"Homing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and astern of them. Either the patrol had found them gone from the island, freed by blasting from the floe, and followed on the trail full speed, or the wireless from some Japanese station on the Tchukchis coast had told of their homing flight. ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... their clean uplifted lines compelled my adoration. Up there, the sky above and below them, part of the sky, but part of us, the great peaks made communion between that homing creeping part of me which loves vineyards and dances and a slow movement among pastures, and that other part which is only properly at home in Heaven. I say that this kind of description is useless, and that it is better to address prayers to such things than to attempt to interpret them ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... the scarlet gleaming street; The town was mad, a man was like a boy. A thousand flags were flaming where the sky and city meet; A thousand bells were thundering the joy. There was music, mirth and sunshine; but some eyes shone with regret: And while we stun with cheers our homing braves, O God, in Thy great mercy, let us nevermore forget The graves they ...
— Songs of a Sourdough • Robert W. Service
... homing to England by the Ostend-Dover packet in the April of some five years ago, relished the vagaries of a curious couple who arrived by a later train, and proved to be both of his acquaintance. He had happened to be early abroad, and saw them come on. They were a lady of some personal ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... back by railway and walked the train most of the way. He dropped from the cars at the water tank and struck across country, and again he ran. But this time it was no headlong flight. Straight as a homing bird went Dannie with all speed, toward the foot of ...
— At the Foot of the Rainbow • Gene Stratton-Porter
... those of man. Hounds can trace footsteps over flat rocks, even though a shower has fallen in the interval; cats can see in the dark; rabbits hear sounds that men never hear; horses detect an impurity in water that a chemical analysis does not reveal, and homing pigeons would gain nothing by carrying a compass. And so I feel safe in saying that if any man were so good and perfect an animal that he had the hound's sense of smell, the cat's eyesight, the rabbit's ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... insects. In fact, all animals appear to possess it in varying degree; they are all more or less able to find their way home. Yet, study it how we may, we are at fault when we try to account for it. In many cases, the homing instinct is apparently governed by sight; but many scientific observers entertain the idea that the sense of smell, in the majority of instances, will be found to lie at the root of the ...
— 'Murphy' - A Message to Dog Lovers • Major Gambier-Parry
... lets drop blue doves which ground the mind Like clover; then, with drawing to the skies, His pleasure is to watch the flocks arise. Here, there, they mount; they show no cloud, no wind, Can hinder homing; and the angels find No transport, like the sight, for, to their eyes, 'Tis more souls for the joy, which glorifies The Father, traced to love ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... Found Treasure Partners A Girl to Come Home To Rainbow Cottage The Red Signal White Orchids Silver Wings The Tryst The Strange Proposal Through These Fires The Street of the City All Through the Night The Gold Shoe Astra Homing Blue Ruin Job's Niece Challengers The Man of the Desert Coming Through the Rye More Than Conqueror Daphne Deane A New Name The Enchanted Barn The Patch of Blue Girl from Montana The Ransom Rose Galbraith The Witness Sound of the Trumpet Sunrise Tomorrow ...
— Exit Betty • Grace Livingston Hill
... intoxication, they knew the ground by instinct and from long association. They gained on him. Across the way a window-sash went up with a bang, and a woman screamed. Through the only other entrance to the mews a belated cab was homing; its driver, getting wind of the unusual, pulled up, blocking the way, and added his advice ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... in the valley lies, Elaine, hast thou forgotten? Where swift the homing swallow flies And in the sunset daylight dies— But hush! Where is Elaine? ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... ourselves. There's Tom Chesney to begin with; George Cooper here, who ought to make a pretty fair scout even if he is always finding fault; Carl Oskamp, also present, if we can only tear him away from his hobby of raising homing pigeons long enough to study up what scouts have to know; yourself, Josh Kingsley; and a fellow by the name of Felix Robbins, ...
— The Boy Scouts of Lenox - Or The Hike Over Big Bear Mountain • Frank V. Webster
... of Frome's lantern was soon lost in this smothering medium, in which even his sense of direction, and the bay's homing instinct, finally ceased to serve us. Two or three times some ghostly landmark sprang up to warn us that we were astray, and then was sucked back into the mist; and when we finally regained our road the old horse began to show signs of exhaustion. ...
— Ethan Frome • Edith Wharton
... up our recovery missile," Tom explained. "Looks like a slim hope, though, from the way that third blip is homing on target. This other control has just caused every instrument on this ship, and all the others in the task force, to make permanent records on magnetic tape of ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... I, "and unless the world spin on too quick, we shall pass some hours in watching." "Ay," said he in a muse, "but it seems to me the moon-army keeps infamous bad watch. I see not one sentinel. Those wings travel sure as a homing bird; and to be driven back upon their centre would be defeat for the—lunatics. Give me but a handful of such cavalry, I would capture the Southern Cross. Magnificent! magnificent! I remember, when I was in it—" ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... TRAIL OF CHALLONER, HIS MASTER. He began to follow it—slowly at first, as if fearing that it might get away from him. Darkness came, and he was still following it. In the light of the stars he persisted, all else crowded from him but the homing instinct of the dog and the ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... was hooked under a bale lashing, to keep him from drifting off in the absence of weight. He held a rifle casually, but at alert, across his knees. Its needle-like bullets were not intended to kill. They were tiny rockets that could flame during the last second of a long flight, homing in on a target by means of a self-contained and marvelously miniaturized radar guidance ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... admirably. The address which Tim gave young Surface was the address of Mrs. Paynter's, where Surface Senior had lived for nearly three years. And so the young man had gone to his father, straight as a homing pigeon. ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... the greatest mercy the day had brought me yet. With less strain on the attention, however, there was more upon the mind. No longer forced to exert some muscle twice or thrice a minute, I had time to feel very faint, and yet time to think. My soul flew homing to its proper prison. I was no longer any unit at unequal strife with the elements; instincts common to my kind were no longer my only stimulus. I was my poor self again; it was my own little life, and no ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... The homing instinct in birds and animals is one of their most remarkable traits: their strong local attachments and their skill in finding their way back when removed to a distance. It seems at times as if they possessed some extra sense—the home sense—which operates ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... unit out to scout the new planet in the Ambassador, homing down on the secret beeping of a featureless box dropped by an earlier survey party. Then they sat back at GHQ and began the same old pattern of worry ...
— Breaking Point • James E. Gunn
... hostile aircraft overhead, 'Tis necessary now, alack! Soon as old Sol has sought his bed, That those who next the window sit, Though they'd prefer to watch the gloaming, Should draw the blind, nor leave a slit, Keeping it down until they're homing, Else on the metals will be thrown A glowing trail as from a comet, And Huns to whom a train is shown ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 5, 1916 • Various
... the islands, calm an hour before, are like swift rivers. Through the cleft gaps in the breakwater of boulders the sea goes back from its adventurous wanderings to the ocean outside; but not as in other places, where a deep felt homing impulse draws tired water to the voluminous mother bosom of the Atlantic. Here, even on the calmest days, steep wavelets curl and break over each other, like fugitives driven to desperate flight by some ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... observed by man's unaided senses; thus only is to be explained the phenomenon of migration and also the many other peculiarities in the behaviour of birds whereby approaching changes in the weather may be foretold. Probably, also, this fact has much to do with the extraordinary homing instinct of pigeons. But, of course, in the days when meteorological science had yet to be born, no such explanation as this could be known. The ancients observed that birds by their migrations or by other peculiarities in their behaviour prognosticated coming changes ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... These Gauls, I should have remembered, can't take it. Their tendency to fly off the handle at the slightest provocation is well known. No doubt the man had put his whole soul into those nonnettes de poulet, and to see them come homing back to him must have gashed him ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... and seas may have to be gone around, but never once does his sense of direction fail him—the homing instinct is supreme. ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... when Win had bathed and laid herself carefully down in the narrow bed which shook and groaned as if suffering from palsy, it seemed more impossible than ever to go to sleep. Each new train that rumbled by was a giant, homing bee, her brain the hive for which it aimed. Her hot head was crowded with thoughts, disturbing, fighting, struggling thoughts, yet the giant bee pushed the throng ruthlessly aside and darted in. Each time it seemed ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... fight continued. It could not last much longer. Despair pulled at the German's heartstrings as he saw his observer topple for a moment in his seat, then pitch forward into space. The biplane tipped dangerously, righted itself and sped like a homing pigeon in the direction of the German lines. There was nothing left but to fly for it. The German dared not look behind; only by the mercy of God were the Frenchman's shots going wild. It could not last; he must ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... they gather round me, and I tell them of my roaming In the Country of the Crepuscule beside the Frozen Sea, Where the musk-ox runs unchallenged, and the cariboo goes homing; And they sit like little children, just as quiet as can be: Men of every crime and colour, how ...
— Rhymes of a Red Cross Man • Robert W. Service
... one of his homing pigeons!" he exclaimed; "perhaps the one that he expected to bring him news from up-river way, about ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... in India. She has laid her spell on certain families; and they have followed one another through the generations, as homing birds follow in line across the sunset sky. And their name becomes a legend that passes from father to son; because India does not forget. There is perhaps nothing quite like it in the tale of any other land. It makes for continuity; for a fine tradition ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... is! which, like carriers let fly— Doff darkness, homing nature knows the rest— To its own fine function, wild and self-instressed, Falls light as ten years long taught ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... and down dale he went. Because of the tremendous trees he could not see the sun; yet with the instinct of the woodsman, an instinct as infallible as that of a homing pigeon, he was not puzzled as to direction. Within two hours his long, tireless stride brought him out into a clearing in the valley where his own logging-camp stood. He went directly to the log-landing, where in a listless and half-hearted manner the loading ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... moment that they met Mortimer. If Alexina had remembered that this was his homing hour she would have parted from her visitor at the drawing-room door; but in truth she had dismissed Mortimer from ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... rotten right now," says he; "Hanged if the devil himself could see. Priscilla, it's up to you and me To show 'em what we can do." Seemed that Priscilla just took the word; Up with a leap like a horse that's spurred, On with the joy of a homing bird, Swift as ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... had declined all other invitations, saying that Mr. Davies was to hasten thither the moment the graduating exercises were over, and now to think of the triumph and malicious delight of the other girls was intolerable. Her lover should fly to her like homing-pigeon the instant he was released from prison. It was tantamount to treason that he should purpose anything else. Almira fretted herself into a fever. She wrote one long letter to the recreant Parson, and her sister Beaytrice, as they called her, followed it up with another still more alarming. ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... joy again; Some, who come homing By stealth at gloaming, Had better have stopped Till death, and dropped By strange hands propped, Than come so ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... How delicately, for instance, would she try to take the edge off the grief of bereaved friends by describing the arrival of the spirit in heaven, and the glad welcome that would be got there from those who had gone before. "Heaven is just a meeting and a homing of our real selves. God will never make us into new personalities. Everlasting life—take that word life and turn it over and over and press it and try to measure it, and see what it will yield. It is a magnificent idea which ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... from Guaymas. He had very little money. The straightening up of affairs showed him to possess only about four hundred dollars to the good, but he started gallantly, shirking in his mind the meeting, but overpowered by the homing instinct, the instinct which leads the ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... a mighty drama cross their path And played upon the stage of vast events Knowing, henceforward, all their life is nought. But Westward sped the little Golden Hynde Across the uncharted ocean, with no guide But that great homing cry of all their hearts. Far out of sight of land they steered, straight out Across the great Pacific, in those days When even the compass proved no trusty guide, Straight out they struck in that small bark, ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... Mr Warden, who shot in at the casino door like a homing rabbit, and walked on in silence, which lasted till Ruth, suddenly becoming aware that her companion's eyes were fixed on her face, turned her head, to meet a gaze of complete, not to say loving, admiration. She flushed. She was ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... the Skyrocket finally circled about Lost Island and settled down over the narrow landing field as easily as a homing pigeon, to come to a stop with hardly a jar, it was bringing news to Mr. Fulton that was bound to soften the ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Air on Lost Island • Gordon Stuart
... say that man is a religious animal. The impulse that causes him to worship, to trust, to pray, is as much a part of his constitution as is the homing instinct of the pigeon. This natural instinct is, however, reinforced by the operation of his reason. Feeling is deeper than thought; we are moved by many impulses before we frame any theories. But the normal ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... she planed off a pellet of good sound wood—it looked like a nail-scrape, the mark she made—and masticating it and moistening it with saliva, whirred back like a homing aeroplane to ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... behind them in split-bottom chairs in the one-horse wagon. Sister Salter was still in her baptismal mood and, as we rumbled on into the deepening twilight through the sweeting spring woods, she continued to sing snatches from the old hymns. Higher and higher her fine treble voice arose till the homing birds answered and every living thing in the forest felt the throb of the poignant melody—everything except the baby on her breast. It slept on as soundly as if it breathed her peace into its soft ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... homing pigeons, the two made their way toward the ruin and desolation that had once been the center of their happy lives, and which was soon to be restored by the willing black hands of laughing laborers, made happy again by the return of the master and mistress ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... near sundown, I see a pair of wild pigeons homing toward the crest of Apo. "Limocons," the Bogobos call them—"leem-o-sahns": the word falls limpid from their lips, unaccented. They say the limocon never was heard to sing in the lowlands, and tell a strange legend that it is an oracle of the Hill People, its song ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... the sunset gold. They had taken boat beneath the Keg of Butter Battery, and were sailing for Saaron with a light breeze on their quarter. Evening and Sabbath calm held the sky from its pale yellow verges up to the zenith across which a few stray gulls were homing. From Garland Town, from St. Ann's, from Brefar ahead of them, came wafted the sound of bells, far and faint, ringing to church, and the murmuring water in the boat's wake seemed to take up Vashti's laugh and echo it reproachfully, as she checked herself with a glance at her companion's ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... are, belonging to a nation with the strongest patriotism! the most inveterate homing instinct in the world! and you pretend you'd rather go anywhere than back to Ireland. You don't suppose I believe you, do you? ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw
... every rod of soil as he retraced his way up that great wind-swept slope, noting every change in vegetation or settlement. Five years before he had crept like a lizard; now he was rushing straight on like the homing eagle who sees his home crag gleam in ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... dream hath possessed knoweth no more of roaming; All roads and the flowing of waves and the speediest flight he knows, But wherever his feet are set, his soul is forever homing, And going, he comes, and coming he ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... the homing hour is here, The task is done. Toilers, and they who course the deer Turn, one by one, At day's demise, Where dwells a deathless glow In loving eyes. I hear them hearthward go To castle, or to cottage on the lea; But him I love comes ...
— Kansas Women in Literature • Nettie Garmer Barker
... dark to distinguish anything but the white disk of a face and the black mass she made in her cloak, yet there was that about her, some rigid aspect of attention, which frightened the girl. She turned her head for a moment to see Prosper homing, and when she looked again into the trees there was certainly no woman. She thought she must have fancied it all, and dismissed the thought without ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... the darkness of their paper bags, the mere fact that I am moving them gives my prisoners a sense of the direction in which I am taking them. If nothing happened to disturb this first impression, the insect would be guided by it in returning. This would explain the homing of my Mason-bees carried to a distance of two or three miles amid strange surroundings. But, when the insects have been sufficiently impressed by their conveyance to the east, there comes the rapid twirl, first ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... a wire-enclosed cote attached to the house just outside this window. Homing pigeons, Mr. Headland. George bought them for me. We had an even half dozen each. We used to send messages to each other that way. He would bring his over to me, and take mine away with him at night when he went home, so we could correspond ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... and toss Swift your homing transports churn; Soon for you the Southron Cross High above your bows shall burn; Soon beyond the rolling Bight Gleam ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 15, 1919 • Various
... surface. Beyond, it entered foothills, flanked a peak, and joined a wide road leading directly to an immense cluster of buildings among trees. The sun was firing the western horizon. From every direction groups of white-garbed peons were drawing like homing pigeons toward this center of the visible landscape. I reached it with them and, passing through several massive gates, mounted through a corral or cobbled stable yard with many bulky, two-wheeled carts and fully two hundred mules, then up an inclined, cobbled way ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... one or more well-known varieties—pouters, fantails, homing pigeons, etc. Read stories of the training and flights of homing pigeons, from ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... everything. It was an outburst from a heart too full of emotion to grope after speech, the cry of a man for the One Woman who alone can call forth an inflection more eloquent than phrases and poetry. And, as she came into his outstretched arms as straight and direct as a homing pigeon, they closed about her in a convulsive grip that held her straining to him, almost crushing her in the ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... myself that my—going is going to inconvenience Cornelia in the slightest; because I can't see that my coming has made even the remotest perceptible difference in her daily routine. Anyway—" he finished more lightly, "when you come right down to 'mating', or 'homing', or 'belonging', or whatever you choose to call it, it seems to be written in the stars that plans or no plans, preferences or no preferences, initiatives or no initiatives, we belong to those—and to those only, hang it all!—who happen to love ...
— Molly Make-Believe • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... was courting both for his reputation and his spirit. Clean as he was, he couldn't play too long with pitch and not be defiled. I heard one day that Briar Hills had just been opened and I pricked up my ears. Aha! It couldn't be long now before the bird would come homing. ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... Butler. "She's twice too good for any one of them. Didn't her dress fit neat, Maria? Well, I hope she won't get let in by their fine ways. For my part, I'm not going to take any notice of the Bertrams. The way they behaved was past enduring. Not at homing when I called, and then leaving their cards on the day when I was at the bazaar. Highty-tighty, says I, who's Mrs. Bertram that she should look down on us in this fashion? Isn't the widow of a good honest butter merchant who paid his way, and left a comfortable fortune behind ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... tighter than he gripped the handlebars of his scooter. He was only vaguely aware of the passing scenery. He knew he should switch on the homing beacon and ride in on automatic, but it seemed like too much of an effort to flick his finger. As the tension rose, the capillaries of his eyes swelled, and things began to white out for him. The rush of landscape ...
— The Planet with No Nightmare • Jim Harmon
... the street, or stabbed in the back as you are homing through the dusk are, to be sure, not everybody's amusements, and in an ordinary way they were not those of Mr. Manvers. But he found that his life gained a zest by being threatened with deprivation, and so long as that zest lasted he was willing to oblige Don Luis. ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... while he was roaring on, his machine seemingly feeling like a homing pigeon. He felt a fierce love for that noble hunter. He felt he could almost talk to it and tell it how proud he was of having been able to put it through its paces. Never had there been such ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Flying Corps • James R. Driscoll
... heard beyond the desert night The murmur of the fields we knew, And our swift souls with one delight Like homing swallows Northward flew. ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... is not so bad, If you are feeling a little down, or sad, To walk along Fifth Avenue to the Park, When the day thinks perhaps of getting dark, And meet that mighty flood of vehicles Laden with all the different kinds of swells, Homing to dinner, in their carriages— Victorias, landaus, chariots, coupes— There's nothing like it to lift up the heart And make you realize yourself a part, Sure, of ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... Sunset Ranch walked slowly up into the main building of the Grand Central Terminal with the crowd. There was chattering all about her—young voices, old voices, laughter, squeals of delight and surprise—all the hubbub of a homing crowd ...
— The Girl from Sunset Ranch - Alone in a Great City • Amy Bell Marlowe
... palings; she surged through forgotten hamlets, whose single streets gave back, reduplicated, the clatter of her exhaust, and, tireless, she repeated the motions. Over naked uplands she droned like a homing bee, her shadow lengthening in the sun that she chased to his lair. She nosed up unparochial byways and accommodation- roads of the least accommodation, and put old scarred turf or new-raised molehills under ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... some people are directed, they appear to have the greatest difficulty in finding their way, while others, more fortunate, remember prominent features on the route, and pick out their course as accurately as does a homing pigeon. ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton
... across the stubble before him waving a friendly crop, "Pip" Vibart the A.P.M. homing to H.Q. "Evening, boy!" he holloaed; "come up and Bridge to-morrow night," and swept on over the hillside. A flight of aeroplanes, like flies in the amber of sunset, droned overhead en route for Hunland. The Babe waved his official cap at them: "Good ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 24, 1917 • Various
... his voice, went, leaving him very quiet. "I am afraid I have not made many while in London." Her eyes lifted slightly, fell. "Call it the homing instinct!" he went on with a laugh. "The desire once more to become part and parcel of one's native land; to become a factor, however small, in ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... of Venus for success. They were as much at home in the mud as they were in the dank, humid air above. They could distinguish one type of mud from another deep beneath the surface, and could carry a dredge-tube down to a lode of the blue-gray muck with the unfailing accuracy of a homing pigeon. ...
— The Native Soil • Alan Edward Nourse
... and watched the homing and departing bees around the hives in the deep, red-clovered grass near ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... holds like redhot iron And runs—runs till he falls down like a beast Pole-axt, and grunts for breath; then up and on, No matter does he know the road or not: The strain I put on his mind will keep him going Right as a homing-pigeon. ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... have read in a book," he said, "and that was told to me, And this I have thought that another man thought of a Prince in Muscovy." The good souls flocked like homing doves and bade him clear the path, And Peter twirled the jangling ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... of shadows impended vaguely over all the illuminated world, and now and again a flicker of wings through the upper atmosphere betokened the flight of homing birds. Crann gazed about him absently while he permitted the statement he had made to sink deep into the jealous, shrinking heart of the young mountaineer, and he ...
— A Chilhowee Lily - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... chance gone—though he died for it, he would not let himself be beaten in this by Fate. Every ounce of the dogged sullen strength of him gathered itself to meet the demands of his stubborn will. And always, whether he walked in reason or in delirium, his course held eastward, straight as a homing pigeon for ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... a Pole—a worker; though so slim His muscle is of steel—no fear for him; He is the breed which conquers; he is nerved To fight and fight again. Too long he served, Man of a subject race! His fierce, blue eye Roams like a homing eagle o'er the sky, So limitless, so deep! for such as he Life has no higher ...
— Fires of Driftwood • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... were a trifle too casual; at times they irritated Douglas, and if he took the boy into his life as he hoped to, he would come into constant contact with Leslie and her friends, who were cultured people of homing instincts. Mickey's manners must be polished, and the way to do it was not to drop to his level, but to improve Mickey. And again, the day before, he had told Mickey to sit down and wait until an order was given him. To invite him to "get in the game" now, was good alliteration; ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter
... with the smartest little schooner that ever came home from the Grand Banks with halibut up to her hatches. He couldn't read or write and he'd never learned navigation; but he'd been born with the instincts of a homing pigeon, and somehow whenever he pointed his schooner toward Gloucester he managed to arrive on schedule; and any time he got a good fair breeze from the west, like as not he'd run over to England and sell ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... sentiment, climate, soil, and production, all combine to give bird-life a development in England that it attains in no other country. In no other land is it so multitudinous and musical; in none is there such ample and varied provision for housing and homing it. Every field is a great bird's- nest. The thick, green hedge that surrounds it, and the hedge-trees arising at one or two rods' interval, afford nesting and refuge for myriads of these meadow singers. The ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... a homing pigeon, he headed blindly and directly for the beach and the salt sea over which had floated the Arangi, on her deck Skipper in command. Somo was largely deserted, and those that were in it were sunk in sleep. So no one vexed him as he trotted through the winding pathways between the many ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... pitiful. From such fierce strenuousness, such virile activity, as unending as elemental processes, it seemed a very terrible drop to disability, to the utilizing of every atom of remaining strength to return to the temporary home nest—that instinct which drives so many creatures to the same homing, at the approach ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... not born within a stone's throw of the Paris fortifications, as her manager would have liked you to believe, but in an indefinite street in Cockneydom, so like its mates that, in the words of Folly herself, she had to have the homing instinct of a pigeon to find it at all. Folly's original name had been—but why give it away? She was one of those women who are above and beyond a name—of a class, or, rather, of a type that a relatively merciful world produces sparingly. She was ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... would refuse to return until the sun was removed; and when it chanced to be the one on the porch and was switched off, they were unable to return because their endowment of optic nerve was small and their homing instinct, so strong in bees and eagles, smaller. There was created, accordingly, an impasse, but Mr. Sprig, who knew his hens, circumvented it. He lit a bedside candle which merely troubled his ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... neared her her glance fell, and she saw that it was a little yellow dog, with hanging red tongue and eyes bulging in terror. From side to side of the red clay road the creature doubled for a moment in its anguish, and then with a spring, straight as the flight of a homing bird, fled to the shelter of Maria's skirts. Quick as a heart-beat the girl's personal fears had vanished, and as an almost savage instinct of battle awoke in her, she stooped with a protecting movement and, picking the small dog ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... battalions move along; Out of the distance memory cries Of days when life and hope were strong, When love was prompt and wit was gay; Even then, at evening, as to-day, I watched, while twilight hovered dim Over Potomac's curving rim, This selfsame flight of homing crows Blotting the sunset's fading rose, Above the roofs ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay
... up on a stepladder laboriously painting the R on THUNDER when old Sudden drove into the yard with half the Rolling R boys packed into the big car. They had heard the strident humming of the plane when Johnny made his homing flight, and craning necks backward, had seen him winging away to the Rolling R. They had guessed very close to the truth, and for them the search ended right there. So, after signalling the other searchers, many of the boys had ridden back in the car, leaving patient, ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... type of woman, however, who goes as straight to the man she loves as a homing pigeon to ...
— 'Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!' AND 'Isn't That Just Like a Man!' • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... itself until seven o'clock Monday morning, P. Sybarite and Mr. Bross, with at least every outward semblance of complete amity, threaded the roaring congestion in narrow-chested Frankfort Street, boldly breasted the flood tide of homing Brooklynites, won their way through City Hall Park, and were presently swinging shoulder to shoulder up the sunny ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... sunshine. There were four arches—though L2000 of the grant had been expended on the poor instead of on temporary decorations. At the Town-Hall an address was received and at the the same time twelve hundred homing pigeons were liberated to carry news of the Royal arrival to all parts of the State. A state banquet followed in the evening and after the Levee on the next day a number of addresses were received. Meanwhile the Duchess visited the two local hospitals. ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... occasional notes in a sonata. Out of doors were all the pleasant sights and sounds of the peaceful evening coming on after the labors of the busy day. The birds were calling to each other in the woods before nesting for the night; the homing rooks flew round and round their trees, cawing loudly; the village dogs barked their welcome to their masters as they came off the fields and the day's work; and the setting sun dyed the autumn leaves a brighter gold, a deeper crimson, a richer russet. It was all ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... evenings of April, when the first young leaves are beginning to frame the finished nests, and the boisterous winds of last month no longer drown the babble of the tree-top parliament at the still hour when farm labourers are homing from the fields, that the rooks peculiarly strike their own note in the country scene. There is no good reason to confuse these curious and interesting fowl with any other of the crow family. Collectively they may be recognised by their love of fellowship, for none are more sociable ...
— Birds in the Calendar • Frederick G. Aflalo
... own. First I tried amateur photography, but this soon grew monotonous and I gave it up. Next I got a cornet, but I soon found that it required more wind than I could conveniently spare. I then tried homing pigeons, but before I had scarcely given the little aerial messengers a fair test I had thought of a dozen other things that seemed preferable. Everything proved alike tiresome and tedious. However, I found that in chasing diversions ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... German riding-master, a leader of a Hungarian band, a manager of a Ritz hotel. But he was not above his station. He even assisted the porter in carrying the coats and golf bags of the gentlemen from the car to the coffee-room where, with the intuition of the homing pigeon, the three strangers had, unaided, found their way. As Carl Schultz followed, carrying the dust-coats, a road map fell from the pocket of one of them to the floor. Carl Schultz picked it up, and was about to replace it, when his eyes were held by ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... the southwest had been frequently swept by expectant eyes, but supper was served and eaten, and the purple shadows of night began softly to drape the glaring desert and still there came no sign of the homing aeroplane. ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... silken bright Cathay, Or where dark India her golden treasure yields; A young boy dreaming in his father's fields, Who plucks a lily from the bending wheat And stands with veiled gaze and searching eyes Pale with some great emprise, Beyond the homing waters of his isle, Beyond Majorca's skies;— And dreams ...
— Chimes of Mission Bells • Maria Antonia Field
... lake and an enchanted forest of sombre trees. On the highest ground in this forest is the clump of firs in which the famous herons build. The most interesting time to visit the heronry is in the breeding season, for then one sees the lank birds continually homing from the Amberley Wild Brooks with fishes in their bills and long legs streaming behind. The noise is tremendous, beyond all rookeries. Mr. Knox's Ornithological Rambles, from which I have already quoted freely, has this passage: ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... Currency Lass had thus ended in a stroke of fortune almost beyond hope. She had brought two thousand pounds' worth of trade, straight as a homing pigeon, to the place where it was most required. And Captain Wicks (or, rather, Captain Kirkup) showed himself the man to make the best of his advantage. For hard upon two days he walked a verandah with Topelius, for hard upon two days his partners watched from ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... gravel path together without further speech, yet with thoughts more closely linked than either guessed; thoughts that flew instinctively as homing doves to the one ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... of the heart they're tied to, an inner bit, aye the innermost bit, the inner heart of the heart. They are the bit pulled, and pulled more, and pulled harder, till the strings grew. Man was born in the warm heart of God. Was there ever such a womb! Was there ever such another borning, homing place! ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... more deeply impressed by the little story than she cared to have her companion suspect. Her world was a world of the commonplace conventions, with New York as its starting point and homing place; and she thought she knew something of humankind. But it came to her suddenly that the men she knew best were not at all ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde |
