"Barnacle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... classed with the Mollusca, some of which they closely resemble in external appearance. It was not till Vaughan Thompson demonstrated, in 1830, their development from a free-swimming and typically Crustacean larva that it came to be recognized that, in Huxley's graphic phrase, "a barnacle may be said to be a Crustacean fixed by its head and kicking the food into its mouth with its legs." For a systematic account of the barnacles and their allies, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... woke her master up in a fright and said: "Master of all masters, get out of your barnacle and put on your squibs and crackers. For white-faced simminy has got a spark of hot cockalorum on its tail, and unless you get some pondalorum high topper mountain will be all on hot cockalorum." .... ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... to leave out John Cheevers from the list of strange characters on the farm, because, though he did not belong there as member and was as a barnacle on the body politic, he was so quaint and queer. He was Irish and came to America as valet to Sir John Caldwell, who died very suddenly at the Tremont House in Boston. Pity, compassion or the like induced Mr. Ripley to befriend him, and being introduced to the life he became, as may ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... seen. But when I put this view of the matter to him I did not get much sympathy. He was a practical young man, without a stitch of romance in his whole make-up, and he only laughed at my suggestion and said that anybody who tried to push into that mess just for the sake of seeing some barnacle-covered logs, or perhaps a rotting hulk or two, would be a good deal of a fool. And so I did not press my fancy on him, and our talks went on ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... belief in the origin of species making any difference in descriptive work, I am sure it is incorrect, for I did all my barnacle work under this point of view. Only I often groaned that I was not allowed simply to decide whether a difference was sufficient to ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... the winds of the morning, an odour of new-mown hay Came, and my forehead fell low, and my tears like berries fell down; Later a sound came, half lost in the sound of a shore far away, From the great grass-barnacle calling, and later ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... that prominent feature of the human face, the organ of scent, they generalize too much, and have but one term for the symmetrical arch, arising majestically, or the tiny atom, scarcely equal to the weight of a barnacle—a very dot of flesh! Nor is the dissimilarity between the invisible functions of the organ, and the visible varieties of its external structure, less worthy of remark. With some, the sense of smelling is so ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 367 - 25 Apr 1829 • Various
... from the Loire, and pickled salmon from England. There was a dish of liver dressed with rice and herbs in the manner of the Turk, for liver, though contained in flesh, was not reckoned as flesh by liberal churchmen. There was a roast goose from the shore marshes, that barnacle bird which pious epicures classed as shell-fish and thought fit for fast days. A silver basket held a store of thin toasted rye-cakes, and by the monk's hand stood a flagon of that drink most dear to holy ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... farther than the land allows him, and his language is a new confusion, and all his thoughts new nations. His body and his ship are both one burden, nor is it known who stows most wine or rolls most; only the ship is guided, he has no stern. A barnacle and he are bred together, both of one nature, and it is feared one reason. Upon any but a wooden horse he cannot ride, and if the wind blow against him he dare not. He swerves up to his seat as to a sail-yard, and cannot sit unless ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... the number of the dimensions of matter depended upon God's choice, even as it depended upon him to cause or not to cause trees to produce animals. Indeed, how do we know whether there are not planetary globes or earths situated in some more remote place in the universe where the fable of the Barnacle-geese of Scotland (birds that were said to be born of trees) proves true, and even whether there are not countries ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... who are born to be put into a glass cupboard before which those who love them spread themselves like door-mats; who rule with a rod pickled in their apparent helplessness, which is stronger than a whip of steel, and who are quite closely related to the barnacle and mollusc to which the tide regularly brings tit-bits out of the ocean, whilst the more mercurial eel has to go out and thresh about in the mud for what it requires to keep it going ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... I roared along like a conquering hero, the boat received a frightful smash and came instantly to a dead stop. I was flung forward and into the bottom. As I sprang up I caught a fleeting glimpse of a greenish, barnacle-covered object, and knew it at once for what it was, that terror of navigation, a sunken pile. No man may guard against such a thing. Water-logged and floating just beneath the surface, it was impossible to sight it in the troubled water in time ...
— Tales of the Fish Patrol • Jack London
... the louse—might be distinguished from scurf (although to the naked eye it is very much like it in appearance) by the former fastening firmly on one of the hairs as a barnacle would on a rock, and by it not being readily brushed off as scurf would, which latter ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... scope of her quarter-section farms. Not many years ago one of the largest business houses in Chicago put up a placard, just before election, stating that the proprietor considered his interests justly the interests of his clerks, and it was decidedly to his interests to have the Honorable Barnacle Bigbug re-elected. All employes were requested to note well. You see the crime of this dry-goods "prince" (how we all run to idiotic titles!) lay in subordinating the good of the State to the good of his particular millions. He totally forgot that the good of each clerk was as much to be looked ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... things to tell you still, my kind foster-child, but little time have I to tell you them, for the barnacle-geese are flying over the house, and when they have all flown by I shall have no more to say. And I have to tell you yet how the King of Ireland's Son won home with Fedelma, the Enchanter's daughter, and how it came to pass that the Seven Wild Geese that were Caintigern's ...
— The King of Ireland's Son • Padraic Colum
... there is a semblance of respectability, considerable wealth, and great force and magnetism, all things are possible. Kent McKibben knew Horton Biggers, the editor, who was a rather desolate and disillusioned person of forty-five, gray, and depressed-looking—a sort of human sponge or barnacle who was only galvanized into seeming interest and cheerfulness by sheer necessity. Those were the days when the society editor was accepted as a member of society—de facto—and treated more as a guest than a reporter, though even then the tendency ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... could depend upon absolutely it was the consistency of his inconsistency. For, having announced his retirement, his very next move was to bewail his inability to retire. He insisted upon clinging to the business like a barnacle to a ship, and was always very much in evidence whenever any deal of the slightest importance was about to be consummated. Indeed, he was never so thoroughly in command as when, his first burst of enthusiasm anent the acquisition of the Narcissus at fifty per cent. of her value having passed, ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... inch in diameter. It is found adhering to the kelp, and forms the chief food of several kinds of seabirds, among others the "steamer-duck." Shells and shell-fish play a large part in Fuegian domestic (!) economy. A large kind of barnacle (Concholepas Peruviana) furnishes their drinking-cups, while an edible mollusc (Mactra edulis) and several species of limpet (Patellae) help out ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... bred in our land, we have the crane, the bitter,[1] the wild and tame swan, the bustard, the heron, curlew, snite, wildgoose, wind or doterell, brant, lark, plover (of both sorts), lapwing, teal, widgeon, mallard, sheldrake, shoveller, peewitt, seamew, barnacle, quail (who, only with man, are subject to the falling sickness), the knot, the oliet or olive, the dunbird, woodcock, partridge, and pheasant, besides divers others, whose names to me are utterly unknown, and much more the taste ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed
... and their shallower sovereigns, seem to have taken a perverse and, as it happened, a fatal pleasure in insulting them. Sad it is to see in Shirley's 'Gamester,' Charles the First's favourite play, a passage like that in Act i. Scene 1, where old Barnacle proclaims, unblushing, his own shame and that of his fellow- merchants. Surely, if Charles ever could have repented of any act of his own, he must have repented, in many a humiliating after-passage ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... my son," said Richard. "There are folk who can take as many forms as a barnacle goose. Keep thou a sharp eye as the fellows pass out, and pull me by the cloak if thou ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the works, but Miss Sherwin is the secret boss, and nags all the easy-going dames into doing something. But way I figure it out——You see, I'm not interested in these dinky reforms. Miss Sherwin's trying to repair the holes in this barnacle-covered ship of a town by keeping busy bailing out the water. And Pollock tries to repair it by reading poetry to the crew! Me, I want to yank it up on the ways, and fire the poor bum of a shoemaker that ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... who sent him to a Mr. Tite Barnacle, a fat, pompous man with a big collar, a big watch chain and stiff boots. Mr. Barnacle treated him quite as an outsider and would give him no information whatever. Then he tried another department, where they said they knew nothing of the matter. ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... of Fort Sumter, in the September previous. They retained the discipline of the ship in their quarters, kept themselves trim and clean, and their floor as white as a ship's deck. They did not court the society of the "sojers" below, whose camp ideas of neatness differed from theirs. A few old barnacle-backs always sat on guard around the head of the steps leading from the lower rooms. They chewed tobacco enormously, and kept their mouths filled with the extracted juice. Any luckless "sojer" who attempted to ascend the stairs usually returned ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... old Nicholas Cockney, and guardian of Priscilla Tomboy of the West Indies. Barnacle is a tradesman of the old school, who thinks the foppery and extravagance of the "Cockney" school inconsistent with prosperous shop-keeping. Though brusque and even ill-mannered, he has good sense and good discernment of character.—The Romp (altered from Bickerstaff's Love ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... and salute your officer, you confounded old barnacle!" roared the old gentleman. "Salute, sir, salute: your master's appointed to the smartest frigate ...
— Syd Belton - The Boy who would not go to Sea • George Manville Fenn
... Afterward, he found out that there had been no intention of regaling him with human flesh, but only with the flesh of the strange animal called "man."[146] As the "man of the mountain" is fixed to the ground by his navel-string, so the barnacle-goose is grown to a tree by its bill. It is hard to say whether it is an animal and must be slaughtered to be fit for food, or whether it is a plant and no ritual ceremony is necessary ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... Tommy, "in a minute or two." He has climbed into Joyce's lap, and is now sitting on her with his arms round her neck. To make love to a young woman and to induce her to marry you with a barnacle of this sort hanging round her suggests difficulties. Mr. Dysart waits. "All things come to those who wait," says a wily old proverb. But Dysart proves this ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... Inside there are stringers and frames to claw on to while feeling around; outside her skin is too slick for anything except a barnacle to grab ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... goin' to run away till I've had the next dance, Mister Eddication! Humph! I ain't begun to tell ye yet what a useless little barnacle you are." ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... family. More distant resemblances connect the lobster with the prawn and the crab, which are expressed by putting all these into the same order. Again, more remote, but still very definite, resemblances unite the lobster with the woodlouse, the king crab, the water flea, and the barnacle, and separate them from all other animals; whence they collectively constitute the larger group, or class, Crustacea. But the Crustacea exhibit many peculiar features in common with insects, spiders, and centipedes, ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... which indicate either that the "general reader" is a less intelligent person in England than in America, or that Mr. Halliwell's standard of scholarship is very low. We ourselves, from our limited reading, can supply him with a reference which will explain the allusion to the "Scotch barnacle" much better than his citations from Sir John Maundeville and Giraldus Cambrensis,—namely, note 8, on page 179 of a Treatise on Worms, by Dr. Ramesey, court physician ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... Brendan. Note 56 refers to a puffin (Anas leucopsis) or 'girrinna.' The bird, at least by 2004 classification, is not a puffin but a barnacle goose (Branta leucopsis) and I found one reference to its Irish name as 'ge ghiurain.' As these birds nest in remote areas of the arctic, people were quite free to ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... will is like ordering your grave clothes. Takes nerve. Mrs. Mosely didn't have any. She was merely a little old gray barnacle sticking to her husband's estate. She—hello! What's ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... extinct species of West Indian nocturnal bird) were fish flesh, and might or might not be eaten in Lent, he tells us that he was fairly worsted,—(although he could cite the celebrated myth of the "barnacle-geese" as a "fact" in justification of one's right to doubt ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... to show their contempt for the young lout that they invented names for him—weakly, perhaps, but very boylike—and for a time he was James the Second, but the lad seemed rather to approve of that; and it was soon changed for Barnacle, which had the opposite effect, and two fights down in a sandy cave resulted, at intervals of a week, one with each of his enemies, after which the Barnacle lay down as usual, and cried into the sand, which acted, Vince said, ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... heard out of the old barnacle, eh, Jack?" said Bill Saxby. "We must be out of this swamp by night and layin' a course for Cap'n Bonnet ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... enough to think it all deserved. The author is a literary man, and German scholar. He has read my book very attentively; but, what is very remarkable, it seems that he is a profound naturalist. He knows my Barnacle-book, and appreciates it too highly. Lastly, he writes and thinks with quite uncommon force and clearness; and what is even still rarer, his writing is seasoned with most pleasant wit. We all laughed heartily over some of the sentences. I was charmed ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... sailing through the sea, But the Past is heavy and hindereth me, The Past hath crusted cumbrous shells That hold the flesh of cold sea-mells About my soul. The huge waves wash, the high waves roll, Each barnacle clingeth and worketh dole, And hindereth ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... some years' seniority over Paul, was slow in unbending his dignity; but observing at last the eager and respectful attention with which the stripling listened to a most veracious detail of five men being inhumanly murdered in Canterbury Cathedral by the Reverend Zedekiah Fooks Barnacle, he was touched by the impression he had created, and shaking Paul graciously by the hand, he told him there was a deal of natural shrewdness in his countenance, and that Mr. Augustus Tomlinson did not doubt but that he (Paul) might have the honour to be murdered himself ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... soon as the force at Lewiston aggregated six thousand men, a forward movement should be made; but Dearborn himself, with the largest force then under arms, took good care to remain on Lake Champlain, clinging to its shores like a barnacle, as if afraid of the fate visited upon the unfortunate Hull. Finally, after two months of waiting, Van Rensselaer sent a thousand men across the Niagara to Queenstown to be killed and captured within sight of four thousand troops who refused to go ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... said it then, Thompson! American bottoms seem to be turned into barnacle-gardens," declared the man who had questioned the matter ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... upwards to maturity, cannot be reconciled with the idea that natural classification follows according to the degrees of resemblance in the parts of most physiological importance. The affinity of the common rock-barnacle with the Crustaceans can hardly be perceived in more than a single character in its mature state, but whilst young, locomotive, and furnished with eyes, its affinity cannot be mistaken{434}. The cause of the greater value of characters, drawn from the early stages of life, can, as we shall ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... three years with the prior, and to his great grief came no more in the fourth. The learned have exhausted their arts to discover what a burnet can be, and have given up the chase. Some would have him to be a barnacle goose, others a dab-chick or coot—none of which can fairly be classed as aviculae small birds. Burnet is brown or red brown, and rather bright at that. We have it in Chaucer's "Romaunt of the ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... Old Bill Barnacle sticks to his ship, He never is ill on the stormiest trip; Upside down he crosses the ocean— If you do ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 8, 1920 • Various
... Barnacle, has got My piercing eyes of black; The Elephant has got my nose, I do not want ...
— Greybeards at Play • G. K. Chesterton
... beach, John Wood was seated in the sand, sheltered from the sun in the boat's shadow, absorbed in the laying on of verdigris. The dull, worn color was rapidly giving place to a brilliant, shining green. Occasionally a scraper, which lay by, was taken up to remove the last trace of a barnacle. ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 9 • Various
... by which time they had cleared three masses of weed and a barnacle-covered plank, they abandoned the search and resumed the voyage. A gloom settled on the forecastle, and the cook took advantage of the occasion to read Tim a homily upon the shortness of life and the suddenness ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs
... be anchored to one spot of the geographical distribution like a barnacle to a ship during the whole of his mortal belligerency?" he one day asked his wife. "We hear nothing, see nothing, become nothing, and our system becomes fossilized, antediluvian. Why not see everything, know everything? Life is hardly worth while, but ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... groups of species, differing more from each other than do the adults. In most cases, however, the larvae, though active, still obey, more or less closely, the law of common embryonic resemblance. Cirripedes afford a good instance of this: even the illustrious Cuvier did not perceive that a barnacle was a crustacean: but a glance at the larva shows this in an unmistakable manner. So again the two main divisions of cirripedes, the pedunculated and sessile, though differing widely in external appearance, have larvae in ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... stay the great barnacle-goose When its eyes are turned to the sea and its beak to the salt of ...
— The Green Helmet and Other Poems • William Butler Yeats
... white-maned sea-horses, or the more sober lines of heavy infantry in uniforms of green and blue, the sea has for countless ages bombarded Carn Du with stone-shot in the shape of great boulders. These have ground and polished off every scrap of seaweed, every barnacle, limpet, and sea-anemone, leaving the rock all smooth and bare, while the boulders lie piled to the east in a heap, where the waves that try to take the rock in flank leap amongst them, and roll them over higher and higher, to come rumbling ...
— A Terrible Coward • George Manville Fenn
... despised in those days, I remember. There was a curious custom that prevailed of blowing horns and pounding tin pans to keep the bees from going away when swarming. The custom is an Old Country one, I fancy. The reader will remember that Dickens, in "Little Dorrit," makes Ferdinand Barnacle say: "You really have no idea how the human bees will swarm to the beating ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... by all the attractions of the middle zone of tide-pools and on as far as the lowest level of the water will admit. We are far out from the shore and many feet below the level of the barnacle-covered boulders over which we first clambered. Now we may indeed be prepared for strange sights, for we are on the very borderland of the vast unknown. The abyss in front of us is like planetary space, unknown to the feet of man. While we know the latter ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... Montmedy " Corporation of Publichouse-keepers of Tonnerre " Drapers of Caen " Harness-makers of Paris " Nail-makers of Paris " Pastrycooks of Caen " " La Rochelle " " Tonnerre " Tanners of Vie " Tilers of Paris " Weavers of Toulon " Wheelwrights of Paris Banquet, Grand, at the Court of France Barber Barnacle Geese Barrister, Fifteenth Century Basin-maker Bastille, The Bears and other Beasts, how they may be caught with a Dart Beggar playing the Fiddle Beheading Bell and Canon Caster Bird-catching, ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... that very thing, boy. It's as fast theer as a barnacle to a ship's copper; an' 'll stay, I hope, till I get my claws upon it,— which won't take very long from now. Pass a piece o' cord this ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... animals having a heavy calcareous shell were grouped with the snails and oysters as mollusks. But the barnacle did not fit well with other mollusks. Its shell was entirely different. It had several pairs of legs; and no mollusk has legs. The barnacle is evidently a sessile crab or better crustacean. Its molluscan characteristics were only skin-deep, evidently an adaptation to a mode of life like ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... he declared. "What I get will be worth it, probably, and besides he's a strong, healthy man. Then, too—well, I shouldn't say it to any one but you, but there is a little obligation on his side and that keeps me from feelin' like too much of a barnacle.... But there, what is the use of our threshin' this all over again? As I said in the beginnin', Sarah, you know why I'm ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... majority of the people then on earth. On the contrary, we blush to admit it, Methuselah was held in very trifling esteem by his frivolous fellow-citizens, who habitually referred to him as an "old 'wayback," "a barnacle," an "old fogy," a "mossback," or a "garrulous dotard," and with singular irreverence they took delight in twitting him upon his senility and in pestering him with divers new-fangled notions altogether distasteful, not to say shocking, to ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... it. I was sick for a couple of days, meanly sick, and my arms were painfully poisoned from the barnacle scratches. For a week I could not use them, and it was a torture to put on and take off ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... mouth while uttering the syllable "wah." They also saw the "Brent goose," a well-known species, and the "Canada goose," which is the wild goose par excellence. Another species resembling the latter, called the "barnacle goose," was seen by our travellers. Besides these, Lucien informed them that there were several other smaller kinds that inhabit the northern countries of America. These valuable birds are objects of great interest to the people of the fur countries for months in the year. Whole tribes ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... War is over and the battle has been won, I'm going to buy a barnacle and take it for a run; When the War is over and the German Fleet we sink, I'm going to keep a silk-worm's egg and listen ...
— The Sunny Side • A. A. Milne
... ancestral palace; or whether, according to the development theory of others, we are rising gradually, and have come up out of an atom instead of descending from an Adam, so that the proudest pedigree might run up to a barnacle or a zoophyte at last, are questions that will keep for a good many centuries yet. Confining myself to what little we can learn from history, we find tribes rising slowly out of barbarism to a higher or lower point of culture and civility, and everywhere the poet also is found, under ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... appeal against the injustice of depriving of personal liberty those who cannot pay their bills, or meet their notes, however small. Its prominent characters are the Clennams, mother and son, the Meagleses, Flintwinch, Sir Decimus Tite Barnacle, Rigaud ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... added, with look half positive and half interrogative, "Time's damned long, ain't it?" I agreed. Forgetting his work, he spliced a bit of rope badly. "See," I said, "that splice is wrong." "Ah," he replied, his face brightening, "you're a salt un too, are ye? Hanged if I didn't think you was a barnacle." He informed me that he had been in the English and American navies, and all round the world. Where had I been? I was obliged to explain that I was a journalist. Quill-driving, as he called it, was evidently, ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... a position in bird-lore intermediate between that of the phoenix and that of the pelican fed upon the blood of its mother whose beak is tipped with red, or that of the barnacle goose, of which the name suggests the mollusc,[1] the barnacle, and which was said to proceed from the mollusc or that of the bird of paradise, the feet of which were cut off by the Malay traders who sold the skins, and which ...
— Essays on early ornithology and kindred subjects • James R. McClymont
... was one of those characters, not uncommon north of the Tweed, who, if slow in forming an opinion, once having done so cling to it as tightly as any barnacle. ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... distance had not "lent enchantment to the view." I gave it some thought, but could not perceive that I had been so annoyingly persistent to merit a response from the President, not unlike that given by Mr. Blaine to one Mr. Tite Barnacle, who was willing to compromise on a foreign appointment. "Certainly," was the reply; the "foreigner the better." I concluded, however, that the bard may have been right when he wrote "There is a destiny that shapes our ends," for it often happens that what a man desires is just what he ought ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... the little spangled toys from the children's crackers were still hanging from clothes-lines across the kitchen. We piled wood on the fire; it had barnacle shells on it; with the wreckage of good ships we warmed ourselves. Mam Widger laid the supper. The steam from the kettles puffed merrily into the room. Herrings were cooking in the oven. A faint odour—they ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... case of degeneration from the acquirement of fixed habits, just as when a lively young crustacean larva gives up its free independent life and glues its head to a stone—what happens? Why, he becomes a mere barnacle instead of a spritely shrimp as he might have been! Let mankind ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... 97), and with some probability, that the "bird" was a nautilus; but the wild traditions concerning the barnacle-goose may perhaps have been the base of the fable. The albatross also was long supposed never to touch land. Possible the barnacle, like the barometz of Tartarean lamb, may be a survivor of the day when the animal and vegetable ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... boat which they had drawn up on a heap of mussel-shells. One or two crabbers, standing on the bow of their little skiffs and poling them along the edge of the water by the handles of their nets, had stopped to watch the job, which was being done with rusty nails and a bit of barnacle-moulded iron from a wreck instead of a hammer. When the iron and nails broke they all sat down and talked the matter over, with any other subject which happened to be lying loosely about on the fallow fields of their minds. When Captain Swendon came up they shook hands gravely with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... intelligent lad, respectable, and quick at figures, wanted in a merchant's office. Wages 8 shillings a week to commence. Apply by letter to Merrett, Barnacle, and Company, ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... of every hare for miles about was known to him, and if a fox or a covey of partridges were to be found at all, he was your man. In wild-fowl shooting he was infallible. No pass of duck, widgeon, barnacle, or curlew, was unknown to him. In fact, his principal delight was to attend the gentry of the country to the field, either with harrier, foxhound, or setter. No coursing match went right if Torn were not present; and as for night shooting, his eye and ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... visit. But as I told Henry (who said it looked as though she intended wintering in our abode), I had distinctly stipulated that the invitation was for a week only. I was not at that time aware of the barnacle-like qualities of Gladys. ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... is silent, and I suspect, Annie, that he is but a plain, home-bred fowl after all. But what shall we say to this piece of plank, hung with barnacles that look large enough for the fabled barnacle-goose to emerge from? Observe this fragment a little. Another piece is secured to it, not neatly, as with proper tools, but clumsily, with many nails of different sizes, driven unevenly and with their heads battered awry. Wedged clumsily in ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... was sought, I do not know. However the flirtation which seems to have no age limit has flourished like a bamboo tree. For once the man was too earnest. Dolly gave heed and promptly attached herself with the persistency of a barnacle to a weather-beaten junk. By devices worthy a finished fisher of men, she holds him to his job of suitor, and if in a moment of abstraction his would-be ardor for Sada grows too perceptible, the little lady reels in a yard or so of line ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... into Devonshire Street, which leads into Harley Street, minutely described in Little Dorrit as the street wherein resided the great financier and "master-spirit" Mr. Merdle, who entertained "Bar, Bishop, and the Barnacle family" at the "Patriotic conference" recorded in the same work, in his noble mansion there, and he subsequently perishes "in the warm baths, in the neighbouring street"—as one may say—in the luxuriant style in which he had ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... him a Samoed, [Footnote: This was the first meeting between West Europeans and Samoyeds.] which was but a young man: his apparell was then strange vnto vs, and he presented me with three young wild geese, and one young barnacle ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, • Richard Hakluyt
... had her guessin' some at that; for she wa'n't dead sure whether he was a real native or not until the boss of the island shows up. He's a hump shouldered, leather faced, bushy browed old barnacle, with a Down East dialect that it was a dream to listen to, and it was only when Mildred heard Hermes call him Uncle Jerry that she could believe the two was any relation. Uncle Jerry didn't interfere, though He let 'em moon around ...
— Torchy • Sewell Ford
... exterior stands a comparatively modern house, but this incongruous companionship is no strange thing in Normandy, although, as we have seen at Falaise, there are instances in which efforts are being made to scrape off the humble domestic architecture that clings, barnacle-like, upon the walls of so many of the finest churches. On the north side of Notre Dame, there is an admirably designed outside pulpit with a great stone canopy overhead full of elaborate tracery. It overhangs the pavement, and is a ...
— Normandy, Complete - The Scenery & Romance Of Its Ancient Towns • Gordon Home
... cathedral of Chartres in a Dutch market-place, and it would be a whitewashed desert in a week, while little shops and houses would be built against its sacred walls. There is hardly a great church in Holland but has some secular domicile clinging like a barnacle to its sides. ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... on your watch and get them here by quarter past one. Things are so much nicer when they are hot and good, and Edna is no more to be trusted than if she was five. If she happened to get to watching a barnacle eat its dinner she'd never once think ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... where we haul him out by the breeches and hang his machine up to dry on the fo'c's'le. By performing these duties four times a month, he leads us to believe he is preparing the way for the ultimate domination of Air Power. We of the Navy are obsolete, and our hulls are encrusted with the Harwich barnacle. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 29th, 1920 • Various
... afternoon walk over the hard-frozen snow to a neighbouring hamlet to take a deserving widow a can of soup, and old "Captain" Barnacle in Wheatsheaf ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... he said to dissipate his friend's surprise. "I can't stand her. She's a regular barnacle, and won't let me ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... agreed very well, though at times you heard it said That BILL had a way of his own of making his lips look red - That JOE looked quite his age—or somebody might declare That BARNACLE'S long pig-tail was never his own ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... "what do you suppose I found this modest, salt-water violet—or barnacle, I should say—doing? Actually dressed in oil-clothes and cleaning fish! Think of it! P. Whittington, the one and only! Wouldn't his friends along Fifth Avenue like to see him in that rig! Honest, Perce, if I wanted to bury myself, I'd pick a cemetery where the occupants didn't ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... Oona, it is a great blessing, but it is a great curse as well for a man, he to be a poet. Look at me: have I a friend in this world? Is there a man alive that has a wish for me? is there the love of anyone at all on me? I am going like a poor lonely barnacle goose throughout the world; like Oisin after the Fenians; every person hates me: you do not ...
— Poets and Dreamers - Studies and translations from the Irish • Lady Augusta Gregory and Others
... every appearance that the Declaratory Bill has occasioned a temporary division in the Cabinet, and a run against Dundas, and consequently against Pitt, who stands a willing sponsor for his transgressions, and who supports him through thick and thin. Dundas sticks to Pitt as a barnacle to an oyster-shell, so that if he chose it he cannot shake him off, and everybody believes he does not mean it, let what will be the consequence, because he likes him, and really wants him in the House of Commons; besides, there is no man who eats Pitt's toads with ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... cook them. By the law of many Indian tribes property and the control of the family go with the mother. The husband never belongs to the same family connection, rarely to the same community or town even, and often not even to the tribe. He is a sort of barnacle, taken in on his wife's account. To the adventurer, like a trader, this adoption gave a sort of legal status or protection. Gist either understood this before he started on his enterprise, or learned it very speedily after. Of the Cherokee tongue he ...
— Se-Quo-Yah; from Harper's New Monthly, V. 41, 1870 • Unknown
... and found ourselves within a marvellous natural break-water, heard the surf dashing without, and saw the spray, but we ourselves were sailing along smoothly and calmly, as if in a mill-pond. The rock of which the reef is formed, is said to be coral; but it is so coated with barnacle and limpet above barnacle and limpet, that I can see nothing but the remainder of these shells for many feet down, and as deep into the rock as our hammers will break. It extends from a good way to the northward of Paraiba to Olinda, where it sinks under water, and then ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... when the birds of passage swept aloft, snipe and teal and barnacle geese, and the rains began; when the green lizard with its turquoise-blue throat vanished; when the Jersey crapaud was heard croaking no longer in the valleys and the ponds; and the cows were well blanketed—then winter ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... First to one and then to another, it became apparent that the extent of the illuminated beach was widening. Hither and thither over the multitude the intelligence ran, in whispers or by glances. Having showed his neighbor each looked again. Ripple-worn sand, shells, barnacle-covered rocks, slowly came within the pale of the radiance and Moses moved with it. Eight stalwart Hebrews, bearing a funeral ark, shrouded with a purple pall, fringed with gold, emerged from among the people and, taking a place ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... of dissatisfaction at the continued closing of certain picture galleries and museums, either wholly or in part, the Government has appointed a special commission to investigate the matter, under the presidency of Sir Tite Barnacle (fifth baronet). A report of the first session follows, during which the cases for the public and culture, and for the Government as against ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various
... into wrong-doing always do bear quite a lot of investigation. But I was at sea before the mast once, where I learned painfully that the captain commands the ship; not even the notions of the buckiest bucko mate amount to as much as a barnacle's bootlace if the ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... knight, I salute you," said Amanda, making as low a bow as the two barnacle children, the bouquet and the basket with its crock of apple butter, ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... but we dashed through and over them at a mad gallop, never drawing rein for an instant except to pick our way among enormous masses of rock, which in some places had caved away from the summit of the cliff and blocked up the beach with grey barnacle-encrusted fragments as ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... afterwards he played some of his music to Wagner, who found it muddled, as if the sustaining pedal was held down all the time—and I have no doubt it was. Another gentleman who saw the score was Hanslick, then a young man looking around for some one to attach himself to—a peripatetic barnacle. Later, he found Brahms, as all the world soon found out, and revised his early notions of the greater musician. But at first he was all enthusiasm and gush, and wrote articles "explaining" Tannhaeuser. ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... comedy by the aforesaid lady, who waits to be enrolled in that much wanted book, a new edition of the Biographia Dramatica. This Broken Bow which looks like a re-cooking of the Merry Miller of Thomas Sadler, 1766, bears to be "printed at Stratford-upon-Avon, for the Author, by W. Barnacle, 1820." Mary Hornby, following the example of the preoccupier of the butcher's shop, tries her hand at both tragedy and comedy; in the first line she stands charged with the perpetration of The Battle of Waterloo, which, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 185, May 14, 1853 • Various
... be they gracious or damnatory, with the formula: "Ee, bless me, my man." (Nowadays none of us speaks to a schoolfellow without beginning: "Ee, bless me, my man.") "Salome" we call the entertaining creature. This nickname adhered like a barnacle to him, immediately after he had employed, in his exegesis of the Greek narrative of Herodias' daughter, the expression: "Now, if ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... is another example of degeneration through quiescence. The barnacles are crustaceans related most nearly to the crabs and shrimps. The young barnacle just from the egg is a six-legged, free-swimming nauplius, very like a young prawn or crab, with a single eye. In its next larval stage it has six pairs of swimming feet, two compound eyes, and two ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... demanded elaborately, "who ever heard of a treasonous barnacle before? A barnacle, Starrett, adheres and adheres, parasite to the end as long as there's liquid, even as you adhered while the ship was keeled in gold. Nevertheless, you're right. I'm all of what you say and more that you haven't brains enough to fathom. And some that you ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... was found upon the island; but several geese were breeding there, and the sooty petrel possessed the grassy parts; the swans of the sailor, in this instance, therefore, turned out to be geese. This bird had been seen before upon Preservation Island, and was either a Brent or a Barnacle goose, or between the two. It had a long and slender neck, with a small short head, and a rounded crown; a short, thick arched bill, partly covered with a pea-green membrane which soon shrivelled up, and came away in the dried specimens. Its plumage ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... did much for Darwin. His narrative of the voyage gained the good will of cultured England in general. The book on coral reefs won the geologists. His "Manual of the Cirrhipedia" (as the barnacle book was called) secured the attention of systematic zooelogists. The time was not far distant when he would need every aid possible toward gaining and keeping the regard of men; for he was to promulgate a theory that would arouse the bitterest ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker |
