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More "Wreckage" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... bad crash. Harry could see a dash of white spray in the sunlight as the gasoline splashed upward at the moment of the smash. The monoplane heeled over and the pilot went out of sight behind the wreckage. The graceful white tail stood high ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Flying Corps • James R. Driscoll
... discarded flights of stairs and banisters, were heaped together pell-mell under the dust, among ropes and pulleys, a wilderness of damaged, broken, demolished, cast-off stage properties. Bernard Jansoulet, as he lay amid that wreckage, his shirt torn away from his chest, at once bleeding and bloodless, was the typical shipwrecked victim of life, bruised and cast ashore with the pitiable debris of his artificial splendor broken and scattered by the Parisian whirlpool. Paul, broken-hearted, gazed sadly ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... slender tree which had evidently been placed there, with several others, for the purpose of forming a rough and ready bridge; but its companions had been removed by floods, for they lay tossed on the bank further down among other wreckage. ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... direction suddenly, after speaking to Mary, he found that he was the object of the same inquiring scrutiny that he had been on the porch. In lulls he caught the old man's face in repose. It had sadness, then, the sadness of wreckage; sadness against which he seemed to fence in his wordy ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... midst of pain and misery, hunger and death. We do not get much of the rush and glory of battle in the "Linseed Lancers." We deal with the wreckage thrown up by the tide of battle, and wreckage is always a sad sight—human wreckage most ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... the absolute wrong-headedness of the whole thing, the self-deception of a criminal idealist shattering his existence like a thunder-clap out of a clear sky, and re-echoing amongst the wreckage in the false assumptions of those other fools. Fancy that hungry and piteous imbecile furnishing to the curiosity of the revolutionist refugees this utterly fantastic detail! He appreciated it as by no means constituting a danger. On the contrary. As things stood it was for his ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... of the water, just covered by some wreckage, the chauffeur lay motionless. The masked man crawled from under the wreckage and looked at him ...
— The Romance of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... current came a rakish york boat floating as idly as a piece of wreckage. Its hold was filled with bags of grain, on which squatted and lay many dark figures scarcely to be distinguished from ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... hat and sword, and went to the door, but Nonna caught me by the skirt, and, "Is he mad then?" she cried; and, "What are you about, Don Francis? Will you meet the padron on the stair and let him up to see this wreckage? Madonna purissima, what is one to do with ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... that were seen against the sky, but as if not far above land, oftenest upon the coast of Durham. They were mistaken for beacons by sailors. Wreck after wreck occurred. The fishermen were accused of displaying false lights and profiting by wreckage. The fishermen answered that mostly only old vessels, worthless except for insurance, were ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... bawling of wind and water sounded the crash. The ship, with only a small sail upon the poop, blew about into the trough of the sea. A mountain of green water thundered over the prow, bearing away men and wreckage. The "governor," Brasidas's mate, flung away the ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... begin to gather thick and ominously, and first with a distant roar and then with the fury and the voice of a hurricane, the wind sweeps fiercely on, howling and whistling over the great green sea that is quickly strewn with wreckage; when the colossal champions of the forest are struck by lightning and the fall of their huge branches and gigantic trunks increase the general uproar, whilst the boom of Heaven's artillery thunders around their huts, then the trembling Sakais throng together. They ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... you understand, I'll have to go back," said the doctor musingly, "a long way back. Some of the story you already know, but now I want you to know it all. But first—when you found me in that hospital, a useless bit of human wreckage, and forced me back into life with your scorn of a coward and your cutting words, what did you think? What did I tell you? It is all hazy ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... solitary isles. The coastward sides of the downs terminate in granitic rocks which are a terror to navigators. Even under the guard of three lighthouses and a lightship, thousands of lives have been lost on the Scillies, and there is a prodigious litter of wreckage wedged in among the granite boulders. Probably the worst disasters were the wreck of Sir Cloudesley Shovell's fleet in 1707, and that of the Schiller in 1875. Of the hundreds of lesser calamities there is no ...
— The Cornish Riviera • Sidney Heath
... the Gate of Tears), a strait between Asia and Africa forming the entrance to the Red Sea, so called from the strong currents which rush through it, and often cause wreckage to ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... a quarter of a mile, where the wagons had stood not grouped and perhaps not guarded, lay heaps of wreckage beside heaps of ashes. One by one the corpses were picked out, here, there, over more than a mile of ground. They had fought, yes, but fought each his own losing individual battle after what ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... of a double life, the wreckage of a promising career. "Just a plain, ordinary thief was Mr. Randall Clayton," said one acute observer; "his case is only extraordinary from the amount taken. And it seems that he robbed for the lucre itself, as the most careful inquiry divulges no stain upon his ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... of driftwood, which is brought by the ocean currents from the Yukon. The ice breaks up first at the head of that great stream, and the debris dams up the river, which overflows its banks, tearing down trees, buildings and whatever borders its course as it breaks its way out to the sea. The wreckage is scattered along the coast for over a hundred miles, and the islands of Bering Sea get a small share. The islanders are constantly on the lookout for the drifting timber, and put out to sea in the stormiest weather ...
— The Dance Festivals of the Alaskan Eskimo • Ernest William Hawkes
... in advance of the others. She reached the group of shacks where the window-lights were blown out and much wreckage strewed the ground. Before an open cellarway stood a ragged and barefooted soldier. He presented arms most grotesquely as ...
— The Mission of Janice Day • Helen Beecher Long
... Moon! She shone on a rude stairway leading up to the bare face of a cliff that topped the hill; and five and forty uncertain steps that had more than once slid down into the street below along with the wreckage of the winter rains, for the cliff was of rock and clay and though the rock may stand until the crack of Doom, the clay mingles with the elements and an annual mud pudding, tons in weight, was deposited on the pavement of the high street, to the joy of the juveniles and ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... roof. By nothing else could he have been so smitten. The roof must have fallen, though the faces around him were still tossing and swaying, though the referee stood counting above him, though there was no wreckage. And the clarity of his mind astonished and pleased him. A brick roof—sure! A brick roof! That was unusual, very unusual. But it had to be that. It was a brick without a doubt ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... looked to where he showed me, and as the ship rose to a great wave, far off I saw a dark speck among white-crested rollers, that rose and fell, and came ever nearer, more swiftly than wreckage should. ...
— Wulfric the Weapon Thane • Charles W. Whistler
... all is to be placed on literature for the young—would have made it her business that at least I was included in the debris. Instead, what do we notice!—a shattered chimney, a ruined stove, broken windows, a wreckage of household utensils; I, alone of all things, miraculously preserved. I do not wish to press the point offensively, but really it would almost seem that it must be you three—you, my dear parent, upon whom will ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... of the gorse in the air, the sound of the clear stream in one's ears, what could be sweeter than to live? and even on dark days, when the wind volleys up from the sea, and the rain dashes on the windows, and the gulls veer and sail overhead, the great guest- room with its fire of wreckage, the women working, the children playing about, must have been a pleasant place enough. But even to the strongest and boldest of the old squires the end came, as the waggon with the coffin jolted along the stony lane, and the bell of Germoe ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... not able ter come ter-night," answered Jenny with dignity, and the beast grinned, displaying a wreckage ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... rotting carcasses, over poisonous streams and through desolate, fire-marked, and ghastly forests of small pines. Everywhere were the traces of the furious flood of humankind that had broken over this height in the early spring. Wreckage of sleighs, abandoned tackle, heaps of camp refuse, clothing, and most eloquent of all the pathway itself, worn into the pitiless iron ledges, made it possible for me to realize something ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... further on, just under the Dean, three or four bodies cast up on the shore, one of them a small drummer-boy, side-drum and all; and near by part of a ship's gig, with 'H.M.S. Primrose' cut on the stern-board. From this point on the shore was littered thick with wreckage and dead bodies—the most of them marines in uniform—and in Godrevy Cove, in particular, a heap of furniture from the captain's cabin, and among it a water-tight box, not much damaged, and full of ...
— The Roll-Call Of The Reef • A. T. Quiller-Couch (AKA "Q.")
... of sand and wreckage, across little inlets made by the waves, in the face of blinding sleet and staggering wind, the life-savers dragged the beach wagon on ...
— Stories of Inventors - The Adventures Of Inventors And Engineers • Russell Doubleday
... scratched his poll and looked down on the wreckage. "I hate to admit it, Val, but the old fox has got us beat; it ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... of emotional interest taken in the incident. At the time I was surprised at this apparent callousness, but I understood it better when I had seen scores of such accidents occur, and had watched the pilots, as in this case, crawl out from the wreckage, and walk sheepishly, and a little shaken, back to their classes. Although the machines were usually badly wrecked, the pilots were rarely severely hurt. The landing chassis of a Bleriot is so strong that it will break the force of a very heavy fall, and the motor, being in front, strikes the ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... do was to go sufficiently slow and follow the curves carefully, so that the heavy waves of our boat, larger than any intended for that channel, might not too much endanger the mud walls, or threaten wreckage to the frail stagings leading to the cabins of the half-aquatic trappers and fishers who ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... working over the mangled bodies of four American soldiers. The street was littered and unexploded hand grenades lay everywhere. Two soldiers had been carrying gunny sacks filled with grenades when one accidentally exploded, it in turn exploding others until the wreckage was complete. A military investigation would report the cause of the accident and the damage wrought, and thus an incident of war would ...
— The Fight for the Argonne - Personal Experiences of a 'Y' Man • William Benjamin West
... street, careened, and rolled over and over, bringing up against a tree on the other side in a twisted tangle of wreckage. ...
— The Jupiter Weapon • Charles Louis Fontenay
... current and drawn thence by the Cohasset tides. Beside this lies a cask ripped from the deck of a Gloucester fishing schooner that sought the halibut even on the chill banks that lie just south of the point of Greenland. And so they come, chips from a Maine shipyard, wreckage from a Bermuda reef, and a thousand tiny things picked up at ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... and went out upon the seaward side. The waves still rose angrily under the grey sky, but were fast abating. He saw in a moment that the shore was full of wreckage; there were spars and timbers everywhere, and all the litter of a ship. Some of the timbers were flung so high upon the rocks that he saw how great the violence of the storm had been. He walked along, and in a minute he came upon the body of a man ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... crest has passed there are miles and miles of inundated land, with only trees and half-submerged buildings and floating wreckage to break the monotony; just a vast lake of yellow, muddy water, swirling and boiling as it seeks to find ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... the well-remembered wreckage; the panels above the doors, which had contained valuable pictures, bare of all but empty frames; broken marbles, mirrors carried off. In old days I was afraid to go up the state staircase and cross these vast, deserted ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... Almighty, have no right to despair. To despair is to lose faith; to despair is to forget God Without God we can do nothing in this frightful chaos of human misery. But with God we can do all things, and in the faith that He has made in His image all the children of men we face even this hideous wreckage of humanity with a cheerful confidence that if we are but faithful to our own high calling He will not fail to open ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... drawn under—down, down. He thought it was the end, and when again he bobbed up to the surface, his breath was all but gone. The great bulk of the vessel was no longer in sight, and Jimmie was struggling in a whirlpool, along with upset boats and oars and deck-chairs and miscellaneous wreckage, and scores of people clinging to such objects, or swimming frantically to ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... the captain emerged last from the cabin, and both stared upward for a moment at the gaps in the slender, sky-scraping top-hamper, where, only minutes before, the main- and mizzen-topmasts had been. A second moment they devoted to the wreckage of the same on deck—the mizzen-topmast, thrust through the spanker and supported vertically by the stout canvas, thrashing back and forth with each thrash of the sail, the main-topmast squarely across the ruined companionway to ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... guns belched out their volleys of grape, and with awful effect. The boats were literally torn to pieces, and their mangled occupants sank under the smooth waters of the lagoon; only two or three seemed to have escaped unwounded, and as they clung to pieces of wreckage our savage allies, with yells of fury, picked them off with their muskets; for the same native who had seen my husband bound in the boat had ...
— "Old Mary" - 1901 • Louis Becke
... who was at that moment being pressed fondly to his side, in a state of mind almost as dumbfounded as his own. "Here!" was all he said as he pressed the plate and napkin into her hand and departed forcibly for the hall, leaving a spectacular wreckage of trains behind him. ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... with the difficult and laborious situation. The dinner bread was baked from flour taken out of a hundred-pound sack that was found lying on top of an immense boulder far above the river. This was flour that had been rescued by the former party from the wreckage of the No-Name, but as they could not add it to their remaining heavily laden boats, the Major had been compelled to leave it lying here. They needed it badly enough towards the end. It was still sweet and good, but we could ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... understand what this implies. The west winds swept through that gateway, reaping as they went, and here and there tremendous trees lay strewed athwart one another with their branches spread abroad in impenetrable tangles. Some had fallen amid the wreckage left by previous gales, which the forest had partly made good, and there was scarcely a rod of the way that was not obstructed by half-rotted trunks. Then there were thick bushes, and an undergrowth of willows where the soil was damp, with thorny brakes ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... some colored troops near by engaged in repairing the roads, and a number of us determined to get up a quartet to sing for the men. We went to where the negroes had built themselves shelters from corrugated-iron sheets and miscellaneous bits of wreckage from the town. We collected three quarters of our quartet and were directed to the mess-shack for the fourth. As we approached I could hear sounds of altercation and a voice that we placed immediately as that of our quarry arose in indignant warning: ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... about the same thing. It was abandoned quite a way out, but off this part of the coast. There is a current setting in towards shore, at this point, I'm told, and I thought I might get some news of her, or find some of the wreckage floating in on the beach. That's why you find ...
— The Motor Boys on the Pacific • Clarence Young
... he heard certain dreadful cries which he never forgot as long as he lived. They were the death shrieks of his unhappy crew, imprisoned below among the bursting steam-pipes and boilers, the cascade of white-hot coals from the furnaces, and the crumpling wreckage of machinery and torn plates; and he knew that his trim little ship and his gallant comrades were gone from him ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... supply exceedingly minute and precarious stepping-stones by which to cross from Ausonius to the Chanson de Roland. From the earliest literary stages of the Teutonic tongues we have, except in the case of Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic, very little wreckage of time; and Anglo-Saxon at least presents the puzzling characteristic that its earliest remains are, coeteris paribus, nearly as complete and developed as the earliest remains of Greek. In German itself, whether High or Low, the change from ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... about among this varied collection, the salt spray in her face, the surging breakers sometimes unexpectedly curling around her rubber boots. There was a new and wonderful fascination to her in examining this ancient wreckage, speculating on the contents of unopened tins, and searching ever farther and farther along the shore for possible treasure-trove of even greater interest ...
— The Dragon's Secret • Augusta Huiell Seaman
... the footstool and the fireplace in the thickest fog that England had ever known. And the horrid black heart of Mr. Jinks was discovered beneath the wreckage of a special carriage next to the luggage van. It was simply black as coal and very nasty indeed. The little boy who found it was a porter's son, whose mother was so poor that she took in washing for ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... the day. It was a raw February evening, sleet was falling in the street, a piercing easterly wind drove even through his thick overcoat. In such doorways as offered protection from the bitter elements the wreckage of humanity which clings to the West end of London, as the singed moth flutters about the flame that destroys it, ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... endless, immeasurable. Then Michael appeared, stepping across the wreckage, and came towards her. The relief was almost unendurable. She stretched out ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... long corridors on the ground floor the inmates were rushing out with their little children in their arms. Some were dragging valueless possessions—the first things they could lay hands on. All that was left of the timber-work after the wreckage of the terrible winter was now brightly blazing. Pelle tried to run up the burning stairs, but fell through. The inmates were hanging half out of their windows, staring down with eyes full of madness; every moment they ran out ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... instruments serving their own ends. Whoever tells you that Austria in alliance with Prussia intends to build up Poland once again is a blinded dreamer. The result of a victory for the Germans and Austrians would mean a new partitioning of Poland, a yet greater wreckage of our nation. Grasp this, listen to no seducers. Remain passive, ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... the words, and at the quaint spectacle of the two little creatures sitting amid the wreckage in the middle of the table not a bit abashed by the novelty of their conspicuous position. Only Evadne, who was standing behind her mother's chair, remained grave. She seemed to be considering the situation severely, and, acting on her own responsibility, she ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... stood out now gaunt and terrible in the pitiless light of dawn. Yet here and there some object had had the luck to escape—a white railway signal here, the end of a greenhouse there, white and fresh amid the wreckage. Never before in the history of warfare had destruction been so indiscriminate and so universal. And shining with the growing light of the east, three of the metallic giants stood about the pit, their ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... other story that Hank Simons told me,—the one about the mill back of Woodstock caving in from the freshet and burying the miller's girl. No one dared lift the timbers until Jonathan crawled in. The child was pinned down between the beams, and the water rose so fast they feared the wreckage would sweep the mill. Jonathan clung to the sills waist-deep in the torrent, crept under the floor timbers, and then bracing his back held the beam until he dragged her clear. It happened a good many years ago, but Hank always claimed ...
— A Gentleman Vagabond and Some Others • F. Hopkinson Smith
... her people flew aft to the poop to prevent the water rushing in; but the vessel was practically split in twain, and sank in a few moments. All around were dead and dying men, disabled galleys, floating wreckage; the Galleon of Venice had taken a terrible toll of the Osmanli; the order to retreat out of range was given, and never was order obeyed ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... were dancing at a dozen points about the wreckage on the listing deck. A grotesque broken thing, queerly illuminated by the growing fires, was hanging over the wheel—the body of Larsen. No living thing was visible; and Dan, after a second look at the wreck of the bow, knew that he must be the sole ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... sea. Bit by bit their foothold vanished from beneath them. One by one they were swept off into the seething cauldron of the storm. At last but one man remained, the cook of the ill-fated vessel, who floated about for three days on a piece of wreckage, until, half-starved and nearly crazed, he was picked up by a passing vessel, and told the tale of the wreck. So ended the career of the patriotic and gallant Capt. Wickes and his crew, and such is the fate that every stout fellow braves when he dons his ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... mystic meaning when Abbott discovered Fran. Suddenly it became only a road—nay, it became nothing. It seemed that the sight of Fran always made wreckage of the ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... a happening on this very spot almost. It was a ship from Cadiz for Savannah. She had taken fire. He picked up among others three people lashed to some pieces of wreckage—a man, a woman, and their baby. She was dead and he dying. He did die later aboard his ship, the predecessor of the Bess. The baby lived. Do you recall ...
— Wide Courses • James Brendan Connolly
... and the staircase and downstairs hall were flooded with light. Then he and Judge Scott, revolvers in hand, cautiously descended. There was no need for this caution. White Fang had done his work. In the midst of the wreckage of overthrown and smashed furniture, partly on his side, his face hidden by an arm, lay a man. Weedon Scott bent over, removed the arm and turned the man's face upward. A gaping throat explained the ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... waiting for the summons, was ready for it. His hands had tightened a little as he heard the wreckage of the room above. He knew that the woman was no longer there, he knew that with his capture they would forget all about her for a little while. The hours to-night would be precious to her. Two men loved her, and Richard Barrington was ...
— The Light That Lures • Percy Brebner
... to a corresponding assortment of Europeans, a larger proportion of the former will be leading alert, active, and useful lives. Within a given social area there will be a smaller amount of social wreckage and a larger amount of wholesome and profitable achievement. The mass of the American people is, on the whole, more deeply stirred, more thoroughly awake, more assertive in their personal demands, and ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... He thought when he had given the note that he could meet it handily; he had twice succeeded in renewing it, and now had come to the time when he must raise a certain sum or be counted among the wreckage. He had been hopeful, but found himself on the day of payment without money and without resources. How many thousands of men who have engaged in our tigerish dollar struggle have felt the sinking at heart which ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... the wreckage of typical White Slavery pass this place daily, for it is located at the edge of the great West Side dumping ground for broken, diseased women and young girls whose bodies can no longer be profitably used in the higher class dives of the South Side segregated districts, and who must ...
— Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls • Jean Turner-Zimmermann
... of reality left them anywhere, and that little is fast fading away before the needs of the manufacturer and his ragged regiment of workers, and before the enthusiasm of the archaeological restorer of the dead past. Soon there will be nothing left except the lying dreams of history, the miserable wreckage of our museums and picture- galleries, and the carefully guarded interiors of our aesthetic drawing-rooms, unreal and foolish, fitting witnesses of the life of corruption that goes on there, so pinched and meagre ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... She mowed the guard down and a half-thousandth of a second later she plowed into the guardhouse. The structure erupted like a box of stove-matches hit with a heavy-caliber soft-nosed slug, like a house of cards and an air-jet. There was a roar and a small gout of flame and then out of the flying wreckage on the far side came Farrow and her stolen car. Out of the mess of brimstone and shingles she came, turning end for end in a crazy, metal-crushing twist and spin. She ground to a broken halt before the last of the debris landed, and ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... told all: two of the ship's giant spars had gone by the board; entangled in her own wreckage, the vessel thumped and pounded with ominous violence against some sunken reef. The full scope of the plight of the once noble ship was plainly made manifest. Though thick streams of scud sped across the sky, the southern ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... election held four months later Smuts scored a brilliant triumph. The South African Party increased its representation by eighteen seats, while the Nationalists lost heavily. The Labour Party was almost lost in the wreckage. The net result was that the Premier obtained a working majority of twenty-two, which guarantees a stable and loyal Government for at least ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... bandy-legged, little stick of a man, arrayed in frayed and tarnished splendour of sky-blue waist-jacket, silver lace, and jack-boots of which the soles and upper leathers threatened speedy and final divorce. In all weathers this bit of human wreckage—Jackie Deeds by name—might be seen wandering aimlessly about the vacant yard, or seated upon the bench beside the portico of the silent, bow-windowed inn, pulling at a, too often empty, clay-pipe ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... hear and understand all that was said to him, even in our Island tongue which was not native to him, but he had no speech. The story ran that he had been picked off a piece of wreckage, somewhere off the North African coast, by the ship in which my grandfather made his last voyage, very many years ago. He was very intelligent and quick of hearing, but dumb, and it was said that he had ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... to the top of the hill, past dead men and horses, and much wreckage of caissons and gun wheels. "There are probably sharpshooters in that wood across the stream," said Jackson. "Do not expose yourself unnecessarily, colonel." Arrived at the level atop they took post in a little copse, wildly torn and blackened, ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... dropped from the cliff house doorway. By the time Lennon reached the tumbledown ranch hut Slade was at the top of the ladder and Pete was beginning to climb. Lennon dashed on along the cliff foot. He gave no heed to the dead Apaches that lay huddled or sprawled amidst the wreckage of the wooden ladder poles and rungs. At the foot of the rope ladder he thrust his rifle through the back of his belt and swung up as ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... the railroads,—or rather they did count on them, and they were disappointed. A freight was derailed just south of Hampton, tearing up the track for a hundred yards, and piling the right of way with wreckage of every description. Macloud's train was twelve hours late leaving Hampton. Then, to add additional ill luck, they ran into a wash out some fifty miles further on; with the result that they did not reach New York until after the markets ...
— In Her Own Right • John Reed Scott
... be a false step? As she paused, looking at Dion, marking the hard obstinacy in his eyes, feeling the hard, hot grip of his hand, it occurred to her that perhaps she had blundered upon the one way out, the way of escape. Amid the wreckage of his beliefs she knew that Dion still held to one belief, which had been shaken once, but which her cool adroitness had saved and made firm in a critical moment. If she destroyed it now would he let her go? Just how low had he fallen through her? She wished ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... had had to do with a different Kitty. Young as she still was, the first exquisite softness of the expanding life was gone; things harder, stranger, more inexplicable than any which those who knew her best had yet perceived, seemed now and then to come to the surface, like wreckage ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of the vehicle was crunched under the cowcatcher and the child was almost borne away with it. Then the pressure lightened. With a great breath of relief and joy Ralph drew the child towards him, tangled up in the wreckage of the baby carriage. ...
— Ralph on the Engine - The Young Fireman of the Limited Mail • Allen Chapman
... on the beach of a bay near at hand, whither much of the wreckage had been carried. Her eyes were closed, but her countenance showed perfect calm; only the pale violet of death blended itself upon her cheeks with the rose of modesty. One of her hands was firmly closed. I disengaged from it, with much difficulty, a little casket; within the casket was ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... wouldn't cause such a wreckage as this," said Snap firmly. His senses were now coming back to him. "Well, I never!" ...
— Guns And Snowshoes • Captain Ralph Bonehill
... dismissed coolies and ponies, and paddled away over the flood water. The country was simply a vast lake, the main road merely marked by a dense row of poplars. Trees rose promiscuously out of the calm and sunlit water, wisps of maize and wreckage clinging to their lower boughs. Presently the road showed in patches, a broad waterfall breaking it every here and there as the imprisoned waters from above sought the slightly lower channel ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... there, amid the disasters and wreckage of their voyages of discovery, they will find something new, some fresh way of embellishing life, or of revealing the heart ...
— Quotations from the Works of John Galsworthy • David Widger
... framed in golden garlands, with satyrs and cupids playing among the leaves. The parquet floor had been laid down by the present Marquis, and Chesnel had picked up the furniture at sales of the wreckage of old chateaux between 1793 and 1795; so that there were Louis Quatorze consoles, tables, clock-cases, andirons, candle-sconces and tapestry-covered chairs, which marvelously completed a stately room, large out of all proportion to the house. ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... day, that is—the Germans had dropped a half-dozen incendiary shells into the building and it had burned in ten minutes. Most of the men who had been there then were still there, under the smoking mass of wreckage; the smell of burned human flesh was in ...
— They Shall Not Pass • Frank H. Simonds
... must go and the lodges be flooded. The crest had been reached, however, and the flood came no higher. Instead it began to recede, vanishing as rapidly as it had come. It left the low ground around the beaver pond a mass of sticky mud and tangled wreckage. ...
— Followers of the Trail • Zoe Meyer
... like ripe cocoanuts. The subsiding wave showed them on the ground, some lying motionless, others squirming and writhing. They reminded him strangely of ants. He was not shocked. He had risen above horror. Quite as a matter of course he noted the succeeding wave sweep the sand clean of the human wreckage. A third wave, more colossal than any he had yet seen, hurled the church into the lagoon, where it floated off into the obscurity to leeward, half-submerged, reminding him for all the world ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... noiselessly. The water would rise inch by inch, covering the grass and shrubs, covering the trees and houses, covering the monuments and the mountain tops. All life would be choked off, noiselessly: birds, men, elephants, pigs, children: noiselessly floating corpses amid the litter of the wreckage of the world. Forty days and forty nights the rain would fall till the waters covered ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... to the four hundred and fifty miles of Straits. They could afford the time to float back and forward with the ice packs for six weeks, and as many as seven vessels have been wrecked in ten years. To this tale of wreckage in the Straits, friends of the Hudson ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... it would give me any pleasure to break any man in this company,' said Mottram. 'There isn't enough excitement in it, and it's foolish.' He crossed over to the worn and battered little camp-piano,— wreckage of a married household that had once held the ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... buildings have by daylight, its white walls blotched like a drunkard's skin with the smoke and water, and its charred timbers sticking out under the ruins of the upper storey like unkempt hair under a bonnet worn awry. There were men working among the wreckage, directing each other with guttural disparaging cries, moving efficiently yet slowly, as if the direness of the damage had made them lose all heart. Ellen stopped to watch them, laying her neck over the top plank of the fence as a foal might do; there was nothing that did not ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... of Old St. Paul's had come down and the huge mass of wreckage been cleared away, working from the west the excavations for the new foundations were begun. The old cathedral had rested on a layer of loam, or "pot earth" or "brick earth," near the surface; and wells ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of St. Paul - An Account of the Old and New Buildings with a Short Historical Sketch • Arthur Dimock
... bleeds for others' aches, and I will ease your pain and smart unless the language breaks. And so to Bildad and his mate I made a helpful talk, with vital truths that elevate and break disasters' shock; I pointed out that stricken men should not yield to the worst, but from the wreckage rise again ...
— Rippling Rhymes • Walt Mason
... the old boy, 'that when the wreckage is cleared away we shall find the mangled bodies of several that perished when the bolts descended from a clear sky upon ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... presence of grown people who were white all over, turned in his tracks and followed Mrs. Williams's cat to the great outdoors. Duke preceded Verman. Mrs. Cullen vanished. Of the apparition, only wreckage and a rightfully apprehensive ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... little croon of pleasure, Stud falls towards the fireplace. Suddenly he stops, beholding the-fallen wreckage. For a fraction of a second the fetters of a generation of servile habits are almost broken. A fugitive expression of surprise passes over his face. Then, remembering himself, he stumbles over the debris and, groping among the cinders, picks up ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 1, 1914 • Various
... what had happened, and took him in to see the wreckage left after that sudden storm. Tom shook his head as he stood in the yard looking down ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... and jagged. In a twinkling the lights went out. There was a scuffling, a struggling in the corridor, cries and shouting, the sound of wood splintering, the blows of an axe,—a rushing forward of heavy bodies and the trampling of feet. The doors burst open, and a cordon of police dashed over the wreckage, cursing, shouting—and then stopped on the threshold, staring in amazement and panting with ...
— The Black Cross • Olive M. Briggs
... huge waves rolled up, carrying wreckage and bodies on their crest. Then, with all the terror of destruction about him, Frohman said to his associates, with the serene smile ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... overthrown. One has been uprooted bodily; all the leaders and branches of the others have been wrenched from the main trunk; and the three still standing are bare poles and broken wreckage. Until one visits the spot one can have no conception of the wholesale destruction that the hurricane has wrought; until he looks on the huge rosy-hearted branches he cannot guess the tremendous force with which the tornado had fallen upon that "sable ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... with the wreckage, return good for evil. How, in that office, a complete set of "Gibbon" was scarred all along the back as by a flint; how so much black and copying ink came to be mingled with Manders's gore on the ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... time or other there was a ship. I don't think it was smashed up, or I'd have seen wreckage when I cruised around before landing. That dog was either left here ...
— Dead Man's Planet • William Morrison
... and—fail to explode; when the devil is in charge of all the motors, and clutches develop play that would scare a shore-going mechanic bald; when batteries begin to give off death instead of power, and atop of all, ice or wreckage of the strewn seas racks and wrenches the hull till the whole leaking bag of tricks limps home on six missing cylinders and one ditto propeller, plus the indomitable will of the red-eyed husky scarecrows ...
— Sea Warfare • Rudyard Kipling
... ourselves living in a kindlier world when the anguish of to-day is over-past. Much of our old civilization, with its veneer of politeness and its heart of barbarism, will have been riven as the ranges were riven by the earthquake. But out of the wreckage shall come the healthier day. The wounds will heal as they always heal, and the scars will stay as they always stay; but they will stay to warn us against perpetuating our ancient follies. Empires will never again regard their militarism as ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... stickler, the fly-speckler, the bully and the sadist serve only to encumber those parts of the establishment which they touch; their subordinates spend part of their own strength clearing away the wreckage which these misfits make. ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... it take to itself the aspect of a dissolved dream. This letter, then, will contain cheque for the $100 which you have paid. And will you tell Irving for me—I can't get up courage enough to talk about this misfortune myself, except to you, whom by good luck I haven't damaged yet that when the wreckage presently floats ashore he will get a good deal of his $500 back; and a dab at a time I will make up ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... had time to speak to Owen of a dream which she had dreamed a few nights before, and in which she was much interested. She had seen him borne on the top of a huge wave, clinging to a piece of wreckage, alone in the solitary circle of the sea. But Owen, when he came downstairs dressed for the concert, looked no longer like a seafarer. He wore an embroidered waistcoat, his necktie was tied in a butterfly bow, and the three pearl studs, which she ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... mile above the station. That was about one o'clock in the mornin'. 'Bout h'af-past two Sim Gould—he was drownded the next summer, fishin' on the Banks—telephoned from the shanty BELOW the station—the one a mile or so 'tother side of the cable house, Mr. Hazeltine—that wreckage was washin' up abreast of where he was; that was six miles from where the longboat come ashore. So there we was. There wa'n't any way of tellin' whereabouts she was layin'; she might have been anywheres along them six ...
— Cap'n Eri • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... and, we must admit it, smuggling, too, whenever he got a chance. This summer evening he had finished his day's work early, and while waiting for his supper he strolled along the sands a little way, to see if there was any wreckage to be seen, for it was long since he had had any luck in that way, and he was very much put ...
— Cornwall's Wonderland • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... of the English breed, which made us suppose that they had been landed from some English vessel. We were confirmed in this belief by discovering an old hen-coop, in which they had probably been washed ashore. There were other pieces of wreckage scattered about, but the hut itself was composed entirely of the products ...
— Peter Trawl - The Adventures of a Whaler • W. H. G. Kingston
... to wreck the car, but even then the scheme is blocked. Tim must be accounted for afterward. The boy must see his passengers and tell of the accident or there will be search made for him under the wreckage, and talk in the papers, reminding the town of the Suburban's existence, and Regan's enemies that a charter is about to ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... from the waters near beside him. A voice—Agias's voice—was calling out for help. The sound of his freedman's cries drove the Roman to action. Twice the waves lifted him, and he saw nothing; but at the third time he lit on two forms clinging to a bit of wreckage, and yet struggling together. A few powerful strokes sent him beside them, and, to his unutterable astonishment, he beheld in the person who was battling with Agias for possession of the float none other than Pratinas. There are times when nothing has opportunity to appear wonderful. This ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... This, with great dexterity, he managed to do, and we came to a standstill not more than a foot or so from the wall. This proved a chastening experience; we pictured our aeroplane dashed against the wall, and reduced to a mass of wreckage. Very cautiously we lifted round the tail of the machine. It was impossible to switch off the motor and have a rest, because, if we had stopped it, we should not have been able to start it again without our gear, which was away on the ...
— Learning to Fly - A Practical Manual for Beginners • Claude Grahame-White
... relief, began to darken in our little room, where we were holding our watch. The tropic night closes quickly in. Soon the city was shrouded in darkness, and we sallied out to the beach at the head of the bay to find relief in movement. The time passed quicker then, and at last we sat down on some wreckage there and watched the tropic night as it revealed its wealth of stars, and sitting there we began to philosophize, moralizing upon the destiny of man and his relations to things seen and unseen, upon spiritual force; most of all upon divine justice, which in the end evens ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... turned the elbow of the drive—and enclose her faithful nurse and foster-mother in arms of child-like love. But destiny ruled otherwise. In vain she waited. Sarah Watson returned no more, death having elected to take her rather horribly to himself some hours previously amid the flaming wreckage of ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... coming up—barefooted, coatless and breathless. Grant and Fenn had run less than fifteen hundred feet—Dick lived a mile from the shaft house. Grant Adams's mind flashed suspicion toward the Bowmans. He went to Dick across the wreckage ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... curtain on the last act of a tragedy. Even if the great steamship were stopped at once, her momentum would carry her a mile beyond the spot before a boat could be lowered, and then it would be almost impossible to find the floating wreckage in the fog. So, usually, the steamships press on with unchecked speed, their officers perhaps breathing a sigh of pity for the victims, but reflecting that it is a sailor's peril to which those on the biggest and staunchest of ships are exposed almost ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... and attempted to throw him, and he was twisting and writhing out of the advantage of the other's hold. They reeled about the room, locked in each other's arms, and came down with a crash across the splintered wreckage of a wicker chair. Joe was underneath, with arms spread out and held and with Martin's knee on his chest. He was panting and gasping for breath ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... a cry, and as I turned my eyes away, I saw him holding a wire with the insulation burned off. He had picked it up from the wreckage of the floor. It led to a bent and blackened can - that had once been a ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... started to speak. "That isn't all. The flapping canvas, with part of the gaff, pounded around like the devil let loose for the ten seconds before we couldn't loosen the halyards and lower away the wreckage, but in that time it had parted the mainstay in two like a ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... to shut myself up alone in a little room that I have rented at the end of an unfrequented lane near the Jardin des Plantes, whither I have had transported all the wreckage saved from my past life: books, knickknacks, portraits, and I know not what. My intention is that I shall remain there unknown to all, my name, whence I come, where I go, my thoughts, my hatred, my past ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... and creaking and swaying. All that swiftly passed under his keen eyes was recorded in his memory—the uncouth crowd of laborers, the hardest lot he had ever seen; the talk, noise, smoke; the rickety old clattering coaches; the wayside dumps and heaps and wreckage. But they all seemed parts of a beautiful romance to him. Neale saw through the eyes of golden ambition and ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... floor. Beauchamp remembered what had brought her home from the Alps. He cast a cold look on his uncle talking with Cecilia: granite, as he thought. And the reflux of that slight feeling of despair seemed to tear down with it in wreckage every effort he had made in life, and cry failure on him. Yet he was hoping that he had not been ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... An exhibition of Zeppelin wreckage has been opened in the Middle Temple Gardens. The authorities are said to be considering an offer confidentially communicated to them by the German Government to add Count ZEPPELIN as an exhibit to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, February 14, 1917 • Various
... this wreckage had not touched her. There was no stain, no crumpled leaf. She was a fresh wonder, even after this, out of a chrysalis. It was this amazing newness, this virginity of blossom from which ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... and there was no answer from the shack or the store. If she were under that wreckage.... Frantically we clawed at the timbers, clearing a space, looking for a slip of a girl with long auburn braids of hair. It was too dark to see clearly, and in my terror I was ripping the boards in any fashion while Jack strove ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... acclamation. His spirit mounted up and up in a transport of emotional splendor; broken visions thronged his mind of sacrifice, renouncement, death. The fire expired and the night grew cold. His ecstasy sank; he became once more aware of the human wreckage about him, the detritus of which he was ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... carriages and commenced to help the infirm to alight. The exiles were all so stiff with travel that they could scarcely move at first. The windows of the train were grey with faces. Such faces! All of them old, even the little children's. The Boche makes a present to France of only such human wreckage as is unuseful for his purposes. He is an acute man of business. The convoy consisted of two classes of persons—the very ancient and the very juvenile. You can't set a man of eighty to dig trenches and you ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... dressed by Andy first of all. Mark and the professor made some attempt to look over the wreckage. The disaster was so great ...
— On a Torn-Away World • Roy Rockwood
... the property in the time limit set. I informed the gentlemen that I could make my bid considerably higher if I was granted more time in which to remove the debris. President Francis asked me how much more I could bid, and I told him I could not state offhand. The conditions as to the removal of the wreckage in the specified time, namely, three months, were somewhat prohibitive, as it would be impossible to fulfill the requirements without an enormous expense. It would be well-nigh impossible to get sufficient men and teams on the work to complete the same in the specified time. ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... important in the eyes of their captors that they disregarded the two dead men who lay bloody and broken amidst the wreckage as they might have disregarded dead frogs ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... gunboat had met with floating wreckage, which the eddy had thrown to the surface. This was part of the sunken mill, but could not be distinguished from the remains of a vessel. When the brigantine had passed the island a reach of a ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... an immense horizon, the first gleams of the future; and between these two worlds—something like the Ocean which separates the old world from Young America, something vague and floating, a troubled sea filled with wreckage, traversed from time to time by some distant sail or some ship breathing out a heavy vapor; the present, in a word, which separates the past from the future, which is neither the one nor the other, which resemble both, and where one can not know whether, at each step, one is treading ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... But he mistrusted his skill in dealing with fatal illness. A blunder might destroy everything. Stop!—he knew something better than that. Had not the transport that brought him out passed a drowned body afloat, and wreckage, even in the English Channel? Shipwreck was the thing! He decided on sending Nicholas Cropredy, his wife's brother-in-law, across the Channel on business—to Antwerp, say—and making Phoebe and little Ruth go out to nurse him through a fever. Their ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... will republish them, though it's a grievous thought to me that that effigy in the German cap - likewise the other effigy of the noisome old man with the long hair, telling indelicate stories to a couple of deformed negresses in a rancid shanty full of wreckage - should be perpetuated. I may seem to speak in pleasantry - it is only a seeming - that German cap, sir, would be found, when I come to die, imprinted on my heart. Enough - my heart is too full. Adieu. - Yours ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... after a storm one finds on the beach all sorts of strange flotsam. Bernard Clowes was a bit of human wreckage left on the sands of society by the storm of the war. When it broke out he was a second lieutenant in the Winchester Regiment, a keen polo player and first class batsman who rarely opened a book. He was sent out ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... miracle, I would be kept in funds indefinitely. I do recall my amazement at the abrupt ending of my dreams. I woke up one morning to discover I had no money, no assets. There were no odds and ends, even, of wreckage which I could salvage for one more week of the ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... plausible, Malone thought. "Did the prowl car boys find any traces of it when they examined the wreckage?" he said. ...
— Out Like a Light • Gordon Randall Garrett
... all nations were fascinated by the mystery attaching to the fate of Laperouse. Every ship that sailed the Pacific hoped to obtain tidings or remains. From time to time rumours arose of the discovery of relics. One reported the sight of wreckage; another that islanders had been seen dressed in French uniforms; another that a cross of St. Louis had been found. But the element of probability in the various stories evaporated on investigation. Flinders, sailing north from Port Jackson in the INVESTIGATOR ...
— Laperouse • Ernest Scott
... her, startled, remembering the wreckage of womanhood he had encountered on the sunken ways of life. She was no fairy. She was flesh and blood, and the possibilities of wreckage were in her as they had been in him even when he lay at his mother's breast. And there was in her eagerness ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... stared about me thus I espied Don Miguel lying among the wreckage of a dismantled gun; his face was towards me and looked as I had seen it an hundred times, save for a smear of blood upon his cheek. Even as I gazed his eyes met mine full and square. For a moment he ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... tobacco-seller, whose stall had suffered disaster. A painted wooden statue of a Cherokee Indian lay face downward across the walk, as the wind had blown it: bellying folds of canvas and tarpaulin hid the wreck of the poor man's stock-in-trade. Beyond this wreckage stood, in order, a vegetable stall, another sweetmeat stall, and a booth in which the boy (who cared little for sweetmeats, and, moreover, had just eaten his macaroon) took much more interest. For it was hung about with cages; and in the cages were birds of all kinds (but the most of them canaries), ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... British or other, but preferred rather to work out their own salvation.' He added many unpleasant remarks about the Reformers. I said to one of his countrymen, 'Why does he, in his safety, flourish about, pinning us deeper down in the wreckage?' ...
— A Woman's Part in a Revolution • Natalie Harris Hammond
... been advised by Brigham Young to look out for the Powell expedition and Asa (Joseph Asay) and his sons continued to watch the river, though a false report had come that the Powell expedition was lost. They were looking for wreckage that might give some indication of the fate of the explorers when Powell's boats appeared. Powell was very appreciative of Asaqy's kindness and wrote enthusiastically of the coming, next day from St. Thomas, of James Leithead, ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... at that same old turning-point once more," he continued—"The Western civilisation of two thousand years, assisted (and sometimes impeded) by the teachings of Christianity, is nearing its end. Out of the vast wreckage of nations, now imminent, only a few individuals can be saved,—and the storm is so close at hand that one can almost hear the mutterings of the thunder! But why should I or you or anyone else think about it? We have ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... of burnt-out ruins. Amid the stones and rubble encumbering the streets, lay broken muskets, wrenched doors, shattered sticks of furniture— mirrors, hangings, women's apparel, children's clothes—loot dropped by the pillagers as valueless, wreckage of the flood. He passed a very few inhabitants, and these said nothing to him; indeed, did not appear to see him, but sat by the ruins of their houses with faces set in a stupid horror. Even the crash of a falling house near by would scarcely ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... indicating a muddy flood of road scrapings, in which were embedded many splinters from the wreckage ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... A Portugee fisherman's picked up and brought in a boat with 'Curlew' painted on her stern, and he saw spars and wreckage driftin' near the empty boat. There's been a hurricane out there. It—it looks bad, ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... caused her to widen the breach between wife and husband by every subtle means in her power; and it was when this idea began to lose colour and substance and drop away among the wreckage of past hopes, that the Baroness ceased to compliment and began to taunt Preston Cheney with his dependence upon his father-in- law, and to otherwise goad and torment the unhappy man. And Preston Cheney grew into the habit of staying anywhere longer ...
— An Ambitious Man • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... the ground floor the inmates were rushing out with their little children in their arms. Some were dragging valueless possessions—the first things they could lay hands on. All that was left of the timber-work after the wreckage of the terrible winter was now brightly blazing. Pelle tried to run up the burning stairs, but fell through. The inmates were hanging half out of their windows, staring down with eyes full of madness; every moment they ran out onto the platforms ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... to Orotava, in the Canary Islands, in his yacht. The family had departed on the voyage; but before the Blanche, as the white sailing-yacht was called, reached her destination, she encountered a severe gale, and had a hole stove in her planking by a mass of wreckage. Her ship's company were thoroughly exhausted when the Guardian-Mother, bound to the same islands, discovered her, and after almost incredible exertions, saved the yacht ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... who were lucky enough to be entangled with the lighter parts of the wreckage, escaped with their lives. But they were too much injured to get upon their feet, and there they lay, their sufferings made tenfold worse by the stifling air, and the horror of their inexplicable situation, until they were found and humanely relieved, more than ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... and unprecedented facilities to the spirit of innovation. The old local order has been broken up or is now being broken up all over the earth, and everywhere societies deliquesce, everywhere men are afloat amidst the wreckage of their flooded conventions, and still tremendously unaware of the thing that has happened. The old local orthodoxies of behaviour, of precedence, the old accepted amusements and employments, the old ritual of conduct ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... it behind the ear. And what with brooding on this prospect, and sitting up in the old flat waiting for the familiar footstep, and putting it to bed when it got there, and stealing into the sick-chamber next morning to contemplate the wreckage, I was beginning to lose weight. Absolutely becoming the good old shadow, I give you my honest word. Starting at sudden ...
— My Man Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... the house, and sat down by the window in the gathering dusk, surveying the wreckage of her dream. The dream was even more precious in that it had grown so old. Caleb was a part of her every-day life, and for fifteen years Saturday had brought a little festival, wherein the commonplace man with brown eyes had been ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... he had bought a small model stationary engine and the methylated spirit lamp had by some accident set fire to the carpet, he was found after the conflagration had subsided standing serenely amongst the wreckage. When challenged as to its cause, "I cannot tell a lie," he replied calmly; "I did it with my little gadget." A few months later he and the present Ambassador of Great Britain at Washington had constructed a double line of miniature tracks, which connected ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 24, 1920 • Various
... in the Nile's moon-haze—are you to be judged thus by the narrow street that snakes into the dark of Bulak? And Budapest by the Danube—are you to be judged by the wreckage of the Stefansplatz that has drifted on your shores? And you, Vienna, and you, Paris—are you, too, to be measured thus, as measured you are, by the crimson light of your half-worlds that for some obscures ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... light, I moored the sloop by kelp in twenty fathoms of water, and held her there a few hours against a three-knot current. That night I anchored in Langara Cove, a few miles farther along, where on the following day I discovered wreckage and goods washed up from the sea. I worked all day now, salving and boating off a cargo to the sloop. The bulk of the goods was tallow in casks and in lumps from which the casks had broken away; and embedded in the ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... see the wreckage of the city—shattered walls, tumbled buildings, streets with rubble still piled in them. Weeds and creeping vines grew over the broken bones of this city as if they were attempting to ...
— Be It Ever Thus • Robert Moore Williams
... ship was driven into this whirlpool, but Odysseus escaped on a broken piece of wreckage to ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various
... science and organization. The new skipper meant to alter this condition of things—and he knew that the waters in the immediate vicinity of Chance Along were neither the most dangerous on the coast, nor the most convenient for the salving of wreckage and fast-drowning cargoes. So he established stations at Squid Beach to the northward, and at Nolan's Cove to the southward, and ordered Nick Leary and Foxey Jack Quinn to take up their abode in the new huts; Nick at Squid Beach, ...
— The Harbor Master • Theodore Goodridge Roberts
... the bleak shadows. At the first sight it seemed to Graham that an attack upon this isolated white building was in progress, but then he perceived that the party of the revolt was not advancing, but sheltered amidst the colossal wreckage that encircled this last ragged stronghold of the red-garbed men, was keeping up a ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... the Niobe, though she was now disabled, and we could hurt her no more. If the others came up on our weather we should be chewed like a bone in a mastiff's jaws. If she must fight again, the Araminta would be little fit for action till we cleared away the wreckage; so I sheered off to make all sail. We ran under courses with what canvas we had, and got away with a fair breeze and a good squall whitening to windward, while our decks were cleared for action again. The guns on the main-deck ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... shoulder saw the ship disappearing. He swam desperately, but was caught in the suck and carried under; but there was no great depth of water, and he soon came to the surface again. The sea was dotted with struggling men and pieces of wreckage. He swam to one of the latter, and held on until he saw some boats, which the next Spanish ship had lowered when she saw her consort disappearing, rowing towards them, and was soon afterwards hauled into one of them. He had closed his eyes as it came up, and assumed the appearance of insensibility, ...
— By England's Aid • G. A. Henty
... the English breed, which made us suppose that they had been landed from some English vessel. We were confirmed in this belief by discovering an old hen-coop, in which they had probably been washed ashore. There were other pieces of wreckage scattered about, but the hut itself was composed entirely of the products ...
— Peter Trawl - The Adventures of a Whaler • W. H. G. Kingston
... poor woman had completely broken down. Shame, humiliation, passionate grief, had made of her a mere miserable wreckage of humanity. ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... the Christmas healths from cups, and enamel at that; for a Willy-Willy had taken Cheon unaware when he was laden with a tray containing every glass and china cup fate had left us, and, as by a miracle, those two glasses had been saved from the wreckage. ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... he lay on his back, half stunned, Cappy Ricks saw water and wreckage fly high in the air. The Costa Rica shivered. So did Cappy. Then the debris descended, and Cappy, choked with salt water, dimly realized that Terence Reardon had him in his arms and was carrying him down to the boat deck, where the motor ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... said a voice he dreaded next to the Devil's. It was Sheeley; he would go into the barroom, and discover the wreckage of the slot-machine! Chick was beginning to feel the handcuffs on his wrists, when he became aware of ascending footsteps overhead. What were they going up-stairs for? Was it a sparring match? Forgetting his ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... figure, stained with blood, showed ruthless energy. Driving the men who remained unwounded, he compelled them to cut away the wreckage and to throw the dead overboard. Garrulous, possessed by some demon, he boasted to them of many prizes they would yet take, and he pointed to the black flag which still floated overhead, unharmed through all the battle. He boasted ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... though almost too great were the effort for human soul to burst through brute form, the Laidley Worm spoke to her conqueror: "Oh! quit thy sword and put aside thy bow!" it moaned—so moans the sea through the crash of the waves on nights when the storm strews the beach of the North Country with wreckage—"Oh! quit thy sword, for, poisonous monster though I be, no scaith will I do thee." Then those who heard the wonder felt sure that the Worm sought by subtilty to destroy their Prince, for still as a white, dead man he stood, and gazed ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... glimpse of her rig before her masts went over. She was a hermaphrodite brig, and old-fashioned at that. She was old-fashioned enough to have a figure-head. It came ashore at Cap'n Sproul's feet as avant-coureur of the rest of the wreckage. It led the procession because it was the first to suffer when the brig butted her nose against the Blue Cow Reef. It came ashore intact, a full-sized woman carved from pine and painted white. The Cap'n recognized the fatuous smile as ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... of his remaining acres, his hunters and hounds, and all his personal belongings; and all the money he could raise from the wreckage of his fortune was a pitiful L10,000. His last sovereign was gone, and he was L40,000 in debt, without a hope of paying it. When he next appeared on a race-course the very men who had cheered him to the echo at Ascot greeted him with jeers and ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... Brisco and Jack Jepson took charge of matters until the wreckage had been cleared away. And a lot of wreckage there was. The Mary Ellen looked little like the trim, schooner that had left New York ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Sea - or, A Pictured Shipwreck That Became Real • Laura Lee Hope
... met the eyes of the young captain. A number of broken seats had fallen down on the ceiling of the car and in the midst of this wreckage lay a short, stocky man with several cuts and bruises on his face from which the blood was flowing. The man had his arms and one leg free, but several seats and some handbaggage were wedged in across his left leg ...
— The Rover Boys on a Hunt - or The Mysterious House in the Woods • Arthur M. Winfield (Edward Stratemeyer)
... blown by all the strong cross-winds of the world, Marshall the editor, who knew Eleanor, came hurrying down the stairs. He saw that wreckage, grown familiar now to them all, saw the girl standing white of face beside the balustrade; the situation came over him at once. He opened the door, drew in both the intoxicated Billy Gray and his daughter. Half an hour later, when Billy could walk a little—it ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... great dexterity, he managed to do, and we came to a standstill not more than a foot or so from the wall. This proved a chastening experience; we pictured our aeroplane dashed against the wall, and reduced to a mass of wreckage. Very cautiously we lifted round the tail of the machine. It was impossible to switch off the motor and have a rest, because, if we had stopped it, we should not have been able to start it again without our gear, which was away on the ...
— Learning to Fly - A Practical Manual for Beginners • Claude Grahame-White
... gratified to obtain much gold in exchange for articles of insignificant value, owing to which circumstances and to the natural advantages of the location, Columbus determined to build a fort with the wreckage of his vessel. The fort was on a hill east of the site of the present town of Cape Haitien. Columbus gave it the name of La Navidad because he had entered the bay on Christmas day, and leaving thirty-nine men as colonists set out on the Nina on January 4, 1493, on his ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... more or less unhappy life, until the guillotine of the Revolution left her a widow, with two children and an empty purse. But even this crowning calamity was powerless to crush the sunny-hearted Creole, who merely laughed at the load of debts which piled themselves up around her. A little of the wreckage of her husband's fortune had been rescued for her by influential friends; but this had disappeared long before Napoleon crossed her path. And at last the light-hearted widow realised that if she had a card left to play, ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... mile farther he encountered the wreckage left by a hurricane of some former season, a path not more than three hundred yards wide, a perfect tangle of fallen trees, amid which bushes were already growing. The windrow led two or three miles to the northeast, and he walked all the way on the trunks, slipping lightly ...
— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... that it should have spoken for itself, and the apathy of the educated classes was not creditable to them. Even so Ezekiel found the Israelites of his day, forgetful of their past history and its lessons, sunk in torpor and indifference. He looked upon the wreckage of his nation, settled in the Babylonian plain; in his fervent imagination he saw but a valley of dry bones, and called aloud to the four winds that breath should come into them and they ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... Welsh mountain or two. To be sure, I must be my own guide now, but I think I can bring it off all right. I've been searching about for a mirror and reflector, in case I try the experiment; for the heliographing apparatus was spoilt in the general wreckage of things by the storm. I've got a reflector off a lamp in the kitchen, but couldn't find a looking-glass anywhere, and I saw there was only a broken bit in your room. My one ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... and the sea flowed over him. The opinion at the time was that he could have saved his life if he had made an effort to do so. I question this very much, as many of the people were picked up in the water, clinging to wreckage; the boats being overcrowded. The only way by which he could have been saved was to displace some one or clutch at a piece of wreck. He preferred death to the former, and there is no evidence that he did not attempt to save himself by means of the latter. The ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... from the Judgment of Solomon, framed in golden garlands, with satyrs and cupids playing among the leaves. The parquet floor had been laid down by the present Marquis, and Chesnel had picked up the furniture at sales of the wreckage of old chateaux between 1793 and 1795; so that there were Louis Quatorze consoles, tables, clock-cases, andirons, candle-sconces and tapestry-covered chairs, which marvelously completed a stately room, large out of all proportion to the house. Luckily, ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... fresh on the field Where the war-sick champions lie, By the wreckage of stiffening dead, The anguish that yearns but to die. Ah note of human agony heard The paean of victory over and through! Ah voice of duty and justice stern That, at e'en this price, commands them to do! And a vision of Glory goes by, Veil'd head and remorseful eye, A triumph of ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... told me afterward, and a sore jaw next day from the blow that put me out. The man who struck me went down across my body, Nelson followed him, and they say there were few unbroken windows in the wreckage of the car that followed as the free-for-all ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... to rise from amid the wreckage of the door. "Come on, don't wait, for they are three to two, and they are just drunk enough to ...
— Young Auctioneers - The Polishing of a Rolling Stone • Edward Stratemeyer
... some of the cruisers were busy amid the wreckage where here, on a spar, some stunned form clung like a limpet, and there, a-bob in the curling seas, a swimmer in his life-suit tossed under the ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... for the Baines, we paid and dismissed coolies and ponies, and paddled away over the flood water. The country was simply a vast lake, the main road merely marked by a dense row of poplars. Trees rose promiscuously out of the calm and sunlit water, wisps of maize and wreckage clinging to their lower boughs. Presently the road showed in patches, a broad waterfall breaking it every here and there as the imprisoned waters from above sought the slightly lower channel of ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... cans and ash heaps the children of the Point were playing. One inspired girl had decked a mound of wreckage and garbage with some glittering goldenrod and was calling her mates to come and see the ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... appalling. Dismembered legs and trunks of bodies were floating about, together with pieces of clothing, boxes of meats, and all sorts of wreckage. Now and then the agonised cry of some poor suffering fellow could be heard above ...
— The Boys of '98 • James Otis
... a sight not often surpassed since Napoleon's flight from Moscow. Right up to the Portuguese frontier the slopes of the railway line were strewn with every imaginable and unimaginable form of loot and wreckage, flung out of the trains as they flew along by the frightened burghers. Telegraph instruments, crutches, and rocking chairs, frying pans and packets of medicinal powders, wash-hand basins and tins of Danish butter lay there in wild profusion; ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... left in the comparative peace and safety of a railway accident. The Boer guns, swiftly changing their position, re-opened from a distance of 1,300 yards before anyone had got out of the stage of exclamations. The tapping rifle fire spread along the hillside, until it encircled the wreckage on three sides, and a third field gun came into action from some high ground on the opposite side of ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... strange sound grew louder. He stood up. Then, with a mighty crash and roar, the earth about him rose up and darkness overwhelmed him. A German shell had landed fairly in the village street hard by and half buried the child in the wreckage. Remi, bruised and with clothing torn, dug himself out practically unharmed. He shook his fist in the ...
— The Children of France • Ruth Royce
... to stir, and he sat up and looked about him. The track at this point ran in a sharp curve about a wooded hillock; all of the near side was heaped with the wreckage of the Bournemouth train; that of the express was mostly hidden by the trees; and just at the turn, under clouds of vomiting steam and piled about with cairns of living coal, lay what remained of the two engines, one upon the other. On the heathy margin of the ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... the American journalist who so heartily despised my bourgeois prudence and progress. As I walked through the Domain one evening, not many months after I had heard myself compared with a 'sure thing grafter,' I saw a piece of human wreckage curled up under a tree in the moonlight. It was not a very infrequent sight of course, even in prosperous Sydney, This particular wreck, as he lay sleeping there, exposed the fact that he wore neither shirt nor socks. He was dreadfully filthy, and his stertorous breathing gave a clue ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... It was all beautiful and poetic. Mary would have taken the room if it had been a hundred instead of a paltry thirty francs a day. But she could not afford to stop and look at the violet sea, still haunted by the red wreckage of sunset. She had her shopping to do, for she must somehow find exactly the right hat and dress, ready to put on, or she would have to dine in her room, and that would be imprisonment on the first night at ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... on a bit o' wreckage," ses Alf, nodding at 'im, "just like they do in books, and was picked up more dead than alive and took to Melbourne. He's now living up-country working on ...
— Short Cruises • W.W. Jacobs
... "when the crate broke several things which presumably were in Sir Marcus' pockets were found lying loose amongst the wreckage. That cat-woman was one ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... have not even the decency of a siding! These wonderfully made semi-Divine human engines are suffered to obstruct the very main lines on which our expresses run, not only wrecked themselves, but the fruitful cause of wreckage ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker
... that I had the good luck to cling to while our captain and the rest of the crew were all lost. I saw your vessel, and fearful of being left to perish on the desolate island, I swam off on a piece of wreckage to try and intercept your course. You have saved my life, and I thank you," continued Dantes. "I was lost when one of your sailors ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... action ceased. For the "Frolic" to escape, was out of the question. Both her masts had gone by the board shortly after her flag was struck; and, when the new enemy hove in sight, the prize-crew was working hard to clear from her decks the tangled mass of rigging, wreckage, and dead bodies, that made the tasks of navigation impossible. The ship was rolling like a log, in the trough of the sea, and was an easy prize for an enemy of even less strength than the man-of-war which was ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... had covered the pain-racked, ghastly face, Dru sat in silent meditation, and thought of the shame of it, the pity of it all. Somewhere amongst that human wreckage he knew Gloria was doing what she could to comfort the wounded and those that were in the ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... the sight, but just then her eye caught a mass of wreckage floating near her and she let go the mule's tail and seized the rude raft, pulling herself up so that she rode upon it in safety. Hank also saw the raft and swam to it, but he was so clumsy he never would have been able to climb upon it had not Betsy ...
— Tik-Tok of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... the court-yard. The night was now clear and calm; the stars burned; the trees whispered; the distant ghylls, swollen by the rain, roared loud through the thin air; a bird on the bough of a fir-tree whistled and chirped. The storm was gone; only its wreckage lay in the ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... adding one more quotation, from the most delightful of attacks upon the attackers of fairy tales, by Miss Repplier: "That which is vital in literature or tradition, which has survived the obscurity and wreckage of the past, whether as legend, or ballad, or mere nursery rhyme, has survived in right of some intrinsic merit of its own, and will not be snuffed out of existence by any of our precautionary or hygienic measures. . . . Puss in Boots is one long record of triumphant effrontery and deception. ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... and understand all that was said to him, even in our Island tongue which was not native to him, but he had no speech. The story ran that he had been picked off a piece of wreckage, somewhere off the North African coast, by the ship in which my grandfather made his last voyage, very many years ago. He was very intelligent and quick of hearing, but dumb, and it was said that he had been captured by Algerine pirates when a boy and had his tongue cut out by them. This, ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... the hill were now examined with care. As they were about to leave the hill and go to the point where the life-boat lay, some wreckage was discovered below them, caught within the clefts of the rock. Here, packed in with seaweed and brush, was an object ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Exploring the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... colors of any flag or the thrilling excitement of charge and countercharge, "laid down their lives for their friends." "Is my face cut?" said William Peart, a locomotive driver commemorated on Tablet 2, as he was pulled from out the wreckage of his exploded engine. He was told that it was. "Never mind," he replied, with his last breath, "I stopped the train." Here is heroism of a new type—dull, commonplace, everyday, without one trace of color or ...
— Heroes in Peace - The 6th William Penn Lecture, May 9, 1920 • John Haynes Holmes
... the stage might swim with its little solitariness into a wider uniqueness. In the distance lay Rome. He could see St. Peter's dome. But around streamed the ocean of grass and the ocean of air. Lifted from the one, bathed in the other, strewed afar, appeared the wreckage of an older Rome. There was no moving in Rome or its Campagna without moving among time-cleansed bones and vestiges. Rome and its Campagna were like Sargasso Seas and held the hulks of what had been ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... through the forest, an ancient path, and the Lost Cabin seemed very near. But the path began nowhere and ended nowhere, and it remained mystery, as the man who made it and the reason he made it remained mystery. Another time they chanced upon the time-graven wreckage of a hunting lodge, and amid the shreds of rotted blankets John Thornton found a long-barrelled flint-lock. He knew it for a Hudson Bay Company gun of the young days in the Northwest, when such a gun was worth its height in ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... the world of Ausonius, south-western France in the latter half of the fourth century, 'an Indian summer between ages of storm and wreckage'. Ausonius himself is a scholar and a gentleman, the friend alike of the pagan Symmachus and of St Paulinus of Nela. He is for thirty years professor of rhetoric in the university of Bordeaux, for some time tutor to a prince, praetorian prefect of Gaul, consul, and ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... Most of us allow the mechanism of the human body to shift as best it can and as long as it can, should it happen to become ungeared, ignoring the frequent warnings which the ever increasing morbid changes and wreckage give us. And then we surrender and succumb. What else can we do? Our vital creditors file their claims in the high court of Vital Bankruptcy. What poor business policy, and what a wretched tenant! For fifteen or more years we may ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... with hay and rags, and other spoil of the flood; and in one place a disordered mattress was lodged high among the boughs of a water- maple, where it would form building material for countless generations of birds. The fat cornfields were often littered with a varied wreckage which the farmers must soon heap together and burn, to be rid of it, and everywhere were proofs of the river's power to devastate as well as enrich its shores. The dwellers there had no power against it, in its moments ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... live at a time when the Tudor state system was breaking up with appalling suddenness, and along with it the Tudor compromise in the affairs of the Church, imposed from above upon an unawakened people, was falling into wreckage. Here was an opportunity that has not often, in the world's history, come to a poet, of realising the dream that he had dreamed in his study, of setting up again, for the admiration and comfort of posterity, the model of an ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... of dead bodies, with his stiff and almost heavy movements, is astonishingly quick at storing away wreckage. In a shift of a few hours, a comparatively enormous animal—a Mole, for example—disappears, engulfed by the earth. The others leave the dried, emptied carcass to the air, the sport of the winds for months on ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... written for despatch to his private brokers as well as to those who acted for the Syndicate, and to the Syndicate's secretary. By prompt action something—a good deal perhaps—might be saved from the wreckage—for himself. For others he had no thought. "This finishes Lancaster," he said to himself; "he'll have to face the music, after all." He sighed. "Means losing ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell
... blew this smoke, too, away from the wreckage. And the tramp was gone, but there was something else left in its place—so that Sergeant Walpole took one look, and swallowed a non-existent something that came up instantly into his throat again, and remembered the urgent ...
— Morale - A Story of the War of 1941-43 • Murray Leinster
... the king, and was especially the crown officer in the county. Since the time of Edward I., however, coroners have been elected by the people. Originally coroners held small courts of inquiry upon cases of wreckage, destructive fires, or sudden death, but in course of time their jurisdiction became confined to the last-named class of cases. If a death occurred under circumstances in any way mysterious or likely to awaken suspicion, it was the business of the ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... both vessels had much difficulty in forcing a way through the wreckage, broken masts and planks, the multitude of dead bodies and net work of cordage, which covered the surface of the water; but even amid ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... than I am,' 'I've thought of that,' said the Captain, 'perhaps you're right.' Then he turned straight towards her and said: 'It's a nasty crash that's come over us, Lovise— like a landslide. But don't you think now we might set to work and shift away all the wreckage that's been burying us for years, and get clear and breathe again? You might have a daughter yet!' At that Fruen got up and made as if to say something, but couldn't. 'Yes,' was all she said, and 'Yes,' she said ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... reported to the commander, sir, this very morning," continued Hellyer; "and, he's sent down word as I'm to keep men stationed along the shore so as to pick up any wreckage that mebbe washed ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... Pandora, Psyche, Thetis, Pomona, Daphne, Clytie, Galatea and Arethusa. Yes, Arethusa herself and Pandora, whom we all know by her box, looked down upon the two new managers of the Opera, who ended by clutching at some piece of wreckage and from there stared silently at Box Five ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... with each other. Here it became necessary for them to take the chance of a long jump. When it came Sam's turn to make the leap, the log upon which he struck rolled under his weight and he went down under the wreckage and ...
— The Call of the Beaver Patrol - or, A Break in the Glacier • V. T. Sherman
... indicator wavered, went slowly, deliberately to zero; the altimeter died; the fuel gauge. Finally, even the dozen or so trouble-indicators here, there, everywhere about the craft. Fifteen million dollars worth of warcraft was being shot into wreckage. ...
— Dogfight—1973 • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... closer we came, one of us drifting helplessly, and the other swimming strongly for the islands. When we were about a furlong apart the great beast seemed to change its course, mayhap it took the wreckage on which I floated for an outlying shoal, something on which it could rest a space in that long swim. Be this as it may, the beast came hurtling down on me lip deep in the waves, a mighty brown head with pricked ears that flicked the water ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... is witnessed the touching last-flicker of Etiquette; which sinks not here, in the Cimmerian World-wreckage, without a sign, as the house-cricket might still chirp in the pealing of a Trump of Doom. "Monsieur," said some Master of Ceremonies (one hopes it might be de Breze), as Lafayette, in these fearful moments, was rushing towards the inner Royal Apartments, "Monsieur, le Roi vous ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... the support of the heart. How thickly are the shores of time strewn with those forms of wreckage called great thoughts. In those far-off days when the overseers of the Egyptian King scourged 80,000 slaves forth to their task of building a pyramid, a great mind discovered the use of steam. Intellect achieved ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... McWade, and it ran like this: Stoner had been working in the Louisiana gas fields near the scene of a railroad accident—three bulls had strayed upon the right of way with results disastrous to a freight train and fatal to themselves. After the wreckage had been cleared away, the claim agent settled with the owner of the bulls and the carcasses were buried in an adjoining field. This had occurred some time prior to Stoner's arrival; in fact, it was only by chance that ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... nothing left him but the love he had for her, nothing left him but himself.—And in spite of all, his desperate desire to snatch her from destruction, his need of denying death, made him cling to the last piece of wreckage, in an ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... They would let the doctor stay in Ascalon, and Morgan would go to him if he felt the need coming on. The rancher disclaimed credit for a service such as one man owed another the world over, he said. But it was plain that he was touched by the outspoken gratitude of this wreckage of humanity that had come halting ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... water, and things that glide and swim; of sea-grasses and currents; of flowing waves that lap about the body with a cool chill; of palpitating color, that, at great depths, becomes a sort of darkness; of sea-beds of shell and sand, and bits of scattered wreckage; of ooze and tangled sea-plants, dusky shapes, and ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... enough; but till then no one had seen a village literally blown away. Not only the walls, but the very brick dust had vanished; its site could be fixed only by reference to the map and to the board stating "THIS IS LA BOISSELLE." Every kind of battle-wreckage lay about, including many dead bodies, ten days unburied in the midsummer heat. But though the guns had done their work so well, enough remained of the wonderful fortified labyrinth to suggest the difficulties of attacking troops. The Battalion ...
— The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T. F.) • Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell
... the helicopter had climbed to position and was circling above, and then turned their attention to the place where the sheet of fused earth and stone bulged upward. It must have been almost ground-zero of one of the hydrogen-bombs: the wreckage of the Cathedral of Learning had fallen predominantly to the north, and the Carnegie Library was tumbled ...
— The Return • H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
... not knowing any better) had its end. And to that same place, he added, the Stream carried all that was caught in its current—like the spar and the plank floating near us—so that the sea was covered with a thick tangle of the weed in which was held fast fragments of wreckage, and stuff washed overboard, and logs adrift from far-off southern shores, until in its central part the mass was so dense that no ship could sail through it, nor could a steamer traverse it because of the fouling of her screw. And this sort of floating island—which lay ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... mangled bodies of four American soldiers. The street was littered and unexploded hand grenades lay everywhere. Two soldiers had been carrying gunny sacks filled with grenades when one accidentally exploded, it in turn exploding others until the wreckage was complete. A military investigation would report the cause of the accident and the damage wrought, and thus an incident of ...
— The Fight for the Argonne - Personal Experiences of a 'Y' Man • William Benjamin West
... which showed plainly enough that there had been a desperate last minute hand-to-hand struggle there, after the defensive ray-web had failed and the pirates rushed the building. The radio alcove was choked with seared, cracked wreckage. Crane, the operator, still sat in his seat, but he was slumped over forward, and his head and chest were pitted with slanting ray holes. One hand had been reaching for a dial. The other was ...
— Hawk Carse • Anthony Gilmore
... place between the footstool and the fireplace in the thickest fog that England had ever known. And the horrid black heart of Mr. Jinks was discovered beneath the wreckage of a special carriage next to the luggage van. It was simply black as coal and very nasty indeed. The little boy who found it was a porter's son, whose mother was so poor that she took in washing for members of Parliament, who paid their bills irregularly ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... along and drawn under—down, down. He thought it was the end, and when again he bobbed up to the surface, his breath was all but gone. The great bulk of the vessel was no longer in sight, and Jimmie was struggling in a whirlpool, along with upset boats and oars and deck-chairs and miscellaneous wreckage, and scores of people clinging to such objects, or swimming frantically ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... fire, and descended abruptly on the detachment below. It was a magnificent compliment to the work, but it was unfortunate that the General should have been the one to consume the nettles. However, I have always thought that Angus's voice of disgust as he contemplated the wreckage of his screen ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... anything on the reef, for it was only from the hill-top that a full view of what was there could be seen, and then only by eyes knowing where to look. From the beach there was visible just a speck. It might have been, perhaps, a bit of old wreckage flung there by a wave in some big storm. A piece of old wreckage that had been tossed hither and thither for years, and had at last found a place ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... the $100 which you have paid. And will you tell Irving for me—I can't get up courage enough to talk about this misfortune myself, except to you, whom by good luck I haven't damaged yet that when the wreckage presently floats ashore he will get a good deal of his $500 back; and a dab at a time I will make up to ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Kit Barnard's order sent the Good Company hurtling spaceward. Astro had just enough time to throw himself into an acceleration chair before the ship shot away from the Deimos spaceport toward the wreckage of the Space Lance. ...
— Treachery in Outer Space • Carey Rockwell and Louis Glanzman
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