"Flotsam" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... legal wreck, the goods must come to land. If they continue at sea, the law distinguishes them by the barbarous and uncouth appellations of jetsam, flotsam, and ligan. Jetsam is where goods are cast into the sea, and there sink and remain under water: flotsam is where they continue swimming on the surface of the waves: ligan is where they are sunk in the sea, but tied to a cork or buoy, in order to be found again[m]. These are also the king's, if no owner appears to claim them; ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... takes flight in a fever of fear, their feet pulling huge stumps of mud out of the ground. We watch the human flotsam fade away, and the lumps of them diminish, immured in ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... prospectors, United States soldiery and newly organized North West Mounted Police crossed and recrossed the international boundary between the American Northwest and what was then known as the "Whoop Up Country." This heterogeneous flotsam and jetsam held some of the material from which ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... the greeting this army received on every side. The flotsam and jetsam which swirled along in its eddies or followed in its wake cheered, howled, and danced deliriously; men, women, and children from doorways and galleries raised their voices lustily, and applauded as if at some favorite carnival parade. In notable contrast was the bearing of the armed ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... not recall. My impression is that it belonged to a stenographer once in the employ of my father, who used frequently to come to our house to take down dictations. However this may be, the machine had lain hidden by dust and the flotsam and jetsam of the house for twenty years, when, as I have said, I came upon it unexpectedly. Old man as I am—I shall soon be thirty—the fascination of a machine has lost none of its potency. I am as pleased to-day watching the wheels ...
— The Enchanted Typewriter • John Kendrick Bangs
... disgruntled American union men, socialists, anarchists, rough-necks, Mexican exiles, peons escaped from bondage, whipped miners from the bull-pens of Coeur d'Alene and Colorado who desired only the more vindictively to fight—all the flotsam and jetsam of wild spirits from the madly complicated modern world. And it was guns and ammunition, ammunition and ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... I'm Dan Mallam, Beachcomber [see note], as they call me, King o' the Pearl Islands, dealer and merchant in copra, pearl shells, and pearls. These are my reefs and islands. This is my estate, and all flotsam and jetsam as is washed ashore is mine. Do you hear me?—mine, to do as I likes with. This steamer's come ashore on my land, and my black lads, as has been out shelling and collecting nuts, saw it come and tell me, who have come over to see what the ...
— King o' the Beach - A Tropic Tale • George Manville Fenn
... was fast approaching a state of panic that might very easily have resulted in fatal consequences, when it suddenly occurred to me that, of course, it would be quite impossible for me to see those insignificant fragments of flotsam, unless they and I each happened to be hove up on the crest of a wave at precisely the same moment, and the reflection so far steadied my nerves that I was able successfully to combat the almost irresistible impulse to put ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... Benton plainly had begun with a gusto. It stirred one's blood. It called—it summoned with such a promise of variety, of adventure, of flotsam and jetsam and shuttlecock of chances, that I, a youth with twenty-one dollars and a half at disposal, all his clothes on his back, a man's weapon at his belt, and an appointment with a lady as his future, forgetful of past and courageous in present, strode confidently, even recklessly ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... had had some sinister experiences with men and women —especially women—drawn from that nameless, mysterious class made up of the human flotsam and jetsam which drifts about every great city. But since she had taken to leaving the gas in the passage unlit at night she had been very little troubled with that kind of visitors, those human bats which are attracted ...
— The Lodger • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... books, old prints, strange fishes in glass cases, rods, guns, pipe-racks, curiosities of every kind from various parts of the world—India, the South Seas, Australia, not forgetting London and Paris—and all the flotsam and jetsam of a far-wandered man, who—as the "King" remarked, introducing their autobiographic display with a comprehensive wave of his hand—had, like that other wanderer unbeloved of all schoolboys, the pious AEneas, been so much tossed about on land ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... a letter for you." She went to the pigeon-holes on the wall that held the flotsam and jetsam of unclaimed mail, and brought him a square, blue linen ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... had not entirely subsided, but there was a perceptible diminution in the height of the waves. Up beyond the water-line lay a fresh installment of jetsam. But, as before, they labored only to save the flotsam. ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... ray of sunshine that had fallen into their dreary lives. But the child was a rent baby. In the crowded tenements of New York the lodger serves the same purpose as the Irishman's pig; he helps to pay the rent. "The child"—it was never called anything else—was a lodger. Flotsam from Rivington Street, after the breaking up of a family there, it had come to them, to perish "if the Lord so willed it" in that basement. "Infant slaughter houses" the Tenement House Commission had called their kind. The father paid seventy-five cents a week for ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... Secretly conveying a shovel and a few tools to the spot the next day, she set about her prodigious task. As the upper works were gone, and the galleon not large, in three weeks, working an hour or two each day, she had made a deep excavation in the stern. She had found many curious things,—the flotsam and jetsam of previous storms,—but as yet, it is perhaps needless to ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... Eve herself. And, indeed, you will not be surprised that to the shores of our little island have drifted all kinds of miscellaneous rubbish, and that the Manxmen, from their very simplicity and ignorance of other literatures, have had no means of sifting the flotsam and assigning value to the constituents. Besides this, they are so irresponsible, have no literary conscience, and accordingly have appropriated anything and everything. This is true of some Manx ballads, and perhaps also of many Manx ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... had been seen—"no sail from day to day"; that they were in the latitude of Panama; that it was squally or not squally, as the case might be; that on one occasion they captured "four barrels of oil," the flotsam of some ill-fated whaler, and that it all proved "very exciting"; that a dolphin was captured, and that he died in splendor, passing through the whole gamut of the rainbow—that the words of tradition might be fulfilled; that the hens had suffered no sea-change, but had contributed from a ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... of anger leaped in Lennan; why should Dromore speak that word as if he were ashamed of his own daughter? Just like his sort—none so hidebound as men-about-town! Flotsam on the tide of other men's opinions; poor devils adrift, without the one true anchorage of their own real feelings! And doubtful whether Dromore would be pleased, or think him gushing, or even distrustful of his morality, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the sands, and now and then—too often on the flat shores of one of our northern estuaries, whence can be seen the white teeth of the sea biting at the shoals flanking the fairway—are mingled with the flotsam sodden relics of life aboard ship and driftwood of tell-tale shape, which silently point to a tragedy of the sea. Usually the daily paper completes the tale; but on some rare occasion these poor bits of drift remain the only evidence of the vain struggle, and from them we must piece together ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... sung With scarce less power than Arno's exiled tongue— We who are Milton's kindred, Shakespeare's heirs. The prize of lyric victory who shall gain If ours be not the laurel, ours the palm? More than the froth and flotsam of the Seine, More than your Hugo-flare against the night, And more than Weimar's proud elaborate calm, One flash ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... and-thundered in his ears. Now he saw it all halcyon, stretching fair and mute to the boundless west, the sinking sun, the lovers' star. They two—could they two, lying with closed eyes, but drift out over bar, floating away through golds and purples towards the kiss of heaven and sea—flotsam of this earth, jetsam of age-distant shores, each to the other paradise and all in all! How profound the stillness—how deep the fragrance of the lily—what indifference, what quiet as of scorn did the Maker of man, having placed his creature in the lists, turn aside to other spectacles!... ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... I know of millowners who complain that they cannot get labourers who will stay, and that their work suffers from the flotsam, jetsam character of those whom they employ working for a few weeks and then leaving. This we should be able ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker
... millenniums have left on the earth—surely there is a call to service that might fire the spirit of the dullest of us.''[110] The obstacles are indeed formidable, but he who can look beneath the eddying flotsam and jetsam of the surface to the mighty undercurrents which are sweeping majestically onward ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... The trees of Cypress Point are unique, this species of cypress having been found nowhere else. The long, never-ceasing swell of the Pacific incessantly flows up the many crescent sand beaches, casting up shells of brilliant hues, sea-weed, and kelp, which seems instinct with animal life, and flotsam from the far-off islands. But the rocks that lie off the shore, and the jagged points that project in fanciful forms, break the even great swell, and send the waters, churned into spray and foam, into the ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... cane-bottomed chairs supported, in more expensive seclusion, Surgeon-Major and Miss Livingstone, the Reverend Stephen Arnold, and two or three other people. The Duke's Own sat under the gallery, cheek by jowl with all the flotsam and jetsam of an Eastern port, well on the look-out for offensive personalities from the men of the ships, and spitting freely. Here, too, was an ease of shoulder and a freedom from the cares of life—at a venture the wives were taking in washing in Brixton, and the children sent ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... this valley of the shadow of death the work which is to resurrect this stricken city has gone steadily forward. Here and there over the waste where Johnstown stood in its pride black smoke arises from the bonfires on which shattered house-walls, rafters, doors, broken furniture and all the flotsam and jetsam of the ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... that Jane went to New York that day week, and at a jewelry counter in one of the shops she discovered the amethyst comb. There were on sale a number of bits of antique jewelry, the precious flotsam and jetsam of old and wealthy families which had drifted, nobody knew before what currents of adversity, into that harbor of sale for all the world to see. Jane made no inquiries; the saleswoman volunteered simply the information that the comb was a real antique, ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... The camps of the black-lime district, which had been considered hell holes, were in reality models of order compared with these mushroom cities of raw boards, tar paper, and tin. Gambling joints, dance halls, and dens more vicious flourished openly, and around them gathered the scum and the flotsam that ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... The little low-ceilinged room, with its square window, into which he took her, was filled with the flotsam and jetsam of his roving life—things beautiful and odd and strange beyond all telling. The things that pleased Rachel most were two huge shells on the chimney piece—pale pink shells with big ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... unlashed and used as a cable to unite the floating apparatus with the canoe. Pencroft and Neb then dug away the sand with their oars, so as to facilitate the moving of the chest, towing which the boat soon began to double the point, to which the name of Flotsam Point was given. ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... its league-wide flood; the moon walks upon it with silver feet. It is the pulsing heart of the land, living still though so many rules and rulers have risen and fallen beside it, their pomps and glories drifting like flotsam dawn the river to the eternal ocean that is the end of all—and the beginning. Dead civilizations strew its banks, dreaming in the torrid sunshine of glories that were—of blood-stained gold, jewels wept from woeful crowns, nightmare dreams of murder and terror; ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... appeals to the American Congress are happily hidden in the rubbish of history, and are somewhat dimmed by the intervention of more than half a century. But his humiliation was extreme. Smart Congressmen, partisans, the ignorant flotsam of conventions and intrigues, heard the philosopher with contempt. A few heard him with sympathy; and the opinion in his favor grew, as if by the pressure of shame, until he was finally supported, and in a midnight ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... Cocos-Keeling Islands, in the Indian Ocean, cannot be passed over. He was eager to visit a coral-reef, and this atoll, stocked and planted only by the flotsam and jetsam of the seas, the winds, and migrating birds, offers to the naturalist a most delightful study; for here, progressing almost under his eyes, are the phenomena which have made Bermuda and other coral ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... of the world; droll, sarcastic, generous and I believe for democracy he is unequaled by any Tammany politician: he knows more policemen, dopes, conductors, beggars, chauffeurs, gangsters, bartenders, jobless actors, painters, preachers, anarchists, and all the rest of New York's flotsam and jetsam than any one in the world. He is always the polished gentleman, and yet they take ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... the President's phrase about the "firm hand of stern repression" in the arrest, conviction and jailing of the six suffragists; a touch of ruthlessness in their incarceration at Occoquan along with women of the street, pickpockets and other flotsam and jetsam. Still, the suffragists are not looking for sympathy, and it need not be ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... in his boat. Notwithstanding the assertions of the watermen, Deville did not relinquish faith in his own eyes. He suspected foul play. So did Winslow, who began to discover the spurious quality of the pretended salvage corps. The vigilant exertions of these hookers-in of flotsam could be accounted for only on the supposition that here, at the outlet of Cypress Bayou, Captain Winslow had fallen into the hands of a gang such as he had described to ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... weeping, Mr. Bell, with deep lines of anxiety scoring his face, Jess, troubled and anxious looking, and old Peter Bell, the former hermit, bearing an expression of mild bewilderment. Last of all came Alverado, the Mexican flotsam of the desert. His inscrutable countenance bore no sign of the suffering he had gone through at the thought that harm had come to his worshipped senorita, but in his heart the Mexican had suffered as much as the rest. ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... turn up a large surface of life, rather than dig mines into geological strata. Masses of experience, anecdote, incident, cross-lights, quotation, historical instances, the whole flotsam and jetsam of two minds forced in and in upon the matter in hand from every point of the compass, and from every degree of mental elevation and abasement—these are the material with which talk is fortified, the food on which the talkers thrive. Such argument as is ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... along in the Noda Valley, and from time to time she was close to the turbid flood which swept down ice cakes and flotsam. From her bowlder she could see a broad and calm stretch—a deadwater of which she ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... life-size, painted statue of the Virgin. There the two stand firmly on their pedestals, their faces raised to God's roof of blue, which never fails. Because their eyes are lifted, they do not see the flotsam and jetsam of shattered stained glass, burnt woodwork, smashed benches, broken picture-frames and torn, rain-blurred portraits of lesser saints. They seem to think ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... learning; but the result of this revolution on a survivor from the fifties resembled the action of the earthworm; he twisted about, in vain, to recover his starting-point; he could no longer see his own trail; he had become an estray; a flotsam or jetsam of wreckage; a belated reveller, or a scholar-gipsy like Matthew Arnold's. His world was dead. Not a Polish Jew fresh from Warsaw or Cracow — not a furtive Yacoob or Ysaac still reeking of the Ghetto, snarling a weird Yiddish to the officers of the customs — but had a keener ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... below the sandbar point, at which the Ohio and Mississippi mingle their waters, and the human flotsam from ten thousand towns is caught by swirling eddies, he found himself subdued by a shadow that fell athwart his course, dulling the fire of his own spirit with a doubt and an awe which he had never ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... within a stone's throw of Broadway, and it is counted one of the sights of the city. Upon entering, one may pass through a saloon where white-aproned waiters load trays and wrangle over checks, then into a ball-room filled with the flotsam and jetsam of midnight Manhattan. Above and around this room runs a white-and-gold balcony partitioned into boxes; beneath it are many tables separated from the waxed floor by a railing. Inside the enclosure men in street-clothes and smartly gowned girls with enormous hats revolve nightly ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... straightened themselves, stood to attention, and saluted the swaying flag. Callow youths, hooligans, round-shouldered slouchers at the best, made shift to lift their heads and keep step. And the torrent caught the human flotsam of the pavement in its onward swirl. If Royson had not utilized that clear space lower down the street, it would have demanded the exercise of sheer force to reach the van of the dense gathering of ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... denied a profession—even a trade, to which to cling in time of shipwreck; and who, when disaster comes, drift out to sea. I warned you the other night to steer clear of me. I come under the head of flotsam!" ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... confused mass of debris; a mass whose individual units were apparently moving at random: yet which was as a whole still following the orbit of Roger's planetoid. Space was full of machine parts, structural members, furniture, flotsam of all kinds; and everywhere were the bodies of men. Some were encased in space-suits, and it was to these that the rescuers turned first—space-hardened veterans though the men of the Chicago were, they did not care even to look at the others. Strangely enough, however, ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... weeks. Then, without warning, and in the same unobtrusive way as he had come, he vanished from the scene. For the moment Suffering Creek wondered; then, as is the way of such places, it ceased to wonder. It was too busy with its own affairs to concern itself to any great extent with the flotsam that drifted its way. Scipio wondered a little more than the rest, but his twins and his labors occupied him so closely that he, too, dismissed the matter from his mind. As for Jessie, she said not a word, and gave no ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... upraised sea-bed of coralline. To the north-west, and outside this strip, lies the little port defended by a network of reefs, in which our Sambk had first taken refuge. The bay-shore bears traces of more than one wreck; and in the graveyard used by the native sailor, an open awning of flotsam and jetsam looks from afar like a tumble-down log-hut. The number of reefs and shoals shown by stripes of vivid green water promised excellent fishing, and failed ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... his path stood a ragged object—a piece of social flotsam—a unit of London's misery. This poor filthy fellow was singing at the top of his voice, a music-hall song upon that fertile topic, "the girls," was dancing wildly around a dilapidated hat which stood upon the pavement at his feet, and was throwing sovereigns into this same ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... slightly in his favor, very slightly, out here on the prairie amongst the derelicts, the flotsam of the grassy ocean, he had found a brief breathing space. He had begun to think the balance had really turned. Hope dawned, and life offered fresh possibilities. And now—now he had been let down afresh. Before, the attack had been directed against the worldly hopes of a man, such as all ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... says at last, 'you're a good chap and I'm a rotter. I'm a bad egg, a rolling stone, flotsam, garbage, punk, anything you like that smells to heaven. I hate myself sometimes. It's hate of myself that makes me desperate. But, give me this chance. Perhaps a sea-voyage will brace me up. Genoa, you say? They speak French ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... his trunk, the admiration of all the girls in the village; but Paris—after it had beaten and twisted and squeezed that brilliant Southern rag in its great vat for ten years, burned him in all its acids, rolled him in all its mire—relegated him at last to the state of battered flotsam and jetsam, embruted, paralyzed, which had killed his father with grief and compelled his mother to sell everything in her house and to live by domestic service in the well-to-do families of the neighborhood. Luckily, just about the time that that relic ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... was right. The flotsam and jetsam of too many sentimental stories and fairy tales were afloat in the child's active mind. A few minutes later she had gathered the eggs and put them away in the pantry. Then she stepped into the sitting-room, awed by the solemn stillness that enveloped the usually ...
— Mildred's Inheritance - Just Her Way; Ann's Own Way • Annie Fellows Johnston
... to draw out from the land, when the eagle-eye of one of the Maories detected the carcass of a whale rolling among the breakers about half a mile to the westward. Immediately a boat was lowered, a double allowance of line put into her, and off they went to the valuable flotsam. Dangerous in the highest degree was the task of getting near enough to drive harpoons into the body; but it was successfully accomplished, the line run on board, and the prize hauled triumphantly alongside. This was the whale they had now ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... through they stared out over the playground of their manhood, until Death came for them. The sea had blown gout into their limbs, had buffeted them until they were bent and bowed, and in the winter nights one could hear them roar with the pain like wild beasts. Down to the harbor drifted all the flotsam and jetsam of the land, invalids and idle men and dying men, and busy folk raced round about and up and down with fluttering coat-tails, in order ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... things, and the mother he loves so well will give him her blessing. So each, you see, has a clearly defined plan, while I drift along, planless, ambitionless, smoking many pipes. I have been trying to think out something practicable. Am I to drift always about the world, a mere piece of flotsam on Swansea tide? Or am I to sit down once more in Chelsea, hand and brain running to seed, while the world spins on outside? I must think out a plan. And I must school myself to cancel all plans beginning "If she will—if only." Why cannot I rise to some decent sense of self-respect, ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... Flotsam and jetsam make another class of Beachcomber by stimulating the gaming instincts. Is there a human being, taking part in the rough and tumble of the world, who can honestly make confession and say that he has ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... a squalid scene—a wide flat area where stakes and floors and frames mingled with all the flotsam and jetsam left by a hurried and profligate populace, moving on to another camp. Daylight found no man there nor any living creature. And all day the wind blew the dust and sheets of sand over the place where had reigned such strife of toil and gold and lust ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... the outside world he might safely have been termed rather rum, but here in this backwater, so full of the oddest flotsam, his waywardness was rather less than the average. He had, for instance, a diverting habit of modifying the time, and even the tune, of the hymns on Sunday, and he confessed to having kissed all the nurses and housemaids except three. But both Escott ...
— The Lunatic at Large • J. Storer Clouston
... the Klondike, and father of the Sourdoughs, strode upon the breakfast table of a million homes along with the toast and breakfast foods. Even before his elected time, he was forcibly launched into the game. Financiers and promoters, and all the flotsam and jetsam of the sea of speculation surged upon the shores of his eleven millions. In self-defence he was compelled to open offices. He had made them sit up and take notice, and now, willy-nilly, they were dealing him hands and clamoring for him to play. Well, play he would; ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... his nostril, Sweet the din of the fighting-line, Now he is flotsam on the seas, And his ...
— Songs of Childhood • Walter de la Mare
... and whirled in every direction like cockle-shells in a hurricane. Their haunts knew them no more, and before he could realize his personal concern with catastrophic events Bobby became a disconsolate wanderer in search of the flotsam and jetsam which were all that remained of his ...
— War-time Silhouettes • Stephen Hudson
... white farmhouse with its group of outbuildings. There was no hamlet in sight, merely scattered farms. The river, swollen and yellow with the Spring rains, swept upon its bosom fence rails, hen-coops, and other flotsam of a Spring flood. Yonder, at a crossing, part of the ...
— Ruth Fielding of the Red Mill • Alice B. Emerson
... present notice was picked up at sea, a child, and, under the provisions of maritime law concerning flotsam, jetsam, and lagan, was appropriated by the crew. He then followed their fortunes for several years, with various adventures, among which is the one wherein he is said to have accompanied Arthur Gordon Pym (disguised in the published account of that voyage under the name and appearance of ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... who had begun his career as a notary, but, finding that profession unprofitable, had become a hunter of pedigrees and heirs-at-law—for the most part to insignificant legacies, unclaimed stock, and all other jetsam and flotsam thrown up on the shadowy shores of the Court of Chancery. M. Fleurus had not often been so fortunate as to put his industrious fingers into any large pie, but he had contrived to make a good deal of money out of small affairs, and had found ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... had little leisure in which to sleep, or to dry himself. When he left the deck he had only the dark, wet berth-deck to retire to, a place of bleakness and misery, where he might share a sopping blanket, if he had one, with the corpse of a drowned rat and the flotsam from the different messes. There was no getting dry nor warm, though the berth-deck might be extremely close and stuffy from lack of ventilation. The cook-room, or galley fire would not be lighted, and there would be no comforting food or drink, nothing but raw meat and biscuit, and a sup of sour ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... charts, models, unfinished musical scores, finally a huge papier-mache globe on which were traced the routes of Mr. Colman Hoyt's four unsuccessful dashes for the North Pole. It depressed me, the sight of this vast lumber-room, this collection of useless flotsam and jetsam, cast up and rejected by the sea of strenuous life. Most moving of all, a broken golf-club standing in a dusty corner, and beside it a wofully scarred and battered ball. I ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... the watering-places first and among the bright and colorful crowds forget the gray appendages of despair. Marvellously renewed, he would walk again in the Piazza di Spanga at twilight, moving in that drifting flotsam of dark women and ragged beggars, of austere, barefooted friars. The thought of Italian women stirred him faintly—when his purse hung heavy again even romance might fly back to perch upon it—the romance of blue canals in Venice, of the golden green hills of Fiesole after ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... foreman's residence, and while the silvery stars were peacefully twinkling in the heavens overhead, they were repeating stories of their checkered lives, which only too often brought back memories of those long-ago days, before they too had joined the flotsam of that class of the "underworld", who, too proud to degrade themselves to the level of outright vagrancy while yet there was a chance to exchange long and weary hours of the hardest kind of labor for the right to earn an honorable existence, were nevertheless, included by critical ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)
... still fresh upon them, splintered timbers of mysterious origin, and logs in multitude, scarred with gashes of the axe. Feliu and his comrades had saved wood enough to build a little town,—working up to their waists in the surf, with ropes, poles, and boat-hooks. The whole sea was full of flotsam. Voto a Cristo!—what a wrecking there must have been! And to think the Carmencita ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... with oilskin-clad men, many of whom bore long, clumsy telescopes, while others in great high boots, and with their sou'-westers tied beneath their chins, walked amongst the foam, a coil of strong rope upon their shoulders, and a boat-hook in hand, ready for anything in the way of flotsam and jetsam that ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... perhaps knows best how to take advantage of old clothes. (Fig. 19.) He collects shells of Gasteropods, abandoned flotsam, the first inhabitant of which has died. The Hermit-crab (Pagurus Bernhardus) is a Decapod Crustacean—that is to say, he resembles a very small Crab. But his inveterate habit during so many generations of sheltering his abdomen in a shell prevents this part from being encrusted with lime and becoming ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... hill-top. It was scarcely more than a shed, with a chimney, stone to the roof, and then built of sticks and clay. Out of this chimney the sparks flew when the smith was working, pitting the black shingle roof and searing the drooping leaves of the hickories. Around the shop was the characteristic flotsam, a cart with a mashed wheel, a plough with a broken mould-board, innumerable rusted tires, worn wagon-irons, and the other wreckage of this ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... emergency. Before the little-used yawl could be lowered, the steamer had swept a wide circle in mid-stream and the search-light picked up the castaways. From that to placing the Belle Julie so that the two bits of human flotsam could be hauled in over the bows was but a skilful hand's-turn of rudder-work, accomplished as cleverly as if the great steamboat had been a power-driven launch to be steered by a touch ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... look in the mien of the average frequenter of this island resort?" he said to Jack, whose eyes, following the impulse of his more robust youth, were examining specimens of feminine flotsam on the ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... which he has written the information, corks up the flask, and casts it into the sea. If the bottle goes to the bottom, it is in the department of the lagan officer; if it floats, it is in the department of the flotsam officer; if it be thrown upon shore, ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... hut, as before. Fishing men returning in straggling order. Bottles opened without loss of time. Black drakes dancing in the air. Surface of river marked by never a sign of fish. Flotsam and jetsam of shucks drifting down, and forming in mass at the eddies. Swifts and swallows exceedingly busy everywhere. Sun hastening to western hill-tops. Beautiful evening effects on field and wood, especially on hawthorn grove, in the light of the ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... amelioration; to the mental, physical and spiritual redemption of sordid lives. To these rooms men from the universities, impelled by a new conscience, bring their learning and their refinement. In these rooms men from the docks—the flotsam and jetsam of ...
— Old Valentines - A Love Story • Munson Aldrich Havens
... averted face. "Only a bit of flotsam on the human wave. How small we all are, any of us! And there's ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... railroad diverted the traffic to the Mariposa Group, Farleys was left to pursue its tranquil way undisturbed by stage or tourist. Still it remains, if stagnant, self-respecting, has a hotel, a post office and a street of stores, along which the human flotsam and jetsam of the mineral belt may drift without exciting comment. A derelict could pass along its wooden sidewalk, drop a letter in the post box, even buy a box of cartridges without attracting notice. And even if he should be noticed, Farleys was sleepy ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... cables-lengths of that part of the shore terminated by Flotsam Point, and after having rounded it in a semicircular line, still protected by the brig's guns, they proceeded towards the mouth of ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... Louise was fascinated. Old Mr. Bushrod Mosby she had known for years—a veritable rustic macaroni, a piece of tinselled flotsam floating on backwater. He had always called her M'Lou; later occasionally Miss M'Lou. Now the rhythm of some ancient rout was stirring old memories, and the obligations of host sat pleasantly heavy upon his befogged ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... and pitiful flotsam that reluctant seas have washed to us piecemeal from a remote past, there are, as will be shown later, many things which, although proceeding from a culture and modes of thought as far removed from our own as they may well be,[1] are worth the reading, which do not require any special ...
— The Instruction of Ptah-Hotep and the Instruction of Ke'Gemni - The Oldest Books in the World • Battiscombe G. Gunn
... The spectacle presented, when the covering was removed, was one to have shocked less hardened nerves than those of Stuart and Dunbar; but the duties of a police officer, like those of a medical man, not infrequently necessitate such inspections. The two bent over the tragic flotsam of the Thames ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... strokes, then sprang out of bed, and, running to the window, drew wide the curtain. The world was awake, the sun already clear above the hills over St. Just pool, and all the harbour twinkling with its rays. My eyes searched the stretch of water between me and St. Mawes, as though for flotsam—anything to give me news, or a hint of news. For many minutes I stood staring—needless to say, in vain—and so, the morning being chilly, crept back to bed with the ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... newer homes among the later streets of Dockland is that beautiful lady's portrait known. Here and there it survives, part of the flotsam which has drifted through the years with grandmother's sandalwood chest, the last of the rush-bottomed chairs, and the lacquered tea-caddy. I well remember a room from which such survivals were saved when the household ship ran on a coffin, and foundered. It was a front parlour ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... watch at the ebb and flow The tides of the public thought— Flotsam or jetsam floating in With the treasure ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher |
