"Cobweb" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... details of structure underneath. Line on line the delicate tracery of steel waiting for its concrete sheathing was silhouetted below him. The night wind rushed past and he braced himself automatically, noting at the same time how the vibration of the steel cobweb was like a marvelous faint tune. The wonder of conception and ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... George Eliot, in 'Middlemarch,' 'ever pinched into its pilulous smallness the cobweb of pre-matrimonial acquaintance?' And, to press the metaphor, the cobweb, as far as Mark and Mabel were concerned, brilliantly as it shone in all its silken iridescence, would have rolled up into a particularly small pill. Mark was anxious that ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... a range of those high, square rocks wherein the men dwelt; and hating them deeply, he turned and pressed on in the opposite direction over a gentle rise and across a little valley; till suddenly, among the trees, he came upon a curious barrier of meshed stuff, something like a gigantic cobweb. Through the meshes he could distinctly see the country beyond, and it seemed to be just the country he desired, more wooded and inviting than what he had traversed. Confidently he pushed upon the woven obstacle; but to his amazement it did not give ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... Mr Chester. 'Dear me! I hope the aged soul has not caught her foot in some unlucky cobweb by the way. She is there at ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... his own idol. In the calmer aspects of religion, apart from sectarian schism, these writings offer, indeed, much that is of second-rate interest, but little that is of real value. The idle speculations in regard to former divinities are here made cobweb thin. The philosophy is not new, nor is the spirit of religion raised, even in the most inspired passages, to the level which it has reached in the Divine Song. Some of these Pur[a]nas, of which eighteen chief are cited, but with an unknown number of subordinate ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... desolate cavern of the store; the ghostly remnant of cotton goods fluttered in a draft like a torn and grimy cobweb; the lower floor ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... vision! At the first glimpse of her in her cobweb fineries, I was ill-bred enough to gape, whereat she ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... finished reading he folded the paper and looked dreamily at the cobweb in the corner. He wished to be understood as having no opinion whatever to express. Cranston sat in silence with lips compressed under his heavy moustache. Davies never moved. His blue eyes were fixed unflinchingly on the swarthy face of ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... the jewels and marbles and round, smooth, soft women of Italy's ancient civilization. But at the same time he had the unmistakable, the terrifying feeling of dare-devil sacrilege. What were his coarse hands doing, dabbling in silks and cobweb laces and embroideries? Silk fascinated him; but, while he did not like calico so well, he felt at home with it. Yes, he had seized her, had crushed her madly in the embrace of his plowman arms. But that seemed now a ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... tree. It first roots in the soil of earth, and then lifts its branches to the heavens. Unless it does so lift its branches it is stunted and deformed, and is not a tree. Unless it roots in earth it is not a tree, but an air-plant or a cobweb. ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... hundreds of girls are taught every year, I did not see a single book of any kind or any printed matter, except a few pamphlets concerning the Roman church. The girls work on embroideries, and surely for fineness they surpass all others. They do the most cobweb-like drawn work, and on this are wrought roses, lilies, and butterflies with outspread wings that look as if they had just lighted down to sip the nectar from the blossoms; these very fine embroideries are done ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... implicated. The intrigue, 'a dark kind of treason,' as Rushworth calls it, 'a sham plot' as it is styled by Sir John Hawles, belongs to our story only so far as the cross machinations involved Ralegh. His slender relation to it is as hard to fix as a cobweb or a nightmare. Even in his own age his part in it was, as obsolete Echard says, 'all riddle and mystery.' Cobham had an old acquaintance with the Count of Arenberg, Minister to the Archduke Albert and the Infanta ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... hurricane lamps inside turned them into dark phantoms surrounded by a shining mist, against which the insect world rushing in its millions out of the forest on the bank was baffled mysteriously in its assault. Rigidly enclosed by transparent walls, like captives of an enchanted cobweb, they moved about, sat, gesticulated, conversed publicly during the day; and at night when all the lanterns but one were extinguished, their slumbering shapes covered all over by white cotton sheets on the camp bedsteads, which were brought in every evening, conveyed ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... usher to see that the fan-bearers and the other attendants, women and men, are in their places.—Here are the pearl and diamond necklaces for your throat and bosom. Take care of the robe. The transparent bombyx is as delicate as a cobweb, and if you tear it No, you must not refuse. We all know how it pleases him to see his goddess in divine majesty and beauty." Cleopatra, with glowing cheeks and throbbing heart, made no further objection to donning the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... said Martin; and he held out to her the third finger of his left hand, and wound at its base were the two hairs, in a ring as fine as a cobweb. She took his finger between two of hers and laughed, and examined it, and ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... Valentine Party, to which all the male and female authors have contributed for the purpose of saying on paper charming things of each other, and at which, for a few hours, all are gratified with the full meed of that praise which a cold world is chary of bestowing upon its literary cobweb- spinners." ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... playing tag. This changed after five minutes to baseball with a lemon for a ball and a chair-leg for a bat. A mood of wild exhilaration caught them. The inevitable psychological reaction had set in. Their morbid horror of Nature vanished in its vitalizing flood like a cobweb in a flame. Never had sea or sky or earth seemed more lovely, more lusciously, voluptuously lovely. The sparkle of the salt wind tingled through their bodies like an electric current. The warmth in the air lapped them like a hot bath. Joy-in-life flared up ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... settling in the towns on the railways, on account of the greater facility of transport. [Headnote: PROCESSIONAL CATERPILLAR. PIPES.] The curious caterpillar of the Moth, Bombyx processionaria, feeds on the leaves of the Aleppo and maritime pine trees. Their nests, made of a cobweb material, and shaped like a soda-water bottle, are firmly attached to the branches. On cutting them open the caterpillars are found coiled up in a ball, and do not endeavour to escape. They feed during the night. When they leave the nest they go in procession, ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... put his hand over his eyes. Mary feigned not to notice his profound emotion, and, taking up a paper parcel on the table, opened it, and unrolled a long piece of wonderful old lace, yellow with age, and fine as a cobweb. ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... a snare till that young lady taught them domestic economy! How she pitied them as the severe Sophia led the way into sacred corners, and lifted the lids of coppers and dustholes, and opened cupboard-doors, and once, with an aspect of horror, detected an actual cobweb lurking in an angle of the whitewashed wall! Clarissa could not admire things too much, in order to do away with some of the bitterness of that microscopic survey. Then there was such cross-examination about church-going, ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... apple-tree, a mass of fragrant bloom, more beautiful than Aurora's morning gown. She was sewing; lining with snowy lawn innumerable pockets in a square basket that she held in her lap. The pockets were small, the needles were fine, the thread was a length of cobweb. Everything about the basket was small except the hopes that she was stitching into it; they were so great that her heart could scarcely hold them. Nature was stirring everywhere. The seeds were springing in the warm earth. ...
— A Village Stradivarius • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... hundred feet had to be made by slow, laborious feeling, aided only by such dim reflections of the gibbous moon as glimmered through a window, cobweb-hung, or through some ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... of my being called Old Woman, and Little Old Woman, and Cobweb, and Mrs. Shipton, and Mother Hubbard, and Dame Durden, and so many names of that sort that my own name soon became quite lost ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... tears of anger on her cheeks as she sat back against her cushions; more tears fell, which, regardless of her pearly complexion, she wiped away with a cobweb of a handkerchief, while she sat and hated Courtland, and the whole tribe of college men, her cousin Bill Ward included, for getting her into a scrape like this. Defeat was a thing she could not brook. She had ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... where the light was dim and the air was decidedly musty, two small boys were crouched, playing a silent game of 'stag knife.' Besides being dark and evil-smelling under there, it was damp; great clammy masses of cobweb hung from the joists and spanned the spaces between the piles. The place was haunted by strange and fearsome insects, too, and the moving of the classes above sent showers of dust down between the cracks in the worn ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... her plan, Maggie thought she had no time to lose in making her confession. Frank would be here before her mother got up again to tea. But she dreaded speaking about her happiness; it seemed as yet so cobweb-like, as if a ...
— The Moorland Cottage • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... cooked and roasted, is now a large empty space: even the chimney is gone; and from the ceiling where thick, heavy beams of timber have been placed close to one another, there hangs the dust-covered cobweb, as if the whole were a mass of dark grey ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... ex-royal exile! The memories of all this folk, flown guests and masters of the still-abiding palace-chambers, haunt us as we hurry through. They are but filmy shadows. We cannot grasp them, localise them, people surrounding emptiness with more than withering cobweb forms. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... neighbor because he has his eggs roasted when you have yours boiled; and gossipping and prying into people's affairs, and backbiting, and thinking heaven and earth are coming together if some broom touch a cobweb that you have let grow over the window-sill of your brains what like a large and generous, mildly aperient (I beg your pardon, my dear) course of history! How it clears away all the fumes of the ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... an affectation of firmness and unconcern he was, I knew, far from feeling. "We are the attorneys of Mrs. Rosamond Allerton, and shall, I dare say, if you push us to it, be able to tear this ingeniously-colored cobweb of yours to shreds. If you determine on going to law, your solicitor can serve us; we will enter an appearance, and our client will be ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... chickenhouse which must have reminded her constantly of her lost kitchen. She looked almost jaunty as she greeted me, a cobweb from the roof of the decaying shed caught in her hair. "I have no profitable secrets to market, Weener—youre ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... flew because he saw an owl abroad, and owls are ever grewsome neighbors to poor little songsters," replied Priscilla dryly, and, pressing the treadle swiftly she drew out her cobweb thread with such earnest care that she could not look up at the tall and comely guest who awkwardly stood awaiting some more hospitable greeting. Receiving none, he presently subsided upon a stool hard by the spinning-wheel, and after ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... artistic harmony of the conjunction. Think for a moment—the ordinary commonplace courtiers; the lovers, men and women in the condition of all conditions in which fairy-powers might get a hold of them; the quarrelling king and queen of Fairyland, with their courtiers, Blossom, Cobweb, and the rest, and the court-jester, Puck; the ignorant, clownish artisans, rehearsing their play,—fairies and clowns, lovers and courtiers, are all mingled in one exquisite harmony, clothed with a night of early summer, rounded in by the wedding of the king and queen. But I have ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... Generations after him, a new Generation sprung up in the World, well known by the Name of Monks and Friars, differing from the former in Religion, Garb, and a few other Circumstances, but in the main, the same individual Imposters; the same everlasting Cobweb-Spinners as to their nonsensical Controversies, the same abandon'd Rakehells as to their Morals; but as for the mysterious Arts of heaping up Wealth, and picking the Peoples Pockets, as much superior to their Predecessors the Pagan Philosophers, as an overgrown Favourite that cheats a whole Kingdom, ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... feeling that found vent in an emphatic "Set her up!" Her frock was of straw-coloured jaconet muslin, cut low at the bosom and short at the ankle, so as to display her DEMI- BROQUINS of Regency violet, crossing with many straps upon a yellow cobweb stocking. According to the pretty fashion in which our grandmothers did not hesitate to appear, and our great-aunts went forth armed for the pursuit and capture of our great-uncles, the dress was drawn up ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and cobweb-time, When yellow begins to show in the leaf, That your old gamut changed its chime From those true tones—of span so brief! - That met my beats of joy, of grief, As rhyme ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... Evening. Huge trees with thick gnarled roots. At the base of one of the trees, Time or a lightning stroke has hollowed a sort of chamber. Rising slopes carpeted with heather. Rabbit holes. Mosses. Toadstools. Stretched between two ferns, a great cobweb, spangled with water-drops. At the rise of the curtain, RABBITS are discovered on every side among the underbrush, peacefully inhaling the evening air. A time of ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand
... take the whole party for a moonlight drive down the river!" called Frederic Forester. "Go take off those cobweb frocks and put on something substantial. I'll give you ten minutes. I've the prettiest sight to show you ...
— The Second Violin • Grace S. Richmond
... lands of the Dry Belt? Ever spend days and days in a swinging, swaying coach, behind a four-in-hand, when "Curly" or "Nicola Ned" held the ribbons, and tooled his knowing little leaders and wheelers down those horrifying mountain trails that wind like russet skeins of cobweb through the heights and depths of the Okanagan, the Nicola and the Similkameen countries? If so, you have listened to the call of the Skookum Chuck, as the Chinook speakers call the rollicking, tumbling streams that sing their way through the canyons with a music so dulcet, so ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson
... Earth's fair bosom blow; Transmute to glittering Flints her chalky lands, Or sink on Ocean's bed in countless Sands. Hence silvery Selenite her chrystal moulds, 220 And soft Asbestus smooths his silky folds; His cubic forms phosphoric Fluor prints, Or rays in spheres his amethystine tints. Soft cobweb clouds transparent Onyx spreads, And playful Agates weave their colour'd threads; 225 Gay pictured Mochoes glow with landscape-dyes, And changeful Opals roll their lucid eyes; Blue lambent light around the Sapphire plays, Bright Rubies ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... weather of the tempest. You think your power's infinite as your malice, And would do all your anger prompts you to; But you must wait occasions, and obey them: Sail in an egg-shell, make a straw your mast, A cobweb all your cloth, and pass unseen, Till you have 'scaped the rocks that are ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... sunshine struck red. The crests of the chestnut trees in the rue Soleil d'Or had turned rosy; and a delicate mauve sky, so characteristic of Paris in early autumn, already stretched above the city like a frail tent of silk from which fragile cobweb clouds hung, tinted with ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... sympathies, antipathies and divers kinds of conversation; form and profession reign there; flatteries and hypocrisies intrude themselves there; pledges are given there; attachments and vows are made there; the mind and heart are impressed and moulded there; the cobweb lines of etiquette are drawn there; a panorama of social fascinations pass before the youthful eye there,—these make the parlor the most dangerous department of home. There the young receive their first ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... atmosphere than could be inhaled in the dusty streets of Logrono, at length gathered so much courage from his example, as to accompany him out to the Retiro, and eat his excellent dinners, and empty his cobweb-covered bottles, without allowing their fear of the Carlists to diminish their ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... think the Spirit with which he writes and the intelligence containd in his Letter, will afford Satisfaction to you and the Circle of our Friends. "It is certain, says he, that the Peace of Europe hangs upon a Cobweb. It is certain that, Portugal & Russia excepted, all Europe wishes us Success. The Ports of France, Spain and the Mediterranean are open to us on the Terms of Neutrality. We have already receivd a Benevolence in ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, vol. III. • Samuel Adams
... from beds of lichen green, They creep from the mullein's velvet screen, Some on the backs of beetles fly From the silver tops of moon-touched trees, Where they swing in their cobweb hammocks high, And rocked about in the evening breeze; Some from the hum-bird's downy nest— They had driven him out by elfin power, And, pillowed on plumes of his rainbow breast, Had slumbered there till the charmed hour; Some had ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson
... bah! it appears you're not afraid of me, then! Very well. I'll tell you. It is the best way out of the difficulty. But sit up against this barrel, and drink a little brandy. I've stopped the bleeding in your head with a black enough cobweb." ...
— Where Deep Seas Moan • E. Gallienne-Robin
... sour smells of the hallway smothered her, but she fumbled for the bell, plunging her hand into the damp, clinging gauze of a cobweb that sent her back shuddering. What proved to be Mrs. Landman herself opened the door upon a rushing smell of hops and a cookery and a glimpse of violently disordered interior. It was not so much the furiously stained figure that sent Lilly a step backward, but a black flap tied over one eye and ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... who is trusted by the Bedawin, and who brought with him a guide of the Faw'idah-Juhaynah, one Rjih ibn Ayid. This fellow was by no means a fair specimen of his race: the cynocephalous countenance, the cobweb beard, and the shifting, treacherous eyes were exceptional; the bellowing voice and the greed of gain were not. He had a free passage for himself, his child, and eight sacks of rice, with the promise of a napoleon ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... died at forty, As white and worn as an old table-cloth, Darned, washed, and ironed to a shred of cobweb, Past mending; while your father was sixty-nine Before he could finish ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
... prompt replies are cold, And stately prudence snaps her cobweb hold. Had the good widow tried, or wish'd to speak, This was a bond she could not, dared not break; Their hearts (you never saw their likeness, never) Were join'd, indissolubly join'd for ever. Why need I tell how soon our tears were dried. ...
— May Day With The Muses • Robert Bloomfield
... bend of the head, and still without looking up. At this moment de Sigognac entered the green-room; he was masked and in full costume, just buckling around his waist the belt of the big sword he had inherited from Matamore, with the cobweb dangling from the scabbard. He also marched straight up to Isabelle, and was received ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... trifling nowadays, but the exercise is good for my health. I have trouble, at times, with my rheumatism, and with my—my memory." He passed his hand over his brow as though brushing away an imaginary cobweb. ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... waste time in trivialities, Fenton," he rejoined gently. He brushed a fleck of cobweb from his coat. "By this time you ought to know that you cannot deal with ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... against the strong current of the tributary. A score or two of house-boats lay tied to the McKeesport shore or were bolstered high upon the beach; a fleet of Yough steamers had their noses to the wharf; a half-dozen fishermen were setting nets; and, high over all, with lofty spans of iron cobweb, several railway and wagon bridges ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... rose,—and stood a moment trying to control herself,—a pretty little pitiful figure in her dainty, garden-party frock, a soft white chiffon hat tied on under her rounded chin with a knot of pale blue ribbon, and a tiny cobweb of a lace kerchief in her hand with which ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... which you will be summoned, you would see there can be no excuse for violating the laws by which you are there to be tried. If you could justify yourself to the world, or to the women of whose folly you take advantage, by the fallacious arguments which you have so ready for that purpose, such cobweb sophistry cannot weaken the ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott
... rejoined the theatrical gentleman; "but till I can forget the blunderbuss fired from the upsetting coach, the cobweb over the poor's-box, and the gay parson and undertaker at the harlot's funeral, I cannot allow of the comparison. Besides, I admire Hogarth for another reason: did he consider an engraver's to be an infradig. profession? No, for ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, Number 489, Saturday, May 14, 1831 • Various
... most distinguished courtiers, came in person, and the rogues lifted their arms up in the air, just as if they held something, and said, "See! here are the trousers, here is the coat, here is the cloak," and so forth. "It is as light as a cobweb; one might imagine one had nothing on, but that is ...
— Tell Me Another Story - The Book of Story Programs • Carolyn Sherwin Bailey
... a powerful force in the sword; so powerful, that the grain of gold was beaten to a flat surface, thin as the covering of mist that we breathe on the glass-pane; and it shone at the sword's point, so that the thin threads of the cobweb seemed to swell to cables, for one saw the strong twistings of numberless small threads. And the voice of Knowledge seemed over the whole world, so that the age of miracles appeared to have returned. Thin iron ties were laid over the earth, and along ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... dusty streak! There a corner not quite clean! There a cobweb! There the sneak Of a spider, ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... had made me there was one, what she called "simple" lingerie frock. And it looked just as simple as the check it called for, a one and two ciphers back of it. It was of linen as sheer as a cobweb, real lace and tiny delicious incrustations of embroidery. It fitted in lines that melted into curves, had enticements in the shape of a long sash and a dangerous breast-knot of shimmery blue, the color of my eyes, and I looked ...
— The Melting of Molly • Maria Thompson Daviess
... Every now and then she let drop another word or two on the subject of her fright; her poor disconnected brain seemed unable to grasp anything as a whole; something would float across it and be lost. Marie had grown apt at gathering together these cobweb strands, and disentangling them, but now even her ingenuity was at fault, and the number was the only point which stood out clearly from wavering words about a man and a box. She gathered at last that somewhere or other this number with the light shining on it had attracted Perine's attention, ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... is a delicate piece of work. A single fiber is not much larger than the thread of a cobweb, and before the silk can be used, several threads must be united in one. First, the cocoon is soaked in warm water to loosen the gum that the worm used to stick its threads together. Ends of silk from half a dozen or more cocoons ...
— Makers of Many Things • Eva March Tappan
... hill the Cumberland, clear as when it descended from its mountains five hundred miles away, flowed between its high, straight walls of limestone, spanned by cobweb-like bridges, and bore on its untroubled breast a great fleet of high-chimneyed, white-sided transports, and black, sullen gunboats. Miles away to her left she saw the trains rushing into Nashville, unrolling as they came along black and white ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... sound, then gliding down in a slippery manner, not as drops of rain do, but each distinct from his neighbour. Inside the iron frame (which fitted, not to say too comfortably, and went along the stonework), at least a peck of snow had entered, following its own bend and fancy; light as any cobweb. ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... unchallenged to a house a few streets away! The sense of unreality produced by that one word was so overwhelming that for a blissful moment the whole fabric of what I had been experiencing, the whole huge and oppressive and unescapable fact of the war, slipped away like a torn cobweb, and I seemed to see behind it the reassuring face of things as ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... love's young dream, the darling joys of sweet buttonhooking, to lace up crisscrossed to kneelength the dressy kid footwear satinlined, so incredibly impossibly small, of Clyde Road ladies. Even their wax model Raymonde I visited daily to admire her cobweb hose and stick of rhubarb toe, as worn ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... He wove it all that day in his web, and the next morning he brought her a long piece of the loveliest spider-lace as fine as a cobweb. Little Freckle Frog was ...
— How Freckle Frog Made Herself Pretty • Charlotte B. Herr
... with all the grandees of his court, came to the weavers; and the rogues raised their arms, as if in the act of holding something up, saying, "Here are your Majesty's trousers! here is the scarf! here is the mantle! The whole suit is as light as a cobweb; one might fancy one has nothing at all on, when drest in it; that, however, is the great virtue of ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... in cruelty, made man, young Hermes, who, as all Olympus knew, was for ever at some piece of mischief, insisted on meddling with his father's work, and got leave to fashion the human ear out of a shell that he chanced to have by him, across which he stretched a fine cobweb that he stole from Arachne. But he hollowed and twisted the shell in such a fashion that it would turn back all sounds except very loud blasts that Falsehood should blow on a brazen horn, whilst the impenetrable ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... indomitable friend he seems to have some heart. I only wish he'd given us some facts; they would have been serviceable. But the letters reveal nothing except that he knew Doris. He writes in one of them: 'Doris is learning to embroider. It's like a fairy weaving a cobweb!' Doris isn't a very common name. She must be the same little girl to whom Miss Challoner wrote from time ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... empires of demi-monde sent their sovereigns, diamond-crowned and resistless, to outshine all other principalities and powers, while in breadth of marvelous skirts, in costliness of cobweb laces, in unapproachability of Indian shawls and gold embroideries, and mad fantasies and Cleopatra extravagances, and jewels fit for a Maharajah, the Zu-Zu was distanced ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... Cobweb, or a confus'd lock of these Cylinders, is a certain white substance which, after a fogg, may be observ'd to fly up and down the Air; catching several of these, and examining them with my Microscope, I found them to be much of the same form, looking most like to a flake of Worsted prepar'd ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... everlastingly patching up the leaks and defects in the construction of the Villas. The next morning we had reveille at six, and turned out promptly to feed the wretched horses; the poor, woe-begone looking creatures, hardly one of which was properly picketed, were standing expectantly amid a perfect cobweb of muddy, tangled picketing ropes in the quagmire, which represented their lines. One of the fellows, who had passed the night under our ox waggon, on lifting his rain-sodden blanket, found to his surprise ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... remained now; and in front of where the fire had been, sat the young mistress of the house half hid in a great arm-chair. Soft white folds fell all around her, and two small blue velvet slippers took their ease upon a footstool; with white laces giving their cobweb finish here, there and everywhere. A book was in her hand, and on her shoulder the grey kitten purred secure, in spite of the silky curls which now and then made puss into a pillow. Now and then. For while Miss Kennedy sometimes made believe to ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... daring rush At Barry's hunt and won "the brush," When sportsmen gathered full of glee Around the famed J.P., M.D. And here diverging from my road Into a little episode, I'll tear at once with gesture brief From memory's book a comic leaf, A tale from cobweb's volume hoary Of this Sangrado in his glory, Many will recollect the story. Edward Barry, grave J.P., Sometimes was given to a spree, Which interfered with the precision Of magisterial decision. So Edward Barry jumped the hedge And took the frigid ...
— Recollections of Bytown and Its Old Inhabitants • William Pittman Lett
... make out your bill—a very arduous, formidable undertaking. The bill is of prodigious dimensions, about the size of a sheet of foolscap paper, lined and cross-lined for a multitude of entries. When the account finally reaches you, it closely resembles a design for a cobweb factory. Any attempt to decipher the various hieroglyphics is useless—it can't be done. The only thing that can be done is to read the total at the foot of the ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... Meadow-Lark again, and told her of his nice warm cozy little nest beneath the mushroom. "It is always nice and dry there," he said, "for the rain runs right off the mushroom and does not touch my little cobweb home!" ...
— Friendly Fairies • Johnny Gruelle
... Grecian origin, the allusions to the habits of Grecian women, to the state of popular feeling at Athens, and the administration of Athenian law, with supercilious indifference. All this such a reasoner might do, and all this M. Neufchateau has done. But would such a tissue of cobweb fallacies disguise the truth from any man of ordinary taste and understanding? Such a man would appeal to the whole history of Terence; he would show that he was a diligent translator of the Greek writers ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... Swedish sage, Bad his keen eye your secret haunts explore On dewy dell, high wood, and winding shore; 35 Say on each leaf how tiny Graces dwell; How laugh the Pleasures in a blossom's bell; How insect Loves arise on cobweb wings, Aim their light shafts, and point ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... at the web of all the human future; even your naught is a cobweb, and a spider that liveth on ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... toward the station. She—we call her so, for there was unmistakable ladyhood in her delicately tailored trimness—she bickered at us in a cheerful way, on top of those bushes which were so loaded with the night's rainfall that they shone a blurred cobweb gray in the lifting light. Her eye was also dark and polished and lucid, like a bead of ink. It also had the same effect of tribulation on our spirit. Neither the catbird nor the frog, we said to ourself, would have tormented their souls trying ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... out their dangerous dream, Till wakened by the morning beam; When, dazzled by the eastern glow, Such startler cast his glance below, And saw unmeasured depth around, And heard unintermitted sound, And thought the battled fence so frail, It waved like cobweb in the gale; Amid his senses' giddy wheel, Did he not desperate impulse feel, Headlong to plunge himself below, And meet the worst his fears foreshow?— Thus Ellen, dizzy and astound, As sudden ruin yawned around, By crossing terrors wildly tossed, Still for the Douglas ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... the continent will prove but governmental farces. So long as any individual State has power to defeat the measures of the other twelve, our pretended union is but a name, and our confederation a cobweb." He illustrates his point by the analogy of the Constitution of Connecticut. It is clear that by the head of the Union he meant the combined executive and legislative force, which in the Constitution was vested in the President and Congress. He recognizes the necessity ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... a Fast-Fish? Alive or dead a fish is technically fast, when it is connected with an occupied ship or boat, by any medium at all controllable by the occupant or occupants,—a mast, an oar, a nine-inch cable, a telegraph wire, or a strand of cobweb, it is all the same. Likewise a fish is technically fast when it bears a waif, or any other recognised symbol of possession; so long as the party waifing it plainly evince their ability at any time to take it alongside, as well as ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... as she reached up quite high and brushed a cobweb off the sky with her broom. "That will not do, either. I must see about getting Mother Hubbard and her dog something to eat. You can stay with her later. Oh, I have it!" suddenly cried the lady who was riding on the back of the white gander, "you can go ...
— Uncle Wiggily and Old Mother Hubbard - Adventures of the Rabbit Gentleman with the Mother Goose Characters • Howard R. Garis
... Wondering how far it would have moved before the sermon was over, and whether it would have shone so very bright if God had made no covenant with Abraham, she was earnestly watching it pass from spot to spot, and from cobweb to cobweb, as if already it fled before the coming darkness of the long winter night, when she caught a glimpse of a very peculiar countenance turned in the same direction—that is, not towards the minister, but towards this travelling light. She thought the woman ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... unique place of the pioneer and post-pioneer eras was the Cobweb Palace, at Meiggs's Wharf, run by queer old Abe Warner. It was a little ramshackle building extending back through two or three rooms filled with all manner of old curios such as comes from sailing vessels that go to different parts of the world. These curios were piled indiscriminately everywhere, ...
— Bohemian San Francisco - Its restaurants and their most famous recipes—The elegant art of dining. • Clarence E. Edwords
... Generations after him, a new Race of Men sprung up in the World, well known by the Name of Monks and Fryars, different indeed from the former in Religion, Garb, and a few other Circumstances; but in the main, the same sort of Impostors, the same ever-lasting Cobweb-Spinners, as to their nonsensical Controversies, the same abandon'd Wretches, as to their Morals; but as to the mysterious Arts of heaping up Wealth, and picking the People's Pockets, infinitely superior to the Pagan ...
— A Discourse Concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing (1729) • Anthony Collins
... rather bold in entering the cobweb of the French spiders," said Gentz. "Still, it is not so dangerous as you believe, and you may be perfectly at ease so far as I am concerned. I am here with a charming lady friend, the Princess Bagration. ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... meant when he wrote it all. Taking a stump of cedar pencil from his pocket, one end of it much gnawn, he added a few scrawls to the inscriptions, and then stood on the seat to look out of the round window, which was darkened by an old cobweb. ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... had "done" a chair-cover in cross-stitch that her mother said ought to get the first prize, and was dead sure to take the third; Mary 'Liza was knitting a pair of shell-pattern, openwork stockings as fine as a cobweb, in which there would not be a knot or a dropped stitch, and Paulina Hobson was putting her eyes out over a linen-cambric handkerchief under Miss Davidson's direction. Fine sewing and embroidery were taught ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... elapsed before he spoke she had no means of knowing; probably, at most, two or three minutes. But to the woman gazing out blindly through the cobweb-covered window into the night, it might well have been hours. For some illogical reason, which she could not have explained to herself, she had the feeling that the victory in the coming struggle would lie with the one who kept silent ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... heavy sigh. She had taken off only her outer garments before lying down; and after washing, and combing out her bright silken hair, she resumed the glittering, bride-like finery of the evening before. Poor Mollie looked at the silver-shining silk, the cobweb lace, the gleaming, milky pearls, ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... tall, beautiful woman clothed in a splendid trailing gown, trimmed with exquisite lace as fine as cobweb. This was the important Sorceress known as Glinda the Good, who had been of great assistance to both Ozma and Dorothy. There was no humbug about her magic, you may be sure, and Glinda was as kind as she was powerful. She greeted ...
— The Road to Oz • L. Frank Baum
... "in his den;" and it deserved the name as much as ever. Not a pane had been cleared of its dinginess; not a cobweb had been swept from its ceiling; nothing had been removed, except the pair of living skeletons who once acted as his attendants. They had been removed by the Remover of all things; and were succeeded by a pair, so similar in meagreness and oddity of appearance, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... having seen in the newspapers an account of a philosopher in Germany who made caterpillars manufacture for him a veil of cobweb. The caterpillars were enclosed in a glass case, and, by properly-disposed conveniences and impediments, were induced to work their web up the sides of the glass case. When completed it weighed four-fifths of a grain. Herschel ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... ornaments but the chtelaine at her side, with no adornment but her own silky hair in its own wayward arrangement. To all this there was just one addition. Hazel had taken the lace veil,exquisite in pattern, cobweb-like in texture, and laid it across her head like a Spanish mantilla, from whence it came down about her on all sides to the floor, leaving only the face and the front of the dress clear. One little ungloved hand held the lace ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... train was hanging over the deep, misted cauldron of the valley, again and again it slipped delicately over the span of cobweb across the sky that is a Canadian bridge. In this land of steep gradients, sharp curves and lattice bridges, the train was divided into two sections, and each, with two engines to pull it, ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... The Filar or cobweb Micrometer (Ramsden's micrometer) eyepiece (Fig. 58) consists of an ocular having a fine "fixed" wire stretching horizontally across the field (Fig. 59), a vertical reference wire—fixed—adjusted ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... much the case with the chapel of Monte Beni. One rainy day, however, in his wanderings through the great, intricate house, Kenyon had unexpectedly found his way into it, and been impressed by its solemn aspect. The arched windows, high upward in the wall, and darkened with dust and cobweb, threw down a dim light that showed the altar, with a picture of a martyrdom above, and some tall tapers ranged before it. They had apparently been lighted, and burned an hour or two, and been extinguished perhaps ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... appearance of these exquisite creatures is increased by two long, fringed tentacles streaming behind, drifting at full length or contracting into numerous coils. The fringe on these streamers is a series of living hairs—an aquatic cobweb, each active with life, and doing its share in ensnaring minute atoms of food for its owner. When dozens of these ctenophores (or comb-bearers) as they are called, glide slowly to and fro through a pool, the sight is not soon forgotten. To try to photograph ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... was well paid out for some of her naughtiness. She was flying away from a tree where she had just wrapped a sleeping bat's head up in a large cobweb, when she heard the sweep of wings, felt a sharp nip—and in less time than it takes to tell found herself in the nest of ...
— The Grey Brethren and Other Fragments in Prose and Verse • Michael Fairless
... bobbing around against wall or ceiling; and that occasional audible episode of the stifled, expiring buzz of a fly, which is too plainly in the toils of Arachne up yonder! For in one corner of my room I boast of a prize dusty "cobweb," as yet spared from the household broom, a gossamer arena of two years' standing, which makes a dense span of a length of about two feet from a clump of dried hydrangea blossoms to the sill of a transom-window, and which, of course, somewhere in its dusty spread, tapers off into a dark ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... A cobweb world of thin, transparent shapes, Though limp as silk, the magic woof proves wrought Stronger than steel: no outlets, no escapes Ope to the struggling spirit, trapped and caught. Prisoned in walls of glass, She sees beyond them, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... still, and cool, and quiet as I walked from room to room, slowly and thoughtfully, stopping to pick up my broken pipe, which lay where I had dropped it; and then going on into the next room, where, under the window, lay the bit of cotton cobweb and cat's-cradle work Lizzy had been doing, and had left behind. I gave a bit of a gulp as I picked that up, and I was tucking it inside my jacket when I stopped short, for I thought I heard ...
— Begumbagh - A Tale of the Indian Mutiny • George Manville Fenn
... sometimes come home slightly tipsy, but nothing more. This time, however, he had a black eye, just a friendly slap he had run up against in a playful moment. His curly hair, already streaked with grey, must have dusted a corner in some low wineshop, for a cobweb was hanging to one of his locks over the back of his neck. He was still as attractive as ever, though his features were rather drawn and aged, and his under jaw projected more; but he was always lively, ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... with me, Ile giue thee Fairies to attend on thee; And they shall fetch thee Iewels from the deepe, And sing, while thou on pressed flowers dost sleepe: And I will purge thy mortall grossenesse so, That thou shalt like an airie spirit go. Enter Pease-blossome, Cobweb, Moth, Mustardseede, and ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... not understanding all that was in his daughter's mind, was oppressed by that most nightmarish of emotions for a man of clear-cut intellectual interests—an apprehension, like an imperceptible, clinging cobweb, not to be brushed away. He wished heartily that the next year were over and Lydia "safely married." Daughters were so much more of a responsibility than sons. They forced on one the reality of a world ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... it all was with its droning old-world smell of ancestor, dry rot, and stale incense. As the clouds came and went, the grey-green, cobweb-chastened, light ebbed and flowed over the walls and ceiling; to watch the fitfulness of its streams was a sufficient occupation. A hen laid an egg outside and began to cackle—it was an event of magnitude; a peasant sharpening his scythe, ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... places I could tell you of. When one walks on those grey roads at evening by the scented elder-bushes of the white cottages, watching the faint mountains gathering the clouds upon their heads, one all too readily discovers, beyond the thin cobweb veil of the senses, those creatures, the goblins, hurrying from the white square stone door to the north, or from the ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... her foot from the meshes, only to find her neck entwined; she clutched at the threads about her throat, only to find her hands entangled; she tore at the cobweb, she bent her body, she slipped away; she beat with her fists, she raged, and only enmeshed herself the more tightly in the horrible skein; finally she lay fast bound. During this last phase of the dance, her artist ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... that she passed over the compliment with a gesture like that of brushing away a cobweb. Her eyes were like deep, clear ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... the spiders Cobweb[46], out of which great flyes breake and in which the little are hangd: the Tarriers snaphance[47], limetwiggs, weavers shuttle & blankets in which fooles & wrangling coxcombes are tossd. Doe I know't ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... shades with cypress the young poet's bays: Pale and dejected, mark, how genius strives With poverty, and mark, how well it thrives; The shabby cov'ring of the gentle bard, Regard it well, 'tis worthy thy regard, The friendly cobweb, serving for a screen, The chair, a part of what it once had been; The bed, whereon th' unhappy victim slept And oft unseen, in silent anguish, wept, Or spent in dear delusive dreams, the night, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 350, January 3, 1829 • Various
... looked into the rose-pink room and saw Liane Delorme, in a negligee like a cobweb over a nightdress even more sheer, kneeling and clawing at her throat, round which a heavy silk handkerchief was slowly tightening; her face already purple with strangulation, her eyes bulging from their sockets, her tongue protruding between ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... shoulders, did remember in some mysterious fashion to return the books he borrowed, enriched often, as Lamb proudly records, with marginal notes which tripled their value. His conduct in this regard was all the more praiseworthy inasmuch as the cobweb statutes which define books as personal property have never met with literal acceptance. Lamb's theory that books belong with the highest propriety to those who understand them best (a theory often advanced in defence of depredations which Lamb would have scorned to commit), was popular before ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... more. The vivid pages of history in which he explains and defends the French Revolution which Burke had attacked and misunderstood, are only an illustration to his main argument. He expounds the right of revolution, and blows away the cobweb argument of legality by which his antagonist had sought to confine posterity within the settlement of 1688. Every age and generation must be free to act for itself. Man has no property in man, and the claim of one generation to govern beyond ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... continually, as if it were keeping time to an inaudible tune, as she sat there stiffly erect. Her skin was pale and withered; and her cheeks were wrinkled in fine lines, like the crossings of a cobweb. Her eyes might once have been blue; but they had become nearly colourless, and, looking at her, one might easily imagine that she was blind. She had a singularly sweet smile, and a musical voice, which though sad, had no trace of whining. If it had not been for her smile and her voice, ...
— An Arrow in a Sunbeam - and Other Tales • Various
... three couples dancing at the moment. There might as well have been but one for, within the hall and without, the eyes of all seemed fastened on that. Some strange caprice had prompted Evelyn Darrah to wear black that night—a grenadine, with cobweb lace and glinting spangles and sweeping train, the bodice cut low and displaying her shapely arms and neck and shoulders, enhancing the grace of her tall and slender form. Her dark hair was coiled in masses, yet here and there a curl or tendril fell upon the soft, polished skin, or ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... of barking," answered Temperance, laying smooth a piece of cobweb lawn. "I think I'll bite, one of these days. Deary me, but there are widows of divers sorts! If ever there were what Paul calls 'a widow indeed,' it is my Lady Lettice; and she doesn't make a screen of it, as Faith does, against all the east winds that ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... 21st, 1741, being then on a visit, and intent on field-diversions, I rose before daybreak: when I came into the enclosures, I found the stubbles and clover-grounds matted all over with a thick coat of cobweb, in the meshes of which a copious and heavy dew hung so plentifully that the whole face of the country seemed, as it were, covered with two or three setting-nets drawn one over another. When the dogs attempted to hunt, their eyes were so blinded and hoodwinked that they could not ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... and stared at it—and suddenly her heart sank with a miserable sense of impotence and dismay. Yes, this was the place beyond question. Through the picket fence she could make out the looming shadows of many buildings, and spidery iron structures that seemed to cobweb the darkness, and—and—Her face mirrored her misery. She had thought of a single building. Where, inside there, amongst all those rambling structures, with little time, perhaps none at all, to search, was she ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... all our efforts to forward the calling of the next conference in the interest of permanent peace brought up dead against an invisible barrier, an impassable wall like the secret line drawn in the air by magic, thinner than a cobweb, more impenetrable than steel. What was it? Indifference? General scepticism? Preoccupation with other designs which made the discussion of peace plans premature and futile? I did not know. But certainly there was something in the way, and the undiscovered nature ...
— Fighting For Peace • Henry Van Dyke
... every adventitious aid the art of modern dressmaking can bestow. Nell knew too little of dress to fully appreciate the exquisite perfection of the toilette de la danse; she could only admire and wonder. It was of a soft cream silk, rendered still softer in appearance by cobweb lace, in which, as if caught by the filmy strands, as in a net, were lustrous pearls. Diamonds glittered in the hair which served them as a setting of gold. Her very gloves were unlike those of the other women, and seemed to fit the long and slender ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... Ay, now their heads do travail, now they work; Their faces run like shittles; they are weaving Some curious cobweb to catch flies. ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... it, so much as patience, accuracy, and watchfulness. Hazlitt thought the most sensible people to be met with are intelligent men of business and of the world, who argue from what they see and know, instead of spinning cobweb distinctions of what things ought ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... made up of moonbeams and rays of sunshine and rainbow-gleams—this dream—woven by fairy fingers into so fragile a cobweb that it seemed absurd to think it could stand the winds and torrents of Grown-Up Land; but Opal, in spite of her eighteen years, was still awaiting the coming of her ideal knight, though the stage setting of the drama, and her picture of just how the ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous
... the absorbers. The moonlight bathing the little room went into them and darkness sprang around us. Snap fumbled at his instrument board. Actinic light showed dimly in the quivering, thumbnail mirrors. Two of them. They hung poised on their cobweb wires, infinitely sensitive to the infra-red light-rays Grantline was sending from the moon. The mirrors in a moment began swinging. On the scale across the room the actinic beams from them were ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... I remember faces well. I may meet her any day, or never meet her at all, but any direct approach we must give up. The more I think of it, the graver it appears. If it be a police affair, no letter reaches her unopened. Rest assured of that. She is like a fly in a cobweb. Chance may help us, but so far the luck ...
— A Diplomatic Adventure • S. Weir Mitchell
... come again, this time like a messenger bearing a command, to call him back to a duty which he believed he had relinquished and put down forever. And solely because it would be treasonable to that duty which still clung to him like a tenacious cobweb, he was riding into the smoke of ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... Axe, sky-parlours in Porridge Island, and night-cellars in Blood-Bowl Alley. He reproduces the decorations of the Rose Tavern or of the Turk's Head Bagnio as scrupulously as the monsters at Dr. Misaubin's museum in St. Martin's Lane, or the cobweb over the poor-box in Mary-le-bone Old Church. The pictures on the walls, the Chinese nondescripts on the shelves, the tables and chairs, the pipes and punch-bowls, nay, the very tobacco and snuff, have all their distinctive physiognomy ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... out the cupboards, Nicky-Nan had discovered in the right-hand one that one or two boards of the flooring were loose. Lifting them cautiously he had peered into a sort of lazarette deep down in the wall, and had lowered a candle, the flame of which, catching hold of a mass of dried cobweb, had shot up and singed his eyebrows, for a moment threatening to set the house on fire. It had given him a scare, and he never ventured to carry ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... of the Walpole tract sounded the rick-tack of busy axes, the yawk of saws, and the crash of falling timber. The twitch roads, narrow trails which converged to centers like the strands of a cobweb, led to the yards where the logs were piled for the sleds; and from the yards, after the snows were deep and had been iced by watering tanks on sleds, huge loads were eased down the slopes to the landings close ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... tact, sought to entangle Le Gardeur's thoughts in an elaborate cobweb of occupations rivalling that of Arachne, which she had woven to catch every leisure hour of his, so as to leave him no time to brood over the pleasures of the Palace of the Intendant or the charms of ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... through these difficulties, and had mastered the alphabet, which was an Egyptian Temple in itself, there then appeared a procession of new horrors, called arbitrary characters; the most despotic characters I have ever known; who insisted, for instance, that a thing like the beginning of a cobweb, meant expectation, and that a pen-and-ink sky-rocket, stood for disadvantageous. When I had fixed these wretches in my mind, I found that they had driven everything else out of it; then, beginning again, I forgot them; ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... ye shapes of nought," he bellowed, "no more, no more, for love's sake. I begin to see what men call red Beelzebub, and that's an end to all true fellowship. Whiffle your tufted bee's wing, Signior Cobweb, I beseech you—a little fiery devil with four eyes floats in my brain, and flame's a frisky bedfellow. Avaunt! avaunt ye! Would now my true friend Bottom the weaver were at my side. His was a courage ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... altogether new means of transport are provided, the attempt to restrict the number of passengers which a car or trolley may carry is, I think, antisocial, and must prove futile. The force of public convenience would break the red-tape barrier like a cobweb. The trains and trolleys follow each other at the very briefest intervals; it does not seem possible that a greater number should be run on the existing lines; and, that being so, there is no alternative between overcrowding and the far greater inconvenience ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... Simpcox, Sly, Grumio, Mopsa, Pinch, Nym, Simple, Quickly, Overdone, Elbow, Froth, Dogberry, Puck, Peablossom, Taurus, Bottom, Bushy, Hotspur, Scroop, Wall, Flute, Snout, Starveling, Moonshine, Mouldy, Shallow, Wart, Bullcalf, Feeble, Quince, Snag, Dull, Mustardseed, Fang, Snare, Rumor, Tearsheet, Cobweb, Costard and Moth; but in names as well as in plot "the father of Pickwick" has distanced the Master. In fact, to give all the odd and whimsical names invented by Dickens would be to publish a book, for he compiled an indexed volume of names from which he drew at ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... thither all the objects of art, furniture, etc. One room only of the maternal mansion was permitted to contribute its quota to the completion of the bridal dwelling—the wing, never since inhabited, in which Philip had made his essay as a painter—and, without variation of a cobweb, and, with whimsical care and effort on the part of Miss Fanny, this apartment was reproduced at Revedere—her own picture on the easel, as it stood on the night of his abandonment of his art, and palette, pencils and colors in tempting readiness on the table. Even the fire-grate ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... cherry and brush heaps and logs half-rotted. The piece of timber to which Solomon had referred was the base log of a giant hemlock abandoned, no doubt, because, when cut, it was found to be a shell. It was open only at the butt end. Its opening was covered by an immense cobweb. Jack brushed it away and crept backward into the shell. He observed that many black hairs were caught upon the rough sides of this singular chamber. Through the winter it must have been the den of a black bear. As ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... flight, this little voyager was coasting the clouds. I can follow him far across the meadow in the cobweb basket as his filmy balloon floats shimmering ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... after, as Rosy lay up in a tree, waiting for the sun to rise, she heard a great buzzing close by, and saw a fly caught in a cobweb that went from one twig to another. The big spider was trying to spin him all up, and the poor fly was struggling to get away before his legs ...
— The Louisa Alcott Reader - A Supplementary Reader for the Fourth Year of School • Louisa M. Alcott
... for once I led my party into Pixley's camp, And he paroled me. I defended, too, The State of Oregon against the sharp And bloody tooth of the Australian sheep. But I've an aptitude exceeding neat For bloodless battles of diplomacy. My cobweb treaty of Exclusion once, Through which a hundred thousand coolies sailed, Was much admired, but most by Colonel Bee. Though born a tinker I'm a diplomat From old Missouri, and I—ha! ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... lumber room The Discobolus standeth and turneth his face to the wall; Dusty, cobweb-covered, maimed and set at naught, Beauty crieth in an attic and no man regardeth: O God! ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... Festus,' replied the other, his person responding passively to the rapid vibrations imparted. 'O, be tender, please—a little softer, there's a dear nephew! My arm is no more than a cobweb.' ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... have needles out of the sweet pine woods, And spools of cobweb thread; We have bachelors' buttons for dolly's dress, And ...
— Pinafore Palace • Various
... web." Hoveden, the historian to whom Scott alludes, applies this strong image to the scattering of the men of Lothian: "For the Almighty was offended at them, and their strength was rent like a cobweb."] ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... small Prussian-Mecklenburg brabble, which there has lately been; paltry enough recruiting-quarrel, such as often are (and has been settled mutually some time ago, this one, but is capable of being ripped up again);—and that, on this cobweb of a pretext, they mean to draw sword when they like. Russia too has its Pretext ready. And if Friedrich hint of stirring, England whispers hoarse, England and other friends, "Wait, your Majesty! Oh, beware!" To keep one's sword at its sharpest, and, with an easy patient air, one's ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Seven-Years War: First Campaign—1756-1757. • Thomas Carlyle
... make our New Oxford Streets, and our other new streets, never heeding, never asking, where the wretches whom we clear out, crowd. With such scenes at our doors, with all the plagues of Egypt tied up with bits of cobweb in kennels so near our homes, we timorously make our Nuisance Bills and Boards of Health, nonentities, and think to keep away the Wolves of Crime and Filth, by our electioneering ducking to little vestrymen and our ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens |
