"Scummy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... masters are black; They are filthy with the slimy filth of ages; like the canals on which they float they give forth an evil smell. On soiled perches you sit, swung out on either side over the scummy water—you who should be savage and untamed, who should ride on the clean breath of the sea and beat your pinions in the strong storms of the sea. Yet you are not held. Tamely you sit and willingly, ten wretches to a ...
— Profiles from China • Eunice Tietjens
... said that the Mafulu name for these things is idagafe. The natives have no knowledge of their origin or past use, the only explanation of the latter which was suggested being that they were used as looking-glasses by looking into the scummy surface of the water inside ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... and Riderhood unshipped his sculls, stood holding on to a barge, and hand over hand long-wise along the barge's side gradually worked his boat under her head into a secret little nook of scummy water. And driven into that nook, and wedged as he had described, was Gaffer's boat; that boat with the stain still in it, bearing some resemblance to ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... I'll lie in our standin'-bed, An' Mac'll take her in ballast—and she trims best by the head.... Down by the head an' sinkin'. Her fires are drawn and cold, And the water's splashin' hollow on the skin of the empty hold— Churning an' choking and chuckling, quiet and scummy and dark— Full to her lower hatches and risin' steady. Hark! That was the after-bulkhead ... she's flooded from stem to stern.... Never seen death yet, Dickie?... Well, now is ...
— The Seven Seas • Rudyard Kipling
... from the saddle, reading the trail that Grit's paws had left in the alkali and sand. Cactus reared its spiny stems or sprawled over the ground more like strange water-growths that had survived the emptying of an inland sea than vegetation of the land. Once the dog's tracks led aside to a scummy puddle, saucered by alkali, dotted with the spoor of desert animals that drank the bitter water in extremity. Then it ran straight to a wide reef of lava. Sandy set down the collie. Grit ran fast across the pitted surface, ahead of the horses, waiting for them to cross the lava. They ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn |
