|
|
|
More "Spider's web" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in the canon? Well, in a day or so Pete would show the Mexican a trick with a large round hole in it—the hole representing the space recently occupied by one of his ponies. Incidentally Pete realized that he was getting deeper and deeper into the meshes of The Spider's web—and the thought spurred him to a keener vigilance. So far he had killed three men actually in self-defense. But when he met up with Malvey—and Pete promised himself that pleasure—he would not wait for Malvey to open ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... surely the one where the inhabitants purchased their fine clothing. He saw crowds of people standing before the little stalls where the merchants spread brocades, stiff satins, heavy gold cloth, shimmery velvet, delicate veiling, and laces as sheer as a spider's web. ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... much loftier and boasted no fire. Lanterns swung from the beams, throwing upwards bars of shadow that criss-crossed with the rafters and trembled slightly as the flames flickered, so that the whole roof seemed spun over by some gigantic spider's web, while the shadow-patterns thrown by the lanterns on to the floor below looked like great spiders dropped from the meshes. In this impalpable tangle sat the men and women—tenants of cottages, labourers, farm servants and their ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... night a spider has made its web from door-post to door-post, and that web is unbroken. If you do not believe me, come and see for yourself. Yet they say the woman came through the doorway and therefore through the spider's web. Oh! Baas, what is the use of wasting thought upon the ways of spooks which, like the wind, come and go as they will, especially in this haunted land from which, as we have all agreed, we should do ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... the spot of all others in that mountain country which most stirs the sthetic and the speculative strains within one. Lovely and remote, all by itself at the foot of a mountain, in a circle of the hills, an old monastery stands, now used as a farm, with one rose window, like a spider's web, spun delicate in stone tracery. There the old monks had gone to get away from the struggles of the main valley and the surges of the fighting men. There even now were traces of their peaceful life; the fish-ponds and the tillage still kept in cultivation. If they had ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... Gertrude at length caught a glimpse of the faint object, and soon succeeded in giving the true direction to the look of her governess also. Nothing was visible but the dim outline, not unaptly described by Wilder himself assembling a spider's web. ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... A spider's web blocks all mine avenue; He catches down and foolish painted flies, That spider wary and wise. Each morn it hangs a rainbow strung with dew Betwixt boughs green with sap, So fair, few creatures guess it ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... 'water shield' [of one of the Zuni War Gods], from which he shook the torrents, was suggested, no doubt, by dew on the web." (Ibid., p.425.) To one unfamiliar with the Indian's habit of mind it may seem strained to connect the beads of dew on a spider's web with the torrential rain, but to one familiar with native thought as expressed in myths where the Indian has dramatized his conceptions of nature and of natural forces and phenomena, the connection ...
— Indian Games and Dances with Native Songs • Alice C. Fletcher
... is thus changed,—has but six months more to live. He, who disregards the deities, or quarrels with the Brahmanas, or one, who, being naturally of a dark complexion becomes pale of hue, has but six months more to live. One, who sees the lunar disc to have many holes like a spider's web, or one, who sees the solar disc to have similar holes has but one week more to live. One, who, when smelling fragrant scents in place of worship, perceives them to be as offensive as the scent of corpses, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... dignity, his knowledge of men, and love of order and uprightness, he gave it that high place which it yet holds, and which it must hold; for when the decisions of the Supreme Court are questioned by a State or people, the fabric of our government is but a spider's web through which anarchy and ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... and Kana grew. Thus they strove, the bluff rising higher and Kana growing taller, until he became as the stalk of a banana leaf, and gradually spun himself out till he was no thicker than a strand of a spider's web, and at last he yielded the ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... it. There was a fountain; it was so snug and exotic that it seemed like a poem. There were the arches of the bridge; in them was the dim reflection of the water. There were two towers; they were as delicate as a spider's web. ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... patience and do our sweeping gently; and we shall be able to separate from the main body the fragments of a sort of extremely fine satin. This transparent, colourless material is the upholstery that keeps out the wet. The Spider's web, if it formed a stuff and not a net, is the only thing that could be ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... went over to the fence. In a bush beside the fence there was a big spider's web. Old Mrs. Ik-to the Black Spider had built the web as a trap to catch flies in. But this time there was something besides a fly in the trap. Ah-mo the Honey Bee had blundered, into the web and was trying hard ...
— The Magic Speech Flower - or Little Luke and His Animal Friends • Melvin Hix
... pale, little woman, with hair as soft and white as the delicate lace that fell like a spider's web over it. The child-like hands, which lay in relief among the folds of her black-satin dress, were withered in their whiteness, like the leaves of a frost-bitten lily. They were quivering, too; and now that she was alone, you might have ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... man, pausing, and looking at his wife, fixedly, while there sat upon his face an expression of terrible despair; "that pledge can never be renewed! It would be like binding a giant with a spider's web. I am lost! lost! lost! The eager, inexpressible desire that now burns within me, cannot be controlled. The effort to do so would drive me mad. I must drink, or die. And you, my poor wife!—and you, my children! what will become ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... England; Spain ceded the Netherlands and all her possessions in Italy to the German empire. And so the fine threads diplomacy had been spinning over the Continent for two centuries were ruthlessly brushed away as a spider's web. ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... Cabul to Shah Bagh; cloudy weather, occasionally a very slight shower during the last few days, depending probably on the Punjab rains. To-day, observed a small green caterpillar, climbing up a fine thread, like a spider's web, which hung from the fly of the tent; its motions were precisely those of climbing, the thread over which it had passed was accumulated between its third pairs of legs; it did not use ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... above. I saw nothing whatever of the web described by Captain Fleeson: the honey-making solitaires were simply confined in cells, where they rested on the bare ground; they were not perched upon "a network of squares, like a spider's web." The "outside" workers observed by me were not black, but very dark yellow, while the "inside" workers were bright yellow ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... hidden from his sight. Even ships lying close in shore can be but faintly discerned through its film, and only the larger spars; the smaller ones, with the rigging-ropes, looking like the threads of a spider's web. ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... network with my knife in order to get at the tree. The lines of those webs were as thick as coarse threads, and pretty strong, as I had reason to know; for when walking back to camp the same evening, meditating deeply on our unfortunate detention, I ran my head into the middle of a spider's web, and was completely enveloped in it, so much so that it was with considerable difficulty I succeeded in clearing it away. I was as regularly netted as if a gauze veil ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... must be, just as there is the puff of wind that drifts the wandering insect to the spider's web—that brought the impression to her mind, was the brief report of a cross-examination in the divorce courts, conducted by J.H. Traill. She knew that in the last two years he had, in a desultory way, been gleaning briefs from the great field where others ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... lovely spider's web there is under the gooseberry bush!" said the farmer's little girl, when she came to fetch the empty bowl of curds ...
— More Tales in the Land of Nursery Rhyme • Ada M. Marzials
... threads. He had luminous final theories about Love and Death and Immortality, odd matters they seemed for him to think about! and all his woven thoughts lay across my perception of the realities of things, as flimsy and irrelevant and clever and beautiful, oh!—as a dew-wet spider's web slung in the morning sunshine across the ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... are bad, and with their pestilent influence; for we are constantly made to feel how much of the good that men endeavour to do is thwarted, counteracted, or destroyed by influences of this sort, and how weak and imitative souls are entangled in the network of traditional influence as in a spider's web. Tradition, in fact, represents to us the accumulated power of past lives as it acts upon us from the outside, just as what men call heredity represents this same influence in ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... talons; and the little steamer made pluckily for Blackfriars. Carts and hansoms, vans and brewers' vans, all silhouetting. Trains slip past, obliterating with white whiffs the delicate distances, the perplexing distances that in London are delicate and perplexing as a spider's web. Great hay-boats yellow in the sun, brown in the shadow—great hay-boats came by, their sails scarce filled with the light breeze; standing high, they sailed slowly and picturesquely, with men thrown in all attitudes; somnolent ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... terror than all her other fears. Sometimes she almost fancied a spell of enchantment had been put upon her, which would render all her efforts to escape her fate as unavailing as the struggles of a gnat in a spider's web. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... specially apt to exert a sexual influence. I have heard of a precisely similar case in a man of intellectual distinction, and another in a lady who acknowledged to a feeling of "exquisite pleasure," on one occasion, at the mere sound of the death agony of a fly in a spider's web. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... into the shelfy nook of shadow where the big trout hovered. Under the surface, floating thus, with the check of ductile influence, the two flies spread their wings and quivered, like a centiplume moth in a spider's web. Still the old trout, calmly oaring, looked at them both suspiciously. Why should the same flies come so often, and why should they have such crooked tails, and could he be sure that he did not spy the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... one who attains an object long desired, with the candor of a child, and the blundering foolishness of an old man utterly without worldly experience, he fell into the life of Mademoiselle Gamard precisely as a fly is caught in a spider's web. The first day that he went to dine and sleep at the house he was detained in the salon after dinner, partly to make his landlady's acquaintance, but chiefly by that inexplicable embarrassment which often assails timid people and makes them fear to seem impolite by breaking off a conversation ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... kept his own counsel, I had learned that the house of the good Martin was a kind of spider's web, and that the silly flies entangled in its meshes were for the most part members of the Fronde. The house was visited by persons of both sexes and of all ranks, from the members of the Royal family downwards. They went there for all sorts of purposes. Some required rare medicines, others charms to ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens
... the darkness of the tunnel at Cleveland Street, and, as they emerged into daylight on the other side, paused for a moment like intelligent animals before the spider's web of shining rails that curved into the terminus, as if to choose the pair that would carry them in safety to the platform. It was in this pause that the passengers on the left looked out with an upward jerk of the ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... and your face comes up against a spider's web woven across the road, what a shock that thin line gives you! You fristle through every ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... are made the best and most delicate buckrams, and those of highest price; in sooth they look like tissue of spider's web! There is no King nor Queen in the world but might be glad to wear them. [NOTE 3] The people have also the largest sheep in the world, and great abundance of ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... struggleth under these distresses, by so much the more doth Satan put forth himself to resist, still infusing more poison, that if possible it might never struggle more, for strugglings are also as poison to Satan. The fly in the spider's web is an emblem of the soul in such a condition—the fly is entangled in the web; at this the spider shows himself; if the fly stir again, down comes the spider to her, and claps a foot upon her; if yet the fly makes a noise, then with poisoned mouth the spider lays hold upon her; if the fly ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... with his grandest courtiers, went to them himself, and both the swindlers raised one arm in the air, as if they were holding something, and said: 'See, these are the trousers, this is the coat, here is the mantle!' and so on. 'It is as light as a spider's web. One might think one had nothing on, but that is the ...
— Stories from Hans Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... a Canterbury poke, dear boys," he cried. "Let 'em have it, my lads. The beggars look like so many flies in a spider's web; and we ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... they are so very delicate, and so precious to us, by a strong bony sheath. At first these nerves are like coarse twine, but they divide and divide until they become as fine as threads of white silk—almost as fine as the stronger part of a spider's web—and they go all over the body, reaching to the ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... Pundits do, but the most illiterate are familiar with its commonplaces, and are ready with their avowal. We often hear, "Is not God everywhere? Does He not pervade all? Is He not all? Is not all evolved from Him, as the spider's web is evolved from its body? Does not all emanate from Him, as the stream flows from the fountain and rays from the sun? Are we not all portions of Him? We may worship anything and everything if only we see God in it. There are differences in the sparks from the ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... The spider's web stretched out over a flower bed with a great fat spider at the centre and the threads along which the spider runs to thrust its poisoned sting into the enmeshed butterfly is nature's most accurate symbol of the vast web of espionage lying over North and South America with secret threads ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis
... made that painful journey, passing levels from which three or four hallways ran out like the radii of a spider's web. He was close to the end of his endurance when he heard a sound, echoed, magnified, from below. It was someone moving. He dragged his body into the fourth level where the light was very faint, hoping to crawl far enough into one of the ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... a little distance, it looks like gossamer work, and as though the wind could blow it away, and waft its filmy fragments out of sight. But the tread of a drove of elephants would not bend nor jar it. The Rock of Gibraltar does not feel firmer under foot than this spider's web of a bridge, over which trains of cars pass one another, as well as ceaseless tides of vehicles and pedestrians. It is estimated that, besides its own weight of six hundred tons, it will sustain a burden of sixteen thousand ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... officials out of it. I laugh sometimes to think how important you think yourselves and how unimportant you really are. The Cathedral laughs too, and once and again stretches out a great lazy finger and just flicks you away as it would a spider's web. I hope you don't ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... after the reception at the palace the chaplain might have been seen daintily picking his way over the cobble-stone pavements. As he walked he thought, and his thoughts were busy with the circumstances which had led him to venture his saintly person so near the spider's web of The Derby Winner. The bishop, London, curiosity, Gabriel, this unpleasant neighbourhood—so ran the links of his chain ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... long and wide ermine stole, and carrying a huge muff to match. Before she touched the electric bell she pulled her large hat forward a little over her face, and adjusted the thick veil, which had a pattern like a spider's web. Then she opened a gold vanity box suspended from her wrist by a chain, and looked at herself in the small mirror it contained. Her face was so shadowed by the hat and disguised by the veil that at a little distance it might ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... if his toe were trodden on; so a man might shrink when a moth shrivelled as if his own hair had caught fire. Man might be a network of exquisite nerves running over the whole universe, a subtle spider's web of pity. This was a fine conception; though perhaps a somewhat severe enforcement of the theological conception of the special divinity of man. For the humanitarians certainly asked of humanity what can be asked of no other creature; ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... army. He hasn't any resisting power, hasn't Harry. And there is nothing but temptation in the army. Dear me, Charlotte! We may well pray not to be led into the way of temptation; for if we once get into it, we are no better off than a fly in a spider's web." ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... interesting. The long horizontal streaks across the sky, which were daily noticeable, took a form that day not unlike the vertebrae of an immense snake, whereas the higher clouds of transparent mist in filaments looked exactly like a huge spider's web. ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... depressing effect upon the family. This poor baby was a weak little bag of bones when first she came to us. The bag was made of shrivelled skin of a dusty brown colour. Her hair was the colour of her skin, and hung about her head like tattered shreds of a spider's web. She sat in a bunch and never smiled. Something about her suggested a spider. Her Tamil name is Chrysanthemum, which by the change of one letter becomes Spider. So we ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... telegraph manager, were recognized by his appointment as general superintendent of the consolidated company. The position was, even then, one of great responsibility and difficulty, the vast net work of lines extending like a spider's web over the face of the country requiring a clear head, and practical knowledge to keep it free from confusion and embarrassment, whilst the delicate and complicated relations in which the telegraph stood with regard to the railroads and the press increased the difficulties of the ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... undergraduates'—yet he realised clearly enough the danger of his correspondence with the Prime Minister, and immediately took steps to counteract it. There was a semi- official agent of the English Government in Rome, Mr. Odo Russell, and around him Manning set to work to spin his spider's web of delicate and clinging diplomacy. Preliminary politenesses were followed by long walks upon the Pincio, and the gradual interchange of more and more important and confidential communications. Soon poor Mr. Russell was little better than a fly buzzing ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... ports of Venezuela were for the first time opened to foreign trade. Her inhabitants were no longer restricted from the enjoyment of the fruits of their own industry. A gigantic system of taxation had been brushed, like a spider's web, away. Two-thirds of the Captain-Generalcy, in a word, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... conduct would serve best to subjugate M. de Talbrun, she became herself—that is to say, a born coquette —venturing from one thing to another, like a child playing fearlessly with a bulldog, who is gentle only with him, or a fly buzzing round a spider's web, while the spider lies ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... called "gentry flies"; in colour and form they are quite like others, but they have a broader breast, a larger belly than the common sort; as they fly they hum loudly and buzz beyond all endurance, and they are so strong that they will break right through a spider's web; or if one is caught, it will buzz there for three days, for it can contend with the spider in single combat. All this the Seneschal had carefully observed, and he argued further that these gentry flies produce ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... were in the Free State. I make no mention here of the thousands of miles of similar blockhouse lines, which made a sort of spider's web of the South ...
— Three Years' War • Christiaan Rudolf de Wet
... day proved one of trial to patience and muscle. The narrow watercourses, which like a spider's web penetrate the marshes with numerous small sheets of water, made travelling a most difficult task. At times I was lost, again my canoe was lodged upon oyster-beds in the shallow ponds of water, the mud bottoms of which would not hear my weight if ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... I like your looks, that's all," replied the other frankly. "And I don't like to see you run into that spider's web." ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... the down-stairs rooms, silent save for a fly buzzing in a spider's web, and together ascended the dusty stairs. The railing was entirely gone; but the concrete ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... I am learning now; it's truth they talk. You would undo the skill of a spider's web And take the inches of it in one line, More easily than know a woman's thought. I'm ugly ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... take a very long thread of raffia in your needle, make seven cross threads and weave a spider's web, having the center fill about one-fourth the space. When the web is finished, buttonhole around the reed to fasten the spirals in position and to give a finish to the frame of ...
— Construction Work for Rural and Elementary Schools • Virginia McGaw
... were here!" she said, in a helpless passion. "If only Theobald were here! To think that they should rob him of his sweetheart because they are caught in Dawson's spider's web. Their own grandchild! It seems unnatural. And you two lovers from ...
— The Story of Bawn • Katharine Tynan
... he seldom emerges, a large variety of spider takes advantage of the hole, and makes its web across the orifice. He is thus furnished with a window and screen gratis; and no one but a Bushman would think of searching beneath a spider's web for a frog. They completely eluded my search on the occasion referred to; and as they rush forth into the hollows filled by the thunder-shower when the rain is actually falling, and the Bechuanas are cowering under their skin garments, the sudden chorus ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... the spider. We pity the fly as (if the image is permissible) the underdog. One of the most agonising of the minor dilemmas in which a too sensitive humanitarian ever finds himself is whether he should destroy a spider's web, and so, perhaps, starve the spider to death, or whether he should leave the web, and so connive at the death of a multitude of flies. I have long been content to leave Nature to her own ways in such matters. I cannot say that I like ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... was neatly bound in thin, tough, plastic tangle-cord, swathed from chin to boot-bottoms, my arms imprisoned, my feet caught. And tangle-cord is about as easy to get out of as a spider's web ...
— The Hunted Heroes • Robert Silverberg
... went away, however, she gave the woman a little shirt of spider's web and a doublet of thistle-down for ...
— The National Nursery Book - With 120 illustrations • Unknown
... Never have I seen such violent twists and bends in a river. At times the waters seemed to loop back on themselves. One great loop bent towards us, and at the arch of this the little ferry of Potgieter's floated, moored to ropes which looked through the field glasses like a spider's web. The ford, approached by roads cut down through the steep bank, was beside it, but closed for the time being by the flood. The loop of river enclosed a great tongue of land which jutted from the hills on the enemy's ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... his client hesitate, he thought that he had lost his chance; he had set himself to frighten and quell La Cibot till she was completely in his power, bound hand and foot. She had walked into his study as a fly walks into a spider's web; there she was doomed to remain, entangled in the toils of the little lawyer who meant to feed upon her. Out of this bit of business, indeed, Fraisier meant to gain the living of old days; comfort, competence, ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... gentler moon; And the myriad gnats that dance like a wall, Or a moving column that will not fall; And the dragon-flies that go burning by, Shot like a glance from a seeking eye— There is one being that loves them all: Not a fly in a spider's web can fall But he cares for the spider, and cares for the fly; He cares for you, whether you laugh or cry, Cares whether your mother smile or sigh. How he cares for so many, I do not know, But it would be too strange if he did not so— Dreadful and ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... dugout. I do not know why he deserted. Perhaps life on a man-of-war with its restrictions irked him, perhaps he was in trouble, and perhaps it was the South Seas and these romantic islands that got into his bones. Every now and then they take a man strangely, and he finds himself like a fly in a spider's web. It may be that there was a softness of fibre in him, and these green hills with their soft airs, this blue sea, took the northern strength from him as Delilah took the Nazarite's. Anyhow, he wanted to hide himself, and he thought he would be safe in this secluded ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... field gun range, trusting that the Turks would not wish prematurely to disclose their artillery positions. So we managed a peep at close quarters, and were startled to see the ramifications and extent of the spider's web of deep, narrow trenches along the coast and on either front of the lines of Bulair. My Staff agree that they must have taken ten thousand men a month's hard work from dark to dawn. In advance of the trenches, Williams in the crow's nest reported that with his ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... costs L70, and is nothing like so durable as the old threads. When we consider that lace to be known as "Old Lace" must be two hundred or three hundred years old, we can understand the strength of this fairy thread, which was like a spider's web in filminess and yet durable enough to last centuries of wear, and remain as a lasting ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... filigree work in solid gold, and over them were canopies of yellow velvet, the folds of which were caught up and draped with bands of green ribbon. And on the thrones were seated two of the sweetest and fairest little maidens that mortal man had ever beheld. Their lovely hair was fine as a spider's web; their eyes were kind and smiling, their cheeks soft and dimpled, their mouths shapely as a cupid's bow and tinted like the petals of a rose. Upon their heads were set two crowns of fine spun gold, worked into fantastic shapes and set with glittering gems. Their robes ...
— The Enchanted Island of Yew • L. Frank Baum
... Shall not these mournful groans pierce thy flinty heart? Wilt thou stop thine ears and shut thine eyes? And wilt thou NOT regard? Take warning, and stop thy journey before it be too late. Wilt thou he like the silly fly, that is not quiet unless she be either entangled in the spider's web or burnt in the candle? O sinner, sinner, there are better things than HELL to be had! There is heaven, there is God, there is Christ, there is communion with an innumerable assembly of saints ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... roads and railways in France converge as surely to the capital as the threads of a spider's web lead to its centre, and in pursuing his route through the bye-ways of Normandy the traveller will be much in the position of the fly that has stepped upon its meshes—every road and railway leading to the capital where 'M. d'Araignee' the enticing, the alluring, the fascinating, ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... brought them to our work place. We found strange boxes with bars of metal inside, with many cords and strands and coils of metal. We found wires that led to strange little globes of glass on the walls; they contained threads of metal thinner than a spider's web. ...
— Anthem • Ayn Rand
... orthodox, and she was handsome as a leopard is handsome, but always she struck me as haunted by a vague fear, a fear of the house, perhaps, and of her mother's power to rule her. I used to fancy, watching her return to their sombre dwelling, that she was drawn back as to a spider's web by the fascination of its tragic silences. The story of her life is like a strange book read by lightning, with many leaves turned over ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... (i.e. Peripatus) shoot out fine threads of a remarkably viscid and tenacious milky fluid... projected from the tips of the oral papillae" (page 759).) is so stupid as to spit out the viscid matter at the wrong end of its body; it would have been beautiful thus to have explained the origin of the spider's web. ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... not a materialist, although he concerned himself much with the functions of the body, and with that strange spider's web of tingling threads which we call the nervous system. The man who sweeps out the temple, who polishes the marble steps and dusts the painted windows, may yet find time to bend in prayer before the altars he helps to keep beautiful, may ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... by black lines, the map will look like a net with irregular meshes. At all the knots are towns, large centres of population which are in constant communication with one another by means of the railways. If we fix our eyes on North Germany, we see what looks like an enormous spider's web, and in the middle of it sits a huge spider. That spider is called Berlin. For as a spider catches its prey in an ingeniously spun net, so Berlin by its railways draws to itself life and movement not only from Germany but from all ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... as she stepped out on the deck. She was fresh as the dew itself, and like a rose. All color of rose was the soft skirt she wore, and the little bolero above, blue, with gold buttons, covered a soft rose-colored waist, light and subtle as a spider's web, stretched from one grass stalk to another of a dewy morning. She was round and slender, and her neck was tall and round, and in the close fashion of dress which women of late have devised, to remind man once more of the ancient ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... knees, and prays with passionate violence). Hear me, O God, in my extremity! In fervent supplication up to Thee, Up to thy heaven above I send my soul. The fragile texture of a spider's web, As a ship's cable, thou canst render strong; Easy it is to thine omnipotence To change these fetters into spider's webs— Command it, and these massy chains shall fall, And these thick walls be rent, Thou, Lord ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... hallowed by some remembrance connected with the playmate of her childhood—the lover of her early youth—the husband of her affections." When, she looked on the dew dancing amid the delicate tracery of the field spider's web—when the joyous whistle of the gay blackbird broke upon her ear—gazing silently on all that was really fresh and beautiful in nature—she felt that, instead of warming, it fell chilly upon her heart. And yet all was as usual—the bright sun, and the smiling landscape. Why, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 580, Supplemental Number • Various
... accident as that could never happen to Matamore," said Herode, with his resounding laugh; "he might fall into a spider's web without breaking ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... to look at a spider's web that the silver light had just touched, making it shine out from its background of dark leaves and verandah post; and there was danger of rupture to the delicate thread of the topic that was weaving so charming a conversation. Wherefore the young lady hastened ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... to which she consented, and they quitted the cottage together. My sister and I were left—truly like two fools, who fancied that they had obtained a golden treasure, till daylight shewed it to be lead—two silly, luckless flies, who had played in sunbeams and were caught in a spider's web. I leaned against the casement, and watched those two glorious creatures, till they disappeared in the forest-glades; and then I turned. Perdita had not moved; her eyes fixed on the ground, her cheeks pale, her ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... she looked at the programme, she thought of the strange complications of feeling that are surely the fruit of an extreme civilisation. She saw herself caught in a spider's web of apparently frail, yet really powerful, threads spun by an invisible spider. Her world was full of gossamer playing the part of iron, of gossamer that was compelling, that made and kept prisoners. What freedom was there for her and ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... ostler told me; and it seems he spent the evening watching him weave his spider's web. But the flies were over-wary. They knew whence he came; they knew the business for which he desired to enrol them—for a rumour had gone round that Condillac was in rebellion against the Queen's commands—and there were ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... "sky-scrapers"—what a brutal name it is when one comes to think of it!—so splendid in the landscape now, did not exist in 1883, but I find it difficult to divide my early impressions from my later ones. There was Brooklyn Bridge though, hung up high in the air like a vast spider's web. ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... loved, above all other amusements, to put flies into a spider's web; and the struggles of the imprisoned insects were wont to bear, in the eyes of this grave philosopher, so facetious and hilarious an appearance, that he would stand and laugh thereat until the tears "coursed one another down his innocent nose." Now it so happened that Spinoza, despite the general ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... experimented on. And horses in the phylo-genetic line are more ancient than dogs: they are lower in the zoologic scale. Much lower still, i.e. among the Arthropoda, occur many other mathematical wonders. I only mention in a cursory way the logarithmic spiral of the spider's web, the precise curves realized without instruments of any kind by the Coleoptera and Hymenoptera in cutting leaves, the stereometry of the aphides. Then, as it were, at the bottom of the scale (if one may still speak of a descent and a bottom) the marvellous plancton filters ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... leafy trees Proclaim the gently swelling breeze, Whilst through my window, by degrees, Its breathings play: The spider's web, all ...
— Cottage Poems • Patrick Bronte
... after this outbreak. He even smiled as he thought how neatly he had walked into the spider's web. Then he shifted his position and prepared to think. But, as he moved his foot struck something. A wallet, it felt like; he reached down, and, by dint of feeling about, managed to ...
— The Girl Aviators' Sky Cruise • Margaret Burnham
... upon the provisions; it is hung from the top of the cupola by a thread which vies with that of a Spider's web for slenderness. The dainty cylinder quivers and swings to and fro at the least breath; it reminds me of the famous pendulum suspended from the dome of the Pantheon to prove the rotation of the earth. The victuals ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... sorting them. English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Georges, and Louises, doubloons and double guineas and moidores and sequins, the pictures of all the kings of Europe for the last hundred years, strange Oriental pieces stamped with what looked like wisps of string or bits of spider's web, round pieces and square pieces, and pieces bored through the middle, as if to wear them round your neck—nearly every variety of money in the world must, I think, have found a place in that collection; and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he replied, "but the more he says it the less I believe him. Miss Flora, the fate of all my uncle holds dear is hanging by a thread, a spider's web, a young girl's freak! If ever she gives him a certain turn of the hand, the right glance of her eye, he'll be at her feet and every hope ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... old barn door; A spider's web hung there As fragile as a little dream, As delicate and fair; They decked it with a thousand gems Of oh! such dazzling sheen, It was the very loveliest thing That ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 19, 1919 • Various
... and fro; And not a wave of their busy wings Is unknown to the Spirit that moveth all things. And the long-mantled moths, that sleep at noon, And dance in the light of the mystic moon— All have one being that loves them all; Not a fly in the spider's web can fall, But He cares for the spider, and cares for the fly; And He cares for each little child's smile or sigh. How it can be, I cannot know; He is wiser than I; ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... often have in this part of the world. When the morning dawned, and the gentle breeze rippled the glassy mirror of the forest lake, all the delicate veils and flags fluttered away into thin air; the waving garlands of the spider's web, the hanging bridges and galleries, or whatever else they may be called, vanished away as if they had never been. Six elves brought me back my sausage skewer, and at the same time asked me to make any request, which they would grant if in their power; so I begged them, if they ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... by land, and away into the mountains, with his father's sword upon his thigh, till he came to the Spider mountains, which hang over Epidaurus and the sea, where the glens run downward from one peak in the midst, as the rays spread in the spider's web. ...
— The Heroes • Charles Kingsley
... of spruce-trees and on delicate lichens they seemed like reduplications of the original growth, and they made the broad, fiat leaves of the arbor-vitae fully twice as wide as before. But this fringe was always on one side only, except when gathered upon dangling fragments of spider's web, or bits of stray thread: these they entirely encircled, probably because these objects had twirled in the light wind while the crystals were forming. Singular disguises were produced: a bit of ragged rope appeared a piece ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... within the door, and at the word he stepped out and flung it to. I sprang forward, but before I reached it the click sounded. I was a prisoner, caught like a fly in a spider's web, and much it helped me to beat on the iron-studded door till my hand bled, to call on him to come in and fight it out like a man, to storm up and down the room in a ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... often gloomy and wrapped in thought and felt that life was not what it ought to be. He had a dim notion that once upon a time a terrible crime had been committed, which it was now everybody's business to hide by practising countless deceptions; he compared himself to a fly caught in a spider's web: the more it struggled to regain its freedom, the more it entangled itself, until at last it died miserably, strangled ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... letting on to be awfully deeply interested in nothing, a spider's web in the corner behind the barrel, and the citizen scowling after him and the old dog at his feet looking up to know ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... to avoid the darlin' young lady,' says he. 'And it's there he threw her down into the deep, cowld, dark lake,' says he. 'Would you like to go up and lie down in his bed?' says he. 'Is it me,' says I, 'to do it? Why my brain is like a spider's web wid lookin' at it,' says I. But a young man that was used to crawling in them unchristian places—them mines—went up; and I thought I could jump through a key-hole, I felt so, to see him do it; and says I, when he came down, 'Young man, I pray, when you settle in ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... towards her, his personality caused that old, odd feeling of helplessness to steal over her. She, almost, felt as if she were a fly gradually being bound by a greedy spider's web. ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... desperately at the sticky staircase and the spider's web swinging in the wind above the broken pane. He felt alone, lost in his misery. He looked at the gap in the banisters.... What if he were to throw himself down?... or out of the window?... Yes, what if he were to kill himself to punish them? How remorseful they would ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... theory, as the Pundits do, but the most illiterate are familiar with its commonplaces, and are ready with their avowal. We often hear, "Is not God everywhere? Does He not pervade all? Is He not all? Is not all evolved from Him, as the spider's web is evolved from its body? Does not all emanate from Him, as the stream flows from the fountain and rays from the sun? Are we not all portions of Him? We may worship anything and everything if only we see God in it. There are differences in the sparks from the ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... tell her, as he haled her on to the sward beyond the arbor, "here it is, the story you told us yester-e'en. Here is the ring where they danced last night, the little folk, an' here is the glow-worm caught in the spider's web to ...
— A Warwickshire Lad - The Story of the Boyhood of William Shakespeare • George Madden Martin
... opened, Baas; moreover, since this talk began I have been to look at it. During the night a spider has made its web from door-post to door-post, and that web is unbroken. If you do not believe me, come and see for yourself. Yet they say the woman came through the doorway and therefore through the spider's web. Oh! Baas, what is the use of wasting thought upon the ways of spooks which, like the wind, come and go as they will, especially in this haunted land from which, as we have all agreed, we should do well ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... reflections. Connie had gone an hour before—he was too late to have detained her upon a pretext—and while sitting speechless before the dinner he could not eat—his heated imagination wove visions of horror in which his wife was entangled as a fly in a spider's web. What if Connie were really possessed by the influence of some drug which rendered her incapable of willing rationally? What if he missed her at the entrance to the opera? Or what if—most desperate supposition—she should, in the event of his ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... walked off to be "made acquainted" with all, or with all the chief of his parishioners then and there assembled. Fleda watched him going about, shaking hands, talking and smiling, in all directions, with about as much freedom of locomotion as a fly in a spider's web; till, at Mrs. Evelyn's approach, the others fell off a little, and taking him by ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... the gallows noose must feel mightily like the strand of the spider's web to the silly fly. And as the spider pounces upon his victim ere it be dead, and sucks away its life blood, so does the hangman cut down his victim alive and cut out his living heart! Oh, 'tis a fine sight! a fine sight! Young Tom must e'en ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green
... or death—honor or infamy—bliss or despair, hung on that feeble twine, scarce thicker than the spider's web! hung on the chance of every flying second, each one of which was bringing nigher and more nigh, the ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... was Court Day in Lexington. From the town, as a centre, white turnpikes radiated in every direction like the strands of a spider's web. Along them, on the day before, cattle, sheep, and hogs had made their slow way. Since dawn, that morning, the fine dust had been rising under hoof and wheel on every one of them, for Court Day is yet the great day of every month throughout the Bluegrass. The crowd had gone ahead of ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... that could never happen to Matamore," said Herode, with his resounding laugh; "he might fall into a spider's web without breaking through it." ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... were for the first time opened to foreign trade. Her inhabitants were no longer restricted from the enjoyment of the fruits of their own industry. A gigantic system of taxation had been brushed, like a spider's web, away. Two-thirds of the Captain-Generalcy, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... "When I came here to-night I was—I hoped—I meant everything that I could to do away with the past, and start fair again. And you meet me with 'nerves,' and silence, and sighs. There's nothing tangible. It's like—it's like a spider's web." ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... highways that should link up the continents. He oppresses and destroys the Arab world, which should be the natural junction of the great trunk railways that, to-morrow, shall join Asia, Africa, and Europe in one splendid spider's web. You are going to move the block from the line, and to join the hands of the continents. Understand, and be enthusiastic. I tell you, this joining of the continents is an unborn babe of history that leapt in the womb the moment the ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... gentlemen mentioned above. I saw nothing whatever of the web described by Captain Fleeson: the honey-making solitaires were simply confined in cells, where they rested on the bare ground; they were not perched upon "a network of squares, like a spider's web." The "outside" workers observed by me were not black, but very dark yellow, while the "inside" workers ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... it seem like a real expedition,—'cross country and back again. Jerry led us through the scratchy, overgrown part of Wecanicut, and we pretended that it was a long, weary trek through the most poisonous jungles to the coast of Peru; and when Greg walked right into a spider's web with a huge yellow spider gloating in the middle of it, he said he'd been bitten by a tarantula. We told him that we should have to leave him there to die, for we must press on to the sea, but he cured himself by eating a magic ...
— Us and the Bottleman • Edith Ballinger Price
... garden just now, with a writing-pad on my knee and my mind ranging the heavens above and the earth beneath in search of a subject, my eye fell on a tragedy in progress at my elbow. A small greenfly had got entangled in a spider's web, and was fluttering its tiny wings violently to effect an escape. The filaments of the web were so delicate as to be hardly visible, but they were not too delicate to bear the spider whom I saw advancing upon his prey with dreadful menace. I forgot my dislike of greenflies, ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... end should he? No more now can he build castles in the air, basing them on the power of creditor over debtor. That bubble has burst, leaving him only the reflection, how illusory it has been. Although, for his nefarious purpose, it has proved weak as a spider's web, it is not likely Colonel Armstrong will ever again submit himself to be so ensnared. Broken men become cautious, and shun ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... a glow of yellow green, then a mass of blossoms, then a throat, chin and face, one after another, all veiled in a gossamer thin as a spider's web, and last—and these I shall never forget—a pair of eyes shining clear below and above the veil, and which gazed into mine with the same steady, full, unfrightened look one sometimes sees on the face of a summer moon when it bursts through ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... incessantly meet with elaborate and perfect contrivances for this same end. It is no exaggeration to assert that, if the use of the talons and tusks of a carnivorous animal, or the use of the viscid threads of a spider's web, or of the plumes and hooks on a seed may be safely inferred from their structure, we may with equal safety infer that many flowers are constructed for the express purpose of ensuring a cross with a distinct plant. From ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... tree on which to build. I have found them indiscriminately on the mango, mowah, neem, and other trees. The nest is invariably made either just above or between the fork of two outshooting slender horizontal branches. It is very neatly made, deeply cup-shaped, of grass and fibres, with spider's web on the exterior. The maximum number of eggs is three; they are of a pale whitish colour, marked generally, chiefly at the broad end, with brownish spots. The brown spots vary in size on different eggs. I secured the first eggs on the 12th July, and the last ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... their gardens, And spoil with dabbled hands, our flowers i' the planting. And yet a saint is made! Alas, those children! Was there no gentler way? I know not any: I plucked the gay moth from the spider's web; What if my hasty hand have smirched its feathers? Sure, if the whole be good, each several part May for its private blots forgiveness gain, As in man's tabernacle, vile elements Unite to one fair stature. Who'll gainsay it? The whole is good; another saint ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... own counsel, I had learned that the house of the good Martin was a kind of spider's web, and that the silly flies entangled in its meshes were for the most part members of the Fronde. The house was visited by persons of both sexes and of all ranks, from the members of the Royal family downwards. They went there for all sorts of purposes. ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens
... saying something wrong often think it of not much consequence, because the child is young and the wrong is very slight. You do not know the power of habit, and how one wrong, howsoever slight, leads to a greater one. Habit has been likened to a spider's web, which at first can be easily broken, but after continued indulgence binds its victim as with a strong cable, making reformation almost impossible. The same is true of good and right conduct. At first it may require an effort to perform ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... to tell the whole world about his victory, but instead he flew straight into a spider's web. And there, he who had defeated the King of beasts came to a miserable end, the prey of ...
— The AEsop for Children - With pictures by Milo Winter • AEsop
... horizontal streaks across the sky, which were daily noticeable, took a form that day not unlike the vertebrae of an immense snake, whereas the higher clouds of transparent mist in filaments looked exactly like a huge spider's web. ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... could not reply. For the first time in her life she seemed to comprehend what it meant to have to die; and death seemed much closer when someone else was about to die than when her own life had been imperiled in the spider's web. ...
— The Adventures of Maya the Bee • Waldemar Bonsels
... almost equally prehensile, although in a different way, infolding the whole border instead of the summit only. Very curious, and even somewhat painful, is the sight when a fly, alighting upon the central dew-tipped bristles, is held as fast as by a spider's web; while the efforts to escape not only entangle the insect more hopelessly as they exhaust its strength, but call into action the surrounding bristles, which, one by one, add to the number of the bonds, each by itself apparently ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... gather round him. He makes poems, he becomes the accepted poet of Northern Italy. But he cannot give continuous delight to the world. His poems are not like his song before Palma. They have no true passion, being woven like a spider's web out of his own inside. His case then is more pitiable, his failure more complete, than Eglamor's. Eglamor could shape something; he had his own enjoyment, and he gave pleasure to men. Sordello, lured incessantly towards abstract ideals, lost in their contemplation, is smitten, like Aprile, into ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... that mountain country which most stirs the sthetic and the speculative strains within one. Lovely and remote, all by itself at the foot of a mountain, in a circle of the hills, an old monastery stands, now used as a farm, with one rose window, like a spider's web, spun delicate in stone tracery. There the old monks had gone to get away from the struggles of the main valley and the surges of the fighting men. There even now were traces of their peaceful life; the fish-ponds and the tillage still ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... undeviating precision which had made him master of billions of dollars and uncounted millions of human lives; which had woven his network of possession all over the United States, Europe and Asia and even Africa; which had drawn, as into a spider's web, the world's railroads and steamship lines, its coal and copper and steel, its oil and grain and beef, its every ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... soul entangled in a perfect spider's web of doubt and mistrust, our Blessed Father wrote the following consoling words: "To try and discover whether or not your heart is pleasing to God is a thing you must not do, though you may undoubtedly try to make sure that His Heart is pleasing to ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... and all-embracing circle of benevolence has inward concentric circles which, like those of the spider's web, are bound together by links, and rest upon each other; making one frame, and capable of one tremor; circles narrower and narrower, closer and closer, as they lie more near to the centre of self from which they proceeded, and which sustains the whole. ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... circled the upper part of the leviathan. In mid-air, held by mighty chains, hung the rolls of blank paper that were soon to be transformed into newspapers. As the vast spools of unprinted material were reeled off, the ribbons of whiteness passed like a spider's web in and out the turning wheels, and as they moved over the inked cylinders that printed them on both sides, the happenings of the world were recorded with lightning speed. In the meantime into the racks below were constantly dropping papers neatly folded,—papers ...
— Paul and the Printing Press • Sara Ware Bassett
... thou stop thine ears and shut thine eyes? And wilt thou NOT regard? Take warning, and stop thy journey before it be too late. Wilt thou he like the silly fly, that is not quiet unless she be either entangled in the spider's web or burnt in the candle? O sinner, sinner, there are better things than HELL to be had! There is heaven, there is God, there is Christ, there is communion with an innumerable ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... kingdom also are made the best and most delicate buckrams, and those of highest price; in sooth they look like tissue of spider's web! There is no King nor Queen in the world but might be glad to wear them. [NOTE 3] The people have also the largest sheep in the world, and great abundance of all the ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... it looks like gossamer work, and as though the wind could blow it away, and waft its filmy fragments out of sight. But the tread of a drove of elephants would not bend nor jar it. The Rock of Gibraltar does not feel firmer under foot than this spider's web of a bridge, over which trains of cars pass one another, as well as ceaseless tides of vehicles and pedestrians. It is estimated that, besides its own weight of six hundred tons, it will sustain a burden of sixteen thousand tons. In other words, the whole population of Cincinnati ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... dinner walked to a private museum; a good collection of birds, shells, etc., also some fine works on natural history with beautiful coloured plates; an immense collection of specimens of plants bequeathed to the institution. A skeleton riding on horseback made ludicrous by a spider's web resembling a bridle. Thence we visited Mr. Pierpoint's garden. Took tea at Mr. Scholfield's but did not see Mr. Wood. Then set off to an election meeting and heard some good speaking; a little monkey not 8 years old ...
— A Journey to America in 1834 • Robert Heywood
... precarious seat I could not control him. Down he went, leaping wildly high out of water, in a glorious rush, till all my line buzzed out of the reel, down to the very knot at the bottom, and the leader snapped as if it had been made of spider's web. ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... Aunt, "and what is more essential, homey, I have read somewhere, 'A woman's house should be as personal a matter as a spider's web or a snail's shell; and all the thought, toil and love she puts into it should be preserved a part of its comeliness and homelikeness forever, and be ...
— Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled during Her Visit - among the "Pennsylvania Germans" • Edith M. Thomas
... it. The "sky-scrapers"—what a brutal name it is when one comes to think of it!—so splendid in the landscape now, did not exist in 1883, but I find it difficult to divide my early impressions from my later ones. There was Brooklyn Bridge though, hung up high in the air like a vast spider's web. ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... singularity in his hair, different from that of all other animals, and, I believe, hitherto unnoticed by naturalists. His hair is thick and coarse at the extremity, and gradually tapers to the root, where it becomes fine as a spider's web. His fur has so much the hue of the moss which grows on the branches of the trees that it is very difficult to make him out when he is ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... fairies' midwife, and she comes In shape no bigger than an agate stone On the fore-finger of an alderman; Drawn with a team of little atomies Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep: Her wagon spokes made of long spinner's legs: The cover, of the wings of grasshoppers; The traces, of the smallest spider's web; The collars of the moonshine's watery beams; Her whip of cricket's bone, the lash, of film; Her wagoner, a small grey-coated gnat, Not half so big as a round little worm, Pricked from the lazy finger of a maid: Her chariot is an empty hazel nut, Made by the joiner squirrel, or old grub, Time out ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... laid down his pipe as gently upon the fender, as if it had been spun from the unravellings of a spider's web— ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... to neglect him and to forget him, as of old. Only some weeks later did chance call his attention to the fact that Cain had entered upon a new phase of his life. It was in the afternoon of one of those light days, when the sun seemed to spread its rays, like the glistening threads of a spider's web along the road, from one tract of woodland to the other. The southern wood cast a cool, clear shadow, and where this ended and the sun began to spin its golden web, the line was as sharp as if cut by a knife. Fausch, whose day's work was done, put his ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... the other complied, unrolling several small sheets of photographer's printing-out paper, to which several extraordinarily complicated and minute designs had been transferred—strongly resembling laborious efforts to conventionalize a spider's web. ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... one has passed this spider's web For many and many a day, See, men, how it is thick and strong;" ...
— The Book of Saints and Friendly Beasts • Abbie Farwell Brown
... involuntarily, and without effort; and, it is only when you oppose it, that you find how powerful it has become. What is done once and again, soon gives facility and proneness. The habit at first may seem to have no more strength than a spider's web; but, once formed, it binds as with a chain of iron. The small events of life, taken singly, may seem exceedingly unimportant, like snow that falls silently, flake by flake; yet accumulated, ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... the dew upon it," and adds: "The 'water shield' [of one of the Zuni War Gods], from which he shook the torrents, was suggested, no doubt, by dew on the web." (Ibid., p.425.) To one unfamiliar with the Indian's habit of mind it may seem strained to connect the beads of dew on a spider's web with the torrential rain, but to one familiar with native thought as expressed in myths where the Indian has dramatized his conceptions of nature and of natural forces and phenomena, the connection ...
— Indian Games and Dances with Native Songs • Alice C. Fletcher
... The Thing, a monstrous shape, was with me there, And two hard arms were thrown about my waist. For very terror I was hushed, nor moved To cast my foe off. I was in the arms Of the strong spider. As we went, I grew Glad, for I thought that now I should be brought To the great spider's web, and there, mayhap, Learn the sad fate of her I loved so well. Up a stark cliff we went, then crossed the web Just as the red moon bloomed upon the hills And silvered all the Panticapean vale. The funnel of the web was in the mouth Of a ...
— Stories in Verse • Henry Abbey
... plainly visible through the opening of her portholes. This majestic mass lay like a floating fortress upon the waves, and overhead her three masts towered up into the very clouds, with their yards set in order, and the ropes crossing from one to the other as intricate as a spider's web. Last of all, from a flagstaff on the stern, brandished the ensign of Great Britain, in defiance of her enemies. And my heart swelled as I gazed upon it, and remembered how that banner had struck terror into the Frenchmen, and Dutch, and Spaniards, in so many great and memorable fights. ...
— Athelstane Ford • Allen Upward
... back to their former evil ways, showing conclusively that they had been self-deceived and theirs but the hope of the hypocrite which 'shall perish: whose hope shall be cut off, and whose trust shall be a spider's web.' ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... hairs, four teeth, a breast Like grasshopper, an emmet's crest, A skin more rugged than thy coat, And drugs like spider's web to boot." ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... no reply, but hastened away, as a fly would escape from a spider's web. The episode, intensely disagreeable as it was, had the good effect of arousing him out of the paralysis of his deep despondency. Besides, he could not help congratulating himself that he had ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... neatly contrived of the cup of an acorn, through the bottom of which ran a hedgehog's prickle. Balanced on the point was the needle, a spear of dried grass, and over all was a spider's web to serve as glass. ...
— The Flamp, The Ameliorator, and The Schoolboy's Apprentice • E. V. Lucas
... event of the aforetime. It manifestly carries the Trojan scission into Olympus and drives out in disgrace the Trojan deities. Vulcan, the wronged husband, is the divine artificer; he makes a network of chains which could not be broken, "like a spider's web, so fine that no one could see it, not even a God;" in this snare the guilty deities are caught, exposed, punished. These invisible, yet unbreakable chains have an ethical suggestion, and hint the law which ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... this valley or crater bottom of Kor, of which I was heartily tired. Who could desire to stay in a place where he had not only been involved in a deal of hard, doubtful, and very dangerous fighting from which all personal interest was absent, but where also he was meshed in a perfect spider's web of bewilderment, and exposed to continual insult into ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... to cast a line over the wreck. But the swell is heavier than ever, the timbers nearer to parting. At last a flash of lurid light from the dim shore-line,—a great boom of sound, and a line goes spinning out like a spider's web up into the gray, bleak sky. Too far! too short! and the line tumbles, plashing into the water. A new and fearful lift of the sea shatters the wreck, the fore part of the ship still holding fast to the sands; but all abaft the mainmast lifts, surges, reels, topples over; with the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... in the body of the fish, compels it to rise, when it is caught.[185] A peculiar device is reported from Dobu, New Guinea. A string long enough to reach to the ground is fastened to a kite. At the end of the string is a tassel of spider's web. The kite is held at such a height that the tassel just skims the water. The fish catching at it entangles its teeth in the spider's-web tassel and is caught.[186] The Chinese have trained cormorants to do their ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... Lion's loud roar is o'er. He's bitten and beaten, he's sick and sore. But a spider's web spread Trapped the Gnat as he sped With the news...He will ...
— Fables in Rhyme for Little Folks - From the French of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... Turning around, we could see the back of the tenement house from whose entry we had just emerged, with its numberless and wretched windows, shutting out the sky, or the fog, which was the only thing visible above us, and a cloud of clothes-lines stretched hither and thither, like a spider's web. ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... hours, everything inside would let go all of a sudden and begin to buzz like a bee, and the hands would straightway begin to spin round and round so fast that their individuality was lost completely, and they simply seemed a delicate spider's web over the face of the watch. She would reel off the next twenty-four hours in six or seven minutes, and then stop with a bang. I went with a heavy heart to one more watchmaker, and looked on while he took ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Professor was giving a most interesting and appreciated address, illustrated by the limelight, on the subject of "Quartz Fibres." If I remember rightly, he was explaining to the audience that the strands of a spider's web were purposely rough so that the spider could climb them easily, but that a quartz fibre was smooth and glassy, and a spider would never attempt to ascend one. He showed on the sheet a single thread of a spider's web and a single quartz fibre, ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... falling. Jack waited for a move from Solomon. In a few minutes he heard a stir in the brush. Then he could dimly see the face of his friend beyond the spider's web. ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... ostensibly had no higher position. His appearance and manner indicated a mystery. Old Hannibal's wool had not grown white for nothing, and he was the last man in the world to go through a mystery as a blundering bumblebee would through a spider's web. He was for leaving the web all intact till he knew who spun it and whom it was to catch. If it was Mr. Allen's work or Miss Edith's, it must stand; if not, he could play bumblebee with a vengeance, and carry off the gossamer of intrigue with ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... and shrubs were covered with rime, and looked like a wood of coral, and every branch was thick with long white blossoms. The most delicate twigs, which are lost among the foliage in summer-time, came now into prominence, and it was like a spider's web of glistening white. The lady-birches waved in the wind; and when the sun shone, everything glittered and sparkled as if it were sprinkled with diamond dust, and great diamonds were lying ...
— The Pink Fairy Book • Various
... Erie. Long before the Falls are reached we hear the mighty roar which made the Indians call the cataract Niagara, or "the thunder of the waters." On leaving here, we cross the river by a suspension bridge, which, from a short distance, looks like a mere spider's web. Over this the cars move slowly, affording a superb view of the Falls and of the ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... enthusiasm of one who attains an object long desired, with the candor of a child, and the blundering foolishness of an old man utterly without worldly experience, he fell into the life of Mademoiselle Gamard precisely as a fly is caught in a spider's web. The first day that he went to dine and sleep at the house he was detained in the salon after dinner, partly to make his landlady's acquaintance, but chiefly by that inexplicable embarrassment which often assails timid people and makes them ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... trick with a large round hole in it—the hole representing the space recently occupied by one of his ponies. Incidentally Pete realized that he was getting deeper and deeper into the meshes of The Spider's web—and the thought spurred him to a keener vigilance. So far he had killed three men actually in self-defense. But when he met up with Malvey—and Pete promised himself that pleasure—he would not wait for Malvey to open the argument. "Got to kill to live," he told himself. "Well, I got the name—and ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... his crown, like those of the old Greek games, is a mere useless badge; on the contrary, his robe of state is composed of his fellow- servants. His whole back is covered with a little grey forest of branching hairs, fine as a spider's web, each branchlet carrying its little pearly ringed club, each club its rose-coloured polype, like (to quote Mr. Gosse's comparison) the unexpanded birds of the ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... the buzzing fly who is lured within the spider's web! 'Tis easy fluttering in, but ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green
... what he knew would happen. Ever so many times in his very long life he had seen spiders go up there, but no sooner had they got fat than a robin or a wren came in and ate them. Some of the clever spider's web was there still when Bevis looked out of the window, all dusty and draggled, with the skins and wings of some gnats and a dead ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... at the foot of Claymore Hill, I rode bang into a flock of sheep and came down with a smash. You never saw such a ruin. The lamp and bell were lost completely, the handle-bars were twisted into corkscrews, the tires were cut to ribbons, the spokes looked like part of a spider's web, my hands and my knees were cut, and the worst of it was that the shepherd's dog mistook me for an enemy and I had to beat him off with the monkey-wrench, until the farmer heard the noise and came ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... the bookbinder's crude ornamentation—ungraceful arabesques of vine leaves which wreathe about broken columns, a rising sun caught in a spider's web of rays—all that configuration begins to spread and distend until it fills the room. The vine leaves tremble in a morning wind; a soft blowing shakes the columns, and higher and higher mounts the sun. Like a dance of flickering torches his rays shoot to and fro, his glistening arms are outstretched ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... trees Proclaim the gently swelling breeze, Whilst through my window, by degrees, Its breathings play: The spider's web, all ...
— Cottage Poems • Patrick Bronte
... one pair of eyes, at least, the police-net was as plainly visible as a spider's web hanging ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... Pope points out that the dispute is now forgotten, and the books of the old disputants lie covered with cobwebs in Duck-lane, a street in London where second-hand books were sold in Pope's day. He calls the cobwebs "kindred," because the arguments of Thomists and Scotists were as fine spun as a spider's web. ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... artillery, and, as these died away, louder and louder again rose the appalling screams of the storm, with slight intervals of lull and perfect calm, only to return with tenfold violence, which made the whole house tremble and vibrate. . . . Several of the windows facing east were swept in as easily as a spider's web; lead and glass scattered all over the rooms, leaving only the shattered frames, through which rushed the resistless wind and blinding snow. . . . Through the joints of doors and windows, the cracks and crevices, before unknown to the eye, the drifting snow penetrated ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... way in which many birds, like our common chaffinch, disguise the outside of their nest with moss and lichen and other trifles felted together, so that the cradle is as inconspicuous as possible. There seems to be a touch of art in fastening pieces of spider's web on the outside ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... cobwebs of interpretation and sophism from this Work of the heart," he cries; "every spider's web in the Mosque, I would sweep away. The garments of your religion, I would have you clean, O my Brothers. Ay, even the threadbare adventitious wrappages, I would throw away. From the religiosity and cant of to-day I call you back to the religion pure ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... should be made very clear to the girl who comes up to the city, and that is that the ordinary ice cream parlor is very likely to be a spider's web for her entanglement. This is perhaps especially true of those ice cream saloons and fruit stores kept by foreigners. Scores of cases are on record where young girls have taken their first step towards "white slavery" in places of this character. And it is hardly too much to ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... that! spiders' webs for thread! How marvelous would the work of the fair ladies all over the land seem, if the door screens and the window hangings and the dresses and the laces were decorated with designs worked with spider's web thread! ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various
... driving rain. First he looked towards the house and then turning sharply towards the left made his way once more to the edge of the last of the experimental tracks that threaded that distant corner of the park like the lines of a spider's web. ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... best to subjugate M. de Talbrun, she became herself—that is to say, a born coquette— venturing from one thing to another, like a child playing fearlessly with a bulldog, who is gentle only with him, or a fly buzzing round a spider's web, while the spider ...
— Jacqueline, v3 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... decade of the nineteenth century, Mr Percival Lowell took up the work where Schiaparelli had virtually dropped it, and soon added a great number of "canals'' to those previously known, so that in his charts the surface of the wonderful little planet appears covered as with a spider's web, the dusky lines criss-crossing in every direction, with conspicuous knots wherever a number of them come together. Mr Lowell has demonstrated that the areas originally called seas, and thus named on the earlier charts, are not bodies of water, whatever ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... grewsome. Within this narrow, dimly-lighted underground passage, with its musty walls sweating with dampness and thick with the tangled meshes of the spider's web, a brave girt and her lover struggled and fought ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... Manning arrived; he was shortly afterwards removed to become Assistant Under Secretary of State at our Foreign Office. The author of Eminent Victorians is pleased to describe "poor Mr. Russell" as little better than a fly buzzing in Manning's "spider's web of delicate and clinging diplomacy." It is not in the memory of those who were behind the scenes that Odo Russell was such a cipher. Though suave in address, he was by no means deficient in decision or force of character, ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... now; it's truth they talk. You would undo the skill of a spider's web And take the inches of it in one line, More easily than know a woman's thought. I'm ugly ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... step, Ross made that painful journey, passing levels from which three or four hallways ran out like the radii of a spider's web. He was close to the end of his endurance when he heard a sound, echoed, magnified, from below. It was someone moving. He dragged his body into the fourth level where the light was very faint, hoping to crawl far enough into one of the passages to remain unseen from the stair. ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... uprightness, he gave it that high place which it yet holds, and which it must hold; for when the decisions of the Supreme Court are questioned by a State or people, the fabric of our government is but a spider's web through which ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... could be cured by putting a spider into a goose quill, sealing it up, and hanging it about the neck, so that it would be near the stomach. This disease might also be cured by swallowing pills made of a spider's web. One pill a morning for three successive mornings ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... foot-men, who said that he would like to see the experiment tried before he made up his mind. I remember a case in which a peasant was accused of having committed arson for the sake of the insurance. He asserted that he had gone into a room with a candle and that a long spider's web which was hanging down had caught fire from it accidentally and had inflamed the straw which hung from the roof. So the catastrophe had occurred. Only in the second examination did it occur to anybody to ask whether ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... bathe himself in the brook, and put on his finest court suit of pink satin rose-petals trimmed with lace from a spider's web; for the fairy queen had ordered a grand court ball in his honor, and there was no ...
— The Story-teller • Maud Lindsay
... dance began, introduced in a thoughtful strain. Having danced herself to satiety and intoxicated herself with the flower's perfume, Mara, with movements of agreeable fatigue, made as if to lay herself to rest, but delayed here and there to brush from her body something like the threads of a spider's web, at first serenely and pensively, then with growing disquiet, which communicated itself to the onlookers. The child paused, reflected an instant, and apparently was about to laugh at herself because of the fears that had arisen in her soul; but the next minute she paled with fright, ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... went by land, and away into the mountains, with his father's sword upon his thigh, till he came to the Spider Mountains, which hang over Epidaurus and the sea, where the glens run downward from one peak in the midst, as the rays spread in the spider's web. ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... that sleep at noon And rove in the light of the gentler moon; And the myriad gnats that dance like a wall, Or a moving column that will not fall; And the dragon-flies that go burning by, Shot like a glance from a seeking eye— There is one being that loves them all: Not a fly in a spider's web can fall But he cares for the spider, and cares for the fly; He cares for you, whether you laugh or cry, Cares whether your mother smile or sigh. How he cares for so many, I do not know, But it would be too strange if he did not so— Dreadful and dreary for even a fly: So I cannot ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... Indian corn is golden, but coarse and rough; the threads of the spider's web are fine, but dull and gray; the satin hair of the blind mole is lifeless and stiff. Let me go, old man! I care nothing for your fancied dangers. I shall row her to-day; that is pleasure enough." And he attempted to seize the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... said to have loved, above all other amusements, to put flies into a spider's web; and the struggles of the imprisoned insects were wont to bear, in the eyes of this grave philosopher, so facetious and hilarious an appearance, that he would stand and laugh thereat until the tears "coursed one ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... from Mars you would say that the world was very badly lighted. But, for all that, night is the time for the Great Wheel, for the conflagration of pleasure at our feet makes us forget the void dark beyond. Then the Wheel seems like a great revolving spider's web, with fireflies entangled in it at every turn, and the little engine-house at the centre, with its two electric lights, seems like the great lord spider, with monstrous pearls for his eyes. And, as in the daytime the height robs the depth of its significance, strips poor humanity of any semblance ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... crazy. And all the time she's been breathing the same air, she's thought him a Moses in the Wilderness, and us nothing but the sticks. Think of her believing in that jelly pulp, that steel engraving in a Family Bible! No, I mean to open her eyes, and get her out of his spider's web." ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... interest in each other in that day; and I cannot bear the thought of your being able to say when the scheme of Universalism shall all vanish like the baseless fabric of a vision, and all the hopes built upon it will be like the spider's web and like the giving up of the ghost, that you should be able to say, I never warned you of this issue, nor admonished you of ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... night and your face comes up against a spider's web woven across the road, what a shock that thin line gives you! You fristle through every nerve ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... content on the day she had for a good round sum sold herself to take up a dancing position of some importance in the house of him who, unknown to her, had got himself entangled in more than one human money-spider's web. ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... lack of mental poise, but also utter tactlessness. However, Catherine rattled on, and Dr. Brayle rattled with her,—Mr. Harland threw in occasional monosyllables, but for the most part was evidently caught in a kind of dusty spider's web of thought, and I spoke not at all unless spoken to. Presently I met Catherine's eyes fixed upon me with a sort of round, ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... had no difficulty in finishing the work he had begun. Dancing like an elf with the line in his hand, he spun round and round the tree till the line was wound round to its very last extremity, and the farmer looked like some big bluebottle fly entangled in the fine meshes of a spider's web. Still he slept on, and with a delighted chuckle Teddy sped back to his little companion; her eyes were dancing with mirth, and she clapped her ...
— Teddy's Button • Amy Le Feuvre
... soaring round tower beside it, or the mystical seven light window of the Franciscan friary by the Nore, with the old mill-weirs running free to this day. How long could we ponder by the east window of Kilcooley, with tracery like a spider's web, and listen to the mystical bells, or gaze at the beautiful oriel at Feenagh, or stand at Jerpoint, with its spacious cloisters and stone-groined choir, with Saint Christopher in Irish marble ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... she struck me as haunted by a vague fear, a fear of the house, perhaps, and of her mother's power to rule her. I used to fancy, watching her return to their sombre dwelling, that she was drawn back as to a spider's web by the fascination of its tragic silences. The story of her life is like a strange book read by lightning, with many leaves turned over unseen between ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... believed by some persons that one stage of this disease is identical with the disease named 'Tacon' by the French, and in this country known as 'Copper Web,' Rhizoctonia crocorum. This Rhizoctonia is a mere spawn or mycelium, a mass of rusty-brown material like a thick coating of spider's web of a red tint. This parasite attacks the Crocus (especially C. sativus), the Narcissus, Asparagus, Potato, and other plants. Immersed in the softer and damper portions of the red substance of the corm may frequently be found great ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... ensconces himself during the months of drought. As he seldom emerges, a large variety of spider takes advantage of the hole, and makes its web across the orifice. He is thus furnished with a window and screen gratis; and no one but a Bushman would think of searching beneath a spider's web for a frog. They completely eluded my search on the occasion referred to; and as they rush forth into the hollows filled by the thunder-shower when the rain is actually falling, and the Bechuanas are cowering under their skin garments, the sudden chorus struck up simultaneously ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... wings Is unknown to the Spirit that moveth all things. And the long-mantled moths, that sleep at noon, And dance in the light of the mystic moon— All have one being that loves them all; Not a fly in the spider's web can fall, But He cares for the spider, and cares for the fly; And He cares for each little child's smile or sigh. How it can be, I cannot know; He is wiser than I; ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... constitution-makers. Paine's mechanical hobby was an iron bridge. A single arch, of four hundred feet span, and twenty feet in height from the chord-line, was to be thrown over the Schuylkill, near Philadelphia. The idea was suggested to him by a spider's web, a section of which the bridge resembled; and the principle he worked upon was, that the small segment of a large circle was preferable to the great segment of a small circle. Paine made a complete model of his bridge, in wrought iron and wood, at Bordentown; but, finding that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... ostentation, shows itself in proportion to the size of the writing, the taller and more flourished the upstrokes and the longer the downstrokes, the greater the self-assertiveness. The flourish beneath the signature will be very pronounced, often an elaborate spider's web of interlaced lines. The writing is more or less angular with the finals turned backwards ...
— The Detection of Forgery • Douglas Blackburn
... somewhere about Hankow. It will stretch from Lille to Kiel, it will drive extensions along the Rhine valley into Switzerland, and fling an arm along the Moldau to Prague, it will be the industrial capital of the old world. Paris will be its West End, and it will stretch a spider's web of railways and great roads of the new sort over the whole continent. Even when the coal-field industries of the plain give place to the industrial application of mountain-born electricity, this great city region will remain, I believe, in its present ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... superstitious I should have made up my mind it was a party of demons and witches journeying to a devils' sabbath, and should have gone on my way; but as it was, the phenomenon was absolutely inexplicable to me. I did not believe my eyes, and was entangled in conjectures like a fly in a spider's web.... ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... My sister and I were left—truly like two fools, who fancied that they had obtained a golden treasure, till daylight shewed it to be lead—two silly, luckless flies, who had played in sunbeams and were caught in a spider's web. I leaned against the casement, and watched those two glorious creatures, till they disappeared in the forest-glades; and then I turned. Perdita had not moved; her eyes fixed on the ground, her cheeks pale, her ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... up to now been experimented on. And horses in the phylo-genetic line are more ancient than dogs: they are lower in the zoologic scale. Much lower still, i.e. among the Arthropoda, occur many other mathematical wonders. I only mention in a cursory way the logarithmic spiral of the spider's web, the precise curves realized without instruments of any kind by the Coleoptera and Hymenoptera in cutting leaves, the stereometry of the aphides. Then, as it were, at the bottom of the scale (if one may still speak of a descent and a bottom) the marvellous plancton filters of ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... hear some trig, compact-looking man, seemingly free, all girded and ready, speak of his "furniture," as whether it is insured or not. "But what shall I do with my furniture?"—My gay butterfly is entangled in a spider's web then. Even those who seem for a long while not to have any, if you inquire more narrowly you will find have some stored in somebody's barn. I look upon England today as an old gentleman who is travelling with a great deal of baggage, ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... the trees, a pulpy stock Of toadstools huddled round them; and the flock— Black wings after black wings—of ancient rook By rook; has not the whole scene got a look As though we were the first whose breath should fan In two this spider's web, to give a span Of life more to three flies? See, there's a stone Seems made for us to sit on. Have men gone By here, and passed? or rested on that bank Or on this stone, yet seen no cause to thank For the grass growing here so ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... deep valley the slender structure gradually won its way, supporting itself on its own web as it crawled along like a spider. Indeed, so tall were its towers and so slender its steel cords and beams that from below it appeared as fragile as a spider's web, and the men, poised on the end of swinging beams or standing on narrow platforms hundreds of feet in air, looked not unlike the flies ...
— Stories of Inventors - The Adventures Of Inventors And Engineers • Russell Doubleday
... for no doubt to remain as to their talking. Then there is superabundant proof of the relish with which men enjoyed, in the Middle Ages, silly, teazing or puzzling answers; the questioner remaining at the end rolled up in the repartees, gasping as a fly caught in a spider's web. The Court fool or buffoon had for his principal merit his clever knack of returning witty or confusing answers; the best of them were preserved; itinerant minstrels remembered and repeated them; clerks turned them ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... dew the moon hath shed, Spider's web is dyed with red; Ere to-morrow's sun hath died Death will wed another bride. Ere the moon her course has run Deeds of darkness ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... went down to the farm to look for Charlie, and they told us he was sitting up in the ash-tree at the end of the field. In my dream I did not feel at all surprised that Cripple Charlie should have got into the ash-tree, or at finding him there high up among the branches looking at a spider's web with a magnifying-glass. But I thought that the wind was so high I could not make him hear, and the leaves and boughs tossed so that I could barely see him; and when I climbed up to him, the branch on which I sat swayed so deliciously that I was quite content to ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... occasioned the second denial, while the third took place in the same place, about an hour afterwards. One sin makes many. The devil's hounds hunt in packs. Consistency requires the denier to stick to his lie. Once the tiniest wing tip is in the spider's web, before long the whole body will be wrapped round by its ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... man would look foolish without antlers. And a terrible voice was absurd, but man should have ears like a spider's web, and eyes ...
— Myths and Legends of California and the Old Southwest • Katharine Berry Judson
... to the room. He snatched suddenly at the covers of the bed. What were the sheets?—fabric as old-fashioned as the room, or were they cellulex? The touch of the soft fabric reassured him: it was as soft as though woven of spider's web, and strong as fibres ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... the spider's web back in its place, that once has been swept away? Can you put the apple again on the bough, which fell at our feet to-day? Can you put the lily-cup back on the stem, and cause it to live and grow? Can you ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various
... irritated man, pausing, and looking at his wife, fixedly, while there sat upon his face an expression of terrible despair; "that pledge can never be renewed! It would be like binding a giant with a spider's web. I am lost! lost! lost! The eager, inexpressible desire that now burns within me, cannot be controlled. The effort to do so would drive me mad. I must drink, or die. And you, my poor wife!—and you, my children! what will become of you? Who ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... that none of my official grannies grow a beard or wear their bronchos clothespin fashion. And I'll warrant you that were this nation ruled by sure-enough women instead of by a lot of anaemic he-peons of the money-power, Columbia would not be caught unprepared when "the spider's web woven across the cannon's throat shakes its threaded tears in ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... good cover for a man to hide in, but nobody is hid in it. There's a big spider's web ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... spider," he went on, trying to push all thoughts of the dead squirrel from his mind. Let me tell you about this spider. In the corner of a fence Neddy saw a large circular spider's web, shaped like a funnel, down in the centre of which was a hole. As he stood looking at the delicate thing, finer than any woven silk, a fly struck against it and got his feet tangled, so that he could not escape. Instantly ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... with the sword, do against dwarfs who have cannon? You are courageous, but they are cunning, and would conquer you. For the sake of the nineteenth century you must not be vanquished. Do not come; in your simplicity you would be caught in the spider's web of clever mediocrity, and your grand efforts to tear yourself free would only be laughed at. Great man, you would be ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... he spoke thus, looking at a spider's web. 'Thou cunning little weaver, thou dost teach me perseverance. Let them tear thy web, and thou wilt begin it again, and complete it. Let them destroy it again, and thou wilt resolutely begin to work again—again! That is what we must do, and that ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... nature. So a man might wince when a snail was crushed as if his toe were trodden on; so a man might shrink when a moth shrivelled as if his own hair had caught fire. Man might be a network of exquisite nerves running over the whole universe, a subtle spider's web of pity. This was a fine conception; though perhaps a somewhat severe enforcement of the theological conception of the special divinity of man. For the humanitarians certainly asked of humanity what ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... times. Then over the roof he threw a bobbin. To the right he threw another, and to the left another. The silver wire seemed to whirl until it became a tangle of wire all over the house. The big black cat made an attempt to escape, but it was caught in the wire as a fly is caught in a spider's web, and it hung helpless ...
— Little Mr. Thimblefinger and His Queer Country • Joel Chandler Harris
... which the assembly was held, Mistress Anne's woman brought to her a beautiful robe. 'Twas flowered satin of the sheen and softness of a dove's breast, and the lace adorning it was like a spider's web for gossamer fineness. The robe was sweetly fashioned, fitting her shape wondrously; and when she was attired in it at night a little colour came into her cheeks to see herself so far beyond all comeliness she had ever known before. When she found herself in ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
Copyright © 2025 Free-Translator.com
|
|
|
