spring-trap

• “He's still holding my fist, tight below the jaw, two little hands as hard as a spring-trap.”

  Fictionaut: Stand Up

• “She had a blunt face with a mouth like a spring-trap, prominent eyes fortified by pebble-lenses and thin, grey hair lugged back into a bun.”

  Tied Up in Tinsel

• “There could be a dozen people in there - contacts, couriers, operators, radio-signallers - and I could walk straight into a spring-trap especially if Benedikt had talked before he died: if they knew he'd given me this address they'd expect me here.”

  The Striker Portfolio

• ““I tried to say as much but he shut up like a spring-trap.””

  Killer Dolphin

• “It is no schoolmaster's manual, no elaborated system set to snap like a spring-trap upon the heads of incautious meddlers, -- it is only the very aroma of the married life of a wise and tender poet.”

  The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 72, October, 1863

• “When a camel expires in the plain near some nomads 'tents, they sometimes set a spring-trap for jackals near the carcase -- they eat these beasts and sell their skin for a few francs; the traps are craftily concealed underground, with a little brushwood thrown over them to aid the deception.”

  Fountains in the Sand Rambles Among the Oases of Tunisia

• “It seems like the world's a big spring-trap, and us in it,' she said slowly.”

  Gone to Earth

• “Guido speaks at first with calm, smiling irony, and later rages like a wild beast caught in a spring-trap; in both cases the verse fits his mood.”

  Robert Browning: How to Know Him

• “The admission was not a wise one; it blanched Dick's lips, but it closed them like a spring-trap.”

  The Gold-Stealers A Story of Waddy

• “They had violent convulsions, in which their jaws snapped with the force of a spring-trap set for vermin.”

  Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft

Show 10 more examples...