"Barnacle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... do the adults. In most cases, however, 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 ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... with people who go to sea. Take half a dozen individuals who are all more or less used to the water, and they will behave in half a dozen different ways. One will become encrusted to the deck like a barnacle, another will sit in the cabin playing cards; a third will spend his time spinning yarns with the ship's company, and a fourth will rush madly up and down the deck from morning till night in the pursuit of an appetite which shall leave no feat of marine digestion ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... 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, ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... irreligious that they exploit popular religion for 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 ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... the matter to him I did not get 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
... 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 ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... Down 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 ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... quarter-section farms. Not many years ago one of the largest business 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 millions. He totally forgot that the good of each clerk was ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... There 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
... wild white-maned sea-horses, or the more sober 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 ...
— A Terrible Coward • George Manville Fenn
... which 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 ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs
... shorter time than 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 Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... assign by custom a part in 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 ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... "Barnacle," said young Wickert wittily. "Something like that, anyway. Bannsocker, maybe. Guess he's some ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... 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 ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... have had 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 the rocks ...
— Torchy • Sewell Ford
... 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 ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... our necks, 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 a sack ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman
... 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
... suggests (iii. 97), and with some probability, that the "bird" was a nautilus; but the wild traditions concerning the barnacle-goose may perhaps have been the base of the fable. The albatross also was long supposed never to touch land. Possible the barnacle, like the barometz of Tartarean lamb, may be a survivor of the day when the animal and vegetable kingdoms had ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... declared. "Nothing can be so bad as the condition of the Holy City. But what has happened? Three days ago thou wast as securely settled here as a barnacle on a shore-rock! To-day thou sendest me word: 'Lo! the time long expected hath come; I go hence to Jerusalem.' What is it, ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... old Nicholas Cockney, and guardian of Priscilla Tomboy of the West Indies. Barnacle is a tradesman of the old school, who thinks the foppery and extravagance of the "Cockney" school inconsistent with prosperous shop-keeping. Though brusque and even ill-mannered, he has good sense and good discernment of character.—The Romp (altered from Bickerstaff's ...
— 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.
... 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 antennae or feelers, ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... that Doctor McMurdoch was one of those characters, not uncommon north of the Tweed, who, if slow in forming an opinion, once having done so cling to it as tightly as any barnacle. ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... Ledge, looming up on the dim horizon line, looked like a huge whale spouting derricks, a barnacle of a shanty clinging to its back. Soon there rose into relief the little knot of men gathered about one of the whale's fins—our landing stage,—and then, as we came alongside, the welcome curl of the smoke, telling of fried pork and ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... 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 ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... both of them handsomely crusted with shells, not of the barnacle sort, but such as you would pick up anywhere in Ceylon or the Andaman, some of them finely coloured, many of them white as milk, of a thousand different patterns; and there was not one of ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... Dickens manner (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, ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... career! Tortoise 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
... 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 water in ...
— Tales of the Fish Patrol • Jack London
... 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 ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... 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 ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, Volume 9 - Asia, Part 2 • Richard Hakluyt
... think of 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 way, ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... 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
... great barnacle-goose When its eyes are turned to the sea and its beak to the salt ...
— The Green Helmet and Other Poems • William Butler Yeats
... 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 ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Out West • Edith Van Dyne
... and the battle has been won I'm going to buy a barnacle and take it for a run; When the War is over and the German fleet we sink I'm going to keep a silkworm's egg and listen to ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... fattening the winds 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 later ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... "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 proves this proverb ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... feel very 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 ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... fiction prevalent 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 ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... of this-here Thanatopsis Club, think she's running the works, but Miss Sherwin is the secret boss, and nags all the easy-going dames into doing something. But way I figure it out——You see, I'm not interested in these dinky reforms. Miss Sherwin's trying to repair the holes in this barnacle-covered ship of a town by keeping busy bailing out the water. And Pollock tries to repair it by reading poetry to the crew! Me, I want to yank it up on the ways, and fire the poor bum of a shoemaker that built it so it sails crooked, ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... sea, in the total darkness of the great depths and the yellowish-green of the shallows of the oceans, with the seaweeds waving their fronds about their barnacle-encrusted timbers and the creatures of the deep playing in and about the decks and rotted rigging, lie hundreds of wrecks. Many a splendid ship with a valuable cargo has gone down off a dangerous coast; many a hoard of gold ...
— Stories of Inventors - The Adventures Of Inventors And Engineers • Russell Doubleday
... things 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 ...
— The King of Ireland's Son • Padraic Colum
... Gordon. Inside there are stringers and frames to claw on to while feeling around; outside her skin is too slick for anything except a barnacle to ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... 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 ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 4, February 1878 • Various
... to 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 [James VI.]." He observes, that the opinion ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.03.23 • Various
... their contempt for the young lout that they invented names for him—weakly, perhaps, but very boylike—and for a time he was James the Second, but the lad seemed rather to approve of that; and it was soon changed for Barnacle, which had the opposite effect, and two fights down in a sandy cave resulted, at intervals of a week, one with each of his enemies, after which the Barnacle lay down as usual, and cried into the sand, which acted, Vince said, ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... It included an eulogium of me 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 over some of the sentences. I was charmed with ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... 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
... 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 hot cockalorum." .... ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... 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 into ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... his 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 ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... anatomical teachers, that in 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 not to distinguish ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 367 - 25 Apr 1829 • Various
... 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. ...
— Eli - First published in the "Century Magazine" • Heman White Chaplin
... lampreys from the Loire, and pickled salmon from England. There was a dish of 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
... 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
... 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
... up; and the whole story is an appeal against the injustice of depriving of personal liberty those who cannot pay their bills, or meet their notes, however small. Its prominent characters are the Clennams, mother and son, the Meagleses, Flintwinch, Sir Decimus Tite Barnacle, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... 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 a theory ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... Society 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
... 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
... Barnacle, Ferdinand. He looked very good-natured and prepossessing, though overpoweringly gay and free, in contrast with ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... 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 ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... is an old fable not worth confuting. The Barnacle goose or clakis of Willoughby, anas erythropus of Linnaeus, called likewise tree-goose, anciently supposed to be generated from drift wood, or rather from the lepas anatifera or multivalve shell, called ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... diameter. It is found adhering to the kelp, and forms the chief food of several kinds of seabirds, among others the "steamer-duck." Shells and shell-fish play a large part in Fuegian domestic (!) economy. A large kind of barnacle (Concholepas Peruviana) furnishes their drinking-cups, while an edible mollusc (Mactra edulis) and several species of limpet (Patellae) help ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... a man be 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 are here we may as well feed from ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... Sumter, in the September previous. They retained the discipline of the ship 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 usually returned in haste, to avoid ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... Making 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. She—hello! ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... 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 ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell |
