"Flotsam" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that surged and eddied around the broad floor. Men and women, delegates and spectators, aged party wheelhorses and youngsters who would vote for the first time that November, all lost their identities to merge with that swirling tide. Over their heads, like agitated bits of flotsam, pennants fluttered and placards rose and dipped. Beneath their feet, discarded metal buttons that bore the names of two or three "favorite sons" and those that had touted the only serious contender against ...
— Hail to the Chief • Gordon Randall Garrett
... devised and used all manner of safeguards against imposition and the inclusion of any who would be wholly burdens, moral or physical. So it happened that, though misfortune had laid on almost all a heavy hand, the early colonists to Georgia were by no means undesirable flotsam and jetsam. The plans for the colony, the hopes for its well-being, wear a tranquil ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... coloured brown like little masses of sea-weed. Other floating creatures are vividly coloured, but the hues are bright blues and greens closely similar to the sparkling tints of sea-water in sunlight. The different members of this marine flotsam frequently rise and fall periodically: some of them sinking by day to escape the light, others rising only by day; others, again, appearing on the surface in spring, keeping deep down in winter. Perhaps the majority of them are phosphorescent, sometimes ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... then, fearing above all things the newspaper, receives one evening a note common in appearance, coarse in expression, requesting her acquaintance, and signed "James Flotsam," let us say. Of course she pays no attention, and two nights later a card reaches her—a very doubtful one at that—bearing the name "James Flotsam," and in the corner, Herald. She may be about ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... present notice was picked up at sea, a child, and, under the provisions of maritime law concerning flotsam, jetsam, and lagan, was appropriated by the crew. He then followed their fortunes for several years, with various adventures, among which is the one wherein he is said to have accompanied Arthur Gordon Pym (disguised in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... little boy and my belongings away comfortably, but the road was rough and the coach swayed, and I gave it up. There were passengers on top of the coach, and passengers inside the coach. One woman who was totally deaf, and some miners and blacksmiths, and a few other men, the flotsam and jetsam of the Western countries, who come from no one knoweth whence, and who go, no one knoweth whither, who have no trade or profession and are sometimes ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... on the ocean of commerce—the jetsam and flotsam, of which the law must direct the disposal. The heirs, as they have been called, may come in to the wreck that lies on the shores of time, after the soul has gone to eternity—but law must decide whether these wreckers are entitled to the cargo,—to ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... miles away in the unknown land; while once in every quarter of an hour or so he woke up to a momentary consciousness that he was a thing neither rich nor rare, and so wondered how in thunder he got there. He is a derelict, a fragment of flotsam and jetsam cast upon the not too hospitable shore of civilization after the great storm had lashed the Southern sea to frenzy and the ship of slavery had gone to pieces forever. Possibly he is a good deal more human than he looks, and if ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... intellect," he went on after a pause. "He is surrounded by innumerable books; he cannot possibly read them all; he dips into one and picks up a scrap from another. His mind gradually fills itself with miscellaneous flotsam, with superficial opinions, with a thousand half-knowledges. Almost unconsciously he begins to rate literature according to what people ask for. He begins to wonder whether Ralph Waldo Trine isn't really greater than Ralph Waldo Emerson, whether J. M. Chapple isn't as ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... world," says Newman; "it comes down by tradition from age to age. . . . Men [outside the church] take up and profess these scattered truths, merely because they fall in with them." Not so Father Hecker: no flotsam and jetsam of doctrine for him, unless some fragment would reveal to him the name of the ship from which it had been torn, and the port from which she had sailed, and so lead him to the discovery of the ship herself, ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... Mary Louise was fascinated. Old Mr. Bushrod Mosby she had known for years—a veritable rustic macaroni, a piece of tinselled flotsam floating on backwater. He had always called her M'Lou; later occasionally Miss M'Lou. Now the rhythm of some ancient rout was stirring old memories, and the obligations of host sat pleasantly heavy upon his ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... When he left the deck he had only the dark, wet berth-deck to retire to, a place of bleakness and misery, where he might share a sopping blanket, if he had one, with the corpse of a drowned rat and the flotsam from the different messes. There was no getting dry nor warm, though the berth-deck might be extremely close and stuffy from lack of ventilation. The cook-room, or galley fire would not be lighted, and there would ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... bears The signet of your Goethes or Voltaires? We who alone in latter times have sung With scarce less power than Arno's exiled tongue— We who are Milton's kindred, Shakespeare's heirs. The prize of lyric victory who shall gain If ours be not the laurel, ours the palm? More than the froth and flotsam of the Seine, More than your Hugo-flare against the night, And more than Weimar's proud elaborate calm, One flash of ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... had missed my goal, and was every moment leaving it farther behind me. I was fast approaching a state of panic that might very easily have resulted in fatal consequences, when it suddenly occurred to me that, of course, it would be quite impossible for me to see those insignificant fragments of flotsam, unless they and I each happened to be hove up on the crest of a wave at precisely the same moment, and the reflection so far steadied my nerves that I was able successfully to combat the almost irresistible impulse to put forth my whole strength ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... a way that made avoidance impossible. Among his duties Lowell found that he must act as judge and jury in many cases that came up. There were domestic difficulties to be straightened out, and thieves and brawlers to be sentenced. Likewise there was occasional flotsam, cast up from the human sea outside ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... the North Atlantic to the Azores; and its floating stuff is matter cast off from the Gulf Stream's edge into the bordering still water—as a river eddies into its pools twigs and dead leaves and such-like small flotsam—and there is compacted by capillary attraction and by the slow strong pressure of ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... ever have dreamed that we should live to hear French talked in our street as a familiar form of speech? But we have. In a little cottage at the other end of the village is a family of Belgians, a fragment of the flotsam thrown up by the great inundation of 1914. They have brought the story of "frightfulness" near to us, for they passed through the terror of Louvain, hiding in the cellars for nights and days, having two of their children killed, and escaping to the ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... sufficiently sad and sufficiently humiliating. His unavailing appeals to the American Congress are happily hidden in the rubbish of history, and are somewhat dimmed by the intervention of more than half a century. But his humiliation was extreme. Smart Congressmen, partisans, the ignorant flotsam of conventions and intrigues, heard the philosopher with contempt. A few heard him with sympathy; and the opinion in his favor grew, as if by the pressure of shame, until he was finally supported, and in a midnight hour of an expiring session of Congress, or rather ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... only temporarily, but I think that we ourselves got most out of the work, both in pleasure and uplift. I recall one clergyman, one doctor, and many men from the business world and clerk's life in the flotsam ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... industriously bumping the paint off the houseboat, while we sat on the windlass box enjoying the fresh breeze in our faces and watching the driftage catch on our anchor chain. Of course one can sit right down on the bobby bow itself with feet hanging over, and poke with a stick at the flotsam. But that is only for moments of lazy leisure, not for a time when one ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... the poop stepped around to the side of the tug and stared anxiously southward. Bits of flotsam mottled the blue expanse, but it really appeared as if the saving drift weed were thinning to nothing. Hogan glanced back over the way ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... paced from smoking to observation-car time and time again. He could not remain still. The first great fury of the storm had passed. It had swept him up, weak and nerveless, on the beach of retrospect; among the wreck of past hopes; the flotsam and jetsam ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... admiration of all the girls in the village; but Paris—after it had beaten and twisted and squeezed that brilliant Southern rag in its great vat for ten years, burned him in all its acids, rolled him in all its mire—relegated him at last to the state of battered flotsam and jetsam, embruted, paralyzed, which had killed his father with grief and compelled his mother to sell everything in her house and to live by domestic service in the well-to-do families of the neighborhood. Luckily, just about the time that that relic of Parisian ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... last, 'you're a good chap and I'm a rotter. I'm a bad egg, a rolling stone, flotsam, garbage, punk, anything you like that smells to heaven. I hate myself sometimes. It's hate of myself that makes me desperate. But, give me this chance. Perhaps a sea-voyage will brace me up. Genoa, you say? They ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... mathematically safe. Mathematically safe they would be if—and only if—they depended upon the laws of chance. No ship moving through the Asteroid Belt would dare to move at any decent velocity without using radar, so the people on this particular lump of planetary flotsam would be able to spot a ship's approach easily, long before their own weak detection system would register on the pickups ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... preparation for the wounded in the tents; bustling at the beach with the unloading of rations, the transports moving here and there far out on the moonlighted sea. Down there were straggler, wounded soldier, teamster, mule-packer, refugee Cuban, correspondent, nurse, doctor, surgeon—the flotsam and jetsam of the ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... in the popular wood of Vincennes left a certain amount of human flotsam and jetsam lying around under the trees and in the dark shadows, helpless from a combination of wood alcohol and water treated with coloring matter and called "wine." It was Monsieur Podvin's business ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... loom like a huge spider under a peaked gable, a chest of drawers which would have set a collector crazy, Chippendale chairs with the seats out, Windsor chairs with the backs broken, gilt mirror frames with no glass in them—boxes—books—bottles—all the flotsam and jetsam of such old establishments. Most of the things had been set back against the wall, but right in the middle of the floor was an object which I took at first ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... that way," he said gently. "It's all been awful. But it can't be undone now, and—— Say, Jessie, you got your mother, and a brother who needs you. Guess you're more blessed than I am. I haven't a soul in the world. I'm just a bit of flotsam drifting through life, looking for an anchorage, and never finding one. That's how it is I'm right here now. If I'd had folks I don't guess I'd be north of 'sixty' now. This place is just the nearest thing ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... pitiful flotsam that reluctant seas have washed to us piecemeal from a remote past, there are, as will be shown later, many things which, although proceeding from a culture and modes of thought as far removed from ...
— The Instruction of Ptah-Hotep and the Instruction of Ke'Gemni - The Oldest Books in the World • Battiscombe G. Gunn
... the heart, the genius of the war. He never, for one moment, changed his course, but kept it fixed upon the Union, no matter what the winds and tides, the currents and cross-currents were. Thus, while so many lesser minds were busy with flotsam and jetsam of the controversial storm, his own serener soul was already beyond the far horizon, voyaging toward the one sure haven for the Ship ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... seemed to Harriet only good to serve and to be busy, to work out the difficult problem that was presented her with all the accumulated years of study and dreams, philosophy and courage, to help her. Then love had come, sweeping all her old life away before it—the flotsam and jetsam of discouraged years; what was ignoble and sordid and outgrown had still lined the river banks, it was true, but that was carried away now, the man she loved needed her, and by some instinct deeper than any dull male reasoning of his, had ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... constitutional extravagance. As a final step in her preparation she rubbed her cheeks violently with a rough crash towel, the resulting brilliant complexion successfully obliterating all traces of weariness, the flotsam and jetsam of anxious days and haunted nights. And then with a jauntiness remarkable under the circumstances, Persis departed, resolved by fair means or foul to distract the thoughts of Mrs. Nelson Richards from the occupancy ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... finally a huge papier-mache globe on which were traced the routes of Mr. Colman Hoyt's four unsuccessful dashes for the North Pole. It depressed me, the sight of this vast lumber-room, this collection of useless flotsam and jetsam, cast up and rejected by the sea of strenuous life. Most moving of all, a broken golf-club standing in a dusty corner, and beside it a wofully scarred and battered ball. I pointed them ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... raft-men to take her to Berlin, for exhibition as "the German raft from America," for such she is; but they persisted in their scheme for showing her in London, where folks are already tired of "flotsam and jetsam" from the West. Their enterprise failed; and the poor Germans had to depart from England deep in debt instead of laden with money, and their raft was ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... "three gallons of oil as good as sperm oil"; that no ship had been seen—"no sail from day to day"; that they were in the latitude of Panama; that it was squally or not squally, as the case might be; that on one occasion they captured "four barrels of oil," the flotsam of some ill-fated whaler, and that it all proved "very exciting"; that a dolphin was captured, and that he died in splendor, passing through the whole gamut of the rainbow—that the words of tradition might be fulfilled; that the hens had suffered no sea-change, but had ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... the one great Pagan Empire which the wrecks of millenniums have left on the earth—surely there is a call to service that might fire the spirit of the dullest of us.''[110] The obstacles are indeed formidable, but he who can look beneath the eddying flotsam and jetsam of the surface to the mighty undercurrents which are sweeping majestically onward can ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... entirely subsided, but there was a perceptible diminution in the height of the waves. Up beyond the water-line lay a fresh installment of jetsam. But, as before, they labored only to save the flotsam. They ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... raving with lips all afoam; Writing a cheque for a million, drivelling feebly of home; Lost like a louse in the burning ... or else in tented town Seeking a drunkard's solace, sinking and sinking down; Steeped in the slime at the bottom, dead to a decent world, Lost 'mid the human flotsam, far on the frontier hurled; In the camp at the bend of the river, with its dozen saloons aglare, Its gambling dens a-riot, its gramophones all a-blare; Crimped with the crimes of a city, sin-ridden and bridled with lies, In the hush of my mountained vastness, ...
— Songs of a Sourdough • Robert W. Service
... the word away from its personal application. "I believe that's rather what I was thinking about when you came, Nona. About how we just go on—flotsam. Don't you know on a river where it's tidal, or on the seashore at the turn, the mass of stuff you see there, driftwood and spent foam and stuff, just floating there, uneasily, brought in and left there—from somewhere; and then ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... it known that they belonged to a neighbouring islet at the moment unfriendly to the overbearing Dunk Island tribe, Blue Shirt and his attendants mentioned that cedar-logs and other attractive flotsam bestrewed the beaches, and volunteered to conduct the strangers to the best places on the understanding that they, being alien and hostile, should remain under the protection of the rifle-carrying ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... I had leisure to walk about town, view the sights and watch the swaying crowds of gamblers, sure thing sharps and other forms of human flotsam and jetsam as they fleeced their victims, the miners. One occasion I shall never forget. It was the funeral of one of the prominent citizens of Oro Fino. The aforesaid prominent citizen bore the euphonious cognomen of "Bob-up-the-creek." Bob, probably ...
— Reminiscences of a Pioneer • Colonel William Thompson
... them. The sea had blown gout into their limbs, had buffeted them until they were bent and bowed, and in the winter nights one could hear them roar with the pain like wild beasts. Down to the harbor drifted all the flotsam and jetsam of the land, invalids and idle men and dying men, and busy folk raced round about and up and down with fluttering coat-tails, in order to scent ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... all the time. Others seem to exist by the continuance of that first faith alone—a sheer optimism that keeps the courage alive and keen enough to seize hold of the slightest driftwood of opportunity, binding this flotsam into a raft that takes them triumphantly out on the high tide. For all the long drag, the anxiety, the physical strain, the harassment, failure in itself seemed as inherently impossible to Justin as that he should be stricken blind or lose the ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... Out of the flotsam of his pondering came memories of other nights such as this, desert nights on the border ranges of old Mexico—that lost world of his adventurous youth. Mingled with his waking dreams were the sounds of many familiar names—Sonora, Trevino, Nueva Laredo, Nava, San ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... and-thundered in his ears. Now he saw it all halcyon, stretching fair and mute to the boundless west, the sinking sun, the lovers' star. They two—could they two, lying with closed eyes, but drift out over bar, floating away through golds and purples towards the kiss of heaven and sea—flotsam of this earth, jetsam of age-distant shores, each to the other paradise and all in all! How profound the stillness—how deep the fragrance of the lily—what indifference, what quiet as of scorn did the ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... excited the envy of the Counts of Leon, and in 875 the Normans came down upon it, pillaged the town and devastated the cathedral. It was one of those Counts of Leon who so vigorously claimed his rights "de bris et d'epaves"—the laws of flotsam and jetsam—esteeming priceless as diamonds certain rocks upon which vessels were frequently wrecked. This law, rigorously enforced through long ages, has ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various
... to imagine, I confess, that the beautiful steam launch that brought us was a wreck; that our half-dozen Chinese servants were members of the family; that the ton of impedimenta was the flotsam of the sea; that the Eurasian keeper and his attendants were cannibals; but we closed our eyes to all disturbing elements, and only remembered that we were alone on a sunlit rock in the midst ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... was realized. But the solution was fully a mile away. On a sandy bar, half buried in the sand, the stout end of a cottonwood trunk, the flotsam of some extraordinary freshet, had come into view. The experience of the morning was repeated, but on a smaller scale, for here were no dangerous tree limbs to threaten their delicate silken bag. After two trials and much pulling and hauling ...
— The Air Ship Boys • H.L. Sayler
... am contented by remembrances— Dreams of dead passions, wraiths of vanished times, Fragments of vows, and by-ends of old rhymes— Flotsam and jetsam tumbling in the seas Whereon, long since, put forth our argosies Which, bent on traffic in the Isles of Love, Lie foundered somewhere in some firth thereof, Encradled by ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... railroad diverted the traffic to the Mariposa Group, Farleys was left to pursue its tranquil way undisturbed by stage or tourist. Still it remains, if stagnant, self-respecting, has a hotel, a post office and a street of stores, along which the human flotsam and jetsam of the mineral belt may drift without exciting comment. A derelict could pass along its wooden sidewalk, drop a letter in the post box, even buy a box of cartridges without attracting notice. And even if he should be noticed, ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... a day, upon the shore, As flotsam, or as jetsam, Some wooden cases,—ten, or more,— Were cast up. "Let us get some, And see, my friend, what they contain; The chance may not occur again," Said good Who-zoo. Said Tum-tum, "Do; We'll both wade out and ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... suction stopped, and he found himself alone on the grey, sullen water. In the distance, bobbing up and down on the short swell, he could see half a dozen boats; but close at hand there was nothing save the flotsam and wreckage from the ship. The submarine, as far as he could tell, had disappeared; at any rate, he was too low in the water to see her. After a while the ship's boats, too, pulled out of sight, and for the first ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... double. Her nose touched her wares as often as not, her mittened hands sought quiveringly the papers that the correspondent asked for. I liked him the better for his solicitude for this forlorn piece of flotsam of his ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... religion," he said. "The flotsam and jetsam of life have to learn to be men and women first. Some of them are ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... Romans across half the world; it bore the civilisation of the far East to new life and virgin western soils; it carried the new West to the old East, and is in our day bringing back again the new East to the old West. Religions, arts, tradings, philosophies, vices and laws have been borne, a strange flotsam, upon its unchanging flood. It has had its springs and neaps, its trembling high-water marks, its hour of affluence, when the world has been flooded with golden humanity; its ebb and effluence also, when it has seemed to shrink and desert the kingdoms set upon its ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... them, splintered timbers of mysterious origin, and logs in multitude, scarred with gashes of the axe. Feliu and his comrades had saved wood enough to build a little town,—working up to their waists in the surf, with ropes, poles, and boat-hooks. The whole sea was full of flotsam. Voto a Cristo!—what a wrecking there must have been! And to think the Carmencita ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... were cool where the alders cast shade, and he sat there for a little while, watching the drift of tiny flotsam down the eddying current and observing the skipper-bugs skating over the still shallows ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... black-lime district, which had been considered hell holes, were in reality models of order compared with these mushroom cities of raw boards, tar paper, and tin. Gambling joints, dance halls, and dens more vicious flourished openly, and around them gathered the scum and the flotsam that crests ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... root and, with a dim sense of the vanity of all knowledge that does not become a rule of life, some form of pessimism is sure to supervene in every serious soul. With age a civilization accumulates such impedimenta, traditional flotsam and jetsam, and race fatigue proceeds with equal step with its increasing volume. Immediate utilities are better, but yet not so much better than acquisitions that have no other than a school or examination value. ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... she can suffer a sea-change From a collier to a Shamrock under sail, From a Hyper-super-Dreadnought, old Leviathan at range, To a lightship or a whaler or a whale; With some canvas and a spar She can mock the morning star As a haystack or the flotsam of a gale. ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... jerk on the tow-rope to jolt Ross awake, for, unnoticing, he was heading for deep water. Even near the shore the torrent was full of floating debris. The bodies of horses and cattle drifting down the stream told of many impoverished farms and the flotsam was eloquent of wrecked and demolished ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... adopted daughter of Captain Bill May, who had brought her home from one of his voyages when she was a little baby, and placed her in his wife's arms, saying that she was a bit of flotsam and jetsam that belonged to him by right of salvage. His ship had been in a Southern port when a woman, with this child in her arms, had fallen from a pier into the river. Springing into the water after them, Captain May had succeeded in saving the child, but the mother was drowned. As ...
— Wakulla - A Story of Adventure in Florida • Kirk Munroe
... on grinning as he looked at the poor bit of human flotsam whom he had dubbed "the owl" because of her silence and her eyes. She aroused Miguel without words, watching him keenly for faintest sign of recovery. The food and sleep had refreshed him in body, but the mind was far away. To the girl he gave no notice, and after a long bewildered ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... stricken city has gone steadily forward. Here and there over the waste where Johnstown stood in its pride black smoke arises from the bonfires on which shattered house-walls, rafters, doors, broken furniture and all the flotsam and jetsam of ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... when the lights were turned up in the interval, one beheld the usual spectacle: stretchers, wheeled chairs, crutches, bandaged heads, arms in splints, blind men, men with one arm, men with one leg: rank on rank of war's flotsam and jetsam, British, Australians, New Zealanders, Newfoundlanders, Canadians, come to make merry over the minstrels: in the front row the Colonel and the Matron, with officer patients; here and there an orderly or a V.A.D.; here and ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... in the outside world he might safely have been termed rather rum, but here in this backwater, so full of the oddest flotsam, his waywardness was rather less than the average. He had, for instance, a diverting habit of modifying the time, and even the tune, of the hymns on Sunday, and he confessed to having kissed all the nurses and housemaids except three. But both Escott and Sherlaw declared ...
— The Lunatic at Large • J. Storer Clouston
... and walked up the beach. Somewhere off this stretch of beach was the Maiden Hand. But where? They strolled along leisurely, stopping now and then to examine some bit of beach flotsam. There were shells, but most of them ...
— The Wailing Octopus • Harold Leland Goodwin
... villainous, rusty heap, in a grassy ditch of the city wall; a few stumps of the trees that had been then cut down were still visible, and from a railroad tie embedded in the sidewalk hung six links of a massive chain. Through this forgotten flotsam on the great shore of the war, the quiet crowds went in and out of the Maillot entrance to the Bois de Boulogne. There was a sense of order and security in the air. I took a seat on the terrace of a little restaurant. The garcon was a small man ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... and some of the dirty flotsam—trappers, forest-runners, and the like—were continually moving about the parade, going and coming on petty, sordid business of their own; and there were women there, too—pallid refugees from distant farms, and now domiciled within ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... had a down-at-heel, out-of-elbow sort of look, it was Calvary Alley. At its open end and two feet above it the city went rushing and roaring past like a great river, quite oblivious of this unhealthy bit of backwater into which some of its flotsam and jetsam had been caught and held, generating crime and disease and sending them out again into the ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... commissioned large numbers of fishermen to secure for me at a price striped sea-shells from the shore, smooth pebbles, crabs' claws, sea-urchins' husks, the tentacles of cuttlefish, shingle, straws, cordage, not to mention[13] worm-eaten oyster-shells, moss, and seaweed, and all the flotsam of the sea that the winds drive, or the salt wave casts up, or the storm sweeps back, or the calm leaves high and dry all along our shores? For their names are no less suitable than those I mentioned above for ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... wreck must have been above all estimate in value. How much 'Jetsam' there may be we cannot tell, but what we have seen is all 'Flotsam,' and will float and find its way in enriching influence to a thousand ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... the trail. Runaway sailors, voyageurs, stray adventurers are they—queer flotsam on the sea of human life. He learns from them the current stories of the day. He can trace in the mysterious verbal "order to return," and that never-produced "packet" given to Fremont by Gillespie, a guiding influence from afar. The appearance of ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... old wheels which have stood weathering so long at one end of the building. I saw under the shed at the other end the wonderful assortment of old iron pipes, kettles, tires, a pump or two, many parts of farm machinery, a broken water wheel, and I don't know what other flotsam of thirty years of diligent mending of the iron works of an entire community. All this, you may say—the disorder of old iron, the cinders which cover part of the yard but do not keep out the tangle of ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... quarreled at a club dinner, and of how one threw three ribs of roasted beef at the other, who retorted with a whole sucking pig just from the native oven, of Thomas' wife leaving him for Europe after a month's honeymoon; and all the flotsam and jetsam of report and rumor, of joke and detraction, which in an island with only one mail a month ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... filled all the pots and pans they had, with most of its contents. It was impossible to take all, so they had signalled to other pilots and fishers, and all the sails in sight had flocked round the flotsam. ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... from paper bundles. It was not very tempting-looking food. Yet there were men in the crowd who looked longingly at it, and a few scuffles occurred in attempts to get some. That crowd represented the slag and scum of the boiling pot of nineteenth-century conditions. And as the flotsam on a river always centres at its eddies, so these had drifted, from the country, and from the slums, to the centre of the whirlpool of American life. Here they were waiting. Waiting for what? The future only would show. But each moment ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... that nameless flotsam of humanity! (mused the pipe). Few and feeble are his friends on earth; and the One who, like him, was wearied with his journey, and, like him, had not where to lay his head, is gone, according to His own parable, into a far country. The swagman we have always with us—And ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... to the white operating table passed all the flotsam of wounded humanity in the summer months. All the human wreckage that marked the savage bush fighting from German Bridge to Morogoro came to me upon this table. And its white cleanness, our towels and surgical gloves and overalls, filled them with a sense ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... plaintiff himself went into the witness-box—and Mahony's feelings became involved as well. This his adversary!—this poor old mangy greybeard, who stood blinking a pair of rheumy eyes and weakly smiling. One did not pit oneself against such human flotsam. Drunkard was stamped on every inch of the man, but this morning, in odd exception to the well-primed crew around him, he was sober—bewilderedly sober—and his shabby clothing was brushed, his frayed collar clean. Recognising the pitiful bid for sympathy, ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... chairs, wiped the table mightily; the French cabmen, the Barbary Coast flotsam and jetsam, gazed over their soup-spoons in silent, ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... were caught in their pastures, and drowned, the farmer rescuing only eleven. The cottagers were driven to their lofts, while the tide snatched away their furniture, doors, window-frames, and tables, and strewed them along the railway banks. There was flotsam and jetsam on what was now once more the coast-line at the village of Taliesin, where in old days the bard's cradle had been washed ashore; here one poor woman recovered her parlour-table of heavy oak; her chairs ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine
... to that she could see no reasonable prospect. She had only to look at Letty, shrinking in her corner of the bedroom, to judge any such mischance impossible. She was so humble; so negligible; so much a bit of flotsam of the streets. She had an appeal of her own, of course; but an appeal so lowly as to be obscured by the wayside dust which covered it. What was the flower to which Rash had now and then compared her? Wasn't that what he called it—the dust flower?—that ragged ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... face the fact that he was in such a position—entirely and utterly alone, except for the useless flotsam that came with him. He might have flung himself into a mad chase after the ship on his suit jets except that the thought of leaving his little island, cold comfort though it was, to plunge into those totally empty depths ...
— Far from Home • J.A. Taylor
... deepened and became more fierce. I think the change of temperature must have been to blame. It was a chill, bleak evening. Overhead, across a background of faded blue, scudded ragged banks of clouds, the lingering flotsam of the shattered rainstorm of yesterday: and a cavalry cloak afforded but indifferent protection against the wind that blew hard and ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... the same of his own. He stood aloof from life and said things about it. He had no wife, no child, no business, no home—he dared not venture boldly into the tide of existence—he stood forever on the bank, and watched the current carrying its flotsam and jetsam to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... an almost life-size, painted statue of the Virgin. There the two stand firmly on their pedestals, their faces raised to God's roof of blue, which never fails. Because their eyes are lifted, they do not see the flotsam and jetsam of shattered stained glass, burnt woodwork, smashed benches, broken picture-frames and torn, rain-blurred portraits of lesser saints. They seem to think ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... a letter for you." She went to the pigeon-holes on the wall that held the flotsam and jetsam of unclaimed mail, and brought him a square, blue linen envelope—distinctly a ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... upwards—a wreck, with its side stove in, entangled in a mass of flotsam and jetsam which had gathered in one of the ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed
... dance-hall, and all-night restaurant, flourishing brazenly within a stone's throw of Broadway, and it is counted one of the sights of the city. Upon entering, one may pass through a saloon where white-aproned waiters load trays and wrangle over checks, then into a ball-room filled with the flotsam and jetsam of midnight Manhattan. Above and around this room runs a white-and-gold balcony partitioned into boxes; beneath it are many tables separated from the waxed floor by a railing. Inside the enclosure men ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... given, and the night pilot was a man for an emergency. Before the little-used yawl could be lowered, the steamer had swept a wide circle in mid-stream and the search-light picked up the castaways. From that to placing the Belle Julie so that the two bits of human flotsam could be hauled in over the bows was but a skilful hand's-turn of rudder-work, accomplished as cleverly as if the great steamboat had been a power-driven launch to be steered by a touch of ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... of the new settlement rose steadily day by day, but it gave signal for no watching enemy. All about stretched the pale green ocean of the grasses, dotted by many wild flowers, nodding and bowing like bits of fragile flotsam on the surface of a continually rolling sea. The little groves of timber, scattered here and there, sheltered from the summer sun the wild cattle of the plains. The shorter grasses hid the coveys of the prairie hens, and on the marsh-grown bayou banks ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... grave of peoples, of languages, of customs and physical types."[172] Its base, north and south, and the longitudinal groove through its center from east to west have been swept by various racial currents, which have cast up their flotsam into its valleys. The pueblos of our arid Southwest, essentially an area of asylum, are inhabited by Indians of four distinct stocks, and only one of them, the Moquis, show clearly kinship to another tribe outside this territory,[173] so that ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... the upraised sea-bed of coralline. To the north-west, and outside this strip, lies the little port defended by a network of reefs, in which our Sambk had first taken refuge. The bay-shore bears traces of more than one wreck; and in the graveyard used by the native sailor, an open awning of flotsam and jetsam looks from afar like a tumble-down log-hut. The number of reefs and shoals shown by stripes of vivid green water promised excellent fishing, and failed to keep ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... to tell her some of his past exploits: the Amazon, the Orinoco, the Andes, Tibet and China; of the strange flotsam and jetsam he had met in his travels. But she sensed only the sound of his voice and the desire to reach out her hand and touch his. Friendship! Bread ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... Sub-Consciousness—to learn a page of prose, or deposit the memory of a piece of music, which you are forced to play slowly and thoughtfully before the digital dexterity is added to the treasures of your Sub-Consciousness. Under exceptional conditions, exceptional flotsam and jetsam is tossed up into Consciousness, as in the case of that servant girl who spoke Latin, Greek, and Hebrew in her delirium, having unconsciously absorbed the same from overhearing the studies of her learned ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... wolfers, buffalo-hunters, whiskey smugglers, missionaries, prospectors, United States soldiery and newly organized North West Mounted Police crossed and recrossed the international boundary between the American Northwest and what was then known as the "Whoop Up Country." This heterogeneous flotsam and jetsam held some of the material from which Montana evolved ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... his own poems. They were printed in blunt type on thick yellowish paper, the edges of which seemed as if they had been cut by the forefinger of an impatient reader, so ragged and irregular were they, and they were bound in vellum, the titles of these two slim flowers of poetry, "Flotsam" and "Jetsam," were printed in black letter type and the covers were further adorned with a sort of embossed seal and with antique looking tapes so that you could tie it all up with two bows when you had finished with Mr Lucas's "Flotsam" for the time ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... were watching for the coming of just such flotsam from the wreck, which they must have sighted when the lightning flashed; and would find some means for plucking him out of the ...
— Darry the Life Saver - The Heroes of the Coast • Frank V. Webster
... unequaled by any Tammany politician: he knows more policemen, dopes, conductors, beggars, chauffeurs, gangsters, bartenders, jobless actors, painters, preachers, anarchists, and all the rest of New York's flotsam and jetsam than any one in the world. He is always the polished gentleman, and yet they take ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... watering-places first and among the bright and colorful crowds forget the gray appendages of despair. Marvellously renewed, he would walk again in the Piazza di Spanga at twilight, moving in that drifting flotsam of dark women and ragged beggars, of austere, barefooted friars. The thought of Italian women stirred him faintly—when his purse hung heavy again even romance might fly back to perch upon it—the romance of blue canals in Venice, of the golden green hills of Fiesole ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... wind was as gradually distributing over its surface. Here and there I observed dark patches which I took to be seaweed, partly buried in the sand; and there was a tolerably well defined tide-mark, consisting apparently of more seaweed, and flotsam of various kinds cast ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... one of the pictures that will stand out always in my mind. Perhaps it was because I was not yet inured to suffering; certainly I was to see many similar scenes, much more of the flotsam and jetsam of the human tide that was sweeping back and forward over the flat fields of ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... way, whilst among the islands, I came across, at various times, many sad signs of civilisation, in the form of a lower mast of a ship, and a deck-house, a wicker-basket, empty brandy cases, and other flotsam and jetsam, which, I supposed, had come from various wrecks. After having been absent from my home in Cambridge Gulf, two or three months, I found myself in a large bay, which I now know to be King's Sound. I had come across many tribes of natives on my way down. ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... squalid scene—a wide flat area where stakes and floors and frames mingled with all the flotsam and jetsam left by a hurried and profligate populace, moving on to another camp. Daylight found no man there nor any living creature. And all day the wind blew the dust and sheets of sand over the place where had reigned such strife of toil and ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... for a period of centuries that would count back to the times of William the Conqueror or Charlemagne, with only such outfit of the world's goods as might survive a 3,000-mile voyage in frail canoes, reenforced by such flotsam of the world's metallic stores as the tides of ocean might chance to bring them—and, with such limited capital to start with in life, what, should we judge, would have been the outcome of the experiment in religion, in morals, in art, in mechanics, ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... American. A well-dressed throng, well-fed, amiable and animated, looking ever forward, the resistless tide of affairs that gave it being bore it onward; it passed the onlooker as a strong current passes flotsam in a back-eddy, with no pause, no turning aside. Acutely he felt his aloofness from it, who had no part in its interests and scarcely any comprehension of them. The sunken look, the leanness of his young face, ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... eagle-eye of one of the Maories detected the carcass of a whale rolling among the breakers about half a mile to the westward. Immediately a boat was lowered, a double allowance of line put into her, and off they went to the valuable flotsam. Dangerous in the highest degree was the task of getting near enough to drive harpoons into the body; but it was successfully accomplished, the line run on board, and the prize hauled triumphantly alongside. This was the whale they had now brought in. We shrewdly suspected that it must ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... my chauffeur might be spared an unpleasant ordeal. Joy! the Marquis did not appear to recognize him, and neither did the Marquise, if she were one of the young women who had run out to the car. Maybe, if he could escape recognition now, he might escape altogether. Once swept away among the flotsam and jetsam below stairs, he would be both out of sight and out of mind. I did not care about myself now, only for him, and I was beginning to cheer up a little, when I noticed that the other young man was gazing at the ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... went to waste Like flotsam on an open sea; She never hit the public taste, Or knew ...
— The Battle of the Bays • Owen Seaman
... bunch of keys, across the hallway to the room in which Frederick R. Woods had died. It was his study, you may remember. It had been little used since his death, but Margaret kept her less important papers there—the overflow, the flotsam of her ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... which sent forth an air blast which drove the boat before it like the hurricane of a tornado. And then the debris from the sky foamed down into the water, and then there was a long, long silence. Save for some inconsiderable flotsam, the steamer and all that was in her had vanished eternally. The canoes from the village were paddling for the beach again. They were alone on a lonely sea. No man seemed to have a ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... be seen also the human flotsam and jetsam of this northern country—miners, prospectors, drifters, government employees, and adventurers—all caught here as though in the cleats of a flume, at this focusing-point at the foot of ...
— Young Alaskans in the Far North • Emerson Hough
... a bank, where he sat, after stumbling through a gutter of stagnant water. Harry Baggs followed and filled a cheap ornate pipe. The voice of the auctioneer rose, tiresome and persistent, punctuated by bids, haggling over minute sums for the absurd flotsam of a small house keeping square of worn oilcloth, a miscellany of empty jars. A surprisingly passionate argument arose between bidders; personalities and threats ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... "This flotsam and jetsam of her talk came to me from time to time as confidential asides from the main flow of palaver which rolled along steadily toward the Judge. The Judge, poor fellow, showed plainly the effects of the struggle; so much ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... rough and interesting. They stopped at an old weather-beaten house that had in its low windows all sorts of curious things—models of ships and boats, odd bits of pottery, rude carvings, old brasses and mirrors,—the flotsam and jetsam from broken homes and broken lives that had drifted into this ...
— Killykinick • Mary T. Waggaman
... on its side, and went back among the palmettos. When abreast of us and not more than half a mile off, with colors flying, we could see the officer of the deck and others closely scanning the shore. We were in hopes they would look upon our boat as flotsam and jetsam, of which there was more or less strewn upon the beach. To our great relief, the cruiser passed us, and when she was two miles or more to the southward we ventured out and approached the boat, but the sharp lookout saw us, and, to our astonishment, ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various |
