"Flounder" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... yet the 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 Wycliffe's soldiers ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... golf or racing, on shooting, fishing, and the gymkhana. Or, if you wish to divert it, you must ask him definite questions about matters of fact. Probably you will get precise and intelligent replies. But if you put a general question he will flounder resentfully; and if you generalise yourself you will see him dismissing you as a windbag. Of the religion, the politics, the manners and customs of the country in which he lives he will know and care nothing, except so far as they may touch his affairs. He will never, ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... 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
... 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 ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... 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 of money and take away nothing ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... 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 |
