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More "Bumble" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... power and brain power," she said; "you must utilize them, or be content to remain forever the inferior race. Get land, every one that can, and as fast as you ean. A landless people must be dependent upon the landed people. A few acres to till for food and a roof, however bumble, over your head, are the castle of your independence, and when you have it you are fortified to act and vote independently whenever your interests are at stake." That part of her lecture (and there was ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... the mosquitoes before another season arrived. He thought of the big Bumble Bees back home and sent for several yoke of them. These, he hoped would destroy the mosquitoes. Sourdough Sam brought out two pair of bees, overland on foot. There was no other way to travel for the flight of the beasts could not be controlled. Their wings were strapped with surcingles, ...
— The Marvelous Exploits of Paul Bunyan • W.B. Laughead
... silently watched awhile. A timid animal world had come to life for the season. Little tadpoles and efts began to bubble up through the water, and to race along beneath it; toads made noises like very young ducks, and advanced to the margin in twos and threes; overhead, bumble-bees flew hither and thither in the thickening light, their drone coming and going like the sound of ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... lad dropped on hands and toes and ran along like a dog, thus far untouched by bullets, though they were thick as a nest of liberated bumble bees about ...
— The Children of France • Ruth Royce
... little astonishment, Benassis beheld Genestas pacing to and fro in the salon, like a bumble-bee in quest of an exit from the room which he has ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... as he parted the rings of her hair from her low brow. 'I don't know whether I am crazy or not They say so, and perhaps I am, when my head is full of bumble-bees.' ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... Wesleyan minister came along and took the younger boy. She is alone in the house. A steamer, probably bound for Cardiff, now crosses the horizon, while near at hand one bell of a foxglove swings to and fro with a bumble-bee for clapper. These white Cornish cottages are built on the edge of the cliff; the garden grows gorse more readily than cabbages; and for hedge, some primeval man has piled granite boulders. In one of ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... dub! One shoe on the Tubb! Where can the other one be? Look in your bunk And look in your trunk, And look in the bumble-bee tree!" ...
— The Rover Boys on the River - The Search for the Missing Houseboat • Arthur Winfield
... laid an egg outside and began to cackle—it was an event of magnitude; a peasant sharpening his scythe, a blacksmith hammering at his anvil, the clack of a wooden shoe upon the pavement, the boom of a bumble-bee, the dripping of the fountain, all these things, with such concert as they kept, invited the dewy-feathered sleep that visited him, and held him for the best part of ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... patience to bring the Tarantula who has bitten into the insidious spikelet to the entrance of the burrow. The following method is quicker: I procure a supply of live Bumble-bees. I put one into a little bottle with a mouth just wide enough to cover the opening of the burrow; and I turn the apparatus thus baited over the said opening. The powerful Bee at first flutters and hums about her glass prison; then, perceiving ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... firs and pines, as shiny as metal, and so motionless that the drops which still hung here and there on their needles seemed frozen. Everything was motionless under this yellow light, the grass-blades, the moss-blossoms, and the little blue butterflies, and a bumble-bee crawled into the bell of a bennet and hung there as if enchanted. In the thicket a fox drew near, his head lowered to sniff the ground, and suddenly he too stood still without stirring a muscle and stared into space, his eyes transparent as green glass, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... the pantry hastily devouring onions and beefsteak. To be hungry is so vulgar! One should live by nothing grosser than inhalation, and should never have an appetite greater than that of a healthy bumble-bee. But, thanks to the robust, latter-day theory, that the best saints have the best bodies, this puerile class is diminishing. For who can doubt that the senses are entitled to their full blossom? Gustation was meant to be delightful; and cooking is certainly half as good as tasting. At times one ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... these plants, for goldfinches were darting around inviting all creation to "See me?" as they gathered the silken down for nest lining. Over the sweetly perfumed purple heads, the humming-birds held high carnival on Sunshine Hillside all the day. The honey and bumble bees fled at the birds' approach, but what were these others, numerous everywhere, that clung to the blooms, greedily thrusting their red noses between the petals, and ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter
... day she worked; no lover lent His aid; and yet with glee At dusk she sought her home, content, That beauteous Bumble Bee. ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... encroaches on its domain, and is drawn to its silken vortex, and is eventually shed below as a clean dried specimen; for this is an agalena spider, which dispenses with the winding-sheet of the field species—epeira and argiope. Last week a big bumble-bee-like fly paid me a visit and suddenly disappeared. To-day I find him dried and ready for the insect-pin and the cabinet on the window-sill beneath the web, which affords at all times its liberal entomological assortment—Coleoptera, Hymenoptera, Diptera, ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... but to look so. Give us the benefit of your two eyes. There is one of the elders whose eyes I have never caught while speaking, save once, and that was when I was preaching from Psalm cxiii. 12, 'They compassed me about like bees,' and by a strange coincidence a bumble-bee got into church, and I had my attention divided between my text and the annoying insect, which flew about like an illustration I could not catch. A dull Pew is often responsible for a dull Pulpit. Do not put your ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... so. The boys found a bumble bees' nest and Tubby didn't have any paddle to hit them with. So they all went for poor Tubby and they stung him so that his face is twice as big as usual—so ...
— Wyn's Camping Days - or, The Outing of the Go-Ahead Club • Amy Bell Marlowe
... restore the hive, especially the stings. Indeed, some schemes of labor and Poor Law reform recently advanced by distinguished Socialists, amount to little more than putting the largest number of people in the despotic power of Mr. Bumble. Apparently, progress means being moved ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... like sparks of fire. Not only did he see and feel, he could even hear it now: his ears were filled with a humming sound, growing louder and louder every minute, like the noise made by a large colony of bumble-bees when a person carelessly treads on their nest, and they are angered and thrown into a great commotion and swarm out to defend their home. Very soon out of this confused murmur louder, clearer sounds began to rise; and these could be distinguished as the notes ...
— A Little Boy Lost • Hudson, W. H.
... the low ceiling; and hung against the wall, between two glaring woodcuts representing "Lady Caroline" in red and "Highland Mary" in blue, is a deep frame filled with worsted flowers, to which a butterfly and a bumble-bee have been pinned. Paper lacework depends from their kitchen-shelves, and common eggshells, artificially colored, decorate the lilac-bushes in the side yard. They are always making new mats or piecing quilts ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... fullness to everything it contained, that he did not care to credit himself with the marvel of having yet so early anticipated so much. But the first sprightly runnings of his genius are undoubtedly here. Mr. Bumble is in the parish sketches, and Mr. Dawkins the dodger in the Old Bailey scenes. There is laughter and fun to excess, never misapplied; there are the minute points and shades of character, with ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... "Troth, Nippi-Bumble, he's about right," added Briant coaxingly. "Come now, avic, wot's the raisin ye won't go? Sure we ain't blackguards enough to ax ye to come for to be sold; it's all fair and above ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... crowd of people, among them many women, and even little children, flocked into the building in a very short time, thronged about the bier, the black table, and Panna, who was leaning against it, carrying on a low, eager hum of conversation till it seemed as though countless swarms of bumble-bees ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... a mere code address, and I use it here symbolically. I have seen commerce pretty close. I know what it is worth, and I have no particular regard for commercial magnates, but one must protest against these Bumble-like proceedings. Is it indignation at the loss of so many lives which is at work here? Well, the American railroads kill very many people during one single year, I dare say. Then why don't these dignitaries come down on the presidents of their own railroads, of which one can't say whether ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... GOVERNOR HANCOCK out. The Governor came, with his Light-horse Troop And his mounted truckmen, all cock-a-hoop; Halberds glittered and colors flew, French horns whinnied and trumpets blew, The yellow fifes whistled between their teeth And the bumble-bee bass-drums boomed beneath; So he rode with all his band, Till the President met him, cap in hand. —The Governor "hefted" the crowns, and said,— "A will is a will, and the Parson's dead." The Governor hefted the crowns. Said he,— "There is your p'int. And here's ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... very nicely so far without one. Did I have one on the Miele? And yet I was the only woman on board. There are only three things I am afraid of—bumble-bees, scarlet fever, and chaperones. Ugh! the clucking, evil-minded monsters, finding wrong in everything, seeing sin in the most innocent actions, and suggesting sin—yes, causing sin—by their ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... his sight,—even the little rose in old Josey Letherbarrow's smock caught his eye with an almost obtrusive flare. The blithe soft carol of the birds outside sounded close and loud,— the buzzing of a bumble-bee that had found its way into the church and was now bouncing fussily against a sunlit window, in its efforts to pass through what seemed to itself clear space, made quite an abnormal noise. His heart beat heavily,—he fancied he could hear it thudding in his breast,—then, all at once, ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... Man's Cave, 'cause a skellington was found there," observed the child as they passed a dark, yawning mouth in the cliff. "And that's Bumble Cave, 'cause the bumblebees make nests in the top of it. And here's Smuggler's Cave, 'cause the smugglers used to hide ...
— The Sea Fairies • L. Frank Baum
... I may remark, is accounts of mountaineering exploits, though I have never seen a glacier or a permanent snow mountain in my life. I do not care a row of pins how badly they may be written, and what form of bumble-puppy grammar and composition is employed, as long as the writer will walk along the edge of a precipice with a sheer fall of thousands of feet on one side and a sheer wall on the other; or better still crawl up an arete with a precipice on either. Nothing on earth would persuade me to do either ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... business. Never showed himself at all. Just opened fire. Sent a bullet through the top of my hat. He's either a damn good shot or a damn poor one. I hung up both hands and yelled we was down and out. What could I do? This outfit couldn't a fit a bumble bee. And I couldn't git away, or git hold of no gun, or see anything to shoot, if I did. He ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... boys and girls who live in the country, and probably a large share of those who live in the city, know the bumble-bee. We had a little different name for him in our neighborhood. Bumble-bee was, however, the only name the family was known by, in Willow Lane, and I think it quite possible that such a corruption, (if it is a corruption, and the wise ones tell us it is, though I should ...
— Mike Marble - His Crotchets and Oddities. • Uncle Frank
... Hall by fire, in 1599, of certain works purporting to be poetical; such works, namely, as Marlowe's Elegies of Ovid, which appeared in company with Davies's Epigrammes, Marston's Metamorphosis of Pigmalion's Image, Hall's Satires, and Cutwode's Caltha Poetarum; or, The Bumble Bee. The latter is a fantastic poem of 187 stanzas about a bee and a marigold, and deserved the fire rather for its insipidity than for the reasons which justified the cleansing process applied to the others, the youthful productions of men who were ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... his chair he closed his eyes. Some thistle-down came on what little air there was, and pitched on his moustache more white than itself. He did not know; but his breathing stirred it, caught there. A ray of sunlight struck through and lodged on his boot. A bumble-bee alighted and strolled on the crown of his Panama hat. And the delicious surge of slumber reached the brain beneath that hat, and the head swayed forward and rested on his breast. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... field mice and the frogs, toads, lizards, and snakes. Also with the wild bees and wasps. One season I made a collection of bumblebee honey, studying the habits of five or six different kinds and rifling their nests. I kept my store of bumble-bee honey in the attic where I had a small box full of the comb and a large phial filled with the honey. How well I came to know the different dispositions of the various kinds—the small red-vested that made its nest in ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... wondering did not help him, and he gave up the riddle, and began, in his pleasant holiday idleness, to look about at other things in the unfrequented wilderness through which the river ran. To trace the raven by following it home seemed too difficult, but it was easy to follow a great bumble-bee, which went blundering by, alighting upon a block of stone, took flight again, and landed upon a slope covered with moss, entering at last a hole which went sloping down ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... most of them were orchids, several of which were new to him. The air of the place was heavy with mingled odours—one might almost have called them perfumes, were it not for a certain smack of rankness and pungency in them—and alive with birds, varying in size from that of a bumble bee up to that of a carrion crow, a few specimens of which could be seen perched here and there on the topmost branches of the tallest trees. Several of the birds were of the humming bird or sunbird species, and these, of course, gleamed and flashed in the sunlight ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... instances of what was expected of him; and his thick voice drowsed in the still air like the obstinate droning of an enormous bumble-bee. Captain Whalley did not know what was the force or the weakness that prevented him from saying good-night and walking away. It was as though he had been too tired to make the effort. How queer. ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... into this folly was a bumble of the utmost beauty. The bars of his coat "burned" as "brightly" as those of the tiger in Wombwell's menagerie, and his fur was softer than my mother's black velvet mantle. I knew, for I had kissed him lightly as he sat on the window-frame. I had seen him brushing first one side and then the other ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... yellow as gold, Sat perched on a red-clover top, When a grasshopper, wiry and old, Came along with a skip and a hop. "Good-morrow!" cried he, "Mr. Bumble-Bee! You seem to ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, July 1878, No. 9 • Various
... "phen-dubs" means? I can. Can you say all off by heart The "onery twoery ickery ann," Or tell "alleys" and "commons" apart? Can you fling a top, I would like to know, Till it hums like a bumble-bee? Can you make a kite yourself that will go 'Most as high as the eye can see, Till it sails and soars like a hawk on the wing, And the little birds come and light on ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various
... Council, are you one? 'Tis said you're but a Bumble-batch! Beware the Jobjob Bird, and shun ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 8, 1892 • Various
... meadow, without shaking the boggy ground. He had a trick with a detachable float, made from a quill and a tiny piece of cork, that brought him many a fish from the centre of a mill-pond. He knew the best baits for every season,—worms, white grubs, striped minnows, miller's thumbs, bumble-bees, grasshoppers, young field-mice,—and he knew where ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... Hurly-Burly,' so you may prepare yourself to see a family that lives up to that name. But there is plenty of amusement, if you are fond of boating and bathing, and we will all welcome you with open arms and glad hearts; and the sooner you come, the better we shall like it. Your cousins, Bob and Bumble are very anxious to see you, and are making wonderful plans for your entertainment. So come as soon as you can, and if you will let us know at what hour to expect you, Uncle Theodore will meet you at ...
— Patty Fairfield • Carolyn Wells
... thick lips together like the stem-end of a tomato and shot a bumble-bee dead that had lit on a weed seven feet away. One after another the several chewers expressed a charge of tobacco juice and delivered it at the deceased with steady, aim ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 1. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... under leaf and flower, Has found a roof, knowing how true thou art; The bumble-bee, within the last half-hour, Has ceased to hug the honey to its heart; While in the barnyard, under shed and cart, Brood-hens have housed.—But I, who scorned thy power, Barometer of the birds,—like August there,— Beneath a beech, dripping from ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... Lizard is rendered doubly perilous by a sea-covered stack of rocks lying to the southward. Before oil was introduced for the lamps it is said the lantern was lit by coal-fires—a kind of first-hand use of gas. Below the lighthouse is the striking Bumble Rock, and close to this the hollow known as the Lion's Den, formed by a natural sudden subsidence in 1847. This formation was an immediate object-lesson as to the manner in which these remarkable hollows, caverns, and rock-freaks have been produced in the course of time; and there can be no doubt ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... a bumble-bee was beating itself against the window-pane and buzzing. Sofya Petrovna looked at the threads on the socks, listened to the bee, and pictured how she would set off . . . . vis-a-vis Ilyin would sit, day and night, never taking his eyes off her, wrathful at his own weakness and pale with spiritual ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... nothing did happen, but there was no knowing what joyful day might bring a new sensation. Sometimes there was a dog-fight. Once—thrilling recollection!—Ozias Brisket's horse had run away ("Think 't 's likely a bumble-bee must ha' stung him; couldn't nothin' else ha' stirred him out of a walk, haw! haw!") and had scattered the joints of meat all about ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... matter where. This is an excellent method on her part, because of the variety of the game that comes her way. I see her accepting with equal readiness whatever chance may send her: Butterflies and Dragon-flies, Flies and Wasps, small Dung-beetles and Locusts. If I offer her a Mantis, a Bumble-bee, an Anoxia—the equivalent of the common Cockchafer—and other dishes probably unknown to her race, she accepts all and any, large and small, thin-skinned and horny-skinned, that which goes afoot and that which takes winged flight. ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... one of his guardians writes to me about him. He is a country gentleman, with a large estate, who married a cousin of my pupil. He is a big, pompous, bumble-bee kind of man, who prides himself on speaking his mind, and is quite unaware that it is only his position that saves him from the plainest retorts. He writes to say that he is much exercised about his ward's progress. The boy, he says, is fanciful and delicate, ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... can see Rooks above the cherry-tree, Sparrows in the violet bed, Bramble-bush and bumble-bee, And old red bracken smoulders still Among boulders on the hill, Far too bright ...
— Fairies and Fusiliers • Robert Graves
... that he was "an example to his order," and yet better than this stately panegyric is the happy accident, if it be one, that the poor flower girls of London have pitched their camp upon the steps, and have successfully defied all the efforts of Mr. Bumble to ...
— Great Testimony - against scientific cruelty • Stephen Coleridge
... "But, bumble-bee, Your gauzy wings, It seems to me, Are flimsy things; Should they get drenched, 'twould spoil them quite, And you'd be ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume VIII, No 25: May 21, 1887 • Various
... afar Where the Little People are; Where the clover-tops are trees, And the rain-pools are the seas, And the leaves like little ships Sail about on tiny trips; And above the daisy tree Through the grasses, High o'erhead the Bumble Bee Hums and passes. In that forest to and fro I can wander, I can go; See the spider and the fly, And the ants go marching by Carrying parcels with their feet Down the green and grassy street I can in ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... saw the march o' regiments o' children, Marching to the robin's fife and cricket's rat-ta-tat! Lily-banners overhead, with the dew upon 'em, On flashed the little army, as with sword and flame; Like the buzz o' bumble-wings, with the honey on 'em, Came an eerie, cheery chant, ...
— The Book of Joyous Children • James Whitcomb Riley
... you see, he started with a fly, as they say, and now it's grown to a bumble-bee. It was a fly then, and now—it's a bumble-bee.... And he still loves her. Look at him, he loves her! I expect he's walking now to the town to get a glimpse of her with one eye.... He'll get a glimpse of her, ...
— Plays by Chekhov, Second Series • Anton Chekhov
... 5: An urchin puts a bumble-bee in his pistol pocket and goes fishing. He sits down, the bee turns the trick, and ...
— A Syllabus of Kentucky Folk-Songs • Hubert G. Shearin
... which developed a hornets' nest of sharpshooters armed with telescopic rifles, who could pick a man's ear off half-a-mile away. The bullets from their guns had a peculiar sound, something like the buzz of a bumble-bee, and the troopers' horses would stop, prick up their ears and gaze in the direction whence the hum of those invisible messengers could be heard. Unable to reach them mounted, we finally deployed dismounted along a staked ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd
... quiet and restful are the silent, scented, spreading fields! How soothing to a spirit tired of the city's din is this solitude, broken only by the singing of the birds and the drowsy droning of the bee, erroneously termed 'bumble'! The green fields, the shady trees, the sweet freshness of the summer air, untainted by city smoke, and over all the eternal serenity of the blue unclouded sky—how can human spite and human passion exist in such a paradise? Does it all not make you feel as if you were an innocent ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... folkses' back yard. Us had a white teacher and all he larnt slave chillun was jus' plain readin' and writin'. I had to pass Dr. Willingham's office lots and he was all de time pesterin' me 'bout spellin'. One day he stopped me and axed me if I could spell 'bumble bee widout its tail,' and he said dat when I larnt to spell it, he would gimme some candy. Mr. Sanders, at Lexin'ton, gimme a dime onct. It was de fust money I ever had. I was plumb rich and I never let my Daddy have no peace 'til he ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Georgia Narratives, Part 4 • Works Projects Administration
... are some parties in this place who employ very queer legal advisers; and in shaking hands, a file or a gimlet, and a bit of tobacco, are as likely to pass as not. That warder can see every thing, my dear young Sir; but he can no more hear what we say than he can understand what a couple of bumble-bees are murmuring about who are barred up in a double window. We can therefore converse with one another as much without reserve as we please, or rather"—and here the little man's eyes twinkled significantly—"as ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... big as all out-of-doors, and e'en BUMBLE was hardly as bumptious. He'd make my London a Paradise, which is a prospect that's perfectly scrumptious. But oh! he is big, with the funniest rig; a Titan who, if he should tumble, Might squelch me as flat as an opera-hat, and make me ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 3, 1892 • Various
... happened. Even the chinless curate, whose voice without consonants gave the effect of an intoning bumble-bee, never took advantage of her suggestions (frequently repeated) that he should drop ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... what I started to say. I wanted to tell you how the least thing distracts me nowadays from my duty to the Sadhana. In my last letter[1] I told you of the bumble-bees which hover round me in some fruitless quest, to the tune of a meaningless humming, with ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... The bumble-bee that tipped the lily-vases Along the road-side in the shadows dim, Went following the blossoms of their faces As though their sweets must needs be ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... that, however much the carters lashed and swore at them, the animals would not budge an inch until she permitted them to go. Here are a few of the common superstitions current in Berkshire. If a corpse be kept over a Sunday another death will occur before the week is out; should a big bumble-bee enter the window, a guest may be expected; and when the woodpecker, commonly called the yaffle, laughs, they say the rain is coming. When the thick mist lies in the valley, the people say it is the White Lady, a belief closely akin to the Dame Blanche, who is said in Normandy to haunt streams. ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... ain't fought out any bumble-bees' nest since the time you got one up your pant leg and pretty near pounded yourself to death with a ball bat," said Sim. "Can you still run as fast as the time Wert Payley and I dared you to ...
— Homeburg Memories • George Helgesen Fitch
... Mrs. Gummidge, Dickens draws types rather than characters. Pecksniff, Podsnap, Dolly Varden, Mr. Bumble, Mrs. Gamp, Mark Tapley, Turveydrop, Mrs. Jellyby—these are not characters; ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... inland were little patches of dwarf birch, scarcely a foot high, crouching close to the ground to escape being torn away by the furious winds that sweep over the land. There was none of the abundant life that we see around us in our fields and woods. A spider, a bumble-bee, and a poor little wanderer of a bird, were the only living things ...
— Harper's Young People, March 30, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... bumble-bee, yellow as gold, Sat perched on a red-clover top, When a grasshopper, wiry and old, Came along with a skip and a hop. "Good-morrow!" cried he, "Mr. Bumble-Bee! You seem to have come ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, July 1878, No. 9 • Various
... and plants. on the effects of slight differences of colour. on fertilisation of scarlet runner. on fossil maize in Peru. on fresh-water mollusks. on the bumble bee. on the ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... Another bumble-bee went over along the tips of the wheat—burr-rr—as he passed; then a scarlet fly, and next a bright yellow wasp who was telling a friend flying behind him that he knew where there was such a capital piece of wood to bite up into tiny pieces and make into ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... enameled wings for the girls and stick pins with bumble bees in black and gold for the boys. On the back of each pin was the date and Janet's ...
— Phyllis - A Twin • Dorothy Whitehill
... love spring, the most joyful season of the year? It is then that the spring bonnet of the workaday world crosses the earth's orbit and makes the bank account of the husband and father look fatigued. The low shoe and the low hum of the bumble-bee are again with us. The little striped hornet heats his nose with a spirit lamp and goes forth searching for the man with the linen pantaloons. All nature is full of life and activity. So is the man with the linen pantaloons. ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... down over his comfortably bulging, unbuttoned waistcoat. The lazy day was in his blood and even the whine of the sawmills on the river-bank, a mile or more to the south, tempered as it was by the distance to the drone of a surly bumble-bee, still vaguely annoyed him. Tiny dots of men in flannel shirts of brilliant hue, flashing from time to time out across the log-choked space between the booms, caught his eye whenever he lifted his head, during the passage of a green-sprayed glass from the veranda rail to his lips, ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... wrong, or to put Mrs. Wing down. Every one twittered and chirped, and made a great noise; but no one would give up, and all went to roost in a great state of uncertainty. But, the next day, it became evident that Mrs. Wing was right; for Major Bumble-bee came buzzing in to tell them that old Daddy Winter's hut was empty, and his white head had been seen in the sunny porch of ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... a few lines in the press of business to tell you I am well, but very lonely, with a view out over the green, in this dull, rainy weather, while the bumble-bees hum and the sparrows twitter. Grand audience tomorrow. It's vexatious that I have to buy linen, towels, table-cloths, and sheets. * * * Farewell. Hearty love, and ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... when the explosion came. Branches and pieces of tree trunk were whirled upward, and the air became populated with deadly bumble bees and humming birds, for such is the sound that the shell splinters make. When I essayed our shell hole afterward, I couldn't fathom how five of us had managed to accommodate ourselves in it, but in the rush of necessity, ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... thing. Whatever had been in Faith's speech, her look, bright, wistful, and happy, had no fear, truly bumble though it was. "There is no danger of my loving this letter too much"—she said as she carefully restored it to its envelope; said with a secret ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... second brood chattered in the old walnut trees far away on the lawn; thrushes sang their deep-throated bugle-calls; finches twittered. A light breeze creeping up the avenue rustled the full foliage languorously. Ursula Winwood closed her eyes. A bumble-bee droned between visits to foxglove bells near by. She loved bumble-bees. They reminded her of a summer long ago when she sat, not on this seat—as a matter of fact it was in the old walled garden a quarter of a mile away—with a gallant young fellow's ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... knelt, her prayer book open upon the carved margin of the tomb, the slender crossed legs and paws of the alert little marble dog serving as so often before for bookrest. Canon Horniblow boomed and droned, like some unctuous giant bumble-bee, from the reading-desk. The choir intoned responses from the gallery with liberal diversity of pitch. And presently, alas! Damaris' thoughts began to wander, making flitting excursions right and left. For half-way through the litany some belated worshipper arrived, causing movement in the ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... broached the subject, being engaged in writing a story, he had removed but one-eighth of his mind for the consideration of mundane affairs, and that, as any one knows, is insufficient to judge fairly whether the winged thing I was reaching out for was a fly or a bumble bee. In the morning, the story being finished and the other seven-eights of brain at liberty to dwell upon the same question, he decided to follow me, with the result that in the afternoon I ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... I hear the old bumble-bee down alow yonder. Keep as still as mice, and stir not, nor ...
— The White Lady of Hazelwood - A Tale of the Fourteenth Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... that flooded him with water and sent him off blowing the tide from his nostrils like a whale. Perhaps these things were permitted because the sight of the victim's suffering was so funny. Half the pleasure in fighting wasps or bumble-bees was in killing them and destroying their nests; the other half was in seeing the fellows get stung. If you could fool a fellow into a mass-meeting of bumble-bees, and see him lead them off in a steeple-chase, it was right and fair to do so. But there were other ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... question was in the handwriting of a fussy officious "bumble" friend of the wealthy man, who dwelt in the town of Covelly. It ...
— Saved by the Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... abuses of his institutions been portrayed! How have the poor-house, the jail, the police courts of justice, passed before his magic mirror, and displayed to us the petty tyranny of the low-minded official, from the magnificent Mr. Bumble, and the hard-hearted Mr. Roker, to the authoritative Justice Fang, the positive Judge Starleigh! And as we contemplate them, how strongly have we realized the time-worn evils of some of the systems they revealed to our eyesight, sharpened to detect the deficiencies ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... work, work don't bother me. I'se fo' times as happy as a bumble bee. Us eats when us kin git it, sleeps mos' ...
— Lady Luck • Hugh Wiley
... claimed the whole discovery as his own, saying he was out on his own hook when the mine was located, which was a falsehood. But though Baxter claimed the mine he could not locate it, nor could I do so. It was along a creek which a certain Jack Wumble had called Bumble Bee, but we could not locate this creek, and Jack Wumble had departed for fresh fields. But I have located the old miner, and he has told me that Bumble Bee Creek was in reality one of the south branches ...
— The Rover Boys out West • Arthur M. Winfield
... Where the dandelions dipped In crimson foam of clover-bloom, And dripped and dripped and dripped; And they clinched the bumble-stings, Gauming honey on their wings, And bundling them in lily-bells, ...
— Afterwhiles • James Whitcomb Riley
... occasional cirrus clouds overspread the sun, and for a while subdued his fierceness. We were all out on the piazza—as the coolest place we could find—my wife, my sister-in-law and I. The only sounds that broke the Sabbath stillness were the hum of an occasional vagrant bumble-bee, or the fragmentary song of a mocking-bird in a neighboring elm, who lazily trolled a stave of melody, now and then, as a sample of what he could do in the cool of the morning, or after a light shower, when the conditions would be ...
— The Conjure Woman • Charles W. Chesnutt
... squirrels brought a present of wild honey; it was so sweet and sticky that they licked their fingers as they put it down upon the stone. They had stolen it out of a bumble BEES' nest on the tippity top ...
— The Great Big Treasury of Beatrix Potter • Beatrix Potter
... and the traps and pitfalls better even than I did, and ran us in up the wind with a steady hand till the roadstead opened before us. But it was empty. Torode was off after plunder, and we turned and ran for Peter Port. We found John Ozanne as busy as a big bumble-bee, but he made time to greet my grandfather very jovially, and showed him all over his little ship with much pride. He was in high spirits and anxious to be off, especially since he had heard ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... long feet, short feet, broad feet, splay feet, club feet, and bumble feet, to which may be added cloven feet in the case of certain animals, ...
— The Comic Latin Grammar - A new and facetious introduction to the Latin tongue • Percival Leigh
... Reddy couldn't think of a thing to say in reply, and so he hurried on, trying to find a place where he would be left in peace. But nowhere that he could go was he free from those taunting voices. Not even when he had crawled into his house was he free from them, for buzzing around his doorway was Bumble Bee and ...
— The Adventures of Prickly Porky • Thornton W. Burgess
... that I wouldn't let you kiss me, won't you?" he answered as he drew back from the table and lit a cigarette after passing me the case. "Everybody calls me Buzz the Bumble Bee because of a historic encounter of mine with a whole nest of bumblebees right out here in the General's garden. It is a title of heroism and I'd like to have you use it as if we'd been kids together as we were slated to have been. Gee, I bet you could have beat the bees down some. ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess
... the side of a narrow brook for our dinner, and one incident of that meal I think of always when I think of Uncle Eb. It shows the manner of man he was and with what understanding and sympathy he regarded every living thing. In rinsing his teapot he accidentally poured a bit of water on a big bumble-bee. The poor creature struggled to lift hill, and then another downpour caught him and still another until his wings fell drenched. Then his breast began heaving violently, his legs stiffened behind him and he sank, head downward, in the grass. ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... influenced by the example of those around them. Mrs. Howard led the traveller to speak of what he had seen in different countries—of natural history—of the beaver, and the moose-deer, and the humming-bird, that is scarcely larger than a bumble bee; and the mocking-bird, that can imitate the notes of all other birds. Charles niched himself into a corner of the sofa upon which the gentlemen were sitting, and grew very attentive. He was rather surprised to perceive that his tutor ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... at this season are hungry vagrants with no fixed place of abode, would gorge themselves, then creep beneath the bits of empty comb or fragments of bark and pass the night, and renew the feast next day. The bumble-bee is an insect of which the bee-hunter sees much. There are all sorts and sizes of them. They are dull and clumsy compared with the honeybee. Attracted in the fields by the bee-hunter's box, they ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... discharged it thoroughly. The third club which this energetic man founded was not given up to eating and drinking, but devoted itself to the discussion of moral and artistic subjects. They called themselves "The Bumble-Bees," though I never could understand the reason why they chose such a name, unless it was, as Murray suggested, that after they had touched a thing there was no sweetness left in it. I should not like to say how many more clubs this man would have started had he ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... are! (Of course women are all alike!) While Osborne, like a good-natured bumble-bee, was buzzing noisily about, as though all the world were his clover-blossom; and Allen, so far as I know, was doing nothing; M. Godin, alert and keen despite his gentleness and a modesty which ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... them and their "statutes" and "digests"! "Convenience of reference." Ah! that is one of their imperent sly jests. Removal of Noosances? Yah! If we started on that lay perniskers There is more than a few in the Westries 'ud feel suthin' singein' their wiskers, Or BUMBLE'S a Dutchman. Their Circ'lar—it's mighty obliging—defines 'em, The Noosances namely; I wonder if parties read Circ'lars as signs 'em, If so, Local Government Boarders must be most oncommonly knowin', ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... toy theatre at Easton and among other things dramatized the minority report of the Poor Law Commission. The play began by the Commissioners taking to pieces Bumble the Beadle, putting him into a huge cauldron and stewing him. Then out from the cauldron leaped a renewed rejuvenated Bumble several sizes larger ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... fiddling out of a barn, With a pair of bagpipes under her arm; She could sing nothing but fiddle cum fee, The mouse has married the bumble-bee. Pipe cat—dance, mouse, We'll have a ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... captured a whole family before they could escape. And to these were added frogs and toads, still partly somnambulent; many ants, curled up as if dead, in the heart of rotting logs; and occasional bumble-bees, wasps, and hornets. Now and then Neewa took a nibble at these things. On the third day Noozak uncovered a solid mass of hibernating vinegar ants as large as a man's two fists, and frozen solid. Neewa ate a quantity of these, and the sweet, vinegary ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... works of Persius Flaccus, Silius Italicus, and Claudianus. He also reprinted the Caltha Poetarum, or the Bumble Bee, of T. Cutwode, from the edition of 1599, for the Roxburghe Club, and assisted in the preparation of the third edition of Ellis's Specimens ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... sewing-machine began to hum through the old house like a cheerful bumble-bee, and Mag entered upon what was certainly the happiest period of her career. Laces, silks, fine muslins—these had the effect upon her developing soul that a virgin canvas has upon the painter. Her fingers ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... Perhaps no Freshman had ever gone through a more severe course of hoaxing - to survive it - than Mr. Verdant Green; and yet, by a system of retaliation, only paralleled by the quadrupedal case of the before-mentioned elephant, and the biped-beadle case of the illustrious Mr. Bumble, who after having his own ears boxed by the late Mrs. Corney, relieved his feelings by boxing the ears of the small boy who opened the gate for him, - our hero took the greatest delight in seeking every opportunity to play off upon a Freshman some ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... running the length of the ridge pole, and from half an inch to two inches deep! Every pack was black with them on the march, and the wagon carried its millions. When the shadow of a branch would cross that slowly lumbering vehicle, the swarm would rise and bumble around distractedly for a moment before settling down again. They fairly ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... none of our soldiers. This engagement we called the capture of fort "Hell." For some time thereafter we made regular raids into the surrounding country in quest of an enemy. We were eventually successful in our quest, as in quick order we ran across and captured a company of bumble bees. This we called the "Battle of the Wilderness." Victory over a nest of hornets we called the capture of "Fort Sumter." A large nest of wasps gave us perhaps the hardest fight of our campaigning. This we ran across in the fields not far from home. There was an unusually large ...
— The Life and Adventures of Nat Love - Better Known in the Cattle Country as "Deadwood Dick" • Nat Love
... HANCOCK out. The Governor came with his Lighthorse Troop And his mounted truckmen, all cock-a-hoop; Halberds glittered and colors flew, French horns whinnied and trumpets blew, The yellow fifes whistled between their teeth, And the bumble-bee bass-drums boomed beneath; So he rode with all his band, Till the President met him, cap in hand. The Governor "hefted" the crowns, and said,— "A will is a will, and the Parson's dead." The Governor hefted the crowns. Said he,— "There is your p'int. And here ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... around Hagerstown, which developed a hornets' nest of sharpshooters armed with telescopic rifles, who could pick a man's ear off half-a-mile away. The bullets from their guns had a peculiar sound, something like the buzz of a bumble-bee, and the troopers' horses would stop, prick up their ears and gaze in the direction whence the hum of those invisible messengers could be heard. Unable to reach them mounted, we finally deployed dismounted ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd
... bygone days. It was his habit to take extensive walks, for miles around the country, moving forward with long strides, and either talking to himself or humming soft tunes; on which account his pupils styled him 'the bumble-bee.' The old man was passionately fond of music, and devoted every minute spared from school duties and his long walks, to his violin. To the more promising of his pupils Mr. James Merrishaw showed great ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... time- honoured conventions and principles. Ajax said with reason that Johnnie Kapus, the nephew of our neighbour, old man Kapus, played the game of life in such a sorry, blundering fashion that he marvelled why his uncle gave him house-room. Ajax christened Johnnie—Bumble-puppy. ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... summer-house. He sat there gazing out at a bed of tulips, which, although they had closed for the night, could not go quite asleep for the wind that kept waving them about. All at once he saw a great bumble-bee fly out of one of ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • George MacDonald
... with admirable emphasis, it is a fact that Lady Walham became so interested in the parish boy's progress, that she took his history into her bedroom (where it was discovered, under Blatherwick's Voice from Mesopotamia, by her ladyship's maid), and that Kew laughed so immensely at Mr. Bumble, the Beadle, as to endanger the ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... need not wear it when I sit Among the broadcloth'd heirs of BUMBLE! But Foreign Minister too humble Were butt of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 29, 1892 • Various
... small fracture, the contemplation of which aroused considerable interest in all present, with the exception of the patient. Don Mike was still dizzy; because his vision was impaired he kept his eyes closed; he heard a humming noise as if a lethargic bumble bee had taken up his residence inside the Farrel ears. Kay, observing him closely, realized that he was very weak, that only by the exercise of a very strong will had he succeeded in sitting up during the journey in from ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... bother work, work don't bother me. I'se fo' times as happy as a bumble bee. Us eats when us kin git it, sleeps mos' all ...
— Lady Luck • Hugh Wiley
... Rose order of plants. It has long been esteemed for its bark and leaves as a [54] capital astringent, these containing much tannin; also for its fruit, which is supplied with malic and citric acids, pectin, and albumen. Blackberries go often by the name of "bumblekites," from "bumble," the cry of the bittern, and kyte, a Scotch word for belly; the name bumblekite being applied, says Dr. Prior, "from the rumbling and bumbling caused in the bellies of children who eat the fruit too greedily." "Rubus" is from the ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... experience was very convincing. I have known people who "have gone where money was" and have fallen honestly and rapturously into love, but you have got to be very sure that money in such a case is not the motive. If it is the penalty never fails to follow. Mr. Bumble married Mrs. Corney for "six teaspoons, a pair of sugar tongs, and a milk-pot, with a small quantity of secondhand furniture and twenty pounds in money." And in two months he regretted his bargain and admitted that he had gone "dirt cheap." "Only ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... better in a soft shirt. There are plenty of men now who would wear dog-harness if they thought they could work more in it. I know another man who walks away out into the country every Sunday: not that he likes the country—he wouldn't recognize a bumble bee if he saw it—but he claims that if he walks on Sunday his head is as clear as a bell ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... from the stuffy workshop the light was like a golden river, streaming down between the two rows of houses, and always in the same direction, down to the sea. Then a speck of white down came floating on the air, followed by whitish-gray thistle-seeds, and a whole swarm of gnats, and a big broad bumble-bee swung to and fro. All these eddied, gleaming, in the open doorway, and they went on circling as though there was something there which attracted them all—doubtless an accident, or ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... awhile. A timid animal world had come to life for the season. Little tadpoles and efts began to bubble up through the water, and to race along beneath it; toads made noises like very young ducks, and advanced to the margin in twos and threes; overhead, bumble-bees flew hither and thither in the thickening light, their drone coming and going like the sound of ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... have a large stock yet in reserve, and I think, papa, that I'll ask Bob and Bumble to visit ...
— Patty at Home • Carolyn Wells
... Lady Hickle is quite a girl and very beautiful—and is starting on a tour round the world or something—she'll get most of his millions, I believe. By the way, who do you think have fixed it up. Dear old Bumble and Diana Lytham. Heaven be good to him. Your turn next, old boy! Well she'll be darned lucky who gets you, see how well I trained you, d'you ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... not the pen of Muston have clothed the recital! what attraction! what novelty! How the reformation, which originated in the cell of an obscure cloister, had already germinated in the mind of Waldo; how the rich merchant of Lyons, in search of the treasures of the age, was suddenly changed into a bumble disciple, voluntarily poor; and what were the principal traits of his ministry, his voyages, his relations, his life, his death! Concerning such men, we cannot regret too deeply the almost utter silence of ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... flocked into the building in a very short time, thronged about the bier, the black table, and Panna, who was leaning against it, carrying on a low, eager hum of conversation till it seemed as though countless swarms of bumble-bees ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... and so on; and after the Tortoises came another long train of ironclads—stately and spacious Mud Turtles for marine transportation service; and from every Tortoise and every Turtle flaunted a flaming gladiolus or other splendid banner; at the head of the column a great band of Bumble-Bees, Mosquitoes, Katy-Dids, and Crickets discoursed martial music; and the entire train was under the escort and protection of twelve picked regiments ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... supremely lovely and quiet and restful are the silent, scented, spreading fields! How soothing to a spirit tired of the city's din is this solitude, broken only by the singing of the birds and the drowsy droning of the bee, erroneously termed 'bumble'! The green fields, the shady trees, the sweet freshness of the summer air, untainted by city smoke, and over all the eternal serenity of the blue unclouded sky—how can human spite and human passion exist in such a paradise? Does it ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... in this place who employ very queer legal advisers; and in shaking hands, a file or a gimlet, and a bit of tobacco, are as likely to pass as not. That warder can see every thing, my dear young Sir; but he can no more hear what we say than he can understand what a couple of bumble-bees are murmuring about who are barred up in a double window. We can therefore converse with one another as much without reserve as we please, or rather"—and here the little man's eyes twinkled significantly—"as ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... quickly influenced by the example of those around them. Mrs. Howard led the traveller to speak of what he had seen in different countries—of natural history—of the beaver, and the moose-deer, and the humming-bird, that is scarcely larger than a bumble bee; and the mocking-bird, that can imitate the notes of all other birds. Charles niched himself into a corner of the sofa upon which the gentlemen were sitting, and grew very attentive. He was rather surprised to perceive that his tutor was as much entertained with the ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... He must go over and help Colonel Bellairs not to make a fool of himself about the disputed right of way across his property where it joined Wentworth's own land. Colonel Bellairs always bungled into business matters of the simplest nature as a bumble bee bungles into a spider's web. For Colonel Bellairs to touch business of any kind was immediately to become hopelessly and inextricably involved in it, with much furious buzzing. His mere presence entangled the plainest matter ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... the common birds, and with field mice and the frogs, toads, lizards, and snakes. Also with the wild bees and wasps. One season I made a collection of bumblebee honey, studying the habits of five or six different kinds and rifling their nests. I kept my store of bumble-bee honey in the attic where I had a small box full of the comb and a large phial filled with the honey. How well I came to know the different dispositions of the various kinds—the small red-vested that made its nest in a hole in the ground; the small black-vested, the large black-vested, ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... freely and his game was the apotheosis of bumble-puppy. Archibald, his partner, was much ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... ever buzzed himself so fatally into the spider-webs of other people's love affairs? I asked myself sternly. As soon as Providence plucked me out of one web, back I would bumble into another, though I had no time for a love affair ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... fierceness. We were all out on the piazza—as the coolest place we could find—my wife, my sister-in-law and I. The only sounds that broke the Sabbath stillness were the hum of an occasional vagrant bumble-bee, or the fragmentary song of a mocking-bird in a neighboring elm, who lazily trolled a stave of melody, now and then, as a sample of what he could do in the cool of the morning, or after a light shower, when the conditions would ...
— The Conjure Woman • Charles W. Chesnutt
... said the Queen. "Feed him with apricots and dewberries, purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries. Steal honey-bags for him from the bumble-bees, and with the wings of painted butterflies fan the moonbeams from ...
— Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare • E. Nesbit
... the goings and comings of an ant or the capricious flight of a bumble-bee; then with his eyes lost in space, immersed in the profundity of nature, ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... white folkses' back yard. Us had a white teacher and all he larnt slave chillun was jus' plain readin' and writin'. I had to pass Dr. Willingham's office lots and he was all de time pesterin' me 'bout spellin'. One day he stopped me and axed me if I could spell 'bumble bee widout its tail,' and he said dat when I larnt to spell it, he would gimme some candy. Mr. Sanders, at Lexin'ton, gimme a dime onct. It was de fust money I ever had. I was plumb rich and I never let my Daddy have no peace 'til he fetched me ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Georgia Narratives, Part 4 • Works Projects Administration
... species are broad and colored like the outer ones. Corresponding to the outer, perianth-segments are the three stamens and the three, petal-like divisions of the style, each bearing a transverse stigma immediately above the anther. They are pollinated by bumble-bees, and in some instances by flies of the genus Rhingia, which search for the honey, brush the pollen out of the anthers and afterwards deposit it on the stigma. According to systematic views of the monocotyledons the original prototype ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... with transit, is accountable for much disheartening bungling. Instead of taking a clear line from the outset, and denouncing these glorified vestries as useless, impossible and entirely unscientific organs, too many Socialists tried to claim Bumble as their friend and use him as their tool. And Bumble turned out to be a very bad friend and a ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... and a submarine cable goes down into the sea, to reappear again upon the distant shores of Portugal. From here the signals are sent that give notice of arriving ships. Beneath the cliffs rises out of the sea that strange black crag, looking like a projecting pulpit, which is known as the Bumble Rock. In the green sward above the cliffs a yawning gulf opens its rocky mouth, and is called the Lion's Den. It terminates in a rocky tunnel which communicates with the sea through a natural archway. This was a cavern, the rocky roof of which fell in about thirty-five years ago. Nestling under ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... note: bumble-bee?] voice of the crowd below the windows watching Volney Sprague's bulletin suddenly lifted in a lion roar. Elation in that quarter was ominous, and Shelby drew a curtain. It appeared that a minor revolt against the Boss in New ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... fits of real fretfulness, or sink into brown studies, from which she wakened with a start. But if, on some such occasion, Johanna said to her: "Where ARE your thoughts, Ephie?" she would only laugh, and answer, with a hug: "Wool-gathering, you dear old bumble-bee!" ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... just ambled along as if he had all the time in the world, as indeed he had. He was feeling very good-natured, was Jimmy Skunk. And why shouldn't he? There was everything to make him feel good-natured. Summer had arrived to stay. On every side he heard glad voices. Bumble the Bee was humming a song. Best of all, Jimmy had found three beetles that very morning, and he knew that there were more if he could find them. So why ...
— The Adventures of Old Mr. Toad • Thornton W. Burgess
... of that meal I think of always when I think of Uncle Eb. It shows the manner of man he was and with what understanding and sympathy he regarded every living thing. In rinsing his teapot he accidentally poured a bit of water on a big bumble-bee. The poor creature struggled to lift hill, and then another downpour caught him and still another until his wings fell drenched. Then his breast began heaving violently, his legs stiffened behind him and he sank, head downward, in the ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... gave up the riddle, and began, in his pleasant holiday idleness, to look about at other things in the unfrequented wilderness through which the river ran. To trace the raven by following it home seemed too difficult, but it was easy to follow a great bumble-bee, which went blundering by, alighting upon a block of stone, took flight again, and landed upon a slope covered with moss, entering at last a hole which went sloping ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... Freshman had ever gone through a more severe course of hoaxing - to survive it - than Mr. Verdant Green; and yet, by a system of retaliation, only paralleled by the quadrupedal case of the before-mentioned elephant, and the biped-beadle case of the illustrious Mr. Bumble, who after having his own ears boxed by the late Mrs. Corney, relieved his feelings by boxing the ears of the small boy who opened the gate for him, - our hero took the greatest delight in seeking every opportunity to play off upon a Freshman some one of those numerous hoaxes which had been ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... down when the explosion came. Branches and pieces of tree trunk were whirled upward, and the air became populated with deadly bumble bees and humming birds, for such is the sound that the shell splinters make. When I essayed our shell hole afterward, I couldn't fathom how five of us had managed to accommodate ourselves in it, but in the rush of necessity, ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... was found in growing clover. This was accounted for by the fact that there were no old maids in that polygamous country. Old maids naturally were not allowed! And there being none, there were of course no cats to kill the mice that eat the bumble-bees' nests; thus, no bumble-bees to fertilize it, therefore no clover. Old maids have ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... bawls for his shoes and away he rushes down there before dawn to sleep beforehand, glued fast to the column like an oyster.[22] He is a merciless judge, never failing to draw the convicting line[23] and return home with his nails full of wax like a bumble-bee. Fearing he might run short of pebbles[24] he keeps enough at home to cover a sea-beach, so that he may have the means of recording his sentence. Such is his madness, and all advice is useless; he only judges the more each day. So we keep him under lock and key, to prevent his going out; for ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... should explain, is a mere code address, and I use it here symbolically. I have seen commerce pretty close. I know what it is worth, and I have no particular regard for commercial magnates, but one must protest against these Bumble-like proceedings. Is it indignation at the loss of so many lives which is at work here? Well, the American railroads kill very many people during one single year, I dare say. Then why don't these dignitaries come down on the presidents of their own railroads, of ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... Bleak—"Rather a friend of mine, who can give a bumble bee the knock-out after he gets his drop of rum. I've seen him chase a wasp ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley
... of University Education for the Irish Catholics, have hitherto imitated the doctrine laid down by Mr. Bumble—that "the great principle of out-of-door relief is, to give the paupers exactly what they don't want; and then they get ...
— University Education in Ireland • Samuel Haughton
... beside him he uttered a peculiar, shrill whistle. The humming sound grew louder, then, and presently hundreds of great bees rose above the flower tops and hovered in the air. But none of them approached the bush except one monstrous bumble-bee that had a body striped with black and gold, and this one sailed slowly toward the visitors and alighted gracefully upon a branch in front ...
— Policeman Bluejay • L. Frank Baum
... out. The Governor came, with his Light-horse Troop And his mounted truckmen, all cock-a-hoop; Halberds glittered and colors flew, French horns whinnied and trumpets blew, The yellow fifes whistled between their teeth And the bumble-bee bass-drums boomed beneath; So he rode with all his band, Till the President met him, cap in hand. - The Governor "hefted" the crowns, and said, - "A will is a will, and the Parson's dead." The Governor hefted the crowns. Said he, - "There is your p'int. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... brambles in the forest, felt rather heavy, and he wished himself a boy again. He was too much exhausted to take the trouble of cutting any fern or seeking for moss, but just threw himself down under a tree, when exactly above his head he heard a great buzzing as a bumble-bee alighted on a honeysuckle branch. 'What are you doing here?' asked the bee in a cross voice; 'at your age you ought to be ...
— The Brown Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... a rule, nothing did happen, but there was no knowing what joyful day might bring a new sensation. Sometimes there was a dog-fight. Once—thrilling recollection!—Ozias Brisket's horse had run away ("Think 't 's likely a bumble-bee must ha' stung him; couldn't nothin' else ha' stirred him out of a walk, haw! haw!") and had scattered the joints of meat all ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... but few birds. One sort, called pardelas by the Spaniards, burrow in the ground like rabbits, and are said to be good eating. There are also humming-birds, not much larger than bumble bees, their bills no thicker than a pin, their legs proportional to their bodies, and their minute feathers of most beautiful colours. These are seldom taken or seen but in the evenings, when they fly about, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... then, was trying to bring Lyveden into smooth water. She had already earmarked a congenial billet at The Shrubbery, Hawthorne. The difficulty was to make Anthony apply for the post. Since Mrs. Bumble could hardly be advised to ask a footman to quit the service of the Marquess of Banff, Valerie, who was determined to remain incognito, had recourse to the Press. Her advertisement for a ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... in question was in the handwriting of a fussy officious "bumble" friend of the wealthy man, who dwelt in the town of ...
— Saved by the Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... One shoe on the Tubb! Where can the other one be? Look in your bunk And look in your trunk, And look in the bumble-bee tree!" ...
— The Rover Boys on the River - The Search for the Missing Houseboat • Arthur Winfield
... As you see, he started with a fly, as they say, and now it's grown to a bumble-bee. It was a fly then, and now—it's a bumble-bee.... And he still loves her. Look at him, he loves her! I expect he's walking now to the town to get a glimpse of her with one eye.... He'll get a glimpse of her, ...
— Plays by Chekhov, Second Series • Anton Chekhov
... however much the carters lashed and swore at them, the animals would not budge an inch until she permitted them to go. Here are a few of the common superstitions current in Berkshire. If a corpse be kept over a Sunday another death will occur before the week is out; should a big bumble-bee enter the window, a guest may be expected; and when the woodpecker, commonly called the yaffle, laughs, they say the rain is coming. When the thick mist lies in the valley, the people say it is the White Lady, a ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... case, I looked another way while the two girls joined us, Theodora having for the moment directed my attention to a tremendously large queen bumble-bee which came booming along the ground and began burrowing in a little heap of ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... "Good-day, Babbitty Bumble; I should be glad to buy some beeswax. But what are you doing down here? Why do you always come in at a window, and say Zizz, Bizz, Bizzz?" Mrs. Tittlemouse began to ...
— The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse • Beatrix Potter
... Cave, 'cause a skellington was found there," observed the child as they passed a dark, yawning mouth in the cliff. "And that's Bumble Cave, 'cause the bumblebees make nests in the top of it. And here's Smuggler's Cave, 'cause the smugglers used to hide things ...
— The Sea Fairies • L. Frank Baum
... winter-quarters by or before this time; the bumble-bee, hornet, and wasp. But here only royalty escapes; the queen-mother alone foresees the night of winter coming and the morning of spring beyond. The rest of the tribe try gypsying for a while, but perish in the first frosts. The present October ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... have you?" said Mrs. Nichols. "Mebby 'twas a bumble-bee—seems 'sef I smelt one; but like enough it's ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... suspiciously. "You've birthed another promotional bumble, Roger. I can see it in your eyes. I only hope it's not as big a one as when you put the Martian ambassador on 3D and he thanked you profusely for the gross of Puffyloaves, assuring you that he'd never slept on a softer mattress in all his life ...
— Bread Overhead • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... night, and night before, and night before that, Seemed like I saw the march o' regiments o' children, Marching to the robin's fife and cricket's rat-ta-tat! Lily-banners overhead, with the dew upon 'em, On flashed the little army, as with sword and flame; Like the buzz o' bumble-wings, with the honey on 'em, Came an eerie, cheery chant, chiming as ...
— The Book of Joyous Children • James Whitcomb Riley
... trying to find a place where he would be left in peace. But nowhere that he could go was he free from those taunting voices. Not even when he had crawled into his house was he free from them, for buzzing around his doorway was Bumble Bee and ...
— The Adventures of Prickly Porky • Thornton W. Burgess
... Indian woman. To make the Sudden Remedy, grandma got roots, herbs, barks, twigs, leaves, mints, moss, and tree gum. These were scraped, grated, or pounded; sifted, weighed, measured, stewed, and stirred; and the juice simmered down with the oil of juniper, and bumble-bees' wax, and various smarty, peppery, slippery things whose names must be kept private for a particular reason. The Sudden Remedy cured her instantly; and as meal was wanted, and no other person could be spared from the place, she offered ...
— Harper's Young People, February 10, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... alone until he began to back the team to rush the hill once more. Then he heard angry exclamations coming from the rear of the wagon—exclamations which sounded not unlike the buzzing of an enraged bumble-bee. He stretched his neck and saw that which suggested an overgrown hoop-snake rolling down the hill. At the bottom a little mud-coated man stood up. The part of his face that was visible above his beard was pale with anger. His brown eyes gleamed ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... didn't know it would make her ill, but she fell right down, all of a heap, and oh, I nearly died of fright, and I ran and ran all the way to Wenmere Woods, and I meant never to come back again—never! And it was all Mrs. Henderson's fault that I did come—at least Mrs. Henderson's and Bumble's, and," drawing herself up with great dignity, "I am never going to speak to either of them again. When I had had my tea—she gave me cream and jam, but not any ham—and when I had played about for a little while, she told me she thought I had better be going home, as I was alone; and at ...
— Kitty Trenire • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... began bluffly, "it's a cursed shame! I'm hanged if it isn't! If we weren't so solemn, my boy, I should quote Bumble about the law. Of course it's the grossest absurdity, and as far as I'm concerned——. By Jove, Piers!" he cried, with sudden change of subject, "if you knew the hard times Biddy and I have been going through! Eh, but she's ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... of what was expected of him; and his thick voice drowsed in the still air like the obstinate droning of an enormous bumble-bee. Captain Whalley did not know what was the force or the weakness that prevented him from saying good-night and walking away. It was as though he had been too tired to make the effort. How queer. More queer than any of Ned's instances. Or was it that overpowering sense of idleness ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... me into this folly was a bumble of the utmost beauty. The bars of his coat "burned" as "brightly" as those of the tiger in Wombwell's menagerie, and his fur was softer than my mother's black velvet mantle. I knew, for I had kissed him lightly ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... below snow-level. And why? Because it's too cold for them? Oh, dear, no: on sunny days in early English spring, when the thermometer doesn't rise above freezing in the shade, you will see both the honey-bees and the great black bumble as busy as their conventional character demands of them among the golden cups of the first timid crocuses. Give the bee sunshine, indeed, with a temperature just about freezing-point, and he'll flit about joyously on his communistic errand. But bees, one must ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... a fearful thing. Whatever had been in Faith's speech, her look, bright, wistful, and happy, had no fear, truly bumble though it was. "There is no danger of my loving this letter too much"—she said as she carefully restored it to its envelope; said with a secret ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... action, where the school children, and some of the idlest or most good-natured of Mrs. Alwynn's friends, were even then assembling, and where Mrs. Alwynn herself was already dashing from point to point, buzzing like a large "bumble" bee. ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... affected by her indignation the absurd Fyne dog began to bark in the porch. It might have been at a trespassing bumble-bee however. That animal was capable of any eccentricity. Fyne got up quickly and went out to him. I think he was glad to leave us alone to discuss that matter of his journey to London. A sort of anti-sentimental journey. He, too, apparently, ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... ground, he would rear up on his hindlegs and snatch and grab until he secured them. Then he would sit up and scratch himself like a dog. He would allow me to take him up in my hands and stroke him, and yet not retire into his bristly shell. He ate a dozen worms and a bumble-bee straight off the reel, and then with all the gluttony of the pig tribe he went searching about for more food. I noticed that he ate the grass, in the same way as dogs do, for medicinal purposes. We put ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... land-snails, all just as I find them. If one began with different note-books for the creatures, and the plants, and the shells, it would be quite endless. I think I shall start at that place in the hedge in the croft where we found the bumble-bee's nest. I should like to find a mole-cricket, but I don't know if they live about here. Perhaps our soil isn't light enough for them to make their tunnels in, but one ought to find no end of curious burrowing creatures when one is on one's face, ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... fill me with despair!' cried Bess. 'I am never ready when ours begins to buzz through the house, like a gigantic, melancholy-mad bumble bee. Of course I must change, dear; firstly, because I am smothered with dust, and sixthly, as Dogberry says, because I have brought a pretty gown to do honour ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... names, Nell and Ned, a mare and a colt. Fine hacks they were, too! Anybody could ride them, they were so quiet. Dad reckoned Ned was the better of the two. He was well-bred, and had a pedigree and a gentle disposition, and a bald-face, and a bumble-foot, and a raw wither, and a sore back that gave him a habit of "flinching"—a habit that discounted his uselessness a great deal, because, when we were n't at home, the women could n't saddle him to run the cows in. Whenever he saw the saddle or heard the girth-buckles ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... spring, the most joyful season of the year? It is then that the spring bonnet of the workaday world crosses the earth's orbit and makes the bank account of the husband and father look fatigued. The low shoe and the low hum of the bumble-bee are again with us. The little striped hornet heats his nose with a spirit lamp and goes forth searching for the man with the linen pantaloons. All nature is full of life and activity. So is the man with the linen pantaloons. Anon, ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... with the last berry. At every step one's movements keep flushing the sparrows which always make their home in these depths, and one hears their fussy chirping and the beating of their tiny, fluttering wings against the stalks, and catches the low buzzing of a bumble bee somewhere, and the sound of the gardener's footsteps (it is half-daft Akim) on the path as he hums his eternal sing-song to himself. Then one mutters under one's breath, "No! Neither he nor any one else shall find me here!" yet still one goes on stripping juicy berries from their conical white ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... young fellow, Quinny!" said Gilbert. "I won't call you 'sloppy' again because I'm tired of telling you that, but really that's what you are. You've only got to see a beautiful woman for a couple of seconds and you start buzzing round her like a bumble bee. Of course, I'm sloppy myself. We're all sloppy. Damn it, here we are, two healthy young fellows who ought to be working hard, and we're wasting a fine morning ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... "It was a Bumble Bee," he comforted her. "It came between us for a bit, its shadow fell upon you, nothing more! Such things will happen; we must be prepared for them. It was nothing in myself that dimmed ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... you tell what "phen-dubs" means? I can. Can you say all off by heart The "onery twoery ickery ann," Or tell "alleys" and "commons" apart? Can you fling a top, I would like to know, Till it hums like a bumble-bee? Can you make a kite yourself that will go 'Most as high as the eye can see, Till it sails and soars like a hawk on the wing, And the little birds come and light on ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various
... Jenny Wren. For whom, perhaps with some old instinct of his race, the gentle Jew had spread a carpet. Seated on it, against no more romantic object than a blackened chimney-stack over which some bumble creeper had been trained, they both pored over one book; both with attentive faces; Jenny with the sharper; Lizzie with the more perplexed. Another little book or two were lying near, and a common ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... duty not only to be wide awake, but to look so. Give us the benefit of your two eyes. There is one of the elders whose eyes I have never caught while speaking, save once, and that was when I was preaching from Psalm cxiii. 12, 'They compassed me about like bees,' and by a strange coincidence a bumble-bee got into church, and I had my attention divided between my text and the annoying insect, which flew about like an illustration I could not catch. A dull Pew is often responsible for a dull Pulpit. Do not put your head down on the back of the seat in front, pretending ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... He was no slow and clumsy workman. He knew his task and rushed about, rapidly strengthening his structure with parallel lines, having a common center, until his silken floor was in place again and ready for the death dance of flies and bees and wasps. Soon a bumble bee was kicking and quivering like a stricken ox on its surface. The spider rushed upon him and buried his knives in the back and sides of his prey. The young man's observation of this interesting process was ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... forget to mention "Oliver Twist," and Mr. Cruikshank's famous designs to that work.* The sausage scene at Fagin's, Nancy seizing the boy; that capital piece of humor, Mr. Bumble's courtship, which is even better in Cruikshank's version than in Boz's exquisite account of the interview; Sykes's farewell to the dog; and the Jew,—the dreadful Jew—that Cruikshank drew! What a fine touching picture of melancholy desolation is that of Sykes and the ...
— George Cruikshank • William Makepeace Thackeray
... capture of fort "Hell." For some time thereafter we made regular raids into the surrounding country in quest of an enemy. We were eventually successful in our quest, as in quick order we ran across and captured a company of bumble bees. This we called the "Battle of the Wilderness." Victory over a nest of hornets we called the capture of "Fort Sumter." A large nest of wasps gave us perhaps the hardest fight of our campaigning. This we ran across ...
— The Life and Adventures of Nat Love - Better Known in the Cattle Country as "Deadwood Dick" • Nat Love
... of that writer's works the resemblance would probably have been more evident. In "Oliver Twist," for example, where Dickens is strong, Cruikshank is strong; where Dickens is weak, he is weak too. His Fagin, his Bill Sikes, his Bumble, and their following, are on a level with Dickens's conceptions; his Monk and Rose Maylie are as poor as the originals. But as the defects of Dickens are overbalanced by his merits, so Cruikshank's strength is far in excess of his weakness. It is not to his melodramatic ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... she says: 'Oh, dear! those horrid boys! They act so rough an' make sech a noise!' Good gracious! ye wouldn't think 'at she Could talk as loud as a bumble bee— No, sirs ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller
... pole, and from half an inch to two inches deep! Every pack was black with them on the march, and the wagon carried its millions. When the shadow of a branch would cross that slowly lumbering vehicle, the swarm would rise and bumble around distractedly for a moment before settling down again. They fairly made a ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... of the planet. After centuries of training, they learned how to live as comfortably in the air as they had done in the water. They increased in size and became shrubs and trees and at last they learned how to grow lovely flowers which attracted the attention of the busy big bumble-bees and the birds who carried the seeds far and wide until the whole earth had become covered with green pastures, or lay dark under the shadow of the big trees. But some of the fishes too had begun to leave the sea, and they had learned how to breathe with lungs as well as with gills. We call ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... out to the Bumble Bee Inn for tea. You needn't be a prig about it! Lots of really nice people go, and what's the harm?" She picked up her gloves and trailed to the door. "I suppose you'll ask who I was with next, and I sha'n't tell you, my dear. I'm bored to death doing the same old proper ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... have Comic Histories, Comic Geographies, and Comic Grammars, but a Comic Bible would horrify us. At sight of such blasphemy Bumble would stand aghast, and Mrs. Grundy would scream with terror. But Bumble and Mrs. Grundy are less important personages in France, and so the country of Rabelais and Voltaire produces what we are unable to tolerate ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... easy for a Frog to jog On with a kind King Log. But in the fulness of the time, there came A would-be monarch—Legion his fit name; A Plebs-appointed Autocrat, Stork-throated, Goggle-eyed, Paul-Pry-coated; A poking, peering, pompous, petty creature, A Bumble-King, with beak for its chief feature. This new King Stork, With a fierce, fussy appetite for work; Not satisfied with fixing like a vice Authority on Town and Country Mice, Tried to extend his sway to pools and bogs, And rule the Frogs! ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 21, 1891 • Various
... was not alone in puns and conundrums that the social life of Brook Farm was rich. It was rich in cheerful buzz. The bumble-bees had no more melodious hum than the Brook Farmers. They had thrown aside the forms that bind outside humanity. They were sailing on a voyage of discovery, seeking a modern El Dorado, but they did not carry with them the ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... function was drinking, and although I never went to any of their carousals I believe they discharged it thoroughly. The third club which this energetic man founded was not given up to eating and drinking, but devoted itself to the discussion of moral and artistic subjects. They called themselves "The Bumble-Bees," though I never could understand the reason why they chose such a name, unless it was, as Murray suggested, that after they had touched a thing there was no sweetness left in it. I should not like to ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... ear without causing the observer the least discomfort. You would never have imagined, dear master, the charm which one feels in perceiving these thousands of imperceptible sounds which are confounded, on a fine summer day, in an immense murmuring. The bumble-bee has his song as well as the nightingale, the honey-bee is the warbler of the mosses, the cricket is the lark of the tall grass, the maggot is the wren—it has only a sigh, but ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... you? Did he beat you?' Phyllopneustes wise folk call them, But don't know what did befall them, Why they ever thought of coming All that way to hear gnats humming, Why they built not nests but houses, Like the bumble-bees and mousies. Nor how little birds got wings, Nor what 'tis the small cock sings— How should they know—stupid fogies? They daren't even believe in bogies. Once they were a girl and boy, Each the other's life and joy. He a Daphnis, she a Chloe, Only they were brown, not snowy, Till an Arab found ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley
... white ribbons, and jogs jovially to church arm in arm with the pretty cause of all this beneficent disturbance. And the spectacle is mighty taking and commendable; but you'll excuse me for holding that it is not Love. It bears about the same relation to Love that Bumble-puppy bears to good whist. Among the eccentricities that make up the Average Man I find none more diverting than his complacent belief that he is, or has been, or will certainly some day be, in love. As a matter of fact, the capacity to love belongs ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... the hens cackling and calling to their chickens. I thought I heard our dog bark; but all was so warm, and still, and sleepy, that I felt as if I should go to sleep too if I kept my eyes shut much longer. I heard the birds though, and a great bumble-bee that flew by when our ...
— Woodside - or, Look, Listen, and Learn. • Caroline Hadley
... Dalmossie dell I sought a nook Beneath a thick and widely-spreading tree, And there I sat to con my little book, My book of old black-letter grammarie. All stillness in that deep and lonely dell Save hum of bumble-bee on nimble wing, Or zephyr sporting round the wild blue bell, While fancy ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... knew the way and the traps and pitfalls better even than I did, and ran us in up the wind with a steady hand till the roadstead opened before us. But it was empty. Torode was off after plunder, and we turned and ran for Peter Port. We found John Ozanne as busy as a big bumble-bee, but he made time to greet my grandfather very jovially, and showed him all over his little ship with much pride. He was in high spirits and anxious to be off, especially since he had ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... her again. But in proof that she loved me to the end, I was remembered in her will; and did I not believe that if living, her generous affection, that was the precious oil through which floated her eccentricities like "flies as big as bumble-bees," would smooth over all appearance of ridicule in these reminiscences, they should never amuse any one save myself. But really, I cannot better carry out her restless desire of pleasing others, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... Gummidge, Dickens draws types rather than characters. Pecksniff, Podsnap, Dolly Varden, Mr. Bumble, Mrs. Gamp, Mark Tapley, Turveydrop, Mrs. Jellyby—these are not characters; they ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... to the Crumpetty Tree Came the Stork, the Duck, and the Owl; The Snail and the Bumble-Bee, The Frog and the Fimble Fowl (The Fimble Fowl, with a Corkscrew leg); And all of them said, "We humbly beg We may build our homes on your lovely Hat,— Mr. Quangle Wangle, grant us ...
— Nonsense Books • Edward Lear
... handed him the plate. He wrinkled up his forehead a little, at the sting in that speech, but he could not keep from grinning. Then, too, Dinky-Dunk always soaps the back of his hand, to wash his back, and reach high up. So do I. And on cold mornings-he says "One, two, three, the bumble bee!" before he hops out of bed—and I imagined I was the only grownup in all the wide world who still made use of that foolish rhyme. And the other day when he was hot and tired I found him drinking a dipperful of cold water fresh from ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... into the hands of the mistress of the poorhouse, who was named Mrs. Bumble. It contained the dead mother's wedding-ring, and, as Mrs. Bumble was a dishonest woman, she hid both locket and ring, intending sometime to ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... lion who has been stung by a bumble-bee; she places herself once more, and of her own accord, upon the griddle of suspicion, and begins her struggle with the unknown all ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Second Part • Honore de Balzac
... chatterin', sassy wren, No bigger'n my thumb, know more than men? Jest show me that! Ur prove't the bat Hez got more brains than's in my hat, An' I'll back down, an' not till then!" He argued further, "Nur I can't see What's the use o' wings to a bumble-bee, Fur to git a livin' with, more'n to me; Ain't my business Important's his'n is? That Icarus Made a perty muss: Him an' his daddy Daedalus They might 'a' knowed wings made o' wax Wouldn't stand sun-heat an' hard whacks. I'll make mine o' luther, ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... undecided whether to own they were wrong, or to put Mrs. Wing down. Every one twittered and chirped, and made a great noise; but no one would give up, and all went to roost in a great state of uncertainty. But, the next day, it became evident that Mrs. Wing was right; for Major Bumble-bee came buzzing in to tell them that old Daddy Winter's hut was empty, and his white head had been seen in the sunny ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... bitter yarrow-tea To a tipsy bumble-bee, A poultice made of plantain leaves To cure a ...
— The Peter Patter Book of Nursery Rhymes • Leroy F. Jackson
... I ain't fought out any bumble-bees' nest since the time you got one up your pant leg and pretty near pounded yourself to death with a ball bat," said Sim. "Can you still run as fast as the time Wert Payley and I dared you to ...
— Homeburg Memories • George Helgesen Fitch
... fairy land afar Where the Little People are; Where the clover-tops are trees, And the rain-pools are the seas, And the leaves like little ships Sail about on tiny trips; And above the daisy tree Through the grasses, High o'erhead the Bumble Bee Hums and passes. In that forest to and fro I can wander, I can go; See the spider and the fly, And the ants go marching by Carrying parcels with their feet Down the green and grassy street I can in the sorrel ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... with appetite left out. Like Lord Dundreary's lady-love, they are "so delicate," unless caught in the pantry hastily devouring onions and beefsteak. To be hungry is so vulgar! One should live by nothing grosser than inhalation, and should never have an appetite greater than that of a healthy bumble-bee. But, thanks to the robust, latter-day theory, that the best saints have the best bodies, this puerile class is diminishing. For who can doubt that the senses are entitled to their full blossom? ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... the subject, being engaged in writing a story, he had removed but one-eighth of his mind for the consideration of mundane affairs, and that, as any one knows, is insufficient to judge fairly whether the winged thing I was reaching out for was a fly or a bumble bee. In the morning, the story being finished and the other seven-eights of brain at liberty to dwell upon the same question, he decided to follow me, with the result that in the afternoon I rode ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... nicely so far without one. Did I have one on the Miele? And yet I was the only woman on board. There are only three things I am afraid of—bumble-bees, scarlet fever, and chaperones. Ugh! the clucking, evil-minded monsters, finding wrong in everything, seeing sin in the most innocent actions, and suggesting sin—yes, causing sin—by ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... where we'll begin," continued Israel, still looking away from me. "We'll take old Smiler right to the Lizard, jist off Carligga Rocks, we'll kip on cloase by Polpeor, an' on to Bumble. I reckon by that time she'll be on the rocks. You c'n board 'er there, ef needs be, and we'll mit you in the saicret caave ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... in the world do you want with bees? Isn't it bad enough around the farm already with yellow-jackets and bumble-bees, without bringing any more here? I should think you would get stung enough by the wild bees without wanting to bring a lot of ...
— Hidden Treasure • John Thomas Simpson
... out!" At this instant an irate bumble-bee darted in, and Ella, in a spasmodic effort of self-defence, threw the spoon at it, and both went flying out of the window. The girl sat down half-crying, half-laughing in her vexation, while Aun' Sheba shook with mirth in ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... chooses a bush with thorns, perhaps a hawthorn, and then when he catches any small creature he sticks it on the thorns and leaves it there spiked until it is wanted. Look at this one's larder. He has a wretched little dead sparrow hanging by its neck from a big thorn, and two or three bumble-bees spiked too. We can imagine the mamma saying to the little ones: 'No, dears, you mustn't have any sparrow to-night just before you go to bed; it would give you indigestion and make you dream. Papa will have some of that for his supper, but if you'll be good children I'll give ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... blow their nests to pieces. Small birds of half a dozen kinds were also there, and one tinkle-tinkled his spring song quite merrily in spite of the cold that kept the others silent and made me blue. One day I spied a big queen bumble-bee on the ground, looking extremely conspicuous in its black and chestnut coat on the fresh green sward; and thinking it numbed by the cold I picked it up. It moved its legs feebly, but alas! its enemy had found and struck it down, ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... come to the flowers In my garden Butterflies, golden-spotted tawny, Blue-spangled and sulphur; Glistening dragon-flies, zooming bumble ...
— A Little Window • Jean M. Snyder
... Chorus)— Spring is coming, hear the humming Of the bumble bees; Life is waking, buds are breaking, Love is ...
— The Last West and Paolo's Virginia • G. B. Warren
... a tiny field that ran up to the woods, and there, among the brilliantly varnished buttercups, the bees sounded like the tides coming in on the coasts of faery. Hazel forgot her dread—an inexplicable sickening dread of the quarry. She chased a fat bumble-bee all across the golden floor—one eager, fluffy, shining head after the other. They might have been, in the all-permeating glory on their hill terrace, with the sapphire-circled plain around—they might have been the two youngest citizens of Paradise, circled in for ever from bleak ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... other hand, many a homely name has a complimentary meaning. Mr. Wegg did not like the name Boffin, but its oldest form is bon-fin, good and fine. In 1273 Mr. Bumble's name was spelt bon-bel, good and beautiful. With these we may group Bunker, of which the oldest form is bon-quer (bon coeur), and Boffey, which corresponds to the common French name Bonnefoy, good faith; while the much more assertive ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... of the Bumble-Bee was heard in every nook and corner of the wood, and from end to end of the deep valley, for Unktomee, the generous, was giving a feast, and the Bee was his herald, the crier of ...
— Wigwam Evenings - Sioux Folk Tales Retold • Charles Alexander Eastman and Elaine Goodale Eastman
... schoolboy, a number of my companions brought the news that the strangest bird in the world had come that day to our garden and hovered over the flowers. It was no bigger than a bumble-bee. "No! It was not a humming-bird," they said, "it was smaller by far, much more beautiful, and it came and went so fast that no one could see ...
— Woodland Tales • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... you bumble-bee," he bellowed; "you and I have got an account to settle before you get away from me. What do you mean by coming flopping on to my farm and ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... as gold Sat perched on a red-clover top, When a grasshopper, wiry and old, Came along with a skip and a hop. "Good morrow" cried he, "Mr. Bumble Bee, You seem to have come ...
— Graded Memory Selections • Various
... many nights past they found the head-man of the village civil and even bumble; but it did not excite the suspicion of the travellers, who congratulated themselves ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... great bumble-bee, with a band of red gold across his back, flew up, and hovered near, wavering to and fro in the air as he stayed to look ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... corners of the meadow fence stand clumps of flower-stalks,—joe-pye-weed, boneset, goldenrod,—bare and already bleaching; and deep within their matted shade, where the brook bends about an elder bush, a single amber pendant of the jewel-weed, to which a bumble-bee comes droning on wings so loud that a little hyla near us stops ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... with horns; then a part of the body and two more legs; then, with one tremendous effort, he was free!—an odd beast of no particular color, looking exceedingly damp and disagreeable, with his fat chunky body and short legs, like an exaggerated bumble-bee, only not at all pretty. He was shaky on his legs and half tumbled from his box to the window-sill, along which he walked trembling till he came to the tassel of the shade, just within his reach. This he grabbed with all four claws, his ...
— Miss Elliot's Girls • Mrs Mary Spring Corning
... writings, so much more perfect form and fullness to everything it contained, that he did not care to credit himself with the marvel of having yet so early anticipated so much. But the first sprightly runnings of his genius are undoubtedly here. Mr. Bumble is in the parish sketches, and Mr. Dawkins the dodger in the Old Bailey scenes. There is laughter and fun to excess, never misapplied; there are the minute points and shades of character, with ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... of his eyes an instant; then with a shout he abandoned Kobuk and the bean-pot for the moment, and scattering the red-vested bumble-bees that were avidly working for honey in the lupine flowers he began gathering a bouquet for ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... came glorious days, when they took long tramps over the hills; or when Thyrsis would carry the child upon his shoulder, and they would wander about the meadows, picking daisies and clover, and making garlands for Corydon. Once Cedric sat down upon a bumble-bee, and that was hard upon him, and perhaps upon the bee. But for the most part the little one was enraptured during these excursions. He was fascinated with the flowers, and continually seeking ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... pump-handle with a rush that flooded him with water and sent him off blowing the tide from his nostrils like a whale. Perhaps these things were permitted because the sight of the victim's suffering was so funny. Half the pleasure in fighting wasps or bumble-bees was in killing them and destroying their nests; the other half was in seeing the fellows get stung. If you could fool a fellow into a mass-meeting of bumble-bees, and see him lead them off in a steeple-chase, it was right and fair to do so. But there ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... not what I started to say. I wanted to tell you how the least thing distracts me nowadays from my duty to the Sadhana. In my last letter[1] I told you of the bumble-bees which hover round me in some fruitless quest, to the tune of a meaningless ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... was a hen cackling in the barn, and a big bumble-bee buzzing and bumbling around in a consequential way among the roses under the window, and I could hear the voices of the children in the front ...
— Queer Stories for Boys and Girls • Edward Eggleston
... gold, Sat perched on a red-clover top, When a grasshopper, wiry and old, Came along with a skip and a hop. "Good-morrow!" cried he, "Mr. Bumble-Bee! You seem to have come to ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, July 1878, No. 9 • Various
... form of literature, I may remark, is accounts of mountaineering exploits, though I have never seen a glacier or a permanent snow mountain in my life. I do not care a row of pins how badly they may be written, and what form of bumble-puppy grammar and composition is employed, as long as the writer will walk along the edge of a precipice with a sheer fall of thousands of feet on one side and a sheer wall on the other; or better still crawl up ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... striplings, who Made all your school-fellows feel humble, Are mulcted of your honours due By an officious Cambrian Bumble. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug. 22, 1917 • Various
... touch that z sound. Indeed what can? What is there like it? Has a church-bell any tone approximating it even? Has a violin? Has a hautboy? Has a French horn? Has a jew's-harp? Ay, that's the thing! A Jew's-harp has something like it; and so—so has a bumble-bee. A thought strikes me! It is possible that Zounds and Sounds are—Yes,' said I, rising and shouting with the excitement, 'Zounds and Sounds are bumble-bees!—bumble-bees curiously prepared; gathered in some warm climate where they abound, and pickled! Henceforth let no man call that ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... done faster and away sooner—and all they do is mess up work that should have been done right the first time. We should have been finished last week, but we have another week to go, at least unless some bumble-fingered beanbrain gets another bright idea that sets us back again. I'm sick ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... not love spring, the most joyful season of the year? It is then that the spring bonnet of the workaday world crosses the earth's orbit and makes the bank account of the husband and father look fatigued. The low shoe and the low hum of the bumble-bee are again with us. The little striped hornet heats his nose with a spirit lamp and goes forth searching for the man with the linen pantaloons. All nature is full of life and activity. So is the man with the linen pantaloons. Anon, the thrush will sing in the underbrush, and the prima ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... plants, cease to range about a thousand or fifteen hundred feet below snow-level. And why? Because it's too cold for them? Oh, dear, no: on sunny days in early English spring, when the thermometer doesn't rise above freezing in the shade, you will see both the honey-bees and the great black bumble as busy as their conventional character demands of them among the golden cups of the first timid crocuses. Give the bee sunshine, indeed, with a temperature just about freezing-point, and he'll flit about joyously on his communistic errand. But ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... and the bowl of his pipe drooping down over his comfortably bulging, unbuttoned waistcoat. The lazy day was in his blood and even the whine of the sawmills on the river-bank, a mile or more to the south, tempered as it was by the distance to the drone of a surly bumble-bee, still vaguely annoyed him. Tiny dots of men in flannel shirts of brilliant hue, flashing from time to time out across the log-choked space between the booms, caught his eye whenever he lifted his head, during the passage of a green-sprayed glass from the veranda ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... attraction! what novelty! How the reformation, which originated in the cell of an obscure cloister, had already germinated in the mind of Waldo; how the rich merchant of Lyons, in search of the treasures of the age, was suddenly changed into a bumble disciple, voluntarily poor; and what were the principal traits of his ministry, his voyages, his relations, his life, his death! Concerning such men, we cannot regret too deeply the almost utter silence of this historian ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... yarrow-tea To a tipsy bumble-bee, A poultice made of plantain leaves To cure a rabbit ...
— The Peter Patter Book of Nursery Rhymes • Leroy F. Jackson
... a file or a gimlet, and a bit of tobacco, are as likely to pass as not. That warder can see every thing, my dear young Sir; but he can no more hear what we say than he can understand what a couple of bumble-bees are murmuring about who are barred up in a double window. We can therefore converse with one another as much without reserve as we please, or rather"—and here the little man's eyes twinkled significantly—"as ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... old woman on a wooden chair, singing in the evening. And the man had taken a fancy to the song and remembered it after in London, and whenever it came to his mind it made him think of evenings—the kind you don't get in London—and he heard a soft wind going idly over the moor and the bumble-bees in a hurry, and forgot the noise of the traffic. And always, whenever he heard men speak of Time, he grudged to Time most this song. Once afterwards he went to that Northern moor again and found the tiny valley, but there was no old woman in the garden, and no one was singing ...
— Tales of Wonder • Lord Dunsany
... the bumble-bee Drones his song in the perfect weather; And, just on purpose to sing to me, Thrush and blue-bird came North together. Just for me, in red and white, Bloom and blossom the fields of clover; And all for me and my delight The wild Wind follows and ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... movements keep flushing the sparrows which always make their home in these depths, and one hears their fussy chirping and the beating of their tiny, fluttering wings against the stalks, and catches the low buzzing of a bumble bee somewhere, and the sound of the gardener's footsteps (it is half-daft Akim) on the path as he hums his eternal sing-song to himself. Then one mutters under one's breath, "No! Neither he nor any one else shall find me here!" yet still ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... went mad.... As you see, he started with a fly, as they say, and now it's grown to a bumble-bee. It was a fly then, and now—it's a bumble-bee.... And he still loves her. Look at him, he loves her! I expect he's walking now to the town to get a glimpse of her with one eye.... He'll get a glimpse of ...
— Plays by Chekhov, Second Series • Anton Chekhov
... fifth day the squirrels brought a present of wild honey; it was so sweet and sticky that they licked their fingers as they put it down upon the stone. They had stolen it out of a bumble BEES' nest on the tippity top of ...
— The Great Big Treasury of Beatrix Potter • Beatrix Potter
... "Hell." For some time thereafter we made regular raids into the surrounding country in quest of an enemy. We were eventually successful in our quest, as in quick order we ran across and captured a company of bumble bees. This we called the "Battle of the Wilderness." Victory over a nest of hornets we called the capture of "Fort Sumter." A large nest of wasps gave us perhaps the hardest fight of our campaigning. This we ran across in the fields not far from home. There was an unusually large number of ...
— The Life and Adventures of Nat Love - Better Known in the Cattle Country as "Deadwood Dick" • Nat Love
... to the pump-spout, and then coming down on the pump-handle with a rush that flooded him with water and sent him off blowing the tide from his nostrils like a whale. Perhaps these things were permitted because the sight of the victim's suffering was so funny. Half the pleasure in fighting wasps or bumble-bees was in killing them and destroying their nests; the other half was in seeing the fellows get stung. If you could fool a fellow into a mass-meeting of bumble-bees, and see him lead them off in a steeple-chase, it was right and fair to do so. But there were other cases in which deceit was not ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... all, Fossell was an excellent player. With the smallest luck, he and Fossell ought to be more than a match for a pair of whom, if one (Miss Gabriel) was wily, the other played a game not usually distinguishable from bumble-puppy. ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... must not forget to mention "Oliver Twist," and Mr. Cruikshank's famous designs to that work.* The sausage scene at Fagin's, Nancy seizing the boy; that capital piece of humor, Mr. Bumble's courtship, which is even better in Cruikshank's version than in Boz's exquisite account of the interview; Sykes's farewell to the dog; and the Jew,—the dreadful Jew—that Cruikshank drew! What a fine touching picture of melancholy desolation ...
— George Cruikshank • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Whereby—if folks was wise—instead of either of them Scholars, And straining their own lungs along of contradictious hollers, They'll lend their ears to reason, and take my advice as follers, Namely—Bumble for the Chairman of the ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... roots, herbs, barks, twigs, leaves, mints, moss, and tree gum. These were scraped, grated, or pounded; sifted, weighed, measured, stewed, and stirred; and the juice simmered down with the oil of juniper, and bumble-bees' wax, and various smarty, peppery, slippery things whose names must be kept private for a particular reason. The Sudden Remedy cured her instantly; and as meal was wanted, and no other person could be spared from the place, she offered to go ...
— Harper's Young People, February 10, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... frogs, toads, lizards, and snakes. Also with the wild bees and wasps. One season I made a collection of bumblebee honey, studying the habits of five or six different kinds and rifling their nests. I kept my store of bumble-bee honey in the attic where I had a small box full of the comb and a large phial filled with the honey. How well I came to know the different dispositions of the various kinds—the small red-vested that ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... were new to him. The air of the place was heavy with mingled odours—one might almost have called them perfumes, were it not for a certain smack of rankness and pungency in them—and alive with birds, varying in size from that of a bumble bee up to that of a carrion crow, a few specimens of which could be seen perched here and there on the topmost branches of the tallest trees. Several of the birds were of the humming bird or sunbird species, ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... the bug panted up, and with the first grin she had seen on his face since Dakota Milt chuckled, "The Teal is a grand car for mountains. Aside from overheating, bum lights, thin upholstery, faulty ignition, tissue-paper brake-bands, and this-here special aviation engine, specially built for a bumble-bee, it's what the catalogues call ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... success through your own ability, many friends and enjoyment of life to the full. See also BUMBLE BEE. ...
— Telling Fortunes By Tea Leaves • Cicely Kent
... Dickens; and had he illustrated more of that writer's works the resemblance would probably have been more evident. In "Oliver Twist," for example, where Dickens is strong, Cruikshank is strong; where Dickens is weak, he is weak too. His Fagin, his Bill Sikes, his Bumble, and their following, are on a level with Dickens's conceptions; his Monk and Rose Maylie are as poor as the originals. But as the defects of Dickens are overbalanced by his merits, so Cruikshank's strength is far in excess of his weakness. It is ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... The bumble-bee that tipped the lily-vases Along the road-side in the shadows dim, Went following the blossoms of their faces As though their sweets must needs be ...
— Riley Love-Lyrics • James Whitcomb Riley
... his cheeks like sparks of fire. Not only did he see and feel, he could even hear it now: his ears were filled with a humming sound, growing louder and louder every minute, like the noise made by a large colony of bumble-bees when a person carelessly treads on their nest, and they are angered and thrown into a great commotion and swarm out to defend their home. Very soon out of this confused murmur louder, clearer sounds began to rise; and these could be distinguished as ...
— A Little Boy Lost • Hudson, W. H.
... foundation of its national existence, trait upon trait, must be laid in the lives of the children," said Mr. Goodloe, slowly, and he smiled as across from the Little House came wee Susan's exquisite treble in a waltz song which was backed up by Mother Spurlock's bumble and Charlotte's none too accurate accompaniment. And ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... sunny, bright, spring day, When to the wood he took his way; He knew that in a certain spot A Bumble Bee his nest had got. The Bee was out, the chance was good, But just when grabbing all he could, He heard the Bee behind him humming, And only ...
— Verses for Children - and Songs for Music • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... inch until she permitted them to go. Here are a few of the common superstitions current in Berkshire. If a corpse be kept over a Sunday another death will occur before the week is out; should a big bumble-bee enter the window, a guest may be expected; and when the woodpecker, commonly called the yaffle, laughs, they say the rain is coming. When the thick mist lies in the valley, the people say it is the White Lady, a belief closely akin to the Dame Blanche, who is said in Normandy ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... here among the trees, With the singing birds and the bumble bees, A-knowing that I can do as I please, Than to live what folks call a life of ease— Up ...
— Ohio Arbor Day 1913: Arbor and Bird Day Manual - Issued for the Benefit of the Schools of our State • Various
... bluffly, "it's a cursed shame! I'm hanged if it isn't! If we weren't so solemn, my boy, I should quote Bumble about the law. Of course it's the grossest absurdity, and as far as I'm concerned——. By Jove, Piers!" he cried, with sudden change of subject, "if you knew the hard times Biddy and I have been going through! Eh, but she's a brick, ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... never happened. Even the chinless curate, whose voice without consonants gave the effect of an intoning bumble-bee, never took advantage of her suggestions (frequently repeated) that he should drop in ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... around inviting all creation to "See me?" as they gathered the silken down for nest lining. Over the sweetly perfumed purple heads, the humming-birds held high carnival on Sunshine Hillside all the day. The honey and bumble bees fled at the birds' approach, but what were these others, numerous everywhere, that clung to the blooms, greedily thrusting their red noses between the petals, and ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter
... and his game was the apotheosis of bumble-puppy. Archibald, his partner, was much irritated ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... secured them. Then he would sit up and scratch himself like a dog. He would allow me to take him up in my hands and stroke him, and yet not retire into his bristly shell. He ate a dozen worms and a bumble-bee straight off the reel, and then with all the gluttony of the pig tribe he went searching about for more food. I noticed that he ate the grass, in the same way as dogs do, for medicinal purposes. We put him into a large box with some hay in it, and as he still ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... sometimes. These gentry are much exercised in their minds by my letters about them, and some of them fly out at me very much as bumble-bees do at one who stirs up their nest. For instance, I received, not long ago, from my good friends, Messrs. Cauldwell & Whitney, an anonymous letter to them, dated at Washington, and suggesting that if I would attend what the latter calls "a seance of that celebrated ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... HANCOCK out. The Governor came, with his Light-horse Troop And his mounted truckmen, all cock-a-hoop; Halberds glittered and colors flew, French horns whinnied and trumpets blew, The yellow fifes whistled between their teeth And the bumble-bee bass-drums boomed beneath; So he rode with all his band, Till the President met him, cap in hand. —The Governor "hefted" the crowns, and said,— "A will is a will, and the Parson's dead." The Governor hefted the crowns. Said he,— "There is your p'int. And here's my fee. These are the terms ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... black mass of the creatures running the length of the ridge pole, and from half an inch to two inches deep! Every pack was black with them on the march, and the wagon carried its millions. When the shadow of a branch would cross that slowly lumbering vehicle, the swarm would rise and bumble around distractedly for a moment before settling down again. They fairly made a nimbus ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... saddle-horses—those were their names, Nell and Ned, a mare and a colt. Fine hacks they were, too! Anybody could ride them, they were so quiet. Dad reckoned Ned was the better of the two. He was well-bred, and had a pedigree and a gentle disposition, and a bald-face, and a bumble-foot, and a raw wither, and a sore back that gave him a habit of "flinching"—a habit that discounted his uselessness a great deal, because, when we were n't at home, the women could n't saddle him to run the cows ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... superlative. We venture to think that his "all" merely includes his own circle. At the same time, however, we admit that militant Atheism is still, as of old, an offence to the superfine sceptics who desire to stand well with the great firm of Bumble and Grundy, as well as to the vast army of priests and preachers who have a professional interest in keeping heresy "dark," and to the ruling and privileged classes, who feel that militant Atheism is a great disturber of the peace ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... had purposely dropped back to bring up the rear of the procession after Salem, letting even the lumbering Hippopotamus bumble on ahead) we beheld all our family of cars drawn up under some skyscraping elms, in front of the most delectable tea-house you ever met in your life. The Hippo was in front of a very fine old white church, with "I am one of the pillars of New England" written in every line ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... me,"—and she grew very serious, and her little sharp eyes changed color,—"first tell me how you happened to be here, in the very heart of Fairy-land, with nobody to take care of you, and not so much as a wasp or a bumble-bee to watch over you when ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... Buzz! A great bumble-bee, with a band of red gold across his back, flew up, and hovered near, wavering to and fro in the air as he stayed to ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... I have known people who "have gone where money was" and have fallen honestly and rapturously into love, but you have got to be very sure that money in such a case is not the motive. If it is the penalty never fails to follow. Mr. Bumble married Mrs. Corney for "six teaspoons, a pair of sugar tongs, and a milk-pot, with a small quantity of secondhand furniture and twenty pounds in money." And in two months he regretted his bargain and admitted that he had gone "dirt ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... pleasant Land of Play; To the fairy land afar Where the Little People are; Where the clover-tops are trees, And the rain-pools are the seas, And the leaves like little ships Sail about on tiny trips; And above the daisy tree Through the grasses, High o'erhead the Bumble Bee Hums and passes. In that forest to and fro I can wander, I can go; See the spider and the fly, And the ants go marching by Carrying parcels with their feet Down the green and grassy street I can in the sorrel sit Where the ladybird alit. I can climb the jointed grass; And on ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... cirrus clouds overspread the sun, and for a while subdued his fierceness. We were all out on the piazza—as the coolest place we could find—my wife, my sister-in-law and I. The only sounds that broke the Sabbath stillness were the hum of an occasional vagrant bumble-bee, or the fragmentary song of a mocking-bird in a neighboring elm, who lazily trolled a stave of melody, now and then, as a sample of what he could do in the cool of the morning, or after a light shower, when the conditions would ...
— The Conjure Woman • Charles W. Chesnutt
... in puns and conundrums that the social life of Brook Farm was rich. It was rich in cheerful buzz. The bumble-bees had no more melodious hum than the Brook Farmers. They had thrown aside the forms that bind outside humanity. They were sailing on a voyage of discovery, seeking a modern El Dorado, but they did not carry with them the lust for gold. They were seeking something which, had they found ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... fly ever buzzed himself so fatally into the spider-webs of other people's love affairs? I asked myself sternly. As soon as Providence plucked me out of one web, back I would bumble into another, though I had no time for a love affair ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... rays of the sun, which were sent back from its cold and shining surface. A paper fly-cage dangled from the ceiling, to which he occasionally raised his eyes in gloomy thought; and, as the heedless insects hovered round the gaudy net-work, Mr. Bumble would heave a deep sigh, while a more gloomy shadow overspread his countenance. Mr. Bumble was meditating; it might be that the insects brought to mind, some painful passage in his own ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... happen! As a rule, nothing did happen, but there was no knowing what joyful day might bring a new sensation. Sometimes there was a dog-fight. Once—thrilling recollection!—Ozias Brisket's horse had run away ("Think 't 's likely a bumble-bee must ha' stung him; couldn't nothin' else ha' stirred him out of a walk, haw! haw!") and had scattered the joints of meat all ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... one began to sing, in the shrillest of voices; a gnat seemed to be chiming in with the voice. Now it ceased, but the gnat still squeaked on; athwart the energetic, insistently-plaintive buzzing of the flies resounded the booming of a fat bumble-bee, which kept bumping its head against the ceiling; a cock on the road began to crow, hoarsely prolonging the last note; a peasant cart rumbled past; the gate toward the village creaked. "Well?" suddenly quavered a woman's voice.—"Okh, thou my dear little sweetheart," said Anton to a little ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... adorned with flowers. Still further inland were little patches of dwarf birch, scarcely a foot high, crouching close to the ground to escape being torn away by the furious winds that sweep over the land. There was none of the abundant life that we see around us in our fields and woods. A spider, a bumble-bee, and a poor little wanderer of a bird, were the only ...
— Harper's Young People, March 30, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... there was a hen cackling in the barn, and a big bumble-bee buzzing and bumbling around in a consequential way among the roses under the window, and I could hear the voices of the children in the front yard playing ...
— Queer Stories for Boys and Girls • Edward Eggleston
... Did he beat you?' Phyllopneustes wise folk call them, But don't know what did befall them, Why they ever thought of coming All that way to hear gnats humming, Why they built not nests but houses, Like the bumble-bees and mousies. Nor how little birds got wings, Nor what 'tis the small cock sings— How should they know—stupid fogies? They daren't even believe in bogies. Once they were a girl and boy, Each the other's life and joy. He a Daphnis, she a Chloe, ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley
... Frog to jog On with a kind King Log. But in the fulness of the time, there came A would-be monarch—Legion his fit name; A Plebs-appointed Autocrat, Stork-throated, Goggle-eyed, Paul-Pry-coated; A poking, peering, pompous, petty creature, A Bumble-King, with beak for its chief feature. This new King Stork, With a fierce, fussy appetite for work; Not satisfied with fixing like a vice Authority on Town and Country Mice, Tried to extend his sway to pools and bogs, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 21, 1891 • Various
... course women are all alike!) While Osborne, like a good-natured bumble-bee, was buzzing noisily about, as though all the world were his clover-blossom; and Allen, so far as I know, was doing nothing; M. Godin, alert and keen despite his gentleness and a modesty which kept him ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... the traps and pitfalls better even than I did, and ran us in up the wind with a steady hand till the roadstead opened before us. But it was empty. Torode was off after plunder, and we turned and ran for Peter Port. We found John Ozanne as busy as a big bumble-bee, but he made time to greet my grandfather very jovially, and showed him all over his little ship with much pride. He was in high spirits and anxious to be off, especially since he had heard of ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... leave it while there was enough to catch even a bumble-bee. The birds are back. They came directly I'd gone a dozen ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... is not what I started to say. I wanted to tell you how the least thing distracts me nowadays from my duty to the Sadhana. In my last letter[1] I told you of the bumble-bees which hover round me in some fruitless quest, to the tune of a ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... Spring is coming, hear the humming Of the bumble bees; Life is waking, buds are breaking, Love is ...
— The Last West and Paolo's Virginia • G. B. Warren
... most favourite form of literature, I may remark, is accounts of mountaineering exploits, though I have never seen a glacier or a permanent snow mountain in my life. I do not care a row of pins how badly they may be written, and what form of bumble-puppy grammar and composition is employed, as long as the writer will walk along the edge of a precipice with a sheer fall of thousands of feet on one side and a sheer wall on the other; or better still crawl up an arete with a precipice on either. Nothing on earth would persuade me to do either ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... and began, in his pleasant holiday idleness, to look about at other things in the unfrequented wilderness through which the river ran. To trace the raven by following it home seemed too difficult, but it was easy to follow a great bumble-bee, which went blundering by, alighting upon a block of stone, took flight again, and landed upon a slope covered with moss, entering at last a hole which went sloping down ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... chance on earth for an old bumble bee of a drudge like me without any wings and frills and things, all weighted down with cares of state?" And Moyese mopped the moisture from a good natured red face, that looked anything but weighted down by the ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... filled the air. First like the drone of a huge bumble-bee, it gradually increased in intensity. The ranchers strained their eyes toward the east, where the copper tint had merged to a sickly green. A light breeze ...
— The Boy Ranchers on Roaring River - or Diamond X and the Chinese Smugglers • Willard F. Baker
... my knowledge and belief love will pick a man up quicker and throw him down harder than even the double-distilled brand of prohibition busthead. Like champagne at 2 a.m., it is good to look upon and pleasant to the palate; but at last it biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an able-bodied bumble-bee in a pair of blue-jean pants. Like alcoholism, love lies in wait for the young and unwary—approaches the victim so insidiously that ere he is aware of danger he's a gone sucker. The young man goeth ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... in reply, and so he hurried on, trying to find a place where he would be left in peace. But nowhere that he could go was he free from those taunting voices. Not even when he had crawled into his house was he free from them, for buzzing around his doorway was Bumble Bee ...
— The Adventures of Prickly Porky • Thornton W. Burgess
... her indignation the absurd Fyne dog began to bark in the porch. It might have been at a trespassing bumble-bee however. That animal was capable of any eccentricity. Fyne got up quickly and went out to him. I think he was glad to leave us alone to discuss that matter of his journey to London. A sort of anti-sentimental journey. He, too, apparently, ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... clear the doubt, They got old GOVERNOR HANCOCK out. The Governor came with his Lighthorse Troop And his mounted truckmen, all cock-a-hoop; Halberds glittered and colors flew, French horns whinnied and trumpets blew, The yellow fifes whistled between their teeth, And the bumble-bee bass-drums boomed beneath; So he rode with all his band, Till the President met him, cap in hand. The Governor "hefted" the crowns, and said,— "A will is a will, and the Parson's dead." The Governor hefted the crowns. Said he,— "There is your p'int. ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... was a schoolboy, a number of my companions brought the news that the strangest bird in the world had come that day to our garden and hovered over the flowers. It was no bigger than a bumble-bee. "No! It was not a humming-bird," they said, "it was smaller by far, much more beautiful, and it came and went so fast that no ...
— Woodland Tales • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... Last night, and night before, and night before that, Seemed like I saw the march o' regiments o' children, Marching to the robin's fife and cricket's rat-ta-tat! Lily-banners overhead, with the dew upon 'em, On flashed the little army, as with sword and flame; Like the buzz o' bumble-wings, with the honey on 'em, Came an eerie, cheery chant, chiming ...
— The Book of Joyous Children • James Whitcomb Riley
... mind, as the great features of the place. Here, on the summit, where the stillness was absolute, unbroken by any sound, and the solitude complete, we thought ourselves beyond the region of animated life; but while we were sitting on the rock, a solitary bee (bromus, the bumble bee) came winging his flight from the eastern valley, and lit on the knee of one of ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... "That bumble-bee's gettin' home late," observed Jed. "The rest of the hive up there at East Harniss have gone to roost two or three hours ago. Wonder what kept him out this scandalous hour. Had tire ...
— Shavings • Joseph C. Lincoln
... the pretty cause of all this beneficent disturbance. And the spectacle is mighty taking and commendable; but you'll excuse me for holding that it is not Love. It bears about the same relation to Love that Bumble-puppy bears to good whist. Among the eccentricities that make up the Average Man I find none more diverting than his complacent belief that he is, or has been, or will certainly some day be, in love. As a matter of fact, the capacity to love belongs to one man or woman ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... came fiddling out of a barn, With a pair of bagpipes under her arm; She could sing nothing but fiddle cum fee, The mouse has married the bumble-bee. Pipe cat—dance, mouse, We'll have a wedding at ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... butterfly here," said Bleak—"Rather a friend of mine, who can give a bumble bee the knock-out after he gets his drop of rum. I've seen him chase a wasp ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley
... think of always when I think of Uncle Eb. It shows the manner of man he was and with what understanding and sympathy he regarded every living thing. In rinsing his teapot he accidentally poured a bit of water on a big bumble-bee. The poor creature struggled to lift hill, and then another downpour caught him and still another until his wings fell drenched. Then his breast began heaving violently, his legs stiffened behind him and he sank, head downward, in the grass. Uncle Eb saw the death throes ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... child-larks had settled beside him he uttered a peculiar, shrill whistle. The humming sound grew louder, then, and presently hundreds of great bees rose above the flower tops and hovered in the air. But none of them approached the bush except one monstrous bumble-bee that had a body striped with black and gold, and this one sailed slowly toward the visitors and alighted gracefully upon a branch in front ...
— Policeman Bluejay • L. Frank Baum
... The Bumble-bee brushed off the pollen from his legs; and the humbler Honey-bee, after allowing his children to suck his paws, to get the honey sticking to them, spruced up and listened attentively to the orders read to him by the train-leader, Sir Locust, who prided himself on ...
— Japanese Fairy World - Stories from the Wonder-Lore of Japan • William Elliot Griffis
... pastime; and because, at the time I broached the subject, being engaged in writing a story, he had removed but one-eighth of his mind for the consideration of mundane affairs, and that, as any one knows, is insufficient to judge fairly whether the winged thing I was reaching out for was a fly or a bumble bee. In the morning, the story being finished and the other seven-eights of brain at liberty to dwell upon the same question, he decided to follow me, with the result that in the afternoon I ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... Beyond the large garden, at the back of this arbor, stretched a wide field with a fringe of woods at its distant edge, gay with the colors of autumn. The sky was bright and blue, and fair white clouds moved slowly over its surface; the air was sunny and warm, with bumble-bees humming about some late-flowering shrubs; and, high in the air, floated two great turkey-buzzards, with a beauty of motion surpassed by no other flying thing, with never a movement of their wide-spread wings, except to give them the necessary ...
— The Late Mrs. Null • Frank Richard Stockton
... they drive in two flies? and mud-turkles? and bumble-bees? and muskeeters? Say, uncle Josiah, did they drive ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... black satin. This time, not without a certain strain on my eyes, which are already growing tired, I succeeded in finding the said organ in the Bembex-wasps, the Halicti (Cf. Chapters 12 to 14 of the present volume.—Translator's Note.), the Carpenter-bees, the Bumble-bees, the Andrenae (A species of Burrowing Bees.—Translator's Note.) and the Megachiles. (Or Leaf-cutting Bees. Cf. Chapter 8 of the present volume.—Translator's Note.) I failed in the case of the Osmiae, the Chalicodomae and the Anthophorae. Is the organ really absent? Or was there want ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... the clearing stood young firs and pines, as shiny as metal, and so motionless that the drops which still hung here and there on their needles seemed frozen. Everything was motionless under this yellow light, the grass-blades, the moss-blossoms, and the little blue butterflies, and a bumble-bee crawled into the bell of a bennet and hung there as if enchanted. In the thicket a fox drew near, his head lowered to sniff the ground, and suddenly he too stood still without stirring a muscle and stared into space, his eyes transparent as green glass, spell-bound ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... a number of his pieces in my book, and I'm fond of 'em. But this man makes things so kind of true and natural I feel at home with HIM. And this one I've longed to read, though I guess I can't understand much of it. His 'Bumble Bee' was just lovely; with the grass and columbines and the yellow breeches of the bee. I'm never tired of that;" and Becky's face woke up into something like beauty as she glanced hungrily at the Emerson while she dusted the delicate ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... Crumpetty Tree Came the Stork, the Duck, and the Owl; The Snail and the Bumble-Bee, The Frog and the Fimble Fowl (The Fimble Fowl, with a Corkscrew leg); And all of them said, "We humbly beg We may build our homes on your lovely Hat,— Mr. Quangle Wangle, grant us ...
— Nonsense Books • Edward Lear
... was down when the explosion came. Branches and pieces of tree trunk were whirled upward, and the air became populated with deadly bumble bees and humming birds, for such is the sound that the shell splinters make. When I essayed our shell hole afterward, I couldn't fathom how five of us had managed to accommodate ourselves in it, but in the rush of necessity, ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... their wings are four of a dark brown colour. the head is black, the body and abdomen are yellow incircled with transverse rings of black, they are ferce and sting very severely, we found them troublesome in frightening our horses as we passed those mountains. the honey bee is not found here. the bumble bee is. one of the men brought me today some onions from the high plain of a different speceis from those near the borders of the river as they are also from the shive or small onion noticed below the falls of the Columbia. these onions ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... comfortably in the air as they had done in the water. They increased in size and became shrubs and trees and at last they learned how to grow lovely flowers which attracted the attention of the busy big bumble-bees and the birds who carried the seeds far and wide until the whole earth had become covered with green pastures, or lay dark under the shadow of the big trees. But some of the fishes too had begun to leave the sea, and they had learned how to breathe with lungs as well as with gills. We call ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... a Bumble Bee," he comforted her. "It came between us for a bit, its shadow fell upon you, nothing more! Such things will happen; we must be prepared for them. It was nothing in ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... works purporting to be poetical; such works, namely, as Marlowe's Elegies of Ovid, which appeared in company with Davies's Epigrammes, Marston's Metamorphosis of Pigmalion's Image, Hall's Satires, and Cutwode's Caltha Poetarum; or, The Bumble Bee. The latter is a fantastic poem of 187 stanzas about a bee and a marigold, and deserved the fire rather for its insipidity than for the reasons which justified the cleansing process applied to the others, the youthful productions of men who were destined to ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... of bees. I lost the bees but I got the gentians. How curiously this flower looks, with its deep blue petals folded together so tightly—a bud and yet a blossom. It is the nun among our wild flowers, a form closely veiled and cloaked. The buccaneer bumble-bee sometimes tries to rifle it of its sweets. I have seen the blossom with the bee entombed in it. He had forced his way into the virgin corolla as if determined to know its secret, but he had never returned with ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... introducing them into the ear without causing the observer the least discomfort. You would never have imagined, dear master, the charm which one feels in perceiving these thousands of imperceptible sounds which are confounded, on a fine summer day, in an immense murmuring. The bumble-bee has his song as well as the nightingale, the honey-bee is the warbler of the mosses, the cricket is the lark of the tall grass, the maggot is the wren—it has only a sigh, ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... the curious life-history of the flies which dwell as unbidden guests or social parasites in the nests and hives of wild honey-bees. These burglarious flies are belted and bearded in the very self-same pattern as the bumble-bees themselves; but their larvae live upon the young grubs of the hive, and repay the unconscious hospitality of the busy workers by devouring the future hope of their unwilling hosts. Obviously, any fly which entered ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... world had come to life for the season. Little tadpoles and efts began to bubble up through the water, and to race along beneath it; toads made noises like very young ducks, and advanced to the margin in twos and threes; overhead, bumble-bees flew hither and thither in the thickening light, their drone coming and going like the sound of ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... they always fill me with despair!' cried Bess. 'I am never ready when ours begins to buzz through the house, like a gigantic, melancholy-mad bumble bee. Of course I must change, dear; firstly, because I am smothered with dust, and sixthly, as Dogberry says, because I have brought a pretty gown to do ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... with the most delicate skill, the exact amount of the punishment to the enormity of the offence. By his profound wisdom he has discovered that the great increase of crime in these countries is entirely attributable to over-feeding the multitude. Like the worthy Mr. Bumble, in "Oliver Twist," he protests "it is meat and not madness" that ails the people. He can even trace the origin of every felony to the particular kind of food in which the felon has indulged. He detects ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... countenance and manner, and their sympathy is quickly influenced by the example of those around them. Mrs. Howard led the traveller to speak of what he had seen in different countries—of natural history—of the beaver, and the moose-deer, and the humming-bird, that is scarcely larger than a bumble bee; and the mocking-bird, that can imitate the notes of all other birds. Charles niched himself into a corner of the sofa upon which the gentlemen were sitting, and grew very attentive. He was rather surprised to perceive that his tutor was as much entertained with the conversation ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... the constables. No sooner had they departed down the flagged path than back flitted the bevy of girls again into the study, until the small room was full to overflowing. It was like seeing a company of fat bumble-bees, their portly bodies resplendent in black and gold, buzz heavily out of a room, and a gay flight of pale-blue and lemon butterflies flit back in their places. All the daughters fell upon their father, Margaret, Bridget, Isabel, Sarah, Mary, and Susanna; ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... as gold, Sat perched on a red-clover top, When a grasshopper, wiry and old, Came along with a skip and a hop. "Good-morrow!" cried he, "Mr. Bumble-Bee! You seem to ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, July 1878, No. 9 • Various
... many more dissected, And I never met a gravedigger who to me objected. If a man gets nineteen bees in his bonnet, I'll cast twenty of 'em out. I've got in my pocket crutches for lame ducks, spectacles for blind bumble-bees, pack-saddles and panniers for grasshoppers, and many other needful things. Surely I can cure this poor man. Here, Slasher, take a little out of my bottle, and let it run down thy throttle; and if thou beest not quite slain, rise, man, ...
— The Peace Egg and Other tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... is a mere code address, and I use it here symbolically. I have seen commerce pretty close. I know what it is worth, and I have no particular regard for commercial magnates, but one must protest against these Bumble-like proceedings. Is it indignation at the loss of so many lives which is at work here? Well, the American railroads kill very many people during one single year, I dare say. Then why don't these dignitaries come ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... elaborate air-castle, made of straw and bright worsted, hangs from the middle of the low ceiling; and hung against the wall, between two glaring woodcuts representing "Lady Caroline" in red and "Highland Mary" in blue, is a deep frame filled with worsted flowers, to which a butterfly and a bumble-bee have been pinned. Paper lacework depends from their kitchen-shelves, and common eggshells, artificially colored, decorate the lilac-bushes in the side yard. They are always making new mats or piecing ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... out of his eyes an instant; then with a shout he abandoned Kobuk and the bean-pot for the moment, and scattering the red-vested bumble-bees that were avidly working for honey in the lupine flowers he began gathering ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... his guardians writes to me about him. He is a country gentleman, with a large estate, who married a cousin of my pupil. He is a big, pompous, bumble-bee kind of man, who prides himself on speaking his mind, and is quite unaware that it is only his position that saves him from the plainest retorts. He writes to say that he is much exercised about his ward's progress. The boy, he says, is fanciful and delicate, and has much too good an opinion ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... only soft shirts because he can work better in a soft shirt. There are plenty of men now who would wear dog-harness if they thought they could work more in it. I know another man who walks away out into the country every Sunday: not that he likes the country—he wouldn't recognize a bumble bee if he saw it—but he claims that if he walks on Sunday his head is as clear as a ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... hands, as an instance of that fantastic play of Nature which repeats, in families widely different, organs of similar form, though perhaps of by no means similar use; nay, sometimes (as in those beautiful clear-wing hawk-moths which you, as they hover round the rhododendrons, mistake for bumble-bees) repeats the outward form of a whole animal, for no conceivable reason save her - shall we not say honestly His? - own ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... too a toy theatre at Easton and among other things dramatized the minority report of the Poor Law Commission. The play began by the Commissioners taking to pieces Bumble the Beadle, putting him into a huge cauldron and stewing him. Then out from the cauldron leaped a renewed rejuvenated Bumble several sizes larger ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... Thomas the good, be it well understood, Was a man of very contemplative mood— He would pour by the hour, o'er a weed or a flower, Or the slugs, that came crawling out after a shower; Black beetles, bumble-bees, blue-bottle flies, And moths, were of no small account in his eyes; An "industrious flea," he'd by no means despise, While an "old daddy long-legs," whose long legs and thighs Passed the common in shape, or in color, or size, He was wont to consider ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... said Gilbert. "I won't call you 'sloppy' again because I'm tired of telling you that, but really that's what you are. You've only got to see a beautiful woman for a couple of seconds and you start buzzing round her like a bumble bee. Of course, I'm sloppy myself. We're all sloppy. Damn it, here we are, two healthy young fellows who ought to be working hard, and we're wasting a fine ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... has an almost epic grandeur; and black-hearted Fagin, the Jew, receiver of stolen goods and trainer of youth in the way they should not go; and Master Dawkins, the Artful Dodger. Such, too, is Mr. Bumble, greatest and most ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... grandmother. "What in the world do you want with bees? Isn't it bad enough around the farm already with yellow-jackets and bumble-bees, without bringing any more here? I should think you would get stung enough by the wild bees without wanting to bring a lot of honey ...
— Hidden Treasure • John Thomas Simpson
... cackling and calling to their chickens. I thought I heard our dog bark; but all was so warm, and still, and sleepy, that I felt as if I should go to sleep too if I kept my eyes shut much longer. I heard the birds though, and a great bumble-bee that flew by when our ...
— Woodside - or, Look, Listen, and Learn. • Caroline Hadley
... Heart,—Only a few lines in the press of business to tell you I am well, but very lonely, with a view out over the green, in this dull, rainy weather, while the bumble-bees hum and the sparrows twitter. Grand audience tomorrow. It's vexatious that I have to buy linen, towels, table-cloths, and sheets. * * * Farewell. Hearty love, and write! Your most ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... conspicuously not adapted to supply electric power or interfere with transit, is accountable for much disheartening bungling. Instead of taking a clear line from the outset, and denouncing these glorified vestries as useless, impossible and entirely unscientific organs, too many Socialists tried to claim Bumble as their friend and use him as their tool. And Bumble turned out to be a very bad friend ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... boy in the summer-house. He sat there gazing out at a bed of tulips, which, although they had closed for the night, could not go quite asleep for the wind that kept waving them about. All at once he saw a great bumble-bee fly out of one of ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • George MacDonald
... "Look!" Three gray birds were starting up from the stubble. They were round, dumpy, like enormous bumble bees. Kennicott was sighting, moving the barrel. She was agitated. Why didn't he fire? The birds would be gone! Then a crash, another, and two birds turned somersaults ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... minister came along and took the younger boy. She is alone in the house. A steamer, probably bound for Cardiff, now crosses the horizon, while near at hand one bell of a foxglove swings to and fro with a bumble-bee for clapper. These white Cornish cottages are built on the edge of the cliff; the garden grows gorse more readily than cabbages; and for hedge, some primeval man has piled granite boulders. In one of these, to hold, an historian conjectures, the victim's ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... lovely and quiet and restful are the silent, scented, spreading fields! How soothing to a spirit tired of the city's din is this solitude, broken only by the singing of the birds and the drowsy droning of the bee, erroneously termed 'bumble'! The green fields, the shady trees, the sweet freshness of the summer air, untainted by city smoke, and over all the eternal serenity of the blue unclouded sky—how can human spite and human passion exist in such a paradise? ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... hanging down his coat-collar, in the fashion of bygone days. It was his habit to take extensive walks, for miles around the country, moving forward with long strides, and either talking to himself or humming soft tunes; on which account his pupils styled him 'the bumble-bee.' The old man was passionately fond of music, and devoted every minute spared from school duties and his long walks, to his violin. To the more promising of his pupils Mr. James Merrishaw showed great kindness, allowing them, among ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... plans for refurnishing and redecorating, she was busy as a bumble-bee. As the mistress of a big garden and a real kitchen she invited all her Chicago friends to come and share her good fortune. She was filled with the spirit of ownership and exulted over the four-acre patch as if it were ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... work don't bother me. I'se fo' times as happy as a bumble bee. Us eats when us kin git it, sleeps ...
— Lady Luck • Hugh Wiley
... "See here, you bumble-bee," he bellowed; "you and I have got an account to settle before you get away from me. What do you mean by coming flopping on to my ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... impelled by some strange motive, he took the path over the Ridge again. It had been a long day and a wearing one. He had tried Hannibal once more; but his pupils cared less for Hannibal than for the bumble-bees droning in the window-frame. For some reason the dull routine of lessons had been duller than usual. The scholars had never been so stupid. Again and again the face that he had seen rest on his arm the day before came between him and his page, and when the eyes opened they were as blue as forget-me-nots. ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... ground. He had a trick with a detachable float, made from a quill and a tiny piece of cork, that brought him many a fish from the centre of a mill-pond. He knew the best baits for every season,—worms, white grubs, striped minnows, miller's thumbs, bumble-bees, grasshoppers, young field-mice,—and he knew where to ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... dash of assurance and a good thimbleful of hypocrisy, and Pecksniff is the product. Leave out the assurance, replacing it with cowardice, and the result is Doctor Chillip or Uriah Heap. Muddle the whole with stupidity, and Bumble ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... of myopy and bulimy. Even now there is room for plenty of improvement in our counterfeit presentment; but in those days the body was made with yellow mohair, ribbed with red silk and gold twist, and as thick as a fertile bumble-bee. John Pike perceived that to offer such a thing to Crocker's trout would probably consign him—even if his great stamina should over-get the horror—to an uneatable death, through just and natural indignation. On the other hand, while the May-fly lasted, a trout so cultured, so highly refined, ...
— Crocker's Hole - From "Slain By The Doones" By R. D. Blackmore • R. D. Blackmore
... was trying to bring Lyveden into smooth water. She had already earmarked a congenial billet at The Shrubbery, Hawthorne. The difficulty was to make Anthony apply for the post. Since Mrs. Bumble could hardly be advised to ask a footman to quit the service of the Marquess of Banff, Valerie, who was determined to remain incognito, had recourse to the Press. Her advertisement ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... instructive account of the holy abbot's endeavors to purify the monastic orders from the stain of simony, her hand clutched his, and doing a delicate cake-walk she compelled him along with her, announcing, "The Hornet and the Bumble-bee went walking hand in hand!" Fancying this prank not to have been without success, she next performed an improvised pas seul illustrative of the text, "The mountains shall ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... what "phen-dubs" means? I can. Can you say all off by heart The "onery twoery ickery ann," Or tell "alleys" and "commons" apart? Can you fling a top, I would like to know, Till it hums like a bumble-bee? Can you make a kite yourself that will go 'Most as high as the eye can see, Till it sails and soars like a hawk on the wing, And the little birds come and ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various
... All for me the bumble-bee Drones his song in the perfect weather; And, just on purpose to sing to me, Thrush and blue-bird came North together. Just for me, in red and white, Bloom and blossom the fields of clover; ...
— Poems of Cheer • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... there was enough to catch even a bumble-bee. The birds are back. They came directly I'd gone a dozen ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... season. Little tadpoles and efts began to bubble up through the water, and to race along beneath it; toads made noises like very young ducks, and advanced to the margin in twos and threes; overhead, bumble-bees flew hither and thither in the thickening light, their drone coming and going like the ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... engagement we called the capture of fort "Hell." For some time thereafter we made regular raids into the surrounding country in quest of an enemy. We were eventually successful in our quest, as in quick order we ran across and captured a company of bumble bees. This we called the "Battle of the Wilderness." Victory over a nest of hornets we called the capture of "Fort Sumter." A large nest of wasps gave us perhaps the hardest fight of our campaigning. This we ran across in the fields not far from home. There was an unusually ...
— The Life and Adventures of Nat Love - Better Known in the Cattle Country as "Deadwood Dick" • Nat Love
... single thing to do with it, but Mr. Roger says they have, and he says a man called Darwin proved it. This is the rigmarole he got off to me the other day. The clover crop depends on there being plenty of bumble-bees, because they are the only insects with tongues long enough to—to—fer—fertilize—I think he called it the blossoms. But mice eat bumble-bees and cats eat mice and old maids keep cats. So your Uncle Roger says the more old maids the more cats, and the more cats the fewer field-mice, and the ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... entomology, or else one afflicted with a combination of myopy and bulimy. Even now there is room for plenty of improvement in our counterfeit presentment; but in those days the body was made with yellow mohair, ribbed with red silk and gold twist, and as thick as a fertile bumble-bee. John Pike perceived that to offer such a thing to Crocker's trout would probably consign him—even if his great stamina should over-get the horror—to an uneatable death, through just and natural indignation. On the other hand, while ...
— Crocker's Hole - From "Slain By The Doones" By R. D. Blackmore • R. D. Blackmore
... BUMBLE will ope his eyes, egad, In hutter consternation. He'd think as soon of a park-prad For covies in my station. Our Board o' Works knows wot is wot, And has a feller-feeling. About the parish must I trot? No, hang ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 6, 1892 • Various
... trait upon trait, must be laid in the lives of the children," said Mr. Goodloe, slowly, and he smiled as across from the Little House came wee Susan's exquisite treble in a waltz song which was backed up by Mother Spurlock's bumble and Charlotte's none too accurate accompaniment. And we ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... into winter-quarters by or before this time; the bumble-bee, hornet, and wasp. But here only royalty escapes; the queen-mother alone foresees the night of winter coming and the morning of spring beyond. The rest of the tribe try gypsying for a while, but perish in the first frosts. The present October I surprised the queen of the yellow-jackets ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... Fan's tail never flew around like that, even when she got in the bumble-bee's nest," ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... snow-flakes, yet stung his cheeks like sparks of fire. Not only did he see and feel, he could even hear it now: his ears were filled with a humming sound, growing louder and louder every minute, like the noise made by a large colony of bumble-bees when a person carelessly treads on their nest, and they are angered and thrown into a great commotion and swarm out to defend their home. Very soon out of this confused murmur louder, clearer sounds began to rise; and these could ...
— A Little Boy Lost • Hudson, W. H.
... jog On with a kind King Log. But in the fulness of the time, there came A would-be monarch—Legion his fit name; A Plebs-appointed Autocrat, Stork-throated, Goggle-eyed, Paul-Pry-coated; A poking, peering, pompous, petty creature, A Bumble-King, with beak for its chief feature. This new King Stork, With a fierce, fussy appetite for work; Not satisfied with fixing like a vice Authority on Town and Country Mice, Tried to extend his sway to pools and ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 21, 1891 • Various
... hands, a file or a gimlet, and a bit of tobacco, are as likely to pass as not. That warder can see every thing, my dear young Sir; but he can no more hear what we say than he can understand what a couple of bumble-bees are murmuring about who are barred up in a double window. We can therefore converse with one another as much without reserve as we please, or rather"—and here the little man's eyes twinkled significantly—"as you please. What I hear from a client in this ridiculous ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... birds sought of these plants, for goldfinches were darting around inviting all creation to "See me?" as they gathered the silken down for nest lining. Over the sweetly perfumed purple heads, the humming-birds held high carnival on Sunshine Hillside all the day. The honey and bumble bees fled at the birds' approach, but what were these others, numerous everywhere, that clung to the blooms, greedily thrusting their red noses between the petals, and giving ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter
... the most joyful season of the year? It is then that the spring bonnet of the workaday world crosses the earth's orbit and makes the bank account of the husband and father look fatigued. The low shoe and the low hum of the bumble-bee are again with us. The little striped hornet heats his nose with a spirit lamp and goes forth searching for the man with the linen pantaloons. All nature is full of life and activity. So is the man with the linen pantaloons. Anon, the thrush will sing in the ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... and the frogs, toads, lizards, and snakes. Also with the wild bees and wasps. One season I made a collection of bumblebee honey, studying the habits of five or six different kinds and rifling their nests. I kept my store of bumble-bee honey in the attic where I had a small box full of the comb and a large phial filled with the honey. How well I came to know the different dispositions of the various kinds—the small red-vested that made its nest in a hole in the ground; ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... in the pantry hastily devouring onions and beefsteak. To be hungry is so vulgar! One should live by nothing grosser than inhalation, and should never have an appetite greater than that of a healthy bumble-bee. But, thanks to the robust, latter-day theory, that the best saints have the best bodies, this puerile class is diminishing. For who can doubt that the senses are entitled to their full blossom? Gustation was meant to be delightful; and cooking is certainly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... over the discomfiture of the constables. No sooner had they departed down the flagged path than back flitted the bevy of girls again into the study, until the small room was full to overflowing. It was like seeing a company of fat bumble-bees, their portly bodies resplendent in black and gold, buzz heavily out of a room, and a gay flight of pale-blue and lemon butterflies flit back in their places. All the daughters fell upon their father, Margaret, Bridget, Isabel, Sarah, Mary, and Susanna; there they all ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... Ned, a mare and a colt. Fine hacks they were, too! Anybody could ride them, they were so quiet. Dad reckoned Ned was the better of the two. He was well-bred, and had a pedigree and a gentle disposition, and a bald-face, and a bumble-foot, and a raw wither, and a sore back that gave him a habit of "flinching"—a habit that discounted his uselessness a great deal, because, when we were n't at home, the women could n't saddle him to run the cows in. Whenever he saw the saddle or heard the girth-buckles ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... did happen, but there was no knowing what joyful day might bring a new sensation. Sometimes there was a dog-fight. Once—thrilling recollection!—Ozias Brisket's horse had run away ("Think 't 's likely a bumble-bee must ha' stung him; couldn't nothin' else ha' stirred him out of a walk, haw! haw!") and had scattered the joints of meat ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... scarcely reached the height of the audacity of these reporters in 1867. Like Mr. Bumble, the Serjeant-at-Arms of the day literally ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... to mix with coxcombs like Ripple, (here the Queen frowned, and Ripple, who was just behind him, made a grimace,) I went to one of the mushroom tables, and sat down to finish my memorial regarding the loan for the hospital for sick bumble-bees, when this torment of a Slyboots comes up, and looking over my shoulder, exclaims, 'What! my lord; surely you are not going to stupefy the Queen with the odious sick bumble-bee memorial to-night, are ...
— The Fairy Nightcaps • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... bunched his thick lips together like the stem-end of a tomato and shot a bumble-bee dead that had lit on a weed seven feet away. One after another the several chewers expressed a charge of tobacco juice and delivered it at the deceased with steady, aim ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 1. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... Comic Histories, Comic Geographies, and Comic Grammars, but a Comic Bible would horrify us. At sight of such blasphemy Bumble would stand aghast, and Mrs. Grundy would scream with terror. But Bumble and Mrs. Grundy are less important personages in France, and so the country of Rabelais and Voltaire produces what we are unable ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... bright worsted, hangs from the middle of the low ceiling; and hung against the wall, between two glaring woodcuts representing "Lady Caroline" in red and "Highland Mary" in blue, is a deep frame filled with worsted flowers, to which a butterfly and a bumble-bee have been pinned. Paper lacework depends from their kitchen-shelves, and common eggshells, artificially colored, decorate the lilac-bushes in the side yard. They are always making new mats or piecing quilts in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... making use of its venomous sting, except when it is seized and handled. Many other Hymenoptera, honey-gatherers or hunters, are quite as spiritless; and I can assert to-day, after a long experience, that only the Social Hymenoptera, the Hive-bees, the Common Wasps and the Bumble-bees, know how to devise a common defence; and only they dare fall singly upon the aggressor, to wreak an ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... Borrow's experience was very convincing. I have known people who "have gone where money was" and have fallen honestly and rapturously into love, but you have got to be very sure that money in such a case is not the motive. If it is the penalty never fails to follow. Mr. Bumble married Mrs. Corney for "six teaspoons, a pair of sugar tongs, and a milk-pot, with a small quantity of secondhand furniture and twenty pounds in money." And in two months he regretted his bargain and admitted that he had gone "dirt cheap." "Only two months to-morrow," ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... "You've birthed another promotional bumble, Roger. I can see it in your eyes. I only hope it's not as big a one as when you put the Martian ambassador on 3D and he thanked you profusely for the gross of Puffyloaves, assuring you that he'd never slept on a softer mattress in all ...
— Bread Overhead • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... scene of action, where the school children, and some of the idlest or most good-natured of Mrs. Alwynn's friends, were even then assembling, and where Mrs. Alwynn herself was already dashing from point to point, buzzing like a large "bumble" bee. ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... of certain time- honoured conventions and principles. Ajax said with reason that Johnnie Kapus, the nephew of our neighbour, old man Kapus, played the game of life in such a sorry, blundering fashion that he marvelled why his uncle gave him house-room. Ajax christened Johnnie—Bumble-puppy. ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... limited in its scenes and characters than any other novel he wrote, excepting "Hard Times" and "Great Expectations." But the description of the workhouse, its inmates and governors, is done in Dickens's best style, and was a frontal attack on the Poor Law administration of the time. Bumble, indeed, has passed into common use as the typical workhouse official of the least satisfactory sort. No less powerful than the picture of Oliver's wretched childhood is the description of the thieves' kitchen, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... lose your head." My most favourite form of literature, I may remark, is accounts of mountaineering exploits, though I have never seen a glacier or a permanent snow mountain in my life. I do not care a row of pins how badly they may be written, and what form of bumble-puppy grammar and composition is employed, as long as the writer will walk along the edge of a precipice with a sheer fall of thousands of feet on one side and a sheer wall on the other; or better still crawl ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... I started to say. I wanted to tell you how the least thing distracts me nowadays from my duty to the Sadhana. In my last letter[1] I told you of the bumble-bees which hover round me in some fruitless quest, to the tune of a ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... to the Rose order of plants. It has long been esteemed for its bark and leaves as a [54] capital astringent, these containing much tannin; also for its fruit, which is supplied with malic and citric acids, pectin, and albumen. Blackberries go often by the name of "bumblekites," from "bumble," the cry of the bittern, and kyte, a Scotch word for belly; the name bumblekite being applied, says Dr. Prior, "from the rumbling and bumbling caused in the bellies of children who eat the fruit too greedily." "Rubus" is ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... (Of course women are all alike!) While Osborne, like a good-natured bumble-bee, was buzzing noisily about, as though all the world were his clover-blossom; and Allen, so far as I know, was doing nothing; M. Godin, alert and keen despite his gentleness and a modesty which kept him for the most part unobtrusively in the shadow ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... hens cackling and calling to their chickens. I thought I heard our dog bark; but all was so warm, and still, and sleepy, that I felt as if I should go to sleep too if I kept my eyes shut much longer. I heard the birds though, and a great bumble-bee that flew by when our eyes ...
— Woodside - or, Look, Listen, and Learn. • Caroline Hadley
... workshop the light was like a golden river, streaming down between the two rows of houses, and always in the same direction, down to the sea. Then a speck of white down came floating on the air, followed by whitish-gray thistle-seeds, and a whole swarm of gnats, and a big broad bumble-bee swung to and fro. All these eddied, gleaming, in the open doorway, and they went on circling as though there was something there which attracted them all—doubtless an accident, or perhaps ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... ball of kyarpet-rags never does come down no-more! An' it's all done as easy as a set-lock rifle! The wizard climbs the danglin' string of kyarpet-rags, hand over hand; then he drifts off an' up'ards ontil he don't look bigger than a bumble-bee; an' then he's lost in the gatherin' shadows ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... his hindlegs and snatch and grab until he secured them. Then he would sit up and scratch himself like a dog. He would allow me to take him up in my hands and stroke him, and yet not retire into his bristly shell. He ate a dozen worms and a bumble-bee straight off the reel, and then with all the gluttony of the pig tribe he went searching about for more food. I noticed that he ate the grass, in the same way as dogs do, for medicinal purposes. We put ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... That's a capital notion! Drat them and their "statutes" and "digests"! "Convenience of reference." Ah! that is one of their imperent sly jests. Removal of Noosances? Yah! If we started on that lay perniskers There is more than a few in the Westries 'ud feel suthin' singein' their wiskers, Or BUMBLE'S a Dutchman. Their Circ'lar—it's mighty obliging—defines 'em, The Noosances namely; I wonder if parties read Circ'lars as signs 'em, If so, Local Government Boarders must be most oncommonly knowin', ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... sufficient occupation. A hen laid an egg outside and began to cackle—it was an event of magnitude; a peasant sharpening his scythe, a blacksmith hammering at his anvil, the clack of a wooden shoe upon the pavement, the boom of a bumble-bee, the dripping of the fountain, all these things, with such concert as they kept, invited the dewy-feathered sleep that visited him, and held him for the best part ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... the parish boy's progress, that she took his history into her bedroom (where it was discovered, under Blatherwick's Voice from Mesopotamia, by her ladyship's maid), and that Kew laughed so immensely at Mr. Bumble, the Beadle, as to endanger the ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the shrillest of voices; a gnat seemed to be chiming in with the voice. Now it ceased, but the gnat still squeaked on; athwart the energetic, insistently-plaintive buzzing of the flies resounded the booming of a fat bumble-bee, which kept bumping its head against the ceiling; a cock on the road began to crow, hoarsely prolonging the last note; a peasant cart rumbled past; the gate toward the village creaked. "Well?" suddenly quavered a woman's voice.—"Okh, thou my dear little sweetheart," said Anton to ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... to give instances of what was expected of him; and his thick voice drowsed in the still air like the obstinate droning of an enormous bumble-bee. Captain Whalley did not know what was the force or the weakness that prevented him from saying good-night and walking away. It was as though he had been too tired to make the effort. How queer. More queer than any of Ned's instances. Or was it that ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... stores it in the hive, is one of the most fascinating of stories, as good as a fairy tale. In connection with this comes very naturally the story of the bees and the pollen. The child will be delighted to learn that the bees collect pollen as well as honey; that the honey bees and bumble-bees have baskets on their legs on purpose to carry it home; that they knead it up with honey and make it into what ...
— The Renewal of Life; How and When to Tell the Story to the Young • Margaret Warner Morley
... fancy to the song and remembered it after in London, and whenever it came to his mind it made him think of evenings—the kind you don't get in London—and he heard a soft wind going idly over the moor and the bumble-bees in a hurry, and forgot the noise of the traffic. And always, whenever he heard men speak of Time, he grudged to Time most this song. Once afterwards he went to that Northern moor again and found the tiny valley, but there was no old woman in the ...
— Tales of Wonder • Lord Dunsany
... so far without one. Did I have one on the Miele? And yet I was the only woman on board. There are only three things I am afraid of—bumble-bees, scarlet fever, and chaperones. Ugh! the clucking, evil-minded monsters, finding wrong in everything, seeing sin in the most innocent actions, and suggesting sin—yes, causing sin—by their ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... at each fresh gust to blow their nests to pieces. Small birds of half a dozen kinds were also there, and one tinkle-tinkled his spring song quite merrily in spite of the cold that kept the others silent and made me blue. One day I spied a big queen bumble-bee on the ground, looking extremely conspicuous in its black and chestnut coat on the fresh green sward; and thinking it numbed by the cold I picked it up. It moved its legs feebly, but alas! its enemy had found and struck it down, and with its hard, sharp little beak had drilled a hole in one ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... the distant shores of Portugal. From here the signals are sent that give notice of arriving ships. Beneath the cliffs rises out of the sea that strange black crag, looking like a projecting pulpit, which is known as the Bumble Rock. In the green sward above the cliffs a yawning gulf opens its rocky mouth, and is called the Lion's Den. It terminates in a rocky tunnel which communicates with the sea through a natural archway. This was a cavern, the rocky roof ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... directed, And likewise have as many more dissected, And I never met a gravedigger who to me objected. If a man gets nineteen bees in his bonnet, I'll cast twenty of 'em out. I've got in my pocket crutches for lame ducks, spectacles for blind bumble-bees, pack-saddles and panniers for grasshoppers, and many other needful things. Surely I can cure this poor man. Here, Slasher, take a little out of my bottle, and let it run down thy throttle; and if thou beest not quite slain, ...
— The Peace Egg and Other tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... useful when plunging through brambles in the forest, felt rather heavy, and he wished himself a boy again. He was too much exhausted to take the trouble of cutting any fern or seeking for moss, but just threw himself down under a tree, when exactly above his head he heard a great buzzing as a bumble-bee alighted on a honeysuckle branch. 'What are you doing here?' asked the bee in a cross voice; 'at your age you ought to ...
— The Brown Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... tripped, Where the dandelions dipped In crimson foam of clover bloom And dripped and dripped and dripped! And they clinched the bumble-stings, Gauming honey on their wings, And bundling them in ...
— Riley Child-Rhymes • James Whitcomb Riley
... it is a couple of miles from many cottages. I do not let the great dogs swim in the canal, because the people have to drink of it. But when they get into the Medway it is hard to get them out again. The other day Bumble (the son, Newfoundland dog) got into difficulties among some floating timber, and became frightened. Don (the father) was standing by me, shaking off the wet and looking on carelessly, when all of a sudden ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... is there like it? Has a church-bell any tone approximating it even? Has a violin? Has a hautboy? Has a French horn? Has a jew's-harp? Ay, that's the thing! A Jew's-harp has something like it; and so—so has a bumble-bee. A thought strikes me! It is possible that Zounds and Sounds are—Yes,' said I, rising and shouting with the excitement, 'Zounds and Sounds are bumble-bees!—bumble-bees curiously prepared; gathered ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... could sing nothing But fiddle cum fee, The mouse has married The bumble-bee; Pipe, cat; dance, mouse: We'll have a wedding At ...
— Pinafore Palace • Various
... jovially to church arm in arm with the pretty cause of all this beneficent disturbance. And the spectacle is mighty taking and commendable; but you'll excuse me for holding that it is not Love. It bears about the same relation to Love that Bumble-puppy bears to good whist. Among the eccentricities that make up the Average Man I find none more diverting than his complacent belief that he is, or has been, or will certainly some day be, in love. As a matter of fact, ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... feet, short feet, broad feet, splay feet, club feet, and bumble feet, to which may be added cloven feet in the case of certain animals, and ...
— The Comic Latin Grammar - A new and facetious introduction to the Latin tongue • Percival Leigh
... quill-pens, wax, matches, sealing-wax, and all scrupulously neat and orderly. There are magnificent specimens of Newfoundland dogs on the grounds, such animals as Landseer would love to paint. One of these, named Bumble, seems to be ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... their sympathy is quickly influenced by the example of those around them. Mrs. Howard led the traveller to speak of what he had seen in different countries—of natural history—of the beaver, and the moose-deer, and the humming-bird, that is scarcely larger than a bumble bee; and the mocking-bird, that can imitate the notes of all other birds. Charles niched himself into a corner of the sofa upon which the gentlemen were sitting, and grew very attentive. He was rather surprised ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... His work is not merely that of administration, manifold and laborious as its duties are. He must have a quick intelligence and a retentive memory. He is a public carrier of knowledge in its germs. His office is like that which naturalists attribute to the bumble-bee,—he lays up little honey for himself, but he conveys the fertilizing pollen ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... she worked; no lover lent His aid; and yet with glee At dusk she sought her home, content, That beauteous Bumble Bee. ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... a large stock yet in reserve, and I think, papa, that I'll ask Bob and Bumble to visit me for ...
— Patty at Home • Carolyn Wells
... besides, to the Crumpetty Tree Came the Stork, the Duck, and the Owl; The Snail and the Bumble-Bee, The Frog and the Fimble Fowl (The Fimble Fowl, with a Corkscrew leg); And all of them said, "We humbly beg We may build our homes on your lovely Hat,— Mr. Quangle Wangle, grant us ...
— Nonsense Books • Edward Lear
... orthodoxy; Whereby—if folks was wise—instead of either of them Scholars, And straining their own lungs along of contradictious hollers, They'll lend their ears to reason, and take my advice as follers, Namely—Bumble for the Chairman ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... in the world, as indeed he had. He was feeling very good-natured, was Jimmy Skunk. And why shouldn't he? There was everything to make him feel good-natured. Summer had arrived to stay. On every side he heard glad voices. Bumble the Bee was humming a song. Best of all, Jimmy had found three beetles that very morning, and he knew that there were more if he could find them. So why shouldn't he ...
— The Adventures of Old Mr. Toad • Thornton W. Burgess
... down to that dress-maker's house, and handed the square paper cousin had written on to a lady who was fluttering round among a lot of girls, all hard at work sewing, like bumble-bees in ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... vividly presented in The dependent Scholar—the indigent learned Greek who looks about for a rich vulgar Roman to buy his company, and finds he has the worst of the bargain. His successors, the 'trencher chaplains' who 'from grasshoppers turn bumble-bees and wasps, plain parasites, and make the Muses mules, to satisfy their hunger-starved panches, and get a meal's meat,' were commoner in Burton's days than in our own, and are to be met in Fielding, and Macaulay, ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... and abdomen are yellow incircled with transverse rings of black, they are ferce and sting very severely, we found them troublesome in frightening our horses as we passed those mountains. the honey bee is not found here. the bumble bee is. one of the men brought me today some onions from the high plain of a different speceis from those near the borders of the river as they are also from the shive or small onion noticed below the falls of ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... popular prices, A clever Cook, and oh! such whopping slices! What wonder then that customers are clamorous, That appetites, of good cheap victuals amorous, Sharpen at sight of that big toothsome joint? The carver does not wish to disappoint; He is no Union Bumble, stingy, truculent, He knows his dish is savoury and succulent, That "Cut and Come again's" a pleasant motto, But deal out "portions" all this hungry lot to? Amphitryon feels the thing cannot be done, Though he should slice the saddle to the bone ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, 19 April 1890 • Various
... must give you a new name," said the little old woman; "but first tell me,"—and she grew very serious, and her little sharp eyes changed color,—"first tell me how you happened to be here, in the very heart of Fairy-land, with nobody to take care of you, and not so much as a wasp or a bumble-bee to watch over you ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... liked in the good things, and assured their anxious guardian that he had chosen the lunch expressly from the point of view of suitability for the delicate digestions of children. And he laid down the maxim that appetite was the safest guide in the world, and when it said "More" no one but a Bumble ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... [Transcriber's note: bumble-bee?] voice of the crowd below the windows watching Volney Sprague's bulletin suddenly lifted in a lion roar. Elation in that quarter was ominous, and Shelby drew a curtain. It appeared that a minor revolt against the Boss in New York City, with ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... one-room 'ouse in our white folkses' back yard. Us had a white teacher and all he larnt slave chillun was jus' plain readin' and writin'. I had to pass Dr. Willingham's office lots and he was all de time pesterin' me 'bout spellin'. One day he stopped me and axed me if I could spell 'bumble bee widout its tail,' and he said dat when I larnt to spell it, he would gimme some candy. Mr. Sanders, at Lexin'ton, gimme a dime onct. It was de fust money I ever had. I was plumb rich and I never ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Georgia Narratives, Part 4 • Works Projects Administration
... was alone until he began to back the team to rush the hill once more. Then he heard angry exclamations coming from the rear of the wagon—exclamations which sounded not unlike the buzzing of an enraged bumble-bee. He stretched his neck and saw that which suggested an overgrown hoop-snake rolling down the hill. At the bottom a little mud-coated man stood up. The part of his face that was visible above his beard was pale with anger. His brown eyes gleamed ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... something directly in front of him. He does not seem to be a boy given to day-dreaming, and he is much too active to sit still a long time. It must be something very interesting which awakens his curiosity. Perhaps a bumble-bee, buzzing in and out the bell-shaped blossoms of some sweet wild flower, catches his eye, and he almost holds his breath ...
— Sir Joshua Reynolds - A Collection of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... ridge pole, and from half an inch to two inches deep! Every pack was black with them on the march, and the wagon carried its millions. When the shadow of a branch would cross that slowly lumbering vehicle, the swarm would rise and bumble around distractedly for a moment before settling down again. They fairly made a ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... Nature which repeats, in families widely different, organs of similar form, though perhaps of by no means similar use; nay, sometimes (as in those beautiful clear-wing hawk-moths which you, as they hover round the rhododendrons, mistake for bumble-bees) repeats the outward form of a whole animal, for no conceivable reason save her - shall we not say honestly His? - ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... Playing bumble-puppy with Minnie Beebe, niece to the rector, and aged thirteen—an ancient and most honourable game, which consists in striking tennis-balls high into the air, so that they fall over the net and immoderately bounce; some hit Mrs. Honeychurch; others are lost. The ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... and redecorating, she was busy as a bumble-bee. As the mistress of a big garden and a real kitchen she invited all her Chicago friends to come and share her good fortune. She was filled with the spirit of ownership and exulted over the four-acre patch as if it were a noble ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... cat came fiddling out of a barn. With a pair of bag-pipes under her arm: She could sing nothing but fiddle cum fee, The mouse has married the bumble-bee; Pipe, cat—dance, mouse, We'll have a wedding at ...
— The Little Mother Goose • Anonymous
... life. Around the clearing stood young firs and pines, as shiny as metal, and so motionless that the drops which still hung here and there on their needles seemed frozen. Everything was motionless under this yellow light, the grass-blades, the moss-blossoms, and the little blue butterflies, and a bumble-bee crawled into the bell of a bennet and hung there as if enchanted. In the thicket a fox drew near, his head lowered to sniff the ground, and suddenly he too stood still without stirring a muscle and stared into space, his eyes transparent as green glass, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... creatures was revealed. There were times when Noozak captured a whole family before they could escape. And to these were added frogs and toads, still partly somnambulent; many ants, curled up as if dead, in the heart of rotting logs; and occasional bumble-bees, wasps, and hornets. Now and then Neewa took a nibble at these things. On the third day Noozak uncovered a solid mass of hibernating vinegar ants as large as a man's two fists, and frozen solid. Neewa ate a quantity of these, and the sweet, vinegary flavour of them was delicious ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... Three in a row!— Billy Bumble, Benny Bell, and little Kitty Coe. Little Kitty sighs; Little Benny cries; And little Billy Bumble pokes his ...
— The Nursery, No. 103, July, 1875. Vol. XVIII. - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... supply electric power or interfere with transit, is accountable for much disheartening bungling. Instead of taking a clear line from the outset, and denouncing these glorified vestries as useless, impossible and entirely unscientific organs, too many Socialists tried to claim Bumble as their friend and use him as their tool. And Bumble turned out to be a very bad friend and ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... opened fire. Sent a bullet through the top of my hat. He's either a damn good shot or a damn poor one. I hung up both hands and yelled we was down and out. What could I do? This outfit couldn't a fit a bumble bee. And I couldn't git away, or git hold of no gun, or see anything to shoot, if I did. He was behind that ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... cross-grained, meddlin', bumble-bee-backed old hag of a soup-slopper; to come stickin' yer big nose into other people's kitchens! If there was a rale misthress to the house instead of the little gal upstairs, you'd be rowled down the front steps afore you'd been let come into ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton
... game was the apotheosis of bumble-puppy. Archibald, his partner, was much irritated ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... prayer book open upon the carved margin of the tomb, the slender crossed legs and paws of the alert little marble dog serving as so often before for bookrest. Canon Horniblow boomed and droned, like some unctuous giant bumble-bee, from the reading-desk. The choir intoned responses from the gallery with liberal diversity of pitch. And presently, alas! Damaris' thoughts began to wander, making flitting excursions right and left. For half-way through the litany some belated worshipper ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... not a fearful thing. Whatever had been in Faith's speech, her look, bright, wistful, and happy, had no fear, truly bumble though it was. "There is no danger of my loving this letter too much"—she said as she carefully restored it to its envelope; said with a secret utterance ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... wood-work of the room, is cut and carved with initial letters. So, likewise, are two tables, which, having received a coat of varnish over the inscriptions, form really curious and interesting articles of furniture. I have seldom (though I do not, personally adopt this mode of illustrating my bumble name) felt inclined to ridicule the natural impulse of most people thus to record themselves at the shrines ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... I'm going way out to Mars without much supplies. Maybe, before I get there, I'll have even ripe tomatoes! 'Cause, with sun all the time, the stuff grows like fury, they say. I'll have string beans and onions and flowers, anyhow! Helps keep the air oxygen-fresh, too. Wish I had a few bumble bees! 'Cause now I'll have to pollenate ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... not wear it when I sit Among the broadcloth'd heirs of BUMBLE! But Foreign Minister too humble ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 29, 1892 • Various
... to as made by a human being, the thing I saw so dimly might possibly not have been a lethal weapon (and if it was a weapon, what in Heaven's name could it be? I wondered); it might conceivably have been a large bird some distance off, just as by a reverse illusion men are said to have fired at bumble bees when grouse driving. Also, it was within the bounds of possibility that the tinkling stones might not have been thrown down by some one above in order to draw me under that face. Everything ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... perilous by a sea-covered stack of rocks lying to the southward. Before oil was introduced for the lamps it is said the lantern was lit by coal-fires—a kind of first-hand use of gas. Below the lighthouse is the striking Bumble Rock, and close to this the hollow known as the Lion's Den, formed by a natural sudden subsidence in 1847. This formation was an immediate object-lesson as to the manner in which these remarkable hollows, caverns, and rock-freaks have ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... period in the life of every child when he is especially susceptible to the "call of the fields;" when he roams through woods or by shady brooks gathering flowers, fishing for mud-cats and cleaning out bumble-bees' nests. It is often compared with the life of the savage and is merely the outward expression of an inward craving for a closer relation with nature and her creatures. If one can reach a child while at that age he has a ready listener and an apt pupil. ...
— An Elementary Study of Insects • Leonard Haseman
... friend of mine who had lived on the river near Clifton Hampden for some eight years, could only remember eight trout being caught in that time. I thought I was going to have one once. I was fishing for chub with a bumble bee, and a great spotted trout rose to it in a way which made me hope I was going to have a trophy to boast of for life. But he "rose short," and I saw him no more. I believe all the brooks which rise in the chalk hills of the Thames Valley ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... had ever done in making literature a power in the land. Thus, the man or the law that stands defiantly against public opinion is beaten the moment you make that man or that law look like a joke; and Dickens made a huge joke of the parish beadle (as Mr. Bumble) and of many another meddlesome British institution. Moreover, he was master of this paradox: that to cure misery you must meet it with a merry heart,—this is on the principle that what the poor need is not charity but comradeship. By ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... by her indignation the absurd Fyne dog began to bark in the porch. It might have been at a trespassing bumble-bee however. That animal was capable of any eccentricity. Fyne got up quickly and went out to him. I think he was glad to leave us alone to discuss that matter of his journey to London. A sort of anti-sentimental journey. He, too, apparently, had confidence in my sagacity. ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... the Bumble Bee Inn for tea. You needn't be a prig about it! Lots of really nice people go, and what's the harm?" She picked up her gloves and trailed to the door. "I suppose you'll ask who I was with next, and I sha'n't tell you, my dear. I'm ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... however, should not stop with the name of a plant. That is a mere beginning. Even slight attention will uncover many fascinating things in the lives of plants. Why cannot a farmer raise a good crop of clover-seed without the bumble-bees? What devices are there among the Orchids to bring about cross-pollination? (See "Our Native Orchids," by William Hamilton Gibson). Examine the flower of the wild Blue Flag, and see whether you can ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... minutes before he could find out what they were doing, but at last he discovered that they had found a bumble-bees' nest. They had long paddles in their hands and were running around, yelling, and waving the paddles frantically. Occasionally one of the boys screamed, and then several of the others would run toward him, all beating the air ...
— Hazel Squirrel and Other Stories • Howard B. Famous
... and help Colonel Bellairs not to make a fool of himself about the disputed right of way across his property where it joined Wentworth's own land. Colonel Bellairs always bungled into business matters of the simplest nature as a bumble bee bungles into a spider's web. For Colonel Bellairs to touch business of any kind was immediately to become hopelessly and inextricably involved in it, with much furious buzzing. His mere presence entangled ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... dell I sought a nook Beneath a thick and widely-spreading tree, And there I sat to con my little book, My book of old black-letter grammarie. All stillness in that deep and lonely dell Save hum of bumble-bee on nimble wing, Or zephyr sporting round the wild blue bell, While fancy feigned ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... scarcely a foot high, crouching close to the ground to escape being torn away by the furious winds that sweep over the land. There was none of the abundant life that we see around us in our fields and woods. A spider, a bumble-bee, and a poor little wanderer of a bird, were the only ...
— Harper's Young People, March 30, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... are broad and colored like the outer ones. Corresponding to the outer, perianth-segments are the three stamens and the three, petal-like divisions of the style, each bearing a transverse stigma immediately above the anther. They are pollinated by bumble-bees, and in some instances by flies of the genus Rhingia, which search for the honey, brush the pollen out of the anthers and afterwards deposit it on the stigma. According to systematic views of the monocotyledons the original prototype of the genus Iris must have had a ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... master of the situation, and he directed ten thousand bees under General Bumble, and another ten thousand wasps under Colonel Hornet, to fall on the robber and cruel Sigli and sting them to death. But this was hardly necessary, as the wriggling of their bodies so fixed them to the figure that ...
— Tales from the Lands of Nuts and Grapes - Spanish and Portuguese Folklore • Charles Sellers and Others
... as the great features of the place. Here, on the summit, where the stillness was absolute, unbroken by any sound, and the solitude complete, we thought ourselves beyond the region of animated life; but while we were sitting on the rock, a solitary bee (bromus, the bumble bee) came winging his flight from the eastern valley, and lit on the knee of one ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... ever have thought," says Preyer, "that the abundance and beauty of the pansy and of the clover were dependent upon the number of cats and owls But so it is. The clover and the pansy cannot exist without the bumble-bee, which, in search of his vegetable nectar, transports unconciously the pollen from the masculine to the feminine flower, a service which other insects perform only partially for these plants. Their existence therefore depends upon that of the bumble-bee. ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... their millions they have perished; but somewhere, coiled up, as it were, and sealed under the snow, there must have been the mothers and germs of the equally vast crowds that will fill the atmosphere this year. The great bumble-bee that shall be mother of hundreds, the yellow wasp that shall be mother of thousands, were hidden there somewhere. The food of the migrant birds that are coming from over sea was there dormant under the snow. Many nations have a tradition of a former ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... resisted a strong desire to catch and kiss the pretty baby, she scandalized her neighbours by laughing outright the next minute. A particularly portly, pious-looking priest, who was marching with superb dignity, and chanting like a devout bumble-bee, suddenly mislaid his temper, and injured the effect by boxing a charity boy's ears with his gilded missal, and then capped the climax by taking a pinch of snuff with a sonorous satisfaction that ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... and he wished himself a boy again. He was too much exhausted to take the trouble of cutting any fern or seeking for moss, but just threw himself down under a tree, when exactly above his head he heard a great buzzing as a bumble-bee alighted on a honeysuckle branch. 'What are you doing here?' asked the bee in a cross voice; 'at your age you ought to be ...
— The Brown Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... by some strange motive, he took the path over the Ridge again. It had been a long day and a wearing one. He had tried Hannibal once more; but his pupils cared less for Hannibal than for the bumble-bees droning in the window-frame. For some reason the dull routine of lessons had been duller than usual. The scholars had never been so stupid. Again and again the face that he had seen rest on his arm the day before came between him and his page, ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... ruffianism has an almost epic grandeur; and black-hearted Fagin, the Jew, receiver of stolen goods and trainer of youth in the way they should not go; and Master Dawkins, the Artful Dodger. Such, too, is Mr. Bumble, greatest and most ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... which are already growing tired, I succeeded in finding the said organ in the Bembex-wasps, the Halicti (Cf. Chapters 12 to 14 of the present volume.—Translator's Note.), the Carpenter-bees, the Bumble-bees, the Andrenae (A species of Burrowing Bees.—Translator's Note.) and the Megachiles. (Or Leaf-cutting Bees. Cf. Chapter 8 of the present volume.—Translator's Note.) I failed in the case of the Osmiae, the Chalicodomae and the Anthophorae. ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... lines in the press of business to tell you I am well, but very lonely, with a view out over the green, in this dull, rainy weather, while the bumble-bees hum and the sparrows twitter. Grand audience tomorrow. It's vexatious that I have to buy linen, towels, table-cloths, and sheets. * * * Farewell. Hearty love, and write! Your ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... thinking of making use of its venomous sting, except when it is seized and handled. Many other Hymenoptera, honey-gatherers or hunters, are quite as spiritless; and I can assert to-day, after a long experience, that only the Social Hymenoptera, the Hive-bees, the Common Wasps and the Bumble-bees, know how to devise a common defence; and only they dare fall singly upon the aggressor, to ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... forget that I wouldn't let you kiss me, won't you?" he answered as he drew back from the table and lit a cigarette after passing me the case. "Everybody calls me Buzz the Bumble Bee because of a historic encounter of mine with a whole nest of bumblebees right out here in the General's garden. It is a title of heroism and I'd like to have you use it as if we'd been kids together as we were ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess
... watched awhile. A timid animal world had come to life for the season. Little tadpoles and efts began to bubble up through the water, and to race along beneath it; toads made noises like very young ducks, and advanced to the margin in twos and threes; overhead, bumble-bees flew hither and thither in the thickening light, their drone coming and going like the ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... against the door-posts, and waiting to see if anything would happen! As a rule, nothing did happen, but there was no knowing what joyful day might bring a new sensation. Sometimes there was a dog-fight. Once—thrilling recollection!—Ozias Brisket's horse had run away ("Think 't 's likely a bumble-bee must ha' stung him; couldn't nothin' else ha' stirred him out of a walk, haw! haw!") and had scattered the joints of meat all about ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... driver was alone until he began to back the team to rush the hill once more. Then he heard angry exclamations coming from the rear of the wagon—exclamations which sounded not unlike the buzzing of an enraged bumble-bee. He stretched his neck and saw that which suggested an overgrown hoop-snake rolling down the hill. At the bottom a little mud-coated man stood up. The part of his face that was visible above his beard was pale with anger. His brown ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... strong desire to catch and kiss the pretty baby, she scandalized her neighbours by laughing outright the next minute. A particularly portly, pious-looking priest, who was marching with superb dignity, and chanting like a devout bumble-bee, suddenly mislaid his temper, and injured the effect by boxing a charity boy's ears with his gilded missal, and then capped the climax by taking a pinch of snuff with a sonorous satisfaction ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... mosquitoes. April 21st, Plover, two hawks, and a butterfly. April 22nd, Gulls, white waveys, robins. April 28th, White cranes. April 30th, Frogs, most of snow gone. May 2nd, Dark butterfly, four purple crocuses. May 4th, Frogs noisy, bumble bees. May 5th, Nearly clear of ice. May 8th, Water from Peace River flowing into lake. An Eagle. May 10th, Sand martins. Ice drifting in channel in front of fort. May 20th, Swans passing north. May 21st, Trees bursting into leaf. July 11th, Strawberries and raspberries. ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... before that, Seemed like I saw the march o' regiments o' children, Marching to the robin's fife and cricket's rat-ta-tat! Lily-banners overhead, with the dew upon 'em, On flashed the little army, as with sword and flame; Like the buzz o' bumble-wings, with the honey on 'em, Came an eerie, cheery chant, ...
— The Book of Joyous Children • James Whitcomb Riley
... out of a barn. With a pair of bag-pipes under her arm: She could sing nothing but fiddle cum fee, The mouse has married the bumble-bee; Pipe, cat—dance, mouse, We'll have a ...
— The Little Mother Goose • Anonymous
... little children, flocked into the building in a very short time, thronged about the bier, the black table, and Panna, who was leaning against it, carrying on a low, eager hum of conversation till it seemed as though countless swarms of bumble-bees ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... "digests"! "Convenience of reference." Ah! that is one of their imperent sly jests. Removal of Noosances? Yah! If we started on that lay perniskers There is more than a few in the Westries 'ud feel suthin' singein' their wiskers, Or BUMBLE'S a Dutchman. Their Circ'lar—it's mighty obliging—defines 'em, The Noosances namely; I wonder if parties read Circ'lars as signs 'em, If so, Local Government Boarders must be most oncommonly knowin', And I'd like to 'eave bricks ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... trying to bring Lyveden into smooth water. She had already earmarked a congenial billet at The Shrubbery, Hawthorne. The difficulty was to make Anthony apply for the post. Since Mrs. Bumble could hardly be advised to ask a footman to quit the service of the Marquess of Banff, Valerie, who was determined to remain incognito, had recourse to the Press. Her advertisement ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... Roses, and lilies fair, Birds in the trees, and the big bumble-bees, Shall welcome our ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, V. 5, April 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... and comings of an ant or the capricious flight of a bumble-bee; then with his eyes lost in space, immersed in the ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... plants. on the effects of slight differences of colour. on fertilisation of scarlet runner. on fossil maize in Peru. on fresh-water mollusks. on the bumble bee. on ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... church arm in arm with the pretty cause of all this beneficent disturbance. And the spectacle is mighty taking and commendable; but you'll excuse me for holding that it is not Love. It bears about the same relation to Love that Bumble-puppy bears to good whist. Among the eccentricities that make up the Average Man I find none more diverting than his complacent belief that he is, or has been, or will certainly some day be, in love. As a matter of fact, the capacity to love belongs to one man or woman in ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... the carters lashed and swore at them, the animals would not budge an inch until she permitted them to go. Here are a few of the common superstitions current in Berkshire. If a corpse be kept over a Sunday another death will occur before the week is out; should a big bumble-bee enter the window, a guest may be expected; and when the woodpecker, commonly called the yaffle, laughs, they say the rain is coming. When the thick mist lies in the valley, the people say it is the White Lady, a belief closely akin to the Dame Blanche, who is said in Normandy to haunt ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... in the evening. And the man had taken a fancy to the song and remembered it after in London, and whenever it came to his mind it made him think of evenings—the kind you don't get in London—and he heard a soft wind going idly over the moor and the bumble-bees in a hurry, and forgot the noise of the traffic. And always, whenever he heard men speak of Time, he grudged to Time most this song. Once afterwards he went to that Northern moor again and found the ...
— Tales of Wonder • Lord Dunsany
... Where the Little People are; Where the clover-tops are trees, And the rain-pools are the seas, And the leaves like little ships Sail about on tiny trips; And above the daisy tree Through the grasses, High o'erhead the Bumble Bee Hums and passes. In that forest to and fro I can wander, I can go; See the spider and the fly, And the ants go marching by Carrying parcels with their feet Down the green and grassy street I can in ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... variety of the game that comes her way. I see her accepting with equal readiness whatever chance may send her: Butterflies and Dragon-flies, Flies and Wasps, small Dung-beetles and Locusts. If I offer her a Mantis, a Bumble-bee, an Anoxia—the equivalent of the common Cockchafer—and other dishes probably unknown to her race, she accepts all and any, large and small, thin-skinned and horny-skinned, that which goes afoot and that which takes winged flight. She is omnivorous, ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... humble-bee [Transcriber's note: bumble-bee?] voice of the crowd below the windows watching Volney Sprague's bulletin suddenly lifted in a lion roar. Elation in that quarter was ominous, and Shelby drew a curtain. It appeared that a minor revolt against the Boss in New York ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... example to his order," and yet better than this stately panegyric is the happy accident, if it be one, that the poor flower girls of London have pitched their camp upon the steps, and have successfully defied all the efforts of Mr. Bumble to remove them. ...
— Great Testimony - against scientific cruelty • Stephen Coleridge
... Patty, "I certainly have most outspoken cousins! They don't seem to hesitate to tell me what to bring and what not to bring them. But I'm sure of one thing! Bumble Barlow won't be so fussy particular; she'll take whatever I bring ...
— Patty in Paris • Carolyn Wells
... oppressive afternoon that they would never be able to move again. Mr. Bob, Hinpoha's black cocker, shared in the prevailing laziness; he lay sprawled on his back with all four feet up in the air, breathing in panting gasps that shook his whole body. A bumble bee, blundering up on the porch, broke the spell. It lit on Mr. Bob's face, whereupon Mr. Bob sprang into the air, quivering with excitement, and knocked Hinpoha's glass out of her hand. Hinpoha picked up the pieces with one hand and patted Mr. Bob ...
— The Campfire Girls on Ellen's Isle - The Trail of the Seven Cedars • Hildegard G. Frey
... the outer ones. Corresponding to the outer, perianth-segments are the three stamens and the three, petal-like divisions of the style, each bearing a transverse stigma immediately above the anther. They are pollinated by bumble-bees, and in some instances by flies of the genus Rhingia, which search for the honey, brush the pollen out of the anthers and afterwards deposit it on the stigma. According to systematic views of the monocotyledons the original prototype of the genus Iris must have had a whorl of six equal, ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... to put Mrs. Wing down. Every one twittered and chirped, and made a great noise; but no one would give up, and all went to roost in a great state of uncertainty. But, the next day, it became evident that Mrs. Wing was right; for Major Bumble-bee came buzzing in to tell them that old Daddy Winter's hut was empty, and his white head had been seen in the sunny ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... his family's honor—all held the audience with a new sensation. As he pushed his palsied arms into his coat and pulled himself fairly off his feeble feet in his effort to button it, turned up to his door humming like a preying bumble-bee, faced slowly about again, his piercing little pink eyes darting with anticipation, and off the trembling old lips droned the telling speech: 'I wonder how his pretty little wife will bear poverty. H'm! We shall see'—the ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... the Lord y^e sicknes ceased. This disease allso swept away many of y^e Indeans from all y^e places near adjoyning; and y^e spring before, espetially all y^e month of May, ther was such a quantitie of a great sorte of flies, like (for bignes) to wasps, or bumble-bees, which came out of holes in y^e ground, and replenished all y^e woods, and eate y^e green-things, and made such a constante yelling noyes, as made all y^e woods ring of them, and ready to deafe y^e hearers. They have not by y^e English been heard or seen before or since. But y^e ...
— Bradford's History of 'Plimoth Plantation' • William Bradford
... rendered sober-minded by any such thing. In the midst of Gerald's instructive account of the holy abbot's endeavors to purify the monastic orders from the stain of simony, her hand clutched his, and doing a delicate cake-walk she compelled him along with her, announcing, "The Hornet and the Bumble-bee went walking hand in hand!" Fancying this prank not to have been without success, she next performed an improvised pas seul illustrative of the text, "The mountains shall skip ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... of awakening spring in the garden seemed to be an endless source of pleasure to the girl; she would sit for hours looking at the pale lilac-tinted wistaria clusters hanging over the naked wall and watching plundering bumble-bees scrambling from blossom ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... and so he hurried on, trying to find a place where he would be left in peace. But nowhere that he could go was he free from those taunting voices. Not even when he had crawled into his house was he free from them, for buzzing around his doorway was Bumble Bee and Bumble ...
— The Adventures of Prickly Porky • Thornton W. Burgess
... institutions been portrayed! How have the poor-house, the jail, the police courts of justice, passed before his magic mirror, and displayed to us the petty tyranny of the low-minded official, from the magnificent Mr. Bumble, and the hard-hearted Mr. Roker, to the authoritative Justice Fang, the positive Judge Starleigh! And as we contemplate them, how strongly have we realized the time-worn evils of some of the systems they revealed to our ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... small point and detail in his surroundings became suddenly magnified to his sight,—even the little rose in old Josey Letherbarrow's smock caught his eye with an almost obtrusive flare. The blithe soft carol of the birds outside sounded close and loud,— the buzzing of a bumble-bee that had found its way into the church and was now bouncing fussily against a sunlit window, in its efforts to pass through what seemed to itself clear space, made quite an abnormal noise. His heart beat heavily,—he fancied he could hear it thudding in his breast,—then, all at once, ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... air. First like the drone of a huge bumble-bee, it gradually increased in intensity. The ranchers strained their eyes toward the east, where the copper tint had merged to a sickly green. A light breeze ...
— The Boy Ranchers on Roaring River - or Diamond X and the Chinese Smugglers • Willard F. Baker
... river, streaming down between the two rows of houses, and always in the same direction, down to the sea. Then a speck of white down came floating on the air, followed by whitish-gray thistle-seeds, and a whole swarm of gnats, and a big broad bumble-bee swung to and fro. All these eddied, gleaming, in the open doorway, and they went on circling as though there was something there which attracted them all—doubtless an accident, ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... Quinny!" said Gilbert. "I won't call you 'sloppy' again because I'm tired of telling you that, but really that's what you are. You've only got to see a beautiful woman for a couple of seconds and you start buzzing round her like a bumble bee. Of course, I'm sloppy myself. We're all sloppy. Damn it, here we are, two healthy young fellows who ought to be working hard, and we're wasting a fine ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... There are plenty of men now who would wear dog-harness if they thought they could work more in it. I know another man who walks away out into the country every Sunday: not that he likes the country—he wouldn't recognize a bumble bee if he saw it—but he claims that if he walks on Sunday his head is as clear as a bell ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... This engagement we called the capture of fort "Hell." For some time thereafter we made regular raids into the surrounding country in quest of an enemy. We were eventually successful in our quest, as in quick order we ran across and captured a company of bumble bees. This we called the "Battle of the Wilderness." Victory over a nest of hornets we called the capture of "Fort Sumter." A large nest of wasps gave us perhaps the hardest fight of our campaigning. This we ran across in the fields not far from home. There was an unusually large number of them, ...
— The Life and Adventures of Nat Love - Better Known in the Cattle Country as "Deadwood Dick" • Nat Love
... recipe were given her by an Indian woman. To make the Sudden Remedy, grandma got roots, herbs, barks, twigs, leaves, mints, moss, and tree gum. These were scraped, grated, or pounded; sifted, weighed, measured, stewed, and stirred; and the juice simmered down with the oil of juniper, and bumble-bees' wax, and various smarty, peppery, slippery things whose names must be kept private for a particular reason. The Sudden Remedy cured her instantly; and as meal was wanted, and no other person could be spared from the place, she offered ...
— Harper's Young People, February 10, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... Hagerstown, which developed a hornets' nest of sharpshooters armed with telescopic rifles, who could pick a man's ear off half-a-mile away. The bullets from their guns had a peculiar sound, something like the buzz of a bumble-bee, and the troopers' horses would stop, prick up their ears and gaze in the direction whence the hum of those invisible messengers could be heard. Unable to reach them mounted, we finally deployed dismounted ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd
... reckoned we had two saddle-horses—those were their names, Nell and Ned, a mare and a colt. Fine hacks they were, too! Anybody could ride them, they were so quiet. Dad reckoned Ned was the better of the two. He was well-bred, and had a pedigree and a gentle disposition, and a bald-face, and a bumble-foot, and a raw wither, and a sore back that gave him a habit of "flinching"—a habit that discounted his uselessness a great deal, because, when we were n't at home, the women could n't saddle him to run the cows in. Whenever he saw the saddle or heard ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... who betrayed me into this folly was a bumble of the utmost beauty. The bars of his coat "burned" as "brightly" as those of the tiger in Wombwell's menagerie, and his fur was softer than my mother's black velvet mantle. I knew, for I had kissed him lightly ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... discomfiture of the constables. No sooner had they departed down the flagged path than back flitted the bevy of girls again into the study, until the small room was full to overflowing. It was like seeing a company of fat bumble-bees, their portly bodies resplendent in black and gold, buzz heavily out of a room, and a gay flight of pale-blue and lemon butterflies flit back in their places. All the daughters fell upon their father, Margaret, Bridget, Isabel, Sarah, Mary, and Susanna; there they ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... alone in puns and conundrums that the social life of Brook Farm was rich. It was rich in cheerful buzz. The bumble-bees had no more melodious hum than the Brook Farmers. They had thrown aside the forms that bind outside humanity. They were sailing on a voyage of discovery, seeking a modern El Dorado, but they did not carry with them the lust for gold. They were seeking something ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... is nothing doing, he is still happy; waiting cheerfully upon events until they arrange themselves for his amusement. He will sit for twenty minutes opposite the garden bank, watching for a bumble-bee to come out of its hole. "I saw him go in," he says to himself, "so he's bound to come out. Extraordinarily interesting world." But to his inferiors (such as the gardener) he pretends that it is not pleasure but duty which keeps him. "Don't talk to me, fool. ...
— The Holiday Round • A. A. Milne
... pumpkin-pie?" echoed the maiden, giving me the terrible alternative in her most cutting tones; "Both!" I ejaculated, with equal distinctness, but, I believe, audacity unparalleled since the times of Twist. The female Bumble seemed to reel beneath the shock, and I noticed that after communicating her experience to her fellow waiting-woman, I was not thought of much account for the remainder ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... the hole of the bumble-bee. Weary with culling sweets from the lime-trees, the heather-bloom, the apple-blossom and the ivy-flower be had sought his humble couch. Suddenly great claws tear away his roof-tree. Red Head is at work. Bees and honey ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 17, 1914 • Various
... crime of eating, proportioning, with the most delicate skill, the exact amount of the punishment to the enormity of the offence. By his profound wisdom he has discovered that the great increase of crime in these countries is entirely attributable to over-feeding the multitude. Like the worthy Mr. Bumble, in "Oliver Twist," he protests "it is meat and not madness" that ails the people. He can even trace the origin of every felony to the particular kind of food in which the felon has indulged. He detects incipient incendiarism in eggs and fried bacon—homicide in an Irish stew—robbery and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... the example of those around them. Mrs. Howard led the traveller to speak of what he had seen in different countries—of natural history—of the beaver, and the moose-deer, and the humming-bird, that is scarcely larger than a bumble bee; and the mocking-bird, that can imitate the notes of all other birds. Charles niched himself into a corner of the sofa upon which the gentlemen were sitting, and grew very attentive. He was rather surprised to perceive that his tutor was as much ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... straw and bright worsted, hangs from the middle of the low ceiling; and hung against the wall, between two glaring woodcuts representing "Lady Caroline" in red and "Highland Mary" in blue, is a deep frame filled with worsted flowers, to which a butterfly and a bumble-bee have been pinned. Paper lacework depends from their kitchen-shelves, and common eggshells, artificially colored, decorate the lilac-bushes in the side yard. They are always making new mats or piecing ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... bowls he brims with honeycomb To feast the bumble bees, Saying, 'O bees, be this your home, For grief is on ...
— Songs of Childhood • Walter de la Mare
... it while there was enough to catch even a bumble-bee. The birds are back. They came directly I'd gone ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... in the handwriting of a fussy officious "bumble" friend of the wealthy man, who dwelt in the town of Covelly. It ...
— Saved by the Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... off, reclined upon his back with his face lifted to the sky. Where his head rested, the wild thyme grew, and one great, black bumble-bee boomed at a deaf ear as it clumsily struggled in the purple blossoms. He lay almost naturally, but some distortion of his neck and a film upon his open eyes proclaimed that the man ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... have one supreme and devastating study of the illiterate minor official in Bumble. That one figure lit up and still lights the whole problem of Poor Law administration for the English reading community. It was a translation of well-meant regulations and pseudo-scientific conceptions of social order into blundering, arrogant, ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... little, chatterin', sassy wren, No bigger'n my thumb, know more than men? Jest show me that! Ur prove't the bat Hez got more brains than's in my hat, An' I'll back down, an' not till then!" He argued further, "Nur I can't see What's the use o' wings to a bumble-bee, Fur to git a livin' with, more'n to me; Ain't my business Important's his'n is? That Icarus Made a perty muss: Him an' his daddy Daedalus They might 'a' knowed wings made o' wax Wouldn't stand sun-heat an' hard whacks. I'll make mine o' luther, ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... I lost the bees but I got the gentians. How curiously this flower looks, with its deep blue petals folded together so tightly—a bud and yet a blossom. It is the nun among our wild flowers, a form closely veiled and cloaked. The buccaneer bumble-bee sometimes tries to rifle it of its sweets. I have seen the blossom with the bee entombed in it. He had forced his way into the virgin corolla as if determined to know its secret, but he had never returned with the ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... last—for I never saw her again. But in proof that she loved me to the end, I was remembered in her will; and did I not believe that if living, her generous affection, that was the precious oil through which floated her eccentricities like "flies as big as bumble-bees," would smooth over all appearance of ridicule in these reminiscences, they should never amuse any one save myself. But really, I cannot better carry out her restless desire of pleasing others, than by reproducing the merriment which throughout a ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... clearing stood young firs and pines, as shiny as metal, and so motionless that the drops which still hung here and there on their needles seemed frozen. Everything was motionless under this yellow light, the grass-blades, the moss-blossoms, and the little blue butterflies, and a bumble-bee crawled into the bell of a bennet and hung there as if enchanted. In the thicket a fox drew near, his head lowered to sniff the ground, and suddenly he too stood still without stirring a muscle and stared into space, his eyes transparent as ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... tell what "phen-dubs" means? I can. Can you say all off by heart The "onery twoery ickery ann," Or tell "alleys" and "commons" apart? Can you fling a top, I would like to know, Till it hums like a bumble-bee? Can you make a kite yourself that will go 'Most as high as the eye can see, Till it sails and soars like a hawk on the wing, And the little birds come and ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various
... before he could find out what they were doing, but at last he discovered that they had found a bumble-bees' nest. They had long paddles in their hands and were running around, yelling, and waving the paddles frantically. Occasionally one of the boys screamed, and then several of the others would run toward him, all beating the air ...
— Hazel Squirrel and Other Stories • Howard B. Famous
... There is one of the elders whose eyes I have never caught while speaking, save once, and that was when I was preaching from Psalm cxiii. 12, 'They compassed me about like bees,' and by a strange coincidence a bumble-bee got into church, and I had my attention divided between my text and the annoying insect, which flew about like an illustration I could not catch. A dull Pew is often responsible for a dull Pulpit. Do not put ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... of Mice had eight Mouse babies in their nest. The babies were no larger than Bumble Bees at first and very pink. This was not because their fur was pink, but only because it was so very short that through it and their thin skin one saw the glow of the red blood in ...
— Among the Farmyard People • Clara Dillingham Pierson
... defiance of certain time- honoured conventions and principles. Ajax said with reason that Johnnie Kapus, the nephew of our neighbour, old man Kapus, played the game of life in such a sorry, blundering fashion that he marvelled why his uncle gave him house-room. Ajax christened Johnnie—Bumble-puppy. ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... grin she had seen on his face since Dakota Milt chuckled, "The Teal is a grand car for mountains. Aside from overheating, bum lights, thin upholstery, faulty ignition, tissue-paper brake-bands, and this-here special aviation engine, specially built for a bumble-bee, it's what the catalogues call a ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... the orchis, the "long purpled" of Shakespeare. By the margin of the pond the yellow iris hangs out its golden banners over which the dragon fly skims. The hedgerows are gay with the full-blown dog-roses, the bells of the bilberries droop down along the wood-side, and the red-hipped bumble bees hum over them. Out of the woodland and up Snaperake Lane I rise to the moorland, and then the sea coast comes in sight, and the longing to know what lies ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... the squirrels brought a present of wild honey; it was so sweet and sticky that they licked their fingers as they put it down upon the stone. They had stolen it out of a bumble BEES' nest on the tippity top ...
— The Great Big Treasury of Beatrix Potter • Beatrix Potter
... said that worthy. "Only my game is bumble-puppy. You can hardly call it whist. Who's ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... where in times of special risk, when incendiary fires were too common, the principal inhabitants took their turn in keeping watch. To find the Parish Beadle in the full-blown dignity of his office we must therefore go to the towns, to Royston for instance, where we shall find Mr. Bumble in all the stately pomp of cocked hat, great coat with a red cape, and gold lace, breeches and hose, and a staff with the royal authority of Georgius {53} Rex emblazoned thereon! A full figure, and an interesting character, worthy in every way of the old Georgian era; in a corporation, as ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... children could tell you the native names of all insects, such as caterpillars, crickets, cockroaches, grasshoppers, locusts, mantis, honey bees, bumble bees, wasps, hornets, yellow jackets, goliath beetles, stage beetles, ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... writing-materials, headed notepaper, envelopes, cut quill-pens, wax, matches, sealing-wax, and all scrupulously neat and orderly. There are magnificent specimens of Newfoundland dogs on the grounds, such animals as Landseer would love to paint. One of these, named Bumble, seems to be ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... resort, to clear the doubt, They got old GOVERNOR HANCOCK out. The Governor came with his Light-horse Troop And his mounted trackmen, all cock-a-hoop; Halberds glittered and colors flew, French horns whinnied and trumpets blew, The yellow fifes whistled between their teeth And the bumble-bee bass-drums boomed beneath; So he rode with all his band, Till the President met him, cap in hand. —The Governor "hefted" the crowns, and said,— "A will is a will, and the Parson's dead." The Governor ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... Bumble Bee Inn for tea. You needn't be a prig about it! Lots of really nice people go, and what's the harm?" She picked up her gloves and trailed to the door. "I suppose you'll ask who I was with next, and I sha'n't tell you, my dear. I'm bored to death doing the same old proper thing all the time! ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... gave, in subsequent writings, so much more perfect form and fullness to everything it contained, that he did not care to credit himself with the marvel of having yet so early anticipated so much. But the first sprightly runnings of his genius are undoubtedly here. Mr. Bumble is in the parish sketches, and Mr. Dawkins the dodger in the Old Bailey scenes. There is laughter and fun to excess, never misapplied; there are the minute points and shades of character, with all the discrimination and nicety of detail, afterwards so famous; there is everywhere ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... fearful thing. Whatever had been in Faith's speech, her look, bright, wistful, and happy, had no fear, truly bumble though it was. "There is no danger of my loving this letter too much"—she said as she carefully restored it to its envelope; said with a secret utterance of ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... the establishment, and found every thing as they had left it the night before. Rollo felt quite confident of the success of his experiment. The only thing that gave him any uneasiness was the want of a queen bee. He and Henry were just speculating upon the expediency of sending in a bumble-bee instead, for a king, when their attention was arrested by hearing Jonas calling Rollo. They looked up, and saw him standing ...
— Rollo's Experiments • Jacob Abbott
... noticed running across the path a tiny Book, not much bigger than a postage-stamp. It had two slender legs, like those of a bumble-bee, and upon these it ran so fast that all the leaves fluttered wildly, the ...
— Twinkle and Chubbins - Their Astonishing Adventures in Nature-Fairyland • L. Frank (Lyman Frank) Baum
... yellow as gold Sat perched on a red-clover top, When a grasshopper, wiry and old, Came along with a skip and a hop. "Good morrow" cried he, "Mr. Bumble Bee, You seem to have ...
— Graded Memory Selections • Various
... England have Comic Histories, Comic Geographies, and Comic Grammars, but a Comic Bible would horrify us. At sight of such blasphemy Bumble would stand aghast, and Mrs. Grundy would scream with terror. But Bumble and Mrs. Grundy are less important personages in France, and so the country of Rabelais and Voltaire produces what we are unable ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... habits of all the common birds, and with field mice and the frogs, toads, lizards, and snakes. Also with the wild bees and wasps. One season I made a collection of bumblebee honey, studying the habits of five or six different kinds and rifling their nests. I kept my store of bumble-bee honey in the attic where I had a small box full of the comb and a large phial filled with the honey. How well I came to know the different dispositions of the various kinds—the small red-vested that made its nest in a hole in the ground; the small black-vested, ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... further inland were little patches of dwarf birch, scarcely a foot high, crouching close to the ground to escape being torn away by the furious winds that sweep over the land. There was none of the abundant life that we see around us in our fields and woods. A spider, a bumble-bee, and a poor little wanderer of a bird, were the only living ...
— Harper's Young People, March 30, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... humble—of porterhouse steak and peas, and honey from bees that bumble, and maybe imported cheese—I think, with a bitter feeling, of insolent money kings, who, drunk with their wealth and reeling, condemn me to eat such things. The pirate and banknote monger still gloat o'er their golden stacks, while I must appease my hunger with oysters and canvasbacks. ...
— Rippling Rhymes • Walt Mason
... interest in it to me, but Baxter claimed the whole discovery as his own, saying he was out on his own hook when the mine was located, which was a falsehood. But though Baxter claimed the mine he could not locate it, nor could I do so. It was along a creek which a certain Jack Wumble had called Bumble Bee, but we could not locate this creek, and Jack Wumble had departed for fresh fields. But I have located the old miner, and he has told me that Bumble Bee Creek was in reality one of the south branches of the Gunnison River, ...
— The Rover Boys out West • Arthur M. Winfield
... and, I may say, supernat'ral exertions on the part of this parish," said BUMBLE, "we have not been able ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 10, 1891 • Various
... hands of the mistress of the poorhouse, who was named Mrs. Bumble. It contained the dead mother's wedding-ring, and, as Mrs. Bumble was a dishonest woman, she hid both locket and ring, ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... legal advisers; and in shaking hands, a file or a gimlet, and a bit of tobacco, are as likely to pass as not. That warder can see every thing, my dear young Sir; but he can no more hear what we say than he can understand what a couple of bumble-bees are murmuring about who are barred up in a double window. We can therefore converse with one another as much without reserve as we please, or rather"—and here the little man's eyes twinkled significantly—"as ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... went straight down to that dress-maker's house, and handed the square paper cousin had written on to a lady who was fluttering round among a lot of girls, all hard at work sewing, like bumble-bees in a rose-bush. ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... the same case, I looked another way while the two girls joined us, Theodora having for the moment directed my attention to a tremendously large queen bumble-bee which came booming along the ground and began burrowing in a little ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... says he looks so. The boys found a bumble bees' nest and Tubby didn't have any paddle to hit them with. So they all went for poor Tubby and they stung him so that his face is twice as big as ...
— Wyn's Camping Days - or, The Outing of the Go-Ahead Club • Amy Bell Marlowe
... inch to two inches deep! Every pack was black with them on the march, and the wagon carried its millions. When the shadow of a branch would cross that slowly lumbering vehicle, the swarm would rise and bumble around distractedly for a moment before settling down again. They fairly made a ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... of hiding myself, so resolved to run up one of the houses, and get in at the first window I found open, and trust to the temper of some little boy or girl, rather than starve. The house I chanced to ascend belonged to Alderman Bumble. I happened to enter the window of Miss Henrietta Bumble's chamber; so I crept into her cap, which was lying in a chair, and lay till she wanted to put it on. I chanced to lay in such a manner, that she distinguished ...
— The Adventures of a Squirrel, Supposed to be Related by Himself • Anonymous
... seven years old. Yesterday (April 14) I saw a butterfly in our yard. It was a blue-black with light spots. I tried to catch it, but couldn't. The same day I saw a bumble-bee. I have a shepherd dog named Punch, and when I go anywhere, he always squeals to go too. He is my best playmate, as I have no brothers or sisters. I think the Post-office Box in ...
— Harper's Young People, May 11, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... never does come down no-more! An' it's all done as easy as a set-lock rifle! The wizard climbs the danglin' string of kyarpet-rags, hand over hand; then he drifts off an' up'ards ontil he don't look bigger than a bumble-bee; an' then he's lost in the gatherin' shadows of the ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... in the fulness of the time, there came A would-be monarch—Legion his fit name; A Plebs-appointed Autocrat, Stork-throated, Goggle-eyed, Paul-Pry-coated; A poking, peering, pompous, petty creature, A Bumble-King, with beak for its chief feature. This new King Stork, With a fierce, fussy appetite for work; Not satisfied with fixing like a vice Authority on Town and Country Mice, Tried to extend his sway to pools and bogs, And rule the Frogs! But modern Frogdom, which ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 21, 1891 • Various
... there With yellow feathers instead of hair, And bumble bees crocheted in the trees— And bumble bees crocheted in the trees— And all the birds were ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... which at this season are hungry vagrants with no fixed place of abode, would gorge themselves, then creep beneath the bits of empty comb or fragments of bark and pass the night, and renew the feast next day. The bumble-bee is an insect of which the bee-hunter sees much. There are all sorts and sizes of them. They are dull and clumsy compared with the honeybee. Attracted in the fields by the bee-hunter's box, they will come up the wind on the scent and blunder ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... attend this gentleman," said the Queen. "Feed him with apricots and dewberries, purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries. Steal honey-bags for him from the bumble-bees, and with the wings of painted butterflies fan the moonbeams from his ...
— Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare • E. Nesbit
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