"Wreckage" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... 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 equally with the fishermen. ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... 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
... 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 ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... 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
... 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 in a summer sea. ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... 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 |
