"Shoal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Collins, commanding a United States man-of-war, captures an English blockade-runner near an isolated shoal somewhere in the vicinity of Bermuda. England asserts that the shoal is a shore, and that the maritime league is violated. Mr. Seward at once yields, Neptune defends as he always does, the rights of the national Tritons, ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... Bass, "is joined to the mainland by a low neck of sand, which is nearly divided by a lagoon that runs in on the west side of it, and by a large shoal inlet on the east. Whenever it shall be decided that the opening between this and Van Diemen's Land is a large strait, this rapidity of tide and the long south-west swell that seems continually running in upon the ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... with all nations, peace at home, grounded upon our enemies' fear or love of us abroad, and attended with plenty of all things necessary either for the preservation of the public weal or thy private welfare, be things worthy thy esteem (though it may be beyond thy shoal conceit) then next to God and thy King give thy thanks for the same to the Navy. As for honour, who knows not (that knows anything) that in all records of late times of actions, chronicled to the everlasting fame and renown of this nation, still the naval part is the thread that runs through the ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... feel more of a drop from the pregnant mystery of her call and his high response to it, to the homely incident of breakfast, was due to Miss Dassonville's obliviousness of its being one. It was for her, in fact, no drop at all but rather as if they had pulled out for a moment into this little shoal of neighbourly interest and comfortable food, the better to look back at the perfect wonder of it, as from the deck of the Merrythought toward the fair front of the ducal palace and the blue domes of St. Mark's ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... with blackness in its depths. The American flag on the fort rippled, a thing of living light, the stripes transparent. High pink clouds were riding down from the north, their flush dying as they piled aloft. There were shadings of peacock colors in the shoal water. Jenieve enjoyed this sunset beauty of the island, as she ran over the rolling pebbles, carrying some leather shoes by their leather strings. Her face was eager. She lifted the shoes to show them to three little boys playing on ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... called by the Indians, Ta-tzun-in. Ascending it by wading, with considerable difficulty, its bed was seen to be chiefly limestone rock. There are two rivers flowing into Newton Inlet from fifty to seventy-five feet in width, navigable for canoes at high tide about half a mile, when shoal ...
— Official report of the exploration of the Queen Charlotte Islands - for the government of British Columbia • Newton H. Chittenden
... morning her whole being seemed gathered into a tense strain that made her feel as though the least thing might snap the taut nerves in her body and leave her broken and stranded on some far, emotional shoal. Her heart beat unevenly, while her lips and hands felt dry and hot, as if she had spent hours in a desert wind. She did not experience the bitter anguish of the night before; such storms are too wild to last, but it had left her deadly heavy within, ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... had completed all preparations and Bivens's big steamer, the Buccaneer, slipped quietly through the Narrows and headed for the Virginia coast, towing a trim little schooner built for cruising in the shoal waters ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... could do no more. Even the insult failed to move me. The rest of the game was with the salmon. He suffered himself to be drawn, skip-ping with pretended delight at getting to the haven where I would fain bring him. Yet no sooner did he feel shoal water under his ponderous belly than he backed like a torpedo-boat, and the snarl of the reel told me that my labor was in vain. A dozen times, at least, this happened ere the line hinted he had ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling
... the exception of Elvira, who had accepted hospitality at a neighbouring farm, were camping in a meadow not far from a stream called Shoal Creek, which drove the mill. The logs of their evening fire were still alight. Susannah sat just within the dark opening of a low canvas-covered waggon; the unsteady flame light fell upon her, and sometimes showed a farther interior where the child lay sleeping. ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... breaks above them, the thunders roll, The ship gets aground on the hidden shoal, And the turbulent waters dash over the barque, And cries from the doomed ship come. Till nothing is left the tale to tell, But the angry roar of the surging swell; So the grand old vessel goes down in the dark— Wrecked in ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... to beat until eight o'clock, P.M., when all the guns having been thrown overboard (except one, retained for signals), and all means taken to lighten her, she began to heave, and in about an hour after she swung off the shoal,—not, however, without having ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly
... board which this bust was shipped for England ran on a shoal and sank, but as the accident happened in shallow water, the bust was recovered, none the worse for its immersion ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... nothing of that himself; but he has sharp rogues about him. If they once made good their landing here, it would be difficult to dislodge them. It must all be done from the land side then, for even a 42-gun frigate could scarcely come near enough to pepper them. They love shoal water, the skulks—and that has enabled them to baffle me so often. Not that they would conquer the country—all brag—but still it would be a nasty predicament, and scare the poor ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... ocean with its mighty sound, From heaven to heaven, one roar, one glitter of doom, While out to the sea-line's blue remotest bound The ships of Drake still fled, and the red fume Of battle thickened and shrouded shoal and ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... does not appear to cease even when the young are fully developed, but he allows them to swim in and out, and try their powers, if not to search for food; and when danger appears, opens his mouth, when they all swim back again in a shoal, for safety. The natives assert that some species, at all events, are not actually developed in the parent's head, but are laid and hatched in the sand, the male and female watching carefully over them; ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... to examine them. Half a mile or so from the cave she was about to turn back when her eye caught a strange appearance on the sea, hundreds and hundreds of moving points drawing in to the shore, white and black points like a shoal of fish only half submerged. It was ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... spoke the ship shook again, this time strongly. It was something more than a shudder; the sensation was for all the world as though she had scraped over a shoal of rock or shingle. There was a little clatter below, a noise of broken glass. The watch, who had been dozing on deck, sprang to their feet, and their ejaculations of surprise and fear rolled in a growl ...
— Stories by English Authors: The Sea • Various
... sealers was known to visit the place frequently. As the ship left the coast a boat's thwart with a piece of rope wound round it was observed floating in the water, and its presence caused some curiosity on board. Within the next few days a shoal of whales known to sailors as the Right whale was sighted, and later in the month several other whales of various species with two threshers at work upon one of them ...
— The Logbooks of the Lady Nelson - With The Journal Of Her First Commander Lieutenant James Grant, R.N • Ida Lee
... the girl, resting her elbow on the tiller. "There are geese on the shoal, yonder. They've come out from Currituck. Oh, I'm afraid it's to ...
— Blue-Bird Weather • Robert W. Chambers
... the westward we passed a shoal and open bay, immediately adjacent to the harbour which we were now about to examine, and soon after came to a reef of rocks, in some parts nearly dry, extending, about three quarters of a mile to the southward of a low point on the southeastern side of ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... which we did not visit, being unwilling to lose time. Following the course of Cordova, we arrived in eight days at Champoton[1], where we cast anchor a league from the shore, on account of the water being very shoal at low ebbs. We disembarked with half of our soldiers close to the town, and the natives remembering their former success against us, attacked us immediately with much military parade. From our former experience, we took care to be well prepared on this occasion, and ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... proceed to consider the circumstances attending the attack and defence of Copenhagen itself. The only side of the town exposed to the attack of heavy shipping is the northern, where there lies a shoal extending out a considerable distance, leaving only a very narrow approach to the heart of the city, (Fig. 35) On the most advanced part of this shoal are the Crown-batteries, carrying in all eighty-eight guns.[21] The entrance into the ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... trifling. It would appear that they used up all the big names, such as Jefferson, Gallatin, Philosophy, Philanthropy, and the like, and were compelled to use, first, the names of their own party, and then such titles as were suggested by trifling incidents. For example, when they reached a difficult shoal on the Yellowstone River, they named that Buffalo Shoal because they found a buffalo on it; and Buffalo Shoal it remains unto this day. In like manner, when they reached a dangerous rapid, twenty miles below that point, ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... it many a time—on the chart. I know every bluff and reef and shoal and cay around Andros from Morgan's Bluff ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... 'errant' and 'arrant'; 'slack' and 'slake'; 'slow' and 'slough'{115}; 'bow' and 'bough'; 'hew' and 'hough'{115}; 'dies' and 'dice' (both plurals of 'die'); 'plunge' and 'flounce'{115}; 'staff' and 'stave'; 'scull' and 'shoal'; 'benefit' and 'benefice'{116}. Or, it may be, the difference which constitutes the two forms of the word into two words is in the spelling only, and of a character to be appreciable only by the eye, escaping ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... is no priest is any good at all but a spoiled priest; a one that would take a drop of drink, it is he would have courage to face the hosts of trouble. Rout them out he would, the same as a shoal of fish from out the weeds. It's best not to vex a priest, or to ...
— The Unicorn from the Stars and Other Plays • William B. Yeats
... away on a pile of bare rocks winking and blinking its warning to less fortunate craft. Tugs, fishing boats, salmon trollers, beach-combing launches, all that mosquito fleet which gets its bread upon the waters and learns bar, shoal, reef, and anchorage thoroughly in the getting,—these knew that besides the half-moon bight called Cradle Bay, upon which fronted Horace Gower's summer home, there opened also a secure, bottle-necked cove less than a mile northward from ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... noisily as on the other side, but the sun had commenced its descent towards the west, and everything was tinged with a rosy hue. The water splashed over us, and we were suddenly covered with small silvery waves which when shaken slightly stiffened against our mackintoshes. It was a shoal of very small fish which had had the misfortune to be driven into the current, and which had come to die in the dazzling brilliancy of the setting sun. On the other side there was a small block which looked like a ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... getting her afloat, when Basset, without his hat flung himself, in the extremity of his terror, headlong in, pitching Primus down upon the bottom, breaking his wooden leg, and capsizing Tom into the water. It was so shoal that he found no difficulty in getting in again, escaping with only a thorough ducking. It was now sauve que peut, and the three addressed themselves, so far as their bewildered faculties would permit, to ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... with excitement, as they tried to get a peep at you. And when—oh, my!—we did at last come up to you, a nice pretty respectable lot you looked, lying about in the boat, with no more discipline than you'd see in a shoal of seals on a rock. You looked as if you had all been pitched in ...
— The Black Bar • George Manville Fenn
... by the compass, and soon perceived the sea to break right a-head of us; we immediately sounded, and shoaled our water from thirteen to seven fathom, soon after deepening it again from seventeen to forty-two; so that we went over the end of a shoal, which a little farther to the northward might have been fatal to us. Cape Blanco at this time bore W.S.W. 1/2 S. distant four leagues: But we were still at a loss for Port Desire, it being impossible that any ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... they are dissolved, or uncrystallized, they are really separated from each other, like a swarm of gnats in the air, or like a shoal of fish in the sea;—generally at about equal distances. In currents of solutions, or at different depths of them, one part may be more full of the dissolved atoms than another; but on the whole, you may think of them as equidistant, like ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... shores, were studded not only with canoes, but at the period of our visit the skulls and skeletons were strewed about in all directions." This method generally prevailed on the neighboring coasts, as at Shoal Water Bay, &c. Farther up the Columbia, as at the Cascades, a different form was adopted, which is ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow
... sought to impress the incalculable danger of meddling with evil, the impossibility of forecasting the tragedy that might thereby result, the certainty that retribution would follow, either here or beyond "this bank and shoal of time." ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... gone. At this time the ship had been pitching her spritsail-yard under water, and it blew a little hurricane. We were on deck in a moment, all hands paying out sheet. We brought the ship up with this cable, but not until she got it nearly to the better end. Unfortunately, we had got into shoal water, or what became shoal water by the depth of the troughs. It was said, afterwards, we were in five fathoms water at this time, but for this I will not vouch. It seems too much water for what happened. Our anchor, however, did actually ...
— Ned Myers • James Fenimore Cooper
... "Your harp is like a mesh, Woven of flesh And spread within the shoal Of life, where runs the tide-race of ...
— Behind the Arras - A Book of the Unseen • Bliss Carman
... committed did not long remain unpunished, for Gilling's brother, Suttung, quickly went in search of the dwarfs, determined to avenge him. Seizing them in his mighty grasp, the giant conveyed them to a shoal far out at sea, where they would surely have perished at the next high tide had they not succeeded in redeeming their lives by promising to deliver to the giant their recently brewed mead. As soon as Suttung set them ashore, they therefore gave him the precious ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... strong columns were sent out to right and left that, skirting the ramparts, should first seize Montmartre and the Observatory and then, wheeling inward, swoop down on the central quarters, surrounding them and capturing all they contained, as a shoal of fish is captured in the meshes of a gigantic net. About two o'clock Maurice heard that the tricolor was floating over Montmartre: the great battery of the Moulin de la Galette had succumbed to the ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... logic and thought-sequence, is a highly abstract study; for although, as has been said, you can do almost anything with words, with words alone you can do next to nothing. The realm where speech holds sway is a narrow shoal or reef, shaken, contorted, and upheaved by volcanic action, beaten upon, bounded, and invaded by the ocean of silence: whoso would be lord of the earth must first tame the fire and the sea. Dramatic and narrative writing are happy in this, that action and silence ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... 29th, while the Junon, 38, Captain Sanders, and Martin, 18, Captain Senhouse, were in Delaware Bay, the latter grounded on the outside of Crow's Shoal; the frigate anchored within supporting distance, and while in this position the two ships were attacked by the American flotilla in those waters, consisting of eight gun-boats, carrying each 25 men and one long 32, and two heavier ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... and the silt and sand Were gathered day by day, Till not a furlong out from land A shoal ...
— The Red Flower - Poems Written in War Time • Henry Van Dyke
... hosts of which we spoke, sailed towards Ireland, and it was not far across the sea, and he came to shoal water. It was but by two rivers; the Lli and the Archan were they called; and the nations covered the sea. {50b} Then he proceeded with what provisions he had on his own back, and ...
— The Mabinogion Vol. 3 (of 3) • Owen M. Edwards
... in with two islands at its extremity, and passed between them; that on the north side is named Bolyna, and that on the south Bamdym. Sailing to the west-southwest a matter of fourteen leagues, they fell in with a white bottom, which was a shoal below the water; and the black men they carried with them told them to draw near to the coast of the island, as it was deeper there, and that was more in the direction of Borneo, for from that neighborhood ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... we had headed; and the last green barge, straw-laden, with a brown sail, had followed; and some ballast-lighters, shaped like a child's first rude imitation of a boat, lay low in the mud; and a little squat shoal-lighthouse on open piles stood crippled in the mud on stilts and crutches; and slimy stakes stuck out of the mud, and slimy stones stuck out of the mud, and red landmarks and tidemarks stuck out of the mud, and an old landing-stage and an old roofless building slipped into the ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... 'eighty-six, the same year my youngest was born. The winter had broke in early that year, not with any reel stormy weather, but jest a bunch o' pesky squalls. An' cold! We was in the boat mighty near every day, an' I used ter forget what bein' warm felt like. There was allers somethin' hittin' a shoal or tryin' to make a hole in the beach. It was squally an' shiftin', ye see. An' the ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Life-Savers • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... there because the sea itself prevents them by forming shoals for not less than thirty stades; consequently the beach at Ravenna, although to the eye of mariners it is very near at hand, is in reality very far away by reason of the great extent of the shoal-water. And a land army cannot approach it at all; for the river Po, also called the Eridanus, which flows past Ravenna, coming from the boundaries of Celtica, and other navigable rivers together with some marshes, encircle it on all sides and so cause the city ...
— Procopius - History of the Wars, Books V. and VI. • Procopius
... the General to devote his whole energies against the little city of Alkmaar. On that bank and shoal, the extreme verge of habitable earth, the spirit of Holland's Freedom stood at bay. The grey towers of Egmont Castle and of Egmont Abbey rose between the city and the sea, and there the troops sent by the Prince of Orange were quartered during the very brief period in which the citizens wavered ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... kinds of social engagements for her and that involved the description of new gowns and a list of the guests of each entertainment. Oh, it was dreadful. Fortunately Clara had a good reputation with her mother, and was able to carry conviction, whereas I had a very hard time. I kept getting into shoal water." ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... suddenly called Code's attention to a flock of sea-pigeons floating on the water a mile ahead. As the skipper looked he saw the fowl busily diving and "upending," and he knew they had struck the edge of the Banks; for water-fowl will always dive in shoal water, and a skipper sailing to the Banks from a distance ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... like, my lady; it is all the same. You have read of panic stricken people, when a church or a theatre is on fire, rushing to the door all in a heap, and crowding each other to death? It is something like that with the fish. They are swimming along in a great shoal, yards thick; and when the first can get no farther, that does not at once stop the rest, any more than it would in a crowd of people; those that are behind come pressing up into every corner, where there is room, till they are one dense mass. Then they ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... with how many alterations, junctions, or re-touchings; the one thing I ask of you is, that the line shall be right, and right by measurement, to the same minuteness which you would have to give in a Government chart to the map of a dangerous shoal. ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... shore, waiting for the boat to take us round to La Brea, and drank in dreamily with our eyes the beauty of that strange lonely place. The only living things, save ourselves, which were visible were a few pelicans sleeping on a skerry, and a shoal of dolphins rolling silently in threes—husband, wife, and little child—as they fished their way along the tide mark between the yellow water and the green. The sky blazed overhead, the sea below; the red rocks and green forests blazed around; and we sat enjoying the genial silence, not ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... offering least danger from the vigilant patrol outside. The skipper had already chosen his course. Because of the gale, he calculated that the blockaders would get a considerable offing, lest they flounder mid the shoal waters inshore. He knew too, even if it were not so dark, that a long, foamy line of surf curtained the bay from any watchful eye on the open sea. By the time she reached the beach channels, La Luz had full speed on. Then, knifing ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... was unknown to him, the pure and pathetic verse of Adelaide Procter. "In the spring of the year 1853 I observed a short poem among the proffered contributions, very different, as I thought, from the shoal of verses perpetually setting through the office of such a periodical."[296] The contributions had been large and frequent under an assumed name, when at Christmas 1854 he discovered that Miss Mary Berwick was the daughter of his old and dear ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... able to satisfy myself that the gas was not absorbed by caustic potash, but was partly taken up by pyrogallic acid, that is to say, that little or no carbonic acid was present, but that a fair amount of oxygen was present, diluted of course by nitrogen. The exposure of a shoal of the beautiful blue pelagic Siphonophore, Velella, for a few hours, enabled me to collect a large quantity of gas, which yielded from 24 to 25 per cent. of oxygen, that subsequently squeezed out from the interior of the chambered ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882 • Various
... at the Hogue, sixteen hundred ninety-two, Did the English fight the French,—woe to France! And, the thirty-first of May, helter-skelter through the blue, Like a crowd of frighten'd porpoises a shoal of sharks pursue, Came crowding ship on ship to St. Malo on the Rance, With the English ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... three other shops near by, and about them is the pleasant litter of a boat-yard. In the cove before them lie at their moorings in the late afternoon a fleet of fifteen or twenty fishing and pleasure boats, all cat-rigged, all of one general build, wide, shoal, with one broad sail, all painted white, by the custom of the place, and all or nearly all kept neat and clean: they are all likely enough to be called upon now and then for sailing-parties. Often of a bright afternoon ...
— By The Sea - 1887 • Heman White Chaplin
... circumference of three miles, and to a height of two hundred feet; and yet in less than three months from that time the waves had washed its immense mass down to the sea level; and in a few weeks more it existed but as a dangerous shoal. And such inevitably would have been the fate of the equally incoherent cone-like craters of Aetna and Auvergne during the seven and a half months that intervened between the breaking up of the fountains of the great deep and the reappearance of the mountain-tops, ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... many interesting experiences in the eastern archipelago, but no mishaps except that the ship grounded on a rocky shoal near one of the islands. Fortunately there was no leak, and after throwing overboard eight of their cannon, three tons of cloves they had gathered in their voyage through the isles of spices, and many bags of meal, the "Golden Hind" ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... pound near Vinal Haven, on one of the Fox Islands. A cove covering about 500 acres, with an average depth of about 90 feet, was selected. A section of about 9 acres, separated from the main portion of the cove by a natural shoal and with a bottom of soft grayish mud, was selected for the pound. In order to make it proof against the efforts of the lobsters to escape and as a protection from enemies without, a wire fence was built over the shoal part. This ...
— The Lobster Fishery of Maine - Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission, Vol. 19, Pages 241-265, 1899 • John N. Cobb
... abundance were given it by successive observers,—Nerita, Sciacca, Fernandina, Julia, Hotham, Corrao, and Graham. The last holds good in English speech, and as Graham's Island it is known in books to-day, though the sea took back what it had given, leaving but a shoal of cinders and sand. ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... him an eternal friendship. This day was fine; our minds, longing for more agreeable sensations, were harmonized by the soothing aspect of nature, and admitted a ray of hope. About four in the afternoon a circumstance occurred which afforded us some consolation: a shoal of flying fish passed under the raft, and as the extremities left an infinite number of vacancies between the pieces which composed it, the fish got entangled in great numbers. We threw ourselves upon them, and caught a considerable ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 • J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard
... discovered, the trap was set at the edge of the dam, at a point where the animal passed from deep to shoal water, and always under the surface. Early in the morning, the hunter mounted his mule and ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... live among those sweeping treetrunks and come within casting distance of the rope? Even if he did, would the rope catch around that head of which only the nose and eyes were showing? Even if it caught could the stallion be drawn to shoal water without being strangled by the slip-knot? Had Perris been a calm man he would have discarded the thousandth chance which remained after all of these possibilities. He would have looked, instead, to his cowpony which ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... of a great shoal near the mouth of the Zuider Zee, northeast of the island of Wieringen. "Under the Vlieter" would mean at the east side of this shoal, in the Tesselstroom or channel to ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts
... nearness of a berg was now of no avail; for there were so many of the bergs and so widely scattered that the temperature of the sea was uniformly cold. Moreover, the submarine bell, which gives warning to navigators of the neighborhood of shoal water, does not signify the approach of icebergs. The newest ocean giant was in deadly peril, though probably few of her passengers guessed it, so reassuring are the huge bulk, the skilful construction, the watertight compartments, the able captain and crew, to the mind of the landsman. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... bold swimmer, the Matutina crossed the dangerous Shambles shoal. This bank, a hidden obstruction at the entrance of Portland roads, is not a barrier; it is an amphitheatre—a circus of sand under the sea, its benches cut out by the circling of the waves—an arena, round ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... have any effect on the insensate fellows who are the betting-man's prey, and thus this precious sport has become a source of idleness, theft, and vast misery. One wretch goes under, but the stock of human folly is unlimited, and the shoal of gudgeons moves steadily into the bookmaker's net. One betting-agent in France receives some five thousand letters and telegrams per day, and all this huge correspondence comes from persons who never take the trouble to see a race, but who are bitten with the gambler's fever. ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... Chilao[149], which is between the firm land and the isle of Manaar. On this voyage ships are sometimes lost, but they are empty, as ships going this way discharge their cargoes at Periapatam into small flat-bottomed boats named Tane, which can run over any shoal without danger, as they always wait at Periapatam for fine weather. On departing from Periapatam, the small ships and flat-bottomed boats go always together, and on arriving at the shoals about thirty-six miles from that place, they are forced through by the winds, which always ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... displayed among an eager few, Who in the field of contest persevered, Passions unworthy of youth's generous heart And mounting spirit, pitiably repaid, When so disturbed, whatever palms are won. 505 From these I turned to travel with the shoal Of more unthinking natures, easy minds And pillowy; yet not wanting love that makes The day pass lightly on, when foresight sleeps, And wisdom and the pledges interchanged 510 With our ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... Lady Godiva, as the feathers fluttered down into the boat and rested on the dead boy's pall. "War among man and beast, war on earth, war in air, war in the water beneath," as a great pike rolled at his bait, sending a shoal of white fish flying along the surface. "And war, says holy writ, in heaven above. O Thou who didst die to destroy death, when will it all ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... not, cousin," says Eyjolf; "for it is shoal water here, and I will not have any of the oarsmen leave his oar to shove her off; and it is far too much for you to go afoot with wounds like yours. You will have to ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... made the mistake of placing a fair-way passage on either side of the islet. The southern channel, twenty-five fathoms deep and three hundred metres broad, is garnished on both flanks with a hundred metres of dangerous shallow, easily distinguished by green blazoned upon blue. The bay is shoal to the south-east; the best anchorage for ships lies to the north-west, almost touching land. A reef or rock is reported to be in the middle ground, where we lay with ten fathoms under us: it was seen, they say, at night, by the aid of lanterns; but next ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... 48 years of age, a seafaring man, a southerner by birth and raising, formerly captain of U. S. light ship Long Shoal, station'd at Long Shoal point, Pamlico sound—though a southerner, a firm Union man—was captur'd Feb. 17, 1863, and has been nearly two years in the Confederate prisons; was at one time order'd ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... by we might perceive a breach in the low barrier; the woods ceased; a glittering point ran into the sea, tipped with an emerald shoal, the mark of entrance. As we drew near we met a little run of sea—the private sea of the lagoon having there its origin and end, and here, in the jaws of the gateway, trying vain conclusions with the more majestic heave of the Pacific. The Casco scarce avowed ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... appeal to more and more of humanity. Nor can we deduce that men are mindless solely from the fact that they are all of one mind. In plain fact the virtues of a mob cannot be found in a herd of bulls or a pack of wolves, any more than the crimes of a mob can be committed by a flock of sheep or a shoal of herrings. Birds have never been known to besiege and capture an empty cage of an aviary, on a point of principle, merely because it had kept a few other birds in captivity, as the mob besieged and captured ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... Saviour, pilot me Over life's tempestuous sea, Unknown waves before me roll, Hiding rock and treacherous shoal; Chart and compass come from Thee, ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... this position she stood the fire of several batteries for some hours, without doing or sustaining much damage; then the admiral ordered the men to be brought off in boats, and the cables to be cut; so that she drove with the sea-breeze upon a shoal, where she was soon filled with water. This exploit was absurd, and the inference which the admiral drew from it altogether fallacious. He said it plainly proved that there was not depth of water in the inner harbour sufficient to admit large ships ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... found their way to Germany, and there by a less discriminating public were joined in a general way to the mass of Yorick production, and the might of Yorick influence. These works represent almost exclusively the Sterne of the Sentimental Journey; for the shoal of petty imitations, explanations and protests which appeared in England when Shandy was first issued[85] had gone their own petty way to oblivion before ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... says he, "will run you on a shoal, and there will he be overhauled by the janizaries, and you be carried prisoners back to Alger. Your freedom will be forfeited, and you will be sold for slaves. And that's not all," adds he; "the lass you have with you will ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... myself," the manuscript goes on, "I was lying in a pebbly shoal. The moon was aloft in heaven. I was cold to the heart, cold to the marrow of my bones. I could move neither hand nor foot, and thought I was dead. By slow degrees a little power came back, and I managed at length, ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... up the Cut-Through a little ways, and then come about, and back he comes again, never slacking speed a mite, and running close to the shoal as he could shave, and all the time going through the bloodiest kind of pantomimes. And past he goes, to wheel 'round and commence all ...
— Cape Cod Stories - The Old Home House • Joseph C. Lincoln
... in its pall of fog, lay the coast. Ahead, and to the right, was a large area of shoal water, portions of which uncovered at low tide. It had already proved the graveyard of many fine ships whose bones still showed when the water fell, and Langdon had no wish to leave his ship there as an everlasting monument ...
— Stand By! - Naval Sketches and Stories • Henry Taprell Dorling
... building of rooks, A brood of grouse, A plump of wild fowl, A stand of plovers, A watch of nightingales, A clattering of choughs, A flock of geese, A herd or bunch of cattle, A bevy of quails, A cast of hawks, A trip of dottrell, A swarm of bees, A school of whales, A shoal of herrings, A herd of swine, A skulk of foxes, A pack of wolves, A drove of oxen, A sounder of hogs, A troop of monkeys, A pride of lions, A sleuth of bears, A gang ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... came by a shoal of porpoises, rolling as they went—papas, and mammas, and little children—and all quite smooth and shiny, because the fairies French-polish them every morning; and they sighed so softly as they came by, that Tom took courage to speak to them: but all they answered was, "Hush, hush, hush"; ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... was—whether rock or sand, whether steep or shoal—we knew not; the only hope that could rationally give us the least shadow of expectation, was, if we might happen into some bay or gulf, or the mouth of some river, where by great chance we might have run our boat in, or got under the lee of the land, ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe Of York, Mariner, Vol. 1 • Daniel Defoe
... again set it up on the rampart. Meantime, General Clinton had landed on an island and was trying to cross with his soldiers to the further end of Sullivan's Island. But the water was at first too shoal for the boats. The soldiers jumped overboard to wade. Suddenly the water deepened, and they had to jump aboard to save themselves from drowning. All this time Americans were firing at them from the beach. General Clinton ordered a retreat. The fleet also sailed out—all that could get ...
— A Short History of the United States • Edward Channing
... "Petite Jeanne" was drawing six feet; the dinghy could sail across a shoal covered by eighteen inches of water. But such a shoal would be clearly visible on the surface of the water. Besides, there was no shallow like that nearer than the Goodwins. Barebone pressed out seaward. He knew every channel and every bank between the Thames and Thorpeness. He kept on ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... Ocean he used to bathe by diving off the forecastle deck when the steamer was going at full speed, and catching a rope which was let down from the stern. Once while he was doing this he saw a shark and a shoal of pilot fish close to him in the water, as he describes in ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... anchor, for the place being shoal, and the channel intricate, there was no getting in where Teach lay that night; but in the morning he weighed, and sent his boat ahead of the sloops to sound, and coming within gun-shot of the pirate, received his fire; whereupon Maynard hoisted the king's colors, and stood directly ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... sacred—namely, the right to monopolise our own thoughts and feelings. Sister Cecilia is not, one may assume, the only good woman in the world who cannot draw a definite line between sympathy and mere curiosity. With many the display of sympathy is nothing but a half-conscious bait to attract a shoal ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... pink-and-orange crabs sidled awkwardly but nimbly this way and that. Tiny sea-horses, yet more fantastic, slipped shyly from one weed-covert to another, aware of a possible peril in every gay but menacing bloom. And just above this eccentric life of the shoal sea-floor small fishes of curious form shot hither and thither, live, darting gleams of gold and azure and amethyst. Now and again a long, black shadow would sail slowly over the scene of freakish life—the shadow of a passing albacore or barracouta. Instantly the shining ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... at the Hogue, sixteen hundred ninety-two, Did the English fight the French—woe to France! And, the thirty-first of May, helter-skelter through the blue, Like a crowd of frightened porpoises a shoal of sharks pursue, Came crowding ship on ship to St. Malo on the Rance, With the English ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various
... now between us and the deep, five hundred good planks to one lath in our buoyant little chip. But the Parki required more care and attention; especially by night, when a vigilant look-out was indispensable. With impunity, in our whale-boat, we might have run close to shoal or reef; whereas, similar carelessness or temerity now, might prove ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... many other customs which the various nations of Europe received from the classical times, and which it is not our object to investigate, they derived from thence a shoal of superstitious beliefs, which, blended and mingled with those which they brought with them out of their own country, fostered and formed the materials of a demonological creed which has descended down almost to our own times. Nixas, or Nicksa, a river or ocean god, worshipped on the ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... shoal work of those mangroves, Yeo," said Amyas; "I doubt whether we shall do aught now, unless ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... have ever seen. The handling of the surf-plank requires some care, for it is a short, heavy board, and in the back-wash is apt to fly back on the unwary, hitting them on their food-receptacle, and effectually (to use a schoolboy term) "bagging their wind." You walk out in the shoal water up to your shoulders, and as a big sea comes in, you throw yourself chest foremost on to your plank, and are then carried along on the top of the roller at the pace of a leisurely train (an Isle of ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... can build upon it. Ocean and sky remain as God made them. He must love space for us, though it be needless for himself; seeing that in all the magnificent notions of creation afforded us by astronomers,—shoal upon shoal of suns, each the centre of complicated and infinitely varied systems,—the spaces between are yet more overwhelming in their vast inconceivableness. I thank God for the room he thus gives us, and hence ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... river, then into it; a shoal of minnows was floating over the sandy bottom, like the black dashes on miniver; though narrow, the stream was deep, and there was ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... With his broad fins and forky tail he laves The rising surge, and flounces in the waves. Thus all my crew transformed around the ship, Or dive below, or on the surface leap, And spout the waves, and wanton in the deep. 130 Full nineteen sailors did the ship convey, A shoal of nineteen dolphins round her play. I only in my proper shape appear, Speechless with wonder, and half dead with fear, Till Bacchus kindly bid me fear no more. With him I landed on the Chian shore, And him shall ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... does it all mean? Simply this, I think: that the West brings down what it can of the Spirit into the world of thought and passion; brings it down right here upon this bank and shoal of time; but China rises with you into the world of the Spirit. We do not as a rule allow the validity of the Chinese method. We sometimes dub Keats, at his best a thorough ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... was assailed by a series of storms and hurricanes and driven far from her right course. After three months of exertion and suffering the captain was obliged to make for the port of Lisbon. There the ship was revictualled; but, having sailed again, she struck upon a rocky shoal at a distance of three leagues from Lisbon and was totally wrecked. Talon and his companions were fortunately saved, and found themselves back in France at the beginning of ...
— The Great Intendant - A Chronicle of Jean Talon in Canada 1665-1672 • Thomas Chapais
... came running up to the encampment with the unexpected and joyful tidings that "millions of sea-cows had come on shore." The crew climbed over the ledge of rocks that flanked their tents, and the sight of a shoal of manatees immediately beneath them gladdened their hearts. These came in with the flood, and were left in the puddles between the broken rocks of the cove. This supply continued for two or three weeks. The flesh was mere blubber, and quite unfit for food, for not a man could retain ...
— Thrilling Stories Of The Ocean • Marmaduke Park
... came by, and rubbed his nose against the canoe, and nibbled a lily root before he noticed me. A shoal of minnows were playing among the grasses near by. A dragon-fly stood on his head against a reed—a most difficult feat, I should think. He was trying some contortion that I couldn't make out, when a deer stepped down the bank and never saw me. Doing nothing pays one under such circumstances, ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long
... to cast himself indignantly from "this bank and shoal of time," or the frail tottering bark that bears up modern reputation, into the huge sea of ancient renown, and to revel there with untired, outspread plume. Even this in him is spleen—his contempt of his contemporaries makes ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... probably still find them afloat in the centre of the bay, in danger, should the sea again get up, of being dashed to pieces against the precipitous cliffs to the left; while, in the event of their escaping that peril, the raft might run on to some hidden shoal or reef down southwards in the darkness, or else be swept out into the offing, where they would be the sport of the waves, and could never hope to reach ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... the highest tides; while a sort of causeway, available at low water, would enable us to reach the island, if necessity required. But there the reef ended; beyond it the sea again resumed its somber hue, betokening deep water. In all probability, then, this was a solitary shoal, unattached to a shore, and the gloom of a bitter disappoint- ment began to ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne
... hurriedly, just giving the leaves a pat with their tails, as if closing the door behind them. These seemed to be messengers, for presently others of a larger size would come along more leisurely, as if to clear the way, and in a short time would appear quite a shoal of these beautiful fish of all sizes, forming a procession, as if they had some kind of carnival or festival afoot, and were making the most of ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... that he felt was the inmost message of the chord—this Presence in the room sought to push forward into objective reality. And behind it, he knew, lay the stupendous urgency and drive of some power that held the entire universe in its pulses as easily as the ocean holds a shoal of minnows.... ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... on the water) in the pursuit of the children of Israel. But here we find conflicting opinions. Some say that Pharaoh, arriving at the bank and seeing the impossibility of overtaking them, turned and retired; others, that there were shoal places in those far-away days where any one could cross; others, that they crossed on flats very like the ordinary modern mortal. But I do not accept this attempt to question the orthodox version, but will verify it as far as my observation will admit. The sea ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... was afterwards much resorted to by the Portuguese as a winter station, and became the key of their Indian trade. The African coast stretches out on both sides of the island into two points, that on the north-east called Pannoni, off which a shoal with three islets extends, some way into the sea. The ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... accommodate a cousin a full third of his own size, if swallowed properly, head first. His speed was so great that any smaller fish which he pursued was doomed, unless fortunate enough to be within instant reach of shoal water. Of course, it must not be imagined that the great trout was able to keep his domain quite inviolate. When he was full fed, or sulking, then the finny wanderers passed up and down freely,—always, however, giving wide berth to the lair under ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... had been uplifted, and deep oceans are always the concomitants of lofty heights. We do not, however, judge of this by inference merely; we have an evidence of the shallowness of the sea in those days in the character of the shells found in the Silurian deposits, which shows that they belonged in shoal waters. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... the island, which bears due south from Point Venus. To sail into it; either keep the west point of the reef that lies before Point Venus, close on board, or give it a birth of near half a mile, in order to avoid a small shoal of coral rocks, on which there is but two fathoms and a half of water. The best anchoring is on the eastern side of the bay, where there is sixteen and fourteen fathom upon an oosy bottom. The shore of the bay is a fine sandy beach, behind which runs a river ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... came they anchored their boats as close together as possible near the middle of the river on some shoal or shallow spot, such as abound in this great river of shifting sand bars. Here they spent their quiet, restful days, having prayers and a couple of religious services ...
— By Canoe and Dog-Train • Egerton Ryerson Young
... on the second of July they found shoal water, where they say[K]: 'We smelled so sweet and strange a smell, as if we had been in the midst of a delicate garden, abounding with all kinds of odoriferous herbs and flowers, so we were assured that ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... tide were now adverse, and we therefore anchored in two fathoms. There is two fathoms in the channel past Sandy Island, but a reef of rocks extend from the left bank of the river, which renders it necessary to keep close to the edge of the shoal off the island. ...
— Journals of Australian Explorations • A C and F T Gregory
... public spirit. There are no public buildings of note, or respectable architectural designs; no harbor improvements, except a lighthouse each on the beautiful summit rock-peaks of Cape Messurado and Cape Palmas—not even a buoy to indicate the shoal; no pier, except a little one at Palmas; nor an attempt at a respectable wharfage for canoes and lighters (the large keels owned by every trading vessel, home and foreign, which touches there.) And, with the exception ...
— Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party • Martin Robinson Delany
... continuing fair, we made good head-way. About midnight, Capt. Hilton's oar touched something which he supposed bottom, but which the blade of the oar discovered to be a shark that followed us next morning. Deeming us, therefore, over some dangerous shoal, he gave full vent to his feelings, by observing, that if even we were to escape these dangerous shoals, our distance from the Island was so great, that we could never endure hunger, thirst and the fatigue of bailing long enough to reach it. I endeavored to convince him that ...
— Narrative of the shipwreck of the brig Betsey, of Wiscasset, Maine, and murder of five of her crew, by pirates, • Daniel Collins
... a dear chap," said Jack. "I'm awfully sorry. I had such a shoal of things to see to. She's upstairs, right at the top of the house, first door you come to. She said you were to go up and have tea with her and ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell
... which it was difficult to make people appreciate, namely, the impossibility of man's fisheries affecting the numbers of the herring to any appreciable extent, a year's catch not amounting to the estimated number of a single shoal; while the flatfish and cod fisheries remove many of the most destructive enemies of the herring. Those who had not studied the question in this light would say that "it stands to reason" that vast fisheries must tend to exterminate the fish; apropos of ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... night, when through the mooring-chains The wide-eyed corpse rolled free, To blunder down by Garden Reach And rot at Kedgeree, The tale the Hughli told the shoal The ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... words, listen not to them," shouted Telemachus. "Are you so foolish as to think you can please so many lords? If you give not the bow to the suppliant, my hands shall drive you from the land, and if I were strong enough I would expel this whole shoal of lawless men." Thus encouraged, Euinaeus handed the great bow to ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... seasickness. Crowded together as they were during the copious rainfall, their sufferings that afternoon and night were pitiable. There were some families with women and children, and such shelter as a canvas awning could afford was kindly arranged for them. When we anchored in shoal water off the coast next morning, and the big flat-boats came to take them ashore, they had hardly strength and spirit sufficient to tumble into these craft, no doubt promising themselves, as usual, never, never again to quit the dry land. The water being very shallow, the Kebela anchored ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... as you do not care a rush whether yours are pardoned or no? And is it anything to you or to God that you believe in the life everlasting, if all your work, and hopes, and longings are confined to 'this bank and shoal of time'? Are you any more a Christian because of all that intellectual assent to these solemn verities? Is not your life like some secularised monastic chamber, with holy texts carved on the walls, and saintly images looking down from glowing windows on revellers ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... wrack about my door; I've heard the sea-wind sing its song in whispers 'round the place, And fought it when it flung the sand, like needles, in my face. I've seen the sun-rays turn the roof ter blist'rin', tarry coal; I've seen the ice-drift clog the bay from foamin' shoal ter shoal; I've faced the winter's snow and sleet, I've felt the summer's shower, But every night I've lit the lamp up yonder in ...
— Cape Cod Ballads, and Other Verse • Joseph C. Lincoln
... the Tree," because all boats, even the Zaire, must pass so close beneath the overhanging boughs of a great lime that the boughs brush their very funnels. Fortunately, the current is never strong here, for the passage is a shallow one. Yoka felt the boat slowing as he reached shoal water, and brought her nearer to the bank of the island. He had reached the great tree, when a noose dropped over him, tightened about his arms, and, before he could do more than lock the wheel, he was jerked from the boat and left swinging ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... peace and among the mountain roots of everlasting righteousness, thy downward course is shattery, headlong, turbulent, and destructive; black-throated whirlpools here, miasmatic marshes there, a cataract, a shoal, a rapid; until the remorseless stream, lashing among rocks which its own riot rendered sterile, pours its unresting waters into the ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... as she then looked in the sunny morning, when suddenly we saw a large ripple in the waters not far off. At first the captain imagined it to have been caused by a whale, and was rather alarmed, but by and by it turned out to be nothing but a shoal of fish. Then we made for a large piece of seaweed which we had seen some way astern. It extended some ten feet deep, and was a huge, tangled, loose, floating mass; among it nestled little fishes innumerable, and as we looked down amid ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... never shall close again By day nor yet by night, While man shall take his life to stake At risk of shoal or main (By day ...
— The Seven Seas • Rudyard Kipling
... the study of her husband's house a day or two after their return, when Tollman entered with a face full of apprehension. He had just suffered a fright which had made his heart miss a beat or two and had set his brain swirling with a fevered vision of all future happiness wrecked on a shoal of damnable folly. When he had presented his wife with the keys of his house he had not laid upon her any Bluebeard injunction that one door she must never open. Bluebeard lived in a more rudimentary age, and his needs included a secret chamber. The things ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... into the sea by an antediluvian horse with a small boy astride, and there the boy unhitches the traces from the machine and goes ashore, leaving you with the waves breaking on the steps before your door. You peep out dubiously. A shoal of naked-shouldered men are swimming and splashing in the surf. Some fifty yards away is another school of bathers, whose back hair betrays their sex, and who are clad in garments made like those worn by ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... blazing in his own splendour. Indeed, the Pandavas afflicted with fear, timidly gazed at Bhishma who was then achieving super-human feats in that battle. And the Pandava troops, thus fleeing away, O Bharata, failed to find a protector, like a herd of kine sunk in a shoal of ants while being trod down by a strong person. Indeed, the Pandavas could not, O Bharata, look at that mighty car-warrior incapable of being shaken, who, furnished with a profusion of shafts, was scorching ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... a glimpse into the countless ages of the past, when these crinoids, so rare and so rarely seen nowadays, formed a prominent feature of the animal kingdom. I could see, without great effort of the imagination, the shoal of Lockport teeming with the many genera of crinoids which the geologists of New York have rescued from that prolific Silurian deposit, or recall the formations of my native country, in the hill-sides of which also, among ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea. For which reason the sea in those parts is impassable and impenetrable, because there is a shoal of mud in the way; and this was caused by ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... hurrying into our office that day full of the plan for his great scheme—just a quibble of the law and the thing was done. We were all to be made rich and successful by it, he explained. There is no use in describing to you the intricacies of his idea; it was one of those shoal waters in which the honesty of young lawyers can sometimes come to grief. The pursuit of law will winnow out the true from the false; it makes an upright man a hundred times more certain and more proud ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... outside of which is the rich dark blue of deep water. All the sea is perfectly clear from any mixture of sand or mud. It is this perfect clearness of the water which renders navigation among coral reefs at all practicable; as a shoal with even five fathoms water on it, can be discerned at a mile distance from a ship's mast-head, in consequence of its greenish hue contrasting with the blue of deep water. In seven fathoms water, the bottom can still be discerned on looking over the side ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... but I am not so sure that we can get through as shoal a place as that seems to be, for it is only the spreading out of the river. The greater the expanse, the less the ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... of those bodies whose history I had to tell you. Professor H.A. Newton, of America, by examining ancient records arrived at the conclusion that the earth passed through a certain definite meteor shoal every thirty-three years. He found, in fact, that every thirty-three years an unusual flight of shooting-stars was witnessed in November, the earliest record being 599 A.D. Their last appearance had been in 1833, and he therefore ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... now," said Noddy philosophically, "but although the Curlew's stuck on the shoal I'm not stuck ...
— The Ocean Wireless Boys And The Naval Code • John Henry Goldfrap, AKA Captain Wilbur Lawton
... was the only way she could get anywhere. She sailed for two years, and never touched rock, reef, nor shoal. She had no inside ballast, her iron keel weighed five tons, but her deep draught and high freeboard made her very stiff. Caught under full sail in tropic squalls, she buried her rail and deck many times, but stubbornly refused to turn turtle. She steered easily, and she could run day and ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... village the course is shaped right to the south-east headland of Vaygats Island (Suchoi Nos), which ought to be passed at the distance of half an English mile. Immediately south-west of this headland lies a very long shoal, which one ought to take ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... to cross the torrent by means of a few bits of gravel projecting above the water; then, failing to find bottom, the more reckless of the Ants are swept off their feet and, without loosing hold of their prizes, drift away, land on some shoal, regain the bank and renew their search for a ford. A few straws borne on the waters stop and become so many shaky bridges on which the Ants climb. Dry olive-leaves are converted into rafts, each with its load of passengers. The more venturesome, ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... of May we had again sight of the land, which made ahead, being as we thought an island, by reason of a large sound that appeared westward between it and the main, for coming to the west end thereof, we did perceive a large opening, we called it Shoal Hope. Near this cape we came to anchor in fifteen fathoms, where we took great store of codfish, for which we altered the name, and called it Cape Cod.[2] Here we saw sculls of herring, mackerel, and other small fish, in great abundance. ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Vol. II - The Planting Of The First Colonies: 1562—1733 • Various
... land-floe, of some thirty miles in width, followed the sinuosities of the coast-line. Bergs here and there strewed its surface; but the major part of them formed what is called a "reef," in the neighbourhood of Devil's Thumb, denoting either a bank or shoal water ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... glaciers that once were tributaries still descend nearly to the sea-level, though their fronts are back in narrow fiords, eight or ten miles from the sound. A similar point juts out into the sound five or six miles to the south, while the missing portion is submerged and forms a shoal. ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... near the Cape. Here we had calms again, and the grass and barnacles grew very fast. Indeed, the ship's bottom was like a half-tide rock, and when the water washed up the sides, as she rolled, the noise made by the barnacles was like the surf on a sea-beach. We were followed for several days by a shoal of dolphins, which we caught in great numbers night and morning. Finally we got round the Cape, and to St. Helena, where we stayed four days, and employed men to assist us in chopping off grass and barnacles as ...
— Notes by the Way in A Sailor's Life • Arthur E. Knights
... before their door, and how the trouts therein were but little, and not seldom none at all; and even therewith came these words into Birdalone's mouth, she scarce knew how: My lady, why do we not fish the lake, whereas there be shoal places betwixt us and the eyots where lie many and great fish, as I have seen when I have been swimming thereover? And now in that same creek whereas the serpent used to lurk when I was little, we have a thing come, which is made to ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... efforts, they were being overhauled slowly, but Seymour still held on and did not despair. There was one chance of escape. Right before them, not a half league away, lay a long shoal known as George's Shoal, extending several leagues across the path of the two ships; through the middle of this dangerous shoal there existed a channel, narrow and tortuous, but still practicable for ships of a certain size. He was familiar with its windings, as was Bentley, as they both had ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... whether rock or sand, whether steep or shoal, we knew not; the only hope that could rationally give us the least shadow of expectation was, if we might happen into some bay or gulf, or the mouth of some river, where by great chance we might have run our boat in, or ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... doubt of their hostile intentions. The anchor was got up, when some of the blacks seized the painter, and others, in trying to capsize the boat, brought the gunwale down to the water's edge, at the same time grappling with the men to pull them out, and dragging the galley inshore towards the shoal-water. The bowman, with the anchor in his hand, was struck on the head with a stone-headed axe. The blow was repeated, but fortunately took effect only on the wash-streak. Another of the crew was struck at with a similar weapon, ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... on piles, with the water flowing beneath it, and Deerslayer had already discovered that the lake was of a great depth, he was fain to ask an explanation of this singular circumstance. Hurry solved the difficulty by telling him that on this spot alone, a long, narrow shoal, which extended for a few hundred yards in a north and south direction, rose within six or eight feet of the surface of the lake, and that Hutter had driven piles into it, and placed his habitation on them, ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... spent hours over his chart, so that he was perfectly familiar with its appearance, and he could have drawn from memory a practically perfect chart, marking every ledge, every shoal and every island, and giving them their correct names. Having become thus familiar with the chart, it was not so strange that he had been able to sail across the Eastern Bay as if ...
— Frank Merriwell's Cruise • Burt L. Standish
... August 1 discovered the enemy in Abukir bay. The French fleet was anchored in line on the western side of the bay, with wide shoals between it and the shore. It was sheltered by Abukir (now Nelson's) island and its rocks, and its leading ship was pretty close to the shoal off the island. It was composed of thirteen ships of the line and four frigates, and was much superior to Nelson's in the size of the ships and weight of metal. Some of the ships, however, were worn out, and many of their ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... beyond. Skua-gulls and giant petrels were perched here and there amongst the rocks, watching for an opportunity of marauding the nests of the non-predacious birds. Sea elephants raised their massive, dripping heads in shoal and channel. The dark reefs, running out into the pellucid water, supported a vast growth of a snake-like form of kelp, whose octopus-like tentacles, many yards in length, writhed yellow and brown to the swing of the surge, and gave the foreground an indescribable weirdness. I stood looking ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... sands from the level tide. The sand, uncovered by the sea for weeks, was bleached to an intolerable whiteness, but there was no wind to lift it, and the sea was tranquil, its little waves all hastening in one direction, like a shoal of fish making for a haven. The sun was already changing its early glory to heat. All the erections for amusement on the shore looked a little foolish in that solitude. I returned to the town along the empty asphalt roads and went with ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone
... interpretation does not reach the climax of absurdity till our Rationalist Punch, by way of signalizing his deliverance from Egyptian bondage, makes Pharaoh and his army forget that the tide ebbs and flows in the Red Sea, raises the tide over a shoal faster than cavalry could gallop from it, gathers an annual crop of twenty millions of bushels of manna from the thorn-bushes of Sinai, and feeds three millions of men, women, and children for forty ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson |
