"Bat" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wife were up and were lighting a lamp. Without waiting for them, the boys slipped on some clothing and their shoes and ran downstairs. Dick took with him a pistol and each of the others a baseball bat. ...
— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht • Edward Stratemeyer
... bad as possible just now. I wonder where your brother is? However, we can't go any nearer.... Yes, the bat- horses are already being moved off, and there are more and more fugitives. A ghastly finish to your mother's ball, by Gad ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... has a coarse female face, the second a beautiful feminine head, and two breasts, and the third a visage ornamented with wreaths and a head-dress. There are various other representations of them, one of the most remarkable of which is a monster with a human head and the body of a vampire bat. ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... when I was climbing into the boat that I got a surprise. One of the two natives at the oars was the little Fijian who had been the pupil of the Maori, but he didn't bat an eyelash ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... better! I am neither a bat nor a mole. Beulah, I warn you; I beg you, child, mind how you act. Once entirely estranged, all the steam of Christendom could not force him back. Don't let him go; if you do, the game is up, I tell you now. You will repent your ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... are the principal emblems of the Apostles:— St. Andrew, a cross saltier; St. Bartholomew, a knife; St. James the Great, a pilgrim's staff, wallet, escallop shell; St. James the Less, a fuller's bat, or saw; St. John, a chalice and serpent; St. Jude, a boat in his hand, or a club; St. Matthew, a club, carpenter's square, or money-box; St. Matthias, a hatchet, battle-axe, or sword; St. Paul, a sword; St. Peter, keys; St. Philip, a tau cross, ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... 'all that's what the WHOLE charm can do. There's something that the half we've got can win off its own bat—isn't there?' She appealed to the Psammead. ...
— The Story of the Amulet • E. Nesbit
... the crumbling base of the auld kirk tower Is the broad-leaved dock and the bright brae flower; And the adders hiss o'er the lime-bound stones, And playfully writhe round mouldering bones: The bat clingeth close to the binewood's root, Where its gnarled boughs up the belfry shoot, As, hiding the handworks of ruthless time, It garlands in grandeur and green sublime The hoary height, where the rust sae fell Bends, as with a burden, the ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... The giant bat-shape that had seized him reached for the other, too. A talon ripped at the naked face, but the ape-man dodged and ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... head from a baseball bat, and the rapid projection of a baseball against his empty stomach, brought the tutor a limp and lifeless mass to the ground. Golightly shuddered. Let not my young readers blame him too rashly. It was his first homicide. "Search his ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... and one's past to shreds, as she had done. No doubt she was making quite a nice little income by teaching; and, in increasing admiration, he walked round the dusty inn and the triangular piece of grass in front of it. A game of bat-and-trap was in progress, and he conceived a love for that old English game, though till now he thought it stupid and vulgar. The horse-pond appealed to him as a picturesque piece of water, and, standing back from ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... thirty, due principally to a last wicket stand between two enormous corporals, who swiped at everything and had luck enough for two whole teams. The house team followed with seventy-eight, of which Psmith, by his usual golf methods, claimed thirty. Mike, who had gone in first as the star bat of the side, had been run out with great promptitude off the first ball of the innings, which his partner had hit in the immediate neighbourhood of point. At close of play the regiment had made five without loss. This, on the Saturday morning, ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse
... was milkin'-time, and yuh was headed straight for the bars and a bran mash. Can't yuh realize the kind uh deal you're up against? Here's cattle that's got you skinned for looks, old girl, and they know it's coming blamed tough; and you just bat your eyes and peg along like yuh enjoyed it. Bawl, or something, can't yuh? Drop back a foot and ...
— Rowdy of the Cross L • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B.M. Bower
... love, as do men of lofty ideals and no sense of the practical, goes off with her to a lonely island, there to fight for her possession and his own life. The stage-setting is magnificent; even a volcano lights the scene. But the clear, hard-blue sky is quite o'erspread by the black bat Melancholia, and the silence is indeed "dazzling." The villains are melodramatic enough in their behaviour, but, as portraits, they are artfully different from the conventional bad men of fiction. The thin chap, Mr. Jones, is truly sinister, and there is ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... posterity,—so solid its masonry, so thick its walls,—and thus abruptly left to moulder; a palace constructed for the reception of crowding guests, the pomp of stately revels, abandoned to owl and bat. And the homely old house beside it, which that lordly hall was doubtless designed to replace, looking so safe and tranquil at the baffled presumption ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... coastguardsman disappeared round the corner of the flagstaff, a young girl came suddenly into sight by the jutting edge of sandstone bluff near the High Wickham; and Herbert, jumping up at once from his reclining posture, raised his bat to her with stately politeness, and moved forward in his courtly graceful manner to meet her as she approached. 'Well, Selah,' he said, taking her hand a little warmly (judged at least by Herbert Le Breton's usual standard), ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... done it without any other reward than the consciousness of doing what I thought right. If I have ever opposed, I have done it upon the points themselves, without mixing in party or faction, and without any collateral views. I honor the king, and respect the people; bat many things acquired by force of either, are, in my account, objects not worth ambition. I wish popularity; but it is that popularity which follows, not that which is run after. It is that popularity which, sooner or later, never fails to do justice to the pursuit of noble ends by noble ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... to him when he was no more than about thirty-seven hours old, and, of course, still blind as any bat. That being so, it may be taken that the grey whelp was not particularly interested. Still, the event was important, and probably affected the whole of Finn's after life. This was the ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... my bat, I sell my ball, I sell my spinning-wheel and all; And I'll do all that e'er I can To follow the eyes ...
— Games For All Occasions • Mary E. Blain
... he was too old. It was beautiful to see Joan handle the foils, but the old man was a bad failure. He was afraid of the things, and skipped and dodged and scrambled around like a woman who has lost her mind on account of the arrival of a bat. He was of no good as an exhibition. But if La Hire had only come in, that would have been another matter. Those two fenced often; I saw them many times. True, Joan was easily his master, but it made a good show for all that, for La Hire was a grand swordsman. What a swift creature Joan was! ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... the rose of evening drops; Upon the streams its petals float away. The hills all blue with distance hide their tops In the dim silence falling on the grey. A little wind said "Hush!" and shook a spray Heavy with May's white crop of opening bloom; A silent bat went ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... silhouette, which suggested the Oriental or Jewish type. His hands, long, slender, with prominent veins and sinews protruding like the strings on a violin, with nails like the claws on the membraneous wings of the bat moved with a senile trembling painful to behold, but those nervously quivering hands became firmer than pincers of steel, or the claws of a lobster, when they picked up any precious object, an onyx cup, ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... and typewriters!' he exclaimed, 'how rude he'll think me!' And he rubbed something out of his eyes. He gave one long, yearning glance at the spangled sky where an inquisitive bat darted zigzag several times between himself and the Pleiades, that bunch of star-babies as yet unborn, as the blue-eyed guard used to ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... been flying on in silence for about an hour, when suddenly Wade made out in the distance the great bulk of the plane, against the dull gray of the clouds, a mile or so above them. It seemed some monstrous black bat flying there against the sky, but down to the sensitive microphone on the side of the Solarite came the drone of the hundred mighty propellers as the ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... curl'd, (Like toupees[2] of this upper world) With flower of sulphur powder'd well, That graceful on his shoulders fell; An adder of the sable kind In line direct hung down behind: The owl, the raven, and the bat, Clubb'd for a feather to his hat: His coat, a usurer's velvet pall, Bequeath'd to Pluto, corpse and all. But, loath his person to expose Bare, like a carcass pick'd by crows, A lawyer, o'er his hands and ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... himself and to his organization. Not only that. In the rebuttal, when engineers seated in the auditorium rose to confound him with questions—engineers representing rival turbine concerns—he proved himself quick at the bat and more than once confounded ...
— Opportunities in Engineering • Charles M. Horton
... difficult to tell which ball belongs to which, and often a good hit sends one ball flying into the middle of the next game. Some of them have real wickets, and at one end there is a carefully kept ground where men play; but some of the little boys have no wickets, and only a bit of wood for a bat. So they get a stick from somewhere and make it stand up in the ground, and then hang one of their shabby little coats round it to make a wicket; but they shout loudly with joy, and enjoy themselves at their game just as much as the bigger boys with ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... his adventure with the owl. He had, however, eluded the otter by diving, in the nick of time, from the stone to which he clung before the entrance, and then seeking the land. If he had been an instant later, she would have picked him off, as a bat picks a moth from a lighted window-pane, and he would never have reached the down-stream shallow. At that time the water, clearing after a summer freshet, was fairly low. Brighteye's danger in some wild winter flood would, therefore, be far greater; ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... regular nuisance. Mr. Churchill had somehow persuaded himself, and what was worse, he had managed to persuade Lord Kitchener as well as Mr. Asquith and others, that she would just about settle the Dardanelles business off her own bat. I had, as it happened (and as will be mentioned in the next chapter), expressed doubts to him six months earlier when the idea of operations in this quarter was first mooted, as to the efficacy of gun-fire from warships in assisting troops on shore or when trying to get ashore. ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... inadequate for his boiling emotions just then. He advanced on Dodd, who shrank back into his chair. Davis whipped the long roll of plans out from under his arm, held the roll by one end, and swung it like a bat-stick. But he did not strike at Dodd, as the magnate seemed ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... is a small colony of bats in this pyramid, of course; but the bat does not hunt in bands, and the sight of these bats flying out from the place was one which Ali Mohammed had never witnessed before. Their concerted squeaking was very clearly audible. He could not believe that it ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... strongly imbued with superstitious feelings; and the conflict between his physical courage and his mental cowardice produced a species of wild exasperation, which, he often asserted, was very hard to bear. Scarcely had he resumed his work when a bat of enormous size brushed past his nose so noiselessly that it seemed more like a phantom than a reality. Barney had never seen anything of the sort before, and a cold perspiration broke out upon him, when he fancied it might be a ghost. Again the bat swept ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne
... sally-port, grasp with his left hand a stanchion, and step on to the grating under which one of the paddle-wheels was churning the water to foam. There he stood looking over the bulwarks with a swinging motion akin to that of a bat when, grappling some object or another with its wings, it hangs suspended in the air. The fact that the man's cap was drawn tightly over his ears caused the latter to stick out almost ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... Sakehow," said Sagastao; "do not be so touchy. I deserved the talking to that papa gave me. It was wrong of me to whack that Indian boy with my bat as I did, and I ought to have been punished; so if you have any jolly good stories about bad Indian boys, and how they were punished, why, let us ...
— Algonquin Indian Tales • Egerton R. Young
... present." The following dramatic passage, accompanied by the most lively action, has lingered in the mind for thirty years after hearing Dr. T. De Witt Talmage lecture on "Big Blunders." The crack of the bat sounds ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... winged reptiles which existed in the Age of Reptiles, in the early days of the Earth. But the later writers on the subject, in the Western world, have contradicted this. It is now taught that these ancient winged-reptiles were featherless, and more closely resembled the Bat family than birds. (You will remember that a Bat is neither a reptile nor a bird—it is a mammal, bringing forth its young alive, and suckling them at its breast. The Bat is more like a mouse, and its wings are simply membrane stretched between ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... sits motionless upon the ground. A few times in my walks through the woods I have started one up from almost under my feet. On such occasions the bird's movements suggest those of a bat; its wings make no noise, and it wavers about in an uncertain manner, and quickly drops to the ground again. One June day we flushed an old one with her two young, but there was no indecision or hesitation in the manner of ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... form of it.[1] If Nature had meant man to think, she would not have given him ears; or, at any rate, she would have furnished them with airtight flaps, such as are the enviable possession of the bat. But, in truth, man is a poor animal like the rest, and his powers are meant only to maintain him in the struggle for existence; so he must need keep his ears always open, to announce of themselves, by night as by day, the approach ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... Baiardo by a monster view, — A bird, and bigger than that courser — prest. Above three yards in length appeared to view The monster's beak; a bat in all the rest. Equipt with feathers, black as ink in hue, And piercing talons was the winged pest; An eye of fire it had, a cruel look, And, like ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... (Aside.) I mustn't let it drift back now. Trust a woman for being as blind as a bat ...
— Soldiers Three • Rudyard Kipling
... that night, and her companions were dressed and waiting when she swept into the room like a bat with outstretched wings, crying: "Out o' the wy! Betty Bellman's coming! ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... sense of musical expression could listen to a quartet in which four characters, animated by totally conflicting passions, should successively employ the same melodious phrase to express such different words as these: "O, toi que j'adore!" "Quelle terreur me glace!" "Mon coeur bat de plaisir!" "La fureur me transporte!" To suppose that music is a language so vague that the natural inflections of fury will serve equally well for fear, joy, and love, only proves the absence of that sense which to others makes the varieties of expression in music as incontestable ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... again. "And that ain't the worst of it, either. Mame Beckman has got an attack; she told Schoolma'am she could die for Pink and never bat an eye. She said she never knowed what true love was till she seen him. She says he looks just like the cherubs—all but the wings—that she's been working in red thread on some pillow shams. She was making 'em for her sister a present, but she can't ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... replied Calandrino, "and that speedily." "Darest thou touch her, then, with a scroll that I shall give thee?" quoth Bruno. "I dare," replied Calandrino. "Fetch me, then," quoth Bruno, "a bit of the skin of an unborn lamb, a live bat, three grains of incense, and a blessed candle; and leave the rest to me." To catch the bat taxed all Calandrino's art and craft for the whole of the evening; but having at length taken him, he brought ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... wouldn't take more than two such statements of manufacturing cost as I have just received from your department to bring me back from the graveyard to the Stock Yards on the jump. And until I do retire you don't want to play too far from first base. The man at the bat will always strike himself out quick enough if he has forgotten how to find the pitcher's curves, so you needn't worry about that. But you want to be ready all the time in case he should bat a few hot ...
— Old Gorgon Graham - More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... around. The gloomy pile in strengthen'd horrour lower'd, Large and majestic ev'ry object tower'd: Dim thro' the gloom they shew'd their forms unknown, And tall and ghastly rose each whiten'd stone: Aloft the waking screech-owl 'gan to sing, And past him skim'd the bat with flapping wing. The fears of nature woke within his breast; He left the hallowed spot of Mary's rest, And sped his way the church-yard wall to gain, Then check'd his coward heart, and turn'd again. The shadows round a deeper horrour wear; A deeper silence hangs upon his ear; A stiller ...
— Poems, &c. (1790) • Joanna Baillie
... wouldst think it long ago— I wandered away to the country from whence our stem did grow. There methought the fells grown greater, but waste did the meadows lie, And the house was rent and ragged and open to the sky. But lo, when I came to the doorway, great silence brooded there, Nor bat nor owl would haunt it, nor the wood-wolves drew anear. Then I went to the pillared hall-stead, and lo, huge heaps of gold, And to and fro amidst them a mighty Serpent rolled: Then my heart grew chill with ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... the bat. 'Truth often changes, but error is eternal,' I said. 'You know when you want to prove anything, these days, you quote from the memoirs of a great man. Well, I was reading the memoirs of the late Doctor Godfrey ...
— 'Charge It' - Keeping Up With Harry • Irving Bacheller
... than ever in evening clothes, I divided my eyes between him and the pictures on the wall. Here Boller, in foot-ball clothes, sat on a fence, wonderfully dashing, with a foot-ball under his arm; there he was in base-ball toggery, erect with bat lifted, ready to strike; here holding a baton, a conspicuous figure in a group of young men, looking exceedingly conscious and uncomfortable in evening clothes—the glee club, he explained, taken on their last tour of the State. And while he dressed, ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... the pitters had taken station, Horrock and a wall-eyed Bat-man of the Train, and the birds had billed three times and had been fairly delivered on the score—a black brass-back of ours against a black-red of the Fifty-fourth. Scarcely a second did they eye one another when crack! slap! ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... a game of cricket," he said, rousing himself a little. "I have got my bat here, and the ball is somewhere about. Just have a look for it, Tommy. We won't bother about stumps. This tree will do quite well ...
— A Tale of the Summer Holidays • G. Mockler
... is bat! ferry bat!" and he lapsed into the broken language that seldom marked his almost perfect English. Then, murmuring something in his own tongue, he leaped away from the motor, ...
— Lost on the Moon - or In Quest Of The Field of Diamonds • Roy Rockwood
... mandragora, cantharides, and vervain, which were supposed to have Satanic properties. They were mixed with other herbs said to have an aphrodisiac effect; also man's gall, the eyes of a black cat, and the blood of a lapwing, bat, or goat." The same authority states that in the seventeenth century "Hoffman's Water of Magnanimity," compounded of winged ants, was ...
— Trial of Mary Blandy • William Roughead
... which each side tried to secure the ball and throw it over the adversary's goal line. This game lasted on into the Middle Ages, and from it football has descended. The ancients seem never to have used a stick or bat in their ball-play. The Persians, however, began to play ball on horseback, using a long mallet for the purpose, and introduced their new sport throughout Asia. Under the Tibetan name of pulu ("ball") ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... in this room many years ago, Jane, and I wish things to be as he left them. Yes, even this cricket bat that I have just found in the attic. He used to have it in the corner by the fireplace, and I wish you to ...
— 'Me and Nobbles' • Amy Le Feuvre
... will you say when the world is dying? What when the last wild midnight falls, Dark, too dark for the bat to be flying Round the ruins of old St. Paul's? What will be last of the lights to perish? What but the little red ring we knew, Lighting the hands and the hearts that cherish A fire, a fire, and ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... Brayley in on this en' an' takin' ol' Bat Truxton clean off'n it to throw him onto the Rattlesnake," Spud went on. "Bat 'll have nigh on a hundred men down there workin' overtime before the week's up, he says. I guess he'll have his paws full without tryin' to run ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... arms. Recoiling, I shuddered and turned my face From the fleshless mockery of embrace. Again o'er a heap of rubbish and rust, I stumbled and caught in the moth and dust What hardly a sense of my soul believes— A mold-stained package of parchment leaves! A hideous bat flapped into my face! O'ercome with horror, I fled the place, And stood again with my curious guide On the solid floor, at the chancel's side. But, lo! in a moment the age-bowed seer Was a darkly frowning cavalier, Gazing no longer in woeful trance, Vengeance blazed in his every glance. Then ...
— Debris - Selections from Poems • Madge Morris
... several years older than himself. Audun struck the ball over Grettir's head, so that he could not catch it, and it bounded far away along the ice; Grettir brought it back, and in a rage threw it at Audun's forehead; Audun struck at him with his bat, but Grettir closed with him and wrestled, for a long time holding his own; but Audun was a man of full strength, and at last prevailed. Grettir's next performance brought him into more trouble. Asmund had a bosom friend named Thorkel Krafla, who paid him a visit at Biarg ...
— The Book of Romance • Various
... Gloucester, and a more extraordinary admixture of incongruous details could not very readily be imagined. The ring hangs from the neck of a monster with a human head having ass's ears, the neck is snake-like, bat's wings are upon the shoulders, the paws are those of a wolf. To the body is conjoined a grotesque head with lolling tongue, the head wrapped in a close hood. Grotesque design, for the reason already stated, frequently appears in the details of church architecture and ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... of a bat I'd be, Masther Dick? I tell ye it was a great big thing as large as a man, wid long black wings, an' it sent a shudder all through me, sor, to see the great ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... out first ball for nought, he (Ratu Lala) pulled up the stumps and carried them off the ground, and henceforth forbade any of his people to play the game on the island of Taviuni. I was not aware of this, and as I had brought a bat and ball with me, I got up several games shortly after my arrival. However, one evening all refused to play, but gave no reasons for their refusal, but Tolu told me that his master did not like to have them play. Then I learned the reason, and ...
— Wanderings Among South Sea Savages And in Borneo and the Philippines • H. Wilfrid Walker
... Weyden, stand by to pass the head-sails over. Then jump for the topsails and spread them quick as God'll let you—the quicker you do it the easier you'll find it. As for Cooky, if he isn't lively bat him ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... in the air before was now heavy around them, blown in thick gusts as the wind moved through the trees. Shrapnel now could be distinctly heard at no great distance, with its hiss, its snap of sound, and sometimes rifle-shots like the crack of a ball on a cricket bat broke through the thickets. They separated, spreading like beaters in a long line: "Soon," Trenchard told me, "I was quite alone. I could hear sometimes the breaking of a twig or a stumbling footfall but I might ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... it was at the sign of the Stuffed Owl, down in a basement bat cave of a place and in the dusk of the evening, that they found their man. To Ginsburg's curious eyes he revealed himself as a short, swart person with enormously broad shoulders and with a chimpanzee's arm reach. Look at those arms of his and one knew why he was called Stretchy. How he had acquired ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... earth, just as any mechanical screen would do. On the other hand, fogs and clouds intercept the rays of the sun also, and hinder its heat from reaching the earth. The invisible vapors given out by leaves impede the passage of heat reflected and radiated by the earth and by all terrestrial objects, bat oppose much less resistance to the transmission of direct solar heat, and indeed the beams of the sun seem more scorching when received through clear air charged with uncondensed moisture than after passing through a dry atmosphere. Hence the reduction ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... enough for the Hertfordshire lanes and Hertfordshire hedges. His object was not so much to run a fox as to kill him in obedience to certain rules of the game. Ever so many hinderances have been created to bar the killing a fox,—as for instance that you shouldn't knock him on the head with a brick-bat,—all of which had to Mr. Harkaway the force of a religion. The laws of hunting are so many that most men who hunt cannot know them all. But no law had ever been written, or had become a law by the strength of tradition, which ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... throats to help them count their votes Is asinine—nay, worse—ascidian folly; Blindness like that would scare the mole and bat, And make ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... May time to the wicket Out I march with bat and pad: See the son of grief at cricket ...
— A Shropshire Lad • A. E. Housman
... third-base respectively. The lines from home-base to first, and from home to third are indefinitely prolonged and called foul-lines. The game is played by two sides of nine men each, one of these taking its turn at the bat while the other is in the field endeavouring, as provided by certain rules, to put out the side at bat. Each side has nine turns, or innings, at bat, unless the side last at bat does not need its ninth innings in order to win; a tie at the end ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... so much as a "good night," he limped down the steps and along the street, flitting in and out of the lamplight like a hunted bat. ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... on bough * Freshest like fairest damsel met my sight; And to the blowing of the breeze it bent * Like golden ball to bat of chrysolite." ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... his own conviction. "He may be called a saint who best teaches us to keep our lives pure; he a poet whose insight dims that of his fellow-men. He is no less than this, though guided by an instinct no higher than that of the bat; no more, though inspired by God. All gifts are from God, and no multiplying of gifts can convert the creature into the Creator. Between Him who created goodness, and made it binding on the conscience of man: and him who reduces it to a system, of which the merits may be judged by man: lies ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... Paris for a bat, I had exchanged with my bunkie, Bill Hanson. 'Let him look,' thinks I; and ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... Dragonfly started in like a house-afire batting that pingpong ball back and forth, back and forth, bang, sock, whizz, sizzle, ping-ping-ping-ping, pong-pong-pong-pong, sock, sock, sock.... Say, that little spindle-legged Dragonfly was good. He won the first game right off the bat. He really was a good athlete for such a thin little guy. "Hey, you guys!" he said, pretending to be very proud of himself, "Isn't there a window somewhere we can open? I want to throw out my chest," which was an old joke, but sounded funny for Dragonfly ...
— Shenanigans at Sugar Creek • Paul Hutchens
... Chiat'ura, Gori, K'ut'aisi, P'ot'i, Rust'avi, Tbilisi, Tqibuli, Tsqaltubo, Zugdidi autonomous republics: Abkhazia or Ap'khazet'is Avtonomiuri Respublika (Sokhumi), Ajaria or Acharis Avtonomiuri Respublika (Bat'umi) note: the administrative centers of the two autonomous ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... deprived of its share of sport and amusement. On one of his periodical visits McCrae donated a baseball, and Harris quickly shaped a bat from the trunk of a stout willow he found by the river-bed. They had all outdoors to play in, and it was a simple matter to mow the grass from a stretch of level prairie and turn over the sod at points to mark the bases. Unfortunately, there ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... screen he could almost feel the hot blast of white light hit his face with the physical impact of a baseball bat. With what was almost a whimper of suppressed fear he rocked ...
— Rescue Squad • Thomas J. O'Hara
... mistress is no slattern; Some wear the legs and hoof of PAN, And some are in the form of man; But the knight is armed, for in his POCKET He has a talismanic locket, Which once belonged to HERCULES, Who wore it on his bunch of keys; The fairy comes, quite old and fat, Mounted upon a monstrous BAT; Around the knight a web she weaves, And holds him fast, and there she LEAVES Sir Francis weeping for his charmer, And longing for his knightly ARMOUR. But his sword was cast in the self-same forge ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... nursery. They have only to tell kind nurse what game it is they fancy. The toys are at once brought out. The little gun is put into their hand; the little horse is dragged forth from its corner, their little feet carefully placed in the stirrups. The little ball and bat ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... flying machine must imitate no other than the bat, because the web is what by its union gives the armour, or strength ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... window-panes were stained with roses and with the figures of saints having pale profiles and wearing bright robes. On one of the tables was a bronze pulpit in the form of a Gothic chapel; in another place was a lamp-support, which represented the Triumph of Death; Death was a woman with the wings of a bat; she was in a flowing robe; she had curved talons on her feet, and a scythe in her hand. This was a sculptured copy of Orcagna, from the Campo Santo of Pisa. In the middle of the dining-room, which was seen beyond an open door, stood a table, in the style ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... separation were to make no difference whatever in their friendship. This compact had been made on one of their last evenings at Rugby. They were sitting together in the six-form room, Tom splicing the handle of a favourite cricket bat, and Arthur reading a volume of Raleigh's works. The Doctor had lately been alluding to the "History of the World," and had excited the curiosity of the active-minded amongst his pupils about the great navigator, statesman, soldier, author, and fine ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... I lingered on for over a week at the Bat and Belfry Inn, as we all called it, and so, strange to say, did the duodenal couple, whom, indeed, we left there, special-dieting ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... hours flew like white doves from off the mounting moon, and the lovers turned to go, all being still: even the noise of the waters still to their ears, as life that is muffled in sleep. They saw the cedar grey-edged under the moon: and Night, that clung like a bat beneath its ancient open palms. The bordering sward about the falls shone silvery. In its shadow was a swan. These scenes are but beckoning hands to the hearts of lovers, waving them on to that Eden which they claim: but when the hour has ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... moments before his death (Stonewall Jackson) he called out in his delirium: 'Order A.P. Hill to prepare for action. Pass the infantry rapidly to the front. Tell Major Hawks—.' Here the sentence was left unfinished. Bat, soon after, a sweet smile overspread his face, and he murmured quietly, with an air of relief: 'Let us cross the river and rest under the shade of the trees.' These were his last words; and, without any expression of pain, or sign of ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... complain. Now, I never had a "bran new" jacket and trowsers in my life—never,—and I don't believe I ever shall; for my two brothers have shot up like Jack's bean-stalk, and left all their out-grown clothes "to be made over for George;" and that cross old tailoress keeps me from bat and ball, an hour on the stretch, while she laps over, and nips in, and tucks up, and cuts off their great baggy clothes for me. And when she puts me out the door, she's sure to say—"Good bye, ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... off her shawl, "I let you know, here's what wouldn't be sot back by nothin' ef she had Sis's chances. In about the las' word pore maw spoke on 'er dying bed, she call me to 'er an' sez, se' she, 'Purithy Emma,' se' she, 'you hol' your head high; don't you bat your eyes for to please none of ...
— Mingo - And Other Sketches in Black and White • Joel Chandler Harris
... of endeavor before Jane got to me. She might have left me there doing little things like making speeches before the United States Senate and running for Governor of Tennessee, after I had, single-handed, remade the archaic constitution of that proud and bat-blind old State of my birth; but such ease was ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess
... in, and for that purpose to acquire the capacities qualifying him for becoming a lawgiver. Private admonition will compensate to a certain extent for the neglect of public interference, and in particular cases may be even more discriminating. Bat how are such capacities to be acquired? Not from the Sophists, whose method is too empirical; nor from practical politicians, for they seem to have no power of imparting their skill. Perhaps it would ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... picture thee some bloodstained Holyrood, Dread haunted palace of the bat and owl, whence steal, Shrouded all day, lost murdered spirits of the wood, And fright young happy nests with ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson, an Elegy; And Other Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... ago we had no mammal in the islands. In that I was not quite strictly correct. I ought to have said, no terrestrial mammal. A little Spanish bat got blown to us once by a rough nor'easter, and took up its abode at once among the caves of our archipelago, where it hawks to this day after our flies and beetles. This seemed to me to show very conspicuously the advantage which winged animals have ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... of ye, Sissy?" he wanted to know. "And air ye all loose from some bat factory? That other one's crazy as ...
— Ruth Fielding Down East - Or, The Hermit of Beach Plum Point • Alice B. Emerson
... nature that is not interesting and in some way useful. Perhaps you will say "How about a bat?" As a matter of fact a bat is one of our best friends because he will spend the whole night catching mosquitoes. But some one will say "he flies into your hair and is covered with a certain kind of disgusting vermin." Did you ever know of a bat flying into any one's hair? And as for the ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... hands of the women. It is, therefore, perhaps not to be wondered at, considering the important status assigned to women by the Khasis, that women should inherit the property and not men. The rule amongst the Khasis is that the youngest daughter "holds" the religion, "ka bat ka niam." Her house is called, "ka iing seng" and it is here that the members of the family assemble to witness her performance of the family ceremonies. Hers is, therefore, the largest share of the family property, because it is she whose duty it is to perform ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... tended, and as we swept past out thrust a black head from the window, and a screech as savage as any wild cat's rent the peace of the night, and I believe that the child's black nurse took us, no doubt, for the devil himself. Then all the dogs howled and bayed, though not one approached us, and a great bat came fanning past, like a winged shadow, and again I heard the owl's hoot, and ever before us, like a white arrow, fled that white cat, and my horse followed in spite of me. Then, verily I speak the truth, though ...
— The Heart's Highway - A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeeth Century • Mary E. Wilkins
... some strange bird-creature hovering a few yards from his face in the darkness was indescribably unpleasant to Woodhouse. As his thought returned he concluded that it must be some night-bird or large bat. At any risk he would see what it was, and pulling a match from his pocket, he tried to strike it on the telescope seat. There was a smoking streak of phosphorescent light, the match flared for a moment, and he saw a vast wing sweeping towards him, a gleam of grey-brown ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... figure in green tights in the basket diminished to a mere spot, and the balloon itself, in the brilliant light, looked like a big silver-grey bat, with its wings folded. When it began to sink, the girl stepped through the hole in the basket to a trapeze that hung below, and gracefully descended through the air, holding to the rod with both hands, keeping her body ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... snow-white body and the six downy feet of palest rose. Then, at Athalie's request, Clive tossed the angelic creature into the air; and there came a sudden blur of black wings in the moonlight, and a bat took it. ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... rascals, trading or masquerading, knowingly or unknowingly, to the best of my knowledge and belief, as the——" He stopped and frowned. "Now, what the dickens was the name of that bird?" he said. "Pheasant, partridge, ostrich, bat, flying fish, sparrow—it's something to do with eggs. What are ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... performs strange dances by the hour together, availing himself not only of his tail, which he uses just as the spider monkey does, but of his hind feet, which he can turn completely round at will, till the claws point forward like those of a bat. But with him, too, the tail is the sheet-anchor, by which he can hold on, and bring all his four feet to bear on his food. So it is with the little Ant-eater, {91b} who must needs climb here to feed on the tree ants. So it is, too, with the Tree ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... so called because it was covered with earth brought from the Holy Land. It is remarkable, however, that in this work the artist embodied Death not in the form commonly used in his day, but in the old Etruscan figure before mentioned. Orcagna's Death is a female, winged like a bat, and with terrible claws. Armed with a scythe, she swoops down upon the earth and reaps a promiscuous harvest of popes, emperors, kings, queens, churchmen, and noblemen. In the rude manner of the time, Orcagna has divided ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... middle of dinner, when all three appeared, immoderately dusty; and no wonder, for the organist had employed them to climb, sweep fashion, into the biggest organ-pipe to investigate the cause of a bronchial affection of long standing,—which turned out to be a dead bat caught in ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... little joke, because now they were proceeding at something in the range of normal velocity, whereas before their speed had been quite beyond his comprehension. But he could comprehend this. He could feel it. They were going like a bat out of hell, and somewhere ahead of them was a planet, and he was closed in, blind, a mouse in a nose-cone. His insides writhed with helplessness and the imminence of a crash. He wanted very much to start screaming again, ...
— The Stars, My Brothers • Edmond Hamilton |
