"Reef" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was vigorous—have accomplished a veto. But projects in which Mrs. Rattleton was concerned never went slowly; and in the present case the necessity for getting back in time for the races really compelled haste. And so it came to pass that not until the Fleetwings was off the Brenton's Reef light-ship, with her nose pointed well up into the north-east, was there framed in Mr. Port's slow-moving mind a suitable line of argument upon which to base a peremptory refusal to go upon the expedition—and by that time he was so excruciatingly ill in ...
— The Uncle Of An Angel - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier
... in imagination the yells, and sees the knives, of the Lascar pirates just starting in pursuit. As I took in the import of those innocent words, falling from Winifred's bright lips, falling as unconsciously as water-drops over a coral reef in tropical seas alive with the eyes of a thousand sharks, my skin seemed to roughen with dread, and my ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... all along the Atlantic coast. The chief forecaster ventured the assertion that a volcanic eruption had occurred somewhere on the line from Halifax to Bermuda. He thought that the probable location of the upheaval had been at Munn's Reef, about halfway between those points, and the more he discussed his theory the readier he became to stake his reputation on its correctness, for, he said, it was impossible that any combination of the effects of high ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... ox. We made haste to tie his elbows back, and then, before he came to himself, we dragged him to a small tree, sat him up, and bound him to it, not by the waist but by the neck—some twenty turns of small line round his throat and the trunk, finished off with a reef-knot under his ear. Next thing we did was to attend to the honourable Antonio, who was making a great smell frizzling his face on the red coals. We pushed and rolled him into the creek, and left the ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... wind," he answered. "If these light airs hold they may overhaul us, because they can spread so much more cloth. But if the westerly freshens—and it nearly always does in the afternoon—I can outsail the Gull. I can drive this old tub full sail in a blow that will make the Gull tie in her last reef." ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... consisting of hard and rocky matter which comes in their way in the course of their navigation; they call such obstacles "reefs," and they have long been in the habit of calling the particular kind of reef, which is formed by the accumulation of the skeletons of dead corals, by the name of "coral reefs," therefore, those parts of the world in which these accumulations occur have been termed by them "coral reef areas," or regions in which coral reefs are found. There is a very notable example of a simple ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... connect the idea of selfishness with this view of the aspirations of humanity. Proctor and Airy absolutely know that they will be forgotten so far out in on-coming time, but still they drudge away, in the belief that man can only acquire knowledge of God's works as the coral reef attains continental proportions—that is, by the infinitesimal contributions of countless unselfish individualities. They are desirous that man should some day know the truth. Is there any unselfishness in ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... the passengers and crew get away on the ship's boats, but Carey is not fit for the journey. The ship lies on the reef, but mostly undamaged. The Doctor and Bostock remain with him. After they are settling in, and Carey is recovering well, a "beachcomber", who reckons he is king of these islands, makes his appearance ...
— King o' the Beach - A Tropic Tale • George Manville Fenn
... gold, and some victuals. On the same evening the fleet came to anchor off Melinda, which is eighteen leagues from Mombaza, and is in lat. 3 deg. S. This place has no good harbour, being only an almost open roadstead, having a kind of natural pier or reef of rocks on which the sea beats with much violence, owing to which the ships have to ride at a considerable distance from the shore. The city stands in a broad open plain, along the shore, surrounded with many palms, and other sorts of trees, which are green the whole year. It has also many gardens ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... an adjective, formed with the proper termination from the noun, batture, which means a bank upon which the sea beats, reef or sand-bank. Cap Batturier may therefore be rendered sand-bank cape, or the cape of the sand-banks. Batturier does not appear in the dictionaries, and was doubtless coined by Champlain himself, as he makes, farther on, the adjective truitiere, ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 2 • Samuel de Champlain
... apprehend the mutineers, and bring them back to England for trial and punishment. The Pandora reached Tahiti March 23, 1791, set sail, with fourteen prisoners, May 8, and was wrecked on the "Great Barrier Reef" north-east of Queensland, August 29, 1791. Four of the prisoners, including George Stewart, who had been manacled, and were confined in "Pandora's box," perished in the wreck, and the remaining ten were brought back to England, and tried by court-martial. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... freshness of inexperience. Her soul was as guileless and as ignorant as a child's; and she was stranded on life, with a large fortune, like a helmless ship, heavily loaded, that breaks from its anchor, and drives headlong upon a reef. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... gathering dust, and I thought: so will the unborn philosophers of the next century fold me up and put me away beside the other mouldy ones—curious but no longer useful. My book will be but an empty shell on the reef of human history. Of such cruelty are the makers of ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... closely, and the dog braced himself to spring, but just then a huge wave rose high over the vessel, the white-crested tip hissing like an angry snake, and Jan looked down, down, down into a dark hole and below it gleamed the jagged peaks of the reef, like threatening teeth of a hidden monster. He knew the danger. Drawing back he turned ...
— Prince Jan, St. Bernard • Forrestine C. Hooker
... for a sea-captain to try to take the clapper out of the bell that floats and tolls above a shoal on which his ship will be wrecked if it strikes? Would it be wise to put out the lighthouse lamps, and then think that you had abolished the reef? Does the signalman with his red flag make the danger of which he warns, and is it not like a baby to hate and to neglect the message that comes to you and says, 'Turn ye, turn ye, why ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... and with the help of the Asika and Jeekie, dug a little in this gravel, not without reward, for in it they found several nuggets. Above, too, where they went afterwards, was a huge quartz reef denuded by water, which evidently had been worked in past ages and was still so rich that in it they saw plenty of visible gold. Looking at it Alan bethought him of his City days and of the hundreds of thousands of pounds capital with ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... looked at each other for a moment or two, and then they one and all emphatically asserted their intention of remaining on the field, assisting Grainger in repairing the plant and raising trial crushings of stone from every reef on the field. ...
— Chinkie's Flat and Other Stories - 1904 • Louis Becke
... spot. From New York to Panama, from Panama to Lima, were our first steps. Here we joined the United States steamship Hartford, Admiral Farragut's flagship, and the next day set sail for our destined port,—if a coral reef surrounded by a raging surf can be called a port. About the same time a party of French observers under Monsieur Janssen, of the Paris Academy of Sciences, left Panama in ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... into the twilight,—such a little fellow, between those two great oars! But the boat could not drift or loiter with his steady stroke, and out he went, until I could only see the boat at last, lifting and sinking on the waves beyond the reef outside the moorings. I asked one of the fishermen whom I knew very well, "Who is that little fellow? Ought he to be out by himself, it is growing ...
— An Arrow in a Sunbeam - and Other Tales • Various
... investment for Bombay and Surat, were in Johanna roads, engaged in watering. At anchor, near them, was an Ostend ship that had called for the same purpose. A few days before, they had received intelligence that a French pirate, Oliver la Bouche,[2] had run on a reef off Mayotta, and lost his ship, and was engaged in building a new one. Thinking that the opportunity of catching the pirates at a disadvantage should not be lost, Macrae and Kirby agreed to go in search of them and attack them. They had just ...
— The Pirates of Malabar, and An Englishwoman in India Two Hundred Years Ago • John Biddulph
... sunrise, and being unable to reef the sail single handed he managed partially to brail it up. All day the craft flew along with the wind on the quarter, making six or seven miles an hour; and he felt that by morning he would be well beyond pursuit. On the run he ...
— A Knight of the White Cross • G.A. Henty
... and cracks; the skirting, having absorbed moisture and now drying again, opens its joints; the rough-cast coquettes with the frost and opens chinks and crannies for the humbler creation. I fail to see the necessity of (and, accordingly, I resent bitterly) all these coral-reef methods. Better walls than this, and better and less life-wasting ways of making them, are surely possible. In the wall in question, concrete would have been cheaper and better than bricks if only "the men" had ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... of a bright, but pale, green colour." Keeling atoll, outside which, at less than a mile and a half distance, no bottom was found with a line 7,200 feet in length, having been fully described, and an account given of all other known atoll systems, the peculiarities of the great barrier reef of North-east Australia, and that of New Caledonia, were recounted. Off the latter, no bottom was found, at two ships' length from the reef, with a line 900 feet long. With these were linked the smaller reefs of Tahiti and others, where considerable islands are ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... open country, and started fairly on our long ride. On our left was the ocean with "league-long rollers thundering on the reef:" on our right, a few miles away, was a line of mountains, divided into numerous spurs and peaks by deep valleys richly clothed in tropical verdure. The country about us was uncultivated and generally open, but here and there ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... km land area: 5 sq km comparative area: about eight times the size of The Mall in Washington, DC note: includes Ashmore Reef (West, Middle, and East Islets) ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... and blasts that have cooled their breath among hills of ice before they sweep across the Atlantic. Now and then a boat comes to grief even on the short voyage made for the purpose of cutting wrack from the shelves of the black-reef that lies a bit off the shore. So, on the whole, the inhabitants of Laraghmena may be considered to pay dearly for their supplies of fish and seaweed; and we at Lisconnel, though we live beyond reach of such things, and have few substitutes for them, are not far wrong in speaking ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... lee-beam lies the land, boys, See all clear to reef each course; Let the fore-sheet go, don't mind, boys, Though the ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... pilot is thinking of dangers to shun, - Of breakers that whiten and roar; How little he cares, if in shadow or sun They see him that gaze from the shore! He looks to the beacon that looms from the reef, To the rock that is under his lee, As he drifts on the blast, like a wind-wafted leaf, O'er the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... shape, and were surrounded by reef. The top reef was a loose shale, and had given great trouble from the frequent slips. Below this were strata of trachitic breccia and augite; the formation was then seamy ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 392, July 7, 1883 • Various
... and risks of this first trip, arising from the poor appliances he had, were enough to discourage, if not deter, a heart less bold than his, but to him a new difficulty only meant the letting out of another reef in his resolution to conquer it. Thus it was that immediately upon his return from this, his first trip, he not only announced that he would make another ascent the ensuing week, but that he would undertake something never previously undertaken in aerial navigation, namely, ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... was a beautiful spar, and her topmast was elegantly tapered and set up in good shape. Unlike most of the regular highflyer yachts, her jib and mainsail were not unreasonably large. Mr. Ramsay did not intend that it should be necessary to reef when it blew a twelve-knot breeze, and, like the Skylark, she was expected to carry all sail in anything short of a full gale. But she was provided with an abundance of "kites," including an immense gaff-topsail, which extended on poles far above the topmast head, and ...
— The Yacht Club - or The Young Boat-Builder • Oliver Optic
... escaped and went to Guam. Mr Becke went back in the cruiser to the Colonies, and then again sailed for Eastern Polynesia, trading in the Gambiers, Paumotus, and Easter and Pitcairn Islands. In this part of the ocean he picked up an abandoned French barque on a reef, floated her, and loaded her with coconuts, intending to sail her to New Zealand with a native crew, but they went ashore in a hurricane and lost everything. Meeting with Mr Tom de Wolf, the managing partner of a Liverpool ...
— By Reef and Palm • Louis Becke
... little time a passage nearly a quarter of a mile in width was discovered through the reef, and they were carried by a strong current into the peaceful waters ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... middle of the river with the four working westward from Long Island City. Toward the end of the work it was evident that the shields in Tunnels B, C, and D would meet in the soft material a short distance east of the Blackwell's Island Reef if work were continued in all headings. In order that the junction might be made in firm material, work from Manhattan in those three tunnels was suspended when the shields reached the edge of the ledge. The shields in Tunnel A met at a corresponding point without ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 • James H. Brace, Francis Mason and S. H. Woodard
... moved slowly downwards. Before them surged the foaming waters, the waves white-crested. A gust of wind struck the boat; the water began to beat heavily against it, so that it was tossed about like a piece of cork. Since Simon had not put up the sail there was now no need to reef it. Flakes of foam flew over the spars, the beams groaned. The clouds rushed on, driving the heaving, thundering waves before them. Soon the little boat was overtaken by darkness, which was only relieved by flashes of lightning. ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... Hong Kong, Isle of Man, Jersey, Montserrat, Pitcairn Islands, St. Helena, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, Turks and Caicos Islands 15 United States—American Samoa, Baker Island, Guam, Howland Island, Jarvis Island, Johnston Atoll, Kingman Reef, Midway Islands, Navassa Island, Northern Mariana Islands, Palmyra Atoll, Puerto Rico, Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (Palau), Virgin ...
— The 1990 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... at the Battery, are deflected a little to the westward by Governor's Island, and thus thrown out into the middle of the bay, where they receive the full force of the tidal impulse, retarded by the Narrows only long enough to disengage and drop their finer silt on the flats between Robin's Reef and the Jersey shore. The depurating process of the New World's grandest community lies ready for use in this natural drainage-system. If there be a standing pool, a festering ditch, a choked gutter, a malarious sink within the scope of the city ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... authorities, for differences between them were frequent and sometimes considerable, and in one instance alone a reduction of 12' in the chart was obtained. It is said in Hawkesworth (III, 202), "As soon as we got within side the reef (through Providential Channel) we anchored in nineteen fathom;" and afterwards (p. 204), that the channel, "bore E. N. E. distant ten or twelve miles." In the first chart the distance is 141/2 miles, ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... to reduce sail, brailing up the spanker and taking a single reef in the topsails; but still keeping the topgallant-sails set above them, a thing frequently done by a skipper ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... only as a landmark to the fishermen, for they had found by experience that by keeping the laird's chimney and the white tower of Cloomber in a line they could steer their way through the ugly reef which raises its jagged back, like that of some sleeping monster, above the troubled waters ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... I think we both know the position of every reef to within a hundred yards, so we will shape our course for Guernsey. If we happen to hit it off, we can hold on to St. Helier, but if when we think we ought to be within sight of Guernsey we see nothing of it, we must lie to again, till ...
— Among Malay Pirates - And Other Tales Of Adventure And Peril • G. A. Henty
... the captain, who was sculling, and he headed the dingy for shore, where it struck on a reef at the mouth of ...
— Dick in the Everglades • A. W. Dimock
... strand near Sligo an English captain numbered eleven hundred corpses which had been cast up by the sea. The flower of the Spanish nobility, who had been sent on the new crusade under Alonzo da Leyva, after twice suffering shipwreck, put a third time to sea to founder on a reef near Dunluce. ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... as it was, set directly for the obstruction, and it might be possible to drop down on it from above—if one provided some means for getting back again. Stonor marked the position of every rock, every reef above, and little ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... nearer to the turn of the land the reefs began to be sown here and there on our very path; and Mr. Riach sometimes cried down to us to change the course. Sometimes, indeed, none too soon; for one reef was so close on the brig's weather board that when a sea burst upon it the lighter sprays fell upon her deck and ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the picnic was a good way off, being the point of the promontory that shut in the mouth of the river, a great crag, with a long reef of rocks running out into the sea, playfully called the Kitten's Tail, though the antiquarians always deposed that the head had nothing to do with cats or kits, but with the disposition to erect chapels to St. Christopher on the points of land where they might first greet the ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... strength of these two blocks for shoring up the hull, you must begin little by little, and keep on brightening up until you have got the craft all right again. And when you have got her right you must keep her right. I say, Tom!—it won't do. You must reef down, or the devil 'll seize the helm in one of these blows, and run you into a port too warm for pea-jackets." For a moment, Spunyarn seems half inclined to grasp Tom by his collarless coat and shake the ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... the coast of Peru. The first slight signs of a gale, seen only by the careful skipper. The hasty preparations for it: all hands to shorten sail; then the moaning of the wind high up in the sky. All hands to reef sail now—the whirl and whoo of the gale as it came down on them. The ship careening as it caught her, the speaking-trumpet—the captain howling his orders through ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... occurred off King's Island, by the wreck of the Neva, in May, 1835, at 4 o'clock in the morning: she struck upon the rocks, swung on the reef, and admitted the sea. The pinnace was lowered, and the prison being broken by the shock, the unfortunate women rushed on the deck; they filled the boat, which was instantly swamped, and all, except three seamen, perished. The long-boat was then carefully laden; but being upset by the surf, all ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... chip of the old block—neck or nothing—carry on all sail till you tear the masts out of her! Reef the t'gallant sails of your temper, boy, and don't run foul of an old man who has been all but a wet-nurse to ye—taught ye to walk, and swim, and pull an oar, and build ships, and has hauled ye out o' the sea when ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... a reef or two, then, that's all," said Herrick. "Bear a hand, my boy, and we'll soon turn ...
— Harper's Young People, April 6, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... Dakar, the capital of the French colony of Senegambia, at daylight on July 3rd. Navigation is not easy here, for a reef runs parallel to the coast and the channel between, is neither broad nor deep. The town is built on the shores of a bay and faces an island strongly fortified. The whole colony is being rapidly developed; a railway runs to St. Louis and roads are ...
— A Journal of a Tour in the Congo Free State • Marcus Dorman
... powers are developed to the highest pitch? Is a native of the Andaman Islands the superior of Socrates? If you admit that Socrates is superior to the savage, where do you draw the line between the natural and the artificial? If a coral reef is natural and beautiful because it is the work of insects, and a town artificial and ugly because made by man, we must reject as unnatural all the best products of the human race. If you distinguish between different works of man, the distinction ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... the gift was thine. Whereat the hero, while the shooting spasm Had fastened on the lungs, seized him by the foot Where the ankle turns i' the socket, and, with a thought, Hurl'd on a surf-vex'd reef that showed i' the sea: And rained the grey pulp from the hair, the brain Being scattered with the blood. Then the great throng Saddened their festival with piteous wail For one in death and one in agony. And none had courage ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... excused for the shrill cry of alarm which escaped from his lips, for at that moment even an experienced sailor would have fancied the little craft had struck upon a reef, more particularly since it was known they were in ...
— The Search for the Silver City - A Tale of Adventure in Yucatan • James Otis
... search-light of war was turned upon the island of Key West, it was, to the people of the North generally, little more than a name attached to a small, arid coral reef lying on the verge of the Gulf Stream off the southern extremity of Florida. Few people knew anything definitely about it, and to nine readers out of ten its name suggested nothing more interesting ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... a violent storm, the ship was wrecked on a reef near the island of Rhodes. The waves swallowed up Lady Hester's treasures, and she herself barely escaped with life. On a small desert island she remained for four-and-twenty hours without food or shelter, until happily discovered ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... of Pamban at the entrance of Palk's Passage in the Straits of Manaar, which is distinguished by its magnificent colonnade and corridors. (Fergusson, Hist. Ind. and Eastern Arch., vol. i, pp. 380-3, ed. 1910.) The island forms part of the so-called Adam's Bridge, a reef of comparatively recent formation, which almost joins Ceylon with the mainland. A railway now runs along the 'bridge', and the pilgrims have ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... drew aft our foresheet, and were soon clear of the harbour; but we found that there was a devil of a sea running, and more wind than we bargained for; the brig came out of the harbour with a flowing sheet, and we lowered down the foresail to reef it—father and brother busy about that, while I stood at the helm, when the agent said to me, 'When do you mean to make a voyage?' 'Sooner than father thinks for,' said I, 'for I want to see the world.' It was sooner than I thought for too, as you shall hear. As soon as the brig was ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... tight the rein Lest that fiery soul of thine Whirl thee out of the listed plain, Past the olives, and o'er the line. Dire and grievous the charge he brings. See thou answer him, noble heart, Not with passionate bickerings. Shape thy course with a sailor's art, Reef the canvas, shorten the sails, Shift them edgewise to shun the gales. When the breezes are soft and low, Then, well under control, you'll go Quick and quicker to strike the foe. O first of all the Hellenic bards high loftily-towering verse to rear, And tragic ...
— The Frogs • Aristophanes
... lighthouses on Labrador in those days, and though hundreds of vessels, crowded often with women and children, had to pass up and down the coast each spring and fall, still not a single island, harbour, cape, or reef had any light to mark it, and many boats were unnecessarily lost ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... strange record of hopes unfulfilled, and high adventure unachieved, would have been disinterred from the dark storehouse of the past! That the vessel came in her present position by accident, could hardly be supposed. More probably, having struck on the Barrier Reef, or on some of the hidden coral shelves with which this sea abounds, she had been taken into this secluded creek for repairs. Cook, the great circumnavigator, careened his ship at a spot not far distant from ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... of Tresham bending down, coaxing and flattering our little girl. He's a bad man, sent with sorrow and shame wherever he goes, and I know it just as I know the long dead roll of the waves and the white creeping mist—like a dirty thief—which makes me cry out at sea 'All hands to reef! ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... terminating in a bold headland. The violence of the sea has caused extensive and picturesque excavations and caverns; and at the end of the cliff, two sharp rocks called the Needles, raised their heads at low water, connected by a low, sunken reef. In a westerly gale these rocks were very dangerous to homeward-bound ships, and I have often sat with admiration in the heights above, watching the grotesque forms and silvery spray of the gigantic breakers, which after being broken in their progress, heaved ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 375, June 13, 1829 • Various
... and slack each reef an' tack, Gae her sail, boys, while it may sit; She has roar'd through a heavier sea afore, An' she'll roar through a heavier yet. When landsmen sleep, or wake an' creep, In the tempest's angry moan, We dash through ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... has he started on his way, than the mother's heart enters upon a period of increasing perturbation. Suppose something should happen to the steamer—that it should break down, or catch fire, or run on a reef—or that there should be a railroad accident—or that George should lose his ticket, or be robbed of his money and find himself in some far-away spot, not knowing what to do with no one to go to? Then that long motor ride through deserted country—suppose ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... in company with other people's babies whom they didn't know, and celebrities whom they knew to death, until, one by one, they either stranded upon a motherly dowager by the Fireplace Shoals, or were rescued from the Soda Reef by some gallant wrecker of a strong-minded young lady, with a view to taking salvage out of them in ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... mine—one of those people who talk about money with an air of familiarity that suggests that they have got an "out-crop" of the Rand reef in their back-gardens—said to me the other day that I ought to buy a fur-lined coat. There never was such a time as this for buying a fur-lined coat or a sealskin jacket, said he. What with the war, and the "sales," ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... very likely to be so with the wind rising out of the northeast; and ere long the Petrel's topmast was sent down, and a double reef put in her mainsail. Until midnight it blew hard with a fast rising sea, and a mist as thick as a hedge. After this, it was ugly weather all the way home, and as they passed Ailsa Craig the wind changed to full north, and fetched the ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... are grannies. They would jam so that you'd never untie 'em, besides being ugly. There's wrong ways even in doing up a string. See here." He rapidly twisted the ends together into a reef-knot. "There's strength and beauty together," he said. "Look how neat it is, the ends tidy along the standing part, all so neat as pie. Besides, it'd never jam. Watch how I do it, and then try ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... building, with a spacious veranda in front, covered by plaited matting and canvas curtains triced up all around. The back and one side of the building rested against a craggy eminence which overlooked the sea on both sides of the island, and commanded a wide sweep of reef and blue water beyond. A few clumps of cocoa-nut-trees and dwarf palms, with bare gaunt stems and tufted tops, stood out here and there along the rocky slopes, while lesser vegetation of cactus and mangrove bushes were scattered thickly over the island, cropping ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... removed. Mr. Hume with his usual perseverance, walked out when the camp was formed; and, at a little distance from it, ascended a ridge of pure sand, crowned with cypresses. From this, he descended to the westward, and, at length, struck upon the river, where a reef of rocks creased its channel, and formed a dry passage from one side to the other; but the bend, which the river must have taken, appeared to him so singular, that he doubted whether it was the same beside which we had been travelling during the day. Curiosity led him to cross it, when ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... last most of the piles were removed by the Athenians. But the most awkward part of the stockade was the part out of sight: some of the piles which had been driven in did not appear above water, so that it was dangerous to sail up, for fear of running the ships upon them, just as upon a reef, through not seeing them. However divers went down and sawed off even these for reward; although the Syracusans drove in others. Indeed there was no end to the contrivances to which they resorted against each other, as might be expected between ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... anything in ten years. Say, Ma, what do you s'pose? Dave Corbett was out in the Nancy three hours and never got a bite. What do you think of that? The wind died down, his engine got stalled, and he and Hosey Talbot had to row home from the Bell Reef Shoals. Haw, haw! Maybe I didn't roar when I saw them come pulling in against the tide, mad as two man-eating sharks. Fit to harpoon the first person they met, they were. I sung out and asked them ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett
... the companions of the carriage that had come to grief by sticking fast in the mud of the cross-roads, for, after the men and beasts belonging to it had striven uselessly for three long hours to move it from the reef on which it had foundered, the gentleman sitting alone inside it had hit upon the peculiar idea of being carried to the csarda on man-back instead of on horseback. He mounted, therefore, on to the shoulders of his huntsman, a broadly built, sturdy fellow, and leaving his ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... as if I was coming up into a reg'lar twister, and thought it would be safer to reef a mite and make for ca'm waters. My head begun to whirl, and I cal'lated I'd best weigh anchor while my soundings ...
— Captain Pott's Minister • Francis L. Cooper
... razors and things, they got to talking of Australia; and that was all about fighting too: dog fights, fist fights between bullockies on the long road from Northern Queensland, riots in Perth when the pearlers came in off the Barrier Reef to spend their pay, rows in the big shearing sheds when the Union men objected to unskilled labour—you'd have thought Australia was one big battlefield, with nothing else but fights worth talking ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... broke in Old Colonial, "the boy's right, I believe. Shut up, you Milesian mudhead, and listen to me. Right from the old pa on the top of Marahemo down to the very foot, there's the Maori middens: a regular reef of nothing but shell, oysters and pipi and scollops and all the rest. There must be hundreds and hundreds of tons of pure shell. All we've got to do is to make a kiln near the bottom and shovel the shell into it; and there's ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... saints in the likeness of Christ until, at last, they attain unto the fulness of the divine standard, even Jesus Christ (Eph. 4:11-15). Holiness is not a mushroom growth; it is not the thing of an hour; it grows as the coral reef grows: little by little, degree by degree. ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... "Reef every thing now!" Riddell shouted, leaping himself first into the rigging like a wild-cat. "Cheerily, men—with a will!" All his ill-humor was gone when the peril ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... to the door, opened it, and stood studying the gale that beat upon his cottage-front, straight from the Manacle Reef. The rain drove past him into the kitchen, aslant like threads of gold silk in the shine of the wreck-wood fire. Meanwhile, by the same firelight, I examined the relics on my knee. The metal of each was tarnished out of knowledge. But the trumpet was evidently an old cavalry trumpet, ...
— The Roll-Call Of The Reef • A. T. Quiller-Couch (AKA "Q.")
... syllable of that fervent prayer, reef, and come home to her? Then I need not have written this history, and all would have been well in Dreamland. But he didn't. He heard nothing but the sibilant waters as they rushed under his keel: he thought of nothing but the rose ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... a minute. But we have not been an hour in the Land of Nod, ere three heavy blows from a handspike are struck on the forecastle hatch, which is then slid back, and a hoarse voice bawls: 'All ha-ands a-ho-oy! tumble up to reef tops'ls!' Out we bundle, and grope for our clothes (the forecastle being as dark as a dog's mouth), get them on somehow, and hurry-scurry on deck. We find the weather and sea altered much for the worse, and the Old Man (captain) himself ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 431 - Volume 17, New Series, April 3, 1852 • Various
... unceasing murmur of the market-place and the bazaars, and the occasional cries of the priests from the minarets; the dark blue sea danced and flashed beyond the white margin of the town and its protecting reef of rocks where the sea-weed rose and fell, and above his head the buzzards swept heavily, and called to one another with harsh, frightened cries. At his side lay the dusty road, hemmed in by walls of cactus, and along its narrow length came lines of patient little ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... Jerry. "'Tis won'erful like hearin' a man's soul whisperin' in his innards; but unless I've a buzzin' in my ears, Mosheur Lanark, you make much about the same kind o' noises as old Gaffer Macklin—but not quite so loud as young Copper. It sounds like breakers on a reef—a ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... of his daily life as if nothing but a clear and shining road lay before him; as if he had done for ever with illusions and uncertainties and wild stirrings of the spirit; as if life spread before him like a sea of which he had a chart whereon every reef was marked, every shoal buoyed, and in his hands and brain the instruments and knowledge wherewith to run a true course. He made himself believe that he was reasonably safe from the perils of those uneasy waters. Sometimes he was a little in doubt, ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... body, that "only a particular inquiry will determine a man from a woman, though it may fail to determine a fool from a man." Tomlinson's imagined nation of the future is "as loyal and homogeneous, as contented, as stable, as a reef of actinozoal plasm." And over each hearth hangs the sacred Symbol—a ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... fairly round the Horn; but one forenoon the glass began to fall, and I saw there was heavy weather coming. After a bit it came on to blow a regular gale. The sea got up in no time, and I had to order all hands up to reef topsails. We were rather short-handed, for I could hardly get men when I started, for love or money. Well, would you believe it?—half a dozen of the fellows were below so drunk ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... is low, and the flat congewoi-covered ledges of reef on the southern side of the bar lie bare and exposed to the sun. Here and there in the crystal pools among the rocks, fish have been left by the tide, and as you step over the congewoi, whose teats spurt out ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... for the reef,—a total loss, said Hrolfur, a total loss, I tell you. She was a beautiful craft, shining black and diced with white along the sides—ten fighting mouths on either side and a carved figure on her prow. I think the king would have been sorry to lose her. She was far too ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... still there was a wonderful spirit and grace, and a wild, weird beauty which attracted us exceedingly; but the captain could only tell us that it had belonged to the wreck of a Danish brig which had been driven on the reef where the lighthouse stands now, and his father had found this on the long sands a day or two afterward. "That was a dreadful storm," said the captain. "I've heard the old folks tell about it; it was when I was only ...
— Deephaven and Selected Stories & Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... that as the bird of Nazareth has been found in books only, so the island of Nazareth has been found only on paper. At first, it appeared quite a respectable island; as maritime discovery progressed, it degenerated to a reef, and from that to a shoal; till at last, expunged from the more correct charts of modern hydrographers, it no longer can boast of a ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 440 - Volume 17, New Series, June 5, 1852 • Various
... had been trailing along the coastline, and now it angled out to glide over a long finger of cape, rocky and waterworn, which pointed at almost a right angle into the sea. This dwindled into a reef of rock, like the nail on a finger. The sea ahead was no unbroken expanse. Instead there was a series of islands, some merely tops of reefs over which the waves broke, others more substantial, rising well above the threatening water, ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... has ever known How he rowed in, alone, And never touched a reef. Some say they saw the dead man steer— The dead man steer the blind man home— Though, when they found him dead, His hand was cold ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... on Brimstone with Percy and the others to take a look at the Barona. The steel hull lay on its side on the foaming reef, a battered, crumpled shape, sadly different from the trim yacht that had left New York so short a time before. A miscellaneous lot of wreckage was swashing in the surf at the base of the point, and Jim and some ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... fleets lay between the enemy and his home ports. During the night our heavy ships, keeping well clear of possible mine-fields, swept down south to south and west of the Horns Reef, so that they might pick him up in the morning. When morning came our main fleet could find no trace of the enemy to the southward, but our destroyer-flotillas further north had been very busy with enemy ships, apparently ...
— Sea Warfare • Rudyard Kipling
... you better, and knew your husband at all, I might steer you a little farther out of Honeymoon Bay into calm waters, and tell you how to reef your sails, and how to tack at certain junctures of the voyage, and with the wind ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... our standing upright on it with perfect safety. After crossing the King Leopold Ranges we struck a level country, covered with rich, tall grass, and well though not thickly wooded. The rough granite ranges, by the way, we found rich in alluvial and reef tin. Gradually the girls grew stronger and brighter. At this time they were, as you know, clad in their strange "sack" garments of bird-skins; but even before we reached the Ord River these began to shrink to such an extent that the wearers were eventually wrapped as in a vice, ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... preserve the rain; neither has it any lake, but several salt ponds, which furnish the sole production of the island. Turk's Island cannot be approached on the east or northeast side, in consequence of the reef that surrounds it. It has no harbor, but has an open road on the west side, which vessels at anchor there have to leave and put to sea whenever the wind comes from any other quarter than that of the usual trade breeze of N.E. which blows over ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... Cornwallis, which, as laid down in the charts, appeared a safe and easy passage. But, on the 20th of May, at one A. M. we ran upon a most dangerous rock, or shoal in 3 20 south latitude, and 146 50 east longitude, and as this reef is not noticed in any map or chart, it appears that ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... patent. His mother-in-law had always lived with him, and she was "difficult." Who knows how keenly the sick woman's mind ran on the possibilities of reef and quicksand for the alien two left alone without her guiding hand? So she set the warning of her love and fear to be no more forgotten while ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... the poem, the wild voyage of the mad monkish lover with the dead Bride of Heaven, it strikes, of course, on the common reef of the Romantic—the ridiculous. But the recurring contrasts of a pure, clear peace in sea and sky, are of rare and atoning beauty. Such a ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart
... sub-order of lizards. Their chief characteristic is their adhesive toes, which enable them to cling to and run on smoothest surfaces even when upside down. They do not like the hot sunlight and largely feed at twilight and at night. The Reef Gecko is found in Florida; the Warty Gecko, so called on account of the rows of large wart-like scales on its back and sides, inhabits Lower California; the Cape Gecko, Lower California; the Banded Gecko, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California. ...
— Pathfinder - or, The Missing Tenderfoot • Alan Douglas
... joined the Zephyrs in an excursion up the lake, and another lighthouse was erected in the vicinity of a dangerous reef. ...
— All Aboard; or, Life on the Lake - A Sequel to "The Boat Club" • Oliver Optic
... stood to the north-west, the soundings for five miles varying from three and three-quarters to seven fathoms; the sea breaking heavily for about a mile in a northerly direction from the end of the sheltering reef, showing a much greater extent of shoalwater than is noted on the charts. Established a routine of watches of two hours each, for the members of the expedition ...
— Journals of Australian Explorations • A C and F T Gregory
... background of the sky was a pure beryl gradually burning aloft into orange. Here waves of fire beat over golden shores and red clouds extended as an army in regular column upon column. At the zenith, billows of scarlet leaped in feathery foam against a purple continent and the flaming tide extended from reef to reef among a thousand aerial bays and estuaries of alternating gloom and glow until shrouded and dimmed in an orange tawny haze of infinite distance. In the immediate foreground of this majestic display, like a handful of rose-leaves fallen out ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... himself long and dismally. "Piled her up," he muttered, "that's what her old man has done. Hit a half-ebb reef, and fairly taken root there. He's not shoved on his engines astern either, and that means she's ripped away half her bottom, and he thinks she'll founder in deep water if he backs her off the ground." A tiny spit of flame, pale against the moonlight, jerked ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne |
