"Gull" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... de Chinaberry tree (Butterfly, flutter by!), Kitty gull a-cryin' on the sunset sea (Fly, li'l gull, fly high!), Bully bat a-follerin' de moon in de sky, Widder bird a-hollerin', 'Hi, dar! Hi!' Tree toad a-trillin' (Sleep, li'l honey! De moon cost a shillin' But we ain't got money!), Sleep, li'l honey, While de firefly fly, An' Chuck-Will's Widder ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... half-frightened delight. It lent a fascination, somewhat morbid perhaps, to all ill-favoured and unsightly creatures—to blind worms and slow-moving toads; to trapped cats and dusty, disabled, winter flies; to a winged sea-gull, property of Bushnell, one of the under-gardeners, that paced, picking up loathsome living in the matter of slugs and snails, about the cabbage beds, all the tragedy of its lost power of flight and of the freedom of the sea ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... custody of the old insane King's person to the Duke of York, instead of the Queen, with an allowance of TEN THOUSAND POUNDS per annum! This is about four thousand pounds a year more than the salary of the President of the United States of America. The guardians of John Gull's purse vote the King's son four thousand pounds a year more, for having the custody of his father's person, who was confined as a lunatic in Windsor Castle, than the Americans pay to their Chief Magistrate, for managing all the business of ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... was torn off and swept to leeward in blinding and drenching clouds of spindrift. And although our engine had been stopped, the ship lay to in the most perfect manner, heading well up into the wind and taking the seas, as they came at her, as buoyantly as a gull, shipping very little water except what came aboard in the form of spindrift or scud water, with an occasional spattering over the ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... weighty splash of the breakers, in which from time to time one fancied something like a wail, like distant cannon-shots, like a bell ringing—the tearing crunch and grind of the shingle on the beach, the sudden shriek of an unseen gull, on the murky horizon the disabled hulk of a ship—on every side death, death and horror.... Giddiness overcame me, and I shut my eyes again with ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... only found the waves, heard the sea-gull's cry, In and out the ocean caves, underneath the sky, All above the wind-washed graves where dead ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... putting knavish tricks Upon green geese and turky-chicks, 150 And pigs, that suddenly deceast Of griefs unnat'ral, as he guest; Who after prov'd himself a witch And made a rod for his own breech. Did not the Devil appear to MARTIN 155 LUTHER in Germany for certain; And wou'd have gull'd him with a trick, But Martin was too politick? Did he not help the Dutch to purge At ANTWERP their Cathedral Church? 160 Sing catches to the Saints at MASCON, And tell them all they came to ask him Appear'd in divers shapes to KELLY, And speak i' th' ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... Thus he argues, that 'If sin can make one who was sometimes a glorious angel in heaven now so to abuse himself as to become, to appearance, as a filthy frog, a toad, a rat, a cat, a fly, a mouse, or a dog, to serve its ends upon a poor mortal, that it might gull them of everlasting life, no marvel if the soul is so beguiled as to sell itself from God and all good for so poor a nothing as a momentary pleasure.'[202] When speaking of the impropriety of excluding ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... the breeze so light that the old patched sails were taking the schooner along at a gentle three knots per hour. A sail or two shone like snow in the offing, and a gull hovered in the air astern. From the cabin to the galley, and from the galley to the untidy tangle in the bows, there was no sign of anybody to benefit by the conversation of the skipper and mate as they discussed a wicked and mutinous spirit which ...
— Sea Urchins • W. W. Jacobs
... had gone into hysterics when he merely grinned at them through the curtains on one of the spare bedrooms; of the rector of the parish, whose candle he had blown out as he was coming late one night from the library, and who had been under the care of Sir William Gull ever since, a perfect martyr to nervous disorders; and of old Madame de Tremouillac, who, having wakened up one morning early and seen a skeleton seated in an arm-chair by the fire reading her diary, had been confined to her bed for six weeks with an ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... raised both hands to his mouth, and hollowing the palms, uttered three mournful cries, long and loud, like the wailing of a gull. ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the most vivid pictures, although it has certainly some unnatural colouring, is that given in The Gull's Horne-Booke, a satirical work published in London in 1609. Under the heading of "How a Gallant should behave himselfe in Powles-Walkes," one of the chapters gives some details of the place. The following extracts ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... the deeper water, are fleets of the Anatidae, the Coromandel teal[1], the Indian hooded gull[2], the Caspian tern, and a countless variety of ducks and smaller fowl. Pelicans[3] in great numbers resort to the mouths of the rivers, taking up their position at sunrise on some projecting rock, from which to dart on the passing fish, and returning far inland at night to their retreats among ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... sea-coast becomes more marked and rugged. There is a place called the Valley of Rocks (I suspect this was only the poetical name for it) bedded among precipices overhanging the sea, with rocky caverns beneath, into which the waves dash, and where the sea-gull for ever wheels its screaming flight. On the tops of these are huge stones thrown transverse, as if an earthquake had tossed them there, and behind these is a fretwork of perpendicular rocks, something like the Giant's Causeway. A thunderstorm came ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... the eye could reach, the castaways saw no signs of life, not a sail, not a smoke, not a gull, not even the ripple of a wave; nothing but gaudy, motionless markings from one flat horizon to the other, dead traceries that swiftly became uninteresting, then monotonous, then disagreeable, then maddening in the ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... gull I should like to shoot," exclaimed Fred, pointing to a bird that hovered over his head, and throwing forward the muzzle ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... fight for God's cause, and at the same time are taken up with worldly business. The owl, which sees clearly at night, but cannot see in the daytime, denotes those who are clever in temporal affairs, but dull in spiritual matters. The gull, which both flies in the air and swims in the water, signifies those who are partial both to Circumcision and to Baptism: or else it denotes those who would fly by contemplation, yet dwell in the waters of sensual delights. The hawk, ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... from the excrement of fish and reptiles. The late Mr. Barrett discovered in it, near Cambridge, in 1858, the remains of a bird, which was rather larger than the common pigeon, and probably of the order Natatores, and which, like most of the Gull tribe, had well-developed wings. Portions of the metacarpus, metatarsus, tibia, and femur have been detected, and the determinations of Mr. Barrett have ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... the outgoing tide bore him swiftly through the Narrows and spewed him out on the broad bosom of the Gulf of Georgia, all ruffled by a stiff breeze that heeled the little yawl and sent her scudding like a gray gull when Thompson laid her west, a half north, ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... I here? Shall I wake at thy side and smile at my dream? The dream that grips me so hard that I cannot wake nor stir! O love! O my own love, found but to be lost! My soul sends over the waters a wild inarticulate cry, Like a gull's scream heard in ...
— Songs from Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... from windy pier, Where the white gull drops and screams, Through the village grown so dear, Till you reach ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... said nothing—his gravity had returned. Now in the glare of the tropical day, with the "Bertha Millner" sitting the sea as placidly as a brooding gull, he ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... breathed—blown—dispossessed of my birthright, free quaffing o' the air. Ha, ha! I cannot laugh. Oh! what a mouth didst thou make at old blacksleeves. Gaping so, I wonder he mistook not thy muzzle for one of the vents into his old quarters. A pretty gull thee be'st, ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... gun; blown the last match; bowed to the last blast; been tranced in the last calm. We have mustered our last round the capstan; been rolled to grog the last time; for the last time swung in our hammocks; for the last time turned out at the sea-gull call of the watch. We have seen our last man scourged at the gangway; our last man gasp out the ghost in the stifling Sick-bay; our last man tossed to the sharks. Our last death-denouncing Article of War has been read; and far inland, in that blessed clime whither-ward our frigate ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... fringe of a heavy sea churning on it, and sea-fowl strutting here and there. In the foreground, half buried under tangles of brown weed torn from the rocks by past storms, lay a dead sailor, and a big herring-gull, with its head on one side and a world of inquiry in its yellow eyes, was looking at him. Tremendous vigor marked the work, and only a Brady could have come safely through the difficulties which had been surmounted in its creation. Everybody sang praises, and Barron nodded warm approval, ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... the sentiment of trees in the woods and grass by the roadside, is the flawless triumph of art. If you have look'd on him who has achiev'd it you have look'd on one of the masters of the artists of all nations and times. You shall not contemplate the flight of the gray gull over the bay, or the mettlesome action of the blood horse, or the tall leaning of sunflowers on their stalk, or the appearance of the sun journeying through heaven, or the appearance of the moon afterward, with any more satisfaction than you shall contemplate ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... however, was only on the surface; for as one walked along the esplanade one discovered that the town had become a citadel, and that all the doll's-house villas with their silly gables and sillier names—"Seaweed," "The Sea-gull," "Mon Repos," and the rest—were really a continuous line of barracks swarming with Belgian troops. In the main street there were hundreds of soldiers, pottering along in couples, chatting in groups, romping and wrestling like a crowd of school-boys, or bargaining in the shops for ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... and after a short interval emerge, bearing their glittering prey in their beaks. Of all the movements of birds, either upon foot or on the wing, I think there is none so interesting to look at as the actions of the fishing gull while engaged in pursuit of his prey. Even the kite is not more graceful in its flight. The sudden turning in his onward course—the momentary pause to fix more accurately the position of his prey—the arrow-like descent— the plunge—the ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... my office the tailor took toll of me by forcing me to wear a garb which I detested, simply because I dared wear no other garb. I could not even drink plain water but that some one was the richer. I was the common gull of the thing called convention. I was plucked to the skin, and if my skin had been worth turning into leather, some one would have put in a claim to that. Even for my skin, poor asset as it was, some one did wait, when it had ceased to be of use to me, for London cemeteries ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... There was not an inch of dry land Left to mark his recent island. Not a flagstaff or a sentry, Not a wharf or port of entry,— Only—to cut matters shorter— Just a patch of muddy water In the open ocean lying, And a gull above it flying. ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... and keen of sight, for they began to leave the ledge shortly after the boat drew away from the yacht, and half the distance to the island had not been covered before not a gull remained ...
— Frank Merriwell's Cruise • Burt L. Standish
... with eyes half-closed. The horizon line is sharp and clear to-day; the blue of the sky meets, but does not mingle with the deeper blue of the ocean; a few white sails can be distinctly seen. Now and then a gull flashes silvery wings in the sunshine, and its cry comes wailing across the water ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... lover, My friends are the Oceans four, The Heavens have roofed me over, And the Dawn is my golden door. I would liefer follow a condor, Or the sea-gull soaring from ken, Than bury my Godhead yonder, In the dust and whirl ...
— My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard • Elizabeth Cooper
... things as came to hand. Sheets sculpturesquely draped the deities who took part; a fox-pelt from the hearth did duty as the leopard skin of Bacchus; a feather duster served Neptune for a trident; the lyre of Apollo was a dust-pan; a gull's breast furnished Jove with ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... mustard standing before them to have wit. 'How so?' saies one. 'It is like a witty scold meeting another scold, knowing that scold will scold, begins to scold first. So,' says he, 'the mustard being lickt up, and knowing that you will bite it, begins to bite you first.' 'I'll try that,' saies a gull by, and the mustard so tickled him that his eyes watered. 'How now?' saies Tarleton; 'does my jest savour?' 'I,' saies the gull, 'and bite too.' 'If you had had better wit,' saies Tarleton, 'you would have bit first; so, then, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... the retreating footsteps and then for a moment pushed open the window. There was the old roar once more, which seemed to have dwelt in his ears; the salt sting, the scream of the pebbles, the cry of a wheeling gull. There was the headland round which he had sailed his yacht, the moorland over which he had wandered with his gun, the meadow round which he had tried the wild young horses. In those few seconds of ecstatic joy, he seemed for the first time to realise all that ...
— The Box with Broken Seals • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... white breast passed overhead; and they stopped paddling to look at it,-a gull. Sign of fair weather!—it ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... going to buy a tame sea-gull there, as a birthday present for Trevor; and Emily had lured him off from that, by a promise of getting one from an old fisherman whom she knew. So there was not much fear of his running back into the danger, though I should not ...
— Lady Hester, or Ursula's Narrative • Charlotte M. Yonge
... they were aware of was that they were lying on their backs, waking up from their sleep, and watching a white gull skimming the air overhead, ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... Avarice guards with bolted door His useless treasures from the starving poor; Loads the lorn hours with misery and care, And lives a beggar to enrich his heir. 100 Unthinking crowds thy forms, Imposture, gull, A Saint in sackcloth, or a Wolf in wool. While mad with foolish fame, or drunk with power, Ambition slays his thousands in an hour; Demoniac Envy scowls with haggard mien, And blights the bloom of other's joys, unseen; Or wrathful Jealousy invades the grove, And turns ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... the girl interrupted him. "You don't know how Mascola does business," she said. "Listen, I'll tell you. Did you ever notice them throw garbage overboard from the deck of a steamer and see one lone gull flying in her wake? The minute he squawks and swoops down to pick it up there's a hundred of them come from all points of the compass to fight it out with him for the spoils. Well, Mascola's men are just like that. We may spot the fish first. We generally do. But that doesn't make the ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... glasses at dinner; my decanter tossed off the table and broken; also a tumbler and champagne glass. One gull seen yesterday and two stormy petrels follow us a long way. A very dull day with all of us, partly occasioned by the unfavourable wind and coldness. Had some affecting conversation with Mr. G. respecting my late dear father. A fine evening, the wind ...
— A Journey to America in 1834 • Robert Heywood
... surface of a field was covered with black and white, vibrating as though waves were passing over it. When we came nearer we saw that the field was covered so thick with gulls that the ground was hidden. The gull was a small white variety about the size of a pigeon, with a black ruff around its neck. The wave-like motion was made by the birds digging away in the newly turned earth for worms and larvae; judging by the way they worked, they must have ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith
... trapper, though he was a man of some little substance; that having accidentally seen an advertisement in the paper, stating that if the heirs of the late Josiah Flint, of Barnet, in the county of Hertfordshire, England, would apply to Messrs. Grub and Gull, Fleece Court, Chancery Lane, London, they would hear of something to their advantage, he, believing himself to be a descendant of the said Josiah, had come over to hear the welcome news. He remarked, with his peculiar smile, that he had heard a great deal which might be ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... buffeting she was receiving the Quickstep never faltered. On she plowed, riding the green billows like a gull, and shipping a sea only occasionally. The deckload, double-lashed, held, although the deckhouse groaned and twisted until Matt Peasley regretted the impulse that had impelled him to do this foolish thing for the sake ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... atmosphere of excitement in the harbour. No wonder that the carts almost run over you as they make journey after journey between boat and barrel. No wonder that three different sorts of sea-gulls—the herring gull, the lesser black-headed gull, and the black-backed gull—have gathered about us in screaming multitudes and fill the air like a snowstorm. Every child in the town seems to be making for home with its finger in a fish's mouth, or in two fishes' mouths, or in three fishes' mouths. Artists have hurried ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... Lichfield bookseller. This epoch-making revelation, briefly and modestly outlined in a letter to The Daily Chronicle, will be set forth in detail in a massive volume of 1,000 pages, with a portrait of the author, to be issued shortly by the House of Swallow and Gull. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 19, 1916 • Various
... writer, and for a critical reading of the manuscript, acknowledgment should be made to Mr. Robert J. Sim. Certain events in the lives of Eve and Petro and little Solomon Otus are told with reference to his observations of eave-swallows and screech owls; his trip to an island off the Maine coast for gull-sketches added greatly to an acquaintance with Larie; and but for his six-weeks' visit with the loons of "Immer Lake," much of the story of Gavia could not have been told. Since Mr. Sim contributed not only the pictures to the book, but many ...
— Bird Stories • Edith M. Patch
... was deliciously green and cool and alive with the piping of robins. Over the lake which glimmered faintly through the trees ahead came the whir and hum of a giant bird which skimmed the lake with snowy wing and came to rest like a truant gull. Of the habits of this extraordinary bird Rex, barking, frankly disapproved, but finding his mistress's attention held unduly by a chirping, bright-winged caucus of birds of inferior size and interest, he ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... I have been blown from off the Jutland shore and have won through the gale safely. That is all. But it was by my own fault, for I must needs take the boat and put out to sea with my hawk there to find fresh sport. It seemed to me, forsooth, that a great black-backed gull or fierce skua would give me a fine flight or two. And so it was; but I rowed out too far, and before I bethought myself, both wind and tide were against me. I had forgotten how often after calm comes a shift of wind, and it had been over still for an hour ...
— Wulfric the Weapon Thane • Charles W. Whistler
... a momentary tenderness, and continued: "When I was young I never doubted that I would conquer life. I pictured myself rising in triumph over circumstance, as a gull leaves the sea.... When I was young.... If I was afraid of the dark then I thought, of course, I would outgrow it; but it has grown deeper than my courage. The night is terrible now." ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... went, with a sea-gull's scream, And a splash of her saucy tail; In a moment he lost the silvery gleam That shone on her ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... close was she now, from the reef points on the great mainsail, luminous with the sunlight, and white as the wing of a gull, to the rail of the bulwarks. A crowd of men were hanging over the port bulwarks gazing at the island and the figures on the reef. Browned by the sun and sea-breeze, Emmeline's hair blowing on the wind, and the point of Dick's javelin flashing ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... peopling my island with beings during the solitary walks I take in the day, that at night I almost fancy these spirit-forms hover round me—perhaps watching me. It may be that I have mistaken the flight of a sea-gull or night-bird for something superhuman, but on several occasions I have been warned of approaching danger by something outside myself; not tangible to the touch, nor definable to the eye, but still noticeable to the ear and to the mind. Put it down ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... put in his mouth. The rupture follows. The two for a while wend their way in opposite directions. Shakib still cherishing and cultivating his bank account, shoulders his peddling-box and jogs along with his inspiring demon, under whose auspices, he tells us, he continues to write verse and gull with his brummagems the pious dames of the suburbs. And Khalid sits on his peddling-box for hours pondering on the necessity of disposing of it somehow. For now he scarcely makes more than a few peddling-trips each month, and when he ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... patience and good humour struggled in vain. Worn out at last, he fled to a little island of basaltic rock, one of the Farne group not far from Ida's fortress of Bamborough, strewn for the most part with kelp and sea-weed, the home of the gull and the seal. In the midst of it rose his hut of rough stones and turf, dug down within deep into the rock, and roofed with logs and straw. But the reverence for his sanctity dragged Cuthbert back to fill the vacant see of Lindisfarne. He entered Carlisle, which the king ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... their backs kept off the east wind. Below them the river was brightly blue, and a skiff dipping its way up stream caught the sunlight on sail and hull until, as it danced from sight around the headland, it looked like a white gull hovering over the water. Above, on the campus, the football field was noisy with voices and the pipe of the referee's whistle; and farther up the river at the boathouse moving figures showed that some of the boys were about to take ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour
... this first stage of their journey. A few hundred yards south of their goal they seemed about to alight, but Droop slightly inclined the aeroplanes and speeded up the propeller a little. Their vessel swept gently upward and northward again, like a gull rising from the sea. Then Droop let it settle again. Just as they were about to fall rather violently upon the solid mass of ice below them, he projected a relatively small volume of gas from beneath the structure. Its reaction eased their descent, and ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... bearded. His hair, untrimmed for many weeks, was long and snarled. He was nearly barefooted and his clothing hung in tatters. In one hand he carried a rusty old trade gun, (a single-barreled, old-fashioned muzzle loading shotgun), in the other he clutched by its wing a gull that he had recently shot. Following the father came an older lad, perhaps fourteen years of age, little better clothed than his two brothers and as wild and unkempt in ...
— The Story of Grenfell of the Labrador - A Boy's Life of Wilfred T. Grenfell • Dillon Wallace
... unsubstantial as itself. Even living, moving things had that aspect. Far out on the lowest further strip of sand, which appeared to be on a level with the sea, gulls were seen standing in twos and threes and small groups and in rows; but they did not look like gulls—familiar birds, gull-shaped with grey and white plumage. They appeared twice as big as gulls, and were of a dazzling whiteness and of no definite shape: though standing still they had motion, an effect of the quivering dancing air, the "visible heat"; at rest, they were seen now as separate objects; then as one ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... a hurry; there will be some hard pulling. I am a jolly good fellow, a good soul with no prejudices, and I will put things plainly to you. You want to do as Valerie does—very good. But that is not all; you must have a gull, a stockholder, a Hulot.—Well, I know a retired tradesman—in fact, a hosier. He is heavy, dull, has not an idea, I am licking him into shape, but I don't know when he will do me credit. My man is a deputy, stupid and conceited; the tyranny of a turbaned wife, in ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... Delight is in the sea-gull's dancing wings, And sunshine wakes to rose the ruddy hue Of rocks; and from her tall wind-slanted stem A soft bright plume the goldenrod outflings Along the breeze, above a sea whose blue Is like the light ...
— Ride to the Lady • Helen Gray Cone
... Little Owl Sea-gull. Cormorant Cormorant. Great Owl Ibis Ardea. Swan Wild Goose. Pelican Pelican. Gier Eagle Alcyone. Stork ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... oars and began, as usual in such free times, to put their goods in order, unpacking and sunning provisions, guns, ropes, clothing, etc. Joe has an old flintlock musket suggestive of Hudson's Bay times, which he wished to discharge and reload. So, stepping in front of the sail, he fired at a gull that was flying past before I could prevent him, and it fell slowly with outspread wings alongside the canoe, with blood dripping from its bill. I asked him why he had killed the bird, and followed the question by a severe reprimand ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... days I was a man, the most wedded to his idols of my generation. I was a dweller under roofs; the gull of that which we call civilisation; a superstitious votary of the plastic arts; a cit, and a prop of restaurants. I had a comrade in those days, somewhat of an outsider, though he moved in the company of artists, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... moral sustenance since I have known of it. In my first printed mention of it I declared: 'The world is no more the alien terror that was taught me. Spurning the cloud-grimed and still sultry battlements whence so lately Jehovan thunders boomed, my gray gull lifts her wing against the night fall, and takes the dim leagues with a fearless eye.' And now, after twenty-seven years of this experience, the wing is grayer, but the eye is fearless still, while I renew and doubly emphasize ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... into a fitful breeze and the white sail moved very slowly. The tide was in, and the water lapped with a cooling sound against the dark green piles. In the distance the blue of the bay melted into the blue of the sky, while the nearer waters mirrored every passing gull, the masts of the fishing boats, the tall marsh grass, the dead twigs marking oyster beds—each object had its double. On a point of marshy ground stood a line of cranes, motionless as soldiers ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... ship, and afterwards another, a sign of the proximity of land. They saw much weed, although none was seen on the previous day. They caught a bird with the hand, which was like a tern. But it was a river-bird, not a sea-bird, the feet being like those of a gull. At dawn two or three land-birds came singing to the ship, and they disappeared before sunset. Afterwards a booby came from W.N.W., and flew to the S.W., which was a sign that it left land in the W.N.W.; for these birds sleep on shore, and go to sea in the mornings in search ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... the strand, They only, each by each; Home, her home, was close at hand, Utterly out of reach. Her mother in the chimney nook Heard a startled sea-gull screech, But never turned her head to look Towards the darkening beach: 80 Neighbours here and neighbours there Heard one scream, as if a bird Shrilly screaming cleft the air:— That was all ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... it be all true," answered Adam Woodcock; "but who can ensure us of that? Moreover, these were but tales the monks used to gull us simple laymen withal; they knew that fairies and hobgoblins brought aves and paternosters into repute; but, now we have given up worship of images in wood and stone, methinks it were no time to be afraid of bubbles in the water, ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... it was whose hand in Autumn Painted all the trees with scarlet, Stained the leaves with red and yellow; He it was who sent the snow-flake, Sifting, hissing through the forest, Froze the ponds, the lakes, the rivers, Drove the loon and sea-gull southward, Drove the cormorant and curlew To their nests of sedge and sea-tang In the realms of Shawondasee. Once the fierce Kabibonokka Issued from his lodge of snow-drifts From his home among the icebergs, And his hair, with snow besprinkled, Streamed behind him like a river, Like a black ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... of gloom shadowed his face, and his thin fingers opened and closed nervously and unconsciously. Diane, Diane, Diane! It was the murmur of far-off voices, it was the whisper of the winds in the shrouds, it was the cry of the lonely gull and the stormy petrel. To pass through the weary years of his exile without again seeing that charming face, finally to strive in vain to recall it in all its perfect beauty! This thought affected him more than the thought of the stigma on his birth. That he could and would live down; he was ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... cried the old hag in her drunkenness: "no, in this world, here, on what we call earth. What words the fools make use of! There is no next world, you silly ninnyhammer! he who does not skim off the fat from the broth while he is here, is a wretched gull. This however is what they clack to their simple brood, that they may behave prettily, and keep within bounds, and go the way one would lead them: but whosoever believes none of their fabling, he ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... and listening. From the light and airy butterfly, the music changed to Farwell's Norwegian Song. Hillard saw the lonely sea, the lonely twilight, the lonely gull wheeling seaward, the lonely little cottage on the cliffs, and the white moon in the far east. And presently she ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... an hour the galley skimmed to and fro among the anchored fleet, now running free like a white-winged gull, anon close-hauled, the razor bows cleaving a path through the dancing water in a little sickle ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... a lot of copies to give away, and he wanted most to bamboozle me into having a picture made, not half so good as I can get for a few dollars a dozen at any good photographer's, and pay him the price of a good team of horses for it. He thought he could gull old Jake Vandemark! If I would pay for it, I could get printed in the book a few of my remarks on the history of the township, and my two-hundred-and-seventy-five-dollar picture. Others would write about something else, and get their pictures in. In that way this ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... needed that. Every mind instantly conjured up the picture of a vivid figure in a frock that gleamed blue as sulphurous flames. A hysterical woman sprang up screaming shrilly, and had to be taken away; a solitary sea gull, its plumage shining with a weird blueness in the electric light, chose this moment to fly low along the deck, crying its wailing cry. That was enough. Another woman began to scream; the music stopped, and there was almost a panic to get away ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... worse, and it seemed to creep toward Jack's heart. He gave one cry, and instantly he heard a faint answer. Could it be the scream of a gull? Nay, they rest at night. He called again, and the voice of his agony was answered by a loud hail; then a flare was lit, and Jack knew that the steamer's boat had been searching ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... dazzling haze like a golden veil and he could only tell that the sea was there by the sudden gleam of tiny white horses, flashing for a moment on the mirror of blue and shining through the haze; sometimes a gull swerved through the air above his head as though a wave had lost its bounds and, for sheer joy of the beautiful day, had flung itself tossing and wheeling into ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... now!" declared Amanda angrily. "Anne is all right, and going to Boston in a chaise. You ought to be satisfied. Let them think what they want to, I don't care. And you've got to go to sea. Father's told Captain Nash that he can have you, and the 'Sea Gull' sails ...
— A Little Maid of Massachusetts Colony • Alice Turner Curtis
... the drawing-room as unconscious of the fate that Mrs. Durlacher had so deftly woven for him as is the unwieldy gull that, tumbling down the wind, strikes into the meshes of the fowler's net and finds itself enchained within the web. Coralie, herself, set to the task of winning him, was as unconscious of the subtly diaphonous mechanism of the trap as he. Yet ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... by seagulls. On a March morning two gulls came up from the sea, and as they neared the Downs began to soar. It was necessary to fix the gaze on one, as the eyes cannot follow two soaring birds at once. This gull, having spread his wings wide, swept up the dean, or valley, with great speed, and, turning a large circle, rose level with the hill. Round again he came, rising spirally—a spiral with a diameter varying from a furlong to a quarter of ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... killing of a gull in Utah is an offense in law; but stronger than legal proscription, more powerful than fear of judicial penalties, is the popular sentiment in favor of these white-winged deliverers. Every year come these graceful creatures to spend the springtime ...
— The Story of "Mormonism" • James E. Talmage
... dawning pale, or twilight dim, It fearful would have been To meet a form so richly dressed, With book in hand, and cross on breast, And such a woeful mien. Fitz-Eustace, loitering with his bow, To practise on the gull and crow, Saw her, at distance, gliding slow, And did by Mary swear - Some lovelorn fay she might have been, Or, in romance, some spell-bound queen; For ne'er, in work-day world, was seen A form so ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... beautiful beach they saw a ship nearing the land. A strong breeze was blowing at the time, and whilst they paused to admire the noble bark, all sails set, ploughing the crested billows, and floating over them like an enormous sea-gull, she came nearer and nearer to the young officers. Another minute the sails were lowered and anchor was cast. A small boat was dispatched from the ship, and made for the beach just where Charles and Henry were standing. They formed a thousand conjectures of the meaning of this movement. ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... person who has been easily deceived in some matter is often described as a "gull," or is said to have been "gulled." Gull is now the name of a sea-bird, but in Early English it was used to describe any young bird, and from the idea that it is easy to deceive such youngsters came the use of the word to ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill
... discordant cries of a sea-parrot grated unpleasantly on the ear, and set half a dozen alert in a small band of seals that were ahead of us. Away they went, breaching and jumping entirely out of water. A sea-gull with slow, deliberate flight and long, majestic curves circled round us, and as a reminder of home a little English sparrow perched impudently on the fo'castle head, and, cocking his head on one side, chirped merrily. The boats were soon among the seals, ...
— Dutch Courage and Other Stories • Jack London
... a gull, a fool, a rogue, that now and then goes to the wars, to grace himself, at his return into London, under the form of a soldier. You must learn to know such slanders of the age,[12] or else you may ...
— King Henry the Fifth - Arranged for Representation at the Princess's Theatre • William Shakespeare
... confused visions. He was a birdhe was a fishor he flew like the one, and swam like the other,qualities which would have been very essential to his safety a few hours before. Then Miss Wardour was a syren, or a bird of Paradise; her father a triton, or a sea-gull; and Oldbuck alternately a porpoise and a cormorant. These agreeable imaginations were varied by all the usual vagaries of a feverish dream;the air refused to bear the visionary, the water seemed to burn himthe ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... rocks, a considerable quantity of spawn, which of course comes to nothing. Escaping the above perils and causalities, and arrived at maturity, they become the prey and food of the otter and heron, king's fisher, gull, &c., who emulate man in their destructive propensities. The larger fish also prey upon the smaller. Luckily otters are not so numerous in any English river as they used to be. Night lines, shackle, rake and flood nets, ...
— The Teesdale Angler • R Lakeland
... that I went to the house of a man named Peters, to whom I was directed, as one deeply engaged in the pursuit, and able to introduce me to it. A sea-gull nailed on his door with extended wings, like the owls and weasels that we see on barns, guided me. I found the worthy in a sort of cellar, which by the ropes, sails, oars, hammocks, and barrels which filled it, might have been taken for a naval depot. From the midst of a thick atmosphere of smoke ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XII, No. 347, Saturday, December 20, 1828. • Various
... please. But I have this comfort, that no sharp words passed my lips that day, and no bitter ones his. I saw he was set on the frolic, and I hoped no harm would come of it. How I watched the sky that day, Miss, no mortal knows; how I started when I saw a sea gull skim across the waves! how I listened for the least sound of a squall! Snap was just as fidgetty seemingly, and we kept stealing down to the beach, long before it was likely they should be back. As I stood watching there ...
— Emilie the Peacemaker • Mrs. Thomas Geldart
... on her heel, and, thumping violently, was carried by the tide (dragging her anchor) some two or three miles, grounding finally upon the shoal of Gull Island. At flood tide sail was made on her as soon as she floated, and we succeeded in getting her back into the channel. As the vessel grounded at every ebb tide and on the return of the water was violently swung around, thumping ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... murmur comfort. In truth, it was Zephyr, the kindly West Wind, come to befriend her; and as she took heart, feeling some benignant presence, he lifted her in his arms, and carried her on wings as even as a sea-gull's, over the crest of the fateful mountain and into a valley below. There he left her, resting on a bank of hospitable grass, and there ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... been a gull and a ninny and a soft Tommy long enough. Time it was done. Here is a good lesson to have nothing to do with that accursed sex, that was the ruin of the man in the beginning, and will be so to the end. God knows I was ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... boy, a slim lad, on my cart now," he said, "that's going with us; he's no more froightened than a gull is froightened of ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... With sea-drawn lights The turned wing of a gull that glows Aslant the violet, the profound Dome ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... number breed further north. Olaf will show us Herons in the island woods, and where the Rails nest in the reeds, near the Marsh Wrens, a mile or two up the river. Some day when it is calm, we will sail over to Great Gull Island, where many water birds lay their eggs on the bare sand. There will be enough for you to see and do, ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... times, whom you peradventure in modesty would give place to, as being deceived by his habit, and presuming him some great worshipful man, believe it, if you shall examine his estate, he will likely be proved a serving man of no great note, my lady's tailor, his lordship's barber, or some such gull, a Fastidius Brisk, Sir Petronel Flash, a mere outside. Only this respect is given him, that wheresoever he comes, he may call for what he will, and take place by reason ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... jape on me, thou sodden-brained gull?" answered Lambourne, nothing daunted. "Why, dark and muddy as thou think'st thyself, I would engage in a day's space to sec as clear through thee and thy concernments, as thou callest them, as through the filthy horn of an ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... wings of the wind, like—a gull! Should he be a knave, it may probably be of infinite service to society, for he is likely ever afterwards to forswear ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... shall lead the choral dance in the heavenly kingdom, and sing the songs of Paradise." And how I clung to His hand! My dog at once followed at my heels... but then we began to float upwards! He in front.... His wings spread wide over all the sky, long like a sea-gull's—and I after Him! And my dog had to stay behind. Then only I understood that that dog was my illness, and that in the heavenly kingdom there was no place ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... articles were distributed among the party, and then followed his young friends with an anticipatory bark. Carlo was lifted out by Hamish, and immediately set off to chase a gull which sailed majestically out to sea, and left him barking ...
— The Adventure League • Hilda T. Skae
... guess!" he replied. "Salt water skims off Archie same's if he was a white bellied gull; can't drown him no more'n ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith
... dear, dear sands! Then they shoulder their spade and rake, and with one fond look at the cliffs turn their backs on the sea. But the sea is with them still, even when the crowded train has whirled them far from waves that the white gull skims over. They have their tales of it to tell to their governess, their memories of it to count over before they fall asleep, their dreams of it as they lie asleep, their hopes of seeing it again when weary winter ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... that for a time we watched two of that larger sort of gull, whose wings are brownish-white, circle and hover against the blue. And then we lay and looked at a band of water mirror clear far out to sea, and wondered why the breeze that rippled all the rest should leave ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... favored, sir, vastly beyond your deserts. I acquiesce, since Fate is proverbially a lady, and to dissent were in consequence ungallant. Shortly I shall find you more employment, at Dover, whither I am now going to gull my old opponent and dear friend, Gaston de Puysange, in the matter of this new compact between France and England. I shall look for you at Dover, ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... desert us. It usually came in about one o'clock, but that hour and another had passed and yet we watched for the first change. Without a breeze our chances of overhauling the stranger were gone. Only a white speck like the wing of a gull now marked her whereabouts on the edge of the horizon, and in another hour she would be invisible even from ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... the Goldfinch, the Nighthawk, and the Sparrow Hawk, is so characteristic in each case that I have often been able to name the bird for a student upon being told its approximate size and the character of its flight. Who can see a Wild Duck swimming, or a Gull flying, without at once referring it to the group of birds to which it belongs? Thus the first step is taken toward learning the names of the species, and the ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson
... you have to cross-question me, I don't know!" commented Mrs. Daniver, addressing a passing sea-gull, and pulling down the corners of her mouth ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... moment on the bridge. A grey mist was being driven up the river, blotting out the gorge and the trees. A gull, shrieking dismally, cleaved the greyness with a white flash. It was cold and Henrietta shivered, and once again she wished she could sit by a fireside with some one who was kind and tender; but to-night there would only be Aunt Sophia ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... morning of Tuesday, July the twelfth, Captain Glazier and his companions, fully equipped, and with a driver celebrated for his knowledge of frontier life, began their long and toilsome wagon journey. A ride of between three and four hours brought them to Gull Lake, where a halt was proposed and ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... what resembled the gleam of a distant sail far away on our starboard quarter. This was such a dim speck against the darkening horizon that I stood up to see better, shadowing my eyes, and forgetful of all else in aroused interest. Undoubtedly it was a sail, although appearing no larger than a gull's wing, and my imagination took me in spirit across the leagues of water. I was still standing there absorbed, unaware even that the mate had departed, when a voice, soft-spoken ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish
... village that the boats were now approaching had been thrown into a state of the greatest excitement by the appearance of the ships, which had been discovered while yet so distant that their sails resembled the wings of the white sea-gull. Upon the first alarm all the warriors had been collected on the beach, and the women had left their work in the fields of maize and hurried with the children to the security of the forest depths. When, however, the fleet came to anchor and the Indians could distinguish the meaning ...
— The Flamingo Feather • Kirk Munroe
... morning was about them. On the heavily wooded shore the great evergreens towered darkly against the sun, but its beams fell with dazzling brightness upon the meadowy undulations of the lake. Above them they heard at times the wild cry of the soaring gull, or the apparently disembodied voice of some unseen bird. Behind them they left the beautiful stretch of Kempenfeldt Bay, gleaming in the sunshine, and now they slowly ascended the waters of Cook's Bay, called after the great circumnavigator, under whom many of ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... the Gull, which swims on the waves of the water, flew toward the Ocean sea, where he found Venus washing and bathing her selfe: to whom she declared that her son was burned and in danger of death, and moreover that it was a common brute in the mouth of ...
— The Golden Asse • Lucius Apuleius |
