"Flounder" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... preternaturally wise? Wherefore be so eager to jump out of one religion, for the purpose of jumping into another? See what good this philosophical friskiness has done you, and on what sort of ground you are come at last. You are so wonderfully sagacious, that you flounder in mud at every step; so amazingly clear-sighted, that your eyes cannot see an inch before you, having put out, with that extinguishing genius of yours, every one of the lights that are sufficient for the conduct of common men. And for what? ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... over our little incidents: how the wagon couldn't go on by way of the shore, and had to flounder back over the rocks, and crawl out of the canon to the upper road; how Kitty and I set out vain-gloriously to walk to Broadlands by the river-trail, and Harshaw set out to walk with us; and how Kitty made it difficult for him to walk with both of us by staving on ahead, with the step of a young ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... shadows coming from these sidelong pits and moving about, huge and misshapen lumps, bear-like, that flounder and growl. They are "us." We are muffled like Eskimos. Fleeces and blankets and sacking wrap us up, weigh us down, magnify us strangely. Some stretch themselves, yawning profoundly. Faces appear, ruddy or leaden, dirt-disfigured, ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... enabled us to do great things. But the use is at an end, and the stage is over. Ask yourselves if you do not sometimes feel in yourselves a sense, that in spite of the strenuous efforts for good of so many excellent persons amongst us, we begin somehow to flounder and to beat the air; that we seem to be finding ourselves stopped on this line of advance and on that, and to be threatened with a sort of standstill. It is that we are trying to live on with a social organization ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... breakfast, and you remember where the man was fishing and caught nothing that day? Well, what does Jeremiah do but just walk plump over the edge. I had all but got to him, by good luck, and of course I went straight for him and caught him before he sank. I induced him not to kick and flounder, and got him inside a life-belt they threw from the pier, and then I settled to leave him alone and swim to the steps, because you've no idea how I felt my clothes, and it would have been all right, only a horrible heavy petticoat got ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... bill with it," said Frank, "and very good-natured he was to take the monster off my hands,—it had already hugged two soldiers and one groom into the shape of a flounder. I tell you what," resumed Frank, after a short pause, "I have a great mind even now to tell my father ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Rover was so unexpected that he had no chance to save himself from going down into the snowbank. He went down so hard and the snow was so soft that for the moment he was almost covered and had to flounder around quite some to ...
— The Rover Boys on a Hunt - or The Mysterious House in the Woods • Arthur M. Winfield (Edward Stratemeyer)
... "Give me a flounder, Johnny?" said a little girl of eleven, dressed in coarse and ragged garments, as she stooped down and looked into the basket of the dirty young fisherman, who sat with his legs hanging over ...
— Poor and Proud - or The Fortunes of Katy Redburn • Oliver Optic
... Violette had no cause to fear! Amedee received his degree on the same day with his friend Maurice, and both passed honorably. A little old man with a head like a baboon—the scientific examiner—tried to make Amedee flounder on the subject of nitrogen, but he passed all the same. One can ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... he asked abruptly. "No? Well, it's a resort, a playground, down New York way. Henry Hudson landed here, and many another Dutchman has been 'landed' and made regrettable discoveries right on this same spot. It has a bathing beach where the gals show what they've got and fat men flounder and cavort far beyond their capacities. Up from the beach is the midway proper—a carnival or street fair, with bandstands and dance platforms, peep shows, free shows, and legits. At the proper season these places are alive with spenders. They ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... officers re-form the column, and the journey is continued. But though the respite has been short, it has been valuable; local inconvenience acts as a sedative to the nerves. Besides, there is less silence. The track that was parched and spongy has now become soft and slippery. Horses flounder and slide. Wet mackintoshes swish against the animals' flanks, and hoofs are raised with a rinsing, sucking sound. But there is man's work afoot. As the rain-mists sufficiently clear, the "Robber" is able to take his bearings. The head of the column has ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... barn-stormer would have risen to the occasion without so much as the blinking of an eye. He would have been able to smile and gesticulate in a manner that would have deceived the most acute observer, while he—ah, he was almost certain to flounder and make a mess of the situation. He did his best, however, and, despite his eagerness, managed to come off fairly well. Any one out of ear-shot would have thought that he was uttering some trifling inanity ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... my three friends, a gentleman whom I knew to possess an enviable flow of silver speech, and obtested him, by whatever he deemed holiest, to give me at least an available thought or two to start with, and, once afloat, I would trust to my guardian-angel for enabling me to flounder ashore again, He advised me to begin with some remarks complimentary to the Lord-Mayor, and expressive of the hereditary reverence in which his office was held—at least, my friend thought that there would be no harm in giving his Lordship this little sugar-plum, whether quite the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... the bog and had done fairly well at first, but when he neared us he too sank to his belly and could only flounder about. We were in this predicament when Du-seen and his followers approached the edge of the horrible swamp. I saw that Al-tan was with him and many other Kro-lu warriors. The alliance against Jor the chief had, therefore, been consummated, and this horde was ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... volumes to which I have referred. I have made some Mendelian experiments myself, not always with results in agreement with the strict Mendelian doctrine, so that I am not venturing to criticise without experience. I have not hesitated to reprint the figure, published many years ago, of a Flounder showing the production of pigment under the influence of light, because I thought it was desirable that the reader should have before him this figure and those of an example of mutation in the Turbot for comparison when following the ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... your eyes, here's old Bill Barley. Here's old Bill Barley, bless your eyes. Here's old Bill Barley on the flat of his back, by the Lord. Lying on the flat of his back like a drifting old dead flounder, here's your old Bill Barley, bless ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... sounded as shrill as a dozen clarions, and it carried half-a-mile along the quay. He sprang ashore. "Hi-ya!" It was like the yell of a hundred cannibals, but the Pilot's crew only grinned. "You ze boys. I bringa you ze flounder for tea. Heh?" In one moment the fat fisher was back in the boat, and in another he had scrambled ashore with a number of fish, strung together through the gills. Above the noise of the traffic on the ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... and wounding and suffering, out of the breeding darknesses of Time, that will presently crush and consume him again. Why not flounder with the rest, why not eat, drink, fight, scream, weep and pray, forget Hugh, stop brooding upon Hugh, banish all these priggish dreams of "The Better Government of the World," and turn to the brighter aspects, the funny and ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... got drunk with rum and with renown, As many others in high places do— Whose fall is like Sam's last—for down and down, By one mad impulse driven, they flounder through The gulf that keeps the future from our view, And then are found not. May they rest in peace! We heave the sigh to human frailty due— And shall not Sam have his? The muse shall cease To keep the heroic roll, which ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... only learn to write their own language correctly by means of Latin prose. Nor is it true that Latin prose supplies the ideal mental discipline. That is only true for the minority of boys who reach the stage at which real Latin prose is written. Most flounder about all their time in the stage of artificial Latin prose, wherein is nothing more than the meticulous application of a set of laboriously acquired grammatical rules—a tolerable training in conscientious ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell
... Seldom my goosequill, of goose from Germany, fatted in England, (Frolicksome though I have been) have I tried on Hexameter, knowing Latin and Greek are alone its languages. We have a measure Fashion'd by Milton's own hand, a fuller, a deeper, a louder. Germans may flounder at will over consonant, vowel, and liquid, Liquid and vowel but one to a dozen of consonants, ending Each with a verb at the tail, tail heavy as African ram's tail, Spenser and Shakspeare had each his own harmony; each an enchanter Wanting no aid from without. ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 7 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 12, 1850 • Various
... done very little by himself, but in another minute Hetty was kneeling on the horse's head, while, at more than a little risk from the battering hoofs, he loosed some of the harness. Then, the Badger was allowed to flounder to his feet, and Clavering proceeded to readjust his trappings. A buckle had drawn, however, and ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... a ready victim. To tell the truth, no one but the Jam-wagon was particularly sorry. If there was a sump-hole in sight, that horse was sure to flounder into it. Sometimes twice in one day we had to unhitch the ox and pull him out. There was a place dug out of the snow alongside the trail, which was being used as a knacker's yard, and here we took him with a broken leg and put a bullet in his brain. While we waited there were ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... supperless the hero sate, Blasphem'd his gods, the dice, and damn'd his fate; Then gnaw'd his pen, then dasht it on the ground, Sinking from thought to thought, a vast profound! Plung'd for his sense, but found no bottom there, Yet wrote and flounder'd on in mere despair. Round him much embryo, much abortion lay, Much future ode, and abdicated play; Nonsense precipitate, like running lead, That slipt through cracks and zigzags of the head; All that on Folly Frenzy could beget, Fruits of dull heat, and sooterkins of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... will presume the fish to be Shad a la Delmonico, Halibut a la Meniere or Turbans of Flounder—it is passed in the platter, followed by rolls and Cucumber Ribbons, Dressed Cucumbers or Sliced Cucumbers, as the case may be. Then the fish course is taken from the table and we come ...
— Prepare and Serve a Meal and Interior Decoration • Lillian B. Lansdown
... have wooed by kisses and won, or he would not have flounder-flatted so just and humorous, nor less pleasing than humorous, an image into so profound a nihility. In the name of love and wonder, do not four kisses make a double affirmative? The humour lies in the ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... her head. "It's a awful hard sayin', Mr. Gael. It's awful hard to say you had ought to be somethin' a person can't manage for themselves. I mean—" poor Joan, the inarticulate, floundered, but he left her, rather cruelly, to flounder out. "I mean, that's an awful hard sayin' fer ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... just as part of the day's work, the steward chopped down with his knife, catching the log-line between the steel edge and the rail. At once, no longer buoyed up by the Elsinore's two-knot drag ahead, the wounded men began to swim and flounder. The circling hosts of huge sea-birds descended upon them, with carnivorous beaks striking at their heads and shoulders and arms. A great screeching and squawking arose from the winged things of prey as they ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... he cried, going with an immense flounder into the midst of the amused trappers, and slapping those next to him on the back. "Give me veapon, do, mes amis—gun, pistol, ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... observance of his Holiness's dignity. How incomprehensible Englishmen are! I should have sworn that he would have piqued himself on calling the Pope the w- of Babylon, and have begun his remonstrance, with "you old d-d-." What extremes of absurdities! to flounder from Pope Joan to his Holiness! I like your reflection, "that every body can bully the Pope." There was a humourist called Sir James of the Peak, who had been beat by a felony, who afterwards underwent the same operation from a third hand. "Zound," said Sir James, "that I did not know this fellow ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... convinced me that Jim could not afford to alienate the affections of such a father-in-law. As I advanced toward the small box in which Mr. Tescheron sat wrapped in his scaly ulster, I caught a glimpse of a live flounder, who appealed to me in whispers, as he made an effort to turn over and find some cooler ice. I did not interrupt him. ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... of torpor till the rising of the stream after the rains enables it to resume its active habits. At this period the natives of the Gambia, like those of Ceylon, resort to the river, and secure the fish in considerable numbers as they flounder in the still shallow water. A parallel instance occurs in Abyssinia in relation to the fish of the Mareb, one of the sources of the Nile, the waters of which are partially absorbed in traversing the plains of Taka. During ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... in the river, two of the little river people were having a talk all by themselves. They were Unfortunate Flounder and Mr. Salmon Trout. Salmon Trout is a very graceful fellow who always holds himself erect in the water. When he swims, he goes so swiftly that you can hardly see him. But Unfortunate Flounder goes floating around on one side all ...
— Little White Fox and his Arctic Friends • Roy J. Snell
... object; for the marines on her poop fired a close volley at him, and a scream of rage and despair from his messmates arose, when they beheld him wildly throw up his left arm in unmistakable agony, and flounder in what appeared his death-flurry. Then his body rose perpendicularly, till his shoulders were a foot or more clear above the water, and he slowly fell backward, with his head pointing to the Danish ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 457 - Volume 18, New Series, October 2, 1852 • Various
... high renown. A pleasant land it is in sooth of murmuring waters, fishful streams where sport the gurnard, the plaice, the roach, the halibut, the gibbed haddock, the grilse, the dab, the brill, the flounder, the pollock, the mixed coarse fish generally and other denizens of the aqueous kingdom too numerous to be enumerated. In the mild breezes of the west and of the east the lofty trees wave in different directions their firstclass foliage, the wafty sycamore, the ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... the highest point of the hill she stood as if transfixed, a slim little silhouette against the darkening sky, her hands clasped in amazement. Suddenly she turned and came tearing down the hill, floundering through sand, falling and picking herself up, only to flounder and fall again, finally rolling down the last few ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston
... given them an unescapable conviction of His reality, and have swayed their wills to live in conformity to His perfect Goodness; and it is also true that when for any cause this clue of rationality is missed or lost, men flounder about in the fog and pass through periods of inward tragedy amounting often to despair. But the approach of Reason still leaves much to be desired. It points to something deeper than the transitory flux of things, it ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... a tiny poem All composed in a metre of Catullus, All in quantity, careful of my motion, Like the skater on ice that hardly bears him, Lest I fall unawares before the people, Waking laughter in indolent reviewers. Should I flounder awhile without a tumble Thro' this metrification of Catullus, They should speak to me not without a welcome, All that chorus of indolent reviewers. Hard, hard, hard is it, only not to tumble, So fantastical is the dainty metre. Wherefore slight me not wholly, ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson
... it helps them to be more honest and candid with themselves, with GOD, and with the Church, if they go to confession from time to time as a piece of self-discipline and a needed spiritual tonic. Yet others discover that they flounder less in spiritual things, and that their religious life is deepened and made stronger, if they place themselves for a time under wise direction. Systematic direction, of course, has obvious dangers. It may tend to destroy independence of character. ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... Virginia coast teemed with many kinds of fish and shellfish which were both edible and palatable. Varieties which the colonists soon learned to eat included sheepshead, shad, sturgeon, herring, sole, white salmon, bass, flounder, pike, bream, perch, rock, and drum, as well as oysters, crabs, and mussels. Seafood was an important source of food for the colonists, and at times, especially during the early years of the settlement, ...
— New Discoveries at Jamestown - Site of the First Successful English Settlement in America • John L. Cotter
... Keppel having returned on board, all the troops were ordered to disembark. The steamers were made fast to the banks, and planks were placed ashore. They were of little use, for officers and men had to flounder and wade through the shallows before they reached firm ground 300 yards from the bank. Four of the guns of Peake's battery were also landed. The force having been formed up was marched a short distance to the south. It was halted behind and exactly covering ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... threefold threshed upon by ploughmen's flails as were the pitifully disjointed members of their mangled bodies under the merciless baton of the cross. If any offered to hide himself amongst the thickest of the vines, he laid him squat as a flounder, bruised the ridge of his back, and dashed his reins like a dog. If any thought by flight to escape, he made his head to fly in pieces by the lamboidal commissure, which is a seam in the hinder part of the skull. If anyone did scramble up into a tree, thinking there to be safe, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... same thing. They are very shy, and difficult to get near, except in the heavy snow, and then their weight will not allow them to get over it, as the lighter deer can; they sink up to their shoulders, and flounder about till they are overtaken. You see, Master Percival, the moose can't put on snow-shoes like we can, and gives us the advantage ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat
... attraction for them, often a fatal attraction, even though it be thick with dirt and very malodorous. During the summer time the boys' bathing lakes in Victoria Park are crowded and alive with youngsters, who splash and flounder and choke, splutter and laugh in them. They present a sight worth seeing, and teach a lesson ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... executed might possibly have succeeded and have caused him to be numbered with the benefactors of Europe,—he dallied with the thought until it was too late, fell into the pit which he had digged for himself, and, in trying to flounder out, met his death at the hands of an assassin who had a grudge against him. Thus even his death was pitiful rather than tragic. It does not appear to be the work of that high Nemesis which Schiller noticed as dominating the career ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... line of shore that appeared and disappeared to leeward; or listened to Job's long tales of adventure up and down the high seas; or fished with hand-lines over the taffrail, happy if they pulled up even a goggle-eyed flounder. Twice they ran into fog, and on those days, when the wet dripped dismally off the shrouds and the watch on deck sang mournful airs in the gray gloom, the two lads settled into big chairs in the cabin, beneath a mighty brass oil-lamp, and while Bob sat ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... Michael's Place and Brompton Crescent are built was known by the name of "Flounder Field," from its usual moist and muddy state. This field contained fourteen acres, and is said to have been part of the estate of Alderman Henry Smith, which in this neighbourhood was upwards of eighty-four acres. He was a native of Wandsworth, where he is buried. It has been asserted that, from ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... same writer how both eyes of the flounder get, quite unintentionally, on the same side of the head. The writer makes much of this case (see p. 306), and we are not ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... head against the stonewall of ignorance of constitutional predispositions and tendencies of material. The attempt to erect psychologic types for vocational selections could never make much headway because it could only flounder in a swamp of metaphors, product of the vices of its methods. Not that anyone would wish to discard at all the psychologic mode of approach. But no science, in the sense of accurate examination, was possible, ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... useless. Like a phantom she had slipped away amid the underbrush, leaving him to flounder blindly in the labyrinth. Once she laughed outright, a clear burst of girlish merriment ringing through the silence, and he leaped desperately forward, hoping to intercept her flight. His incautious foot slipped along the steep edge of the shelving bank, and he went down, half ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... support from the pasty-faced pack of cacklers who surround him. I would stretch no finger to help him, no, not if I saw him up to his chin in the oleo-margarine of which his brains and those of his bottle-nosed, flounder-eared friends seem to be composed. So much then for Mr. J. Du reste, as TALLEYRAND once said, my important duties to the readers of this ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., August 23, 1890. • Various
... commenced a battle with the waves that for many minutes, that seemed hours to the frightened girl, hung in the balance; but at last the swimmer beneath her forged steadily and persistently toward the sandy beach to flounder out at last with an unconscious ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... my friend," said the rigid Madame Phellion, a small woman, flat as a flounder, who retained upon her features the grim severity with which she taught music in boarding-schools for young ladies; ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... cheapest of fish, and considered coarse food as usually served, becomes an epicurean dish when served with a fine Hollandaise or oyster sauce, and it will not even then be more expensive than any average-priced boiling fish. Flounder served as sole Normande conjures up memories of the famous Philippe, whose fortune it made, or it may be of luxurious little dinners at other famous restaurants, and is suggestive, in fact, of anything but economy. Yet it is really ...
— Choice Cookery • Catherine Owen
... ape wriggle upon the back of their king, and, with steel muscles tensed beneath the armpits of his antagonist, bear down mightily with his open palms upon the back of the thick bullneck, so that the king ape could but shriek in agony and flounder helplessly about upon the thick ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... have been about two o'clock in the morning that I was suddenly conscious of a feeling of suffocation. I tried to call out, but there was something which prevented me from uttering a sound. I struggled to rise, but I could only flounder like a hamstrung horse. I was strapped at the ankles, strapped at the knees, and strapped again at the wrists. Only my eyes were free to move, and there at the foot of my couch, by the light of a Portuguese lamp, whom should I see but the Abbot ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... sorts of tombs and chapels to see," continued Jim, "with more than an average crop of historical legends concerning them; and the vergers have all the characteristics of that class: once upset them in their parrot-like description, and they flounder about in most comical manner. The last time I was here they showed me the tomb of St. Gengulphus, with an effigy of that eminent clergyman—considerably damaged about the nose—in stone, on the top. I appealed to the verger gravely to know if it was ...
— Belles and Ringers • Hawley Smart
... relate we had two calm days in succession, and on the 6th the snow lay so deeply round the Hut that progression without skis was a laborious flounder. The dogs plunged about in great glee, rolling in the snow and "playing off" their surplus energy after being penned for a long spell in ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... notwithstanding his changed appearance, the instant he spoke to them. At once they broke out into an excited chattering, and Suarez was so disconcerted by the tidings they conveyed that he stammered a good deal, and seemed to flounder in giving the ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... was carefully watching his antagonist, smile, and he knew what was coming. So deftly that, for the life of him, the spectator could not see how it was done, Terry went over again as "flat as a flounder." Not only that, but to the astonishment of the victim as well as of the witness, the Shawanoe remained erect, so that he literally flung his antagonist to the ground and ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis
... patience with a suffering brother!" remarked Bob, and seated himself, with a few words in Gaelic which drew a hearty laugh from the men about him, on a heap of turf to watch the unyielding flounder in the peat-hole, where there was no room to swim. He had begun to think the man would drown in his contumacy, when his ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... two feet in width. On either side one sank to his knees and deeper in the snow. The stampeders they overtook were reluctant to give way, and often Smoke and Shorty had to plunge into the deep snow and by supreme efforts flounder past. ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... candour now. I swear to you that, given a man clear-eyed enough to see that a woman by ordinary is nourished much as he is nourished, and is subjected to every bodily infirmity which he endures and frets beneath, I do not often bungle matters. But when a fool begins to flounder about the world, dead-drunk with adoration of an immaculate woman—a monster which, as even the man's own judgment assures him, does not exist and never will exist—why, he becomes as unmanageable as any other maniac when a frenzy is upon him. For then the idiot hungers after a life ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... to Flounder sadly in the mud-banks of this fishery question, still there is some hope that coercive measures may yet be taken for restraining the Dominion fishermen from having every thing on their own hook. Rumor has it ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, Issue 10 • Various
... Longstreet began to flounder and half-way through his recital bogged down helplessly. He had met Sanchia Murray, had gone with her to the Montezuma House, had ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... perhaps, after all, the most remarkable being exhibited in the reptile house is Tyrrell. I don't think much of the Indian snake-charmers now. See a cobra raise its head and flatten out its neck till it looks like a demoniac flounder set on end; keep in mind that a bite means death in a few minutes; presently you will feel yourself possessed with a certain respect for a snake-charmer who tootles on a flute while the thing crawls about him. But Tyrrell comes along, without a flute—without as much as a jew's-harp—and ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... the quantity of fat it contains, fish may be divided into two classes: (a) dry, or lean fish, and (b) oily fish. Cod, haddock, smelt, flounder, perch, bass, brook trout, and pike are dry, or lean fish. Salmon, shad, mackerel, herring, eel, halibut, lake trout, and white fish are oily fish. (This latter group contains from 5 to 10 per ...
— School and Home Cooking • Carlotta C. Greer
... now more than when he had only himself to think of. But it would not do to fire his rifle there. So he broke off a cedar branch and threw it. He crippled the rabbit, which started to flounder up the slope. Venters did not wish to lose the meat, and he never allowed crippled game to escape, to die lingeringly in some covert. So after a careful glance below, and back toward the canyon, he began to ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... genius or by his good fortune. But what is the chance of success or failure; of obtaining popularity, or of holding it, when achieved? One man goes over the ice, which bears him, and a score who follow flounder in. In fine, Mr. Pendennis's was an exceptional case, and applies to himself only: and I assert solemnly, and will to the last maintain, that it is one thing to write a novel, and another to get ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... or flounder into four filets. Roll each one up, stuffing with a mixture of sal piquant sauce. Roll around each a thin slice of pork and fasten with a skewer. Stand on end in a baking pan and put a small piece of butter and a slice of lemon on each ...
— Joe Tilden's Recipes for Epicures • Joe Tilden
... Dalyell tells me that it is the practice of muleteers in the neighbourhood of Erzeroum, when their animals lose their way and flounder in the deep snow, to spread a horse-cloth or other thick rug from off their packs upon the snow in front of them. The animals step upon it and extricate themselves easily. I have practised walking across deep snow-drifts on ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... throat is hoarse with raving. He has a clear and powerful voice, which often serves him in good stead. The congregation has a knack of getting out of time and tune when the melody is unfamiliar; this, in turn, distracts the choir, who flounder hopelessly, until the schoolmaster drags them back by putting full steam on the harmonium and singing at the top of his voice. Every Sunday afternoon, at least, he was obliged to display his vocal prowess in this manner. After every one of the commandments read out by the parson the prisoners ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... me after the lesson. I told him I could find the way back to the boarding-house alone, but he said he'd consider it a pleasure and privilege to call for me. He has the nicest manners! He never needs to flounder around for the right thing to say, it just slips from his tongue like butter. Aunt Maria always says, "look out for them smooth apple-sass talkers," but I'm sure Mr. Lee is a gentleman and just the right kind for a ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... As find our common nature—overmuch Despised because restricted and unfit To bear the burthen they impose on it— Cling when they would discard it; craving strength To leap from the allotted world, at length They do leap,—flounder on without a term, Each a god's germ, doomed to remain a germ In unexpanded infancy, ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... you're caught, struggle and flounder as you please, Sweetheart, you'll but intangle more; let me alone to tickle your Gills, i'faith. [Looking after her.—Uncle, get ye home about your Business; I hope you'll give me the good morrow, as becomes me—I say no more, a Word ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... transferred, we must take pains to see that the pupil really appreciates their value,—that he realizes their time-saving and energy-saving functions. I do not know that there is any better way to do this than to let him flounder around without them for a little so that his sense of their value ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... magnitude notwithstanding they are full of absurdities. The clergyman has a multitudinous companionship, moreover, among novelists, essayists, and poets whose safety lies in more or less fantastic generalization when they come to talk about music. How they flounder when they come to detail! It was Charles Lamb who said, in his "Chapter on Ears," that in voices he could not distinguish a soprano from a tenor, and could only contrive to guess at the thorough-bass from its being "supereminently harsh and disagreeable;" yet dear old Elia may be forgiven, ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... you dear thing," I replied; "only you haven't my dreadful boldness of mind, and you keep back, out of timidity and modesty and delicacy, even the impression that, in the past, when you had, without my aid, to flounder about in silence, most of all made you miserable. But I shall get it out of you yet! There was something in the boy that suggested to you," I continued, "that he covered ...
— The Turn of the Screw • Henry James
... matchis jalled an' suvved kettenescrus 'dree the panni. And yeck penned as yuv was a boro mush, an' the waver rakkered ajaw sa yuv was a borodiro mush, and sar pookered sigan ket'nus how lengis were borodirer mushis. Adoi the flounder shelled avree for his meriben "Mandy's the krallis of you sar!" an' he shelled so surrelo he kaired his mui bongo, all o' yeck rikkorus. So to akovo divvus acai he's penned the Krallis o' the Matchis, and rikkers his mui bongo sar o' ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... tried the barrier to find a way out, but for more than two weeks the snow was without a crust that would sustain the weight of a dog, and she could only flounder into the drift a few feet and struggle out again. Then a light drizzle of rain came, and the next night there was a sharper tingle in the air, a promise of cold weather, and crust began to form. In a day or two more it would be firm enough to travel upon, and the old Grizzly would ...
— Bears I Have Met—and Others • Allen Kelly
... a third reason that influenced the young navigators in deciding to take the longer course across the Atlantic. This concerned the fogs such as can always be met with off the Newfoundland Banks, and which are often so dense that vessels flounder through them for several ...
— Air Service Boys Over the Atlantic • Charles Amory Beach
... he usually followed. As the night deepened, the wind rising brought a heavier rain. The trail became increasingly difficult to follow; rough at best, it was now almost impassable. Sheets of water trickled over stretches of rock causing the horse to slip and flounder. In other places rivulets shooting out of crevices cut the loose earth from under the horse's feet. Leg-tired, the horse finally resented being headed into the driving rain and went forward slipping, hesitating and groping like a man on ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... who twist their mouths, or squint, are warned that, if the wind changes, their contortions will remain. The fate of the flounder, which mocked the cod, is cited ...
— Elves and Heroes • Donald A. MacKenzie
... speech, which we breathe in from childhood, were to the men of that age strange and questionable. They groped and floundered among them, very much as modern wool growers in Ohio or iron-smelters in Pennsylvania flounder and grope among the elementary truths of political economy. But the spirit in which the Hebrew prophet rebuked and humbled an idolatrous king was a spirit they could comprehend. Such a spirit was sure to manifest itself in narrow cramping measures and in ugly acts of persecution; ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... of people, May take a fright; so down the lane I trundled, Where Goodman Dobson's crazy mare was founder'd, And where the flints were biggest, and ruts widest, By ups and downs, and such bone-cracking motions We flounder'd on a furlong, till my madam, In policy, to save the few joints left her, Betook her to her feet, ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... of a little fish, however, called a sand dab—he is a tiny, flounder-shaped titbit hailing from deep water; and for eating purposes he is probably the best fish that swims—better even than the pompano of the Gulf—and when you say that you are saying about all there is to be said for a fish. And the big crabs of the Pacific side are the ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... to stumble over his replies, to grope, to flounder. The agony of his soul was in his face. And then, in a moment of tortured desperation he rose from his seat, tall, gaunt, disordered, and clasped his hand to his forehead as if driven to the utmost bound of his endurance and to the ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... gave him the crumpled letter, but he plunged into a torrent of stuttered words while he held out his hand for the letter. His Excellency carefully smoothed out the paper, read it, looked at Jean-Christophe, let him flounder about with his explanations, then checked him, and said with a ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... joy flow through the soul from an unknown region to an unknown end, then consciousness is mystical. Such an experience may suffuse the best equipped mind, if its primordial energies, its will and emotions, much outrun its intelligence. Just as at the beginning pure inexperience may flounder intellectually and yet may have a sense of not going astray, a sense of being carried by earth and sky, by contagion and pleasure, into its animal paradise; so at the end, if the vegetative forces still predominate, all articulate experience may be ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... snored in the stove, and fearsomely rattled the door, and shaken the cabin, and swept howling on. But she never in the world would have attended. Not in that emergency! She would not, for anything, have peeped out of the windows, in perfectly proper curiosity, to watch the Bottle River jacks flounder into town. Not she! Pattie Batch was busy. Pattie Batch was so desperately employed that her swift little fingers demanded all the attention that the most alert, the brightest, the very most bewitching ...
— Christmas Eve at Swamp's End • Norman Duncan
... sweeping through his green bath in harmonious curves, now turning his black glistening back to me, now exhibiting his fair white chest, in every movement active and graceful, turned out to be our old homely friend the flounder, whom we have all gobbled up out of his bath of water souchy at Greenwich, without having the slightest idea that he ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... a thing of my own here!" declared Frank. "If we except, of course, my fire stick and the remains of a flounder." ...
— Boy Scouts in Southern Waters • G. Harvey Ralphson
... with the whip; but he paid no heed to the stinging lash, and the man had not the heart to strike harder. Dave refused to run quietly on the trail behind the sled, where the going was easy, but continued to flounder alongside in the soft snow, where the going was most difficult, till exhausted. Then he fell, and lay where he fell, howling lugubriously as the long train of ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... is also a FLOUNDER, a sea-fish which will wander very far into fresh rivers, and there lose himself and dwell: and thrive to a hand's breadth, and almost twice so long: a fish without scales, and most excellent meat: and a fish that affords much sport to the angler, with any small worm, but especially a little bluish ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... who lived with his wife in a miserable little hovel close to the sea. He went to fish every day, and he fished and fished, and at last one day, when he was sitting looking deep down into the shining water, he felt something on his line. When he hauled it up there was a great flounder on the end of the line. The flounder said to him: "Look here, fisherman, don't you kill me; I am no common flounder, I am an enchanted prince! What good will it do you to kill me? I sha'n't be good to eat; put me back into the water, and ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... the water, were five cents a pound, while sea bass, fresh cod, mackerel, and similar fish went at the same price. Small fish, or white bait, went by quantity, ten cents securing about half a gallon. Smelt, herring, flounder, sole, all went at equally low prices, and as each buyer secured his allotment he went hurrying off through the mist, as silently as the floating gulls. When these were all supplied the rest of the fish and crabs were taken up to the wharf and put on the counters ...
— Bohemian San Francisco - Its restaurants and their most famous recipes—The elegant art of dining. • Clarence E. Edwords
... dinner proper, commonly divided into three services, comprising a considerable choice of fish (particularly turbot, flounder, mullet, and lampreys), poultry and game (from chicken, duck, pigeon, and peacock, to partridges, pheasants, ortolans, and fieldfares), hare, joints of the ordinary meats, as well as of wild boar and venison, a kind of haggis, a variety of ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... second for reflection. As Brooks rushed headlong forward, Charles hurriedly interposed his stick between his legs, and leaving him to flounder, started off ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... grew more and more indistinct as it neared the summit, until at last it utterly vanished. Still he kept up his speed toward the active little figure—which now seemed to be that of a mere boy—skimming over the frozen snow. Twice a stumble and flounder of the mustang through the broken crust ought to have warned him of his recklessness, but now a distinct glimpse of a low, blackened shanty, the prospector's ruined hut, toward which the messenger was making, made him forget all else. The distance was lessening between ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... persuaded Dean Drone to come, and as soon as Mr. Smith and Alphonse saw him they landed him with a fried flounder that even the apostles ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock
... also decorate their war caps or bonnets with those feathers.- The leather winged batt common to the United States is also found on this side of the Rocky mountains.- Beside the fish of this coast and river already mentioned we have met with the following speceis viz. the Whale, Porpus, Skaite, flounder, Salmon, red charr, two speceis of Salmon trout, mountain or speckled trout, and a speceis similar to one of those noticed on the Missouri within the mountains, called in the Eastern states, bottle-nose. I have no doubt but there are many other speceis of fish, which also exist ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... well to lose your way; but in case this unpleasant luck befall you, set systematically to work to find it. Throw terror to the idiots who always flutter and flounder, and so go wrong inevitably. Galton the Plucky says,—and he has as much cool wisdom to impart as a traveller needs,—when you make the unlively discovery that you are lost, ask yourself the three ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... am I to do? I am in for it, flounder how I will. Yes, yes! She has hooked me! She dangles me at the end of her line, up the stream and down the stream, fair water and foul, at her good pleasure! So be it. But I ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... liquid filth, ankle-deep, leg-deep, neck-deep—in a word, of unknown bottom—on which the lamplight does not even glimmer, but which I have occasionally watched in the gradual growth of its horrors from morn till nightfall. Should I flounder into its depths, farewell to upper earth! And hark! how roughly resounds the roaring of a stream the turbulent career of which is partially reddened by the gleam of the lamp, but elsewhere brawls noisily through the densest gloom! Oh, should I be swept away in fording that impetuous ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... force a way through deep, loose-drifted snow. Feather-light in its individual flakes, in mass it made haste impossible; to push on six inches through it was labour; to come a dozen paces to Gratton was hard work. She floundered as she had seen him flounder; she threw herself forward as he had done, and, sinking with every effort, at last reached ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... mind whether to follow or no. For 'twas near day now, an' his face plain at that distance. Fearin' he'd come on again, I pulled hot foot the few steps between me an' home. But when I came to the door, I went cold as a flounder. ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... town, and the monotonous perspective of which is so desolating to heart and eye; backwards or forwards, it is always the same, with a flat sameness of outlook to right and left, and every 450 seconds the chime would boom and flounder heavily by, with a dozen sharp railway whistles after it, like swordfish after a whale, piercing it through ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... that as great a distance as possible may be covered before it stops again. The poor brutes, sinking almost to their bellies despite the snow-shoeing, have no purchase for the exercise of their strength and continually flounder and wallow. Our whip was lost and I was glad of it, for even as considerate a boy as Arthur is apt to lose patience and temper when, having started the sled with much labour by gee pole and rope about ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... all about?" again demanded the younger man, seizing the rope halter and aiding the mare to flounder out upon the firmer sand below high-water mark. "What are you doing up so early? And what were you going to ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... write somethin' about 'em for some kind of a paper, an' it meant a good deal to her, an' I had kept a record of all the projec's she'd written me to do with 'em—only to have Cast Steel an' flint fool Bill Andrews flounder in with that herd ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason
... application is still closer, when we consider that all the people were to be taken like fishes in a net; and, by assistance of the Pope, who sets up to be the universal Fisher of Men, the whole innocent nation, was, according to our common expression, to be "laid as flat as a flounder." ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... those of the greatly clearer Conon, into which its peaty waters fall, and whose scaly denizens are of silvery brightness. No fish seems to possess a more complete power over its dingy coat than a very abundant one in the estuary of the Conon—the common flounder. Standing on the bank, I have startled these creatures from off the patch of bottom on which they lay—visible to only a very sharp eye—by pitching a very small pebble right over them. Was the patch a pale one—for a minute or so ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... the shark began to flounder about, I noticed that the pilot- fish went away, leaving him alone in his extremity; and on my mentioning this to Mr Marline he took the opportunity of pointing a ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... already stretching out behind him. In five minutes he would be cut off. The formation of the hills had sent the wind whirling down through a gap and carrying one stream of fire away ahead of the rest. The Bishop did not know the country to the north of the road. If he left the road he could only flounder about and wander aimlessly until the fire closed in ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher
... hole was full of water. To traverse this desert one must wade and flounder through liquid mud waist deep and sometimes deeper. Yet it had to be done. We had nine positions up there at each of which a handful of men must be relieved daily; or rather nightly, as it was, obviously, impossible to move about over that ...
— The Emma Gees • Herbert Wes McBride
... the sweeps. I felt it ground gently on the soft mud. Three of the Chinese—they all wore long sea-boots—got over the side, and the other two passed me across the rail. With Yellow Handkerchief at my legs and his two companions at my shoulders, they began to flounder along through the mud. After some time their feet struck firmer footing, and I knew they were carrying me up some beach. The location of this beach was not doubtful in my mind. It could be none other than one of the Marin ...
— Tales of the Fish Patrol • Jack London
... wade through this for twenty miles without finding a dry place for bivouac. Ant hills, ten and fifteen feet high, with dome-shaped roofs, dot the wild waste like pigmy houses, and sometimes they are the only dry land found to rest on. The horses flounder through the mire, or sink up to the belly in slime, while clouds of flies make the life of man and beast a living death. Keys rust in the pocket, and boots mildew in a day. At other seasons, as I know by painful experience, the hard-baked ground ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... storyteller has but to have been condemned by nature to a liberally amused and beguiled, a richly sophisticated, view of relations and a fine inquisitive speculative sense for them, to find himself at moments flounder in a deep warm jungle. These are the moments at which he recalls ruefully that the great merit of such and such a small case, the merit for his particular advised use, had been precisely in ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... Perch, sole, cod, eel, carp, char, skate, tench, trout, brill, bream, pike, and many others, plain monosyllables: salmon, dory, turbot, gudgeon, lobster, whitebait, grayling, haddock, mullet, herring, oyster, sturgeon, flounder, turtle, plain dissyllables: only two trisyllables worth naming, anchovy and mackerel; unless any one should be disposed to stand up for halibut, which, for ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... not mean," said Vavasor respectfully, "that any two persons in the concert-room can be as much unlike each other as that flounder shuddering along the sandy bottom, and that yard of eel sliding through the water like ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... flounder (Pleuronectes flesus), the only flat-fish which ascends British rivers. It is common a long way up such rivers as the Severn, far above tidal influence, and it will take almost any flesh-bait used ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... providence. The very notion of a state of probation has darkness in it. The all-knower has no need of satisfying his eyes by seeing what we will do, when he knows before what we will do. Methinks we might be condemn'd before commission. In these things we grope and flounder, and if we can pick up a little human comfort that the child taken is snatch'd from vice (no great compliment to it, by the bye), let us take it. And as to where an untried child goes, whether to join the assembly of its elders who have borne the heat of the day—fire-purified martyrs, and torment-sifted ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... salt water Fish, are best fresh from the water, tho' the Hannah Hill, Black Fish, Lobster, Oyster, Flounder, Bass, Cod, Haddock, and Eel, with many others, may be transported by land many miles, find a good market, and retain a good relish; but as generally, live ones are bought first, deceits are used to give ...
— American Cookery - The Art of Dressing Viands, Fish, Poultry, and Vegetables • Amelia Simmons
... excus'd, A pretty tunnel underneath his bed, And left him running, grumbling, over head; Had scratch'd a track out, like a grubbing mole, Through a long, dark, and damp and dirty hole— Like rats in sewers, had flounder'd through the mud, Instead of sailing, duck-like, o'er the flood; But bubbling springs chok'd up the project deep, And trickling waters ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... now, because they have so inadequately re-expressed it. We shall see that their system has no motive power at all in it, or that its motive power is simply the theistic faith they rejected, now tied up in a sack and left to flounder instead of walking upright. We shall see that their system is either nothing, or that it is a mutilated reproduction of the very thing it professes to be superseding. Once set it upon its own professed foundations, and the ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... of comparative anatomy to natural history." The slower motions of the owl prove to the natural historian that it consumes less oxygen than the eagle. By the same physiological principle he can tell that the herring is the most active among fish, and the flounder the slowest, by merely seeing the gills of each: those of the herring being very large, prove that it consumes much oxygen and is very active; while the flounder, with its small gills, consumes but little, and is very slow in its motions as a necessary ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... to the surprise of all, the disabled horse began to flounder once more; and as they all lifted at his pack and pushed him forward he gave a series of plunges and ...
— The Young Alaskans in the Rockies • Emerson Hough
... christened after my mother," said Priscilla gently; and this was strictly true, for the deceased Grand Duchess had also been Priscilla. Then a feeling came over her that she was getting into those depths where persons with secrets begin to flounder as a preliminary to letting them out, and seized with panic she got up ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... how, when threatened by a hostile patrol, Hilary, Mandeville, Maxime and Charlie had hurried back on foot into the wood and hotly checked the pursuit long enough for their fellows to mount the team, lay a shoulder to every miry wheel and flounder away with the prize. But beyond that keen moment when the four, after their one volley from ambush, had sprung this way and that shouting absurd orders to make-believe men, cheering and firing from behind trees, and (cut off from their horses) had made for a gully and ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... heels upon the floor They flounder'd all together, There strode a stranger to the door, And it was ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... rattle of blocks as the ladder was hoisted in, and the deck quivered as the engines began to throb. Jake heard the screw slowly flounder round and the wash beneath the poop as the steamer moved out to sea, but there was nobody except their colored crews on board the boats that dropped astern. Kenwardine had had his chance and lost it. He had been too bold and now must confront ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss
... had the burden of the great guns. The fatigue undergone is not to be described. The men in front durst not halt to breathe, because the least stoppage there might have thrown the column behind into confusion, on the brink of deadly precipices; and those in the rear had to flounder knee deep, through snow and ice trampled into sludge by the feet and hoofs of the preceding divisions. Happily the march of Napoleon was not harassed, like that of Hannibal, by the assaults of living enemies. The mountaineers, on the contrary, flocked in to reap the liberal ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... thud on the other side, a flounder of slipping hoofs, and the staccato pounding of the gallop broke out again. The chestnut had come down upon the fallen horse or helpless man, and was going on, uncontrollable. Crestwick rushed madly at the hedge, and scrambling through, badly scratched and ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... DAB. The sea-flounder. An old general term for a pleuronect or flat fish of any kind, but usually appropriated to the Platessa limanda. The word is familiarly applied to one ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... melted butter and a little salt, you have the sweet delicate flavour of the flounder, which is overpowered by ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... ri an hour, as it was a mere flounder either among rocks or in deep mud, the woman in her girt-up dress and straw sandals trudging bravely along, till she suddenly flung away the rope, cried out, and ran backwards, perfectly scared by ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... kept its feet; but, now seemingly overcome by surprise, and knowing the advantage its pursuers would have over it upon the slippery ice, it began to plunge and flounder, and once or twice came to its knees. The hungry pursuers appeared to recognise their advantage at once, for their howling opened with a fresh burst, and they quickened their pace. Their sharp claws enabled them to gallop over the ice at top speed; and one large brute that ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... be without help or protection. That's the thought I can't endure, Diane. Try to be just to me. If I make mistakes, if I flounder about, if I say things that offend you, it's because I can't rest while you're exposed to danger. Alone, as you are, in this great city, surrounded by people who are not your friends, a prey to criticism ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... beautiful. This Ashcroft bachelor fellow was a sentimental monstrosity. He was imbued with the superstition that one must love, and be loved, before one could marry. No aphorism could be further removed from the truth. The glaring realism dawned upon him that it was quite possible for a person to flounder through this world and be entirely immune from the love epidemic; that few people ever marry the one they do really love, that some are never sought after by one of the opposite sex during their whole life, only in a business-like way; that modern society was too busy to entertain ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... depend upon him to find out who the person is, and the name, if possible. He, therefore, gets the card and shows it to me by some magical twist. Sometimes he manages to whisper the name. Often I fail to grasp either the whisper or the card; then I am lost, and flounder hopelessly about without bearings of any kind, asking leading-questions, cautiously feeling my way, not knowing whether I am talking to a person of great importance or the contrary. When at last my extreme wariness and diplomacy ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... been, for Old Scratch was there too. I saw him as plain as I see you; he ran out afore me, and couldn't stop or look back, as long as I said catekism. He was in his old shape of the sarpent; he was the matter of a yard long, and as thick round as my arm and travelled belly-flounder fashion; when I touched land, he dodged into an eddy, and out of sight in no time. Oh, there is no mistake, I'll take my oath of it; I see him, I did upon my soul. It was the old gentleman hisself; he come there to cool hisself. Oh, it was ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... direction certainly," Robinson challenged. "We'd flounder in the thicket. A waste of time. Let us get ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... day! what a foggy, dull, shivering apology for light is this kind of muddy twilight through which we are about to tramp and flounder for the rest of our existence, wandering farther and farther from the beauty and freshness and from the kindly gushing springs of clear gladness that made all around us green in our youth! One wanders and gropes in a slough ...
— George Cruikshank • William Makepeace Thackeray
... she doesn't know she's rich, and good-looking and run after," said Nora, beginning to flounder. "But half the time, anyway, she ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of life and thought Hinduism is definite and unmistakeable. In whatever shape it presents itself it can be recognized at once. But it is so vast and multitudinous that only an encyclopedia could describe it and no formula can summarize it. Essayists flounder among conflicting propositions such as that sectarianism is the essence of Hinduism or that no educated Hindu belongs to a sect. Either can easily be proved, for it may be said of Hinduism, as it has been said of zoology, that you ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... most of whatever artist there is in me has been given to turbine machines and boat building and the problem of flying, and do what I will I fail to see how I can be other than a lax, undisciplined story-teller. I must sprawl and flounder, comment and theorise, if I am to get the thing out I have in mind. And it isn't a constructed tale I have to tell, but unmanageable realities. My love-story—and if only I can keep up the spirit of truth-telling all through as strongly as I have now, you shall have it all—falls into ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... for controlling the women; she has the intellectual machinery, the purgatory and the code of slave-ethics. She has the supreme advantage that the rank and file of her mighty host really believe what she teaches; they do not have to listen to table-rappings and flounder through swamps of automatic writings in order to bolster their hope of the survival of ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... railways in this country, except one of eight miles to a tomb! Hence we all have to flounder about on awful roads in motor-cars, which break down and have to be dug out, and always collapse at the wrong moment, so we have to stay out ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... took a walk around, to see the different kinds of fish, displayed on the stalls. Here were to be seen the Sea-Bass, Black-fish, the Sheep's-Head, the Pike, the Flounder, and a number of others, so many that it would fill a good part of this little book, just to print the pictures of them all. But we will give them one; this ...
— Susan and Edward - or, A Visit to Fulton Market • Anonymous
... feet deep, and he took long, flying leaps on his snowshoes. Behind him came the pack of great, fierce brutes, snapping and snarling, howling and whining, a horrible chorus that made shivers chase one another up and down the boy's spine. But as he reckoned, the deep snow made them flounder, ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler |
