative of the Mac Dermott family, made her appearance with the genuine warmth of Irish hospitality; and inviting the two ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... expenditures. But yet she is a copy of the other woman. Look at the train which she drags behind her over the dirty pavement, where dogs have been, and chewers of tobacco, and everything concerned with filth except a scavenger. At every hundred yards some unhappy man treads upon the silken swab which she trails behind her—loosening it dreadfully at the girth one would say; and then see the style of face and the expression of features ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... minor, who has a positive beast of a house-master and is practically a Bolshevist, says that we ought to go on strike against the tipping system and demand a regular living wage from relations. He says that if a scavenger gets four quid a week a fellow who has to tackle Greek aorists ought to get ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 21, 1920 • Various
... man could see nothing but the light—that, and the wolf-man. The ghoulish creature stood its ground. The fingers were still at his throat, but now they moved uncertainly, groping. There was no longer the deliberate movement of set purpose. It was as though the light had blinded the cruel scavenger, that its purpose was foiled through its power of vision being suddenly destroyed. It was a breathless moment ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... interminably and without apparent progress. Often used transitively with 'over' or 'through'. "The file scavenger has been groveling through the /usr directories for 10 minutes now." Compare {grind} and {crunch}. Emphatic form: 'grovel obscenely'. 2. To examine minutely or in complete detail. "The compiler grovels over the entire source program before beginning to translate it." "I grovelled through all the ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... sound a wolf ran out of a thicket in the ravine below him, and fled away toward the mountains. Lance, from his elevated point, could see the wolf's muzzle was bloody. That would mean, that a lost horse had been killed or an estray steer. He called down and we went in to see what thing this scavenger ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... scouring and hustling the intestines in the greatest possible haste, in order to remove an obstruction about three hundred inches distant from where these "forcers" had entered the intestinal sewer. With mercury as a scavenger the work is pretty thoroughly done, though extra care has to be taken that some of the teeth may remain after the victim survives the additional intestinal inflammation occasioned by its ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... curious play should never have been republished, when the volumes of Dodsley's Old Plays, in their very latest reissue, are encumbered with heaps of such leaden dulness and such bestial filth as no decent scavenger and no rational nightman would have dreamed of sweeping back into sight and smell of ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... melancholy days in which London wears the appearance of a huge scavenger's cart. A lurid fog and mizzling rain, which had been incessant for the previous twenty-four hours; sloppy pavements, and kennels down which the muddy torrents hastened to precipitate themselves in the sewers below; armies of umbrellas, as far as the eye could reach, ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... house, when I stepped out of the cab and looked about me. It was stuck on like a swallow's nest to the end of a great row of commonplace houses, nearly a quarter of a mile in length, but itself was not the work of one of those wretched builders who care no more for beauty in what they build than a scavenger in the heap of mud he scrapes from the street. It had been built by a painter for himself, in the Tudor style; and though Percivale says the idea is not very well carried out, I ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... haste in their conveyance, for the wind parted the curtains and I saw Her. When they returned from pilgrimage the boy that was Her husband had died, and I saw Her again in the bullock-cart. By God, these Hindus are fools! What was it to me whether She was Hindu or Jain—scavenger, leper, or whole? I would have married Her and made Her a home by the ford. The Seventh of the Nine Bars says that a man may not marry one of the idolaters? Is that truth? Both Shiahs and Sunnis say that a Musalman may not marry one of the idolaters? Is the Sahib ...
— Soldiers Three • Rudyard Kipling
... heart—was that which the fathers ascribed to the mere proclamation of Christianity, when first piercing the atmosphere circumjacent to any oracle; and, in fact, to their gross appreciations, Christian truth was like the scavenger bird in Eastern climates, or the stork in Holland, which signalizes its presence by devouring all the native brood of vermin, or nuisances, as fast as they reproduce themselves under local distemperatures ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... angel gives warning of what is coming. In words that are an echo of Ezekiel's, long centuries before, he calls to all the scavenger birds of the earth that haunt battlefields to come to a great feasting time.[164] And John sees the vast armies of the nations of the earth all gathered together for a last mighty battle, under the leadership of the great leader of ...
— Quiet Talks on the Crowned Christ of Revelation • S. D. Gordon
... arghilah, generally called the adjutant," replied Sir Modava. "He is the licensed scavenger of Calcutta, for it is forbidden by law to kill or molest him. You see him walking about in a crowd with as much dignity and gravity as though he were a big banker; and he is also seen perched upon the walls and buildings. They have an ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic |
