"On all fours" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... been hit. We walked past the Church tent—it was full of rents and holes. And just beyond it was a huge pit with fresh soil heaped up in a ring around it. Loose earth and stones and sods were scattered everywhere. Then we saw something move in the darkness—it was a man on all fours, dragging himself painfully along and uttering a groan with every breath. Two bearers arrived with a stretcher. They put it down by his side and helped him on to it. Then they picked it up and disappeared in the ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... lines of nationality. Nevertheless, it is a fact that the really amusing story has an almost universal appeal. I have seen in an American country newspaper a town correspondent's humorous effort in which he gave Si Perkins's explanation of being in jail. And that explanation ran on all fours with a Chinese story ages and ages old. The local correspondent did not plagiarize from the Chinaman: merely, the humorous bent of the two was identical. In the ancient Oriental tale, a man who wore the thief's collar as a punishment was questioned by an acquaintance concerning ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... valerian," said I; on which they poked out their seven noses, and I ran at them with my spines, for a father who is not an Encyclopaedia on all fours must adopt some method of checking the inquisitiveness ...
— Brothers of Pity and Other Tales of Beasts and Men • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... couple of yards behind the spot where we were standing. If they had leaped fairly and kept their feet, they would have been on us before we could have moved. But Fortune ordered it that, zeal outrunning discretion, the first of the two should catch his foot in the woodwork and fall on all fours, while the second, unable to check his spring, alighted on top of him, and, judging from the stifled yell which followed, must have ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... began to crawl on Christmas Day. Before, he used to roll. We throw things across the floor and he crawls for them like a little dog, on all fours.... ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
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