"Gull" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... cry of surprise. Instead of the hot, stuffy interior of the submarine with its pale electrics and maze of machinery, he was gazing at a wide circle of small-crested waves which shone gloriously blue under a brilliant sky. Now and then a white-winged gull swooped across the view, but apart from these, there was no sign of life or ...
— On Land And Sea At The Dardanelles • Thomas Charles Bridges
... is alone,' the Captain answered. 'Our hawser fetched him off his horse as neatly as ever a gull was netted by a cragsman. What have ye ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... known of it. In my first printed mention of it I declared: 'The world is no more the alien terror that was taught me. Spurning the cloud-grimed and still sultry battlements whence so lately Jehovan thunders boomed, my gray gull lifts her wing against the night fall, and takes the dim leagues with a fearless eye.' And now, after twenty-seven years of this experience, the wing is grayer, but the eye is fearless still, while I renew and doubly emphasize that declaration. I know, as having known, the meaning ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... asked for the master. The English footman, in scarlet knee-breeches, left him to wait in the stone hall. The place was very quiet and rather cold, but all as clean as a gull's wing. There was a dark table in the middle and a high-backed chair against the wall. Two oil pictures faced each other from opposite sides. One was of an old man without a beard, but with a high forehead, framed ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... with canvas as a defence, and a few are at times decorated with streamers of coloured rags, like those that we innocently place in our gardens in seed-time to scare the sparrows. The gulls soon recover from their alarm, if they ever feel any; and it is somewhat suggestive of irony to watch a gull calmly wiping his beak on a piece of rag intended to scare him away. Whether meant as insulting or not, such conduct does not provoke the inhabitants to severe reprisals; the gulls are an institution of the place, to be grumbled at sometimes but always to be tolerated. And all the grumbling ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... master gull; 'any little thing, you know,' and his own high-bred beak was the first to take hold of the cage, which presently the gulls lifted in the air and broke ...
— The Magic City • Edith Nesbit
... "A gull would have to fan a thousand miles of air to find the eastern sea. And yet it is no mighty reach to hunt across, when shade and game are plenty! The time has been when I followed the deer in the mountains of the ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... eceellenza floated like a swan, and swam faster than a gull. Forgotten! Signore, no,—I think of it every time I hear a plash in the canals, and every time I think of it I curse the Ancona-man in my heart. St. Theodore forgive me if it be unlike a Christian ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Tia Juana he flew and made for the sea like a gull that has flown too far from its nesting place. He watched and saw the two planes spiraling upward, climbing to a higher altitude where it would be easy to dart down at him if he swung north. They suspected that trick, evidently, and were preparing ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... name of the author. They say, "Very well done." "The alliteration is so pretty." "What's an oesophagus, a bird?" "What's it all mean, anyway?" I tell them it means Mark Twain, and that an oesophagus is a kind of swallow. Am I right? Or is it a gull? Or a gullet? ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... stay no longer, but went away home, and Captain Cock, who was quite drunk, comes after me, and there sat awhile and so away, and anon I went again after the company was gone, and sat and played at cards with Sir W. Pen and his children, and so after supper home, and there I hear that my man Gull was gone to bed, and upon enquiry I hear that he did vomit before he went to bed, and complained his head ached, and thereupon though he was asleep I sent for him out of his bed, and he rose and came ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... to indicate the channel when the captain himself called out, "It is for me then to point out the buoy; there it is!" but as they drew near, the buoy floating on the water spread but a pair of wings and flew away in the shape of a gull, and many a gull in a fog may have ...
— The Journal of Submarine Commander von Forstner • Georg-Guenther von Forstner
... breeze would desert us. It usually came in about one o'clock, but that hour and another had passed and yet we watched for the first change. Without a breeze our chances of overhauling the stranger were gone. Only a white speck like the wing of a gull now marked her whereabouts on the edge of the horizon, and in another hour she would be invisible even ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... than many a sleeping place that had fallen to his lot in France. And at sunrise the outgoing tide bore him swiftly through the Narrows and spewed him out on the broad bosom of the Gulf of Georgia, all ruffled by a stiff breeze that heeled the little yawl and sent her scudding like a gray gull when Thompson laid her west, a half north, to ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... churning sea began to subside, and the invisible balm seduced all the sufferers to the quarter-deck. They were wild to sight Madeira as children to see the rising of the pantomime-curtain. There was not much to gaze at; but what will not attract man's stare at sea?—a gull, a turtle, a flying fish! By the by, Captain Tuckey, of the Congo Expedition, remarked the 'extraordinary absence of sea-birds in the vicinity of Madeira and the Canaries:' they have since learned the way thither. Porto Santo appeared as a purple lump of three knobs, a manner of 'gizzard ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... on the surface; for as one walked along the esplanade one discovered that the town had become a citadel, and that all the doll's-house villas with their silly gables and sillier names—"Seaweed," "The Sea-gull," "Mon Repos," and the rest—were really a continuous line of barracks swarming with Belgian troops. In the main street there were hundreds of soldiers, pottering along in couples, chatting in groups, romping and wrestling like a crowd of school-boys, or bargaining ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... guards with bolted door His useless treasures from the starving poor; Loads the lorn hours with misery and care, And lives a beggar to enrich his heir. 100 Unthinking crowds thy forms, Imposture, gull, A Saint in sackcloth, or a Wolf in wool. While mad with foolish fame, or drunk with power, Ambition slays his thousands in an hour; Demoniac Envy scowls with haggard mien, And blights the bloom of other's joys, unseen; Or wrathful ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... century had been celebrated the year before, on the first day of the year 1800; but it was now discovered, by the wisdom of John Gull, that the new century did not commence till the old one was finished, and therefore millions, who had before celebrated it, now performed the ceremony over again. I was then, as I now am, in a gaol, but I was in a very different gaol from this. ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... No!—the fool. He had not wit enough to be a traitor. Poor thick-eyed beetle! not to have foreseen 135 That he, who gull'd thee with a whimper'd lie To murder his own brother, would not scruple To murder thee, if e'er his guilt grew jealous And he could steal upon thee ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... bark "Rosette," and sail from Boston to Calcutta; Lula, the steamer "North Star," from New York for Liverpool; Mary shall take the "Sea-Gull," from Philadelphia to San Francisco; and Nina is owner of the "Racer," that makes voyages up the Mediterranean. Are we all ready for ...
— The Stories Mother Nature Told Her Children • Jane Andrews
... bird the Gull, which swims on the waves of the water, flew toward the Ocean sea, where he found Venus washing and bathing her selfe: to whom she declared that her son was burned and in danger of death, and moreover that it ...
— The Golden Asse • Lucius Apuleius
... and swept to leeward in blinding and drenching clouds of spindrift. And although our engine had been stopped, the ship lay to in the most perfect manner, heading well up into the wind and taking the seas, as they came at her, as buoyantly as a gull, shipping very little water except what came aboard in the form of spindrift or scud water, with an occasional spattering over ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... such things as came to hand. Sheets sculpturesquely draped the deities who took part; a fox-pelt from the hearth did duty as the leopard skin of Bacchus; a feather duster served Neptune for a trident; the lyre of Apollo was a dust-pan; a gull's breast furnished Jove with his ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... in woods, Unseen as sings the nightingale; they were Unfit to mix in these thick solitudes Call'd social, haunts of Hate, and Vice, and Care: How lonely every freeborn creature broods! The sweetest song-birds nestle in a pair; The eagle soars alone; the gull and crow Flock o'er their carrion, just ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... birds are the eagle, the turkey-buzzard, the hawk, pelican, heron, gull, cormorant, crane, swan, and a great variety of wild ducks and geese. The pigeon, woodcock, and pheasant, are found in the ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America in the years 1811, 1812, 1813, and 1814 or the First American Settlement on the Pacific • Gabriel Franchere
... and his wife, Sue, white as a ghost, Tip Elder and I, with Roger and Margarita leaning over the rail. She had on a long, tight-fitting travelling coat of slate grey and a quaint, soft little felt hat with a greyish-white gull that sprawled over the top of it. She looked taller than I had ever seen her, and her hair, drawn up high on her head, made her face more like a cameo than ever, for she was pale from the excitement and fatigue of shopping. On her hand, as she waved ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... leans, so sweet and soft, Flitting oft, O'er the mirror to and fro, Seems that airy floating bat, Like a feather From some sea-gull's wing of snow. ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... simultaneously the mate and crew, who had risked a shower bath on deck to see us off; and after a vicious little crack from the Albert's quarter as we dropped astern, we found ourselves rushing away before the rolling waters, experiencing about the same sensation one can imagine a young sea-gull feels ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... troubled, Sorely wrought the whale-mere. Wallowed there the Horn-fish, Glode the great deep through; and the gray-backed gull Slaughter-greedy wheeled. Dark the storm-sun grew, Waxed the winds up, grinded waves; Stirred the surges, groaned the cordage, Wet with ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... his old dismal haunt by the seashore. The cry of the drowning girl would not have come to him as it would to the more finely nervous constitution of Mr Cupples; but the cry of a sea-gull, or the wash of the waves, or even the wind across the tops of the sand-hills, would have been enough to make him see in every crest which the wind tore white in the gloamin, the forlorn figure of the girl he loved vanishing from ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... Faustus still doth hold, Nought is now said, but hath been said of old; Well, Faustus, say my wits are gross and dull, If for that word I give thee not a Gull: Thus then I prove thou holdst a false position; I say thou art a man of fair condition, A man true of thy word, tall of thy hands, Of high descent and left good store of lands; Thou with false dice ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... my lover, My friends are the Oceans four, The Heavens have roofed me over, And the Dawn is my golden door. I would liefer follow a condor, Or the sea-gull soaring from ken, Than bury my Godhead yonder, In the dust and whirl ...
— My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard • Elizabeth Cooper
... and genial. The wind had died, and the waves of the rising tide were creeping up the long, sloping stretches of the sand with a lazy, soothing rush. A winter gull poised above their heads and soared seaward. The smoke of an ocean liner streaked the horizon as she swept toward the channel off ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... and we had made a rapid and prosperous voyage so far. Sunny days and cold, clear, starry nights had come and gone amid the intense and wonderful loveliness of these strange seas. Not a sail had we passed, not a gull had been seen, scarcely a porpoise. But now this radiant Easter Sunday morning finds us almost becalmed on the eastern side of Mauritius, with what air is stirring dead ahead, but only coming in a cat's-paw ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... away, and the Rose, released from the strain, shook her feathers on the wave-crest like a freed sea-gull, while all ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... double papers fabricated merely for exhibition, in which she makes herself talk of morals and principle, as if her qualms of conscience would not permit her to go all lengths with her Holy Allies, are all to gull her own people. It is a theatrical farce, in which the five powers are the actors, England the Tartuffe, and her people the dupes. Playing thus so dextrously into each other's hands, and their own persons seeming secured, they are now looking to their privileged orders. These faithful auxiliaries, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... a great gull over New Orleans one hot morning in early August. The boys who occupied seats on the light aluminum form under the sixty-foot wings glimpsed the Gulf of Mexico in the distance, while directly their feet ran the crooked streets ...
— Boy Scouts in an Airship • G. Harvey Ralphson
... arctic gull (Cataractes parasiticus), given to make other sea-birds mute through fear, and then eat their discharge—whence it is termed dirty ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... pecks aimed at his hands, he with firmness folded the great strong wings and legs and carried the gull outside on ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... tale into the French, M. Victor Hugo will please twig the proper meaning of the word "spray"; I shall be very angry if he make it appear that my hero is a gull. ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... matrons. The grave-digger was singing something so old that his adversary had forgotten it, or perhaps had never known it; but the good dames instantly sang the victorious refrain through their noses, in tones as shrill as those of the sea-gull; and the grave-digger, summoned to surrender, passed ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... begun their friendship. The sun beat warmly down and the hill at their backs kept off the east wind. Below them the river was brightly blue, and a skiff dipping its way up stream caught the sunlight on sail and hull until, as it danced from sight around the headland, it looked like a white gull hovering over the water. Above, on the campus, the football field was noisy with voices and the pipe of the referee's whistle; and farther up the river at the boathouse moving figures showed that some of the boys were about to take ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour
... some with a shark's head and the flat body of a sting-ray. Many birds partake of the parrot; some have the head, neck, and bill of a parrot, with long straight feet and legs; others with legs and feet of a parrot, with head and neck of a sea gull. Voyage to South Wales by Captain John Hunter, ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... intention of going back to Cape Coast Castle by the way that they came. Thanks to the firmness of the brothers this mutiny was quelled, and on the 22nd October the explorers left Egga, firing a parting salute of three musket-shots. A few miles further down, a sea-gull flew over their heads, a sure sign that they were approaching the sea, and with it, it appeared all but certain, the end of ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... and a chance to take a prize or two. So the Fame not being available, he had a small vessel constructed at Leghorn, and called her the Saint George. She was a fast sailer and was as graceful as a sea-gull. "In this fair ship," said he, as he gazed upon her admiringly, "I shall take many a prize and shall have, I trust, many a sharp adventure. Saint George, I salute you! May you bring me only the ...
— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston
... north-easter flashed in the white cataracts of his eyes and woke a feeble activity in his scrannel limbs. When the wind blew loud, his daughter had told me, he was always restless, like an imprisoned sea-gull. He would be up and out. He would rise and flap his old draggled pinions, as if the great air fanned ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... years would have been pronounced as five-and-forty by the friendly, fifty by the candid, fifty-two or three by the grim. He was as handsome a study in grey as could be seen in town, there being far more of the raven's plumage than of the gull's in the mixture as yet; and he had a glance of that practised sort which can measure people, weigh them, repress them, encourage them to sprout and blossom as a March sun encourages crocuses, ask them questions, give them answers—in short, a glance that ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... now art seeming Death-pale, bloody red, Like a dying sea-gull gleaming White with blood o'erspread. Purple tides the wounds are showing From thy faith in justice flowing; Denmark, bear the cross, thy burden Honor ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... Slavery speeches are all Bunkum; so are reform speeches, too. Do you think them fellers that keep up such an everlastin' gab about representation, care one cent about the extension of franchise? Why no, not they; it's only to secure their seats to gull their constituents, to get a name. Do you think them goneys that make such a touss about the Arms' Bill, care about the Irish? No, not they; they want Irish votes, that's all—it's Bunkum. Do you jist go and mesmerise John Russell, and Macauley, and the other officers of the regiment of ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... 'em in the face! Say, if I were a sea-gull, and all over silver, think I'd care what a pack of dirty seals thought about ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... although not naturally superstitious, I have a way of peopling my island with beings during the solitary walks I take in the day, that at night I almost fancy these spirit-forms hover round me—perhaps watching me. It may be that I have mistaken the flight of a sea-gull or night-bird for something superhuman, but on several occasions I have been warned of approaching danger by something outside myself; not tangible to the touch, nor definable to the eye, but still noticeable to the ear and to the mind. Put it down a bird, as your ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... recent appearance. There are not a few of these notices in Richardson's Dictionary: thus one from Lord Bacon under 'essay'; from Swift under 'banter'; from Sir Thomas Elyot under 'mansuetude'; from Lord Chesterfield under 'flirtation'; from Davies and Marlowe's Epigrams under 'gull'; from Roger North under 'sham' (Appendix); the third quotation from Dryden under 'mob'; one from the same under 'philanthropy', and again under 'witticism', in which he claims the authorship of the word; that from Evelyn under 'miss'; and from Milton ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... Town to Melbourne, had been blown out of her course and south of the Crozet Islands; she was now steering north-west, making towards Kerguelen, across an ice-blue sea, vast, like a country of broken crystal strewn with snow. The sky, against which the top-gallant stay-sails shewed gull-white in the sun, had the cold blue of the sea and was hung round at the horizon by clouds like the white clouds that hang ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... You are wrong; and I am going to prove it. Because, you see, though it is easy to gull that fool who just left here, it is not so easy to deceive Corporal Bavois. Very well! it was scarcely prudent to leave in the court-yard a gun that certainly had not been ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... lone, so grim, At dawning pale, or twilight dim, It fearful would have been To meet a form so richly dressed, With book in hand, and cross on breast, And such a woeful mien. Fitz-Eustace, loitering with his bow, To practise on the gull and crow, Saw her, at distance, gliding slow, And did by Mary swear - Some lovelorn fay she might have been, Or, in romance, some spell-bound queen; For ne'er, in work-day world, was seen ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... lengthen over the limitless and lonesome prairie; Where herds of buffalo make a crawling spread of the square miles far and near; Where the hummingbird shimmers— where the neck of the long-lived swan is curving and winding; Where the laughing-gull scoots by the shore when she laughs her near human laugh; Where band-neck'd partridges roost in a ring on the ground with their ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... What a gull they must have thought me! I might have known that, with my lost papers on the way to France, they must hold me tight here till I had been tried, nor permit me to escape. But I was sick of doing nothing, thinking with ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... is the next world?" cried the old hag in her drunkenness: "no, in this world, here, on what we call earth. What words the fools make use of! There is no next world, you silly ninnyhammer! he who does not skim off the fat from the broth while he is here, is a wretched gull. This however is what they clack to their simple brood, that they may behave prettily, and keep within bounds, and go the way one would lead them: but whosoever believes none of their fabling, he is ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... lived on the dividends of railways and omnibus companies. On the way to my office the tailor took toll of me by forcing me to wear a garb which I detested, simply because I dared wear no other garb. I could not even drink plain water but that some one was the richer. I was the common gull of the thing called convention. I was plucked to the skin, and if my skin had been worth turning into leather, some one would have put in a claim to that. Even for my skin, poor asset as it was, some one did wait, when it ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... with a white breast passed overhead; and they stopped paddling to look at it,-a gull. Sign of fair ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... he circled about them, reckless and irresponsible as a sea-gull, "I am so glad, so very glad you have come. I like you because you are so bold and young. I have none about me like you. You will teach me to ride a tourney. I have been hearing all about yours at Thrieve from the Lady Sybilla. I wish you had asked me. But now we shall be friends, and ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... when past fifty, attained instant success, and never again reached the high level of her first book. 'La Gaviota' (The Sea-Gull) appeared in 1849 in the pages of a Madrid daily paper, and at once made its author famous. 'The Family of Alvoreda,' an earlier story, was published after her first success. Washington Irving, who saw the manuscript of this, encouraged her to go on. Her novels were fully translated, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... of 1896 that Pilcher built his third glider, the 'Gull,' with 300 square feet of area and a weight of 55 lbs. The size of this machine rendered it unsuitable for experiment in any but very calm weather, and it incurred such damage when experiments were made in a breeze ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... in the water, and shot several birds, on which we feasted the next day. One of these birds was of that sort which has been so often mentioned in this journal under the name of Port Egmont hens. They are of the gull kind, about the size of a raven, with a dark-brown plumage, except the under-side of each wing, where there are some white feathers. The rest of the birds were albatrosses ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, Volume 1 • James Cook
... wharf on which it stood had rotted away and fallen in, and nothing now remained but the line of spiles, which rose out of the water like a row of bad teeth from which the gums had fallen away. And on top of each spile roosted a huge sea gull of marvelous whiteness, fatted with the spoils ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the health; it injures the intellect. Short of drunkenness, that is, in those effects of it which stop short of drunkenness, I should say from my experience that alcohol is the most destructive agent we are aware of in this country."—Sir William Gull, the most eminent English physician ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... hour the galley skimmed to and fro among the anchored fleet, now running free like a white-winged gull, anon close-hauled, the razor bows cleaving a path through the dancing water in a ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... behind us, and over it a company of gulls kept flashing and wheeling and clamouring. While I listened, following Marc'antonio's example, it seemed to me that an echo from the summit directly above us took up the gull's cry and repeated it, prolonging the note. Marc'antonio ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... heaved painfully. So sunk was I in my reflections, so lost in thought, that I never knew that the storm had broken loose, and that the heavy rain was falling in torrents. The very ground, parched with long drought, smoked as it pattered upon it; while the low, wailing cry of the sea-gull, mingled with the deep growl of far-off thunder, told that the night was a fearful one for those at sea. Wet through and shivering, I sat still, now listening amidst the noise of the hurricane and the creaking of the cordage for any footstep ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... she had realized. Possibly, some of her emphasis imparted itself to her touch on the tiller, and jerked the sloop too violently into a sudden puff as it careened. At all events, the boat swung sidewise, trembled for an instant like a wounded gull, and then slapped its spread of canvas prone upon the water ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... the wind blew through the fields of grass like countless angels in the courts of heaven. Shadow and color and light and movement dancing before the first syllable of the Name. A gull flew down almost to my hand, and the sunlight thundered in my ears. Last night the sea was sadly purifying the earth. I now understand the Washer of the Ford. Majesty lies in darkness, and grief is only the privilege of seeing Majesty. Today on the porch with ...
— The Forgotten Threshold • Arthur Middleton
... the articles were distributed among the party, and then followed his young friends with an anticipatory bark. Carlo was lifted out by Hamish, and immediately set off to chase a gull which sailed majestically out to sea, and left ...
— The Adventure League • Hilda T. Skae
... three several Impositions. First, He underboil'd his Wort to save its Consumption: Secondly, He boiled this Seed instead of the Hop; and Thirdly, He beat the Yeast in for some time to encrease the strength of the Drink; and all these in such a Legerdemain manner as gull'd and infatuated the ignorant Drinker to such a degree as not to suspect the Fraud, and that for these three Reasons: First, The underboil'd wort being of a more sweet taste than ordinary, was esteemed the Produce of a great allowance of Malt. Secondly, The Daucus ...
— The London and Country Brewer • Anonymous
... some one's hospitalities. He comes again by and by, and the house is vacant. He infers that his host has moved. A while afterward, in another town, he sees the man enter a house; he infers that that is the new home, and follows to inquire. Here, now, is the experience of a gull, as related by a naturalist. The scene is a Scotch fishing village where the gulls were kindly treated. This particular gull visited a cottage; was fed; came next day and was fed again; came into the house, next time, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... But, cuckold-like, love him who does the feat: What injuries soe'er upon us fall, Yet, still the same religion answers all: Religion wheedled you to civil war, Drew English blood, and Dutchmen's now would spare: Be gull'd no longer, for you'll find it true, They have no more religion, faith—than you; Interest's the god they worship in their state; And you, I take it, have not much of that. 20 Well, monarchies may own religion's name, But states are atheists in their ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... heat and moisture combine to throw up a rank vegetation on its marshy banks. The peasants fly from its pestiferous exhalations, and nothing is heard or seen but the plash of the fish in the still waters, the sharp cry of the heron and gull, wheeling and hovering till they dart on their prey, and some rude fisherman's boat piled with baskets of eels for the ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... if she needed Vee," I goes on. "She's just got in the habit of havin' her 'round. That might be all right, too, if she didn't have the travel bug so bad. But with her keepin' on the wing so constant— Well, I'm no bloomin' sea-gull. And when you're engaged, this long-distance stuff ought to be ruled ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... fog was thicker, and the ocean smooth as glass. For fear of collision with another ship, the lookout man kept blowing a horn which had a most dismal sound. The captain and mate tried to get the sun at noon but could not find the faintest trace. After dinner a gull flew past, which made the cook say he smelt danger. A few were below but the most of us were on deck when a slight bump was felt and then another. The rattling in the rigging stopped and the ocean swell broke on our stern. The mate started to the companion scuttle and shouted ...
— The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 • Gordon Sellar
... as dull a dolt as ever I met, yet clever enough to gull you. He thought you must suspect. I dreaded it—needlessly. You wise St. Quentins! You cannot see what goes ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... ye went out on the 'ills an' found 'im, I was settin' at my door down shorewards watchin' the waves an' hearin' the wind cryin' like a babe for its mother, an' if ye'll believe me, there was a sea-gull as came and flopped down on a stone just in front o' me!—a thing no sea-gull ever did to me all the time I've lived 'ere, which is thirty years since I married Twitt. There it sat, drenched wi' the rain, ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... steak, And some sea gull eggs, And a pint of sea cow's milk, Green sea weed sauce And water cress And oysters ...
— The Iceberg Express • David Magie Cory
... wherever they went they were pursued by thousands of mackerel, who wanted to eat them. One day John felt that the moment was very near when he would be eaten by a mackerel, and he was quite right. Isabel felt the same thing, but she was wrong. She jumped out of the water and was eaten by a sea-gull. When the fishermen saw Isabel leaping into the air they came out and caught the mackerel in a net. They also caught Margaret with a lot of other whitebait; and she was eaten by ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 15, 1920 • Various
... the last gun; blown the last match; bowed to the last blast; been tranced in the last calm. We have mustered our last round the capstan; been rolled to grog the last time; for the last time swung in our hammocks; for the last time turned out at the sea-gull call of the watch. We have seen our last man scourged at the gangway; our last man gasp out the ghost in the stifling Sick-bay; our last man tossed to the sharks. Our last death-denouncing Article ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... fine snooding;—to the sid a length of gut on which half an inch ofclay pipe-stem is threaded, and to the gut a rather large hook. The bait is a 'lask,' or long three-cornered strip of skin, cut from the tail of a mackerel. The older fishermen prefer a round lead, cast in the egg-shell of a gull, because it runs sweeter through the water, but with this form the fish's bite is difficult to feel on account of the jerk having to be transmitted through the ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... and for several minutes there was no sound but the sigh of the wind and the lapping of the tide. A white-winged gull flew by, with the flash of sunshine on its silvery breast. Beth watched it till it vanished, and her eyes were full of sadness. A little gray-coated sand bird came tripping over the beach 'peeping' softly to itself, as if ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... apartments, and that he often walks about the woods and crags of Minto at night, with a white nightcap, and long white beard. The circumstance of his having died on the road down to Scotland is the sole foundation of this absurd legend, which shows how willing the vulgar are to gull themselves when they can find no one else to take the trouble. I have seen people who could read, write, and cipher, shrug their shoulders and look mysterious when this subject was mentioned. One very absurd addition was made on occasion of a great ball at Minto House, which it was said was ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... distributed over that part of the interior traversed by the Expedition. Like Elanus notatus, it has a bright full eye, the iris inclined to a light pink. Its shoulders are black, and its back like a sea-gull, slate-coloured. ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... and tell him of it? A pity, if it should prove to be nothing, or only the chattering of a sea-gull. His brave protector had need of rest. Ben would not be angry to be awaked; but the sailor would be sure to laugh at him if he were to say he had heard a little girl talking at that time of night in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Perhaps Ben might say it was a mermaid, and mock him ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... than doubtful company, this might have proved a disagreeable experiment, but that Tigg and Crimple, studying to understand their man thoroughly, gave him what license he chose: knowing that the more he took, the better for their purpose. And thus while the blundering cheat—gull that he was, for all his cunning—thought himself rolled up hedgehog fashion, with his sharpest points towards them, he was, in fact, betraying all his vulnerable parts ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... enterprise, who freed his mind of its swaddling-clothes, showed him the dark holes of the business, taught him its dialect, took the mechanism apart bit by bit, dissected for his instruction the particular public he was expected to gull, crammed him with phrases, fed him with impromptu replies, provisioned him with unanswerable arguments, and, so to speak, sharpened the file of the tongue which was about to operate upon the life ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... the twilight— Calls as its chance were vain? The cry of a gull sent seaward Or the voice of an ...
— The Song of the Sword - and Other Verses • W. E. Henley
... is old. Your weak side, my diabolic friend, is that you have always been a gull: you take Man at his own valuation. Nothing would flatter him more than your opinion of him. He loves to think of himself as bold and bad. He is neither one nor the other: he is only a coward. Call him tyrant, murderer, pirate, bully; and he will ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... GULL. About that same time, a pair of laughing gulls had the temerity to build a nest on the ground in the very storm centre of the great Flying Cage. Daily and hourly they were surrounded by a truculent mob of pelicans, herons, ibises, storks, egrets ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... no pity for any Marguerite," Le Rossignol added, and she tossed from her head the entire subject with a cap made of white gull breasts. A brush of red hair stood up in thousands of tendrils, exaggerating by its nimbus the size of her upper person. Never had dwarf a sweeter voice. If she had been compressed in order to produce melody, her tones were compensation, enough. She made lilting sounds while ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... Macwheeble out to the field of battle. Now you must know the Bailie's greatest horror is an armed Highlander, or a loaded gun; and there he stands, listening to the Baron's instructions concerning the protest; ducking his head like a sea-gull at the report of every gun and pistol that our idle boys are firing upon the fields; and undergoing, by way of penance, at every symptom of flinching, a severe rebuke from his patron, who would not admit the discharge of a whole battery of cannon, within point-blank ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... Hawk-Eye had taught the Twins how to fish the streams for trout, and he himself had learned how to fasten his net between two of the gull rocks and catch the fish that ...
— The Cave Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... The better to gull the world, the Star-gazers assert that the heavens are the book in which God has written the destiny of all things; and that it is only necessary to learn to read this book, which is simply the construction of the stars, to be able to know ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... to Nassau was safely accomplished; the vigilant look-out at the mast-head giving prompt notice of a speck on the horizon no larger than a gull's wing, when the course would be so changed as to lose sight of it. Two cases of yellow fever, both ending fatally, occurred among the passengers during the brief voyage, and we were quarantined on our arrival at Nassau. One of the sick men ...
— The Narrative of a Blockade-Runner • John Wilkinson
... What you want to go there so often? It's no wonder if you are drowned crossing that nasty place in such a storm, You are like a wet sea-gull. If you were a baby you wouldn't be more trouble," ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... coming down carrying a stretcher, where lay a long white figure whose face was shrouded, and whose fight was done. Sometimes I stopped to watch the passers in the street, the moonlight shining on the spire opposite, or the gleam of some vessel floating, like a white-winged sea-gull, down the broad Potomac, whose fullest flow can never wash away the red stain ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... mingle with the brine as a river should; you do not put an end to your labours by dispersing; you hold together through the sea, keep your current fresh, and hurry along in all your original purity; you dive down to strange depths like a gull or a heron; I suppose you will come to the top again and ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... boy and the child were playing on the shore of the lake one day, the boy began to throw pebbles into the water, when suddenly a gull arose from the centre of the lake, and flew towards the land. When it had arrived there, it took human shape, and the boy recognised that it was the lost mother. She had a leather belt around her, and another belt of white metal. She suckled the baby, and, preparing to return to the ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends: North American Indian • Anonymous
... large gray gull, mistaking him for a corpse, had made a dash at him, and its loud discordant scream in a moment brought a countless number of these formidable birds together, all prepared to contest for a share of the spoil. These large and powerful foes he had now to scare ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... hold And give me leave (my Lord) to say thus much (And in mine own defence) I am no Gull To be wrought on by perswasion: nor no Coward To be beaten out of my means, but know to whom And why I give or lend, and will do nothing But what my reason warrants; you may be As sparing as you please, I must be bold To make use of my own, without ...
— The Spanish Curate - A Comedy • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... be expected the fauna and flora of the Shoals is neither rare nor extensive. Gulls are to be seen of course at all times,—especially the large burgomaster gull, one of the finest of birds in size and ferocity, and in power of sight nearly equal to an eagle. In spring and fall flocks of coot and the more fishy sort of ducks are to be found there together with a good many loons. Snowy owls are not uncommon in cold weather, ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... only found the waves, heard the sea-gull's cry, In and out the ocean caves, underneath the sky, All above the wind-washed graves ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... of the sporting gull, again; it had been nigh to deceive my sight, which would be to cheat the look-out of a man that has the advantage of some ten or fifteen years' more practice in marine appearances. I remember once, when beating in among the islands of the China seas, ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... sand and mud. Most of the land in the upper part of this branch was low and full of swamps. Pelicans and various other birds were here seen in great numbers. Among the rest an uncommon kind, called then the Hooded Gull, and supposed to be a non descript; but it appears from a drawing sent to England, a plate from which is here inserted, to be of that species called by Mr. Latham the Caspian Tern, and is described by him as the second ...
— The Voyage Of Governor Phillip To Botany Bay • Arthur Phillip
... when one's in good heart and at really pleasant things. I've a lot of nice things to do, but the heart fails—after lunch, particularly!" Heart and head did, however, fail again; and another attack of brain fever followed. Sir William Gull brought him through, and won his praise as a doctor and esteem as a friend. Ruskin took it as a great compliment when Sir William, in acknowledging his fee, wrote that he should keep the cheque ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... heavy spray Shot through the doorway serpentine cold arms To seize the fore-doomed morsel of the sea: Then she slept never; and she would have died, But that she evermore was stung to life By new sea-terrors. Sometimes the sea-gull With clanging pinions darted through the arch, And flapped them round her face; sometimes a wave, If tides were high and winds from off the sea, Rushed through the door, and in its watery mesh Clasped her waist-high, then out again to sea! Out to the devilish laughter and the ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald |
