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More "Flounder" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... In moments of real despair we are inwardly dumb. But observe the holders of imaginary conversations. They are conquerors to the last one. They administer stinging rebukes that leave the adversary writhing. They rise to Alpine heights of pure wisdom and power, leaving him to flounder ignobly in the mire of ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... I had hoped was true. He was "bluffing." He wanted me to flounder into some admission, and to make him a promise in order to save the man I loved. I was only a woman, he'd argued, no doubt—an emotional woman, already wrought up to a high pitch of nervous excitement. Perhaps he had expected ...
— The Powers and Maxine • Charles Norris Williamson
... upon which 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. ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... would follow some big shaggy dog. He introduced, too, a lot of new-fangled games; he was what they called a gymnast, and in feats of rassling there wasn't a man among them all but he could stretch as flat as a flounder. And then he always treated. Everybody had a place for him soon,—even I did; and as for Dan, he'd have cut his own heart out of his body, if Mr. Gabriel 'd had occasion to use it. He was a different man from any Dan ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... beautiful motion-masters I ever beheld, 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 ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... 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 battery. Contrary to expectation, he did not sink, however, but floated at full length, with ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 457 - Volume 18, New Series, October 2, 1852 • Various
... temperate, and upright, and unimpeached. For perhaps the most hopeless people, morally speaking, are those people who, according to their own confession, "have never done any harm." There is a good prospect for those who are trying to grow better, however they may slip and flounder. There is hope, on the other hand, for the desperately wicked—for the very violence of one extreme precipitates the other; and sometimes the best and purest souls have been swept by a thunder-shower of sin. But those who rest upon the fact that ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... 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 of which the day is over. ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... 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 moral for ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... 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 ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... please you, be dull, (For Britons deem dulness "respectable"); Stale flowers of speech you may cull, With meanings now scarcely detectable; You may wallow in saturnine spite, You may flounder in flatulent flummery; Be sombre as poet YOUNG'S "Night," And dry as a Newspaper "Summary"; As rude as a yowling Yahoo, As chill as a volume of CHITTY; But oh, Sir, whatever you do, You must ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 15, 1893 • Various
... 'eed the flappin' flounder. If 'e wont obleege ye in a little matter like thirty dollars, I will—I'll ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... from the juniper-berry, or, perhaps, from malt, hath, by the early devotion of their votaries, been poured forth in great abundance, should any daring tongue with unhallowed license prophane, i.e., depreciate, the delicate fat Milton oyster, the plaice sound and firm, the flounder as much alive as when in the water, the shrimp as big as a prawn, the fine cod alive but a few hours ago, or any other of the various treasures which those water-deities who fish the sea and rivers have ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... duty to help in the entertainment of the company; but, for my part, I throw myself upon your mercy. I wouldn't, for the world, hint that we are more solid than the girls, but 'tis very certain that we are more lumbering. If I were to begin a tale, I'd flounder through it, like a whale with a harpoon in its body; while any of the girls, even down to little Anna, would glide along, like a graceful, snow-white swan upon a silver lake—happy in her element, and giving pleasure to all ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... 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 ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... The reminiscences of the gay days of his youth stirred Hoccleve's muse to unwonted vivacity. In the London Lick-penny Lydgate, if Lydgate's it be, wrote humorous satire with success. Skelton himself, though in his (much too respectfully spoken of) play Magnificence he could flounder with the worst of his predecessors, in his light and railing rhymes was nimble enough, and ranged easily from vigorous invective of Wolsey to pretty panegyrics of fair ladies. Now and again also these good souls ceased their search for polysyllables, looked ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... As when he wrote poetry the grappling-hooks of rhyme dragged him into statements he had not dreamed of at the start and was afraid of at the finish—so now he stumbled into a proposal he could not clamber out of. He must flounder through. ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... too short life, when he found this special path of his (and it is impossible to say whether the actual finding was in the case of Jonathan or in the case of Joseph), he did but flounder and slip. When he had found it, and was content to walk in it, he strode with as sure and steady a step as any other, even the greatest, of those who carry and hand on the torch of literature through the ages. But it is impossible to derive full satisfaction from his feats in this ...
— Journal of A Voyage to Lisbon • Henry Fielding
... into which he has again betrayed us at high noon—what must we be now in the angry dark of the evening? This time we have to go into a field to turn, a field full of tussocks, which in the dark we are unable to see, and over which the horses flounder and stumble. However, now at length—now that we have wasted three-quarters of an hour, and that it is quite pitch dark—(I need hardly say that we have no lamps)—we have at length regained the blessed breadth of the high-road, ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... 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, anyting—cannon, ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... 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; ...
— Susan and Edward - or, A Visit to Fulton Market • Anonymous
... 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 whispered 'No!' and the inviting 'Don't!' with which the maiden's kisses are accompanied, ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... fifteenth century the existing stock of fish for culinary purposes received, if we may trust the vocabularies, a few accessions; as, for instance, the bream, the skate, the flounder, and the bake. ...
— Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine • William Carew Hazlitt
... incident in the wider meaning of Flaubert's fiction, a meaning more amply expressed in Salammbo, where not one foolish woman alone but thousands on thousands of men, women, and children, mingled with charging elephants and vipers, flounder and fight in indescribable welters of blood and filth, and go down to rot in a common pit. If I read Flaubert's meaning right, all human history is there; you may show it by painting on broad canvas a Carthaginian battle-scene ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... common to the Atlantic and Mediterranean, I was unable to observe miralets, triggerfish, puffers, seahorses, jewelfish, trumpetfish, blennies, gray mullet, wrasse, smelt, flying fish, anchovies, sea bream, porgies, garfish, or any of the chief representatives of the order Pleuronecta, such as sole, flounder, plaice, dab, and brill, simply because of the dizzying speed with which the Nautilus hustled through these ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... For the 'alias' rule we may quote '[a]theist', 'cryptog[a]mia', 'h[o]meopathy', 'heterog[e]neous', 'pandem[o]nium', while the normal shortenings are found in 'an[)o]nymous', 'eph[)e]meral', 'pand[)e]monium', '[)e]r[)e]mite'. Ignorance of English usage has made some editors flounder on a line ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt
... an ax would crack one of the glass helmets. Then the denuded Quabo would flounder convulsively in the air till it drowned. But there were all too few of these individual victories. The main body of the Quabos, rank on rank, dragging their water-hose behind them, came on with the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • 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 ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... onocratylus, or pelican, a fowl between a stork and a swan—a melancholy water-fowl brought from Astracan by the Russian ambassador." This writer tells us, "It was diverting to see how the pelican would toss up and turn a flat fish, plaice or flounder, to get it right into its gullet at its lower beak, which being filmy stretches to a prodigious wideness when it devours a great fish. Here was also a small water-fowl, not bigger than a more-hen, that went almost quite erect ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... tongues; and they do think as much faster 'an a man, as a express train beats er eight ox-team. Dyce is the safest sign-post! If she was only here now, I couldn't botch things, for she sees clare through a mill-stone, and she'd shove me the right way. If I go a huntin', I may flounder into a steel trap; if I stand still, wuss may happen. Mars Lennox is too much for me. I wouldn't trust him no further 'n I would a fat possum. I am afeard of his oily tongue. He sot out to hang that poor young gal, and now he is willing to pay two hundred and ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... dead men. They stamp and prance with sobbing breath, Victims of wine or love or death, In ragged time they jump, they shake Their heads, sweating to overtake The impetuous tune flying ahead. They flounder after, with legs of lead. Now, suddenly as it started, play Stops, the short echo dies away, The corpses drop, a senseless heap, The drunk men gaze about like sheep. Grinning, the lovers sigh and stare Up at the broad moon hanging there, While Tom, five fingers to his nose, Skips ...
— Country Sentiment • Robert Graves
... 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 six others ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... 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 and misapprehension, ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... make a perfectly literal translation, and throw in the parenthesis-marks and some hyphens for the assistance of the reader—though in the original there are no parenthesis-marks or hyphens, and the reader is left to flounder through to the remote verb the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... so plaguy rough," continued the Clockmaker, "that he'd been the better, if it had been hammered and mauled down smoother. I'd a levelled him as flat as a flounder." ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... see how she can," said Kat, "be so polite to a fellow who is paddling about in our canoe, while we flounder in the water, and get along the best we can. I think ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving
... once the recollection of how Clare had come upon the passage in Lord Cumnor's letter flashed on his lady, but she did not say anything about it, but left her husband to flounder about as best ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... Then came this other And chewed up his brother, Made but one gulp, and behold he was through! He was a gold fish Oh! he was a bold fish— But before he could wink he was eaten up too! Up came a flounder, He was a ten-pounder, Opened his mouth, swallowed him and was gone; Before you could blink, sir, Before he could shrink, sir, This fish came by and the flounder was gone! (Alas for my story, 'Tis getting ...
— On the Tree Top • Clara Doty Bates
... Miss Sallie wasn't meant. She really wasn't. She never surely knows the lesson herself, and it was such fun asking her all sorts of questions just to see her flounder round for answers that I used to pretend I wanted to know a lot of things I didn't. But I don't do that now. It was like punching a lame cat to see it ...
— Mary Cary - "Frequently Martha" • Kate Langley Bosher
... fish called the flounder, perhaps you may know, Has one side for use and another for show; One side for the public, a delicate brown, And one that is white, which he always ...
— Stevenson Memorial Cook Book • Various
... heavy jumps landed him, not among the bulrushes as he had hoped, but in a pool of muddy water where he sank up to his middle with alarming rapidity. Much scared, he tried to wade out, but could only flounder to a tussock of grass and cling there while he endeavored to kick his legs free. He got them out, but struggled in vain to coil them up or to hoist his heavy body upon the very small island in this sea of mud. Down they splashed again, and Sam gave a dismal groan as he thought ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, September 1878, No. 11 • Various
... happily so various, that there is always a chance for every man, and he may win the prize by his 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 ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... a wild flounder over the sodden ground, three hundred yards of it, with shell-holes where the rain took you up to your armpits, but the Reedshires had tasted the glories of conquest, and there was no holding them back, if, indeed, anyone had wished ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... over snow; once or twice we had to flounder through drifts, and once a brief bitter snowstorm blotted out sight for twenty minutes, while we hugged each other on the ledge, clinging wildly ...
— The Planet Savers • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... agitation &c 315. moon, Proteus, chameleon, quicksilver, shifting sands, weathercock, harlequin, Cynthia of the minute, April showers^; wheel of Fortune; transientness &c 111 [Obs.]. V. fluctuate, vary, waver, flounder, flicker, flitter, flit, flutter, shift, shuffle, shake, totter, tremble, vacillate, wamble^, turn and turn about, ring the changes; sway to and fro, shift to and fro; change and change about; waffle, blow with the wind (irresolute) 605; oscillate &c 314; vibrate ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... and eye his motions, and make pitying or impertinent remarks at his ill-luck—the old man answers not, but fishes on imperturbably. Anon, he gathers up his clams or worms, and his one sun-baked flounder—you think he is going home—but no, he is merely going to another corner of the wharf, where he throws his line under a vessel's counter, and fishes on with the same deathlike patience as before. He seems ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... doesn't know she's rich, and good-looking and run after," said Nora, beginning to flounder. "But half the time, ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... its forlorn shabbiness is softened into something of romantic indistinctness. But daylight is dreadfully disenchanting. The rows of tumble-down houses, the sandy, unpaved streets—through which you flounder as in the deserts of Sahara, unless you choose to try sidewalks that have as many ups and downs as a range of mountains, each man building to the height that pleases himself—the large parade, without ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... superstition. It is not true that boys can 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
... 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 the time, and looks more like a dead leaf than ...
— Little White Fox and his Arctic Friends • Roy J. Snell
... was not favourable. The critics laughed it to scorn, and called it a farce and a failure. The Quarterly Review, in the course of a savage diatribe, declared that it was "as dull as ditch-water and as flat as a flounder," and in a graver mood reproved it as a mere "bid for the bigoted voices of Exeter Hall." Some of the criticisms were not wanting in acumen. It was perceived at once that, as Theodora Campion is the heroine of the book, it was an error in art to kill her off in the ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... more important than that. It's like learning to swim. For a long time you flounder about, it's unpleasant and gets up your nose and you choke. Then all at once you are swimming like a duck. That's how I feel about all this.... The challenge was that woman in ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... and signed him to a seat. "I trust not," she said, answering his citation; "but I think the flame through which Beatrice walked must have been less contaminating than this morass in which I flounder." ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... 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
... Nay, Gad, 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, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... Wherefore, Madame Sand, try and be so 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? Let our ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... trail 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 them; he could see ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... after us, we would not care where the millions go; but since things are as they are, it is heartbreaking to see the cause of wild-life protection actually starving, or at the best subsisting only on financial husks and crumbs, while less important causes literally flounder ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... I found a herd of seven up to their backs in soft snow, and tired out,—a strange condition for a caribou to be in. They were taking the affair philosophically, resting till they should gather strength to flounder to some spruce tops where moss was plenty. When I approached gently on snowshoes (I had been hunting them diligently the week before to kill them; but this put a different face on the matter) they gave a bound or two, then ...
— Wilderness Ways • William J Long
... Carlyle described us as "forty million Americans, mostly fools." He declared we would flounder on the ballot-box, and that the right of suffrage would be the ruin of this Government. The "forty million of fools" had done tolerably well for the small amount of brain Carlyle ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... is, cod, cusk, flounder, etc. Skin the fish by starting at the head and drawing down towards the tail; then take out the bones. Cut the fish into pieces about three inches square, and salt and pepper well. Butter such a dish, as you would use for escolloped oysters. Put in ...
— Miss Parloa's New Cook Book • Maria Parloa
... thoughts (bits of nature) very unceremoniously, and at odd times, we may, possibly, be pardoned or praised for so doing. Well, we never hear mention of this game but we think of a bump we once received during the sport, our blind ardour causing us to flounder in a fender, and bruise our head, the remains of which will be taken to the "long home." Well do we remember the spotted turban worn on that occasion—for we recollect, at the time, thinking "Belcher" ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... the kind being a low dwarf birch, hardly worthy of being called a shrub,) we would cut across the shoulder of some projecting spur, and obtain a wider prospect of the level land upon our right; or else keeping more down in the flat, we had to flounder for half an hour up to the horses' shoulders in an Irish bog. After about five hours of this work we reached the banks of a broad and rather singular river, called the Bruara. Halfway across it was perfectly fordable; but ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... a ray of moonlight. Then she snaps The light on where the onyx tub and walls Dazzle the air. I enter then her room And stand against the closed door, do not pry Upon her in the bath. Give her the chance To fly me, fight me standing face to face. I hear her flounder in the water, hear Hands slap and slip with water breast and arms; Hear little sighs and shudders and the roughness Of crash towels on her back, when in a minute She stands with back toward me in the doorway, A sea-shell glory, pink and white to hair Sun-lit, a lily crowned ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... on the line, I drew up with great eagerness and vigor. It was two of those broad-leaved sea-weeds, with stems like snakes, both rooted on a stone,—all which came up together. Often these sea-weeds root themselves on muscles. In the morning, our pilot killed a flounder with the boat-hook, the poor fish thinking himself secure ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... faith. If I ever really and truly believed in spiritualism and then found, as so many people have done, alas! that the prophet of it was himself a fraud, I should be cut, as it were, from all my spiritual bearings, to flounder hopeless and broken-hearted mid the desolate wastes of agnosticism. I cannot give myself unless I am convinced that the sacrifice is for something which I must believe in spite of all doubt; not entirely what I want to believe ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... a slant, is six inches of snow over loose stones or small boulders. There you hope for divine favor and flounder ahead. There is one compensation; the snow is soft to fall on. Boggy areas you must be able to gauge the depth of at a glance. And there are places, beautiful to behold, where a horse clambers up the least bit of an ascent, hits his pack against a projection, and is hurled into outer space. ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... 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 ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... 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 ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... recognized Suarez, 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 ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... 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 ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... he would say, to see how he would try to get out of the difficulty or flounder staggeringly through it. Her mother knew in an instant that her own speech had been a stupid blunder. She had put the man into exactly the position Joan would enjoy seeing him in. But he wasn't in ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... be there when she came—but I couldn't get over those silkworms. She was goin' to 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
... same time the ship's fictitious gravity, engendered by the centrifugal force of its rotation, ceased, so that passengers, most of whom were assembled in the main salon, which occupied the entire midship section, drifted away from the curved floor, whose contour followed that of the outer skin, to flounder in helpless confusion. ...
— In the Orbit of Saturn • Roman Frederick Starzl
... 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 ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... flat fish, as for example the flounder and the skate, are exactly the colour of the gravel or sand on which they habitually rest. Among the marine flower gardens of an Eastern coral reef the fishes present every variety of gorgeous colour, while the ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... taken him up as short and as sharply as that, but he tried not to flounder in her grasp. "I don't think there's anything I've done in any such calculated way as you describe. Everything has come as a sort of indistinguishable part of everything else. Your coming out belonged ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... so thick and 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 ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... 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 malicious light in ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... one thrust. And he did not withdraw his bill, either. Instead he set up a terrible squawking and began to flounder about on the bank of ...
— The Tale of Ferdinand Frog • Arthur Scott Bailey
... the shallow curl of the waves on the beach, and clambered over the high bow of the dory. Amos baited their lines, and with a word of advice as to the best place to sit, he again turned to his own fishing and soon pulled in a big, flopping, resisting flounder. ...
— A Little Maid of Province Town • Alice Turner Curtis
... the Quaker turned to me. "Man, Andrew," he said, "it was a good thing that I had a Bible upbringing. I can manage the part fine, but I flounder among the 'thees' and 'thous.' I would be the better of a drink to wash my mouth of the accursed pronouns. Will you be alone to-night about the darkening? Then I'll call in to see you, for ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... his careful quest was rewarded with only a delicately perfumed handkerchief, upon which he could not hope to obtain a loan of more than ten cents; a pair of gloves too small for use and a bit of paper that was not a cheque. A second look at this, however, inspired hope. It was about the size of a flounder, ruled in wide lines, and bore in conspicuous characters the words, "Western Union Telegraph Company." Immediately below this interesting legend was much other printed matter, the purport of which was that the company did not hold itself responsible ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... made it up yet," went on Laddie. "It's going to be about a flounder and a wringer, but I got to think. When I get it ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Cousin Tom's • Laura Lee Hope
... fate of such 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
... has been struck with the curious adaptation of nearly all animals to their habitat, for example in the matter of color. The sandy hue of the sole and flounder, the white of the polar bear with its suggestion of Arctic snows, the stripes of the Bengal tiger—as if the actual reeds of its native jungle had nature-printed themselves on its hide;—these, and a hundred others which will occur to every one, are marked instances ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... I 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 get hold of a clue, then I swim along beautifully ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... remainder of the wall cases. These include perch; bream; the john-dory; carp; barbel; salmon; pike; trout; sturgeon; the shark; thornback; lamprey; turbot; plaice; sole; flounder; cod; haddock; &c. ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... he called a fish-whip, made from the whipray, a fish quite new to us, but indigenous to these waters. With a body shaped like a flounder, it has a tail often ten feet long, tapering from about one inch in thickness at the butt to an eighth of an inch at the small end. When dried this resembles whalebone, and makes a good coach-whip. There is a great variety of fish ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... came when I had to abandon the wind-swept heights and flounder through the soft snow of the canyons. Through narrow passes I had to crawl, so terrific was the wind that poured through the channel like a waterfall. Nothing short of a Kansas cyclone can match the velocity of a mountain-top gale. All day I stemmed its tide, which sapped my strength, ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... steamer built of light draft especially, to profit by any outlet offering least danger from the vigilant patrol outside. The skipper had already chosen his course. Because of the gale, he calculated that the blockaders would get a considerable offing, lest they flounder mid the shoal waters inshore. He knew too, even if it were not so dark, that a long, foamy line of surf curtained the bay from any watchful eye on the open sea. By the time she reached the beach channels, La Luz had full speed on. Then, knifing the higher ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... flannel, with guns, are urging a little row-boat up toward the interior country. They will return at night laden with rail or reed-birds, with the additional burden perhaps of a great loon, shot as a curiosity. Others, provided with fishing-tackle, are going out for flounder. Laughing farewells, waving handkerchiefs and the other telegraphic signs of departure, are all very gay, but the tune may be changed when the great sailing-party comes back, wet and wretched, and with three of the principal beauties limp as bolsters on the gentlemen's ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... Flounders are good all year round, but the fluke is better than the flounder in summer. Carp may be had all year, but care must be taken that it has ...
— The International Jewish Cook Book • Florence Kreisler Greenbaum
... 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
... immorality. The thing I cannot stand is his morality. If ever a man on this earth lived to embody the tremendous text, "But if the light in your body be darkness, how great is the darkness," it was certainly he. Great men like Ariosto, Rabelais, and Shakspere fall in foul places, flounder in violent but venial sin, sprawl for pages, exposing their gigantic weakness, are dirty, are indefensible; and then they struggle up again and can still speak with a convincing kindness and an unbroken honour of the ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... was resumed. We heard the other mule scream with note indescribable; we heard him flounder and kick; and ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... came this queer one And gobbled that 'ere one— Didn't he show the most magical skill? Then came this other And chewed up his brother, Made but one gulp, and behold he was through! He was a gold fish Oh! he was a bold fish— But before he could wink he was eaten up too! Up came a flounder, He was a ten-pounder, Opened his mouth, swallowed him and was gone; Before you could blink, sir, Before he could shrink, sir, This fish came by and the flounder was gone! (Alas for my story, 'Tis getting quite gory! ...
— On the Tree Top • Clara Doty Bates
... pin'd unconscious of his rising fate; Studious he sate, with all his books around, Sinking from thought to thought, a vast profound! Plung'd for his sense, but found no bottom there; Then writ, and flounder'd on, in meer despair. He roll'd his eyes, that witness'd huge dismay, Where yet unpawn'd ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... enjoyed to the full the clamours of advertisement, but it was not favourable. The critics laughed it to scorn, and called it a farce and a failure. The Quarterly Review, in the course of a savage diatribe, declared that it was "as dull as ditch-water and as flat as a flounder," and in a graver mood reproved it as a mere "bid for the bigoted voices of Exeter Hall." Some of the criticisms were not wanting in acumen. It was perceived at once that, as Theodora Campion is the heroine of the book, it was an error in art to kill her off in ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... it is our duty to help in the entertainment of the company; but, for my part, I throw myself upon your mercy. I wouldn't, for the world, hint that we are more solid than the girls, but 'tis very certain that we are more lumbering. If I were to begin a tale, I'd flounder through it, like a whale with a harpoon in its body; while any of the girls, even down to little Anna, would glide along, like a graceful, snow-white swan upon a silver lake—happy in her element, and giving pleasure to all who witnessed ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... the trail 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 ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... further, the young man sank somewhat heavily into a chair. Geoffrey had ridden all night through powdery snow-drifts which rose at times to the stirrup, and at others so high that his horse could scarcely flounder through them. He had made out lists of necessary stores as the jolting train sped on to Vancouver, and had been busy every moment until it was time to start for High Maples. Though he would have had it otherwise, he dare not neglect one item when time was very precious. He had not ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... the evidence were not so convincing that it had been done by Adams, I'd say flatly that it is impossible. We have no approach which holds any hope at all. What we've done so far, you might best describe as flounder. But if Adams turned the trick, it must be possible. There may be, as a matter of fact, more ways than one. We'd like to ...
— Project Mastodon • Clifford Donald Simak
... Many flat fish, as for example the flounder and the skate, are exactly the colour of the gravel or sand on which they habitually rest. Among the marine flower gardens of an Eastern coral reef the fishes present every variety of gorgeous colour, while ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... But the water is not conquered after all! I have known houses burst asunder from the foundations giving way. I have seen a palace separated from the very steps that led up to its door. And in spring, when the snow melts which has been collecting for months, the horses can scarcely flounder along through the rivers of ...
— The Rambles of a Rat • A. L. O. E.
... the next boy took him up. Then he began to construe;—a frightful confusion of nominatives without verbs, accusatives translated as ablatives, and adverbs turned into prepositions, ensued, and after a hopeless flounder, during which Mr Gordon left him entirely to himself, Barker came to a full stop; his catastrophe was so ludicrous, that Eric could not help joining in ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... 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 ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... really thinks, will think his way into light. He may turn many a somersault, but he will come right side up at last. But people in general do not think, and if they refuse to be walled in by other people's thoughts, they inevitably flop and flounder into pitiable prostration. So important is it, that a poor creed is better than none at all. Truth, even adulterated as we get it, is a tonic. Bring forward something tangible, something positive, something that means something, ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... nature declares that animals which are placed in new surroundings, not fatal to life, undergo certain changes and modifications in their anatomical and physiological structures to meet the exigencies demanded by such a modification of surroundings. Thus, the flounder and his congeners, the turbot, the plaice, the sole, etc., were, centuries and centuries ago, two-sided fishes, swimming upright, after the manner of the perch, the bass, and the salmon, with eyes arranged one on each side of the head. From upright fishes, swimming, probably, close to the surface ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... yelping and crying with grief and pain. The half-breed tried to drive him away 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 ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... especially on a slant, is six inches of snow over loose stones or small boulders. There you hope for divine favor and flounder ahead. There is one compensation; the snow is soft to fall on. Boggy areas you must be able to gauge the depth of at a glance. And there are places, beautiful to behold, where a horse clambers up the least bit of an ascent, ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... said the child. "And afterward I fished a little, but I didn't catch anything, 'cept an old flounder, and he winked at me, so I put him back. And then I thought a long time—oh! a very long time, sitting like Patience on the doorstep. And suddenly, Daddy Captain, I thought about those boxes of clothes, and how you said they would be mine when I was big. And I measured myself against the ...
— Captain January • Laura E. Richards
... good all year round, but the fluke is better than the flounder in summer. Carp may be had all year, but care must be taken that it has ...
— The International Jewish Cook Book • Florence Kreisler Greenbaum
... for cultivation, entertainment, and information, which the utmost leisure we can spare from other pressing avocations does not suffice to give us knowledge of, it does seem to be little less than a moral and intellectual sin to flounder about blindly in the flood of new publications. I am speaking, of course, of the general mass of readers, and not of the specialists who must follow their subjects with ceaseless inquisition. But for most of us who belong to the still comparatively few who, really read books, the main ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... 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. It ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... arise from their meeting in those places with strata too harsh, hard, and solid, for their purpose, which they relinquish, and go to a fresh spot that works more freely ? Or may they not in other places fall in with a soil as much too loose and mouldering, liable to flounder, and threatening to overwhelm them and their ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which must have been very delightful. Tom Hood was among the guests on many occasions. Before being Brompton Grove, this part of the district had been known as Flounder's Field, but ...
— The Kensington District - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... for in the latter case, instead of being assisted by reason, our real help in all study, we have to rely upon memory or our power of imitation, and to do simply as we are told without thinking about it. The consequence is that at the very first difficulty we are left to flounder about in the dark, or to remain inactive till the ...
— The Theory and Practice of Perspective • George Adolphus Storey
... row-boat up toward the interior country. They will return at night laden with rail or reed-birds, with the additional burden perhaps of a great loon, shot as a curiosity. Others, provided with fishing-tackle, are going out for flounder. Laughing farewells, waving handkerchiefs and the other telegraphic signs of departure, are all very gay, but the tune may be changed when the great sailing-party comes back, wet and wretched, and with three of the principal beauties limp as bolsters ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... had a tuneful tongue, Such happy intonation, Wherever he sat down and sung He left a small plantation; Whenever in a lonely grove He set up his forlorn pipes, The gouty oak began to move And flounder into hornpipes." ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... 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 ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... Marechal's own Cabinet; sat there, an hour, talking to the Marechal [little admiring the Marechal's talk, as we shall find], still insisting on the incognito,"—to which Broglio, put out in his high paces by this sudden thing, and apt to flounder, as I have heard, was not polite enough to conform altogether. "What shall I do, in this sudden case?" poor Broglio is thinking to himself: "must write to Court; perhaps try to detain—?" Friedrioh's chief thought naturally is, One cannot be ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... 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 ...
— The Emma Gees • Herbert Wes McBride
... on, and thought it great fun. Sometimes a big flat fish, called a flounder, would slip from one of the baskets, in which the men were putting them, and flop out ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue at Aunt Lu's City Home • Laura Lee Hope
... me for laughing at you, you dear child you!" she said. "But I remember so well how I use to flounder through just such needless anxieties, and life looks so different, so very different, to me now from what it did then! What should you think of a man who, having just sowed his field, was astonished not to see it at once ripe for the harvest, because his neighbor's, after ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... her, and the boat speedily sailed and drifted beyond reach. Charley and Belle Vue at once swam to a beacon marking a submerged reef about a mile away, but Tom and Mary, being caught in the current, were swept past the only available resting-place. They were 8 miles from shore. Tom soon began to flounder, but Mary, keeping her heart and her precious blanket, cheered him on, and, changing her course, took a "fair wind down," as she afterwards said, towards a distant point of the mainland. Lifting the giant despair from her boy's shoulders with encouraging words, holding him up occasionally ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... dead as in life they slept, warriors and princes of 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 Lebanonian ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... 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 ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... Walter "squattered" through the ford. The twilight was darkening fast, and, in the shadow of the ravine, we were almost safe from the eyes of our pursuers; but I marvel that even at such a distance their ears were not attracted by the flounder and the splash. My squire and I followed more leisurely; indeed, throughout, the former had displayed a creditable coolness and determination; also, he seemed to take very kindly to my own favorite motto, "Festina lente"—"More haste, ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... 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 ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... they rolled and floundered, and were half smothered before they could recover their feet; and then a pretty pickle they were in, wet to the skin, and covered with mud from one end to the other; they could not see out of their eyes. Peggy did nothing but scream and flounder—she was frightened out of her wits—while the carman and I laughed ready to split. I gave him half a crown to drive on shore without them, which he did, and we left them to make their way out how they could; and a pretty pickle they did come out at last. Thus was their day's pleasure as well ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... 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 ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... flounder—but you leave him to ask what you want, ma'am; don't mention this [He puts the deed back into his pocket]. The Centry's no mortal good to him if he's not going to put up works; I should say he'd be glad to save what ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... 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
... 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
... which may be cited is the asymmetrical condition of the heads of the flat-fishes (Pleuronectidae), such as the sole, the flounder, the brill, the turbot, &c. In all these fishes the two eyes, which in the young are situated as usual one on each side, come to be placed, in the adult, both on the same side of the head. If this condition had appeared at once, if in the hypothetically fortunate ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... caused the deputy to flounder for a moment in attempting to explain that he had misquoted his own sentiments, and then he ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... out so funnily that it sounded just like some queer old flounder trying to talk, and we thought he was joking. But he wasn't at all. Sometimes he is very nice and tells us the longest yarns about when he shipped on a whaler, but this time he was busy and the rudder-gudgeons didn't behave right, I think, so he let us do all the talking. ...
— Us and the Bottleman • Edith Ballinger Price
... 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
... 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 do ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... there when she came—but I couldn't get over those silkworms. She was goin' to 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
... into 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, ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... was the undertaking, and what a task it was to keep the road on such a night. The blackness was intense, and the snow, which all the time had been steadily falling, added to the difficulty. Every few steps he would plunge off into the deep snow, and flounder around again until he had regained the solid footing. The distance, which was not more than a mile, seemed never-ending. Still he plodded on, the thought of that silent form lying in the snow inspiring him with extra energy. At length, much exhausted, a welcome glimmer ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody
... be a bit afraid it meant that I'd walked in myself, and hadn't heeded His warnings. Sometimes, I think, when folks do that, He leaves them to flounder awhile ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... us. Rebels, as a rule, are astonishingly ignorant of arithmetic and accounting, generally. They are good shots, fine horsemen, ready speakers and ardent politicians, but, like all noncommercial people, they flounder hopelessly in what people of this section would consider simple mathematical processes. One of our constant amusements was in befogging and "beating" those charged with calling rolls and issuing rations. It was not at all difficult at times to make a hundred men count as a hundred ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... 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 this ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... was that she brought him to the point, but the widow had netted him so close that he didn't even try to flounder. ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... attempts to discover very adroitly and pleasantly. The knowledge she showed of many passages in my life seemed to me all but unaccountable; and she appeared to take a not unnatural pleasure in foiling my curiosity, and in seeing me flounder in my eager perplexity, from ...
— Carmilla • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... 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 Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... 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
... as time and space! This hour of the progress, this noontide of Kate's struggle, must have been the very crisis of the whole. Despair was rapidly tending to ratify itself. Hope, in any degree, would be a cordial for sustaining her efforts. But to flounder along a dreadful chaos of snow-drifts, or snow-chasms, towards a point of rock, which, being turned, should expose only another interminable succession of the same character—might that be endured by ebbing spirits, by stiffening limbs, by the ghastly darkness ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... called the flounder, perhaps you may know, Has one side for use and another for show; One side for the public, a delicate brown, And one that is white, which he ...
— Stevenson Memorial Cook Book • Various
... and government of men and things, made the animals, he endowed certain of them with wisdom, and all with the powers of speech. The black bear could then converse with the cayman, and the whispers of the porpoise in the ears of the walruss and the flounder expressed the thoughts which were passing in his mind. The wants which the heron and the goosander now express by nods and winks, were then conveyed by plain, straightforward words; and the grunts and squeaks of the hog, and the bleating of the kid, and the neighing of ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... 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 ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... Through this the sled-trail ran, a narrow ribbon of packed footing barely 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
... want the pleasure of seeing how you look as you flounder through the rapids; and then, again, I may pick up a few points as to how not ...
— The Outdoor Chums After Big Game - Or, Perilous Adventures in the Wilderness • Captain Quincy Allen
... false-hearted girl! Has our communion for hours given me no rights? Am I a Frenchman or a flounder? Answer; you are condemning me to tortures! Why did you ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... and think what you are saying! This is really the first, last and only rule. If you "stop" you can't chatter or expound or flounder ceaselessly, and if you think, you will find a topic and a manner of presenting your topic so that your neighbor will ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... sand. Scenery as yesterday, hills heaped upon heap, group around group, and sometimes a plain of sand, furrowed in pretty tesselated squares like the sands of the sea-shore. I walked about three hours to ease the nagah. The camels continued to flounder in the sand, throwing over their necks their heavy burdens. The ascents extremely difficult: people employed in scooping an inclined path for the animals. But, in the afternoon, about three, we ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... no definite intention, but he moved a pace forward, and Courthorne touched the horse with his heel. It backed, and then, growing afraid of the blackness about it, plunged, while Winston for the first time saw that there was a gap in the loosely-laid planking close behind it. Another plunge or flounder, and horse and rider would ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... will themselves exert on a part of the vulgar mass below them, there had been a happy omen for the community; and if it may not be so assumed, are we to have the disgraceful deficiencies of the upper classes pleaded as an argument against raising the lower from their degradation? Must the multitude flounder along the mud at the bottom of the upward slope, because their betters will not be at the cost of making for themselves a higher terraced road across it than that they ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... could do the same. Two or three heavy jumps landed him, not among the bulrushes as he had hoped, but in a pool of muddy water where he sank up to his middle with alarming rapidity. Much scared, he tried to wade out, but could only flounder to a tussock of grass and cling there while he endeavored to kick his legs free. He got them out, but struggled in vain to coil them up or to hoist his heavy body upon the very small island in this sea of mud. Down they splashed again, ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, September 1878, No. 11 • Various
... the 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 disposed ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... hence than they are now, nor will presenting to them bread, cheese, ale, blankets, stockings, and a dry sermon, as Mr. Crabb did half a century ago, render them permanent help. We must do as the eagle does with her young: we must cause a little fluster among them, so that they may begin to flounder for themselves. Take them up, turn them out, and teach them to use their own wings, and the schoolmaster and sanitary officers are the agencies to do it. The men are clever and can get money sufficient to keep their ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... and their wandering disposition brings them into trouble. Once I found a herd of seven up to their backs in soft snow, and tired out,—a strange condition for a caribou to be in. They were taking the affair philosophically, resting till they should gather strength to flounder to some spruce tops where moss was plenty. When I approached gently on snowshoes (I had been hunting them diligently the week before to kill them; but this put a different face on the matter) they gave a bound or two, then ...
— Wilderness Ways • William J Long
... colony always sails under the lee of its mother. Talk does it all, friend Harris. Talk, talk, talk; a man can talk himself into a fever, or set a ship's company by the ears. He can talk a cherry into a peach, or a flounder into a whale. Now here is the whole of this long coast of America, and all her rivers, and lakes, and brooks, swarming with such treasures as any man might fatten on, and yet his Majesty's servants, who come among us, talk of their turbots, and their sole, and their ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... happens it, once more, that the baptism of civilization has not been equally efficacious for all? Does this not show that progress itself is a privilege, and that the man who has neither wagon nor horse is forced to flounder about for ever in the mud? What do I say? The totally destitute man has no desire to improve: he has fallen so low that ambition even is extinguished ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... immediately fell away from under me, so that if I had not been obeying orders by hanging tight I should most certainly have plunged forward against the horses. We seemed to slide and slither down a steep declivity, then hit water with a splash, and began to flounder forward. The water rose high enough to cover the floor of the Invigorator, causing the Captain to speculate on whether Redmond had packed in the shells properly. Then the bow rose with a mighty jerk and we scrambled ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... moonlight. Then she snaps The light on where the onyx tub and walls Dazzle the air. I enter then her room And stand against the closed door, do not pry Upon her in the bath. Give her the chance To fly me, fight me standing face to face. I hear her flounder in the water, hear Hands slap and slip with water breast and arms; Hear little sighs and shudders and the roughness Of crash towels on her back, when in a minute She stands with back toward me in the doorway, A sea-shell glory, pink and white to ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... Further, he can shut his ears when he has had enough, which is a faculty man may envy him. His wife, too, always has a first-rate sealskin jacket, made in one piece, and he hasn't to pay for it. He can always run down to the seaside when so disposed, although the run is a waddle and a flounder; and if he has no tail to speak of—well, he can't have it frozen off. All these things are better than the empty honour of extinction; better than evolution into bathers who would be drownable, and translation into unaccustomed situations—with ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 26, February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... 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 gray eyes in the ...
— Christmas Eve at Swamp's End • Norman Duncan
... confound the understanding of the reader by the remoteness and obscurity of their illustrations; they soothe the ear by the monotony of the same everlasting round of circuitous metaphors. They are the mock-school in poetry and prose. They flounder about between fustian in expression and bathos in sentiment. They tantalise the fancy, but never reach the head nor touch the heart. Their Temple of Fame is like a shadowy structure raised by Dulness to Vanity, or like Cowper's description of ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... Meeting such droves of cattle and 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, and there ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... betimes who know that a bugle will sound the reveille at 5.30 in the morning. The end of the entertainment is planned to allow time for a final cup of tea or a glass of Horlick's Malted Milk before we go out to flounder through the mud ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... tidewater rivers and bays and the Atlantic Ocean bordering the 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, it ...
— New Discoveries at Jamestown - Site of the First Successful English Settlement in America • John L. Cotter
... soldiers who 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 ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... himself on the swing, when the girls set it going with all their might. The cords broke, the eunuch fell into the bath, and the girls made off with their lamps, and left the meddlesome old fool to flounder about till morning, when assistance came, but not before he was half ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... he must have had an ugly fall, but, picked up quickly by the delicate and steady finger of his rider, the good horse found some slight projection of the bank, whereby to make a second spring. After a heavy flounder, however, which must have dismounted any less perfect horseman, he recovered himself well, and before many minutes ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... from; it is the virgin soil of the wilderness; but it is a good way to the college and the library, and much work must be done. I am near to nature and can write upon these themes with ease and success; this is my proper field, as I well know. But bookish themes—how I flounder about amid them, and have to work and delve long to get down to the real truth about them ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... didn't seem to think this funny, nor did Mrs. Doane, but the father was chuckling to himself as they sat down to their baked flounder. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... that Jim-the-ladder took delight in keeping up the count by reports. The poor boy wanted to die in his mother's arms. He had got his time down to a week, when the 'screw' clapped as many marks on to him as added a month to his imprisonment. Then he lost heart, and dropped down like a flounder, and when they picked him up ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... uncovered by the foam. On the crest of a bulging cascade they were fortunately borne right over this ridge, which next moment showed its black teeth, as if grinning at the dire mischief it might have done if it had only chosen to bite! Next instant the canoe overturned, and left the men to flounder to land, while it went careering down ...
— The Norsemen in the West • R.M. Ballantyne
... really and truly believed in spiritualism and then found, as so many people have done, alas! that the prophet of it was himself a fraud, I should be cut, as it were, from all my spiritual bearings, to flounder hopeless and broken-hearted mid the desolate wastes of agnosticism. I cannot give myself unless I am convinced that the sacrifice is for something which I must believe in spite of all doubt; not ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... a few moments the boats would float, plunging the men beyond their depths. They would swim and flounder perhaps a boat's length, clinging to the gunwale, before the boat would once more run aground. Again they would drag their clumsy burden a hundred yards over sand that sucked hungrily at their sodden boots. This passed, came many yards of smooth rock a few inches ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... as before, rolling beneath the arch with frightful impetuosity. As I gazed upon the eddies of the whirlpool, I thought within myself how soon human life would become extinct there; a plunge, a convulsive flounder, and all would be over. When I last stood over that abyss I had felt a kind of impulse—a fascination: I had resisted it—I did not plunge into it. At present I felt a kind of impulse to plunge; but the impulse was of a different kind; it proceeded ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... It's much more important than that. It's like learning to swim. For a long time you flounder about, it's unpleasant and gets up your nose and you choke. Then all at once you are swimming like a duck. That's how I feel about all this.... The challenge was that ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... for shelter. Luckily he had the advantage of Grumpy in one way. He had a bare ledge to run on, while Grumpy Weasel had to flounder for some ...
— The Tale of Grumpy Weasel - Sleepy-Time Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... 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 who is ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... one point involved the pruning of all growth on every other. Here was Morton, almost in the front rank of his particular subject, and, besides, very far from being a bookworm; yet, when taken an inch out of his rut, he could do nothing but flounder. He wondered what Morton would make of these things if ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... jagged peak and come on one of those snug coves where the white fisher hamlets now nestle. Reefs white as lace fret line the coast. Lonely as death, bare as a block of marble, Gull Island is passed where another crew in later years perish as castaways. Gray finback whales flounder in schools. The lazy humpbacks lounge round and round the ships, eyeing the keels curiously. A polar bear is seen on an ice pan. Then the ships come to those lonely harbors north of Newfoundland—Griguet and Quirpon and Ha-Ha-Bay, ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... 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 the vegetables most ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... 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 bring in carloads ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... to this, and, with the exception of the select few between whom and myself there is a bond of intellectual brotherhood, I say to people just what I think is likely to please them. In the society of fashionable people I am utterly lost. I get into a muddle and flounder about, losing the thread of my ideas in some tissue of absurdity. With an inveterate habit of being over polite, as priests generally are, I am too anxious to detect what the person I am talking with would like said to him. My attention, when ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... had General Flounder bring him a great spear. But Sun Wu Kung was not satisfied with it. Then he ordered Field-Marshal Eel to fetch in a nine-tined fork, which weighed three thousand six hundred pounds. But Sun Wu Kung balanced ...
— The Chinese Fairy Book • Various
... Sings the vessel to the ocean, And these words the hero utters: "Like a bubble swim these waters, Like a flower ride the billows; Loan me of thy magic feathers, Three, O eagle, four, O raven, For protection to my vessel, Lest it flounder in the ocean!" Now the sailor, Lemminkainen, Seats himself upon the bottom Of the vessel he has builded, Hastens on his journey homeward, Head depressed and evil-humored, Cap awry upon his forehead, Mind dejected, heavy-hearted, That he could not dwell ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... 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
... driftwood and from that plunged into the thicket. MacRae did not try to follow. He did not even move. He looked after her a minute. Then he sat down on the log again and stared at the steady march of the swells. There was a sense of finality in this thing which made him flounder desperately. Still, he assured himself, it had to be. And if it had to be that way it was better to have it so understood. Betty would never look at him again with that disturbing message in her eyes. ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... nature) very unceremoniously, and at odd times, we may, possibly, be pardoned or praised for so doing. Well, we never hear mention of this game but we think of a bump we once received during the sport, our blind ardour causing us to flounder in a fender, and bruise our head, the remains of which will be taken to the "long home." Well do we remember the spotted turban worn on that occasion—for we recollect, at the time, thinking "Belcher" a new term, just coined;—having ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... drawing out and draining dry the sensation he had begun to taste. He would do it, moreover—that would be the refinement of his art—not only without the betraying anxiety of a single question, but just even by seeing her flounder (since she must, in a vagueness deeply disconcerting to her) as to her real effect on him. She was distinctly floundering by the time he had brought her—it had taken ten minutes—down to a consciousness of absurd and twaddling topics, to the ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... 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
... account for her to himself, did the honest Lackaday flounder from trope to metaphor. "To love her," he quotes from Steele, "is a ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... she would have Latin and Greek talked if there were no word for a gentleman in either! There were always stories to be told of Bertha's narrow escapes of being overtaken by them in garden or corridor, till Maria, infected by the panic, used to flounder away as if from a beast of prey, and being as tall as, and considerably stouter than, Phoebe, with the shuffling gait of the imbecile, would produce a volume of sound that her sister always feared might ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... awful sense of helplessness takes possession of you. If it were daylight, you could pass around the deep drifts, even in this chaos; but now a drift looks the same as the prairie grass swept bare. You plunge headlong into it, flounder through it, creeping on hands and knees, with your face sometimes buried in the snow, get on your feet again, ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... power—the secret of so much success in this world—of thrusting forth a sure and steady hand to grasp the heart of a question and tear it from the tangle of side-issues among which the majority of men and women are condemned to flounder. ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... walk for miles on shingle Or flounder knee-deep in a bog Than listen to a speech from PRINGLE Or hearken to the howls ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 9, 1917 • Various
... there is a prospect of their increase, for, in the words of old Robert Binnell, Water Bailiff of the City of London in 1757, we may "venture to affirm that there is no river in all Europe that is a better nourisher of its fish, and a more speedy breeder, particularly of the flounder, than is the Thames." Eels were also taken in considerable numbers between Hammersmith and Kew; but the main supply of London eels came from Holland even in the days of London salmon. In a very old print of the City, with ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... went on, in a brisk, matter-of-fact tone. "I spent two months last year looking for a job in New York. I was about down to my last cent before I found it. It occurred to me that, perhaps, you—" He was beginning to flounder. ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan
... being a hard, well-rolled "cinder path"; on the contrary, it is of soft sand into which the naked foot sinks if planted too firmly, and upon it the most adept "hard-track" runner would at first pant and flounder helplessly. The Greeks have several kinds of foot races, but none that are very short. The shortest is the simple "stadium" (600 feet), a straight hard dash down one side of the long oval; then there is the "double course" ("diaulos") ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... 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 instead ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... and thrice-honored ladies, flounder about in a tangled net of prejudice, of intrigue. We are blinded by conventions, we are crushed by misunderstanding, we are distracted by violence, we are deceived by hypocrisy, until only too often villains receive the rewards of nobility and the truly great-hearted are suspected, distrusted, ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... 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 malicious light in ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... already repudiated, and only do not recognise 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 entire quasi-religious structure, with its ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... fiskar," i. e. "sacri pisces," id. p. 148. The Danish phrase is "helleflyndre," i. e. "holy flounder." The English halibut is hali holy but flounder. This word but is classed as Middle English, but may still be heard in the north of England. The fish may have been so called "from ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... strong-boned thorough-bred, does for a four-barred ox-fence that lies before him. Like him, we take them flying; never relaxing the slapping stride of our loose gallop, we go straight ahead, never turning aside, except for a laugh at those who flounder in the swamps we sneer at. But we confess honestly, we fear the little, brother, the small urchin who, with nankeen trousers and three rows of buttons, performs the part of Cupid. He strikes real terror into our heart; he it is who, with a cunning wink or ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... low stretch of shore, I could select the one precise point where the friendly causeway stretched its long arm to receive me from the water? How easily (some tempter whispered at my ear) might one swerve a little, on either side, and be compelled to flounder over half a mile of oozy marsh on an ebbing tide, before reaching our own shore and that hospitable volley of bullets with which it would probably greet me! Had I not already (thus the tempter continued) been swimming rather unaccountably ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... I will cure you. I will be your friend and put you all right. Now, we will just drive down to Richmond; we will have a light dinner, a flounder, a cutlet, and a bottle of champagne, and then we will go to the French play. I will introduce you to Jenny Vertpre. She is full of wit; perhaps she will ask us to supper. Allons, mon ami, mon cher Armine; allons, mon brave!' Ceremony was a farce with ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... seek to recapitulate the interlacing growth of my apprehension of the world, as I flounder among the half-remembered developments that found me a crude schoolboy and left me a man, there comes out, as if it stood for all the rest, my first holiday abroad. That did not happen until I was twenty-two. I was a fellow of Trinity, ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... and vigor. It was two of those broad-leaved sea-weeds, with stems like snakes, both rooted on a stone,—all which came up together. Often these sea-weeds root themselves on muscles. In the morning, our pilot killed a flounder with the boat-hook, the poor fish thinking ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to note it in the very commencement, and to learn, like the thoughtful students of painting, to put aside any half-childish over-estimate of the absurdity of a blue stroke transfixing a huge flounder-like fish as a likeness of a sea, (which you have been accustomed to see translucid, in breakers and foam, in modern marine pictures,) or your quick sense of the ugliness of straight figures with long ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... 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
... original meaning of the word, is alone concerned. For I am positive there are many thousands who, if they were to bring their own palate to a severe examination, would discover that they really find a more delicious flavour in mutton than in venison, in flounder than in turbut, and yet prefer middling or bad venison to the best mutton; that is, what is scarcest and dearest, and consequently what is, from the folly of mankind, the most in vogue, to what is really the most agreeable to ...
— Essays on Taste • John Gilbert Cooper, John Armstrong, Ralph Cohen
... for laughing at you, you dear child you!" she said. "But I remember so well how I use to flounder through just such needless anxieties, and life looks so different, so very different, to me now from what it did then! What should you think of a man who, having just sowed his field, was astonished not to see it at once ripe for the harvest, because his neighbor's, ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... astonishingly tolerant and kind, lending him money, advancing him what he required, taking up or renewing notes for him, until the boy, heavily in his debt, plunged more heavily still in sheer desperation, only to flounder the deeper at every struggle to ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... teaching children Miss Sallie wasn't meant. She really wasn't. She never surely knows the lesson herself, and it was such fun asking her all sorts of questions just to see her flounder round for answers that I used to pretend I wanted to know a lot of things I didn't. But I don't do that now. It was like punching a lame cat to see ...
— Mary Cary - "Frequently Martha" • Kate Langley Bosher
... use, and has 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 of which ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... 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. He spoke ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... now that what I had hoped was true. He was "bluffing." He wanted me to flounder into some admission, and to make him a promise in order to save the man I loved. I was only a woman, he'd argued, no doubt—an emotional woman, already wrought up to a high pitch of nervous excitement. ...
— The Powers and Maxine • Charles Norris Williamson
... sick abed—full of interest—read the debates and get excited over them, though don't 'versteh'. By reading keep in a state of excited ignorance, like a blind man in a house afire; flounder around, immensely but unintelligently interested; don't know how I got in and can't find the way out, but I'm having a booming time ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... took some time!" said the child. "And afterward I fished a little, but I didn't catch anything, 'cept an old flounder, and he winked at me, so I put him back. And then I thought a long time—oh! a very long time, sitting like Patience on the doorstep. And suddenly, Daddy Captain, I thought about those boxes of clothes, and how you said ...
— Captain January • Laura E. Richards
... recognise 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 entire quasi-religious structure, with its visionary hopes, its impossible ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... Trout Grayling Pickerel Northern Pike Shad Menhaden Spanish Mackerel Pompano Bluefish Crappie Calico Bass Rock Bass Sunfish Small-mouth Black Bass Large-mouth Black Bass Wall-eyed Pike Weakfish Red Drum Kingfish Tautog Rosefish Tomcod Haddock Ling Cusk Summer Flounder Flatfish Muscallonge Northern Muscallonge Striped Mullet Common Mackerel Bonito Sauger Yellow Perch White Bass Striped Bass White Perch Sea Bass Scup Spotted Weakfish Croaker Bergall Spadefish Whiting Cod Burbot Hake Halibut Sand Dab ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... the understanding of the reader by the remoteness and obscurity of their illustrations; they soothe the ear by the monotony of the same everlasting round of circuitous metaphors. They are the mock-school in poetry and prose. They flounder about between fustian in expression and bathos in sentiment. They tantalise the fancy, but never reach the head nor touch the heart. Their Temple of Fame is like a shadowy structure raised by Dulness ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... of view—and the deposit and record of the national mentality, character, appeals, heroism, wars, and even liberties—where these, and all, culminate in native literary and artistic formulation, to be perpetuated; and not having which native, first-class formulation, she will flounder about, and her other, however imposing, eminent greatness, prove merely a passing gleam; but truly having which, she will understand herself, live nobly, nobly contribute, emanate, and, swinging, poised safely on herself, illumin'd and illuming, become a full-form'd world, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... Bushman's capabilities, he knew that there were also limitations to them. Even in such matters as the splitting of hard rock and the driving of massive piles into the river-bed, the higher intelligence of the man of intellect had its effect. Gordon smoked his pipe out as he watched Nasmyth flounder into the stream among the other men, pushing a little car loaded with broken rock that apparently ran along a submerged track. Then he strolled back toward ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... who had some local repute as a "wise woman," was a person of about fifty years of age, remarkable for her enormous size, a flat face with small oblong eyes and a little, twisted mouth, which had caused her to be nicknamed "the Flounder." She greeted the Abbot with much reverence, curtseying till he thought she would fall backwards, and having received his fatherly blessing, sank into a chair, that seemed to vanish ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... autumn twilight. I find a greater comfort in uncertain hope and a more uncertain faith. If I ever really and truly believed in spiritualism and then found, as so many people have done, alas! that the prophet of it was himself a fraud, I should be cut, as it were, from all my spiritual bearings, to flounder hopeless and broken-hearted mid the desolate wastes of agnosticism. I cannot give myself unless I am convinced that the sacrifice is for something which I must believe in spite of all doubt; not entirely what I want to believe because belief is full of happiness and comfort. ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... their connection with the messenger. But the trail 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 them; he could see ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... 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 Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... spite of us; we do not seem to possess the power to rid our minds of the adverse thought. Under these conditions we should never struggle to throw off the obsessing idea by force. Our exertions only bring into play the law of reversed effort, and we flounder deeper into the slough. Coue's technique, however, which will be outlined in succeeding chapters, will give us the means of mastering ourselves, even ...
— The Practice of Autosuggestion • C. Harry Brooks
... was so plaguy rough," continued the Clockmaker, "that he'd been the better, if it had been hammered and mauled down smoother. I'd a levelled him as flat as a flounder." ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... sole and certain crevettes are both specialties and are served at this juncture, but little sole is being received here and our own flounder answers requirements admirably. Shrimps, too, will please an American palate fully as well as ...
— Twenty-four Little French Dinners and How to Cook and Serve Them • Cora Moore
... that any of them had ever seen in the Arctic Seas; and when Joe brought his club down on the skull of the foremost with a terrible thwack, it refused to tumble over, but continued to splutter and flounder towards the sea. Dr Hayward, however, used his spear at this moment with such effect that the seal fell, and another blow from the Herculean club ...
— The Coxswain's Bride - also, Jack Frost and Sons; and, A Double Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... waiting horses; also 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 ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... thought he could do the same. Two or three heavy jumps landed him, not among the bulrushes as he had hoped, but in a pool of muddy water where he sank up to his middle with alarming rapidity. Much scared, he tried to wade out, but could only flounder to a tussock of grass and cling there while he endeavored to kick his legs free. He got them out, but struggled in vain to coil them up or to hoist his heavy body upon the very small island in this sea of mud. Down they ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, September 1878, No. 11 • Various
... alone, the Quaker turned to me. "Man, Andrew," he said, "it was a good thing that I had a Bible upbringing. I can manage the part fine, but I flounder among the 'thees' and 'thous.' I would be the better of a drink to wash my mouth of the accursed pronouns. Will you be alone to-night about the darkening? Then I'll call in to see you, for I've much to ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... in. There was no lack of ammunition aboard the Seamew, and there seemed to be no lack of porpoises anxious to serve as moving targets. And, indeed, Mart soon found that he need spend no worry over leaving wounded fish to flounder out ...
— The Pirate Shark • Elliott Whitney
... unable to observe miralets, triggerfish, puffers, seahorses, jewelfish, trumpetfish, blennies, gray mullet, wrasse, smelt, flying fish, anchovies, sea bream, porgies, garfish, or any of the chief representatives of the order Pleuronecta, such as sole, flounder, plaice, dab, and brill, simply because of the dizzying speed with which the Nautilus hustled through ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... howdy! Come in, take a cheer. I am glad to see you. I 'lowed you'd come. Old Dr. Flounder used to say he larnt lots o' things of me. But most of the doctors sence hez been kinder stuck up, you know. But I know'd you fer a ...
— The Hoosier Schoolmaster - A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana • Edward Eggleston
... DAWKER. He'll kick and flounder—but you leave him to ask what you want, ma'am; don't mention this [He puts the deed back into his pocket]. The Centry's no mortal good to him if he's not going to put up works; I should say he'd be glad to save ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... explosion of the under side of man; and the most masculine and direct of women will some day, to your dire surprise, draw out like a telescope into successive lengths of personation. Alas! for the man, knowing her to be at heart more candid than himself, who shall flounder, panting, through these mazes in the quest for truth. The proper qualities of each sex are, indeed, eternally surprising to the other. Between the Latin and the Teuton races there are similar divergences, not to be ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... rule, he never was satisfied with his altitude until he had pushed his plane somewhere near the limit of its climbing ability. He was a splendid pilot at great altitude, and he had learned from experience that many pilots capable of doing good work at the lower levels flounder around like fish out of water when above twelve thousand feet. This being equally true of friend and foe, Larkin always felt better when he was high enough not to have any worry about someone coming down on him. He preferred having his ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke
... there, an hour, talking to the Marechal [little admiring the Marechal's talk, as we shall find], still insisting on the incognito,"—to which Broglio, put out in his high paces by this sudden thing, and apt to flounder, as I have heard, was not polite enough to conform altogether. "What shall I do, in this sudden case?" poor Broglio is thinking to himself: "must write to Court; perhaps try to detain—?" Friedrioh's chief ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... 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 hope for ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... and yelping and crying with grief and pain. The half-breed tried to drive him away 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 sleds ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... the flounder, perhaps you may know, Has one side for use and another for show; One side for the public, a delicate brown, And one that is white, which he always ...
— Stevenson Memorial Cook Book • Various
... rein, and after a flounder or two the pony started the load and struggled up the ascent. Leaving the woman at the top, voluble with thanks, Vane came down and sauntered ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... 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 ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... 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 gray eyes in the whole ...
— Christmas Eve at Swamp's End • Norman Duncan
... out here to fish or to talk?" Rick asked. They were anchored a few hundred yards off the reef tip and had been for almost an hour. In that time Cap'n Mike had made a good haul of four blacks, one flounder and a porgy. Rick and Scotty ...
— Smugglers' Reef • John Blaine
... like a dog that can't make up his 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
... But there was rather too much water; as we went on it came well over our knees, and every now and then up the tops of our thighs so there was too little holding ground for us or snipe. We walked in line, laboriously, halting every now and then to wait for one or the other to flounder out of a deep place; and when the sun got up the glare from the water made me think of sunstroke; however, we persevered and managed to get fourteen couple before lunch time, and I found my American five-shooter the very thing for ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to bear our ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... a dream 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 ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... Mallet, had set up house. I remember to this day owning to my brother that though I had intended my review of Gulliver's Travels to be epoch-making, it had turned out a horrible fiasco. However, I somehow felt I should only flounder deeper into the quagmire of my own creation if I rewrote the two reviews. Accordingly, they were sent off in the usual way. Knowing my father's experience in such matters, I did not expect to get them back in type for many weeks. As a matter of fact, they came back quite quickly. I corrected ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... throbbed the intense vision of his drawing out and draining dry the sensation he had begun to taste. He would do it, moreover—that would be the refinement of his art—not only without the betraying anxiety of a single question, but just even by seeing her flounder (since she must, in a vagueness deeply disconcerting to her) as to her real effect on him. She was distinctly floundering by the time he had brought her—it had taken ten minutes—down to a consciousness of absurd and twaddling ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... early days of his Circuit journeys: "Yet there are some of us who like the procession, though it can never be anything but mean and ludicrous, and who fancy that a line of soldiers, or the more civic array of paltry policemen, or of doited special constables, protecting a couple of judges who flounder in awkward gowns and wigs through ill-paved streets, followed by a few sneering advocates and preceded by two or three sheriffs or their substitutes, with their swords, which trip them, and a provost and some bailie-bodies trying to ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... there's fishing on the seaside. I used to catch flat fish sometimes, with a long string line, it was like swimming a kite. If you go out in a surf boat, take care it does not "flounder" and get "squamped," as some people say, ...
— Neighbor Nelly Socks - Being the Sixth and Last Book of the Series • Sarah L. Barrow
... down till ever hole in the prairie was a pond; and I tell you I wished I'd bought a boat instead of the buckboard. And the mosquitoes, oh, my! Well, we floundered around about three days and got all our stuff wet and half spoiled. Then we found we'd missed the way and had to flounder three days back again. I tell you, I felt pretty much discouraged. Then we saw something a-coming. It turned out to be a settler going back. He said there was nothing but pond holes and bogs, the mosquitoes were awful, the boom was bust, and the Sioux on the war path. ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... reared, backed away into the ditch, collapsed there on his quarters, and recovered himself with the grunt and flounder of a hippopotamus ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... 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)
... behind which Quintana stood; but before he could fire again Quintana's shot in reply came ripping through the juniper and tore a ghastly hole in the calf of his left leg, striking a blow that knocked young Hastings flat and paralysed as a dead flounder. ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... trying to account for her to himself, did the honest Lackaday flounder from trope to metaphor. "To love her," he quotes from ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... ran madly for shelter. Luckily he had the advantage of Grumpy in one way. He had a bare ledge to run on, while Grumpy Weasel had to flounder for some distance through a ...
— The Tale of Grumpy Weasel - Sleepy-Time Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... down, even its forlorn shabbiness is softened into something of romantic indistinctness. But daylight is dreadfully disenchanting. The rows of tumble-down houses, the sandy, unpaved streets—through which you flounder as in the deserts of Sahara, unless you choose to try sidewalks that have as many ups and downs as a range of mountains, each man building to the height that pleases himself—the large parade, without armament or shade, a dreary common of sand, the crowds ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... 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 ...
— The Turn of the Screw • Henry James
... remedy. There are other cases in which men find by experience that 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 ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... done in this war by such devices as caterpillar wheels. So far from cavalry being able to negotiate country where machines would stick and fail, mechanism can now ride over places where any horse would flounder. ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... also 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 ...
— Air Service Boys Over the Atlantic • Charles Amory Beach
... tenderly nurtured, but what will not a woman endure when her child is in danger? Complaining less of the dangers of the road than her attendants, who had been inured to such from their infancy, she kept herself close by the side of the pony, watching its every footstep, and ready, if it should flounder in the morass, to snatch her little Mary from its back. At length they came to a place where the guide greatly hesitated, for all around him was broken lumps of heath, divided from each other by deep sloughs of black tenacious mire. After great consideration, Martin, selecting what ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... 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
... "Helgir fiskar," i. e. "sacri pisces," id. p. 148. The Danish phrase is "helleflyndre," i. e. "holy flounder." The English halibut is hali holy but flounder. This word but is classed as Middle English, but may still be heard in the north of England. The fish may have been so called "from being eaten particularly on holy days" ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... 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 ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... prop the tottering fortunes of his chowder-headed rag, let him obtain 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 journal fully ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., August 23, 1890. • Various
... sails under the lee of its mother. Talk does it all, friend Harris. Talk, talk, talk; a man can talk himself into a fever, or set a ship's company by the ears. He can talk a cherry into a peach, or a flounder into a whale. Now here is the whole of this long coast of America, and all her rivers, and lakes, and brooks, swarming with such treasures as any man might fatten on, and yet his Majesty's servants, who come among us, talk of their turbots, ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... when she came—but I couldn't get over those silkworms. She was goin' to 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 ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason
... Invigorator immediately fell away from under me, so that if I had not been obeying orders by hanging tight I should most certainly have plunged forward against the horses. We seemed to slide and slither down a steep declivity, then hit water with a splash, and began to flounder forward. The water rose high enough to cover the floor of the Invigorator, causing the Captain to speculate on whether Redmond had packed in the shells properly. Then the bow rose with a mighty jerk and we scrambled ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... general. Without Woman, sir, what, or where, should we be? Until we attain a knowledge of—a—Woman, through the medium of the—a—Passion (I speak of it with reverence!), what, or where are we? We journey over arid plains, we flounder in treacherous quagmires. Suddenly looms before us, clear against the sky, as here represented, the Peak in Darien—Woman! Guided by the—a—Passion (I speak of its lofty phases, sir, its lofty phases!), we scale those crystal heights. It may be in fancy only; it may be that circumstances over which ...
— Mrs. Tree • Laura E. Richards
... 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 ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher
... appears 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 that the monitor Miantonomah, Captain SCHUFELDT, is awaiting ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, Issue 10 • Various
... "an I be not wanted, I can go"; and he turned tipsily along the corridor and proceeded to flounder ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Mr. Diston 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
... 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
... housebuilding. Their houses were, generally speaking, very sensibly contrived,—roomy, airy, and comfortable; but in their water arrangements they had little mercy on womankind. The well was out in the yard; and in winter one must flounder through snow and bring up the ice-bound bucket, before one could fill the tea-kettle for breakfast. For a sovereign princess of the republic, this was hardly respectful or respectable. Wells have come somewhat nearer in modern times; but the idea of a constant supply of fresh water by ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... 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 a strap ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... in front. Over his head dived Southwell Primus, while Johnson, in an agony, yelled to White to hurry his shapeless stumps. Moles, with a last tremendous stretch, touched the rope, and Johnson plunged splendidly to his work. I took up my position on the mat and helped White to flounder out. ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... 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 Islands, a ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... breakfast, my dog and I would go out to catch a peculiar sort of fish called the "sting-rae." These curious creatures have a sharp bony spike about two inches in length near the tail and this I found admirably adapted for arrow-heads. The body of the fish resembled a huge flounder, but the tail was long and tapering. They would come close in-shore, and I would spear them from the rocks with a Papuan fishing-spear. The smallest I ever caught weighed fifteen pounds, and I could ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... boats and sea-men flounder, and the strait grind sand with sand and cut boulders to ...
— Sea Garden • Hilda Doolittle
... not a 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
... to have bled freely. Had they quarrelled, or what? He went out into the yard with a hand-lamp, trembling lest he should come upon one or more corpses; but the place was bare, and he then remembered having heard them stumble and flounder over the wall. ...
— The Tinted Venus - A Farcical Romance • F. Anstey
... curiosities was a sea-cow, who lived in a tank of salt water, and came at the keeper's call to kiss him, and flounder on its flippers along the margin of the tank after a fish. It was very like a seal, only much larger, and had four fins instead of two. Its eyes were lovely, so dark and soft and liquid; but its mouth was not pretty, and I declined one of the ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... neither, for the rug has both light and dark colors; and, of the reds, yellows, greens, and blues, some are stronger and others weaker. Then what do we mean by a key of color? One must either continue to flounder about ...
— A Color Notation - A measured color system, based on the three qualities Hue, - Value and Chroma • Albert H. Munsell
... the line, I drew up with great eagerness and vigor. It was two of those broad-leaved sea-weeds, with stems like snakes, both rooted on a stone,—all which came up together. Often these sea-weeds root themselves on muscles. In the morning, our pilot killed a flounder with the boat-hook, the poor fish thinking himself secure ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... 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 argument ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... his back, then crawled through the snow into the shelter of the fir-woods. As soon as he was out of sight, he arose, recovered the thongs of his larrigans from the futile snare, and made his way back on the trail as fast as he could flounder. That one glance over the edge of his trench had told his trained eye all he needed to know about ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... be tides in the affairs of men which taken at the flood... and so on. Personally I am still on the look out for that important turn. I am, however, afraid that most of us are fated to flounder for ever in the dead water of a pool whose shores are arid indeed. But I know that there are often in men's affairs unexpectedly—even irrationally—illuminating moments when an otherwise insignificant sound, perhaps only some perfectly commonplace gesture, suffices ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... after all! I have known houses burst asunder from the foundations giving way. I have seen a palace separated from the very steps that led up to its door. And in spring, when the snow melts which has been collecting for months, the horses can scarcely flounder along through the rivers of mud in ...
— The Rambles of a Rat • A. L. O. E.
... given up all fish diet. Have given up codfish, weak fish, sole, flounder, shark's fins, bass, trout, herring (dried, kippered, smoked, and fresh), finnan haddie, perch, pike, pickerel, lobster, halibut, and stewed eels. Gross weight now only nine hundred and thirty pounds averdupois. Sweet thoughts ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler
... stockings, and a dry sermon, as Mr. Crabb did half a century ago, render them permanent help. We must do as the eagle does with her young: we must cause a little fluster among them, so that they may begin to flounder for themselves. Take them up, turn them out, and teach them to use their own wings, and the schoolmaster and sanitary officers are the agencies to do it. The men are clever and can get money sufficient to keep their families comfortable even at skewer-making and chair-mending, ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... 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 and misapprehension, ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... combination, especially on a slant, is six inches of snow over loose stones or small boulders. There you hope for divine favor and flounder ahead. There is one compensation; the snow is soft to fall on. Boggy areas you must be able to gauge the depth of at a glance. And there are places, beautiful to behold, where a horse clambers up the least bit of an ascent, hits his pack against ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... 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 ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... the large towns, who willingly pay high prices for the scanty supply of these delicious fish which they are able to obtain. Of other succulent fish there was a great variety, from the majestic "grouper," running up to over a hundredweight, down to the familiar flounder. Very little fishing could be done at night. Just as day was dawning was the ideal time for this enticing sport. As soon as the first few streaks of delicate light enlivened the dull horizon, a stray nibble or two gladdened the patient ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... over with a rush as he neared the bank, for suddenly from a reed-bed above them there was a wallow and a flounder, with a tremendous disturbance in the water, as something shot down towards the ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... in perfect 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 ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... fish is the coarseness of fibre and the quantity of fat present. Fish which are highly flavored and fat, while they may be nutritious, are much less easy of digestion than flounder, sole, whitefish, and the lighter varieties. The following fish contain the largest percentage of albuminoids:—Red snapper, whitefish, brook trout, salmon, bluefish, shad, eels, mackerel, halibut, haddock, lake trout, bass, cod and flounder. ...
— Public School Domestic Science • Mrs. J. Hoodless
... blow with an ax would crack one of the glass helmets. Then the denuded Quabo would flounder convulsively in the air till it drowned. But there were all too few of these individual victories. The main body of the Quabos, rank on rank, dragging their water-hose behind them, came on with the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... question of interest or, as people say, of the story? What's a situation undeveloped but a subject lost? If a relation stops, where's the story? If it doesn't stop, where's the innocence? It seems to me you must choose. It would be very pretty if it were otherwise, but that's how we flounder. Art is our ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... 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
... at my leisure, with my Sunday hat on, and a pair of clean white cotton stockings, in this heavenly mood, under the green trees, and beside the still waters, out of which beautiful salmon trouts were sporting and leaping, methought in a moment I fell down in a trance, as flat as a flounder, and I heard a voice visibly saying to me, "Thou shalt have a son; let him be christened Benjamin!" The joy that this vision brought my spirit thrilled through my bones, like the sounds of a blind man grinding "Rule Britannia" ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... said one, allowing his voice to express his impious mood, "if we keep on monkeying out here! If we've got to flounder ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... a good show," continued Slim, doing his best to appear at ease. The frantic corrections of his companions only made him flounder about ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller
... to think this funny, nor did Mrs. Doane, but the father was chuckling to himself as they sat down to their baked flounder. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... and the poor beasts, Meeting such droves of cattle and 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 ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... 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, it was ...
— New Discoveries at Jamestown - Site of the First Successful English Settlement in America • John L. Cotter
... almost the hour of sundown, before Chick and Ten-Ichi were carried to the quicksand pit; and then a procession followed them. The hands and feet of the prisoners were not bound, for it was desired that they should flounder in the quicksand in order to hasten its work; and without ceremony they were hurled into the midst of it, ...
— A Woman at Bay - A Fiend in Skirts • Nicholas Carter
... though boats and sea-men flounder, and the strait grind sand with sand and cut boulders to sand ...
— Sea Garden • Hilda Doolittle
... 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
... the elimination of regional considerations, but it has become apparent that without centralized executive action the management of this great business, like the management of any other great business, will flounder in incapacity and languish under a division of council. A plain and unmistakable reassertion of this principle of unified control, which I have always been advised was the intention of the Congress ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... looking off through half-closed eyes toward the faint 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 ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... silver plates fastened by small wires to the extremity of the principal wire used, and introducing the tongue between those plates, I succeeded in obtaining powerful shocks upon the tongue and gums, and could easily convulse a flounder, an eel, or a frog. None of these effects could be obtained directly from the electromotor, i.e. when the tongue, frog, or fish was in a similar, and therefore comparative manner, interposed in the course of the communication between the zinc and copper plates, separated everywhere ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... plaguy rough," continued the Clockmaker, "that he'd been the better, if it had been hammered and mauled down smoother. I'd a levelled him as flat as a flounder." ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... couldn't get over those silkworms. She was goin' to 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 ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason
... never was satisfied with his altitude until he had pushed his plane somewhere near the limit of its climbing ability. He was a splendid pilot at great altitude, and he had learned from experience that many pilots capable of doing good work at the lower levels flounder around like fish out of water when above twelve thousand feet. This being equally true of friend and foe, Larkin always felt better when he was high enough not to have any worry about someone coming down on him. He preferred having his ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke
... 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
... 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
... the deputy to flounder for a moment in attempting to explain that he had misquoted his own sentiments, and then he went ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... tugged at the pony's bridle; and Mrs. Ainslie, arriving presently, came to his assistance, while some of the other riders, coming up behind, encouraged Brunette with shouts and hunting-crops. Thus urged, Brunette decided that some further effort was necessary, and made one, with a mighty flounder, while Norah rolled off into the water. Half a dozen hands helped her ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... 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 ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... 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
... however, I leave in its old pre-eminence; I tasted the other indeed but once, but it seemed to me to set my mouth on fire—such is not for my drinking), and drank to the fishers, crying, "What say you, children—shall we not go and flounder again upon the Ruegenwald strand?" Upon which they all ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... 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
... 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 whispered "No!" and the inviting "Don't!" with which the maiden's kisses are accompanied, and ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... 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 such ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... misnomers. Their names are single and simple. 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 my part, ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... his bold visage, and a thin third day; Swearing and 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... stirrups and with hands trumpeted uttered a yell. The rider jerked his horse to a rear flounder, waved frantically, ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... about at my leisure, with my Sunday hat on, and a pair of clean white cotton stockings, in this heavenly mood, under the green trees, and beside the still waters, out of which beautiful salmon trouts were sporting and leaping, methought in a moment I fell down in a trance, as flat as a flounder, and I heard a voice visibly saying to me, "Thou shalt have a son; let him be christened Benjamin!" The joy that this vision brought my spirit thrilled through my bones, like the sounds of a blind man grinding "Rule Britannia" out of an organ, and my senses vanished from me into a kind of slumber ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... seemed as though the lightning had riven solid walls asunder within the thick black mass of overhanging vapour, and so had let loose upon us the waters of a lake. In a moment the whole pit of the amphitheatre was awash, knee-deep, and before those who were standing there could flounder to the steps leading upward they were buried to their waists—and this although the water was pouring out through the vent provided for it with such violence that we could hear the rush and gurgle of it above the dashing and roaring of the falling rain. And all the dark mass ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... virgin soil of the wilderness; but it is a good way to the college and the library, and much work must be done. I am near to nature and can write upon these themes with ease and success; this is my proper field, as I well know. But bookish themes—how I flounder about amid them, and have to work and delve long to get down to the real truth about them in ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... away: as far as the eye could reach, the bluest of skies melting into the bluest of seas, which broke its foam-flecked edge against the flat, brown reefs that fringed the shore. Then, downhill—with a trip and a flounder that sent the sand man-high—and at last you were on what Laura and Pin thought the most wonderful beach in the world. What a variety of things was there! Whitest, purest sand, hot to the touch as a zinc roof ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... must have had an ugly fall, but, picked up quickly by the delicate and steady finger of his rider, the good horse found some slight projection of the bank, whereby to make a second spring. After a heavy flounder, however, which must have dismounted any less perfect horseman, he recovered himself well, and before many minutes ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... and housebuilding. Their houses were, generally speaking, very sensibly contrived,—roomy, airy, and comfortable; but in their water arrangements they had little mercy on womankind. The well was out in the yard; and in winter one must flounder through snow and bring up the ice-bound bucket, before one could fill the tea-kettle for breakfast. For a sovereign princess of the republic, this was hardly respectful or respectable. Wells have ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... exception of the select few between whom and myself there is a bond of intellectual brotherhood, I say to people just what I think is likely to please them. In the society of fashionable people I am utterly lost. I get into a muddle and flounder about, losing the thread of my ideas in some tissue of absurdity. With an inveterate habit of being over polite, as priests generally are, I am too anxious to detect what the person I am talking with would like said to him. My attention, when I am conversing with any one, ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... followed us into 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, ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the prize by his 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 money ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... 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
... as light as a golden puff ball, but it must not be used in a family who have a habit of coming late to breakfast, because, if allowed to stand, this particular omelette grows presently as flat as a flounder. ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... foot passenger to skip with ease from one to the other until he gets across; but if the stones are placed too far apart in attempting to span the distance one is liable to miss the mark and fall in the water and flounder about until he is again able to get a foothold. 'Tis the same with written language, the reader by means of paragraphs can easily pass from one portion of connected thought to another and keep up his interest in the subject until he ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... early devotion of their votaries, been poured forth in great abundance, should any daring tongue with unhallowed license prophane, i.e., depreciate, the delicate fat Milton oyster, the plaice sound and firm, the flounder as much alive as when in the water, the shrimp as big as a prawn, the fine cod alive but a few hours ago, or any other of the various treasures which those water-deities who fish the sea and rivers have committed to the care of the nymphs, the angry ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... were in for a great bag. But there was rather too much water; as we went on it came well over our knees, and every now and then up the tops of our thighs so there was too little holding ground for us or snipe. We walked in line, laboriously, halting every now and then to wait for one or the other to flounder out of a deep place; and when the sun got up the glare from the water made me think of sunstroke; however, we persevered and managed to get fourteen couple before lunch time, and I found my American five-shooter the very thing ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... 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; ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... ocean, And these words the hero utters: "Like a bubble swim these waters, Like a flower ride the billows; Loan me of thy magic feathers, Three, O eagle, four, O raven, For protection to my vessel, Lest it flounder in the ocean!" Now the sailor, Lemminkainen, Seats himself upon the bottom Of the vessel he has builded, Hastens on his journey homeward, Head depressed and evil-humored, Cap awry upon his forehead, Mind dejected, heavy-hearted, ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... drawing-rooms. If I do, there shall be no deceit. I certainly shall not marry for love. Indeed, from early years I never thought it possible that I should do so. I have floundered unawares into the pitfall, and now I must flounder out. I have always thought that there was much in the world well worth the living for besides love. Ambition needs not be a closed book for women, unless they choose to close it. I do not see but that a statesman's wife may stand nearly as high in the ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... little stir and amusement. I think, 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 ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... that never before had entered into her gay life. Veath would treat her as if she were of fragile glass and it would not be long until the whole boat would be staring at the beautiful girl who was going to the heathen. Remorse struck him and he tried to flounder ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon
... 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 of which the ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... 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 gray eyes in the whole wide world could bestow upon anything ...
— Christmas Eve at Swamp's End • Norman Duncan
... 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
... however, they found that the seals were much more formidable to look at than anything that any of them had ever seen in the Arctic Seas; and when Joe brought his club down on the skull of the foremost with a terrible thwack, it refused to tumble over, but continued to splutter and flounder towards the sea. Dr Hayward, however, used his spear at this moment with such effect that the seal fell, and another blow from the ...
— The Coxswain's Bride - also, Jack Frost and Sons; and, A Double Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... grinding that tune to four young gentlemen. Of the remaining four, two, who grasped their foreheads convulsively, were engaged in solving mathematical problems; one with his face like a dirty window, from much crying, was endeavouring to flounder through a hopeless number of lines before dinner; and one sat looking at his task in stony stupefaction and despair—which it seemed had been his condition ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... Mooween knows, as well as any other fisherman, the kind of night on which to go fishing. He knows also the virtue of keeping still. As a big salmon struggles by, Mooween slips a paw under him, tosses him to the shore by a dexterous flip, and springs after him before he can flounder back. ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long
... heartbreaking work. For a few moments the boats would float, plunging the men beyond their depths. They would swim and flounder perhaps a boat's length, clinging to the gunwale, before the boat would once more run aground. Again they would drag their clumsy burden a hundred yards over sand that sucked hungrily at their sodden boots. This passed, came many yards of smooth rock a few inches below ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... 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
... from any shelter. The steady rain in which we had traveled for eight hours then became a violent thunder-storm; all the brooks and ditches by the way were over their banks, and our horses could hardly flounder under their loads through the heavy going; while we, in the darkness, could not see the road, even where it could he followed, save when the lightning flashes showed it, and so, not being able to walk, rode perforce. My horse refused a ditch a foot wide, and when we came to one I had to ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... at night there poured upon us, untented and unprotected, a furious storm of rain, sleet, and snow, making our condition almost unendurable. We are now left in a bed of almost fathomless mire. None of the men who flounder through these oozy roads, under the inclement sky, will ever forget the "Muddy March." We had scarcely reached the river-shore before we were compelled to return. In one instance a piece of artillery with its horses had to be abandoned, submerged so deeply in the mud that it was considered impracticable ...
— Three Years in the Federal Cavalry • Willard Glazier
... its authors have already repudiated, and only do not recognise 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
... 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 ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... such obstinate brutes as time and space! This hour of the progress, this noontide of Kate's struggle, must have been the very crisis of the whole. Despair was rapidly tending to ratify itself. Hope, in any degree, would be a cordial for sustaining her efforts. But to flounder along a dreadful chaos of snow-drifts, or snow-chasms, towards a point of rock, which, being turned, should expose only another interminable succession of the same character—might that be endured by ebbing spirits, by stiffening ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... execution. They startle and confound the understanding of the reader by the remoteness and obscurity of their illustrations; they soothe the ear by the monotony of the same everlasting round of circuitous metaphors. They are the mock-school in poetry and prose. They flounder about between fustian in expression and bathos in sentiment. They tantalise the fancy, but never reach the head nor touch the heart. Their Temple of Fame is like a shadowy structure raised by Dulness to Vanity, or like Cowper's description of the Empress of Russia's ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... yarn about a woman's bath. I was stopping at a shabby-genteel boarding-house in Melbourne once, and one very cold winter, too; and there was a rather good-looking woman there, looking for a husband. She used to go down to the bath every morning, no matter how cold it was, and flounder and splash about as if she enjoyed it, till you'd feel as though you'd like to go and catch hold of her and wrap her in a rug and carry her in to the fire and nurse her till ...
— On the Track • Henry Lawson
... uncertain faith. If I ever really and truly believed in spiritualism and then found, as so many people have done, alas! that the prophet of it was himself a fraud, I should be cut, as it were, from all my spiritual bearings, to flounder hopeless and broken-hearted mid the desolate wastes of agnosticism. I cannot give myself unless I am convinced that the sacrifice is for something which I must believe in spite of all doubt; not entirely ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... his 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 ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... reads the lessons when his superior's 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 ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... bottom, where we must cross a soft mound formed of the powdery dust thrown off by the avalanche in its rush. Leo slipped over safely, but I, following a yard or two to his right, of a sudden felt the hard crust yield beneath me. An ill-judged but quite natural flounder and wriggle, such as a newly-landed flat-fish gives upon the sand, completed the mischief, and with one piercing but swiftly ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... 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 ...
— Beneath An Umbrella (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... certainly," Robinson challenged. "We'd flounder in the thicket. A waste of time. Let us get ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... 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 ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... the two boys pitched in. There was no lack of ammunition aboard the Seamew, and there seemed to be no lack of porpoises anxious to serve as moving targets. And, indeed, Mart soon found that he need spend no worry over leaving wounded fish to flounder out their lives. ...
— The Pirate Shark • Elliott Whitney
... supperless he sate, And pin'd unconscious of his rising fate; Studious he sate, with all his books around, Sinking from thought to thought, a vast profound! Plung'd for his sense, but found no bottom there; Then writ, and flounder'd on, in meer despair. He roll'd his eyes, that witness'd huge dismay, Where yet unpawn'd ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... close reasoning. As he pins you down to statement of facts and forces you to draw valid conclusions, you feel in a most perplexed frame of mind. Either you find yourself unable to give reasons, or you entangle yourself in contradictions. In short, you flounder about helplessly and feel as though the bottom of your ship of knowledge has dropped out. And when the ordeal is over and you have made a miserable botch of a recitation which you thought you had been perfectly prepared for, you complain that "if the instructor had ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... which was one of the most expensive pieces, intended for deer and other large game. The pilot loaded it himself, and said he should try for the largest reptile in the group on the beach. He fired. The alligator gave a spring, and began to flounder in the sand, while his companions deserted him, taking to the water. In another moment he ...
— Down South - or, Yacht Adventure in Florida • Oliver Optic
... 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 can prove anything if you merely collect ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... wet weather. Seeing that the enemy may have fixed rifles trained on you at any bend of the trench, it is unwise to carry a light; and in a dark night and an unaccustomed trench you are almost sure to flounder. ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean
... and the most masculine and direct of women will some day, to your dire surprise, draw out like a telescope into successive lengths of personation. Alas! for the man, knowing her to be at heart more candid than himself, who shall flounder, panting, through these mazes in the quest for truth. The proper qualities of each sex are, indeed, eternally surprising to the other. Between the Latin and the Teuton races there are similar divergences, not to be bridged by the most liberal sympathy. And in the good, plain, cut-and-dry ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... way it had shaped during dinner, and Tommy would have acted wisely had he now gone out to cool his head. "If you moved me?" she repeated interrogatively; but, with the best intentions, he continued to flounder. ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... away from under me, so that if I had not been obeying orders by hanging tight I should most certainly have plunged forward against the horses. We seemed to slide and slither down a steep declivity, then hit water with a splash, and began to flounder forward. The water rose high enough to cover the floor of the Invigorator, causing the Captain to speculate on whether Redmond had packed in the shells properly. Then the bow rose with a mighty jerk and we ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... sweet sounds they followed, The gasping cod swallow'd— 'Twas wonderful, really; And turbot and flounder, 'Mid fish that were rounder, Just ...
— The Lilac Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... coming of Christ; and decides that he himself is the man appointed by God and promised by the Prophets to perform these works. Good Heavens! in what an entirely dark and sordid stupor is our Christopher now sunk—a veritable slough and quag of stupor out of which, if he does not manage to flounder himself, no human ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... have a care against seeking to hurry myself right out of the flounder class and right into the ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... Widderin! a bucket of Champagne in an hour's time, if thou wilt only stay not now to bend thy neck down to the clear gleaming water; flounder through the ford, and just twenty yards up the bank by the cherry-tree, we shall catch sight of the house, ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... declared that she would have Latin and Greek talked if there were no word for a gentleman in either! There were always stories to be told of Bertha's narrow escapes of being overtaken by them in garden or corridor, till Maria, infected by the panic, used to flounder away as if from a beast of prey, and being as tall as, and considerably stouter than, Phoebe, with the shuffling gait of the imbecile, would produce a volume of sound that her sister always feared might attract notice, and ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... on a slant, is six inches of snow over loose stones or small boulders. There you hope for divine favor and flounder ahead. There is one compensation; the snow is soft to fall on. Boggy areas you must be able to gauge the depth of at a glance. And there are places, beautiful to behold, where a horse clambers up the least bit of an ascent, hits his pack against a projection, and ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... backed away into the ditch, collapsed there on his quarters, and recovered himself with the grunt and flounder of a hippopotamus ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... 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, ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... night, and, feeling something on the line, I drew up with great eagerness and vigor. It was two of those broad-leaved sea-weeds, with stems like snakes, both rooted on a stone,—all which came up together. Often these sea-weeds root themselves on muscles. In the morning, our pilot killed a flounder with the boat-hook, the poor fish thinking ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... myself, I remember by the names of herring, rock, sturgeon, shad, oldwife, sheepshead, black and red drums, trout, taylor, greenfish, sunfish, bass, chub, plaice, flounder, whiting, fatback, maid, wife, small turtle, crab, oyster, mussel, cockle, shrimp, needlefish, bream, carp, pike, jack, mullet, eel, ...
— The Bounty of the Chesapeake - Fishing in Colonial Virginia • James Wharton
... 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
... was now, as before, rolling beneath the arch with frightful impetuosity. As I gazed upon the eddies of the whirlpool, I thought within myself how soon human life would become extinct there; a plunge, a convulsive flounder, and all would be over. When I last stood over that abyss I had felt a kind of impulse—a fascination: I had resisted it—I did not plunge into it. At present I felt a kind of impulse to plunge; but the impulse was of a different kind; ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... the interlacing growth of my apprehension of the world, as I flounder among the half-remembered developments that found me a crude schoolboy and left me a man, there comes out, as if it stood for all the rest, my first holiday abroad. That did not happen until I was twenty-two. I was a fellow of Trinity, and the Peace of Vereeniging ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... their masters, sometimes, daub on colors with their full palettes and strong brushes, this feeble herd tag after them and flounder around in color and passion in ...
— Mae Madden • Mary Murdoch Mason
... pelican, a fowl between a stork and a swan—a melancholy water-fowl brought from Astracan by the Russian ambassador." This writer tells us, "It was diverting to see how the pelican would toss up and turn a flat fish, plaice or flounder, to get it right into its gullet at its lower beak, which being filmy stretches to a prodigious wideness when it devours a great fish. Here was also a small water-fowl, not bigger than a more-hen, that went almost ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... smoke the deed conceals, Bertram his ready charger wheels; But flounder'd on the pavement-floor The steed, and down the rider bore, And, bursting in the headlong sway. The faithless saddle-girths gave way. 'Twas while he toil'd him to be freed. And with the rein to raise the steed. That from amazement's iron trance All ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... 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. ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... on disembarking—the sand and the Touaregs. The sand, because you have no sooner set your foot on shore than you flounder about in it as if it were a mire; and it pursues you everywhere—in the country, in the streets, and in the houses. The Touaregs are impressed on you because, though you never see them, everything recalls ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... the thick matted seaweed to the boat. The water was deeper than he expected, and when he came to the boat he needed the aid of the boatmen to climb over the gunwale. Instead of giving him this aid the rascals allowed him to flounder there, and kept looking to the shore, where the constable had by this time appeared with his musket. The moment he showed himself, the three boatmen cried out together, 'We surrender!' and invited him on board; where he instantly took up a hatchet—no doubt provided by the ship for ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... come back. At 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
... there 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 ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... like the procession, though it can never be anything but mean and ludicrous, and who fancy that a line of soldiers, or the more civic array of paltry policemen, or of doited special constables, protecting a couple of judges who flounder in awkward gowns and wigs through ill-paved streets, followed by a few sneering advocates and preceded by two or three sheriffs or their substitutes, with their swords, which trip them, and a provost and some bailie-bodies trying ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... place is like a fish out of water. Its fins mean nothing, they are only a hindrance. The fish can do nothing but flounder out of its element. But as soon as the fins feel the water, they mean something. Fifty-two per cent of our college graduates studied law, not because, in many cases, they have the slightest natural aptitude for it, but because it ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... 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 now reached the foot of a long low-lying ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... enough if you called me. I merely want you to think it over soberly and let your heart decide. You know where I stand, don't you, Hazel, dear? I haven't changed—not a bit—I'm the same old Bill. But I'd rather hit the trail alone than with an unwilling partner. Don't flounder about in any quicksand of duty. There is no "I ought ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... 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 that the monitor Miantonomah, Captain SCHUFELDT, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, Issue 10 • Various
... slices of cod, hake or flounder. Mince four onions very fine and then place the onions in ...
— Mrs. Wilson's Cook Book - Numerous New Recipes Based on Present Economic Conditions • Mary A. Wilson
... days were very pleasant till we struck Millbank sound There we were hit with a heavy sea on our starboard-beam. The old ship would leap almost out of the ocean and then fall back like a wounded duck. she would flounder, pitch, rool and dive come to the surface and wipe off the brine slick as a mole. I felt a little disturbed in the locality of my abdomen, also my appetite failed me for a few days; I was standing one morning on deck by the hand rail just leaning over for convenience—near ...
— Black Beaver - The Trapper • James Campbell Lewis
... hammers and nails, and fastened a circle of cleats to catch their feet. Then with a boy on the main fife-rail (his head out) holding slack, eighteen men—three to a bar—would inhale all the air their lungs could hold, and, with a "One, two, three," would flounder down, push the capstan around a few pawls, and come up gasping, and blue in the face, to perch on their bars and recover. It went slowly, this end, but in three days more they could walk around with their heads ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... and happier ambition to which I aspired..." This was what he designed to say, sentimentally propelled, by way of graceful exit, and what was almost printed on a scroll in his head for the tongue to read off fluently. He stopped at 'the greater,' beginning to stumble—to flounder; and fearing that he said less than was due as a compliment to the occasion, he ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and after a flounder or two the pony started the load and struggled up the ascent. Leaving the woman at the top, voluble with thanks, Vane came down and sauntered ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... stood; but before he could fire again Quintana's shot in reply came ripping through the juniper and tore a ghastly hole in the calf of his left leg, striking a blow that knocked young Hastings flat and paralysed as a dead flounder. ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... literary men, and who held those informal conversation parties, so popular in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which must have been very delightful. Tom Hood was among the guests on many occasions. Before being Brompton Grove, this part of the district had been known as Flounder's Field, but ...
— The Kensington District - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... and at odd times, we may, possibly, be pardoned or praised for so doing. Well, we never hear mention of this game but we think of a bump we once received during the sport, our blind ardour causing us to flounder in a fender, and bruise our head, the remains of which will be taken to the "long home." Well do we remember the spotted turban worn on that occasion—for we recollect, at the time, thinking "Belcher" a new term, just coined;—having ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... quite unconnected, while our only support was an occasional stake at irregular distances, at which we used to rest, as the spars invariably sunk into the mud if we attempted to stop; and there being a long string of us, many a fall and flounder in the mud (gun and ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... of expression, clear, orderly, accurate, and full; such as a young parser might profitably imitate; such as an experienced one would be sure to approve; what have we? A chaos of half-formed sentences, for the ignorant pupil to flounder in; an infinite abyss of blunders, which a world of criticism could not fully expose! See, for example, the seven pages of parsing, in the neat little book entitled, "A Practical Grammar of the English Language, by the Rev. David Blair: Seventh Edition: London, 1815:" pp. 49 ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... directness, a question of interest or, as people say, of the story? What's a situation undeveloped but a subject lost? If a relation stops, where's the story? If it doesn't stop, where's the innocence? It seems to me you must choose. It would be very pretty if it were otherwise, but that's how we flounder. Art is our ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... upon his skirts; Daun and Prince Karl set out after him, just about the time of his arrival,—"70,000 strong," the Prince hears; including plenty of Pandours. Certain it is, the poor Prince's mind did flounder a good deal; and his procedures succeeded extremely ill on this occasion. Certain, too, that they were extremely ill-taken at head-quarters: and that he even died soon after,—chiefly of broken heart, said the censorious world. It is well known how Europe rang with the matter for a long while; ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... he would make a third attempt to secure the child, whereupon they applied in their despair to Loki, who carried the boy out to sea, and concealed him, as a tiny egg, in the roe of a flounder. Returning from his expedition, Loki encountered the giant near the shore, and seeing that he was bent upon a fishing excursion, he insisted upon accompanying him. He felt somewhat uneasy lest the terrible giant should have seen through his ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... muse to unwonted vivacity. In the London Lick-penny Lydgate, if Lydgate's it be, wrote humorous satire with success. Skelton himself, though in his (much too respectfully spoken of) play Magnificence he could flounder with the worst of his predecessors, in his light and railing rhymes was nimble enough, and ranged easily from vigorous invective of Wolsey to pretty panegyrics of fair ladies. Now and again also these good souls ceased their search ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... same. Two or three heavy jumps landed him, not among the bulrushes as he had hoped, but in a pool of muddy water where he sank up to his middle with alarming rapidity. Much scared, he tried to wade out, but could only flounder to a tussock of grass and cling there while he endeavored to kick his legs free. He got them out, but struggled in vain to coil them up or to hoist his heavy body upon the very small island in this sea of mud. Down ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, September 1878, No. 11 • Various
... future," he went on, in a brisk, matter-of-fact tone. "I spent two months last year looking for a job in New York. I was about down to my last cent before I found it. It occurred to me that, perhaps, you—" He was beginning to flounder. ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan
... came over with a rush as he neared the bank, for suddenly from a reed-bed above them there was a wallow and a flounder, with a tremendous disturbance in the water, as something shot down ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... 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 burden ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... a frock, belonging to one of our people that was towing, overboard. At the same time they immediately shewed a knowledge of bartering, and sold some fish they had (amongst which was an extraordinary flounder, spotted like porphyry, and a cream-coloured eel, spotted with black) for small nails, of which they were immoderately fond, and called them goore. But, indeed, they caught with the greatest avidity bits of paper, or any thing else that was thrown to them; and if what was thrown fell into ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... within the range of topics of which his love was not afraid. But at times it was necessary to speak of the future, and when they did the poor mermaid showed her fins and tail. She could neither walk nor dance nor fly; she could only flounder. There was no denying the fact that poor little Rosie floundered. She floundered because she was obliged to deal with life on a scale of which she had no experience, but as to which Claude had keenly developed ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... terrified, he will seize his rider, or pad, or any other object (except his driver), to place under his knees to prevent his sinking. In this instance the driver in great alarm ordered me off, and I had to flounder out through the black mud. The elephant remained fast all night, and was released next morning ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... draining dry the sensation he had begun to taste. He would do it, moreover—that would be the refinement of his art—not only without the betraying anxiety of a single question, but just even by seeing her flounder (since she must, in a vagueness deeply disconcerting to her) as to her real effect on him. She was distinctly floundering by the time he had brought her—it had taken ten minutes—down to a consciousness of absurd and twaddling topics, to the reported precarious ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... stop and think what you are saying! This is really the first, last and only rule. If you "stop" you can't chatter or expound or flounder ceaselessly, and if you think, you will find a topic and a manner of presenting your topic so that your neighbor will be interested rather ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... gentlemen and thrice-honored ladies, flounder about in a tangled net of prejudice, of intrigue. We are blinded by conventions, we are crushed by misunderstanding, we are distracted by violence, we are deceived by hypocrisy, until only too often villains receive the rewards of nobility and ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... Albert. "Because their masters, sometimes, daub on colors with their full palettes and strong brushes, this feeble herd tag after them and flounder around in color and passion in a way ...
— Mae Madden • Mary Murdoch Mason
... 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 ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... what, or where, should we be? Until we attain a knowledge of—a—Woman, through the medium of the—a—Passion (I speak of it with reverence!), what, or where are we? We journey over arid plains, we flounder in treacherous quagmires. Suddenly looms before us, clear against the sky, as here represented, the Peak in Darien—Woman! Guided by the—a—Passion (I speak of its lofty phases, sir, its lofty phases!), we scale those crystal heights. It may be in fancy only; ...
— Mrs. Tree • Laura E. Richards
... There are other cases in which men find by experience that 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 ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... a 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
... 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 looked smilingly down ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis
... terrific blow with an ax would crack one of the glass helmets. Then the denuded Quabo would flounder convulsively in the air till it drowned. But there were all too few of these individual victories. The main body of the Quabos, rank on rank, dragging their water-hose behind them, came on with the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... look clearer. The word FOREORDAIN means to ordain beforehand: and the word ELECT means to choose. Some that I have met with, in speaking on these subjects, particularly as they are given in the epistolary writings of the New Testament, remind me of fish in a net; they flounder about in the net, while every effort they make fastens them only the more tightly in its meshes. They read: "Whom God foreknew, he also FOREORDAINED to be conformed to the image of his Son, ... and whom he foreordained, them he also called: and whom he called, them he also ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... quiet physicist who sat at the table's end. "If you were not so sure and if the evidence were not so convincing that it had been done by Adams, I'd say flatly that it is impossible. We have no approach which holds any hope at all. What we've done so far, you might best describe as flounder. But if Adams turned the trick, it must be possible. There may be, as a matter of fact, more ways than one. We'd like ...
— Project Mastodon • Clifford Donald Simak
... did not try to follow. He did not even move. He looked after her a minute. Then he sat down on the log again and stared at the steady march of the swells. There was a sense of finality in this thing which made him flounder desperately. Still, he assured himself, it had to be. And if it had to be that way it was better to have it so understood. Betty would never look at him again with that disturbing message in her eyes. He would not be troubled by a futile longing. But it hurt. ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... you know why great Sea Lions Flounder on the rocky islands, Standing by the Golden Gateway? Why they fight in baffled fury, Barking ever ...
— The Legends of San Francisco • George W. Caldwell
... ancestors had some excellent ideas in home living and housebuilding. Their houses were, generally speaking, very sensibly contrived,—roomy, airy, and comfortable; but in their water arrangements they had little mercy on womankind. The well was out in the yard; and in winter one must flounder through snow and bring up the ice-bound bucket, before one could fill the tea-kettle for breakfast. For a sovereign princess of the republic, this was hardly respectful or respectable. Wells have come somewhat nearer in modern times; but the idea of a constant ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... known to the inhabitants of the large towns, who willingly pay high prices for the scanty supply of these delicious fish which they are able to obtain. Of other succulent fish there was a great variety, from the majestic "grouper," running up to over a hundredweight, down to the familiar flounder. Very little fishing could be done at night. Just as day was dawning was the ideal time for this enticing sport. As soon as the first few streaks of delicate light enlivened the dull horizon, a stray nibble or two gladdened ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... dangerous is this method! for there are many names would puzzle you. From what would you derive Vejupiter and Vulcan? Though, indeed, if you can derive Neptune a nando, from swimming, in which you seem to me to flounder about yourself more than Neptune, you may easily find the origin of all names, since it is founded only upon the conformity of some one letter. Zeno first, and after him Cleanthes and Chrysippus, are put to the unnecessary trouble of explaining mere fables, and ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... performed its morning office upon my limbs: and this wakeful brute (one would think he was guarding the golden fleece) starts crowing before night has fairly begun. But he shall pay for it.—Yes; only wait till daylight comes, and my stick shall avenge me; I am not going to flounder about after you in ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... a care against seeking to hurry myself right out of the flounder class and right into ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... An awful sense of helplessness takes possession of you. If it were daylight, you could pass around the deep drifts, even in this chaos; but now a drift looks the same as the prairie grass swept bare. You plunge headlong into it, flounder through it, creeping on hands and knees, with your face sometimes buried in the snow, get on your feet again, ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... where we must cross a soft mound formed of the powdery dust thrown off by the avalanche in its rush. Leo slipped over safely, but I, following a yard or two to his right, of a sudden felt the hard crust yield beneath me. An ill-judged but quite natural flounder and wriggle, such as a newly-landed flat-fish gives upon the sand, completed the mischief, and with one piercing but swiftly stifled ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... sea-eggs, for which the women dive with much dexterity, and fish, which they train their dogs to assist them in catching. These dogs are sent into the water at the entrance to a narrow creek or small bay, and they then bark and flounder about and drive the fish before them into shallow ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... leisure, with my Sunday hat on, and a pair of clean white cotton stockings, in this heavenly mood, under the green trees, and beside the still waters, out of which beautiful salmon trouts were sporting and leaping, methought in a moment I fell down in a trance, as flat as a flounder, and I heard a voice visibly saying to me, "Thou shalt have a son; let him be christened Benjamin!" The joy that this vision brought my spirit thrilled through my bones, like the sounds of a blind man ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... an ode or an epistle, then rises perhaps to a political irony, and is at last brought to its height by a treatise of philosophy. Then begins the poor animal to entangle himself in sophisms and to flounder in absurdity.' ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... 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 such a ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... according to a quaint authority, "an onocratylus, or pelican, a fowl between a stork and a swan—a melancholy water-fowl brought from Astracan by the Russian ambassador." This writer tells us, "It was diverting to see how the pelican would toss up and turn a flat fish, plaice or flounder, to get it right into its gullet at its lower beak, which being filmy stretches to a prodigious wideness when it devours a great fish. Here was also a small water-fowl, not bigger than a more-hen, that went almost quite erect like the penguin of America. It ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... a patent or two and a set of ideas; 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 ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... 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 ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... with all his books around, Sinking from thought to thought, a vast profound: Plunged for his sense, but found no bottom there; Then wrote and flounder'd on, in ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... "a flounder is a queer sort of a flat fish. He's dark on top and white on the bottom. He swims on his side and has his two eyes on the one side of his head unlike any other fish. When the tide comes in he comes close inshore and burrows down into the sand to wait till a minnow floats by. He reaches ...
— Boy Scouts in Southern Waters • G. Harvey Ralphson
... kick and flounder—but you leave him to ask what you want, ma'am; don't mention this [He puts the deed back into his pocket]. The Centry's no mortal good to him if he's not going to put up works; I should say he'd be glad to save what ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... 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
... two boys pitched in. There was no lack of ammunition aboard the Seamew, and there seemed to be no lack of porpoises anxious to serve as moving targets. And, indeed, Mart soon found that he need spend no worry over leaving wounded fish to flounder out their lives. ...
— The Pirate Shark • Elliott Whitney
... instances. Many flat fish, as for example the flounder and the skate, are exactly the colour of the gravel or sand on which they habitually rest. Among the marine flower gardens of an Eastern coral reef the fishes present every variety of gorgeous colour, while the river fish even of the tropics rarely if ever have gay or conspicuous markings. A ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... suited all sorts of bathers. The little timid waders could dip their toes and splash their hair in the shallow basin in-shore. The more advanced could wade out shoulder-deep, and puff and flounder with one foot on the ground and the other up above their heads, and delude the world into the notion they were swimming. For others there was the spring-board, from which to take a header into deep water; and, further out still, the rocks rose in ledges, where practised divers ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... 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 an ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... i. e. "sacri pisces," id. p. 148. The Danish phrase is "helleflyndre," i. e. "holy flounder." The English halibut is hali holy but flounder. This word but is classed as Middle English, but may still be heard in the north of England. The fish may have been so called "from being ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... pleasure of seeing how you look as you flounder through the rapids; and then, again, I may pick up a few points as to how ...
— The Outdoor Chums After Big Game - Or, Perilous Adventures in the Wilderness • Captain Quincy Allen
... should be a bit afraid it meant that I'd walked in myself, and hadn't heeded His warnings. Sometimes, I think, when folks do that, He leaves them to flounder awhile before He helps ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... think this funny, nor did Mrs. Doane, but the father was chuckling to himself as they sat down to their baked flounder. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... precociously "noting," though we were certainly incorrigible observers—that, the awareness in question remaining at the best imperfect, our little friends as distinguished from our companions of the cousinship, greater and less, advanced and presumed but to flounder and recede, elated at once and abashed and on the whole but feebly sophisticated. The cousinship, on the other hand, all unalarmed and unsuspecting and unembarrassed, lived by pure serenity, sociability and loquacity; the ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... 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, it ...
— New Discoveries at Jamestown - Site of the First Successful English Settlement in America • John L. Cotter
... 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
... going north we crossed this river, or rather marsh, which is full of papyrus plants and reeds. Our ford was an elephant's path; and the roots of the papyrus, though a carpet to these animals, were sharp and sore to feet usually protected by shoes, and often made us shrink and flounder into holes chest deep. The Chisera forms a larger marsh west of this, and it gives off its water to the Kalongosi, a ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... station, and that I had to get a good weight of stores on to the Barrier to provide for that contingency. We are safely here with all requisite stores, though it has taken nearly a week. But we find the surface very soft and the ponies flounder in it. I sent a dog team back yesterday to try and get snow-shoes for ponies, but they found the ice broken south of Cape Evans and returned this morning. Everyone is doing splendidly and gaining the right sort of experience ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... motherhood—that is, unless we desire most suicidally to educate all the most promising stocks of the nation out of existence. But now what do we owe to her in the matter of providing the right kind of intellectual, moral, spiritual, psychical environment? It is a pity to flounder with so many adjectives, but nearly all the available ones are forsworn and fail to express my meaning. Let us, however, speak of the spiritual environment, seeking to free that word from all its lamentable associations of superstition and cant, and to associate it rather with a humanized ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... more, an' more, an' the things they said was about all she could stand, so help her Heaven! One asked her if she knowed she needed a new carpet an' he happened to keep carpets, an' another told her her house needed paintin' an' he happened to keep paint, an' another just come out flat as a flounder an' said if she knowed how old her stove was, she'd come straight to him the first thing, an' he happened to keep stoves. An' she says they need n't suppose as she was n't sharp enough to see as every last one of them letters was really ...
— Susan Clegg and a Man in the House • Anne Warner
... formal, pedantic in style and execution. They startle and confound the understanding of the reader by the remoteness and obscurity of their illustrations; they soothe the ear by the monotony of the same everlasting round of circuitous metaphors. They are the mock-school in poetry and prose. They flounder about between fustian in expression and bathos in sentiment. They tantalise the fancy, but never reach the head nor touch the heart. Their Temple of Fame is like a shadowy structure raised by Dulness to Vanity, or like Cowper's description ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... Mother Grizzly 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 ...
— Bears I Have Met—and Others • Allen Kelly
... on the pink granite islands in huge herds. Polar bears flounder from icepan to icepan. The arctic hare, white as snow but for the great bulging black eye, bounds over the boulders. Snow buntings, whistling swans, snow geese, ducks in myriads—flacker and clacker and hold solemn conclave on the adjoining rocks, as though this were their realm from ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... unpleasant to step off the duck-boards in wet weather. Seeing that the enemy may have fixed rifles trained on you at any bend of the trench, it is unwise to carry a light; and in a dark night and an unaccustomed trench you are almost sure to flounder. ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean
... Beach. Two gentlemen in flannel, with guns, are urging a little row-boat up toward the interior country. They will return at night laden with rail or reed-birds, with the additional burden perhaps of a great loon, shot as a curiosity. Others, provided with fishing-tackle, are going out for flounder. Laughing farewells, waving handkerchiefs and the other telegraphic signs of departure, are all very gay, but the tune may be changed when the great sailing-party comes back, wet and wretched, and with three of the principal beauties limp as bolsters ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... 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 gray eyes in the whole wide world could bestow upon ...
— Christmas Eve at Swamp's End • Norman Duncan
... in their fright, and they rolled and floundered, and were half smothered before they could recover their feet; and then a pretty pickle they were in, wet to the skin, and covered with mud from one end to the other; they could not see out of their eyes. Peggy did nothing but scream and flounder—she was frightened out of her wits—while the carman and I laughed ready to split. I gave him half a crown to drive on shore without them, which he did, and we left them to make their way out how they could; and a pretty pickle ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... lately developed for what I might call the ultra-domestic school of fiction. Here is another example, Married Life (CASSELL), in which Miss MAY EDGINTON, following the mode, unites her hero and heroine at the beginning and leaves them to flounder for our edification amid the trials of double blessedness. I am sorry to say it, but her great solution for the eternal problem of How to be Happy though Married appears to be the possession of a sufficient bank-balance to prevent ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 153, November 7, 1917 • Various
... they are foolish, become the most unfortunate pretenders to fashion. They are too near to be pleasant; and the gulf which people of hereditary fashion place between is impassable, even though they flounder up to their ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... great eagerness and vigor. It was two of those broad-leaved sea-weeds, with stems like snakes, both rooted on a stone,—all which came up together. Often these sea-weeds root themselves on muscles. In the morning, our pilot killed a flounder with the boat-hook, the poor fish thinking himself secure on ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... The fish called the FLOUNDER, perhaps you may know, Has one side for use and another for show; One side for the public, a delicate brown, And one that is white, which he ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... pre-eminence; I tasted the other indeed but once, but it seemed to me to set my mouth on fire—such is not for my drinking), and drank to the fishers, crying, "What say you, children—shall we not go and flounder again upon the Ruegenwald strand?" Upon which they all shouted, ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... did up his blankets, fixed the pack on his back, then crawled through the snow into the shelter of the fir-woods. As soon as he was out of sight, he arose, recovered the thongs of his larrigans from the futile snare, and made his way back on the trail as fast as he could flounder. That one glance over the edge of his trench had told his trained eye all he needed to ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... had some local repute as a "wise woman," was a person of about fifty years of age, remarkable for her enormous size, a flat face with small oblong eyes and a little, twisted mouth, which had caused her to be nicknamed "the Flounder." She greeted the Abbot with much reverence, curtseying till he thought she would fall backwards, and having received his fatherly blessing, sank into a chair, that seemed ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... disembarking—the sand and the Touaregs. The sand, because you have no sooner set your foot on shore than you flounder about in it as if it were a mire; and it pursues you everywhere—in the country, in the streets, and in the houses. The Touaregs are impressed on you because, though you never see them, everything recalls them. The town is in ruins, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... doubt and error and regrets, such as trouble those who give themselves to philosophy at the outset, like people who leave a land they know, and do not yet descry the land they are sailing to. For by abandoning the common and familiar, before they know and apprehend what is better, they frequently flounder about in the middle and are fain to return. As they say the Roman Sextius, giving up for philosophy all his honours and offices in Rome, being afterwards discontented with philosophy from the difficulties he met with in it at first, very nearly threw himself out of window. Similarly ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... circle of cleats to catch their feet. Then with a boy on the main fife-rail (his head out) holding slack, eighteen men—three to a bar—would inhale all the air their lungs could hold, and, with a "One, two, three," would flounder down, push the capstan around a few pawls, and come up gasping, and blue in the face, to perch on their bars and recover. It went slowly, this end, but in three days more they could walk around ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... 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 outer brink of ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... with rain, and two hours' ride in ordinary condition of the roads from any shelter. The steady rain in which we had traveled for eight hours then became a violent thunder-storm; all the brooks and ditches by the way were over their banks, and our horses could hardly flounder under their loads through the heavy going; while we, in the darkness, could not see the road, even where it could he followed, save when the lightning flashes showed it, and so, not being able to walk, rode perforce. My horse refused a ditch a foot ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... self-defense. The wonderful colors and color patterns of the tropical fish of the reef, or of the open water forms like the mouse-fish of the Sargossa Sea, often render them more or less completely hidden from the foraging enemy. A flounder looks like a fish which was originally symmetrical, but which had come to lie flat on its side upon the bottom, whereupon the eye underneath had left its original place to appear on the upper surface. The difficult and unusual conditions of deep-sea existence have been met by fishes in two ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... can, and finds a sculpin on the hook. The boys come around him, and eye his motions, and make pitying or impertinent remarks at his ill-luck—the old man answers not, but fishes on imperturbably. Anon, he gathers up his clams or worms, and his one sun-baked flounder—you think he is going home—but no, he is merely going to another corner of the wharf, where he throws his line under a vessel's counter, and fishes on with the same deathlike patience as before. He seems not quiet so much as torpid,—not kindly nor ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... 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, ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... a colony always sails under the lee of its mother. Talk does it all, friend Harris. Talk, talk, talk; a man can talk himself into a fever, or set a ship's company by the ears. He can talk a cherry into a peach, or a flounder into a whale. Now here is the whole of this long coast of America, and all her rivers, and lakes, and brooks, swarming with such treasures as any man might fatten on, and yet his Majesty's servants, who come among us, talk of their ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... kind of night on which to go fishing. He knows also the virtue of keeping still. As a big salmon struggles by, Mooween slips a paw under him, tosses him to the shore by a dexterous flip, and springs after him before he can flounder back. ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long
... formidable to look at than anything that any of them had ever seen in the Arctic Seas; and when Joe brought his club down on the skull of the foremost with a terrible thwack, it refused to tumble over, but continued to splutter and flounder towards the sea. Dr Hayward, however, used his spear at this moment with such effect that the seal fell, and another blow from the Herculean ...
— The Coxswain's Bride - also, Jack Frost and Sons; and, A Double Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... very pleasant till we struck Millbank sound There we were hit with a heavy sea on our starboard-beam. The old ship would leap almost out of the ocean and then fall back like a wounded duck. she would flounder, pitch, rool and dive come to the surface and wipe off the brine slick as a mole. I felt a little disturbed in the locality of my abdomen, also my appetite failed me for a few days; I was standing ...
— Black Beaver - The Trapper • James Campbell Lewis
... laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to bear our ignorance ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... asks you a series of questions demanding close reasoning. As he pins you down to statement of facts and forces you to draw valid conclusions, you feel in a most perplexed frame of mind. Either you find yourself unable to give reasons, or you entangle yourself in contradictions. In short, you flounder about helplessly and feel as though the bottom of your ship of knowledge has dropped out. And when the ordeal is over and you have made a miserable botch of a recitation which you thought you had been perfectly prepared ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... flood of silver light which the full moon here pours down, even its forlorn shabbiness is softened into something of romantic indistinctness. But daylight is dreadfully disenchanting. The rows of tumble-down houses, the sandy, unpaved streets—through which you flounder as in the deserts of Sahara, unless you choose to try sidewalks that have as many ups and downs as a range of mountains, each man building to the height that pleases himself—the large parade, without armament or shade, a dreary ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... 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 of which the day is over. Certainly equality ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... have known houses burst asunder from the foundations giving way. I have seen a palace separated from the very steps that led up to its door. And in spring, when the snow melts which has been collecting for months, the horses can scarcely flounder along through the rivers of mud in ...
— The Rambles of a Rat • A. L. O. E.
... sister Ellen," said Tom, "and that it is our duty to help in the entertainment of the company; but, for my part, I throw myself upon your mercy. I wouldn't, for the world, hint that we are more solid than the girls, but 'tis very certain that we are more lumbering. If I were to begin a tale, I'd flounder through it, like a whale with a harpoon in its body; while any of the girls, even down to little Anna, would glide along, like a graceful, snow-white swan upon a silver lake—happy in her element, and giving pleasure to all who witnessed ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... am sure—' Albinia let Maria flounder, but she only found her way out of the speech with 'Well! and is not it the ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... with a sudden horror, that she might weep. She wished she had not stood up. She wondered wildly why she had stood up. No one spoke, and she was impelled to flounder on. "Think of the mockery!" she said. "Think how dumb we find ourselves and stifled! I know we seem to have a sort of freedom.... Have you ever tried to run and jump in petticoats, Mr. Capes? Well, think what it must be to live ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... after this be consigned by the shorthand writers to the public press; and from thence be transferred to the hands, nay, into the throats and lungs, of hawkers, with voices more licentious than the loud flounder-man's. And this you must hear till you are stunned; nay, you must hear nothing else ...
— The Way of the World • William Congreve
... as much faster 'an a man, as a express train beats er eight ox-team. Dyce is the safest sign-post! If she was only here now, I couldn't botch things, for she sees clare through a mill-stone, and she'd shove me the right way. If I go a huntin', I may flounder into a steel trap; if I stand still, wuss may happen. Mars Lennox is too much for me. I wouldn't trust him no further 'n I would a fat possum. I am afeard of his oily tongue. He sot out to hang that poor young gal, and now he is willing to pay two hundred and fifty dollars to show the court ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... was lost in the snow, and even the Don began to be at fault. The drifting wilderness nearly blinded her, the deep snow was unutterably fatiguing. There was but one thing in her favor—the night, for February, was mild. She was all in a glow of warmth, but what if she should get lost and flounder about here until morning? And what would ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... have 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
... with a rush as he neared the bank, for suddenly from a reed-bed above them there was a wallow and a flounder, with a tremendous disturbance in the water, as something shot down ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... he went on, in a brisk, matter-of-fact tone. "I spent two months last year looking for a job in New York. I was about down to my last cent before I found it. It occurred to me that, perhaps, you—" He was beginning to flounder. ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan
... left the burden of the conversation to him. He might flounder, or be completely stalled, as often as he pleased; it was no part of ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... it please you, be dull, (For Britons deem dulness "respectable"); Stale flowers of speech you may cull, With meanings now scarcely detectable; You may wallow in saturnine spite, You may flounder in flatulent flummery; Be sombre as poet YOUNG'S "Night," And dry as a Newspaper "Summary"; As rude as a yowling Yahoo, As chill as a volume of CHITTY; But oh, Sir, whatever you do, You ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 15, 1893 • Various
... stout boy thought he could do the same. Two or three heavy jumps landed him, not among the bulrushes as he had hoped, but in a pool of muddy water where he sank up to his middle with alarming rapidity. Much scared, he tried to wade out, but could only flounder to a tussock of grass and cling there while he endeavored to kick his legs free. He got them out, but struggled in vain to coil them up or to hoist his heavy body upon the very small island in this sea of mud. Down they ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, September 1878, No. 11 • Various
... interest or, as people say, of the story? What's a situation undeveloped but a subject lost? If a relation stops, where's the story? If it doesn't stop, where's the innocence? It seems to me you must choose. It would be very pretty if it were otherwise, but that's how we flounder. Art ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... 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 argument ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... on the seaside. I used to catch flat fish sometimes, with a long string line, it was like swimming a kite. If you go out in a surf boat, take care it does not "flounder" and get "squamped," as some people say, instead of founder ...
— Neighbor Nelly Socks - Being the Sixth and Last Book of the Series • Sarah L. Barrow
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