"Cowry" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wentletrap snail from Tranquebar on India's eastern shore; a marbled turban snail gleaming with mother-of-pearl; green parrot shells from the seas of China; the virtually unknown cone snail from the genus Coenodullus; every variety of cowry used as money in India and Africa; a "glory-of-the-seas," the most valuable shell in the East Indies; finally, common periwinkles, delphinula snails, turret snails, violet snails, European cowries, volute snails, olive shells, miter shells, helmet ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... voice, Tombed in thy brittle shell, This human heart Thou croonest age on age, "Give and ask not, Help and blame not," Heeded less than large and mottled cowry The which at least some child may hold to ear All smiles ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... it, more awake and more excited than anyone, chewing on a twig that he would presently use as a toothbrush; for he borrowed right- and left-handedly from all the customs of the country he knew and loved. There was no need to worry about food—no need to spend a cowrie at the crowded stalls. He was the disciple of a holy man annexed by a strong-willed old lady. All things would be prepared for them, and when they were respectfully invited so to do they would sit and eat. For the rest—Kim ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... get their liberty as well as a husband. But the competition must be something awful. A fellow that has got a fine property or money is regularly hunted down; and even a poor devil like me has to be monstrous careful. Cowrie, of the Carbineers, who has got sixty thousand a year, says that he can't go to certain houses, for fear they may have a clergyman secreted about the place and will get him spliced to the ugliest daughter before he can escape. Awfully ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... marveled at the mystery of the ocean song being thus forever kept alive, inland. Shells seem so much like work of human hands, and are often so marked as with letters, that it is not strange that faith soon found the supernatural in them. The magic shell of all others is the cowrie. Why the Roman ladies called it porcella, or little pig, because it has a pig's back, is the objective explanation of its name, and how from its gloss that name, or porcellana, was transferred to porcelain, is in books. But there is another side to the shell, and another ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... sold her precious jewel in exchange for a cowrie. Virtue may be preserved with much pains for a long time; yet a day's carelessness may lose it. So it was with Hira. The wealth to gain which she had sold her precious jewel was but a broken shell; for ...
— The Poison Tree - A Tale of Hindu Life in Bengal • Bankim Chandra Chatterjee
... sacred symbol of the Mid[-e]/wig[^a]n, and may consist of any small white shell, though the one believed to be similar to the one mentioned in the above tradition resembles the cowrie, and the ceremonies of initiation as carried out in the Mid[-e]/wiwin at this day are believed to be similar to those enacted by Mi/nab[-o]/zho and the Otter. It is admitted by all the Mid[-e]/ priests whom I have consulted that much of ...
— The Mide'wiwin or "Grand Medicine Society" of the Ojibwa • Walter James Hoffman
... As things stood there was no way of instituting a more extended search. The police could be of no assistance, overwhelmed with their labors; individuals who might have helped were lost in the melee; money was as useless as strings of cowrie shells. ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner |
