"Comber" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... knowest the fight we had for bread, winning it by strange and unaccustomed labors: I, who knew naught but my books, and something of husbandry, becoming a weaver of baize; Brewster a ribbon weaver, Tilley a silk worker, Cushman a wool comber, Eaton a carpenter, and so on; well, goodman Carpenter was loth to trust his maid to such scant living as I could offer, nor would he let us even call ourselves troth-plight; and Alice, the gentle, timid maid that she was, yielded all ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... almost helpless. You can neither luff, nor spill the wind out of the sail by slackening off the sheet, nor put your boat in a position to take a heavy sea safely. The end of your long boom is liable to trip as you roll and wallow through the waves, and every time you rise on the crest of a big comber your rudder comes out of water, and your bow swings around until there is imminent danger ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... my muse and give me a start, And let me give praise to the one famous art; For it's not an M.P. or a Mayor that I toast, But the ancient Wool-comber, ...
— Revised Edition of Poems • William Wright
... the nasal howls from the boat were utterly ignored, the acting chief engineer hauled himself along the rail hand over hand to windward, ducking below the canvas guard as a more than usually big comber split against the Puncher's side ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... captains? Oh, lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief. Ho, ho! from all your furthest bounds, pour ye now in, ye bold billows of my whole fore-gone life, and top this one piled comber of my death! Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool! and ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... Kitchell—ninety-nine swine an' me make a hundred swine. I'm a shoat with both feet in the trough, first, last, an' always. If that bark's abandoned, an' I says she is, she's ours. I'm out for anything that there's stuff in. I guess I'm more of a beach-comber by nature than anything else. If she's abandoned she belongs to us. To 'll with this coolie game. We'll go beach-combin', you and I. We'll board that bark and work her into the nearest port—San Diego, I guess—and get the salvage on her if we have to swim in her. Are you with me?" he ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... of Pickering, for at that point a great delta was formed. This fan-shaped accumulation of bouldery gravel is marked in the geological survey maps as covering a space of about two square miles south of Pickering, but the deposit is probably much larger, for Dr. Thornton Comber states that the gravel extends all the way to Riseborough and is found about 6 feet below the surface, everywhere digging has taken place in that direction. The delta is partly composed of rounded stones ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... the rising swell caught the craft, and threw her once more on her beam-ends. As for a moment she lay on her side, the men attempted to free the masts, but could do nothing, for the boat almost immediately again fell over, bottom up. But a second comber, lifting her with redoubled violence, threw them all clear of the boat, turned her momentarily right way up, and then breaking into the masts and sails, tipped her for the third time upside down, flinging her at the same instant in mad fury clear of the angry water. So ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... give a girl the choice, an' she'll make a good wife. That's my theory. So if my gal is set agin a man, I'm set agin him. If she likes a partic'lar man, I'll like him too. She won't cotton to any miserable, fish-backed beach-comber, I can promise you. So mushy, flabby talk don't count with Rose; you can make your mind clear ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... was published in 1638. In the same year, 1638, when Cowley's age was twenty, a Latin comedy of his, "Naufragium Joculare," was acted by men of his College, and in the same year printed, with a dedication to Dr. Comber, Dean of Carlisle, who was Master of Trinity. The poet Richard Crashaw, who was about two years older than Cowley, and, having entered Pembroke Hall in 1632, became a Fellow of Peterhouse in 1637, sent ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley
... Love, then went to summon Helen, in the likeness of an old woman, a wool-comber, who had worked for Helen in Lacedaemon, and whom she greatly loved. She found the white-armed Helen on the high tower, and spake: "Come hither to Paris, who sends for thee; he is there in the fragrant chamber, shining ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... roller-crest like a storm-driven gull winging in towards the land. The wiry figure of Bill Wheaton crouched in the stern while two sailors fought with their oars. As they gathered for their rush through the last zone of froth, a great comber rose out of the sea behind them, rearing high above their heads. The crowd at the surf's edge shouted. The boat wavered, sucked back into the ocean's angry maw, and with a crash the deluge engulfed them. ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... themselves upon the beach and clung "tooth and toenail" when the breaker receded. Slim was completely exhausted; but before another comber rolled in those who were strong managed to drag the weaker ones out of ...
— Navy Boys Behind the Big Guns - Sinking the German U-Boats • Halsey Davidson
... For his sake his brothers Bartholomew and Diego (James) were to receive appointments, and his son Diego was to be brought to court and educated. Then, after securing the welfare of these members of his family, Columbus wrote to his old father, the wool-comber in Genoa, and sent ...
— Christopher Columbus • Mildred Stapley
... comber's crashing thunder Strange beaches flash into my ken; On jetties heaped head-high with plunder I dance and dice with sailor-men. Strange stars swarm down to burn above me, Strange shadows haunt, strange voices greet; Strange women lure and laugh and love me, And fling their ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... welth and eas. Howe be it that sole that hath suche besynes And dyueres charges fyndeth great disseas Neyther shall he god, nor yet the worlde pleas And shall with his burthyns his mynde so vex and comber That halfe his cures, can he nat count ...
— The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 • Sebastian Brandt
... put on his cap and gown, and to his wife's inquiries told her where he was going, and that after he had seen Mr. Norris he would step on down to Comber's, where was a sick body or two, and that she might expect him back not earlier than five o'clock. She nodded without speaking, and he went out. She watched him down the drive from the dining-room window and then went back to her business with an ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... was turned on and with one well directed plunge the Chelton was shot through what seemed to be a "comber" as if she had ...
— The Motor Girls on Crystal Bay - The Secret of the Red Oar • Margaret Penrose
... but so well hidden were the guns that I could not locate them. We still crept slowly forward; section after section crawled across the black, ploughed fields, now rising up like giant caterpillars to the crest of a mound, and again dropping out of sight in the hollow land like corks on a comber. On our heels the ambulance corps followed with its stretchers, and in front the enemy was firing vigorously; over the belt of trees that lined the summit of the hillock little wisps of smoke could be seen rising ...
— The Amateur Army • Patrick MacGill
... the gardens, the white streets, quay, pier, wharf are deserted and silent. Rarely a human being passes; the sands are abandoned except by some stray beach-comber; only at the station remains any sign of life where trains are being loaded for the North, or roll in across the long draw-bridge, steaming south to that magic port from which the white P. and O. steamers sail away into regions of ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... regarded their work. It had indeed been bloody, for they had drawn off and joined our other three boats in the attack on the remaining two of the enemy. The deserted boat was in the trough of the sea, rolling drunkenly across each comber, its loose spritsail out at right angles to it and fluttering and flapping in the wind. The hunter and boat-puller were both lying awkwardly in the bottom, but the boat-steerer lay across the gunwale, half in and half out, his arms trailing ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... strangest of all, the English people had acquired the faculty and habit of thinking,—even of believing; individual conscience had unfolded itself among them;—Conscience, and Intelligence its handmaid. [1] Ideas of innumerable kinds were circulating among these men; witness one Shakspeare, a wool-comber, poacher or whatever else, at Stratford, in Warwickshire, who happened to write books!—the finest human figure, as I apprehend, that Nature has hitherto seen fit to make of our widely Teutonic clay. Saxon, Norman, Celt, or Sarmat, I find no human soul ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... weather had been magnificent—blue skies, a gentle wind, and a sea scarcely silvered by a comber. ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... a roller suddenly fell with a thunderous crash, and the long white comber came roaring down upon ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... are other isles with other beaches. One may present a narrow strip of soft sand, cringing and squeaking under foot, almost entirely composed of finely ground coral and shells, among which polished fragments of red coral are to the beach-comber as the "colours" the gold fossicker may find in his dish—prospective of reward. They reinspire the like fervour which leads to the discovery of mountains as well as microbes, for may they not signify the existence within the bounds of the Great Barrier Reef ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... race: full men besides, though not by reading, but by strange experience; and for days together I could hear their yarns with an unfading pleasure. All had, indeed, some touch of the poetic; for the beach-comber, when not a mere ruffian, is the poor relation of the artist. Even through Johnson's inarticulate speech, his "O yes, there ain't no harm in them Kanakas," or "O yes, that's a son of a gun of a fine island, mountainous right down; I didn't never ought to have left that ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of its piers creates a fierce whirlpool whenever the water is high. The exertions of the men at the oars were of no avail, and irresistibly our small ark was attracted by this charybdis. With the speed of an arrow we were sucked down below the surface, and a big comber broke over our heads. The water was icy cold, and when in the next moment our raft, which had not capsized, continued its way downstream as innocently as if nothing had happened we could not help laughing at one ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... now do. She pitched helplessly head first into a hollow, and a door flew open under the break of her poop; it surprised and shocked us, for the dead might have signed to us then. She went astern of us fast, and a great comber ran at her, as if it had but just spied her, and thought she was escaping. There was a high white flash, and a concussion we heard. She had gone. But she appeared again far away, on a summit in desolation, black against the sunset. The stump of her bowsprit, the ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... to be chronicled of that first term only the Comber Fight and, a little conversation, one windy day, with Galleon. The small boy, by name Beech Minimus, whom Peter had defended on that earlier occasion, had attached himself with unswerving fidelity to his preserver. He was round and fat, and on ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole |
