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Beetle   Listen
verb
Beetle  v. i.  To extend over and beyond the base or support; to overhang; to jut. "To the dreadful summit of the cliff That beetles o'er his base into the sea." "Each beetling rampart, and each tower sublime."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Beetle" Quotes from Famous Books



... "Three dozen children! all eating dreadful pumpkin-pie—with cheeks like saddle-bags, and voices loud enough to make a mummy jump out of his skin in an ecstasy of astonishment at the noise! was there ever such a foolish freak?" whereupon, taking out his beetle-back snuff-box, and giving it the traditional taps, he helped himself to such a prodigious pinch, by way of consolation, that he was obliged to retire precipitately behind the honeysuckles, and nearly cracked his left wing ...
— The Fairy Nightcaps • Frances Elizabeth Barrow

... beliefs some of which have a strangely Christian ring. He was a believer in the resurrection of the body; hence the care that was taken from the time of the Third dynasty onwards to preserve it by embalmment, and to place above the heart the scarab beetle, the symbol of evolution, which by its magical powers would cause it to beat again. Hence, too, the long texts from the Ritual of the Dead which enabled the deceased to pass in safety through the perils that encompassed the entrance to the next world, as well as the endeavour ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce

... close of a summer's evening, those sounds which reveal to us that the great pulse of life is still strong,—strong even at that hour of repose,—the sleepy half-notes of the woodland bird, the "droning flight" of the beetle, or the passing hum of a belated bee. Tiny lamps, the glow-worm's "dusky light," shone here and there from the hedgerow. No step sounded, the air was sweet with the perfume of flowers, and had not yet lost the heat ...
— What the Blackbird said - A story in four chirps • Mrs. Frederick Locker

... beetle, weld, hammer; belabor, maul, buffet, smite, flagellate, whack, pelt, strike; See whip; overcome, vanquish, surpass, conquer, eclipse, subdue, checkmate, rout, excel, outdo; cheat, swindle, defraud; throb, pulsate; ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... sloping from my chin. Suddenly a rather large insect—dark and flat, with more legs than a self-respecting insect ought to need—appeared at the bottom of the counterpane, and slowly advanced. I think it was nothing worse than a beetle. It walked successfully past my Father's sleek black ball of a head, and climbed straight up at me, nearer, nearer, until it seemed all a twinkle of horns and joints. I bore it in silent fascination until it almost tickled my chin, and then I screamed 'Papa! Papa!' My ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse

... soon after his removal from St John's College, and his being chosen a fellow of Trinity. "Hereupon," he continues, "I did set forth a Greek comedy of Aristophanes, named in Greek [Greek: Heirene] with the performance of the Scarabaeus, or beetle—his flying up to Jupiter's palace with a man and his basket of victuals on her back; whereat was great wondering, and many vain reports spread abroad of the means how that ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby

... in astonishment. He had always imagined professional pugilists to be bullet-headed and beetle-browed to a man. He was not prepared for one of Mr Joe Bevan's description. For all the marks of his profession that he bore on his face, in the shape of lumps and scars, he might have been a curate. His face looked ...
— The White Feather • P. G. Wodehouse

... it shall never again fall to thy lot to see, hear, and smell all these. Here shalt thou linger out thy remaining days; thy companions the toad, the eft, the spider, the beetle; and when thou diest of hunger and thirst, which will eventually be thy lot, this cell shall be thy ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake

... the beetle. "Am I not just as good as that big creature yonder, that is waited on, and brushed, and has meat and drink put before him? Don't I ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen

... in ancient sages, Have been like cobwebs in all ages: Cobwebs for little flies are spread, And laws for little folks are made; But if an insect of renown, Hornet or beetle, wasp or drone, Be caught in quest of sport or plunder, The flimsy fetter flies in sunder. Your simile perhaps may please one With whom wit holds the place of reason: 10 But can you prove that this in fact is Agreeable to life and practice? ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]

... I beg of you, call me a beetle," exclaimed our hero, rather peevishly; "for I am actually a Woggle-Bug, and ...
— The Woggle-Bug Book • L. Frank Baum

... rose-tree, and there he would sit for hours gazing with tender longings at the beautiful rose, and murmuring impassioned avowals. The rose's disdain did not chill the hoptoad's ardor. "See what I have brought you, fair rose," he would say. "A beautiful brown beetle with golden wings and green eyes! Surely there is not in all the world a more delicious morsel than a brown beetle! Or, if you but say the word, I will fetch you a tender little fly, or a young gnat,—see, I am willing to undergo ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field

... a beetle pierced on the needle of Fate; A wretch in a cosmic death-cell, peaks for my prison bars; 'Whelmed by a world stupendous, lonely and listless I wait, Drowned in a sea of silence, ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service

... stopped nibbling almost at once, after which he looked at it again, moving the soft sensitive end of his nose rapidly for a second or so, and then hopped away to attend to his own affairs. A very large and handsome green stag-beetle crawled from one end of The Rat's crutches to the other, but, having done it, he went away also. Two or three times a bird, searching for his dinner under the ferns, was surprised to find the two sleeping figures, ...
— The Lost Prince • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... Overhead, white, billowy clouds float lazily over their background of ethereal blue. Cool June breezes fan the cheek. Distant knolls are dotted with flocks of sheep whose bells tinkle dreamily; and drowsy hum of beetle makes the bass, while lark song forms the air of the sweet symphony that Nature plays. Such was Grasmere as ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard

... a dark, beetle-browed-looking ruffian, this holy man; and the colonel, when he had finished examining his book of prayer and crime, tossed it to me, saying,—"There! that will show your friends in England the kind of politicians we make war against. Ha! what have we here? This is more serious." And he ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant

... A dark, beetle-browed, heavy-jawed, coarse-featured man, who looked as if he was as powerful as a giant, rose slowly to his feet, and replied in a surly tone, and with an ugly glitter in ...
— A Woman at Bay - A Fiend in Skirts • Nicholas Carter

... questioning Mumga, who was very old and had seen many strange things in her long life; but Mumga, being an ape, had a faculty for recalling the trivial. That time when Gunto mistook a sting-bug for an edible beetle had made more impression upon Mumga than all the innumerable manifestations of the greatness of God which she had witnessed, and which, of course, ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... Attraction, capillary Barley, to transplant, by Messrs. Hardy Beetle, instinct of Books noticed Butterfly, instinct of Calendar, horticultural ——, agricultural Columnea Schiedeana Dahlia, the, by Mr. Edwards Digging machine, Samuelson's Eggs, to keep Farm leases, by Mr. Morton Frost, plants injured by Grapes, colouring Green, German, by Mr. Prideaux ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 185, May 14, 1853 • Various

... "I've lived on th' moor with 'em so long. I've watched 'em break shell an' come out an' fledge an' learn to fly an' begin to sing, till I think I'm one of 'em. Sometimes I think p'raps I'm a bird, or a fox, or a rabbit, or a squirrel, or even a beetle, an' I don't ...
— The Secret Garden • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... bright-coloured rags came dancing round Domini, holding out their copper-coloured hands, and crying shrilly, "'Msee, M'dame! 'Msee, M'dame!" A deformed man, who looked like a distorted beetle, crept round her feet, gazing up at her with eyes that squinted horribly, and roaring in an imperative voice some Arab formula in which the words "Allah-el-Akbar" continually recurred. A tall negro, with a long tuft ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens

... stage, the vulgar will never cease to be vulgar, though the sun and moon may change their course, and "heaven and earth wax old as a garment." Perhaps, in order to please tender-hearted people, I might have been less true to nature; but if a certain beetle, of whom we have all heard, could extract filth even from pearls, if we have examples that fire has destroyed and water deluged, shall therefore pearls, fire, and water be condemned. In consequence of the remarkable catastrophe which ends my play, I may ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... were now completed; and none of the dark sounds and sights of hideous Night yet dared to triumph over the death of Day. Unseen were the circling wings of the fell bat; unheard the screech of the waking owl; silent the drowsy hum of the shade-born beetle! What heart has not acknowledged the influence of this hour, the sweet and soothing hour of twilight! the hour of love, the hour of adoration, the hour of rest! when we think of those we love, only to regret that we have not loved more ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield

... had the rest stood. Still, altogether, they are fighting infinitely better than expected, and at Clamart they fought really well in the open for the first time. Before, I own that my only feelings towards the battalions of beetle-browed ruffians from the faubourgs was disgust, now I am beginning to feel a respect for them, but it makes the ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty

... nucleus of all the congregated sepulchres in the old churchyard of King's Chapel. Certain it is that, some fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was already marked with weather-stains and other indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique than anything else in the New World. Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful era. Before this ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... they cast surprised glances at Giovanni and his companion, whom they all hated as a favoured person. One of them was finishing a drinking-glass, rolling the pontil on the arms of the working-stool; another, a beetle-browed fellow, swung his long blow-pipe with its lump of glowing glass in a full circle, high in air and almost to touch the ground; another was at a 'bocca' in the low glare; all were busy, and the air was very hot and close. The ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford

... to like everything they write about even, let alone read,' Alice said. 'Look at "Ruin seize thee, ruthless king!" and all the pieces of poetry about war, and tyrants, and slaughtered saints—and the one you made yourself about the black beetle, Noel.' ...
— The Wouldbegoods • E. Nesbit

... solution of picric acid be boiled with a strong solution of potassium cyanide, a deep red liquid is produced, owing to the formation of potassium iso-purpurate, which crystallises in small reddish-brown plates with a beetle-green lustre. This, by reaction with ammonium chloride, gives ammonium iso-purpurate (NH{4}C{8}H{4}N{5}O{6}), or artificial murexide, which dies silk and wool a beautiful red colour. On adding barium chloride to either of the above salts, a ...
— Nitro-Explosives: A Practical Treatise • P. Gerald Sanford

... wiz. I haven't missed an instalment since it started. Give us more stories like "Monsters of Moyen," and "The Beetle Horde."—Josephine Frankhouser, 4949 Chestnut ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various

... appeared his nose, which was a prominent aquiline. Nobody ever saw much more of the Major than his nose and his moustache. His hat came low down over his forehead, which was itself low, and a pair of beetle brows, of a dense purple-black, were faintly visible in the shadow of the brim. He never took off his hat in the presence of his fellow-men; and as he never encountered the fair sex, except in the person of the barmaid ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon

... shout from the crowd proclaimed that the Golden Eagle was once more in sight. At first a mere speck against the blue, she rapidly assumed shape and was soon circling above the heads of the onlookers, her engine droning steadily, as if she had been some gigantic beetle. ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton

... dowered with an overwhelming power of enthusiasm. Eleanor dressed well and had a handsome, commanding profile with small, compressed lips and large, prominent, melancholy eyes that wickedly reminded Gregory of the eyes of a beetle. Beneath the black feather boa that was thrown round her neck, her thin shoulder-blades, while she talked to Mrs. Forrester and sketched with pouncing fingers the phrasing of certain passages, jerked and vibrated oddly. Mrs. Forrester ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick

... motioned to the clerk to remove the oak cover, and the old man, with the air of an officious waiter, lifted it with a flourish, disclosing, inside the cracked font, a white pudding-basin, inside which, again, reposed a species of beetle known as a "devil's coach-horse." The Archdeacon, peering in and evidently recognizing the insect and its popular designation, and looking much shocked, exclaimed with some warmth: "Dear me! I should scarcely have expected to find that thing ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory

... offered for sale was a beetle. "What is the special advantage of this beetle?" asked ...
— Tales of Giants from Brazil • Elsie Spicer Eells

... square planisphere, of the zodiac of the Temple of Denderah. Some archaeologists think it preceded the crab, as the emblem of the division of the zodiac called by us, Cancer. Its emblem, as shown on the Hindu zodiac, looks more like a beetle or other insect than ...
— Scarabs • Isaac Myer

... beetle," said the Premier. "Exactly. And so you got to Wazuchistan. Where is it and ...
— Winsome Winnie and other New Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock

... was hidden from Mister Masters was presently obvious to Mr. Blagdon and to others. So the spider, sleepily watching the automatic enmeshment of the fly, may spring into alert and formidable action at seeing a powerful beetle blunder into the web and threaten by his stupid, aimless struggles to set the fly at liberty and to destroy the whole fabric ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris

... speech with so disagreeable an inflection that Arved was astonished. He looked around and spat at a beetle. ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker

... the senseless confection. Eve at the age of five minutes must have been a ringer for Miss Ada Lowery at nineteen or twenty. I was introduced, and a gum-drop suffered neglect while she conveyed to me a naive interest, such as a puppy dog (a prize winner) might bestow upon a crawling beetle or a frog. ...
— Options • O. Henry

... very little girl. He had been pointed out to her by one of her father's cowboys who, for reasons of his own, heartily hated and a little feared the old man. Since then the girl's lively imagination had created a most unseemly brute out of the enemy of her house, a beetle-browed, ugly-mouthed, facially-hideous being ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory

... that upsets all his fundamental axioms. These four minds, all so different, whose hopes were so small, who believed in nothing for themselves or after themselves, who regarded their own existence as that of a transient and a fortuitous being,—like the little life of a plant or a beetle,—had a glimpse of Heaven. Never did music more truly merit the epithet divine. The consoling notes, as they were poured out, enveloped their souls in soft and soothing airs. On these vapors, almost visible, as it seemed to the listeners, like the ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac

... vain: she always retorted that she wasn't good enough for me, and recommended me to marry an accursed barmaid named Rebecca Lazarus, whom I loathed. I talked of suicide: she offered me a packet of beetle poison to do it with. I hinted at murder: she went into hysterics; and as I am a living man I went to America so that she might sleep without dreaming that I was stealing upstairs to cut her throat. In America I went out west and fell in with a man who ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw

... 12). This is sometimes known as ladybug, and the bug is the little, round, reddish beetle whose wings are black dotted. It is a pretty, harmless beetle that gardeners like to see around their plants. Children repeat the rhyme when they find the beetle in the house and always release it to "fly away and ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester

... surprise you," she asked, "to know that I could be cruel? I mean exactly what the word means. Like a little boy who tears the legs off a beetle. Can you imagine me hurting some one frightfully, whom I needn't have hurt at all? Some one who was trying in his own way to be kind ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster

... sitting quite still for a few moments on a branch of a tree in his most characteristic nuthatch attitude, on or under the branch, perched horizontally or vertically, with head or tail uppermost, but always with the body placed beetle-wise against the bark, head raised, and the straight, sharp bill pointed like an arm lifted to denote attention,—at such times he looks less like a living than a sculptured bird, a bird cut out of beautifully variegated marble—blue-gray, ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser

... of semi-automatic telegraphy keyers that would send a string of dots if you held them down. In fact, the Vibroplex keyers (which were among the most common of this type) even had a graphic of a beetle on them! While the ability to send repeated dots automatically was very useful for professional morse code operators, these were also significantly trickier to use than the older manual keyers, and it could take some practice to ensure one didn't introduce extraneous dots ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0

... like a hunted stag. He could not go on saying "Ah!" indefinitely; yet what else was there to say to this curious little beastly sort of a beetle ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

... around and saw close to him a brown beetle, sitting on a blackberry leaf. Teddy looked at the beetle for a while in silence, and then he said, "Well, why ...
— The Counterpane Fairy • Katharine Pyle

... met thee many a summer's day, And ventured fearless in thy shallow flood, And rambled oft thy sweet unwearied way, 'Neath willows cool that on thy margin stood, With crowds of partners in my artless play— Grasshopper, beetle, bee, and butterfly— That frisked about as though in merry mood To see their old companion sporting by. Sweet brook! life's glories then were mine and thine; Shade clothed thy spring that now doth naked lie; On thy white glistening sand ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry

... lepidoptera may be mentioned, Cocaecia rosaceana, or "Leaf-roller," so called from its habit of curiously rolling the leaves of the Cotton plant and then feeding inside the roll. Then grasshoppers and locusts occasionally do some damage, as well as a beetle named Ataxia crypta, which is noted for attacking the stalks of the Cotton plants, but it should be pointed out this beetle does not prey upon healthy and vigorous ...
— The Story of the Cotton Plant • Frederick Wilkinson

... whose early training had been free and unrestrained, being brought to order by a Japanese mother-in-law was almost too much for my gravity. It would be like a big black beetle ordering the life of a butterfly. Not without a struggle the conservative grandfather acknowledged that his system had failed. For the first time since I had known him Kishimoto San, with genuine humility, appealed for help. ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay

... from one pair of shoulders to another, chattering wildly. In course of time, he reached the automobile, landed in a heap on the bosom of the beetle-browed, Roman-nosed passenger in the tonneau, and encircling him with his hairy arms. The beetle-browed man got up and fought for his freedom, ...
— Owen Clancy's Happy Trail - or, The Motor Wizard in California • Burt L. Standish

... The stag-beetle dies slowly (it was John who collected the beetles). Even on the second day its legs were supple. But the butterflies were dead. A whiff of rotten eggs had vanquished the pale clouded yellows which came pelting across the orchard and up Dods Hill and away on to the ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf

... Golovine, and to Monsieur Raeff, who afterwards, by Rasputin's influence, received the appointment of Procurator of the Holy Synod. At Stuermer's fine house there were, in the absence of the Starets, constant meetings of Raeff, General Kurloff, the Chief of the Political Police, and a beetle-browed official named Kschessinski, who was director of that secret department of State known as "the Black Cabinet," a suite of rooms in the central postal bureau in Petrograd, where one's correspondence ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux

... This good fellow, quotha? I scorn that base, broking, brabbling, brawling, bastardly, bottle-nosed, beetle-browed, bean-bellied name. Why, Robin Goodfellow is this same cogging, pettifogging, crackropes, calf-skin companion. Put me and my father over to him? Old Silver-top, and you had not put me before my father, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various

... long time sitting on the wooden bench, so long that the stooping sun found out the solemn, outstretched arms of the cedar, and touched them till they gleamed green as a beetle's wing. Each little twig and twiglet was made manifest, raw gold against the twilight that lurked beneath the ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley

... sinful world, passion and prejudice should fail to stir the mind, one learned coleopterist will fill ten attractive volumes with descriptions of species of beetles, nine-tenths of which are immediately declared by his brother beetle-mongers to ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley

... unshielded eyes; The allotted hours aloft shall wheel in vain And in the unpregnant ocean plunge again. Assault of squalls that mock the watchful guard, And pluck the bursting canvas from the yard, And senseless clamour of the calm, at night Must mar your slumbers. By the plunging light, In beetle-haunted, most unwomanly bower Of the wild-swerving cabin, hour ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... him is nothing short of statesmanship. For sometimes he will jump furiously at a fly, for very devilishness, without ever meaning to take it, and then, wearying suddenly of his gymnastics, he will snatch sulkily at a grasshopper, beetle, or worm. Trout feed upon an extraordinary variety of crawling things, as all fishermen know who practice the useful habit of opening the first two or three fish they catch, to see what food is that day the favorite. But here, as elsewhere in this ...
— Fishing with a Worm • Bliss Perry

... come out to take the air!" But in going down an alley, To a castle in a valley, They completely lost their way, And wandered all the day; Till, to see them safely back, They paid a Ducky-quack, And a Beetle, and a Mouse, Who took them ...
— Verse and Prose for Beginners in Reading - Selected from English and American Literature • Horace Elisha Scudder, editor

... the south side and reaching nearly to the floor. A hotbed sash is excellent for this purpose. The runway or yard should be as large as our purse will permit. In this yard plant a plum tree for shade. The chickens will keep the plum trees free from the "curculio," a small beetle which is the principal insect pest of this fruit. This beetle is sometimes called "the little Turk" because he makes a mark on a plum that resembles the "star and crescent" ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller

... Pyetushkov was on the point of getting up, and twenty times he huddled miserably under the sheepskin.... At last he really did get down from the stove and determined to go home, and positively went out into the yard, but came back. Praskovia Ivanovna got up. The hired man, Luka, black as a beetle, though he was a baker, put the bread into the oven. Pyetushkov went again out on to the steps and pondered. The goat that lived in the yard went up to him, and gave him a little friendly poke with his horns. Pyetushkov looked at him, and for some unknown reason said 'Kss, Kss.' ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev

... During the next twenty-four hours I waited impatiently for the water to settle and clear; then I began to introduce the living inmates. I collected prawns and crabs and sea-snails, and a tiny sole or two, a couple of inches long, and by good chance I found a small sepiola, or cuttle-fish, as big as a beetle, which burrowed in the sand and changed color magically from dark brown to faintest buff. I also had a pair of soldier-crabs, which fought each other continually. When the sunlight fell on my aquarium, I saw the silver bubbles of oxygen form on the green fronds of the sea-weed; the little snails ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne

... can be themselves to others as well as themselves. But they had their enemies here. For I saw great strong-armed beetles, hurrying about with most unwieldy haste, awkward as elephant-calves, looking apparently for glowworms; for the moment a beetle espied one, through what to it was a forest of grass, or an underwood of moss, it pounced upon it, and bore it away, in spite of its feeble resistance. Wondering what their object could be, I watched one of the beetles, and then I discovered a thing I could not account for. But it is no use ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald

... as he had seen her years before, kneeling in front of their door, and washing the heaps of linen, by her side, in the stream that ran through their garden. He almost fancied that he could hear the sound of the wooden beetle with which she beat the linen, in the calm silence of the country, and her voice, as she called out ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant

... A burnished army of bright utensils, shine; And the stern butler heedless of his bunion Looks happy, and the tabby-cat of the house Forgets the elusive, but recurrent mouse And purrs and dreams; And in his corner the black-beetle seems A plumed Black Prince arrayed in gleaming mail; Whereat the shrinking scullery-maid grows pale, And flies for succour to THOMAS of the calves, Who, doing nought by halves, Circles a gallant arm about ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, June 4, 1892 • Various

... XVII His beetle brows the Turk amazed bent, He wrinkled up his front, and wildly stared Upon the cloud and chariot as it went, For speed to Cynthia's car right well compared: The other seeing his astonishment How he bewondered was, and how he fared, All suddenly by name the prince gan call, By which awaked ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso

... meanings. He calls my large gold hair-pins koppa. Perhaps in his imagination they represent horses, as do many other objects also with which he plays. Berries he now calls mamma. He has a sharp eye for insects, and calls them all putika, from the Esthonian puttukas (beetle), which he has ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer

... outpost recently arrived is sitting in a hollow in a vile temper, morosely gouging hunks of tepid bully beef out of red tins. Several thousand mosquitos are assiduously eating the outpost. There is nothing to do except to kill the beasts and watch the antics of the scavenger beetle, who extracts a precarious livelihood from the sand by rolling all refuse into little balls and burying them. It is ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 10, 1916 • Various

... sent out colour and fragrance into the whole world, for they kept not their best for themselves, but would imitate the sun and the stars, which poured their warmth and radiance over the spring. And many a little gnat and beetle burst the narrow cell in which it was enclosed and crept out slowly, and, half asleep, unfolded and shook its tender wings, and soon gained strength, and flew off to untried delights. And as the butterflies came forth from their chrysalids in all their gaiety and splendour, so ...
— Peter Schlemihl etc. • Chamisso et. al.

... boat she stepped then, and found the earth all paved of a middling gravel, and nought at all growing there, not even the smallest of herbs; and she stooped down and searched the gravel, and found neither worm nor beetle therein, nay nor any one of the sharp and slimy creatures which are ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris

... unique in the production of a species of beetle remarkable for variety of colors and ornamentation of body. We had seen numerous specimens of this insect in southern India and at Singapore, some of which were an inch long, but these of Elephanta were not remarkable for size. They ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou

... later, to be as useful as he was beautiful. He it was who took upon himself the care of the potato-patch in the garden below, spending hours every day in clearing off the destructive potato-beetle, singing as he went to and from his labors, and, when the toils of the day were over, treating us to a delicious evening song from the top of a ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller

... all had seen it fully, Mr. Trelawny turned it over so that it rested on its back in a cavity made to hold it in the upper half of the box. The reverse was no less wonderful than the upper, being carved to resemble the under side of the beetle. It, too, had some hieroglyphic figures cut on it. Mr. Trelawny resumed his lecture as we all sat with our heads close to ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker

... few hours, and is then easily removed by washing with cold water. If, after the wood has dried, it becomes cracked, apply a solution of hot size with a brush, which will bind it well together and make it better for varnishing, as well as destroy the beetle which is often met with in old oak, and is erroneously called ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 194, July 16, 1853 • Various

... everything in their way, and end in a general stampede for underground retreats from the region poisoned by sunshine. Next year you will find the grass growing tall and green where the stone lay; the ground-bird builds her nest where the beetle had his hole; the dandelion and the buttercup are growing there, and the broad fans of insect-angels open and shut over their golden disks, as the rhythmic waves of blissful consciousness pulsate through ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin

... might never have another; for Gover'ment folk will not easy work a quarrel on their own account. I mind him sittin' there on the settle, his shins against the fire, a long pipe going, and Casey of the Lazy Beetle, and Jobbin the mate of the Dodger, and Little Faddo, who had the fat Dutch wife down by the Ship Inn, and Whiggle the preaching blacksmith. And you were standin' with your back to the shinin' pewters, and the great jug of ale with the white napkin behind you; the light ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... winged wardens of your farms, Who from the cornfields drive the insidious foe, And from your harvests keep a hundred harms; Even the blackest of them all, the crow, Renders good service as your man-at-arms, Crushing the beetle in his coat of mail, And crying havoc ...
— Conservation Reader • Harold W. Fairbanks

... heavy necklace, glittering with priceless jewels, and on his arms were massive bracelets of pure gold. A golden serpent, the symbol of royalty, gleamed from his forehead, and his golden breastplate showed the sacred beetle worked in precious stones, to protect him from evil spirits. Whenever he appeared in the streets of his capital, he was borne in the royal chair on the shoulders of eight of his courtiers, while on each side ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various

... can't lift a large hammer. It is not a question of force or courage between the sexes. It's a question of lifting power in the shoulders. A bold woman could commit ten murders with a light hammer and never turn a hair. She could not kill a beetle with a ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton

... This pretty spotted little beetle was used formerly in the neighbourhood of Llanidloes as a prognosticator of the weather. First of all the lady-bird was placed in the palm of the left hand, or right; I do not think it made any difference which hand was used, and the person who ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen

... point,' said Claudio. 'O, I do fear you, Claudio!' replied his sister; 'and I quake, lest you should wish to live, and more respect the trifling term of six or seven winters added to your life, then your perpetual honour! Do you dare to die? The sense of death is most in apprehension, and the poor beetle that we tread upon, feels a pang as great as when a giant dies.' 'Why do you give me this shame?' said Claudio. 'Think you I can fetch a resolution from flowery tenderness? If I must die, I will encounter darkness as a bride, and hug it in my arms.' 'There spoke my brother,' said Isabel; 'there ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb

... more or less in decoration, especially in Brazil, where the richly-colored beetles of the country are affected as articles of personal adornment. Recently in a Union Square jewelry store a monster beetle was on exhibition, having been sent there for repairs. It was alive, and about its body was a delicate gold band, locked with a minute padlock; a gold chain attached it to the shawl of the owner. Sometimes they are worn upon the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 362, December 9, 1882 • Various

... to common sight. His glasses were obviously of a very high power, yet he could scarcely see anything till he clapped his face close down and hunted for it. When he pencilled for me the new Latin name he had given to a small, slender, almost dazzling green, beetle inhabiting the Spanish moss—his own scientific discovery— he wrote it so minutely that I had to use a lens to ...
— Strong Hearts • George W. Cable

... round about us, thick as daisies in a summer meadow. For my own part, I know not what a walk, or a talk, or a peep into a book may lead me to. Brunel hit upon the notion of a tunnel-shield, from the casual sight of a certain water-beetle, to whom the God of Nature had given a protecting buckler for its head. Newton found out gravitation, by reasoning on the fall of an apple from the tree. Almost every invention has been the suggestion of an accident. Even so, to ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... plant; among animals we examine such things as an Amoeba, a Vorticella, and a fresh-water polyp. We dissect a starfish, an earthworm, a snail, a squid, and a fresh-water mussel. We examine a lobster and a crayfish, and a black beetle. We go on to a common skate, a codfish, a frog, a tortoise, a pigeon, and a rabbit, and that takes us about all the time we have to give. The purpose of this course is not to make skilled dissectors, but to give every student a clear and definite ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell

... mosquitoes are coming out by hundreds, they have not annoyed me before, but I think I must use my net to-night. I lie on my bed after dinner smoking with a lighted candle by my side. A hornet flies in and settles on my hand, then a large beetle comes with a buzz and a thud against me, making me start. Sundry moths, small flies, and beetles, are playing innocently round the flame. In half an hour I shall be able to make a fair entomological collection but as I neither ...
— Three Months of My Life • J. F. Foster

... replied that I had not yet decided, whereupon my tormentor, after looking at my feet, which I have never succeeded in growing up to, observed, "Well, if I were you, I think I should emigrate to Colorado and help to crush the beetle." Later on in life I was the victim of a cruel hoax, carried out with triumphant ingenuity by a confirmed practical joker, who with the aid of a thread caused what appeared to be a gigantic blackbeetle to perform strange and unholy evolutions in my sitting-room. Worst ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, December 22, 1920 • Various

... of the gold-bug is that of a man who finds a piece of parchment on which is a secret writing telling where Captain Kidd hid his treasure off the coast of South Carolina. The gold-beetle has nothing whatever to do with the real story, and is only introduced to mystify. It is one of the principles of all conjuring tricks to have something to divert the attention. Poe's detective story is a ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody

... thy courage, Claudio; and I quake Lest thou a feverous life should'st entertain, And six or seven winters more respect Than a perpetual honor. Dar'st thou die? The sense of death is most in apprehension; And the poor beetle that we tread upon, In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great As when a giant dies! Ay, Isabella, but to die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction and to rot; This sensible, warm motion to become ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce

... I could, how I would maul His tallow face and wainscot paws, His beetle brows, and eyes of wall, And make him soon give up ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift

... declared Scraps; "I saw it done myself. But your ferocious growl isn't as loud as the tick of a beetle—or one of Ojo's ...
— The Patchwork Girl of Oz • L. Frank Baum

... best livers had always been the best killers. He did not pretend to justify the plan, but there it was; and it worked the same whether it was one microscopic organism preying on another or a bird devouring a beetle or Germany trying to swallow the world. Rapp, Senior, said that was all very well, but these pacifists would keep us out of war yet. Doctor Purdy, with whom he had finished a game of pinochle—Herman Vielhaber had lately ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson

... obscure place which did not inspire confidence. He was a beetle-browed fellow, short, with deep-set furtive eyes, and he struck me as being a thief—or perhaps a receiver of stolen property. The atmosphere of the place seemed mysterious ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux

... signs. It was requisite that he should be quite black, have a white square mark on the forehead, another, in the form of an eagle, on his back, and under his tongue a lump somewhat in the shape of a scarabaeus or beetle. As soon as a bull thus marked was found by those sent in search of him, he was placed in a building facing the east, and was fed with milk for four months. At the expiration of this term the priests repaired at new moon, with ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch

... lion has something of the physiognomy of those magnificent ones which we have borrowed from the bas-reliefs of the Assyrians. Still, the intaglio is in other respects decidedly Phoenician and not Assyrian. Observe, for instance, the beetle with the wings expanded, which fills up the lower part of the field; this is a motive borrowed from Egypt, which a Ninevite lapidary would certainly not have put in such a place."[7107] The Phoenician inscription ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson

... for black beetle on Aster and Chrysanthemum. As soon as one is discovered apply Nicoticide, and apply it thoroughly, all over the plant. Promptness is demanded in fighting this ...
— Amateur Gardencraft - A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover • Eben E. Rexford

... millions of embryo or spawn deposited by the female, the breed of Salmon and Trout (to say nothing of other species) would long since have become extinct. Eels, fish, birds, water rats, toads, frogs, and last but not least, the water beetle,[8] prey upon the ova, spawn and young fry; floods also sweep away and leave on banks, or rocks, a considerable quantity of spawn, which of course comes to nothing. Escaping the above perils and causalities, and arrived at maturity, ...
— The Teesdale Angler • R Lakeland

... the Raven said, "Within the dark yew-tree, So in the Autumn yewberries Sad lamps may burn for me. Summon the haunted beetle, From twilight bud and bloom, To drone a gloomy dirge for me At dusk above my tomb. Beseech ye too the glowworm To rear her cloudy flame, Where the small, flickering bats resort, Whistling in tears my name. Let the round dew a whisper make, Welling on twig and thorn; And only the grey ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume II. • Walter de la Mare

... shame, with a soft blush upon her tawny check. But at the mouth of each of those drains, if we can get our flies in, and keep ourselves unseen, we will have one cast at least. For at each of them, in some sharp-rippling spot, lies a great trout or two, waiting for beetle, caterpillar, and whatsoever else may be washed from among the long grass above. Thence, and from brimming feeders, which slip along, weed-choked, under white hawthorn hedges, and beneath the great roots of oak and elm, shall we pick out full many a goodly trout. There, in yon stop-hole ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley

... misfortune had early taught the truths of life, and he followed the strait path with the tenacity of an insect making for its nest; he was one of those dogged young men who feign death before an obstacle and wear out everybody's patience with their own beetle-like perseverance. Thus, young as he was, he had all the republican virtue of poor peoples; he was sober, saving of his time, an enemy to pleasure. He waited. Nature had given him the immense advantage of an agreeable exterior. His calm, ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac

... not have laughed at the hollowness of the mummery, if the blows had been gentle, considerate, and forbearing? A "make-believe" blow would have implied a "make- believe" hammer and a "make-believe" curtain. No!—hammer away, like Charles Martel; "fillip me with a three-man beetle;" be to me a malleus hreticorum; come like Spenser's Talus—an iron man with an iron flail, and thresh out the straw of my logic; rack me; put me to the question; get me down; jump upon me; kick me; throttle me; put an end to me in any ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... Cast Skin.—New Britain and Annamite story of immortality, the serpent, and death, 69 sq.; Vuatom story of immortality, the lizard, the serpent, and death, 70; Nias story of immortality, the crab, and death, 70; Arawak and Tamanchier stories of immortality, the serpent, the lizard, the beetle, and death, 70 sq.; Melanesian story of the old woman and her cast skin, 71 sq.; Samoan story of the shellfish, two torches, ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer

... beginning to roll about on the grass, poking and pulling at each other in a manner which foretold the beginning of war. Clemence and Vie were gazing sentimentally through the branches. Plain Hannah, stretched flat along the ground, was barricading the movements of a tiny beetle, and chuckling over its persistent efforts to outwit her schemes. Dan sat with arms clasped around his knees, a picture of patience on a monument. The sight of his twisted lips, his tilted, disconsolate chin fired Darsie to action. It was her doing that he was here at all; it was her ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... it is found in a species of palm vulgarly called the groogroo—is the larva of a large-sized beetle, the Prionus, which is peculiar to the warm latitudes of America. With the exception of a slight similarity about the region of the head, the worm bears no resemblance to the parent beetle. When full-grown, it is about 3-1/2 inches in length, having the body large and ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 451 - Volume 18, New Series, August 21, 1852 • Various

... on the ground, Shining, quite still, as though they had been stunned By some great violent spirit stalking through, Leaving a deep and supernatural calm Round a dead beetle upturned in ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various

... is hush'd, save where the weak-ey'd bat, With short shrill shriek flits by on leathern wing, Or where the beetle winds His small but ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt

... of every flying creeping thing that goeth upon all four, which have legs above their feet, to leap withal upon the earth; even these of them ye may eat; the locust after his kind, and the bald locust after his kind, and the beetle after his kind, and the grasshopper after his kind." (Lev. 11:21, 22.) At the present time locusts are used as food by many oriental peoples, though usually by the poorer classes only. Of the passage referring to locusts as part of the Baptist's food while he lived ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage

... as simpering idiots or embryo vixens. To mild old ladies it generally gave a look of aggressive cynicism. Our vicar, as excellent an old gentleman as ever breathed, Begglely presented to us as a beetle-browed savage of a peculiarly low type of intellect; while upon the leading solicitor of the town he bestowed an expression of such thinly-veiled hypocrisy that few who saw the photograph cared ever again to trust ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome

... room, The moth, the beetle, and the fly were banish'd, And where the sunbeam fell athwart the gloom The very ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood

... as many grasshoppers as it does sparrows. The Chickadees, Brown Creepers, and many of the Warblers feed largely upon insects and insect eggs which they glean chiefly from the trees. The Rose-breasted Grosbeak and the Bob-White eat the Colorado potato-beetle. In the West the Franklin's Gull follows the farmer in the fields and picks up ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts

... difficulties of the journey were fully realised. During the whole of that day and the next they were almost continuously engaged in dragging the sledges over masses of ice, some of which rose to thirty feet above the general level. If the reader will try to imagine a very small ant or beetle dragging its property over a newly macadamised road, he will have a faint conception of the nature of the work. To some extent the dogs were a hindrance rather than a help, especially when passing over broken fragments, for they were always ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne

... rose knows well a gay voluptuous beetle, whose pleasure is to lie embedded in a fount of beauty. Deep among the incurving petals of the blushing-fragrance, he loses himself in his joys sometimes, till a breezy waft reveals him. And when the sunlight ...
— Crocker's Hole - From "Slain By The Doones" By R. D. Blackmore • R. D. Blackmore

... of mutton into steaks with a bone in each; trim them nicely, and scrape clean the end of the bone. Flatten them with a rolling pin, or a meat beetle, and lay them in oiled butter. Make a seasoning of hard-boiled yolk of egg and sweet-herbs minced small, grated bread, pepper, salt, and nutmeg; and, if you choose, a little minced onion. Take the chops out of the butter, ...
— Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches • Eliza Leslie

... kind of beetle or butterfly, then, that this philosopher comes down upon here from the heights of his universal science—his science of the nature of things in general, but that great Spenserian monstrosity,—that diseased product of nature, which ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon

... the potatoes with a silver fork; add nearly a cup of cream, and beat hard at least five minutes till light and creamy; serve at once, or they will become heavy. If preferred, the potatoes may be rubbed through a hot sieve into a hot plate, or mashed with a potato beetle, but they are less light and flaky when mashed with a beetle. If cream for seasoning is not obtainable, a well-beaten egg makes a very good substitute. Use in the proportion of one egg to about five potatoes. For mashed potatoes, if all utensils and ingredients ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg

... foreign pollen by selecting for pollinating purposes a flower which has not quite opened. If the standard is not erected, it is unlikely to have been visited by Megachile. Lastly, it not infrequently happens that the little beetle Meligethes is found inside the keel. Such flowers should be rejected for ...
— Mendelism - Third Edition • Reginald Crundall Punnett

... to hold services in the little old deserted schoolhouse, and found it, much to our surprise, packed with the inhabitants of Sodom; a more villainous looking crowd I never saw not even in darkest New York. Beetle-browed, mop-haired men, whose faces, if tapped, would apparently give forth as much fire-water as ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss



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