"Slimy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... people's backs - Surprising, too, what one can do with fifty fat black beedles - And treacle on a chair Will make a Quaker swear! Then sharp tin tacks And pocket squirts - And cobblers' wax For ladies' skirts - And slimy slugs On bedroom floors - And water jugs On open doors - Prepared with these cheap properties, amusing tricks to play, Upon a friend a man may spend ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... protruded from his pocket the butt of a pistol—newly purchased. "I go armed, Binet. It is only fair to give you warning. Provoke me as you have suggested, and I'll kill you with no more compunction than I should kill a slug, which after all is the thing you most resemble—a slug, Binet; a fat, slimy body; foulness without soul and without intelligence. When I come to think of it I can't suffer to sit at table with ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... delighted the church as the beauties of endless torment, and listening to the weak wailing of damned infants struggling in the slimy coils and poison folds of the worm ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... the prevailing religious ceremonial lies in the attitudes of abasement that it enforces upon the faithful. A man would be thought a slimy and knavish fellow if he approached any human judge or potentate in the manner provided for approaching the Lord God. It is an etiquette that involves loss of self-respect, and hence it cannot be pleasing to its object, ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... cell to a high place with unstable flooring, graced above by a well-stretched rope; and there they will hang me by the neck until I am dead. The red wrath always has undone me in all my lives; for the red wrath is my disastrous catastrophic heritage from the time of the slimy things ere ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... sputtered, choked. What had he betrayed? Would the strange donor reclaim the gift, knowing it was gold? He leered craftily at Driscoll, and with a hungry, gloating secrecy—his old slimy way of handling money—he smuggled the holy symbol under his jacket. But from cunning the leer changed to suspicion and quick alarm. He delved into his pockets, one after another. He searched greedily, wildly, until the last ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... sang and surged, ravished the soul until it was brought lacerated and captive to the feet of the victorious master magician. The eye was promise-crammed, the ears sealed with bliss, and she felt the wet of the waters. She breathed hard as Alberich scaled the slimy steeps; and the curves described by the three swimming mermaids filled her with the joy of the dance, the free ecstatic movements of free things in the waves. The filching of the Rheingold, the hoarse shout of laughter from Alberich's love-foresworn lips, and the terrified cries ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... flat as a table, but arter running vor a vew minutes he says, 'Look owt!' Oi didn't know what to look owt vor, and down oi goes plump into t' water. Vor all at once we had coomed upon a lot o' rocks covered wi' a sort of slimy stuff, and so slippery as you could scarce keep a footing on 'em. Oi picks myself up and vollers him. By this toime, maister, oi war beginning vor to think as there warn't so mooch vun as oi had expected in this koind ...
— Through the Fray - A Tale of the Luddite Riots • G. A. Henty
... pleased them to observe what a difference there was when they had surmounted the chine and began to descend toward the north upon other people's land. Here all was damp and cold and slow; and chalk looked slimy instead of being clean; and shadowy places had an oozy cast; and trees (wherever they could stand) were facing the east with wrinkled visage, and the west with wiry beards. Willie (who had, among other great inventions, a scheme for improvement ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... first day of the seventh John takes Will Cathcart's acceptance from its place in the large safe, and lays it in the smaller box beside his desk, devoted to more pressing and immediate business. Two days later Cathcart picks his way across the slimy yard, passes through the counting-house, and enters his friend's inner sanctum, closing ...
— John Ingerfield and Other Stories • Jerome K. Jerome
... his tracks. And the men were marched to the rear. Hour after hour the flames of hell swirled in endless waves about this angle of the Southern trenches. Line after line of blue broke against it and eddied down its sides in slimy pools. ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... natural state is a different-looking object from what we see in commerce, resembling somewhat the appearance of the jelly fish, or a mass of liver, the entire surface being covered with a thin, slimy skin, usually of a dark color, and perforated to correspond with the apertures of the canals commonly called "holes of the sponge." The sponge of commerce is, in reality, only the skeleton of a sponge. The composition ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... a bunch of strawberries, red on one side and white on the other—perfect reproductions of the land fruit, except that there were no leaves, and the stem was all pipy and slimy. ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling
... "the pale radiance from her brow illuminated the whole valley." Calling to his consort, Marguerite of Flanders, he pointed out to her the wondrous sight, and hastening forth they drew her dripping body from the dark slimy water and bore it tenderly to the chateau. The news spread far and wide, and for days came throngs to view the "sweet martyr's" body, for which the priests had prepared a costly catafalque, and for her a grand mass was celebrated in ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... mouldy piles of stone and dust convinced them that there could be no survivors. The ruins looked as though they had lain in those crumbling piles for centuries. Northwood, smothering his repugnance, stepped among them—among the green, slimy stones and the unspeakable revolting debris, staggering back and faint and shocked when he came upon dust that was ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... it. And yo're going back after more?" His forehead was still creased with puzzlement. "Wal, I'm going with ye, eyes or no eyes, an' I'll keep tabs on ye, Bill Simms, by day and night. You can lay to that, you slimy-hearted swab!" ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... haunting fiend, every natural phenomenon has its informing spirit; every quality, as hunger, greed, envy, malice, has an embodied visible shape prowling about seeking what it may devour. Where our science, for example, sees (or rather smells) sewer gas, the Japanese behold a slimy, meagre, insatiate wraith, crawling to devour the lives of men. Where we see a storm of snow, their livelier fancy beholds a comic snow-ghost, a queer, grinning old man ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... shone deathly pale; they could see the fingers of his right hand working convulsively; they could hear his labored breathing. Below him was the deep, black water, lapping and rippling as the swirl of the tide sucked it into the dark, slimy recesses among the piles. In its bosom was horrible death. The Count stepped out upon the very edge of the pier and gazed wofully down upon the swelling waters. His dismal purpose no longer admitted of doubt. Involuntarily the two followed him until they were close at his back. Little as they ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... the result proved as I had hoped: for he walked deliberately among the trees, and stooped down to the water. I alighted, dragged old Hendrick through the mud, and with a feeling of infinite satisfaction picked up the slimy trail-rope and twisted it three times round my hand. "Now let me see you get away again!" I thought, as I remounted. But Pontiac was exceedingly reluctant to turn back; Hendrick, too, who had evidently flattered himself with vain hopes, showed the utmost repugnance, and grumbled in a manner ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... some say, like a saucer with one side flatted, which adheres to the rock. The texture is somewhat like isinglass, or rather more like fine gum-dragon; and the several layers of the matter it is composed of, are very apparent; being fabricated from repeated parcels of a soft slimy substance, in the same manner as the common martins form theirs of mud. Authors differ much as to the materials of which it is composed: some suppose it to consist of sea-worms, of the mollusca kind; others, of a kind of cuttle-fish, or a glutinous sea-plast called agal-agal. It has also ...
— Domestic pleasures - or, the happy fire-side • F. B. Vaux
... fare he had promised him, he walked quickly in the direction of the quay. Here and there a lantern gleamed at the stern of some huge merchantman. The light shook and splintered in the puddles. A red glare came from an outward-bound steamer that was coaling. The slimy pavement looked like ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... into the inner heart of being, the brightness quickly dies, and only the surfaces of things remain visible. Oh, the unimaginable length of ages when on the earth there was no living thing! then life's ugly, slimy beginnings; then the conscious soul's fitful dream stretching forth to endless time and space; then the final sleep in abysmal night with its one star of hope twinkling before the all-hidden throne of God, in the shadow ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... starting, we swallowed as much water as we could collect, and filled our handkerchiefs and pockets with oysters—which we took out of the shells, for otherwise we could have carried but few. It was not a time to be particular, but the oysters did feel somewhat slimy, and did not look very nice. How much we wished for a bottle in which we could carry water!—but all our ingenuity could devise no means of securing any for the future. We had an orange apiece remaining, and that was all on which ...
— Saved from the Sea - The Loss of the Viper, and her Crew's Saharan Adventures • W.H.G. Kingston
... done a deed, they said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. I was buried for a thousand years in stone coffins, with mummies and sphinxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed with cancerous kisses by crocodiles, and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things, ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... excuses for self-imposed starvation, only revelling in the impurity and duskiness of its own shut-up heart. At last the joy-bells ring its knell, while it crawls into eternity like a vile reptile, leaving a slimy track ...
— Turns of Fortune - And Other Tales • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... Marazion bathed, sailed, climbed, walked and finished her book. She had a room at St. Michael's Cafe, at the edge of the little town, just above the beach. Across a space of sea at high tide, and of wet sand and a paved causeway slimy with seaweed at the ebb, St. Michael's Mount loomed, dark against a sunset sky, pale and unearthly in the dawn, an embattled ship riding anchored on full waters, ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... stripped off her overcoat and fitted it over the crack at the bottom of the door, where showed a strip of light from the slimy hall without. She caught up the red cotton table-cloth and stuffed it along the window, moving clumsily through the room, in which the darkness was broken only by pallid light that seeped through the window from cold walls without. She staggered over and lay down ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... barrel of brine. By long practise the men become exceedingly expert in the work, and rivalry among the gangs keeps the pace of all up to the highest possible point. All through the night they work until the deck is cleaned of fish, and slimy with blood and scales. The men, themselves, are ghastly, besmeared as they are from top to toe with the gore of the mackerel. From time to time, full barrels are rolled away, and lowered into the hold, and fresh fish raised ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... is in the Zoo he doesn't get anything so large as a deer, but rabbits and small things that he can swallow easily, and frogs, of which all snakes are very fond, perhaps because they are slimy and slip down quickly. There are many other snakes beside the boa, some not so large, but more poisonous. The boa is not poisonous. He relies on his huge strength to kill his enemies; but other snakes, such as vipers and rattlesnakes, are. Even when the head of a viper ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... drop of spring water," he said, but Dan's luck was out this trip, and the Spring Hole proved a slimy bog "alive with dead cattle," as he himself phrased it. Three dead beasts lay bogged on its margin, and held as in a vice, up to their necks in slime and awfulness stood two poor living brutes. They turned ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... darkness was heavy. The man grew lonely. And then he sought to mount the wall. But his hands slipped on the human blood of the red, slimy dollar-marks, and he fell crashing back among his tinkling treasures. He rose, and tried again. The naked, splitting skulls leered at him. The toothless jaws clattered, and the eyeless sockets glowed eerily. The man raised his voice. He begged that a rope ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... leer. "No—ah, no, the lovely senorita will come with me," he replied; but there was the temper of steel in his words. For Snake le Vasquez, on the border, where human life was lightly held, was known as the Slimy Viper. Of all the evil men in that inferno, Snake was the foulest. Steeped in vice, he feared neither God nor man, and respected no woman. And now, Estelle St. Clair, drawing-room pet, pampered darling of New York society, which she ruled with an iron hand from her father's ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... the conclusion that he had dropped into a sewer. To get out the way he had entered appeared impossible. He could not leap upward from the slimy, concave bottom the distance he had dropped. To follow the sewer upward would lead him nowhere nearer escape. There remained no hope but to follow the trickling stream downward toward the river, into ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... over the cleansing of the temple-area can be almost felt rising up out of the very page, in the critical questions and cynical comment of the Jews. One can easily see all the bitterness of their hate tracking its slimy footprints out of that ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... this, have been off, but we had terrific rains, which caught us in motion, and nearly drowned some of the troops in the rice-fields of the Savannah, swept away our causeway (which had been carefully corduroyed), and made the swamps hereabout mere lakes of slimy mud. The weather is now good, and I have the army on terra firma. Supplies, too, came for a long time by daily driblets instead of in bulk; this is now all remedied, and I ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... a wooden vat three hundherd an' sixty feet long, twenty-eight feet deep, an' sivinty-five feet wide, an' if three hundherd pounds iv caustic soda boiled, an' if the leg iv a guinea pig, an' ye said yestherdah about bi-carbonate iv soda, an' if it washes up an' washes over, an' th' slimy, slippery stuff, an' if a false tooth or a lock iv hair or a jawbone or a goluf ball across th' cellar eleven feet nine inches—that is, two inches this way an' five gallons that?' 'I agree with ye intirely,' says th' profissor. 'I made ...
— Mr. Dooley in Peace and in War • Finley Peter Dunne
... mouse! Mark how it looks! It must have a soul! It looks, it looks, though it cannot stir! See the ribs of it, how they stare! Its blind eyes yet have a seeing air! It knows it has a soul! Haggard it hangs o'er the slimy pool, And gapes wide open as corpses gape: It is the very murderer! The ghost has modelled himself to the shape Of this drear house all sodden with woe Where the deed was done, long, long ago, And filled with himself his new body full— To haunt for ever his ghastly crime, ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... to see, what Alterations appeared in the putrefaction, He observed, that at the beginning, within twenty four hours, a slimy film floated on the top of the water, which after a while falling to the bottom, there came another such film in ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... black, dabbing her red-rimmed eyes with a damp pocket-handkerchief. He had been to the Zoo when he was a lad, and he still remembered how he had shrunk with horror at the sight of certain reptiles slowly crawling over one another in their slimy pond. But he was enraged at the similarity between the two sensations, and he walked briskly on that level and monotonous road, looking about him at the unhandsome spectacle of ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... the gymnotus is a kind of eel, with a blackish, slimy skin, furnished along the back and tail with an apparatus composed of plates joined by vertical lamellae, and acted on by nerves of considerable power. This apparatus is endowed with singular electrical properties, and is apt to produce very formidable ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... right to express herself in public on all questions of morals and religion, the Rev. Mrs. Crane began with fine sarcasm: "To women has always unquestionably been allowed the being good. They are called too good to enter the slimy pool of politics. They are complimented often in the spirit of the man who said to his wife: 'Angelina, you get up and make the fire; it will seem so much warmer if laid by your fair hands!' To women is also conceded the ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... I observed that he was elaborately dressed, as if for some grand entertainment. My dislike for this man was infinite. At that moment it amounted to nothing less than a creeping of the flesh, as when, feeling about in a dark place, one touches something cold and slimy, and questions what the secret hatefulness may be. And still I could not but acknowledge that, for personal beauty, for polish of manner, for all that externally befits a gentleman, there was hardly another like ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... about the divine frenzy of going over the top are usually those who dipped their pens a long, long way from the slimy duckboards of the trenches. It's funny how we hate to face realities. I knew a commuter once who rode in town every day on the 8.13. But he used to call it the 7.73. He said it made ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... and then snapped his fingers. "Abracadabra," he cried. He swore as something wet and slimy that looked like seaweed plopped into his hand. The next time he got a limp fish that had been dead far too long. But the third try worked better. This time, a whole bunch of bananas appeared. They were a little riper than he liked, but some of them were edible ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... been on board a week—that I am bumped, rolled, gurgled, washed, and pitched into Calais Harbour before her maiden smile has finally lighted her through the Green Isle. When blest for ever is she who relied On entering Calais at the top of the tide. For we have not to land to-night down among those slimy timbers—covered with green hair as if it were the mermaid's favourite combing-place—where one crawls to the surface of the jetty, like a stranded shrimp; but we go steaming up the harbour to the Railway-station Quay. ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... you will trip upon the slimy Fucus that fringes the seaward side of every rock. This is one of the few Algae that grow here in luxuriance. The slate has not the deep fissures necessary to afford shelter to the more delicate kinds; and the heavy swell of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... monstrosities worse than those which they have displaced, so soon as she begins to manipulate and improve. If a sensible fashion lifts the gown out of the mud, she raises hers midway to the knee. If there is a reaction against an excess of hair oil, and hair slimy and sticky with grease is thought less nice than if left clean with a healthy crisp, she dries and frizzes and sticks hers out on end like certain savages in Africa, or lets it wander down her back like Madge Wildfire's, and ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... empty powder-casks Cromwell had left there; a vaulted chamber for the men of the half-moon battery; a well which was said to have no bottom and which had remained unused for a hundred years, because a wicked uncle had thrown the rightful heir into it; and slimy, creepy-crawly dungeons with chains for your hands and feet; and cachettes where they spilled you through a hole in the floor, and let it go at that; and—but what wasn't there, indeed, in that extraordinary old feudal citadel, which had been in continuous human possession ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne
... says that at the passage of the Red Sea the ten miracles wrought were as follows: (1) the waters divided; (2) the waters were like a tent, or a vault; (3) the sea-bed was dry and hard; (4) but when the Egyptians trod upon it, it became muddy and slimy; (5) the sea was divided into twelve parts, one for each tribe; (6) the waters became as hard as stone; (7) the congealed waters appeared like blocks of building-stone; (8) the water was transparent so that the tribes could ...
— Pirke Avot - Sayings of the Jewish Fathers • Traditional Text
... Not pray! (Seizing him again) Pray this instant, you dog, you rotten hound, you slimy snake, ...
— Androcles and the Lion • George Bernard Shaw
... protruding bone, having previously been freely treated with strong carbolic acid. About the tenth day, the discharge, which up to that time had been only sanious and serous, showed a slight admixture of slimy pus; and this increased till (a few days before I left) it amounted to about three drachms in twenty-four hours. But the boy continued as he had been after the second day, free from unfavorable symptoms, with pulse, tongue, appetite, and sleep natural and strength increasing, while the limb remained ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... if she love him more than me, why then Let her go with him!—Gone to Italy! Pursue, says he? Revenge?—Let the corpse crush The slimy maggot with its pulpy ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... slimy mud. It oozed out from under Bernice's rubbers in unpleasant bubbles until it seemed to her as if she must kill herself. Hot air coming out from a steam laundry. Hot, stifling air. Bernice didn't work in the laundry but she wished that she did so that the hot air would kill her. She wanted to be ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... about to reveal," he says, smoothing a slimy tall hat, "is of a nature so revolting, so 'orrible in its details, that I can 'ardly bring myself to speak it to any 'uming ear!" (Here you will probably prepare to take notes.) "You see before you one who is of 'igh birth but low circumstances!" (At this, you give ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. February 14, 1891. • Various
... so, without expecting to find the gate open, I tried the handle. It turned, to my no little amazement; the gate swang lightly aside, as if its hinges had been newly oiled, and I followed the staircase, creeping up the slimy steps in the half-dark. Up and round I went, till I was wellnigh giddy, and then I tripped and reeled so that my body struck against a heavy ironed door. Under my weight it yielded gently, and I stumbled across the threshold of a room that smelled strangely sweet and ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... to stop and rest for a moment while he took a spell of shuddering and gagging as a sudden picture of the slimy gullet came into his mind, with Ed Brown laying where the rabbit had been, melting down into a stinking soup of ...
— Cat and Mouse • Ralph Williams
... nothing else than a couple of interlaced, twisted branches, or roots, of some tree which had fallen into the pool in a former caving-in of the bank. In that dark deep wherein his foot was held fast, his mind's eye could see it all well enough—the water-soaked, brown-green, slimy, inexorable coil, which had yielded to admit the unlucky member, then closed upon the ankle like the jaws of an otter trap. He could feel that grip—not severe, but uncompromisingly firm, clutching the joint. As he considered, he ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... noticed, pray, An earthly belle or dashing bride walk, And how her flounces track her way, Like slimy ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... had, will make the salutations you receive, and the scituation of the place seem so much the pleasanter. And these dainty green Meadows will be a delicate refreshment. You'l find your stomack not only sharpned, but also curiously cleansed of all sorts of filthy and slimy humours. And you light not sooner from your horse then your appetite is ready to entertain what ever comes before you: The good Man in the mean while is contriving at whose house he shall first whet his ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh
... the fog, and I says to my mate—boy by the name of 'Ucklebridge, only chiefly called Slimy, to distinguish him—I says—I says that was my guv'nor, safe and square, by the token of the sound of it. And then I catches him up in the fog, follerin' by the sound. My word, missis, he was bad! Wanted to holler me over the coals, he did, for behind my time. I could ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... fierce onslaught. It lasted long and when it had gone another silence, as ominous as the preceding one, followed. The rain ceased entirely and the pony again stepped forward, making his way slowly, for the trail was now slippery and hazardous. The baked earth had become a slimy, sticky clay which clung tenaciously ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... Arise! For this triumphant day Shall crush the serpent cherished in thy breast. E'en now the slimy coils unfold, The venomed folds relax their hold, The tooth is drawn that stung thee from thy rest. Arise! For with a groan Falls Slavery from his throne! While, seizing Song's immortal lyre, And girt afar with Heaven's Promethean fire, Eternal Freedom, winged ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... ages in perfect security. We reached the bed of the stream, where scattered threads of water tinkled as they fell over huge blocks into little pools below, and then went whispering on their way towards the darkness. At the botton of a long slant of greenish slimy stone, patched here and there with moss, I stopped a few minutes, feeling that I could not grasp without an effort the deep gloom and grandeur of my surroundings. The jackdaws had all flown away, and there was ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... not altogether like this job. The slimy feeling of the frog rather went against his stomach. Still, after the large hind legs had been duly skinned, they presented so much the appearance of the white meat of a spring chicken that Tubby felt encouraged ...
— The Boy Scouts on Belgian Battlefields • Lieut. Howard Payson
... not know what a German dinner is like? Watery soup with knobby dumplings and pieces of cinnamon, boiled beef dry as cork, with white fat attached, slimy potatoes, soft beetroot and mashed horseradish, a bluish eel with French capers and vinegar, a roast joint with jam, and the inevitable 'Mehlspeise,' something of the nature of a pudding with sourish red sauce; but to make up, the beer and wine first-rate! ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... journey ended. They came to a niche in the slimy wall. Up into this the men climbed, dragging him after them. The man above was cautiously tapping on what appeared to be solid masonry. To King's surprise a section of the wall suddenly opened before them. He was seized from above by strong hands and literally jerked through ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... had sunk to his waist, and it was only a question of minutes ere the slimy ooze would close over his head. It was a situation that demanded instant action. For a moment Charley stood silent beside the captain gazing hopelessly at his doomed chum. Then he turned swiftly and ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... the author, with modest pride, asks his readers all round, has he once forgotten the laws of politeness, and showed the monster's hideous tail above water? No! Those who like may peep down under waves that are pretty transparent and see it writhing and twirling, diabolically hideous and slimy, flapping amongst bones, or curling round corpses; but above the waterline, I ask, has not everything been proper, agreeable, and decorous, and has any the most squeamish immoralist in Vanity Fair ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... driving home from Pine Ridge with Sylvia, we noticed that even the wood edges had the appearance of being scorched by fire, and many of the old orchards where we go in May for apple blossoms are wrecks meshed in the treacherous slimy webs. ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... streams spouted out of the mouths and nostrils of stone monsters, and fell in glistening drops; while other rivulets, that had run wild, came leaping from one rude step to another, over stones that were mossy, slimy, and green with sedge, because, in a Century of their wild play, Nature had adopted the Fountain of Trevi, with all its elaborate devices, for her own. Finally, the water, tumbling, sparkling, and dashing, with joyous haste and never-ceasing murmur, poured itself ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Elizabeth, not to be behindhand, did the same. Ordering his men away from the guns, and forming them up, he led them in person over the side on to the decks of the Pearl, which was by this time a scene of dreadful carnage. Blood was everywhere; her planking was so slimy with it that men slipped and fell in it. It ran in little rivulets from ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... it was too dangerous a venture. The slimy seaweed underneath caused her to slip, and the strong swirl of the tide nearly swept her from her feet. With difficulty she ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil
... often find a better market by sending their fish to Paris; much of the fish caught off Brighton goes there. It is fifty miles to London, and 250 to Paris; how then can this be? Fish somehow slip through ordinary rules, being slimy of surface; the maxims of the writers on demand and supply are quite ignored, and there is no groping to the bottom of this ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... half-senseless captive to Bothwell's castle of Hermitage. Even then the earl spared his life. He lay in a hideous den, in pitch darkness and dead silence broken only by the splash of drops of fetid water that fell from the slimy arch of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... of a twig, the ticking of an insect—there was none—the silence was the silence of stone. I thought of worms; I imagined countless legions of them making their way to me from the surrounding mouldering coffins. Every now and then I uttered a shriek as something cold and slimy touched my skin, and my stomach heaved within me as a whiff of something particularly ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... "petticoats," busy with splitting-knives on hake and cod and pollock and haddock, brought in by the noisy power-boats; the lighthouse-keepers from Matinicus Rock, five miles south, in military caps, oilskins, and red rubber boots, towing a dory to be dumped full of slimy hake heads for lobster bait; the post-office and general store above the cove, and ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... the same idea. For several minutes I stood contemplating this proud and noble river—violent, but not furious; wild, but still majestic. It was swollen, and was magnificent in appearance, and was washing with its yellow mane, or, as Boileau says, its "slimy beard," the bridge of boats. Its two banks were lost in the twilight, and tho its roaring was loud, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... arrived by seven, and it was bright moonlight when they went at it. Never have I beheld such a jolly scene of labor. Tugging these wet and heavy boards over a bridge of boats ashore, then across the slimy beach at low tide, then up a steep bank, and all in one great uproar of merriment for two hours. Running most of the time, chattering all the time, snatching the boards from each other's backs as if they were some coveted treasure, getting up eager ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... putting them all in the background while Peter receives the charge, and making them all witnesses to it. Note the handsomely curled hair and neatly tied sandals of the men who had been out all night in the sea-mists, and on the slimy decks; note their convenient dresses for going a-fishing, with trains that lie a yard along the ground, and goodly fringes—all made to match;—an apostolic fishing costume. Note how Peter especially, ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... surely. Only it is not for your beaux yeux; not because I like you. I loathe and detest you. You are a low, slimy spy, who richly deserves to be ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... Stevens' boy had been right. Quade was after Joanne. His ugly soul was disrupted with a desire to possess her, and Aldous knew that when roused by passion he was more like a devil-fish than a man—a creeping, slimy, night-seeking creature who had not only the power of the underworld back of him, but wealth as well. He did not think of him as a man as he stood listening, but as a beast. He was ready to shoot. But he saw nothing. He heard no sound that could have been made by a stumbling ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... globe often convulsed both from within and without; pouring forth from several mouths, rivers of boiling matter, which are imperceptibly leaving immense subterranean graves, wherein millions will one day perish! Look at the poisonous soil of the equator, at those putrid slimy tracks, teeming with horrid monsters, the enemies of the human race; look next at the sandy continent, scorched perhaps by the fatal approach of some ancient comet, now the abode of desolation. Examine the rains, the convulsive storms of those climates, where masses of sulphur, bitumen, ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... that she had always resented Tippy's saying she would make a mess of it if she tried to do it. But mess was the only name which could be given to what poured out on the top of the stove as her fingers went crashing through the shell and into the slimy feeling contents. The broken yolk dripped from her hands, and in the one instant she stood holding them out from her in disgust, all the rest of the egg which had gone sliding over the stove, cooked, scorched and turned ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston
... into any pursuit,' said James, as he paused at the door with Miss Conway; but suddenly becoming aware of the slimy entanglement round his hat, he exclaimed, 'Absurd fellow!' and pulled it off rather petulantly, adding, with a little constraint, 'Recovery does put people into mad spirits! I fancy the honest folks here ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... method of progression by which, in the race of existence, many lives are lost. The timid will hobble from stone to stone, landing at each forward point more and yet more shaky in the knees. The torrent roars about them. Sick they grow and giddy; stepping-stones are green and slimy; the effort of balancing cannot be ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... at him. The siren voices sing to you from the smiling island, and their white arms and golden harps and the flowery grass draw you from the wet boat and the weary oar; but when a man lands he sees the fair form end in a slimy fish, and she slays him and gnaws his bones. 'He knows not that the dead are there, and that her guests are in the depths of hell.' Yes! every sin is a mistake, and the epitaph for ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... they usually drove to our horror, into our yard! A horse would appear in the gate, straddling its fore legs, with its big belly heaving; before it came into the yard it would strain and heave and after it would come a ten-yard beam in a four-wheeled wagon, wet and slimy; alongside it, wrapped up to keep the rain out, never looking where he was going and splashing through the puddles, a peasant would walk with the skirt of his coat tucked up in his belt. Another cart would appear with planks; then a third with a beam; then a fourth ... ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... the latter's "Deluge" has a certain awe-inspiring air with it. A slimy green man stands on a green rock, and clutches hold of a tree. On the green man's shoulders is his old father, in a green old age; to him hangs his wife, with a babe on her breast, and dangling at her hair, another child. In the water floats a corpse (a ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... gave way, and the wagon lurching over struck the officer, who fell into the muddy water of the Pamunkey. Always amused at an officer's mishap, cavalry men and drivers laughed. The young man struck out for the farther shore, and came on to a shelving slope of slimy mud, and was vainly struggling to get a footing when an officer ran down the bank and gave him a needed hand. Thus aided, Penhallow gained firm ground. With a look of disgust at his condition, as he faced the laughing troopers he said, with ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... beautiful woman, with hair streaming like moss and dark eyes looking into his, luring him with a power he cannot resist. His breath grows short, his gaze is fixed, mechanically he rises, steps to the brink, and lurches forward into the river. The arms that catch him are slimy and cold as serpents; the face that stares into his is a grinning skull. A loud, chattering laugh rings through the wilderness, and all is ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... gash of a mouth from out of which poured at regular intervals a sickening breath—yellow, blue, greenish often—and from which, too, often came dulled explosions, followed by belchings of debris which centipedes of cars dragged clear of its slimy lips. ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... this seemed to be felt by the five Khaki Boys as they stood in the mud and darkness waiting. For it had rained and the trench was slimy on the bottom in spite of ...
— The Khaki Boys Over the Top - Doing and Daring for Uncle Sam • Gordon Bates
... but a left hand Hale, yet considering the Plough-staffe, vpon which the Plow-man resteth his right hand, it is all one as if he had a right. And indeede, to make your knowledge the more perfect, you shall know that these gray clayes are generally in their owne natures so wet, tough, and slimy, and doe so clogge, cleaue, and choake vp the Plough, that hee which holds it shall haue enough to doe with his right hand onely to clense and keepe the Plough from choaking, insomuch that if there were another Hale, yet the Plow-man should haue no ...
— The English Husbandman • Gervase Markham
... I believe for the first time in his life, snapped an oar and overturned a lantern. Some drift-wood, covered with slimy weeds, washed heavily up at our feet. I remember that a little disabled ground-sparrow, chased by the tide, was fluttering and drowning just in sight, and that Myron drew it out of the water, and held itup for a moment ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... telephone cable. It took us nearly an hour to find where this slipped into the water. And we were tired and hungry and wet and cold, but we simply had to persevere. It was frightful. At length we found the thing—it looked like a slimy black snake—and we cut it, where the water was a foot deep—the water bit my wrists and ankles as sharply as if it had been sharks—and went back to the house ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... from the roadside and aimed it at the slimy little body, but his throw erred, and the missile fell harmlessly into the wheat field beyond, startling a blackbird with scarlet marks, which soared suddenly above the bearded grain and vanished, with a tremulous cry and a flame of outstretched ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... nowise cast down by his recent discouraging experiences, Walter Skinner held his head high and looked around him fiercely, as of yore. His doublet and hose besplashed with mud and torn by briers seemed not to give him any concern; neither did the condition of his shoes, which were foul with the slimy mud ...
— A Boy's Ride • Gulielma Zollinger
... That downe it fell, and all vnwares she sanke Vp to the brests; then it inclos'd her round, Kisses each part, and from the purling ground The vnder-streames made haste to come and view Those beauties which no earth could euer shew. The slimy fishes with their watry finnes Stand gazing on her, and close by her swimmes, And as she mou'd they mou'd, she needs no bait, For as when Orpheus plaid, so do they wait. And purple Titan, whom some fogs did shrowd, Perforce brake forth from ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... of Wisbeach is very like the town of Boston. It stands upon a river which is very narrow and which curves, and in which there rises and falls a most considerable tide, and which is bounded by slimy wooden sides. Here, as at Boston, the boats cannot turn round; if they come in frontways they have to go out backwards, like Mevagissey bees: an ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... nostrils and tongue, and screams of people, moaning and sobbing and general uproar. Something lay across Peter's chest, and he felt that he was suffocating, and struggled convulsively to push it away; the hands with which he pushed felt something hot and wet and slimy. and the horrified Peter realized that it was half the body of a mangled ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... low, empty hut, nearly square in shape, built of variously sized logs, and banked over with two or three feet of moss and grass-grown earth, so as to resemble an outdoor cellar. Half of one side had been torn down by storm-besieged travellers for firewood; its earthen floor was dank and wet with slimy tricklings from its leaky roof; the wind and rain drove with a mournful howl down through its chimney-hole; its door was gone, and it presented altogether a dismal picture of neglected dilapidation. Nothing daunted, Viushin ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... wept . . . Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song, Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long. But at my back in a cold blast I hear The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear. A rat crept softly through the vegetation Dragging its slimy belly on the bank While I was fishing in the dull canal On a winter evening round behind the gashouse 190 Musing upon the king my brother's wreck And on the king my father's death before him. White bodies naked on the low damp ground And bones cast in a little low dry garret, Rattled by the rat's ...
— The Waste Land • T. S. Eliot
... cocoa-nut trees. This was the spot we longed to visit; so, getting into the captain's boat, we approached the shore, where a number of nearly naked negroes rushing into the sea (there being no pier or jetty) presented their slimy backs at the gun-wale, and carried us in triumph to the beach. The town boasted of one hotel, in the only sitting-room of which we found some Portuguese officers smoking pipes as dirty as themselves, and drinking ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... had surprised and puzzled her; but now, as she timidly looked up and around her, she felt a shock of horror and revulsion such as might come over a man who, walking by night and believing that he is treading on flowers, suddenly finds that the slimy slope of a bottomless bog is leading him to perdition. She tottered and clutched at a statue, gazing about her, listening to the uproar, and wondering whether she were awake ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... disposed of the knife they found jointly—one was to own, the other to carry and use it. So by this plan the lion was to own California, and the snake was to occupy it as a hunting-ground; nay, not it alone, but every State and Territory in the Union must be given up to its slimy purposes. In other words, California was to be admitted as a free State, upon condition of the passage of the Fugitive Slave Bill, which authorized the slave-hunter to follow the fugitive into ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... the sentinels. A wicket, composed of immense beams of wood, was opened and they shot beneath the gloomy arch, through the Traitors' gate. A feeling of dread took possession of the girl as her gaze fell upon the slimy walls of the dismal arch. The wherrymen ceased rowing and the water rippled sullenly against the sides of the boat which soon, impelled by the former efforts of ...
— In Doublet and Hose - A Story for Girls • Lucy Foster Madison
... water. A mud-bank, upon which grew some clumps of flags and some water-lilies, descended by a gentle decline from the bank to the middle of the river. The water was very clear, and there was no current; the slippery and slimy mire could be ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... suit that has been drowned; That's what decided me," said Clarice. "And so I married him, I really wanted a merman; And this slimy quality in him Won me. No one forbade the ...
— Spectra - A Book of Poetic Experiments • Arthur Ficke
... bank where the badger lived. It was a day of amber sunlight, but there was a shiver of coming winter in the air. I had seen ice on the little horsepond that morning, and as we went through the garden we found the tall asparagus, with its red berries, lying on the ground, a mass of slimy green. ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... the strong-neck'd ox; no gentle bud The sun had dried; the cattle chew'd the cud Low levell'd on the grass; no fly's quick sting Enforc'd the stonehorse in a furious ring To tear the passive earth, nor lash his tail About his buttocks broad; the slimy snail Might on the wainscot, by his many mazes, Winding meanders and self-knitting traces, Be follow'd where he stuck, his glittering slime Not yet wip'd off. It was so early time, The careful smith had in his sooty forge Kindled no coal; nor did his hammers urge His neighbours' ...
— Pastoral Poems by Nicholas Breton, - Selected Poetry by George Wither, and - Pastoral Poetry by William Browne (of Tavistock) • Nicholas Breton, George Wither, William Browne (of Tavistock)
... mucous plus the pint of water, making a quart of liquid altogether, pours through the pylorus, and during the rapid walk, works its way rapidly down through the alimentary tract, washing the whole tract and preparing it to receive and rapidly to digest the next meal. This slimy water, having washed out the stomach and small intestine, then passes into the large intestine, moistening and lubricating its contents and causing it to move gradually towards the rectum, where it stimulates a normal free passage ...
— The Biology, Physiology and Sociology of Reproduction - Also Sexual Hygiene with Special Reference to the Male • Winfield S. Hall
... he looked upon the swollen, discolored face, round which the long black hair clung, matted and slimy from being so long saturated with water, and thought that this was once the beautiful Julia, though now so fearfully changed that no one could possibly have recognized her. Owing to the state which the body was in, Dr. Lacey thought proper ...
— Tempest and Sunshine • Mary J. Holmes
... took time for reflection, carefully weighing the chances so as to take the best. From the situation of the place the result was this—that he could not escape through the back of the wood, the stream which bordered it being not only deep, but very wide and muddy. Beneath this thick water was a slimy bog, on which the foot could not rest. There was only one way open, the high-road. To endeavor to reach it by creeping round the edge of the wood, without attracting attention, and then to gallop at headlong speed, required all the remaining strength and energy of his noble steed. Too probably ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... Ned turned the flashing glare on the surrounding darkness the mystery was solved. The Pioneer was lodged in mid channel on a timber dam. The bow projected a foot or two over the edge, but could go no further owing to lack of water. None was running over at all at this point, and the slimy timbers protruded six or eight inches above the level of ...
— Canoe Boys and Campfires - Adventures on Winding Waters • William Murray Graydon
... were used to the mirk of the Pit, and saw beside him the face of a youth, glimmering white as the dead moon at midday, and shining with tears and sweat of agony; and the lad was tearing at the walls, trying to make a way out; but his hands slipped on the slimy stones, and he fell back ...
— The Silver Crown - Another Book of Fables • Laura E. Richards
... hours the mental part of my day business, choosing the noxious from the useful. And in my dreams I shall be hauling on recalcitrants, and suffering stings from nettles, stabs from citron thorns, fiery bites from ants, sickening resistances of mud and slime, evasions of slimy roots, dead weight of heat, sudden puffs of air, sudden starts from bird-calls in the contiguous forest—some mimicking my name, some laughter, some the signal of a whistle, and living over again at large the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... tried to seek, Such leaden weight dragg'd these Icarian wings, My faithless wand was wavering and weak, And slimy toads had trespass'd in our rings— The birds refused to sing for me—all things Disown'd their old allegiance to our spells; The rude bees prick'd me with their rebel stings; And, when I pass'd, the valley-lily's bells Rang ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... pluck the delicate flowers with which it was painted and gather them into a nosegay. In some dudgeon, I blew a small jug of great beauty on to a carved prie-dieu, to which it adhered as though made of some slimy substance. ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... rich in scenery which would relieve the tedium of the journey. But when we came out upon the river-bank and looked at the dull shores, and the sandy bed, which the scant stream does not cover, but through which it creeps, treacherous and slimy, in half a dozen channels, there was no pleasure to the eye, no relief for the spirit. Late in the afternoon we approached a little village, and were greeted with music and hearty cheers,—the first ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... morbid fancy win, I touched, despite my loathing sane, The cold, hair-covered, slimy skin, Not yet washed clean ...
— Enamels and Cameos and other Poems • Theophile Gautier
... developed by this day's rain. Being in dry weather a loose light sand without any apparent consistency, it was now discovered to have a small portion of loam mixed with it, which, without having the tenacity of clay, is sufficient to render it slimy and boggy: I am quite satisfied that two days' rain will at any time render this country impassable. The mortification and distress of mind I felt at being obliged to take a retrograde direction was heightened by seeing the horses struggling under loads far beyond their ...
— Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales • John Oxley
... the Irrawaddy by elephants, then floated down the great river to Rangoon. All the logs in this yard were marked with a red cross to signify that they belonged to the government. Down by the river shore, where the ground was so soft that their feet sank deep into the slimy mud, were five elephants engaged in hauling logs up from the river to the dry ground ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... already"—Chad could see the rock fence where he had sat that spring day—"it's curious and mournful that you can see in any season a sign of the next to come." And there was the creek where he found Dan fishing, and there the road led to the ford where Margaret had spurned his offer of a slimy fish—ugh! "I do love the autumn. It makes me feel like the young woman who told Emerson that she had such mammoth thoughts she couldn't give them utterance—why, wake up, Mr. Buford, wake up!" Chad came ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... story is not in the fact that such men are in prison, but that a Dostoevski should be among them. Here is a delicate, sensitive man of genius, in bad health, with a highly organised nervous system, with a wonderful imagination, condemned to live for years in slimy misery, with creatures far worse than the beasts of the field. Indeed, some of the most beautiful parts of the story are where Dostoevski turns from the men to the prison dog and the prison horse, and there finds true friendship. His kindness to the ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... you wear the clothes of a—a dead person?" cried Anne, cringing as if touched by some cold and slimy thing. ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... a mere filthy hovel, all slimy and badly lighted, thrust back beneath the colonnades of the old market-place. Often and often since then, when noctambulism was the fashion, have we, future great men, spent whole nights there, elbows on table, amidst tobacco smoke and literary talk. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... was extended to its greatest length as he used it to single out the Terrans he had been eyeing—let this one, and that, and that, and the fourth be ready to join with the Salariki party an hour after nooning on this very day and they would indeed teach the slimy, treacherous lurkers in the depths a well ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... fear for two hours. Suddenly, a reptile of some kind seized my leg. In my fright, I struck a blow which loosened its hold, but I could not tell whether I had killed it; it was so dark, I could not see what it was; I only knew it was something cold and slimy. The pain I felt soon indicated that the bite was poisonous. I was compelled to leave my place of concealment, and I groped my way back into the house. The pain had become intense, and my friend was startled by my look of anguish. I asked her to prepare a poultice ...
— Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Written by Herself • Harriet Jacobs (AKA Linda Brent)
... bit; while Crowbar, dumb and purple in the face, gave telling blows with his fists. He could not strike the devil's head, because of the horns, and he could not grab his body, because it was so sleek and slimy. At length the devil's strength gave out. Crowbar siezed him by the throat, threw him on his back, put a knee upon his breast, and, with the cane in his right hand, gave him a blow between the horns that split his head in two. But he died hard. His head was split open, yet he was struggling, ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... he moved forward. On all sides the walls were wet and slimy. He advanced with care, resolved to avoid all pitfalls, were it possible to do so. He was in a place where the roofing was no higher than his shoulders, so he had to stoop as ...
— The Mansion of Mystery - Being a Certain Case of Importance, Taken from the Note-book of Adam Adams, Investigator and Detective • Chester K. Steele
... blood that fills my veins, transmitted free from godlike ancestry, were like that slimy ooze which stagnates in your arteries, I had remained at home, and broke my plighted oath to save my life. I am a Roman citizen; therefore have I returned, that ye might work your will upon this mass of ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... Russian dinner, of which I will omit details, except as regards the soup. This soup was botvinya. A Russian once obligingly furnished me with a description of a foreigner's probable views on this national delicacy: "a slimy pool with a rock in the middle, and creatures floating round about." The rock is a lump of ice (botvinya being a cold soup) in the tureen of strained kvas or sour cabbage. Kvas is the sour, fermented liquor made from black bread. In this liquid portion of the soup, ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... both go with a celerity which to this day astonishes my memory. No average merchantman's anchors have ever been let go with such miraculous smartness. And they both held. I could have kissed their rough, cold iron palms in gratitude if they had not been buried in slimy mud under ten fathoms of water. Ultimately they brought us up with the jibboom of a Dutch brig poking through our spanker—nothing worse. And a miss is ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... bright hair But lieth floating in the moonlight air, Like the long moss, beside a silver spring, In elfin tresses, sadly murmuring. The worm hath 'gan to crawl upon her brow— The living worm! and with a ripple now, Like that upon the sea, are heard below, The slimy swarms all ravening as they go, Amid the stagnate vitals, with a rush; And one might hear them echoing the hush Of Julio, as he watches by the side Of the ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart
... its frail joints Swayed with the undulations of the tide. A restless impulse urged him to embark And meet lone Death on the drear ocean's waste; 305 For well he knew that mighty Shadow loves The slimy caverns of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... girl sank down upon this gloomy shore and cried, clinging to the kanaka's knee: "O father, beat out my brains with this jagged stone, and do not let the eel twine around my neck, and trail with a loathsome, slimy, creeping crawl over my body before I die. Oh! the crabs will pick and tear me ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... very dark. The palace rises upward four lofty stories. Above is a square patch of sky, on which a star trembles. The court is full of damp, unwholesome odors. The foot slips upon the slimy pavement. Nobili stopped. The old man came limping ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... sicken and grow pale as they glided like ghosts through these watery woods. Into this wilderness it seems impossible that the hand of human industry, or the foot of human wayfaring should ever penetrate; no wholesome growth can take root in its slimy depths; a wild jungle chokes up parts of it with a reedy, rattling covert for venomous reptiles; the rest is a succession of black ponds, sweltering under black cypress ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... so slovenly, wasteful, and destructive to one's thrift, and so demoralizing, in a small way, as is this practice. What so revolting to one, of the least tidy nature whatever, as a villainous brute, with a litter of filthy pigs at her heels, and the slimy ooze of a mud-puddle reeking and dripping from their sides? See the daubs of mud marking every fence-post, far and near, along the highway, or where-ever they run! A burrow is rooted up at every shady point, a nuisance ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... the cube, where they found that Smith, happening to look out a window, had spied a pond not far off. The three visited it and found, on its banks, the first green stuff they had seen; a tiny, flowerless salt grass, very scarce. It bordered a slimy, bluish pool of absolutely still fluid. Nobody would call it water. They took a few samples of ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint
... cavern; then, as Forbes turned to flee, the enraged monster, with blood streaming from a hole in his neck, threw his slimy coils forward in convulsions of agony, and, before the eyes of his horrified companions, Melton ...
— The River of Darkness - Under Africa • William Murray Graydon
... was down, it required a considerable detour to reach the spot, and when at last they came off the ladder-way, the mangled body had disappeared. The water was now running in, submerging first one slab of slimy rock and then another, and the four men in the boat—the workmen, that is, the boatman, and Mr. Fison—now turned their attention from the bearings off shore to the water ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... awful mud lest again I should trample heedlessly on something that had once lived and loved and laughed. And they lay everywhere, here stark and stiff, with no pitiful earth to hide their awful corruption—here again, half buried in slimy mud; more than once my nailed boot uncovered mouldering tunic or things more awful. And as I trod this grisly place my pity grew, and with pity a profound wonder that the world with its so many ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... deserted wharf, at the end of which was ever to be seen a broad-beamed fisherman, sitting upon an uncomfortably wooden chair, from which he dabbled perpetually with his whip-cord line in the shallow water that washed the slimy face-timbers of the wharf. There he sat, day after day, and all day, and, for aught I know, all through the summer-night, a big-timbered, sea-worthy man, reading contentedly a daily paper of local growth, and pulling up never a better bit of sea-luck than the puny, mean-spirited fishling called by ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... stagnant or stagnating water originating in bogs are distinguished into Trask, stagna, and Tjernar or Tjarnar (sing. Tjern or Tjarn), stagnatiles. Trask are pools fed by bogs, or water emanating from them, and their bottoms are slimy; Tjernar are small Trask situated within the limits of Mossar.—L.L. Laestadius, om Mojligheten af Uppodlingar i Lappmarken, pp. ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... for lying on; but he discovered a broken one-legged stool, and on this he sat and slept, propped as well as might be in a corner. It is difficult to say which would be worse—a fall from the stool by daylight into the embers of a wood fire, or the shuddering slimy waking about midnight, after a nod more vigorous than the rest, to find oneself plunged in eight cold ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... country, against those sickening anti-Christs who bayonet children, rape women, and wantonly torture unto death defenseless men—and boast of it, sir; gloat over it! It'll be our country against that polluted swamp of slimy creatures, sir; and in our country there shall be neither Democrats nor Republicans! Politics be damned, sir! Until those breeders of paresis—those Hohenzollern upstarts who, as God is my witness, are the vomit of hell—shall ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... off on Aprille 4, And now 'tis August 2, I stood upon ye slimy shoore And swere me to be trewe; I sawe yt schippe bear out to sea— O waly, waly! woe ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson |
