"Barnacle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in olden times was that of the barnacle-tree, to which Sir John Maundeville also alludes:—"In our country were trees that bear a fruit that becomes flying birds; those that fell in the water lived, and those that fell on the earth died, and these be right good for man's meat." As early as the twelfth century ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... houses in Chicago put up a placard, just before election, stating that the proprietor considered his interests justly the interests of his clerks, and it was decidedly to his interests to have the Honorable Barnacle Bigbug re-elected. All employes were requested to note well. You see the crime of this dry-goods "prince" (how we all run to idiotic titles!) lay in subordinating the good of the State to the good of his particular ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... crab, which are expressed by putting all these into the same order. Again, more remote, but still very definite, resemblances unite the lobster with the woodlouse, the king crab, the water flea, and the barnacle, and separate them from all other animals; whence they collectively constitute the larger group, or class, Crustacea. But the Crustacea exhibit many peculiar features in common with insects, spiders, and centipedes, so that these are grouped into the still larger ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... forbearing. She has been sticking to me for the last few days like a barnacle. Our respectable young ladies think a lot of themselves, but—except you and Nelly—I dont know a woman in society who has as much brains in her whole body as Susanna Conolly has in her little finger nail. I cant imagine how the deuce you all have the cheek to expect men to ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... considering a little, that she used to hear long ago of Mr Tite Barnacle as a man of great power. He was a commissioner, or a board, or a trustee, 'or something.' He lived in Grosvenor Square, she thought, or very near it. He was under Government—high in the Circumlocution Office. She appeared to have acquired, in her infancy, ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... "myths of the dawn" still farther back toward the dim origin of the Aryan race; and the book closes with a chapter on Modern Mythology, of which some twenty pages are given to an exhaustive treatise, anatomical and historical, on the Barnacle Goose. This brings us round handsomely to Locke and Sir William Hamilton once more, and there ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... of the morning, an odour of new-mown hay Came, and my forehead fell low, and my tears like berries fell down; Later a sound came, half lost in the sound of a shore far away, From the great grass-barnacle calling, and ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... enough in the work to pursue it for its own sake, as an amusement. I found among the islanders what was said to be a piece of the natural history of the puffin, sufficiently apocryphal to remind one of the famous passage in the history of the barnacle, which traced the lineage of the bird to one of the pedunculated cirripedes, and the lineage of the cirripede to a log of wood. The puffin feeds its young, say the islanders, on an oily scum of ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... our belief in the origin of species making any difference in descriptive work, I am sure it is incorrect, for I did all my barnacle work under this point of view. Only I often groaned that I was not allowed simply to decide whether a difference was sufficient ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... The famous "barnacle-geese" ought not to be omitted from any sketch of the vicissitudes of this doctrine of Biogenesis. An elaborate illustrated account covering their alleged natural history was printed in one of the early volumes of the ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... described by the fortune- teller. The schooner was anchored to the lee of a reef, while the captain, Paul and two of the crew embarked in the yawl on a tour of investigation. They pulled close under the cliff and into an inlet between two great jaws of barnacle-covered rock that towered high above them. Paul was astonished to see the exact reproduction of the word picture painted by the black fortune-feller of Jamaica before his eyes. They rowed through the inlet on the swell and entered a bay that was perfectly landlocked. All around it to ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... it's gone beyond my patience to stand it longer. You are an incumbrance, you are a barnacle. I'll sell you my interest in this enterprise and you can go on and run it; this partnership business don't suit me." Palmer ended it by saying: "I'll see you ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... says Tommy, "in a minute or two." He has climbed into Joyce's lap, and is now sitting on her with his arms round her neck. To make love to a young woman and to induce her to marry you with a barnacle of this sort hanging round her suggests difficulties. Mr. Dysart waits. "All things come to those who wait," says a wily old proverb. But Dysart ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... broom and salute your officer, you confounded old barnacle!" roared the old gentleman. "Salute, sir, salute: your master's appointed to the smartest frigate ...
— Syd Belton - The Boy who would not go to Sea • George Manville Fenn
... a wallflower rooted in the clefts of some old church tower, they don't jump at once to the inane conclusion that it is made of rock—that it derives its nourishment direct from the solid limestone; nor when they observe a barnacle hanging by its sucker to a ship's hull, do they imagine it to draw up its food incontinently from the copper bottom. But when they see that familiar pride of our country, a British oak, with its great underground buttresses spreading abroad through the soil in every direction, they infer ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... a less intelligent person in England than in America, or that Mr. Halliwell's standard of scholarship is very low. We ourselves, from our limited reading, can supply him with a reference which will explain the allusion to the "Scotch barnacle" much better than his citations from Sir John Maundeville and Giraldus Cambrensis,—namely, note 8, on page 179 of a Treatise on Worms, by Dr. Ramesey, court ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... us deliberately pass by all the attractions of the middle zone of tide-pools and on as far as the lowest level of the water will admit. We are far out from the shore and many feet below the level of the barnacle-covered boulders over which we first clambered. Now we may indeed be prepared for strange sights, for we are on the very borderland of the vast unknown. The abyss in front of us is like planetary space, unknown to the ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... his dignity; but observing at last the eager and respectful attention with which the stripling listened to a most veracious detail of five men being inhumanly murdered in Canterbury Cathedral by the Reverend Zedekiah Fooks Barnacle, he was touched by the impression he had created, and shaking Paul graciously by the hand, he told him there was a deal of natural shrewdness in his countenance, and that Mr. Augustus Tomlinson did not doubt but that he (Paul) might have the honour to be murdered ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... keep him from sinking to despair, or to what is more unmanning, self-pity. He had failed before, through trying to frame his life to other men's plans. He had failed now, through trying to win success through other men's efforts—a barnacle clinging to the hull of some craft freighted with fortune. Perhaps, too, he fairly and squarely faced the fact that if he was to be one whit different from the beggar for whom he had been mistaken, he must build his own life solely and wholly on ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... liver dressed with rice and herbs in the manner of the Turk, for liver, though contained in flesh, was not reckoned as flesh by liberal churchmen. There was a roast goose from the shore marshes, that barnacle bird which pious epicures classed as shell-fish and thought fit for fast days. A silver basket held a store of thin toasted rye-cakes, and by the monk's hand stood a flagon of that drink most dear to holy ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... forgetting its high station and degenerating to the likeness of a worm. No doubt it is really a case of degeneration from the acquirement of fixed habits, just as when a lively young crustacean larva gives up its free independent life and glues its head to a stone—what happens? Why, he becomes a mere barnacle instead of a spritely shrimp as he might have been! Let ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... their fortunes. She must also remain as young looking as ever and always be at his beck and call. Gaylord was rapidly developing into an impossible little bully, the usual result of an impoverished snob who manages to become a barnacle-like fixture on someone a trifle more foolish yet better of ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... Alice should come with her, and be left at Blairgowrie while Mary visited her friends. She was delighted, and wrote gaily that when she did come she "would not be a week-end visitor or a tea visitor, but a barnacle. It is, however, all too alluring. One only thing can overtop it, and that is duty as put into my hands by my King." Then she paints a picture of the piles of timber and corrugated iron about her for the building of a house, "for the happy and privileged man or woman ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... view, and for the present he criticised both Dickens and some of the similar denunciations contained in Carlyle's 'Past and Present,' and 'Latter-day Pamphlets.' The assault upon the 'Circumlocution Office' was, I doubt not, especially offensive because 'Barnacle Tite,' and the effete aristocrats who are satirised in 'Little Dorrit,' stood for representatives of Sir James Stephen and his best friends. In fact, I think, Dickens took the view natural to the popular mind, which always embodies a grievance in a concrete ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... in their quarters, kept themselves trim and clean, and their floor as white as a ship's deck. They did not court the society of the "sojers" below, whose camp ideas of neatness differed from theirs. A few old barnacle-backs always sat on guard around the head of the steps leading from the lower rooms. They chewed tobacco enormously, and kept their mouths filled with the extracted juice. Any luckless "sojer" who attempted to ascend the stairs ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... to tell you still, my kind foster-child, but little time have I to tell you them, for the barnacle-geese are flying over the house, and when they have all flown by I shall have no more to say. And I have to tell you yet how the King of Ireland's Son won home with Fedelma, the Enchanter's daughter, and how it came to pass that the Seven Wild Geese that were Caintigern's brothers ...
— The King of Ireland's Son • Padraic Colum
... it is a great blessing, but it is a great curse as well for a man, he to be a poet. Look at me: have I a friend in this world? Is there a man alive that has a wish for me? is there the love of anyone at all on me? I am going like a poor lonely barnacle goose throughout the world; like Oisin after the Fenians; every person hates me: you ...
— Poets and Dreamers - Studies and translations from the Irish • Lady Augusta Gregory and Others
... do to leave out John Cheevers from the list of strange characters on the farm, because, though he did not belong there as member and was as a barnacle on the body politic, he was so quaint and queer. He was Irish and came to America as valet to Sir John Caldwell, who died very suddenly at the Tremont House in Boston. Pity, compassion or the like induced Mr. Ripley to befriend him, and being introduced ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... of these books did much for Darwin. His narrative of the voyage gained the good will of cultured England in general. The book on coral reefs won the geologists. His "Manual of the Cirrhipedia" (as the barnacle book was called) secured the attention of systematic zooelogists. The time was not far distant when he would need every aid possible toward gaining and keeping the regard of men; for he was to promulgate ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... "what do you know about that? He clings to us like a barnacle or a poor relation—and the worst of it is the damned sea lawyer is absolutely right. We have no authority to fire him, Skinner. Just think of a government that will permit such a ridiculous state of affairs as that to ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... companies. However, if there was one thing about Cappy you could depend upon absolutely it was the consistency of his inconsistency. For, having announced his retirement, his very next move was to bewail his inability to retire. He insisted upon clinging to the business like a barnacle to a ship, and was always very much in evidence whenever any deal of the slightest importance was about to be consummated. Indeed, he was never so thoroughly in command as when, his first burst of enthusiasm anent ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... agreed very well, though at times you heard it said That BILL had a way of his own of making his lips look red - That JOE looked quite his age—or somebody might declare That BARNACLE'S long pig-tail was never ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... the Barnacle fowl, it may be an addendum, not uninteresting to your correspondent "W.B. MacCabe," to add to his extract from Giraldus another from Hector Boece, History of Scotland, "imprentit be Thomas Davidson, prenter to the Kyngis nobyll grace ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.03.23 • Various
... one had done the dwelling-house of Caleb Plummer the honour to miss it after such an inroad, it would have been, no doubt, to commend its demolition as a vast improvement. It stuck to the premises of Gruff and Tackleton like a barnacle to a ship's keel, or a snail to a door, or a little bunch of toadstools to the stem of a tree. But it was the germ from which the full-grown trunk of Gruff and Tackleton had sprung; and, under its crazy roof, the Gruff before last ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... night the servant woke her master up in a fright and said: "Master of all masters, get out of your barnacle and put on your squibs and crackers. For white-faced simminy has got a spark of hot cockalorum on its tail, and unless you get some pondalorum high topper mountain will be all on ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... a fruyt, that becomen briddes fleeynge: and tho that fellen in the water, lyven; and thei that fallen on the erthe, dyen anon: and thei ben right gode to mannes mete. And here of had thei als gret marvaylle, that summe of hem trowed, it were an impossible thing to be. [Footnote: The Barnacle-bearing trees are said to have grown in Ireland.] In that contree ben longe apples of gode savour; where of ben mo than 100 in a clustre, and als manye in another; and thei han gret longe leves and large, of 2 fote long or more. And in that contree, and in other contrees there abouten, ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, Volume 9 - Asia, Part 2 • Richard Hakluyt
... (I mean the description of the Circumlocution Office) is beyond praise. It is a complete picture of the way England is actually governed at this moment. The very core of our politics is expressed in the light and easy young Barnacle who told Clennam with a kindly frankness that he, Clennam, would "never go on with it." Dickens hit the mark so that the bell rang when he made all the lower officials, who were cads, tell Clennam coldly that his claim was absurd, until the last ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... one had done the dwelling-house of Caleb Plummer the honour to miss it after such an inroad, it would have been, no doubt, to commend its demolition as a vast improvement. It stuck to the premises of Gruff and Tackleton, like a barnacle to a ship's keel, or a snail to a door, or a little bunch of toadstools to the ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... therefore holds a position in bird-lore intermediate between that of the phoenix and that of the pelican fed upon the blood of its mother whose beak is tipped with red, or that of the barnacle goose, of which the name suggests the mollusc,[1] the barnacle, and which was said to proceed from the mollusc or that of the bird of paradise, the feet of which were cut off by the Malay traders who sold the skins, and ...
— Essays on early ornithology and kindred subjects • James R. McClymont
... professional purposes without delicacy or scruple (for example, Sydney Carton and the ghost in Hamlet!): they are anarchical, and cannot balance their exposures of Angelo and Dogberry, Sir Leicester Dedlock and Mr Tite Barnacle, with any portrait of a prophet or a worthy leader: they have no constructive ideas: they regard those who have them as dangerous fanatics: in all their fictions there is no leading thought or inspiration for which any man could conceivably risk the spoiling ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... them. By the law of many Indian tribes property and the control of the family go with the mother. The husband never belongs to the same family connection, rarely to the same community or town even, and often not even to the tribe. He is a sort of barnacle, taken in on his wife's account. To the adventurer, like a trader, this adoption gave a sort of legal status or protection. Gist either understood this before he started on his enterprise, or learned ...
— Se-Quo-Yah; from Harper's New Monthly, V. 41, 1870 • Unknown
... Wood was seated in the sand, sheltered from the sun in the boat's shadow, absorbed in the laying on of verdigris. The dull, worn color was rapidly giving place to a brilliant, shining green. Occasionally a scraper, which lay by, was taken up to remove the last trace of a barnacle. ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 9 • Various
... you. You haven't earned a dollar in four years. I have it from her, and from others. It is commonly understood that you won't work, you won't do a stroke toward supporting the child. You are a leech, a barnacle, a—a—well, a loafer. If you had a drop of real man's blood in you, you'd get out and earn enough to buy clothes for yourself, at least, and the money for a hair cut or a shoe shine. She has been too good to you, my little man. ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... and hang his machine up to dry on the fo'c's'le. By performing these duties four times a month, he leads us to believe he is preparing the way for the ultimate domination of Air Power. We of the Navy are obsolete, and our hulls are encrusted with the Harwich barnacle. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 29th, 1920 • Various
... distant resemblances connect the lobster with the prawn and the crab, which are expressed by putting all these into the same order. Again, more remote, but still very definite, resemblances unite the lobster with the woodlouse, the king crab, the water-flea, and the barnacle, and separate them from all other animals; whence they collectively constitute the larger group, or class, Crustacea. But the Crustacea exhibit many peculiar features in common with insects, spiders, and centipedes, so that these are grouped ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... feet ten, and weighed fully fourteen stone; not corpulent, but very thick all through; his round and massive head alone would have outweighed a baby. With eyes shut, he seemed to be trying to get the better of his own weight, then he moved with the slowness of a barnacle towards the door. The secretary, watching him, thought: 'Marvellous old chap! How he gets about by himself is a miracle! And he can't retire, they ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... time they had cleared three masses of weed and a barnacle-covered plank, they abandoned the search and resumed the voyage. A gloom settled on the forecastle, and the cook took advantage of the occasion to read Tim a homily upon the shortness of life and the suddenness of death. Tim was much affected, but not nearly so much as he was when he discovered ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs
... to dissipate his friend's surprise. "I can't stand her. She's a regular barnacle, and won't let me ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Whose fabled keys of heaven and hell Bolt hard the patriot's prison-cell, And open wide the banquet-hall, Where kings and priests hold carnival! Weak vassal tricked in royal guise, Boy Kaiser with thy lip of lies; Base gambler for Napoleon's crown, Barnacle on his dead renown! Thou, Bourbon Neapolitan, Crowned scandal, loathed of God and man And thou, fell Spider of the North! Stretching thy giant feelers forth, Within whose web the freedom dies Of nations eaten up like flies! Speak, Prince and Kaiser, Priest and ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... universe, and build our hovels out of the ruins of our ancestral palace; or whether, according to the development theory of others, we are rising gradually, and have come up out of an atom instead of descending from an Adam, so that the proudest pedigree might run up to a barnacle or a zoophyte at last, are questions that will keep for a good many centuries yet. Confining myself to what little we can learn from history, we find tribes rising slowly out of barbarism to a higher or lower point of culture and civility, and everywhere the poet also is found, under one name ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... hand at inventing names. I have a quite new and curious genus of Barnacle, which I want to name, and how to invent ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... Publichouse-keepers of Tonnerre " Drapers of Caen " Harness-makers of Paris " Nail-makers of Paris " Pastrycooks of Caen " " La Rochelle " " Tonnerre " Tanners of Vie " Tilers of Paris " Weavers of Toulon " Wheelwrights of Paris Banquet, Grand, at the Court of France Barber Barnacle Geese Barrister, Fifteenth Century Basin-maker Bastille, The Bears and other Beasts, how they may be caught with a Dart Beggar playing the Fiddle Beheading Bell and Canon Caster Bird-catching, Fourteenth Century Bird-piping, ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... that very thing, boy. It's as fast theer as a barnacle to a ship's copper; an' 'll stay, I hope, till I get my claws upon it,— which won't take very long from now. Pass a piece o' ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... example of degeneration through quiescence. The barnacles are crustaceans related most nearly to the crabs and shrimps. The young barnacle just from the egg is a six-legged, free-swimming nauplius, very like a young prawn or crab, with a single eye. In its next larval stage it has six pairs of swimming feet, two compound eyes, and two ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... a thorough-going conservative we are likely to picture him as a stay-at-home person, a barnacle fastened to one spot. We take for granted that aversion to locomotion and aversion to change are the same thing. But in thinking thus we leave out of account the inherent instability of human nature. Everybody likes a little change now and then. If a person cannot get it in one ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... littlenesse) Coots, Sanderlings, Sea-larkes, Oxen and Kine, Seapies, Puffins, Pewets, Meawes, Murres, Creysers, Curlewes, Teale, Wigeon, Burranets, Shags, Ducke and Mallard, Gull, Wild-goose, Heron, Crane, and Barnacle. ...
— The Survey of Cornwall • Richard Carew
... north-west corner of the exterior stands a comparatively modern house, but this incongruous companionship is no strange thing in Normandy, although, as we have seen at Falaise, there are instances in which efforts are being made to scrape off the humble domestic architecture that clings, barnacle-like, upon the walls of so many of the finest churches. On the north side of Notre Dame, there is an admirably designed outside pulpit with a great stone canopy overhead full of elaborate tracery. It overhangs the pavement, and is a noticeable object as you ...
— Normandy, Complete - The Scenery & Romance Of Its Ancient Towns • Gordon Home
... Bill Barnacle sticks to his ship, He never is ill on the stormiest trip; Upside down he crosses the ocean— If you do ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 8, 1920 • Various
... the larvae, though active, still obey, more or less closely, the law of common embryonic resemblance. Cirripedes afford a good instance of this: even the illustrious Cuvier did not perceive that a barnacle was a crustacean: but a glance at the larva shows this in an unmistakable manner. So again the two main divisions of cirripedes, the pedunculated and sessile, though differing widely in external appearance, have larvae in all their ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... true! The Barnacle is always upside down in its home, and its twelve feathery legs are thrust out of the door at the top. They make a fine net, in which minute animals are caught and brought into the mouth below. This funny creature actually kicks its food into its mouth! If you own a magnifying glass, you can ...
— On the Seashore • R. Cadwallader Smith
... appearance that the Declaratory Bill has occasioned a temporary division in the Cabinet, and a run against Dundas, and consequently against Pitt, who stands a willing sponsor for his transgressions, and who supports him through thick and thin. Dundas sticks to Pitt as a barnacle to an oyster-shell, so that if he chose it he cannot shake him off, and everybody believes he does not mean it, let what will be the consequence, because he likes him, and really wants him in the House of Commons; besides, there is no man who eats Pitt's toads with such zeal, attention, ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... their standard butt. These shallow parasites, and their shallower sovereigns, seem to have taken a perverse and, as it happened, a fatal pleasure in insulting them. Sad it is to see in Shirley's 'Gamester,' Charles the First's favourite play, a passage like that in Act i. Scene 1, where old Barnacle proclaims, unblushing, his own shame and that of his fellow- merchants. Surely, if Charles ever could have repented of any act of his own, he must have repented, in many a humiliating after-passage with that same city of ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... anchored to one spot of the geographical distribution like a barnacle to a ship during the whole of his mortal belligerency?" he one day asked his wife. "We hear nothing, see nothing, become nothing, and our system becomes fossilized, antediluvian. Why not see everything, know everything? Life is hardly worth while, but since we ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... much sympathy. He was a practical young man, without a stitch of romance in his whole make-up, and he only laughed at my suggestion and said that anybody who tried to push into that mess just for the sake of seeing some barnacle-covered logs, or perhaps a rotting hulk or two, would be a good deal of a fool. And so I did not press my fancy on him, and our talks went on about more ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... first trip was unsuccessful, but on the second voyage the wreck was found. Divers, armed with modern apparatus, spent several days in the quest, but in vain, until, finally, just as the last diver was about to give the signal to be drawn up, he leaned against what seemed only the barnacle-encrusted end of a beam; but suddenly it gave way, and numbers of golden doubloons rolled out at his feet. Considerable sums rewarded further search in the sand-filled and decaying carcass of the old ship; but exactly how much was ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 4, February 1878 • Various
... not my chaperon, Charlotte, because in my hour of need I simply fastened myself to you like a limpet, or an albatross, or a barnacle, or any other form of nautical vampire that you prefer. Still, I might as well confess that I cabled to Duke, or wirelessed, or did something awfully expensive of that sort at St. Thomas while you were having that interminable talk with the captain, who, by the ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... before which those who love them spread themselves like door-mats; who rule with a rod pickled in their apparent helplessness, which is stronger than a whip of steel, and who are quite closely related to the barnacle and mollusc to which the tide regularly brings tit-bits out of the ocean, whilst the more mercurial eel has to go out and thresh about in the mud for what it requires to keep it going in its ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... this day a number of Velella, which are furnished with crests; some of them were dead, and nearly always when such was the case we found a species of barnacle attached in great numbers to them. When these animals had only recently died, so that the whole of their blue base had not been detached from them, the barnacles were generally very minute, so that the naked eye could ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... BARNACLE (Lepas anatifera). A species of shell-fish, often found sticking by its pedicle to the bottom of ships, doing no other injury than deadening ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... and great force and magnetism, all things are possible. Kent McKibben knew Horton Biggers, the editor, who was a rather desolate and disillusioned person of forty-five, gray, and depressed-looking—a sort of human sponge or barnacle who was only galvanized into seeming interest and cheerfulness by sheer necessity. Those were the days when the society editor was accepted as a member of society—de facto—and treated more as a guest than a reporter, though even then the tendency was ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... amusement, he scorched the edges of the newspaper with the wick of the lamp; and at about half past eight o'clock I had the satisfactions—I am sorry to confess it was a satisfaction—of seeing the Rivermouth Barnacle in flames. ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... admiration which these callow youths had for Methuselah was not shared by a large majority of the people then on earth. On the contrary, we blush to admit it, Methuselah was held in very trifling esteem by his frivolous fellow-citizens, who habitually referred to him as an "old 'wayback," "a barnacle," an "old fogy," a "mossback," or a "garrulous dotard," and with singular irreverence they took delight in twitting him upon his senility and in pestering him with divers new-fangled notions altogether ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... or two crabbers, standing on the bow of their little skiffs and poling them along the edge of the water by the handles of their nets, had stopped to watch the job, which was being done with rusty nails and a bit of barnacle-moulded iron from a wreck instead of a hammer. When the iron and nails broke they all sat down and talked the matter over, with any other subject which happened to be lying loosely about on the fallow fields of their minds. When Captain Swendon came up they ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... soul is sailing through the sea, But the Past is heavy and hindereth me, The Past hath crusted cumbrous shells That hold the flesh of cold sea-mells About my soul. The huge waves wash, the high waves roll, Each barnacle clingeth and worketh dole, And ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... he didn't made him chary of mining. Peace and security exerted their appeal, and after looking about for a few reflective years, he had married the prettiest waitress in the Golden Nugget Hotel in Placerville and settled down to farming. He had settled and settled hard, settled like a barnacle, so firm and fast that he had never been able to pull himself loose. Peace he had found but also poverty. If the mineral vein was capricious, so were the elements, insect pests and the fruit market. Thirty years after ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... a will is like ordering your grave clothes. Takes nerve. Mrs. Mosely didn't have any. She was merely a little old gray barnacle sticking to her husband's estate. ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... to include Barnacles among plants; but in the time of Shakespeare the Barnacle tree was firmly believed in, and Gerard gives a plate of "the Goose tree, Barnacle tree, or the tree bearing Geese," and says that he declares "what our eies have seene, and ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... then, Thompson! American bottoms seem to be turned into barnacle-gardens," declared the man who had questioned the ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... is silent, and I suspect, Annie, that he is but a plain, home-bred fowl after all. But what shall we say to this piece of plank, hung with barnacles that look large enough for the fabled barnacle-goose to emerge from? Observe this fragment a little. Another piece is secured to it, not neatly, as with proper tools, but clumsily, with many nails of different sizes, driven unevenly and with their heads battered awry. Wedged clumsily in between these pieces, ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... her guessin' some at that; for she wa'n't dead sure whether he was a real native or not until the boss of the island shows up. He's a hump shouldered, leather faced, bushy browed old barnacle, with a Down East dialect that it was a dream to listen to, and it was only when Mildred heard Hermes call him Uncle Jerry that she could believe the two was any relation. Uncle Jerry didn't interfere, though He let 'em moon around on ...
— Torchy • Sewell Ford
... birds of passage swept aloft, snipe and teal and barnacle geese, and the rains began; when the green lizard with its turquoise-blue throat vanished; when the Jersey crapaud was heard croaking no longer in the valleys and the ponds; and the cows were well blanketed—then winter ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... with statesmen. Never let this glorious word be disgraced, degraded, by applying it to the little, self-centred whelps who are unable to get beyond the politician stage. Then enter public life; but enter it as a man, not as a barnacle: enter it as a statesman, not ...
— What All The World's A-Seeking • Ralph Waldo Trine
... damned long, ain't it?" I agreed. Forgetting his work, he spliced a bit of rope badly. "See," I said, "that splice is wrong." "Ah," he replied, his face brightening, "you're a salt un too, are ye? Hanged if I didn't think you was a barnacle." He informed me that he had been in the English and American navies, and all round the world. Where had I been? I was obliged to explain that I was a journalist. Quill-driving, as he called it, was evidently, in his opinion, an ignominious employment. However ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... leading character stands for his class. Squeers is the representative of the schoolmaster, then too common, ignorant, brutal, and grasping; Winkle is the Cockney sportsman; it is impossible to think of red tape without naming Mr. Tite Barnacle; and so on through all the books. If he sometimes too plainly labels his characters with their qualities and defects, it is a fault caused by his own clearness of conception and of execution. It is another note of genius to suffer every character to work out its own ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... for it. I was sick for a couple of days, meanly sick, and my arms were painfully poisoned from the barnacle scratches. For a week I could not use them, and it was a torture to put on and take off ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... was a curious custom that prevailed of blowing horns and pounding tin pans to keep the bees from going away when swarming. The custom is an Old Country one, I fancy. The reader will remember that Dickens, in "Little Dorrit," makes Ferdinand Barnacle say: "You really have no idea how the human bees will swarm to the beating ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... Mr. Pugh), and think of him as merely heralding the great Collectivist revolt against Victorian Individualism and Capitalism, which seemed so clearly to be the crisis at the end of this epoch—you will suddenly remember the agreeable young Barnacle at the Circumlocution Office: and you will be unable, for very shame, to assert that Dickens would have trusted the poor to a State Department. Dickens did not merely believe in the brotherhood of men in the weak modern way; he was the brotherhood of men, and knew it was a brotherhood in sin ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... describing that prominent feature of the human face, the organ of scent, they generalize too much, and have but one term for the symmetrical arch, arising majestically, or the tiny atom, scarcely equal to the weight of a barnacle—a very dot of flesh! Nor is the dissimilarity between the invisible functions of the organ, and the visible varieties of its external structure, less worthy of remark. With some, the sense of smelling is so dull, as ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 367 - 25 Apr 1829 • Various
... rumbled a bewhiskered old barnacle who stood behind the young officer of the bark, "We've struck ile before we're a ...
— Swept Out to Sea - Clint Webb Among the Whalers • W. Bertram Foster
... then to another, it became apparent that the extent of the illuminated beach was widening. Hither and thither over the multitude the intelligence ran, in whispers or by glances. Having showed his neighbor each looked again. Ripple-worn sand, shells, barnacle-covered rocks, slowly came within the pale of the radiance and Moses moved with it. Eight stalwart Hebrews, bearing a funeral ark, shrouded with a purple pall, fringed with gold, emerged from among the people and, taking a place in front of the Lawgiver, walked confidently down the sand toward ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... Islands hatches, along with the eiders, the long-necked prutgaessen, barnacle goose (Anser bernicla, L.) marked on the upper part of the body in black and brownish grey. It lays four to five white eggs in an artless nest without down, scattered here and there among the eiders' nests rich in down. This variety of goose is found in greatest numbers during the moulting season ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... to see how each living thing bears about in its body the story of its degradation, or the history of its rise and exaltation. Even in things that creep and crawl, the whole life-history is swept together in the animal body. The ship barnacle began its career with two splendid eyes. But it used its vision to find an easy place upon the side of pier or ship. Giving up locomotion, it grew sleek and fat, and finally its big eyes grew dull through ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... all very well as an exhibition of spirit on Mother Carey's part, but it had been a very hard week. Gilbert was sulky; Peter had had a touch of tonsillitis; Nancy was faltering at the dishwashing and wishing she were a boy; Julia was a perfect barnacle; Kathleen had an aching tooth, and there being no dentist in the village, Was applying Popham remedies,—clove-chewing, roasted raisins, and disfiguring bread poultices; Bill Harmon had received no reply from Mr. Hamilton, and when Mother Carey went to her room that evening she felt conscious ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... division the newspapers flayed us. Worcester would never stand for a second division team. Baseball admirers, reporters, fans—especially the fans—are fickle. The admirers quit, the reporters grilled us, and the fans, though they stuck to the games with that barnacle-like tenacity peculiar to them, made life miserable for all of us. I saw the pennant slowly fading, and the successful season, and the business deal, and the cottage, ...
— The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories • Zane Grey
... word, in Rost and Palm's Greek Lexicon, s. v. [Greek: sardonios].] or Sardinian, laugh; a laugh caused, as was supposed, by a plant growing in Sardinia, of which they who ate, died laughing; to the 'barnacle' goose, [Footnote: For a full and most interesting study on this very curious legend, see Max Mueller's Lectures on Language, vol. ii. pp. 533-551; [for the etymology of the word barnacle in ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... superstitious purpose, we could not determine. But they have many instruments made of two or three hoops, or concentric pieces of wood, with a cross-bar fixed in the middle, to hold them by. To these are fixed a great number of dried barnacle-shells, with threads, which serve as a rattle, and make a loud noise; when they shake them. This contrivance seems to be a substitute for the rattling-bird at Nootka; and perhaps both of them are employed on ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... which quite touched me, though I am not vain enough to think it all deserved. The author is a literary man, and German scholar. He has read my book very attentively; but, what is very remarkable, it seems that he is a profound naturalist. He knows my Barnacle-book, and appreciates it too highly. Lastly, he writes and thinks with quite uncommon force and clearness; and what is even still rarer, his writing is seasoned with most pleasant wit. We all laughed heartily ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... especially true of us women—is to rush at our moral problems without giving a moment's thought to their causes, which often lie deep hidden in human nature. Our great naturalist, Darwin, gave eight years' study to our lowly brother, the barnacle; he gave an almost equal amount of time to the study of the earthworm and its functions, revealing to us, in one of his most charming books, how much of our golden harvest, of our pastures, and our jewelled garden-beds, we owe to this silent and patient ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... salute you," said Amanda, making as low a bow as the two barnacle children, the bouquet and the basket with its crock of apple butter, ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... that happens. One of the peculiar, unlooked-for results of independent preaching was to evolve the sensational preacher, who, clinging like a barnacle to orthodoxy, sought to meet the competition of the independent by flaunting a frankness designed to deceive the unwary. This species announced on blackboards and in the public prints that he would preach to "Men Only," or "Women Only," and his subjects were "Girls, Nice ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... back with it. This little friend lived for three years with the prior, and to his great grief came no more in the fourth. The learned have exhausted their arts to discover what a burnet can be, and have given up the chase. Some would have him to be a barnacle goose, others a dab-chick or coot—none of which can fairly be classed as aviculae small birds. Burnet is brown or red brown, and rather bright at that. We have it in Chaucer's ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... scene would be the fairer, the season more sacred for its association with thoughts of him and his love. Whereas, my Alfred's adoring platitudes would disgust me with the sunset, with the world, and with myself, for permitting him to haunt my presence and hang upon my smile—foppish barnacle that he is! If you knew how I despise ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... and hare, eh? But the hare may and ought still to reach the goal, and have her cell built, even if she does have her wander yahr, like the young barnacles, before becoming attached! No! she need not become the barnacle goose. That is fabulous," said Mrs. Grinstead, laughing off a little of her seriousness, and adding, "Tell me of the other girls. I think Vera did not come home ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... ploughshares into falchions, nor the mud of Adderbury into gunpowder. I tremble for my painted windows, and write talismans of number forty-five on every gate and postern of my castle. Mr. Hume is writing the Revolutions of Middlesex, and a troop of barnacle geese are levied to defend the capital. These are melancholy times! Heaven send we do not laugh ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... organ, "has succumbed to the Jazz, the Fox-trot and the Bunny-hug." It still shows a decided preference, however, for the Barnacle-cling. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, March 12, 1919 • Various
... House, to hear the rehearsal of the "gracious Speech from the Throne." But, as a rule, his fate on Wednesday and Saturday is a ceremonious banquet at a colleague's house, and a party strictly political—perhaps the Prime Minister as the main attraction, reinforced by Lord and Lady Decimus Tite-Barnacle, Mr. and Mrs. Stiltstalking, Sir John Taper, and young Mr. Tadpole. A political dinner of thirty colleagues, male and female, in the dog-days is only a shade less intolerable than the greasy rations and mephitic vapours of the ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... demanded elaborately, "who ever heard of a treasonous barnacle before? A barnacle, Starrett, adheres and adheres, parasite to the end as long as there's liquid, even as you adhered while the ship was keeled in gold. Nevertheless, you're right. I'm all of what you say and more that ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... quarrelled during our afternoon walk over the hard-frozen snow to a neighbouring hamlet to take a deserving widow a can of soup, and old "Captain" Barnacle in Wheatsheaf Lane a promising ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... and, stooping low, saw beneath the vehicle a parasitic square box like a huge barnacle fixed to the bottom of the van. A box about four feet by two. The door of it was open, and Parker's bedfellows—two iron buckets and ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman
... of univalves are wanderers, many bivalves are free, and multivalves become fixed at an early stage of existence. The goose-necked barnacle, with its five valves, comes in its myriads attached to derelict coco-nuts, floating logs, and pumice-stone. The species owes its name to the fabulous belief that it was the preliminary state of the barnacle goose of the ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... presses, and there be much of more importance to be learned? So, also, is the Cirrhopode one idea of the author of nature. You may find a very respectable quarto account of the family, tracing them in all their varieties; but a page might inform you of all that is essential about the barnacle, curious as its history has been, and you need not ponder on the quarto unless you have some particular curiosity to gratify. The Types of nature, both in her vegetable and animal departments are, after all, few. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 450 - Volume 18, New Series, August 14, 1852 • Various
... he would never have one of the noisy things on the place, even though the Whipple New Place now boasted two—boasting likewise of their speed and convenience—and even though Gideon Whipple jestingly called him a fossilized barnacle on the ship of progress, had secretly bought a motor car and secretly for three days taken instructions in its running from the city salesman who delivered it. His intention was to become daringly expert in its handling and flash upon the view of the discomfited Gideon, who had not yet driven ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... organism belongs, as the forms through which the embryo{433} passes from the germ upwards to maturity, cannot be reconciled with the idea that natural classification follows according to the degrees of resemblance in the parts of most physiological importance. The affinity of the common rock-barnacle with the Crustaceans can hardly be perceived in more than a single character in its mature state, but whilst young, locomotive, and furnished with eyes, its affinity cannot be mistaken{434}. The cause of the greater value of characters, drawn from the early ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... or a Glass representing the Face of the World, by John Swan, M.A., 4th edit., 1670, is the following mention of the Barnacle goose ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 16, February 16, 1850 • Various
... philanthropist for some time, before the truth was discovered, and during that time he could carry out any secret plans he had in mind. The boy is more shrewd than he appears to be. We, by chance saved his life, and at once he attached himself to us like a barnacle, and we can't ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Out West • Edith Van Dyne
... discourse? Of such therefore as are bred in our land, we have the crane, the bitter,[1] the wild and tame swan, the bustard, the heron, curlew, snite, wildgoose, wind or doterell, brant, lark, plover (of both sorts), lapwing, teal, widgeon, mallard, sheldrake, shoveller, peewitt, seamew, barnacle, quail (who, only with man, are subject to the falling sickness), the knot, the oliet or olive, the dunbird, woodcock, partridge, and pheasant, besides divers others, whose names to me are utterly unknown, and much more the taste of their flesh, wherewith I was never ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed
... and subtlety, expounding the very antithesis of the conceptions I am presenting to-night. Mr. Belloc—who has evidently never read his Malthus—dreams of a beautiful little village community of peasant proprietors, each sticking like a barnacle to his own little bit of property, beautifully healthy and simple and illiterate and Roman Catholic and local, local over the ears. I am afraid the stars in their courses fight against such pink and golden dreams. ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... to the view." I gave it some thought, but could not perceive that I had been so annoyingly persistent to merit a response from the President, not unlike that given by Mr. Blaine to one Mr. Tite Barnacle, who was willing to compromise on a foreign appointment. "Certainly," was the reply; the "foreigner the better." I concluded, however, that the bard may have been right when he wrote "There is a destiny that ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... "Barnacle," said young Wickert wittily. "Something like that, anyway. Bannsocker, maybe. Guess he's some ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... would be a whitewashed desert in a week, while little shops and houses would be built against its sacred walls. There is hardly a great church in Holland but has some secular domicile clinging like a barnacle ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... while young possess no shells. After they have grown to be of some size, they leave the parent barnacles, and swim off, to start colonies elsewhere. The larva has twelve legs or arms, large compound eyes, and suckers enabling it to cling firmly. When of full growth, the barnacle's grip is so strong that it is very difficult to pull it from its hold. Some of the South American barnacles are sought after as a delicacy, having the flavour of a nice crab. One kind of barnacle is shaped ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... ain't goin' to run away till I've had the next dance, Mister Eddication! Humph! I ain't begun to tell ye yet what a useless little barnacle you are." ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... Brendan. Note 56 refers to a puffin (Anas leucopsis) or 'girrinna.' The bird, at least by 2004 classification, is not a puffin but a barnacle goose (Branta leucopsis) and I found one reference to its Irish name as 'ge ghiurain.' As these birds nest in remote areas of the arctic, people were quite free to invent ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... roared along like a conquering hero, the boat received a frightful smash and came instantly to a dead stop. I was flung forward and into the bottom. As I sprang up I caught a fleeting glimpse of a greenish, barnacle-covered object, and knew it at once for what it was, that terror of navigation, a sunken pile. No man may guard against such a thing. Water-logged and floating just beneath the surface, it was impossible to sight it in the troubled ...
— Tales of the Fish Patrol • Jack London
... heard the surf dashing without, and saw the spray, but we ourselves were sailing along smoothly and calmly, as if in a mill-pond. The rock of which the reef is formed, is said to be coral; but it is so coated with barnacle and limpet above barnacle and limpet, that I can see nothing but the remainder of these shells for many feet down, and as deep into the rock as our hammers will break. It extends from a good way to the northward of Paraiba to Olinda, where it sinks under water, and then ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... lines of heavy infantry in uniforms of green and blue, the sea has for countless ages bombarded Carn Du with stone-shot in the shape of great boulders. These have ground and polished off every scrap of seaweed, every barnacle, limpet, and sea-anemone, leaving the rock all smooth and bare, while the boulders lie piled to the east in a heap, where the waves that try to take the rock in flank leap amongst them, and roll them over higher and higher, ...
— A Terrible Coward • George Manville Fenn
... it has taken me to put this on Paper I had off coat and vest, kicked off my shoes, and struck into the water. 'Twas of the shallowest, and I had but to wade towards him who struggled. When I came anigh him, he must even catch hold of me, clinging like Grim Death or a Barnacle to the bottom of a Barge, very nearly dragging me down. But I was happily strong; and so, giving him with my disengaged arm a sound Cuff under the ear, the better to Preserve his Life, I seized him by the waist with the other, and so ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... aboord again, and brought with him a Samoed, [Footnote: This was the first meeting between West Europeans and Samoyeds.] which was but a young man: his apparell was then strange vnto vs, and he presented me with three young wild geese, and one young barnacle [Footnote: Anser bernicla, L.]. ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, • Richard Hakluyt
... there are stringers and frames to claw on to while feeling around; outside her skin is too slick for anything except a barnacle to grab ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... said Richard. "There are folk who can take as many forms as a barnacle goose. Keep thou a sharp eye as the fellows pass out, and pull me by the cloak if thou ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... louse—might be distinguished from scurf (although to the naked eye it is very much like it in appearance) by the former fastening firmly on one of the hairs as a barnacle would on a rock, and by it not being readily brushed off as scurf would, which latter (scurf) is ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... the parrot tribe held the most conspicuous place. They were of all colors and sizes, from the large, awkward-looking mackaw, with his hoarse, discordant note, to the little, delicate-looking paroquet, dumb as a barnacle, and not bigger than a wren. The monkeys, of all sizes, forms, and colors, continually chattering and grimacing, as fully represented the four-footed animals as the parrots did the bipeds. We found there the mongoose, but little larger than a squirrel; an animal ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... day with an abnormal amount of luggage for such a brief visit. But as I told Henry (who said it looked as though she intended wintering in our abode), I had distinctly stipulated that the invitation was for a week only. I was not at that time aware of the barnacle-like qualities of Gladys. ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... several geese were breeding there, and the sooty petrel possessed the grassy parts; the swans of the sailor, in this instance, therefore, turned out to be geese. This bird had been seen before upon Preservation Island, and was either a Brent or a Barnacle goose, or between the two. It had a long and slender neck, with a small short head, and a rounded crown; a short, thick arched bill, partly covered with a pea-green membrane which soon shrivelled up, and came away in the dried specimens. ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... the comedy of literature; and (again) those who do not read Dickens—perhaps even those who read him a little—may acclaim him as a humourist and not know him as a wit. But that writer is a wit, whatever his humour, who tells us of a member of the Tite Barnacle family who had held a sinecure office against all protest, that "he died with his drawn salary in his hand." But let it be granted that Dickens the humourist is foremost and most precious. For we might well spare the phrase of wit just quoted rather than ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... you stay the great barnacle-goose When its eyes are turned to the sea and its beak to ...
— The Green Helmet and Other Poems • William Butler Yeats |
