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More "Tortoise" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... shame, Puffing little clouds of smoke, and picking at a daisy, Dreaming of your dinner, p'raps, or wishful for the same: Suddenly, around that ferny bank there slowly waddled— Slowly as the finger of a clock her shadow came— Slowly as a tortoise down that winding path she toddled, Leaning on a crooked staff, a poor old crooked dame, Limping, but not lame, Tick, tack, tick, tack, a poor old ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... of interest in Henry IV.'s room, in which he is said to have been born 13th December, 1553, including the magnificently carved bedstead; but the chief attraction is the tortoise-shell cradle, which as a rule Frenchmen come only to see. Why they should come is quite a different matter, seeing that although a tortoise's shell might make a very comfortable cradle for even such an illustrious infant as was ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... whence a Capuchin issues on wet days; you look to find the execrable engravings which spoil your appetite, framed every one in a black varnished frame, with a gilt beading round it; you know the sort of tortoise-shell clock-case, inlaid with brass; the green stove, the Argand lamps, covered with oil and dust, have met your eyes before. The oilcloth which covers the long table is so greasy that a waggish externe will write his name on the surface, using his thumb-nail ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... which is either white or untidy, well-gloved or otherwise, he twirls his moustache, or his whiskers, or picks his teeth with a little tortoise-shell toothpick. ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... believe she made some, but nobody listened much, so she came away disappointed and fiercely determined to do good somewhere or know the reason why! She's a stout, wildly untidy woman whose mouse-coloured hair is always coming down, though it's freely dotted with irrelevant tortoise-shell combs; and whose elaborate clothes look somehow insecure, the way scree does on the side of a mountain. Her ideas leap out of her brain like rabbits out of holes, and then go scuttling away again, to be followed ineffectively by others: and her latest is ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... Tharonhij-Jagon, that is, God, once went out walking with his brother, and a dispute arose between them, and God killed his brother." I suppose this fable took its rise from Cain and Abel. They have a droll theory of the Creation, for they think that a pregnant woman fell down from heaven, and that a tortoise, (tortoises are plenty and large here, in this country, two, three and four feet long, some with two heads, very mischievous and addicted to biting) took this pregnant woman on its back, because every place was covered with water; and that the woman sat upon the tortoise, groped ...
— Narratives of New Netherland, 1609-1664 • Various
... a moderate drinker; ah, sir, do you bear in mind How the plodding tortoise in the race left the leaping hare behind? 'Twas because he held right on and on, steady and true, if slow, And that's the way, I'm thinking, that the moderate drinkers go! Step over step—day after day—with sleepless, tireless pace, While the toper sometimes looks behind ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For • Various
... entreat you to spare me this time! I've indeed said what I shouldn't; but if I had any intention to insult you, I'll throw myself to-morrow into the pond, and let the scabby-headed turtle eat me up, so that I become transformed into a large tortoise. And when you shall have by and by become the consort of an officer of the first degree, and you shall have fallen ill from old age and returned to the west, I'll come to your tomb and bear your stone tablet ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... she had sung Una voce poco fa at the age of seven with the same embellishments which she used later when she appeared in the opera in which the air occurs. No, these singers are freaks of nature like tortoise-shell cats and like those rare felines they are usually females of late, although such singers as Battistini and Bonci remind us that men once sang with as much agility as women. But when this type of singer finally becomes extinct naturally the operas which depend on it will disappear too for ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... i.e. the lyre. The first lyre was supposed to have been formed by drawing strings over a tortoise shell. ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... "March!" quoth he. "These bonds stick so plaguey close that I cannot so much as bend my knees!" "For shame!" they answered. "It is fear and not armour that stiffens your legs." Thus rebuked, Sancho endeavoured to move, but fell flat on the earth like a great tortoise; while in the darkness the others made a clash with their swords and shields, and trampled upon the prone governor, who quite gave himself up for dead. But at break of day they raised a cry of "Victory!" and, lifting Sancho up, told him that ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... are probably the descendants of illicit connections among Banjaras. The word Pachbhaiya means 'five brothers,' and this name possibly commemorates a polyandrous connection of some Audhelia woman. Limuan means a tortoise, which is a section of many castes. Several of the section-names are thus totemistic, and, as in other castes, some reverence is paid to the animal from whom the name is derived. At present the Audhelias forbid marriage within ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... having very fair sandy Beeches, pav'd with innumerable Sorts of curious pretty Shells, very pleasant to the Eye. Amongst the rest, we found the Spanish Oyster-Shell, whence come the Pearls. They are very large, and of a different Form from other Oysters; their Colour much resembles the Tortoise-Shell, when it is dress'd. There was left by the Tide several strange Species of a muciligmous slimy Substance, though living, and very aptly mov'd at their first Appearance; yet, being left on the dry Sand, (by the Beams of the Sun) soon exhale ...
— A New Voyage to Carolina • John Lawson
... 'Bije always did, and I didn't want to fall too fur behind. But," with a chuckle, "you needn't mention the price to anybody. If Abbie—my second cousin keepin' house for me, she is—if Abbie heard of it she'd be for puttin' me in an asylum. Abbie's got a hair breastpin and a tortoise shell comb, but she only wears 'em to the Congregationalist meetin'-house, where she's reasonably sure there ain't likely to be any sneak-thieves. She went to a Unitarian sociable once, but she carried 'em in a ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... it happens with those of a phlegmatic temperament, of a dull habit, does not permit him to move, except with feebleness, in a sluggish manner, his experience is slow, frequently unprofitable. The tortoise and the butterfly are alike incapable of preventing their destruction. The stupid man, equally with him who is intoxicated, are in that state which renders it impossible for them to arrive at or attain the end they ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... by their ready made clothes of a material that would be warm in Alaska and by them wearing Spanish dollars for watch guards and by the walk which is rolling easily when sober and pitching heavily toward the night. The oldest resident always sits in front of the hotel and in the same seat, with a tortoise shell cane and remembers when Vasquez or Mendoza or Barrios, or Bonilla occupied the Cathedral and fired hot shot into the Palace and everybody took refuge in the English Consulate and he helped guard the bank all night with ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... one of the knives—a folding knife with a broad single-edged blade, locked open with a spring; the handle was of tortoise shell, bolstered ...
— Time Crime • H. Beam Piper
... there was published an instruction book in this art, called Chelys Minuritionum, i.e., the 'Tortoise-shell of Diminutions,' hence (Chelys meaning a lyre, made of a tortoise-shell) 'The Division Viol.' The book is by Christopher Sympson, a Royalist soldier, who was a well-known viol-da-gamba player. The work is in three parts, the third of which is ...
— Shakespeare and Music - With Illustrations from the Music of the 16th and 17th centuries • Edward W. Naylor
... scrubbed by the daughter of his former tenant. Fish nets were draped upon the walls like tapestry; beyond hung the gun and a bag of cartridges. Long, slender sea-shells with the brown translucency of the tortoise were arranged in the form of fans. They were the gift of Tio Ventolera, as were two enormous periwinkles on the table, white, with erect points, and the interior of a moist rose-color, like feminine flesh. Near the window his mattress ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... sticks sharpened to a point we have performed all the digging of a pretty long canal. The earth was lifted out in 'gowpens' and carried to the huge dam we have built in karosses (skin cloaks), tortoise-shells, or wooden bowls. We intended nothing of the ornamental in it, but when we came to a huge stone, we were forced to search for a way round it. The consequence is, it has assumed a beautifully ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... forces of nature and of nature's jungle. Why, even the tiny balu of the tribe of Go-lat, the great ape, was better fitted to survive than these, for a balu could at least escape the numerous creatures that menaced its existence, while with the possible exception of Kota, the tortoise, none moved so slowly as did helpless ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... now passes along the streets of the metropolis will come upon a vendor of toys, who will drop upon the pavement an artificial miniature tortoise, rabbit, rat, or what not, well wound up; and the creature will begin to crawl, or dance, or jump, or run, according to its nature. The busy, conservative man smiles a superior smile, and passes on. It ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... special correspondents to the scene of the pageant. Mr. Reuter will soon have completed his Overland Telegraph to China. At Liverpool they call New York "over the way." The Prince of Wales's travels in his nonage have made Telemachus a tortoise, and the young Anacharsis a stay-at-home. Married couples spend their honeymoon hippopotamus hunting in Abyssinia, or exploring the sources of the Nile. And the Traveller's Club are obliged to blackball nine-tenths of the candidates ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... of Raffael. It would be easy to explain a thought from the image on the retina, and that from the geometry of light, if this very light did not present the very same difficulty. We might as rationally chant the Brahim creed of the tortoise that supported the bear, that supported the elephant, that supported the world, to the tune of "This is the house that Jack built." The sic Deo placitum est we all admit as the sufficient cause, and the divine goodness as the sufficient reason; but an answer to the Whence and Why is ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Yours is, too, the time of life to acquire this inestimable habit. Men fail much oftener from want of perseverance than from want of talent and of good disposition: as the race was not to the hare but to the tortoise, so the meed of success in study is to him who is not in haste, but to him who proceeds with a steady and even step. It is not to a want of taste or of desire or of disposition to learn that we have to ascribe the rareness of ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... mahogany, walnut, English oak, bird's-eye maple, and the manufactured effects such as ormolu, marquetry, and Boule, or buhl. He explained the latter—how difficult it was to produce, how unsuitable it was in some respects for this climate, the brass and tortoise-shell inlay coming to swell with the heat or damp, and so bulging or breaking. He told of the difficulties and disadvantages of certain finishes, but finally recommended ormolu furniture for the reception room, medallion tapestry for the ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... elasticity. A further discovery was made by Mr Goodyear, who, by adding about twenty per cent of sulphur, converted it into so hard a substance that all sorts of articles can be manufactured from it for which tortoise-shell had hitherto been chiefly used—indeed, it is difficult to say what cannot be made ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... eleven cats at the farm here now. Papa's favorite is a little tortoise-shell kitten he has named "Sour Mash," and a little spotted one "Fannie." It is very pretty to see what papa calls the cat procession; it was formed in this way. Old Minniecat headed, (the mother of all the cats) next to her came aunt Susie, then Clara ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... species which were extinct before man was created, and hence "indicate a faint and shadowy knowledge of a previous state of organic existence." The Hindoos dreamed that the earth rested on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise, and the tortoise on a serpent; and though it may be an unimportant coincidence, it will not be out of place here to state, that a fossil tortoise has lately been discovered in Asia large enough to support an elephant. I confess that I ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... red ribbon, which is the same as offering her his hand.[16] As soon as the betrothal has taken place, the fiance must think at once about a present for his fiancee. This varies, of course, according to the ability and taste of the giver. Formerly it was a tortoise-shell comb, a silver needlecase, a silk handkerchief, ear-rings, finger-rings, gloves, etc. Now-a-days nothing is left but rings and a certain silver arrangement to support the hair, and called, like the ribbon above mentioned, 'ntrizzaturi. In Milazzo and its territory the fiance ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... are very kind," Donald replied. Miss Bascom had adjusted her tortoise-shell lorgnette, and was surveying ...
— Hepsey Burke • Frank Noyes Westcott
... gone, and Nassau is given up to a sleepy trade in sponges and tortoise-shell, and peace is no name for the drowsy tenor of the days under the palm trees and the scarlet poincianas. A little group of Government buildings surrounding a miniature statue of Queen Victoria, flanked by some old Spanish cannon and murmured ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... of the Hare and the Tortoise?' she queried. 'If not you'll find it in the Third Reading Book. Perhaps you're not as far ...
— The Adventure League • Hilda T. Skae
... of escape from the harsh realities and dull routine of ordinary existence. From his childhood the world of ideas seems to have been at least as real and familiar to him as the material world. The fabulous beings of whom he talked to his young sisters—the Great Tortoise in Warnham Pond, the snake three hundred years old in the garden at Field Place, the grey-bearded alchemist in his garret[90]—had probably for him as much meaning and interest as the living people around him. Urged by a restless desire ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... Viking period (A.D. 800-1050) were oval and convex, somewhat in the form of a tortoise. In their earliest form they occur in the form of a frog-like animal, itself developed from the previous Teutonic T-shaped type. With the introduction of the intricate system of ornament described above, the frog-like animal is gradually superseded ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... that materials might be given to him for making the pots. So Vishnu gave his Sudarsana (discus) to be used as a wheel, and the mountain of Mandara was fixed as a pivot beneath it to hold it up. The scraper was Adi Kurma the tortoise, and a rain-cloud was used for the water-tub. So Kulalaka made the pots and gave them to Maheshwar for his marriage, and ever since his descendants have been known as Kumbhakar ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... of these periods is the free use of small solid figures of animals as decoration—the phoenix, the elephant, the frog, the ox, the tortoise, and occasionally men; shapes grow less austere and less significant, as a comparison between figures 11 and 13 will indicate; then towards the end of the 2nd century A.D. the influence of Buddhism is felt in the general tendency towards suavity of form (fig. 14). This ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... a small fish, tied by the tail, the flat head of which was furnished with numerous suckers, by which it attached itself so firmly to any object as to be torn to pieces rather than abandon its hold. In this way the Spaniards witnessed the taking of a tortoise of enormous size. The same mode of fishing is said to be employed on the eastern coast of Africa. The natives led the Admiral to suppose that the sea was full of islands south and west, and that Cuba ran to the west without ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... extreme heat, and the evenings, nights, and mornings are usually cool. Gold is found in all parts, although not in large quantities, but it must exist where there are traces of it. Throughout the whole island there is a great deal of wax and much tortoise-shell. Rice is sowed in all parts, and in some places in great quantities. They raise fowl, goats, and swine in all the villages, and wax they do not save. There is a great quantity of wild game, which is excellent, growing ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume X, 1597-1599 • E. H. Blair
... driven about by a cyclone, as they rushed from one sight to another, filling up all the chinks between with shopping, which was irresistible where everything was so pretty and so wonderfully cheap. She herself purchased a tortoise-shell fan and chain for Rose Red, and had her monogram carved upon it; a coral locket for Elsie; some studs for Dorry; and for her father a small, beautiful vase of bronze, copied from one ...
— What Katy Did Next • Susan Coolidge
... turtle soup is made of a small native tortoise, called a terrapin, and the article terrapin ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... thee! the first crowd was made of a horse-head. 'Tis true, the finding of a dead horse-head Was the first invention of string instruments, Whence rose the gittern, viol, and the lute: Though others think the lute was first devis'd In imitation of a tortoise-back, Whose sinews, parched by Apollo's beams, Echo'd about the concave of the shell: And seeing the shortest and smallest gave shrill'st sound, They found out frets, whose sweet diversity (Well-touched by the skilful learned fingers) Raiseth so strange a multitude of chords. ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... in danger of being wrecked. Several of these fish they caught, using large hooks fastened to chains, and sometimes baited merely with a piece of colored cloth. From the maw of one they took out a living tortoise; from that of another the head of a shark, recently thrown from one of the ships; such is the indiscriminate voracity of these terrors of the ocean. Notwithstanding their superstitious fancies, the seamen were glad to use a part of these sharks for food, being very short ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... parasol was a big paper box. Mell lifted the lid. A muff and tippet lay inside, made of yellow and brown fur like the back of a tortoise-shell cat. These were beautiful, too. Then came rolls of calico and woollen pieces, some of which were very pretty, and would make nice doll's dresses, ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... reality. What men call motion is only a name given to a series of conditions, each of which, considered separately, is rest. "Rest is force resistant; motion is force triumphant."[457] The famous puzzle of "Achilles and the Tortoise," by which he endeavored to prove the unreality of motion, has been rendered ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... wards of Edo, his little trays fitting neatly into each other, and wrapped in a furoshiki or bundle-handkerchief. His wares formed a marvellous collection of the precious and common place, ranging from true coral and tortoise shell, antique jewelry and curious netsuke of great value, to their counterfeits in painted wood, horn, and coloured glass. "Mobei San, long has been the wait for you. Is there a bent comb in stock?"—"Truly this Mobei is vexing. ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... that certain malconformations very frequently, and that others rarely coexist, without our being able to assign any reason. What can be more singular than the relation between blue eyes and deafness in cats, and the tortoise-shell colour with the female sex; the feathered feet and skin between the outer toes in pigeons, and the presence of more or less down on the young birds when first hatched, with the future colour of their plumage; or, again, ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... she saw a grave Chinaman standing on a stage-like platform. He wore a long coat, beautifully flowered, and a hat with a turned up brim. Balanced on his nose were enormous tortoise-shell spectacles. A ragged gray moustache drooped from the corners of his mouth and a ragged wisp of whisker hung from his chin. She was informed by Ah Cum that the Chinaman was one of the literati and that he was expounding the ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... tack to get away from this dangerous neighbourhood; but he sees on the other hand enemies not less terrible; a tortoise forty feet long, and a serpent of thirty, lifting its fearful head and gleaming eyes ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... slept still more idly below; while a few, not altogether unmindful of our old shipmate's instructions, were bending over their books or using their pencils. Some also were carving with their knives strange devices on bones, or cutting out rings from the shell of the tortoise. ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... the show, I guess, except Monolith, the moth-eaten old elephant, and the big tortoise in the sideshow. They say the elephant's over a hundred, and some think the tortoise is two hundred years old. So they go Scalawag ...
— The Corner House Girls Growing Up - What Happened First, What Came Next. And How It Ended • Grace Brooks Hill
... that of the Philippines, and resembles that of the Marianas Islands. Their manner of pronouncing words is something like that of the Arabs. The woman who appears to be of highest station has many rings and necklaces of tortoise-shell, that are called here carey; and others of a material that is unknown to us. This material, which somewhat ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 41 of 55, 1691-1700 • Various
... the course I 'd wish you; pray observe me. We see that undermining more prevails Than doth the cannon. Bear your wrongs conceal'd, And, patient as the tortoise, let this camel Stalk o'er your back unbruis'd: sleep with the lion, And let this brood of secure foolish mice Play with your nostrils, till the time be ripe For th' bloody audit, and the fatal gripe: Aim like a cunning fowler, close one eye, ...
— The White Devil • John Webster
... way, hurrying on—and I will allow that this attempt of his seemed to me very grotesque, so that I could scarcely help laughing; the other lookers-on in the street laughed too, though some put on an aspect of disgust. 'Look, the tortoise!' some one said; 'does he think he can go quicker than the orderlies?' My companions came up to the man while this commentary was going on, and seized him by each arm. 'Where were you going? Where have you come from? How dare you make an exhibition of yourself?' they cried. ...
— The Little Pilgrim: Further Experiences. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... they could see that the rock was very large—as large as a big field. No trees grew on it, no grass—nothing. The great rock was as smooth and as bare as the back of a tortoise. ...
— The Story of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting
... with a dip of about 33 degrees to the westward, and separating with great cleanness and smoothness, present impressions of such liveliness, that there is no possibility of doubt as to their being animal foot-tracks, and those of the tortoise family. A thin layer of unctuous clay between the beds has proved favourable to their separation; and it is upon this intervening substance that the marks are best preserved. Slab after slab is raised from the quarry—sometimes a foot ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 459 - Volume 18, New Series, October 16, 1852 • Various
... opposite to him, but never looked up. A low table was placed in front, on which there was a two- spouted kettle full of sake, some sake bottles, and some cups, and on another there were some small figures representing a fir-tree, a plum-tree in blossom, and a stork standing on a tortoise, the last representing length of days, and the former the beauty of women and the strength of men. Shortly a zen, loaded with eatables, was placed before each person, and the feast began, accompanied by the ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... reached their new homes, in numbers comparatively small, but still sufficient to occasion much danger and alarm to the early settlers, and to cause their destroyers to be regarded as among the greatest heroes of the time and the greatest benefactors of mankind. The Hindoo tradition of the tortoise on whose back stands the elephant which upholds the world, and the account of Leviathan in the Book of Job, seem to point in the same direction. [Footnote: For additional instances see Tylor's Early History ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... in his stiff cope, creep up to the group with the motion of a tortoise. And, for a moment, his quavering voice pronouncing the absolution was the only ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... necklaces, and bracelets of bones, shells, and beads of mother-of-pearl, tortoise-shell, &c. which are worn by both sexes. The women also wear on their fingers neat rings made of tortoise-shell, and pieces in their ears about the size of a small quill; but ear ornaments are not commonly worn, though all have ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, Volume 1 • James Cook
... nor the battle to the strong. Lying here in this quiet backwater it is hard to believe that the world without is turbulent with storm and stress and the ebb and flow of uncertain tides. The little yellow cat rolling on its back among the daisies, the staid tortoise making a stately meal off the buttercups near me, these are great events in this haven of peace. And yet, looking back to the working days, I know how much goodness and loving kindness there is under the ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... Lord, as he termed him, which I should be very happy to translate, were my pen capable of rendering into English the robust thundering sentences of his powerful Castilian. I had till then considered him a plain uninformed old man, almost simple, and as incapable of much emotion as a tortoise within its shell; but he had become at once inspired: his eyes were replete with a bright fire, and every muscle of his face was quivering. The little silk skull-cap which he wore, according to the custom of the Catholic clergy, moved up and down with his agitation, ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... her joy declar'd: The fair round face, the snowy beard, The velvet of her paws, Her coat, that with the tortoise vies, 10 Her ears of jet, and emerald eyes, She ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... to five large eggs of a shagreen-green colour, upon a bed of leaves. The male and female sit alternately for about a month upon them. The articles we saw exposed for sale in the fair were chiefly pearl shell and the tripang, known also as the beche-de-mer; as also tortoise-shell, edible birds' nests, pearls, and birds of paradise, or rather their stuffed skins. The Malay traders had brought for sale, or to exchange with these articles, guns, swords, knives, choppers, tobacco, plates and basins, handkerchiefs, sarongs, calicoes, ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... table and the ground as if they were a crooked dial-plate, and himself the only figure on it. With hair and whiskers deficient in colour at all times, but feebler than common in the rich sunshine, and more like the coat of a sandy tortoise-shell cat; with long nails, nicely pared and sharpened; with a natural antipathy to any speck of dirt, which made him pause sometimes and watch the falling motes of dust, and rub them off his smooth white hand or glossy linen: Mr Carker the Manager, sly of manner, sharp ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... know what it is to be born alone, Baby tortoise! The first day to heave your feet little by little from the shell, Not yet awake, And remain lapsed on earth, ...
— Tortoises • D. H. Lawrence
... suddenly shouts for "Ten! Reach out to it, longer, longer!" While the wind and the tide raced hand in hand The swing of the crew and the pace were grand; But now that the two meet face to face It's buffet and slam and a tortoise-pace. ...
— The Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch • R. C. Lehmann
... Amongst them is a drawing in sepia for Tintoretto's masterpiece, the Miracle of St. Mark at Venice. In a room kept locked, but which the custode will open on application, are some interesting cabinets (one designed, it is said, by B.Cellini, another of amber, athird of tortoise-shell); also bronzes, carving in wood and ivory, majolica, enamels, etc. Amongst other curiosities is a "Presepio," with numerous figures in coral, the metal ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... your first exertions favored my intentions. I admit that your imagination was more actively employed upon the work than was your penetration. The loss of your fondest convictions was more than atoned for by your presentiments, which gathered results much more rapidly than the tortoise pace of cold scientific inquiry, passing from the known to the unknown. Your kind of inspired system gave you your first enjoyment in this new field of activity, and I was very careful not to destroy a welcome ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... or material composition, what hidden bond can connect the flower which a girl wears in her hair and the blood which courses through her youthful veins; or, what is there in common between the dense and resisting mass of the oak, or the strong fabric of the tortoise, and those broad disks of glassy jelly which may be seen pulsating through the waters of a calm sea, but which drain away to mere films in the hand which raises them out of ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... Topics! [Whirling from one to the other.] Everyone is here, everyone of the slightest mark or consequence! The Pheasant-hen is here, in a frock from fairyland. The Duck is here, who is so good as to say he will recite for us by and by. The Tortoise is here—[Noticing that the TORTOISE is not there] I was mistaken, the Tortoise is not here. She ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand
... deposit their eggs. Some of these marine turtles grow to an enormous size, sometimes reaching a weight of over eight hundred pounds. One of them is much sought for on account of the delicacy of its flesh; another because of the thickness and beauty of its horny plates which furnish the so-called tortoise-shell, an important article of commerce. Turtles appear to reach a very old age, specimens having been known to have lived several hundred years. The box tortoise of our woods, the musk turtles, the snapping turtles are familiar examples of this order, while the terrapin, ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... repeat here the well-known fable of the 'Hare and the Tortoise,' but something of the character of those animals may be found in the cousins. At their first dame's school, as well as at the more advanced grammar school of their little town. Howel was always able to beat Rowland in swiftness, whilst ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... parlor in social gatherings, or walking in the street. I once pointed out to a friend a ludicrous resemblance between his countenance and expression and that of one of the tortoises in the illustrations of one of Agassiz's works on natural history. To which my friend replied: "It is the tortoise on which the elephant stands that bears up the foundations of the world," ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... England, was at that time divided into counties? What other country possessed similar establishments? But Mary has done more; in her French translation she has preserved many expressions in the English original; such as welke, in the fable of the Eagle, the Crow, and the Tortoise; witecocs, in that of the Three Wishes; grave, in that of the Sick Lion; werbes and wibets, in that of the Battle of the Flies with other Animals; worsel, in that of the ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham
... cargo would have put all the machinery of a royal dockyard to shame. As for the activity of the custom-house, it would have been the movement of a tortoise, to the rapidity of whatever is most rapid in unpacking or pilfering. But pilfering here we had none; we were all "men of honour;" and, undoubtedly, if any propensity to mistake the tuum for the meum had been exhibited, there were among us sufficient of the stamp of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... thousands, in the past centuries whose work was superb, but the twenty-eight are deemed to be the immortals of this particular art. One of these great men, Ogawa Ritsuo, is famous for the number and variety of the materials—mother-of-pearl, coral, tortoise-shell, &c. &c., he used in his work. A profuse richness is its chief characteristic. One of his pupils imitated in his work various materials—pottery and wood-carving, and bronzes. The last famous artist in lacquer, Watanobe Tosu, died about thirty years ago. Whether ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... this describes a tramp and vagrant world, adrift in space, with neither elephant nor tortoise to plant the sole of its foot upon. It is a set of stars hurled into heaven without even a centre of gravity to pull against. In other spheres of life it is true that we have got used to living in a state of relative insecurity. The ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... the Vulture, Captain Nabob; the Tortoise snow, from Lapland; the Pet-en-l'air, from Versailles; the Dreadnought, from Mount Etna, Sir W. Hamilton, commander; the Tympany, Montgolfier; and the Mine-A-in-a-bandbox, from the Cape of Good Hope. Foundered in a hurricane, the ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... The Master of the Border Hunt lent a couple of foxhounds, who effected nothing; and there were a hundred other attempts and as many failures. Jim Mason set a cunning trap or two and caught his own bob-tailed tortoise-shell and a terrible wigging from his missus; Ned Hoppin sat up with a gun two nights over a new slain victim and Londesley of the Home Farm poisoned a carcase. But the Killer never returned to the kill, and went about in the midst of the all, carrying on his ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... he was obliged to stoop as he entered the doorway. Within was an ordinary peasant's kitchen, but cleaner than the average. In spite of the weather the floor boards were freshly scrubbed. The hearth was swept, and by the stove lay a sleek tortoise-shell cat. There was a wooden dresser, a chimney shelf with rows of plates standing on it, and in a doorway just beyond an elderly peasant woman ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... his younger rival Sophocles; shortly afterwards he retired to the court of king Hiero, at Syracuse, He died at Gela, in Sicily, in 456, in the 69th year of his age. It is unanimously related that an eagle, mistaking the poet's bald head for a stone, let a tortoise fall upon it in order to break the shell, thus fulfilling an oracle predicting that he was to die by a blow from heaven. The improvements introduced into tragedy by AEschylus concerned both its form and composition, and its manner of representation. In ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... filled with old red velvet furniture. I sat down on a sofa, and before long became conscious that I was being gazed upon by a haughty young woman, with an aristocratic nose, large dark eyes, hair caught back by tortoise-shell combs under a peculiar head-dress, having a gleam of gold directly on the top. Her gown was of dark green, with white puffs let into the sleeves below the elbows; around her tapering waist was a narrow belt of jewels; the front of her corsage was also ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... has gone, as the tortoise goes, Heavy and slow; And the same rose blooms, and the same sun glows, And the same brook ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... made one fearful to set foot upon it. It was a jolly, chummy sort of carpet that seemed to say, "Walk on me all you want to, and don't be afraid to spill your crumbs; I like crumbs." A very large tortoise-shell cat lay stretched along the arm of the couch, half asleep, and purred as Eve dipped her fingers in the long fur. The windows on the side of the room were open and the draperies swayed gently with the little breeze. Wade, seated at the other end of the couch from his hostess, was feeling ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... imperceptible fissure? It is well known that reptiles and amphibians are particularly tenacious of life, and that some turtles in particular will live for months, or even for years, without tasting food. The common Greek tortoise, hawked on barrows about the streets of London and bought by a confiding British public under the mistaken impression that its chief fare consists of slugs and cockroaches (it is really far more likely to feed upon its purchaser's choicest seakale and asparagus), buries itself in the ground ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... the question indifferently while she stooped to pet a tortoise-shell cat that was curled asleep ...
— Jerry • Jean Webster
... seemed to strike our host. He shot his head out of the mist with a queer tortoise-like motion he sometimes had, and blinked approvingly ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... but stand there is no doubt as to the result. The thing that would puzzle us would be for him and his troops to march away into Upper Egypt and lead us a long dance there. In this tremendous heat our fellows would not be able to march far, and it would be like a tortoise trying to catch a hare, hunting them all over the country. The more men Arabi gets together the more likely he is to make a stand and ...
— A Chapter of Adventures • G. A. Henty
... enter in my ledger instead of "two dozen eggs" and "three pounds of butter," "two dozen pearls at so much a dozen" (or would they be entered by ounces?) and "fifty pounds of sandalwood," or should I reckon that by cords? I could find out later. I would wear my large tortoise-shell spectacles (possibly blinders in addition), and I should attend strictly to business for a while, but when a full moon rose over a South Sea lagoon, and the palm trees rustled and the phosphorescence broke in silver on the bow of the pearl schooner, where she rode at anchor in ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... here, and then I suddenly found I could. Princess Ruby declares I make it all up—but I don't. I can even understand what some of the animals have to say, and its rather fun sometimes. The other morning in the Gardens I heard a tortoise telling a squirrel——" ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... perfect,' to the frank disapproval of our own George Innes, when he says that it is 'the most infernal piece of clap-trap ever painted. There is nothing in it. It is not even a fine bouquet of colors.' Some one said it looks like a 'tortoise-shell cat having a fit in a platter of tomatoes.' The lurid light that streams through the mist of the angry sea intensifies a scene already ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... at the moment when the wise men of his day were saying that the earth was supported on the shoulders of a giant, that the giant stood on a platform made of the backs of elephants; that the elephants stood on the back of a mighty tortoise, but where the tortoise stood none of them said; how did he dare at that time to write that God hangeth the ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... consent to appear at Court like a poor and humble frog from the marshes. A little sedan-chair was made for her, large enough to hold a couple of eggs comfortably, and this was covered outside with tortoise-shell and lined with lizard-skin. From the little green frogs that hop about the meadows she selected fifty to act as maids of honour, and each of these was mounted on a snail. They had dainty saddles, and rode in dashing style with the ...
— Old-Time Stories • Charles Perrault
... first rank of the Romans rested their shields upon the wall, and so did those that were behind them, and the like did those that were still more backward, and guarded themselves with what they call Testudo, [the back of] a tortoise, upon which the darts that were thrown fell, and slided off without doing them any harm; so the soldiers undermined the wall, without being themselves hurt, and got all things ready for setting fire to the gate ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... looked at him through her tortoise-shell lorgnette, hanging from a gold chain, the gray amber of her eyes took on an insolent stare through the glasses, a strange expression, half caressing, ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... pleatings! Felicia couldn't get one of those bodies half around her healthy young waist. But she liked the bonnets and the shawls. They were adorable. The shawls were so soft, so quaintly shaped, the bonnets were fairly ravishing. Felicia tried them on, peering into a carved tortoise shell hand mirror, and giggled whimsically at the little flowered ones with lacy ties and the stuffy winter ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... order to salute a magpie—for he was very superstitious—pointed with his cane to a tank that lay buried on its back in the sand like a defeated tortoise, ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... of Vishnu are most commonly given as ten[356] but are not all of the same character. The first five, namely, the Fish, Tortoise, Boar, Man-Lion and Dwarf, are mythical, and due to his identification with supernatural creatures playing a benevolent role in legends with which he had originally no connection. The sixth, however, Parasu-rama or Rama with the axe, may contain historical elements. He is represented as a ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... mistress was completely gained over, and easily carried her point with Louis, who had, indeed, wrongs of his own to resent. His feelings were not quick; but contempt, says the Eastern proverb, pierces even through the shell of the tortoise; and neither prudence nor decorum had ever restrained Frederic from expressing his measureless contempt for the sloth, the imbecility, and the baseness of Louis. France was thus induced to join the coalition; and the example of France determined the conduct ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... back to his ledger; the Doctor plunged into the Star, the Captain folded up his newspaper and began studying the trinkets in the holiday stock in the show case under the new books. A comb and brush with tortoise shell backs seemed to arrest his eyes. "Doc," he mused, "Christmas never comes that I don't think of—her—mother! I guess I'd just about be getting that comb and brush for her." The Doctor casually looked through the show case and saw what had attracted ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... Union so afflicted—or blessed, according to how you look at it; the number of volumes in each of the world's ten largest libraries; the salary of every officer of the United-States Government; the average duration of life in a man, elephant, lion, horse, anaconda, tortoise, camel, rabbit, ass, etcetera-etcetera; the age of every crowned head in Europe; each State's legal and commercial rate of interest; and how long it takes a healthy boy to digest apples, baked beans, cabbage, dates, eggs, fish, green corn, h, i, j, k, l-m-n-o-p, quinces, rice, shrimps, tripe, ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... had finished speaking, Rea was downstairs and out on the east veranda. At the kitchen door stood a Chinaman, throwing bits of meat to the scrambling seventeen cats,—black, white, tortoise-shell, gray, maltese, yellow, every color, size, shape of cat that was ever seen. And they were plunging and leaping and racing about so, that it looked like twice as many cats as there really were, and as if every ...
— The Hunter Cats of Connorloa • Helen Jackson
... and fall of man is the following:—In the beginning, a few men rose out of the ground, but there was no woman among them. One of them found out a road to heaven, where he met a woman; they offended the Great Spirit, upon which they were both thrust out. They fell on the back of the tortoise; the woman was delivered of male twins; in process of time, one of these twins slew ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 338, Saturday, November 1, 1828. • Various
... hurried off a boy to the Mendez house with word that I was coming, sent out for flowers and made a lovely little fuss about me. I tried to make myself look as pretty as possible in a pale tulle, with little rosy wreaths upon it, and the high old tortoise-shell comb, that had been mother's, in my hair. The excitement gave me more color than I had had for weeks. I thought, "Even if I am not happy, at least I can ...
— The Other Side of the Door • Lucia Chamberlain
... bottom—when, in consequence of prolonged droughts, the current had so moderated that they were in no danger of being swept away—each on its large white foot, with its valves elevated over its back, like the carpace of some tall tortoise. I found occasion at this time to conclude, that the Unio of our river-fords secretes pearls so much more frequently than the Unionidae and Anadonta of our still pools and lakes, not from any specific peculiarity in the constitution ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... I declare that then he snubbed me not one little bit. These things are very far away. But to me, though far away, they are very vivid and very lovely. I see them as you, when you were small, so often pleaded to see a fairy landscape by looking through the large end of the gold and tortoise-shell spy-glass upon my writing-table. All of which may seem to you somewhat childish and trivial, but I grow an old woman and have a fancy for toys and tender make-believes—such as fairy landscapes seen through the big end of a spy-glass. The actual landscape, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... cold. "You know I ain't built on the same lines as you; and in a case of this kind, the one that c'n go faster just has to accommodate himself to the pace of the slow one. You're the hare, and I'm like the poor old tortoise; but please remember that the turtle came in winner after all in the race. Not always to the swift, you know, does the race go. I may beat you out in the long run, with the endurance test. If I've got anything at all, ...
— The Boy Scouts in the Maine Woods - The New Test for the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... a testudinate which we remember is that downward one of the unfortunate tortoise that cracked the bald crown of Aeschylus. But turtle, as embracing all chelonians, or, as liberal shepherds call it, "turkle," is unquestionably Cisatlantic. The distinguished naturalist has made himself an American citizen by adopting our own expression, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... after this he was comically alarmed by an inoffensive animal; as he was walking along a deer-track, he chanced to spy a very fine tortoise-shell box, as he imagined, though he could not conceive how it could be dropped there; and, thinking he might make good advantage of it among the Indians, claps it into his pocket; he had not gone far before he heard a hissing noise, which seemed ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... the forehead of every child an account of all that shall happen to him in the world. It is reported of Vixnu that he metamorphosed himself at pleasure. He first took the form and nature of a fish, and the second form assumed was that of a tortoise. The Indians believed there were seven seas in the world,—one of milk, of so delicious a nature that the gods ate butter made of it. One day, when the gods wanted to feast on the butter according to custom, they brought to the shore of the milk ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... Fontange, the Tire-woman, her Account of my Lady Blithe's Wash. Broke a Tooth in my little Tortoise-shell Comb. Sent Frank to know how my Lady Hectick rested after her Monky's leaping out at Window. Looked pale. Fontange tells me my Glass is not true. Dressed ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... in her chair. A sham tortoise-shell hairpin dropped from her untidy hair on to the floor with a little clatter. Her veil parted at the top from her hat. Little Alfred, terrified by an angry frown from the cornet player, was hastily returning fragments of partially ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... shatter'd beech sublime He stood, Still'd with his waving arm the babbling flood; "To Man's dull ear," He cry'd, "I call in vain, "Hear me, ye scaly tenants of the main!"— 250 Misshapen Seals approach in circling flocks, In dusky mail the Tortoise climbs the rocks, Torpedoes, Sharks, Rays, Porpus, Dolphins, pour Their twinkling squadrons round the glittering shore; 255 With tangled fins, behind, huge Phocae glide, And Whales and Grampi swell the distant tide. Then kneel'd the hoary Seer, to heaven address'd His fiery eyes, and smote his ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... find a man can live without his money as merrily as a tortoise without its head, or a wasp ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... that ever I met," thought he, "I have gone farthest in folly, and have thereby led things into a state of confusion which I myself could not make straight again, even if I were a sage—which I certainly never shall be any more than a tortoise or a phoenix. I once heard tell of a hermit who, because it is written that we ought to bury the dead, and because he had no corpse, slew a traveller that he might fulfil the commandment: I have acted in exactly the same way, for, in order to spare another man suffering and to bear the sins ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the offending list, and told Cotton the house-master's opinions. Jim Cotton had not very quick feelings, but contempt can pierce the shell of a tortoise, and as Philips innocently retailed the message, the secretary of the Penfold Tablet Fund knew there was one man who held ...
— Acton's Feud - A Public School Story • Frederick Swainson
... age of the moon," said her ladyship, putting the little tortoise-shell-bound calendar into her reticule; and having done so, she proceeded to assist Lady Penelope in the arrangements for ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... fifty kinds of Turtle and Tortoises in North America, some of which live on the land and feed largely upon plants, e. g., the Common Box Turtle, found from the New England States to South Carolina and westward to Kansas, and the Gopher Tortoise of the Southern States. Others are aquatic, like the Painted Turtles, which are found in one form or another practically ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... Drawing, as applicable to Cabinet Work; Veneering, Inlaying, and Buhl-Work; the Art of Dyeing and Staining Wood, Ivory, Bone, Tortoise-Shell, etc. Directions for Lackering, Japanning, and Varnishing; to make French Polish, Glues, Cements, and Compositions; with numerous Receipts, useful to workmen generally. By J. STOKES. Illustrated. A New Edition, with an Appendix upon French Polishing, Staining, Imitating, ...
— Mechanical Drawing Self-Taught • Joshua Rose
... wandering through the globe as the descendants of Noah, without a written language. The Hindoo therefore in his belief that the earth was actually drawn up at the flood, by the tusks of a boar, and that it rests at this hour on the back of a tortoise: and the North American Indian in his wild supposition that Waesackoochack, whose reputed father was a snake, formed the present beautiful order of creation after the deluge, by the help of a musk-rat, afford no inconsiderable proof that the Bible is of far greater antiquity ...
— The Substance of a Journal During a Residence at the Red River Colony, British North America • John West
... Hence some animals have acquired wings instead of legs, as the smaller birds, for purposes of escape. Others, great length of fin or of membrane, as the flying-fish and the bat. Others have acquired hard or armed shells, as the tortoise and the ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... once more, he was met by a strong up-current and had to fight his way through. Tiny particles stung him as they rushed by, and it seemed to him that millions of fish were darting here and there, snapping at something. It was rice. Gradually it dawned on Piang that he had reached his goal; the tortoise had reached it first, and the secret lay hidden in that dark thing at ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart
... "Behold the Tortoise: He maketh no progress unless he sticketh out his neck." But he maketh very little progress unless he pick the right time and place to "sticketh out his neck"—which can be quite a sticky problem for a man ...
— Wizard • Laurence Mark Janifer (AKA Larry M. Harris)
... clock in the ticket office, but could not see its face; wondered how late it was, and how long she had been absent. Feeling very lonely and restless she closed the door, and sat down in the deserted waiting-room, glad of the companionship of a tortoise-shell cat which was curled up on a chair next ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... saying, 'O Ocean; we have come to churn thy waters for obtaining nectar.' And the Ocean replied, 'Be it so, as I shall not go without a share of it. I am able to bear the prodigious agitation of my waters set up by the mountain.' The gods then went to the king of tortoises and said to him, 'O Tortoise-king, thou wilt have to hold the mountain on thy back!' The Tortoise-king agreed, and Indra contrived to place the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... stormed, prancing from one side of the table to the other, shaking the flimsy sheets in an angry hand, and scattering pins and needles broadcast on the carpet, while Eunice, like the tortoise, toiled slowly away, until bit by bit the puzzle became clear to her mind. She discovered that one piece of the pattern stood for half only of a particular seam, while others, such as collar and cuffs, represented a whole; mastered the mystery of holes and ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... manuscript, under the four symbols of the cardinal points, we see four figures, one a sitting figure similar to the middle one with black head, on the left side of the Cortesian plate; one a spotted dog sitting on what is apparently part of the carapace of a tortoise; one a monkey, and the other a bird with a hooked bill. Is it not possible that we have here an indication of the four days—Dragon, Death, Monkey, Vulture, with which the Mexican ...
— Notes on Certain Maya and Mexican Manuscripts • Cyrus Thomas
... collection. There is a species of cistus which grows on S. Vincent's rock, which is not, I am told, to be found in any other part of England. Helpless as I am and scoffed at in these matters, I will contrive to get some of it for you. A shoemaker showed us a tortoise shell which he had for sale. I wished to have bought it for La Sophie, but upon inquiry I found it could not be had for less than a guinea; now I thought at the utmost it would not give Sophy above half a crown's worth of pleasure, so I left the shoemaker in quiet possession of his ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... on the matted floor and divan there were two or three fine Sine carpets; a couple of trophies of splendidly ornamented weapons adorned the wall; by his side, upon a small eight-sided table inlaid with tortoise-shell and mother-of-pearl, stood a silver salver with an empty coffee-cup of beautiful workmanship,—the stand of beaten gold, and the delicate shell of the most exquisite transparent china. He had evidently been on duty at the palace, for he was in uniform, and had removed ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... roof, had been made into a sort of Chinese temple. All round the walls were hung curtains of black and yellow, decorated with dragons in gold, and above, suspended by cords at the four corners, was a rug or banner of white ornamented with a great tortoise—the sacred animal of Chinese religion—with gold eyes and claws. All round the side of the room were set coloured lights, shaded and dim. Coming from the bright outer sunlight, the place in its shadowed ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... resorting to this method of presaging the future, and the practice derives interest from the fact that a precisely similar custom has prevailed in Mongolia from time immemorial. Subsequently this device was abandoned in favour of the Chinese method, heating a tortoise-shell; and ultimately the latter, in turn, gave way to the Eight Trigrams of Fuhi. The use of auguries seems to have come at a later date. They were obtained by playing a stringed instrument called koto, by standing at a cross-street and watching the passers, by manipulating stones, ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... such as bears and lions are designated. By "creeping things" those animals are meant which either have no feet and cannot rise from the earth, as serpents, or those whose feet are too short to lift them far from the ground, as the lizard and tortoise. But since certain animals, as deer and goats, seem to fall under none of these classes, the word "quadrupeds" is added. Or perhaps the word "quadruped" is used first as being the genus, to which the others are added as species, for even some reptiles, ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... and drink up the liquor, and then beat the great ends of them in a mortar, and so eat them. They would eat horse's guts, and ears, and all sorts of wild birds which they could catch; also bear, venison, beaver, tortoise, frogs, squirrels, dogs, skunks, rattlesnakes; yea, the very bark of trees; besides all sorts of creatures, and provision which they plundered from the English. I can but stand in admiration to see the wonderful power of God in providing ...
— Captivity and Restoration • Mrs. Mary Rowlandson
... The tortoise thus, with motion slow, Will clamber up a wall; Yet, senseless to the hardest blow, ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... a soft silk cravat artificially tied in a bow knot with wide and floating ends, and he purchased a French silk hat with a broad and curving brim. Having satisfied himself that the effect was good, he laid in a stock of similar articles, and further adorned his appearance with a pair of tortoise-shell-rimmed spectacles, and a green umbrella. For possibly cool or rainy weather he provided himself with a coffee-coloured overcoat that had a velvet collar and tails reaching almost ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... Combs—the set of combs, side and back, that Della had worshipped long in a Broadway window. Beautiful combs, pure tortoise shell, with jewelled rims—just the shade to wear in the beautiful vanished hair. They were expensive combs, she knew, and her heart had simply craved and yearned over them without the least hope of possession. And now, they were hers, but the ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... were slaughtered wholesale. In this manner, too, the game soon came to an end, as it must do whenever the game is so one-sided as it was here. Then, as I have said, the shells were valuable! The shells! What chance had the tortoise and the turtle? "'Tis the voice of the turtle, I heard him complain." (What's that from? That's from WATTS—eh?) What chance had the peas, however wild? or a bean as broad as one of ——'s after-dinner ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 15, 1891 • Various
... is either white or untidy, well-gloved or otherwise, he twirls his moustache, or his whiskers, or picks his teeth with a little tortoise-shell toothpick. ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... deer. It was scraped entirely free from flesh, and then placed over a fire made from cherry wood. The divine will was determined by the cracks caused by the fire in the bone. A later method of divination was by using the shell of a tortoise in the same way as the shoulder-blade of the deer was used. They had superstitions about fighting with the back to the sun; about using only one light in the house at once; about breaking off the teeth of a comb in the night-time; about the destination ...
— Japan • David Murray
... That you may read. . . . They sit in rows in the bare school-room Reading. Throwing rocks at windows is better, And oh the tortoise-shell cat with the can tied on! I would rather be a can-tier Than a ...
— Spectra - A Book of Poetic Experiments • Arthur Ficke
... of the desert was before them. Millicent lay curled up, like a golden tortoise-shell cat, in the sun; Michael, with his legs doubled up to his chin, rested his head on his knees. He would have been asleep in a few minutes if Millicent had not spoken; ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... was one inconvenience about our villa (besides its flavour of suicide) which it is necessary to mention here. By common consent all the cats of the neighbourhood had selected our garden for their evening reunions. I fancy that a tortoise-shell kitchen cat of ours must have been a sort of leader of local feline society—I know she was "at home," with music and recitations, ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... the thing in his pate, He concluded 't was useless to strive against fate: And so, like a tortoise protruding his head, Said, "My dear, may we come out from under our bed?" "Hah! hah!" she exclaimed, "Mr. Socrates Snooks, I perceive you agree to my terms by your looks: Now, Socrates—hear me—from this happy hour, If you'll only obey me, I'll never look sour." 'T is said ...
— The Universal Reciter - 81 Choice Pieces of Rare Poetical Gems • Various
... brightly and you are chatting gayly beside it, he should take off one of your shoes and stockings, put your foot on his lap, and in a moment of forgetfulness carry irreverence so far as to kiss it; if he likes to pass your large tortoise-shell comb through your hair, if he selects your perfumes, arranges your plaits, and suddenly exclaims, striking his forehead: "Sit down there, darling; I have an idea how ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... of traps. Baited it could properly be called when the repast was of so wise a savour, and gilded surrounding objects seemed inevitably to need to be when Miss Barrace—which was the lady's name—looked at them with convex Parisian eyes and through a glass with a remarkably long tortoise-shell handle. Why Miss Barrace, mature meagre erect and eminently gay, highly adorned, perfectly familiar, freely contradictions and reminding him of some last-century portrait of a clever head without powder—why Miss Barrace should have been in particular the note of a "trap" ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... boyhood's painless play, Sleep that wakes in laughing day, Health that mocks the doctor's rules, Knowledge never learned of schools, Of the wild bee's morning chase, Of the wild-flower's time and place, Flight of fowl and habitude Of the tenants of the wood; How the tortoise bears his shell, How the woodchuck digs his cell, And the ground-mole sinks his well; How the robin feeds her young, How the oriole's nest is hung; Where the whitest lilies blow, Where the freshest berries grow, Where the ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... was comically alarmed by an inoffensive animal; as he was walking along a deer-track, he chanced to spy a very fine tortoise-shell box, as he imagined, though he could not conceive how it could be dropped there; and, thinking he might make good advantage of it among the Indians, claps it into his pocket; he had not gone far before he heard a hissing noise, which seemed to be very near; ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... word Infinite is the real fallacy in the amusing logical puzzle of Achilles and the Tortoise, a puzzle which has been too hard for the ingenuity or patience of many philosophers, and which no less a thinker than Sir William Hamilton considered as insoluble; as a sound argument, though leading to a palpable falsehood. The fallacy, as Hobbes hinted, lies in the tacit assumption ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... procured a small cup of baked clay. I then began digging; my fingers soon touched some hard object; it was a small stone statuette. I had scarcely loosened my discovery from the earth, before Lucien also plunged his arm into the hole and brought out a little fancifully-shaped tortoise, the tail of which had been used as a whistle. Enticed on by these successes, we knelt down so as to break through a wider extent of the calcareous stratum; but our torches began to burn palely, and the close ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... country, but each expressed only the thought, or the want of thought, of the multitude. No man stood on truth. They were merely banded together, as usual, one leaning on another, and all together on nothing; as the Hindoos made the world rest on an elephant, the elephant on a tortoise, and the tortoise on a serpent, and had nothing to put under the serpent. For all fruit of that stir we ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... James, as you may say, all these weary years. When there was kittens, I kept the one that looked most like old Malty, but of late years, the cats has all been different, and the one I buried jest afore I sailed away was yeller and white with black and brown spots—a kinder tortoise shell—that didn't look nothin' like Malty. You'd never have knowed they belonged to the same family, but I was sorry when she died, on account of ...
— Lavender and Old Lace • Myrtle Reed
... has from twenty to thirty members, some of whom are boys who serve as acolytes. When the open air ceremony of the Snake Dance begins, the members of these brotherhoods appear scantily clothed, with their faces painted red and white, and with tortoise-shell rattles tied to their legs. The Antelope fraternity first enters the square, preceded by a venerable priest carrying two bags filled with snakes. These serpents, which have been previously washed and covered with sacred meal, are deposited by the priest in a small leaf-embowered ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... 'It is a pity some one doesn't tell him this isn't the house.' And then from inside the cab some one put out a foot feeling for the step, like a tortoise's foot coming out from under his shell when you are holding him off the ground, and then a leg came and more parcels, and ...
— The Story of the Treasure Seekers • E. Nesbit
... The Tortoise, weary of his condition, by which he was confined to creep upon the ground, and being ambitious to have a prospect, and look about him, gave out that, if any bird would take him up into the air, and show him the world, he would reward ...
— Favourite Fables in Prose and Verse • Various
... hall that ran through the house was a large tortoise-shell cat. She had a prettily marked face, and she was waving her large tail like a flag, and mewing kindly to greet her mistress. But when she saw me what a face she made. She flew on the hall table, and putting up her back till it almost lifted her feet from the ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... and bath were not only exquisitely appointed, but stood prepared for use at a moment's notice; the bed itself was beautifully dressed; the dressing-table was decked with all manner of scent-bottles, mirrors, and trays, together with every conceivable toilet implement in tortoise-shell with a silver-inlay monogram—apparently A-M-S; the rugs were silken, princely, priceless; elusive wraiths of seductive perfumes haunted the air like ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... around the hawse-holes. She might be mistaken for a whaler coming off a four years' cruise. And nearly that length of time has she been cruising, but not after whales. Her cargo, a full one, consists of sandal-wood, spices, tortoise-shell, mother-of-pearl, and real pearls also—in short, a miscellaneous assortment of the commodities obtained by traffic in the islands and around the coasts of ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... crews of which had jumped into the sea, were captured. Of great length and well made, these boats were decorated in front with a man's head carved, the eyes of which were formed of mother of pearl, the ears of tortoise-shell, ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... the tortoise withdraweth its extremities into its shell, let me, O Blessed One, withdraw ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... SUBSTANCE to support them. Had the poor Indian philosopher (who imagined that the earth also wanted something to bear it up) but thought of this word substance, he needed not to have been at the trouble to find an elephant to support it, and a tortoise to support his elephant: the word substance would have done it effectually. And he that inquired might have taken it for as good an answer from an Indian philosopher,—that substance, without knowing what it is, is that which supports the earth, as ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... on it from his offices in the Hotel Cecil, Londoners have to look to him to see if he or Pierpont Morgan will not open it to them again. What a pleasant alternative from the asphyxiating Underground or the tortoise-moving omnibus would not a fast, comfortably fitted line of river steamers be! It seems inconceivable that, with such a waterway and such primitive and inadequate alternative means of travel, the people should stand its being closed. What a great, stimulating, suggestive pathway it ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... The Latin word testudo, represented in Greek by the precisely equivalent [Greek: chelonae] in Dio's narrative, means "tortoise."] ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. III • Cassius Dio
... stopped again, and taking off her spectacles harangued the tortoise-shell cat, who was sitting on the rug ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... interest in Henry IV.'s room, in which he is said to have been born 13th December, 1553, including the magnificently carved bedstead; but the chief attraction is the tortoise-shell cradle, which as a rule Frenchmen come only to see. Why they should come is quite a different matter, seeing that although a tortoise's shell might make a very comfortable cradle for even such an illustrious infant as was Henry IV., yet as ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... gathers no moss. The persistent tortoise outruns the swift but fickle hare. An hour a day for twelve years more than equals the time given to study in a four years' course at a high school. The reading and re-reading of a single volume has been the making of many a man. "Patience," says ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... upon the ocean's shore What once a tortoise served to cover; A year and more, with rush and roar, The surf had rolled it over, Had played with it, and flung it by, As wind and weather might decide it, Then tossed it high where sand-drifts dry Cheap burial might provide it. It rested there to bleach or tan, The rains ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... long after Nannie's story a great tortoise-shell tomcat appeared in the Earnest home. No one thought of asking Mrs. Earnest if she had brought him there, and the others knew nothing about him. More curiously still, when Mr. Earnest began to grow sulky or ugly, Sir Tortoise ...
— The Gentle Art of Cooking Wives • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... delighted with Julia's working lace so very well."—O. B. Peirce's Gram., p. 255. "And it is from their representing each two different words that the confusion has arisen."—Booth's Introd., p. 42. "AEschylus died of a fracture of his skull, caused by an eagle's letting fall a tortoise on his head."—Biog. Dict. "He doubted their having it."—Felch's Comp. Gram., p. 81. "The making ourselves clearly understood, is the chief end of speech."—Sheridan's Elocution, p. 68. "There is no discovering ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... she was at work within the house, and Paul ran in and out. She spoke to him once about introducing an evil-smelling water- tortoise; he went forth to exploit it in the yard. From time to time his shrill voice reached her; then the frayed edges of David's black trousers of ceremony engaged her, to the exclusion of all else. Between the scissors ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... "You'll find a man can live without his money as merrily as a tortoise without its head, or a ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... any shareholder has any question to put, I shall be glad to answer it." A soft thump. Old Jolyon had let the report and accounts fall, and stood twisting his tortoise-shell glasses between ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Isle of Salabat we went to another, where I furnished myself with cloves, cinnamon, and other spices. As we sailed from that island we saw a tortoise that was twenty cubits in length and breadth. We observed also a fish which looked like a cow, and gave milk, and its skin is so hard that they usually make bucklers of it. I saw another which had the shape and colour of a camel. In short, after ...
— Fairy Tales From The Arabian Nights • E. Dixon
... blind queen's eyes, her windows were shaded by curtains of green Indian silk. The floor was covered with a thick Babylonian carpet, soft as moss under the foot. The walls were faced with a mosaic of ivory, tortoise-shell, gold, silver, malachite, lapis-lazuli, ebony and amber. The seats and couches were of gold covered with lions' skins, and a table of silver stood by the side of the blind queen. Kassandane was seated in a costly arm-chair. She wore a robe of violet-blue, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... She would wait in the street with the carriage-blinds pulled down, and Modeste should go in and ask for information. Five minutes passed—ten minutes passed—they seemed ages. How slow Modeste was, slow as a tortoise! How could she leave her there when she knew she was so anxious? What could she be doing? All she had to do was to ask news of M. ...
— Jacqueline, v3 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... particulars,' answered Lee, with an easy transition from a sentimental to a common-sense, business-like tone, and at the same time unscrewing the lid of a tortoise-shell tobacco-box, and taking a folded paper from it. 'I keep these matters generally here; for if I were to drop such an article—just now, especially—I might as well be hung out to ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 431 - Volume 17, New Series, April 3, 1852 • Various
... The name is used in the northern hemisphere for a different fish, which is also called there the Frog-fish and Toad-fish. The name arises from a fancied resemblance of the profile of the fish to a human hand. It is also called Frog-fish and Tortoise-shell fish. Mrs. Meredith calls it Tortoise-shell Fish from its colour, when figuring it in 'Tasmanian Friends and Foes' under its former scientific name of Cheironectes Politus. The surface of its skin is hirsute with minute spines, and the lobe at the end of the detached filament of the dorsal ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... land at Bellagio by daylight, we find it to be very much of a bazaar of souvenirs along the water-front, and everybody determined to carry away a keepsake. There is so much to buy—ornamental olive wood and tortoise-shell articles, Como blankets, lace, and what may be described in general terms as modern antiquities. These abound from shop to shop; even English groceries are available. Bellagio's principal street is suddenly converted at its northern end into ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... up with, madam. It has been a dreadful experience. Last night, after I had extinguished the candle in my bedroom, I placed my foot upon something smooth and hard, which scuttled from under me. Imagine my horror! I lit the gas, and came upon a well-grown tortoise which Clara has thought fit to introduce into the house. I call it a filthy custom to have ...
— Beyond the City • Arthur Conan Doyle
... such couches a good deal of decoration was lavished in the way of veneerings of ornamental wood, or thin plates of ivory or tortoise-shell, or reliefs in bronze or even in gold or silver. The feet might also, in the richer houses, consist of silver or of ivory. For the dining-rooms of people of wealth a special feature was made of such work upon the conspicuous parts of the frames, while the cushions and coverings were of ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... through the globe as the descendants of Noah, without a written language. The Hindoo therefore in his belief that the earth was actually drawn up at the flood, by the tusks of a boar, and that it rests at this hour on the back of a tortoise: and the North American Indian in his wild supposition that Waesackoochack, whose reputed father was a snake, formed the present beautiful order of creation after the deluge, by the help of a musk-rat, ...
— The Substance of a Journal During a Residence at the Red River Colony, British North America • John West
... even the toad and tortoise excepted, this poor ill- formed creature is the most tenacious of life. It exists long after it has received wounds which would have destroyed any other animal, and it may be said, on seeing a mortally-wounded sloth, that life disputes with death every inch ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... planted with trees and surrounded by artistic walls enclosing the grave-mounds and monumental tablets. The cemeteries themselves are the metonyms of the villages, and the graves of the houses. In the north especially the grave is very often surmounted by a huge marble tortoise bearing the inscribed tablet, or what we call the gravestone, on its back. The tombs of the last two lines of emperors, the Ming and the Manchu, are magnificent structures, spread over enormous areas, and always artistically situated on hillsides facing natural or artificial lakes or seas. ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... animals. The path was much shorter than that visited in Nankow, and the carving of the animals was less perfect. The avenue ended with a gateway of three arches, which we did not pass through, but which contained a memorial tablet mounted on a huge tortoise; beyond this there was a long oblong building with an effective terrace roof; doors were placed in each corner of the walled enclosure. At the back rose an immense mound which covers the tomb. From a high tower ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... heroine appeared in the drawing-room, clothed in a robe of pale blue silk, of a cut and fashion much like that worn by her sister. Her hair was left to the wild curls of nature, its exuberance being confined to the crown of her head by a long, low comb, made of light tortoise shell; a color barely distinguishable in the golden hue of her tresses. Her dress was without a plait or a wrinkle, and fitted the form with an exactitude that might lead one to imagine the arch girl more ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... pink drawers of silk, and for girdle she had the blue buds of the lotus, which are symbols of virginity. She was young and exquisitely formed. In her face you read strange records, and on her lips were promises as rare. Her eyes were tortoise-shell, her hair was ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus
... the outlying ramparts of machinery, we entered the domain of the table-workers, and I was turned over to Phoebe, a tall girl in tortoise ear-rings and curl-papers. Phoebe was assigned to "learn" me in the trade of "finishing." Somewhat to my surprise, she assumed the task joyfully, and helped me off with my coat and hat. From the loud-mouthed tirades as to "Annie Kinzer's ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... his stiff cope, creep up to the group with the motion of a tortoise. And, for a moment, his quavering voice pronouncing the absolution was the only ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... remark thereupon, by leading him at once into an adjoining room: the door of which was open. It was a large room, with a great window. Behind a desk, sat two old gentleman with powdered heads: one of whom was reading the newspaper; while the other was perusing, with the aid of a pair of tortoise-shell spectacles, a small piece of parchment which lay before him. Mr. Limbkins was standing in front of the desk on one side; and Mr. Gamfield, with a partially washed face, on the other; while two or three bluff-looking men, ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... efficiently, with no trace of fuss and flurry, is a big man. It is not the hurrying, clattering and chattering individual who turns off the most work. He may imagine he is getting over a lot of track, but he wastes far more than the necessary amount of steam in doing it. The fable of the hare and the tortoise would not be a bad primer for a number of us, and the lesson relearned would not only be beneficial in a business-producing way, but it would help us in the full ...
— Initiative Psychic Energy • Warren Hilton
... still lower depth of atrocity, but as far as enquiry of the Government at Sydney can make out, unconnected with labour traffic, but with the tortoise-shell trade. Skulls, it will be remembered, were the ornament of old Iri's house at Bauro, and skulls are still the trophies in the more savage islands. It seems that some of the traders in tortoise-shell are in the habit of assisting their clients ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... employ for cutting it the hand of a Being, who then immediately becomes in turn a new knot for us, and a knot harder to untie than the first. An Indian tells you that our globe is suspended in the air on the back of an elephant. And the elephant! It stands on a tortoise. And the tortoise? what sustains that?... You pity the Indian: and yet one might very well say to you as to him—Mr. Holmes, my good friend, confess your ignorance, and ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... skin, bones, and wattle, but with ordinary feathers, and which cannot "be more aptly described than by comparing them to a white fowl drawn down a sooty chimney; it is, however," adds Mr. Layard, "a remarkable fact that a male bird of the pure sooty variety is almost as rare as a tortoise-shell tom-cat." Mr. Blyth found the same rule to hold good with this breed near Calcutta. The males and females, on the other hand, of the black-boned European breed, with silky feathers, do not differ from each other; so that in the one breed, ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... degenerated into white savages: mere huts, with domed kitchens behind them. In the dwelling-house the whole family pigged together, with raw flesh drying on the rafters, stinking skins in a corner, parasitical vermin of all sorts blackening the floor, and particularly a small, biting, and odoriferous tortoise, compared with which the insect a London washerwoman brings into your house in her basket, is a stroke with a feather—and all this without the excuse of penury; for many of these were shepherd kings, sheared four thousand fleeces a ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... answered, thrusting out my head as a tortoise does, "when in this very hut you seemed to produce the shape, also out of smoke, I think, of one whom I used to know. Say, how do you do ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard
... one cannot feel the full import of this fact. Not only has every house in Kittery its cat, but every house seems to have its half-dozen cats, large, little, old, and young; of divers colors, tending mostly to a dark tortoise-shell. ...
— Widger's Quotations from the Works of William Dean Howells • David Widger
... diamonds, and other precious stones, ginger, spices, and some scents. The state of Ethiopia was then such that no trade came down the Nile to Syene; and the produce of southern Africa was brought by coasting vessels to Berenice. These products were ivory, rhinoceros teeth, hippopotamus skins, tortoise shell, apes, monkeys, and slaves, a list which throws a sidelight both on the pursuits of the natives and the tastes of ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... but the fraternity. He sold that negro for two thousand dollars, and then put him for ever out of the reach of all pursuers; and they can never graze him unless they can find the negro; and that they cannot do, for his carcass has fed many a tortoise and cat-fish before this time, and the frogs have sung this many a long day to the silent repose of ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... pen thro' and thro' I should strike it; But I hear that your Lordship's own style is just like it. 40 Dear my Lord, we are right: for what charms can be shew'd In a thing that goes straight like an old Roman road? The tortoise crawls straight, the hare doubles about; And the true line of beauty still winds in and out. It argues, my Lord! of fine thoughts such a brood in us 45 To split and divide into heads multitudinous, While charms that surprise ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... or japan, clean well the substance which is to be japanned; then lay vermillion, tempered with shell-lac varnish, or with drying oil, very thinly diluted with oil of turpentine, on the places intended to imitate the more transparent parts of the tortoise-shell; when the vermillion is dry, brush the whole over with black varnish, tempered to a due consistence with the oil of turpentine. When set and firm, put the work into a stove, where it may undergo a very strong heat, which must be continued a considerable ...
— Young's Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets • Daniel Young
... said to himself, and he went softly to another stone upon which there was only one, a handsome reptile, which looked as if it had been painted by nature to imitate polished tortoise-shell. ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... retardation; slackening &c. v.; delay &c. (lateness) 133; claudication|. jog trot, dog trot; mincing steps; slow march, slow time. slow goer[obs3], slow coach, slow back; lingerer, loiterer, sluggard, tortoise, snail; poke* [U.S.]; dawdle &c. (inactive) 683. V. move slowly &c. adv.; creep, crawl, lag, slug, drawl, linger, loiter, saunter; plod, trudge, stump along, lumber; trail, drag; dawdle &c. (be inactive) 683; grovel, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... sitting down on the edge of a chair, and looking around most uncomfortably at the luxurious apartment. He had not realized it would be like this. He was beginning to feel like a fish out of water. As for the rest of the committee, they were overawed and dumb, all except the little fellow with the tortoise-rimmed glasses. He was not looking at anything but Allison, and was intent on his mission. When he saw that his superior had been struck dumb, he took ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... which I found delicious. I may here mention that several days later I became aware that this same broth—the origin of which puzzled me at the moment, though not enough to prevent me from taking it—had been prepared from a kind of tortoise, the existence of which in large numbers on the spit Hutchinson had accidentally discovered that very morning, and in pursuit of which he had sent out two of the most slightly wounded with a sack, and instructions to catch ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... that certain malconformations frequently, and that others rarely, coexist without our being able to assign any reason. What can be more singular than the relation in cats between complete whiteness and blue eyes with deafness, or between the tortoise-shell colour and the female sex; or in pigeons, between their feathered feet and skin betwixt the outer toes, or between the presence of more or less down on the young pigeon when first hatched, with ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... its colour. When we apply the word beauty we do not mean always by it a more beautiful form, but something valuable on account of its rarity, usefulness, colour, or any other property. A horse is said to be a beautiful animal; but, had a horse as few good qualities as a tortoise, I do not imagine that he would ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... special fields of labour. He is a great trader with the countries near home, and sends out many junks to the East Indies, the Malay Islands, and the South Sea Islands, to collect edible birds' nests, trepang, ornamental woods, pearls, pearl-shells, tortoise-shell, and the skins of birds of paradise. At Singapore, there are hundreds of Chinese shopkeepers, who sell all kinds of miscellaneous articles, such as penknives, cotton thread, writing-paper, gunpowder, and corkscrews, ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... natures. The result of your first exertions favored my intentions. I admit that your imagination was more actively employed upon the work than was your penetration. The loss of your fondest convictions was more than atoned for by your presentiments, which gathered results much more rapidly than the tortoise pace of cold scientific inquiry, passing from the known to the unknown. Your kind of inspired system gave you your first enjoyment in this new field of activity, and I was very careful not to destroy a welcome enthusiasm which was very favorable to the development of your excellent ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... adrift, rudderless on a frightening sea, called her father into her bedroom at the Savoy and showed him the letter. He drew out and adjusted his round tortoise-shell-rimmed reading-glasses and ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... were warmer I should get on faster, but I cannot stir into the air without bringing on cough. Tell Ulick O'More that we entertained his brother at tea last evening, we were obliged to desire him to bring his own cup, and he produced the shell of a land tortoise; it was very like the fox and the crane. Poor fellow, it was the first good meal he had for weeks, and I was glad he came in for some famous bread that the General had sent us in. He made us much more merry than was convenient to either of us, not ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the south garden in Renata's wake, occasionally stopping to pick up one or other of the two fat babies who struggled along after their mother, interrupting more or less effectually the business on which she was engaged. A pathetic-eyed yard or so of brown dachshund and a tortoise-shell kitten completed the party. Renata Aston was small and dark, gentle and deliberate of movement, and possessing an elf-like trick of shrinking her entrancing personality into comparative invisibility that bereft one of further vision. She moved from border to border choosing her flowers ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... caravan went on. At midday the Bedouins returned, reinforced. Zeyn al-Din and his mustered force beat them off. No loss of goods or life, but much of time! The caravan went on, that with laden beasts must move at best much like a tortoise. That night the rest was shortened. Two hours after midnight and the strings of camels were moving again, the asses and mules so monstrously misshapen with bales of goods, the horses and horsemen and those afoot. At dawn, not these Bedouins, ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... creature on the platform swayed its great head slowly as a tortoise does, and contemplated us with its flaming eyes. At length it spoke in a thick, guttural voice, using the tongue that seemed to be common to this part of Africa and indeed to that branch of the Bantu people to which the Zulus belong, but, ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... Monsieur Planche's anti-spasmodics; and mint and Hoffman's drops are among my favorite remedies. Here are some lozenges which I have made up on purpose; they are compounded doubly strong." Monte Cristo opened the tortoise-shell box, which the lady presented to him, and inhaled the odor of the lozenges with the air of an amateur who thoroughly appreciated their composition. "They are indeed exquisite," he said; "but as they are necessarily submitted to the process of deglutition—a function which it is frequently ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the manufacture of which the Samoans show some ingenuity. They cut a strip off the shell, from two to three inches long, and rub it smooth on a stone, so as to resemble a small fish. On the under side, or what may be called the belly, of this little mock fish, they fasten a hook made of tortoise-shell, or, it may be, nowadays, an English steel one. Alongside of the hook, concealing its point, and in imitation of the fins of a little fish, they fasten two small white feathers. Without any bait, this pearl-shell contrivance is ...
— Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before • George Turner
... of animals also hollow out shelters for their eggs, with the double object of maintaining them at a constant temperature and of concealing them. Most reptiles act in this manner. The way in which a Tortoise, the Cistudo lunaria, prepares its nest is extremely curious. When the time for this labour arrives, the tortoise chooses a site. It commences by boring in the earth with the end of its tail, the muscles of which are held firmly contracted; it turns the tail like a gimlet and succeeds ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... the "Bulls of Nineveh," the "Tortoise," the "Gorilla," and the "Druids' Temple"—also the "Druids' Reading-desk," the "Druids' Oven," and the "Druid's Head." Then there was the "Idol," where a great stone, said to weigh over two hundred ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... with sharp eyes, dark hair, and a suave self-assured manner, rose at her approach, smiling at her embarrassment. The other man, considerably younger, was M. Locuty, a stocky, bushy haired man with square jaws and heavy tortoise-shell eyeglasses. He was an engineer at the huge Michelin Tire Works at Clermont-Ferrand where Metenier was an important official. The industrialist introduced the girl merely as "my ...
— Secret Armies - The New Technique of Nazi Warfare • John L. Spivak
... is to be born alone, Baby tortoise! The first day to heave your feet little by little from the shell, Not yet awake, And remain lapsed on earth, ...
— Tortoises • D. H. Lawrence
... the ocean's shore What once a tortoise served to cover. A year and more, with rush and roar, The surf had rolled it over, Had played with it, and flung it by, As wind and weather might decide it, Then tossed it high where sand-drifts dry Cheap burial ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year - Edited by Katherine D. Blake and Georgia Alexander • Various
... the girls five beautiful, carved tortoise shell boxes, containing exquisite sets of combs for their hair, the half dozen or more that Chinese ...
— The Automobile Girls At Washington • Laura Dent Crane
... Prospero looked like, and it is not at all unlikely that the poet intended we should not see him very clearly. He is a hideous spectacle, scarcely human, yet resembling a man in some respects. He is called in various places villain, slave and tortoise; a moon-calf, that is, a shapeless lump; a fish, with legs like a man and fins like arms; a puppy-headed monster; a man monster; half a fish and half a monster; a plain fish; a mis-shaped knave; "as strange a thing as e'er I looked ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... stone dead. 'Tis but a polished tortoise-shell, of which the living inhabitant has long since crumbled to dust; but it still gleams in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... who would still creep like a tortoise, suddenly stooped down. The August dust was very thick along the way and wagons had already been traveling into town, and yet she picked up a string of red, white and blue beads, which surely were Polly's, since patriotism had been one of her chief ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at Sunrise Hill • Margaret Vandercook
... of the Bhagavat-Gita: "The highest perfection to which the soul can attain, is action without passion. The mind is to be entirely independent of external objects; to preserve its undisturbed serenity it should have the conscious power of withdrawing all its senses within itself, as the tortoise draws all its limbs beneath in shell." Action is necessary, but action must produce no emotion—no sensation on the calm spirit within; whatever may be their consequences, however important, however awful, events are to be unfelt, and almost unperceived by the impassive ...
— Nala and Damayanti and Other Poems • Henry Hart Milman
... similes of metallurgical poets—but a straightforward yellow, darkening at the roots; and she wore it low down on her neck in great coils that were held in place by a multitude of little golden hair-pins and divers corpulent tortoise-shell ones. Item, her nose was a tiny miracle of perfection; and this was noteworthy, for you will observe that Nature, who is an adept at eyes and hair and mouths, very rarely achieves a creditable ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... immediately ran to the assistance of the baboon; and after a little more scraping, he pulled out a live tortoise about a foot long. ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat
... been outdone in their kind care of her, and kind attention to her wants. And when the supper was at length over, Mrs. Van Brunt declared a little colour had come back to the pale cheeks. The colour came back in good earnest a few minutes after, when a great tortoise-shell cat walked into the room. Ellen jumped down from her chair, and presently was bestowing the tenderest caresses upon pussy, who stretched out her head and purred as if she ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... the great inland sea was white with sails. Great fleets brought corn from Gaul, Spain, Sardinia, Africa, Sicily, and Egypt. This was the most important trade. But a considerable commerce was carried on in ivory, tortoise-shell, cotton and silk fabrics, pearls and precious stones, gums, spices, wines, wool, oil. Greek and Asiatic wines, especially the Chian and Lesbian, were in great demand at Rome. The transport of earthenware, made generally ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... depths below the ground. Then Gods and bards in terror flew To him who mighty Madhu slew. "Help of all beings! more than all, The Gods on thee for aid may call. Ward off, O mighty-armed! our fate, And bear up Mandar's threatening weight." Then Vishnu, as their need was sore, The semblance of a tortoise wore, And in the bed of Ocean lay The mountain on his back to stay. Then he, the soul pervading all, Whose locks in radiant tresses fall, One mighty arm extended still, And grasped the summit of the ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... out 'Womanish babblers, how can we build god's altar Ere we divine its foreordained true shape?' Then one 'It is a pedestal for deeds'— ''Tis more and should be hewn like the king's brow'— 'It has the nature of a woman's bosom'— 'The tortoise, first created, signifies it'— 'A blind and rudimentary navel shows The source of worship better than horned moons.' Then a lean giant 'Is not a calyx needful?'— 'Because round grapes on statues well expressed Become the nadir of incense, nodal lamps, Yet apes have hands that cut and carved red ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... metal, their heavy rounded helmets fitting closely to the head and neck, and surmounted by crests of waving plumes, they were, in truth, men of brass, invulnerable to any Oriental weapon. Drawn up in close array beneath their "tortoise," they received almost unhurt the hail of arrows and stones hurled against them by the lightly armed infantry, and then, when their own trumpet sounded the signal for attack, and they let themselves fall with their whole weight upon the masses of the enemy, brandishing ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... walls, the neatness of three chairs and of the deal table, all scrubbed by the daughter of his former tenant. Fish nets were draped upon the walls like tapestry; beyond hung the gun and a bag of cartridges. Long, slender sea-shells with the brown translucency of the tortoise were arranged in the form of fans. They were the gift of Tio Ventolera, as were two enormous periwinkles on the table, white, with erect points, and the interior of a moist rose-color, like feminine flesh. Near the window his mattress lay rolled up with his pillow and sheets—a rustic bed which ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... the thoughts of desperate men! I do remember an apothecary,— And hereabouts he dwells,—which late I noted In tatter'd weeds, with overwhelming brows, Culling of simples; meagre were his looks, Sharp misery had worn him to the bones; And in his needy shop a tortoise hung, An alligator stuff'd, and other skins Of ill-shaped fishes; and about his shelves A beggarly account of empty boxes, Green earthen pots, bladders, and musty seeds, Remnants of packthread, and ...
— Romeo and Juliet • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... illustrates the extraordinary deductive methods adopted by the ancient Greeks. But they went much farther in the same direction. They seem to have been in great difficulty to explain how the earth is supported, just as were those who invented the myth of Atlas, or the Indians with the tortoise. Thales thought that the flat earth floated on water. Anaxagoras thought that, being flat, it would be buoyed up and supported on the air like a kite. Democritus thought it remained fixed, like the donkey between two bundles of hay, because it was equidistant ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... they shot ahead at first, their speed was so great that they could not control their machine. In a moment they were rolling head-over-heels in clouds of snow, and while the hare was thus amusing itself a tortoise slid ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... had no idea himself that they were so. In the twenty-fourth chapter there is a ridiculous descent from the sublimity of the two preceding. We are told that the possessor of entire sincerity is like a spirit and can foreknow, but the foreknowledge is only a judging by the milfoil and tortoise and other auguries! But the author recovers himself, and resumes his theme about sincerity as conducting to self-completion and the completion of other men and things, describing it also as possessing all the qualities which can be predicated of Heaven ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) Unicode Version • James Legge
... for instance, Tom, and if the poor brute was killed and skinned he'd look exactly like a white cat or a tortoise-shell." ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... into the room. Favoretta got up to look at it, and immediately Herbert's eye glanced from his book: in spite of all his endeavours to command his attention, he heard the exclamations of "Beautiful!—How smooth!—like tortoise-shell!—What can it ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... semi-poetical little book in a long article in the "Christian Examiner," headed "Transcendentalism," and published in the January number for 1837. The acute and learned Professor meant to deal fairly with his subject. But if one has ever seen a sagacious pointer making the acquaintance of a box-tortoise, he will have an idea of the relations between the reviewer and the reviewed as they appear in this article. The professor turns the book over and over,—inspects it from plastron to carapace, so to speak, and looks for openings ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... high explosive projectile. The first music to soothe the savage breast was the soughing of the wind through the trees. Then strings were stretched across a crevice for the wind to play upon and there was the AEolian harp. The second stage was entered when Hermes strung the tortoise shell and plucked it with his fingers and when Athena, raising the wind from her own lungs, forced it through a hollow reed. From these beginnings we have the organ and the orchestra, producing such sounds as nothing ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... that I bore was "Tala Tala," which means spectacles in practically all the Congo dialects. There are nearly two hundred tribes and each has a distinctive tongue. In many sections that I visited the natives had never seen a pair of tortoise shell glasses such as I wear during the day. The children fled from me shrieking in terror and thinking that I was a sorcerer. Even gifts of food, the one universal passport to the native heart, failed ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... operations. As to diet, the Archbishop was ordered to take nothing but light and cooling food, two to four pints of asses' milk in the early morning, drawn from an ass fed on cooling herbs, and to use all such foods as had a fattening tendency; tortoise or turtle-soup,[149] distilled snails, barley-water and chicken-broth, and divers other rich edibles. The purging of the brain was a serious business; it was to be compassed by an application to the coronal suture of an ointment made of Greek pitch, ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... farewell tour of the shops in San Juan, and buy a few gifts for the friends at home: a green parrot to please sister; a tortoise-shell comb for mother; a cane for father, a native hat for brother, and a calabash drinking bowl for ...
— A Little Journey to Puerto Rico - For Intermediate and Upper Grades • Marian M. George
... and died where they stood. No human agency seemed able to ignite the squibs. The crackers gave one bang and collapsed. The Roman candles might have been English rushlights. The Catherine wheels became mere revolving glow-worms. The fiery serpents could not collect among them the spirit of a tortoise. The set piece, a ship at sea, showed one mast and the captain, and then went out. One or two items did their duty, but this only served to render the foolishness of the whole more striking. The little girls giggled, the little boys chaffed, the aunts and cousins said it was beautiful, the ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... quite near them now, Captain Beausire's back as he came down, stern foremost, so as to give both hands to Mme. Roland; and further up, further off, Roland still letting himself slip, lowering himself on his hams and clinging on with both his hand and elbows at the speed of a tortoise, Pierre keeping in front of him to ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... our captain, who invited him to partake of a banquet of sweetmeats, which he readily accepted. Captain Middleton then made enquiry as to what commodities the king had for sale in his dominions. He made answer, that they had pearls, tortoise-shell, and some cloth of their own manufacture, which we supposed might be of striped cotton. The king said farther, as we were unacquainted with the place, he would send a pilot to conduct us. Captain Middleton then requested to see some of the pearls; but ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr
... the costume of a retainer of a superior class. He wore the ribbon of the Legion of Honor at his button-hole. He had made up a withered old face with powdered hair, deep wrinkles, and a colorless skin. His eyes were hidden by tortoise-shell spectacles. He looked like a retired office-clerk. On giving his name as Monsieur de Saint-Denis, he was led to the Duke's private room, where he found Derville reading a letter, which he himself had ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... she with a little laugh. "I'd imagined you a horrid elderly person with a white cravat and tortoise-shell spectacles. It ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed
... the frozen waters of Spitzbergen and in the Antarctic seas; that the sharks and seals of various kinds are found in equally innumerable tribes in seas the farthest apart in the two hemispheres; that the turtle and the tortoise inhabit indifferently the Atlantic, the Indian, ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... and casts, says, that no idea of the creature that made the tracks can be formed from any animal at present existing, for instead of the prints being in successive pairs, an odd one is found to intervene. He considers it to have had three legs on each side, and to have been neither tortoise-like nor vertebrate; and after naming it Protichnites, adds: 'I incline to adopt, as the most probable hypothesis, that the creatures which have left their tracks and impressions on the most ancient of known sea-shores, belonged to an articulate and probably crustaceous ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various
... What men call motion is only a name given to a series of conditions, each of which, considered separately, is rest. "Rest is force resistant; motion is force triumphant."[457] The famous puzzle of "Achilles and the Tortoise," by which he endeavored to prove the unreality of motion, has been rendered familiar to the ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... should have of catching a pirate under such circumstances!" Ralph said, laughing. "You might as well set a tortoise ...
— A Knight of the White Cross • G.A. Henty
... than that of the most rapid express trains. If the distance traversed by a locomotive in an hour is represented by one tenth of an inch, it would need a line nine feet long to indicate the corresponding advance of the earth in the same time. But a tortoise, pursuing his ordinary gait without a wager, moves eleven hundred times slower than an express train. We have here a basis of comparison with the provincial steamboats. If we had seen a tortoise start that night from Port Hawkesbury ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... being decked with thin attire, appeared highly graceful. And her feet with fair suppressed ankles, and possessing flat soles and straight toes of the colour of burnished copper and high and curved like tortoise back and marked by the wearing of ornaments furnished with rows of little bells, looked exceedingly handsome. And exhilarated with a little liquor which she had taken, and excited by desire, and moving ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... within the bounds of its subservience to Paris, was certainly unique. It was wonderful the amount of decoration she could carry without being the worse for it. Her head alone, over and above its bronze hair, coil on coil and curl on curl, sustained several large tortoise-shell pins, a gold lace fillet, and a rose over each ear. It was no more to her than a bit of black ribbon to a young girl. Old rose and young rose mingled delicately in the silks and gauzes of her gown; here and there a topaz flashed rose from her bodice and from the dusk of her bared neck. There ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... beauty with a silver collar, lay on light blue's knee. They looked haughtily about, and talked English together. I took no notice, just went on smoking. I observed that the ladies were getting angry—over my cigar, doubtless. One looked at me through her tortoise-shell eyeglass. ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... arched passage built of white marble. On the top of the mound is an imposing marble structure consisting of a double arch, beneath which is the imperial tablet, a large slab, upon which is carved a dragon standing on the back of a gigantic tortoise. The remains of the emperor are buried somewhere within this mound, though the exact spot is not known: this precaution, it is said, was taken to preserve the remains from being desecrated in a search for the treasures which were buried with him, while the persons who performed this last office ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... these blasted rows, the scene changed to vast tracts of level country, buried in sand, and smothered with heath; the particular character of which I had but too good an opportunity of intimately knowing, as a tortoise might have kept pace with us without being ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... till then considered him a plain, uninformed old man, almost simple, and as incapable of much emotion as a tortoise within its shell; but he had become at once inspired: his eyes were replete with a bright fire, and every muscle of his face was quivering. The little silk skull- cap which he wore, according to the custom of the Catholic ...
— The Pocket George Borrow • George Borrow
... 443. This robber haunted the rocks in the neighborhood of Megara, and used to insist on those who became his guests washing his feet. This being done upon the rocks, Scyron used to kick the strangers into the sea while so occupied, where a tortoise lay ready to devour the bodies. Theseus killed him, and threw his body down the same rocks, which derived their name of Saronic, or ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... I endeavored to show him that this view would deprive Columbus of his greatest distinction. He answered invariably, "But without having read it, how could he ever have known it?"—thus putting the earth upon the tortoise and leaving the tortoise to account ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... warning and protective proverbs. For instance, with what relishing force such sayings as the following touch the evil resident in indolence and delay!—"An unemployed mind is the Devil's workshop"; "The industrious tortoise wins the race from the lagging eagle"; "When God says, To-day, the Devil says, To-morrow." In like manner, another cluster of adages depict the certainty of the detection and punishment of crime:—"Murder will out"; "Justice has feet of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... his writing-paper as country cats from the coverts. They are inveterate and determined poachers, and, alas, they meet with scant mercy from the keeper if he catches them. Many a fireside tabby or tortoise-shell dies a violent death in the course of every year, and is buried in a secret grave. This often gives rise to disturbance, for the cottager, to whom the deceased was as the apple of her eye, may make complaint of the keeper to his master. My friend SYKES, one of the best keepers ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 28, 1893 • Various
... was of mosaic; the walls, faced partly with red marble and partly with wood, on which were painted fish, birds, and griffins, attracted the eye by the play of colors. From the door to the side chamber they were ornamented with tortoise-shell or even ivory; at the walls between the doors were statues of Aulus's ancestors. Everywhere calm plenty was evident, remote from ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... found on the desert are the wildcat, coyote, rabbit, deer, rat, tortoise, scorpion, centipede, tarantula, Gila monster, chuck-walla, desert rattlesnake, side-winder, humming-bird, eagle, quail, and road-runner. Wild horses and wild donkeys, or "burros," frequent these great wastes, cropping the vegetation that grows ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... the Jackal, and the latter runs under an overhanging rock, crying "Help! help! this rock is falling on me!" The Lion goes for a pole with which to prop up the rock, and so the Jackal escapes. It is worthy of note that a tortoise or terrapin, which stands next to Brother Rabbit in the folk-lore of the Southern negroes, is the cause of Hlakanyana's death. He places a Tortoise on his back and carries it home. His mother asks him what he has there, and ...
— Nights With Uncle Remus - Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation • Joel Chandler Harris
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