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More "Adder" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... which escaped and fell upon their brown cheeks, which the ardour of the dance soon turned rosy. Broad golden circles beat upon their necks, and through their long gauze shifts, embroidered at the top with pearls, showed their golden bronze bodies which moved with the ease of an adder. They twisted, turned, swayed their hips, bound with a narrow black girdle, threw themselves back, bowed down, inclined their heads to right and left as if they found a secret voluptuousness in touching their polished chins with their cold, bare shoulders, ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... God that grow In Paradise, and various, yet unknown To us, in such abundance lies our choice, 620 As leaves a greater store of Fruit untoucht, Still hanging incorruptible, till men Grow up to thir provision, and more hands Help to disburden Nature of her Bearth. To whom the wilie Adder, blithe and glad. Empress, the way is readie, and not long, Beyond a row of Myrtles, on a Flat, Fast by a Fountain, one small Thicket past Of blowing Myrrh and Balme; if thou accept My conduct, I can bring thee thither soon. 630 Lead then, said Eve. Hee leading swiftly ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... head's one that its spite was spent on; Thirty years are fled since that morning, 805 And with them all my head's adorning. Nor did the old Duchess die outright, As you expect, of suppressed spite, The natural end of every adder Not suffered to empty its poison-bladder; 810 But she and her son agreed, I take it, That no one should touch on the story to wake it, For the wound in the Duke's pride rankled fiery, So, they made no search and small inquiry— And when fresh gypsies have ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... forth from their blazing coverts, and glancing through the ring, unscared by its waning lamps; all undulating by me, bright-eyed, and hissing, all made innocuous by fear—even the terrible Death-adder, which I trampled on as I halted at the verge of the circle, did not turn to bite, but crept harmless away. I halted at the gap between the two dead lamps, and bowed my head to look again into the crystal vessel. ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... sense of the rhythmical in prose composition. Rhythmus, or pomp of cadence, or sonorous ascent of clauses, in the structure of sentences, were effects of art as much thrown away upon him as the voice of the charmer upon the deaf adder. We ourselves, occupying the very station of polar opposition to that of Lamb, being as morbidly, perhaps, in the one excess as he in the other, naturally detected this omission in Lamb's nature at an early stage of our acquaintance. Not the fabled Regulus, with his eyelids ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... as John was laying down his aunt to come and hear, she rushed up the stairs with, "And it is all your doing, you unnatural, good-for-nothing varmint! That was what you were after all night, you and your aunt, the adder that I have warmed at my bosom! Turning against your own poor father, to set them bloody-minded soldiers on him! And now he'll be taken and hanged, and I shall be a poor miserable widow woman all ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... charm an adder even to tears, So sweet a song, from mouth so full of grace. Before I saw thee, my Odora! ne'er I thought this world could ever grow so fair To me. Love throws a rosy, sparkling tissue On mountain, hill, lake, tree, ...
— Lays of Ancient Virginia, and Other Poems • James Avis Bartley
... o'ergrown with weeds and bushy shrubs, Where milky hedgehogs nurse their prickly cubs: And here and there a mandrake grows, that strikes The hearers dead with their loud fatal shrieks; Under whose spreading leaves the ugly toad, The adder, and the snake, make their abode. Here dwelt Orandra; so the witch was hight, And hither had she toiled him by a sleight: She knew Anaxus was to go to court, And, envying virtue, she made it her sport To hinder him, sending her airy spies Forth with delusion to entrap his eyes, As ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... is winking at his wayward temper, his licentious passions and growing habits of vice. And these, in their terrible maturity, will recoil upon the deluded parent, "biting like a serpent and stinging like an adder." Nothing is more ruinous to a child and disastrous to the hopes and happiness of home, than such relaxation of discipline. "A child left to himself bringeth his mother to shame." How many mothers ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... exclamation and leaped back out of the grass. "Come out of that grass, Walt," he cried, "I have been bitten by a puff adder. ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... An anonymous letter-writer has but one means of knowing the effect of his attack. In this he has the superiority over the viper; he knows that his poison has taken effect, when he hears the victim cry;—the adder is deaf. The best reply to an anonymous intimation is to take no notice directly nor indirectly. I wish Mr. Bowles could see only one or two of the thousand which I have received in the course of a literary life, which, though begun ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... uttered I sat up upon the topmost step of the gallery; for some time I felt stunned in somewhat the same manner as I once subsequently felt after being stung by an adder. I soon arose, however, and retired to my bed, where, notwithstanding what I had done, I was not ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... ill-doing, the inhabitants have fastened on it the longest and clumsiest of all. It comes from the Mohegan words Apo-keep-sink, meaning a safe, pleasant harbor. Harbor it might be for canoes, but for nothing bigger, for it was only the little cove that was so called between Call Rock and Adder Cliff,—the former indicating where settlers awaiting passage hailed the masters of vessels from its top, and the latter taking its name from the ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... native of Aprey, named Manette Sejournant, was not, strictly speaking, a beauty, but she had magnificent blonde hair, gray, caressing eyes, and a silvery, musical voice. Well built, supple as an adder, modest and prudish in mien, she knew how to wait upon and cosset her master, accustoming him by imperceptible degrees to prefer the cuisine of the chateau to that of the wine-shops. After a while, by dint of making her merits appreciated, and her presence continually desired, she became ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... fell, uttering a last mournful cry. But Lady Ildea was not satisfied. Hastily dismounting, she ran through the grass to where the bird lay, and found the body of the maiden Sipelie, pierced to the heart, and covered with blood. Horror-struck, she turned away, but at that instant she trod upon an adder, which suddenly darted its fangs into her foot, inflicting ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3 • Various
... think as much iv ye as we did whin ye'er name was first mintioned be th' stanch an' faithful press. Set here, ol' la-ad, an' warrum ye'er toes by th' fire. Set here an' r-rest fr'm th' gratichood iv ye'er fellow-counthrymen, that, as Shakspere says, biteth like an asp an' stingeth like an adder. R-rest here, as ye might r-rest at th' hearth iv millyons iv people that cud give ye no house ...
— Mr. Dooley's Philosophy • Finley Peter Dunne
... in the end, eluded us, and we soon were of opinion that smaller fry were capable of affording better fun. Some seasons afterwards, when our Hunt was disbanded, the shopkeepers' apprentices continued, with the youngsters, to work our mongrel hounds; but eventually Joker's death from the bite of an adder put an end to their pastime, for the bobtail and the terrier were the only possible ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... wonderful that Pistoja is lost in his scorn. Coming upon Vanni Fucci continually consumed by the adder, ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... shows the Greek authors were frequently in error. In the realm of the dead, according to the texts of the Book of the Dead, (chapter LXXXIX. and other places,) the responsible soul or Ba of the deceased, may become a sparrow-hawk, an adder, a crocodile-headed being, etc., but only to deceive its demon enemies;[81] not until after this, is the Khu, the intellectual soul, which accompanies the Ba, which is represented under the symbolized form of a sparrow-hawk ...
— Scarabs • Isaac Myer
... she would have jumped from an adder, but she did not spring far—not, indeed, beyond arm's length—and then, quick as thought, she raised her little hand and dealt him a box on the ear with such right goodwill that it sounded among the trees ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... a jackal running across the path, just as a fox would in England, reminded Owen that he was in Africa; and though occasionally one meets an adder in England, one meets them much more frequently in the North of Africa. It was impossible to say how many Owen had not seen lying in front of his horse like dead sticks. As the cavalcade passed they would twist themselves down a hole. As for rats, they ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... motionless. In this manner he came up to Montparnasse without being seen or heard, gently insinuated his hand into the back pocket of that frock-coat of fine black cloth, seized the purse, withdrew his hand, and having recourse once more to his crawling, he slipped away like an adder through the shadows. Montparnasse, who had no reason to be on his guard, and who was engaged in thought for the first time in his life, perceived nothing. When Gavroche had once more attained the point where Father Mabeuf was, he flung the purse over the hedge, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... beneath dead leaves one caught an occasional glimpse of fragrant, pink arbutus. In marshy places beside the creek, swaying in the wind from slender stems, grew straw-colored, bell-shaped blossoms of "Adder's Tongue" or "Dog Tooth Violet," with their mottled green, spike-shaped leaves. In the shadow of a large rock grew dwarf huckleberry bushes, wild strawberry vines, and among grasses of many varieties grew patches of white ...
— Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled during Her Visit - among the "Pennsylvania Germans" • Edith M. Thomas
... reptiles, than those of any other sort of live stock. Instances have been known where the tongues of such cattle have been even bitten or stung while grazing or feeding, which have proved fatal. Such stock are, however, seldom attacked by reptiles of the adder kind, except in cases where these are disturbed by the animals in pasturing or feeding; which is the main reason why so many of them are bitten and stung about the head, and occasionally the feet. There are mostly ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... cannot be renewed? He treated you with unswerving impartiality; he never punished you but when you deserved punishment, and when he believed it to be for your good, and yet you turn upon him in this adder-like way; you break open his desk like a thief, and, in one moment of despicable ill-temper, you rob him and the world of that which had been the pursuit and object of his life. You, Evson, may well hide your ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... Lo how the adder egg of vanity can brood in its own dunghill, and hatch itself to persecution, rape, and murder!—Lo how Guilt and Folly couple, and engender darkness to hide their own deformity!—The picture is ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... he preferred Cristel. He hobbled up to his lodger, and shook his infirm fists, and screamed at the highest pitch of his old cracked voice: "Let her be, or I won't have you here no longer! You deaf adder, ...
— The Guilty River • Wilkie Collins
... feature Le Gardeur was a manly reflex of his beautiful sister Amelie, but his countenance was marred with traces of debauchery. His face was inflamed, and his dark eyes, so like his sister's, by nature tender and true, were now glittering with the adder tongues of the ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... cried Tom. "Bound to say he has found an adder somewhere, and wants me to kill it, though I should hardly think there are any about now," and he set off at a trot after the dog, whose whole manner changed at this, for it went bounding off along the road, stopping every now and then to drop the bone and bark ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn
... in youth; with much of enjoyment actually in our hands, and more in prospect; with just so much mystery over our coming life as to keep alive interest, yet with enough known and understood in its prospects to awaken sympathy; what deafest ear of the deaf adder could ever be so closed against the voice of the charmer, as our minds, so engrossed with the enjoyments and the hopes of earth, are closed against the voice which speaks of the ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... knows where it is hid. In a rage Atli orders Gunnar to be thrown to the snakes. Though his hands are bound, Gunnar plays so sweetly with his toes on the harp, which Gudrun has sent him, that all the snakes are lulled to sleep, with the exception of an adder, which stings him to the heart, so that ...
— The Nibelungenlied • Unknown
... of many a poor victim of his own past is a commentary. The eternal duty of resistance is farther taught by the words. Hope of victory, encouragement to struggle, the assurance that even these savage beasts may be subdued, and the lion and adder (the hidden and the glaring evils—those which wound unseen, and which spring with a roar) may be overcome, led in a silken leash or charmed into harmlessness, are given in the command, which is also a promise, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... muttered Trebooze. "Nothing but slugs and evats!—Toads, too,—hang the toads! What a plague brings all this vermin? Curse it!" shrieked he, springing back, "there's an adder! and he's gone up my sleeve! Help me! Doctor! Thurnall! or I'm ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... these. It cannot be helped. Each of us has his author who is a favourite, a friend, an idol, whose immaculate perfection he maintains against all comers. For example, things are urged against Scott; I receive them in the attitude of the deaf adder of St. Augustine, who stops one ear with his tail and presses the other against the dust. The same with Moliere: M. Scherer utters complaints against Moliere! He would not convince me, even if I were convinced. ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... puts on a hundred hideous forms; twining as an adder about her bosom, dancing as a frog upon her stomach, anon like a bat, sharp-snouted, covering her scared mouth with dreadful kisses. What is it he wants? To drive her into a corner, so that conquered and crushed at last, she may yield and utter the word "Yes." Still she is resolute ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... boy, not to catch hold of the tail of a puff adder," he exclaimed, as Percy again dismounted. "They are pretty numerous hereabouts, and you may chance to put your hand close to one of their holes while ...
— Hendricks the Hunter - The Border Farm, a Tale of Zululand • W.H.G. Kingston
... he ejaculated. "What an extraordinary experience! Will you believe me, Doctor, when I tell you that as I drew this penknife out of my waistcoat pocket it actually seemed to change into an adder in my hand? There was the flat, wicked-looking head, the malevolent eyes, the characteristic markings of the body, and, above all, there was the feeling of it writhing strongly in my grasp, as though it were trying to get enough of ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... rare difference, outlaw—for whereas her tongue (honoured relict!) is tipped with gall, wormwood, henbane, hemlock, bitter-aloes and verjuice, and stingeth like the adder, the asp, the toad, the newt, the wasp, and snaky-haired head of ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... March, his shoes are purple, He is new and high; Makes he mud for dog and peddler, Makes he forest dry; Knows the adder's tongue his coming, And begets her spot. Stands the sun so close and mighty That our minds are hot. News is he of all the others; Bold it were to die With the blue-birds ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... not, taste not, handle not: Drink will make the dark, dark blot, Like an adder it will sting, And at last to ruin bring, They who tarry ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... "Stay, adder, stay, that by thy pattern my sister may draw the fashion and work of a rich ribbon, that I may present to my beloved, by which means thy beauty and the excellent order of thy scales shall for ever be preferred before all ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... maiden, near the notch a running hare. And after that he cut some arrows out of oak, put tips of sharpened copper on them, and five feathers on the end. Then he hardened the arrows and steeped them in the blood of snakes and the poison of the adder ...
— Finnish Legends for English Children • R. Eivind
... my good allow? You are my all-the-world, and I must strive To know my shames and praises from your tongue; None else to me, nor I to none alive, That my steel'd sense or changes right or wrong. In so profound abysm I throw all care Of others' voices, that my adder's sense To critic and to flatterer stopped are. Mark how with my neglect I do dispense: You are so strongly in my purpose bred, That all the world ...
— Shakespeare's Sonnets • William Shakespeare
... looked down at the earth one night, when his light was shining quite brightly, to see if any one was moving. When the earth people were all asleep was the time he chose for playing with his three dogs. He called them dogs, but the earth people called them snakes, the death adder, the black snake, and the tiger snake. As he looked down on to the earth, with his three dogs beside him, Bahloo saw about a dozen daens, or black fellows, crossing a Creek. He called to them saying, "Stop, I want you to carry my dogs across that creek." But the black ...
— Australian Legendary Tales - Folklore of the Noongahburrahs as told to the Piccaninnies • K. Langloh Parker
... majesty vaulted the earth. Sitting down at a table, he beckoned the hostess for his beer, and conversed freely with his acquaintance. By his arch replies I found that I was in company with an original—a man that might stretch forth his arms in the wilderness without fear, and like Paul, grasp an adder without harm. He playfully entwined his fingers with their coils and curled crests, and played with their forked tongues. He had unbuttoned his waistcoat, and as cleverly as a fish-woman handles her ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini
... institution after it had been dead for many years, and invited those gentlemen to come into it, which they did, and so of course they have a right to turn him out if they want to. The difference between Beecher and the man who put an adder in his bosom is, that Beecher put in more adders than he did, and consequently had a proportionately livelier time of it ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... with the injuries inflicted by the venomous varieties of snakes, the most important of which are the hooded snakes of India, the rattle-snakes of America, the horned snakes of Africa, the viper of Europe, and the adder of the United Kingdom. ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... the least doubt of it. He was in my eyes at that moment a crawling adder, whose fangs were liable to penetrate the flesh of some one if he was not put out of the way. But I am more than glad I was spared the infliction of ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... thee, or by Him who made The world, thy heart's blood dyes my blade!"— "Thy threats, thy mercy, I defy! 405 Let recreant yield, who fears to die." —Like adder darting from his coil, Like wolf that dashes through the toil, Like mountain-cat who guards her young, Full at Fitz-James's throat he sprung; 410 Received, but recked not of a wound, And locked his arms his foeman round. Now, gallant Saxon, hold thine own! No maiden's hand is round thee ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... cited. Two favourite Irish terriers, in violation of an all-precautionary training, molested a death adder, the emulation of each inciting the other to recklessness. When the fray was over and the wicked little serpent lay squirming in death, both dogs took joyful credit on account of the feat. An hour after one began to froth at the lips, and in another hour he lay dead. His son and ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... in now down on the flat to make sure no poor sick critter is left in bed in any of them houses. Now's your chance if you want to git up to Daggin's. Go out the back way, follow up the alleys, and go in at the back when you git there. But remember, 'Dan shall be a serpent by the way, an adder in the path that biteth the horse heels, so that his rider shall fall backward!' In Clay County we had to eat up the last mule from the tips of his ears to the end of the fly-whipper. Now we got to pass through the pinches again. We ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... "The Deaf Adder, or Surda Echidna of Linnaeus.—Under this head may be classed all that portion of the spectators (for audience they properly are not) who, not finding the first act of a piece answer to their preconceived notions of what a first ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... the shadow, Quickly, thickly, comes the crowd— From death's bosom creeps the adder, Trailing slime upon ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... the cliffs with my children, after their return from school at noon, to gather wild flowers, it being May-day. We came in with the spring beauty, called miscodeed by the Indians, the adder's tongue, and some ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... certain, that all snakes cannot be played upon in this way: there are some species which are utterly callous to the influences to which the cobra yields itself so readily. No missionary will find any difficulty in getting a snake-charmer to appreciate that Scripture text about the deaf adder which will not listen to the voice of the charmer, charm he ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... deception. One day she came in, after having been a long while absent, and fell asleep, with her mouth open. The little ones peeped in slily, and saw on her teeth the remains of the nice white bulbous roots of the mo-na-wing, or adder's tongue violet. They at once knew it was spring, and without disturbing the old one, who only wanted to keep them in till they were full grown, away they scampered, out of the hole, and dispersed themselves about the forest, and so the ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... hath sorrow? who hath contention? who hath wounds without cause? They that tarry long at the wine, they that go to seek mixed wine. Look not thou upon the wine; at the last it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder." Prov. 23:29-32. ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... thy own father's heart. The adder! O, the charms of hell o'erpowered me; He dwelt within me, to my inmost soul Still to and fro he pass'd, suspected never On the wide ocean, in the starry heaven Did mine eyes seek the enemy, whom I In my heart's heart had folded! Had I been To Ferdinand what Octavio was to me, War ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... still, But the heart of the sunflower is darker and sadder; When the corn is in stacks on the slope of the hill, And slides o'er the path the striped adder; ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... Mackworth savagely. For all his polish, his courtesies, and civilities had not succeeded in making Charlie conceal how much he feared and disliked him. The young horse rears the first time it hears the adder's hiss, and the dove's eye trembles instinctively when the hawk is near. Charlie half knew and half guessed the kind of character he had to deal with, and made Mackworth hate him with deadly hatred by the way in which, without one particle ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... which had protected the rights and nursed the virtues of her great husband and his family, were good enough for her, for her children, and for all. Her ear was closed against the sound of Christianity, as naturally as an adder's against all sound. She could not, and never did hear it. From her I received my principles and first impressions. Not even the history, nor so much as a word of the sufferings, of the Christians ever fell on my ear. I grew up in all things ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... tell you, brother, according to the flesh: it is just as complete as the lark's is with the adder, no more so, nor ever can. Reconciled, forsooth! To what would I ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... unkindness like a vulture on her father's breast: for her husband she is a gilded serpent: to Gloster her cruelty seems to have the fangs of a boar. She and Regan are dog-hearted: they are tigers, not daughters: each is an adder to the other: the flesh of each is covered with the fell of a beast. Oswald is a mongrel, and the son and heir of a mongrel: ducking to everyone in power, he is a wag-tail: white with fear, he is a goose. ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... never knew. He had lost the power of speech! He was gurgling, inarticulate, just like poor Hale. A few moments after my arrival he breathed his last. The fellow who had guided me to the place bent over him—I shall always remember the scene—then fell back as though he had stepped upon an adder. ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... that Judge Sewall writhed under the infliction of these lines as they were doubly thrust upon him by the deacon's "lining" and the singing of the congregation; and the words, "The drowsy Adder will as soon unlock his Sullen Ear" seemed to particularly irritate him; doubtless he felt sure that no one could doubt his integrity, but feared that some might think ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... talked, it befell that an adder, coming out of a bush hard by, stung a knight in the foot; and he, seeing the snake, drew his sword to kill it and thought no harm thereby. But on the instant that the sword flashed, the trumpets blared ...
— Stories from Le Morte D'Arthur and the Mabinogion • Beatrice Clay
... believe that God means that odour of the bean-field; that when Jesus smelled such a scent about Jerusalem or in Galilee, he thought of his Father. And if God means it, it is mine, even if I should never smell it again. The music of the spheres is mine if old age should make me deaf as the adder. Am I mystical again, reader? Then I hope you are too, or will be before you have done with this same beautiful mystical life of ours. More and more nature becomes to me one of God's books of poetry—not his grandest—that is history—but his ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... taught him, and so far from dying, living to a very great age. And this instance shows, that the most dangerous of enemies is the one that never threatens till he actually strikes, resembling not the cobra, but the adder, as Shatrunjaya discovered to his cost, ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... Nor think me so unwary or accurst To bring my feet again into the snare Where once I have been caught; I know thy trains, Though dearly to my cost, thy gins, and toils; Thy fair enchanted cup and warbling charms No more on me have power, their force is null'd; So much of adder's wisdom have I learnt To fence my ear against thy sorceries. If in my flower of youth and strength, when all men Loved, honour'd, fear'd me, thou alone couldst hate me, Thy husband, slight me, sell me, and forego me; How wouldst thou use me now, blind, and thereby ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... trustworthy and tougher and nimbler than his companion, and, so far, more estimable. One flings himself on his prey with a rush like a block of stone hurled from a roof, but the other, without being seen, strikes his poisoned fang into his flesh like an adder hidden in the sand. The third, on whom I had set great hopes, was beheaded the day before yesterday without my knowledge; but the pair whom you have condescended to inspect with your own eyes are sufficient. They must use ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... and down, and as he came to the letter he spurned it with his foot, like a poisonous adder, too loathsome to touch. "I have deserved this punishment," cried he, laughing aloud ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... mother, thou, Whose womb unmeasurable, and infinite breast, Teems, and feeds all; whose self-same mettle, Whereof thy proud child, arrogant man, is puff'd. Engenders the black toad and adder blue, The gilded newt and eyeless venom'd worm; Yield him, who all thy human sons doth hate, From forth thy plenteous ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... been frightened, or perhaps bitten by a black snake or a death-adder, Harry and I climbed up after him as quickly as possible, little heeding the cuts and bruises we inflicted upon our naked bodies. As soon as we reached the ledge and flung ourselves, panting and somewhat terrified, on the thick bed ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... the rough countryman, but hardly had they been uttered, when Viola sprang from her chair, as though an adder had stung her. "Uncle," she cried, and a small fist hovered before Gabriel's eyes in such a threatening manner that he involuntarily closed them. But the child, whose features reminded him so strongly of his dead sister, could not make ...
— A Ghetto Violet - From "Christian and Leah" • Leopold Kompert
... lying here, gaeing up and down in my thoughts, a bairn again with my grandmither, gaeing up and down the braes and by the glen. I want to say somewhat to you. When you see an adder set your heel upon it! When a wolf goes by take your firelock and after him! When a denier and a cheat is near you tell the world as much and help to set the snare! Where there are betrayers and persecutors hunt the wild ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... them in a dark cave, in the middle of which was a caldron boiling. The old women had put into the pot a toad, the toe of a frog, the wool of a bat, an adder's tongue, an owl's wing, and many other things, of which you will find the list in Shakspeare. Now and then they walked around the pot, repeating a ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... fere, A lovely partner of a lady's bed, A noble head a golden crown to wear: His glosing sire his errand daily said, And sugared speeches whispered in mine ear To make me take this darling in mine arms, But still the adder stopt ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... an adder had stung me, and hurried into the coach to support the patient, who was already ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... who should be my playmates but the adder and the frog, That was got beneath a furze-bush and born in a bog? And what should be my singing, that was christened at an altar, But Aves and Credos and ...
— A Few Figs from Thistles • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... species; among them I believe the Hymenophyllum Tunbridgense, with many of the same tribe. I see a little fern which, to my eyes, is our English Asplenium Trichomanes. Every English fern which I know has a variety something like it here, though seldom identical. We have one to correspond with the adder's tongue and moonwort, with the Adiantum nigrum and Capillus Veneris, with the Blechnum boreale, with the Ceterach and Ruta muraria, and with the Cystopterids. I never saw a Woodsia here; but I think that every other English family is represented, and that we have many more besides. On the whole, ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... adder in one's breast to feed on one, nor rise up every night to sow thorns in the garden of ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... round about him fearfully, for Sergeant McGinnis was due on his rounds and Sergeant McGinnis, though married, had an eye like a hawk for a pretty girl and a tongue like an adder ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie
... recovered from the qualm which Juba's intelligence had caused him, and he cried out, "Cease your rubbish; old Gurta's jealous; I know her spite; Christian is the most blackguard word in her vocabulary, its Barbar for toad or adder. I see it all; no, Callista, the divine Callista, must take in hand this piece of wax, sing a charm, and mould him into a Vertumnus. She'll show herself the more potent witch of the two. The new emperor too ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... beautiful. But women are like adder's eggs. He is a fool who warms them in his bosom." He turned his slow regard upon Mrs. Sin. "You have stained your hair to look even as hers. It was discreet, my wife. But one is beautiful and many-shadowed like a copper vase, and the other is like a winter sunset ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... your boot, what then? He cannot hurt you. But suppose you are out after the deer, and you are crawling along the heather with your face to the ground, and all at once you see the two small eyes of an adder looking at you and close ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... dimly that Sarah was treading on dangerous ground, and that something was annoying her host, so she turned to Mrs Clay and said, 'Sarah says I am to choose what we do every day, so may I choose to go and fish in the Adder?' ...
— Sarah's School Friend • May Baldwin
... thought of it myself. What I had done was partly in self-defence, and I did not consider it a crime. And then, he whose life I had taken was an evil man, with the devil's dues in him, and I felt no more remorse after killing him than if I had trodden on a poisonous adder. But now I see things differently. In coming here I exposed you to danger at the hands of the State. I ask your pardon, and I beg you to let ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... vii., p. 33.).—The belief that the slow-worm cannot die until sunset prevails in Dorsetshire. In the New Forest the same superstition exists with regard to the brown adder. Walking in the heathy country between Beaulieu and Christ Church I saw a very large snake of this kind, recently beaten to death by the peasant boys, and on remarking that the lower jaw continued to move convulsively, I was told ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 211, November 12, 1853 • Various
... wreath for Lamia? What for Lycius? What for the sage, old Apollonius? Upon her aching forehead be there hung The leaves of willow and of adder's tongue; And for the youth, quick, let us strip for him The thyrsus, that his watching eyes may swim Into forgetfulness; and, for the sage, Let spear-grass and the spiteful thistle wage War on his temples. ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... pails the she-goats come, without a master's word, And home with udders brimming broad returns the friendly herd. There round the fold no surly bear its midnight prowl doth make, Nor teems the rank and heaving soil with the adder and the snake; There no contagion smites the flocks, nor blight of any star With fury of remorseless heat the sweltering herds doth mar. Nor this the only bliss that waits us there, where drenching ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... hearin' you, hain't I, and been hearin' for a year back, I hain't deef as an adder!" And he jammed his hat down over his ears and went to the barn. But there wuz a sort of a waverin' expression to his linement that made ...
— Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition • Marietta Holley
... cut deep through Lord Dalgarno's assumed composure. He started as if an adder had stung him, but instantly composed himself, and, fixing on the Duke's still smiling countenance an eye which spoke unutterable hatred, he pointed the forefinger of his left hand to the hilt ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... John Newton, started as if an adder had bitten him, and gazed franticly upon the intruder. 'Miss Ward, madam,' he exclaimed involuntarily, 'don't say more, and ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 441 - Volume 17, New Series, June 12, 1852 • Various
... for the girl had never been deep; and, the moment she fancied she and her son were drawing toward each other, she became to her the thawed adder: she wished the adder well, but was she bound to harbor it after it had begun to bite? There are who never learn to see anything except in its relation to themselves, nor that relation except as fancied by ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... fell. There came a note, whose every word bit my heart like an adder. Allen demanded the boy, whom the law gave to his guardianship; and I was warned I must make no attempt to see him after he was taken away, because he would be taught to forget me. I refused. I dared the officer to lay hands on my little one, ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... music of both these noble visitors again another season. For it is noticeable how common such things tend to become when once they are discovered. An enthusiastic botanical collector told me that for years he searched far and near for the adder's-tongue fern, till one day he stumbled upon it in a place over which he had long been in the habit of passing. Marking the peculiarities of the spot he straightway wrote to a kindred spirit, whom he knew to ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... thou upon the wine when it is red, when it giveth his color in the cup, at the last it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder,'" continued the chaplain, as he passed out ...
— Outward Bound - Or, Young America Afloat • Oliver Optic
... Tessibel," Myra said, shifting her eyes from her companion's face to the box where the infant lay, but Tess did not ask the name. Suddenly Myra leaned over and whispered something in the other girl's ear, and Tessibel started as if she had been stung by an adder. ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... means," he said, "if it will relieve your feelings;—but in justice to me, let me know why you do so! What is my offence? I give you a piece of commonplace information concerning the movements of the Court this afternoon, and you jump off your seat as if an adder had ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... the work of God for the instruction of man. Plutarch has observed, that the medical science would be brought to the utmost perfection, when poison should be converted into physic. Thus, in the mortal disease of Judaism and idolatry, our blessed Lord converted the adder's venom of Saul the persecutor, into that cement which made Paul the chosen vessel. That manly activity, that restless ardor, that burning zeal for the law of his fathers, that ardent thirst for the blood of Christians, did the Son of God find necessary ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... the creature, being engaged in eating something to its taste, would not come at her call. She seized it by the neck to drag it away, with the result that its fore-feet, obstinately set upon the wall, overturned a large stone, revealing a great puff adder ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... Graham to heal the Earl of Angus, himself dying of witchcraft. Bothwell was charged with employing a retainer, Ninian Chirnside, to arrange more than twenty-one meetings with the wizard Graham; the result being the procurement of a poison, 'adder skins, toad skins, and the hippomanes in the brain of a young foal,' to ooze the juices on the King, 'a poison of such vehemency as should have presently cut him off.' Isobel Gowdie, accused of ...
— James VI and the Gowrie Mystery • Andrew Lang
... you who know so much know what is in this letter," said Sir John, staring at Fareham's superscription as if he had come suddenly upon an adder. ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... threatening against him his empty ban, he compelled the pious and mighty German emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, to prostrate himself at his feet while he stepped upon him and said, Thou shalt tread upon the lion and adder; and when the emperor protested against such shameful pride and said, Non tibi, sed Petro (Not to thee, but to Peter), the Pope, with increasing scorn, replied, "Et mihi, et Petro" (Both to me, and to Peter). This is pride carried almost to ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... Snake, Adder, &c. Beat the herb Calaminth with Turpentine, and yellow Wax to a Salve, and apply it. To expel the inward Poyson, give the ...
— The School of Recreation (1684 edition) • Robert Howlett
... up against the right hand corner of the room, there sat the Pasha, his limbs gathered in, the whole creature coiled up like an adder. His cheeks were deadly pale, and his lips perhaps had turned white, for without moving a muscle the man impressed me with an immense idea of the wrath within him. He kept his eyes inexorably fixed as if upon vacancy, and with the look of a man accustomed to refuse the prayers of ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... The devil, the presiding genius, expressed a fear that their designs would be frustrated unless unusual measures were resorted to. He promised to give them an image of wax; and directed them to hang up and roast a toad, and then to lay the drippings of the toad mixed with wine, an adder's skin, and a certain part of the forehead of a newly-foaled foal, in the way where the king was to pass, or to hang the preparation in a position where it might drop on his body. These plans again miscarried; for the king escaped ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... reputation of being an antidote for poisons and a specific against epilepsy. Culpepper speaks of it as a sure panacea for apoplexy, palsy, and falling sickness, a belief current in Sweden, where finger rings are made of its wood. An old-fashioned charm for the bite of an adder was to place a cross formed of hazel-wood on the wound, and the burning of a thorn-bush has long been considered a sure preventive of mildew in wheat. Without multiplying further illustrations, there can be no doubt that the therapeutic ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear; which will not hearken to the voice of charmers, charming ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... to numerous robberies in this hotel, our guests will please lock their doors." This was one of three hotels owned by the same man. One of the others had been described to us as the "tough" hotel, and at the other, a few weeks previous, a friend had found a puff-adder barring his bedroom door. The ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... which this was spoken, John saw the necessity of acquiescence. "I did but jest," he said; "and you turn upon me like an adder! Name whom you will, in the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... was in the habit of giving him his plate of porridge and milk to take outside the farm and eat every morning. He had probably done so for long enough, when one day, his mother, happening to go out, saw him seated on the ground eating his porridge in company with an adder, who, however, instead of hurting the child, merely supped up the milk. When the reptile edged a little nearer to the boy than was quite equal, Douglas slapped the adder on his head with his horn spoon, saying, "Keep yer ain side o' the plate, ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... sight of so strange an attitude for his sister to take. At last Aunt Susan pointed to something gliding away in the grass, and gasped: "A serpent! oh, dear, oh, dear, a serpent!" Vainly did my husband try to calm her fright by explaining that it was only an adder going to seek the moisture of the river-bank and never intending to attack any one, that they were plentiful and frequently to be met with, when their first care was to pass unnoticed; our poor aunt would not be persuaded to descend ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... anxiety and displeasure, as he left Rosa's side, and made his way around the table, until he stood immediately behind his wife. He touched her on her shoulder to attract her attention. She started as if an adder had stung her, but she ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... the young man, throwing her from him, as if stung by an adder. "Birth, education, the prejudices of society, have placed an eternal barrier between us. Impoverished though I be, I never can so far forget myself as to mate with a ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... creek of the sea, and hardly escaped drowning. Another time I fell out of a boat into Bedford river, but, mercy yet preserved me alive: besides, another time, being in a field, with one of my companions, it chanced that an adder passed over the highway, so I having a stick in my hand, struck her over the back; and having stunned her, I forced open her mouth with my stick, and plucked her sting out with my fingers; by which act had not God been merciful unto me, I might ...
— Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners • John Bunyan
... to Juliette with an unexpressed query in his adder-like eyes. She shrugged her shoulders, and made a gesture as ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... such good care not to be deluded that, though he sat by to see fair play, yet it was always with his elbows on the table and his fingers in his ears, regardless of appearing to the priest in the character of the deaf adder. After all, he was not the object, and good Pere Bonami at first thought the day his own, when he found that almost all his arguments against Calvinism were equally impressed upon Berenger's mind, but the differences ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... added Robert, "as I wouldn't wind a serpent around my throat, I don't want to put something inside of it which will bite like a serpent and sting as an adder." ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... other all over the eastern country from Texas to Massachusetts. They are usually confounded, however, with two perfectly harmless snakes, the cotton mouth with the common water snake, the copperhead with the so-called spreading adder, but as their differences have to be learned from actual inspection and are very hard to express in a description which would help to identify living specimens, it is wisest to keep away from all ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... that much of it which it was impossible to avoid. But the very first time such talk was begun in my dormitory, I spoke out. What I said I don't know, but I felt as if I was trampling on a slimy poisonous adder, and, at any rate, I showed such pain and distress that the fellows dropped it at the time. Since then I have absolutely refused to stay in the room if ever such talk is begun. So it never is now, and I do think the fellows are very glad ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... now that he was bent, crippled, weak, helpless,—"and all through her, what hope was then," thought Patience, "yet if she had loved him, or there had been any truth in her, she could have wedded him now, and he would have been at ease through life! A little adder at our hearth! We are well quit of her, if he will but think so, but how shall I ever ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge
... have followed a lady this night, Followed her far and lone, Fox and adder and weasel know The ways ...
— Peacock Pie, A Book of Rhymes • Walter de la Mare
... Nether-mark were the Salmon, and the Lynx, and the Ling worm, the Seal, the Stone, and the Sea-mew; the Buck-goat, the Apple-tree, the Bull, the Adder, and the Crane. ...
— The House of the Wolfings - A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark Written in Prose and in Verse • William Morris
... pledged a lord who held a hollow beaker. Another sat, with earnest face beneath a mitred brow. He seemed to whisper in the ear of one who listened trustingly. But on the chest of him who wore the miter, an adder lay, ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... wine when it is red, when it giveth its color in the cup, when it moveth itself aright," started him down a course which made him learn from a terrible experience that "at the last it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder." Does any one call a glass of wine a small thing? Read Tom's story and then call it small, if you dare! Whatever he did was done with his might, drinking not excepted. He boasted of his power to drink much and keep sober, while he laughed at the companions who imbibed far less ...
— The Children's Portion • Various
... any old adder!" exclaimed Roland Yorke to Arthur, when they left Mr. Galloway alone. "The only possible way in which it can have gone, is through that post-office. The men have forked it; as they ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... appointment was, and they were agreed and accorded thoroughly; and wine was fetched, and they drank. Right so came an adder out of a little heath bush, and it stung a knight on the foot. When the knight felt himself stung, he looked down and saw the adder; then he drew his sword to slay the adder, and thought of none other harm. ...
— Stories of King Arthur and His Knights - Retold from Malory's "Morte dArthur" • U. Waldo Cutler
... take meal from a certain sack, and knead it and bake some bread. On returning home, Sigmund asked whether his orders had been carried out. The lad replied by showing the bread, and when closely questioned he artlessly confessed that he had been obliged to knead into the loaf a great adder which was hidden in the meal. Pleased to see that the boy, for whom he felt a strange affection, had successfully stood the test which had daunted his brothers, Sigmund bade him refrain from eating of the loaf, for although he was proof against the bite of a ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... CREDITOR! Good heaven, is there beneath Thy glorious concave of cerulean blue, A being formed so thoroughly for dislike, As is a creditor? No, he's supreme, The devil's a joke to him! Whoe'er has seen An adder's head upraised, with gleaming eyes, About to make a spring, may form a shade Of mild resemblance to a creditor. I do remember once—'tis long agone— Of stripping to the waist to wade the Tyne— The English Tyne, dark, sluggish, broad, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 495, June 25, 1831 • Various
... and Syllables—This defect makes the words an ambassador sound like a nambassador, or an adder like ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... and the face of the Lady Amelia became very dark. Was it not evident that this snake, when taken into their innermost bosoms that they might there warm him, was becoming an adder, and preparing to sting them? There was very little more conversation that evening, and soon after the story of the cook, Crosbie got up and went away ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... a man who found An adder coil'd upon the ground, 'To do a very grateful deed For all the world, I shall proceed.' On this the animal perverse (I mean the snake; Pray don't mistake The human for the worse) Was caught and bagg'd, and, worst of all, His blood was by his captor to be spilt Without regard ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... finally agreed that Arthur and a certain number of knights should meet Mordred with an equal number, and discuss the terms of peace. It had been strictly enjoined on both parties that no weapon should be drawn, and all would have gone well had not an adder been lurking in the grass. One of the knights drew his sword to kill it, and this unexpected movement proved the signal for one of the bloodiest battles ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... gross? Are their ears dull of hearing, and have they closed their eyes? I fear there are some few vipers among us, who, for ten or twenty pounds' gain, would sell their souls and their country, though at last it would end in their own ruin as well as ours. Be not like the deaf adder, who refuses to hear the voice of the charmer, ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... are at hand. He is born, the man of sin, the son of perdition, the wicked man, the beast from out the abyss, the abomination of desolation. He comes from the tribe of Dan, of which it is written: 'Dan shall be a serpent in the way, an adder in the path.' ...
— The Merrie Tales Of Jacques Tournebroche - 1909 • Anatole France
... floor-ways, plated close and true— The last love's labour of the autumn wind— Is broken with curled flower buds white and blue In all the matted hollows, and speared through With thousand serpent-spotted blades up-sprung, Yet bloomless, of the slender adder-tongue. ...
— Among the Millet and Other Poems • Archibald Lampman
... and swear to obey me for the rest of yer nateral life,' and he did it. He got well, and he is tougher'n a biled owl, if he is eighty-six. But the cold sorter settled in his ears, and he's deef as an adder. Ef angel Gabriel blew his horn now I'm afeared Silas wouldn't ...
— Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks - A Picture of New England Home Life • Charles Felton Pidgin
... reminiscent chuckle even to-day. As my eye fell on the antique dressing-table, I seemed to see, suddenly and laughably, Margarita, sweeping down the stairs, enveloped in a billowy peignoir, her hair loose, her eyes flashing furiously, in her extended finger and thumb, held as one would hold a noxious adder, a ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... inflicts its torture without discrimination upon all who dare invade its domain. Snakes lurk in the fetid swamps and lagoons, the brilliant coral and the deadly mapina. Beneath the forest leaves coils the brown adder, whose sting proves ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... bell-bird, the coach-whip, the tewinga, the laughing-jackass, the rifle-bird and regent, filled the air with sound, if not with music. And the black snake, the brown snake, the whip, the diamond, and the death adder glided gently among the fallen leaves and grasses, and held themselves in cheerful readiness for intruders. That was why a condition was attached ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner
... had been dumb rather than that you had mentioned it now," said Mowbray, starting, as if stung by an adder—"What, Clara's pittance!—the trifle my aunt left her for her own fanciful expenses—her own little private store, that she puts to so many good purposes—Poor Clara, that has so little!—And why not rather your own, Master Meiklewham, ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... and timber, often wide enough to contain within it a winding footpath, or a rough cart-track. Under its shelter the earliest primroses, anemones, and wild hyacinths were to be found; sometimes the first bird's nest; and, now and then, the unwelcome adder. Two such hedgerows radiated, as it were, from the parsonage garden. One, a continuation of the turf terrace, proceeded westward, forming the southern boundary of the home meadows; and was formed into a rustic shrubbery, with occasional ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... invariably did so; accordingly they all took a pinch, but from wishing much to succeed, not one sneezed, though their eyes watered, and all, without exception, had to pay me the wager." "I put my face close to the thick glass-plate in front of a puff-adder in the Zoological Gardens, with the firm determination of not starting back if the snake struck at me; but as soon as the blow was struck, my resolution went for nothing, and I jumped a yard or two backwards with astonishing rapidity. My will and reason were powerless against the imagination ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... of lies as of lines, swell like a toade, hiss like an adder, bite like a dog, and chatter like a monkey, my pen is prepared, and my mind; and if you chaunce to find anie worse words than you broughte, let them be put in your dad's dictionarie. Farewell, and be hanged; and I pray God you fare no ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... the bowl! though rich and bright, Its rubies flash upon the sight, An adder coils its depths beneath, Whose lure is woe, whose sting is ...
— Elsie's children • Martha Finley
... 1872.—Leave Chikulu's, and pass a large puff-adder in the way. A single blow on the head killed it, so that it did not stir. About 3 feet long, and as thick as a man's arm, a short tail, and flat broad head. The men say this is a very good sign for our journey, though it would have been a bad sign, and suffering and death, ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... during his early life. Once, he fell into a creek of the sea, once out of a boat into the river Ouse, near Bedford, and each time he was narrowly saved from drowning. One day, an adder crossed his path. He stunned it with a stick, then forced open its mouth with a stick and plucked out the tongue, which he supposed to be the sting, with his fingers; "by which act," he says, "had not God been merciful ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... name for them, meaning "adder." The French termed them "Mingos," from another Algonkin word meaning "stealthy." The English and Dutch colonists in America knew them as the Five Nations. Their own title was "People of the Long House," as if the five ...
— Boys' Book of Indian Warriors - and Heroic Indian Women • Edwin L. Sabin
... glandular secretion of the Chinese swamp-adder is also beyond price. Again-the case upon the pedestal yonder contains five perfect bulbs, three already in flower, as you observe, of an orchid discovered by our chief chemist in certain forests of Burma. It only occurs at extremely ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... me, unless perhaps the object of my entire abhorrence. Yet am I none the less compelled to justify the ensuing action before an irrational audience, which faces common logic in very much the attitude of Augustine's famed adder! Decidedly I think that, on the whole, I ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... overhead, And just alive with larks asinging; And in a twinkling I was swinging Across the windy hills, lighthearted. A kestrel at my footstep started, Just pouncing on a frightened mouse, And hung o'er head with wings a-hover; Through rustling heath an adder darted: A hundred rabbits bobbed to cover: A weasel, sleek and rusty-red, Popped out of sight as quick as winking: I saw a grizzled vixen slinking Behind a clucking brood of grouse That rose and cackled at my coming: And all about my way were flying The peewit, with ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... went well enough; it takes ladies a few weeks to find out each other's weak points. But then the new Mrs. Tunnygate unexpectedly yet undeniably began to exhibit the serpent's tooth, the adder's tongue or the cloven hoof—as the reader's literary traditions may lead him to prefer. For no obvious reason at all she conceived a violent hatred of Mrs. Appleboy, a hatred that waxed all the more virulent on ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... our hands, and more in prospect; with just so much mystery over our coming life as to keep alive interest, yet with enough known and understood in its prospects to awaken sympathy; what deafest ear of the deaf adder could ever be so closed against the voice of the charmer, as our minds, so engrossed with the enjoyments and the hopes of earth, are closed against the voice which speaks ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... on the tender spring; Unwholesome weeds take root with precious flowers; The adder hisses where the sweet birds sing; What virtue breeds iniquity devours: We have no good that we can say is ours, But ill-annexed Opportunity Or kills his ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... situation in Portugal, where more trouble seemed brewing. But Laploshka listened with the abstraction of the deaf adder, and quickly returned to the subject of the ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... again, when once thou hast departed from them: sin has a smooth tongue; if thou hearken to its enchanting language, ten thousand to one but thou art entangled. Take heed, therefore, of listening to the charms wherewith sin enchanteth the soul. In this, be like the deaf adder; stop thine ear, plug it up to sin, and let it only be open to hear the words ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... Zarathustra fallen asleep under a fig-tree, owing to the heat, with his arms over his face. And there came an adder and bit him in the neck, so that Zarathustra screamed with pain. When he had taken his arm from his face he looked at the serpent; and then did it recognise the eyes of Zarathustra, wriggled awkwardly, and tried to get away. "Not at all," said Zarathustra, "as yet ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... distended, When his frantic struggles ended, Through King Olaf's horn an adder, Touched by ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... There are gradations. I went to throw myself at the feet of my great-aunt; good old great-aunt Lady de Culme, who is a power in the land. I let her suppose I came for myself, and she reproached me with Lord Adder. I confessed to him and ten others. She is a dear, she's ticklish, and at eighty-four she laughed! She looked into my eyes and saw a field with never a man in it—just the shadow of a man. She admitted the ten cancelled the one, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Alef's town, nestling in a glen which sloped towards the southern sun. They discovered, besides, two ships drawn up upon the beach, whose long lines and snake-heads, beside the stoat carved on the beak-head of one, and the adder on that of the other, bore witness to the piratical habits of their owner. The merchants, it seemed, were well known to the Cornishmen on shore, and Hereward went up with them unopposed; past the ugly dykes and muddy leats, where ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... perhaps his life was uneventful for so far-travelling a dog, though it held its moments of eccentricity, as when he leaped through the window of a four-wheeler into Kensington, or sat on a Dartmoor adder. But that was fortunately of a Sunday afternoon—when adder and all were torpid, so nothing happened, till a friend, who was following, lifted him off the creature ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the forest people she called him beloved! Like the fang of an adder the word stung Dupont's brain. And like fire touched to powder, swiftly as lightning illumines the sky, the glory of it blazed in Reese Beaudin's face. And all that were ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood
... the longest and clumsiest of all. It comes from the Mohegan words Apo-keep-sink, meaning a safe, pleasant harbor. Harbor it might be for canoes, but for nothing bigger, for it was only the little cove that was so called between Call Rock and Adder Cliff,—the former indicating where settlers awaiting passage hailed the masters of vessels from its top, and the latter taking its name from ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... of the aged thane, and she hated Agitha because of them. The spirit of evil spread his darkness over her soul. He filled her breast with the poison of asps, her eyes with the venom of the adder that lures ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... Flying) Angels," a title still in use in Utah days; then the "Big Fan," suggested by Jeremiah xv. 7, or Luke iii. 17; then "Brothers of Gideon," and finally "Sons of Dan" (whence the name Danites,) from Genesis xlix. 17: "Dan shall be a serpent by the way, an adder in the path, that biteth the horse's heels, so that ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... shot!" he ejaculated. "What an extraordinary experience! Will you believe me, Doctor, when I tell you that as I drew this penknife out of my waistcoat pocket it actually seemed to change into an adder in my hand? There was the flat, wicked-looking head, the malevolent eyes, the characteristic markings of the body, and, above all, there was the feeling of it writhing strongly in my grasp, as though it were ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... maidens patience. Hast thou slaine him then? Henceforth be neuer numbred among men. Oh, once tell true, euen for my sake, Durst thou a lookt vpon him, being awake? And hast thou kill'd him sleeping? O braue tutch: Could not a worme, an Adder do so much? An Adder did it: for with doubler tongue Then thine ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... Ha, excellent! I was awaiting this. Thou wilt inoculate our knightly veins With thy corrupted Jewish blood. Thou 'lt foist This adder on my bosom. Henry Schnetzen Is no weak dupe, whom every lie may start. Make ready, Jew, for ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... use of the treacherous juice, Which some folks say stings like an adder, They went back again at the handkerchief men, Who slowly got madder ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field
... John was laying down his aunt to come and hear, she rushed up the stairs with, "And it is all your doing, you unnatural, good-for-nothing varmint! That was what you were after all night, you and your aunt, the adder that I have warmed at my bosom! Turning against your own poor father, to set them bloody-minded soldiers on him! And now he'll be taken and hanged, and I shall be a poor miserable widow woman all along ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of hearing, and have they closed their eyes? I fear there are some few vipers among us, who, for ten or twenty pounds' gain, would sell their souls and their country, though at last it would end in their own ruin as well as ours. Be not like the deaf adder, who refuses to hear the voice of the charmer, ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... be thrown to the snakes. Though his hands are bound, Gunnar plays so sweetly with his toes on the harp, which Gudrun has sent him, that all the snakes are lulled to sleep, with the exception of an adder, which stings him to the heart, so that ...
— The Nibelungenlied • Unknown
... dawned the day when from this comfortable high estate a common adder, preserved in spirits of wine, was the cause of his downfall and Bully Harberth the means of ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... sorcery. But he had only employed Graham to heal the Earl of Angus, himself dying of witchcraft. Bothwell was charged with employing a retainer, Ninian Chirnside, to arrange more than twenty-one meetings with the wizard Graham; the result being the procurement of a poison, 'adder skins, toad skins, and the hippomanes in the brain of a young foal,' to ooze the juices on the King, 'a poison of such vehemency as should have presently cut him off.' Isobel Gowdie, accused of witchcraft in 1622, confessed to having employed a similar ...
— James VI and the Gowrie Mystery • Andrew Lang
... unimpeachable, your utility will be much questioned, if you wish to spare a royalist because he is a brave man," said Barrere. "By the same argument, I presume, you would refrain from knocking an adder on the head, because he rose boldly in ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... I have been hesitating between Moorcock and Black Adder, but I thought you would like ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... man and grave-digger, was going a sweethearting. He took off slowly the leathern "breeks" of his craft, sloughing them as an adder casts his skin. They collapsed upon the floor with a hideous suggestion of distorted human limbs, as Saunders went about his further preparations. Saunders was a great, soft-bodied, fair man, of the chuby flaxen type so rare in Scotland—the type which ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... feathers new she sings; The turtle to her make hath told her tale. Summer is come, for every spray now springs: The hart hath hung his old head on the pale; The buck in brake his winter coat he flings; The fishes flete with new repaired scale. The adder all her slough away she slings; The swift swallow pursueth the flies smale; The busy bee her honey now she mings; Winter is worn that was the flowers' bale. And thus I see among these pleasant things Each care decays, and yet my sorrow springs. ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... hounds once, and then darted away round the log's butt end. Jess made some gruff remarks in her throat which could not well be translated into our tongue; but they sufficed to teach Finn a good deal. He had now seen a death-adder, the snake whose bite kills inside of fifteen minutes; and, so much more apt are the dog kind in some matters than ourselves, that Finn would never again require reminding or instructing about this particular form of danger. Jess had bitten ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... upon the wine when it is red, when it giveth his color in the cup, at the last it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder,'" continued the chaplain, as he passed out of ...
— Outward Bound - Or, Young America Afloat • Oliver Optic
... deceit that adder tongue of thine o'erflows, Nor is thy temper over-sweet, as well thine earlier consort knows. Thou'rt truly worthy of thy fame for boastful speech and lust of power, And well dost thou deserve thy name— ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... Kostbera to wife. Their sons were Solar, Snaevar, and Giuki. When the Giukungs came to Atli, Gudrun besought his sons to intercede for their lives, but they would not. The heart of Hogni was cut out, and Gunnar was cast into a pen of serpents. He struck his harp and lulled the serpents, but an adder ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... and spiders, Grubbing in poisonous pools for hot salamanders and toadstools; Charming the bats from the flues, snaring the lizards by twilight, Sucking the scorpion's egg and milking the breast of the adder!" ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... our captain for his perseverance, though it had become the pretty generally received opinion on board, both fore and aft, that we were destined never to reach our station. All sorts of stories were going the round of the decks. An old woman near Plymouth, Mother Adder-fang she was called, had been heard to declare, two nights before the ship went out of harbour, that not a stick of the Orpheus would ever boil a kettle on English ground. Another was said to have cursed the ship and all on board. Then we had a fine variety of Flying ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... was a man of the sea, and the sea would not rest until it had got him back. So the grave was opened, and he really was found with his thumb in his mouth. So they laid him upon a cart and harnessed two oxen before it; and as if stung by an adder, the oxen ran away with the man of the sea over heath and moorland to the ocean; and then the sand ceased flying inland, but the hills that had been heaped up still remained there. All this Juergen heard and treasured in his memory from the happiest days of his childhood, ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... words, every one of them an adder, Alfred turned on her furiously, and his long arm shot out of its own accord, and the fingers opened like an eagle's claw. She saw, and understood, but never blenched. Her vindictive eye met his dilating ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... often the Continent has been convulsed by a dish that disagreed with some one, or by a ship that did not start to its time. The Jacobites were very wise in toasting "the little gentleman in black velvet" that raised the fatal mole-hill. Does not the old romance say that an adder starting from a bush brought on the terrible battle in which all the chivalry of England were strewn like leaves around ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... the man that enters these gates that lead down to hell. The saloon is a serpent, with the serpent's fascinating beauty and power to charm, but with the serpent's deadly bite. "At the last it biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an adder." Kansas has wisely ordained that it will not maintain by the public authority and at the public expense poisonous serpents to sting ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... not go back to a time when he did not remember Duncan, and to Irene he was like a fixed part of the scheme of nature. He had one defect which at this instant made him invaluable. He resented any imputation of the fact angrily, but he had been deaf as an adder for years. ...
— VC — A Chronicle of Castle Barfield and of the Crimea • David Christie Murray
... to try any detective work; to find out if she is a woman with a past, with a husband living? You are not going to put a live adder among the eels? I daresay drysalters eat eels. It is the reading of sensational novels that ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... Egypt. A queen who presented England with a threadless needle, fell in love with some foreigners, was unsuccessful in her love and naval affairs, and finally became a mummy through the auspices of an adder. Ambition: An Egyptian St. Patrick. Also Royal lovers. Recreation: Barging with Anthony. ...
— Who Was Who: 5000 B. C. to Date - Biographical Dictionary of the Famous and Those Who Wanted to Be • Anonymous
... Newton, started as if an adder had bitten him, and gazed franticly upon the intruder. 'Miss Ward, madam,' he exclaimed involuntarily, 'don't say more, and I'll go ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 441 - Volume 17, New Series, June 12, 1852 • Various
... lazily swishing their tails coming home to milking, and the shadow of the thick hedge had already caused the anemones in the grass to close their petals, there was a slight rustling sound. Out into the cool grass by some cowslips there came a small dark head. It was an adder, verily a snake in the grass and flowers. His quick eye—you know the proverb, 'If his ear were as quick as his eye, No man should pass him by'—caught sight of us immediately, and he turned back. The hedge was hollow ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... Hath my insect never seen; But violets and bilberry bells, Maple-sap and daffodels, Grass with green flag half-mast high, Succory to match the sky, Columbine with horn of honey, Scented fern, and agrimony, Clover, catchfly, adder's-tongue And brier-roses, dwelt among; All beside was unknown waste, All was picture as ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... taste not, handle not: Drink will make the dark, dark blot, Like an adder it will sting, And at last to ruin bring, They who tarry ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... companion, "Oh! who could prefer the most brilliant ball-rooms to a scene like this?" but we checked the impulse; for perhaps, thought we, the "still small voice," which speaks from all around us, is even now whispering to her heart. But never, we believe, was adder more deaf to the accents of the "charmer" than was Emily at that moment to those of nature. Her mind, we are pretty sure, was still running, and all the faster as she approached it, on that fancy ball. Perhaps she suspected that ours was following the same turn, ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... weapon from his hand, And, backward borne upon the lea, Brought the proud Chieftain to his knee. "Now, yield thee, or, by Him who made The world, thy heart's blood dyes my blade!"— "Thy threats, thy mercy, I defy! Let recreant yield, who fears to die."— Like adder darting from his coil, Like wolf that dashes through the toil, Like mountain-cat who guards her young, Full at Fitz-James's throat he sprung, Received, but reck'd not of a wound, And locked his arms his ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... little protuberancies on the side of the sheath, which, by observing the Figure diligently, is easie enough to be perceiv'd; and from several particulars, I suppose the Animal has a power of displaying them, and shutting them in again as it pleases, as a Cat does its claws, or as an Adder or Viper ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... not to be deluded that, though he sat by to see fair play, yet it was always with his elbows on the table and his fingers in his ears, regardless of appearing to the priest in the character of the deaf adder. After all, he was not the object, and good Pere Bonami at first thought the day his own, when he found that almost all his arguments against Calvinism were equally impressed upon Berenger's mind, but the ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... strawberry flowers clustering beside the star moss all a-shimmer with new green. The Canada Mayflower spread a carpet under the pines; and in the hollows where the mists settled, where the brooks flowed, where the air was heavy with the damp, ineffable odour of growing things, they gathered drooping adder's-tongues, white-starred bloodroots and foam-flowers. From Insall's quick eye nothing seemed to escape. He would point out to them the humming-bird that hovered, a bright blur, above the columbine, the woodpecker glued to the trunk of a maple high above their ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... truth to say, and that's but right, Strong drink (it hath an adder's bite!) Was what had put him in the mud, The only kind he used ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... were of opinion that smaller fry were capable of affording better fun. Some seasons afterwards, when our Hunt was disbanded, the shopkeepers' apprentices continued, with the youngsters, to work our mongrel hounds; but eventually Joker's death from the bite of an adder put an end to their pastime, for the bobtail and the terrier were the only possible leaders ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... of the raiders lit a red flame that stung The stouted hearted Josh like a vile adder's tongue, Till he rushed from his cabin in madness and swore He would save Sue and children or sleep nevermore. But a flash from a rifle sent a ball through his brain, And Joshua Bell never breathed once again. And his loved ones perished in the flame ...
— The Loom of Life • Cotton Noe
... vain to ask for mercy; you must go free,' said the smiling man. 'Henceforth a hair shall slay you like a sword, and a breath shall bite you like an adder; weapons shall come against you out of nowhere; and you shall die many times.' And with that he was swallowed once more in the wall behind; and I went out into ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... glance. As the nostrils of his big three-angled nose dilated, the scream of an eagle rang in his voice, his huge ugly hand held the crook of his cane with the clutch of a tiger, his tongue flew with the hiss of an adder, and his big deformed foot seemed to grip the floor as the claw of ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... be but last May's elf, wing shifted, eye sheathed— Changeling in April's crib rocked, who lets 'scape rills locked fast since frost breathed— Skin cast (think!) adder-like, now bloom bursts ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... anyone, especially the clerks, would have believed the heavens were open above them, behold, her good man, who comes upon her near the old cross. She, at that time lazily swinging her charming little foot over the side of the litter, drew in her head as though she had seen an adder. She was a good wife, for I know some who would have proudly passed their husbands, to their shame and to the great disrespect of ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... sight of Arlington Heights, ever work their will here, I could name one Briton whose composure will not be ruffled by compassion at hearing the news. If there is anything in presentiments, surely one of these whispered warnings thus early in my pilgrimage, though I was deafer than the adder just then. ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... a man will fight openly and fairly, I will not hate him. If I wanted to touch an adder with my hand I would not catch him by the tail so that it could curl around and sting my hand; I would catch it just behind the head. It might writhe and wriggle, but I should know that it could not bite me. That is how I want to treat the ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... THE TAIL. Mr. Courthope does not condescend to italicize his pun; but a swallow-tailed and adder-tongued pun like this must be paused upon. Compare Mr. Murray's Tale of the Town of Lucca, to be seen between the arrival of one train and the departure of the next,—nothing there but twelve churches and a cathedral,—mostly of the tenth ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... dangers that do not appeare: Cal. Thou must sad chance by fore-cast, wise resist, Or being done say boote-les had I wist. Caes. But for to feare wher's no suspition, Will to my greatnesse be derision. Cal. There lurkes an adder in the greenest grasse, Daungers of purpose alwayes hide their face: Caes. Perswade no more Caesar's resolu'd to go. Cal. The Heauens resolue that hee may safe returne, 1630 For if ought happen to my loue but well: His danger shalbe doubled ...
— The Tragedy Of Caesar's Revenge • Anonymous
... said in a low voice. "Watch out for her. She's as deadly as a puff adder and she collects men. The other man is Douglas's father, Henry. The plump redhead beside him is his wife, Anne. The other woman is my mother, Clara, even though Eloise and I don't look like her. ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... mountain', on account of the black patches of rock that appear upon its mighty spire, where the sides are too precipitous to allow of the snow lying on them; then on past the lonely lake Baringo, where one of our two remaining Askari, having unfortunately trodden on a puff-adder, died of snake-bite, in spite of all our efforts to save him. Thence we proceeded a distance of about a hundred and fifty miles to another magnificent snow-clad mountain called Lekakisera, which has ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... rod: What! and so lose The strength which comes by suffering? Well, if grief Be gain, mine's double—fleeing thus the snare Of yon luxurious and unnerving down, And widowed from mine Eden. And why widowed? Because they tell me, love is of the flesh, And that's our house-bred foe, the adder in our bosoms, Which warmed to life, will sting us. They must know— I do confess mine ignorance, O Lord! Mine earnest will these painful limbs may prove. . . . . . And yet I swore to love him.—So I do No more than I have sworn. Am I to blame ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... the hill where he came to battle with the stormwinds, and to watch the sunsets and the moon rising over the lake. And then they went down into the glen, where the mountain streamlet tumbled. Here had been wood-sorrel, and a carpet of the white trillium; and now there was adder's tongue, quaint and saucy, and columbine, and the pale dusty corydalis. There was soft new moss underfoot, and one walked as ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... can be optimists. The latter rigorously deny themselves sensual gratifications, and keep themselves aloof from all objects of pleasure. For them to be pleased is equivalent to sin, and to laugh, to be cursed. They would rather touch an adder's head than a piece of money.[FN211] They would rather throw themselves into a fiery furnace than to come in contact with the other sex. Body for them is a bag full of blood and pus;[FN212] life, an ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... answered by his notice of the reception of the criticism. An anonymous writer has but one means of knowing the effect of his attack. In this he has the superiority over the viper; he knows that his poison has taken effect when he hears the victim cry;—the adder is deaf. The best reply to an anonymous intimation is to take no notice directly nor indirectly. I wish Mr. B. could see only one or two of the thousand which I have received in the course of a literary life, which, though begun early, has not yet extended to a third part of his existence ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... recreated that institution after it had been dead for many years, and invited those gentlemen to come into it, which they did, and so of course they have a right to turn him out if they want to. The difference between Beecher and the man who put an adder in his bosom is, that Beecher put in more adders than he did, and consequently had a proportionately livelier time of it when they ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... dark zigzag lines against the sky. From the trees the bell-bird, the coach-whip, the tewinga, the laughing-jackass, the rifle-bird and regent, filled the air with sound, if not with music. And the black snake, the brown snake, the whip, the diamond, and the death adder glided gently among the fallen leaves and grasses, and held themselves in cheerful readiness for intruders. That was why a condition was attached to the ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner
... stepping off the 'aisle,' a snake passed over my foot, and biting me on the ankle vanished in the swamp. It must have been some sort of a water-snake, but I did not know. All I knew was that I had been bitten by a snake that might be poisonous. It could easily have been an adder, or a karait—even a cobra—though I had not a minute in which to observe a hood or any distinctive marks. I immediately collected my faculties to think what was the best thing to do. I knew I had no time to lose. Mother was away in town ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... of Falstaff's plaintive 'If to be fat is to be hated!' At displays of natural feelings of any sort this comfortless evil spirit ever curls the lip. Inhabiting modern young ladies, it is especially superior to the maternal instinct, and cringes from a baby in a railway carriage as from an adder. At the dropping of an 'h' it shrinks as though the weighty letter had fallen upon its great toe, and it will forgive anything rather than a provincial accent. It lives entirely in the surfaces of things, and, as the surface of life is frequently ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... a small mongoose (my! what a lot of hunters do collect about the bungalows at night, to be sure!) under the bush, engaged in eating that precise reptilian form of poisoned death known as a night adder, which it had just killed. But the genets had other and private business, and they parted from the mongoose with no more than a snarl, the two genets to appear next—or, rather, to be no more than guessed at—crossing ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... George Sheldon's cards, which the clerk looked at. He gave a little start as if an adder ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... snake In the caldron boil and bake; Eye of newt and toe of frog, Wool of bat and tongue of dog, Adder's fork and blind-worm's sting, Lizard's ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... enough to contain within it a winding footpath, or a rough cart-track. Under its shelter the earliest primroses, anemones, and wild hyacinths were to be found; sometimes the first bird's nest; and, now and then, the unwelcome adder. Two such hedgerows radiated, as it were, from the parsonage garden. One, a continuation of the turf terrace, proceeded westward, forming the southern boundary of the home meadows; and was formed into a rustic shrubbery, with occasional seats, entitled "The Wood Walk." The other ran straight ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... you have made the Most High your abode, There shall no evil befall you, No plague come near your tent; For he will give his angels charge over you, To keep you in all your ways; They shall bear you up on their hands, Lest you strike your foot on a stone. You shall tread on the lion and adder, You shall trample on the young lion ...
— The Children's Bible • Henry A. Sherman
... fluviatile, with its fluted stem and verticillate series of linear brandies. Two other species of the same genus, Equisetum sylvaticum and Equisetum arvense, flourish on the drier parts of the moor, blent with two species of minute ferns, the moonwort and the adder's tongue,—ferns that, like the magnificent royal fern (Osmunda regalis), though on a much humbler scale, bear their seed cases on independent stems, and were much sought after of old for imaginary virtues, which the modern schools of medicine refuse to recognize. ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... should Queen Armida wed, A goodly swain to be a princess' fere, A lovely partner of a lady's bed, A noble head a golden crown to wear: His glosing sire his errand daily said, And sugared speeches whispered in mine ear To make me take this darling in mine arms, But still the adder stopt her ears ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... made of some kind of dark brown, mottled wood, bearing a marked resemblance to a snake's skin; and the top of the cane was carved in conformity, to represent the head of what I took to be a puff-adder, fragments of stone, or beads, being inserted to represent the eyes, and the whole thing being finished with an ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... the greater number of pteridophytes, and their general structure corresponds with that of the maiden-hair fern described. There are three orders, of which two, the true ferns (Filices) and the adder-tongues (Ophioglossaceae), are represented in the United States. A third order, intermediate in some respects between these two, and called the ringless ferns (Marattiaceae), has ...
— Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany - For High Schools and Elementary College Courses • Douglas Houghton Campbell
... is what they call the puff adder. It is a very heavy, sluggish animal, and very thick in proportion to its length, and when attacked in front, it can not make any spring. It has, however, another power, which, if you are not prepared for it, ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat
... Star-Child was glad and ran back to his playmates. But when they saw him coming they ran away from him in fear. He went to the well and looked in. Lo, his face was as the face of a toad and his body was scaled like an adder. He flung himself down on the ...
— Tell Me Another Story - The Book of Story Programs • Carolyn Sherwin Bailey
... by Him who made The world, thy heart's blood dyes my blade!"— "Thy threats, thy mercy, I defy! 405 Let recreant yield, who fears to die." —Like adder darting from his coil, Like wolf that dashes through the toil, Like mountain-cat who guards her young, Full at Fitz-James's throat he sprung; 410 Received, but recked not of a wound, And locked his arms his foeman round. Now, gallant Saxon, hold thine own! No ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... said to myself. "Let Burbank keep his adder. Let it sting him. If it so much as shoots a fang at me, ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... marry thy great-grandfather's widow." She, poor thing! at that time was thinking little of marriage; for even then, though known only to herself and her femme de chambre, that dreadful organic malady (cancer) was raising its adder's crest, under which finally she died. But, in spite of languor interchanging continually with disfiguring anguish, she still impressed one as a regal beauty. Her person, indeed, and figure, would have tended towards such a standard; but all ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... goldenrod is golden still, But the heart of the sunflower is darker and sadder; When the corn is in stacks on the slope of the hill, And slides o'er the path the striped adder; ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... languorous dreams. She haunted the mind, though she passed from the sight. When Roger Montrose sought his pillow that night, 'Twas to dream of La Travers. He thought she became A burning red rose, with each leaf like a flame. He stooped down and plucked it, and woke with a start, As it turned to an adder ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... as the adder itself to the cries, When wisdom, humanity, justice implore, You would have our proud eagle to feed on the eyes Of those who have taught ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... and oh, what danger lurks there! Fathers and mothers—see to it, that if your child's heart cease to beat, your own break not with the remembrance of words and looks, that bite like a serpent and sting like an adder! ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... been daubed with honey; the writer has been promised "an European reputation" (Madame LAFFARGE has a reputation equally extensive), and he is at this moment to be found upon drawing-tables, whose owners would scream—or affect to scream—as at an adder, at SHELLEY. Nay, Shelley's publisher is found guilty of blasphemy in the Court of Queen's Bench; and that within these few months. We should like to know Lord Denman's opinions of Mr. BOONE. What would he ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, December 11, 1841 • Various
... competent observers, I am free to express my hope of hearing the music of both these noble visitors again another season. For it is noticeable how common such things tend to become when once they are discovered. An enthusiastic botanical collector told me that for years he searched far and near for the adder's-tongue fern, till one day he stumbled upon it in a place over which he had long been in the habit of passing. Marking the peculiarities of the spot he straightway wrote to a kindred spirit, whom he ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... harmless little bonnet maker assumes the airs of a dragon, to disguise his natural cowardice; while the pottingar wilfully desires to show himself timid, poor spirited, and humble, to conceal the danger of his temper. The adder is not the less deadly that he creeps under a stone. I tell thee, son Henry, that, for all his sneaking looks and timorous talking, this wretched anatomy loves mischief more than he fears danger. But here we stand in front ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... godly, industrious life, doing the duty which lies nearest you, avoiding sin as you would an adder, because it is sure sooner or later to sting you, if you touch it, is the straight road, and the only road, to happiness, either in this life, or in the life to come. Pleasure and amusement, drinking and jollity, will not make you happy. Money will not make you happy. Cleverness, and cunning, ...
— True Words for Brave Men • Charles Kingsley
... bit me, it would go farther to convince me that the next adder would bite me too than if fifty young Buffons told me ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... show you the pit of your own heart, Padahoon, and the adder that bites at the root of it. You are jealous of the fame and the office of Simwa, but you shall not sink your venom in the ...
— The Arrow-Maker - A Drama in Three Acts • Mary Austin
... the ashes to save himself. Just so have the swifts left the hollow trees and taken to my chimney, the phoebe to my pigpen, the swallow to my barn loft, the vireo to my lilac bush, the screech owls to my apple trees, the red squirrel for its nest to my ice-house, and the flat-nosed adder to the sandy knoll by my beehives. I have taken over from its wild inhabitants fourteen acres in Hingham; but, beginning with the fox, the largest of my wild creatures, and counting only what we commonly call "animals" (beasts, birds, and reptiles), there are dwelling with me, being fruitful ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... camp was he sensible of the murmurs of censure at his hypocrisy in joining the penitential procession at all. Dame Idonea, in a complete suit of sackcloth, was informing her friends that she had made a vow not to wash her face till the whole adder brood of Montfort had been crushed; and that she trusted to see the beginning of justice done to-morrow. She had offered a candle to St. James to that effect, hoping to induce him to turn away his ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... bitten by a cobra, or a rattlesnake, or a puff-adder, there are many remedies, but few people who can recommend them from personal experience. It is to be feared that most of them unfortunately die before writing their testimonials. Perhaps they were too long deciding which thing to take. ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... prose composition. Rhythmus, or pomp of cadence, or sonorous ascent of clauses, in the structure of sentences, were effects of art as much thrown away upon him as the voice of the charmer upon the deaf adder. We ourselves, occupying the very station of polar opposition to that of Lamb, being as morbidly, perhaps, in the one excess as he in the other, naturally detected this omission in Lamb's nature at an early stage of our acquaintance. Not the fabled Regulus, with his eyelids torn ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... from the enterprise, and now resolving to rescue her brother at every hazard, Frances turned her looks towards the east, in earnest gaze at the clouds which constantly threatened to involve her again in comparative darkness. Had an adder stung her, she could not have sprung with greater celerity than she recoiled from the object against which she was leaning, and which she for the first time noticed. The two upright posts, with a crossbeam on their tops, and ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... to do more. But the world thought otherwise and went on, And my head's one that its spite was spent on; Thirty years are fled since that morning, 805 And with them all my head's adorning. Nor did the old Duchess die outright, As you expect, of suppressed spite, The natural end of every adder Not suffered to empty its poison-bladder; 810 But she and her son agreed, I take it, That no one should touch on the story to wake it, For the wound in the Duke's pride rankled fiery, So, they made no search and small inquiry— And when fresh ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... "An adder is a small thing to sting a man," said Ingvar in his grim voice. "Nor will it always hurt him much. Yet if a man is so close among many that he must needs tread on one, and it bites him, and in fleeing that he must set foot on another, ...
— Wulfric the Weapon Thane • Charles W. Whistler
... Alexander the Third practiced when, by threatening against him his empty ban, he compelled the pious and mighty German emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, to prostrate himself at his feet while he stepped upon him and said, Thou shalt tread upon the lion and adder; and when the emperor protested against such shameful pride and said, Non tibi, sed Petro (Not to thee, but to Peter), the Pope, with increasing scorn, replied, "Et mihi, et Petro" (Both to me, and to Peter). This is pride carried almost ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... and strawberries that grow So near the ground, fly hence, boys, get you gone! There's a cold adder ...
— The Bucolics and Eclogues • Virgil
... coarse or big of its kind, as in horse-radish, or horse-chesnut; most likely the old form of the word gave name to the horse as the big beast where there was not an elephant or other greater one. The dragon-fly is, in some parts called the "tanging ether" or tanging adder, from tang, a long thin body, and a sting. Very few Dorset folk believe that the dragon-fly stings horses any more than that the horse ...
— Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect • William Barnes
... indeed—that heart hath long been changed; Worm-like 'twas trampled—adder-like avenged— Without one hope on earth beyond thy love, 400 And scarce a glimpse of mercy from above. Yet the same feeling which thou dost condemn, My very love to thee is hate to them, So closely mingling here, that disentwined, I cease to love ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... a living sentient creature in the cold, dank, noisome grave; have felt the loathsome worm slide along my warm, quivering limbs; the toad find a resting-place upon my breast; the adder wreath her slimy folds round my swelling throat; have struggled against the earthly weight that pressed out my soul and palsied my bursting heart, with superhuman strength; but every effort to free ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... even more trustworthy and tougher and nimbler than his companion, and, so far, more estimable. One flings himself on his prey with a rush like a block of stone hurled from a roof, but the other, without being seen, strikes his poisoned fang into his flesh like an adder hidden in the sand. The third, on whom I had set great hopes, was beheaded the day before yesterday without my knowledge; but the pair whom you have condescended to inspect with your own eyes are sufficient. They must use neither dagger nor lance, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... no public officer was ever to be found. A general epidemic seemed to have fallen upon the offices, and exterminated all the inhabitants. The Colonial Secretary would rush out to luncheon, deaf as an adder to the cries of female distress that rang in the troubled air behind him. The Advocate General, hearing the well-known voice inquiring for him in no friendly key, would hurry away through an opposite door, and dive into the woods adjoining Government-house, ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... their young, ambitious compatriot. Erasmus on his part irritated him furtively. He reveals in this whole dispute a lack of self-control and dignity which shows his weakest side. Usually so anxious as to decorum he now lapses into invectives: The British adder, Satan, even the old taunt ascribing a tail to Englishmen has to serve once more. The points at issue disappear altogether behind the bitter mutual reproaches. In his unrestrained anger, Erasmus avails ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... my master," replied Anthony Foster; "she is in no mood to stoop to his lure, for she yelled out on seeing him as if an adder had stung her." ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... Sigmund laughed, and answered: "I have heard of that son of a king, Who might not be scared from his bread for all the worms of the land." And therewith he went to the meal-sack and thrust therein his hand, And drew forth an ash-grey adder, and a deadly worm it was: Then he went to the door of the cave and set it down in the grass, While the King's son quaked and quivered: then he drew forth his sword from the sheath, And said: "Now fearest thou this, that men call ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... said, Go to the tomb of that woman, and open it and behold what thou hast begotten on her; and if thou let to go, thou shalt have a great harm. And he yede and opened the tomb, and there flew out an adder right hideous to see; the which as swithe flew about the city and the country, and soon after the city sank down. And there be many perilous ...
— The Travels of Sir John Mandeville • Author Unknown
... leaves were traditionally said to have been lashed with the virgin’s milk, it is doubtless a survivor from the gardens tended and cherished by the monk of old. The Botrychium Lunaria (moonwort) and Ophioglossum (adder’s tongue) are found within 300 yards of the Baths (occasionally intermittent for a season); the Trichomanes (English maidenhair) grows in one solitary place on the inner walls of a closed well, though entirely unknown anywhere else for many miles round. ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... of England, a jackal running across the path, just as a fox would in England, reminded Owen that he was in Africa; and though occasionally one meets an adder in England, one meets them much more frequently in the North of Africa. It was impossible to say how many Owen had not seen lying in front of his horse like dead sticks. As the cavalcade passed they would twist themselves down a hole. As ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... than he had anticipated. Even the austere and exacting are usually appeased by the signs of contrition, but the nature of Deerslayer did not require proofs of intense feelings so strong in order to bring him down to a level with the regrets felt by the girl herself. He arose, as if an adder had stung him, and the accents of the mother that soothes her child were scarcely more gentle and winning than the tones of his voice, as he now expressed his contrition at having ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... continued, after a moment's pause, "I had told him that if ever we should meet where his life would cost me nothing, I would kill him as I would set my heel upon an adder—and he only smiled as though I had paid him some delicate compliment. And that night, Guy, a hundred yards from your cottage, he sidled up to me in that lonely road, and bade me direct him to the abode of Mr. Guy Ducaine. A ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... hostess for his beer, and conversed freely with his acquaintance. By his arch replies I found that I was in company with an original—a man that might stretch forth his arms in the wilderness without fear, and like Paul, grasp an adder without harm. He playfully entwined his fingers with their coils and curled crests, and played with their forked tongues. He had unbuttoned his waistcoat, and as cleverly as a fish-woman handles her eels, let out several snakes and adders, warmed by his breast, and spread ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini
... repeated my blows, till I felt sure that the creature was dead. I now dragged it out by the tail, prepared, should it give signs of life, to renew my attack. As I brought it into the light, I saw that it was a black variety of the puff adder, which is among the most poisonous serpents of Africa. It is said that if a person is bitten by it, death ensues within an hour. To make sure, I threw the body into the fire. Not till then did Natty sufficiently recover the effects of his fall and alarm ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... the warmhearted ebullition of feeling produced by his appearance had subsided, "so you have returned to us at last; but indeed, you return now to a blank and dismal prospect. Miss Goodwin's adder tongue has charmed the dotage of your silly old uncle to ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... confirm this statement, but much that shows the Greek authors were frequently in error. In the realm of the dead, according to the texts of the Book of the Dead, (chapter LXXXIX. and other places,) the responsible soul or Ba of the deceased, may become a sparrow-hawk, an adder, a crocodile-headed being, etc., but only to deceive its demon enemies;[81] not until after this, is the Khu, the intellectual soul, which accompanies the Ba, which is represented under the symbolized ...
— Scarabs • Isaac Myer
... To know my shames and praises from your tongue; None else to me, nor I to none alive, That my steel'd sense or changes right or wrong. In so profound abysm I throw all care Of others' voices, that my adder's sense To critic and to flatterer stopped are. Mark how with my neglect I do dispense: You are so strongly in my purpose bred, That all the world besides methinks ...
— Shakespeare's Sonnets • William Shakespeare
... you repay me? I, who have kept you out of the workhouse, treated you like my own child? And then to go and write filthy, rascally, Radical ballads on me and mine! This comes of your Methodism, you canting, sneaking hypocrite!—you viper—you adder—you snake—you—!' And the squire, whose vocabulary was not large, at a loss for another synonym, rounded off his oration by a torrent of oaths; at which Argemone, taking Honoria's hand, walked proudly out of the room, with ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... high on his forehead to have a better sight of so strange an attitude for his sister to take. At last Aunt Susan pointed to something gliding away in the grass, and gasped: "A serpent! oh, dear, oh, dear, a serpent!" Vainly did my husband try to calm her fright by explaining that it was only an adder going to seek the moisture of the river-bank and never intending to attack any one, that they were plentiful and frequently to be met with, when their first care was to pass unnoticed; our poor aunt would not be persuaded to descend from her pedestal for some time, and not before she was ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... such abundance lies our choice, 620 As leaves a greater store of Fruit untoucht, Still hanging incorruptible, till men Grow up to thir provision, and more hands Help to disburden Nature of her Bearth. To whom the wilie Adder, blithe and glad. Empress, the way is readie, and not long, Beyond a row of Myrtles, on a Flat, Fast by a Fountain, one small Thicket past Of blowing Myrrh and Balme; if thou accept My conduct, I can bring thee thither soon. 630 Lead then, said Eve. Hee leading swiftly rowld In tangles, and ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... mice and voles. House-mice and wood-mice, red voles, and grey. Last of all, Berus the adder. Not a mouse stepped aside, as he worked his slow, sinuous length between the cornstalks. He, too, was of ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... their purpose by the bold actions of General Grant than by the blandest words of the smoothest-tongued Democrat in America. To any mere persuader, no matter what his place or his opinions, they would turn an ear as deaf as that of the adder,—refusing to listen to the voice of the charmer, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... we feared," they said. "He is unrepentant and he is worthy of death. It is not expedient that the young adder should live. There is poison under his tongue, and he speaks things not lawful for an Israelite to hear. Let him die, that we may see him no more, and that our children be not ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... asleep, I wot, than he had been for many a day, else he would never have rested so quietly with one of the friar's sort so close beside him. As for the friar, had he known who Robin Hood was, you may well believe he would almost as soon have slept with an adder as with the man he had for ...
— The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood • Howard Pyle
... terrible fright a large picnic party, at which I assisted, was thrown into while lunching in the garden of a villa, almost in the town of Rio, by a lady jumping up from her seat with a deadly whip-snake hanging on her dress. I once myself sat on an adder who put his fangs through the woollen stuff of my inexpressibles and could not escape. The same thing happened with the lady's dress; in that case also we caught the snake, as it could not disentangle ...
— Sketches From My Life - By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha • Hobart Pasha
... to boiling-point in Laura's adder gland. He could not even remember when he had said good-by to her! It was in July, after the Eton and ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... sacrifice, and in its flash the eye of uncoiled adders, and in the foam the mouth-froth of eternal death. Not knowing what a horrible mixture it is, men take it up and drink it down—the sacrificial blood, the adder's venom, the death-froth—and smack their lips and call ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... at the fourth rhyme by a brief and fatal movement among the gamesters. The round was completed, and Thevenin was just opening his mouth to claim another victory, when Montigny leaped up, swift as an adder, and stabbed him to the heart. The blow took effect before he had time to utter a cry, before he had time to move. A tremor or two convulsed his frame; his hands opened and shut, his heels rattled ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... passage, a change of abode of the spirit, and the left body crumbled to dust when the spirit went out of it to continue its existence elsewhere, but that those who hated the thought of such change could, by taking thought, prolong life and live for a thousand years, like the adder and tortoise or for ever. But no, he would not leave the poor boy to grope alone and blindly after that hidden knowledge he was burning to possess. He pitied him too much. The means were simple and near to hand, the earth teemed with the ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... concerned with the injuries inflicted by the venomous varieties of snakes, the most important of which are the hooded snakes of India, the rattle-snakes of America, the horned snakes of Africa, the viper of Europe, and the adder of ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... words, life depended on human power over the natural materials of the earth. At the same time there were many things which could not be controlled by power over the earth and its elements,—the sting of the scorpion, the bite of the adder, the rise of the Nile, sickness, the sudden onslaught of the enemy, the straying of cattle, the disfavor of the god. For these evils man's only hope was magic,—the set words spoken in the proper manner which have power over ...
— The Egyptian Conception of Immortality • George Andrew Reisner
... A painstaking adder of figures, I have audited the gentleman's accounts and found them correct to the farthing. He must pay for his terrier's sickness and have four guineas in hand against the dog's board and lodging, in case, after all, he was to stay at the Dogs' Home. For a shilling he gave to a beggar, because ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... is most cruel and ruinous. It is winking at his wayward temper, his licentious passions and growing habits of vice. And these, in their terrible maturity, will recoil upon the deluded parent, "biting like a serpent and stinging like an adder." Nothing is more ruinous to a child and disastrous to the hopes and happiness of home, than such relaxation of discipline. "A child left to himself bringeth his mother to shame." How many mothers have bitterly experienced this, and wept bitter tears over the memory of their degraded ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... advocate, is the work of God for the instruction of man. Plutarch has observed, that the medical science would be brought to the utmost perfection, when poison should be converted into physic. Thus, in the mortal disease of Judaism and idolatry, our blessed Lord converted the adder's venom of Saul the persecutor, into that cement which made Paul the chosen vessel. That manly activity, that restless ardor, that burning zeal for the law of his fathers, that ardent thirst for the blood of Christians, did the Son of God find necessary in the man who was one day ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... Joel, trying to twitch back again; "it's an ugly mean old adder, Polly, but he's most dead. I've ...
— The Adventures of Joel Pepper • Margaret Sidney
... that lives next door to Betsey said he'd bring us home, an' I thought we'd better come. He's goin' over to the village to-night; he's got folks there. I told him he'd a good deal better stay here, but he won't. He's as deaf as an adder, an' you can't make him hear anythin', anyway. We ain't spoke a word all the way home. Where's Loretty? She came over to ...
— Young Lucretia and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... brother! do not touch that cup that is offered to you by the harlot world, spiced and fragrant and foaming; 'at the last it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder.' But take the pure joys which the Christ, loved, trusted, obeyed, summoned to your feast and welcomed in your heart, will bring to you; and these shall grow and greaten until ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... great morass lay in white and sinister tangle under the wild spring moon, when the dark and dreadful swamps were rife with horrible croaks and snaps, the whirring of the wings of waterfowl or the noise of a disturbed puff adder, Philip stretched himself upon the seat of the music-machine and slept through the twilight and the early evening. When the camp ahead, glimmering brightly through the live oaks, was silent, Philip awoke and watched ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... of Aprey, named Manette Sejournant, was not, strictly speaking, a beauty, but she had magnificent blonde hair, gray, caressing eyes, and a silvery, musical voice. Well built, supple as an adder, modest and prudish in mien, she knew how to wait upon and cosset her master, accustoming him by imperceptible degrees to prefer the cuisine of the chateau to that of the wine-shops. After a while, by dint of making her merits appreciated, and her presence continually desired, she became ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... seen, was from Gaul. The British variant of the superstition was that the snakes thus formed a ring of poison matter, larger or smaller according to the number engaged, which solidified into a gem known as Glain naidr, "Adder's glass."[65] The small rings of green or blue glass, too thick for wear, which are not uncommonly found in British burial-places, are supposed to represent this gem. So also, possibly, are the much larger rings of roughly-baked clay which occur throughout ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... Adder, &c. Beat the herb Calaminth with Turpentine, and yellow Wax to a Salve, and apply it. To expel the inward Poyson, give the said ...
— The School of Recreation (1684 edition) • Robert Howlett
... Surely an adder crawled from that tiny golden cylinder and upon the smooth white paper distilled its subtle venom. I, poor fool, exulting in the splendid throes of accomplishment, never dreamed that the real christening of my bantling was the toast the Master of Hell drank as the name "Amalgamated" was slowly ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... accents: "I ask, O king, for my life, and that of my people. If we had all been sold as bondmen and bondwomen, I had held my tongue, great as the evil would have been to thee." The king started, as if stung by an adder, and with a brow dark as wrath, and a voice that sent Haman to his feet, exclaimed: "Thy life! my queen? Who is he? where is he that dare even harbor such a thought in his heart? He who strikes at thy life, radiant creature, plants his presumptuous blow on his monarch's bosom." "That man," ...
— Half Hours in Bible Lands, Volume 2 - Patriarchs, Kings, and Kingdoms • Rev. P. C. Headley
... an irregular border of copse-wood and timber, often wide enough to contain within it a winding footpath, or a rough cart-track. Under its shelter the earliest primroses, anemones, and wild hyacinths were to be found; sometimes the first bird's nest; and, now and then, the unwelcome adder. Two such hedgerows radiated, as it were, from the parsonage garden. One, a continuation of the turf terrace, proceeded westward, forming the southern boundary of the home meadows; and was formed into a rustic ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... awestruck, and the face of the Lady Amelia became very dark. Was it not evident that this snake, when taken into their innermost bosoms that they might there warm him, was becoming an adder, and preparing to sting them? There was very little more conversation that evening, and soon after the story of the cook, Crosbie got up and went away to his ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... donkey. He reached the top, whence he signalled that there was a shot, and passed the rifle to me, cocked this time. I took it, put my hand down in the heather—felt something cold and slimy, then something astonishingly sharp and painful, and jumped to my feet with a yell! I had been bitten by an adder, that was all! Now, was that my fault? HUGH picked up the rifle, bowled over the stag, and then, with some consideration, applied ammonia to my finger, and made me swallow all ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, May 14, 1892 • Various
... be cited. Two favourite Irish terriers, in violation of an all-precautionary training, molested a death adder, the emulation of each inciting the other to recklessness. When the fray was over and the wicked little serpent lay squirming in death, both dogs took joyful credit on account of the feat. An hour after one began to froth at the lips, and in another hour ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... that appears repulsive, and causes shrinking in the heart of the beholder. Chiefly is it his eyes that seem to produce this effect; their glance inspiring fear, such as one feels while being gazed at by an adder. ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... beast of the forest issues boldly from his den, and the spear of the powerful pierces his heart. The deadly adder lurks in his covert till the unwary ...
— The Indian Princess - La Belle Sauvage • James Nelson Barker
... and shuffle of hoofs Away to the wild waste land, I can see the sun on the station roofs, And a stretch of the shifting sand; The forest of horns is a shaking sea, Where white waves tumble and pass; The cockatoo screams in the myall-tree, And the adder-head gleams ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... will have it. If not found at home, it will be found in the streets, and oh, what danger lurks there! Fathers and mothers—see to it, that if your child's heart cease to beat, your own break not with the remembrance of words and looks, that bite like a serpent and sting like an adder! ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... if ever you saw a snake with red rims to its eyes and the expression of a parrot, you might have some idea of it. She was hobbling along with a stick, in quite the proper manner, but I felt certain that all that was put on, and that she could have glided as swift as an adder if she pleased. I confess I was afraid of her. I had a feeling that she knew ...
— The Five Jars • Montague Rhodes James
... sky-dividing hills; There to the pails the she-goats come, without a master's word, And home with udders brimming broad returns the friendly herd. There round the fold no surly bear its midnight prowl doth make, Nor teems the rank and heaving soil with the adder and the snake; There no contagion smites the flocks, nor blight of any star With fury of remorseless heat the sweltering herds doth mar. Nor this the only bliss that waits us there, where drenching rains By watery Eurus swept along ne'er devastate ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... remembrances of England, a jackal running across the path, just as a fox would in England, reminded Owen that he was in Africa; and though occasionally one meets an adder in England, one meets them much more frequently in the North of Africa. It was impossible to say how many Owen had not seen lying in front of his horse like dead sticks. As the cavalcade passed they would twist themselves down a hole. As for rats, they ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... had my Florence great and free;[290] Oh Florence! Florence![291] unto me thou wast 60 Like that Jerusalem which the Almighty He Wept over, "but thou wouldst not;" as the bird Gathers its young, I would have gathered thee Beneath a parent pinion, hadst thou heard My voice; but as the adder, deaf and fierce, Against the breast that cherished thee was stirred Thy venom, and my state thou didst amerce, And doom this body forfeit to the fire.[292] Alas! how bitter is his country's curse To him who for that country would expire, 70 ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... you down though we smoke you out like a wasps' nest, you disloyal adder, you," was ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was awaiting this. Thou wilt inoculate our knightly veins With thy corrupted Jewish blood. Thou 'lt foist This adder on my bosom. Henry Schnetzen Is no weak dupe, whom every lie may start. Make ready, Jew, ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... instruction of man. Plutarch has observed, that the medical science would be brought to the utmost perfection, when poison should be converted into physic. Thus, in the mortal disease of Judaism and idolatry, our blessed Lord converted the adder's venom of Saul the persecutor, into that cement which made Paul the chosen vessel. That manly activity, that restless ardor, that burning zeal for the law of his fathers, that ardent thirst for the blood of Christians, did the Son of God find necessary in the man who was one day to ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... up and down, and as he came to the letter he spurned it with his foot, like a poisonous adder, too loathsome to touch. "I have deserved this punishment," cried he, laughing aloud from ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... sculptured figure of a faun still remains on the proscenium; wild shrubs shade a great part of the ruin, and where manhood and beauty once sat, listening to the tragedies of an Eschylus or Euripides, the adder and the lizards sun themselves. The next ruins we visited were those of Selinunte, anciently Selinus or Selinuntium, which lies on the southern coast of the island. This city was founded by a colony of Greeks ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... mouldering abbey's broadest wall, Where ruining ivies propped the ruins steep, Her folded arms wrapping her tattered pall, Had Melancholy mused herself to sleep. The fern was pressed beneath her hair, The dark green adder's tongue was there; And still as past the flagging sea-gale weak, The long, lank leaf bowed fluttering o'er her cheek. That pallid cheek was flushed; her eager look Beamed eloquent in slumber! Inly wrought, Imperfect ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... soon turned rosy. Broad golden circles beat upon their necks, and through their long gauze shifts, embroidered at the top with pearls, showed their golden bronze bodies which moved with the ease of an adder. They twisted, turned, swayed their hips, bound with a narrow black girdle, threw themselves back, bowed down, inclined their heads to right and left as if they found a secret voluptuousness in touching their polished chins ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... Probus,' replied Macer, 'might you preach the faith of Christ in the ear of the adder! to the very stones of the highways! Aurelian turn from a settled purpose! ha! ha! you have not served, Probus, under him in Gaul and Asia as others have. Never did the arguments of his legions and his great officers on the other side, serve but to intrench him ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... that there is no danger does not suffice. I may mention a trifling fact, illustrating this point, and which at the time amused me. I put my face close to the thick glass-plate in front of a puff-adder in the Zoological Gardens, with the firm determination of not starting back if the snake struck at me; but, as soon as the blow was struck, my resolution went for nothing, and I jumped a yard or two backwards with astonishing rapidity. My will and reason were powerless against ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... mustache, muttering, "A good deal of ceremony to-night about crushing an adder." Athos shrunk into his corner, pale ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... there were lunges in quart, there were cuts over and under, thrusts in flanconade and tierce, feint and double-feint, and sudden disengagements. The sweat trickled down the vicomte's face; Victor's forehead glistened with moisture. Suddenly Victor stooped; swift as the tongue of an adder his blade bit deeply into the vicomte's groin, making a terrible wound. The vicomte caught his breath in a gasp ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... its effect upon Wyat. An adder's bite would have been less painful. His hands convulsively clutched together; his hair stood erect upon his head; a shiver ran through his frame; and he tottered back several paces. When he recovered, ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... he was a King. It would take me from sun to sun to tell of all the places where he stopped, and of all the screaming and threatening that followed him wherever he went. It is a wonder he did not turn deaf as an adder. At last he got very tired and sorrowful, and sat down by the wayside and wept, thinking he would rather turn to marble at once, than live by such a horrible remedy. He saw a little cabin close by, but he had hardly strength to reach it, and he thought he would ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... the young woman rushing to Mrs. Seabright and throwing her arms about her neck. Between sobs she said, "Mother, mother, do with me what you will, just so you allow me to be with her when I choose. Oh, mother, how I wish you were now what you were before the adder bit you." ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... most of the animals that are doomed to be devoured, enjoy their lives until immediately before the catastrophe, takes none of its horror from the mode of death. To be dismembered alive is certainly not an agreeable experience, and I suggest that you should observe how, for instance, a water-adder swallows a frog; how the poor creature, seized by the hind legs, gradually disappears down its throat, while its eyes project staring out of their sockets; how it does not cease struggling desperately even as it reaches ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... goodly swain to be a princess' fere, A lovely partner of a lady's bed, A noble head a golden crown to wear: His glosing sire his errand daily said, And sugared speeches whispered in mine ear To make me take this darling in mine arms, But still the adder stopt her ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... better sight of so strange an attitude for his sister to take. At last Aunt Susan pointed to something gliding away in the grass, and gasped: "A serpent! oh, dear, oh, dear, a serpent!" Vainly did my husband try to calm her fright by explaining that it was only an adder going to seek the moisture of the river-bank and never intending to attack any one, that they were plentiful and frequently to be met with, when their first care was to pass unnoticed; our poor aunt would not be persuaded to descend from her pedestal for some ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... should have sprung away, but not being able clearly to see in what position the reptile was lying, or which way his head was pointed, I controlled myself, and remained rooted breathless to the spot. Straining my eyes, but moving not an inch, I at length clearly distinguished a huge puff-adder, the most deadly snake in the colony, whose bite would have sent me to the other world in an hour or two. I watched him in silent horror: his head was from me—so much the worse; for this snake, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various
... of adder, by her pent In smooth lips!—oh, Sybarite blind! Oh, woman allied to the serpent! Oh, beauty with venom combined! Oh, might overcoming the mighty! Oh, glory departing! oh, shame! Oh, altar of false Aphrodite, What strength is consumed ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... April lies the Mole, disembowelled by the peasant's spade; at the foot of the hedge the pitiless urchin has stoned to death the Lizard, who was about to don his green, pearl-embellished costume. The passer-by has thought it a meritorious deed to crush beneath his heel the chance-met Adder; and a gust of wind has thrown a tiny unfledged bird from its nest. What will become of these little bodies and so many other pitiful remnants of life? They will not long offend our sense of sight and smell. The sanitary officers of the ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... the footmen in the market-place fell back, at a run, on every side. The horsemen, who had been standing in a line two deep, wheeled suddenly, and made their flank into their front; and as swift as a striking adder, the long, steel-clad column was launched upon ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hybernate or become torpid when the temperature falls below a certain point. The rapidity of all their vital actions will depend upon the state of the thermometer; they digest faster in the heat of summer than in the milder warmth of spring. Their secretions (as the poison of the adder) are in hot weather more copious, and in winter are not formed at all. The reptiles breathe, in all cases, by lungs; but we must except here those called Batrachians, as frogs or newts, which breathe, in the first stage, by gills, and afterward by gills and ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... Beecher recreated that institution after it had been dead for many years, and invited those gentlemen to come into it, which they did, and so of course they have a right to turn him out if they want to. The difference between Beecher and the man who put an adder in his bosom is, that Beecher put in more adders than he did, and consequently had a proportionately livelier time of it ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... gun, and went into the woods a shooting. He spied a Ringdove among the branches of an oak, and intended to kill it. He clapped the piece to his shoulder, and took his aim accordingly. But, just as he was going to pull the trigger, an adder, which he had trod upon under the grass, stung him so painfully in the leg that he was forced to quit his design, and threw his gun down in a passion. The poison immediately infected his blood, and his whole body began to mortify; which, when he perceived, he could not help owning it to be just. ...
— Aesop's Fables - A New Revised Version From Original Sources • Aesop
... ta'en, his brand Forced Roderick's weapon from his hand, And, backward borne upon the lea, Brought the proud Chieftain to his knee. "Now, yield thee, or, by Him who made The world, thy heart's blood dyes my blade!"— "Thy threats, thy mercy, I defy! Let recreant yield, who fears to die."— Like adder darting from his coil, Like wolf that dashes through the toil, Like mountain-cat who guards her young, Full at Fitz-James's throat he sprung, Received, but reck'd not of a wound, And locked his arms his foeman round.— Now gallant Saxon, hold thine own! No maiden's hand is round thee thrown! ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... he puts on a hundred hideous forms; twining as an adder about her bosom, dancing as a frog upon her stomach, anon like a bat, sharp-snouted, covering her scared mouth with dreadful kisses. What is it he wants? To drive her into a corner, so that conquered and crushed at last, she may yield and utter the word "Yes." Still she is resolute to say "No." ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... appeal, the Cardinal Balue proceeded to lift the gauntlet, with such precaution as one would touch an adder—so great was apparently his aversion to this symbol of war—and presently left the royal apartment ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... reason, and in time grow serious; an unbeliever may feel the pangs of a guilty conscience; one whose thoughts or eyes wander among other objects may, by a lucky word, be called back to attention; but the sleeper shuts up all avenues to his soul; he is "like the deaf adder, that hearkeneth not to the voice of the charmer, charm he never so wisely;" and we may preach with as good success to the grave that is under ...
— Three Sermons, Three Prayer • Jonathan Swift
... to catch hold of the tail of a puff adder," he exclaimed, as Percy again dismounted. "They are pretty numerous hereabouts, and you may chance to put your hand close to one of their holes while you ...
— Hendricks the Hunter - The Border Farm, a Tale of Zululand • W.H.G. Kingston
... the Algonkin name for them, meaning "adder." The French termed them "Mingos," from another Algonkin word meaning "stealthy." The English and Dutch colonists in America knew them as the Five Nations. Their own title was "People of the Long House," as if the five nations were one family housed ...
— Boys' Book of Indian Warriors - and Heroic Indian Women • Edwin L. Sabin
... and of me; I thought we ran under a common brand. There are gradations. I went to throw myself at the feet of my great-aunt; good old great-aunt Lady de Culme, who is a power in the land. I let her suppose I came for myself, and she reproached me with Lord Adder. I confessed to him and ten others. She is a dear, she's ticklish, and at eighty-four she laughed! She looked into my eyes and saw a field with never a man in it—just the shadow of a man. She admitted the ten cancelled the one, and exactly named to me, by comparison with the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... partly in self-defence, and I did not consider it a crime. And then, he whose life I had taken was an evil man, with the devil's dues in him, and I felt no more remorse after killing him than if I had trodden on a poisonous adder. But now I see things differently. In coming here I exposed you to danger at the hands of the State. I ask your pardon, and I beg ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... we discovered the reason. The horse had shied at a sleeping puff adder which was curled up in the sand of that little frequented road, and on this puff adder Savage had descended with so much force, for he weighed thirteen stone, that the creature was squashed quite flat and never stirred again. This, however, ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... cried the young man, throwing her from him, as if stung by an adder. "Birth, education, the prejudices of society, have placed an eternal barrier between us. Impoverished though I be, I never can so far forget myself as to mate ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... good care not to be deluded that, though he sat by to see fair play, yet it was always with his elbows on the table and his fingers in his ears, regardless of appearing to the priest in the character of the deaf adder. After all, he was not the object, and good Pere Bonami at first thought the day his own, when he found that almost all his arguments against Calvinism were equally impressed upon Berenger's mind, but the differences ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... before him. All horrent the cobra exalts his hooded head, and the spanning jaws fly open. Quivers and chitters the tail of the cheerful rattlesnake; silently slips out the forked tongue, and is as silently absorbed. The fangless adder warps up the leg of the Professor, lays clammy coils about his neck, and pokes a flattened head curiously into his open mouth. The young man of Colusa is interested; his feelings transcend expression. Not a syllable ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... 'Is it thus? Strong drink is an adder and subtractor, too. Is it the heat or the call of the wild that's ...
— Options • O. Henry
... minister's man and grave-digger, was going a sweethearting. He took off slowly the leathern "breeks" of his craft, sloughing them as an adder casts his skin. They collapsed upon the floor with a hideous suggestion of distorted human limbs, as Saunders went about his further preparations. Saunders was a great, soft-bodied, fair man, of the chuby ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... "I know, I know, Mr. Sutcliffe, it was mean of me," he said, "and I know I ought to apologise to her. But if you had seen the look on her face, and had suffered what I have suffered, you'd have spoken too. Why, she might think I was an adder. But there, I dare say she knew who I was, and that I had ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... I am hearin' you, hain't I, and been hearin' for a year back, I hain't deef as an adder!" And he jammed his hat down over his ears and went to the barn. But there wuz a sort of a waverin' expression to his linement that made me ...
— Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition • Marietta Holley
... Furibon. One day as he was walking in the garden, finding the heat increase, he retired into a shady grove and began to play upon the flute to amuse himself. As he played, he felt something wind about his leg, and looking down saw a great adder: he took his handkerchief, and catching it by the head was going to kill it. But the adder, looking steadfastly in his face, seemed to beg his pardon. At this instant one of the gardeners happened to come to the place where Leander was, and spying the snake, cried out to his master: "Hold him ...
— The Little Lame Prince - And: The Invisible Prince; Prince Cherry; The Prince With The Nose - The Frog-Prince; Clever Alice • Miss Mulock—Pseudonym of Maria Dinah Craik
... speak of M. Colbert," replied D'Artagnan. "He is an exceptional man, is that M. Colbert. He does not love you; that is very possible; but, mordioux! the squirrel can guard himself against the adder with very ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... heard the words of the aged thane, and she hated Agitha because of them. The spirit of evil spread his darkness over her soul. He filled her breast with the poison of asps, her eyes with the venom of the adder that lures ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... mistress, you who know so much know what is in this letter," said Sir John, staring at Fareham's superscription as if he had come suddenly upon an adder. ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... be shot!" he ejaculated. "What an extraordinary experience! Will you believe me, Doctor, when I tell you that as I drew this penknife out of my waistcoat pocket it actually seemed to change into an adder in my hand? There was the flat, wicked-looking head, the malevolent eyes, the characteristic markings of the body, and, above all, there was the feeling of it writhing strongly in my grasp, as though it were trying to get enough of its length clear to turn and strike me! Talk about ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... who discovered it, curled up in the sun right by the gate. Her appeals for assistance brought Wade in a hurry, and the serpent, after an exciting chase through the hedges and flower beds, was finally dispatched. It proved to be an adder of blameless character, but neither Eve nor Miss Mullett had any regrets. Eve declared that a snake was a snake, no matter what any one—meaning Wade—said, and Wade was forced to acknowledge the fact. Armed with a shovel, they marched to ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... experiencing an amount of beatitude which was evidently too cordial for philosophical enjoyment. A long tongue of flame had crept under the cage, completely singing every hair from the cat's body. The felicitous adder was slowly burning in two and busily engaged in impregnating his organic system with his own venom. The joyful rat had lost his tail by a falling bar of iron; and the beatific rabbit, perforated by a red-hot nail, looked as if nothing ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... cried a man who found An adder coil'd upon the ground, 'To do a very grateful deed For all the world, I shall proceed.' On this the animal perverse (I mean the snake; Pray don't mistake The human for the worse) Was caught and bagg'd, and, worst of all, His blood was by his captor to be spilt Without regard to ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... whispered in his ear, "look not thou upon the wine when it is red, when it giveth its color in the cup, when it moveth itself aright," started him down a course which made him learn from a terrible experience that "at the last it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder." Does any one call a glass of wine a small thing? Read Tom's story and then call it small, if you dare! Whatever he did was done with his might, drinking not excepted. He boasted of his power to drink much and keep sober, while he laughed at the companions who imbibed ...
— The Children's Portion • Various
... or favour for the lower orders, that is, for the great mass of our fellow-creatures, treated as an indecorum and breach of the harmony of well-regulated society. In short, I prefer a bear-garden to the adder's den; or, to put this case in its extremest point of view, I have more patience with men in a rude state of nature outraging the human form than I have with apes 'making mops and mows' at the extravagances they have ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... its character—"Dan is a lion's whelp that leapeth forth from Bashan" on the Hermon;* "a serpent in the way, an adder in the path, that biteth the horse's heels, so that his rider falleth backward."** The new position they had taken up enabled them to protect Galilee for centuries against the incursions of ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... Words and Syllables—This defect makes the words an ambassador sound like a nambassador, or an adder like a nadder. ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... 1867.—Sitting down this morning near a tree my head was just one yard off a good-sized cobra, coiled up in the sprouts at its root, but it was benumbed with cold: a very pretty little puff-adder lay in the path, also benumbed; it is seldom that any harm is done by these reptiles here, although it is different in India. We bought up all the food we could get; but it did not suffice for the marches we expect to make to get to the Chambeze, ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... sleepest, and rise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light." But the unthankful act against this grace, and ruin it: as Virgil did with this little fly that saved him from death. He lay asleep, and an adder came toward him: but this fly Saura flew before, and lighted on his forehead, and pricked him a little, and therewith he wakened; also the adder came; but this Virgil, in his waking, felt his forehead smart, and smote himself on the face; and so he slew the fly, ...
— The Form of Perfect Living and Other Prose Treatises • Richard Rolle of Hampole
... quiet, or you'll have a fit of the mother [hysterics]. Nobody wants to send the lad amongst snakes—I don't know that there's so much as an adder there. As to devils, he'll find them where'er he goeth, and some of them in men's and women's bodies, or ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... when from this comfortable high estate a common adder, preserved in spirits of wine, was the cause of his downfall and Bully Harberth the means ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... of all that this letter would have taught him, and so far from dying, living to a very great age. And this instance shows, that the most dangerous of enemies is the one that never threatens till he actually strikes, resembling not the cobra, but the adder, as Shatrunjaya discovered to his cost, ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... going to try any detective work; to find out if she is a woman with a past, with a husband living? You are not going to put a live adder among the eels? I daresay drysalters eat eels. It is the reading of sensational ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... very opposite to this, in plenty, in health, in youth; with much of enjoyment actually in our hands, and more in prospect; with just so much mystery over our coming life as to keep alive interest, yet with enough known and understood in its prospects to awaken sympathy; what deafest ear of the deaf adder could ever be so closed against the voice of the charmer, as our minds, so engrossed with the enjoyments and the hopes of earth, are closed against the voice which speaks of the ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... in horse-radish, or horse-chesnut; most likely the old form of the word gave name to the horse as the big beast where there was not an elephant or other greater one. The dragon-fly is, in some parts called the "tanging ether" or tanging adder, from tang, a long thin body, and a sting. Very few Dorset folk believe that the dragon-fly stings horses any more than that the ...
— Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect • William Barnes
... enough, you'll hear the bell toll, I reckon. There is none at Honedale Church, which they attend. They are Episcopalians, you see, and so they'll come up here, maybe. I hope I shall be deafer than an adder." ...
— Aikenside • Mary J. Holmes
... and exacting are usually appeased by the signs of contrition, but the nature of Deerslayer did not require proofs of intense feelings so strong in order to bring him down to a level with the regrets felt by the girl herself. He arose, as if an adder had stung him, and the accents of the mother that soothes her child were scarcely more gentle and winning than the tones of his voice, as he now expressed his contrition at having ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... hardly escaped drowning. Another time I fell out of a boat into Bedford river, but, mercy yet preserved me alive: besides, another time, being in a field, with one of my companions, it chanced that an adder passed over the highway, so I having a stick in my hand, struck her over the back; and having stunned her, I forced open her mouth with my stick, and plucked her sting out with my fingers; by which act had not God been merciful unto me, I might by my desperateness, have brought ...
— Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners • John Bunyan
... you now. Ishmael, you say, is a usurper, yet to believe an Idumaean sooner than Ishmael is to sting like an adder. By the drunken son of Semele, what it is to be a Jew! All men and things, even heaven and earth, change; but a Jew never. To him there is no backward, no forward; he is what his ancestor was in the beginning. In this sand I draw you a circle—there! Now tell me ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... diabolical imaginable. Among the reptiles of Patagonia, Sir Henry, there is one—a species of black adder, known in the country as the Mynga Worm—whose bite is more deadly than that of the rattler or the copperhead, and as rapid in its action as prussic acid itself. It has, too, a great velocity of movement and a peculiar power of springing and hurling itself upon ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... feared," they said. "He is unrepentant and he is worthy of death. It is not expedient that the young adder should live. There is poison under his tongue, and he speaks things not lawful for an Israelite to hear. Let him die, that we may see him no more, and that our children be not corrupted ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... the middle, as a policeman would fasten upon a favourite thief; and then he set himself to blow into the barrel with such fury, that had there been an ounce of wadding left, the blast would have blown it all through the enormous touch-hole. Being well assured after this that neither an adder nor a slow-worm had taken up his domicile within the barrel, he began to load. One charge—two charges—then a third, "as a compliment," and after this, a fourth, "for good luck." On this infernal charge—imperial, ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... close up against the right hand corner of the room, there sat the Pasha, his limbs gathered in, the whole creature coiled up like an adder. His cheeks were deadly pale, and his lips perhaps had turned white, for without moving a muscle the man impressed me with an immense idea of the wrath within him. He kept his eyes inexorably fixed as if upon vacancy, and with ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... of a fenny snake, In the caldron boil and bake; Eye of newt, and toe of frog, Wool of bat, and tongue of dog, Adder's fork, and blind-worm's sting, Lizard's leg, and owlet's wing, For a charm of powerful trouble; Like ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... doubt of it. He was in my eyes at that moment a crawling adder, whose fangs were liable to penetrate the flesh of some one if he was not put out of the way. But I am more than glad I was spared ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... to hold up yer right hand and swear to obey me for the rest of yer nateral life,' and he did it. He got well, and he is tougher'n a biled owl, if he is eighty-six. But the cold sorter settled in his ears, and he's deef as an adder. Ef angel Gabriel blew his horn now I'm afeared Silas ...
— Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks - A Picture of New England Home Life • Charles Felton Pidgin
... all fell through the lust of the eye. I should make a covenant with mine, and pray, 'Turn away mine eyes from viewing vanity.' ... Satan makes unconverted men like the deaf adder to the sound of the gospel. I should pray to be made deaf by the Holy Spirit to all that would tempt me ...
— The Biography of Robert Murray M'Cheyne • Andrew A. Bonar
... mill stream The mountain roses fall; And fern and adder's-tongue Grow on the old mill wall. The tarn is on the upland moor, Where not a leaf doth grow; And through the mountain gashes, The merry mill stream dashes Down to the sea below. But in the quiet hollows The red trout ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... mountains; close by my feet hissed and glided the snakes, driven forth from their blazing coverts, and glancing through the ring, unscared by its waning lamps; all undulating by me, bright-eyed, and hissing, all made innocuous by fear—even the terrible Death-adder, which I trampled on as I halted at the verge of the circle, did not turn to bite, but crept harmless away. I halted at the gap between the two dead lamps, and bowed my head to look again into the crystal vessel. Were there, indeed, no lingering drops yet left, if ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... the bird-cages, but the workbox, and all the implements, were removed; and the piece of embroidery, the taking up of which had made Philip recoil, as if he had touched an adder, was put away with the rest. Philip had left the keys on the floor. Amine opened the buffets, cleaned the glazed doors, and was busy rubbing up the silver flagons when her father ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... stealth and cunning more than the strength and courage and address of the bear; its attack more than the rush of the majestic, resistless bison, or the furious pass with antlers lowered of the noble, ambereyed, infuriated elk. Hidden as still as an adder in long grass of its own hue, or squat on a log, or amid the foliage of a sloping tree, it waited around the salt licks and the springs and along the woodland pathways for the other wild creatures. It possessed ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... in the lake," said Taliesin, the bard[125]; "a spotted adder on the mountain, a star, a priest. This was long, long ago; since then, I have slept in a hundred worlds, revolved ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... Michigan to Huron is in a canoe, threading one's way from woodland lake to woodland lake, through brush-hidden brooklets, without a portage. In this region the liverwort blooms fragrantly beside the snow-bank in early spring, and here the arbutus exists as in New England. The adder-tongues and violets and anemones are here in rare profusion in their time, and the wandering gray wolf, last of his kind, almost, treads softly over knolls carpeted with wintergreen and decorated with scarlet berries. It is a country of blue water and pure air, ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... one night, when his light was shining quite brightly, to see if any one was moving. When the earth people were all asleep was the time he chose for playing with his three dogs. He called them dogs, but the earth people called them snakes, the death adder, the black snake, and the tiger snake. As he looked down on to the earth, with his three dogs beside him, Bahloo saw about a dozen daens, or black fellows, crossing a Creek. He called to them saying, "Stop, I want you to carry ...
— Australian Legendary Tales - Folklore of the Noongahburrahs as told to the Piccaninnies • K. Langloh Parker
... meal from a certain sack, and knead it and bake some bread. On returning home, Sigmund asked whether his orders had been carried out. The lad replied by showing the bread, and when closely questioned he artlessly confessed that he had been obliged to knead into the loaf a great adder which was hidden in the meal. Pleased to see that the boy, for whom he felt a strange affection, had successfully stood the test which had daunted his brothers, Sigmund bade him refrain from eating of the loaf, for although he was proof against the bite of a reptile, he could not, like his ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... tender spring; Unwholesome weeds take root with precious flowers; The adder hisses where the sweet birds sing; What virtue breeds iniquity devours: We have no good that we can say is ours, But ill-annexed Opportunity Or kills his life or else ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... for tarantula) are very common, and though not exactly fatal, are very dangerous if not attended to. The deaf adder is the most formidable "varmint" in Australia. There are two varieties; it is generally about two feet long. The bite is fatal. The deaf adder never moves unless it is touched, hence its name. I do not think it has the power of twisting or twirling, like the ordinary snake or adder ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey
... cause? who hath redness of eyes? 30. They that tarry long at the wine; they that go to seek mixed wine. 31. Look not thou upon the wine when it is red, when it giveth his colour in the cup, when it moveth itself aright. 32. At the last it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder. 33. Thine eyes shall behold strange women, and thine heart shall utter perverse things. 34. Yea, thou shalt be as he that lieth down in the midst of the sea, or as he that lieth upon the top of ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... as any old adder!" exclaimed Roland Yorke to Arthur, when they left Mr. Galloway alone. "The only possible way in which it can have gone, is through that post-office. The men have forked it; as they ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... not that in the ruddy glow there is the blood of sacrifice, and in its flash the eye of uncoiled adders, and in the foam the mouth-froth of eternal death. Not knowing what a horrible mixture it is, men take it up and drink it down—the sacrificial blood, the adder's venom, the death-froth—and smack their lips and call it a ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... rock adder—one of the deadliest of African snakes. Barely more than three inches in length, and a dull gray in color, it was small wonder that Harry in his excitement had not seen it as he was about ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... "an European reputation" (Madame LAFFARGE has a reputation equally extensive), and he is at this moment to be found upon drawing-tables, whose owners would scream—or affect to scream—as at an adder, at SHELLEY. Nay, Shelley's publisher is found guilty of blasphemy in the Court of Queen's Bench; and that within these few months. We should like to know Lord Denman's opinions of Mr. BOONE. What would he say of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... French is Vulgar Latin, which differs considerably from that we study at school. I only give Vulgar Latin forms where it cannot be avoided. For instance, in dealing with culverin (p. 38), I connect Fr. couleuvre, adder, with Lat. col[)u]ber, a snake. Every Romance philologist knows that it must represent Vulgar Lat. *colobra; but this form, which, being conjectural, is marked with an asterisk, had better be forgotten by the ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... blood-pisen from that bite!" teased Josh, to scare me. But I remained unscared. I sucked the blood from the tiny punctures, feeling secure, after I had done it. I remembered how Queen Eleanore had saved the life of Richard Coeur de Lion in the Holy Land, when he had been bitten by an adder, by sucking out the venom. I enjoyed the thrill of a repeated ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... like poor Hale. A few moments after my arrival he breathed his last. The fellow who had guided me to the place bent over him—I shall always remember the scene—then fell back as though he had stepped upon an adder. ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... grasp. His knees worked. His frame became agitated with one continued movement, swaying backwards and forwards, almost to falling, and his inarticulate complaints became terrific. I attempted to steady him by an exertion of strength; I spoke kindly to him, but he writhed in my grasp like an adder, and as an adder was deaf—grief and fear had horrible possession: myself almost in a state of desperation—for the sight was pitiful. I at last endeavoured to awe him into a momentary quiescence, and strongly bade him at last to die like a man; but the word "Death" ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... were not an inspiring spectacle. A soldier, stripped of his arms and held by his foes, becomes of a sudden a pitiable, almost a contemptible object. You think instinctively of an adder that has lost its fangs, or of a wild cat that, being shorn of teeth to bite with and claws to tear with, is now a more helpless, more impotent thing than if it had been created without teeth and claws in the first place. These similes are poor ones, ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... corrupt! He was interrupted repeatedly; and I think I may safely say, among hands, they gave him the d——d lie fifty times! James M. Davis, a respectable mechanic, asked him if he would say that to Major Donelson's face? He replied, that he heard the hissing of an adder, or a goose, and went through with certain stereotyped phrases you have all heard from his lips. This call upon him by Mr. Davis was not named in my newspaper report, nor in my letter to Major Donelson. Indeed, I did not anticipate a ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... great-grandfather's widow." She, poor thing! at that time was thinking little of marriage; for even then, though known only to herself and her femme de chambre, that dreadful organic malady (cancer) was raising its adder's crest, under which finally she died. But, in spite of languor interchanging continually with disfiguring anguish, she still impressed one as a regal beauty. Her person, indeed, and figure, would have ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... The man sat rocking himself to and fro, trying not to think of anything. For now the past, too, was coming with all its weight upon him; every minute he started up as if an adder had stung him; crawled about his cell seeking refuge in motion and finding none; then he threw himself on the floor and struggled for sleep. Sleep would not come so sought; and now his spirits were quite cowed. He would cringe to Hawes; he would lick the dust at ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... workmanship, apparently Indian, being made of some kind of dark brown, mottled wood, bearing a marked resemblance to a snake's skin; and the top of the cane was carved in conformity, to represent the head of what I took to be a puff-adder, fragments of stone, or beads, being inserted to represent the eyes, and the whole thing being finished with an ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... same large substratum in his nature, that Lamb had no sense of the rhythmical in prose composition. Rhythmus, or pomp of cadence, or sonorous ascent of clauses, in the structure of sentences, were effects of art as much thrown away upon him as the voice of the charmer upon the deaf adder. We ourselves, occupying the very station of polar opposition to that of Lamb, being as morbidly, perhaps, in the one excess as he in the other, naturally detected this omission in Lamb's nature at ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... for mercy; you must go free,' said the smiling man. 'Henceforth a hair shall slay you like a sword, and a breath shall bite you like an adder; weapons shall come against you out of nowhere; and you shall die many times.' And with that he was swallowed once more in the wall behind; and I ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... and Brother Archangias followed him, chatting. A hundred yards further Vincent surreptitiously bolted, and again glided up towards the church, keeping a watchful eye upon them, and ready to dart behind a bush if they should look round. With adder-like suppleness, he once more glided into the graveyard, that paradise full of lizards, nests, ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... brow. That cast an awful look below; Whose rugged sides the ivy creeps, And with her arms from falling keeps. 'Tis now the raven's bleak abode; 'Tis now th' apartment of the toad; And there the fox securely feeds. And there the poisonous adder breeds, Concealed in ruins, moss, and weeds; While ever and anon there fall Huge heaps of hoary, mouldered wall. Yet time has seen, that lifts the low And level lays the lofty brow,— Has seen this broken pile complete, Big with ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... tamely on the death of my fair-haired boy be melted in their sockets with ceaseless tears, shed for those that are nearest and most dear to thee! May the ears that heard his death-knell be dead hereafter to all other sounds save the screech of the raven, and the hissing of the adder! May the tongue that tells me of his death and of my own crime, be withered in thy mouth—or better, when thou wouldst pray with thy people, may the Evil One guide it, and give voice to blasphemies instead of blessings, until men shall fly in terror from thy presence, and the thunder of heaven ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... and toe of frog, Wool of bat, and tongue of dog, Adder's fork, and blindworm's sting, Lizard's leg, and owlet's wing, For a charm ...
— The Book of Hallowe'en • Ruth Edna Kelley
... no! It was all a mistake of old Mr. Chadwick's. He's as deaf as an adder, and when Mrs. Brooks told him Mother was mendin' fast, and she wanted me to come down to-day, certain sure, he got the message all wrong, and give it to the fust person passin' in such a way as to scare me 'most to death, and send us down in a hurry. ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... her holiest place, Not to be loudly broken in upon. Oh! friend, thoughts deep and heavy as these well-nigh O'erbore the limits of my brain; but he Bent o'er me, and my neck his arm upstay'd From earth. I thought it was an adder's fold, And once I strove to disengage myself, But fail'd, I was so feeble. She was there too: She bent above me too: her cheek was pale, Oh! very fair and pale: rare pity had stolen The living bloom away, as tho' ...
— The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... irritated him furtively. He reveals in this whole dispute a lack of self-control and dignity which shows his weakest side. Usually so anxious as to decorum he now lapses into invectives: The British adder, Satan, even the old taunt ascribing a tail to Englishmen has to serve once more. The points at issue disappear altogether behind the bitter mutual reproaches. In his unrestrained anger, Erasmus avails himself of the most unworthy weapons. He eggs his German friends on to write ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... his life was uneventful for so far-travelling a dog, though it held its moments of eccentricity, as when he leaped through the window of a four-wheeler into Kensington, or sat on a Dartmoor adder. But that was fortunately of a Sunday afternoon—when adder and all were torpid, so nothing happened, till a friend, who was following, lifted him off the creature with his ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... jewel-case; and now she felt no doubt that she had the diamonds. But on opening the case, in the same instant that she saw them gleam she saw a letter lying above them. She knew the handwriting of the address. It was as if an adder had lain on them. Her heart gave a leap which seemed to have spent all her strength; and as she opened the bit of thin paper, it shook with the trembling of her hands. But it was legible as print, and ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... as it is to a large and populous city, the traditions of the past come so strongly upon the mind, that one would rather look for the apparition of a whole band of these inky-haired adder-anointed priests of Montezuma, than expect to meet with the benevolent-looking archbishop, who, in purple robes, occasionally walks under the shade ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... preserved me. I was warn'd, And laid not to my breast the pois'nous adder! Accuse not fate! your own deceitful heart It was, the wild ambition of your house. But God is with me. The blow was aim'd Full at my head, but ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... ruddy rascal, He the lively Lemminkainen, Struck his left shoe in the snowdrift, Like an adder in the meadow, Pushed his staff of pinewood forward, As it were a living serpent, 200 And he said as he was gliding, Grasping firm the pole he carried: "Let the men who live in Lapland, Help me all to bring the elk home; And let all the ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... evening. E'er, ever. Eerie, apprehensive; inspiring ghostly fear. Eild, eld. Eke, also. Elbuck, elbow. Eldritch, unearthly, haunted, fearsome. Elekit, elected. Ell (Scots), thirty-seven inches. Eller, elder. En', end. Eneugh, enough. Enfauld, infold. Enow, enough. Erse, Gaelic. Ether-stane, adder-stone. Ettle, aim. Evermair, evermore. Ev'n down, downright, positive. ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... Wretch! 'tis no virtue, but the policy Of those who fain must deal perforce with vice: As such I recommend it, as I would 350 To one whose foot was on an adder's path. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... lady, several; the black snake, which is the most deadly next to the rattlesnake, is sometimes called the puff-adder, as it inflates the skin of the head and neck when angry. The copper-bellied snake is also poisonous. There is a small snake of a deep grass green colour sometimes seen in the fields and open copse-woods. I do not think ...
— Lady Mary and her Nurse • Catharine Parr Traill
... rats and mice and voles. House-mice and wood-mice, red voles, and grey. Last of all, Berus the adder. Not a mouse stepped aside, as he worked his slow, sinuous length between the cornstalks. He, too, was of ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... ashen and as mad as an adder. His hair puffed out, his eyes glistened. John rose more leisurely, stepped to the hearth, picked up a piece of box stuff and knocked a nail out ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... arranged a feast for Sir Modred and his men. And as they feasted all went merrily till an adder glided out of a little bush and stung one of the knight's men. And the pain was so great, that the man quickly drew his sword to ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various
... pretty frequently among lower animals. Our commonest English lizard, for example, which frequents moors and sandhills, does not lay or deposit its eggs at all, but hatches them out in its own body, and so apparently brings them forth alive: while among snakes, the same habit occurs in the adder or viper. The very name viper, indeed, is a corruption of vivipara, the snake which produces living young. Still more closely do some birds resemble mammals in the habit of secreting a sort of milk for the sustenance ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... allow? You are my all-the-world, and I must strive To know my shames and praises from your tongue; None else to me, nor I to none alive, That my steel'd sense or changes right or wrong. In so profound abysm I throw all care Of others' voices, that my adder's sense To critic and to flatterer stopped are. Mark how with my neglect I do dispense: You are so strongly in my purpose bred, That all the world besides ...
— Shakespeare's Sonnets • William Shakespeare
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