"Wreckage" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... would be too bad, now!" Tubby whimpered, as he imagined he could see the bold pilot of the crippled flier dashed to the ground amidst the wreckage of his machine. ...
— The Boy Scouts on Belgian Battlefields • Lieut. Howard Payson
... yet: there was still a fall of forty feet, and he must needs repass the wreckage of his own making to filch the blankets from his cell. In terror lest he should awaken the Master-Side Debtors, he hastened back to the roof, lashed the coverlets together, and, as the city clocks ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... and a ghastly light shot far out on the sea. The junk heaved back, settled, turned slowly over and seemed to spread out into a great mass of wreckage. Pieces of timber and plank and spar came tumbling down and a few men scrambled to our decks. We could hear others crying out in the water, as they swam here and there or grasped at planks and beams to ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... Oberon long since sailed to the Isle-of-No-Land-at-All, and the room in which her picture hung has gone also, like old Dockland, and is now no more than something remembered. The clipper's picture went with the wreckage, when the room was strewn, and I expect in that house today there is a photograph of a steamer ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... story of a double life, the wreckage of a promising career. "Just a plain, ordinary thief was Mr. Randall Clayton," said one acute observer; "his case is only extraordinary from the amount taken. And it seems that he robbed for the lucre itself, as the most careful ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... value; on his left hand a superb signet ring. He carried a heavy, gold-mounted stick. His face was curiously divided against itself. The fine calm forehead and the deep setting of the widely separate eyes gave an impression of intellectual power and balance. But the lower part of the face was mere wreckage; the chin quivering and fallen, from self-indulgence, the fine lines of the nose coarsened by the spreading nostrils; the mouth showing both the soft contours of sensuality and the hard, fine line of craft and cruelty. The man's eyes were unholy. They ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... and there was no answer from the shack or the store. If she were under that wreckage.... Frantically we clawed at the timbers, clearing a space, looking for a slip of a girl with long auburn braids of hair. It was too dark to see clearly, and in my terror I was ripping the boards in any fashion while Jack ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... wrecked, and my recollection of that place is a land of feathers, contents of the beds of the Frenchmen who had left their homes, and would return to find nothing but a heap of ruins and a litter of broken glass, china, and furniture, smothered in feathers and presenting a sad wreckage of what had once been a home. That evening we reached an inn where food—warm, satisfying food—was to be had, and twenty-four hours later we steamed into Tientsin station, greeted by a hearty cheer from ...
— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable
... Las Vegas Bombing and Gunnery Range, which is a closed military area nearby, so no one was hurt. At first we thought it was just one of those typical accidents that happen during rocket research. Even the best-performing rockets sometimes go haywire. But when we got into the wreckage, we found the steering vanes had been tampered with, in a way ...
— The Scarlet Lake Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... of centuries of absolutism; before them the aurora of an immense horizon, the first gleams of the future; and between these two worlds—like the ocean which separates the Old World from the New—something vague and floating, a troubled sea filled with wreckage, traversed from time to time by some distant sail or some ship trailing thick clouds of smoke; the present, in a word, which separates the past from the future, which is neither the one nor the other, which resembles both, and where ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... down to Shrewsbury, but his chief, the president of the Board of Trade, also, quite a novel course for a high and mighty Cabinet Minister. I was present as a journalist and remember seeing Lloyd George walking along by the side of the dismantled lines, threading his way through the wreckage, putting questions to the railway officials, and generally seeking to probe out on his own account how the affair occurred. On behalf of a score of special correspondents who had come down from London, I stopped Lloyd George in the street as he was walking to his hotel to ask him ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... defenses east of Col dei Bois peak. This position commanded the road of the Dolomites and the explosion blew it up entirely, and gave possession of it to the Italians. The entire Austrian force which occupied the summit was buried in the wreckage. On the following night the Austrians attempted to regain this position which the Italians had fortified strongly in the meantime, but the attack ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... and fro resulted in the cancelling of contracts, the recalling of invitations, the settling of accounts, with the most loyal effort to save as much as possible from the wreckage. Harrison and his associates, almost frantic with fear for Brewster's life, managed to perform wonders in the few hours of grace. Gardner, with rare foresight, saw that the Viennese orchestra would prove a dead loss. He suggested the possibility of ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... Connie as, closely followed by 'Merican Joe, he pushed aside the thick screen of spruce branches and came suddenly upon the crib-like cache that the Indian had constructed to entice the malicious night prowler. For right in the midst of the wreckage of the cache, surrounded by the broken snowshoes, the tin cans, the old coat, and the sticks that had formed the crib, was the carcajo himself, a foreleg in one trap and his thick shaggy tail in another! When he caught sight of the trappers the animal immediately showed ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx
... elopement to blame for her father's joy in the wreckage of Anthonio's ships and his final exaction of the bond? Was it introduced in the Plot for ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... it, and that probably in a few days more will recover the other $500,000,000. Who has recovered this vast sum? The people who had been "shaken out"? No, indeed! The votaries of the "System" have made it—they and the frenzied financiers whose haunt is Wall Street, and whose harvest is in such wreckage. ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... repaired repeatedly, sometimes on the same day. In spite of the earthy casing, the silk woof gives it the requisite pliancy to cleave when pushed by the anchorite and to rip open without falling into ruins. Swept back to the circumference of the mouth and increased by the wreckage of further ceilings, it becomes a parapet, which the Lycosa raises by degrees in her long moments of leisure. The bastion which surmounts the burrow, therefore, takes its origin from the temporary lid. The turret derives ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... wind tore to pieces and carried off thread by thread. A second later two clouds rushed upon one another, and rent one another with crashing reports, which seemed to sprinkle the coppery expanse with wreckage; and every time the hurricane thus veered, blowing from every point of the compass, the thunder of opposing navies resounded in the atmosphere, and an awful rending and sinking followed, the hanging fragments of the clouds, ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... stringy and coated over with weird sauces, and the poulet never appears at the table in her recognizable members—such as wings and drumsticks—but is chopped up with a cleaver into cross sections, and strange-looking chunks of the wreckage are sent to you. Moreover they cook the chicken in such a way as to destroy its original taste, and the veal in such a way as to preserve its original taste, both being ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... walls were covered with Flemish tapestry, six scenes from the Judgment of Solomon, framed in golden garlands, with satyrs and cupids playing among the leaves. The parquet floor had been laid down by the present Marquis, and Chesnel had picked up the furniture at sales of the wreckage of old chateaux between 1793 and 1795; so that there were Louis Quatorze consoles, tables, clock-cases, andirons, candle-sconces and tapestry-covered chairs, which marvelously completed a stately room, large out of all proportion ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... for others against their will, and the strong spill the blood of the weak for their ambition and the sweat of the children for their greed. Never was learning so diffused nor the content of scholarship so large as now. Yet the great cities are as Babylon and Rome of old, where human wreckage multiplies, and hideous vices flourish, and men toil without expectancy, and live without hope, and millions exist—not live at all—from hand to mouth. As we survey the universal unrest of the world today ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... from our adventure," ended Sir Mortimer, "if the sea claims us, and upon his sandy floor, amid his Armida gardens, the silver-singing mermaiden marvel at that wreckage which was once a tall ship and at those bones which once were animate,—if strange islands know our resting-place, sunk for evermore in huge and most unkindly forests,—if, being but pawns in a mighty game, we are lost or changed, happy, ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... most things else knew that she was being spirited off to a delightful sounding place called Holiday Hill in the charge of a gray-eyed young doctor who had made himself personally responsible for her from the moment he had extricated her, more dead than alive, from the wreckage. Somehow, for the moment she was ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... jumble of running rigging, booms and spars, blocking the way forward. Aft it was clearer, the top-hamper of the after mast having fallen overboard, smashing a small boat as it fell, but leaving the deck space free. There were three bodies tangled in the wreckage within our sight, crushed out of all human resemblance, and the face of a negro, caught beneath the ruins of the galley, seemed to grin back at me in death. Every timber groaned as the waves struck, and rocked the ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish
... across a ruin. Kenkenes climbed over a chaos of prostrate columns, fallen architraves and broken colossi, and the sounds of his advance stirred the rat, the huge spider, the snake and the hiding beast from the dark debris. Here and there were solitary walls standing out of heaps of wreckage, which had been palaces, and frequent arid open spaces marked the site of groves. In complex ramifications throughout the city sandy troughs were still distinguishable, where canals had been, and in places of peculiarly complete destruction the strips of ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... commented Barry. "While she was living with him she made a bigger hash of his life than she can do when she's away. She was spoiling his work as well as his life. And old Peter's work means a lot to him. He's still got that left out of the wreckage." ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... easiest trail. All this, without his being a civil or a mining engineer, understand; merely a man trained in constructive mechanics. On the other hand, the mining or the civil man would view the wreckage of a locomotive accident and see in the debris, select from the snarl of tangled wheels and driving-arms and axles a ready picture of the nature of the accident and how much of the wreckage offered possibilities ...
— Opportunities in Engineering • Charles M. Horton
... be the smallest pebble that was ever dropped into the sunny mid-ocean of the mind; but sooner or later it sinks to a hard bottom, sooner or later sends it ripples toward the shores where the caves of the fatal passions yawn and roar for wreckage. It is the Comedy of speech that forever dwells as Tragedy's fondest sister, sharing with her the same unmarked domain; for the two are but identical forces of the mind in gentle and in ungentle action as one atmosphere holds ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... her sails set, dingy canvas wet and idle in the foggy, breathless night. But their impact against her was almost as if they had hit a pier. The collision sent them reeling about the pilot-house. As they drove past they saw her go down, her stern a splintered mass of wreckage, in which ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... M'sieur," he said. "I know of no other woman who would have stood up under such a thing as Jeanne has done. MON DIEU, when I found a part of the canoe wreckage far below I thought that both of you ...
— Flower of the North • James Oliver Curwood
... System-wide government, a single race, and a universal language. They're a dark-brown race, which evolved in its present form about fifty thousand years ago; the present civilization is about ten thousand years old, developed out of the wreckage of several earlier civilizations which decayed or fell through wars, exhaustion of resources, et cetera. They have legends, maybe historical records, ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper
... kept on and caught him again, for honey he could not resist. But the wreckage of the trap was all they found in ...
— Monarch, The Big Bear of Tallac • Ernest Thompson Seton
... lit up with a brightness greater than that of the sun. Every floating piece of wreckage, every rope, every nail stood out with unnatural clearness. I was obliged to close my eyes, and protect ...
— The International Spy - Being the Secret History of the Russo-Japanese War • Allen Upward
... "is to shut myself up alone in a little room that I have rented at the end of an unfrequented lane near the Jardin des Plantes, whither I have had transported all the wreckage saved from my past life: books, knickknacks, portraits, and I know not what. My intention is that I shall remain there unknown to all, my name, whence I come, where I go, my thoughts, my hatred, my past loves, everything, in fact, a secret. I shall cloister myself. I shall stretch myself ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... mistrusted his skill in dealing with fatal illness. A blunder might destroy everything. Stop!—he knew something better than that. Had not the transport that brought him out passed a drowned body afloat, and wreckage, even in the English Channel? Shipwreck was the thing! He decided on sending Nicholas Cropredy, his wife's brother-in-law, across the Channel on business—to Antwerp, say—and making Phoebe and little Ruth go out to nurse him through a fever. Their ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... Merbes-le-Chateau, another kilometer farther on, revealed to us all its doors and many of its windows caved in by blows of gun butts and, at the nearer end of the principal street, five houses in smoking ruins. A group of men and women were pawing about in the wreckage, seeking salvage. They had saved a half-charred washstand, a scorched mattress, a clock and a few articles of women's wear; and these they had piled in a mound on the ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... making bread, I think. At the same time we had come to the ruins—the same time of day, that is—the Germans had dropped a half-dozen incendiary shells into the building and it had burned in ten minutes. Most of the men who had been there then were still there, under the smoking mass of wreckage; the smell of burned human ...
— They Shall Not Pass • Frank H. Simonds
... slipped along through the silence of the country-side—the next, and the silence was split by a shattering roar and the shock of riven plates, the clash of iron driven against iron, and of solid woodwork grinding and grating as it splintered into wreckage. ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... beside the gravestone, lay the thin neck of the Upper Scheldt, less than one hundred yards wide at this point, where it curved between the lines of charred and flattened buildings. We could still see the rush of water tumbling and splashing through the wreckage of the bridge we had just crossed. Twice it had been dynamited and twice rebuilt in part, so that at present a single line of slippery beams, suspended a few feet above the water and supported by some heavy wire, was all that remained between ourselves and the retreating ...
— The Log of a Noncombatant • Horace Green
... arrived at results of the most encouraging kind, for one learnt that the Hun as a warrior would within quite a short space of time be a phantom of the past, that adult males within the Kaiser's dominions would speedily comprise only the very aged, the mentally afflicted or the maimed wreckage from the battlefields of France and Poland, and that if this attractive Sovereign proposed to continue hostilities he must ere long, as Lincoln said of Jefferson Davis, "rob the cradle and the grave." Even Lord Kitchener displayed some interest in these mathematical ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... to repair the wreckage in some degree, and, having quieted the sufferer, he set out for Miss ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... of either brick or stone within the effective limits of the blast were severely damaged so that most of them were flattened or reduced to rubble. The wreckage of a church, approximately 1,800 feet east of X in Nagasaki, was one of the few masonry buildings still recognizable and only portions of the walls of this structure were left standing. These walls were extremely thick (about 2 feet). The two domes of the ...
— The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki • United States
... warning, no opportunity to check himself, nor any desire to do so. In each instance he had heard, dozing in the day-coach and sleeping soundly in his berth, the voice cry: "John! John!" and instantly his brain was ablaze with the light of burning wreckage. In the canon he had only felt, indefinitely, the danger ahead; but to-night he saw the bridge swept away, and the dark gorge that yawned in front of them. Instantly upon hearing the cry that woke ...
— The Last Spike - And Other Railroad Stories • Cy Warman
... raiders, The crew of submarine That sank the unarmed traders To vent the Kaiser's spleen. The wreckage of the nations, Ten million dwellings lost, Murders and mutilations, The world's ...
— War Rhymes • Abner Cosens
... smouldering by means of the New Guinea wood I have already mentioned, and of which I found a large stock on board. The ship itself, I should mention, provided me with all the fuel that was required in the ordinary way, and, moreover, I was constantly finding pieces of wreckage along the shore that had been gathered in by the restless waves. Often—oh! often—I reflected with a shudder what my fate would have been had the ship gone down in deep water, leaving me safe, but deprived of all the stores she contained. The long, lingering agony, the starvation, the madness ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... curiosity began to stir, and he sat up and looked about him. The track at this point ran in a sharp curve about a wooded hillock; all of the near side was heaped with the wreckage of the Bournemouth train; that of the express was mostly hidden by the trees; and just at the turn, under clouds of vomiting steam and piled about with cairns of living coal, lay what remained of the two engines, one upon the other. ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... he said, and then gave us his history in return. 'I am a Cyprian, gentlemen. I left my native land on a trading voyage with my son here and a number of servants. We had a fine ship, with a mixed cargo for Italy; you may have seen the wreckage in the whale's mouth. We had a fair voyage to Sicily, but on leaving it were caught in a gale, and carried in three days out to the Atlantic, where we fell in with the whale and were swallowed, ship and crew; of the latter we two alone survived. We buried ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... advised by Brigham Young to look out for the Powell expedition and Asa (Joseph Asay) and his sons continued to watch the river, though a false report had come that the Powell expedition was lost. They were looking for wreckage that might give some indication of the fate of the explorers when Powell's boats appeared. Powell was very appreciative of Asaqy's kindness and wrote enthusiastically of the coming, next day from St. Thomas, of James Leithead, with a wagonload ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... enough to think it God's will that they should suffer the tyranny of one man—who have thought it their duty not even to hope for liberation. (Olof takes the volume and begins to read.) You shall hear complaints all the way from the primeval forests of Norrland down to the Sound. Out of the wreckage from the churches the King is building new castles for the nobility and new prisons for the people. You shall read how the King is bartering away law and justice by letting murderers escape their punishment if they seek refuge ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg
... sea retreats after a storm one finds on the beach all sorts of strange flotsam. Bernard Clowes was a bit of human wreckage left on the sands of society by the storm of the war. When it broke out he was a second lieutenant in the Winchester Regiment, a keen polo player and first class batsman who rarely opened a book. He was sent out with the First ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... beach had scarcely yet caught the distinctness of day, but was already beginning to glisten with the gathering light, and, as far as I could see, was desolate. I passed through and clambered out towards the south side of the rock to watch the sea, if perchance some bit of floating wreckage might explain the mystery of last night. ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... serious injury by the defects of his adversary's antlers, picked himself up from the wreckage of the fence, and, grunting with anger, plunged back to meet his assailant. The latter, somewhat puzzled by the fence and its zig-zag twistings, had drawn a little to one side, and so it happened that when the first bull rushed ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... that in this period of national wreckage that all was bad, that all the women were corrupt and all the men were without principle, for there was never perhaps such a condition of affairs in any country; but the prevailing and long-continued licentiousness at the court, ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... namesake had reported that he had seen about thirty natives, all unclad, on an adjacent islet. With the captain was his mate, two other white men, a black boy, and a young gin. Many derelict logs were seen and certain wreckage, which made the boat's company inclined to the belief that some of the castaways might have landed on Dunk Island. They steered hither, ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... dories, apparently in daily use; a small sloop yacht, dismantled and plainly beyond repair; and an oyster-smack also out of commission. About them the beach was strewn with a litter of miscellany,—nets, oars, cork buoys, bits of wreckage and driftwood, a few fish too long forgotten and (one assumed) responsible in part for the ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... a terrible life," the reformers say. "Men are ground down to scrap and are thrown out as wreckage." This may be so, but my life was spent in the mills and I failed to discover it. I went in a stripling and grew into manhood with muscled arms big as a bookkeeper's legs. The gases, they say, will destroy a man's lungs, but I worked all day in the mills and had wind enough ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... threw the keg into the lagoon. If the commanders propose to land storming parties and the ships advance into the zone of danger there will soon be nothing left of them but bits of shapeless floating wreckage. ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... at that same old turning-point once more," he continued—"The Western civilisation of two thousand years, assisted (and sometimes impeded) by the teachings of Christianity, is nearing its end. Out of the vast wreckage of nations, now imminent, only a few individuals can be saved,—and the storm is so close at hand that one can almost hear the mutterings of the thunder! But why should I or you or anyone else think about it? We have our own concerns to attend to—and we attend to these so well that we forget ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... parallel with each other. Here it became necessary for them to take the chance of a long jump. When it came Sam's turn to make the leap, the log upon which he struck rolled under his weight and he went down under the wreckage and ...
— The Call of the Beaver Patrol - or, A Break in the Glacier • V. T. Sherman
... a button, and the staircase and downstairs hall were flooded with light. Then he and Judge Scott, revolvers in hand, cautiously descended. There was no need for this caution. White Fang had done his work. In the midst of the wreckage of overthrown and smashed furniture, partly on his side, his face hidden by an arm, lay a man. Weedon Scott bent over, removed the arm and turned the man's face upward. A gaping throat explained the ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... seemingly limitless plains of snow, rolling maddeningly in a succession of low hills and shallow hollows, now it seemed that Nature spurned the milk and water fashioning of her handiwork, and had hurled the rest of the world into a wreckage of broken, ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... the sea through the blackness in an effort to pick up the German raider if she still remained afloat. As his eyes became accustomed to the darkness, he saw what he believed was a mass of wreckage some distance away. Gradually the shape in the water became ...
— The Boy Allies with Uncle Sams Cruisers • Ensign Robert L. Drake
... him under check and saved himself at critical moments from disaster? When we regard his life as a whole, the actual facts hardly justify such a conclusion. Nature had given him two safeguards which, without any effort of will on his own part, assured him deliverance where the risk of wreckage was greatest—a consuming desire to know which grew with every year of his life, and a versatility of temperament which necessitated ever-renewed sensations equally of the mind and heart. Of the working of these two elements in him we have ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... harvesting of storms; And at full tide, the little hampered waves Lift up the litter, so that, against the light, The yellow kelp and bracken of the sea, Held up in ridges of green water, show Like moss in agates. And there is no place In all the coast for wreckage like this bay; There often will my grannam be, a sack Over her shoulders, turning up the crust Of sun-dried weed to find her ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... inhabitant noting his approach. By night none but as clever a poacher as Garron could have found his way across the labyrinth of bogs, ditches and pitfalls. Both the hut and the woman cost Garron nothing; both were a question of abandoned wreckage. ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... had been during the night, must have gone about at this time, and probably for this reason. She was able thus to fetch into the wake of the crippled vessel, which a frigate had already gallantly attacked, taking advantage of the uselessness of the Frenchman's lee batteries, encumbered with the wreckage ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... reached the bridge at last, she found it closed to traffic. The Potomac had been infected by the war spirit. In sheer Hunnishness it had ravaged its banks, shearing away boat-houses and piers, and carrying all manner of wreckage down to pound the old aqueduct bridge with. The bridge was not expected ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... rafters, swung backward by sinewy arms, and driven crashing against the saloon door, one panel of which went in before it. Twice again, while another pistol-shot rang out, we plied the ram, and then followed it pell-mell across the threshold, where we went down in a heap amid the wreckage of the door, though I had sense enough left to remove Hemlock's smoking revolver which lay close by, just where he had dropped it on the floor. He evidently had not expected this kind of attack and suffered for his ignorance. We could not see him, but a breathless voice implored somebody to ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... better chance of exhibiting themselves in the verse division of our Anglo-Saxon wreckage. Beowulf itself consists of one first-rate story and one second-rate but not despicable tale, hitched together more or less anyhow. The second, with good points, is, for us, negligible: the first is a "yarn" ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... general wreckage, the Fulton Street house was saved, and to the Fulton Street house the spoiled, terrified little family moved. Mary Lou sometimes told Susan with mournful pride of the weeping and wailing of those days, of dear George's first job, that, with the check that Ma's ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... the Marauder, Soudan McLeod, soon after. His mainmast had broken off eight or ten feet below the head. They were clearing away the wreckage. "I s'pose I oughter had more sense," he called out ...
— The Seiners • James B. (James Brendan) Connolly
... brought Paul, startled, to his feet. He crossed the library and entered the panelled dining-room. The portrait of Sir Jacques had fallen from its place above the mantelpiece, breaking a number of ornaments as it fell. Davison was already on the spot and stood surveying the wreckage. ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... passed there are miles and miles of inundated land, with only trees and half-submerged buildings and floating wreckage to break the monotony; just a vast lake of yellow, muddy water, swirling and boiling as it seeks ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... became greater; huge waves rolled up, carrying wreckage and bodies on their crest. Then, with all the terror of destruction about him, Frohman said to his associates, with the serene ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... furniture, faded, worn, damaged though it was, had to suffice, without even being repaired. Felicite, however, who keenly felt the necessity for this parsimony, exerted herself to give fresh polish to all the wreckage; she herself knocked nails into some of the furniture which was more dilapidated than the rest, and darned the frayed ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... when, upon rounding an abrupt steep, his four animals reared in terror, then seemed to crouch back upon their haunches. The rude log bridge they should have dashed across was gone—in its place gaped a huge fissure, its throat choked with wreckage ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... rage of speculation that has been toward in London, his lordship has suffered heavily. How heavily I am not prepared to say. But heavily enough, I dare swear, to have caused this offer to return to his king; for he looks, no doubt, to sell his services at a price that will help him mend the wreckage of his fortunes. A week ago a gentleman who goes between his majesty's court at Rome and his friends here in Paris brought me word from his majesty that Ostermore had signified to him his willingness to rejoin the ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... to a quail's nest. Anything in the shape of a nest is always welcome, it is such a mystery, such a centre of interest and affection, and, if upon the ground, is usually something so dainty and exquisite amid the natural wreckage and confusion. A ground nest seems so exposed, too, that it always gives a little thrill of pleasurable surprise to see the group of frail eggs resting there behind so slight a barrier. I will walk a long distance any day just to see a song sparrow's nest amid the stubble or under a ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... A piece of wreckage is thrown upon the beach, and you wonder what dire disaster happened far out at sea, and if the rest of the ship went to the bottom with all on board. But take it home, let it dry in the sun, then place it on your open grate fire, and as you watch the iridescent blaze curl up the chimney, ...
— Byways Around San Francisco Bay • William E. Hutchinson
... was the sudden cry from Jack Rover, and he pointed to a place on the opposite shore of Clearwater Lake. A dense volume of smoke was rolling skyward. Then came another tremendous explosion, and a mass of wreckage could be seen ...
— The Rover Boys Under Canvas - or The Mystery of the Wrecked Submarine • Arthur M. Winfield
... Miro class cruiser. The crew—repulsive creatures—were all dead. Some thirty of them. Mr. Demming and I assumed that the craft had been hit during one of the actions between our fleet and theirs and that somehow both sides had failed to recover the wreckage. At any rate, today it is floating, abandoned of all life, in your sector." Rostoff added softly, "One has to approach quite close before any signs of battle are evident. The ...
— Medal of Honor • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... up in a transport of emotional splendor; broken visions thronged his mind of sacrifice, renouncement, death. The fire expired and the night grew cold. His ecstasy sank; he became once more aware of the human wreckage about him, the detritus of which he was now ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... suffered disaster. A painted wooden statue of a Cherokee Indian lay face downward across the walk, as the wind had blown it: bellying folds of canvas and tarpaulin hid the wreck of the poor man's stock-in-trade. Beyond this wreckage stood, in order, a vegetable stall, another sweetmeat stall, and a booth in which the boy (who cared little for sweetmeats, and, moreover, had just eaten his macaroon) took much more interest. For it was hung about with cages; and in the cages ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... set themselves to clear away the filth and the wreckage, human and otherwise. Of the human wreckage Anka made short work. Stepping out into the frosty air, she returned with a pail ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... among the wreckage of the past, found herself disgraced, discredited, and at war with all of Europe. Austria, naturally the leader in an effort to stop the atrocities which threatened a daughter of her own royal house, had been joined finally ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... banks, which had to be levelled by the mattocks of the mago. Then the fords themselves were gone; there were shallows where there had been depths, and depths where there had been shallows; new channels were carved, and great beds of shingle had been thrown up. Much wreckage lay about. The road and its small bridges were all gone, trees torn up by the roots or snapped short off by being struck by heavy logs were heaped together like barricades, leaves and even bark being in many cases stripped completely off; great logs floated down the river in such numbers ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... mother to follow at a slower pace, Nancy and Dan tore up the hill and threw open the kitchen door. There, comfortably dozing on the settle by the fire, sat the Captain! At his feet lay Zeb—also sound asleep with the wreckage of several blackened eggs strewn round him on the hearth-stone! The Captain woke with a start as the children burst into the room and for an instant stood staring in amazement and delight at the scene before them. Zeb, utterly worn out, slept on, and the Captain, ...
— The Puritan Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... the field Where the war-sick champions lie, By the wreckage of stiffening dead, The anguish that yearns but to die. Ah note of human agony heard The paean of victory over and through! Ah voice of duty and justice stern That, at e'en this price, commands them to do! And a vision of Glory goes ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... brig upon the sands; then the efforts of the mariners to launch their boats, their defeat, and the breaking up both of boats and brig; then the arrival upon shore of thirteen men, two of whom died of wounds and exhaustion. The eleven survivors finding some wreckage upon the beach proceeded the next morning to build themselves a shelter, and finally erected the cabin and threw up the earthwork discovered by the ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... commander of a great war ship; but there seemed to be no odd jobs to offer him. There came a day when even Peter realized that life was real and life was earnest. When the floor was strewn with playthings his habit had been to stand amid the wreckage and smile, whereupon Joanna would fly and restore everything to its accustomed place. After the passing of Joanna, Mother Carey sat placidly in her chair in the nursery and Peter stood ankle deep ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... gently). When I lost you, it was as if all the solid ground went from under my feet. Look at me now—I am a shipwrecked man clinging to a bit of wreckage. ...
— A Doll's House • Henrik Ibsen
... these bits of wrecks and wreckage as the captain spoke; and, mingled with a feeling of pity for those who had perished in the tornado, came a satisfactory thought to ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... four American soldiers. The street was littered and unexploded hand grenades lay everywhere. Two soldiers had been carrying gunny sacks filled with grenades when one accidentally exploded, it in turn exploding others until the wreckage was complete. A military investigation would report the cause of the accident and the damage wrought, and thus an incident of war ...
— The Fight for the Argonne - Personal Experiences of a 'Y' Man • William Benjamin West
... was a place of damp desolation. They looked at their dwelling with dismay. It was slimy, dripping; it hummed hollow with the wind, and was strewn with shapeless wreckage like a half-tide cavern in a rocky and exposed coast. Many had lost all they had in the world, but most of the starboard watch had preserved their chests; thin streams of water trickled out of them, however. The beds ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... silence. The half-mad ogre went to the window and slyly beckoned Fred to follow. He crawled out of bed and took his place before the iron bars. The man pointed a skinny finger; Fred's gaze followed. He found himself looking down upon a stone-paved yard filled with loathsome human wreckage—gibbering cripples, drooling monsters, vacant-eyed corpses with only the motions of life. Some had their hands strapped to their sides, others were almost naked. They sang, shouted, and laughed, prayed or were silent, according to their mental infirmities. ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... Denmark there is a sight worth seeing. In the dining-room of a small inn there are painted figureheads of foundered vessels saved from the wreckage. The hand of madness has unmistakably touched all those wooden men and women with their painted faces and clothes. They look forward into the distance, where they seem to see something beyond all. Their noses quiver in the air on the scent of ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... family; but the truth is, one of the corsairs was French and the other Greek; they were not Italians at all. Fernando further says that his father was sailing under them when the battle off Cape St. Vincent was fought; that when the vessels caught fire, his father clung to a piece of wreckage and was washed ashore. Thus does Fernando explain the advent of Columbus into Portugal. But all this took place years before Fernando ...
— Christopher Columbus • Mildred Stapley
... thus I espied Don Miguel lying among the wreckage of a dismantled gun; his face was towards me and looked as I had seen it an hundred times, save for a smear of blood upon his cheek. Even as I gazed his eyes met mine full and square. For a moment he lay without motion, then (his face a-twitch with the effort) ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... skyscrapers the Woolworth was the first to crumble; it split into sections as it fell across the wreckage which already littered City Hall. Then the Bank of Manhattan Building, crumbling, partly falling sidewise, partly slumping upon the ruins of itself. Simultaneously the Chrysler Building toppled. For a second or two it seemed perilously to ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings
... Most of us allow the mechanism of the human body to shift as best it can and as long as it can, should it happen to become ungeared, ignoring the frequent warnings which the ever increasing morbid changes and wreckage give us. And then we surrender and succumb. What else can we do? Our vital creditors file their claims in the high court of Vital Bankruptcy. What poor business policy, and what a wretched tenant! For fifteen or more years we may ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... the water, just covered by some wreckage, the chauffeur lay motionless. The masked man crawled from under the wreckage and looked at ...
— The Romance of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... result of the battle was success, as vouched for by films of oil the destroyers saw appear on the water's surface. General report had it that five submarines composed the attacking party and that wreckage and oil coming to the surface gave evidence of two having ...
— The Delta of the Triple Elevens - The History of Battery D, 311th Field Artillery US Army, - American Expeditionary Forces • William Elmer Bachman
... outlined still with a proud magnificence in unbroken alignment against the star-strewn sky. Elsewhere the destruction is bewildering; fragments of columns, entablatures, bas-reliefs lie about in indescribable confusion, like a lot of scattered wreckage after a world-wide tempest. For it was not enough that the hand of man should overturn these things. Tremblings of the earth, at different times, have also come to shake this Cyclops palace which threatened to be eternal. And all this—which represents ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... is, as a whole, so broad, so crystallized about old boulders, so imbedded in shallows, so wedged into crannies on either shore, that it is a great danger. The waters from thousands of swollen streamlets above are pressing behind it; wreckage and refuse are piling up against it; every one knows that it must yield. But there is danger that it may resist the pressure too long and break suddenly, wrenching even the granite quays from their foundations, bringing desolation to a ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... wreckage of my old life I've managed to build a fairly respectable craft. It has taken me just four years to realize that it is not a pleasure boat. To-night I realize once for all that it is a very modest little tug, and wherever it can tow anything or anybody ...
— Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... BOAT reports last call from Cymena freighter (Gayer Tong-Huk & Co.) taking water and sinking in snow-storm South McDonald Islands. No wreckage recovered. Addresses, etc., of crew at all A. ...
— With The Night Mail - A Story of 2000 A.D. (Together with extracts from the - comtemporary magazine in which it appeared) • Rudyard Kipling
... rows of oars are broken." The Greek vessels, lighter and easier to manoeuvre than those of the Phoenicians, surround the latter and disable them in detail. "The surface of the sea is hidden with floating wreckage and corpses; the shore and the rocks are covered with the dead." At length, towards evening, the energy of the barbarians beginning to flag, they slowly fell back upon the Piraeus, closely followed by their adversaries, while Aristides bore down upon Psyttalia with ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... good it would at least strike somewhere in the midst of the debris and add more or less to the wreckage. As to whether the Boche commander-in-chief had been caught napping and buried in the ruins, was a matter about ...
— Air Service Boys Flying for Victory - or, Bombing the Last German Stronghold • Charles Amory Beach
... him all through the house to show how nicely they had taken care of things. And in every room Gissing saw the marks of riot and wreckage. There were tooth-scars on all furniture-legs; the fringes of rugs were chewed off; there were prints of mud, ink, paints, and whatnot, on curtains and wallpapers and coverlets. Poor Mrs. Spaniel kept running anxiously from the ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... speed, trying to reach her and draw her out from the driver's seat. But the bent and tangled mass of wreckage held her captive, and it was only after other willing hands had come to their assistance that they were able to lift ...
— The Radio Boys' First Wireless - Or Winning the Ferberton Prize • Allen Chapman
... the name of Nathan, and then of his wife, beside themselves because they could not find even a trace of either to indicate their fate. Had the storm picked them up as it had done Elizabeth and carried them out of the wreckage? ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... that the Red Rover, the vessel they had encountered, was sinking fast. Her passengers and crew lost no time in getting on board the Magnet, and in five minutes the Red Rover was engulfed in the sea, which was immediately covered with spars, boxes, and other wreckage. The alarm was dreadful. The Magnet, having sustained serious damage, her situation was most critical. She was making a great deal of water, and the pumps were instantly set to work, while the vessel made for the shore. Happily they were boarded by a fishing smack and taken to Sheerness, where ...
— Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, Volume I • Sir Moses Montefiore
... triumph. Count on the office to back up its men in the field! There was the whole story, the whole horror and heartbreak, finely displayed. There were his photographs of the wreckage; there, in a "box" was his interview with the superintendent of the Rutland Company; there was a map of the devastated area. Perhaps someone had found time even to do an editorial; in that case the clean-up ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... to speak. "That isn't all. The flapping canvas, with part of the gaff, pounded around like the devil let loose for the ten seconds before we couldn't loosen the halyards and lower away the wreckage, but in that time it had parted the mainstay in two like a ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... she gasped, then her voice broke despondently, but she never ceased to tug ineffectually at Chamberlain, trying to drag him out of the mass of wreckage. ...
— The Runaway Skyscraper • Murray Leinster
... plausible, Malone thought. "Did the prowl car boys find any traces of it when they examined the wreckage?" he said. ...
— The Impossibles • Gordon Randall Garrett
... which I have no knowledge save what was told me afterward, and a sore jaw next day from the blow that put me out. The man who struck me went down across my body, Nelson followed him, and they say there were few unbroken windows in the wreckage of the car that followed as the ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... vans and lorries had to be erased. . . . But I have said enough now perhaps to give some idea of the bulk and quality of our great bonfires, our burnings up, our meltings down, our toil of sheer wreckage, over and above the constructive effort, in those ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... encountered a great storm of wind, which separated the ship from her consorts, blew many days, and finally wrecked the vessel on a rocky island. The entire company was drowned except Pine, the daughter of his master, two maid-servants, and one negro female slave. They gathered what they could of the wreckage, and Pine and his companions lived there in community life, a free-love settlement By the four women he had forty-seven children, and in his sixtieth year he claimed to have 565 children, grandchildren, ...
— The Isle Of Pines (1668) - and, An Essay in Bibliography by W. C. Ford • Henry Neville
... Mr. Robert. "No hysterics, please. Can't we lose a mast or so without gettin' panicky? Just a weak turn-buckle on the weather stay, that's all. Here, Vee, take the wheel, will you, and see if you can keep her headed into it while we chop away this wreckage. Torchy, you'll find a couple of axes over the forward lockers. Get ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... The wreckage of some name-forgotten barque, Half-buried by the dolorous shore; Whereto the living waters never more Their urgent billows pour; But the salt spray ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... going? No one knew. We crossed the rest of the village. The Germans had occupied it during the August retreat. It was destroyed, and the destruction was beginning to live, to cover itself with fresh wreckage and dung, to smoke and consume itself. The rain had ceased in melancholy. Up aloft in the clearings of the sky, clusters of shrapnel stippled the air round aeroplanes, and the detonations reached us, far and fine. Along the sodden road ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... and slippery ground with involuntary gestures, helping ourselves sometimes with the rifle. Mechanically the eye fastens on some detail of the declivity, of the ruined ground, on the sparse and shattered stakes pricking up, at the wreckage in the holes. It is unbelievable that we are upright in full daylight on this slope where several survivors remember sliding along in the darkness with such care, and where the others have only hazarded furtive glances through the loopholes. No, there is no firing against us. The wide exodus of the ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... occupations and conditions, compared to a corresponding assortment of Europeans, a larger proportion of the former will be leading alert, active, and useful lives. Within a given social area there will be a smaller amount of social wreckage and a larger amount of wholesome and profitable achievement. The mass of the American people is, on the whole, more deeply stirred, more thoroughly awake, more assertive in their personal demands, and more confident of satisfying them. ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... self-contained until their peoples overflow into new lands: before they become world Powers, they may gain in strength by being narrowly national. But there are other States whose fortunes are widely different. They represent some principle of life or energy, in the midst of mere political wreckage. If the binding power, which built up an older organism, should decline, as happened to the Holy Roman Empire after the religious wars, fragments will fall away and join bodies to which they ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... a periscope depth, and I surveyed her from a position off her stern. She was sinking fast, but I felt so furious at being nearly trapped that I could not resist giving her a torpedo; detonation was complete, and a mass of wreckage shot into the air as the hull of the ship disappeared. As to the two boats, I left them to make the best course to ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon
... coal-supply, our allowance at Macquarie Island had been reduced by one-half, on account of the large amount of wreckage lying on the beach. The weekly cook limited himself to three briquettes, and these he supplemented with sea elephant blubber and wood, which he gathered ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... next night the unwearied gale blew; significant lumps of wreckage drifted past the schooner, and two floating batches of fish-boxes hinted at mischief. The frightful sea made it well-nigh impossible for those below to lie down with any comfort; they hardly had the seaman's knack of saving themselves ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... of dead bodies, with his stiff and almost heavy movements, is astonishingly quick at storing away wreckage. In a shift of a few hours, a comparatively enormous animal—a Mole, for example—disappears, engulfed by the earth. The others leave the dried, emptied carcass to the air, the sport of the winds for months ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... put each man to his station, and I had the sense to picket them a little distance from the house. The Englishmen were clumsy conspirators. We watched them arrive, let them pass, and followed silently on their heels. Their business was wreckage, and they fixed a charge of powder by the tobacco shed, laid and lit a fuse, and retired discreetly into the bushes ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... artillery equipment, all that Don Marcelo had seen clean and shining with the enthusiastic friction that man has given to arms from remote epochs—even more persistent than that which woman gives to household utensils—were now dirty, overlaid with the marks of endless use, with the wreckage of unavoidable neglect. The wheels were deformed with mud, the metal darkened by the smoke of explosion, the gray paint spotted ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... reported in the Press that the philanthropist I have referred to offered to take over and salve this mass of human wreckage for the sum of one million pounds. His offer was liberally responded to; whether he received the million or not does not matter, for he has at any rate been able to call to his assistance thousands of men and women, ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... oppresses mankind, in the shape of great corporations, combinations, etc., and in nine cases out of ten you will trace it back to the fountain of interest on money loaned. The coral island is built out of the bodies of dead coral insects; large fortunes are usually the accumulations of wreckage, ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... dissolved dream. This letter, then, will contain cheque for the $100 which you have paid. And will you tell Irving for me—I can't get up courage enough to talk about this misfortune myself, except to you, whom by good luck I haven't damaged yet that when the wreckage presently floats ashore he will get a good deal of his $500 back; and a dab at a time I will make up to him ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... were, with all canvas set in the hope of catching what breeze might come to disturb the flat calm, the Eleanor Jones' main and fore masts were ripped out of her as if by a giant's hand. The crew managed to cut the wreckage away before it had pounded a hole in her side, and with what canvas they could set on the mizzen the captain attempted to drive her before the wind. But naturally enough the ship had no steerage-way and simply revolved in ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... must have lies beneath the wreckage, in the iron chest, over at the island yonder," said she; "that is, if you love me enough to ...
— Weird Tales from Northern Seas • Jonas Lie
... and to teach them how to prepare and eat their food, and we made vessels of pottery, which you will notice are found everywhere. They understood the art of weaving, in a very primitive way, which I also tried to improve. Only on three occasions did we take any toll from the sea, when the wreckage came ashore. ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Treasures of the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... between the sand-bags, another and another man fell to his knees or toppled sidelong, tripping his fellows into a little knot or windrow of kicking arms and legs; but the main wave poured on, all the faster. Among and above them, like wreckage in that surf, tossed the shapes of scaling-ladders and notched bamboos. Two naked men, swinging between them a long cylinder or log, flashed through the bonfire space and on into ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... realities. The first is the peril to mankind implicit in a continuance along its present disaster course of war, with its inescapable counterpart, social dissolution. The second is the possibility that out of the wreckage and rubble of an outmoded cultural pattern, a mature, chastened, more experienced, more consciously purposive generation will arise, possessing the wit to see the necessity of creative advance, and the wisdom to guide the ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... and stood for a moment panting in a scene of wreckage and disorder. The table was littered with shivered glasses and decanters and chinaware. The furniture was scattered and overturned. Farbish was weakly leaning to one side in the seat to which he had made his way. The men who had gone down under the heavy blows of the chair lay ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck |
