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More "Beak" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... believe what the owl told him. But he noticed that the fellow had a sharp beak, and ...
— The Tale of Benny Badger • Arthur Scott Bailey
... foot caught in the meshes and he began to struggle; whereupon all the other birds took fright and flew away. But presently his mate came back and hovered over him, then alighted on the toils unobserved by the fowler, and fell to pecking with her beak and pulling at the mesh in which the male bird's foot was tangled, till she released the toes and they flew away together. Then the fowler came up, mended his net and seated himself afar off. After an hour or so the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... all about her, on head and shoulders and arms, all unafraid, all content; then all fluttering with their clipped wings, about her lips, except a grey parrot who rubbed his beak against her ear. ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... and so deeply serrated, that every individual tooth resembles a row of poniards set up against the walls of an armory; and these last, says Agassiz, furnished with weapons so murderous, must have been the pirates of the period. Some had their fins guarded with long spines, hooked like the beak of an eagle; some with spines of straighter and more slender form, and ribbed and furrowed longitudinally like columns; some were shielded by an armour of bony points, and some thickly covered ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... hopped off gaily, determined to do his best to deliver his message; but, alas! a long-legged stork who was prancing along the same road caught him in her cruel beak, and before he could say a word he had ...
— The Brown Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... action. Every year they built their nests around the parsonage of St. Philemon in greater numbers than anywhere else. The best places were quickly taken, the hollows in the trees, the holes in the walls, the forks of the apple-trees and the elms, and you could see a brown beak, like the point of a sword, sticking out of a wisp of straw between all the rafters of the roof. One year, when all the places were taken, I suppose, a tomtit, in her embarrassment, spied the slit of the letter-box protected by its little roof, at the right of the parsonage gate. She slipped ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... thought the magpie; she fidgeted upon the branch, drew herself up, and muttered something between her beak about the propriety of people attending to ...
— Tales From Catland, for Little Kittens • Tabitha Grimalkin
... was sought for with avidity and thronged with occupants. Whoever has seen a flock of hungry pigeons, in the spring, alight on the leaf-covered ground, beneath a forest, and apply the busy powers of claw and beak to obtain a share of the hidden acorns that may be scratched up from beneath, may form some just notion of the pressing hurry and bustle that marked life in this place. The enhanced price that everything bore was one of the results ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... tall young man of five-and-twenty, with a lengthy olive-hued countenance, black frizzled hair, and deep-set eyes; the wide, dark rings beneath them were completed by the wrinkled purple eyelids above. With a nose like the beak of some bird of prey, a pinched mouth, and cheeks worn lean with study and hollowed by ambition, he was the very type of a second-rate personage on the lookout for something to turn up, and ready to do anything if so he might get on in the world, ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... a crane, and when it feels itself ill it fills its craw with water, and with its beak makes an ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... carved the double eagle, the insignium (!!) of empire; but instead of having body to body, and wings and beaks pointed outwards, as in the arms of Austria and Russia, the bodies are separated, and beak looks inward to beak. The late governor had the Vandalism to whitewash the exterior; but the Natchalnik told me, that under the whitewash fine bricks were disposed in diamond figures between the stones. This antique principle of tessellation, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... had a swordfish take my bait, swim away on the surface, showing the flying-fish plainly between his narrow beak, and after fooling with it for ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... in the sky, and near to it hung a star. A little passing cloud with a dented edge drifted over the star and the lower horn of the moon. It went by, and they shone out again upon the background of the blue heavens. Also an owl flitted across the window-place of my cell. It had a mouse in its beak, and the shadow of it and of the writhing mouse for a moment lay upon Irene's breast, for I turned my head and saw them. It came into my mind that here was an allegory. Irene was the night-hawk, and I was the writhing mouse that fed its appetite. Doubtless it was decreed that the ...
— The Wanderer's Necklace • H. Rider Haggard
... had a plumage of silver-gray feathers, with a brilliant scarlet tail. Her eyes were a bright yellow, with black pupils, and around them a circle of small white feathers. Her beak was large and strong, hooked at the end. Her tongue was thick and black. Her claws were also black, and she could use them as freely as Minnie used her hands. When her mistress offered her a cup of tea,—a drink of which she was very fond,—she ...
— Minnie's Pet Parrot • Madeline Leslie
... the famous Zoo' With Bertie, and Nellie, and Dick, and Sue. And we feel quite ready to jump for glee When the wonderful birds and beasts we see. The pelican solemn with monster beak, And the plump little penguin round and sleek, Have set us laughing—Ha, ha! Ho! ho! And you'll laugh too, if you look below. To the monkey-house then we make our way, Where the monkeys chatter, and climb, and play; At the snakes we peep, then ...
— London Town • Felix Leigh
... extended head peering east. The body of this aboriginal work of art, crude in form, was of massive silver. And to it were attached overlapping plates of gold in the similitude of feathers. The unfolded wings were also of gold. The head, beak and talons were of gold, and the eyes were two polished bits of quartz. The idol, for such no doubt it was, stood forty inches in height and weighed about three ...
— The Air Ship Boys • H.L. Sayler
... celebrated bird in Chinese tradition, the Fung Hwang, which some sinologues identify with the phoenix of the West.(2) According to a commentator on the 'Rh Ya, this "felicitous and perfect bird has a cock's head, a snake's neck, a swallow's beak, a tortoise's back, is of five different colours and more than six ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... sez he, after a while, 'it appeared so awful to me when I saw it coming out of the white mist with its glaring red eyes and terrible beak. It was a ghost I feels, if it wasn't the sea sarpint; and whether or no it bodes no good to the man wot sees it, I ...
— Tom Finch's Monkey - and How he Dined with the Admiral • John C. Hutcheson
... times a day until relieved. One of our correspondents has sent us the following treatment with permanganate of potash which he has found the best roup remedy he has ever tried: Dissolve 1 ounce of permanganate of potash in 3 pints of water, hold the fowl's head in this for a second, then open the beak and rinse out the mouth in the solution. Wipe with a clean, soft cloth and apply a very little witch hazel or carbolated salve to the eyes, nostrils and head. Repeat the operation as often as the throat and head ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... the other sturdily. "In God's name, I like it not. And yet Goodwin Hawtayne is not the man to stand back when his fellows are for pressing forward. By my soul! be it sink or swim, I shall turn her beak into Freshwater Bay, and if good Master Witherton, of Southampton, like not my handling of his ship then he ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the instant that saw Amiel lay a commending and fraternal hand on Jennie's curls, the Monster struck. Jealousy had no firmer grip of beak and talons on the Moor of Venice than on the crop-headed Dorothea. In absolute self- defense she did an unprecedented and wholly unexpected thing. Without warning she burst into song, even as Jennie was coyly preparing for ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... to call him Trainer Thoreau, because the boys called the soldiers the "trainers," and he had a long, measured stride and an erect carriage which made him seem something like a soldier, although he was short and rather ungainly in figure. He had a curved nose which reminded one a little of the beak of a parrot. ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... swoons as his broad beak slips Within her luscious lips. O but - I cannot see - I long to die Alike for wonder - and ...
— Household Gods • Aleister Crowley
... of the raven; the cormorant on some wave-encircled ledge, hangs out his dark wing to the breeze; the spotted diver, plying his vocation on the shallows beyond, dives and then appears, and dives and appears again, and we see the silver glitter of scales from his beak; and far away in the offing the sunlight falls on a scull of seagulls, that flutter upwards, downwards, and athwart, now in the air, thick as midges over some forest-brook ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... "but his beak shows through. Not in vain hath Egypt brooded all these years, if thou fail not with that dagger-stroke of thine to-night; and how canst thou fail? Nothing can now stop ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... pigeons, of which there are certainly more than a hundred well-marked races. The most noteworthy of these races are, the four great stocks known to the "fancy" as tumblers, pouters, carriers, and fantails; birds which not only differ most singularly in size, colour, and habits, but in the form of the beak and of the skull: in the proportions of the beak to the skull; in the number of tail-feathers; in the absolute and relative size of the feet; in the presence or absence of the uropygial gland; in the number of vertebrae in the back; in short, in precisely ...
— The Origin of Species - From 'The Westminster Review', April 1860 • Thomas H. Huxley
... off, leaving me to inspect the diary. Its first page was garnished with the resemblance of a large swan with curly wings; from his beak proceeded the owner's name in full, and underneath were his lucubrations. The first few pages ...
— Wonder-Box Tales • Jean Ingelow
... (Asilus), with his nasal, twangy buzz! "Waiow! Wha-a-ar are ye?" he seems to say, and with a suggestive onslaught against the window-pane, which betokens his satisfied quest, is out again at the window with a bluebottle-fly in the clutch of his powerful legs, or perhaps impaled on his horny beak. ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... "The beak wasn't such a bad fellow after all, when we went up in the morning. I said I was ashamed to confess we were both disgracefully intoxicated, and that I would take great care nothing of the same humiliating nature should occur ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... believe how nicely they listened! When I finished I looked at the clock. It had been nine minutes, and I could n't think what to do the other dreadful minutes till Miss Denison should come back. At last my eye fell on the blackboard, and that gave me an idea. I drew a hen's beak and then a duck's, a hen's foot and then a duck's, to show them the difference. Just then Miss Denison came in softly, and I confess I was bursting with pride and delight. There was the blackboard with the sketches, not very good ones, ...
— Polly Oliver's Problem • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... a mid-wife Kahezhewabuk, it was so Kekenahwahjechegun, n. a sign or mark Kegedooweneneh, n. a speaker or lawyer Kahgahgewinze, n. hemlock Kahgahgeh, n. wind-pipe Kekindewin, n. a covenant Kezebegahegahnahboo, n. soap suds Kahskahkoonegun, n. corn-crib Kahskahegun, n. a scraper Koozhe, n. a beak Koonekahdin, n. frost, snow Kechemekun, n. a high-way Kagah, adv. mostly Kahweengagoo, n. nothing Kegahweendahmoon, I will tell you Kahgequaweneneh, n. an exhorter, or preacher Kegowhyekaweneneh, n. a fisherman ...
— Sketch of Grammar of the Chippeway Languages - To Which is Added a Vocabulary of some of the Most Common Words • John Summerfield
... called, because it has two wattles under its beak as large as those of a small dunghill-cock, is larger, particularly in length, than an English black-bird. Its bill is short and thick, and its feathers of a dark lead colour; the colour of its wattles is a dull yellow, ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, Volume 1 • James Cook
... pale eyes twinkled with a tiger's bloodthirsty greed. Her broad, flat nose, with nostrils expanded into oval cavities, breathed the fires of hell, and resembled the beak of some evil bird of prey. The spirit of intrigue lurked behind her low, cruel brow. Long hairs had grown from her wrinkled chin, betraying the masculine character of her schemes. Any one seeing that woman's ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... eyes, beak, and legs were as black and bright as jet, ran nimbly but awkwardly up and down, to the great amusement of the children. Annie made haste to fetch her mother and father, George, and even Willie, who laughed ...
— The Young Emigrants; Madelaine Tube; The Boy and the Book; and - Crystal Palace • Susan Anne Livingston Ridley Sedgwick
... picked up a worm she found there. The fowls darted at her hands; but to amuse herself with the sight of their greediness she held the worm high above them. At last she opened her fingers, and forthwith the fowls hustled one another and pounced upon the worm. One of them fled with it in her beak, pursued by the others; it was thus taken, snatched away, and retaken many times until one hen, with a mighty gulp, swallowed it altogether. At that they all stopped short with heads thrown back, and eyes on ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... fear. And instantly there came a great storm of rain and of hail. The hailstones were so large and so hard that neither man nor beast could live through that storm, for they would have slain them, so fiercely did they beat. And the way that I escaped was this. I placed the beak of my shield over the head and neck of my horse, while I held the upper part over my own head. Thus did we withstand the storm, though the flanks of ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert
... bands of green (hoist side), white, and red; the coat of arms (an eagle perched on a cactus with a snake in its beak) is centered in the ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... with a beak of a nose was waiting in the corridor and hastened to unlock a door marked "Private," and the colonel went in, and the little man locked the door and tiptoed down the ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... jutting far out from the almost perpendicular strata beneath. Its form is precisely that of a gigantic helmet, hammered out by the fanciful artist into the likeness of an eagle, its wings partly outstretched, and its beak—the point of the crag—overshadowing the grim head of some gaunt warrior. With but little aid from the imagination, the whole features may be discerned; hence it was denominated, "The Eagle Crag." ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... the sun, Oping the dusky eyelids of the South, Till shade and silence waken up as one, And Morning sings with a warm odorous mouth. Where are the merry birds?—Away, away, On panting wings through the inclement skies, Lest owls should prey Undazzled at noonday, And tear with horny beak ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... became fewer and fainter, and the little pipings of despair died away; and in every cage lay a poor murdered minstrel, with the song that abode within him forever quenched;—in every cage but two, and those two were high up on the wall; and in each glared a pair of wild, white eyes; and an orange beak, tough as steel, pointed threateningly down. With the needles which they grasped as swords all wet and warm with blood, and their beadlike eyes flashing in the light of the lantern, the Liliputian assassins ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... curb'd the fury of his car And dropt his thirsty lance at thy command. Perching on the sceptred hand Of Jove, thy magic lulls the feather'd king With ruffled plumes, and flagging wing: Quench'd in dark clouds of slumber lie The terror of his beak, and lightnings ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... His face was quite blue. After a few seconds of immobility, he tried to breathe: he put out his lips, opened his poor mouth, like a little bird opening its beak to get a last mouthful of ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... the canary suddenly, as if encouraged by Mary Ann's opinion. It was a pretty little bird—one golden yellow from beak to tail, as though it had been dipped ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... looked at me with those eyes, black and haughty, if his mouth was thin and his nose like an eagle's beak, and his hair stiff, so that I could not run it through my fingers, I should hate him even as I hate ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... thinking over what Dinky-Dunk said. I have been trying to see things from his standpoint. By a sort of mental ju-jutsu I've even been trying to justify what I can't quite understand in him. But it's no use. There's one bald, hard fact I can't escape, no matter how I dig my old ostrich-beak of instinct under the sands of self-deception. There's one cold-blooded truth that will have to be faced. My husband is no longer in love with me. Whatever else may have happened, I have lost my heart-hold on Duncan Argyll McKail. I am still his wife, in the eyes ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... looked steadily at the two men who were walking slowly up the room. Hale was slender, tall, and dark in color, with a nose like the beak of an eagle. He was perfectly dressed and had even an elegant appearance. His age might have been forty, but in the artificial light he looked even younger. Clancy, on the other hand, wore his clothes with the air of a man unaccustomed to evening dress. He was light in color, ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... to show his gratitude to me, so I thanked him, and examined the bird. It was larger and longer in the body than a common duck—a species of gannet—with a brown body, and under-part white, and a long beak; its expression of countenance indicating, I declared, the excessive stupidity it is said to possess. Several of the passengers crowded round to have a look at the stranger, and while thus engaged I was startled by hearing Mr ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... shroud (Lest the smoke his sight o'erwhelm), Our Admiral's voice rang loud, "Hard-a-starboard your helm! Starboard! and run him down!" Starboard it was—and so, Like a black squall's lifting frown, Our mighty bow bore down On the iron beak of the Foe. ...
— Poems of American Patriotism • Brander Matthews (Editor)
... ways of Hel, until the fire of Surt has consumed the tree. Hrym steers from the east, the waters rise, the mundane snake is coiled in jotun-rage. The worm heats the water, and the eagle screams; the pale of beak tears carcases; the ship Naglfar is loosed. Surt from the south comes with flickering flame; shines from ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... leaning back in his place, softly cracking the knuckle of a forefinger, and, last of all and close to his elbow, his son, his support, his confidant and companion, Harran, so like himself, with his own erect, fine carriage, his thin, beak-like nose and his blond hair, with its tendency to curl in a forward direction in front of the ears, young, strong, courageous, full of the promise of the future years. His blue eyes looked straight into his father's with what Magnus could fancy a ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... and the earth and sea, The winds, the clouds, the moon, the sun, apart In different stations; and you there might view The stars that gem the still-revolving heaven, And, under them, the vast expanse of air, In which, with outstretch'd wings, the long-beak'd bird Winnow'd the gale, as if instinct with life. Around the shield the waves of ocean flow'd, The realms of Tethys, which unnumber'd streams, In azure mazes rolling o'er the earth, Seem'd ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... upper floor. In the foreground near the feet of the mother, a hen leading her young ones, to whom a little girl throws crumbs of bread; a basin full of water, and on the edge of it, one of the small chickens with its beak up in the air so as to let the water go down." Diderot then proceeds to criticise the details, telling us the very words that he hears the father addressing to the bridegroom, and as a touch of observation of nature, that while one ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... that the chicken grows the horny tip to its beak with which it ultimately pecks its way out of its shell, because it remembers having grown it before, and the use it made of it. We say that it made it on the same principles as a man makes a spade or a hammer, ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... Holland. Colonel Rutler was robust and tall; his face wore an expression of audacity, bordering on cruelty; his hair, lying in close, damp meshes, was of a deep red; his mustache of the same color hid a large mouth overshadowed by a hooked nose, resembling the beak of ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... by a tall man with a huge red nose, like the beak of an eagle, a copper complexion, jet black piercing eyes, and enormous black bushy whiskers. He looked down at me, I thought, with ineffable contempt. His clothes were of blue cloth, and his hands, which were very large and hairy, were marked on ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... wonder some other women of the tribe are afraid of her. She is tall and well rounded, and her chest is of that fulnesss that develops at an early age in the women of the Pueblos. Her face is even pretty,—her lips are pouting and sensual, the nose small and shaped like a short, pointed beak, the cheek-bones high, while the chin indicates remarkable determination. Magnificent black hair streams down her back. It is as full as a wave, as ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... out of the egg, balances itself correctly, runs about, picks up food, thus snowing that it possesses a power of directing its movements to definite ends. How did the chick learn this very complex co-ordination of eyes, muscles, and beak? It has not been individually taught; its personal experience is nit; but it has the benefit of ancestral experience. In its inherited organisation are registered the powers which it displays at birth. So also as regards the instinct of the hive-bee, already ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... class. Some of the costumes are very rich and expensive, of satin and velvet heavy with gold. I have seen a distinguished diplomatist in the guise of a gigantic canary-bird, hopping briskly about in the mud with bedraggled tail-feathers, shrieking well-bred sarcasms with his yellow beak. ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... solid. Miss Lydia uttered a little, ambiguous squeak and crumpled her program in her hand. For Colonel Calhoun was made up as nearly resembling Major Talbot as one pea does another. The long, thin white hair, curly at the ends, the aristocratic beak of a nose, the crumpled, wide, raveling shirt front, the string tie, with the bow nearly under one ear, were almost exactly duplicated. And then, to clinch the imitation, he wore the twin to the Major's supposed to be unparalleled coat. High-collared, baggy, ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... that unfortunate hare who had hollowed out in the snow a burrow with two entrances. Two of these birds having recognised his presence, one entered one hole in order to dislodge the hare, the other awaited him at the other opening to batter his head with blows from his beak and kill him before he had time to ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... is a small gray or reddish-brown snout-beetle hardly over a quarter of an inch in length. In proportion to its length it has a long beak. It belongs to a family of beetles which breed in pods, in seeds, and in stalks of plants. It is a greedy eater, but feeds ...
— Agriculture for Beginners - Revised Edition • Charles William Burkett
... either Will make the gall of envie overflow; She feeds on outcast entrailes like a kite: 5 In which foule heape, if any ill lies hid, She sticks her beak into it, shakes it up, And hurl's it all abroad, that all may view it. Corruption is her nutriment; but touch her With any precious oyntment, and you kill her. 10 Where she finds any filth in men, she feasts, ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... they were soon in the hollows of deep waters. There was a berth in the ship set apart for Shibli Bagarag, and one for the captain. Shibli Bagarag, when he entered his berth, beheld at the head of his couch a hawk; its eyes red as rubies, its beak sharp as the curve of a scimitar. So he called out to the captain, and the captain came to him; but when he saw the hawk, he plucked his turban from his head, and dashed it at the hawk, and afterward ran to it, trying to catch it; and the hawk flitted from corner to corner of the berth, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... crow, and eidos, eidos, form.] A process of the scapula shaped like the beak of ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... labor, she ripens the wheat; she ripens it also for the little Calender-beetle, which, although exempted from the labor of the fields, enters our granaries none the less, and there, with its pointed beak, nibbles our wheat, grain ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... Miss Dombey is the object of my passion; what are your opinions, Chicken, in this state of things, and what, on the spot, do you advise? The so-much-to-be-astonished Chicken, in the meanwhile, dips his beak into a tankard of strong beer, in Mr Toots's kitchen, and pecks up two pounds of beefsteaks. In Princess's Place, Miss Tox is up and doing; for she too, though in sore distress, is resolved to put a shilling in the hands of Mrs Miff, and see ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... grace 1859, he is fifty-three years of age. He presents the appearance of a well-preserved man. His frame is slight and robust, and his constitution is that of a mountaineer. The breadth of his forehead, the brilliancy of his eyes, his beak-like nose, and all the upper part of his face inspire a certain awe. His countenance, of almost Moorish hue, is at times lit up by flashes of intellect. But his heavy jaw, his long fang-like teeth, and his thick lips express the grossest appetites. ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... thorn now and up to his belly in the warm red grass. Where could the birds be? Whirr! and a great feathered shell seemed to have burst at his very feet. What a covey! twelve brace if there was a bird, and they had all been lying beak to beak in a space no bigger than a cart wheel. Up went John's gun and off too, a little sooner than it should ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... fiend!' I shriek'd, upstarting— 'Get thee back into the tempest and the night's Plutonian shore! Leave no black plume as a token of the lie thy soul hath spoken! Leave my loneliness unbroken, quit the bust above my door! Take thy beak from out my heart and take thy form from off my door! ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... H[o]-w[o], the second of the incarnations of the spirits, is of wondrous form and mystic nature. The rare advent of this bird upon the earth is, like that of the kirin or unicorn, a presage of the advent of virtuous rulers and good government. It has the head of a pheasant, the beak of a swallow, the neck of a tortoise, and the features of the dragon and fish. Its colors and streaming feathers are gorgeous with iridian sheen, combining the splendors of the pheasant and the peacock. Its five colors symbolize the cardinal virtues of uprightness of mind, ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... taught her, to show her pleasure at seeing her old friend again, and, wonderful to relate, she could talk as of old. The old man told her how sorry he was for all that had happened, and inquired after her tongue, wondering how she could speak so well without it. Then the sparrow opened her beak and showed him that a new tongue had grown in place of the old one, and begged him not to think any more about the past, for she was quite well now. Then the old man knew that his sparrow was a fairy, and no common bird. It would be ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki
... words can express: consider the clouds of midges that often dance over a stream. One day, chancing to glance at a steeple, I saw what looked like thin smoke issuing from the top of it. Now it shot out in a straight line from the gilded beak of the weathercock, now veered about, or declined from the vane. It was an innumerable swarm of insects, whose numbers made them visible ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... he comes up; and to hit a wave always on the front side, under the crest. Gripping her fish tightly, she bends in her slow flight and paralyzes it by a single blow in the spine from her hooked beak. Then she drops it back into the whitecaps, where, jumping to the top of my rock, I can see it occasionally struggling near ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... much unexplored ocean lay before him to the westward, with a fair wind and fine weather.) Some Albetrosses, Pintado birds, and Doves about the Ship, and a Bird larger than a Duck, his plumage of a Dark Brown, with a Yellow beak. We saw of these Birds in our Passage to the Northward, after doubling Cape Horn. At Noon the weather was more moderate; set the Reefd Mainsail. A great Sea from the West-South-West. Wind West; Course North 54 degrees 30 minutes East; distance ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook
... eagerness of Morano, his uncouth touch on his shoulder, seemed only pathetic to Rodriguez. He looked at the Professor's face, the nose like a hawk's beak, the small eyes deep down beside it, dark of hue and dreadfully bright, the silent lips. He stood there uttering no actual prohibition, concerning which Rodriguez's eyes had sought; so, stepping aside from his window, Rodriguez beckoned Morano, who at once ran forward ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... speck, after a while, there will stream out a number of little (almost imperceptible) red veins. At the end of some of which, in time, there will be gathered together a knot of matter, which by little and little will take the form of a head and you will, ere long, begin to discern eyes and a beak in it. All this while the first red spot of blood grows bigger and solider, till at length it becomes {85} a fleshy substance, and, by its figure, may easily be discern'd to be the heart; which as yet hath no other inclosure but the substance of the egg. But by little and little, the ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 36. Saturday, July 6, 1850 • Various
... copper or of gold, according to the quality of the person; the wings spread out, fall over the front of the head-dress, and conceal the temples. The tail, long and open, forms a beautiful tuft of feathers. The beak covers the top of the nose; the neck is fastened to the body of the artificial animal by a spring, that it may the more freely play, and ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... I should know," added Jorian oracularly, "for I was brought up along with a chough. He and I were born the same year, but he cut his teeth long before me, and wow! but my life was a burden for years all along of him. If you had but a hole in your hose no bigger than a groat, in went his beak like a gimlet; and, for stealing, Gerard all over. What he wanted least, and any poor Christian in the house wanted most, that went first. Mother was a notable woman, so if she did but look round, away flew ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... like a bird Slips lightly oceanward— Sail feathering smooth o'er the bay And beak that drinks the wild spray. In his eyes beams cheerily A light like the sun's on the sea, As he watches the waning strand, Where the foam, like a waving hand Of one who mutely would tell Her love, ...
— Rose and Roof-Tree - Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... Austro-Hungarian Empire bears to a monstrous bird of prey hovering threateningly over Italy. The body of the bird is formed by Hungary; Bohemia is the right wing, Bosnia and Dalmatia constitute the left; the Tyrol represents the head, while the savage beak, with its open jaws, is formed by that portion of the Tyrol commonly known as the Trentino. And that savage beak, you will note, is buried deep in the shoulder of Italy, holding between its jaws, as it were, the Lake of Garda. To continue the simile, it will be seen that the talons of the bird, ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... species of owl, considered it as sacred. The rover did not ask permission to slay it. Nobody knew him, or guessed why he was going among the hills. He came upon the bird in the mountains, when its beak was dripping with human blood, and at a mile distance hurled the spear, which flew through the air, as if self-directed, and pierced the creature through and through. For this he was arrested and consigned to the sacrificial ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... was Lorrito. It was a very human bird; I saw it eat some bread and milk from its tin one day and then sidle along a pole to a place where there was a towel hanging. It took a corner of the towel in its claw, wiped its beak with it, and then sidled back again. It would sometimes come and see me at breakfast; it got from a chair-back on to the table by dropping its head and putting its round beak on to the table first, making a third leg as it were of its head; it would then waddle to the butter and begin ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... harsh and peculiar, and may be likened to the sound of the Spanish guttural g, followed by a rough double r r; when uttering this cry it elevates its head higher and higher, till at last, with its beak wide open, the crown almost touches the lower part of the back. This fact, which has been doubted, is quite true; I have seen them several times with their heads backwards in a completely inverted position. To these observations ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... he goes to battle himself, ranges his chickens behind him and fights to the death. If he is the victor, he himself sings the Te Deum. In civil life there is no one so gallant, so honest, so disinterested. He has all the virtues. Has he in his royal beak a grain of corn, a grub, he gives it to the first lady among his subjects who presents herself. Solomon in his harem did not come near ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... like an inverted chopping-bowl and covered with tough skin instead of feathers. It had four legs—much like the legs of a stork, only double the number—and its head was shaped a good deal like that of a poll parrot, with a beak that curved downward in front and upward at the edges, and was half bill and half mouth. But to call it a bird was out of the question, because it had no feathers whatever except a crest of wavy plumes of a scarlet color on the very top of its head. The ...
— The Scarecrow of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... and Pindus' inland peak, Robed half in mist, bedewed with snowy rills, Array'd in many a dun and purple streak, Arise; and, as the clouds along them break, Disclose the dwelling of the mountaineer: Here roams the wolf, the eagle whets his beak, Birds, beasts of prey, and wilder men appear, And gathering storms around ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... but old age and Arrowfield soot and the dirty little black yard where he generally lived had changed his tint most terribly, and though he plunged in, and bobbed and jerked the water all over his back, and rubbed the sides of his head and his beak all among his ...
— Patience Wins - War in the Works • George Manville Fenn
... checked the rising fears of the guests by repeated proclamations that there was plenty of time, and that he would give them due warning before the train started. Those who had flocked out of the cars, to prey with beak and claw, as the vulture-like fashion is, upon everything in reach, remained to eat like Christians; and even a poor, scantily-Englished Frenchman, who wasted half his time in trying to ask how long the cars stopped and in looking at his watch, made a good dinner ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... complexion, either; he had twinkling gray eyes and a pronounced Roman nose, the numerous freckles upon which were deepened by his funereal dress-coat and trousers. He reminded me of Alfred de Musset's blackbird, which, with its yellow beak and sombre plumage, looked like ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... 10th July, 1880, I observed a pair of Yellow Tits building in a crevice of a large banian tree about 9 feet from the ground. The two birds were flying to and from the nest in company, the hen carrying building-materials in her beak. I watched the nest constantly for several days, but never saw the birds near it again until the 18th inst., when the hen flew out of the hole as I passed the tree. I visited the spot on the 19th and 20th ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... old man counting on a table a big heap of gold pieces, which Kiki thought to be money. One of these would buy him supper and a bed, he reflected, so he transformed himself into a magpie and, flying through the open window, caught up one of the gold pieces in his beak and flew out again before the old man could interfere. Indeed, the old man who was robbed was quite helpless, for he dared not leave his pile of gold to chase the magpie, and before he could place the gold in a sack in his pocket the robber bird was out of sight ...
— The Magic of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... mob-cap, with a long black veil, surrounded her thin, wan face with its narrow, hooded border. A great number of deep, transverse wrinkles ploughed her brow, which resembled yellowish ivory in color and substance. Her keen and prominent nose was curved like the hooked beak of a bird of prey; her black eye was piercing and sagacious; her face was at once intelligent, ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... fed out of the same dish; and when Pussy was absent, the pigeon, in return for the protection afforded her against the rats, constituted herself the defender of the kittens—and on any person approaching nearer than she liked, she would fly out and attack them with beak and wings, in the hope of driving them away from her young charges. Frequently, too, after this, when neither the kittens nor her own brood required her care, and the cat went out about the garden or fields, the pigeon might be seen fluttering close by her, ...
— Stories of Animal Sagacity • W.H.G. Kingston
... crash. There, his brows knitted, his mouth drawn on one side in sardonic meditation, he sat through many still hours—a sort of Prometheus in the bonds of unholy desire, having his very vitals torn by the beak ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... beak of a young beccaccia The campanile, the Duomo's fit ally, Shall soar up in gold full fifty braccia, Completing Florence, ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... the wings and legs; pour on ale or wine, mince them into the flavoured sauce. Give your lord the left wing, and if he wantit, the right one too. Pheasants, &c.: take off the wings, put them in the dish, then the legs. Woodcocks, Heronshaws, Brew, &c. break the pinions, neck, and beak. Cut off the legs, then the wings, lay the body between them. Crane: take off the wings, but not the trompe in his breast. Peacocks, &c.: carve like you do the Crane, keeping their feeton. Quails, larks, pigeons: give your lord the legs first. Fawn: serve the kidney first, ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... again a Gallic warrior of gigantic size challenged any one of the Romans to single combat. His challenge was accepted by M. Valerius, upon whose helmet a raven perched; and as they fought, the bird flew into the face of the Gaul, striking at him with its beak and flapping his wings. Thus Valerius slew the Gaul, and was called in ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... immense condor drove full at him, its evil head outstretched as if it meant to tear him with its hooked beak. The boy struck at it with one arm while he controlled the aeroplane with the other and the monstrous bird seemed nonplussed for a moment. With a scream of rage it rejoined its mates and they continued to circle about the aeroplane, every minute growing, it seemed, more numerous ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... conversation about poison while the little basket was gently rocked on the priest's knees; then, in particular, the sleepy osteria, and the little black hen, so suddenly killed, lying on the ground with a tiny streamlet of violet blood trickling from her beak. And next there was that splendid ball at the Buongiovanni mansion, with all its odore di femina and its triumph of love: and finally, before the Palazzo Boccanera, so black under the silvery moon, there was the man who lighted a cigar ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... held their breath. Jumbo was within two or three yards of the island when the foremost of the two swans stooped its long neck and made a savage grab at his hind legs. It seemed impossible that the cruel beak could miss him, yet it did; for poor Jumbo was by that time so exhausted that he suddenly sank and disappeared. The angry, surprised swan dived his head down in search of him; but the current, which swept round here with ...
— A Tale of the Summer Holidays • G. Mockler
... excuse for hanging about me) that in future she was to take her orders from Price—an announcement which caused my maid to stand several inches taller in her shoes, and sent the housekeeper hopping downstairs with her beak in the ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... the Prado, the king (Philip III.) gave orders to Pantoja to paint its likeness, which he did with such truthfulness that the royal bird, on seeing it, mistook it for a real eagle, and attacked the picture with such impetuosity that he tore it in pieces with his beak and talons before they could secure him. The indignant bird was then tied more carefully, and the ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... habit of pondering over everything. I think about the beak of the ship, which buries itself in each new wave. I think about the laughter of the steerage passengers, those poor, poor people, who, I am sure, scarcely have a gay time of it. My sousing was a treat to them. I think of the rapscallion, Wilke, who married a humpbacked ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... Shews Bathsheba Embrac'd throughout the Land. But this Judaick Paraphrastick Sport We'll leave unto the ridling Smile of Court. Good Heav'n! What timeful Pains can Rhymers take, When they'd for Crowds of Men much Pen-plot make? Which long-Beak'd Tales and filch'd Allusions brings, As much like Truth, as 'tis the Woodcock sings. What else could move this Poet to purloin So many Jews, to please the English Swine? Or was it that his Brains ...
— Anti-Achitophel (1682) - Three Verse Replies to Absalom and Achitophel by John Dryden • Elkanah Settle et al.
... have filled her mind for a long time, but she was interrupted by the dismal croaking of a raven overhead. Lifting her eyes, she saw in the dim light a large raven on the point of swallowing a frog which it held in its beak. 'Though I have no hope of help for myself,' she said, 'I will not let this unfortunate frog die, if I can save it; though our lots are so different, its sufferings are quite as great as mine.' She picked up the first stick which came to hand, and made the raven ...
— Old-Time Stories • Charles Perrault
... marry Englishmen, but none of the highborn Cymry might aspire to wed an Englishwoman. Hating the prince under whom they had come to so much disgrace, the Welsh themselves captured poor Gryffyth, and sent his head, his hands, and the beak of his ship, to Edward the Confessor, from whom they accepted the appointment of three of their native princes to ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... other foot and glanced casually at the canvases which leaned against the walls of the shabby studio. There was the Duchess: incredibly old, the face a web of wrinkles, the lips indrawn over toothless and shrunken gums, the nose a thin, curved beak, the eyes deep-set, gleaming, inscrutable, watching; and drawn tight over the hair—even Maggie did not know whether that hair was a wig or the Duchess's—the faded Oriental shawl which was fastened beneath her chin and which fell over her thin, ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... upset Polly's food, or something of that kind. However, they seemed all right again. An hour or so after Polly was on her stand, she called out in a tone of extreme affection, "Pussy! Pussy! come here, Pussy." Pussy went and looked up innocently enough; Polly with her beak seized her tin of food and tipped its contents all over the cat, and then chuckled as poor Puss ran away half frightened ...
— Fun And Frolic • Various
... is neither so wholesome nor so well tasted; and the same may be said of the Loggerhead, which feeds on moss from the rocks, and has its name from its large head. The Hawksbill, so named from having a long small mouth, like the beak of a hawk, is the smallest species, and is that which produces the so-much-admired tortoise-shell, of which cabinets, boxes, combs, and other things are made in Europe, and of this shell each has from three to four pounds, though some have ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... did not please the olive-sided, but he alighted on a branch below and bided his time; it came soon, when the goldenwing took flight, and he came down upon him like a kingbird on a crow. I heard the snap of the woodpecker's beak as he passed into the thick woods, but nobody was hurt, and the flycatcher ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... from Chiranni's Circus in South America dug from the bottom of his trunk as funny a clown costume as ever Joy donned. When made up, all pronounced Alfred as funny appearing as any clown. "He has a beak like Dan Rice and feet like Dr. Thayer," were a few ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... filling their ears with a painful clamour. Every now and again, one of the birds, recovering its senses in the hurly-burly, would make a curving swoop downward past the rows of windows below, and triumphantly catch in its beak something that had been thrown into ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... up at last, And read them both a lecture; And how he served them with his beak, I ...
— Naughty Puppies • Anonymous
... IN ONE THING. These ideas of substances, though they are commonly simple apprehensions, and the names of them simple terms, yet in effect are complex and compounded. Thus the idea which an Englishman signifies by the name swan, is white colour, long neck, red beak, black legs, and whole feet, and all these of a certain size, with a power of swimming in the water, and making a certain kind of noise, and perhaps, to a man who has long observed this kind of birds, some other ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... were thus disputing, a duck quacked to them, "You thieving folks, who bade you go to my nut-hill? Well, you shall suffer for it!" and ran with open beak at the cock. But the cock also was not idle, and fell boldly on the duck, and at last wounded her so with his spurs that she also begged for mercy, and willingly let herself be harnessed to the carriage as a punishment. The little cock now seated himself on the box and was coachman, and ...
— Household Tales by Brothers Grimm • Grimm Brothers
... the monster seized the largest and most gaily decorated plane in his hundred-foot tentacles just as the Skylark came within sighting distance. In four practically simultaneous movements Seaton sighted the attractor at the ugly beak, released all its power, pointed the main bar of the Skylark directly upward, and advanced his speed lever. There was a crash of rending metal as the thing was torn loose from the plane and jerked a hundred miles into the air, struggling so ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... boarded the king's ship; now on the beak, Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin, I flam'd amazement: Sometimes I'ld divide, And burn in many places; on the topmast, The yards, and bowsprit, would I flame distinctly, ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... about, and I got to thinking how much old Justice Hawkins looked like the counsel in 'Alice in Wonderland' when they tried the knave of spades for stealing the tarts. He has just the same sort of a beak and the same sort of a wig, and I wondered why he had his wig powdered and the others didn't. Pollock's wig had a hole in the top; you could see it when he bent over to take notes. He was always taking notes. I don't believe he understood ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... not hit, the steersman lost his nerve, and shrank from the coming shock. The galley's helm went up to port, and her beak slid all but harmless along Amyas's bow; a long dull grind, and then loud crack on crack, as the Rose sawed slowly through the bank of oars from stem to stern, hurling the wretched slaves in heaps upon each other; and ere ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... he, reverently, "hast thou not a secret message for my ear?" Then the hawk put its beak to Morven's ear, and Morven bowed his head submissively; and the hawk rested with Morven from that moment and would not ...
— The Fallen Star; and, A Dissertation on the Origin of Evil • E. L. Bulwer; and, Lord Brougham
... developments the existence of which no scientist has ever before even suspected." Occasionally the tortoise stopped, whereupon they poked it from behind with their knives. It was a vicious-looking brute, and had a huge horny beak, with which it bit off young trees that stood in its way as though they had been blades of grass. They were passing through a valley about half a mile wide, bordered on each side by woods, when Bearwarden suddenly exclaimed, "Here we have it!" and, looking forward, they ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... down the gloom of time, foresees with a prophet's vision. With a resolution equal to thine own, I defy thy threats of an inglorious suicide. I hail thee as my own! Queen of climes undarkened by the eagle's wing, unravaged by his beak, I bow before thee in homage and in awe—but I claim thee in worship and in love! Together will we cross the ocean—together will we found our realm; and far distant ages shall acknowledge the long race of kings born from the ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... the winds, the clouds were there, The moon and sun, each in its several place; There too were all the stars that, fixed in heaven, Are borne in its eternal circlings round. Above and through all was the infinite air Where to and fro flit birds of slender beak: Thou hadst said they lived, and floated on the breeze. Here Tethys' all-embracing arms were wrought, And Ocean's fathomless flow. The outrushing flood Of rivers crying to the echoing hills All round, to right, to ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... with the first fair wind, and after a long navigation the first place we touched at was a desert island, where we found the egg of a roc, equal in size to that I formerly mentioned. There was a young roc in it, just ready to be hatched, and its beak had begun ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments • Anonymous
... have more pronounced colours than female robins. The beak is yellower, the breast is brighter, the back and the top of the head are darker. Robins both run and hop. The sense of sight of the robin is very acute, but its sense of hearing is even more keen. ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... destitute of timber, but is apparently fertile, consisting of a dark rich mellow looking lome. John Shields sick today with the rheumatism. Shannon killed a bird of the plover kind. weight one pound. it measured from the tip of the toe, to the extremity of the beak, 1 foot 10 Inches; from tip to tip of wings when extended 2 F. 5 I.; Beak 3 5/8 inches; tale 3 1/8 inches; leg and toe 10 Ins.- the eye black, piercing, prominent and moderately large. the legs are Hat thin, slightly imbricated and of a pale sky blue colour, being ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... Levitan is staying with me. Yesterday evening I went out with him shooting. He shot at a snipe; the bird, shot in the wing, fell into a pool. I picked it up: a long beak, big black eyes, and beautiful plumage. It looked at me with surprise. What was I to do with it? Levitan scowled, shut his eyes, and begged me, with a quiver in his voice: "My dear fellow, hit him on the head with ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... dress was in a very forlorn condition, being covered with egg behind, while the front of the skirt showed a number of dismal rents made by the beak and claws of the angry rooster. I did not think it would be improved by rolling on the grass, but I could not well ...
— Five Mice in a Mouse-trap - by the Man in the Moon. • Laura E. Richards
... the roots of the upper molars we use the cowhorn forceps," continued the dentist, monotonously. "We get the inside beak over the palatal roots and the cow-horn beak over the buccal roots—that's the roots on the outside, you see. Then we close the forceps, and that breaks right through the alveolus—that's the part of the socket in the ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... piece of grey crepe paper together lengthwise of the grain and gather in at the bottom. Stuff this bag with soft paper or cotton and gather again some distance from the top. Shape the top into ears and make two rosettes with black centers for eyes. A beak of black stiff paper protrudes between the eyes. Mount the owl on a branch by sewing with heavy black thread in a way ...
— Armour's Monthly Cook Book, Volume 2, No. 12, October 1913 - A Monthly Magazine of Household Interest • Various
... fury, but a cold devil who could devise a scope for his malice, choose how to do his stabbing work wiseliest. Inside the town gate they took up close order, wedgewise, linked and riveted; a shield before, shields beside, Richard with his double-axe for the wedge's beak. They took the steep street at a brisk pace, turning neither right nor left, but heading always for the citadel, boring through and trampling down what met them. This at first was not very much, only at one ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... and many of my men, one of whom died. My animals were all healthy, but the donkeys and camels were attacked by a bird, about the size of a thrush, which caused them great uneasiness. This bird is of a greenish-brown colour, with a powerful red beak, and excessively strong claws. It is a perfect pest to the animals, and positively eats them into holes. The original object of the bird in settling upon the animal is to search for vermin, but it is not contented with the mere insects, ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... the mother of Coquettishness, need not have put her hand before her face as she looked at these lovers. As a crowning joy, an orgy of happiness, Massimilla pillowed Emilio's head in her arms, and now and then ventured to press her lips to his; but only as a bird dips its beak into the clear waters of a spring, looking round lest it should be seen. Their fancy worked upon this kiss, as a composer develops a subject by the endless resources of music, and it produced in them such tumultuous and vibrating echoes as fevered ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... you hear the tap, tap, of the "carpenter" woodpecker, with his black coat and gay red cap. He drills holes in the bark of a tree with his strong beak and then fits an acorn neatly into each safe little storehouse. It is thought that worms and grubs fatten while living in these acorns, so that the woodpecker always has a meal ready in the winter when the ...
— Stories of California • Ella M. Sexton
... to the door, looked and listened—only the distant rattle of a woodpecker's beak on a dead tree in the woods. The snow began to fall in little fitful dabs. It was two miles to the nearest cabin, and her soul rose in fierce rebellion at her loneliness. It was easy for a man who loved the woods, the fields and running waters, ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... brilliancy of his gifted antagonist. At the close of a series of joint debates Johnson said: "This speech terminates our joint debates. I have now encountered the 'Eagle Orator' upon every stump in the State, and come out of the contest with no flesh of mine in his claws—no blood of mine upon his beak." To which Henry instantly replied: "The eagle—the proud bird of freedom—never wars ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... Dimly there crept into my mind memory of the Dyak legend of the winged messenger of Buddha—the Akla bird whose feathers are woven of the moon rays, whose heart is a living opal, whose wings in flight echo the crystal clear music of the white stars—but whose beak is of frozen flame and ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... the herd. The calves sense its presence and as it sidles up, Krishna seizes it by the hind leg, whirls it round his head and dashes it to death. A crane demon, Bakasura, then approaches. The cowherds recognize it, but while they are wondering how to escape, the crane opens its beak and engulfs Krishna. Krishna, however, becomes so hot that the crane cannot retain him. It lets him go. Krishna then tears its beak in two, rounds up the calves and taking the cowherd boys ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... hands! for ever on your plain Must the gorged vulture clog his beak with blood? For ever must your Nigers tainted flood Roll to the ravenous shark his banquet slain? Hold your mad hands! what daemon prompts to rear The arm of Slaughter? on your savage shore Can hell-sprung Glory claim the feast of gore, With laurels water'd by the widow's tear Wreathing ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... out of the loophole in the awning, in evident terror lest something they ought to see should slip by them. Escaping from the jam, we made our way to the bow, carrying stools, umbrellas, and books, and there, on the very beak of all things, we had a fine view. Duly and dutifully we admired Bingen, Cob-lentz, Ehrenbreitstein, Bonn, Drachenfels, and all the other celebrities, and read Childe Harold on the ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... concern her, and she wished to shut them out from her ears. What did concern her was to know what was with her up in the sky. Had a bird alighted on the parapet and startled her by scratching at the plaster with its beak? Could a mouse have shuffled in the wall? Or was there a human being up there hidden ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... hops toward me, as if to pay his respects, or to make my acquaintance. I have passed under his nest within a few feet of his mate and brood, when he sat near by on a branch eying me sharply, but without opening his beak; but the moment I raised my hand toward his defenseless household, his anger and indignation ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... upstarting— "Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore! Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken! Leave my loneliness unbroken!—quit the bust above my door! Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from of my door!" Quoth ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... vols. v. 122; vi. 16-49. I may remind the reader that the O. Egyptian "Rokh," or "Rukh," by some written "Rekhit," whose ideograph is a monstrous bird with one claw raised, also denotes pure wise Spirits, the Magi, &c. I know a man who derives from it our "rook" beak ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... three equal vertical bands of green (hoist side), white, and red; the coat of arms (an eagle perched on a cactus with a snake in its beak) is centered ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... him. It was sung confoundedly well, too. The band came in with a wild, trailing strain, that was positively heart-breaking. The party just mentioned was, as I said, old, and a gentleman, but he was tall, robust, broad-shouldered, with eagle-like beak, and keen gray eyes that were fitting accompaniments to so distinguished a feature. His dress was rather careless, but his air and the expression of his face evinced a mixture of eccentricity and a sense of superiority. At least, it had evinced this ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... lay the mangled corpses of yesterday's hunt, and over each fought and feasted a host of gannets, sea-gulls, and cormorants. The bodies were hidden from view by the birds, which tore with beak and weak palmated talons, at the greasy, bloody carcasses, and above these wheeled and fluttered a cloud of competitors for a share of the spoils. Occasionally a bird bolder than the rest would swoop at an unprotected baby-seal, ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... took George round the back of the hill and they mounted the crest from the reverse side. They came over it and there at their very feet lay one of George's best bullocks, with tongue protruded, breathing his last gasp. A crow of the country was perched on his ribs, digging his thick beak into a hole he had made in his ribs, and another was picking out one of his eyes. The birds rose heavily, clogged and swelling with gore. George's eyes flashed, his gun went up to his shoulder, and Jacky saw the brown barrel rise slowly for a moment as it followed the nearest bird wobbling ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... come so high. Of birds, I mean about Churra, there are several species of hawks, and their old companions crows and swallows; but I have seen no sparrows, which is singular enough. There is one beautiful species of jay, with crimson-orange beak and legs, and a pretty king-fisher; but, except perhaps in the valleys, birds, I should say, are very scarce. With respect to shooting, scarcely any is to be had; wood- cocks are found in the dells about Churra, but sparingly. I have seen only ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... the dead, of the populous woods? Where do they hide their little last hours, where are they buried? Where is the violence concealed? Under what gay custom and decent habit? You may see, it is true, an earth-worm in a robin's beak, and may hear a thrush breaking a snail's shell; but these little things are, as it were, passed by with a kind of twinkle for apology, as by a well-bred man who does openly some little solecism which is too slight for direct mention, ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... soft-hairy or smooth. Leaves: More or less divided, the lobes with rounded teeth; large lower compound leaves on long petioles. Fruit: An erect pod, each of the 5 divisions tipped with a long, sharp beak. ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... wearily. Now that I saw her awake and moving I noticed what a superior, well-bred manner she had. There were tears in her eyes and her beak was trembling. ...
— The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting
... eyes and heard little choky sounds. He stopped laughing and started for Grandfather Frog as fast as he could swim. He climbed right up on the big green lily-pad, and reaching out, grabbed the end of the fish tail in his beak-like mouth. Then Spotty the Turtle settled back and pulled, and Grandfather Frog settled back and pulled. Splash! Grandfather Frog had fallen backward into the Smiling Pool on one side of the big green lily-pad. Splash! Spotty the Turtle had fallen backward into the ...
— The Adventures of Grandfather Frog • Thornton W. Burgess
... of the spring, which, like a fairy temple, seemed to have been exhaled from in bubbles, was yet capped, as in the broad light of day, by a gilded eagle, from whose beak was suspended a bottle of the water, and no other light was shed upon the scene than the silver and golden radiance emitted together from this bottle, as if ten thousand infinitely small goldfish floated there in ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... body was jet black, its curving legs, three to a side, chrome yellow. The round head ended in a sharp beak and it had large, many-faceted eyes. The wings, which lazily tested the air, were black and touched ...
— The People of the Crater • Andrew North
... apartments against the violence of the world and frowns away unseemly intruders. We have no spontaneous enthusiasm, no spiritual independence, no inner being, obedient only to its own law. We do not plough the billows of time with true beak and steady weight, but float, a tossed cork, now one side up and now the other. We live the life of an insect accidentally caught within a drum. Every steamer that comes hits the drum a beat; every telegram ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... so close over the heads of Neewa and Miki that they heard the menacing purr of giant wings. As the wraith-like creature disappeared there came back to them a hiss and the grating snap of a powerful beak. It sent a shiver through Miki. The instinct that had been fighting to rouse itself within him flared up like a powder-flash. Instantly he sensed the nearness of an ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... he meant by all this, until afterward. I had never heard of such a thing as birds talking. I stood on the table staring hard at her, and she stared hard at me. I was just thinking that I would not like to have her sharp little beak fastened in my skin, when I heard some one say, "Beautiful Joe." The voice seemed to come from the room, but I knew all the voices there, and this was one I had never heard before, so I thought I must be mistaken, ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... should the homely bird do but walk right out on the land and up to Bobby. Bobby then saw that it was not a stake-driver, but a long-legged, long-necked, short-bodied gentleman, in a black bob-tail coat. And yet his long, straight nose did look like a stake-driver's beak, to be sure. He was one of the stake-driver fairies, who live in the dark and lonesome places along the creeks in the Hoosier country. They make the noise that you hear, "Ke-whack! ke-whack!" It may be the driving of stakes for the protection of the nests of their ...
— Queer Stories for Boys and Girls • Edward Eggleston
... catch the afternoon breeze full upon his loose gray locks. His broad, high curved forehead, seemed to weigh down upon his body like an ivory chest laden full of unseen jewels. His arrogant nose, as strong as the beak of a bird of prey, seemed to be reaching across the sunken mouth toward the sensuous, powerful jaw. A gray beard ran down along the neck, that was wrinkled, wasted with age. A hasty vision it had been, to be sure; but she had seen him; and his venerable figure remained ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... choicest of his helping, reserved till the last. Seeing the bird's beady black eyes fasten upon it he made a quick movement to impale it with his fork. But Oso was quicker still. Down darted his sharp beak and snatched the titbit from under the very points of the tines. A single gulp and ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... was the mother of Coquettishness, need not have put her hand before her face as she looked at these lovers. As a crowning joy, an orgy of happiness, Massimilla pillowed Emilio's head in her arms, and now and then ventured to press her lips to his; but only as a bird dips its beak into the clear waters of a spring, looking round lest it should be seen. Their fancy worked upon this kiss, as a composer develops a subject by the endless resources of music, and it produced in them such tumultuous and vibrating ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... them all about her, on head and shoulders and arms, all unafraid, all content; then all fluttering with their clipped wings, about her lips, except a grey parrot who rubbed his beak against her ear. ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... another, and occasionally all of these colors are fantastically blended in a single specimen. The creature has two long fore claws, or pincers; small eyes, mounted like round berries on the ends of short stalks or pedicels; and a mouth that seems to be formed by two horny, beak-like mandibles. It walks or runs with considerable rapidity in any direction,—backward, sidewise, or straight ahead,—and is sure to go in the direction that you least expect. If you approach one, ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... of his ship extricated himself with such address as to get clear, though only by a moment. From the velocity of their motion they struck against each other with such violence that they were both excessively injured by the shock; the beak, indeed, of one of them being broken off, the whole ship was ready to founder, which circumstance being observed, the ships of Brutus's fleet, which were nearest that station, attack them when in this disorder and sink ...
— "De Bello Gallico" and Other Commentaries • Caius Julius Caesar
... the upper molars we use the cowhorn forceps," continued the dentist, monotonously. "We get the inside beak over the palatal roots and the cow-horn beak over the buccal roots—that's the roots on the outside, you see. Then we close the forceps, and that breaks right through the alveolus—that's the part of the socket in the ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... And dropt his thirsty lance at thy command. Perching on the sceptred hand Of Jove, thy magic lulls the feather'd king With ruffled plumes, and flagging wing: Quench'd in dark clouds of slumber lie The terror of his beak, and lightnings of ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... of the uncapturable spirit which lies behind the forms of nature, the shadowy, hovering smile of life that is ever vanishing and ever springing again out of death. While they stood there close to the old linhay a bird came flying round them in wide circles, uttering shrill cries. It had a long beak and long, pointed wings, and seemed distressed by their presence. Little Gyp squeezed ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... parting message to the earth, a great bird hovered motionless. It seemed to hang in air as if by a thread. Then it descended with a wide, circling swoop. In less than ten seconds, as it seemed to Hervey, its body and great wings, and even its curved, cruel beak, were plainly visible circling a few yards above the tree. It seemed like a journey from the heavens to the ...
— Tom Slade on Mystery Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... yes, Andrew, and that I can. 'Twas a quist a-cooing in the tree one time—and then—she did recollect herself and did sharpen up her tongue and 'twas another sort of bird what could drive its beak into ...
— Six Plays • Florence Henrietta Darwin
... same angle toward the hull, which they again met six or seven feet under water. Thus was formed all round the ship a knuckle, which, being filled-in solid and covered with iron, was a very perfect protection against any but the most powerful ram. The Tennessee herself was fitted with a beak and intended to ram, but, owing to the slender resources of the Confederacy, her engines were too weak to be effective for that purpose. She could only steam six knots. Her battery, however, was well selected and powerful. She carried on each side two six-inch rifles, and at each ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... Australia Cray-fish. ASTACUS QUINQUE-CARINATUS, t. 3. f. 3.—Carapace smooth, rather convex, and with three keels above; the beak, longly produced, ending in a spine, simple on the side and produced into a keel on each side behind; the central caudal lobe rather narrow, indistinctly divided in half, and like the other lobes flexile ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... usually obscurely toothed, sometimes crenate or serrate, downy above, prominently veined, soft-hairy and somewhat glaucous beneath. Twigs downy. Catkins appearing with the leaves. Fruit-capsules tapering to a long slender beak, pedicels long and slender. A small, tree-shaped shrub, 4 to 15 ft. high, common in both moist and dry ground. New England, ...
— Trees of the Northern United States - Their Study, Description and Determination • Austin C. Apgar
... amuse herself with the sight of their greediness she held the worm high above them. At last she opened her fingers, and forthwith the fowls hustled one another and pounced upon the worm. One of them fled with it in her beak, pursued by the others; it was thus taken, snatched away, and retaken many times until one hen, with a mighty gulp, swallowed it altogether. At that they all stopped short with heads thrown back, and eyes on the alert for another worm. Desiree called them by ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... his arms being bound with leather thongs and he looked into the face of the savage, saw the hideous paint on it, the bright, beady eyes, the whites of which looked yellow; noted the high cheekbones, the nose like an eagle's beak, the cruel mouth like a thin slit in the face, and fear was upon him, such, as ...
— Rodney, the Ranger - With Daniel Morgan on Trail and Battlefield • John V. Lane
... knowledge that any other species of our woodpeckers excavate these winter quarters, but they probably do. The chickadee has too slender a beak for such work, and usually spends the winter nights in natural cavities or in the abandoned holes ...
— The Wit of a Duck and Other Papers • John Burroughs
... her shoulders, securing the other ends to blackboard pointers which she held in each hand. By extending her arms at full width she gave the impression of wings and flapped wildly round the lawn, the illusion being furthered by a brown-paper head-dress with a long twist to resemble a beak. ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil
... latter, but more in attendance upon them than as actively pursuing them, for the females seemed themselves almost as active agents in the sport of being wooed as were their lovers in wooing them. The male bird first dipped down his head till his beak just touched the water, then raised it again in a constrained and tense manner,—the curious rigid action so frequent in the nuptial antics of birds,—at the same time uttering his strange haunting note. The air became filled with it; every ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... did she touch the youth with her wand; three charms did she repeat. He fled; wondering that he sped more swiftly than usual, he beheld wings on his body; and indignant that he was added suddenly as a strange bird to the Latian woods, he struck the wild oaks with his hard beak, and, in his anger, inflicted wounds[35] on the long branches. His wings took the purple colour of his robe. The piece of gold that had formed a buckle, and had fastened his garment, became feathers, and his neck was encompassed with {the colour of} ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... embarrassed, though, when I looked across the table, for at the side of the poet was an odious individual, Paul de St. Victor. His cheeks looked like two bladders from which the oil they contained was oozing out. His nose was sharp and like a crow's beak, his eyes evil-looking and hard; his arms were too short, and he was too stout. He looked like ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... of Police. M. Sauvager, the deputy, was a thin, tall young man of five-and-twenty, with a lengthy olive-hued countenance, black frizzled hair, and deep-set eyes; the wide, dark rings beneath them were completed by the wrinkled purple eyelids above. With a nose like the beak of some bird of prey, a pinched mouth, and cheeks worn lean with study and hollowed by ambition, he was the very type of a second-rate personage on the lookout for something to turn up, and ready to do anything if so he might get on in the world, while keeping within the limitations ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... that prejudice was inspired by a lofty zeal for what it conceived to be the highest interests of humanity, or by a crafty policy which saw in the new doctrine a blow to the coming renewed supremacy of the Church. To us, now, it may seem that Huxley had "sharpened his beak and claws" with the spirit of a gladiator rather than with that of the mere defender of a scientific doctrine; but a very short study of contemporary literature will convince anyone that for a time the defenders of evolution had to defend ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... into the Lion's mouth and hit the end of the bone with his beak. The second time he hit it, the bone ...
— More Jataka Tales • Re-told by Ellen C. Babbitt
... convent—to be bricked up alive, perhaps. And then I hears a scratch, scratch, scratching, and 'Drat the mice,' says I; but I didn't take any notice, and then there was a little tap, tapping, like a bird would make with its beak on the window-pane, and I went and opened it, thinking it was a bird that had lost its way and was coming foolish-like, as they will, to the light. So I drew the curtain and opened ...
— In Homespun • Edith Nesbit
... shines bright, Both current and ripple are dancing in light. We have roused the night raven, I heard him croak, As we plashed along beneath the oak That flings its broad branches so far and so wide, Their shadows are dancing in midst of the tide. "Who wakens my nestlings," the raven he said, "My beak shall ere morn in his blood be red. For a blue swoln corpse is a dainty meal. And I'll have my share with the pike ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... no session of the Chamber that day,—Marianne was seated in her little salon. She was warming the tips of her slippers, that furtively peeped from beneath the lace of her skirt as a little bird might protrude its beak from a nest, her right leg crossed over the other, and she appeared to be musing, her chin resting on her ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... me no one had been here? (Shakes his finger at her.) My little song-bird must never do that again. A song-bird must have a clean beak to chirp with—no false notes! (Puts his arm round her waist.) That is so, isn't it? Yes, I am sure it is. (Lets her go.) We will say no more about it. (Sits down by the stove.) How warm and snug it is here! (Turns ...
— A Doll's House • Henrik Ibsen
... thin-chested, slight unspeakably, Neat-footed, weak-fingered, in his face,— Lean, large-boned, curved of beak, and touched with race, Bold-lipped, rich tinted, mutable as the sea, The brown eyes radiant with vivacity,— There shines a brilliant and romantic grace, A spirit intense and rare, with trace on trace ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... of about forty, thin, wiry, and with a nose resembling the beak of a bird of prey. His eyes, half buried under bushy eyebrows, twinkled like two stars. His mouth was large and smiling; his expression exceedingly benignant. From the face I passed to the costume. ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... face was beautiful, powdered with tiny freckles; especially under the eyes, which were of a deep, tranquil blue-grey. She half sat, half lay on her left side; whilst before her, quite close, strutted up and down on the grass, a bird, with blue plumage, coral-red beak, and ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... front. For furniture there were a bench, two chairs, some shelves, a cast iron stove, a wooden box partly filled with saw-dust which was used as a cuspidor, and a rough wooden table which served as a desk. In a chair beside the desk sat a tall, lean-faced man, with a nose that suggested an eagle's beak, with its high, thin, arched bridge, little, narrowed, shifting eyes, and a hard mouth whose lips were partly concealed under a drooping, tobacco-stained mustache. He turned as the three men entered, leaning back in his chair, his legs a-sprawl, motioning them ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... to the open French window of the pretty salon, angrily oblivious of the blue waters of Lac Leman which lapped placidly against the stone edges of the quai below. He was a tall, fierce-looking old man, with choleric blue eyes and an aristocratic beak of a nose that jutted out above a bristling grey moustache. A single eyeglass dangled from a broad, black ribbon round his neck. "One of the old school" was written all over him—one of the old, autocratic school ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... at the confluence of the St. Charles with the St. Lawrence, near the place where Jacques Cartier had spent the winter of 1535-6. Tradition tells us that when Cartier's sailors beheld the adjacent promontory of Cape Diamond they exclaimed, "Quel bec"—("What a beak!")—which exclamation led to the place being called Quebec. The most probable derivation of the name, however, is the Indian word kebec, signifying a strait, which might well have been applied by the natives to the narrowing of ...
— Canadian Notabilities, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... her when some danger lies O'er her young brood, and, with wild eyes, Straight at the sudden foe she flies, Her full soul spurred To battle with the gnashing beak— A roaring tiger is more meek; And somehow one is bound to speak Well ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 18, 1914 • Various
... and haggard; a long beard descended to his waist. His peculiar nose—the most marked characteristic of his race, long and beak-shaped, yet not exactly aquiline—marked the Jew. He ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... upon my carcass?" And even then a grim smile touched those swollen lips as into the savage mind came a sudden thought-the cunning of the wild beast at bay. Closing his eyes he threw a forearm across them to protect them from Ska's powerful beak and then he lay ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... parting, bird or fiend!' I shriek'd, upstarting— 'Get thee back into the tempest and the night's Plutonian shore! Leave no black plume as a token of the lie thy soul hath spoken! Leave my loneliness unbroken, quit the bust above my door! Take thy beak from out my heart and take thy form from off my door! ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... behold! a black crow that appeared from behind the house, was wheeling about the hawk, striking at it with its beak until, that it might have its talons free to defend itself, it let go the swallow, which, followed by its mate, came fluttering to the earth, while the crow and the falcon passed away fighting, till they were lost in the blue depths ...
— Swallow • H. Rider Haggard
... heard it not when it replied. Ho, ho!—a feast! I 'gan to croak, Alighting straightway on an oak; Whence gloatingly I eyed aslant The little trembler lie and pant. Leapt nimbly thence upon its head; Down its white nostril bubbled red A gush of blood; ere life had fled, My beak was buried in its eyes, Turned tearfully upon the skies— Strong grew my ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... had formed it, almost gave the lie to his character, for though his hair, when uncovered, resembled the rude and wild bristles of the hood he had drawn over it, yet an open, high, and manly forehead, broad ruddy cheeks, large, sparkling, light coloured eyes, and a nose which looked like the beak of the eagle, promised something valiant and generous. But the effect of these more favourable traits was entirely overpowered by his habits of violence and insolence, which, joined to debauchery and intemperance, had stamped upon the ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... sending up the last of the four to my comrades. I had them throw down the snares, and with them I made a kind of a lasso which I tried to throw over the head of the vicious bird. As I threw it he coolly reached up and cleverly caught it in his beak, and snapped it in two as quickly as could a pair of scissors. I tried it again, and once more he was too much for me. Why he had not cut himself loose when in the snare was a mystery to me when I here saw how clever he was ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... steady pencil and sharp chisel, and in strong, clear, minute lines of black and white showed us the scene. There, on Mount Ida, with a castellated rock in the distance, the charger of Paris browses beneath some stunted larches; the Trojan knight's helmet, with its monstrous beak and plume, lies on the ground; and near it reclines Paris himself, lazy, in complete armour, with frizzled fashionable beard. To him, all wrinkled and grinning with brutal lust, comes another bearded ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... tight-buttoned in his famous frock coat—he had donned it for the ceremonious afternoon, but Joanna (I think) had suppressed the purple cravat with the yellow spots—was talking to an elderly and bony female owning a great beak of a nose. I wondered how so unprepossessing a person could be admitted into a refined assembly, but I learned later that she was Lady Molyneux, one of the Great Personages of the county. The lady seemed ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... his right hand and the hawk left the prince and alighted on Morven's shoulder. "Bird of the gods!" said he, reverently, "hast thou not a secret message for my ear?" Then the hawk put its beak to Morven's ear, and Morven bowed his head submissively; and the hawk rested with Morven from that moment and would not be scared away. And Morven said, "The stars have sent me this bird, that in the day-time when I see ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... hired a horse and rode across the plain to Magersfontein. I must often have described the place to you—the great flat and the beak of hill, like a battleship's ram, thrust southward into it. Do you know, I felt quite awestruck as I approached it. It seemed quite impossible that I, alone on my pony, could be going to ride up to and take single-handed ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... Visitation. In memory of her he has quartered his own arms with those of Des Touches, which are: party couped, tranche and taille or and sinople, on the latter two eagles argent. He means to take one of the eagles argent for his own supporter and put this motto in its beak: Souviegne-vous. ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... been left on, the condition of the beak is a means of determining age. In a young chicken, it will be smooth and unmarred; in an old one, it will be rough and probably darker in color. If the feet have been left on, they too will serve to indicate the age. The feet of a young chicken are smooth and soft; whereas, ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 3 - Volume 3: Soup; Meat; Poultry and Game; Fish and Shell Fish • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences
... Since so many important decisions in life must be made blindly, one does not wonder that primitive men settled dark questions by studying the stars, by interpreting the flight of birds, the whimsical zigzags of the lightning bolt, or the turning of the beak of a fowl this way or that in picking corn. The human mind bewildered is ever looking for crevices in the great mystery that inwraps the visible universe, and ever hoping that some struggling beam from beyond may point ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... plum-cake to a cobble-stone is food for this voracious bird. A poor soldier, whose sole possession was the cross of honor which he wore on the breast of his coat, was once watching the ostriches in the Jardin d'Acclimatation, when a bird suddenly darted at him, seized his cross in its beak, and swallowed it. The soldier went to the superintendent of the garden and entered a bitter complaint; but the feathered thief was not arrested, and the ...
— Harper's Young People, September 28, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... beverages. A tom-tit, who often drinks water from a saucer which we put on our window-sill, one day found the water frozen. What did the intelligent creature do? Why, it rapped on the window-pane with its beak till the window was opened, then hopped on to the sideboard, and began trying to peck the cork out of a whiskey bottle! I took the hint, and poured some of the spirit into the saucer; the bird drank it greedily! My wife's comment on this occurrence ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 24, 1891. • Various
... have survived in a more or less vague and unconscious form in mediaeval Europe. "In the tenth century," according to Dufour (Histoire de la Prostitution, vol. VI., p. 11), "shoes a la poulaine, with a claw or beak, pursued for more than four centuries by the anathemas of popes and the invectives of preachers, were always regarded by mediaeval casuists as the most abominable emblems of immodesty. At a first glance it is not easy ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... of pointers a sportsman can follow, to ascertain where any animal has been carried away in an avalanche. He hovers over the spot, constantly alighting, and then taking wing again; but if once you observe him pecking with his beak you may proceed to the spot, and be certain of finding, a very short distance below the snow, the carcass of a wild sheep, as fresh as it was on the day on which it was carried away. Many a haunch of good mutton have I obtained ...
— Forest & Frontiers • G. A. Henty
... that I had not, and then told her (so as to give her no further excuse for hanging about me) that in future she was to take her orders from Price—an announcement which caused my maid to stand several inches taller in her shoes, and sent the housekeeper hopping downstairs with her beak in the air like an ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... a Chinn if he didn't. Watch him blowin' his nose. 'Regular Chinn beak. 'Flourishes his handkerchief like his father. It's ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... astern. In an instant a huge albatross pounced down on the tempting bait, and was hooked. It required two men, however, to draw him on board over the taffrail. Even when brought on deck he attacked everyone who came near him. The doctor advised us to stand clear of his wings and beak, but Horner thoughtlessly held out his hat, when the bird, seizing hold of it, bit the crown clean out in a moment. Not until he had had several blows on the head with a handspike did he drop dead. He measured seventeen feet from tip to ...
— Peter Trawl - The Adventures of a Whaler • W. H. G. Kingston
... getting into a pretty tangle at the palace. Mary would not speak to the king, and poor Catherine was afraid to come within arm's length of her; Wolsey was glad to keep out of her way, and she flew at Buckingham with talons and beak upon first sight. As to the battle with Buckingham, it was short but decisive, and this was the way it came about: There had been a passage between the duke and Brandon, in which the latter had tried to coax the former into a duel, the only way, of course, to settle ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... do I, Master Roland—the major-domo's mouth was as crooked as a hawk's beak for the whole morning afterwards, and any other page in your room would have tasted the discipline of the porter's lodge for it. But my Lady's favour stood between your skin and many a jerking—Lord send you may be the better for her protection ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... feo. These last three species are new.) Father Zea whispered some complaints at the daily augmentation of this ambulatory collection. The toucan resembles the raven in manners and intelligence. It is a courageous animal, but easily tamed. Its long and stout beak serves to defend it at a distance. It makes itself master of the house, steals whatever it can come at, and loves to bathe often and fish on the banks of the river. The toucan we had bought was very young; yet it took delight, during the whole voyage, in teasing the cusicusis, ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... Benton, Cincinnati, and Louisville covering them by an attack upon the upper batteries. As the Essex neared the Arkansas the bow fasts of the latter were slacked and the starboard screw turned, so that her head swung off, presenting her sharp stem and beak to the broad square bow of the assailant. The latter could not afford to take such an offer, and, being very clumsy, could not recover herself after being foiled in her first aim. She accordingly ran ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... paunch," cried Giles, "do I pronounce this dire and dreadful ban, videlicet, Sir Fatness, nota bene and to wit: may the fiend rend it with gruesome gripings—aye, rend it with claws and beak, unguibus ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... the squirrel's house," said the pigeon, as they stopped at an old tree. "Rap-tap-rap" with his beak on a knot-hole in the trunk, and a fat squirrel opened the door. What a lot of chattering! he was inviting them to enter. "How delightful," thought Laurie as they stepped inside, "now I shall see what a squirrel's ...
— The Pigeon Tale • Virginia Bennett
... a bit of meat, perched in a tree and held it in her beak. A fox, seeing her, wished to secure the meat, and spoke to the crow thus: "How handsome you are! and I have heard that the beauty of your voice is equal to that of your form and feathers. Will you not sing for me, so that I may judge whether this is true?" The crow was so pleased that she opened ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... de Monredon was all-glorious, of course. She certainly looked like an old vulture, in a pelisse of gray velvet, with a chinchilla boa round her long, bare neck, and her big beak, with marabouts overshadowing it, of the same color. Monsieur de Talbrun —well! Monsieur de Talbrun was very bald, as bald as he could be. To make up for the want of hair on his head, he has plenty of it on his hands. It is horrid, and it makes him look like an animal. You ...
— Jacqueline, v2 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... which at first are uniformly colored, just before maturity show a colorless space at the top, from which the chloroplasts and oil drops have disappeared (D), and at the same time this portion pushes out in the form of a short beak. Soon after the wall is absorbed at this point, and a portion of the contents is forced out, leaving an opening, and at the same time the remaining contents contract to form a round mass, the germ or egg cell (Fig. ...
— Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany - For High Schools and Elementary College Courses • Douglas Houghton Campbell
... tyrant. He is, however, a magnificent bird, when seen with wings expanded, nearly eight feet from tip to tip—and a body three and a half feet in length—his snowy-white head and neck shining in the sun, and his large, hooked, yellow beak open as he espies, afar off, the fish-hawk emerging from the ocean with his struggling prey. Downward he pounces with rapid flight. The fish-hawk sees his enemy approaching, and attempts to escape; but, laden with the fish he has just captured, in spite of the various evolutions ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... of no use, he had taken me in hand, and went on asking question after question; the more we parleyed the less we understood each other, until at last we both grew angry, and I actually thought the Signor would have liked to peck me with his hooked beak, until the maids, who had been listening to our confusion of tongues, laughed heartily at us. I put down my knife and fork and went out of doors; for in this strange land I, with my German tongue, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... of a Roman centurion—bold, cruel as a hawk's beak, strong-nostriled as a wolf's muzzle. His firm white teeth, as they crunched on the cracker suggested, even stronger, the semblance to a carnivorous animal of prey. A benevolent-looking pair of gold-rimmed glasses sat astride that nose, but Burke noticed that, oddly enough, Trubus did not need them ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... knock Speug down. He's out o' breath now, and the master he's took up the runnin', and—my eye and Betty Martin—ain't he talkin'! Not cussin'—no, not one swear word has he let go. Young gentlemen, upon my Alfred David, if the master ain't preachin' for all the world as if he was a blessed beak on the Bench and old Pompous was a 'habit and repute.' It's as good as a circus; you just go and 'ear 'im," and in exactly one and a quarter seconds the boys were an unseen audience when Mr. Peter McGuffie senior gave his opinion of the conduct of Bailie MacConachie, which he had been doing ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... and went back to Katrina. And now the two of them came near taking to their heels; for, sure enough, propped against the stone and almost covered with rim frost sat a giant troll, with a bristly beard and a beak-like nose! ...
— The Emperor of Portugalia • Selma Lagerlof
... some years before one of their priests had immolated a captive {126} chief. From a crevice in this stone, where a little earth was imbedded, there grew a cactus, upon which sat an eagle holding in its beak a serpent. A priest ingeniously interpretated this symbolism as a prophecy of signal and long-continued victory, and, forthwith diving into the lake, he had an interview with Tlaloc, the god of waters, who ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... With beak and claws I did my best To loose the nails and set him free, But they were all too strong for me;— ...
— 'All's Well!' • John Oxenham
... creature? The numbers of insects far exceed all that words can express: consider the clouds of midges that often dance over a stream. One day, chancing to glance at a steeple, I saw what looked like thin smoke issuing from the top of it. Now it shot out in a straight line from the gilded beak of the weathercock, now veered about, or declined from the vane. It was an innumerable swarm of insects, whose numbers made them visible at ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... went with the hand to the fire. There was a ragged gash across the back where the bird's beak had torn it, but no blood oozed from the wound. He noticed with disgust that the nails ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... light strengthened, and showed to the watchers upon the Cygnet's decks the ship in distress. It was Baldry's ship, the little Star. She lay rolling heavily in the heavy sea, her masts gone, her boats swept away, her poop low in the water, her beak-head high, sinking by the stern. Her lights yet burned, ghastly in the dawning; her people, a black swarm upon her forecastle, lay clinging, devouring with their eyes the Cygnet's boats coming for their deliverance across the gray ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... being in the neighbourhood of land of any seafowl we are acquainted with. I directed the bird to be killed for supper, and the blood to be given to three of the people who were the most distressed for want of food. The body, with the entrails, beak, and feet, I divided into 18 shares, and with an allowance of bread, which I made a merit of granting, we made a good supper, compared with ...
— A Voyage to the South Sea • William Bligh
... be. When I see it, with its beak lifted, singing, something comes loose in my heart, and I feel as if I should cry, and fly up to heaven. Do you know what I mean? Oh, I'm sure you do, or you could never have made that thrush. Father is so glad you've come to show me how to work. He says now I shall have a life-work, ...
— Touch and Go • D. H. Lawrence
... wing, Wears on her breast the varnished buds of Spring; When the loosed current, as its folds uncoil, Slides in the channels of the mellowed soil; When the young hyacinth returns to seek The air and sunshine with her emerald beak; When the light snowdrops, starting from their cells, Hang each pagoda with its silver bells; When the frail willow twines her trailing bow With pallid leaves that sweep the soil below; When the broad elm, sole empress of the plain, Whose circling shadow ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... islands emerging from the waste of waters, while, with such confusion as is inseparable from traditionary lore, the raven is substituted for the dove, and appears making its way to the lone tenants of the boat with evidence of the subsidence of the waters—a fir-cone in its bloody beak. Rolled down the long stream of ages, the true history is more or less changed, and even fragmentary, like a water-worn stone. Still, between these traditionary records and Bible story there is a remarkable agreement. They sound like its echo. In them pagan voices proclaim ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie
... stipulate that she may be mine, {if} preserved by my valor." Her parents embrace the condition, (for who could hesitate?) and they entreat {his aid}, and promise as well, the kingdom as a dowry. Behold! as a ship onward speeding, with the beak fixed {in its prow}, plows the waters, impelled by the perspiring arms[83] of youths; so the monster, moving the waves by the impulse of its breast, was as far distant from the rocks, as {that distance} in the mid space of air, which ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... cheery call and hopped as near to me as he could get and repeated his cries over and over. Somehow his cries took the form of words in my mind. This is what he said to me: "You, you, you, cheer up, cheer up, cheer up." He hopped about from limb to limb, wiping his beak, picking at pieces of bark, but ever and anon hopping back to look at me and cry again. "Cheer up, cheer up, cheer up." This he did for a long time, then he flew away, only to return soon and to peer at me again, crying his merry "You, you, you, cheer up, ...
— Heart Talks • Charles Wesley Naylor
... a circle round the parrot's cage and gazed with interest at its occupant. She (Evangeline) was balancing easily on one leg, while with the other leg and her beak she tried to peel a monkey-nut. There are some of us who hate to be watched at meals, particularly when dealing with the dessert, but Evangeline ...
— Once a Week • Alan Alexander Milne
... the chance," said Dason, and knelt and offered his neck to the axe. So Tob cut off his head, sticking it on the galley's beak as an advertisement of what had been done. The body he threw over the side, and one of the great man-eating birds that hovered near, picked it up and flew away with it to its nest amongst the crags. And so we were free to get a meal of the fruits and the ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... sight," went on Dona Jocasta. "They make their eagle on the standard and they put the serpent there of the reason that some day a thing of poison would crawl to the nest of the eagle of Mexico to comrade there. It has crawled over the seas for that, Padre, and the beak and claws and wing of the eagle must all do battle to kill the head and the heart of it;—for the heart of a serpent dies hard, and they breed and hatch their eggs everywhere in the soil of Mexico. ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... under the chin, and a long black veil, closely encircled her thin, sallow face. A number of deep wrinkles had impressed their transverse furrows in her forehead of yellow ivory; her marked and prominent nose was bent like the beak of a bird of prey; her black eye was knowing and piercing; the expression of her countenance was at once intelligent, ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... What bosh these "poets" write, about this humbug pet! Firstly, they're not true "Robins," but a base, inferior set; Second, there is no music in their creaking, croaking shriek; Third, they are slow and stupid—common birds from tail to beak! Tis said, "they come so early." Well, I'd rather they'd come late. They're simply made for pot-pies, and deserve no ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, Issue 10 • Various
... through the Hills, over the Gauley where the oak leaves carpeted the ford, and the little trout darted like a beam of light, and the old fish-hawk sat on the hanging limb of the dead beech-tree with his shoulders to his ears and his beak drooping, like some worn-out ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... most species are comparatively short, and the head is small so that they are often hardly noticeable when the body is distended. The sucking beak which is thrust into the host when the tick is feeding is furnished with many strong recurved teeth which hold on so firmly that when one attempts to pull the tick away the head is often torn from the body and left in the ...
— Insects and Diseases - A Popular Account of the Way in Which Insects may Spread - or Cause some of our Common Diseases • Rennie W. Doane
... of fire to shore, and Raven said, 'Because you were cowardly and obeyed me only through fear, your beak shall remain forever burned off and ...
— Girl Scouts in the Adirondacks • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... modern repugnance to the vulture as feeding on carcasses was probably not felt by the singer of this song. What he brings into view are the characteristics common to the eagle and the vulture; superb strength in beak and claw, keenness of vision almost incredible, magnificent sweep of pinion and power of rapid, unwearied flight. And these characteristics, we may say, have their analogues in the divine nature, and the emblem not unfitly shadows forth one aspect of the God of Israel, who is 'fearful in praises,' ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... there's anything truer than a act of parleyment - Ah! you ask the beak. True? I've that in my 'art as makes me ...
— The Plays of W. E. Henley and R. L. Stevenson
... when he had been left alone for a few minutes, a bird with brilliant plumage came and fluttered round the window, and finally rested on the sill. His feathers were sky-blue and gold, his feet and his beak of such glittering rubies that no one could bear to look at them, his eyes made the brightest diamonds look dull, and on his head he wore a crown. I cannot tell you what the crown was made of, but I am quite certain that it was still more splendid than ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Leonora Blanche Alleyne Lang
... said La Salle. "Now, Creamer, take your birds, gun, and one decoy, and align yourself with these oars when you have counted one hundred paces. When you have done so, face about and turn the beak of the decoy towards the boat. Now, Ben," continued he, when this was done, "walk up within twenty yards of Creamer, and let me align you; Kennedy will go with you, and, counting one hundred paces beyond Creamer, ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... top of its head was of a deep purple. On its breast was a broad yellow collar; the wings were green, changing to violet towards the edges, and while the feathers on its thighs were of a lovely azure, those of the tail were scarlet, banded with black and tipped with yellow. Its beak which by its shape showed that the bird was a species of parrot, was of ...
— Norman Vallery - How to Overcome Evil with Good • W.H.G. Kingston
... in a circle round the parrot's cage and gazed with interest at its occupant. She (Evangeline) was balancing easily on one leg, while with the other leg and her beak she tried to peel a monkey-nut. There are some of us who hate to be watched at meals, particularly when dealing with the dessert, but Evangeline ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 14, 1914 • Various
... furniture there were a bench, two chairs, some shelves, a cast iron stove, a wooden box partly filled with saw-dust which was used as a cuspidor, and a rough wooden table which served as a desk. In a chair beside the desk sat a tall, lean-faced man, with a nose that suggested an eagle's beak, with its high, thin, arched bridge, little, narrowed, shifting eyes, and a hard mouth whose lips were partly concealed under a drooping, tobacco-stained mustache. He turned as the three men entered, leaning back in his chair, his legs a-sprawl, motioning ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... a branch of a tree with a piece of cheese in her beak when a Fox observed her and set his wits to work to discover some way of getting the cheese. Coming and standing under the tree he looked up and said, "What a noble bird I see above me! Her beauty is without equal, the hue of her plumage exquisite. If only ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... elegant, it rolled its full, dark-blue neck as it moved to her. She crouched down. 'Joey, dear,' she said, in an odd, saturnine caressive voice, 'you're bound to find me, aren't you?' She put her face forward, and the bird rolled his neck, almost touching her face with his beak, as ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... you, Sinclair. You love fighting, you see. You're made for fighting. You make me think of that hawk. All beak and talons, made ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... Boilvar!" yelled the slangy bird, as he fastened his beak in Tim's ear. "Waow! Whoop her up, boys! ...
— Jack Wright and His Electric Stage; - or, Leagued Against the James Boys • "Noname"
... sack, without eyes or other organs of special sense, which lies motionless under a flat, thin, circular, reddish scale composed of wax and two or three cast skins of the insect itself. The insect has a long, slender, flexible, sucking beak, which is thrust into the leaf or stem or fruit of the orange on which the "scale bug" lives, and through which the insect sucks the orange sap, which is its only food. It lays eggs under its body, and thus also under the protecting wax scale, and dies. From the eggs hatch active ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... defense, at the window; Zoe blushing crimson, and newly started away from her too-enterprising wooer; and the tall, thin, grim old maid, standing stiff, as sentinel, at the bedroom door, and gimleting both her charges alternately with steel-gray orbs; she seemed like an owl, all eyes and beak. ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... you have done; Only think of all you can do; A false note is really fun From such a bird as you! Lift up your proud little crest, Open your musical beak; Other birds have to do their best, ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... ape in the Zoo To a white cockatoo: "Your beak is uncommonly strong!" Said the white cockatoo To the ape in the Zoo, "And your tail is ...
— Rhymes Old and New • M.E.S. Wright
... gently, therefore, he followed the outraged boy back to the barn. The crumbs were all gone. The nimble bills of the hens, the greedy, overbearing beak of the rooster, had gobbled them all up. Resentfully, Tommy picked up his shiny air rifle and went ...
— Frank of Freedom Hill • Samuel A. Derieux
... it was very near sunset and the windows were small, and I had slipped off my knapsack and dropped into a big comfortable chair before I noticed a clean-shaven man with a big hooked nose and gleaming eyes seated in the far corner. It was like the beak of a bird, that nose, and I was so fascinated by it that I didn't answer the landlord when he came in and said 'Good evening.' The man opposite said 'Good evening' too, so I suppose that it must have been just a mistaken ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... as a Sacred Bird in Folk-Speech and Child-Song" (198). The latter says: "It is with a sort of awe (Ehrfurcht) that the child looks upon this sacred bird, when, returning with the spring he settles down on the roof, throwing back his beak and greeting the new home with a flap of his wings; or when, standing now on one foot, now on the other, he looks so solemnly at things, that one would think he was devoutly meditating over something or other; ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... expressive sweep of the hand outward the cashier stood waiting, his tall, narrow head, topped by carefully brushed gray hair, thrust forward in the attitude of a parrot about to strike with its beak. ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... pictures. To one of them, the title of which was "Saffron and the Rainbow," was appended the explanation, "The effect of this is great." Opposite another, which represented "A Stork, flying with a violet in its beak," stood this motto, "To thee they are all known;" and "Cupid, and a bear licking its cub," was styled "Little by Little." Fedia used to pore over these pictures. He was familiar with them all even to their minutest details. Some of ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... you had so little religion As to catch a hawk, some falcon-lanner, And thrust her broad wings like a banner {270} Into a coop for a vulgar pigeon; And if day by day and week by week You cut her claws, and sealed her eyes, And clipped her wings, and tied her beak, Would it cause you any great surprise If, when you decided to give her an airing, You found she needed a little preparing?— I say, should you be such a curmudgeon, If she clung to the perch, as to take it in dudgeon? Yet when the Duke to his lady signified, ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... after a while, 'it appeared so awful to me when I saw it coming out of the white mist with its glaring red eyes and terrible beak. It was a ghost I feels, if it wasn't the sea sarpint; and whether or no it bodes no good to the man wot sees it, I know. ...
— Tom Finch's Monkey - and How he Dined with the Admiral • John C. Hutcheson
... noblest tragic woe. He was not of European blood, he was handsome, but not of European beauty. His face white—not of a Northern whiteness; his eyes protruding somewhat, and rolling in their grief. Those eyes had seen the Orient sun, and his beak was the eagle's. His lips were full. The beard, curling round them, was unkempt and tawny. The locks were of a deep, deep coppery red. The hands, swart and powerful, accustomed to the rough grasp of the wares in which he dealt, seemed unused to the flimsy artifices ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... were in camp on the San Miguel water-hole a solitary horseman on the regulation fiery steed dashed in among them. The newcomer was of a portentous and devastating aspect. A beak-like nose with a predatory curve projected above a mass of bristling, blue-black whiskers. His eye was cavernous and fierce. He was spurred, sombreroed, booted, garnished with revolvers, abundantly drunk, and very much unafraid. Few people in the country drained by the Rio Bravo ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... barriers,—rises a crag of a singular shape, jutting far out from the almost perpendicular strata beneath. Its form is precisely that of a gigantic helmet, hammered out by the fanciful artist into the likeness of an eagle, its wings partly outstretched, and its beak—the point of the crag—overshadowing the grim head of some gaunt warrior. With but little aid from the imagination, the whole features may be discerned; hence it was denominated, "The Eagle Crag." ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... chloropus).—Very similar are the ways of the moor-hen, with its brilliant beak. But once, by some extraordinary chance, a moor-hen fell down a cottage chimney, and was brought alive for inspection by a boy, who, ignorant of natural objects, as was always the case in villages forty years ago, thought ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... the grave-clothes garb and swaddling barret (Why purse up mouth and beak in a pet so, You bald old saturnine poll-clawed parrot?) 220 Not a poor glimmering Crucifixion, Where in the foreground kneels the donor? If such remain, as is my conviction, The hoarding it does ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... throughout this landscape of manifest life. Where are they—all the dying, all the dead, of the populous woods? Where do they hide their little last hours, where are they buried? Where is the violence concealed? Under what gay custom and decent habit? You may see, it is true, an earth-worm in a robin's beak, and may hear a thrush breaking a snail's shell; but these little things are, as it were, passed by with a kind of twinkle for apology, as by a well-bred man who does openly some little solecism which is ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... thoughtfully into the fire, the glow of which fell full upon his face, revealing every feature like carving. His nose was hooked slightly, and to Dick it now looked like the beak of an eagle. The somber eyes, too, ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... this portrait in the full insolence of her young womanhood. She retained not a trace of that handsomeness today. Her hands were skinny, large-veined, discolored by moth patches, and her large aquiline nose rose from her sunken cheeks like the beak of an old eagle—an indomitable old eagle. Many women of sixty-eight had worn far better, but looks need care, spurred by vanity, and she had a profound contempt for both. No doubt if she had made a few of the well-known feminine concessions would have looked at least ten years younger ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... light blue, was the word Love. Out of his left shoulder, in the same direction, rose a staff of deep blue, to which was attached a drooping silver flag crossed with bars of gold. (Its pattern was like the one placed in his grave.) On the top of the staff rested a dove, holding in its beak a wreath, composed of rainbow shades, circling the word Peace in letters whiter than snow. As the new sun continued to rise, the jewelled sky increased in dazzling brilliancy, ten thousand gems of shining gold shot out, and ten thousand sapphires too, all glistening gloriously ...
— Young Lion of the Woods - A Story of Early Colonial Days • Thomas Barlow Smith
... swept his back. His red jacket was cut short and square, barely reaching to the waist, the better to show off his elegant figure. In his girdle he carried an enormous sabre, the hilt of which was a glittering eagle's beak. A pair of flapped breeches of sky blue moulded the fine muscles of his legs and was braided in rich arabesques of a darker blue on the thighs. He might have been a dancer dressed for some warlike and dashing role, in Achilles ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... given her the stuffed parroquet on her birthday, and Mamma had given her the Bible and the two grey china vases to make up, with a bird painted on each. A black bird with a red beak and red legs. She had set them up on the chimney-piece under the picture of the Holy Family. She put the Bible in the middle and the parroquet on the top of the Bible and the vases one on ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... companions rode up to the chief gateway, a grand circular archway, with all the noble though grotesque mouldings, zigzag and cable, dog-tooth and parrot-beak, visages human and diabolic, wherewith the Norman builders loved to surround their doorways. The doors were of solid oak, heavily guarded with iron, and from a little wicket in the midst peered out a cowled head, and instantly ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Tagaygt-Huwaytt, the half Fellahs that own and spoil the once goodly land; the dogs barked at us, but the men never thought of offering us hospitality. We had an admirable view of the Tihmah Mountains—Zahd, with its "nick;" the parrot-beak of Jebel el-Sht; the three perpendicular Pinnacles and flying Buttresses of Jebel 'Urnub; the isolated lump of Jebel Fs; the single cupola of Jebel Harb; the huge block of Dibbagh, with its tall truncated tower; the little Umm Jedayl, here looking like a pyramid; ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... With beak and claws the bird endeavored to tear at the youth's face. Jack jerked loose the transmitter and beat it to pieces over the bird, but without ...
— On a Torn-Away World • Roy Rockwood
... doves, a pony, and sundry fragments. She had fastened the jessamine sprigs to the tops of their heads by a tiny daub of wet clay, and had evidently been surprised trying to put a sprig into the mouth of one of the doves, for it hung by a little thread of clay from the beak. He detached it and put it in his buttonhole. Poor little Sylvia! she took things awfully to heart. He would be as nice as ever he could to her all day. And, balancing on his stool, he stared fixedly at the wall against which she had fallen back; the line of her soft chin ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... they turned the nose of their machine toward a lower level, running at reduced speed, a huge bird with curving beak, which John said was a condor, dashed from the crags after the airplane. It was followed a moment later by five or six others. The great birds seemed to resent the appearance of so strange a giant in the mountain fastnesses where they had ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... couple of young ducks which were on a pond come swimming towards him. "You come just at the right moment," said he, and laid hold of one of them and was about to wring its neck. On this an old duck which was hidden among the reeds, began to scream loudly, and swam to him with open beak, and begged him urgently to spare her dear children. "Canst thou not imagine," said she, "how thy mother would mourn if any one wanted to carry thee off, and give thee thy finishing stroke?" "Only be quiet," said the good-tempered tailor, ...
— Household Tales by Brothers Grimm • Grimm Brothers
... wars in the lands from whence thou camest—that is if indeed they make wars in the Stars. Now tell us, what shall we do? Twala has brought up many fresh men to take the place of those who have fallen. Yet Twala has learnt his lesson; the hawk did not think to find the heron ready; but our beak has pierced his breast; he fears to strike at us again. We too are wounded, and he will wait for us to die; he will wind himself round us like a snake round a buck, and fight the ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... said Pietro. "Old Elsie is a fierce old kite, with strong beak and long claws, and will not let the poor girl have any good of her youth. Some say she means to marry her to some rich old man, and some say she will shut her up in a convent, which I should say was a sore hurt and loss to the world. There are a plenty of women, whom ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... ship was of deep draft and rode to anchor, the shallow flat-bottomed long ships were drawn up on shore. The Phoenicians took the Egyptian and Cretan models and improved them. They lowered the bows of the fighting ships, added to the blunt ram a beak near the water's edge, and strung the shields of the fighting men along the bulwarks to protect the rowers. To increase the driving force and the speed, they added a second and then a third bank of oars, thus producing the "bireme" and the ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... long even for such a tall man, and the huge, bony hands were gnarled and knotted. Regardless of the season, he had removed his bowler hat, revealing his forehead, which was high, flat and narrow. His nose was a large, fleshy, hawklike beak, and from the side of each nostril a deep indentation extended downwards until it disappeared in the drooping moustache that concealed his mouth when he was not speaking, but the vast extent of which was perceptible now as he opened it to call out the ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... built pyramids. Little Thais loved Ahmes like a father, like a mother, like a nurse, and like a dog. She followed the slave into the cellar when he went to fill the amphorae, and into the poultry-yard amongst the scraggy and ragged fowls, all beak, claws, and feathers, who flew swifter than eagles before the knife of the black cook. Often at night, on the straw, instead of sleeping, he built for Thais little water-mills, and ships no bigger than his hand, with all ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... his chin, his jaw, was likewise firm or harsh, with all the fierceness and indomitableness of the male—the nose also. It was the nose of a being born to conquer and command. It just hinted of the eagle beak. It might have been Grecian, it might have been Roman, only it was a shade too massive for the one, a shade too delicate for the other. And while the whole face was the incarnation of fierceness and strength, the primal melancholy from which he suffered seemed to greaten the lines ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... an assembly of strange things, Of horrors such as nightmare only brings. Asps, and spread eagles without beak or feet, Sirens and mermaids here and dragons meet, And antlered stags and fabled unicorn, And fearful things of monstrous fancy born. Upon the rigid form of morion's sheen Winged lions and the Cerberus are seen, And serpents winged and finned; things made to fright The timid foe, alone by ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... of a leguminous plant, Physostigma venenosum, a native of tropical Africa. It derives its scientific name from a curious beak-like appendage at the end of the stigma, in the centre of the flower; this appendage though solid was supposed to be hollow (hence the name from [Greek: phusa], a bladder, and stigma). The plant has a climbing habit ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... brought him a native woman, each holding an arm and thrusting her forward between them. She was not at all unlike a native woman of to-day, either in dress or sullenness; she had the beak and the keen eyes and the cruel lips of the "Hills." They showed her to him, and it was quite clear that they compared her to their own women, left behind; the comparison ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... he threw him, Hid in his wing his beak and wept, There ceased his sorrows to pursue him, The ...
— The Bakchesarian Fountain and Other Poems • Alexander Pushkin and other authors
... by the chimney, he heard a rustling and stirring about overhead; one of the little owls clicked its beak in its sleep, and he heard a sleepy, whining voice: "Now just you stop scrouging me. Screecher is ...
— The Counterpane Fairy • Katharine Pyle
... is loud, very harsh and peculiar, and may be likened to the sound of the Spanish guttural g, followed by a rough double r r; when uttering this cry it elevates its head higher and higher, till at last, with its beak wide open, the crown almost touches the lower part of the back. This fact, which has been doubted, is quite true; I have seen them several times with their heads backwards in a completely inverted position. To these observations ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... feet, and one of this size carries from seven to ten people. The body is formed by the hollowed-out trunk of a tree, tapering and rising at each end, short and rounded behind, but in front run out into a long beak. A stout plank on each side raises the canoe a foot, forming a gunwale secured by knees, the seam at the junction being payed over with a black pitch-like substance. This gunwale is open at the stern, the ends not being connected, but the bow is closed by a raised ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... explaining about, and I got to thinking how much old Justice Hawkins looked like the counsel in 'Alice in Wonderland' when they tried the knave of spades for stealing the tarts. He has just the same sort of a beak and the same sort of a wig, and I wondered why he had his wig powdered and the others didn't. Pollock's wig had a hole in the top; you could see it when he bent over to take notes. He was always taking notes. I don't believe he understood ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... one of those keen profiled men who have such roguish eyes when they come to earth. Frenchmen strolling down the boulevards glanced skywards and smiled. They were brave lads who defended the air of Paris. No Boche would dare to poke the beak of his engine above the housetops. But one or two men were uneasy and stood with strained eyes. There was something peculiar about the cut of those wings en haut. They seemed to bend back at the tips, unlike a Bleriot, with its straight spread ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... second time before there was any answer. They heard voices—Massey's and another. Then the druggist came to the entrance, unbolted it and stuck his head out—his gray hair all ruffled up in a tuft which made him, with his big beak and red-rimmed eyes, ...
— How Janice Day Won • Helen Beecher Long
... he took a few seeds and began to coax the bird, until it, in point of fact, performed various tricks, on the stage, clasping in its beak a mask ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... Andrew, and that I can. 'Twas a quist a-cooing in the tree one time—and then—she did recollect herself and did sharpen up her tongue and 'twas another sort of bird what could drive its beak into the ...
— Six Plays • Florence Henrietta Darwin
... Castlereagh till he's got them under cow — Just pick a quarrel and raise a fight, and leather him good and hard, And I'll take good care that his wretched sheep don't wander a half a yard. It's a five-pound job if you belt him well — do anything short of kill, For there isn't a beak on the Castlereagh will fine you ...
— Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... indifference did not please the olive-sided, but he alighted on a branch below and bided his time; it came soon, when the goldenwing took flight, and he came down upon him like a kingbird on a crow. I heard the snap of the woodpecker's beak as he passed into the thick woods, but nobody was hurt, and the flycatcher ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... rapped out the words in tones of unusual vigour, a little, stout, old gentleman, opening a door behind Gotthold, received them fairly in the face. With his parrot's beak for a nose, his pursed mouth, his little goggling eyes, he was the picture of formality; and in ordinary circumstances, strutting behind the drum of his corporation, he impressed the beholder with a certain air of ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Isabel a little conventual curtsey and then came to be kissed. The Countess Gemini simply nodded without getting up: Isabel could see she was a woman of high fashion. She was thin and dark and not at all pretty, having features that suggested some tropical bird—a long beak-like nose, small, quickly-moving eyes and a mouth and chin that receded extremely. Her expression, however, thanks to various intensities of emphasis and wonder, of horror and joy, was not inhuman, and, as regards her appearance, it ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... Coon thought that he would drive Solomon out of his snug house and live in it himself. But he soon changed Solomon Owl—so Fatty discovered—had sharp, strong claws and a sharp, strong beak as well, which curled over his face in a ...
— The Tale of Solomon Owl • Arthur Scott Bailey
... she added; and then she held the bird toward me. His little beak moved from her mouth to mine, and the delightful sensation seemed like the forerunner of the ...
— The Sorrows of Young Werther • J.W. von Goethe
... Indian stork with an enormous beak, about 5 ft. in height, which feeds on carrion and offal, and is useful in ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... changes, we have in Lithuanian szwilpti for the song of birds. Of all natural objects, different kinds of reeds and the hollow stalks of plants are, owing to their hollow and cylindrical form, best adapted for the imitation of a bird's beak and the sonorous transmission of breath. In many languages the word for a flute is the same as that for a reed. In Sanscrit, vanca and venu mean a flute and bamboo; in Persian, na and nay mean a flute and reed; in ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... the Jotun Loki is loosed. The shadows groan on the ways of Hel, until the fire of Surt has consumed the tree. Hrym steers from the east, the waters rise, the mundane snake is coiled in jotun-rage. The worm heats the water, and the eagle screams; the pale of beak tears carcases; the ship Naglfar is loosed. Surt from the south comes with flickering flame; shines from ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... I've learned owl-eology. I've passed days and nights in a hundred collections, And can not be blinded to any deflections Arising from unskilful fingers that fail To stuff a bird right, from his beak to his tail. Mister Brown! Mister Brown! Do take that bird down, Or you'll soon be the laughing-stock all over town!" And the barber ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... and simple thing, my dear Edward. When we go on board the DUNCAN, turn her beak head to the east, and go right along the thirty-seventh parallel till we come back to our starting ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... to do what the Esquimaux tell us was done. Men so placed are no more responsible for their actions than a madman who commits a great crime. Thank God, when starving for days, and compelled to eat bits of skin, the bones of ptarmigan up to the beak and down to the toe-nails, I felt no painful craving; but I have seen men who suffered so much that I believe they would have eaten any kind of ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... won't you ketch it," he raged in his puny wrath. "My master's a law-cove, and he'll 'ave y' up before the beak." ...
— The Opal Serpent • Fergus Hume
... fire to shore, and Raven said, 'Because you were cowardly and obeyed me only through fear, your beak shall remain forever burned off and short as it ...
— Girl Scouts in the Adirondacks • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... with long beak outstretched before him, and long legs outstretched behind cast a beady eye upon him, and shrilled "Cor-reck! Cor-reck!" in unregenerate approbation of ...
— Flying U Ranch • B. M. Bower
... willingly and kindly aid him. Wondrous to relate, the bird not only kept the place it had once taken, but as often as the encounter was renewed, raising itself on its wings, it attacked the face and eyes of the foe with its beak and talons, until Valerius slays him, terrified at the sight of such a prodigy, and confounded both in his vision and understanding. The crow soaring out of sight makes towards the east. Hitherto the advanced guards on ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... counties of Worcester and Essex, presented similar examples of political geography. It is said that Gilbert Stuart, seeing in the office of the Columbian Centinel an outline of the Essex outer district, nearly encircling the rest of the country, added with his pencil a beak to Salisbury, and claws to Salem and Marblehead, exclaiming, 'There, that will do for a salamander!' 'Salamander!' said Mr. Russell, the editor: 'I call it a Gerrymander!' The mot obtained vogue, and a rude cut of the figure published in the ...
— Proportional Representation - A Study in Methods of Election • John H. Humphreys
... and also heard speak the beak, And sound in its voice and I and my, When it was in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... burning spot, and taking off my hat, I thanked the man for his most kind attention. He pointed out to me that time spent in explaining the condition of my nose, would have been pure loss: the danger was pressing, and he attacked it at once! I was indeed entirely unconscious of the state of my beak—the ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... fine. The fearfull bird his little house now builds In trees and walls, in Cities and in fields. The outside strong, the inside warm and neat; A natural Artificer compleat. The clocking hen her chirping chickins leads With wings & beak defends them from the gleads My next and last is fruitfull pleasant May, Wherein the earth is clad in rich aray, The Sun now enters loving Gemini, And heats us with the glances of his eye, Our thicker rayment makes us lay aside Lest by his fervor we be torrified. All flowers the Sun now ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... hour we had a fire made of dry melon stalks, and he was toasting over it, and we made such a feed as we had not tasted for a week. We ate that pauw; nothing was left of him but his leg-bones and his beak, and we felt not a little ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... necessity must it have been which could have forced the poor, hunted wanderers of the wilderness to fly for refuge and protection from the talons and beak of the eagle to the claws and teeth of the lion. It was but a change, and made with but little hope of its being for the better. None saw this more clearly, felt it more deeply, than the sagacious Tecumseh; and his proud spirit groaned under the humiliating ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... which, having exhausted its malignancy without producing any particular effect, ended by gently harmonizing with the captain's sandy hair, reddish beard, and tanned skin. His mouth was like a badly made buttonhole, which gaped a little when he smiled. He had a nose like a parrot's beak, and his eyes were blue, kindly, and wise in their straightforwardness. When he would render his costume absolutely de rigueur, he wore a leathern jacket with manifold pockets, from one to another ...
— A Christmas Accident and Other Stories • Annie Eliot Trumbull
... beneath Lay earth and sea: the winds, the clouds were there, The moon and sun, each in its several place; There too were all the stars that, fixed in heaven, Are borne in its eternal circlings round. Above and through all was the infinite air Where to and fro flit birds of slender beak: Thou hadst said they lived, and floated on the breeze. Here Tethys' all-embracing arms were wrought, And Ocean's fathomless flow. The outrushing flood Of rivers crying to the echoing hills All round, to right, to left, rolled ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... his eyes, and indignant gestures, exclaimed, 'It's not true! The little bird said, coui, coui, coui, coui, before he fell into the fire, to make his mother hear; but the mother did not hear him, and he burnt his wings, his claws, and his beak, and he died, poor little bird.' And the child ran away, crying as if he had been beaten. He had been worse than beaten; he had been deceived, or at least he thought so; his story had been spoiled by being altered." So seriously do children for a long ...
— The Story Hour • Nora A. Smith and Kate Douglas Wiggin
... hole under the garden-steps; and was taken up, after supper, on the table to be fed. But at last a tame raven, kenning him as he put forth his head, gave him such a severe stroke with his horny beak as put out one eye. After this accident the creature languished ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... the Deacon! I didn't know it gave his like, in these lax days. He has a beautifully chiseled old face with an eagle beak and ice-blue eyes, and he looks as if his favorite winter sport were Turning Erring Daughters Out into ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... as he had done in the days before his marriage. In his strong, almost passionate nature, there was one great weakness; the love and admiration of women was a necessity to him. He could no more help trying to make women love him, than the kingfisher can help thrusting down his beak when the bright speckled sides of his prey flash through the water. It was from neither cruelty nor vanity, for Thorne had less of both traits than usually falls to the lot of men; it was rather from the restlessness, the yearning of a strong nature for that which it needed, but had not yet ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... between a stork and a swan—a melancholy water-fowl brought from Astracan by the Russian ambassador." This writer tells us, "It was diverting to see how the pelican would toss up and turn a flat fish, plaice or flounder, to get it right into its gullet at its lower beak, which being filmy stretches to a prodigious wideness when it devours a great fish. Here was also a small water-fowl, not bigger than a more-hen, that went almost quite erect like the penguin of America. It would eate as much fish as its ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... barrel-like paunch," cried Giles, "do I pronounce this dire and dreadful ban, videlicet, Sir Fatness, nota bene and to wit: may the fiend rend it with gruesome gripings—aye, rend it with claws and beak, unguibus et rostro, ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... worm she found there. The fowls darted at her hands; but to amuse herself with the sight of their greediness she held the worm high above them. At last she opened her fingers, and forthwith the fowls hustled one another and pounced upon the worm. One of them fled with it in her beak, pursued by the others; it was thus taken, snatched away, and retaken many times until one hen, with a mighty gulp, swallowed it altogether. At that they all stopped short with heads thrown back, and eyes on the alert for another worm. Desiree called them by their names, and talked pettingly to them; ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... you a little sketch to-day from the foreground of a Venetian picture, in which there is a bit that will show you this precision of method. It is the head of a parrot with a little flower in his beak from a picture of Carpaccio's, one of his series of the Life of St. George. I could not get the curves of the leaves, and they are patched and spoiled; but the parrot's head, however badly done, is put down with no more touches than the Venetian gave ...
— Lectures on Landscape - Delivered at Oxford in Lent Term, 1871 • John Ruskin
... of Tomo Chichi, on presenting the feather of an Eagle to Oglethorpe, is very expressive in his own laconic explication. By a little paraphrase it may be understood to import: "The Eagle has a sharp beak for his enemies, but down on his breast for his friend. He has strong wings, for he is aspiring; but they give shelter to feeble ones, for he is ...
— Biographical Memorials of James Oglethorpe • Thaddeus Mason Harris
... claws, which looked slender as cobwebs, were knotted close to his body, and it was long before one could feel the least motion in them. Finally, to our great joy, we felt a brisk little kick, and then a flutter of wings, and then a determined peck of the beak, which showed that there was sonic bird left in him yet, and that he meant at any rate to ...
— Queer Little Folks • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... said, and the creature looked up intelligently at her as she rapped him on the back with a long knitting-needle.—"And you, Mademoiselle Cleopatre!—attention!" she continued, tapping the ancient fowl on the beak. ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... and claws, disclosing to their sight The glorious meed of high heroic might. For with insatiate vengeance, he pursued, And never-ending hate, the feathery brood. Unhappy they, confiding in the length Of horny beak, or talon's crooked strength, Who durst abide his rage; the blade descends, And from the panting trunk the pinion rends. Laid low in dust the pinion waves no more, The trunk, disfigured, stiffens in its gore. What hosts of heroes fell beneath his force! What heaps of chicken-carnage marked ...
— The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius - with some other poems • James Beattie
... his possession a hen, which answered the purpose of a cat in destroying mice. She was constantly seen watching close to a corn rick, and the moment a mouse appeared, she seized it in her beak, and carried it to a meadow adjoining, where she would play with it like a young cat for some time, and then kill it. She has been known to catch four or five mice a ...
— A Hundred Anecdotes of Animals • Percy J. Billinghurst
... up the grave with the earth they had turned up, they flew away, but returned in a few minutes, bringing with them the bird that had committed the murder, one holding one of its wings in its beak, and the other one of its legs; the criminal all the while crying out in a doleful manner, and struggling to escape. They carried it to the grave of the bird which it had lately sacrificed to its rage, and there killed it in just revenge for the ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... beautiful bird, with plumage of the finest shining blue, with purple beak and legs, the natural and living ornament of the temples and palaces of the Greeks and Romans, which, from the stateliness of its part, as well as the brilliancy of its colors, has ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... nerve was obviously shaken by his competitor's undoubtedly fine performance, and he craked indecisively. At 4.30 a.m. I distinctly heard him utter a flat note. At 4.47 he missed the second part of a bar entirely. Thisbe's beak, I must believe, curled derisively; Strong-i'-th'-lung laughed contemptuously, and at 5.10 a.m. Eugene faltered, stammered and fled from ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 21, 1920 • Various
... the wild and clamorous sea-gulls Toiled with beak and claws together, Made the rifts and openings wider In the mighty ribs of Nahma, And from peril and from prison, From the body of the sturgeon, From the peril of the ...
— Required Poems for Reading and Memorizing - Third and Fourth Grades, Prescribed by State Courses of Study • Anonymous
... him. All night the lion remained, roaring at intervals, and Bar Shalmon clung to one of the upper branches afraid to sleep lest he should fall off and be devoured. When morning broke, a new danger threatened him. A huge eagle flew round the tree and darted at him with its cruel beak. Then the great bird settled on the thickest branch, and Bar Shalmon moved stealthily forward with a knife which he drew from his belt. He crept behind the bird, but as he approached it spread its big wings, and Bar Shalmon, to prevent himself being swept from ...
— Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends • Gertrude Landa
... thee, Kai, that there is neither man nor beast that could endure that shower and live. For not one of those hailstones would be stopped either by the flesh, or by the skin, until it had reached the bone. I turned my horse's flanks towards the shower, and placed the beak of my shield over his head and neck, while I held the upper part of it over my own head. And thus I withstood the shower. When I looked on the tree, there was not a single leaf upon it, and then the sky became clear; and ...
— The Mabinogion Vol. 1 (of 3) • Owen M. Edwards
... passed along, he saw an old man counting on a table a big heap of gold pieces, which Kiki thought to be money. One of these would buy him supper and a bed, he reflected, so he transformed himself into a magpie and, flying through the open window, caught up one of the gold pieces in his beak and flew out again before the old man could interfere. Indeed, the old man who was robbed was quite helpless, for he dared not leave his pile of gold to chase the magpie, and before he could place the gold in a sack in his pocket the robber bird ...
— The Magic of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... together, fell for about 100 feet, as though hit by a rifle bullet. After the first blow, the large wings of the heron expanded, and checked the rapid fall; the falcon was fixed upon its back, holding the neck in its sharp beak, while it clung to the body with its claws. In this position the two birds slowly descended towards the ground, twirling round and round in their descent from a ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... minutes there was no difference in speed, nor any sign by which the instructed might detect the probable evidence of defeat or success. The whole ten, which formed the front line, skimmed the water with an equal velocity, beak to beak, as if some secret attraction held each in its place, while the humble, though equally light bark of the fisherman steadily kept its ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... elements of Materia Medica, and does in reality effect cures. I class him among what are popularly known as humbugs, however, for he is a pretender to more wisdom than he possesses. It was to me a strange and suggestive scene—the bald, beak-nosed, coal-eyed charlatan, standing in the market-place, so celebrated in history, peering through his gold spectacles at the upturned faces below him, while the bony skeleton at his side swayed in the wind, ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... she roused herself, and her great wings flew out, striking his arm and face as he pushed them forward; and had he not drawn back swiftly, her iron beak would surely have rent his ...
— Wulfric the Weapon Thane • Charles W. Whistler
... bits of leaf and bark. It had two eggs in it, quite white, and each about as large as a small sugarplum. 6. When you approach the spot where one of these birds has built its nest, it is necessary to be careful. The mother bird will dart at you and try to peck your eyes. Its sharp beak may hurt your eyes most severely, and even destroy the sight. 7. The poor little thing knows no other way of defending its young, and instinct teaches it that you might carry off its nest if ...
— McGuffey's Third Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... not get that hen away from the bad fox. They used to think me a slow dull reader for not getting on with my lesson, but I used to sit and picture to myself the red hen, with its wings beating helplessly, screeching in terrified protest, or perhaps, if he had got it by the neck, with beak wide agape and silent, and eyes staring, as it left the farmyard for ever. I have seen blood-spillings and down-crushings and abject defeat here and there in my time, but the red hen has remained in my mind as the type of helpless tragedy." ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... Spike Brennon his work-out. Spike had laboured to develop other talent in Newbern, but with ill success. When you got 'em learned a little about the game they acted like a lot of sissies over a broken nose or a couple of front teeth out or something. What he wanted was lads that would get the beak straightened, pretty near as good as new, or proper gold ones put in, and come back looking for more trouble. Wilbur Cowan alone he had ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... Tigers do not generally come so high. Of birds, I mean about Churra, there are several species of hawks, and their old companions crows and swallows; but I have seen no sparrows, which is singular enough. There is one beautiful species of jay, with crimson-orange beak and legs, and a pretty king-fisher; but, except perhaps in the valleys, birds, I should say, are very scarce. With respect to shooting, scarcely any is to be had; wood- cocks are found in the dells about Churra, ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... light, and in some cases the jaws, though bearing teeth, are beak-like at their extremities and appear to have been enveloped in a horny sheath. In the part of the vertebral column which lies between the haunch bones and is called the sacrum, a number of vertebrae may unite together into one whole, and in this respect, as in some details of its structure, ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley
... A wooden staircase leading to the upper floor. In the foreground near the feet of the mother, a hen leading her young ones, to whom a little girl throws crumbs of bread; a basin full of water, and on the edge of it, one of the small chickens with its beak up in the air so as to let the water go down." Diderot then proceeds to criticise the details, telling us the very words that he hears the father addressing to the bridegroom, and as a touch of observation of nature, that while ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... his feet, and showing their teeth to all besides; and for virtues such as these they were rewarded by the highest offices in church, camp, and state, while new taxes and imposts were invented almost daily to feed their avarice and supply their extravagance. France, doomed to feel the beak and talons of these harpies in its entrails, impoverished by a government that robbed her at home while it humiliated her abroad, struggled vainly in its misery, and was now on the verge of another series of internecine combats—civil ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... surrender grew inevitable; but its Moorish commander, Mirat, though an infidel, was, for his nobility of character, in special favor with the Virgin,—Notre Dame de Puy.[23] In this extremity, she sent to him an eagle bearing in its beak a live fish; and Mirat promptly sent it to Charlemagne, to show his heavenly succor. The king, knowing that there was no possible fishing on the castle hill, perceived that it was a miracle; and lessening his rigor in the face of this sign, proposed less hard terms: the ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... and there, and already a monstrous protuberance was coming into view midway along its back, as if forced into position from within. Where the bow of the tramp had been there were colossal treads now visible. There was a sort of conning-tower, armored and grim. There was a ghastly steel beak. The thing was a war-machine of monstrous size. It emitted a sudden roaring sound, as of internal-combustion engines operating at full power, and lurched heavily. The steel plates of the tramp still visible above water, crumpled up like paper and were trodden under. The thing came toward ...
— Morale - A Story of the War of 1941-43 • Murray Leinster
... of 1615, pursuing one day a remarkable bird "which was the size of a hen, had a beak like a parrot and was entirely yellow, except for a red head and blue wings, and which had the flight of the partridge"—a bird I cannot identify—lost his way in the woods. For two days he wandered in the wilderness, sustaining himself by shooting birds and roasting ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... dares to approach its nest. The bird circles round the disturber of the peace with evident exasperation, and now and then goes whizzing past his head at such a furious rate that he must every moment fear that he will be wounded with its sharp beak. ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... was shy and reserved. The fond male flew to a knot-hole in an old apple-tree and coaxed her to his side. I heard a fine confidential warble—the old, old story. But the female flew to a near tree and uttered her plaintive, homesick note. The male went and got some dry grass or bark in his beak and flew again to the hole in the old tree, and promised unremitting devotion; but the other said "Nay," and flew away in the distance. When he saw her going, or rather heard her distant note, he dropped his stuff and cried out in a tone that said plainly ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... a bough almost over Dick's head, but this was game far too large for Mr. Owl's beak and talons, and he soon flew away in search of something nearer his size. A raccoon on a bough stared with glowing eyes and then ...
— The Rock of Chickamauga • Joseph A. Altsheler
... respectable women then. With gay ladies the habit was to hold them up just a little higher. I saw a pair of feet in lovely boots which seemed perfection, and calves which were exquisite. I fired directly. Just by Beak Street she stopped, and looked into a shop. "Is she gay?" I thought. "No." I followed on, passed her, then turned round, and met her eye. She looked at me, but the look was so steady, indifferent, and with so little of the gay woman in her ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... the most odd and interesting bird on the American continent except the emperor penguin. Its beak baffles description, its long legs and webbed feet are a joke, its nesting habits are amazing, and its food habits the despair of most zoological-garden keepers. Millions of flamingos inhabit the shores of a number of small ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... word for word and adds something about the eagle, for instance, the last part may be, "to tell you that she has an eagle with silver beak." The next player may add, "golden claws," the next "emerald eyes," the next "purple feathers," ...
— Games for Everybody • May C. Hofmann
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