"Barnacle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... positive and half interrogative, "Time's damned long, ain't it?" I agreed. Forgetting his work, he spliced a bit of rope badly. "See," I said, "that splice is wrong." "Ah," he replied, his face brightening, "you're a salt un too, are ye? Hanged if I didn't think you was a barnacle." He informed me that he had been in the English and American navies, and all round the world. Where had I been? I was obliged to explain that I was a journalist. Quill-driving, as he called it, was evidently, in his opinion, an ignominious employment. However did I learn splicing! When I explained ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... enough to think it all deserved. The author is a literary man, and German scholar. He has read my book very attentively; but, what is very remarkable, it seems that he is a profound naturalist. He knows my Barnacle-book, and appreciates it too highly. Lastly, he writes and thinks with quite uncommon force and clearness; and what is even still rarer, his writing is seasoned with most pleasant wit. We all laughed heartily over some of the sentences. I was charmed with those unreasonable mortals, who know anything, ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... sailing through the sea, But the Past is heavy and hindereth me. The Past hath crusted cumbrous shells That hold the flesh of cold sea-mells About my soul. The huge waves wash, the high waves roll, Each barnacle clingeth and worketh dole And hindereth me ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... fortune- teller. The schooner was anchored to the lee of a reef, while the captain, Paul and two of the crew embarked in the yawl on a tour of investigation. They pulled close under the cliff and into an inlet between two great jaws of barnacle-covered rock that towered high above them. Paul was astonished to see the exact reproduction of the word picture painted by the black fortune-feller of Jamaica before his eyes. They rowed through the inlet on the ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... prawn and the crab, which are expressed by putting all these into the same order. Again, more remote, but still very definite, resemblances unite the lobster with the woodlouse, the king crab, the water-flea, and the barnacle, and separate them from all other animals; whence they collectively constitute the larger group, or class, Crustacea. But the Crustacea exhibit many peculiar features in common with insects, spiders, and centipedes, ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... you heard Mr. Belloc, with delightful wit and subtlety, expounding the very antithesis of the conceptions I am presenting to-night. Mr. Belloc—who has evidently never read his Malthus—dreams of a beautiful little village community of peasant proprietors, each sticking like a barnacle to his own little bit of property, beautifully healthy and simple and illiterate and Roman Catholic and local, local over the ears. I am afraid the stars in their courses fight against such pink and golden ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... I roared along like a conquering hero, the boat received a frightful smash and came instantly to a dead stop. I was flung forward and into the bottom. As I sprang up I caught a fleeting glimpse of a greenish, barnacle-covered object, and knew it at once for what it was, that terror of navigation, a sunken pile. No man may guard against such a thing. Water-logged and floating just beneath the surface, it was impossible to sight it in the troubled ...
— Tales of the Fish Patrol • Jack London
... BARNACLE (Lepas anatifera). A species of shell-fish, often found sticking by its pedicle to the bottom of ships, doing no other injury than ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... there long ago. The first trip was unsuccessful, but on the second voyage the wreck was found. Divers, armed with modern apparatus, spent several days in the quest, but in vain, until, finally, just as the last diver was about to give the signal to be drawn up, he leaned against what seemed only the barnacle-encrusted end of a beam; but suddenly it gave way, and numbers of golden doubloons rolled out at his feet. Considerable sums rewarded further search in the sand-filled and decaying carcass of the old ship; but exactly how much was realized is known ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 4, February 1878 • Various
... with just enough wholesome human rage to keep him from sinking to despair, or to what is more unmanning, self-pity. He had failed before, through trying to frame his life to other men's plans. He had failed now, through trying to win success through other men's efforts—a barnacle clinging to the hull of some craft freighted with fortune. Perhaps, too, he fairly and squarely faced the fact that if he was to be one whit different from the beggar for whom he had been mistaken, he must build his own life solely and wholly ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... very thing, boy. It's as fast theer as a barnacle to a ship's copper; an' 'll stay, I hope, till I get my claws upon it,— which won't take very long from now. Pass a piece o' cord this ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... are stringers and frames to claw on to while feeling around; outside her skin is too slick for anything except a barnacle ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... quarter-section farms. Not many years ago one of the largest business houses in Chicago put up a placard, just before election, stating that the proprietor considered his interests justly the interests of his clerks, and it was decidedly to his interests to have the Honorable Barnacle Bigbug re-elected. All employes were requested to note well. You see the crime of this dry-goods "prince" (how we all run to idiotic titles!) lay in subordinating the good of the State to the good of his particular millions. He totally forgot that the good of each clerk was as ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... and yet he passed through maze after maze of stones fallen in huge masses from the cliffs above, without seeing a sign, till all at once, as he passed round one huge mass, beyond which lay scores of others covered with barnacle and weed, he heard voices, and stopped short, hidden from the group before him ...
— Witness to the Deed • George Manville Fenn
... described. Their organ, the "Indianapolis Journal," poured out upon me an incredible deliverance of vituperation and venom for scattering my heresies outside of my Congressional district, declaring that I had "the temper of a hedgehog, the adhesiveness of a barnacle, the vanity of a peacock, the vindictiveness of a Corsican, the hypocrisy of Aminadab Sleek and the duplicity of the devil." I rather enjoyed these paroxysms of malignity, which broke out all over the State among the Governor's ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... woke her master up in a fright and said: "Master of all masters, get out of your barnacle and put on your squibs and crackers. For white-faced simminy has got a spark of hot cockalorum on its tail, and unless you get some pondalorum high topper mountain will be all on hot ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... sound word I've heard out of the old barnacle, eh, Jack?" said Bill Saxby. "We must be out of this swamp by night and layin' a course for Cap'n Bonnet ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... be despised in those days, I remember. There was a curious custom that prevailed of blowing horns and pounding tin pans to keep the bees from going away when swarming. The custom is an Old Country one, I fancy. The reader will remember that Dickens, in "Little Dorrit," makes Ferdinand Barnacle say: "You really have no idea how the human bees will swarm to the beating of any old ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... in our land, we have the crane, the bitter,[1] the wild and tame swan, the bustard, the heron, curlew, snite, wildgoose, wind or doterell, brant, lark, plover (of both sorts), lapwing, teal, widgeon, mallard, sheldrake, shoveller, peewitt, seamew, barnacle, quail (who, only with man, are subject to the falling sickness), the knot, the oliet or olive, the dunbird, woodcock, partridge, and pheasant, besides divers others, whose names to me are utterly unknown, and much more the taste of their flesh, wherewith I was never acquainted. ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed
... in upon the wild white-maned sea-horses, or the more sober lines of heavy infantry in uniforms of green and blue, the sea has for countless ages bombarded Carn Du with stone-shot in the shape of great boulders. These have ground and polished off every scrap of seaweed, every barnacle, limpet, and sea-anemone, leaving the rock all smooth and bare, while the boulders lie piled to the east in a heap, where the waves that try to take the rock in flank leap amongst them, and roll them over ...
— A Terrible Coward • George Manville Fenn
... The one passage in the older and heartier Dickens manner (I mean the description of the Circumlocution Office) is beyond praise. It is a complete picture of the way England is actually governed at this moment. The very core of our politics is expressed in the light and easy young Barnacle who told Clennam with a kindly frankness that he, Clennam, would "never go on with it." Dickens hit the mark so that the bell rang when he made all the lower officials, who were cads, tell Clennam coldly that his claim was absurd, until the last official, who is a gentleman, tells ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... and magnetism, all things are possible. Kent McKibben knew Horton Biggers, the editor, who was a rather desolate and disillusioned person of forty-five, gray, and depressed-looking—a sort of human sponge or barnacle who was only galvanized into seeming interest and cheerfulness by sheer necessity. Those were the days when the society editor was accepted as a member of society—de facto—and treated more as a guest than a reporter, though even then the tendency ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... but not so large as, the common wild goose, known as the barnacle or bernicle goose. MAX MUELLER(1) has suggested that this word was really derived from Hibernicula, the name thus referring to Ireland, where the birds were caught; but common opinion associated the barnacle goose with the shell-fish known as the barnacle (which is found on timber exposed to the sea), supposing that the former was generated out of the latter. Thus in one old medical writer we find: "There are founde in the north parts of Scotland, and the Ilands adjacent, ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... to dissipate his friend's surprise. "I can't stand her. She's a regular barnacle, and won't let me go for ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... of many Indian tribes property and the control of the family go with the mother. The husband never belongs to the same family connection, rarely to the same community or town even, and often not even to the tribe. He is a sort of barnacle, taken in on his wife's account. To the adventurer, like a trader, this adoption gave a sort of legal status or protection. Gist either understood this before he started on his enterprise, or learned it very speedily after. Of the Cherokee tongue he ...
— Se-Quo-Yah; from Harper's New Monthly, V. 41, 1870 • Unknown
... will hardly do to leave out John Cheevers from the list of strange characters on the farm, because, though he did not belong there as member and was as a barnacle on the body politic, he was so quaint and queer. He was Irish and came to America as valet to Sir John Caldwell, who died very suddenly at the Tremont House in Boston. Pity, compassion or the like induced Mr. Ripley ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... So, also, is the Cirrhopode one idea of the author of nature. You may find a very respectable quarto account of the family, tracing them in all their varieties; but a page might inform you of all that is essential about the barnacle, curious as its history has been, and you need not ponder on the quarto unless you have some particular curiosity to gratify. The Types of nature, both in her vegetable and animal departments are, after all, few. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 450 - Volume 18, New Series, August 14, 1852 • Various
... I suppose," she commented. "He always stuck to this place in summer like a barnacle. ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... great barnacle-goose When its eyes are turned to the sea and its beak to the salt of ...
— The Green Helmet and Other Poems • William Butler Yeats
... gracious or damnatory, with the formula: "Ee, bless me, my man." (Nowadays none of us speaks to a schoolfellow without beginning: "Ee, bless me, my man.") "Salome" we call the entertaining creature. This nickname adhered like a barnacle to him, immediately after he had employed, in his exegesis of the Greek narrative of Herodias' daughter, the expression: "Now, if I ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... and their shallower sovereigns, seem to have taken a perverse and, as it happened, a fatal pleasure in insulting them. Sad it is to see in Shirley's 'Gamester,' Charles the First's favourite play, a passage like that in Act i. Scene 1, where old Barnacle proclaims, unblushing, his own shame and that of his fellow- merchants. Surely, if Charles ever could have repented of any act of his own, he must have repented, in many a humiliating after-passage with that same city of London, of having given those base ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... north-west corner of the exterior stands a comparatively modern house, but this incongruous companionship is no strange thing in Normandy, although, as we have seen at Falaise, there are instances in which efforts are being made to scrape off the humble domestic architecture that clings, barnacle-like, upon the walls of so many of the finest churches. On the north side of Notre Dame, there is an admirably designed outside pulpit with a great stone canopy overhead full of elaborate tracery. It overhangs the pavement, and is a noticeable object as you go ...
— Normandy, Complete - The Scenery & Romance Of Its Ancient Towns • Gordon Home
... and while young possess no shells. After they have grown to be of some size, they leave the parent barnacles, and swim off, to start colonies elsewhere. The larva has twelve legs or arms, large compound eyes, and suckers enabling it to cling firmly. When of full growth, the barnacle's grip is so strong that it is very difficult to pull it from its hold. Some of the South American barnacles are sought after as a delicacy, having the flavour of a nice crab. One kind of barnacle is ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... General assuring the secretary of war that, as soon as the force at Lewiston aggregated six thousand men, a forward movement should be made; but Dearborn himself, with the largest force then under arms, took good care to remain on Lake Champlain, clinging to its shores like a barnacle, as if afraid of the fate visited upon the unfortunate Hull. Finally, after two months of waiting, Van Rensselaer sent a thousand men across the Niagara to Queenstown to be killed and captured within sight of four thousand troops who refused to go to the help of their comrades. Disgusted ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... include Barnacles among plants; but in the time of Shakespeare the Barnacle tree was firmly believed in, and Gerard gives a plate of "the Goose tree, Barnacle tree, or the tree bearing Geese," and says that he declares "what our eies have seene, ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... son," said Richard. "There are folk who can take as many forms as a barnacle goose. Keep thou a sharp eye as the fellows pass out, and pull me by the cloak ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of these books did much for Darwin. His narrative of the voyage gained the good will of cultured England in general. The book on coral reefs won the geologists. His "Manual of the Cirrhipedia" (as the barnacle book was called) secured the attention of systematic zooelogists. The time was not far distant when he would need every aid possible toward gaining and keeping the regard of men; for he was to promulgate a theory that ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... The famous "barnacle-geese" ought not to be omitted from any sketch of the vicissitudes of this doctrine of Biogenesis. An elaborate illustrated account covering their alleged natural history was printed in one of the early ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... Samoed, [Footnote: This was the first meeting between West Europeans and Samoyeds.] which was but a young man: his apparell was then strange vnto vs, and he presented me with three young wild geese, and one young barnacle [Footnote: Anser ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, • Richard Hakluyt
... tide, on the beach, John Wood was seated in the sand, sheltered from the sun in the boat's shadow, absorbed in the laying on of verdigris. The dull, worn color was rapidly giving place to a brilliant, shining green. Occasionally a scraper, which lay by, was taken up to remove the last trace of a barnacle. ...
— Eli - First published in the "Century Magazine" • Heman White Chaplin
... lifting her leanness, keened in the gates of my heart. Till, fattening the winds of the morning, an odour of new-mown hay Came, and my forehead fell low, and my tears like berries fell down; later a sound came, half lost in the sound of a shore far away, From the great grass-barnacle calling, and later ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... taken in and done for," Madagascar had not come within my purview; its distance had not "lent enchantment to the view." I gave it some thought, but could not perceive that I had been so annoyingly persistent to merit a response from the President, not unlike that given by Mr. Blaine to one Mr. Tite Barnacle, who was willing to compromise on a foreign appointment. "Certainly," was the reply; the "foreigner the better." I concluded, however, that the bard may have been right when he wrote "There is a destiny ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... fische in it bot ane perfit schapin foule. This clerk, knawin us richt desirous of sic uncouth thingis, came haistely, and opinit it iwith all circumstance afore rehersit." So far the venerable "Chanon of Aberdene." The West Highlanders still believe in the barnacle origin of this ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.03.23 • Various
... will," says Tommy, "in a minute or two." He has climbed into Joyce's lap, and is now sitting on her with his arms round her neck. To make love to a young woman and to induce her to marry you with a barnacle of this sort hanging round her suggests difficulties. Mr. Dysart waits. "All things come to those who wait," says a wily old proverb. But Dysart ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... I was sick for a couple of days, meanly sick, and my arms were painfully poisoned from the barnacle scratches. For a week I could not use them, and it was a torture to put on and take off ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... Publichouse-keepers of Tonnerre " Drapers of Caen " Harness-makers of Paris " Nail-makers of Paris " Pastrycooks of Caen " " La Rochelle " " Tonnerre " Tanners of Vie " Tilers of Paris " Weavers of Toulon " Wheelwrights of Paris Banquet, Grand, at the Court of France Barber Barnacle Geese Barrister, Fifteenth Century Basin-maker Bastille, The Bears and other Beasts, how they may be caught with a Dart Beggar playing the Fiddle Beheading Bell and Canon Caster Bird-catching, Fourteenth Century Bird-piping, ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... anchored to one spot of the geographical distribution like a barnacle to a ship during the whole of his mortal belligerency?" he one day asked his wife. "We hear nothing, see nothing, become nothing, and our system becomes fossilized, antediluvian. Why not see everything, know everything? Life ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... our belief in the origin of species making any difference in descriptive work, I am sure it is incorrect, for I did all my barnacle work under this point of view. Only I often groaned that I was not allowed simply to decide whether a difference was sufficient ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... new edition of the Biographia Dramatica. This Broken Bow which looks like a re-cooking of the Merry Miller of Thomas Sadler, 1766, bears to be "printed at Stratford-upon-Avon, for the Author, by W. Barnacle, 1820." Mary Hornby, following the example of the preoccupier of the butcher's shop, tries her hand at both tragedy and comedy; in the first line she stands charged with the perpetration of The Battle of Waterloo, which, I doubt not, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 185, May 14, 1853 • Various
... always do bear quite a lot of investigation. But I was at sea before the mast once, where I learned painfully that the captain commands the ship; not even the notions of the buckiest bucko mate amount to as much as a barnacle's bootlace if the old man ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... BARNACLE. A good job, or snack easily got: also shellfish growing at the bottoms of ships; a bird of the goose kind; an instrument like a pair of pincers, to fix on the noses of vicious horses whilst shoeing; a nick name for spectacles, ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... us deliberately pass by all the attractions of the middle zone of tide-pools and on as far as the lowest level of the water will admit. We are far out from the shore and many feet below the level of the barnacle-covered boulders over which we first clambered. Now we may indeed be prepared for strange sights, for we are on the very borderland of the vast unknown. The abyss in front of us is like planetary space, unknown to the feet ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... and the battle has been won, I'm going to buy a barnacle and take it for a run; When the War is over and the German Fleet we sink, I'm going to keep a silk-worm's egg ...
— The Sunny Side • A. A. Milne
... thick all through; his round and massive head alone would have outweighed a baby. With eyes shut, he seemed to be trying to get the better of his own weight, then he moved with the slowness of a barnacle towards the door. The secretary, watching him, thought: 'Marvellous old chap! How he gets about by himself is a miracle! And he can't retire, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... "who ever heard of a treasonous barnacle before? A barnacle, Starrett, adheres and adheres, parasite to the end as long as there's liquid, even as you adhered while the ship was keeled in gold. Nevertheless, you're right. I'm all of what ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... thorough-going conservative we are likely to picture him as a stay-at-home person, a barnacle fastened to one spot. We take for granted that aversion to locomotion and aversion to change are the same thing. But in thinking thus we leave out of account the inherent instability of human nature. Everybody likes a little change now and then. If a person ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... An intelligent lad, respectable, and quick at figures, wanted in a merchant's office. Wages 8 shillings a week to commence. Apply by letter to Merrett, Barnacle, and Company, ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... bad," he drawled. "Nothing but death and what's that? I don't suffer much—not now. It's cancer, keeps gnawing away like a rat in the wall. By and by it will get up to my heart and then it's good-by Jim. I shan't care. What's life good for that a chap should cling to it like a barnacle on ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... heavy calcareous shell were grouped with the snails and oysters as mollusks. But the barnacle did not fit well with other mollusks. Its shell was entirely different. It had several pairs of legs; and no mollusk has legs. The barnacle is evidently a sessile crab or better crustacean. Its molluscan characteristics were only skin-deep, ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... egg of the louse—might be distinguished from scurf (although to the naked eye it is very much like it in appearance) by the former fastening firmly on one of the hairs as a barnacle would on a rock, and by it not being readily brushed off as scurf would, which latter ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... by which time they had cleared three masses of weed and a barnacle-covered plank, they abandoned the search and resumed the voyage. A gloom settled on the forecastle, and the cook took advantage of the occasion to read Tim a homily upon the shortness of life and the suddenness of death. Tim was much affected, but not nearly so much as he was when he discovered ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs |
