"Wreckage" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... American journalist who so heartily despised my bourgeois prudence and progress. As I walked through the Domain one evening, not many months after I had heard myself compared with a 'sure thing grafter,' I saw a piece of human wreckage curled up under a tree in the moonlight. It was not a very infrequent sight of course, even in prosperous Sydney, This particular wreck, as he lay sleeping there, exposed the fact that he wore neither shirt nor socks. He was dreadfully filthy, and ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... sank underfoot; as the Mausers flashed from between the sand-bags, another and another man fell to his knees or toppled sidelong, tripping his fellows into a little knot or windrow of kicking arms and legs; but the main wave poured on, all the faster. Among and above them, like wreckage in that surf, tossed the shapes of scaling-ladders and notched bamboos. Two naked men, swinging between them a long cylinder or log, flashed through the bonfire space and on into ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... more than those below, and they made their way down a hall where mortar lay heaped over the wreckage of glass, pictures and chairs. The bedroom that was their goal was tragic in its signs of intimate habitation strewn and dust-covered, as if years had passed since they had been set forth by an arranging feminine ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... wreck as that which then went ashore on the Hen-and-Chicken Shoals was a godsend to the poor and needy settlers in the wilderness where so few good things ever came. For the vessel went to pieces during the night, and the next morning the beach was strewn with wreckage—boxes and barrels, chests and spars, timbers and planks, a plentiful and bountiful harvest, to be gathered up by the settlers as they chose, with no one to forbid ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard Pyle
... thud of liberated gas, and perhaps a flare. Quite certainly those flying machines will carry folded parachutes, and the last phase of many a struggle will be the desperate leap of the aeronauts with these in hand, to snatch one last chance of life out of a mass of crumpling, fallen wreckage. ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... with wreckage. I saw that by some miracle of chance the microscope was still standing, and I had a moment ...
— Beyond the Vanishing Point • Raymond King Cummings
... of uncertainty seemed endless, immeasurable. Then Michael appeared, stepping across the wreckage, and came towards her. The relief was almost unendurable. She ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... seas gave, all earth, all earth embraced; Exulting in the great hauls of her mesh; Desired and hated, desperately dear; Most human of them was. No more pursue! Enough that the black story can be told. It preaches to the eminently placed: For whom disastrous wreckage is nigh due, Paints omen. Truly they our throbber had; The passions plumping, passions playing leech, Cunning to trick us for the day's good cheer. Our uncorrected human heart will swell To notions monstrous, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... their own daughter, he stated, but an adopted child. Twenty-three years ago, when he had lived in St. Louis, a steamboat explosion had occurred up the river, and on a piece of wreckage floating down stream, a girl baby had been found. There was nothing on the child to give a hint of its home or parentage; and no one came to claim it, though the fact that a child had been found was advertised all along the river. It was believed that the infant's ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... Mary, and there was no answer from the shack or the store. If she were under that wreckage.... Frantically we clawed at the timbers, clearing a space, looking for a slip of a girl with long auburn braids of hair. It was too dark to see clearly, and in my terror I was ripping the boards in any fashion while Jack ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... driven her to make a false step. And yet—would it be a false step? As she paused, looking at Dion, marking the hard obstinacy in his eyes, feeling the hard, hot grip of his hand, it occurred to her that perhaps she had blundered upon the one way out, the way of escape. Amid the wreckage of his beliefs she knew that Dion still held to one belief, which had been shaken once, but which her cool adroitness had saved and made firm in a critical moment. If she destroyed it now would he let her go? Just how low had he fallen through her? She wished she knew. But she did not know, ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... keenly to McWade, and it ran like this: Stoner had been working in the Louisiana gas fields near the scene of a railroad accident—three bulls had strayed upon the right of way with results disastrous to a freight train and fatal to themselves. After the wreckage had been cleared away, the claim agent settled with the owner of the bulls and the carcasses were buried in an adjoining field. This had occurred some time prior to Stoner's arrival; in fact, it was only by chance that he ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... anything not essential to national self-preservation, or helpful to national, self-development. Fail he well, might, and without shame; but he could hope at least to save something of worth from the drift of wreckage. The wastefulness of Western life had impressed him more than its greed of pleasure and its capacity for pain: in the clean poverty of his own land he saw strength; in her unselfish thrift, the sole chance of competing with the ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... Psyche, Thetis, Pomona, Daphne, Clytie, Galatea and Arethusa. Yes, Arethusa herself and Pandora, whom we all know by her box, looked down upon the two new managers of the Opera, who ended by clutching at some piece of wreckage and from there stared silently at Box ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... wonder if perchance this was not the vengeance of the discarded gods. But drawing in on themselves, they learned from St. Augustine to create an inner "City of God." How shall humanity meet this blackest crisis of all? What new "City of God" can it build on the tragic wreckage of a thousand years of civilization? Has Israel no contribution to offer here but the old quarrel with Christianity? But that quarrel shrinks into comparative concord beside the common peril from the resurrected gods of paganism, from Thor and Odin and Priapus. And it was always an exaggerated ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... which was full of winding paths in the fashion of a labyrinth. They had conceived the idea of making in the espalier wall an archway, through which the prospect could be seen. As the arch could not remain suspended, the result was an enormous breach and a fall of wreckage to the ground. ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... the brusque Sir Felix Solomon gazing, without any visible evidence of distress, upon the wreckage of ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace
... remembered by old residents on the coast to this day, and was lost with all hands. She is supposed to have struck on a reef to the southward of the Palm Islands, as the bulk of her cargo was cast ashore in Ramsay Bay, Hinchinbrook Island. Portions of the wreckage were found on the Brook Islands; her figurehead—the spread eagle of the United States—and a seaman's chest were picked up on the beach here. Her windlass, with a child's pinafore entangled with it—for the skipper had taken his wife and two children to bear him company—drifted ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... the tangled cables, dimly seen in the shoal water, the line of wreckage in the channel, and the weed-covered strip of torn concrete which led through the hills, it testified to the arrival of the air age. Bridges, highways, and harbors alike had passed ...
— Final Weapon • Everett B. Cole
... of childhood is its bowed head and mute lips under the blow and the stinging word, because judgment is passed, not on motives, as the parent demands for himself, but on the external appearance of the act. We look into our Heavenly Father's face, out of the wreckage and mistakes of a day, and say, "I meant to do it aright, but I am so ignorant," and we are comforted that He looks at the heart and understands. Can we be less pitifully ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux
... soon seen that the Red Rover, the vessel they had encountered, was sinking fast. Her passengers and crew lost no time in getting on board the Magnet, and in five minutes the Red Rover was engulfed in the sea, which was immediately covered with spars, boxes, and other wreckage. The alarm was dreadful. The Magnet, having sustained serious damage, her situation was most critical. She was making a great deal of water, and the pumps were instantly set to work, while the vessel made for ...
— Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, Volume I • Sir Moses Montefiore
... has passed there are miles and miles of inundated land, with only trees and half-submerged buildings and floating wreckage to break the monotony; just a vast lake of yellow, muddy water, swirling and boiling as it seeks to find ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... itself into a merciless fury. Boundless might was loosening into frenzy. He had seen the misshapen wreckage of houses and barns ride by, bobbing like bits of cork. He had seen the swirl of foam that was like the froth of a ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... Titan's atmosphere. Guess the Nomad's done for." Carr drew her fiercely close as an awful picture flashed across his mind—of Ora's body mangled in twisted wreckage; of the savages ...
— Creatures of Vibration • Harl Vincent
... consistently to develop. She had engaged herself in short to the perfection of a type, and almost anything square and smooth and whole had its weight for a person still conscious herself of being a mere bruised fragment of wreckage. But it contributed hugely at present to carry on the two parallel lines of her experience in the cage and her experience out of it. After keeping quiet for some time about this opposition she suddenly—one Sunday afternoon on a penny chair in the Regent's ...
— In the Cage • Henry James
... hear within its own walls an echo of the greater lamentation swelling and muttering where the conflict seems to rage unceasingly. The waves of war break upon the whole surface of the country, and like the incoming tide, strew it with wreckage. ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... of one of the newest and finest warships in the Turkish fleet—The Mahmoud, Captain Ali Ali—which foundered in a storm on the night of July 5, some distance off Cabrera, in the Balearic Isles. There were no survivors, and no wreckage was discovered by the ships which went in relief—the Pera and the Mustapha—or reported from anywhere along the shores of the islands, of which exhaustive search was made. The Mahmoud was double-manned, as she carried a full extra crew sent on an educational cruise on the most perfectly ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... places thin, and everywhere treacherous; but it is, as a whole, so broad, so crystallized about old boulders, so imbedded in shallows, so wedged into crannies on either shore, that it is a great danger. The waters from thousands of swollen streamlets above are pressing behind it; wreckage and refuse are piling up against it; every one knows that it must yield. But there is danger that it may resist the pressure too long and break suddenly, wrenching even the granite quays from their foundations, bringing desolation ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... no more helpful contribution by example than prove a Republic's capacity to emerge from the wreckage of war. While the world's embittered travail did not leave us devastated lands nor desolated cities, left no gaping wounds, no breast with hate, it did involve us in the delirium of expenditure, in expanded currency and credits, in unbalanced industry, in unspeakable waste, and disturbed ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... abandonment but very little wreckage in her work. She conserves her energies in fitness, her soul in tenderness, her people in love, and the interests of The Army in loyalty. Consequently, her ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... cheeks seriously hurt, Ivan Petrovitch lost an ear; the most seriously injured was Thaddeus Tchitchnikoff, both of whose legs were broken. Extraordinarily enough, the first person who appeared, rising from the midst of the wreckage, was Matrena Petrovna, still holding Feodor in her arms. She had escaped with a few burns and the general, saved again by the luck of the soldier whom Death does not want, was absolutely uninjured. Feodor ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... overthrown. One has been uprooted bodily; all the leaders and branches of the others have been wrenched from the main trunk; and the three still standing are bare poles and broken wreckage. Until one visits the spot one can have no conception of the wholesale destruction that the hurricane has wrought; until he looks on the huge rosy-hearted branches he cannot guess the tremendous force with which the tornado had fallen upon ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... frost. Here and there, where new shafts were starting, these fires flamed redly. Figures of men crawled out of the holes, or disappeared into them, or, on raised platforms of hand-hewn timber, windlassed the thawed gravel to the surface, where it immediately froze. The wreckage of the spring washing appeared everywhere—piles of sluice-boxes, sections of elevated flumes, huge water-wheels,—all the debris of an ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... call from Cymena freighter (Gayer Tong-Huk & Co.) taking water and sinking in snow-storm South McDonald Islands. No wreckage recovered. Addresses, etc., of crew at all A. B. ...
— With The Night Mail - A Story of 2000 A.D. (Together with extracts from the - comtemporary magazine in which it appeared) • Rudyard Kipling
... and left the bedroom, while Yeo returned to the bed upon which lay the unconscious form of the old man. Cuthbert took a walk to the end of the street where the wreckage of the motor car had now been removed, and asked the policeman what had become of the victims. He was informed that the chauffeur, in a dying condition, had been removed to the Charing Cross Hospital, and that the body ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... was lit up with a brightness greater than that of the sun. Every floating piece of wreckage, every rope, every nail stood out with unnatural clearness. I was obliged to close my eyes, and protect them with my ...
— The International Spy - Being the Secret History of the Russo-Japanese War • Allen Upward
... mountain rats were scurrying about the meadows, but the dogs had gone afar, leaving only the two heaps of bones and the wreckage of all outside the tent to tell of their foray. The sun flooded the mesa, disclosing myriad fern-fronds and mosses and colored petals waving in the light breeze as Le Brunnec and I went down to the ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... arose from the waters near beside him. A voice—Agias's voice—was calling out for help. The sound of his freedman's cries drove the Roman to action. Twice the waves lifted him, and he saw nothing; but at the third time he lit on two forms clinging to a bit of wreckage, and yet struggling together. A few powerful strokes sent him beside them, and, to his unutterable astonishment, he beheld in the person who was battling with Agias for possession of the float none other than Pratinas. There are times when nothing has opportunity to appear ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... the Marauder, Soudan McLeod, soon after. His mainmast had broken off eight or ten feet below the head. They were clearing away the wreckage. "I s'pose I oughter had more sense," he called out as we ...
— The Seiners • James B. (James Brendan) Connolly
... Upon the wreckage of thy yesterday Design the structure of to-morrow. Lay Strong corner stones of purpose, and prepare Great blocks of wisdom, cut from past despair. Shape mighty pillars of resolve, to set Deep in ...
— New Thought Pastels • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... about that time, when I was beginning to feel a certain numbness of mind as well as weariness of body, that as I struck out in the mechanical and weakening fashion which I kept up from what little determination I had left, I came across my salvation—in the shape of a piece of wreckage that shoved itself against me in the blackness, as if it had been some faithful dog, pushing its nose into my hand to let me know it was there. It was no more than a square of grating, but it was heavy and substantial; and as ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher
... hat and sword, and went to the door, but Nonna caught me by the skirt, and, "Is he mad then?" she cried; and, "What are you about, Don Francis? Will you meet the padron on the stair and let him up to see this wreckage? Madonna purissima, what is one to do with a ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... tragedy of the sea. Usually the daily paper completes the tale; but on some rare occasion these poor bits of drift remain the only evidence of the vain struggle, and from them we must piece together the narrative as best we can. And as the sea does not give up everything, nor all at once, some wreckage sinking, or perishing, or floating upon the water a long time before finding a well- concealed hiding-place upon some unfrequented shore, so the past yields but a fraction of its records, and that fraction slowly and grudgingly. So far this book has been a gathering of the flotsam of a ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... to be the wreckage of psychoanalysis. It is said that "half the neurotics of London" consult him about their souls. I have no idea of the manner in which he treats these unhappy people, but I am perfectly sure that he gives them counsel of ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... to a periscope depth, and I surveyed her from a position off her stern. She was sinking fast, but I felt so furious at being nearly trapped that I could not resist giving her a torpedo; detonation was complete, and a mass of wreckage shot into the air as the hull of the ship disappeared. As to the two boats, I left them to make the best course to ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon
... to meet unaccompanied women and girls who land in Canada, to see to their requirements and to attend them on board their trains, so that they may not be misled or enticed in wrong directions by the unscrupulous individuals who fatten on the wreckage of human lives. Social-service workers have always found difficulty in this work because of the brazenness and the threatening attitude of some of the evildoers, but when the stalwart men in scarlet and gold are at the ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... pointed cylinder, in height no more than twice that of a man. It came up slowly. Its rectangular door was open. As it reached our level and went past us quite close, I saw a man's figure standing there. Tarrano! Tarrano alone! From the wreckage of his ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... a vision of the wreckage of the two previous accidents, as the Star photographer had snapped them, flashed across my mind. But Kennedy was too ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... held our breath as the express roared along the same track. The crash was horrible. Engine and carriages piled themselves into a hill of splintered wood and twisted iron. Red spurts of flame flickered up from the wreckage until it was all ablaze. For half an hour we sat with hardly a word, ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... spill the blood of the weak for their ambition and the sweat of the children for their greed. Never was learning so diffused nor the content of scholarship so large as now. Yet the great cities are as Babylon and Rome of old, where human wreckage multiplies, and hideous vices flourish, and men toil without expectancy, and live without hope, and millions exist—not live at all—from hand to mouth. As we survey the universal unrest of the world today and see the horrors of ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... sent us along, under topsails only, at a rate of about six knots an hour. On the following day, at six bells in the forenoon watch (11 a.m.), the look-out aloft reported a something which he took to be floating wreckage, about three points on the port bow; and Mr Smellie, our second lieutenant, at once went aloft to the foretopmast crosstrees to have a look at it through his telescope. A single glance sufficed to acquaint him with the fact that the object, which was about six miles distant, was a raft with people ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... tufted gayly with hay and rags, and other spoil of the flood; and in one place a disordered mattress was lodged high among the boughs of a water- maple, where it would form building material for countless generations of birds. The fat cornfields were often littered with a varied wreckage which the farmers must soon heap together and burn, to be rid of it, and everywhere were proofs of the river's power to devastate as well as enrich its shores. The dwellers there had no power against ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... of the drive—and enclose her faithful nurse and foster-mother in arms of child-like love. But destiny ruled otherwise. In vain she waited. Sarah Watson returned no more, death having elected to take her rather horribly to himself some hours previously amid the flaming wreckage ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... and ice floes were not the only things that went floating by! Presently the stream came driving with washing piers and bath houses, then with boats and wreckage of bridges. ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... church which had according to custom been shelled more than the houses. The large crucifix was lying with arms outstretched on a pile of wreckage, the body pitted with shrapnel. The cure accompanied us, and it was all the poor old man could do to keep from breaking down as he led us mournfully through that devastated cemetery. Some of the graves, even those with large slabs over them, had been ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... with seaweed, A barn full of the harvesting of storms; And at full tide, the little hampered waves Lift up the litter, so that, against the light, The yellow kelp and bracken of the sea, Held up in ridges of green water, show Like moss in agates. And there is no place In all the coast for wreckage like this bay; There often will my grannam be, a sack Over her shoulders, turning up the crust Of sun-dried weed to ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... I was not surprised. The Italy of the Renaissance was full of such episodes—the murderous jealousy of brothers, the obedient cruelty of retainers, the wreckage of women's sanity by the fall of horrors much more ingeniously contrived than this. What froze my blood was the anticipation gradually shaping in my mind. I felt that this was the prelude to something monstrous, incredible, which I should be ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... house, and sat down by the window in the gathering dusk, surveying the wreckage of her dream. The dream was even more precious in that it had grown so old. Caleb was a part of her every-day life, and for fifteen years Saturday had brought a little festival, wherein the commonplace man with ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... spending the weekend at Stowe after they got to New York, even though they had both broken ankles previously. Their friends in San Francisco were joking with them about it before they left. They gave Miss Sosnak a doll with a cast on its leg as a gag. The doll was found in the wreckage. Apparently Miss Sosnak had given it to the little girl who was killed on the flight, Barbara Patterson, who actually had a cast on her leg at the time. She had fallen and hurt ...
— The Last Straw • William J. Smith
... adjoining room, which brought Paul, startled, to his feet. He crossed the library and entered the panelled dining-room. The portrait of Sir Jacques had fallen from its place above the mantelpiece, breaking a number of ornaments as it fell. Davison was already on the spot and stood surveying the wreckage. ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... It was a most dreary place, just a sort of freight station where the tracks crossed the through road. It could not be called a town, though now it is a thriving city and the freighting road runs miles below. When I reached the place most of the wreckage had been cleared away, the dead buried, the wounded sent to friends or hospitals at a distance. I found about half a dozen remaining, four of them almost well enough to resume their journey. Two were thought hopeless, one of them being Mrs. Crawford. ...
— The Girls at Mount Morris • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... lustre of gold in the hills, tints of glowing bronze slashed with a red line as the heart of a wound, but recalling the heart of a flower. The folds of the earth glistened. There was flame down there in the river bed. The wreckage of the land, the broken fragments, gleamed as if braided with precious things. Everywhere the salt crystals sparkled with the violence of diamonds. Everywhere there was a strength of colour that hurled itself to the gaze, unabashed and almost ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... clinched and attempted to throw him, and he was twisting and writhing out of the advantage of the other's hold. They reeled about the room, locked in each other's arms, and came down with a crash across the splintered wreckage of a wicker chair. Joe was underneath, with arms spread out and held and with Martin's knee on his chest. He was panting and gasping for ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... bay he entered Flinders examined the refuse thrown up by the sea, with the object of finding any particle of wreckage that might have been carried in. If, as was commonly believed (and was, in fact, the case), Laperouse had been wrecked somewhere in the neighbourhood of New Caledonia, it was possible that remnants of his vessels might be borne to the Queensland coast by the trade winds. "Though the hope of restoring ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... novel.... If the image of passion should float over this motionless, sleepy little world, the picture would glow into the enchanting colour of life." The storm of passion does break over the edge of the hill overlooking the mighty river, and, amid the wreckage, the two victims rise into a nobility that the reckless reformer and the pleasant ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... was certain of that—the melancholy wreckage of a vanished and resplendent time. Its small principality, flourishing when commerce and communication had gone by water, was one of the innumerable victims of progress and of the concentration ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... quarries, or wherever they could make themselves useful. They were, on the whole, so well fed and sheltered that they were perfectly satisfied, and went down with the Altrurians on the beach during the Voluntaries and helped secure the yacht's boats and pieces of wreckage that came ashore. Until they became accustomed or resigned to the Altrurian diet, they were allowed to catch shell-fish and the crabs that swarmed along the sand and cook them, but on condition that they built their fires on the beach, and cooked only during an offshore wind, so that the fumes ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... bodies, with his stiff and almost heavy movements, is astonishingly quick at storing away wreckage. In a shift of a few hours, a comparatively enormous animal—a Mole, for example—disappears, engulfed by the earth. The others leave the dried, emptied carcass to the air, the sport of the winds for months on end; he, treating it as a whole, makes a clean job of things at once. ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... road was so torn and distorted one might have thought a steam dredge had begun work there, but the fragments of wreckage were oddly isolated and inconspicuous. The peasant's cart, tossed into a clump of weeds, rested on its side, the spokes of a rimless wheel slowly revolving on the hub uppermost. Some tools were strewn in a semi- circular trail in the dust; a pair of ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... midst of pain and misery, hunger and death. We do not get much of the rush and glory of battle in the "Linseed Lancers." We deal with the wreckage thrown up by the tide of battle, and wreckage is always a sad ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... the surface, his breath was all but gone. The great bulk of the vessel was no longer in sight, and Jimmie was struggling in a whirlpool, along with upset boats and oars and deck-chairs and miscellaneous wreckage, and scores of people clinging to such objects, or ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... assumed that in this period of national wreckage that all was bad, that all the women were corrupt and all the men were without principle, for there was never perhaps such a condition of affairs in any country; but the prevailing and long-continued licentiousness at the court, which was ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... Volts, amperes and watts, and their definitions. A new boat determined on. Determining size of the boat. Recovering their life-boat. Visit to Observation Hill. Hunting for the lost flagpole and flag. Wreckage of a ship's boat discovered. The Professor sent for. Ascertain it is not part of their wrecked boat. Gathering up portions of the boat. Amazing discovery of skull and skeleton. Methods of determining age. Condition of the skull and teeth. Carrying ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Exploring the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... 1696, the vessels under the command of De Vlaming lay at anchor between Rottnest Island and the mainland of Australia. The island was searched for wreckage with little result. One piece of timber was found which, it was conjectured, might have been deck timber, and a plank was found, three feet long and one span broad. The nails in the wreckage were ...
— Essays on early ornithology and kindred subjects • James R. McClymont
... shadows. At the first sight it seemed to Graham that an attack upon this isolated white building was in progress, but then he perceived that the party of the revolt was not advancing, but sheltered amidst the colossal wreckage that encircled this last ragged stronghold of the red-garbed men, was ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... With the monumental wreckage of those early Mahomedan dynasties, steeped in treachery and bloodshed, the plain of Delhi is still strewn. The annals of Indian history testify more scantily but not less eloquently to their infamy until the supremacy of Delhi, but not of Islam, was shaken for two centuries by Timur, ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... HAVE adapted. I have thought things out. I think—much as you do. Much as you do. So it's not that. But—... Mind you, I am perfectly clear where I am. Where we are. What is happening to us all is the breakup of the entire system. Agreed! We have to make another system or perish amidst the wreckage. I see that clearly. Science and plan have to replace custom and tradition in human affairs. Soon. Very soon. Granted. Granted. We used to say all that. Even before the war. Now we mean it. We've muddled about in the old ways overlong. Some new sort of world, planned and scientific, ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... The poor woman had completely broken down. Shame, humiliation, passionate grief, had made of her a mere miserable wreckage of humanity. ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... stool was still at the apex of its swing, he struck, with the strength of his shoulder behind the blow. It landed full on the rustler's jaw, and Hardy went crashing backward, heels over head, landing on the wreckage of the stool. For a moment ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... idiotic obsession there must have been a grotesque belief that somehow, by accident or miracle, I would be kept in funds indefinitely. I do recall my amazement at the abrupt ending of my dreams. I woke up one morning to discover I had no money, no assets. There were no odds and ends, even, of wreckage which I could salvage for one more week of ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... the time Lennon reached the tumbledown ranch hut Slade was at the top of the ladder and Pete was beginning to climb. Lennon dashed on along the cliff foot. He gave no heed to the dead Apaches that lay huddled or sprawled amidst the wreckage of the wooden ladder poles and rungs. At the foot of the rope ladder he thrust his rifle through the back of his belt and swung up as ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... of four American soldiers. The street was littered and unexploded hand grenades lay everywhere. Two soldiers had been carrying gunny sacks filled with grenades when one accidentally exploded, it in turn exploding others until the wreckage was complete. A military investigation would report the cause of the accident and the damage wrought, and thus an incident of war ...
— The Fight for the Argonne - Personal Experiences of a 'Y' Man • William Benjamin West
... at the absolute wrong-headedness of the whole thing, the self-deception of a criminal idealist shattering his existence like a thunder-clap out of a clear sky, and re-echoing amongst the wreckage in the false assumptions of those other fools. Fancy that hungry and piteous imbecile furnishing to the curiosity of the revolutionist refugees this utterly fantastic detail! He appreciated it as by no means constituting a danger. On the contrary. As things stood it was for his advantage rather, ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... eyes, and the smoke and dust began to clear, they saw the Convocation Chamber in wreckage, showers of plaster and bits of plastiboard still falling from above. The gold and onyx bench was broken in a number of places; the Chiefs of Management in front of it, and the Presidium above, had vanished. Among the benches lay black-clad ...
— A Slave is a Slave • Henry Beam Piper
... Jones. "There are often iron bolts and sharp points about such wreckage that don't require much force to drive 'em through a ship's bottom. Take a look into the hold, Jim, and ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... sight presented itself: Dr. Quint, hair on end, both mustaches pulled out, shirt, cuffs, and white waistcoat smeared with blood, knelt amid the general wreckage on the floor, in the act of ripping ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... While the wreckage of Russia's once proud fleet lay concealed in Port Arthur's inner basin, the Japanese, after scouring the waters to clear them from mines, landed troops on the Liaotung Peninsula, claimed by Japan after the war with China, but despoiled of it by Russia's ...
— The Story of Russia • R. Van Bergen
... in the religious and cultural life of Virginia. New counties were created as population spread further and further up the great rivers; and parishes increased in numbers as the population grew. The first official list of "The parishes and the clergymen in them" which has survived the wreckage of time was the list of 1680, and the next is the list of 1702. These lists show that in 1680 there were forty-eight parishes and thirty-six clergymen incumbents. In the list of 1702 there were fifty parishes ...
— Religious Life of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century - The Faith of Our Fathers • George MacLaren Brydon
... to a low, smothered cry. She had turned, and was standing on the very position that the battery had occupied. The scene was most frightful, the ground torn and fissured as by an earthquake and covered with wreckage of every description, the dead lying as they had fallen in every imaginable attitude of horror, arms bent and twisted, legs doubled under them, heads thrown back, the lips parted over the white teeth as if their last breath had been expended in shouting defiance to the foe. A corporal had ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... I all but lost consciousness with the shock of our own abrupt retarding. Our cage stopped and turned back. Tina located the wreckage and stopped again. ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... Prosperity hath quenched, As dewdrops glistening on the lowly sward Like priceless jewels ere the morning breaks, Melt into space when light and heat abound, As though they ne'er had been. Relentless fate! This ruthless law the world's wide ways hath fringed With wreckage of a host of peerless lives; And Saul is numbered 'mongst the broken drift. Saul, though the Lord's anointed, saw not God: But—curse of life! ingratitude prevailed. His faith waxed weak as days of trial ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... handwork, and learning; but the result of this revolution on a survivor from the fifties resembled the action of the earthworm; he twisted about, in vain, to recover his starting-point; he could no longer see his own trail; he had become an estray; a flotsam or jetsam of wreckage; a belated reveller, or a scholar-gipsy like Matthew Arnold's. His world was dead. Not a Polish Jew fresh from Warsaw or Cracow — not a furtive Yacoob or Ysaac still reeking of the Ghetto, snarling a weird Yiddish ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... lonely mystery of existence" as Romanes found it? Shall we at the behest of those who put the intellect above the heart endorse an unproved doctrine of descent and share responsibility for the wreckage of all that is spiritual in the lives of our young people? I refuse to have any part in such responsibility. For nearly twenty years I have gone from college to college and talked to students. Wherever I could do so I have pointed ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... to Nepenthean conditions rushed in their pyjamas out of doors, to escape the falling wreckage. An American lady, staying at Mr. Muhlen's high-class hotel, jumped from her bed-room on the third floor into the courtyard below, and narrowly ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... ran into a derelict Miro class cruiser. The crew—repulsive creatures—were all dead. Some thirty of them. Mr. Demming and I assumed that the craft had been hit during one of the actions between our fleet and theirs and that somehow both sides had failed to recover the wreckage. At any rate, today it is floating, abandoned of all life, in your sector." Rostoff added softly, "One has to approach quite close before any signs of battle are evident. The ...
— Medal of Honor • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... shooting, twisting upward; Wade and Morey kept firing the molecular beams with precision. The pale rays reached out to touch the battleship, and wherever they touched, the ships went down in wreckage, falling to the city below. In spite of the odds against it, the Ancient Mariner was giving a good account ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... darkness of the hall. Tom strained his eyes for a closer look and just managed to distinguish the figure of a cadet standing before the wreckage of the Space Queen. Funny, thought Tom. Why should anyone be wandering around the hall at this time of night? And then, as the floor slipped past, the figure turned slightly and was illuminated by the dim light ...
— Stand by for Mars! • Carey Rockwell
... and went out upon the seaward side. The waves still rose angrily under the grey sky, but were fast abating. He saw in a moment that the shore was full of wreckage; there were spars and timbers everywhere, and all the litter of a ship. Some of the timbers were flung so high upon the rocks that he saw how great the violence of the storm had been. He walked along, and in a minute he came upon the ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... one panel of which went in before it. Twice again, while another pistol-shot rang out, we plied the ram, and then followed it pell-mell across the threshold, where we went down in a heap amid the wreckage of the door, though I had sense enough left to remove Hemlock's smoking revolver which lay close by, just where he had dropped it on the floor. He evidently had not expected this kind of attack and suffered for his ignorance. ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... great waves, over which the mist once more closed thick and heavy as a pall. They shouted, and once they heard a faint answer, and rowed towards it; but when they got to the spot whence the sound seemed to proceed, they could see nothing except some wreckage. They were all dead, their agony was done, their cries no more ascended to the pitiless heavens; and wind, and sky, and sea were just as ...
— Mr. Meeson's Will • H. Rider Haggard
... others besides him it seemed. The channel was full of ships, aimless ships that tossed between tide and wind. Looking closer, he saw that they were all wreckage. There had been tremendous doings in the north, and a navy of some sort had come to grief. Atta was a prudent man, and knew that a broken fleet might be dangerous. There might be men lurking in the maimed galleys who would ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... beautiful, and apparently doomed figure was borne, I perceived that she, in the midst of the mighty, all-mastering misery, was not the only object in the embrace of the whirl. Both above and below were visible fragments of wreckage—significant wreckage—plumed hats, sword-sheaths, portfolios, epaulettes, decorations, insignia of honour, as if here a national Argosy, laden with Opulence, Rank Intelligence, and Honour, had gone, dismally and desperately, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 28, 1893 • Various
... and here a breadth of rampant kelk feigning to be lawful crop. In the ungrazed pastures swaths of dead stuff caught their feet, and the ground beneath glistened with sweat. At the bottom of the valley a little brook had undermined its footbridge, and frothed in the wreckage. But there stood great woods on the slopes beyond—old, tall, and brilliant, like unfaded tapestries against the walls of a ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... silent minute both stared, stupefied. The hat they knew so well—the big black hat with its willow plume and buckle of brilliants—had vanished. In its place they saw the tumbled wreckage of what had once been another hat distinctly: wisps of straw dyed purple, fragments of feathers, bits of violet-coloured ribbon and silk which, mixed with wads and shreds of white tissue-paper, filled ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... Above the bawling of wind and water sounded the crash. The ship, with only a small sail upon the poop, blew about into the trough of the sea. A mountain of green water thundered over the prow, bearing away men and wreckage. The "governor," Brasidas's mate, flung away the last ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... strode past him and flung the door open. He had never before known such a passion of hatred as raged within him. Throughout his life Simon Harley had left in his wake wreckage and despair. He was the best-hated man of his time, execrated by the working classes, despised by the country at large, and distrusted by his fellow exploiters. Yet, as a business opponent, Ridgway had always taken ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... these bits of wrecks and wreckage as the captain spoke; and, mingled with a feeling of pity for those who had perished in the tornado, came a satisfactory thought to ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... shame, cruelty, and wreckage belong to this crime that one's heart bleeds to think of the tens of thousands doomed, not by their own choice, but by the wicked greed of unnatural parents or the crafty cunning of wicked decoys to such a gehenna, without the least power to extricate themselves ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker
... the smallest pebble that was ever dropped into the sunny mid-ocean of the mind; but sooner or later it sinks to a hard bottom, sooner or later sends it ripples toward the shores where the caves of the fatal passions yawn and roar for wreckage. It is the Comedy of speech that forever dwells as Tragedy's fondest sister, sharing with her the same unmarked domain; for the two are but identical forces of the mind in gentle and in ungentle action as one atmosphere holds within itself unseparated ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... of the stranger's arrival. He went down between the silent cabins, all roofed with new snow, and the empty snow-trimmed stages, and looked out upon the little harbor. What was that, just at the edge of the shadow of the rock to the right of the narrow passage?—a boat, lump of wreckage or a shadow? Stare as he would, he could not determine the nature of the thing in that faint and elfin twilight; but it drew his eye and aroused his curiosity as no natural shadow of any familiar rock could have done. He dragged a ...
— The Harbor Master • Theodore Goodridge Roberts
... tropic night closes quickly in. Soon the city was shrouded in darkness, and we sallied out to the beach at the head of the bay to find relief in movement. The time passed quicker then, and at last we sat down on some wreckage there and watched the tropic night as it revealed its wealth of stars, and sitting there we began to philosophize, moralizing upon the destiny of man and his relations to things seen and unseen, ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... especially as the Spaniards were gratified to obtain much gold in exchange for articles of insignificant value, owing to which circumstances and to the natural advantages of the location, Columbus determined to build a fort with the wreckage of his vessel. The fort was on a hill east of the site of the present town of Cape Haitien. Columbus gave it the name of La Navidad because he had entered the bay on Christmas day, and leaving thirty-nine men as colonists set out on the Nina on January 4, 1493, ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... side at which we usually boarded her, and we pulled round to the further side, where a marvelous sight awaited us. A huge rent appeared, the decks and bulwarks were torn open, the water was covered with floating wreckage—all seemed in ruins; and the compartment where the pinnace rested was fully revealed to view. There sat the little beauty, to all appearance uninjured; and the boys, whose attention was taken up with the melancholy scene of ruin and confusion around them, were astonished to hear me ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... I inspected the surrounding water for any sign of my guest's belongings. I immediately discovered both oars, which were drifting upstream quite close to one another and only a few yards away; but except for them there was no sign of wreckage. His boat and everything else in it had vanished as completely ...
— A Rogue by Compulsion • Victor Bridges
... wrong turn had been taken in judgment at Simla, or in the Cabinet, or in the India Office, or that to-day in this House some wrong turn might be taken, what disasters would follow, what titanic efforts to repair these disasters, what devouring waste of national and Indian treasure, and what a wreckage might follow! These are possible consequences that misjudgment either here or in ...
— Indian speeches (1907-1909) • John Morley (AKA Viscount Morley)
... the beds of the Frenchmen who had left their homes, and would return to find nothing but a heap of ruins and a litter of broken glass, china, and furniture, smothered in feathers and presenting a sad wreckage of what had once been a home. That evening we reached an inn where food—warm, satisfying food—was to be had, and twenty-four hours later we steamed into Tientsin station, greeted by a hearty cheer from a friendly group, for we had been missing and untraced since ...
— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable
... external aspect of it, but the flower of civilization was still sound at the stem. When the storm was over it would grow and bloom again amid the wreckage. French and Germans, in the intervals of battle, were often friendly with each other. They listened to the songs of the foe, and sometimes at night they talked together. John recognized the feeling. ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the dining-room, and there amid the candle drippings and the wreckage of the night before espied the miniature automaton. He picked it up and examined it minutely as ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... even smiled. A fearful force dragged at the boys and swept them toward the great whirlpool made by the ship. They swam desperately, and just as strength seemed to fail, the pressure was released and they floated in a sea covered with wreckage and with swimming ...
— Shelled by an Unseen Foe • James Fiske
... certain portions of the Mississippi Valley, as well as in many other countries, we find a patch of soil lying on a nearly level surface, which for geologic ages has not felt the effect of streams, we may discover, commingled in the debris, the harder wreckage derived from the decay of a thousand feet or more ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... suffering. By degrees a fierce but unspoken feud arises between them. At the very end, just when open war is about to break out between the two, a huge shell bursts in their trench and both are buried under the wreckage. The captain comes to himself with a shattered skull. At a few paces' distance lies the implacable lieutenant, his entrails trailing on the ground beside him. They exchange a last look. Marschner sees a face that is almost ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... every puff of wind and every footfall raised clouds of pulverised cosmos. For two weeks, amid the wretched scene, hideous by night as by day, I persisted in existing. It was a huge pen with men, horses, camels, donkeys, dogs and poultry hobnobbing amid a daily wreckage of old provision tins, garbage of soiled forage and stable-sweepings and whatnot. All that, with a temperature of 116 degrees to 120 degrees Fahr. in the shade, wore the temper and added amazingly to the consumption of wet things. At the Grenadier Guards' mess ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... realities. The first is the peril to mankind implicit in a continuance along its present disaster course of war, with its inescapable counterpart, social dissolution. The second is the possibility that out of the wreckage and rubble of an outmoded cultural pattern, a mature, chastened, more experienced, more consciously purposive generation will arise, possessing the wit to see the necessity of creative advance, and the wisdom to guide ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... himself in the street again he was astonished to see Madame Toussaint and Madame Theodore still there with little Celine. With their feet in the mud, like bits of wreckage against which beat the ceaseless flow of wayfarers, they had lingered there, still and ever chatting, loquacious and doleful, lulling their wretchedness to rest beneath a deluge of tittle-tattle. And when Toussaint, followed by his son, came out, delighted with the advance he ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... upon him there after he had been dropped amidst the wreckage of his balloon. Whether it was her natural hatred for mankind that tempted the savage beast to attack the balloonist, or the scent of fresh blood from some of his scratches, it would be hard to say, possibly both reasons had to do ...
— Boy Scouts on a Long Hike - Or, To the Rescue in the Black Water Swamps • Archibald Lee Fletcher
... The Hawk did not speak again, and following The Hawk's searchlight with their eyes, the two lads saw a mass of wreckage floating a ...
— The Boy Allies Under the Sea • Robert L. Drake
... home. Her heart is dancing shoreward, but silently and pale The swift relentless phantom is hungering on her trail. They scour and fly together, until across the roar He signals for a pilot—and Death puts out from shore. A moment Malyn's window is gleaming in the lee, And then—the ghost of wreckage ...
— Ballads of Lost Haven - A Book of the Sea • Bliss Carman
... Which Galileo's "old discoverer" first Dimly revealed, dissolving into clouds The imagined fabric of our universe. "Jupiter stands in heaven and will stand Though all the sycophants bark at him," he cried, Hailing the truth before he, too, went down, Whelmed in the cloudy wreckage of ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... discovery they began almost to taste the humour of the situation. They fed and rested in bomb-proof chambers which the Commandant and M. Etienne had devised in the slope of earth under the terre-plein; and from these they watched and discussed in safety the wreckage done upon the empty buildings ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... pleased me; an occasional cruise would be an agreeable diversion, and I assented to Kidd's proposal without hesitation. There was as much wreckage lying on the cliff as would build a man-of-war, and a small cove at the foot of the oasis where the sloop could ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... of a rocky, dangerous coast that stood out intensely black like an India-ink drawing on gray paper. Presently the second in command spoke to his chief. He thought he saw something on the water, to seaward. Small wreckage, perhaps. ...
— Tales Of Hearsay • Joseph Conrad
... o'clock the next morning I was taken by an escort of six soldiers to the court-house. Having taken my place in the prisoner's box, I listened to my charges, which were recited as follows: Fourteen cases of murder; wreckage of trains; and ill-treatment of prisoners-of-war. To the question, "Guilty or not?" I pleaded "Not guilty," whereupon I was requested to make my defence, which I declined to do; for the public prosecutor had promised me, ...
— In the Shadow of Death • P. H. Kritzinger and R. D. McDonald
... time of day, that is—the Germans had dropped a half-dozen incendiary shells into the building and it had burned in ten minutes. Most of the men who had been there then were still there, under the smoking mass of wreckage; the smell of burned human flesh ...
— They Shall Not Pass • Frank H. Simonds
... caused Peter to think of these things newly; Thomas, who was starting life with so poor a heritage. For Thomas, so like himself, Peter foresaw the same progressive wreckage. Thomas too, having already lost a mother, would lose later all he loved; he would give to some friend all he was and had, and the friend would drop him in the mud and leave him there, and the cold bitterness ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... can we think of one such, the secret of whose power does not lie in the charm of his or her personality—that is to say, in the wideness of his or her sympathy with, and therefore life in and communion with other people? In the wreckage that comes ashore from the sea of time there is much tinsel stuff that we must preserve and study if we would know our own times and people; granted that many a dead charlatan lives long and enters largely and necessarily into our ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... insisted on leading him all through the house to show how nicely they had taken care of things. And in every room Gissing saw the marks of riot and wreckage. There were tooth-scars on all furniture-legs; the fringes of rugs were chewed off; there were prints of mud, ink, paints, and whatnot, on curtains and wallpapers and coverlets. Poor Mrs. Spaniel kept running anxiously from the kitchen ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... imprudently, all his life-boats and belts. A few minutes later, when he was himself torpedoed, the Italians did not see him; anyhow they made for the shore. De Pombara encouraged his men by causing them to sing the Marseillaise and so forth; they were in the water, clinging to the wreckage, for several hours, until another boat came past. The next day at Brindisi, when he met the captain of the Citta di Messina, this gentleman once more did not see him; but the French Government, although de Pombara was a very young man, ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... himself in the presence of grown people who were white all over, turned in his tracks and followed Mrs. Williams's cat to the great outdoors. Duke preceded Verman. Mrs. Cullen vanished. Of the apparition, only wreckage and a ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... way in which she had been torn and precipitated past the iceberg. At moments when she plunged the whiteness of the water creaming upon the surges on either hand threw out a phantom light of sufficient power to enable me to see that the forward part of the brig was littered with wreckage, which served to a certain extent as a breakwater by preventing the seas, which washed on to the forecastle, from cascading with their former violence aft; also that the whole length of the main and top masts ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... cars was gone. Alongside the track lay pieces of wreckage, and many bodies and pieces of what had once been ...
— The Boy Allies On the Firing Line - Or, Twelve Days Battle Along the Marne • Clair W. Hayes
... up just behind the French lines, has been the most struck. It is simply torn to pieces and has hundreds of holes in it. Altogether some three thousand shells have been thrown at us and found a lodgment. The wreckage round the outer fringe is appalling, and in this present calm scarcely believable. Another three thousand shells will bring ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... had bidden Lloyd farewell, we carried the salmon we had obtained from him back to camp, where Hubbard tried to plank it on a bit of wreckage picked up on the shore. It fell into the fire, and there was great excitement until, by our united efforts, we had rescued it, and had seen part of it safely reposing in the frying pan, while Steve set to work boiling the remainder in our kettle with slices of ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... it's a grievous thought to me that that effigy in the German cap - likewise the other effigy of the noisome old man with the long hair, telling indelicate stories to a couple of deformed negresses in a rancid shanty full of wreckage - should be perpetuated. I may seem to speak in pleasantry - it is only a seeming - that German cap, sir, would be found, when I come to die, imprinted on my heart. Enough - my heart is too full. Adieu. ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... forward and dove at full speed directly toward one of the giant's propellers. There were fifty of these strung along each great wing. If enough of them could be destroyed, the plane must crash. There came a terrific crash—a flare of light—and splintered fragments of flaming wreckage plummeted down. Yet the mighty blades continued whirling as smoothly ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... then, and I wondered how collisions and traffic jams of all sorts could be avoided. I do not know yet; I only know that there is no trouble. Here were empty trucks, speeding back for new loads. And some there were that carried all sorts of wreckage—the flotsam and jetsam cast up on the safe shores behind the front by the red tide of war. Nothing is thrown away out there; nothing is wasted. Great piles of discarded shoes are brought back to be made over. ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... better than you. Forrester, you and Agnew and Jonas, patch up the Ida; and Harden, you stay with me and let's see what the maps say about the chances of our getting out before we reach the Ferry. When the rest have finished the patch, you and Agnew row downstream and see if you can pick up any wreckage ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... must, defeat Germany or perish in the attempt, but that a nation of 65 million inhabitants cannot be effaced or permanently reduced to impotence. After the war the two nations will have to live peaceably side by side once more, and repair so far as possible the wreckage to which this gigantic struggle has reduced their political, social, and commercial intercourse. Any peace settlement will be good only so far as it avoids placing obstacles in the path of so difficult an achievement. ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... squirming and writhing. They reminded him strangely of ants. He was not shocked. He had risen above horror. Quite as a matter of course he noted the succeeding wave sweep the sand clean of the human wreckage. A third wave, more colossal than any he had yet seen, hurled the church into the lagoon, where it floated off into the obscurity to leeward, half-submerged, reminding him for all the world of a ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... must have lies beneath the wreckage, in the iron chest, over at the island yonder," said she; "that is, if you love me enough to ...
— Weird Tales from Northern Seas • Jonas Lie
... the words, and at the quaint spectacle of the two little creatures sitting amid the wreckage in the middle of the table not a bit abashed by the novelty of their conspicuous position. Only Evadne, who was standing behind her mother's chair, remained grave. She seemed to be considering the situation severely, and, acting on her own responsibility, she ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... over to leeward amongst a tidy heap of wreckage; but we soon managed to scramble out, and saw the fugitives making rapid going ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... wreckage has been opened in the Middle Temple Gardens. The authorities are said to be considering an offer confidentially communicated to them by the German Government to add Count ZEPPELIN as an exhibit to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, February 14, 1917 • Various
... better part of three days to cross above the wreckage of snows and forest. They had camped for two nights within a stone's throw of the upper glaciers. Wayland could see the reflection of the stars in the ice at night, and count the layers of the century's snow-fall that ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... which Carmen had been placed was swamped not far from shore, but she managed to lay hold of a piece of drifting wreckage, and began to fight steadily and easily landward. Presently she was aware, however, of a man struggling hard some little distance away to the left of her, and from the tousled hair shaking in the water she was sure that it ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Dismembered legs and trunks of bodies were floating about, together with pieces of clothing, boxes of meats, and all sorts of wreckage. Now and then the agonised cry of some poor suffering fellow could be heard above ...
— The Boys of '98 • James Otis
... she listed to starboard. I stood on the bridge when she sank, and the Lusitania went down under me. She floated about eighteen minutes after the torpedo struck her. My watch stopped at 2.36. I was picked up from among the wreckage and afterward ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... captain shouted, and broadside after broadside swept the decks of the brig, which, hampered by her wreckage, was lying almost motionless in the water. So terrible was the fire, that the privateer's men threw down the axes with which they were striving to cut away the floating spars, ...
— The Tiger of Mysore - A Story of the War with Tippoo Saib • G. A. Henty
... The stout car crushed through the glittering doors of metal and glass, and before the fragments fell the four men were in the thick of short, sharp and decisive battle. Their neuros hissed venomously, spanged as they met opposing beams. And the princess, struggling through the wreckage, wept tears of rage as the coarse fabric of her clothing caught, entangled ...
— The Martian Cabal • Roman Frederick Starzl
... world of Ausonius, south-western France in the latter half of the fourth century, 'an Indian summer between ages of storm and wreckage'. Ausonius himself is a scholar and a gentleman, the friend alike of the pagan Symmachus and of St Paulinus of Nela. He is for thirty years professor of rhetoric in the university of Bordeaux, for some ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... and a little further on, just under the Dean, three or four bodies cast up on the shore, one of them a small drummer-boy, side-drum and all; and near by part of a ship's gig, with 'H.M.S. Primrose' cut on the stern-board. From this point on the shore was littered thick with wreckage and dead bodies—the most of them marines in uniform—and in Godrevy Cove, in particular, a heap of furniture from the captain's cabin, and among it a water-tight box, not much damaged, and full of papers, by which, when it came to be examined, next day, the wreck was ...
— The Roll-Call Of The Reef • A. T. Quiller-Couch (AKA "Q.")
... 'perhaps you're right.' Then he turned straight towards her and said: 'It's a nasty crash that's come over us, Lovise— like a landslide. But don't you think now we might set to work and shift away all the wreckage that's been burying us for years, and get clear and breathe again? You might have a daughter yet!' At that Fruen got up and made as if to say something, but couldn't. 'Yes,' was all she said, and 'Yes,' she said again. 'You're tired and nervous, I know,' he said. 'But think a little over ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... of hard work followed. With the cruisers tagging along nearby, suiting their pace to the slow drift of the schooner, the boys cut away the wreckage and rigged a jury-mast at the stump of the foremast. On this they spread a spare forestaysail which they dug from the sail locker. That it would aid greatly in the ship's progress Steve did not expect, but it would, ...
— The Adventure Club Afloat • Ralph Henry Barbour
... breath! The shore Is still a huddled alabaster floor Of shelving ice and shattered slabs of cold, Stern wreckage of the fiercely frozen wave, Gleaming in mailed wastes of white and gold; As though the sea, in an enchanted grave, Of fearful crystal locked, no more shall stir Softly, all lover, to the April moon: Hardly a breath! yet was I now ...
— The Lonely Dancer and Other Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... being sodden with rain. Pilcher resolved on a second trial, in which the glider again rose easily to about thirty feet, when one of the guy wires of the tail broke, and the tail collapsed; the machine fell to the ground, turning over, and Pilcher was unconscious when he was freed from the wreckage. ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... accident. The Boer guns, swiftly changing their position, re-opened from a distance of 1,300 yards before anyone had got out of the stage of exclamations. The tapping rifle fire spread along the hillside, until it encircled the wreckage on three sides, and a third field gun came into action from some high ground on the ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... had been joined by Ian Hamilton and whose advance had been delayed to allow French and Buller to get into position on his flanks, reached Komati Poort on September 24, he found himself hitting at vacancy with the wreckage of two lost republics around him, derelict railway stock, disabled guns, abandoned ammunition, and burning stores. Koetzee's men had disappeared, most of them into Portuguese territory, which they had been partly persuaded and partly compelled to enter by the Portuguese authorities, ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... followed by 'Merican Joe, he pushed aside the thick screen of spruce branches and came suddenly upon the crib-like cache that the Indian had constructed to entice the malicious night prowler. For right in the midst of the wreckage of the cache, surrounded by the broken snowshoes, the tin cans, the old coat, and the sticks that had formed the crib, was the carcajo himself, a foreleg in one trap and his thick shaggy tail in another! When he caught sight of the trappers the animal immediately showed fight. ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx
... and had provided them with a house, food, clothing, anything they wished created out of the raw elements of earth and air and water. But the bones of all the men who had been aspace with these four ladies lay mouldering in the wreckage ...
— Service with a Smile • Charles Louis Fontenay
... appearance of inky blackness, and large masses of pumice were floating past, among which were numerous dead bodies of men, women, and children, intermingled with riven trees, fences, and other wreckage from the land, showing that the two great waves which had already passed under the vessel had caused terrible devastation on some parts of the shore. To add to the horror of the scene large sea-snakes were seen swimming wildly about, as if seeking to escape from the ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne |
