"Flotson" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was the greeting this army received on every side. The flotsam and jetsam which swirled along in its eddies or followed in its wake cheered, howled, and danced deliriously; men, women, and children from doorways and galleries raised their voices lustily, and applauded as if at some favorite ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... letter for you." She went to the pigeon-holes on the wall that held the flotsam and jetsam of unclaimed mail, and brought him a square, blue linen envelope—distinctly a ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... What though the outer city reeked of the garish nineteenth century! In all this chamber there was scarce an article, from the shrivelled ear of wheat to the pigment-box of the painter, which had not held its own against four thousand years. Here was the flotsam and jetsam washed up by the great ocean of time from that far-off empire. From stately Thebes, from lordly Luxor, from the great temples of Heliopolis, from a hundred rifled tombs, these relics had been brought. The ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... sung With scarce less power than Arno's exiled tongue— We who are Milton's kindred, Shakespeare's heirs. The prize of lyric victory who shall gain If ours be not the laurel, ours the palm? More than the froth and flotsam of the Seine, More than your Hugo-flare against the night, And more than Weimar's proud elaborate calm, One flash of Byron's lightning, ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... stood a ragged object—a piece of social flotsam—a unit of London's misery. This poor filthy fellow was singing at the top of his voice, a music-hall song upon that fertile topic, "the girls," was dancing wildly around a dilapidated hat which stood upon the pavement at his feet, and was throwing sovereigns into this same hat from an apparently ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... Louise was fascinated. Old Mr. Bushrod Mosby she had known for years—a veritable rustic macaroni, a piece of tinselled flotsam floating on backwater. He had always called her M'Lou; later occasionally Miss M'Lou. Now the rhythm of some ancient rout was stirring old memories, and the obligations of host sat pleasantly heavy upon his befogged ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... prints, strange fishes in glass cases, rods, guns, pipe-racks, curiosities of every kind from various parts of the world—India, the South Seas, Australia, not forgetting London and Paris—and all the flotsam and jetsam of a far-wandered man, who—as the "King" remarked, introducing their autobiographic display with a comprehensive wave of his hand—had, like that other wanderer unbeloved of all schoolboys, the pious AEneas, ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... soils; it carried the new West to the old East, and is in our day bringing back again the new East to the old West. Religions, arts, tradings, philosophies, vices and laws have been borne, a strange flotsam, upon its unchanging flood. It has had its springs and neaps, its trembling high-water marks, its hour of affluence, when the world has been flooded with golden humanity; its ebb and effluence also, when it has seemed to shrink and desert the kingdoms set upon its shores. The fifteenth ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... to be seen also the human flotsam and jetsam of this northern country—miners, prospectors, drifters, government employees, and adventurers—all caught here as though in the cleats of a flume, at this focusing-point at the foot of the wild ...
— Young Alaskans in the Far North • Emerson Hough
... individual and corresponding disadvantages for the State. Liberty implies the right to rise by honest endeavour, but does not exclude the possibility of a wilful surrender to slothful inactivity, e.g., the human flotsam and jetsam of British cities, the casual ward and similar institutions. These and other phenomena of life in our islands have aroused bitter contempt among Germans. Contempt has been succeeded by envy and hatred. Rightly or wrongly the German ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... pieces of flotsam and jetsam that were ever thrown upon this coast," I remarked. "My father will ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... tide had not entirely subsided, but there was a perceptible diminution in the height of the waves. Up beyond the water-line lay a fresh installment of jetsam. But, as before, they labored only to save the flotsam. ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... to that she could see no reasonable prospect. She had only to look at Letty, shrinking in her corner of the bedroom, to judge any such mischance impossible. She was so humble; so negligible; so much a bit of flotsam of the streets. She had an appeal of her own, of course; but an appeal so lowly as to be obscured by the wayside dust which covered it. What was the flower to which Rash had now and then compared her? Wasn't that what he called it—the ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... Winslow, while the entertainer drifted off into the flotsam of the party. Olive went to join a group about the hostess, who had just come in to stir up mirth and jocund merriment in the dining-room, as it had settled down into a lower state of exhilaration than the ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... whiskey smugglers, missionaries, prospectors, United States soldiery and newly organized North West Mounted Police crossed and recrossed the international boundary between the American Northwest and what was then known as the "Whoop Up Country." This heterogeneous flotsam and jetsam held some of the material from which Montana evolved ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... physical and spiritual redemption of sordid lives. To these rooms men from the universities, impelled by a new conscience, bring their learning and their refinement. In these rooms men from the docks—the flotsam and jetsam of humanity—receive ...
— Old Valentines - A Love Story • Munson Aldrich Havens
... eccentric company enough. I found some of it hard to endure, though I am a mild-tempered man; but, certainly, when I told the captain to "shut up" I had forgotten that I was merely a bit of human flotsam, cut off from my resources and with my fare unpaid; a mere casual dependant on the bounty, or speculative enterprise, of the ship. He reminded me of it with considerable vigour; but at any rate I ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... the machine came originally I do not recall. My impression is that it belonged to a stenographer once in the employ of my father, who used frequently to come to our house to take down dictations. However this may be, the machine had lain hidden by dust and the flotsam and jetsam of the house for twenty years, when, as I have said, I came upon it unexpectedly. Old man as I am—I shall soon be thirty—the fascination of a machine has lost none of its potency. I am as pleased ...
— The Enchanted Typewriter • John Kendrick Bangs
... quarreled at a club dinner, and of how one threw three ribs of roasted beef at the other, who retorted with a whole sucking pig just from the native oven, of Thomas' wife leaving him for Europe after a month's honeymoon; and all the flotsam and jetsam of report and rumor, of joke and detraction, which in an island with only one mail a month are ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... loom like a huge spider under a peaked gable, a chest of drawers which would have set a collector crazy, Chippendale chairs with the seats out, Windsor chairs with the backs broken, gilt mirror frames with no glass in them—boxes—books—bottles—all the flotsam and jetsam of such old establishments. Most of the things had been set back against the wall, but right in the middle of the floor was an object which I took at first for a ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... could never have been on the face of one even faintly conscious that he was watched by any living thing on earth. The whole of Larry's heart and feeling seemed to have come up out of him. Yearning, mockery, love, despair! The depth of his feeling for this girl, his stress of mind, fears, hopes; the flotsam good and evil of his soul, all transfigured there, exposed and unforgettable. The candle-light shone upward on to his face, twisted by the strangest smile; his eyes, darker and more wistful than mortal eyes should be, seemed to beseech ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... sufficiently sad and sufficiently humiliating. His unavailing appeals to the American Congress are happily hidden in the rubbish of history, and are somewhat dimmed by the intervention of more than half a century. But his humiliation was extreme. Smart Congressmen, partisans, the ignorant flotsam of conventions and intrigues, heard the philosopher with contempt. A few heard him with sympathy; and the opinion in his favor grew, as if by the pressure of shame, until he was finally supported, and in a midnight hour of an expiring session of Congress, or rather in the early ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... the wreckwood gatherers along this part of the coast carry long gaffs to hook the flotsam and drag it above reach of ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... was all we could do to make headway against it. Seals were diving round us, white whales coming and going, but we had no eyes for them now. Suddenly Henriksen called out that there was a bear on the point in front. I turned round, and there stood a beautiful white fellow rummaging among the flotsam on the beach. As we had no time to shoot it, we rowed on, and it went slowly in front of us northward along the shore. At last, with great exertions, we reached the bay where we were to put in for the reindeer. The bear was there before us. It had not seen the boat hitherto; but now it ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... keen glance raked him again. Judged by his clothes, he was one of the world's ineffectives, flotsam tossed into the desert by the wash of fate; but there was that in the steadiness of his eye, in the set of his shoulders, in the carriage of his lean-loined, slim body that spoke of breeding. He was no booze-fighting grubliner. ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... all together not enough plot to set up one lively Victorian novel. Benet, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald—the flood-gates of each mind have been opened, and all that the years had dammed up bursts forth in a deluge of waters, carrying flotsam and jetsam and ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... but a waif on the ocean of commerce—the jetsam and flotsam, of which the law must direct the disposal. The heirs, as they have been called, may come in to the wreck that lies on the shores of time, after the soul has gone to eternity—but law must decide whether these wreckers are entitled to ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... with deep lines of anxiety scoring his face, Jess, troubled and anxious looking, and old Peter Bell, the former hermit, bearing an expression of mild bewilderment. Last of all came Alverado, the Mexican flotsam of the desert. His inscrutable countenance bore no sign of the suffering he had gone through at the thought that harm had come to his worshipped senorita, but in his heart the Mexican had suffered as much ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... They knew what we ate, and that was where they went too far. They had, among the flotsam in their hive, a few human bodies they had picked up from some wreck they'd come across in their travels. They had them stashed away like everything else they could lay a pseudopod on. So they stacked them the way they'd seen Terran frozen foods shipped in the past, and ...
— Greylorn • John Keith Laumer
... caught in their pastures, and drowned, the farmer rescuing only eleven. The cottagers were driven to their lofts, while the tide snatched away their furniture, doors, window-frames, and tables, and strewed them along the railway banks. There was flotsam and jetsam on what was now once more the coast-line at the village of Taliesin, where in old days the bard's cradle had been washed ashore; here one poor woman recovered her parlour-table of heavy oak; her chairs had travelled farther yet to ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine
... children, born in the sub-cellars, children of poverty, children of crime, children of wealth, children that are afraid when they hear their names pronounced by the lips of their mother, children that cower in fear when they hear the footsteps of their brutal father, the flotsam and jetsam upon the rude sea of life, my heart goes out to them ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... the time they were passing through his mind, he made a new foundation for a fire, this time in the open; where no treacherous tree could blot it out. Next, he gathered dry grasses and tiny twigs from the high-water flotsam. He could not bring his fingers together to pull them out, but he was able to gather them by the handful. In this way he got many rotten twigs and bits of green moss that were undesirable, but it was the best he could do. He ...
— Lost Face • Jack London
... Broadway Flotsam Spring Bowery Afternoon Promenade The Fog Faces Debris Dedication The Song of Iron Frank Little at Calvary Spires The Legion of Iron Fuel A Toast "The Everlasting Return," Palestine The Song To the Others Babel The Fiddler Dawn Wind North Wind The ...
— The Ghetto and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... Lowell found that he must act as judge and jury in many cases that came up. There were domestic difficulties to be straightened out, and thieves and brawlers to be sentenced. Likewise there was occasional flotsam, cast up from the human sea outside the reservation, ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... were watching for the coming of just such flotsam from the wreck, which they must have sighted when the lightning flashed; and would find some means for plucking him out of ...
— Darry the Life Saver - The Heroes of the Coast • Frank V. Webster
... things happen in this world occasionally, good as well as bad. There came up a heavy storm, and the next morning, walking with my father on the beach, strewn with deep-sea flotsam and jetsam, we came upon the mast of a ship, water-logged till it had the weight of iron; it might have been, as my father remarked, a relic of the Spanish Armada. And it was covered from end to end with the rarest and ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... all) I cordially hated the Strand. But the Embankment I regarded as one of the most romantic thoroughfares in London; and many a score of articles (which brought me money) do I owe to the inspiration of that broad, darkling, river-skirted road, and the queer human flotsam and jetsam one may meet ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... busied themselves with the task of retrieving such of the wreckage and the salvage of the Halfmoon as the waves had deposited in the shallows of the beach. There were casks of fresh water, kegs of biscuit, clothing, tinned meats, and a similar heterogeneous mass of flotsam. This arduous labor consumed the best part of the afternoon, and it was not until it had been completed that Divine and his party returned ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... here, my fine fellow, I'm Dan Mallam, Beachcomber [see note], as they call me, King o' the Pearl Islands, dealer and merchant in copra, pearl shells, and pearls. These are my reefs and islands. This is my estate, and all flotsam and jetsam as is washed ashore is mine. Do you hear me?—mine, to do as I likes with. This steamer's come ashore on my land, and my black lads, as has been out shelling and collecting nuts, saw it come and tell me, who have come over to see what the sea has washed me up this ...
— King o' the Beach - A Tropic Tale • George Manville Fenn
... Queen of England when the bottle was taken to the Admiralty in 1705, and shared with the high official whose business it was to attend to all flotsam and jetsam, a cordial dislike of Duchess Josiana. It seemed to the Queen an excellent thing that Josiana should have to marry this frightful man, and as for David Dirry-Moir he could be made an admiral. Anne consulted the Lord ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... railroad diverted the traffic to the Mariposa Group, Farleys was left to pursue its tranquil way undisturbed by stage or tourist. Still it remains, if stagnant, self-respecting, has a hotel, a post office and a street of stores, along which the human flotsam and jetsam of the mineral belt may drift without exciting comment. A derelict could pass along its wooden sidewalk, drop a letter in the post box, even buy a box of cartridges without attracting notice. And even if he should be noticed, Farleys was sleepy and a good way from anywhere. ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... ploughing, should turn up a large surface of life, rather than dig mines into geological strata. Masses of experience, anecdote, incident, cross-lights, quotation, historical instances, the whole flotsam and jetsam of two minds forced in and in upon the matter in hand from every point of the compass, and from every degree of mental elevation and abasement—these are the material with which talk is fortified, ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... it known that they belonged to a neighbouring islet at the moment unfriendly to the overbearing Dunk Island tribe, Blue Shirt and his attendants mentioned that cedar-logs and other attractive flotsam bestrewed the beaches, and volunteered to conduct the strangers to the best places on the understanding that they, being alien and hostile, should remain under the protection ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... now lay yellow in the blaze of the sun, the sandy dust was inches deep in the great road, cut by thousands of wheels. Flotsam and jetsam, wreckage, showed more and more. Skeletons of cattle, bodies not yet skeletons, aroused no more than a casual look. Furniture lay cast aside, even broken wagons, their wheels fallen apart, showing intimate disaster. The actual hardships ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... turned slightly in his favor, very slightly, out here on the prairie amongst the derelicts, the flotsam of the grassy ocean, he had found a brief breathing space. He had begun to think the balance had really turned. Hope dawned, and life offered fresh possibilities. And now—now he had been let down afresh. Before, the attack had been directed against the worldly ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... and intelligence which seems so integrally American. A well-dressed throng, well-fed, amiable and animated, looking ever forward, the resistless tide of affairs that gave it being bore it onward; it passed the onlooker as a strong current passes flotsam in a back-eddy, with no pause, no turning aside. Acutely he felt his aloofness from it, who had no part in its interests and scarcely any comprehension of them. The sunken look, the leanness of his young face, seemed suddenly accentuated; the gloom in his discontented eyes ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... a down-at-heel, out-of-elbow sort of look, it was Calvary Alley. At its open end and two feet above it the city went rushing and roaring past like a great river, quite oblivious of this unhealthy bit of backwater into which some of its flotsam and jetsam had been caught and held, generating crime and disease and sending them out again ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... "This flotsam and jetsam of her talk came to me from time to time as confidential asides from the main flow of palaver which rolled along steadily toward the Judge. The Judge, poor fellow, showed plainly the effects of the ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... sea retreats after a storm one finds on the beach all sorts of strange flotsam. Bernard Clowes was a bit of human wreckage left on the sands of society by the storm of the war. When it broke out he was a second lieutenant in the Winchester Regiment, a keen polo player and first ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... upon the shore, As flotsam, or as jetsam, Some wooden cases,—ten, or more,— Were cast up. "Let us get some, And see, my friend, what they contain; The chance may not occur again," Said good Who-zoo. Said Tum-tum, "Do; We'll both wade out and ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... upon the velvety lawn in front of the ranch foreman's residence, and while the silvery stars were peacefully twinkling in the heavens overhead, they were repeating stories of their checkered lives, which only too often brought back memories of those long-ago days, before they too had joined the flotsam of that class of the "underworld", who, too proud to degrade themselves to the level of outright vagrancy while yet there was a chance to exchange long and weary hours of the hardest kind of labor for the right to earn an honorable existence, were nevertheless, ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)
... enterprise came to him as a stimulus—the feel of the new country was as the breath of his nostrils. His bosom swelled with joy as he looked out toward that West which had so long allured him—that West of which he was to be the discoverer. The carousing riffraff of the wharfs, the flotsam and jetsam of the river trade, were to him but passing phenomena. He shouldered his way among them indifferently. He walked with a larger ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... Yes, she had defied him, but deep in her heart she had feared—how she had feared!—that Saltash would fail to hold her against him. Again, a deep compassion came over Jake, stirring the very depths of him. Poor little girl, flung to and fro as flotsam in the cruel surf of life's breakers! He had done his best to deliver her, but Fate had been against him. Fate had ordained that she should be the victim of this man's caprice, the slave of impulses which might or might not be her destruction. It was as if he watched her trying ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... and-thundered in his ears. Now he saw it all halcyon, stretching fair and mute to the boundless west, the sinking sun, the lovers' star. They two—could they two, lying with closed eyes, but drift out over bar, floating away through golds and purples towards the kiss of heaven and sea—flotsam of this earth, jetsam of age-distant shores, each to the other paradise and all in all! How profound the stillness—how deep the fragrance of the lily—what indifference, what quiet as of scorn did the Maker of man, having placed his creature in the lists, turn aside to other ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... of the fact that impertinent railroads were beginning to crawl about its feet, and the flotsam and jetsam of the adjacent city were gradually being deposited at its base, it nevertheless reared its granite shoulders proudly ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... wiped the table mightily; the French cabmen, the Barbary Coast flotsam and jetsam, gazed over their soup-spoons ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... its mysterious sources in the high places of the mountains. The dawn rises upon its league-wide flood; the moon walks upon it with silver feet. It is the pulsing heart of the land, living still though so many rules and rulers have risen and fallen beside it, their pomps and glories drifting like flotsam dawn the river to the eternal ocean that is the end of all—and the beginning. Dead civilizations strew its banks, dreaming in the torrid sunshine of glories that were—of blood-stained gold, jewels wept from woeful crowns, nightmare dreams of murder and terror; dreaming also of heavenly ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... seams admitted, the sailor had little leisure in which to sleep, or to dry himself. When he left the deck he had only the dark, wet berth-deck to retire to, a place of bleakness and misery, where he might share a sopping blanket, if he had one, with the corpse of a drowned rat and the flotsam from the different messes. There was no getting dry nor warm, though the berth-deck might be extremely close and stuffy from lack of ventilation. The cook-room, or galley fire would not be lighted, and there would be no comforting food or drink, nothing but raw meat and biscuit, and a sup of sour ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... the intellect," he went on after a pause. "He is surrounded by innumerable books; he cannot possibly read them all; he dips into one and picks up a scrap from another. His mind gradually fills itself with miscellaneous flotsam, with superficial opinions, with a thousand half-knowledges. Almost unconsciously he begins to rate literature according to what people ask for. He begins to wonder whether Ralph Waldo Trine isn't really greater than Ralph Waldo Emerson, ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... pitiful flotsam that reluctant seas have washed to us piecemeal from a remote past, there are, as will be shown later, many things which, although proceeding from a culture and modes of thought as far removed from our own as they may well be,[1] are worth the reading, which do not require any special knowledge ...
— The Instruction of Ptah-Hotep and the Instruction of Ke'Gemni - The Oldest Books in the World • Battiscombe G. Gunn
... on this wreck must have been above all estimate in value. How much 'Jetsam' there may be we cannot tell, but what we have seen is all 'Flotsam,' and will float and find its way in enriching influence to a ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... of millenniums have left on the earth—surely there is a call to service that might fire the spirit of the dullest of us.''[110] The obstacles are indeed formidable, but he who can look beneath the eddying flotsam and jetsam of the surface to the mighty undercurrents which are sweeping majestically onward can exclaim ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... husband to two Russian ladies now deceased. An Alaskan missionary, home on a short leave, called periodically, and attempted to persuade Mary to return with him to his heathen. These suitors were disposed of summarily when they made their desires known; but there were other visitors, part of the flotsam and jetsam of a great city, who appeared and disappeared mysteriously—ships passing Mistress Mary in the night of sorrow, and, after some despairing, half-comprehended signal, vanishing into the shadows out of which they had come. Sometimes, indeed, inspired by the good cheer ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the surfs thin line, at the dawn before The sun warms the sea, little, lonely and sad, sifting the sobbing tide. I will sift the surf that edges the night, with my net, the four Strands of my eyes and my lips and my hands and my feet, sifting the store Of flotsam until my soul is tired ...
— Amores - Poems • D. H. Lawrence
... above all things the newspaper, receives one evening a note common in appearance, coarse in expression, requesting her acquaintance, and signed "James Flotsam," let us say. Of course she pays no attention, and two nights later a card reaches her—a very doubtful one at that—bearing the name "James Flotsam," and in the corner, Herald. She may be about to refuse to see the person, ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... wood of Vincennes left a certain amount of human flotsam and jetsam lying around under the trees and in the dark shadows, helpless from a combination of wood alcohol and water treated with coloring matter and called "wine." It was Monsieur Podvin's business to hunt these unfortunates up and to relieve them of any ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... without a certain rude and massive grandeur, its grounds and possessions, through which the brother and sister were still picking their way, were even more grotesque and remarkable. Over a space of half a dozen acres the flotsam and jetsam of years of tidal offerings were collected, and even guarded with a certain care. The blackened hulks of huge uprooted trees, scarcely distinguishable from the fragments of genuine wrecks beside them, were securely fastened by chains to stakes and piles driven in the marsh, while heaps ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... flag-ship,—an old scow impressed for military service. But this was later; and when Fog and Waring came scudding into the harbor, the wild little village existed in all its pristine outlawry, a city of refuge for the flotsam vagabondage ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... though he paced from smoking to observation-car time and time again. He could not remain still. The first great fury of the storm had passed. It had swept him up, weak and nerveless, on the beach of retrospect; among the wreck of past hopes; the flotsam and jetsam ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... to take her to Berlin, for exhibition as "the German raft from America," for such she is; but they persisted in their scheme for showing her in London, where folks are already tired of "flotsam and jetsam" from the West. Their enterprise failed; and the poor Germans had to depart from England deep in debt instead of laden with money, and their raft was left ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... was reflecting upon something of the same sort. The Portuguese sailors, the last one of the departing four dodging a kick launched at him by Mr. Butts, went down to the shore, pulled the abandoned dingy upon the sand, and emptied the water out of it. They fished the oars out of the flotsam in the cove. Then they sat down on the upturned boat, manifestly under ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... was a deep hole where flotsam leaves and twigs performed an endless treadmill dance in the grasp of ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... She was another illustration of the rule that succeeding generations of women are seldom marked by cumulative progress, their advance as girls being lost in their recession as matrons; so that they move up and down the stream of intellectual development like flotsam in a tidal estuary. And this perhaps not by reason of their faults as individuals, but ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... in "Flotsam and Jetsam": reprinted, with alterations, as Proem to "Ranolf and Amohia", Second ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... there was a curious background to his thoughts. Some part of his earlier life seemed stirred up in the man. The one selfishness permitted to rank as a virtue in his sex was alive. His heart had ceased to throb with the loiterers, the flotsam and jetsam of the gutters. For the moment he was cast loose from the absorbed and serious side of his career. A curious wave of sentiment had enveloped him, a wave of sentiment unanalysable and as yet impersonal; he walked as a man in a dream. For the first time he ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... little to know or to pronounce their names correctly, but even the older ones were often too dazed to give a coherent account of themselves; although the more robust quickly recovered. The first thing to do with this human flotsam was to wash and disinfect and feed it, clip its hair to the skull, and then, having burned the rags of arrival, dress it in clean substantial clothes. While I was in Paris Mr. Jaccaci and Mrs. Hill were meeting these trains; and, when ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... trophies of the power of ocean to be found floating around those isles, and our young adventurers were frequently reminded of this by discovering oars, planks, casks, or other flotsam, which had belonged to some lost ship ...
— Viking Boys • Jessie Margaret Edmondston Saxby
... moment. A keen interest spread throughout the ship. On several occasions, fantastic clouds on the horizon gave hope of land, only to be abandoned on further advance. On December 28 and 29 large masses of floating kelp were seen, and, like the flotsam met with by Columbus, still ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... before the opening of this story I grew tired of fighting. How I drifted, a sort of human flotsam, against the crags of Styria would be a long, uninteresting story. By a curious combination of events I assumed the duties of tutor to the small count, Maximilian of Hapsburg, then a flaxen-haired little ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... knew that there had been no wreck, else the coast-guard station, less than a mile away, would have been very busy, and she herself must surely have heard some of the disturbance. No, there had been no wreck, yet all about her lay the wave-sodden flotsam and jetsam of many past disasters. A broken mast stump was imbedded upright in the sand at one spot. In another, a ladder-like pair of stairs, suggesting a ship's companionway, lay half out of the water. Sundry casks and barrels dotted the beach, some empty, some still ...
— The Dragon's Secret • Augusta Huiell Seaman
... was the same fez. The little old woman that we strolled to was bent nearly double. Her nose touched her wares as often as not, her mittened hands sought quiveringly the papers that the correspondent asked for. I liked him the better for his solicitude for this forlorn piece of flotsam of ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... movement, our recent fiction is like a river flowing sluggishly over hidden bowlders: the surface is so broken by whirlpools, eddies and aimless flotsam that it is difficult to determine the main current. Here our attention is attracted by clever stories of "society in the making," there by somber problem-novels dealing with city slums, lonely farms, department stores, ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... last, 'you're a good chap and I'm a rotter. I'm a bad egg, a rolling stone, flotsam, garbage, punk, anything you like that smells to heaven. I hate myself sometimes. It's hate of myself that makes me desperate. But, give me this chance. Perhaps a sea-voyage will brace me up. Genoa, you say? They speak ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... not set apart, indeed, by any legal formula, but by a natural law of classification which seems to be inherent in the universe. It was a curious and motley crowd—a little dull, perhaps, but orderly, well-behaved, and self-respecting, with here and there part of the flotsam and jetsam of a great city, a ragged, sodden, hopeless wretch wending his way about with the rest, thankful ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... I lay in that bight thar, an' the sun come out. The eye o' the storm it was, and after awhile it come on to blow again, as is the custom with twisters. When the weather cleared again, I don't know how long it was, I crawled down and overhauled the flotsam. There was part of Number One boat, with a beaker o' water an' a ham from the cabin stores. Later, I found my mate, Seth Colburn. He was dead. He'd sailed with me all his life, come from down Eastport way, and a smart man he was, too, at figgers. I dug his grave with my bare hands in ...
— Isle o' Dreams • Frederick F. Moore
... swiftly. The quadruple lines of columns all along the Corso, as the four-mile-long main thoroughfare was called, began to look like pier-piles in a flowing tide of men. Yellow, blue, red, striped and parti-colored costumes, restless as the flotsam on a mill-race, swirled into patterns, and broke, and reblended. The long portico of Caesar's baths resounded to the hollow hum of voices. Streaming lines of slaves in the midst of the street were delayed by the crowd, and abused for obstructing it. Gossip went up ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... which sweeps across the North Atlantic to the Azores; and its floating stuff is matter cast off from the Gulf Stream's edge into the bordering still water—as a river eddies into its pools twigs and dead leaves and such-like small flotsam—and there is compacted by capillary attraction and by the slow strong ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... village, and the dressmaker never let a chance slip to humiliate the old woman. Martha's open denunciation of the dressmaker's vinegar tongue had only increased the outspoken dislike each had for the other. She saw now, to her delight, that the incident which had seemed to be only a bit of flotsam that had drifted to her shore and which but from Martha's manner would have been forgotten by her the next day, might be a fragment detached from some floating family wreck. Before she could press the matter to an explanation Martha turned abruptly ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith
... became more fierce. I think the change of temperature must have been to blame. It was a chill, bleak evening. Overhead, across a background of faded blue, scudded ragged banks of clouds, the lingering flotsam of the shattered rainstorm of yesterday: and a cavalry cloak afforded but indifferent protection against the wind that blew hard and sharp from ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... world was awake, the sun already clear above the hills over St. Just pool, and all the harbour twinkling with its rays. My eyes searched the stretch of water between me and St. Mawes, as though for flotsam—anything to give me news, or a hint of news. For many minutes I stood staring—needless to say, in vain—and so, the morning being chilly, crept back to bed with the shivers ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... Gemsbock's Pass on the other; and this toll, being the only coin by which they came honestly in the course of the year, was regarded as a certainty and highly valued. Moreover, it was the only time that any purchases could be made, and the flotsam of the ford did not always include all even of the few requirements of the inmates of the castle; it was the only holiday, sacred or secular, that ever gladdened the ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... flotsam of humanity! (mused the pipe). Few and feeble are his friends on earth; and the One who, like him, was wearied with his journey, and, like him, had not where to lay his head, is gone, according to His own parable, into a far country. The swagman we have always with us—And ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... tide, and spending the night on land. By the way, whilst among the islands, I came across, at various times, many sad signs of civilisation, in the form of a lower mast of a ship, and a deck-house, a wicker-basket, empty brandy cases, and other flotsam and jetsam, which, I supposed, had come from various wrecks. After having been absent from my home in Cambridge Gulf, two or three months, I found myself in a large bay, which I now know to be King's Sound. ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... human limbs, and which sent forth an air blast which drove the boat before it like the hurricane of a tornado. And then the debris from the sky foamed down into the water, and then there was a long, long silence. Save for some inconsiderable flotsam, the steamer and all that was in her had vanished eternally. The canoes from the village were paddling for the beach again. They were alone on a lonely sea. No man seemed to have a thought he wished ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... uninhabited save by the keepers of the lighthouse, has not a trace of beach. The abrupt, precipitous walls of lava are too bare to feed a tree, so hot is the sun in summer, so heavy is the air with salt. At their base are piles of pebbles that the storm-surf has rolled on high, with a mixture of flotsam and jetsam and dead fish. Scattered around the larger islet lie the Little Columbretas,—the Foradada, piercing the surface of the water like the arch of a submarine temple, and a cluster of barren rocks, bald, sheer-faced, unapproachable, ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... tranquillity would have continued; but this is the view of those who can not realize that the tide of affairs is no more controlled by the "great men" than is the river led down to the sea by its surface flotsam, by which we measure the speed and direction of its current. Under that terrific tension, which to the shallow seemed a calm, something had to give way. If the dam had not yielded where Roebuck stood guard, it must have ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... out the difficult problem that was presented her with all the accumulated years of study and dreams, philosophy and courage, to help her. Then love had come, sweeping all her old life away before it—the flotsam and jetsam of discouraged years; what was ignoble and sordid and outgrown had still lined the river banks, it was true, but that was carried away now, the man she loved needed her, and by some instinct deeper ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... chests and boxes she had packed her pathetic loot—odds and ends of embroidery, of dress goods, of passementerie, of chair coverings; dozens of spools of thread and crochet cotton; odd dishes; jars of cold cream; flotsam and jetsam of the shops, a mere wreckage of material. Kate remembered it with vicarious shame and the blood that flowed to her face swept on into her brain. She flamed with loyalty to that little dead, bewildered woman, whose feet had walked ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... goal, and was every moment leaving it farther behind me. I was fast approaching a state of panic that might very easily have resulted in fatal consequences, when it suddenly occurred to me that, of course, it would be quite impossible for me to see those insignificant fragments of flotsam, unless they and I each happened to be hove up on the crest of a wave at precisely the same moment, and the reflection so far steadied my nerves that I was able successfully to combat the almost irresistible ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... large pastures in the Strip, fifteen strays. That night, in a dug-out on that range, the home outfit of cowboys played poker until nearly morning. There were seven men in the camp entitled to share in this flotsam on their range, the extra steer falling to the foreman. Mentally they had a list of the brands, and before the game opened the strays were divided among the participants. An animal was represented by ten beans. ...
— Cattle Brands - A Collection of Western Camp-fire Stories • Andy Adams
... his nostril, Sweet the din of the fighting-line, Now he is flotsam on the seas, And his bones ...
— Songs of Childhood • Walter de la Mare
... clouds hung low. Twice Anton had to jerk on the tow-rope to jolt Ross awake, for, unnoticing, he was heading for deep water. Even near the shore the torrent was full of floating debris. The bodies of horses and cattle drifting down the stream told of many impoverished farms and the flotsam was eloquent of wrecked and demolished houses and indicative ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... along the banks is most inspiring, magnificent here. Down the terraced slopes and right to the water's edge on the alluvial soil it stands in ranks. Each year, of course, the floods undercut the banks, and more trees fall, to become at last the flotsam of the shore a ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... Junius, or on which side of Whitehall Charles I. was beheaded; for if you do you will be considered a bore—and that is something too dreadful for you at your tender age to understand." For these last two stories I by no means vouch. They belong to the flotsam and jetsam of ephemeral gossip. But the following, which I regard as eminently characteristic, I had from ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... writer has apparently been so jarred by the patent incongruities, the baseless fiction, nay, the very fantasies (such as the fairy pavilion seen floating upon the Channel), which, imaginative and invented flotsam that they are, accumulated and were heaped about the memory of Aphra Behn, that he is apt to regard almost every record outside those of her residence at Antwerp[1] with a suspicion which is in many cases surely unwarranted and undue. Having energetically cleared away the more peccant ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... the cliff, where the old fishermen had their homes, and things were rough and interesting. They stopped at an old weather-beaten house that had in its low windows all sorts of curious things—models of ships and boats, odd bits of pottery, rude carvings, old brasses and mirrors,—the flotsam and jetsam from broken homes and broken lives that had drifted ...
— Killykinick • Mary T. Waggaman
... Maories detected the carcass of a whale rolling among the breakers about half a mile to the westward. Immediately a boat was lowered, a double allowance of line put into her, and off they went to the valuable flotsam. Dangerous in the highest degree was the task of getting near enough to drive harpoons into the body; but it was successfully accomplished, the line run on board, and the prize hauled triumphantly alongside. This was the whale they had now brought in. ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... her some of his past exploits: the Amazon, the Orinoco, the Andes, Tibet and China; of the strange flotsam and jetsam he had met in his travels. But she sensed only the sound of his voice and the desire to reach out her hand and touch his. Friendship! ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... were in reality models of order compared with these mushroom cities of raw boards, tar paper, and tin. Gambling joints, dance halls, and dens more vicious flourished openly, and around them gathered the scum and the flotsam that crests a ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... In addition to this flotsam, which is found in large masses in every big city, the militia which I mentioned consists of many adherents of an international European republic. I have been told the figures with which the foreign nations are there represented, but I remember only that almost eight thousand Englishmen ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... with the Allies, and is now in Russia working out a programme for the relief of Russia's refugees under the auspices of the Tatiana Committee. He is out on the roads in an automobile constantly, meeting the incoming human flotsam and jetsam of war, and his recommendations will have the weight of authority. America has become a synonym for service in France, Belgium, and Servia, but thus far America has done next to nothing for Russia. Shall America, who responded so splendidly to the appeal of Belgium ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various
... stormy one indeed. He was not yet five when the Protestant zeal of the Lord Protector Somerset stirred the Roman Catholics of the West Country into an insurrection that swept the anti-Papal minority before it like flotsam before a flood. Drake's father was a zealous Protestant, a 'hot gospeller,' much given to preaching; and when he was cast up by the storm on what is now Drake's Island, just off Plymouth, he was glad to take passage for Kent. His friends at court then made him a sort of naval chaplain ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... charts, models, unfinished musical scores, finally a huge papier-mache globe on which were traced the routes of Mr. Colman Hoyt's four unsuccessful dashes for the North Pole. It depressed me, the sight of this vast lumber-room, this collection of useless flotsam and jetsam, cast up and rejected by the sea of strenuous life. Most moving of all, a broken golf-club standing in a dusty corner, and beside it a wofully scarred and battered ball. I pointed them ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... captain of the "Saucy Jane," mackerel fisher, lying off the point, perceived a derelict "Whitehall" boat drifting lazily towards the Gulf Stream. On boarding it he was chagrined to find the expected flotsam already in the possession of a very small child, who received him with a scornful reticence as regarded himself and his intentions, and some objurgation of a person or persons unknown. It was Johnnyboy. But whether he had attempted ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... extravagance. As a final step in her preparation she rubbed her cheeks violently with a rough crash towel, the resulting brilliant complexion successfully obliterating all traces of weariness, the flotsam and jetsam of anxious days and haunted nights. And then with a jauntiness remarkable under the circumstances, Persis departed, resolved by fair means or foul to distract the thoughts of Mrs. Nelson Richards from the occupancy of ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... north and walked up the beach. Somewhere off this stretch of beach was the Maiden Hand. But where? They strolled along leisurely, stopping now and then to examine some bit of beach flotsam. There were shells, but most of them were small ...
— The Wailing Octopus • Harold Leland Goodwin
... before. Fishing men returning in straggling order. Bottles opened without loss of time. Black drakes dancing in the air. Surface of river marked by never a sign of fish. Flotsam and jetsam of shucks drifting down, and forming in mass at the eddies. Swifts and swallows exceedingly busy everywhere. Sun hastening to western hill-tops. Beautiful evening effects on field and wood, especially on hawthorn grove, in ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... and all-night restaurant, flourishing brazenly within a stone's throw of Broadway, and it is counted one of the sights of the city. Upon entering, one may pass through a saloon where white-aproned waiters load trays and wrangle over checks, then into a ball-room filled with the flotsam and jetsam of midnight Manhattan. Above and around this room runs a white-and-gold balcony partitioned into boxes; beneath it are many tables separated from the waxed floor by a railing. Inside the enclosure men in street-clothes and smartly gowned girls with enormous hats revolve nightly ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... mind, but a worm is at the root and, with a dim sense of the vanity of all knowledge that does not become a rule of life, some form of pessimism is sure to supervene in every serious soul. With age a civilization accumulates such impedimenta, traditional flotsam and jetsam, and race fatigue proceeds with equal step with its increasing volume. Immediate utilities are better, but yet not so much better than acquisitions that have no other than a school or examination value. If, as Ruskin ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... sea-change From a collier to a Shamrock under sail, From a Hyper-super-Dreadnought, old Leviathan at range, To a lightship or a whaler or a whale; With some canvas and a spar She can mock the morning star As a haystack or the flotsam of a gale. ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... dollar-trailers as they looked upon the worms that honeycombed their headstones' bases. What thoughts went through Bob Brownley's mind only his Maker knew. For minutes he stood motionless, then he walked on down Broadway. He went into the Battery. The benches were crowded with that jetsam and flotsam of humanity that New York's mighty sewers throw in armies upon her inland beaches at every sunrise: Here a sodden brute sleeping off a prolonged debauch, there a lad whose frankness of face and homespun clothes ...
— Friday, the Thirteenth • Thomas W. Lawson
... [Footnote 4: Flotsam, goods found floating on the water from a wreck; jetsam, goods thrown overboard from a ship which has perished; legan, heavy goods thrown overboard with a line and buoy to mark where they have sunk; derelicts, ...
— Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period - Illustrative Documents • Various
... lake the color of a blue heron's breast; a junk with sails of purple creeping out of a morning mist as yellow as saffron; an island with a still lagoon in its center, and coconut palms alive with screaming parrots of every gorgeous hue; a sandy beach where jabbering natives dragged the flotsam of a wrecked steamer out of the breakers; a village on a high plateau, where a drum throbbed incessantly, and naked Indian children peered out from behind the huts; a skirmish line in khaki crawling up to the brow of a shell-swept hill; a dog-team yelping ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... of what may be seen in Trafalgar Square. But with early autumn and the shortening days and the steadily increasing pressure of that undercurrent of want and misery through which strange flotsam and jetsam come to the surface, one saw, on the long benches or crouched on the asphalt pavement, lines of men and women sitting silently, making no appeal to passers-by, but, as night fell, crouching lower in their thin garments or wrapping ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... eddied around the broad floor. Men and women, delegates and spectators, aged party wheelhorses and youngsters who would vote for the first time that November, all lost their identities to merge with that swirling tide. Over their heads, like agitated bits of flotsam, pennants fluttered and placards rose and dipped. Beneath their feet, discarded metal buttons that bore the names of two or three "favorite sons" and those that had touted the only serious contender against the party's new candidate ...
— Hail to the Chief • Gordon Randall Garrett
... out of that wreckage, as out of a troubled sea, rise two figures: St. Joseph, and an almost life-size, painted statue of the Virgin. There the two stand firmly on their pedestals, their faces raised to God's roof of blue, which never fails. Because their eyes are lifted, they do not see the flotsam and jetsam of shattered stained glass, burnt woodwork, smashed benches, broken picture-frames and torn, rain-blurred portraits of lesser saints. They seem to ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... its side, and went back among the palmettos. When abreast of us and not more than half a mile off, with colors flying, we could see the officer of the deck and others closely scanning the shore. We were in hopes they would look upon our boat as flotsam and jetsam, of which there was more or less strewn upon the beach. To our great relief, the cruiser passed us, and when she was two miles or more to the southward we ventured out and approached the boat, but the sharp lookout saw us, and, to our astonishment, the steamer ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... shelves, and disappeared lower down behind forests of T-squares and bevels, and piles of drawing boards, tied together with webbing straps. Bit by bit, such parts of the partitions as had remained unoccupied had become covered with inscriptions and drawings, a constantly rising flotsam and jetsam of scrawls traced there as on the margin of an ever-open book. There were caricatures of the students themselves, coarse witticisms fit to make a gendarme turn pale, epigrammatic sentences, addition sums, addresses, and so forth; while, above all else, written in big letters, ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... of his own. He stood aloof from life and said things about it. He had no wife, no child, no business, no home—he dared not venture boldly into the tide of existence—he stood forever on the bank, and watched the current carrying its flotsam and jetsam to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... books, with the single exception of "Flotsam," which appeared serially in Longman's Magazine, and was, at first, produced in book form by Messrs. Longman, were published by the firm of Messrs. Smith, Elder, ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... thirty-third day after leaving Trieste, a haze of hills arose from the eastward horizon, and we knew it to be India. Then the blue water waxed green, greenish, and brown, like to liquid mud. The gulls became tamer and more numerous, and jetsam and flotsam drifted past us. We sighted land very early. As we were running in the pilot came alongside, and called up to the captain, "Have you any sickness on board?" The answer was, "Yes." "Then," said the pilot, "run up the yellow flag. I will keep alongside in a boat, and you ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... a few tools to the spot the next day, she set about her prodigious task. As the upper works were gone, and the galleon not large, in three weeks, working an hour or two each day, she had made a deep excavation in the stern. She had found many curious things,—the flotsam and jetsam of previous storms,—but as yet, it is perhaps needless to say, ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... official, rouletted, diagonal surcharge, Luxemburg, 1878), antique dynastical ring, unique relic) in unusual repositories or by unusual means: from the air (dropped by an eagle in flight), by fire (amid the carbonised remains of an incendiated edifice), in the sea (amid flotsam, jetsam, lagan and derelict), on earth (in the gizzard of a comestible fowl). A Spanish prisoner's donation of a distant treasure of valuables or specie or bullion lodged with a solvent banking corporation loo years previously at 5% compound interest of the collective worth of 5,000,000 pounds stg ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... Mathematically safe they would be if—and only if—they depended upon the laws of chance. No ship moving through the Asteroid Belt would dare to move at any decent velocity without using radar, so the people on this particular lump of planetary flotsam would be able to spot a ship's approach easily, long before their own weak detection system would register on the pickups of an ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett |
