"Ant-" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... come to live in Waterloo, when the Bank of New Guinea had finally dispensed with Dad's services as manager at Billabong. His wife had picked on this obscure suburb of working men to hide her shame, and Dad who could make himself at home on an ant-hill, had cheerfully acquiesced. He had started in business as a house-agent, and the family of three lived from hand to mouth on the profits that escaped the publican. Not that Dad was idle. He was for ever busy; but it was the busyness ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... upon it on that June evening far away, it was girt and crowned with batteries. The banks of the St. Lawrence, that define what we have called the throat of the bull, are precipitous and lofty, and seem by mere natural strength to defy attack, though it was just here, by an ant-like track up 250 feet of almost perpendicular cliff, Wolfe actually climbed to the plains of Abraham. To the east of Quebec is a curve of lofty shore, seven miles long, between the St. Charles and the Montmorenci. When Wolfe's eye followed those seven miles ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... fairies, hot and angry as a swarm of bees. They came and fastened upon the unhappy old man, and began pulling him. "To the ant-hills!" they cried; "off with him to the ant-hills!" But when they found that Toonie still held him, ...
— The Blue Moon • Laurence Housman
... write letters to our friends explaining to them what we are about. We even indite diaries to be read by goodness knows whom, explaining to ourselves what we have been doing. Sometimes we find something that really looks valuable, and rush to our particular ant-heap with it while our neighbours pause and watch us. But they really do not care; and if the rumour of our discovery reach so far as the next ant-heap, the bustlers there are almost indifferent, though a few may feel a passing pang of jealousy. They may ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... and in order that my recorder could put down the readings so that I might identify them later I was obliged to give him titles for these. They had no names in our language, and I did not know the native ones, so, remembering that at the foot of one I had found some ant-hills covered with beautiful diamond-like quartz crystals, I called it Diamond Butte, and the other, having a dark, weird, forbidding look, I named on the spur of the moment Solitaire Butte. These names being used ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... will come when the Polar ice shall have accumulated, till it forms vast continents many thousands of feet above the level of the sea, all of solid ice. The weight of this mass will, it is believed, cause the world to topple over on its axis, so that the earth will be upset as an ant-heap overturned by a ploughshare. In that day the icebergs will come crunching against our proudest cities, razing them from off the face of the earth as though they were made of rotten blotting-paper. There is no respect now of Handel ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... not enjoy torturing his prisoners. He tried that once on a Mexican down Agua Prieta way. After the custom of his nation he pegged out the luckless prisoner near an ant-hill, with his mouth propped open by a wooden gag and a trail of ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... with him. He said that she was the only country worth inhabiting in a cursed world, that she was God's own country. Then I fanned his flame with my own home-sick talk. The wind was blowing chillily north-westward that night on the other side of our ant-hill shelter. A kindred wind was blowing just as steadfastly in my own soul. I had had my contrarieties lately, both of hard times and pastoral reverses; but, and that seemed to matter more, I was beginning to feel my age, its untimely ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... Universal Protection Society," of which you are chairman, to call upon our honored Secretary of State, with the view of obtaining protection for the interests of our merchants who are now endeavoring to create a trade in ant-eaters with the inhabitants of the Chickadiddle Islands in the South Sea, I have the honor to submit the following synopsis of what took place at ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 16, July 16, 1870 • Various
... through the forest of Guyana, his arriving at a savannah, extending in a level plain beyond the visible horizon, and in which he beheld a structure that appeared to have been raised by human industry. M. de Prefontaine, who accompanied him in the expedition, informed him that it was an ant-hill, which they could not approach without danger of being devoured. They passed some of the paths frequented by the labourers, which belonged to a very large species of black ants. The nest they had constructed, which had the form ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... upon Mr. Booth's map of East London, with its coloured lines showing the swarms of human beings who live ignobly and die obscurely, and realise for yourself of what import the cult of beautiful form is to these human ant-heaps. Walk down the populous Whitechapel Road of a Saturday night, or traverse the long slimy alleys of Rotherhithe among the timber wharves, and discover how many of your countrymen and contemporaries are living neither in your country nor in your century. To Mr. Henry ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... into a doorway, and thought she would wait till the people had passed, but she waited and waited, and still they kept on coming backwards and forwards, just for all the world like a number of busy ants swarming about an ant-hill. There was no end to them. They hustled and jostled, and ran and pushed, and talked till Phyllis was utterly bewildered, and said to herself she had better ...
— Little Folks (November 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... MYRMIDONS, "ant-men," so-called because Zeus was said to have peopled Thessaly, from which originally they came, by transforming ants into men; they were the people of AEgina, whose warriors followed Achilles to the siege ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... motor-bus crowded with drafts for the Front. Big ocean liners, flying the Red Cross, lie at their moorings, and lofty electric cranes gyrate noiselessly over supply ships unloading their stores, while animated swarms of dockers in khaki pile up a great ant-heap of sacks in the sheds with a passionless concentration that seems like the workings of blind instinct. And here are warehouses whose potentialities of wealth are like Mr. Thrale's brewery—wheat, beef, fodder, and the four ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... remember my coming up here—four or five days ago now? I was coming to tell you to burn the stuff, and then you know one of the youngsters stirred up an ant-bed and drove ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... small pointed eminences or "cusps;" and the animal was doubtless insectivorous. By Professor Owen, the highest living authority on the subject, Amphitherium is believed to be a small Marsupial, most nearly allied to the living Banded Ant-eater (Myrmecobius) of Australia (fig. 158). Amphilestes and Phascolotherium (fig. 184) are also believed by the same distinguished anatomist and palaeontologist to have been insect-eating Marsupials, and the latter is supposed to find its nearest living ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... finer flooring, they procured a quantity of the material of which the ant-hills are composed; which, being of a glutinous nature, makes a mortar almost as binding as ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... on some specialized line, will fail to understand what to the dabbler in many lines seems perfectly natural and reasonable. Larssen, a master-mind, had his peculiar limitations as well as smaller men. His brain had been trained to see the world as an ant-heap into which some Power External had stamped an iron heel. The ants fought blindly with one another to reach the surface—to live. That was the law of life as he saw it—to fight ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... could all but count the windows of Silao, Irapuato, and other towns; the second, though more than twenty miles away, still in the back foreground of the picture. Thread-like, brown trails wound away over the plain and up into the mountains, here and there dotted by travelers crawling ant-like along them a few inches an hour. Take the most perfect day of late May or early June in our North, brush off the clouds, make the air many times fresher and clearer, add October nights, and multiply the sum total by 365, and it is more easily understood why Americans who settle in ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... care, nurture, provision, education. We have to go far down the scale for any instance of organized motherhood, but we do find it in the hymenoptera; in the overflowing industry, prosperity, peace and loving service of the ant-hill and bee-hive. These are the most highly socialized types of life, next to ours, ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... of his hind feet, which he can turn completely round at will, till the claws point forward like those of a bat. But with him, too, the tail is the sheet-anchor, by which he can hold on, and bring all his four feet to bear on his food. So it is with the little Ant-eater, {91b} who must needs climb here to feed on the tree ants. So it is, too, with the Tree Porcupine, {91c} or Coendou, who (in strange contrast to the well-known classic Porcupine of the rocks of Southern Europe) climbs trees after ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... give me Wealth!" the Egyptian cried. His prayer was granted. High as heaven behold Palace and Pyramid; the brimming tide Of lavish Nile washed all his land with gold. Armies of slaves toiled ant-wise at his feet, World-circling traffic roared through mart and street, His priests were gods, his spice-balmed kings enshrined Set death at naught in rock-ribbed charnels deep. Seek Pharaoh's race to-day, ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... original motion and impetus of the shell itself, spreading as they go. Horizontal fire is easy to find cover against, but these discharges from on high are much more difficult to evade. For instance, ant-hills are excellent cover against rifles, but none at all against these shells. It is shrapnel, as this kind of shell is called, that does the most mischief. The round bullets (200 to a caseful) lie scattered about ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... present rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, elephants, lions, tigers, oxen, horses, etc.; and if you examine the newest tertiary deposits, which contain the animals and plants which immediately preceded those which now exist in the same country, you do not find gigantic specimens of ant-eaters and kangaroos, but you find rhinoceroses, elephants, lions, tigers, etc.,—of different species to those now living,—but still their close allies. If you turn to South America, where, at the present day, we have great sloths and armadilloes and creatures of that kind, ...
— A Critical Examination Of The Position Of Mr. Darwin's Work, "On The Origin Of Species," In Relation To The Complete Theory Of The Causes Of The Phenomena Of Organic Nature • Thomas H. Huxley
... too. So he laid the two sweetmeats on the ground, and he took out another, and another, and another, until he had taken them all out; but in each he found an ant. "Never mind," he said, "I won't eat the sweetmeats; the ants shall eat them." Then the Ant-Raja came and stood before him and said, "You have been good to us. If ever you are in trouble, think of me and we will ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Collected by Joseph Jacobs
... mechanically, too horrified at her surroundings to utter a sound. For dawn had just broken and she saw that she was standing in a small open space in the midst of a sandalwood scrub, and encircled by twenty or thirty ferocious-looking myall blacks all armed with spears and waddies. The strong ant-like odour which emanated from their jet-black skins filled her nostrils and, putting her hands to her eyes, she shuddered and fell upon her ...
— Chinkie's Flat and Other Stories - 1904 • Louis Becke
... he would bring out his gun and . . . suddenly Mark was turned inside out by terror, for not twenty yards away there was without any possibility of self-deception a wild beast something between an ant-eater and a laughing hyena that with nose to the ground was evidently pursuing him, and what was worse was between him and home. There flashed through Mark's mind the memories of what other hunters had done in such situations, what ruses they had adopted if unarmed, what method of defence if armed; ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... ants hauling some large object to their nest; for the nearest grown-up person was invariably hailed, and pulled, and pushed, and hurried along till the "new flower" was reached. Then, if the object was incautious enough to stoop down to examine it, the ants, ant-wise, would envelope it, climbing, swarming all over it, till there was nothing ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... first story and rush the private apartments, and murder him in his morning bath or in his bed! What a surprising and unexplained apparition it would have been! But now, and for the future, he would know that daily about this time a large ant-like colony was running about under him, very strong of arm, very active of leg; and what protection, he wondered, from peril of sudden inroad was that search under his bed on the ninth day of every ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... Ant-lion is classic; it does not differ greatly from the others. He excavates a conical pitfall, in which he conceals himself, and seizes the unfortunate ants and other insects whom ill-chance ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... Pikermi he has discovered the group of the Simocyonidae intermediate between bears and wolves; the genus Hyaenictis which connects the hyaenas with the civets; the Ancylotherium, which is allied both to the extinct mastodon and to the living pangolin or scaly ant-eater; and the Helladotherium, which connects the now isolated giraffe with the ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... to the comparatively sheltered position of the more deeply sunk spines, and from the fact that the head was usually under cover of a stone or ant-heap, were less common; in one instance hyperaesthesia was noted in one upper extremity as the result of a crossing bullet having struck the fourth cervical spine. In a man wounded at Paardeberg Drift the bullet entered at the centre of the buttock, traversed the bones of the pelvis, and, ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... the approaching army would crush the men, women, and children whose touching fear and helplessness he had just beheld, as a man's foot tramples on an ant-bill, and again every instinct of his being urged him to pray, while from his oppressed heart the imploring cry rose through ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... like an ant-hill in commotion, there is so much scurrying around; but I know that is what you thoroughly enjoy. You shall have a finger in every pie if you will come out and help me to ...
— Two Little Knights of Kentucky • Annie Fellows Johnston
... the common, sir; she has turned off there." I knew this common very well; it was for the most part very uneven ground, covered with heather and dark-green furze bushes, with here and there a scrubby old thorn-tree; there were also open spaces of fine short grass, with ant-hills and mole-turns everywhere; the worst place I ever ...
— Black Beauty • Anna Sewell
... things; his mind ran over vast tracts and shoreless oceans of conjecture. Then, after floating for a time among a thousand contradictory ideas, he felt he was strongest in his own house, and he resolved to watch it as the ant-lion watches his ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... "Mind the ant-bear holes!" shouted Dikkop, but as he shouted in Dutch Jerry did not understand him, and devoted himself to vain endeavours to restrain the horse. At first the animal looked after itself and avoided the holes referred to, but as Jerry kept tugging furiously at the reins it became reckless, ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... we stopped for supplies. There are six thousand inhabitants here, with some good buildings and a fine, broad, stone wharf, but it is rather a dingy place. The steamer "Bonanza" had just landed. On the double row of flaggings leading up to the summit of the bank, were two ant-like processions of Kentucky folk—one, leisurely climbing townward with their bags and bundles, the other hurrying down with theirs to the boat, which was ringing its bell, blowing off steam, and in other ways ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... together, disintegrating to form new groups, revolving in the slow mass of the herd, shaking hands, crying greetings, mumbling confidential asides. An observer who did not understand would find it all as aimless as the activity of an ant-heap—as puzzling as the slow writhings of a swarm of bees. Clouds of cigar smoke over all—voices blended into one continual diapason; medley, and miasma of ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... MacCailein; "Curse them!" he cried in the Gaelic, and he shook a white fist foolishly at the north; "I'm wanting but peace and my books. I keep my ambition in leash, and still and on they must be snapping like curs at Argile. God's name! and I'll crush them like ants on the ant-heap." ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... of the big, heated girl facing her made her impatient. Could one not poke up this calm, as the child Billy had poked up the small, quiet ant-hills, so that they immediately teemed with excited life. "Are you not afraid?" asked ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... Thus there existed beneath the county of Stirling a vast tract, full of burrows, tunnels, bored with caves, and perforated with shafts, a subterranean labyrinth, which might be compared to an enormous ant-hill. ...
— The Underground City • Jules Verne
... worried the doctor as to when I should go, and always received the non-committal reply, 'When you are fit to travel.' Saturday, however, found me on board of a hospital ship, and at 9 o'clock that night we arrived at Southampton. Ant-like, the stretcher-bearers went to and fro, from ship to train. For some reason or other they dumped me in a corner with my head nearest the scene of activities, so that I was unable to interest myself in watching the entraining of others. I feverishly hoped they wouldn't forget ...
— One Young Man • Sir John Ernest Hodder-Williams
... thousand of his troops, all mounted, filing out of the gate and heading straight for the wagon—for, to be quite candid, the South African savage is a little uncertain in his moods, and the man who is to-day in high favour may, as likely as not, find himself staked out on an ant-heap to-morrow, to die the awful "death of the ants" in revenge for some unknown and unintended offence. But upon the arrival of the cavalcade I was quickly reassured by the cordial tone of the king's greeting and the respect with which the indunas saluted ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... all ran about as fast as ants in an ant-hill, and the busiest of all was sixteen-year-old Hannah Sherwin. Since she was my grandmother's grand mother's mother, at last the ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... the Author Frontispiece A Dasylirion, 1 Cottonwood, 4 Cereus Greggii, a small cactus with enormous root, 5 Fronteras, 7 Remarkable Ant-hill, 8 Church Bells at Opoto, 10 Also a Visitor, 11 A Mexican from Opoto, 12 Rock-carvings near Granados, 15 The Church in Bacadehuachi, 17 Aztec Vase, Found in the Church of Bacadehuachi, 18 Agave Hartmani, a new species of century plant, 19 Ancient ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... indignation had momentarily lifted him above his normal stature: he remained a little man among little men, and his eagerness to rebuild his life with all the old smiling optimism reminded Susy of the patient industry of an ant remaking its ruined ant-heap. ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... his heart. The moon began to be now eclipsed by twilight; a golden band surrounded the horizon, announcing the approach of the day. Athos threw his cloak over the shoulders of Raoul, and led him back to the city, where burdens and porters were already in motion, like a vast ant-hill. At the extremity of the plateau which Athos and Bragelonne were quitting, they saw a dark shadow moving uneasily backwards and forwards, as if in indecision or ashamed to be seen. It was Grimaud, who in his anxiety had tracked his master, and ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... whiskers, and wearing leggings, whom I should be able to recognise again, shot my friend, Private F. Foster, 4th Batt. King's Royal Rifle Corps, by putting the muzzle of his rifle to his side. Private Foster had been firing under cover of an ant-heap till the Boers took the position; he then threw away his rifle to put his hands up, but was shot all ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... do the ligaments which hold the bones, and consequently the skeleton falls to pieces. When, therefore, you have made your skeleton by the means recommended by various authors, such as exposing it in an ant-hill, a wasp's nest, or to the attacks of the "blow-flies" or "mealworm" (the larvae of a beetle), to "tadpoles," or —as is the usual way with the bone preservers—by maceration in water for a lengthened period (after removal ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... into a pint-pot, his tongue became loosened, and he expressed an opinion that geology was all bosh, and said if he had half his employer's money he'd be dashed if he would go rooting round in the mud like a blessed old ant-eater; he also irreverently referred to his learned boss as "Old Rocks" over there. He had a pretty easy billet of it though, he said, taking it all round, when the weather was fine; he got a couple of notes a week and all expenses paid, and the money was sure; he was only required to look ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... our drive to-day was a new experience; we had passed over a few ant-hills before on our journey, but now we came to a land where it was difficult, if not impossible, to dodge them; they literally covered the ground, and the South American ant-hill is a power to be reckoned with. ...
— Argentina From A British Point Of View • Various
... which are found among the aphides. The ants may be observed stroking the aphides with their feelers, causing the aphides to excrete a sweet fluid on which the ant feeds. Aphides are sometimes called ant-cows. ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... the Three Brahmin Brothers" (Tawney, 1 : 293), where two older brothers, in order to get rid of the youngest, who has been slandered by their wives ("Potiphar's wife" situation), order him to dig up an ant-hill in which lives a venomous snake. Because of his virtue, however, he finds a pitcher filled with gold! There is nothing else in this story which even in the remotest way suggests ours. While Benfey (1 : 214-215, note) has shown ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... that he was in Paris he found that he had forgotten one important thing: her name. He could not remember it. He could only recollect her Christian name: Antoinette. And then, even if he remembered, how was he to find a poor little governess in that ant-heap of human beings? ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... much difference between the length of the two, and one seems very much like the other. While we are very small we see great differences between ourselves and others; but on the mountain top the hovel and the palace do not differ so very much in height. They all look like ant-hills, very much of the same size. And so from the standpoint of I'shvara, in the vast hierarchies from the mineral to the loftiest Deva, the distinctions are but as ant-hills in comparison with Himself, and one ...
— Avataras • Annie Besant
... state, though in reality it was here. The Mkungu's women brought pombe, and spent the day gazing at us, till, in the evening, when I took up my rifle, one ran after Bana to see him shoot, and followed like a man; but the only sport she got was on an ant-hill, where she fixed herself some time, popping into her mouth and devouring the white ants as fast as they emanated from their cells—for, disdaining does, I missed the only pongo buck I got a shot at in my anxiety to show the fair one ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... the nocturnal animals from their slumbers in the straw— the wingless apteryx, like a little armless man with a very long nose; the huge misshapen earthy-looking ant-bear, and those four-footed Rip Van Winkles, the quaint, rusty, blear-eyed armadillos. But the giant ant- eater was the most wonderful, for he walked on his knuckles, and strode majestically about, for all the world like a mammalian peacock, ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... honour, and orders were given by which barrels of fruit and some cases of wine should be brought off to vary the plain food of an ocean-going trader. In the evening the Governor's baggage began to arrive—great iron-bound ant-proof trunks, and official tin packing-cases, with other strange-shaped packages, which suggested the cocked hat or the sword within. And then there came a note, with a heraldic device upon the big red seal, to say that Sir Charles Ewan made his compliments ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... car. A whiskered villager with flapping trousers came pounding up the single street. His eyes were panic-stricken and his mouth was wide. He emitted the yell in a long, sustained note. Other villagers popped into view like ants from a disturbed ant-hill. Some instantly ran back into their houses. Others began to run toward the outskirts of the village, ...
— The Invaders • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... know—I don't know," said Christopher, in a voice which had grown spiritless. Then after an instant in which he stared blankly down at Tucker's ant-hill, he turned hurriedly away and followed the little straggling path to ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... the Park yesterday, walking with Lancelot, her new ant-eater, and the latter, who has happily recovered from his severe attack of measles, is now quite tame, and was wearing bronzed toe-nails and a large blue ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 22, 1914 • Various
... her forty years ago in the suburbs of Manchester? and once begotten, how could she do other than grow up cheese-paring, ambitious, with an instinctively accurate notion of the rungs of the ladder and an ant-like assiduity in pushing George Plumer ahead of her to the top of the ladder? What was at the top of the ladder? A sense that all the rungs were beneath one apparently; since by the time that George Plumer became Professor of Physics, or whatever it might be, Mrs. Plumer ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... ... whack, step, leap.... Each leap seemed to last ages. With each, the cave opened out and the number of Selenites visible increased. At first they seemed all running about like ants in a disturbed ant-hill, one or two waving hatchets and coming to meet me, more running away, some bolting sideways into the avenue of carcasses, then presently others came in sight carrying spears, and then others. I saw a most extraordinary thing, all hands and feet, bolting for cover. The ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... they found nothing till after the midday halt, when a furious barking from the setter Rough'un took the attention of all, and Mr Rogers and the boys cantered up to a thin cluster of trees, where, on what seemed to be at first a broken stump, but which on nearer inspection proved to be a tall ragged ant-hill, a vicious-looking snake was curled, swinging its head about threateningly, and darting out its forked tongue at the dog, which ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... prosperous in your earthly career, and can afford to look upon men that are failures and beneath you in social position with a smile of pity or of contempt, as the case may be. Well! I suppose the distance to the nearest fixed star is pretty much the same from the top of one ant-hill in a wood as from the top of the next one, though the one may be a foot higher than the other. I suppose that we have all come out of nothing, and are anything, simply because God is everything. If He were to withhold His upholding and inbreathing power from any of us for one moment, we ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... nobody's fault but his! I shall tell him I'm like the Christian religion, for which people are always making apologies that it doesn't want! Two years! Patience! It will be very good for Robin, and four-and-twenty is quite soon enough to bite off one's wings, and found an ant-hill. As to being bullied into being kissed, pitied, pardoned, and trained by Honor, I'll never sink so low! ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... young leaves here, scratches up a root there, tears the bark off a decaying tree and eats the insects underneath, lifts a stone and finds a mouse or a lizard beneath, or loiters for twenty minutes over an ant-hill. With plenty of time, he is never in a ...
— Bear Brownie - The Life of a Bear • H. P. Robinson
... forth. It whistled and screamed and crashed. It spat fire, and unfolded puffs of grey and white and black smoke. It flashed tongues of livid flame, like some devilish ant-eater lapping up its insects... and the insects ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... escaped, met and recognized their former companions, fell to mutual caresses with their antennae, took them up by their mandibles, and led them to their own nests; they came presently in a crowd to seek the fugitives under and about the artificial ant-hill, and even ventured to reach the bell-glass, where they effected a complete desertion by carrying away successively all the ants they found there. In a few days, the ruche was depopulated. These ants had remained four months ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... in which were taken by young d'Etaples and Isabelle Ray, the company, as it ate ices, was glibly discussing the real drama which had produced in their own elegant circle much of the effect a blow has upon an ant-hill— fear, agitation, and a tumultuous rush to ...
— Jacqueline, v2 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... no teeth at all. Whereas, alas! almost all of them have some, and I am heartily ashamed of their scientific designation; but how can we help it? The only really Edentata, i. e. toothless animals, amongst them are the ant-eaters, who, considering the nature of their food, are not much in want of teeth. They feed among the ant-hills, whence they get their name; and as they are a tolerable size (from two to three feet ...
— The History of a Mouthful of Bread - And its effect on the organization of men and animals • Jean Mace
... words, Bhima well-skilled in speech said,—'That king who is without exertion, or who being weak and without resources entereth into hostility with one that is strong, perisheth like an ant-hill. It may be generally seen, however, that even a king that is weak may vanquish an enemy that is strong and obtain the fruition of all his wishes, by wakefulness and by the application of policy. In Krishna is policy, in myself strength, in Arjuna triumphs. So like the three (sacrificial) ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Part 2 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... no inclination to risk touching it with his nose; but, having jumped forward in such a way as to shut Echidna off from his home, they were left perforce face to face for a few moments. During those moments, Finn decided that he had no wish to slay the ant-eating porcupine, and Echidna, for his part, made up his exceedingly rudimentary little mind that Finn was a fairly harmless person. So they sat up looking at one another, and Finn marvelled that the world should contain so curious a creature as his new acquaintance; ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... I'll tell you of the torrid, Spanish Main, Where the tarpons leap and tumble in the silvery ocean plain, Where the wheeling condors circle; where the long-nosed ant-bears sniff At the food the Jackie "caches" in the ...
— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston
... herself firmly there. For a whole long day she sat there like a frightened squirrel in the deep loneliness of the forest, where all is still and dead, people say. Dead! There flew by butterflies chasing each other either in sport or in strife. There were ant-hills near, each covered with hundreds of little busy labourers, passing in swarms to and fro. In the air danced innumerable gnats; crowds of buzzing flies swept past; lady-birds, dragon-flies, and other winged insects floated hither and thither; earth-worms ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... the ground to steady the glasses as he trained them off in the direction the five men had gone. Twice he saw them cross over ridges. Then a tiny, swift-moving speck came into his field of view, traveling up the slope of a distant divide. The ant-like rider dipped over the crest of ...
— The Settling of the Sage • Hal G. Evarts
... singers of the 'Brahma Loka,' or heaven of the Brahmins. The 'kimmori' is made of a pipe of bamboo or blackwood, with frets or screws, which should be fashioned of the scales of the pangolin, or scaly ant-eater, though more often they are made of bone or metal. It has only two strings, one touching the frets, the other carried above them. The tail-piece is always carved like the breast of a kite, and the instrument is frequently ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... once, I beheld that very bird, a solitary female, flittering on over the flat ground before me, perching on the little green ant-mounds and flirting its tail and bobbing as if greatly excited at my presence in that lonely place. I wondered where its mate was, following it from place to place as it flew, determined now I had found a bird to keep it in sight. Presently a great blackness appeared low ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... summit of the nearest hill they paused and looked over a restless welter of foliage that glittered in the sun, far down into the highway. It bustled like an unroofed ant-hill, for the road was alive with men who seemed from this distance very small. Duke Alessandro's attendants had found him and were clustered in a hubbub about their reviving master. Dwarfish Lorenzino de Medici was the ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... straight. We saw vast numbers of the large black goose walking about slowly and feeding. It had a strong black spur on the shoulder, with which it can defend its young. David told us that it forms its nests in ant-hills, and, of course, eats up the inhabitants. Among the several varieties of geese was the Egyptian or Chenalopex Aegyptiaca. It flew along over the surface, but appeared unable to rise. It would have been impossible to count the ducks which sat on the banks. Stanley fired among them, and ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... the whole smash stopped to see what the end would be. It was a real pretty race, an' the grey mare takin' it as free as if she was carryin' a little bit of a pipkin like me instead of twenty-six stone. She's a flower, that grey mare! Once she stumbled, an' we knowed it wasn't an ant-bear's hole she'd found in the veld, and that she'd been hurt. But they know, them hosses, that they must do as their Baases do; and they fight right on. She come home with the two all right. She switched round a corner and over a nose of land where that crossfire couldn't hit the lot; an' there ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... rains, this ant-raised earth is washed into the rivulets and borne away to fertilize distant valleys, or is carried to the ocean, where, along the coast line, it "sows the dust of continents ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... the mushroom growth of Elizabethville, the one wonder town of the Congo. In 1910, when the railway arrived, it was a geographical expression,—a spot in the jungle dominated by the huge ant-hills that you find throughout Central Africa, some of them forty feet high. The white population numbered thirty. I found it a thriving place with over 2,000 whites and 12,000 blacks. There are one third as many white people in the Katanga Province as in all the rest of ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... next twenty-four hours Jefferson Square resembled an ant-hill after a big boy has trod on it. Such rushing around and talking in excited groups; such goings out and comings in; such wagons colliding at front doors leaving bulky parcels; such errand boys breathless with carrying huge bundles! The like ...
— Jerry's Reward • Evelyn Snead Barnett
... snake that lived in the ant-hill at the back of the house whose movements Jim and the piccanin had been discussing. The ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... life-long pursuits. This I shall refer to in connection with Motley's last work, "John of Barneveld." An historian among archivists and annalists reminds one of Sir John Lubbock in the midst of his ant-hills. Undoubtedly he disturbs the ants in their praiseworthy industry, much as his attentions may flatter them. Unquestionably the ants (if their means of expressing themselves were equal to their apparent intellectual ability) could teach him many things that he has overlooked ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... before the close of the tertiary period, the characters which essentially distinguish their existing faunas. The eastern continent had then, as now, its great pachyderms, elephants, rhinoceros, and hippopotamus; South America its armadillos, sloths, and ant-eaters; Australia a crowd of marsupials; and the very strange birds of New Zealand had predecessors of similar strangeness. Everywhere the same geographical distribution as now, with a difference in the particular area, as respects the northern portion of the continents, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... surpass in intelligence and constructive ability the human occupants of the valley, the low and wretched Kytch tribe of the Dinka Negroes, who like the ants are attracted by the natural vegetation of the flood-plain, and who use the ant-hills as refuge stations for themselves and their cattle during the flood.[602] Elsewhere in Africa the natives are more intelligent, for flood-plain villages built on artificial mounds have existed from the earliest times. Diodorus Siculus tells us that those ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... when all the scalebugs are fixed, that is about the end of July or beginning of August. All previous application will clean the tree or plant only for a time, and does not prevent a more or less numerous immigration from the neighboring vegetation, especially if an ant-hill is ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various
... of ants working together in perfect harmony, it is impossible not to ask ourselves how far they are mere exquisite automatons; how far they are conscious beings. When we watch an ant-hill tenanted by thousands of industrious inhabitants, excavating chambers, forming tunnels, making roads, guarding their home, gathering food, feeding the young, tending their domestic animals—each one fulfilling its duties industriously, and without confusion—it is difficult; altogether ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... of English people, the distance and coldness of their own Channel which they put between them and whoever has not been presented to them in a proper manner. Humanity seems to be an ant-hill on which they tread; they know none of their species except the few they admit into their circle; they ignore even the language of the rest; tongues may move and eyes may see in their presence ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... found a place which seemed to be free from ant-hills, and our tent was again pitched, but only to find that the venomous things swarmed over us as soon as ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... proclaimed breathlessly, an hour afterward, when he arrived at the cabin on Tra-Lee. He gripped Smoke's hand. "You should a-saw 'em. Ever kick over a ant-hole? Dawson's just like that. Main Street was crawlin' an' hummin' when I pulled my freight. You won't see Tra-Lee to-morrow for folks. An' if they ain't some a-sneakin' acrost right now I don't know minin' ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... All we have to do is to follow the foothills. We shall probably find Juan and his burro sound asleep on an ant-hill somewhere. He's positively the laziest human being ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in New Mexico • Frank Gee Patchin
... That's the reason they'd stayed so long up the draw. Poor old Johnny! I was glad it was night, and he was dead. Apaches are the worst Injuns there is for tortures. They cut off the bottoms of old man Wilkins's feet, and stood him on an ant-hill—. ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... round like tired mill-horses, in the narrowest circle, with an unhappy Ipse Ego for its centre: all the passing events of the outward world seem unnaturally dwarfed and distant, as if seen through an inverted telescope: the struggles of stranger nations move you no more than the battles on an ant-hill; the only question of civil or religious liberty in which you feel the faintest interest is the unimportant one involving your own personal freedom. And throughout you are shamefully conscious that this indifference is not philosophical, but ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... ways, and their motto seems to be, 'Every one for himself, and the devil take the hindmost.' Cheating, lying and stealing are hard words, and I don't mean to apply them to all who swarm about below there like ants on an ant-hill—they have other names for these things, but I'm old-fashioned and use plain words. There's a deal too much dishonesty in the world, and business seems to have become a game of hazard in which luck, not labor, wins ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... was bestowed on this bird, and the Major's spoil would have borne the honors of the day, had not Robert come across an animal a few miles further on, and bravely killed it. It was a shapeless creature, half porcupine, half ant-eater, a sort of unfinished animal belonging to the first stage of creation. A long glutinous extensible tongue hung out of his jaws in search of the ants, which ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... day, as Gwythyr the son of Greidawl was walking over a mountain, he heard a wailing and a grievous cry. And when he heard it, {103} he sprung forward, and went towards it. And when he came there, he drew his sword, and smote off an ant-hill close to the earth, whereby it escaped being burned in the fire. And the ants said to him, "Receive from us the blessing of Heaven, and that which no man can give we will give thee." Then they fetched the nine bushels of flax-seed which Yspaddaden Penkawr had required of Kilhwch, and they brought ...
— The Mabinogion Vol. 2 (of 3) • Owen M. Edwards
... Orthopterans as grasshoppers, crickets, etc. 2. Neuropters as ant-eaters, dragon-flies or libellula. 3. Hymenopters as bees, wasps, ants. 4. Lepidopters as butterflies, etc. 5. Hemipters as cicada, plant-lice, fleas, etc. 6. Coleopters as cockchafers, fire-flies, etc. 7. Dipters as gnats, musquitoes, flies. 8. Rhipipters as stylops. 9. Parasites as acara, ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... month of the session the floor of the House began steadily to grow more and more tumultuous. To an unpolitical onlooker, leaning over the gallery rail, it was often an incomprehensible Bedlam, or perhaps one might have been reminded of an ant-heap by the hurry-and-scurry and life-and-death haste in a hundred directions at once, quite without any distinguishable purpose. Twenty men might be rampaging up and down the aisles, all shouting, some of them furiously, others with a determination that was deadly, ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... in consequence of the wind freshening during the night. Three days afterwards they reached a secure anchorage, which he named the Bay of Rest, as the crew had been long fatigued when the found it. Here a landing was effected, and Allan Cunningham took occasion to measure one of the gigantic ant-hills of that coast. He found it to be eight feet in height and twenty-six in girth, which after all is not so large as some to be seen in that region. All examinations of the country tending to give King and his companion a very poor opinion of the place; they left the inlet ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... with occasional sandy flats, producing a broad-leafed Melaleuca, and a pretty species of Grevillea, with pinnatifid, silvery leaves. Neither the Melaleuca nor the Grevillea grew more than twenty feet high. On the flats we found a great number of ant-hills, remarkable for their height and size; they were of various forms, but chiefly conical, some of them rose ten feet high. From the appearance of the ant-hills I should take the sub-soil to be of ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... large quadrupeds which feed almost exclusively upon insects. The ant-bear is strong enough to pull down the clay houses built by the species of termites that constitute his ordinary diet, and the curious ai-ai, a climbing quadruped of Madagascar, is provided with a very slender, hook-nailed finger, long enough to reach far ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... of the character of that of the equatorial regions of South America, and of the semi-tropical districts of Mexico. There are several varieties of ant-eaters, similar to those found in the valley of the Amazon, while the grey squirrel of more northern latitudes skips playfully amid the forests of the interior. In the woods and wide savannahs are two or more varieties of deer—one resembling the European deer in colour, but of less ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... setting into a purple ocean looked with a fiery stare upon the enormous wall of the Cordilleras, worthy witnesses of his glorious extinction. But it is inconceivable that it should have seen the ant-like men busy with their absurd and insignificant trials of killing and dying for reasons that, apart from being generally childish, were also imperfectly understood. It did light up, however, the backs of the firing party ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... white plumes became bigger. All at once a ship lying dark on the water, scarcely a mile away on the weather-bow, spat out a long ribbon of light like an ant-eater's tongue, and we found ourselves standing in a glare of light as if we were actors in the middle of ...
— The International Spy - Being the Secret History of the Russo-Japanese War • Allen Upward
... on Herod. iii. c. 102. Nearchus saw the skins of these formicae Indicae, by some rationalists explained as "jackals," whose stature corresponds with the text, and by others as "pengolens" or ant-eaters (manis pentedactyla). The learned Sanskritist, H. H. Wilson, quotes the name Pippilika ant-gold, given by the people of Little Thibet to the precious dust thrown ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... advanced on the plain, they discovered what the haze had prevented their seeing at early dawn, that the plain was covered with a variety of beautiful flowers, of the amaryllis and other tribes, and with the hills of ants and the ant-eaters' holes, which latter were ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... and pregnant epithet. Such is the fine analogy between the worship of holy shrines and the lover's homage to the spot which his mistress's feet have trod; such France's tolerance of the Elysee brethren compared to the Arab laying his verminous burnous upon an ant-hill; the apt quotation from the Psalms to illustrate the on-coming of the Guards; the demeanour of horses in action; the course of a flying cannon-ball; the two ponderous troopers at the Horse Guards; Tom Tower ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... days passed away that followed his arrival in London. He spent them for the most part within doors, writing for the Prior in the mornings, or keeping watch over the door as his Superior talked with prelates and churchmen within, for ecclesiastical London was as busy as a broken ant-hill, and men came and went continually—scared, furtive monks, who looked this way and that, an abbot or two up for the House of Lords, priors and procurators on business. There were continual communications going to and fro among the religious houses, ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... geometricians, mechanicians, engineers, weavers, physicists, chemists and surgeons who have forestalled most of our human inventions. I need not here remind the reader of the wasps' and bees' genius for building, the social and economic organization of the hive and the ant-hill, the spider's snares, the eumenes' nest and hanging egg, the odynerus' cell with its neat stacks of game, the sacred beetle's filthy but ingenius ball, the leafcutter's faultless disks, the ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... the most important part of their equipment. Some of them picked at the earth with a gravity that was equalled only by the feebleness of the effort and the poverty of the result. Three strokes so wearied them that they were forced to pause and gather strength, while others carried away the ant-hills which the first dug up. It seemed an endless task to fill the wheelbarrows. Fill, did I say? They were never filled. After a bucketful of earth had been slowly shovelled in, the laborer paused, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... The millet stems were so high that he disappeared within them with a crumpling of dry leaves. The soft ant-hills which it was his daily custom to level off failed to attract his attention. He walked straight on. Parrots flew by, chattering, with their green wings shining in the sun, and huge grasshoppers were ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... ant-hills screamed cranes with delight; In their rooms were our wives sighing sore. Our homes they had swept and made tight:— All at once we arrived at the door. The bitter gourds hanging are seen, From branches of chestnut-trees high. Three years of toil away we had been, ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... glass in the windows flung back the sun. A door opened and a midget in shirtsleeves came out, stretching arms, palpably yawning. Suddenly smoke jetted from a tumbled chimney, other puffs followed and steady vapors mounted. Ant-like men emerged from every house, gathered in little knots, busied themselves with the horses, hurried back to breakfasts. Faint sounds came up to ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... birth of mankind till now, there has never been another like our master.' Yu Zo said, 'Is it only among men that it is so? There is the ch'i- lin among quadrupeds; the fung-hwang among birds; the T'ai mountain among mounds and ant-hills; and rivers and seas among rainpools. Though different in degree, they are the same in kind. So the sages among mankind are also the same in kind. But they stand out from their fellows, and rise above the level; and from the birth of mankind till now, there never ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) • James Legge
... days later the crow invited the jackal to dinner in return; and when the jackal arrived the crow led him to an ant-hill and showed him a hollow gourd which he had filled with live mice and said "Here is your dinner." The jackal could not get his nose into the hole of the gourd so, to get at the mice, he had to break it. And the mice ran all over the place and the jackal jumped about here and there trying to catch ...
— Folklore of the Santal Parganas • Cecil Henry Bompas
... time several millions of years—to our own geologic age—and we find the earth swarming with the human species like an ant-hill with ants, and with a vast number of forms not found in the Mesozoic era; and the men are doing to a large part of the earth what the ants do to a square rod of its surface. Where did they come from? We cannot, in our day, believe that a hand ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... towers, has become interesting to look at from the sea; nor is it possible to walk through the overshadowed streets without feeling a pleasing wonder. A city, when enough people swarm in it, is as fascinating as an ant-hill, and its buildings, whatever other charms they may have, are at least as curious and delightful as sea-shells or birds' nests. The purpose of improvements in modern structures may be economic, just as the purpose of castles was military; but both may incidentally please the ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... followed by his three persecutors, and not knowing very well what was to become of him, marched along in terror among them, turning out for the lame, stepping over the cripples in bowls, with his feet imbedded in that ant-hill of lame men, like the English captain who got caught in the quicksand of a swarm ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... daylight follows dawn; but when we try to think backwards from that first expedition, we either see nothing clearly, or we find Caesar an insignificant unit in a general disorder, as hard to identify as an individual ant in a swarming ant-hill. In the lives of all 'great men,' which are almost always totally unlike the lives of the so-called 'great,'—those born, not to power, but in power,—there is a point which must inevitably be enigmatical. It may be called the Hour ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... induced to join Venice and the pope. At the end of this long campaign of diplomacy, perfidy and blood, in which misery had rioted through ten thousand cottages, whose inhabitants the warriors regarded no more than the occupants of the ant-hills they trampled beneath their feet, it was found that no one had gained any thing but toil ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... became sure that the brothers had turned into the little white-throated birds which had sat on the bush by the hole, so, they supposed, to escape their vengeance. And ever afterwards the little white-throats were called Weeoombeens. And the memory of Piggiebillah is perpetuated by a sort of porcupine ant-eater, which bears his name, and whose skin is covered closely with miniature ...
— Australian Legendary Tales - Folklore of the Noongahburrahs as told to the Piccaninnies • K. Langloh Parker
... rather haltingly when they had reached a sandy, ant-infested path that ran slantingly up among the trees. He affected a certain perplexity. He said he did not understand what it was his wife was "after," what she "thought she was doing" in "making all this trouble"; he wanted to know just what it was ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... morning meeting of the smaller council. The day was dull, the chamber warm, the business to be transacted monotonous; and Blondel, far from well and interested in one thing only—beside which the most important affairs of Geneva seemed small as the doings of an ant-hill viewed through a glass—had fallen asleep, or nearly asleep. Naturally a restless and wakeful man, of thin habit and nervous temperament, he had never done such a thing before: and it was unfortunate that he succumbed ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... came to apply for leave: One day Langley was strolling about just outside the lines, looking for somebody to talk to, when he noticed an apparently very old native man sitting on an ant-heap and regarding him somewhat intently. This old native had been several times seen in the vicinity of the camp, but he never seemed to speak to any one, and he looked so harmless that the police did not even trouble to ask him for the written pass which all natives are ...
— Stories by English Authors: Africa • Various
... a licensed destroyer, a poor, fragile tyrant, whom arbitrary decrees protect, but a necessary note of an infinite harmony? To fancy that the law of life is the same in the immensity of space and irradiates worlds as it irradiates cities and as it irradiates ant-hills. To fancy that each vibration in ourselves is the echo of another vibration. To fancy a sole principle, a primordial axiom, to think the universe envelops us as a mother clasps her child in her two arms; and say to one's self, "I belong to it and it to me; it would cease to be without ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... had wound it up by chasing each other all over the graves with a lantern. This piece of embroidery was probably suggested by the fact that, after the signing and sealing was completed, Carl had taken the lantern and had walked circumspectly to the little hollow to examine his ant-hill. The others had gone quietly into the ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Meredith, of a calamity which destroys an ant-hill and half its inhabitants. Does the Power that runs the universe think us of more ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... thick-skinned tapir, and even the largest alligator. In spite of the enormous jaws of the latter, the jaguar will leap towards the tail of the creature, tear open its side, and devour it even before life is extinct. Only two animals do not fear the jaguar; one is the great ant-eater, which is defended from the monster's attacks by its thick shaggy coat; the other is the little peccary. The latter, however, when caught singly is quickly despatched. When collected in a herd the case is very different. They then so fearlessly assail the jaguar ...
— The Wanderers - Adventures in the Wilds of Trinidad and Orinoco • W.H.G. Kingston
... a microscope, a real swell one, that we see what-do-you-call-'ems in water with, and stars, and ant-eggs, and all sorts of games, you know. Won't it be a jolly good present?" said Tommy, rather confusing microscopes and ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... less favored mortals; the pedestrian bricklayer and carpenter, respectable men with money stored away in their broad belts—portions of that great army of Tyrolese who, possessing neither trade nor manufactures in their native land, are forced in an ant-like manner to stray into Bavaria and Austria until they can return laden with their winter store, since the mere fattening of cattle cannot support a nation,—these respectable but footsore men, wending their way from Steiermark, were received with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... proper showman style: "Ladies and gentlemen, I have the pleasure of exhibiting to your notice the celebrated 'What-do-you-think?' or Giant Uncle-Eater. You have all probably heard of the Ant-Eater. This is, as you will readily perceive, a member of the same family, but more so! He measures seven feet from the tip of his snout to the end of his tail, eight feet back again, five feet around the small of his waist, and has four feet of his own, making twenty-four in all. In ...
— Entertainments for Home, Church and School • Frederica Seeger
... think I would always be nice, however rich I was—ways that don't affect me very much, so that they're no sacrifice. And he's seen lots of things. Sloths, which I always thought were just metaphors. And ant-eaters, and alligators, ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... miles north-east of Ladysmith, Rietfontein[105] farmhouse lay by a branch of the Modder Spruit, south-west of a long, low ridge, which descended to the railway line in smooth and easy slopes dotted with ant-heaps, with on its forehead a sparse eyebrow of stones. Beyond the crest line, to the northward, the ground sank with a gentle sweep, broken only by two rough under-features jutting from the western extremity of the ridge, to ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... pursued the yelling and retreating mob, and was dealt with unmercifully by the swift-footed. He became much excited as he desperately chased a middle-aged man, who occasionally turned and fired off his gun, but was suddenly tripped by an ant-hill and fell to the ground, with the other on top of him. The excitement was intense. The bear man returned to his companion, and the dancers gathered in little knots ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... communings with nature; it is a busy place where the struggle for life is keen and practical enough, and its inhabitants have little time or inclination to bestow on the pursuit of poetry. As in all the towns of the Terra di Lavoro, as this collection of human ant-hills on the eastern side of Naples is sometimes designated, the old command given to the first parents of mankind—"by the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread"—is scrupulously observed in Torre del Greco. It is little enough, however, that these frugal ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... widespread everywhere. The cook's moans had now subsided. On two sides black curling clouds of smoke rose and spread from the fires. Through the streets soldiers in various uniforms walked or ran confusedly in different directions like ants from a ruined ant-hill. Several of them ran into Ferapontov's yard before Alpatych's eyes. Alpatych went out to the gate. A retreating regiment, thronging and ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... would exist, in spite of the establishment of Socialism in both countries. Ants are as completely Socialistic as any community can possibly be, yet they put to death any ant which strays among them by mistake from a neighboring ant-heap. Men do not differ much from ants, as regards their instincts in this respect, where- ever there is a great divergence of race, as between white men and yellow men. Of course the instinct of race-hostility can be overcome ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... fashion that the foundation stones are carried to the apex, and the swiftness of this transfer is increasing in a sort of geometrical ratio. I see that the result of this is something like that which would take place in an ant-heap if the community of ants were to lose their sense of the common law, if some ants were to begin to draw the products of labor from the bottom to the top of the heap, and should constantly contract the foundations and broaden the apex, and should thereby also force the ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... Temple at this moment can only be described by comparing it to an ant-hill on which persons have thrown stones, or which has been disturbed by a sick being driven into its centre. The ants in those parts on which the stones have fallen, or which the stick had disturbed, are filled with confusion and terror; they run to and ...
— The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ • Anna Catherine Emmerich
... had ridden far, however, he heard such a moaning and complaining by the roadside that he stopped his horse to see what the matter was; and—do you believe it?—it was the ant people whose ant-hill stood in the way, right where Hans was about ...
— The Story-teller • Maud Lindsay
... individual defence; while the eggs and larvae of the ants are a dainty for a great number of the inhabitants of the forests. And yet the ants, in their thousands, are not much destroyed by the birds, not even by the ant-eaters, and they are dreaded by most stronger insects. When Forel emptied a bagful of ants in a meadow, he saw that "the crickets ran away, abandoning their holes to be sacked by the ants; the grasshoppers and the crickets fled in all directions; the spiders and the beetles ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... colour of my fears. In that darkling calm my senses seemed preternaturally sharpened. I fancied I could even feel the hollowness of the ground beneath my feet: could, indeed, almost see through it the Morlocks on their ant-hill going hither and thither and waiting for the dark. In my excitement I fancied that they would receive my invasion of their burrows as a declaration of war. And why had they taken ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... heels, still baking and breathless. The insects bit worse than ever, and once or twice Kettle fancied he felt the jaws of a driver ant in his flesh, and wondered if news would be carried to the horde in the ant-hill, which would bring them out to devour their prey without the train of honey being laid to lure them. Moreover, fever had come on him again, and with one thing and another it was only by a constant effort of will that he prevented himself ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... boundaries, as they are indicated by elevated ground, by charcoal [-remnants],[232] by husks,[233] by trees, by a causeway, by ant-hills, by depressions of the soil, by bones, by ...
— Hindu Law and Judicature - from the Dharma-Sastra of Yajnavalkya • Yajnavalkya
... between Bangu and me, a shadow as that of a toad standing on its hind legs. I looked round and saw that it was the shadow of Zikali, whom I had seen once or twice. There he stood, though whence he came I know not, wagging his great white head that sits on the top of his body like a pumpkin on an ant-heap, rolling his big eyes and ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... o'er, Neigh'd loud upon the forest shore; Domains that once, at early morn, Rang to the hunter's bugle horn, When barons proud would bound away; When even kings would hail the day, And swell with pomp more glorious shows, Than ant-hill population knows. Here crested chiefs their bright-arm'd train Of javelin'd horsemen rous'd amain, And chasing wide the wolf or boar, Bade the ...
— The Banks of Wye • Robert Bloomfield
... under the shadow of his seizure. I had directed his removal, and grudged him no professional attention that it was in my power to bestow. But afterwards, locked into my room, my whole nervous system broke up like a trodden ant-hill, leaving me conscious of nothing but an aimless scurrying terror and the black swarm of thoughts, so that I verily fancied my reason ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... How ant-like seemed the black army crawling up the icy pass, clinging to its slippery face in the blinding buffet of snow and rain! Men dropped from its ranks uncared for and unpitied. Heedless of those that fell, the gap closed up, the march went on. The great army crawled up and over the summit. Far behind ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... curved lines and concentric circles. These patterns represented the Wollunqua and some of his traditionary adventures. The snake himself was portrayed by a broad wavy band, but all the other designs were purely conventional; for example, trees, ant-hills, and wells were alike indicated by circles. Altogether there were eight such drawings on the earth, some of them very elaborate and entailing, each of them, not less than six or seven hours' labour: one of them was ten feet long. Each drawing was rubbed out before the next one was drawn. Moreover, ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer |
