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More "Surf" Quotes from Famous Books



... "Return into the sea out of which you came," he hurled him over the edge of the cliff. Two seconds later the sound of a heavy splash echoed up its sides; then, save for the murmur of the waterfall and the surge of the surf upon the beach, ...
— Swallow • H. Rider Haggard

... near me clinging to slippery things they couldn't see, cursing perhaps, or praying their prayers, or perhaps already sliding away, down and down, into the cold, black caves of the sea. And then the shadows seemed to be full of shades, and the surf-tongues were near to catching ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... Then they stoned Stigandi to death, and there he was buried under a heap of stones. Olaf kept his word to the bonds-woman, and gave her her freedom, and she went home to Herdholt. Hallbjorn Whetstone-eye was washed up by the surf a short time after he was drowned. It was called Knorstone where he was put in the earth, and his ghost walked about there a great deal. There was a man named Thorkell Skull who lived at Thickshaw on his father's inheritance. He was a man of very dauntless heart and ...
— Laxdaela Saga - Translated from the Icelandic • Anonymous

... its moods as the heart of a giddy maid to her lovers—to-day it may invite you to come in and take possession of its placid waters in the harbour beyond; to-morrow it may roar and snarl with boiling surf and savage, eddying currents, and whirlpools slapping fiercely against the grim, black rocks ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke

... the middle they rose gradually, like the sticks of a fan, to the top of the cliff, and descended in the same fashion to its base. That miraculously light, yet perfectly firm, staircase cost them twenty-two days of toil. A little tinder and the surf of the sea would destroy all trace of it forever in a single night. A betrayal of the secret was impossible; and all search for the violators of the convent was doomed ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac

... with sandpaper leaves. The indicus. Analyzing soils. How plants digest food. Larvae. The early forms of many animals. Kinds of food in the earth. The bruang. The sun-bear of Malay. The bear and the honey pot. How it was tamed. The sport. The ocean. George and Harry at the beach. Bathing in the surf. The discovery of the wreck of an upturned boat. Finding the compartments belonging to their lost boat on Wonder Island. Sending for John. The skeleton beneath the upturned boat. The bound skeleton. The startling discovery of the same kinds of ropes found ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Adventures on Strange Islands • Roger Thompson Finlay

... who sat down on a boulder with the water dripping from her skirt, looked ruefully at him and the dinghy, which was rolling over in the surf. ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss

... her child suffered. They were in the King's Road now, and the brightly lighted shop-windows almost dazzled Bessie. On the opposite side she could see a dark line that was evidently the sea; a dull, heavy surging of waves broke on her ear; now and then the splash of the white surf ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... have had a fair chance of escape, with a good start, while the gun-brig was picking up her boat. Unless, indeed, a shot from the Delia should carry away an important spar, which was not very likely at night, and with a quick surf to baffle gunnery. However, none of these things came to pass, and so the chances ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore

... away, so little did they know about firearms. The chief had a feast of young dog prepared for his guests, who partook of it with reluctance. All communication was by signs, and when the chief imitated the beating of surf and drew a cow and a sheep in the sand, pointing west, they thought they were at last nearing the longed-for Spanish settlements, and went on their way joyfully. Little did they imagine that the settlements the chief described were far off on ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh

... strip of waning light above the chimneys. From somewhere in the city came sounds like the distant beating of drums, and beyond, far beyond, a vague muttering, now growing, swelling, rumbling in the distance like the pounding of surf upon the rocks, now like the surf again, receding, growling, menacing. The cold had become intense, a bitter piercing cold which strained and snapped at joist and beam and turned the slush of yesterday to flint. From the street below every sound ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers

... the fate of Idmon. Now at the hour when the sun passes his noon-tide halt and the ploughlands are just being shadowed by the rocks, as the sun slopes towards the evening dusk, at that hour all the heroes spread leaves thickly upon the sand and lay down in rows in front of the hoary surf-line; and near them were spread vast stores of viands and sweet wine, which the cupbearers had drawn off in pitchers; afterwards they told tales one to another in turn, such as youths often tell when at the feast and the bowl they take delightful ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius

... varied smells of things Yet never to our nostrils see them come; With eyes we view not burning heats, nor cold, Nor are we wont men's voices to behold. Yet these must be corporeal at the base, Since thus they smite the senses: naught there is Save body, having property of touch. And raiment, hung by surf-beat shore, grows moist, The same, spread out before the sun, will dry; Yet no one saw how sank the moisture in, Nor how by heat off-driven. Thus we know, That moisture is dispersed about in bits ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius

... the surf, they had taken long tramps along the beach when the tide was out, they had sailed in his yacht, "The Dolphin," they had been up at the great hotel, where a fine ...
— Princess Polly's Playmates • Amy Brooks

... and progressive creatures that we are, with ruling brains, and forming hands, capable of fellowship, and thirsting for fame, can we not contend, in comfort, with the insects of the forest, or, in achievement, with the worm of the sea? The white surf rages in vain against the ramparts built by poor atoms of scarcely nascent life; but only ridges of formless ruin mark the places where once dwelt our noblest multitudes. The ant and the moth have cells for each of their young, but our little ones lie in festering heaps, ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin

... straightforward, intelligent, American citizen boil to see the impudence, the hypocrisy, of men of this kind,—and they belong to both parties. I heard a story of one who used, when Long Branch was more popular than it is now, to go down there for a summer outing. One day he went out in the surf to bathe. He was strong and vigorous and bold, and he swam out beyond the breakers; he was heading strongly and fearlessly for the European shore. All at once, a shark, a man-eater, was coming the other way, and swam up squarely in front of him. They eyed each other for a moment, and then ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various

... length the curtain began slowly to rise, and his view extended further and further toward the river, until all was visible, even to the very land. Not a craft of any sort was in sight. Even the wreck had disappeared, though this was subsequently discovered in the surf, having drifted out with the current until it struck an eddy, which carried it in again, when it was finally stranded. No vestige of le Feu-Follet, however, was to be seen. Not even a tent on the shore, a wandering boat, a drifting spar, or a rag of a sail! All had disappeared, ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper

... Gulf of Mexico were beating heavily upon the sandy beach of Point Isabel, but the dull and boding sounds were not the roar of the surf. There came a long silence, and then another boom. Each in succession entered the white tents of the American army on the upland, carrying with it a message of especial importance to all who were within. It was also of more importance to the whole world than any man who heard it could then ...
— Ahead of the Army • W. O. Stoddard

... imperishable, Endless, and all alike, as sands on the shore, Innumerable atoms; and one desert, Barren and cold, on which the wild waves break, But nothing rests, save carcasses and wrecks, Rocks, and the salt-surf weeds ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron

... enamelled and softly swelling plains, shaded over with delicious groves, and watered by purling brooks, and the entire country but little elevated above the surrounding ocean. The reality is very different; bold rock-bound coasts, with the surf beating high against the lofty cliffs, and broken here and there into deep inlets, which open to the view thickly-wooded valleys, separated by the spurs of mountains clothed with tufted grass, and sweeping down towards the sea from an elevated and furrowed interior, ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville

... were getting into the boat to cross the surf, the affectionate old soul ran out upon the strand, and called to her "Amy Stuart! Amy Stuart!" to the general's great amazement as clearly as her own; and she held up a packet in her hand as they were pushing off, and shouted after her, "Child—child! ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... north-east; but, to the north and west, there is a blue line of higher land along the border of it, and above this, but farther back, a misty band of mountains, touched with snow. To the east, the paleness and roar of the Adriatic, louder at momentary intervals as the surf breaks on the bars of sand; to the south, the widening branches of the calm lagoon, alternately purple and pale green, as they reflect the evening clouds or twilight sky; and almost beneath our feet, on the same ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin

... by moment the seas broke more strongly over the rocks. The fishermen studied the shore anxiously. So did I, and with a sailor's eye, though I could see little chance for a swimmer to gain that surf- hammered line of rocks. I made signs toward the headlands on either flank. The Japanese shook their heads. I indicated that dreadful lee shore. Still they shook their heads and did nothing. My conclusion ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London

... 14th of August we anchored off Mazatlan, a picturesque and ancient adobe town in old Mexico. The approach to this port was strikingly beautiful. Great rocks, cut by the surf into arches and caverns, guarded the entrance to the harbor. We anchored two miles out. A customs and a Wells-Fargo boat boarded us, and many natives came along side, bringing fresh cocoanuts, bananas, and limes. Some Mexicans bound for Guaymas came on ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes

... into the water and were floated ashore in the arms of naked girls; she had lain for weeks in enormous atolls, where the only life was that of birds, and the silence was unbroken save for the long roll of the surf, and at night the ghostly scurrying of turtles over the sand; she had been everywhere in those labyrinthine seas, those haunts of romance and mystery, with love, danger, ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne

... coast of France, which was hilly and picturesque, and as we approached Marseilles was very bold and striking. We steered among rocky islands, rising abruptly out of the sea, mere naked crags, without a trace of verdure upon them, and with the surf breaking at their feet. They were unusual specimens of what hills would look like without the soil, that is to them what flesh is to a skeleton. Their shapes were often wonderfully fine, and the great headlands thrust themselves out, and took such lines of light and shade that ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... took Uncle Heck to his room, sat him in front of a quart of vintage, and left the old geezer there to slosh around in the surf until sleep claimed ...
— You Should Worry Says John Henry • George V. Hobart

... between A sound came from the land; It was the sound of the trampling surf On the rocks and the ...
— The Children's Own Longfellow • Henry W. Longfellow

... as they were speaking, a fitful gust swept by the house, wailing and screaming and rattling the windows, and after it came the heavy, hollow moan of the surf on the beach, like the wild, angry howl of some savage animal just beginning ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... down with a gentleman to the Ocean House, the other day, to see the sea horses, and also to listen to the roar of the surf, and watch the ships drifting about, here, and there, and far away at sea. When I stood on the beach and let the surf wet my feet, I recollected doing the same thing on the shores of the Atlantic—and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... edge of the sea. The natives have been attracted to this main road, and from Galle to Colombo it is almost one continuous village; there is no prettier sea-shore in the world, nor a more beautiful surf. Every few miles we come upon large numbers of fishermen drawing in their nets, which are excessively long and take in several acres of sea in their sweep. An artist who would come to Ceylon and devote himself to depicting "the fishers of Ceylon's isle" (how well that sounds! and a ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie

... and fell on top of her and they wrestled for the doll. The surf thundered nearby. The tide, capricious in the grip of the three suns, rose suddenly, flooding them with chill water. Coughing and spluttering and choking, they retreated further up ...
— A World Called Crimson • Darius John Granger

... behind the western foreland ere we caught ahead of us the roar of the surf on the bar which lay across the river's mouth. Our rowers had passed that way many a time before, and plunged us headlong into the mighty battle of the waters where river and sea met. For a short minute it seemed as if no boat could live in such a whirl; ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed

... for this second gyration. Even as the stairway canted he lost his balance; they were both thrown violently through the open hatchway, and swept off into the boiling surf. Under such conditions thought itself was impossible. A series of impressions, a number of fantastic pictures, were received by the benumbed faculties, and afterwards painfully sorted out by the memory. Fear, anguish, amazement—none of these could exist. All he knew was that the lifeless form of ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy

... go back to Singapore And ship along the Straits, To a bungalow I know beside Penang; Where cocoanut palms along the shore Are waving, and the gates Of Peace shut Sorrow out forevermore. I want to go back and hear the surf Come beating in at night, Like the washing of eternity over the dead. I want to see dawn fare up and day Go down in golden light; I want to go back to Penang! I want ...
— Many Gods • Cale Young Rice

... very well in its way, but it is a thing which can be very easily overdone." The ship was as ready to get rid of them as they were to get rid of the ship. They were landed, working to their waists in the surf, and the ship got safely ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard

... cressets of pure gold; my quarried scars "Of black crevase and shadow-fill'd canon, "Are trac'd in silver mist. How on my breast "Hang the soft purple fringes of the night; "Close to my shoulder droops the weary moon, "Dove-pale, into the crimson surf the sun "Drives up before his prow; and blackly stands "On my slim, loftiest peak, an eagle, with "His angry eyes set sunward, while his cry "Falls fiercely back from all my ruddy heights; "And his bald eaglets, in their bare, broad nest, "Shrill pipe their angry echoes: "'Sun, arise, "'And show ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford

... the heave of the slight ground-swell, were the three white buoys left by the Spaniards to mark the sunken boats and slipped cable; and far away on the beach, just within the western point, was something long and round, which rolled in the gentle surf and glistened in the sunlight. He knew nothing of buoys, but they relieved his loneliness; they were signs of human beings, who must have placed him there with the bread and water, and who ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson

... assented Vince, as if he were standing at a wheel steering. "Yes, I suppose you're right, for I can hear the sound of surf. Listen." ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn

... Newman was speaking, a wonderful thing happened. He suddenly dwindled in size until he was no larger than a manikin, going through the motion of drinking from a tiny bottle; while in contrast, his voice increased so tremendously in volume it broke upon my ears like a surf upon a beach. ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer

... was swinging lazily in, and the yawl rose to it sleepily, with a long, slow movement. The distant roar of the surf upon the Finisterre coast rose in the peaceful atmosphere like a lullaby. The holy calm of sunset, the hush of lowering night, and the presence of the only man who had ever drawn him with the strange, unaccountable bond that ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman

... substantial, began to manifest a desire to stand on both ends at once and to roll like a log in a rapid. The sun was shining brightly overhead, the verandas of the hotels along the beach were crowded with gaily dressed people, the surf fringing that beach was dotted with bathers, everything on shore wore a look of holiday and joy—and yet out here, on the edge of the Channel, there was anything but calm and ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln

... calm as glass, the sky cloudless azure; and the doubt was not whether we should be able to get on board through the surf, but whether, having got on board, we should not lie ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley

... these horrors was a haunting knowledge that I was going mad, that this man Humphrey was waiting for me out beyond the surf beckoning to me with flapping arms, and had cast on me a spell whereby, as my brain shrivelled to madness, my body was shrivelling and changing into that of Black Bartlemy. Always I knew that Humphrey waited ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol

... off, and only to be seen on rare days, when the sun's rays are dancing to be dry after rain, are sturdy, broad-shouldered Benmore, and slender, graceful Binnein, the twin guardians of the enchanted region beyond, where Beauty lies in the lap of Terror, and the Atlantic surf sings lullaby. There are the Monzievaird hills to the right, rising in Benchonzie to the height of 3048 feet, and to something under this figure in the Cairngorm or Blue Craig, upon which you see the stone-heap of Cainnechin—memorial, as it is said, of a battle fought within what are now ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various

... company of dragoons. His men escaped, but the dragoons cut off his way to the shore. As they rode at him, reaching out for his sword, he suddenly dashed among them, cut one down, and, diving through the surf, swam out to the boat, his sword between his teeth. Their bullets churned up the sea all about him, but he was not hit. He seemed to bear a charmed life; in all his fights he was wounded but once. ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis

... managed to slip away and walk out through the yam and manioc gardens, and the banana groves, to the uproarious beach beyond. He threw himself wearily down on the warm white sand, and when the great rollers swept in and crashed into noisy bellowing surf, the spindrift from it drove on him, and refreshed him luxuriously. It was almost worth going through all he had suffered to enjoy the ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne

... here took a sharp bend inland, and in consequence he tramped on with his face set almost due south, nothing doubting of his direction, but hoping, as each hour passed, that the next would bring him within sound of the surf. The road ran straight for mile after mile. Now and again he passed a small cabaret brightly lit and merry with a noise of talk and laughter that warmed his heart for a moment. In the stretches of darkness between he met one or two wayfarers, who wished him "Good ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... within the surf, but a few yards distant from the outer rocks, thrown on her beam-ends, with both foresail and mainsail blown clear out of their bolt-ropes. The cry for succour was raised in vain; the wail of despair was not heard; the struggles for life were not beheld, ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat

... each other toward the end," Graham replied. "We were both out of our heads for short spells and long spells. Sometimes it was one, sometimes the other, that was all in. We made the land at sunset—that is, a wall of iron coast, with the surf bursting sky-high. She took hold of me and clawed me in the water to get some sense in me. You see, I wanted to go in, which would have ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London

... is a very great difference in the degrees of personal beauty, grace, and splendor. There is as much difference between the beauty and splendor of the highest and those of the lowest, as we now see between the dazzling splendor of the surf and the pale light of the moon. As the resurrection is a portion of heaven's rewards, it follows that the more completely we have mortified our inordinate passions, and made our life conformable ...
— The Happiness of Heaven - By a Father of the Society of Jesus • F. J. Boudreaux

... lads watched the games as the hardy men relaxed their work-tensed muscles. The sullen booming of surf on the rocky coast constantly ...
— Boy Scouts in the North Sea - The Mystery of a Sub • G. Harvey Ralphson

... not be omitted of this noble breed of water-dogs. A vessel was driven on the beach of Lydd, in Kent. The surf was rolling furiously. Eight poor fellows were crying for help, but not a boat could be got off to their assistance. At length a gentleman came on the beach accompanied by his Newfoundland dog: he directed the attention of the animal to the vessel, and put a short stick ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt

... done, with very little consciousness on the patient's part. Black figures, with woolly mop-heads, and sometimes decorated with whitewash of lime, crowded round to assist in the transport of the sick man through the surf; and David himself, in a white European garb, met his guests, with dignified manners that would have suited a prince of any land, and conducted them through the grove of palms, interspersed with white huts, to a beautiful house consisting ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge

... doubtless had already dried their tears, the sky began to smile before we reached the treacherous pass in the outer reef. Beyond Moto Utu, the tiny islet in the harbor that had been harem and fort in kingly days, we saw the surf foaming on the coral, and soon were through ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien

... wave that carried him resistlessly to the front of the hall and up onto the platform. A great roar like the breaking of surf arose on all sides of him and stupefied his sensitive brain in which silence sat always putting together a fine new world about which no one else knew. Suddenly everything was still, so still that the solitude was again ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo

... while any of its timbers kept together, and when it no longer yielded him support, binding the girdle around him, he swam. Minerva smoothed the billows before him and sent him a wind that rolled the waves towards the shore. The surf beat high on the rocks and seemed to forbid approach; but at length finding calm water at the mouth of a gentle stream, he landed, spent with toil, breathless and speechless and almost dead. After some time, ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch

... penetrate for a moment as the schooner rolled heavier than usual, only to recede, leaving it darker and blacker than before. The roar of the wind through the rigging came to the ear muffled like the distant rumble of a train crossing a trestle or the surf on the beach, while the loud crash of the seas on her weather bow seemed almost to rend the beams and planking asunder as it resounded through the fo'castle. The creaking and groaning of the timbers, stanchions, ...
— Dutch Courage and Other Stories • Jack London

... medical attendance, medicine, public worship, amusements, and interment. It furnishes and maintains its own museums, parks, art galleries, libraries, concert-halls, roads, bridges, markets, slaughterhouses, fire-engines, lighthouses, pilots, ferries, surf-boats, steam-tugs, life-boats, cemeteries, public baths, washhouses, pounds, harbours, piers, wharves, hospitals, dispensaries, gas-works, water-works, tramways, telegraph-cables, allotments, cow-meadows, ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson

... Amazonian Dames Contrive whereby to glorify their names. A ruff for Boston Neck of mud and turfe, Reaching from side to side, from surf to surf, Their nimble hands spin up like Christmas pyes, Their pastry by degrees on high doth rise ... The wheel at home counts in an holiday, Since while the mistress worketh it may play. A tribe of female hands, but manly hearts, Forsake at home their ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday

... did Joe recognize the friendship Babbitt was offering him. Babbitt paid up his losses and left the shack rather childishly. Joe raised his head from the coils of smoke like a seal rising from surf, grunted, "I'll come 'round t'morrow," and dived down to ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis

... to hear the leaves rustle when you kick them, don't you? When I was so high, I used to pretend it was wading in the surf." ...
— The Scarlet Car • Richard Harding Davis

... conditions heralded by the change of wind was right. As the two partook of their evening meal the complaining surf lashed the reef, and the tremulous branches of the taller trees voiced the approach of a gale. A tropical storm, not a typhoon, but a belated burst of the periodic rains, deluged the island before midnight. ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy

... line, seen only as they topped a wave, but seen only too well. To keep the ship off shore was impossible; and as they drifted nearer and nearer, the line of sand-hills rose, uglier and more formidable, through the gray spray of the surf. ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley

... mainland. To the north-north-west are, apparently, two small islands. A short distance to the east of the horn of the bay there seems to be much white sand or salt for two or three miles from the beach towards the blue water (on this side of which there is a white line as if it were surf): this again appears at the shores of the island, and also at the horn of the bay. From the south shore to the island the distance is great; I should say about twenty-five miles, but it is very difficult to judge correctly. At three miles and a half ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart

... looked wild, without a trace of man, And girt by formidable waves; but they Were mad for land, and thus their course they ran, Though right ahead the roaring breakers lay: A reef between them also now began To show its boiling surf and bounding spray, But finding no place for their landing better, They ran the boat ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron

... of 1799-1800 was one of the most severe ever known to Europeans. The Norwegian sea was frozen in all the fiords, where, as a usual thing, the violence of the surf kept the ice from forming. A wind, whose effects were like those of the Spanish levanter, swept the ice of the Strom-fiord, driving the snow to the upper end of the gulf. Seldom indeed could the people of Jarvis see the mirror of ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac

... marigees' screams, the slithering swish of the surf, the ghost-quiet movements of the baroons in the trees and the raucousness ...
— Happy Ending • Fredric Brown

... banked so high against the rampart that it could be mounted readily, if the assailants could but time their arrival at the right moment. This was not easy, as that rocky and tempestuous coast was often made inaccessible by fogs and surf; Shirley therefore preferred a plan of his own contriving. But nothing could be done without first persuading his ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman

... asphodels; immense, inexpressibly solemn and fresh; a little wood of cork-trees in the distance, a broken Roman ruin, blue Apennines half hidden in clouds. A few shepherds were going home, looking immense on the flatness, and goats and horses. Song of larks, and suddenly an unexpected booming of surf. Following the sound inexplicably loud, across the deeper black sandy soil, we got to the sea. Most strange against it, a fringe of marshy grass, of bulrushes! Far off the tower of Astura, and the faint Cape of Circe among ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee

... happy thought, and suggested the graveyard! This was a walled-in inclosure, perhaps a hundred feet each way, on the weather side of the island, and on a windy day, with the surf thundering in, it was the lonesomest spot where a man could find himself. The natives left it alone at all times, except to bury somebody, and none of them came nearer to it than they could help. The ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne

... drowning. My walking-stick, which was a very necessary adjunct, as I still suffered from my accident on Marston Moor, was washed out of my hands, but brawny Arabs seized me and my fellow-passengers, and we were borne safely through the surf to the beach, where we arrived, dazed, breathless, ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.

... Ridge. A hum of mingled voices filled the air. As when upon the vast, hoarse-moaning sea And all along the rock-built somber shore Murmurs the menace of the coming storm— The muttering of the tempest from afar, The plash and seethe of surf upon the sand, The roll of distant thunder in the heavens, Unite and blend in one prevailing voice— So rose the mingled murmurs of our camps, So rose the groans and moans of wounded men Along the slope ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon

... music that made the birds stop in their flight to listen. The mother loved the son so much that she wished to keep him by her so long as she lived, and that was why she never let him go with her to the shore. She believed that if he visited the towns and tasted the joys of surf-riding, shared in the games of the athletes, and drank the beer they brewed down there, and especially if he saw the pretty girls, he would never go back to his mountain home. And though Hiku wondered what life was among the people on the shore, he was obedient and not ill content until ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner

... would receive him, extending far over the rolling country. He would sit down in the moss and lean against a tree from which he could see a patch of ocean between the trunks. At times the wind would carry to him the noise of the surf, like distant boards falling on each other. The caw of crows above the treetops, hoarse, desolate, forlorn ... He had a book on his knees, but he read not a line in it. He was enjoying a deep oblivion, a floating in perfect freedom over space and time; and only occasionally ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various

... set apart for the festival, was a spacious down, mantled with white asters; which, waving in windrows, lay upon the land, like the cream-surf surging the milk of young heifers. But that whiteness, here and there, was spotted with strawberries; tracking the plain, as if wounded creatures had been dragging themselves bleeding from some deadly encounter. All round the down, waved scarlet ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville

... fretted the soft expanse of Chincoteague Bay. There seemed a slender hand of silver reaching down from the sky to tremble on the long chords of the water, lying there in light and shade, like a harp. The drowsy dash of the low surf on the bar beyond the inlet was harsh to this still and shallow haven for wreckers and oystermen. It was very far from any busy city or hive of men, between the ocean and the sandy ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend

... of the timber-line it was black, black not only with the gloom of night, but with the concentrated darkness of spruce and balsam and a sky so low and thick that one could almost hear the wailing swish of it overhead like the steady sobbing of surf on a seashore. It was black, save for the small circles of light made by the Eskimo fires, about which half a hundred of the little brown men sat or crouched. The masters of the camp were all awake, but twice as many dogs, exhausted and footsore, lay curled in heaps, as inanimate ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood

... Of all his country's good. Yet still she kept A seal upon her lips, until by chance An incident occurred which sealed her fate. As on the sand near by the water's edge One thoughtless stands to watch with eager eyes The surf that beats continuous on the shore, And suddenly when least expected flows A wave that reaches far beyond the rest, So stood the king and queen of Vijiapore In parents' place, tempting their daughter fair To marry whom she loved not, could not love, When Chandra suddenly her mind declared. ...
— Tales of Ind - And Other Poems • T. Ramakrishna

... feelings. What, then, had attracted her? His strangeness, wildness, the mesmeric pull of his passion for her, his music! Nothing could spoil that in him. The sweep, the surge, and sigh in his playing was like the sea out there, dark, and surf-edged, beating on the rocks; or the sea deep-coloured in daylight, with white gulls over it; or the sea with those sinuous paths made by the wandering currents, the subtle, smiling, silent sea, holding in suspense its ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... away we dash towards the shore. The Meena (port) is before us, that white row of houses on the point; and back among the gardens is the city of Tripoli. In less than half an hour we reach the shore, but the surf is so high that we cannot go near the pier, so they make for the sand beach, and before we reach it, the boat strikes on a little bar and we stop. Out jump the boatmen, and porters come running half naked from the shore and each shouts to ...
— The Women of the Arabs • Henry Harris Jessup

... portmanteau was dropped down on to the laden boat; I, as best I could, managed to follow it; and on the top of a pile of rope and empty flour-sacks we rolled landward. The surf was high; it cost much yelling, leaping, and splashing to gain the dry beach. Meanwhile, not without apprehension, I had eyed the group awaiting our arrival; that they had their eyes on me was obvious, and I knew enough ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing

... orders were to raid the house on the bluff. But would they go on with their bloody work? They would suddenly find themselves leaderless, unguided. Would that suffice to stop them? The vivid memory came to me anew of that arch villain, Sanchez, lying where I had left him, his head resting in the surf—dead. Would the discovery of his body halt his followers, and send them rushing back to their boat, eager only to get safely away? This did not seem likely. Estada knew of my boarding the sloop from the wharf, and would at once connect the fact of my being ashore with the killing ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish

... causing rain or fine weather. So long as the weather is fine they load him with presents of grain and cattle. But if long drought or rain threatens to spoil the crops, they insult and beat him till the weather changes. When the harvest fails or the surf on the coast is too heavy to allow of fishing, the people of Loango accuse their king of a "bad heart" and depose him. On the Grain Coast the high priest or fetish king, who bears the title of Bodio, is responsible for the health of the community, the fertility of the earth, and ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... signals were sent up. Then, on the topmost peak of the rock, appeared the huge form of Coppinger. He waved his sword, and a boat immediately put off from the ship, with two men at each oar, for the tide is terribly strong just there. They neared the rock, rode boldly through the surf, and were steered into the Gull Creek by someone who evidently ...
— Cornwall's Wonderland • Mabel Quiller-Couch

... my father or Roger divined my intention, hurled with all my might the box of securities over the railing into the sea beneath. It opened just before reaching the water, and the contents were submerged by the seething surf. ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant

... three of the fellows who come down here summers who I know will be glad to go Dutch on a motor boat," he said. "We can take the bulliest trips, way out to deserted sand islands, where the surf is the best ever. We'll take along a tent and spend the night there sometime, or we can stretch out in the boat. Then we must see if we can get hold of some horses. Do you ride? Think of it! We've been married months, and I don't know yet ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison

... of peaks crowding sharply into the horizon, like prodigious amethysts,—and beyond them, to the left, the glorious spectre of Fuji, towering enormously above everything. Between sea-wall and sea there is no sand,—only a grey slope of stones, chiefly boulders; and these roll with the surf so that it is ugly work trying to pass the breakers on a rough day. If you once get struck by a stone-wave,—as I did several times,—you will not ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn

... subteni. Support (prop) subportilo. Supporter partiano. Suppose supozi, konjekti. Suppress subpremi. Supremacy superegeco. Supreme superega, cxefa. Surcharge supertakso. Sure certa. Surely certe, nepre. Surety garantiajxo. Surety, to be garantii. Surf sxauxmo, mar—. Surface suprajxo. Surfeit supersati. Surge ondego. Surgeon hxirurgiisto. Surgery hxirurgio. Surly malgaja. Surmise konjekti. Surmount venki. Surname alnomo. Surpass ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... passed under the boat. They lifted her high up, as if to show us the surf. As the boat sank slowly down into the trough of the wave, the surf disappeared and with it much of the shore. The wave had shut ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various

... steep is the pitch of the ground, and so narrow the shingly ledge at the bottom. And truly in bad weather and at high tides there is no shingle ledge at all, but the crest of the wave volleys up the incline, and the surf rushes on to the top of it. For the cove, though sheltered from other quarters, receives the full brunt of northeasterly gales, and offers no safe anchorage. But the hardy fishermen make the most of its scant convenience, and gratefully ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore

... and his friends went out on the terrace. The tide was full and the woods across the bay looked like islands. A line of white surf marked the edge of the marsh, which ran back, broken by winding creeks, to the foot of the rising ground. Sometimes a gleam of sunshine touched the lonely flats and they flashed into luminous green, silver, and yellow. Then the color faded and the ...
— Partners of the Out-Trail • Harold Bindloss

... hither and thither by the gusts of her own emotions. But now she was at peace, she was reconciled to the Church; she would never be alone again. The struggle of her life still lay before her, and yet in a sense it was a thing of the past. She felt like a ship that has passed from the roar of the surf into the shelter of the embaying land, and in the distance stretched the long peacefulness ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore

... minutes the dash of the surf and the cries of the wheeling sea fowl made the only sound in that part of the world; then from those half-clad rapscallions arose a shout of "Kirby!"—a shout in which the three leaders did not join. That one who looked a gentleman rose from the sand and made me a low bow. "Well ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various

... was bespelled by the wonder of the unknown. Beyond the water through which they slid, black and smooth as polished basalt, he saw a lighthouse winking. From his steamer time-table he learned that it must be Great Gull Island light. Great Gull Island! It suggested to him thunderous cliffs with surf flung up on beetling rock, screaming gulls, and a smuggler on guard with menacing rifle. He lost his fear of fear; he ceased to think about his accustomed life of two aisles and the show-case of new models and the background of boxes and boxes and boxes ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis

... the same time maintain a bright lookout for me, and be ready to come to my help, should I be hard pressed. Ah! there is the reef that I spoke of a little while ago; see there, broad off the weather bow; you can see the surf breaking upon it—and there is a small island right ahead of us. Keep her away, lad; up helm and let her go off a point. So! steady as you go; that ought to carry us clear of everything. And, thank God, there is the dawn coming; ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood

... and set it in the window. It was a quarter before twelve when her trembling hands failed her, and she laid down her knitting and walked to the front door. The northeast wind whipped her in the face, and she could hear the surf at Breakers' Edge. The pathway of light from the window lay upon a figure by the gate. A voice came out of the stillness. It was young ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown

... hit square. It was the impact of resistible power. A great sheet of water rose like surf from the tail of the jam; a mighty cataract poured down over its surface, lifting the free logs; from either wing timbers crunched, split, rose suddenly into wracked prominence, twisted beyond the semblance of themselves. ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White

... breathless anxiety. Then, after the boat had disappeared completely from sight, hidden by a huge grey wall of sea, she seemed suddenly to climb to the top of it, to hover there, to become mixed up with the spray and the surf and a great green mass of waters, and then finally, with a harsh crash of timbers and a shout from the fishermen, to be flung high and dry upon the stones. Philippa, clutching the iron railing, saw for a moment nothing but chaos. ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... the breakers. Forgetting the treasure which he had concealed in the cave, and the friendly treatment which he had so long received from the tribe who knew of its whereabouts, the sailor rushed into the surf, and throwing himself into the boat bade the men pull back to the ship. When he was standing on the deck of the latter he recognised fully his own position. Above him floated the Spanish flag, fierce glances of hatred from all the crew ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... water, practically black beneath a surface reflection of daytime sky. The image shifted—a patch of barren rocks. The sergeant glanced at the survey picture, shifted the telescope, and found the northern-most island. He swelled the picture. He could see the white of monstrous surf breaking on the windward shore—waves that had gathered height going all around the planet. He traced the shoreline. There was a bay up at ...
— A Matter of Importance • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... had galloped through the golden forest of Kerselec that I came in sight of the ocean, although among the sunbeams and the dropping showers of yellow beech-leaves I fancied I could hear the sound of the surf. ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

... Hutchinson Port suffered a fresh pang of misery when the presentation was accomplished and he was forced to say approximately pleasant things to a lady whose decidedly ballet-like attire in the surf—or, to be precise, on the beach above high-water-mark, where, for some occult reason, she usually saw fit to do the most of her bathing—joined to the exceeding celerity of her conduct generally, had marked her during the preceding season as the conspicuous centre of ...
— The Uncle Of An Angel - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier

... was rolling its waves against the beach, like the ocean in a storm. In the attempt to land, La Salle's canoe was nearly swamped. He and his three canoe-men leaped into the water, and, in spite of the surf, which nearly drowned them, dragged their vessel ashore, with all its load. He then went to the rescue of Hennepin, who, with his awkward companion, was in woful need of succor. Father Gabriel, with his sixty-four years, was no match for the surf and ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman

... discussion, for at his sharp orders they took their places in the canoes, and pushed off. The priest was obliged to assume Chevet's former position, and I would gladly have accompanied him, but Cassion suddenly gripped me in his arms, and without so much as a word, waded out through the surf, and put me down in his boat, clambering in himself, and shouting his orders to ...
— Beyond the Frontier • Randall Parrish

... journey was uneventful and at nightfall the ship lay at anchor off the low Texas coast, and a boat loaded with men grounded on the sandy beach. Four of them arose and leaped out into the mild surf and dragged the boat as high up on the sand as it would go. Then the two cow-punchers followed and one of them gave a low-spoken order to the Irishman at ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford

... at night in the open field. A characteristic piece of ill-temper was her treatment of young ACTAEON. The latter, who was a respectable, though rather reckless young man, was once walking along the beach, when he suddenly came upon DIANA and several female friends in the act of taking the surf. Envious to behold the extremes of boniness, which then, as now, doubtless characterized the strong-minded females, he concealed himself in a neighboring bathing-house, and brought his opera-glass to bear on the group. He was, however, discovered, and DIANA and her friends were so indignant at being ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 12 , June 18,1870 • Various

... Briefly, this is a Greek temple pediment, in which, doubtful of their power to carve figures beautiful enough, they cut a trefoiled hold for ornament, and bordered the edges with harlequinade of mosaic. They then call to their help the Greek sea-waves, and let the surf of the AEgean climb along the slopes, and toss itself at the top into a fleur-de-lys. Every wave is varied in outline and proportionate distance, though cut with a precision of curve like that of the sea itself. From this root we are able—but it must be in a lecture on crockets only—to ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin

... lazy motion of the vessel as it rolled on the long unceasing swell that ever sets on that rocky shore, lulled the senses of all into a sleepy apathy. The only music that ever reached our ears was the eternal roar of that monotonous surf, as it licked the rugged beach with ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various

... strain of sad sweet music which comes floating by us on the wings of night and silence, and which we rather feel than hear—like the exhalation of the violet dying even upon the sense it charms—like the snow-flake dissolved in air before it has caught a stain of earth—like the light surf severed from the billow, which a breath disperses—such is the character of Ophelia: so exquisitely delicate, it seems as if a touch would profane it; so sanctified in our thoughts by the last and worst of human woes, that we scarcely ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson

... shore What once a tortoise served to cover. A year and more, with rush and roar, The surf had rolled it over, Had played with it, and flung it by, As wind and weather might decide it, Then tossed it high where sand-drifts dry Cheap ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year - Edited by Katherine D. Blake and Georgia Alexander • Various

... are drowned while bathing in the surf are said to experience but little pain. In fact, their ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 11, June 11, 1870 • Various

... hills lifted from the level of the water and took on color and variety, till from the deck one could make out the swell of their contours and distinguish the hues of the wild vegetation that clothed them. The yellow of a beach and a snowy gleam of surf showed at their feet, and then, dead ahead and still far away, they opened, and in the gap there was visible the still shining blue of water that ran inland and ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon

... ocean and, if need be, can move some colored cloth to look like rolling waves; and yet how far is his effect surpassed by the superb ocean pictures when the scene is played on the real cliffs and the waves are thundering at their foot and the surf is foaming about the actors. The theater has its painted villages and vistas, its city streets and its foreign landscape backgrounds. But here the theater, in spite of the reality of the actors, appears thoroughly unreal compared with the throbbing life of the street ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg

... conflict in the adjacent waters between the currents of the China Sea and those of the Pacific, making navigation hazardous, and for small boats perilous. On the day of our arrival, calm and fair as it was, a tremendous surf was beating on the bar, the spray and foam mounting in a regular wall many feet high, and driven up, not by the gradual attack of an advancing wave, but by the tireless energy of angry waters ceaselessly ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox

... that were rolling wildly upon (happily) a sandy beach beneath the cliffs. I told my men to be ready to jump out the moment that we should touch the sand, and to secure the canoe by hauling the head up the beach. All were ready, and we rushed through the surf, the native boatmen paddling like steam engines. "Here comes a wave; look out!" and just as we almost touched the beach, a heavy breaker broke over the black women who were sitting in the stern, and swamped the boat. My men jumped into the water like ducks, and the next moment we ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker

... is of to-day; the past is dead, and the future when it comes will pass as to-day is passing. Life is a dream, an evanescent thing, all but meaningless, and real only as is the murmur of the surf when the sea-breeze comes in the morning, and man awakens from ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86

... Suffaraire Manuel Sugasta Miles Suldan Parks Sullevan Dennis Sullivan Patrick Sullivan Thomas Sullivan George Summers Rufus Sumner Amos Sunderland Edward Sunderland (3) Francis Suneneau John Suneneaux Andre Surado Godfrey Suret Jack C. Surf Francis Surronto Hugh Surtes John Surtevant John Sussett Franco Deo Suttegraz Louis John Sutterwis George Sutton John Sutton Thomas Sutton Jacob Snyder Roman Suyker Simon Swaine Zacharias Swaine Thomas Swapple Absolom ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge

... a purple crown Six foot out of the turf, And the harebell shakes on the windy hill - O the breath of the distant surf! - ...
— Poems • Francis Thompson

... there stood his foe with his nostrils all wide, And the shouts of his backers rolled on in their pride. The swells of the Ring and the stars of the Turf Surged round like the waves of the storm-beaten surf. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 17, 1892 • Various

... the anchorage at 4.30 P.M. We soon got into one of the country boats made for landing in the surf (without nails, and all the planks sewn together). We were hoisted by the waves upon the beach, and found there a considerable crowd, with the Governor, Sir W. Denison; Sir H. Grant, etc., and a guard of honour, to receive ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin

... wave, struggling in vain, blinded and half-choked with salt water, he was driven violently against a great black object tumbling about in the surf, and with all the strength of his little hands he clung to it. The water rolled over him, and beat against him, but he would not lose his hold; and at last there came a bigger wave and lifted him up and cast him right on to the object he was ...
— A Little Boy Lost • Hudson, W. H.

... knocked up with him on the morning of the 9th. Having found the things, and put them on the horse, I sent the boy with them back to the camp, together with a large sting-ray fish which he had speared in the surf near the shore. It was a large, coarse, ugly-looking thing, but as it seemed to be of the same family as the skate, I did not imagine we should run any risk in eating it. In other respects, circumstances had ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre

... every morning in a large, bright, bare room whose three big windows looked into rustling maple boughs. The steady rushing of surf could be heard just beyond the maples. Sometimes a soft fog wrapped the trees and the lawn in its pale folds, and the bell down at the lighthouse ding-donged through the whole warm, silent morning, but more often there was sunshine, and Rachael took her book to the beach, got into her stiff, ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris

... said, "who played that banjo-mandolin thing they all play, and sang mournful luxurious songs, and danced under the lanterns at night. And the bathing! There's no bathing here at all. There you can stay in the sea air day if you like. It's like bathing in champagne. Sun and surf and sands—there's nothing like it." ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 5, 1919 • Various

... quietly awaiting the dreadful emergency which is to call them into action. The traveler stands for example on the southern shore of the island of Nantucket, and after looking off over the boundless ocean which stretches in that direction without limit or shore for thousands of miles, and upon the surf rolling in incessantly on the beach, whose smooth expanse is dotted here and there with the skeleton remains of ships that were lost in former storms, and are now half buried in the sand, he sees, at length, a hut, standing upon the shore just above the reach of the water—the only human structure ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various

... waste of waters before him. Not a "speck of ice," to use his own words, could be seen. There, from a height of four hundred and eighty feet, which commanded a horizon of almost forty miles, his ears were gladdened with the novel music of dashing waves; and a surf, breaking in among the rocks at his ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin

... watchers on the little tug and started on their journey over the seemingly illimitable sand-dunes. They trekked in single file and by the aid of the stars and a compass easily kept their eastward course. The murmur of the surf grew fainter and fainter until not a sound broke the stillness, the soft footfall of the camels being inaudible even to the men who led them. Halloran had enjoined silence for some reason, and he stopped his brother irritably when that usually irrepressible youth started ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell

... Again they will fly low, wheeling and screaming, their wild sea-voices shrill with the sound of storm. If it is thick and gray overhead, the snow-white bodies of the herring-gulls toss in the wind above the roofs like patches of foam. I hear the sea—the wind, the surf, the wild, fierce tumult of the shore—whenever the white gulls sail screaming into ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp

... pushed out into the transparent depths of the lagoon. Bight ahead of us, after another hour's paddling, lay a long, gleaming point of sand covered with a grove of palms; beyond that a wide sweep of pale green shallow water; beyond that again the wild tumble and fret of the surf on the ...
— Concerning "Bully" Hayes - From "The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton and Other - Stories" - 1902 • Louis Becke

... Suabilty Benjamin Subbs Jacquer Suffaraire Manuel Sugasta Miles Suldan Parks Sullevan Dennis Sullivan Patrick Sullivan Thomas Sullivan George Summers Rufus Sumner Amos Sunderland Edward Sunderland (3) Francis Suneneau John Suneneaux Andre Surado Godfrey Suret Jack C. Surf Francis Surronto Hugh Surtes John Surtevant John Sussett Franco Deo Suttegraz Louis John Sutterwis George Sutton John Sutton Thomas Sutton Jacob Snyder Roman Suyker Simon Swaine Zacharias Swaine Thomas ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge

... it on the horse and attached a rope to it. The fishermen took the lines, and, paying out as they went so as to leave plenty of slack line, got on the rocks just above the little beach whereon, sheltered though it was, the seas broke heavily. There they waited, ready to pull the horse through the surf when he should have come ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker

... a considerable river; but an officer, who was sent in a boat to sound, saw breakers stretching across. The soundings were regular, from 9 to 6 fathoms, within a mile or two of the shore; when there was only twelve feet; and the surf which rolled in, made it impossible to land. The country round the bay is described as level and open, ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders

... right angle. Unfortunately, Tristram could not see in the gloom that the canal here took a sharp bend inland, and in consequence he tramped on with his face set almost due south, nothing doubting of his direction, but hoping, as each hour passed, that the next would bring him within sound of the surf. The road ran straight for mile after mile. Now and again he passed a small cabaret brightly lit and merry with a noise of talk and laughter that warmed his heart for a moment. In the stretches of darkness between he met one or two wayfarers, who ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... The Torridge where its branching crystal spreads To join the Taw. Hard by from a chalk cliff A torrent leaps: not lovelier Sappho was Giving herself all silvery to the sea From that Leucadian rock. Beneath your feet Lie sand and surf in curving parallels. Off shore, a buoy gleams like a dolphin's back Dripping with brine, and guards a sunken reef Whose sharp incisors have gnawed many a keel; There frets the sea and turns white at the lip, And in ill-weather lets the ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... poems had led me to expect something different. He always had the look of a man who had just taken a bath. The skin was light and clear, and the blood well to the surface. His body, as I once noticed when we were bathing in the surf, had a peculiar fresh bloom and fineness and delicacy of texture. His physiology was undoubtedly remarkable, unique. The full beauty of his face and head did not appear till he was past sixty. After that, I have little doubt, it was the finest head this age or country ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs

... seized them for the fate of Idmon. Now at the hour when the sun passes his noon-tide halt and the ploughlands are just being shadowed by the rocks, as the sun slopes towards the evening dusk, at that hour all the heroes spread leaves thickly upon the sand and lay down in rows in front of the hoary surf-line; and near them were spread vast stores of viands and sweet wine, which the cupbearers had drawn off in pitchers; afterwards they told tales one to another in turn, such as youths often tell when at the feast and the bowl they take delightful pastime, and insatiable ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius

... other people's feelings. What, then, had attracted her? His strangeness, wildness, the mesmeric pull of his passion for her, his music! Nothing could spoil that in him. The sweep, the surge, and sigh in his playing was like the sea out there, dark, and surf-edged, beating on the rocks; or the sea deep-coloured in daylight, with white gulls over it; or the sea with those sinuous paths made by the wandering currents, the subtle, smiling, silent sea, holding in suspense its unfathomable restlessness, waiting to surge and ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... whirled as if some sharp blow had dazzled him. Outside the implacable winds still rushed and warred, and beat and clamored, shrieking, wailing, like voices from hell. The snow dashed like surf against the walls. It seemed to cut off the little cabin from the rest of the world and to dwarf all human action like the sea. It made social conventions of no value, and narrowed the question of morality to the relationship of these three ...
— The Moccasin Ranch - A Story of Dakota • Hamlin Garland

... The crumbling surf on the shingle rattles, The great waves topple and pour, Full of the fury of ancient battles, Clamant ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various

... But not on the surf-beaten islands, Nor yet upon Morven's land, Does she drive, for her rudder, unshattered, Is firm in the ...
— Memories of Canada and Scotland - Speeches and Verses • John Douglas Sutherland Campbell

... pleasantly," said Cap, pricking up his ears like a dog that hears a distant baying; "it is the surf on the shores of ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper

... island,' she answered, as one in a dream: 'and again I see it. It has two sharp peaks and one that would seem to be cut short. Lawns of green climb up to the peaks between forests. There is a ring of surf all about the shore . . . but the boat has found a passage through . . . and you and Pete are landing . . . and— strangest!—there is a dog leaping about on the shore ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... the shot struck home. Above the Russian trenches lay a long white cloud of powder forming a great wall of waves. The dull thunder of the guns was tremendous. It whistled and howled, it cried and moaned, it roared like the surf of the ocean, like the terrifying growl of a thunderstorm, and then it threw back a hundredfold clear echo. In between came the dull crack of the Russian shrapnel. They broke in the broad, swampy lowlands of the Rawka; they pierced the cover of ice which ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various

... lagoon are of a different kind from those which abound on the outer edge of the reef, and of which the reef is built up. Close to the seaward edge of the reef, over which, even in calm weather, a surf almost always breaks, the coral rock is encrusted with a thick coat of a singular vegetable organism, which contains a great deal of lime—the so-called Nullipora. Beyond this, in the part of the edge of the reef which is always covered by the breaking waves, the ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley

... wrong, hardly decent, to let his grief spend itself in the lighted-up street. The Front was deserted and dark, for there was rain in the wind, and the sound of the surf had a quick savage chop in it. Away, over the sea, was a great ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds

... Majesty, upon the Duke's taking his leave, evinced very great anxiety respecting the safe landing of his Grace. Everybody who knows this coast is aware that when the wind is blowing at all from the eastward that there is a very heavy surf on the beach, and consequently great difficulty in landing. His Grace, however, on thanking her Majesty for the concern she evinced on his account, made light of the matter, and returned on board the Ariel, ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various

... calamity leaped suddenly at his throat. Then he was aware of a crattering of hoofs along the road that led to the fort. Hodgson threw himself from one of the horses that were used in handling the surf-boat, and ran to him hatless ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris

... described, but he certainly did not look it. I would like to have had just such a man on any one of my gangs with old Captain Joe over him. He would have fought the sea with the best of them and made the work of the surf-men twice as easy if he had taken a ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith

... hum of bursting surf undertoned all other noises and, prisoned as she was, the schooner and her floe were sweeping slowly toward the land in the grip of a current rather than before the ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn

... first to go on guard and during the initial hour of his vigil practically nothing came to disturb him. He heard the occasional cry of the nightbirds and the booming of the surf on the reefs and the shore of the isle, and saw numerous fireflies flit to and fro, ...
— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht • Edward Stratemeyer

... had run the dingy into the surf, had shipped oars, and were lustily pulling away—Cap'n Sproul in the stern roaring abuse at them in a way that drowned the howls of Mr. Butts, who came peltering down ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day

... The priest was obliged to assume Chevet's former position, and I would gladly have accompanied him, but Cassion suddenly gripped me in his arms, and without so much as a word, waded out through the surf, and put me down in his boat, clambering in himself, and shouting ...
— Beyond the Frontier • Randall Parrish

... is returning to the Isle of France gets into shallows during a hurricane, and is being beaten to pieces close to land. One stalwart sailor, stripped to swim for his life, approaches Virginie, imploring her to strip likewise and let him try to pilot her through the surf. But she (like the lady in the coach, at an early part of Joseph Andrews) won't so much as look at a naked man, clasps her arms round her own garments, and is very deservedly drowned. The sailor, to one's great relief, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury

... House, and at the close of the meeting, heard the cry "Tea party! tea party!" Joining the party that boarded the tea-ships, he labored with all his might in throwing the tea into the water. It being about low tide, the tea rested on the bottom, and when the tide rose it floated, and was lodged by the surf along the shore. He was subsequently an officer in the Revolutionary army; was present at the surrender of Burgoyne, and himself fell into the hands of the enemy, in February, 1781, sharing in the imprisonment of General Peleg Wadsworth, at Castine, and in the daring escape of ...
— Tea Leaves • Various

... says she in Spanish, pointing to the surf that thundered beyond the reef. 'Go back! Here is the devil—the sea hath more mercy—go back whiles ye may!' And now she checked all at once and falls a-shivering, for a voice reached us, a man's voice a-singing fair to hear, and the ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol

... deforestation (most of the country's forests - once the largest in West Africa - have been cleared by the timber industry); water pollution from sewage and industrial and agricultural effluents natural hazards: coast has heavy surf and no natural harbors; during the rainy season torrential flooding is possible international agreements: party to - Biodiversity, Climate Change, Endangered Species, Hazardous Wastes, Law of the Sea, Marine Dumping, Nuclear ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency

... the village, but on the other hand he often walked and rode along the sea-beach; and people claimed to have heard him from a distance, talking to the waves and listening to the rolling and hissing of the surf, as though he could hear the answering voice of the spirit of the sea. Upon the topmost summit of the watch-tower he had a sort of study fitted up and supplied with telescopes—with a complete set of astronomical apparatus, in fact. Thence during the ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann

... said Wagstaffe, as another salvo of "whizz-bangs" broke like inflammatory surf upon the front-line trenches. "Intermittent strafes we are used to, but this all-day performance seems to indicate that the Boche is really getting down to it for once. The whole proceeding reminds me of nothing so much as our ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)

... wonderland where snowy mountains, mighty and ancient forests, glaciers and geysers, lakes and waterfalls, foaming rivers and the cliffs and rolling surf down her long sea-coast give new and beautiful pictures at ...
— Stories of California • Ella M. Sexton

... I could make apparent how difficult a thing it was to get supplies from our ship to the shore in a surf which, after ten o'clock in the morning, allowed no small boats to touch even the bit of a pier that was run out without breaking either the one or the other, and nothing in the form of a lighter save two dilapidated flat-boat pontoons. These had been broken and cast away by ...
— A Story of the Red Cross - Glimpses of Field Work • Clara Barton

... and dark, with a damp coolness in the air, and he reached down from his cot for his slippers, and first clapped them together before placing them upon his slim feet. Then he arose, stepped out upon his verandah, and thought awhile. Darkness everywhere, and the noise of the surf beating within the enclosed crescent of the harbour. Over all, a great heat, tinged with a damp coolness, a coolness which was sinister. And standing upon his verandah, came rushing over him the agony of his wasted life. His prisoner life ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte

... and waking, through half a lifetime, as that one has done. Other things leave me, but it abides; other things change, but it remains the same. For me its balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun; the pulsing of its surf is in my ear; I can see its garlanded crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the cloud-rack; I can feel the spirit of its woody solitudes, I hear the plashing of the brooks; in my nostrils ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... human creatures, clinging with bare white arms to the life-lines that run from the shore to the buoys; beyond these the lifeguard stays himself in his boat with outspread oars, and rocks on the incoming surf. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... bar almost enclosing the creek, which was quite still, even when the surf whitened the stony strand without, driven before a wet and stormy south-wester. It was the merest routine to carry the painter ashore and twist the rotten rope round an exposed root of the great willow tree; for there was not the slightest chance of that ancient craft ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies

... Balder Dead are Arnold's finest narrative poems. They are stately, dignified recitals of the deeds of heroes and gods. The series of poems entitled Switzerland and Dover Beach are among Arnold's most beautiful lyrics. A fine description of the surf is contained ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck

... of Rockaway and Coney Island are reached in from one to two hours by steamer. At either of these places a day may be spent on the sea shore. The surf-bathing is excellent at both, and each may also be reached by a railway. Of late years, Coney Island has become a favorite resort of the roughs of New York and Brooklyn, and, as a consequence, is not as attractive to ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe

... gusts between A sound came from the land; It was the sound of the trampling surf On the rocks and the ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes

... temple pediment, in which, doubtful of their power to carve figures beautiful enough, they cut a trefoiled hold for ornament, and bordered the edges with harlequinade of mosaic. They then call to their help the Greek sea-waves, and let the surf of the AEgean climb along the slopes, and toss itself at the top into a fleur-de-lys. Every wave is varied in outline and proportionate distance, though cut with a precision of curve like that of the sea itself. From this root we are ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin

... morning Jim and his friends went out on the terrace. The tide was full and the woods across the bay looked like islands. A line of white surf marked the edge of the marsh, which ran back, broken by winding creeks, to the foot of the rising ground. Sometimes a gleam of sunshine touched the lonely flats and they flashed into luminous green, silver, and yellow. Then the ...
— Partners of the Out-Trail • Harold Bindloss

... from the flat at the back of the township, where a few thousand ewes and lambs were shepherded amongst the quarry holes, came another insistent droning in a deeper note, like the murmur of distant surf. No one was stirring: to the right and left along the single thin wavering line of unpainted weatherworn wooden houses nothing moved but mirage waters flickering in the hollows of the ironstone road. Equally deserted was the wide stretch of brown ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson

... in exclamations from all around, as Undine sported in the water like a dolphin. "But then," someone added, "she's used to bathing in the surf in Hawaii. ...
— The Campfire Girls at Camp Keewaydin • Hildegard G. Frey

... our feelings are not only excited for the safety of the crew, but for that of the vessel itself, to which we attach a degree of interest as for a friend. A gale was now up; the boat put off to their aid was in danger of being swamped by the surf, and found it impracticable to make way against a violent head-wind and tide united. Nothing short of a miracle could now save the ship; however the wind suddenly shifted a little, and I began to hope that if she was to be wrecked, it might be farther on the shore; as in case of her striking on ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 375, June 13, 1829 • Various

... Charlotte Islands. He was Tyee of the West Wind, and his storms and tempests were so mighty that the Sagalie Tyee Himself could not control the havoc that he created. He warred upon all fishing craft, he demolished canoes and sent men to graves in the sea. He uprooted forests and drove the surf on shore heavy with wreckage of despoiled trees and with beaten and bruised fish. He did all this to reveal his powers, for he was cruel and hard of heart, and he would laugh and defy the Sagalie Tyee, and looking up to the sky he would call, 'See how powerful ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson

... western end is fifty acres of pasture, sloping north; those gray dots are sheep grazing. The eastern half is just scrub evergreen. That little cove on the northeast corner's the Sly Hole; you mightn't think it, but a good-sized schooner can ride there at low tide. Pretty rocky all round. Always a surf breaking on one side or the other. Our landing-place is ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman

... rose correspondingly. By the time the orange groves in the suburbs of Jaffa came into sight, the tourists were in a gay and cheerful humor. But when we arrived at the pier of Jaffa, we discovered that the sea still felt the effects of the gale. The surf was rolling high and the angry waves were breaking violently over the ugly-looking rocks in the harbor, hiding them for an instant from view and sending the snowy spray high into the air. As we looked out toward the Moltke riding at anchor a mile away, many of the ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob

... electric surf, running toward Jill. A hungry worm of light reared up, searching for Dio's gun. Gray's hand swept it down, to be instantly buried in a mass of glowing ropes. Dio's hatchet face snarled at him ...
— A World is Born • Leigh Douglass Brackett

... of the famous navigator, Giovanni Verrazzano (See "The World's Discoverers"), who visited the Atlantic seaboard nearly about the same time as the kidnapper Ayllon. Once, as he was coasting along near the site of Wilmington, N. C., on account of the high surf a boat could not land, but a bold young sailor swam to the shore and tossed a gift of trinkets to some Indians gathered on the beach. A moment later the sea threw him helpless and bruised at their feet. In an instant he was seized by the arms and legs and, crying lustily ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson

... laugh like happy bathers, while the seas Break in their open arms, And the slow-moving breeze Draws languid fingers down their placid brows. Even the surly ocean knows their charms, And under the shrill laughter of the surf, He booms and ...
— Carolina Chansons - Legends of the Low Country • DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen

... The surf Mrs. Nuddle had raised in the little private sea of her tub had died down, and a froth of soap dried on the rawhide of her big forearms as her heifer eyes roamed the newspaper-gallery of portraits. One sudsy hand supported and suppressed her smile of ridicule. These women, belles ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes

... would be waiting and her father would be impatient. But she hesitated. Her thoughts were out there on the water where she loved to be. The twang of the wind as it swept through the trees along the shore, and the beat of the surf upon the gravelly beach were music ...
— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody

... short and every sea lifting high her stern and driving her farther on to the half-hidden tongues of stone. Even as the light played on her she heeled over to starboard at an angle of about forty-five degrees with an ominous rending of timbers which sounded above the roar of wind and surf. ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife

... himself sliding toward the land he was so provoked with the cow that he dove head first, down to the bottom of the sea. That was a pull! The Elephant was jerked off his feet, and came slipping and sliding to the beach, and into the surf. He was terribly angry. He braced himself with all his might, and pulled his best. At the jerk, up came the Whale ...
— Stories to Tell to Children • Sara Cone Bryant

... of the reef showed above water, but its extent and limits were very clearly defined by the ripples and agitation—gentle though this last was—of the surface of the water above it. The surf was breaking heavily on its outer margin in clouds of gleaming white that flashed and glittered in the brilliant sunshine; and an occasional undulation of swell came sweeping in across the reef, causing a thousand swirls and eddies to appear as it traversed the vast barrier of submerged rock— coral, ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood

... and broke in a surf of splendor upon the great mountain-line that overhangs Puerto del Norte. Where, at the corporation dock, there had lurked the shadow of a yacht, gray-black against blue-black, there now swung a fairy ship of purest silver, cradled upon a swaying mirror. ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... himself to be a good swimmer, had secured an end of the smallest of these to his waist; he now stood prepared to divest himself of all his superfluous clothing at a moment's notice, and to attempt the hazardous experiment of rushing into the boiling surf, to drag out any poor unfortunate whom he might be able to reach. Others were engaged in various ways in preparing themselves to render what assistance was in their power, when a cry from Grummet announced that the crisis had arrived; on looking up we saw ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood

... the cliffs. Down and crashing down fell the trees, the noise of their fall accompanying the battle chant of the Valkyr beside me like wild harp chords of storm-lashed surf. Up to the precipices the forest rolled, unbroken. Now the cliffs loomed overhead. The dawn had ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt

... island lying under the west shore) will bear W. You water at a well that is behind the beach at the head of the bay. The water is tolerable, but scarce; and bad getting off, on account of a great surf on the beach. The refreshments to be got here, are bullocks, hogs, goats, sheep, poultry, and fruits. The goats are of the antelope kind, so extraordinarily lean, that hardly any thing can equal them; and the bullocks, hogs, and sheep, are not much better. ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, Volume 1 • James Cook

... waves, too, went down in the fog; the now invisible and hushed breakers occasionally sent the surf over the sand in a quick whisper, with grave intervals of silence, but with no continuous murmur as before. In a curving bight of the shore the creaking of oars in their rowlocks began to be distinctly heard, but the boat itself, although apparently only its ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte

... glory on dunes and sea: one more of the countless soft nights where peace and calm beauty told of an ageless existence that made naught of the red havoc of men or of monsters. It shone on the ceaseless surf that had beaten these shores before there were men, that would thunder there still when men were no more. But to the tense crouching men in the car it shone only ahead on a distant, glittering speck. A wavering reflection marked the uncertain flight ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various

... Bob. "Oh, come on," he continued, and led the way down to the beach, where there were some bathing pavilions and several houses. The professor was walking along behind, in the vain hope of yet discovering a horned toad, perhaps on its way to get a dip in the surf or ...
— The Motor Boys on the Pacific • Clarence Young

... blush of the morning, The soft cheek of Kathleen discloses their dye; What ruby can rival the lip of mavourneen? What sight-dazzling diamond can equal her eye? Her silken hair vies with the sunbeam in brightness, And white is her brow as the surf of the sea; Thy footstep is like to the fairy's in lightness, Of Kathleen mavourneen, cuishlih ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... baby under two years should never be given a sea bath, a word of caution about sea bathing for young children may not be amiss. The cruelty with which well-meaning parents treat young, tender children by forcibly dragging them into the surf, a practice which may be seen at any seaside resort in the summer, can have no justification. The fright and shock that a sensitive child is thus subjected to is more than sufficient to undo any conceivable good resulting from the plunge. On the other ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler

... blossoms and nest-building, of New England uplands and wilderness rivers, of camps and canoes, of snowshoes and trout rods, of sunrise on the hills, when one climbed for the eagle's nest, and twilight on the yellow wind-swept beaches, where the surf sobbed far away, and wings twanged like reeds in the wind swooping down to decoys,—all thronging about one, eager to be remembered if not recorded. Among them, most eager, most intense, most frequent of all associations, there is a boy with nerves all ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long

... in this case to start using Internet filtering software. The testimony of the Chairman of the Board of the Greenville Public Library is illustrative. In December 1999, there was considerable local press coverage in Greenville concerning adult patrons who routinely used the library to surf the Web for pornography. In response to public outcry stemming from the newspaper report, the Board of Trustees held a special board meeting to obtain information and to communicate with the public concerning the library's ...
— Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) Ruling • United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania

... was but one, however; nor could the most scrupulous examination show him a human being. After remaining a quarter of an hour on the boom, during all which time the only sounds that were heard were the sighings of the night-air, and the sullen and steady wash of the surf, Captain Truck came on deck again, where he found his mate waiting his report with intense anxiety. The former was fully aware of the importance of his discovery, but, being a cool man, he had not magnified the danger ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper

... coast, we have nothing but county meetings and shipwrecks; and I have this day dined upon fish, which probably dined upon the crews of several colliers lost in the late gales. But I saw the sea once more in all the glories of surf and foam,—almost equal to the Bay of Biscay, and the interesting white squalls and short seas ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore

... forbidding, but that is not so at all. In the summer, when the sun is shining, they are beautiful. The glaciers lie like white untrodden land in a sea of sand, their lower rim flashing green and blue in the sunlight. When you come nearer, you see a chain of jagged sandhills like a dark surf, where the glacier and the sand waste meet. (He is silent again. Halla has picked a flower and is pulling its petals.) Why are you doing that? What are you ...
— Modern Icelandic Plays - Eyvind of the Hills; The Hraun Farm • Jhann Sigurjnsson

... been able to reach a large lofty rock away from the surf. There, shouting vainly in the darkness, hearing no voice in reply to his own, not knowing if he should find himself on an isolated rock or at the extremity of a line of reefs, and perhaps the sole survivor of the catastrophe, he waited for ...
— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne

... the name of a bay, while at the same time it is so large and so much exposed to the southeast and northwest winds, that it is little better than an open roadstead; and the whole swell of the Pacific Ocean rolls in here before a southeaster, and breaks with so heavy a surf in the shallow waters, that it is highly dangerous to lie near in to the shore during the southeaster season, that is, between the months of November ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana

... a door had been swiftly and silently closed, the sound of the surf became suddenly less. The boat floated on an even keel; she opened her eyes and ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole

... frequent not only at sea, but also while landing here, for Nome has no harbour, but merely an open, shallow roadstead, fully exposed to the billows of the ocean. There is therefore frequently a heavy surf along the beach, and here many a poor miner has been drowned within a few yards of the Eldorado he has risked ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt

... melancholy dreams. Night arrived; and with its shadows a heavy discomfort. It oppressed my limbs with the oppression of some dull weight, and was palpable. There was also a moaning sound, not unlike the distant reverberation of surf, but more continuous, which, beginning with the first twilight, had grown in strength with the darkness. Suddenly lights were brought into the room, and this reverberation became forthwith interrupted into frequent unequal bursts of the same ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... watched with feverish anxiety the passage through the broken water, lest the frail craft should be overturned and all aboard drowned. A rope was bent on to the stern, and the crowd quickly hauled the coble away from the heavy surf into safety. At this point, an elderly gentleman, tall, with a long, shaggy beard and bushy grey hair, which might have been a wig, rode up on a brown mare. His appearance and demeanour stamped him with the characteristics of a real ...
— Looking Seaward Again • Walter Runciman

... wilder storm in this same bay some years ago, and of which he says to-day's gale reminds him. On that previous occasion three ships were wrecked together within a few yards of this house. It must have been a dreadful, awe-inspiring scene. No boat could live on the surf, so every survivor had to be dragged ashore with ropes fastened to the cliffs and hauled by willing hands. Hundreds of townspeople and fisher folk came pouring over from St. Ives and all the hamlets round about in order to take part in the work of ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell

... I chanced to go, With pencil and portfolio, Adown the street of silver sand That winds beneath this craggy land, To make a sketch of some old scurf Of driftage, nosing through the surf A splintered mast, with knarl and strand Of rigging-rope and tattered threads Of flag and streamer and of sail That fluttered idly in the gale Or whipped themselves to sadder shreds. The while I wrought, half listlessly, ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley

... pointed to a narrow street near. Following this out of curiosity, we crossed the moat and found ourselves on the great bathing beach. To get out of the hands of the servants who immediately surrounded us, we jumped into one of the little wagons and were driven out into the surf. ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor

... deck, together with a few of the least skilful of the negroes, who composed the crew, and the hatches closed upon us, to prevent the sea from coming in between decks, while the dangers occasioned by the surf running over the bar, was passed. The wretched condition to which we were reduced, was such as to awaken a feeling of sympathy, even among the blacks, who shed tears of compassion for our misfortunes; during this time, the most profound ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 • J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard

... in the apartment which Murfree had occupied, just across from the cobbler's. Dr. Browne stood over the bed, and had the two watchers guarding the door to keep out the frankly-curious people without. They thronged up to its lintels just as the surf presses against the dykes, that are the doors of the land, to guard it from that strange old sea which would learn all its secrets, only to obliterate them. The doctor looked up. "He is resting at last," he said in brusque fashion, ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry

... of winter, o'er the turf That hides in death his cherished form! And roar, ye pine-trees, like the surf That breaks ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various

... hauled taught from the upper part of the stern, made an easy descent to any who had art enough to walk or slide upon a rope, with a smaller rope fixed above to hold by. This was a means of saving a number of lives, though many were washed off by the impetuous surf, and perished. The flood coming on, raised the surf, and prevented any more from coming at that time, so that the ropes could be of no further use. We then retired from the rocks; and hunger prevailing, set about boiling some of the drowned turkeys, ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous

... Long Island, where the ocean heaves in its wildest and most crystalline surf, a small cove had broken itself into the slopes of an irregular hill, after generations of beating storms and crumbling earth, taking a crescent shape, and forming one of the most picturesque bits of landscape to be found along the coast. The two points or promontories that ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens

... vent to this malediction, the boat ran swiftly past a low rocky point, over which the surf ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne

... Honoria, rising like Venus from the bead on the surf. "I warned you not to speak that ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry

... the helm hard down, but she would not obey. He tried at once to get in his sails, but the surf was running very strong, and presently a heavy sea broke clean over her. Then came confusion and dismay: the flapping of the wet, half-lowered sails, and the whipping of the slack ropes, making all effort useless. There was no chance of her- holding. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... of the men, and casting their long shadows strongly against the mud wall of the house; at another, a black cloud as it flew across her disk, cast every thing into deep shade, while the only noise we heard was the hoarse dashing of the distant surf, rising and falling on the fitful gusts of the breeze. We tried ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott

... four tropic birds (Phaeton aethereus) and a tern; and next evening, shortly before sunset, we sighted the Island of Mauritius, the Bamboo Mountain at Grand Port being the first part seen. We rapidly closed in with the land, and during the night were near enough to see the surf on the coral reefs fringing the shore, it assuming the appearance, in the bright moonshine, of a sandy ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray

... hundred Canadians and Indians. The harbor was protected by six ships of the line and five frigates, three of the latter being sunk at its mouth. The English ships were six days on the coast before a landing could be attempted, on account of a heavy surf continually rolling with such violence, that no boat could approach the shore. The violence of the surf having somewhat abated, a landing was effected on June 8th. The troops were disposed for landing in three divisions. That ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean

... paid us an official visit to see that we did not bring yellow fever or other infectious disease, the kind doctor, an Irishman educated in America, took us ashore at a little temporary landing-place to avoid the surf. On the shore there were some handkerchiefs shaking, and in a crowd we saw Susan and Leila, and Charlie [his grandson] who were waiting for us in carriages, and in a few moments we embraced them all. The sun was hot upon us, but, after ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse

... that it was bedtime—for we were now in the period of perpetual sunlight—we again turned into the igloos which had been hurriedly built after our exciting experience the night before. A low murmur as of distant surf was issuing from the blackness ahead of us, and steadily growing in volume. To the inexperienced it might have seemed an ominous sound, but to us it was a cheering thing because we knew it meant the narrowing, and perhaps the closing, of the stretch of open water that barred ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary

... her whether the bar is passable or not. For the bar of the Port is as changeable in its moods as the heart of a giddy maid to her lovers—to-day it may invite you to come in and take possession of its placid waters in the harbour beyond; to-morrow it may roar and snarl with boiling surf and savage, eddying currents, and whirlpools slapping fiercely against the grim, black rocks ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke

... The water about us turned a blue that none there had ever seen, so turquoise, so cerulean, so penetrable by the eye! Before us gentle surf broke on a beach bone-white. The beach with little rise met woodland; thick it seemed and of a vivid greenness and fairly covering the island. It was island, masthead told us, who saw blue ribbon going around. Moreover, there were two others, no greater, upon the horizon. Nor, though the woodland ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston

... barking or rushing out to fight back a wave that was sneaking too close. He loved the water, and the best time of all, he thought, was when his mistress took her swimming lesson and he could plough through the waves beside her. Often she would lie on her back in the hissing, white surf, holding to Jan's collar until they both landed on the warm sand. Sometimes the two of them would dig a big hole, and the dog would scrunch into it, while she buried him until only his nose and eyes could be seen. Jan was so happy ...
— Prince Jan, St. Bernard • Forrestine C. Hooker

... effect of smoothing paths. No one, at that moment, was engaged in smoothing either paths or people. The private secretary was no worse off than his neighbors except in being called earlier into service. On April 13 the storm burst and rolled several hundred thousand young men like Henry Adams into the surf of a wild ocean, all helpless like himself, to be beaten about for four years by the waves of war. Adams still had time to watch the regiments form ranks before Boston State House in the April evenings and ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams

... ice," to use his own words, could be seen. There, from a height of four hundred and eighty feet, which commanded a horizon of almost forty miles, his ears were gladdened with the novel music of dashing waves; and a surf, breaking in among the rocks at his feet, stayed his ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin

... coat. Fog opened his eyes. 'Anything come ashore?' he asked faintly, trying to turn his head towards the reef. Conquering his repugnance, the young man walked out on the long point. There was nothing there; but farther down the coast barrels were washing up and back in the surf, and one box had stranded in shallow water. 'Am I, too, a wrecker?' he asked himself, as with much toil and trouble he secured the booty and examined it. Yes, ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson

... commented on the strange undertone of music, echoing from a thousand silvery rills and tiny cascades, which follow the verdant lines of terrace or parapet, and make the shimmering air vocal with melody, like the distant song of surf on a coral reef. Variety of form belongs to all Javanese agriculture as the result of handicraft, for the peasant unconsciously puts his own personality into his toil. The exquisite tints of the rice in different stages of growth display a translucence indescribable except ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings

... gusts between A sound came from the land; It was the sound of the tramping surf, On the rocks and ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth

... came to them one brave fellow made a small line fast to his waist, and sprang into the cauldron of boiling breakers. He reached the shore almost lifeless, and his gallant act was the means of saving several of the crew, who dared to risk being hauled through the surf. Alas! as often happens, some of them still clung to the rigging that held the oscillating mast. It was assumed that they must be benumbed, or that they dreaded being dashed to death in the attempt to attach themselves to the rope that had been the means of rescuing their ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman

... visiting Mrs. Noxon again and Kedzie snubbed her haughtily when she met her at the Casino or on Bailey's Beach. Kedzie was admitted to that sacred surf of the Spouting Rock Association now and she was as pretty ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes

... This road bore the euphonious name of Eel Street,—so named by the boys of the town. When about half-way from its end, I turned off to the right, and followed a wooded lane to the house of an honest surf-man, Captain George Bogart, who had recently left his old home on the beach, beside the restless waves of the Atlantic, and had resumed his avocation ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop

... intently, but all was silent as death. I longed for human voices, but I could hear none. No sound reached me but the roar of distant surf, but it ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking

... being essential for their growth, but they grow quite down to the edge of the sea. The natives have been attracted to this main road, and from Galle to Colombo it is almost one continuous village; there is no prettier sea-shore in the world, nor a more beautiful surf. Every few miles we come upon large numbers of fishermen drawing in their nets, which are excessively long and take in several acres of sea in their sweep. An artist who would come to Ceylon and devote ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie

... fully a mile south of the village, and quite out of reach of the people, and were soon in the mild surf. After a half hour of this enjoyment they dressed, and ascended a slight elevation from which could be seen the character of the land along ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Treasures of the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay

... continued Miss Adair, gathering courage, and glancing from under the surf of her hair at her listener's impassive face; ...
— The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories • Margaret Collier Graham

... my dreams, I need scarcely tell you. On stormy nights, when the wind shook the four corners of the house and the surf roared along the cove and up the cliffs, I would see him in a thousand forms, and with a thousand diabolical expressions. Now the leg would be cut off at the knee, now at the hip; now he was a monstrous kind of a creature who had never had but the one leg, and that in ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson

... prostrate or ran away, so little did they know about firearms. The chief had a feast of young dog prepared for his guests, who partook of it with reluctance. All communication was by signs, and when the chief imitated the beating of surf and drew a cow and a sheep in the sand, pointing west, they thought they were at last nearing the longed-for Spanish settlements, and went on their way joyfully. Little did they imagine that the settlements the chief described were far off on ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh

... with the great wave, struggling in vain, blinded and half-choked with salt water, he was driven violently against a great black object tumbling about in the surf, and with all the strength of his little hands he clung to it. The water rolled over him, and beat against him, but he would not lose his hold; and at last there came a bigger wave and lifted him up and cast him right on to the object he was clinging ...
— A Little Boy Lost • Hudson, W. H.

... Captain Hollinger, Bob, and Mart, spending two days at the great Moana Hotel. For Waikiki is the great seaside resort of Honolulu—throbbing with motor cars, gay with villas and stately with hotels; trolley cars running to the city brought out the tourists and surf-bathers, as well as everyone in Honolulu who could get a day off to go ...
— The Pirate Shark • Elliott Whitney

... that this swimming in smooth water was but indifferent sport and began to talk to Arthur with great animation, in his native tongue, about the pleasures of "faahee," or surf-bathing, and the exquisite fun of dodging the "manos," or sharks, among the rollers. Presently he struck out into the lagoon, and before we could guess his intention, he swam over to the reef, and, picking his way across it, plunged fearlessly ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer

... mother's voice in lullaby or hymn, (The voice, O tender voices, memory's loving voices, Last miracle of all, O dearest mother's, sister's, voices;) The rain, the growing corn, the breeze among the long-leav'd corn, The measur'd sea-surf beating on the sand, The twittering bird, the hawk's sharp scream, The wild-fowl's notes at night as flying low migrating north or south, The psalm in the country church or mid the clustering trees, the open air camp-meeting, The ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman

... amongst the artists were half a dozen of the best performers in Johannesburg. And at the foreshore, between fatigues, drills, and spells of duty the fellows used to gather, to enjoy the one luxury of Swakopmund—the surf-bathing. Here you would meet men upon whom you never expected again to set eyes assembled literally from all over South Africa from the Cape to the Zambesi. Belonging to one regiment I met, in privates and corporals, six well-to-do farmers, a handful of solicitors, ...
— With Botha in the Field • Eric Moore Ritchie

... quarried scars "Of black crevase and shadow-fill'd canon, "Are trac'd in silver mist. How on my breast "Hang the soft purple fringes of the night; "Close to my shoulder droops the weary moon, "Dove-pale, into the crimson surf the sun "Drives up before his prow; and blackly stands "On my slim, loftiest peak, an eagle, with "His angry eyes set sunward, while his cry "Falls fiercely back from all my ruddy heights; "And his ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford

... man.) When the wave had broken upon the sand, there was the bather wallowing on the top of the water like a Polar bear disporting in an Arctic sun. In swimming Borrow clawed the water like a dog. I had plunged into the surf and got very close to the swimmer, whom I perceived to be a man of almost gigantic proportions, when suddenly an instinct told me that it was Lavengro himself, who lived thereabouts, and the feeling that it was ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton

... raising its bristled snout above the surf, gives out a low prolonged wail, like the moan of some creature in ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid

... here now and rid of that dusty, dirty city. You would be amused if you saw this place and tried to understand why we prefer it to any place we have seen. There is surf bathing at a half mile distant and a good hotel with a great bar where a Frenchman gives us ice and the sea captains and agents for mines and plantations in the interior gather to play billiards. Outside there are rows of ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis

... now knee-deep in the surf, and Du Mesne, clinging to the gunwale as he passed out, was soon waist deep, and time and again lost his footing in ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough

... Suppose supozi, konjekti. Suppress subpremi. Supremacy superegeco. Supreme superega, cxefa. Surcharge supertakso. Sure certa. Surely certe, nepre. Surety garantiajxo. Surety, to be garantii. Surf sxauxmo, mar—. Surface suprajxo. Surfeit supersati. Surge ondego. Surgeon hxirurgiisto. Surgery hxirurgio. Surly malgaja. Surmise konjekti. Surmount venki. Surname alnomo. Surpass superi. Surprise surprizi. Surrender kapitulaci. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... dark clouds came up in rapid procession; the surf began to sigh and moan; the sea-fowls caught the sound, and cried as they only cry when the ocean is angry. The boats lying out hoisted sail and scudded away for the nearest haven of shelter. Then a ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various

... with rolling surf, a long and very high pier, showing the great rise of the tide,—at this point sixty feet in the spring,— and directly before one the peculiarly striking promontory of Blomidon, with the red sandstone showing through the dark pines ...
— Over the Border: Acadia • Eliza Chase

... surf in the moonbeam, The albatross lone on the spray, Alone know the tears wept in vain for the children Magic ...
— Peacock Pie, A Book of Rhymes • Walter de la Mare

... end of the trunk with Jane, in addition to the pack she had slung over her shoulder. They finally started down a narrow path that led on down to the shore, leaving some of their equipment behind to be brought later on in the afternoon. As they neared the shore the boom of the surf ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls by the Sea - Or The Loss of The Lonesome Bar • Janet Aldridge

... been to the Lido for a short swim in the slight but bracing surf of the Adriatic. They had had a midday breakfast in a queer little restaurant, known only to the initiated and therefore early discovered by Larry, who had a keen scent for a cook learned in the law. They had loitered along the Riva degli Schiavoni, looking at a perambulatory ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various

... Detlor felt her heart come romping to her throat, for, whatever this man was to her now, he once was her lover. She grew hot to her fingers. As she looked, the air seemed to palpitate round her, and Mark Telford to be standing in its shining hot surf tall and grand. But, on the instant, there came into this lens the picture she had seen in George Hagar's studio that morning. At that moment Mildred Margrave and Baron were entering at the other end of the long, ...
— An Unpardonable Liar • Gilbert Parker

... swimming, that the lads regained their boat, which driven before the wind, seemed determined to reach the shore without them. They succeeded at last, dressed themselves, and stood in for the land. A long line of heavy surf was beating violently against the beach, and by some mismanagement, the boat got capsized among the breakers. One lad was thrown on shore, but Davy Jarvis got entangled in the surf, which beat ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie

... water, and less of unseen animal life below it, there is yet more that seems like vital force in the individual particles of waves. Each separate drop appears more charged with desperate and determined life. The lines of surf run into each other more brokenly, and with less steady roll. The low sun, too, lends a weird and jagged shadow to gallop in before the crest of each advancing wave, and sometimes there is a second crest on the shoulders of the first, as if there ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... dense oppression, such As tawny tigers feel in matted shades, Vexing their blood and making apt for ravage. Beneath the stars the roofy desert spreads Vacant as Libya. All is hushed near by. Yet fitfully from far breaks a mixed surf Of muffled sound, the Atheist roar of riot. Yonder, where parching Sirius set in drought, Balefully glares red Arson—there—and there. The Town is taken by its rats—ship-rats And rats of the wharves. All civil charms ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville

... trees, directly across the lawn in front of him, loomed the dark shadow of a long, low, cottage-like building, and from a window a light twinkled out between the tree trunks; while from beyond again came the roll of surf, low, rhythmic, like the soft accompaniment ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard

... layer, in the same manner as may often be seen in bezoar-stones, when an object like a nail forms the centre of aggregation. The crenulated edges, however, of the frond appear to be due to the corroding power of the surf on its own deposit, alternating with fresh depositions. On some smooth basaltic rocks on the coast of St. Jago, I found an exceedingly thin layer of brown calcareous matter, which under a lens presented a miniature likeness of the crenulated and polished fronds ...
— Volcanic Islands • Charles Darwin

... Sighted the centre of Dorre Island, and stood in to within about two miles of the shore, which we found steep and rocky with a heavy surf breaking on it; we then tacked and ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey

... step gingerly along an outstretched oar and climb on board. The orders of the captain to the mate are sporty and suggest turf rather than surf. "Kick her up, Mac!" "Give her a kick ahead!" "Who-o-oa!" On Sunday evening, June 28th, we reach Fond du Lac, clinging close to the water-line on her beautiful stretch of sand. All unregarded are the church-bells, and the Indians crowd to meet ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron

... I grew somewhat bewildered, the entire surface bearing such uniformity of outline as to afford little guide. Yet I held to my original course fairly well, for I could pilot somewhat by the dim north star; and it was not long before my alert ears caught the pounding of surf along the shore-line. Much encouraged, I pressed forward with greater rapidity, ignoring the lanes between the dunes, and clambering over the mounds themselves in my eagerness to reach the lake before the ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish

... this precision. The district was alive with rabbits, and haunted by gulls which made a continual piping about the pavilion. On summer days the outlook was bright and even gladsome; but at sundown in September, with a high wind, and a heavy surf rolling in close along the links, the place told of nothing but dead mariners and sea disaster. A ship beating to windward on the horizon, and a huge truncheon of wreck half buried in the sands at my feet, completed the innuendo ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson

... element of danger. As long as they went before the waves they were safe enough, but Lester knew that if they broached to, broadside to the waves, they would be swamped in the twinkling of an eye. The water was pretty shoal where they were, and while not actually surf was still near enough like it to keep ...
— The Rushton Boys at Treasure Cove - Or, The Missing Chest of Gold • Spencer Davenport

... can be realized? In the midst of the loftiest manifestations of the soul's power the body ceases to be. With indescribable bravery a warrior lays down his life, a fireman rescues a child from a burning building, a life-boatman goes through the surf to a sinking ship, and, at that very moment when he proves himself best fitted to live, death comes and he is seen no more. It cannot be proven that this is not the end, but it is not reasonable to believe that this is the end. If it is, human life is utterly without significance, and ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford

... most fertile soil, on which delicious vegetables grow ten months of the year. The region is especially famed for potatoes, which become almost a fruit here. The farm I live on is charmingly situated about a mile from the old Mission, and two from the beach, on which a tremendous surf breaks and thunders day and night. From my house I look over the coast-table and range of mountains, the hills of Monterey, the bay, and a near landscape, exquisitely diversified by plain and wood, hill and valley, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various

... winning back all he had lost, and much more, too, if he would but remain awhile longer. Archie was firm, however, and passed out into the narrow alleyways again, feeling that he had learned a great deal through a very small expenditure of money. He gradually found his way back into the crowded Surf Avenue, where there were hundreds of things, evidently, which he had not yet seen. The crowds, too, seemed greater even than before, and there seemed to be thousands of people arriving every hour from New York and Brooklyn, over the various street-car and railway lines, and by the excursion ...
— The Adventures of a Boy Reporter • Harry Steele Morrison

... whether the bar is passable or not. For the bar of the Port is as changeable in its moods as the heart of a giddy maid to her lovers—to-day it may invite you to come in and take possession of its placid waters in the harbour beyond; to-morrow it may roar and snarl with boiling surf and savage, eddying currents, and whirlpools slapping fiercely against the grim, black rocks ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke

... by Atmospheric Density); The Chant (Gradation through Values of Separated Objects) The View-Metre Three Pictures Found with the View-Metre View Taken with a Wide Angle Lens Photography Nearing the Pictorial The Path of the Surf—Photo (Triangles Occuring in the leading line); The Shepherdess—Millet (Composition Exhibiting a Double Exit) Circular Observation—The Principle; The Slaying of the Unpropitious Messengers (Triangular Composition—Circular Observation) Huntsman and Hounds (Triangle ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore

... Pitons, and enter another little craterine harbor, to cast anchor before the village of Choi-seul. It lies on a ledge above the beach and under high hills: we land through a surf, running the boat high up on soft yellowish sand. A delicious saline ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn

... told us that it was bedtime—for we were now in the period of perpetual sunlight—we again turned into the igloos which had been hurriedly built after our exciting experience the night before. A low murmur as of distant surf was issuing from the blackness ahead of us, and steadily growing in volume. To the inexperienced it might have seemed an ominous sound, but to us it was a cheering thing because we knew it meant the narrowing, and perhaps the closing, of the stretch of open water that barred our way. So ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary

... with the fragrance of jasmine and gardenia, and through the swaying boughs of palm and mimosa there are glimpses of rugged mountains, their summits veiled in clouds, of purple sea with the white surf beating eternally against the reefs, whiter still in the yellow sunlight or the magical moonlight of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... by this time drawn the cliff, and the strip of sand, and the waste of sea beyond; and now he was blotting in some boats and figures—figures of men wading through the surf and dragging the boats in shore; and other figures making for the steps. Last of all, close under the cliff, in advance of all the rest, he drew a tiny man standing alone—a tiny man scarce an ...
— Monsieur Maurice • Amelia B. Edwards

... aside to give this region a blow. There is a never-ending conflict in the adjacent waters between the currents of the China Sea and those of the Pacific, making navigation hazardous, and for small boats perilous. On the day of our arrival, calm and fair as it was, a tremendous surf was beating on the bar, the spray and foam mounting in a regular wall many feet high, and driven up, not by the gradual attack of an advancing wave, but by the tireless energy of angry waters ceaselessly beating upon ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox

... their open eyes, with all the ecstasy of their new-found energy, they clambered over the slippery seaweed and leaped from rock to rock, swept along with the winds, daring the waves, shouting down the surf. ...
— Four Days - The Story of a War Marriage • Hetty Hemenway

... and I asked the time. It was five o'clock. He stretched out his hand to Arnold Bentham, who met and shook it weakly; and both gazed at me, in their eyes extending that same hand-clasp. It was farewell, I knew; for what chance had creatures so feeble as we to win alive over those surf-battered rocks to ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London

... died unwed, And they quit their gloomy bed, Hungry still for human pleasure, Here to trip a moonlit measure. Near the shore the mermaids play, Floating on the cool, white spray, Leaping from the glittering surf To the dark and fragrant turf, Where the frolic trolls, and elves Daintily disport themselves. All the shapes by poet's brain, Fashioned, live for me again, In this spiritual light, Less than day, yet more than night. What a world! a waking dream, All things other ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus

... we can hardly forbear asking whether this be a band of malefactors and felons flying from justice. What are their crimes, that they hide themselves in darkness? To what punishment are they exposed, that, to avoid it, men, and women, and children, thus encounter the surf of the North Sea and the terrors of a night storm? What induces this armed pursuit, and this arrest of fugitives, of all ages and both sexes? Truth does not allow us to answer these inquiries in a manner that does credit to the wisdom or the justice of the times. This was not the flight ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster

... a proud campaign; And on their brows the bright invisible crown Victory sheds from her own radiant form, As o'er her favourites' heads she sings and soars. But dreams came not so calmly; as around Turbulent shores wild waves and swamping surf Prevail, while seaward, on the tranquil deeps, Reign placid surfaces and solemn peace, So, from the troubled strands of memory, they Launched and were tossed, long ere they found the tides That lead to the gentle bosoms of pure rest. And like to one who from a ghostly watch In a lone ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... eucalypti were between thirty and forty feet in circumference and over a hundred feet in height. The glimpses which we caught between these tall trees of Torbay, with the waves breaking in huge rollers on the shore or in angry surf against the steep cliffs of ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey

... Zuleika was of a gentle, loving disposition, but a vein of romance and poetry had already developed itself in her notwithstanding her extreme youth. She sighed for the unknown delights of the sea, and the wail of the surf sounded to her like the most delicious of mysterious harmonies. Her infant imagination peopled the watery realm with spirits of good and evil always in contention, and the great ships, with their huge white sails, that she saw in the distance from the sandy beach of ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg

... sort"—"capable husbands"—men who had been more or less attentive to her—now, these grim and terrible axioms of worldly wisdom, of upper class honor, from her grandmother sounded in her ears like the boom of surf on reefs in the ears ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips

... the gloom that the canal here took a sharp bend inland, and in consequence he tramped on with his face set almost due south, nothing doubting of his direction, but hoping, as each hour passed, that the next would bring him within sound of the surf. The road ran straight for mile after mile. Now and again he passed a small cabaret brightly lit and merry with a noise of talk and laughter that warmed his heart for a moment. In the stretches of darkness ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... spot are not numerous. There is surf-bathing all along the outer side of the beach, and good swimming on the inner. The fishing is fair; and in still weather yachting is rather a favorite amusement. Further than this there is little to be said, ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various

... of fishes, as we presently perceived. So, somewhat cheered, we cast our eyes to the right and left, and, seeing nothing to justify our fears, advanced along the mole to the very end, where it juts out into the sea, with great stones around to break the surf. Here, then, with deadly apprehensions, we peered amongst the rocks, holding our breath, clutching tight hold of one another by the hand, in terror of finding that we so eagerly searched,—a hood, a woman's skirt clinging to the stones, a stiffened hand ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett

... any opposition. In later times too they often came there and brought upon the Romans irreparable calamity. This same people also assailed the wall of the Chersonesus, where they overpowered those who were defending themselves from the wall, and approaching through the surf of the sea, scaled the fortifications on the so-called Black Gulf; thus they got within the long wall, and falling unexpectedly upon the Romans in the Chersonesus they slew many of them and made prisoners ...
— History of the Wars, Books I and II (of 8) - The Persian War • Procopius

... the basaltic lump Loo (Ilheu) Fort with the Pontinha, the curved scorpion's tail of rock and masonry, Messieurs Blandy's coal stores, to the west. Big ships must still roll at anchor in a dangerous open roadstead far off shore; and, during wet weather, ladies, well drenched by the surf, must be landed with the aid of a crane in what should be the inner harbour. The broken-down circus near Reid's is to become a theatre, but whence the money is to come no one knows. The leper hospital cannot afford to make up more than nine or ten beds. The jail is in its old disgraceful state, ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton

... since that day six months ago when his old schooner, dismasted and leaking in a gale, had foundered near the Wolves, two sharp-toothed islands near Grande Mignon. Four islanders had been lost that day, and he alone had lived through the surf. ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams

... thunder-booming sea A flying bark, whose white sails strain beneath The wind's wild buffering, and all the air Maddens with roaring, as the rollers crash On a black foreland looming on the lee Where long reefs fringe the surf-tormented shores. So chased she, and so dashed the ranks asunder Triumphant-souled, and hurled fierce threats before: "Ye dogs, this day for evil outrage done To Priam shall ye pay! No man of you Shall from mine hands deliver his own life, And win back home, to gladden parents ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus

... from the island and a boat sent out, which was carefully steered through the breakers. Forgetting the treasure which he had concealed in the cave, and the friendly treatment which he had so long received from the tribe who knew of its whereabouts, the sailor rushed into the surf, and throwing himself into the boat bade the men pull back to the ship. When he was standing on the deck of the latter he recognised fully his own position. Above him floated the Spanish flag, fierce glances of hatred from all the crew were turned upon him, and to complete his discomfiture the ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... the younger wrapt His little ragged cloak, To shield him from the freezing sleet, And surf that o'er them broke; Then drew him closer to his side, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various

... where, for one instant, an upstretched arm and nothing more rose feebly from the water. The next moment, hurled thither as it seemed by the wave, he had reached it, and was battling for dear life with the surf ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed

... changed the smoke of turf, A heathery land and misty sky, And turned on rocks and raging surf ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various

... fishing," promised the man. "And so you're here to get moving pictures; eh? Well, I don't know much about 'em, but you couldn't come to a nicer place than this spot on the coast. And you only have to go a little way to get right where the real surf comes smashing up on the beach. Of course, as I said, we're so land-locked just here that we don't see much of it, even in a storm. Moving pictures; eh? I'd ...
— The Moving Picture Boys on the Coast • Victor Appleton

... dreamed to advantage. Famishing, shipwrecked or marooned, he fought with the big Pacific surf for rock-clinging mussels, and carried them up the sands to the dry flotsam of the spring tides. Of this he built a fire, and among the coals he laid his precious trove. He watched the steam jet forth and the locked shells pop apart, exposing the salmon-colored meat. Cooked to a ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London

... steed with his nostril all wide, But through it there rolled not the breath of his pride: And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf, And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various

... down on our own countrymen wearing white helmets on their heads and suits of snowy white as they walk about amid brown-skinned natives whose bare bodies gleam like satin, lands where lines of palm trees wave their long fronds over the pearly surf washing at their roots. We will visit also other lands where you look out over a glowing pink and mauve desert to seeming infinity, and see reflected in bitter shallow water at your feet the flames of such a sunset glory as you never yet have imagined. Or you can ride out across ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton

... should try a kayah, it would certainly be on land. But those Greenlanders learn to handle themselves so well that their kayahs will go dancing over the big billows and then fly through a ragged, dangerous surf. From their kayahs, too, they will fight the ...
— Connor Magan's Luck and Other Stories • M. T. W.

... the fitful gusts between A sound came from the land; It was the sound of the trampling surf On the rocks and ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes

... swell of the ocean burst in thunder, and flew to almost the height of the cliff in a very great and glorious fury of foam. In other parts, where I suspected a sort of beach, there was the silver tremble of surf; but in the main, the heave coming out of the north-east, the folds swept the base of the ice ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell

... foot of a huge wall of vast cliffs, which rose majestically to an enormous height. Some of these, dividing the beach with their sharp spurs, formed capes and promontories, worn away by the ceaseless action of the surf. Farther on the eye discerned their massive outline sharply defined ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne

... And so our decorations must needs wait till we reach port, when the holds are in travail and the winches scream out their agony to the bare brown hills beyond the town and mingle with the deep, dull roar of the surf on ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee

... time, there were two little boys. William was five years old, and Johnny was not quite three. The weather was very warm, and these little boys got very weak, and looked so pale and sick, that the doctor said their parents had better take them to Newport, and let them bathe in the surf. So their Mother packed up their clothes, and some books, for she did not wish them to be idle; and, one pleasant afternoon, they all went on board of the steamboat that was going ...
— Aunt Fanny's Story-Book for Little Boys and Girls • Frances Elizabeth Barrow

... with only Heaven to see them the men kissed tenderly as women, then hand in hand sprang out into the sea. Drenched and blinded they struggled up after the first plunge, and struck out for the shore, guided by the thunder of the surf they had listened to for twelve long hours, as it broke against the beach, and brought no help on its receding billows. Soon Warwick was the only one who struggled, for Moor's strength was gone, and he clung half conscious to the spar, tossing from wave ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott

... foe with his nostrils all wide, And the shouts of his backers rolled on in their pride. The swells of the Ring and the stars of the Turf Surged round like the waves of the storm-beaten surf. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 17, 1892 • Various

... Tahiti, a silver belt of reef took the rough caresses of the lazy rollers, and let the glistening surf break gently on the beach. Along this wall of coral, hidden, but charted by its crown of foam, we ran for miles until we found the gateway—the blue buckle of the belt, it ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien

... out was the blue sky that bent down to meet a bluer sea, the sand on the shore was as white as the blown snow, and the sea-birds that circled around the cupola in the crystalline, fragrant air were singing. The melody blended strangely with the sound of the surf on the shining ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed

... Lindsay calls "Splendor" in the movies is an interesting and striking feature of them—the moving of masses of people amid great architectural construction—sieges, triumphs, battles, mobs—but all this is akin to scenery. Its movements are like those of the trees or the surf. One can not make a play entirely of scenery, though the contrary seems to be the view of some managers, even on the stage of the regular theatre. So far, the individual acting and plot construction in the great spectacular movies has ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick

... land, called by the French, Cape Naturaliste, we had nearly run ashore from the darkness of the night, and the little elevation of the land. Our sounding in seven fathoms was the first indication of danger; and, on listening attentively, the noise of the surf upon ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King

... comfort me in my distress in that time, two of the sailors robbed me of all my money, and ran away from the ship. I had been so long used to an European climate that at first I felt the scorching West India sun very painful, while the dashing surf would toss the boat and the people in it frequently above high water mark. Sometimes our limbs were broken with this, or even attended with instant death, and I was day by day mangled ...
— The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African - Written By Himself • Olaudah Equiano

... the sea was calm as glass, the sky cloudless azure; and the doubt was not whether we should be able to get on board through the surf, but whether, having got on board, we should not ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley

... Supply provizi. Support subteni. Support (prop) subportilo. Supporter partiano. Suppose supozi, konjekti. Suppress subpremi. Supremacy superegeco. Supreme superega, cxefa. Surcharge supertakso. Sure certa. Surely certe, nepre. Surety garantiajxo. Surety, to be garantii. Surf sxauxmo, mar—. Surface suprajxo. Surfeit supersati. Surge ondego. Surgeon hxirurgiisto. Surgery hxirurgio. Surly malgaja. Surmise konjekti. Surmount venki. Surname alnomo. Surpass ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... weary and the watchful, if they will but patiently wait for it. As the dawn gradually broke we found that we had been drifted into a bay, and that the shore was not four hundred fathoms from us. There was a good deal of surf breaking on it, so that it was necessary to use caution in landing. Waiting out opportunity, we gave way and drove the boat high up on the beach. A sad sight met our view; the sand on each side was covered with portions of the wreck and casks of ...
— Will Weatherhelm - The Yarn of an Old Sailor • W.H.G. Kingston

... the island, he will have the choice of three routes. First, he may sail by a Netherlands India boat to Samarang (or Soerabaia, if, as often happens from December to February, it is impossible to land at the former place owing to the surf); this occupies about thirty-six hours. There is an excellent hotel at Samarang—the Pavilion—where the night can be spent, and the following day the train will carry him to Amberawa, a distance of ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold

... was. He was doing it more beautifully than the Canon or any of them. For that group on the lawn were like a rather eager rescue party, holding out hands to a struggling swimmer in the social surf. They expected him to struggle and he didn't. He landed himself in the middle of them with an adroitness that put them in the wrong. What's more, he held his own when he got there. He looked about as different from any of the men on that tennis-ground as ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair

... that fact when he arose. It was a pleasant morning, the sun was rising over the notched horizon of the tumbling ocean, the breeze was blowing, the surf on the bar was frothing and roaring cheerily—and it was his birthday. The morning, the sunrise, the surf and all the rest were pleasant to contemplate—his age was not. So he decided not to contemplate it. Instead he went out and hoisted ...
— Shavings • Joseph C. Lincoln

... hear him recounting his experiences over a bottle of wine; such a pleasant vein of talk as he has, with a ready smile at his own mishaps, and every now and then a sudden gravity, like a man who should hear the surf roar while he was telling the perils of the deep. For it was no longer ago than last night, perhaps, that the receipts only amounted to a franc and a half, to cover three francs of railway fare and two of board and lodging. The Maire, a man worth a million ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... lanes shared its caress with open meadows and murky cities. The sea, binding the little islands in its turbulent immensity, drew the night's beauty to its bosom, and the spray of foam rising from the surf was a shower of star-dust ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter

... no light matter which had so roused the soldier's admiration. Out of the haze which still lay thick upon our right there twinkled here and there a bright gleam of silvery light, while a dull, thundering noise broke upon our ears like that of the surf upon a rocky shore. More and more frequent came the fitful flashes of steel, louder and yet louder grew the hoarse gathering tumult, until of a sudden the fog was rent, and the long lines of the Royal cavalry broke out from it, wave after wave, rich in scarlet and blue and ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle

... the waves, as in minute peals they rolled in upon the pebbly beach, and brought back with them at each retreat, some of the larger and smoother stones, whose noise, as they fell back into old ocean's bed, mingled with the din of the breaking surf. In one of the many little bays I passed, lay three or four fishing smacks. The sails were drying, and flapped lazily against the mast. I could see the figures of the men as they passed backwards ad forwards upon the decks, and although the height was nearly ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever

... until I had galloped through the golden forest of Kerselec that I came in sight of the ocean, although among the sunbeams and the dropping showers of yellow beech-leaves I fancied I could hear the sound of the surf. ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

... general capitulation, and some hundreds immediately followed, jostling each other in their haste, squawking, whirring their flippers, splashing and churning the water, reminding one of a crowd of miniature surf-bathers. We followed the files of birds marching inland, along the course of a tumbling stream, until at an elevation of some five hundred feet, on a flattish piece of ground, a huge rookery opened out—acres and acres ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson

... Island shore, where the ocean heaves in wave after wave from the "outer deep," forming coves of inimitable beauty, promontories wooded to the brink, and broken precipices against which the surf lashes continually, there stood, some thirty years ago, an old mansion-house, with irregular and pointed roofs, low stoops, gable-windows, in short, exhibiting all those architectural eccentricities which our modern artists strive for so earnestly in their ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various

... Port suffered a fresh pang of misery when the presentation was accomplished and he was forced to say approximately pleasant things to a lady whose decidedly ballet-like attire in the surf—or, to be precise, on the beach above high-water-mark, where, for some occult reason, she usually saw fit to do the most of her bathing—joined to the exceeding celerity of her conduct generally, had marked her during the preceding season as the conspicuous centre of one phase of life ...
— The Uncle Of An Angel - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier

... that thine hand made then by Humber's banks Of all who swelled the Scythian's riotous ranks With storm of inland surf and surge of steel: None there were left, if tongues ring true, to feel The yoke of days that breathe submissive breath More bitter than ...
— Locrine - A Tragedy • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... which was good for us, for the winding channels that lead up to Wareham were sheltered under their bare banks. We could hear the thunder of the surf along the rocky coast outside, when the wind ceased its howling for a moment; and at high water the haven had been well nigh too stormy for a small boat. Now we should do best to go by water, for wind was with us; though, unless the gale dropped very quickly, we could not return in ...
— King Alfred's Viking - A Story of the First English Fleet • Charles W. Whistler

... door had been swiftly and silently closed, the sound of the surf became suddenly less. The boat floated on an even keel; she opened her eyes and found herself ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole

... yer honour. Mr. Walter has been asking us; but there's no boat could get through that surf, not if all Ireland ...
— Orange and Green - A Tale of the Boyne and Limerick • G. A. Henty

... than eight, in which depth the south end of the Green Island (a small island lying under the west shore) will bear W. You water at a well that is behind the beach at the head of the bay. The water is tolerable, but scarce; and bad getting off, on account of a great surf on the beach. The refreshments to be got here, are bullocks, hogs, goats, sheep, poultry, and fruits. The goats are of the antelope kind, so extraordinarily lean, that hardly any thing can equal them; and the bullocks, hogs, and ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, Volume 1 • James Cook

... body, the light went out, and I saw the man no more. How long the night lasted I cannot tell; to me it seemed an age, and no second of it was free from fear. Whether we were driving north, south, east, or west no one knew, while the fury of the storm would have drowned the thunder of waves on a surf-beaten shore. But the Aguila was an English boat, built by honest English workmen, and her planks held firmly together despite the ...
— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens

... in his spare time, and run a pipe in through the kitchen wall and rigged up a sink, out of a galvanized pig-trough. It may not be lovely to the eye, but it will save many a step about this shack of ours. And the steps count, now that the season's work is breaking over us like a Jersey surf! ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer

... poised, and broke in a surf of splendor upon the great mountain-line that overhangs Puerto del Norte. Where, at the corporation dock, there had lurked the shadow of a yacht, gray-black against blue-black, there now swung a fairy ship of purest silver, cradled upon a swaying mirror. ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... timber, and everywhere sunflecked, warm, dry shade. Nowhere is there a hint of that sinister suggestion of the Reach. Clear, beautiful, limpid, wide-spreading, irregular pools, set in an undulating field of emerald-green mossy surf, shaded with graceful foliage and gleaming in the sunlight with exquisite opal tints—a giant necklace of opals, set in links of emerald green, and thrown down at hazard to fall in loops and curves within ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn

... Wanganui shore, a Maori was seen scouring along it, in desperate haste. Behind, there raced a thread of enemies, Maoris on the war-path, but the man plunged into the surf before they could overtake him. Sir George imagined that here was another messenger, with information from the little Wanganui garrison of British soldiers. It was necessary he should hear tidings ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne

... beguile her to take moonlight walks with him on the bridge, for the sole purpose, as it seemed, of pouring into her ear the longest of his ballads. He would lead her away to sequestered rustic seats, whence the rush of the surf to the sands was heard soft and soothing; and when he had her all to himself, and the sea lay before them, and the scented shade of gardens spread round, and the tall shelter of cliffs rose behind them, he would pull out his last batch of sonnets, and read them in a voice tremulous with emotion. ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte

... vast, unquiet distance the surf came booming in with the heavy impetus of high tide, flinging long streamers of kelp and bits of driftwood over the narrowing stretch of sand where garishly costumed bathers had lately shrieked hilariously at their ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower

... running races with the waves, but walking soberly and anon halting to scan the beach ahead. Her legs were bare to the knee, and she had hitched up her short skirt high about her like a cockle-gatherer's. In the roar and murmur of the surf she did not hear the Elder approaching, but faced around with a start as he called ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... of the ship, he missed the cordage and struck the axe deep into the oar. Another wave, however, washed it clear of the wreck. We all seized hold of it, and the next instant we were struggling in the wild sea. The last thing I saw was the boat whirling in the surf, and all the sailors tossed into the foaming waves. Then ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne

... in the surf, and Du Mesne, clinging to the gunwale as he passed out, was soon waist deep, and time and again lost his footing in ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough

... 'Sunrise at Narragansett'—W. S. Hazeltine, N. A. A fine effect of transparent sky, faithful rocks, and rolling surf. The warmth of coloring and vivid reality of this picture render it ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... Kathleen discloses their dye; What ruby can rival the lip of mavourneen? What sight-dazzling diamond can equal her eye? Her silken hair vies with the sunbeam in brightness, And white is her brow as the surf of the sea; Thy footstep is like to the fairy's in lightness, Of ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... the first to perform this difficult operation. It was necessary to provide Sir John Hope with a number of small boats; these were accordingly brought on the backs of mules from various Spanish ports, it being impossible, on account of the surf at the entrance of the Adour, as well as the command which the French held of that river, for Lord Wellington to avail himself of water carriage. Soult had given orders for the forces under General Thevenot to dispute ...
— Reminiscences of Captain Gronow • Rees Howell Gronow

... and Balder Dead are Arnold's finest narrative poems. They are stately, dignified recitals of the deeds of heroes and gods. The series of poems entitled Switzerland and Dover Beach are among Arnold's most beautiful lyrics. A fine description of the surf is contained ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck

... into Mr. Jelnik's grounds through the hedge behind the spring-house, and ran like a hare through his garden. I had to hammer upon his door before I could make Achmet hear me, so loud and surf-like was the noise of ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler

... replied, "I dare say she is not dead." He caught hold of the woman, and hung her head over one of the ratlines of the mizen shrouds, and there she hung by the chin, which was hitched over the ratlin; but a surf came and knocked her backwards, and away she went rolling over and over. A captain of a frigate which was lying at Spithead came up in a boat as fast as he could. I dashed out my left hand in a ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne

... are going back again, because much rain and wind is coming from the westward, and we want to get over the reef before the surf becomes too great." Then one of them stood up ...
— "Pig-Headed" Sailor Men - From "The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton and Other - Stories" - 1902 • Louis Becke

... wave, but seen only too well. To keep the ship off shore was impossible; and as they drifted nearer and nearer, the line of sand-hills rose, uglier and more formidable, through the gray spray of the surf. ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley

... or merry life in every room. About the spacious fire-place in the "baronial" hall was a wide semicircle of young people, and before that in the parlor, a cluster of elders, whose graver talk was enlivened, from time to time, by the peals of laughter that tossed into jubilant surf the stream of the ...
— At Last • Marion Harland

... beacon,—a beacon that had grown clearer and brighter with his advancing years, until it seemed to rise above earth into the dazzling radiance of the stars. Its steady light fell upon his rising passion now, and his fury broke as the swelling surf breaks upon the beacon rock—into ...
— Killykinick • Mary T. Waggaman

... hails with the boat-swain's mate in charge, and drew near at last to the forbidden ship. Not a cat stirred, there was no speech of man; and the sea being exceeding high outside, and the reef close to where the schooner lay, the clamour of the surf hung round her ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne

... So heavy was the surf in the early morning that the officers and soldiers going ashore had to be carried from the rowboats to the beach on the backs of natives, but it fortunately calmed down enough before we women went over ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel

... the sense of ancient things. Most notable is this in the first, where the actual romance, quick, human and haunting, does not so much as show its face till after forty pages of old-time local colour. Perhaps of all the seven I myself would prefer the last—"The Kanaka Surf," a slight intrigue, but a perfect epic of such bathing as, I suppose, can be understood nowhere but on these enchanted coasts. To read it is to realise what a loss we suffer in one who could put such jewelled loveliness on to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 25th, 1920 • Various

... wife who, in Lufcadio Hearn's story Chita, adopts the baby dragged by her husband from the surf, and takes it to her heart in place of the ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.

... blue surface gleams the sheen of myriad fish. Far to the southwards the fitful volcanic flames of Colima light up the landscape at night. A day's journey more across the coastal plains, and our reconnaissance is finished. The long-drawn surf beats upon the shore of the vast western ocean, for we have crossed the continent; and the sun's glowing disc dips to the ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock

... the Farallones, lake, crag, or chasm, forest, mountain, valley, or island, river, bay, or jutting headland, every one bears the stamp of its own peculiar beauty, a singular blending of richness, wildness and warmth. Coastwise everywhere sea and mountains meet, and the surf of the cold Japanese current breaks in turbulent beauty against tall "rincones" and jagged reefs of rock. Slumbering amid the hills of the ...
— California and the Californians • David Starr Jordan

... washed, in one quick moment, by this muddy water of the Atlantic, into that sea far off whence no voyager has come back to bring the tidings. Land and sea seemed to her to hint at this thing,—this awful sea, cold and dark beyond. What did the dark mystery in the cry of the surf mean but that? That was the only sound. The heavy silence without grew intolerable to her: it foreboded evil. The cold, yellow light of day lingered long. Overhead, cloud after cloud rose from the far ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various

... they saw land on both boards, and a great surf running up in the firth. They cast anchor outside the breakers, and the wind began to fall; and next morning it was calm. Then they see thirteen ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous

... 45: Hale-po. In the opinion of the author it is the name of the board. A skilled Hawaiian says it is the name given the surf of a place at Napoopoo, in Kona, Hawaii. The action is not located there, but in Puna, ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson

... thunder of the surf was growing louder and louder; till, not as in England over a bare down, but through thickest foliage down to the high tide mark, we rode out upon the shore, and saw before us a right noble sight; a flat, sandy, surf ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley

... so," answered Lester, as he looked up at the sky where some stars showed through. "The clouds seem to be breaking away and the wind has died down a little. The surf doesn't sound so loud on the ...
— The Rushton Boys at Treasure Cove - Or, The Missing Chest of Gold • Spencer Davenport

... the little "Come-Outer" chapel dripped at sedate intervals. The brick walk leading to the door of Captain Elkanah Daniels's fine residence held undignified puddles in its hollows. And, through the damp stillness, the muttered growl of the surf, three miles away at the foot of the sandy bluffs ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln

... the N.W., or lee-side of the island; and as we stood round its S. or S.W. part, we saw it every where guarded by a reef of coral rock, extending, in some places, a full mile from the land, and a high surf breaking upon it. Some thought that they saw land to the southward of this island; but, as that was to the windward, it was left undetermined. As we drew near, we saw people on different parts of the coast, walking, or running along the shore, and in a little time after we had reached ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr

... things they couldn't see, cursing perhaps, or praying their prayers, or perhaps already sliding away, down and down, into the cold, black caves of the sea. And then the shadows seemed to be full of shades, and the surf-tongues were near to catching my ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... the mast. The next moment a sea broke over her that carried the three of them, with two of the crew hanging on to the mast, which, clear of the wreck, was rapidly driven towards the shore. Once a great sea broke Paul's hold and he found himself unaided swimming in the mad surf. He was fortunate enough to catch a hatch that was floating near which supported him to the shore where he was thrown with considerable violence and half stunned. He managed to stagger up the beach and in a few minutes discovered Betsy dragging the insensible ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton

... prompt in action, but not encouraging. He got off with Ken in his power boat in surprisingly short order. The coast guard, who had received a very urgent telephone message, launched the surf-boat, and tried vainly to pierce the blank wall of fog—now darkening to twilight—with their big searchlight. Lanterns, lost at once in the murk, began to issue from wharf-houses as men started on foot up the shore of ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price

... no business in the water, but if you start to go in swimming, go in all over. Don't be one of those chappies who prance along the beach, shivering and showing their skinny shapes, and then dabble their feet in the surf, pour a little sand in their hair, and ...
— Old Gorgon Graham - More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer

... nursery, education, board and lodging, vaccination, medical attendance, medicine, public worship, amusements, and interment. It furnishes and maintains its own museums, parks, art galleries, libraries, concert-halls, roads, bridges, markets, slaughterhouses, fire-engines, lighthouses, pilots, ferries, surf-boats, steam-tugs, life-boats, cemeteries, public baths, washhouses, pounds, harbours, piers, wharves, hospitals, dispensaries, gas-works, water-works, tramways, telegraph-cables, allotments, cow-meadows, artisans' dwellings, schools, churches, and reading-rooms. ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson

... the lonely forests the mind of the visitor is involuntarily carried back to the scenes that took place there, as well as to the actors who centuries ago passed away. Now silence broods over the place once so active with life, and nothing but nature remains, while the distant surf is ever sounding an everlasting requiem to the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... of storm, the waves wash against this bank, undermine it, sweep away the pieces which tumble down, leaving the gold on the beach. The gold is in very fine particles, and it moves with the heavier sand, which alters its position frequently under the influence of the waves and surf. One day, the beach will have six feet depth of sand; the next, there will be nothing save bare rocks. The sand differs greatly in richness at various times: one day, it will be full of golden specks; a few days later, at the same place it will be barren. The sand in the mean time has ...
— Hittel on Gold Mines and Mining • John S. Hittell

... and a painful experience for the invalid. But to sit aloft one's self in the pure air and under the unclouded dome of heaven, and thus look down on the submergence of the valley, was strangely different and even delightful to the eyes. Far away were hilltops like little islands. Nearer, a smoky surf beat about the foot of precipices and poured into all the coves of these rough mountains. The colour of that fog ocean was a thing never to be forgotten. For an instant, among the Hebrides and just about sundown, I have seen something like it on the sea itself. But the white was not so opaline; ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson

... shown by Captain Savage could have saved the ship and her crew. We had chased a convoy of vessels to the bottom of the bay: the wind was very fresh when we hauled off, after running them on shore, and the surf on the beach even at that time was so great, that they were certain to go to pieces before they could be got afloat again. We were obliged to double-reef the topsails as soon as we hauled to the wind, and the weather looked very threatening. In an hour afterwards, the ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat

... The ship moved gently onward. The monotonous cry of the leadsman in the chains was the only sound audible. The soundings were indicating shoaler water, although the murmuring of the surf had been left far astern. The almost imperceptible darkening of the mist on either beam seemed to show that the Excelsior was entering some land-locked passage. The movement of the vessel slackened, the tide was ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte

... higher ground. He sat down beside a stunted, leaning fir and watched his boat go. It was soon done. A bigger sea than most tore the battered hull loose, lifted it high, let it drop. The crack of breaking timbers cut through the boom of the surf. The next sea swept the rock clear, and the broken, twisted hull floated awash. Caught in the tidal eddy it began its slow journey to join the vast accumulation of ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... beeves are good, And men have quaint, old-fashioned ways, And every burn has ballad lore, And every hamlet has its song, And on its surf-beat, rocky shore The eerie legend lingers long. Old customs live there, unaware That they are garments cast away, And what of light is lingering there Is lingering light ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson

... look, his eyes sparkled once more. Go back to the Life-saving Station where he had worked in his lusty youth—back to the sound of the surf upon the shore, back to the pines and cedars of the Beach, out of the bondage of dry old lavender to the goodly fragrance of balsam and sea-salt! Back to ...
— Old Lady Number 31 • Louise Forsslund

... Some showed groups of stalwart, immaculately clad young gods lolling indolently on tropical shores, with a splendor of palms overhead, and a sparkling blue sea in the distance. Others depicted a group of white-clad men wading knee-deep in the surf as they laughingly landed a cutter on the sandy beach. There was a particularly fascinating one showing two barefooted young chaps on a wave-swept raft engaged in that delightfully perilous task known as signaling. Another ...
— Buttered Side Down • Edna Ferber

... tells it at all, in the following sentence: "On the 7th of March, the fleet with Scott's army came to anchor a few miles south of Vera Cruz, and two days later he landed his whole force—nearly twelve thousand men—by means of surf-boats." A writer in a recent number of The Army and Navy Journal says General Worth's Division of 4,500 men were landed in one hour, and the whole force was landed in six hours, without accident or ...
— The Colored Regulars in the United States Army • T. G. Steward

... hard," continued Miss Adair, gathering courage, and glancing from under the surf of her hair at her listener's impassive face; ...
— The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories • Margaret Collier Graham

... still may thrill me with the old passion, with the first ecstacy—it is Balzac. Upon that rock I built my church, and his great and valid talent saved me often from destruction, saved me from the shoaling waters of new aestheticisms, the putrid mud of naturalism, and the faint and sickly surf of the symbolists. Thinking of him, I could not forget that it is the spirit and not the flesh that is eternal; that, as it was thought that in the first instance gave man speech, so to the end it shall still be thought that shall make speech beautiful and rememberable. The grandeur ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore

... directly afterwards he set them both down on their feet, saying, "Run before the next wave comes." Ten yards farther and they were beyond the reach of the sea. Harold was with them, and directed those who had got ashore to form lines, taking hold of each other's hands, and so to advance far into the surf and grasp their comrades as they were swept up. Many were saved in this way, although some of the rescuers were badly hurt by floating pieces of wreckage, for the vessel had entirely broken up immediately after her course ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty

... black-bearded man who laughed at him in derision as he held high above his head the figure of a little child. Tarzan half started as though to rush through the surf and strike out for the already moving steamer; but realizing the futility of so rash an act he ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... place they had reached was just outside the northern boundaries of Harlem, a sylvan spot still unspoiled by the rude invasion of the flat-house builder. The land, thickly wooded, sloped down sharply to the water, and the perfect quiet was broken only by the washing of the tiny surf against the river bank and the shrill notes of ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein

... entrance, he thought with grateful heart of the friends who had smoothed the way for him. Ah, not for long the fog and slush! The medal carried with it a travelling stipend, and soon the sunlight of his native land for him and her. He should hear the surf wash on the shingly beach and in the deep grottos of which she had sung to him when a child. Had he not promised her this? And had they not many a time laughed for very joy at the prospect, the ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis

... the shore. The sea was breaking round them now; but the brig was almost flat bottomed and drew but little water. All on board hung on to the shrouds and bulwarks, momentarily expecting a crash, but she drove on through the surf until within a hundred yards of the shore. Then as she went down in the trough of a wave there was a mighty crash. The next wave swept her ...
— Bonnie Prince Charlie - A Tale of Fontenoy and Culloden • G. A. Henty

... the mortal maid lies indolent Save one sweet cheek which the cool velvet turf Had touched too rude, tho' all the blooms besprent, One soft arm pillowed. Whiter than the surf ...
— Zophiel - A Poem • Maria Gowen Brooks

... hills had receded, and a wide and slightly undulating plain extended to their feet, some twelve miles back. The captain was going to land, as he had some despatches for the colony, and he invited Frank to accompany him. They did not, as Frank expected, land in a man of war's boat, but in a surf boat, which, upon their hoisting a signal, came out to them. These surf boats are large and very wide and flat. They are paddled by ten or twelve negroes, who sit upon the gunwale. These men work vigorously, and the boats travel at a considerable pace. Each boat has a stroke peculiar to itself. ...
— By Sheer Pluck - A Tale of the Ashanti War • G. A. Henty

... laughing matter, if the wind increases, and a heavy surf breaks on the shore," said Devereux, ...
— Paul Gerrard - The Cabin Boy • W.H.G. Kingston

... and join his workmen on the dikes, and he went. And when the poor fellows toiling there saw that their engineer was coming to help them, they set up a cheer. The engineer had a rope put around him and was lowered down into the surf, and other men came and had ropes put about them, and they were lowered down. And after a while the cry was heard: "More mortar and more blocks of stone!" But there were no more. "Now," said the Holland engineer, "men, take off your clothes!" and they took them off, and they stopped up the holes ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various

... to that old worthy, who was just poking his head up out of the forecastle,—"Trull, is that noise the surf?" ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens

... of young ACTAEON. The latter, who was a respectable, though rather reckless young man, was once walking along the beach, when he suddenly came upon DIANA and several female friends in the act of taking the surf. Envious to behold the extremes of boniness, which then, as now, doubtless characterized the strong-minded females, he concealed himself in a neighboring bathing-house, and brought his opera-glass to bear on the group. He was, however, discovered, and DIANA and her friends were so indignant ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 12 , June 18,1870 • Various

... 12 was not managed according to Shirley's written instructions; nor was the siege. Shirley had been playing a little war game in his study, with all the inconvenient obstacles left out—the wind, the weather, the crashing surf in Gabarus Bay, the rocks and bogs of the surrounding country, the difficulties of entering a narrow-necked harbour under a combination of end-on and broadside fire, the terrible lee shore off the islands, reefs, and Lighthouse Point, ...
— The Great Fortress - A Chronicle of Louisbourg 1720-1760 • William Wood

... forest bird's start, But he said, as he mounted his steed to depart, "Nay, fear not, but trust to the chief for thy guide, And the light of the morrow shall see thee my bride." Why faltered the words ere the sentence was o'er? Why trembled each heart like the surf on the shore? In a marvellous legend of old it is said, That the cross where the Holy One suffered and bled Was built of the aspen, whose pale silver leaf, Has ever more quivered with horror and grief; And e'er since the hour, when thy pinion of light Was sullied ...
— Indian Legends and Other Poems • Mary Gardiner Horsford

... bony, ribby regions of the earth, where at the base of high broken cliffs masses of rock lie strewn in fantastic groupings upon the plain, you will often discover images as of the petrified forms of the Leviathan partly merged in grass, which of a windy day breaks against them in a surf of green surges. Then, again, in mountainous countries where the traveller is continually girdled by amphitheatrical heights; here and there from some lucky point of view you will catch passing glimpses of the profiles of whales defined along the undulating ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville

... some sort of a noise," said Flint, rising from his recumbent position. "But I can make nothing of what I hear. If there was a fresh breeze, I should say that it was the surf." ...
— Within The Enemy's Lines - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic

... lighted another lamp and set it in the window. It was a quarter before twelve when her trembling hands failed her, and she laid down her knitting and walked to the front door. The northeast wind whipped her in the face, and she could hear the surf at Breakers' Edge. The pathway of light from the window lay upon a figure by the gate. A voice came out of the stillness. It ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown

... below the sea wall, yearning for Zanzibar, he saw a man running, from time to time throwing something into the sea, and another man running silently in pursuit with a knife in his hand. He waded along the shore, and presently found in the surf a bag of gold-dust. Next morning he slipped aboard a north-bound coaster. Instead of calling at Zanzibar, this time ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman

... heavy batteries were mounted) would have had a fair chance of escape, with a good start, while the gun-brig was picking up her boat. Unless, indeed, a shot from the Delia should carry away an important spar, which was not very likely at night, and with a quick surf to baffle gunnery. However, none of these things came to pass, and so the chances ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore

... north-easternmost point of the land, called by the French, Cape Naturaliste, we had nearly run ashore from the darkness of the night, and the little elevation of the land. Our sounding in seven fathoms was the first indication of danger; and, on listening attentively, the noise of the surf upon ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King

... been already made. The surf was breaking over the ledges in all directions, and it was with the utmost difficulty that they succeeded in getting clear out into deep water. A breeze which had sprung up from the east, tended to raise the sea a little, but ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne

... the glimmering lights of a poor fishing-village to fascinate me? Far below, a mile perhaps, I behold them in the darkness and the storm like some phosphorescence of the beach; I see the pale tossing of the surf beside them; I hear the continuous roar borne up and softened about these heights; and this is night at Taormina. There is a weirdness in the scene—the feeling without the reality of mystery; and at evening, I know not why, I cannot sleep without stepping upon the terrace or peering through the ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry

... of such lovely isles," said Cis. "The sea, he said, is blue, bluer than we can conceive, with white waves of dazzling surf, breaking on islands fringed with white shells and coral, and with palms, their tops like the biggest ferns in the brake, and laden with red golden fruit as big as goose eggs. And the birds! O madam, my mother, the birds! They are ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge

... if I live till Mardi be forgotten by Mardi, I shall not forget the sight that greeted us, as we drew nigh the shores of this same island of Ohonoo; for was not all Ohonoo bathing in the surf of ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville

... that seemed to be the breathing of the ocean. But such sounds did not disturb the universal stillness of the hour; neither did the gambols of yonder group of seals and walruses that were at play round some fantastic blocks of ice; nor did the soft murmur of the swell that broke in surf at the foot of yonder iceberg, whose blue sides were seamed with a thousand watercourses, and whose jagged pinnacles rose up like needles of steel into the ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne

... outside a big reef which stretched between her and the shore; her hull was almost hidden by the surf which broke over her, the only dry place on her being the fore-top, which was crowded with sailors; and it was evident that she must soon break up under the battering seas ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace

... to, and my father's mansions razed to the ground, and himself falls at the altar built by the God, slain by the blood-polluted son of Achilles, the friend of my father slays me, wretched man, for the sake of my gold, and having slain me threw me into the surf of the sea, that he might possess the gold himself in his palace. But I am exposed on the shore, at another time on the ocean's surge, borne about by many ebbings and flowings of the waves, unwept, unburied; but at present I am hastening on my dear mother's account, having ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides

... brought you well lapped up i' my shawl an' William Shearman—that was Thomas Shearman's son, feyther to William an' Tom as lives over yonder at Pulwick village—well, William was standin' in 's great sea-boots ready to carry her through th' surf into the boat; an' Mester Adrian—Sir Adrian, I mean—stood it might be here, miss, an' there was Renny, an' yon were th' t'other gentry. Well, Madam stopped an' took you out o' my arms, an' hugged you to her breast—an' then she ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle

... dearth of "C's." Not more than a dozen of the crowded Monarchic's passengers were dancing with impatience beneath the third letter of the alphabet, and Mr. Rolls, Jr., walked straight up to tall Miss Child without being beaten back by a surf of "C's." To be sure, Miss Carroll was under the same letter, and observed the approach of Peter with interest, if not surprise; but she was seated on a trunk at some distance ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson

... a club, or shot by an arrow or a bullet, the cause of death is clearly the malignity of persons using these weapons; and so it is easy to think that a man killed by the falling of a tree, or by the upsetting of a canoe in the surf, or in a whirlpool in the river is also a victim of some being using these things as weapons. For a man holding this view, it seems both natural and easy to regard disease as a manifestation of the wrath of some invisible ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen

... draught itself being less noticeable than the way in which it smoothed down the heavy sea running. Though the cold did not lift, the weather grew tolerable once more: and each time I crossed the townplace[2] with a lamb in my arms, I heard the surf running lower and lower in the porth ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... thing about this talking, which you forget. It shapes our thoughts for us;—the waves of conversation roll them as the surf rolls the pebbles on the shore. Let me modify the image a little. I rough out my thoughts in talk as an artist models in clay. Spoken language is so plastic,—you can pat and coax, and spread and shave, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various

... Sometimes at the opera she took on a gossamer tint from the singer's face, and longer ago than he could afford operas, he had understood that all the beauty of the world, bursting apple buds, the great curve of the surf that set the beaches trembling, derived somehow its pertinence from her. Now at the age of forty he had ceased to think very much about ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin

... "Pompeii of Denmark," sand, not lava, being answerable for this entombment. It is said that the village which surrounded the church was buried by a sandstorm in the fourteenth century. This scene of desolation, on a windy day, when the "sand fiend" revels and riots, is best left to the booming surf and avoided by those who do not wish to ...
— Denmark • M. Pearson Thomson

... since it looked as if Mayne was off his course. The swell broke angrily ahead, but in one place, some distance to one side, the wall of forest looked less solid than the rest. A roar came out of the mist and Kit knew it was the beat of surf on a hidden beach. This told him where he was, because a sandy key protected the mouth of the lagoon; but he doubted if Mayne could get round the point. The tide was carrying the vessel on and there was ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss

... swinging lazily in, and the yawl rose to it sleepily, with a long, slow movement. The distant roar of the surf upon the Finisterre coast rose in the peaceful atmosphere like a lullaby. The holy calm of sunset, the hush of lowering night, and the presence of the only man who had ever drawn him with the strange, unaccountable bond that we call sympathy, ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman

... while bathing in the surf are said to experience but little pain. In fact, their Sufferings ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 11, June 11, 1870 • Various

... from the coast of Brazil, is but a spot upon the ocean. On most maps it is not even a spot. Except by birds, turtles, and hideous land-crabs, it is uninhabited; and against the advances of man its shores are fortified with cruel ridges of coral, jagged limestone rocks, and a tremendous towering surf which, even in a dead calm, beats many feet high ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis

... to time he gazed out through the open window, off toward the whispering lines of surf on the eastern shores of Staten Island—the surf forever talking, forever striving to give its mystic message to the unheeding ear of man. And as he gazed, his blue eyes narrowed with the intensity of his thought. Once, as though some sudden understanding had come ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England

... hour of very rough walking he heard a sound which made him stop instantly and listen. At first he thought it might be the wind in the trees, but soon his practised ear told him that it was the sound of the surf upon the beach. Without the slightest hesitation, he made his way as quickly as possible towards the ...
— Kate Bonnet - The Romance of a Pirate's Daughter • Frank R. Stockton

... after a glance at Vane's face, he kept silent. After all, Vane was leader; and when he looked as he did then, he usually resented advice. The mouth of the bay grew wider, until Carroll could see most of the forest-girt shore on one side of it; but the surf upon the point was growing unpleasantly near. Wisps of spray whirled away from it and vanished among the scrubby firs clinging to the fissured crags behind. The sloop, however, was going to windward, for Vane was ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss

... Tunis Latham and the girl posing as Ida May Bostwick. Two young people can tell a great deal to each other under certain circumstances in the mid-watch of a starlit night. The lap, lap of the wavelets whispering against the schooner's hull, the drone of the surf on a distant bar, and the sounds of insect life from the shore were accompaniments to ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper

... mighty in arms and foison of the clod; Oenotrian men dwelt therein; now rumour is that a younger race from their captain's name have called it Italy. Thither lay our course . . . when Orion rising on us through the cloudrack with sudden surf bore us on blind shoals, and scattered us afar with his boisterous gales and whelming brine over waves and trackless reefs. To these your coasts we a scanty remnant floated up. What race of men, what land how barbarous soever, allows such a custom for ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil

... all faced with granite bowlders brought from Finland; at their outer termination the work is of a more durable kind, the facing is made of squared blocks of granite, so that it may stand the heavy surf which at times is raised by a west wind in the Gulf. These embankments, as already stated, extend over a space of nearly six miles, and represent a mass of work to which there is no counterpart in the Suez Canal; nor does the plan of the new Manchester ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various

... blue sky yielded to the on-sweep of clouds. Like angry surf the pale gleams of gray, amid the purple of that scudding front, swept beyond the eastern rampart of the valley. The purple deepened to black. Broad sheets of lightning flared over the western wall. There were not yet any ropes or zigzag streaks darting ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey

... grateful heart of the friends who had smoothed the way for him. Ah, not for long the fog and slush! The medal carried with it a travelling stipend, and soon the sunlight of his native land for him and her. He should hear the surf wash on the shingly beach and in the deep grottos of which she had sung to him when a child. Had he not promised her this? And had they not many a time laughed for very joy at the prospect, the ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis

... of the Noirmont fishermen," he reported. "He said it is the worst gale in thirty years and when the weather clears the surf will be ...
— The Spanish Chest • Edna A. Brown

... and hard as a pavement, gave no sound to his careless steps; and thus it was that he came silently upon the one woman as she stood beside the silver surf. Had he seen her first he would have slunk past in the landward shadows; but, recognizing his tall form, she called and he came, while it seemed that his lungs grew suddenly constricted, as though bound about with steel hoops. ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach

... low but steep, the waters appeared to be deep, and a heavy surf dashed upon the island, and threw up its spray far over the mound. He was so near that he could distinguish the pebbles on the beach, and could see beyond the mound a long, flat surface ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille

... was charged with electricity. A great roar of cheering went up from below like the roaring of surf, and it was followed by a clapping of hands like the running of the sea off a shingly beach after the boom ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine

... remaining about half an hour, they again proceeded, and at seven in the evening arrived in the second Brass River, which was a large branch of the Quorra. They kept their course down it about due south, and half an hour afterwards, Lander heard the welcome sound of the surf on the beach. They still continued onwards, and at a quarter before eight in the evening, they made their canoe fast to a tree for the night, on the west ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish

... many little ports, all of them very pretty and picturesque; little quiet basins of blue water, with the houses scattered about along the hill sides, and half hidden by foliage; the white surf thundering outside, and the surface, inside, glassy smooth. Our last port in Cuba was Santiago, since made memorable as the scene of the murder of the gallant and unfortunate Fry, and his companions in misfortune. Should these lines ever meet the eye of ...
— The Narrative of a Blockade-Runner • John Wilkinson

... upon the beautiful level sandy beach above the Cliff House, and within twenty paces of the snowy surf of the broad Pacific Ocean, which was spotted here and there with monstrous sea-lions attracted shoreward by curiosity concerning the vast multitude of ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various

... Tom. He was washed up on the beach among the wreckage, in a great wooden box which had been securely tied around with a rope and lashed between two spars—apparently for better protection in beating through the surf. Matt Abrahamson thought he had found something of more than usual value when he came upon this chest; but when he cut the cords and broke open the box with his broadax, he could not have been more astonished had he beheld a salamander instead of a baby of nine or ten ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard Pyle

... took on color and variety, till from the deck one could make out the swell of their contours and distinguish the hues of the wild vegetation that clothed them. The yellow of a beach and a snowy gleam of surf showed at their feet, and then, dead ahead and still far away, they opened, and in the gap there was visible the still shining blue of water that ran inland and lay ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon

... We sailed right in, till we were within ten yards of the sands, and there we moored the lugger by the head and stern, so that her freight could be discharged. The men on the beach waded out through the surf (though it took them up to the armpits), and the men in the lugger passed the kegs and boxes to them. Waves which were unusually big would knock down the men in the water, burden and all, and then there would be laughter from all hands, and grumbles from the victim. I ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield

... reached down from his cot for his slippers, and first clapped them together before placing them upon his slim feet. Then he arose, stepped out upon his verandah, and thought awhile. Darkness everywhere, and the noise of the surf beating within the enclosed crescent of the harbour. Over all, a great heat, tinged with a damp coolness, a coolness which was sinister. And standing upon his verandah, came rushing over him the agony of his wasted life. His prisoner life upon this lonely island in the Southern ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte

... to a little bay, south-west from their ships, in search of water: the surf prevented their landing, but the carpenter swam on shore; and near four remarkable trees, standing in the form of a crescent, he erected a post, on which a compass was carved, and left the Prince's flag flying upon it.[4] "When the said carpenter had done this in the sight of me, Abel ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West

... flows into the sea. From the school-house we could often catch the hum of the waves breaking lazily along the shore of Colveston Bay; or, if the wind blew hard from the sea, it carried with it the roar of the breakers on the bar mouth, and the distant thunder of the surf on the ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed

... five hundred miles northeast of Cuddalore, whence he would have a fair wind to proceed when he wished. It was his purpose to attack not only the coasting vessels but the English factories on shore as well, the surf being now often moderate; but learning on the 12th, from an English prize, the important and discouraging news of Hyder Ali's death, he gave up all minor operations, and sailed at once for Cuddalore, ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan

... of relative values, too simple to strive to keep simple, unself-conscious, and with a hungry heart, she was not a spectator, half ashamed of being amused. She was Coney Island! Her heart a shoot the chutes for sheer swoops of joy, her eyes full of confetti points, the surf creaming no ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst

... the time. It was five o'clock. He stretched out his hand to Arnold Bentham, who met and shook it weakly; and both gazed at me, in their eyes extending that same hand-clasp. It was farewell, I knew; for what chance had creatures so feeble as we to win alive over those surf-battered rocks to the higher ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London

... which had fallen from the wretched man's shoulders as the fray began, bound it about the waist by the scarf, to which he attached firmly an immense block of stone, which lay at the brink of the fearful well, which was now—for the tide was up—brimful of white boiling surf, and holding his breath atween resolution and abhorrence, hurled it into ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various

... at least the Hawaii National Park has the advantage over the Alaskan park because it involves the life and scenery of the tropics. We can find snow-crowned mountains and winding glaciers at home, but not equatorial jungles, sandalwood groves, and surf-riding. ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard

... stay in this port, a singular fact occurred. A violent surf broke over the shore, and prevented the shore-boats from reaching the strand. Although he was provided with a life-belt, one of the sailors, who could not swim, refused to jump into the sea to reach the boat. Threatened with being left alone on ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne

... any of them. We went to the house of a lady who was a friend of Mr. Cholott, and she gave us a splendid room, that looked right out over the harbor. We could see the islands, and the light-house, and the bar with the surf outside, and even get a glimpse of the ocean. We saw the "Tigris" going out over the bar. The captain wanted to get out on the same tide he came in on, and he did not lose any time. As soon as she got fairly out to sea, we hurried down, to go to the fort. But first, ...
— A Jolly Fellowship • Frank R. Stockton

... the hour when the sun passes his noon-tide halt and the ploughlands are just being shadowed by the rocks, as the sun slopes towards the evening dusk, at that hour all the heroes spread leaves thickly upon the sand and lay down in rows in front of the hoary surf-line; and near them were spread vast stores of viands and sweet wine, which the cupbearers had drawn off in pitchers; afterwards they told tales one to another in turn, such as youths often tell when at ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius

... Giorgione would have set them, wild and fragrant, among their leaves, in her hand. Between his fairness, and Sir Joshua's May-fairness, there is a strange, impassable limit—as of the white reef that in Pacific isles encircles their inner lakelets, and shuts them from the surf and sound of sea. Clear and calm they rest, reflecting fringed shadows of the palm-trees, and the passing of fretted clouds across their own sweet circle of blue sky. But beyond, and round and round their coral bar, lies the blue of sea and ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... Lissa, on the Dalmatian coast. Though Lissa is a strong position, the usual comparison of it with Gibraltar is exaggerated. It ought to have been possible to land the Italian troops which Persano had with him under cover of his guns, and to take the island before Tegethoff came up. The surf caused by the rough weather, to which he chiefly attributed his failure, would not have proved an insuperable obstacle had the ships' crews been exercised in ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco

... nowhere else. And then—most ideal place of all for a child—there was a fascinating rocky island in the sea, connected by a neck of twenty yards of pebble covered hardly at high water; and on one side of this pebble isthmus was the full surf of the sea, and on the other the quiet ripple of the waters of the bay. But such an island! All their own to colonize and govern, and separated from home by just ...
— Pirate Gold • Frederic Jesup Stimson

... the first lesson out of his profound knowledge of life, her interest would break away continually, despite her honest efforts to pin it down to the facts so patiently elucidated for her. Recurrently she heard: "I don't know; I really don't know." It was curiously like the intermittent murmur of the surf, those weird Sundays, when her father paused for breath to launch additional damnation for those who disobeyed the Word. "I don't know; I ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath

... insecurely fastened that it threatened to come adrift every instant. The old man grinned as he recognised Denison; then, pipe in mouth, he went boldly out through the passage between the lines of roaring surf ...
— The Colonial Mortuary Bard; "'Reo," The Fisherman; and The Black Bream Of Australia - 1901 • Louis Becke

... 10th of June the vessel lay to off Madras; and Macaulay had his first introduction to the people for whom he was appointed to legislate in the person of a boatman who pulled through the surf on his raft. "He came on board with nothing on him but a pointed yellow cap, and walked among us with a self-possession and civility which, coupled with his colour and his nakedness, nearly made me die of laughing." This gentleman was soon ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan

... shouting down the bank, and she took flight into her dressing-room, there to sit staring at the wall, till the advent of Aunt Pen forced her to resume the business of the hour by assuming her aquatic attire and stealing shyly down into the surf. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... broke forth again, and yet again, in long bursts of cheering, which were echoed from without by the multitudes in the street and great square Place, and came rolling through the open windows in waves of sound like the beating of the surf upon ...
— A Heroine of France • Evelyn Everett-Green

... alone, she fancied now, for it was nearly seven o'clock. Nothing remained but to climb down again and follow him. It was getting full late to be out by herself on the island. And tide was coming in, and the surf was getting strong—Atlantic swell from the ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen

... land on both boards, and a great surf running up in the firth. They cast anchor outside the breakers, and the wind began to fall; and next morning it was calm. Then they see thirteen ships coming out ...
— Njal's Saga • Unknown Icelanders

... is the ivy o'er Alulvan, And crisp with summer-heat its turf; Far, far across its empty pastures Alulvan's sands are white with surf: And he himself is grey as ...
— Songs of Childhood • Walter de la Mare

... the steed with his nostril all wide, But through it there rolled not the breath of his pride: And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf, And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various

... rude to me; The eye withdraws in horror from yon mountains rude and bare, Where flag of green nor tree displays, nor blushes flow'ret fair. And how shall bark so frail as mine that beetling beach come near, Where rages betwixt cliff and surf the battle-din of fear? It seems as, like a rocking hull, that Island of the main Were shaken from its basement, and creaking with the strain! But the siege of waters nought prevails 'gainst giant Hirt the grim, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... of Kennedy's fate had been eagerly and incautiously communicated at Ellangowan, with the gratuitous addition, that, doubtless, "he had drawn the Young Laird over the craig with him, though the tide had swept away the child's body—he was light, puir thing, and would flee farther into the surf." ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott

... forgetting the more serious business which had brought us to Crescent Beach. While we children disported ourselves like mermaids and mermen in the surf, our respective fathers dispensed cold lemonade, hot peanuts, and pink popcorn, and piled up our respective fortunes, nickel by nickel, penny by penny. I was very proud of my connection with the public life of the beach. I admired greatly our shining soda fountain, the ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin

... always needs corpses. She makes ointments out of them, or perhaps she eats them. On moonlight nights she sits in the surf, where it is whitest, and the spray dashes over her. They say that she sits and searches for ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof

... lady. "She is the only person who lets me enjoy things, and now I cannot enjoy them in her absence. Yesterday I drove alone over the three beaches, and left her at home with a dress-maker. Never did I see so many lines of surf; but they only seemed to me like some of Kate's ball-dresses, with the prevailing flounces, six deep. I was so enraged that she was not there, I wished to cover my face with my handkerchief. By the third beach I ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... a beautiful beach, and surf bathing, and a boardwalk miles long, and piers, and merry-go-rounds, and shops, and hot sausages, and moving-pictures, and rolling-chairs, and lovely music, and ice-cream waffles, and orangeade, and popcorn. Your ...
— Miss Gibbie Gault • Kate Langley Bosher

... his own safety, plunged into the boiling surf on one of those nights of terror so common to that coast, rescued a half-dead sailor, carried him to his father's house, and brought him back to a life of usefulness that gave the world a record of imperishable value. For the half-drowned ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok

... a surf like that breaking on a lee-shore under your lee can do!" observed an old salt, who stood holding on to the bulwarks with one hand, while he searched for a quid of ...
— The Rival Crusoes • W.H.G. Kingston

... through the surf, beside Its rocks of gray upon the coming tide; And lightly is it stranded on the shore Of pure and silver shells, that lie before, Glittering in the glory of the sun; And Julio hath landed him, like one That aileth of some wild and weary pest; And Agathe is folded ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart

... time they sat in an apple tree and looked at the great lake, and watched the gulls swooping and soaring through the air. Many boats were plowing through the water, and many people were strolling along the beach or swimming in the surf. ...
— Exciting Adventures of Mister Robert Robin • Ben Field

... rounded hills. Slowly finer points appeared, the ridge of mountains showed details and we could recognize the tops of the giant banyan trees, towering above the forest as a cathedral does over the houses of a city. We saw the surf, breaking in the coral cliffs of flat shores, found the entrance to the wide bay, noticed the palms with elegantly curved trunks bending over the beach, and unexpectedly entered the lagoon, that shone in the bright ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser

... the timber-line it was black, black not only with the gloom of night, but with the concentrated darkness of spruce and balsam and a sky so low and thick that one could almost hear the wailing swish of it overhead like the steady sobbing of surf on a seashore. It was black, save for the small circles of light made by the Eskimo fires, about which half a hundred of the little brown men sat or crouched. The masters of the camp were all awake, but twice as many dogs, exhausted and footsore, lay curled in heaps, as inanimate ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood

... little or no use in guiding her course. Squall after squall struck the little schooner; and, as she heeled over, it sometimes appeared that she would never again rise, or be able to beat out through the tremendous surf which came rolling in. At length Mr Kingston judged it wise to shorten sail, which he forthwith did, having set only his mainsail, jib, and fore-and-aft foresail, a fore-trysail. He also sent a good hand on the fore-yard to ...
— Our Sailors - Gallant Deeds of the British Navy during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston

... nearer, the whole white beach was distinctly seen; and above it a narrow belt of land of a light clay colour, surrounding a perfectly smooth lagoon of a beautiful blue tint; while against the outer belt the surf was breaking with terrific force. The highest part of the land appeared to be about ten or twelve feet above the level of the sea; and we calculated that the belt between the sea and the lagoon was ...
— Twice Lost • W.H.G. Kingston

... paused and looked up and down the rapids rushing down the slope in all their wild variety, with the white crests of breaking surf, the dark massiveness of heavy-climbing waves, the fleet, smooth sweep of currents over broad shelves of sunken rock, the dizzy ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... For often as we sleep on Christmas eve the ringing of bells comes to us. Marriage peal and funeral knell, chimes and tolling, clash of summons and measured stroke, dying noises from a dead past swelling and sinking, sinking and swelling, like falling and failing surf on a wreck-strewn beach. Ah, me! where be the ships, the proud, white-sailed ships, the rich-laden ships, whose broken timbers and splintered spars lie now dank, weed-grown, sand-covered, on that sorrowful shore, on that mournfully resounding shore ...
— Holiday Tales - Christmas in the Adirondacks • W. H. H. Murray

... to the heave of the slight ground-swell, were the three white buoys left by the Spaniards to mark the sunken boats and slipped cable; and far away on the beach, just within the western point, was something long and round, which rolled in the gentle surf and glistened in the sunlight. He knew nothing of buoys, but they relieved his loneliness; they were signs of human beings, who must have placed him there with the bread and water, and who might come ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson

... tempest had continued to blow with increased violence, and its howling and whistling, blended with the roar of the dashing waves and the menacing thunder of the surf, drowned the elders' shouts of command, the terrified shrieks of the children, the lowing and bleating of the trembling herds, and the whining of the dogs. Ephraim's voice could be heard only by those nearest and, moreover, many of the torches were extinguished, while others were kept ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... were eagerly seeking him, when he returned among them, dripping and—empty-handed. He had reached the ship, he said, with another; found the box, and trusted himself alone with it to the sea. But in the surf he had to abandon it to save himself. It had perhaps drifted ashore, and might be found; for himself, he abandoned his claim to the reward. Had he looked abashed or mortified, Jenny felt that she might have relented, but the braggart was as all-satisfied, as confident and boastful as ever. Nevertheless, ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... warbling of birds mingled with the distant songs of the ferrymen.[4] Other landscape poems, as they may be called, remarkable for their clear and vivid portraiture, are that of Mnasalcas,[5] the low shore with its bright surf, and the temple with its poplars round which the sea-fowl hover and cry, and that of Anyte,[6] the windy orchard-close near the grey colourless coast, with the well and the Hermes standing over it at the crossways. But such epigrams always stop short of the description of natural objects ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail

... discharge of a great double-shotted gun. It could not but be that, humble as his walk was, and his years so few, his fevered mind should leap into the questions of the hour like a naked boy into the surf. He made mistakes, sometimes in a childish, sometimes in an older way, some against most worthy things. But withal he managed to keep the main direction of truth, after his own young way of thinking and telling it. He had no such power to formulate his ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable

... straight across the high ground between Dry Creek and Cold Spring Coulee when he first saw it plainly, and he altered his course a trifle. The roar of it came faintly on the wind, like the sound of storm-beaten surf pounding heavily upon a sand bar when the tide is out, except that this roar was continuous, and was full of sharp cracklings and sputterings; and there was also the red line of flame to ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower

... blazing already high up in the heavens, whose bright blue vault was unflecked by a scrap of cloud to temper the solar rays, while a brisk breeze, blowing in from the south-west, gave a feeling of freshness to the air and raised a little wave of surf, that broke on the beach with a rippling splash far astern; the cooing of the doves in the distance chiming in musically with the lisp of the ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson

... when the frigate nigh To Norway's land Distress-guns was firing, the surf running high With sea-weed and sand. To help from the harbor men put out boats, But they turn back, ... The frigate toward Germany drifting floats, A broken wrack! What once had been ours overboard was strown, ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson

... that all good darkies when they die go to Guinea, and one of these was very touching and strange. He had been brought as a slave-child to South Carolina, but was always haunted by the memory of a group of cocoa-palms by a place where the wild white surf of the ocean bounded up to the shore—a rock, sunshine, and sand. There he declared his soul would go. He was a Voodoo, and a man of ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland

... and the captain well knew that in no way could the dread disease be kept away better than by constant exercise on the sands of the seashore. The sailors entered heartily into their captain's plans, and spent hours racing on the beach, swimming in the surf, and wandering ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot

... at sea or on shore, in cottage window or at masthead or in lighthouse or on lightship a twinkling diamond point. A moon, apparently as big as a barrel-head, hung up in the east and below it a carpet of cold fire, of dancing, spangled silver spread upon the ocean. The sound of the surf, distant, soothing; and for the rest quiet and the fragrance of the ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln

... half-caste pointed out beyond the frothing surf that marked the position of the reef constituting one of the stronghold's main defences. Away beyond it, a mile or so distant, a sail was standing out to sea. "There she go," ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini

... of rocks, which forms the only roadstead at Falkenborg, circles in the shape of a horse-shoe, having but one inlet. It is sunk half a foot under water, so that a heavy surf is always broken before it reaches a vessel lying in the centre of this curious bay. The channel into it is not more than twenty or thirty ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross

... silver and gold. Night after night of sparkling cold, Orion lifts his tangled feet From where the tossing branches beat In a fine surf against the sky. So the trance ended, and we grew Restless, we knew not how or why; And there were sudden gusts that blew Our dreaming banners into storm; We wore the uncertain crumbling form Of a brown swirl of windy leaves, A phantom shape that stirs and heaves Shuddering from earth, ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley

... and of peril was before them. As the day advanced, the wind increased to almost a gale. The waves frequently broke into the boat, drenching them to the skin, and glazing the boat, ropes, and clothing with a coat of ice. The surf, dashing upon the shore, rendered landing impossible, and they sought in vain for any creek or cove where they could find shelter. The short afternoon was fast passing away, and a terrible night was before them. A huge billow, ...
— King Philip - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott

... dear, was it yesterday We heard the sweet bells over the bay? In the caverns where we lay, Through the surf and through the swell, The far-off sound of a silver bell? Sand-strewn caverns, cool and deep, Where the winds are all asleep; Where the spent lights quiver and gleam, Where the salt weed sways in the stream, Where the sea beasts, ranged all around, Feed in ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester

... nm Disputes: none Climate: subtropical, tempered by easterly tradewinds, relatively low humidity, little seasonal temperature variation; rainy season May to November Terrain: mostly hilly to rugged and mountainous with little level land Natural resources: sun, sand, sea, surf Land use: arable land 15%; permanent crops 6%; meadows and pastures 26%; forest and woodland 6%; other 47% Environment: rarely affected by hurricanes; subject to frequent severe droughts, floods, earthquakes; lack of natural freshwater resources Note: ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... the guns," said the Adjutant, and both stood silent a moment listening to the long, deep, rolling thunder that boomed steady and unbroken as surf on a distant beach. "And they're our guns too, mostly," went on the Adjutant. "I suppose we're firing more shells in an ordinary trench-war-routine day now than we dared fire in a month this time last year. Last year we were short of shells, the year before we were short of guns ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)

... Ostia and Castle Fusano. A million birds sang; the woods teemed with blossoms; the sod grew green hourly over the graves of the mighty Past; the surf rushed in on a fair shore; the Tiber majestically retreated to carry inland her share from the treasures of the deep; the sea-breezes burnt my face, but revived my heart. I felt the calm of thought, the sublime hopes of the future, nature, man,—so ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... put the rest of the fish into the pocket of my coat, and turned my thoughts to the breakers on the bar. Soon it was evident to me that I could not pass them standing in my barrel, so I hastened to upset myself into the water and to climb astride of it. Presently we were in the surf, and I had much ado to cling on, but the tide bore me forward bravely, and in half an hour more the breakers were past, and I was in the mouth of the great river. Now fortune favoured me still further, for I found a piece of wood floating on the stream ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard

... a long tongue of land, beaten upon by white rollers of surf, that seemed as if they strove to overwhelm the old forts set far above their reach. A rocky island too, rising darkly out of a golden sea; and then we entered the mouth of a wonderful bay, like ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... Philippines, the poorest soil seems to give nourishment to the cocoanut-palm; indeed, it thrives best on, or near, the sea-shore, as close to the sea as where the beach is fringed by the surf at high tide. The common cocoanut-palm attains a height of about sixty feet, but there is also a dwarf palm with the stem sometimes no taller than four feet at full growth, which also bears fruit, although less plentifully. A grove of these is a ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman

... hour of noon, when I came, all tattered and wayworn, to the summit of a steep descent, and looked below me on the sea. About all the coast, the surf, roused by the tornado of the night, beat with a particular fury and made a fringe of snow. Close at my feet, I saw a haven, set in precipitous and palm- crowned bluffs of rock. Just outside, a ship was heaving on the surge, so trimly sparred, so glossily ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson

... the Pitons, and enter another little craterine harbor, to cast anchor before the village of Choi-seul. It lies on a ledge above the beach and under high hills: we land through a surf, running the boat high up on soft yellowish sand. A delicious saline scent ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn

... three miles the soundings did not show less than three fathoms, with an even sandy bottom, the last mile shoaling gradually to the beach; the landing being easily effected, as there now was but little surf. The shore was found to be generally very sandy, a low flat valley extending from the head of the cove across the isthmus about two miles to Mermaid Strait, where it terminated in a muddy mangrove creek. In about half an hour several wells were found, some containing ...
— Journals of Australian Explorations • A C and F T Gregory

... the south-eastward had blown all day, and raised so much surf on the north side of the port, that our watering there was much impeded; a midshipman and party of men remained on shore with casks all night, and it was not until next evening [MONDAY 23 AUGUST 1802] that the holds ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders

... Don Pagano Said: "That is a strange queer fellow, And most strange his occupation. Came here with but little luggage, Lives here quite alone but happy, Clambers up the steepest mountains, Over cliffs, through surf is strolling, Loves to steal along the sea-shore. Also lately 'mid the ruins Of the villa of Tiberius With the hermits there caroused. What's his business?—He's a German, And who knows what they are doing? But I saw upon his table Heaps of paper written over, Leaving ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel

... little hill called Hutchinson's Hill, you could look over three and a half miles of ground covered with fighting seals; and the surf was dotted all over with the heads of seals hurrying to land and begin their share of the fighting. They fought in the breakers, they fought in the sand, and they fought on the smooth-worn basalt rocks of the nurseries, for they were just as stupid and unaccommodating as men. Their wives ...
— The Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling

... wave of warmth as he leaned into the wind and started to walk. The connection between the Union Hotel and the building he had just left was an arched sidewalk that curved between them, five stories above the sand and surf. ...
— The Man Who Staked the Stars • Charles Dye

... seemed as if there would be no avoidance of it now. The robe and the glittering gauds of which Phorenice had recently despoiled the merchant, drew the eyes of these people with keen attraction. The fishers in the boats paddled into the surf which edged the beach, and leaped overside and left the frail basket-work structures to be spewed up sound or smashed, as chance ordered. And from the houses, and from the filthy lanes between them, poured out hordes of others, women mixed with the men, ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne

... is singularly deficient in good harbours. Those of the desert region are only slight indentations in a remarkably uniform coast-line, sheltered on one side by a point of land, or small island. The landings are generally dangerous because of the surf, and the anchorages are unsafe from storms on the unprotected side. Among the most frequented of these are Valparaiso, Coquimbo, Caldera, Iquique and Arica. There are some small harbours for coasting vessels of light draught along the coast of central Chile, usually at the partially ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various

... running and playing amidst the little waves that fell on the sand, and the ripples that curled around our feet. At last there came a small boat from the side of the round-ship, and rowed in toward shore, and still we feared not, though we drew a little aback from the surf and let fall our gown-hems. But the crew of that boat beached her close to where we stood, and came hastily wading the surf towards us; and we saw that they were twelve weaponed men, great, and grim, and all clad in black raiment. Then indeed ...
— The Story of the Glittering Plain - or the Land of Living Men • William Morris

... arising; and you must keep your eyes open to guard against detection, and at the same time maintain a bright lookout for me, and be ready to come to my help, should I be hard pressed. Ah! there is the reef that I spoke of a little while ago; see there, broad off the weather bow; you can see the surf breaking upon it—and there is a small island right ahead of us. Keep her away, lad; up helm and let her go off a point. So! steady as you go; that ought to carry us clear of everything. And, thank God, there is the dawn coming; we shall just ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood

... dash of the surf and the cries of the wheeling sea fowl made the only sound in that part of the world; then from those half-clad rapscallions arose a shout of "Kirby!"—a shout in which the three leaders did not join. That one who looked ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various

... proved to be the case, for, with the surf thundering on either hand, we sailed into a smoothly flowing inlet through which the flood tide was running between high dunes all sparkling in the moonlight and crowned with ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers

... anchor in less than eight, in which depth the south end of the Green Island (a small island lying under the west shore) will bear W. You water at a well that is behind the beach at the head of the bay. The water is tolerable, but scarce; and bad getting off, on account of a great surf on the beach. The refreshments to be got here, are bullocks, hogs, goats, sheep, poultry, and fruits. The goats are of the antelope kind, so extraordinarily lean, that hardly any thing can equal them; and the bullocks, hogs, and sheep, are not much better. Bullocks ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr

... he said. "I must go because I am the only seaman among you, and I will take four of those black fellows with me. I do not apprehend any danger unless we have to make a surf landing, and even then they can all swim like fishes, while I am very well able to take care of myself in the water. I shall sail down the coast until I come to a port, and there put in. Then I will get a vessel of some sort and come back for ...
— The Adventures of Captain Horn • Frank Richard Stockton

... of leafage; The keen clean green of summer sea; Dazzle of surf in mid-day light, The very sound of ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman

... traveller first makes for the island of Capri. The greatest curiosity which he here visits and describes in the azure grotto. He and his companion are rowed, each in a small skiff, to a narrow dark aperture upon the rocky coast, and which appears the darker from its contrast with the white surf that is dashing about it. He is told to lie down on his back in the boat, to protect his head from a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various

... aeroplane's descent in his garden was purely accidental, he was ready to do all in his power to speed the parting guest. In a few minutes Smith was hurrying along the shore road with a German on either side, at his left the surf roaring on the fringe of coral reef, at his right a screen of tufted palms and plantations running up the lower slopes of the mountains. He soon came to a collection of drinking-bars and stores, all bearing German names. Herr Schwankmacher, now transformed ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang

... breakers tumbling against the coast far as the eye could reach, and that seemed interposed as a sort of selvage between the blank, leaden sea, and the deep, melancholy russet of the land. Through one of those changes so common in dreams, the continuous line of surf seemed, as I looked, to alter its character. It winded no longer round headland and bay, but stretched out through the centre of the landscape, straight as an extended cord, and the bright white saddened down to the fainter hue of decaying vegetation. ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller

... head; And we will sit in Twilight's face, and see The sweet Moon glancing through the Tooa[370] tree, 10 The lofty accents of whose sighing bough Shall sadly please us as we lean below; Or climb the steep, and view the surf in vain Wrestle with rocky giants o'er the main, Which spurn in columns back the baffled spray. How beautiful are these! how happy they, Who, from the toil and tumult of their lives, Steal to look down where nought but Ocean strives! Even He too loves at times the blue ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron

... in a semicircle, the base of which was the green-covered tableland fronting Santiago. The spots were tossing idly upon a restless sea, and, as the sun rose higher, each gradually assumed the shape of a marine engine of war. Beyond them was a stretch of sandy, surf-beaten coast, and directly fronting the centre ship could be seen a narrow cleft in the hill—the gateway leading to the ancient city of ...
— A Gunner Aboard the "Yankee" • Russell Doubleday

... treasure isle, And he the pirate of its hidden hoard; Life! 'twas the ship he sailed to seek it in, And Death is but the pilot come aboard, Methinks I see him smile a boy's glad smile On maddened winds and waters, reefs unknown, As thunders in the sail the dread typhoon, And in the surf the shuddering timbers groan; Horror ahead, and Death beside the wheel: Then—spreading stillness of the broad lagoon, And lap of waters ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson, an Elegy; And Other Poems • Richard Le Gallienne

... after we struck the storm seemed to abate a little. The people of the country came down to the shore and stood upon the rocks to see if they could do anything to save us. We were very near the shore, but the breakers and the boiling surf were so violent between us and the land that whoever took to the water was sure to be dashed in pieces. So everybody clung to the ship, waiting for the captain to contrive some way to get us to ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various

... is bright and new; the warm breath of the meadow comes up in your face; to your knees you are in a sea of daisies and clover; from your knees up, you are in a sea of solar light and warmth. Now you are prostrate like a swimmer, or like a surf-bather reaching for pebbles or shells, the white and green spray breaks above you; then, like a devotee before a shrine or naming his beads, your rosary strung with luscious berries; anon you are a grazing Nebuchadnezzar, or an artist ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs









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