"Spider" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... were only that butterfly!" At that moment the luxurious vagrant, in the midst of its careless sports, and voluptuous banquet, became entangled in a web woven by a great black spider, which sat with eager impatience waiting until it had wound itself into the toils by its fruitless exertions, that he might seize and devour his prey. The heart of Adakar melted with pity; starting up ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... passage in Scripture," said Oisille, "too good for you to turn to your own purposes. But beware of doing like the spider, which transforms sound meat into poison. Be advised that it is a perilous matter to quote Scripture out ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. IV. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... he assured her, "but, you see, all over Germany there is spread like a spider's web the lay religion of the citizen—devotion to the Government, blind obedience to the Kaiser. Independent thought has made Germany great in science, in political economy, in economics. But independent thought is never turned ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Common: star; [{splat}]; . Rare: wildcard; gear; dingle; mult; spider; aster; times; twinkle; glob (see {glob}); ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... by the sight of the sufferers, and for over two centuries excited the astonishment of contemporaries. The Netherlands and France were equally affected; in Italy the disease became known as tarantism, it being supposed to proceed from the bite of the tarantula, a venomous spider. Like the St. Vitus' dance in Germany, tarantism spread by sympathy, increasing in severity as it took a wider range; the chief cure was music, which seemed to furnish magical means for exorcising ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... "Spider Flynn is matched to meet Kid Holloway; is that what you mean, Stephen? Somebody tumbled out of an air-ship the other day; is that what you mean? And they're selling scientific jewelry on Broadway at a dollar a quart; is that what you ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... him stuff that puts him to these ends; For, being not propp'd by ancestry, whose grace Chalks successors their way, nor call'd upon For high feats done to the crown; neither allied To eminent assistants; but, spider-like, Out of his self-drawing web, he gives us note, The force of his own merit makes his way; A gift that heaven gives for him, which buys A place ...
— The Life of Henry VIII • William Shakespeare [Dunlap edition]
... read to her of the ant-lion, stealthily watching at the bottom of its funnel-shaped den for its prey, which the deceitful sand brings within its reach, if once the victim comes to the edge of the pit; and of the spider, so politely inviting ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... guidance the Pradhana gives birth to all its effects, from the so-called Mahat downwards to individual things. This interpretation is confirmed by the comparisons set forth in the next sloka, 'As the spider sends forth and draws in its threads, as plants spring from the earth, as hair grows on the head and body of the living man, thus does everything arise here from the Indestructible.' The section therefore is concerned only with the ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... must never lose hold of the principle that every flower is meant to be seen by human creatures with human eyes, as by spiders with spider eyes. But as the painter may sometimes play the spider, and weave a mesh to entrap the heart, so the beholder may play the spider, when there are meshes to be disentangled that have entrapped his mind. I take my lens, therefore—to the little wonder of a brown wasps' nest with ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... warm-blooded vertebrates. Otherwise, one could not see either an ant, with its abdomen or antennae cut off, gorge itself with honey; or a humble-bee, in which the antennae and all the front of the head had been removed, go to find and pillage flowers; or a spider, the foot of which had been broken, feed immediately on this, its own foot, as I myself have seen; or, finally, a caterpillar, wounded at the "tail" end, devour itself, beginning behind, as I have observed ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... movement on the deck caught Anderson's eye. He was unable to control a shrill intake of breath as an enormous spider, hairy and swift, darted across to the couch and sprang. It landed next to Ives' knee, sprang again. Paresi swung at it and missed, his hand catching Ives heavily just under the armpit. The spider hit the deck, skidded, righted itself and, abruptly, was gone. Ives caved in around the impact ...
— Breaking Point • James E. Gunn
... begin with one the law already suspects," mused the fisherman. "Not that that is any criterion, but that it disposes of him in a certain order—disposes of him or—involves him more deeply," and the colonel looked to where a ground spider had woven a web in which a small but helpless grass hopper ...
— The Golf Course Mystery • Chester K. Steele
... Watch a spider's thread floating in the air at dawn, then you will get some idea of the gentle, supple, ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... twenty-four without the telephone girl. Her hands move quickly over the face of the switch board, picking up long, silk-wound wires, reaching high, plugging one after another the holes of the switch board. The wires cross and recross, until the switch board is like a spider web, and in the tangle of lines under the hands of the telephone girl are enmeshed the business affairs of ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... arms, two of them being very long. The Octopus's body is round, like that of a fat spider, while the Cuttle has a long body. The Cuttle has many sharp claws on its arms, besides numbers of big, strong suckers. It holds and tears its prey at the same time. Its staring eyes are like big black lanterns on each side of the head. The head twists this way and that, so ...
— Within the Deep - Cassell's "Eyes And No Eyes" Series, Book VIII. • R. Cadwallader Smith
... the hack and was driven home barely in time to rush her bundles into her room before school was out. She could scarcely wait until the children were in bed to open the parcels. The doll had to be dressed, but Kate was interested in Christmas by that time, and so contemplated the spider-waisted image with real affection. She never had owned a doll herself. She let the knitting go that night, and cut up an old waist to make white under-clothing with touches of lace, and a pretty dress. Then Kate went to her room, tied the doll in a safe place ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter
... including the much-prized, native Janet, with his favourite water- green backgrounds, aware of the poet's predilection, had given to all alike the same brown eyes and tender eyelids and golden hair and somewhat ambered paleness, varying only the curious artifices of the dress—knots, and nets, and golden spider-work, and clear, flat stones. Dangerous guests in that simple, cloistral place, Sibyls of the Renaissance on a mission from Italy to France, to Gaston one and all seemed under the burden of some weighty message concerning a ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... could never rid himself of the attentions of the police. Henceforth it was almost impossible for him to work in safety, and whatever booty he obtained he must needs share with his unwelcome companions. He was like a fly condemned to spend his life in the irk-some society of the spider. When he had not much to give, his poverty was rewarded by years in prison; and then, as he says himself, he "was welcomed back into the old criminal life by crooked police officials." These officials had no desire to help him. ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... pieces of stove-pipe and a few fire-irons are exposed for sale. Von Holzen, having pushed open the door, stood waiting at the foot of a narrow and grimy staircase. He knew that in such a shop in such a quarter of the town there is always a human spider lurking in the background, who steals out upon any human fly that may pause to ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... thus in the world, that, when human prudence has done its best, some general, perhaps national, event, destroys the schemes of the individual, as the casual touch of a more powerful being sweeps away the web of the spider. ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... regaling himself only with a bottle of soda-water, imperceptibly flavoured with cognac by the hands of a ministering angel at the refreshment-counter of the Waterloo Station, and then hurrying on at once in a hansom to that dingy street in Soho where Mr. Medler sat in his parlour, like the proverbial spider waiting for the ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... it. They had apparently been lighted, and burned an hour or two, and been extinguished perhaps half a century before. The marble vase at the entrance held some hardened mud at the bottom, accruing from the dust that had settled in it during the gradual evaporation of the holy water; and a spider (being an insect that delights in pointing the moral of desolation and neglect) had taken pains to weave a prodigiously thick tissue across the circular brim. An old family banner, tattered by the moths, drooped from ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... seen her. Yet the moment he sung out and pointed, all hands cried out, "There she is!" But what was it, sir? Only a mast about three miles off—just one single mast sticking up out of the white water, as thin and faint as a spider's line. Yet that was the ship we had been waiting all night to see. There she was, and my heart thumped in my ears the moment my eye fell on that mast. But Lord, sir, the fearful sea that was raging ...
— Heroes of the Goodwin Sands • Thomas Stanley Treanor
... own little space was held dry and clear for us by the needles of two enormous red cedars some four feet in diameter. A variety of thoughts sifted through my mind as it followed lazily the shimmering filaments of loose spider-web streaming through space. The last thought stuck. It was that that day was a holiday. Therefore I unlimbered my six-shooter, and turned her loose, each shot being accompanied by a ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... fight for life. He wrestled at his gun to tug it free, but found it anchored. He pulled the trigger, and the gun spoke loud and clear, but the bullet plunged into empty space. Then he felt that left arm begin to move, and the hand worked up behind his back like a great spider. ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand
... talking, puffing at one of the host's long cigars. Cap'n Sproul sat on the edge of a spider-legged chair, great unhappiness on his countenance. Mr. Bickford was both charmed and delighted, so he said, by their acceptance, and made it known that he had suggested them, in his anxiety to have only gentlemen ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... people can well spare you for a month, and I am sure will be the more inclined to do so from the consideration that change of air and scene will be good for you, and that, though your stock of original ideas is certainly extraordinary, yet you cannot be expected to go on for ever, like a spider, existing mentally in the midst of your own weavings, without every now and then recruiting your strength and taking in a new supply ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... the freshness of the spot, how charming and very delightful it is, and how summer-like and shrill it sounds from the choir of grasshoppers." One of the poets in the Anthology finds a grasshopper struggling in a spider's web, which he releases with ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... they are quite like others, but they have a broader breast, a larger belly than the common sort; as they fly they hum loudly and buzz beyond all endurance, and they are so strong that they will break right through a spider's web; or if one is caught, it will buzz there for three days, for it can contend with the spider in single combat. All this the Seneschal had carefully observed, and he argued further that these gentry flies produce the smaller folk, corresponding ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... tents and rude cabins, and there was the unfailing accessory of a large mining camp, the gambling tent, where the banker, like a wily spider, lay in wait to appropriate the hard-earned dust of the ...
— Joe's Luck - Always Wide Awake • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... threepence. Such a turn-out had never been presented to her notice before. The traffic in the street of the Consuls was mostly pedestrian and far from fashionable. And anyhow Therese never looked out of the window. She lurked in the depths of the house like some kind of spider that shuns attention. She used to dart at one from some dark recesses which I ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... mountains or the mediaeval speculation on their meaning. His letters to his wife from the Alps and Pyrenees record his impressions with a painstaking and detailed accuracy which does not forget the black-and-yellow spider performing somersaults on an imperceptible thread hung from one brier to another. The emotion after an hour on the Rigi-Kulm "is immense." "The tourist comes here to get a point of view; the thinker finds here an immense book in which each rock is a letter, each lake ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... found a dimpled spider, fat and white, On a white heal-all, holding up a moth Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth— Assorted characters of death and blight Mixed ready to begin the morning right, Like the ingredients of a witches' broth— A snow-drop spider, a flower like froth, And dead wings carried ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... out to the dark ship—and then he would be alone with the Captain, alone in the dark ship, with the Captain's heavy hand upon his shoulder, his mouth smiling, his great legs drawing him in as a spider draws a fly into its web, and everyone asleep, only the stars and the dark water. He tried to say the Lord's Prayer again, but the words would not come. The sweat began to trickle down ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... to drop to the ground but when he looked Diamond could see nothing but a little spider with long legs which made its way over the ice toward the south. It grew and grew till Diamond discovered that it was not a spider but a weasel. Away glided the weasel and away went Diamond after it. The weasel grew and grew and grew till he saw ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • Elizabeth Lewis and George MacDonald
... for she had scarcely done so before the handle was turned and the voice of Irene was heard outside crying through the keyhole, "What changeling is in this room? Which of you housemaids has dared to lock herself in? Come out! I've got a big spider ready, and"—— ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... love, Gervase is in love, everybody is in love, except me and one other! It is a whole network of mischief, and I am the unhappy fly that has unconsciously fallen into the very middle of it. But the spider, my dear,—the spider who wove the web in the first instance,—is the Princess Ziska, and she is NOT in love! She is the other one. She is not in love with anybody any more than I am. She's got something else on her mind—I don't know what it is exactly, but ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... power, against which no one can sufficiently guard and protect himself. Here it is led by the nose, and oppresses the common people, becomes a government of the like of which a heathen says: "The spider-webs catch the small flies, but the mill-stones roll through." So the laws, ordinances and government of one and the same authority hold the small men, and the great are free; and where the prince is not himself so wise that he needs nobody's advice, or ...
— A Treatise on Good Works • Dr. Martin Luther
... could exhaust its nature. All things that happen result from the one substance. This surely means that what happens now and what happened millions of years ago are, for the substance, equally present and necessary results. To illustrate once more in my own way: A spider creeping back and forth across a circle could, if she were geometrically disposed, measure out in temporal succession first this diameter, and then that. Crawling first over one diameter, she would say, 'I ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... in needlework. Only one wish a year, however, could be made. So, if any one wanted several things—health, wealth, skill in needlework, wisdom, etc.—they must wait many years before all the favors could be granted. Above all things, rainy weather was not desired. It was a "good sign" when a spider spun his web over a melon, or, if put in a square box he should weave a circular web. Now, the cause of all this preparation was that on the seventh of July the Herd-boy star and the Spinning Maiden star cross the Milky Way to meet each other. These are the stars which we call Capricornus ...
— Japanese Fairy World - Stories from the Wonder-Lore of Japan • William Elliot Griffis
... the attack took place, abruptly and hideously. The attack of the tiger on the wild ass, the attack of the spider on the fly. Montparnasse suddenly tossed away his rose, bounded upon the old man, seized him by the collar, grasped and clung to him, and Gavroche with difficulty restrained a scream. A moment later ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... ought to be. He had a dim notion that once upon a time a terrible crime had been committed, which it was now everybody's business to hide by practising countless deceptions; he compared himself to a fly caught in a spider's web: the more it struggled to regain its freedom, the more it entangled itself, until at last it died miserably, strangled by the ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... a mouthful of smoke over a spider which was just about to kill a fly. This caused the spider to fall into the river, from where a supper-hunting swallow ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... the web of a vile love are as pitiful as those of a fly in the meshes of the spider; he crawls to the edge, but only to ensnare himself more completely; he takes pleasure in ridiculing her, but whether he praises or blames, she remains mistress of his life; all threads are equally fatal, and each that should have served to bear him out of the trap only goes to ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... first, that some insect during certain seasons might cross the plants, but I have almost given up this; nevertheless, pray have a look at the flowers next season. Secondly, I conjectured that the Spider and Bee-orchis might be a crossing and self-fertile form of the same species. Accordingly I wrote some years ago to an acquaintance, asking him to mark some Spider-orchids, and observe whether they retained the ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... of my dulness drives me wild. Then again I merely gaze at it. I try time and again to get my mind on my work, and something—anything, provided it is trivial enough—turns me aside. Just now I saw a spider-web, and that made me think of Bruce, and thence I went by way of Walter Scott to Palestine, and when I came to I was writing a song for—who was the minstrel?—to sing outside of the prison ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... rather a strain. We must find something a little less serious; but I am going to fill up all your time. You had got too much taken up with your psychology, and we must not live too much on theory, and spin problems, like the spider, out of our own insides; but we will not spend too much time in trudging over this country, though it is well worth it. Did you ever see anything more beautiful than those pine-trees on the slope there, with the blue distance between ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... thread of fused quartz plated with silver, only one one- thousandth of a millimetre in diameter, so tenuous that it could not be seen except in a bright light. It was a thread so slender that it might have been spun by a miscroscopic spider. ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... charged, and the light from the furnace flashed out brighter and brighter; and above me, and around me, a hundred devils yelled and laughed and swore and spit, and snapped their bony fingers in my face, and leaped up to the ceiling into the black, long spider-webs, and rode on the spiders which was bigger than a powder-horn, and jumped onto my head. Then they all formed in line, and marched and hooted and yelled; and when the snakes joined the procession, the devils leaped ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... "To seek a spider in a stubble-field! Truly he needs my bauble who sent them on such an errand," said the jester, rather slowly, as if to take time for consideration. "What's your name, ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... the late spring Janet crossed the Warren Street bridge, the upper of the two spider-like structures to be seen from her office window, spanning the river beside the great Hampton dam. The day, dedicated to the memory of heroes fallen in the Civil War, the thirtieth of May, was a legal holiday. Gradually Janet had acquired a dread of holidays ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... prey of the road-kids. Robbing a drunken man they call "rolling a stiff"; and wherever they are, they are on the constant lookout for drunks. The drunk is their particular meat, as the fly is the particular meat of the spider. The rolling of a stiff is ofttimes an amusing sight, especially when the stiff is helpless and when interference is unlikely. At the first swoop the stiff's money and jewellery go. Then the kids sit around their victim in a sort of pow-wow. A kid generates a fancy for the stiff's necktie. Off ...
— The Road • Jack London
... Eck and Luther lasted till July 13. Luther concluded his argument with the words: 'I am sorry that the learned doctor only dips into Scripture as deep as the water-spider into the water—nay, that he seems to fly from it as the devil from the Cross. I prefer, with all deference to the Fathers, the authority of Scripture, which I herewith recommend to ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... visited me. Hombre! they swarmed down upon us but a day ago. They came out of the bush in millions, straight for the house. We fled. Caramba! had we remained, we should have been eaten alive. But they swept the house—Hombre! no human hands could have done so well. Every spider, every rat, beetle, flea, every plague, was instantly eaten, and within a half hour they had disappeared again, and we moved back into a thoroughly ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... personages. The chief of these are the Enupits, who are pigmies dwelling about the springs, and the Rock Rovers, who live in the cliffs. Their gods are zoic, and the chief among them are the wolf, the rabbit, the eagle, the jay, the rattlesnake, and the spider. They have no knowledge of the ambient air, but the winds are the breath of beasts living in the four quarters of the earth. Whirlwinds that often blow among the sand-dunes are caused by the dancing ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... to its full height. Outside the row of geranium beds glowed scarlet and crimson in the calm light. Beyond them the turf of the lawn was overspread by trailing gossamers, and delicate cart-wheel spider's webs upon which the dew still glittered. In the shrubberies robins sang; and above the river great companies of swallows swept to and fro, with sharp twitterings, restlessly gathering for ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... For my part, I honor the blessed and blessing spirit that is quick to discover and extol all that is pleasing and meritorious. Give me the honest bee, that extracts honey from the humblest weed, but save me from the ingenuity of the spider, which traces its venom, even in the ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... things that pullulate in damp and darkness under big flat stones. To think that I have been friends with all these—roses and centipedes and all—and then to think that most of my outer life has been spent between bare whitewashed walls, with never even a flea or a spider to be ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... wainscots, behind which the mice were always scampering and squeaking and rattling down the plaster, and enacting family scenes and parlor theatricals. It had a cellar where the cold slug clung to the walls, and the misanthropic spider withdrew from the garish day; where the green mould loved to grow, and the long white potato-shoots went feeling along the floor, if haply they might find the daylight; it had great brick pillars, always in a cold sweat with holding ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... paths are trod of none Where through the woods they went astray; The spider's traceries are spun Across the darkling forest way; There come no Knights that ride to slay, No Pilgrims through the grasses wet, No shepherd lads that sang their say ...
— Aucassin and Nicolete • Andrew Lang
... Winecup and Spider, in connection with the sign of Mars, the characteristic of Mars being energy, show the strength, courage, and perseverance needed to carry out a successful career; the Spider being a symbol of concentration, patience, and achievement, whilst the ...
— Telling Fortunes By Tea Leaves • Cicely Kent
... awful state of affairs. A wretched wayfarer caught and held like a fly in a spider's web, and not a soul at hand ...
— Queensland Cousins • Eleanor Luisa Haverfield
... struggling to free himself from her chaste, but spider-like embrace. 'Let me go! I have made arrangements for you in an altered state of society, and mean to provide for you comfortably in ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... Puritans, who watched the cobwebs swaying, trembling, forming strange maps of imaginary rivers with their many tributaries, or outlines of intersecting roads and lanes. And if little Yet-Once, Hate-Evil, or Shearjashub chanced, by good fortune, to be seated near a window where a crafty spider and a foolish buzzing fly could be watched through the dreary exposition and attempted reconciliation of predestination and free will, that indeed were a happy way ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... gem, barring a flaw, and I congratulate you on its recovery, but I see no human eye in it. I see some indistinct lines, fine as the thread of a spider's web, that is all. There is the breakfast bell, duke. We will go into the drawing room and find Cora. She must be down ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... a Chinese almanack for the current year, we have a curious woodcut representing a fly, a spider, a bird, a sportsman, a tiger, and a well. Underneath this strange medley is a legend couched in the following terms:—"Predestination in all things!" The letterpress accompanying the picture explains that the spider had just secured a fat fly, and was on the ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... South will not tolerate our interference with their slaves, [by our discussing the matter in the newspapers and elsewhere]." "The Union then, if used to disturb this institution of Slavery, will be then as the 'spider's web; a breath will agitate, a blast will sweep ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... Europe, the remarks here thrown together will serve to show the extreme folly of Britain, in resting her hopes of success on the extinction of our paper currency. The expectation is at once so childish and forlorn, that it places her in the laughable condition of a famished lion watching for prey at a spider's web. ...
— A Letter Addressed to the Abbe Raynal, on the Affairs of North America, in Which the Mistakes in the Abbe's Account of the Revolution of America Are Corrected and Cleared Up • Thomas Paine
... undressed himself and lay down. He was quite tired out, and he felt sure that in a few moments he should be fast asleep. But soon he began to roll and toss about uneasily. The bed was hard and uncomfortable. He opened his eyes. There was a spider crawling over him, and he shivered. Other spiders, as large as crabs, were creeping quietly over the ground and the walls as if this was their home ...
— Pinocchio in Africa • Cherubini
... him. The little German, with his round, rosy cheeks, his dot of a nose, his big spectacles, and his rotund body, looked even more than usual like a spider or a Santa ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... you walk into my parlour?' said the spider to the fly; ''Tis the prettiest little parlour that ever you did spy. The way into the parlour is up a winding stair, And I have many curious things to show ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... Dryad: Sprinkle out of flower bells Mortal sense entrapping spells; Make no sound On the ground; Strew and lap and lay around. Gnat nor snail Here assail, Beetle, slug, nor spider here, Now descend, Nor depend, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... perceived, to my admiration, that the sound made by this invisible automaton was louder than that of the artificial machine. Its vibrations would fall as regular, but much quicker. Upon a strict examination, it was found to be nothing but a little beetle, or spider, in the wood of a box." Sometimes they are found in the plastering of a wall, and at other times in a rotten post, or in some old chest or trunk; and the noise is made by beating its head on the subject that it finds fit for sound. ...
— Apparitions; or, The Mystery of Ghosts, Hobgoblins, and Haunted Houses Developed • Joseph Taylor
... spiteful laughter of malicious demons. One feels tired, worried, unsafe, as if in an enemy's country, helplessly following the guide, who walks noiselessly on the soft ground. With a branch he sweeps aside the innumerable spider-webs that droop across the path, to keep them from hanging in our faces. Silently the other men follow behind; once in a while a dry branch ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... see, took any notice or care of her. For the children were kept away with her in the old house, and my lady wasn't one to take trouble about anybody till once she stood in her way, and then she would just shove her aside or crush her like a spider, and ha' done with her.'—They have always been a proud and a fierce race, the Oldcastles, sir," said Weir, taking up the speech in his own person, "and there's been a deal o' breedin in-and-in amongst them, and that has kept up the worst of them. The men took to the women of their own sort somehow, ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... the morning light,—the freshness, the pearls and diamonds, the fairy linen spread on the grass to bleach (there be those who call it spider-web, but to such I speak not), the silver fog curling up from river and valley. I love it so much that I am loath to confess that sometimes the evening light is even more beautiful. Yet is there a softness that comes ...
— Melody - The Story of a Child • Laura E. Richards
... when he was coming down by the break in the cliff, where some great winter wave had bitten out such a slice that the top had come tumbling down, he saw the monster sunning itself on the flat rock by the side of its pool, like a huge nightmare spider. ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... as if she was bitten by that Neapolitan spider which, according to the legend, is such a wonderful dance-incentor. She would have the music quicker and quicker. She sank on Kew's arm, and clung on his support. She poured out all the light of her languishing eyes into his face. Their glances rather confused than charmed him. But the bystanders ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... sat on a tuffet, Eating of curds and whey; There came a great spider, Who sat down beside her, ...
— Denslow's Mother Goose • Anonymous
... that Blue Spider, when he communicated the secret to him, "mum's the word. If you mentions it, the kernel's family will bu'st up. I will return to the streets from vich I came. Trumps, alias Rodgers, to the den hout of vich 'e was 'auled. Susan will take the wail and retire to ...
— The Garret and the Garden • R.M. Ballantyne
... Girard), which is widely diffused in California, forms a simple shaft-like burrow, but, like the European Trap-door Spider, it is very skilful in forming an entrance and in concealing its presence. Its habits have lately been described by D. Cleveland of San Diego.[84] In the adobe land hillocks are numerous; they are about a ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... our woodfolk, Grand-daddy," began Nimble-toes. "No one could write a letter, so they told me what to say. I've said it forty-'leven times, lest I forget. The message is from Pa Field-Mouse, Squire Cricket, Sir Spider, Daddy Grasshopper, Mr. Hop Toad, and Mr. Jack Rabbit. ...
— Grand-Daddy Whiskers, M.D. • Nellie M. Leonard
... a pale, little woman, with hair as soft and white as the delicate lace that fell like a spider's web over it. The child-like hands, which lay in relief among the folds of her black-satin dress, were withered in their whiteness, like the leaves of a frost-bitten lily. They were quivering, too; and now that she was alone, you might have seen that delicate head begin to vibrate with ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... offender, and I knew it. That knowledge transformed my pity into passive endurance, and, eventually, into blind hate—the same instinct, I suppose, which prompts a man to savagely stamp on the spider he has but half killed. And with this hate in my bosom the season of 1882 ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... 30 feet in length and 12 feet in width and height, a spider is at a point on the middle of one of the end walls, 1 foot from the ceiling, as at A; and a fly is on the opposite wall, 1 foot from the floor in the centre, as shown at B. What is the shortest distance that the spider must crawl in order to reach the fly, which remains stationary? Of course ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... to Shah Bagh; cloudy weather, occasionally a very slight shower during the last few days, depending probably on the Punjab rains. To-day, observed a small green caterpillar, climbing up a fine thread, like a spider's web, which hung from the fly of the tent; its motions were precisely those of climbing, the thread over which it had passed was accumulated between its third pairs of legs; it did not ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... Bar," on North Main Street of the City of Angels was all but empty. Upon it the lassitude of early afternoon lay heavily. The spider-legged music-racks of the Mexican string orchestra, the empty platform chairs, the deserted side-tables along the pictured wall, the huge cactus scrawled over with pin-etched initials,—all the impedimenta of the saloon seemed ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... another, fighting fiercely until they dropped. Even in his later days according to Hoylake, he was not ashamed of these exploits. The gamblers invented for themselves new refinements of sport or cruelty. Spider-racing. I do not suppose that anyone living to-day knows what spider-racing is. This was the manner of it. At night, when the big black-bellied spiders that haunted the lofts came out to spread their nets, stable-boys were sent with ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... Geoffreys of Anjou had been at daggers drawn with the Dukes of Normandy and Brittany, but it had since, like most other such ancient feudal fortresses, become the nucleus of walls and buildings for use, defence, or ornament, that lay beneath him like a spider's web, when he had gained the roof of the keep, garnished with pepper-box turrets at each of the four angles. Beyond lay the green copses and orchards of the Bocage, for it was true, as he had at first suspected, that this was the chateau de Nid de Merle, and that Berenger was a captive in his ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and neglected, but their poisoned weapons were in fine order. Their blow-pipes hung from the roof of the hut, carefully suspended by a silk-grass cord, and on taking a nearer view of them no dust seemed to have collected there, nor had the spider spun the smallest web on them, which showed that they were in constant use. The quivers were close by them, with the jaw-bone of the fish pirai tied by a string to their brim and a small wicker-basket of wild cotton, which ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... five thousand dollars on this accursed thing, and this is the first money that has come back,' he said, as the greenbacks were placed in his hand. 'Try it again,' said the affable clerk, as an historical affable spider once said, 'walk into my parlor!' to a foolish policy-playing fly. The man who was five thousand less four hundred dollars out, did try it again. He kept trying it. He kept winning as if a good angel stood behind him dictating the plays. He struck two thousand ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... man, small, only five feet six inches in height, with sallow skin and jet black whiskers, his eyes dark and piercing, his whole personality, as one observer put it, "reminiscent of the spider." His reputation was that of an unscrupulous and immoral rascal, who would not hesitate to sacrifice his best friends, if need be. His war against Cornelius Vanderbilt for control of the Erie was one of his typical operations—a war which, when he saw he was ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... thou mayest spin spider's webs, or jib up and down like a gnat,' said one, 'but such tricks are not lawful upon land of ours. ...
— Slain By The Doones • R. D. Blackmore
... made me dizzy, but I smiled. Ben was not the same in Belem, I saw at once, and no longer wondered at its influence, or at the vacillating nature of his plans and pursuits. Mrs. Somers gave me some tea from a spider-shaped silver tea-pot, which was related to a spider-shaped cream-jug and a spider-shaped sugar-dish. The polished surface of the mahogany table reflected a pair of tall silver candlesticks, and the plates, being ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... coherent, but Elizabeth perfectly understood what he meant. Several times during the past weeks she had attempted to open his eyes to the truth; but he would neither see nor hear, and had insisted upon rushing on to his fate like a great blundering bluebottle into a spider's web. ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... performed the work of many, and the superfluous labourers were thrown out of employment. Yet it is to be observed, that the work thus executed was inferior in quality; not marketable at home, and merely hurried over with a view to exportation. It was called, in the cant of the trade, by the name of "Spider-work." The rejected workmen, in the blindness of their ignorance, instead of rejoicing at these improvements in arts so beneficial to mankind, conceived themselves to be sacrificed to improvements in mechanism. In the foolishness of their hearts they imagined that the maintenance and well-doing of ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... himself flat on the ground, and lay for a long time eagerly watching the antics of a beetle. A little later, with Brutus patiently beside him, he sat cross-legged for ten minutes, waiting to see how a certain big yellow spider would spin her web between two branches ...
— John of the Woods • Abbie Farwell Brown
... was about to spring upon its victim, turned and slunk away. The python swung itself into the tree and disappeared among the leaves. The spider stopped short in its advance and hid ...
— The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus • L. Frank Baum
... cried a voice behind them. Turning quickly around they beheld a huge purple spider sitting not two yards away and regarding them with its ...
— Glinda of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... spring, the others in autumn, along the garden-walks and over the lawns, in search of a caterpillar; the Pompili (The Pompilus is a species of Hunting-wasp known also as the Ringed Calicurgus—Translator's Note.), who travel alertly, beating their wings and rummaging in every corner in quest of a Spider. The largest of them waylays the Narbonne Lycosa (Known also as the Black-bellied Tarantula—Translator's Note.), whose burrow is not infrequent in the harmas. This burrow is a vertical well, with a curb of fescue-grass intertwined with silk. You can see the eyes of the mighty Spider ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... little expectation of obtaining more than the negative she gave him. Though her father supported him and her sister supported him, he could not play the fiddle so as to draw your soul out of your body like a spider's thread, as Mop did, till you felt as limp as withy- wind and yearned for something to cling to. Indeed, Hipcroft had not the slightest ear for music; could not sing two notes in ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... the flour with half a pint of milk. Let your spider get hot and then grease it with butter or cotton ...
— Ethel Morton's Enterprise • Mabell S.C. Smith
... in the Free State. I make no mention here of the thousands of miles of similar blockhouse lines, which made a sort of spider's web of ...
— Three Years' War • Christiaan Rudolf de Wet
... little altered, with the view of adapting it to "ears polite;" for without some process of this kind, it would not have been presentable. A lady went to the doctor in great distress of mind, and stated to him, that, by a strange accident, she had swallowed a live spider. At first, his only reply was, "whew! whew! whew!" a sort of internal whistling sound, intended to be indicative of supreme contempt. But his anxious patient was not so easily to be repulsed. She became every moment more ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 364 - 4 Apr 1829 • Various
... crafty webs to entrap their poorer neighbors, who seldom escape from their toils, until every dollar has been extracted from them, and as far as their worldly goods are concerned, they resemble the skins and skeletons which line the nest of some voracious old spider. ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... reptile Mr. Burke," must reluctantly be compelled to admit that Burke set his enemies a bad example by his own unlicensed use of opprobrium. In justifying, for instance, the application to Warren Hastings of Coke's savage description of Raleigh as a "spider of hell," Burke allowed his fierce indignation to get the better of his tongue, to the detriment of his own object, the bringing of an offender to justice. Miss Burney in her memoirs affords a remarkable instance ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... most tragic loss: the sinful waste of human spirit and potential. We can ignore this terrible truth no longer. As Franklin Roosevelt warned 51 years ago, standing before this Chamber, he said, "Welfare is a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit." And we must now escape the spider's web of dependency. ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... been much better off, if, stopping at Naples, I had fallen into the blazing Crater of Vesuvio, and have cast up again into the air in the shape of Red-Hot Ashes. I think it would have been better for me to be Bitten by the Tarantula Spider (which is about the size of a small Nutmeg, and when it bites a person throws him into all kinds of Tumblings, Anger, Fear, Weeping, Crazy Talk, and Wild Actions, accompanied by a kind of Bedlam Gambado), than to have gone upon the pretty Dance I was destined to Lead. However, there was no ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... could tell them wonderful fairy tales and strange stories of the forest. He told them of the goblins that came at night to water the horses, of how the oxen talked in their stalls on Christmas Eve, of how a spider shut up in a nutshell could cure the fever, and of the marvellous powers possessed by horse shoes and four-leaved clover. He knew more strange things ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... Professor Park has to say about it. There has been another review in "La Presse" equally favorable. All seem to see the truth about American slavery much plainer than people can who are in it. If American ministers and Christians could see through their sophistical spider-webs, with what wonder, pity, and contempt they would regard their own ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... say nothing of previous training; while the Manchester factory-girl, aided by the multiplying power of the wheel, easily makes as much yarn, though not quite so fine, in a day. If it were an object to rival the tenuity of the finest India muslin, machinery could easily accomplish it. But that spider-web fabric is carried so nearly to transparency, that the Emperor Aurengzebe is said to have reproved his daughter for the indelicacy of her costume while she wore seven thicknesses of it. She might have worn ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... Markland strove to shut out from his mind the light shining in through the little window opened by Mr. Allison; but the effort was in vain. Steadily the light came in, disturbing the owls and bats, and revealing dust, cankering mould, and spider-web obstructions. All on the outside was fair to the world; and as fair, he had believed, within. To be suddenly shown his error, smote him with a painful ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... fads. The collecting mania, in a variety of forms, raged hot and strong. There were the Natural History enthusiasts, who went in select parties, personally conducted by a mistress, to the shore at low tide, to grub blissfully among the rocks for corallines and zoophytes and spider crabs and madrepores and anemones, to be placed carefully in jam jars and brought back to the school aquarium. "The Gnats", as the members of the Natural History Society were named, sometimes pursued their ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... time of Darwin, the classic explanation has been that all silky substances that fall from the sky are spider webs. In 1832, aboard the Beagle, at the mouth of La Plata River, 60 miles from land, Darwin saw an enormous number of spiders, of the kind usually known as "gossamer" spiders, little aeronauts that cast out filaments by which the wind ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... ah Nick! it is na fair, First showing us the tempting ware, Bright wines, and bonie lasses rare, To put us daft Syne weave, unseen, thy spider snare ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... Joe had found such a crust there. But the place was bare now of everything except deserted spider-webs, black and heavy with dust. These and the mass of net upon the ground were all that Keekie Joe could see in the light of the genial moonbeams which shone through the open doorway and wriggled in through the cracks ...
— Pee-Wee Harris Adrift • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... "The busy spider hangs the brush With filmy gossamers, The frogs are croaking in the creek, The sluggish blacksnake stirs, But still the ground is bare of bloom Beneath the ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... "There's the red spider out along the south wall—ugh, ugh," persisted Simon, without seeming to hear her; "and your new g'raniums a'most covered wi' blight. I wur a tacklin' one of 'em just afore ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... or meanly, and they died.... And they were hustled out of the house quickly.... They thought themselves so important, and they lacked the faithfulness of the dog, the cleanliness of wild animals, the strength of horses, the beauty of tropic birds, the mathematical science of the spider, the swiftness of fishes.... And they grew old abominably, the women's breasts falling, the men getting pot-bellies.... How the devil had they ever arrogated to themselves the ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne |
