"Snag" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... butt of a gun. Drift chips, lodged in the goose grass, kindled fire for kettle, but oilcloth had to be spread before you could get footing ashore. I began to wonder what happened as to repairs when canoes ripped over a snag in this kind of region, and that brought up the story of a furtrader's wife in another muskeg region north of Lac La Ronge up toward Churchill River, who was in a canoe that ripped a hole clean the size of a man's fist. Quick ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... he said wryly. "We must have struck a snag or perhaps a rock, just under water. Half the bottom of the hull's torn out. There's no hope of repair. If I hadn't given her the gun and beached her, we'd ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... woman stood speculating on sausage for dinner. As I passed her she looked up at me. She had but one tooth in the front of her head. I had become so nervous and easily affected in the last few days that the woman's face made a loathsome impression upon me. The long yellow snag looked like a little finger pointing out of her gum, and her gaze was still full of sausage as she turned it upon me. I immediately lost all appetite, and a feeling of nausea came over me. When I reached the market-place I went to the fountain ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... the mass of floating seaweed. I knew absolutely that my hook was going to snag it. But I tried to be careful, quick, accurate. I jumped my bait. It fell short. The hook caught fast in the kelp. In the last piece! The kite fluttered like a bird with broken wings and dropped. Captain Dan reversed the boat. Then he burst out. Now Dan was a big man and he had a stentorian ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... shape in 1884, the people will allow the party to remain in power. Changes of administration depend a great deal on the feeling of the country. If crops are bad and money is tight, the people blame the administration, whether it is responsible or not. If a ship going down the river strikes a snag, or encounters a storm, a cry goes up against the captain. It may not have been his fault, but he is blamed, all the same, and the passengers at once clamor for another captain. ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... Mississippi and its tributaries, the pilot is the man of greatest importance. He is supposed to be thoroughly familiar with the channel of the river in all its windings, and to know the exact location of every snag or other obstruction. He can generally judge of the depth of water by the appearance of the surface, and he is acquainted with every headland, forest, house, or tree-top, that marks the horizon and tells him how to keep his course at night. Professional ...
— Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field • Thomas W. Knox
... darkness, and so he endeavoured to put a stop to our progress. If so, he was mistaken, for we managed to keep down the centre of the stream, paddling with might and main. We incurred the danger, we knew, of running against a floating log or a snag, or sticking fast on a shallow; but it was better to run these risks than be shot by Indians, for although we had only seen one there might be dozens of them. It became more and more evident that the red ...
— In the Wilds of Florida - A Tale of Warfare and Hunting • W.H.G. Kingston
... shall come, and partly also, and perhaps chiefly, for the protection of our commerce on the high seas. This latter object is, for all I can see, in principle the same as internal improvements. The driving a pirate from the track of commerce on the broad ocean, and the removing of a snag from its more narrow path in the Mississippi River, cannot, I think, be distinguished in principle. Each is done to save life and property, and ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... every one on the boat was on his feet and running to the side. I joined the rush to the bows, and leaning over, saw that we were hard aground at the lower end of a sand bar. Imbedded in this bar was a long white snag, a tree trunk whose naked arms, thrusting far down stream, had literally impaled us. The upper woodwork of the boat was pierced quite through; and for all that one could tell at the moment, the hull below the line was in all likelihood ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... been imagined that she "would not know," and would think she was traveling upstream. She! Why, she had been steamboating for years. At dawn she got up and went listlessly and sat down on the cable coil again. She passed many a snag whose "break" could have told her a thing to break her heart, for it showed a current moving in the same direction that the boat was going; but her thoughts were elsewhere, and she did not notice. But at last the roar of a bigger and nearer break than usual brought her out of her torpor, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... her long skinny arm reached around behind me to snag a couple sandwiches the size of postage stamps from a waiter's tray. She wolfed them down, wiping at the end of her long nose with a wadded-up hunk of cambric. She'd done it before, and plenty, for her nose was red and sore. She made ...
— Vigorish • Gordon Randall Garrett
... in the morning. I am fading. I do not take my meals now, with any sort of regularity. Her dear name haunts me still in my dreams. It is awful on teeth. It never comes out of my mouth but it fetches an old snag along with it. And then the lockjaw closes down and nips off a couple of the last syllables—but ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... below, there were snakes and mosquitoes, and a few wading and swimming fowl; and up above, those big woodpeckers that the country people called logcocks—larger than pigeons, with flaming crests and spiky tails—swooping in their long, loping flight from snag to snag, always just out of gunshot of the chance invader, and uttering a strident cry which matched those surroundings so fitly that it might well have been the ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... on the river and that it behoved all loyal subjects to remove it. The people poured down from their villages to the moist warm valley of poppy-fields; and the King and I went with them. Hundreds of dressed deodar-logs had caught on a snag of rock, and the river was bringing down more logs every minute to complete the blockade. The water snarled and wrenched and worried at the timber, and the population of the state began prodding ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... this unbridled Salagua which had been their moat and rampart for so many years! Its waters flowed thin and impotent over the rapids, lying in clear pools against the base of the black cliffs, and the current that had uprooted trees like feathers was turned aside by a snag. Where before the sheep had hung upon its flank hoping at last to swim at Hidden Water, the old ewes now strayed along its sandy bed, browsing upon the willows. From the towering black buttes that walled in Hell's ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... because, having got the earth properly constructed and set up, as it were, I undertook to explain about latitude and longitude. Figures came in there, and I was never strong at mathematics. My education in that branch had run into a snag about the middle of the little multiplication table. A boy from the "plebs" school challenged me to fight, as I was making my way to recitation, trying to learn the table by heart. I broke off in the middle of ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... in English; "if we should strike a snag or any thing, broadside on, the boat would ...
— Rollo in Geneva • Jacob Abbott
... place where I thought there should be a trout, and to that little place the grasshopper was cast, when snap! went my leader. I put on another hook and another grasshopper, but the result was precisely the same, so I concluded there must be a snag there, although I had supposed that I knew a fish from a snag! I tried one or two other places, but there was no variation—and each time I ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... have got to Richmond so long as the Rebels contested the passage; each step forward finds new and greater obstacles. The channel is as narrow as Harlem River and as crooked as a walk in the ramble of Central Park. Each elbow of the stream is muscular with snag and snare wherever the swift stream swoops around abruptly. Jagged abatis, driven piles, and artificial lumber, bar the way before us. To the right of us, to the left of us, behind us, stand up the ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... tiny bit of oil stone, a file, or a piece of emery cloth are all good for this purpose. It takes a sharp point to penetrate the bony jaw of a fish. Always inspect your hook after you have caught it on a rock or snag. ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... about what deed shall be the noble one, won't you just give me a hand, and help me save this heel of mine from a blistering shoe? The shoe was all right in school, but just now it has picked up a snag, somehow, and between the shoe and the snag, my life ...
— The Girl Scout Pioneers - or Winning the First B. C. • Lillian C Garis
... Mormon, again setting into motion the fiendish echoes. He was naked to the waist; he had lost flesh; he was haggard, worn, dirty, wet. While he pulled on a shirt Nas Ta Bega made the rope fast to a snag of a log of driftwood embedded in the sand, and the boat swung to shore. It was perhaps thirty feet long by half as many wide, crudely built of rough-hewn boards. The steering-gear was a long pole with a plank nailed to the end. The craft was empty ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... and found the Red Un in agony, holding his jaw. Owing to the fact that he lay far back in an upper bunk, it took time to drag him into the light. It took more time to get his mouth open; once open, the Red Un pointed to a snag that should have given him trouble if it didn't, and set up a ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... a snag," replied Douglas, as he pitched into him; and before the fellow had time to reflect, he lay sprawling in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... not see it any more; I had no time. I had to keep guessing at the channel; I had to discern, mostly by inspiration, the signs of hidden banks; I watched for sunken stones; I was learning to clap my teeth smartly before my heart flew out, when I shaved by a fluke some infernal sly old snag that would have ripped the life out of the tin-pot steamboat and drowned all the pilgrims; I had to keep a look-out for the signs of dead wood we could cut up in the night for next day's steaming. When you have to attend to things of that ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... lunch, and a quiet loaf, the party sped homeward with the current, handling rods and trolls as salmon and bass demanded lively attention. Shooting a rapid, and out into a deep pool at its foot, the Doctor's boat struck a snag, and he, having a resisting power equal to that of a billiard-ball, put his heels where his head had been, and disappeared under the water, to pop up again instantly, sputtering and spitting, like a jug full of yeast ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... a person engaged in the fishery; and in the United States the naked trunk of a tree, which, imbedded in a river, becomes one of the very dangerous snag tribe. ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... feathery palms at the water's edge hid evil-smelling mud, festering with fever, the home of reptiles and crocodiles. Desperately the boy strove to overtake the boat, and just as he was giving up hope, a friendly snag tempted the runaway to pause, and Piang's strong, young hand closed over the outrigger. Then began the task of climbing back. A sudden movement might release the banco, and it would continue its mad flight, which he would ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart
... gentlemen, and therefore cannot work. They pay a good price for their indolence, as the neglect of their craft and their loose ideas of navigation seldom fail to bring them to grief before they even reach the Mississippi at Cairo. Their heavy, flat-bottomed boat gets impaled upon a snag or the sharp top of a sawyer; and as the luckless craft spins round with the current, a hole is punched through the bottom, the water rushes in and takes possession, driving the inexperienced crew to the little boat usually carried in ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... down to his boat, which lay moored to a snag alongside the bank, trodden hard to the consistency of asphalte by a hundred bare feet. He stepped over the gunwale and made his way aft with a practised balancing step. The after part of the canoe was decked in and closed with ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... that a man holding a similar job is paid. So far so good. But then, as her employer, undertake to hand out to her exactly the same treatment which the man holding a like position expects and accepts. There's where Mr. Boss strikes a snag. The salary she will take—oh, yes—but she arrogates to herself the sweet boon of weeping when things distress her, and, when things harass her, of going off into tantrums of temper which no man in authority, however patient, ...
— 'Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!' AND 'Isn't That Just Like a Man!' • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... while the deputy was gaily entertaining the widow, who was about equally divided in her attentions. As they proceeded Simon would say, "A very deep place here;" "bar here;" "push her off a little from that snag," etc., and the deputy would occasionally supply the widow with persimmons. While in the deepest part of the stream the widow discovered a splendid bunch of persimmons hanging from a bough which reached to the centre of the river. She declared she must have them. Simon ...
— The Expressman and the Detective • Allan Pinkerton
... said, for Dick never liked to boast in advance of what he expected to accomplish, having learned from sad experience that very often a snag is apt to sink the craft freighted with hopes, and ...
— Dick the Bank Boy - Or, A Missing Fortune • Frank V. Webster
... 'I will hold up mine feeble hands for mine oldt friendt Custos (Arne's name was Augustine), for I know not who I wouldt waidt for, over andt above mine oldt rival, Master Dom (meaning Pepusch). Only by your bermission, I vill dake a snag of your ham, andt a slice of French roll, or a modicum of chicken; for to dell you the honest fagd, I am all pote famished, for I laid me down on mine billow in bed the lastd nightd widout mine supper, at the instance of mine physician, ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... patching and darning was stylish. Soon as the washing was brung in the clothes had to be sorted out and every snag place patched nice. Folks had better made clothes and had to take care of em. Clothes don't last no time now. White folks had fine clothes but they didn't have nigh as many ...
— Slave Narratives: Arkansas Narratives - Arkansas Narratives, Part 6 • Works Projects Administration
... this one of ours was accidental. We discovered it the first time we ran on a snag in a bit of a rapid. The head-boat hung up and anchored, and the tail-boat swung around in the current, pivoting the head-boat on the snag. I was at the stern of the tail-boat, steering. In vain we tried to shove off. Then I ordered the men from ...
— The Road • Jack London
... Golden Bird get away, and he flew across the river and fell in a tangle of undergrowth. Rufus called Polly, and she plunged right in after him. Her dress caught on the same snag and God, Ann, they were being sucked under just as I got to them. She's still unconscious." In some ways as unconscious as was the Corn-tassel, Matthew began to press hot kisses on the face under his chin which brought forth a ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... whirled onwards by an unseen power. Though we got the paddles out, we had lost all control over our canoe. The next instant, her bow striking a rock, she was whirled round, when her stern came in contact with a snag also fixed in the crevices of ...
— Snow Shoes and Canoes - The Early Days of a Fur-Trader in the Hudson Bay Territory • William H. G. Kingston
... the arching moss and vines that trailed from the trees on the bank. Now and then a snag would be struck, and on such occasions Ruth would ...
— The Moving Picture Girls Under the Palms - Or Lost in the Wilds of Florida • Laura Lee Hope
... adventure. As to the kind of adventure, they are not particular so long as it promises excitement. Sometimes they go through their whole school career without accident. More often they run up against a snag in the shape of some serious-minded and muscular person who objects to having his toes trodden on and being shoved off the pavement, and then they usually sober down, to the mutual advantage of themselves and the rest of ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... ran against a snag, for your grandmother said that perhaps I could get yours without your being there, for my little sister could be your proxy. 'Oh, but,' I said, 'Patty is short and chubby while Marian is tall and slender. I am afraid I could never select the proper garment ...
— Little Maid Marian • Amy E. Blanchard
... years, George, and let me tell you somepin funny," continued the Captain. "Old Ahab Wright has taken to smoking in public to get the liberal vote! Let me tell you somepin else. They've decided to put the skids under Grant Adams and his gang down in the Valley, and the other day they ran into a snag. You know Calvin & Calvin are representing the owners since Tom's got this life job, though he's got all his money invested down there and still advises 'em. Well, anyway, they decided to put a barbed-wire trocha around all the mines and the factories. Well, four carloads of wire and ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... miser ran foul of a snag. A market-man had watched him for some time purloining his vegetables, and on the first of the year, sent in a bill of several dollars, for turnips, potatoes, parsnips, &c. The old miser, of course, refused to pay the bill, denying ever having had "the goods." ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... by bushmen in New Zealand to the insect Weta (q.v.). (2) A trunk embedded in the mud so as to move with the current—hence the name: a snag is fixed. (An American use of the word.) See ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... Snag the dog came in, and he joined in the search, you may be sure, although I do not know that he exactly understood what they were ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... tried to git the driver to hurry up, but first one thing happened, then another. I want to see what the little chap 'll do with this rattler; these blamed little bells set up a jinglin' noise every time the hack struck a snag." ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... tres and royal of equal size (ex. Schomburgk's deer); the second has the tres-tine larger than the royal (ex. our swamp deer); and the extreme type is that in which the royal is represented merely by a snag, the whole horn being bent forward (ex. the Burmese Panolia Eldii). The true cervine type of horn I have already described in its progress from youth to age. The Kashmir and Sikim stags are the representatives of this form in India. In Japan there is an intermediate ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... fack, but I'd rather she'd find it out from the captain than from me. I didn't want to seem to make trouble for her. So, while I was wondering what to do about it, she headed right in, leaving me with the valise and the umberella, and a kind of qualmy feeling that the old lady might strike a snag. ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne
... a snag somewhere," said Bob. "After we get everything assembled, we've still got to run our leading-in wire down to my bedroom. But I don't think that will take ...
— The Radio Boys' First Wireless - Or Winning the Ferberton Prize • Allen Chapman
... resort to circumlocution for the purpose of "padding," that is, filling space, or when they strike a snag in writing upon subjects of which they know little or nothing. The young writer should steer clear of it and learn to express his thoughts and ideas as briefly as possible ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... reporter had figured it out that the city was a mirror reflecting himself, he grew excited. That was the kind of idea he had always been looking for. But at night in his bedroom when he started to write he hit a snag. He had thought he held in his mind the secret of the city. Yet when he came to write about it the secret slipped away and left him with nothing. He sat looking out of his bedroom window, noticing that the telephone poles in the dark alley looked like ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... sent down as fast as possible to Alexandria, whither Porter followed them on the 16th, leaving the Osage and Lexington at Grand Ecore, and the big Eastport eight miles below, where, on the 15th, she had been sunk to her gun-deck either by a torpedo or by a snag. The admiral brought up his pump boats and after removing the guns got the Eastport afloat on ...
— History of the Nineteenth Army Corps • Richard Biddle Irwin
... high winds, tremendous thunder, and soaking rain; and they were repeatedly in extreme danger from drift-wood and sunken trees. On one occasion, having continued to float at night, after the moon was down, they ran under a great snag, or sunken tree, with dry branches above the water. These caught the mast, while the boat swung round, broadside to the stream, and began to fill with water. Nothing saved her from total wreck, but cutting away the mast. She then drove down the stream, but left one of the unlucky half-breeds ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... deep river he sank below the surface; so his enemies went away believing that they had seen the last of him. But, in reality, he was carried down, half drowned, below the next bend in the river, where he fortunately came across a 'snag' floating in the water (a snag is, you know, a part of a tree or bush which floats very nearly under the surface of the water); and he held on to this snag, and by great good luck eventually came ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... have let us founder. We help him now with the readiness and good-humor with which we relinquish the profits which were dear to us, and the product of our industry; but he has taken us through a very narrow channel, on a dark night, without striking rock or snag. He and I thank you heartily for your fidelity ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... you what, Alf, when this here Kaiser comes up ag'inst me he strikes a snag. He couldn't 'a' started his plot in a worse place than here in Tinkletown. Gosh, with all you hear about German efficiency, you'd 'a' thought he'd 'a' ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... another, I suppose," she broke in scornfully. "Well, I may as well inform you that you are about to strike a snag," she went on, a trifle inelegantly in her desire to be emphatic. "We intend to see to it that the mother of that baby gives it a name ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... made tear in the bottom of the canoe where a little slither of wood had been neatly taken clean out; it looked as if the tooth of a sharp rock or snag had eaten down her length, and investigation showed that the hole went through. Had we launched out in her without observing it we must inevitably have foundered. At first the water would have made the wood swell so as to close the hole, but once out ...
— The Willows • Algernon Blackwood
... And far from defiant —"And servile," no doubt you retort!— But if you struck a snag on A bottle-green dragon, Who filled up two-thirds of your court, And curled up his tail on your new tin roof, And made your piazza groan under his hoof, Would you threaten and thunder, Or just knuckle under Completely, I wonder, ...
— Grimm Tales Made Gay • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... balte tree it was unanimously decided to push on. At the next few stopping places the ruse was repeated, so that no doubt was any longer entertained as to the supposed cause of the occurrence, the wrath of the tagbnua. Several little incidents, such as striking a hidden snag, and the increase of the flood, both of which were also attributed to this spirit's malign influence, heightened their fear. They finally begged me to stop for the purpose of sacrificing one of my chickens to ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... ill-nature; and there's nothing blessed about the persecution you undergo on that account. Your position is not heroic; at best, it is only pitiable; at worst, it is detestable. Athanasius contra mundum is grand only in cases where the snag is right, and the mundus wrong. Then persecution becomes the second-highest form of blessedness—the highest form, of course, being the ability to turn round and flatten-out the persecutor. Now, if Alf could open the windows of his understanding——But then, one of the gravest ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... forfeits, isn't it?" he said, rather boyishly. "This is all I've got. It's an Indian charm I had given me down in New Mexico, but the tree is alive and growing. It isn't a sunken snag." ...
— Kit of Greenacre Farm • Izola Forrester
... through the wood Where the old gray snag of the poplar stood, Where the hammering "red-heads" hopped awry, And the buzzard "raised" in the "clearing" sky And lolled and circled, as we went by ...
— Afterwhiles • James Whitcomb Riley
... He was made commissioner of the general land office of the United States and judge of the supreme court of the State of Illinois, and was subsequently elected to the senate of the United States; but when he was about to take his seat he ran up against the snag that is found in section 3 of article I of the constitution of the United States, which provides that a senator must have been a citizen of the United States for nine years before election, and it appeared that the general fell short of the requisite period. The consequence was that ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... A devilfish-like snag held tree and burden. With a burst of speed Philip swam alongside. Winifred? Thank God! Still alive, although unconscious; face white, eyes closed. As he grasped her, her ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... "Perhaps a snag tossing in the motion of the water,—at all events, you can't say there was no water." Dr. Rigdon glanced at Gordon with a ...
— The Phantom Of Bogue Holauba - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... thought his hook had caught in a snag, but he was greatly surprised after carefully pulling in his line, to find on the end of it a sluggish fish four feet long, and as large around as a stovepipe. We were to wait here till the 3d of September for Powell, but on the 29th of August three shots were heard in the valley ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... of those rushes once, when I was in swimming, and would have been drowned if I hadn't been born to be hanged.) Well, a rush came along just as Campbell got free from his horse, and he went down-stream one side of a snag and his horse the other. Campbell's pretty stout, you know, and his uniform was tight, ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... old and truthful, Thus addresses his companion: "O thou hero, Lemminkainen, Stoop and look beneath this war-ship, See on what this boat is anchored, See on what our craft is banging, In this broad expanse of water, In the broad-lake's deepest soundings, If upon some rock or tree-snag, Or upon some other hindrance." Thereupon wild Lemminkainen Looked beneath the magic vessel, Peering through the crystal waters, Spake and these the words be uttered: "Does not rest upon a sand-bar, Nor upon a rock, nor ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... did, the chances are he'd think twice before loaning you his boat," Max told him. "In the first place he'd expect you to snag the craft, and sink the same, because you do everything with such a rush and whoop. And then again, the way things look around here every boat that's owned within five miles of town will be needed to rescue people from ...
— Afloat on the Flood • Lawrence J. Leslie
... side with him. Major Holt had promised to send a first-class man to meet Joe at this place, with orders to take instructions from Joe. Joe said curtly: "You're to snag as many Security men as you can, place them more or less out of sight under the Platform here, and tell them to turn off their walkie-talkies and wait. No matter what happens, they're to wait right here ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... thread, the only line I had in my possession, but, when the men had gone two or three hundred yards, they got into conversation, and did not hear us shouting that the line had become entangled. By still going on they broke it, and, being carried away down the stream, it was lost on a snag. In vain I tried to bring to my recollection the way I had been taught to measure a river by taking an angle with the sextant. That I once knew it, and that it was easy, were all the lost ideas I could recall, and they only increased my vexation. ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... not, to my knowledge, written one novel in which his hero is represented as having achieved complacency. Mr. Merrick's heroes all undergo the very human experience of "hitting a snag." They are none of them represented as enjoying this experience; but none of them whimper ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... two in all the dailies.... She sat in a sumptuous suite at the Ritz, Discussing with her husband, Who had just returned from the beagles in South Carolina Her new pet charity; And she had called me in at this very moment, Because she had struck a snag. This was her charity: She related with tears in her eyes, What was she to do about it? She received no response from the American public. The poor assistant stagehands of the Paris theatres They ...
— The Broadway Anthology • Edward L. Bernays, Samuel Hoffenstein, Walter J. Kingsley, Murdock Pemberton
... it is to lag, And on he scrambles from crag to crag, Like one determined never to flag— Now weathers a block Of jutting rock, With hardly room for a toe to wag; But holding on by a timber snag, That looks like the arm of a friendly hag; Then stooping under a drooping bough, Or leaping over some horrid chasm, Enough to give any heart a spasm! And sinking down a precipice now, Keeping his feet the ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... the incident of the quiet Dinner, and it's just here that love's young dream hits a snag, and ...
— My Man Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... clattered down the long hill, and with a short, thunder-like rumble crossed the bridge between the Sliver Place and Appledale. Perhaps the writer may be called to account for this romantic name: he will therefore give it here. Appledale was once called Snag-Orchard, on account of the old trees whose fugitive roots often found their way into the road, making great trouble, and causing great complaint from the citizens, who yearly worked ...
— Be Courteous • Mrs. M. H. Maxwell
... to dive. Madge knew she must get all the way down to the very bottom of the bay to see if by any chance Tania's body could have been entangled among the sea weed, or her clothes caught on a rock or snag. ...
— Madge Morton's Victory • Amy D.V. Chalmers
... in the original sacks; they wet through or absorb moisture from the air, snag easily, and burst under the strain of a lashrope. Pack your flour, cereals, vegetables, dried fruits, etc., in the round-bottomed paraffined bags sold by outfitters (various sizes, from 10 lbs. down), which are damp-proof and ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... Haven't I told you I will invent some yarn to put him off the scent? He wouldn't be suspecting mischief, anyhow. I tell you I'm not going drifting round this river in the dark any longer. Next thing we know we may hit a snag and upset." ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... Ramsey had a painful misgiving. Hugh was remarking upon some matter on the other side of the world, when she asked him as abruptly as a boat might strike a snag: "Is your ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... bend in the road, I caught sight of a mountain chickadee flitting to a dead snag on the slope at the right, the next moment slipping into a small hole leading inside. I climbed up to the shelf, a small level nook among the tall pines on the mountain side, to inspect her retreat, for it was the first nest of this interesting species that I found. The chickadee flashed in and ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... her own an' my child Abby's clothes with the Injuns she pots. Little Abby used to scout for her maw. "Yere comes another!" little Abby would cry, as she stampedes up all breathless, her childish face aglow. With that, my wife would take her hands outen the wash-tub, snag onto that savage with her little old Winchester, and quit winner ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... not respond to her merry mood; his anxiety was to steer the conversation away from Simeon, and he had run against a snag at the start. ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... before I see my mother. The old snag I was riding give out and they was leading so they changed me. I cried two or three days. They didn't pay my crying no 'tention. They had a string of nigger men and boys, no women, far as from me 'cross to that bank. I judge it is ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... like to bump myself right here in Crystal City. Even if you're telling the truth I don't believe you. If you'd thought he had something valuable you'd have swiped it yourself, not come running to us. Don't bother me. If you got something, snag it. If not, ...
— Master of the Moondog • Stanley Mullen
... more propitious. For fully an hour the car ran at high speed which afforded him some hope that the strong arm of the law might intervene. But the strong arm of the law was apparently under its pillow in delicious slumber. Not a snag did those bloody fugitives encounter ...
— Pee-wee Harris on the Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... of dark-brown hair on the pillow are truthfully expressed. One mother and babe, all mothers and babes, are in this picture. Turn to that old rascal in a brown cloak, who is about to taste a glass of wine. A snag gleams white in his sly, thirsty mouth. The wine tastes fine, eh! You recall Goya. As for the boys swimming, the sensations of darting and weaving through velvety waters are produced as if by wizardry. But you never think of Sorolla's ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... up as Vicksburg, the party in the Sachem was again called for. The vessel got under way on the 8th of June, in charge of Acting Assistant Joseph E. Harris, to whom Mr. Gerdes had transferred the command, but unfortunately a few hours after starting she broke her shaft by striking a snag, and was entirely disabled, until extensively repaired. She was towed from Baton Rouge, where the accident happened, to New Orleans, and there turned over to Captain Morris, of the U. S. Navy, commanding the sloop of war Pensacola. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... me back. I had struck a snag, And must creep through the battle spume All a flamin' age, with a grinnin' jag In me thigh, for water, or jest a fag. Like a crippled snake I was forced to drag Shattered flesh till the crack ...
— 'Hello, Soldier!' - Khaki Verse • Edward Dyson
... "That road outside the clearing was simply a narrow, little used path; and I was so dead tired I began to look for a place where I might take an hour's rest. I chose a big cedar snag a few rods from the trail, the spreading kind that is always hollow, and found the opening screened in fern and just wide enough to let me in. Almost instantly I was asleep and—do you know?"—the humor broke again gently— "it was late in the afternoon ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... shudder as twilight spills A ghostly gray and the bent moon sallows The moor with her wicked flame? Why do the gibbering croons of the hag In her hut by the wood Go muttering, muttering in my blood— Till the hoot of an owl On the snag of a tomb Breaks out of the gloom Like the wail of ...
— Nirvana Days • Cale Young Rice
... alert and respectful interest. "Fine kettle of fish brewing down there," he resumed darkly, and paused again, glanced at the ceiling critically as if searching for leaks, smacked his lips and murmured confidentially a single word: "Snag!" ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... The only snag in the latter theory was the fact of our accident. Assuming that I had to get involved in the mess, there were easier ways to introduce me than by planning a bad crack-up that could have been fatal, ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... she lifted her head. He started as though his boat had struck a snag. How like—how terribly like to that young Zosephine whose ill-concealed scorn he had so often felt in days—in years—long gone, at Carancro! This was not, and could not be, the same—lacked half the necessary years; and yet, in the joy ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... employed his intervals of leisure in coarse and brutal recreation. Their roistering exploits, indeed, have made these rivermen almost better known at play than at work. One of them, the notorious Mike Fink, known as "the Snag" on the Mississippi and as the "Snapping Turtle" on the Ohio, has left the record, not that he could load a keel boat in a certain length of time, or lift a barrel of whiskey with one arm, or that no tumultuous current had ever compelled him to ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... ran against a snag," he repeated, "and now your mate's run against another." He gave the butt of his ready pistol a significant tap. "But I'm the worst snag that ever either of you struck," he went on in his vainglory. "Make no mistake about that. ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... had a grand and ringing run. I received two hard knocks, was unseated once, but held on, and I got a stinging crack in the face from a branch. R.C. added several more black-and-blue spots to his already spotted anatomy, and he missed, just by an inch, a solid snag that would have broken him in two. The pack stretched out in wild staccato chorus, the little Airedales literally screeching. Jim got out of our sight and then Sampson. Still it was ever more thrilling to follow ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... sweet bye and bye, honey!" His tone had become offensively familiar. "It's for his good, you know. If it's the last word I ever speak I'm trying to save him from the biggest snag he ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... it. I was wondering how we could account for that if we accepted the shock theory. I guess we can't. I'm still up against it. I've struck a snag—maybe a stone wall, Darcy!" ...
— The Diamond Cross Mystery - Being a Somewhat Different Detective Story • Chester K. Steele
... intended leaving him to fish the rest of the brook, while I went back to that upper path to look up two or three special arbutus clumps that I knew, but seeing his depression over the snag incident, I could not suggest this. Instead I followed the stream with him, accepting his urgent offer of all the best pools, while he, taking what was left, drew out perfectly good trout from the most unhopeful-looking ...
— More Jonathan Papers • Elisabeth Woodbridge
... a stream to carry matter in suspension is proportional to its velocity, it follows that any circumstance tending to retard the rate of flow will induce deposition. Thus a fall in the gradient at any point in the course of a stream; any snag, projection or dam, impeding the current; the reduced velocity caused by the overflowing of streams in flood and the dissipation of their energy where they enter a lake or the sea, are all contributing causes to alluviation, or the deposition of streamborne sediment. It is ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... see, he was just sore mistaken. For the little lass didn't sink. The stream was very swift, and her long clothes kept her up till she caught in a snag just opposite a fisherman, who was ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel
... fair way to escape this, for they found that they could make some progress in getting their boat toward the shore. But, just as they began to think their object was about to be accomplished, they were arrested by a sudden mishap. It happened that there was a little snag in the river, nearly in the direction in which they were going. It was the end of a small log, which rose almost to the surface of the water. The greater part of the log was firmly imbedded in the sand, but there was a small portion of it which projected so far as barely to ...
— Marco Paul's Voyages and Travels; Vermont • Jacob Abbott
... where I was when I awoke, and I could almost hear the silence. Not a tree moaned, not a branch seemed to stir. I arose and my head came in violent contact with a snag that was not there when I went to bed. I thought either I must have grown taller or the tree shorter during the night. As soon as I peered out, ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... can stop that soon or not," remarked Seaton as he set the levers, "but we may as well have something to shoot at. We'd better take our regular twelve-hour tricks, hadn't we, Mart? It's a wonder we got as far as this without striking another snag. I'll take the first trick at the ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... of the theatre. Here and there some of them had been restored and were occupied, probably by robber barons who had gone into trade. Others were still ruinous, and there was now and then such a mere gray snag that March, at sight of it, involuntarily put his tongue to the broken tooth which he was keeping for the skill ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... a stake. Such a thing would not be permitted to exist in this river.... A snag probably. Some old tree stump undermined by last ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... a sunken rock, listed heavily to port. Her spars were all over the side, a tangled mass washing and beating about in the seas. A snag of rock had been driven clean through the timbers of the port-bow. Black Dennis Nolan and his companions managed to get aboard at last. A fire of rags and oil still burned in an iron tub on the main deck. They went forward to ...
— The Harbor Master • Theodore Goodridge Roberts
... He struck a snag when he appealed to the National Kansas Committee for a gift of rifles and an appropriation of five thousand dollars. They voted the rifles on conditions. But a violent opposition developed against giving five thousand ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... whittling faster than ever, I made another hickory clock, shaped like a scythe to symbolize the scythe of Father Time. The pendulum is a bunch of arrows symbolizing the flight of time. It hangs on a leafless mossy oak snag showing the effect of time, and on the snath is written, "All flesh is grass." This, especially the inscription, rather pleased father, and, of course, mother and all my sisters and brothers admired it. Like the first it indicates the days of the ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... And that shows that one's life is looked out for, when he ain't looking out for it himself. In fact, any of these stools here will float you, sir, should the boat hit a snag, and go down in the dark. But, since you want one in your room, pray take this one," handing it to him. "I think I can recommend this one; the tin part," rapping it with his knuckles, "seems ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... This is most important. They show every change in costume that every one of the ensemble makes during the performance. The same thing with the principals. Always figure the time you have allowed each person to change costume, otherwise you will strike a snag which may ruin ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... thus far, the boatman discovered that, in listening to his learned passenger, he had neglected that vigilance which the danger of the river rendered indispensable. The stream was hurrying them into a most frightful snag; escape was hopeless; so the boatman opened the ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... discharge of pus (matter), which, when formed, is kept pent up until it has accumulated to such an extent that it burrows by simple gravity, as no other exit is possible. In this way foreign matters, such as a broken piece of the stake or snag, or whatever caused the wound, may be carried to an indefinite depth, or the cavity of a joint may be invaded and very serious, ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... from the superior whiteness of its column of "exhaust," penetrating the bank of dark gray fog; and occasionally the echoes are awakened by the burly roar of its whistle, which, in times like this, acts as a fog-horn. But the snag is an insidious enemy, not revealing itself until we are within a rod or two, and then there is a quick cry of warning from the stern sheets—"Hard a-port!" or "Starboard, quick!" and only a strong side-pull, aided by W——'s ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... set to work on the deer. It was wonderful to see his skill. In a few cuts and strokes, a ripping of the hide and a powerful slash, he had cut out a haunch. It took even less work for the second. Then he hung the rest of the deer on a snag, and wiped his knife and ...
— The Young Forester • Zane Grey
... dirty hand contemptuously at the despised tackle when the two came slowly up. "That's the way it goes when you take a lot of girls along! They've got to have the best rods and tackle, and all they'll do will be to snag lines and lose leaders and hooks, and giggle ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... tightened they put the reins under the leathers, and threw their hats at him, and shouted, and "hooshed" him round the yard, expecting he would buck with the saddle. But Callaghan only trotted into a corner and snorted. Usually, a horse that won't buck with a saddle is a "snag." Dave knew it. The chestnut he tackled for Brown did nothing with the saddle. HE was a snag. Dave remembered him and reflected. Callaghan walked boldly up to Dave, with his head high in the air, and snorted at him. He was a sorry-looking animal—cuts ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... to do something. For chairman they picked an old flongboo who was an umpire and used to umpire many mix-ups. Among the flongboos he was called "the umpire of umpires," "the king of umpires," "the prince of umpires," "the peer of umpires." When there was a fight and a snag and a wrangle between two families living next door neighbors to each other and this old flongboo was called in to umpire and to say which family was right and which family was wrong, which family started it and which family ought to stop it, ...
— Rootabaga Stories • Carl Sandburg
... those we had noticed as we ascended the river. We stopped to take one or two photographs of tropical scenery and of various little stations on the way down the river. We also paused to look at the body of a dead alligator which had been caught in a snag. He was between five and seven feet long, and a second rather larger one lay close by. From time to time we caught sight of parties of blacks hidden amongst the rank vegetation of the shores, and we saw some beautiful ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... frequently impaled themselves, and this often to the destruction of the ship and great loss of life. We ran against one of these trees, somewhat sideways luckily for us, but it stood up on end, and amid a frightful noise, and a little momentary consternation, carried away one paddle box and wheel. A snag is only one of the numerous sources of accident in American river navigation. But one soon gets accustomed to the carelessness of danger which characterises the Americans, and on the whole travelling on their river steamers is very pleasant. The sleeping cabins are invariably ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... dual set of ivories which a dentist would have been proud to exhibit as specimens of his art, and with a vigorous thrust of the boat-hook, forced the light craft far out into the stream, thus disturbing the repose of a young alligator which was sunning himself upon a snag. Cyd was fond of the water, and had no taste for the various labors that were required of him about the house and stable. He was delighted with the prospect of a sail on the river; and being a slave, and not permitted to express his views in the ordinary ...
— Watch and Wait - or The Young Fugitives • Oliver Optic
... interest Marguerite. She skipped two or three pages which seemed to go unnecessarily into the subject of derelicts and snags. "I am not quite sure as to what a derelict is: I do not think I am one; out certainly I am not a snag." ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... their class that a word dropped at a critical moment might save them from this mischance. And there was the further, and not altogether unreal, ground of confidence, that the examiner himself might be uneasily conscious of the ever-present possibility that some hidden Hebrew snag might rudely jag a hole in his own vessel while sailing the mare ignotum of oriental literature. Of course, the examination would also include other departments of sacred learning, for it was the province and duty of Presbytery to satisfy ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... swift and the speed of the canoe was not slackened. The young Onondaga devoted most of his time to watching. Much wreckage from storms or the suction of flood water often floated on the surface of these wild rivers, and his keen eyes searched for trunk or bough or snag. They also scanned at intervals the green walls speeding by on either side, lest they might pass some camp fire and not notice it, but finding no lighter note in the darkness he felt sure that no hostile ...
— The Hunters of the Hills • Joseph Altsheler
... him off, which he did with a vengeance. He didn't mean any harm, though he don't like a bone in poor Bertie's body. However, the toboggin snapped in two from the concussion in landing. Bertie was shot out and rolled to the bottom, which would not have mattered, only he struck his head against some snag or stone hidden by the snow. We looked down, but he didn't seem to move, and we got frightened. I had had nearly enough jumping, but I took Captain Delamere on my toboggin—didn't trust him to steer, I can tell you, my dear—and bumped down quite safe. ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... been today if Noah had run his ark into such a fog as this, and there had been no fog-horn on Mount Ararat, and he had passed by with his excursion and not made a landing, and had floated around on the freshet until all the animals starved, and the ark had struck a snag and burst a hole in their bottom. I tell you, we can all congratulate ourselves that Noah happened to blunder on that high ground. If that ark had been lost, either by being foundered, or being blowed up by Fenians because ...
— The Grocery Man And Peck's Bad Boy - Peck's Bad Boy and His Pa, No. 2 - 1883 • George W. Peck
... innumerable unseen mouths. But there was no wind astir; and the brown-black, glistening current beneath the white folds was glassy smooth save where the occasional big swirls boiled up with a swishing gurgle, or the running wave broke musically around an upthrust shoulder of rock or a weedy snag. The river was not wide—not more than fifty yards from bank to bank; but from the birch canoe slipping quietly down along one shore, just outside the fringe of alder branches, the opposite shore was absolutely hidden. There was nothing to ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... a try-on all right," he added. "Evidence was against you, but they struck an unexpected snag. You'll have to keep it up, though"; and deciding "there was nothing in the yarn," the Dandy slept in the Quarters, and I in the House, leaving the doors and windows ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... logs which formed the foundation of their floor were quietly floating in the water before the cabin! The submerged obstacle or snag which had torn them from their fastening was still holding the cabin fast. Hemmingway saw the danger. He ran along the narrow ledge to the point of contact and unhesitatingly leaped into the icy cold water. It reached his armpits before ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... Bandy-legs!" cried Max. "If something has happened to your boat, why, head for the shore, and paddle hard. It ain't so far away but you can reach it easy enough. You must have hit a snag, and punched a hole in the ...
— The Strange Cabin on Catamount Island • Lawrence J. Leslie
... a hard knock, then another, that unseated her, but frantically she held on and slid back, and at the end of a long run through comparatively open forest she got a stinging blow in the face from a far-spreading branch of pine. Bo missed, by what seemed only an inch, a solid snag that would have broken her in two. Both Pedro and Dale got out of Helen's sight. Then Helen, as she began to lose Bo, felt that she would rather run greater risks than be left behind to get lost in the forest, and she urged her horse. Dale's yell pealed back. Then it seemed ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... another thing. Us little people are entitled to a representative aboard that ship. We got a right to know what's going on. How come there's nothing about it in the papers? Only the big shots knowing about it and whispering among themselves? It's because they're trying to snag it all ...
— The Stowaway • Alvin Heiner
... unusually heavy, but all three were expert voyageurs, and succeeded in steering past difficulties of all kinds, until one afternoon, when good fortune seemed to forsake them utterly. They began by running the canoe against a sunk tree, or snag, and were obliged to put ashore to avoid sinking. The damage was, however, easily remedied; and while Ian was busy with the repairs his comrades prepared a hot dinner, which meal they usually ate cold in the canoe. Next they broke a paddle. This was also easily ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne
... was seen in the Ikmin river. A hook was fastened in the end of a bamboo pole, and close to this a minnow was attached to a short line, to act as a lure. When the other fish approached the captive, the pole was jerked sharply, in an attempt to snag them. On one occasion the writer saw fifty fish taken by this method in less than ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... alongside the impaled canoe and gave directions for releasing her. In a minute she was floating clear again, but with an eight-inch rip in the bottom, through which the water began to press rapidly. The snag was the broken stump of a tree, which had pierced the wood like ...
— The Campfire Girls on Ellen's Isle - The Trail of the Seven Cedars • Hildegard G. Frey
... agreed the other, bracing up. "Tell me what a true-blue scout would figure out as his line of duty in case he ran up against a snag when his whole heart was set on ...
— The Boy Scouts of Lenox - Or The Hike Over Big Bear Mountain • Frank V. Webster
... passed six days of desert, without the slightest appearance of vegetation, and a little branch of the snag, (Caparis sodada,) was brought as a comfort and curiosity. On the following, day, they had alternately plains of sand and loose gravel, and had a distant view of some hills to the westward. While Major Denham was dozing ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... off to get a rest. They'd take to the woods and canebrakes. Once four of the best nigger fellars on their master's place took to the woods for to git a little rest. The master and paddyrolls took after 'em. They'd been down in there long 'nough they'd spotted a hollow cypress with a long snag of a limb up on it. It was in the water. They got them some vines and fixed up on the snag. They heard the dogs and the horn. They started down in the hollow cypress. One went down, the others coming on. He started hollering. But he thought a big snake in ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Arkansas Narratives, Part 4 • Works Projects Administration
... the impossible as plainly pointed out, not only by local talent, but by no less a man that the august captain of a government snag-boat. Several weeks before the launching, an event had taken place at Benton. The first steamboat for sixteen years tied up there one evening. She was a government snag-boat. Now a government snag-boat may be defined as a boat maintained by the government for the sole purpose of sailing the ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... frequent reversals of my head and 'head's antipodes' as I tripped over reeds and roots, perhaps I should have reached the 'point proposed' with only a loss equivalent to the proverbial 'year's growth,' had not a hidden snag unluckily lain in the way, which 'by hook or by crook' fastened itself in the part of my trowsers exactly corresponding, when dry, with that 'broad disk of drab' finally seen, after much anxiety, by the curious Geoffrey Crayon between the parted coat-skirts of a certain mysterious 'Stout ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... hands as the coils of a snake. Then she was ready to faint, but she must not faint. She struggled away, stood free. It was the man Bill who had caught her. He said something that was unintelligible. She reached for the snag of a dead cedar and, leaning there, fought her weakness, that cold black horror which seemed a physical thing in her ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... never burned. He was eminently conservative, and looked with wary suspicion on anything that appeared like earnestness. In the midst of a driving, bustling Western city, he stuck in the mud of his German phlegm, like a snag in the swift current of the Mississippi. Yet Mr. Ludolph found him a most valuable assistant. He kept things straight. Under his minute supervision everything had to be right on Saturday night as well as on Monday morning, on the 31st ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... under the water any longer than Dave had been, but Frank did not come up so soon. They looked among the brush by the shore, to see if he was hiding there and fooling them, but they could not find him. "He's stuck in some snag at the bottom," said Dave; "we got to dive for him"; but just then Frank came up, and swam feebly for the shore. He crawled out of the water, and after he got his breath, he said, "I got caught, down there, in the ...
— The Flight of Pony Baker - A Boy's Town Story • W. D. Howells
... about in the margin shallows, he either sets off with a rapid whir to some other feeding-ground up or down the stream, or alights on some half-submerged rock or snag out in the current, and immediately begins to nod and courtesy like a wren, turning his head from side to side with many other odd dainty movements that never fail to fix ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... smiled reassuringly across at her. "All right, old thing. Two heads are generally better than one if you're up against a snag." ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... into an eddy just before sunset, and had made fast to a snag and a live root when the little boat came dropping down in the edge of the current hardly forty feet distant, with the man leaning on his sweeps, watching her every motion, especially fastening his gaze ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... and fruits; the ice cream I dismissed, for I did not feel like having any, it was so cold. Then I thought of its comfortable beds—when suddenly a tremendous bumping, which almost threw me out, reminded me that I was not on that luxurious train. I had struck a snag or boulder. This made it clear at once that I was dreaming and was not on the Chicago Limited, but that I was travelling in "The Land of the ...
— The Land of the Long Night • Paul du Chaillu
... Heav'n perform'd a victor's vows: He bar'd an ancient oak of all her boughs; Then on a rising ground the trunk he plac'd, Which with the spoils of his dead foe he grac'd. The coat of arms by proud Mezentius worn, Now on a naked snag in triumph borne, Was hung on high, and glitter'd from afar, A trophy sacred to the God of War. Above his arms, fix'd on the leafless wood, Appear'd his plumy crest, besmear'd with blood: His brazen buckler on the left was seen; Truncheons of shiver'd lances hung between; And on the right was ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... Eyes struck. A motor boat, going head-on upon a snag, can be easily wrecked. The boat struck and stuck, and father leaped up ...
— Wyn's Camping Days - or, The Outing of the Go-Ahead Club • Amy Bell Marlowe
... by the former name, the enemies by the latter. We were engaged at extra-illustrating Boswell's life of Johnson, and had already got together somewhat more than eleven thousand prints when we ran against a snag, an obstacle we never could surmount. We agreed that our work would be incomplete, and therefore vain, unless we secured a picture of the book with which the great lexicographer knocked down Osborne, the bookseller at ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... commented his instructor, for the child took to it as a duck to water. In twenty minutes or so he had learnt to turn his paddle slantwise after the stroke, and to drag it so as to assist the steering; which was not always easy, for here and there a snag blocked the main channel, or a pebbly shallow where the eye had to search for the smooth V that signals the best water. Tilda watched him, marvelling at his strange aptitude, and once, catching her eye, he nodded; but still, as he ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... words of command, and the burning top of a tall pine snag threw its light upon bayonets in the highway. The soldiers ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... avoids them. Sometimes one swimming below the surface escapes his eye; and then a heavy bumping against the bows shakes the boat, and startles the equanimity of the less experienced passengers. The "snag" is most dreaded. That is a dead tree with heavy roots still adhering. These, from their weight, have settled upon the bottom, and the debris gathering around holds them firmly imbedded. The lighter ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... goad, prick; snag, projection; incitement, stimulus, goad, incentive, instigation, impetus, provocation; ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... never fear. We're at the last lap now. One more spurt and it's over. You've got to tell me what the new snag is. Is it ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... shoes off and went around in his stockinged feet!' I couldn't understand, though, why he hadn't thought of that before. I went back to Robert Blackburn's room and got one of his shoes, and ran into a snag again. The sole of the shoe was a trifle larger than the footprints. Every one of his shoes I tried was the same way. I argued that the handkerchief was enough, but I wanted this other evidence. I simply had to clear up these ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... been termed "floating palaces." We had a prosperous passage as far as the junction of the Ohio with the Mississippi, where the boat struck the branches of a large tree, that had been washed into the bed of the stream, and was there stuck fast, root downwards. This formidable chevaux-de-frise (or snag, as it was termed by the captain) fortunately did not do much damage to the vessel, although at first an alarm was raised that she was sinking, and much confusion ensued. This apprehension was, however, soon dissipated by the report of the carpenter, whose account of the damage was so far ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... boats grated against a snag, which reminded them of the danger which they would have to encounter when returning. The rocks and snags could not, as they were then steering, do them much injury, but it would be a very different ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... small herd of horses to take to Dodge City, where we arrived after an uneventful trip, and after disposing of the horses we started out to do the town as usual. But in this we met an unexpected snag. Our bookkeeper, Jack Zimick, got into a poker game and lost all the money he had to pay the cowboys off with, which amounted to about two thousand dollars, and also about the same amount of the boss' money. The boys ...
— The Life and Adventures of Nat Love - Better Known in the Cattle Country as "Deadwood Dick" • Nat Love |
